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Speaker 4: Happy Monday, Welcome to Breaking Points. As you saw, no
Speaker 4: overhead shot because there's nobody in the studio, although the
Speaker 4: crew is holding down the ford there so today. I'll
Speaker 4: be joined later in the program by comedian Dave Smith.
Speaker 4: We're going to start with Dave Smith and I are
Speaker 4: going to interview Amir Tabona, columnist at Howarett's, about the
Speaker 4: recent Howaretz report about the aid site massacres and IDF
Speaker 4: soldiers being instructed to shoot at or toward civilians who
Speaker 4: are seeking aid. We're also going to talk about to
Speaker 4: Bone's new column suggesting that Donald Trump is once again
Speaker 4: screwing up with Netan Yahoo by pushing to have the
Speaker 4: charges dropped against him rather than putting pressure on him.
Speaker 4: We're going to start the program with Dave day, an
Speaker 4: editor of The American Prospect, to talk about the Big
Speaker 4: Beautiful Bill, which is hurtling towards passage in the Senate today.
Speaker 4: We're also going to talk about the reaction over the
Speaker 4: weekend to zoron Mom Donnie's win by Democratic elite Sakeen
Speaker 4: Jeffries saying he's not willing to endorse him as of yet.
Speaker 4: And then we're going to finish with Aiden Karney, who
Speaker 4: many of you may know as doctor Turtle Boy. Aiden
Speaker 4: Carney is the local reporter in Massachusetts who really brought
Speaker 4: the Karen Reid trial to national attention. We'll talk a
Speaker 4: little bit about the Reed trial itself, but mostly we're
Speaker 4: going to talk about what is becoming a very important
Speaker 4: press freedom case. This part has been overlooked by the
Speaker 4: media that has been focusing on the Karen Reid trial.
Speaker 4: But Aiden Carney, who the reporter who effectively broke this story,
Speaker 4: is facing multiple charges directly related to his journalism in
Speaker 4: this case, and so we're going to talk about that
Speaker 4: and why it's so important for us to keep the
Speaker 4: focus on it even as Karen Reid has been acquitted
Speaker 4: and people are moving on now to the phase of
Speaker 4: doing more documentaries and movies about it. But to start
Speaker 4: the program, we're going to be joined by Dave dan
Speaker 4: to talk about the ongoing debate and senate over the
Speaker 4: Big Beautiful Bill. So the Big Beautiful Bill. Joining me
Speaker 4: to talk about that is American Prospect editor Dave Dayan. Dave,
Speaker 4: thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 5: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4: So this thing is barreling through Congress. The House said
Speaker 4: that they were going to get it done by Memorial Day.
Speaker 4: Kind of people scoffed at that they got it done
Speaker 4: by Memorial Day. The Senate said they're going to get
Speaker 4: it done by July fourth. That's the arbitrary deadline that
Speaker 4: they set. They had. They got it through a procedural
Speaker 4: vote over the weekend and are have now moved into
Speaker 4: the debate phase. As you and I are speaking, the
Speaker 4: debate is ongoing and they're going to be moving towards
Speaker 4: you know, votes, towards eventual final passage, you know, any
Speaker 4: any moment now like this is, this train is as
Speaker 4: far left, the station is about to pullland to the
Speaker 4: White House unless something calamitous happens between now and then
Speaker 4: to Klambus for Republicans. Uh So, let's let's unpack some
Speaker 4: of the objections to this bill that Republicans are are
Speaker 4: putting forward and then talk about what this thing means.
Speaker 4: So let's start with a six. This is Tom Tillis,
Speaker 4: who announced right around this time that you're seeing him
Speaker 4: on the floor, that you know what, he's not going
Speaker 4: to run for reelection for it in North Carolina after
Speaker 4: Trump got ticked with him and said he was going
Speaker 4: to recruit a primary challenger to him. So here's Tilli's
Speaker 4: talking about some of his objections to the bill.
Speaker 6: Between the state directed payments and the cuts scheduled in
Speaker 6: this bill, there's a reduction of state directed payments and
Speaker 6: then there's the reduction of the provider tax. They can't
Speaker 6: find a hole in my estimate. So what they told
Speaker 6: me is that yeah, it's rough, but North Carolina's use
Speaker 6: the system.
Speaker 4: They're going to have to make it work, all right.
Speaker 6: So what do I tell six hundred and sixty three
Speaker 6: thousand people in two years or three years when President
Speaker 6: Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid
Speaker 6: because the funding's not there anymore, when the White House
Speaker 6: richer's advising the President are not telling him that the
Speaker 6: effect of this bill is to break up promise. And
Speaker 6: you know, the last time I saw a promise broken
Speaker 6: around health care with respect to my friends on the
Speaker 6: other side of the aisle, is when somebody said, if
Speaker 6: you like your health care, you.
Speaker 4: Could keep it.
Speaker 6: If you like your doctor, you could keep it. We
Speaker 6: found out that wasn't true. That made me the second
Speaker 6: Republican Speaker of the House since the Civil War, Ladies
Speaker 6: and gentlemen, because we betrayed the promise to the American people.
Speaker 6: Two years later, three years later, it actually made me
Speaker 6: a US Senator because in twenty ten it had just
Speaker 6: been proposed and just anticipation of what was going to
Speaker 6: happen was enough to have a sea change election. That's
Speaker 6: what Republicans into the majority for the second time in
Speaker 6: one hundred years. Now, Republicans are about to make a
Speaker 6: mistake on healthcare and betray sang a promise. It is
Speaker 6: inescapable that this bill in its current form will betray
Speaker 6: the very promise that Donald J. Trump made in the
Speaker 6: Oval office or in the cabinet room when I was
Speaker 6: there with finance, where he said, we can go after
Speaker 6: a waste, fraud and abuse on any programs.
Speaker 4: And we can get into some moment. The fact is
Speaker 4: probably the fastest growing in industry in North Carolina is
Speaker 4: the clean energy industry, which this bill also just takes
Speaker 4: an absolute sledgehammer two. So it's not just the medicaid
Speaker 4: cust to till us is gonna you know, has a
Speaker 4: problem with Let's let's uh, let's let's roll Holly quick
Speaker 4: because Holly voted yes, Josh Holly, but made a passionate
Speaker 4: argument for why he should have voted no. So let's
Speaker 4: let's roll a little bit of Holly.
Speaker 7: We can't be cutting health care for working people and
Speaker 7: for poor people in order to constantly give special tax
Speaker 7: treatments corporations. Others said, we've we've built in the spill,
Speaker 7: but unless we take further changes, take for.
Speaker 8: The steps that will happen in future.
Speaker 1: Understand, I sweep if.
Speaker 7: We're gonna be working fort party, we've got for ten
Speaker 7: thirty people and I just to medicate stuff here. I
Speaker 7: think it's bad. I think we've we've delayed the worst
Speaker 7: in it and in a short term for my state,
Speaker 7: you know it's going to be fine, but we as
Speaker 7: on going forward basis we cannot but one like this.
Speaker 7: I think that part of has a lot of thinking
Speaker 7: to do.
Speaker 4: An Alabama Senator Katie Britt appeared on I believe was
Speaker 4: Jake Tapper's program, was pressed on this as well. Let's
Speaker 4: her argument is basically, na uh, this is not happening.
Speaker 4: So let's roll, Katie Britt, talk about.
Speaker 9: Them in terms of your constituents, because they are about
Speaker 9: seven hundred and sixty thousand Alabamas who.
Speaker 4: Rely on Medicaid.
Speaker 9: The bill will also cut federal funding for food stamps
Speaker 9: or require states to kick in more and shift a
Speaker 9: lot of that cost to Alabama. And that's more than
Speaker 9: seven hundred and fifty thousand Alabamas who rely on what
Speaker 9: we're what we're gonna call food stamps, including three hundred
Speaker 9: and thirty thousand children. So are you guaranteeing that these
Speaker 9: changes that you were voting for Monday presumably will not
Speaker 9: hurt recipients in Alabama of Medicaid, of food stamps or
Speaker 9: SNAP for those who are citizens and for those who
Speaker 9: truly need it and deserve it absolutely.
Speaker 10: So when you look at Medicaid children, obviously we have
Speaker 10: the Children's Health Insurance Program, so children are absolutely not
Speaker 10: touched by this same thing when it comes to SNAP benefits,
Speaker 10: So we've made sure that that is taken off the table.
Speaker 10: What you're talking about is able bodied, working aged Americans
Speaker 10: without dependence at home, having them work, train, volunteer in
Speaker 10: some capacity twenty hours a week in order to receive
Speaker 10: those government benefits. This goes back to Bill Clinton era politics,
Speaker 10: when you know that being a part of something bigger
Speaker 10: than yourselves, helping to contribute is ultimately what we need
Speaker 10: to do. And it's actually the American people agree with
Speaker 10: us on this. But when you look at what's happening
Speaker 10: in Alabama specifically, you think about what you mentioned with
Speaker 10: regards to SNAP. What we're doing on that is ensuring
Speaker 10: that states have some skin in the game. If you
Speaker 10: have an error rate that is down below six percent,
Speaker 10: which Alabama is about a percentage point a little bit
Speaker 10: over that above that, we will have time. We have
Speaker 10: several years to make sure that we get that percentage
Speaker 10: point down, and I have every faith and belief that
Speaker 10: we will. We've got to make sure that these overpayments
Speaker 10: under payments that are happening. We've seen it in our
Speaker 10: own state, where people's benefits are being stolen from other states,
Speaker 10: that that stuff stops if states. Obviously under the Biden administration,
Speaker 10: we stopped that accountability during for the SNAP program. Reinstituting
Speaker 10: it and ensuring that states have some skin in the
Speaker 10: game will ultimately help us be able to deliver these
Speaker 10: resources and services that these people so desperately need.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, I've heard your fellow Senator Taberville talk
Speaker 9: about he's worried that your state can't afford it, Your
Speaker 9: state can't afford to pick up the slack.
Speaker 10: What we can afford to do is get it right,
Speaker 10: all right, Dave.
Speaker 4: So the Medicaid cuts are the debate really zeros in
Speaker 4: on the work requirement that is being put into place here.
Speaker 4: There's a lot more going on than just just a
Speaker 4: work requiring because I think for the the Republicans thought
Speaker 4: that by talking about the work requirement they would win
Speaker 4: a public debate because people, you know, a lot of
Speaker 4: people are like, all right, you know, hey, it's not
Speaker 4: so much to volunteer or to you know, make sure
Speaker 4: you're trying to work if your state's going to give
Speaker 4: you this benefit. There's a lot more going on, and
Speaker 4: Tillis alluded to a lot of it. There you unpack,
Speaker 4: you know, a little bit more of what's going on,
Speaker 4: Like why is why is Tillis so so convinced that
Speaker 4: this actually will deal a significant blow to people on Medicaid.
Speaker 5: Well, I forgot my bolo tie today, but I'll try.
Speaker 11: We can.
Speaker 12: We can, like photoshop from New Mexico to wear a
Speaker 12: bolo tie on the Senate Florida.
Speaker 4: But when when you're when you're retiring, you do whatever
Speaker 4: you want.
Speaker 11: Okay.
Speaker 12: So what Tillis is talking about are two things that
Speaker 12: the Senate build added the Senate version of this bill.
Speaker 12: One is provider taxes and the other is state directed payments.
Speaker 12: These are both ways in which states get additional resources
Speaker 12: to fund their Medicaid programs. You know, Republicans have called
Speaker 12: them gimmicks, but the reality in the context of this
Speaker 12: bill is it's just more money for Medicaid. The way
Speaker 12: the provider tax works is states tax healthcare providers but
Speaker 12: then also give them higher reimbursements on Medicaid payments, and
Speaker 12: so the hospitals and clinics make out even but the
Speaker 12: states aren't really kicking.
Speaker 11: In that share.
Speaker 12: They get the taxes, but they don't kick in everything
Speaker 12: because there's a state federal match on Medicaid payments. So
Speaker 12: it's a way to get more federal dollars into the
Speaker 12: state that pays for the Medicaid program. And if that
Speaker 12: is capped or actually ramped down, so those tax provider
Speaker 12: taxes have to be lower over time, starting I believe
Speaker 12: in twenty twenty eight and moving on through twenty thirty two,
Speaker 12: then there's simply less money for Medicaid. And the state
Speaker 12: directive payments are a similar thing, where Medicaid pays a
Speaker 12: fairly low reimbursement rate, and what states have done have
Speaker 12: appealed to the federal government to top off that reimbursement
Speaker 12: rate so to ensure that hospitals and doctors actually care
Speaker 12: for Medicaid patients.
Speaker 5: And the Senate bill cuts that and limits that to
Speaker 5: a degree.
Speaker 12: So both of those things basically stop the states from
Speaker 12: getting the amount of money they need right now.
Speaker 5: They don't have.
Speaker 12: Extra money sitting around in the states for Medicaid, so
Speaker 12: what they would have to do is cut the program.
Speaker 12: And this is the interesting way in which the federal
Speaker 12: government can say, well, we're not cutting medicaid, we're just
Speaker 12: doing this and that and the other thing. But they're
Speaker 12: forcing states to cut medicaid, right, So it's it's just
Speaker 12: sort of a one step removed kind of situation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I want to try to give the Republicans
Speaker 4: there the Pharos shake in their in their argument here,
Speaker 4: and you mentioned that, you know, they they say these
Speaker 4: aren't really cuts, we're just kind of getting rid of
Speaker 4: of gimmicks. And there's some semantics going on here, but
Speaker 4: I understand what they're saying. And like one of the
Speaker 4: things Katie Britt was referring to there is if you
Speaker 4: move from you know, Alabama to California, you know, in
Speaker 4: a lot of situations, the state Alabama, for instance, will
Speaker 4: still be getting credit for you living in you know,
Speaker 4: you might you don't automatically just leave the roles necessarily,
Speaker 4: so you might still be Alabama might be getting credit
Speaker 4: for you being on the roles in Alabama, while California
Speaker 4: also gets credit. And so the federal government on on
Speaker 4: some level is double paying. It's like in California and
Speaker 4: paying out Alabama to treat the same person. So what
Speaker 4: they're saying is we're going to cramp down on that.
Speaker 4: But what it leads to, well, we don't know how
Speaker 4: frequent that is. But what then it leads to, it's
Speaker 4: just less money for Alabama. Then, so the reason why
Speaker 4: they're getting less money is almost besides the point because, right,
Speaker 4: they've been counting on it for many years. That's just
Speaker 4: how the system runs.
Speaker 12: They've built their Medicaid program around the expectation.
Speaker 4: That this money comes in that it's going to be
Speaker 4: pretty stable, right.
Speaker 12: And the other thing in the bill, and it's not
Speaker 12: just work requirements but changes to biden error enrollment efficiencies
Speaker 12: that were put in by rule. The entire idea here
Speaker 12: is to make it harder to sign up for Medicaid.
Speaker 12: I mean, once again, the idea is, oh, no, we're
Speaker 12: not cutting the program, but we're just going to make
Speaker 12: it impossible to get it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 12: It's the example is in the pre Obamacare days, the
Speaker 12: insurance office would be on the seventh floor and there
Speaker 12: would be no working elevator, so no sick people could
Speaker 12: actually get to the insurance office to enroll for insurance.
Speaker 12: And it's a similar kind of thing. They're just making
Speaker 12: it harder to sign up for Medicaid and the ideas
Speaker 12: a lot of I believe it's something like Matt Brunneck
Speaker 12: had this number, something like sixty percent of the eligible
Speaker 12: population here works and is on Medicaid. But the churn
Speaker 12: is expected because you have to constantly update and constantly
Speaker 12: add forms to make sure. So there's like a strangling
Speaker 12: of Medicaid through the bureaucracy here. And there are work
Speaker 12: requirements on SNAP as well that have the same function.
Speaker 4: Right, It's like, if it's you against the bureaucracy, the
Speaker 4: bureaucracy is going to win most of those fights. Don't
Speaker 4: win those fights against me, Like I cannot keep up
Speaker 4: with the forms and the and the requirements and when
Speaker 4: this is due, and like you have to have it
Speaker 4: in triplicate, and you have to you know, send a
Speaker 4: notarized copy of your driver's license and like. And if
Speaker 4: the goal of them is to set up a process
Speaker 4: that most people will fail, they will succeed at that.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 12: I would just add one more thing that hasn't been
Speaker 12: talked about a lot with respect to Medicaid, which is
Speaker 12: there are new cost sharing requirements for individuals who are
Speaker 12: on the Medicaid program in certain contexts. So that means
Speaker 12: that people on Medicaid will just have to pay more
Speaker 12: if they want to do a doctor's visit or a
Speaker 12: test or anything like that.
Speaker 5: And the likely result, these are very poor people.
Speaker 12: When you're talking about the Medicaid population, the likely result
Speaker 12: is they will not be able to pay and therefore
Speaker 12: will not try to pay, they won't go to the doctor.
Speaker 12: So the savings, once again, they can say, we're not
Speaker 12: cutting Medicaid, but we're making it harder to use. And
Speaker 12: if you're making it harder to use, that's an effective cut.
Speaker 4: And so Musk has been, you know, absolutely melting down
Speaker 4: over over this bill. And let's let's put up the
Speaker 4: first multiple tweets that people can go find. So here
Speaker 4: here's one of his where he says, the latest Senate
Speaker 4: draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and
Speaker 4: cause immense strategic harm to our country. Utterly insane and destructive.
Speaker 4: It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely
Speaker 4: damaging industries of the future. So he's talking here about
Speaker 4: the sledgehammer that the bill takes to not just the
Speaker 4: clean energy industry, but kind of the energy industry overall,
Speaker 4: because the energy industry also is going to require the
Speaker 4: production of more transformers and transmission lines and general federal
Speaker 4: investment into building the infrastructure that they say we will
Speaker 4: need for all the cloud storage AI plus the you know,
Speaker 4: ramping up of electrification of.
Speaker 8: Ug on people.
Speaker 5: Some people would say that this is just a reversal
Speaker 5: of the inflation reduction acts investments in energy, mostly clean energy,
Speaker 5: but it was technology neutral, so a lot of things
Speaker 5: could be subsidized. It doesn't just take away that does
Speaker 5: tax credits for clean energy. It actually adds a new
Speaker 5: tax on solar and wind.
Speaker 12: And the only way to get out of that tax
Speaker 12: it's to ensure not a single speck of your project
Speaker 12: includes anything that's Chinese made.
Speaker 5: And this is kind of an impossibility right now.
Speaker 12: It would require complete change to supply chains, which maybe
Speaker 12: is something we should do, but is not something we
Speaker 12: can do in the time period scheduled because the tax
Speaker 12: would kick in in twenty twenty seven, and that's two
Speaker 12: years away, and so I've heard energy experts describe this
Speaker 12: as a total kill shot for wind and for solar.
Speaker 12: In the meantime, there is a new tax incentive production
Speaker 12: tax credit for metallurgical coal, the kind of coal that's
Speaker 12: made used in steel. There's a tax break on big
Speaker 12: oil that was stuck in by Oklahoma Senator James Langford.
Speaker 12: That is for domestic drillers, mostly based in Oklahoma, who
Speaker 12: would be exempt from the alternative minimum tax for corporations
Speaker 12: that Elizabeth Warren put into the Inflation Reduction Act, So
Speaker 12: it would mean that domestic oil drillers might not have
Speaker 12: to pay any taxes at all. And there's also the
Speaker 12: only tax that it not only tax credit from the
Speaker 12: IRA that it not only maintains but expands, is a
Speaker 12: tax credit for biofuels, which is basically ethanol, the use
Speaker 12: of corn and soy to make fuels, which studies have
Speaker 12: shown is actually worse for the environment than if you
Speaker 12: would use gasoline because it's such an immense land use.
Speaker 12: This completely upends the energy market in the US. We
Speaker 12: already have strains on the grid because of data centers,
Speaker 12: because of increased demand, and not only will this likely
Speaker 12: raise electricity rates, but there is a very strong likelihood
Speaker 12: that you will get blackouts more often.
Speaker 5: Because of this bill.
Speaker 4: Let's put up a four real quickly, and I want
Speaker 4: to dig in on your point there. This is again
Speaker 4: another Elon Musk tweet where you know, he's elevating somebody
Speaker 4: else who said, like, by twenty twenty thirty, China could
Speaker 4: have the ability to produce enough solar and storage infrastructure
Speaker 4: each year to match the entire electricity generation capacity of
Speaker 4: the United States. Contexts there, of course, being you know,
Speaker 4: the the AI race and the tech race between the
Speaker 4: US and China, and energy being you know, the most
Speaker 4: important fundamental input. So you could imagine our strategic decision
Speaker 4: makers if given the choice and we're there now forcing
Speaker 4: the choice upon themselves of powering AI and storage and
Speaker 4: cloud or powering your home, They're going to choose powering
Speaker 4: the AI and the cloud storage, and you are going
Speaker 4: to get a blackout. And I don't think people have
Speaker 4: really internalized the likelihood of this. As somebody from California
Speaker 4: who's a little closer to the edge of the energy
Speaker 4: debate tell us a little bit about why we may
Speaker 4: wind up in this world where the richest country in
Speaker 4: the world is going to kind of foist rolling blackouts
Speaker 4: on itself.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's a simple demand situation, right.
Speaker 12: We currently are at the limits of demand that we
Speaker 12: have for energy, and with this rollout of more data centers,
Speaker 12: more of the components used in AI, that's going to
Speaker 12: require a massive amount of electricity, meaning demand is going
Speaker 12: to go up. And if demand goes up and you
Speaker 12: don't have the supply available, you know they're talking about,
Speaker 12: oh well, we'll build nuclear. There really is no schedule
Speaker 12: for more than maybe one or two nuclear plants to
Speaker 12: be built in the next decade. It's just not a
Speaker 12: quick acting kind of situation.
Speaker 5: And whereas you could.
Speaker 12: Continue the massive increase in solar in particular that we've
Speaker 12: seen over the last couple of years, Basically something like
Speaker 12: eighty to ninety percent of all the new electricity generation
Speaker 12: that has been installed over the last several years is
Speaker 12: from either solar or battery storage. And so if you're
Speaker 12: taking that away, if you're making that impossible to pencil out,
Speaker 12: you're making that not cost effective to build. You're relying
Speaker 12: on natural gas on nuclear things that have basically stagnated,
Speaker 12: and that means you're not going to keep up with demand,
Speaker 12: and the result is that somebody can't get power. I mean,
Speaker 12: if you don't have enough enough power that people want,
Speaker 12: someone's going to be left holding the.
Speaker 4: Bad And so paying for all this, what we're paying
Speaker 4: for is massive tax cuts for the rich, right, Can
Speaker 4: you talk a little bit about what the other side, like,
Speaker 4: who's getting the benefits of this bill and to what tune?
Speaker 12: Sure, So it's an extension of the twenty seventeen Trump
Speaker 12: tax cuts. Those were certainly tilted towards the wealthy. There
Speaker 12: are also these new tax cuts, these kind of populous
Speaker 12: tax cuts that Trump talked about during the campaign. No
Speaker 12: tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on overtime.
Speaker 12: There's an alleged no tax on Social Security, but it
Speaker 12: has nothing to do with Social Security. There's a temporary
Speaker 12: boost to the standard deduction if you're over the age
Speaker 12: of sixty five. There is also, and the Senate added
Speaker 12: this a number of business tax cuts that are being
Speaker 12: made permanent in this bill, on research and development and
Speaker 12: business expensing and things like that. So you know, you
Speaker 12: put that all together. There's also an increase that effectively
Speaker 12: repeals the estate tax.
Speaker 5: I mean the increase.
Speaker 12: Now the threshold for actually having to pay the federal
Speaker 12: estate tax is so high that you're effectively eliminating any
Speaker 12: any family or estate from having to pay it.
Speaker 5: What you're putting it at it's something like thirty million.
Speaker 5: I think.
Speaker 12: It's a pretty extreme number. You know, there are all
Speaker 12: kinds of tricks that are done. I mean, if you're
Speaker 12: if you're holding this, you know, you still have to
Speaker 12: step up in basis. So if you're holding all of
Speaker 12: your assets in stocks and equities, and when you die,
Speaker 12: you step up to the level that it was at
Speaker 12: and you don't pay an additional tax on that. So
Speaker 12: I mean, there's a whole host of ways to gain
Speaker 12: the system, and now it's not as hard to gain.
Speaker 5: So you know, basically you put these all together.
Speaker 12: And by the way, all of those tax cuts are
Speaker 12: much more expensive than the spending cuts that have been
Speaker 12: put into offset it. Congressional Budget Office came out and
Speaker 12: said three point three trillion dollars and that's before interest expensing.
Speaker 5: Is how much this bill would cost.
Speaker 12: The way that the Republicans get around this is through
Speaker 12: a gimmick known as the current Policy baseline, and my
Speaker 12: understanding that may have already been voted on by the
Speaker 12: time we're talking, because that was going to be the
Speaker 12: first thing to be voted on in the vote rama
Speaker 12: here on the Senate floor. The current Policy Baseline says that, oh,
Speaker 12: if the current policy is these Trump tax cuts, these
Speaker 12: individual tax cuts. If we extend that, that doesn't cost
Speaker 12: any money because it's just keeping the same system that
Speaker 12: we have in place now. If you use a current
Speaker 12: law baseline, which says those expire at the end of
Speaker 12: the year and you have to pay to fund those
Speaker 12: tax cuts, it would be three point eight trillion dollars.
Speaker 12: This is why you'll hear Republicans say, actually, this bill
Speaker 12: saves the federal government five hundred billion dollars, because they're
Speaker 12: waving a magic wand around the Trump tax cuts and
Speaker 12: say those don't cost any money. So it's actually important
Speaker 12: because the budget reconciliation rules dictate that this bill would
Speaker 12: be out of compliance and unable to pass under these
Speaker 12: rules if they didn't use the current policy baseline.
Speaker 4: So if you give me twenty dollars today, that'll cost
Speaker 4: you twenty dollars. But if you give me twenty dollars
Speaker 4: every day forever after that, it doesn't actually cost you anything.
Speaker 12: I mean, the good analogy is that the analogy is
Speaker 12: that Democrats and they should they get a trifecta again,
Speaker 12: could pass the Medicare for All for One Day Act,
Speaker 12: which would cost one day's worth of Medicare for All,
Speaker 12: and then the next bill after that would extend it
Speaker 12: for ten years and say, hey, it's just the current
Speaker 12: policy today.
Speaker 5: So I guess I guess that's okay.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, reality is a thing, but I guess we'll see
Speaker 4: whether we have to deal with that or not. Dave Dan,
Speaker 4: editor of The American Prospect, thank you so much for
Speaker 4: joining me on breaking points. So the Democratic freak out
Speaker 4: over ZORONMM Donnie's victory in the Mayora primary continues. Who
Speaker 4: better to talk to us about that than a long
Speaker 4: time New York City resident, Although I guess expat now
Speaker 4: in Jersey, you are telling me Davia smim.
Speaker 8: Well, think I'm a refugee of the twenty twenty lockdowns
Speaker 8: I escaped over the border.
Speaker 4: Yes, it must been a harrowing journey. I'm I'm impressed
Speaker 4: that you made it. Somebody must have, you know, smuggled
Speaker 4: you into like a horse and drawn carriage and taken
Speaker 4: you over the bridge.
Speaker 8: Well there's not listen, it was As far as political
Speaker 8: refugees go, it's not very common that you end up
Speaker 8: getting a house for the price of your apartment when
Speaker 8: you get to the other side, so that it was
Speaker 8: a happy ending.
Speaker 11: So there you go.
Speaker 4: So So, Mom, Donnie, let's start with hickeen Jeffries. He's
Speaker 4: the Democratic leader in the house. Mom, Donnie was on
Speaker 4: a bunch of Sunday shows, as were a bunch of Democrats,
Speaker 4: all kind of circling around each other. Here's Jeffries getting
Speaker 4: asked whether he's going to endorse the Democratic nominee for mayor.
Speaker 5: Let's start with the big news leader, Jeffries.
Speaker 11: Out of your hometown. Mom, Donnie won a big victory.
Speaker 1: Have you endorsed him yet? I have not.
Speaker 13: We had a conversation on Wednesday morning where I congratulated
Speaker 13: him on the campaign that he ran a campaign that
Speaker 13: clearly was relentlessly focused on the high cost of living
Speaker 13: in New York City and the economy.
Speaker 1: He outworked, he out.
Speaker 13: Communicated, and he outorganized the opposition, and that's clearly why
Speaker 13: he was successful.
Speaker 1: So what's holding you back from endorsing him right now?
Speaker 13: Well, we don't really know each other. Well, our districts
Speaker 13: don't overlap. Globalizing the Antifada, by way of example, is
Speaker 13: not an acceptable phrasing. He's going to have to clarify
Speaker 13: his position on that as he moves forward. With respect
Speaker 13: to the Jewish communities that I represent, I think our
Speaker 13: nominee is going to have to convince folks that he
Speaker 13: is prepared to aggressively address the rise in anti Semitism
Speaker 13: in the City of New York, which has been an
Speaker 13: unacceptable development.
Speaker 4: Before we get into that, let's roll in Eric Swalwell
Speaker 4: and then talk about some of this. So Swallwell, many
Speaker 4: people do not know this. He actually ran for president
Speaker 4: at one point, tied with Kirsten Jelibrand for the most
Speaker 4: forgettable presidential candidacy in American history. Nonetheless, he did. Here
Speaker 4: he is on the Sunday Show sporting the new Democratic thing,
Speaker 4: trying to look regular with a beard.
Speaker 9: And frankly stylistically, and I'm not a socialist, and I
Speaker 9: don't associate myself with what he has said about the
Speaker 9: Jewish people.
Speaker 14: I think the reference that I had read was global
Speaker 14: intofada specifically, which has very serious meanings that are violent
Speaker 14: and destructive.
Speaker 15: Which he says, and I pressed him on this on
Speaker 15: the show on Monday, but which he says are not
Speaker 15: calls for violence because into fada is a much broader
Speaker 15: term involving all kinds of uprisings and resistance and things
Speaker 15: like that. So I just want to be clear about
Speaker 15: how at least he defines it. But I do also
Speaker 15: want to be clear that he said he does not
Speaker 15: support violent into fada.
Speaker 14: Is that there so, Brian, I didn't hear your exchange
Speaker 14: with him, but if I was speaking to him directly,
Speaker 14: I would simply say, that is not how the words
Speaker 14: are received, and it doesn't matter what meaning you have
Speaker 14: in your brain, it is not how the word is received.
Speaker 14: And when you use a word like intofada to many
Speaker 14: Jewish Americans and Jewish New Yorkers, that means you are
Speaker 14: permissive for violence against you.
Speaker 9: What specifically has Moum Donnie said that you think is
Speaker 9: anti Semitic.
Speaker 16: Pro Hamas Muhammas is a dangerous terrorist organization.
Speaker 9: When did he praise I don't recall him ever praising.
Speaker 16: There's several there's several videos, even during his days of
Speaker 16: being a rap artist, of praising Hamas and other terrorist groups,
Speaker 16: and so a little research you will be able to
Speaker 16: find it.
Speaker 17: Do you condemn that phrase globalize the atada?
Speaker 18: That's not language that I use. The language that I
Speaker 18: use and the language that I will continue to use
Speaker 18: to lead the city is that which speaks clearly to
Speaker 18: my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief
Speaker 18: in universal human rights, and ultimately that's what is the
Speaker 18: foundation of so much of my politics, the belief that
Speaker 18: freedom and justice and safety are things that to have
Speaker 18: meaning have to be applied to all people, includes Israelis
Speaker 18: and Palestinians's life.
Speaker 15: But do you actually condemn it?
Speaker 4: So Eric Swalwell that probably had the most egregious and
Speaker 4: unsourced claim there where he said, you know, I had
Speaker 4: I take issue with things that he has said about
Speaker 4: the Jewish community, which he's never said anything negative about
Speaker 4: the Jewish community ever, like nobody's even until Swalwell accused
Speaker 4: him of that. He can't point anything. I reached out
Speaker 4: that his office to see if they would point anything.
Speaker 4: They haven't gotten back to me yet. The Jilibrand one
Speaker 4: I wanted to get your take on because if you
Speaker 4: take the anti Semitism debate out of this, the language
Speaker 4: that she was using there feels ripped out of like
Speaker 4: twenty nineteen, twenty twenty cancel culture, so like it doesn't
Speaker 4: matter what you think the word means. And what's so
Speaker 4: crazy is that we're talking about an Arabic word which
Speaker 4: means resistance. Like that's not there's no no debate. That's
Speaker 4: what the word means. You can go go to Google
Speaker 4: Translate and put in antifada. It means resistance. But according
Speaker 4: to jail Brand, it doesn't matter what it means. What
Speaker 4: matters is how it makes people feel on the other end,
Speaker 4: which to me is the very familiar cancel culture language.
Speaker 4: And she even then says, we have the same thing
Speaker 4: when it comes to black brown in LGBTQ communities. We understand.
Speaker 4: So she's making the argument to the left like, look,
Speaker 4: you guys have adopted this cancel culture rubric. This fits
Speaker 4: into it, so you should cancel him. What I'm curious
Speaker 4: about for people who've been critical of cancel culture, how
Speaker 4: are they squaring this language policing around mom Donnie.
Speaker 8: Well, Ryan, it's a good question. I've been asking that
Speaker 8: question for about two years now. Across huge swats of
Speaker 8: the political portion of Americans that are supporting Israel. Nobody
Speaker 8: seems to have an issue squaring. It's just we will
Speaker 8: just pretend that everything we stood for or five minutes
Speaker 8: ago doesn't exist and move on. It's really it's I
Speaker 8: think the worst aspect of wokeism and cancel culture and
Speaker 8: even political correctness as it used to be called when
Speaker 8: when I was a kid. Is that it's this this
Speaker 8: thing where you try to shut down conversation based off
Speaker 8: a term that someone's using, and nobody it becomes an
Speaker 8: excuse to never grapple with the point that the person
Speaker 8: was making. It's like, you know, you just you used
Speaker 8: the wrong term, and therefore everyone has to freak out
Speaker 8: about this. But what's really truly remarkable about this race
Speaker 8: to me is there's this it's like there's this denial
Speaker 8: amongst the Democratic establishment of how bad the situation is
Speaker 8: for them, you know, like it's it's you know, going
Speaker 8: back to twenty sixteen, where there was a civil war
Speaker 8: in the Republican Party and a civil war in the
Speaker 8: Democrat in the Democratic Party with the Trump campaign, in
Speaker 8: the Bernie Sanders campaign, and it's almost like because you know,
Speaker 8: the Republicans were they just surrender and Donald Trump took
Speaker 8: over the whole party, the republic But the Democrats cheated
Speaker 8: Bernie Sanders out of the nomination, and so they were
Speaker 8: able to pretend that this didn't really happen. But now
Speaker 8: after the humiliation that was, you know, running Joe Biden
Speaker 8: and then Kamala Harris against Donald Trump and then losing
Speaker 8: to the man who you said was a threat to
Speaker 8: democracy and an insurrectionist and a Russian spy or all
Speaker 8: these things, and then to come back and what the
Speaker 8: option was Andrew Cuomo? Like that was the alternative that
Speaker 8: you put up against this guy, the disgraced former senior
Speaker 8: citizen murderer, Andrew Cuomo. And anyway, everybody's ignoring the obvious here,
Speaker 8: which is that Mom Donnie ran a campaign about the
Speaker 8: unaffordability of New York City. It's clearly the number one crisis.
Speaker 8: And I certainly disagree with a lot of his solutions,
Speaker 8: but at least he's talking about it. And then it's
Speaker 8: like they're they're beating up on him at the debate
Speaker 8: by saying, but you won't commit to going to visit Israel,
Speaker 8: or we're having some debate about whether he favors a
Speaker 8: two state solution or a democratic one state solution. I mean,
Speaker 8: who cares. This is a mayoral race for New York City,
Speaker 8: And so that even trying to make the major issue
Speaker 8: whether he uttered the phrase intifada instead of using a
Speaker 8: different term, which I've never even heard him use the term,
Speaker 8: And I just at this point, I totally tune this out.
Speaker 8: I hear every single day that I'm a Hamas supporter,
Speaker 8: and which is not true. I've never supported Hamas in
Speaker 8: my life. I don't hate Jewish people. But this is,
Speaker 8: as you know, in America, everyone who's critical of the
Speaker 8: Israeli government gets this stuff labeled, and I just think
Speaker 8: it's gotten to a point where it's meaningless. But even
Speaker 8: if he had said the term, who cares? You know,
Speaker 8: what's his plan for the city? And every time I've
Speaker 8: ever heard him asked about Jewish people, which he's asked
Speaker 8: about all the time, he always gives the right answer
Speaker 8: and says he's critical of the power policies of the
Speaker 8: Israeli government, but has nothing against Jewish people. So the
Speaker 8: whole thing just seems it seems to be this like
Speaker 8: impotent flailing around where they can't take on anything of substance.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And the irony to your point is that he
Speaker 4: didn't actually say that. This scandal quote unquote scandal started
Speaker 4: from a Bulwark interview where Tim Miller asked him, I mean,
Speaker 4: what about a phrase like globalize the anti fada? Would
Speaker 4: would you condemn that? And his answer was, well, I
Speaker 4: don't use that phrase because I know that, you know,
Speaker 4: it rings offensive to some people's ears. He's like, but
Speaker 4: I'm not going to condemn it outright across the board,
Speaker 4: because there is this demand that we condemn just basic
Speaker 4: Arabic words, So I'm not He's like, I'm not going
Speaker 4: to condemn an Arabic word because that would mean that
Speaker 4: an Arabic speaker who was using the word intifada is
Speaker 4: condemned by me when I don't know what they're saying.
Speaker 4: And so it's it's too much because people hear it differently,
Speaker 4: and so I don't use it. But people mean different things.
Speaker 4: A lot of people mean it non violently, as you know,
Speaker 4: like the first anti fat it was nonviolent. INTI fought
Speaker 4: across into fund. It just means resistance. It's the word
Speaker 4: for resistance. So therefore I'm not going to condemn an
Speaker 4: entire word that covers like many different things. So that's
Speaker 4: the that's the context where this arose. And then you
Speaker 4: have people like Eric Adams saying that he goes around
Speaker 4: chanting it, or Eric Swalwall saying he says terrible things
Speaker 4: about Jewish people. But real quickly, Hakeem Jefferies before we
Speaker 4: move on the Democratic leader that we played there his
Speaker 4: calling card for why he needed to rise up the ranks,
Speaker 4: and his establishment supporters argued that this was a man
Speaker 4: who was going to be an effective communicator for Democrats
Speaker 4: like he was. He's the charismatic, articulate guy who's going
Speaker 4: to deliver the message in a way that like Nancy
Speaker 4: Pelosi and Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer and some of
Speaker 4: these stumbling older folks can't. He's the young, fresh voice.
Speaker 4: You're not a Democrat. I'm curious for your perspective when
Speaker 4: you saw him there on me on that Sunday show.
Speaker 4: Did you were youmoved? Did you feel like, Okay, this
Speaker 4: is a communicator that is finally going to break through
Speaker 4: to the American public.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's just it really just pulls at your guts
Speaker 8: and your heart, and yeah, it's just all so ridiculous, man,
Speaker 8: And you know it's I think this is one of
Speaker 8: the things that because now kind of like the media
Speaker 8: environment is so much less controlled than it used to
Speaker 8: be and so much more decentralized, and we have shows
Speaker 8: like this and lots of other ones, and it's just
Speaker 8: like the overwhelming hypocrisy of all of this. It's almost
Speaker 8: like they relied on a controlled environment to be able
Speaker 8: to sell these type of arguments. Because the thing that
Speaker 8: comes up to me, you know, with haw came Jeffreys.
Speaker 8: You're like, okay, so you can't endorse this guy because
Speaker 8: he's said some things that you think might be offensive
Speaker 8: to the Jewish community, Like have you ever applied this
Speaker 8: to the Muslim community? Have you ever? You know what
Speaker 8: I'm saying, Like even if the word even the word intifada,
Speaker 8: if you're gonna say, well, that could have violent connotations
Speaker 8: with it, which is like it it certainly could, and
Speaker 8: some people certainly use it to me and violence as well,
Speaker 8: But like, how about the term war? I mean, the
Speaker 8: term war almost always comes with women and children dying,
Speaker 8: But yet people can advocate for that, and we don't
Speaker 8: put that term under a microscope and go you know
Speaker 8: what I mean, And that people could advocate for flattening
Speaker 8: Gaza and in the Democratic Party, you know, and like
Speaker 8: nobody is sitting here and going, well, hey, I got
Speaker 8: Muslim constituents. I can't endorse this guy, which you know,
Speaker 8: like if you were to take that position and then
Speaker 8: also held the same thing for the term into fada,
Speaker 8: then maybe I could start listening to you. But again,
Speaker 8: I think it's just it's so it's so naked and transparent.
Speaker 8: It's like, no, you you're beholden to the war party,
Speaker 8: and so obviously you don't want to support this guy
Speaker 8: who's outside of that, even though it's just the mayor
Speaker 8: of New York City. It has absolutely nothing to do
Speaker 8: with the war. And the funny what was so amazing,
Speaker 8: so remarkable about this race to me is that while
Speaker 8: all the other candidates in the primary debate and and
Speaker 8: the moderators are all trying to get this guy for
Speaker 8: like not supporting Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state,
Speaker 8: he insists it must be a democratic state, as if
Speaker 8: that's unpopular. You know, It's like, now, somehow you're supposed
Speaker 8: to convince people that, he goes, I support Israel as
Speaker 8: a state with equal rights for everybody, and then someone's
Speaker 8: supposed to that's Adolf Hitler talk right there, like that's evil.
Speaker 8: Equal rights for everybody is what Nazis say or something.
Speaker 8: But while the bottom line in reality is that the
Speaker 8: war is unpopular, and Cuomo and everybody else is insisting
Speaker 8: that they carry this baggage they carry this unpopular baggage
Speaker 8: which mom Donnie gets to be free of and say,
Speaker 8: oh yeah, no, I'm not for that war. Anyway, Let's
Speaker 8: talk about why Chicken over races twelve dollars instead of
Speaker 8: seven dollars. It's like they just hand him the win.
Speaker 8: It's fascinating.
Speaker 4: Over the weekend at the Glassonberry Festival, which is apparently
Speaker 4: this gigantic cultural event over in England. Uh, the the
Speaker 4: monitors over at BBC were on guard, uh to make
Speaker 4: sure that uh, what's what's the Irish band that they
Speaker 4: are that they're all scared of the uh the one
Speaker 4: that says free Palestine. Uh, yeah, yeah they were. They're
Speaker 4: they're basically they accused them of like waving a Hesbala
Speaker 4: flag at a previous route, so they're they're like, we're
Speaker 4: going to make sure that these mixed do not say
Speaker 4: the words, you know, free Palestine. They're on guard. They
Speaker 4: kept them from performing live over the airwaves, said yeah,
Speaker 4: you have to get them on demand later, and then
Speaker 4: they just let their guard down for the top performance
Speaker 4: by about Villain. So he comes on stage. Let's roll
Speaker 4: a little bit of what the centers missed.
Speaker 19: Free, free, Free, Free, fru Hi have you heard this
Speaker 19: one though?
Speaker 4: Bef beft to the eye, the iff to the id
Speaker 4: iff to the.
Speaker 1: I d FtF to the I d F stef to
Speaker 1: the I d F.
Speaker 4: Kind of remarkable visual because you've got the BBC logo
Speaker 4: up in the corner there, and you've got the like
Speaker 4: the well produced you know, cameras that are rolling over
Speaker 4: the crowd, while you also hear the crowd chanting along
Speaker 4: with him. Uh, which has led to a predictable uh
Speaker 4: out meltdown in England and around the world. In response
Speaker 4: to it, Villain himself came out with a statement which
Speaker 4: said he's where he said. I said what I said.
Speaker 4: That was a statement, and then he had a longer
Speaker 4: statement about how political change is important and you got
Speaker 4: to speak from whatever blackborm notes. So not not backing down.
Speaker 13: Uh.
Speaker 4: They the English British are saying they're even going to
Speaker 4: like open an investigation into whether charges ought to be brought. Dave,
Speaker 4: did you did you happen to watch the glass Very
Speaker 4: Festival in real time? Is this in a cultural event
Speaker 4: you're tuned into or did you only pick up on
Speaker 4: it after the meltdown?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 8: I have I've never heard of this I've never heard
Speaker 8: of the event. I've never heard of the band or
Speaker 8: this guy, which is it's funny because that's I think
Speaker 8: the case counting.
Speaker 4: I was trying to think of, yes, yes, I think, yes,
Speaker 4: that's right.
Speaker 8: I'm sure a huge portion of the Breaking Points audience,
Speaker 8: but so nobody, I think essentially of the people who
Speaker 8: are outraged about this actually cared about it or knew
Speaker 8: about it. But again, it is it's, you know, I've done,
Speaker 8: like I've done so many of these debates on Israel
Speaker 8: Palestine over the last couple of years, and so many
Speaker 8: like shows about it, and it's, like we were saying earlier,
Speaker 8: it's the double standards and the hypocrisy are just like,
Speaker 8: what's so overwhelming, you know, it's it's the idea that
Speaker 8: after all of these months of just women and children
Speaker 8: being massacred in the most ruthless ways, that we're supposed
Speaker 8: to be outraged about like a chant at a concert,
Speaker 8: and that this is you know, this is really the
Speaker 8: threat of our time, not what the IDF is doing
Speaker 8: to Gaza. Is just it's very bizarre, and so yeah,
Speaker 8: looks it's fairly predictable that this was a provocative thing
Speaker 8: to do and I think the thing that should be
Speaker 8: a wake up call is just as you point it out,
Speaker 8: it's such a huge crowd and they're all in agreement,
Speaker 8: and I think that's the thing that is is threatening
Speaker 8: to people who are our supporters of Israel, but should
Speaker 8: be something that everybody should take a look at, like, hey,
Speaker 8: look what's going on here, and this is however you
Speaker 8: feel about it, this is going to be one of
Speaker 8: the costs that this that comes with the policy of
Speaker 8: destroying Gaza. And I have been I still just cannot
Speaker 8: believe twenty two months later, whatever we are since October seventh,
Speaker 8: that the pro Israel crowd doesn't wake up to this,
Speaker 8: that it's like, hey, look, yes, the poor Palestinians cannot
Speaker 8: stop you. And as we were just discussing, it seems
Speaker 8: like for whatever reason, the Americans, including the Trump administration,
Speaker 8: are unable or unwilling to put pressure on Israel to
Speaker 8: stop them. America really is the only the Americans are
Speaker 8: the only ones who could stop the Israelis, and we're not.
Speaker 8: We're facilitating it, and the poor Palestinians are helpless. However,
Speaker 8: you are turning the entire world against you, and for
Speaker 8: a group of people. I say this as a Jewish
Speaker 8: you know person myself. I'm well aware of the culture
Speaker 8: of kind of paranoia within Jewish Americans at least, and
Speaker 8: I think maybe maybe that's understandable given the history of
Speaker 8: Jews have been treated in the world. But if you
Speaker 8: have that, if you have this concern that there's this
Speaker 8: rise in anti Semitism, there's this rise in jew hatred,
Speaker 8: and oh, my god, ought a next authoritarian Hitler esque
Speaker 8: figure could be right around the corner, then, my God,
Speaker 8: read the room. I mean, then advocate to end this
Speaker 8: policy because it is coming with this you're listen. Turns
Speaker 8: out you can only slaughter so many and women and
Speaker 8: children before you make a lot of people hate you.
Speaker 8: And the way that that manifests itself is not always
Speaker 8: gonna be, you know, a man in a suit and
Speaker 8: tie saying, excuse me, good sir, I disagree with this
Speaker 8: policy decision of slaughtering women and children. It's gonna look
Speaker 8: like this quite often, and if you don't want to
Speaker 8: see more of it, stop slaughtering women and children.
Speaker 4: That's it's a really interesting point about the crowd response,
Speaker 4: because you're right, they can prosecute Bob Villain. Maybe maybe
Speaker 4: they can find some laws that he broke in in England,
Speaker 4: you can end his career. You could have prevented him
Speaker 4: from even ever going on stage. You know what, we've
Speaker 4: looked into your past, you said some things. We're nervous
Speaker 4: about what you're gonna say. We're not gonna put you
Speaker 4: up on stage. What you can't do if you're an
Speaker 4: Israeli defender is influence how that crowd is going to respond, because, yeah,
Speaker 4: if Bob Villain goes up there and chance death, death,
Speaker 4: the idf and the crowd looks at him like he's
Speaker 4: a maniac. Then he looks he looks crazy, and he
Speaker 4: looks like a he looks like a fool, and you know,
Speaker 4: he moves on probably and you know, moves on to
Speaker 4: some other song where you know, he had that one
Speaker 4: reason attacking British people who want their country back, and
Speaker 4: he moves on to that one instead. But that wasn't
Speaker 4: the response. You've got hundreds of thousands of people screaming
Speaker 4: along with him, and yeah, that if you're a defender
Speaker 4: of Israel, that really has to be the problem. And
Speaker 4: it's been interesting to watch the evolution around the arguing
Speaker 4: around the language. You know, We started this in October
Speaker 4: of twenty twenty three with people censuring Rashida Talib on
Speaker 4: this floor of the House of Representatives for using the
Speaker 4: phrase from the river to the sea in a video
Speaker 4: that she had posted. And the argument was, if you
Speaker 4: believe in you know one you know, one person, one vote,
Speaker 4: you know, everyone with from the river to the sea
Speaker 4: is treated with equal rights, that that is a rejection
Speaker 4: of the Jewish supremacist nature of Israel, and the people
Speaker 4: who then will be in control will slaughter everybody, like
Speaker 4: who's Jewish from the river to the sea. So pretty
Speaker 4: horrifying assumptions to make about people. But that like, that's
Speaker 4: the argument for why that is. And that phrases an
Speaker 4: attack on civilians globalize The anti Fada people say, well,
Speaker 4: the second Antifada included bus bombings, cafe bombings, So if
Speaker 4: you say the word antifada, you're you're supporting killing people
Speaker 4: in civilians, killing civilians in cafes. Now it almost feels
Speaker 4: like Bob Villain took that critis I'm in. I was like, Okay,
Speaker 4: I'm going to tell you exactly who I'm talking about.
Speaker 4: The IDF, the members of the military who just the
Speaker 4: day before had been exposed as shooting directly at civilians
Speaker 4: who were getting aid at a gas a Humanitarian Foundation
Speaker 4: distribution site, which hasn't stopped people from saying that he
Speaker 4: actually is calling for the death of all Jewish people
Speaker 4: or civilians. But I thought, what did you make of
Speaker 4: the fact that he zeroed in directly on the military
Speaker 4: with that chant?
Speaker 8: Yeah, well, I think it It was probably a smart decision.
Speaker 8: I mean, I guess I don't know how much thought
Speaker 8: was actually put into it.
Speaker 4: At anti ranch up because he's like death, I'm not
Speaker 4: leaving any room for ambiguity in what I'm calling for
Speaker 4: on the death on the violence side, but leaving any
Speaker 4: room for ambiguity on the target side, which is the IDEAF.
Speaker 8: That's right, And and it's so it's it's funny because
Speaker 8: it's like you watch all of these people, the Israel
Speaker 8: defenders kind of just constantly, as we have for the
Speaker 8: last couple of years, just twisting themselves into all types
Speaker 8: of pretzels to to somehow, you know, like try to
Speaker 8: logically work out that it is somehow it is way
Speaker 8: over the line to call for death death to the
Speaker 8: IDF yet calling because somehow that's anti Semitic. Yet calling
Speaker 8: for the destruction of Hamas is not anti Palestinian. You see,
Speaker 8: there's a major difference there. And sure, if we if
Speaker 8: as we are actually enacting the policy supposedly of destroying Hamas,
Speaker 8: the innocent Palestinian Palestinians are being slaughtered in the process,
Speaker 8: well that's okay, because we're really just targeting Hamas. Even
Speaker 8: though we're shooting into crowds of people trying to get
Speaker 8: food or destroying the entire gaza strip, that's still targeting Hamas. However,
Speaker 8: just hollering death to the IDF is an attack against
Speaker 8: all Israelis or all Jews broadly speaking. I mean, if
Speaker 8: you can make both of those thoughts, you know, not
Speaker 8: contradict each other somehow, good luck to you. But it
Speaker 8: has been you know, Look, when you engage in a
Speaker 8: war in the manner that the IDEF has over the
Speaker 8: last couple of years, I'm sorry that you're you're you're
Speaker 8: indistinguishable from a terrorist organization. And so if you're allowed
Speaker 8: to chant death to terrorist organizations, which seems to be
Speaker 8: the justification for this entire destruction of Gaza, then I
Speaker 8: don't see why you shouldn't be allowed to do it
Speaker 8: the other way. And obviously this is gonna you know,
Speaker 8: this is gonna upset a lot of people. It's not
Speaker 8: the way I would you know, communicate the issue. But again,
Speaker 8: you know, there's something there's something like profoundly Freudian about
Speaker 8: what you were saying there where it's like, well, what
Speaker 8: if you know this this kind of like foundational Freudian
Speaker 8: insight that if you repress, you know, you repress certain urges,
Speaker 8: they re emerge in an uglier way. And so, I,
Speaker 8: you know, I've had this thought a lot over the
Speaker 8: last few years. I remember when there was that major
Speaker 8: campaign to counsel my buddy Joe Rogan, and I remember
Speaker 8: just even thinking at the time, you know, when they
Speaker 8: were getting the artists to like boycott Spotify because he
Speaker 8: was having you know, like you know, anti lockdown scientists
Speaker 8: on his show or something like that. And you go, so,
Speaker 8: what do you guys think, like Brian Stelter on CNN
Speaker 8: every day advocating that Joe Rogan get you know, get censored.
Speaker 8: What do you think they're all coming back to CNA
Speaker 8: you think is fifteen million subscribers or what they're just
Speaker 8: gonna they're gonna go, well, Rogan's gone. I guess we
Speaker 8: got to tune into Don Lemon and Brian Stelter tonight.
Speaker 8: I mean, come on, they're just And it's funny because
Speaker 8: we kind of we ran this experiment of mass censorship
Speaker 8: on social media for years and did that solve any
Speaker 8: of those problems? Is there is there no more right
Speaker 8: wing extremism now or no, it's it's worse than it's
Speaker 8: ever been, or from their perspective, So again, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 8: look when you got this many people, it's like governments
Speaker 8: are by their nature their instruments of force, and all
Speaker 8: they can do is repress this stuff. But that doesn't
Speaker 8: that doesn't mean it goes away. In fact, that's probably
Speaker 8: going to mean that it comes it re emerges in
Speaker 8: a much more dangerous, uglier form.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I'm curious as somebody who's been engaged in this,
Speaker 4: this dialogue and this debate, you know from the very beginning,
Speaker 4: what you know, how you've seen it change over the
Speaker 4: last you know, year plus, Like, have you seen are
Speaker 4: people coming up to you who are like who have
Speaker 4: changed their minds? That Dave, You're actually right, I wish
Speaker 4: I had seen this earlier. Or are you've seen people
Speaker 4: who like, after a year and a half of this,
Speaker 4: I think you're you're crazy and you're obsessed, and you're
Speaker 4: you've lost your mind about this. Like what you've got
Speaker 4: your because you've been in so many different kind of
Speaker 4: debates on this, on this issue, You've got your finger
Speaker 4: on the kind of pulse I think in a way
Speaker 4: that a lot of people don't. So what are what
Speaker 4: are you sensing about, like how public attitudes have change?
Speaker 4: Because you're right, like, you can censor all you want,
Speaker 4: but if a chant like that is going to resonate
Speaker 4: with hundreds of thousands of normies at a concert, that's
Speaker 4: your problem, not the chance.
Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah, well, so you know the it's like all
Speaker 8: it's always been the case with every every war of
Speaker 8: my lifetime that I can remember, is that it's always
Speaker 8: like when the war first launches, the war propagandists are
Speaker 8: at their strongest, and then as time goes on, their
Speaker 8: case just gets weaker and weaker and weaker, and the
Speaker 8: justification changes and the you know, the things they were
Speaker 8: saying yesterday aren't even the arguments today. You know, there
Speaker 8: was if you remember at the very beginning of this war,
Speaker 8: whenever you would you would debate that somebody would always
Speaker 8: say something like, uh, you know, we can't trust the
Speaker 8: guys a health ministry. These numbers have been inflated. It's
Speaker 8: not that many those talking points are pretty much all
Speaker 8: gone now because it's the deaf count, as everybody acknowledges,
Speaker 8: is way higher than what they were disputing back then.
Speaker 8: In terms of like the reaction from people there, there's
Speaker 8: no question that there are you know, Israel is a
Speaker 8: particularly interesting issue, and it is one that is so emotional,
Speaker 8: like there's so much emotion around it, and there are
Speaker 8: the people who are just dug in and there's certainly
Speaker 8: I've I've lost some fans and I've lost I don't
Speaker 8: even know what to say. It's not even like people
Speaker 8: necessarily that I'm friends with, but people say like in
Speaker 8: the you know, in the commentator sphere, who would have
Speaker 8: had just nothing but great things to say about me,
Speaker 8: you know, like a if you had asked Dave Rubin
Speaker 8: his thoughts about me two years ago, he would have
Speaker 8: just told you what a bright guy I was, and
Speaker 8: you know whatever, it would have been nothing but compliments.
Speaker 8: Now it'll be he's a moron, he doesn't know what
Speaker 8: he's talking about so like, I've gotten some of that,
Speaker 8: but overwhelmingly the response from the people has been like,
Speaker 8: just totally on the side of that, this is just
Speaker 8: insane and it's indefensible. And I've heard from so many people.
Speaker 8: I mean, I've gotten so many messages over the last
Speaker 8: couple of years of people who were like, I was
Speaker 8: a lifelong supporter of Israel, even a couple months into
Speaker 8: the war, I thought you were crazy, and I liked
Speaker 8: your takes on other things, but couldn't get on board
Speaker 8: with this, And now they just look back at it
Speaker 8: and go, oh, yeah, this is just totally indefensible. And
Speaker 8: there's many different It's like, I don't think I've ever
Speaker 8: seen any war or which I don't like using the
Speaker 8: word war because it's really not a war. It's just
Speaker 8: the destruction of a captive people. But you know, the
Speaker 8: term genocide is much closer than the term war to
Speaker 8: what you're seeing over there from So it's the most
Speaker 8: like the defense of the policy is incoherent at every level,
Speaker 8: at every and then the most basic one that I
Speaker 8: think resonates the most with Trump supporters is that however
Speaker 8: you feel about it, even if you were on Israel's
Speaker 8: side of the conflict and say, you know whatever, after
Speaker 8: October seventh, you have to respond and they have a
Speaker 8: right to defend themselves or whatever the talking point is.
Speaker 8: It's so clearly not in America's interest for this thing
Speaker 8: to continue. It does nothing except in gender more hatred
Speaker 8: against us, and it's it's a destabilizing force. No matter
Speaker 8: how you feel about it. People over here are just
Speaker 8: pitted against each other over a conflict thousands of miles
Speaker 8: away that has nothing to do with America. It has
Speaker 8: nothing to do you know, Hamas is probably Hamas. October
Speaker 8: seventh is the by far the biggest you know, violent
Speaker 8: achievement of the of the history of Hamas since it started.
Speaker 8: They probably are no threat to repeat October seventh. There
Speaker 8: are certainly no threat to the United States of America.
Speaker 8: It is just too goofy. I mean, if you know,
Speaker 8: somehow they'll try to make it out that Iran is
Speaker 8: a threat to us, which is still pretty goofy. But Hamas,
Speaker 8: I mean, come on, this is just not so you
Speaker 8: just you can't defend the idea that America should be
Speaker 8: funding something that is against America's interest. And so to me,
Speaker 8: I've seen you know, I think it's been pretty overwhelming that,
Speaker 8: like the people are opposed to this policy, and then
Speaker 8: and and so I've you know, I kind of have
Speaker 8: had the benefit it. Like the secret Ryan that I'll
Speaker 8: share with you here is that I'm actually not that
Speaker 8: good of a debater. I'm not the most brilliant guy
Speaker 8: in the world. I'm not reinventing the world. Well I'm not.
Speaker 8: I'm not. As Douglas Murray thought, this was a real gotcha,
Speaker 8: I'm not the expert. There are people who know this
Speaker 8: conflict in the history way better than I do. Norman
Speaker 8: Finkelstein can recite every un resolution in his sleep. I
Speaker 8: can't do that, you know what I mean. But I
Speaker 8: know enough, and I just take the side that is
Speaker 8: the obvious correct side. And then that makes it very
Speaker 8: difficult to debate against because the truth has this ring
Speaker 8: to it, you know, when people say something rings true.
Speaker 8: Truth just has like a power that when you're in
Speaker 8: an argument, it's very easy to win it when you
Speaker 8: have the truth on your side. And so my experience
Speaker 8: has been that this has been with the overwhelming majority
Speaker 8: of people just calling out the insanity of this policy
Speaker 8: has been resonating.
Speaker 4: And I think the podcast and YouTube format has also
Speaker 4: changed it because if you're debating somebody for three minutes
Speaker 4: on cable news, Douglas Murray talking point and a Dave
Speaker 4: Smith talking point will both ring true, like they're both
Speaker 4: you can each go back and forth for a couple
Speaker 4: of minutes and sound reasonable to people who aren't steeped
Speaker 4: in in the issue. And that's the point you're trying
Speaker 4: to reach build aren't steeped in it. But you have
Speaker 4: to go beyond three minutes. You know, once you're in
Speaker 4: the minute thirty and minute sixty and minute ninety, then
Speaker 4: that's when the truth starts to ring through, and and
Speaker 4: the side that is incoherent just completely just kind of
Speaker 4: crumbles in the face of those those facts. So I
Speaker 4: think that's probably played a role too, And you're willing
Speaker 4: to like engage long form makes it so that yeah,
Speaker 4: over over the space of the debate, you're like, Okay,
Speaker 4: wait a minute, none of this is making sense.
Speaker 8: Yes, that's right, long long form and you know not
Speaker 8: a less controlled environment is always like that. That is
Speaker 8: always a benefit to the truth teller. So whoever's telling
Speaker 8: the truth, that's always going to help more and more.
Speaker 8: And I think you're totally right. I mean it's it's
Speaker 8: when you really think about it, it's like the cable
Speaker 8: news in general is such a ridiculous format. Yeah, I
Speaker 8: mean it's it's crazy that it ever existed.
Speaker 4: And you know, you go and do this Earth is
Speaker 4: flat on there and sound reasonable for you know, two exchanges.
Speaker 8: There's I mean, I'm not even exaggerating. I've been on
Speaker 8: you know, I used to do these shows. I don't
Speaker 8: really do them anymore because it's like there's no point
Speaker 8: and there's just the audiences on these internet shows, and
Speaker 8: so what's the point in going back and doing cable news.
Speaker 8: I get I get asked all the time to do
Speaker 8: you know, like Fox News shows, but I'm just like,
Speaker 8: it's not worth my time. But I've done a time.
Speaker 8: But they would do this thing where it'd be like
Speaker 8: it'd be literally three people on a panel, there's a
Speaker 8: ten minute segment. The host of the show does you know,
Speaker 8: two minutes up front, So now there's eight minutes to
Speaker 8: be divided amongst three people to discuss the most important
Speaker 8: topic in the world. And she's like this is the same,
Speaker 8: like would you and so then it is you know, like, look,
Speaker 8: it's a good exercise. I think sometimes to like, oh,
Speaker 8: you're like, can I trim the fat and cut my
Speaker 8: argument down to the most compelling two minute case? But yeah,
Speaker 8: almost anybody can can even propagandas can sound compelling for
Speaker 8: ninety seconds or two minutes. But it's not till you
Speaker 8: start being able to push back on them and pull
Speaker 8: the thread of all of their claims to kind of
Speaker 8: expose how you know, It's like in my cousin Vinny
Speaker 8: when he's you know, he says, you turn the card
Speaker 8: to the side, and then you see how it's paper thin.
Speaker 8: You know, It's like you have to be able to
Speaker 8: do that. But now, and this is one of the
Speaker 8: things that I'm really encouraged by. I just think it's
Speaker 8: so amazing that we're living through this time. The new
Speaker 8: norm now is long form shows, and that the politicians
Speaker 8: even have to be able to go there. You saw
Speaker 8: just Bernie Sanders going on Joe Rogan's show the other day,
Speaker 8: and then of course Donald Trump doing all the show
Speaker 8: is to help get his second term. That's the new
Speaker 8: that's the new standard now. And I think that one
Speaker 8: of the things that you know, people have seen with
Speaker 8: a lot of this stuff, I think probably the biggest,
Speaker 8: biggest example of it was Ted Cruz with Tucker Carlson
Speaker 8: the other day. Is that you see that, like so
Speaker 8: much of this war propaganda, they like they fall apart
Speaker 8: with the like the most basic pushback, the most basic
Speaker 8: just like kind of like just just one for one
Speaker 8: follow up question and their entire case falls apart. And
Speaker 8: so that is that is very encouraging to me, and
Speaker 8: I think that's that's our best hope moving forward.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've had the same experience. I did cable for
Speaker 4: many years, and my colleagues or my wife would say, like,
Speaker 4: don't you have like see an n or MSNBC in
Speaker 4: like two minutes, don't you to prepare for this? Like no,
Speaker 4: they're going to give me thirty five seconds to talk,
Speaker 4: Like I have thirty five seconds off the top, like
Speaker 4: on whatever issue you've got, I've got thirty seconds on that.
Speaker 4: And that's not a value to the viewer who wants
Speaker 4: my surface thirty seconds. But that's what they do, and
Speaker 4: then they just do it every hour on repeat. The
Speaker 4: Israeli newspaper, Howarettes released a startling investigation over the weekend
Speaker 4: or like gues startling to people who didn't believe the
Speaker 4: many Palestinian eyewitnesses and medics and doctors who had been
Speaker 4: making the same case. But what the howrets we could
Speaker 4: put this element up on the screen investigation revealed is
Speaker 4: that what we have been seeing and what we have
Speaker 4: been hearing about is is the result of a policy
Speaker 4: coming from at least some commanders in the field to
Speaker 4: deliberately shoot at shoot toward starving Palestinian aid seekers at
Speaker 4: the at and around the aid centers related to the
Speaker 4: Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Amir Tibon is a columnist at how
Speaker 4: Reetz were still joined as well by Dave Smith. Late
Speaker 4: later in this interview, we're going to talk about Amir's
Speaker 4: latest column on Netan, Yahoo and Trump. We want to
Speaker 4: start here with this how a Retz investigation, Amir, How
Speaker 4: has it been resonating in Israel? This this feels like
Speaker 4: a piece that broke through in a way that some
Speaker 4: had not in the past. But maybe that's just my
Speaker 4: hope kind of give you know, coloring my analysis.
Speaker 19: So, first of all, this is an investigation by three
Speaker 19: of my colleagues, and Nil Sassoon and iv Kobovich and
Speaker 19: Barb and I want to give them the due credit
Speaker 19: for the hard work that they did here, and it's
Speaker 19: mostly based on interviews with soldiers, with people on the
Speaker 19: ground who are eyewitnesses to the very disturbing reality that
Speaker 19: has developed around the question of the aid distribution in
Speaker 19: Gaza and all these incidents where you have people being
Speaker 19: killed from gunfire. Now, the investigation doesn't say that this
Speaker 19: is exclusively the idea, if it doesn't rule out the
Speaker 19: claim that we've heard from the Israeli side that also
Speaker 19: Hamas has targeted people near the aid centers or some
Speaker 19: of the workers, but it definitely includes testimonies from soldiers
Speaker 19: who say that they were given orders to fire live ammunition,
Speaker 19: let's say, at least in the vicinity of the aid
Speaker 19: distribution centers. And I really think it's just worth reading.
Speaker 19: It's a very very strong article. There's been strong pushback
Speaker 19: against it. But what's interesting to note is that at
Speaker 19: least I've seen one reporter, one military reporter for I
Speaker 19: think it's Channel fourteen, which is a very right leaning
Speaker 19: Prona Tanyao media outlet, who basically after denouncing the investigation
Speaker 19: in Haretz, said that some of the orders and some
Speaker 19: of the rules of engagement, you know, when soldiers can
Speaker 19: open fire around the distribution centers was changed after the
Speaker 19: publication of the story, which, you know, it's a weird
Speaker 19: way to try to debunk something if you're saying it's
Speaker 19: not true. But by the way it has led to
Speaker 19: changes in the policy, and from my point of view,
Speaker 19: I think what it really shows is that from speaking
Speaker 19: of from an Israeli perspective.
Speaker 1: This is a war that has exhausted itself.
Speaker 19: I don't understand as somebody who you know, Ryan knows
Speaker 19: this lived on the border with Gaza before October seven,
Speaker 19: still plans to go back and live in the of
Speaker 19: Israel when the war is over. I don't see how
Speaker 19: this actually makes my family safer. There are other elements
Speaker 19: of this war, and war is always a terrible thing,
Speaker 19: but there are elements of it where I would read
Speaker 19: a story and say, you know, this is terrible, but
Speaker 19: we were attacked, and this is war, and this is difficult.
Speaker 1: I think we're at a point today where it.
Speaker 19: Seems like the war really has exhausted itself, and these
Speaker 19: incidents are one glaring example of it.
Speaker 8: If you will do you do you have a sense
Speaker 8: of the motivation behind giving orders like this. It's one
Speaker 8: of the things that's really dumbfounding to me is you know,
Speaker 8: you have so much pushback internationally on the you know,
Speaker 8: the destruction of Gaza and the treatment of the Palestinian people.
Speaker 8: What is the benefit of ordering IDF soldiers to shoot
Speaker 8: live ammunition into a group of civilians looking for food.
Speaker 19: So, first of all, I I want to be very,
Speaker 19: very kind of cautious here with the wording, because I
Speaker 19: think what we know is that soldiers were given orders
Speaker 19: to fire, let's say in that direction. We don't necessarily
Speaker 19: know that they were told go and kill people. But
Speaker 19: the thing he really is that we are at a
Speaker 19: point where you have this war of a tuition in Gaza.
Speaker 19: From the Israeli perspective, we are losing a lot of
Speaker 19: soldiers there, and a lot of them, you know, young
Speaker 19: people who have been in this endless war situation since
Speaker 19: they joined the army.
Speaker 1: Really their life is in danger.
Speaker 19: And when you are in a situation like that, a
Speaker 19: lot of times you're saying, Okay, I'm going to take
Speaker 19: extra precaution as a commander to try to protect my soldiers.
Speaker 19: And if the soldiers are in this kind of stalemate situation,
Speaker 19: there is very little movement. They see danger everywhere because
Speaker 19: Gaza today is basically tons of rubble and destroyed building
Speaker 19: and they are being faced with you know, explosives and
Speaker 19: the land mines and RPGs and things like that. So
Speaker 19: there's this heightened sense of danger and that a lot
Speaker 19: of times will lead to decisions that you know, for
Speaker 19: me as a civilian, I look at it and I say,
Speaker 19: this is not leading us anywhere. But for a soldier
Speaker 19: in the field on the ground, you're like, I guess
Speaker 19: much more, you know, considering first of all your survival
Speaker 19: and so and I think this is one of the
Speaker 19: issues I tend here that when I look at it,
Speaker 19: I say, okay, this is first of all terrible, and
Speaker 19: second of all, I take it up to the government,
Speaker 19: not to the soldiers on the ground. Again this is
Speaker 19: from my perspective. I take it to the government and say,
Speaker 19: what are you sending these people to do at this point?
Speaker 19: What is this achieving for us for Israel as a country.
Speaker 4: The tank shells to me at a layer of complexity,
Speaker 4: not complexity like depravity to the order, because I think
Speaker 4: no aid organization thinks that using live ammunition and firing
Speaker 4: warning shots at AID seekers is like an effective way
Speaker 4: to do AID distribution, like you've never heard of World
Speaker 4: Central Kitchen saying no, we apologize for the thirty seven,
Speaker 4: you know, people that were killed at the World Central Kitchen.
Speaker 4: We were firing warning shots and it turned out that
Speaker 4: we killed thirty seven and wounded seventy two like that.
Speaker 4: Never in the history of aid distribution has that happened.
Speaker 4: But even setting aside the live ammunition warning shots, firing
Speaker 4: shells towards civilian crowds is guaranteed to lead to I mean,
Speaker 4: unless there's some miraculous situation where it lands nowhere near
Speaker 4: they fired, it's guaranteed to lead to casualties at least,
Speaker 4: you know, significant amounts of people wounded. But I take
Speaker 4: your point that I imagine the soldiers were saying, who cares,
Speaker 4: Like we're we're there's a risk to us, or we
Speaker 4: perceive a risk to us, and we might might as
Speaker 4: well fire, And so yeah, I think I think again.
Speaker 19: You know, you can look at the tactical question Ryan,
Speaker 19: why did this specific tank fire, And honestly, I wouldn't
Speaker 19: have the answer.
Speaker 1: I would assume it was because they felt in danger.
Speaker 1: But I think the bigger question.
Speaker 19: Is what is happening with this entire experiment of changing
Speaker 19: the mechanism of the aid distribution, which I remind you
Speaker 19: about one hundred days ago when the war in Gaza
Speaker 19: was renewed after the Trump wit CoV cease fire collapsed
Speaker 19: because NATANIAO chose to renew the war. This was presented
Speaker 19: at least domestically to people in Israel, but I think
Speaker 19: also it on the international scene as the big game changer.
Speaker 1: You know, you would have this.
Speaker 19: Supposedly neutral but in fact very much aligned with Israeli
Speaker 19: and American government's aid organization, you know, the Ghazi Hunanitarian
Speaker 19: Foundation ache over the aid distribution. Hamas would no longer
Speaker 19: be able to control it. They wouldn't be able to
Speaker 19: loot and steal the a and everything would be run
Speaker 19: through these encampments. It would all be very professional, and
Speaker 19: a lot of eight organizations that have more experience working
Speaker 19: in Gaza and elsewhere in the world said, this doesn't
Speaker 19: make any sense. This is going to turn out into
Speaker 19: a disaster, and they gave several.
Speaker 1: Reasons for their warnings.
Speaker 19: One of it was again, he would have Hamas on
Speaker 19: the one hand trying to stop it, and on the
Speaker 19: other hand, the Israeli soldiers were supposed to bring some
Speaker 19: layer of protection to these centers, and if you have
Speaker 19: any situation where they start firing at one another, this
Speaker 19: becomes a blood death. And I think after one hundred
Speaker 19: days since the war was renewed, I don't see the
Speaker 19: big change on the ground.
Speaker 1: I see still people dying every day.
Speaker 19: I see the hostages still held by Hamas, and Hamas
Speaker 19: hasn't budged in their position that the war must end
Speaker 19: in order to have the release.
Speaker 1: Of all the hostages.
Speaker 19: And we are still seeing, by the way, apart from
Speaker 19: these eight distribution centers and everything that's happening around them,
Speaker 19: trucks coming into Gaza and being looted and people stealing.
Speaker 19: One of the explanations you're reading now in Israeli media
Speaker 19: is that it's not Hamas doing the looting, it's local
Speaker 19: clans or you know, sometimes the clan can be a
Speaker 19: nice word for a crime organization. I'm not sure how
Speaker 19: that's better, honestly, but it's become a dystopia nightmare really,
Speaker 19: and again, to me, it all comes back to the
Speaker 19: fundamental question, why is this war continuing. Why aren't we
Speaker 19: getting to a deal that would bring back the hostages
Speaker 19: and end this insanity.
Speaker 4: And to the point of the war ending. Let's let's
Speaker 4: move on to your piece that you wrote in how
Speaker 4: Ratz yesterday. Again we're joined here by a mere to
Speaker 4: Bone columnist for the Israeli newspaper, as well as Dave Smith,
Speaker 4: so we can put up d one. This is your
Speaker 4: column yesday where you and in the past when we've
Speaker 4: had you on and you've made predictions that Trump or
Speaker 4: Whitcoff were making particular strategic mistakes. Your your predictions have
Speaker 4: very unfortunately borne out and been accurate. And so now
Speaker 4: you're warning again here that that Trump is misunderstanding that
Speaker 4: Yahoo and making mistake in if people have seen it, Dave,
Speaker 4: I'm sure you've seen these Trump sending these long love
Speaker 4: letters to net Yahoo and basically berating the Israeli judiciary
Speaker 4: threatening to withhold us, you know, implicitly threatening to withhold
Speaker 4: us funding if the judges don't drop all of these
Speaker 4: different corruption charges against nen Yahoo, which presumably Trump thinks
Speaker 4: is some there are some obstacle to net Yahoo reaching
Speaker 4: a deal, which maybe in his mind they are. Let's
Speaker 4: tell us like, what is what is Trump thinking and
Speaker 4: why do you think this is wrong?
Speaker 19: So first of all, Ryan, I can say with one
Speaker 19: hundred percent certainty, what is Trump thinking? But I can
Speaker 19: look at his actions and made he tried to understand.
Speaker 19: So he got the Iran war done. Right after those
Speaker 19: twelve days, he got a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.
Speaker 19: There was that moment where Natania wanted to send more
Speaker 19: planes over there, and he stopped the mid level. I
Speaker 19: don't know, maybe now the pilots need to have truth Social,
Speaker 19: you know, installed in those.
Speaker 1: Thirty five so that they know what they're doing.
Speaker 19: And then everybody expected him to move to Gaza, because
Speaker 19: I want to remind you a month and a half ago,
Speaker 19: when we had that separate US Hamas Qatar deal to
Speaker 19: release Idan Alexander, the Israeli American hostage, the soldier, the
Speaker 19: lone soldier was taken by Hamas. At the time, Trump
Speaker 19: already wrote on truth Social that it's time to end
Speaker 19: this brutal war.
Speaker 1: That's a quote that he used. That was a month
Speaker 1: and a half ago.
Speaker 19: But suddenly now instead of putting everything on Gaza, we're
Speaker 19: seeing him pushing instead to cancel and Taniau's criminal trial,
Speaker 19: you know, to length the angry posts on this issue
Speaker 19: within forty eight hours.
Speaker 1: So what some people are saying is well, there's an
Speaker 1: obvious linkage here.
Speaker 19: He wants the Natanio trial to be canceled or at
Speaker 19: least to show Nathaniel that he's batting hard for him,
Speaker 19: and then in return, Natanieo will.
Speaker 1: Give him what he wants on Gaza again. You know,
Speaker 1: there are several problems with this.
Speaker 19: First of all, the mechanism for ending the Nataniao trial
Speaker 19: runs through some kind of a plea agreement between him
Speaker 19: and the prosecution, and the prosecution has said, okay, we
Speaker 19: can erase all the charges against Antanio, but he needs
Speaker 19: to admit that he did something wrong, because that's usually
Speaker 19: part of a plea agreement, And he needs to be
Speaker 19: retiring from his position of power so that he cannot
Speaker 19: do corrupt actions again in the future. And antania refuses completely.
Speaker 19: I don't see how Trump's intervention can change that. And
Speaker 19: he can put threats, and by the way, I understood
Speaker 19: his threat, not specifically to take military aid from Israel,
Speaker 19: but maybe to put sanctions on the prosecution in Israel
Speaker 19: and on the judges and basically do something that would
Speaker 19: hurt them personally. But even that I don't think would help,
Speaker 19: because you would see strong pushback against that.
Speaker 1: In Israel.
Speaker 19: Trump is very popular in Israel after what happened in Iran, especially,
Speaker 19: he's seen as the savior who came to help Israel
Speaker 19: against the Iranian nuclear threat. But you can throw a
Speaker 19: lot of appreciation and goodwill away if you're seeing as
Speaker 19: someone who's meddling in the internal affairs of the country
Speaker 19: and trying to impose judicial outcomes on something that's really
Speaker 19: none of any other countries business.
Speaker 1: To.
Speaker 19: The second issue is that the real obstacle to a
Speaker 19: deal in Gaza, a deal to bring back all the.
Speaker 1: Hostages and end the war, is not the natany out
Speaker 1: There's just no connection between the two things.
Speaker 19: The real obstacle has been all along that NATANIEO doesn't
Speaker 19: agree to end the war, and that's fundamentally what Hamas
Speaker 19: are saying they will demand in order to release all
Speaker 19: the hostages, and a lot of military pressure and a
Speaker 19: lot of death and destruction in Gaza so far has
Speaker 19: not changed their demand. Were six hundred and thirty two
Speaker 19: days into the snipmer and we already had an agreement
Speaker 19: in place right the agreement in January that Trump and
Speaker 19: wikoff together with the last breath of the Biden administration
Speaker 19: they brought together. But I give most of the credit
Speaker 19: to Trump and Wikock because the Biden team was working
Speaker 19: on this for months and they got nothing.
Speaker 1: Really Suddenly Witkof emerged and boom, it was done.
Speaker 19: That deal had everything spelled out already, you know, first phase,
Speaker 19: thirty three hostages, thousand Palestinian prisoners, partial Israeli withdrawal, more
Speaker 19: aid coming into Gaza. All of that was successfully implemented
Speaker 19: in February and the beginning of March. But then Nataniao
Speaker 19: invented new parameters for the agreement, walked away from what
Speaker 19: he signed and he said, no, I want a partial ceasefire,
Speaker 19: partial withdrawal, only some of the hostages come back.
Speaker 1: And that's when it all fell apart.
Speaker 19: It's going to be four months soon because time is
Speaker 19: passing and people are dying and the suffering is continuing.
Speaker 19: And that's the fundamental problem. It's not about Nataniao's trial,
Speaker 19: it's not about Iran. It's about one question. Ken Trump
Speaker 19: convinced Nathanieo to.
Speaker 1: Stop the war. That's it.
Speaker 19: And so far, with all the talk and all the grandeur,
Speaker 19: and there was a Trump tweet the other day about
Speaker 19: you know, take the Gaza deal, get the hostages. The
Speaker 19: real question is will there be any pressure from Trump
Speaker 19: to make this happen? And it's binary, you know, one
Speaker 19: or zero, that's what it will take.
Speaker 8: Did you feel like you mentioned the Witcough deal that
Speaker 8: he got through during Joe Biden's lamed up, which I
Speaker 8: agree with you certainly seems that, yes, the Biden administration
Speaker 8: had this deal on the table, I think since May
Speaker 8: of twenty twenty twenty four, and then it doesn't happen
Speaker 8: until witkof comes in. From all the reporting that I
Speaker 8: read about that, it does seem like they were putting
Speaker 8: some pressure on the net and Yahu government. And it
Speaker 8: seems one of the things that's kind of bizarre about
Speaker 8: this whole thing from the American perspective is that Donald Trump,
Speaker 8: you know, if any country was imposing this albatross around
Speaker 8: his neck that Israel is, and he politically wanted to
Speaker 8: get this thing done, and he was funding the thing,
Speaker 8: you know, we'd see him insulting them, threatening to pull
Speaker 8: the funding. It seems like very easy theoretically for America
Speaker 8: to put pressure on Israel since they are funding and
Speaker 8: arming this campaign. And yet in this case, it just
Speaker 8: seems like that there was a little bit of pressure
Speaker 8: that Witkoff put on Yahoo at the very beginning, and
Speaker 8: now there is this inability to do that. It's something
Speaker 8: that's kind of fascinating to me and I think a
Speaker 8: lot of other Americans. Of course, we've seen Benjamin Netanyahu
Speaker 8: on secret recordings bragging about how he can move America
Speaker 8: in the past. What's your perspective on that, is Netanyahu,
Speaker 8: is his administration concerned about this pressure or do they
Speaker 8: feel like they can get what they want.
Speaker 19: I think that when with Kov came to the region
Speaker 19: right before Trump's inauguration, everybody had one mission on their minds,
Speaker 19: which was don't get this guy's boss angry at you.
Speaker 19: And with Kov played that card very smartly. He played
Speaker 19: it with Katar, he played it with Egypt, he played
Speaker 19: it with Israel. And from Hamas's perspective, I think they
Speaker 19: were willing to go along with Trump and not with
Speaker 19: Biden because they said, Okay, there's a risk here, because
Speaker 19: the mechanism of the agreement always included a loophole through
Speaker 19: which NATANIAO could break the deal and renew the world.
Speaker 19: But they said, if we do it with by the end,
Speaker 19: you know, in a few months we get Trump and
Speaker 19: then who knows what happens.
Speaker 1: But with CoV this is Trump's guy.
Speaker 19: So if this is an agreement that he is responsible for,
Speaker 19: there's a bigger likelihood that this won't happen.
Speaker 1: And then it did happen. And now the question again is,
Speaker 1: you know, does Trump want this war to end enough
Speaker 1: to use his leverage?
Speaker 19: And by the way, I don't think he needs to
Speaker 19: put any kind of threats like the ones that you
Speaker 19: hinted at. I think his popularity in Israel, especially now
Speaker 19: at this moment, you know, just a public call to
Speaker 19: do it would pretty much be enough. And it would
Speaker 19: actually help NITANIAO in a sense because NATANIAO could come
Speaker 19: and say, well, you know what, we didn't achieve all
Speaker 19: of the goals in the war supposedly, but President Trump
Speaker 19: is asking us and look what he just did for
Speaker 19: us in Iran. So it wouldn't even take a lot,
Speaker 19: because you know, there is a political price to pay.
Speaker 19: I said, you know, I'm going to go to a
Speaker 19: great lengths to get the seasfire and have a full
Speaker 19: on confrontation with NATANIAO. And I think he would emerge
Speaker 19: victorious from a confrontation like that, I really do. But
Speaker 19: right now it would even require less than that. So
Speaker 19: why isn't he doing? Honestly, I don't have the answer.
Speaker 19: And maybe in the few next few days we'll see
Speaker 19: something change. Right Ron Dermer Nathaniel's closest aid is in
Speaker 19: Washington right now.
Speaker 1: He's going to have meetings in the White House.
Speaker 19: There was a meeting over the weekend between Marco Rubio
Speaker 19: and the families of some of the Israeli hostages, and
Speaker 19: the families are pushing for this right The families are
Speaker 19: basically saying, we want the war over. We don't want
Speaker 19: another partial deal. Five hostages there, three hostages in three months.
Speaker 19: We want everybody released. The war is over, it's done.
Speaker 19: But the question what is Trump going to do? And
Speaker 19: I guess that's you know, always the unknown territory. So
Speaker 19: the war is over if Trump wants it, is the
Speaker 19: bottom line. Amir Bone a columnist at how Retz. Thank
Speaker 19: thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thank you, guys. Let's hope for good news.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 4: On June eighteenth, Karen Reid was finally, after a multi
Speaker 4: year saga, acquitted of a murder in Canton Massachusetts.
Speaker 11: Is that right, Aiden, Camp Massachusets is corrected.
Speaker 4: Massachusetts, And it was a case that captured international attention,
Speaker 4: will be the subject of many has been the subject
Speaker 4: of documentaries, will be the subject of movies and documentaries
Speaker 4: and books and so on. And one of the reporters
Speaker 4: or they maybe the reporter who helped bring it to
Speaker 4: national international attention. Aiden Carney, who known online as doctor
Speaker 4: turtle Boy, is here on Breaking Points. We're very I
Speaker 4: did to be joined by doctor turtle Boy, Aiden Carney. Aiden,
Speaker 4: thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 11: Thank you for having me Ryan, I really appreciate it
Speaker 11: being there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so we want to talk a little bit
Speaker 4: about the case, but mostly I actually want to talk
Speaker 4: about your case because I think it's a fascinating, important,
Speaker 4: and overlooked case of press freedom. Because as a result,
Speaker 4: as a direct result of your coverage of this case,
Speaker 4: you have gone up against the same kind of system
Speaker 4: of law enforcement that you accused of corruptly mishandling at
Speaker 4: best the case of Karen Reid, and they have retaliated
Speaker 4: against you in an extraordinary way. You've already been behind
Speaker 4: bars as a result of it, and you continue to
Speaker 4: face down charges. But for people who don't know the case.
Speaker 4: Let's let me try to give him a quick thumbnail sketch,
Speaker 4: and you can you can tell people, you know, the
Speaker 4: important bars that I'm I'm missing. But essentially, Karen Reid
Speaker 4: was dating a police office her name, John O'Keefe in Canton, Massachusetts.
Speaker 4: They go out to a bar drinking with a whole
Speaker 4: bunch of other cops. Uh, there's a there's one cop
Speaker 4: there who she's got some kind of a flirty text
Speaker 4: relationship with. She and John drive to an after party
Speaker 4: at at you know, one of the cops houses who
Speaker 4: was at the bar with them. She just doesn't go
Speaker 4: into the house. He says he's going to go, and
Speaker 4: she tells him go in, tell me if it's cool
Speaker 4: or not. She waits about he goes, He goes in. Well,
Speaker 4: this is the debate. She waits about ten minutes and
Speaker 4: she leaves. He is then found the next morning on
Speaker 4: the front lawn of the cops house. The cops charge
Speaker 4: her with hitting him, knocking him into the ground, and
Speaker 4: then he dies of hypothermia overnight. They never go into
Speaker 4: the you know, they don't go into the officer's house.
Speaker 11: We didn't, he didn't die.
Speaker 8: But right, So.
Speaker 4: Is there any important piece I'm missing there because I
Speaker 4: don't want to spend too much time on the case itself,
Speaker 4: but tell us, like what attracted your attention to it?
Speaker 11: So what attracted my attention to it? Initially?
Speaker 17: You know, it makes headlines when a police officer is killed,
Speaker 17: and that's kind of a story that I write about.
Speaker 17: So you know, I'm conservative, right and so like during
Speaker 17: the whole like summer of twenty twenty, like I took
Speaker 17: the back the blue.
Speaker 11: Position, if you will, on that, and that's kind of
Speaker 11: like my bread and butter.
Speaker 17: And you know, when police officers are killed in the
Speaker 17: line of duty around here in Massachusetts, it's always like
Speaker 17: the same theme.
Speaker 11: The profile of a cop killer is like always the same.
Speaker 17: It's somebody who has a long and documented history of violence, arrests.
Speaker 17: You could have seen it coming a mile away, and
Speaker 17: they never should have been out roaming the streets.
Speaker 11: In the first place.
Speaker 17: So when I saw a police officers killed, you know,
Speaker 17: I look into it and I see it's this, it's
Speaker 17: the girlfriend who did it, And I'm like, well, does
Speaker 17: she have a history of violence?
Speaker 11: Let's look in at her.
Speaker 17: And I looked into her and she's Jike, some you know,
Speaker 17: number cruncher at Fidelity, working as a financial analyst, and
Speaker 17: no history of violence whatsoever. And it appeared to all
Speaker 17: be a horrible accident. It sounded like I didn't look
Speaker 17: into it much. It's there was a blizzard that night,
Speaker 17: and I'm like, well, it sounded like there was like
Speaker 17: a foot of snow and she accidentally backed into him
Speaker 17: without realizing it after dropping them off, And wow, what
Speaker 17: a horrible, horrible way to die, like the tragedy for everyone.
Speaker 17: So I really had little interest in the story because
Speaker 17: it just it just sounded like a horrible, sad tragedy
Speaker 17: that I wasn't that into. And so I honestly forgot
Speaker 17: the name Karen Reid. And she was indicted, and I
Speaker 17: didn't even pay attention to it, because the original arrest
Speaker 17: gets a lot of attention, but not the indictment. I
Speaker 17: didn't even know what an indictment was until I was indicted. Like,
Speaker 17: it's just move your case to a more important courtroom
Speaker 17: where you know you can face more years in jail, essentially,
Speaker 17: that's what it means.
Speaker 11: And so I know forgot about it.
Speaker 17: And then in April of twenty twenty three, I saw
Speaker 17: a couple headlines about something about a Google search at
Speaker 17: two twenty seven someone inside the house where John O'Keefe
Speaker 17: was found on the lawn of had googled how long
Speaker 17: too that and cold at two twenty seven am, and
Speaker 17: that this was suspicious and I hadn't really take it
Speaker 17: into full implication of what that meant.
Speaker 11: And so then I got, you know, I put it
Speaker 11: on my to do list of things to look into.
Speaker 17: It was busy that week, and then five days later,
Speaker 17: April seventeenth, I got a message from a Duxbury police
Speaker 17: officer or a retired Duxbury cop by the name of
Speaker 17: Brian Johnson, who generally has the same position with me
Speaker 17: on policing back to blue, et cetera. And he tells
Speaker 17: me that, like, you need to look into this case.
Speaker 17: It appears as if this woman is being framed. John
Speaker 17: used to work with me at Duxbury Police. I actually
Speaker 17: trained him because John used to be a Duxbury police
Speaker 17: officer or a small town on the South Shore, and
Speaker 17: you know, he's like, something doesn't add up about this.
Speaker 11: And the homeowner is a Boston cop named Brian All.
Speaker 17: Who has a notorious record as being a hothead, you know,
Speaker 17: a boxer, a fighter, and he's not really well liked
Speaker 17: in Boston police. So like, I think this woman has
Speaker 17: apparently been framed. So that means more to you coming
Speaker 17: from a police officer who's telling you that, Like, this
Speaker 17: woman appears to have been framed.
Speaker 11: And so I do a deep dive.
Speaker 17: I read Alan Jackson had filed a ninety four page
Speaker 17: affidavit a couple days prior that explained all of this stuff.
Speaker 17: And it was like reading a movie script when you're
Speaker 17: reading this, like this can't be real, Like this is crazy,
Speaker 17: Like this doesn't happen in real life, something so brazen.
Speaker 17: And you know, I'm a receipts guy. I like evidence.
Speaker 17: I don't just take people at their word for it.
Speaker 17: And Alan Jackson had cell bright reports from Jennifer McCabe's
Speaker 17: cell phone, from John O'Keeffe's cell phone showing that he
Speaker 17: was going up and down three flights of stairs. Karen
Speaker 17: Reid doesn't have a flight of stairs, and or alexis
Speaker 17: as nice as it is, you know, And so everything
Speaker 17: came back with data and evidence, and when it finally
Speaker 17: hits you what happened here, You're like, holy cat, Wow,
Speaker 17: this is the story of the century. So I made
Speaker 17: a post on April seventeenth that I was, you know,
Speaker 17: writing a story about what appears to be a Boston
Speaker 17: police officer who was killed inside the home of another
Speaker 17: Boston police officer and a girlfriend was being framed for it,
Speaker 17: and a lot of people were commenting saying, like, is
Speaker 17: this the story out of Canton? Oh, I remember this,
Speaker 17: and so people were really anticipating it. I spent all
Speaker 17: night writing my story on this. I published it at
Speaker 17: like three thirty am, and it kind of blew up,
Speaker 17: and I did a show about it, and it got
Speaker 17: a lot. You know, my audience grew greatly as a
Speaker 17: result of my first coverage of this, and I really
Speaker 17: thought that it was going to be the end of it.
Speaker 17: I'm like, well, they have to drop the charges now, right, Like,
Speaker 17: it's quite obvious this woman didn't do this and that
Speaker 17: somebody else did. And because silly me, I was operating
Speaker 17: under the impression that our institutions actually wanted justice for
Speaker 17: people like John O'Keeffe and were actually interested in finding
Speaker 17: who actually killed him. And I thought that anyone with
Speaker 17: the brain looking at this knows that she didn't do this,
Speaker 17: and these people over here right clearly are suspicious and
Speaker 17: at the very least they should be looked into.
Speaker 11: But when they didn't, when they.
Speaker 17: Released a press release a couple of days after my
Speaker 17: first story and they kind of put their pedal to
Speaker 17: the metal and they're like, now we're doubling down, like
Speaker 17: we're going harder at her Now, that's when I realized that, oh, wow,
Speaker 17: this is much worse than I thought these are. It's
Speaker 17: the DA's office itself that is participant, that is okay
Speaker 17: with this, and our institutions are okay with this. And
Speaker 17: so that's when, you know, the harder they pushed, the
Speaker 17: harder I push back. And what kind of got me
Speaker 17: into hot water was, you know, I say, I wear
Speaker 17: three hats. I'm a journalist, I'm a satirist, and I'm
Speaker 17: an activist. Right when I'm When i'm a journalist, it's
Speaker 17: when i'm writing the stories and researching and doing all
Speaker 17: that stuff. When I'm a satirist, it's when I'm on
Speaker 17: my show and I'm cracking jokes and I'm being a
Speaker 17: little bit outrageous. When I'm an activist, it's when I'm
Speaker 17: showing up and i'm protesting and I'm urging people to
Speaker 17: write letters and emails and stuff like that and become involved.
Speaker 17: And so I put on my activist hat and I,
Speaker 17: you know, I went up to I said Jennifer McCabe.
Speaker 17: I saw her at a John o'keef hearing on May
Speaker 17: twenty fourth, about a month after I started writing it,
Speaker 17: and the woman who googled how long to die and
Speaker 17: cold it to twenty seven was there with her, you know,
Speaker 17: her husband, and she's wearing a Justice for JJ button
Speaker 17: And that just really offended me because she googled how
Speaker 17: long to die in cold in order to decide how
Speaker 17: long it would take for John to die in the cold,
Speaker 17: and then she shows up wearing that button. So I just,
Speaker 17: you know, I have a phone. I go outside and
Speaker 17: I start interviewing her, and I'm like, why are you
Speaker 17: wearing a Justice for JJ button when you helped, you know,
Speaker 17: cover up his murder? Like are you at all remorseful
Speaker 17: of that?
Speaker 11: Why did you.
Speaker 17: Delete all these phone calls? It's this thing called journalism
Speaker 17: that people used to do. You just go up to
Speaker 17: people and you ask him questions and at the end
Speaker 17: they walked away. And that's when my you know, my
Speaker 17: wild side came out, and I'm like, oh, these people
Speaker 17: are cop killers, ladies and gentlemen. They killed the Boston
Speaker 17: police officer and they're getting away with it and blah
Speaker 17: blah blah blah blah. So she went and tried to
Speaker 17: get a harassment prevention order on me after that, and
Speaker 17: the judge told her, sorry, like that's protected speech, He's
Speaker 17: allowed to do that. But she told the judge that
Speaker 17: is there anything you can do to get him to
Speaker 17: stop blogging about me? And I thought that was pretty
Speaker 17: telling about things to come. Anything you can do. She's
Speaker 17: asking the government, can you do something to silence this
Speaker 17: person's First Amendment rights? Because there I don't like what
Speaker 17: they're doing to me. I don't it's making me uncomfortable.
Speaker 17: I don't like him asking questions, et cetera. And the
Speaker 17: judge said, no, he has a first memor right to
Speaker 17: do it. So then about two weeks later, she I
Speaker 17: knew that her daughter at a lacrosse game at a
Speaker 17: town called bill Ricca. And you know, I knew that
Speaker 17: she'd be there, and I'm like, well, this is a
Speaker 17: public event. I have a right to go there if
Speaker 17: I want to and ask her questions. So I went
Speaker 17: there bought a ticket, and I went right up to
Speaker 17: her in the stands and I had a camera out
Speaker 17: and I her husband was there and he goes, hey,
Speaker 17: tough guy, how you been. Oh you're a lot smaller
Speaker 17: in person, like kind of mocking me whatever. And so
Speaker 17: I go over to her and I'm like, Jen, why
Speaker 17: did you go how long to die cold? At two
Speaker 17: twenty seven am? And she's laughing, She's like smiling about this.
Speaker 17: This is all like a big joke to her. I'm like,
Speaker 17: is this funny to you? Like a Boston police officer
Speaker 17: has been killed and you're laughing about it, and you know,
Speaker 17: I cause it's a scene, A scene is being caused.
Speaker 17: Security comes over from the school and they're like, this
Speaker 17: is not here, not And I'm okay, and I leave
Speaker 17: and I called her cop killer on the way out
Speaker 17: and I left and I have been indicted for fellowy
Speaker 17: witness intimidation for that because Massachusetts has a really broad,
Speaker 17: to say, the least witness intimidation statute. Every state has one,
Speaker 17: and they're they're necessary obviously, because you can't have witnesses
Speaker 17: and cases who are afraid to testify out of fear
Speaker 17: of violence from mobs.
Speaker 11: Or gangsters or whoever.
Speaker 17: Right, that's the traditional witness intimidation is supposed to be
Speaker 17: in spirit, but in Massachusetts it's much broader, and it
Speaker 17: says that you can't cause physical violence to a witness
Speaker 17: or a motional harm whatever that means, which is the
Speaker 17: most subjective term ever. And so all so that's part
Speaker 17: one of the witness intimidation statue. Part two is you
Speaker 17: can't cause emotional harm with the intent to or reckless
Speaker 17: disregard for the fact that it may interfere or obstruct
Speaker 17: an ongoing court proceeding. And so they get all these
Speaker 17: people to go in front of the grand jury, Jennifer
Speaker 17: McCabe and many others who I had done similar things with,
Speaker 17: and they all went in front of the grand jury
Speaker 17: and they testified that they were, you know, sad, scared, fearful,
Speaker 17: not a physical harm because I've never physically threatened to
Speaker 17: but they're just emotionally scarred from this all. So that's
Speaker 17: part one they've covered of the statue. Part two is
Speaker 17: to obstruct in a criminal proceeding. And so they prosecutors
Speaker 17: would ask them these kind of leading questions at the
Speaker 17: grand jury where there's no judge, there's no defense. You
Speaker 17: just hear one side of this, and the bar for
Speaker 17: probable causes very low. And they asked these witnesses, well,
Speaker 17: why did you you you know what, why do you
Speaker 17: Why do you think he's doing this? And they would
Speaker 17: all say, like it was a script. I think he
Speaker 17: is doing this because I am a witness in the
Speaker 17: Carara reecase and he does not want me to testify.
Speaker 11: Like they all said the exact same thing.
Speaker 17: And so it's just very obvious that like they found
Speaker 17: this kind of statute and like, this is how we're
Speaker 17: going to get him, This is how we're going to
Speaker 17: shut him up. And so you know, I was doing
Speaker 17: this for like six months. I held a protest in
Speaker 17: Canton that was actually inspired by like I went, so
Speaker 17: we called it a rolling rally. We met in a
Speaker 17: stop and shop in Norwood, a neighboring town of Canton,
Speaker 17: where Brian Albert lived, and we went to his new
Speaker 17: house in Norwood, and I announced we were coming ahead
Speaker 17: of time, so if they didn't want to be there,
Speaker 17: they didn't have to be there. And for seven minutes
Speaker 17: I stood outside of his residence with a megaphone and
Speaker 17: I just explained his involvement in the murder of John O'Keefe.
Speaker 11: I said, he's the.
Speaker 17: Homeowner, he didn't come outside, blah blah blah, And then
Speaker 17: we left and nothing happened.
Speaker 11: We went to the next house.
Speaker 17: We went to Michael Procter's house, next, then Jennifer McCabe's,
Speaker 17: then Julie Nagels. It was a nice Sunday afternoon. Women, children,
Speaker 17: the elderly were there. There were no calls to the police,
Speaker 17: no disturbing the peace calls, anything like that. It was
Speaker 17: a nice It was as peaceful of protests as you get.
Speaker 17: And honestly, what made me do something like that was,
Speaker 17: you know, I had seen I think it was a
Speaker 17: summer before, two summers before, when Roe versus Wade was overturned,
Speaker 17: a lot of people went outside the homes of Supreme
Speaker 17: Court justices like Trsus.
Speaker 11: Kavanaugh and others, and they protested.
Speaker 17: And I was controversial because it's like, you know, should
Speaker 17: they be allowed to do this, should they not be
Speaker 17: allowed to do this?
Speaker 11: And ultimately they were allowed to do it.
Speaker 17: And I said, well, if you're allowed to do it
Speaker 17: to a Supreme Court justice, you're certainly allowed to do
Speaker 17: it to Brian Albert and so and I didn't really
Speaker 17: have any goal.
Speaker 11: I wasn't trying to get them to change.
Speaker 17: I know they're not going to change their testimony or
Speaker 17: anything like that, but I just want to make my
Speaker 17: voice heard, like I just have the right and so
Speaker 17: do others. And because I'm outraged about this, I take
Speaker 17: the position that John Keith was murdered inside Brian Albert's
Speaker 17: house and that these people are framing it and it's
Speaker 17: in person, and that really upsets me. So I do
Speaker 17: the most American thing I can do, and I take
Speaker 17: to the streets and I peacefully protest, and I did.
Speaker 17: I didn't threaten anyone. I've never hurt anyone. I haven't
Speaker 17: like caused a bruise. All I've done is hurt feelings.
Speaker 17: And so I was On October eleventh, I dropped my
Speaker 17: kids bust my kids bust Off is like right across
Speaker 17: the street from our house. They were six and eight
Speaker 17: at the time, and get them on the bus and
Speaker 17: then I cross the street and you know, their bus
Speaker 17: stops at the next house, couple houses away, and so
Speaker 17: they could definitely see this happening. A truck pulls up
Speaker 17: where I'm trying to go into my driveway, walk up
Speaker 17: the driveway and a guy gets out and he's got
Speaker 17: a vest on and he's like hey.
Speaker 11: I'm like, can I help you? And he's like, yeah,
Speaker 11: you're under arrest.
Speaker 17: We got a bunch of warrants and put your hands
Speaker 17: and he starts putting me in cuffs, and I'm like,
Speaker 17: what is happening?
Speaker 11: What is going on right now?
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 11: And then all of a sudden, six other on mark
Speaker 11: cars pull up and one of.
Speaker 17: Them pops out and starts reading my rights, and it's
Speaker 17: this guy named Brian Tully. And Brian Tully is the lead,
Speaker 17: the head detective lieutenant at the State Police Norfolk County Unit,
Speaker 17: and so he's like the head honcho of the Camera
Speaker 17: Reid investigation.
Speaker 11: He signs all the paperwork, et cetera.
Speaker 17: So I I'm like, I've been extremely critical of this
Speaker 17: guy and accused him of being involved in the cover
Speaker 17: up of John O'Keeffe's murder. And so the guy that
Speaker 17: I'm accusing of being involved in the police cover up
Speaker 17: of a murder is now at my house arresting me
Speaker 17: for accusing for doing exactly what I did accusing this
Speaker 17: guy and being nefarious, thus proving my point here, Like
Speaker 17: they're like the guy that's accusing them of cover up
Speaker 17: and having all this influence and getting people outraged about this.
Speaker 11: You're now at his house arresting him.
Speaker 17: They had a search warrant for my house, and which
Speaker 17: I thought was ironic because they didn't get a search
Speaker 17: warrant for Brian Albert.
Speaker 4: Scha for the house where the dead body was found.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 11: I jokingly say this, but it's it's absurd.
Speaker 17: I say I should have if I threw a dead
Speaker 17: cop on my yard, they would leave me alone, because
Speaker 17: that's like kryptonite to the Massachusetts State Police. They will
Speaker 17: just not They will just leave you alone if there's
Speaker 17: a dead cop on the yard and blame someone else.
Speaker 4: I'm glad you mentioned your conservative politics because it's like
Speaker 4: ow that it goes to the role of the importance
Speaker 4: of the principle of press freedom. Our viewers will know
Speaker 4: I'm not on the right, but your viewers, if they're
Speaker 4: watching this, may not know that. But you know, press
Speaker 4: freedom should not just apply to you, to your political allies.
Speaker 4: And also, I think it's important to know that people
Speaker 4: need to understand that press freedom applies to everybody in
Speaker 4: the country. It is not limited just to journalists. Because
Speaker 4: think about that. If you had to limit it to journalists,
Speaker 4: then some government agency would then have to credential who's
Speaker 4: a journalist and would say, okay, well you're a journalist
Speaker 4: and you're not, so you get First Amendment and you don't.
Speaker 4: So for people who would say he's he's doing satire here,
Speaker 4: or he's an activist because he's got a bullhorn in
Speaker 4: front of this cops house, and it actually doesn't matter,
Speaker 4: like freedom of the press applies to all people who
Speaker 4: are here in the United States and so, and it's
Speaker 4: not just whether you agree with someone or not, it's
Speaker 4: it particularly important if you don't agree with them, you
Speaker 4: stand up for their their press freedom rights. I would
Speaker 4: most of the things that you talked about here are
Speaker 4: covered in this you know, forty five minute roughly video
Speaker 4: that you have posted on your Twitter feed, which is
Speaker 4: is it doctor turtle Boy. What's what's your Twitter handle.
Speaker 11: At doctor turtle Boy.
Speaker 4: So people should go check that out. But I wanted
Speaker 4: to play just one, one little clip of it here
Speaker 4: so people can get a flavor of the the actual
Speaker 4: language that prosecutors have been using and compare that to
Speaker 4: you know, the reality of what you were doing. So
Speaker 4: let's let's roll this clip here.
Speaker 17: Actual video shows I was talking about returning to Canton
Speaker 17: to see a d BW worker who was giving me
Speaker 17: the run around ninety four.
Speaker 8: Throwboarding turnst the Canton.
Speaker 12: This is a video posted shortly after Karen visited Pups
Speaker 12: of Weaknesses.
Speaker 1: This is not my last trips Canton.
Speaker 5: I will be back.
Speaker 1: I'll be back.
Speaker 11: Get used to this the staple part me, this staple.
Speaker 1: Think I'm fucking around.
Speaker 9: We haven't seen the last thing.
Speaker 8: Okay used to one nineteen to one.
Speaker 17: They combined sentences from two different clips. I will be
Speaker 17: back was encouraging people not to be afraid of the mcalberts.
Speaker 17: This is not my last trip to Canton. I will
Speaker 17: be back, And more and more, I think people are
Speaker 17: getting Like a year or so ago, people didn't want
Speaker 17: to cooperate with Karen reid defense team because they're like, yeah,
Speaker 17: it's easy to keep my head down and you know
Speaker 17: whatever and keep a low profile. But now, you know,
Speaker 17: now they're like, fuck it. You know, We've made people
Speaker 17: realize that you don't have nothing to be afraid of.
Speaker 17: The big bad monster's not gonna bite you. We newted
Speaker 17: their ass. They can't do anything and not so tough anymore,
Speaker 17: are they?
Speaker 1: This is not my last trips Canton.
Speaker 8: I will be back.
Speaker 1: I'll be back.
Speaker 11: Get used to this, people say, partly to see the
Speaker 11: same fucking around.
Speaker 5: You haven't seen the last name one nineteen one.
Speaker 11: These people think I'm fucking around. You haven't seen the
Speaker 11: last of me. Get used to it, Get used to it.
Speaker 17: But the Commonwealth makes it seem like I'm talking about
Speaker 17: harassing to mcalverts, which obviously sounds bad, but this was
Speaker 17: intentionally deceptive. I was actually referring to a DPW employee
Speaker 17: who was giving me the run around, and I said
Speaker 17: that I will be back to get information on who
Speaker 17: plowed Fairview Road the night that John O'Keefe was killed.
Speaker 1: I can, I can leave a message and I'll get
Speaker 1: it to him the field right now.
Speaker 17: She goes, how do I spell the last name?
Speaker 14: Stir.
Speaker 17: She had already written out my first name and spelled
Speaker 17: it correctly. She knows who I am. She didn't have
Speaker 17: to ask my first name. She didn't even have to
Speaker 17: ask what my last name was. She just asked how
Speaker 17: to spell it. She'd already spelled my name, so she
Speaker 17: knows who I am. At this point people are messaging
Speaker 17: me now and they're saying that she is a she
Speaker 17: is a friend. She lives in tim Alberts, n And
Speaker 17: she is best friends with the Week's Girls, that is
Speaker 17: mckaeb's sisters. So this is what we're dealing with here.
Speaker 17: This is the home cooking. So I'll be back, miss uh,
Speaker 17: miss boys regular, I'll be back. You haven't seen the
Speaker 17: last to me because he never called while she never
Speaker 17: called me today, Try to never called me. If you
Speaker 17: think you're gonna get rid of me that easily, you're
Speaker 17: badly mistaken. I will literally sit there all day, all day, like, well,
Speaker 17: what are Chinese? I'll make it. I'll make a day
Speaker 17: of it. I'll just sit there all freaking day because
Speaker 17: he's got to come back sometime. I'll be like, I've
Speaker 17: unfinished business. We didn't see Michael morrisey today. I'll be back.
Speaker 17: They get used to this, like these people think I'm
Speaker 17: fucking around, like I'm missed the internet guy, like I'm
Speaker 17: gonna sit here and I'm gonna write blogs all day
Speaker 17: and that it's okay he's writing blogs and just ignore whatever. No, no, no,
Speaker 17: I live an hour away. It's not I got alexus
Speaker 17: now it's not a problem. Good it's got great mileage
Speaker 17: and a good engine. I'll be there in an hour,
Speaker 17: no problem, Like I'll get used to it.
Speaker 4: So bring us up to speed on where these various
Speaker 4: cases are. So we just played this clip of this
Speaker 4: clerk who kind of blew you off, and you said
Speaker 4: on your live stream, you know, I'll be back because
Speaker 4: I want I need these documents, which is the essence
Speaker 4: of journalism. Like if journalism was asking for a document
Speaker 4: and being blown off and then moving on, none of
Speaker 4: us would ever get to the bottom of anything. So
Speaker 4: you you ask after the document, you're told forget it.
Speaker 4: You're like, I'll be back for this document. Like that's
Speaker 4: the essence of investigative journalism. Everything else that you were
Speaker 4: describing asking people questions, you know, having a hunch, like
Speaker 4: you believed X about this person, You're asking them about that,
Speaker 4: Like this is this is the basics of journalism. So
Speaker 4: I know that you were recently acquitted of one set
Speaker 4: of charges, talk about those, But then also like how
Speaker 4: did you wind up? I understand you did what sixty days?
Speaker 4: Sixty days it's right behind bars, yep. Or you're reporting
Speaker 4: on this case, So what was that for and what
Speaker 4: talk about the charges that you're still facing.
Speaker 17: So I've had six of them. We had a motion
Speaker 17: of the Smiths in March, and six of them ended
Speaker 17: up getting dismissed. Against the two cops, Buchennick and Proctor.
Speaker 17: They were both dismissed just because it's absolutely absurd, absolutely
Speaker 17: absurd that police officers have the audacity, who have guns
Speaker 17: and badges and all the power in the world, to
Speaker 17: say that they're intimidated by a journalist. I mean, it
Speaker 17: looks ridiculous. So I had two of those taken away.
Speaker 17: There was three conspiracy charges that were taken away because
Speaker 17: I had reported that Jennifer McCabe was at the Proctor's house.
Speaker 17: I posted a picture of her car parked outside there
Speaker 17: when the district attorney had said that she didn't know
Speaker 17: the Proctor family.
Speaker 11: And the way I was able to.
Speaker 17: Prove it was her car was I asked my followers,
Speaker 17: can somebody run a license plate for me and just
Speaker 17: kind of run.
Speaker 11: I wanted to make sure it was her car. It
Speaker 11: looked like her car.
Speaker 17: I was pretty sure is her car, But being a
Speaker 17: journalist and all I want to make I want to
Speaker 17: double check. I don't want it to fame anyone. So
Speaker 17: somebody volunteered to run a license plate for me, and
Speaker 17: they did, and they came back McCabe and I said, okay,
Speaker 17: thank you, and I wrote a story about it. And
Speaker 17: they called that conspiracy to commit witness intimidation, and both
Speaker 17: the person who ran the license plate and me were
Speaker 17: charged with conspiracy to commit witness intimidation, three charges of it,
Speaker 17: which each carried ten years in jail. So luckily those
Speaker 17: three were dismissed because they were just outrageous, but I
Speaker 17: still had the six. I have six more felony witness
Speaker 17: intimidation charges which are ten years each, four picketing charges,
Speaker 17: and I have since picked up two more charges of
Speaker 17: witness intimidation, or what we call window intimidation. I was
Speaker 17: outside Chris Albert's pizza shop, and I didn't know that
Speaker 17: I was being audio recorded, and we had I had
Speaker 17: about five sangrias that night, and there was a there
Speaker 17: was a camera in the window that was, you know,
Speaker 17: obviously picking up what was happening outside, at least the video.
Speaker 17: You can't intercept audio in Massachusetts because it's a two
Speaker 17: party consense state. So I was with a buddy and
Speaker 17: we started doing like an act. It was like a
Speaker 17: comedy act, and they called it witness intimidation. He wasn't
Speaker 17: there and it was literally in front of an empty window.
Speaker 17: So I picked up two more charges for that, and
Speaker 17: then I also picked up the thing that sent me
Speaker 17: to jail. So on October eleventh, I'm arrested for the
Speaker 17: first time, and they set bail, and if you are
Speaker 17: charged with a new crime while you're out on bail,
Speaker 17: you can have your bail revoked and go to jail
Speaker 17: without ever being convicted of a crime.
Speaker 11: And so it's very scary. You're just constantly on thin ice.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 17: I was seeing some woman, not even seeing her like
Speaker 17: I was just in a sexual relationship with some woman
Speaker 17: who was a free kir and Reed supporter who had
Speaker 17: just you know, kind of fangirled me, and I went
Speaker 17: along with it. I would go over there Fridays. It
Speaker 17: was nothing serious. Long story short. She turned out to
Speaker 17: be a psychopath. She pretended to be pregnant, pretended to
Speaker 17: have a couple abortions a couple times just to kind
Speaker 17: of mess with me and I Finally, after I realized
Speaker 17: there was no baby, I ended things with her. We
Speaker 17: have since gotten her phone extraction, and I've seen that
Speaker 17: on December ninth, she immediately got she was so upset
Speaker 17: about this breakup or whatever, that she contacted enemies, people
Speaker 17: who are dedicated to just destroying me, who got her
Speaker 17: in touch with Brian Tully from the State Police and
Speaker 17: the Special Prosecutor Ken Mellow, And within days she was
Speaker 17: speaking with them, and unbeknownst to me, Brian Kelly and her,
Speaker 17: according to her phone data, kind of conspired to He
Speaker 17: sent her a grand jury summons, a fake grand jury
Speaker 17: summons on December twenty second. We now know that there
Speaker 17: was no grand jury being held in regard to this,
Speaker 17: and he told her to send me the grand jury
Speaker 17: summons and say we need to talk about this, and
Speaker 17: she did, and so on December twenty second, she sends
Speaker 17: it to me, and I'm like, how does Brian Tully
Speaker 17: know who you are?
Speaker 11: Like what is happening?
Speaker 17: And she kind of confessed to me that I was
Speaker 17: so mad, and I was mad at you, and I
Speaker 17: just was I want to get back at you, and
Speaker 17: now it's gone too far and now I have to
Speaker 17: testify and I don't know what to do, and I
Speaker 17: need help and I need a lawyer. And this and that,
Speaker 17: and I fell bad for her, and I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 17: even though you've like betrayed me, I still feel bad
Speaker 17: for you, and I'd like to help you out, get
Speaker 17: you out of this jam. And against the advice of
Speaker 17: my attorney, I went to her house on December twenty third,
Speaker 17: because she said she wanted to like show me all
Speaker 17: of her communications with the police and show how they
Speaker 17: were setting me up. And I thought this could help me,
Speaker 17: you know. So I went to her, but I didn't
Speaker 17: want to go in her apartment, and she's got like
Speaker 17: a common area in her apartment building. So we met
Speaker 17: there for an hour or two, and unbeknownst to me
Speaker 17: now that we have her phone data and we've seen
Speaker 17: the police report, she went into the bathroom in the
Speaker 17: common area and she called them and she said that
Speaker 17: I have him here, and she kept her phone on
Speaker 17: and she attempted to record our conversation in this common area,
Speaker 17: and they urged her to get them back. There's cameras
Speaker 17: in the common area, and so she can't lie about
Speaker 17: me in there. So she's there, like get them back
Speaker 17: in your apartment, and so she had her son caller
Speaker 17: and say, Mom, come back her son was like twelve
Speaker 17: at the time. I need you to come back in here.
Speaker 17: She's like, okay, I have to go back in there.
Speaker 17: Can we just go in my apartment? And I said sure.
Speaker 17: And the second I walked into her apartment, I was
Speaker 17: going to jail, like I now know that, and so
Speaker 17: she showed me everything in there. And then around two am,
Speaker 17: I'm like, I have to go home. It's Christmas Eve morning.
Speaker 11: Now I have to leave.
Speaker 17: And she's like, you can't leave me, and I said, oh,
Speaker 17: I have to go home. It's Christmas Eve. And she
Speaker 17: then took the abortion pill in front of me and
Speaker 17: she's like, now you can't leave. I'm going to be
Speaker 17: in pain, and you can't leave me. I said, you're
Speaker 17: not pregnant. Stop it, and she was just using it
Speaker 17: as a way to keep me there. And then she
Speaker 17: woke up her four kids who are two, three, five,
Speaker 17: and twelve, and start like three in the morning and
Speaker 17: starts taking their jackets out of the closet and said,
Speaker 17: if you leave, I'm taking my kids and I'm driving
Speaker 17: to your house and holding an hour away and I'm
Speaker 17: gonna bleed out in your driveway and you can't leave me.
Speaker 11: You can't do this.
Speaker 17: And the five year old comes out and he looked horrified.
Speaker 17: And I'm now taping this. I tell her, I'm taping
Speaker 17: this for my own safety. This is getting out of control.
Speaker 17: And I said, okay, I will put the boy back
Speaker 17: to bed, please. I'm gonna sit here, and I don't
Speaker 17: want to endanger these kids. I'm gonna sit here and
Speaker 17: wait for her to fall asleep. So she falls asleep.
Speaker 17: At five am.
Speaker 5: I leave.
Speaker 17: I'm so tired that I fall asleep beyond the wheel
Speaker 17: of my car on the way home and I crash
Speaker 17: on the highway.
Speaker 11: I'm woking up after crashing into a guardrail.
Speaker 17: Luckily, I'm able to make it home on Christmas Eve,
Speaker 17: but I'm all messed up from this and I'm like,
Speaker 17: I'm on no sleep. And we go to my sister's
Speaker 17: house on Christmas Eve for like lunch, and then I
Speaker 17: get a call from the Holding police and they say,
Speaker 17: we just visited your house. We have something for you
Speaker 17: we need to give you. Unbeknownst to me, I'm tipped
Speaker 17: off an hour later by a Holding firefighter who says,
Speaker 17: don't go home. The police just came to your house
Speaker 17: with a warrant for your arrest. I said what for,
Speaker 17: and they said an assault and battery in Medfield. There's
Speaker 17: a warrant out for your arrest. And I'm like, oh
Speaker 17: my god, she said that I hit her. Holy shit.
Speaker 17: And you know that's automatic arrest in Massachusetts, like whenever
Speaker 17: there's a domestic violence and basically whoever gets to the
Speaker 17: cops first gets to have the other person arrested and
Speaker 17: no marks, no nothing like that. As it turns out,
Speaker 17: she has done this to four other men, including her father.
Speaker 17: She had her father arrested for assault and battery.
Speaker 11: This is what she does.
Speaker 17: She gets people arrested, then she gets orders on them,
Speaker 17: and then she has them arrested for violating the order.
Speaker 17: So I am I'm a fugitive on Christmas, and I
Speaker 17: make plans with my attorney on December twenty sixth, which
Speaker 17: is my birthday, to We're going to go to the
Speaker 17: courthouse quietly, get in there and get out.
Speaker 11: That's the goal.
Speaker 17: No media, nothing thing, just get in and get out.
Speaker 17: So we go to the courthouse at nine am on
Speaker 17: December twenty sixth. Brian Tully's standing on the series of
Speaker 17: the courthouse with the Medfield Police. There's waiting to arrest
Speaker 17: me when I go in there, so that's not an option.
Speaker 17: My lawyer says, go turn yourself into midfield PD.
Speaker 1: I do.
Speaker 11: There's a big hubba baloo.
Speaker 17: Media comes down there, and you know, I am just
Speaker 17: kind of praying, like, please don't let my bail get revoked.
Speaker 17: We play the tape that I recorded of her like
Speaker 17: threatening to take her kids, but there's no context to it,
Speaker 17: and quite frankly, it sounds like a woman in distress.
Speaker 17: At least that's how the judge must have taken it.
Speaker 17: Because I am He revokes my bail for ninety days.
Speaker 17: We later get that reduced to sixty because it turns
Speaker 17: out he's not allowed to do that, and I am shelsha.
Speaker 17: I'm like literally in shock because here I am going
Speaker 17: to jail and no warning, Like I'm like I could
Speaker 17: I've never met.
Speaker 11: I'm a home former high school teacher. I don't go
Speaker 11: to jail like this is.
Speaker 17: And because I'm kind of a high profile person around here,
Speaker 17: they don't put me in general popularly, which is actually
Speaker 17: much worse because you're in isolation the whole time and
Speaker 17: there's no one to pass the time with. There's no
Speaker 17: one to play chess. With to have a conversation with.
Speaker 17: And I'm just in shock and I'm sad and I'm depressed,
Speaker 17: and you know, I do the sixty days. I develop
Speaker 17: a routine that kind of helps me get through it mentally, physically.
Speaker 11: And when I got out of jail, in isolation the
Speaker 11: whole time, the whole time.
Speaker 17: We actually had my lawyer at meetings with the jail
Speaker 17: guard asking, like I said, I'd rather get the shit
Speaker 17: kicked out of me, Like if I get beat up,
Speaker 17: I get beat up, Like I'd rather do that than
Speaker 17: sit here all day.
Speaker 11: This is torture, like this is and I'm in medical.
Speaker 4: The UN calls it, defines it as torture.
Speaker 17: Yeah, yeah, And I'm sitting in the medical unit, which
Speaker 17: is where they send people who are having freak outs.
Speaker 17: You know, there's a lot of people in jail who
Speaker 17: should be in mental institutions, and they all send them
Speaker 17: to the medical unit and they're yelling and screaming all
Speaker 17: night and you can't sleep. One guy had just come
Speaker 17: into jail and he had swallowed a bunch of heroin
Speaker 17: packets beforehand, and I guess that's what they do, and
Speaker 17: they shit it out and that you can get high
Speaker 17: in jail that way, and so but it comes up
Speaker 17: in the X ray and so they send him to medical.
Speaker 11: And it was a.
Speaker 17: CEO's job to sit there outside of a cell and
Speaker 17: wait for him to take a shit, and just that
Speaker 17: was his, I mean, worst job ever. And but it
Speaker 17: smells so bad in the whole unit, and like that's
Speaker 17: where I was living for sixty days.
Speaker 11: It was literal hell. And so I got out of there.
Speaker 17: On February twenty third, three days later, camer Reid has
Speaker 17: a hearing, all right, and I go to that hearing
Speaker 17: because I never miss a can't read hearing and it's
Speaker 17: my job, and I'm back. And who shows up to
Speaker 17: the hearing with the Jennifer McCabe and Chris Albert but
Speaker 17: Lindsay Gattani, the person that sent me to jail in
Speaker 17: the first place, in live and she has never come
Speaker 17: to a hearing before. They have since befriended this woman
Speaker 17: while I was in jail, and they know she has
Speaker 17: a restraining order on me because of the arrest, and
Speaker 17: they bring her like a toy and I am forced
Speaker 17: to leave the courtroom, which I do because I can't
Speaker 17: be within one hundred yards of her. I leave I
Speaker 17: stand across the street where a police officer told me
Speaker 17: to go, and ten minutes later the hearing's over and
Speaker 17: everybody leaves. I didn't see her, she didn't see me,
Speaker 17: and a few hours later she must have heard that
Speaker 17: I was still outside the courthouse, that the Registry of
Speaker 17: Deeds across the street. So she calls the police and
Speaker 17: she says he was within one hundred yards of me
Speaker 17: and he was yelling liar, liar at me, which is
Speaker 17: completely untrue, and there's video to prove this. And so
Speaker 17: I am charged once again, three days after getting out
Speaker 17: of jail, with the misdemeanor of violating a restraining order.
Speaker 17: I had also been indicted since then with witness intimidation
Speaker 17: against her and wire tapping her for recording our conversation,
Speaker 17: which she said I didn't give a permission to do.
Speaker 17: And just like that, I'm facing another one hundred and
Speaker 17: twenty days in jail, this time at a March fourteenth hearing.
Speaker 17: So I didn't really feel free at all. Luckily, the
Speaker 17: judge just kind of saw through this one and didn't
Speaker 17: revoke my bail this time. But it was still very scary,
Speaker 17: and that's what I had the trial for a couple
Speaker 17: weeks ago was violating the restraining order against her and
Speaker 17: I was acquitted.
Speaker 4: So have you gone? What about the original charges of
Speaker 4: salt and battery?
Speaker 17: They dropped that the day I got out of jail,
Speaker 17: so they made it obvious that they had no intention
Speaker 17: whatsoever of pursuing this. They didn't believe her, and they
Speaker 17: were just using this as a way to have your
Speaker 17: bail revoked. I mean, I learned a lot about I
Speaker 17: didn't know anything about bail revocation. I'm not a criminal,
Speaker 17: and I've never violated the law before, and this is
Speaker 17: all very new territory to me. And that's one thing
Speaker 17: I've learned about this is that there are a lot
Speaker 17: of people in jail temporary the ninety day stints for
Speaker 17: bail revocations for crimes that they have never been convicted
Speaker 17: of and probably will never get convicted of, and they
Speaker 17: just and some of them, yeah, well yeah, some of them,
Speaker 17: while they're in jail for ninety days to get out earlier,
Speaker 17: will plea out to whatever misdemeanor. And it's like that's
Speaker 17: how they get their stats, that's how they get their
Speaker 17: you know, their convictions or whatever is. They just throw
Speaker 17: you in jail for something you haven't been convicted of
Speaker 17: and you want to get out, so you just like, whatever, Okay,
Speaker 17: I'll take a plea.
Speaker 11: What do I have to do?
Speaker 17: I have to do community service for ten hours? Okay, whatever,
Speaker 17: just get me out of here. And that's what they do.
Speaker 17: And so it's really I think it's a huge problem.
Speaker 17: I think bail revocation in general seems unconstitutional to put
Speaker 17: people in jail for crimes that they have never been
Speaker 17: convicted of, because you don't get that time back. Right.
Speaker 4: So, you went into this as a you know, conservative,
Speaker 4: back to the blue guy who'd been publicly oppositional to
Speaker 4: Black Lives Matter. I'm just curious, has it have you
Speaker 4: rethought some of your politics along along the way, or
Speaker 4: do you have a different understanding of policing and law
Speaker 4: enforcement than you did when you went into this.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I certainly I view police as just like any
Speaker 17: other line of work, potentially flawed, Like people are people.
Speaker 17: I'm sure there's great cops, but I'm sure there's bad cops.
Speaker 17: As a teacher, like there's a lot of great teachers,
Speaker 17: and then there's some teachers who mess around with students, right, Like,
Speaker 17: there's bad like every possession, every profession has their bad apples,
Speaker 17: But yeah, I mean, I certainly think it's changed my
Speaker 17: you know, opinions on the accused. Like I was this
Speaker 17: person who, like many just viewed the person sitting in
Speaker 17: the defendant chair must have done something because how else
Speaker 17: did they get there? But now I know, with Karen
Speaker 17: Reid and myself that actually anyone could be there, they
Speaker 17: could put any It means not like being indicted or
Speaker 17: charged with the crime does not mean you're guilty of
Speaker 17: a crime.
Speaker 11: That is one big thing I've taken out of this.
Speaker 17: I always now will give the defendants the assumption of
Speaker 17: innocence in any crime, and it is up to the
Speaker 17: state to prove they have the burden of proving beyond
Speaker 17: a reasonable doubt that this person did that. So I
Speaker 17: don't know if that's a political thing, because I do
Speaker 17: think that, you know, kind of cuts all. There's people
Speaker 17: on the right and the left that you know, agree
Speaker 17: with me on this issue, like for and there's also
Speaker 17: people on the left that won't get on board with
Speaker 17: me with this, and people on the right it won't
Speaker 17: like so for instance, like people like you know, Glenn
Speaker 17: Greenwald and Tucker Carlson, who you know, one is liberal
Speaker 17: and the other's conservative, but I think it's I find
Speaker 17: them interesting because they they both are very big advocates
Speaker 17: for free speech and being able to say what you
Speaker 17: want and just kind of against the weaponization of the government, uh,
Speaker 17: in order to, you know, punish people who have spoken out.
Speaker 4: So what's what's next for you? I saw some news
Speaker 4: that you're involved with a movie that's going to be produced.
Speaker 4: Can you talk a little bit about that, and also
Speaker 4: what does your lawyer say about the likelihood of these
Speaker 4: charges like sticking and going forward?
Speaker 17: Yeah, So with the charges I had, like I said,
Speaker 17: I still have, I'm facing one hundred and five years
Speaker 17: in jail, and we're going to try to knock out
Speaker 17: like the Lindsay witness intimidation ones. We're going to file
Speaker 17: emotion to dismiss. I think we can win that one.
Speaker 17: Same with the window intimidation's one. So hopefully I'm looking
Speaker 17: at six charges still a felony witness intimidation.
Speaker 11: So at that point a number of things can happen.
Speaker 17: Worst case scenario is we bring it to trial, and
Speaker 17: that's a very scary prospect because you're putting your faith
Speaker 17: in the hands of twelve strangers. Or a judge if
Speaker 17: you go bench trial, and so that's something we'd like
Speaker 17: to avoid if possible. And I'm kind of hoping that
Speaker 17: cooler heads will prevail in all this, and now that
Speaker 17: Caaren Reid has been acquitted, that they'll take a step
Speaker 17: back and say, why don't we just end this Karen
Speaker 17: Reid saga.
Speaker 11: This has been embarrassing for us. We lost.
Speaker 17: He was kind of vindicated with the acquittal, and you know,
Speaker 17: because if Karen Reid didn't do it, someone else did.
Speaker 17: And he's accusing these people of doing it, and so
Speaker 17: apparently twelve jurors believe that they did it. So you know,
Speaker 17: maybe maybe it's best to take a step back. So
Speaker 17: that's one thing I'm hoping for. There's also a DA
Speaker 17: election coming up in twenty twenty six, and the people
Speaker 17: who are looking at primary because it's a very liberal county,
Speaker 17: a Republican can't win that seat. So the only way
Speaker 17: he can be booted is with is if he's primaried
Speaker 17: and one of the women running against him now is
Speaker 17: taking the kind of pro free speech, pro CAUNRA reposition,
Speaker 17: and so like, maybe there will be political change that
Speaker 17: will save me. Who knows, but I can't count on that,
Speaker 17: So that's how we're dealing with those charges, but day
Speaker 17: by day. But as far as the movie goes, yeah,
Speaker 17: I signed a deal with Compelling Pictures, a production company
Speaker 17: out of Los Angeles, in last year, and they have
Speaker 17: the rights to book my book, my movie, and the
Speaker 17: documentary which we've been working on for several months now.
Speaker 17: And we got a lot of great footage during the
Speaker 17: week of Camera Read's acquittal, and that should be coming
Speaker 17: out on four to six months. I don't know what
Speaker 17: streaming platform it will be on. King Yeah, the documentary,
Speaker 17: I don't know. There's a competitive, a competitor documentary that's
Speaker 17: kind of coming out with a company called Sandpaper Films.
Speaker 17: It's a British company and they have a deal with Netflix,
Speaker 17: but they don't you know, I won't be in that documentary.
Speaker 11: I refuse to participate.
Speaker 17: They have kind of taken a turtle boy as the
Speaker 17: villain approach to their documentary.
Speaker 11: That's at least what I understand.
Speaker 17: So it's not going to be a very popular documentary
Speaker 17: because there's no market for Karen Reid is guilty. The
Speaker 17: vast majority of the public beliefs Canon Read is innocent.
Speaker 17: So I think that because they're a British company, they
Speaker 17: don't really understand the vibe over here in Massachusetts that
Speaker 17: actually the woman accused of murder is the protagonist in
Speaker 17: the story and Turtle Boy is kind of the person
Speaker 17: jumping in and helping her.
Speaker 11: And so I don't think that's going to go well
Speaker 11: for them. But we're using the.
Speaker 17: Documentary to kind of build up the Hollywood movie. That's
Speaker 17: that's what they're big into. And he's talking to directors, screenwriters, actors,
Speaker 17: everybody's in the process of that and he hopes that
Speaker 17: to have the dock out and force six months and
Speaker 17: the movie within eighteen months.
Speaker 4: Last question for you, where's doctor turtle Boy come from?
Speaker 4: Where's that? Where's that nickname? Well?
Speaker 17: I ran out of I've I've been kicked off of
Speaker 17: Twitter so many times that I ran out of handles.
Speaker 17: And I was honestly inspired to do it by Jill Biden.
Speaker 17: Like my old my slogan used to be, well, if
Speaker 17: Jill Biden's a doctored, then so am I. And so
Speaker 17: that's how it started. And I have since transformed that
Speaker 17: into if jud Welcher is a doctor. Jud Welcher was
Speaker 17: the guy the crash reconstruction is for the commos.
Speaker 11: Then, so am I.
Speaker 17: But I kind of dig it, like it's cool being
Speaker 17: called doctor, Like I get why people like being called doctor.
Speaker 17: It makes you feel important, and you know, I'm not
Speaker 17: actually a doctor, like if you're dying, don't call me,
Speaker 17: but you know, I like the sound of it, so
Speaker 17: I just stuck with it.
Speaker 4: Well, doctor, thank you for joining us. I really really
Speaker 4: appreciate this. We'll continue to follow this this story too.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 11: Thanks for having me Ryan, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 4: All right, that was the good doctor, Turtle boy, and
Speaker 4: that'll do do it for the program today. Thank you
Speaker 4: to Dave Smith for holding down the fort with me.
Speaker 4: Thank you Todave Dan for joining to talk about the
Speaker 4: big beautiful Bill, and of course also thank you to
Speaker 4: Aiden Carney. Thanks everybody for joining us, and the regular
Speaker 4: crew will be back on Tuesday. See you there,