7/23/25: Microsoft Workers Rebel On IDF Support, Bibi Blackmailed Bill Clinton, IceBlock Founder Wife Fired By Trump Admin

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. This is Matt Rogers from Las Culture East. That's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Culture East. That's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try a new food and suddenly it's like, okay, hold on. I got a new favorite food. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Kewpie mayo. Yeah, it's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it at the grocery store. And this mayo is different. Mm-hmm. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Kewpie only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor.

0:33It's smoother, deeper, almost buttery. Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. Egg sandwiches, fries, burgers. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. People who really care about flavor use it. Put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand. Kewpie, the original Japanese mayonnaise. Cha-ching! That's the sound of Lowe's Labor Day Savings. Get up to 45 % off select major appliances and save up to an additional$100 on select laundry pairs. Plus, get three bags of Miracle-Gro.75 cubic foot garden soil for just$10. Labor Day deals are on now at Lowe's. In-store and online. Valid through 9-9.

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2:22Microsoft workers, you can put this element up on the screen, have told their bosses at the company that they're no longer going to work on Israeli tech. Now, Microsoft is heavily involved, as DropSite has reported, with Israel's genocide in Gaza, providing enormous amounts of cloud computing and other technological support for the assault on Gaza. The amount of money that the Israeli Ministry of Defense has sent to Microsoft has massively increased since October 2023, according to internal company documents that we reviewed and reported on. This is an escalation from Microsoft workers who are now drawing a line and saying that they will just simply not work on this account.

3:14Now, that doesn't mean that Microsoft won't be able to find workers inside the company who will do it. But the publicity around it and the difficulty around it raises the stakes for Western companies who are continuing to be so intimately involved in what the world is now seeing of not just people getting mowed down at aid distribution sites, but dying in droves of starvation and malnutrition. You think this resonates at all? Yeah.

3:51Emily Jashinsky:I think it's been resonating. I mean, Crystal and I covered what happened with the church and also the Christian village in the West Bank. The IDF just announced, by the way, that they finished their review of the bombing of the church and that it was an accident. It was an accident. So that's all resolved. Good. Yeah. Glad we got to the bottom of that one. But that was a real shift. And I think whenever a shift like that happens, you start to see more focus on every sort of subsequent. You know, people take more seriously when they see. It's a good point. Because it just erodes. You have a new prism for how you're viewing what's going on.

4:32Emily Jashinsky:Right. It erodes trust. So if everyone's telling you this is Pollywood and it's all, you know, staged and fake and that's your predisposition to when you see these awful, awful images. that those arguments that had been sort of blocking you from taking seriously the images and the claims of suffering, then you have those arguments against it have so much less credibility. When you have one experience like that, it changes. Like you said, it's a new prism. And I've noticed that in the last week, I think. And speaking of staged and faked, we didn't talk about this a few days ago when it was released, but it's a fascinating development.

5:12The IDF put out this extraordinary short propaganda film of them for 43 seconds not shooting civilians. Let's roll this clip and then discuss. If you're listening, what you're seeing are hundreds of hungry people kind of mobbing an aid truck that is coming in through northern Gaza. and you're hearing commanders tell the IDF soldiers, don't shoot, don't shoot. And at least four times in this short clip, they say, don't shoot, don't shoot, don't shoot. And then the people who did not get shot kind of applaud the IDF for not shooting them. This was then posted by the Israeli military as evidence of their most moralness.

6:07Emily Jashinsky:But so the IDF posted that video IDF posted that video. It doesn't take a whole lot of deconstruction to start to raise questions about it. It's like, OK, congratulations, you found 43 seconds of your folks not shooting unarmed civilians who were seeking aid. What is going on with your rules of engagement that officers had to repeatedly order troops not to fire unarmed people? Like if I've been critical of the U.S. military my entire life, basically. But there's no world in which U.S. troops looking at a group of people who are mobbing an aid truck and kind of taking the flour off the aid truck would have to be told not to shoot.

7:02None of the soldiers there are under any risk whatsoever. Like it's clear what the people want. The people want the food that's on the truck. There would be no, no, no other army in the world would think, oh, we should shoot at these people. So that, that they had to keep saying, hey, we're filming here, guys. Don't shoot. Like we're doing a propaganda film here. Can you please, can you guys please not shoot the civilians? It reminds me of the one that the GHF put out several weeks ago where it's a guy speaking to camera for like seven seconds talking about how effectively they're distributing aid and how there's no violence.

7:40And this is an amazing accomplishment. A tremendous success is what Tammy Bruce at the State Department called it yesterday. And at the very end of the clip, you hear gunfire from there's no Hamas anywhere near these things. because that's why they're like 15 kilometers away from any populated area. And so it's like, and that's the take they posted. They couldn't even get a seven-second clip where they weren't shooting in the background. So this was really striking me. It made me think, so I did the show yesterday. So I came from out northwest D.C. down to the studio here, also went home. I saw a lot of people on my way in and my way out.

8:22I didn't shoot any of them.

8:25Emily Jashinsky:none the most moral television hosts in the world yeah i've saw i saw a bunch of people this morning some of them were hungry probably probably not maybe maybe a few were like define hungry yes um i didn't shoot i i haven't not i have not shot anybody all day long noble peace prize and i don't think i will shoot anybody for the rest of the day all right i'm gonna come next week with a letter nominating you for the nobel peace prize i appreciate there's a lot of stiff competition this year. Yeah. So my chances are not, are not very good. Uh, so this is the, this is the state that they're in with their, with their propaganda.

8:59Here's 43 seconds, uh, in which we didn't shoot unarmed people. Um, now, uh, now a warning, um, if you're not following this closely, a lot of this, uh, might be, might be new to you and might be graphic. Uh, maybe you want to scroll through this if you don't want to see it.

9:16Emily Jashinsky:It is very graphic. But the, the intensity of the violence, is just exploding. So we can put up C3 here. This is all stuff within the last 24 hours. This is a strike on a home that killed 15 civilians, including an enormous number of children. You've had an increasing number of strikes where you're seeing the, yeah, you don't even want to look at that. You're seeing fetuses blown out of pregnant women's bodies. These are toddlers who were born after October 7th, you know, who have known nothing but this. Here's a man who died of starvation. Well over 100 people now have died of starvation. And here's a clip that was circulating.

10:13Just two guys just sitting out on the pier, just bombed and killed just for sitting on the pier.

10:22And that's it. And then on filming their own murders.

10:30So like we keep hearing that they're getting closer and closer to a ceasefire. But an enormous number of the people in Gaza are now kind of beyond the point of no return. I reported on one where we didn't post this, but you can see it on my Twitter feed if you want. A paramedic was hit yesterday. I hope he's still alive. He was alive as of yesterday, according to medical sources. And you can see him. So he's taken into the hospital with getting an auction. And you compare his picture to a picture of him from a couple of years before. He's just shed so much weight. He's just skin and bone. And the medics were getting food much longer than the regular population.

11:19Only in the last couple of days at Nasser Hospital, for instance, did the hospital staff stop getting food. Patients stopped getting food a long time ago. Now it's basically every person for themselves, whatever they can find. So it's just going absolutely bananas. Now, meanwhile, they cut off Internet to Darabala, which is the remaining kind of civilian infrastructure left in Gaza. It's actually where Abu Bakr grew up and was from. It's where his family is. And it's where a lot of the U.N. and aid organizations are housed because there's nowhere else for them to operate at this point. So they've now launched an incursion into Darabala.

12:07They cut off internet to it. They're bombing the hell out of it. Soraya Al-Quds, which is a resistance faction, put out a statement that you can put up this next element, that they've now lost contact with Roan Brezlovsky, who is one of the 20 remaining hostages, assumed to be 20 remaining hostages who are still alive. the you know Hamas had warned and actually IDF commanders have have warned like if we if we continue to assault these particular areas we're very worried that we're going to kill more hostages they've already killed an untold number uncounted number at this point but a significant number of hostages and so now there's this reporting that they've lost contact with with Rome.

13:01So this is in the context of Whitcoff heading to, you know, there's reports that he's going to be heading over there as they're trying to finalize an agreement. There's, you know, the negotiations heavily are around aid and how aid would be distributed, because if this aid system continues, then the death by starvation and the slaughter at all of these aid distribution studies would continue, and Hamas is saying, we can't agree to that. Yesterday, Tammy Bruce, this is an incredible moment at the State Department, which said, it's a tremendous success, like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distribution.

13:41And one of the reporters is like, well, the result of this success is starvation. Like, that's your definition of success? It's like before people weren't dying of starvation. Now they are. I'm not sure under what terms that counts as a success.

14:00Emily Jashinsky:The ceasefire timeline is interesting because it seems to me like, and you've covered this closely, I think we've talked about it, that the escalation correlates. The closer a ceasefire appears to be politically, the closer the Trump administration suggests they are to a ceasefire. Whenever Wyckoff is negotiating, it seems like you end up – It's like they empty the warehouses of bombs on – yeah. So I don't know. Hopefully we're going to get a reprieve to this soon. But too late for a lot of people. So let's also take a trip down memory lane. This is crazy. The 1990s, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bill Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky.

14:43Stick around for this one. This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. us with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture Research with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try on new food and suddenly it's like, wait. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Kewpie mayo. It's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it in the grocery store before. And if you've ever just walked past it, some people would say that's a huge mistake. Because this mayo is different. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs.

15:14Kewpie only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, and almost buttery. Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. Egg sandwiches, fries, burgers. Some fans even swear by dipping pizza crust in it. And once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. People who really care about flavor use it. Never tried it? Grab the bottle with the red cap next time you're at the store. Put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand. Kupi, the original Japanese mayonnaise. I think something that makes me well-studded to be a is my empathy.

15:48Growing up with a big family, I think I've always kind of been a caregiver. When you care give, you get to know the family and the patient and you get really close and Rasmussen University, they did a very, very good job of giving us the resources that we need. So just being able to apply the knowledge that I've retained to my daily life has been so amazing. Learn more at rasmussen.edu. Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc, and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time.

16:26Fortunately, though, Mint's story is better. Every plan,$15 a month, even unlimited. That's it. Happy ending. Zero tears. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. So in a scandal that has been largely lost to contemporary memory, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was alleged to have blackmailed then-President Bill Clinton by revealing to him that Israel had collected tapes of phone sex calls between the 42nd President and White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

17:02The story is worth revisiting amid allegations that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in a long-running Israeli blackmail operation of his own. So Clinton met with Netanyahu in the Oval Office in February 1997. Subsequently, according to testimony Lewinsky gave to the special counsel's office, Clinton Secretary Betty Curry reached out to Lewinsky to invite her to an Oval Office meeting, telling her Clinton, quote, had something important to tell her, unquote. It would turn out to be their final sexual encounter. But Clinton also used the opportunity to tell her that a, quote, quote, foreign embassy had tapped his phone and recorded their conversation, Lewinsky said.

17:40Clinton did not specify which embassy, though the meeting with Lewinsky came the month after his meeting with Netanyahu. The special prosecutor's report was far more concerned with Lewinsky's claim of the sexual encounter that day because it contradicted Clinton's claim that they had had only one encounter that year than they were with the fact that a foreign government was spying on the president and letting him know about it. The prosecutor was also interested in Clinton's response, namely that he proposed cover stories. These are cover stories that the two could employ if they were confronted with the tapes.

18:14Clinton suggested the pair say they knew they were under surveillance and the phone sex was a quote put on for whoever was listening. That's an awfully flimsy idea, but look, he was guilty. The man did not have much to work with. Now in April, Netanyahu and Clinton met again for a, quote, private visit. On a Saturday then in May 1997, Clinton again had Kerry invite Lewinsky to the White House. During that visit, he broke up with her, Lewinsky testified. The next fall, so this is fall of 1998, Clinton hosted Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for a summit at Wye River, Maryland. Toward the end of the summit, at 7 a.m.

18:53after a long night of final negotiations and handshakes, Netanyahu approached Clinton privately to demand the release of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, long a cause celeb of the Israeli far right. That's according to reporting at the time from the New York Times. Now, Netanyahu brought up the sex tapes in the context of the Pollard demand, according to subsequent reporting by Washington Examiner editor Daniel Harper in his book Clinton, Inc., The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine. He writes, quote, not wanting to directly threaten the powerful American president, a crucial Israeli ally, Clinton was told that the Israeli government had thrown the tapes away, but the very mention of them was enough to constitute a form of blackmail, Halpern reported.

19:38The talks almost broke down as CIA chief George Tenet told Clinton he would resign on the spot if Clinton agreed to the terms. So instead, Clinton agreed to, quote, review Pollard's case. He did not release him. Pollard was eventually freed in 2015 under the Obama administration. Now, on the last day of his first term, Trump pardoned Pollard's handler. Back in Israel, Pollard is now an outspoken supporter of extremist national security minister Ben Gavir, Itamar Ben Gavir, and has called for the full ethnic cleansing of Gaza. I don't know, Emily, what do you think? What did Netanyahu tell Bill Clinton?

20:16Emily Jashinsky:I'm so curious. Is there another foreign embassy that this could be? So this is very casually in the book of Daniel Helper, right? Tell us about him as a reporter. Well, I was even going to ask you. I mean, he's sort of a right-of-center Bush era. I mean, I don't want to get this wrong, but that's my kind of— Yeah, he was doing a lot of these Clinton-ing style, yeah. Right, and then was covering foreign policy during that time period. I remember Daniel Hopper a lot from the kind of blogging years, if that makes sense, like the Bushira blogging years. But this is very casually in the book. And there was another book I think was called Gideon's Spies in 98, published in the UK, that reported the same thing.

20:57Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. That it was – that Yahoo – and that it was Israel that had gotten these tapes. Because basically what – back then it was probably pretty – maybe even easier than it is now. a lot of people were learning about this affair. Yeah. Like it was everywhere. Before it was reported by Drudge and then by Newsweek, it was the talk of like elite Washington. That's how, like, you know, Linda Tripp was telling book agents and book publishers. Yeah, Lucy Ann Goldberg. Yeah, Jonah Goldberg's mom. Yes, exactly. And she's telling people. And like, you know, actually, what's his name? George Conway. Right.

21:45He like he was who's now the resistance Democrat guy. Kellyanne Conway's ex-husband and Coulter. And like this whole right wing world.

21:56Emily Jashinsky:Brett Kavanaugh was working with Ken Starr. George Conway was in that group. Coulter was defending Paula Jones. Right. She was on the Paula Jones. The Paula Jones lawyers learned about Monica way early. So in other words, a lot of people in Washington knew about the Monica affair while it was still ongoing. So if you were a foreign embassy that learned this, then it would not have been hard for Israel and others, not just them, to learn about it. It would then not be hard for you to go and tap Monica Lewinsky's phone. You don't even have to tap the White House at that point. Right. You just get Monica's phone line.

22:36Emily Jashinsky:Which is way easier, of course. Right. Yeah. And then, boom, you're going to pick up all of these calls that continue to happen. How do you like Bill Clinton's cover story? We knew that we were being surveilled by a foreign government, and so we decided to do fake sex tapes with an intern. I mean, I was going to say, I think actually that may. So first of all, I think it gives it more credibility that it's casually in the book. And I think Daniel Halper is sort of broadly pretty pro-Israel. I'll have to go back and look. But I think that's sort of baked into a lot of the coverage that Daniel Halper has done.

23:17Emily Jashinsky:But I think the fact that this is sort of casually just inserted into the narrative of the book lends credibility to it. And people aren't challenging it. It's the same thing with the Alex Acosta quote that Vicky Ward put in her story that like barely raised an eyebrow at the time. And Acosta, there weren't all other people from those meetings in the Senate coming out and saying this never happened. Right. So anyway, all that, that's like a bit of a tangent. But it also makes you look differently on the way Clinton vociferously denied the affair because it's possible that they were really serious about this defense for foreign policy reasons.

23:59Emily Jashinsky:that they were, they had motives beyond just protecting Clinton, that they were like also dealing with the potential foreign policy consequences of this entire thing being known to an ally. It was crazy. Although by fall of 98, when the Y River thing is happening, it's Eastern Shore. I remember when that was happening, Eastern Shore, Maryland. the world kind of the public knew about all of this so like the value the value of that black male by then was much diminished by the fact that it was it was everywhere already and then you had you had the midterms where democrats overperformed despite all of this stuff right because when it when did he when did it all break that he admitted it I don't remember exactly when that was.