8/22/25: BREAKING: FBI RAIDS John Bolton, Mayhem At Dem Townhall, Israel Admits 83% Civilian Deaths

18:43Emily Jashinsky:which will likely, of course, bolster the Trump administration's claims that self-deportations are being fueled by some of these tactics. But yeah, what was that again? What was that number? One and a half million from January to June. So in just have left it just a decline in the immigrant population. It's Pew. So they're they're surveying the population. They can't tell completely. But yes. Yeah, that tracks to me. Immigrant communities, particularly social media in immigrant communities, is nonstop fear. It's nonstop images of raids and windows being smashed and people being beaten on the ground.

19:26And so it would track to me that not only do you have very few people coming in, that people are just going to be leaving, self-deporting, as Romney put it.

19:37Saagar Enjeti:right yeah and it just seems like everything's designed for social media you know whether it's like the the dc people only you know taking uh national guard photo shoots in front of like the link and memorial uh or you know these sort of highlighted kind of brutal social media videos but then when to emily's point when it comes down to like the raw numbers of like what you'd have to do, that seems to be still a big question of how they do any of that in reality, or if they're just going to rely on these sort of propaganda videos to kind of feed the hogs.

20:14Emily Jashinsky:Well, it's the videos and they are also doing CBP Home, which offers like a thousand dollar travel stipend for people to, if we borrow Mitt Romney's verbiage, self-deport. And they feel like they've had a good, they feel like that's been working for them. And I guess the Pew study would confirm that, but it's a combination of the carrot and the stick, which is the financial incentive will make it easy, as they say, to help you book a flight and leave, which also I think if you want to come back, you don't get penalized. So if you try to go through legal pathways in the future, if you use CBP Home, you don't get penalized as part of that.

20:55Emily Jashinsky:And then also ratcheting up the imagery and talking about things like alligator Alcatraz as part of it. It's the carrot and stick program. Meanwhile, real quickly, I was talking to a contractor here in D.C. yesterday who said two of his carpenters didn't show up for work yesterday. And, you know, most contractors work with subcontractors and the subcontractors are the ones that are tasked with verifying immigration status. And that's where it's in the subcontractor level that a lot of this, where a lot of people without documents end up, you know, getting work. And his point was, you know, you want me to hire a white or black carpenter who has legal paperwork here?

21:40I'm happy to. Show me one. Like, what's the plan here? This is a generational problem. Like, what's your step two in this plan here? so you've successfully you've successfully scared these people out from coming to work or leaving or into leaving the country was there a single penny and build back better for uh trade schools not build back better big beautiful bill big beautiful bill um you know there might have been something it certainly was not a priority certainly was not something that they said, you know, we're going to train a generation of Americans to do the kinds of jobs that we're telling them that they we want them to do.

22:25Emily Jashinsky:It looks like they expanded 529s to include trade schools. So, OK, so that's the most Kamala Harris thing ever. So you so you can go to so 529s, that's where you can get a tax break for put for putting money away for your kid to go to school. So now they expand that to trade school. Now, if you open it in a disadvantaged neighborhood that has been majority white, so let's do DEI for white people, and it insists on doing subsidized business with Israel for three years, then you can get this tax break towards trade school. That would be, I guess, the Republican version of the Kamala Harris approach to education reform.

23:14So yeah, so tinkering at the edges of 529s is not a remotely serious way to develop a generation of carpenters and electricians and all the kinds of people that we are brutalizing and trying to drive out of the country. So I guess good luck to us.

23:36Saagar Enjeti:I'm excited. I'm excited to see all the new buildings that pop up over the next couple of years. made by fail-son college-educated people who can't get a job at Quiznos. They're going to be putting up my house. I mean, I even know people here in LA that work in construction. My brother works on houses. And what a lot of places do, not on my brother's sites, but on a lot of sites I hear, is the guys have to now either park their cars down the street or park their cars in the backs of the houses. And they have to tape up the windows to kind of obscure her inside working on these homes. Yeah. I talked to some workers that they used to meet on a corner because they were all going to the same place, and now they stay in their homes and they dash out.

24:26Once they each get picked up home by home.

24:30Emily Jashinsky:This is a chart that shows the foreign-born share of the workforce declining and the native-born share of the workforce increasing. Now, this is, again, like I want to be clear that all of this stuff is like loaded with, to the point that you were making, Ryan, consequences that are not even, there's basically nothing that you can, it's generational. It's not like a wave of magic wand and you increase the share of the domestic workforce and everyone's suddenly taking apprenticeships and everything's fine. Right. And that's not it's only it's only general. And there was actually there were there's tons of money for apprenticeships in Build Back Better, which I bet they ripped that out.

25:14But it's only generational if you actually invest in it. If you don't, then the next generation, we're not going to have like we're not going to have the carpenters, electricians then either. Like people think that this stuff is just going to happen. But yeah, we could also just go into rapid and long, long term decline as a country like that is also a thing. and that seems to be what we're choosing.

25:36Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, but it's nice to have options on the table. I was anecdotally, I have heard, I'm not a gig work apologist in any way whatsoever. I have though heard that was a problem for people, native born people who were looking for gig work had actually a problem doing that in recent years. And just anecdotally, that seems to have changed here in DC in the two week experiment we've had with this federal takeover. So I don't, that's just gig work. That's not, you know, skilled trades, construction. Like getting more, like they're getting more Uber Eats deliveries. Yeah. Because that might be. Yeah. But yes, but that's the kind of thing that doesn't need years of investment to learn how to swing a hammer.

26:21Emily Jashinsky:For most people, it's not their ideal work situation. It's not great. It's precarious. Yeah. 16 years ago, I started working as a CNA in the hospital. I loved it. On the day I decided to enroll in the nursing program at Rasmussen University, it was afternoon, my 35th birthday. I was hanging out with a friend, and they had just questioned me what I was going to do with this next chapter of my life. I immediately had said, I want to go to nursing school. So I actually had contact information from an advisor at Rasmussen, contacted her, and actually ended up starting like three weeks later. My name is Cherish Adams, and I'm a Rasmussen University graduate.

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28:29Saagar Enjeti:On that note, let's move on to some other Democrat news here. There was a tussle, a dust-up, if you will, at the St. Louis Police and Security. We're calling for Rep. Wesley Bell at a town hall. Here's a video from one constituent who filmed some of the assaults and by the end is getting thrown to the ground themselves. Yeah, and I could add a little bit of background here, too. that so this was a the town hall held by wesley bell who defeated cory bush in that contentious uh primary um as bush and other uh constituents who were at this said so it was it was tense um you know bell did everything he could to stack the audience um uh you know requiring tickets and you know it was not it's just not a free-for-all um but still like most of the people there were pretty hostile to him.

29:21And so after...

29:23Saagar Enjeti:Hostile for what reason, Ryan? Israel. Israel. Like yelling at him about Israel. And he kept... And he was defending, like, you know, calling them what are you supporters of October 7th or whatever. So after the event... For people who are... Not to interrupt, Ryan, but for people who are just hearing the audio here, I mean, there are large men grabbing women by their hair and throwing them to the ground. And throat. And so at the end of the event, Bell tells them, I got to go talk to the media in the back. I'm going to do some interviews and then I'll come out and speak with people. So Bell leaves and then immediately all the security starts attacking these constituents saying the town hall's over.

30:06You got to leave. And that's how this event unfolded that you just witnessed. And so now I saw an alderman shared that. Cori Bush also shared that. saying Wesley Bell has questions to answer here. Did he tell them to stay and then order his security to get them out? Did he lie to them, basically, and set them up for this physical confrontation? So Bell is vulnerable, and Cori Bush has clearly been publicly flirting with a rematch against him. A lot of news about Bell and about his tenure as a prosecutor in St. Louis broke after he won the election, including sexual harassment allegations, allegations of inappropriate, like romantic relationships with staff.

31:00And that's just the tip of the iceberg. So and also, you know, we're now two years into this genocide, two years deeper. And so the climate is different, perhaps for for Bush. So I think I think I think Bella is vulnerable here.

31:17Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, and I mean, just to give people a little context for people who don't remember everything about Wesley Bell, AIPAC went all in on his race to unseat Cori Bush. The AIPAC tracker here claims that he's gotten over$12 million from the Israel lobby. I was reading something that almost two-thirds of all of Wesley Bell's donations were directly from AIPAC or AIPAC-affiliated people. So this was just one of the most egregious, like thumb on the scale races we've seen since the Jamal Bowman one. Is that right, Ryan? Yes, that's the second most they've ever spent to knock somebody out. And her race was close, much closer.

32:034 ,000 votes, I think, than Bowman. Bowman got trounced, whereas Bush only lost by a few thousand votes. So... This could be an interesting race.

32:17Emily Jashinsky:I mean, it is just, this is one of the most illustrative AIPAC examples. It's like you're talking about a district in the St. Louis area that needs to have, what, how much,$12 million? $12 million. $12 million coming to prevent one vote and one voice on one issue that is not a domestic issue. Right. Does money mean anything to you guys, like that you can just drop$12 million to APAC? No. You need to get to the first couple. It would be enough. Paul Singer's already a million deep into the Thomas Massey primary. Like a primary. Yeah. Kentucky. Is Massey going to win that? Yes. Because they're throwing everything at him, right?

33:08I mean, they've got Trump's team is out there.

33:11Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. I think he'll be fine. But I don't know. Maybe it's worth a trip. Maybe I'll do that. Check it out.

33:18Saagar Enjeti:Yeah. And it's also especially egregious to see that amount of money thrown in and kind of, you know, Democrats just kind of looking the other way on it. He's just another congressman like everyone else. And it's like, OK, sure. I mean, in another little bit of Democrat news here, I did want to bring up and get y 'all's reactions to something happening over in Minnesota, where the Minnesota DFL have revoked their party's endorsement of state Senator Omar Fata. Is it Fata?

33:52Emily Jashinsky:Mm-hmm.

33:53Saagar Enjeti:Yeah. In the Minneapolis mayor's race. Now, this guy is, is he DSA? he's like an out and out out of the closet socialist yeah he's I don't know if he's DSA I think he's DSA but he's definitely he would not be offended at being called a socialist yeah and so they I guess endorsed and then decided to pull that back which kind of is just a fascinating one as well because it's like it's such a it's the mayor of Minneapolis and it's just like okay The Democrats, they don't care. This is still like an old litmus test that they're applying. Because did he make any statements on Israel or is it just his socialist bona fides?

34:40Well, so they're saying, I don't know how close you've looked into it, Emily. I haven't had a chance to dive into the weeds. They're saying that they discovered an irregularity in the way that the Excel spreadsheet was handled. during the caucus that this one candidate was deleted from one of the rounds of voting and that that made the whole thing unfair. I think there might be more in the weeds. There's some people who are just straight up accusing him of fraudulently messing with the spreadsheet somehow. Others are saying, no, that this was an error. This is the party's error. Either way, they took all of the controversy around it and said, all right, well, we're just tossing the whole thing out.

35:27Now, the Minnesota Democratic establishment has wanted to nuke these caucuses ever since it became clear that the left had become able to out-organize the establishment at these caucuses. They're very confusing caucuses. You have to go to multiple different events. you go to one and then you get your delegates and then you organize those delegates and then you go to another caucus. It's more than just like an Iowa caucus. It's like this months-long organizing effort. And the more passionate you are, then the better you're going to do in this. And it turns out the left wing of the Minnesota party is more passionate than the establishment is.

36:15And so they've been out organizing them. So they've really wanted to get rid of these for a pretty long time. And yeah, the party kind of establishment leadership just does not want Fata to be the nominee. That's just, it's not a coincidence that their views on the irregularities lined up with their position here.

36:35Saagar Enjeti:But for what reason in particular? What is the great threat of this Minneapolis mayor candidate? I mean, for one, it's probably, you know, race. Like this, he would be the first Somali. american to be mayor of the city and i'm sure there's some like resistance to that there uh and but then also the you know socialist politics well they want they want more of a jacob fray like seems kind of radical but is totally uh amenable to the business community

37:11Emily Jashinsky:right can you maybe give more context on some of the stuff that's happened with dfl recently Because I actually think there have been – there are serious allegations of chicanery and fraud stuff with DFL in recent years, haven't there been? It's been a source of some drama. Has it been a source of more drama than most state parties? The head of it is now the chair of the DNC, Ken Martin. So that's interesting as well. There was the feeding our future thing. That was like the Biden and FBI was looking into that. And I think people from DFL were wrapped up in it. But that might—and then the FBI was investigating their endorsement process.

38:02Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, anyway, like you said, that's kind of not that unusual for state parties.

38:07Saagar Enjeti:Emily, let's keep following this lead. I think the FBI should maybe raid some of the DFL, find out what's going on. No one's above the law.

38:18Emily Jashinsky:I was going to say John Bolton can take over the DFL.

38:22Saagar Enjeti:Nice. Okay. So in that case, I wanted to get, while we're on Democrats and infighting and socialist candidates, we had to talk about Graham Plattner just for a quick second here. Graham Plattner kind of came out of nowhere with this campaign video that people have been sharing around. It kind of went viral. He's running against Susan Collins here in Maine. Let's take a listen to that, and then let's get y 'all's reactions. I have never met people who are more hardscrabble, even in a place that requires you to work like two or three different jobs. We have watched this state become essentially unlivable for working class people.

39:06And it makes me deeply angry. My name is Graham Plattner, and I'm running for U.S. Senate in Maine to defeat Susan Collins. A decade of military service going overseas. Farming oysters to feed my community. Diving to lend a hand to other fishermen. Trying to start a family. But everywhere I've gone, it seems like the fabric of what holds us together is being ripped apart by billionaires and corrupt politicians. profiting off of destroying our environment, driving our families into poverty, and crushing the middle class.

39:37Saagar Enjeti:So that's a taste of it. Graham Plattner running against Republican Susan Collins in Maine. What are we to make of this? Well, turns out, this has never happened for me before, it turns out I knew Graham. That's wild. So Graham grew up in Maine, then joined the military, did, I think, four tours over 10 years or something, and then went to GW, which maybe Emily knew him. I mean, I see probably a little before your time. So he went to college at George Washington University, never, didn't actually finish, which to me is another feather in the cap. Yeah, that is really the best way

40:21Emily Jashinsky:to go to George Washington University. Yes, but while he was there to help pay for it, he tended bar to tune in. That's right. Which was my home away from home for many years back in the 2000s. Chicken balls. So when I saw this, I was like, wait a minute. I know Graham. So I texted the other bartender, Ned, and I was like, is this the same Graham? He's like, yeah, Graham's running for senator. This is awesome. Yes, he is. So wild. So he'd be the second bartender maybe to come to Congress.

41:03The race is this guy, Jordan Wood, who we can talk about more. I'll have a story on him next week. More of a conventional-ish candidate. Janet Mills is the Democratic governor of Maine, and everybody is kind of waiting for her to decide whether or not she's going to run. She would be 79 when she took office, which would make her the— Spring shake, Edwin. spring chicken for the Senate, but still the oldest freshman senator ever in Senate history. So if you're setting age records in the Senate, you're old. And also the Senate is a place of seniority, and so it takes... They basically don't talk to you in the Senate until you've won your second...

41:50until you've won re-election. So she would be 85 when her colleagues started to engage with her. Awesome. Like, what do you, come on, Democrats. Like, run the, and, you know, she's fine. Like, I think she's like minus four or something. Approval rating. So it's not like people, like, despise her, but it's not like they love her either. Running her would just be the, like, oh, this is what we do. We take the governor, we put her up, and we see what happens. And now this Graham Plattner is offering them a different path. And I think he would make it very easy for them to say yes to if he's if he said if he's talked in a more passive voice like our environments being destroyed, our the fabric of our community is being ripped apart.

42:48It's when he see democracy is at risk. It's when he adds by billionaires.

42:54Emily Jashinsky:Yep. That the party's like, oh, do we really have to do we really have to be so rude about about how it's happening? Let's just let's just talk about the fact that it is happening and it's bad. Do we really have to name them? Well, but do you go ahead? I was going to say, I think that actually is like the fine line between Gavin Newsom adopting this new strategy of like looking like you're punching Republicans in the nose and then actually executing on that, which is you have to be able to talk about the system itself being fundamentally broken, but not in those sort of vague terms about the system is not working.

43:34Emily Jashinsky:You need to say why the system is not working. You need to have a platform. So like you can you can raise money and you can boost your name recognition by trolling Trump on social media. But that doesn't mean you're going to like suddenly this is what Matt Bennett And I know we're going to talk about third way. He called it, quote, combative centrism. He says Democrats need a combative centrist. Well, if centrism looks like Dan Osborne, yes, if centrism, if combative centrism or Graham Plattner. But if combative centrism looks like Gavin Newsom talking a little bit more like a populist while also still taking all the PG &E money and doing whatever he wants with it, that is the – I really feel like actually, Ryan, that's such an important point because that's like the fine line between looking like a populist and actually being a populist.

44:21Emily Jashinsky:And I don't think Dems are prepared for how far short just looking like a populist goes. I mean, ask J.D. Vance. Yeah, and Griffin, do we have the morning, Joe? I'm going to pull that up in a second. While you're looking for that, I'll decide the point that the path for him, too, could be the Bernie route and the Osborne route. So Bernie always runs in the Democratic primary so that nobody can win the nomination. And then he rejects the nomination and runs as an independent. So I could imagine Graham doing that, that if he wins, because Angus King is an independent senator from Maine. Like Maine is a different kind of state.

45:02It has a real independent streak to it. They were the hipsters when it came to this. Now it's cool now, but they've been doing it forever. So you can imagine a world in which he's like, look, I'm not even necessarily a Democrat here. I'm running in the Democratic primary, but it doesn't mean I love this party. and if he wins the nomination he can decline it and then run as an independent which that I think is their way of beating Susan Collins they've tried Sarah Gideon the last candidate had $75 million and finished with more than $12 million in the bank she had another$50 million in super PAC money Susan Collins had just as much and she got beaten by like six points or something she was the speaker of the house like that they they can't they keep running these like it's my turn democrats against susan collins and people are like collins is kind of a phony and a fraud but so is this person and i've and collins is a hard worker and charming and person um and knows everybody in maine and so you have to you can't just do a Susan Collins light to beat Susan Collins.

46:18Emily Jashinsky:You need a real contrast. And she, that was, the Gideon race was after the Kavanaugh vote. And this time Collins voted against the one big beautiful bell. So it's... Right, but people are a little tired of that shtick. Graham had a good line about her. He's like, the only difference between her and Ted Cruz is Ted Cruz is honest about, you know, how he's selling you out. But did you see that she, I think, to me, made a mistake she has already criticized him by name over his position on Gaza, which he called it a genocide and said that the U.S. needs to change its policy towards Israel. She's really got her finger to the wind on that one.

47:03Yeah, she went after him over that.

47:05Emily Jashinsky:Mills or Collins? Collins did. Collins did, yeah. Collins went after Graham Plattner over it. It's like, I don't know if this is your move. You really want to elevate this guy? be careful. Hasn't she already gotten... You really want to make this race about Gaza? I think this was in Politico, but I think Susan Collins already has Dems, Dem donors lining up behind her.

47:28Saagar Enjeti:Yep. Yeah. Yeah, they would rather, yeah, they'd rather do that. But some Dems are starting to get a little bit, they're starting to get a little warm for him. We've got a morning Joe clip here. Ryan mentioned, Ryan mentioned that you know, the passive voice that Graham should adopt. But I think Graham's greatest skill is his voice. No, I don't think he should adopt it. No, no, I don't think he should adopt it. I think it's the thing that the party would like him to adapt. Yeah, but you mentioned that that's what the party would like. But his deep bravado, I think, is his greatest superpower here.

48:03Saagar Enjeti:And I think it can let him get away with anything. As we can see, it's already wooed our friends over at Morning Joe. So let's take a listen right here to the, yeah, part of the MSXBO Now Plus or whatever it is. I saw an ad out of Maine. I saw an ad out of Maine. Whoa. That's one of the most effective ads I have seen in a long time. And that's a Democrat who's being himself, but also is very clearly saying, no, no, no. The flag's not your symbol. No, no, no. A hardworking dude in a black T-shirt is not just, you know, you're somebody. There are a lot of hardworking people out here who think you all are acting crazy right now.

48:55And it's really, it's the authenticity. And it's something you and I talked about too. You have all the focus groups you want. You walk into a room, you either know you, people in that room either know you're one of them or you're not.

49:08Saagar Enjeti:And the candidate you mentioned in Maine, Graham Plattner, is, and I'll just read his bio here on his X site, combat veteran, friend of the working manor, foe of the oligarchy. Hunk, 6 '5". Let's go! You know, it's funny. It's like, out of all the things, you know, he didn't like that he was anti-oligarchy, anti-billionaire. He liked that he was a hunk. He was salivating over this guy. He was like, the biceps, the vibe. But I just know the bartender that you that you respect that you want to earn the respect of when you come to the bar. It's running the Fetterman strategy again in the sense that when Fetterman was a left wing candidate, a populist left wing candidate that people would come after him and try to tar him with all the same things that they would try to hit AOC with.

49:57And it just it just didn't scan because people would be like, well, look at him. He looks like, yeah, this American dude. He's like, he's like a cool bartender. Like, yeah, it's not going to stick. And yeah, just the morning morning Joe is just they're just like, yeah, I think he's hot.

50:17Emily Jashinsky:wait until they realize it's another vote for medicare for all um wait till they realize it's another vote that that was their problem with with fetterman at the time um and then they couldn't quite figure out how to because they're so caught up in their cultural politics they're just they just love so much that he's a veteran and can can can like grab the flag yeah that But they're so all in that they have nothing to then say about the substance of his politics. They're stuck. Well, I mean, this brings us back to Dan Osborne, who was running against Deb Fischer, someone that morning, Joe, would absolutely bear hug any time they saw her in an airport lounge, I should say, because they wouldn't just be meandering around the airport.

51:04Emily Jashinsky:But he was really clever on the culture stuff. And that's a huge question for Graham. Maine has had a lot of controversy over trans sports. And Janet Mills in particular has become a focus of the Trump administration. That has made a lot of waves in Maine recently. And so that is sort of the next bridge to cross. Bernie, AOC obviously have gone on the fighting oligarchy tour and downplayed a lot of that and actually attacked it to the extent that they've addressed it, attacked it by saying it's a distraction. It's trying to divide working people. And those lines, I think, are effective. Dan Osborne, when we interviewed him last year, Ryan, had I thought of, you know, you could tell it wasn't focus grouped or anything, I think, which is why it was effective.

51:49Emily Jashinsky:A really strong answer when we asked him about abortion and when we talked to him about some of the culture war questions. So on the one hand, this sort of like combative centrist, it just shows how our category for what centrism is is totally confounded. Like it doesn't we don't really like we know what they want centrism to be. But for the average voter, it's something that feels more like anti-oligarchy common sense policies. But it's not like this neat left right center that Morning Joe would want it to be. And I think they're probably in for a little bit of a rude awakening when they find out.

52:26Emily Jashinsky:And Gavin Newsom, too, by the way, when they find out what voters who like you punching Republicans in those actually want to see you do. Yeah. And an oysterman like how lucky could Democrats get that they that Graham know that the only part that's unlucky for them is his politics. You know that he agrees more with me than he does with them. But from a biography perspective, you know, they got a combat veteran and an oysterman who's born and raised in Maine, like, and is willing to call himself a Democrat. Not many of those. Seriously. Right. 16 years ago, I started working as a CNA in the hospital.

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55:10Saagar Enjeti:and so yeah it's like you know the democrats they need fighters but that but you know they really only want fighters who meme as we see uh they're much more comfortable with newsom and in his meme war uh we've got a site here from harry enton showing that so the memes are working folks let's take a listen i think i think it absolutely has been working in terms of generating attention which is what he's trying to do right i mean take a look here let's take a look right at the at gov press office followers on X. That's, of course, where you get those sort of the account where Newsom posts those Trump-style mocking types of tweets.

55:44Get this. That account, get this. Up 450 % in terms of the number of followers since mid-June. And it's not just on Twitter, X, where Newsom is gaining. Even on TikTok and Instagram, his followers are up over a million since January alone. My goodness gracious. And more than that, Laura, more than that, what about Google? What about those Google searches for him? Yet there's daily Google searches for Gavin Newsom up like a rocket. What are we talking about? Since June 1, up 1 ,300 % compared to August 1. Look at that, up 500%. So the bottom line is in politics, especially if you're thinking of entering in 2028, it's all about generating attention.

56:20And so far, Gavin Newsom has done a good job at generating attention.

56:23Saagar Enjeti:And, you know, the one thing I want to mention before, Tina, for you guys to get your reaction is like, you know, seeing how, quote unquote, almost like unhinged some of the Gavin Newsom press office meemery has become, it makes other people that we think of in 2028 look downright timid. It makes AOC look humble and timid and reserved. And it's almost like, oh, AOC would need to really crank up her rhetoric in a way that it's like, almost we've been told people like Kerr should tone down their rhetoric, but it seems like almost the opposite here with Newsom. What do y 'all make of that?

57:01Emily Jashinsky:Oh, well, I just want to say, I actually ran this by a Republican strategist, and I was like, this is, you know, I think the Newsom posts have gone from the Alec Baldwin impression of Trump to the Shane Gillis impression of Trump. So that's something. His Cracker Barrel post was genuinely pretty artful. But all that is to say, it's great right now for fundraising. And I sent it to a Republican strategist friend who is like, no, because I was kind of like skeptical. I was like, this is basically I sent him this playbook article that was drooling over Gavin Newsom a couple of days ago about how he was like the great hope of the Democratic Party.

57:38Emily Jashinsky:And I was like, this is so stupid. And the person I sent it to the Republican strategist was like, actually, no, this is what you need to do if you position yourself for a primary because it's name recognition. It's Google searches. It's donors. And it's particularly donors. And so if you can build up goodwill with Democratic voters who then recognize your name and then the donor class starts throwing money at you, you make connections that are helpful in a primary and you come in with a little bit of a war chest. And so, yes, to that extent, it's I think it is successful, like all of that. Great.

58:15Emily Jashinsky:But what does it mean that he's doing? He picked a redistricting fight, which is talking about like this is raw power. But it's not something that is actually fundamentally attacking the system itself, as we were just discussing. And I think Gavin Newsom is in for a rude awakening. If a year and a half from now or whatever, we're talking primary time and he's out in Iowa, New Hampshire, talking about redistricting and not the oligarchy that has metastasized in his own state because of the rocket fuel that he's poured on it. So, yeah, I mean, it's working in a political sense. But I don't know that it's working in a sort of deeper sense.

59:00Yeah, I don't think you're going to get Gavin Newsom talking about the millionaires and the billionaires. Nope. But I think Democratic primary voters will take whoever they think is going to win. Joe Biden.

59:14Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. And it's existential to them. And so if they think that Gavin Newsom's a fighter against Republicans, you know, that he can take on, he can make fun of Vance and DeSantis and Marco Rubio and Trump himself if he figures out some way to fake run for another term, then that's going to be enough to get through the primary. So, yeah, I agree with the Republican strategist. Like his goal, he's not his goal right now is not to win the general election. His goal is to be the nominee. And then once you're the nominee, you've got a coin toss chance of being president.

59:51Saagar Enjeti:yeah okay very interesting well i wanted to get to this um before we get to our second paywall half wanted to make sure we talked a little about this um there has been a new reporting from the israeli army database suggesting at least 83 percent of the gaza dead were civilians classified intelligence from May reveals Israel believed it had killed 8 ,900 militants in Gaza, indicating a proportion of civilian slaughter with few parallels in modern warfare. Now, Ryan, I know you have looked into these numbers more. And I guess my first question is like, hey, this is just from the Israeli army database, which they've admitted on air.

1:00:38Saagar Enjeti:I mean, I've seen them admit it like multiple of times on Piers Morgan and on other sites that they're not exactly sure. Like, and they're not always tracking the amount of deaths. And there's also been, you know, from, I think, the view of our show, probably an undercount on the amount of deaths because there's still so many people buried under rubble and stuff like that. So what is all of that add into this already very bleak calculation? And so Yuval Abraham, one of the authors of this Guardian 972 piece, you know, says, you know, has said publicly and says the piece that it is their assessment that this is a, that even this is a significant undercount, that the number is probably over 90 % civilians rather than 83 % because effectively what the IDF does is anybody who's a fighting age and is a male, And they define fighting age extraordinarily liberally, like 16-ish to basically, you know, well into your 60s, if not higher.

1:01:44If they kill you, then they'll put you in this probably, at minimum, they'll put you in this probably a militant category, which they included in this thing. So basically, any man who's over like 16 who they kill, they're putting into this calculation. Even given that, they're only getting to this 17 % figure. Now, the Israeli PR response to this was, okay, these are people we've identified as terrorists. Well, it's not totally accurate. you've identified them as potentially being that which sometimes your identification just goes on the fact that they're a male like anas al-shreef like he would be factored into this most of the journalists that they've killed um they would be they would they would be included in this militant figure even though that's a even though that's false um they're saying you know if people pop out of a tunnel and we shoot them like we don't know their name um but you know we know that they're a combatant.

1:02:51So that should count as a combatant. Problem there is that while they don't know their name, Ministry of Health eventually gets their name when that person goes to the morgue or the hospital and then they get included on the paperwork that they put out every day. And then the IDF sees that name and says, oh, that's a 20-year-old male. We're counting them. Whether we know anything about them or not, we're counting them. So basically, from all of the research that we've done, what we can tell is that they are counting every single remotely fighting age male as a combatant and then doing their calculations from there and still winding up at genocidal levels of slaughter.

1:03:37Saagar Enjeti:Which is like, you know, we've been told for the last two years it's the greatest military ratio ever done by a modern army. Although they barely say that anymore, if you've noticed. They made the most moral army in the world. They've basically dropped that line. You almost never hear that anymore. But Griffin, for you and I, this is, you know, to me it's personal because it's like nobody's standing up for us civilian men. And like, you know, if we were in Gaza and we go to a, try to fill up buckets of water and bring them back to the family and we're killed along the way, we would get listed as combatants just because we're men.

1:04:22Yeah. And anybody who knows me knows that that would be false. No fighting going on here.

1:04:27Emily Jashinsky:Unless you're at a bar. Unless you're at a bar. Unless someone feels yourself up. That's different. It's a real story. You can Google it. This is one of the things that is going to, we all know this, but one of the things that's going to be, that's going to probably age the most poorly is the number conversation. Yeah. Like that is becoming clearer and clearer. And actually, you know, coming from the right, I fully understand people's skepticism. I get it. Fine. But at this point, there's just so much evidence.

1:05:11Saagar Enjeti:It's also frustrating because it's like, you know, the last two years have been spent talking about the protesters not understanding, overblowing it. And I'm sorry, like, I'm not a fucking war expert. I don't know any of this stuff. But when you see, like, the amount of destruction and they tell you it's only this many people, it's like, I'm sorry. Like, that's absolutely ridiculous. And so, yes, turns out the protesters were right. They're killing basically everyone they can see. And I doubt that many people are going to have to ever own up to that fact because they're just, I mean, in the milieu of news, everyone's just going to kind of pretend like they weren't denying that for two years.

1:05:55And meanwhile, I'll put this one up. So this is the BBC, about as Israeli friendly an outlet as you're going to get. And the headline here, famine confirmed in Gaza for first time, UN backed report. So to get an official designation of a famine takes an extraordinary amount of evidence. And so while people have been colloquially using the phrase famine for at least several weeks, maybe dating back to like April or April, May, it was March when Israel cut off, March 2nd when Israel cut off all food and then kept it cut off for two months and then let in a trickle after that. So people have been throwing around the term famine colloquially since then.

1:06:43But now they've designated as, I'll just read this, the integrated food security phase classification, IPC, which is used by governments and international bodies to identify hunger levels around the world, has raised its classification to phase five, the highest and most severe. it says over half a million people across the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution, uh, and death. Uh, and it's, and it goes on elsewhere to say that, um, even a matter of days that, that go by without immediate surging of, uh, nutritional support and medical support, um, will lead, you know, to irreversible damage for, you know, as they're saying, 500 ,000 people at like immediate risk.

1:07:31Um, And so this is the step that people were hoping would not be reached because it's such a high bar to clear kind of logistically and bureaucratically for the IPC to actually come out and say that we're at phase five, that it's reflective of, you know, just an utterly extraordinary situation.

1:07:56Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, and you said, you know, they're not really debating the numbers as much anymore, and the Israeli spokespeople aren't mentioning that they're a moral army anymore. So certain American media influencers have sort of said, don't worry, we'll take up the mantle. We'll handle it all from here. People like the free press still going on, doing these insane articles like this woman, Olivia Reingold, who is complaining that her article saying there's no starvation in Gaza. Now she's losing childhood friends because of it. And she's the real victim here. And we're going to go to the second half now.

1:08:34Saagar Enjeti:But we do have some I want to bring up. Some conservative American influencers have been sent to Gaza to prove that starvation is not real. A lot of these guys are associated with, what's it called? The learning one. PragerU. The learning one. The learning one. Yeah, they're sending their best. We're going to look at that in the second half. Folks, for anyone who wants to check out that second half, you can sign up to become a member at breakingpoints.com. We're also going to cover that. We should tease.

1:09:03Emily Jashinsky:We're also going to argue about Cracker Barrel.

1:09:05Saagar Enjeti:We're going to go to the mat on the woke DEI Cracker Barrel rebrand. And fun other stories like that. Emily, you don't know what side I'm going to be on yet. I haven't decided either. Go to BradyBoys.com to become a member. We've got a great$10 monthly membership now, and we're going to answer some AMA questions. So we'll see you all on that second half. Some people use ChatGPT to answer questions. Others use it to get real work done. With ChatGPT work, you bring the goal, plus real inputs like briefs, notes, files, feedback, data, and project plans. It can help turn them into an analysis, tracker, deck outline, prototype, or workflow you can review and keep shaping.

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