← Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
10/29/25: Israel Shatters Ceasefire In Gaza, RSF Massacre in Sudan, Hurricane Slams Jamaica
00:44:45
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- [00:00]
Podcast Advertiser/Host
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:05]
Krystal Ball
I turned off news altogether.
- [00:08]
Ryan Grim
I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.
- [00:12]
Krystal Ball
It's the rage bait.
- [00:15]
Ryan Grim
It feels like it's trying to divide people. We got clear facts. Maybe we can calm down a little.
- [00:25]
Krystal Ball
NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the Facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News reporting for America.
- [00:37]
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- [01:05]
American Military University Advertiser
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- [01:35]
Krystal Ball
Hey guys, Sagar and Krystal here.
- [01:37]
Breaking Points Member/Host
Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show.
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Krystal Ball
This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.
- [01:50]
Breaking Points Member/Host
So if that is something that's important to you, Please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows unedited ad free and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.
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Krystal Ball
We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you@breakingpoints.com Good morning, everybody. Happy Wednesday. Have an amazing show for everybody today. Bro show people live for the pound.
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Ryan Grim
Two bro shows in a row on Wednesday.
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Krystal Ball
Two bro shows in a row. That's right. All thanks to my crazy schedule. But thank you for having me, Ryan. I appreciate it here on Wednesday night.
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Ryan Grim
It's always a pleasure.
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Krystal Ball
Well, mostly thank you to Emily for letting me swap around with her. Oh my God. All right, here's the tough part of the job. What do we have to today? Israel. Okay, we're going to start with Israel breaking the ceasefire, bombing parts of Gaza where you talk about their pretext. We'll analyze some of what that is. Then Ryan is going to give us an update on some horrific developments in South Sudan or, sorry, no, in Sudan. I'm not exactly familiar. The rsf. There's a UAE backed militia and lots of killing. It's just a horrific, horrific story. We're going to talk about the storm Hurricane Melissa made landfall yesterday in Jamaica as well as the fact that there are three thousands, thousands of American service members currently in Caribbean waters, remember, as part of this Venezuelan regime change operation. And there's some big question marks actually as to their own role. Are they going to continue with drug interdiction? Are they going to help with hurricane relief? They themselves potentially could be at risk from. According to some sources that I spoke to, we're going to get over to OpenAI. There is a new story from ChatGPT that nearly a million people are actually interacting with ChatGPT on the issue of mental illness and suicide. In addition to a major whistleblower inside of ChatGPT warning not to believe Sam Altman's claims about AI pornography, which I believe we covered in our last.
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Ryan Grim
We did indeed. And it's a very disappointment because I really like my last gasp was to just trust Sam Altman. And if we can't trust Sam Altman, who can we trust?
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Krystal Ball
If we can't trust Sam Altman, who indeed can we all trust? By the way, you'll all be happy to know that the state of California has helped Sam Altman and OpenAI transform into a for profit company. So now we can just get rid of that pesky little nonprofit status.
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Ryan Grim
How lovely for him.
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Krystal Ball
Yes. Thank you to the state of California, to Gavin Newsome and all the officials there who assisted the multi billionaire. We are going to talk about Sami Hamdi. Ryan, you're going to give us a breakdown on this. He's a British political commentator, he's critical of Israel and he was detained at a California airport.
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Ryan Grim
Current, like political prisoner.
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Krystal Ball
Yeah.
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Ryan Grim
Well, in the United States has he.
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Krystal Ball
Been deported or is he okay. Wow. Okay.
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Ryan Grim
Still.
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Krystal Ball
Still in prison for his politics there on Sami Hamdi. Rings a little hollow, isn't it, whenever we critique the UK for doing the exact thing.
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Ryan Grim
Yeah, yeah.
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Krystal Ball
A little tough.
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Ryan Grim
Let them speak freely over here. But if they come here.
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Krystal Ball
Right.
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Ryan Grim
They're going to prison.
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Krystal Ball
That's right, exactly. All right, let's go to talk. We're also going to talk about SNAP actually, by the way we talked touched a little bit on it yesterday. But the there's some brinksmanship going on within the current United States government about whether some 42 million Americans who are dependent on the SNAP food stamp program are going to receive some of their payments and benefits on Friday. I believe there's some fiscal cliff issues, but there are claims that the administration actually could pay them if they wanted to. There's actually some Republican efforts to try and to immediately fund the SNAP program, but that is getting poured cold water on by the White House and by Senate leadership. So, you know, this is when the shutdown really actually might start to impact millions of people's lives outside of the DMV here. Not to say that it already hasn't, but in particular, really a tangible thing in addition to air traffic control problems that we've seen across the country.
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Ryan Grim
Yep.
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Krystal Ball
And then finally we're gonna talk with Ben Smith about China. He wrote a very interesting piece, actually. I really liked it. And it Trump is poised to end Washington's decade of the China hawks. Very astute, actually, in terms of where things are going. You probably have tracked my own evolution on the issue if you've been watching over the last seven or eight years. And it is, of course, something that any future politician is going to have to grapple with. Before we get to that, thank you to everybody who's been subscribing BreakingPoints.com if you can support the show. If not, no worries. Please hit subscribe on the YouTube video. If you're listening to this on a podcast, send an episode to a friend or rate us 5 stars. It really helps us with growth. Let's go and put this then up on the screen. Israel has resumed the Gaza ceasefire. Now after some 104 Palestinians were killed in airstrikes, Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered, quote, powerful strikes in Gaza. As the ceasefire breaks down, I'm going to kick it to Ryan because Ryan, I don't really know. There were two separate instances of their claims for the ceasefire breakdown. So why don't you explain it Right.
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Ryan Grim
If you're going to break a ceasefire, better to have two pretexts rather than just one pretext. The irony being, of course, that Israel has been out of compliance with the ceasefire from the beginning because a key part of the agreement was that it would flood in humanitarian aid. They immediately reneged on that agreement. Humanitarian aid is not flooding in. If we lived in a world where we just followed these things in a neutral and dispassionate way, we'd say, well, that is a violation of the ceasefire. I suppose now Hamas is going to just carpet bomb Tel Aviv as a response to Israel breaking the ceasefire. But let's get into the two pretexts. The first is the claims of an almost identical situation in Rafah where what they're saying is that there was basically a cell, and this is within the realm of possibility that a cell of fighters, whether it's Islamic Jihad or Hamas, gets cut off from the rest of the forces. And they don't have access to the knowledge that this war has ended. People on all sides have acknowledged that this is a possibility and that if you come on these fighters, there may be conflict, and that is not, ipso facto, a breaking of the ceasefire that should launch a full scale war. So according to the Israeli side, that is what happened. We don't have any information from the Hamas side, which, or the Islamic Jihad side, which would, if it was a fighter who, or a group of fighters who were trapped, like, we wouldn't actually be able to get any information from Mosser pij. Like they just, they wouldn't, they wouldn't know about that. This is a group they would have lost touch with many, many months ago. The last time they claimed this, according to my sources, it was in fact them just running over an unexploded ordinance or an IED and then claiming that they had gotten into a confrontation. And they never backed up their claim of having confronted Palestinian fighters with any body cam footage, anybody captured, any evidence, any drone footage, any evidence whatsoever, ballistic, forensic, anything that would have shown that their story matched up. So I think that at this point we can say that the explosive, the story of them running over the explosive is we're going to lean in that direction. So one Israeli soldier has been said by the Israeli government to have been killed. So that, that, that, that happens. You're not going to, they're not going to name a person, a soldier who died, who didn't die. So somehow somebody, some Israeli soldier did die. We also have. And we can roll a two here while I'm explaining this. So this is, according to, this is drone footage put out by the Israeli military, which, and you can go and find the longer video which claims to have found evidence that Hamas is playing games with the remains of captives. This, this is actually a, an Israeli soldier who was killed about in 2024. And they, Israeli and Israel at the time was able to recover most of his remains, but there was some portion remained with Hamas. And basically what they're saying happened in this footage is that they kind of moved it to a particular area and then called in the Red Cross and called in a photographer and said, look, like we found this body here and then they turned it over to the Red Cross. And what Israel is saying is that this is evidence that they're playing games and they're stalling for time and that in fact they do know where more of the remains are than they're letting on. This still remains to develop. We don't know exactly yet what happened here, but you can watch the video and see for yourself that the Israeli claim look on its face seems to have some merit to it.
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Krystal Ball
And this is what they have released, as you said. So, yeah, I mean this is one of those.
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Ryan Grim
Right. And we also have to be extremely careful because any government should have its claims treated with extreme skepticism. But Hamas is the government too.
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Krystal Ball
So it's like, listen, we have no idea. There is. I mean, this is part of the difficulty in the post war collapse of Gaza is that, you know, is there any centralized Hamas in terms of dealing with.
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Ryan Grim
The more Hamas tries to become centralized, the more.
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Krystal Ball
Exactly. The more they get criticized, the more they get bombed now.
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Ryan Grim
And should 102 people have been killed?
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Krystal Ball
154, yeah, 104 Palestinians killed as of this morning in retaliation. We don't exactly even know what the retaliatory strike was, who the people were that were involved.
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Ryan Grim
And let's think about this. In either of these scenarios, okay, let's say that you did catch them playing games with these remains and stalling for time. Does that justify a bombing campaign across Gaza that kills more than 100 people and wounds more than 200? And if they did encounter a fighter who had been stuck for eight months in a tunnel and he popped up and there was firefight, does that justify. Right. Killing 100?
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Krystal Ball
Well, let me just read from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Israel's military says Wednesday that the ceasefire was back on in Gaza after killed 104 people, including 46 children. 46 children, exclamation. Are these not war crimes?
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Ryan Grim
Question you. Those are war. Those are by definition war crimes.
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Krystal Ball
Question you can. Yeah, it almost seems quaint, frankly, after what we all lived through. We will also note that, you know, from the administration, they're still trying desperately to hold this thing together. Let's put this up here on the screen. This is a three. Vice President J.D. vance telling reporters that the Gaza ceasefire will hold despite today's exchange of fire. Quote, the ceasefire is holding. That doesn't mean that there aren't going to be little skirmishes here and there. We know that Hamas or somebody else within Gaza attacked an IDF soldier, he said, notably avoiding a definitive assignment of blame on Hamas. We expect the Israelis are going to respond, but I think the president's peace is going to hold despite it. That seems interesting. Ryan. Can we compare with the statement of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
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Ryan Grim
And this to set context for Rubio here. This was on Air Force One before these incidents. And I feel like Rubio, the way he poked in here and put his face in front of Trump, sort of green lit. What came next? As we talked about last week, there's now this deconfliction zone where the US Says that any response to a ceasefire break has to come through the United States. The United States is going to make sure that the peace is maintained through this like 200 service member unit in this deconfliction zone. And Netanyahu said publicly, we appreciate the Americans, but of course we'll never allow that. We are our own sovereign people. And so there's been a tug and tug of war over, you know, who gets to break this ceasefire. Can Israel just unilaterally break it? And then you have Rubio coming out and basically saying, yeah, Israel can do whatever it wants. So listen to Marco Rubio on Air Force One here. You're talking about the strike against the Palestinian jihad individuals. Yeah, look, Israel didn't surrender its right to self defense. Obviously the ceasefire is based on obligations on both sides. By the way, we'd also like to see Hamas speed up the return of hostage bodies. We still have 13 hostages, two Americans included. But we don't view that as a violation of the ceasefire. They have a right. There's an imminent threat to Israel. And all the mediators agree with that. So leaning a little closer to Israel there, but at the same time, as you heard him say, we don't consider the slow release of the remains to be a violation of the ceasefire. And that's been a huge issue in Israel. They really believe that they have all of the bodies and they're lying about it.
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Krystal Ball
And actually one of the things that the Hamas has responded with, they say, quote, we confirm that any Zionist escalation will hinder the search, excavation, recovery of the bodies, which will lead to a delay in the occupation's recovery of the bodies of the later. Hamas issued a statement calling on mediators to take immediate action to pressure Israel to restrain its escalation against civilians in Gaza and to compel it fully abide by the ceasefire agreement. What's crazy is this morning is Israel now is saying that they are back in full compliance of the ceasefire. So it's one of those where, I mean, I don't really know what ceasefire means if you just get to bomb and attack each other based on whatever you want. And IDF reservists, by the way, was apparently killed in that Tuesday attack. I did find it interesting in Rubio's comment, he said, hama or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Maybe you can explain to this they are not party to the ceasefire, Correct?
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Ryan Grim
No, they are.
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Krystal Ball
Well, but this is what I'm trying to get at. Is that like, politically. Yes, but this is what I'm saying in terms of the actual control inside of Gaza, as in, who know? I mean, you know, there's roving, there's no central law and order, there's people with guns, you know, in an area which has been bombed to nothing. It'd be like saying that, you know, in the middle of a Mad Max collapse, that certain looters or something speak on behalf of the entire population. It just doesn't really work that way.
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Ryan Grim
Right. And just the way that the kind of defense of Gaza worked over the last two years, you'd have all of these different units who were pretty stationary. Like, they would move around. But, like, if you're the Beit Hanun Battalion, you stay in Beit Hanun. Like, you're not. You're not kind of shifting around the strip. And so for operational security, obviously there is not a lot of electronic communication going on between a lot of these units, because Israel has that entire thing tapped and wired. And they're going to map out the different flows of communications and just then start carpet bombing any areas they see being lit up. And so that was always a question going into the ceasefire. Exactly what you're saying. Okay, we've got the negotiators in, you know, in Doha agreeing to this on behalf of PIJ and on behalf of Hamas, but do they speak for every, you know, guerrilla unit in. Right. In Gaza? And the hope was, basically from the mediators and from everybody involved was that they. That just the pressure of the momentum of the ceasefire would then kind of basically work to persuade. There's more persuasion. Like, you're not ordering. Like, these guys are armed and they're in these and they're out there. They can make their own decisions. So, yes, that is a live question here. Which, when Israel then kills more than 100 people, think about what that does to the psychology of these fighters who didn't like the idea of the ceasefire to begin with, because they're like, for whatever reason. And now they're like, look, we told you this was. It was. It's been three weeks. Exactly three weeks. I'm saying, look, we told you Israel is never going to abide by this. Now they just killed another hundred people for nothing. Right?
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Krystal Ball
And so the Health Ministry, you know, caveats, et cetera. 46 children, 20 were women of the 104 Palestinians who were killed. Interesting, right. In terms of the Israeli response there, we do have some of the initial views of what that looks like. Let's go and put this image up here on the screen. This was immediately yesterday in the aftermath of what some of the attacks actually looked like. And all of this actually is in line with this new yellow line. We can put that up here on the screen for the Wall Street Journal. Ryan, again, maybe you can help explain it a little bit to the audience. This so called yellow line was the demarcation line through which Israel would control the ceasefire. But from the Wall Street Journal, they're saying a trip to the Gaza yellow line shows that Israel is digging into its position and seems to creating some sort of permanent berm for some sort of buffer zone. So can you just explain, because I believe that the yellow line that was originally agreed to has now changed and they're actually occupying more of Gaza than they initially agreed upon.
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Ryan Grim
Right. So, right, the deal was, okay, you will withdraw, Israel will withdraw back to this yellow line. And then as soon as they do that, we'll release, we being Hamas, will release all of the captives. And so Israel withdrew back to this yellow line, Hamas reached all the captives, and then people start going back to their homes. People came close to this yellow line was not marked anywhere at the time, still is not really marked. And so they'd go to say eastern Gaza City, where their homes are, and they would be shot and killed. Like an entire bus, a family in a bus, the entire family killed inside this bus. And so you had then this kind of contradictory impulse on both sides. Humanitarian organizations would say, well, wait a minute, this is not fair. You're not marking like you're not even telling people. What kind of sick game is this? Like people have just have to guess and as well say, well, we publish maps. They should be able to look at the map. But people can't even recognize their own neighborhoods because it's just complete rubble. And think about as you think about as you're walking through your own neighborhood, like the different ways that you know how to get around. Like there's this, this giant tree, there's this yellow house at the corner, there's the gas station here. Now imagine you've been away for eight months. You come back, the tree is gone, the gas station is a pile of rubble, the yellow house is a pile of rubble. The red house that you knew was a pile of rubble. Like at that point, how do you even find your way? So saying that, hey, there's a map on Facebook that you can look at isn't very helpful to people. Then they said, okay, we're going to put out yellow markers like every 200 meters or something. Also not extraordinarily helpful. Now they're building much more significant reinforcements. And then you see the contradictory nature of it. They're like, oh, wait a minute. So now basically this is just going to become your territory, because what's inside the kind of Hamas controlled area, if you want to call it that, is west, is basically western Gaza, but not northern and southern, and then not the eastern part either. So it's like the inner, just the inner slice of it, and all of the kind of agricultural area, lots of area that used to be heavily populated is all within this Israeli zone. And they, ironically, I saw some, I think, propagandists calling it like, free Gaza. It's like, no, no, the part that's occupied by Israel can't really call that free Gaza. But what they're, what they're setting up is just never leaving this, this area like that. That seems to be, and that's what the Wall Street Journal suggests here, that, like, they're, they're, they're reinforcing this in a, in a fundamental way. And the irony being that they were negotiating over whether the buffer zone at the edge of Gaza would be 800 meters or 1200 meters. And now Israel seems to be trying to create a reality where they're just way inside there.
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Krystal Ball
And so broadly here with the ceasefire. Ryan, what do you expect in terms of how this all plays out? Because it flagged by our producer, Mack, let's put this up here on the screen. Netanyahu's testimony, if you're all wondering, in his criminal trial, was cut short today, yesterday over, quote, security developments that happened in Gaza.
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Ryan Grim
Amazing coincidence.
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Krystal Ball
It just keeps happening, doesn't it? So it's one of those, where is it every single time that he's going to have to testify that there just happens to be some sort of pretext in Gaza, like at the subject of the Israeli political sphere of what's happening. And then apparently America is just fine with them violating the ceasefire and encroaching here on the yellow line. It just, it looks very grim. And all the cynics, you know, initially talking about the ceasefire seem pretty vindicated I think today.
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Ryan Grim
Yeah, I wish we would just give the guy asylum, like political asylum, get a place in South Florida, like it is, it is not fair for 100 plus Palestinians to have to die so that he can delay a criminal trial, that's no reason for anybody to lose a life, right? Just end this. But yes, this has been, this is whenever he's gotten into political trouble or criminal trouble over the last two years, you've seen strategy change and tactics change around the attack on Gaza and we're still seeing that.
- [23:32]
Krystal Ball
I turned off news altogether.
- [23:34]
Ryan Grim
I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.
- [23:39]
Krystal Ball
It's the rage bait.
- [23:41]
Ryan Grim
It feels like it's trying to divide people. We got clear facts. Maybe we can calm down a little.
- [23:51]
Krystal Ball
NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News reporting for America.
- [24:03]
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- [24:31]
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- [25:04]
Ryan Grim
Update on what's going on.
- [25:05]
Krystal Ball
Yes. You're going to have to fully brief all of us. I know this happened overnight here, but I do think it's an important story. Yeah. So Sudan's killings.
- [25:13]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. In the town of Al Fasher was where the kind of Syrian army capital has been in north Darfur. And there's been this civil war going on since 2023 and the UAE has come in heavily. United Arab Emirates has come in heavily on the side of what's called the rsf, the Rapid Support Forces. And a year ago the US State Department said the RSF is committing ethnic cleansing in Darfur and in Sudan. And the support of the UAE has continued, continue to pay. So you can put up, put up a 8 here. And so Fasher finally yesterday and over the last couple days, but it has kind of now fully fallen to the rsf. And what you're looking at here are a ton of people rounded up by the RSF who as as we understand it. And it, and there is much more disturbing video that would confirm this that we're not going to show you here were then executed. And this is not the first time that the RSF has taken over a city. And estimates of civilian massacres as a result have been over 10,000. Like in a particular city, like this absolute horrific bloodbath. If we put up a nine. A lot of the OSINT people online are saying they have never seen visible blood, blood from space.
- [26:57]
Krystal Ball
But what precipitated this, well, so what.
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Ryan Grim
Precipitated this precisely is El Fascher has been basically surrounded by, by the RSF for a year and a half. And it's one of the remaining key strongholds of the saf, their opposition. And so what precipitated the massacre was that they finally managed to break through and take it. What precipitated it more broadly is gold. Basically. Sudan has significant wealth underneath it.
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Krystal Ball
And why is the UAE supporting this militia?
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Ryan Grim
So the ua? Well, the UAE has this massive Africa play that it's been doing. The UAE is supporting African proxy forces all over the continent, like absolutely everywhere. And the uae, like Qatar is technically a country, but it's, you know, it's more like an investment vehicle slash mafia that is trying to figure out how to take this wealth that it, that has come out of the ground, this fossil fuel wealth that it's created in the last several decades and only a several decades, like 50 years ago or so. This is a deeply poor area now. It's like the richest place on earth. They know that that's not going to last forever. At some point you tap the last bit of natural gas and oil. And so their question is, what next for us? And what's next for them is that they are, they're building ports and creating alliances all over Africa for the continued extraction of natural resources and funding all of these civil conflicts to make it easier for them to then, to then get access, oftentimes kind of arming both sides of the conflict. But in this case they've really thrown their lot in with RSF and we could put up a 11 real quick to show that how much this is escalating. So this is the Foreign Relations chairman saying the horrors, the Republican, the horrors in Darfur's Al Fasher were no accident. They were the RSF's plan all along. I think that's true. The RSF has waged terror and committed unspeakable atrocities, genocide among them, against the Sudanese people. The RSF must be called what it is A foreign terrorist organization and officially designated as one. America is not safer, secure or more prosperous with the RSF slaughtering thousands. And so, you know, to hear, to hear Jim Risch talk like that make, then makes you ask the question. Wait a minute, hold on a second. So you're saying that our ally, the UAE is major terrorist financier because that, that's what you have to say if, like, if you agree with that statement.
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Krystal Ball
Which can I, can I put my synagogue on here a little bit? You know, whenever it's a conflict that doesn't involve Israel, unspeakable atrocities and genocide amongst them. Right. Darfur was the original, one of the original quote, unquote genocides of the 21st century in the early 2000s. After Rwanda, it was supposed to be never again. It actually didn't really work. Why does America suddenly care? They say America is not safer, secure or more prosperous with RSF slaughtering thousands. Is there a deeper thing going on here or is this just exposed the human rights industrial complex?
- [30:38]
Ryan Grim
So I wish Ken Vogel was here because it'd be, I'm curious, like, who's do, like which different faction. Ken Vogel, being the Times reporter that we interviewed, you guys also interviewed who does all the foreign lobbying. Yeah, it's a good question, like what foreign lobbying is going on that gets statements like this. On the other hand, the level of atrocity is reaching heights that are difficult to ignore even for Americans when it comes to Africa. Americans are pretty good at ignoring what's going on in Africa just across the board and ignoring things almost everywhere, including even people say, well, what about the protests around Gaza? But Gaza has significantly fallen off the last year or so. The, you know, mainstream news also, like, it's just, you know, the U.S. it's just not something that people are paying attention to. So yeah, I don't know exactly what's going on in Washington that is making, that is now putting this pressure on the UAE's proxies in Sudan. But I'm sure they're, I think like kill. They. They also posted, they were a little bit more aggressive in what they posted on social media this time than in the last, you know, mass massacre of 10 to 15,000 people. Didn't. They didn't elevate it in the same way.
- [32:08]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, but if I were the Sudanese, I'd be like, you, you people are really going to lecture me about, you know, about mass massacres and you know, after what you've just funded going on in Israel, they kind of have a point.
- [32:19]
Ryan Grim
Right.
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Krystal Ball
And same with the uae, they're like, really? Like, you're going to talk to me about who I can send money to.
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Ryan Grim
Yeah.
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Krystal Ball
Whether it' strategic interest and all. Get out of here.
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Ryan Grim
Right. What, did the RSF get surrounded in an area and wouldn't let food.
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Krystal Ball
Exactly.
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Ryan Grim
And then killing them. Yeah, Yeah. I don't know.
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Krystal Ball
It's dark.
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Ryan Grim
No. Yes. Opening. Opening that, that and letting that out into the world.
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Krystal Ball
I also think that explains the social media activity. They're like, we can post whatever we want.
- [32:43]
Ryan Grim
We can do what we want.
- [32:44]
Krystal Ball
Right. We can do anything that we want.
- [32:46]
Ryan Grim
Look. Because they're seeing it on their phones out of Gaza all day long. Yeah, of course they're doing this.
- [32:50]
Krystal Ball
Exactly.
- [32:50]
Ryan Grim
We're going to do this.
- [32:51]
Krystal Ball
It's very sad as. I'm glad you are following it. I honestly, I hate to say I haven't really been familiar. I followed it a little bit back 20 years ago. Violence and terrorism, so. Exactly. You know, a lot. Not a huge ton of like U.S. strategic interest or any of that in the region. But suddenly Washington is waking up. I will, I'll be honest with you. Even though I obviously see what's happening here, anytime I start to see the word genocide and all that's being turned, just thrown around by the State Department, I'm like, something's going on here. You know, I don't know exactly what it is. I'm a little suspicious. Suddenly Marco Rubio cares about human rights and all of that. I'm like, I don't know about this, Ryan.
- [33:26]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And we could end this overnight too, and be like, look, uae, you're getting sanctioned and your whole little sovereign wealth fund here.
- [33:33]
Krystal Ball
They're not going to do that.
- [33:34]
Ryan Grim
But they're not going to do that.
- [33:34]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, they will never do that. Especially first of all, after what we.
- [33:37]
Ryan Grim
Did, we're fine with it.
- [33:38]
Krystal Ball
The Saudis and Yemen, this is just long standing US policy. I'm always just fascinated about what everyone in Washington starts to care about.
- [33:47]
Ryan Grim
Yeah.
- [33:47]
Krystal Ball
And the reason my spidey senses go up is I'm like, it's never about the actual killings. There's usually something else going on.
- [33:53]
Ryan Grim
And I'm just, you know, and the UAE sees this as a sphere of influence for them too. They can have geopolitical advantages. Like they. No, the UAE hates Hamas as well. And there was this push a year ago. What if we get everybody in Hamas to just go to Sudan? So. And so in order to do that, the RSF has to like then take over all of Darfur, which they basically now control. Like what they are also finding is the same thing that Israel's arguing to the public, which is that you can actually just do the ethnic cleansing, you can do the genocide, get away with it and then people will forget about it. It's more important to win and then people just move on. So RSF is right now in a brutal fashion winning.
- [34:36]
Krystal Ball
Yes. Well, look at Azerbaijan and Armenia. The same exact thing, but not that anybody apparently here cared. I turned off news altogether.
- [34:47]
Ryan Grim
I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.
- [34:51]
Krystal Ball
It's the rage bait.
- [34:54]
Ryan Grim
It feels like it's trying to divide people.
- [34:58]
Krystal Ball
If we got clear facts, maybe we.
- [35:00]
Ryan Grim
Can calm down a little.
- [35:04]
Krystal Ball
NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News reporting for America.
- [35:16]
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- [36:15]
Krystal Ball
Let's get to the storm, shall we? Thank you for that update, Ryan. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. We have an update here from Ryan hall, the weather YouTuber extraordinaire who does a fantastic job. We have been covering, of course, just, you know, noting the Category 5 Hurricane Melissa which made landfall yesterday with Jamaica some 185 mile per hour winds. Here's what he had to say. We've got a breaking update from the National Hurricane Center. This is a special tropical cyclone update on Hurricane Melissa. At 1pm Eastern, Category 5 Hurricane Melissa made landfall in the southwestern Jamaica area near New Hope. This is now confirmed to be one of the most powerful, powerful hurricane landfalls ever recorded in the entire Atlantic basin with 185 mile per hour winds and a central pressure of 892 millibars. Those numbers are historic, historic numbers, he says. And we have some video guys, it's going to put that up there on the screen now that it has made landfall, you can just see some of the images that came out of Jamaica and some of the damage. Already we're still in the initial phases of learning exactly what happened. They say that Cuba actually evacuated some 750,000 people ahead of the storm. But you can see, you know, the infrastructure and some of the images that were coming out of Jamaica and also, you know, noting just generally like the overall damage and oh my God, I mean, that's just so terrifying. Right in the middle of the Caribbean, Category five, one of the most powerful storms literally ever recorded. So it's pretty scary that this is happening. Not to mention, as I said that at the very same time that you can see, look at that difference in the image here. It's just totally nuts. And what I think Ryan and others were noting was the level of the intensity in the storm. So obviously there's some big domestic questions here. First of all, this is just the beginning of hurricane season. We are in the middle of a government shutdown. Are the weather service and the National Oceanic Administration and others who track some of these hurricanes, are they gonna be fully up to staff? But one of the domestic angles that I just think nobody's really paying attention to are all of these thousands of service members who are in the middle of the Caribbean. Put this up here, please. On the screen it says, hurricane Melissa collides with US Military mission in the Caribbean. Military campaign against the drug cartels. Alleged. Alleged drug cartels, so called drug cartels in Latin America could soon reckon with the natural disaster and humanitarian crises in the region. Eight warships collectively carrying 6,000 troops. Several dozen aircraft are assembled in the region for the Trump administration's military strikes. But many of the personnel are also trained apparently to respond to natural disasters, serving on ships with a long track record of doing so. In the south com area, the Hurricane Melissa obviously is going to cause a tremendous amount of damage in the region. Kind of one of the long standing things that the US Would always do is when there's a hurricane in Haiti or somewhere, they'll show up with a big show of force, drop off a bunch of 80. So it's a genuine question here as to whether they're going to do anything or whether they're just going to stay parked there to try and blow up as, you know, fishermen, drugs, boats as possible. That's one. But second is just, it highlights that despite this, the fact that it is hurricane season, these thousands of service members are in these waters. And the USS Gerald Ford, one of the largest aircraft carriers in the world is headed there right now as we speak. And all of them are just going to be sitting in these hurricane prone situation. It's dangerous, number one, no matter what. And then of course it gets to the for what Question, which of course we've covered here extensively.
- [39:51]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And so the Navy says they're monitoring the storm, of course, and are working to make sure that they're not directly impacted by it. Wouldn't that be great if the US Military actually, when the storm passes, they're like, you know what, instead of doing regime change in Venezuela, we're going to go to Jamaica, we're going to disembark and we're going to help everybody clean up here. We're going to really throw our back into this because we're all one people here. We're all one hemisphere, we're all together. Trump can even go over and, you know, throw the paper towels at people. He loves doing that. I don't expect that's going to happen, but I guess anything's possible. Meanwhile, the, you know, the strikes continue. It does seem like they've moved more to the Pacific side.
- [40:38]
Krystal Ball
Yes, very. Lately they have.
- [40:39]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, lately they've moved. Those are striking boats on the Pacific side. And as we've said before, like whether the boats have drugs on them or not, like, most likely the people on the boats are actually fishermen. Like fishermen who are either paid an enormous fortune to make one run or are told, you're doing this run for us or we're going to kill your sister. Or a combination, don't do this run and we'll kill your sister. Do the run and we're gonna give you $20,000, which is more than you make in like five years.
- [41:17]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. This latest one, we're not exactly sure even where it took place. They said it was an international water somewhere in the Pacific Ocean near the coast of Mexico. And apparently even though 14 people were killed in the attacks, they said that there was one person who survived the strikes. According to Hegseth, Mexican search and rescue authorities, quote, accepted the case and assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue. The condition of the survivor is remains unclear. Mexico's Navy said that it had dispatched a patrol boat and aircraft to safeguard human life at sea. The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum at this morning said, quote, we do not agree with these attacks. Said she had asked the country's foreign minister as well as representatives to meet the US Ambassador and says, quote, all international treaties need to be respected. So that's some 57 people now who have been killed in the strikes. The overall, you know, picture of the strikes is it just makes no sense in a lot of different ways. Because all of this presumes a naval campaign or a campaign at sea for drugs. I mean, literally yesterday, Ryan, after being sent this report, the 2025 National Drug Enforcement DEA estimate mentions Venezuela exactly seven times. Of those seven, they all talk about trend. Aragua. They only mention street level drug trafficking, street level, small level drug trafficking. It has no mention of fentanyl. I read extensively through the fentanyl section that was provided to me of this 2025 thing. The entire fentanyl section is focused on Mexico and land routes to the United States via the border. These both. This is trifling. It's not. It's literally, if anything, actually. Listen, listen, I don't wanna sound like I'm defending cocaine or anything, but if you're gonna use the fentanyl pretext, if the boat's coming from Colombia, that's actually a good tell that it doesn't have fentanyl in it because that means it's straight up Colombian. Pure cocaine. That's the pure stuff. That's probably what these people are paying for. Right? So again, I don't support cocaine. I would like for it to be.
- [43:29]
Ryan Grim
Burned to see if the boat comes to Mexico, then it could get lighted with the fentanyl.
- [43:33]
Krystal Ball
Right. So if the boat goes to Mexico, it's actually a different story. And from what I read, again, this is our own government. This is, by the way, Donald Trump's DEA put out this report just a few short months ago. And I'm reading through the fentanyl section last night. They have the whole thing mapped out even to the interstates of where all of the fentanyl is coming from, including the Chinese precursors that are making their way to Mexico. All of this. Actually just spoke yesterday with a very knowledgeable source about what was happening inside of Mexico. Apparently Sheinbaum and others had have pretty significantly cut down the amount of fentanyl coming across the border. There's two reasons. Number one is the border is much more close, so there's not as many migrants coming across. Makes sense, of course, so the drug traffickers can't take advantage of that. But two is actually there's been a Mexican deployment to the US Mexico border, which is not entirely shutting down. I mean, it's not feasible to say zero amount of fentanyl, but a much smaller amount of fentanyl is currently making its way to the us so most of these are just show of force strikes for a purpose which remains entirely mysterious unless you start to look at regime change in Venezuela, even though these are happening in the Pacific Ocean. Not that anybody apparently even keeps track anymore. Also, if this guy survived, so then why wouldn't you go get him? Why wouldn't you go send him to court?
- [44:54]
Ryan Grim
Some cartel leader over here.
- [44:55]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, of course. You remember that case of piracy? I was thinking about that recently, that movie, Captain Phillips, the USS Maersk Alabama, and they captured that. I forget exactly his Somali name, but they captured the pirate. Or FBI arrested him. He was repatriated to the United States by the FBI. He was actually arrested by FBI agents, I'm pretty sure. Or he was transferred to the FBI custody. He was put on trial actually here in the. I think he's in the US Federal penitentiary right now on the charge of piracy. So if you do survive the attack, presumably you would want to take that person, prosecute and put him at trial. Instead, they're like, no, he can go back to Mexico. So then why did you kill him? Right? It makes no sense. No.
- [45:37]
Ryan Grim
So, yeah, and I was talking to somebody who did just recently left the Coast Guard doing drug interdictions in the Caribbean. And he was saying that you generally can. You generally can tell a fishing boat, you know, not a boat that's carrying drugs from a boat that is just generally used for fishing. Fishing boats will have kind of more people on them. Drug boats, they've got the extra motors you can kind of see. He's like, but oftentimes it looks like they're gauging just by kind of trajectory of the boat. And he said they would do that as well. Like you'd look at the trajectory of where the boat's going and that would be your first clue. And he'd say somewhere they'd be right about half to three quarters of the time on those. Because what they do is they go up to the boat and be like, hey, this Coast Guard stop, you know, we're going to board you and search you. And then they'd search and be like, oh, okay, we were wrong. Sorry, go on about your business.
- [46:36]
Krystal Ball
Interesting.
- [46:37]
Ryan Grim
But if you're just bombing them from there. Yeah, you're going to be right half to three quarters of the time. You're going to be wrong a quarter to a half of the time.
- [46:47]
Krystal Ball
And this is all an international water. Nobody even knows where this is. Nobody knows where it took place. They say it's off the coast of Mexico. Where, you know to what extent. Literally no coordinates. Like just a picture that's released by Secretary Hegseth from the department, you know, from the dod. And you're just like, okay, you know, that's the only information. And that's just to show everybody the bias to implicit. You know, why is the Washington Post saying against drug cartels? It's not even true. Like, there's no evidence that that's true.
- [47:13]
Ryan Grim
Right.
- [47:14]
Krystal Ball
It's crazy. Like, they just take this stuff and they run with it. So even with Venezuela, like, nobody interrogates the central premise at the heart of this entire thing. And it's ramping up. This is all, you know, it's slowly, slowly, slowly happening. And I think actually this week will be a big jump point for Venezuela. Not just because of the hurricane, because the hurricane, like I said, the military is actually gonna have to make a choice. Do we leave here and kind of abandon the pressure campaign on Maduro or do we try and go do some humanitarian assistance? Who knows? Right. But that, you know, the resources are finite. That's why all of this does connect together.
- [47:51]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And it shows how quickly the conscience of a country can be corrupted. Because when you're watching like Duterte in the Philippines where he's just going around just executing drug dealers in the streets, like, you can, you can imagine how in the Philippines the debate would have turned to, well, was that a fruit seller or was that a drug dealer? Rather than.
- [48:12]
Krystal Ball
We don't quite sure that did happen at the time, if I remember right.
- [48:15]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, yeah, that's what the debate would shift to. Rather than, we don't want death squads just extrajudicially killing anybody. Like we have. We've tried to develop a civilized society. Let's try to keep that. But. And so you can see it in our own national conversation, is this a drug boat or is it not a drug boat? Rather than. Let's just not have death squads from the air burning people alive.
- [48:41]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, it's. Who knows, who knows where things are going to go in all of this. But everybody keep an eye on the hurricane. Obviously, first of all, just with the people of Jamaica. That's horrific. Who have to deal with that. And then we have our own troops who are in the waters. They themselves. United States military are going to have to make a choice. All while this escalating air campaign against Venezuela continues. Hopefully, Ryan and I'll have some more reporting on that later on in this week.
- [49:23]
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Krystal Ball
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Krystal Ball
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Ryan Grim
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- [50:52]
Krystal Ball
This is an I Heart podcast.