6/10/26: Putin Assassination Attempt, Bernie Candidate Wins In CA, Cuba Preps For US War

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. 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. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. 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. We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. At the end of last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Ukraine had tried to assassinate him and his family. Donald Trump confirmed that he believed that this had happened. Since then, we've heard almost nothing about it. We wanted to walk through this wild story that has just completely kind of evaporated from Western press attention. Matt Bivens, in his sub-stack, The Hundred Days wrote about it recently and put this first element up on the screen. This is a, the whole piece is worth reading, but we'll... Former editor of The Moscow Times, I believe. Yeah, Matt, very serious reporter, and stitched together this timeline, which is quite wild. It's December 28th, and so a lot's going on then. You're starting to have the protests in Iran. Trump is meeting with Zelensky and also with Netanyahu and Mar-a-Lago, and also capturing Maduro. Like, so tons, and plus it's the end of the year, and nobody's paying attention. Everybody's checked out. I was skiing, as a matter of fact. Literally checked out. Literally checked out. I know I was checking in, but checked out. So it's easy to miss an attempt at assassination of the head of a superpower, or a major nuclear power. The government has threatened to outplay it. Yeah, so what happened? So we put up D2 here, which is relevant, and we'll come back to this. So Putin has ordered CCTV to be turned off around him, because the U.S. and Israel appeared to use this in their assassination of Ayatollah Khomeini and others. So Putin, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're wrong. So on December 29th, Trump was asked about a claim that Putin had just made that Ukrainian drones had swarmed his family's compound and in an attempt to assassinate him. And here's what Trump said on next, standing next to Netanyahu on December 29th. This is the alleged strike on Putin's residence, because it's got a little piece of it. Yeah, I don't like it. It's not good. I heard about it this morning. You know who told me about it? President Putin told me about it. Early in the morning, he said he was attacked. That's no good. That's no good. Don't forget, you know, the Tomahawks, I stopped the Tomahawks, I didn't want that. Because we're talking about, you know, it's a delicate period of time. This is not the right time. It's one thing to be offensive, because they're offensive. It's another thing to attack his house. It's not the right time to do any of that. So then a couple of days later, he put up D4, a Wall Street Journal and others report, that actually we didn't do this. Ukraine didn't do this. Didn't happen. So Trump was then asked about it again on Air Force One. You said that you were really very angry with the Ukrainian president Zelensky if he was the one who conducted that strike on Putin's residence. I don't believe that strike happened. Right. So Putin had said in that phone call to you that that strike happened. You came out and said that and you believed Putin. There was some criticism. There is something that happened fairly nearby, but it had nothing to do with this. Why did you believe Putin in that moment and then go say that about Ukrainian president? There's nobody knew at that moment. That was the first I heard about it. So why don't we... He said that his house was attacked. We don't believe that happened. Now that we've been able to check. But that was the first we ever heard about it. We just hope that Russia and Ukraine get it settled. Amen. You know, it's costing us nothing. In fact, we make money. So if you had a hard time hearing that, it's Trump saying we don't believe that happened anymore. And so Putin says, okay, hold on a second. You think it didn't happen. We'll enroll D5 here. He released a video of what he says and what he says are Ukrainian drones that crashed in the forest. They released also a kind of a flight map that showed I think 91 drones that they counted that moved from Ukrainian positions to this compound where the Putin's family was apparently staying and offered and they met with the American ambassador and said, you wanna look at them? Go ahead. You can study them yourselves. Like we shot down a bunch of these. Some of these crashed. Like here they are. We didn't hear any... We don't know if the CIA ended up obtaining some of these or not. Zelensky at the time called it a fabrication. He said, you know, Putin is trying to blow up the peace deal that Zelensky and Trump were talking about in Mar-a-Lago. Putin said, no, Zelensky is actually trying to blow this up. Zelensky has now taken a different tune. In June 4th, on June 4th, he wrote a letter to Putin filled with a bunch of, you know, what might as well be expletives. He put up D7 here. He writes in this letter, this is Zelensky. We often hear that you are comfortable with this war. Of course, not in those cases when it comes to the security of your residence in Valde, or your parade in Moscow, your own life is valuable to you. Valde is where the compound was, where his family was staying and where Putin says that they tried to kill him. He was asked, so also recently, a drone, which may have been Ukrainian, may have been Russian, we're not sure yet, I think went into Romania. And it crashed into the top of an apartment building. And it injured, I think, a grandmother and her grandson with some burns on their arms. They're okay, but it was scary. It hit a building. New York Times wrote about this, big, giant Western coverage, like this errant drone that hit this NATO country. We need to do a war about this. And so, Putin was asked about this drone. And in this press conference, and we'll play this for a second, but what he basically says is, okay, let me see the drone. We'll study the drone and you can just look at the drone and then you can figure out if it was Ukrainian or Russian. He's like, either way, it was a mistake. So US people could look at the drone? You just go and look at the drone. And he says, just like we did with the drones that tried to kill me, that we turned over the drones. So, roll D8 here. The same is happening here, has happened here. And until we receive some objective data, like the data that we handed over to the representatives of the American administration, the data and the debris of the drone that hit the residents of the Russian president. So we gave the findings if we receive these data from them and then we can share our estimates of what happened. So, not to say that Putin doesn't lie. Putin obviously lies. All presidents lie. Putin lies a lot. But in this case, he's turning over the material itself for us to examine. Assuming, I mean, sure, I guess it could have been tampered with but yes, he's saying, then you could examine whether it's been tampered with. And you can just look at the, like here, here's the drone, we say it's crashed in the forest here. Here's our chain of custody. I guess you can always just disbelieve everything, but at some point, like if you do launch 91 drones, like it's gonna leave some evidence behind. Right. We also have the preexisting evidence that the president at first seemed to believe Putin. And just one quick point on my end, Bivens points out. He says, in summary, in recent days, both Zelensky and Putin have again referenced an attack on Putin's home and family carried out by US supported Ukrainian drones. This is the same attack that Trump initially believed in but then scoffed at after the CIA formally told him it never happened, but it clearly did happen, which suggests, Bivens says, that the CIA is giving false briefings to the president. So that then becomes germane when you're thinking about Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and all of these other places, China, Taiwan, around the world, where we're in hot conflicts or potential hot conflicts about if John Ratcliffe and his CIA is under ODI and I, outgoing ODI and I and Tulsi Gabbard, where we know there are conflicts, seemingly, between ODI and CIA, what information is getting to the president? That's extremely important. And obviously, right now, we should mention, Ukraine is saying that missiles had a military plant really far inside of Russia. So all the way, like, 560 miles from the front line, according to BBC. Yeah, I guess Tulsi Gabbard, ODI. Maybe she can come on the show now that she's retired. She can talk about this assassination attempt. Like, I don't know if people have quite understand the fire that we're playing with here. Yeah, I'm just gonna comment request action on this right now. Because... Excellent. All right. Get them the report back. Let's do it. Next up, Jane Kim. One of the least discussed, but perhaps most important races in California that was decided recently, may have been the one for insurance commissioner. There will be two Democrats that will move into the general election. One of them, Jane Kim, had the endorsement of Bernie Sanders and was running on a platform of insurance for all. Which, and we're gonna talk about what exactly that means. But first I'm gonna start with a little bit of the message that she ran on to finish first in this top two. I'm Jane Kim. I'm running for insurance commissioner to fight for us. And I'm not gonna take a dime from the insurance companies. I'm running to make insurance available for everyone. To lower costs right away by capping excess profits and CEO pay. And to write a plan to guarantee healthcare for every child in California. Joining us now is Jane Kim. Number one of the top two finishers for insurance commissioner, Ben Allen, state senator was the second, I believe. He's welcome to join as well. But Jane, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So we wanted to talk to you because insurance is one of these. And this is not health insurance for, correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe there's some relation. Yeah. So this office oversees the 3.3 trillion dollar industry and it regulates all types of insurance but managed healthcare plans. Right. So we wanted to talk to you because insurance is one of those things that is not talked about very much. Although it's everybody has to think about it whenever they're making any serious decision. They think about it when they get their bill every month. And it's right at the intersection of basically everything. Climate, earthquakes, natural disasters and the ability- Fires. Fires and the ability to kind of continue a functioning human civilization. Like it's that important. Yet it's that under discussed. California, as we think about it over here, is fairly corporate dominated. And so I'm curious, how you managed on a kind of anti-corporate campaign, with a anti-corporate campaign, how you managed to kind of break through. What was the message that you were bringing that was able to kind of get beyond the clutter that's usually thrown up by the insurance industry and make sure that they control this critical position? So this office was created in 1988 by the voters of California to be the backstop between 40 million Californians and this trillion dollar industry. And this industry is an industry that is doing quite well. In 2024, property and casualty insurance netted $170 billion. And so this narrative that they're going bankrupt is just simply not true. Meanwhile, we are required to have insurance to drive to work or to school, to own a home or to open a business or a nonprofit of any kind. And the system is failing. Rates are going up, they're canceling our coverage. And even if we have insurance, they fight our claims every step of the way. And so we ran on the message of a more affordable California and that this office should be the champion of consumers and not a lapdog for a billion our corporations. And this message resonated across the state of California. We ran on a platform talking about new ideas, at least to the US, a single payer home disaster home and program guaranteed for all that is publicly run and nonprofit. We talked about expanding our already existing low cost nonprofit auto insurance program and Medicare for Kids. And as you can see from our results, we're plus eight in the top two. We didn't just win in San Francisco, which is my backyard, which we're plus 18. We also won in Los Angeles County where my main opponent resides. And we're in first place in Republican and rural counties across the state of California, which just showed that Californians are tired of the status quo and they want to see someone who's gonna champion a more affordable California. I think it means such an important point that you're required to have insurance to operate and to complete basic functions in the state of California and of course in other states. So you tell us a little bit more about what you would be able to accomplish in this role, like what's possible? What gives you hope that you could actually do should you be elected? Yeah, so this is an executive office that regulates this industry. And by the way, there's zero federal oversight of insurance, which is also really interesting. So it's regulated by the 50 states. And it has this outside say on who gets to build wealth in this country, right? I mean, you can't drive to work without auto insurance. You can't own a home or open a business, as I mentioned earlier. And as was mentioned earlier, it sits at this very interesting intersection of this, what everyone is feeling, the wealth inequality, climate disaster and fairness. And ultimately what people want is they want a fair and level playing ground. And this is what this office can do. It regulates industry, sets the ground rules for how property and casualty industry plays in the state of California, the most populous state in the country. And so there's a couple of things that I have talked about. One, one of the biggest fights is around claims. And we're seeing this, whether you live in the Palisades or in paradise. And so one, I wanna freeze your rates. When you file a claim, you shouldn't be penalized for using the business that you've been paying into, often for decades. Second, I want them to pay you interest every day. They deny delay or underpay a valid claim. That is actually a big part of their business strategy. Their main business is not really insurance, it's their banks. They take our premiums and they invest it in the bond markets. By the way, they're huge institutional investors in fossil fuel, which is driving climate disaster. And then they cancel coverage on the homes destroyed by it. So they try to keep their money in their float for as long as possible. So I also want to create a financial distance center from doing that by having them pay you interest. The other is that we wanna really cap their profits. And that's something that the insurance commissioner can do in the rate setting. ACA mandates that 85 cents of every dollar we pay in premiums goes back into paying claims. I think we should do the same for home insurance, maybe at 65 cents a dollar, not even as high, or an auto insurance at 75 cents a dollar. And making sure that, and by the way, currently in California, it's roughly around 49 cents of our premium dollars go back into paying claims. And make sure that they're not spending it just on shareholders, CEOs, and Super Bowl ads. So that's wild. So of every dollar that goes into the insurance industry in California, 49 cents comes back in claims. What's the other 51 cents go to? Now, presumably, if I'm gonna, like, kind of steel man, let's say the insurance industry argument, they'd say, well, for disaster insurance, they don't hit every year. So we need to build up massive reserves so that when they do hit, that we can pay them off. So maybe you would need to stretch that out over a longer time horizon than one year. But like, so what are they, where's that other 51 cents going? How much is going to that reserve? And how much is going to profits or to kind of the operations required to keep their cash flow business going? So let me start with their business model. So part of their revenue is, of course, our premiums. And by the way, at least in the last few years, our premiums have outpaced what they have paid in claims, despite at least in California, some of the biggest fire claims payout in history. Two, they take our premiums and they invest it in what they call their float. So they invest it in the bond market or fossil fuels. And so all of this is a part of their revenue model and they're doing exceedingly well. Every billionaire invests in insurance. It makes a ton of money. And so when I say 65 cents to a dollar, we're just talking about the premium revenue. And so the remainder goes to their shareholders, it goes to CEO pay, of course, some of it goes to their reserves, it goes to their advertising. And what this office can do is that it can shine a light in terms of mandating that we understand where our dollars are going. And by the way, this message resonated in Twalamy County and Nevada and El Dorado, which are more rural areas of California. And it did well in Republican counties like San Diego, Riverside and in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Pulse, insurance industries don't treat you differently because you're a Republican. Everyone is feeling fleeced by the insurance industry. And they see their rates go up, they see their coverage get canceled, and then they hear about how much money these industries are making. And one example I'll just give is in April, Traveler, which is in the top 10 of property casualty industry, announced that they did so well just in the first quarter of 2026. They had 2.2 billion in excess capital. What did they do with it? They didn't provide discounts or refunds to their policy holders. They didn't invest back in the communities that they had profited from in the form of resiliency and fireproofing and floodproofing, which would collectively make us all safer. They gave it all to their shareholders. And one of the reasons why I'm proposing a single payer nonprofit publicly run disaster insurance program guaranteed for every homeowner in California is that I want to claw back some of those premium dollars that we're already spending and have them stewarded by the public. We would invest those premiums as well. And when we have excess capital like New Zealand, we would invest it back into floodproofing and fireproofing and resiliency. And so there are two ways to lower your risk, right? Cause ultimately that is what is driving up the cost of insurance. And if you want to make insurance affordable and available, you have to actually address risk. Private insurance market prices risk. And so we would take a portion of that revenue and actually invest it in making us collectively safer. While the private insurance market reduces their risk by canceling coverage of what they consider their sickest homes or their homes with pre-existing conditions. And by the way, this is not our idea. This is modeled after what we see in New Zealand. France and Spain also have a form of a publicly run disaster insurance for all program. Canada very interestingly has single payer auto insurance in some of their provinces. And they also use excess capital to invest in roads and filling potholes because they know that that also will reduce risks in the future. Yeah, there seems to be some real parallels there between the arguments for single payer healthcare as well that the government would then be incentivized to do preventive medicine and to invest in clinics and other, you know, in primary care to try to make it so that people go to the ER less. And which is also then better for society. People don't want to get sick. People don't want their houses to burn down. I would imagine that one of the criticisms or the questions that you get, this is the thing that occurs to me, is okay, but what about that house that's in the area that has burned down six times in the last 10 years or whatever? That's a very real, yeah, I was just gonna add, like that's, I randomly did a long investigation to NFIP, the National Flood Insurance Program, a while back. And it's, what Ryan is saying is a real thing at least with the NFIP is that you have a house that keeps getting rebuilt like 20 times in some cases in a very dangerous flood zone, which it's not just a problem for the rates, it puts people's lives at risk. So sorry, Ryan, to interrupt. I think Emily and I have the same question. If you have a publicly run, if you have a public option or a single payer system, how do you make sure that the public isn't helping somebody build a house on stilts every year? Yeah, so this is a big problem throughout the state of California because of our terrain and the size of our state, our geography. We experience almost every type of disaster, climate disaster that you can imagine, mudslides, floods, fires. And one thing that we have been thinking a lot about is that we would want to guarantee disaster insurance for existing homeowners. And keep in mind, many of these homeowners moved into these parts of California long before they became wildfire distrust zones. In fact, what we call the WUI, the wildfire urban interface, has grown 111% since 2011. So the wildfire regions moved into neighborhoods and areas. And in many ways, we don't want to penalize these homeowners, many of whom are actually working class and middle class homeowners, not just wealthy vacation owners and the Palisades and Tahoe. They have nowhere else to go. California is such an expensive state. There are very few places for them to relocate and move into. And so we would want to make sure that we covered folks and made sure that people aren't bankrupt or destitute. We wouldn't want to cover new developments in the WUI because we wouldn't want to give developers that type of incentive that they would get covered in case a disaster hit knowing that they are building in a wildfire zone. But we have a very big problem across the country because as I mentioned, the WUI has expanded 111%. So even if you live in a safe zone today, you may not in five or 10 years. And so it's gonna take way more than just insurance as a tool for us to become more resilient as country. We actually have to take on fossil fuels. So we keep talking about how homeowners and the public is gonna pay for these disasters. We haven't yet talked about how we're gonna hold fossil fuels accountable. And also our dependent on fossil fuels, so we have to make polluters pay. And we need to revamp our land use and our building code as well to become more resilient. But the one other idea that we are considering is allowing structural coverage to be used for relocation and replacement. So if your home does burn down, you can take the insurance that you get. And instead of rebuilding, that you're allowed to actually use it to move and buy another home. Oh, because currently you have to spend it right there. Yes, yes. That's a great idea. That's a great idea. Exactly. If you have insurance and your house burns down, the only thing you can do with that money is rebuild. Yeah. Right, no, it's a no-brainer. Come on, come on California. And everybody else should do this. And everybody else, right? It's not just California. I mean, Texas, Florida, Nebraska, actually the biggest claims payout is wind and hail. Right. Wow. Fascinating, fascinating. Oh, Jane Kim, one of the two Democratic nominees for Insurance Commissioner in California. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me in covering one of the most important jobs you may have never heard of, that really sits at this incredibly interesting fascination around economic fairness, wealth inequality, and climate injustice. And really excited to be in this race for this office. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, I look forward to having you back. Whenever you come back on, assuming you do become the commissioner, it will be in difficult situations, no doubt. But interesting ones that we have to grapple with as a country and a society. So glad somebody's thinking about it. We're joined in studio this time by a friend of the show, Juan David Rojas, he's an independent journalist. You can find his writing all the time over at Compact. He had a big, big story about his work, kind of as a social worker, with people who had come during the Biden surge and were making asylum claims and won some big takeaways from the piece. We wanna talk about Claudia Scheinbaum. We wanna talk about some different things happening around Latin America. Pete Heikset is actually at Guantanamo Bay today, but let's start just with some of the big picture takeaways that you had through your time spent, actually working in this capacity with people who are trying to make asylum claims, who are trying to be here in the United States as long as possible during the Biden years. What did you find out? Yeah, so I worked as a social worker with what are called UCs and accompanying children. Those are minors under the age of 18 who come to the border without parents or legal guardians. And so they're held in a shelter and released to what are called sponsors, typically family members, but not always. Sometimes this and relatives, and sometimes even people who they're not related to in the slightest. We should mention, by the way, people may be familiar with this from a huge New York Times story on Javier Becerra, who is making the runoff in the California governor's race is gonna be against Steve Hilton. This is a huge piece of baggage that Javier Becerra now comes in because while you were working in this capacity, New York Times had a deep dive on how many UCs ended up being on a counter for, so go on. Yeah, it became a political issue. So I was a case manager. And so basically, like my job is once these kids were released to sponsors, you have to check on them, make sure that they track their immigration hearings, get pro bono attorneys, have a roof over their head, stuff like that. And this piece took me a really long time to write. It was really hard to write. It's a very delicate issue. And I wanted people from both sides of the aisle to take the right things out of it. And that New York Times piece you mentioned, I can thankfully say that during my time, there was only one case that I cite in the piece of a minor who went, like, they just ran away and couldn't find them. And anyway, we can go into that. Is this South Florida? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's another thing. I worked in South Florida, the Miami office of this agency. So the Cubans, Venezuela. Yeah, yeah, South Americans, et cetera. And well, the thing about one of the main things for on left of center that I wanted people to take out of the piece is that, you know, there's this idea typically that it's like, oh, you know, if you come here to arrive at the border, like, you know, you must be really desperate, you're fleeing violence, stuff like that, that is the case. But in my experience, and this is also reporting that has been done, the vast majority of these asylum claims are economic migrants. During the Biden search. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so yeah, and I worked in 2022, 2023. I've had to secure it as professional career. Journalism was kind of an accident, but yeah, yeah. You know, in my experience, these were all very hardworking, loving families. But in my experience, again, it was a small minority of people. Yeah, you know, we're like fleeing persecution from the Ortega dictatorship, the Cuban regime, of violence from gangs. The rest wanted, typically, yeah, just to work in the US and many other families, and some of them, to be fair, also wanted to go back. And that's another complicated aspect of this, that because, like, you know, you like come here either illegally or still sit asylum, then going back to your country sometimes becomes difficult. But essentially, yeah, for on the like the right side of the aisle, like I try to be very compassionate and talk about like some of these stories, even like people who like didn't have, in my opinion, legitimate claims of asylum. These are good people, they're not all criminals. On the other hand, the issue I saw under Biden was there was just no enforcement once people were inside of the country. You look at the data, deportations inside of the country, interior enforcement. Under Obama, in Obama's first term, was like 200,000 a year. Then in, by Trump's first term, it was like 100,000. Then by Biden's term, it was 50,000. Basically, once you get into the country, you don't get deported. So, you know, and there's like debates about this, that, oh, a lot of people were deported at the border inside of the country, not so much. And the problem with that is you get this insane backlog of asylum claimants. And that hurts actual asylees, because you have so many economic migrants crowding out people with legitimate claims. And so, my perspective is there needs to be limits. I consider myself a social democrat. An old school social democrat. And in the olden days, social democrats were more restrictive on immigration. You're more anomalous. Yeah, not because like immigrants are bad or anything like that. It's just there needs to be limits to these things. Just like you wanna have controls on capital. There needs to be limits on immigration, thoughtfully. And it's the same thing with like deportation. A critique I would have, what I've seen now under Trump, is like you just have these, this deliberate abuse, what I find to be gratuitously sadistic policies people were detained for like a year on end. Deport, I have a line in the piece that's like, deportation should be neither pleasant nor like, deliberately performative. And like Chris Kobach, former attorney general of Kansas Republican, he stressed that the best way to do this is to have a national regime of e-verify on employers, meaning you punish employers for contracting illegal labor. And that would be a lot more efficient than having an $80 billion ice. Yes, it would. Well, and the economic conditions of these countries, whether it's Cuba or Venezuela, is extremely relevant to our incursions into those countries continuing under the Trump administration. Absolutely, yeah. Yes, indeed. When we destroyed Mexico's kind of agriculture economy, we sent a massive win. In the 90s, because I have to. Of Mexican migrants, northward. Mexico now doing much better. There's a lot we wanna get through with you. So to move to Mexico real quickly, we could put up F1 here. Walk us through what is the, Claudia Shinebaum was celebrating the launch of this like $5,000 electric vehicle, this van, if you're not watching, it kind of, as Mack described, it kind of looks like a little airport shuttle. I would love to have one of these guys that are a tool around the neighborhood. $5,000? Yeah, it reminds me of like the smart cars, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But speaking of social democrats. So what's going on with Mexico's kind of EV industry? Is this, are we headed to a place where the US is gonna just be making $50,000 to $60,000 gas guzzlers while the rest of the world is just driving these $5,000 to $10,000 EVs? Like how long is that gonna last? What is going on here? And she's doing this on the eve of the World Cup, we should mention as well, Mexican Games on Mexico on Thursday, lots of anxiety about potential violence. Yo and girl had a good piece on that and that's kind of tensions. So there's politics in there too. Totally, totally, yeah. I believe it's called the Ovinia. And it's not very fast. I think it's top speed is like 50 miles an hour. And so like some of the opposition have said, oh, it's basically just a glorified scooter. But I mean, yeah, that could reasonably get you around in like some big cities. Like that's a flagship that the Mexican government had. They wanted it to have their own Mexican manufacturer. Is there a Chinese partnership? Like what's the? I don't think so. I think it was pretty Mexican made. Now there's a ton of Mexican EVs in China and a lot of anxieties of that if they'll ever be led into the US. You mean Chinese EVs in Mexico? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Chinese EVs in Mexico that will be led in. And actually you guys bring that up with NAFTA. That's a good point. Like Mexican immigration, for instance, has gone down all, immigration to the US has gone down a lot. I actually, It's reverse at this point, I think. There's even a lot of people that are going back NAFTA destroyed. Way more Americans going to Mexico. That too, expats. Some of the two million. Why do we call them expats is not migrants? Well, probably not migrants. That's another story. We try to use language here like equally. So yeah, American US migrants. US migrants. Well, Pete Hexeth in... Taking Mexican jobs, laptop jobs that Mexicans won't do. Pete Hexeth in Guantanamo Bay today becoming another US official to visit the island of Cuba in recent weeks raising all kinds of anxieties, of course, among the skeptics of a potential US intervention. Now you've followed this very closely at once. So with Hexeth now making the trip, Radcliffe has made the trip. You're reading the tea leaves. What's your expectation about what could come in the days and weeks ahead? Yeah, I think we'll probably see strikes of some kind. Some sort of Maduro operation. Who knows? Maybe they'll even go for a full invasion. I mean, right now there's like, they basically have all the same assets they had for the Maduro operation around 10,000 troops. The thing is Cuba's a lot smaller, has more favorable geography, and there's a history there in the lobby. I could see them pushing for this. On the other hand, with Iran, that's complicated. And actually, tying this to our initial conversation, you know, like under Biden, it was something like three million Cubans left the island, half of which came here, and especially to South Florida, a lot of people that I worked with. Now under Trump, if you didn't have such like restrictive policies at the border, you'd have millions of Cubans still coming in. And actually, this is something that went under notice. The Nicaraguan government in 2022, they removed visas on Cubans, and that allowed Cubans to just go to Nicaraguan and straight to the US. They put visas back on, apparently as a gesture to the Trump administration, guess it didn't work, because they just got sanctioned a bunch a few days ago. You probably talked to people who had done that. I talked to Cubans who had done that too. In Mexico, they said, they went through Nicaragua, and then right up to the US. So, and yeah, and so this is just to me, logical, that, hey, if you don't want to have millions of people coming here on the one side, yeah, I disagree that, you know, immigration policy should be so lax, especially with asylum, I think there should be a lot of reform. On the other hand, we shouldn't go about wanton intervening in all of these countries. It's completely counterproductive. Yes. Give us a quick update while we have you on the elections. Elections in Colombia, elections in Peru, is the believing government going to fall. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot. Bolivia, yeah, I don't know, I don't think the government is going to finish its term, but yeah, maybe support from the US will help. There's elections right now in Peru and in Colombia. There's still counting votes in Peru. It's like the closest election. Oh, in LA? No, Peru. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a lot of people pointed that out, that Peru counted however many votes, but there's faster than LA. Yeah, there's like 97% of the vote counted, and it's like 50.0 something to 49.99 something. So yeah, these elections in Peru. And the left is up by a little bit. Slightly, slightly. The problem is the votes coming in now are mainly like super rural, which are in favor of the left and abroad that are super in favor of Fuhimori. I always find it interesting that in South America, the rural votes are more left-wing. Sometimes, it depends in Peru's interesting, because a lot of these leftists, I call them base leftists. They're socially conservative, but economically left-wing. And this makes sense, because their base is rural. And so in the Highlands in Peru, this guy, the current candidate, his big promise was to pardon former President Pedro Castillo, the guy with the hat. And this guy, he was like an evangelical pro-life, like anti-LGBT, super right-wing on social issues. And so this guy, Sanchez, he's a background as a psychologist, and so his track record in Congress, he said he's in favor of civil unions, stuff like that. But he still builds himself as pro-life and a man of faith and stuff like that, but is still left-wing. So the narrative we usually hear is just that it's communism versus capitalism. And it's looking like they're doing well in Colombia. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it looks like there's this crazy mob lawyer. He was a lawyer for drug trafficking, paramilitaries, and former President Uribe, who's currently under trial. And so, but they left and made a lot of mistakes. So will we coo him or will we pardon him? You never know. Yeah, he's a good drug trafficker. Yeah, yeah. Yes, well, Juan, friend of the show, go check him out on social media, has a sub-stack as well. I know you're taking some reporting trips to South America and all over Latin America in the days and weeks ahead. So thank you for joining us in studio. It was a pleasure to have you here for the first time you saw the studio. Thanks for having me, guys. Of course, well, that's gonna do it for us on today's edition of Breaking Points. We so appreciate you taking the time to be with us on this Wednesday. Ryan, anything else? That's it. That's it, I got nothing. That's great, Ryan has declared. It is over. All right, well, Ryan, we'll see you on Friday. Crystal and Sager, we'll see you back here tomorrow. Have a great one, everyone. This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.