Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 2: the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that,
Speaker 2: let's get to the show.
Speaker 4: He thinks he's so funny.
Speaker 5: Frank, good book, Franson, who's going to start the show today?
Speaker 4: We first of all, welcome to Counterpoints.
Speaker 5: But if you were listening, Ryan was opening the show
Speaker 5: by looking straight to camera as though he was busy
Speaker 5: reading his book, The Squad amc and The Hope of
Speaker 5: a Political Revolution.
Speaker 4: I don't know if that kinds of starting the show right.
Speaker 6: I'm enjoying it. It's fun to go back through it.
Speaker 6: Speaking of this book we're gonna have. Ted was on
Speaker 6: the show later today. We promised last time that Ted
Speaker 6: Cruz was going to join us.
Speaker 3: We talked a big game, we were really going to
Speaker 3: nail this guy to the wall.
Speaker 6: And maybe he was watching the beginning of the show
Speaker 6: and he decided he's not gonna make it. He rescheduled
Speaker 6: for today, so he will be here later. That's what
Speaker 6: we're told. We make no promises because he controls his schedule,
Speaker 6: but he says he will be here later in the show.
Speaker 6: The reason it's relevant to the book is he's currently
Speaker 6: hanging out at number thirteen on the bestseller list. You
Speaker 6: know what they say about the last person to graduate
Speaker 6: from medical school where they call them a doctor, the
Speaker 6: person that's at the very bottom of the bestseller list,
Speaker 6: best selling author. My book's out next week. I've got
Speaker 6: my eye on Ted Cruz. It's kind of a conflict
Speaker 6: of interest to have him on here, because I don't
Speaker 6: want to help him sell books.
Speaker 4: This is so bitterly competitive it is.
Speaker 6: I'm going to make it the most boring interview ever,
Speaker 6: so nobody watches it, nobody.
Speaker 3: Buys the book.
Speaker 4: That's pretty good. Well, maybe don't do that.
Speaker 3: I won't do that. It'll be an exciting interview.
Speaker 4: We do.
Speaker 3: Go ahead and buy the book. If you like Ted Cruz,
Speaker 3: go ahead and buy book.
Speaker 5: You know he's always game to have debates and arguments,
Speaker 5: so I expect that's what's going to happen. By the
Speaker 5: time this airs, we will know how it went. But
Speaker 5: that's my expectation for it at the very least. But Ryan,
Speaker 5: before we get to that, we do have a lot.
Speaker 4: Of news to go over.
Speaker 5: More hostages were released yesterday, more negotiations towards a potential
Speaker 5: extension of the ceasefire.
Speaker 4: We have elections.
Speaker 5: Nicki Haley got the coveted Koch brothers in Noorisement.
Speaker 3: And rods, and Nicki Haley just had an.
Speaker 5: Interesting reaction to that. We're talking about all kinds of
Speaker 5: stuff and.
Speaker 6: Yes, and Congress is now trying to figure out ways
Speaker 6: to get money to Ukraine. Yes, and so the new
Speaker 6: strategy that they have landed on is they're going to
Speaker 6: tighten asylum rules. They're going to add more money for
Speaker 6: border security. There's a deal being worked out between kind
Speaker 6: of Ukraine. Yeah, it's sort of kind of like, well,
Speaker 6: the kind of hardline immigration hawks don't like it, obviously,
Speaker 6: the immigration rights groups don't like it. People who think
Speaker 6: that we need to wind this war down already don't
Speaker 6: like it.
Speaker 3: Nobody seems to like it.
Speaker 6: But that's how they get things through Congress that nobody likes.
Speaker 4: How we get things done in this country.
Speaker 3: It's right.
Speaker 6: Everybody means everybody hates it. That means it's likely to
Speaker 6: become law.
Speaker 4: Everybody hates it except for the lobbyists. Probably.
Speaker 3: No, it's great, great Northern Virginia real estate, that's for sure.
Speaker 4: It'll do great for that.
Speaker 5: We also had some interesting numbers coming out of Black
Speaker 5: Friday about by now pay later functions that have been
Speaker 5: added to different shopping websites and what that might say
Speaker 5: about the economy. After that, we will get to ted Cruz,
Speaker 5: but let's start with the hostages.
Speaker 4: Ryan. More hostages were released yesterday.
Speaker 5: We can put the a block up on the screen here,
Speaker 5: the truth, I guess, if you could call it, that
Speaker 5: was extended two days and eleven more hostages were freed yesterday.
Speaker 5: What did you make of some of this footage that
Speaker 5: was coming out yesterday of the Middle East ryane of
Speaker 5: hostages being released.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And what I think people who are hoping for
Speaker 6: is that this two day truce will lead to another
Speaker 6: two or three day truce which leads to another one
Speaker 6: and can eventually reach to get to some kind of
Speaker 6: long term truce. Because you're not going to get to
Speaker 6: a resolution, You're not going to get to justice at
Speaker 6: this point. Because at the same time that this is unfolding,
Speaker 6: you have the complete collapse of all civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
Speaker 6: You've got more than one point seven million people displaced,
Speaker 6: have the water treatment facilities destroyed, you have sewer's treatment
Speaker 6: facilities destroyed. You have people who don't have enough remotely
Speaker 6: enough access, let alone water, but food also the healthcare
Speaker 6: system is completely destroyed. Doesn't take a lot of imagination
Speaker 6: to understand where that's going.
Speaker 3: Like that leads directly to rampant disease.
Speaker 6: Cindy McCain actually is, you know now, the head of
Speaker 6: the World Food Program, which I had forgotten, but she's
Speaker 6: been out warning that Gaza is approaching famine conditions. There
Speaker 6: are only about two hundred trucks of you know, containing
Speaker 6: humanitarian relief supplies getting in and that's just not enough
Speaker 6: for a city of what used to be a city
Speaker 6: of two million people, which is now a gigantic pile
Speaker 6: of rubble on which two million people are expected to survive.
Speaker 4: And we have more from the New York Times.
Speaker 5: We can put this next graphic up on the screen here,
Speaker 5: the first round of hostages released as extended truce appears.
Speaker 4: Behold, that's their headline.
Speaker 5: But if you're looking at this, if you're watching the show,
Speaker 5: you can see these figures here of the people who
Speaker 5: have passed away in captivity, the people who are eighty
Speaker 5: years old in captivity, eighty years and over in captivity,
Speaker 5: which we saw actually some of them being released Israelis
Speaker 5: yesterday and getting jeered pretty brutally as they were released.
Speaker 4: We saw a we see.
Speaker 5: Here people fifty five years and older, eighteen to fifty
Speaker 5: four and older. Eleven Israeli hostages were released yesterday, and
Speaker 5: according to Reuter's, Hamas had said earlier that it received
Speaker 5: a list of thirty three Palestinians that were going to
Speaker 5: be released from Israeli jails in return for.
Speaker 4: Those eleven hostages.
Speaker 5: People probably remember that the Israeli the Israeli stance on
Speaker 5: this was that they would extend the truth by one
Speaker 5: day for every ten more hostages that were released ran.
Speaker 4: Where do you think that stands right now after yesterday.
Speaker 6: I think that they're sorting out who and how they're
Speaker 6: going to move forward. I do think that Hamas wants
Speaker 6: to continue releasing hostages.
Speaker 3: They certainly prefer that to you.
Speaker 6: A bombing rampage they have, they have essentially signaled that
Speaker 6: they would release all the hostages if there would be
Speaker 6: a kind of permanent ceasefire reached. Is basically Israeli government
Speaker 6: is rejecting that, saying that no, like they're they're still
Speaker 6: committed to completely annihilating Hamas. The calculations of what that
Speaker 6: would take though at the current pace, you know, they
Speaker 6: they there are various estimates of how many Hamas fighters
Speaker 6: they've killed at this point. You're talking, I've seen estimates
Speaker 6: between one and two thousand. Others have said maybe up
Speaker 6: to five thousand, but you're talking about at least thirteen
Speaker 6: thousand people being killed, and people are saying it's likely,
Speaker 6: you know, significantly higher than that. So in order to
Speaker 6: kill thirty to forty thousand Hamas fighters and actually annihilate this,
Speaker 6: we're talking about hundreds of thousands of killed, and that's
Speaker 6: violently killed. That's before you get to the number of
Speaker 6: people dying by disease. But just as these hostage releases
Speaker 6: are putting kind of a global spotlight on the Hamas
Speaker 6: brutality of you know, people over eighty in captivity, people
Speaker 6: unders Holocaust fibers, under in captivity, the Israeli hostage release
Speaker 6: is similarly putting a spotlight on some of their brutality.
Speaker 6: And you're seeing you're seeing children release who are allegedly
Speaker 6: caught up for throwing stones a lot, you know, mostly
Speaker 6: women and children who are being held mostly without charges,
Speaker 6: some convicted, some charge, but most mostly not. And the
Speaker 6: way that they're being treated, and maybe we have this here,
Speaker 6: the way that they're talking about having been t read
Speaker 6: it and is really detention, is also shocking.
Speaker 4: That I'm.
Speaker 7: Sol oh so become a response by could she that
Speaker 7: what the lost romot? You call it the.
Speaker 4: Awesome slso?
Speaker 7: Could she? But mohammed.
Speaker 6: So just horrifying stories that we're hearing coming out of
Speaker 6: from from the detainees. And then we're also winding up
Speaker 6: with this situation where the detainees are the former detainees
Speaker 6: being told that they're not allowed to celebrate, not allowed
Speaker 6: to meet with people, not allowed to speak to the press.
Speaker 4: That's part of the deal.
Speaker 3: That's part of the deal. They're not allowed to celebrate.
Speaker 3: Struck me.
Speaker 5: It's you know, actually, let's even get into this next
Speaker 5: clip because we see some of this kind of the
Speaker 5: sparks really starting to fly.
Speaker 3: On this issue that Sky News.
Speaker 8: I believe we understand that a teenager has been shot.
Speaker 8: Is this the right way to handle this situation, given
Speaker 8: that tensions are already rising and emotions are already quite high.
Speaker 9: Well, we're talking about the release of attempted murderers. You
Speaker 9: call them children, but we're talking about teenagers who stabbed
Speaker 9: other teenagers. We're talking about.
Speaker 8: That's not my question, Deputy Mayor. I totally and fully
Speaker 8: understand that they haven't been accused giving you the contract,
Speaker 8: I understand, but I if I can, Deputy Mayor, Deputy.
Speaker 4: Mayor, I'm just going to interrupt you.
Speaker 8: I am fully aware of I'm fully aware of I'm
Speaker 8: answering that, Deputy Mayor.
Speaker 10: I'm fully aware of what they've been vibrations. Part of
Speaker 10: the deal was that there would be no celebrations, and
Speaker 10: the reason that these clashes are occurring is because exactly
Speaker 10: against the deal that there would be no celebrations celebrating
Speaker 10: the release of attempted murderers in East Jerusalem, in my city,
Speaker 10: where many people, many of the victims live side by
Speaker 10: side with the people who try to kill them.
Speaker 9: Part of the deal was that they would not have
Speaker 9: these celebrations. And if the clashes are occurring, it's exactly
Speaker 9: because of that.
Speaker 5: Well, so that was the deputy mayor you heard of
Speaker 5: Jerusalem speaking on Sky News and ran, you know, I
Speaker 5: do what you said earlier makes sense to me. It
Speaker 5: also makes sense to me that celebrations can fuel potential
Speaker 5: conflict in a way that she's making a decent argument
Speaker 5: that that's what happened.
Speaker 6: So it goes back to this talking point that we
Speaker 6: constantly hear that Israel is the only democracy in the
Speaker 6: Middle East, that that's why, that's why it needs to
Speaker 6: be protected, the only democracy in the Middle East. Would
Speaker 6: not insist that you cannot celebrate, because you have to
Speaker 6: understand that's also in the context of laws they've implemented
Speaker 6: in the last several weeks that say you cannot. You
Speaker 6: know that there have been hundreds and even thousands of
Speaker 6: people that are arrested and jailed for posting just sympathy
Speaker 6: for people who've been killed in Jazza.
Speaker 5: In fact, we talked about a journalist last week on
Speaker 5: the show who and those were not sympathetic posts that
Speaker 5: she ended up being detained over. They were not I
Speaker 5: wouldn't characterize them as sympathetic so much as I would
Speaker 5: characterize them as sympathetic with hun loss, they're sort of
Speaker 5: blocking people who had been taking hostage.
Speaker 6: But yes, she was detained, right, And then the idea
Speaker 6: that though not only can you not celebrate, but you
Speaker 6: can't have family members come visit you after you've kind
Speaker 6: of left detention. It just really exposes or or asks
Speaker 6: the question of what kind of democracy are we talking
Speaker 6: about here. It's last democracy in the Middle East or
Speaker 6: the only democracy in the Middle East. Also, why does
Speaker 6: a racket short shrift on this all the time? Levin
Speaker 6: has elections too, didn't we create a democracy?
Speaker 4: I thought we did that.
Speaker 3: We did, yeah, and also they do have elections.
Speaker 4: Are you saying the mission was not accomplished?
Speaker 6: It was a mission was accomplished clearly thought more anyway.
Speaker 4: We needn't litigate or relitigate that.
Speaker 5: But no, I mean, I think it's legitimately a challenge
Speaker 5: because you you do have a serious potential for a
Speaker 5: security situation to erupt and obviously want to avoid that
Speaker 5: as much as possible so that.
Speaker 4: You can get your own hostages back.
Speaker 5: And that's I mean, it's no easy feat, but obviously
Speaker 5: doing it while proving that you can live up to
Speaker 5: the standards of the sort of middle Eastern democracy.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's important obviously, right and.
Speaker 6: Even if you have cut a deal with Hamas that
Speaker 6: there would be no celebrations, Like the people who were
Speaker 6: released from prison were not part of that deal. They
Speaker 6: were just told that they were released from prison. And
Speaker 6: then if you're if you're celebrating the fact that you've
Speaker 6: gotten your freedom. The other choice that the Israeli soldiers
Speaker 6: and Israeli police have is to not shoot them like
Speaker 6: that's You could also just let the celebration kind of
Speaker 6: wind down and people go home like that's that's that's
Speaker 6: an option that exists. Speaking of peace, the number one
Speaker 6: Washington piece Nick Joe Biden, yesterday posted something extraordinarily controversial,
Speaker 6: which he is already walking back. Let's put this up
Speaker 6: here and I'll read this. Tell me what you make
Speaker 6: of this. Hamas unleashed. This is Joe Biden, Hamas unleashed
Speaker 6: a terrorist attack because they fear nothing more than Israelis
Speaker 6: and Palestinians living side by side in peace. To continue
Speaker 6: down the path of terror, violence, killing and war is
Speaker 6: to give Hamas what they seek. We can't do that,
Speaker 6: you know, for the most part. This is also this
Speaker 6: was my analysis from the very beginning that hamas its
Speaker 6: brutal provocation, was intended to create war, to undermine the
Speaker 6: extension of the Abraham Accords, and that Israel should not
Speaker 6: play into their hands by engaging in as Biden calls it, terror, violence, killing,
Speaker 6: and war, and that we can't do that. That kind
Speaker 6: of that was because this was posted on Twitter, I think,
Speaker 6: and Biden is not used to making news on Twitter.
Speaker 6: The American press largely skipped over this post from yesterday.
Speaker 6: Israeli press sees on it was like, whoa what on
Speaker 6: earth is Biden saying? Because Biden clearly seems to be
Speaker 6: referring to the Israeli action as terror, violence, is killing
Speaker 6: in war, which it is. It's terrifying, it's it's violent,
Speaker 6: it's killing, it's war, it's war, right, And so the
Speaker 6: Israeli presses saying, wait a minute, is Biden all of
Speaker 6: a sudden calling for a ceasefire and an end of
Speaker 6: the war.
Speaker 3: No, he's not.
Speaker 4: He walks it back.
Speaker 6: He's now walking back in. Well, his aids are walking
Speaker 6: it back. Two reporters do we have here? Let me
Speaker 6: get your reaction and I'll find the I'll find the
Speaker 6: exact quote.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 5: First of all, I mean, imagine it's your job to
Speaker 5: write these tweets for Joe Biden.
Speaker 3: And you accidentally called for an end of.
Speaker 4: War and you don't.
Speaker 5: And we're going to get into what Netna who talked
Speaker 5: about with Elon Musk recently and Elon Musk's trip to Israel,
Speaker 5: because actually Nina who was talking about a two state solution.
Speaker 5: Whether or not he supports the two state.
Speaker 3: Selection extremely important.
Speaker 4: It's very relevant. Yeah right now.
Speaker 5: We're going to get into some of that in a second,
Speaker 5: but it is really relevant right now as we're talking
Speaker 5: about this post from by on X, because that is
Speaker 5: in contrast with the statement of the government, the stated
Speaker 5: position of the government of the country who is reliant
Speaker 5: on our aid in this situation. I don't mean our money,
Speaker 5: but certainly our munitions. There are plenty of quotes from
Speaker 5: Israeli government officials in the Israeli press about how devastating
Speaker 5: it would be to lose the support of America in
Speaker 5: the war, because specifically because of munitions and those types
Speaker 5: of resources, it's less about you know, we're about twenty
Speaker 5: percent and in a normal year we make up about
Speaker 5: twenty percent of their military budget, so significant not make
Speaker 5: or break, but the munitions are absolutely critical, and so
Speaker 5: it's really strange to see that ostensible contradiction between our
Speaker 5: position in that Yahoo's position. You've made an interesting point
Speaker 5: repeatedly about how Biden. You made this point on Twitter yesterday.
Speaker 5: I saw I think you were arguing with Ben Dreyfus
Speaker 5: and you were talking about how Biden Biden's strategy seems
Speaker 5: to be a public stance that allows him to pressure
Speaker 5: that y'ahoo privately.
Speaker 4: But we don't know, I mean, we honestly have no.
Speaker 6: That's what he claims, right, right, right, We don't know
Speaker 6: what's happening behind the scenes, but yes, that is that's
Speaker 6: what Biden has been saying that he's and he's kind
Speaker 6: of alluded to it a little bit when he was
Speaker 6: asked about conditioning AID, whether you should condition AI days
Speaker 6: or based on whether or not they're committing human rights abuses,
Speaker 6: he said the other day, that's an interesting thought, and
Speaker 6: it's something we should consider.
Speaker 3: That's the furthest of American.
Speaker 6: President has gone since well back back in the eighties.
Speaker 6: The posture even of the Reagan administration was further to
Speaker 6: the left than we're in now. But in this new era,
Speaker 6: that's that's a step that hasn't been taken before. And
Speaker 6: then Biden said, if I had started by saying that,
Speaker 6: then I wouldn't have He basically said that it wouldn't
Speaker 6: have been able to develop the wiggle room privately to
Speaker 6: force this kind of truce and this hostage deal. The
Speaker 6: problem with that claim of his is that Hamas was
Speaker 6: put this on the table from the very beginning, and
Speaker 6: the President of the United States can with the phone call,
Speaker 6: force Israel to take these deals. They did it in
Speaker 6: nineteen eighty two with Lebanon, Biden himself did it in
Speaker 6: twenty twenty one with Gaza, like you can make these
Speaker 6: phone calls and by the end of the phone call,
Speaker 6: the Israeli Prime Minister agrees to truces. That's how this works.
Speaker 6: So it could have happened, so we didn't need to
Speaker 6: actually do this. But that is his claim. Now here's
Speaker 6: the cleanup on his peacenick tweet. This is a Jewish insider,
Speaker 6: this is a White House aid. He meant that we
Speaker 6: can't lose hope for peace, so he didn't want to
Speaker 6: lose hope, not that he wants or demands peace or
Speaker 6: is going to use his power to actually bring about peace.
Speaker 6: We can't lose hope for peace. So he meant that
Speaker 6: we can't lose hope for peace ultimately in the region,
Speaker 6: so ultimately sometime in the future, that it's still incredibly
Speaker 6: important that we continued to lay the groundwork for and
Speaker 6: create the conditions for a lasting piece. And that involves
Speaker 6: a two state solution. And so let's get to the
Speaker 6: next two elements here, which are quite relevant to this.
Speaker 6: Verst is Ben Gavie. Ye far right doesn't even begin
Speaker 6: to describe him, but he's a He represents a hard
Speaker 6: right settler kind of block in net Yahu's government.
Speaker 3: If we can put this put this one up here.
Speaker 6: Ben Vere Basically he says, if you don't hurry up
Speaker 6: and restart this war, I'm going to bring the government down.
Speaker 4: And he's the national security man.
Speaker 6: And now Gavier could leave the government, and if everyone
Speaker 6: else stayed, net Yaho wouldn't have enough support to stay.
Speaker 6: But Gavir is not alone in his hawkish approach to this.
Speaker 6: Now the counter argument that who has been making to
Speaker 6: the right, and this is the argument that he's been
Speaker 6: making four years that we refuse to hear in the
Speaker 6: United States. Let's put up this quote from bbing net Ya,
Speaker 6: who said he told his cabinet essentially quote, I am
Speaker 6: the only one who will prevent a Palestinian state in
Speaker 6: Gaza and the West Bank after the war.
Speaker 3: So that is.
Speaker 6: Netanyahu's argument for why he should be prime minister. That
Speaker 6: is what he effectively ran on just when he became
Speaker 6: Prime minister.
Speaker 3: This is yesterday, that's from yesterday.
Speaker 4: Well, Joe Biden is posting a tweet that he posted.
Speaker 6: Right saying that Biden Biden insists that everything they're doing
Speaker 6: is in furtherance of a two state solution, while Netanyahu
Speaker 6: has been very publicly and openly saying he does not
Speaker 6: support a two state solution. And the reason, and he
Speaker 6: has said this in the past, the reason that he
Speaker 6: bucked up Hamas was because Hamas makes it more difficult
Speaker 6: for Palestinians to get to statehood. So we are at
Speaker 6: a place where we're like, I think the word gas
Speaker 6: lighting is overused, but when you see the contradiction in
Speaker 6: these in these public statements, it's kind of staring here
Speaker 6: at the face. I think it's appropriated to finally use that.
Speaker 5: Well, the word quagmire is underused an American foreign policy
Speaker 5: and that's where this is headed from my perspective. As again,
Speaker 5: you know, I know a lot of our audience disagrees
Speaker 5: with me on the question of Israel and generally supportive
Speaker 5: of Israel and take a different position on this, although
Speaker 5: I have plenty of problems with the way they've prosecuted
Speaker 5: this war and the way that they've chosen to run
Speaker 5: their country. But even so, we're headed to a situation
Speaker 5: where you have right now a completely different endgame for
Speaker 5: the government that Joe Biden is supporting. If their endgame
Speaker 5: is openly on November twenty seventh, no Palestinian state, and
Speaker 5: Biden is saying, on the one hand, you know, I
Speaker 5: have two mister, two state solution here, which has long
Speaker 5: been his approach to this, and it's something that he's touted.
Speaker 5: Then what does it mean to eradicate Hamas? What does
Speaker 5: it mean to destroy Hamas? What does it mean to
Speaker 5: eliminate Hamas? Seriously tell me, because I don't think we
Speaker 5: have any answers to that question.
Speaker 4: What have you done so far?
Speaker 5: We actually don't know, to your point that you made earlier,
Speaker 5: we don't know a breakdown of Hamas and civilians. We
Speaker 5: don't know the extent of the damage to the Hamas
Speaker 5: military and government operation, the terrorist operation, it's extremely hard
Speaker 5: to say. And at the same time, now because of
Speaker 5: what Biden has said, there are some people in Israel,
Speaker 5: actually left and right, who are looking at it and saying,
Speaker 5: Ben Giver, bring the government down because we can't have
Speaker 5: a ceasefire right now that's prolonged indefinitely into the future.
Speaker 5: We will not sufficiently eliminate, we will not sufficiently harm
Speaker 5: Hamas's military operation. I don't believe that Hamas's military operation
Speaker 5: has gotten its sort of necessary come uppance, and I
Speaker 5: mean that in a pragmatic matic sense as much as
Speaker 5: a moral sense for what they did on October seventh.
Speaker 5: And so these are huge tensions. The CIA director William
Speaker 5: Burns was apparently he's been taking a leading role in negotiations.
Speaker 5: He was in Israel talking to the masdhead yesterday and
Speaker 5: trying to negotiate.
Speaker 4: For them with Hamas.
Speaker 5: But that only goes so far when you have dramatically
Speaker 5: different endgames, and that to me feels like a quagmire.
Speaker 3: Right or yes.
Speaker 6: And the folks like Ben Gavie are very clear that
Speaker 6: they have absolutely no interest in giving up the West.
Speaker 3: Bank like they have absolutely not.
Speaker 6: They have seized vast portions of it, and they do
Speaker 6: not plan on its slowing down the settlements or slowing
Speaker 6: down the expulsions or what peace would take, which is
Speaker 6: actually rolling back the settlements the land for peace. And
Speaker 6: when it comes to Gaza, they've been also very clear
Speaker 6: like that there are significant elements of the Israeli governments
Speaker 6: say we should just clear it out, yeah, and turn
Speaker 6: it into Israeli settlements.
Speaker 5: And I mean, our government is funding supporting a war
Speaker 5: that the government we're supporting has a completely different endgame
Speaker 5: as opposed to what our position is on our public position.
Speaker 3: At least we're not that stupid, though, are we.
Speaker 5: Well, if our position is two state solution and this
Speaker 5: is the government, the head of the government that we're
Speaker 5: supporting is saying something basically completely different than that. Let's
Speaker 5: move into the second part of the block, because we
Speaker 5: have net and Yahu talking exactly about this. We're going
Speaker 5: to start though with Elon Musk, because the two of
Speaker 5: them had a conversation when Elon Musk went to Israel
Speaker 5: this week and toured. Let's start with some clips and
Speaker 5: some of the audio here is a little bit hard
Speaker 5: to hear. But there's there's some interesting stuff in here.
Speaker 5: So let's roll this one.
Speaker 9: Last night some of them home, that's home yet, but
Speaker 9: the most of them were.
Speaker 7: Taking the murdered signed them in order to breach doors
Speaker 7: from windows.
Speaker 11: Obviously that there are three things that need to happen
Speaker 11: in the guz's situation. I mean, there's no choice but
Speaker 11: to kill those who insist on murdering civilians. There's our choice.
Speaker 11: They're not going to change their mind. And then the
Speaker 11: second thing is to change the education so that a
Speaker 11: new generation of murderers is not trained to be murderers.
Speaker 11: And then the third thing, which is also very important,
Speaker 11: is to try to build prosperity.
Speaker 5: So as Elon Mus talking to Yahu and the first
Speaker 5: part of the clip, and we actually have more from
Speaker 5: a conversation they had that we're going to roll, I
Speaker 5: think we might as well just roll right into it.
Speaker 4: It's still very relevant. Here's that club.
Speaker 12: The Germans hold themselves up in the German cities. Nobody said, well,
Speaker 12: don't attack the Wehrmacht, the German army, the Nazi army
Speaker 12: because you have the civilians there. In fact, that's exactly
Speaker 12: what the Allies did, through the cities of France and
Speaker 12: the cities of Germany, and many, many, many civilians were killed.
Speaker 12: I don't know what history would be like if you had,
Speaker 12: you know, the kind of mass communications that we have
Speaker 12: today in protests would have been launched against the Allies
Speaker 12: on behalf of the Nazis. Because because as the German
Speaker 12: chancellor who visited Israel and saw these these horrors, he said,
Speaker 12: Kamas are the new Nazis, Commas are the new Nazis.
Speaker 12: And people are demonstrating either out of ignorance, out of malevolence.
Speaker 12: They're protesting, yeah, for the wrong side.
Speaker 13: I mean it is. It was troubling to see massive
Speaker 13: protests in almost every major city in favor of a
Speaker 13: moss or well. They generally characterized it as sort of
Speaker 13: a free Palestine movement.
Speaker 5: And obviously a lot of international law was developed in
Speaker 5: the wake of World War Two and exactly what who
Speaker 5: was talking about. We sort of came to a consensus,
Speaker 5: at least a lot of the West came to a
Speaker 5: consensus and what was appropriate uses of some of these
Speaker 5: vastly power, more powerful new technologies.
Speaker 4: Military right now?
Speaker 6: Yes, like the world, including the West, said no. Dresden
Speaker 6: was not okay.
Speaker 4: Actually, and planes, by the way, are new in Dresden.
Speaker 5: We take it for somewhat for granted now, but like
Speaker 5: planes were within one hundred years of their existence.
Speaker 4: I mean decades way less.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we're trying decades into the existence of airplanes and
Speaker 5: are being used in completely foreign ways to wage war
Speaker 5: that humanity had never seen before in World.
Speaker 4: War One and World War two.
Speaker 6: Right, and so yeah, to go back and say that
Speaker 6: the things that the world like, they were actual not
Speaker 6: like the Germans were actual Nazis, Like you didn't have
Speaker 6: to stretch the like some weird comparison to say that
Speaker 6: all Ammas or Nazis or you know, actual Nazis. And
Speaker 6: even in that situation the West, like okay, if we
Speaker 6: had it to do over again, Dreasden is you know,
Speaker 6: fire bombing Dressden and killing how many tens of thousands
Speaker 6: of civilians with you know, for the sake of sowing
Speaker 6: terror was not actually necessary for the military and end goal.
Speaker 5: That was Elon Musk Withhu on X. They were doing
Speaker 5: a space's conversation on X. So this was a public
Speaker 5: back and forth. That's the audio that you just heard. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean I think it's it's again putting Elon Musk
Speaker 5: in this strange situation where I guess he's putting himself
Speaker 5: in the strange situation where we've seen the power that
Speaker 5: he has in Ukraine with Starlink, and then the tour
Speaker 5: with net Yahu is also extremely interesting because it's I
Speaker 5: think underscoring the power that he has with X And
Speaker 5: so he has this sort of like multi front on
Speaker 5: the Info war front, the Info operation front. He controls
Speaker 5: one of the most important, one of the largest platforms
Speaker 5: for social media for media now period. It's the public
Speaker 5: Square controls it. And on the other hand, he also
Speaker 5: controls and has the potential to control when it comes
Speaker 5: to at least in Ukraine. And I know there's talk
Speaker 5: about how Starlink can function in the future and be
Speaker 5: expanded and used the means to even engage.
Speaker 4: In that discourse.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And his point, Musk is this very very smart
Speaker 6: guy and so when he says like really dumb things,
Speaker 6: I always wonder.
Speaker 3: Like what on earth is going on?
Speaker 6: So he talked about the basically we need to re
Speaker 6: educate people in Gaza and then we need prosperity. I'm
Speaker 6: all with him on prosperity, Like basically the way that
Speaker 6: the troubles in Ireland, you know, wind up, is that
Speaker 6: the Ireland was given basic dignity but also economic growth
Speaker 6: and opportunity, and so the costs of joining you know,
Speaker 6: Shinfein were higher because you had actual economic opportunities. The
Speaker 6: cost of joining Hamas for a nineteen year old kid
Speaker 6: in Gaza is zero because it's like a seventy five
Speaker 6: percent unemployment rate. Now it's close to one hundred percent,
Speaker 6: and so what else do you have to do? Like,
Speaker 6: if you give people other options, they are.
Speaker 3: Going to take them.
Speaker 6: That's why you see kind of prosperity and peace and
Speaker 6: the end to conflict moving in Tantum.
Speaker 13: So.
Speaker 6: I think he's right on that the education point was
Speaker 6: just absurd. I interviewed a guy who went to school
Speaker 6: in Gaza a couple of weeks ago, and I actually
Speaker 6: asked him about what you hear about all the propaganda
Speaker 6: that Hamas and before them, you know, Fatah was giving
Speaker 6: to children in Gaza schools, and you read some of it,
Speaker 6: you're like, yeah, this is this is gross stuff, Like
Speaker 6: there's no doubt about it. He made the point, he's like,
Speaker 6: he's like, you really think that in a situation where
Speaker 6: you're living under a blockade where you have four hours
Speaker 6: of electricity to day, where your access to food and
Speaker 6: water is heavily restricted by the Israeli government, that you're
Speaker 6: unable to travel to visit your family in the West Bank,
Speaker 6: or visit your family in Saudi Arabia or Jordan. You
Speaker 6: can't leave for college, you get sick, you need treatment
Speaker 6: in a hospital, you can't leave Gaza. He's like, under
Speaker 6: those conditions, you think you need a teacher to create
Speaker 6: resentment in you for the Israelis Like how like what
Speaker 6: it takes only like one step backwards to think so?
Speaker 6: After Israel produces a famine of biblical proportions makes Gaza uninhabitable,
Speaker 6: what kind of education curriculum are you going to bring
Speaker 6: in and make the people who went through that believe
Speaker 6: that actually it was all okay.
Speaker 4: I mean, there doesn't seem to be it again.
Speaker 5: It's it's very hard to know how the public has
Speaker 5: reacted in Gaza to Hamas in the wake of October seventh,
Speaker 5: because obviously it's different, it's not all it's Gaza is
Speaker 5: not a monolith. The Palsenian people are not a monolith.
Speaker 5: At the same time, though there's a completely legitimate argument
Speaker 5: that they should be blaming Hamas for putting themselves in this.
Speaker 5: Hamas knew what it was going to trigger on October
Speaker 5: seventh and understood the response that was going to trigger,
Speaker 5: and it does always understand the response that it's going
Speaker 5: to trigger. It's intentional, and that I mean in terms
Speaker 5: of where the blame is laid in the last couple
Speaker 5: of months, in the last at least the last you know,
Speaker 5: since October seventh, that that has to be part of
Speaker 5: the equation. And I think that a lot of the
Speaker 5: indoctrination is to prevent that. And it's not to say
Speaker 5: that there aren't obviously there are legitimate grievances that people
Speaker 5: have in Gaza against Israel, There's no question about it.
Speaker 5: But I mean that's an important part of this puzzle,
Speaker 5: and I think that's why the Hamas propaganda comes in
Speaker 5: and tries to.
Speaker 4: Sort of be the block right.
Speaker 6: But the Palestinian Palestinians have seen this movie before in
Speaker 6: some ways, and so they know where this is going.
Speaker 6: So back back in the early eighties when Israel invaded
Speaker 6: Lebanon to clear the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the plot out
Speaker 6: of bay Rout after indiscriminate bombing of bay Rout, after massacres,
Speaker 6: after huge, huge numbers of civilian casualties, PLO basically waved
Speaker 6: the white flag and said, you know, we will leave.
Speaker 6: We will leave Beairut. And the Lebanese population at the
Speaker 6: time was like good like because this has brought this
Speaker 6: like massive like catastrophe onto us, and so there were
Speaker 6: a lot of there were a lot of Lebanese who
Speaker 6: kind of turned against the PLO. The PLO asked the
Speaker 6: United Nations in the United States to bring in kind
Speaker 6: of you know, peacekeepers and an international force to protect
Speaker 6: the civilian population. The US sit on at the request
Speaker 6: of Israel, said no, we're not going to do that,
Speaker 6: but we will take Israel's word that if you leave,
Speaker 6: there will not be you know, civilian massacres. And the
Speaker 6: PLO took them at their word. As soon as they
Speaker 6: as soon as the PLO shipped out of the port
Speaker 6: in Beirut, all of the foreign monitors left, Israeli forces
Speaker 6: came in uh leveled the place like horrifying civilian massacres,
Speaker 6: and decades long or almost decades long occupation followed. And
Speaker 6: so the as this started going on, the Lebanese people
Speaker 6: started thinking, hold on a second, maybe we like, maybe
Speaker 6: we don't actually want the only people who were capable
Speaker 6: of fighting back leaving. So I think that is also
Speaker 6: something that's playing out, Oh totally in God, Like, yeah,
Speaker 6: they don't, they don't. You know a lot of Palestinians do,
Speaker 6: obviously are finding themselves in a situation of how on earth?
Speaker 6: But if if a Maas just leaves do they do
Speaker 6: they trust that Israel is going to come in and.
Speaker 3: Just peacefully rebuild the place now?
Speaker 5: And again that's where we get into Quagmar territory, and
Speaker 5: it's where we get into this question of like, how
Speaker 5: have they proven?
Speaker 4: How has any of the United States proven that.
Speaker 5: The eradication the destruction of Hamas is possible here.
Speaker 4: In all sincerity?
Speaker 5: And so we without having that, it looks like, you know,
Speaker 5: it's it's headed for. There's there's nothing that's going to
Speaker 5: happen right now that's breaking any cycle.
Speaker 4: It's just not going to be.
Speaker 5: It's not breaking the cycle, it's it's perpetuating the cycle.
Speaker 5: Nothing here is going to change, and we have no
Speaker 5: plan to anything that will change because you're not eradicating Hamas,
Speaker 5: you're not destroying Hamas. And if you do, say you
Speaker 5: do that, what comes into the vacuum. We also have
Speaker 5: absolutely no plan for except for more violence.
Speaker 6: The only people that seem to have a plan, the
Speaker 6: only faction that seems to have a plan, are the
Speaker 6: ones who say we're just going to lock this completely
Speaker 6: down and we're going to basically empty out the population
Speaker 6: one where or the other of the gods strip right,
Speaker 6: which will then only leave a handful of West Bank
Speaker 6: regions to just keep under perpetual lockdown. Like that, that's
Speaker 6: the only endgame that seems to make any sense. And
Speaker 6: I'm using the words sense in a neutral way, not
Speaker 6: as something that anybody ought to support, but anything else,
Speaker 6: any other endgame does not seem plausible given what's being done.
Speaker 4: Right, No, I agree.
Speaker 5: Then what's worse is that we're not being given anything
Speaker 5: clear anyway. And that's because they know, I mean, it's
Speaker 5: like it's a completely feudal exercise to say like, oh, yes,
Speaker 5: we have this very clear path to peace, we have
Speaker 5: very clear path.
Speaker 4: To a better situation. There isn't one, and that's why
Speaker 4: we're not hearing.
Speaker 6: Right, and roughly even populations between Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Speaker 6: Means that you'd have to have a huge either outflow
Speaker 6: of population elsewhere into other Middle Eastern countries or the
Speaker 6: deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order for
Speaker 6: Israel to be actually able to carry out an occupation,
Speaker 6: because if you have population of seven eight million trying
Speaker 6: to occupy a population of seven to eight million, you
Speaker 6: can't do that, you know, sustainably and indefinitely, because you
Speaker 6: also have need those seven million people to run an
Speaker 6: economy and.
Speaker 3: To be a country. You can't just be a prison.
Speaker 5: It's no minor difference between Biden and Nyah who Biden's
Speaker 5: saying two state solution, two state solution, and yah who's saying,
Speaker 5: I'm not budging on this period, there's no two state solution.
Speaker 5: To have the two leaders say that within such close
Speaker 5: proximity to each other on the same day. Again, it's
Speaker 5: not surprising if you follow both of these governments, but
Speaker 5: it's it should be shocking to the sort of conscience
Speaker 5: of where this hot war, hot conflict is going in
Speaker 5: the near future.
Speaker 6: And to finish up with Elon Musk, we can put
Speaker 6: this last element up. Musk had suggested that he was
Speaker 6: going to make Starlink available to Gaza humanitarian outfits. The
Speaker 6: Israel pushed back and said, no, do not, do not
Speaker 6: do that because Tamas will end up using starlink. And
Speaker 6: so Israel has now told Elon Musk that Starlink can
Speaker 6: only operate in Gaza with its approval.
Speaker 12: You know.
Speaker 6: Their quote is basically, you know, any operation of Starlink
Speaker 6: within Israel, you know, must have the permission of Israel,
Speaker 6: and that includes Gaza, which contradicts there kind of earlier
Speaker 6: claims that Gaza is like independent and that they've left
Speaker 6: it right.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, just to the you know, we're what
Speaker 5: we're almost two months into this hot conflict. We're coming
Speaker 5: up on the first week of December, which we'll make
Speaker 5: it two months.
Speaker 4: And you know, the New York Times.
Speaker 5: Had a staggering again not particularly surprising, but a staggering
Speaker 5: report on the proportion the apparent proportion of civilian deaths
Speaker 5: in this conflicts.
Speaker 3: Because women and children making up like eighty percent.
Speaker 5: From yeah, I mean from several different ways that people
Speaker 5: have have sort of crunched these numbers and analysts have
Speaker 5: looked at them, and it is by what the information
Speaker 5: we have available right now, it does not compare favorably
Speaker 5: to other conflicts. It does not compare favorably to Fallujah,
Speaker 5: the US prosecution of the Iraq War and Fallujah. Even
Speaker 5: there where there's high civilian casualties, what we're seeing right
Speaker 5: now appears to be a really, really a much worse
Speaker 5: proportion of civilian dust to militant dusts to fight or dust.
Speaker 5: It's hard to know, I get it. These these numbers
Speaker 5: are difficult. Although Ryan, you guys at the Intercept have
Speaker 5: actually earlier in the conflict, you were able to validate
Speaker 5: some of the.
Speaker 4: Numbers that were coming out.
Speaker 5: But all that is to say, when you have that
Speaker 5: situation juxtaposed with the lack of direction from these governments,
Speaker 5: the lack of clear sort of paths forward, it's just
Speaker 5: it's a disaster.
Speaker 6: And we might find And how horrifying is this that
Speaker 6: the proportion of civilian casualties carried out by the Israeli
Speaker 6: assault on Gaza will be higher than the proportion of
Speaker 6: civilian murders by Hamas.
Speaker 3: On October seventh.
Speaker 6: And that is not at all to defend or minimize
Speaker 6: what Hamas did on October seventh. What what it does
Speaker 6: do is it puts in context the brutality of what
Speaker 6: Israel is doing here. If Hamas even had a lower
Speaker 6: proportion of civilian deaths in what we all agree it
Speaker 6: was a horrifying atrocity, then what does this count as.
Speaker 4: Ryan on this question of a ceasefire.
Speaker 5: There's new reporting in the intercept about how Democrats in
Speaker 5: Congress are handling the question of where we go from here.
Speaker 5: Take us through a little bit of what you guys
Speaker 5: have learned from Bernie Sanders yesterday, yes when he was
Speaker 5: questioned by Daniel bogus Law YEP.
Speaker 6: Senate Democrats yesterday met and discussed whether or not to
Speaker 6: condition aid to Israel. My colleague Bogus Law talk to
Speaker 6: Bernie Sanders ahead of time, and Sanders said that you
Speaker 6: can put.
Speaker 3: Up this element here.
Speaker 6: I think it's c one said that he was considering
Speaker 6: forcing a vote onto the Senate floor condition conditioning aid.
Speaker 6: Now this comes as Senator Peter Welsh, the other Senator
Speaker 6: from Vermont, has called for an indefinite ceasefire. Representative Becka Ballot,
Speaker 6: who's the only member of the House from Vermont, has
Speaker 6: called for a ceasefire and has signed on to that resolution,
Speaker 6: leaving Bernie Sanders is the only elected official from Vermont
Speaker 6: who is not called for a ceasefire. And so the
Speaker 6: question then becomes, what would Sanders do with regard to this, this,
Speaker 6: this vote on conditioning AID. Now any if Sanators is
Speaker 6: watching this, or if any of his staff are watching this.
Speaker 6: There actually is only one way that I know of
Speaker 6: to force a vote on conditioning AID, and that's the
Speaker 6: Foreign Service to Act Subsection five OO two B, and
Speaker 6: I think it's only been used once in fifty years.
Speaker 6: And it's different than the lay He Law. The lay
Speaker 6: Hey Law says that the United States government cannot give
Speaker 6: military assists and security assistance to units that are engaged
Speaker 6: in human rights abuses. But that's only enforceable by the
Speaker 6: State Department. In the State Department, obviously it has no
Speaker 6: intention of enforcing that at the moment. There is a
Speaker 6: provision that under five oh two B that would allow
Speaker 6: any Senator and then so not just talking to Bernie
Speaker 6: Sanders or anybody in the Senate.
Speaker 3: We'll ask Ted Cruz if he.
Speaker 6: Wants to introduce this when he comes here later today.
Speaker 6: Any Senator can put a privileged resolution on the floor
Speaker 6: that it has to sit in the committee for ten days.
Speaker 6: After ten days come out of the Committee and then
Speaker 6: you vote on it. If it passes the Senate, it
Speaker 6: would force then the State Department to take thirty days
Speaker 6: to conduct a study of whether or not Israel is
Speaker 6: engaged in a pattern of human rights abuses, and if
Speaker 6: they are, then a congressional resolution of disapproval would be privileged,
Speaker 6: would get a vote on the floor. So Sanders actually
Speaker 6: does have a path like he can do this if
Speaker 6: he is serious about wanting to put people on the
Speaker 6: record on the question of funding unchecked human rights of abuses.
Speaker 5: So the day after Thanksgiving, he said he told reporters
Speaker 5: that conditioning AID is quote a worthwhile thought, and said,
Speaker 5: I don't think if I started off with that.
Speaker 4: This is Biden, though, this is Biden.
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, great, So that he said we'd have ever
Speaker 5: gotten to where we are today, which was to your
Speaker 5: point earlier in the show about Biden's argule even Biden's
Speaker 5: So what he said publicly versus what he said.
Speaker 3: It seems like Bernie is not willing to go further
Speaker 3: than Biden. It seems like.
Speaker 5: But I think that also reflects Bernie's stance on this,
Speaker 5: that he thinks this is sort of an attack to
Speaker 5: whole I don't want to say neutrality, but almost the
Speaker 5: sort of neutrality and the question of a ceasefire, not
Speaker 5: a neutrality in the conflict, but this question of a ceasefire.
Speaker 5: That it's helpful to have a public stance that allows
Speaker 5: you some more wiggle room privately.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think Bernie has just really dug in.
Speaker 6: And he's not someone who is you know, who really
Speaker 6: takes pressure from the left, well right, he doesn't. I mean,
Speaker 6: he doesn't take pressure well from anybody. He's he's very
Speaker 6: he's an he's an independent minded person.
Speaker 4: You talked about some of that in the book that
Speaker 4: in the Squad.
Speaker 3: Go get that, Go get the book.
Speaker 6: And uh, you know he a lot of his family
Speaker 6: was wiped out in the Holocaust. He took you from
Speaker 6: people close to him, you know, he took the October
Speaker 6: seventh massacres, you know, extremely hard as as I think
Speaker 6: it's easy to say that we all did, but you know,
Speaker 6: I think for for for some you know, who have
Speaker 6: that that experience, that that experience and that heritage, no,
Speaker 6: it hits, it hits even harder, incredibly, And so it
Speaker 6: was it was visceral for him and then and he
Speaker 6: is he is not like I said, he's not somebody
Speaker 6: that responds well to pressure from the left. So you've
Speaker 6: you've just seen him kind of digging in, and then
Speaker 6: you've seen the left, uh, you know, pushing harder and
Speaker 6: harder on him, because there's such a dissonance between the
Speaker 6: Bernie Sanders that people think they know and the Bernie
Speaker 6: Sanders of of this moment.
Speaker 3: So this is a live question.
Speaker 6: Now if he says he's considering the bare minimum, which
Speaker 6: is to say, our security assistance should not be used
Speaker 6: for what we all acknowledge, our human rights abuses, international
Speaker 6: war crimes like that. Should that shouldn't be a difficult
Speaker 6: step for him to take.
Speaker 5: Now, you've been following John Federman very closely throughout his
Speaker 5: his young political cameritment, especially over the last couple of months.
Speaker 4: When you can put this next element up on the
Speaker 4: screen here, Obviously people have seen.
Speaker 5: The images of John Feedder, not this one from the
Speaker 5: oh right, So this is John Fetterman. Ryan's going to
Speaker 5: get into this in a second. But if you're looking
Speaker 5: at the screen right now, this is some background. It's
Speaker 5: really helpful context and background on John Fetterman's approach the
Speaker 5: question of Israel super pack support, APAC support and all
Speaker 5: of that. So let's take a look at this vo
Speaker 5: and then Ryan, you can walk us through some of
Speaker 5: the background. This is John Fetterman's office where he has
Speaker 5: speaking of you incredibly visceral reactions that a lot of
Speaker 5: Jewish Americans especially have had to October seventh. This is
Speaker 5: pictures of the hostages on the wall of John John
Speaker 5: Fetterman's Senate office.
Speaker 4: Now, John Fetterman, as.
Speaker 5: We've talked about a little bit here, is is definitely
Speaker 5: Ryan a man of the left.
Speaker 4: Has been right sort of populist left.
Speaker 5: This is he's not just sort of cautiously like Bernie
Speaker 5: staking out a different position from the left on this.
Speaker 5: He was draped in the really flag at the demonstration,
Speaker 5: the Perriginal demonstration here in DC recently, and he has
Speaker 5: done that not just literally but also rhetorically and with
Speaker 5: his votes throughout the course of the last couple of months.
Speaker 5: Give us a little bit more background about as people
Speaker 5: just saw up on their screen, the Connor Lamb dilemma,
Speaker 5: the super packs that came into the race, what explains
Speaker 5: John Fetterman. In fact, we can put the tweet up
Speaker 5: from Ryan because Ryan has been following this on Twitter, right.
Speaker 6: This comes from my new book that's out next week.
Speaker 6: And so during the twenty twenty two campaign, when he
Speaker 6: was running for Senate, he had to fend off not
Speaker 6: just a primary challenge, but also a Republican because it's
Speaker 6: a swing district.
Speaker 3: And so I'll just read a little bit of that.
Speaker 6: Fetterman was locked and what threatened to be a tight
Speaker 6: primary race with the Representative Connor Lamb for the Senate nomination.
Speaker 6: Lamb's campaign was openly pleading for super Pac support to
Speaker 6: put him over the top. Early in the year, Jewish
Speaker 6: Insider reported Mark Melman, who was the head of d MFI,
Speaker 6: had reached out to Fetterman with questions about his position
Speaker 6: on Israel. It's Democratic Majority for Israel Democratic activist Brett
Speaker 6: Goldman told Jewish Insider, quote, he's never come out and
Speaker 6: said that he's not a supporter of Israel, but the
Speaker 6: perception is that he aligns with the squad more than
Speaker 6: anything else. So Melmann said, the Fetterman campaign responded to
Speaker 6: his inquiry and quote came with an interest in learning
Speaker 6: about the issues. Following the meeting, the campaign reached out again.
Speaker 6: Then they sent us a position paper which we thought
Speaker 6: was very strong, Melman said, but it wasn't quite strong enough.
Speaker 6: Jewish Insider reported that DMFI emailed back some comments on
Speaker 6: the paper, which quote Fetterman was receptive to addressing in
Speaker 6: a second draft. In April, Fetterman agreed to do an
Speaker 6: interview with Jewish Insider.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 6: I want to go out of my way, he said,
Speaker 6: to make sure that it's absolutely clear that the views
Speaker 6: that I hold in no way go along the lines
Speaker 6: of some of the more fringe or extreme wings of
Speaker 6: our party. I would also respectfully say that I'm not
Speaker 6: really a progressive in that since Betterman unprompted stress that
Speaker 6: there should be zero conditions on military aid to Israel,
Speaker 6: that BDS which isott the boycott movement toward Israel, that
Speaker 6: BDS was wrong, and so on. Quote let me just
Speaker 6: say this, even if I'm asked or not, I was
Speaker 6: dismayed by the Iron Dome vote, he added. As a result,
Speaker 6: DMFI and APEX stayed out of his race. Now, I
Speaker 6: think some of this goes to explain where he has
Speaker 6: wound up on this issue because he has both a
Speaker 6: Democratic primary to worry about or at the time, and
Speaker 6: now he has a general election to worry about next
Speaker 6: time he runs in Pennsylvania Senate. But I do not
Speaker 6: think it explains everything, because he's been kind of the
Speaker 6: most vocal. Yeah, he's an advocate of Israel.
Speaker 4: Like it's clearly a sincere.
Speaker 6: There's something more going on than just just this.
Speaker 5: Well, and I can imagine, you know, the pictures of
Speaker 5: the hostages. For example, we were just talking about how
Speaker 5: incredibly visceral the witnessing what happened on October seventh was
Speaker 5: for a lot of people who descend from Holocaust survivors,
Speaker 5: his families, as you mentioned Bernie Sanders, where a lot
Speaker 5: of his family has wiped out. The hostages here are
Speaker 5: are really I completely understand him putting their pictures up
Speaker 5: in his office. I mean that is, you know, the enduring,
Speaker 5: not even symbol, because it's beyond symbolic.
Speaker 4: I mean, it is symbolic, but it is.
Speaker 5: The enduring symbol and the enduring you know, example of
Speaker 5: Hamasa's specific culpability.
Speaker 4: In October seventh.
Speaker 5: John Fetterman, on the other hand, though, for the sort
Speaker 5: of the way that he's handled this, it is really
Speaker 5: really interesting that he seems to almost relish right being
Speaker 5: anti populist Left when he so relished being pro populous left,
Speaker 5: and the rest of his campaign he really wasn't shy,
Speaker 5: and I actually think that's why he won. I think
Speaker 5: he's the sort of model electoral popular And I don't
Speaker 5: mean that, you know, in any I mean that in
Speaker 5: a sort of like a literal sense, that the path
Speaker 5: for populous victory, as I see it, is you're not
Speaker 5: not pretending you aren't in favor of medicare for all,
Speaker 5: not pretending that you have a more centrist position on
Speaker 5: any of these issues. So for Fetterman, it is particularly
Speaker 5: interesting for.
Speaker 6: Him, right and right, I think, you know, calling for
Speaker 6: the hostages to be released, I think is something that
Speaker 6: basically everybody can agree with, like.
Speaker 3: At least the hostages. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 6: It's it's the inability, it seems, or the unwillingness to
Speaker 6: say anything about or anything significant about the catastrophe and Gaza, Right,
Speaker 6: that's the part I think that that has people kind
Speaker 6: of shaken that like wow, Like okay, you want to
Speaker 6: wear an Israeli flag at the at the rally.
Speaker 3: Okay, you know you want to, you know you want to.
Speaker 6: Even he saw anti war protesters on the street and
Speaker 6: a bunch of veterans getting arrested and he waved an
Speaker 6: Israeli flag like in their face as they were getting arrested. Like,
Speaker 6: all right, that's a little bit over the top, but
Speaker 6: I get it. But if you couple that with at
Speaker 6: least expressions of concern for the Palestinians facing a slaughter
Speaker 6: that is kind of orders of magnitude greater than what
Speaker 6: happened on October seventh, then at least you can sense
Speaker 6: the humanity in the situation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Hamash should release the hostages. There shouldn't have to
Speaker 5: be a negotiation. Hamash should release the hostages.
Speaker 6: You can condemn hamas but also condemn collective punishment of
Speaker 6: two million people.
Speaker 4: This is you know.
Speaker 5: So the House of Representatives took a vote last night
Speaker 5: on an resolution that was build as basically just a
Speaker 5: pro Israel resolution and an anti like Holocaust resolution, a
Speaker 5: very just like sort of symbolic gesture that the House
Speaker 5: does every so often. Two votes were not for it.
Speaker 5: One was a present vote from Rashida Salib. The other
Speaker 5: was an outright no from Thomas Massey, who took issue
Speaker 5: reasonably so with a part of the bill that reads
Speaker 5: it rejects or it recognizes the House of Representatives recognizes
Speaker 5: that denying Israel's right to exist is a form of
Speaker 5: anti Semitism.
Speaker 4: Massy said, I'm voting.
Speaker 5: No on the resolution because it equates anti Zionism with
Speaker 5: anti Semitism. Anti Semitism is deplorable, but expanding it to
Speaker 5: include the criticism of Israel is not helpful. And the
Speaker 5: reason I brought that up is just because two things
Speaker 5: can be true at the same time. We can have
Speaker 5: two different positions or two positions on different issues at
Speaker 5: the same time and acting like they're constantly mutually exclusive.
Speaker 4: I get having priorities.
Speaker 5: I get that the priorities, and I think the priorities
Speaker 5: here should be the hostages.
Speaker 4: Again.
Speaker 5: That's why I understand Fetterman having them on his wall.
Speaker 5: That can be true, and it can also be true that,
Speaker 5: as The New York Times documented this week, the proportion
Speaker 5: of civilian casualties is disgusting and unacceptable. You don't have
Speaker 5: to pick one or the other. Let's move on to
Speaker 5: Nikki Haley. Nikkia Haley scored the coveted Coke Brothers endorsement
Speaker 5: yesterday when the conservative group Americans for Prosperity came out
Speaker 5: and gave her their steal of approval in the twenty
Speaker 5: twenty four presidential election. We can go ahead and put
Speaker 5: the first, the first element up on the screen here.
Speaker 5: So this is a headline from the New York Times.
Speaker 5: Coke network endorses Nikki Haley in bid to push GOP
Speaker 5: past Trump. All right, Ryan, this is actually pretty interesting.
Speaker 5: Let's let's roll DeSantis's reaction here. This is another tear sheet.
Speaker 5: The DeSantis camp reacted by putting out a press release
Speaker 5: immediately that said, the Dsanta's campaign congratulates Donald Trump on
Speaker 5: securing the Coke endorsement. Congrats to Donald Trump on securing
Speaker 5: the Coke endorsement.
Speaker 4: Like clockwork, the.
Speaker 5: Pro open borders, pro jailbreak bill establishment is lining up
Speaker 5: behind a moderate who has no mathematical bathway of defeat
Speaker 5: the former president. Every dollar spent on Nicki Haley's candidacy
Speaker 5: should be reported as an in kind to the Trump campaign.
Speaker 5: That's from the DeSantis comms director Andrew Romeo, and I
Speaker 5: will add Ryan, it is pretty interesting for a couple
Speaker 5: of reasons.
Speaker 4: One, it's a Pete Amy twenty twenty move.
Speaker 5: It's an attempt to consolidate the field because in a
Speaker 5: state like New Hampshire and actually even in Iowa. If
Speaker 5: you put together the anti Trump votes for other candidates,
Speaker 5: that will generally in polling that means Trump will have
Speaker 5: a much harder time that you don't have Trump over
Speaker 5: that fifty percent threshold in early states. So if you
Speaker 5: can consolidate the votes, then you can have this like
Speaker 5: last gasp attempt to get get in and potentially undermine Trump.
Speaker 4: NICKI. Haley is a hawk.
Speaker 5: The Cookes are not Americans for Prosperity and stand together
Speaker 5: the broader Coke Network are not hawkish on foreign policy.
Speaker 5: They have this very sort of traditiontional libertarian approach to
Speaker 5: foreign policy and to immigration. As the Desanta's campaign slammed
Speaker 5: the pro open borders Americans for Prosperity, And that brings
Speaker 5: me to the third point, which is that this is
Speaker 5: highly sort of unusual, but not in any way surprising,
Speaker 5: because over the course of the last ten years, Americans
Speaker 5: for Prosperity went from being a really consensus celebrated tea
Speaker 5: party group to being what now is decried by one
Speaker 5: of the leading presidential campaigns as pro open borders.
Speaker 4: Blah blah blah.
Speaker 6: The DeSantis campaign seemed quite salty. There were they hoping
Speaker 6: that they were going to get the Cope endorsement.
Speaker 5: I don't think so, and I actually don't think anybody
Speaker 5: really wants it. But on the other hand, The New
Speaker 5: York Times lays out how it could be helpful for
Speaker 5: Nikki Haley, who has this somewhat of a surge in
Speaker 5: New Hampshire where she's basically overtaken Dysantis in some poles
Speaker 5: in New Hampshire, and she's you know, feels like she's
Speaker 5: on a surge, and states like Iowa, South Carolina obviously
Speaker 5: now that Tim Scott has dropped out, that's extremely helpful
Speaker 5: to her in early states.
Speaker 4: So that comes with.
Speaker 5: AFP's infrastructure, and so the one thing that Nikki Haley
Speaker 5: didn't have. You know, it doesn't matter that much if
Speaker 5: the polls are going at you know, five points in
Speaker 5: one direction or the other if you don't have a
Speaker 5: ground game. So this matters to the extent that it
Speaker 5: can give her a ground game to say this really
Speaker 5: already has that in some of these early states, especially
Speaker 5: in Iowa.
Speaker 3: How did the Koch square.
Speaker 6: The foreign policy question there is like do they they
Speaker 6: just don't like Trump so much?
Speaker 3: They say that they're just.
Speaker 6: They they'll take someone who one hundred and eighty degrees
Speaker 6: opposite of them when it comes to American adventurism abroad.
Speaker 5: I think so this is a memo, they say in
Speaker 5: sharp contrast to recent elections that were dominated by the
Speaker 5: negative baggage of Donald Trump and in which good candidates
Speaker 5: lost races that should have been one Nicki Haley at
Speaker 5: the top of the ticket, with boost candidates.
Speaker 4: Up and down the ballot.
Speaker 5: Haley is quote the key independent and moderate voters that
Speaker 5: Trump has no chance to win. I think that means
Speaker 5: the key to independent, moderate voters the moment, we requires
Speaker 5: face to tested leader with governing judgment and policy experience
Speaker 5: to pull our nation back from the brink. The country
Speaker 5: is being ripped apart by extremes on both sides.
Speaker 6: Which basically folks are saying that they're upset that they're
Speaker 6: extremes on both sides after spending the last three decades
Speaker 6: funding like extreme element of well.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's kind of interesting because the ex.
Speaker 3: They're all trying to find who did this, Like they're huge.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they were huge Tea Party funders because the Tea
Speaker 5: Party the question was limited government, quote limited government, and
Speaker 5: so their hope was that you know, they don't think
Speaker 5: they got behind like a Christin O'Donnell, but you know,
Speaker 5: you can find any number of people. Their hope was
Speaker 5: that these sort of cultural conservatives would keep the social conservatism,
Speaker 5: the cultural conservatism, on the back burner, and would you know,
Speaker 5: they would be able to convince people, you know, to
Speaker 5: do Gang of eight stuff. They would be able to
Speaker 5: convince people, and that's a reference to immigration. They'd be
Speaker 5: able to convince people to do all of the pro
Speaker 5: business stuff.
Speaker 4: Get those tax cuts.
Speaker 5: They got those tax cuts in fact, by the House
Speaker 5: and the Senate in twenty seventeen the president. I don't
Speaker 5: know how much money they put into the presidential election,
Speaker 5: but they got.
Speaker 3: Those tax cuts when Trump pays them.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, they got those tax cuts in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 4: So it depends.
Speaker 5: I mean, they're pro business extremism, sure on other issues
Speaker 5: they are totally moderate. Which is why it's much more
Speaker 5: easy for DeSantis to come in now and say to
Speaker 5: try to drive a wedge because Nikki Haley has a
Speaker 5: coke endorsement, and I actually think running ads connecting Nikki
Speaker 5: Haley to the pro open Border's coke network is not
Speaker 5: helpful to her whatsoever.
Speaker 4: In Iowa or New Hampshire.
Speaker 6: And we also have a very bizarre debate coming up
Speaker 6: between two people who sort of are running for president.
Speaker 6: One of them is an official candidate for president, Ron DeSantis,
Speaker 6: who I think most people have forgotten is kind of
Speaker 6: still running, but he still.
Speaker 3: Hasn't dropped out.
Speaker 4: This is the next element.
Speaker 6: The other one is Gavin Newsom, who is not an
Speaker 6: official candidate for president, but I think people kind of
Speaker 6: take his candidacy at this point more seriously than they
Speaker 6: take Ron desantiss On. On the other side, Newsom is
Speaker 6: not going to do anything unless some unless Biden either
Speaker 6: you know, fades out, decides he's not going to run
Speaker 6: at the last minute, or drops out. We have like
Speaker 6: weeks left for that to even be remotely possible. And
Speaker 6: so to position himself in this kind of war for
Speaker 6: the kind of second you know, second tier position to
Speaker 6: get with with Kamala Harris and with others, there's going
Speaker 6: to be this debate. I guess why are they doing this?
Speaker 4: Well, an economist journalist.
Speaker 5: You just saw that economist element on the screen, the
Speaker 5: presidential matchup that isn't referring to DeSantis and Newsom. Uh,
Speaker 5: They asked Newsome why people should watch this debate between
Speaker 5: a presidential candidate and a governor who is not currently
Speaker 5: running for anything. And he said, quote, I don't know
Speaker 5: they should and a doing this sentiment.
Speaker 4: You know, it's supposed to on Thursday.
Speaker 5: It has been scheduled before, and it has been mixed before,
Speaker 5: And it's obviously a kind of a question for the
Speaker 5: RNC two if you want your one of your presidential
Speaker 5: candidates participating in this sort of extracurricular debate in the
Speaker 5: middle of debate season. There's another debate obviously coming up
Speaker 5: next week with the sixth that's going to be in Tuscaloosa,
Speaker 5: the University of Alabama. So it's just a strange situation.
Speaker 5: I don't think anybody really wants it. I'm sure it'll
Speaker 5: be interesting because news in particular, you know, news in
Speaker 5: particular is a showman. DeSantis really is not a showman.
Speaker 5: But if you want to see a clash of the
Speaker 5: sort of younger standard bearers of the centrist Democrats, I
Speaker 5: guess he tries to be a sort of progressive in spirit.
Speaker 4: So if you want to see.
Speaker 5: The clash between a spiritual progressive and I.
Speaker 6: Think what he really channels is like the id of
Speaker 6: the Democratic resistance that wants to see kind of Republicans
Speaker 6: rhetorically punching the I agree, probably actually literally sometimes. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and so people loved his interview with Hannity where he
Speaker 6: really really gave it to Hannity. It doesn't matter like
Speaker 6: kind of what the response is in some of these debates.
Speaker 6: What I'm realizing is that people just want kind of
Speaker 6: mean and clever things said to the face of the opposition,
Speaker 6: no matter what the opposition, Like the opposition can have
Speaker 6: a great retort or not, but as long as you
Speaker 6: kind of throw that first punch, then people are like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: I mean.
Speaker 5: I want these sort of ideas to clash in public
Speaker 5: as much as as humanly possible. And I've talked about
Speaker 5: this before, like the famous John Stewart moment where he
Speaker 5: told Tucker Carlson and Paul Bagala that Crossfire was like
Speaker 5: ruining America and everyone sort of clapped and cheered and said,
Speaker 5: this is exactly what we needed.
Speaker 4: I've always disagreed with that.
Speaker 5: I think that it's not helpful to push these conversations
Speaker 5: and to not be able to model public debate, even
Speaker 5: you know, among people who disagree with each other, hate
Speaker 5: each other, and even among people who get really theatrical
Speaker 5: with it and make it into a show. I mean,
Speaker 5: I think that's important for the public to see. I
Speaker 5: think it's important for people in politics to be able
Speaker 5: to do like even just going through the motions. I
Speaker 5: think it's important. And to see the clash of ideas I.
Speaker 4: Think is important. So I'm glad that they're doing it.
Speaker 5: But it's extremely weird, and I think it just speaks
Speaker 5: to the fact that Gavin Newsom knows that anything could
Speaker 5: happen to Joe Biden at any given moment. Ronda Santis
Speaker 5: knows that he knows the same thing could be true
Speaker 5: of Donald Trump, who is facing four indictments.
Speaker 3: That's true. Everyone's just hanging out hoping.
Speaker 5: And people are Yeah, people are desperate, desperate to find
Speaker 5: anything that just completely removes Donald Trump from the race,
Speaker 5: at least his name from the ballad, even though it's
Speaker 5: to loom heavily over the race. So that's where we
Speaker 5: are right now. Nobody likes the situation between the presidential matchups,
Speaker 5: and I really also don't think anybody likes the situation
Speaker 5: between Newsom and DeSantis. So that's but this is what
Speaker 5: we get.
Speaker 6: The United States Senate is trying to find money for Ukraine,
Speaker 6: and to do so Emily, they're turning to immigration policy.
Speaker 6: Tell us what's going on with these negotiations.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so again obviously when we were covering what happened
Speaker 5: with Kevin McCarthy and ended in the speakership of Mike Johnson. Again,
Speaker 5: he continues, we will bring you updates week by week
Speaker 5: on whether Mike Johnson continues to be a real person.
Speaker 5: He is, in fact a real person. We can confirm
Speaker 5: that as of this week. We'll bring you an update
Speaker 5: next week if that changes. But Mike Johnson is now
Speaker 5: in the situation of basically negotiating against the government shutdown.
Speaker 5: He wants to do sort of a tiered omnibus system,
Speaker 5: what they.
Speaker 4: Call it ladder, which is new.
Speaker 5: You've never seen that in all your time covering congresson Imagine. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's sort of a legislative parliamentary innovation. But one of
Speaker 5: the ways that Republicans are trying to force Democrats to
Speaker 5: the table is making them pass what was Hr two
Speaker 5: in the House, a very tough immigration bill that I
Speaker 5: think actually probably would have been a consensus left right
Speaker 5: type of legislation twenty years ago, but no longer is
Speaker 5: because we have massive waves of migrants we've never seen
Speaker 5: before coming up through Central America and into Mexico, And
Speaker 5: so it's now a political football in a way it
Speaker 5: wouldn't have been before it reforms the asylum system. There
Speaker 5: may be a bargaining chip, and I say that in
Speaker 5: a way that it's a tragedy that I'm saying it,
Speaker 5: But there may be a bargaining ship with DACA immigrants,
Speaker 5: which is condant.
Speaker 3: How can we get a pathway deicizenship? And nobody else would.
Speaker 5: Right, But will Republicans let a pathway decizenship for the
Speaker 5: DACA kids who are not really kids anymore.
Speaker 4: Becomesties and forties now, yes, So all that is to.
Speaker 5: Say Republicans think rightfully. It's pathetic that Democrats support the
Speaker 5: Biden administration's immigration policy, and a lot of this does
Speaker 5: need to go through Congress because the Biden administration is
Speaker 5: just acting with executive authority that can be reformed via Congress.
Speaker 5: And so they're saying, this is our demand, this is
Speaker 5: our bargaining chip, this is our uh, this is our
Speaker 5: condition for passing your omnibus budget deal to avoid a
Speaker 5: government shutdown. Mike John's and wants to push it into January.
Speaker 5: There's not a lot of time to figure this out.
Speaker 6: Basically, right, And so Chris Murphy is the Democrat leading
Speaker 6: the negotiations on the Senate side. Murphy, though, his priority
Speaker 6: is Ukraine funding, right, And so you're hearing a lot
Speaker 6: of anger from folks, particularly Pablo Manricus has been reported
Speaker 6: has been reporting this on Capitol Hill saying that so
Speaker 6: the Hispanic senators are not happy having Chris Murphy kind
Speaker 6: of giving away the farm on immigration in order to
Speaker 6: get Ukraine money.
Speaker 3: At the same time, though, you've got then.
Speaker 6: The Republicans on the right in the House thinking that
Speaker 6: there's not enough in the Senate immigration provision.
Speaker 3: So where is this going to head?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 5: That's one of the big remaining questions. And actually we
Speaker 5: can put the element up, the next element up on
Speaker 5: the screen here. This is the Associated Press's coverage. Republicans
Speaker 5: want to pair security with aid, border security with aid
Speaker 5: for Ukraine. Here's why that makes the deal so tough.
Speaker 5: It's about also immigration and enforcement, so funding, and this
Speaker 5: is where Biden has definitely come to the table, and
Speaker 5: this is what's really upsetting some of the Republicans in
Speaker 5: the kind of Freedom Caucus circles and conservative movement circles.
Speaker 5: Biden is saying basically that I'm going to come to
Speaker 5: the table on funding you know, CBP, I'm going to
Speaker 5: come to the table. I'm going to fund border patrol.
Speaker 5: I'm going to fund all of these security measures.
Speaker 3: Buy more four wheelers right for the border.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly, exactly, And so that gives Biden a huge
Speaker 5: rhetorical win. He can say that he struck a deal
Speaker 5: with Republicans because you need a filibuster.
Speaker 4: Proof majority in the Senate for this to pass.
Speaker 5: Obviously, Republicans control the House, so you would obviously Democrats
Speaker 5: have a huge contingency in the House, but you would
Speaker 5: need a lot of Republicans. It would have to be
Speaker 5: a bipartisan deal in the House as well. So Biden
Speaker 5: can strike a deal with Republicans that lets him say
Speaker 5: he support a tougher border, a tougher border policy. And
Speaker 5: all of that comes without reforming asylum wall, which if
Speaker 5: you've if all the immigration issue closely, whether you're on
Speaker 5: the left or on the right, without changes to our
Speaker 5: asylum law, there will continue to be a humanitarian crisis
Speaker 5: at the border. That is at the bottom line, that's
Speaker 5: game over. That there's no period, there's no other question
Speaker 5: that you can even bring up in that space. So
Speaker 5: the sort of Freedom Caucus people that pushed out Kevin
Speaker 5: McCarthy and are sort of, you know, begrudgingly swallowing the
Speaker 5: Mike Johnson pill are furious because it gives Biden a
Speaker 5: rhetorical win on border security without actually doing a damn
Speaker 5: thing for the border. Now, let's put this quote up
Speaker 5: on the screen. This is exclusive to us here at
Speaker 5: Counterpoints Breaking Points. This is from a senior student staffer
Speaker 5: who told us last night Republican Side Republican sident staffer,
Speaker 5: it's not about the border, it's about a fig leaf
Speaker 5: for funding Ukraine. And that's how Mitch McConnell. But I
Speaker 5: kind of joked with the source. I was like, I'm
Speaker 5: just going to attribute this to Mitch McConnell, because that's
Speaker 5: miss McConnell is probably saying that in private, like this
Speaker 5: is our figurey for funding Ukraine.
Speaker 4: It's transparently obvious. That's what they're doing, right.
Speaker 3: They want money for Ukraine.
Speaker 6: They have to figure out a way that they can
Speaker 6: get Republicans to feel good about voting for it, and
Speaker 6: so go after immigrants a little tiny bit, right.
Speaker 5: And this is again from the AP piece. They were
Speaker 5: saying Bind's emergency request to Congress included aid for Ukraine, Israel,
Speaker 5: and other US allies along with fourteen billion dollars bolster
Speaker 5: the immigration system and border security.
Speaker 4: So again it's about the.
Speaker 5: Israel emergency request too, And that was a huge sort
Speaker 5: of dust up with Jade Vance on the Senate side,
Speaker 5: who was specifically saying they're trying to tie Ukraine to
Speaker 5: Israel because they know that their support for Israel funding
Speaker 5: and that support for more and more money in Ukraine
Speaker 5: is really becoming difficult for them to sell back home.
Speaker 6: Right, So they're just trying to find things that you
Speaker 6: can rope to Ukraine funding and kind of drag it
Speaker 6: through Congress. Already, you've got Heritage Action, When can put
Speaker 6: up this third element here? You've got Heritage Action right
Speaker 6: wing organization and saying HR two is the only solution
Speaker 6: to securing the border. It's the kind of a preemptive
Speaker 6: shot at these negotiations, and they're warning that what the
Speaker 6: Senate Republicans are coming up with is too moderate and
Speaker 6: should not be kind of enough of a carrot to
Speaker 6: drag Ukraine funding across the finish line.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I want to read this article from the
Speaker 5: Hill just as of yesterday, they say no government funding
Speaker 5: bills are scheduled to hit the House floor this week,
Speaker 5: and their headline is actually GP faces ominous signs and
Speaker 5: effort to avoid January shutdown. Basically, so this is the
Speaker 5: emergency funding request. But it's all tied together because these
Speaker 5: are all different chips and they're all different pieces of
Speaker 5: the puzzle to get to a funded government. Because if
Speaker 5: Mike Johnson is gone in the middle of this negotiation,
Speaker 5: which is totally possible because there's still one person motion
Speaker 5: to vacate, then you go into a shutdown. And I
Speaker 5: don't think Democrats. I mean, the incentive for Democrats is
Speaker 5: its shutdowns are a gift to them politically, so they
Speaker 5: don't have a ton of incentive. It doesn't look great
Speaker 5: for Biden, you know, they obviously want to avoid that.
Speaker 5: But Republicans always get blamed for a shutdown, sometimes reasonably
Speaker 5: so because Republicans say, please blame us for the shutdown, like,
Speaker 5: look at us, we shut down the government. So the
Speaker 5: incentives to actually make a deal on this both politically
Speaker 5: and on the policy front are basically zero, right.
Speaker 6: And this is all happening as we've gotten new revelations
Speaker 6: over the last few days that the negotiations that were
Speaker 6: taking place in Turkey between Ukraine and Russia in March
Speaker 6: of twenty two were actually as close to reaching a
Speaker 6: peace deal as some people suspected at the time. Later
Speaker 6: torpedoed basically, you know, by the US and buy the
Speaker 6: UK the famous Boris Johnson visit Kiev in which he
Speaker 6: pushed Selenski, you know, to not sign any truth agreement.
Speaker 6: The question of whether you know, Russia was serious about
Speaker 6: it and would have been willing to actually reach a
Speaker 6: truce at that point remains open. But what we're hearing
Speaker 6: from a key leader in the Ukrainian negotiations that it
Speaker 6: was extremely it was extremely close at the time that
Speaker 6: Russia at at the moment was looking for a way out.
Speaker 6: Now Here we are almost two years later, with the
Speaker 6: US trying to figure out how to kind of jam
Speaker 6: up Congress to push through tens of billions of more
Speaker 6: for a war that has seen you know, so many
Speaker 6: people killed on each side.
Speaker 5: And yeah, I mean, we can just kind of end
Speaker 5: with this quote from Mario Diaz Billart, so the Hill rights.
Speaker 5: As the funding fight drags on, Senior appropriators worried that
Speaker 5: the House GOP will be weak on footing, will be
Speaker 5: on weak footing and inner chamber negotiations if the Conference
Speaker 5: continues to struggle with clearing its conservative spending bills. Diaz
Speaker 5: Bilart says, my goal is to move the most conservative
Speaker 5: bills we can out of the House to put us
Speaker 5: in the best possible negotiation position with the Senate. But
Speaker 5: if we can't pass, we don't get the Republican votes
Speaker 5: to do conservative bills. HR two was a bill that
Speaker 5: the House Republicans passed earlier. That's one of those bills
Speaker 5: that kind of fits into that strategy. So this is
Speaker 5: all connected and it's all a disaster.
Speaker 4: That's basically all you need to know.
Speaker 5: There you go, Ryan, I don't know if you found
Speaker 5: this Black Friday stats, these.
Speaker 3: Black Friday Yes I stuff going on here.
Speaker 5: It really is interesting and I was actually specifically curious
Speaker 5: to hear your thoughts on it because it seems pretty troubling,
Speaker 5: and we have covered a couple of times, for example,
Speaker 5: credit card delinquency spiking. It was one of those really
Speaker 5: frightening indicators of where the economy could be going.
Speaker 4: We got more of that just from Black Friday data.
Speaker 6: You have some interesting contradictions in this economy. Most people
Speaker 6: who are experiencing it, who are in the economy, are
Speaker 6: telling posters that they feel like it's much worse than
Speaker 6: it has been in recent years. Yet we continue to
Speaker 6: keep getting data points, you know, suggesting that people are
Speaker 6: feeling good about it.
Speaker 3: One of them.
Speaker 6: You can put this up here Business Insider. Americans broke
Speaker 6: a record for spending on Black Friday and then, but
Speaker 6: it's just hiding a bigger problem for the economy now.
Speaker 6: Consumer spending is often looked at by economists as a
Speaker 6: gauge for how people are genuinely feeling about the economy.
Speaker 6: Two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, twenty ten,
Speaker 6: people really pulled back there. They're dining out there, and
Speaker 6: they're spending in general because they felt much more precarious
Speaker 6: than they had two thousand and seven, two thousand and six,
Speaker 6: and they're squirreling money away for potentially getting laid off
Speaker 6: and for and you know, for other calamities that they
Speaker 6: see coming as a result of the economy. You're not
Speaker 6: seeing that at this point, you're seeing spending, you know,
Speaker 6: remain robust, but then there are these other problems underneath
Speaker 6: the economy.
Speaker 3: What do you make of those?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean this is so the data is actually
Speaker 5: from Adobe, and there's this new I mean it's not
Speaker 5: entirely new. People have seen it for years, probably by
Speaker 5: now pay later function on light Way. Yeah, it's yeah,
Speaker 5: it's digital lightweight. So this is from Business Insider, they say.
Speaker 5: According to Adobe, which tracks online sales, online shopping on
Speaker 5: Black total nine point eight billion, which was actually up
Speaker 5: seven point eight percent from last year. That's kind of
Speaker 5: a part of why this is concerning. Adobe estimates US
Speaker 5: shoppers will further spend as much as twelve point four
Speaker 5: billion on Cyber Monday. Though that said, they continue well.
Speaker 5: The increase in spending was predicted for the holiday season.
Speaker 5: What is worsome is how Americans are paying for the items.
Speaker 5: Many are paying via by now pay later platforms such
Speaker 5: as Klarna or after Pay, which you see when you're
Speaker 5: online shopping obviously when you're checking out, they say. Compared
Speaker 5: to last year, Klarna observed nearly a thirty percent increase
Speaker 5: in orders placed by US shoppers on Black Friday this year.
Speaker 5: On items such as food mixers, TVs, and coffee makers.
Speaker 5: And that's according to data that they shared with Business Insider,
Speaker 5: that's a thirty percent increase.
Speaker 12: Now.
Speaker 5: According to Adobe, they say by now pay Later financing
Speaker 5: was up forty seven percent overall this Black Friday compared
Speaker 5: to last year in twenty twenty two, about ten percent
Speaker 5: of purchases on the day after Thanksgiving us buy now,
Speaker 5: pay later now. Obviously that could be because these options
Speaker 5: have gotten easier to use.
Speaker 4: There's no question about it.
Speaker 5: They're they're easier, they're quicker, they're more efficient. The sort
Speaker 5: of digital layaway has become much more seamless.
Speaker 6: It's so much more fun to do it that way.
Speaker 6: You're like, oh, wait, I just have to pay one
Speaker 6: hundred dollars a month right for a little while TV. Right,
Speaker 6: that seems better than this. Yeah, you can get a
Speaker 6: nice you keep doing that and then boom, yes.
Speaker 5: And that's so one of the interesting things is they
Speaker 5: said Black Friday spending may have been higher because spending.
Speaker 4: Prior to Black Friday was lower.
Speaker 5: Meaning people are looking specifically to shop deals because they
Speaker 5: feel like they need to shop deals. And obviously, you
Speaker 5: know Black Friday deals are great and cyber Monday deals
Speaker 5: are great, but it's definitely an indicator if that's shooting
Speaker 5: up and you have slower spending in the run up
Speaker 5: compared to other years, and then the spike both in
Speaker 5: credit card delinquencies and a spike to forty seven percent.
Speaker 5: I mean that efficiency alone does not explain.
Speaker 3: It, right.
Speaker 6: I think one of the best insights into what's going
Speaker 6: on in this economy comes from this new report by
Speaker 6: Lydia to pillis highlighted by Jeff Stein of the Washington Post.
Speaker 6: We can put up this element here for people who
Speaker 6: are just listening. It's what the economy looks like to
Speaker 6: Biden voters in swing states.
Speaker 3: And I want to zero in on the breakdown of
Speaker 3: by age.
Speaker 6: And so the question is, on the one hand, do
Speaker 6: you think the economy is excellent or good? On the
Speaker 6: other hand, do you think the economy is poor or
Speaker 6: only fair? People age eighteen to twenty nine, eleven percent
Speaker 6: of them call the economy excellent or good, while eighty
Speaker 6: nine percent on the other side saying it's.
Speaker 3: Poor or only fair.
Speaker 6: Almost unanimous from people eighteen to twenty nine, slightly slightly
Speaker 6: different for thirty to forty four. That's only nineteen percent
Speaker 6: versus eighty percent, So still overwhelmingly people under forty four
Speaker 6: consider the economy to suck. People sixty five and over meanwhile,
Speaker 6: say sixty two percent of them say that the economy
Speaker 6: is excellent or good. Thirty seven percent say it's bad.
Speaker 6: You saw some flip idiots on Twitter saying that this
Speaker 6: was all about TikTok, But if you look at home ownership,
Speaker 6: it also correlates here.
Speaker 3: If you look at the.
Speaker 6: Who has purchased a new home in the last couple
Speaker 6: of years, the average agent, I think is fifty eight
Speaker 6: or something like that. The wealth exists at the top
Speaker 6: in an environment age top too, right, in an environment
Speaker 6: where you had interest rates crash in twenty twenty, A
Speaker 6: lot of people who own homes refinanced in twenty twenty
Speaker 6: down to three percent or less, and so they are
Speaker 6: now sitting on thirty year loans with basically free money
Speaker 6: for the next thirty years.
Speaker 3: Interest rates are now then seven to eight percent range.
Speaker 3: So in order for.
Speaker 6: Somebody to buy a house in twenty twenty three compared
Speaker 6: to twenty twenty for the exact same house at say
Speaker 6: five hundred thousand dollars, you can do them. But it's
Speaker 6: you might have to pay an extra thousand dollars a month,
Speaker 6: and it depends on the size of the house, the
Speaker 6: size of the mortgage. Each one of those points above
Speaker 6: three percent adds hundreds of dollars a month. And so
Speaker 6: you have all of these people who are under you know,
Speaker 6: and even forty five to sixty four, fifty seven percent
Speaker 6: of those.
Speaker 3: Say the economy is poor.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so everyone under sixty four thinks the economy stinks.
Speaker 5: And I think it's an expectations versus reality, like mean
Speaker 5: come to life, because we have an expectation that the
Speaker 5: American dream is attainable to everyone. Upward mobility is attainable
Speaker 5: to everyone. And the very specific rungs of that ladder
Speaker 5: are a college education and then home ownership, and home
Speaker 5: ownership comes with you look at reasons people feel like
Speaker 5: they're not getting married, home ownership is actually listed as
Speaker 5: one of them. Student loans are actually listed as among
Speaker 5: those things. There's a ton of uncertainty this year about
Speaker 5: payment on student loans, and so you can understand I
Speaker 5: in that uncertainty, people might turn to things like buy now,
Speaker 5: pay later, because you're still paying. It's not that you're
Speaker 5: not making the purchase. It's just that you're managing your
Speaker 5: finances incrementally in ways that maybe make you.
Speaker 4: Feel more comfortable people say.
Speaker 5: Now, this is from the Business Insider article that eighty
Speaker 5: three percent of respondents studies have found pay off their
Speaker 5: buy now, Pay later programs on time, although, as they note, seventeen.
Speaker 4: Percent do not.
Speaker 5: And I think that also shifts the worst the economy gets,
Speaker 5: or I would expect it to shift, they write, compounding
Speaker 5: the problems that people tend to spend more when using
Speaker 5: buy now, pay later programs, suggesting overconfidence in what they
Speaker 5: can afford. A second research paper from the Social Science
Speaker 5: Research Network found that consumers spent twenty percent more when
Speaker 5: buy now, Pay Later was offered, especially on retail items.
Speaker 4: So combine that with.
Speaker 5: The fact that you're seeing a car and credit card
Speaker 5: loan delinquencies spike in recent months, not homeowner loans, which
Speaker 5: is so interesting to the point that you made, because
Speaker 5: the people who are buying homes right now are not
Speaker 5: in any it's a very different financial situation. The economy
Speaker 5: is so uneven. I shouldn't say they're not under any
Speaker 5: financial duress, but it's a completely different bubble. Basically like
Speaker 5: economic bubble that people live in.
Speaker 4: And so if.
Speaker 5: You're able to buy a home right now, you're probably
Speaker 5: also not experiencing the economy in the same way that
Speaker 5: other people are, where we're seeing delinquencies and spiking.
Speaker 4: It's actually really troubling time, I think.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and the one thing homeowners are facing is increases
Speaker 6: in property taxes because of reappraisals, because you've got this
Speaker 6: situation where you when you have home values rising, but
Speaker 6: you're not going to sell your home because nobody can
Speaker 6: buy it. But then you end up paying higher property
Speaker 6: taxes as a result of that. Everybody's getting squeezed. The
Speaker 6: economy is kind of broken. The housing market is like
Speaker 6: broken because of the fast move in interest rates. And
Speaker 6: when you have a crunch a shortage of housing and
Speaker 6: you make it harder for people to purchase housing, what
Speaker 6: you also do is then decrease the number of starts. Yeah,
Speaker 6: like it's counterproductive to driving down just driving down the
Speaker 6: cost of housing, because in order to do that, you
Speaker 6: need to create more housing, but the interest rate policy
Speaker 6: incentivizes fewer housing starts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, it's I mean, it's on that note, I
Speaker 5: think it's also just going back to expectations versus reality.
Speaker 5: The economy is broken, broken compared to what people understood
Speaker 5: the sort of social contract in America to be. So
Speaker 5: it's broken in a lot of different ways that you
Speaker 5: have these variables totally out of whack compared to where
Speaker 5: they used to be. But that also creates a situation
Speaker 5: where people say, I'm paying my taxes. I'm paying a
Speaker 5: lot of money in taxes, especially depending on where you live,
Speaker 5: and what I'm getting for. What I'm getting in return
Speaker 5: is insane costs of college, These lingering tens of thousands
Speaker 5: of dollars. The average college student graduates with around forty
Speaker 5: thousand dollars in student loan debt and then takes that
Speaker 5: with them in their first ten years of adult life
Speaker 5: into the workforce.
Speaker 4: So what the hell do you expect people to do?
Speaker 4: Of course, they're using buy now, pay later.
Speaker 12: All right.
Speaker 6: Well, up next, we're going to be joined by Texas
Speaker 6: Republican Senator Ted Cruz selling in a new book called Unwoke,
Speaker 6: something about cultural Marxism.
Speaker 3: We're going to maybe find out what that is.
Speaker 5: It's how to defeat Ryan Grimm's Cultural Mark good Luck.
Speaker 5: It's actually a book about how we can take the
Speaker 5: Lenin book off the shelf.
Speaker 3: Ever never happening.
Speaker 5: I like how he's lit up by the red As
Speaker 5: you pointed out the Christmas read nobody loved Christmas.
Speaker 4: Like Vladimir Lenin.
Speaker 3: You had Lenin staring at Cruz. Excellent.
Speaker 4: All right, we'll see you after this.
Speaker 5: What we're joined now by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas,
Speaker 5: who's also the author of the new book. It's called Unwoke,
Speaker 5: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America. You can see
Speaker 5: it up on your screen right now. Senator Cruz, thank
Speaker 5: you so much for joining.
Speaker 4: Us here in counterpoints.
Speaker 1: It's great to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 5: All right, so I want to start with a question
Speaker 5: that you've probably heard from critics. You were on Bill
Speaker 5: Maher recently on the Left over the course of the
Speaker 5: last couple of months. The book is called Unwoke again,
Speaker 5: as we just mentioned, and I'm curious, for example, when
Speaker 5: Elon Musk banned from the River to the Sea on Twitter,
Speaker 5: is that an example or what do you say to
Speaker 5: critics who would argue that's an example of conservative wokeness?
Speaker 5: Do you support banning that from Twitter?
Speaker 1: Look, I don't support banning really anything. I believe in
Speaker 1: free speech, and I think that there's a real difference.
Speaker 1: It's one of the things I talked about in the
Speaker 1: book between the left and the right. The approach of
Speaker 1: the radical left, the approach of the cultural Marxist is
Speaker 1: to use power and force and coercion to silence voices
Speaker 1: they disagree with. And by and large, conservatives, we're not
Speaker 1: looking to silence the left. I don't want to see Bernie,
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders or AOC silence. Frankly, I want to hear,
Speaker 1: have people hear what they say more because it's so idiotic. Look,
Speaker 1: I agree with John Stuart Mill the best cure for
Speaker 1: bad speech is more speech and so but at the
Speaker 1: same time time we need to understand the reason I
Speaker 1: wrote this book is what has happened in America. Look,
Speaker 1: millions of Americans across this country are looking at the
Speaker 1: state of the nation, going what the heck happened to
Speaker 1: the country we love? And what has happened is every
Speaker 1: major institution in America has been captured by the radical left.
Speaker 1: And what this book does is it explains that. And
Speaker 1: each chapter in the book focuses on a different institution.
Speaker 1: So it starts off with universities. I call universities the
Speaker 1: Wuhan lab of the woke virus. It's where it was created,
Speaker 1: it's where it mutated, it's where it's spread. From universities,
Speaker 1: the book goes to K through twelve education, then to journalism,
Speaker 1: then to government, then to big business, then to big tech,
Speaker 1: then to entertainment Hollywood, TV, movies, music, sports, then to science,
Speaker 1: and the last chapter in the book focuses on China.
Speaker 1: And I described China as a central nexus that is
Speaker 1: intertwined with all of them. And what the book does
Speaker 1: is really two things. Number One, it explains how and
Speaker 1: why these major institutions in America got captured by the
Speaker 1: radical left. But then, even more importantly, it lays out
Speaker 1: a positive, proactive battle plan for how we take these
Speaker 1: institutions back, because I think if we don't take the
Speaker 1: institutions back, we're going to lose our country.
Speaker 6: The taking of these institutions back, though sometimes seems to
Speaker 6: people like reverse cancel culture. Like my former colleague Glenn
Speaker 6: Greenwald has been a you know, kind of a has
Speaker 6: become this kind of big supporter of the rights, free
Speaker 6: speech kind of advocacy over the last several years.
Speaker 3: And I'm sure you've seen him.
Speaker 6: Recently, he's been extremely disappointed with the way that the
Speaker 6: right has responded to the Israel Palestine fine catastrophe. He wrote,
Speaker 6: for instance, conservatives pushing this safety rhetoric which isn't due
Speaker 6: to violence, but words should either apologize to the minority
Speaker 6: groups they mocked all these years, or realize they're suddenly
Speaker 6: endorsing such flamed victim narratives because a group they like
Speaker 6: is claiming it. So why hasn't there been more kind
Speaker 6: of public support for free speech in the last six weeks?
Speaker 1: So look, I think free speech is the right approach,
Speaker 1: and I support free speech for everyone. I support it
Speaker 1: for radicals, I supported for leftists who hate me. I
Speaker 1: support free speech for Hamas. Now I also support killing
Speaker 1: the terrorists so they can have free speech while they're
Speaker 1: in the grave. But if you engage in acts of terrorism,
Speaker 1: I emphatically support Israel's right to defend itself at a
Speaker 1: stated objective is they're going to eliminate Hamas. But when
Speaker 1: it comes to the US, actually, what's happening in universities
Speaker 1: in particular is a powerful illustration of what I explain
Speaker 1: in this book. It is cultural Marxism and you know,
Speaker 1: I've had lots of conversations in the last two months
Speaker 1: actually with with Just several weeks ago, I was talking
Speaker 1: with a very successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur who's a man
Speaker 1: of the left. He's been a democratic whole life, and
Speaker 1: he was expressing complete bewilderment. Where is all of this
Speaker 1: vicious anti semitism on the left coming from, whether it's
Speaker 1: in the squad in Congress, or whether it's on college campuses.
Speaker 1: And I explained, I said, look if you look at
Speaker 1: and the book on Woke explains this. Marxist started out
Speaker 1: with Karl Marx writing the Communist Manifesto, and he had
Speaker 1: a worldview that the world is in constant conflict, and
Speaker 1: it is in constant conflict between oppressors and victims. And
Speaker 1: Marx viewed things in a socioeconomic lens, and so the
Speaker 1: oppressors for Marx were the owners of capital, and the
Speaker 1: victims were the proletariat, the working men and women. And
Speaker 1: in the solution that Marx advocated for was the violent
Speaker 1: revolution of the proletariat of the victims to overthrow the
Speaker 1: oppressors and use government to force redistribute the wealth. Now,
Speaker 1: what I described in the book is how Marxists, starting
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties began infiltrating the universities and becoming tenured professors,
Speaker 1: becoming administrators, and from there we saw Marxism begin to mutate.
Speaker 1: It started off just plain vanilla Marxists, then it mutated
Speaker 1: on other axes. So you had, for example, the same
Speaker 1: frame of a press or victim, but they shifted it
Speaker 1: to race. And that's where critical race theory came from.
Speaker 1: Same idea constant battle, but based on races. They shifted
Speaker 1: it to gender and sexual orientation and gender identity. That's
Speaker 1: where things like queer theory came from. And what I
Speaker 1: explained to this fella I was talking to is I said, look,
Speaker 1: what is happening is very simple. For the radical left,
Speaker 1: they have coded Jews as oppresser's and they have coded
Speaker 1: Palestinians as victim, and therefore, for cultural Marxists, they support
Speaker 1: the violent revolution of the so called victims against the
Speaker 1: so called oppressors. It is part of what's been indoctrine.
Speaker 1: And you look at universities at these leftists who are
Speaker 1: radically protesting in support of terrorists who are committing atrocities
Speaker 1: that are unspeakable. That is a manifestation of the sickness
Speaker 1: that has taken over our institutions.
Speaker 6: Do you distinguish between opposition to Zionism and anti Semitism
Speaker 6: or do you believe that those are the I think.
Speaker 1: I think anti Zionism is anti Semitism.
Speaker 6: What do you I mean, what do you say to
Speaker 6: so many different Jewish groups who are who are who
Speaker 6: say that anti they are anti Zionists.
Speaker 1: So the ones that are our radical leftist organizations that look,
Speaker 1: there are fifty some odd Muslim nations on the face
Speaker 1: of the planet, there's one Jewish nation in the state
Speaker 1: of Israel. The modern state of Israel was formed coming
Speaker 1: out of World War II, coming out of the wake
Speaker 1: of the Holocaust, and it was formed on the premise
Speaker 1: that never again means never again, that we would not
Speaker 1: allow six million Jews to be exterminated by genocidal, racist maniacs.
Speaker 1: I think the Jewish people deserve to have a homeland
Speaker 1: that is theirs. Israel was historically a Jewish nation, going
Speaker 1: back thousands of years. I've walked in the city of David,
Speaker 1: I've walked on the streets where Jesus walked down the streets,
Speaker 1: and anti Zionists look when you see leftists chanting from
Speaker 1: the river to the sea, that means from the Jordan
Speaker 1: River to the sea. It literally means obliterate the modern
Speaker 1: state of Israel because they hate Israel and they want
Speaker 1: to eliminate the only Jewish nation in the world that
Speaker 1: is racist and genocidal. Now, you asked earlier, would I
Speaker 1: ban that statement. No, I'd allow people to say it.
Speaker 1: You know, members of the squad have tweeted out from
Speaker 1: the river to the sea. But the answer, I'd allow
Speaker 1: him to say it, but I wouldn't sit there quietly.
Speaker 1: I'd point out that you were calling for once again
Speaker 1: the extermination of millions.
Speaker 6: Of Jews, as I'm sure you know though in Lekun's
Speaker 6: platform it says, you know, from the river to the sea,
Speaker 6: there will only be Israeli sovereignty. Are they suggesting genocide
Speaker 6: of all Palestinians?
Speaker 3: Of course not exactly.
Speaker 6: So if they're If they're not, why is the other
Speaker 6: suggesting genocide?
Speaker 1: Because that's what Hamas supports. You know, I started yesterday morning.
Speaker 3: That's just restating it.
Speaker 1: Like about hold on, let me say yesterday morning, I
Speaker 1: started the day by watching a forty six minute video
Speaker 1: of the actual atrocities that Hamas committed, and about fifty
Speaker 1: senators watched it. You know, as you guys know, I
Speaker 1: do a podcast every week. It's called Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Speaker 1: I do it Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Today's podcast is
Speaker 1: all about that video, because yesterday morning and right about
Speaker 1: this time, I sat in a room and I watched
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirty seven people murdered. And most of
Speaker 1: the footage was taken from body cams or cell phones
Speaker 1: that the Hamas terrorists were carrying, and they were gleefully
Speaker 1: murdering civilians. They were murdering women, that were murdering children,
Speaker 1: and look, Hamas. I got to say, the most disconcerting
Speaker 1: thing I've I turned fifty three in December. In fifty
Speaker 1: three years of life on this planet, I've never had
Speaker 1: a day where I watched one hundred and thirty seven
Speaker 1: people be murdered. That's what I did yesterday. And when
Speaker 1: you watch people, the most disturbing thing was the joy,
Speaker 1: the glee from these terrorists. I'll tell you there was
Speaker 1: a moment on the video where one of the Hamas
Speaker 1: terrorists called his parents and the Israelis.
Speaker 3: Intercepted the k and we've heard of this one.
Speaker 1: And he calls his dad first of all, and he's says, Dad,
Speaker 1: I killed ten of them with my bare hands. And
Speaker 1: he's like so proud, and he's celebrating ten I killed ten,
Speaker 1: And he said, I want to talk to mom. Can
Speaker 1: I talk to mom?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And his mom gets on and he says, I killed
Speaker 1: ten Jews. I murdered them with my bare hands, and
Speaker 1: she begins crying with joy the twisted hate. Can you
Speaker 1: imagine calling your mother in celebration that you just murdered
Speaker 1: ten people and you're no proud of it and your
Speaker 1: mother is proud of you for doing it.
Speaker 6: And I know Emily wants to get a question, but
Speaker 6: on this point real briefing, whenever we've had critics of Israelan,
Speaker 6: we've kind of insisted that they condemned that, because while
Speaker 6: we disagree with a lot on the show, we also
Speaker 6: try to find kind of moral common ground and we
Speaker 6: can all agree that those types of atrocities need to
Speaker 6: be fully condemned. And with that in mind, we're going
Speaker 6: to read to you a couple of things that we've
Speaker 6: been hearing from the Israeli government. We've had Defense Minister Galant.
Speaker 6: We will eliminate everything, an IDF spokesperson. Our focus is
Speaker 6: on damage, not on precision. Agriculture Minister Avi Dikt. We
Speaker 6: are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba Gaza Nakba twenty
Speaker 6: twenty three.
Speaker 3: That's how it'll end.
Speaker 6: Israeli Heritage Minister I'mahailai, who said a nuclear bomb is
Speaker 6: quote one of the possibilities. A Finance minister Bezil Smochrich.
Speaker 6: We need sterile zones in the West Bank. Israeli President
Speaker 6: Isaac Herzog. It's an entire nation out there that is responsible.
Speaker 6: This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it's absolutely
Speaker 6: not true. They could have risen up, they could have
Speaker 6: fought against that evil regime. Another former Kannestant member, there
Speaker 6: is one and only solution, which is to completely destroy
Speaker 6: Gaza before invading it. I mean destruction like what happened
Speaker 6: in Dresden and Hiroshima without nuclear weapons.
Speaker 3: Would you join us in condemning that as well.
Speaker 1: So I condemn nothing that the Israeli government is doing.
Speaker 1: I stand with the people of Israel. And let me
Speaker 1: explain there is a qualitative difference. The Israeli government does
Speaker 1: not target civilians. They target military targets. The Israeli government
Speaker 1: has stated they're targeting.
Speaker 6: Then if they're so, they're actually not that they are,
Speaker 6: then they are targeting.
Speaker 1: No, they're exceptionally good at so. So for example, a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks ago, we had stories all over the
Speaker 1: world that Israel bombed a hospital in Gosen, killed five
Speaker 1: hundred Palestinians. Now it turns out that was a blatant lie.
Speaker 1: It was Hamas propaganda and if you break down literally
Speaker 1: every element of the story was a lie. So number one,
Speaker 1: Israel doesn't target hospitals Israeli.
Speaker 3: Why has so many hospitals been targeted.
Speaker 1: Because they haven't, because it's fault. Let's actually look at
Speaker 1: the facts. So Israel uses precision, precision guided munitions, they
Speaker 1: don't target hospitals. What ended up we discovered was the
Speaker 1: case it was the hospital. It was not an Israeli
Speaker 1: missile that took it out. It was a rocket from
Speaker 1: it actually wasn't as it was Palestinian Islamic Jahad. And
Speaker 1: you got to understand the terror rist in Gaza. They
Speaker 1: fire thousands of rockets. They have no guidance systems on them,
Speaker 1: so they literally put rockets. The rockets have some propulsion,
Speaker 1: They have an explosive they have typically ball bearings or
Speaker 1: nails or something designed to kill as many people as possible,
Speaker 1: and they fire them in the general direction of Israel,
Speaker 1: but they can't steer them once they fire them, and
Speaker 1: about twenty percent of them end up hitting Gaza. So
Speaker 1: it's the terrorists that are actually bombing Gaza. So it
Speaker 1: was it was a terrorist missile that hit. But number one,
Speaker 1: it wasn't from Israel. Number two, it didn't hit the hospital,
Speaker 1: hit the parking lot. Number three, five hundred people were
Speaker 1: not killed. All of that was a lie. And yet
Speaker 1: what happened and I talk about this in the book,
Speaker 1: but that's journalism. But look, so I can tell you
Speaker 1: there is no military on the face of the planet,
Speaker 1: including the US military, that goes to the lengths that
Speaker 1: the Israeli military does to avoid civilian cagety. So I'll
Speaker 1: give you.
Speaker 6: But the IDF said, our focus is on damage, not
Speaker 6: on presistent.
Speaker 1: Weeks damage to hamas to terrorists.
Speaker 6: And I they have said, they keep saying that what
Speaker 6: they're doing is what they're intending to do and here
Speaker 6: in the United States, but.
Speaker 1: That's simply not true. They are targeting the jar no,
Speaker 1: My focus is on damage, good damage Hamas. I want
Speaker 1: to utterly eliminate Hamas. And I'll tell you something Israel does.
Speaker 1: For example, so why are their Palestinian civilian casualties? The
Speaker 1: reason is because Hamas uses human shields. Hamas wants Palestinians killed.
Speaker 1: Look you look at the Hamas headquarters. It's in the
Speaker 1: basement of a hospital. They put it in the basement
Speaker 1: of a hospital.
Speaker 3: Why but they didn't find it there.
Speaker 1: They put it there because they want Palestinian mothers, children killed.
Speaker 1: They put missiles in kindergartens. And the reason is it's
Speaker 1: part of my podcast. I did an entire podcast that
Speaker 1: I that was entitled CNN is Hamas's Air Force, So
Speaker 1: is MSNBC, so is ABC, And I went through about
Speaker 1: a dozen stories where the corporate media just repeated Hamas
Speaker 1: propaganda and look, Hamas is not strong enough to defeat Israel,
Speaker 1: but they're counting on the useful idiots in the media
Speaker 1: amplifying their messages. So I'll tell you something that the
Speaker 1: IDF does. So, for example, if there's a building that
Speaker 1: they know they're Hamas terras in, they will drop initially
Speaker 1: what are called dud bombs, they'll drop a bomb on
Speaker 1: the top of that. They've done this in previous work
Speaker 1: that doesn't have an explosive and the dud bomb will
Speaker 1: thud on the roof, and they do it to tell
Speaker 1: the civilians get out. They also, by the way, they
Speaker 1: have every cell phone in Gaza, so they will text
Speaker 1: civilians lead. By the way, when Palestinian civilians try to leave,
Speaker 1: Hamas keeps them there. They want Palestinians to die because
Speaker 1: it is useful for propaganda. There's no military, by the way,
Speaker 1: the US military, when we're attacking our enemies, we don't
Speaker 1: drop dud bombs telling people to evacuated. It is only
Speaker 1: the IDF that does that.
Speaker 5: And so on that note, Because we have to wrap
Speaker 5: a hot conflict now in the Middle East again, is
Speaker 5: it time to endorse Donald Trump?
Speaker 4: Negotiator of the Abraham Courts.
Speaker 1: Look, I will say, President Trump, we had peace in
Speaker 1: the Middle East, and Joe Biden inherited peace and prosperity,
Speaker 1: and he utterly screwed it up. We went from peace
Speaker 1: and prosperity. We now have two wars. We have the
Speaker 1: biggest war in Europe since World War Two. We have
Speaker 1: the worst war in the Middle East. In over fifty years.
Speaker 1: And it's because having a weak and ineffective commander in
Speaker 1: chief is a train wreck. It doesn't work. And so listen,
Speaker 1: we're wrapping up. But I do want to encourage your viewers.
Speaker 1: The book is designed to number one. It's interesting and fun,
Speaker 1: it's filled with stories. It's not some abstract academic work.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting read. I want to encourage folks right
Speaker 1: now today. Pull out your phone, go online, go to Amazon,
Speaker 1: go to Barnes and Noble, to go, go to Books
Speaker 1: a million, buy the book. And I'll say this, Look,
Speaker 1: Christmas time is coming, so I'm going to coourage you
Speaker 1: buy more than one and and and in particular, it
Speaker 1: makes a great Christmas present. Look look, I mean literally,
Speaker 1: buy one for your mom, buy one for your best friend,
Speaker 1: buy one for your crazy left wing neighbor.
Speaker 3: Cultural Marxism will triumph if we don't.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right, And don't let Ryan win. And let
Speaker 1: me give you one one more example, which is buy
Speaker 1: one for your kids or your grandkids, because they need
Speaker 1: to understand the poison that that they're being indoctrinated for.
Speaker 1: And I wrote this book. I wrote this book for
Speaker 1: the same reason I do the podcast that we've got
Speaker 1: to engage in the battle of ideas, we've got to
Speaker 1: engage in substance and and and this book is designed
Speaker 1: to empower you to fight back, to take these institutions back.
Speaker 5: Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Told you have to wrap. Welcome to come back again.
Speaker 3: I look forward to that.
Speaker 4: Thanks so much.
Speaker 3: All right, that was Senator Ted Cruz.
Speaker 6: And the book is this Squad AOC and the Hope
Speaker 6: of a Political Revolution both that's actually it's actually my
Speaker 6: book which is out next week.
Speaker 4: Yes, consummate sales, but.
Speaker 3: It's right, he's on here to move those books.
Speaker 6: But if you buy mine instead, we can knock him
Speaker 6: off the best seller list.
Speaker 3: Wouldn't that be fun?
Speaker 5: That was one of the conversations that I have been
Speaker 5: waiting for. So we had this interview schedule for a
Speaker 5: couple of weeks ago. We had to cancel his book tour.
Speaker 5: The book tours are crazy, which you know obviously you've
Speaker 5: done it before. But that was actually one of the
Speaker 5: best I think clashes of both sides that I have
Speaker 5: seen in public debate throughout this entire uh, this entire conflict.
Speaker 5: And he was on a really tight schedule, so you know,
Speaker 5: it was it was sort of we were navigating that
Speaker 5: this shortened timeline. But at the same time, Brian I
Speaker 5: was content. Honestly, we had a lot of questions for him.
Speaker 5: I was actually content to listen.
Speaker 4: To your back and forth. I thought that was actually
Speaker 4: very helpful.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I didn't didn't mean the bigfoot it, but he
Speaker 6: just throws out so much different stuff, and we were
Speaker 6: being told he had to run. If people are like,
Speaker 6: why need you, you know, respond to every single thing,
Speaker 6: he said, that's.
Speaker 4: Why, because we could do an hour with him music.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and hopefully he'll come back for longer.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we appreciate him being here.
Speaker 6: We certainly what did you make of a he said,
Speaker 6: there is absolutely nothing Israel could do that he would condemn.
Speaker 5: I think when you read and the damage precision thing, again,
Speaker 5: it was a great question because that's not saying damage
Speaker 5: hamas precision, because if you were saying precision too, you
Speaker 5: would be seeing precision in reference to hamas.
Speaker 4: So that doesn't make sense to me.
Speaker 5: I think those questions, I think those points are extremely problematic.
Speaker 4: I do think it's unhelpful.
Speaker 5: As we talked about Thomas Massey, Republican from Kentucky saying
Speaker 5: earlier today to complaint anti conflaint, anti Zionism, and anti Semitism.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I mean I.
Speaker 5: Thought that was like a very useful At the same time,
Speaker 5: I mean, I think condemning Hamas and demanding Hamas release
Speaker 5: the hostages unconditionally is entirely recent.
Speaker 3: Sure do it, Yeah, release the hostages.
Speaker 5: By the way, we just appreciate everyone who subscribes. If
Speaker 5: you subscribe to the premium version of Breaking Points, you
Speaker 5: get this whole show early. You get the video totally uncut,
Speaker 5: and you know we don't just get the clips, you
Speaker 5: get the whole full show, so outros just like this one.
Speaker 5: But you also help make interviews like the one that
Speaker 5: we just did possible. Having some of the most powerful
Speaker 5: senators sit down for interviews with new media just a
Speaker 5: really important thing. And we appreciate all of your support
Speaker 5: so much.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And his book was called Unwoke, something about cultural Marxism,
Speaker 6: and you heard him perfect holiday present.
Speaker 5: Present, but not as perfect right as a squad out
Speaker 5: on December fifth.
Speaker 3: That's right, get it.
Speaker 4: Do it so many times. I can do it.
Speaker 3: That's what it's coming out. See you guys.
Speaker 6: I actually will be out of studio because I'll be
Speaker 6: in Los Angeles next week, so i'll be remote for
Speaker 6: the show next week, but I will see you guys
Speaker 6: from there. I'll actually be out at Hassan Piker's for
Speaker 6: his stream, so be sure to tune in for that.
Speaker 6: I'm sure that's going to be a lot of fun.
Speaker 4: Do you even know how to play video games?
Speaker 6: I mean I did in the nineties. There you go,
Speaker 6: all right, I still play like Mario Kart.
Speaker 4: We'll find out. Tune in next week.