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Speaker 1: All right, Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints.
Speaker 3: There was a massive crackdown on pro Palestime protesters on
Speaker 3: campuses across.
Speaker 1: The country, by pro Israel demonstrators.
Speaker 3: Out at UCLA and by pro Israel proxies NYPD over
Speaker 3: at Columbia University. We're going to unpack all of that, Emily.
Speaker 3: What else we've got today? Oh, we've got mugs.
Speaker 4: We have mugs. We have mugs. We can actually put
Speaker 4: this up on the screen. We are now a mug
Speaker 4: company with a news show. That's the that's I think
Speaker 4: the new mission. Yes, to sell mugs. That's what we're
Speaker 4: here to do. Counterpoints. Mugs made in the USA, Union decorated,
Speaker 4: even dishwasher safe available now awfully expensive.
Speaker 3: But if it makes you feel better. All of the
Speaker 3: money will be taken by middlemen, and very little we'll.
Speaker 4: Get to us. Well, it'll go to unions and US workers.
Speaker 1: That's true. So good middlemen, well organized middlemen. Good for them.
Speaker 3: We're going to talk about the Trump interview at Time Magazine.
Speaker 3: He has just an incredible ability to continue to make
Speaker 3: himself look bad in these interviews, put out positions that
Speaker 3: are just contrary to what the general public once.
Speaker 1: We're going to unpack a bunch of that. Is that
Speaker 1: an accurate reading.
Speaker 4: He's also really good at making journalists look bad, so
Speaker 4: like while he's making himself look bad. Yeah, it's ever one.
Speaker 3: Also, Joe Biden is moving to reschedule marijuana from Schedule
Speaker 3: one to Schedule three. We'll talk about when that's going
Speaker 3: to happen and what the implications of it are. Democrats
Speaker 3: are teaming up with Mike Johnson to make sure that
Speaker 3: there's no more drama around the speaker's race. They've announced
Speaker 3: that they will support him if Marjorie Taylor Green goes
Speaker 3: forward with her motion to vacate the chair so it
Speaker 3: would be tabled in a massive down vote for MTG.
Speaker 3: Weird development, interesting kind of uniparty in Congress Proud and
Speaker 3: then a friend of yours, author of Pagan America.
Speaker 4: Hagan America, which is what Ryan always says. Serious, this pagan.
Speaker 1: America, cribbing my America.
Speaker 4: Yes, right, it's America. But yeah, it'll be interested to
Speaker 4: hear some from the right. And John's got a super
Speaker 4: interesting new book out that we can talk about.
Speaker 5: Ryan.
Speaker 4: Some days we say we have a really big show,
Speaker 4: but we're just kind of saying that for the hell
Speaker 4: of it to have something to say. Today, we have
Speaker 4: a big never love, we would never lie. But you
Speaker 4: know it every shows a big show, of course, but
Speaker 4: this is really a big show. Because footage continues to
Speaker 4: roll in, like by the minute from these campuses. They
Speaker 4: were wild overnight. UCLA in particular, erupted into violent clashes
Speaker 4: last night with NYPD cleared out the Columbia encampment and
Speaker 4: the barricades. Let's start there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Columbia University.
Speaker 3: After the university attempted to clear out the encampment, there
Speaker 3: what protesters called an autonomous group of mostly students and
Speaker 3: some faculty occupied Hamilton Hall, which was the site of
Speaker 3: an ocy. We can roll some of this footage here,
Speaker 3: which is the site of the famous occupation in nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty eight by anti Vietnam War protesters. They renamed it
Speaker 3: hind Hall for the six year old Hindri Yab, who
Speaker 3: was the girl that many of you probably remember. She
Speaker 3: made the desperate, harrowing phone call to rescue workers saying
Speaker 3: that her entire family had been killed by the IDF
Speaker 3: and she was begging them to.
Speaker 1: Rescue her before it got dark. To rescue.
Speaker 3: Rescue workers were sent out to her as the world
Speaker 3: was kind of captivated by this intense situation. They'd learned
Speaker 3: only days later that the IDF had actually attacked the
Speaker 3: car again and attacked the rest workers and she had died.
Speaker 3: So the protesters renamed Hamilton Hall, named for Alexander Hamilton,
Speaker 3: hind Hall. Last night, a called a bear Mars mobile
Speaker 3: accessibility ramp system or something like that.
Speaker 4: You just saw this on your screen. In fact, it
Speaker 4: was that big truck.
Speaker 1: Like rolled up to the huge equipment from like a
Speaker 1: medieval or.
Speaker 4: From a highly industrial era where they have like an
Speaker 4: actual from what you saw on your screen, speaking of captivating,
Speaker 4: was NYPD walking up this sort of how would you
Speaker 4: even describe it? Like a ramp that's on top of
Speaker 4: the truck into the window of the building, and the
Speaker 4: other thing you saw on your screen there was a
Speaker 4: violent clash outside the hall as the protesters sort of
Speaker 4: tried to form human barricades to prevent the police from
Speaker 4: going in and clearing out the encampment that was sort
Speaker 4: of set up inside of the hall that you mentioned Ryan,
Speaker 4: that had been you know, everyone was seen by now
Speaker 4: the videos of the chairs being stacked in front of
Speaker 4: the doors and the students and other protesters formed the
Speaker 4: human chain. So you had NYPD going into the window
Speaker 4: several stories up, and then you had them also trying
Speaker 4: to clear people from that sort of human chain system
Speaker 4: at the bottom of the building. And that's what was
Speaker 4: unfolding at Columbia last night.
Speaker 3: And then so if people were following along on the
Speaker 3: Guardians live blog, for instance, they shut.
Speaker 1: It down for the night.
Speaker 3: They said, all right, everybody's been arrested, and the Columbia
Speaker 3: University is asking the NYPD to stay on campus effectively
Speaker 3: through the middle of May so that they can have
Speaker 3: their graduation. About an hour later, live blogs around the
Speaker 3: world popped back up because we can roll this here.
Speaker 3: Pro Israel rioters at UCLA began attacking the encampment at
Speaker 3: the University of California, Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: We have footage of that here if we want to
Speaker 1: roll some of that.
Speaker 6: Approaching plan beyond that, there's nobody else.
Speaker 1: In some of that footage. You may or may not
Speaker 1: have been able to hear it.
Speaker 3: The pro Israel mob was shouting at the one at
Speaker 3: the one guy outside the barricades there, you're by yourself.
Speaker 3: Right after they shouted your you're by yourself, several of
Speaker 3: them grab him, drag him out and start beating him
Speaker 3: rather rather mercilessly. Are also emerged footage of pro Israel
Speaker 3: protesters yelling at a woman. They yelled, you stand no chance,
Speaker 3: old lady. Let's roll that clip and you also heard
Speaker 3: f you old lady.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And there's photos actually also the fireworks there. Take note,
Speaker 4: I mean people just saw people launching fireworks into the
Speaker 4: encampment was a really dangerous thing to do. There's an
Speaker 4: image that someone, a photographer for the AFP, took of
Speaker 4: one of the counter protesters actually throwing a barricade or
Speaker 4: looking to throw a barricade in the direction of some people.
Speaker 4: You can see how completely dangerous this is. Now you
Speaker 4: may be wondering who these people are. We're wondering actually
Speaker 4: the exact same question. The protest group, the Ante Israel
Speaker 4: protest group on campus says, these are quote Zionist aggressors
Speaker 4: I'm reading from the NBC News lifelog here, who are
Speaker 4: not UCLA students that have been quote incessantly verbally and
Speaker 4: physically harassing us, violently trying to storm the camp and
Speaker 4: threatening us with weapons. Another update just this morning, the
Speaker 4: University of Arizona late yesterday that they responded to a
Speaker 4: quote unlawful assembly on campus by deploying a quote chemical
Speaker 4: irtant munitions or chemical irritant munitions. So there are forty Yes,
Speaker 4: that's probably a tear gresser of pepper ball type situation,
Speaker 4: but there are forty of these encampments more than that
Speaker 4: spread out around the country. And so this question about UCLA.
Speaker 4: If you now have you know, as they describe them
Speaker 4: as quote Zionist aggressors, if you now have counter protesters
Speaker 4: starting to come into these demonstrations, you have LAPD, you
Speaker 4: have NYPD in some of the schools in the bigger cities.
Speaker 4: This is a recipe for serious danger right now. That's
Speaker 4: I shouldn't say flourishing, but really it is flourishing, starting
Speaker 4: to spread, proliferate around campuses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and whether their students are not Zionist digressors probably
Speaker 3: is objectively true, like they're Zionists and.
Speaker 4: They're being aggressive. Yes, they might not even take issue
Speaker 4: with that description.
Speaker 1: It's just flatly true.
Speaker 4: But we don't know who they are, we don't know
Speaker 4: whether they're students. And this was similar actually to just
Speaker 4: last week when we were talking to Sofia Selfia, a
Speaker 4: student in the Colombia encampment who joined uslide from the broadcast.
Speaker 4: Even they are having a hard time determining who the
Speaker 4: sort of pro Palestine demonstrators are in some cases, whether
Speaker 4: they're students or when you're in a big city, it's
Speaker 4: just very easy for members of the community and hangers
Speaker 4: on to sow chaos.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's worth talking about the rhetoric that helped lead
Speaker 3: to this. We can put up this next element, the
Speaker 3: statement from President Biden that was put out just yesterday morning,
Speaker 3: Echoing some of his other statements. He said, President Biden
Speaker 3: has stood against repugnant anti Semitic smears and violent rhetoric
Speaker 3: his entire life. He condemns the use of the term antifada,
Speaker 3: as he has the other tragic and dangerous hate speech
Speaker 3: displayed in recent days. President Biden respects the right to
Speaker 3: free expression, but protests must be peaceful and lawful. Forcibly,
Speaker 3: taking over buildings is not peaceful, it is wrong, and
Speaker 3: hate speech and hate symbols have no place in America.
Speaker 3: Anti Fada, by the way, is an Arabic term for
Speaker 3: the uprising uh and it can It can mean violent
Speaker 3: or non violent, just just as uprising can be an
Speaker 3: up and uprising in English can be either violent or
Speaker 3: non violent. Somebody pointed out that the Holocaust Museum, in
Speaker 3: its Arabic translation, refers to the warsaw antifada.
Speaker 1: It's an uprising.
Speaker 3: So there's nothing, you know, there's nothing inherently violent about
Speaker 3: the word antifada. There's definitely nothing inherently anti Semitic about it.
Speaker 3: There are many people who receive that connotation, you know,
Speaker 3: when when they hear it.
Speaker 1: But this is because it's used in.
Speaker 3: Because the second Antifada did include you know, suicide bombings
Speaker 3: and and and serious violence, and that's the one that
Speaker 3: that most people are familiar with, rather than the kind
Speaker 3: of the term itself.
Speaker 1: But this is not the first time.
Speaker 3: Biden in the White House, you know, have have condemned
Speaker 3: these these protests in a blanket way as anti semitic.
Speaker 3: And so you can read this to me as a
Speaker 3: green light both to the NYP to do what they
Speaker 3: did at Colombia and also to the pro Israel mob
Speaker 3: and UCLA to do what they did. He has just
Speaker 3: just like the US in the kind of Israel Palestine conflict.
Speaker 1: We we claim that we're.
Speaker 3: Playing a role as a mediator, but we are one
Speaker 3: hundred percent on one side of the conflict. Here again,
Speaker 3: President Biden clearly signing one hundred percent kind of with
Speaker 3: the pro Israel protesters.
Speaker 1: And there has been virtually no violence.
Speaker 3: Whatsoever from campus protesters throughout throughout the several weeks of
Speaker 3: these encampments. There have been moments where you could say,
Speaker 3: you've seen some signs that have been anti semitic. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there have been some, you know, some like old protesters
Speaker 3: who have like you know, wandered nearby with like vile
Speaker 3: anti semitic signs, But there haven't been any accusations of
Speaker 3: any violence.
Speaker 4: Except any of them they did to get into the building,
Speaker 4: they smashed.
Speaker 1: They smashed their way into the building, no doubt.
Speaker 4: About that, And that was a I don't believe that
Speaker 4: the woman who did that was a student. I believe
Speaker 4: that this has been reported it was like a sixty
Speaker 4: three year old outside organizer who I mean, maybe that
Speaker 4: was the strategy to have someone else smash into with
Speaker 4: a hammer. I think it was into the building that.
Speaker 1: Was in sixty eight too, Like you had.
Speaker 3: Tom Hayden, for instance, was the lead organizer of the
Speaker 3: ninety sixty eight occupation, and he proudly called himself an
Speaker 3: outside agitator, like they would keep you know, these they
Speaker 3: would go from campus to campus, you know, helping the
Speaker 3: students organize.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and your point about Biden is a really interesting
Speaker 4: one because it's also Chuck Schumer who's come out and
Speaker 4: like condemned what was happening is quote unquote lawlessness. And
Speaker 4: again I mean, like it's correct that some of this
Speaker 4: absolutely is lawlessness. But to the Biden point, it speaks
Speaker 4: to the sort of political difficulties of Democrats in the
Speaker 4: United States who are trying desperately not to lose votes
Speaker 4: in dearborn right because they need Michigan, and so they
Speaker 4: put out statements like that one.
Speaker 3: But meanwhile, like the value of a news program like ours,
Speaker 3: I think is emphasized by moments like this, because are
Speaker 3: when they are covering this, just clashes erupted, no clue
Speaker 3: what happened one way or the other. New York Times
Speaker 3: writes after UCLA declared a pro Palestinian encampment illegal on
Speaker 3: Tuesday night, clashes broke out and administrators called in the
Speaker 3: police for help. The LAPD said that it was responded
Speaker 3: because of quote, multiple acts of violence within the large encampment.
Speaker 3: Those are words, those are sentences, but they convey no information.
Speaker 3: What's ironic is over at the intercept. A week or
Speaker 3: so ago, my colleague Jeremy Skhiale and I published their
Speaker 3: internal private style guide, which urged reporters not to use
Speaker 3: words like slaughter or massacre because they were imprecise, they said,
Speaker 3: and don't use the word occupied territory.
Speaker 1: That's imprecise. Say Gaza West Bank. Don't say occupied.
Speaker 3: They're charged, right, yeah, but they don't say they're charged.
Speaker 3: What they said in the memo is that they're imprecise.
Speaker 3: They say we for precision. They aim for precision. When
Speaker 3: they're trying to euphemize is rarely violence. When they're talking
Speaker 3: about when they're talking about the violence from last night,
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, the goal of precision just completely
Speaker 3: out the window.
Speaker 1: Just clashes broke out. Where's the precision?
Speaker 3: All of a sudden, the hunt for precision becomes a
Speaker 3: hunt for making the sentences as vague as possible so
Speaker 3: that people are just like ah, in that shame. All
Speaker 3: of these encampments broke out across the country, and now
Speaker 3: there's violence. It must must be the pro pousetating protesters
Speaker 3: getting violent.
Speaker 4: I think that's a really interesting contrast. Let's also roll
Speaker 4: this thing that we have from MSNBC. Lawrence O'Donnell was
Speaker 4: reacting live on MSNBC last night while they were doing
Speaker 4: a toss off. Let's roll this MSNBC last night.
Speaker 7: What we have seen on the videos so far is
Speaker 7: actually the most organized and calmest and most professional police
Speaker 7: intervention we've ever seen on a college campus.
Speaker 4: You know, that's a weird way to describe what happened
Speaker 4: last night. Ryan and I say that as somebody who
Speaker 4: comes to this from I think we probably disagree on this.
Speaker 4: I am sick of a being told that it's you know,
Speaker 4: anti Semitic to disagree with everything that Israel says like that,
Speaker 4: I'm so sick of it, and the same time, I'm
Speaker 4: sick of saying being told that it's like anti or
Speaker 4: that it's just a blanketly pro Israel thing to question
Speaker 4: any of these protests and people smashing into a hall,
Speaker 4: kids are trying to take finals, stacking up chairs, barricading themselves,
Speaker 4: forming human chains, and just like I'm sick of it,
Speaker 4: I think those people actually should be like, face consequences.
Speaker 4: That's what civil disobedience is. So I'm just sick of
Speaker 4: this like stupid binary And even then, looking at what
Speaker 4: was happening in New York last night and chextaposing it
Speaker 4: with Laurence O'Donnell is a hell of a contrast.
Speaker 3: Maybe it shows our sliding scale, because I guess if
Speaker 3: you compare the NYPD's aultarized response to what the intense
Speaker 3: police violence at VCU, for instance, or down at UT Austin,
Speaker 3: I guess it was less violent.
Speaker 1: But it also the kind of just.
Speaker 3: The optics of it, the gigantic siege equipment rolling through
Speaker 3: the street, the riot police, the counter terrorism units being
Speaker 3: brought in for students. They didn't wield batons like it
Speaker 3: was nineteen sixty eight. At the Chicago Convention or ut
Speaker 3: Austin like this week. But it still gives off the
Speaker 3: appearance of an extraordinarily authoritarian situation for college students and
Speaker 3: to just who are Yes, they smashed the windows, but
Speaker 3: they're not violent, they're not they're not they're not dangerous
Speaker 3: to other people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's why, By the way, it's also extremely unhelpful.
Speaker 4: And this is where I thought our interview last week
Speaker 4: with Sofia was really helpful, because it's very, very important
Speaker 4: to the point of precision to not just use these
Speaker 4: sort of blankets smears against the students. Actually wrote along
Speaker 4: piece in the Federalists about this a couple of days ago,
Speaker 4: because you end up completely misunderstanding what they're doing and
Speaker 4: misunderstanding what they say they're there to do. Crystal Sen's
Speaker 4: a great tweet this morning about how at Brown University
Speaker 4: handled their protests completely different. They actually just like held
Speaker 4: a vote on divestment and dealt.
Speaker 1: With schedule one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, they agreed to schedule vote, but like actually
Speaker 4: dealt with the demand that the protesters were making, which
Speaker 4: was very specifically divestment. That isn't to say they haven't
Speaker 4: broadened it, but the point of the encampment was to
Speaker 4: force a vote on divestment. And I get that if
Speaker 4: you give in to those protests, like you can create
Speaker 4: a bigger situation. But I think everyone on Columbia's university
Speaker 4: Columbia University's campus right now says this has been wildly
Speaker 4: mismanaged by the school. Whether you're on one side or
Speaker 4: the other, everyone agrees, like Colombia completely completely botched this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so Brown will hold a divestment vote in
Speaker 3: October of next year on whether to continue investing in
Speaker 3: general and Israeli companies or was it was is it
Speaker 3: specifically connected, Oh, it's I think it's fund specifically connected
Speaker 3: to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. As The New
Speaker 3: York Times reports, University of Chicago has also handled this
Speaker 3: in a much more kind of reasonable and civil way.
Speaker 3: They said, look that these this encampment is breaking our rules,
Speaker 3: but we also as a principal, support free expression. And
Speaker 3: as long as they're not disrupting people's ability to do
Speaker 3: their own expression, people's ability to get the class, as
Speaker 3: long as they're not endangering public safety.
Speaker 1: We're going to give some leeway here. We're going to.
Speaker 3: Encourage people to express themselves other ways, but we're not
Speaker 3: going to bring in a militarized response here.
Speaker 1: UCLA in some ways did the same thing.
Speaker 3: It was, but it was the kind of pro Israel
Speaker 3: demonstrators that that that escalated things last night, but only
Speaker 3: after you know, not only Biden's comments, but also UCLA
Speaker 3: itself saying okay, this is an illegal encampment that that
Speaker 3: seems to have given the counter protest there's the green
Speaker 3: light to go ahead and do what they did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I mean it's it's been like the University
Speaker 4: of Chicago response was I actually think kind of pitch perfect,
Speaker 4: and they've been doing pitch perfect responses to these type
Speaker 4: of things. They're like actually consistent in the free speech,
Speaker 4: free speech space. There's the University of Chicago letter that
Speaker 4: was some people may be familiar with actually like a
Speaker 4: really big deal when it started circulating almost ten years
Speaker 4: ago now, pushing back on some of the schools that
Speaker 4: were giving into crazy speech demands of the left. Actually,
Speaker 4: and so to see the consistency on this from places
Speaker 4: like universities, I have to see consistency heartening. Yeah, absolutely
Speaker 4: absolutely is.
Speaker 3: Last point I would make is to the protesters, particularly
Speaker 3: ones at UCLA and elsewhere who feel like their strategy
Speaker 3: of nonviolence is no longer effective, that it can't be
Speaker 3: effective in the face of this violent response. I would say,
Speaker 3: you know, effect of non violence is always met with violence. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but that is part of it's virtue. Like that is
Speaker 3: that is part of its value. It exposes the cruel
Speaker 3: face of the system that you're opposing.
Speaker 4: That is the fundamental premise of civil disobedience is the
Speaker 4: civility of it. And that's why those images are are
Speaker 4: so poignant from the American civil rights era of just
Speaker 4: abject stoicism on the faces of people who are, you know,
Speaker 4: confronting consequences for violating certain laws, but are doing it
Speaker 4: just stoically. And that's baked into the American narrative about
Speaker 4: how that changed hearts and minds that people believe so
Speaker 4: deeply in this that rather than giving in to the
Speaker 4: forces of inscibility, rather than you know, joining the people
Speaker 4: who as you know, we talked to Savia about this
Speaker 4: and talked to other students of Columbia about this. The
Speaker 4: hangers on who come with or even some of the
Speaker 4: students who say things that are legitimately calls for violence
Speaker 4: or are not civil instead of giving into that or
Speaker 4: returning it with violence. There's so much power to your point, Ryan,
Speaker 4: and remaining civil in the face of aggress Yes.
Speaker 3: So I would say stay true, stay true to your
Speaker 3: non violent values, not in spite of the violence, but
Speaker 3: you know, because of and in the face of the
Speaker 3: violence from counter protesters. Let's move on to the violence.
Speaker 3: Prime Minister Benjamin Nenyaho publicly addressing the rumors that he
Speaker 3: kind of got going that the International Criminal Court may
Speaker 3: launch charges against him and senior leaders of Israel for
Speaker 3: war crimes.
Speaker 1: Let's roll Nenyahu here.
Speaker 5: The International Criminal Court in the League is contemplating issuing
Speaker 5: arrest wants against senior Israeli government and military officials as
Speaker 5: war criminals. This would be an outrage of historic proportions.
Speaker 5: International bodies like the icy c arose in the wake
Speaker 5: of the Holocaust committed against the Jewish people. They were
Speaker 5: set up to prevent such ores, to prevent future genocides.
Speaker 5: Yet now the International Court is trying to put Israel
Speaker 5: in the dock. It's trying to put us in the
Speaker 5: dock as we defend ourselves against genocidal terrorists and regimes Iran.
Speaker 5: Of course that openly works to destroy the one and
Speaker 5: only Jewish state. Branding Israel's leaders and soldiers as war criminals,
Speaker 5: will pour jet fuel on the fires of anti Semitism,
Speaker 5: those fires that are already raging on the campuses of
Speaker 5: America and across capitals around the world. It will also
Speaker 5: be the first time that a democratic country fighting for
Speaker 5: its life according to the rules of war is it
Speaker 5: self accused of war crimes. The Israeli army, the idea,
Speaker 5: is one of the most moral militaries in the world.
Speaker 3: It takes endless measures to practivilians. We've heard that before.
Speaker 3: So the NENYAHUO pressured the US to come out publicly
Speaker 3: and defend Israel against the rumors that Israel peers to
Speaker 3: have started itself, that the ICC was coming at them,
Speaker 3: and the White House did. The White House said, we
Speaker 3: do not believe that the ICC has jurisdiction over Israel.
Speaker 3: Their argument they're making is that Israel has not signed
Speaker 3: on to the ICC itself. However, Palestinians have, and when
Speaker 3: the ICC launched charges against Vladimir Putin, the US applauded
Speaker 3: those charges. Russia is not a signatory to the ICC,
Speaker 3: but Ukraine is, and that is why the ICC has jurisdiction.
Speaker 3: If you are committing a crime against a member, a
Speaker 3: signatory of the ICC, then the ICC has jurisdiction whether
Speaker 3: you're a signatory or not. That was the principle that
Speaker 3: the White House believed when the ICC charged putin all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, that doesn't apply anymore in this case.
Speaker 3: Not long after the US gave that Yahoo the assurance
Speaker 3: that he wanted, that Yahoo came out and said that
Speaker 3: even if he cuts a hostage deal with Hamas, he
Speaker 3: is still going to launch an invasion into Rafa.
Speaker 4: It's very interesting to hear Net and Yahoo alluding to
Speaker 4: these sort of international rules that were largely agreed upon
Speaker 4: in the wake of the Holocaust, and he referenced that directly,
Speaker 4: and to see the way that they are used selectively
Speaker 4: and as blunt forced objects. I mean, it is exactly
Speaker 4: true that we all we've talked about this many times.
Speaker 4: We came together after World War Two, after the Holocaust,
Speaker 4: the level of industrial slaughter the world had never seen
Speaker 4: and stead this is and that's you know, includes things
Speaker 4: like Dresden and nuclear weapons. We came together and said
Speaker 4: there this is not sustainable for humanity, and these are
Speaker 4: the new sort of ethical again. Yeah, right, And these
Speaker 4: are the ethical guidelines that we'll look to going forward,
Speaker 4: and we agree with them when we want to agree
Speaker 4: with them, when it's blunt forth first object that we
Speaker 4: can use against enemies for the sake of our in
Speaker 4: foreign policy goals. And then we say, well, those are
Speaker 4: non binding or nobody signed on to that or whatever.
Speaker 4: It's just the sanctimony that goes behind the United States
Speaker 4: AND's allies in the West wielding them. Not just like
Speaker 4: the Putin thing is such a good example. I mean,
Speaker 4: it was just the level of credibility we assigned to
Speaker 4: it when we wanted to use it there. I mean,
Speaker 4: that's as good an example as you can get.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so much for the rules based international order.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, there's there's reporting where you can put up this
Speaker 3: next element that the US is contemplating accepting significant numbers
Speaker 3: of Palestinian refugees who were trying to flee Gaza. And
Speaker 3: what's fascinating about this news is that, you know, for
Speaker 3: the most part, we have accepted very few dozens of
Speaker 3: Palestinian refugees over the years, and when we have it
Speaker 3: is refugees who are claiming political asylum from Hamas, and
Speaker 3: HAMAS is a vindictive organization toward its critics absolutely, and
Speaker 3: so people who are kind of dissidence again and critics
Speaker 3: of Hamas like have some have been legitimately granted refugee
Speaker 3: status here in the United States.
Speaker 1: Not many, not many, like dozens.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I pulled the numbers last night. It's actually
Speaker 4: kind of shocking.
Speaker 1: Sixty something, what is it?
Speaker 4: Last ten years, US has resettled more than four hundred
Speaker 4: thousand refugees from CBS CBS fleeing violence, and in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty three fifty six Palestinian refugees, So that was points.
Speaker 4: There are nine percent of sixty thousand refugees in that
Speaker 4: twelve month period.
Speaker 3: Right, and so in order to in order to boost
Speaker 3: that number up to the number of people who need
Speaker 3: actual safe havens at this point, what the US would
Speaker 3: have to do is grant them asylum basically from themselves,
Speaker 3: because they would have to grant them asylum from Israel,
Speaker 3: from the idea, from the military campaign.
Speaker 4: They need Egypt's cooperation.
Speaker 3: But the legal rationale for accepting this many refugees from
Speaker 3: Gaza would be that they are persecuted by Israel and
Speaker 3: we are supplying the weapons and the political support and
Speaker 3: the global the global support for that very persecution which
Speaker 3: we are then going to give asylum against. So we'll
Speaker 3: be giving them asilum in our country against ourselves.
Speaker 1: Basically.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we talk about this when we talk about the border.
Speaker 4: So asylum is actually much more narrow category than it's
Speaker 4: often used. And then it's been used in our southern
Speaker 4: border in particular. So you have to prove that you're
Speaker 4: being targeted based on your nationality, religion, or your political views.
Speaker 4: And so you can see pretty easily how that argument
Speaker 4: can be made, and you can pull a million quotes
Speaker 4: from Israeli government on this point and talk about what's happened,
Speaker 4: you know, in your community in Gaza when you're applying
Speaker 4: for asylum. Now, they absolutely could still use hamas and
Speaker 4: you know they could, that could be the rationale that
Speaker 4: a lot of them give, but they could also you
Speaker 4: can see start making an argument in the other direction.
Speaker 4: And it reminds me, actually, Ryan of how the US
Speaker 4: sanctioned that unit of the idea recently. Is like it's
Speaker 4: the same sort of strange circular logic and listen, if
Speaker 4: people as refugees are coming to the United States and
Speaker 4: they want to be citizens of the United States. That's great.
Speaker 4: I think that's awesome. There's public polling out of Palestine
Speaker 4: that suggests a big chunk of the population there in
Speaker 4: Polling is tough there. But this is when the Palestinian
Speaker 4: Center for Policy and Survey Research in December, seventy two
Speaker 4: percent of Palestinians quote believe that Hamasa's decision to launch
Speaker 4: the October seventh attack was correct. Now, again, we can
Speaker 4: debate what that means, but it definitely means this fundamental
Speaker 4: disagreement with US foreign policy, and you can understand why
Speaker 4: people in Palestine would have a very hostile approach towards
Speaker 4: United sert perspective towards the United States foreign policy. So
Speaker 4: does this so discord and communities. I don't know that
Speaker 4: enough people will be accepted that it'll so discord around communities.
Speaker 4: To be honest with fifty six and twenty twenty three,
Speaker 4: that was one of the most violent recent years on
Speaker 4: record in Palestine. And so that's what a lot of
Speaker 4: people on the right are worried about. You know, we're
Speaker 4: going to import a bunch of people who hate America.
Speaker 4: I don't know that they're going to be able to
Speaker 4: get enough people out that that becomes a problem, to
Speaker 4: be honest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the Israeli governments, you know, put out a
Speaker 3: lot of white papers and other and trial balloons showing
Speaker 3: that the plan was to depopulate you know, Gaza going
Speaker 3: in and so yeah, on the one hand, this this
Speaker 3: plays into the effort to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip
Speaker 3: of Palestinians and then and rebuild it as Israeli's on
Speaker 3: as Jared Kushner said, you know, waterfront, waterfront property.
Speaker 4: Maybe they'll use Kushner's quote the never silent abligations.
Speaker 3: At the same time, the area is going to be
Speaker 3: uninhabitable for many years. It's the nor Northern Gaza for instance.
Speaker 3: You know, so a normal bomb an ordinance getting dropped
Speaker 3: from a plane in a battlefield or fired elsewhere, it
Speaker 3: has something like a ten percent failure rate. Israel does
Speaker 3: not use these weapons normally. You know, they're dropping them
Speaker 3: in areas where they're going to have a much higher
Speaker 3: failure rate. And so maybe you're pushing twenty percent failure
Speaker 3: rate and you're talking of you know, thousands and thousands
Speaker 3: of bombs being dropped on Gaza. Those are fairly stable
Speaker 3: unexploded ordinance until they are disrupted by a bulldozer or
Speaker 3: some type of construction during a rebuilding process. It's impossible
Speaker 3: to overstate how time consuming it is to extract these
Speaker 3: weapons in northwest Washington, d C. Where they did where
Speaker 3: they did basically chemical weapons testing during World War One.
Speaker 3: They are still to this day finding unexploded like mustard
Speaker 3: gas ordinances in Washington, d C. Near American University where
Speaker 3: that research which was carried out more than one hundred
Speaker 3: years later.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 3: It's just going to be borderline impossible for hundreds of
Speaker 3: thousands of people to return to their homes anytime soon,
Speaker 3: which means they're going to have to live somewhere.
Speaker 4: And just before we wrap, let's put this poll up
Speaker 4: on the screen. This is reporting in the Jerusalem Post
Speaker 4: about a new poll published by end twelve. Over half
Speaker 4: of the Israeli public beliefs that Prime Minister Benjamin Ninyaho
Speaker 4: should resign immediately, including twenty eight percent of those who
Speaker 4: voted for the block that supports nt Yahoo. Forty eight
Speaker 4: percent of Israeli's believe Defense Minister Galant should resign immediately.
Speaker 8: Wow.
Speaker 4: I mean, like if you keep going down the line,
Speaker 4: here there's fifty percent believe the idea of chief of
Speaker 4: staff should resign, fifty six percent believe that the head
Speaker 4: of Shinbet should resign right now. I mean fifty four
Speaker 4: percent of respondent said that the elections should be held earlier.
Speaker 4: So that's not just opposition in net Yahoo. That's immediate,
Speaker 4: urgent opposition to Net Yahoo. And obviously in Israel there's
Speaker 4: opposition from uh like, both sides. So people who are
Speaker 4: you know, more hardcore that want, you know, Net Yahoo
Speaker 4: to go even harder than he has gone. And then
Speaker 4: there are people who disagree that he was, thinking he's
Speaker 4: already gone too far, and then he's been you know,
Speaker 4: mismanaging the situations and incompetent. But all that is to say,
Speaker 4: this is a pretty untenable situation for net Yahoo and
Speaker 4: his coalition at the moment.
Speaker 3: In Israel, it's been a strategic failure in every sense
Speaker 3: of the word world word up and down from net
Speaker 3: Yahoo and his managing of the conflict before and after
Speaker 3: October seventh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the Israeli public is picking up on that,
Speaker 4: no doubt about it. Donald Trump just yesterday he was
Speaker 4: back in court and as day nine, day nine on
Speaker 4: the hush money trial. Donald Trump was held in violation
Speaker 4: of his gag order once again. It's the second time
Speaker 4: that he's actually been sanctioned for violating the gag order.
Speaker 4: And this is there's kind of some interesting new one
Speaker 4: in this particular ruling because the judge one Merchant find
Speaker 4: Donald Trump, but he said because he was criticizing expected
Speaker 4: trial witnesses, So that would be Michael Cohen in particular.
Speaker 4: That's a big one, Stormy Daniels, that's a big one.
Speaker 4: He's criticized the makeup of the jury pool. But what
Speaker 4: Merchant said is that it's specifically related, like you can
Speaker 4: talk about the trial, but it's specifically you cannot keep
Speaker 4: talking about these expected witnesses. And that's obviously a pretty
Speaker 4: huge distinction because it addresses the central issue of Donald
Speaker 4: Trump's argument, which is I have to be able, like
Speaker 4: this is the middle of a campaign. I have to
Speaker 4: be able to make my case to the public, So
Speaker 4: you have to let me talk about this trial. I'm
Speaker 4: running for president of the United States. So Merchant narrowed
Speaker 4: it and said, this is specifically about you know, talking
Speaker 4: about so specifically about the key witnesses here, not just
Speaker 4: about the case in General. And then Donald Trump sat
Speaker 4: for an interview with Time that was released yesterday that
Speaker 4: was just of incredible quotes. Yeah, just a lot happening.
Speaker 3: When he when he said he was barred from commenting
Speaker 3: on the makeup of the jury because it's Trump.
Speaker 1: I thought he was talking about makeup, because he would
Speaker 1: do that. He would do that.
Speaker 3: He's got every year, he's got opinions on fashion Week.
Speaker 3: But no, apparently he's talking about the jury itself, and
Speaker 3: you're not supposed to do.
Speaker 1: You know, that violates the gag order.
Speaker 3: And so he got a thousand dollars fine for each
Speaker 3: kind of truth Social tweet.
Speaker 1: He put up, yeah, one.
Speaker 3: Thousand dollars for nine posts, and he was made to
Speaker 3: delete the posts and the judge said, you know you
Speaker 3: you could get incarceratory penalties next time.
Speaker 4: And he removed the posts. By the way he did,
Speaker 4: he took them down. So he removed seven from truth
Speaker 4: Social and two from his campaign website, and he owes
Speaker 4: nine thousand dollars. He could, you know, end up with
Speaker 4: as you said, Ryan, the consequences could only increase. But
Speaker 4: the fact that he actually took down all of the posts,
Speaker 4: it looks like he's throwing in the towel in most
Speaker 4: particular on this particular point. And actually, I think it's
Speaker 4: kind of a fair decision that you can't be going
Speaker 4: after the key witnesses. You can still talk about the trial, though.
Speaker 4: I guess that gives him a little roadmap to making
Speaker 4: his case in the public.
Speaker 3: Just be careful there, mister president. I'd love to get
Speaker 3: your take on his Time interview, though. Let's highlight a
Speaker 3: couple of them.
Speaker 4: I mean, so if you go on Time's website and
Speaker 4: we can put this element up on the screen, they
Speaker 4: do the thing where they give you the amount of
Speaker 4: time it'll take to read the article eighty three minutes.
Speaker 4: The eighty three minute read he had this. Really it
Speaker 4: must have been a two hour interview, would be my guess,
Speaker 4: after you account for the editing, for clarity and everything
Speaker 4: that goes into publishing a transcript. And I love when
Speaker 4: they just published the transcript, the raw transcript. We pulled
Speaker 4: a couple of highlights from it. He basically the journalist
Speaker 4: basically got Trump to touch on everything under the sun.
Speaker 4: But we can move to this first poll quote because
Speaker 4: I want to start with the economy, because you know, honestly,
Speaker 4: we're talking a lot about foreign policy on this show
Speaker 4: and the discourse in general. For obvious reasons, a lot
Speaker 4: of American voters are going to be primarily voting on
Speaker 4: the economy when they go to the polls in November.
Speaker 4: So this is Trump saying he's getting asked by the
Speaker 4: journalist about his ten percent tariff funal imports and a
Speaker 4: sixty percent tariff on Chinese imports. Asked if that's still
Speaker 4: his plan, and Trump says, quote, it may be more
Speaker 4: than that. RN. I actually thought that was very interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And then he and then he's may be
Speaker 1: a derivative of that.
Speaker 3: Derivative of that. I don't know what he means by
Speaker 3: derivative there, nobody knows, And you're right. And so the
Speaker 3: reporter press is like, really, it could could be more
Speaker 3: than ten percent. He's saying, yes, yes, it could be.
Speaker 3: And then he says it's not actually going to raise prices.
Speaker 3: It's just going to cost China money and it's going
Speaker 3: to put a bunch of money in Chinese coffers. That's
Speaker 3: you can that's nonsense, Like it's fine to support tariffs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that tariffs.
Speaker 3: You know, have a real serious role to play when
Speaker 3: it comes to building your domestic manufacturing base, like that's
Speaker 3: they're important, but in the immediate term, they're going to
Speaker 3: cause inflation, like they're going to prices are going to
Speaker 3: go up, Like that's how that's how tariffs operate.
Speaker 4: Well, this created a huge point. This like created a
Speaker 4: huge debate on econ Twitter yesterday about the technical definition
Speaker 4: of inflation because a lot of people were saying Donald
Speaker 4: Trump is campaigning against inflation but also campaigning on a tariff.
Speaker 4: And then economists were like, actually, this important distinction. Inflation
Speaker 4: is not the same as like pricing creases and Ryan
Speaker 4: you just you just need to be precision here, right.
Speaker 1: No, but they're right, But it's interesting they're true that.
Speaker 3: That's right from a from an economic textbook perspective, there
Speaker 3: those are those are different things. And inflation refers to
Speaker 3: just when there's kind of more money in the economy,
Speaker 3: mean chasing like a smaller number of you know, or
Speaker 3: not enough goods, Like that's inflation. But from the perspective
Speaker 3: of somebody who's going to the store, yeah, it's the same.
Speaker 3: It's the same buying something. Yes, they see the price rise,
Speaker 3: and people aren't people don't kind of object to the
Speaker 3: concept of inflation, but they're okay with price increases. They
Speaker 3: don't like when things cost more and when their wages
Speaker 3: are not keeping up with the cost of things going up.
Speaker 1: That's something.
Speaker 3: And you know, in some ways they don't care whether
Speaker 3: it's greedflation from corporations, right oh, rising prices, whether it's
Speaker 3: supply shocks from the pandemic and the reopening of the
Speaker 3: economy and the port's being all cluttered, or whether it's
Speaker 3: fiscal policy monetary policy. Like, what people don't like is
Speaker 3: when they go to the grocery store and it used
Speaker 3: to cost fifty dollars for a bag and I was eighty.
Speaker 1: Dollars for a bag or whatever. That's what they don't like.
Speaker 3: And so Trump is going to learn that the hard
Speaker 3: way if he doesn't figure out a way to come
Speaker 3: at this in a way that gets prices down.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's true that, for example, Joe Biden has
Speaker 4: no control over greedflation. I shouldn't say no control. He
Speaker 4: doesn't have a lot of control over greedflation, but you know,
Speaker 4: unless he sort of. But I mean, just even like
Speaker 4: policy wise, these are private businesses making terrible decisions as
Speaker 4: private businesses.
Speaker 1: And good decisions for themselves.
Speaker 4: Make good decisions for themselves. You know, you got to
Speaker 4: have some money for the buybacks, but.
Speaker 3: Try to figure out a way to get corporations to
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 1: So it's actually an interesting point.
Speaker 3: John Kenneth Gallbraith included prices in his understanding of the
Speaker 3: government's role in the economy. Like we understand that the
Speaker 3: government and through the FED, plays a role in inflation,
Speaker 3: plays a role in unemployment and labor and wages, and
Speaker 3: we always have had understood that the government also played
Speaker 3: a role in prices. In the seventies, we moved away
Speaker 3: from that and we said, well, prices, what can you do,
Speaker 3: just like the weather. But actually it is a function
Speaker 3: of a government and private sector interacting. And so we
Speaker 3: could actually come in and mess with prices if we
Speaker 3: wanted to, and I think we should.
Speaker 1: But anyway, that's a side point.
Speaker 4: But it's interesting because right the voters are always going
Speaker 4: to blame, you know, in the same way that Joe
Speaker 4: Biden is getting a lot of blame for you know,
Speaker 4: even I think he deserves some of the blame. He
Speaker 4: spent a ton of money and that's always behind inflation.
Speaker 4: But there's also a component of this, even from the right.
Speaker 4: I agree that was gre inflation, and voters just don't
Speaker 4: want to hear you scapegoat They know prices are higher,
Speaker 4: they don't want you to downplay higher prices, and they
Speaker 4: don't want you to scapegoat whether it's China or greedy CEOs.
Speaker 4: I think Donald Trump is probably better at communicating why
Speaker 4: he you know, describes some of the blame to China
Speaker 4: in these cases, but he will learn that lesson. Nonetheless,
Speaker 4: he had a pretty good economy during his administration until
Speaker 4: COVID hit. And what's going to happen if you know
Speaker 4: you have a ten percent tariff, it's he's going to
Speaker 4: have to confront people who are upset about that. And
Speaker 4: we saw it kind of happen with farmers and all
Speaker 4: of that over the course of the administration, and he
Speaker 4: maintained some I think, pretty impressive levels of support from farmers.
Speaker 4: But in a way, yes, it's the Biden lesson can
Speaker 4: also be the Trump lesson that you know, when people
Speaker 4: are paying higher prices, they don't want to hear excuses
Speaker 4: from the president, even if the president himself is not
Speaker 4: waving his magic wand or couldn't wave a magic wand
Speaker 4: and tackle things one thing. Also Bran, my apologies to
Speaker 4: the control and I skipped this, but let's put B
Speaker 4: two up on the screen, because if I were interviewing
Speaker 4: Donald Trump right now, this is basically the question that
Speaker 4: I would want the answer to. You know, they if president,
Speaker 4: if a president doesn't get immunity. This is what Trump
Speaker 4: tells Time about the Supreme Court case that's pending right now.
Speaker 4: He said, quote, then Biden, I am sure will be
Speaker 4: prosecuted for all of his crimes. Trump said that if
Speaker 4: presidents do get immunity, He went on to say, basically,
Speaker 4: that's great that Joe Biden will not be prosecuted for
Speaker 4: his many crimes, but you know, and said that he wouldn't,
Speaker 4: you know, push for or implied basically argued that he
Speaker 4: wouldn't push for Joe Biden if presidents have immunity to
Speaker 4: then be responsible for all of these different allegations alleged
Speaker 4: crimes that Joe Biden has been involved with. But I
Speaker 4: think that's really one of the most important questions is
Speaker 4: what we see from Donald Trump in the next Trump
Speaker 4: administration potentially if he is elected president, voters should know
Speaker 4: exactly how he plans to wield the state wield the
Speaker 4: powers of the state against political opponents, because that's what
Speaker 4: he's campaigning against right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how vindictive do you think he will be if
Speaker 3: he becomes president? Is he going to throw the Justice
Speaker 3: Department at a bunch of his enemies.
Speaker 4: I think it's really hard to say, because he likes
Speaker 4: being liked, and he in the last administration was really
Speaker 4: torn in two different directions from sort of the hardcore
Speaker 4: right people and then the neo conservative moderates, And you know,
Speaker 4: he never really figured that out himself, like which balance
Speaker 4: you know worked best. He was intentionally having them fight
Speaker 4: each other over what his policy should be. So I
Speaker 4: just really have a hard time making a prediction on that.
Speaker 4: I don't know. What do you think?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think he probably will be.
Speaker 3: I think he'll I think he's so angry about what
Speaker 3: he's going through now that he feels it's unjust and
Speaker 3: a witch hunt and election interference and persecution, that I
Speaker 3: think he would that. I think he will. I think
Speaker 3: he'll try. Whether or not the wheels can get rolled
Speaker 3: through the Justice Department is another question, but I think
Speaker 3: he'll definitely try.
Speaker 4: So we'll put be five up on the screen here
Speaker 4: because time got him to respond to questions about the
Speaker 4: war as well in Israel. I want to know you
Speaker 4: said you want to get Israel to wind down the war.
Speaker 4: You said it needs to get over with. How are
Speaker 4: you going to make that happen? The reporter asked, would
Speaker 4: you consider withholding aid? Trump really wouldn't give a clear
Speaker 4: answer to that question about withholding aid. He said, I
Speaker 4: think that Israel has done one thing very badly public relations.
Speaker 4: No argument there, Ryan. I don't think that the Israel
Speaker 4: Defense Fund or any other group should be sending out
Speaker 4: pictures every night of buildings falling down and being bombed
Speaker 4: with possibly people in those buildings every single night, which
Speaker 4: is what they do. That's obviously not just a public
Speaker 4: relations argument, which is why I chuckle the lad but
Speaker 4: because he's framing in as a public relations argument and
Speaker 4: he's avoiding answering the question about whether he would withhold AID.
Speaker 4: But that's also when you're talking about buildings that might
Speaker 4: have people in them. That's also him criticizing the policy.
Speaker 4: I don't know what he would do if he was
Speaker 4: in office. Obviously he was cozy with Netanyahu, even though
Speaker 4: he's not been cozy with him, at least rhetorically in
Speaker 4: the press. Now again, I think it's it's very hard
Speaker 4: to predict what you see come out of a second
Speaker 4: Trump administration, but at least interesting that the father in
Speaker 4: law of Jared Kushner is talking that way.
Speaker 3: It's an interesting way to smuggle in criticism because it's
Speaker 3: completely acceptable on the pro Israel side to say that
Speaker 3: ITUAL hasn't been good at it's PR right like that.
Speaker 3: That's always a fine thing for any kind of ally
Speaker 3: to criticize their their.
Speaker 1: Own organization or group of PR.
Speaker 3: PR bad PR. You're great, You're doing great. Everything you're
Speaker 3: doing is great. People just don't understand how great you are.
Speaker 3: That's basically what that's saying. But your point is exactly right.
Speaker 3: He doesn't talk about PR. Then he talks about war crimes,
Speaker 3: talks about about bombing civilians and flattening buildings, and then
Speaker 3: he does talk about the PR reaction to that. They
Speaker 3: then broadcast that, so he you know, he's seeing the
Speaker 3: fact that Israel's broadcasting a lot of its crimes, and
Speaker 3: whether he's seeing a lot of the kind of the
Speaker 3: IDF soldiers and they're and their tiktoks and they're and
Speaker 3: their reels where they're wearing women's clothing, or whether they're
Speaker 3: blowing up moss or blowing up schools or like riding
Speaker 3: around on children's bikes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like all of this stuff is being broadcast.
Speaker 3: So it is a combination of war crimes that is
Speaker 3: that are a fundamental problem of substance, but then also
Speaker 3: the lack of shame about them and the broadcasting of
Speaker 3: them to the world. So yeah, he's see and and
Speaker 3: I think one thing that bothers him is that it
Speaker 3: causes problems for him now, it causes bigger problems for Biden.
Speaker 3: So he's happy with that at the moment. But I
Speaker 3: think he's like, in his mind, he's like, guys, like
Speaker 3: he said, just just in the same way he said,
Speaker 3: you've got to wrap this up. You've got to get
Speaker 3: this over with. He's like, what are you doing, you know,
Speaker 3: bombing a building full of civilians and then broadcasting that,
Speaker 3: Like that's not going to play well. It's not a
Speaker 3: moral argument like you shouldn't do that. It's an argument
Speaker 3: that this is not going to be effective in your mission,
Speaker 3: of which I'm aligned with, which I'm aliged.
Speaker 4: And again that's why I think it's interesting that like
Speaker 4: again this is the father in law of Jared Kushner,
Speaker 4: Jared Kushner's, and people Trump gives him credit actually in
Speaker 4: fact for heading up Middle East Israel policy basically under
Speaker 4: Trump's watch. And what they did by moving the embassy
Speaker 4: and uh just completely allying the United States with you know,
Speaker 4: the goals of the net Yahoo administration essentially, not that
Speaker 4: you know that's new for the United States foreign policy,
Speaker 4: but it was the sort of there was a an
Speaker 4: enthusiasm for that alliance that I think was very specific
Speaker 4: to the Trump administration. So that's why I find you know,
Speaker 4: potentially Donald Trump coming into office again likely likely based
Speaker 4: on reporting, bringing Jared Kushner back into the administration. That's
Speaker 4: I think genuinely an interesting contrast.
Speaker 3: And even casual observers at the time warned that Kushner's
Speaker 3: approach to the Abraham Accords of pretending that the Palestine
Speaker 3: question didn't exist and just trying to reach normalization with
Speaker 3: Saudi and the UAE and Israel and others was not
Speaker 3: going to work because Palestinians do exist, and it was
Speaker 3: going to lead to some type of an explosion.
Speaker 1: That was the warning.
Speaker 3: But you can't completely blame the Trump administration for that,
Speaker 3: because the Biden administration came in January twenty twenty one
Speaker 3: and had every opportunity to say, whoever let this kid
Speaker 3: run Middle East policy for the United States was an idiot,
Speaker 3: and we're not going to continue following that course. Instead,
Speaker 3: they basically followed the Kushner policy going forward. They did
Speaker 3: not re enter the deal, They discarded the Obama approach
Speaker 3: to the region and adopted the Trump approach, and we
Speaker 3: wound up with this let's do his two states. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so he was asked about potential solutions. I thought this
Speaker 3: This was also kind of a bit insightful from Trump
Speaker 3: in an interesting way. Do you think an outcome of
Speaker 3: that war between Israel and Hamas should be a two
Speaker 3: state solution between Israelis and Palestinians? Trump says, most people
Speaker 3: thought it was going to be a two state solution.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure a two state solution anymore is going
Speaker 3: to work. Everybody was talking about two states. Even when
Speaker 3: I was there, I was saying, what do you like here?
Speaker 3: Do you like two states?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 3: People are going back to it depends where you are
Speaker 3: every day. It changes now if Israel's making and here's
Speaker 3: the insightful part and if Israel's making progress, yes, they
Speaker 3: don't want two states, they want everything right, And if
Speaker 3: Israel's not making progresses he goes on, sometimes they talk
Speaker 3: about two state solution. Two state solutions seem to be
Speaker 3: the idea that people liked most, the policy or the
Speaker 3: idea that people liked above this.
Speaker 4: Is like really the benefit of Donald Trump. In some
Speaker 4: cases he comes in with no like rhetorical allegiance to
Speaker 4: either side of the debate, and it's just like perceptive
Speaker 4: in the sneakiest ways sometimes because he has this like
Speaker 4: weird business mindset and he hasn't been reading scripts from
Speaker 4: full of talking points from like the RNC for twenty years,
Speaker 4: so he just is like free wheeling, and sometimes it
Speaker 4: has disastrous consequences. Other times it's weirdly perceptive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when things are going well for Israel, as Trump observes,
Speaker 1: they just want everything. Why would they agree to two states.
Speaker 3: It's only when they're on their heels that they say, okay,
Speaker 3: maybe we'll maybe we'll agree to that.
Speaker 4: And the cushions of the world. Again, this is interesting
Speaker 4: because I'm saying this as somebody broadly on the right.
Speaker 4: It's frustrating any criticism of Israel. You are lumped into
Speaker 4: this category as like pro hamas pro anti Semitism or
Speaker 4: enabling anti Semitism. This is Donald Trump openly criticizing Israel
Speaker 4: when nobody forced him to. This interview was not particularly
Speaker 4: tough on him on that question, like it pushed him.
Speaker 4: It was fair, but it wasn't like hostile. It wasn't
Speaker 4: saying like, you need to criticize Israel right now, or
Speaker 4: you will, you know, sacrifice all of your credibility. It
Speaker 4: wasn't doing that. He just went there, and I actually
Speaker 4: think that's really.
Speaker 1: Interesting and real quickly, and then we can move on
Speaker 1: to to Weed.
Speaker 3: I did want to ask you about maybe you have
Speaker 3: some insight into this the myth of pristone questions. So
Speaker 3: he gets asked, do you think women should be able
Speaker 3: to get the abortion pill myf of pristone? And he says, well,
Speaker 3: I have an opinion on that, but I'm not going
Speaker 3: to explain. I'm not going to say it yet, but
Speaker 3: I have pretty strong views on that, and I'll be
Speaker 3: releasing it probably over the next week. So this is
Speaker 3: the abortion pill, which the Supreme Court has said is legal.
Speaker 3: Do you have any insight what is he actually going
Speaker 3: to put something out in a week.
Speaker 1: Is he just making that up?
Speaker 3: Where is there any speculation about where he lands on this,
Speaker 3: because this is a huge issue because if you're in
Speaker 3: a red state that has banned abortion, but you can
Speaker 3: still get access to this, it's a game changer.
Speaker 4: It's why abortions have increased post obs. There's this mass
Speaker 4: movement towards Smith of Perstone, and it now accounts for
Speaker 4: a massive.
Speaker 1: Proportion learning about it now do yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I haven't heard any rumblings that
Speaker 4: he's planning to make an announcement on this, which could
Speaker 4: That doesn't mean he's not planning to make an announcement
Speaker 4: on it. Frankly, if I had to guess where he
Speaker 4: stands on this personally, I actually still think that could
Speaker 4: diverge from whatever his policy is because this interview is
Speaker 4: similarly like he wouldn't give an answer on what he
Speaker 4: would definitively do about military aid, conditioning military aid to Israel.
Speaker 4: He also would not give an answer about what he
Speaker 4: would do with abortion, and he kept saying it's up
Speaker 4: to the states, it's up to the states. You're hypothetical.
Speaker 4: I won't answer because it's so impossible. You're never gonna
Speaker 4: have sixty votes in the Senate, So I can't answer
Speaker 4: your question about whether I would sign a fifteen week ban,
Speaker 4: et cetera, et cetera. On this. I think it's possible
Speaker 4: he announces a policy really similar to what he announced
Speaker 4: with abortion in general, that he's just supportive of leaving
Speaker 4: it up to the states. Basically that upset a lot
Speaker 4: of people in the anti abortion movement. But I don't
Speaker 4: know whether that reflects what he's saying when he says
Speaker 4: he has a very strong opinion on it, because his
Speaker 4: very strong opinion could potentially not be reflected by whatever
Speaker 4: policy he announces. I think he's, you know, privately, you
Speaker 4: hear that he's kind of icked out by anti abortion people,
Speaker 4: that he feels like they're weird religious extremists, and you know,
Speaker 4: is personally not hardcore anti abortion. So I would if
Speaker 4: I had a guess, I would say he's probably prof
Speaker 4: for pristone personally, But whether that is whatever policy he
Speaker 4: announces is a completely different question.
Speaker 3: Well, the DEA is making big moves on marijuana. So
Speaker 3: back in the election year twenty twenty two, if you remember,
Speaker 3: the Biden administration did two things during the mid terms.
Speaker 3: At once they pardoned every non violent weed defender. But
Speaker 3: the more significant thing they did at that time was
Speaker 3: they asked the confederal bureaucracy to study whether or not
Speaker 3: marijuana belonged.
Speaker 1: In Schedule one.
Speaker 3: Now, Schedule one is the most restrictive category for an
Speaker 3: illegal drug. It means it has zero medical benefit and
Speaker 3: a high potential for abuse. You could say that the
Speaker 3: stronger weed lately has a significant potential for abuse, but
Speaker 3: the zero medical benefit has always been completely absurd. But
Speaker 3: it was clear at that moment that he was teeing
Speaker 3: up a twenty twenty four move. Now, HHS and the
Speaker 3: FDA both signed off on reclassifying marijuana, moving it out
Speaker 3: of Schedule one. The DEA has been dragging its feet,
Speaker 3: as you can as you can imagine the DEA does.
Speaker 3: But yesterday the Associated Press reported, and we can put
Speaker 3: this up, that the DA finally is getting in line
Speaker 3: and recommending back to the White House that they do
Speaker 3: what everybody else said they ought to do, which is
Speaker 3: reschedule marijuana from Schedule one to Schedule three.
Speaker 1: Now, Schedule three says it has some medical value, So
Speaker 1: there's been some reporting that this would help with.
Speaker 3: Tax liabilities for marijuana firms, cannabis company. You know, it's
Speaker 3: because so basically one of the but that's not necessarily
Speaker 3: the case.
Speaker 1: Because Schedule three is still quite restrictive.
Speaker 3: Because right now, if you are marijuana business, you basically
Speaker 3: have it's basically impossible to write off a lot of
Speaker 3: your costs, which means you have exorbitant tax bill at
Speaker 3: the end because you don't pay taxes on your profits
Speaker 3: like a normal business. You pay taxes on all of
Speaker 3: your revenue because you can't write off your costs because
Speaker 3: your costs are illegal under federal law. At the same time,
Speaker 3: you don't have access to banking, which puts people at
Speaker 3: serious risks because they're moving cash around, you know, gigantic
Speaker 3: you know, trucks going back and forth filled with cash
Speaker 3: from homes to businesses. And so this is much less
Speaker 3: than what a lot of advocates would want, you know,
Speaker 3: have have wanted, but it will it will help on sentencing,
Speaker 3: you know, you know, with mandatory minimums. It also helps
Speaker 3: importantly with research. Right now, if you want to research marijuana,
Speaker 3: which so many people in the medical field want to
Speaker 3: do because there are significant medical benefits like getting access.
Speaker 1: It's it's hilarious.
Speaker 3: Like if you want to get gummies or weed, you
Speaker 3: walk down the street and you buy them. If you
Speaker 3: want to do research on cannabis at the university setting,
Speaker 3: it's impossible, right right, Like there are like a handful
Speaker 3: of studies that have gone through like ten years of
Speaker 3: like fighting with the DA.
Speaker 4: So the research just like getting dime bags on the corner.
Speaker 3: They just research something else because they can't then get
Speaker 3: they can't get the university to approve the studies, and
Speaker 3: so they just go study something else. So now at
Speaker 3: least this will lead to an explosion of actual you
Speaker 3: know research, you know into in the US because around
Speaker 3: the world people are able to study it.
Speaker 1: So so so that'll help.
Speaker 3: This is still months away though, Yeah, it's got to
Speaker 3: go to the Office of Managing Budget. There's a comment period,
Speaker 3: and you know, this could drag out till after the
Speaker 3: after the election. Sager is not here to complain, but
Speaker 3: to you know, Sager, can you know, take pride in
Speaker 3: the fact that not much it's going to.
Speaker 1: Change it in the near term.
Speaker 4: I was going to say, and you know, sccer's arguments
Speaker 4: are serious, and I think a lot of our viewers,
Speaker 4: probably as much as we make fun of him. I
Speaker 4: think a lot of our viewers probably know this, but
Speaker 4: right if you duck to what you're right, you can
Speaker 4: see this Ryan Grimm book, This is Your Country Drugs,
Speaker 4: The Secret History of Getting High in America. If ever
Speaker 4: there were an expert on the history of getting high
Speaker 4: in America by This is Your Country on Drugs by
Speaker 4: Ryan Grimm, for the expert take it is.
Speaker 3: Are you amazing like that? That book came out in
Speaker 3: two thousand and nine and you could sort of if
Speaker 3: you squinted, see the direction that things were going in
Speaker 3: the final chapter.
Speaker 1: But to get to this place in my lifetime is
Speaker 1: kind of interesting.
Speaker 4: That's what I was actually going to ask you about,
Speaker 4: because I think that's when we were talking about this
Speaker 4: a little bit yesterday. This is a really big deal.
Speaker 1: I used to work. I was actually a weed lobbyist, right,
Speaker 1: that's right, two thousand and four.
Speaker 3: I worked for the Marijuana Policy Project on state level lobbying.
Speaker 4: High powered, very funny. This is funny is the weed
Speaker 4: lobbyists now actually are high powered. It's like John Bayner, yes,
Speaker 4: value of John Bayner, right, but back then, and that's
Speaker 4: what's interesting about the schedule classifications that right now while
Speaker 4: this O and B process goes on, it's still classified
Speaker 4: Schedule one alongside like heroin LSD, And yet you have
Speaker 4: people like John Bayner advocating for what was he doing,
Speaker 4: Like was it cannabis? Yeah, So the other thing I
Speaker 4: was interested in here is if it's a Schedule three drug,
Speaker 4: you're still still a significant DEA regulations. But that means
Speaker 4: that fifteen thousand cannabis dispensaries in the US that exist
Speaker 4: right now would have to register with the DEA. I'm
Speaker 4: reading from the Associated Press report report here. That means
Speaker 4: they have to go along with these like fairly strict
Speaker 4: reporting requirements, and.
Speaker 1: I think what they're not going to do well.
Speaker 4: It sounds like the DEA is not even in a
Speaker 4: position to handle those reporting requirements. So, in a sense,
Speaker 4: if this plays out, even in the direction that's good
Speaker 4: for some of these dispensaries, is up in the air
Speaker 4: financially because now they have this massive burden of reporting
Speaker 4: the DEA in ways that they weren't before.
Speaker 3: It'll at least, you know, reduce the incentive for the
Speaker 3: DEA I think, to break down the doors of cannabis dispensaries.
Speaker 3: But you know, they've largely moved away from that and
Speaker 3: left it. They've basically started leaving it up to localities.
Speaker 3: In the beginning days, like in the Bush administration, when
Speaker 3: medical cannabis facilities first started opening, you'd have the DEA
Speaker 3: in standoff with like local police who were supportive of
Speaker 3: the dispensaries. They've they've somewhat moved away from that. We
Speaker 3: have not yet gotten to a rational system, but it would,
Speaker 3: you know. But it now gives Congress, you know, more
Speaker 3: ability to rationalize I think the system because the DA
Speaker 3: is sort of given a little bit of permission. Chuck
Speaker 3: Schumer is trying to put something related to cannabis into
Speaker 3: the FAA's trying to put He's trying to put weed
Speaker 3: banking into.
Speaker 1: The FAA reauthorization.
Speaker 3: He keeps trying to do it because you know that
Speaker 3: by you know, Schumer in particular sees you know, weed
Speaker 3: and student debt as you know, key ways to try
Speaker 3: to uh, you know, win the support of young people
Speaker 3: in particular.
Speaker 4: So, uh yeah, And this is complete un evenness culturally
Speaker 4: in terms of policy. That's really fascinating here. And for
Speaker 4: the other side of this argument, because I'm so kind
Speaker 4: of ambivalent, I do commend people to go watch some
Speaker 4: of Sager's model on this topic, because I don't think
Speaker 4: Grant you mentioned this earlier. There is a level of
Speaker 4: potency that increased rapidly just in the last several decades.
Speaker 4: That's totally relevant to what's happening on underdeveloped brains when
Speaker 4: they're smoking weed like that. This is some serious research
Speaker 4: in that space that's paying attention to.
Speaker 3: If you're a parent, Yeah, and substance abuse is a
Speaker 3: problem no matter what the substance. The question for me
Speaker 3: has always been should it be criminalized?
Speaker 1: You know? Is the answer to lock people up?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And I don't. I don't think so. But it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean we're ever going to get to a rational place either.
Speaker 4: Breaking news from Capitol Hill, Mike Johnson continues to be
Speaker 4: a real person. Ryan and I have followed these developments
Speaker 4: for weeks now. Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House sounds
Speaker 4: completely made up, and yet he continues to be the
Speaker 4: Republican Speaker of the House does exist.
Speaker 1: He's real.
Speaker 4: But the real takeaway from what's happening on Capitol Hill
Speaker 4: right now is that Democrats made a decision yesterday to
Speaker 4: ally themselves formally with Mike Johnson in his battle against
Speaker 4: House Republicans. So Marjorie Taylor Green's motion to vacate and
Speaker 4: we can put this first element up on the screen.
Speaker 4: This is a tweet from Jake Sherman over at punch
Speaker 4: Bowl that House Democratic leadership has said they will vote
Speaker 4: to table that Marjorie Taylor Green motion to vacate if
Speaker 4: she forces a vote on it, which is called privileging
Speaker 4: the motions. So she filed the motion weeks ago. Thomas
Speaker 4: Massey signed onto it after the Ukraine Party vote for
Speaker 4: an AID vote that we talked about last week, and Thomas,
Speaker 4: speaking of Thomas Massey, we can put the next element
Speaker 4: up on the screen. He tweeted yesterday at Representative Jeffreys
Speaker 4: and Speaker Johnson. Not sure who's in charge, so asking
Speaker 4: both of you, are you still working together to eliminate
Speaker 4: the motion of vakate so you can share power forever.
Speaker 4: This was in response to a Mike Johnson sweet on
Speaker 4: April eighteenth talking about how many people to borrow a
Speaker 4: phrase from Trump. Many people have been encouraging him to
Speaker 4: endorse a new rule to raise the threshold on the
Speaker 4: motion to vacate. Super quick primer on the motion to vacate.
Speaker 4: It sounds like a technical parliamentary procedure term. What it
Speaker 4: actually means is that it existed in Congress until Nancy
Speaker 4: Pelosi took it away after watching what happened to John Bayner.
Speaker 4: We somehow managed not to talk about John Bayner twice
Speaker 4: in this show in twenty twenty four. But John Bayner
Speaker 4: was He had a motion of vakate filed against him
Speaker 4: by Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan back in the day.
Speaker 4: They never ended up privileging it. They forced Bayner to resign.
Speaker 4: Nancy Pelosi saw that and changed the rule that had
Speaker 4: existed for all of Congress's history basically and said, this
Speaker 4: is not happening to me. I'm not going to have
Speaker 4: challenges to my power just because one of my members
Speaker 4: wants to file and privilege this motion to vacate. So
Speaker 4: what Hakim Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi's successor, is doing right now
Speaker 4: is saying, we're saving Mike Johnson's ass because if Marjor
Speaker 4: Taylor Green forces this motion to vacate, it privileges it
Speaker 4: and gets a vote and I'm out of here, or
Speaker 4: that Johnson is out of here, we'd rather have Mike
Speaker 4: Johnson in power, and that's saving Republicans from a cycle
Speaker 4: of chaos in the middle of an election year. Because
Speaker 4: I'm curious for your perspective on this. Democrats realize that
Speaker 4: they can get a lot of their priorities over the
Speaker 4: hurdle of Republican House leadership, Republican majority in the House,
Speaker 4: because they have the Senate and the presidency. They feel
Speaker 4: like they can get probably a lot of earmarking porks
Speaker 4: that type stuff out of funding bills FAA is coming up,
Speaker 4: farm bills coming up in the future by aligning themselves
Speaker 4: with Mike Johnson.
Speaker 3: Now, and I think you have to presume that there
Speaker 3: was some type of an arrangement. It came to a
Speaker 3: passage of you they avoided a government shutdown, they funded
Speaker 3: the wars and Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and Democrats provided a
Speaker 3: lot of muscle for that, but you know, Speaker Johnson
Speaker 3: had to go along and put it on the floor.
Speaker 3: And so you can imagine that this, uh, this commitment
Speaker 3: from Hakeem Jeffers is not coming out of nowhere, that
Speaker 3: it comes out of those those talks, and that that collaboration,
Speaker 3: that cooperation from before. You know, it's I think that
Speaker 3: Democrats think, Okay, yeah, chaos is fun, Like it's nice
Speaker 3: when you know Republicans are shooting at each other and
Speaker 3: if you could have them, you know, voting for Speaker
Speaker 3: again for a week or two, it makes them, it
Speaker 3: makes them look like losers. But yeah, I think to
Speaker 3: your point, their priority was getting the getting the wars funded.
Speaker 3: So they'd rather have that than a than a marginal
Speaker 3: and a political advantage. And you know they still get
Speaker 3: plenty of infighting, Like there's lots of Republican finger pointing speak.
Speaker 1: They can have the best of all worlds.
Speaker 4: Speaking of books written by Ryan Grimm. You can all
Speaker 4: see the squad behind you.
Speaker 1: And we're backing them up back there.
Speaker 4: The thing that I wanted to ask you was, actually,
Speaker 4: if this is demoralizing to the squad and to members
Speaker 4: of sort of justice Dems when they see this happening,
Speaker 4: because I bet to a lot of their voters you
Speaker 4: see this happening, it is demoralizing and it's infuriating.
Speaker 3: I mean, it might be demoralizing to their to their base,
Speaker 3: but probably not to them personally.
Speaker 1: Because they've been because they've been locked up.
Speaker 3: With Jeffries, Like they voted for Jeffries every every step
Speaker 3: of the way. They didn't mount anybody to challenge Jeffreys
Speaker 3: and they they you know, they did not like that
Speaker 3: is funding for the war in Israel moved through, but
Speaker 3: they all were supportive of the money for the war
Speaker 3: in Ukraine for the most part. So uh, I don't
Speaker 3: see a whole lot of daylight between them and Jeffreys
Speaker 3: on on these on these questions. You know, it deprives
Speaker 3: you know, now the question would be, would Republicans bail
Speaker 3: out a Jeffries speakership in the future, No, you don't
Speaker 3: think so, No, let them let them.
Speaker 4: Go down, because I can just imagine Republican voters after
Speaker 4: that happened in town halls be like Tea Party all
Speaker 4: over again. And Republicans are just I think, kind of
Speaker 4: keyed into getting the different parliamentary machinations probably post Tea
Speaker 4: Party because this was such a big deal with Bayer,
Speaker 4: and I just see like, actually less of that on
Speaker 4: the left that they pay really close attention to the
Speaker 4: different maneuvers that leadership uses to kind of screw over populists.
Speaker 4: But on the right that's a pretty mainstream, like hobby
Speaker 4: horse of people in the conservative movement is following what's
Speaker 4: happening in the sort of like meat grinder on Capitol Hills.
Speaker 4: So I think people would be pretty furious about that,
Speaker 4: you know, the Mike Johns is just I don't think
Speaker 4: there would be some people who would you know, you
Speaker 4: could maybe get fifteen to twenty. So it kind of
Speaker 4: depends on how big the majority is. There's maybe a
Speaker 4: way to make the math work, but I don't know.
Speaker 4: I think that's it would be unlikely.
Speaker 3: What it means is today is made first Happy may Day,
Speaker 3: and you're not going to have any kind of House
Speaker 3: speaker drama between now and November until after the election, right.
Speaker 4: Which, again, if I'm a Democratic voter, I'm watching this
Speaker 4: and say saying, what the hell are you doing? Like
Speaker 4: let them do this, like let them fight. It's a
Speaker 4: middle of an election year. Why are you going out
Speaker 4: of your way to save Mike Johnson who just said,
Speaker 4: for example, we have a biblical mandate Johnson to step
Speaker 4: in with Israel.
Speaker 3: Tell me if I'm still correct on this. Johnson was
Speaker 3: known as a terrible fundraiser. Is he still a bad fundraiser?
Speaker 3: Has he stepped his game up? Because if not, like
Speaker 3: one of the unspoken reasons or unspoken publicly reasons that
Speaker 3: Democrats were so happy to see Kevin McCarthy go is
Speaker 3: that he was a voracious fundraiser tends to hundreds of
Speaker 3: millions of dollars for Republican candidates, and taking that chess
Speaker 3: piece off the board meant that that was tens of
Speaker 3: millions of dollars that might not get raised and then
Speaker 3: spent against Democratic candidates. You know, the week after he
Speaker 3: was ousted, they had to cancel some gigantic fundraiser in Texas.
Speaker 3: And you would think that material interests alone would get
Speaker 3: these donors to write these checks to the political party
Speaker 3: that is benefiting their material interests.
Speaker 1: But they also need to be sweet talked. They want
Speaker 1: that rubber chicken.
Speaker 3: They want the speeches, they want the glad handing, they
Speaker 3: want they want the photo. They want their kid to
Speaker 3: get the internship and the chance to like whisper in
Speaker 3: the ear of the speaker. And without that, you know
Speaker 3: they're going to give less money. So if it's still
Speaker 3: the case that Johnson is a lousy fundraiser, Keem Jefferies
Speaker 3: is probably thinking let him continue as speaker.
Speaker 4: He's not Kevin McCarthy. That's basically what I've heard in
Speaker 4: those circles. He may have he could step his game up,
Speaker 4: that's still not going to make him Kevin McCarthy. And
Speaker 4: you know, there's mixed donor opinions on some of these
Speaker 4: uniparty priorities, especially in the right now, Ukraine, et cetera.
Speaker 3: I think the donors don't are a little Some of
Speaker 3: these rich Republicans are probably put off by his true believer.
Speaker 1: Well he's also a true believer.
Speaker 4: And I mean religious, yeah, right.
Speaker 1: Whereas some of the rich problems. Yeah, they go to
Speaker 1: church and they talk about it, but they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: this guy he really means this stuff.
Speaker 4: We Donald Trump himself was a Republican donor, and he's
Speaker 4: not going to be like persuaded by the dispensationalist biblical
Speaker 4: mandate philosophy about supporting.
Speaker 3: Theoretical arguments about how church the separation of church and
Speaker 3: state is a myth.
Speaker 4: People are probably aicked up by Mike Johnson, yeah, in
Speaker 4: that respect, but who knows how. I mean, he can
Speaker 4: be selling himself in a number of different ways behind
Speaker 4: closed doors. But you know, there's still there's still gonna
Speaker 4: be plenty of money that lobbyists have to throw around
Speaker 4: in the defense industry and sector. So maybe that'll help
Speaker 4: him because he got the bill over the line that
Speaker 4: said with sort of a lot of Republican voters are
Speaker 4: sort of not voters donors, mainstream Republican donors. They're not
Speaker 4: going to be happy about the border being left out
Speaker 4: of that bill.
Speaker 1: So too.
Speaker 3: But speaking of religious that's right. The author of the
Speaker 3: new book Pagan America.
Speaker 4: Yes, he means it in a different way than you do, right, Ryan,
Speaker 4: he's Pagan America, and he thinks we did it mentioned
Speaker 4: accomplish the banner up.
Speaker 1: Yet America has fallen.
Speaker 4: Yeah. We'll be joined right after this by my college
Speaker 4: get the Federalist, Daniel Davidson, whose new book Pagan America
Speaker 4: is out right now stick around all right. We're joined
Speaker 4: now by John Daniel Davidson. He's my colleague at The Federalist,
Speaker 4: where he's a senior editor, but for the purposes of
Speaker 4: this conversation, he's also the author of a new book,
Speaker 4: Pagan America. John, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 8: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4: Of course, now, a lot of our viewers, and actually
Speaker 4: a lot of the country is frankly not Christian, not
Speaker 4: practicing Christian in the way that you write about in
Speaker 4: this book and definitely probably looks at this and says,
Speaker 4: what does pagan America mean? And I'm not even just
Speaker 4: talking about people on the left, What do you mean
Speaker 4: by pagan America? And what does that mean for people
Speaker 4: who aren't right now going to church every Sunday? And honestly,
Speaker 4: would hear your description of paganism that you're going to
Speaker 4: give and say, okay, so it means we've separated a
Speaker 4: church and state.
Speaker 9: Good, yeah, right, Okay, So pagan America is an argument
Speaker 9: that there's really only one alternative to Christianity, and it's
Speaker 9: not secularism. Its pit's paganism, right, And I don't mean
Speaker 9: that in a post Christian era that we're in, as
Speaker 9: you say, you know, many people in this country, a
Speaker 9: growing number of people are not practicing Christians, and a
Speaker 9: growing number don't even identify as Christians. I think in
Speaker 9: about thirty twenty or thirty years, we'll have Christianity as
Speaker 9: a self identified group as a minority in this country
Speaker 9: for the first time ever.
Speaker 4: Right, they might hear post Christian America thing, I think,
Speaker 4: and Ryan, you probably hear that and you think, okay, I.
Speaker 9: Think, okay, post Christian America is fine. Part of the
Speaker 9: argument of the book is that America as we know
Speaker 9: it and understand it is only possible with a Christian people,
Speaker 9: in other words, a people who accept basic normative claims
Speaker 9: of Christian doctrine, chief among them the doctrine of imago
Speaker 9: day that each person is created in the image and
Speaker 9: likeness of God and therefore has inherent dignity. From whence
Speaker 9: we get rights, freedom of speech, religion, consent of the governed.
Speaker 9: All of the things that we associate with our American
Speaker 9: system of government and our American way of life are
Speaker 9: products of Christian civilization. They can't exist on their own
Speaker 9: outside of that context. Outside of that context, they eventually
Speaker 9: devolve into a form of post Christian neopaganism. And that's
Speaker 9: the era that we're emerging into today. As we shed
Speaker 9: our Christian civilization, we're also going to shed those things
Speaker 9: that we associate with our American way of life that
Speaker 9: I just enumerated, And the reason is because there's no
Speaker 9: basis for them outside of a Christian moral cosmology that
Speaker 9: posits what human beings are and what their relationship to
Speaker 9: God is, and what the relationship to one another should be.
Speaker 1: So I pride myself in reading all the books.
Speaker 3: Before we interview the author, and I just did not
Speaker 3: have time to that's fine, to get to this one,
Speaker 3: So I apologize. So I'm coming in totally kind of blank.
Speaker 3: But why is that the case? Why can't just appreciation
Speaker 3: for civic virtue and love of country and just general
Speaker 3: morality like be enough to stitch together of people.
Speaker 9: Well, general morality has to be based on something a
Speaker 9: vision of the world or a vision of what human
Speaker 9: beings are.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 9: So pagan morality, and this holds true across vast expanses
Speaker 9: of time in geography and cultures, is that if you
Speaker 9: are not part of my group, then it's my moral
Speaker 9: duty to take what you have or subjugate you for
Speaker 9: the benefit of me and my people.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 9: And that's what we see over and over again throughout history,
Speaker 9: the history of pagan peoples and cultures.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So let me ask you about so in a Christian
Speaker 3: nation for a couple hundred years, we have launched more
Speaker 3: wars than any other nation maybe in history. Like in
Speaker 3: the two hundred plus years that we've been a country,
Speaker 3: We've done some subjugating, We've done some subjugating. There have
Speaker 3: been only a few years out of all of those years,
Speaker 3: even during our isolation quote unquote isolations period while we're
Speaker 3: enacting a genocide, that we were not at war with
Speaker 3: other people in subjugating them. So what Either it's not
Speaker 3: true that Christianity allows us in a meaningful way to
Speaker 3: see others as as equals and then and treat them
Speaker 3: as we would like to be treated, or we are
Speaker 3: just overriding that as an impulse, like when when is
Speaker 3: this Christianity going to kick in?
Speaker 8: Well, I wouldn't miss I want to be careful.
Speaker 9: We don't mistake an ideal for you know, the history
Speaker 9: is contingent and and and we're never going to attain
Speaker 9: the ideal of like human equality right or or a
Speaker 9: perfect realization of Christian moral ideals. The United States didn't
Speaker 9: do it, European civilization didn't do it. I don't think
Speaker 9: anyone's ever going to get it right. But that doesn't
Speaker 9: negate the fundamental sort of philosophical and moral claims of Christianity.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 9: Christianity, as opposed to many other moral and religious systems,
Speaker 9: does claim in equality between people, and that's that's where
Speaker 9: we get things like human rights.
Speaker 8: The basis for human rights and human dignity.
Speaker 4: So why can't you take it out in a post
Speaker 4: Christian America? Why can't you say, we like the ideas
Speaker 4: that came from Gold rules Gold, we're taking the Christ
Speaker 4: out of it and like we just.
Speaker 9: Yeah, christless Christianity in other words, or a or a
Speaker 9: a secular humanism. Right, this is the argument you know
Speaker 9: that the Stephen Pinker or Richard Dawkins would make.
Speaker 8: Right. You know, they want the culture without the cults.
Speaker 9: But you can't have the culture without the cults because
Speaker 9: the culture relies on the religion, and the religious claims
Speaker 9: as the source of its vitality, the source of its coherence. Right,
Speaker 9: Why should a people who are post Christian retain Christian
Speaker 9: moral virtues?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 9: Why should I think that all men are created equal
Speaker 9: when clearly in many ways people are not equal. We
Speaker 9: see inequality all around us. And and why shouldn't we
Speaker 9: adopt a pagan morality that says, you know, any question?
Speaker 9: And this is you know, the ancient Aristotle said this.
Speaker 9: You know, the ancient pagans they understood inequality means that
Speaker 9: some people are naturally slaves and some people are naturally rulers.
Speaker 8: And and if.
Speaker 9: You're poor, that fate has decided that you should be poor,
Speaker 9: and that's your lot. Christianity, you know, brought a moral
Speaker 9: revolution to this this pagan morality and this pagan cosmology
Speaker 9: and positive a radically new way of understanding the world
Speaker 9: and our relations, and it launched a radical shift in
Speaker 9: human civilizations that had never before been seen. And so
Speaker 9: America is one expression of that, right, And I mean,
Speaker 9: we can have different interpretations of American history. European civilization
Speaker 9: is of course where we came from. But we're entering,
Speaker 9: and this is what the book argues, We're entering this
Speaker 9: new of unprecedented era, a post Christian era. And my
Speaker 9: argument is we should not expect the Christian cosmology, the
Speaker 9: Christian moral virtues that organized the West for all these centuries,
Speaker 9: to remain intact, cut off from the source of their vitality, right,
Speaker 9: and we should expect something new. And the new thing
Speaker 9: we should expect is a resurgence of this pagan mentality,
Speaker 9: the pagan ethos, which is one that's based on force
Speaker 9: and coercion.
Speaker 3: But I guess I'm still trying to figure out, like
Speaker 3: I was saying earlier, when does the Christianity kick in
Speaker 3: If the country's founded on these Christian ideals, and the
Speaker 3: country had Christians supporting slavery, Christians supporting the ethnic cleansing
Speaker 3: of Native Americans, Christians supporting the Spanish Marian War.
Speaker 1: The film.
Speaker 9: I think these are departures from from Christianity absolutely, Okay,
Speaker 9: let's I mean, these are departures from themes of Christianity.
Speaker 3: It's sort of like true communism has never been tried. Well,
Speaker 3: people mock that idea when you when when actual communists will.
Speaker 1: Say, looks the communism is going to kick in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when's it communy? Like you say, well, the Soviet
Speaker 3: Union wasn't Cuba wasn't great. Well, then that wasn't real communism.
Speaker 3: But christ what I'm saying, Communism only had like.
Speaker 1: A two hundred year run. Christianity has had two thousand years.
Speaker 8: Right, and and well, I mean, I don't know about you, but.
Speaker 9: I think that Christianity has produced a great civilization the
Speaker 9: world's ever seen. Right, which one is that this is
Speaker 9: the one that we're sitting in right now, right, that's.
Speaker 4: Certainly a fairer, indjuster world than we've seen before.
Speaker 8: Well, that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 9: I mean, consider something like you know, the Roman Empire. Right,
Speaker 9: we have a tendency, I guess, since the Enlightenment to
Speaker 9: sort of romanticize the pagan past and in the Roman world,
Speaker 9: in the Greek world, those are slave societies. Most people
Speaker 9: in the Roman Empire were slaves that they didn't have
Speaker 9: anything like rights. Right, if you were a Roman citizen
Speaker 9: or a Roman aristocrat, you could do whatever you wanted to.
Speaker 8: People who were a lower in a lower station than you.
Speaker 9: You could rape them, you could murder them, you could
Speaker 9: you could discard them. And there wasn't seen so far
Speaker 9: from not being any kind of moral censure. It was
Speaker 9: it was like a mark of your rank that you
Speaker 9: were able to do this. This is true all through
Speaker 9: pagan societies, as I said, across time and cultures.
Speaker 3: Well, what about what about the Ottoman Empire? What about
Speaker 3: a lot of Chinese Empire, like throughout Chinese history, like
Speaker 3: you had, Yeah, people who had probably far more right
Speaker 3: slave societies too, I mean.
Speaker 4: Abolished slavery later actually in most of the Ottoman areas
Speaker 4: than were in the West. And what's interesting about that,
Speaker 4: I think actually is a lot one of the grossest arguments,
Speaker 4: one of the grossest Christian arguments in favor of slavery
Speaker 4: the United States was these are not people. And what's
Speaker 4: interesting about that is because you know, as soon as
Speaker 4: you acknowledge these are human beings and you're a Christian,
Speaker 4: you have to treat them equally as human beings.
Speaker 8: Is the abolitionist argument.
Speaker 4: Right. Well, I was going to say, if you could talk,
Speaker 4: because that's in the book about how Christians get blamed
Speaker 4: for perpetrating slavery. I think rightfully, there was a Christian
Speaker 4: argument that was made in favor of slavery. Christian argument
Speaker 4: that's made in front of awful imperialism and to your point,
Speaker 4: ethnic cleansing. But if you go to if you talk
Speaker 4: about what happened when Columbus arrived, it was bartol Madeli's
Speaker 4: Cassas that was saying this is awful from Christian perspective.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so the debates over you know, what should yeah,
Speaker 9: what should the proper disposition of Christian Europeans be toward
Speaker 9: the indigenous peoples of the Americas. That was a debate
Speaker 9: that was initiated by Catholic monks and scholars in Spain
Speaker 9: right who.
Speaker 1: Had debates had a view on it too.
Speaker 9: No, I'm saying from the European perspective of what should
Speaker 9: our disposition be towards these peoples in the New World.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 9: And there was a there was a debate about their humanity,
Speaker 9: about what responsibilities the Catholic Church and the crown had
Speaker 9: to these people.
Speaker 8: It was the kind of debate, you know.
Speaker 9: The fact that they were having a debate about this
Speaker 9: at all, I would say, is a product of Christian civilization.
Speaker 9: It's not the kind of thing that would have been
Speaker 9: debated in a pagan society at all.
Speaker 8: It would have been absolutely just these people.
Speaker 1: The debates in the Ottoman Empire, the debates in China,
Speaker 1: debates in Japan, like there's everybody debates.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 9: I'm talking about a debate about whether or not these
Speaker 9: people should be just enslaved like animals and treated as such,
Speaker 9: or should their inherent dignity and humanity be recognized as
Speaker 9: children of God and our goal should be.
Speaker 1: To bring them breaks and the Romans all debated that.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 9: And on one side, I mean, Aristotle debated the He
Speaker 9: disagreed with the the practice how slavery was practiced, but
Speaker 9: he accepted at the very beginning of the politics he
Speaker 9: accepts the premise of natural slavery and natural rulers. His
Speaker 9: quibble is with the implementation of it, not not with
Speaker 9: the philosophical position that slavery is a natural state for
Speaker 9: some people. And this is this was common, but this
Speaker 9: was never accepted in Christianity in centuries and centuries of
Speaker 9: Catholic Europe. It was only in a modern context in
Speaker 9: the nineteenth century when the Antebellum South posited this very Unchristian,
Speaker 9: very pagan argument that slavery was natural, and it was
Speaker 9: that aberration was a departure from how Christianity had been
Speaker 9: approaching this issue for centuries and centuries, not.
Speaker 4: Only in the New World in eleven hundred.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 9: I mean the idea of human rights or of peace,
Speaker 9: of you know, that that war should should be confined
Speaker 9: and noncombatants should be protected. These were things that medieval
Speaker 9: Catholic Europe came up with.
Speaker 1: That's true. But one reason for that is that these
Speaker 1: Christians were doing more war than anybody else, and.
Speaker 9: Who than Genghis Khan.
Speaker 3: Genghis Khan is the exception, more more war, uh than
Speaker 3: North American, South Americans, Chinese after more.
Speaker 8: War than the Aztecs.
Speaker 9: I don't know, more war than you know, I mean,
Speaker 9: yea more war than the Egyptians commanche.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, look look around the world, like look
Speaker 1: at the biggest wars and the US and Europe.
Speaker 8: You're talking about modern one like World War one, world
Speaker 8: War two.
Speaker 3: But if you're talking about right, yeah, but if you
Speaker 3: look at how far they went.
Speaker 9: Well, World War two was a pagan war, right, I
Speaker 9: mean Nazi Germany it was a post Christian society. Uh,
Speaker 9: Communist the Soviet Union was a post Christian society.
Speaker 8: These were these.
Speaker 4: Were Nietzsche's primary argument against Christianity.
Speaker 1: It was that it was in some ways to Nazis
Speaker 1: were pagan.
Speaker 8: I think Nazis, Yeah, Nazis were absolutely pagan.
Speaker 9: So Nazis were honest enough, like the Marquis de Right
Speaker 9: to say, if we're going to reject Christianity, then we
Speaker 9: then the Christian morality has got to go. There's no
Speaker 9: basis to treat people as though they have inherent dignity
Speaker 9: and worth.
Speaker 8: Let's just liquidate all these people.
Speaker 4: They tried to keep the trappings, they liked some of
Speaker 4: the trappings of Christianity, but they took Christ quite literally,
Speaker 4: took Christ out of the Christianity.
Speaker 1: And then they go after the Communists as godless.
Speaker 9: The Nazis where their god was sort of the pagan vulk. Right,
Speaker 9: this very clearly hearkening back to a pre Christian even
Speaker 9: in their aesthetics.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 9: You know, there's no sense in which the Nazis were
Speaker 9: a manifestation of Christian cosmology, right, this was this was
Speaker 9: very clearly post Christian. And so when I say post Christian,
Speaker 9: and the reason I say the Nazis were at least
Speaker 9: honest about it is that if you get rid of
Speaker 9: the Christian claims, you eventually have to get rid of
Speaker 9: the Christian morality too.
Speaker 8: So I mentioned the Marquis de Sade. During the Enlightenment
Speaker 8: there was.
Speaker 9: This rejection, overt rejection of Christianity and specifically attacks against
Speaker 9: the Catholic Church. Marquis de Sade said, well, not only
Speaker 9: should we attack Christianity, but we should sweep away Christian
Speaker 9: morality as well. There's no reason why the strong should
Speaker 9: you know, scrape and bow before the week. That that's
Speaker 9: against nature. Right, That's yeah, that's what and that's what
Speaker 9: Marquis de said, That's what Nia said, That's what you
Speaker 9: know the Nazis said, right, And that is what Pagan
Speaker 9: society's the principle in which Pagan societies had always been organized.
Speaker 9: And what I'm saying is that Christian civilization was organized
Speaker 9: on different principles, never fully realized right, ideals that we
Speaker 9: are always moving toward, never never quite going to achieve
Speaker 9: because this is this is the world, and we're falling.
Speaker 9: You know, people are what they are, but the ideal
Speaker 9: and the claim, the ontological claim about what people are
Speaker 9: was fundamentally different than what Pagan's positive.
Speaker 1: No go ahead for this, But I don't know. I
Speaker 1: think if if the US is held up as the
Speaker 1: example as the most Christian nation, that doesn't bode well for.
Speaker 3: Linking nationalism and Christianity. We'll just based on our behavior
Speaker 3: over the last two hundred years.
Speaker 4: Somewhat interesting about this conversation is that all three of
Speaker 4: us share very similar foreign policy at the moment.
Speaker 8: So I don't know what your guys foreign policy is.
Speaker 4: He's a full but no, I mean, we pretty much
Speaker 4: agree on what's happening right now. All that is to say,
Speaker 4: I actually think it was this was very helpful to
Speaker 4: have a conversation from the right.
Speaker 1: We do a lot on the left and we do.
Speaker 4: He's great to have one from the right.
Speaker 8: Well, I appreciate y'all having me on. You read the
Speaker 8: book and then we'll come back and talk about it.
Speaker 4: A fist fight. It'll be a to see who can
Speaker 4: try and Christian, well, if you leave me out of
Speaker 4: it would be kind of Christian. Keep the women, the
Speaker 4: vulnerable out of the fist fight, all right, John Daniel Davidson.
Speaker 8: Thanks for joining us, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Appreciate it, all right.
Speaker 4: Ryan, And that does it for us on today's edition
Speaker 4: of Counterpoints. But it's worth reminding people that in addition
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Speaker 4: And this is a hell of a Friday show, I'll
Speaker 4: say that much.
Speaker 3: And I mean we can tell you who's going to
Speaker 3: be on because one of the guests has been talking
Speaker 3: about it all week on his streaming program. We're gonna
Speaker 3: have Omar Padar and we're going to have a streamer
Speaker 3: who is better known as I think mister Bonelli.
Speaker 4: Jokes, I'm too out of that rabbit hole like Eve
Speaker 4: and Sager, been having fun with these.
Speaker 3: These he goes, he goes, he goes by Destiny, Yes,
Speaker 3: and like why we had them on as an open
Speaker 3: question TBD.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll see how.
Speaker 4: But that's the point of the conversation.
Speaker 3: I think the best argument that you could make for
Speaker 3: it is that he makes a lot of the arguments
Speaker 3: that you see very frequently from the pro Israel It's
Speaker 3: a crowd, and he makes them very effectively, and so
Speaker 3: I think it's useful to see people kind of push
Speaker 3: back against them and encounter them. I think if he
Speaker 3: just started learning about this issue in the last six months.
Speaker 4: Which is true of a lot of people, and normally
Speaker 4: politics are worth talking about because that's again like by definition,
Speaker 4: they're probably representative of a broad swath of the country
Speaker 4: who doesn't for a living think constantly about these issues
Speaker 4: and here every update in the news. So I think
Speaker 4: it's a contrast that's well worth developing and it'll be
Speaker 4: a really interesting conversation. So we're doing these every Friday now.
Speaker 4: We started with dun Lemon.
Speaker 1: Last another questionable decision.
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Speaker 1: I took Don Lemon's advice. I broke out my lighter jacket.
Speaker 4: I didn't even notice.
Speaker 3: I mean, I used to wear this deep into the fall.
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Speaker 1: In the winter, it's a good spring, but it's a
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