Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at Breaking Points, are already thinking of
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Speaker 3: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Speaker 4: Good morning, Happy Wednesday, Welcome to Counterpoints. All right, so
Speaker 4: today we are excited to announce the Friday edition of
Speaker 4: our show.
Speaker 3: Thanks to the.
Speaker 4: Support of Breaking Points viewers, listeners and premium subscribers.
Speaker 5: Every Friday, you can expect to see us actually right here,
Speaker 5: but with a slightly different format. We're excited to be
Speaker 5: hosting long form debates, interviews and all that good stuff
Speaker 5: starting this Friday.
Speaker 4: Actually, and it's not going to be like Crossfire. It's
Speaker 4: not going to be a point scoring thing. We're not
Speaker 4: going to be trying to make people look stupid, although
Speaker 4: if somebody is stupid, we're gonna.
Speaker 5: They're welcome to look so they're welcome to We're not
Speaker 5: going to prevent people from right but we're not going.
Speaker 4: To try to do it on purpose. It's not going
Speaker 4: to be a kind of partisan back and forth. It's
Speaker 4: going to be more of an effort to kind of
Speaker 4: shed light rather than heat.
Speaker 3: Maybe. Yeah, we'll see.
Speaker 5: I think that's a good way to put it, and
Speaker 5: like find the contrast, figure out where it actually is,
Speaker 5: get rid of those traps that keep us outraged but
Speaker 5: poorly informed.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 5: Well, like many of you, Ryan and I want to
Speaker 5: see people that we agree with and people that we
Speaker 5: disagree with actually just kind of talk it out. Sometimes
Speaker 5: we'll grill those people ourselves. Other times we'll facilitate debates
Speaker 5: between different maybe election officials, other journalists, and thought leaders.
Speaker 5: So that's the plan, and.
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Speaker 5: It's been awesome.
Speaker 4: And with that will leave you with the teams. We've
Speaker 4: got a big guest for Friday. I don't I don't
Speaker 4: want to play them up too much. I think you're
Speaker 4: going to kind of laugh when you see it. But
Speaker 4: also I think you'll enjoy it.
Speaker 5: I think it'll be I think it'll be a really
Speaker 5: good conversation. I'm actually very excited about it.
Speaker 4: It might be a little bit of a spit take, like, really,
Speaker 4: that's what you got, It'll be kind of funny, it'll
Speaker 4: it'll it'll be a good conversation.
Speaker 5: Now, last night, yes, huge, huge deal past the Senate.
Speaker 5: We're going to break down all of that. We're going
Speaker 5: to talk about some updates of the Middle Least. We're
Speaker 5: going to talk about Lena Kahn and you have to
Speaker 5: see voting to ban non compete clauses. Ryan, you've got
Speaker 5: an interesting story for us, and we have a great
Speaker 5: guest from Columbia. Before we get to that, you have
Speaker 5: some news out of Pennsylvania. There were elections last night.
Speaker 5: It was a Tuesday.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so last night Summer Lee was up for re election.
Speaker 4: She had a significant contest. She had, I should say,
Speaker 4: a significant challenger from her right. Summer Lee was one
Speaker 4: of the first members of Congress to come out for
Speaker 4: a cease.
Speaker 3: Fire in Gaza.
Speaker 4: Apax spent millions of dollars against her in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 4: was aiming for her in twenty twenty four, but they
Speaker 4: saw kind of how strong she was looking going into
Speaker 4: her primary, decided not to spend money.
Speaker 3: Now. Jeff yass who is a.
Speaker 4: Republican billionaire in Pennsylvania, a close ally of Netnaho.
Speaker 5: Actually big TikTok investor.
Speaker 3: Big TikTok investor.
Speaker 4: He financed Netnahu's attempt to take over the courts to
Speaker 4: dodge his little corruption scandal that he's got over there.
Speaker 3: He put at least eight hundred thousand dollars in another race.
Speaker 4: We don't know exactly how much because the final FEC
Speaker 4: reports aren't out. But the election last night was a
Speaker 4: decisive victory for Summerly, winning by at least twenty points
Speaker 4: as they continue to count the votes. As Summerly put it,
Speaker 4: opposing genocide is not just good policy, it's also good politics.
Speaker 3: Here she is last Night's burg.
Speaker 5: But you know what we send a message, and we
Speaker 5: knew when we sail in the very beginning that this
Speaker 5: was the message that we were sending. That this movement is.
Speaker 6: Moment billionaire.
Speaker 7: Shoot at this staga, that everybody who wants to.
Speaker 5: Say that the power of the people is not stronger
Speaker 5: than the people of power.
Speaker 8: But we more.
Speaker 4: And Emily last night in the Senate billions of dollars
Speaker 4: more for three war theaters Ukraine, Israel and also China.
Speaker 4: China just keeps getting kind of smuggled into this conversation.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, if we're gonna we're gonna spend sends of
Speaker 4: billions of dollars on war, let's make sure we're beefing
Speaker 4: up for World War three in that region as as well.
Speaker 3: So were you what did you? What did you make
Speaker 3: of Congress?
Speaker 4: Finally, after months of hemming and hauling doing what kind
Speaker 4: of everybody expected that they would do in fun more war.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, I would say, so, let's we can put
Speaker 5: this next element up on the screen. There was overwhelming
Speaker 5: support for this bill.
Speaker 3: And how did this take a year?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 5: No, it's amazing. Actually, maybe that's the real accomplishment of
Speaker 5: the Freedom Caucus. It's that they delayed this for a
Speaker 5: year now. There were there is a pretty impressive list,
Speaker 5: I would say of Republicans who voted against this bill,
Speaker 5: even including people who have traditionally been kind of hawkish
Speaker 5: like Marco Rubio Ted Cruz. When you lose Ted Cruz
Speaker 5: on an Israel bill, that's I think something. And actually,
Speaker 5: on that note, we can put the next element up
Speaker 5: on the screen. This is what's in the bill that
Speaker 5: the final bill that was passed. So it's sixty billion
Speaker 5: dollars for you carrying fifteen billion dollar that will include
Speaker 5: facilitating weapons sales. Fifteen billion of that is for training
Speaker 5: and intelligence, military training and intelligence. Eight billion is going
Speaker 5: to go to the Ukrainian government government operations, one point
Speaker 5: six billion allocated to the private sector, fourteen billion for Israel,
Speaker 5: eight billion for roughly the China theater. So that's kind
Speaker 5: of how the numbers break down and what was actually
Speaker 5: passed last night.
Speaker 4: And no money in there for defense attorneys at the Hague.
Speaker 4: But maybe there'll be some pro bono help.
Speaker 3: From the US.
Speaker 5: Pretty sure they always have money for that. Yeah, there's
Speaker 5: always money in the bananas, Stan, ye, yes.
Speaker 3: So take them one by one. Ted Cruz is a
Speaker 3: politician's politician.
Speaker 4: They're all politicians, but Ted Cruz is the one that
Speaker 4: I like to watch in the Senate to get a
Speaker 4: sense of how which way the winds are blowing and
Speaker 4: of the political movement because he really has his kind
Speaker 4: of finger on the pulse of the grassroots. And so
Speaker 4: to see Ted Cruz come out and vote no on
Speaker 4: a war spending package that includes billions of dollars for Israel,
Speaker 4: just you know, days after the Iran attack, which Israel
Speaker 4: believed was going to really help Greece, this this package
Speaker 4: through and it did actually help grease this package through
Speaker 4: suggest that there's you know, something bubbling, you know, within
Speaker 4: the kind of Republican caucus that has gotten to the surface.
Speaker 3: If Ted Cruz is feeling the heat of it. Is
Speaker 3: that an accurate read? You know, I trust your judgment
Speaker 3: on the internal Republican politics more than my own.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it's absolutely an accurate read.
Speaker 4: You know, it's and what is It's Ukraine. It's Ukraine overriding,
Speaker 4: the isolationism overriding.
Speaker 5: It's border, the border, it's the border. It's because this
Speaker 5: didn't include a dime for the border, and people will
Speaker 5: guess that, People will say well, you know, what do
Speaker 5: you what do you mean? There was that deal that
Speaker 5: bipart isn't compromised deal that was brokeer. My opinion on
Speaker 5: that bill is that it is intentionally designed to and
Speaker 5: there are a lot of exemptions in it. We could
Speaker 5: debate it, and we debated it at the time, and
Speaker 5: I think Crystal and Sacker debated it at the time too.
Speaker 5: There were a lot of exemptions written into the bill
Speaker 5: that would have basically maintained presidential power that you could
Speaker 5: sort of carve out some of the small concessions Democrats
Speaker 5: made on asylum and all of that. But the point
Speaker 5: is Republicans were furious.
Speaker 3: With so they wanted the border money in there. And
Speaker 3: if they didn't get the border money in there, yes,
Speaker 3: Israel doesn't any money.
Speaker 5: And so the media is looking at this and saying like,
Speaker 5: Mitch McConnell broke her to deal with Chuck Schumer and
Speaker 5: James Langford, and Republicans are like, well, we never supported
Speaker 5: that deal. We never would have supported that deal. And
Speaker 5: so because they got so screwed by leadership on the
Speaker 5: House side that Mike Johnson said that over and over
Speaker 5: and over again that you can't have a dime more
Speaker 5: for Ukraine until you do something serious about the border,
Speaker 5: and he basically flip flopped on it, and again like
Speaker 5: what was going to happen? Probably this was always the
Speaker 5: inevitable result, but Republicans felt like they didn't even fight.
Speaker 5: And then on top of the it is the kind
Speaker 5: of Ukraine. I don't want to call it isolationism because
Speaker 5: now we're how many years into the war and people
Speaker 5: like Ted Cruz, Mark Rubio like there and most Republicans
Speaker 5: actually were initially pretty supportive of the war effort. It's
Speaker 5: just the Biden administration prosecution of the policy coupled with
Speaker 5: no border support.
Speaker 4: And this is what they call in Congress a free
Speaker 4: vote because whenever it's this overwhelming, like the outcome is
Speaker 4: already determined, like you know, no matter how Ted Cruz votes,
Speaker 4: the bill is going to pass. So that means it
Speaker 4: is a pure political calculation, like where does he want
Speaker 4: his name to appear on the YA or the n
Speaker 4: A column, And so that goes to how is this
Speaker 4: going to look at back home?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 4: How is this going to look in presidential primaries in
Speaker 4: the future, And clearly, you know he made the calculation.
Speaker 3: A no vote is going is the winner here. Mitch McConnell.
Speaker 4: Meanwhile, kind of doing at victory lap or a dance
Speaker 4: on Tucker Carlson's had here. So really kind of interesting
Speaker 4: comments from Mitch McConnell afterwards. Let's let's let's roll roll
Speaker 4: him on Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 9: The demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who, in
Speaker 9: my opinion, ended up or he should have been all along,
Speaker 9: which was interviewing Vladimir Putin, and so he had an
Speaker 9: enormous audience which convinced a lot of rank and viile Republicans.
Speaker 9: It maybe this was a.
Speaker 5: Mistake that dare you interview foreign leaders?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, set us time.
Speaker 4: Whatever you think of Tucker Carlson, the idea that you
Speaker 4: can't interview a foreign leader, even a dictator, is you know,
Speaker 4: utterly absurd. But what's what's interesting about that clip is
Speaker 4: that's what passes for emotion from Mitch McConnell.
Speaker 3: There there may be no stronger.
Speaker 4: Supporter of the war, in supporting the war in Ukraine
Speaker 4: than Mitch McConnell. His his ability to move money, you know,
Speaker 4: to Ukraine through the Lame Duck, uh, you know, was
Speaker 4: one of the biggest gifts to the Ukrainian War effort,
Speaker 4: and you know, he put all of the capital that
Speaker 4: he had remaining, you know, into it, and it people
Speaker 4: have talked about it as really one of the only
Speaker 4: things he has really ever believed in, other than opening
Speaker 4: up campaign finance laws like that. Like it's that plus
Speaker 4: the Ukraine War. And we don't need to get into
Speaker 4: the psychology of why that is or what happened.
Speaker 3: It's it just is.
Speaker 4: And he played he and Kevin McCarthy teaming up with
Speaker 4: Democrats who are almost unanimously supportive of it, you know,
Speaker 4: have been able to muscle through all of this support.
Speaker 4: But I found it really interesting that he pinpoints Tucker
Speaker 4: Carlson as kind of the problem that the problem with
Speaker 4: inside the Republican coalition that that produced this opposition internally.
Speaker 5: And implication of that, by the way, is that his
Speaker 5: own voters who disagree with him on this are so
Speaker 5: stupid they just mindlessly followed Tucker Carlos guy exactly. Not
Speaker 5: that they found they're intelligent that he does it, that
Speaker 5: they're intelligent people who maybe found an alternative argument compelling.
Speaker 5: And it's hardly just Tucker Carlson. It's never just been
Speaker 5: Tucker Carlson. There have been plenty and plenty of other
Speaker 5: people Mitch McConnell would complain about. It's not as though
Speaker 5: Tucker Carlson is like the origin of what McConnell sees
Speaker 5: as this cancer spreading throughout the country. Because to your point,
Speaker 5: even Ted Kruz, this is Cruz on Fox. I pulled
Speaker 5: this up after you mentioned it. Ryan, he said, I'm
Speaker 5: going to vote no on Fox. But I will tell
Speaker 5: you this is a very close call. And I struggled
Speaker 5: for a long time without a vote because there are
Speaker 5: elements of this bill I really, really strongly support. This
Speaker 5: has military aid for Israel. Israel's in the middle of
Speaker 5: a war. We should have provided this emergency military aid.
Speaker 5: But I can't support this bill ultimately because it gives
Speaker 5: money to Gaza, gives money for the NGOs that are
Speaker 5: trafficking illegal immigrants, and it does nothing zero to stop
Speaker 5: the invasion at our southern border. It's got to be
Speaker 5: the priority. If you're listening to this. Ryan just put
Speaker 5: his head in his hands and he just seemed to
Speaker 5: sigh an exasperation.
Speaker 4: So Ted Cruz, with more than two million people facing starvation,
Speaker 4: voted against the bill, not because it was sending weapons
Speaker 4: to the people who are organizing that starvation, but because
Speaker 4: it also sent food and water and humanitarian relief supplies
Speaker 4: to the people in Gaza, which he claims is somehow
Speaker 4: connected to a train of trafficking to the border.
Speaker 5: Well and noticing he mentioned yeah, so the NGOs. It's
Speaker 5: a lot of the things throughout Central America like.
Speaker 4: Those he's saying this and right he's saying that, like
Speaker 4: Hamasa is like trafficking people to the border and they're
Speaker 4: going to use this like money.
Speaker 5: Oh no, I think he's talking about like the like
Speaker 5: the various aid groups, whether it's like things that are being.
Speaker 3: He thinks here is a Pamas front for instance.
Speaker 5: Well, but also the stuff in you know, like the
Speaker 5: Dairying Gap. Some of those groups not and not so
Speaker 5: much that they're facilitating although he objects to this too.
Speaker 5: I'm sure facilitating your terrorists coming up or using the border.
Speaker 3: Next that to Gaza is But.
Speaker 5: I think he's talking about like the Catholic charities or
Speaker 5: whatever that incentive bias, and they are funded by the UN.
Speaker 5: They are I don't know exactly about this bill, but
Speaker 5: I think that's what he's subjecting to just the broader
Speaker 5: question of those NGOs facilitating people coming in. And actually
Speaker 5: we've written at the Federal spout some of those groups
Speaker 5: that are like explicitly evangelical and Catholic and they basically
Speaker 5: help people get through the Darien Gap, like here, you
Speaker 5: might die, but clearly you're going to do it anyway,
Speaker 5: so we'll be here to help out you. And I
Speaker 5: probably disagree with yah, but I think.
Speaker 3: That's what we may or may not.
Speaker 4: But like to connect that to humanitarian relief organizations in Gaza,
Speaker 4: to me is it makes it almost impossible to even
Speaker 4: have any kind of non psychedelic conversation about the situation.
Speaker 4: It's like like there is a genoside going on there,
Speaker 4: like hundreds of thousands of people immediate risk of famine,
Speaker 4: millions at risk of starvation. Israel's blockading relief efforts from
Speaker 4: getting in and this has some peanuts for the people
Speaker 4: who are suffering through that. And Cruiz connects it to
Speaker 4: the aid organizations that he objects to the activities and
Speaker 4: the Darien Gap and the way that they're incentivizing migrants,
Speaker 4: which like I see what.
Speaker 5: You're saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well Tom Cotton did
Speaker 5: not he supported the bill. Kitty Britt supported the bill
Speaker 5: ninety five billion dollars in total. By the way, we
Speaker 5: haven't even mentioned that includes the TikTok divestment or the
Speaker 5: package TikTok divestment.
Speaker 3: So Peter Wells sended it to a year. So your
Speaker 3: TikTok's okay for at least a year.
Speaker 5: I mean it will likely always be okay. We'll just
Speaker 5: come under different owners because they know they can make
Speaker 5: a ton of money off of this, and that's how
Speaker 5: it'll bay.
Speaker 3: They might screw it up, like chairman, she's doing a
Speaker 3: good job with it so far.
Speaker 5: Right, even better, it's too addictive China where the kids
Speaker 5: are like eating their vegetables.
Speaker 4: On do you and what I think the compromise should
Speaker 4: be that the Chinese regulate social media for our children
Speaker 4: because we have a collective action problem here as a
Speaker 4: parent of kids, like when everybody else's kids is able
Speaker 4: to see YouTube and is able to be on like
Speaker 4: this or that, Like it's asking too much to say
Speaker 4: that each individual parent needs to solve that.
Speaker 3: You need a collective solution. What is what's chairman, she's
Speaker 3: ruled over there. You get like one hour on Friday
Speaker 3: of video games one hour on Saturday video games. And
Speaker 3: then that's for everybody. It's all the kids out for kids.
Speaker 4: So the kids that are not like complaining and throwing
Speaker 4: a temper tantrum and the parents being like, all right,
Speaker 4: finally leave me alone. So that should be the compromise.
Speaker 4: Let she manage our kids access to social media, and
Speaker 4: then maybe that's the political speech. And then they can
Speaker 4: also apparently and they can also do social medias like
Speaker 4: TikTok is. Apparently they're better at it than our people are, Like,
Speaker 4: we can't win without just passing a law of banning
Speaker 4: their stuff.
Speaker 5: The list of people who voted no, I mean, I'm
Speaker 5: looking at it right now. At one point in the
Speaker 5: list on the Washington Post website, it goes Jeff Merkley,
Speaker 5: Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, Eric Schmidt. I mean, it's just
Speaker 5: a really interesting coalition of people. And again they're finding
Speaker 5: different reasons to disagree with the bill. So, for example,
Speaker 5: Ted Cruz cited first the first thing he cited was
Speaker 5: the Israel problems that he had with the bill that
Speaker 5: we just talked about, but then went into the border.
Speaker 5: I think for a lot of these guys, they would
Speaker 5: first and foremost say it was the lack of border funding.
Speaker 5: Some of them might have objected to, in fact, the
Speaker 5: TikTok divestment, but overall, when you find Bernie Sanders and
Speaker 5: Marco Rubio together against this huge what was the final
Speaker 5: vote was seventy nine and support eighteen against and so
Speaker 5: three didn't vote. There are two of them came out
Speaker 5: against the bill. One of them came out for the bill.
Speaker 5: That's Tim Scott, Rand Paul and Tommy Tubberville were against
Speaker 5: the package. They didn't vote because it was, like you said,
Speaker 5: a free vote. So if your fundraising or whatever, I
Speaker 5: don't agree with it.
Speaker 4: But that's what they do well, and it's it's easier
Speaker 4: than to tell groups like, oh I would have voted,
Speaker 4: your would have scored you yeah, and to say like
Speaker 4: I would have you know, if he's meeting with a
Speaker 4: pro Israel group, you can say, yeah.
Speaker 3: I would have voted for that money.
Speaker 4: If he's meeting with a border group, you could say
Speaker 4: I was going to vote against that, like members of
Speaker 4: Congress are known to do that.
Speaker 5: But when sometimes they scored you and it goes into
Speaker 5: your score, so.
Speaker 4: You're like, yeah, so then but putting all of these
Speaker 4: things together in one bill is just one more way
Speaker 4: of kind of abstracting politics away from people. Like because
Speaker 4: if if everybody was forced to vote yes or no
Speaker 4: on TikTok, yes or no on Ukraine, yes or no
Speaker 4: on money for a war with China, yes or no
Speaker 4: on money for the war for Israel's war, like, then
Speaker 4: when they run for reelection, people will know, oh, they
Speaker 4: voted yes on this, they voted no on that.
Speaker 3: Here's who I support.
Speaker 4: So that's it's a little bit more representative democracy when
Speaker 4: you put everything in there together and just ask people
Speaker 4: to do one giant yes or no. It's it's just
Speaker 4: a one more effort to confuse people and and to
Speaker 4: kind of separate the idea of accountability and representation.
Speaker 5: That is such a good point, and it was one
Speaker 5: of the conditions actually.
Speaker 3: The Freedom Caucus one like single issue votes.
Speaker 5: I was, well, she votes, and that was part of
Speaker 5: their deal in the rules package with Kevin McCarthy. And
Speaker 5: it has not turned out that way at all. And
Speaker 5: Mike Johnson, of course, is somebody who's always been you know,
Speaker 5: in just he said many times, so we shouldn't governed
Speaker 5: by omnibus, and we shouldn't governed by omnibus precisely because
Speaker 5: of this. It was the only way, and they knew this,
Speaker 5: and Mike Johnson knew this. The only way that Mike
Speaker 5: Johnson was going to get the money for Israel. He
Speaker 5: figured this out pretty you know, it was pretty quickly
Speaker 5: apparent to him after he took the job. The only
Speaker 5: way that they were going to be able to get
Speaker 5: money allocated to Israel was to tie it. And Mitch
Speaker 5: McConnell the same thing. The only reason they were going
Speaker 5: to get money that was going to go to Ukraine
Speaker 5: was to tie it to Israel. And for Johnson, he
Speaker 5: just realized he couldn't attach meaningful border security to it
Speaker 5: in the way that the rest of his conference wanted
Speaker 5: because there was nothing that you could do in the Senate.
Speaker 5: And so he said, this is more important. Israelis more important.
Speaker 5: He flip flopped on Ukraine aid it's another thing he
Speaker 5: said he wouldn't do without border security, and here we
Speaker 5: are because when you combine them all together, it's the
Speaker 5: only way that you can build coalitions instead of having
Speaker 5: people forced to be courageous and vote up and down
Speaker 5: on individual items. It's not a good thing, it's not
Speaker 5: a healthy thing. We're also watching very closely. Yesterday the
Speaker 5: second theater of conflict, which was in the courtroom in
Speaker 5: New York. Donald Trump had a real one yesterday. We
Speaker 5: can put this first Alan, We're gonna roll this first element,
Speaker 5: because as the Trump trial has commenced in New York,
Speaker 5: there are no cameras, there's no audio allowed, and yet
Speaker 5: we're still getting so much drama actually from it. John
Speaker 5: Stewart took issue with the way the media has been
Speaker 5: just in the first couple of days, where now this
Speaker 5: is the third day of the actual proceedings. He took
Speaker 5: issue with the way the media has been treating this trial.
Speaker 5: Let's roll this club, can we go?
Speaker 3: It's on, it's happening.
Speaker 10: History will be made, shaping up to be the trial
Speaker 10: of the century, maybe the trial of the century, the
Speaker 10: trial of the centric, but just might be the trial
Speaker 10: of this century.
Speaker 3: The taxman is here, Donald Trump. He will finally be
Speaker 3: forced to face the music.
Speaker 5: The legal walls closing in around Donald Trump. The legal
Speaker 5: walls are starting to close in on Donald Trump.
Speaker 11: Yes, this time, mister Bong, it truly is you're doing.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 11: If you'll excuse me, I'm going to leave this room. Obviously,
Speaker 11: when I leave, I'm not going to press this button
Speaker 11: right here that opens all the doors and dismantles the
Speaker 11: killing machine I've established. Perhaps if we limit the coverage
Speaker 11: to the issues at hand and try not to create
Speaker 11: an all encompassing spectacle of the most banal of details,
Speaker 11: perhaps that would help.
Speaker 4: You're looking at live pictures in New York City of
Speaker 4: Donald Trump's motorcate.
Speaker 10: It's about a twenty minute drive between Trump Tower and
Speaker 10: the Court building.
Speaker 5: Trump leaving Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
Speaker 12: They're now making their way across town along fifty seventh Street.
Speaker 12: They just cross Park Avenue, making their way up towards
Speaker 12: Lexiston Avenue.
Speaker 13: He's heading down the FDR to the Manhattan Courthouse on
Speaker 13: Chamber Street.
Speaker 5: Arriving at this intersection of American history with defiance.
Speaker 11: Arriving at the intersection of American history with defiance.
Speaker 3: Northeast corner of that intersection is where I'll meet you.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Another good lady said, seriously, we're going to follow
Speaker 5: this guy to court every effing day. You're trying to
Speaker 5: make this oj. It's not a chase. He's commuting now,
Speaker 5: he's communting. So the media's first attempt, the very first
Speaker 5: attempt on the first day at self control failed. Now
Speaker 5: it's worth noting the vast majority of those clips were
Speaker 5: from MSNBC. He threw Jack Tapper and for good measure,
Speaker 5: but the glee of MSNBC. It actually kind of reminded
Speaker 5: me of what Primila Jaiapaul said on the Sunday Shows
Speaker 5: this week. I forget what show it was, but basically
Speaker 5: she was like, if there was if impeachment had worked,
Speaker 5: we wouldn't be here right now. And the reason that
Speaker 5: reminds me like you can connect those two dots. It's
Speaker 5: just like MSNBC has been going to the bank, like
Speaker 5: they've been cashing in on this every day for years now,
Speaker 5: and impeachment didn't work. So all of the different attorneys
Speaker 5: who Politico revealed their on conference calls, the media attorneys,
Speaker 5: did you see this political story? No, these media attorneys,
Speaker 5: Barbara McQuaid, Jeffrey Tubin. I don't know that you want
Speaker 5: to be an Zoom with Jeffrey Tubin, but they've been
Speaker 5: having Zoom salons weekly to talk about Trump's legal drama.
Speaker 5: And then they go and talk on George Conway, like
Speaker 5: all of these guys, and so it's like they're frothing
Speaker 5: at the mouth because it's like, this is what we
Speaker 5: have to get them. We have to get them, and
Speaker 5: every opportunity to do that is like great television for
Speaker 5: them too.
Speaker 3: And it's not as if there's nothing else going on
Speaker 3: in the world.
Speaker 4: That's the impression that you would get from this type
Speaker 4: of coveragew I've said a million times that I agree
Speaker 4: with Jiapaul in the sense that if they would have
Speaker 4: impeached him on the night of January sixth, the early
Speaker 4: morning hours of January seventh, write it just down on
Speaker 4: some bloodstained paper boat on it right there, kick it
Speaker 4: over the Senate and force the Senate to deal with
Speaker 4: it in the remaining couple weeks before he left office,
Speaker 4: there's a chance that they actually impeach him. Like Lindsay
Speaker 4: Graham was completely done with him, like they believed that
Speaker 4: his time was over, that he had he had come
Speaker 4: for the system and he had he had missed and
Speaker 4: when you do that, you're finished.
Speaker 3: It was that it was when people went to the airport.
Speaker 4: Lindsay Graham got mobbed at the airport by people that
Speaker 4: were there for January sixth, that they're like, oh, wait, no,
Speaker 4: we're changing our minds.
Speaker 5: Well, that's why I think it never would have gone away, because,
Speaker 5: like say they had voted to impeach, those are still
Speaker 5: their constituents, and so now.
Speaker 3: Can he run as an impeached for president?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 5: Like this is MSNBC's big problem, CNN's big problem right
Speaker 5: now is that they fundamentally do not want to make
Speaker 5: the argument to people who still support Trump. They just
Speaker 5: want to sort of wish it away and having him
Speaker 5: this legal drum.
Speaker 4: But what they're left with really is they have to
Speaker 4: beat him at the ballot box. And they right right,
Speaker 4: which they did.
Speaker 3: In you know, actually twenty sixteen, three million votes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's not impossible.
Speaker 3: They did it in twenty eighteen, they did it in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty, they did it in twenty twenty two. They
Speaker 3: can do it again.
Speaker 5: But the way to do it is not by censoring
Speaker 5: a Hunter Biden laptop story. It's by making the arts
Speaker 5: on the merits for your candidate. And that's where all
Speaker 5: of this stuff completely distracts them from that, and they're
Speaker 5: left with but Trump, like they're left with, but you know,
Speaker 5: this hush money case, and we can put the snuxt
Speaker 5: element upon the screen, because this is what they're talking
Speaker 5: about in the courtroom, that the National Inquirer made up
Speaker 5: the story about Ted Cruz's father and Lee Harvey Oswald,
Speaker 5: according to David Pecker, who has taken the stand and
Speaker 5: again this case, which is over the hush money payment
Speaker 5: Stormy Daniels Karen McDougall so reading from this article. David Pecker,
Speaker 5: the former publisher of National Inquirer, testified at Donald Trump's
Speaker 5: trial Tuesday that the tab would completely manufacture a negative
Speaker 5: story in twenty sixteen about the father of Senator Ted
Speaker 5: Cruz of Texas, who was then Trump's rival for the
Speaker 5: GOP presidential nomination. The paper had published a photo allegedly
Speaker 5: showing Cruz's father, Raphael Cruz, with Lee Harvey Oswald, handing
Speaker 5: out pro Fidel Castra pamphlets in New Orleans in nineteen
Speaker 5: sixty three, not long before Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
Speaker 5: Trump repeatedly referred to the story on the campaign trails
Speaker 5: and interviews. Manhattan Prosecutor Joshua Steinlass asked Pecker about the
Speaker 5: story's origins during the trial to Sday Manhattan. Pecker said
Speaker 5: that then National a Choir editor Dylan Howard and the
Speaker 5: Tabloids research department got involved and Pecker indicated that they
Speaker 5: faked the photo. That was the foundation for the story.
Speaker 5: We mashed the photos in the different picture with Lee
Speaker 5: Harvey Oswald and mashed it to together. And that's how
Speaker 5: the story was prepared created, I would say, Pecker said
Speaker 5: on the witness stand, they talked about some other headlines.
Speaker 5: We can put the next element up on this point.
Speaker 4: On that one, the irony is that Packer and Trump
Speaker 4: did not have the courage to go forward with the
Speaker 4: actual potential conspiracy. There there was a son of somebody
Speaker 4: who may have been involved in the JFK's assassination running
Speaker 4: against him at the time, and that was Jeb Bush.
Speaker 4: But he did not He didn't have the didn't have
Speaker 4: the guts to go ahead and say that. Jeb Bush's
Speaker 4: father one of the only people who doesn't know didn't
Speaker 4: know where he was on the day.
Speaker 5: There are several people.
Speaker 3: QUO was then Ali everyone else and my generation remembers that.
Speaker 3: But I mean, where was I then?
Speaker 5: Well he was he goes back to OSS, doesn't.
Speaker 4: He I don't know about all the way to the OSS.
Speaker 4: But he ran the CIA. But yeah, it may have
Speaker 4: gone all the way to the oss.
Speaker 5: So but let's put this next element up on the
Speaker 5: screen again. This is what's happening in the courtroom. Packer
Speaker 5: gave some examples of stories Vetch The Inquirer on Trump's opponents, including,
Speaker 5: and this is paraphrasing some of them, ben Carson left
Speaker 5: sponge and patient's brain ted, cruse, shamed by porn star,
Speaker 5: family man Marco Rubio's love child stunner. I think Crystal
Speaker 5: teld us that was her favorite of the headline. The
Speaker 5: one that was killing me was that Ben Carson left
Speaker 5: the sponge and a patient.
Speaker 3: Remember that story.
Speaker 5: Actually it's good stuff, but seriously, like this trial. There
Speaker 5: was an op ed in the New York Times just
Speaker 5: yesterday from someone saying, at first I thought, and I'm
Speaker 5: paraphrasing it, I'm looking for the headline right now, But
Speaker 5: it was basically, at first I thought that Alvin Bragg
Speaker 5: case was an embarrassment, and now I think it's a
Speaker 5: historic mistake. I just brought it up like this case again.
Speaker 5: You can have the conversation about should he have classified
Speaker 5: this as a campaign expense? But then it's like you
Speaker 5: want him to classify a hush money payment as a
Speaker 5: campaign expense, that's probably an issue in and of itself.
Speaker 5: I mean, obviously step one is don't pay off porn
Speaker 5: stars with this weird scheme.
Speaker 3: But it's legal to do that.
Speaker 5: It is, It's perfectly legal because the campaign finance law
Speaker 5: is that you can't do it if it's only purpose,
Speaker 5: or you can only do it if it's like you
Speaker 5: can't have multiple you can have multiple purposes. So if
Speaker 5: you're saying fundamentally, the only reason was for the campaign,
Speaker 5: but Trump is saying Milan, I wanted to protect Milania,
Speaker 5: I wanted to do x Y.
Speaker 4: She's trying to have an affair. She was pregnant at
Speaker 4: the time. He's embarrassed about it. Ironically, the question for
Speaker 4: the jury turns on whether or not Trump has any
Speaker 4: shame and as actually trying to keep secrets from his
Speaker 4: wife or is just a complete and total scumbag who
Speaker 4: wouldn't even bother. But yeah, he's probably trying to keep
Speaker 4: some secrets. Yes, yeah, he's probably got some shame. But
Speaker 4: when you're in court if he does, if he has
Speaker 4: a tiniest bit of shame, and the jury can be like,
Speaker 4: you know what this is, you legitimately can cover up
Speaker 4: your your affair this way.
Speaker 5: And when you're in court, he can like continue to
Speaker 5: deny as he does, that any of this ever happened,
Speaker 5: and hypothetically.
Speaker 3: Again he denies it even happened.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well that he denies that he had the affairs
Speaker 5: with the women. So again like he can yeah, I know,
Speaker 5: it's funny, but like he can still cling to that,
Speaker 5: and there's nothing legally, you know, that's not what's on trial.
Speaker 5: What's on trial is the payments. And so he can
Speaker 5: still continue to say that I was trying to quash
Speaker 5: a false story, which is a perfectly normal thing that
Speaker 5: happens in the course of campaigns, Like people do it
Speaker 5: all the time. And now, actually there's an interesting conversation
Speaker 5: happening about the precedent for other campaigns that this would
Speaker 5: set going forward, Like what if he's found guilty on this,
Speaker 5: what does it mean for different campaign expenses, you know
Speaker 5: down the road as people mull some much more innocuous questions,
Speaker 5: not even hush money payment support stars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's so many other things you can charge them with.
Speaker 3: I'd say just do that instead.
Speaker 5: Come on, So here's Donald Trump talking of talking about
Speaker 5: the gag order. Let's roll this clip of them yesterday.
Speaker 6: I can't even.
Speaker 13: Allow articles to be put in.
Speaker 12: As an example, these are articles that were over the
Speaker 12: last day and a half. They're very good articles into
Speaker 12: the cases of sham and you should be tried.
Speaker 13: It shouldn't have been submitted.
Speaker 5: And I don't even know if you're allowed to put
Speaker 5: them in.
Speaker 12: We have a gag order, which to be is totally unconstitutional.
Speaker 13: I'm not allowed to talk, but people are allowed.
Speaker 3: To talk about me.
Speaker 6: So they can talk about me. They can say whatever
Speaker 6: they want.
Speaker 11: They can live, but I'm not allowed to say.
Speaker 12: And I just have to sit back and look at
Speaker 12: why a conflicted judge.
Speaker 6: It's me to have a game.
Speaker 3: I don't think anybody's in a city anything like this.
Speaker 12: I'd love to talk to you people, I'd love to
Speaker 12: say everything that's on my mind, but I'm restricted because
Speaker 12: I have a gag in it having to do with
Speaker 12: the schools and the closings. That's Biden's fall. And by
Speaker 12: the way, this trial is all bighten. You know, this
Speaker 12: is all Biden. Just in case anybody is any question,
Speaker 12: and they're keeping me in the courtroom that's freezing, by.
Speaker 8: The way, in a courtroom all day long.
Speaker 11: Well, he's out campaigning.
Speaker 13: That's probably an advantage because he can't campaign.
Speaker 3: Nobody knows what he's doing. You can't put two sentences together.
Speaker 2: But he's out campaigning.
Speaker 11: He's out campaigning, and I'm here at the.
Speaker 5: Courtant from sitting him.
Speaker 12: Giving sitting up as street as they can all day along,
Speaker 12: because you know what, it's a very unfair situation.
Speaker 4: I think that's a reference to him getting caught sleeping, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: they claim they're.
Speaker 5: All kinds of weird pieces of color.
Speaker 3: If he wants to sleep through his own trial, you know,
Speaker 3: it seems fine with me.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's really a power move power move. But yeah, again,
Speaker 5: so like the judge's daughter. By the way, one of
Speaker 5: her clients is Adam Schiff. She works at a progressive
Speaker 5: consulting company out of Chicago. One of her biggest clients
Speaker 5: is Adam Schiff, who fundraises awful lot of the law
Speaker 5: fair against Donald Trump. That is again like he's the judge,
Speaker 5: that's his daughter, it's not him. But there's some reasons
Speaker 5: that Donald Trump is going to want to continue to
Speaker 5: talk about this case. It's obviously salient in the campaign contact.
Speaker 5: I don't think it's an easy question because on the
Speaker 5: one hand, you know, you should have rule of law,
Speaker 5: and that's why you know. It doesn't like Donald Trump
Speaker 5: getting sued over this or going to court over this,
Speaker 5: the criminal charges. I mean, it bothers me that it's
Speaker 5: not a consistent standard. But people should be obviously held
Speaker 5: to the law, regardless of how powerful they are, and
Speaker 5: so the same thing with the gag order. But at
Speaker 5: the same time, there's this intersection with an obvious campaign
Speaker 5: question as to whether he should be able to make
Speaker 5: his case to the American public in the middle of
Speaker 5: a presidential election. I think that's a real challenge and
Speaker 5: a real question about how this is transpiring.
Speaker 3: Is he trying to get locked up?
Speaker 5: You think no, I don't think so. What do you think?
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 4: It's it feels like going out and talking about your
Speaker 4: gag order and just constantly attacking the judge after you've
Speaker 4: been told you're going to be held in contempt and
Speaker 4: warning after warning after warning.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I could. I could see an explanation either way.
Speaker 3: That one.
Speaker 4: He just is so unused to the idea of consequences
Speaker 4: that he feels like there there can be no consequences
Speaker 4: for him for anything, or that he sees political value
Speaker 4: and historical value in, you know, getting handcuffed and frog
Speaker 4: marched out of there. But it's very hard to see
Speaker 4: that because he knows that that would be deeply unpleasant.
Speaker 3: He doesn't like that.
Speaker 4: It's chili in the courtroom. It's old, like he has
Speaker 4: to sit up and can't just not off when he
Speaker 4: feels like it. It's like, it really sucks to have
Speaker 4: any of your freedoms taken away from you, and the
Speaker 4: criminal justice system is just absolutely brutal, start to finish,
Speaker 4: to go through, it's dehumanizing, it's ugly.
Speaker 3: It rips the soul out of your body. And so
Speaker 3: I would.
Speaker 4: Imagine that he's feeling that and doesn't want any more
Speaker 4: of it. On the other hand, he's just walking right
Speaker 4: into handcuffs here.
Speaker 3: If he doesn't if he doesn't listen to the judge.
Speaker 5: Well, if he doesn't win and then part in himself.
Speaker 5: And I think that's what's I think that's the big
Speaker 5: bet right now, or that there'll be immense pressure on
Speaker 5: whoever comes next to pardon him.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 5: The reason Packer was on the stand is because they're
Speaker 5: trying to the prosecution was trying to show this close
Speaker 5: relationship between the Trump campaign and the National Inquirer, which
Speaker 5: very obviously existed. But if that's where MSNBC's glee is
Speaker 5: coming from at this point in twenty twenty, for proving
Speaker 5: that Donald Trump was feeding stories to the freaking National Inquirer, amazing.
Speaker 3: I just yeah.
Speaker 4: A lot of people don't like Ronan Pharaoh for various reasons,
Speaker 4: but his book Catch and Kill highly recommend it. It's
Speaker 4: a thriller, like he's got so many interesting documents and
Speaker 4: inside sources that he's able to tell it like a novel.
Speaker 4: And he'd tell Catch and kill is the phrase that
Speaker 4: the National Inquirer would use to help somebody like Trump
Speaker 4: catch a scandal and then kill it, So like, is
Speaker 4: there a love child somewhere? Sure, that's interesting. We'll pay
Speaker 4: you thirty thousand dollars for that story, and then boom,
Speaker 4: you kill the story. And now that person has signed
Speaker 4: an NDA so they can't leak it anywhere else. And
Speaker 4: so that that's one of the services that the National
Speaker 4: Inquirer was willing to provide for people like Trump.
Speaker 5: Let's move over to the Middle East where they're is
Speaker 5: escalations and tensions, escalations and violence. Franky Ryan, we can
Speaker 5: put the first element up on the screen has bella
Speaker 5: tell us what happened.
Speaker 3: So be one up here.
Speaker 4: So it has been launching one of its deepest forays
Speaker 4: into into Israel and years two drones going deep toward
Speaker 4: the Acre base. This was Ochre Base, Israel saying that
Speaker 4: there is no no report damage. But you know a
Speaker 4: lot of this is just kind of people probing and
Speaker 4: testing defenses and and seeing how far they can push
Speaker 4: the envelope it is. It has led to significant evacuations,
Speaker 4: and the evacuations are fascinating because a lot of people
Speaker 4: talk about the the West Bank and the settlements in
Speaker 4: the West Bank as a FATA company. It's like, look,
Speaker 4: these these people are there. There's there's nothing you can
Speaker 4: do about. It doesn't matter that the internettional community says
Speaker 4: these settlements are illegal.
Speaker 3: It is what it is, and it always will be
Speaker 3: this way. This war has shown that that's not necessarily true.
Speaker 4: Southern Israel and northern Israel have seen massive evacuations of
Speaker 4: tens of thousands of people into the interior of Israel.
Speaker 4: They're about you know, when people talk about reorganizing the
Speaker 4: West Bank after a peace deal, it's not as if
Speaker 4: all seven hundred thousand settlers.
Speaker 3: Who are there would be moved out.
Speaker 4: It's more along the lines between say one hundred and
Speaker 4: one hundred and fifty thousand, because the deals that have
Speaker 4: been on the table before would say, look, all right,
Speaker 4: you've been here for fifty years, like this community is
Speaker 4: going to stay. We're going to get a land swap
Speaker 4: in exchange for that where Palestinians are going to have
Speaker 4: sovereignty and be able to live. But then there are
Speaker 4: certain settlements that are so illegal and so new that
Speaker 4: that even Israel say, okay, yes, we will just we
Speaker 4: will dismantle those. And it's the far right is often said,
Speaker 4: well that's impossible, You're never You're never going to do that.
Speaker 3: People live there, they're not moving.
Speaker 4: And what we're seeing and what we're seeing just from
Speaker 4: this this Hesbela attack, is that no, actually people people
Speaker 4: can move. And in Israel there is a dawning realization
Speaker 4: that they might not actually kind of resettle the north
Speaker 4: like there because without it, and that's why you have
Speaker 4: so many people that are calling for this full on
Speaker 4: war on on Lebanon and just you know, raise ba
Speaker 4: route to the ground so that they can reclaim because
Speaker 4: they have sovereignty over this territory, but they have moved that,
Speaker 4: so many Israelis have moved out of it, that it's
Speaker 4: it's sovereignty without any of the benefits of it, because
Speaker 4: you can't actually live in it, because it's not safe
Speaker 4: to live in because there's rockets flying constantly, and so
Speaker 4: without without some type of peace deal, that that just becomes,
Speaker 4: you know, land where nobody can live. And so that's
Speaker 4: one of the things I find fascinating about this attack.
Speaker 4: Now Israel has responded, we can put up B two
Speaker 4: here with more more bombing of Gaza and retaliations against.
Speaker 5: Well and in southern Lebanon. Yeah, yeah, right, So they
Speaker 5: their airstrikes killed two has Bula fighters, according to the
Speaker 5: IDF in Southern Lebanons then confirmed those deaths. Didn't add
Speaker 5: any details at the time, but that's Israel has killed
Speaker 5: about two hundred and seventy has Bela fighters and fifty
Speaker 5: civilians since October, that's according to Reuters, So two more
Speaker 5: just yesterday.
Speaker 4: To the point you were just making, and the media
Speaker 4: has described the US media has described the war in
Speaker 4: gazas reaching a kind of low intense quote low intensity phase.
Speaker 4: But the images you see coming out of the reports
Speaker 4: that you hear continue to show significant bombing campaign relative.
Speaker 5: To October fifteenth. Of course it's going to look like right.
Speaker 3: But also Gaza itself is much diminished relative to October fifteenth.
Speaker 4: You know, they have pushed everybody into one area and
Speaker 4: now bombing that area, and in the casually account keeps soaring.
Speaker 4: That gets us to our next point, which you know,
Speaker 4: as the nation is and in the globe in some ways,
Speaker 4: like the Columbia University is becoming like international news as
Speaker 4: everybody's focused on these encampments that are that are spreading
Speaker 4: throughout universities. We're finding Palestinian civil forces are finding increasingly
Speaker 4: finding mass graves as they're returning to hospitals.
Speaker 3: Some of these mass graves appear to have.
Speaker 4: Been originally made by Palestinian medical personnel. Others appear to
Speaker 4: have been made by the IDF. And this also goes
Speaker 4: to the question of you know, how significant is is
Speaker 4: the undercount that that Hamas is putting out. Because Ralph
Speaker 4: Nader was actually making an interesting point recently. He's he's
Speaker 4: been you know, his background is actually in casualties and
Speaker 4: fatalities and and and the number of people dying as
Speaker 4: a result of you know, back in the seventies is
Speaker 4: a GM. Now he's studying it as a result of
Speaker 4: this war. His argument is that the numbers are much
Speaker 4: much higher, uh than than people than than than people
Speaker 4: are saying they are, and that you shouldn't necessarily trust
Speaker 4: Hamas figures, not because they're overcounting it, because they're they
Speaker 4: have an incentive to undercount it, because it is Hamas's
Speaker 4: job to at the in the end to protect the
Speaker 4: civilian population, even though you know, there's there's little they
Speaker 4: can do if uh, you know, the IDEF drops a
Speaker 4: two thousand pound bomb on a refugee camp, it's that's
Speaker 4: going to kill hundreds of people at a minimum. But
Speaker 4: in general, and and and their numbers are you know,
Speaker 4: oddly trusted like by the UN, by the US, by
Speaker 4: by Israel. But what he's saying is it might actually
Speaker 4: be an undercount and the identification of these mass graves
Speaker 4: suggest that there may be something to that.
Speaker 5: There's truly so much we don't know yet. And according
Speaker 5: to this report in The Guardian, a total of three
Speaker 5: hundred and ten bodies have been found in the last week,
Speaker 5: including thirty five just in the past day, according to
Speaker 5: Palestinian officials. Now, these are obviously at two of Gaza's
Speaker 5: largest hospitals, that's where the mass graves were found. And
Speaker 5: so Israel, you know, rightfully does say that there's Hamas
Speaker 5: infrastructure in hospitals. Ryan, We've talked about this before, even
Speaker 5: granted that where Hamas would be able to let's say,
Speaker 5: hypothetically like separate itself from the civilian population, which obviously
Speaker 5: I think was the much more humane well violence in
Speaker 5: general not humane, but you know, you would be able
Speaker 5: to separate from the civilian popular. It's incredibly difficult in
Speaker 5: a dense, densely packed area like Ganza, in a tiny
Speaker 5: area like Gaza. So just the kind of conversation on
Speaker 5: both sides of that, Israel is going to say that
Speaker 5: this was you know, first of all, they say the
Speaker 5: claim that the IDF buried Pastadian bodies is baseless and unfounded.
Speaker 5: They said, after examining the bodies, the IDEF returned them
Speaker 5: to where they had been previously buried. So that's the
Speaker 5: claim from the IDF. Obviously, there's also the issue of
Speaker 5: the hospitals themselves, where we've had conversations in the past
Speaker 5: several months about raised on hospitals, and you know, the
Speaker 5: legitimacy of that as anti terrorism operations versus operations that
Speaker 5: are going to disproportionately end up targeting vulnerable civilians. Obviously,
Speaker 5: that's we've debated it for a couple of months now.
Speaker 4: For my Intercept podcast that'll be out on Friday, I
Speaker 4: just interviewed a doctor from Dallas who just recently came
Speaker 4: back from Gaza.
Speaker 3: He was working at the Pan Hospital.
Speaker 4: The stories he told from there so disturbing because some
Speaker 4: of the doctors that he worked with had come from
Speaker 4: Al Shifa Hospital because after that was raided, and he
Speaker 4: had he confirmed something that that my college Jeremy Scahill,
Speaker 4: had heard from other medical personnel had worked in Gaza,
Speaker 4: which is that the that doctors when the IDF is approaching,
Speaker 4: have started to take off their scrubs, like and nurses
Speaker 4: as well. That there is now a belief among medical
Speaker 4: personnel that they are more at risk by appearing to
Speaker 4: be medical personnel than if they can blend in with
Speaker 4: the civilian population, which, if you sit with and think
Speaker 4: about what that, what that says is just profoundly, deeply disturbing.
Speaker 4: And you know, he said that the entire time that
Speaker 4: he was there, he never saw anybody that looked remotely
Speaker 4: like a Humas fighter. At the same time, he said
Speaker 4: that the European hospital where he was working, everyone there
Speaker 4: assumes that they are next that the raid is coming,
Speaker 4: but not that there's some pretext that as if like
Speaker 4: there's Hamas guys everywhere, but just that it's coming. And
Speaker 4: they were hoping that these international doctors would stay as
Speaker 4: long as they possibly could because they thought that that
Speaker 4: was the one thing that was standing between them and
Speaker 4: the entire thing just getting completely flattened, people rounded up
Speaker 4: and killed. The way that people are seeing it on
Speaker 4: the ground compared to the way that people are understanding it, hears,
Speaker 4: couldn't be couldn't be much different. By the way, David Saderfield,
Speaker 4: we could talk about this, who has to be the
Speaker 4: biggest failure of any kind of administration official almost in history.
Speaker 4: So David's David Saderfield is Biden's guy who's in charge
Speaker 4: of humanitarian relief in Gaza, and everybody there is dying.
Speaker 4: So just on a objective level, just complete and total failure.
Speaker 4: He came to the State Department briefing yesterday rather than
Speaker 4: offering contrition like this is the vibe that he decides
Speaker 4: is the appropriate thing to give off to the public.
Speaker 4: Let's roll David Saderfield from yesterday's State Department.
Speaker 14: Briefing three weeks later. Can you say you're satisfied with
Speaker 14: the steps that Israel has taken so far? Has the
Speaker 14: deconfliction mechanism that you talked about you said there's progress?
Speaker 14: Is that in place now and is working? And the
Speaker 14: final thing is about the peer we're being told us
Speaker 14: will rely on Israel for security. Can you elaborate on that?
Speaker 14: Is it going to be security of US troops provided
Speaker 14: by Israel? Who will distribute the aid inside GUSA?
Speaker 13: Thank you, I'll take your last part in turn to
Speaker 13: Sonali for that. But I am not going to give
Speaker 13: you now spare the rest of your colleagues. I'm not
Speaker 13: going to give you a grade. Did they get an
Speaker 13: A plus and AARB. We are in the constant process
Speaker 13: of monitoring, assessing, facilitating, supporting progress towards the goals. The
Speaker 13: President said, this is not a gotcha test At two
Speaker 13: pm on the seventh of May, well is reel past
Speaker 13: or not. This is a set of requirements to help
Speaker 13: the people of Gaza and the humanitarian workers whose role
Speaker 13: is vital in facilitating assistance. Progress is being made, but
Speaker 13: I am not going to stand here and give you
Speaker 13: a grade on that. More needs to be done.
Speaker 5: They're so bad at that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're so bad at that was That was Reuter's reporter,
Speaker 4: whom Ira Pamock by the way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like, not only is he bad.
Speaker 4: At his job of getting humanitarian relief into Gaza, but
Speaker 4: not not good at even making us feel like he's trying.
Speaker 5: He seemed to be almost like trying to answer the question.
Speaker 5: It's like a book report when you're in third grade.
Speaker 5: You know, you can see this a lot with flax,
Speaker 5: like they just kind of and he's not even a
Speaker 5: flack's he was flacking, right, he's in the rooms point
Speaker 5: of time. Yeah, but he he just like goes may
Speaker 5: second at this exact point of time. I'm not going
Speaker 5: to give Israel grade like it's a test. It's like
Speaker 5: you're just you're just talking to talk at those points
Speaker 5: so that you don't answer the question. You're talking around
Speaker 5: the question.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know what he's doing up there, because
Speaker 4: there's nothing he can say except you know, I resign
Speaker 4: and I apologize and I will turn myself into the Hague.
Speaker 4: But other than that, like, what are you even doing you?
Speaker 5: I actually think though, and that's what's again, because we
Speaker 5: disagree on some of this stuff, but I actually think
Speaker 5: you can make this argument in a way that you know,
Speaker 5: whether or not the public is in the right place
Speaker 5: is another question, but in a way that appeals to
Speaker 5: the PubL Like that is not a way that appeals
Speaker 5: to the public whatsoever, because basically nobody in the United States,
Speaker 5: I mean, the public polling is overwhelming that people are
Speaker 5: upset about the humanitarian issues in Gaza, and so to
Speaker 5: just kind of brush it aside like that and say,
Speaker 5: I'm not going to give them a grade. What are
Speaker 5: you talking about. We're working on it. Don't worry. It's
Speaker 5: just there's you can actually do a better job. There
Speaker 5: is a better way, even if it's like for the
Speaker 5: sake of propaganda, you can do a better job than that.
Speaker 5: And that's it's like just not only is a you know, problematic,
Speaker 5: it's incompetent. Like the combination of those two things is
Speaker 5: just the Biden administration defined right now.
Speaker 4: The FTC yesterday moved to ban non compete agreements. This
Speaker 4: is Lena Khan's kind of latest victory over corporate power.
Speaker 4: It was just it was described by some as the
Speaker 4: perhaps the best thing that the Biden ministry has ever done,
Speaker 4: because what it can do is unleash significant wage growth
Speaker 4: and significant kind of economic opportunity for people up and
Speaker 4: down the ladder. Let's let's actually roll Lena Khan first.
Speaker 4: This was an interview posted yesterday with the news organization
Speaker 4: More Perfect Union to coinciding with the with the final vote.
Speaker 4: Here's here's a little clip from that interview. Here's FTC
Speaker 4: chairwoman Lena Khan.
Speaker 1: A lot of the comments that we got were from
Speaker 1: workers that actually wanted to go start their own competing business.
Speaker 1: We heard from people in the ausephalt business that saw
Speaker 1: an opportunity in the market wanted to go start a
Speaker 1: rival firm, but weren't able to do so because they
Speaker 1: were locked in with a noncompete.
Speaker 8: And there's actually correct me if I'm wrong, there's attorneys
Speaker 8: and bankers who make a decent income who are also
Speaker 8: affected by it too.
Speaker 5: Could be agreements, that's right.
Speaker 1: I mean, we got comments from across the income level,
Speaker 1: people making near minimum wage, but also people making tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars,
Speaker 1: sharing stories about how non competes had been devastating.
Speaker 5: For their lives.
Speaker 1: We heard from doctors in rural America who shared how
Speaker 1: non competes really limit their ability to continue providing care
Speaker 1: for their patients if they ever look to change employers.
Speaker 1: So this is having real world effects harming Americans and
Speaker 1: harming their communities.
Speaker 8: As you were talking, I was thinking of corporate m
Speaker 8: and A attorneys and big bankers at firms who work
Speaker 8: on mergers, and I would just want to make a
Speaker 8: point to them that Lina CON's got your backs. More
Speaker 8: freedom of movement as a result of this noncompete ban.
Speaker 4: And so the joke there that they're making at the
Speaker 4: very end is at the expense of these mergers and
Speaker 4: acquisitions attorneys, because their whole job is to merge, is
Speaker 4: to consolidate corporate power, to bring corporations together and lead
Speaker 4: to cons em to seats consumers, right, yeah, they're bringing
Speaker 4: benefits for con Yeah, And so their whole their whole
Speaker 4: job is just to sit in the middle of these
Speaker 4: mergers and make money. And actually they go out and
Speaker 4: pitch them constantly like it's it's one of those situations
Speaker 4: where the economy gets sort of a kink in it,
Speaker 4: and then in the kink develop a bunch of parasites
Speaker 4: who make a living off of it, like lobbyists for instance.
Speaker 3: And we can talk about this in a future program.
Speaker 4: Bobbies are constantly going around creating problems that they then
Speaker 4: pitch themselves able to solve. It's just like it's this
Speaker 4: extra layer of problem that is deeper than just the
Speaker 4: fundamental layer of corruption. And so, but nobody hates Lena
Speaker 4: Khn other than the Wall Street Journal, more than kind
Speaker 4: of mergers and acquisitions attorneys, because it's she's making it
Speaker 4: harder for corporations to consolidate. And so that's Faz Shakir,
Speaker 4: that's Bernie Sanders campaign manager saying, look, now you can
Speaker 4: go find another job, go start a new firm, thanks
Speaker 4: thanks to Lena Khan. Because non competes up and down
Speaker 4: ladder really really make it difficult for economic innovation, I believe.
Speaker 4: I think Crystal and Sacer had one that they had
Speaker 4: to fight to get out of, you know, when they
Speaker 4: went from rising over over to here. Because corporations are
Speaker 4: always trying to make sure that they control absolutely everything yeah,
Speaker 4: and you know, if they had their way, you wouldn't
Speaker 4: have been able to have independent competing businesses. Yeah, like
Speaker 4: the one we're sitting in right now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the FTC is estimating that it's like one in
Speaker 5: five workers currently bound by non compete clauses. Now in
Speaker 5: some industries, that's where the FTC is saying it's stifling
Speaker 5: because you don't have the freedom to kind of move
Speaker 5: and competitively because that industry is so dominated where it
Speaker 5: would be one thing moving from industry to industry. One
Speaker 5: industry where maybe there's a non compete or it's you
Speaker 5: know common to have a noncompete, another industry where basically
Speaker 5: nobody has non compete, something like that. Matt Stoler has
Speaker 5: written that non competes so have just exploded. He said
Speaker 5: it was because of the ease of like printing contracts out,
Speaker 5: which is probably true that you know, it's just so
Speaker 5: easy now to like throw it on compezza at people.
Speaker 5: It's so cheap to throw non competzz at people, and
Speaker 5: you know why not. But in certain industries it does
Speaker 5: clearly stifle competition, there's no question about it. But where
Speaker 5: there are questions being raised, so the Chamber of Commerce
Speaker 5: has said they're immediately going to sue. They were beat
Speaker 5: to the punch, though, is put C three up on
Speaker 5: the screen by this is so, this is the argument
Speaker 5: from the FTC. Republican Commissioner too voted against on the
Speaker 5: FTC and he said he was sympathetic to the rule
Speaker 5: banning non competes, but beginning with policy puts the cart
Speaker 5: before the horse. And Matt said exactly what I thought,
Speaker 5: opposition on procedural grounds, and that was the lawsuit that
Speaker 5: was filed in Texas basically immediately by Eugene Scalia, the
Speaker 5: son of Antonin Scalia, who's making a very broad argument,
Speaker 5: and Stoler already a newsletter, you know, arguing against it,
Speaker 5: rebutting the points in the suit that was filed, but
Speaker 5: basically big it's great, but basically saying that the FTC
Speaker 5: itself is unconstitutional. The FTC's powers are overly broad. That's
Speaker 5: an argument that I'm kind of sympathetic to. But a
Speaker 5: Matt also kind of walks through how the FTC came
Speaker 5: to be because Congress was having an impossible time regulating
Speaker 5: such rapidly changing industries in the twentieth century. Technology and
Speaker 5: the way markets were moving just made it very hard,
Speaker 5: and that's where the FTC came in. But where Republicans
Speaker 5: are going to challenge this. You even see the FTC
Speaker 5: Republican FTC commissioner saying there, I'm sympathetic to this noncompete.
Speaker 5: The proliferation of them is genuinely problematic. That's the sort
Speaker 5: of predicate for what he said. But the FTC itself
Speaker 5: has overbrought authority, and so we're challenging it on those grounds.
Speaker 5: I don't think that will be successful, but I don't know.
Speaker 6: Ryan.
Speaker 3: And the ruling.
Speaker 4: The new rule leaves in place non competes for high
Speaker 4: level executives that are already in place, but but bars
Speaker 4: but bars future ones, but it invalidates ones for places like,
Speaker 4: for instance, Jimmy John's. My colleague Dave Jamison almost a
Speaker 4: decade ago had kind of a breakthrough story that really
Speaker 4: put this issue on the map when when he wrote
Speaker 4: about the fact that Jimmy John's The Sandwich Place was
Speaker 4: making it's sandwich makers signed non competes in other words,
Speaker 4: and attempting to enforce them, and so in other words,
Speaker 4: there you're making nine dollars an hour, you know, at
Speaker 4: Jimmy John's making subs and then you see that there's
Speaker 4: another job at Subway that's they're now offering eleven dollars
Speaker 4: an hour. Their short staff they need help. They would
Speaker 4: tell you, no, you cannot take that job.
Speaker 5: How dare you take that proprietary now?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it propriet ther knowledge of the way that you
Speaker 4: I mean, sandwiches, they are freaky fast, It is true.
Speaker 5: They really are.
Speaker 3: Actually, how did you how did you Ainty make this thing?
Speaker 4: So, however, the idea that you're going to prevent somebody
Speaker 4: from taking a better paying job at a different sandwich
Speaker 4: shop is just so anathema to the basic idea of
Speaker 4: freedom and the and the free market and all of
Speaker 4: the things that we're told are are real about the market,
Speaker 4: like competition, supply and demand. Everybody has taught these basic things,
Speaker 4: and it would be as if consumers were told no,
Speaker 4: you're you're you're only allowed to shop at the store.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: That is what the monopolies try to do structurally. But
Speaker 4: what these businesses are trying to do is legally say
Speaker 4: there are other businesses, you're just not allowed to work
Speaker 4: for any of them.
Speaker 5: Matt also pointed out that Lena Khan made the argument
Speaker 5: that non competes have forced people to stay at employers
Speaker 5: that sought to violate their religious liberty and said, these
Speaker 5: noncompetes are robbing people of book core constitutional liberties. And
Speaker 5: Matt said, who's the conservative here? Yeah, but yeah, I
Speaker 5: mean there's legitimately a point to the way competition has
Speaker 5: been hampered to the Obviously you have even Republican FTC
Speaker 5: commissioners saying that's problematic. Now, Congress did legitimately delegate this
Speaker 5: power to the ft.
Speaker 3: They point the commissioners, and they fund the agency.
Speaker 5: And so we get into sort of CFPB territory too,
Speaker 5: about if this is something that Congress delegated, it's power
Speaker 5: that Congress delegated. Can you make this case on strong
Speaker 5: constitutional grounds? That's what's going to be tested.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's a kind of micro version in some
Speaker 4: ways of what I was talking about recently with the
Speaker 4: way that TikTok was able to come in and dominate
Speaker 4: the social media space was because we allowed our big
Speaker 4: tech overlords to just basically stay in place on top
Speaker 4: of their piles of cash, and anytime a new tech
Speaker 4: company was coming along with some type of innovation that
Speaker 4: threatened their dominance in the market, they would do a
Speaker 4: catch and kill. They would just buy it and bring
Speaker 4: their engineers in and smother the thing, or if it
Speaker 4: was big enough, they'd kind of, you know, make it
Speaker 4: part of their monopoly operation. And that stifled innovation, and
Speaker 4: TikTok came from outside was like, oh, you guys haven't
Speaker 4: developed any new social media in ten years, but we've
Speaker 4: got a new algorithm that we think people.
Speaker 3: Are going to like.
Speaker 4: And now our response again as well, we're gonna we're
Speaker 4: going to ban that and we're going to make you
Speaker 4: sell it to an American. So the point would be,
Speaker 4: if you are a company like Jimmy John's, that is,
Speaker 4: you know, making freaking fast sandwiches, if you want to
Speaker 4: if you want to maintain your hold in the marketplace,
Speaker 4: you just have to continue to make freaky fast good sandwiches.
Speaker 4: Like you cannot use this law fair to try to
Speaker 4: build walls around your employees and to try to otherwise
Speaker 4: prevent competition from rising up.
Speaker 3: What you have to do is you have to outcompete.
Speaker 3: And I hate that these people are making me sound
Speaker 3: like some free market ideas.
Speaker 5: I know. I was going to say you were earlier
Speaker 5: in the show when you were like thank you for,
Speaker 5: you know, subscribing and making this a profitable enterprise. And
Speaker 5: here we go with the competition and the free market.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there is a there is a place you know
Speaker 4: where you know, where you know where they actually have
Speaker 4: pretty effective markets, where they allow businesses to rise and
Speaker 4: fail ruthlessly and quickly and in a way that produces
Speaker 4: actual economic value.
Speaker 3: Heaven, China, China. That's what people like that.
Speaker 4: And that's what people misunderstand about the kind of Chinese
Speaker 4: miracle over the last twenty years of economic growth.
Speaker 3: Is that they actually allow businesses to fail.
Speaker 4: Our system is so corrupt that failing businesses are able
Speaker 4: to just build up, you know, different different mechanisms of
Speaker 4: maintaining subsidies.
Speaker 5: I don't know if I agree with that, but regardless,
Speaker 5: we'll put a pin in it and you can transport
Speaker 5: us to Ecuador.
Speaker 4: We recently covered the turmoil engulfing Ecuador after the US
Speaker 4: ambassador there colluded with the nation's attorney general in what
Speaker 4: amounted to blatant foreign election interference, pushing the fake idea
Speaker 4: that the left wing party of Rafael Correa was somehow
Speaker 4: responsible for the assassination of a rival presidential candidate. That
Speaker 4: smear campaign did the trick, and the heir to a
Speaker 4: banana fortune, Daniel Naboa, was elected with US support. Now,
Speaker 4: the fact that the US is still helping elect banana
Speaker 4: magnates one hundred and twenty years after we coined the
Speaker 4: term banana republic suggests an extraordinary lack of imagination when
Speaker 4: it comes to our imperial managers. But at least now
Speaker 4: the bananas double as cover for cocaine exports to Europe. Now,
Speaker 4: the goal of installing a right wing go government in
Speaker 4: the South or Central American country, of course, is to
Speaker 4: make way for American corporations to profit. The new mechanism
Speaker 4: we have to do that is called isds, or investor
Speaker 4: state dispute settlement. Those are global courts that allow multinational
Speaker 4: corporations to sue small countries and overturn their democratically enacted
Speaker 4: labor or environmental protections, which the corporations claim inhibit their
Speaker 4: natural right to profit. Ecuador's Neboa, in taking office, moved
Speaker 4: immediately to bring those courts back after the government of
Speaker 4: Korea had gotten rid of them. Last week, in a
Speaker 4: Senate hearing, there was a surprisingly honest conversation about those
Speaker 4: courts and our role in pushing them between Rhode Island
Speaker 4: Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and US Trade Representative Catherine Tye
Speaker 4: take a listen.
Speaker 10: But I really think that there's something very evil about
Speaker 10: the entire ISDS mechanism, and it's perhaps best embodied by
Speaker 10: the attack through the ISDS mechanism of the tobacco industry
Speaker 10: on the little country of Togo. Togo had the nerve
Speaker 10: to try to control the packaging of cigarettes with warnings
Speaker 10: about tobacco's known health effects, and they were sued by
Speaker 10: the world tobacco industry, which has enormous resources at its disposal.
Speaker 10: Togo is a country of about eight million people. It
Speaker 10: has less than five thousand miles of roads. Its annual
Speaker 10: budget is about one point two billion. It is in
Speaker 10: no position to take on a international industry like that
Speaker 10: that can use it to first of all bully Togo
Speaker 10: into submission, and then take that and leverage against other countries.
Speaker 10: In fact, the tobacco industry even ultimately went up against
Speaker 10: Australia and got them alves tangled up in the complexity
Speaker 10: of their effort.
Speaker 3: But that shows how evil this is.
Speaker 10: So the quicker we can get rid of that as
Speaker 10: a vehicle for putting private interest over public interest and
Speaker 10: putting some that wait over virtue, the better off we
Speaker 10: will be. And i'd ask for your thoughts on how
Speaker 10: we can remove ISDS from those existing agreements and treaties.
Speaker 4: Now, you don't hear American policy described as evil in
Speaker 4: the Senate very often, even though that label could often
Speaker 4: apply now. Over the weekend, Neboa's effort to bring those
Speaker 4: courts back to Ecuador was required to go before Ecuadorian voters,
Speaker 4: and even though the ballot measure was written in the
Speaker 4: most confusing way possible, more than sixty percent of Ecuadorians
Speaker 4: said no.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 4: A few weeks ago, we also reported on how the
Speaker 4: left leaning government in Honduras is bucking the World Bank's
Speaker 4: ISDS court in its fight with crypto investors who have
Speaker 4: seized actual territory inside the country and are claiming they
Speaker 4: have actual sovereignty there. Both fights, the one in Ecuador
Speaker 4: and the one in Honduras, were subjects of protests that
Speaker 4: last week's annual World Bank IMF meetings held here in Washington.
Speaker 4: This comes as more than three hundred economics professors urged
Speaker 4: the White House to strip these courts out of trade deals.
Speaker 3: Now Here's how Tie responded to Shelton white House.
Speaker 10: Very very interested in the views of members of Congress,
Speaker 10: especially those who sit on their Judiciary Committee and our lawyers.
Speaker 5: Indeed, we.
Speaker 10: The US was responsible for pushing a lot of this
Speaker 10: I SDS nonsense in of those treaties in the first place.
Speaker 3: Correct. I think that's absolutely correct.
Speaker 10: Yeah, okay, well god speed, stay in touch with us
Speaker 10: on the conclusions that you draw.
Speaker 4: So what's really remarkable, Emily about that that exchange is,
Speaker 4: first of all, white House is you know, being pretty
Speaker 4: clear and how he's feeling about these But that's that's
Speaker 4: one senator. Now, they can they can make a video,
Speaker 4: you know, they can make an appearance at the Juiciary Committee,
Speaker 4: but they can't.
Speaker 3: Do a lot more than that.
Speaker 4: To have Catherine Tie basically agreeing with him is kind
Speaker 4: of a seed change when it comes to you know,
Speaker 4: U S trade policy. Tie is what is like Lena
Speaker 4: Khan also also a former Hill staffer. Like Lena Khan,
Speaker 4: one of the this this code array of seriously populist
Speaker 4: aides who have wound up in the Biden administration through
Speaker 4: kind of a real, you know, organized effort to make
Speaker 4: sure that the populist wing of the party has quote.
Speaker 3: Unquote representation there.
Speaker 4: But what they're doing is pushing forward, you know, real
Speaker 4: real policy change in an in an impressive direction and
Speaker 4: giving support then to say, the Ecuadorian people who are
Speaker 4: pushing back against noboah, the Honduran government that is pushing
Speaker 4: back against against the World Bank. But it creates this
Speaker 4: bizarre split screen where you have the Biden administration foisting
Speaker 4: Neboa on the Ecuadorian public, you know, boosting him to
Speaker 4: the presidency, uh, the ambassador supporting him all the way, UH,
Speaker 4: supporting his push for to bring back these corporate courts
Speaker 4: into Ecuador, while other elements of the Biden administration who
Speaker 4: are responsible for trade are against that. So it it
Speaker 4: creates this really schizophrenic situation. But at least, I guess
Speaker 4: inside the imperial core there's some opposition to what the
Speaker 4: rest of the empire's doing.
Speaker 5: Although Niboa correct me if I'm wrong, is fairly like
Speaker 5: in terms of polling, his polls pretty well with the
Speaker 5: Ecuadorian public.
Speaker 3: He did well.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of like's. There's maybe a parallels like
Speaker 5: Bukele and that crime crackdowns, nationalism.
Speaker 4: The public supported. So at the same time that this
Speaker 4: that this measure was up on the corporate courts. He
Speaker 4: also had some referenda up about cracking down on the
Speaker 4: mafia and drug cartels, right, and that's the WHI which
Speaker 4: passed and they and they support him. There there are
Speaker 4: huge questions about the role of that banana industry that
Speaker 4: we talked about at the top, his role in it
Speaker 4: and relationship to other narco traffickers. So some of this
Speaker 4: is seen by the Ecuadoran public is kind of intramural
Speaker 4: warfare among rival kind of narco clans.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and this gets to that's an important point, and
Speaker 5: there's a You were making this point about how the
Speaker 5: goal of installing a right when government in the South
Speaker 5: or Central American country is to make way for American
Speaker 5: corporations to profit and for American control to come in,
Speaker 5: whether it's trafficking, whatever it's whatever's going on.
Speaker 3: If it's uh, you know, Nicaragua, we want it to
Speaker 3: be US, not China, that kind of thing.
Speaker 5: US not China. But forever it was US not Russia.
Speaker 5: And I think that's what's interesting about the point you
Speaker 5: were making with Lena Khan Taie is that people are
Speaker 5: now there's a generation of young leftists and increasingly people
Speaker 5: on the right who saw what happened with the Cold
Speaker 5: War see the same playbook being regurgitated or being trotted
Speaker 5: out again in these different countries. Now China is obviously
Speaker 5: part of it, still Russia though, in Africa and in
Speaker 5: other places, and they're like, we know exactly what's happening.
Speaker 5: You cannot continue to use the specter of communist nuclear annihilation.
Speaker 5: The world has changed. We don't live in the you know,
Speaker 5: sixties anymore. And I think that's a really healthy reaction
Speaker 5: to some of this and the increasing like I hope
Speaker 5: that young leftists continue to be as sort of like
Speaker 5: anti this global you know it used to be just
Speaker 5: like World Economic Forum getting protested by young leftists. Now
Speaker 5: you only hear talked about on the right. Essentially, I
Speaker 5: think that's an important like pillar of you know, being
Speaker 5: in favor of workers, not letting them be dicked by
Speaker 5: these totally disconnected international bodies that are run by oligarchs.
Speaker 4: All right, Well, the only thing that anybody seems to
Speaker 4: care about in the world is the protest set up
Speaker 4: at Columbia University. And so we're going to be joined
Speaker 4: after this by a lead organizer of those protests. Stick
Speaker 4: around to hear her perspective. All right, we are joined
Speaker 4: now from the Columbia Encampment by first year a law
Speaker 4: student and Columbia undergrad graduate Safia Southeast.
Speaker 3: Safia, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 6: It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you got it.
Speaker 4: So when I talked to you a couple of days
Speaker 4: ago or whenever that was about coming on to join
Speaker 4: the show, you were out picking up sat or supplies.
Speaker 4: Can you tell us a little bit about how Sata
Speaker 4: went there at the encampment.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it was honestly one of the most inspiring experiences
Speaker 7: I've had, and not like anything else. We had dozens
Speaker 7: and dozens of students gathered around on the floor.
Speaker 6: It was my first.
Speaker 7: Outdoor stater and it was really beautiful, mostly led by
Speaker 7: Jewish Voice or Peace here on campus. We had a
Speaker 7: specialized hagadah talking about the concepts of liberation and it
Speaker 7: was just a very wonderful multicultural moment.
Speaker 6: Nearly everybody on campus or everybody at the camp was
Speaker 6: there and shared in the moment. So very grateful to
Speaker 6: have that.
Speaker 5: And can you tell us us a little bit about
Speaker 5: the logistics of the encampment. How many people are there
Speaker 5: right now? You guys are overnight intense, How are you
Speaker 5: getting food? What's your life like? Basically we get a
Speaker 5: good I think visual love it, which we appreciate a lot.
Speaker 5: But what's your life like right now in the encampment?
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So, after the first encampment was kind of dismembered, on Wednesday,
Speaker 7: a bunch of students jumped over to the West Found
Speaker 7: of Columbia and we've been here since.
Speaker 6: So students are here overnight.
Speaker 7: At the very beginning, we weren't allowed to have tents,
Speaker 7: so we were sleeping on the ground on tarps in
Speaker 7: the rain, which was not very fun. We now have tents,
Speaker 7: which is wonderful. We have probably about fifty students here
Speaker 7: right now. There was supposed to be a police rate
Speaker 7: at eight a m. This morning, so we have fewer
Speaker 7: students than we usually do.
Speaker 6: Usually there's about two hundred, a lot of them sleeping
Speaker 6: over here.
Speaker 7: We have food from donations and so it's been a
Speaker 7: really wonderful experience to watch people come in.
Speaker 6: There's a system of runners who.
Speaker 7: Come and collect food from all over and we have
Speaker 7: a food table abundance and it's yeah, we have water
Speaker 7: supplies a lot of students taking care of us. It's
Speaker 7: a very community driven place where everybody just kind of.
Speaker 6: Chips in whatever they can in terms of like labor
Speaker 6: and support.
Speaker 4: And so President Biden recently called the protests that you're
Speaker 4: a part of flatly anti submit. The Secretary of Education
Speaker 4: said that he's launching a title, was it nine?
Speaker 3: What's the title?
Speaker 4: Whatever title they're using to investigate Columbia basically for anti Semitism.
Speaker 4: What was your reaction, What was your reaction in the
Speaker 4: camp to that national attention and to that allegation.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I am really disappointed and glorified at that idea.
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm a Jewish student here.
Speaker 7: We have a huge number of Jewish students who we
Speaker 7: have a Shabbat service and a hof Dollar service and
Speaker 7: obviously a huge stay. It's part of our strict Columbia
Speaker 7: like a community guidelines here in the encampment that we
Speaker 7: accept everybody if they're here and in support of the cause.
Speaker 7: There has been anti Semitic incidents that have happened outside
Speaker 7: of the campus gates, usually by individuals or groups that
Speaker 7: are not aligned with the people who have organized the encampment,
Speaker 7: or at least the message is not aligned. And so
Speaker 7: while I do understand why some Jewish students on campus
Speaker 7: feel threatened in some capacity, the bumping that in with
Speaker 7: the encampment I find to be really disheartening, given the
Speaker 7: fact that this is such a accepting place that has
Speaker 7: welcomed me and everybody else. And honestly, I find that
Speaker 7: the protests and the anti Semitic comments and the focus
Speaker 7: on that has been a complete distraction from why we
Speaker 7: are here and the actual message of divestment and transparency
Speaker 7: and support for Palestinian people that this can't stands for.
Speaker 6: Especially because it is such a.
Speaker 7: Welcoming environment that I am very grateful to be a
Speaker 7: part of.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I think it's important that you acknowledged
Speaker 5: some of the stuff that's been, as you say, off message,
Speaker 5: because you know, there was that all Cassan's next Target
Speaker 5: sign that was horrific, but you know, free speeches. There
Speaker 5: was also the one that said let it be known
Speaker 5: that was the flood that put the global into FODO
Speaker 5: back on the table again a speaker, So that's not
Speaker 5: is you know, it's important though to support free speech
Speaker 5: when it's really hard, and I guess I would just
Speaker 5: say you know, probably some of your fellow Jewish students
Speaker 5: on campus or on the other side of this might say,
Speaker 5: you know, are you guys cracking down hard enough on
Speaker 5: those people who are off message? What would you say
Speaker 5: to that? What would you say to them if they
Speaker 5: were in front of you and said, you know, you
Speaker 5: should be cracking down harder on the people who are
Speaker 5: veering off message. I imagine you've done some of that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I will say that it's hard to crack down
Speaker 7: on people when they are individuals and physically outside the
Speaker 7: bounds of the school. So we are all in this
Speaker 7: inner space, and a lot of the idea is like
Speaker 7: taking up this space on campus, and so the idea
Speaker 7: of like going outside and policing individual people for messages
Speaker 7: is firstly impossible. Second of all, Duad the Divestment Group,
Speaker 7: along with the other organizing groups have actively tried to
Speaker 7: address and con and and go against the idea of
Speaker 7: anti Semitism, asking groups outside to stop using this kind
Speaker 7: of rhetoric. The girl with the all access sign was
Speaker 7: not a Columbia student. We have no idea how she
Speaker 7: got here. I have not known of a single incident
Speaker 7: of a Columbia student or somebody in the encampment using
Speaker 7: such language.
Speaker 6: And so while there has been an active effort to kind.
Speaker 7: Of wash this kind of rhetoric, it's it's very very
Speaker 7: difficult somebody's coming and recording, and so it happens quite
Speaker 7: often here. So yeah, so we have been trying to
Speaker 7: also like tell you a students that they're welcome to
Speaker 7: come with the like stators and services and things like that.
Speaker 7: We are trying to make this as welcoming a space
Speaker 7: as possible and ask those groups to really make sure
Speaker 7: that they are acting in line with the overall message
Speaker 7: without it being a distraction to what we're here standing for.
Speaker 4: One of the big controversies nationally, Pierce Morgan played a
Speaker 4: role in this, But even without Pierce Morgan, I think
Speaker 4: you still would have had this this this quote unquote
Speaker 4: stabbed in the eye controversy that went around. If we
Speaker 4: could play ef EF four here, just put this put
Speaker 4: this v up v O up. A student who turns
Speaker 4: out to be kind of a right wing provocateur. She
Speaker 4: had previously gone viral like a year or two ago
Speaker 4: complaining about Israeli couscous. So here there that's the flag
Speaker 4: incidents that you guys just saw it basically toy, little toy,
Speaker 4: little flag that the person is waving as as they're
Speaker 4: walking through.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 3: The the alleged victim said that she had been stabbed in.
Speaker 4: The eye and sent fear kind of coursing through Jewish
Speaker 4: communities around the country. That the video urged finally last
Speaker 4: night showing that you know, if she was hit at all,
Speaker 4: it was a it was it was grazing by a
Speaker 4: kind of rounded ball at the end of a toy
Speaker 4: toy flag, and that clearly.
Speaker 3: Has because she's been on televit and clearly did no damage.
Speaker 4: What you know, I'm curious what you know, what the
Speaker 4: encampment felt when they when they initially heard that story.
Speaker 4: And also, yes to at Lea's point, what are you
Speaker 4: guys doing to try to control the message and control
Speaker 4: the narrative, because now this has become a kind of
Speaker 4: international spectacle that is kind of a competition for the narrative.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that there's a sense there is a
Speaker 7: sense of war reversly at the idea of somebody who
Speaker 7: was kind of on our side i quote unquote for
Speaker 7: treating such behavior, but also the idea that incidents get
Speaker 7: blown out of.
Speaker 6: Proportion is not, hir.
Speaker 7: We have a lot of students who are counter protesters
Speaker 7: who try to come in, who try to film our
Speaker 7: faces and change to the narrative a lot, or take
Speaker 7: things out of context. We have strict policies here not
Speaker 7: to interact with counter protesters because we understand that pretty
Speaker 7: much anything that we do will often be misconstrued or
Speaker 7: taken out of context. And so, I mean, our main
Speaker 7: policy is to not encourage that, not give anybody any fuel,
Speaker 7: but then also to really not express it. For the
Speaker 7: most part, I think that we try to work to
Speaker 7: show it with our actions rather than trying to control
Speaker 7: a certain message which we have found to be inadequate
Speaker 7: or futile.
Speaker 6: For the most part, there's so many people.
Speaker 7: That every single thing we say will get used in
Speaker 7: some capacity, And we do have a lot of instigators
Speaker 7: here who try to come who try to video us
Speaker 7: and change the narrative, and so all we can do
Speaker 7: is kind of take a.
Speaker 6: Step back and hope that the actual message gets through.
Speaker 5: And you have House Speaker Mike Johnson coming to Columbia today,
Speaker 5: what are the things I want to ask I'm sort
Speaker 5: of fascinated by. On the one hand, do you have
Speaker 5: people on the right, saying Columbia has been too permissive
Speaker 5: of the encampment, too permissive of the ravel rousers. On
Speaker 5: the other hand, the left says Columbia has been and
Speaker 5: this may be your perspective too, the left has been
Speaker 5: cracked down on by the university disproportionately. Tell us a
Speaker 5: little bit about what your interactions with the university have been, like,
Speaker 5: what your perspective is on how they've handled the whole situation.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, my experience of joining the encampment was
Speaker 7: specifically in reaction to watching the students get arrested and
Speaker 7: watching this swarm of NYPD office sers in riot here
Speaker 7: come and forcibly extract at a couple dozen students from
Speaker 7: genuinely peacefully protesting. So I find that a large part
Speaker 7: of this now has been this idea of free speech
Speaker 7: and the ability to protest on campus, and this area
Speaker 7: of campus spond has been designated by Columbia as a
Speaker 7: free speech sto. And as we see the legacy of
Speaker 7: Vietnam protests, the idea that within thirty hours the administration
Speaker 7: came and forcibly removed people with MIPD officers was just
Speaker 7: a horrific incident and then in light of that, I
Speaker 7: believe that the administration has been scared to act in
Speaker 7: any way, and especially after the huge backlash and international
Speaker 7: movement that those arrests largely inspired. It's been interesting to
Speaker 7: see their response so at first, through the course of
Speaker 7: negotiations that organizers have had, there's been a lot of
Speaker 7: mixed messages from them, a lot of lack of clarity
Speaker 7: in terms.
Speaker 6: Of the administration.
Speaker 7: They've given us mixed messages and most promises regarding ten
Speaker 7: police presence, how long we can be out here. We
Speaker 7: were informed last night at ten thirty that there was
Speaker 7: a threat of the National Guard coming, that president should
Speaker 7: be actually threatened to send in the National Guard, which
Speaker 7: is horrific.
Speaker 3: Who does she threaten that to directly h they're kind
Speaker 3: of student negotiators.
Speaker 7: Or that was sent to I believe administration or like
Speaker 7: that was through faculty. Then then told us afterwards, however,
Speaker 7: we were sent a threatening letter saying that she had
Speaker 7: a midnight deadline and that if that was for negotiations
Speaker 7: and if there was no agreement met, that she would
Speaker 7: take further action. So there was a lot of talk
Speaker 7: there was supposed to be a police raid last night,
Speaker 7: and then she decided to change the deadline until eight
Speaker 7: am today, so.
Speaker 6: We believed that there was going to be a huge
Speaker 6: police raid at.
Speaker 7: Eight am today, and then as of this morning, she
Speaker 7: has changed the deadline to a further forty eight hours.
Speaker 7: So it's been tiring and tedious, and the administration has
Speaker 7: been consistently arguing in that faith.
Speaker 6: There's been no.
Speaker 7: Communication with faculty as in how to handle it, so
Speaker 7: the faculty are completely in the dart about what to
Speaker 7: do or how to manage things with their students, how
Speaker 7: to manage student safety. So there's been such just a
Speaker 7: sense of confusion both in what's happening and trying to
Speaker 7: both protect the students and protect the rite of free
Speaker 7: speech here on campus. They're somehow not doing any of it,
Speaker 7: which is just incredibly disappointing and disheartening to see from
Speaker 7: our administration, especially from a new president.
Speaker 4: And so in mid February, the Shearian Collective and if
Speaker 4: we can put up I think it's f F three
Speaker 4: here put up this crazy job posting where one of
Speaker 4: the things they said they were looking for were infiltrators
Speaker 4: that they can read from it here they said individual
Speaker 4: they're looking well, individuals with Arabic sounding names and Middle
Speaker 4: Eastern appearance, may be uniquely positioned for deeper infiltration and
Speaker 4: will receive cash compensation for their vital role in our operation.
Speaker 5: UH.
Speaker 3: One of the cities they said they were looking to
Speaker 3: hire in was UH was New York City.
Speaker 2: UH.
Speaker 4: The organization some of their internal messages were leaked later
Speaker 4: It said that they actually hoped that they were just
Speaker 4: they were just going to spark a lot of paranoia
Speaker 4: and that they might not even need to go forward,
Speaker 4: you know, with this operation, that just publicly posting for
Speaker 4: these job offerings would be enough enough to kind of
Speaker 4: tear protest groups in half, with everybody you know, pointing
Speaker 4: at each other as infiltrators. I'm curious what what the
Speaker 4: level of paranoia is, although at the same time, calling
Speaker 4: it paranoia is not quite fair because you know, we
Speaker 4: know throughout history there have been kind of provocateurs and
Speaker 4: infiltrators who have come in to try to you know,
Speaker 4: you know, shout, make make an organization look bad. So
Speaker 4: how is the encampment handling that particular dynamic.
Speaker 6: There is a fear of infiltrators. We try to be
Speaker 6: on the lookout.
Speaker 7: There's a lot of security around this perimeter and people
Speaker 7: that have now been trained to kind of see to
Speaker 7: stuss out people for lack of a better word, and
Speaker 7: it's pretty much impossible, so we can have people come in.
Speaker 7: We have very strict community guidelines that we try to follow,
Speaker 7: and so when people violate those community guidelines, like filming
Speaker 7: people's faces, which has like students have already started to
Speaker 7: be doxed and exposed for their involvement in any way.
Speaker 7: So as soon as we see things like people filming,
Speaker 7: we can kind of say if we leave.
Speaker 6: There have been instances of.
Speaker 7: Us having to actively ask people to leave because they
Speaker 7: were trying to instigate.
Speaker 6: It's impossible to see who's trying to infiltrate and who
Speaker 6: is not.
Speaker 7: However, we have alerts kind of like when we know
Speaker 7: that things are higher, when there's things that are less disorganized,
Speaker 7: like last night, in the midst of thinking there's going
Speaker 7: to be a police.
Speaker 6: Raid, we were noting that it's a specific time.
Speaker 7: That would be very feasible for quote infiltrators to come in.
Speaker 6: So there is a level of paranoia, there is a
Speaker 6: level of fear.
Speaker 7: However, everybody here kind of knows that there's a chance
Speaker 7: of being docs to being exposed, of being arrested or suspended,
Speaker 7: and so there's only so much that we can do
Speaker 7: to prevent it. And the only idea is that we
Speaker 7: can't be scared. We already know that the administration is
Speaker 7: threatening us enough and so the possibility of infiltrators is
Speaker 7: surely not enough to kind of.
Speaker 6: Change anything here.
Speaker 4: And while I've got you, I don't want to put
Speaker 4: you on the spot too much as a kind of
Speaker 4: spokesperson for the entire kind of movement. But as here's
Speaker 4: my old man complaint, as somebody who covered Occupy Walls Street,
Speaker 4: the so called people's mic, and so for people who
Speaker 4: don't know, the people's mic is what the protests have
Speaker 4: developed when the police that you can't use av and
Speaker 4: you've got to be able to reach people in the back.
Speaker 4: So somebody will say something and then the entire crowd
Speaker 4: kind of repeats it back. And when you're in the
Speaker 4: middle of it, it can be this production of solidarity
Speaker 4: and really a moving experience. When you're outside of it,
Speaker 4: it just looks so creepy and weird, like the people's mic.
Speaker 3: I'm like, God, the people's mic has got to go.
Speaker 3: There's got to be something else.
Speaker 4: But I'm curious for you know, how you feel about
Speaker 4: the people's mic and if there's any other solution, because
Speaker 4: once it becomes a contest for you know, public ideas
Speaker 4: and the public narrative, it winds up undermining by just
Speaker 4: kind of looking weird.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there is an incident of this a few days
Speaker 7: ago in a video that started being put around for
Speaker 7: some instinct, try to come on to campus, come into
Speaker 7: the encampment, and we ask them to leave. There was
Speaker 7: a lot of people mike and then people started singing spirituals,
Speaker 7: which in the moment made me cry. It was a
Speaker 7: gorgeous moment and everybody was in solidarity, singing together.
Speaker 6: Watched a video of that later. It looked like a
Speaker 6: horror movie and I understand that.
Speaker 7: So I think it's a really difficult line to draw
Speaker 7: because we need people mike in order to communicate. There's
Speaker 7: not a lot of capacity as long as the school
Speaker 7: is not allowing us to use any applification.
Speaker 6: But I mean, I'm in agree with you. I've seen
Speaker 6: those videos. I think.
Speaker 7: It's again that kind of line between worrying too much
Speaker 7: about the media and then having to change organizing tactics
Speaker 7: in a way to make it yet less useful and
Speaker 7: less organized and making it so people can't communicate. So again,
Speaker 7: I think that there's a dentive priorities and a lot
Speaker 7: of this tire encampment has been trying to figure out
Speaker 7: what their priorities are.
Speaker 6: We have finals coming up. People think that this is
Speaker 6: more important.
Speaker 7: We understand we can look like oh horror movie when
Speaker 7: using people's mike, But again, we have to do whatever
Speaker 7: it takes to make sure people are united, even if
Speaker 7: it gets misconstrued, because as I said before, truly everything
Speaker 7: is getting misconstrued in a way that's supporting.
Speaker 6: The other side.
Speaker 4: Its last question for you, how are how are people
Speaker 4: handling the professional threats you have, you know, senators, members
Speaker 4: of Congress, billionaires saying we need to identify We're going
Speaker 4: to have facial recognition technologies can to identify all of
Speaker 4: these hamas supporters, and we're going to make sure that
Speaker 4: they're you know, they're never never employed ever again. Obviously,
Speaker 4: these are successful students who've you know, made it to
Speaker 4: you know, Columbia undergrad or Columbia graduate school.
Speaker 3: And so that is that must be something that is
Speaker 3: on them at some level. Getting smeared like that.
Speaker 4: On the other hand, you're facing this moment of intense
Speaker 4: moral clarity, witnessing a genocide unfold.
Speaker 3: How are people grappling with that tension.
Speaker 6: We try to be really careful of privacy.
Speaker 7: So privacy is one of the number one concerns at
Speaker 7: the candid So we always have masks on hand.
Speaker 6: We always kind of have levels of a different levels
Speaker 6: of privacy for different people.
Speaker 7: We have the groups of people who are willing to
Speaker 7: be arrested and then those who don't want such level
Speaker 7: of attention. We have no photographs of people's spaces. We
Speaker 7: have really strict rules of the media who come here
Speaker 7: and what they can and cannot do. We understand that
Speaker 7: this is such a huge concern for a lot of
Speaker 7: people who put their life on the line for this,
Speaker 7: and a lot of what is most useful is the
Speaker 7: bodies just here and occupying the space and who these
Speaker 7: people are.
Speaker 6: We try to keep that protected as as much as possible.
Speaker 7: I am in a very lucky position where my hopefully
Speaker 7: future employers would never cared if I am identified with this,
Speaker 7: but a lot of people really do care, and a
Speaker 7: lot of people are putting their friendships, their family relationships
Speaker 7: on the line, and while we could do whatever we
Speaker 7: can again, I think people have assumed this sense of
Speaker 7: risk coming here and know what may happen, but in
Speaker 7: interim or trying everything that we possibly can to protect
Speaker 7: people and also to prevent people from coming in infiltrators
Speaker 7: and using that opportunity to expose us, which is really
Speaker 7: all all that they're able.
Speaker 6: To do at this point.
Speaker 5: You know, I was just going to say, I had
Speaker 5: a funny thought while you were talking. Just having worked
Speaker 5: with so many conservative college students in the last decade,
Speaker 5: there's something so similar. And there is obviously hypocrisy, but
Speaker 5: there's just something so similar about students exercising important rights
Speaker 5: on campus, engaging in free expression, having challenging conversations, and
Speaker 5: getting to targeted for it. And we just have to
Speaker 5: be consistent when it's hardest. And I think that's you know,
Speaker 5: it's when students are within the bounds and outside of
Speaker 5: you know, they're not being bigoted, they're not being violent
Speaker 5: or inciting anything. It's we should be cool, like we
Speaker 5: should be happy to see this happen on college.
Speaker 4: Campuses, and college campuses advertise that there are places where
Speaker 4: this kind of thing can happen.
Speaker 3: I guess. And the actual last question for.
Speaker 4: You, what have you said and what would you say
Speaker 4: to other Jewish students who say that they can't be
Speaker 4: safe at these protests.
Speaker 7: I would say that I understand the fear, and I
Speaker 7: understand that a lot of the rhetoric can feel really personal.
Speaker 7: I think that there's a huge distinction between being critical
Speaker 7: of Israel and being critical of the Jewish people, and
Speaker 7: that is a distinction that I believe that all the
Speaker 7: Jews here understand, and that I believe that it is
Speaker 7: honestly more anti Semitic to conflate those two.
Speaker 6: So a lot of the fears that people have are those.
Speaker 7: I do understand that there are sometimes personal attacks that
Speaker 7: are outside of the context of Israel.
Speaker 6: However, I would just try to tell Jewish.
Speaker 7: Students that this is not about religion, This is not
Speaker 7: about the personal identities.
Speaker 6: This is about holding the school.
Speaker 7: Accountable and making sure we know where our tuition money
Speaker 7: is going, making sure we have a say in that,
Speaker 7: and honestly just championing deep solidarity with people in Gaza
Speaker 7: who are currently being murdered, and that is the issue
Speaker 7: first and foremost, besides and the identities of individual people here.
Speaker 7: Or the Jewish students on campus and elsewhere, is though
Speaker 7: almost irrelevant to what we are trying. And this has
Speaker 7: been such a honestly inspiring, encouraging experience for me as
Speaker 7: a Jewish student.
Speaker 6: Was faced absolutely no far of anti semitism here.
Speaker 7: That I really would encourage students to look at it
Speaker 7: in that lens and know that they are safe at
Speaker 7: least in.
Speaker 6: This encampment and in these spaces.
Speaker 4: Well Sofia South, the first year law student at Columbia University,
Speaker 4: thank you so much for joining us, and good luck
Speaker 4: with the ongoing protest.
Speaker 6: Thank you thanks for having me.
Speaker 5: This is a fascinating interview Ryan, and I think an
Speaker 5: important perspective from somebody who is Jewish and is has
Speaker 5: this is argument about, you know, the conflation of anti
Speaker 5: Zionism and anti Semitism perspective quite literally from inside the encampment.
Speaker 5: Thanks for setting that up. I really thought that was interesting.
Speaker 4: And she was telling me before, you know, she's not
Speaker 4: at all unfamiliar with anti Semitism, and and you know,
Speaker 4: being in some spaces where it's almost where it's uncomfortable
Speaker 4: to even mention your your Jewishness, but she said was
Speaker 4: one of the places where she's been most proud to
Speaker 4: mention it and felt most welcomed really, which I thought
Speaker 4: found rather a striking and I'm glad.
Speaker 5: You know, it would be one thing if she came
Speaker 5: on and pretended that some of the other stuff hadn't happened.
Speaker 5: The Akassar, right, this is targets, this real stuff.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean there was that speech about the Oh my gosh,
Speaker 5: that one speech was so bad from someoney. This must
Speaker 5: have been on the people's mic. The quote was the
Speaker 5: Aloxa flood that put the global into fought back on
Speaker 5: the table again in the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian
Speaker 5: freedom fighters, referring to October seventh. I mean, you have
Speaker 5: to acknowledge that, and you have to talk about how
Speaker 5: you're dealing with it. It's a real problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it really is.
Speaker 4: And it's interesting to see how they're how the students
Speaker 4: are grappling with it, as you know, because there's a
Speaker 4: contradiction between you know, their initial kind of rolling out
Speaker 4: of a small protest aimed at at discrete kind of
Speaker 4: university policies, which then steam rolls into this international moment, right,
Speaker 4: and then all of a sudden they're trying to grapple
Speaker 4: with how that looks.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they've got the Speaker of the House coming to
Speaker 5: talk to them, to talk at them.
Speaker 3: Probably I want to see the Speaker of the House
Speaker 3: use the people's mic like that would be That would
Speaker 3: be kind of fun.
Speaker 5: No comment, Well, just a reminder. We talked about this
Speaker 5: in the beginning of the show. We're so excited to
Speaker 5: announce that we're going to be doing a Friday edition
Speaker 5: of Counterpoints from here on out, starting this week with
Speaker 5: a very big guest. So breakingpoints dot com if you
Speaker 5: want to get the show early, you'll get the show early,
Speaker 5: not just this week but every week. But it will
Speaker 5: be coming to everybody on Fridays, probably a little bit
Speaker 5: earlier than that Thursday night if you're a premium subscriber.
Speaker 5: Breaking Points dot Com for that. But we're just excited
Speaker 5: to get it out there.
Speaker 3: Go change my tie. So it looks like we did
Speaker 3: this on a different day.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we are about to tape it, but I just
Speaker 5: destroyed the illusion.
Speaker 3: All right, We'll see you guys next time.