Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 2: the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that,
Speaker 2: let's get to the show.
Speaker 4: Good morning, and welcome back to Counterpoints. I hope everybody
Speaker 4: had a good holiday break, and I hope everyone had
Speaker 4: a chance to read my book. You're gonna be a
Speaker 4: quiz on it at the end of this show.
Speaker 3: Are you going to be ready for it?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 4: Absolutely excellent this She had already read this.
Speaker 5: Out passive flowing colors.
Speaker 4: But we've got a big show today because we have
Speaker 4: some of the largest and most significant i think, political
Speaker 4: and military developments in the war in Israel and now
Speaker 4: also Lebanon that we're going to get into at the
Speaker 4: end of the show. We're going to have a tech guy,
Speaker 4: Paul Bigger, who went viral toward the end of December
Speaker 4: with a post where he called out a lot of
Speaker 4: people that he was directly doing business with, calling them
Speaker 4: apologists for genocide, telling them you can keep your money,
Speaker 4: and we're going to talk to him about what the
Speaker 4: last two or three weeks has been like since then,
Speaker 4: because I think a lot of people, whether it's this
Speaker 4: issue or others, have always kind of dreamed of the
Speaker 4: idea of telling everyone in their professional lives to just
Speaker 4: go pound stand and I don't ever want to see
Speaker 4: you again. He actually did it. He did the Tom
Speaker 4: Cruise thing from that show Jerry McGuire, Yes, the Jerry
Speaker 4: McGuire thing.
Speaker 5: Now I'm worried you're going to Jerry McGuire everybody here.
Speaker 4: Or they did the Dave Chappelle thing at the from
Speaker 4: Half Baked Right, anyway, you're going to.
Speaker 5: Do that too, probably one day day.
Speaker 4: One day. But you're cool, sweet, Well, we also be This.
Speaker 5: Is kind of in some ways related to what we're
Speaker 5: all talking about with Israel, obviously because it kicked it
Speaker 5: all off. But the president of Harvard resigned yesterday, was
Speaker 5: pretty clearly pushed into her resignation amid allegations of plagiarism.
Speaker 5: There was an I've seen story that basically didn't happen.
Speaker 3: So we're going to break that John Doe's getting called out.
Speaker 5: That sounds maybe like anti news, but we're going to
Speaker 5: break down exactly why this didn't turn out. The list
Speaker 5: that was supposed to be released yesterday. Everyone was anticipating
Speaker 5: it a list of John donate.
Speaker 4: Why do they keep teasing us with this? They're never
Speaker 4: going to tell us anything.
Speaker 5: It's been temporarily delayed. So we'll stay on the case
Speaker 5: and we'll kind of explain what happened too. And then
Speaker 5: Unusual Whales, The Great Unusual Whales Heroic Unusual Whales is
Speaker 5: out with a twenty twenty three report on congressional trading
Speaker 5: that Ryan, honestly I think should be one of the
Speaker 5: biggest stories in the country. It is so repulsive. It
Speaker 5: also goes back to Israel in a lot of ways too.
Speaker 4: So members of Congress are still allowed to trade stocks,
Speaker 4: like despite them promising we're going to take care of
Speaker 4: that under the last Congress. That despite Kevin McCarthy saying
Speaker 4: it was gonna be the very first thing that he
Speaker 4: took care of when he took power. American people gave
Speaker 4: him that power. He's now trading stocks is a private citizens.
Speaker 4: So congratulations to everybody, and for the American people.
Speaker 5: It should not go without note that Ryan is wearing
Speaker 5: his Christmas tie. That's right for everyone who follows along
Speaker 5: with the saga of Ryan's ties and Ryan's Christmas ties
Speaker 5: in particular.
Speaker 4: It's a nice time you get used to this one.
Speaker 4: In twenty twenty four, you're going to be seeing a
Speaker 4: lot of it. It's in the rotation, that's right, it
Speaker 4: is indeed.
Speaker 5: Well, let's start with the breaking news out of the
Speaker 5: Middle East. Ryan, I'm really curious for how you were
Speaker 5: reacting yesterday to the sites from Beirut Lebanon.
Speaker 4: Yesterday we got news that the IDF accomplished its most
Speaker 4: significant assassination to date of a top Hamas political figure.
Speaker 4: But this one was in Beirut. Here's footage from the
Speaker 4: aftermath of that attack. So we're told it's a Rory,
Speaker 4: who is a deputy political leader in Hamas's political wing,
Speaker 4: was killed in that attack. He had been a target
Speaker 4: of Israel's for a very long time.
Speaker 3: The US had had him on a hit list as well.
Speaker 4: This is the highest ranking official that Israel has killed
Speaker 4: since October seventh. According to the reports that we're getting,
Speaker 4: the fact that it did not happen in Gaza but
Speaker 4: instead in Beirut, is creating a concern about the escalated,
Speaker 4: the spiraling escalation of this conflict, but also from the
Speaker 4: other direction, raising questions among some people that if they
Speaker 4: have this intelligence capacity and if this is what they
Speaker 4: were doing, they would have maintained a lot of global
Speaker 4: support even though this is a political figure, he's connected
Speaker 4: to the alk Isaan brigades, Rather than dropping two thousand
Speaker 4: pound bombs to go after low level Hamas figures and
Speaker 4: kill dozens to hundreds of civilians at the same time
Speaker 4: with a casually rate climbing over twenty two thousand, with
Speaker 4: a lot of people unable to find food all day
Speaker 4: long at this point, if they'd have taken a more
Speaker 4: targeted approach, I think they would have maintained more support
Speaker 4: around the world.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's an interesting point because there have been quotes
Speaker 5: about precision versus turning Gaza into a parking lot, and
Speaker 5: there's been completely i would say, contradictory points being made
Speaker 5: depending on who's talking from the Israeli government about whether
Speaker 5: the goal is to turn Gozit into a parking lot
Speaker 5: or whether the goal is precision. The precision versus parking.
Speaker 4: Lot approach and do we have a two here?
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, so I think we used a two, but
Speaker 5: here's a three. This is to Ryan's point, Senior Hamas
Speaker 5: or Hamas hasn't formed mediators. So senior Hamas officials that
Speaker 5: are involved in mediations, they've said they're freezing all hostage
Speaker 5: negotiations until further notice. There are still dozens of hostages.
Speaker 5: We don't know how many exactly are alive. That's another
Speaker 5: difficult thing of all of this. I think it's still
Speaker 5: north of a high hundred hostages now frozen in the
Speaker 5: light of this in the aftermath of this attack, and.
Speaker 4: A lot of these hostages are actually active duty soldiers
Speaker 4: that are going to be much more difficult for Israel
Speaker 4: to exchange because exchanging civilians, exchanging a civilian hostage for
Speaker 4: kind of civilian hostages held in Israeli prisons under administrative
Speaker 4: detention or something like that is an easier negotiation. When
Speaker 4: it comes to trading kind of prisoners of war active
Speaker 4: duty soldiers who were captured in combat, then Hamas asked
Speaker 4: for much more significant concessions in order to trade those back.
Speaker 4: Then there's the complication that because the IDF completely melted
Speaker 4: away on October seventh, for so many hours that allowed
Speaker 4: a bunch of just gangs and random fighters to make
Speaker 4: their way through the fence and into some of these
Speaker 4: Israeli areas. And so what people are saying is that
Speaker 4: Hamas doesn't even know where all of the hostages are.
Speaker 4: And that's a big problem for the negotiations. Well, because
Speaker 4: Camas can trade the hostages that Hamas has. But you
Speaker 4: just had some thugs and gangs come in and grab
Speaker 4: people and so and so where are they and who
Speaker 4: negotiates for them? All of that in the context of
Speaker 4: this assassination just blowing up the talks.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and we have actually some footage we can roll
Speaker 5: here of the fallout in the streets of beaut and
Speaker 5: in Georgian and other places. Right. Yeah, so you can
Speaker 5: see the protest on the screen here, and if you're
Speaker 5: listening to the show, you can see a big crowd
Speaker 5: walking down the street of Beirut protesting what had just unfolded.
Speaker 5: It's nighttime, so it's probably not too far removed from
Speaker 5: the event itself taking place. Ran then this is all
Speaker 5: coming in the context and importantly in the context of
Speaker 5: of President Biden saying what we want is, you know,
Speaker 5: kind of a cessation. He might not use that word,
Speaker 5: of course, because it's so so charged, but a cessation
Speaker 5: of the invasion around the new Year. And that's exactly
Speaker 5: what appears to be on the table in Gaza that
Speaker 5: Israel is saying, we are kind of pausing, we're working
Speaker 5: on hostage negotiations.
Speaker 4: And then this and the kind of the historical path
Speaker 4: that led us up to this neighborhood is also pretty interesting.
Speaker 4: So this was in the Dahia neighborhood. To run it
Speaker 4: back to how you even have a Hamas leader hanging
Speaker 4: out in that neighborhood at all.
Speaker 3: You have to go back. You can go back as
Speaker 3: far as you want.
Speaker 4: But if it's in the late nineteen seventies, you know,
Speaker 4: after kind of the PLO is kicked out of Jordan,
Speaker 4: they go into southern Lebanon, and then Israel pushes the
Speaker 4: PLO from there up into be Route and southern Lebanon.
Speaker 4: Then in nineteen eighty two they invade southern Lebanon with
Speaker 4: this kind of scorched earth approach to get the PLO
Speaker 4: Palestine liberation while seeing liberation organization out of Beirut. Because
Speaker 4: their idea is that we're not going after the Lebanese people.
Speaker 4: We're not going after the Palestinian people. Were just going
Speaker 4: to root out the PLO and then everything will be okay,
Speaker 4: which sounds familiar. They finally agree, the PLO agrees, okay,
Speaker 4: after so much civilian death, after such a broad assault
Speaker 4: on the civilian infrastructure in Lebanon, which was deliberately done
Speaker 4: to kind of turn the civilian population in Lebanon against
Speaker 4: the PLO, the PLO agrees with international mediators that they
Speaker 4: will leave. They will leave, They will get on boats,
Speaker 4: leave the port of Beirut, they go to Tunisia and
Speaker 4: other places. The agreement that they got from the US
Speaker 4: and from other international forces was that there would be
Speaker 4: an international force that would protect the civilian population, because
Speaker 4: they're saying, look, if this is if we're going to
Speaker 4: leave to protect the civilians, then somebody has to protect them.
Speaker 4: You can't just leave them at the mercy of the IDF.
Speaker 4: Right after the last PLO official gets on a boat,
Speaker 4: the international forces leave Israel, then DF carries out some
Speaker 4: of the most brutal massacres in Israel's history in southern
Speaker 4: Lebanon that the names of them.
Speaker 3: Ring out today.
Speaker 4: And so they then occupy Lebanon up until two thousand.
Speaker 4: They leave after kind of a little guerrilla war in
Speaker 4: which Hesbola, you know, has become like a real force
Speaker 4: between eighty two and two thousand in reaction to this war.
Speaker 4: Then in two thousand and six they invade again and
Speaker 4: they they destroy the Dahia neighborhood so massively that it
Speaker 4: creates this thing called the Dahia doctrine. Because there had
Speaker 4: been some hesbel of fighters that were using this neighborhood,
Speaker 4: the one where we just saw the images from to
Speaker 4: launch some rockets from there, and so they said they
Speaker 4: came up with what's called the Dahead doctrine. If any
Speaker 4: civilian area is used by fighters to fight against the IDF,
Speaker 4: we're going to just completely annihilate in a disproportionate way, flattening,
Speaker 4: flatten it, They're going to turn it into a part
Speaker 4: lot and became known as the Dahia doctrine.
Speaker 3: And that's in fact what they did.
Speaker 4: The Lebanese will turned into a disaster for Israel also
Speaker 4: for Lebanon. But you've heard, you've had a lot of
Speaker 4: people saying that what they're doing now in Gaza is
Speaker 4: the Dahia Doctrine. They're just executing this doctrine. Just interesting
Speaker 4: coincidence that now Hamas is in Dahia and that they're
Speaker 4: bombing bombing the leader there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that is really interesting. And actually speaking of Gaza,
Speaker 5: we can put this next element up on the screen.
Speaker 5: Israel's current plan, According to this thread from NBC an
Speaker 5: NBC News reporter, Israel's current plan for Gaza after Hamas
Speaker 5: involves local Palestinian clans rather than the PA, administering areas
Speaker 5: and taking responsibility for civilian needs in Israeli official tells
Speaker 5: NBC News. Israel's government also wants an inspection mechanism on
Speaker 5: the Gaza Egypt border to prevent weapons smuggling controlled by
Speaker 5: Israel on the Gazan side. Israel also wants a temporary
Speaker 5: security zone on Gaza's perimeter, but has not said publicly
Speaker 5: whether that would be on Israeli or Palestinian land. All
Speaker 5: this is expected to discussed in an Israeli cabinet meeting
Speaker 5: at nine pm, that's yesterday, a local time. The Israeli
Speaker 5: official says, as Anthony Blincoln, our Secretary of State, prepares
Speaker 5: to visit the region, this is explosive ryan their plan
Speaker 5: for Gaza after hamas involves Palestinian clans rather than the PA.
Speaker 5: This is a total change in the order and not
Speaker 5: surprising in the wake of October seventh. But we haven't
Speaker 5: seen some of these ideas, these kind of vague notions
Speaker 5: fleshed out into specific policy proposals so far. And what
Speaker 5: we get from this is Palestinian clans, we get temporary
Speaker 5: security zone from this, an inspection mechanism on the Gaza
Speaker 5: Egypt border, big news yesterday just.
Speaker 4: On that front, right, And what they seem to be
Speaker 4: doing is just throwing things against the wall see what happens,
Speaker 4: to see what will stick. And for this plan this
Speaker 4: was planned, was immediately rejected by everybody who knows anything
Speaker 4: about anything, like, what are you talking about clans having clans?
Speaker 4: These are like, seriously, let's talk, It's not going to happen. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the only way that something like that works is if
Speaker 4: it's a pretty minuscule refugee camp. And that actually fits
Speaker 4: in with comments that we saw from ben Gavi and
Speaker 4: Smotrich yesterday, which flowed into then this confrontation with public
Speaker 4: confrontation with the United States. So let's start with ben Gavier.
Speaker 4: If we can put up this, so he writes, the
Speaker 4: war presents an opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration
Speaker 4: of the residents of Gaza. Ben ver telling reporters, and
Speaker 4: he says, we cannot withdraw from any territory we are
Speaker 4: in in the Gaza strip. Not only do I not
Speaker 4: rule out Jewish settlement there, I believe it is also
Speaker 4: an important thing. So this is the thing of saying
Speaker 4: the quiet part out loud. So when he says the
Speaker 4: quiet part out loud, Matt Miller, my buddy over the
Speaker 4: State Department. He responds, quote, the United States reject the
Speaker 4: inflammatory and irresponsible statements from Israeli ministers Smotrich who said
Speaker 4: basically the same thing and Ben Govere there should there
Speaker 4: should be no mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. To
Speaker 4: zero in on that that should word because you also
Speaker 4: had let me let me find this. You had the
Speaker 4: UN ambassador Lynda Thomas Greenfield. I have her quote here too.
Speaker 4: We don't have the element. But so she responded later
Speaker 4: that same day, she said, quote in a statement, there
Speaker 4: should be no mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, and
Speaker 4: we reject the recent inflammatory statements from Israeli ministers Besilil
Speaker 4: Smotrich and It'samir Benkevie, so very similar wording from both
Speaker 4: Matt Miller at the State Department and Lynda Thomas Greenfield
Speaker 4: over at the United Nations, our ambassador over there. Note
Speaker 4: the word should, like that these are diplomats who invest
Speaker 4: enormous amounts of weight in all all of the words
Speaker 4: that they choose, and for them to be deliberately choosing
Speaker 4: the words should rather than will, there will not be
Speaker 4: or there shall not be, I think indicates where the
Speaker 4: United States is at this point and how aggressive they're
Speaker 4: willing to be, because what else have they said? There
Speaker 4: should not be two thousand pound bombs dropped in large
Speaker 4: civilian neighborhoods, and there was like, okay, maybe there shouldn't be,
Speaker 4: but guess what there are? So the US, by expressing
Speaker 4: its kind of opinion on the matter rather than issuing
Speaker 4: a directive of what can be done with its assistance,
Speaker 4: is a huge discrepancy.
Speaker 5: Well, and I think it also speaks to what they
Speaker 5: see as as reasonably or let's not even say reasonable,
Speaker 5: what they see is plausible. Because let's put the next
Speaker 5: element up on the screen. This is how ben Gevier responded,
Speaker 5: this got hot, really hot, so you can see it
Speaker 5: on the screen. This is the translation from Hebrew. Really
Speaker 5: appreciate the United States of America, but with all due respect,
Speaker 5: we are not another star on the American flag. The
Speaker 5: United States is our best friend. But first of all,
Speaker 5: we will do what is best for the state of Israel.
Speaker 5: The migration of hundreds of thousands of God from Gaza
Speaker 5: will allow the residents of the enclave to return home
Speaker 5: and live in security and protect the IDF soldiers. Ryan,
Speaker 5: first your reaction, and second my reaction is just I
Speaker 5: don't think that makes anybody safer. I don't think anybody
Speaker 5: is made safer by that point. Like, in addition to
Speaker 5: just the phrasing, I don't think that's making anybody. What
Speaker 5: does it accomplish the post October seventh goal of protecting
Speaker 5: and securing Israel, I don't think so.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm more interested in your take on this because me,
Speaker 4: I'm already baked in on this and I found it
Speaker 4: just early outrageous that, yeah, this top official from the
Speaker 4: government government that we fund is going to tell us,
Speaker 4: you know, publicly to our faith no, that we we
Speaker 4: are going to engage in an ethnic cleansing of this
Speaker 4: of this area, like it's an not our humiliation to
Speaker 4: us as well as being just evil.
Speaker 3: But that that's where I am.
Speaker 4: What I'm curious about is does he start losing people,
Speaker 4: you know, who have been more supportive or more sympathetic
Speaker 4: toward what they've been doing over the last two months.
Speaker 4: So that's why I'm curious what you think of it,
Speaker 4: but also how people are, how people who've been supportive
Speaker 4: of kind of the IDF's effort here are seeing this
Speaker 4: because now it's getting so difficult. Like Ted, if Ted
Speaker 4: Cruz were here, you know, he'd be like, I condemned nothing,
Speaker 4: but it'd be very difficult for him to suggest that
Speaker 4: this is now a targeted operation against Amas and that
Speaker 4: if a mass would just surrender, this would be over.
Speaker 4: When you have Israeli government officials saying explicitly no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 4: What we're trying to do is get everybody.
Speaker 5: Out, everybody out of Gaza. Yeah no, And we can't
Speaker 5: rule out settlements in Gaza and actually insist on them, right,
Speaker 5: And so again I would probably differ from Ted Cruz
Speaker 5: and other probably mainstream Republicans on the point of whether
Speaker 5: or not that's why. And I think though that what
Speaker 5: to your point, what they would say actually is they
Speaker 5: probably come down on the side of Bengavie because they
Speaker 5: feel that the Biden administration has been insufficiently supportive of Israel,
Speaker 5: that the Biden administration's public posture of support of Israel
Speaker 5: is undercut by all kinds of things, you know, by
Speaker 5: its support for the UN, by.
Speaker 4: The refugee or could Biden do if Biden were basically
Speaker 4: Ben Gavier's deputy, Like what more could he even have done?
Speaker 5: I mean, that's right, because everything that the Biden administration
Speaker 5: has done and like this is a great example of
Speaker 5: where mainstream Republicans would say Biden has been insufficiently supportive,
Speaker 5: because we know that Biden was negotiating behind the scenes
Speaker 5: for a draw down in the New Year, and that's
Speaker 5: something that people in Israel, sort of hard right people
Speaker 5: in Israel were uncomfortable with, and that a lot of
Speaker 5: people here disagreed with, saying that as soon as we get,
Speaker 5: you know, to this period of the new year, this
Speaker 5: should become become a p is an operation, which is
Speaker 5: sort of a teal in and of itself, of course, yeah,
Speaker 5: become a position operation. So I think that's what they
Speaker 5: would say. It's hard for me to argue that position
Speaker 5: because I don't believe that position. I don't buy that
Speaker 5: position myself. But I think actually that's christ and I
Speaker 5: were talking about this yesterday. For us to be huge
Speaker 5: participants in a war, we're fundamentally we are on different pages.
Speaker 5: The United States having the President say two state solution,
Speaker 5: two state solution, two state solution, and having net Yahu
Speaker 5: say absolutely for years, no, two state solution, it's not possible.
Speaker 5: One state solution, and you have billions of dollars of money,
Speaker 5: but then also munitions pouring into this war effort, tens
Speaker 5: of thousands of people's lives lost, and fundamentally you don't agree.
Speaker 5: In the end, it's a very dangerous place to be
Speaker 5: because then there's disagreement on some of these smaller points
Speaker 5: that adds up to a horrifying picture of a quagmire,
Speaker 5: the recipe for a quagmire.
Speaker 4: Or a recipe for what they call the peace between
Speaker 4: the Lion and the lamb, where instead of you do
Speaker 4: wind up with a one state solution, except it's because
Speaker 4: you've gotten rid of all the Palestinians.
Speaker 5: A dangerous one state solution by the way, because you
Speaker 5: have pushed everybody into countries that are not that far
Speaker 5: away from you, still very close.
Speaker 4: Well, they're trying to push them in the Europe and
Speaker 4: the United States as well.
Speaker 5: Still, so Lebanon, like, these places are not that far
Speaker 5: and that's a right.
Speaker 3: And we've seen how that worked out before.
Speaker 5: Powder keg Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 4: To read a little bit more from Matt Miller's statement,
Speaker 4: he wrote, we have been we have been clear, consistent
Speaker 4: and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain
Speaker 4: Palestinian land. So there is a will so give give
Speaker 4: the United States credit there h and will remain Palestinian
Speaker 4: land with Hamas no longer in control of its future
Speaker 4: and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel.
Speaker 5: But this is exactly what we were talking about the
Speaker 5: two states solution. You have completely different. It's not like
Speaker 5: Bengavir is just a member of parliament, the Kanessa, He's
Speaker 5: literally part of the government. That's to have two people
Speaker 5: on such dramatically different pages at the exact same time,
Speaker 5: when you have the US as such a huge participant
Speaker 5: financially and in terms of resources in this war, that's outrageous.
Speaker 4: And words don't mean anything if the weapons continued to flow,
Speaker 4: like as long as we continue to enable the military assault,
Speaker 4: which then makes the settlements possible. And if after that
Speaker 4: we enable the importation of all of the steel and
Speaker 4: the copper and the construction equipment and other things that
Speaker 4: you need to build the four seasons Gaza that the
Speaker 4: IDF will want to construct. There doesn't matter what we say.
Speaker 4: Matt Miller here says that is the future we seek
Speaker 4: in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, the surrounding region
Speaker 4: and the world. If that's the future we seek, why
Speaker 4: are we funding the exact opposite future, right, Yeah, and
Speaker 4: raised the questions of whether or not that's what we
Speaker 4: actually see.
Speaker 5: To the point where you're being clapped back at on
Speaker 5: Twitter by the government that you're backing. I mean, it's
Speaker 5: to your point, it's embarrassing and it should be frightening,
Speaker 5: even if you are on different sides of this argument.
Speaker 5: It should be frightening just because it shows the extent
Speaker 5: to which this war can kareem out of control very well.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's already obviously it's war, it's out of control,
Speaker 5: but could koreem into a broader regional conflict. And you know,
Speaker 5: we started this block by talking about Lebanon. This is
Speaker 5: just an absolute powder keg. There's no clear sense of
Speaker 5: direction from our government, from anybody's government at this point.
Speaker 4: The only people with a sense of clear directions seem
Speaker 4: to be Smotrich right and Benivie right, Like they have
Speaker 4: their eye on the prize.
Speaker 5: And they are voices in their own.
Speaker 4: And then yeah, like the who has done nothing to
Speaker 4: kind of make it make anybody believe that they're doing
Speaker 4: anything other supporting.
Speaker 5: But what does he even think? Yeah about that exact question.
Speaker 5: We'll learn more about that in the days ahead. Ryan,
Speaker 5: we wanted to talk a little bit about the back
Speaker 5: and forth over we can put this next element up
Speaker 5: on the screen. A lot of people probably saw this.
Speaker 5: The New York Times dropped an article in the last
Speaker 5: several days that detailed their investigation. You can see the
Speaker 5: headline there, screams without words, how Hamas weaponized sexual violence
Speaker 5: on October seventh. That was published just a few days ago,
Speaker 5: and it has some just incredibly disturbing allegations. Let me
Speaker 5: just read from it a little bit in case people
Speaker 5: haven't been following sort of the broader conversation about it.
Speaker 5: It is really official to say that everywhere Hamas terror
Speaker 5: struck the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border
Speaker 5: and the Kimmits them, they brutalized women. A two month
Speaker 5: investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details establishing that
Speaker 5: the attacks against women were not isolate events, but part
Speaker 5: of a broader pattern of gender based violence. On October seventh,
Speaker 5: relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones,
Speaker 5: and interviews with more than one hundred and fifty people,
Speaker 5: including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers, and rape counselors, the Times
Speaker 5: identified at least seven locations Whereasraeli women and girls appeared
Speaker 5: to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated. Four witnesses described
Speaker 5: in graphic detail, seeing women raped and killed at two
Speaker 5: different places, a long route two thirty two, the same
Speaker 5: highway where miss Abduscha's half naked body was found sprawled
Speaker 5: on the road at a third location. And I'm reading
Speaker 5: from the relevant excerpts of the article and pay attention
Speaker 5: to the wording and the sourcing as well. The Times
Speaker 5: interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics, who together described finding
Speaker 5: more than thirty bodies of women and girls in and
Speaker 5: around the rave site and intukubuts them in a similar
Speaker 5: states as miss Abdush's leg spread close torn off signs
Speaker 5: of abuse in their genital areas. Ryan, it didn't stop there, unfortunately,
Speaker 5: as unfortunate as it is to even delve into this,
Speaker 5: relative of the sister of one of the women that
Speaker 5: is discussed in the article.
Speaker 4: Right, one of the main women that you mentioned in.
Speaker 5: The article very much one of the main women in.
Speaker 4: Described in a subsection if you've read the story as
Speaker 4: the woman in the black dress, right, The.
Speaker 5: Woman in the black dress and her family talks in
Speaker 5: New York Times for the story and was not pleased
Speaker 5: with the outcome.
Speaker 4: Right, They were shocked at what they read, and so
Speaker 4: her sister posts on Instagram. People have since verified that
Speaker 4: this is in fact her sister. Yeah, we can put
Speaker 4: up a nine. So basically, what she's saying here is
Speaker 4: that there wasn't time for her to be raped in
Speaker 4: that the New York Times never told them that they
Speaker 4: were going to discuss her death in terms of sexual assault.
Speaker 4: We can talk about how we can clarify and contextualize
Speaker 4: this in a moment, but just want to read a
Speaker 4: little bit to people who are on the podcast. So
Speaker 4: she writes, the appearance is not easy, and she's talking
Speaker 4: about a video that the Times looked at. But it
Speaker 4: is clear that the dress will be up and not
Speaker 4: in a normal way. The head is half burned because
Speaker 4: they threw a grenade on the car so that it
Speaker 4: won't so that it won't look like I justify what
Speaker 4: they did there. The scum did much worse deeds. She's
Speaker 4: talking about Hamas here. Yes they tried, Yes they cut
Speaker 4: off heads and parts of bodies, but in the case
Speaker 4: of my sister, they did not, and why not?
Speaker 3: And so she says.
Speaker 4: At six point fifty one, Gal sends us a message
Speaker 4: to the WhatsApp group. We are on the border. You
Speaker 4: don't understand what's going on, what explosions are there. We'll
Speaker 4: get out of here. At seven o'clock, my brother in
Speaker 4: law calls his brother and says that they were shot
Speaker 4: in the wave. She is grunking how in four minutes
Speaker 4: they also raped and burned. So the sister's argument that
Speaker 4: she's making here on Instagram is that it's just simply
Speaker 4: was impossible because they were in their car and had
Speaker 4: the grenade thrown in it and that and so the Times.
Speaker 4: So The Times has not yet responded to this charge
Speaker 4: from the sister, but this was one of the central
Speaker 4: alliations at the Times build bilt, It's built its story around.
Speaker 4: So we just wanted to raise this one here and
Speaker 4: we'll can we'll continue to follow this because the New
Speaker 4: York Times story has been you know, used, you know,
Speaker 4: quite heavily in the last four or five days, not
Speaker 4: just to kind of justify the ongoing assault on on
Speaker 4: Goss and civilians, but also then to kind of condemn
Speaker 4: anybody who has been critical of the assault and say, well,
Speaker 4: clearly you don't care about all of these atrocities that
Speaker 4: were committed, But to me, if you're going to write
Speaker 4: a piece of this, of this heightened importance, you've got
Speaker 4: to be a lot more careful than this. But it
Speaker 4: also feels like a moment where if you, as a reporter,
Speaker 4: as a media organization, feel like the wind is at
Speaker 4: your back, so to speak, that you're that the thrust
Speaker 4: of public opinion is all in one direction, then you
Speaker 4: get a sloppy you say, you can you report things
Speaker 4: that aren't backed up in the same way that you
Speaker 4: would if in other words, if if The New York
Speaker 4: Times did a piece where they were kind of challenging
Speaker 4: the conventional narrative around what happened on October seventh, they
Speaker 4: would have those anecdotes so buttoned down that a hurricane
Speaker 4: wouldn't be able to lift them off the ground. But
Speaker 4: if if you're writing a narrative that is in line
Speaker 4: with the conventional understanding and then just and just advancing
Speaker 4: in a little bit, you're much less careful about what
Speaker 4: you're because everybody's gonna, you know, gobble it up and
Speaker 4: share it no matter what, and because anybody who raises
Speaker 4: questions about it is then immediately asked whether or not
Speaker 4: they're a rape apologist.
Speaker 5: It's I think it's always worth noting when a major
Speaker 5: news organization, or any news organization for that matter, faces
Speaker 5: a serious accusation of you misreporting something, especially in something
Speaker 5: as sensitive as you were talking to the family of
Speaker 5: somebody who was basically blown to bits in a ambush
Speaker 5: at a music festival, and you get that story egregiously
Speaker 5: wrong according to these allegations, I think that's always worth noting.
Speaker 5: On the other hand, Ryan, I'm curious if I just
Speaker 5: like present you with a question that might be on
Speaker 5: some viewers' minds, which is why focus on you know,
Speaker 5: it's true, this is a bad and you kind of
Speaker 5: just answered this question because from my perspective, you know,
Speaker 5: there are taped interrogations with Hamas militants that you know, again,
Speaker 5: you have to put some stock in the IDF if
Speaker 5: you take this as gospel. And I'm not saying that
Speaker 5: all of these taped interrogations that we've gotten have been
Speaker 5: perfectly you know that there hasn't been any editing or
Speaker 5: any coercion or anything like that that always happens. But
Speaker 5: also people who are caped of great evil and great
Speaker 5: violence are capable of great evil and great violence, and
Speaker 5: that's what we saw carried out on October seventh. So
Speaker 5: I do take those, you know, admissions from Hamas militants
Speaker 5: themselves in their own words, which you can you can
Speaker 5: see and watch on the internet seriously. And so the
Speaker 5: focus that I've seen online about this time story from
Speaker 5: my perspective, has been disproportionate. But it's interesting to me
Speaker 5: because I think it speaks to one of the strange
Speaker 5: realities about the Israel Palastine conflict, which is that elite opinion.
Speaker 5: It's one of the very few topics on which elite
Speaker 5: opinion is genuinely polarized. You know, it's it's not like,
Speaker 5: for example, let's see, it's not like what's a good
Speaker 5: example of like a lot of cultural things, gay marriage,
Speaker 5: for example, You're you're not going to get the same
Speaker 5: amount of debate on that among cultural elites are probably
Speaker 5: among the broader country. But even ten years ago then
Speaker 5: you would have among the general population on this, And
Speaker 5: we're going to talk about this in the next block.
Speaker 5: Even at Harvard there are bitter disagreements between the Bill
Speaker 5: Ackmans and the Claudine Gays and other professors. And that's
Speaker 5: where I think people see that. In media, there are
Speaker 5: these competing narratives. Sometimes you get a narrative from the
Speaker 5: New York Times that is incredibly pro Israel. Sometimes you
Speaker 5: get a narrative from the Associated Press or Reuters and like, woo,
Speaker 5: you know, maybe that's a little too credulous of Hamas,
Speaker 5: what Hamas is telling you, et cetera, et cetera. So
Speaker 5: that's where I actually find the response to the story interesting.
Speaker 5: But I'm just pitching that question because I'm guessing it's
Speaker 5: on people's minds.
Speaker 4: And the first thing i'd say is there's a great
Speaker 4: book people should read by Christina Lamb called Our Bodies
Speaker 4: Their Battlefields, which is about the history of rape as
Speaker 4: a weapon of war. It's something that has been overlooked
Speaker 4: by the Larsi male kind of military historian, totally demographic,
Speaker 4: and so the possibility that there was zero sexual violence
Speaker 4: on October seventh is basically close to zero. Like it
Speaker 4: is it is, it is something that happens in war.
Speaker 4: When The New York Times leads its most significant two
Speaker 4: month long investigation with a particular anecdote, because their article
Speaker 4: begins at first she was known simply as the woman
Speaker 4: in the black dress in a greeny video you can
Speaker 4: see her, and that is then challenged directly by her sister,
Speaker 4: not and challenge in a way that says, look, your
Speaker 4: timeline doesn't line up, like a grenade was thrown on
Speaker 4: the car she was blown up. And The New York
Speaker 4: Times doesn't present in this article any other evidence other
Speaker 4: than kind of this, this this snippet of video, other
Speaker 4: than they say based largely on the video evidence, which
Speaker 4: was verified by The New York Times, so they saw
Speaker 4: the video. Israeli police officials said they believed that Miss
Speaker 4: Abdusch was raped, and she became a symbol of the
Speaker 4: horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the October
Speaker 4: seventh attacks. Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck,
Speaker 4: they brutalized women. And so if the symbol of the
Speaker 4: horrors visited upon Israeli women is this anecdote which is
Speaker 4: at the very top of the New York Times high
Speaker 4: profile story, and it is sourced to Israeli police officials anonymously,
Speaker 4: and her sister is publicly contradicting the possibility of it
Speaker 4: even happening, it requires further investigation.
Speaker 3: It may be that the sister who is in shock.
Speaker 4: Who is suffering through a tremendous grief, and may want
Speaker 4: something to be different than it is.
Speaker 3: That may be, but this warrants.
Speaker 4: This warrants more investgation rather than just sitting here and saying, well,
Speaker 4: Israeli police officials say this, so yeah, and the New
Speaker 4: York Times has a snippet of video. Yeah, but the
Speaker 4: video is not of a rape.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think that's a good point. I think that's
Speaker 5: a totally fair point, especially because the way both statements
Speaker 5: from competing sides, especially in the middle of the war,
Speaker 5: in the middle of any war, are treated by the
Speaker 5: press is an extremely important question because people's lives are
Speaker 5: on the line, like for example, with some hospital bombings retaliations.
Speaker 5: The people who are making those decisions whether or not
Speaker 5: to retaliate are certainly following the press, and the press
Speaker 5: is certainly getting information from intelligence but also from its
Speaker 5: own reporting and all of that. So yes, I mean
Speaker 5: that actually, when when government is saying something, media is
Speaker 5: taking that a what is government either lying about or
Speaker 5: getting flat out wrong and just being oppy with facts
Speaker 5: for the sake of propaganda? And then be how is
Speaker 5: media treating those claims with skepticism?
Speaker 4: Totally important because and trigger warning, explicit content warning, all
Speaker 4: those things. There's one reason there's been so much focus
Speaker 4: on this article is because of the height of and
Speaker 4: like the explosive nature of some of the allegations, some
Speaker 4: of them rising to the level of this is really
Speaker 4: hard to believe and isn't isn't backed up by forensic evidence, video,
Speaker 4: other things, one witness that they have here. And I'll
Speaker 4: read people this and I think people will understand when
Speaker 4: I read this why some people are skeptical of some
Speaker 4: of this reporting and also why some people are like
Speaker 4: this justifies what's going on at this moment. The woman
Speaker 4: this is, The New York Times writes. The first victim
Speaker 4: she said she saw was a young woman with copper
Speaker 4: color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down
Speaker 4: to her knees. One man hold her by the hair
Speaker 4: and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said,
Speaker 4: and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into
Speaker 4: her back.
Speaker 3: She said.
Speaker 4: She then watched another woman shredded into pieces while one
Speaker 4: terrorist raped her. She said, another pulled out a box
Speaker 4: cutter and sliced off her breast. One continues to rape her,
Speaker 4: and the other throws her breast to someone else and
Speaker 4: they play with it, throw it and it falls on
Speaker 4: the road. This anecdote made it into the New York Times,
Speaker 4: which The New York Times is saying is credible that
Speaker 4: people were that that hamas terrorists.
Speaker 5: It's named eye witness.
Speaker 4: It's a named eyewitness. Name is her last name is.
Speaker 4: Sapir said that they used a box cutter and were
Speaker 4: throwing a breast around back and forth like a like
Speaker 4: some type of a sporting event. And they do have
Speaker 4: another person who was hiding in the same spot. He
Speaker 4: said he and Sapier were part of a group of
Speaker 4: friends who had met up at the party. In an interview,
Speaker 4: he said he barely lifted his head to look at
Speaker 4: the road, but he also described seeing a woman raped
Speaker 4: and killed. So there's a second witness. But he's they
Speaker 4: don't they don't quote him, like they don't, you know,
Speaker 4: he doesn't. He's saying he didn't he didn't look up,
Speaker 4: and then this, and then the story and then the
Speaker 4: story ends there basically at this moment. So it leaves
Speaker 4: people wondering, like what what happened here?
Speaker 6: Is?
Speaker 4: Did work? Like where there were there really people throwing
Speaker 4: body parts around the road and there's and nobody else
Speaker 4: saw this. There's no video of this, there's no dash
Speaker 4: cam video of this, there's no what where are these bodies?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 4: Did they get picked up? Did he must take them
Speaker 4: back to gods? Like you if if if bodies were
Speaker 4: mutilated in this fashion, you would ex they we would
Speaker 4: have them, like you would think.
Speaker 5: Right, Although I mean, I guess it depends because we
Speaker 5: know at the music festival and we can put the
Speaker 5: next element the last I'm up to this block up
Speaker 5: on the screen some of the security situation. We already
Speaker 5: know that in the response the idea may have hurt
Speaker 5: a whole lot of people. And so that is just
Speaker 5: to say bodies may be mutilated in the ways that
Speaker 5: are even after terrible mutilations happened to them from shelling
Speaker 5: and burning and whatnot, that it would be hard to
Speaker 5: make that determination. And so yeah, the survivors of the
Speaker 5: October seventh concert are seeking fifty six million dollars in
Speaker 5: damages from Israeli security forces, and we'll have to follow
Speaker 5: that lawsuit closely because that's substantiated. There's no question that
Speaker 5: they have serious claims.
Speaker 4: And their main claim comes from the fact that on
Speaker 4: Friday night they were already getting very credible reports that
Speaker 4: an assault was coming onto the Saturday. On late Friday
Speaker 4: night early Saturday morning on Friday, the IDF approved the
Speaker 4: concert Rave Event Musical Event festival to go for an
Speaker 4: extra day, and that said, it's okay if they had said, no,
Speaker 4: we're getting like the Because the IDEF is responsible for
Speaker 4: this event, which is happening just across the fence from Gaza.
Speaker 4: The IDEF knew that there were all of these intelligence
Speaker 4: reports that something could be happening. If they had said no,
Speaker 4: the permanent you had, which was just for a couple
Speaker 4: of days, it ends now like we're not extending it
Speaker 4: for another day. Everybody go home. Three hundred plus people
Speaker 4: would still be alive. It's not more than that, yes, right,
Speaker 4: it was how many were killed at the at the
Speaker 4: concert like it was at least I think it was
Speaker 4: at least three hundred, so yes, and plus the rest
Speaker 4: completely traumatized and running for their lives, and others others captured,
Speaker 4: taken hostage and may have been killed either in it
Speaker 4: a bombing, died of dysentery, or hopefully still alive and
Speaker 4: will be released at some point. So there's there's doing
Speaker 4: in a landmark case. The IDF for what I think
Speaker 4: everyone across the spectrum agrees as a monumental failure.
Speaker 5: In the aftermath of October seventh, the president of Harvard
Speaker 5: came under fire. The former president of Harvard, we should say,
Speaker 5: Claudine Gay. We can put the first element up on
Speaker 5: the screen. She published a letter yesterday resigning from her
Speaker 5: post atop Harvard. She was the first black female president
Speaker 5: of Harvard. She in the aftermath of October seventh, was
Speaker 5: called before Congress essentially to respond to allegations that Harvard
Speaker 5: had not been as harsh on these speech questions that
Speaker 5: pertain to propoused Indian students versus pro Israel students and
Speaker 5: Republicans grilled Claudine Gay, they grilled the presidents of Penn
Speaker 5: and it was Yeah, the president of Penn resigned right
Speaker 5: away afterwards, and Claudine Gay in the meanwhile, So Claudine
Speaker 5: Gay meanwhile got hit with a ton of allegations of
Speaker 5: plagiarism that originated actually from Counterpoints guest Chris Rufo and
Speaker 5: Aaron Sibarium, who's an excellent reporter over at the Washington
Speaker 5: Free Beacon.
Speaker 4: Well, they were bouncing around the Internet, I'd read as
Speaker 4: part of kind of an anti DEI attack on Gay,
Speaker 4: like people were accusing her of being unqualified and boosted
Speaker 4: just because she was a black woman. So she just
Speaker 4: bouncing around like racist four Chan things before it kind
Speaker 4: of migrated into the discourse. Yeah, by Rufo really seems
Speaker 4: to be I don't know how much credit he gets,
Speaker 4: like if he was the one that first surfaced them,
Speaker 4: if he gave him the New York Post or what.
Speaker 5: He did follow up on tips and the same with
Speaker 5: Sibarium that as soon as so. Basically, this is why
Speaker 5: it's related to October seventh, even though these are you know,
Speaker 5: play or allegations throughout the course of her career, is
Speaker 5: that they started getting tips. Rufo and Svarian started getting
Speaker 5: tips because people were so pissed off about her testimony
Speaker 5: in front of Congress in which she kind of copped
Speaker 5: to this legalese or resorted to this legalese to defend
Speaker 5: Harvard's speech policies. And that's where this is, you know,
Speaker 5: like there's this so many different conversations happening in this
Speaker 5: one conversation alone that you have to sort of disentangle
Speaker 5: these things, which is I think the speech policy is
Speaker 5: absolutely correct, Like I think the speech policy that she
Speaker 5: was defending is absolutely correct, And on the other hand,
Speaker 5: think that she was using this awful like HR language
Speaker 5: to mask hypocritical approaches to speech. So conservative students are
Speaker 5: obviously punished and their speech is restricted disproportionately in different cases,
Speaker 5: and so clouding gay gets brought before Congress and has
Speaker 5: no sense of moral clarity just like it is incapable
Speaker 5: of defending with any like real vigor and principle her
Speaker 5: position on free speech it was a circus.
Speaker 3: To me, it was.
Speaker 4: It was bad answer that given by both Penn and Harvard,
Speaker 4: because at least Dephonics said yes or no. Question. Can
Speaker 4: calling for the genocide of Jews get you, uh, get
Speaker 4: you caught up in the disciplinary process right at your college.
Speaker 4: I think she asked for it yes or no, Just
Speaker 4: say yes, because there are certainly are situations where it
Speaker 4: could and then you say yes. Of course, each individual
Speaker 4: case depends on the context, what words were used and
Speaker 4: in what context. And you know, because there was a
Speaker 4: famous case of a professor at Penn who he said,
Speaker 4: all I want for Christmas is white genocide. Just a joke, people.
Speaker 5: He was a Drexel.
Speaker 3: Maybe Philadelphia, so he was a joke.
Speaker 4: If but if you say that, just that there's a
Speaker 4: strict no context rule. He's done and everybody's telling an
Speaker 4: obvious joke is done if if context can't be allowed,
Speaker 4: but they just should just say yes. And then you
Speaker 4: force Stefanic then to kind of get into the weeds,
Speaker 4: which is what the mi T president did. She said, well,
Speaker 4: I haven't heard anybody saying that on campus. What are
Speaker 4: you talking about? And Stefana came back with, well, there
Speaker 4: have been people who chanted intifada, which is Arabic for
Speaker 4: the word uprising. And at that point you're like, well,
Speaker 4: I'd have to see a lot of context in order
Speaker 4: to say that. You know, I understand why people receive
Speaker 4: that in a violent fashion because it's second to defada.
Speaker 4: It was quite violent or suicide bombings involved, but the
Speaker 4: word antifada just means uprising. There's a news outlet that
Speaker 4: covers Israel Palestine called Electronic Antifada. Like, just is reading
Speaker 4: that calling for genis I know, of course not. And
Speaker 4: she's kept her job, and she has so far kept
Speaker 4: her job, but they're coming for her next anyway, go ahead, I.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, no, no, no that Let's put this up on
Speaker 5: the screen so we can see the examples of plagiarisim.
Speaker 5: The Freebeacon actually made this very handy illustrate where you
Speaker 5: can see highlighted text between Claudine Gay's work. She's a
Speaker 5: political scientist. I think she studied economics at Stanford and
Speaker 5: taught she's taught political science for a while, and you
Speaker 5: can you can just see the text being highlighted. That's
Speaker 5: the same. We can put the next element up as
Speaker 5: well now too, and you could go to the Freebeacon
Speaker 5: website to read all of these examples, and you can
Speaker 5: see them in Rufo's work as well. It's also worth
Speaker 5: noting the Associated Press headline just this morning. I mean,
Speaker 5: this is one of the best that I've ever seen
Speaker 5: among associated bad Associated Press headlines. Harvard's president resignation highlights
Speaker 5: new conservative weapon against colleges plagiarism. Again, like, this is
Speaker 5: what Jonathan Chait already yesterday and in New York Magazine
Speaker 5: was accusing Rufo of weaponizing quote like high standards of
Speaker 5: excellence something like that, one of those phrases like exceptional
Speaker 5: standards or standards of excellence, something to that degree, which
Speaker 5: is just stop, pause and listen to yourself. That's a
Speaker 5: weird way to talk about what happened, because there are
Speaker 5: a lot of students at Harvard who looked at Claudine
Speaker 5: Gay and said, if I did what you did here,
Speaker 5: and a lot of it was not citing works that
Speaker 5: she later added citations to. Harvard tried to kind of
Speaker 5: wiggle out of this and not punish her at all.
Speaker 5: But when you have students saying, listen, I would be
Speaker 5: kicked out of Harvard and my career would be severely
Speaker 5: affected if I had done all of these things and
Speaker 5: the president, I'm to hear the president is keeping her
Speaker 5: job with no punishments whatsoever. She just has to add citations.
Speaker 5: I feel like that's where it became most untenable. On
Speaker 5: the other hand, the Harvard Corporation, which is this sort
Speaker 5: of secretive corporation that runs Harvard, has apparently been taking
Speaker 5: the backlash from people like Bill Ackman really seriously, and
Speaker 5: le Fong actually found an example. First, let's put B
Speaker 5: four up on the screen. This is a least dephonic
Speaker 5: taking a little bit of a victory lap before it's
Speaker 5: a tweet from alistaphonics saying two down Harvard knows that
Speaker 5: this long overdue forced resignation of the anti Semitic plagists president,
Speaker 5: it's just the beginning of what will be the greatest
Speaker 5: scandal of any college or university in history. There there
Speaker 5: we have the inflation of the term anti semitic, quite
Speaker 5: an inflation of anti semitic. And let's put up this
Speaker 5: Leefong tweet where he's responding to I believe it was
Speaker 5: this is the next element, Bill Ackman saying, you know,
Speaker 5: next up MI t to the point that Ryan made
Speaker 5: and Lee responded, Now they're going after you get another
Speaker 5: university president mit Sally Cornblath, who also declined to censor
Speaker 5: pro pouset Indian student speech. They're making it very clear
Speaker 5: this is about enforcing pro Israel dogma, nothing else. So Ryan,
Speaker 5: that's to the point you made that it's not stopping
Speaker 5: with Clauding day. Right.
Speaker 4: And obviously this wasn't about plagiarism, which is which then
Speaker 4: makes a lot of her defenders look bad because because
Speaker 4: everybody knows this is not about plagiarism, then when they
Speaker 4: find these very solid examples of what everbody understands to
Speaker 4: be plagiarism, her defenders have to defend the plagiarism because
Speaker 4: they're defending the metaphyte rather than that one. Rather than
Speaker 4: to me, you just have to be like, look, it's
Speaker 4: true that you would not have been This plagiarism would
Speaker 4: not have been uncovered if not for the kind of
Speaker 4: witch hunt that came out of the of that hearing,
Speaker 4: Like the they came for you trying to get you fired,
Speaker 4: and they found this pretext to get you fired.
Speaker 3: However, the pretext is legitimate.
Speaker 4: You're bust sorry, right, exactly too bad, Like you shouldn't
Speaker 4: have plagiarized like and for there are a lot of
Speaker 4: academics who are in academics to get to other positions
Speaker 4: such as president of a university, and you have to
Speaker 4: in order to get there, you have to get your PhD.
Speaker 4: And you have to be published in respectable journals. Those
Speaker 4: are boxes that you have to check. And for those academics,
Speaker 4: they're kind of just checking those boxes while they're working
Speaker 4: the politics and getting And that's fine. If if you
Speaker 4: want to be president of Harvard, that's that's a cool ambition.
Speaker 4: I'm not saying everybody has to be like just you know,
Speaker 4: in the stacks of books at the library, you could be.
Speaker 5: But that's right, Harvard colors on your tie.
Speaker 4: I suggested Rashid Khalidi, author of one hundred Years World
Speaker 4: Great Palestinian American Scholar, as the next president of Harvard.
Speaker 4: Like if because Harvard originally said, you know what, we
Speaker 4: probably would get rid of President Gay based on these
Speaker 4: initial plagiarism allegations, but it will look like we're caving
Speaker 4: to Bill Ackman and the rest of this mobs and RUFO.
Speaker 4: We don't want to do that, so they stuck by
Speaker 4: her for a while, but then the plagiers and allegations
Speaker 4: are just too much. And so if they really want
Speaker 4: to get back at Rufo and Acman Rashid Khalidi for
Speaker 4: Harvard President doubled up further left.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So this is when the New York Times they
Speaker 5: say initially fact. Initially, faculty reaction was mixed, with some
Speaker 5: saying the charges were serious and other calling the examples minor,
Speaker 5: including some of the people that were plagiarized from professor's
Speaker 5: Both camps questioned the seemingly ideological nature of the effort
Speaker 5: to publicize them but clearly ideologically.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: But as more allegation surfaced, faculty support for doctor Gay
Speaker 5: began to erode. Particularly these questions arose about what procedures
Speaker 5: the corporation, which normally has no involvement in scholar matters,
Speaker 5: had used to investigate. So people were actually dissatisfied with
Speaker 5: the nature of the investigations, of the investigation, which they
Speaker 5: thought was sort of a charade and a rubber stamp.
Speaker 5: And that is all sort of bubbling, and that's where
Speaker 5: Claudine Gay, who by the way, this is the shortest
Speaker 5: tenure for any president of Harvard since sixteen thirty six,
Speaker 5: which is when Harvard was founded. She was the first
Speaker 5: black president and the second woman ever to leave to
Speaker 5: lead Harvard University. So you can see where Harvard was
Speaker 5: reluctant to part ways with her, anticipating already charges of racism.
Speaker 5: Claudine Gay's resignation letter is in no way as an
Speaker 5: apology for the plagiarism. She defends her work. She does
Speaker 5: not apologize for anything and says that she that this
Speaker 5: is some people have said she blames racism for what
Speaker 5: happened to her. I think she just kind of invokes it.
Speaker 4: Obviously, the initial the initial allegations of plagiarism were surfaced
Speaker 4: by people who were upset that a black woman was
Speaker 4: made president of Harvard.
Speaker 5: You're talking about what allegedly.
Speaker 4: Was on fair four chan threats or whatever. Now they
Speaker 4: were surfaced because she's plagiarized, and clearly even able to.
Speaker 3: Surface them because she was plagued.
Speaker 4: But yes, she's not wrong that the initial people who
Speaker 4: found them and then leaked them and surfaced them to
Speaker 4: RUFO and the other other folks were animated by anger
Speaker 4: at the fact that they they thought this black woman
Speaker 4: didn't deserve to be president of Harvard like that she's
Speaker 4: she's not, She's not wrong about that.
Speaker 5: I think there's always if you're a black woman in
Speaker 5: America and you're in a position of in a high
Speaker 5: profile position, you're there's always going to be a racialized element.
Speaker 4: But you also have to because because you know that,
Speaker 4: you can't be that sloppy with your with your work. Clearly,
Speaker 4: what she was doing is she's all of these areas
Speaker 4: were like kind of it's the what what you would
Speaker 4: call the b matter of your your articles where you're
Speaker 4: just kind of summarizing, and it's so like, I'm glad
Speaker 4: I'm not an academic because some of it's so boring,
Speaker 4: Like you have to like summarize all of this prior
Speaker 4: research that's done before you get to your own original research.
Speaker 4: So your little job is to try is to take
Speaker 4: other people's work, summarize it, cite it, and so that
Speaker 4: people like have the context for what your original contribution
Speaker 4: is coming afterwards. And so in those places where she's
Speaker 4: summarizing what other people's work is, she's just copying and
Speaker 4: pasting lines, dropping them in into her own work, changing
Speaker 4: them a little bit, usually citing where she got it from,
Speaker 4: but sometimes not citing.
Speaker 5: Apparently forty plus times are in that right that ballpark.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so so then you're busted. You just have
Speaker 4: to you have to be more careful about how you
Speaker 4: do it. The whole thing is copying because you're just
Speaker 4: you're you're you're just reiterating what people have pre as
Speaker 4: they said. And so I understand why some academics are like,
Speaker 4: this is not serious, because this is just the grunt work.
Speaker 4: This is this is the busy work of academia rather
Speaker 4: than the original work that you know, we're supposed to
Speaker 4: be focused on. But that's that's that's Look, they're the
Speaker 4: ones that set this stupid framework up.
Speaker 3: They live and buy it and die by it.
Speaker 5: It reminds me of, in a weird way, a lot
Speaker 5: of what happens on the on the right with Donald Trump,
Speaker 5: which is that you are completely correct that the people
Speaker 5: coming after Donald Trump for X, Y, and Z have
Speaker 5: ulterior motives.
Speaker 4: Yes, they're not really just the broken clock however, information right. Yeah,
Speaker 4: So then the payoffs to porn stars absolutely.
Speaker 5: Yes, and then still the broken clock is right twice
Speaker 5: a day. And sometimes it's like he clearly is seriously
Speaker 5: being accused of doing something that is clearly wrong.
Speaker 4: Al Capone did cheat on his taxes, Alon and that's
Speaker 4: that is the moral of the story. Although we have
Speaker 4: no choice because you can't, like honestly criminal enterprise with
Speaker 4: the irs. So that was a little on He was
Speaker 4: in a catch twenty Yeah.
Speaker 5: A highly anticipated set of names in one of Virginia
Speaker 5: Giffray's cases. Actually this is a twenty fifteen case against
Speaker 5: Gillian Maxwell. Virginia Jiffray is one of the most prominent,
Speaker 5: if not the most prominent Epstein accusers and accusers against
Speaker 5: Maxwell as well. There was a list of names that
Speaker 5: was set to be made public, as many people actually
Speaker 5: know just yesterday. What happened instead is that as everybody
Speaker 5: was anticipating the release of these names that, according to
Speaker 5: leaks to ABC News and other outlets, were going to
Speaker 5: include dozens of mentions of Bill Clinton and potentially Donald
Speaker 5: Trump as well, that was postponed until January twenty second
Speaker 5: because of a filing from one of the one of
Speaker 5: the Jane was mentioned in the case, who would have
Speaker 5: been or successfully said she would be in danger if
Speaker 5: her name was released. Now the judge was going to
Speaker 5: shield victims' names, but the list is going to be
Speaker 5: kind of a mix of the accused and accusers, So
Speaker 5: it was you know, there was a lot sort of
Speaker 5: legally on the line, and whether we actually ever get
Speaker 5: the list of names on January twenty second is an
Speaker 5: open question. Obviously, much of this information that we were
Speaker 5: set to get was probably already out in the public,
Speaker 5: and in fact, reporting suggests that a lot of this
Speaker 5: was already going to be known. Nevertheless, everyone myself included
Speaker 5: probably you as well, Ryan, were kind of on tens
Speaker 5: or hooks waiting for this information to be released, because
Speaker 5: when it comes to the case of Jeffrey Epstein and
Speaker 5: Galene Maxwell and all of their various connections to intelligence,
Speaker 5: which really after of course, the many many victims who
Speaker 5: suffered over the years is first and foremost in this story,
Speaker 5: especially from a political lens, this was a very useful
Speaker 5: bit of information, even if if much of it is
Speaker 5: already known to that point. One of those people who
Speaker 5: was on tenterhooks was Aaron Rodgers, who went after Jimmy
Speaker 5: Kimmel so some Disney and Disney violence because Rogers was
Speaker 5: on Pat McAfee's ESPN show and called out Jimmy Kimmel.
Speaker 5: Jimmy Kimmel responded, I think we have the video that
Speaker 5: we can roll of Rogers on the McAfee show. Watch.
Speaker 5: This had something to do with the Epstein list that
Speaker 5: came out.
Speaker 6: It feels like supposed to be coming. That's supposed to
Speaker 6: be coming out wine. I've been waiting my wine cellar
Speaker 6: first time.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, are really
Speaker 2: hoping that doesn't.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 7: Obviously, a clip from this particular program was run on
Speaker 7: Jimmy Kimmel's show whenever Aaron brought up the list and
Speaker 7: then Jimmy marked him for it, and Aaron has not
Speaker 7: forgot about that. But here we are sit right in
Speaker 7: front of that nice bottle of scotch. What do you say,
Speaker 7: I'm waiting to celebrate something.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'll tell you what.
Speaker 2: If that list comes out, I definitely will be popping
Speaker 2: popping some sort of bottle.
Speaker 5: So that was from the middle of the day yesterday
Speaker 5: as everyone was waiting for the list to be released.
Speaker 5: It could have happened basically at any point yesterday and
Speaker 5: Rogers goes on ESPN and calls out Jimmy Kimmel also
Speaker 5: and say.
Speaker 3: He was Jimmy Kimmel was on it or yeah.
Speaker 5: So here's Jimmy Kimmel's response, invoking that great key and
Speaker 5: Peel sketch. Dear a asshole. For the record, I've not
Speaker 5: met flown with visitor, had any contact whatsoever with Epstein,
Speaker 5: Nor will you find my name on any quote list
Speaker 5: other than the clearly phony nonsense that soft brain wackos
Speaker 5: like yourself can't seem to distinguish from reality. Your reckless
Speaker 5: words put my family in danger. Keep it up and
Speaker 5: we will debate the facts further in court. I sort
Speaker 5: of think that Jimmy Kimmel just streisand affected the whole situation,
Speaker 5: like a throwaway comment from Aaron Rodgers on a televis podcast.
Speaker 5: Maybe could have let that one go unless it, like
Speaker 5: for some reason, started picking up a bunch of steam,
Speaker 5: and maybe it had. I don't know, but I probably
Speaker 5: would have let that one go. I don't know.
Speaker 4: It's it's hard to say because once in this world
Speaker 4: of you never know information being completely untethered from reality.
Speaker 4: You know, if if your name starts to circulate kind
Speaker 4: of in orbit with Epstein, there's just no way to
Speaker 4: pull it out.
Speaker 3: But your question is an issue.
Speaker 4: When did Kimmel accidentally make him propel it into orbit
Speaker 4: rather than just ignoring it. He probably saw a bunch
Speaker 4: of stuff coming out of that Rogers podcast, which which
Speaker 4: then pushed him to make a public statement about it.
Speaker 5: He's right that it definitely puts his family in danger.
Speaker 5: There's no question about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and there's he would know if he's gonna be
Speaker 4: on the list.
Speaker 3: He says he's not.
Speaker 4: He's not like that's that's pretty pretty clear. So the
Speaker 4: list would be supposed to have one hundred and eighty
Speaker 4: seven names on it. That includes Epstein's employees, his co conspirators,
Speaker 4: some perpetrators, but also victims. And it was one of
Speaker 4: the victims who requested that the names be withheld for now.
Speaker 4: I'll be shocked if they ever actually release any of
Speaker 4: these names again. First person is allowed to petition to
Speaker 4: keep their name hidden. So I mean, I would love
Speaker 4: to have my faith restored in this process, but I
Speaker 4: don't understand how we're ever going to learn anything out
Speaker 4: of this.
Speaker 5: So yeah, for example, this is the ABC News reporting.
Speaker 5: They say the document stem from a twenty fifteen civil
Speaker 5: lawsuit centered on allegations that Epstein's one time paramore, Geeland Maxwell,
Speaker 5: facilitated the sexual abuse of Virginia Giffrey, an alleged trafficking victim.
Speaker 5: Jeffrey also accused Epstein and Maxwell of directing her to
Speaker 5: have sex with Prince Andrew and several other prominent men.
Speaker 5: Prince Andrew denied the allegations. Most of the prominent names
Speaker 5: that appear in the documents are already associated in some
Speaker 5: way with Epstein four allegations of wrongdoing for having worked
Speaker 5: with him, flown on his planes, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 5: In some instances, the only appearances of the names are
Speaker 5: in potential witness list or in proposed terms for searches
Speaker 5: of electronic records. So ABC News at one point says
Speaker 5: something like, you know, Bill Clinton is expected to appear
Speaker 5: in the documents hundreds of these hundreds of sealed court
Speaker 5: filings from the twenty fifteen civil suit. But Bill Clinton
Speaker 5: is not, I think is The ABC News turn of
Speaker 5: phrase was like, he's not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Speaker 5: It's like, well, Virginia Jeffrey accuses Bill Clinton of being
Speaker 5: on the island of being a little Saint James. That's wrongdoing.
Speaker 5: That is wrongdoing in and of itself period.
Speaker 3: Wrong.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's doing wrong. Also, there's a picture of him
Speaker 5: getting the massage from the underage you remember that from
Speaker 5: the under the seemingly or the very young looking woman
Speaker 5: rubbers yeah, the shoulder rub yeah, which is just man.
Speaker 5: And in other news, Virginia Giffray has also Accusedwitz.
Speaker 3: Well, she's backed off that she well, she.
Speaker 5: Got, she got, she got slapped with a defamation suit
Speaker 5: from Dershowitz.
Speaker 4: Right, and so now she says that she believes that
Speaker 4: that was a case of mistaken identity and all suits
Speaker 4: between Dershowitz and Jiffrey have been have been dropped as
Speaker 4: a result of that, which has freed up Dershwitz for
Speaker 4: his next effort.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 3: There is reporting that.
Speaker 4: Israel wants to hire Alan Dershowitz to represent it at
Speaker 4: the basically at the International Criminal Court where it's being
Speaker 4: accused of carrying out genocide by South Africa, also now
Speaker 4: joined by Malaysia. This is a this is an ongoing case.
Speaker 4: I think it would be the first one since uh Bosnia,
Speaker 4: although you know that that happens in real time or
Speaker 4: Rwanda one you know was so fast that the prosecutions
Speaker 4: didn't come until after genocide was over. In Bosnia, there
Speaker 4: were prosecutions brought during the conflict, which which did then
Speaker 4: kind of trigger intervention. So we'll see, we'll see where
Speaker 4: that goes. Dershwitz was asked for comment and said that
Speaker 4: he's not commenting, like he did not did not deny
Speaker 4: or confirm that he would be representing Israel at the
Speaker 4: criminal court.
Speaker 5: Right. And you know, again to Ryan's point, will these
Speaker 5: names ever be released? I don't know.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't put money on it, but you know.
Speaker 5: One of the big this is just.
Speaker 3: Like I'd love to be wrong.
Speaker 5: The same and we've got a couple of weeks to
Speaker 5: find out, but then there might be another delay. When
Speaker 5: you're dealing with hundreds of people, you're dealing with hundreds
Speaker 5: or hundreds of documents, and at least dozens of people
Speaker 5: you're dealing that means with dozens of legal teams in
Speaker 5: all likelihoods. So there's kind of a never ending road
Speaker 5: ahead of us. And again we're talking about a civil
Speaker 5: case from twenty fifteen that has already seen a million
Speaker 5: twists and turns. I was just on the court document
Speaker 5: list and it's already like eight pages long if you
Speaker 5: go to the reports of all of the filings in
Speaker 5: the case. So There's a lot more to come on this,
Speaker 5: but you know, I always think with Epstein, the main
Speaker 5: thing to remember is that there is reporting. There is
Speaker 5: people who have said on the record that they believe
Speaker 5: he's tied to Masad. They believe that he has tied
Speaker 5: to either It's really intelligence or American intelligence in different ways.
Speaker 5: And you know, again victims first and foremost here, but
Speaker 5: from a political lens, that is is probably the most
Speaker 5: important thing to keep in mind, and we already have
Speaker 5: plenty of evidence to suggest that's exactly what was going on.
Speaker 4: Speaking of a sordid list of names, he hey, unusual
Speaker 4: Whales is out with its annual report on Congressional insider trading.
Speaker 3: If we can put up this this element unusually.
Speaker 4: His first report was back in twenty twenty, and it helped,
Speaker 4: it helped, it helped reinvigorate the debate over whether or
Speaker 4: not members of Congress should be able to trade, which
Speaker 4: includes you know, roughly one hundred percent of the public
Speaker 4: saying that they should not be able to trade.
Speaker 5: Yeah, including many members of Congress who will say.
Speaker 4: Members of Congress coupled with the secret for us inside
Speaker 4: Congress to continue to allow the trading to continue. Nancy
Speaker 4: Pelosi said that she would that she would ban trading.
Speaker 4: Is what happened back in the twenty twenty two congressional
Speaker 4: cycle was, if you remember, Alexandra Cozi Cortes put forward
Speaker 4: what's known as a discharge petition, which is, you have
Speaker 4: a bill that leadership is not allowing to get to
Speaker 4: the floor. You cred discharge petition that if it gets
Speaker 4: two hundred and eighteen signatures, it is forced onto the floor.
Speaker 4: So she introduced a discharge petition. It started gaining momentum,
Speaker 4: and Pelosi jumped out and said, I promised that we're
Speaker 4: going to do this by the end of the year.
Speaker 4: Pelosi's team then kind of interfered with the negotiations, blew
Speaker 4: that up. One thing leads to another, when't you know,
Speaker 4: the congressional term expires without the ban ever getting enacted.
Speaker 4: Kevin McCarthy, while he was in the minority, promised that
Speaker 4: his number one goal, first thing he would do when
Speaker 4: he took over the House of Representatives was that he
Speaker 4: was going to use the Republican majority to ban congressional
Speaker 4: insider trading. Ken McCarthy, no longer with us as Speaker
Speaker 4: of the House, did not ban congressional trading, which leads
Speaker 4: us to I guess the third fourth Unusual Wales report
Speaker 4: on insider trading, it actually, you amusingly has Republicans slightly
Speaker 4: underperforming the SNP over the year SMP had a good
Speaker 4: year good Old Biden, with Democrats overperforming the s and
Speaker 4: P rose at twenty five percent Democrats.
Speaker 3: So it's very hard to guess.
Speaker 4: The returns that members of Congress are generating. So he
Speaker 4: pegs Democrats at thirty one percent Republicans at eighteen percent.
Speaker 4: Because you don't know exactly when they bought the stop,
Speaker 4: so therefore you you don't know if they've sold it
Speaker 4: when necessarily if they sold it by at this point
Speaker 4: he annualizes, He annualizes return So there's a lot of
Speaker 4: estimating going on to come up with these numbers. But
Speaker 4: what you can certainly find is suspiciously well time trades
Speaker 4: from a number of members of Congress.
Speaker 5: My favorite is when you match them to their committees,
Speaker 5: as Unusual Wales does here, which is the most outrageous
Speaker 5: part of all of us. And why again, I think
Speaker 5: this report from American hero Unusual Whales should be a
Speaker 5: huge national story because you just put the element up
Speaker 5: on the screen about um speeding Republicans. Republicans did pretty
Speaker 5: well on the Senate side, but this is about how
Speaker 5: they're trading when it comes to war Numerous members in Congress,
Speaker 5: unusual whales rights traded warstocks before the Israel Gaza pastin conflict.
Speaker 5: We present the above table that's the one on the
Speaker 5: screen without comment noting that spias up only ten percent
Speaker 5: since the conflict. Well, members who traded these warstocks have
Speaker 5: often outperformed. They said they saw something worse at the
Speaker 5: start of the Ukraine conflict. You should read that report too,
Speaker 5: because it's equally a stomach training. But based on the
Speaker 5: portfolios of members who would benefit from war stocks is
Speaker 5: what you're looking at here on the screen. I added
Speaker 5: our tweet for reference as our highlighting of the war
Speaker 5: conflict was part of Kevin Hearn losing his run for
Speaker 5: US Congress speaker, and Tommy Taberville is a good example
Speaker 5: of this.
Speaker 4: I've definitely addicted to day trading.
Speaker 5: He's addicted to day trading and seriously addicted to day trading.
Speaker 5: So he was he bought puts against Elon Musk's Tesla
Speaker 5: in twenty twenty three. He was doing a lot of
Speaker 5: stuff with Tesla. Actually, then he disclosed two hundred and
Speaker 5: fifty thousand dollars in futures trading of wheat, corn, soy,
Speaker 5: and cattle in August of twenty twenty three. He sits
Speaker 5: on the Senate Committee for Agriculture and Nutrition and Forestry.
Speaker 5: There's also a farm bill that was being discussed and
Speaker 5: the can was kind of kicked. So another thing to
Speaker 5: keep in mind. He purchased forty five thousand dollars in Huma,
Speaker 5: so that's a penny stock in July, and he repeated
Speaker 5: that purchase right when the Ukraine War stard did and
Speaker 5: that ended up being used in the Ukraine War for
Speaker 5: tissue implants. And he's on armed Services. So another thing
Speaker 5: just to keep in mind is that, yes, these are annualized,
Speaker 5: and they're they're not perfect estimates, there's no question about it.
Speaker 5: But at the same time, just in and of the self,
Speaker 5: in and of itself, the fact that they're trading, yeah,
Speaker 5: is it's outrageous and in.
Speaker 3: The past unusual.
Speaker 4: Wells and other reporters have found connections between whether or
Speaker 4: not a company lobbied a member of Congress and how
Speaker 4: well they that member of Congress then trade the stock.
Speaker 4: Because what what often happens is that, let's say Huma
Speaker 4: or whatever you've got, You've got a defense company that
Speaker 4: comes in and talks to a Member of Congress and says,
Speaker 4: here's you know, we would we you know, we need
Speaker 4: help with the Pentagon, you know, help us get through
Speaker 4: this process. Here's this thing that we make this really good.
Speaker 4: And in the meeting they will tell the Member of Congress, oh,
Speaker 4: by the way, in March, like we're going to get
Speaker 4: through FDA Phase three, or we have a new kind
Speaker 4: of microprocessor that's coming online. It's going to like be amazing.
Speaker 4: And so the member of Congress then gets that information
Speaker 4: from that meeting might help them at the Pentagon, and
Speaker 4: then also buys the stock, and then because they have
Speaker 4: that access to that early information, they make tens or
Speaker 4: hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so it's a way
Speaker 4: for a company to put cash into a brown paper
Speaker 4: bag and leave it on the desk. Without putting cash
Speaker 4: in a brown paper bag and leaving it on the desk, Yeah,
Speaker 4: no money has changed hand. It's just a little hey, yeah,
Speaker 4: we got an we got a contract coming through. It's
Speaker 4: gonna be worth you know, one point five billion dollars
Speaker 4: in two weeks. When that's announced, you don't even have
Speaker 4: to say, when that's announced, our stock is going to pop.
Speaker 4: The member of comments like which day two weeks you're
Speaker 4: gonna announce that?
Speaker 3: Good to know.
Speaker 5: That's That's exactly why it has to all be blind
Speaker 5: or banned completely. I mean, there's just no other way
Speaker 5: to do it. Marjor Tailler Green beat Rocanna last year
Speaker 5: according to these estimates. And we've talked to We've pressed
Speaker 5: Roe on this issue.
Speaker 4: His his wife is wealthy and her advisor makes trades.
Speaker 3: Kills. Roe.
Speaker 4: Sure, but it's it is difficult because if if it's
Speaker 4: your spouse, who's who's doing it? Because it makes you,
Speaker 4: it makes it look like you're the one, yeah doing it.
Speaker 4: But that's and Roe has been one of the most
Speaker 4: outspoken in favor of a band, a band that would
Speaker 4: include spouses.
Speaker 5: Yes, absolutely so, because your spouse is at all those
Speaker 5: dinners with you too. They're sitting at the tables with
Speaker 5: the lobbyists, traveling to the drunkets and all of that stuff.
Speaker 5: So there's just no question and overhearing phone calls and
Speaker 5: all of those so there's just there's just no question
Speaker 5: that it's and to your point about Row even.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And the bigger point is it creates the appearance
Speaker 4: of corruption or conflicts of interest to people in the public,
Speaker 4: even even if there isn't any like, even if there's
Speaker 4: no connection whatsoever, people just like.
Speaker 5: Come on right well and unusual. Wales reminds us of
Speaker 5: the stand Crenshaw quote where he says, some of the
Speaker 5: extentive this is the only way for Yeah, he says,
Speaker 5: you have no way to better yourself as a congressman
Speaker 5: other than trading stocks, which is something that's a kind
Speaker 5: of popular refrain on Capitol Hill. Is that compared to
Speaker 5: what they could be making in the lobbying sector, members
Speaker 5: of Congress are just doing public service, making that one
Speaker 5: hundred and eighty k or whatever it is now. I
Speaker 5: think it's still around one hundred and eighty k. And
Speaker 5: that's not enough money to have two houses, because you
Speaker 5: have to have one in your district, and you have
Speaker 5: to sleep somewhere in Washington, d C. And blah blah
Speaker 5: blah blah blah. So of course we have to engage
Speaker 5: in corrupt conduct to do that. What else do you
Speaker 5: expect us to do but be corrupt?
Speaker 4: Oh An update by the way to our last block
Speaker 4: and a clarification. It's the International Court of Justice where
Speaker 4: South Africa has brought the charges against Israel, not not
Speaker 4: the International Criminal Court.
Speaker 5: The one that dershwitoz is right, the one that maybe
Speaker 5: or maybe not defending it right.
Speaker 4: And Turkey has now joined and is backing the South
Speaker 4: African So you now have a NATO member taking Israel
Speaker 4: to the International Court of Justice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for genocide.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Well the other thing I think, just to close
Speaker 5: a loop on the unusual whales segment, congresspeed the market overall,
Speaker 5: and of one hundred trading members, thirty three percent beat
Speaker 5: the market with their portfolios one unusual thing unusual whales,
Speaker 5: unusual thing that unusual Wales discovers. They write. A general
Speaker 5: rule I found is that if Congress members are up
Speaker 5: for re election in twenty twenty four, then they've severely
Speaker 5: decreased and or stopped trading their activity in the last
Speaker 5: year and points to w Washman, Schultz, Nancy Pelosi and
Speaker 5: all of her fun NVIDIA activity. So the number of
Speaker 5: trading is down, the number of members disclosing trades is down,
Speaker 5: but the values of those transactions are comparable the years
Speaker 5: pass says unusual whales. So they've been selling more stocks
Speaker 5: than buying. But they've also been selling more government securities
Speaker 5: than in previous years, and they were buying more corporate
Speaker 5: securities in the last two years as well. So important
Speaker 5: patterns to look out for in the years ahead. But
Speaker 5: hopefully we can just all agree to ban this shit
Speaker 5: in the years ahead, so we don't even have to
Speaker 5: see this put unusual wheels out of business guys.
Speaker 4: Maybe nice, Yeah, that'll be nice.
Speaker 5: All right, Ryan. Paul Bigger is our guest up next.
Speaker 5: You explained a little bit earlier in the show about
Speaker 5: why we're talking to Paul because of this viral blog
Speaker 5: that he wrote, some of which was directed at his
Speaker 5: own people he's in business with. So he's going to
Speaker 5: join us on the show next.
Speaker 3: Yeah, stick around for that.
Speaker 4: We're now joined by Paul Bigger, who's the founder of
Speaker 4: Circle CI as well as Dark Lang. Paul's also the
Speaker 4: author of a viral blog post put up on December
Speaker 4: fourteenth called I Can't Sleep. Paul, thanks so much for
Speaker 4: joining us here on Counterpoints.
Speaker 6: And thank you so much for having me and.
Speaker 4: So I wanted to read people a little bit of
Speaker 4: your posts. They have some context for this if we
Speaker 4: can put up this first element you write. At one
Speaker 4: point in this really harrowing essay, you write, I don't
Speaker 4: know what to do, but I know these are not
Speaker 4: my people who can work with people whitewashing genocide. Are
Speaker 4: we supposed to pretend it's business as usual as we
Speaker 4: send our friends intros frolic at conferences, discuss monetization strategy
Speaker 4: to Ed sim Erica Brescia, Michael Deering, and especially Matt Aco.
Speaker 3: We're done.
Speaker 4: I'll never pitch you again, never ask for help, never
Speaker 4: send intros or recommend you. I'm done with Bold Start
Speaker 4: and DCVC and Harrison Metal and Redpoint. I'm also done
Speaker 4: with Bessemer and Sequoia and First Round. I'm ashamed that
Speaker 4: these are some of my biggest supporters over the years,
Speaker 4: that people who invested in me twice, the people who helped,
Speaker 4: who advised I cannot work with the people whitewashing killing
Speaker 4: that people know it's happening and who cover for it.
Speaker 4: And so, Paul, can you give us a little bit
Speaker 4: of kind of context about you know, first of all,
Speaker 4: how you came to this decision to kind of write
Speaker 4: this post, and what what is what is dark line?
Speaker 4: What is a circle CI can contextualized situate yourself in
Speaker 4: the in the tech world for our audience.
Speaker 6: Sure, so.
Speaker 1: The circle CI is is what they call in tech
Speaker 1: a unicorn, right, it's it's a it's a company that's
Speaker 1: worth a billion dollars.
Speaker 6: And there's there's a lot of these.
Speaker 1: Now there's there's about a thousand of them, and we
Speaker 1: were circle CI was sort of early in the in
Speaker 1: the most recent tech boom, the one that went from
Speaker 1: about twenty ten twenty twenty one, and was one of
Speaker 1: the one of the large companies in a particular space
Speaker 1: called continuous integration, which is sort of developer workflow, and
Speaker 1: so that is you know what, once you found one
Speaker 1: of these, you're you have a certain cache in the industry,
Speaker 1: and you find it easier to raise the next round.
Speaker 6: And next fundraising round.
Speaker 1: You know, you know a lot of investors, You've built
Speaker 1: up your network, you're sort of you're sort of in
Speaker 1: a little bit and so that that's sort of like
Speaker 1: my position in the industry. It's not you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not like Brian Chesky or Mark Zuckerberg or anything like that.
Speaker 1: I'm like two tiers down, but I'm also not the
Speaker 1: bottom tier or not not the people who are just
Speaker 1: sort of joining the industry. And so the the context
Speaker 1: for writing the blog post was simply like, how can
Speaker 1: we do business as usual during this thing that's going on?
Speaker 1: During during the war on the people of Gaza, you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're At the time, the you know, South Africa
Speaker 1: had not invoked the Genocide Convention, but I think it
Speaker 1: was clear to anyone who was paying attention that that
Speaker 1: there was a genocide going on. And I kept seeing
Speaker 1: pro Israel posts, and I kept seeing people who were
Speaker 1: saying basically Israel had the right to do anything it liked,
Speaker 1: or in a couple of cases, people focusing on what
Speaker 1: I considered to be what I still consider to be
Speaker 1: pro Israeli propaganda. So for example, the focus on Harvard,
Speaker 1: on Claudine Gay, on the anti Semitism at universities, those
Speaker 1: are all look away from the genocide that's happening in Gaza.
Speaker 1: And the reason I wrote the post is just literally
Speaker 1: I couldn't sleep, Like I was seeing these images every
Speaker 1: day as many of us are, and just being like,
Speaker 1: how can we do work when this thing is happening?
Speaker 5: Yeah, and there's something really interesting here you write, I
Speaker 5: wasn't ready to see that my friends are Brown trips,
Speaker 5: which you sort of just mentioned, that they actively true
Speaker 5: on the genocide, the anger, the desire, the need even
Speaker 5: for retribution against innocent civilians. I wasn't ready for my
Speaker 5: friends being campguards, party officials, propagandists. And one thing from
Speaker 5: the right that's interesting about that is I've basically seen
Speaker 5: people on the right similarly write that about people that
Speaker 5: they would consider pro Palestinian. And I wanted to ask you, Paul,
Speaker 5: maybe it's to talk a little bit about how the
Speaker 5: polarization on this issue has affected tech, and maybe some
Speaker 5: of the response that you've gotten since this letter has
Speaker 5: gone this post has gone viral speaks to that because
Speaker 5: they're they're really this is really a battle ideologically in
Speaker 5: so many different sectors, but it's particularly hit tech this time.
Speaker 6: It has hit tech.
Speaker 1: I think what we have is that a lot of
Speaker 1: the top of tech, so investors, they're they're much more
Speaker 1: right wing, they're much wealthier, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: bottom of tech is is much more left wing, much
Speaker 1: more liberal. And the center tech is the sort of
Speaker 1: the founders at the start of their career. They are
Speaker 1: typically I would say that the junior founders are more
Speaker 1: left wing and the senior funders are more right wing
Speaker 1: as they get sort of more pulled into the institution
Speaker 1: that is Silicon Valley.
Speaker 6: So it is it is an ideological thing.
Speaker 1: And one of the funny things that keeps coming up
Speaker 1: is whenever you have Irish people in tech, they are
Speaker 1: they are predominantly left or they are predominantly on the
Speaker 1: side of Palestine. And the reason for that, of course,
Speaker 1: is that we we were a colony, we were an
Speaker 1: oppressed people, and we recognize what we see in Palestine.
Speaker 6: And I think that a lot of the reason.
Speaker 1: That that there's so much support for Israel in tech
Speaker 1: is that Silicon Valley was, you know, originally it was
Speaker 1: almost a dartback creation, right. There's a lot of alignment
Speaker 1: with the defense industry, with sort of with US interests.
Speaker 1: You know, tech is very centered in the US and
Speaker 1: a lot of the people who are who are senior
Speaker 1: in tech are you know, part of the status quo
Speaker 1: and part of and this is even before we get
Speaker 1: into the the amount of cross investment with Israel and
Speaker 1: a lot of people making you know, making money by
Speaker 1: doing so. So there's a there's there's definitely a large
Speaker 1: ideological component to this. The I I suppose that that
Speaker 1: I realized that, but I was surprised at how much
Speaker 1: ideology could go and enable the sort of extremist I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm just going to call it a genocide because that's
Speaker 1: what it is that's being enabled by Israel.
Speaker 6: You would think that.
Speaker 1: There were that there were lines that would never be crossed,
Speaker 1: and I think that's kind of what surprised me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and some of the comments you you flagged as
Speaker 4: kind of triggering the post when you mentioned matt Aco,
Speaker 4: you linked to one of his tweets where he's referring
Speaker 4: to Palestinians and he says there's not a lot of
Speaker 4: innocence of the two million routinely set a huge majority
Speaker 4: share one hundred percent of the sub human goals of
Speaker 4: hamas he puts free Palestine in quotes, because the cruelty
Speaker 4: they delight in. The cruelty, the sub human savagery is
Speaker 4: intrinsic to the culture and the movement really kind of
Speaker 4: just literally dehumanizing language coming from you know, somebody that
Speaker 4: you had worked for, So I can imagine where this
Speaker 4: came from.
Speaker 3: But I'm curious, you.
Speaker 4: Know, how how brutal was this response from people you criticized,
Speaker 4: and what else did you hear in the wake of this?
Speaker 3: In the two now almost two and a half weeks
Speaker 3: since this.
Speaker 1: There's been a handful of people who I've seen make
Speaker 1: similar comments to to Madoca, the sort of dehumanizing comments,
Speaker 1: the sort of the sort of thing really people should
Speaker 1: regardless of what side you're on, no one should ever
Speaker 1: say about about another human being. The tal Broda, it's
Speaker 1: not someone I know, but it's someone who is pretty
Speaker 1: senior at open Ai and someone who who was forced
Speaker 1: to apologize but wasn't actually removed from his job despite
Speaker 1: being a very senior executive at open Ai, which is
Speaker 1: one of the really important companies in tech right now.
Speaker 6: He he had I don't have it, have a tan.
Speaker 1: But extremely dehumanizing, in fact, worse worse than Madocco, I
Speaker 1: would say. Another one was Andrea Scale, who is a
Speaker 1: tech CEO, and he was well known for being the
Speaker 1: CTO of Mozilla, and he said equally dehumanizing stuff weeks ago,
Speaker 1: and I challenged him on it on Twitter before he
Speaker 1: made his account private. The I I would say that
Speaker 1: that the majority of what is out there is what
Speaker 1: I would term pro Israeli propaganda. It is taking the
Speaker 1: talking points that are coming out from these uh you know,
Speaker 1: often from from Israel, sometimes from the IDF. There was
Speaker 1: this phenomenal discussion sub stack by by Lee Fang and
Speaker 1: Jack Poulson are who are independent journalists who were who
Speaker 1: chronicled the story of how Pati Cosgrave, who's the CEO
Speaker 1: of website, and how he got taken down, how he
Speaker 1: got fired. And so you start to see the same
Speaker 1: strategies and the same talking points coming from many, many
Speaker 1: different investors. All of a sudden, Harvard was a really
Speaker 1: really important thing to talk about and anti Semitism in universities,
Speaker 1: that was the real discussion that everyone wants to talk about.
Speaker 1: And then you see that spread throughout the New York Times.
Speaker 1: You see Clouding Gay eventually resigned, I think yesterday. You know,
Speaker 1: this is all part of a you know, all the
Speaker 1: same people with the same ideology controlling the conversation and
Speaker 1: making it impossible to say, well, there's thirty thousand people
Speaker 1: that have been killed by Israel, by Israeli soldiers dropping
Speaker 1: bombs on apartments. You know, it's like, how is it
Speaker 1: that on the one hand, we're talking about that, and
Speaker 1: on the other hand, you know, everyone's like tweeting about like.
Speaker 6: Oh, from the River to the Sea. It's such a
Speaker 6: such a triggering term for me, you know.
Speaker 4: And so since then, you've launched tech for Palestine, Like
Speaker 4: how did how did that come together?
Speaker 6: So basically.
Speaker 1: After after I posted that blog post, everyone reached out
Speaker 1: to me, and I just started taking meetings and just
Speaker 1: talking to people and seeing, you know, I had no
Speaker 1: real plans for it. And what what happened was I
Speaker 1: started connecting people together and eventually there became a discord,
Speaker 1: and eventually we launched publicly yesterday tech for Palestine dot
Speaker 1: org and we had, you know, another another three hundred
Speaker 1: people join our discord from the from the original sort
Speaker 1: of tight group of about forty people. And basically, there's
Speaker 1: an awful awful lot of people in tech who are
Speaker 1: looking to make a difference, who are looking to you know,
Speaker 1: who see the genocide that's happening and say this, this
Speaker 1: is not okay, and who want to make a difference.
Speaker 1: And we're trying to help organize that, connect engineers and
Speaker 1: others to people who are who are doing projects and
Speaker 1: run projects ourselves and all of them are about changing
Speaker 1: the ability to speak up about Palestine. It has been
Speaker 1: you as we've seen, it has been okay for people
Speaker 1: to say massively dehumanizing things so long as there as
Speaker 1: so long as they're pro Israel. Obviously we don't want
Speaker 1: and we don't see dehumanizing things being said by the
Speaker 1: supporters of Palestine, but we want to enable people to
Speaker 1: say genocide is not okay. You know, having normal lives
Speaker 1: without having bombs dropped on you is a future that
Speaker 1: we want to see for Palestine and advocate for the
Speaker 1: end of what has been an incredibly long Israeli oppression
Speaker 1: of the Palestinian people.
Speaker 5: You mentioned open Ai earlier, and it reminded me actually
Speaker 5: of Elon Musk's involvement both in Ukraine and obviously he
Speaker 5: famously went over to Israel I think it was just
Speaker 5: about a month ago, and so I'm curious us to
Speaker 5: from that thirty thousand foot view. These are people that
Speaker 5: the people that you call out, the people that you
Speaker 5: work around, with enormous power and in some cases unregulated
Speaker 5: power at their fingertips, and this whole experience, I'm just
Speaker 5: curious as to what it tells you, maybe about the
Speaker 5: culture of tech and how ideology and power are kind
Speaker 5: of mingling in one industry with potentially devastating consequences, with
Speaker 5: potentially wonderful consequences, but largely in a way that makes
Speaker 5: average people feel powerless in so many different cases.
Speaker 1: There has long been this idea in tech that we
Speaker 1: are the people who know better than everyone else. I
Speaker 1: would say that the large shift in tech from by
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven onwards is that like the doers
Speaker 1: the engineers, we're the people who know better than everyone else,
Speaker 1: and so we we should get to control that and
Speaker 1: some Moltman, CEO of open Ai, was was a when
Speaker 1: he was leader of of y Combinator, which is one
Speaker 1: of the most influential sort of creator of startups in
Speaker 1: the industry. He he made clear that, oh, the press
Speaker 1: has turned on Silicon Valley. The press has turned against us.
Speaker 1: We have to ignore what is being said in you know,
Speaker 1: in the population at large, and just focus on what
Speaker 1: we're doing because we know better. You see similar things
Speaker 1: in Facebook. You know, Facebook is is massively powerful, and
Speaker 1: they were led by this internal idea that engagement and
Speaker 1: making money those are the things that that are are
Speaker 1: good for us, and that led to genocide and me
Speaker 1: and mar it led, of course to to the massive
Speaker 1: disinformation campaigns of the last couple of US elections. So tech, yes,
Speaker 1: it is. It is supremely powerful. It is it is
Speaker 1: massively unregulated. And now as we're we're essentially being ushered
Speaker 1: into this new AI era, we see that people at
Speaker 1: the top of the most important AI organization are are
Speaker 1: incredibly biased. And the bias is one of the problems
Speaker 1: that we are going to face throughout this this AI
Speaker 1: era because the the way that this data is trained,
Speaker 1: how people look at training these AI models, you know,
Speaker 1: the the biases of the people who collect and put
Speaker 1: together the data is reflected in the data, and that
Speaker 1: that is going to permeate into everything and already has.
Speaker 1: We're already seeing AI being used to target civilians in
Speaker 1: in Palestine, in Gaza, for example.
Speaker 5: We're in China. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And so you talked about how your first company became
Speaker 4: a unicorn. Did that kind of billion dollar valuation enable
Speaker 4: what you were able to do or how how difficult
Speaker 4: has your has your new company's financial situation been made
Speaker 4: by your decision to speak out.
Speaker 1: I think one of the reasons that I spoke at
Speaker 1: is that I recognized I was in probably the best
Speaker 1: position from a risk perspective. So as an entrepreneur, I'm
Speaker 1: pretty risk averse anyway, sorry, pretty risk tolerant, and anyway,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of fine.
Speaker 6: It's it's what we do.
Speaker 1: But also because I had cashed out a bit of
Speaker 1: my old company because I didn't have a you know,
Speaker 1: a financial risk really and also my my new company,
Speaker 1: dark Lane, I say, it's new, it's seven years old,
Speaker 1: it's not doing that well. And so our next round
Speaker 1: of funding would have been an angel round anyway, it
Speaker 1: would have been from you know, a bunch of hot,
Speaker 1: mid to high net worth individuals. It wouldn't have been
Speaker 1: talking to the same investors. And we had a plan
Speaker 1: to to be cash for positive and to get off
Speaker 1: the VC track a little bit. Anyway, So it was,
Speaker 1: you know, I was pretty well positioned for it. And
Speaker 1: so it was something where where I realized that I
Speaker 1: had less to fear than most people. And when I
Speaker 1: posted and everyone reached out to me, and tons of
Speaker 1: people in tech, lots of founders were saying, we can't
Speaker 1: say anything. You know, these are our investors, these are
Speaker 1: the people we're afraid to speak out against.
Speaker 6: Even though even though we know it's right.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's it's clear that that I was one
Speaker 1: of the few people who who had that risk profile,
Speaker 1: and so it made it easier to to take the stands.
Speaker 4: It's interesting you say, because I kind of feel the
Speaker 4: same way sometimes, not financially speaking, but the news organization
Speaker 4: that where I work for, the Intercept, gives us like
Speaker 4: a total freedom to, you know, to say whatever we
Speaker 4: want about a particular issue, which most journalists don't have.
Speaker 4: So in some ways I feel kind of obligated to
Speaker 4: take that opportunity because because I have less less risk
Speaker 4: than others do. It kind of seems like, so I
Speaker 4: understand the situation. It doesn't make it doesn't It doesn't
Speaker 4: make it less nerve wracking or difficult, but to not
Speaker 4: have the same kind of immediate consequences makes it more
Speaker 4: makes it more doable.
Speaker 3: But anyway, Paul, you know, go ahead, and.
Speaker 1: I know it's it's it's it's funny you mentioned that
Speaker 1: I gotta I got a piece published a bit a
Speaker 1: better new thing tech for Palestine published in tech Runch yesterday,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, having a pro Palestine piece in
Speaker 1: a tech publication is like rare but at the same time,
Speaker 1: you know, I looked through it and it was you know,
Speaker 1: it was edited very carefully to be Ah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess what I'm saying is is that that one can
Speaker 1: perceive the amunds of censorship at news organization like you're saying.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no doubt well, Paul, thanks so much for joining us,
Speaker 4: really appreciate it.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much having me.
Speaker 4: All right, that'll do it for us this week.
Speaker 5: Yeah. And you know, Ryan, that's actually not for me.
Speaker 3: I'll be back tomorrow.
Speaker 5: That's right, you will be back with Crystal, So you're
Speaker 5: going to have just ab show. Yeah, so make sure
Speaker 5: that you macrodos. You want Ryan and Crystal uh talking
Speaker 5: about I don't know, presumably Israel taxes, yeah, or taxes.
Speaker 4: Yeah. You know.
Speaker 5: You said something interesting there though, which is reminds me
Speaker 5: also that Crystal and Saga give us really the freedom
Speaker 5: to that's true.
Speaker 3: They certainly have never suggested that we restrict anything.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, well, obviously sometimes they force us at you know,
Speaker 5: at risk of great force to talk about UFOs, But no,
Speaker 5: we were so we're so grateful for that here. And uh,
Speaker 5: you know, when I realized I mentioned China in that
Speaker 5: last interview segment. But AI is being used here in
Speaker 5: the United States to target civilians as well. It's we're
Speaker 5: seeing that deployed all of the world, and so we'll
Speaker 5: certainly be covering those things.
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Speaker 4: See you later.