Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here
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Speaker 2: let's get to the show.
Speaker 3: Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. Secretary of Saint Anthony B.
Speaker 3: Lincoln was in Israel yesterday. We're going to talk about
Speaker 3: what he said publicly after meetings with leaders across the region.
Speaker 3: We're also going to get into this insane bitcoin hack
Speaker 3: of the sec emily.
Speaker 4: What else we got today?
Speaker 5: The White House faced some really tough questions in the
Speaker 5: briefing yesterday over Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's apparently unknown health
Speaker 5: condition to the White House, so the President doesn't seem
Speaker 5: to have been cueued in on what's going on with
Speaker 5: the Secretary of Defense. We have some great clips from
Speaker 5: the briefing yesterday. We're going to cover the most bizarre
Speaker 5: story in recent memory, and that would be the Crown
Speaker 5: Heights tunnels. We speaking of good video, We've got some
Speaker 5: good video in that block.
Speaker 3: What it's indescribable. You're just gonna have to sit around
Speaker 3: and wait for that one.
Speaker 6: And well, we tried to describe the indescribable.
Speaker 4: You'll you'll have to just watch it.
Speaker 3: If you're listening to this on the podcast, go find
Speaker 3: some videos of what happened in Crown Heights.
Speaker 4: It's going to blow your mind.
Speaker 6: And in some great news, Don Lemon is back and
Speaker 6: we're all over the story.
Speaker 4: He never left my heart, not in your heart, right.
Speaker 6: That's that's important.
Speaker 5: We also finally got I think probably the best graphic
Speaker 5: of all time because Ken Clippen seein this here and
Speaker 5: we're just referring him.
Speaker 6: Askenny Clipps clips.
Speaker 4: He's Kenny Clips.
Speaker 3: He He and a bunch of other lefty journalists were
Speaker 3: suspended yesterday. He's going to talk about what his his
Speaker 3: brief time kicked off of Twitter was like because there
Speaker 3: was an outrage and he was He and a bunch
Speaker 3: of the others were reinstated. He also has a big
Speaker 3: scoop coming later today, probably won't be ready in time
Speaker 3: for this show, but we'll post that once it's up.
Speaker 4: That's going to be interesting. That's all I can say
Speaker 4: at this point.
Speaker 6: So Kenny clips is here.
Speaker 4: Any clips will be here.
Speaker 5: Before Kenny Clips, though, Ryan, can you tell us a
Speaker 5: little bit about what's been swirling around the SEC just
Speaker 5: in like the last twelve hours.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we can put up this first element here.
Speaker 3: But basically what happened is somebody was able to hack
Speaker 3: the SEC's Twitter account. And I'm calling it Twitter because
Speaker 3: it's Twitter dot com and as long as he's using
Speaker 3: Twitter dot com, it's Twitter, all right. So somebody hacked
Speaker 3: the SEC's Twitter account and posted on it basically that
Speaker 3: the SEC had approved e f T bitcoin products or
Speaker 3: ef T crypto products. There was a lawsuit against the
Speaker 3: SEC by crypto backers that said, you have to allow
Speaker 3: e f ts, which are basically a way for institutional
Speaker 3: and other kind of retail investors to get vested in
Speaker 3: something without putting their actual money in it, so you
Speaker 3: don't actually have to buy the bitcoin or if you
Speaker 3: want to do you know, anything else the S and
Speaker 3: P five hundred, you can buy an e f T
Speaker 3: that kind of mirrors the performance of the S and P.
Speaker 3: And what they're saying is there should be a there
Speaker 3: should be an e f T that mirrors the performance
Speaker 3: of say bitcoin. And so the lawsuit was successful, and
Speaker 3: so there is an upcoming decision rule from the SEC
Speaker 3: that the bitcoin world is eagerly anticipating. I think Bitcoin
Speaker 3: is up like sixty percent over the last you know,
Speaker 3: several months in anticipation of this ruling. So somebody got
Speaker 3: a hold of the SEC's accountant jumped the gun. They first,
Speaker 3: I don't know what's what's the next element that we have?
Speaker 5: This is the Yeah, so let's put this up. This
Speaker 5: is roughly two times as much market cap was destroyed
Speaker 5: by the SEC's tweet as was lost in the.
Speaker 1: Ft X blow up, right, because it.
Speaker 3: Sent things on in a tail spend, and so people
Speaker 3: are like making and losing money all over the place.
Speaker 3: As some of the people in the crypto world accurately
Speaker 3: said afterwards, if this happened, actually I think it was
Speaker 3: a wink Levas twin. I saw quote when the Winklevi
Speaker 3: said if this would happen at any publicly traded company,
Speaker 3: the SEC would be demanding an investigation. So now Twitter
Speaker 3: has posted this is from Twitter their safety. We can
Speaker 3: confirm that the account SEC GOV was compromised and we
Speaker 3: have completed a preliminary investigation. Based on our investigation, the
Speaker 3: compromise was not due to any breach of X's systems
Speaker 3: that's Twitter, but rather due to an unidentified individual obtaining
Speaker 3: control over a phone number associated with the SEC account
Speaker 3: through a third party. We can also confirm that the
Speaker 3: account did not have two factor authentication enabled at the
Speaker 3: time the account was compromised. We encourage all users to
Speaker 3: enable this extra layer of security. More information and tips
Speaker 3: on how to keep your account secure can be found
Speaker 3: in our help center. For one of the scandals that
Speaker 3: it Must first brought to Twitter was making people pay
Speaker 3: for a two factor like this is like incredibly dangerous
Speaker 3: because everybody should have two factor. Like, if you're watching
Speaker 3: this and you don't have two factor, get it.
Speaker 4: Basically that means.
Speaker 6: If you work at the SEC, if you work.
Speaker 3: At the SEC, do the authenticator app go beyond just
Speaker 3: two factor with a phone number. Two factor means like
Speaker 3: you just just having your password is a not is
Speaker 3: not enough to hack into your phone or because if
Speaker 3: you don't have two factor, you can also guess not
Speaker 3: just guess at somebody's password, but you can do hit
Speaker 3: the forgot password, and if they have the phone associated
Speaker 3: with the account, then that request then goes to that phone,
Speaker 3: and that seems to be what happens. So they basically
Speaker 3: hit for god password on SEC's Twitter account. It sent
Speaker 3: its sent something to a phone that they had gotten
Speaker 3: now access to through some third party vendor, and then
Speaker 3: they reset the password, went in there and made a
Speaker 3: fake SEC announcement.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and billions of dollars changed hands.
Speaker 5: Let's put the next elemen up on the screen. This
Speaker 5: is delicious. Here's a tweet from the SEC from October.
Speaker 6: Careful what you read on the internet.
Speaker 5: The best source of information about the SEC is the SEC.
Speaker 5: If that source of information actually ryan is that the
Speaker 5: SEC is incapable of handling the most basic of tasks,
Speaker 5: then indeed the best source of information about the SEC
Speaker 5: is the SEC.
Speaker 3: If what Twitter says is true. Twitter is a biased
Speaker 3: source here because you know they're on the line. They're
Speaker 3: on the hook here as well. But they're making very
Speaker 3: definitive statements. And when when you make a clear statement
Speaker 3: like that, I tend to give them like I tend
Speaker 3: to assume they're probably telling the truth.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they came out hard.
Speaker 3: Because if it's if it's something that can be detected
Speaker 3: as false, and you're dealing with the SEC, you're going
Speaker 3: to get in a lot of trouble. Yeah, so I
Speaker 3: just zoom that they're telling the truth here. And if
Speaker 3: that's the case, what an extraordinary blunder from whoever was
Speaker 3: running the SEC's Twitter account. Like, and if it turns
Speaker 3: out that the SEC had some intern, they're like, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's Twitter.
Speaker 4: Let an intern run the run the account.
Speaker 3: That's insane because tweets move markets, h as we as
Speaker 3: we saw with some hilarious tweets about like insulin is free.
Speaker 3: Like right after Elon Musk bought Twitter and allowed anybody
Speaker 3: to be verified, people were buying, like, you know, the
Speaker 3: names of fake companies and posting things and moving billions
Speaker 3: of dollars around.
Speaker 5: Right, And sometimes when people hack a government account, they
Speaker 5: do something that is sort of a slapstick troll.
Speaker 6: This was a much better troll than just saying except
Speaker 6: this was.
Speaker 3: And what's so funny And then we'll move on to
Speaker 3: some more serious news is that bitcoin and crypto are
Speaker 3: trying to show that they can be like responsible members
Speaker 3: of the financial community, and they're days away from getting
Speaker 3: this announcement CC and they somebody, some packer preempts it
Speaker 3: by hacking the SEC as like all right, yeah, sure.
Speaker 4: Bring them on in just what could go wrong? This
Speaker 4: seems fine?
Speaker 5: Yeah, what a crazy story and a reminder of how
Speaker 5: of how vulnerable the markets are when and especially just
Speaker 5: to a tweet is one thing, but it's you have
Speaker 5: vulnerability in the market because a tweet can change the market.
Speaker 5: But then also it's really easy for a tweet to
Speaker 5: be posted like these two layers of security or these
Speaker 5: layers of stability, I should say, are are always really.
Speaker 3: Vulnerable, right, and their account is sec gov. The problem
Speaker 3: hooter had earlier was they were verifying whatever and so
Speaker 3: you could get you know, SEC above and post something
Speaker 3: and like full of people for five minutes and that's
Speaker 3: enough to move you know, hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 5: Right. Secretary Blincoln was in Israel yesterday and address some
Speaker 5: of the questions about the lawsuit that's been covered on
Speaker 5: this show. Tell us a little bit about what Blincoln
Speaker 5: had to say when he was in Israel yesterday facing
Speaker 5: questions actually about the genocide claims.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he actually so, here's from his opening remarks that
Speaker 3: his press briefing yesterday where he brings up the genocide
Speaker 3: charges that South Africa has filed. South Africa has been
Speaker 3: joined by Malaysia and Turkey.
Speaker 4: At this point.
Speaker 3: France has said that they will respect the decision of
Speaker 3: the International Court of Justice, though they have not joined
Speaker 3: the prosecution yet. One as I think was discussed on
Speaker 3: the show yesterday, one Israeli Kannesset member has said Oprah
Speaker 3: Casiv has said that he has endorsed also those genocide charges,
Speaker 3: which is fascinating development.
Speaker 4: But let's play Blincoln yesterday.
Speaker 7: We believe the submission against Israel to the International Court
Speaker 7: of Justice distracts the world from all of these important efforts.
Speaker 4: Over the charge of genocide is meritless.
Speaker 7: It's particularly galling given that those who are attacking Israel
Speaker 7: Hamas has Bolah, the Huthis, as well as their support
Speaker 7: or Iran, continue to openly call for the annihilation of
Speaker 7: Israel and.
Speaker 4: The mass murder of Jews.
Speaker 7: On this trip, I came to Israel after meeting with
Speaker 7: the leaders of Turkey, Greece, Jordan, Cutter, the United Our
Speaker 7: of Emorates, Saudi Arabia. All of those leaders share our
Speaker 7: concern about the spread of the conflict. Nonetheless, ninety percent
Speaker 7: of Gaza's population continues to face acute food and security
Speaker 7: According to the United Nations, for children, the effects of
Speaker 7: long periods without sufficient food can have life long consequences.
Speaker 3: Within about a minute of saying that the charges of
Speaker 3: genocide are meritless and baseless, he adds, oh, and by
Speaker 3: the way, the United Nations, as the ninety percent of
Speaker 3: Palestinians and guys are on the brink of starvation.
Speaker 6: In the charge of generosiquare that?
Speaker 5: So this is South Africa at the International Court of Justice,
Speaker 5: and Ryan mentioned joined by these other countries. Now, so
Speaker 5: one of the people who has actually argued successfully at
Speaker 5: the International Court of Justice, Francis Boyle, went on Democracy
Speaker 5: Now and had a really interesting perspective on what could
Speaker 5: happen with this particular suit going forward to we have
Speaker 5: a clip of that we can roll now.
Speaker 8: I was the first lawyer ever to win anything under
Speaker 8: the Genocide Convention from the International Court of Justice that
Speaker 8: goes back to nineteen twenty one. I single handedly won
Speaker 8: two World Court orders for the Republic of Bosnia Herzegovina
Speaker 8: against Yugoslavia to cease and desistem committing all acts of genocide,
Speaker 8: and based on my careful review of all the documents
Speaker 8: so far as submitted by the Republic of South Africa,
Speaker 8: I believe South Africa will win an order against Israel
Speaker 8: to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide
Speaker 8: against the Palestinians. Under Article one of the Genocide Convention,
Speaker 8: all contracting parties one hundred and fifty three states will
Speaker 8: then be obliged quote to prevent unquote the genocide by
Speaker 8: Israel against the Palestinians. Second, when the World Court gives
Speaker 8: this cease and desist order against Israel, the Biden administration
Speaker 8: will stand condemned under Article three, paragraph E of the
Speaker 8: Genocide Convention that criminalizes complicity in genocide.
Speaker 5: Ran I wonder actually if Blincoln is addressing that and
Speaker 5: sort of preemptively in his scripted remarks, because as we
Speaker 5: just heard Boyle say, at least from the perspective of
Speaker 5: the ic J, there's a case that can actually it
Speaker 5: actually might.
Speaker 6: Have some lags.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that that, according to Boyle, wanted to you know
Speaker 3: who won what maybe the most high profile case before
Speaker 3: that court. They're gonna they have a good South Africa
Speaker 3: has a good chance of winning this case, which then
Speaker 3: which then creates legal obligations, you know, for the United States,
Speaker 3: and which then puts the United States in an even.
Speaker 4: Trickier position visa vi.
Speaker 3: The Houthis who say that they are currently right now
Speaker 3: basically enacting their responsibilities and obligations under Article one of
Speaker 3: the Prevention of the Convention around the Prevention of Genocide,
Speaker 3: that all states have a duty to intervene to stop genocide,
Speaker 3: not just to not do genocide themselves, but if they
Speaker 3: are aware of it happening.
Speaker 4: It's there. It's their obligation to step in.
Speaker 3: And that's that's related to the way that the world
Speaker 3: did not step in during the Holocaust. In fact, the
Speaker 3: United States famously kind of turning away Jewish refugees fleeing
Speaker 3: the Holocaust and sending them back. So the result was
Speaker 3: this law, this international law that says you're supposed to intervene.
Speaker 3: The Huthies say that they're operating under that pretext. If
Speaker 3: the International Court of Justice says, in fact, there is
Speaker 3: an international obligation to stop this, that makes the US
Speaker 3: threats against the Huthis that much harder.
Speaker 4: I think to sustain morally.
Speaker 6: Completely changes that.
Speaker 5: But to sustain morally I feel like is we could
Speaker 5: have a debate on that, but to sustain even just
Speaker 5: as a member of the Security Council and a leading
Speaker 5: nation in.
Speaker 4: And hypocritical and all that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but also I would imagine they're further legal machinations
Speaker 5: that would interfere, Yeah, going forward that you know, you
Speaker 5: have to sort of from the US. I mean maybe
Speaker 5: if you're blanking, you say, yeah, we can swat these down,
Speaker 5: you know, like a fly swatter, like left and right
Speaker 5: as like them up. I don't think that's sustainable at
Speaker 5: all when you get into exactly what you're just saying,
Speaker 5: how it affects other combatants in situations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and not to tease the news that Kenklepenstein is
Speaker 3: gonna have later today, but that it implicates that exact
Speaker 3: question the US's role in this war and what it's
Speaker 3: legal exposure is and related to that.
Speaker 4: And we don't have this.
Speaker 3: Clip enough of looking at Blincoln, we can just read
Speaker 3: some of what he said at this press conference. This
Speaker 3: is all related to the humanitarian crisis that the Israeli
Speaker 3: blockade and bombardmen has created. And so at the center
Speaker 3: of that, behind the scenes is this dispute between Israel
Speaker 3: and the United Nations over how to get humanitarian aid in.
Speaker 3: Israel does not want the UN involved at all. They
Speaker 3: basically think the UN is like a cat's paw for Hamas.
Speaker 3: And so you had recently had Senators Chris van holl
Speaker 3: and Jeff Markley go over to rough A crossing, and
Speaker 3: every aid worker that you talked to says there is
Speaker 3: not enough aid getting in because of the logistical difficulties
Speaker 3: thrown up by Israel around the idea. You know, they
Speaker 3: say it's about, you know, making sure that no weapons
Speaker 3: wind up in the hands of Hamas.
Speaker 5: And Israel is responding to a real logistical challenge presented
Speaker 5: by Hamas, which actually, you know, there is evidence and
Speaker 5: there's a question of how widespread it is, but there
Speaker 5: is evidence of for example, gunman taking over trucks, taking
Speaker 5: the aid from the trucks and all of that.
Speaker 6: That is a real problem for Israel.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, there's a huge breakdown.
Speaker 3: You know, there's a coming social breakdown because of the
Speaker 3: way that everything has collapsed, and you just have two
Speaker 3: million people living in tight quarters and not nobody getting
Speaker 3: enough food, water, or medicine. Although even if even if
Speaker 3: you were able to smuggle in a couple weapons, like
Speaker 3: let's let's imagine that you could, let's say, the UN
Speaker 3: completely somehow failed to allow you know, a few boxes
Speaker 3: of bullets or guns to go through. It's the most
Speaker 3: kind of well equipped military in the world against.
Speaker 4: Ten twenty thousand, how many are left?
Speaker 3: People just hold up like, is that worth starving two
Speaker 3: million people over?
Speaker 4: And that's granting a one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: Of the benefit of the doubt to the Israeli argument,
Speaker 3: rather than taking a lot of the Israeli officials at
Speaker 3: their word, which is that they actually believe that the
Speaker 3: starvation policy is the goal itself, not an unfortunate byproduct,
Speaker 3: not a bug, but a.
Speaker 6: Feature, right right, No, absolutely, And.
Speaker 3: So Blinkoln in his in his press briefing brought up
Speaker 3: the UN he and he said, and you have kind
Speaker 3: of this is diplomacy, so you have to kind of
Speaker 3: read between the lines a little bit. But he says
Speaker 3: the United Nations is playing an indispensable role in addressing
Speaker 3: the immense humanitarian needs in Gaza. There is simply no alternative.
Speaker 3: I spoke last night with the UN's new senior Humanitarian
Speaker 3: reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza to Greed Cog about all these
Speaker 3: efforts that are underway, and then he says to Greed,
Speaker 3: Cog is someone I worked very closely with a few
Speaker 3: years ago when she led the UN mission that destroyed
Speaker 3: the Assad regimes chemical weapons and serious so I can
Speaker 3: say from experience, she has what it takes to get
Speaker 3: this job done.
Speaker 4: She has America's full support. She must have Israel's as well.
Speaker 3: So that Blincoln very clearly, but kind of going, how
Speaker 3: would you describe that? Like kind of elliptical language, But
Speaker 3: he's saying, we support the UN, and we want the
Speaker 3: UN involved in this. UN has to be involved in this.
Speaker 3: But then he says she must have Israel's as well,
Speaker 3: meaning she doesn't yet have Israel's support, And it raises
Speaker 3: a question of, like, what's the point of being a
Speaker 3: superpower if you have to like beat around the bush
Speaker 3: and like begging cajole to get your priorities enacted in
Speaker 3: the face of the greatest humanitarian crisis that we've seen
Speaker 3: on this planet in a very long time.
Speaker 5: Else it'll be interesting to see how this transpires because
Speaker 5: to your point earlier, and we've talked about this a lot,
Speaker 5: there's the tug of war internally within the Knesset, within
Speaker 5: Israel's own government about how to best prosecute this war.
Speaker 5: You have some people talking about Dresden, you know, some
Speaker 5: people talking about you know, the very real concerns of
Speaker 5: the people in Gaza, and it's difficult to know. And
Speaker 5: actually it's difficult to know because I think it's unclear
Speaker 5: within the net Yahoo administration itself with the real policy.
Speaker 5: Is this the real policy? That is the real end here?
Speaker 5: That starvation is the way to prosecute the war? Is
Speaker 5: the end here?
Speaker 6: That you have to sort of keep the United States happy, keep.
Speaker 5: Your sort of international partners happy, play nice with the UN,
Speaker 5: and you also have to, you know, do what is
Speaker 5: morally right and ensure that innocent civilians are able to
Speaker 5: eat and drink clean water and have medical care. All
Speaker 5: of that I think is genuinely unclear because Israel is
Speaker 5: divided on how to how what what is the way
Speaker 5: to go forward? And so that's where the US, uh,
Speaker 5: what is the point of being a super superpower If
Speaker 5: you have to kind of beat around.
Speaker 4: The bush and you can't even get your client to
Speaker 4: do what you need.
Speaker 6: To do, it will they?
Speaker 5: I mean, so what we just saw in the last
Speaker 5: month is the US say, let's uh, draw this war back,
Speaker 5: let's pull let's you know, let's let's uh sort of
Speaker 5: do an indefinite pause on the parking lot uh dynamics
Speaker 5: here in Gaza as the new year starts.
Speaker 6: That's exactly what happened. And so I mean, we obviously
Speaker 6: are pulling some serious strings.
Speaker 3: Although you're still seeing air strikes, right, I guess, I
Speaker 3: guess fewer.
Speaker 5: They've they've shifted to what the what are they saying
Speaker 5: precision operations even though they were.
Speaker 4: Still hitting residential building and.
Speaker 5: They also said they were doing precision too, And this
Speaker 5: goes back to how unclear the strategy of the war is.
Speaker 5: They were talking about how they were doing precision at
Speaker 5: the same time they were talking about turning gods into
Speaker 5: a parking derecision versus parking lot like this has been
Speaker 5: the theme of their stated strategy, is that it's muddled.
Speaker 3: And to see how muddled is elsewhere in the country
Speaker 3: fascinating development reported by Axios.
Speaker 4: Here you can put up this last element.
Speaker 3: So basically NETNYA, who's on a call, And the element
Speaker 3: we have up here is that ask zelenski ua rebuff's
Speaker 3: bb request to pay.
Speaker 4: Palestinian workers barred from Israel.
Speaker 3: So Netna who right after October seventh basically told West
Speaker 3: Bank Palestinian workers they could no longer travel into Israel
Speaker 3: to work anymore. So now one hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 3: or so Palestinian workers are owed on unemployment benefits.
Speaker 4: Meanwhile, the right wing.
Speaker 3: Elements of Netnahu's government, well the furthest right wing elements,
Speaker 3: smoke rich Ben Geber and others have insisted that no
Speaker 3: money because I think, who's the finance minitors.
Speaker 4: He's like, he's like, they're all Nazis.
Speaker 3: Everyone in gaz is a Nazi, and they're terrorists in
Speaker 3: the West Bank, and I'm not sending them their money.
Speaker 3: So this is something that Blincoln was asked about at
Speaker 3: the press briefing yesterday. This is Palestinian authority money that
Speaker 3: is sitting in Israeli accounts that Israel has blocked from
Speaker 3: getting to the Palestinian authority. Now, Shinbate and the military
Speaker 3: establishment in Israel said, this is a horrible idea, like
Speaker 3: set the ethics aside of whose money it is, Why
Speaker 3: are you going to create enormous economic based instability in
Speaker 3: the West Bank like at this very moment, like this
Speaker 3: is this is not what we need. But Smo Church,
Speaker 3: Benkivir and others have said, if you release that money
Speaker 3: to them, we're quitting the government. We will leave. And
Speaker 3: n Yaho apparently believes that he can't keep together a
Speaker 3: coalition without the far right.
Speaker 4: So what does he do.
Speaker 3: He calls up Mohammed ben Zioned over at the UE.
Speaker 3: It's like they've got money over it.
Speaker 4: A Muradi got money and.
Speaker 3: The Benzaia was so appalled by the request that they
Speaker 3: leaked it to the press and said sont Ya who said, hey,
Speaker 3: can you pay the unemployment benefits of these Palestinian workers
Speaker 3: that I'm barring from Israel?
Speaker 4: And he said are you joking right?
Speaker 3: And to show how ridiculous he thought the request would,
Speaker 3: he said, why don't you go ask? Zelenski asks, So
Speaker 3: Lenzi's gotten a lot of money from your friends lately,
Speaker 3: he's got a lot sitting around. Go ask him for
Speaker 3: some money if you've got a problem, or give the
Speaker 3: Palestinians their money, or let them let them work, Like
Speaker 3: what what's your long term what's your long term strategy here?
Speaker 3: Like the way the way that Gaza turned into the
Speaker 3: complete economic basket case that it's been for the last
Speaker 3: two decades. Is not because of say, the Hamas decided
Speaker 3: to turn it into some like uh, you know, terror Dan,
Speaker 3: It's because Gosins were no longer allowed to leave and
Speaker 3: the entire economy was based on interchange, exchange with the
Speaker 3: rest of Israel.
Speaker 4: And so what's left then, well, just guess we're gonna.
Speaker 5: Fight negotiating with again. This is where Yahu is in
Speaker 5: a serious jam when.
Speaker 6: It comes to not an unpredictable one. And he knew
Speaker 6: that all along.
Speaker 5: I mean, if this ever happened, they understood exactly what
Speaker 5: kind of problem, what kind of problems they would be facing.
Speaker 6: This is obviously one of them. When you're looking at.
Speaker 5: The same dynamics we just talked about with the UN
Speaker 5: when it comes to this money that in order for
Speaker 5: him to maintain his coalition, he has to keep Smetric
Speaker 5: Benevier happy, and to keep them happy, you have to
Speaker 5: piss a lot of other people off.
Speaker 6: And you have to.
Speaker 4: Including all these people you owe money too.
Speaker 5: Including including that, and including the United States. And so again,
Speaker 5: none of this is like simple, it's it's obviously extremely complicated. Uh,
Speaker 5: both strategically and politically. Morally is the other question, and
Speaker 5: you know, when you kind of are. I think there's
Speaker 5: a benefit in some sense of being here in the
Speaker 5: United States.
Speaker 6: You can sort of see.
Speaker 5: Things in a way that's not even just the United States.
Speaker 5: I mean, if you're outside of the war zone, you
Speaker 5: have the benefit of, for example, some clarity, additional clarity
Speaker 5: that you don't necessarily always have. That doesn't mean we
Speaker 5: know better, That's not what I'm saying at all. What
Speaker 5: I'm saying is that you're at least able to take
Speaker 5: a step back and emotionally see that there's a real
Speaker 5: moral problem for everyone.
Speaker 4: And to the extent it's complicated.
Speaker 3: It's complicated from Netanyahuu's perspective of trying to stay in
Speaker 3: power in an untenable situation.
Speaker 6: I mean genuinely.
Speaker 4: Also, he's got the.
Speaker 3: World held hostage in a way because if he leaves
Speaker 3: office he might go to jail because of these previous
Speaker 3: corruption charges. So he's just doing any dance that he
Speaker 3: can and doing anything to stay in power. And also,
Speaker 3: I feel like the rest of the world should be like, Okay, fine,
Speaker 3: we won't prosecute you for these corruption charges if you
Speaker 3: will just rationally come to some end of this. Now,
Speaker 3: I think a lot of the world would like to
Speaker 3: see and prosecuted for war crimes, so that it's complicated.
Speaker 3: But having all of this held hostage by his corruption
Speaker 3: charges from the past, yeah, it just makes it that
Speaker 3: much more difficult to then sort through the question of
Speaker 3: what is really what coalition ought to be running the government.
Speaker 5: Also there, I mean, it is a complicated question when
Speaker 5: it comes to whether or not you're by helping civilians
Speaker 5: you're arming your enemy. And to some extent, you absolutely
Speaker 5: are helping your enemy when you are taking care of civilians.
Speaker 5: But that's something that after World War Two we kind
Speaker 5: of came to the table and said, you know, there's
Speaker 5: there's a serious give and take here that needs that
Speaker 5: there here's how we've sort of mapped this out morally legally,
Speaker 5: and that's you know, nobody's I'm not saying that's easy
Speaker 5: at least, that's genuinely a very complicated moral question. But again,
Speaker 5: you know, we can see pretty clearly what's happened to
Speaker 5: civilians in Gaza, but.
Speaker 3: The dynamic can be the reverse in a way, and
Speaker 3: that's why the National security establishment once these Palestinians to
Speaker 3: get paid, because actually, by not paying them, you're making
Speaker 3: life much more difficult for the Israeli National security established,
Speaker 3: which does not want a gigantic uprising in the West
Speaker 3: Bank right now. They'll they'll take it some other times perhaps,
Speaker 3: and when they can focus all of their energies on
Speaker 3: suppressing it. But when when they're you know, trying to
Speaker 3: pick a fight with Iran, with Hesbula and engaged, engaged
Speaker 3: in this wholesale slaughter down in Gaza, to have millions
Speaker 3: of Palestinians in the West Bank livid, it's just bad timing, absolutely,
Speaker 3: But the ideologues in that government are like, we don't care,
Speaker 3: like they're just going for it.
Speaker 5: Right well, and their goals are different than certainly different
Speaker 5: than our goals. We talked about this last week and
Speaker 5: Yahoo no two state solution, President Biden, who in the
Speaker 5: United States in general, who are a huge part of
Speaker 5: this war in terms of munitions, about twenty percent of
Speaker 5: the Israeli military budget comes to the United States every year, say,
Speaker 5: two state solution not a minor difference. It's a huge,
Speaker 5: huge difference, and it's one that continues obviously to plague
Speaker 5: the prosecution of the war from our perspective, from Israel's perspective.
Speaker 5: If you're not on the same page about some of
Speaker 5: these very basic end goals, like Netan Yahoo is not
Speaker 5: with strict mendevir huge problems.
Speaker 3: Anthony Fauci spent the last two days on Capitol Hill
Speaker 3: and in giving closed door testimony to the Select Subcommittee
Speaker 3: investigating the coronavirus pandemic a lot. They talked about it,
Speaker 3: an awful lot. But we're only hearing it, you know,
Speaker 3: from leaks so far from Republicans, basically mostly from Yeah,
Speaker 3: I actually haven't seen any leaks coming from Democrats.
Speaker 4: I don't even know if they were in the room.
Speaker 5: Debbie Dingle talked to the press a little bit, so
Speaker 5: obviously Democrat from Michigan talked to the press a little
Speaker 5: bit and said, you know, it's political that we're here
Speaker 5: to begin with. But basically what we know is from Republicans.
Speaker 5: I don't know about you, but I found actually the
Speaker 5: lack of media coverage of this to be interesting because
Speaker 5: we have seen some heightened just in the last couple
Speaker 5: of months criticism of Fauci from the press, nothing like
Speaker 5: I think he deserves, but there has been a little
Speaker 5: bit more scrutiny, and it's at least an interesting story.
Speaker 6: Pretty much crickets.
Speaker 3: From the media, everything is kind of overshadowed by the war,
Speaker 3: the war in Gaza, but yes, there does seem to
Speaker 3: be a little bit of a moving on from the media. Also,
Speaker 3: without public testimony, without those sots to play it in
Speaker 3: the clip and to circulate on Twitter and then also
Speaker 3: wind up in the evening news cable news, you're less
Speaker 3: likely to get that kind of coverage. That's what people
Speaker 3: want from it. So we do have a cable news sot,
Speaker 3: we do have.
Speaker 5: A cable news st Well, first let's put this. Let's
Speaker 5: put this first element up on the screen because we have,
Speaker 5: as Ryan said, we have gotten some stuff from these
Speaker 5: meetings so far, mostly all from Republicans. So he's nine
Speaker 5: hour closed door grilling and that was just day one.
Speaker 5: This is the headline that we just put up on
Speaker 5: the screen. Day two happened yesterday. So this is from
Speaker 5: the Republican Select Committee on the Coronavirus pandemic. They say
Speaker 5: he's completed his two day, fourteen hour transcribed interview with
Speaker 5: the COVID Select Committee, and the most important.
Speaker 6: Highlights from day two, they said.
Speaker 5: Fauci claimed that the quote six feet apart social distancing
Speaker 5: recommendation promoted by federal health officials was likely not based
Speaker 5: on any data.
Speaker 6: Quote, it just sort of appeared that's a.
Speaker 3: Which is like that part I kind of knew at
Speaker 3: the time, like it was a brand new virus. He
Speaker 3: were like, you just stay six feet apart. It's like, well,
Speaker 3: who said six feet, Like five feet you're in trouble.
Speaker 3: Seven feet you're not. Like the common sense that they
Speaker 3: just kind of made that.
Speaker 6: Up approximately two Fauci's apart. Two Yeah.
Speaker 5: Fauchi acknowledged the Lavely hypothesis as not a conspiracy theory,
Speaker 5: Republicans said. They also said he had admitted that America's
Speaker 5: vaccine mandates during the COVID nineteen pandemic could increase vaccine
Speaker 5: hesitancy in the future. And actually that's what the chairman,
Speaker 5: brad Winstrip really focused on in his press release about
Speaker 5: what happened yesterday. So in his press release, he said,
Speaker 5: after two days of testimony, in fourteen hours of questioning,
Speaker 5: and by the way, this just came out as we
Speaker 5: were starting taping. Many things became evident during his interview
Speaker 5: to day, doctor Fauci claimed that the policies and mandates
Speaker 5: he promoted man nfortunately increased vaccine hesitancy for years to come.
Speaker 5: He testified that the Lably hypothesis, which was often suppressed,
Speaker 5: was in fact not a conspiracy theory. Further, the social
Speaker 5: distancing recommendations forced on Americans quote sort of appeared and
Speaker 5: were likely not based on any scientific data. So Ryan,
Speaker 5: that's what one strip chose to focus on.
Speaker 3: That's where I'm like, okay, but breathing right in somebody's
Speaker 3: face when you're sick shouldn't do it? Is it's based
Speaker 3: on some data, Like I mean during the plague throughout
Speaker 3: you know, people's social distance, because if you're sick, you
Speaker 3: look stay away from other people, right, Like that's why
Speaker 3: you don't go to work when you're sick.
Speaker 4: You don't go to school when you're sick.
Speaker 3: Like, social distance has been understood.
Speaker 4: By humans for thousands of years.
Speaker 3: So like for him to come in and be like
Speaker 3: they implemented this brand new thing called social distancing, it's like,
Speaker 3: I don't want to be around him if he's got
Speaker 3: a cough.
Speaker 6: Right, So we're we're coming on the heels of day.
Speaker 5: Thing.
Speaker 3: They tell you to cover your mouth now when you're cough,
Speaker 3: Believe it or not, no scientific backup whatsoever.
Speaker 5: So we're coming down the end of day two here.
Speaker 5: But the big takeaway from day one was that when
Speaker 5: we can put this next element up on the screen
Speaker 5: right now too, is that, as the committee said, Fauci
Speaker 5: claimed he quote did not recall pertinent COVID nineteen information
Speaker 5: or conversations more than one hundred times on day one.
Speaker 5: So that's reporting from the New York Post who was
Speaker 5: quoting Brad Runstrup, who sort of did his running play
Speaker 5: by play of what happened in that room. Now, Fauci,
Speaker 5: according to the committee, profusely defended his previous testimony where
Speaker 5: he said that the NIH did not fund or does
Speaker 5: not fund a gang gain a function research in Wuhan,
Speaker 5: and today they said so Monday, he repeatedly played semantics
Speaker 5: with the definition of gain and function in an attempt
Speaker 5: to avoid conceding that NIH funded.
Speaker 6: This dangerous research.
Speaker 5: Right that is where the rubber is going to meet
Speaker 5: the road, and that's exactly what the segment we have
Speaker 5: is addressing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So Fauchi did an interview with Meddi Hassan back
Speaker 3: in I think last summer or whatever, and I actually
Speaker 3: talked to Metty ahead of the interview, you know, because
Speaker 3: he knows. That's something I've been covering a lot, and
Speaker 3: he was asking for you know, was just strategizing around
Speaker 3: around the interview and pointed him to this.
Speaker 4: Interview that Fauchi gave.
Speaker 3: I think back in either twenty twelve or twenty fourteen,
Speaker 3: back when there was this debate over whether or not
Speaker 3: to ban or pause gain a function search, and he
Speaker 3: was a strong advocate of not banning, not pausing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and in his interview he said, in that interview back
Speaker 3: ten years ago, he said, it's possible that there could
Speaker 3: be a mistake in using gain of function research that
Speaker 3: could lead to.
Speaker 4: A global pandemic, and we have to acknowledge that.
Speaker 3: However, I think the benefits of the research outweigh the costs.
Speaker 4: That was his opinion at the time.
Speaker 3: Mehdi asked him if he still held that opinion, and
Speaker 3: he ended up dancing around the definition of gain of
Speaker 3: function a lot without really kind of answering the question directly,
Speaker 3: because it's not you either have to disavow your previous
Speaker 3: comment or you have to sound like a maniac.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And this is what he's been doing back and
Speaker 5: forth with Paul too. And we've asked rand Paul about
Speaker 5: this on that show too.
Speaker 3: So here's some of the dancing that he did, which
Speaker 3: is probably similar to what you're going to read in
Speaker 3: the transcript when it eventually gets least.
Speaker 4: Here's vouch you with Metty.
Speaker 9: We put aside gain of function because that's so confusing.
Speaker 6: Of what a gain of function is.
Speaker 9: Is that any research that needs to be brought up
Speaker 9: to a greater degree of scrutiny how to be researched.
Speaker 9: At that time, the operative definition that actually was making
Speaker 9: an enhancement of the pathogenesis or the transmissibility of a
Speaker 9: pathogen that is highly likely known to be very transmissible
Speaker 9: giving morbidity and mortality in humans. And the fact the
Speaker 9: studies that were done that were funded through a United
Speaker 9: States organization with a sub award Security to Eco Health
Speaker 9: Alliance was looking at bad viruses that have never been
Speaker 9: shown to infect humans. So by definition the operative definition
Speaker 9: of the gain of function of concern, the NIH was
Speaker 9: not funding that.
Speaker 4: And that's when I said.
Speaker 9: So just to be careful of you is because if
Speaker 9: you as at me not to this that you are
Speaker 9: your position is. We did fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Speaker 1: Yes, we didn't fund gain of function.
Speaker 9: Research at Therefore, you did not lie to Congress.
Speaker 10: I just want to clarify.
Speaker 9: I'm want to clarify, we did not fund gain of
Speaker 9: function research according to the operative definition of what gain
Speaker 9: function research was.
Speaker 3: So the problem with his answer there he keeps going
Speaker 3: back to operative definition. EcoHealth lost its UH basically, you know,
Speaker 3: lost its grant for doing gain of function research without
Speaker 3: informing the NIH about it. They came, they came up
Speaker 3: to they came up with an agreement with the NIH,
Speaker 3: which we know because the Intercept got these documents through
Speaker 3: FOYA that said if there was a one log expansion
Speaker 3: and pathogenicity, that would count as gain of function and
Speaker 3: they would report back.
Speaker 4: To the NIH. They never did that.
Speaker 3: Ultimately, and for a variety of reasons, they had their
Speaker 3: grant rescinded and in that recision and barred from future funding.
Speaker 3: And in that letter from the NIH, it says that
Speaker 3: they conducted gain of function research outside of the protocol.
Speaker 3: So that is what makes it impossible to square what
Speaker 3: Fauci is saying when it comes to the operative definition. Well,
Speaker 3: why was the NIH operating under a different operative definition
Speaker 3: than the one that you say was operative?
Speaker 8: Right?
Speaker 5: And so Emily Copp of us Right to Know had
Speaker 5: a really good point on Twitter yesterday. She said, FOUC
Speaker 5: she appears to be redefining gain of function research in
Speaker 5: order to escape.
Speaker 6: A perjury conviction.
Speaker 5: And so again that's why Republicans really want to get
Speaker 5: him on the record, and he's transcribed this transcribed testimony,
Speaker 5: because that's clearly what he's trying to do. And if
Speaker 5: you listen to him in that conversation with Mehdi, if
Speaker 5: you listen to him in any conversation now which he's
Speaker 5: asked or if he's pressed on this question of gain
Speaker 5: and function, he should have known when he was testifying
Speaker 5: before Congress. And he did though actually when he was
Speaker 5: testifying before Congress that this was going to be an issue,
Speaker 5: and that's why he's always been playing sort of fast
Speaker 5: and loose with it. But even so, when you look
Speaker 5: back at how he was originally defining gain of function,
Speaker 5: it's so so obvious what he's doing now. And nobody
Speaker 5: wants to be convicted of perjury. So hey, man, you
Speaker 5: gotta do what you gotta do. But you shouldn't have
Speaker 5: lied in the first place, and you shouldn't have done
Speaker 5: any of this in the first place.
Speaker 6: And I mean good on the Republicans for pushing him on.
Speaker 5: This.
Speaker 3: Seems almost impossible to get convicted of perjury before Congress nowadays,
Speaker 3: But he did seem to have a wilful intent to
Speaker 3: mislead Congress about the research that he was funding.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, which he now acknowledges.
Speaker 3: Is it's not a conspiracy theory to say that it
Speaker 3: may have emerged from the lab that he knew he
Speaker 3: was financing through a sub award.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he knew that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You can imagine you're the guy who fought an internal
Speaker 3: battle against people who were trying to stop gain a
Speaker 3: function research and successfully stopped it in the Obama administration
Speaker 3: because they thought it was so dangerous. He gets it restarted,
Speaker 3: but only under these very strict conditions. He then goes
Speaker 3: around those strict.
Speaker 4: Conditions and funds the Wuhan lab.
Speaker 3: A pandemic breaks out within, you know, pretty quickly after
Speaker 3: this research starts to get funded. You can imagine he
Speaker 3: doesn't know for certain exactly what happened. But what do
Speaker 3: you if you're him, what are you gonna think? How's
Speaker 3: it gonna look even if it's even if you're innocent,
Speaker 3: It's not gonna look good, right, you've seen the movie
Speaker 3: where they like, all of a sudden, the guy has
Speaker 3: a gun in his hand, but he didn't actually kill
Speaker 3: the person he's He then tries to figure out a
Speaker 3: way that he's not gonna wipe up in.
Speaker 4: Prison for the rest of his life, even if he
Speaker 4: knows he's innocent.
Speaker 3: So even if he thought he was innocent, he was
Speaker 3: lying to try to get out of it, to try
Speaker 3: to say, well, it's the web market that's crazy, right,
Speaker 3: and we also we weren't funding what we were funding.
Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, it's a web of lies.
Speaker 5: I don't know if we have this next element, it's
Speaker 5: a tweet from Justin good Men over at Yeah. So
Speaker 5: Justin Goodman over at White Coat Waste. We've had him
Speaker 5: on this show before too. He says that this is
Speaker 5: another speaking of the web of lies. Fauci knows that
Speaker 5: foreign animal labs he funded are exempt from oversight due
Speaker 5: to an illegal loophole.
Speaker 6: Under Fauci NIAI.
Speaker 5: D funded more foreign animal labs than any NIH organization
Speaker 5: and admitted to Jo that it never inspected one. And
Speaker 5: so this is in response to different things that Fauci
Speaker 5: testified about. So this is not even just about gain
Speaker 5: of function. This was the Select sub Commitee tweeted. Fauchi
Speaker 5: was unable to confirm if NIAI D has any mechanisms
Speaker 5: to conduct oversight of the foreign laboratories they fund, And
Speaker 5: Goodman is saying, yet he knows that they're exempt from
Speaker 5: oversight because of this illegal loophole, and they were funding
Speaker 5: all kinds of foreign animal labs on a different scale
Speaker 5: under Fauci than had been seen recently before that.
Speaker 6: So he's in a world of trouble.
Speaker 5: Whether you know there's any consequences for him, I think
Speaker 5: is the open question now.
Speaker 3: All Right, So that's a story about public officials misleading
Speaker 3: the public in a way I deeply care about. We
Speaker 3: now have a story about a public official misleading the
Speaker 3: public in a way I kind of don't care about.
Speaker 3: But it's really funny. Although I'm sad for Lloyd Austin.
Speaker 3: It sounds like he's still in the hospital. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: let's talk about the problems that the White House is facing,
Speaker 3: because the White House Press Corps has found itself a
Speaker 3: scandal and it's got questions that it once answered.
Speaker 6: It is pretty absurd when you.
Speaker 3: Think it's really crazy, like nobody would get away with
Speaker 3: this in like this in like a six person office,
Speaker 3: no let alone, or.
Speaker 6: In nineteen ninety five, right like Bill Clinton.
Speaker 5: If this happens under his watch, like this is the
Speaker 5: story that is leading all of the networks.
Speaker 6: It is the headline.
Speaker 5: And I mean, obviously there are two wars going on
Speaker 5: right now, So in some ways that makes the story
Speaker 5: more important.
Speaker 6: In some ways it makes it less important.
Speaker 5: But the president seemed, but it seems to have not
Speaker 5: known that his Defense secretary was undergoing serious medical treatment
Speaker 5: for a very serious condition.
Speaker 3: Raises the question of whether it matters that anybody has
Speaker 3: their hand on the wheel. So let's put up this
Speaker 3: first element here as part of Secretary Austin's this is
Speaker 3: a statement. As part of Secretary Austin's routinely recommended health screening,
Speaker 3: he has undergone regular prostate surveillance. Changed in his lab
Speaker 3: evaluation in early December twenty twenty three identified prostate cancer
Speaker 3: which required treatment. December twenty second, he was admitted to
Speaker 3: Walter Reed Walter Reid and underwent a minimally invasive surgical
Speaker 3: procedure called a prostate ectomy to treat and cure prostate cancer.
Speaker 4: It seemed to go fine.
Speaker 3: He went home on January first, New Year's Day, he
Speaker 3: was admitted back to Walter Reed with complications from the
Speaker 3: December twenty second procedure, including nausea, severe abdominal, hip and
Speaker 3: leg pain, and initial evaluation revealed at urinate track infection.
Speaker 3: January tewond the decision was made to transfer him to
Speaker 3: the ICU for close monitoring any higher level of care.
Speaker 3: Now they say that under no time during this was
Speaker 3: he sedated. And so you hear ICU and you think,
Speaker 3: all right, this guy's like in a coma, Like that's
Speaker 3: just how the public hears it. He was getting intensive care,
Speaker 3: but he was not sedated, which seems to be the
Speaker 3: rationale that they would be relying on to say, well.
Speaker 4: Okay, I was working from home. I was working from.
Speaker 3: The ICU, managing two wars from the ICU. So the
Speaker 3: White House Press Corps, you know, just battering the White
Speaker 3: House over this.
Speaker 4: I think we have John Kirby getting knocked around here.
Speaker 11: We learn also today that Secretary Austin, when he went
Speaker 11: into the hospital for the first time on December twenty second,
Speaker 11: he knew he was going to be under General MSTA,
Speaker 11: knew he was going to be spending the night and
Speaker 11: transferred authority to his deputy Secretary. Was the White House
Speaker 11: informed then that author that the authority.
Speaker 1: Was going to be transferred.
Speaker 11: No, So the President has known for I guess five
Speaker 11: days now that Secretary Austin was in the hospital, but
Speaker 11: he wasn't informed.
Speaker 10: Why he was not informed until last Friday that Secretary
Speaker 10: Austin was in the hospital. He was not informed until
Speaker 10: this morning that the root cause of that hospitalization was
Speaker 10: prostate cancer?
Speaker 11: Is that because the White House knew and didn't inform
Speaker 11: the President because Secretary Austin chose not to share that.
Speaker 4: With the president.
Speaker 10: Nobody at the White House knew that Secretary Austin had
Speaker 10: prostate cancer until this morning, and the President was informed
Speaker 10: immediately after.
Speaker 11: We were okay, last week, we learned that Jake Sullivan,
Speaker 11: I believe, found out about the fact that Secretary Austin
Speaker 11: was hospitalized on Thursday morning. So just want to clarify,
Speaker 11: you're saying the President found out a day later than
Speaker 11: the NSC did.
Speaker 4: No, Jake was informed.
Speaker 10: A National Security visor was informed that Secretary Austin was
Speaker 10: in the hospital and had been for some time. He
Speaker 10: found out late Thursday afternoon, and he informed he and
Speaker 10: the Chief staff. Mister Science informed the president later that evening,
Speaker 10: early that evening, not long after they learned, they informed
Speaker 10: the president directly Thursday.
Speaker 5: So Ran, when you think about it, you say Friday first, yes,
Speaker 5: And so when you think about all of the we
Speaker 5: think about all of the operations that are happening every
Speaker 5: single day, every single hour, really, both in Ukraine and
Speaker 5: in Israel, I think this becomes less of a sort
Speaker 5: of Washington intrigue scandal and more of a serious one.
Speaker 6: That raises two another question, which is does.
Speaker 5: Anybody even care if Biden is in the loop on
Speaker 5: this is Austin actually saying, don't tell the guy because
Speaker 5: he's not running this administration. That's the real That's the
Speaker 5: biggest question for me, is that is this just that
Speaker 5: people know that Biden isn't even doing anything that like if.
Speaker 3: That was crazy, If that was the case, though, you'd
Speaker 3: at least tell the chief of staff, right, the White
Speaker 3: House chief of staff, they are doing it. You would
Speaker 3: tell Jake Sullivan, You'd tell Tony Blinken, like if.
Speaker 5: Jake Sullivan knew first. They did tell Jake Sullivan after
Speaker 5: a long time, because.
Speaker 3: Jake was like in a meeting and he's like Where's
Speaker 3: where Lloyd? What's going on with Lloyd? And eventually somebody's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: by the way, I guess guess he's in the hospital.
Speaker 3: I think it's his war crime alibi. So when he
Speaker 3: had when he goes to the Hague, like I was
Speaker 3: in the ICU, you can't blame me for any This
Speaker 3: is not me. I don't think that's gonna fly because
Speaker 3: it's only a couple of days.
Speaker 4: He was doing war crimes before it.
Speaker 3: He was supporting war crimes from the ICU, and he's
Speaker 3: still supporting war crimes.
Speaker 5: So but again, when you think about the decision is
Speaker 5: that go are going through the Pentagon, high level life
Speaker 5: and death decisions that are going through the Pentagon on
Speaker 5: an hourly basis, because there are now two wars happening,
Speaker 5: let alone all of the various conflicts around the war
Speaker 5: around the world, but two hot conflicts right now that
Speaker 5: we are funding to a serious degree. And you think
Speaker 5: that you can just keep this quiet, keep this from
Speaker 5: the president for as long as you did, something else
Speaker 5: is going on. That's not just that Lloyd Austin was.
Speaker 5: You know, he's very a private person. You know, he
Speaker 5: just didn't want the public. He wanted to leak to
Speaker 5: the public. He didn't want the president to worry about him.
Speaker 5: There's something else going on there.
Speaker 3: But it's also a story that the White House Press
Speaker 3: Corps loves because there are answers that they can get,
Speaker 3: questions that they can ask, and it's short of any
Speaker 3: kind of political valance.
Speaker 4: There's no substance. I mean, okay, yeah, there should be
Speaker 4: people running the show.
Speaker 3: There's substance there, but it's short of ideological substance.
Speaker 4: And they love the non ideological stories.
Speaker 5: A great completely pass intrigue, right right, personnel questions.
Speaker 6: There's nothing they love more than personnel.
Speaker 3: Perfect personnel intery. You can say it matters because it does,
Speaker 3: and you can look tough.
Speaker 4: And you're going to you're going to challenge the White
Speaker 4: House hard, right, Well, uh, Deucey's question was funny, like
Speaker 4: what kind of president is this or something something like that.
Speaker 6: It's like, I mean, it's pretty unusual.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think if if, if this would have
Speaker 3: happened under the Trump administration, Oh yeah, yeah, it would,
Speaker 3: but he'd be so hypocritical from uh, Democrats in particular,
Speaker 3: because they don't want Trump involved.
Speaker 4: Well, I don't want.
Speaker 3: Trump talking to his cabinet secretaries. They just want some
Speaker 3: deep state just running it.
Speaker 5: Well, that's what it reminds me of, like when it's
Speaker 5: actually kind of an interesting question because in the Trump
Speaker 5: administration there were people who were wish they weren't operating
Speaker 5: with the oversight of the president because you think.
Speaker 4: Of like how Trump had tried to avoid him.
Speaker 5: He put the like the CEO of Exon in charge
Speaker 5: of the State Department, and then he had John Bolton
Speaker 5: in the White House.
Speaker 6: But he also had people who were way more.
Speaker 5: I'm not saying they are isolationalists, but more isolationist, sort
Speaker 5: of on the spectrum of you know, interventionists isolationists. And
Speaker 5: so he constantly had this like pull tug of war
Speaker 5: happening in his own administration ideologically, and people were playing
Speaker 5: each other against each other as like little pawns to
Speaker 5: see who could get to the president, to see, you know,
Speaker 5: who could put a crazy article on the President's desk
Speaker 5: and make John Bolton look bad or whatever it is.
Speaker 5: And so absolutely it would have happened to the Trump
Speaker 5: administration because there were people who didn't want Donald Trump
Speaker 5: to be involved. They didn't want him to oversee what
Speaker 5: they were doing in foreign policy, because then maybe one
Speaker 5: of the less interventionist people in his administration would try
Speaker 5: to persuade him to take different steps.
Speaker 3: Maybe if Biden takes his hand off the Gaza teller
Speaker 3: a little bit, there would be less unconditional support for
Speaker 3: what Israel's doing there.
Speaker 5: That's why this is interesting because it does have that
Speaker 5: sort of like Trumpian there's does the Pentagon want to
Speaker 5: operate without oversight of the White House? And is this
Speaker 5: part of sort of giving the White House the middle
Speaker 5: finger and trying to operate more freely. I don't know,
Speaker 5: but there's something interesting there.
Speaker 4: Let's get to the important news.
Speaker 3: Tunnels, all right, So in Crown Heights police somehow stumbled
Speaker 3: on a network of tunnels built underneath a historic synagogue.
Speaker 3: They're in the Orthodox community, and we can get there
Speaker 3: are a couple of theories about.
Speaker 4: What was going on here. If we have this first
Speaker 4: element that we can that we can throw up.
Speaker 3: Here this is this is footage of Mayhem that broke
Speaker 3: out after the police were like, look this, you can't
Speaker 3: just be digging massive tunnels underneath the synagogue.
Speaker 4: We're going to have to clear this out. They refused
Speaker 4: to clear out.
Speaker 3: And so as you can see in the video they
Speaker 3: they handcuffed using those little plastic cuffs the first person
Speaker 3: that was stuck in the tunnel.
Speaker 4: And that's when all hell broke.
Speaker 3: Loose and the congregants started fighting back.
Speaker 4: And you see a little bit of.
Speaker 3: You know, pepper spray type stuff, you know, getting doused,
Speaker 3: and then you see people start to rip the wooden
Speaker 3: walls off off the side of the synagogue. And here's
Speaker 3: here's footage of the tunnels, the tunnels themselves.
Speaker 4: Which are you know, go down underneath. And then kind
Speaker 4: of it.
Speaker 3: Seems like, well, anyway, let's get into the theories about
Speaker 3: what's going on.
Speaker 4: There's two theories. One some kids run a muck. But
Speaker 4: I'm gonna hear the kids run a muck theory is great.
Speaker 3: It's like they some teenagers were told not to do this,
Speaker 3: and you know how kids today are these days, these days,
Speaker 3: and they just went ahead and dug these dug these tunnels.
Speaker 5: This is from limbs of Talk. This is a tweet
Speaker 5: sort of saying. Gen Z was taught that nothing is
Speaker 5: more important than their feelings, and now they're emboldened to
Speaker 5: act entitled and spoiled.
Speaker 6: Was zero regard or respect for.
Speaker 5: Others, we keep seeing this time and again in all
Speaker 5: our institutions. We must fix the broken education system. The
Speaker 5: future of our country depends on it. And this is
Speaker 5: her saying the disgraceful teams. This is how she starts.
Speaker 5: Wh dug underneath a well respected synagogue did so on
Speaker 5: their own after being explicitly told not to. They went
Speaker 5: against synagogue leadership. And so, yes, Ryan, that is one
Speaker 5: of the theories that.
Speaker 4: These are woke tunnels.
Speaker 6: I see.
Speaker 5: That's not so much wokeness as it is just generationally
Speaker 5: gen zer kids these days, their phones.
Speaker 4: And their and their tiktoks and there.
Speaker 5: So this went massively viral in TikTok, a lot of
Speaker 5: this when the tunnel videos first started cropping up, massive
Speaker 5: virality on social media, especially on TikTok.
Speaker 4: So the theory go ahead. Well, I was just going
Speaker 4: to say, so absurd, but let's address it first.
Speaker 5: So either way, one thing we do know is that
Speaker 5: the tunnels weren't just being dug by some bord hit
Speaker 5: for the hell of it, right, Like it wasn't just
Speaker 5: you know, screw huge to authorities. This is a fairly
Speaker 5: rolling Stone describes it as quotidian, but a fairly serious
Speaker 5: dispute internicene dispute among different sects in Crown Heights, So
Speaker 5: in reality, the explanation for the tunnels was at least
Speaker 5: somewhat more quid quotidian. Rolling Stone rights the tunnels were
Speaker 5: the result of an ongoing dispute between the Chabad Lubavic
Speaker 5: community and a more extremist splinter sect, which has long
Speaker 5: been embroiled in turmoil over ownership of the building that
Speaker 5: is housing the headquarters. Members of the splinter group believe
Speaker 5: that the Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who led the Chabad Lubavic
Speaker 5: movement before his death at the age of ninety two
Speaker 5: aged death in nineteen ninety four, is the Messiah, and
Speaker 5: that is a claim that the mainstream Chabad movement rejects.
Speaker 6: And so this had started happening.
Speaker 3: The extremists believe that he's still alive, like and wants
Speaker 3: them to do this basically, right.
Speaker 5: It's crazy, I mean, it's just it's a crazy, crazy story.
Speaker 5: And so rolling Stone goes on to say, in two
Speaker 5: thousand and six, a court determined that the mainstream Chabad
Speaker 5: Lubovitch community had control over the building. So it's located
Speaker 5: on the Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn's heavily hasatic Crown Heights,
Speaker 5: as Rolling Stone says, yet there has still been tension
Speaker 5: between the two groups for all of this time, with
Speaker 5: the newspaper The Jewish Chronicle reporting today that about six
Speaker 5: months ago a small group of members from the Messianic
Speaker 5: Movement started construction on a network of underground tunnels in
Speaker 5: order to gain illegal access to the building.
Speaker 6: So six months.
Speaker 5: Ago, and this was there were some of his videos
Speaker 5: that were popping up about a month ago, maybe a
Speaker 5: little longer ago than that actually, and it sort of
Speaker 5: stayed a local.
Speaker 4: Story of people popping out of the street, just people
Speaker 4: like that.
Speaker 10: One.
Speaker 6: We do have more veo here that we can roll.
Speaker 5: This is the next element that we can put up
Speaker 5: on the screen, just so you can sort of start
Speaker 5: to see what this looked like. And I'll read more
Speaker 5: here from Rolling Stone, they say. At first, the intern
Speaker 5: icing dispute between what is essentially two small stacks of
Speaker 5: the already small Crown Heights Orthodox Jewish community primarily garnered
Speaker 5: only local media interests. The mainstream Chabad Lubovitch community also
Speaker 5: immediately made it clear that it did not endorse the tunnels,
Speaker 5: with chairman Rabbi j. Hudokrinsky issuing a statement saying that
Speaker 5: Chabad Lubovitch community is pained by the vandalism of a
Speaker 5: group of young agitators who damaged the synagogue below Chabad headquarters,
Speaker 5: and he called their actions odious.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 5: Ryan Willistone also notes that this started taking off when
Speaker 5: conspiracy theories that are pretty obviously anti Semitic about Satanic
Speaker 5: ritualistic sex abuse from kind of cuan non adjacent accounts
Speaker 5: started to spread, and that was maybe the fuel that
Speaker 5: took this from a local news story to a national one.
Speaker 3: But also the image of the guy walking out of
Speaker 3: the sidewalk. If you're listening to this on the podcast,
Speaker 3: we're playing the clip of this guy that went viral,
Speaker 3: the big old hat climbing out of basically threw a
Speaker 3: grate out of the sidewalk onto the street and then
Speaker 3: walking off. And just imagine you're walking down the street
Speaker 3: and you see that and try to describe it later. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't have friends, listen, you won't believe what I
Speaker 3: saw today.
Speaker 5: Well, there was that guy on Twitter saying he heard
Speaker 5: he was hearing people speak Yiddish and.
Speaker 4: He under the sidewalk or something.
Speaker 5: Well, he said, I live in like a ground floor
Speaker 5: apartment building and there's nothing.
Speaker 6: He's like, I can't have no explanation for it.
Speaker 5: I lived in Crown Heights. But that tweet started going
Speaker 5: viral too. Again, I actually don't think the anti Semitic
Speaker 5: conspiracy theres are what made the story viral. I think
Speaker 5: the story went viral because it's absolutely.
Speaker 4: Because it's crazy.
Speaker 6: It's a crazy story. It's a crazy story.
Speaker 4: The people love New York too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Italian cop talking talking to the dudes before
Speaker 3: all help pops up.
Speaker 4: Maybe we have some at some of that in posts.
Speaker 3: It's just that was just a great classic New York
Speaker 3: clip too.
Speaker 4: He's like, he's like, what are you guys doing here?
Speaker 4: You can't just do.
Speaker 6: This, he said something like, this is America.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna have to clear the whole Showal Yeah, we
Speaker 3: got to fix this by tonight.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Because also there real concerns now that there are that
Speaker 3: there's significant structural damage, right, Like you can't like you
Speaker 3: can't just take sledgehammers to underneath historic buildings and not
Speaker 3: have some concern. No, not not to be like, you know,
Speaker 3: the structural engineer guy who's like insisting on everything being
Speaker 3: done by the book.
Speaker 4: But come on, guys, like gravity is.
Speaker 5: A thing, no, seriously, and like as often as I
Speaker 5: have some like libertarian impulses on these domestic questions. For example,
Speaker 5: there's a woman in Herndon who's gone viral on TikTok
Speaker 5: for digging a tunnel underneath her own house more for
Speaker 5: the hell of it. But she has some like sort
Speaker 5: of explanation that actually might be well described as quotidian
Speaker 5: probably a better description there. But she is like now
Speaker 5: being investigated by the city. And again even as somebody
Speaker 5: with libertarian impulses, it's like you can see in some
Speaker 5: of these videos, there's a house not far away from her.
Speaker 5: So if you don't know what you're doing, you can
Speaker 5: cause other people's property to collapse.
Speaker 6: Your freedom unsafe.
Speaker 3: Your freedom to dig a tunnel ends underneath my property,
Speaker 3: I think would be a fair libertarian or near enough.
Speaker 5: To my property that you're damaging my property.
Speaker 3: The libertarians are all about their own property rights too.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, to an extension.
Speaker 4: It just depends some of them to.
Speaker 5: Get into it, probably, But you know, again, at its
Speaker 5: at its heart, what is a crazy dispute comes down
Speaker 5: to a messianic act of Judaism, which again, those questions
Speaker 5: of the Jewish Messiah are loomed very heavily over the
Speaker 5: conflict over the West Bank and over that land in particular.
Speaker 5: So this stuff, you know, this is a sort of
Speaker 5: silly embodiment or manifestation of it. But these are these
Speaker 5: are ancient questions that mean a lot to people. Yeah,
Speaker 5: to the point where they will dig tunnels under Crown Heights.
Speaker 4: It popped, It popped onto the House floor.
Speaker 3: If you remember when Republicans tried to or did push
Speaker 3: a resolution that said specifically like anti Zionism is anti Semitism,
Speaker 3: and Jerry Nadler, who represents the Orthodox Communities in New York,
Speaker 3: went to the House floor and said, this is absurd
Speaker 3: for many, many reasons, but one particular reason it's absurd
Speaker 3: is that I have anti Zionist constituents who believe that
Speaker 3: you cannot bring Israel, that humans cannot bring Israel onto
Speaker 3: the earth.
Speaker 4: Only the Messiah can bring Israel onto their right and
Speaker 4: that is their interpretation.
Speaker 3: How dare you call them anti Semitic for that anti
Speaker 3: Zionist interpretation?
Speaker 6: Right? I mean I just celemated Christmas.
Speaker 3: The birth of the Messiah, this one particular sect not
Speaker 3: exactly covering itself in glory in this moment.
Speaker 5: Covering itself in a lot of dirt, a lot of dirt,
Speaker 5: a lot of dirt. But no, I mean the questions
Speaker 5: of the Messiah are so central too, what not just
Speaker 5: Israeli culture and politics, but Western culture. Again, like we
Speaker 5: just celebrated Christmas in this country. For Christians, that's about
Speaker 5: the Messiah again, ancient questions that mean a lot to
Speaker 5: people that they're willing to actually lay down their lives
Speaker 5: in the Middle East right now is what we're seeing
Speaker 5: and dig tunnels in other cases if they're in crowd nights.
Speaker 4: Well, speaking of the return, the return of.
Speaker 6: The Messiah, Don Lemon is back.
Speaker 5: If you were wondering if Don Lemon would return here,
Speaker 5: he is not three days, more like three months, but
Speaker 5: he's back.
Speaker 3: So Don Lemon is announcing his new program, which will
Speaker 3: be airing on Twitter and elsewhere, I guess, but I
Speaker 3: think primarily he's saying it will premiere on Twitter.
Speaker 4: We can put up this first element.
Speaker 3: This is Don Lemon of CNN, employee of seventeen years.
Speaker 3: He said, I've heard you, and today I am back
Speaker 3: bigger Boulder freer. That's what was missing was Don Lemon.
Speaker 3: We need him unleashed. My new media company's first project
Speaker 3: is The Don Lemon Show. It will be available to
Speaker 3: everyone easily, whenever and wherever you want it, streaming on
Speaker 3: the platforms where the conversations are happening, and you'll find
Speaker 3: it first on Twitter, which he calls X for some reason,
Speaker 3: the biggest space for free speech in the world. I
Speaker 3: know now more than ever that we need a place
Speaker 3: for honest debate and discussion without the hall monitors.
Speaker 4: This is just the beginning, So stay tuned, Stay tuned.
Speaker 5: Okay, I just want to say my favorite part of
Speaker 5: his statement is where he starts with quote, I've heard you,
Speaker 5: which is just a brilliant pr move from someone who
Speaker 5: stumbles through life trying to orchestrate his own pr presumably
Speaker 5: because actually, the greatest bit of color in any profile
Speaker 5: I think written in modern history is when it's like GQ,
Speaker 5: where Esquire sat down in profile Don Lemon went to
Speaker 5: a restaurant with him.
Speaker 6: Someone ordered sorbet. The writer ordered sorbet.
Speaker 5: And Don Lemon corrected him and said, let's pronounced sor bet.
Speaker 6: That's so good, really, and that made it into the profile.
Speaker 5: So Don Lemon saying, I've heard you implying you're just
Speaker 5: letting the reader know that people are clamor.
Speaker 3: Ring for Are you suggesting that the volume from the
Speaker 3: Groundswell was not audible to your ears?
Speaker 5: I hadn't heard it, Ryan, but maybe that's because I
Speaker 5: was tuned into the fact that by the time he
Speaker 5: left CNN, he had horrible ratings both in primetime and
Speaker 5: then on the morning show that they tried to move
Speaker 5: him to.
Speaker 6: They used the Nicky.
Speaker 5: Haley thing about her being past her prime, sort of
Speaker 5: as the fig leaf to finally get rid of Don Lemon,
Speaker 5: it seemed like, but.
Speaker 6: His ratings were bad.
Speaker 5: People were not clamoring for Don Lemon even when he
Speaker 5: was on CNN. And to his point, he would say,
Speaker 5: that's why, because I was on CNN and I was
Speaker 5: just caged in. Tucker Carlson responded, we have this next element,
Speaker 5: Tucker also, who used to work at CNN. I believe
Speaker 5: they overlapped Ryan. Tucker responds, congratulations, it's a new world. Welcome,
Speaker 5: and Don replies, thanks, Tucker. Now it is to Tucker's
Speaker 5: benefit to have more people do their shows on X
Speaker 5: because it encourages Elon must to sort of build up
Speaker 5: the infrastructure for X as a video platform, creates the
Speaker 5: expectation that X is a political video platform. And so
Speaker 5: I understand why he's ushering Don Lemon into this new era.
Speaker 6: But the idea that.
Speaker 5: Don Lemon was shackled by CNN is outrageous. And we
Speaker 5: have some video actually that's just delightful that proves that
Speaker 5: he was never really just it was just it was
Speaker 5: too hard for Donna. He was suffocated by Jeff Zucker
Speaker 5: and Chris lichto Rizi, here's Don Lemon on a.
Speaker 4: Leash black people.
Speaker 3: If you really want to fix the problem, here's just
Speaker 3: five things that you should think about doing.
Speaker 4: Is it fair to say this.
Speaker 1: Because I'm out of mommy, but is it mommy bringing?
Speaker 9: Just because you can have a baby, it doesn't mean
Speaker 9: you should.
Speaker 4: I'm not sexist, by the way, I don't mean to
Speaker 4: be crude. Okay, yeah, there are ways not to perform
Speaker 4: oral sex if.
Speaker 1: You oh got to do I reased to day. I
Speaker 1: gotta say everywhere I go, and you know what I'm
Speaker 1: going to ask.
Speaker 7: You, and people say, hey, that guy's on your show,
Speaker 7: is he really running for president?
Speaker 4: But just because you have the right, Does it mean
Speaker 4: that you should.
Speaker 5: There are What did he say about oral sex?
Speaker 6: It's just amazing?
Speaker 5: Why Christian, It was like, what, go watch that on
Speaker 5: the Free Beacons YouTube channel because the whole thing is
Speaker 5: absolutely hilarious. There's more to it, I actually believe it
Speaker 5: or not. That goes on for like another minute of
Speaker 5: Don Lemon saying outrageously funny things, and it's it's funny Ryan.
Speaker 5: Because Chris Cuomo then went to News Nation. He mounted
Speaker 5: a comeback after he also left Cianna in disgrace with
Speaker 5: bad news ratings and a serious ethical scandal that would
Speaker 5: basically end the career of any journalist in the crib.
Speaker 4: Are we calling what Chris Cuomo did a comeback?
Speaker 6: No? Probably not, But he actually tried.
Speaker 5: He's trying to mount a comeback, right and he has
Speaker 5: been on you know, different people's shows, and you know
Speaker 5: he's he's trying to be taken seriously. Don Lemon is
Speaker 5: now trying to do the very same thing. They are
Speaker 5: two of the people who I think created so much
Speaker 5: distrust in media unnecessarily.
Speaker 6: They are two of the biggest people who.
Speaker 5: Did that from not just during the Trump administration, before
Speaker 5: the Trump administration during COVID, the way Chris Cuomo and
Speaker 5: Don Lemon both treated Andrew Cuomo, it was, I mean
Speaker 5: these things seriously so distrusted media. There are a lot
Speaker 5: of good reporters, believe it or not, who are over
Speaker 5: there in Ukraine who are doing reporting from Israel right now,
Speaker 5: putting their lives on the line to get into Gaza,
Speaker 5: some of them on CNN. And these two jokers just
Speaker 5: laughed their way through the last decade, saying the dumbest
Speaker 5: stuff possible, just making everybody.
Speaker 6: Hate the media.
Speaker 3: I never quite understood the Don Lemon phenomenon. I would
Speaker 3: see the right get lived at him as some kind
Speaker 3: of symbol of the left, but I never quite undernew
Speaker 3: from that series of clips. He certainly doesn't come off
Speaker 3: as somebody who's remotely associated with the left, Like what
Speaker 3: is how would you where would you put Don Lemon
Speaker 3: in our kind of ecosystem of politics.
Speaker 5: I think he's actually a perfect embodiment of the left.
Speaker 5: Hear me out in that he's not a leftist, but
Speaker 5: he is culturally left on the issues that get you
Speaker 5: into the Manhattan cocktail party circuit. So he's willing to,
Speaker 5: for example, on his Air one time he had Rick Wilson.
Speaker 6: And I think it was like wajaht a Lee.
Speaker 5: Laughing at Rick Wilson's just reprehensible and not funny. I mean,
Speaker 5: I'm willing to laugh at these things, but just not funny.
Speaker 5: Impression of Trump supporters as like toothless rubes or something.
Speaker 5: I think he said like that, and they're just wheezing
Speaker 5: through their laughs on the air. And so he's willing
Speaker 5: to be kind of culturally a signal that he is
Speaker 5: on the right. He agrees with you on all the
Speaker 5: right things, but there's no way that he supports, you know,
Speaker 5: Medicare for all or like any of these serious leftist
Speaker 5: policy proposals. Economically, he doesn't want to forfeit the power
Speaker 5: of the neoliberal sort of establishment. He doesn't want to
Speaker 5: eat into any of that. The dude just wants to
Speaker 5: make a ton of money, hang out in Martha's vineyard
Speaker 5: and wear super expensive suits like that's all he wants.
Speaker 4: Oh Martha's Vineyard beautiful, so I hear.
Speaker 5: And he wants to be taken seriously as like an intellect,
Speaker 5: which is why he wears his classes.
Speaker 4: I've been TODs kit CODs beautiful. I assume Martha's Vineyard.
Speaker 6: Nice.
Speaker 5: But anyway, that's that's sort of like the left has
Speaker 5: allowed itself to be because of those cultural issues publicly
Speaker 5: in the perception of a lot of people in Middle America,
Speaker 5: co opted by people liked on Lemon.
Speaker 3: So it's clear why that there's a platform on something
Speaker 3: like CNN for that, or why there was for a
Speaker 3: long time. But is there an audience for it that
Speaker 3: you have to build independently? I mean, I assume out
Speaker 3: of the gate Musk will juice his numbers just to
Speaker 3: try to encourage new people to come in so they're
Speaker 3: like wow, and also he'll do some ridiculous things that
Speaker 3: will get like people gawking.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he's going to do more of what he did
Speaker 5: during Trayvon Martin. You're telling people to pull up their pants.
Speaker 5: He's going to do more of that because it's always
Speaker 5: been a performance.
Speaker 6: You know, he knows that this does he fully believe
Speaker 6: what he's saying.
Speaker 4: Sometimes does draw an organic audience.
Speaker 5: Well, the thing is, you can do really well in
Speaker 5: niches now and it doesn't do well on CNN. I
Speaker 5: don't know if there's a niche audience for Warmed Over
Speaker 5: centrist performative sanctimony on Twitter.
Speaker 6: I kind of doubt it.
Speaker 4: Not on Twitter now that's gone.
Speaker 6: But you can do.
Speaker 5: Better because you have way less overhead and there's fewer
Speaker 5: expectations for you to be the voice of America on
Speaker 5: primetime on a cable news network every day. So he'll
Speaker 5: probably be able to at least seem like he's doing fine,
Speaker 5: at least at first.
Speaker 6: But by the way, Crystal was all over this yesterday.
Speaker 5: She was like, I have called Don Lemon's right wing
Speaker 5: turn from the beginning. So we'll see, because he will
Speaker 5: know that on X the best way to get attention
Speaker 5: is going to be a performative contrarian.
Speaker 4: At two, don I know this hit Ryan hard. We've
Speaker 4: lost Don.
Speaker 6: Don has as goes down, So goes the nation.
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 3: Up next Kenny Clips to talk about his brief suspension
Speaker 3: from Twitter and what it was like to see his
Speaker 3: life flashed before his eyes.
Speaker 4: Sticks around for that, all.
Speaker 5: Right, We're happy to be joined now by Kenny Clips,
Speaker 5: also known as Ken the White, not Ken the Gray anymore.
Speaker 5: He has defeated the ball rog and is here in
Speaker 5: studio with us Ken Clippenstein of the intercept Amazing story.
Speaker 6: We hope that you're doing okay after the trauma.
Speaker 5: You suffered yesterday, but we have a lot to dig into.
Speaker 3: So we're going to talk with Ken after we wrap
Speaker 3: this show about a story that it's going to be
Speaker 3: published at the Intercept later today. I don't want to
Speaker 3: teach too much about that, but for now we want
Speaker 3: to talk about deeply traumatic experience that he went through.
Speaker 3: I'm kidding, it's somewhat serious as well, though. So yesterday
Speaker 3: morning or late late last night yesterday morning year, a
Speaker 3: ton of accounts on Twitter got suspended. We can put
Speaker 3: this first element up. Here's a handful of the yours.
Speaker 3: Yours was among them, Truanon pod Rob Russo with a
Speaker 3: podcast with jordanil Alan McCloud. All these are critics of Israel,
Speaker 3: but many, many more than just this Z squirrel.
Speaker 4: It was kind of polarizing account.
Speaker 3: It was anti anti imperialist account and even so we're
Speaker 3: running a.
Speaker 4: Piece at the intercepted.
Speaker 3: I think we'll be up today by somebody who was
Speaker 3: resigning from the DNC and protest of what's happening in Gaza,
Speaker 3: and he emailed me that morning he was like, I
Speaker 3: was caught up in this perch. So it went beyond
Speaker 3: even kind of you know, higher visibility accounts and spread
Speaker 3: out into into some others. But it was fairly quickly
Speaker 3: undone after a lot of kind of public outrage. And
Speaker 3: Musk himself well before we get the camera. We can
Speaker 3: put Musk up himself if we have this next element,
Speaker 3: he said, I will investigate. Obviously, it is okay to
Speaker 3: be critical of anything, but it is not okay to
Speaker 3: call for extreme violence, as that is illegal apart from
Speaker 3: the UN exemption where officials from countries recognized by the
Speaker 3: UN can say what they say at the UN. For
Speaker 3: the record, I do not personally agree with your views.
Speaker 3: I forget he's responding to here. Nonetheless, maybe it was
Speaker 3: Jackson ankle. The point of freedom of speech is allowing
Speaker 3: those whose views you disagree with to express those views. So,
Speaker 3: first of all, do you have any idea what might
Speaker 3: have triggered this, Like when you went back through your
Speaker 3: posts from the last couple of weeks, was there anything
Speaker 3: where you're like, oh, I crossed the line there.
Speaker 12: I was uncharacteristically quiet over the last couple of weeks.
Speaker 12: I must have been one of the only people that
Speaker 12: didn't comment on the unfolding scandal with the professors torching
Speaker 12: each other, which.
Speaker 4: That's what was missing was, which I'm wholly in supportive.
Speaker 12: Anything that burns down these institution lead academic institutions, I'm
Speaker 12: fine with. But I didn't actually say anything about it.
Speaker 12: It was actually one of the only times that I
Speaker 12: couldn't go back and find stuff that I might have
Speaker 12: said that would have pissed people off.
Speaker 1: So I was a little bit surprised by it.
Speaker 12: But the serious point, I mean, there's a funny side
Speaker 12: of this, but the serious side is how little disclosure
Speaker 12: there is. I found out about the band the same
Speaker 12: way you guys did and everyone else, which was rolling
Speaker 12: over in bed seeing my phone, you know, getting blown
Speaker 12: up with text messages and calls asking what happened to
Speaker 12: know what they were talking about.
Speaker 6: Everyone is like, we've noticed that Ken is suspended. Ken
Speaker 6: you must return.
Speaker 12: That's how I found out. And I never got an
Speaker 12: email from Twitter. You know, in the past, it's been
Speaker 12: you get suspended, they send you a message.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 12: People maybe complain that the appeal system doesn't work expeditiously
Speaker 12: enough or the way they wish, but there was at
Speaker 12: least some kind of a mechanism. Tell you, here's what happened,
Speaker 12: here's why we determine this nothing, And I still haven't
Speaker 12: gotten anything. Even subsequent to the reinstatement, I got an
Speaker 12: email saying, you've been reinstated, no explanation about what happened.
Speaker 12: So how are they going to prevent this from happening
Speaker 12: again if they don't even understand there's been no disclosure
Speaker 12: around how what exactly went wrong?
Speaker 5: Well, and that's interesting because Elon Musk seems to be
Speaker 5: implying there that to his knowledge, there was some algorithmic
Speaker 5: sweep of people who may have called for violence. And
Speaker 5: sometimes the algorithm everybody knows this. If you're trying to
Speaker 5: target people who have called for violence, you can sweep
Speaker 5: up all kinds of different mentions of one word that
Speaker 5: the algorithm is looking for and using as a target word.
Speaker 12: But that's you know, I'm not a call for violence
Speaker 12: kind of. I don't think it would go well from me.
Speaker 12: Not a very tough guy physically, so I'm not gonna
Speaker 12: push push or anything in that direction.
Speaker 6: But that's what like.
Speaker 5: So I'm again, like Ryan, trying to piece together what
Speaker 5: it sounds like is Elon Musk is saying Twitter has
Speaker 5: some sort of algorithmic sweep that was supposed to violence.
Speaker 12: And one of the ironies of all of this is
Speaker 12: that Lee Fong and I at the Intercept reported violent
Speaker 12: man exactly reported on the mechanism by which the federal
Speaker 12: government is communicating with the social media platforms to in
Speaker 12: the past takedown uh uh, you know, communicate to them
Speaker 12: what they perceived to.
Speaker 1: Be threats about.
Speaker 12: Yeah, COVID right, the lor in Afghanistan seemed to be expanding,
Speaker 12: and you know, I think that led to the Twitter
Speaker 12: files that Elon has it as you know, of historic
Speaker 12: importance and something we need to focus on. And the
Speaker 12: question now is what's going on with respect to Israel
Speaker 12: with these platforms. So when I see him say something
Speaker 12: like that, it makes me wonder if he and I'm
Speaker 12: not talking about the Israel government. I'm talking about the
Speaker 12: US intelligence community, which has its own set of interests
Speaker 12: around disinformation concerning the war.
Speaker 5: A moss And was regularly meeting, we know, with the
Speaker 5: intelligence community at least in the lead up to twenty
Speaker 5: the twenty twenty election, and I think Elon has said
Speaker 5: that that's not happening now, but we I mean, it's
Speaker 5: it's just really hard to know.
Speaker 4: Doing it on his own.
Speaker 3: So I'm just curious mechanically, so you hear, hey, Ken,
Speaker 3: how'd you get suspended?
Speaker 4: So what happened? When you go open up Twitter?
Speaker 12: It just wouldn't. I couldn't post, I couldn't do anything.
Speaker 12: It still let me you could look at things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I could look at things, but it said you
Speaker 1: have been permanently.
Speaker 12: Suspended at the bottom, and so I couldn't message anyone
Speaker 12: permanals anything. Yeah, and with again with nothing. I don't
Speaker 12: know how it would have appealed it because there was
Speaker 12: no decision sentered. There was no saying like, if you
Speaker 12: want to hear Ra's decision, go here. The potential context
Speaker 12: for this.
Speaker 3: Is not just the Bill Ackman kind of which I've
Speaker 3: never com.
Speaker 1: By the way, I must be one of the few
Speaker 1: people that didn't.
Speaker 4: So the EU, congratulations.
Speaker 3: The EU is not interested in the First Amendment, and
Speaker 3: you know the way we are because we have not
Speaker 3: made them like official states. They don't have a First Amendment.
Speaker 3: And so they have a policy where they're pushing Twitter.
Speaker 3: They're telling Twitter that they have insufficiently censored pro.
Speaker 4: Hamas accounts, and.
Speaker 3: You can you can imagine how somehow an algorithm would
Speaker 3: lump pro Hamas and anti Israel or anti IF or
Speaker 3: anti Gaza war into the same thing.
Speaker 1: That is the operative question in all this.
Speaker 12: And unfortunately, the people with the political tendency most likely
Speaker 12: to care about that kind of chilling effect on speech
Speaker 12: are are the ones that have such strong views on
Speaker 12: Israel that they're not saying anything about this right now.
Speaker 12: So we find ourselves in a really difficult situation where
Speaker 12: I think there's a real risk of what you're describing happening,
Speaker 12: but the political factions that might have raised issue with
Speaker 12: that are inclined to say, well, you know, let's go
Speaker 12: after Hamas.
Speaker 1: Let's go after these anti Israel factions.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: And you've seen Glenn are former colleague, Glenn Greenwall tangling
Speaker 3: a ton with the right because you know, he was
Speaker 3: in lockstep alliance with them, totally in support of free
Speaker 3: speech and especially speech that you find abhorrent. Right, and
Speaker 3: he's been shocked to see the right just turn on
Speaker 3: Israel on this question of Israel. Well, we you know,
Speaker 3: we don't we know, we don't actually mean we'll defend
Speaker 3: the speech rights of people who are critical of this
Speaker 3: Israeli assault.
Speaker 5: The right doesn't really say this is someone on the right.
Speaker 5: The right doesn't really have a clear idea of what
Speaker 5: it means by free speech, just that it means it's
Speaker 5: against political correctness.
Speaker 4: Everyone sort of agrees, right, this is a gun.
Speaker 12: Under my skin about all this. You know, I got banned, boohoo,
Speaker 12: poor me?
Speaker 1: Who cares?
Speaker 12: The important part in all this is the discourse around
Speaker 12: like speech and what kind of process we're gonna have
Speaker 12: in place for this guy that comes to be free speech.
Speaker 12: And something I saw people say again and again is haha,
Speaker 12: can you know cheered on people getting banned before and
Speaker 12: now it happened to him. I have never once cheered
Speaker 12: anyone getting banned, because I don't believe you know, if
Speaker 12: you're making calls to violence, yes, that's one thing. But
Speaker 12: anything that's constitutionally protected to the extent that we can,
Speaker 12: we should try to support that. I've always said that.
Speaker 12: So this kind of lazy dichotomy of you know, left
Speaker 12: doesn't care about this, right cares. It's like it just
Speaker 12: doesn't capture not only me, but I suspect a lot
Speaker 12: of people don't fit into these categories, you know.
Speaker 5: No, And I think that's what Twitter does to our brains.
Speaker 5: It gamifies things like free speech so that you can
Speaker 5: get a bunch of retweets by trying to dunk on
Speaker 5: can or whatever. It's just an easy it's a shortcut
Speaker 5: to virality, which is obviously very cheap. Do you think
Speaker 5: it's possible that this was a gift from Elon Musk
Speaker 5: to you, Ken for your mental health?
Speaker 6: I do think it.
Speaker 11: Edit.
Speaker 1: I did pretty well on subsec.
Speaker 12: I got a lot of newsletter subscribers, so a shout
Speaker 12: out if you could do that, if you could do
Speaker 12: this again at some point it's temporary.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, yeah, I think I was.
Speaker 6: Gonna say it is.
Speaker 5: Elon Musk talks all the time that one of the
Speaker 5: big reasons he bought Twitter was to clip to.
Speaker 6: Ben take on Kenny clip my foiler.
Speaker 1: Beth Bordon had a really funny comparison.
Speaker 12: She she likes to call it like, uh, what was
Speaker 12: it when when Obama was roasting Trump and you can
Speaker 12: see the gears turning in Trump's head like I'm going
Speaker 12: to destroy this guy. She's like, Yep, that was you
Speaker 12: in twenty twenty and that's why we're all stuck with
Speaker 12: Thanks Ken, I'll president date Elon well.
Speaker 5: He talks about how important X is as a free
Speaker 5: speech platform. Don Lemon talks about how important access is
Speaker 5: a free speech platform and ally certainly to you and
Speaker 5: others in this difficult time. But if that is true,
Speaker 5: if Elon must really believes that this is such an
Speaker 5: important platform because it shapes the discourse, it shapes news coverage,
Speaker 5: and I agree all of that stuff is absolutely true,
Speaker 5: it does shape his coverage, then it should be a
Speaker 5: paramount priority for him to protect journalists because, for example,
Speaker 5: we're just we're going to talk to you in a
Speaker 5: little bit about a big scoopy of coming out today,
Speaker 5: and presumably if excess such a big and important part
Speaker 5: of journalism and discourse, that's I mean serious to protect
Speaker 5: your ability to communicate.
Speaker 12: I would love for him to live up to the
Speaker 12: precepts that he espouses. You know, I'm obviously someone who
Speaker 12: has a history with him, and I'm not a fan
Speaker 12: of his, but when he claimed to care about free speech,
Speaker 12: I was obviously skeptical. But I would have been the
Speaker 12: you know, first person to say, you know, a great
Speaker 12: job if he followed through on that, because that's the
Speaker 12: important thing.
Speaker 1: Hey, yeah, right back, I'm doing it now, good job,
Speaker 1: thank you.
Speaker 3: Before we wrap this, I do you want to talk
Speaker 3: about the logical extension of this argument around calls for
Speaker 3: violence came up when it came to the Hamas account
Speaker 3: or a Hamas account, I think it was Kassam twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four. Yes, that's connected to the Hamas military wing.
Speaker 3: So Musk did ban this account, and he was that
Speaker 3: pressed on it by Jackson Hinkel on Twitter and asking
Speaker 3: why ban this but not other accounts that call for violence.
Speaker 3: Musk said this was a tough call while many government leaders,
Speaker 3: including the USA, do call for killing people.
Speaker 4: We have a UN exemption rule.
Speaker 3: If a government is recognized by the UN, we will
Speaker 3: not suspend their accounts. Hamas is not recognized as a
Speaker 3: government by the UN, so was suspended. Jackson then responded,
Speaker 3: I understand the rule, but I don't understand why it's
Speaker 3: only being applied to Palestinian accounts. Here are a few
Speaker 3: examples of pro Israeli accounts that have not been held
Speaker 3: accountable for violating the same rule. He quotes Laura Lumer
Speaker 3: saying expel all Jahadis from Congress and turned Gaza into
Speaker 3: a parking lot. He quotes somebody else saying flatten everything,
Speaker 3: spare no school, no children's hospital, no old age home,
Speaker 3: delete their entire gene pool off.
Speaker 4: The face of the earth.
Speaker 3: He quotes Bethany Mandel saying, not nuking these effing animals
Speaker 3: is the only restraint I expect, and that's own because
Speaker 3: the cloud would hurt Israelis Laura Lumer again, I support
Speaker 3: the complete destruction of gods that they have had more
Speaker 3: than enough time to evacuate. A one percent support this.
Speaker 3: Just so we are clear, and you can find others.
Speaker 3: So he responds to this and general suspensions should be
Speaker 3: even handed. We are also very reluctant to have permanent suspensions,
Speaker 3: so people should expect these series of temporary suspensions that
Speaker 3: become longer rather than instant permanent suspensions. All of this
Speaker 3: suggests that the banning of Kassam twenty twenty four, then
Speaker 3: all of these other accounts getting caught up in this,
Speaker 3: in this ban that was then overturned because of the
Speaker 3: public reaction. Followed by him saying people should expect temporary
Speaker 3: suspensions rather than instant permanent suspensions suggest something was deliberate here, totally,
Speaker 3: like because you're you described an instant permanent suspension and
Speaker 3: now he's saying, well, okay, maybe that's not the way
Speaker 3: to do it. Well, what do he claim is he
Speaker 3: is he going to have to now ban like Laura
Speaker 3: Lumer for a few hours?
Speaker 12: Well, fly is in the face of his claim that
Speaker 12: you know, oh this was just a spam thing and
Speaker 12: a few people got caught up it. Then why is
Speaker 12: every single account they could find people that had voice
Speaker 12: criticisms of Israel? Literally I couldn't find a single example
Speaker 12: that didn't fit that.
Speaker 6: Hmmm, that is interesting. I mean, it's not surprising.
Speaker 3: And it seems like he's suggesting that he might actually
Speaker 3: now have to do a tit for tat thing, so
Speaker 3: he looks balanced Bethy Mandel, watch out.
Speaker 5: It's a problem when you start to play this game
Speaker 5: and then so you can't play the game to begin with.
Speaker 5: It's why as people were really pression about this, and
Speaker 5: I was questioning it at the time a little bit.
Speaker 5: When Alex Jones was first banned, that was sort of
Speaker 5: the what toppled twitters House of cards like when they
Speaker 5: got rid of Alex Jones was like, Okay, here we
Speaker 5: go careening down the slippery slope.
Speaker 6: And it didn't seem like it at the.
Speaker 5: Time, but everything after that proved it really was that
Speaker 5: if you're going to play the game at all, it's
Speaker 5: not going to work well ideological for ideologically for one size,
Speaker 5: unless it's free space.
Speaker 3: Unless you carve out a like convicted of found liable
Speaker 3: for defamation on the platform, which they could have said
Speaker 3: that with Alex Jones and then and then then at
Speaker 3: least you have a standard that you then universally apply,
Speaker 3: like if Ken is like found to have to feigned somebody.
Speaker 12: And in fact, there is what Elon pledged to do
Speaker 12: when he first he said he wants to bring things
Speaker 12: into accordance with the host nation laws around speech right.
Speaker 6: Make your Kenny clipped joke?
Speaker 4: What was it should have been? Kenny clipped?
Speaker 3: Yes, are little we have Kenny clips on there, but
Speaker 3: I guess.
Speaker 12: The elips he was using a safety scissors very it
Speaker 12: wasn't very sharp any clip anyway, Ken, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3: Later today, I think we'll have up this next segment
Speaker 3: that we're going to pause now record, but I guess
Speaker 3: that's going to do it for us for this show.
Speaker 4: So thanks everybody for joining us. Do we have any plugs?
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