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