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But enough with that, let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody, Happy Tuesday.
We have an amazing show for everybody today, extra amazing because it's a bro.
Shows for to see. Ryan.
Did we do this pump?
That's right, indeed we do.
Gosh, I got to set up these topics. This is always so difficult. It's Crystal's job. So we're going to talk about the GOP primary. All right, we can start off there. It's very similar to yesterdays show. Today is actually the New Hampshire primary. The first six votes have already been cast, all for Nikki Haley.
But don't worry.
It's a very very tiny little town. There are more reporters there than actual voters. We'll also talk about the Democratic primary. Some weird stuff going on. I'm curious to get your inside. It appears that there's some Biden effort to try and quash votes there, so we'll talk about that. We'll talk about Dean Phillips and Mary and Williamson, everybody's closing pitch. We've got some of the ads and everything. We've got actually a guest who's going to be joining
us in the show. This is one of those organizers for the writ end ceasefire fire, so we will see how that goes, how that materializes.
We've also got predictions. I forgot about that.
Crystal actually sent us her predictions, and Ryan and I will give hours as well on how we think that the night is going to go in the GOP primary. There are some major developments in the Trump legal front in terms of that divorce case involving Fanny Willis and some of the other things that we're learning about that Trump truly is the luckiest man alive.
Ran on Israel.
Some crazy news just happening breaking overnight. Twenty one IDF soldiers died in a single incident in combat. It is the deadliest incident so far for the IDF. That comes amidst a new ceasefire proposal from the Israeli government, as well as a new US military assessment on how Israel Paris to be using the war.
And that's good according to our strategist.
Finally, and of course Bill Ackman returns to the show. I mean, at least in terms of topics, we're going to talk about some campus censorship stuff and a very insane incident at Columbia University.
Before we get to the show.
Though, do not forget, we've got an election special that's going on right now twenty five percent off on our yearly membership Breakingpoints dot Com.
Also in terms of planning, so here's what we're gonna have.
We are gonna have a breaking segment tonight after we get the results of the New Hampshire primary, and tomorrow we will have a special Breaking Points Counterpoints Crossover event where I will be joining the Counterpoints team here in the studio and we will have Crystal joining us remotely before we have our normal Thursday show. So all of your election coverage, you guys are helping us out with Breakingpoints dot Com again to become a premium member. But
let's go ahead and begin with the GOP primary. So what exactly can we expect from tonight? We thought it would be prudent, as always to give people a preview of the closing pitch to New Hampshire voters. First, we're going to listen to the front runner, Donald Trump. This is his last ad in the state of New Hampshire. Let's take a list.
Americans were promised to secure retirement Nicky Haley's plan and.
Set social Security medicare. How would you manage the entitlements? We say, the rules have changed.
We changed retirement age to reflecting life expectancy.
What we do know is sixty five is way too low and we need to increase that increase.
That gay Least plan cut social Security benefits for eighty two percent of Americans.
Trump will never let that happen. I'm Donald J.
Trump and I approved this message.
Very interesting tactic there, Ryan. We're going to get into some polling, but it appears to have worked. It's also just, you know, sometimes we don't marvel enough with the fact that the GOP front runner is attacking somebody else from wanting to cut Social.
Security, and that actually is pretty crazy.
In twenty sixteen, it was one of the things that had people on the left so intrigued by this Republican primary because we had all seen the polling for many years and done the reporting that the center, the center right, the center left, and the right had been trying to cut solid security and medicare.
For a generation.
It broke the Bush presidency when he tried to do it, and despite having all of the power in Washington, they just couldn't do it because the public was so against it.
That was obvious.
Trump is good at recognizing what the public is for and against. Yes, they are not four cuts to solid security and medicare. Nicki Haley apparently not so good at that. And she can just use a clip of her saying that she's going to make people's lives worse, right.
I mean, we've played it here. We showed it to our focus group as well.
It didn't play over well with our New Hampshire GOP focus group, if you guys will recall it was one of the first focus groups we ever did here.
At breaking points.
Nicky Haley has a Defending Democracy super pac running ads on her behalfs we wanted to give people a taste of what the anti Trump position looks like in New Hampshire. Here's the ad that they're have on the airwaves.
The new Pool shows Nicki Haley is now within striking distance of Trump heading into the New Hampshire primary.
One state be Trump from winning the nomination New Hampshire. One candidate can defeat Nicki Haley. Most Granite Staters want to defeat Trump, but he'll win unless voters stand firm behind a single alternative. That's why undeclared voters must go to their polling place on January twenty third to support Haley New Hampshire. We can't waste this opportunity to defeat Trump. Defending Democracy Together is responsible for the content of this.
Advertising, Defending Democracy being one of those Bill Crystal groups. The problem for Nicki Haley Ryan is that in general, she's surging amongst independents and amongst Democrats. If you want a perfect example of this, CNN actually was to going around doing interviews. At a recent Nicki Haley interview, Here's what her own voters had to say on whether they would vote for Trump or Biden plot twist.
A lot of them are saying, Biden, let's take a lesson and Biden, what.
Are you gonna do? That really puts me in a quandrey I Frankly am more scared of another Trump term than another Biden's term.
Well, voted for him twice. I don't know that I could be a good conscience wait for him again. I mean, he does things we teach our children not to do.
I would probably end up either voting for myself it's a protest.
Or for Biden.
Probably end up voting for myself or for Biden. I'm pretty sure that lady's probably going to vote for Biden.
She's younger.
Yeah, no shade, no shade at all. That's a totally rational position.
But you know, you just got to be honest that a lot of those people isn't really even fair to call them Republicans anymore. And this is not a personal dispersion. It's just like, look, that's what a realignment looks like.
That's how Biden was able to win many GOP counties back in twenty twenty in that election, it was specifically because of these former Trump voters, largely white, largely college educated people who previously would have voted for John McCain, Mitt Romney in some cases lifelong Republicans, but for Trump it was just too much. But the flip side of this is that Trump also brings out a hell of a lot of non college educated white voters who they would never vote for anybody else. In some case the
never voted in twenty thirty years. So it's the flip side of that coin as well.
But also this is not the NFL playoffs, This is not single elimination. Yeah, Haley can beat Trump in New Hampshire, yes, and he's still gonna romp everywhere else in the country. So this this line that they have in the ad that says one state can stop Donald Trump, that's actually not how it works.
Yeah, it's just not true at all.
She can romp there tonight and it won't act. And I don't even think she's not gonna romp.
That's it.
Well, save a predictions, saving prediction. We do have another funny clip just came across the radar. Had to play this just to give you guys an idea of like how Trump voters and others have a cheap enmity for Nicki Haley. This was an incident actually on her final day of campaigning yesterday in New Hampshire. A man shouts out, will you marry me? Nicky says, well, are you going to vote for me? And she goes, no, I'm going to vote for Trump, and she's like, all right, get out of here.
Let's take a listen.
But you know what, we've got a lot on the line here, we really do.
And you look at what's happening in this election.
Yes, are you going to vote for me?
Get out of here, Get out of Hereptils are off, Yeah, nuptials apparently are off.
Oh well, there's some interesting questions around that, but we won't get into it today.
In terms of the polling in all of that, this is one where actually the Washington Post just came out with a new Mammoth poll which is really worth digging into because it gives us a deep insight not only to Nicki Haley and her alleged like skyrocketing, but some of the group by group polling. So guys, we can please put this up there, and Ryan just chime in for anything that you see.
The reason this is useful is it shows the November twenty twenty three number.
Now note this, while Nicki Haley has gone from eighteen to thirty four percent, it's November. Trump has gone from forty six to fifty two. DeSantis allegedly seven to eight. Remember he just dropped out of the race. Now Chris Christy was at eleven. Now obviously he's at one. It's pretty clear that Chris Christie voters largely have crossed over to Nicki Haley, and that's what helps us consolidate her.
The DeSantis number, we just don't know. We don't have any idea.
The poll was conducted around the same time that Desants is actually dropping out out of the race, the very last day that they were doing it, So it's not, you know, exactly it's not exactly clear to us where those people.
Are going to go.
But let's say that we split the difference and we go Trump and Haley. Yeah, that would put Nikki Haley at thirty seven, but that still puts trumpet some fifty five, which is just such an incredibly dominant position. The next one, though, is this is the true money because how different groups of New Hampshire Republicans plan on voting, and they actually have a head to head here of Trump and Nikki Haley. So, for example, New Hampshire potential GOP primary voters are all
fifty two percent, as we just said, registered Republicans. This is a very clear number, sixty four percent. Trump twenty two percent Hailey registered undeclared thirty eight percent Trump forty eight percent Hailey. So she's winning there amongst those undeclared voters extremely motivated to vote, That seems like a category I would want. Fifty eight percent Trump thirty percent Hailey,
no college degree sixty twenty seven college graduates. Here's another big flag thirty nine percent Trump forty three percent Hailey. Very conservative Trump seventy eight, Somewhat conservative Trump fifty seven, moderate liberal Trump twenty nine, Nikki Haley fifty six. Are you noticing a trend here? And then also amongst those who believe that Biden won due to fraud eighty two percent Trump, six percent Hailey, Biden won fairly fourteen percent
Trump seventy one percent Hailey. Abortion should be legal in all cases thirty eight percent, Trump forty nine percent Hailey. And then finally, Trump's abortion should be illegal in all cases seventy two fourteen.
What do you make of all this? Ryan? To me, It's just this is such an obvious class.
Yeah, I mean, Haley's Haley's got the people that we understand as never Trump or these are suburban voters who are just appalled by Trump.
They're more moderate, they're they're a little wealthier, they went to college.
They have been gravitating towards the Democratic Party. A lot of these, for whatever reason, a kind of are the ones who are lagging behind in the realignment.
But that's who they are. And yeah, they don't like Trump.
And so what Haley has been doing is that she has been consolidating this support of those never Trump type voters, but she has not been peeling any support away from Trump, which is the key.
Yeah, I mean, that's just such a problem for her.
And then let's put the final slide police guys up there on the screen, and what we can see here is Trump has a big advantage over Haley in trust to handle immigration and the economy. Those are important because those are the two most important issues for Republican voters. So, for example, on immigration policy, you can see that sixty two percent say Trump, twenty six percent say Nikki Haley. On economic policy, you've got fifty eight Trump, twenty nine
Nikki Haley. Foreign policy, it's fifty seven Trump, thirty two Nikki Haley. Abortion is actually the only one where there's a little bit of a split, only forty percent Trump. But obviously still got the plurality there. Something interesting that was flagged to me Ryan was that the economy numbers actually were a big one for Trump, that he was actually consolidated over time. And the reason why is those
social security ads that he's been running. Those social Security ads have just been killing Niki Haley with a lot of older GOP voters, people who we had that one woman in the ads she said, I might vote for myself or vote for Biden. But people think that age group, especially sixty plus, and remember this is the vast majority of people are going to vote in the primary and frankly in the election too. So you're always going to wrap your head around that. And in that what do
we see trump domination? That social security policy might be the single most popular thing that he actually believes in this primary. And a very hidden part of the media wants to talk about abortion and stop the steal obviously very important issues big in twenty twenty two, but you.
Know, social security pretty important too. We don't focus enough on it.
The media hates social security yea like the media class, like the owners. Top editors in general are the ones who believe in their heart of hearts that Washington spends too much money and we need to get our deficit under control. You know, we watched that circus all throughout
the Obama administration. Actually, all these different efforts to cut a grand bargain where you're going to raise taxes and you're going to cut social security in Medicare and you're going to make the CBO numbers look better.
Good point, and people hate that's.
Yes.
I think a lot of wealthy people in Washington are they kind of glad that they're going to have self security down the line, but they think of it as like gravy, like it's their iras, their four oh one ks, and their kind of generational wealth which is going to take care of them in their retirement. That's not the case for most Americans. Most Americans believe that accurately that they paid into Medicare and self security and they're relying
on it in retirement. So the idea that you're going to make them work longer and get fewer benefits is just infuriating.
Yes, I mean no, you're absolutely right, and that's part of the problem that we see overall. Now, finally, let's just put the RCP numbers up there. What we've got is real clear politics shows Trump at fifteen points leading currently in the RCP average. You've got the overall that you can see in almost every There's not a single poll ride that we could see from the last couple of days that doesn't show Trump at least at fifty percent,
with over fifty percent in many of those. And obviously that still does not even factor in the Dysantis number. So look, if Trump wins by sixty, I mean, that's just one of those where not only is it not outside the realm of possibility, I would actually consider it, you know, relatively likely. I'm not quite sure you know what exactly she's doing here, and this is her last stand, I guess you could say.
So let's move on to the predictions.
I've got crystals here that I can read for everybody, and we will see. Okay, So she says this is going to be fifty five forty Trump over Nikki Haley. Now we're also going to include her Democratic predictions because these are interesting. Sixty two percent Biden, eighteen percent for Dean Phillips, seven percent for Mary Ann Williamson, and three percent for the ceasefire. What's your back of the Napkin math for the GOP and then for the Democratic primer.
I think Trump pushes like fifty eight, yeah, to about thirty five. Okay, it's a blowout, Yeah, because I think a bunch of those dissantis people actually wind up with Trump. I agree, it's not as simple as people think that Trump and Dessand's only sam As and Haley don't like each other either. And also there's like some people just don't like Nikki Haley.
Yeah, and Desander's endors Trump.
Right, Yeah, that's not nothing.
Uh a Democratic side, I think Trump, I think Biden maybe fifty or slightly less, Like you're gonna have to write him in.
Yeah, that's a lot.
That's a lot of work now, right in the campaigns you know, have succeeded Markowski and all that.
But it's rare. It's a rare thing.
So maybe maybe I think Crystal's probably about right. Maybe Dean Phillips pushes close to twenty. Maryanne pushes close to ten. Uh, ceasefire. We'll talk up later in the show about this. Probably is going to be lucky to get like a thousand votes total because it's it's very late. It's an unusual thing. Yes, people are like, what do you mean right in ceasefire? Do we get a ceasefire? If it wins, it.
Could shock people DMFI.
The pro Israel group is just wrote yesterday to the New hamp Sure Secretary of States saying, don't even count them.
So at least there's some concern out there.
Yeah, well they don't know what the number over for even a thousand is thousand two. He's one too many, Okay, So mine actually think I'm gonna go Trump sixty. I think he's going to break the sixty percent threshold. He's got his you know, momentum is on his side. Everything is going just the energy that we see. New Hampshire was already Trump country back in twenty sixteen. You've got tons there. Sure, you know the New Hampshire establishment is behind Nikki Haley.
No, who gives it? You know, like whatever they look at Iowa. You know you have the.
Freaking governor of the state indorsed ron de Sanders. How much good did that do for him? So okay, you know everyone's like, oh, Christian new New I'm like, all right, whatever, you know, he's ready to But.
Yeah, they don't. They don't listen to and they're also not electing a governor of New Hampton.
Exactly right, right, So how they would vote for their senator and we've seen this previously. They can vote, they elect Democratic senators when it's a general election, but not in the primary. That's not how things work. Remember who they put up in their secreatorial candidate? Well general exactly, Yeah, how did that come? But my point just being that the electorate the primary electorate very very different. So we can keep that. I think Trump is going to beat that.
I think Nikki Hilly the lucky to get thirty five percent of the vote. And then the big question is is she going to drop out tonight? You know, if she does not cross that threshold, if she doesn't win the primary. Because we got to set the calendar up for everybody. We have to remember the South Carolina primary is more than a month now away after this, So you got to twist in the wind for a whole month before you're about to play in your.
Own fares state, staring at polls show you down, showing you down by forty points in your own homeste. Kamala Harris dropped out because she didn't want to get rinsed in California.
Yes, exactly right, which was a head of Super two or no, not Super Tuesday. But I think a little bit after it they revised it.
Yeah, the mail in voting started very early, but it was a Super Tuesday.
So we can just surmise, like, it's very possible that if Trump absolutely romps, I think a sixty would do it. I think there would be enough to push her out. But listen, she's a narcissist, who knows. You know, some donors enjoy lighting their cash on fire, so maybe they're going to keep doing that. It's it's certainly possible for the Democratic primary. I tend to agree with you. I think Crystal's underestimating Dean here a little bit. She has
Dean at eighteen. I'm gonna give him thirty five. I just think that, you know, being on the ballot counts. Being on the ballot matters. It's just one of those is easier is going to be, you know, near the top of the tickets, one with the most quote unquote name id that actually is there, you know, putting ceasefire and writing in Joe Biden. That takes some effort. I think you'd be lucky to crack fifty Marianne. I mean,
her campaign is just really struggle. I haven't seen a poll with her above three, So I'm not even sure I would give her the seven percent ceasefire.
I'm with you. I don't even think it rates. Maybe less than one percent.
Yeah, I think less than one percent. Just yeah.
I think you're going to be counting ceasefire in numbers of votes rather than rather than in percentages.
But I think I think you're right that.
You know, people have been telling telling polsters, you know, eighteen percent or whatever for Dean Phillips. But they've also been telling polsters they badly do not want Biden to run for president, right, And so voting against somebody against somebody against him, you know, voting for somebody against him is a way to protest that. The other way to
protest it is just to not show up. So I think I would guess like you have lower turnout than that's four point, because if you're a Democrat, you can either go out vote for somebody you don't really like, vote for these two other candidates that are on the ballot but you don't really have much passion for, or you can mess around and maybe jump over into the Republican primary and vote for Mickey Aleey. You don't really like either, and it's not even going to matter because
Trump's going to win either way. So I think a decent number of them stay home. On the other hand, they have so much pride in their or little New Hampshire primary.
Yeah, that's true.
But that's my thing is that though he certainly did so, I think there's I think there's a chance there.
Could be a shockingly low number that's possible.
Yeah, right, so let's go through the scenario.
So like very very low turnout, which would Biden win, but maybe Dean over performance. There could be medium turnout, which actually, again I would put Dean a little bit higher up in there.
Here's the question too.
Yeah, we have Biden beating Trump in New Hampshire lately, up by like five points or sites. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how many votes Trump gets compared to Biden, and I think the media might pick up on that because Trump could actually end up getting in a competitive Republican primary more votes than Biden gets an uncompetitive one.
Right, and that would I mean Dan to a certain extent, though, It's like, what is that we're comparing apples to oranges because you've got a competitive primary versus non competitive primary, so it's not exactly the best barometer, but yeah, you're right, it's certainly something that we will look at. Like we said, we're gonna have breaking news on that actually tonight, so you can look forward to that, and then we will also have a show tomorrow morning. All right, So let's
actually go to the Democratic primary. As we said, there's a very strange thing happening in the state of New Hampshire. We've gotten a little bit of Inkling's Ryan about the Biden campaign getting worried about this. Now they're telling people to go and write in Biden, even though they're like, oh, we don't actually care, but now we do care, so
panicking a little bit. And one of the instances you could know this is that there are now robocalls with deep fakes of Biden's voice actually telling people across the state to not vote tomorrow because it's important that you save your vote for the November election. Pretty sure it doesn't work that way, but let's take a listen, and again this is going out to a lot of people in New Hampshire.
Let's take a listen to this.
You know the value of voting democratic on our vote count. It's important that you save your vote for the November election. Will need your help in electing Democrats up and down the ticket. Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump. Again, your vote makes a difference in November, not just Tuesday.
So it's a deep, deep fake Biden telling people not to vote for Biden.
What do you make of this? So obviously these are all these dark money groups. You never know who's actually behind this stuff. I mean, I'm not going to say it's connected to the DNC or whatever, but clearly someone on behalf of Biden is putting this out for a reason. If they don't want people to come out to.
Vote, why would somebody on behalf of Biden though, want him not to vote so that they can say, well, we didn't lose because we didn't try.
Yeah, something like that. I think they were.
I think they just want to or maybe maybe right, maybe it's a what you think it's an anti Biden mary Anne?
Oh, I think that was That was actually Mary Anne's voice. She was impersonating Biden. Yeah, I mean, it's just one of those Phillips last night.
So, I mean already though this is getting attention. The New Hampshire Attorney General is actually investigating whether this is.
A voter suppression.
Oh, it absolutely is.
Yeah, I mean it definitely is.
There's First Amendment car about when it comes to election, like deliberate misinformation around, Like you're not allowed to stay voting day is Monday, right exactly when it's actually Tuesdays unless you can prove to a jury that you really are an idiot.
Didn't know?
But like that's illegal, Like what what you just heard? Deep faking the president's voice and then telling them not to vote. Also, it should be legal to make so little sense. Yeah, it's a crime against logic. Yeah, you can vote in both the primary and the general, like the people do it all the time.
That is quite legal.
Here's what's a little weird, Ryan.
The message has a phone number at the end that belongs to the former Democratic chair of the New Hampshire primary who now runs a super pac which is supporting the New Hampshire write in campaign for Biden.
So I mean that's probably somebody like planting drugs on somebody, Okay, right, all right, Yeah, I think it's that's trying to point fingers.
So according to her, she says in an interview that she began receiving Sunday evening calls for people who would received the message. She says that she's had called her and she was not a Biden supporter. She says that, you know, they had nothing to do with it. So I don't know, I don't know exactly what's going on here, but we can track it and we can just say something is happening. There's definitely a voter suppression effort which
is going on in state. Let's put this up there as well, which just shows you a little bit of his panic. This is from the New York Times, and again I want to get some of your analysis. They say that while they are, you know, they don't care necessarily about the New Hampshire ballot because they're not on it.
After moving the primary to South Carolina, quote, they are still hoping that he will win, and by doing that, they're actually spending a decent amount of money on the right in So I'm curious what you think of this. What what is this something that is coming back to bite them? Are they actually panicking? You covered a lot in terms of way they rigged the Democratic primary.
Give people some background on that.
And the background around this particular fight is that Biden wanted to basically reward South Carolina, you know, for making him president by making South Carolina the first primary. They also punished Iowa, got rid of the Iowa caucuses after that.
One's fair, This one's yeah.
And also Iowa was helpful to Democrats because it was a swing state for so long.
Not a swing state anymore.
We used to say that elections, you know, started in Iowa and finished in Florida. Not true anymore. Both are red states at this point, and so Iowa was gone. New Hampshire then always first in the nation primary and they would say, look, it's right in our constitution. They love telling people that their constitution says they have to
be the first primary. That the DNC is like, we don't really care what your constitution says, Like, we can set the primary, and we're making the first one South Carolina. New Hampshire said screw you, we're holding one anyway. And so Biden was like, well, then I'm not going to be on the ballot, Like we're not going to sanction this,
We're not going to participate in it. But it's so ingrained in people's minds that if you even traveled to New Hampshire to this day, even even though it's not a sanqusd primary, Let's say six months ago somebody a Democrat traveled to New Hampster. Oh look, look look at that Gavin Newsom going in New Hampshire. Maybe he wants to be president. So it's the mythology around it is
still locked into people's minds. And so as it gets closer, and as Biden's numbers continue to plummet, they they reckoned that they just simply could not withstand getting annihilated in a state like New Hampshire that has this mythology around it. So now right, you've got these Biden allities who're like,
we can't, we can't have this. We need to write Biden in and then if we can writeing with Biden, if we can we can get that going, then we can show that there's that the grassroots support is really there for him. It was New Hampshire that knocked LBJ out.
Yes that's right, I mean yeah, I mean there's a lot of mythology around Hampshire. You can go both ways, right, So New Hampshire is what saved Bill Clinton campaign back in ninety two. New Hampshire is really the first state that Donald Trump ever won, so the two of them have a lot of affinity for that. Iowa that's like an Obama state. That's where Obama was able to launch two thousand and eight, but he ended up losing New Hampshire. So there's a lot of things that famous Hillery famous.
There was also the Tabasco thing. Am I forget that right around the same time. I think it was around the same time. I'll never personally never forget that moment. But let's get and think about some of the closing pitches. So, as we already predicted, I think Dean is going to actually do a little bit better than a lot of people are expecting, just because his name is literally on the ballot. And Dean gave his final closing argument in a video that was posted yesterday to New Hampshire voters.
Let's take a listen.
Well, tomorrow was the big day, January twenty third, the first in the nation primary right here in the Granite State. I've spent the better part of the last three months with so many of you Democrats, independents, Republicans, Libertarians, and I just want to say thank you. It's been a remarkable experience. I know how to do this. I'm the
second most bipartisan member of the entire US Congress. I came from the business world where you could never succeed by demeaning and endangering half of your customers.
You actually do the opposite.
You invite people, you listen to them, you learn them, you welcome them. That's what I'm going to do as president. We're going to solve these problems by working together. I'm going to take what I learned here and spread it all around the world, the way you practice democracy, what you've shared with me, and most of all, how we're going to fix it. So if you're ready for change, I'm ready to be your president.
Just an uber normal pitch there. I mean, in a sane world, I think something like that would have worked. But the thing is Ryan. I mean, you know we cover this before. MSNBC literally refuse to avisment on. He still has not done an interview on the network, and the reason why is MSNBC knows of the Democrats actually trust the media. They are I've seen a few things. The Financial Times had a piece on him the Wall
Street Journal as well. Let's be real, like that's not going to make any difference, Like it's all about television and it's all just for especially for a lot of these boomers, the world that they're living in is one where and if it does not on linear TV, it doesn't exist. And so Dean's had a rough time. He had a campaign event where nobody showed up. But I'm just not going to discount your name being on the balance. I just think that's, you know, that's a massive strategic advantage.
He never made a case for like who he was or why he was running. He started out with like this Medicare for all and he was for free college, and so you thought for a second that this guy who had been this centrist kind of lawmaker is now going to kind of run.
He sees like room to Biden's left.
That didn't really catch on because I think it's just didn't map to him right, Like you see that closing ad, where do you see medicare for all and like free college fitting into that ad like I'm the most bipartisan guy out there. And so after after that fell apart, he goes back to on the bipartisan guy, and then you're just Biden, except you know Cojin And at that point you're like, well, we already have Biden, and if your coach.
Is not a terrible pitch, I mean something, it could work.
People would have to know who he is.
Yeah, that's true, Like I think Biden, but Cogin could be like a Newsome, but he's he's already understood to be.
Like a threat.
Like to get it, to get next to him, to get onto MSNBC requires you to have a little bit more kind of muscle behind you.
That's a good point.
We also have some video of Marianne Williamson in one of her last campaign events that she posted yesterday.
Let's take a listen to her closing pitch.
We have always been this kind of bipolar American mind. We have always been this inherent struggle. It's in the DNA of this country. Other generations rose up and they responded to the Gilded Age. They responded to it with the establishment of the labor movement. Other generations rose up and they responded to institutionalize the president of black people and segregation in the American South. I'm running for president because it's our turn now.
All right, so we'll see how it goes. I mean, Marianne Crystal said this yesterday. I think it was totally true on Israel, seems to just fumble the ball because it's like, clearly that's an animating issue against Biden. Dean is pro Israel from what we've seen in a Crystal's interviews with him.
So obviously that's just something that's just on the table.
And now you've got the CEA Spire votes, which may even draw away from Marianne. But by not making her name synonymous with that, I think she risked the only chance of cracking let's say seven to ten percent, which look, I mean, at the end of the day, that's not just not going to cut it, period, It doesn't really matter. But you know, if we're thinking about seven to ten, it's a lot different. Seven to ten's a lot different than three maybe four, Like, we don't know where that's gonna ENDU.
I think there was absolutely a path for a credible candidate to take a critical of Israel position over the last three months and put real pressure on Biden. Separately, this is another conversation we can have another time.
Be fascinating. If f RFK we're in that camp.
Yes, that's a good that.
Would be, that that'd be and the parallels would be amazing, you know to nineteen sixty eight and LBJ And I.
Mean I think you would win. I don't think there's anything.
He might win, but he's but he's like to the right of Biden on Israel, so it's just not true in the world of possibility.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it's one of those where I think you would definitely win a New Hampshire primary just because again a mighty ballot that's just wanted. He's already doing well there anyway. So it's one of those where he decided to go independent.
And I get it.
You know, the DNC was working against him and all that. He just didn't identify with the party anymore. But you cannot ever forget this. Getting on the ballot.
Is really hard.
Yeah, the California does not want you on the ballot. We were looking yesterday. It takes like one hundred and something thousand signatures and look, the signature wars are nuts. It requires you to get like thirty percent more than you actually need because lawyers are going to challenge the validity and even if you get totally legit ones if you don't write legibly, or if you don't write the proper address, or there's all kinds of legal tricksters that
the Republicans and the Democrats have used. Really tough in these states. Yeah, I mean Texas, same thing. Good luck getting on the ballot in some big states with thirty forty fifty electoral votes like in these ones. And that's what you actually need to really compete, you know, and actually to draw some stakes away. So look, keep that in mind as we continue to cover the RFK junior campaign. Right now, he's only still on the ballot in Utah.
He's got some time, you know, he's got a little bit of time, but some of the filing deadlines and all this stuff are coming up. It takes a hell of a lot of organizations. So final thoughts on the Democratic primary tonight, what do you think?
It's a rare primary where I really don't know what's going to happen because of all these different variables to write in the absolute disgust with Biden, but the anemic performance of his opponents, and so it just leaves, you know, so much room for people to have to have a bunch of difficult and like unpleasant decisions in front of them, trying to express something into a system that doesn't want to hear from them and doesn't give them a good way to actually express anything.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I like I said, I think Dean will overperform a bit. But in general, there's some tough you know, some tough work right now just for everybody going against them. And unfortunately, I think Biden's basically gotten away with rigging the primary.
I think it's unfortunate. You know, you basically got It's just crazy.
You get to deem a state which by all means is totally in the tank for you, with the most machine politics arguably in the whole country, whenever it comes to a primary and it's a red state, like both of these primaries. First primaries should obviously be in actual swing states. I've always thought Michigan was a great pick, something genuinely fifty to fifty industrial working class.
Or you could go the other way.
You could say Super Tuesday should go first and everybody should be forced to compete national But people just basically rigging things for themselves.
It's not right. And you know, prior to Biden.
Nobody even dared to try, but you had the opportunity decided to pick it. And I've said here before, wild you know, if you can go into this too, Obama will never happen again. That type of scenario. It will never have the insurgent cannot win. If South Carolina is going to be number one, it's going to be incredibly difficult.
If you got the establishment, it'd be very hard, but it's not completely impossible. But the other thing that's changing is that these races are now so national. Like even back in two thousand and seven, when Obama is running in Iowa, he could be a lot more popular in Iowa than he could be nationally. Now, for the most part, your national polls have a gravitational poll on your regional
and local polls. That the moments where you're going to have somebody who's doing extremely well in a state but not doing well nationally are basically gone because we are now a national culture and a national media environment getting because we're all in the same you know, slightly tweaked
feeds from TikTok, Twitter and everybody else. And so that that's the other reason that you're not going to have somebody that can kind of come come from nowhere, because you have to have nat And the only reason that Obama got the national numbers that he did was by winning Ioway exactly that show that he could win. And so then other people were like, oh, if he can win, then I'm with him. But if you don't have that chicken, if you don't have that egg, you can't get the chicken.
Very very very true.
Joining us now is Andrew Veolinsky. He is an organizer and former new hand let me get this correctly, former executive counselor in New Hampshire, and he is an organizer in the right in Ceasfire campaign.
Andrew, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us.
Hey, thanks for having me absolutely so. Andrew, you sent us a picture of your ballot. We're going to edit it and put it up on the screen. You have written in ceasefire there, and you've been an organizer in kind of this last minute movement. We'll give us some of the reasoning behind wanting folks to write in ceasfire on the New Hampshire ballot as opposed to rallying around a different candidate.
Well in New Hampshire first in the primary means first in the nation. Primary means that we have a great deal of responsibility to make our concerns known, and our vote is our agency. I watched on October seventh as the attack happened and hostages were taken in Heart and then I kept watching in November and December, and I saw the Israeli siege of Gaza, the destruction of the healthcare system, the apparently indiscriminate bombing of non combatants, and
not enough response from the Biden administration. And so in the middle of December, I penned a letter to the editor telling everyone that I was going to write the words cease fire on my ballot.
That's where it started.
About ten days ago, other people started reaching out to me, and now this effort is taken off with coverage on shows like Yours, Press Coverage and Politico, Nation, huff Post, Al Jazeera are at the Boston Globe. It's really gotten a bit of a life of its own, and we hope to send a message to the president about our concerns, in particular the violence that's happening perpetrated by the net Yahoo government in.
The time between your letter to the editor being published, and say ten days ago when you started to get some modest financial support from around the country to actually, you know, turn this into a real campaign. How much traction had it gotten just kind of virally grassroots word of mouth wise in those couple of weeks or are we really only looking at the last ten days as a serious effort.
So I have a decent following here in New Hampshire, and so there was response by I would say the people most interested in social justice issues in our state, and some rather colorful responses complaining about my letter were anatomically incorrect but.
Picked up.
Really, and this isn't just the influence of other people in New Hampshire's primary focus really grows in that last week to ten days and builds right through to the primary. So the idea that it was somewhat limited and then exploded.
Isn't that unusual here?
Now?
You recent you recently had the Secretary of State announced that they actually would be tallying, you know, the number of people who wrote in ceasefire. You've also had a super pac called Democratic Majority for Israel has written to the Secretary of State kind of urging them to reverse that decision. So where does that stand when will we learn how many people wrote in Ceasefire.
So I spoke directly to the Secretary yesterday late morning. He told me that all the write in votes would be counted and that he was intending to report both the Biden write ins and the Ceasefire writ ins. Ceasefire doesn't have a million two in a pack behind it. Last night sometime Pro Israel Pack wrote to the Secretary complaining that it was illegal to report the ceasefire results. I disagree with their analysis. I've done election law in
New Hampshire for the last twenty five years. I don't think they have a leg.
To stand on.
But there's been no announcement by the Secretary that he's going to change his position, and I expect later this evening, after the bulls close, the Secretary will announce the Ceasefire writing votes.
Andrew, all we have you, it's the daily election and all that. Just what's the feeling, you know, you were elected in the state of New Hampshire. What is the feeling there of being bypassed by the Biden White House or by the DNZ by Biden and this current now effort to do a write in campaign for Biden.
How does that make people feel voters there.
Well, I understand the arguments that a more diverse state should go first, but someone that the DNC should have looked at our laws. We have a particular statute that says New Hampshire has to hold its primary seven days before the next primary. Caucuses don't count. The Democratic Party lost the governors raised state House, and the state Senate, so it's all Republican controlled. There was zero chance that the Republican controlled legislature was going to repeal that statute
to accommodate the DNC. It was probably one of the dumber moves I've seen for the DNC to change the order, not recognizing that the secretary of the state was legally bound to hold the primary when he's holding it. So it's been an odd primary. You've got this supposed small time grassroots effort to write in the president, and then Washington Post yesterday reported it's backed by a million two in a pack. You have Republicans dropping in and dropping
out almost by the minute. So now that it's a Haley and Trump race are very popular governor backing Hailey, we'll see how that works out. You have two unknowns running as Democrats, Dean Phillips and Mary Anne Williamson. There's also an interesting comedian named Verman Supreme ballot and Vermin Supreme's goal is to beat Dean Phillips.
So it's, uh, there you have it.
What's what's your sense of where the ceasefire votes are going to come from? Are they pulling from Vermin Supreme? Are they pulling from Biden? Mary Anne Dean?
Why not.
Endorse a candidate who's for a cease fire? What was your thinking there? And what's your what's your go ahead?
And I have a follow that was intentional. I am not interested in replacing Joe Biden. I didn't want to support a person who would then be a threat to the president in the no member election. I wanted him to do better by recognizing the importance of this issue in the one way that he seems to pay attention, which is to the vote. So if we get people to go out and actually mark their ballots with a vote, we're in a position where President Biden can veto UN resolutions,
but he can't veto the vote. And this effort has grown the another ten or fifteen states now looking at repeating this effort of writing in ceasefire instead of backing a third party candidate or a farm team candidate like Phillipson and Williamson.
Interesting, what's your number in your mind as the votes are counted that would be a success for you and that would land for the president.
It's not a specific number.
So part of it starts with the coverage we're currently receiving across.
The nation in a big way.
Turnout is supposed to be high on the Republican side. It's not clear to me that it will be as high. It likely won't be as high on the Democratic side. So getting a number of votes enough that show up that make a difference, I'll.
Be happy with that.
But quite frankly, given all of the attention that's been paid to this and people now talking cease fire, why isn't the president doing more?
We've already won.
What kind of blowback have you gotten from other Democrats over this? Because I've heard people complain that this is going to give people the idea of November that they should do this. So have you heard that from people? And what have you heard?
Yeah?
So I'm being called an anti Semitic bigot a lot, which is kind of amusing because I'm a former Synegogue Sunday School teacher and I was president of our synagogue. So it just shows you how quickly and how crass people become. The organized Democratic leadership in our state has put out all kinds of rumors that the votes won't be counted, that we have a couple of special elections in addition to the primary, that those votes won't be counted. None of that is true. The votes will be counted,
and ceasefire has no impact on the local elections. We've heard stories about how this is going to keep poll workers laid into the night. I talked to the secretary and he said, no, we count write INDs in the usual course. This isn't that big a deal. It's basically a one position race to today and we'll get the votes out and we'll tally them and we'll report them this evening.
Very very interesting stuff, sir.
We appreciate you joining us, and we'll be watching the results tonight, so thank you very much. At the same time, electoral wise, we always got to keep an eye on this. Let's put this up there on the screen. Trump remains the most blessed man in the US legal system. I mean, the Georgia case Ryan was one where he had a lot of problems. You know, there was not the same
constitutional questions around state election law. They genuinely can in diet and prosecute whomever they want is because it's totally under their purview in terms of how they view election interference, et cetera. And the lead prosecutor there, Fanny Willis, seemed to have a pretty good case.
She had one.
Look, regardless of whether you think it was legit or not, she had people flipping, including Sydney Powell and all of these other individuals who worked for Trump, and you know, including his lawyer, and all of them were cooperating. Well, it then comes out, you know, soon afterwards, just in the last month or so, that the person that she had chosen as the case is lead prosecutor may have been involved in a tumultuous affair with Fanny Willis, all stemming from his divorce case.
So let's just keep this up there so I can read from it.
It says that the future of this election interference can now hinge on a bitter divorce case playing out in the suburbs of Atlanta, involving the case's lead prosecutor his estranged wife and the testimony she is now seeking from Fannie Willis, who the estranged wife says is his alleged paramour. Now it appears that this is going to actually be unsealed.
Emergency court hearing just yesterday evening, the judge Is says that a decision on the question of whether Willis can be called as a fur testimony in this divorce case, Nathan Wade will be stayed. Now what this means is that right now the co defendant, one of Trump's actual co defendants. He's the one who unearthed this because he discovered that the two were quote having an improper, clandestine
personal relationship that has now financially benefited both. I actually think the financial part of this Ryan could be some of the most damaging because this gentleman Nathan Wade, who Fanny Willis tapped, had very little experience and has now made hundreds of thousands of dollars paid by the state
in legal expenses. So, I mean, this is you know, classic problems for dismissal that could be challenged, especially if something like this comes out Willis herself, I mean, is one where look, you should always say this with a Granssalt.
But here's what the ex or the strange wife says.
She says Willis is trying to hide under the shield of her position to avoid testimony. We are not seeking her position. Deposition is the disrettorney of Fulton Counting. We're seeking the deposition and individual capacity is the alleged paramore of my client's husband. So whatever her job is, it has nothing to do with whether or not she should
have to sit for a deposition. Now, Fanny Willis's attorney says that the knowledge that she may or may not have about Wade in his marriage quote is not unique. You have got two parties in this case, one that is alleged to have an extra marital affair. If that's the case, If that is true, Nathan Wade has that information so pretty nowhere their own attorney and not dying that this is true, which I mean to me, it
seems pretty true allegedly for missus Willis's lawyers. I'm just saying, you know, for my own reading of the facts are publicly available, which you have not disputed. It's not looking good for you. I mean, I can't believe this, Ryan, I said this time time. Chrystal It's like what Trump has truly been touched by God? Like there's no other explanation, and I don't even believe that God.
Yeah, Like the Georgia case was always to me the biggest threat to Trump.
This is the go find me the votes case.
I ad to unbelieved.
This is the one where he's straight up got on a call with the States Yeah, Secretary of State, and instructed his team find me eleven thousand x number of votes so that we flip this thing I become president.
Right. Just seems like blatant criminality on tape.
And like you said, she's a hard charge prosecutor. She's got people flipping, she's got people ready to testify. Grand jury's ready to go, and then boom. Because Trump doesn't have to necessarily win here, what.
Trump needs to do is to exactly raise question.
Delay this long enough that it's too close to the election and you can't can't prosecute it anymore. There's nothing better than a divorce case when it comes to opposition researchers and the journalists who are looking to dig into public figures, because that is when it all comes out. Now, you also have to take everything with a great herself.
Yeah, I'm couching it, like, well, this is the guy's ex or a strange life.
There's nobody, nobody more motivated than somebody filing, you know, a divorce case ages because divorces are all divorces are hard. But divorces that wind up in court where filings are public, that's like the top ten percent of divorces because they've gone past the place where you're going to amm aclude settle anything, going past the place where even just going
to go to court. You're now like airing everybody's dirty laundry, and in some cases you're just making up dirty laundry and airing it like that absolutely happens, but like you said,
doesn't look good in terms of in terms of the response. Now, what does this have to do with the case, you know, not really anything in the sense that like that doesn't change the kind of facts of the case of what Trump did or what the prosecutor has she had Fanny Willis at her defense, she said, look, there's there are three you know, you know, main primary attorneys that I've hired on this case, all friends of mine, a black man,
a white man, and a white woman. It's unfair that they're only coming after the black man and accusing me of this, you know, improper relationship. On the other hand, a lot of people are saying, you know, as Trump would say.
Many people are saying, yeah, I.
Mean here's the thing that it's like, let's part yeah, go ahead, guy, No.
I mean I mean more in looking at this. They allegate like she's not denying some of the substances of this stuff. For example, the man's been paid six hundred and fifty grand charging the state of Georgia.
Now also the travel stuff.
Is this is what I was about to get to. They say that there were many questions about trips that mister Wade paid for and took with miss Willis. As county officials are prohibited from receiving anything of value from people doing business with the county. So literally, if he paid for a hotel room or something that she happened to be and again allegedly that if she did not immediately reimburse him for that half, or she took trips
or accepted airplying tickets and all these things. This is cut and dry corruption stuff, and these laws are in place exactly for a reason. Now maybe she can make restitutions, she can pay it back or something like that. But again we're talking in the court, not only of public opinion. We're talking about in courts of law. This is the exact type stuff. And get a case thrown out or
they can delay it. Like you said, if you get the lead prosecutor removed from a case, and you know so much is going to happen now legally in terms of pushing that back. If you push it back after the twenty twenty four deadline, boom, now Trump literally could be the president again.
Now he's got immunity. There's all kinds of different things going.
On, right, lead prosecutor plus one of the top three kind of secondary prosecutors. But yeah, if you take the romance, the potential romantic relationship out of it, these are standard kickback laws, like in other words, a prosecutor cannot pay somebody or any state OFFICI. You can't pay somebody and then they give you ten percent back. That's a kickback. Yes,
that's those are banned. And so if there is evidence of him kicking things back to her, that falls under the kickback laws, even if it wasn't a kickback, because you know, she wasn't she wasn't paying him so that she would get paid.
She was, she was, They were just going on trips.
Together, allegedly, irregardless, Like you pick somebody, it's still illegal.
Allegedly.
You know, you got a personal relationship with and you're you know, you're getting them, putting them in a nice, cushy job. We don't have a lot of expirity ground since every thousand was.
A lot of money.
Okay, that's a lot of money. That's one of those Yeah, maybe you had to pay an associate. Okay, still pocket in a decent amount of that. And that's only just so far. If the case goes to trial, I mean, who knows, it could be making a million plus of taxpayer dollars. So keep in mind that this is just one of Trump's legal issues. Don't forget. He's also got another one coming. Let's put this up there. This is actually gonna happen on Wednesday, which is kind of interesting.
The defamation trial round two, by the way, is happening now with Egen Carroll delaying Trump's possible testimony. The judge who is overseeing Trump's defamation trial has actually delayed those proceedings after the Tuesday primary contest where this was complicated because it meant that Trump was supposed to actually offer testimony in his own defense, in the testimony or in court. His lawyer said, my client reminded me tomorrow's the New
Hampshire primary. He needs to actually be in New Hampshire. Seems to be, you know, a decent enough excuse. A lawyer actually for Egen Carroll then objected to the delay, saying that they want to get this over with, Can you give people a little bit of a you know, come up with some background on the case, like with each because this is the second defamation trial, and I guess we should remember they found that what they found
that he defamed her. They did not find that they any substance of the claim that he raped her.
Okay. So but this is where it gets, you know, I confused.
Well, they found that there's enough evidence right that her claims are solid, okay, and that him that his attacking her over making those claims is defamation.
Got it, and laid a giant judgment on him for it.
He immediately defamed her after that judgment.
Right and according to the court, Yeah, according to the court corney or lawsuit, Yes, exactly right.
Well and also like I'm to take to take a victory lap. He put out a statement like right afterwards, and immedia I think it was on this show.
I was like, that's the same defamation that he just.
Got nailed for, Like, there's no difference between what he just said and what the court just said is defamation.
And so this time.
When he went back to court, they skipped the whole trial, the whole fact finding part of you know, was their sexual assault. They said, we've already decided that there was and so now the question is these comments do they count as defamation? So they so they skip that and if he he could pay, you know, he's gonna get hit with another judgment after that.
He might keep the fam here, just keep going back because like.
Well how much are these judgments?
So millions? Yeah, I mean millions.
Now if is he ever going to pay is a question. But yeah, it was an enormous amount of money. Okay, many millions.
Maybe maybe you'll get his supporters to pay for it, like he did with the Stop the Steal.
Yeah, I mean you canal defense fund right, Sure he can't.
Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure he could. They can find a way. So it's one of those.
Where it probably just never pay stronger. He put out a truth social let's put this up there. Here's what he had to say. He says, I traveled laced last night from the state of New Hampshire to New York to attend one of the crooked Joe Biden's inspired which
hunt trials. Despite the fact that I was there on time and on schedule, it was then learned that one of the jurors not feeling well, and for that reason, today's session, having to do with a woman I know nothing about out has therefore canceled, with a new date to be determined. All of these various Biden political opponent trials just happened to be starting with great purpose in the middle of what will be the most election important
election in the history of our country. They could have all began years ago or years after that, but certainly not during the election. In actuality, they should never should have been brought at all, because I have done nothing wrong.
It is what it is. I will do what I have to do.
All I ask is for fair judges and juries, and I will win every single one of them.
So that's what the manhatt says.
Go ahead, to back up his one of his wild claims here, he says these are Biden inspired which Hunt trials.
It is true that Reid.
Hoffman funded the billionaire supporter of Biden, an opponent of Trump, more an opponent of Trump than he is a supporter of Biden, financed the laws, financed her lawsuit. R Like that's a fact. Like that is a fact. The judge and jury has still found him reliable for it, though, Yeah, very important point. So anyway, that's what we got Trump's latest legal rank. Don't forget I left out the business case.
What else?
We have the January sixth case, we have the documents case, we have this case e Gene Carrol. I believe it was the Star case too. I forgot it one still forgot about that one. And so yeah, anyway, I think, what is it? Some ninety one criminal charges and all that, and he's got to run the table on all of them. It's gonna be a tough bet, but we'll keep you guys updated. As I said, though, there's no there's no luckier man in this world than Donald Trump whenever it
comes to legal matters. In many ways, I honestly feel like he he's like some sort of like magical material which absorbs his opponents strength.
I mean, it's just like he's certainly the only president in modern memory that looked younger when he left office.
It's very true.
He's like the sort of gryffindor y Harry Potter nerds who are out there. All right, let's move on to Israel. Some very very serious news that we can report this morning. A stunning incident happening in Gozia. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. We have the IDF confirmed. You know, this says twenty one Israeli soldiers actually been revised this morning to twenty four Israeli soldiers killed as they were rigging two buildings in southern Gaza with explosives.
Hamas attacked nearby tank with RPGs and explosions in the building, causing the buildings then to collapse on top of the soldiers.
This is according to the IDF.
The Israeli soldiers have routinely supposed these celebratory videos on social media of themselves celebrating and laughing while doing control demolitions of Gaza neighborhoods and others, just as noted by Jeremy Scahill. I mean, we don't know yet much about the incident, Ryan, but what's your immediate reaction to this? This is this is some crazy stuff. The single deadliest incident so far in the war on Gaza for the for the IDF in.
This war, right, This comes after they have claimed to have kind of operational control of major parts, if not all, of Gaza, which clearly is not the case. No, if if they're if Hamas is able to you know, launch an attack on a tank right near a building that
they're trying to do a controlled demolition on. We'll talk about this later, but we have seen an enormous number of kind of TikTok videos and Twitter videos of soldiers, like Jeremy said, celebrating these controlled demolitions of just absolute entire.
We're going to we actually have universities. Let's let's play. Let's play some of the clips that have gotten people.
So yeah, so I can narrate some of these. Our team went ahead and compile. This appears to be people who are IDF soldiers who are joking about finding sneakers and opening a Nike store actually in the Gaza strip, going through some of the rubble. This one here again, these are all TikTok videos that they're openly posting inside of a classroom, kind of mocking the fact that it's
an empty classroom. This is just you know, it's like kids with guns screwing around on kids bikes rolling around inside of a house.
And kids have been falling to evacuate.
This is where think, this is where things start to get become great question marks about the literal like discipline with than the IDF. I mean, these are guys like doing just demolition with target practice with the shoulder fired rockets. And then here you've got a guy just literally unloading his clip into a wall. I believe they're calling it the war on walls on social media. I'm just complete
like lack of discipline fired. I mean, I just can't imagine what would happen to a US military soldier or service member serving in Iraq from you know, within their own command, if they were to conduct themselves like this in a single incident. And so look to Israel, all we can say is war of occupation. Welcome to it.
You know, it's easy to bomb stuff, It's a lot harder when you got people on the ground and it's not a surprise to me Ryan that the single deadliest incident comes what months into the war, allegedly in a safeestone, and the lack of discipline and training that these guys have is genuinely stunning to me, Like, how do you lose twenty four guys in a single incident.
I'm trying to think, just off the top of my head.
I believe the only time the US military whatever stuff are casualties like this was like a terrible once in a decade, some bunch of Navy seals and a helicopter r you know, Operation Red Wings like comes to mind, and that's where a whole bunch of stuff goes completely wrong.
This is not supposed to happen Jack period.
You know, in general, a lot of little things that go into tactics and to the way that your command and all that is organized. But it's not lost on me that twenty one of the twenty four are confirmed reservists who were quote working to remove buildings and other infrastructure near the border, for example, Army combat engineers and all those. They suffered a lot, you know, with IEDs
and others. So I would just say, itt Israel, like, you know, you broke it now you bought it, and now you signed yourself up for This is the future.
This is what the future is going to look like. But don't forget too. This is a small country.
You only got nine million people that's not marry military age males and or females. People in Israel are going to be pissed about this already. The Prime Minister Neatsayahu has ordered an investigation into this. It reminds me of an incident that we covered here previously, Ryan, where it was like ten IDF soldiers were killed in a single incident. It's like literal amateur hour you're reading this, It's like one guy, a couple guys wandered off, they get pinned down.
Then you know, some Klonel for some reason is like, hey, I'm going to go and help all of them get wiped out in like fifteen minutes. Again, like this does not happen in the US military, and their total lack of discipline and others is really coming back to bite them. But it also just demonstrates like you can lose a lot of people. You know, two hundred and seventeen is a total acknowledged death toll by the IDF. We don't know what the real one is, and we definitely don't
know what the wounded number is. But the longer this goes on, and the longer and longer, you've got troops in there that's going to keep on going, and you got do you lose twenty four guys, you know, even in a month, you know, you start to do the math, and we start to think about the toll that's going to take on the Israeli military.
The IDF is trained and practiced as an occupation army, like most mostly in the West Bank or stationed around the Gaza envelope. But in the West Bank they are raiding homes of mostly unarmed Palestinian civilians. They can't fight
that they are. They're arresting unarmed Palestinians. Occasionally, once in a while there's there's actual live fire, you know, in Jeanine or elsewhere, but it's not as if they're running up against kind of a trained, a trained military insight, and certainly not one you know, that has has had years to kind of build a tunnel infrastructure that that they that they can you know, exploit against an invading force.
And this is all happening as Netanyahu keeps signaling that he's going to launch some type of ground invasion against southern Lebanon.
You're like, like, what you can do is you can you know.
Occupy the West Bank with the help of the Palestinian authority and you can lose the help of the Palestinian authority to do that.
Uh, they're in big trouble.
And yes, and you can you can bomb Gaza, you know, back to the Stone Age. You can kill tens of thousands of civilians under underneath rubble. But you're not You're not a military that it's that's equipped to do this type of thing. There's a column in Aretz this morning calling out this discipline that you just mentioned and warning that the army risks losing control, complete control of these soldiers.
Then the columns has warns that there could be the formation out of this of basically gangs of like paramilitaries, because you've got all of these armed young men who are posting on social media criticism of their superiors, both civilian and military, and then getting cheered on by the Ben Gavier's and the other hard right elements of the government, and that has the potential to just spiral out of control.
Like once you have if you have lost these soldiers and they feel like they can just publicly tell you, you know where to shove it, and they have allies in this factional coalition, that's a recipe for a Lebanon style debacle, like a fail like there is a risk of a failed state here.
Now that's a great, great point.
I mean, all of this why our military is professional.
It's all volunteer and they spend.
A lot tolerated first seconds. I remember TikTok.
I think there was an incident where guys in Syria were wearing like they're they were posting their running data to Strava and it was used at one point and immediately they were like, all right.
Everybody's banned from Strava. It's not gonna happen like that's like nobody's banned TikTok. I can't believe it.
It's a stunning to me, genuinely, just given how much this is playing. Maybe they just don't care, or maybe because it's a reservist military, they don't want to put too much pressure on them.
But I don't know what you guys are doing.
Their entire social medi accounts that are just monitoring TikTok's and just reposting.
Yeah, we just played it here on our show. It's nuts.
On top of that, there's some major diplomatic news. Let's put this up there.
Uh.
The Israelis are proposing a two month fighting pause in Gaza aka ceasefire in exchange for the release of all hostages. Israel, they say, is given Hamas this proposal through the Katari and Egyptian and mediators that would include two months fighting in pause as part of a multi phase deal that would have the release of all remaining hostages inside of Gaza. You still have one hundred and thirty hostages or still
that are being held, including some IDF soldiers. This is including apparently Presidential Advisor Brett McGirk, who was in Egypt on Sunday and helping work with the Kataris.
In general, I just want your overall analysis on this.
Apparently the Israeli War Cabinet approved this type of parameters about ten days ago and have been communicating it. The CIA Director William Burns has been involved as well. What do you think, Ryan about the prospects for something like this. I mean, usually I would say if you're not firing for two months. It's pretty hard to turn those guns back on.
That said, this is.
All we're talking about, So I don't think they necessarily care if you're Hamas, do you take this deal?
Do you not take the steal?
What do you think the other thing that they have proposed.
And it's not clear if this is a kind of requirement that Hamas accept this or not, but they said they would offer quote unquote safe passage to Hamas leaders outside of Gaza elsewhere. That brings back nineteen eighty two if you remember this history, after Israel invaded Lebanon to try to clear out the ploy, Israel got an agreement from the Palestinian leadership that they would leave for Tunisia
and elsewhere. There were international monitors, that international forces that came in, and the deal that the PLO and Israel cut was that the international forces would remain to protect the civilian population. Because Israel had the diahea doctrine had been attacking the civilian population to put pressure on the to put pressure on the Lebanese to then put pressure on the PLO to leave.
That worked.
As soon as the PLO left, the international forces left, Israel and its proxies engaged in absolutely horrific civilian massacres in southern Lebanon massacres that that were that involved Ariel Sharon and like you ministers, this is like, yeah, we're not talking, we're talking. This is Wikipedia level stuff here. And so that wasn't that.
Long ago for these folks.
So if you're you know, in your fifties and sixties and you're a Palestinian, you know you were ten or twenty, you know when this, when this happened, you remember this, and so hearing again, hey guys, as long as your leadership leaves, don't worry. You know we're going to cut a deal. Everything is going to be fine. You remember that. And so also you know that Israel is going to hunt you down or anywhere around the world, so you can get safe passage to Tunisia or they're going to.
Cut to it, but they're going to try to get you anyway.
So you're actually maybe even safer bizarrely in Gaza, even though nobody's safe.
It's a Gordian knot and it's not a good situation.
I think that's like the easy I think it shows that Israel is under insane amounts of pressure too to actually focus for now on the hostages, which they have not been doing.
Well, that's a good segue. Guys.
I'm gonna go a little bit out of order here, but can we please put d E four on the screen so I can narrate it a bit. This is showing the families actually of hostages in Gaza storming into a Kannesset meeting, which is their parliament, demanding an end to the war and a deal. Immediately they say, quote, you will not sit here while our children die. And clearly you can also see there's some signs there in Hebrew.
Many of these are family members. I mean they're literally storming the meeting and taking over the entire thing, faces and others of those who have not yet been released.
This is a tough, tough situation.
I mean, it just demonstrates as well the disconnect in the Israeli war cabinet between those like Gavie Smo Trick and Netting On to a certain extent where they want the war to continue. They don't care about the hostage. They can say they want to, but they haven't saved a single one. The only thing they've done is shot three of them that we know. Uh.
And then in terms of the bombing.
I mean, listen, you know, ask the hostages who were released to say that they were bombed.
So there's that we can keep that in mind.
There was a mother on Facebook of a hostage who said that there the autopsies showed that her son was killed by like a poison gas attack inside a tunnel.
Wow.
So there's enormous amounts of pressure from these families on on the net Yahoo government to take the lives of the hostages seriously. And at the very beginning you but you had Smotris, she had Ben Gaverer saying we need to not care over much about the hostages. We need
to be ruthless in how we wage this. Uh the hand, the kind of a mass version of the Hannibal directive, which is which is that you know, hostages are too costly politically for Israel, and so it's better it's better that they're they're they're killed before they can become hostages. Like that's the Hannibal theory, the Hannibal.
Directive, and so.
Without if Israel was accomplishing its military objectives, they might be able to push back on this on the on the families who are demanding the hostages RelA hostage release take priority. But without that, okay, you're not accomplishing your military objectives. The demands of the families become that much harder to ignore.
I think you're exactly right, and that actually is a perfect subway. We can put E two up on the screen. This is news we've been holding now for a while. We wanted to make sure that we got to it. This just happened a couple of days ago. Leaked to US military assessment to the Wall Street Journal, they say that Hamas has told us far falls far short of Israel's war aims. It is really forces have killed twenty to thirty percent of Hamas fighters.
US intelligence estimates.
Show a toll that falls short so far of Israel's goal of destroying the group and shows that it's resilience after months of war that have laid swats to the Gaza Strip. The US estimate found that Hamas still has enough munitions to continue striking Israel and Israeli forces in Gaza quote four months, and that the group is attempting to reconstitute police force in parts of Gaza City, which already we have seen major Israeli withdrawals from Ryan You
and I have discussed some of that previously. Israeli officials concede that despite the aggressive air ground campaign that has killed thousands of civilians, they have not achieved their goal of destroying Hamas, which has run Gaza now, and that they have withdrawn thousands of troops following pressure from the United States to transition to a more surgical phase of
its war against Hamas. Military officials say that the war can continue for many more months, and that their survival has raised questions within Israel, the Palestinian authorities, and abroad about whether Israel can even achieve this most basic aim. Biden administration has now begun to scale down their expectations for the war. They say to Hamas's degradation as a security threat from its utter destruction, and that the US has urged Israel to shift the war toward more targeted
operations are aimed at Hamas leadership. A senior Israeli military official told The Wall Street Journal, if you don't have to win, you just have to not lose. I actually would swap that around. I would say that's Hamma goal, you know. I would say for Hamas, Yeah, they don't have to win. There's no there's no winning against people who got airpower. You got no airpower, but you don't have to not lose. Ask the Taliban how that worked out for him. They're stronger when we left than they
were when we invaded. Somebody makes sense of that for me? After a billion dollars or sorry, one hundred million.
Dollars or so.
Same with the Hoosies, same with the who thees, same with you know isis we can think about that in terms of Iraq and how much it costs. And then they talk here about some of the surviving fighters and others. They're basically saying that in terms of the number of fighters that have been killed, even if you take the Israeli military estimate, which is nine thousand, that is still thirty percent of the group's total fighting force. And that's the very very high end, right, that's not very good.
And that was the fighting force at the beginning, at the beginning.
That's now you don't even know.
Now you've taken two million people and displaced them, how many new recruits have you created by orphaning them? By killing their brothers and sisters, their grandparents, their uncles, their their nephews. If you are if you are you know, a eighteen year old man or woman in Gaza at this point, like you're either you know, scrounging for food and medicine to keep your to keep yourself alive, or maybe you go try to join Hamas.
At this point.
It's very that's been the problem with that, that's the that's the doctrine, Like, that's the problem that. You know that the kind of counter terrorism effort globally has always tried to reckon with if you kill a terrorist, do you create more terrorists than you have just killed?
And that's not necessarily like something that you know, it's a common talking point.
People are like, oh, what does that mean? We should do nothing.
It's like, listen, you should just be calibrated and you should think about whether trade offs exist and what they look like. So, for example, if we were to think about where a terrorist group genuinely could have been eradicated, I think al Qaeda in two thousand and one is a perfect example because it's a small paramilitary organization which has ties to the Taliban, but is not.
Directly to that indigenous anywhere.
It's not indigenous. You know, half of the people in Afghanistan are like, who are you Arabs.
Why are you here?
I don't even like you, right, So they're willing to get about the right They're like, get out of here, go kill him. So that was the perfect example of one where yeah, I genuinely think we could have gone in there. As long as there weren't a lot of Afghan civilians around. You could a carpet bomb, you could have killed every single one of them, would have done nothing.
But then we're going to think about the Taliban. It's like, well, now you're talking about somebody's cousin, somebody's uncle, somebody who's involved in drug trafficking, and all these you know, activities including police force and anti government for very different reasons. Now we're not getting into a phase where you can just go in and kill somebody and make sure that
you're not having some detrimental effect. May still be a good reason to kill him, you know, maybe they're in charge of X, Y and Z, or if you kill one person that can have a bigger effect, But at the end of the day, you're going to need a bigger political military strategy.
It's why we lost the war in Afghanistan. Same thing.
We killed a lot of insurgents in Iraq. How did that work out? You know, it didn't work out so well.
And yeah, I is kind of is a confusing example and raise people's expectations in a way that was was inappropriate because isis basically just a bunch of Europeans, yes, who came down.
There from Chechnya or Britain under Belgium. And again people in Syria are like, why are you enslaving my you know name?
Or they've just radicalized on YouTube and everywhere else, and then and they come down for this like it.
Much easier to kill much easier to kill it.
And you can express and you can extract that from the culture because it's not indigenous to endemic to the culture, whereas this effort to call Hamas isis fails because Hamas is made up of people who are from Gaza. Yeah, like, you can say whatever you want about and they're from Gaza.
They're from there, which means it's not going to be that easy to root them out. It's a lot it's a lot harder to kill them. It's a lot harder to separate them from the population. If you did want to separate them from the population, you probably do the opposite of what Israel is doing.
And now you know you've got as bad You've got a bad, bad situation.
So you've got twenty one, twenty four guys who have been killed here, how many more are going to be killed, you know, in this war of occupation?
And now you know.
They're going to face all blow up a building, They're going to face all kinds of problems inside Israel because already they've done these withdrawals and the reservists they're sending it back.
They need him to work in the military.
Well, we all just got a preview today of what a real war of occupation looks like. You need hundreds of thousands of people standing around on street corners with guns. You can bomb them till Kingdom come, but you can only keep it up for certain tier periods of time. And eventually you know you're going to be involved in this type of activity.
You're going to get killed. A lot of you are going to get killed.
Especially when you don't have good taxic, good discipline, good command and control, so many these different things. So listen, I think this is a big, big problem. Any final thoughts here.
Yeah, I mean, if you're the family of one of these twenty four and maybe counting IDF soldiers who died, you're asking what did they die for?
And you're told they were doing a controlled.
Demolition of a building, right like, buildings do not threaten anybody. What threatens people are ideologies and people who hold those ideologies, who operate out of buildings and who use weapons. But you can destroy them. What does destroying a university do?
Right like?
What does destroy What does leveling an apartment building do to make Israel any safer? And so you're so not only did you lose at least twenty four soldiers, but you but you did it to destroy a building, like there's no there's no building that is worth that.
The lucky thing is that, at least in Israel, their population, as you can see, is a lot less compliant than ours. You know, whenever their people are on the line, they genuinely do kind of act out in many cases as you.
Saw in terms of storming that connected.
So perhaps the families of those you know inside the country will begin to ask questions.
It's a small country.
When you lose somebody, you know, it's it's it's going to hit a lot more. As we were talked a lot about on October seventh. Let's move to the final part here about Harvard. We've been wanting to cover some of this campus craziness or so called I just want to say I told you so about Bill af all right, I can say it every time, but every time we get vindicated.
This is just the most perfect example to me.
So if we'll all recall Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge funder who has done some very questionable practices whenever it comes to SPACs and to crashing the market after COVID, there's a lot of discussion. We can put that off to the side, just you know, giving people a context about how a man became worth four billion dollars.
I've done it before. Yeah, maybe it'll do it again. Okay.
So Bill Ackman on October eighth wakes up and is like, oh my god, there's all these Palestinian groups that are saying abhorrent and awful things. I should help to cancel them and make sure that they can never get a job.
This morphs into after the Harvard hearing before Congress, an effort to get Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, fired for not saying immediately the calling for the genocide against Jews constitutes a targeted harassment at the university eventually then morphs into plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay in which she retires. But remember he didn't actually care about clip plagiarism. He cared about getting this one fired over quote unquote anti
semism concerns. Well, Harvard has now heeded the call and they've created a quote anti Semitism task force.
But now let's put this up there. This is pretty amazing.
Bill Ackman and Larry Summers, form president of Harvard, are now decrying the choice of Derek J. Pensler, who is a professor of Jewish history and is Jewish himself, as the leader of an anti Semitism task force. Will you guess why, Ryan, because quote he helped to lead a panel which had signed a letter that was critical of Israel, describing it as a regime of apartheid for its treatment
of Palestinians. Now this is very, very important here, because what they are saying is that this man, who is a Jew, a professor of Jewish history, and who is leading the anti Semitism task force himself, is not a proper person to lead the anti Semitism task force. Because he has been critical of Israel. Okay, so not that he's anti Semitic himself, but they are saying that criticism Israel equals anti semitins. That gives the whole game away, doesn't It kind of gives the whole game away. And
so just give you an example about Bill Ackman. Let's put this up there on the screen. He says, Harvard continues on the path of darkness again because he was chosen as the co chair of this anti Semitism task for US, and he led a panel which then signed a letter and then also called forest easfire, which means then that criticism of Israel the government itself, according to Acman, is anti Semitism, and also according to Larry Summers, we can put his.
Tweet up there on the screen. We're only giving you half of this, by the way, there's a lot more. And if you're an acinesque, but I.
Mean, Ryan, this is just so blatant and transparent, you know the way that so many people have like fallen for this. Guys, none of this says anything to do with DEI. It's about Israel. It's about protecting Israel from criticism. And listen, you know, I you know, the whole apartheid thing and all that. Who cares, it's a foreign country. In this country, we are allowed to criticize the foreign country, last time I checked, except we've got an Israel. Except
apparently in this case, it's just outrageous. Outrageous to me, Israel is a country.
Israel is a country with policies. Criticizing those policies does not make you anti Semitic. For a long time, that had seemed like a pretty straightforward proposition, and you would often have the opponents of that proposition kind of twisting themselves into NASA say that that's not actually what they mean. But like you said, it's now very clear exactly what
they mean. That you cannot have a co chair of an anti Semitism task force who is a critic of Israel, because they are by definition, he's Jewish anti semitic, and he's one of the most renowned professors of Jewish history, like in you know that is that is working today certainly, but in you know, a century, and to call him
anti semitic is flatly absurd. And the apartheid question is an interesting one too, because you know, apartheid means that you have different rights, you know, within the borders of a country, depending on your ethnicity, or your or your religion.
The critics of that label say it's not fair to call Israel apartheid because the occupation is temporary and at some point in the future there will be a resolution which means it is no longer an apartheid state, whereas South Africa was a locked in, permanent, permanent This is
this is, this is what it is. Net Yahoo clearly stating that there will never be a Palestinian state locks that in the only alternative if there will never be a Palestinian state is that it is all under the security control of Israel, and everyone underneath Israel's security control is subject to those laws. And if you are Palestinian or Arab, you have different privileges, you have different rights.
That is apartheid.
And you if net Nyah, who is not willing to say to even pretend that at some point in the future there will be a two state solution, then it is a part time like that. That's just definitionally too so to say that it's uh, it's anti Semitic and out of bounds to say that. For a Jewish historian who knows the history is to demand ignorance.
Yes, of your panelists.
Look, I haven't even thought about it that much because I honestly think that some of these rhetorical battles are irrelevant. It's like, look, are the Palestinians treated worse than Israeli citizens? It's like, yeah, definitely, Okay, I can tell you that from I haven't seen it with my own eyes.
I don't know. You'd call it whatever you want. I don't know.
The whole point is just a great I mean, we get you know, it devolved into all of these rhetorical battles and it's not and it is like, listen, this is all irrelevant. The whole point is about are you allowed to say what you want in the United States of America?
And the answer should be.
Yes, yeah, if you're a scholar of Jewish history and you want.
To scholars, listen. I hate some of these scholars, all right. I brought this man and I would.
Probably hate hate each We would hate over DEI over so much. And as long as he defended my right to be able to criticize him and vice versa, we're cool, man, you know, the professor and I that's the problem. Is that people are not actually properly implying these principles whenever they're talking, you know, out of both sides of their mouth.
This is about Israel period.
At the same time, we have a very strange situation at Columbia University. We have some video actually we can play here of two Columbia University students who were allegedly sprayed with something called skunk spray, which is apparently used on Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli forces. It is quote known to cause nausea, abdominal pain, and vomiting, and this is self reported from some of these protesters,
but appears to have some verification with their symptoms. Columbia University actually responded to these allegations.
We could put this up there please.
They say that the Department of Public Serifety is working with the local and federal authorities to invest agate some of these incidents. Ryan, you guys had an intercept story on this. Could you break it down for us and just tell us a little bit about what you guys found.
Yeah, we can put this up in post by colleague Preem Tucker as his pieces headline Columbia scold students for quote unsanctioned Gaza rally where they were attacked with chemicals. And the allegation is that two of these students are former IDF soldiers. It would be familiar with the use of skunks.
Brother.
There's been some confirmation at least of that one of them was You've had at least you know, the two were attacked, but you had dozens. You were kind of sickened by this pretty intense chemical spray.
And it wasn't until.
Uh Prem's story went up that Columbia finally sent out a new statement, like that first state interesting that they put out was what they say they were concerning incidents. Now they're saying that they're you know, they're looking into it like that there's there's going to be an investigation. You know, if anybody has concerned, you know, they should reach out, like taking it a little bit more seriously
than they were before. It felt like the Columbia administration was kind of hoping that the press just just go wouldn't cover this, and that we were the first news
outlet to cover it. Is kind of shameful because and also hypocritical that if this happened in reverse, where what's his name Shy Davidson, Yeah, has been making a huge name for himself as this Columbia business professor or associate professor adjunct or something who is saying he feels deeply unsafe on campus and urging all of these students to
be disciplined. If this had been a pro Israel rally and you had s JP students come and like hit them with skunk spray and somewhat to the hospital, you cannot imagine a world in which the media didn't touch it until the intercept covered it.
Yeah, you're obviously right. And again you know it's like, look, these protesters. I don't know anything other people, but at the they're not hurting anybody, like you know in this country, stay at least you know, if someone's gonna spram, it should be the cops.
And even then it's like we should probably talk about it.
You know, just get the spray people unless they're attacking you. And when you do, it's like what is happening here? Like how is there not again some outrage? It's just it's nuts to me. We're not applying proper principles. I mean, for right wing people, you want maga folks to be sprayed in the face, like with skunk spray by what an agent of like the Ukrainian military or something that would be nuts, That would genuinely be nuts.
What if we had a Russian student exactly, and there's like a pro Ukraine raw I'm sure the.
Media would condone that. May they call it an active self defense or something. But that's my whole point is that you're not supposed to selectively, you know, apply some of this stuff. So the campus craziness continues, It certainly does, and we will continue to keep you guys updated.
Right, It's been great talking with you man.
We will be together tomorrow morning for the Counterpoints counter Points Breaking Points crossover reaction to the new Amster primary, in which the whole team will be here with Crystal also joining us remotely.
And thank you all very much for joining us. We really appreciate you.
Got the discount going on now if you can help us out breaking Points dot com otherwise, I'll see you tonight, I'll see you tomorrow. I'm gonna see you all the time, all right, see just see it tomorrow morning.