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Well, good morning, welcome to Breaking Points. I kind of Crystal wanted to whisper it as a sort of as an attribute to Soger, but in a way that I know it would really annoy him because he's screamed he's good morning. So if I whisper it, I think maybe I'll get understood.
He's had a little more of a somber opening in recent weeks, given the somber nature of news, and there is a lot to get into this morning. So we have a potential potential deal on hostages, a little disputed sort of how close they are to closing brokering that deal would include a quote unquote humanitarian pozzle.
Break that down for you.
We also have new details Israel revealing what they claim to be additional evidence of Hamas's use of Al Shifa Hospital that they say justified that attack on that hospital. So we will break that down for you as well. We also have a whole situation regarding Osama bin Laden and TikTok and zoomers and a lot of questions there a lot of freak out about what young people are doing on TikTok these days.
That should be a fun conversation.
We've got a lot of doings with regards to Elon Musk, anti Semitism, the ADL banning certain speech on Twitter as well. Sam Altman, one of the founders of open ai, was kicked out of that organization and now has just been snatched up by Microsoft that open Ai had a business relationship with and also a.
Funder relationship with. This is huge.
News in the AI world, so we'll break out of that down for you. We've also got some major CNN missus in terms of their Israel coverage that we want to show you as well. And we've got a Democratic candidate for Senate who is going to join us for the state of Michigan who is calling on Joe Biden to step aside because he says he cannot win in the state of Michigan, especially given his stance on Israel and Gaza.
So a lot to get into.
Very quickly before we jump into the news here this morning, we have a little bit of Breaking Points news, which is that lovely holiday merch that Griffin Producer and our graphics team design for you guys is available now. That beautiful ugly sweatshirt, the wonderful Christmas or ornament, the socks, the coffee tumbler all available to you. And apparently we are running a little bit of a Black Friday discount as well, so make sure you check those out if
you have a chance, if you're interested. And premium subscribers got early access to this, so if that is something you're interested in for the future, breakingpoints dot Com to become a premium subscriber. All right, with that out of the way, let's go ahead and jump into the latest on the news. So we do have reports of a potential hostage deal. In fact, originally the Washington Post reported this deal was done and dusted, and then they had to kind of walk it back and say, oh, well,
we're still working out the details. Let's put this up on the screen. From the Washington Post, the headline here US close to deal with Israel and Hamasta pause conflict, free some hostages. They had to change that headline after the US push back on the idea that this had already been completed. So here are the details of what's
being reported in the Post. They say there is a detailed, six page set of written terms that would require all parties to the conflict to freeze combat operations for at least five days, while an initial fifty or more hostages are released in smaller batches every twenty four hours. Not immediately clear how many of the two hundred and thirty nine people believed to be in captivity in Gaza would
be released under the deal. Also not clear, by the way, whether the US citizens who are being held would be part of that deal. They say that overhead surveillance would monitor movement on the ground to police the pause. The stop and fighting is also intended to allow a significant increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance, including fuel, to
enter the besieged enclave from Egypt. After this article was initially published, and this is what I was referring to before National Security Council spokesperson Adrian Watson tweeted that there was no deal yet, but we continue to work hard to get a deal. And by the way, this is interesting, Emily.
So in terms of the domestic politics in Israel, you have very i guess you would say competing pressures on Netanyahu, who, on the one hand, you have the families of hostages and you have huge public sentiment in terms of doing whatever you can to return these hostages, especially the civilian hostages who are being held right now by Hamas.
On the other hand, you have.
Hard right parts of his coalition who are opposed to any sort of pause in the fighting and in the bombing campaign. So, you know, and that would be a non starter in terms of any hostage deal if they're just going to continue bombing. So the way that he is, the way he is framing this is, you know, for
any international support to continue, humanitarian aid is essential. Because of that, we accept the recommendation to bring fuel into Gaza, speaking about a smaller fuel deal that they've already made. But this is kind of the framing of you know, in order for us to continue the bombing campaign, we've got to maintain international legitimacy, and this kind of deal would be part of that.
Right, which brings us to what treata PARSI of our friends with our friends at the Quincy Institute tweeted yesterday. I think he tweeted this yesterday. I'm sorry, this was from Friday. We have the element of treatise tweet here. He's saying a diplomat from a key US ally has told him that Net and Yahoo is blocking the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Biden is well aware, but refuses to pressure not in Yahoo publicly. The diplomat says
Biden's unconditional support for Israel has made Net and Yahoo. Actually, this part's really interesting, Crystal more obstinate and inflexible. So Biden's unconditional support for Israel, according to this diplomat from a key US ally conveyed this to Treatah, has actually made Net and Yahoo more obstinate and inflexible. Also has these immense, almost i mean untenable pressures at home, as you said, to not do one thing and to really
do the other thing. I mean, it's an impossible position to be in, and he's not navigating it well.
I would say no.
And this is what doctor Parci's tweeting here is also sort of publicly known. There was reporting recently, I believe in the last week that there actually was a deal that was you know, basically already crafted that they were ready to implement to return the hostages, which of course is you know, a high priority, should be a high priority for absolutely everyone, especially as I said, the civilians, who you know, should be left out of this entirely.
They should be released immediately.
And that deal was short circuited by the ground invasion that occurred.
So again, you know, there's been.
I would say, and demonstrated from the beginning a real lack of care and concern from net Yahoo with regard to these hostages. The hostage families Emily took him forever meet with them. There was this crazy report that in one of the meetings with all the hostage families they actually had like a plant infiltrator who was an activist net Nyahu's supporter come in and be like whatever, net Yah, who says, that's what we're on board with and they need to just go for it and continue the fighting.
And keep in mind, you know, as this bombing campaign which has completely obliterated at this point Gaza City and is now we're going to talk about this now. They're moving into South Gaza, very place where they told everyone to flee to. They're now ramping up the bombing campaign there as well. Well, it's not only Palestinians who are at risk there, these hostages are also at grave risk
the longer that this bombing campaign goes on. This deal was apparently mediated by Qatar and is being crafted you know, Qatars kind of the go between between Israel and Hamas
in terms of these negotiations. So yet to be seen how close they actually are to striking this deal, but I think it has become increasingly clear that the biggest obstacle and the biggest barrier to having some kind of a deal to release at least the women and the children from this group of hostages has become you know, net Yahoo in terms of their agreement on a potential short term five.
Day roughly ceasefire. So that's where we are.
We also had a biden op ed that he published in the last several days, and there was one noteworthy part that people picked up on go ahead and put this up on the screen. He is saying, as we strive for peace Gaza in the West Bank should be reunited under a single GOVERNMENTCE structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian authority as we all work toward a two state solution.
I've been emphatic with Israel's leaders that extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank must stop and that those committing the violence must be held accountable. And this is the part people really picked up on. The US is prepared to take our own steps, including issuing visa bands against extremist attacking civilians in the West Bank. And Barack Revied, who as a reporter with Axios, his commentary on this is he said, this matters, this is a big deal.
It's the first time the US is publicly considering individual sanctions against settlers and Emily. Just to lay out for people, part of why this is such a critical piece is the whole settlement movement, this illegal settlement movement under international law. The entire goal of it is to make a two state solution impossible. And already you have had and this has been occurring over decades.
This is nothing new.
It has ramped up under the net Yahoo administration, and it has further accelerated during this war on Gaza as you have. You know, this was already before October seventh, the most violent year that Palestinians in the West Bank had faced, perhaps ever, and now that violence has only escalated. You have settlers coming in and attacking Palestinians, pushing them off their land. And oftentimes it's not like they're just out there freelancing. In half of these instances over the years,
the idea is actively involved. So this has been This isn't again some extremist grow freelancing.
This has been an.
Official policy of the Israeli government in an attempt to make a two state solution completely unviable because they have built out so many of these settlements within the West Bank territory. The whole thing is basically like Swiss cheese at this point.
Yeah, I mean, and this is It was also the deadliest year for Israelis before October seventh as well, because the violence had been so bad in the West Bank.
The tensions were so strong in the West Bank.
And that's important context for all of this, because it wasn't just like out of the blue, it was there were all of these clashes happening in the West Bank. Because you have a very far right government that has actually settlers in the administration, that's right Yahoo administration, and so obviously it was going in this direction, you know, it was going in a to a really bad place really quickly of the course the last year.
Yeah, and part of what people in Israel, who by the way, are not happy with the net Yahoo government means some like eighty percent blame him in part for what happened on October seventh. There was a recent poll that showed that support for his party, Lacud party, had absolutely collapsed. Because this guy was supposed to be he called himself mister Security, that's.
What his supporters called him.
And then to have this dramatic failure happen on your watch obviously has caused a massive loss of political support. But one of the things that we identified in those early days was the fact that, you know, a lot of security forces and IDF troops had been moved from the area that was ultimately attacked by Hamas to guard these settlers in the West Bank and help them with these incursions and in pushing Palestinians off of their land.
So there was a lot of pressure from his right wing coalition partners to move those security forces to help the settlers and to protect the settlers, and that's part of why they were caught with their pants down on October seventh. And you know, the political leanings of that that air that was attacked by hamas Be or the Gaza Strip tends to be more liberal, tends to be more left. You've got these kibbutsum and people who are
peace activists. I mean, it's absolutely tragic that those were the people who were attacked, you know, the most aggressively and the most horrifically in what happened on October seventh.
But that's part of the domestic rub of the failures that happened with this net Yahoo administration, as they were so so obsessed with pushing forward and settlements that they left this other group of their citizens exposed to these attacks on October seventh, which is actually a good transition to you know, we're learning more details about what unfolded
on that day. Mehdi Hassan had an interview with an IDF spokesperson where he was pressing him on you know, some of the falsehoods that have now been proven to have come from the Israeli government, and there was a bit of a revelation here that was rather interesting. Let's take a listen to how this all went out.
Those numbers are provided by Hamast, there's no independent And secondly, more importantly, you have no idea how many of them are Commas terrorists, combatants and how many of civilians come us? What have you believed that they're all civilians, that they're all children? And here we have to say something that isn't said enough Commas until now we're destroying their military
machine and with that we're eroding their control. But up until now they've been in control of the Gaza strip and as a result, they control all the images coming out of Gaza. Have you seen one picture of a single dead CAMAS terrorist in the fighting in Gaza?
Not one?
Is that that Commas can control Commas can control the information.
And you said you would be brief.
I have haven't. You're right, but I have.
Seen lots of children with my own lying eyes being pulled from the robbers because there the pictures come. US wants you to see exactly the pictures. Also, people your government has killed.
You accept that right, you've killed children? Or do you deny?
No?
I do not, I do not.
I do not.
First of all, you don't know how those people died.
Those two.
First of all, we don't want to see are killed. Okay, he don't want to see a single I agree with you.
So you have two pieces there that are very noworthy. Number One, he won't admit that children have been killed.
Yeah, I mean, there's no reason to do that.
What kind of a fantasy land do you think we're all?
Like?
How stupid do you think that we are? How many of these horrifying images have we seen? We know that the population of Gaza is nearly fifty percent children. Yeah, we know that the death toll is I think roughly forty percent children. So to deny they've killed any kids, that is another level. By the way, I want to crack myself, I said an idfspokesurce and this is actually senior advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Nett Yahoo.
The other part, though, that was really noteworthy here is you'll recall the original death count on October seventh was roughly fourteen hundred, and then they revised it down to twelve hundred, and he says that that's because some of the bodies that were burned beyond recognition that they had assumed were Israeli citizens were actually Hamas militants.
So that was.
Another important revelation there, And just in the interest of accuracy and what actually unfolded on October seventh raises a lot of questions too about exactly what the response was and what that looked like.
And to that point, there's just absolutely no reason to not answer the question about children. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense from the line that Israel used, and I think, by the way, rightfully show that in so many senses, Hamas put children in this situation, that Hamas knew exactly what was going to happen after October seventh,
So you can't have to be true. At the same time, you can't say Hamas is putting their own people in this awful situation, but also that these children are not in an awful situation. There's absolutely no reason to take the first line when first of all, the entire world and by the way, I was talking about this with Ryan last week. It's really frustrating because there's no like we're going to talk about this in the next segment,
but we need to. Western journalists are not in Gaza journalists who are in Gaza are in grave danger, and that means over here on the side of the world, we have to take what the Israeli government is saying seriously.
They are making that very difficult, and they have been doing that for years.
But in a situation like this, when you cannot even concede that children have been killed, the trust that you desperately need to build with American audiences, with Western audiences, with British audiences, with everyone around the world that is not in Gaza right now is severely damaged. And there's no it's it's a totally unforced air.
Yeah, I mean, listen, I think Israel has decided because I've been thinking about this. Their propaganda is so sloppy,
it's been bad. It's actually astonishing to me. You know, we're going to talk later about that CNN report where they were with you know, the IDF guy, and he's showing them what he purports to be evidence that this other hospital, not Alshiva, a different hospital I think it is called, I don't remember the name of it, the children's hospital, that it was used by Hamas militants, and you know, his' point into like baby bottles and it's like, yeah,
it's a children's hospital where people starre seeking refuge. But the real crowning moment is when he reveals this Arabic list that he says is where the terrorists were recording their names of when they were watching the hostages. And immediately people who actually speak Arabic look at this and are like, it's literally just a calendar. And again, I am quite sure that the IDF has plenty of Arabic
speakers available to them. I'm also quite sure by the way that CNN has plenty of Arabic speakers available to them. So to have the level of propaganda be that incredibly sloppy is just to me completely absurd. It's one of the things that many presses him on. But I think that they, really, number one, are just so used to all of this is for a US audience, right, They know that international opinion, They don't really care about international opinion,
They just care about a US audience. I think there's been such lockstep support for Israel across both parties for so long that they ever felt the need to have the propaganda be actually very good, and now really they're only pitching it to Joe Biden and Joe Biden seems to be buying it all hook line and Singer, So I guess they don't feel the need to up their game in terms of the propaganda efforts here because the one guy that they need to keep on their side
that they seem to be doing the job just fine.
On that.
I saw some people commenting on Twitter that basically, like, the one person who believes all of this is Joe Biden, but that's the only person they need to believe all of this.
So I guess there you go.
Although as we were just talking about, they're not it seems entirely happy with the US pushing so hard for a hostage deal, and they don't seem entirely happy with the Biden administrations call for humanitarian ceasefire that seems to have, you know, obviously been a point of tension. But I also think, and this is a really interesting point actually that you just brought up the intense level of propaganda
that any country would engage in. But the sloppiness and the propaganda I also think is partially because they're doing so much of it.
I don't know if you've noticed.
It's like, obviously we're in the social media era, So they're trying to be completely aggressive so that when something gets posted on X and all of the journalists are there and narratives start getting crafted, that they're on top of it. They're in front of it. But it's been
very sloppy. It's a really strange thing to watch happen in real time on social media, and I think that's where some of this has has just looked so ham fisted, is that they're trying so hard in the middle of a war to be winning the propaganda race, and it's just so it's very odd to watch happen.
The other thing is, I think, frankly, that their actions in Gaza, where you have this overwhelming civilian death toll, where you have so many children being massacred, where you have daily attacks on I mean, we can't even keep track on schools, refugee camps, hospitals, ambulances, you name it,
civilian infrastructure, and it's been destroyed. Like they know that that on its face is not actually defensible, and so that's how you end up with this preposterous attempt to be like, I don't really know that we killed on any kids. You can't prove that we killed on any kids, and that's also the reason why they've so aggressively cut off communications and also, by the way, why they've targeted journalists. I think the number is fifty now journalists in Gaza.
Who have been killed.
And by the way, there's been, you know, virtual silence from the American press, which claim during the Trump administration cares so much about freedom of the press and protecting journalists, et cetera. Pretty much total silence when it comes to the fact that so many journalists have been killed, more than any other conflicts that we've seen. There's another interesting new detail, and I'll phrase this very delicately, about October seventh,
that also came out. This was from a Haaretz report, and let's go ahead and put this up on the screen from our own Ryan Grimm, sort of summarizing.
What came out here.
This was from Just to be clear, it was from the Hebrew version of the paper. This is a translation from Google Translate, so it maybe a little imprecise, and I'll get to that in a minute. But the bottom line here is, you know, one of the greatest scenes of horror and atrocities was that Rave of Music festival, and this Haretz investigation found that number one. Organizers originally planned to end the event on Friday, but got permission
to extend it midweek from the Army. And this goes to the idea that actually Hamas didn't even know this festival was going on. They just sort of happened upon it and then of course killed a lot of civilians and unleashed horrors there. Hamas did not know about the music festival, only learning about it after breaching Israeli territory. This assessment is backed up by a body cam footage of a terrorist asking a captured civilian where the bad guys are?
Now.
That part, in particular seems to be a poor translation. Apparently the Hebrew word for bad guys and the Hebrew word for one of the kibbuts that they did plan to attack and did in fact attack, is very similar. So the Hebrew language speakers that I saw said, no, this was actually not asking where the bad guys are, They were asking for directions to this kibbutz. But this last one is really key and has got a lot
of people's attention. It is rarely attack. Helicopter fired on terrorists and also killed some of the partygoers, which opens up a real question Emily of you know, how many of the civilians who were horribly massacred on October seventh, how much of that was friendly fire. It's a question that a lot of people have been asking from the beginning and were completely shut down like this was off
the table. But you know, in the interest of accuracy and understanding the events that unfolded on this horrific and fateful day, it's important to know exactly what the response was, what the death toll was, and how all of this unfolded.
Yeah, it absolutely is.
And again that's why you know, the Israeli government, the IDF, whatever side you take in this conflict.
Obviously it's no it's.
No easy task to be in the middle of a war right now and to also be managing you know, the international press and the international community and all of that.
But the Israeli government has done itself absolutely no absolutely no favors by saying things like That's why the children point on Medi's show is such an unforced error, because when you have situations like this, and you know, the Haretz account is so far the only account we have of the helicopters and the civilians, that doesn't mean it
won't be verified. It very well could be verified, in fact, because as some of Israel's defenders were saying last night on x it's pretty believable, right when you're in the middle of this insane attack that sadly there's going to be people caught in the crossfire. I can't it's hard
to even talk about those sorts of things. But if that's the case, you your trust with the public, in your trust with you know, American benefactors, the people who are sending military assistants, the people who are you know, in the UN, whatever it is, your trust should be ironclad. And when you are caught in the middle of just ridiculous talking points, you are doing yourself no favors whatsoever. And this isn't to say that we should all just
be able to blindly trust the Israeli government. It is to say that the Israeli government should be doing absolutely everything in its power to ensure that that trust is coming from a serious place and to give the public reason to trust their lawmakers who are saying that they trust the Israeli government. Biden last week saying that as it pertains to the hospital, he really believes the intelligence, but he won't say what it is that this is
a Hummas central command site. Well, if he's saying that he has intelligence, that the Israeli government has intelligence, and the public then has to trust that while the Israeli government is saying it is taking such ridiculous lines. Yeah, in the public that is incredibly deleterious to the cause that Israel wants to promote.
I mean, I trust the Israeli government as much as I trust Moss, which is to say not at all. And so it makes it impossible to really know what's happening on the ground. Have to trust, you know, the doctors at the hospital and take the word of the ordinary civilians who are there and the few remaining journalists who have not been killed who remain in the Gaza strip. But you know, one final point on why this music festival piece matters, because I can see people being like, yeah, okay,
you know, friendly fire, what does it matter. Obviously Hamas came and massacred people. We know that, and no one is denying that here. But let me just say that part of what has been used, in fact, the entirety of the case that has been used to justify the indiscriminate bombing campaign, the complete leveling of Gaza city, now moving into the south where they told everyone to flee, the very high civilian death rate, higher by the way than even the civilian death rate that Hamas inflicted on
October seventh. What has been used to justify that is the details of the horrors and atrocities that were committed on October seventh, and so it's important we know those details and we know what is actually true and what is actually false, because that's how that is the emotional case that they're making to justify committing essentially like daily war crimes in their prosecution of this war on Gaza.
So that's why getting these details, you know, and apart from just knowing the historical record and having an accurate picture, that is the additional layer of why it matters to get these things straight. And that report from how Rotz it came from a police, an Israeli police investigation, so
it has a high level of credibility here. And also now as people point out, it does make sense in terms of the response and also in terms of some of the images that came out of the extent of the destruction, which it seems unlikely Hamas would have been able to execute on their own. All right, let's go ahead to speaking of propaganda. We have some updates about Al Chifa Hospital, which was at Central Hospital in Gaza.
You know, the Israeli government built for weeks a case that this was Hamas's headquarters, that they had this elaborate tunnel system underneath. They sent out multiple images that they said showed where the entrances to these tunnels were. They had graphics that showed all of these elaborate infrastructure that they claimed was underneath the buildings. They had their famous
computer animation of hamaskran Central underneath of the hospital. In the first days after they raided Al Shifa at great cost to civilian life there, they put out very limited evidence of certainly nothing approaching what they had originally claimed. There were something like ten guns laid down on a table. CNN and other Western outlets caught them like moving these guns around and manipulating the evidence. Something I covered over the weekend. There was a box of dates that was involved.
It was limited, okay in terms of what they were showing. Now they have a new video that they released that they claim shows a much larger tunnel. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen and you can see the operational tunnel shaft. This goes on for a little bit of time, but I just want to make sure, you know, in the interest of you know, everybody seeing the full nature of the evidence that they're providing here,
I want to put it out there. They say in their tweet that revealed this video that they found a significant fifty five meter long terrorist tunnel ten meters underneath the Shifa Hospital complex during an intelligence based operation. The tunnel entrance contains various defense mechanisms, such as a blastproof door in a firing hole in an attempt by Hamasa
block Israeli forces from entering. For weeks, we've been telling the world about hamasas cynical use of the residence of Gaza and patients of Sheifa Hospital as human shields.
Here is more proof.
So you know, a lot of people I think will be skeptical of this video to begin with, because of all the issues with Israeli government propaganda, as we've just been saying. But Emily, even if you take this at face value, that this you know generally is a tunnel, which is very believable given the fact we know. Put this next piece up on the screen that Israel themselves had built buggers and underneath of this hospital back in
nineteen eighty three when Israel still ruled Gaza. So it's certainly totally believable that there are tunnels underneath of Al Chief.
I don't think anyone should deny that.
But this is a far from the original presentation of why rating this hospital was justified something that you know, under international law, hospitals are generally off limits. It requires absolutely exceptional circumstances to justify a raid and seizure embombing of a hospital as what occurred here. As I mentioned,
there was tremendous loss of human life. You know, dozens of people died because of this raid at this hospital, and you know, still and even Western media outlets saying this nothing approaching what they initially claimed has been proved here.
Yeah, this is what was really again interesting to watch the IDF and the Israeli government over the weekend on social media use social media to sort of win the propaganda war on this question of the hospital. The World Health Organization, which the Israeli government has sort of accused of being complicit in October seventh and complicit in the UN in general sort of being aware of what Hamas was doing, but not being you know, publicly sort of
raising red flag, et cetera, et cetera. They put out a report on Saturday saying they went in on Saturday. There are twenty five health workers and two hundred and ninety one patients remaining in Al Shifa, which with several patient deaths having occurred over the previous two to three
days due to the shutting down of medical services. Patients include thirty two babies in extremely critical condition, two people in intensive care without ventilation, and twenty two dialysis patients whose access to life saving treatment has been severely compromised. So at least as of Saturday, that's sort of the state of affairs and where everything stands.
But in addition that that was from Tablet.
If people just saw that up on their screen about the Israeli tunnels from back in the nineteen eighties, that was from Tablet pros rule publications. So, I mean, finding the tunnels probably wasn't the hard part for the Israeli government.
It was probably more like accessing the tunnels in a way that you know, there weren't booby trapped, that they felt was the safest way that they possibly could.
But this is the state of affairs. These are the tunnels, and they are giving CNN interviews, they're giving Fox News interviews where they're actually, you know, there are additional guns. As you talked about, there's additional guns in one of the scenes. They said it's because they found more guns, not that they moved the guns there. They're saying, you know, this was going to be the grand you mentioned this central command center. They're like central nervous system of Hamas
was going to be under here. So they're spending the weekend pushing out image after image after image, and you just have to trust them that this is what it says it is when you also are finding out that things aren't what they say it, they are right again. So if we hypothetically, say, hypothetically give them the total benefit of the doubts, say everything they're saying is correct. They are going about it so poorly because nobody has
any reason to believe it. When you make missteps like this time and again and again, and the cynical person, of course will say, well, it's not a misstep, it's an intentional propaganda campaign, which people that's what everyone does in war, but it's just when you have a hospital involved.
When Ryan and I were talking about it last week, it was like, this is a situation that really is reflective of so many of the different tensions in the conflict, like this one is almost symbolic of the conflict.
As a whole.
Yeah.
I think that's right, and that's part of why they have been so aggressively trying to prove their case. And also, at the same time they're trying to prove the case, they're also rapidly moving the goalposts, which we'll get to you in a moment. But to your point, Emily about the skepticism from the Western press put this up on
the screen. I mean, you had basically every major media outlet nicely, very diplomatically, like Kamanyo, you said, this was a oscar in Central and we've seen nothing like a oscar in Central. You've got CNN with that analysis video suggests IDF might have rearranged weaponry at Alshifa prior to.
News crew visits.
There is also a BBC report that I played over the weekend to the same effect. The economist asking was Israel's attack on Al Shifa Hospital justified if you read the column, the suggested answer is very much know the Washington Post Israeli troops scour Gaza's Al Shifa Hospital for evidence of Hamas, and again the narrative beforehand was this is Hamasa's headquarters. That's why listen, we hate it. We
hate that it's a civilian. We have no beef of civilians, but we have to go in because this is Hamas's headquarters. Here's our commuter animation that shows you we know exactly where these things are and this is what we're going to find. And the presentation of media outlets of like this is where the tunnels are. We've got in pinpoint and we know where to go. The US government the day before, coming out John Kirby, NSC spokesperson saying, yeah, we have intelligence as well that backs this up. I
don't think it's an accent. That's the very next day that this rate occurs and still nothing approaching what they originally claimed has panned out. I also don't think it's an accident that now, because of the loss of international legitimacy surrounding this raid of this hospital and also know
what they've been doing overall in Gaza. I don't think it's an accident that that has pushed them closer to accepting some sort of a hostage sheeld and some sort of a five day cease fire because the Biden administration has been pathetic and they're pushed back. The most important thing that they said is that there are absolutely no red lines for Israel.
But you can.
See Biden putting out this op ed saying, you know what, We're actually going to maybe sanction these illegal settlers, increasing pressure behind the scenes, et cetera, et cetera, that Israel is feeling at least some pressure because their public case has so clearly fallen apart. And you know, the last piece, let's put this up on the screen from the World Health Organization. I only read some of this report. They said due to time loans, I think there were only
allowed inside. Yeah, they said for one hour inside the hospital, which they described as a death zone and the situation as desperate. Signs of shelling and gunfire inside this hospital were evident. The team saw a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital and was told that more than eighty people were buried there. So there's no doubt that absolute horrors unfolded here. We know that und I think four of the premature babies that had to be removed
from the incubators because they ran on fuel died. We know everyone in the intensive care unit died. We know that there were patients who were effectively forced to evacuate, who were in no condition to travel, who were moving by foot. We know the horrific conditions that doctors were facing as they were trying their best to care for patients.
And you know, it's Israel scrambling to try to prove that this was all worth it and making a case that I think very few people are believing at this point.
The word scrambling I think is really accurate because actually over the weekend they released video of hostages being brought into El Shifa on October seventh. Yeah, and again a lot of people said, again like, look, this proves this is some last central command. They're taking the hostages to a hospital. It's also the largest, most advanced hospital in Gaza.
So again I'm not sure that that proves it. And at one point someone from the IDEF, maybe even the IDEA of itself, said the video is on our side. Think they told media that the video and they weren't talking just about that particular video they were talking about all the video in general.
They're saying the video is on our side.
That quote to me again, I actually don't dismiss the possibility that Al Shifa, given the fact that it had tunnels that have been there since the nineteen eighties, may have been used as HAMAS headquarters. I don't think that's impossible. But even if you take that, even if you agree with me that you know this is it's not impossible that this is HAMAS headquarters. Obviously Hamas is operating underground.
Obviously Hamas planned what happened on October seventh somewhere. So even if you you sort of say, yes, this is possible that this is a HAMAS central command, here's actually the word that the idf used quote well hidden terrorist infrastructure in the complex. Well hidden terrorist infrastructure in the complex. Okay, So if you even if you do that, what they have produced so far is not what you would expect if you said that there was a well hidden terrorist
infrastructure in the complex. That's just not what we've seen so far, which is why they're coming out now and getting ahead of it and saying things like the video is on our side.
Yeah, and also and this we can transition to the next part here rapidly moving the goalpost. So they're no longer saying this was Hamas HQ. Now they're saying, oh, actually Hamas HQ is really in the south, and Hamas all you know, the Hamas leaders all fled to the south. That's why even they acknowledge they haven't been able to get that many of top Hamas leadership. So now they're saying, okay, Communists, that's the real place where Hamas HQ is. So the
story has dramatically shifted. And you'll recall, of course Palestinians were told to flee northern Gaza. There was a you know, line that was established you must go to southern Gaza otherwise you're going to be deemed a terrorist you you know, will feel free to attack, you, bomb your home, whatever, which they did quite dramatically in the north of Gaza. So now you have effectively, i mean very close to all of two million residents of Gaza who are in
southern Gaza. Communists is one of the places that people have fled to because that's where they were told to go under the assumption that they would be safe. Now the bombing of southern Gaza has actually ramped up after those evacuation orders. It's not like it's ever really been a safe place, but Israel is now signaling okay, since amas HQ wasn't an Ashifa, it's actually in Conunison.
That's where Hamas leadership fled.
Now we're going to start this more aggressive bombing campaign in the south. US Deputy National Security Advisor John Feiner was on the Sunday shows doing his duty, looking very uncomfortable by the way in this role. But anyway, we'll put that aside. Raising alarms and concerns that the US government has with this ramped up attack in the South. Let's take a listen to what he had to say.
We have been quite clear that Israel has every right to defend itself against the threat that it faces. That includes, by the way, the right to go after Hamas leadership, who they say now have fled to the southern part
of Gaza and have sought refuge there. So in the event that we believe that Israel is likely to embark on combat operation, including in the South, we believe both that they have the right to do that, but that there is a real concern because hundreds of thousands of residents of Gaza have fled now from the north to the south at Israel's request, and we think that their operations should not go forward until those people, those additional civilians,
have been accounted for in their military planning, and so we will be conveying that directly to them, and have been conveying that directly to them. They should draw lessons from how the operation proceeded in the north, including lessons that lead to greater and enhanced protections for civilian life, things like narrowing the area of active combat, clarifying where civilians can seek refuge from the fighting.
So I mean, very diplomatically, he's saying, listen, you bombed a hell on of northern Gaza. You killed thousands upon thousands of civilians, thousands upon thousands of children. Maybe take some lessons from that as you move into southern Gaza.
Well, and to your point, this is where the Biden administration is really under the crunch with the Israeli government. I mean, obviously, again this is part of their messaging campaign in the media. You know, this is this is part of how the Biden administration is negotiating with Israels what they're saying publicly on shows exactly like this, and you.
Know, it's crystal.
I mean, it's a very interesting state of affairs as of right now, because again we were just talking about the hospital.
Some of this stuff is fully believable.
We don't know that it's true, but it's entirely possible again, that Alshifa was being used as a Hamas headquarters. It's entirely possible that Hamas knowing you know, the ground invasion obviously was delayed and delayed and delayed as people were waiting for it, that Hamas cleared places and went to the south. But again, this has been happening over the
last few weeks. Even if the Israeli government says that it is doing absolutely everything it can to protect civilians within reasonable boundaries, and then people in the south, in the South aren't safe, that it is an incredible problem for the Israeli government. It's an incredible problem for the United States government, especially given where public opinion is heading in the United States. And I think that's what the Biden administration understands, and it's why Reuters is reporting.
I think clearly from.
Katari sources that any obstacles to this piece deal that we talked about earlier in the show are minor. I think is the term that the Katari sources quote very minor, because the Biden administration has to answer questions exactly like this. And if Israel starts turning towards an operation more heavily in the South, they've already had problems with civilians being
put in danger in the South. If they start turning in that direction, it's a huge problem, not just for the Israelis, but for the American government as well.
The Israelis caret yahoo. Let me say not. I don't like to speak in those blanket terms, and when I say Israelis always mean the Israeli government cares about one thing, which is keeping Joe Biden on their side.
And all of these little you know.
There's all these leaks to the press about like, oh, they're really concerned. Behind the scenes, they're having these tough conversations, and you know, they send this dude out who I've actually never heard of before to be like, oh, we're worried about the South, et cetera, et cetera.
I think it's.
Already very clear that until there is a US willingness to say You're not getting our money unless you stop bombing schools, bombing hospitals, indiscriminately bombing and killing civilians. Nothing's going to change until the US, you know, actually starts letting some things, some votes.
Go through the UN.
And you did actually have them let one thing go through, which is about these quote unquote humanitarian pauses.
But we know from what.
The settlement leak. I mean, that's the Biden saying he might sanction.
Settlers settlers, So I mean that's like a little little like maybe I'll do that, And that's very minimal in terms of what we could do with the incredible leverage that we have, the amount of money that we routinely send Israel, and the escalating fourteen billion dollars that we're planning to send right now, the huge list of weapons that they tried to keep secret, by the way, from the American public, of what exactly is being sent to Israel,
and Ken Klippenstein and others were able to get their hands on specifically that list and reveal what has already been sent. So until the US government is actually inclined to use any of that considerable leverage, Israel's going to do what they want. And you know, the population is traumatized. By October seventh, they are convinced this is an existential threat. And so the polling shows some eighty percent don't really
care that much about Palestinian civilian life. So I think again, there's not going to be any change in the approach from the Israeli government until the US does more than like leak to the Washington posts that oh, we're so concerned and we really wish they would stop. And I was going to mention, you know, with the regard to this humanitarian pauses, we know from what Secretary blink And reportedly told Netnyahu when he was there, it's not about
actually bringing an end to the conflict. It's about buying time internationally and saving face so that the bombing campaign can continue for a lengthier period of time. I referred before to the moving of the goalposts in terms of where Hamas HQ actually has put this up on the screen from the Financial Times, this is one of the things that people were pointing to Israel signals operations in southern Gaza after hospital rate. Israel now believe several Hamas
leaders have moved south, with some in conunis. The largest city in southern Gaza. According to several Western officials, some of Israel's allies have asked them to be cautious in their operations in the south, where nearly one million palace I needs have fled, after being assured it would be safer than the north. Now, first of all, we are seeing strikes in the south, they added, and second, operations
in conunits can be incredibly difficult and destructive. Western officials said the scale and intensity of Israel's growing ground invasion of Gaza has caused concerns, despite consistent support for the country's right to quote defend itself. I don't think anybody meant that this requires ground operations of such a scope.
And they've already started this bombing campaign Emily and already very clear large death toll and large civilian death tolls, because this is where everyone is now, this is where everyone was told to flee to, and this is where they fled to.
Yeah, and again this is we were just talking about this.
It's an increasingly big problem for the US government, which public opinion is very going to be a very very tough pressure on Biden. In fact, we're going to talk about that with a guest today in all kinds of ways that you know, maybe even people didn't originally expect the political pressures that would fall on Joe Biden over this.
I agree with you.
I think, you know, until there's completely foundationally different conversations about US AID, which actually Tablet magazine over the summer, very pariseral magazine had a fascinating piece about how US aid to Israel in some ways is bad for both the US and Israel.
It's a really interesting piece. I recommend people check it out.
Until some of those foundational conversations start happening. I mean, I don't see how anything you know, dramatically changes. I do think the Biden administration is very aware of public opinion and you know, talking to these government about different things like this, and is probably.
Applying some pressure. But you know, short of immense pressure, short of sort of foundational conversations about the nature of the support. Yeah, I agree with you.
I don't think there's there's Without having conversations about the fundational questions, you don't get foundational change.
And you actually had a report Bertie Sanders, who has not called for a ceasefire, notably he came out and called for conditioning aid to Israel. And there was also a report that a number of I think all Democratic senators have begun that conversation. So that has started to happen, you know, at least within the Senate, but with Joe Biden the support has been more or less locked up. The other question here that has always been is okay,
so you completely flatten Gaza City. Now you're moving to the south to base, probably completely flatten southern Gaza as well. What the hell are you going to do after this mission accomplished moment?
That makes your people safer?
That's right, Yes, that makes your peoples, that makes it any sort of you know sense, that has any sort of reasonable humanitarian potentially situation for Palestinians.
Put this up on the screen. This was really eyebrow raising.
This is from a health monitor inside Israel's three day after options for Gaza amid government split. So I've got a short list here. Number one a role for Egypt. First option, which joins the greatest support among Israeli decision makers, is for Egypt to basically take control of the enclave in return for complete forgiveness of its massive foreign debt.
I mean, this is very adjacent to the ethnic.
Cleansing plan that was strategically released from the Israeli government and that many members of the far right Israeli cabinet have been pushing for. Next one is from Ramala to Gaza City. Second option, this is what the US has been pushing for, is the Palestinian authorities return to Gaza, which several Israeli decision makers regard as a bad idea. Simply put, it would torpedo the government's ultimate goal of
severing all ties between itself and Gaza. And also it would make it so that there was one unified leadership between the West Bank and Gaza, which would take off the table, you know, their talking point of like, oh, we have no one to negotiate with in terms of a two state solution. So it would make a two state solution more possible and more viable, so that they don't want that, even though that's what the US has
been pushing. There are other problems, by the way, I'll get into a minute with the idea that the PA could take over Gaza, and the last one is an international coalition. The third option is handing the keys to an international coalition consisting of Arab countries and Ornato.
The EU or the UN.
We also have been floated as part of this international coalition, to which I would certainly say hell no.
Which by the way, is basically how the West Bank and Jerusalem in particular is run. Right now, it's under control of Jordan, but there's also international cooperation with how it works, and so we kind of have a test case of how well it works, and the answer is.
Not very Yeah.
Well so in the PA, you know that theoretically is the governing body in the West Bank has zero legitimacy. And this is sort of intentional again from the Israeli government has zero legitimacy within the West Bank. They are accurately, i would say, seen as effectively collaborators with the Israeli security establishment.
And so that's why I say.
There's you know, there's a lot of issues with the idea that you're just going to nation build and install your chosen ruler of you know, Makmudabas and the PA in the Gaza strip, where they have zero you know, popular support, legitimate legitimacy, they already have no support also or legitimacy really in the West Bank.
Either within that international coalition.
Hard though one of the things they float here as an idea that people are talking about is completely insane. They want to construct a huge artificial island off the coast of Gaza.
Quote.
It will be cheaper and faster than rebuilding the Gaza strip itself. A very senior former security official told this paper seeing and promote his brainchild. There is technology, means in money. Abu Dhabi in dubai I have huge numbers of such artificial islands which you become hubs of tourism, commerce, housing and infrastructure. It's relatively easy, it's cheap that will allow everyone to turn over.
A new leaf.
The Gazmins will receive new land with efficient infrastructure that will no longer be a land border between Israel and Gaza.
The source warrant.
Any attempt to rebuild Gaza is doomed given the massive underground tunnel network into which everything could collapse. The underground city will suck up what is above it. Disaster is yet to come. The former security official set the island could be a pretty good solution. So they're like pitching this like it's some resort destination and like it'll be
great for everyone. The whole nature of this conflict, which often gets framed in religious terms, but it's really a land dispute, and so what you're talking about here is completely pushing them off of the land that they are claiming and entitled to by the way, And it's also very revealing about the extent of the utter devastation and destruction which has already been unleashed in the Gaza strip that they're like, there's nothing to go back to, we
can't even rebuild it. It'd be easier to build a whole separate island where we can then keep you for in prison than to try to rebuild Gadza City, which is uninhabitable.
Now, this is the most Western Galaxy brain solution that you could possibly joke about it, I mean that would come up with it's satire because again, to your point, this is a land conflict, and the land conflict obviously, whoever came up with the solution whenever security officials talking to the media and floating the solution, understands that fundamentally
this is a land conflict. But they have this end of history Western Galaxy brain idea that it just needs more land, that people will be satisfied if you just give them a brand new hunk of fabricated land in the middle of the ocean, as opposed to the land is important to them because there are holy sites on the land.
The land is important to them.
They're fighting, they're spilling blood over the land because of that particular land and its connection to their families, to their faiths, to their sense.
Of honor and dignity.
And so this idea that we'll just create new land and everyone will be happy with it is again like it is so perfectly representative of this like end of history, a Western idea about how to solve conflicts. And we have a really hard time understanding here in the United States, in our sort of comfortable world, why people would fight that bitterly over their land. It's hard for people to wrap their brains around. But there are holy sites in Gaza.
It's not just the West Bank. There are holy sites in Gaza that matter a lot to people.
I think it actually sort of reminds me of the thinking of some like libertarians and also a lot of liberals. That's like or neoliberals, I should say, that's like, oh, your factory town in the US is destroyed, just moved to New York or just moved to like San Francisco and learned to code. And it's like I say, this is someone who still lives in the hometown where I.
Was born and raised. Place is important to people.
You know, this is no La or San Francisco or whatever is not my home. This is my home and that matters to me. So yeah, I mean, it's just I guess what I'll say finally on all of this is all of these options are bad. All of them
are horrific. You know, you have a situation now where, in the name of quote unquote eradicating Hamas, which is an impossible goal, you've killed thousands upon thousands at the number I saw this, between twelve and sixteen thousand civilians killed at this point, you know, a huge number of children killed, huge number of children orphaned. And for every Hamas person that you have taken out, how many more radicals.
Have you created with this destruction?
So you know, one of the things we keep talking about is the lessons that should have been learned after nine to eleven. And there is no doubt that the actions we took after nine to eleven actually made us
less safe. And I think that's incredibly clear here as well, And it becomes even clearer when you look at the preposterous ideas that are being floated for the post war scenario, everything from you know, outright ethnic cleansing, pushing people completely off of the land into the desert in Egypt and basically using Egypt's debt load to force their compliance in Israel. That's there is I don't think there's any doubt at
this point that that is their top choice. The only question is whether the US, Egypt and other players are cold, you know, cajoled and convinced to go along.
With it, and whether that makes anyone more safe, because one of the reasons Egypt doesn't want that is they think it will actually advance the Muslim Brotherhood's cause because you have a bunch of radicalized people who just watched their land again turned into a quote parking lot to quote Max Miller, and are now in a new country where there are sort of even the embers of the Muslim Brotherhood and you can easily come back in and imagine how that makes Israel significantly less safe.
Again, Yeah, that's true too.
And then you know everything from that, from the ethnic club solution to the let's build them their own island, which also by the way pushing them off their land is you know, I would say that is still ethnic cleansing. But anyway, that's where we are, that's what we know, and it is it's hideous. I mean, it's just horrendous what is happening. And you know, it's very bleak what the future could look like as well. Even after this, they had their quote unquote mission accomplish moment.
Crystal, I'm fascinated to talk about this next block because it's been massively viral.
But the question is why. Yeah, the question is how organic the ver.
I've been excited to talk to you about this one.
It's interesting for a lot of reasons. It's interesting on the sort of tech front, but it's also interesting on the kind of gen z the new sort of discussion about how people see this country, how people see their role in the world. So if people haven't heard obviously this blew up late last week, but Osama bin Laden's infamous letter to America that ended up on the internet in two thousand and two. Somehow someone got their hands on it. I think it was The Guardian that originally
got their hands on it two thousand and two. It is going around the internet. Back in the day when it was a series of tubes, as al Gore would have said. But was that al Gore that said series of tubes?
Christal?
I think it sounds right, so I'll go with it, the.
Series of tubes that made up the Internet.
But this letter started to make the rounds everyone thought on TikTok over the course of the last week. It turns out that's not exactly the case. So let's put the first element up on the screen here. So yaeshar al Lee, Christal, I don't even know how to begin describing you, Charlie. If you don't know about Yashar Alie, basically a prolific user of Twitter, prolific user of x who has had quite an interesting background, you can google it because there's no reason for us to dive into
the particulars of all of it. Very friendly with Kathy Griffin, although not anymore. It's all up in the air. But Charlie posts. Over the past twenty four hours, thousands of tiktoks at least have been posted where people shared just how they read bin Laden's how they just read bin Laden's quote infamous quote letter to America, in which she explained.
Why he attacked the United States.
Now, one particular thing to keep in mind there with what I just read is he says thousands of tiktoks at least. So then he continues and says the tiktoks are from people of all ages, racist ethnicities, and backgrounds. Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes and they'll never see geopolitical matters the same way.
Again. Many of them, and I've watched a lot.
Ya Shark continues, say it has made them reevaluate their perspective on how what is often labeled as terrorism can be a legitimate form of resistance to hostile power. All right, let's put the next element up on the screen right here. This is actually going to be This is from if we put the next one up here, this is Oh sorry, I was like at the wrong block. This is going
to be the video compilation of that. Yashar posted of people saying they've just read bin laden Letter to America and have had their eyes opened up for the first time.
So take a listen to what your sharp posted this morning.
I read Letter to America, which is Osama bin Laden's letter to America explaining why he attacked Americans, and I am ashamed to say that I not only have never read this letter, but I didn't even know this letter existed.
And I feel the same exact way I felt when I was deconstructing Christianity. I feel a little bit just confused, like I have entered into another timeline.
What is this?
So I just read a letter to America and I will never look at life the same. I will never look at this country the same. In the last twenty minutes, my entire viewpoint on the entire life I have believed and I have lived, has changed.
It becomes apparent to me that the actually nine to eleven and those acts committed against the USA and its people were all just the build up of our government failing other nations.
All right, So let's put up how Glenn reacted to The Guardian pulling the letter down off.
Of their website.
So Glenn Greenwall tweets The Guardian's removal of the bin laden letter from its site after twenty one years until Americans started to read it completely backfired. The Washington Post says the removal actually spurred even more interest, and TikTok is now aggressively banning discussion of the letter, and that's the next element, we can just throw that up Immediately, TikTok comes out and says, content promoting this letter clearly
violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform. Well, Chris, so the Washington Post actually started investigating this and came to some interesting conclusion that tell us so much actually about social media and the news media. The fascinating kind of pipeline from
the people think of Covington Catholic. You had the snippet of a video that's going viral on Twitter at the time and suddenly ends up in the Washington Post and CNN, and people hadn't really taken the time to do their due diligence. They had just, you know, these professional reporters making lots of money here in Washington, DC and New
York ran with these ridiculous stories. Well, that's actually kind of at the heart of this too, because it's a striisand effect conversation and essence which the striisand effect is basically, once you publicly complain about something, you know, saying that it's getting too much attention, it'll get much more attention that there may have not organically been that much attention on it in the first place. So if we put
the next element up. Washington Post looked into the sort of source of the virality here and came to some, i mean, just fascinating conclusions, one of which was that if you look at the Google trends and this is the next element, there's a there's a lot of stuff to go through here, because the Washington Post found a lot of evidence here.
This is Ryan Broderick. He runs a newsletter.
He's saying if you look at the Google trends, he says, there are folks in my replies saying that Google Trends proves the bin laden letter was already going viral before it was shared on Twitter slash acts I marked below when it was tweeted. Yes, there was some interest. I never said there wasn't, but it was plateauing. After the tweet,
the interest doubled. The Washington Post also talked about this Google Trends data, basically saying that that TikTok did kind of make it viral, but that wasn't the whole story.
And that's right.
If you look at this, people had started googling Osaba bin Laden's letter to America basically on this timeline, like roughly over the past few weeks. Then he's pinpointed right there. If you're watching this, you can see there's a little blue dot with a circle around it when the yeshar Ali tweet is posted, and it spikes right after that, So it's going up before and then spikes right after it.
That would be the streis in effect illustrated here pretty gig neatly conveniently, so, Crystal, there's also, as Sager says, and this next tweet, we can put Sager up on the screen because even when he's not with us, he is always with Sager says, if you're going to read the bin Laden letter and think it's somehow profound, you should probably read to the end. Is why he says there are no such thing as innocent American civilians and why three thousand innocents deserve to die in nine to eleven.
And I think the implication there, Crystal, is that it's also the argument kind of being rolled out by Israel that there's no such thing as an innocent civilian in Gaza. We've heard people in the United States make that argument as well. And this is where the power of the bin Laden letter comes from. That, you know, a TikTok banning it horrible idea, horrible idea as dumb as I think the people who are posting about it is. This is the dumbest idea ever because what you're doing is
making it seem more forbidden. And the power of this history if you read this letter, which is actually a very useful piece of historical context, if you read this letter, it is so powerful to you if you're a young American who does doesn't remember nine to eleven precisely because nobody has ever told you that this is what been Laden fought, precisely, because nobody has ever told you this is how other people on the other side of the
world see the United States go. And actually just did a really interesting interview on his show with David Talbot, who wrote Devil's Chessboard, about great book all of these things the CIA has been doing in other countries, especially in the Middle East, that Americans don't know about, but that loom very large in places like Syria, in places like Iran, in places like Iraq, in places like Afghanistan. That's where the power comes in from the bin laden letter. That's how that stuff goes viral.
So first, let me talk about some of the content of the tiktoks, which we showed you a few of, and there were others, you know, the ones that we showed actually zero issue with because I think what people my sense of what people are reacting to and why they're like, oh my god, I feel like I've been lied to my whole life is because what sold to the American public is this very cartoonish like access of evil,
good versus evil. They hate us because we're free, like you know, they just came out of nowhere and these are just bad people or the culture's bad, or the religion's bad. It's just evil. There's nothing you could do about it. And there is an element of that. And if you read the letter too, by the way, there is a lot of it that is, you know, there's like horrors in there and completely anti Semitic and anti gay and all this stuff.
That's an excellment.
Right, Well, we'll get yeah, and we could put that up on the screen. Emily actually flag this some of what he you know, objects to. We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, and toxic and
gambling and trading with interest. But you know, there are also things in there that are legitimate foreign policy grievances, which if you are going to be someone like bin Laden who inspires this like horrific terrorist movement that took hold among some group of people, there has to be some core grievance that is actually real well, and that's why people study, you know, what enabled the rise of Hitler?
What was Hitler saying about his own justifications? What were the social and political and economic conditions that led to the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany. It's not because they support Hitler or Nazism. It's because it's important to understand the conditions that led to this result. It's part of also, you know what people are talking about with understanding the history of Israel and Palestine that you
know leads to October seventh. It's not to say, oh, October seventh was justified and it was fine for them to attack civilians. It's listen, if you cage a people and you have them in this open air prison for decades, yeah, you can expect that there's going to be some horrific, violent,
dangerous results. So I actually fully support people reading the Letter to America from Bin Laden to have a deeper understanding of a of a horrific and traumatizing, you know, in a lot of ways seminal moment in American histay, to have some of it's important to understand what your adversaries and enemies are saying about why they do the things that they do. And it's also ironic to me, Emily,
because we showed that thing from Sager. We have probably mentioned Letter to America a number of times on this shows exactly in this context, you guys did this. Yeah, it's our fault. Yeah, we sparked the truth the viral trend. But exactly in this context of okay, if you are going along with the Israeli officials who are like all of the Palestinians are Nazis, Isaac Kurtzog, they're you know, supposedly like moderate president saying we need to really rethink this,
this idea of innocent civilians. It's practically a quote that comes out every day that's basically like, no, they voted for Hamas, they support Hamas, therefore they're not innocent.
Therefore they deserve to die, exactly what bin Lan says about us.
And by the way, bin Laden has more of a point with America because we are actually democracy, we do actually elect their leadership. These people have not had an election for Hamas, most of most of the population of the Gaza Strip wasn't even alive when they had their last election.
All of this is horrific.
None of it justifies attacks on innocent civilians. So it's important to understand that if you're going along with the Israelis when they're saying, yeah, there's no innocent civilians because look, they like Hamas and they voted for Hamas, you are bolstering the very same argument that bin Laden made to
massacre innocent civilians in America. And also, by the way, you are bolstering the very argument that Hamas would make about why there are no innocent Israelis and why it was perfectly fine and justified for Israeli civilians to be massacred on October seventh and in suicide attacks and other attacks and you know, firing rockets, et cetera.
Et cetera over the years.
You should reject all of that and so I actually think it's a good thing for people to be reading the letter. Now, let me also say Emily that there were also some of these tiktoks that were like bin Laden was right, no nuts, Ben Laanen was not right. All right, let's not let's this No, absolutely not. But do I think they should be banned? Do I think TikTok should pull this down because of this you know, idiotic facil and you know, immature and completely wrong take. No,
I don't think they should have taken it down. I think it's absurd that the Guardian something is popular on your website and that's like a red flag to you. Isn't that the whole reason you have things on your website is for people to find them and read them
and engage with them. That's insane to me. And Glenn also made a good point because it's it's mostly the right that's like, you know, these dumb zoomer TikTok kids like they love Hamas and they're evil and they hate America and now they love bin Laen, etcetera, etcetera, which is just like a fastile, preposterous rating of what's going
on here. And also, you know, we showed you the data of this wasn't even that much of a thing until it got called attention to and you had a bunch of people rocketing in to be like, Oh, what are these dumb kids actually think? But you know, up until very recently, there was this whole effort to release that school shooter manifesto that was being kept Audriaill. Yes, that was being kept hidden. And the idea there wasn't we want to read her writings because we support her massacre.
No, it was, hey, we want to.
I mean, it was kind of like we want to own the libs and left and whatever, but it was like, we want to understand what radicalized this person. We want to read her words and her justification. And the very same principlelies.
Here again, like this is powerful because we don't tell this version of history. And I actually think that the right vastly underestimates how.
Powerful this is.
With Generation Z and the kids that are going to be younger than them, who don't remember nine to eleven, we're learning about nine to eleven because the Internet has democratized the way we tell stories about ourselves as a country, and there are really important elements of that story that we are not honest with ourselves about there, for example, asom Bin Laden, the Taliban al Qaeda.
We can go back to the Cold War and.
The Musa Haden and have these really serious conversations about nuclear war policy during the Cold and how actually some of the things that we did from the perspective of a country that had just spilled blood overseas and the Pacific and had dropped a nuclear weapon for the first time ever twice in Japan, why people were utterly terrified, Why there were drills that you know, people were hiding under their desks because they were so afraid of nuclear war,
and how that led us to make some really ridiculous decisions overseas. But if we're not honest about those decisions, we are going to look like we are hiding that, and we are to some extent hiding it. And it's an amazing country that you know, people like David Talbot can write the book that he did and can talk about it in the media, and that we can study
these things and be honest about them. But until we sort of have a high profile confrontation with those mistakes and what they did oversea is like, this is why the fight over the sixteen nineteen project we can go back to the revolution or whatever, but like we aren't even being honest about the history the immediate history of conflicts.
That we are in right now. Well, this is now.
This is also why you know, we were opposed to like banning our tea during the at the you know, at the beginning of the Ukraine War, when Russian invades Ukraine and all of these like Russian propaganda outlets were banned, not because we think that they're accurate and perfect all the time, but because it's important to know what your what propaganda is your enemy putting out, how are they justifying this conflict, and what are also some like potentially
legitimate grievances that they had that enabled their justification of this war and this conflict. Those are really important things
to understand. So and to your point, Emily, you know, the reason why, the big reason why we are so supportive of Israel since the sixties and so supportive of Saudi Arabian like these are our best buds in the region, is because we found them very useful for combating a Pan Arab movement, and we found frequently we found these sort of like Islamists, religious extremists groups like the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Bin Laden connection there, we found them useful
for our aims at the time. And so also part of understanding this complex history is not to then go, oh, well, we backed bin Laden, therefore bin Laden must be good or right, or it's all our fault or whatever, but to understand the blowback and the potential consequences of some of the things that we have done in this region,
and also that Israel has done in this region. NETANYAHUU is on record saying that he supported Hamas he wanted to bolster Hamas thing because they were an obstacle to a two state solution, and he didn't want a two state solution. So to say all of these things isn't to say, ergo Hamas is good or ergo it's all Israel's fault that they got their citizens massacred.
It's to understand the history.
So that we can try to keep people safe and avoid conflicts and avoid terrorism and avoid war in the future. And so I just find the whole, like the entire moral panic over this bin Laden letter situation, to be absurd, Like on every single level, I find it completely absurd.
It's ridiculous.
And the last thing we should mention is that there was, originally from people, including myself, speculation that the Beijing owned app TikTok was could be in some ways tweaking with the algorithm to make this amplify this in the United States. And actually TikTok saying that they're aggressively banning the content doesn't mean that that wasn't necessarily happening in Beijing.
But I don't think it does.
I don't think we actually even need TikTok, as the Google data that the Washiant and post polled shows.
We don't need TikTok.
We don't need Instagram like the Russian memes from twenty sixteen that they actually did put like thirty thousand dollars behind or whatever it was, to have some minimal effect. We're trying to prey on these divisions over transiteology and Black Lives Matter and all of this stuff in the US. Our foreign adversaries know that we're already completely divided along these lines, and they already know how powerful this stuff is. We actually don't need them to pour gasoline on the fire.
Shouldn't allow them to pour gasoline on the fire.
But even if they do the.
Fires already burning, they might make the fire worse, but the fire is already burning because of plenty of the problems that we have on our own. And as of like ten years ago, people can go read this in the Washington Post. There were CIA textbooks they were made in like Missouri or Colorado, that were encouraging and writing about jihad in Afghanistan that were from Madrasas, and as of ten years ago they were still circulating. They're from
like the nineteen eighties. That is still a completely There are still completely real fault lines that stem from this Cold War ideology that are driving the conflicts today right now. I mean, some of these things are still being driven by them. So we need to be honest about it. And if we aren't, people should expect the political establishment should expect a whole lot more sentiment exactly like this.
And that is a great point because a lot of this does come down to cope that the younger generations have a very different view of this conflict. And I don't think you can look at the pole like none of these social media platforms are so powerful that what they serve you just like instantly brainwatches people into whatever
view they're promoting. There is a genuine generational break in the way that people view this conflict between Israel Palestine, and I think that is attributed to a lot of things.
Sagar and I had a conversation about this.
I think part of it is that young people didn't grow up in this Cold War era where it was like, these are our friends and that's that, and this sense of like, you know, being existential, that we just back our friends against the bad guys no matter what.
And I think it also is.
Attributable to the fact that there is less of a lock on what people are able to see and the media that they're able to consume. There's a lot of reasons, I'm sure multifaceted, that have led to that, but it's organic. It's very clear in every single poll that comes out. And I don't know that the TikTok algorithm has a whole lot to do with it, right, No.
I agree completely.
Let's move on to what is roiling x dot com formerly known as Twitter over the last couple of days, which is Elon Musk firing off a couple of tweets, which it's no stranger to the advertisers on AX, so the board of over at AX or the people in the sort of c suite at ACX at this point that Elon Musk sort of doing what Elon Musk does and firing off some tweets can cause these massive explosions of controversy as it regards to their business.
So let's put this first tear sheet up on the screen. This is from The Guardian.
The headline is Elon Musk agrees with tweet accusing Jewish people of quote hatred against whites. This then spurred by the way he was referring to this weird tweet that said I'm going to read it actually because if you're listening, you can see it on the screen if you're watching, But if you're listening, I think it's actually helpful to
see the whole thing that he was responding to. Okay, Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they can that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about Western Jewish populations. Coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country. Don't exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your.
Face there it is, so Elon Musk replies, you have said the actual truth. After this, as you can.
Imagine, it spurs a huge advertising pullout. So this is from Axios. They have a list of companies that have suspended their ads on X, and they posted this to X. Actually, Apple, IBM, Disney, Comcast, Slash, NBC, Universal, lions Gate Entertainment, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount. This is really something crystal that already just in the last few hours.
I'm actually kind of surprised a lot of those companies were still advertizing on X, which I actually, first of all, don't imagine is that helpful to some of their business.
I think it is to generating buzz.
You know, you can understand why Paramount or Disney or for example, would be advertising there. But you know, I'm actually surprised, given what's been happening, when they were still on there in any significant way.
But this gets really interesting, So let's put the next element up.
This is from Matt Binder, who says Eli Musk is so mad about all the advertisers fleeing X. He announced he's going to sue Media Matters, and in his statement he appears to confirm the accuracy of their reports in an attempt to downplay it.
Good luck with the lawsuit.
So this is a Musk's tweet of a statement that he said, quote the split second court opens on Monday. Ex court will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and all those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company. Stephen Miller, the Attorney General also of Missouri, reply to Elon Musk and basically we're saying fraud is serious. The Age of Missouri said, we're looking into this. Stephen Miller said fraud is both a civil and criminal offense.
So that they are saying Media Matters, who put together this report, They said, basically their report is what gets advertisers to flee.
They've done this with Fox News before.
They do this all the time and tell places like Disney and Apple that their posts are appearing next to anti Semitic posts, so that their advertising content content is appearing next to anti Semitic posts. And so Elon Musk puts out this statement that says, of the five point five billion ad impressions on x that day. This is of the Media Matters report the day they studied, less than fifty total AD impressions were served against all of
the organic content featured in the Media Matters article. For one brand showcase in the article, one of its ad adjacent to a post two times, and that ad was seen in the setting by only two users, one of which was the author of the Medium Matters piece. And this is Media Matters puts together. I think these stupid reports, like sloppy reports, silly reports. But advertisers are so sensitive about these things right now, especially when you have Elon
Musk tweeting things like this. They're so sensitive to the public backlash that they will respond to Media Matters like this. Also, they're sort of already sympathetic to the ideological bent of Media Matters. So it's fairly easy for Media Matters to sort of control advertisers with things like this. We saw them again do it with target Carson Show on Fox.
News and other things.
But Elon is accusing Media Matters of creating fraudulently like a puppet account and following accounts taking activities to tweak the out or to mess with the algorithm so that it would serve them up the worst content on X. Now there are people calling for Linda Yakarino, who's in charge of what trust and safety at.
She's the CEO.
Yeah, she's the one who She came from NBC and the whole ones because she was the head of advertising at NBC. And the idea was that she has all these like brand relationships and she'd be able to bring the brands back over to X and make them feel comfy having their ads placed there.
Right, that's right, and so Musk had said on Friday, quote as I said earlier this week, decolonization from the river to the sea and similar euphemism to necessarily imply genocide. Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and result in suspension. Jonathan green Blat of the Anti Defamation League responded to Elon Musk and said, this is an important and welcome moved by Elon Musk. I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.
Jakarino had also put out a statement without mentioning Musk, there's no room for anti Semitism hate on X period.
Else is from the CEO, so Chrystal.
These are kind of two separate things on the one hand, you have the Media Matters report. On the other hand, you have Elon Musk and what he posted.
Yeah, that sort of creates the fire, but in some ways is separate because there's all of these different layers when we're just talking about the media Matters but Musk himself him expressing that sentiment. What did you make of his reply to the random post that he has no reason to replay too well?
I mean, I guess I'm just dense because when I first read it, I just didn't understand it. Like the Dielectric electrical hatred. It wasn't a conspiracy that I was personally really familiar with.
So I just didn't understand it. I mean I did.
I have, like the reference to minority hordes. I was like, that sounds bad. But then Matt Iglecie has to actually explained it. It's like why this helped me? Sorry, and it didn't help me. It was like, Oh, what they're saying is that Jews, because they vote for Democrats, deserved to die basically is the idea. And so yeah, to have Elon Musk co signing that, like, ain't that the truth?
Brother? It's like this is wild.
And then to see On the other hand, the ADL guy who's out there calling everybody antis coming out and being like, good job on banning certain words from your platform, and I stand, you know this is great, and I support you when you you legit, just like there is no two ways around the fact what Elon mus said is like wildly anti Semitic and and like anti Muslim
and problematic on all sorts of levels. So there's that piece of the story which I think speaks to something I've been tracking, which is that you know, many of the people on the right who were so against identity politics and now are sounding very much like the left used to and throwing the word anti Semitic around all the time, and you know, engaging their own form of identity politics and safetyism and whatever. It's not actually anti Semitism that they have a big problem with, it's criticism
of Israel. Like that's the thing the Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens dispute. As a primary example of this, Candace said some crazy stuff about how what Hitler did was fine except he wanted to take his ambitions worldwide or whatever. I don't want to miss quote, or you can go and read the quote. It was an issue at the time, and lots of people condemned her for it, that he apparently didn't have a problem with because he then hires her at the Daily Wire. But when she's critical of Israel,
that's where he says, this is repugnant. I think that's the word of disgusting. Maybe is the word that he used, that this is absolutely disgraceful, disgraceful.
There you go, Thank you for reminding me of the exact words that he used. There.
That's where he draws the line. And it's very similar with the ADL. Jonathan green Blad has come out and said that, you know, it's very clear that anti Zionism is anti Semitism.
That's insane.
Zionism is a political ideology. You can critique that, and there are many Jews who are not Zionists, by the way, and there are many non Jews who are Zionists.
So it's a political ideology. Of course you can critique it.
Of course you can critique the Israeli government without being an anti semit So there's that piece of it. Then the Media Matters piece is Media Matter is obviously an activist organization and one of their specialties is weaponizing capitalism against companies right and Twitter. The reason all of these social media platforms have very similar content moderation policies is not because of the individual billionaire owners or words or whatever.
It's because it's what the advertisers demand. So if you can show Apple that their ad was displayed next to some hitler post, and then you have the you know, the the Twitter head of Twitter dude whatever his technical title is, now being like by the way I share your antisemitic conspiracy, you can understand why they'd be like, I think I'm going to take.
My ad dollars somewhere else.
And obviously Twitter already in the you know, in the tank, in the toilet or whatever in terms of their revenue under Elon Musk's leaderships. So there's a lot of layers here, and all of them are kind of interesting.
The funny thing to me about Media Matters is that they don't, I don't think inside Media Matters they see these little studies they do as like scientific or anything that could like withstand peer review. I mean obviously not, but like the media treats them that way. And I think that's so funny that the.
Media Matters is very pro censorship, you know, I mean they are, like, I guess, sort of consistently pro censorship.
I guess I would give them that.
But and then elon mister free speech, then he's like, oh, you can't say these certain words the river to the sea, which, by the way, you know, you when Israelis say it, and there was a who was it is reelly like minister leadership. Israeli Foreign minister recently said from the river to the sea there will be secure Yeah, there will, he said, from the Jordan to the sea, there will be security control at all times moving forward.
That's fine.
But when Palestinians, some of whom I'm sure do use it as like, you know, wipe them all out, and plenty of whom mean it as in we want one state with equal rights. That sound of bounds, decolonization out of bounds. But you know, listen, if you're a pro censorship dude, I guess all right, but you're supposed to be mister free speech, and you can't use these words and phrases on your site.
Listen.
I think the right needs to be more consistent on this period. I think free speech people needs to be more consistent on this period because this long per date's October seventh. And you know, there's a really serious problem with inflation, like definition inflation that we talk about on the right all of the time when it comes to
words like racism and bigotry. Particularly one that's really obvious is white supremacy, sort of taking how a lot of people used to understand those terms and the definition that we used to sort of have consensus on, and then at least briefly, and then inflating it to include people who are acting in good faith, are decent and civil, but you just disagree with them and you weaponize the term by wrapping it into it. That happens with anti semitism on the right. That is the way that the
definition is often inflated. And I think sometimes there is very much anti semitism that gets ignored in the press and that people don't talk about. But there are a whole lot of other things. Decolonization is not necessarily necessarily anti semitism.
To talk, no, it's absurd. And if Elon Musk, by the way, wants to take the side.
Of the Guardian in deep platforming things that are uncomfortable. When we were talking about the Islama bin Laden letter, last segment and the Guardian.
Pulling it down.
That is a bad move, even though it's Osama bin laden, because we need to be able to read these things. And even if you think from the River to the Sea is what Elon Musk is saying, it is even if you agree with him that you know, and I generally do think that a lot of times it is used with the sort of wink wink, you know, you kind of know what I mean. Not always, but I
think sometimes it is used that way. Even if you think that's always how it's used, it should be allowed on your free speech absolutist platform because the minute you start banning things is when bad ideas metastasize in the shadows. The minute you start banning things is when people get really curious about them, and it's when you give them power. You give things power by banning them. And we should all be able to read exactly where everybody stands on this.
And I understand advertisers not wanting their content on that. Then he needs to figure out another business model, which he's sort of trying to do. But this is not, I mean, this is not the sort of magic wand that fixes this free speech magic wand that makes Twitter suddenly better again. Yeah.
Jim Zogbie shared a poll of when Palestinians say, you know, one state or from the river to the sea, they mean they tend to mean, and again I'm not saying in all cases, one state with equal rights for everyone.
Now israelis Jewish.
Israelis see that as an existential threat because they see the Jewish nature of their state as being an essential quality. And if everyone in the territory from the river to the sea had equal rights, you would no longer have that Jewish majority, and so that's why they see it as existential. But the number of genocidal posts that you see coming from Israeli ministers are like wipe them out, a race them all, who are actively arguing for displacing them all permanently out of Gaza.
And that's all find and good.
It makes it very difficult for me to stomach this sort of like, you know, freak out over a chant that has been used for a long time and attempt to demonize a chant that many people genuinely do mean as like a call for one state with equal rights, whether you support that solution or not. But I think your point is the most important one, Emily, which is that listen, if you support free.
Speech, you don't get to pick and choose.
You know, I don't get to pick and choose when a speech that I don't like, and there's plenty of it, like, yeah, most of what.
He says, not most, but some, you know, you don't like.
Making space for speech that you find abhorrent is kind of the point of free speech. Otherwise those principles don't matter at all. So anyway, lot going on there with with Elon Musk and the things that he's saying and the things that he's doing, and the way that advertisers are responding.
Sure well, perhaps the most influential AI company on the face of the earth was thrown into chaos starting on Friday when founder Sam Altman was pushed out of the company. We're going to get into the whole timeline that transpired over the weekend, but let's just start with the news after being fired on Friday, Sam Altman, we can put this first element up on the screen here. He said, I loved my time at Open Ai. It was transformative for me personally and hopefully the world a little bit.
Most of why I loved working with such talented people will have more to say about what's next later.
Well, actually we know what's next.
After a wild weekend where he's pushed out, he's flirting actually with coming back. There's news reports that he's coming back. He's posting pictures that suggest maybe he's coming back. It turns out he's actually landed at Microsoft. We can put the next element up on the screen. He has been hired by Microsoft already, so this is just between Friday and Monday. He was hired at Microsoft. And if we put the next staurshat up on this screen, it followed
just the wile this weekend I was. I was telling Crystal before we started filming this. It was like an episode of Succession. And the New York Times has to dive into it that they bill as in the headline the fear intention that led to Sam Altman's ouster at open AI. It looked from reports, especially originally because of where the fault lines are now open AIA has a really interesting structure. This is from the New York Times
on Saturday. They said the conflict between fast growth and AI safety came into focus on Friday afternoon when mister Altman was pushed out of his job by four of open AI's six board members. One of the chairman of the board actually wasn't on this meeting when they ousted Sam Altman. A couple big members of the team. Their chief technology officer quit after Altman was pushed out by the board, he was asked to join this board meeting
over video at New San Francisco. They're reading from a script according to The New.
York Times, remote breakup one the remote breakup.
And you know again, this is one of the most interesting parts of it is that they have this nonprofit board. Obviously open ai started as a nonprofit. Altman was one of the people who actually pushed He was really the person who pushed to start funneling all of this corporate money into open Ai.
So their governed by a nonprofit board. I'm reading from the Wall Street Journal.
Now, only a minority of its members were allowed to have a financial stake in the company at any given time. According to the company's bylaws, Altman himself had no equity in the company, further diminishing his influence with the board.
This setup, as the Journal continues, allowed the board to essentially oust Altman without the consent of some of open AI's largest investors, and even though he delivered rapid financial access for the company and sent its valuation soaring, because the members of the nonprofit board don't exactly have the same I guess financial motives or interest in the financial motives that somebody like Sam Altman would. After steering all of this Microsoft cash and other corporate cash into open Ai.
And now obviously Altman is going to Microsoft to work on AI. That's part of this deal. He's the head of their AI operations now, which means presumably he's going to be I mean, I would imagine he's still going to have because of the stake that Microsoft has an open Ai. Altman still apparently has very good will with people on the for profit side of open Ai. That's why this was really shocking to the AI community. He's ousted by this split.
Crystal.
I'm really curious to see what you think about this, this fundamental split in the AI world between people who say we need to reel this in begging for regulation, people like Tristan Harris at the Center for Humane Tech, which worked with the Biden administration on the recent executive orders. So people who are just saying we need to reel this back in. This technology is been it's a pendor's box. It's opened, and we need to kind of pull it
back in as quickly as we can. And the sort of market indreasing camp that is, you know, full techno optimist, and we need to be actually on the accelerator right now because there's so much good that can be that can come from this and the more sort of profit motive and capitalist drive is involved in the process, the better it's all going to be.
Altman is more on the techno optimist side of this.
He's actually been pushed out by some of these same foundational dynamics that he tried to navigate and actually accommodated when he was in charge of open ai.
So the history of open ai is it originally is established Altman, actually Elon Musk was involved at that time and a number of other people establish open ai as an explicitly non profit organization to try to pursue tech, including obviously AI, under a nonprofit umbrella so that all the decision making wasn't driven by just the profit motive.
So that was the original I which is.
A good idea by the way, which is a really good idea, and something that I fully support, because I do think that there are reasons to be concerned about what AI could unintentionally unleash, especially if you have, you know, big business controlling the decision making and driving the direction
of development. Not only are you not going to pursue some of the things that actually could be really good for humanity because those things don't turn a profit, but you also run the risk of unleashing things that are really not ready to be unleashed and have inherent risk.
We got a little bit of.
A glimpse of this when chat GPT was rolled out, And remember there was that brief period before they sort of like lobotomized chat GPT where people are having some really wild caudles, Some real wild stuff was going on over there.
And part of why you know AI is different than.
Other tech is I saw someone explain that they may have even been saying, altman that explained this, but I'm not sure. But you know, like a phone, I don't know how a phone work, but I know there are people who could tell me how it works, right, who could explain, like this piece and this fits with this, and this is how like there's a functionality that.
Human beings understand with large language models.
It's not like that you feed in all of this insane astronomical amounts of data and you create something that is different that you can't just there's no human being on the planet who could tell you, like, if you ask the chat GPT this question or the AI this question, because of how it's programmed, you're going to get this result. That's what makes it such a that's what makes it
so different, that's what makes it so frankly scary. That's what makes it something that you should approach with some caution and care and not just leave up to the whims of markets and people who want to turn a huge profit on it. So yeah, I mean that's sort of the overall state of affairs. And my eyebrows were firmly raised when open ai shifted to making this big business deal with Microsoft. I had a lot of questions
about the direction that would go in. Sam was very outfront being like, no, it's fine, I totally trust them.
It's going to be all good.
The other cultural divide, or like philosophical divide in Silicon Valley, too, is between the effective altruists that we've covered in the context of Sam Bankman Freed, who have this philosophy that is, like, you know, the best we need to calculate the best, greatest good that our dollars can be put towards. We should do everything we can to get wealthy and then use that money in these like directed ways towards the things that we find to be the greatest threat to
humanity and civilization. And put your feelings aside about whatever cause like emotionally moves you, and we'll.
Just do this complex calculus. I have all sorts of issues with that. I did a monologue on it. You can listen to it.
But one of the things that they identified as one of the grave risks that a lot of money should be funneled into is the threat from AI, sort of AI gone wild.
I guess you would say. Another one was pandemic preparedness.
That's why Sam Beakman Freed's thing was always like cloaked in, Oh sure, it's not about me getting the regulation or the non regulation I want of crypto. It's really about pandemic preparedness. Anyway, AI development was the other big cause, or one of the other big causes that they're devoting to.
There's a lot of silicon valley and tech types who are do believe in the effective altruist like system, and so that is part of the split here, and the tension as well between the direction Sam was going in in the direction that the board wanted to go in.
And that's again interesting about this, Like there are experts, there are people reporters who cover this really closely who say it's not necessarily we don't know definitively that the reason he was originally pushed out was because people were like, whoa Sam Altman? Uh, you know, the nonprofit board was like, we just got to pump the brakes on all of this.
So much as it could have been that, or it could have been that these tensions stem from that fundamental disconnect between Altman and the nonprofit board and in other sort of then logistical, downstream ways, he ended up sort of on their chopping board. So if it's tensions that come from that initial disagreement, or it was front and center the initial disagreement itself, I'm sure we'll learn more
and more about in the days to come. But this conversation about AI find so incredibly frustrating because the techno optimist side of this will point to all of these silly pessimists. They lovey tweeting that pessimist Twitter page that we're worried about the Internet, that we're worried about cell phones, that were worried about whatever else it was, We're worried about cars. They liked their horses of all of that,
first of all, as a way to dismiss pessimists. Now, those pessimists made the eventual product product safer and better, So denigrating the pessimists is not helping the product. Second of all, Yes, the call for regulations that sometimes is the baptist and bootlaggers, it is the protectionist, it is crony capitalism, and it is driven sometimes by apocalyptic fears.
But actually those apocalyptic fears are held by people who are not just tech outsiders who don't understand the tech like we necessarily like we don't, we can't tell you how the phone works. They're actually, as you mentioned, people who do understand how this tech works, have developed the tech are also in the camp of the pessimists, not all of them, but many of them are. So to then act as the people who don't understand the tech are only afraid because they're ignorant, is again stupid.
It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
And this conversation was just once again thrust to the forefront with the aster of Altman over the weekend. So now he's the head of Microsoft, which has tons and tons of money. Putting tons and tons of money into AI is massively powerful, Crystal. I don't think we got any step closer to say for AI over the weekend.
No, I don't think so. And there's two separate genres of AI concern. One of them is like the apocalyptic scenario, like the AI is going to kill us all and you know, or like unleash something that is unpredictable, et cetera. There's that one, even if you don't buy into that one.
The other one, though, is that you have massive job loss triggered by rapid AI development, which is something that you know, corporate titans like they're all for So that's part of why people are concerned by this being controlled by the for profit sector of society. And as you say, Emily, you know, not just people who are outside of it and don't understand, but actually people who are intimately knowledgeable
and involved with the development of AI. But I would also just say that sometimes people who have a little bit of a remove, who aren't emotionally invested in the development of extra Y or Z, but have almost like a layman's perspective on what this could mean and what it can unleash. Those views are also really valuable because you know, at times people get so into the weeds and so like in love with the technology itself that they have an incentive to downplay the risks and downplay
some of the consequences. So personally, I don't I wouldn't dismiss you know, people who are sounding alarms who don't have intimate familiarity with exactly what the tech is or what it does.
Let's move on to a pretty massive l from CNN over the last few days, which you know takes a lot of l's actually, but this one I think is worth discussing.
Here.
I'm going to play a clip. This is Anderson Cooper UH Friday. This is a guest on Anderson Cooper's show, a former is really Intelligence chief talking on CNN on Friday night.
Let's just watch the clip and then Crystal and I will discuss and.
In the south of several areas, we have been asking the godsen uh to move to the Mowassee area, which is the area closest to the seat Uh and this is where the big ten cities have been established. Fighting in the southern Honurnis does not mean that we're fighting in the same area. And as you've seen in the couple in the last couple of weeks, the fighting is
very surgical, it is slow, it is very methodical. We are trying not to reach any of the non combatant population in the Gaza Strip, and I think that there is no way that we can eradicate the Hamas without dealing with most of its forces that have been that have fled to the south.
Now again one little note. The noncombatant population in the Gaza Strip is really a non existent term because all of the Gazans have voted for the Hamas, and as we have seen on the seventh of October, most of the population in the Gaza Strip a Haamas.
Nonetheless, we are treating them as non combatant, we are treating them as regular civilians, and they are spared from the fighting.
All right.
So again the quote there the non combatant population of the Gaza Strip is really a non existent term because all of the Gazzens voted for Hamas, and as we've seen on the seventh of October, most of the population in the Gaza strip are Hamas. That's the quote from the four is really intelligence Chief. Anderson Cooper just gets piled on when this video is posted to Twitter. For Kenna does a little squint when his guests said that, but basically let it go. You can you just heard
in the clip or saw on the clip. He moved on to another topic completely after that statement was made, which, of course there is pretty relevant context and the question. But first of all, even if you're on the side of that Israeli Intelligence chief, you could talk about how there were supportive demonstrations on October seventh and Gaza the people were, you know, in some sense supportive of what happened on October seventh.
But that's not the same as an election.
And the last election that happened, as you pointed out earlier in today's show, was before like half of the population in Gaza was alive, let alone able to vote, able to vote.
Yeah, Anderson Cooper just moves on from them.
Maybe Anderson Cooper had just read Bin LUN's letter to America.
And was persuaded persuaded by his logic that actually there are no civilian combatants. Since you have elections, it's fair game to massa her civilians or certainly the IDF dude maybe had just let agreed with the bin laden letters. You know what, Osama's got a point. What's up with
this non combatant think? No, I mean, listen, there's so much policing of like rally chance of people who are basically powerless or like the Harvard letter, which we talked about here and which I had, is like, you can't say Israel is solely responsible for what Hamas did on October seventh. Hamas also guys has some responsibility, and.
What's that responsibility? By the way they want to claim the responsibility.
True, but for all of the you know, policing of that rhetoric, you've got someone with actual power here on a cable news network outwardly laying out a case for Jenaside while he's like, oh, well, of course we're doing what we can about civilians, but also there's not really civilians, so eh, who really cares?
And zero pushback, zero pushback.
You could not imagine the same thing happening on the other side if you had somebody on there who was like making the case that well, actually, all of these Israeli civilians, like they're not really civilians because they voted for Nanna Who, and they're complicit in the apartheid and like the blockade and the occupation, so they basically use access. There's no way that that would go unchallenged, and it shouldn't.
It shouldn't by the way, But here this just becomes so normalized and commonplace, and it becomes rhetoric that we hear all the time that you know, the most Anderson Cooper can muster here is like a little squinting of his eyes before he moves on to the next stop.
It's the Tucker Carlson squint a little bit.
He's taking his cues from Bin Laden and Tucker Carlson.
Okay, wow, So CNN has taken a few l's over the course of this context. Actually one of them from the other side is when they kind of immediately like the New York Times and some other outlets ran with the hamas framing of the initial hospital. This was like right after October seventh. People kind of remember when a hospital was hit. We still don't know exactly what happened with it, but as as Israel not claims as the
US now claims Hamas missile hitt A hospital. CNN took a lot of heat for sort of like The New York Times. Basically, many major news outlets ran with the information that they had. That was one of the first blunders that I think see in an experience over the course of this conflict. But from the other side, let's look at this footage they ran. This is actually like a package, as it's called in the in the biz. A package they ran from this is Al Shifa man.
The HuffPost did a dive. Here's the next element on what happened. CNN quietly cut, according to the Post headline, disputed Israeli military claim from some video reports. Huff Post rights in several other broadcasts of Robertson's report, which had included.
We talked about this earlier in the show. A calendar that was supposed to be like a harmas.
It was a shift, yes, where Hamas militants or terrorists were recording their names for their shifts of watching the hostages right, and in reality it was a calendar.
Nobody knows how this aired because CNN, first of all, obviously Israel has people who speak Arabic. The IDEAF has people who speak Arabic, and you'd think before giving CNN and other people tours of this facility and making a claim that would easily be vetable, and you would of course make sure that you met that. Why would CNN then air You know, It's one thing for a sort of government engaged in a conflict to push propaganda. It's an entirely different thing for a media outlet to sort
of run with it. CNN has not, by the way, they have changed this package, as you know they have. They're being shown through this kind of battleground area around Al Shifa by the IDEF. They run a package based on that, with the Arabic calendar, with that claim that it's a hostage like shift schedule for Hamas, and then it sort of disappears as huff Post catches. They're saying in several other broadcasts as well as on the CNN YouTube page on their website, none of the false information
actually was there. Instead, they say, Robertson's report skips ahead to the journalists asking Hagari from the IDF about other hospitals, and the IDF spokesperson arguing, quote, we were right to fire.
Upon al Rontisi.
In an email to huff Post, a CNN spokesperson acknowledged the report, which first aired on Kaitlin Collins's program, was quote cut purely for length for subsequent shows.
Not for personal embarrassment and humiliation.
Sure, yes, the spokesperson argued that such cuts were quote not uncommon at all, especially given the nine minute length of the original segment, and huff Post continues, CNN has seemingly provided no acknowledgment or explanation to its online readership about these scenes apparently being cut from other versions of Robertson's report. The cnn dot com page for the report includes no editor's note or clarification, nor to CNN's YouTube page.
That is not common practice, even when news outlets, especially for a pretty high profile and a pretty egregious mistake like this one, where again it's a mistake. I mean, even if you give, like let's say hypothetically we just give describe the benefit the doubt to CNN say they did everything. You know, sometimes the journalists just make mistakes. Sometimes that happens. Well, when it's a mistake, that's as
I think pretty obvious. You've met calendars in a foreign language before allowing a foreign government to make a claim about them.
It's just a journalism one on one.
Yeah, so when you make a mistake, you just issue a correction again, like standard operating procedure, common practice in the news industry.
That's not what happened here.
Yeah, this is such a pretty good half post report, getting CNN even to admit that they weren't amending anything that they are claiming. It was just entirely for length, which is obviously untrue.
Yeah.
I mean Caylen Collins should have come out and you know, issue a statement on her program since this aired on her program. Absolutely, But I mean they're just this is humiliating, Like it's humiliating. And the context is that there are very few journalists left in Gaza. As we discussed before, somewhere around fifty of them have been murdered, killed.
They're gone.
There's no foreign journalists allowed in Western journalists unless the IDF decides to take you on one of these ride alums and then they vet the footage and you are only shown what they are willing to show you. You aren't allowed to freelance. You know, there were journalists who are allowed. I've read the New York Times was allowed onto the Alshifa Hospital grounds. They were not allowed to go and talk to the doctors, they were not allowed to go and talk to the patients. They had to
be just with the Israeli military. And so you're very aware that you're being presented with the version of the facts that the Israeli military and the Israeli government wants you to show. So if anything, you should be even more vigilant and do even more fact checking about what it is that they are presenting to the world, because you are being used for their propaganda, like there's just
no other way around it. Now, Listen, you may say it's worth accepting those conditions so that at least there is some picture of what is happening there, and also it's worth knowing what their version of the propaganda is,
but it should always be framed in that context. So it's utterly humiliating for them that, given that state of affairs, they just run with these claims of the calendar, which is easily debunkable, which again, CNN has many Arabic speakers on their staff, and they couldn't bother to just check in with one of them to see if the claims added up and rather than doing the honorable thing admitting taken the l y admitting like, guys, we screwed up here,
we should checked this, we didn't. Here's you know, it wasn't a Hamas militant recording of their hostages or whatever. It's actually just an Arabic language calendar. Sorry for that, which would still not totally undo the harm because more people always see the original report than correction. But that's what you do when you screw up, You take the l you admit it. Instead, they tried to do the stealth edit and got called out and caught for it by the Huffin Post.
And you know what, Chrys, this goes back to what we were talking about earlier in the show, which is, and we may disagree on this, but I think it's entirely plausible that Hamas could have been operating the tunnels, which by the way, are likely the ones built by Israel in nineteen eighty three. Is the Tablet magazine reported back in twenty fourteen that under Al Shifa these tunnels whereas really, I think it's entighly plausible that Hamas. We
know they operate underground. We know that they've operated beneath hospitals. We know that we can debate the specifics, but we at least that is true.
And so it's.
Possible that Hamas is operating some sort of central command center out of Al Shifa or out of the tunnels beneath Al Shifa. Possible even if you're sort of you agree with me on that point. Israel and of course CNN,
but definitely Israel is not doing itself any favors. There's no way in which lying about these sorts of things, or failing to vet these sorts of things are putting forward such sloppy propaganda makes any strategic sense whatsoever, because all it does is make it much harder, let alone for the gossens that want to trust you when you're telling them to evacuate to the south and they're skeptical as to whether a there'll be a to return and be they'll be safe if they're in these crowded refugee
camps in the south.
But the sort of western.
Population where where we're going to talk about some polls with the guest next that show a lot of opposition to Biden's pro Israel policy that is not helping Israel at all.
This is.
This is sloppy propaganda. This is you know, I'm not begging them for you know, good proper I'm just.
Saying that by their level of contempt, the strategic.
Argument they're going around saying transparency, transparency, transparency, the video is on our side. Out of Al Shifa, we are being transparent. We're putting up these videos, We're giving the media tours. These are from the pure cynical strategic standpoint. These are massively unforced errors because they're losing trust with every single one of these examples. And there's no need to claim that a calendar is a hostage watch shift.
If it's not.
Yeah, I think that is all very true.
All right, let's go ahead and get to Democratic Senate candidate in the state of Michigan who has some real thoughts about Biden's Israel policy.
Let's get you.
Excited to be joined this morning by a Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan. Naser bay dun is a business owner. He also was the executive director of the Arab American Chamber of Commerce and chair of the Arab American Civil Rights League. And it's great to have you joined us this morning, sir.
Welcome, Thank you great to be here.
Yeah, it's our pleasure. So go ahead and put this up on the screen. From Fox News, you had a spicy take here. You are urging Biden to drop out of the twenty twenty four race, and you are pointing in particular to what you describe as his handling of the Israel Gaza conflict, throwing his presidency into a tail spin. Just elaborate on why you're making this call and what you're seeing there in Michigan.
Well, you know, being on the ground in Michigan, a lot of the people who had supported President Biden in the last election say they're unwilling to do so regardless who the Republican nominee is in the upcoming election. And I think that the Biden camp is banking on the fact that people are going to forget about the twelve thousand Palestinians killed in Gaza and Biden's inability to do anything or is not lying to call for a ceasefire and try and put an end to this conflict, and
people are going to hold that against them. And I think, you know, not only in Michigan, but other very vital swing states, he's lost a lot large majority of people who supported him in the last election.
Yeah, we can put these poll numbers up on the scene, up on the screen. This is from Ben Samuels, who looks at some of these quote latest troubling poll numbers for Biden on Israel, and these are from NBC News. Seventy percent of voters aged eighteen to thirty four, so a very young demographic disapprove of his policy. Fifty six percent of all voters disapproved of his policy. Fifty one percent of Democrats say Israel's gone too far for nine
percent of Democrats oppose US aid to Israel. So that is really interesting, and I'm curious if it is something you're also seeing on the ground in Michigan, as you mentioned, a swing state that had been sort of a place where you had parents going against even the teachers' union in a way that caught national media attention when it came to books in schools, and people saying, maybe this is sending all of these voters to Republicans that roughly
share Biden's Israel policy. I can imagine as you're traveling the state now and talking to people in your state, that's definitely not what you're seeing anymore.
No, it's become a race of which is the better of two evils in terms of a lot of the people in our community. You've got to remember that Donald Trump won Michigan in twenty and sixteen by approximately ten thousand volts. Joe Biden won in twenty twenty by about one hundred and fifty thousand volts. So it's a very small margin of error, and every bolt's going to come
in this upcoming election. So what's going to happen is that you're going to get people who choose not to vote, or they're going to vote but not choose anybody at the top of the ticket, or maybe go to Robert Kennedy or Cardell West as a protest vote. So I think that one, President Biden has lost his moral leadership in this upcoming election. Two, he's eighty one years old. We can see that he doesn't have the vitality to
run this country for the next four years. And also when he ran in twenty twenty, he said he was going to be a transitional president. He's going to try and fix write what Trump did to this nation and lead it put it on a better footing. But now that he's in power, he's decided he wants to run when he's eighty two for four years.
And also he has a vice president.
But a lot of people don't you know, consider as a viable alternative to be the next president. We had a vice president that was you know, gave people confidence that it would be a different scenario.
But we don't. And I think that if he chooses to run, he's going to lose.
And not only is he going to lose, he's going to cost us the majority in the Senate and no chance of getting the majority in the House.
Now.
So you put your finger on something when you said it's the lesser to evils, and what the White House is saying is number one.
People get over at number two.
When you're faced with the alternative, all right, it's our guy Biden or it's Trump. People are going to remember the Muslim band. They're going to remember, you know, the chaos of the Trump administration, and they're going to suck it up and they're going to go back to the polls and they're going to vote for Joe Biden.
Why do you think that it'll be different this time?
Well, because you got to remember that when you talk to people, they say, oh, the stock market was better under Trump.
Prices were better under Trump. And Trump might have.
Issued a Muslim ban, but he didn't. He wasn't complacent in the depth of twelve thousand Muslims and Gozzim. So you know, if they're betting on the fact that Trump is the worst of two evils, I think, you know, they're miscalculating how people actually feel. This issue has galvanized people all across the country. And it's not just Muslims and Arab Americans.
You know, you have.
Jews, you have Christians, you have anybody that's anti war seeing this president take this country and on a course that a lot of people don't want to go. And you also have to remember when Trump was president, he didn't cause any wars, he didn't attack anybody. So people are going to look at and I think that President Biden and his team are grossly miscalculating how people feel and the anger because of what Israel is doing in Gaza right.
Now and a lot of college towns in Michigan in your state, nasaur So how are you seeing this dynamic translate into the primary campaign for US Senate. Obviously A Lisa Slotkin is running for US Senate in Michigan establishment Democrat figure actually former CIA, which is interesting in the
context of this particular issue. So when you see young voters, as you point out, not just Arab Americans, but sort of across the board, young voters opposing the Biden administration's policy here, have you seen some of those dynamics then translate into the Democratic primary for the Senate seat in Michigan.
Definitely, we've seen a lot of momentum. You know, I'm a long shot candidate. You know, I'm not your typical candidate that's going to be running for US Senate. I've never held office before. I'm an immigrant, I'm an Arab, I'm Muslim Man, so you know, but I do see that our position, our opposition to apex dominance and occupation of Congress, is really gaining traction with people. And you know you mentioned Alissa Slopkins. Well, if APAX and the
CIA had a baby, it would be Alyssa Slopkins. So you know, we're you know, this is a fight that we're going to take to the people of Michigan and let them choose who they want to represent them in the next US Senate race.
Lastly, Naser just to go back to the Joe Biden point, would you go so far as to say you think he's doomed in the state of Michigan based on what you're hearing seeing on the ground.
I will guarantee you that he's doomed in the state of Michigan and other states that are going to be too close to call, because he has alienated so many people. And you would think a person like Joe Biden, who lost his wife and a child and then another child, would empathize with the Palestinians and the five thousand children that have been killed in Gaza in the last forty
four days. But we see no empathy whatsoever. And then you know, President Biden just published a pop ed in the Washington Post I believe it was yesterday, and which he says that after this, there needs to be a Palestinian peace process and there needs to be an outcome where the Palestinians have a state.
Where were you before October seven?
Why were you trying to circumvent the Palestinians with the abraham Accords instead of being, you know, trying to forge a peace deal that could have prevented had the Palestinians had hope for the last twenty years.
Maybe we wouldn't have had an October seven.
But the US, the Arabs, the Israelis have given the Palestinians no hope and today is just a culmination of you know, their spare and their lack of hope of ever establishing what's you know, their rights and their aspirations.
NASA.
Lastly, just tell people where they can learn more about your campaign.
Well, they can go to my website at Naser n A S S E R four M I f O R m I dot com.
All right, well, good luck to you and we appreciate your time this morning and your very clear eyed analysis.
Thank you, sir, thank you, thank you very much.
That's it for us today. We will be back tomorrow with all of the latest of whatever is happening in the world.
Will see that.
Kept up keep shop with me up shot with