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Indeed, we do a lot to tackle this morning. So first of all, we've got updates for you. Of course, out of Israel, we're asking the question this morning if Israel is actually losing this war. They are a number of analysts who are making that case, and this comes as Israel's caught lying about casualties. And also a new report has revealed that they use US supplied white phosphorus in Lebanon, So we'll break all of that down for you. Also, Zelenski is in town trying to secure additional aid that
looks increasingly in doubt. It's certainly done for this year, but trying to push forward next.
Year, so we'll give you those updates. We also have a.
Trump case that is headed to Scotus breakdown those details for you. We've got updated numbers about how housing is less affordable than ever.
We're also going to tell you about the.
Lemonade from Panera that allegedly could kill you, the Gift Loco Summer Colony.
We will be sampling the lemonade here live on the air.
Just see what all the fuss is about, why everybody want this lemonade band, why has it become such a big meme online, and what.
Is actually in said lemonade. Anyway, we will.
Discuss all the details.
See if we dropped dead, We've got ems on standby.
Griffin says he's ready with that. On taking a look at some of the biggest lies that the US has been telling about Israel's war on Gosden, about the Israeli US relationship in general. We also have a fantastic report from journalist Leefong about the information war that is being waged. But before we get to any of that, a reminder, this is your last chance to buy our very special Christmas Ugly sweatshirt and get it before the holiday.
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Indeed, all right, so let's go ahead and get to the latest down of Israel. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. So this is Hamas propaganda videos. It is violent, so you know, just be aware if you choose to continue watching this. And as I said, this is Hamas propaganda. But we want what we wanted to take a look at this morning is how is Israel's offensive going. Are there anywhere close to achieving their
alleged supposed goal of eliminating Hamas. I think what these images show, which again this is from one side, and this is you know, the Hamas militants targeting Israeli tanks here and firing on them. But it shows you the horror and the brutality of urban combat and how even the most well equipped and well trained militaries in the world are going to you know, suffer casualties and setbacks
when you're talking about this type of environment. This is something that certainly US troops found when they were engaged in urban combat in various situations as well.
You can see them targeting their IDF soldiers.
They're being highlighted by these red triangles that Hamas loves to use in their propaganda videos. So that just gives you, look, we don't have a lot of insight. This is the only window that we get into the fighting that is happening on the ground in Gaza. So that's why we show you these videos. And let's go and put this next piece up on the screen from the Nation, which
raises really, you know, provocative question. This is two analysts and they argue Israel is losing this war despite the violence that is unleashed on Palestinians, Israel is failing to achieve its political goals.
One of these.
Analysts is Daniel Levy, is the president of the US Middle East Project, a former Israeli negotiator at Taba under Prime Minister a who Brock and also at Oslo B under Prime Minister Jitsak Rabin. They say that both Israel and Hamas appear to be resetting the terms of their political contest, not to the pre October seventh status quo, but to the nineteen forty eight one. Not clear what comes next, but there is no going back to the
previous state of affairs. They make a comparison to the US's failures in Vietnam, and they write here the Vietnamese leadership measured the impact of its military actions by their political effects, rather than by conventional military measures such as MENI, material loss or territory gained. Thus, Henry Kissinger's nineteen sixty nine lament, we fought a military war, our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition. Our opponents aimed
for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of gorilla war. The gorilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. They also saber site here, John Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, you know this is a relatively hawkish organization. These are not You know, these are not squishes by any means. Writing about how Hamas's concept of military victory is all
about driving long term political outcomes. Hamasi's victory not in one year or five, but from engaging with decades of struggle that increase Palestinian solidarity and increase Israel's isolation. In this scenario, Hamas rallies a besieged population in Gaza around it in anger, helps collapse the Palestinian authority government by ensuring Palestinians see it even more as effectless adjunct to Israeli military authority. Meanwhile, Arab states move strongly away from normalization.
Global selth aligned strongly with the Palestanian caused Europe recoils at the Israeli armies excesses, and an American debate erupts over Israel destroying the bipartisan support Israel has enjoyed here since the early nineteen sevenis I'm sure you can see
already many of those things unfolding. So just to sort of sum up the argument that they make here, it's provoking a global outcry, unifying Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza, and relieving Hamas of the need to govern, which you know, with Israeli stated goal of taking Hamas out of the governance's position, which that is the piece
they will probably be able to achieve. It's not clear that that's even a setback for Hamas, who doesn't really want to have the responsibility of day to day governing.
A very complicated situation.
I know it might sound crazy, you know, the idea of a Western sire military that is quote unquote losing, but it really all depends on how you define winning.
And something that they very aptly point out is the Tet Offensive, which was a military defeat for the viet Cong and for the North Vietnamese Army and their backers, but a strategic and political military disaster for the United States for LBJ, because it showed us all that we would have to commit tens of thousands of American soldiers to even have a chance of being able to quote unquote pacify and to defeat the viet Cong and to save South Vietnam.
And ultimately they were correct.
It was a major turning point in the American political history for that reason, if we take it back, and I've been comparing a lot of Israeli actions to the US campaign. Whenever we were initially fighting in the early days of Vietnam so sixty four through nineteen sixty six, where there was a big debate happening in the US military.
LBJ was led to.
Believe by Robert McNamara, Maxwell Taylor, and his military advisors, as well as McGeorge Bundy, that what we could do is we could use the overwhelming power of the American Air Force to bomb the North Vietnamese and viet Cong positions, and also to destroy as much of the infrastructure as possible, to force the population to rise up against the VC, and to then turn it into a political victory for the US and for South Vietnam. By the time of
nineteen sixty six, there was a major battle. I'm blanking on the name, but if you've ever watched the movie We Were Soldiers, it's that battle which demonstrated the military capability to fight and also just how difficult it was going to be for American forces and for the South Vietnamese to go up against the North Vietnamese, where several hundred American soldiers were engaged in I think it was like thousands of NBA and they fought viciously and brutally,
and it was a major turning point because it demonstrated to the US military they're like, look, in this current advisor format, given the enemy that we're up against, there is no way that even with the bombing and even with all of our military capability and all that, that we're going to be able to accomplish this mission. So that is when there was a major divide in the White House, and there was only one man who actually spoke up at the National Security Council. He said, mister President,
there's no way that we can win this war. We're going to have to have some sort of political negotiation with the with Ho Chi Minh, and we're gonna have to come to some sort of understanding because if you send in troops there, I will fear that we are going to get bogged down into a jungle and that we are going to lose thousands and thousands.
So obviously he was right. I guess, you know, at least.
Courage to him for speaking up. The reason why all that matters is that when we're starting to look now at the Israeli casualties and that the strategic situation, the question remains, how sustainable is this for Israel? And again you might you might say, of course, they can go on forever. It's like, well, it's kind of like the US campaigns, you know, in Vietnam and all that. Theoretically we could have sent millions more men to Vietnam, but
politically that was never sustainable. And the Israeli population, they've only got a small country, you know, a couple million people.
You've got three hundred thousand at full strength.
With reservists of the IDF, and some of the numbers that are coming out show us that even in just two months, there's a lot of people who have either lost their lives or who have been maimed irrevocably for time to come. And some of these are some of the most elite combat fighters in the entire IDF. So now you've got questions about who's going to backfill all these empty jobs in Israel.
The war is costing one hundred million dollars a.
Day because they have to pay all of these reservists, and the Israeli economy is really suffering. They have to then make a choice or we're going to go into a total war footing, or are we going to continue this fight?
And then you've got the political.
Pressure, the grand strategic pressure, I guess, if you will, of the US of Europe and everybody else pretty much getting fed up with a lot of what is going on, and eventually that's going to break. Apparently Secretary Blincoln in his last visiness, I know that National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, after Zelenski's business, is going to get on a plane and go to Tel Aviv. But the apparently the message has been delivered. You guys got to wrap this thing up
by the end of the year. But then, you know, this is why I keep saying, now, what what's the day one of after the war?
Look like? I genuinely believe that the worst is far you have to come in this war.
I think the bombing campaign and all of that the initial shock very much like Iraq. It will take a long time for us to see what chaos emerges from the vacuum. But we know that the vacuum exists, and the Israelis themselves are they're going to pay a price for what type of price?
We have no idea.
Well, and there's a lot of ways to look at this, and it's very difficult to say is Israel winning or lose? Are they accomplishing their objectives? When we don't really know what their objectives are. They won't say what they actually want day after Now you can look at the plans that have been released of quote unquote fitting out the population, of pushing everybody into Egypt. You can listen to the alleged stated goal of destroying Hamas, which I think is
an impossible goal. So they've set themselves an impossible standard that almost guarantees their failure. You can look at what
they've been able to accomplish on the ground. Hamas has certainly taken a heavy hit, they claim, the Israeli's claim that they've killed thousands of Hamas fighters, that's still a fraction of the of their total fighting force, not to mention the fertile ground for recruiting that they have created, which will undoubtedly lead to more radicalization and will create more militants, more jihadists than they will be able to.
Destroy through their operations. So there's that.
There's also the fact that listen, this massive civilian carnage which is horrific, which is unjustifiable. This in a lot of ways serves Hamasa's ends because when they're talking about here, listen, the status quo pre October seventh, was the Palestimian cause.
Was basically forgotten.
Yeah, it was dead.
I mean Benjamintanyahu is able to go to the UN and hold up a map of Israel that does not include the West Bank, that does not include Gaza, that shows it as all Israeli territory from the river to the sea, which by the way, is closer to the reality than anything else. At this point, Israel controls all of that land and the destinies of all the people who.
Live in that area.
They're able to do that and able to work on normalization of relationships with Saudi Arabian with other countries with men attention to the basically like lip service to any sort of concessions to the Palestinians. That was the status quo. Now the Palestinian cause is front and center worldwide. There has been a massive backlash here throughout Europe, certainly around the world, the Arab world, the Arab street is enraged
at what they see unfolding. And so you know, for those people who say, listen, Hamas is happy to sacrifice civilian lives of Palestinians in service of their cause, that's true. I think that is absolutely accurate. And so in many ways, the horror and the brutality of the Israeli response, it's almost like a jiu jitsu move. Hamas is using their own power against them to achieve.
Their political goals.
Over and above, you know, the military realities on the ground, there's also a lot of questions about like what is actually unfolded, how is it actually going for Israel in terms of their ground offensive, in terms of their bombing campaign. We certainly know about the massive death numbers, a massive toll it's taken on the civilian population, but you know, how is it going for their own fighters. There were questions that begun to emerge when this report was published
and then altered. Put this up on the screen from Whyett. They originally reported that five thousand IDF soldiers had been injured, and then it was taken down and change presumably this person opines by military censorship to two thousand. So this
raised questions, Okay, well what is the real number. Haretz decided to do an investigation to see how the purported IDF numbers match up with what hospitals in Israel are reporting in terms of the number of injured soldiers that they are taking in and that they are taking care of.
Put this up on the screen.
So Israel, first of all, was extremely cagy. They did not want to release numbers at all. Then, under pressure, they stated that one five hundred and ninety three soldiers had been wounded since October seventh. However, when Hara actually went to the hospitals, they say the results of their investigation showed a considerable and unexplained gap between the data
reported by the military and that from the hospitals. As of Sunday, the number of fallen soldiers in the war that Israel had dubbed Swords of Iron stands at four hundred and twenty five ninety seven of whom have been killed since the launch of the ground operation. An examination conducted by Herrets with the hospitals where the wounded soldiers
have been in our treated shows a considerable gap. They found that the hospital's data shows the number of wounded soldiers to be twice as high as the army's numbers. For one example, one single hospital alone reported treating more soldiers close to two thousand soldiers who were hurt in the war since October seventh. That is more than the
total number that the Army reports have been injured. So one hospital is saying we treated almost two thousand injured soldiers and the Israeli Army is saying only fifteen hundred have been wounded. And again that's just one hospital. There's additional data from the Health Ministry. They say that ten thy, five hundred and forty eight soldiers and civilians were wounded in the war and have been admitted between October seventh
and October tenth. The army's figure of fifteen hundred wounded soldiers accounts for only fifteen percent of that total number of admissions, which seems unusually low since one would expect a significant portion.
Of the war related casualties to be soldiers.
So Harat's basically catching the idf here lying about the true casualty numbers, which also, of course raises a lot of questions about how many have actually been killed in action as well well.
A lot of that comes through from this person who's quoted in the article. She's the head of the rehabilitation department for the Ministry of Defense in Israel. She says that more than fifty eight percent of wounded who are taken in by US have quote severe injuries of hands and feet, among others, that those require amputation. Twelve percent are internal injuries spleen, kidney laceration of internal origins. There are also head and eye injuries, and seven percent are
mentally injured, a number that will surely skyrocket. She's talking also about some of the horror right now in side of these hospitals because a lot of these soldiers are being rushed through by They're immediately taking care it's like a triage care type situation where they're sending them home almost immediately, so they're not having long term care that a lot of them are required. She notes, like, who who's gonna make sure these guys take a shower, Who's
gonna make sure they're okay? I mean, they're basically sending them a home and hopefully that their parents or somebody in their family is going to be able to care for them.
That's the reality for a lot of these soldiers.
Now.
So this is a full blown triage care type situation. And they say that the amount of new wounded coming into the single hospital every day is sixty So sixty IDF wounded every single day, with the vast majority of them being pretty seriously injured and in some cases requiring amputation. A lot of that fits with some of the video that we showed you, which is the you.
Know, the horror of what urban combat looks like. You saw there.
You had RPGs, you had, you know, small arms or grenades, you have presumably there's IEDs and this is why it's such a nightmare to fight in an urban combat situation like this. And if this keeps up, the thing is is that if this just keeps up for days and days and days, then that.
Wound or that wounding number continues to climb. The number of soldiers.
You know, there have been some serious casualties already amongst those that have been confirmed killed. And we saw in one of the opening things from there is just what asymmetric warfare looks like. You have a cheap little drone where you take a grenade and you just take it right over the target and you drop it. That's something that the Russians have done to the Ukrainians. Some of the Ukrainians have done to the Russians. We first saw a lot of it pioneered in the Battle of Mosul
and by Isis. They were very very effective at using this against both American forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces as well as the Iraqi security forces. And that leads us again to the question of occupation, which is, if you're going to occupy this territory and you're going to be military responsible for this, that is going to take hundreds of thousands of troops on a long timeline, because you are going to need at least one hundred two hundred kant the initial and then you've got to cycle
those guys in and out. We ran into manpower problems for Iraq here in the US, and we have a massive population and they don't even have anything even close to that. Possibly why the Israelis want us to latch on and become the peacekeeping force.
But we'll talk about that, I think at another day.
Last thing I want to flag is this, and this is by a very respected military analyst. Go and put this up there on the screen. It was in Foreign Affairs. His name is Robert Pape. I encourage everybody to go and read this full thing if you are able. In Foreign Affairs, which can be iffy in terms of their paywall, but they have something which I think is really important around the failed bombing campaign, around collective punishment, and really about what the actual military goals for all of this
will look like. They say that since the dawn of air power, countries have sought to bomb enemies into submission and to shatter civilian morale push to their breaking point. The theory goes, populations will rise up against their governments and will switch sides. The strategy of coercive punishment reaches apogee in World War Two. Histories remembers the indiscriminate bombing of cities in war by the place of the targets Hamburg, Dramstart, Dresden,
now Gaza can be added to this list. And what they point out is some of the problems that I raised from Vietnam for Russia and it's war on Ukraine even if you go back to World War Two and how it actually animated a lot of the German population who weren't even Nazis to back the government because they felt as if it was a rally around the flag issue. He basically arrives at an issue where the current bombing campaign, the current military style operation is not one which historically
has ever been successful at accomplishing their military ends. And he really lands on something that we've been trying to highlight here a lot which is around the civilian population. They remained the center of gravity inside of this. To destroy Hamas, you could kill every single fighter. But I mean we initially there were no terrorists in Iraq. We went in and we killed what one hundred or so
or whatever that existed. By two thousand and four, two thousand and five, there were tens of thousands of jihattists, some of them were foreigners, but a lot of them were Iraqi too, and why well they became terrorist because we were there, and it became a chicken in the egg situation is to try and to fight them, and I really believe that that is almost certain to be the case here in Gaza. I mean absent basically two options.
You can full scale militarily occupied is it take hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people and you're going to lose people every single day to id's and all this other way you work to a political solution, or you can.
Try and kill them all.
And neither really an actual option for the IDF or from a realistic point of view. So I do think they're in a big problem. I think they're much more in a bind than a lot of their military backers and propagandas here in the US are making them out to baby.
There were two pieces in this analysis that really stood out to me. One is what you just said, which I just want to emphasize. It has never in history worked to bomb the population into turning on their leadership.
It has the opposite effect.
We saw this in World War Two with the Germans bombing of London. We saw this from our side bombing German cities. We saw this in Va Vietnam. We see it with Russia bambing Ukrainian cities. Okay, this idea that again we've covered multiple times, so it is worth emphasizing that their goal is to intentionally hit.
These quote unquote power targets.
We're talking about high rise apartment buildings, we're talking about homes, we're talking about public infrastructure. And shock the civilian population into turning on Hamas is fantasy. It will will have and has already had the opposite effect. So that's number one. Number two and I had never seen this research before. He is an expert on what leads people to become terrorists and become jihadis. He says, most people who become terrorists do so because their land is being taken away.
What ninety five percent of the suicide terrorists in my database, and this is across religions, regions, grievances, etc. What ninety five percent had in common is they were fighting back against a military occupation that was controlling territory they considered their homeland. He also goes on to say, in the long run, the only way to defeat HAMAS is to drive a political wedge between it and the Palestinian people.
Unilateral Israeli step signaling some kind of serious commitment to a new future would change the framework and dynamics in.
The Israeli Palestine relationship.
Get Palestinian's a genuine alternative to simply sut supporting hamas and supporting violence. If the end goal for Israel, which is what it should be, is peace and security for their own people, then they are going in the polar opposite direction. They are failing to make their own people warsake. Their people will face only additional heightened terrorist attacks and insecurity if they continue in this direction.
I'm fraid, frankly, the damage has already done.
Yep.
Unfortunately, that very might well be true.
All right, So let's go on to what was uncovered in this Washington Post report yesterday. We had received reports of the potential use of white phosphorus in this conflict by Israel in a number of places.
They have now confirmed.
Put this up on the screen, that Israel used US supplied white phosphorus and the place that they confirmed it was in an attack in Lebanon. So this is a civil rights rights group is saying this should be investigated as a war crime.
Now.
To give you some of the details here, there are circumstances where white phosphorus can be used in warfare, but it cannot be used against a civilian population. Is supposed to be used as like a smoke screen, effectively where it's not going to injure civilians. What they found were the remnants of artillery rounds fired into a Lebanese town near the border of Israel, which incinerated at least four homes.
The rounds, which eject felt wedges saturated with white phosphorus that burns at high temperatures, produce billowing smoke to obscure troop movements As they fall haphazardly over a wide area. The contents can stick to this skin, causing potentially fatal burns and respiratory damage. It's use near civilian areas can
be prohibited under international humanitarian law. What they track here in talking to residents as well, is that Israel shell the hell out of this town for hours and hours, trapping people in their homes until they could escape the next morning around seven am. Residents refer to that attack as the Black Knight. These chemicals, if they're left in the body, can damage internal organs, sometimes fatally, and they also go on to say, which I think is noteworthy.
Unclear why the Israeli military would use these rounds at night, because it's already dark. So if it's supposed to be as some sort of smoke screen, you're not accomplishing anything. Residents speculate that the phosphorus was meant to displace them from the village and to clear the way for future Israeli military activity in the area. So again, these are US supplied US supplied white phosphorus used against civilians in
up and on. This is something that our own officials have been asked about and sort of deflected and denied.
Now confirmed.
This had already been investigated by a number of human rights groups, now confirmed by the Washington Posts.
Yeah.
The Biden administration also now under scrutiny for this.
Let's going to put this up there on the screen, because they actually used an emergency declaration. This is another interesting little bureaucratic thing which shows you the immense power of the executive and what we really.
Should all be trying to rein in.
The Biden administration invoked a power that they have as the executive to send military arms if the United States remains under imminent national security threat. So remember that is what they invoked to supply tank shells to Israel. They all they have to do is give a notification to Congress to bypass the official arm sales. These are ones that they could use on Ukraine. Theoretically, they could use
it anywhere around the world. Of course, they get away with it because most people in Congress just support it, or they don't support they supported it enough not to do anything about it. And Crystal this really aligns with the fact that the Biden administration here is caught in a position where they both out of one side of
their mouth. Like just yesterday, John Kirby is like, well, we're very concerned anytime somebody uses white phosphorus that we provide to them, and at the same time is using emergency National Security Law, which is created to protect American citizens as one where we can supply tank ammunition to Israel. It also just raises a question to me, do these reelis actually need this tank ammunition or is this symbolic? Both are pretty bad for Israel. One is you've only
been fighting for two months. You've only been fighting for two months, you need tank Amo from the Big bad America.
What have you guys been doing? You know?
One of the things that they like to brag about is how they are self sufficient in a way, and that they're like, well, we've used your arms to either purchase more from you or your money. We've invested in our own defense supply chain, whereas the leaders in military technology. You can't even fight two months in an urban combat situation. You already need tank Amo. We're already supplying Ukraine. And it's like, well,
what's happening here? You've been basically a nation in war for your entire existence for the last seventy five years.
So that's one.
Number two here also is about the way that the administration can basically just bypass the will of the Democratic American people through Congress, which is supposed to have all power whenever it comes to war, to just supply basically whatever they want to any long standing US ally, which I think is crazy. I think if this is going to happen, I think the Congress should and have had
to have voted for it. He does, though, demonstrate how the difficult bind I think that the Biden administration finds himself in where they're both I believe President Biden at a Christmas party, a Hanuka party yesterday said quote, I am a Zionist, so he's like standing strongly with Israel, but then also is caught not only with his base, but I think increasingly with the international community, especially with the especially with the hypocrisy around Ukraine, because and we
went back and looked, of course the Ukrainians whenever the Russians used white phosphorus on them, like this is war crime, this is horrible, this is evidence that they're trying to take us out.
They try to cover up that they use white phosphorus too.
Then you know, I remember also I covered a lot of this at the time during the Syrian Civil War, the Russians would use white phosphorus against civilians, which is horrible.
But you know that.
Obama, Biden and all these people had a lot to say about that at the time. And now we're the ones who are providing the white fosphus, Like what are we doing here?
Right?
Yeah?
And get this, So, first of all, what Kirby said in responses, he's an NSC spokesperson. We've seen the reports, certainly concerned about that. We'll be asking questions to try to learn a little bit more. Okay, imagine if the report was about Russia, how they would be reacting to the use of white phosphorus against civilians in a way that appears to violate international law.
That's number one.
Number two with that Guardian article details is not only did they bypass Congress in terms of these tank munitions, but they also cite unnamed officials as admitting than in Israel's case, the US is not even following guidelines that Biden himself established in February that require all arms transfers to foreign governments to be subject to rigorous and continual examination of the recipient's record on the Geneva Conventions and other global norms.
We're conducting warfare.
We have provisions in place that are supposed to make sure any weapons sales that go through, any arms transfers that occur, that these things are not being used against civilians. Why this report matters so much outside of the horror of what is being done to these civilians, these are US supplied white phosphorus being used, credible reports being used against civilians in a way that is tantamount to a
war crime. And when it comes to Israel, just we're not going to look, we're not going to investigate, We're going to pretend this is not going to go going on. We'll do a little bit of handra we're a little bit concerned, maybe we'll ask some questions about it.
That's it.
All of the normal protocols that are typically in place, which you're already probably too weak as it is, those are out the window when it comes to Israel. And I'm reminded of the fact early on in this conflict you had a State Department official, Josh Paul, who resigned over the fact that they were giving Israel carte blanche and completely circumventing all of the normal checks and procedures in terms of arms transfers. Let's take a listen to what he had to say to Christian Amanpor.
What was so different that made you resign publicly?
Well, in all the arms transfers I've been a part of discussing before, including to Israel, there has always been space for discussion and debate. You can raise concerns about how are these arms going to be used? Do we have confidence that laws of war, laws of proportionality are going to be respected, Do we have concerns about some of the units that these arms might be going to,
and their track records. What was different here was that there was no discussion, There was no space for that discussion. There was simply an approach of essentially, the barn doors are open, and that remains the case. You know, the Wall Street Journal reported the last couple of days that America has transferred over four thousand dumb bombs to Israel, several thousand guidance kits, and forty five thousand artillery shells.
So the bundles remain open. And while I'm certainly encouraged to hear what Vice President Harris said, what Secretary Austin has said, for as long as those bundles remain open, I don't know why Israel would take those warnings seriously.
So he's right, I don't know why Israel would take those warnings seriously either. So keep in mind as we're watching this devastation unfolded northern Gaza, now move to southern Gaza, the huge civiliantol, the children who have been killed, all of that. It's twenty two thousand US made bombs that have been dropped on this population an incredibly short period of time. Do you think that any of the Biden administrations little like we're going to ask some tough questions
and leak into the press. Do you think anyone in the world believes that believes they actually care. No, we are directly complicit in everything the israelis doing on the ground in Gaza.
That's another question I raised for Israel, which is from a strategic point of view, why would you want to put yourself in this position to be wholly reliant on us to resupply you.
That's an incredible choke point.
I mean, this again raises something that they brag all the time about how they have they've well prepared about their military, about how this how strong they are, and from what I can tell, basically on this they're relying on us not only so resupply their tanks, but basically all of the precision guid ammunitions are sold to them by the US. They don't even have a domestic they don't have the same level of domestic arms that they
have once bragged about. This puts them in a position too, where you're basically reliant on us and our domestic political whims as to whether you're going to get it, and you might get it now but what about five years from now, whenever you're going to need it. This raises only once again some of the excellent points made in that Nation article about their own Basically, they have destroyed the bipartisan consensus on Israel. It may not feel that way,
but the process began the uring the Iran deal. I think today is a genuine breaking point. Yeah, for a huge portion of the American public. Ten years from now, the next Gaza war or the next whatever war that they find themselves in.
It's not even even close to the same.
Yeah.
I mean, imagine a new generation of democratic lawmakers. And then you've got millennials and people who are our age and younger, who are aging into their forties and their fifties. These are well established, tax paying adults who usually vote a lot. A lot of the boomers at that point are either gone or fading off. I mean, that's one of those where it's a totally changed domestic political situation.
And let's also talk about, like you know, crass naked political calculations, which is what you know, the people in this town.
What they care about. Very possible.
Joe Biden loses reelect because of his unconditional support for Israel. Previously all of the pressure had been on the other side. But I mean we talked about yesterday Pullan of Michigan that has him down by ten points, and a part of that is no doubt attributable to discussed from young people, from Arab Americans, from Muslim Americans for our complicity in
Israeli war crimes and atrocities in Gaza. And the last piece that I wanted to highlight here just to always keep the focus on the human beings who are trying to live their lives, trying to survive right now under complete siege, is you know, the bombs are just the beginning of the pain and the heartache. Put this up on the screen. The hunger war has started. This is a report from the AP. A bag of flour now goes for one hundred and twenty dollars in Gaza. There's
a black market for sugar. You can forget about eggs. Thousands of people pounce on AID trucks when they arrive. Crowds ransacked a warehouse where food had piled up before distribution. There's also now mounting reports of illnesses that are running rampant given the lack of food, lack of medicine, lack of basic sanitation, lack of sewage. This is, you know, completely predictable. Chaotic scenes they say, of sickness and filth are unfolding at shelters in Rafa, bursting at the scenes.
The UN Humanitarian Office said Wednesday the poor sanitation had led to rampant cases of scabies, life's diarrhea, of raising fears more serious disease may soon spread. Aid workers have reported outbreaks of the liver disease hepatitis A. And this is all a direct result of the complete siege that the two point two million residents of Gaza have been under since the very beginning days of this war.
On there again the ancient like we said day day five, six ten, twelve afterwards, two months, three months, what's that going to look like? What about food? Who is going to foot the bill? Are you now responsible? Who's going to be in charge of distributing it? It's looking more and more like total chaos, as already reports out of a Gaza crystal of full blown looting, I mean Somalia
Mugadishu level looting of some of these aid convoys. That leads to what warlords who are going to take control or the IDF is going to take control.
I mean that none of this ends up in a good situation.
Yeah, all of it really bad.
President Zelensky big Z himself is here on the ground and here in Washington. He's been here since Monday, flying from Argentina to attend the inauguration of the new president there. And he gave an interesting speech, I think, which demonstrates his complete lack of political skill and not lack of knowledge about any of his so called opponents. Let's put
this up there on the screen. So in his speech that he gave yesterday to the National Defense College, speaking to military leaders, but in attendance for several reporters, he says, quote, if there's anyone inspired by unresolved issues on Capitol.
Hill, it is just Putin and his sick clique.
So let's really think and digest that Zelenski comes to Washington. The sole people he needs to convince are Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Republicans to do what to drop their insistent on their it has to be border security funding if we're going to fund Ukraine, and his way of doing that is not.
Here's why it's good for you. Here's what I can do for you.
Here are the questions that Here are the answers to the questions which you have asked me, which is what is my plan for victory? What am I realistically going to do with the sixty one billion? Instead, his plan is to call them basically accomplices of Putin. That is not going to go down well, I think with a lot of the people who are in opposition, And just to highlight this, we've got some of the plans about what exactly he wants to do.
Let's put this up there on the screen.
His plan right now, Crystal from Axios and others, is to basically try and emotionally blackmail the House of Representatives and the Senate Republicans as the clock ticks.
Because the House is set.
The House and the Senate are both set to leave at some time at the end of this week.
Thursday is done for the entire year.
Already, people on Capitol Hill and others say that there's no way. So he's coming here effectively in a last ditch effort. I also just saw his schedule for the day. He's not meeting with the White House. First President Biden alleged that he was inviting Zelensky to Washington.
For them to parlay No, no, no, no.
His entire bulk of his day, Crystal is spent on Capitol Hill, starting actually only fifteen minutes from right now, where he will be speak meeting with Speaker Johnson and then with Senate Republicans. And I think the biggest mistake that he seems to have internalized is he genuinely seems to believe that Mitch McConnell is speaking for Republicans, because
Mitch McConnell is very supportive of Ukraine AID. He tried to get the party to not insist on border security funding to pass the stand Along supplemental and there was a full blown revolt inside of the GOP caucus, and we played even here on the show, even freaking Lindsey Graham says, look, guys, like we.
Got to have some sort of border security funding. There's no way.
He does not seem to actually understand the American political system currently at all. I actually think him coming here is a tremendous show weakness, because how does it make you look if you come all the way to Washington with hat in hand and they basically just leave town and go home for Christmas break. Yeah, after that you have done so. I think this is the final breaking point for Selensky. I'm not saying he'll never get aid.
I would never put it past the establishment for fur the rest of the year.
I think it's dead. I don't think he has a chance in hell.
I mean to be honest with you, Ever since we really had it confirmed that it was the US and the UK that blocked that early peace deal and like force them to continue fighting. And again, listen, there's no guarantees of whether it would have come together, et cetera, et cetera. But I have a lot more empathy for Zelenski's position because we did hang him out to dry, you know, we did lead him along the garden path and effectively say like we've got your back and you know,
say no to the peace deal, keep fighting. We're going to be with you, brother. And then here he is desperate, you know, low on manpower, low on supplies, and very unlikely to be able to come back home with anything to say for it. So you know, in a sense, I, like I said, I have a lot more empathy for their position than I did previously. Really understanding the way that all of these things unfolded. I think it's disgraceful
what we've dragged the Ukrainians through. I think the amount of death and destruction that has been wrought over these past years, this past year, since the beginning of this conflict is really you know, there's a lot of blood on our hands for the way that we pushed them to pursue this war.
So that's kind of how I'm looking at I.
Will parse a little bit.
I don't have any empathy for Zelensky. I think he's basically been a blackmail artist from day one. I have incredible empathy for the Ukrainian fighting man and for all of those who laid there their lives because they took Zelenski's orders. And we'll get to this a little bit later in the show, but even they are like, hey man, you got to start telling us the truth. All this rose tinted speeches and all that that ain't going to cut.
It for us anymore. We got average age of forty three.
Just to give people an idea too of what the dynamics are on Capitol Hill, here's Senator JD.
Vans.
He spoke a little bit about this yesterday on Zelenski is the leading opponent of Ukraine aid in the Senate.
Here's what he had to say. Look, Steve, it's gross.
You have a foreign leader coming to the United States like we're some sort of geopolitical salvation army. That is not the role of the United States here is to hand out money to every beggar who comes into our country and demands that we fund there foreign conflict.
This is back a second, Steve.
We have to understand that Republicans, for once in this town have actually stood pretty firm the last couple of weeks on the question of border security and said you're not going to get another dime for Ukraine unless you do something serious about the American southern border. So Zelensky is parachuting into this domestic political debate about prioritizing our own border. He's not here to tell us anything we
haven't heard before. He's here to badger and browbeat Speaker Johnson and Senate Republicans into foregoing our negotiations on border security in order to write him another blank check. I've never seen anything like this. This's not Churchill coming in the midst of world wars. This is literally a guy begging for a handout and telling Republicans to stop negotiating over your own border security. I'm offended by it. As
a United States senator, I'm offended by it. We should be focused on our own boarder and be having that debate. We don't need Zelenski to parachute and tell us how to run our country.
As I understand it that a lot of Republicans are not actually taken kindly to that. Senator ran policy that he wouldn't even attend the Zolenski meeting. He's like, I don't have anything to say to him. I have nothing that I want to hear from him. I think it's a big, big mistake that he's making, and just agree.
It's not sure what else he's supposed to do.
Well, Honestly, what Zelenski is supposed to do is instead of he needs to realize the political reality and he needs to make sure that he's not seen as basically aligning himself completely with the Democratic Party. What he should have done is stayed at home and allowed Mitch McConnell, the Establishment and others to try and to slip Ukraine aid at every turn for the next year, which don't get they are going to do that. This debate is not done. They are going to every writer, every government
funding bill. There's going to be some last ditch effort to try and to slip something in there. He should have had the knowledge that this was dead. JD actually raised Churchill, which is a good example. Churchill privately loathed the US Senate. I believe he once said that you can always count on the American Senate should do the right thing after they've exhausted every other option. He was furious about len Lease, but he was incredibly grateful every
time he came to Washington. He always met with people behind the scenes. He understood the American political system. Maybe because he's spent a lot more time here and he himself was half Us, or he was born to an American. I think Zelenski just has zero understanding the political system. He seems to believe that MSNBC and the Atlantics speak for America and that you know, all these neo cons or whatever who will go on.
I don't agree with that.
It's to me, it's very clear from the fact that he is showing up here now that he.
Realizes how we could position he's.
In and how much potential additional Ukrainian aid is on the rocks, and the only thing he can think to do is rather than just like staying in Ukraine and hoping for the best topin Mitch comes through, is to come here and try to reassert Ukrainian pre eminence in terms of American foreign policy, because the obviously the American foreign policy the landscape has completely shifted since October seventh.
The Ukrainians are completely on the back burner, and so to me, I'm just I don't know that he has a better hand to play. I think the best thing he probably can do is to come here and meet with the people who are sympathetic to him and just remind them like, hey, you guys were supposed to be backing us up, and remember we still have this righteous cause fighting back against Russian imperialism and you know this territorial land grab, so try to keep us front and center.
I don't know that he has a better move that he could really play.
Maybe you're right.
I just think that it puts him in a weaker position to come here to advocate for it and to fail, whereas I think he probably could have gotten something over the next year if you'd buy it. Both are terrible, I mean they're spread.
I mean they should be.
I mean they in many ways this too where you know, you can't put a lot of all the blame here on America.
A lot of this is their fault too.
They seem to believe and have ridiculous expectations and have never decided to even change any of their public positioning, which, as we hinted at, let's put this up there on
the screen. From the Financial Times, even people inside the Ukraine quote former and current advisors saying that the lack of realism in the president's messaging is undermining confidence and that basically a lot of the Ukrainian people do not want to hear that everything is moving forward and that everything is rosy and that everything is going to be great,
and that they're going to achieve a total victory. And while they may want that to happen, they also are friends with enough people who have either been killed or who know people who have been wounded, or know people who are now getting drafted to understand at a basic level that is just not the military reality on the ground.
I increasingly believe, and I've said it here, I don't think that Zelenski's political leadership will last for all that much longer, simply because he's an open war with his own military commander. He's being his political opponents, Poroshenko and the mayor of Kiev are outwardly coming and blasting him. The military commander himself is going on the record to the economists saying it's a stalemate and there's basically nothing
else that we can do. So much of the ground that he was fighting from, like the United Country that's moving forward, and even most of his legitimacy was under the idea that he was the only one who could convince the West to give him made a lot of that is just not materializing now. So, yeah, you know, a lot of his like recent raison detra i guess if you will, just doesn't exist, especially if this aid bill goes down.
Yeah, I mean, and they give this example that's kind of devastating in this piece about the rose colored glasses and how all of the videos that he puts on or about how they're moving forward and they're winning and they're gaining ground, et cetera. When people aren't stupid. And this is also like not that in nineteen eighties, you can't just control all of the information that's coming in it's also a country is small enough that, yeah.
People are getting direct reports of.
What's actually going on in the front lines. But this example they cite was Ukraine's frequent use of counter propaganda during the ten month battle for Bakmut. This mirrored Russian tactics and trying to maintain an image of success. Official channels on telegram and other social media brand in the fight with slogans such as fortiss Bakmut and Unbreakable Bachmut, which disappeared in the days before Russia declared victory in May.
Zelenski never officially acknowledged Ukraine's retreat from Bachmut, and in June the Defense Ministry presented continued Ukrainian attacks from the edge of the town as evidence that it had not in fact lost the battle. So it's becoming impossible, I think, has become impossible to maintain this happy face of we're making gains, we're gaining ground, everything's going on in our direction, We're on the brink of victory any day now.
And you know, when.
Things are so sort of desperate for the Ukrainians in terms of manpower, in terms of you know, the failures of the counter offensive, in terms of being able to garner additional aid from US and other places around the world. Yeah, you have now this specter of people turning on each other, casting blame, going to the press, you know, criticizing Celensky in a way that we've never seen before. So certainly there is no doubt there is a lot of turmoil domestically in Ukraine.
I think you're absolutely right, and I do think that is really going to be a problem for him in the next months to come. And don't forget the winter. You know, it's getting cold and things are only getting worse. The Russians are actually firing i think cruise missiles and some of those for the very first time in a long time, and largely because they're trying to degrade as much of the infrastructure as possible and make it as painful on the civilian population before they get to the
next fighting season. That's before there's even questions of USA. So I think there's a lot to be said here. Anyway, let's talk about Trump.
So Jack Smith has asked the Supreme Court to get involved preemptively in one of the cases against Donald Trump, and the Supreme Court responding here pretty quickly put this up on the screen I'm gonna give you all of the details momentarily. Supreme Court has agreed to consider Jacksmith's petition for it to establish whether Donald Trump is immune from prosecution. Trump has until four on December twentieth to respond.
Put the next piece up on the screen that gives the backstory here, So Special Counsel Jacksmith asks the Supreme Court on Monday to swiftly decide whether former President Donald Trump is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes allegedly committed while he was in office. This has to do
with the election interference case, not the document's case. One of the arguments that the Trump team has been making is, Listen, these are things that were done when he's president of the United States, and we believe that means that he's immune. Jack Smith is arguing, Listen, we need to expedite this process. We need to circumvent we're gonna skip the appeals level.
We want the Supreme Court to decide this right now, so that we can expedite this try and get some sort of a resolution in a timely fashion, you know, before we're in the height of the presidential election season and before there's a possibility of Donald Trump getting elected, So Sager, you know, incredibly important obviously in terms of the campaign, in terms of the timeline, because one of the biggest questions with all of these cases hasn't been
so much will Trump be found guilty, but when will the trials unfold? When will will be the possibility of some sort of conviction. Is it going to conflict with the hid to presidential campaigning? Is it going to occur after November when Trump can just onn the federal charges, you know, get his DOJ to drop the charges, et cetera. So a major move by Jack Smith here, which is unusual but not unprecedented, to jump up to the Supreme Court and try to get them to expedite what's happening.
I actually think this is a good thing.
And the reason why is it raises like these mega questions, and this is something if people go watch our initial coverage and all this, I have so many its. I was like, they're going to be a crazy amount of Supreme Court cases around presidential immunity because the main question at hand before the Court is around the immunity provisions of the president as previously established in DOJ policy and
in some existing case laws. But none of it has ever happened before where president is actually being put on trial for deeds that allegedly occurred while he was the president of the United States, and not only that he was the outgoing president of the United States, actually as a successor had already been certified by the Congress, which raises just all kinds of crazy questions around presidential power
about what it actually means. The immunity claim itself is that Trump has said not only that he denies the truth of any allegations in here, but that all of the underlying charges against him occurred during his sitting presidency, which shields him from any prosecution the initial immunity grounds. So the judge in the case has already rejected it. But this is like a democratic appointed judge. I mean, even put that aside, it's not the way that this
gets litigated. Is why it was immediately escalated and accepted now by the Supreme Court. Then it raises even crazier political questions about Trump's got three people who we have pointed to the bench, So are they going to rule against him? They have had no problem doing that previously. But this also falls into big questions that go beyond Trump, because people like Justice Alito and others Brett Kavanaugh as well are big defenders of the idea of the Supreme
executive and executive power. This is something that they've ruled about previously. Justice Thomas probably a little bit more libertarian. Maybe he swing there as well, obviously, I think I know all the liberals will go on there. Justice Roberts as well, we don't actually know, because he's also a big defender of kind of the unitary executive model and what that looks like for presidential power. So there's some actually some major constitutional questions that are at play before the Court.
So just to make it really clear to people in case it's not, what the Trump team is arguing is basically that if you're present United States, you can do anything, you can break any law, and you have complete and total immunity forever. The analysis that Jack Smith is offering here is that you can't be charged while you are president, but if you commit crimes during your tenure in office, then after you are out of the presidency, you can be charged and you can be found guilty for crimes
that you committed while you were president. You know, the legal analysis that I saw for what it's worth, seem to indicate that they they thought it was more likely that Jacksmith would prevail on this question, and that you know, Trump's assertion that listen to you're immune for absolutely anything you do, even if it's on the periphery of your powers as president the United States, You're good to go for the rest of your life, that that was likely
to be rejected. The bigger question, again was the timeline. Will the Supreme Court take this up when this is you know, would be highly unusual for them to do so, or are they going to let the appeals process play out and go through the normal sort of chain of command here in terms of the US judiciary, which of course would take a much longer period of time. And
this is the Trump team's strategy. Their strategy is to delay as much as they possibly can, to try to push things out to ideally after the election has already happened. And so Jack Smith coming in here to try to short circuit that potential direction of their you know, of what they're doing here, just a little bit of historical background. They write that the Supreme Court rarely moves with the
speed that Smith is proposing here. But there is president for doing so in the nineteen seventy four case involving Richard Nixon in a subpoena for tape recordings issue during the Watergate investigation. The Supreme Court granted the government's request to resolve the dispute one week after it was filed
and issued a decision less than two months later. I read another analysis that said this move of jumping over the appeals Court and going straight to the US Supreme Court has been very rare in history, but actually has been used more frequently. Believe the number was like nineteen times over the past several years. So it's become a little bit more commonplace and interesting that the Supreme Court has agreed very quickly to consider this so very noteworthy.
This is probably, you know, one of the biggest political stories in the country, hanging over whatever is going to happen in twenty twenty four, and really the timeline is kind of the key piece here.
Also, another reminder.
Of Trump's dominance in the Republican primary currently came yesterday in a new to Mooin registered pole.
Put this up on the screen. De Moin.
Registered poles are considered, you know, sort of like the best poll of Iowa and of potential caucus goers. They now find Donald Trump with a majority, an outright majority, fifty one percent in the state of Iowa. This is an incremental improvement from their last poll. They find DeSantis hanging on to the number two slot at nineteen percent, nikkiy Haley in third at sixteen percent, the VIK is
at five, Chris Christi at four. So that is where things stand today, and Sager, one of the things that I took note of here is, first of.
All, Nicky Haley is struggling to grow beyond.
This point because a number of voters see her as like too moderate and sort of like too critical of Trump. The other thing I take note of is there's always been this theory of, oh, we need to consolidate the Republican field. As people drop out, then there a one Trump alternative could emerge. Guess who benefited most from people dropping out of the.
Race was Donald Trump?
Yeah, Donald Trump is benefiting the most as people drop out of the race, because that analysis relies on a fantasy world in which you know, there's this majority of the Republican coalition looking for Trump alternatives. No people who are backing Tim Scott or others. Apparently many of them their second choice was Donald Trump.
So here we are.
Also, what was really noteworthy to me is that three quarters of the Republican fields a Republican caucus goer, say that Trump can defeat Biden despite his legal challenges. And you know what, I think they're right. I actually think that they're one hundred percent right. We had some of that polling that we covered yesterday which showed that it would have a slight impact on the way that people voted.
Look, nobody knows for sure until it actually Yeah.
So nobody can really nobody can think about what will happen until it really does. But you know, you can presuppose it a little bit in terms of how would it impact your vote, and the vast majority of people, or at least independence and others, it's not going to have such a massive impact on your vote. I think that Biden is under so much. I think Biden is underwater in so many ways, more so than the legal problems,
that it just dwarfs everything else. So, for example, Crystal, I was looking yesterday in the crosstabs of that Wall Street Journal pool. This was highlighted by Josh Crossauer. If you ask people did Biden's policies help you or hurt you? Fifty four percent say they hurt me. Only twenty some percent say that they helped you. If you ask them about Trump, it's actually flipped.
It's not an.
Overall majority, but it's this minority who say hurt, majority who say or plurality who say helped.
How can you overcome that?
I mean, it's just like the ultimate test, especially when you've got this mirror image of these two candidates. I think Trump benefits the most from I wouldn't call it rose colored glass syndrome. More just he was president when it wasn't COVID, and post COVID, shit's gone bad and you've got high gas, you've got an international global crisis. Some of that he was responsiblere in twenty nineteen, some of it he's not. Biden is definitely a casualty of
the Federal Reserve and of COVID policy. Some of it is the own making in terms of vaccines and masks and all that other stuff that he decided to do in twenty twenty one. But nonetheless, put the two times together and Biden Trump can ask the most basic question, would you rather live in twenty nineteen or would you rather live today? Most people are going to say twenty nineteen. That's what the vast majority of people want to return to, inflation wise, price wise, life wise. That he's got a
lot going for him. From a structural advantage point.
Of view, Trump has never been in a stronger position to win in his previous two races than he is now. I mean, just to put yourself back in the twenty sixteen polling and in the twenty twenty polling, Remember it had him down consistently by big numbers in some of these states. Now you got him up by double digits in Michigana state that wasn't all that close last time around. You cannot look at this landscape and think that it is anything but a catastrophe for Joe Biden. Now what
they're betting on is these court cases. They're betting on you know, Trump's disposition and people being reminded that this man is like chaotic, chaotic asshole. They're hoping that abortion continues to be a dominant force in politics. And what they would point to is listen, a lot of the same analysis held in the you know, anticipation of the red wave in the last midterms, it didn't come through.
People were still they were very upset about the economy, They were not happy with Biden, they were not happy with his leadership.
His approval rating.
Was very low, and nevertheless Democrats overcame historical norms in terms of midterm election. It was a very disappointing night fe or Republicans. They would also point to special elections that we've had where Democrats have been consistently outperforming what the polls have expected them to do. So that's what they would say. But I think, frankly, it's cope. I mean,
you can't look at these economic numbers. You can't look at the head to head numbers and think that this is you know that this is going well for the Biden team. And the other piece of this is, you know, Biden is not capable of really campaigning. He's not campaigning. They really aren't even building out campaign operations in these states. Saw an article about that about how they're way behind
even just organizationally in terms of their campaign apparatus. He's not able to effectively debate, he's not able to effectively communicate, he's not able to effectively go out and do rallies and really persuade people that he's got the vigor for another four years and a plan and an agenda that they, you know, may have some interest in. So I think there, I think they're in a terrible position. And when you add the third party candidates into the mix, it just gets even.
More Die check this out, just more I pulled up.
Trump has double digit leads on handling the economy, inflation, crime, securing the border, Ukraine War, Israel conflict. Biden has a double digit lead on only one.
Issue, abortion. Well, I mean, if I were him, that's basically all I would be doing.
And what Sean Trendy over at RCP highlights is that while Biden has a single digit lead on healthcare and on social Security, Democrats are supposed to have double digit.
Leads on those.
So even in the places where he's beating Trump, supposedly he's not beating him by the margin that you're supposed to just as a baseline generic Democrat in this race.
So will abortion save his ass? Actually?
Maybe that's one of those the craziest part of American politics.
We covered that Texas case yesterday of the mother of two who was going through a process to try to get an abortion for the baby she's caring now, who has a fatal defact too, is expected only days outside of the womb. Two updates for you on that. And again this was in the state of Texas. Number one, she decided she's going to go out of state to have the abortion, and she's suffering massive health impacts also of carrying this pregnancy, which she.
Would love to have a healthy baby.
Girl.
This isn't that she doesn't want children, it's that this particular baby is unable to live. So she decided to go out of state. At the same time, the Texas Supreme Court ruled against her. So it shows you how even in this extraordinary circumstance where she knows the baby is not going to survive, they would force her to
carry it to term. And those are the sorts of stories that are unfolding and sorts of court cases that are unfolding day after day after day that Trump is going to have to grapple with that he hasn't really had to grapple with. And it ties into a whole picture of him and the Republican Party as extremists where it's like, okay, and this is again this is the democratic case. Well, you may not be happy with me on any number of issues, but these people are crazy
and so we can't put them back into power. And look, it has worked pretty well in these certainly in these midterm elections, in the special elections. It has been a pretty compelling case. So you can't just dismiss it totally out of hand.
I think you are absolutely right. So look, we'll cover everybody what happens. He's got until he's only got eight days Trump to give his response to the Supreme Court. We theoretically could have a ruling by the end of the year, which is nuts, and that would be it.
Boom, We're going to trial.
So the days for trial look closer and closer, I think, although if the Supreme Court rules the other way, that would be even grazier.
So we really have no idea, that's my idea, but definitely something to keep to waking, keep watching.
Let's go to housing.
Obviously an issue we know that so many of you are fascinated by and really affected by. If you were to again ask me why people hate the economy so much today, this has got to be the most central story and nobody really talks about it. We did at least get one question about it at the GotoP debate responded to an idiotic.
Fashion line answer.
We will move past that and just at least give people credit for asking it. But there are some new charts here which highlight a terrible reality. The math for buying a house no longer works. It's one of the biggest flip I guess you could say in almost fifteen twenty years since the great recession of two thousand and seven.
So let's put this up there on the screen. We've got a lot of these that show you that the cost now of an average monthly new home payment is now almost one thousand dollars dollars higher than the average monthly new lease payment. Whereas the math on that largely worked in your favor for buying a house for more than a decade twenty ten onward in a lower interest
rate environment. But with the massive spike that everybody saw from those new monthly home payments with these interest rates, you makes it so that it doesn't make a whole lot of financial sense.
Now.
The reason why that's bad is twofold. Obviously, owning a home, especially your first home, is usually the first path that you have to net worth that actually will set you up for retirement and intergenerational wealth.
Two.
Whenever you have it make more sense to rent. That gives all the leverage in the world to the people who are the landlords. And we can see this in some of the other prices that we have access to in some of these other charts, if we want to go ahead to the next one. For example, the average rate on the thirty year fixed mortgage has now skyrocketed
to between six and ten percent. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot to people who are alive in the nineteen seventies, but when you pair it with the median sale price at a literal all time high four hundred thousand dollars for the median sale price. On top of that, it's actually over half a million for people who live in a metro area. You're at a point where even coming up with the downpayment cash seems like a nearly
impossible task. And then having to keep up with mortgage payments, which are in some cases with interest, going to be more than your actual paycheck.
Why what are you supposed to do? Right now?
They have crystal the total cost of a mortgage for a four hundred thousand dollars home at different interest rates. I mean, the difference right now is that for a four hundred thousand dollars home at three percent, the overall cost with interest leaves you roughly shy of half a million dollars, whereas today with the eight percent interest rate or even the five percent interest rate, you are way
past that half a million. You're getting into the eight hundred thousand dollars territory of the amount of interest that you're paying. So then think of all two about you have to the house has to appreciate more than what like forty percent or whatever over the value by the time you pay it for.
You to even make any money on the damn house.
So at like every level to buy, to keep, and to sell, we're in a bad market such that people are probably more trapped in housing and from housing scenarios than ever before. This is a terrible impact on the overall economy and it's really like shrinking upward mobility for an entire generation. I think, especially people who are between thirty and thirty five, people who would traditionally have bought their first home starter home type situation with one kid,
maybe two kids, and would have leveled up after that. Yeah, you've got people who we either did that and are not locked in. Maybe they don't have any more kids because of that, maybe they're driving longer commutes, you know, all kinds of things. It really freezes people, I think, at a phrase in their life and it's just so frustrating.
I mean, imagine working your whole life almost a decade, you know, if you're elder millennial, and then you get to a point where you found you you planned the entire time, you're going to be ready, and now you can't do it. Yeah, you can see all of it right here in the data.
Yeah, this show's the median age of home buyers, which is now up to thirty six or thirty five years old. Only a decade ago it was thirty years old. I mean that's a really significant difference. Are you, you know, heading into your thirties or are you heading out of your thirties when you're able to aspirationally buy a home. Some of the numbers in here were pretty shocking to me,
even though we've been covering this a lot. They found that before the FED started raising rates, a person with a monthly housing budget of two thousand dollars could have bought a home value at more than four hundred thousand dollar. Today, that same buyer would need a home valued at two
hundred and ninety five thousand dollars or less. How many homes in your town go for less than two hundred ninety five thousand dollars, not a lot, And there is so little supply on the market, especially of quote unquote starter homes or homes that would be affordable to you know, I mean, this would take a significant amount of income just to be able to afford this. So it really
is an extraordinary landscape. And to tie it in with the political conversation that we've been having, if I was Biden, not.
Only would I be leaning into abortion.
This is what I would be talking about relentlessly. It is such an undercovered issue. It gets so little focus and attention, and it causes pain at every level of society. I mean, there is almost no one who isn't impacted by the basic ability to afford shelter, especially in certain cities.
You know, some of the numbers of renting versus buying in major metros, they found that the premium is one hundred and seventy five percent more to afford a house payment in cities like Seattle, Austin, and several cities in California. So it's even way worse in a lot of places in the country than you know, the overall numbers. There is a little bit of movement in Congress, or at
least some ideas that are beginning to be formulated. And again, these are things that I would lean into like crazy if I was Biden, because I think it would put Trump in a very difficult situation, especially being the real estate developer, being very cozy with you know, hedge funders and carrying water for them while he was President of the United States.
Put this up on the screen.
There's new legislation that Democrats in Congress have introduced, both in the House and the Senate that would ban hedge funds from buying and owning single family homes in the US. It will require them to manage funds pulled to sell off all the single family homes that they own over a ten year period, would eventually prohibit those companies from owning those single family homes at all. During the decade
long phase out period. It would impost to tax penalties with the proceeds reserved for down payment assistance for individuals looking to buy homes from corporate owners. So it would basically get Wall Street out of speculating on single family homes.
We've covered here extensively. How you know, this is a very uneven phenomenon, But there are certain cities and certain neighborhoods in America where the permanent capital coming in and buying up entire neighborhoods, really targeting the more affordable housing areas in major metro areas and making it possible for people to be able to buy homes in that area.
Companies that are trying to turn themselves into America's landlord, and this has had a major impact both in terms of the housing stock that's for sale for just regular people and also in terms of the prices in those areas. So this would go directly after that.
I'm all for it.
There's another piece of legislation that would require corporate owners of more than seventy five single family homes, so sort of like larger landlords, to pay an annual fee of ten thousand dollars per home into a housing trust fun to be used as down payment assistance for families. Because Sager, as you rightly identify. One of the big problems now is people being able to have enough cash upfront to be able to compete in the market and be able
to secure housing. So it's not just about affording that monthly payment. It's obviously being able to afford that down payment. And so both of these pieces of legislation would try to provide some funds to give people a boost in that area as well.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, I hope that some of this stuff goes through. This is arguably the single most important thing. I know that there are some metropolitan areas which have down payment assistance. It has a limited track record, largely because those exist in areas where the property values are already so DC for example, they have a one I think it can go up to like seventy thousand dollars, which of course is.
A lot of money.
But yeah, it's one of those where if you're trying to buy a house is one point two million dollars, it's not going to and you.
Got investors coming in all cash, as.
You've got people who are not even investors.
Another problem I often see and speaking to people, especially living in California and in New York and Miami as well. The amount of foreign capital. There's really rich hedge funders, people from all over the world. People forget California and New York, Miami. These are some of the most desirable real estate, not in America but the whole world. Because you have access to the US legal system. It's a great place to park cash. But it increases the property values.
It makes it very difficult for a lot of local residents to be able to buy in. So structurally, I think there were things that are really not looking good. Housing is becoming effectively a luxury good, which I think is one of the worst developments that we could have in our modern economy, and yet nobody's talking about it, and very few are actually trying to do.
Anything about it.
Yeah.
I mean, even these bills, which I fully support, I think they'd be good. You know, this would nibble around the edges.
Yeah, exactly.
You really need a multi pronger. You've got one big things. You've got to surge a huge construction boom of more affordable units both to rent and to buy. I mean, that's a big piece of the puzzle here. But to get Wall Street out of speculating on housing, which you know housing should be sheltered for people to live in, et cetera. I think that would be I think it would be huge. I think it would be very difficult to accomplish because you would have massive the lobbying, moneyed
interests push back on this idea. But again, if Biden was able to take up this mantle and really lean into it, I do think it would put Republicans and Donald Trump in particular in a very difficult spot. So we'll see if they have two brain cells to rup together to actually get their act together.
On this one.
Not going to take that bet now.
In much less serious news, but equally very important according to some is the Panera lemonade and the controversy around it. So Chrystal and I have actually procured these lemonades. We will give you the news before we try them live on the air. Neitherus have ever tried it before. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. There are currently two lawsuits that Panera is facing for its highly caffeinated charge lemonade, blamed for two separate debts.
One gentleman, Dennis Brown, drank three charged lemonades from a local Panera on October ninth and suffered a fatal cardiac arrest. Sadly actually had an unspecified chromosomal deficiency disorder and a develop mental delay. He actually lived independently and he would often stop at Panera Bread after the shift. The legal complaint says that because he had high blood pressure, he
did not consume energy drinks. The lawsuit that was filed on behalf of his family for Panera alleges that he drank three of these charged lemonades and then less Sadly suffered.
Another lawsuit, which was first.
Reported, called the beverage quote a dangerous energy drink and argues that Panera has failed to appropriately warn consumers about its ingredients, which include the stimulant guaron extract.
It's a common ingredient in many energy drinks.
Now, I'm not one hundred percent sure if this is fair, Crystal, because Panera, in its advertising has advertised said lemonade as quote plant based and clean, with as much caffeine as our dark roast coffee. Now, let's be clear here, though, it has a lot more caffeine than met dark roast coffee, unless you're talking about the biggest size like we have in front of us and in fact, describing it as clean maybe one of the most absurd things I've ever heard.
If you want to see what's actually in this thing, and we have some of the ingredients, please put it up there. Five hundred and thirty calories in this drink, one.
Hundred and thirty grams of sugar. That is more carbohydrates than I eat in like three days. I mean, what is that? Like three cookies, like three jumbo.
Is quite a bit worse than soccer, Okay, but.
Even then, that's like three chocolate chip cookies.
Like that is a crazy amount of sugar.
And then three hundred and not three hundred and ninety milligrams of caffeine. Now I get it. I think it does certainly sound like a lot. But if we think about this, let's look at like a monster energy drink. One of my favorite energy drinks is the Black Rifle coffee, the three hundred milligram the espress our drink. We've had them here on the air before, courtesy of Evan Hayfer. By the way, out to my man, Evan, those got three hundred milligrams of caffeine. And so there's a big
I think, like witch hunt right now. It's become a big meme to try and get these things banned where. Look, I think it's tragic that this man suffered a cardiac arrest. That said, like, people are adults, and if you can walk into a seven to eleven in this country and buy two monsters, then why can't you walk into a Panera and buy this big gas drink with three ninety milligrams and even one hundred and thirty grams of sugar.
Look ice gross, There's no way I'll be drinking this whole thing because I'm not going to drink that amount of sugar.
But people drink that amount in Coca Cola every single day.
Actually, arguably it's way worse for you than way worse for you to drink that amount of sugar. Coca and it used to drink that amount of caffeine.
Yeah, that's true.
I just looked it up. A can of coke I think has thirty nine grams of sugar.
You need like four.
Yeah, you have a lot of people do that, A lot of coke to match that amount of sugar. I mean, listen, my heartbreaks for these people.
Yeah, I feel about it. Lois like, don't get me wrong.
Yeah, I guess what I'm looking at is is is this really Panera's fault or is this like a regulatory issue, because I don't think there's any mandatory requirements that you put extra warnings on, you know, super caffeinated drinks, and if there's a genuine health danger, it seems like that would be a reasonable standard to apply. So it's I don't know that. Like listen, companies Panera does this all the time. They describe a lot of their food as
quote unquote clean. It doesn't mean anything. It's not regulated. It's like utterly meaning a lot of the things that when you go to the grocery store and you see these labels put on, they're not certifying anything real. They're just aspirationally describing the product in the way that you want to associate with it. So so yeah, it's hard for me. First of all, I definitely don't think it
should be banned. I don't know that it's Panera's fault or that they should be punished, but I would like to see it spark a conversation about whether there should be more warning labels on highly caffeinated drinks, because I just say, like, thinking about you know, I take my kids supreneura. Sometimes if I wasn't really paying attention, I don't really let my kids have caffeine because they're crazy
enough as it is. And if I just saw lemonade and I wasn't really paying close attention, I could see them filling up a cup of this and me not even knowing that they were having this level of intake.
Now, would that be like really dangerous there? I doubt it.
I'm sure you know they're healthy. They don't have any underlying health condition, so I don't think they would be put at considerable risk. But as a parent, I would like a little additional information or a little additional flag, because I would never think even if I took note of quote unquote charged lemonade, I would never think it had that level of caffeine because that's insane.
So cool. That's why I was cool.
Three hundred and ninety milligrams, all right, So I looked at it. Regulation regulation around caffeine and energy drinks is that they are classified as dietary supplements, thus they are not required to have FDA approval before production or sale. Is not currently regulate the amount of caffeine and other
stimulants that are found in energy drinks again. I mean, I think that's fine, especially we have a current system, especially right now, is that things don't really get banned unless you can prove some sort of public health crisis and specifically targeting to teenagers. So, as I said, many people are calling it the fifth Loco. I actually think what happened to for Loco is bullshit if you look
back on it. Their argument against for Loco in two thousand and nine was that the amount of caffeine had to be banned specifically because it was being marketed to teenagers. I mean that's a obviously false because it was being marketed to people who can legally consume alcohol. Now, in terms of its marketing and all, that wasn't targeting young people. Yeah, and as a participant in for Loco Fridays, it was awesome.
Now.
I also remember though that when four Loco was banned, what did people start doing. They started buying red Bull and pouring into Loco because and I think Vodga Red Bull at that time also took off as one of the more popular bar drinks. It was just the it's like a natural combination that people who are really drawing frat culture and all that are going to indulge in regardless.
So to me, it seems very nanny state when we look back on it, it's a lot like what happened to Jewel in the same way, or we're going to ban Jewel because they're targeting children, and by that, we're going to destroy this multi billion dollar American company, so that cheap Chinese vapes where those elf bars and all those other things can be widely available in every vape store in the entire US, and you can buy Zen and all you can buy like twelve milligram like Zin
and nicotine packets that are out there right now, which tons of teenagers.
But so I'm I don't know that I've really seen people calling for a ban. Maybe somebody out I've seen it. Is it more like what do you think about additional warnings? What do you think about, you know, being more easily available than information about how much caffeine it has?
What do you think about those sorts of things?
Because to me, that's just like transparency and then people can make up plansformed decisions about what they're going to purchase and what they're going to consume, and that I support.
I support information for consumers. The calorie content is available by law in Panera bread. Whenever you order one of these things, I think you order these are Uber eats, right, yes, right there, it's in the Uber Eats app.
It tells you exactly how many calories it is, how many calories in it, and.
If I were they huge now, I don't know if they did before, but now when you order them, they have a warning on it that says like, not for kids, not for people pregnant, not for people with underlying health conditions. I'm not quoting verbatim, but there was some sort of a warning that came up.
If I were to choose any warning label to put on this thing, it would not be about caffeine, and it would be about sugar. One hundred and thirty grams sugar and call them this thing out unquote clean.
That would really bend all of our entire food systems.
I support if you were to ask me what's more dangerous in this thing, it is not the caffeine, and a one hundred percent is the sugar. And I would support that for every drink out there on the planet, some sort of massive warning label as to what's actually going to kill you.
But we have we talked around this enough. Should we try it?
Let's try?
We drink it? All right?
Cheers, cheers?
Okay, mine is pretty tasty.
I got a strawberry lemon mint.
I'm like, yeah, I hate to say it's a little sweet. I was, what am I drinking? Mango?
U zoo is yours and minus strawberry lemon mint, and that's pretty good.
Ten years ago. This thing is definitely.
A lot of sugar. Yeah, you can get it. It's very sweet.
Your tongue is like dripping.
I don't drink regular soda or regular but you know, sometimes when you accidentally get one or something, you can feel coat your teeth.
I can't.
That's the mouthfeel that I'm getting from this one thing.
I was a little surprised by is given the amount of sugar and caffeine. I actually thought the cups would be larger because this doesn't even approach like a big large one size, and this is the large size. That being said, I cannot imagine drinking three of these things. That would be wild on every level. I can't really imagine drinking any beverage the size three of them, which fullish.
Yeah, I agree, but unfortunately a lot of people I mean, how many how many times you've been in the seven eleven and you see people walk out of there with double double big gulps that are full of like full sola.
Too young to have been involved in the like big gulp wars when Bloomberg was Mayor.
Of Needs or well, I do remember you remember it?
Yeah, yeah, that was a that was the whole thing. But I mean, it's listen, I'm I am much more in support of transparency and changing incentives than like outright bands. I think are generally generally not the way to go unless it's like a really exceptional circumstance. But I don't know that this qualifies as an exceptional circle.
It certainly doesn't in my opinion.
Anyway, thank you for indulging us, letting us have fun on this, Crystal.
What are you taking a look at?
Well, tell me name me one more nation, any other nation that's doing as much as the United States to alleviate the pain and suffering of the people of Gazwa. You can't, You just can't. The United States, through President Biden, is leading the effort to get trucks, food, water, medicine, and fuel into the people of Gaza.
Wait.
Wait, name another nation. Name an other nation that's doing is more than the United States to get hostages out or to get people foreign nationals out of Gaza. You can't do it. And name another nation that is doing more to urge this is Israeli counterparts. Our Israeli counterparts to be as cautious and deliberate as they can be in the prosecution of their military operations. You can the United States is at the forefront of this.
That was NSC spokesman John Kirby and one of the greatest feats of gaslighting I have literally ever seen, positioning the US is a great humanitarian savior even as our bombs are being dropped on thousands of Palestinian babies.
We are aiding and a betting a medigal.
Siege, the worst massacre of civilians in modern history, the mass displacement of nearly the entire population of Gaza what Nick Christoph is now calling Rwanda level atrocities, and still have the gall to posture like we are humanity's last best hope. It is literally unreal, as in thoroughly disconnected
from reality. If I spent the entire day, I could not possibly untangle all of the twisted delusions and outright lies that the US is pushed in order to justify the unjustifiable and in order to wash the Biden administration's hands of the blood being spilled and chaos being sewed
in Gaza and more broadly in the Middle East. But I wanted to spend a little bit of time today tackling some of the greatest absurdities being peddled from the White House and State Department podiums, taking apart the elaborate fairy tale that Biden and co. Must push lest they just admit that they are dedicated to helping Israel commit war crimes. So let's start with mister Kirby. Here, he says, to name one nation that is doing as much as the US to alleviate the pain and suffering of the
people of Gaza. As a starting point, how about literally every other member of the UN Security Council, all of whom voted for an immediate ceasefire and release of all hostages, save for the UK, which abstained the US vetoed that resolation, making clear that are hosed. Concern for the hostages is just an empty pack of lies, and our alleged concern
for civilians is even more of a cruel joke. More to the point, it is the height of insanity to claim you are the humanitarian savior of Palestinians for giving a little, perfunctory lip service to concerns for civilians and sending in a few aid trucks while your state department is working feverishly to ship as many weapons and munitions as possible as fast as you can, knowing that these weapons are being used overwhelmingly to massacre Palestinian civilians living
on how about we check in with the State Department. Their spokesman, Matthew Miller, is doing his absolute best to pretend that life for Palestinians and Gaza is anything but absolute hell on earth. Fresh off being rebuked as irresponsible by the IDF for suggesting that Hamas was not releasing hostages because they had been raped, Matthew Miller decided to give the residents of Gaza a little advice on how
they could keep themselves and their families safe. Miller's guidance, just go to the yuon designated sites.
So where should people go?
People should go to the site. Let's take it one question time. Before you asked a question, let me answer. People should go to the UN designated sites where that are on Israeli lists as deconfliction zones that should not be the target of military campaigns.
Now Listen to a UNISEF official on that very same day, in response to a similar question about where people should go to be safe, there is.
No way safe. This place is not safe under that title, is not safe. Children in that hospital is not safe. There are no bond because he that would offer a modicum of safety, it doesn't exist.
Nowhere is safe.
Matthew Miller's fantasy in which UN flag facilities offer some sort of safe harbor was also just rebuked by the Secretary General of the UN itself, who wrote in a statement quote, the people of Gaza are being told to move like human pinballs Rickichet, between ever smaller slivers of the south without any of the basics for survival. But
nowhere in Gaza is safe. At least eighty eight UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East shelters have been hit, killing over two hundred and seven people in injuring over nine hundred. In another exchange, Miller was confronted with the actual horrors that our government is standing firmly behind, and it gets a little uncomfortable for him, this fairy tale of safe zones and humanitarian assistants collapsing. He reaches for the only other option, pleading ignorance.
There was a report that Israel's assault forced the nurse to leave babies behind.
They were found decomposing. Are you aware of the story.
I am aware of that report.
Y and do you take it as it happened, or if it did happen, is at the walk line sight?
I would say that is a tragedy. It's a tragedy for those babies, It's a tragedy for their family members, It's a tragedy for the Palestinian people, and it is
a tragedy for the world. It is why we have made clear that far too many Palestinians have been killed in this conflict, and that of course includes far too many Palestinian children and of course Palestinian babies, And it is why we have taken every measure we could to speak loudly and clearly to the government of Israel that it needs to do everything it can to minimize civilian harm.
And it's why we have worked to try and move humanitarian assistance in and it is also why I will say we have said that Hamas should stop hiding its fighters in hospitals. So it gets to the very difficult nature of this war and the immense human tragedy that has been inflicted on far.
Tell better if it's happened. It's not a work, right or is there a work.
I'm never going to be able to make an assessment here. You saw us today make a conclusion about war crimes after a very deliberate fact finding process where we then apply the factor a lot. It's not something I can do responding to just please let me finish my answers before you interrupt. I will take all your questions. It is not something I can do responding to a report from the podium.
Amazingly, on the very same day that Miller plot ignorance, the State Department didn't miraculously remember what war crimes actually are, sending out this tweet announcing they had to Herman the Sudanese armed forces had committed war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Sudan.
Wow.
Perhaps they can use these new powers to figure out the immensely complicated riddle of whether premature babies in the Niku are legitimate military targets. Now it's complete, our partial exploration of US fairy tales, fantasies, and outright falsehoods. Let's go back to where we started, because John Kirby has been routinely turning in oscar winning performances in defense of the Israeli government.
Just take a listen to this one.
It is not the Israeli defense forces strategy to kill innocent people. It's happening. I admit that each one's a tragedy, but it's not like these Raelis are sitting around every morning and saying, hey, how many more civilians can we kill today? Let's go Obama. Let's go Obama school or a hospital or a residential building and just and cause
civilian casualties. Not doing that, they're trying to go after Hamas, and it's a very difficult task when Hamas, oh, by the way, in addition to deliberately slaughtering people, is deliberately hiding themselves in residential buildings, in hospitals, in tunnels, make putting the innocent people of Gaza directly in the crossfire. Now you tell me, is that right?
Peddling oh, so many lies in such a short period of time.
It's almost impressive.
Frankly, first claim from Kirby quote it is not the IDF strategy to kill innocent people.
Actually it is.
This is blindingly, undeniably obvious if you just look at the death toll. The very lowest civilian death rate estimate I have seen comes from an Israeli university studies published in Haretz, which found that sixty percent of all deaths in Gaza were civilians. Other estimates have placed that number closer to eighty or ninety percent, But even taken the low number, it would be significantly higher than the civilian
death toll of all twentieth century conflicts combined. That includes, of course, intimously brutal wars like World War One, World War II, Vietnam, etc. What's more, this same Israeli study confirmed the reporting of nine seven two, which found that yes, in fact, Israel is intentionally bombing civilians in hopes of creating a quote shock that would turn the population on humas. So when Kirby says, quote, it's not like the Israelis are sitting around every morning and saying, hey, how many
more civilians can we kill today? Let's go Bama school or a hospital or a residential building, and just cause civilian casualties.
They actually literally are doing that.
Kirby goes on to say what the Israelis are actually doing is hunting Hamas. This may be the biggest fairy tale of the mall Adam Johnson lays this out well in his new piece for The Nation, The Hunt from
Hamas narrative is obscuring Israel's real plans for Gossap. In it, he asked us to consider the hunt for Hamas narrative that surrounded the attack, for example, on Alshif, the hospital we were told Al Shifa was the beating heart of Hamas Hq, complete with this computer generated image of hamas command and control center doctor Evil's style layer where Hamas leaders, militants,
and hostages could all be located. In the end, the IDF was able to produce roughly a dozen guns, one tunnel shaft, and a box of dates, and then everyone moved on to con Unis, which we are now told is the real Hamas Hq. As Johnson writes, quote, looking at Israeli attacks through a countert pkeral Lens makes Israel's military decisions seem perplexing. Why would Israel attack a hospital if it didn't think it was a Hamas command center.
The Israeli military has shelled and attacked a number of hospitals, most of which it didn't even bother to claim more Hamas military basis. This is because the hunt for Hamas framework continually adopted by US media is the wrong framework. The government is doing forcible population transfers, and this means everyone.
It's the simplest way to explain Israel's actions. Yet American media, tied to counter terror narratives can't or won't get their minds around the obvious fact that Israel's attempting to depopulate Gaza in stages. Not to mention, given the high rate of civilian death, Israel is without a doubt, creating more Hamas militants than they are destroying. Taken together, the US is mounting an all out assault on reality in order to continue to justify are unconditional, no redline support for
Bibi's war on Gaza. The impossible and failing nature of perpetuating this elaborate mythology is why have they resorted to increasingly desperate distraction. Oh my god, it's TikTok, Oh my god, A rally chant meets someone somewhere feel unsafe. Oh my god, a university president actually stood up for free speech. Can't have any of that free speech lest someone actually tells the truth. And the level of gaslighting here has been truly extraordinary.
And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints dot com. Joining us now is independent journalist Lee Fong. He's got a great new piece out. Let's go and put it up there on the screen. Inside the pro Israel information war israelly, government led zoom calls, WhatsApp chat logs, and other documents provide a window into the massive effort to shape online
discourse and silence pro Palestinian voices. Lee, thank you so much for joining us, first of all, and why don't you break down a little bit of what you uncovered from behind the scenes of some cancelation campaigns that we've seen in front of us.
Well, good morning, thanks for having me, And before I begin, I just want to give a big shout out to my co author, Jack Bolsen. Really fantastic journalists. Check out a substact, check out tech inquiry to Watchdog group that he runs. We did this story looking into there's really let me just say that there's two wars going on. There's the physical war in Gaza, but there's also a propaganda war. There's a war to win public opinion, to
shape the online and public discourse. This story looks into that many of the participants in this organization and these groups that we looked into, they call it the information war, also the second battlefield. And we looked at documents, planning documents, activist documents, videos, and webinars with training seminars on how
to engage in this information war. And we've got access to this three hundred person WhatsApp group Pro Israel Group, many prominent members, officials from APAC, the very influential pro Israel lobbying group here in the US, Venture Capitalists, Tech Leader. There's a lot of prominent names in there, and they're basically organizing to support Israel. Some of the work is
fairly benign or you know, normal charitable work. You know, they're raising funds to provide humanitarian assistants to communities that impacted in Israel. But some of the other work is perhaps a little bit more problematic that raises certain concerns. They're organizing as well to silence Palestinian voices. To silence pro Palestinian voices, They're organizing the pressure campaigns on universities
and other groups to cancel pro Palestinian speakers. They've gone after and successfully canceled events from Congresswoman Rashida t Lei, a Democrat from Michigan, Muhammad al Kurd He's a fairly prominent writer from Jerusalem and writes for the Nation and other US based publications. He was scheduled to speak at the University of Vermont, and you know, members of this group mobilize the pressure effort to cancel that event.
It was canceled. They're pooling money into.
AI based tech tools to automatically flag and report pro Palestine and content on various social media platforms Instagram, Twitter, what have you.
They're organizing to send.
Even even arms and weapons to Israel, although it seems like some of those efforts were not successful because of customs efforts or customs issues. But you know, there's there's just it's a sprawling effort. I mean, these are these are mostly volunteers. Of course, any group on either side of this, pro Palestating or pro Israel has a right to speak out.
There's no issue with that.
We all have a First Amendment right here. But what's kind of interesting and again kind of unusual here is that many Israeli government officials have participated in these efforts. They've sat in on the chats, they've helped guide the advocacy on webinars. So, you know, I've looked at a lot of different interest groups and you know, effort.
To shape public policy, public discourse.
The role of a foreign government in such a heavy handed role here, you know, that's that's something that's that I haven't seen before.
Yeah, Lee, perhaps you could take us through one example of someone that they targeted for cancelation getting there, you know, getting them fired, getting a taught canceled, so we can see how this network sort of operates.
Well, the story goes through a lot of different examples, but you know, one we open with and this was publicly reported, you know, shortly after the October seventh terrorist attack. You know, you saw a wave of cancelations. You know, one employee from the website building Wix, it's an Israeli company in Ireland, posted on LinkedIn Free Palestine. She later posted other comments criticizing the kind of exclusive Zion estate of Israel. You know, these are potentially controversial comments, but
you know this is her political opinion. By look at this WhatsApp group, we see kind of a very rapid effort to identify tech employees and academics and activists for cancelation. So someone took a screenshot of her simply saying free Palestine, shared with the group immediately, and an executive from WIS, from this tech company that employed said, you know, we're already working on it. Someone else confirmed that she'd work on it. She's the WIS executive says, you know, we'll
look for a statement tomorrow. You know this has been taken care of, and indeed, within twenty four hours, this employee was fired. And you know the WhatsApp group is just littered with examples of this. Uh, they're going after, you know, very kind of even minor or relatively minor student groups, pressuring universities to cut their ties with them.
They're mobilizing.
Donors and alumni from various elite colleges NYU, Columbia and others to support decisions to revoke the status of student group. You know, Jewish voices for Peace as Students for Palestine. These are kind of left wing groups that are more on the very much so on the pro Palestinian side. They're really targeting these organizations and getting them removed or canceled from university campuses.
Lee Another part that I've thought was really fascinating because it rang so true is you talk about some of the training that's done in this group, and in particular you've got information about and Israel based venture capitalists. Who outlined three categories of people that it was worth reaching out to and trying to persuade. One group was dubbed the impressionables, typically young people. They reflexively support the weak,
opposed the oppressor, but are not really knowledgeable. For this category of people, the goal is not to convince them of anything, but to see doubt.
That was one group.
The second group was what was described as the uncomfortable sympathizer group that wants to support Israel, typically more liberal, but.
Opposes net and Yahoo.
These types can be won over by pointing out we are a multi ethnic, diverse, democratic liberal society with rotten apples. The like Israeli gay pride flags sort of come to mind in that genre of outreach The final group consists of those who are reflexively pro Israel, kind of Israel right or wrong. Members of this group are not actually very knowledgeable, so they needed to be equipped with the right facts to make them more effective in advocating for Israel.
That's right.
I mean these are just I mean, some of these tactics. I guess you kind of see them on any controversial emotionally related topic.
But it's really interesting to see. You know, this was.
A high level official runs the Israel office of Bessemer Venture Partners. This is one of the biggest VC firms in the world. You know, they help seed LinkedIn, Yelp, Shopify, you name it. I mean, this is a very big VC firm, a lot of money under management, a lot of influence. And one of their partners, Andy David, led this talk and gave as that you just referenced, and he did it so alongside an IDF spokesperson in uniform for this kind of training session for tech leaders in VC,
VC folks to engage in the social media debate. And you know, he was kind of bragging that he had, you know, ridiculed and rebutted Paul Graham and other very influential, influential venture capitalists who has made comments that people perceive as pro Palestinian, talking about the civilian body count on both sides and how it's hire on the Palestinian side. But you know, this is just that's just one of many of these webinars, and they're really focused on social media.
They're the pro Israel side, and I think both sides really are concerned about how this conflict is perceived. And really, if you open up any of these social media platforms, you do see hateful stuff on both sides. You know, you see anti Semitic convents, you see Islamophobic, anti Arab comments, you see people justifying the slaughter of civilians.
Really again on both sides.
But really it is also a lopside of debate because the vast majority of people who are losing their academic freedom, who are losing their free speech, are getting kind of removed from social media because they're getting constantly flagged, whether by bots or by volunteers, it's not really clear or by these kind of the black box of who makes decisions at the social media companies. They're seeing more of the pro Palestinian side getting silenced.
Yeah, we have that example that you mentioned. We could put it up there on the screen just to show people the level of state support even for this where it shows a graphic here for those who are just listening that says Israel needs you now. Special guests include a major in the IDF spokesperson unit, Libby Weiss, who previously I know, I believe she was an American citizen who made ali a, went to Israel and now works
as a spokesperson for the IDF. And then Adam Fisher, who's a partner at that venture firm that you mentioned. I mean, this is right up like a government organized effort to and who were the people then lee who participated in this. It's very what high net worth individuals who then were encouraged to participate in cancelation campaigns here in the United States.
Yes, it's largely folks in the Bay Area, people at work who work at VC funds, family offices, tech firms, tech lawyers. But you know, it's a loosely organized group of volunteers essentially. I mean, these are people who are very concerned about the conflict, you know, who want to do who want to play a part. Again, that's that's there, right, But you know, there's also some people in DC in
New York. I don't have the full list of this particular zoom call, but you know, we we we have viewed quite a few.
We watched some of these videos.
Some of these videos were actually posted online that anyone can see, but just in very kind of hidden corners of the Internet. Even just within the first few days after the conflict started on October seven, you know, you had almost immediately you had idf of spokespeople, people from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Israel organizing these zoom calls to say, hey, look for you know, people who support Israel, who are traumatized by this this terror attack.
You can play a part too. You can be a frontline soldier. We need you to influence universities. We need you to influence your elite circles of donors and other.
Influential people in the media.
We need you to pressure Congress to maintain strong support for Israel. We need munitions, we need armaments, We need Congress to send US military support to win this war. And you know, even though there are people fighting in the physical battlefield, you can play your part back in the United States. And indeed that's what we've seen over the last two months.
Yeah, you know, Lee, it actually reminds me of I mean, this is this is not new for the Israeli garment that always been very savvy about shaping public opinion, especially in the places where they need public opinion to be shaped. I mean, this goes all the way back to the early Zionists, you know, trying to secure the ball for declaration from Britain and trying to shape the media coverage in England of what was happening in historic Palestine there.
So it has a lot of echoes around history of this sort of like organized effort, which again may not be illegal, but it's nevertheless interesting to see how these things that feel like they're organic unfolding online and the types of arguments that are being made and the type of sweeping cancelations that we've seen across the country, to see some of the nitty gurdy of how this is
actually organized behind the scenes. The last question I had for you is has there been any descent within these networks. Has there been a moment where someone raised their hand, you know what, this is too far, or this person shouldn't be fired, or you know what, this rhetoric I really object to.
Yes, yeah, you know, this is not like this is a three hundred person WhatsApp group, you know. And again, this is a snapshot into what are probably there are probably a lot of other WhatsApp groups and other organizing efforts. This is just one that we got access to. But there was some pushback against some of these demands to
cancel the Netflix film far Ha. It's a Jordanian film that depicts a scene or you know, a moment in the nineteen forty eight war, you know what Palestinians called the Nakba, when many Palestinians were forced out of their homes and pushed out of Israel. You know, there's there's a very gory scene. I you know, I just recently watched the film in which Israeli militant soldiers kill civilians US.
You know, heart wrenching film, our heart wrenching scene. And there is an effort in this onsapp group to apply more pressure to Netflix to cancel this film, to stop it from being streamed. And one of the members of this group said, you know what, you know, even Israeli historians have confirmed that some of these activities indeed took place but this person was kind of over over road by the other members who said, look, this is still incitement against Jews as anti semitism.
This is blood lebel at this point, at this point.
In time, you know it's not even if it's historically accurate, we still need to get this consul.
Wow. Again, this is not that.
There was some lively back and forth, you know what, It's not. Everyone was in an agreement.
All right, I guess we'll take it.
What's that Netflix film again?
I want to check it out far far ha.
Lee.
Thank you, it's a fantastic report. I really encourage people to read it in depth because, like I said, it is really fascinating just to see the way these things develop behind the scenes versus just the public face that we all have access to.
So thank you so much for your work and always great to see you.
Absolutely everybody subscribed to Lee's substack. We'll see you later, man, appreciate that.
Take care.
Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it.
We got a great counterpoints show for everybody tomorrow, so you guys can enjoy that. Otherwise, we'll see you all on Thursday.