3/3/23 Weekly Roundup: Part Time Jobs Rise, Tom Cotton's Lab Leak Theory Smeared, Angela Davis Discovers Ancestors on Mayflower, Ken Klippenstein on Pentagon's War Plan for Iran

Breakingpoints dot com. Interesting report and analysis is from the Wall Street Journal about the rise of part time work. Let's put this up on the screen. Their headline is burned down. More Americans are turning to part time jobs. The number of people working part time rose by one point two million in December and January. Most were people who chose it, so they're not being forced into it. And the quote they have here is twenty five hours is the new thirty five. Let me give you a

few more of the numbers here. So as I said, it rose by one point two million, and most of that increase eight hundred and fifty seven thousand workers part time workers was driven by people who work part time by choice, not because they were unable to find full

time work or because their hours were cut. The total number of people working part time voluntarily twenty two point one million in January, is now almost six times the four point one million who were working part time but who are working part time but would prefer full time hours. That's the highest ratio in two decades, and of course looks very different from the first months of the pandemic when there was a huge crash and people were just

taking whatever work that they could find. Now you have people who you know, this is part of a whole reorientation that we've been talking about here for a long time, where people who are in the fortunate position where they don't have to work full time are reassessing their life priorities and they're saying, hey, maybe instead of the sixty hours, maybe I work three days a week, and maybe I have more time with my kids. Maybe I'm spending more

time on hobbies. Maybe I have an interest or a small business that I want to get off the ground, And they're changing their whole set of priorities within their life in a way that I think is possible. Reminds me of the four day week study that has been making the round. Yeah, I was thinking about that. To fifteen percent of workers who participated in the studies said no amount of money on earth would convince them to go back to five work like a lot of sale.

It's like you're saying a lot of people who are mid thirties, even sometimes not even with kids, are deciding to quit their job. They're transitioning into part time work and they're just pursuing either hobbies or a lot of them are just spending a lot more time with families.

So this is a big part time revolution. I mean, still, it's only sixteen percent, but the trend line with the highest ratio since two decades also shows you where things are headed in terms of preference, and that is going to bleed into the bigger companies who are just going to have to make it work. They'll either move to like a four day work week, which is longer, or a ton more hybridization. You basically, if you're hiring right now for a generic white collar job, good luck trying

to say five day a week in person. That is very rare. With the choicest workforce. People just won't take it. They'll say, no, I'm not going to do it anymore. Right. Well, I mean the four day work week thing is actually really important piece to bring up because this was a huge trial. It's the largest study that they've done on four day work week, and they basically found workers were happier, they were less stressed, they got as much stuff done, and the companies at the end of it almost all

uniformly continued it. Yes, because so it wasn't just good for the workers, Like the corporations themselves found that this was beneficial for them. So I think more employers need to and should lean into the idea of all right, we don't have the standard forty hour work week. People are still expected to, you know, to deliver, but getting out of this archaic idea of what matters is the number of like hours that you literally have your butt

in the chair. And some of that rethinking certainly happened during the pandemic when obviously people are forced to work remotely and this is all you know, white collar office workers that we're talking here, which is, you know, a sort of relatively privileged group. But that forced a rethink

on the part of workers for sure. And I feel like the boss class is kind of, you know, they're kind of late to catch up to a new way of thinking about these things instead of embracing like, listen, if you get your work done, you get your work done. I don't really care what you're doing with your day

or what hours you're doing it in. They're going in the direction of what sort of surveillance technology can we invest in and make sure that your like eyes are on the screen for the right percentage of time, or that you're like doing whatever you're supposed to be doing during the technical office hours. So I do feel like they're a little bit late to the trend here. They're

not going to win. There's no question flexibility is here to say, it will be the growing trend now for decades and we're all just trying to figure it out. I think it's a good thing. I think people should have more flexibility, and especially you know, if you can go full if you can go part time and make it work, and you know, it also opens up the whole swads of the country. A lot of people literally only where they live because of the commute. I mean, what if you don't have to what if you know

you can live an hour outside. And they quote one guy who's like a part time tech worker who move started a new family farm with his parents and raise his chickens. That sounds nice. It would never be able to do that if you didn't, if you didn't have this flexibility. So anyway, yeah, it's great work. As like a religion, has been the case for certainly our entire lives. And so to the extent that people are rethinking that, I think that is incredibly healthy, not just for those people,

but for all of society. It is a fun chart. Somebody actually sent me this. It is that in nineteen seventy six, the share of people who said that developing and meaningful philosophy of life over was surpassed by people saying being well off financially, and the gap between those two exploded during the nineteen eighties, where eighty percent of people now saying it's more important to be better off financially than it is to develop a meaningful philosophy of life.

So the flip of that, even if a slightness right there, that's sick. Well, you know, it's not a surprise nineteen seventy explosion of financialization in the US economy, trade free trade, except but you know, if you have a decline within that and you come more to where words we were. People were a lot happier in the nineteen sixties. So I think it shows why. Yeah, positive trend, we'll take it.

So some new revelations from the US government, they say, actually Labilique yep, it seems to be the most likely one from the Energy Department. And apparently the FBI didn't take a genius. Ryan, We've both been covering this now for a long time, but a lot of journalists and other prominent figures in the media humiliated themselves on this subject. And let's just say we're going to keep some of the receipts, you know, why not. Let's put this up there on the screen. So what do we got? Oh?

Very interesting. So here you have Tom Nichols, the so called death of expertise guy, saying arguing with the conspiracy theorist rarely goes well, it gives people advancing a theory to keep repeating it as just a hypothesis, as Cotton does here. Every time you ask him, he'll repeat it,

say it's unlikely, and just say he's asking questions. Well, you know, Cotton wasn't correct that it was a bioweapons program, But he does appear to have been correct that it did come from a actual Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the US government now claims with the intelligence points to. However, oh go ahead, there is evidence that there is a bioweapons program. Yeah, that's right under way, COVID. It wasn't

part of it, right, We don't know. Yes, we don't know, and we certainly can't go We certainly there's no reason to go there. I will not say that it is part of it yet, but it could also be part

of a bioweapons program and be an accidental leak. Like whenever people hear bioweapons program, then they think, oh, no, well that it was an intentional but DARPA they went for DARPA funding, which they call biodefense, and if that was if it was if it if it came out of that kind of recipe that was created for the DARPA application, then that would actually make it part of like a defense or offensive operation. But it's still an accident.

It doesn't necessarily mean right. And then the person it is an applebom who said, for Tom Cotton, wow, this is just like Soviet propagandists who tried to convince the world the CIA invented AIDS and Apple Bomb is literally on the board of global disinformation in trying to dismantle

So that's interesting. And what does this show you. You know, you have the ambassador, the Chinese ambassador that faced the nation had on their program saying that it was a conspiracy theory, and then you also had CNN saying quote

fact checking Tom Cotton's claims about the coronavirus. I mean, all of these people absolutely proclown themselves in retrospect, even SA Maddie Hassen yesterday saying it's not our fault that we labeled this conspiracy theorist, it's the conspiracy theorists fault for co opting what was a genuine theory called lapli. And it's like, well, maybe you're not supposed to use your personal feelings against Trump or somebody who's saying China virus or whatever to keep away from the facts of

what's been happening here. That's actually I very much appreciated the intercept on this. I know Mara, you know who I've talked to before. I mean, she's not like some

China hawk or whatever. She just always wanted to get to the bottom of this and what do we learn from those documents, from the FOYA documents on the Eco Health Alliance and the NIH and how they were circumventing their own procedures and how we've been pouring millions of dollars of fundy into this lab, Like that alone should just be the scandal, period, doesn't have to be put Yeah, And that's what makes me so proud of the intercept supporting because we actually didn't go into it with like

an agenda one way or the other, like what's going on? We were like, this is a this is a real open question. What what documents can we find that can shed some light on this question? And that's that's what it ought to be like because it also never and by the way, and Meddi's defense, he's he's, as far as I know, the only cable host who actually pressed

Fauci on this. That's true, and you know Fauci lies tucking and dodging, but he did say, like the interceptors reported this, you've said this, and but it never made sense to me, and maybe you could unpack some of it for me how this became so partisan, because like I understand why if you're doing research about the effect of the minimum wage, the effective minimum wage on say joblessness, that people who oppose a minimum wage will see in

the data that it raises unemployment, and then they'll they're talking points, and people who support the minimum age will find their own studies, Like I understand how that epistemologically kind of evolves into a partisan fight? This what like, how is this democratic? Look, it's simple, and it became from It came from day one. Nancy Pelosi remember saying we can't discriminate against Chinatown walking around in which she's the biggest hawk. Oh but oh, the Chinatown in San Francisco,

it was sparking hate. Crimes became an anti Asian hate thing. And look, I'm not saying that there hasn't been violent crimes against Asian people, although you know a lot of that is product of just violent crime in San Francisco and New York. Some people don't really like to talk about that one. But the point that I'm making is that it became immediately that the idea was if we acknowledge this, if we talk about it, it's racist against

Asian people in America, which of course is ludicrous. And the part to me that didn't make sense about that is that the non bigoted explanation was that it was actually these rural, redneck Chinese who were eating bat soup. Right, yeah, you're right. That to me, they still talks about that

all the time. That's like, so it's less racist to say that these like peasant Chinese were eating bat soup at wet markets, which apparently is not that common of a phenomenon, right, and and Weland it's like a city of like twenty million people's super sophistic huge. Yeah, but we played on these these tropes and these bigotries that Western people have about royal Chinese people to say that that's yeah, you know, you know how you know those

Chinese people always eating those bats. That's that's the woke answer, right, I listen. But like that we were doing joint US and Chinese research in a lab right near there, and there was an accident. That's the that's the that's the bigot an explanation that the whole look, the whole thing

is ridiculous. And from day one, so many of these reporters The New York Times, Don McNeil straight up admitted he didn't take lab League seriously because he trusted doctor fauctions we've been talking about, and a lot of these people have egg on their face. Beyond that, a lot of the social media sensors are have to straight up need to apologize to many of the figures who were deplatformed and smeared his conspiracy theory. It took a long time until you were able to talk about this. Was

it Facebook taking your account down? Yes? Twitter did as well. They took down the zero hite account for talking about the bioweapons thesis. And that's look from day one, it was like, well, the lab is there and they were studying back coronaviruses. Maybe it came out of there. Oh, it turns out it's not consistent with evolutionary Like every scrap of evidence from day one has pointed to the

Huhan lab. In my opinion, had to be an idiot to believe the natural origin theory thesis outside of two months into it, when we already knew from independent analysis that the fear and cleavage site looked like it was inserted into the virus. That's it, pack it up and

go home. Well, that's that's why in early February you had that conference call with these scientists who are Christian Anderson and all these people who are now like the most outspoken opponents of the idea, saying all this looks like it came from the lab, like as we look at the cleavage site, as we look at the relationship here, Like to me, some guys are saying, I'm seventy thirty LAB, I'm sixty forty LAB, I'm fifty to fifty LAB, like some saying I can't see any explanation for how this

has a natural origin. Those same dudes then like three days later or organizing a letter saying that the science has settled on this, well certainly settled now I think maybe we'll find out not quite. It's it's still not quite Like there's no there's well the same, but the gun is dead because they covered it up. It's gone, And people say we'll never know, and I just don't

know if that's true. Like I still do think that we could know, Like there still could be there's evidence that the that the NIH and that the US has access to that has not been revealed yet related to Ralph Barrack's lab and some other places. So it's not just the Chinese, you know, who are who have a lack of transparency on this and maybe we will get something more out of out of China, like we like. I think it's too early to say that we'll never know. Okay,

well I hope. So at this point, personally, I got all I know. Yeah, I mean I think most people should. I'm pretty confident. Yes, yes, I don't even I barely even even say hypothesis anymore, because at this point, the natural origin hypothesis is the one that's bunk like, it has far less evidence on its side. But we'll let the rest of the mainstream catch up with that one and we will see you guys later. Angela Davis appeared on Skip Gates' show where he searches people's genealogy, and

boy was she stunned by what he found. Let's roll this any idea what you're looking at? That is a list of the passengers on the Mayflower. No, I can't believe this. No, my ancestice did not come here on the may Flow. Your ancestors kate on the may Flow. No, no, no, you are descending from one of the one hundred and one people who sailed on the Mayflower. That's a little bit too much to deal with right now. Did you ever, in your wildest dreams think that you may have descended

from people who laid never the foundation, never never. Amazing clip. It's easy to see why it went viral. And Henry Lewis Gates show on PBS, I think it's called finding your roots occasionally has a moment like this. He discovered Angela Gates is. Angela Davis is a distant relative of William Brewster, one of as Gates said, there the Puritans to arrive on the Mayflower. He was fleeing persecution, religious persecution, drama, one of the major founders of the Plymouth Bay Colony.

And so there are a number of different ways that I think people can kind of interpret what this means about America, what it means about Angela Davis such a One of the things that always strikes me when these types of situations arise is kind of the rape culture associated with slavery, Because now there were free blacks in New England, you know, you know, from the you know,

seventeen hundred's on. So it is certainly within the realm of possibility that there was some type of relationship that that was that was not rape, that produced this, But that possibility is extraordinarily slim. You know, most likely you're talking about some somehow you wind up in a situation of slavery that produces this type of outcome. And that's because that that is where most of the where most

of most of that those family trees intersected. No, absolutely, And you can imagine then why actually it shouldn't be that surprising to Angela Davis. And I'm sure it was just sort of the shock of the moment because she's obviously very well aware of that history. Also the Mayflower, it's the may Flower. It's the icon of colonization and exploration and America and everything. Yeah, which is again why

it's easy to see that it went viral. I wanted to ask you, Ryan about the significance of Angela Davis obviously on the left, the right actually sort of makes her college campus appearances, et cetera. The right myself included, will weigh in on that and ask, you know, these lavish speaking fees that come to Angela Davis, who was once on the FBI's most wanted list for her role in a very complicated situation back in the seventies, I

end up going to jail being quitted. So Angela Davis's role in the contemporary left, as and Henry Lewis Kese Junior, by the way, was involved in the Beer Summit, the famous beer summit that everyone seems to have forgotten about in the Obama administration, where he accused a white Boston cop basically of racially profiling him as he was trying to break into his own house, which he did, right, I don't know. I think that's still an open question

as to whether it was like malicious racial profiling. But Obama then brought the officer and Henry Lewis Gates to the White House for the Beer Summit, and Angela Davis going back to her as we're now involved in this DEI what people call wokeness cancel culture discussion. Is there a significance to Angela Davis being the person here who's learning about the William Brewster Plymouth colony relationship. Sure, I mean she is an iconic and also polarizing figure on

the left. The specific crime that she was accused, but so basically, somebody tried to break a couple guys out of prison in California and used weapons that Angela Davis had purchased, and that the assailant died, other people died like it was became an atrocity, and Angela Davis was then arrested for buying the guns that were used, but an all white jury actually like acquitted her, although she spent I think more than a year kind of in jail between the charges and the and the trial and

her then being found not guilty. Obviously, the FBI was cracking down on black panthers and leftists at the time, and this was a part of that. And from there, you know, she went on to be one of the more kind of celebrated writers and academics in on on the left over the years, you know, viewed with an

enormous amount of moral authority. You know, fell in fell into more controversy over the last several years when, if you remember, a Birmingham Jewish organization gave her some lifetime award and then rescinded it, saying that her her views on Israel, She's supportive of the boycott of Israel, made it so that she didn't they no longer wanted her to get this award, and so then that that produced a lot of backlash saying that you know that it's unfair to call her an anti semit just because of

her position on Israeli abuses towards Palestinians. So but she she has maintained, you know, she has maintained her cultural cachet for sure. So to have somebody with you know, who has been part of our culture for fifty years, to learn that she came from the Mayflower, it's pretty amazing. Well, then let's put the next element up on the screen, because I think this was a good take from Michael Brendan Doherty of National Reviews. So take coming from the right.

That wasn't just you know, owning the Libs, he said, think about it from both perspectives. Almost certainly exploitation played its role, But someone who came on the Mayflower has a radical like Angela Davis as a descendant America is huge. Talk of divorce is senseless in light of this reality. Obviously. I think the reason this clip popped on the right is because there's a lot of momentum that seeks to hold people accountable for the sins of their ancestors because

of the color of their skin. Right now, So that is white Americans who are being held accountable or want to be The argumentation goes or should be held the accountable, as the argument goes before the sins of previous white Americans. This complicates that obviously when exploitation. Obviously, as Doherty says, there may have played a role, yes, But then on the other hand, sometimes it didn't, sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't, sometimes it didn't, And that makes it a

very difficult sort of reality. The reality is much more complicated and in some ways much more beautiful in that American sense that William Brewster, the line from William Brewster to Angela Davis is sort of thoroughly American, that you know, you can descend from the lineage of somebody who founded the Plymouth Colony and be a sort of black radical and someone who's allowed to have rightfully, who's fought for all of these different metrics of progress for black Americans,

et cetera, et cetera. I think we'd have to know a lot more to say whether or not it's complicated, because if it is, if it is what we assume, and he says exploitation, he's talking about rape, you wouldn't say that the product of a rape, you know, bears any responsibility or any kind of culpability or even relationship

to the to the power structures that produce that. No, but that's the thing, like we don't know, and sort of trying to categorically say we do know is a problem, right, but I mean we can, we can, we can certainly

make a very educated guess, oh absolute. But then codifying things legally into policy, I think is a really different question, right, which which shows why it would be better, I think, to produce a social democratic society that that elevated everybody, rather than saying, well, we're going to go back, you know, four hundred years and figure out whether there was consent between these ancestors, to determine whether you are going to get some form of reparations that you know, that just

falls apart pretty quickly. Let's go back to the Skip Gates thing real quick, because I mean, it'd be one thing if the cop and this is what was July two thousand and nine, he's trying he came back from a trip. He's like couldn't find his keys. He's like trying to get into his house, right he's in Cambridge.

It'd be one thing if the cop like stops him as rude to him, asks him, you know who who are you like and and kind of gets aggressive, like you could say, look, that was you know, let's do the protect and serve thing, let's not be hostile with people until we know what's going on. But they went

further than they put the guy in cuffs and arrested him. Well, he started arguing and saying, do you know, like, basically I don't think you do messing with Yeah, which is understandable again because he's going into his own house and Louis Gates, Yeah, it's and this is a Cambridge police I think I think I said earlier Boston, but Cambridge police, speaking of Plymouth and the settling of Massachusetts. Here you have in this is happening in Cambridge, Harvard professor, Cambridge

cop and an too. It's like you can't ask a neighbor, hey, is this is this actually Henry Lewigates Junior. You can't

type it in your phone. And so again you can understand entirely why any of those Gates gender would be furious that you know and would be This is one of the things I think the right got wrong about the kind of Beer Summit discourse back in two thousand and nine is that you can understand why somebody of his age who has lived through the America that he's lived through would be on guard and would sort of have that reflexive upset over being treated that way on

his own porch by a cop. That doesn't mean the cop was acting in a racist fashion necessarily, but you can understan and why Gates would jump to that conclusion. And I'm not saying this is how he felt, but there's also a sense of survivor's guilt among a lot of people who escape oppression and escape a marginal circumstance and get to Cambridge, get to an endowed professorship, get to a place where you're on speaking terms with presidents, while so many people that you grew up with are

still living in these brutal conditions. And so I think that that kind of cuts against somebody like Gates's willingness to kind of bow down to an officer who is treating him in that way because he feels like, I've made a lot of compromises to get where I am, but I'm going to stand up for myself on my

own porch, you know. I think it's really interesting that this is on his show and with Angela Davis, because it's a good reminder from the Beer Summit to from the arc of like early Obama years to Biden your now that our media discourse has done the entire country basically a disservice by just erasing any nuance from these really complicated conversations. And I think that's had positive I think that's had negative effects for both sides of the debate,

whether or not you think one side is right or wrong. Ultimately, it's just what's wrong is the lack of seriousness and nuance that our media culture in the age of Twitter, which was very new in two thousand and nine, has brought to these conversations because we're forced to make snap

judgments for the algorithm. We're not forced to, but people do make snap judgments for the algorithm to be involved in the discourse as quickly as it possibly can, and that brings us to I think it's a totally flattened

dialogue about that. And I do think on the question of how this complicates things, it also has to complicate the mythology of the mayflower, like it has to remind people that what they learned in third grade about about that landing has many other layers to it that have, you know, combined to produce the fabric of this society. I think the schools have definitely moved in that direction to the point of perhaps overreach, which we would probably

disagree on at this point. But again we don't actually know where down the line exploitation if that was the case occurred, it could have been. You know, it's just it's it's really hard to know, but fascinating reminder of

how unique this country is. There are more cases like this, and you say unique in a bad way, But the I think the way of looking at it that I prefer, the Michael Brendan Doherty way, is to say there are people who are legitimately were white supremacists from another age who have paved the way for the Angela Davises of the world. Well, that's for sure. So one of our great partners, Ken Clippenstein of The Intercept, has some bombs

tell new reporting. Let's go and put this up on the screen here, guys, Penanon developed contingency plan for war with Iran. In January, the US and Israel conducted the largest joint military exercise in history, and obviously Ken is here with me. Now, great to Caesar, good to be with you, all right, So just tell us a little

bit of what you found here. Yeah. So this con plan, which stands for a concept plan, it's basically a war plan that the military does to try to game out how scenario would happen and how they would fight a war with partner nations. And what's interesting about this is I think there's this misconception that the military has plans for every single thing, but the reality and I interviewed in the story is I interviewed a advisor of the Joint Chiefs who himself was a military planner under the

Marine Corps Special Operations Command. These con plants, in particular, are very expensive to do because you have to get buy in not just from DoD but from outside agencies like the State Department as well as the White House. So these tend to be pretty rare. The last time that there was an Iran con plan reported was in two thousand and two and run up to the Iraq War, and so this is the first indication that they've had

any kind of update to those plans. And the code name for it is Support Centry, And basically what's interesting about it is that takes place in the context of a huge shift regionally in terms of the US's relationship with Israel. So under the Trump administration, they passed what was called the Abrams Accords, which were sort of pitched as a peace accord, and to some extent it was that because it did normalize relations between the Arab Gulf

States and Israel. But an unintended consequence of that is that it made it so that they can negotiate together as a block for what they want and basically their common enemy in that region now that they have normalized

relations is Iran. And so the concern on the part of people are interviewing this story, and a lot of military planners too, is that we're going to get dragged into a conflict that Washington doesn't necessarily want because Israel is now able to coordinate with the Arab Gulf States to do these sort of things. Give us a little bit more of the history on those because I think this is important. Obviously, back under the Obama Biden administration,

they negotiated the Iranian nuclear deal. Israel's very unhappy Nan Yahoo came gave this sort of infamous speech in front of Congress. Then Trump comes in, he backs out of that deal. Biden campaigned on getting back into it, he has not actually done that. There was sort of a window of time at the beginning of this administration that was probably the most likely time for him to get in.

And so now, I mean, what you're showing here, and what seems to be the case from other activities as well, is that we're sort of backing the Israeli view of a much more brazenly aggressive approach to Iran. Is that a fair characterization? And what else are we seeing in that regard totally? To give you an example, recently, this is just a couple of weeks ago, the US ambassador to Israel made a statement publicly saying, whatever Israel wants to do to handle the alleged nuclear threat in Iran,

we have their back. And there were so many questions to the press State Department Press secretary about that. It's kind of interesting they didn't walk it back. Now, they didn't say like, oh, we're totally on board with that, but they were like, we supported the Israeli's and our partners in the region. So that's going to be a signal to a country like Israel, which recently accorded to the new York Times conducted a drone strike in Iran where they blew up a I think it was a

military production factory. And that's one of a bunch of covert operations that they've been doing. Killed a nuclear scientist not long ago. And so when you have a green light like that, you have to imagine that the Israeli is going to take that in a certain way. And so the question now is how far are they going to go. We had, as you mentioned before, the biggest US military exercise in history, and I think something that's important for the audience to understand is that war is

not when the troops go into the country. That war is a continuum and it's an entire plan. There's a

lot of logistics in planning. That was the point of my reporting this con plan, the concept plan, to give people the idea that the planning is happening, that in addition to that, the military exercise are happening, and that has the effect if you look at the Iranian government statement in response to that military exercise, the Iranians started having their own military exercise, and I think it was lieutenant general in charge of I think it was the army.

He said military exercises are the war before war, and I thought that that was a pretty good way to put it, war before war. Regarding those drone strikes, I mean, there were a couple of things that Israeli drone strikes on Iran. There are a couple of things that I've found noteworthy. Number One, it came right in the wake

of those giant military exercises. Number Two, Typically, when Israel has engaged in these type of attacks on Iran, and we'll put aside, you know, in Ukraine, Row territorial senateergy, etc. Here we have a different view. Apparently, Usually we say, oh, we don't really know what happened here. They came out

and said it was Israel. I found that to be noteworthy because it was almost an endorsement of the actions that normally we try to keep ourselves a little more removed from exactly, and that's the effect that this regional

shift has had. Another point I make in the story is that historically Israel has been put under the combatant command of European Command in the US military, and that sort of seems not very intuitive, Like why would the Israel being under European Command instead of Central Command, which

is the Middle East Command. President Trump, in his capacity as commander in chief, is able to change something like that, which he did with an order in the last few days of his administration he moved Israel from European Command to Central Command. I started interviewing, you know, former military officers, trying to get a sense of why that what that

change meant, because there's hardly in reporting on it. And it turns out there's good reason to have Israel under European Command because that makes it so that they're not fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Arab Gulf States, and it just keeps our combatant command separate from the full extent of what their interests are in that region. Insulates us a little bit from having to respond to problems that that might be, you know, in the Israelis interest,

but not necessarily ours. But now that they're on Central Command along with the restaurant, that's completely changed the state of play in the region and not only align the Arab Golf States with Israel, but also puts us on the hook to respond to problems that happened with regard to Israel that we wouldn't have responded to when they

were under European Command. And finally, there was a news recently, this is from the UN agency, the IAEA, that uranium purity and Iran is just seven percent off from bomb making levels. What do you make of this news and the timing of the news. I think it's early reminiscent of the run up to Iraq. Again, I'm not talking

two thousand and two. I'm talking to the Clinton administration when the UN is putting out all these statements hand rating about a nuclear enrichment on the part of the Iraqi government, and then the effect that has is it stokes a lot of anxiety in the public. You don't want to be very clear, I don't want the Iranians to get nucle weapons. That's going to trigger an arms race in the region. Saudi Arabia has made its own moves towards a nuclear program, so as the UAE, that

would be very dangerous. You know, I'm opposed to all of that. However, if you look at what our intelligence communities' conclusions have been in the Nuclear Posture Review, which it seems no one read, they state very clearly that they have no evidence. This is as close as a quote as a quote as I can remember. They have no evidence that the Uranians actually want a nuclear weapon. Now

you can say, why are they enriching? They want to get to the point where they're near to it if they feel they need to hurry up and get one, a deterrent kind of thing, but that our best intelligence. The CI director reiterated this in an interviewed just a couple of days ago, also said, we have no evidence that they're actually going to cross that line into full on enrichment as opposed to getting to the point where they could do it quickly. And I said the last

one was the last. But I think it's important to get this as well, because under the Obama administration, in my opinion, the Iranian nuclear deal was one of their greatest achievements. Trump was just opposed to whatever Obama did. Reflexively, he you know, backs out of it. And as I said before, Biden ran on, we're going to get back into this deal that we walked away from. How did that fall apart? And to the point now where I don't think there's any expectation from anyone that it's really

possible or feasible for the tale to be rekindled. I think that's really important angle to all this because Trump is in the past. You know, we can wring our hands all we want about what he did or didn't do. The reality is that Biden didn't reverse those things. Biden's commander in chief could send Israel back to European command. Biden commander as commander in chief has all sorts of

a suite of options in terms of relationship. The best impression I get from folks in the defense community that I talk to is not so much that he's a pope that he hates the Iran deal, but is that he just did not prioritize it to the extent that he needs to, more focused on domestic stuff, didn't care as much about foreign regional policy. When you do that, the POSSE gets farmed out to the autopilot of the military community, which is always going to be escalate, escalate, ESCALATEE,

which I think is what we're seeing in the region. Yeah, I think that's right. And in the meantime, while they squandered time on the US side, totally there's now a more hardline leader in Iran. And of course now you have the complicating factor of them allegedly providing support and drones to Russia, which again, just creates a more adversarial relationship between US and Iran, makes it much more difficult

to imagine getting back into any sort of deal. Really important reporting, guys, I really encourage you to read through the whole thing, because, as Ken points out, listen before a war actually happens. These are all of the sort of preparations that her so that they can build the case, so they can build the preparedness, so they can then go and sell it to the American public. So Ken, thank you so much, great reporting, Thanks for having me