6/26/24: Hillary Says 'Impossible' To Debate Trump, Bowman Trounced By AIPAC, Kenya On Fire As Troops Occupy Haiti, Ryan Exposes Pro-Israel Group Lies, MIT Nuke Expert Dire Warning On Ukraine

of Prince yesterday in Haiti. And also there's at least twenty two deaths so far in protests over a.

to influence that race. They were finally a month after the election, forced to disclose their actual funding and despite their denials, you're going to be shocked it actually was. Apak going to unpack how all of that unfolded. And then at the end of the show, we're going to be talking to a Theodore Postal, who's one of the kind of nuclear war experts in the world and in world history, since we only have since the forties, Yeah,

to think about nuclear war. He's gone back and forth from the Pentagon to mit A is one of the most respected voices on this He is warning that the Ukrainian strikes inside Russia are putting nuclear war at a much higher risk than it was before Ukraine started striking Russia's early warning nuclear detection system. It's pretty frightening and kind of should be leading the news all around the world. Yeah, you'd think, kind of like a first order thing that I think we all want is to not die in

a nuclear annihilation, and yet here we are. We'll put it at the end of the show.

Hillary Clinton wrote in otbed for the New York Times, where as the Fox News headline put it, she complained, it's quote impossible to defeat Trump and a quote waste of time to refute his arguments. Ran the thing I pulled out of this op ed from Hillary Clinton is a quote where she says, Unfortunately, mister Biden starts from a disadvantage because there's no way he can spend as much time preparing as I did eight years ago. Being president isn't just a day job. It's an everything, everywhere,

all at once job. Historically that has led to weaker first debate performances for the incumbent. So I feel like this op ed, which she dropped a day before dropping her big book announcement, was kind of a nice one to pr punch for Hillary Clinton. Savvy as ever, but I think she's trying to lay the groundwork for a mediocre Biden performance by pushing publishing a opbed in the pages of the New York Times saying it's an impossible job.

guy's mouth. You just don't know, and you don't even know if it's going to work because nobody's ever said it before, nobody's ever tried it before. So it's not something you can even and train for. And it's not as if either Biden or Trump are going to be getting into like the nitty gritty of tariff policy or know, one of these like nineteen eighties or nineties debates that gets like super wonky, like that's just like nobody expects

anybody to go remotely near that. If these candidates can string together a sentence from beginning to end, that that is like grammatical yes. And if they can even put together a paragraph that can be transcribed and you read it and you're like, yeah, that's like eighth grade level and it makes a clear point, that would be a win for either of them. But I don't expect either of those things to happen. What we are expecting, though,

are some stunts. And Hillary Clinton remembers that right after the Access Hollywood moment, Donald Trump responded using what was the Steve Bannon's idea of bringing three or four women who had accused her husband of sexual assault to the.

killed by immigrants here in the United States. Do you have any insight from the Trump camp as to what kind of kind of a show they're planning on putting on.

Trump referred to the CNN anchor commentator as fake Tapper throughout no audience, sitting down, originally sitting down a dead debate, turn off the mics when you're not speaking so I can't interrupt him. They knew I wouldn't accept that because it was CNN, Dana Bash, Jake Tapper, and I like an audience, and probably he doesn't, who knows, so they

thought they would present it. I would say no, and they would say we can't debate because Trump said no, So I said yes before they even gave me the terms. So he got roped into it. Interestingly, that's Trump explaining how he even got Biden to agree to a debate. And one of the things, in terms of the stunt question, this is the reason I described this debate as historic. Obviously, debates happen all the time, but some people may be aware this is the first debate and modern history that's

happening without the Presidential Debate Commission. Is that what it's called debate committee?

stream of the debate. I mean, it's the stupidest little piece of negotiating, leverage whatever that.

why did I agree to fake Tapper? Well, you know, it was the only way to get Biden to debate. I think he's also trying to lay the groundwork for mediocre performance, because frankly, they both performed, like I'm trying to use mediocre as an adverb mediocrely back in twenty twenty.

that's why the debates are important. Because I think Trump is correct that one of the biggest reasons he won the primary and then won the election of twenty sixteen is because people did not expect him to handle Hillary Clinton the way that he did, and obviously the other GOP candidates, and Clinton didn't perform well druxtaposed with Donald Trump,

not as well as people expected her to. I agree with her and with you that it's an impossible job because he's what was he called yesterday by RFK Junior, the best debater of his generation or in a generation, or in American history.

to be yelling. It's just a mess.

At the same time, they're very unconfident about how he's going to perform in the debate, and the thinking is, Okay, well, this is worth a shot, and if it works, great, but if it doesn't, it's far enough away from the general election that people will have forgotten this debate performance.

Those two things, if you've figured it out, are contradictory like you can't, on the one hand, hope that a good debate performance is going to catapult you to the White House, but believe that a bad debate performance isn't actually going to hurt you, because those are ideas or in contradiction. Either the debate matters or it doesn't. But you know, contradictions have never stopped anybody from moving forward with what they wanted to do.

putting his foot in his mouth and saying outrageous things that infuriated people. Nobody could accomplish that except for the social media platforms driven by kind of democratic.

that districting ken Bucks. It was ken bucks old seat. The Trump back candidate in Utah to replace Romney lost handily. It's like a twenty point love Romney twenty Yeah, but Trump, I mean, this is this is not There was a conversation last week we were talking about Bob good getting booted from his seat. He's the chairman of the Freedom Caucus. We interviewed him a couple of months ago, and people

were saying, well was the Trump factor? Trump waded in for his opponent, and that's what ded a men really mixed bag with Trump endorsements in recent result history, and last night was absolutely no exception to that. So those are I think a few of the big ones. We might touch on a couple of other ones going forward here, but let's start with Bowman. Ryan a big, big loss.

a landslide. Daniel Maren's over, my old colleague over at the Hoffington Post has a really good kind of rundown of this race that gets into the retail political I don't know if you want to call the mistakes that Bowman made over the last couple of years, because mistakes implies that he didn't do it on purpose, like what Bowman in twenty twenty one took a trip sponsored by j Street to visit Israel, and Jay Street had endorsed him in twenty twenty against Elliott Engel obviously a pro

Israel group, a pro Israel, but it's liberal Zionist. It's kind of They fight with APAK a lot, and in twenty twenty two in particular, they were kind of a leading element of the coalition that was fighting back against APAC while APAK was spending millions of dollars trying to take out like squad like members. In twenty twenty, Bowman came in DMFI, which was the kind of proto APAC.

Super Pac spent about two million dollars against Bowman trying to buck up Elliott Engle, who was the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and one of the leading Israel Hawks in Congress. And so for Angle to go down was a huge deal. And despite that two million dollars in spending, Bowman beat him. Israel Palis and wasn't a huge part of the race at the time. It was what drove the funding, but it wasn't what drove the

kind of public conversation about the race. Remember, this was the height of the George Floyd protests and Elliot Angle had this absolutely monumental gaff where he went to a George Floyd rally and he was caught on an open mic trying to speak and the guy running the rally is like, look, so many elected officials here were not letting everybody speak. Well, you know it's hot out here. We'll be here all day. And he said, I wouldn't ask if I didn't have a primary. I wouldn't even

be here if I didn't have a primary. Led it, and it was on the hot mic, it was on New York One. It's like wow, and it fed into a that's a tone deaf thing to stay at the height of the George Floyd protests. And also he was caught living in Maryland at the time, Like a reporter went to his door in Maryland and found him there. And you've been claiming you've been at these events in New York, but you haven't been in New York at all. He's like, I've been in both places. And there's no

evidence he'd been in both places at all. He'd just been in Maryland. So the two things came together created a big scandal and Bowman crushed him, even in heavily Jewish precincts. Twenty twenty one, Jay Street takes him to Israel and Apak takes lawmakers to Israel on these guided tours every two years. Run Steney Hoyer organizes these trips their bipartisan and they come back fortified in their support

for Israel. Jamal Bowman came back from that trip to Israel a changed person, and he's talked about this, like seeing the occupation up close in the West Bank, seeing that Muslims could not or Palestinians could not go down

certain roads, seeing the fencing. There's this one famous street that has kind of netting over top of the street, and I think it's in Hebron because so many of the Jewish Israeli settlers there throw trash onto the street from their settlements, so they eventually had to put up a net. The highways where you can't drive if you don't have the right license plate. You have to have

certain permits to get different areas. He was shocked to his core, and so that's why I say I wouldn't describe the political decisions he made after that a mistakes, because he decided that this was wrong and this was something he was going to stand up for now. He did in the time since then, he did not build inroads into the Jewish community. He did not come to the synagogues. And this is what they say, that he didn't come to the synagogues and have this dialogue with them.

He didn't talk to them about his experience that he'd had there. It was it was more of just a public kind of political campaign that he was running, and that's what he felt was appropriate. But what it did is it drove this wedge even among say the liberals in his district, who might say, you know what, I agree with you, I'm against the occupation and again this and that they felt like they had just kind of lost touch with him, and he didn't care about that community.

And so it's interesting that Apak spent nearly twenty million dollars in this race because his initial race is what basically brought a pack into the Super Pac game. Like DMFI spending two million dollars and losing to Jamal Bowman convinced a pack, Okay, DMFI is not cut out for this on its own. Yeah, they're raising five ten million dollars a year. We can do much better than that. That's why they came in in twenty twenty two and

spent thirty forty fifty million dollars. And why they came in and just spent nearly twenty million just in this race.

a different question. Yeah, most expensive race in history. But it's also this New York like buying airtime in New York is insanely expensive, and to blanket the airwaves, especially when you have to buy New York air, but it's like suburban New York that you're actually aiming for is going to cost you an enormous amount of money.

this race, saying this was too much. It was it's not even this from people who are sounded like very supportive of APAC, saying this is starting to actually undermine your cause and give people reason to say you're out here putting gross amounts of money to buy races, and it's not feeling like so democratic anymore. It's feeling a little bit like big money.

kids of soccerbractics or whatever. Looking at Jamal Bowman like jumping around saying fa pack whatever else he said, and then a guy and also the whole fire thing, the nine to eleven conspiracy theories, which don't always play so well in New York. And he had walked back, you know, sort of on a parallel track with Mersher, Taylor Green, you.

Jamal Bowman because of the district that he's running in the politics around it. But nobody can say that with

any confidence because that's not what happened. A pack came in and dropped at least you know, we'll see the final total in the end, but you know, more money than has ever been dropped by any single organization in a in a congressional race before, and that obviously tilts the scale, and so now it it makes it so that nobody has to actually talk about the issues at play, and instead both sides you can say, look at look

at look at the sheer amount of money. And from the Democratic side, and we're going to talk about this later in our in our a PAC block, it is this isn't the A pack block right right? It is wild that Democrats are allowing in democratic primaries Republican billionaires to funnel so much money into their primaries. It's kind of an incredible situation and I just don't think Republicans would ever allow that.

up at the top. What's very interesting about this situation is that the establishment guy, Jeff Hurd, he won the Republican primary in Lauren Bobert's current district, so the third congressional district. She switched districts feeling like she was going

to lose, and she probably would have lost. Actually we don't know, but she probably would have lost from that third district outside Denver to this district, which is I believe, Yeah, it's the fourth congressional district, and the establishment guy, not a big maga guy, is the one who ended up winning her actual district that she'll be vacating obviously moving over to this new district.

How do you think that goes? Do you think that there's enough anti Bobert sentiment in that district that she actually ends up losing and that she only won because the anti Bobert vote was split, or do you think that a decent number of those candidates had as a second choice Bobert so that she'd win in a primary anyway, Because the point here is that Bowman last year had two opponents. To last election had two opponents, and he

got like fifty four percent of the vote. He won comfortably because they split the anti Bowman vote, But for people watching closely, it was a warning sign, like, oh, you were just four percentage points over a majority. You could have lost that race if there was a single opponent against you. She's only forty three.

media double standard aside. I think it's really interesting that people who are like now in Congress were pulled in those directions, because I think it's tempting for all of us and I don't think it's isolated to them, And I think the populism in particular, when you're seeking out explanations for the just rapid changes de industrialization, material concerns that have accelerated, you know, it's not crazy to get pulled down in crazy directions. You just have to sort

of be vigilant against those things. But I think Lauren Bobert with Jamal Bowman in that sort of fire alarm versus beetlejuice situation, they just look ridiculous. And I know Lauren Bobert ran on she used to own a bar right that was like a Second Amendment the bar basically like a gun themed bar. I think it was called Shooters something like that.

South Carolina, Dave Williams getting crushed in Colorado. Five all before the Utah Senate race comes in and Pol's had voted Trump back Trent Stags down big, And indeed Trent Stags did go down to John Curtis, who ended up winning the primary for that Romney seat. We can put that up on the screen. That's be five. He was definitely not the Trump pick in the Utah race and ended up winning by double digits fifty endors thirty. I

believe Romney did endorse John Curtise. Yeah, he's like people see him as like a Romney two point zero kind of if.

Lake City that it would be a democratic state. But because of Mormonism and the conservative strain in it, it's a red state. But that would also explain why it is anti Trump and trends toward this kind of Curtis Romney style.

like rotary clubs and all of that stuff. And it's one of the few red states that was not few, it's one of the handful of red states that was sort of ardently anti Trump in the Republican primary twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, And that is an interesting point along the

lines of what you were making. If you go to you know, rural Wisconsin super like old DEM districts, super pro Trump, but in states or in places where the social fabric was stronger, southeastern Wisconsin, they're pretty anti Trump and anti populism. So I think there's something to that about Utah in particular. But it's also hard to extricate the Mormonism from the Utahism.

Prince yesterday. This block is called Haiti. On the screen, it could also be called Kenya though Ryan because this was unfolding, called America right, or yeah, this was unfolding as just we could literally put it on a split screen with what was happening in Nairobi yesterday, which was just a demonstration that as of right now, according to the Human Rights Commission of Kenya, left twenty to twenty

two people dead. A section of their parliament, as the BBC reported, went up in flames as demonstrations against a new tax proposal escalated. I'll keep reading from this BBC report. They said protests against an unpopular finance bill, which included several tax rises, have been going for days, but they escalated on Tuesday as MP's passed an amended bill. Protesters broke into Parliament, vandalizing the interior and setting parts of the complex on fire. The ceremonial may symbol the authority

of the legislature was stolen. Police open fire with live ammunition, killing at least five people, according to the Kenyan Medical Association. This is a quote from twenty four year old named Derek, who told the BBC there are some things that are hard to understand, like how can you impose a sixteen percent tax on bread? How can you tax sanitary pads? That was a reference to proposals that were in the

original bill that fueled some of these protests. We should, of course note that this is the troops that landed Import of Prince yesterday, the Kenyan troops that landed Import of Prince yesterday. It's absolutely part of a US back scheme to basically, I mean, we don't know how it's going to end. We can probably guess how it's going to end, but to engineer the preferred outcome of the United States in Haiti. And it comes as a pretty

important time in Africa for the United States. They just gave them what the first Sub Saharan African country, Biden did. He designated them a major non NATO ally ally right around the same time that these negotiations over Haiti are happening.

supposed to make Kenyon leaders happy. Coincidentally, William Rutteau is one of the first people, if not the first people ever charged by the International Criminal Court were for war crimes for a slaughter that he was allegedly heavily involved in. They eventually dropped those charges and now he's now he's president of Kenya. The Kenya has also been doing all sorts of pro very weird, pro us stuff, weird in the sense that it doesn't fit with kind of what

the politics of the region might indicate. They're the only country there that joined our kind of anti Huti coalition. And you'll often see if you look at that giant UN billboard, when let's say there's an Israel Palestine vote, in the entire world is voting one way and there's like countries you've never heard of that are like Pacific Islands and the US are voting the other way. Kenya will be there with them too. Yeah, like what that's

going on here with Kenya? You can also if you want to go down a rabbit hole, go check out Kenya's election in which Ruto won in a very very scandal plagued election by like zero point one percent or something, with all sorts of anomalies and all sorts of allegations that that it was rigged and that the that the US is preferred candidate Rutto came out on top despite not having actual actual majority support. And then fast forward, US wants international troops to go into Haiti. The US

feels like, okay, we can't. We've sent in the Marines too many times into Haiti.

extremely unpopular. They had to pay the Kenyan troops. I think it's reported they're getting paid an extra fifteen hundred dollars a month on top of their salaries, which is which is only further fueling resentment in Haiti because Haitian police officers aren't even getting paid right, Like they haven't been paid in months at best, and they're like, wait a minute, but you're paying them fifteen you know, the average you know, Haitian police officer makes it a tiny

fraction of that. And you know, there are reports that the base that the US built for these canyons isn't really ready yet. And then the question is what on earth are they going to do? Like what what do we think a couple thousand foreign police officers are going to do in a situation that is completely out of control? Like what?

flames yesterday as well. This is from the Associated Press quote. The Finance bill was meant to raise or introduce taxes or fees on a range of daily items and services, including internet data, fuel, bank transfers, in diapers. Some measures were stripped as Anchor grew, and it's all part of the Kenyan government's efforts to raise an extra two point

seven billion dollars in domestic revenue. Obviously, then sending well paid troops to Haiti not going to be popular either, I'm assuming, and actually I think the US did pay for that operation.

force into try to occupy Haiti. Like, there are Haitian political elements that are trying to work toward some type of solution and if the kind of United Nations want to support that, they can do that with support for uh, you know, Haitian farmers, Haitian Haitian merchants, Haitian Haitian businesses, Haitian organizations that are trying to come together and you can help import the things that they that they need

to get off the ground. But just coming in with more guns and putting Kenyan troops in a base is only it's kind of suppressing whatever kind of whatever political reckoning and political dialogue needs to happen to eventually get somewhere. You've tried, We've been trying, they've been Yeah, we have been trying to impose some type of situation on Haiti for two hundred years.

from winning an open primary. Now I reported that a PAK was routing its money through a super pack that claims to have a pro science mission called three fourteen Action, and that it also appeared APAC was funneling money through a different pack called Voters for Responsive Government. APAC's allies furiously denied the reporting, arguing it played into antisemitic tropes.

Yet about a week later, Jiapaul's opponent, Maxine Dexter, was forced to disclose some of her last minute surgeon funding, and it turned out it was coming from donors who regularly gave to APAC. One of the donors who had maxed out to Dexter even told me she wasn't aware of the contribution, but that she green lights whatever APAC asks her to do. She told me, quote, I give

all my contributions through APAC. Still, they refused to disclose their super pac spending down the stretch, and three fourteen Action even brazenly lied about the source of the money. And when I say that they lied, I mean they straight up, baldfaced lied. The super PACs were relying on

a campaign rule that treats them differently than candidates. Candidates have to disclose every forty eight hours down the stretch of the campaign, so nobody can sneak in new money, but super PACs only have to disclose their previous month's funding on the twentieth day of the next month. The election was scheduled for May twenty first, and on May twentieth, super PACs would have had to declare all of their

fundraising from April. On May twentieth. Now, Voters for Responsive Government filed a report that claimed it had not raised or spent a single penny in April, yet they had ads out to the market by May second. In other words, their claiming they raised money, hired contractors, produced ads, set up bank accounts, and placed the media by all in twenty four hours, with none of that work happening in April.

Of course, that's basically impossible. But the reason they needed to make that claim on their paperwork was so that they could then delay disclosure of everything all the way until June twentieth, a month after the election. Three fourteen Action also pushed a ton of their action into their May paperwork, So on May twentieth, that's the day before

the election, they only disclosed three donors. One of them was an APAC guy who gave them three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, another was Michael Bloomberg, and another was unrelated to the race. Now, I've been covering politics for about twenty years or so, and I have seen my share of dishonesty, but what came next reminded me I

still know how to be shocked. Eric Poliak, the managing director of three fourteen Action, took to Twitter on May twentieth, after they released their donors to taunt me, saying, quote waiting on Ryan Grimm to issue a retraction. What's so stunning about this denial is that when Eric made it on May twentieth, he knew that on May first, three fourteen Action had cashed a million dollar check from United Democracy Project APAX Superpack. And he knew that a month later,

on June twentieth, that fact would become public. Yet he decided to knowingly lie to the public. Anyway. Here it is in three fourteen Actions June twentieth filing. So that's a lot of zero's on the small screen there, but I can count them for you. There's six of them. That's a million dollars. In other words, Pollyok knew his organization was spending a million dollars of APAX money on top of lots more from APAC directed donors, Yet he

said exactly the opposite the day before the election. Now, on May second, a few days before my article initially confirmed apax's role in the race. Giapaul and her opponent, Eddie Morales held a rare joint press conference raising questions about the source of the new money in the race.

Poliak took to Twitter to mock them. He wrote, after Soushila Giapaul and Eddie Morales veep style press conference where they offered zero evidence to back the ridiculous claims, It's clear they're down in the polls and desperate to smear our grassroots movement fueled by millions of contributions. So consider the audacity there. He claimed to be leading a grassroots

movement fueled by millions of contributions. The day after they deposited that million dollar check, when Voters for Responsive Government disclosed its donors, we learned that APAC had cut them a one point three million dollar check, and eight other APAC linked donors had kicked in two point six million dollars more. According to the paperwork they filed, they managed

to raise all that money in a single day. Emily, I don't know if you've ever done any fundraising, but calling that many people in a single day, just getting them on the phone is going to be hard. All the zeros there, God, that's a lot just typing in those. This is going to take you more than twenty.

to pay attention to this stuff. For the purpose of ads. People should be paying attention to this stuff that's really dirty.

They didn't have a source that I had that said like, oh yeah, this is actually this is definitely a pack, right, And so it makes it very tough for and especially you know, journalists that don't want to get accused of like trafficking and anti Semitic tropes, because you can't just go around just recklessly like suggesting without evidence that APAC is funding a particular superpack. If you have the evidence,

you can say it. And they couldn't quite prove it because APAC had done a good enough job of keeping its keeping its fingerprints off of the money until afterwards. Like and it's very smart in a way because it like makes you sound crazy when you're saying it in real time, like you sound like a conspiracy theorist or a lunatic, but then afterwards like, oh yeah, that was us, And after the polls closed, APAC was like this shows

that being pro Israel is good politics. Mm hmm. It's like, well, if that's true, why didn't you why do you endorse her publicly? Why did you deny that this was happening? Like why did you? Why would you have to stress so much, why you have to spend so much, and why do you have to go to such extreme lengths to conceal the role of a pro Israel organization in this race?

weirdos like unusual that we follow politics this closely. Most voters like what's apack? Never heard of APEC absolutely. What Democratic voters don't like, however, is Republican rich people spending

money in Democratic primaries. And if you go through, if you scroll back and look at that list of the eight people that gave, for instance, I think you'll find all of those are like Republican donors, like and not just like we give to both, but like mostly Republican donors, a lot of Trump donors, and that drives Democratic primary voters crazy. Summerlee was able to use that to her advantage in the Pittsburgh race. Others have been able to

use that to their advantage. But by hiding the donors until after the election, you strip Democrats of the ability to say this is actually Republican money, because you don't. You could say it's Apack money if you can, if you can report that you have some evidence, but without knowing who the specific donors are, you can't necessarily say it's Republican money. Even though most APAC money is Republican money.

Democratic leadership sees that as a win win. Yeah, probably, like that's fine. Actually, probably you're gonna you're gonna discipline our left flank. Ye works for us.

in town at the time, that international game. And I came to the attention of the US Navy because of some of the work I was doing with them as as an outside analyst, and I was offered a position as a science and policy advisor to the Chief of naval operations, and of course that was a great opportunity, so I took it and I wound up, you know,

very quickly in the belly of the beast. Worked a few years with the chief, saw quite a lot, which I must say educated me to a level that maybe I should dave at this point, because you see a combination of the most capable and the most incapable and opportunistic people. You see the spread you know, very very good and very very bad people. And it gave me, I think, an extremely refined understanding of how these bureaucracies work.

And of course I took the opportunity to I spent many nights in a cage reading classified documents to learn as much as I could about the weapon systems that you know that I'm supposed to be advising on them. And that gave me a baseline that I've been able to build on for decades.

whole Earth from space. We have this kind of capability, So if they lose a radar, they have no way of knowing what's coming at them from that direction, whereas if we lose a radar, we just simply go to our satellites and look down and say, oh, yeah, we

can see nothing is happening there. Now, given the high state of tension between Russia and the United States at this time, I think it's extraordinarily dangerous to tamper with anything that has anything to do with Russia's early morning capabilities because they are going to be more alert at this time because of concerns about nuclear weapon US from the United States now Americans tend to have the attitude or we would never strike them first. It's a common reaction.

But I can assure you that they don't believe this about us. And in fact, if you look at American nuclear weapons systems and the kinds of things we are doing even now, it creates the appearance. I want to be understanding. It creates an appearance because I don't think people realize, you know, what the meaning of what they're doing is. But too a well informed technical analyst. On the Russian side, it looks like the United States is

preparing to fight and win a nuclear war with Russia. Now, of course, fighting and winning a nuclear war is ridiculous. The only way you win a nuclear war is by a definition. The definition is ridiculous. It's like, at the end of this exchange, where both of our countries and civilization is destroyed, we have margin of larger a slightly larger number of nuclear weapons left in our arsenal in

the adversary. Well, that's totally ridiculous. That's like saying, well, we'll have more fingernails on our body when our head is blown off. So fighting and winning a nuclear war is just absolutely this is not a matter of opinion, absolutely analytically ridiculous. But these kinds of doctrines have developed in the United States and in Russia too, because there was a long time where people did not fully understand how catastrophic large scale use of nuclear weapons would be.

From my point of view, this is so obvious that you know, an infant would understand it. But unfortunately in in the world of military doctrine. And let me be clearer, I'm not talking about just the military people. I'm talking about civilian political scientists in the Pentagon. They invent these magical worlds where you can use nuclear weapons with very limited consequences, and the physics I want to understand, the

physics of this shows that that's not true. Forget about all the other complexities, like no one would know what was going on if a nuclear weapon was used. Let's just reflect back on what happened when the World Trade Center was in The President had no idea what was going on. The US government couldn't inform it because they had no idea of what was going on. Now, imagine you have hundreds, if not thousands of events on a

much larger scale simultaneously going on. Who is going to know what's happening, and of course all kinds of reactions and counter reactions could be happening automatically, and every simulation, every simulation that's worth looking at, indicates that you would have a rapid escalation to a general nuclear war, nuclear weapons start to get used. So we need to do everything, absolutely everything to keep our hands off the Russian systems because if they attack us by accident, it's going to

be the end of everyone. So this is not like poking the bear to see what he's going to do. This is really dangerous.

in this war. So, Ted, as you're watching this play out, how do you feel, based on all the context you just gave us, the administration is handling the threat of potential nuclear conflict. Are they. Do you feel good about the way the administration?

the Russians, trying to provoke them to do something very dangerous. Now, I don't want to sound like a Putent lover, but I have to say that looking at Putin very clear eye, not all this silly demonization of them, but just looking carefully at his history and what he does, what he says he's going to do, and how he follows up, it is very clear that mister Putin is an extremely stable, strategic thinker, and I do not believe he is going to do anything rash in responsibility. He's not going to

be provoked. But it appears, it appears that the United States is trying to provoke him to do something silly. It's not silly, extraordinarily dangerous and leaving. And I do not think he will do this, but I think he will strike back, and it will cost American lives in the end. He's made it clear just the other day that he considers this a serious war crime. Incidentally, I haven't seen, it looks to me more like an accident, but that's another discussion. But he considers it a war crime,

and the Russians in general are absolutely outraged. We should also keep in mind that the Russians believe, right or wrong, that this horrifying Crocus City attack in Moscow, where all these innocent people who are murdered by these people who appear to be associated with ISIS, and also according to the Russians, they believe that the Ukrainians were involved, in

one way or another, supporting the ISIS attack. Given that the Russians have this mindset, independent of whether or not this is correct, they are going to be acting on it. And instead of doing things to reduce the belief among the Russians by either providing them with information intelligence or apologizing or making some statements that indicate we do not support this kind of thing, we have just stuck stuck our thumb in the eyes of the Russians at every opportunity,

and this is not good diplomacy. We have this war, we want to win the war. Incidentally, we're not winning it. We are losing it catastrophically, and the American press is not covering this right now, The Russians could end this war in weeks if they chose to take the casualties. Right now, what they are doing is minimizing their casualties while they are destroying Ukrainian forces at the rate of nearly two thousand casualties a day. That's like for five

thousand casualties a month. That is the strategy of the Russians at this time. That's why we're not seeing great gains in territory because their strategy is destroyed the Ukrainian army and then when the army is sufficiently depleted, then sweep in and take over everything. They have three hundred thousand troops, fully armed, fully trained, and fully equipped, not involved in the fighting at this point that they can

call in any time they choose. The problem they have, or if you want to call it a problem, is they don't want to take the extra casualties associated with a big offensive action against the capable army. So the first part of their strategy is to destroy the capability of the army they're facing and then unleash the backup forces, the reserve forces on the remaining army. This is a bad situation, and the American press has not reported it accurately.

I follow this every day. There's a lot of international coverage of this from organizations that every time you check what has had what they said, and what has actually been verified, they're accurate. So it's not it's clear to me that we have an accurate that I have. Others do too, have an accurate picture of the situation in Ukraine. We have lost already unless the Russians, you thought, I'm sorry,

I was, unless the Russians. Well, the point the point here, the point here is that if we have already lost, why aren't we talking to the Russians to see what kind of cease fire we can get? Instead we talked about victory. There is no victory. I'm not saying this because I'm you know, some kind of defeat us. I'm saying this because the facts are clear, and all that is happening right now is the Russians are deepening their commitment. They're resolved to finish this thing in a way that

meets there perceived security objectives. And their perceived security objective is to keep NATO out of Ukraine. And what they will do, what they are poised to do and can do at any time, except that they don't want to take the casualties at the moment because they have a strategy that's working. What they will do is they will take all of Ukraine, of the Black Sea coast. They

will probably take up to Tiev the land there. They may take the main body of what we call Western Ukraine, but I don't think they want to do that because the Western Ukrainians are deeply hostile to Russians. But what they can do is they can then strangle Ukraine because the Black Sea Coast is the only way that Ukraine can take these tremendous resources they have in brain and sell them to the world. So they can just stop Ukraine from being an economically viable enterprise. So I don't

have any idea what they will do. But why do we want to play this game? And this is an American decision at this point, and it's the only decision we have all this fiction, which I believe is designed to prevent the average American from understanding that the war in Ukraine is lost and that this could have implications for the November election. That's what's going on here.

a Russian kind of radar facility. My understanding from our conversation that you and I had yesterdays that that that that is not an early that that was not necessarily and.

big space program. They have probes they send to the Moon, to Mars and Venus, and these things are very very far away in space, and they have a gigantic and tennis that focus radio signals on those specific objects, so they could communicate signals to them and get information back. So that's what that particular facility was.

how would you miss it if you were Russian? When when Anthony Blincoln tells Lavrov, Sergei Lavrov, that well, we reserve the right to put nuclear ballistic missiles in Ukraine, what does he think Lavrov is thinking? It would be like telling John F. Kennedy during the Cuba Cuban missile crisis that we deserve the right to put nuclear arm ballistic missiles in Cuba, so you Americans don't get tough luck. I mean, I don't understand what this administration thinks it's doing.

It's just I mean, it's incomprehensible to me.

We have reports of that even the other day in this Azov unit, which is a bunch of neo Nazis. These guys are ultra nationalists. Their followers of this guy step On Bandera. Vandera was the guy who fostered a political movement that resulted in the murder of one hundred and fifty thousand Polish people during the World War Two. And also the population of ss Gestapo units with Ukrainian volunteers. That's that's, that's the Ukraine.

the Americans have typically in a war. You know, we have complete control of the air, but the Russians have an ear and they also have ten to one artillery firing capability ten to one. So when you go out, when you get out of your foxhole and go running at the enemy, they slaughter you. And this is exactly the kind of combat strategy the Ukraine has been involved in for the last couple of years. A very high percentage of the losses that the Ukrainians have been suffering

are due to these hopeless attacks. Rather than falling back and trying to defend positions and letting the Russians try to take those positions, they just run into the fire of the Russians. And it's very clear that Kluton does not want a large number of Russian casualties. It's very hard to know what's actually happening. So this is a guess. I want to be clear, this is a guess, But my guess is that the casualties being taken by the

Ukrainians are five to one. So when you hear about fifteen hundred casualties being taken, which is sort of the average during the day, fifteen hundred to two thousand, right now you're talking about three hundred or three hundred and fifty or four hundred casualties on the part of the Russians.

So this is a massacre. And you know, my own view of this is I'm terribly upset about it because I from my point of view, you can call me whatever you want, but I just see innocent people on both these Russian soldiers are no more guilty than these Ukrainian soldiers who have been forced into combat, and they're

murdering each other for no reason. Because Ukraine is lost, and the political decision makers are sitting in the White House, and in this case they are the ones because they have these step on Budera extremists in charge in Ukraine. The White House is trying to sustain the appearance with the help unfortunately of the American press, which has not done a very good job, that this war is still open to a potential positive end for the United State. It's actually over.

even in recent memory. Obviously you mentioned earlier your history in the space in the nineteen eighties, but just maybe even over the course of the last ten twenty years, has there been a moment as precarious as this is. It always as precarious as this. How does this compare?

that's another discussion. But people were not at each other at all, and it was there was a sounding rocket, a rocket that's launched vertically by scientists, you know, point beheading people like me who were just who were just trying to understand take measurements in the ionosphere, upper ionosphere. And they launched this rocket in a near vertical trajectory slightly tipped over away from Russia, but it went to a very high altitude eleven thousand kilometers and it was

taking measurements of the ionosphere. Well, the problem with this rock was that its powered flight trajectory had the appearance of a trident ballistic missile of going through a near vertical trajectory. Now most people would say, why does that matter, Well, this, this could be the first part of a nuclear attack where you detonate a nuclear weapon at high altitude and it creates a sort of a radar absorbing layer in the atmosphere. So it's it's like you took a blanket,

you threw it over the radar. Or if you have think of yourself as a as someone who's watching and I throw I throw a blanket over your head, so now you can't see anything. And this kind of precursor attack is exactly something you had both sides, Russia and the United States planned for in their own nuclear war retaliation findings, you know, planning. Now, in nineteen ninety six, you had a very In fact, I've spoken with the guy who was in charge. His name is Victor Yessen.

He was the guy in charge of the Strategic Rocket Forces at the time, and he's a very sober, extremely well educated, competent man, and he sat there watching this thing, this experiment, which he had no idea whether or not it was a nuclear weapon, rise to its maximum altitude. In the moment it started to fall back to the earth, he called off the alert because he knew that this whatever it was, he didn't know what it was, but

he knew it was not a precursor of nuclear attack. Now, if the time was, if we had big fighting going on in the Ukraine, in Ukraine at the time, in the United States in Russia, maybe we're using tactical nuclear weapons against each other or very so is very very serious escalation. NATO troops were injected, you know, the French troops that Ma Kron wants to put into into Ukraine. They're being slaughtered by the Russians, which of course will happen if those troops are there, and you know, the

Russians could think they were under attack. Now, I think they are very cautious. So I don't want to overstate this, you know, I mean, the Russians are very cautious, They're very competent, they're very professional. They understand that if they accidentally attack the United States, it's the end of their

country too. So I don't want to overstate this. But the question I would ask you to consider is do you think they're them having this state of mind at that time without a complete knowledge of what's going on, is a good thing for the United states. That's the So I don't want to be one of these people. O.

The sky is falling, the sky has fallen. But when the consequences are literally the end of civilization and you know, potentially the end of human existence that is less clear, but certainly the end of civilization as we know it, why would you want to push push the buttons on this. I don't understand. I'm baffled. And part of the reason may be that the people in the White House are

not informed. And that's been my experience. Incidentally, I've talked to people over decades from time to time in White House positions and they don't have a clue there. Because these people are political and I'm not saying this to attack them. They're concerned is how do I get reelected and how do I how do I keep the American public from knowing my dark secret, you know, my screw up on something. And that's why you see all this Kate mongering for Putin. You know, Putin is our adversary.

There's no question that he doesn't mean good things for us. But he's not Adolphe. I mean, this is ridiculous. He's a very capable guy who is Jiu jitsing us in so many circumstances. These guys don't want the American people to figure out how clever he has been and how everything we have done to try to screw up the Russians has backfired on us because the Russians have been clever and responding. So what do you do. You don't want to You can't explain this. You don't want to

explain this to your electorate. You're trying to get reelected. So he say, oh, it's this guy Putin. He's so terrible, he's so such a Now I'm not trying to say that I would want to run against put In an election in Russia. He killed me. But but you know, Muhammed Ben Salmon is not our oneful somebuddy either. You know, these countries have their own political systems, and when you when you recognize what's going on in those systems, doesn't mean you approve of them, and it doesn't mean you

think it's good. It's just understanding the facts of the world. And this guy, this guy Putin, is unbelievably thoughtful, deep thinking, and strategic in his thinking. And he just said just yesterday that he's going to find a way to pay us back for what he sees as this attack. And let me tell you, he doesn't bluff. He doesn't bluff. I have watched him with extreme care, and when he says something, I don't say, Oh, he's a monster, what are you know? Blah blah. You know, I take it

at its word. And I asked myself, what does this guy mean? And we have had a decades of people who claim to be experts on Russia feeding us nonsense about what a monster this man is. He's not a nice person. You wouldn't want him as your close personal friend. But that is different from portraying him as this monster that goes around murdering people. Whenever he has the notion, it's not the case at all. You'll you just have

to look at the facts. And so we have these people who in one way or another are getting funding from the US government to a field an alliance to the US government, who have painted this portrait that is totally bizarre. I mean, why don't we do that with other you know, you know, he's not hitler.