Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/11/23: Biden Speech On Israel And Gaza, Lindsey Graham Wants War With Iran, Tragic Reports Out Of Israeli Kibbutz, Gaza Bombing, Finland Pipeline Damaged By "External Activity", Hillary Calls For MAGA Deprogramming, Santos Indicted For Fraud, And MORE!

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Biden's first address endorsing Israel's attacks on Gaza, Lindsey Graham calls for war with Iran, horrific reports out of Israeli Kibbutz after Hamas attack, Gaza suffers widespread bombing destruction ahead of invasion, Mia Khalifa fired for pro-Palestine statements, Finland pipeline destruction due to alleged "external activity", Hillary Clinton calls for MAGA deprogramming, George Santos indicted for fraud, and Yousef Munayyer joins to discuss the massive offensive into Gaza. To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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If we can put up this first element here. These are minimum figures, and so if you're listening to the podcast, you're not seeing these. Israelis were up to a minimum of 1,200 killed, 2,700 wounded, absolutely unprecedented casualty figures on the Israeli side. The bulk of those civilians, a significant portion of those civilians that we know, at least 260 at the music festival. The number so far, minimum killed in Gaza, 1,050 as of this hour, 5,100 wounded. But the assault on Gaza continues around the clock. And so, you know, these numbers are going to continue to climb. Emily, you were pointing out that there are now reports that the last power station is running low. Hours.

And medical equipment has been cut off by sanctions and by a blockade for years. But ingress and egress has been severely limited over the last couple of days. So one can imagine that the health care system has essentially ceased to function beyond people doing heroic measures as they can. And so as people enter into their own kind of health complications that come from just living without electricity, food, and water, combined with round-the-clock bombings and with nowhere to run. Right. We're going to get into that, the difficulty of humanitarian assistance on behalf of NGOs in circumstances like this. We're also just about to get into some highlights

or lowlights from the White House yesterday. But before we do it, that graphic that we just put up on the screen and the numbers that Ryan just read, I just am pausing in my own mind and thinking, this is a matter of a couple of days. You can go back and this conflict stretches decades into the past, but if you look at the deaths that have happened just in the last couple of days, I mean it's just a completely staggering figure. And then when you look at, we do have some footage

obviously from the warfare yesterday, when you look at the do have some footage obviously from the warfare yesterday when you look at the future of this specific conflict This is going to be urban warfare in a lot of cases You're going to have bodies being pulled out of the rubble for days just from what's already happened And and then that's going to go into the future as well. It's There is no light at the end of this tunnel. And it feels very much like a, not to kind of Americanize it, but a 9-11 feeling around the lust for revenge and a kind of just unstoppable force that we're witnessing.

And certainly President Biden last night made no effort at all to do anything to slow it down. I think it probably only ramped it up. Let's play a little bit from the first presidential address since the Hamas assault on Israel. Bloodthirstiness brings to mind the worst, the worst rampages of ISIS. This is terrorism. But sadly, for the Jewish people, it's not new. This attack has brought to the surface painful memories and the scars left by a millennia of anti-Semitism and genocide of the Jewish people.

So in this moment, we must be crystal clear. We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel. And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack. There's no justification for terrorism. There's no justification for terrorism. There's no excuse. Hamas does not stand for the Palestinians' people's right to dignity and self-determination. Its stated purpose is the

annihilation of the state of Israel and the murder of Jewish people. They use Palestinian civilians as human shields. Hamas offers nothing but and bloodshed, with no regard to who pays the price. The loss of innocent life is heartbreaking. Like every nation in the world, Israel has the right to respond, indeed has a duty to respond to these vicious attacks. What's so different about the remarks that he made last night and a lot of the remarks that you're seeing come from Israeli defense officials and up Israelis say, this is a strictly targeted operation at Hamas militant operations. And we regret any civilian loss of life and that they are collateral damage that we attempted to avoid. We are doing everything in our power to minimize or

completely eliminate civilian casualties. We won't succeed necessarily entirely, but that's what we're trying to do. None of that language even, none of that pretense, and we used to think of it as pretense, but we might find out that it wasn't just pretense, that the language actually did have some connection to minimizing civilian casualties. Now, you would still have, in, say, 2021, a couple thousand civilian casualties. But a couple thousand compared to what we may be about to witness might be orders of magnitude different. None of the Israeli defense officials are talking about civilian casualties or even pretending like they're going to try to minimize casualties.

So they're talking about as much widespread damage as possible. The closest Biden came there was saying, you know, civilian casualties, you heard his quote, whatever he said, civilian casualties are unfortunate. Israel has a right to defend itself. Just kind of pushing right through it in a way, you're like, oh, they're not even suggesting that they're going to try to minimize it here. I have a quote from the New York Times this morning, which says that Israel has given broad warnings for people to leave certain neighborhoods or towns, but has acknowledged they are not as extensive or specific as they have been in the past. And many residents say they have not received them. Gazans say, of course, they have nowhere to go. Anyway, we are going to get into some of what that actually looks like. We have some clips. We have some video. For now, let's move on to Jake Sullivan,

who went into the White House briefing room after Biden's address yesterday and talked about the specifics of somewhere around 20 American hostages. It seems like we still don't have the exact number of American hostages that have been taken, the exact number of American fatalities. This is all fluid, but Sullivan actually addressed that very question just yesterday in the briefing room. We do not know about their condition and we cannot confirm a precise number of American citizens. We believe that there are 20 or more Americans who at this point are missing, but I want to underscore and stress that does not mean necessarily that there are 20 or more American hostages. Just that is the number who are currently unaccounted for. We will work

hour by hour, both to determine whether we can account for any of those Americans, or to confirm exactly what the number of Americans are being held hostage. And we will come back to you with that information as soon as we have it. As you know, very sadly and tragically, the number of dead has risen with each passing hour. And that's true of the total number. It's also true of Americans, which has gone up just today from an earlier report this morning of 12, then 13, now 14. And in the Free Press this morning, that's Barry Weiss's publication, Very Pro-Israel. They had a story just this morning talking about how that number, wherever it ends up landing, puts us in a situation

potentially not unlike the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, which had enormous geopolitical ramifications. In fact, it still has enormous geopolitical ripples all the way up to 2023. So that's just, we're talking about this in the kind of broad context of these fatality numbers as we should be. And Ryan, I looked up the number since 2008, according to the United Nations, 6,400 Palestinian fatalities over 15 years. So 2000 between Israel and Palestine, just in the last day. I mean, this is evolving rapidly, obviously, just an incredible, incredible toll. But the point about the hostages specifically, that puts America in a very, very particular conversation about military force, aid, and everything that has to do with potentially extracting hostages. Right. And I think important to notice there is that he said at least 20. Right.

Like the number could be significantly higher than that. Right. Like quite significantly higher. The number of people with dual citizenship there is high. And if you have a case of hundreds of hostages, there's a good chance that you've got dozens and dozens and dozens, at least, of Americans in there. And it does then put into context the question of what kind of all-out assault, because not only are you talking about the 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza, but now you're talking about, you know, risking the lives of the Israeli and American hostages as well. There was a really interesting, and you might've actually sent this in,

interview that Jake Tapper did yesterday with a Palestinian American woman who was stuck in Gaza. Did you see this? Yes. Yeah. And so he finishes the interview by saying, you know, you're an American you should be able to get out it is Unfair is wrong right that the embassy has not been able to find a way out because she was saying that Her she and her family were driving all over Gaza trying to find someplace that was safe So go to the beach, but then they bombed the beach. They say go to the north. They bombed the north You know go down to the south and they and they bomb the south. I was talking to a source of mine from a previous story whose family is in a town below Gaza, south of Gaza

City. That town got bombed. Hamas is absolutely nowhere near this town. And so there isn't anywhere to go. And Jake Tapper finishes the interview by saying, hey, the White House has my number. They can call me. I'll help you get out. If he can do that 2.1 million times, then all the civilians can be protected. If not, you're talking about maybe dozens of Americans, perhaps hundreds of Israelis, and millions of Palestinians with absolutely nowhere to go. Yeah, and one preliminary assessment that the New York Times has written of Israeli hostages, 150 Israeli hostages right now. That is a staggering number, and that gets to this next clip. The most they've had in 15 years is, I think, five.

Right. Hamas. Right, right. And two of those I think were dead. Again, according to the UN, we mentioned the Palestinian fatalities over the last 15 years, 300 Israeli fatalities over the last 15 years as well. The next clip is Jake Sullivan getting pressed, rightfully pressed, on the intelligence situation. And that will obviously come into play when recovering hostages is at stake.

So let's roll this. How did Israel miss this attack coming? That's a question for you to ask the Israeli government. Obviously, the Israeli government has placed a high premium on its intelligence capacity as it relates to Hamas, as it relates to the West Bank, as it relates to Hezbollah. And why it is that they did not have warning from this is not a question that I can answer from this podium. What about U.S. intelligence? Was there anything in what crosses your desk that would suggest that this was coming? We did not see anything that suggested an attack of this type was going

to unfold any more than the Israelis did. So, of course, the Israelis should be furious with their government on this level of failure. They are. I mean, we look back on 9-11 as an intelligence failure and have immense anger and upset over all of the signs that were missed in the months and the days ahead of the attacks. This is, I mean, there's just no question at this point that this is absolutely an intelligence failure.

There are all kinds of different reports. I mean, this is from the Associ at this point that this is absolutely an intelligence failure. There are all kinds of different reports. I mean, this is from the Associated Press. They say, they quote one expert. This is a really interesting point. He says, quote, something big without elaborating. He said Israeli officials were focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza. Netanyahu's government, the AP continues, is made up of supporters of Jewish West Bank settlers who have demanded a security crackdown in the face of a rising tide of violence there over the last 18 months, quote, we have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming and very soon and it would be big, but they underestimated such warnings.

And it makes you wonder when Biden is saying in his address last night, we stand with Israel, you know, which Israel? Like, what does he mean by we stand with Israel, which Israel? What does he mean by we stand with Israel? Does he mean the vast swath of the Israeli public that is livid at the Netanyahu government and is calling for his resignation rather than calling for kind of a unity government because of everything that he did that kind of led to this. The conversation in Israel has been so shockingly nuanced compared to the conversation here in the United States. And that's often true. Yes. And so later in the show, we're going to talk about this editorial, but the JIT that

Haaretz led, which is one of the major newspapers in Israel, which represents a view that has been put forward by a lot of different commentators across Israel that Netanyahu holds a significant amount of blame for what happened. And I think people in Israel don't have to do the throat clearing of, well, of course, Hamas has responsibility for the barbarity. That's obvious. Here in the United States, we just say that, and kind of that's the end of it. But basically, Netanyahu moved an enormous number of troops out of the South and up to the West Bank

because his far-right cabinet was insisting on these pogroms and this massive crackdown in the West Bank with the explicit goal of ultimate annexation and so Haaretz was you know a lot of Israelis were opposed to that policy and so to watch them move all the troops out of Gaza and out of out of the southern region up to the West Bank and then leave that completely exposed while also having all of these far, far right-wing ministers antagonizing Palestinians on a daily basis. You're like, look, this was

predicted, predictable, and you drove it and you didn't stop it. That's the context here. This is from the Christian Science Monitor, which reported, since the UN started counting deaths in 2006, 2023 has been the deadliest year for Palestinians. 200 have died this year at the hands of Israeli soldiers or settlers in the occupied West Bank. And so that's the context, I say that's important context on this question of intelligence and on this question of the Israeli military because obviously this Egyptian official who's talking to the Associated Press has some sort of legs to stand

on when making the argument that there's a really serious question of whether or not Israel was underestimating and was fooled by people who were intentionally going, quote, back to the Stone Age. They had set up replicas of cities in Gaza. They were training in front of, there's no way that Israel missed that. They were training out in the open air. So it has to be an underestimation. And that is, that should have Israelis reeling. And it does, I just want to use this quote

from Glenn Greenwald on System Update last night. He said, there's far more criticism of the Israeli government and far more debate over Israel's actions in Israel than there is here in the United States. One needs only read an Israeli newspaper, listen to an Israeli news broadcast to see how much more vibrant the debates are about their own country than they are in the United States. And this is a really good segue, Ryan, into talking about how some folks, Lindsey Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, Republican from South Carolina,

are starting to frame the conflict. We have a clip from him on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News just last night. For every Israeli or American hostage executed by Hamas, we should take down an Iranian oil refinery. The only way you're going to keep this war from escalating is to hold Iran accountable. How much more death and destruction do we have to take from the Iranian

regime? I am confident this was planned and funded by the Iranians. Hamas is a bunch of animals who deserve to be treated like animals. So if I was Israel, I would go in on the ground. There is no truce to be had here. I would dismantle Hamas. This is the best opportunity Israel has to destroy Hamas. Take it to the Iranians. If you harm one American in Syria by using your Iranian militia against us in Syria, if you escalate the war by urging Hezbollah to attack Israel in the north, if Hamas kills one American Israeli hostage, we're going to blow up your oil refineries and put you out of business. It is now time to take the war to the Ayatollah's backyard. All right. Lessons on de-escalation from Lindsey Graham. He literally says,

this is how we're going to de-escalate the situation, by taking the war to Iran. And I think it's important to understand that that would practically be a moderate view sitting around Netanyahu's cabinet right now. So that, so that's what we have to, as we think about how this is going to unfold, there would be nothing, nobody would bat an eye if he said this in a war cabinet right now, I think. No, not at all. Right. And again, I mean, the sort of passions of people who are on the ground in Israel who are Israeli and who are missing friends and family, loved ones, have seen communities, just completely ransacked. This often happens, and the 9-11 comparison

is one that's been thrown around a lot, and I think rightfully so when you look at the numbers. At the same time, there are a lot of lessons, The Intercept had a story on this actually just today, I think, about how you react when those tensions and those passions are informing the way that you're seeing a situation. That is not always the correct path forward when you have the benefit of hindsight and that's difficult when you see what you've seen in the last couple of days of course. Yeah and if you remember as I think we all do, Barbara Lee was the one person

that stood up at the time and three days after 9-11 went to the floor of the House and gave a prescient, wise speech that at the time she was pilloried for from left to right. Unpatriotic. Unpatriotic, un-American. And Oakland needs to be cast off into the ocean. And today, or I should say last week, everyone understood, almost universally left to right, that she had been courageous and she had been right, that it was good that she had taken that stand. And so I think people should remember that because there will be a 20 years from now, and we will be looking back at what happened. And if Israel does launch a mass casualty event that makes the last couple of days look like a skirmish

and it spirals out into a multi-decade regional conflict, I think there's going to be a lot of regret. And a lot of people say, I wish somebody had stood up at the time and said, hold on, let's think about this here and now the other 9-11 parallel is that we ended up going to war not just against Afghanistan yes but then also against Iraq yeah and against Iraq on faulty intelligence some of it related to Iran right actually right that also Saddam did a 911, Iran did 9-11. And so here is Jake Sullivan getting asked about the latest,

what seems to be faulty intelligence, about some type of direct link between Iran and this operation. What can you say about Iran's role in the Hamas attack? Is that one of the actors you're worried about widening the war? Look, we've said since the beginning that Iran is complicit in this attack in a broad sense because they have provided the lion's share of the funding for the military wing of Hamas. They have provided training. They have provided capabilities. They have provided support. And they have had engagement and contact with Hamas over years and years.

And all of that has played a role in contributing to what we have seen. Now, as to the question of whether Iran knew about this attack in advance or helped plan or direct this attack, we do not, as of the moment I'm standing here at the podium, have confirmation of that. I think that's an important way to understand this, that there is complicity. And the left would understand this in the sense that, let's say the IDF carries out a raid in the West Bank and 15 civilians are killed. The left would, I think, accurately say that the U.S. funded that operation. The U.S. trained the IDF forces that went in there. There's a decades-long relationship here that includes political, strategic, and financial support, but that the United States did not plan that particular operation. And I think that is an important distinction of an operation of this scale. Yeah. No, I think that is a really good parallel because, yeah, and Jake Sullivan then gets pushed

again yesterday by Jackie Heinrichs of Fox News, specifically on this question of money, which has been at the center because obviously the funds were released and people remember coverage of that. The funds were released. It's been central to the Republican criticism of the Biden administration. Jake Sullivan, I'll let him speak for himself, but he goes back and forth with reporters about what happened to that money and how it's been used so far. Take a look at this. This activity that you've just laid out, all of the ways that they are complicit in this. The administration said that if we see them going in the wrong direction, that we would stop that down. I understand the position that you guys have, that not a dollar of this has been spent. But will you prevent it from getting into their hands to allow them to do what they

do that you just laid out? Let me just reiterate what I said, because it's unequivocal. Not a dollar of that money has been spent, and I will leave it at that. Has it been considered? Yes. So that's, of course, a reference to the $6 billion that were unfrozen after they had been in South Korea. But there was a prisoner swap, obviously, as people likely remember, not that long ago, actually within just the last month, right, Ryan? It's like a matter of weeks that that happened. And the Republican criticism is that money is fungible. So Iran knew it had that money coming into the bank. Jake Sullivan's

question is, so whether that money has been unfrozen, they would say is arguably irrelevant because Iran knew it had these unfrozen $6 billion coming in and could then put that money into funding Hamas and can still put that money into funding Hamas. Sullivan is saying, well, it wasn't unfrozen. Basically, that's the best response that the White House has to that question. It's interesting. Did you read between the lines that they're going to refreeze it without saying they're going to refreeze it? Yeah, it sounds like it, which is also interesting from the perspective of it's sort of their concession that they knew the sort of question of fungibility of money was obviously on the table when they unfroze the funds to begin with. It was a matter of diplomacy and negotiation. Obviously, it was a prisoner swap. But knowing that, it sounds

actually like both the United States and Israel were underestimating what their intelligence was telling them about Hamas's ability and will to launch an attack, exactly like what we saw, which was sophisticated land, sea, air. It sounds exactly like like because they seem reading between the lines to say they might freeze those funds again, exactly like they had no idea, no idea that this was coming because it's, I have a hard time believing they would have done that prisoner swap if they did. Oh, they certainly, I think we can be, I think we can be certain that they did not see that

coming. What we know is that Iran is politically toxic in the United States, but just how toxic it is determines what level of detente and negotiation an administration feels like it can get away with. And so it felt like they were at a place where they could unfreeze these funds, do the prisoner swap, perhaps move forward on some other issues that they're working on, including getting more kind of oil into the kind of global Oil oil capacity even if we're not the ones buying it if we can do something to lower prices, right? But then Iran's toxicity goes to nuclear levels

right in in after this assault because you know Hamas is Hamas is a sovereign and independent organization, but it is also financed heavily by Iran. So people need to understand that there is that relationship between them, but that doesn't mean that Iran gets to call the shots. The Houthis are in a similar arrangement. They are financed heavily and backed by Iran, but they make decisions independently of Iran. Sometimes they make decisions that Iran is upset with because they're furthering their own interests rather than Iran's. When Iran's and the Houthis line up, they work together. When the Houthis and Iranian interests diverge, the Houthis, for the most part, are going to serve their own interests. Yeah, and there was a quoting, I think this was actually in the New York Times,

of a Hamas militant who had said Iran funded them to the tune of some $70 million last year. So the $6 billion is not, these numbers, at least in my own head, are all over the place. There's so much that's getting thrown around about funding and aid. $6 billion being unfrozen to Hamas. Fungibility that frees... To Iran, yes, sorry. That frees up a lot of money then that they could potentially send to Hamas.

Ish, though. Potentially. Right, because the scale is so different. This is $6 billion in oil revenue that is going into the economy of Iran the amount of money relatively that they're giving to Hamas is tiny and so to even relative to the Oil money, right? Yeah So, you know the the six billion was frozen and they still financed Hamas and by the way, this is just a staggering No, like the amount of money that we send to Israel in terms of aid and you can obviously include all other things

Pails in comparison to what we have sent to Ukraine over the last couple of years Which is going to be a huge question on the table going forward as well We have sent more money to Ukraine in the last couple of years than we have sent to Israel like total in decades It's that much money. And so that's, again, that's what Congress is talking about right now is potentially lumping these into a Ukraine funding bill that you would attach Israel, increase in Israeli military aid. Biden said yesterday he's sending two ships to the Mediterranean with about two dozen advanced fighter jets. So he said, quote, we're surging additional military assistance,

including ammunition and interceptors, to replenish the Iron Dome. We're going to make sure that Israel does not run out of these critical assets to defend its cities and its citizens. So I'm sure our annual spending when it comes to Israel is going to be very high over the next year.

There's no question about that. This is going to raise really big questions for people like Lindsey Graham, who have been pushing really hard for Congress to send more money to Ukraine, have said that the money is being totally monitored and is being spent appropriately, and there's accountability. That's about to get even more ugly than it already has been. And if it's just money, the U.S. will keep sending money. But primarily and significantly what we're sending is weapons and equipment.

And that is a limited factor. We can print whatever you need. You want to print another couple hundred million dollars and spend it in Pakistan buying munitions. As long as the Pakistanis can fire up and rev up those munitions factories, then we can keep sending dollars over there and sending the munitions into Pakistan. What we do run out of is component parts, supplies, replenishment for HIMARS, for Iron Dome. Ukraine had been pushing Israel to move a lot of equipment from Israel to Ukraine. That obviously isn't going to happen at this point.

Which Israel resisted. Israel absolutely did resist it. To the consternation of the West. And it was much easier for the U.S. to move all of our stockpiles to Ukraine when we had these massive stockpiles. We're now drawing that down. Yeah, and we were talking before the show that, again, there's the 9-11 question that looms really heavily over this. There's also the

question you were talking about World War II I was saying it feels like 1913 because the way we are seeing the coalition's coalesce is pretty unsettling. Yeah yeah the new way there's a there was a new book I don't know what the camera was the title the last Imperial war or something like that which makes the argument that you have to understand World War two as really starting with the Japanese invasion Of China and with the Spanish Civil War Meaning that you know from the early 1930s you started having these conflagrations that started sorting people into camps Yeah, and then it evolves into the broader war. So yeah,

who knows where this is going? Antony Blinken, his final element here, is headed to Israel on Thursday. I think he's leaving tonight. He'll get there Thursday morning. And so he'll be there as this offensive ramps up. We don't know what is coming, but it certainly looks plausible that we're going to see a ground invasion of Gaza. Yes, absolutely. And members of Congress have been on the ground in Israel. Some of them were actually just on normal, maybe codels. Cory Booker was there. Cory Booker was there. So I saw Debbie Wasserman Schultz on MSNBC yesterday saying

she was still hearing from different countries in the Middle East that they are supportive of the Abraham Accords. And that's another huge question. We were talking about the deadliest year in the West Bank in years earlier as being a crucial context. Well, of course, the Abraham Accords and Kristalln Sager have talked about this, whether Iran is trying to sort of scuttle them because they see that as a threat started under President Trump. Biden was trying to negotiate something with Israel as Saudi Arabia was saying basically, you know, every day we're getting closer to it. We're getting closer to it. Biden had that quote when he was with Netanyahu recently where he said, if you told me we'd

be negotiating a peace deal with Saudi Arabia and Israel, I would have said, what the heck are you drinking? Something like that from not so long ago, whatever W. Washington says, it seems that that is basically dead in the water right now. We'll see. The push among those U.S. allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to cut a Middle East peace deal without the Palestinians is still strong. Yeah, that's true. And we can talk about this later, but there's some thinking that some of the strategic aims of Hamas in acting with such barbarity was to then produce a barbaric response,

which would then scuttle these coming deals. Yeah. And again, like that question of world wars, one, two, pick your poison. When we see the kind of tectonic plates of geopolitics moving in these directions, people are rightfully disturbed. Let's move on to some of the footage from yesterday. We want to obviously bring that to everyone. This is footage from Israel, from Ashkelon yesterday of the Iron Dome. If you're listening to the podcast, just an incredible shot of the Iron Dome intercepting Hamas rockets over Ashkelon just from yesterday. Ryan, that is in the broad daylight. It's something that we see every now and then, of course, but really,

really something to see that happening over residential areas like it was yesterday. Yeah. And the Iron Dome was really overwhelmed on Saturday just by sheer numbers. And it just became a math game that the Iron Dome can shoot a certain number of missiles in a minute. And if there's more than that, that's it. That's the math. And the only way they can ramp that up is by getting more launchers. And somehow perhaps speeding up the reload time, which is going to be, which is, you know, at some point, you can only reload so fast. So, you know, by launching like 5,000 of them on Saturday, they were able to overpower that.

And I wonder if in this era of the Iron Dome and of their mass surveillance, because Israel has pioneered the most sophisticated kind of cyber surveillance technology out there, Pegasus being kind of the most famous of them, which can get into your Android or your iPhone without you even clicking anything. Famously, I think they used it on, Saudis licensed it and used it on Jamal Khashoggi. And Gaza has been known as one of the most surveilled areas in the world. And so the combination of the surveillance plus the Iron Dome plus this sophisticated technological security barrier that was outside of Gaza, which included unmanned machine guns linked to cameras, linked to just the most over-the-top kind of sophisticated technology you can imagine, kind of probably then lulled them into a sense of hubris and allowed then Hamas to counter-strategize, say, well, okay, well, then we're not going to use phones and, you know,

we're going to annihilate this technological barrier with just drones that were, if you saw some of these videos, the drones would go up and just drop a grenade in there and take the communications offline. So now you've taken this thing offline and now your unmanned machine gun is just unmanned and unroboted. Right. And you can then take a bulldozer through the fence. Right. And, yeah, we were talking earlier about the level of intelligence failure. A lot of people saw yesterday, we can put this next element up on the screen, from Kfar Azzah, just stunning, stunning, shocking images from a kibbutz that was just brutalized. There was an I-24 report yesterday, so that's Israeli media, that suggested a very specific number of babies were decapitated.

Now, this is not confirmed. That specific number was not confirmed yesterday. What was confirmed, CBS News, Nora O'Donnell said that there were bodies of decapitated babies recovered in the area of this kibbutz that was, again, the only way to say it is absolutely brutalized. You see this screen, you see this quote from the Reuters article that starts, about 750 people, many of them families with young children. Now it's become a charnel house after Hamas gunmen burst out of the Gaza Strip on Saturday and laid waste to the village. Ryan, the extreme virality of the I-24 report led to this really, I think, unfortunate situation yesterday. On the one hand, journalists' job is to fact-check extraordinary claims, especially when they're coming from the IDF, from a government, essentially, which is what I-24 was sourcing

their report to. On the other hand, getting into this conversation about how many babies were decapitated is not a good place to be. Yeah, the whole, so an I-24, so people understand, is known as closely linked to Netanyahu, closely linked to the Israeli military. It's not known as kind of a dispassionate, independent source of news. It's the first place that the Israeli military is often going to go with propaganda. And so, but your point is, I think, a good one in that you're, I was confused at the entire nature of this debate here. Because on the one hand, you had some people on the left who were saying, look, the deaths of civilians, this is what decolonization

is. Like this is what it looks like. Yet when this particular atrocity was floated in a completely kind of unverified way, everybody's, well, no, no, that didn't happen. So it really lifted the veil and showed that actually, okay, there is humanity there. You do care about atrocities. I agree with that. I think that's an interesting take because to me, as someone on the right, the left, I think, has this reasonable fury when Western media takes talking points from the Israeli government and regurgitates them as though they're automatically the sort of verified truth. And I think that frustration is what I think brought us to the point yesterday where people who were on the one hand saying, this is the reality of decolonization. This is what it looks

like. But on the other other hand we're saying this you know we we don't know uh that the story is true we're coming from that place of you know i-24 going viral and what you do like i-24 said something that doesn't make it automatically true and that's again like it's just not a good place to be in when the reality is that and and you know the reality is that that village was brutalized was was flattened um and as Nora O'Donnell came in with unfortunately last night that there were recovered uh decapitated babies that uh were found just uh even with Nora O'Donnell's report there I'd still want to see some more details. I mean, I actually don't want to see

any more details, but I'd want to see more corroboration and more verification because it still doesn't scan. But to me, you don't need any of that in the sense that what Hamas was doing in this village and others was horrifying. Like they were going door to door in some cases and finding civilians in their homes and killing them yeah or capturing them like that is horrifying enough yeah like so yeah even if as i think eventually we will this kind of decapitation of babies thing is debunked that's not necessarily something to celebrate because you still are left with a horrifying massacre. Murdered babies. Right. Right. Murdered babies. At minimum. Right. Yes. Murdered babies. Holocaust survivors taken hostage. I mean,

there's just nothing. Yeah. No, absolutely. I'll add a French journalist said she cross-checked images of the... I don't even want to keep saying the phrase. And I saw that French journalist's post that was just completely unconvincing. It was odd. So what I was going to say is that on the one hand, I think the quibbling over the numbers and the veracity of the story, which Sky News had an interesting conversation about,

is coming from this very real and legitimate frustration that some people have about Western media running with the sort of gospel, you know, whatever the IDF is saying or whatever Netanyahu is saying as true. On the other hand, I think for people like me on the right, sort of people that are, or people that aren't even on the right but are generally pro-Israel, the frustration came from, well, why are we quibbling? And that led some people to say the story must be true, if that makes sense. So it's this very visceral frustration

that why is anybody trying to, why are people so aggressively trying to cast doubt on the story when, as you said, Ryan, like the level of atrocities here are manifest for everyone to see. Why are we quibbling over the number? And so I think those sort of two visceral reactions were what was butting heads yesterday. And I think the stakes seem to be that the more that each side can, if the Israelis are able to dehumanize Hamas in particular to a complete extent, then there are some that believe that that then completely takes the gloves off. Right.

That when people say, look, you're killing babies with this wanton destruction of a civilian population, then they will say, well, how's it feel? Eat it. This is your revenge. And so it feels like there's a kind of propping up of some of the most over the top atrocity propaganda that you can get to, to then justify ironically like the exact same thing. The deaths of

thousands or maybe more than tens of thousands of children. Because something like a million people in Gaza are under, are 15 and under. It's almost half the population. Almost half the population. So you're gearing up to annihilate thousands or tens of thousands of those children. With no stakes, who don't understand. They're not old enough to understand and take a position. The overwhelming number of whom have never been able to leave Gaza. When the news said that people broke out of Gaza, that should have been a clue to people. What do you mean they broke out?

Broke out. Are they in prison? Oh, they are in prison. It is a prison. We have video here from MSNBC yesterday of a reporter talking about this question. We discussed earlier in the show, of course, in the New York Times that I'm going to reread after we watch this clip from MSNBC about what people in Gaza were hearing from the Israeli government. There is a network of tunnels underneath Gaza City built by Hamas. It's how they move military hardware around. And you can bet that those

Israeli hostages, those 150 or so people, are likely in those tunnels. They are likely spread out across the network as Hamas tries to make it as difficult as possible for Israel to rescue these hostages who are seen as such valuable bargaining chips. In terms of how Israel goes about reducing civilian casualties, they say that they use very precise intelligence before they strike any specific location. I've been inside Gaza when Israel has been bombing, and you meet Palestinians who say that their phone rang, and on the other end of the line was an Israeli military officer telling them in Arabic, we're going to strike your apartment building because there is

Hamas infrastructure in it, but we want you to go door by door first and make sure that there's nobody inside the building before we strike. In some cases, they can stay on the phone for an hour making sure that the building is empty before they bomb it. But as I said, Jose, it is simply the reality that when you drop high-powered explosives in a place as densely populated as Gaza City, that there will be civilians killed. Yeah, I thought that was actually a really good report there,

because on the one hand, and this is again from the New York Times, we read this quote earlier in the show, Israel has given broad warnings for people to leave certain neighborhoods or towns, but has acknowledged they are not as extensive or specific as they have been in the past. And many residents say they have not received them. Gazans say they have nowhere to go anyway. So some people get—go ahead. And what that reporter was talking about, just to be clear, is previous bombings.

And I've been in briefings with Israeli defense forces here in Washington that say that they can also send mass text messages to a building before they bomb. They also do what's called a tap. Like they'll drop a very low explosive on the roof of the building as a warning. Like, okay, if you miss the text message, if you miss the call, it's like, boom. Get out. Get out.

And you hear that and they get out. But that's before. Like it's not clear that they're doing that this time because the the the amount the volume of explosives being dropped and and the sheer expanse and scope is is unprecedented and the mingling of civilians hostages with hamas which is always a challenge um You know if you if you take Israel charitably and say that they're trying to minimize civilian casualties I mean either way that's an enormous challenge because of the Urban densely packed nature of Gaza of the West Bank. I mean that is just incredibly difficult difficult Already, but now that's why I think this New York Times quote is helpful

It says that even Israel has acknowledged they're not as extensive or specific in this space as they have been in the past. Let's roll this next element. This is footage from what, so we're going to do a voice over here if you're listening. Just again, I used this word earlier, brutalized a place of Gaza here, eastern part of Gaza, that has been completely flattened. You can see in some of that rubble things like teddy bears, just completely, completely awful, and previously one of the safest places in Gaza, reportedly. Yeah, and it's also setting up all sorts of places for snipers and other militants to hide if the expected ground invasion does come. A couple of comparisons yesterday were being drawn to Fallujah, but on a much higher level.

You can look at Aleppo, I think, already. We have some examples of what this could look like, and it is horrific. Right. Yes. could look like and it is horrific right yes it's right and it wouldn't be the first time that something that israel is doing out of kind of anger and and to project strength and force ended up backfiring like so like let's like let's say that they level this area all of these different areas i see and end up creating kind of sanctuaries uh for snipers and other fighters who then are able to then stave off an invasion. Because it's not guaranteed that the invasion is going to be successful. They've called up 300,000 people. The war in Lebanon in 2006 did not go particularly well,

or whatever. I'm going to get the years wrong war in Lebanon another war and another ground invasion of Gaza You know did not go as well as the Israelis would have would have liked it to because The advantage is always on the defending to the to the defending force the ones who can hide behind walls run through tunnels Against the ones who are you know exposed exposed and moving through a city that they know well from satellite imagery, but don't know as well from having lived in it their entire lives. And let's run through some other updates here. We can put the next element up on the screen. This is from the AP reporting that an Israeli airstrike has killed 19 members of the same family in a southern Gaza refugee camp. We can go to the next element as well, B6.

This is from The New York Times. Israeli airstrikes hit marketplace and mosques in Gaza, killing dozens. The strikes also hit two hospitals, schools, and infrastructures, the UN said. Now, this is B6. We can just go to the next element, we'll roll through these so you get a glimpse into what's happening. At least six Palestinian journalists have been killed in Israel's bombings of Gaza, that's from Al Jazeera, and then finally the next element here from the Times of Israel, this is a big one Ryan, Israel has been said to bomb Rafah crossings to Egypt after telling Gazans to flee through it. The Messenger reported this

as well. Actually, there was a strange situation yesterday where an Israeli spokesperson went out and said people can get to Egypt through Rafah and then said the Rafah section is actually the Rafah crossing is closed. Did you see that happen? Yeah. And then you saw, right. And you've seen some video emerge of people who are at this crossing getting bombed. And so, but at the same time, Egypt is not here for that either, because one of the big fears of Egypt, Jordan, other countries is that Israel was eventually going to continue the displacement. Gaza is as populated as it is because of displacement previously. And so the thinking was there's going to be a crisis that leads to the border getting

opened up with Egypt and millions of people getting pushed out of Gaza and into Egypt, and Israel, quote-unquote, solves the Gaza problem that way by just completely cleaning it out of Palestinians and then rebuilding it and populating it with Israelis. And so Egypt has always been, you call it paranoid or not, they have been on guard for that. And so there's not a situation where Egypt, you know, now that maybe there's a humanitarian crisis that gets to such a level that Egypt does eventually succumb to that and allows it.

But Egypt is also a dictatorship, basically, that is afraid of its own shadow, is afraid of every civil society group that operates within its borders, is afraid of anybody with any like even remote links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Is two million people that they feel like might cause some internal instability and would like that You're like you're going to have instability as a result of that. So Egypt is Does not want to open up the border here enormous instability You know coming that will have ripple effects of course into into Europe into the United States all throughout the Middle East by the way Hundreds of people were killed in Afghanistan when an earthquake hit this week as well. And those always cause mass refugee situations. So again, there's going to be so much ripple effect from all of this in the years to come, which we'll talk about in a bit. Speaking of the ripple effect, this has obviously roiled American

culture, American politics, and Mia Khalifa was fired by Playboy for her comments. She's long been a supporter of Palestine over Israel and she obviously weighed in in recent days. This is Fox News is framing, they say Mia Khalifa referred to Hamas terrorists as quote freedom fighters and said Palestinians said Palestinians are, quote, fighting for freedom every day. She says she referred to the Palestinian citizens as freedom fighters. That's what her response was to all of this. But Playboy fired her and said it was, quote, reprehensible. Her comments were reprehensible.

Ryan, what did you make of that? It's interesting in the way that if you say something that is kind of supportive of Palestinian liberation in the midst of atrocities that are being carried out by Hamas, it is immediately assumed by the listener that you are endorsing those atrocities. And that is what her boss over at this, she was working at a mushroom, a psilocybin company as well, got fired from that publicly on Twitter. You saw this. Her boss publicly said, you're fired and this is why. How could you endorse this? But if you say, I stand with Israel while Israel is bombing civilian populations, nobody automatically says,

oh, well, so therefore you're saying that you support the killing of these civilians. Like you're allowed a distinction when you say I stand with Israel to say, well, I stand with Israel when they're doing things the right way and I oppose the bad things that they do. But if you say I stand with Palestine, you're not allowed to have that distinction. You're automatically assumed, well, you must be supporting all these atrocities. You're not saying that you want Palestinians to have dignity and self-determination, which even Biden himself said last night. It must be that you're supporting terrorism and barbarity. Right. So she said, this is what first caught people's attention, right after the attack, she wrote on X, quote, if you can look at the situation in Palestine and not be on the side of Palestinians, then you are on the wrong side of apartheid, and history will show

that in time. She then said, quote, please tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones and film horizontal. Then she, two days later, said the statement is in no way, shape, or form is enticing spread of violence. I specifically said freedom fighters because that's what the Palestinian citizens are, fighting for freedom every day. She also, in another post, said I can't believe the Zionist apartheid regime is being brought down by guerrilla fighters in fake Gucci shirts. The bad pics of these moments better reflect that. Now, Playboy, which has this interesting history of actually championing free speech rights, invoked that history when it fired her and said, Playboy, and this is actually fascinating, we are longtime champions of free speech, but we don't condone, quote, hate speech.

And we've talked for years, Ryan, about— Then you're not a free speech champion. That's—yes. And we've also talked for years about this definition of hate speech and how everybody uses it as a cudgel, basically, to silence different voices. And on the one hand, Playboy is a private company that has every right to say, we don't like cancel culture. We're pro free speech. We just personally don't want someone like this on our team. We don't think it's good for our image. We don't think it's good for X, Y, and Z. That may be inconsistent. You may be able to make the argument that you're championing free speech. If that's your image, then you shouldn't be firing somebody who's saying something like that.

On the other hand, that question of like, what is the line between, you know, speech that's that's not cancelable? Because even the people who are the most ardent, strident opponents of cancel culture will say sometimes, like, I don't think that you should be punished by the government. But I also support a private organization's right to be like, nah, no, like we're not going to stand for this. It has been actually a pretty interesting conversation over Mia Khalifa. And I think the other thing that happened here is that you had, so to me, it's taken for granted that the killing of civilians is atrocious and is horrifying and should be condemned across the board, no matter who the civilians are. They do not deserve to be casualties of somebody else's war. But then you had a small number of loud people who were kind of saying, well, that's kind of okay in the process of decolonization. And so a thing

that ought to have just been assumed that civilians are off limits, civilians should not be killed, all of a sudden now that becomes a live question. Do you actually endorse the killing of civilians? And if you don't specifically condemn it, then you're assumed to then be supporting it. And I think she partly got caught up in that as well. Yeah. No, I think that's true. And actually, you and I may disagree on this. Let's move to the next element. We can put it up on the screen. This is from John Hasson, conservative, who is referring to his column in Town Hall, where he goes in on that sort of 34 Harvard Student Organization joint statement that they issued. They say, quote, we, and many people have probably seen this so far. The undersigned student organizations hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.

The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. And then we've been talking about these sort of unfortunate cycles of finger pointing that this can devolve into often what I would take issue with in the statement from Harvard students that has been echoed by student statements elsewhere, which some people, I think, have unfairly conflated with school statements. You know, if a bunch of students put together a letter at NYU or Columbia or wherever, it's not the same thing as the school putting out that statement, obviously. And I think there has been some conflation of that. I think we, the undersigned student organizations, hold the

Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence is an absurd thing to say in the wake of what happened over the weekend. But Ryan, now there's sort of these big questions about free speech on college campus that scramble the usual coalitions of conservatives who typically support free speech on college campuses and are sort of looking at this in a different lens suddenly. Well, and Barry Wise has been one of the leading voices of this kind of anti-cancel culture movement. And she has never once had any problem differentiating between free speech rights for me but not for thee when it comes to the Palestinian question. Like she was a leading kind of anti-Palestinian activist in college and she's never kind of moved away from that and the I feel like

Cancel culture for Palestinians on college campuses has always been kind of kind of baked into the hypocrisy around our cancel culture, but Not you've you've seen Kind of the kind of social justice left become so hegemonic on campuses yeah that see that that now they're facing a backlash right you know for an unwillingness to kind of uh you know approach it with any nuance like just yeah it's okay to say that you know hamas has agency as well. Exactly.

You're not required to massacre people at a music festival. Right. That's a choice. And you can believe that Israel created the conditions in which people made the decision to massacre people at a music festival, kill babies. On the other hand, they still made the decision to massacre people and kill babies. On the other hand, they still made the decision to massacre people and kill babies. That is not entirely Israel's fault, which is the exact quote from the statement. That's a really unfortunate way to put it. But yeah, no, go ahead. So what's really interesting though, is if you line up that Harvard state, that Harvard student statement, with a major editorial that was running the Haaretz newspaper. Obviously, the Haaretz newspaper is going to write it in a more sophisticated way,

because they are actual journalists and live in Israel, and they're not college students who live in America. But there's not a ton of daylight between some of the reasoning. And so let's put up this really important Haaretz piece, and I think important for Americans to understand. The headline here is, Netanyahu bears responsibility for this Israel-Gaza war. Haaretz editorial. And I think if this were written by a student group here in the United States,

you would have people coming for them and people losing their minds. Instead, this is one of the largest, this is the lead editorial from one of the largest newspapers in Israel. And just to read a little bit of it here, the disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Sinpiat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gavir to key positions while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.

Netanyahu will certainly try to evade his responsibility and cast the blame on the heads of the army, military intelligence, and the Shin Bet security service who, like their predecessors on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, saw a low probability of war with their preparations for a Hamas attack proving flawed. They scorned the enemy and its offensive military capabilities. Over the next days and weeks, when the depth of Israel defense forces and intelligence failures come to light, a justified demand to replace them and take stock will surely arise. And so this has led to calls for Netanyahu just to step down and it shows an ability to think in a multi-dimensional way that that we lack here in the United States now I think it probably also goes without saying from

her ROTS Retsa's perspective that of course they condemn Hamas because they don't have to say that they write, you know, they know they prob, you know everyone in that newspaper knows somebody who was You know who was either killed or captured or or something knows somebody who knows somebody they've plenty of coverage of that, right? And so that's probably why it go, you know goes without saying for them and where it doesn't necessarily for Some of the some of Harvard students the other funny thing uh funny you know not haha funny dark uh you just saw a white white shoe law firm withdraw yes a job offer that it had made to a kind of summer associate who signed this law which is just

it which just like exposes how absurd all of this is. That's where they draw the line. Because you have, because, well, and also you have these students who are, you know, play acting. Oh my gosh. As revolutionaries. Yes. You know, cheering on, you know, like the assault on a music festival in the most kind

of over the top, while being a summer associate at a white shoe law firm planning to go into big law after Harvard, when you're going to then represent Bhopal after they spill chemicals all over some indigenous village in India or whatever. Or Raytheon. Yeah, right. Who do you think these big law firms represent? Yeah. So it does kind of put the lie to whether or not this is a true revolutionary element within our society. Yeah, the cold hard reality there.

And just another quick thing on the Haaretz op-ed. I do think there's a really big distinction between saying Netanyahu is is the sort of blame for the disaster lies at his feet. They used the word disaster. The Harvard students used the word all unfolding violence, entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. And I think Haaretz on sort of the political level saying that Netanyahu created the conditions is responsible for creating the conditions that led to the disaster is different from saying hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. But all that is to say, this question of where even the people who are upset about the broadening definitions of hate speech, where do they draw the line as to what constitutes hate speech?

I think it's a really interesting one and is a worthwhile conversation to have. These are horrible conditions in which to have that conversation, but it's one worth paying attention to. Impossible. Yeah, that's well said. Let's turn now to the war in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, of course, specifically Reuters is reporting, we can put this element up on the screen here, that Finland has said, quote, outside activity likely damaged a gas pipeline and a telecoms cable. A subsea gas pipeline, Reuters says, and a telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia under the Baltic Sea have been damaged in what may have been a deliberate act, the Finnish government said on Tuesday. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said NATO was sharing its information over the damage and stands ready to support the Allies' concern. Finland joined the military alliance in April, while Estonia has been a member since 2004. The Baltic Connector gas pipeline was shut on early Sunday on concerns that gas was leaking

from a hole in the 48-mile pipeline. Finnish operators said that it could take months or more to repair. We do have some video, actually, of that press conference yesterday. It's in Finnish, so we're going to do a little reading of the sub... So the information that the border guard and the coast guard, this is the prime minister of Finland, received this morning. The leak is located in the Finnish exclusive. According to a preliminary assessment, the damage discovered could not have been caused by normal use of the pipeline or pressure fluctuations. It is likely that the damage is the result of external activity,

he adds. And so, right, so there also are kind of, there's seismic evidence that there was an explosion. Right. And they said they're still sorting through it, but they do have data that shows that there was an explosion right around the time that they saw the pressure massively drop. They're saying this is a very, very big hole in the pipeline. So just not the kind of thing that they can think of any way that this could have happened other than placing a bomb. And there's also the telecom pipeline that is a separate attack, which is cutting off significant amounts of communications. Gas prices rose in Europe as a result of this, obviously rising in Finland as well.

If this is what we think it is, this would be payback for the West blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline. Right. Well, allegedly, of course, right? That was a conspiracy theory for all of, you know, a week until the media was forced to admit because its own sourcing was telling them. Yeah, and I think if we include Ukraine in the West, then I don't think there's anybody who questions that the West, broadly speaking, was responsible for blowing up this pipeline. Because we have now firmly established, I think, through lots of basic evidence that it wasn't Russia. We also have intelligence that Russia very quickly afterwards began kind of specking out and looking for bids to fix it. Right.

So the idea that they would blow it up just to try to start fixing it right away just strains reasoning to the point where it just breaks. Another thing we should note is that gas prices, which were already spiking because of everything we've been talking about today, the conflict that is ruling the Middle East, they were already going up. And in Europe, they're up even higher after what happened on Sunday.

Ryan, that question of payback for the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline is a really interesting one one Finland obviously just joined NATO We talked about that earlier and to some controversy not a ton of controversy But to some there are some people who thought that wasn't wise and now I think there's a question of whether Everyone in Finland thinks that it was wise Yeah for sure and this is and so let's also talk about the way that this conflict is now going to play out in the wake of the Russians, you know, were behind basically this Hamas attack, a real effort to kind of shoehorn that, you know, that war into this one.

You know, clearly Iran has involvement, not operational involvement, but we know that Iran is a supporter of Hamas. Iran also has been allied with Russia on this Ukraine war. So I think from the Ukrainian perspective, they're like, all right, that's close enough. Like, let's say that Russia did this. But, you know, Russia is not, you know, Russia has tight alliances with Israel as well. And particularly a lot of the far right members of the Israeli government have a lot of links with the Russians. So the idea that Russia is like operationally supportive of this Hamas, that was always absurd. But the charge, I think, is interesting and revealing because it shows, I think, a real anxiety from the Ukrainians that this is going to be the beginning of the end of

Western support for their war, that it's going to wind down into kind of a ceasefire at which Russia will then basically de facto seize the territory that they've gained so far. Because two fronts before Taiwan has opened up might be too much. And Russia and China have both been critical of the U.S. in the wake of the violence over the weekend, which we were talking earlier in the show about the sort of echoes of what happened before World War I, what happened before World War II, let alone 9-11, which is the obvious parallel that everybody's drawn. And of course, geopolitics are always sort of shifting alliances and coalitions. But I think what we are seeing does really have serious echoes of early 20th century, mid-20th century stuff, because these alliances are starting to

coalesce in ways over, like, for instance, oil prices right now. Iran, Saudi Arabia. So when you look at Abraham Accords and how that was an effort, Biden has been trying to bring together Saudi Arabia and Israel. Iran is on the other side of the conflict with Hamas. Gas prices, oil prices are at the center of all of this. And then the same goes for Russia and Ukraine. The coalescing of these really big superpowers, and China is a huge factor that has sort of been allied with Russia in Ukraine, and Iran, by the way, has been allied with Russia and Ukraine to varying degrees, that's, again, very unsettling, to say the least. Right. And people are making a lot of comparisons,

like you said, from October 7th to September 11th. But the key date that they're leaving out of that is 2001 versus 2023. The U.S. place in the world is entirely different in 2023 than it was in 2001. 2001, Russia had just become Russia, you know, 10 plus years, 10 years earlier, and had gone through the greatest collapse in GDP and human misery and just quality of life and life expectancy in human history throughout the 1990s so Russia is just completely flat on its back China is you know 22 years back in time from the exponential growth that they've seen for those 22 years so they they were in no capacity to be flexing anything outside of their very specific region. So when we decided that we were going to follow invading Afghanistan with an invasion of Iraq,

the UN could say whatever they want, the world can say whatever we want, we were just going to do it. There was absolutely no check on our kind of military power at that time. Now, we eventually found that the reality of occupying a country for several years that didn't want us to be occupying it was its own check. And that becomes its own insurgency and develops into ISIS, etc. But in terms of other geopolitical forces checking the United States, there were none. Today there are. And so I think that really inhibits the kind of room that we have to maneuver and how many kind of fronts we can take on these different violent conflicts,

while also like China making inroads in our own backyard. Yes, and we would be remiss if we didn't mention that nuclear weapons are at the center of absolutely all of this. That's something that weighs very heavily on Israel, obviously, given places like Gaza, Palestinians' mines, given how small these areas are, how close they are to nuclear powers. But we're talking about all nuclear powers here for the most part when we talk about where these coalitions are, what they're turning into. And when that happened before, when the Cold War was front of mind, we saw the United States funding, getting behind Mujahideen and a lot of people now looking back on Israel's history with Hamas, of course, and decisions that were made about where to sort of

give support and money in different circumstances. So these nuclear conflicts, we have so much history to learn from, and it just feels like we're not learning from any of it. So at the end of the show, we're going to talk to Palestinian-American advocate and policy analyst Yusuf Munir. But I think we need a break from this for a little bit. So let's talk about Hillary Clinton and George Santos. No, why not? Well, of course, we did want to bring you coverage of one of the most inflammatory things Hillary Clinton has maybe ever said. That's a long list, but let's take a listen to her. One thing she said that caught a lot of people's attention,

and rightfully so, on CNN last week. Those mega extremists take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure. He's only in it for himself. He's now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him? You know, because at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen. We get Christine Amanpour just kind of laughing at that, of course, somewhat chilling coming from the former secretary of state. It's one thing if someone says it on a podcast. It's another thing when it's coming again from the former secretary of state and first lady. It carries a whole lot more weight in that case. And such an interesting

glimpse into the mind of America's most powerful people. Ryan, I think it's really important to recognize that privately, she would probably say the same thing about a whole lot of Bernie Sanders supporters. And that is where it's chilling, like extremely chilling. We're seeing some laws already in the UK as it relates to protests around what's happening in Israel and Palestine about limiting potential speech. This is, I mean, government efforts to start limiting speech in this kind of high-tech social media digital world. People are getting way more brazen about saying things exactly like what Hillary Clinton just said. Somebody described her, I think, accurately as kind of the raw id of a certain kind of liberal Democrat at

this point. A powerful one. Yeah. And she's just, the things that she says privately with her friends who nod along, she now just says them in interviews with people who then also nod along. A journalist who's laughing at it. I mean, it's kind of funny. I mean, she wasn't laughing because it was funny. She's also not going to, mean, she wasn't laughing because it was funny. She's also not gonna like she doesn't actually have any power anymore It's in it, but it's very interesting to see You know where her mind is or has has gone my first thought from the perspective of Democrats who are watching this and being like can you like so many Normie Democrats were like, can you please stop?

Right, but she has lost so many people, right? Please stop. My first thought was about Herbert Hoover who Absolutely insisted on showing up at every single Republican National Convention Right for the rest of his very long life, right? Like he lived into like the 70s or something. He wanted to watch and look no. No he wanted to speak and They're like

Can you not speak? Maybe you're Herbert Hoover. You're killing us man, right like Most qualified and that there's an irony there Let's assume that Hillary Clinton was elected president, had she been. The three most qualified, like on paper, presidents in history would be her, James Buchanan, and Herbert Hoover. Right. And Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan went down as the two worst presidents, you've got to say, like in our history. And the Republicans, every four years, had to watch this guy get up on TV and address the American public and remind the American public that the Republican Party was the party of Herbert Hoover as they were trying to shake him off and

You know and battle this this kind of democratic hegemony that that grew up From the Great Depression that Herbert Hoover, you know mishandled so badly And so here here Hillary, for the rest of our lives, is just going to be rolling out interviews saying increasingly unhinged things. I had to look up a fact because I thought Herbert Hoover at one point had to cede a spot to Claire Booth Luce. And I looked it up. This is New York Times from 1944 at the RNC. I think I have to go back into the loose biography, but I think for some reason she had to steal the spotlight for him,

and he was glad to give it up to her. I don't know how glad he was. So the story goes. Right, they're begging him, look, really? Come on, we can finally, come on, FDR can barely speak anymore. It's 1944, Herbert! Like, we can beat this guy this time. No, you can't. You cannot beat him. And this is the New York Times frames it as to hand over the torch of the Republican

Party to quote a new generation. So Hillary Clinton maybe should recognize that quote a new generation might take her place. She's their Hoover. She's not going anywhere. What would be frightening, speaking of the generational problem here for Democrats, I'll put this, we can put this next element up on the screen. This is my boss, Melanie Hemingway, over at Pentagon's policy to pay for some of its staffers to get abortions in the light of the Dobbs decision that's been going on for a year. Tuberville's hold, I think, goes back to March.

So Mali said, Former CIA Director Michael Hayden calls for the assassination of Senator Tuberville because the senator is performing, in Mali's state, she's a conservative, desperately needed oversight of the U.S. military. Now, Hayden responds to some of the conservative backlash. This is the next element. Ed says, basically, I was surprised to wake up this morning and discover that many MAGA nuts had lost their minds over my suggestion that, quote, Coach Tuberville not be considered a member

of the human race. I stand by that view. I'm wishing you all a nice day, even the intransigent Tommy Tuberville. Again, Ryan, this is something that if someone said on a podcast, it's like, whatever. The former CIA director, a completely different story. And I think it just gets to the conversation we're having about how some of these, like, the bitterness of both former Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton, Michael Hayden, this kind of past generation of neoconservative, neoliberal American leaders is leading itself to this brazenness in prior years. I mean people would be like, what are you doing man? There are a lot of raw ids running around out there. Rampant raw ids.

Just letting their id flag fly on X.com. Yeah, maybe it's a Twitter thing. Maybe that's all. Maybe if, but for Twitter. Except Hillary Clinton was talking to Christiane Amanpour. So not but for Twitter. And Michael Hayden, there's a great Columbia Journalism Review piece from back in 2017 that is like castigating the media for taking anything he says seriously. When you look at his history of lying about torture, Abu Ghraib, his history of lying about Edward Snowden and the NSA.

I mean, the guy is an absolute joke that somehow still gets published in places like USA Today and seen on cable news. But again, former CIA director saying that about a sitting senator, Hillary Clinton saying that about millions of Americans, normal times. Let's move on to a less dangerous sociopath, and kind of a funnier one. So much funnier, and also an indicator of what normal times we are living in. So George Santos facing another indictment from the feds. Put this up here. So the new charges include a bunch of his schemes to basically trick the Republican Party into, well, into thinking that he was a more financially viable candidate than he was, so that he would then get financial support

from the Republicans. Because in both parties, you have to show significant amounts of contributions or personal wealth, or else they're just not interested in your candidacy. Now, there's also more pedestrian grifting in here. Basically, Santos was grabbing, allegedly grabbing his contributor's credit card numbers and then just running them and running them and running them and moving their money into his personal bank account, into his campaign account, into other candidates' accounts. it's a brand new kind of straw donor kind of scandal. Usually a straw donor scandal means, okay, you're only allowed to give $6,000. So that, you know, let's say across the campaign. So, but you want to give $50,000 because you've got a lot of money and you really support this person. So you give 6,000, you give 6,000 to your daughter, to 6,000 to your son, $6,000 to your other son, to your aunt, your uncle, and they all give $6,000 each. And then you spread it around and the campaign gets $50,000. That is illegal.

That is one of the few things that is actually prosecuted when it comes to campaign finance left in this world. Now, what he did is he did straw donors, but without any actual money, just it was like straw, straw. And so what he did is he had his finance team, who's getting indicted along with him and probably flipped on him. Yeah, his treasurer is pleaded guilty. Right. What they did is he gave them the occupation, the address, and the names of a bunch of his relatives. And then they just put them in their spreadsheet and told the FEC and told the Republicans, this person gave us $5,000. This person gave us $5,000.

But it didn't actually represent, as far as we can tell from the indictment, money that came from elsewhere. It was just fabricated. Yeah. Just made up. And then he said he was going to loan his campaign $500,000.,000. We all kept wondering where'd the $500,000 come? Hillary's like, it must be Russia. And I don't know if Hillary said that, but like that's, it was like the Hillary-id type person. Yes. Yeah. Who was like, this must be Russia. Right. That gave him this $500,000. Turns out he didn't have $500,000. Right. Because that was sort of,

that was for so long. And we've talked about this many times. That was one of the biggest questions looming over this is how on earth did George Santos have $500,000 to lend his campaign? Where did it come from? Why is he not telling us? And we're all such suckers. The source that he had this money was him. And we should have been like, oh, maybe he's lying. So the government says that he had less than $8,000 in both of his bank accounts at the time that he claimed to loan $500,000 to his campaign. Now, given the evidence I imagine the government has in this case and George Santos' established pattern of lying, I think it's probably fair to take their word for it.

In the superseding indictment here, again, he was originally indicted, pleaded not guilty. This one supersedes that. And he's, I mean, I assume going to plead not guilty to this. I have no idea. Might as well. Yeah, I might as well if he's going to keep doing it. But if they're saying he had less than $8,000 in both of his bank accounts, I mean, and was claiming to lend $500,000 to his campaign and filed that report with the FEC. It's not that he said, I'm loaning $500,000 to the FEC, or to my campaign. He filed that in a report with the FEC, which you can understand then why his campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, is in a plea agreement right now, because that is damning. He also is accused of just abject credit card fraud. Here's another part. In one instance,

the court documents, according to CBS News, on Sealed Tuesday revealed that Santos allegedly racked up $15,800 on a contributor's credit card, a sum far higher than federal campaign laws permit. That donor, quote, did not know or authorize charges exceeding such limits. So he somehow has gotten access by being the Anna Delvey of Congress to people's credit card information, is making unauthorized charges. And the government says he's doing some of this for personal expenses on donors. That is basically unheard of. It's not the kind of corruption we're used to. Taking your own donor's credit card information and racking up $16,000 on it, thinking somehow you're not going to get caught. That's really remarkable. The kind of corruption we're used to is if you give me gold bars, then I will do official acts on behalf of the Egyptian government. The donor is in on it. Yeah.

Right. Not, I'm just going to steal the gold bars from the back of your car. Yeah. And you're not going to notice that that i'm gonna be in congress and everything's gonna go fine it's sociopath i think his scheme was always hinged on not winning and that was his it wasn't his fault i don't think he tried to win yeah but he accidentally won democrats uh you could you know tom swosey uh what it would beat him 2020, then didn't run for reelection in 2022. And the people that they put up were just a mess. And so he's like, uh-oh, now what? He must have had the most mixed feelings on his election night.

Well, and I think there's always two important things to keep in mind with this. One is that a lot of this happened in the shadow of local media, which has been diminished to the point where, or I should say that it happened in the shadow of media not existing, local media basically not existing anymore. There was an outlet in Long Island that was doing a pretty good job of this, but it was one. It was, you know, Gayleman's work. But, you know, when you don't have local media digging into the stuff, these primaries digging into these like lower level elections, you end up with stuff exactly like this. And then on the other hand, Republicans had opposition research because you do what's called a vulnerability study that was conducted by a top firm for George Santos. So the vulnerability study goes through all kinds of stuff, not this specific, but all kinds of red flags with George Santos that if anybody's campaign got that vulnerability report, all the consultants would quit and be like, absolutely not. Everybody on the campaign would quit and be like, absolutely

not. It's like, oh, he says he worked for Goldman Sachs. Google turns up, no. And it's a powerful enough group of people that were working on this vulnerability report that you imagine, I have a hard time believing this didn't make its way around the New York Republican Party. And a lot of conservatives have said this is the eagerness of sort of the Republican Party's establishment to say, we have an intersectional sort of gay, Hispanic, Republican, and New York is, you know, there's a red wave that's going to wash across New York. Look at this George Santos guy. He's a gay Hispanic and he's Republican. Look at us go. And that's how you end up with George Santos because everybody just says it's worth it to put someone in there that checks kind of the boxes that allow you to trot them out as a

diversity trophy for Republicans, as opposed to actually somebody who can serve as constituents. And they're like, and it's a lack of civic responsibility. They're like, it's not our, it's not our problem. Like Democrats need to figure it out. The media needs to figure it out. If they don't, then it's on y'all. Whoops. Yep. Anyway, thank you, George Santos. That was fun. And we really needed that. Up next, we're going to be joined by Yusuf Munayer, the head of the Palestine Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C. Stick around for that. To talk more about the ongoing conflict, we're joined now by Yousef Munir, who's head of the Palestine-Israel program at Arab Center in Washington, D.C.

Yousef, thanks so much for joining us. We were just saying that you get very busy when violence breaks out in the Middle East. And I know that must be a difficult place, a difficult role to kind of play in this ecosystem. You know, my kids know quite young and are not aware of all the brutality that is taking place. But they understand that when Baba gets busy like this, something terrible is happening in the region. And, you know, I've spoken to many people over the last several days, and in many ways it's kind of an encapsulation of a bigger part of this problem.

Time and time again, particularly when there are Israeli victims, people want to hear about the situation. But it is the long stretches of time in between the periods when my phone is ringing that are the reason why this keeps happening. And in those periods of time, there's little attention paid to the situation on the ground that Palestinians are facing day in and day out underneath a system of structural violence. And we are witnessing now a massive Israeli military operation that's about to take place in the Gaza Strip. It's already began with aerial bombardment. Over a thousand Palestinians have been killed, 5,000 wounded, and electricity and water and fuel has been cut off to an already destitute and desperate Gaza Strip. This is going to be perhaps the 16th or 17th Israeli military

operation in Gaza in the last 20 years. Each time, the Israeli military has said that their objectives are to attack the Palestinian militants, degrade their capabilities, and so on and so forth. And each time, Palestinian fighters end up showing that their capabilities are actually greater the next time around. There is no military solution to this, and I am deeply, deeply concerned that in this moment, particularly as American officials have given complete backing to Israel, that an Israeli government that is effectively led by the most far-right and extremist constellation of Israeli politicians in its history are going to be carrying out unspeakable and unprecedented acts of mass atrocities in the Gaza Strip.

There is still time to avert further bloodshed. We can't go back in time and prevent what has already happened. But there is time to prevent this situation from becoming far, far worse. And I think my message, and I think the message of all reasonable people in this moment, should be that we don't want to be remembered as the people who were silent before a genocide took place in the Gaza Strip. And this is what we are about to see, I fear. And we can put this up on the screen. You had a post that I really want to talk about here. This is from Twitter X. You responded to a tweet where somebody said, Israel is readying for a months long ground campaign and gossip.

An Egyptian official tells the Times of Israel, saying that this message has been passed along from Jerusalem to Cairo. And you responded and said it will likely be years. That question of what's to come, Yousef, I want to give that question to you while also asking how you think the Biden administration, the president himself, and Jake Sullivan, who talked yesterday, Sullivan was actually answering questions from reporters, Biden gave prepared remarks. What does the future look like in the context of what we've seen from the administration in the last 24 hours or so? I think one of the most disturbing things we've heard from this administration is really a de-emphasis on the importance of the laws of war and the protection of civilians in the Gaza Strip. Despite the fact that we've been hearing comments from Israeli officials at the highest levels about the need to flatten Gaza, about the need to eradicate people, about the need to target essentially the entire population. The defense minister announced the

collective punishment through the tightening of the siege, calling the population there beast people. As someone who has studied mass atrocities and mass human rights abuses, periods of hysteria and dehumanization targeting an entire people often precede these kinds of events. And the Israeli military, as I said, is about to carry out this operation with full American backing and, of course, additional American weapons. And I think this is something we must be urgently, urgently concerned about. And Yusuf, what is the effect of cutting off food, power, water, medical supplies at this point? And how long into this do we have to go before there are more lives lost from that than even the bombing? Well, that's something that's been happening throughout this.

Of course, Gaza's been under a tight Israeli siege that has just been tightened even further. There were a few hours of electricity a day in Gaza preceding all of this, limited supplies coming in, and now the tap has been closed entirely. The effects of this are multifaceted, and all of them are devastating to the civilian population on the ground. Hospitals right now are overwhelmed with victims. There are 5,000 Palestinian injuries as of this moment, and those numbers we know are going to rise significantly because so much of Gaza has been turned into rubble and they have no idea yet how many bodies lie beneath, who is alive and who is not. Those hospitals are going

to cease functioning. And when you target an entire population, including the facilities that are used to save people's lives, you are carrying out an atrocity. And again, this is something that the Israeli defense minister, that the U.S. government is standing in full solidarity with, announced his clear intention to do and took full responsibility for. This is unspeakable. And I you know, I fear that what we are about to see is going to make the events of the last several days seem like a peaceful time gone past. So, you know, this is one of the main impacts. The other one, which I think is extremely important too, and under-discussed at this time, is that there are very few Western reporters in the Gaza

Strip right now. You look at all our American networks, nobody has anybody on the ground in the Gaza Strip. There are no eyes on what is going on in that place. Some of the little evidence that we have of what is happening is coming through people who are recording and posting to social media on the ground in Gaza. They no longer have electricity. Their phones are going to die. Gaza becomes a black box in which the Israeli military has been given a green light to carry out mass atrocities.

Again, there is time to still try to prevent more of this from taking place. So on the question of that green light, the sort of the U.S. government now looking at what the policy should be, the Israeli government on the ground say, you know, this is an ambush, a slaughter of hundreds of innocent people. We don't want to handcuff ourselves in war in a response to this. But Yusuf, how would you, I guess, counsel the United States as it sort of, you know, we've heard the Lindsey Grahams, the saber rattling from people like him, from people like Nikki Haley. On the other hand, those, you know, there are forces in our government right now negotiating with Israel, talking to Israel about how they're responding to this. So within that sort of context of Israel saying, on the one hand, there has to be a response. But on the other hand, people in the United States saying, we don't want to go full Lindsey Graham, full saber rattling. And, you know, to quote some of the Israeli officials that you quoted earlier, flatten everything, commit mass atrocities. What does that sort of look like?

How can the United States have those conversations responsibly with people in Israel? You know, I don't know how many times, how many military operations have to be carried out in Gaza for people to understand that a military solution does not exist here. This is a failure of policy as well. It's not just a failure of security. It's a failure of policy, and it's a failure of policy and it's a failure of imagination. There are alternatives to this, very clear alternatives that have always been present. We need to apply international law and demand it. We cannot, as Americans,

say that we care about a rules-based international order in Ukraine or wherever else, and then pretend that international law does not exist when it comes to the Palestinians. This siege of Gaza has been going on for a decade and a half. It's a brutal war crime. The occupation, the settlements, all of this international law applies to. But our government unfortunately has turned a blind eye to that. If we are sending the message to Israelis and Palestinians that there are no rules, that no holds are barred, these are the kind of outcomes that we are going to see.

And when it comes to American officials and some of their rhetoric, I have to say, including some of the politicians on the right, but not just politicians on the right. You know, the dangers of their rhetoric extend beyond the region. The dehumanization of Palestinians and of Arabs and Muslims more broadly is something we saw the impact of in the aftermath of 9-11 here in the United States, and we're likely to continue seeing that in the form of hate crimes against people who are part of that community. And this is something I think that is wildly irresponsible on the part of our officials and things very well could spin out of control, not just in the region, but also here in the United States if this kind of language is repeated. And Yusuf, I think that just objectively speaking, the policy of siege and occupation and periodic invasion just objectively is not working.

Like nobody would look at this situation, all the death that we've seen over the last week, and say that this is an acceptable price for whatever we have. So if we were going to use our imaginations in a broader way, What would a different approach look like? Well, I think there are many people, unfortunately, Ryan, including in Israel in particular right now, who are saying that the problem wasn't the siege. The problem was we haven't hit Palestinians hard enough, if you can imagine. And that the only possible response can be to hit them harder because violence is the only language they understand. This is the absolute lack of strategic vision on the part of the Israeli government. And it should be said here that the Israeli government has clearly failed their people, not just in this last week, but in providing a vision for peace that could actually resolve the core issues here

between Israelis and Palestinians. Again, the path forward is not complicated. International law and human rights are quite clear on what is right and what is wrong, who is being denied, and those are the things that need to be resolved. Palestinians need to have freedom. We in the United States understand the importance of freedom. And when it is denied to people year in and year out, forced to live under a military occupation, people are going to oppose that. And Palestinians have been calling for the application of international law. They've

been calling for the intervention of the international community, and they've been ignored year after year. And so if anything is to come out of this horrific moment that we are witnessing, I hope it is an understanding that by ignoring this issue, we are not doing anybody any favors. Palestinian and Israeli alike are going to continue suffering from violence that is the product of a system of occupation and apartheid. It's unconscionable that we could permit ourselves to do that. Last question. The combination of there being no Western media in Gaza with the propensity of Twitter now to surface so much garbage and unverified stuff Combined with propaganda coming from all sides has made it very difficult for people to follow this

So how do you know how would you tell people who are watching this who want to keep up with what's going on? You know, where do you get your news and where would you recommend people go to get some semblance of truth out of this? I think it's important to try to hear directly from people in Gaza themselves who are telling you about what is happening there to the extent that we can. And it's become increasingly, increasingly difficult. I've seen people from Gaza send out messages that their phone batteries are about to die and asking the world to remember them if they never hear from them again. We need to look to international organizations who have credibility in documenting human rights abuses, international organizations like the United Nations who have been reporting and warning on the situation in

Gaza for years, who have been ignored. As they've said, the situation has become increasingly unsustainable. And even when we don't have information coming to us, we need to use some common sense. We need to use some common sense about what is taking place on the ground, a place where 2 million people are trapped and have been subjected to the most horrific and bizarre experiment in human history, repeatedly bombed. And nothing good can be happening there, whether you are hearing news about it or not. We should expect that horrific things are taking place at this time. Well, Yousuf, thanks so much for joining us.

Really appreciate you taking time out of your day. And of course, I'm going to see you later today for my Intercept podcast. Always good to talk to you, even under these unfortunate circumstances. Thanks for bringing attention to this issue. All right, well, that'll do it for us today. Emily, thanks for being here and slogging through this. This is brutal stuff. And I hope that Yusuf and my own prediction of where this is going turns out to be untrue. Because like he was saying, we could look back on the last week and say, man, I wish there was something we could do to get back the tens of thousands of lives that were just lost. Absolutely. And as we've been talking about all day, that would potentially not just be limited to this region.

And that can ripple into a broader conflict. We have historical precedent for that. So it certainly feels like the worst is yet to come, but hopefully it's not. We don't have to go over the brink. We don't have to go over the brink, Although that message so far in Eastern Europe has not been successful and it hasn't been successful in the region, the Middle East for years either when it comes to Israel and Palestine. That'll do it for us. Breaking Points will be back tomorrow. We'll see you guys next Wednesday. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's

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