Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/25/23: US Blames Iran For Attacks, Biden Admin Promises More Civilian Casualties, Trump Takes Down Speaker Nominee, Jenna Ellis Cries, Bernie Staffers Demand Ceasefire, Cancel Culture On Palestine, Psychedelic Legalization

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss the US blaming Iran for recent attacks on US troops in the Middle East, Biden Admin says more civilian casualties are coming in Gaza, Trump takes down GOP speaker nominee Emmer in only four hours, Jenna Ellis cries during apology in Georgia court, cancel culture comes for the left on Palestine, and 3 star General Steele fights for psychedelic legalization in the USA.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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find out how it ends by listening to the okay story time podcast on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Welcome to CounterPoints. I'm Emily Dushinsky here with Ryan Grim. And there's big news today. Actually, it feels like there's big news every day, Ryan. But the House Speaker Carousel has a new member, and we're going to talk all about Mike Johnson, who by the end of today may actually be the Speaker of the House. So we'll bring you that information. We are going to start with updates on the war in the Middle East. We're going to take you through how the White House handled that situation yesterday. We're going to take you to

questions about the American presence in Lebanon and attacks that have happened on American troops, according to our government, over the last couple of days. We are going to talk about the plea deal that both Jenna Ellis struck and also news that Mark Meadows was given immunity. He's a former chief of staff at the White House. And then we're going to do some really interesting stuff here about Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman, and censorship of people with kind of heterodox takes on Palestine. So Ryan, we also have a guest here who's going to talk about one of your pet subjects, and that's psychedelics. So I'm looking forward to that too. Yeah, and there'll be two guests here. One is a general, a retired general, who is advocating on behalf of psychedelics for veterans. And it's interesting timing because if you guys watched yesterday, Sagar and I covered that wild situation where the Alaska Air plane almost went down.

And it turns out the guy is saying that he was on shrooms and thought he was kind of getting out. He was going to wake himself up by shutting the plane off. That's a nightmare for everybody on board, but also for people who are urging psychedelics be brought out of the shadows. I would argue it means we need better education and regulation around them because we have prohibition and what happened happened. But we're going to talk to our guests about that at the end of the show. Quick plug. Remember, if you go to BreakingPoints.com, become a premium subscriber, you can get the whole uncut show right into your inbox.

You can get that early. Second plug, as you'll see up here, I got a second book back here now. It's out in late November, early December. It's called The Squad. It's about kind of the American left over the last couple of years. We'll be talking about that more, but just a little subtle reminder in the background there for the next couple weeks. It looks great. Good cover. Good cover. We'll take it. So let's talk about the spiraling war in the Middle East, and let's put up A1 here because

this is the most kind of bellicose language that we've heard from the United States yet, where they're saying that they will hold Iran responsible for attacks by what it considers to be its proxies, its clients around the region. Because Iran has clients in Yemen, obviously in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq. And previously, the Pentagon and the White House's line had been, look, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves here. If there is evidence that Iran directed a particular attack, then we will hold Iran responsible for that. But in general, we're not trying to ratchet things up here. This is removing some of those qualifications there. What did you make of the White House coming out through the Pentagon saying that from here forward, attacks on U.S. troops by Iran proxies will be blamed on Iran?

Well, let's put A2 up actually, because I think this gives us some indication of exactly how we should take it. So this is saying correctly, the Pentagon says US troops have been attacked 10 times in Iraq and three times in Syria over the past week. Now, Ryan, if we go to A3, this is a story from The Intercept that basically gets to exactly how many people are on the ground in Lebanon, which the government is actually kind of cagey about. Here's the quote from the story over at The Intercept. It's that the White House in a June, quote, war powers letter to Congress,

President Joe Biden noted that, quote, approximately 89 United States military personnel are deployed to Lebanon to enhance the government's counterterrorism capabilities and to support the counterterrorism operations of Lebanese security forces. And this is operating under what's known as 270E. It's the provision of law, 270 Echo, they call it, that allows the United States to operate through proxies, through basically unvetted proxies. And so in other words, you might only have 89, we don't know, like this is what they say, you might only have 89 personnel, but how many proxies

are those 89 American personnel, you know, equipping, recruiting, training, and operating? And what effect does that create in creating, let's say, targets for Hezbollah in Lebanon? What vulnerabilities does it create and what assets does it give the United States in that region? It shows that there's been this kind of war buildup across the entire region. People might be wondering, wait a minute, we're getting attacked in Syria? How are we getting attacked in Syria? That doesn't make sense. We're not at war with Syria.

We're not in Syria. Well, yes, turns out we are in Syria. We're in Iraq. We're in Syria. Well, yes, turns out we are in Syria. We're in Iraq. We're in Syria. Every place we are, that's an opportunity for some group, some Iran-backed group to lob shells at us. Yeah, exactly. And we can put the next element up on the screen too, because this gets to it. This is from Ian Bremmer, who says 86,000 approximately Americans live in Lebanon, 600,000 Americans live in Israel. And to just pause for a moment and I think acknowledge that it's, from my perspective, entirely likely Iran is behind some of this. There are obvious questions

and I think there's good reason for skepticism about what our government is telling us as it pertains to Iran's involvement. That said, given the kinetic conflict now in Israel, given the fact that this is a very hot war now in Israel, I think of course it's possible that Iran is behind some of this. And I think that actually gets to the threats. We had how many Americans killed in the attacks? Upwards of 30 at this point in the original October 7th attack. Americans that were held as hostages. That puts responsibility on the conflict more and more dangerous and more and more likely by the sort of cavalier spreading out of troops across the world and particularly across the Middle East that in times of peace, we sort of look the other way. We don't think about it very much, but it's happening, especially because of things like 127 Echo that we don't even

think about or talk about on a normal day. And now when a conflict spills over into something serious, it's an incredibly fragile ecosystem that is really teetering on the precipice of something, a massive escalation. And to me, that's why one of the most important things that I think Barack Obama did was successfully negotiate the Iran deal with Russia and with five European countries. The argument that he was making at the time, and he ran over Israel to do it, it was Israel's number one objection to Obama was that he was inking this Iran deal. His argument was this conflict isn't working.

Constantly ratcheting up tensions is only going to lead to dangerous places. And it's also not preventing them from getting a nuclear weapon. So if we bring Iran into the fold, that know, AEI, let in the inspectors to follow their progress of their domestic kind of industrial nuclear capacity, have Russia involved, have us involved. It brings them into the fold so that they're less likely then to see benefit in some global or regional conflagration. It's the same reason that getting a ceasefire in Ukraine, getting to a truce there is so important because every day that wars go on, every day that tensions are ratcheted up, unpredictable things can happen. And I think

Iran, there's no evidence that Iran directed the Hamas attack. But the fact that Iran and Hamas are connected, then just spirals this into the place we are now. And I think that it isn't often reflected upon enough in Washington that people who advocate for a position, like a hardline approach to Iran, like Israel successfully lobbied Trump to withdraw the US from the Iran deal so Though those hardliners got what they wanted although it wasn't very hard I mean basically every Republican was opposed to the Iran nuclear deal So it wasn't as though Israel had to push very hard. Oh absolutely and and Trump wanted to do it Because it had Obama's name on it

It was the Obama, you know Iran nuclear deal so he Obama so he's like oh it has it had Obama's name on it. He hated the Iran deal. It was the Obama, you know, Iran nuclear deal. So Obama, so he's like, oh, it has, it's Obama's thing. I'm going to undo it like that. Like, yes, but it was Israel's number one priority, but yes, it was very easy to convince them to do it. And so he does that. So he got his wish and then Biden to his great discredit did not get the United States back into the Iran deal. And so I feel like people who got their wish there argued that this was going to be a better step forward. And look where we are. That's what I'm saying. There needs to be some accountability for if you get to implement and execute your preferred strategy and it blows

up, literally blows up, then there should be some reflection on that. Yeah, I mean, I may disagree on the point about the deal, but I think you're raising a really important point about how the parallel with Ukraine, when you have actually other nuclear powers that are attached to proxy wars or attached to conflicts that have become hot wars. We look at just Xi Jinping, and we talked about this, Chris and I talked about this last week. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were in Beijing last week,

peacocking and talking about how they're old friends. And whatever you think of those two countries, they are allied against the United States. And definitely against Israel. They try to sort of say that they're going to be the United States and definitely against Israel. They try to sort of say that they're going to be the new peace brokers of the world and they're going to step in and try to mediate these conflicts. They haven't done a great job of that so far. Putin started one of them and invaded Ukraine and Xi Jinping has not condemned that. So the prospects for peace in a world order led by those two, I don't think should give anyone much optimism.

That said, this is a real coalescing of countries against United States hegemony. And that means that this is even more fragile. That means that you have nuclear powers. You have North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, and the more people you have fanned out across the world on what the authority of 127 echo, it's terrifying. And it is so, so much more fragile, I think, than we realize. I feel like people are recognizing it now. But if China were to take this opportunity to move on Taiwan, and we saw them in a conflict with the Philippines, naval conflict with the Philippines last week, these are dominoes. And you don't always know that the first domino has fallen until years later when you look back.

And I think it's one of the few good things Obama did on foreign policy, but his argument was this unconditional support for Saudi Arabia, for the United Arab Emirates, both of them which want nuclear programs and Israel, which has a nuclear program. And isolation of Iran is not useful long term for the United States, that it's just going to lead to conflict. It obviously was working. Yeah. And so they tried to unwind that. The Washington swamp is so dominated by Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel, and the Republican Party is kind of lockstep with Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE. And so it reverted back to the mean,

and here we are with the world about to blow up. Speaking of the world being about to blow up, let's actually pivot here and take a look to what, look at what John Kirby told White House reporters in a briefing yesterday. He was pushed by one reporter who actually asked him about Barack Obama's Medium post saying that the Israeli government had basically not done enough to mitigate the harms to civilians in Gaza. And then she also pushed him on Obama saying that cutting off food, water, and electricity in Gaza risked Israel losing global support. Let's take a look at how John Kirby reacted.

President, former President Obama shared some of his views about the conflict yesterday. One of the things he said was that the Israelis haven't done enough to avoid killing or injuring civilians as they seek to take out Hamas in Gaza. Does President Biden share that view? President Biden has, since the very beginning of this conversation, been talking to the prime minister. And we have been talking to Israelis at various levels, at the cabinet level and below, about what separates us from Hamas as two democracies. And that's respect for human life. That's abiding by the law of war. That's by doing everything you can to try to prevent civilian casualties and collateral damage. And that's an active conversation we continue to

have with them. Former President Obama shared some of his views about the conflict yesterday. One of the things he said was that the Israelis haven't done enough to avoid killing or injuring civilians as they seek to take out Hamas in Gaza. Does President Biden share that view? President Biden has, since the very beginning of this conversation, been talking to the prime minister, and we have been talking to Israelis at various levels, at the cabinet level and below,

about what separates us from Hamas as two democracies, and that's respect for human life. That's abiding by the law of war. That's by doing everything you can to try to prevent civilian casualties and collateral damage, and that's an active conversation we continue to have with them. And speaking of those casualty numbers, we have those. If we could put up a five, of course, Israeli casualties, most of them civilians, and most of them on October 7th, 1,400, roughly 200 hostages still held. On the Gaza side, a Palestinian authority is saying that 700 civilians killed over the last 24 hours and at least 5,700 killed. We don't have a breakdown between civilians and militants there.

Overwhelmingly, if you look at the kind of destruction of Gaza, you know, north to south, you're going to see massive numbers of civilian casualties. The scenes that are coming, the scenes that have come out of October 7th are, you know, boggle the mind. And the images that we're seeing out of Gaza boggle the mind. Just absolute hell on earth. Those numbers boggle the mind, what has happened in such a short period of time. And I think they're undercounting significantly. I hope I'm wrong about that. So you can see where John Kirby is going to increasingly be pressed about this. And I want to read actually from Axios, which is, I think, kind of reacting to the back and forth yesterday. They don't say they are, but they're reporting this morning,

President Biden, despite full-throated support for Israel and its right to strike Hamas, has methodically and meticulously delayed the expected invasion of Gaza, U.S. officials tell us. That's Axios. That's an interesting thing to be leading off Axios' newsletter with, Ryan, the morning after John Kirby is pressed in such a public way on the fate of so many civilians in Gaza. Right. And if you watch that clip and you understand the dilemma that Kirby and the Biden administration and Israel in when it comes to the siege of Gaza, there is nobody out there who's going to say, you know what? Yes, it does sound reasonable to cut off food, energy, and water from a population that was 2 million at the start. Sure, we understand that from a military perspective.

Nobody. It's utterly indefensible. Israel's argument that they've come up with so far is, well, Hamas has some energy. They have some fuel and they're using it for rockets. Okay, that's terrible. Bad for Hamas. But that's a tiny amount of fuel. That is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the entire enclave being blocked off. We're talking about people, because the salination plants are down, drinking salty, dirty water. The UN says you need roughly 15 liters

minimum of water for all purposes, hygiene, drinking, etc., just for basic survival. The average Gazan is down to less than one liter of water a day. That's for everything, start to finish, for 24 hours. You can't survive on that. And there's nobody out there who thinks that there's any kind of military justification for that It's also just straight-up illegal. It's like against international laws of war And so and it's why I think Obama was you know, Obama didn't talk about apartheid He didn't talk about you know

He just he laid out that that I think that's why he's zeroed in on that because it's there's just no counter argument to it That's and that's where Obama likes to go. Yeah. Is a place that is kind of comfortable, but also critical. Let's actually, I know that we don't like to skip around, but if we could, because it fits so perfectly with what Ryan just said, go to A8. This is another John Kirby quote that has drawn a lot of criticism from the briefing yesterday.

If we could roll A8, that would be great. This is war. It is combat. It is bloody. It is ugly. And it's going to be messy. And innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward. I wish I could tell you something different.

I wish that that wasn't going to happen. But it is going to happen. And that doesn't make it right. It doesn't make it dismissible. It doesn't mean that we aren't going to still express concerns about that and do everything we can to help the Israelis do everything they can to minimize it. But that's unfortunately the nature of conflict. I don't think we've ever heard comments like that from a White House podium ever in American history. At the very end, he says, obviously, we're going to do what we can to help Israel do what it can to minimize

civilian casualties. But if the preceding 30 seconds is all about how, look, civilian casualties are inevitable. This is war. It's going to happen. And then to say, we're going to continue to express concerns about civilian deaths that have not happened yet, that we are going to be complicit in, really undermines how concerned you actually are. You just can't plausibly and authentically express concerns for something that you're about to do. Because if you're really concerned, you could not do it. You could just not. That's interesting because my reaction to that clip was his honesty, which I agree with you is unusual, is something that, especially as journalists, but even as people who are critical of the kind of political establishment, we often demand. That's exactly the sort of honesty.

I just want different honesty. Right. But I mean, I think that's almost commendably honest because that is at its sort of most basic level, our approach to this. And I mean, he's not wrong about it. Like he's reflecting US policy accurately there. And what I've been surprised, I guess, to learn is that some of the pretense that was articulated in past bombing campaigns was more than just pretense. So let's say take May 2021 when Israel's last bombing Gaza, you know, actually I think there was a three-day bombing campaign in 2022, but the longer bombing campaign in 2021 was accompanied by claims that civilian casualties were being minimized. And the number of civilian casualties then compared to now is

a fraction of what we're seeing. And so when you remove even the pretense, you had an Israeli, top Israeli defense official said, he said, the goal is damage, not precision. So when you're explicitly on the record saying that you're going for damage and not precision, and you're explicitly minimizing your ability to reduce civilian casualties, it turns out that in real life, many more real lives do get snuffed out. Like there is actually a link between the rhetoric. It's not just rhetoric, in other words. Like there were some gloves on, we now realize, you know, in hindsight. And we can see that by what we see with the gloves off.

Hamas is, I mean, makes it virtually impossible for Israel to exist on a day-to-day basis with any semblance of peace and security without having, obviously, as, you know, we fund like a fifth of their military budget on an annual basis although it pales in comparison and speaking of Hamas this is something I want to ask the general when he gets here yeah they have they clearly have invested heavily in missile technology they yesterday they spent more missiles it feels like than the last couple weeks to very little effect other than striking fear right they're not killing people the iron dome and they know something about a lot of them are landing in the airfields. Yet they have zero anti-aircraft capacity. These F-16s are flying over Gaza unmolested. Drones are flying over unmolested.

That's a great point. How is that possible? To me, it feels like everyone's incentives line up to have Gazan civilians suffer. But I'd love to hear the general's take on this. Why has Hamas been unable to develop even rudimentary anti-aircraft? Now, presumably, it's a more fixed structure, and so it would be easier to take out immediately. Whenever you see wars break out, the anti-aircraft weaponry lasts a couple days. So maybe that's what it is. But we'll ask him, see what his take is, because obviously I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Well, I think that's actually a really important point. And I think actually the point about Hamas is really important, too, because there's no—Israel has to—if Israel wants to sort of stamp out Hamas, that goal in Gaza, that goal is, I mean, without, because of the way people live in Gaza, without harming civilians to the degree that we're seeing right now when we had the death counter up over 5,700 as of right now, that number is sure to climb because the ground invasion hasn't even started yet. When you see numbers like that, and when you look at the reality, I mean, if the United States is saying that we're going to help Israel minimize the casualties, and Israel is saying that we're not about precision, we're about maximizing damage, that's a really difficult thing for the White House, especially because as we started this

block, we were talking about how the U.S. has a presence fanned out across the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of civilians in Israel, plenty of civilians, well, actually just people stationed in Lebanon. I forget what the numbers are. We have it right here from The Intercept. Eighty-nine U.S. military personnel deployed to Lebanon. All of these different, I mean, this ecosystem is very, very fragile. And it is, you know, when Axios is saying Biden is trying to remind Netanyahu that U.S. interests need to be sort of at front of his mind when he's making these decisions, which is also just a strange position for the Israeli government. There was a great tablet piece over the summer about how U.S. aid actually harms the Israeli cause because it puts one hand behind their back, essentially, because now they have to keep the interest of the U.S., which has 600,000 people

in Israel front of mind and presence fanned out throughout the Middle East, top of mind. That is, I mean, the task of minimizing civilian casualties in that situation, but also allowing Israel to stamp out an existential threat, good luck. And the scale of the slaughter is turning the world against the Israeli assault. We saw that yesterday with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. We can play some of his comments that were taken in Israel as like deeply offensive. Let's roll Guterres. This is A7. The relentless bombardment of Gaza by Israeli forces, the level of civilian casualties, and the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods continue to mount and are deeply alarming.

I mourn and honor dozens of UN colleagues working for UNRWA, sadly at least 35 and counting, killed in the bombardment of Gaza over the last two weeks. I owe to their families my condemnation of these and many other similar killings. The protection of civilians is paramount in any armed conflict. Protecting civilians can never mean using them as human shields. Protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than one million people to evacuate to the South, where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine, and no fuel, and then continuing to bomb the South itself.

I'm deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza. The Israeli foreign ministry reacted extremely harshly to that statement, but the numbers and the stories that we're seeing out of there tell a brutal picture. If we can put up, what is it, A9 here, we're starting to get something, you know, the UN reporting 42% of Gaza's housing units are damaged or destroyed and 1.4 million Gazans, well more than half the population, has been displaced. That's a statistic that justifies the entire idea of statistics. That's just a monstrous number. If we can put up a 10 from my old HuffPost colleague, Phil Lewis, quoting the AP,

the World Health Organization says nearly two-thirds of Gaza's health facilities have ceased functioning. And I just think that those numbers are difficult for us to absorb over here. Yeah, definitely. What that looks and feels like. And I think it helps to explain why somebody like Antonio Guterres would be willing to go out on what seems to us like a limb and be so heavily critical despite the politics over at the UN. Yeah, I'm sure it didn't surprise the Israeli delegation too much, but I will say I also think it's hard for us to understand over here the task of, I mean, virtually everyone in the United States

after October 7th said, and worldwide said, Israel has a right to respond because there cannot be any type of incentive for people, no matter what you actually think of what's happening in Gaza, for the humanitarian or the crimes against humanity that occurred in Israel on October 7th. There cannot be an incentive for that. And so Israel has a right to respond. Now, how Israel responds is obviously where there's disagreement, massive disagreement that spans the full spectrum. But also just about everybody in the world stage looks and says Israel's response

should minimize civilian casualties. Well, what does that mean? Does that mean you stop at 5,700? I mean, it's just such a gross thing to even have to talk or think about. But there is a real challenge at A, being able to respond, and B, doing it in a tiny, tiny area like Gaza that is so densely packed with civilians, where you have a group like Hamas that even if it's overstated, does sometimes, even just for space reasons, whether it's for space reasons or much worse reasons, which I tend to side with the latter, has military facilities and planning places and puts missiles in civilian areas that just makes it incredibly difficult to have any kind of response that also minimizes civilian deaths. So all that is to say, this is just, and there was, the Israeli government put out video

yesterday of some of the people who are implicated in those crimes against humanity in Israel, talking about how mad they are at Hamas leadership for putting the people of Gaza in the situation that they're in. And I don't take very seriously what they're saying, but I do think there's truth to the fact that Hamas put the people of Gaza in just an ugly and unbelievable situation, because from Israel's perspective, there does have to be some kind of response. That does not mean that Israel should not be prosecuting this war. In the scope of history, it would be very unusual to supply your enemies with food and water, et cetera, et cetera. But it is morally what Israel should be doing in this situation. And they should be. They absolutely should be

minimizing the harm and the suffering of all of these civilians, all of the children in Gaza. It's not easy, though. And it makes our own political problems pale in comparison. Let's take a look at the journey of Tom Emmer anyway yesterday. If we can put up B1, we're going to talk about the speaker fight, which might resolve itself today. So yesterday morning, and this is Jake Sherman reporting that Tom Emmer had dropped out of the race for speaker yesterday morning, as we reported here. Tom Emmer was the speaker designate. If you took a long nap by the time you woke up, he was done. He put up B2 here. He had more than 20 no votes. He didn't crack 200. He needed 217 on the floor. It was clear he wasn't going to get there. If you put up B3, the reason it became clear that he wasn't going to get there was that Donald J. Trump,

despite a slobbering phone call from Tom Emmer, put out just an utterly brutal, I have many wonderful friends wanting to be Speaker of the House, and some are truly great warriors. Rhino Tom Emmer, who I do not know well, is not one of them. He never respected the power of a Trump endorsement. Anyway, it's delightful truth social from Trump as always. And his operation texted it out to everybody in the house. And within moments, Tom Emmer said, all right, forget this. I'm out of here. He was the whip. Maybe he still is technically the whip. And so he knows how to count votes. He knows he didn't have it. So they went back to the drawing board and they emerge with Mike Johnson. It sounds fake.

Right. I know. We're going to take their word for the fact that Mike Johnson is a Republican member of Congress. Is a human American man. But you don't have to be a Republican member of Congress to be Speaker of the House, so whatever. That's true. They picked Mike Johnson. So Gates himself, who lit this fire, is saying that Mike Johnson is good enough to douse it. And so tell us, so it looks like, looks like we might get a Speaker Mike Johnson. So Emily, what can you tell us about Speaker Johnson, Speaker Designate Johnson? You know, it's, I can confirm that he is a Republican member of Congress and a human American man. Excellent. Good start. Great start for Mike Johnson. He's from Louisiana. I think he was actually just elected in 2017. He's the vice chair of the House GOP conference.

So he's in kind of a leadership position, although sort of a, to the extent you can say, backbench leadership position, that's kind of where he is. He's a very, like, he's actually as kind of archetypical as he sounds, right? Like a boring Republican middle-aged white guy to use the cartoon. Well, Emmer ran an insurance company. Could it be better than that? Let's see. Could it be better than Emmer? Because Emmer actually, and I'm going to, like you guys are going to get.

So Emmer was funny. He was almost an astronaut or something. You guys are going to get annoyed with me today, but I really, I'm going to skip ahead while we're talking about archetypical Republicans. If we could go to B6, this is actually how Emmer could maybe outrun Mike Johnson in the sort of cartoonishly Republican middle-aged white guy race.

He got stuck on upside down on a Zoom call. Today's gig economy sprung out from the last recession. It offers a job to anyone who wants one. During COVID-19, we must make sure that our nation's sole proprietors and the smallest of small businesses receive timely. Will the gentleman suspend? I'm sorry, Mr. Emmer? Yes. Are you okay? I am. You're upside down, Tom. I don't know how to fix that.

Can he turn right side up? And get it right side up? What's that cat? Yeah, Madam Chair. Cat? Is this a metaphor? I don't know, but it's upside down. They couldn't even figure out why he was upside down, what it meant that he was upside down,

let alone him figuring out how to not be upside down. Mike Johnson, I believe, is slightly younger than Tom Emmer. I don't know exactly how much younger. I think he is younger. But all that is to say, he's a very, let's say, he's a well-respected kind of social conservative. He's the type of guy who would speak at CPAC, which is sort of unusual. What we mean by that, hardcore, what, like pro-life

guy. Yep. Anti-gay marriage guy. Yep. Like that whole thing. So you scratch the Republican conference, you're going to get a lot of those people. They've done a decent job of kind of just having the Supreme Court take the lead on that stuff. But it looks like with the elevation of Mike Johnson, some of that is coming to the fore. And again, this is where Tom Emmer yesterday, I think you were following some of this. I think some of it was overstated, but there was a storyline that Tom Emmer's support for same-sex marriage was a sticking point for some of the hardcore Republicans that wouldn't give- There was one guy who told him that or something. Right. Who told him? I forget. Somebody told him, that's why I'm not voting for you. Yes. It became like a minor subplot. And

when you have one or two people in a situation like this with the math for Republicans, that's like an issue, even though it wouldn't be if they had a bigger margin. It's a real issue. And so actually, I think what we're seeing happen here is that they have exhausted the time they're comfortable with. They already did not have enough time to do what they need to do to fund the government going into December because they don't want to do omnibuses. They want to do single subject bills. They want to fund the government that way. They can't really agree on any of those funding levels. They actually have, you know, as kind of funny as I think it is to see the House that doesn't do anything good,

hasn't done anything good in a while in chaos. They actually do have things to do by the end of the year if we want to avoid a government shutdown. If they want to avoid a government shutdown, there are some serious things that do need funding. And I think they realized that they had exhausted all their options. It actually looked for about 24 hours like Byron Donalds, who got the backing of Freedom Caucus people and were suddenly really excited about Byron Donalds. I like Byron Donalds.

They got behind him briefly. The conservative movement started aligning behind Byron Donalds. I like Byron Donalds. They got behind him briefly. The conservative movement started aligning behind Byron Donalds. But I would say Mike Johnson is maybe like a more like milquetoast kind of boring version of some of those flamethrowers in that he's not like on CNN, like Byron Donalds always on CNN yelling at people. And it's relatively funny. But Mike Johnson isn't going to be that guy. He might decide to be that guy, but Republicans also sort of realize that being Speaker of the House kind of ruins your career. They don't necessarily want to put their rising stars

in the Speaker of the House position because you end up having to compromise in ways that are going to really piss off the base and, you know, denigrate your fundraising ability, undercut your fundraising ability, I should say. So he's sort of a run-of-the-mill hardcore Republican, which is... Chair of the Republican Study Group, which is the kind of big block of conservative Republicans. Yeah. And Speaker, I think, is cool to have on your Wikipedia, especially if your name is Mike Johnson.

Mike Johnson. Because it's going to be in parentheses, The Speaker. The speaker. You get a portrait, right? There's got to be hundreds of Mike Johnsons on Wikipedia. So it's hard to distinguish yourself just as a member of Congress. Yes. If you're a speaker, that helps. It got so bad, if we put up before, Kevin McCarthy thought he briefly had a path back in. He was floating an idea where he would be a speaker and Jim Jordan would be assistant speaker which is funny because like there's already that title already exists it's called majority leader although they did actually create an assistant speaker ship for Jim Clyburn in the house back in I think

2019 because no no it would have been when they got bumped out of the majority because you get fewer leadership posts in in the minority than I think 2019. No, no, it would have been when they got bumped out of the majority, because you get fewer leadership posts in the minority than you do in the majority. 2015. Yeah, and so nobody wanted to bump Clyburn out, so they kind of made a new position that allowed him to stay in. But that would be weird. Does Jordan go to every White House meeting when the Speaker's called over? Yeah. Like, would have been funny. But looks like, you know, Mike Johnson might have it. Yeah.

You think? Yeah, so that's the thing. It feels like what's happened is they think they've exhausted the clock. They've run out the clock to the point where they are kind of itching to get back to business to do what they want to do. And they're also realizing the public is looking at them and laughing. I think there was a brief moment where, you know, nobody on a regular basis, like your average American doesn't know or really care that much who's the Speaker of the

House. And I don't think they necessarily should. But at a certain point, when you're going through what he's like the fourth guy to get votes in the conference, like it's starting to just look completely ridiculous that they have the they're getting the votes in the conference, private votes. And then when you go to the floor, they can't hit the 217 mark. Like, it's just stupid. I think all the talk of Democrats being willing to help and some Republicans beginning to entertain that prospect took away some of the leverage of the crazy eights, as McCarthy calls the Gates crew. So it's like, okay, because if we keep holding the line here, we can keep holding the line, but we're not going to get Mike Johnson. You know, we're going to get whatever, you know, whoever Gottheimer wants to pluck out of

like the no labels problem solvers thing. Right. They realized it was giving ammunition to the centrists and the more ammunition they give the centrists in the court of public opinion, it was more and more likely that there was going to be a deal struck with Democrats that was really bad for them, which was always a possibility. And Gates knew that. And if Gates, this is actually kind of a win for Gates because when he did this, the likelihood that they were going to get someone much worse than Kevin McCarthy from a Freedom Caucus perspective was really high because who could step into that role? Steve Scalise, Tom Emmer, those were the big names. Like Emmer was one of the biggest names because people in the Freedom Caucus thought that he had

brokered some compromises that were good for them and some deals that were good for them, kind of behind the scenes over the course of this last Congress. That said, he still is very business friendly, very establishment friendly in a way that wouldn't always go well for them. And so when Gates got rid of McCarthy, McCarthy was one of the few people, as we've talked about many times, that was willing and had good relationships with the Freedom Caucus and was willing to listen to them. Mike Johnson is someone who the Freedom Caucus should be pretty happy with as Speaker of the House. I think it's unusual that you have somebody that is on such good terms with the conservative movement

that's in a position of Republican leadership. So that's kind of a win for Matt Gaetz, even though, you know, do I care that much that he threw Congress into chaos for the last couple weeks? Honestly, not really. Nobody really does. I mean, so all of this is still at the stage of maneuvering because it hasn't resulted in policy yet. But would you say that this power play ended up being ultimately to the power benefit of the right in the House or not so much? Or is it too early to

tell? I think it'll depend on how the Johnson speakership goes. And I am assuming, I think it might take them a couple of votes today. I'm assuming that they have, you know, run to the end of their line here. I don't know that for sure. It could still go either way. They don't really know. But I do think this is the most likely that they will have a speaker by the end of the day of any of the previous people who have made it out of conference. So, again, could take a couple votes today. They don't know at this point, and that's very clear. But I would say it's more likely than

it has been in the other situations that they leave today with the Speaker of the House. All right, let's move on to one of the other circuses down in Georgia. Another one of President Donald Trump's alleged co-conspirators in the RICO case down in Georgia, where Trump is accused of trying to go out and find me 11,000 votes and flip the election and create some fake electors. His attorney, Jenna Ellis, pleaded guilty in rather dramatic fashion to a much lesser charge, which suggests that she's ready to cooperate at a trial. Let's play Jenna Ellis here speaking to the judge. Thank you, Your Honor, for the opportunity to address the court.

As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously, and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings. In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, I believed that challenging the results on behalf of President Trump should be pursued in a just and legal way. I endeavored to represent my client to the best of my ability. I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information, especially since my role involved speaking to the media and to legislators in various states. What I did not do, but should have done, Your Honor, was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true.

In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence. I believe in and I value election integrity. If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges. I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse. If we can put up the next element, she's basically charged with aiding and abetting false statements and writings, conditions of the plea agreement, according to NBC News, include the requirements she served five years of probation. I hope that's unsupervised for her sake. I've been on supervised probation. It sucks. Pay $5,000 of restitution to the Georgia Secretary of State and testify at hearings or trials in the case.

I'm trying to move past that you were on supervised probation. It sucked. I don't recommend it. Noted. They treat you like total garbage. You've got to take drug tests. It costs you money for the privilege. It sucked. I don't recommend it. They treat you like total garbage. You gotta take drug tests. It costs you money for the privilege. It's unpleasant. That sounds unpleasant. Sometimes I just learn so much of you at unexpected times. But you know, Jenna Ellis, to Ryan's point, also required to complete 100 hours of community service and write an apology letter to the

citizens of Georgia. She also agreed to provide any hours of community service and write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia. She also agreed to provide any requested documents or evidence not posted about the case on social media and not have any communication with any witnesses or the media until the case has been closed. Now, we do have another element that sort of looks back on, it sort of puts together, this is from I think the Republican Accountability Project or Accountable GOP, something like that. It's their Twitter handle. They spliced together videos of Jenna Ellis from 2020 with Jenna Ellis just yesterday. Let's take a look at that.

Strike force team that is working on behalf of the president and the campaign to make sure that our constitution is protected. We are a nation of rules. All of your fake news headlines are dancing around the merits of this case and are trying to delegitimize what we are doing here. Let me be very clear that our objective is to make sure to preserve and protect election integrity. What is the point of all this? Well, the point of this, of course, is to get to fair and accurate results because the election was stolen and President Trump won by a landslide.

We know already that the election results in at least five of the swing states were irredeemably compromised. So we already have sufficient evidence for these states to decertify their electoral results. Your question is fundamentally flawed when you're asking where is the evidence. You clearly don't understand the legal process. What we have asked for in the court is to not have the certification of false results. I think it's actually easy to watch the clip of her yesterday and have sympathy. And I'm not saying that's entirely unwarranted. When I see that, I think good for Jenna Ellis. I actually wish a lot of people that have sort of come into Trump's orbit and been poisoned or just compromised in the frenzy of Republican politics in the last few

years would come out and kind of explain how they got sucked into all of this and how seemingly reasonable people, I mean, a lot of folks who lived in New York City under Rudy Giuliani do not recognize, I mean, whatever people originally thought about him, they don't recognize the Rudy Giuliani that's become a close Trump ally from the Rudy Giuliani as when he was mayor of New York City and wonder, you know, how is it that people who are seemingly intelligent, reasonable, normal, successful people come out and say things like in that last clip, one that stuck out to me was Jenna Alice saying President Trump won in a landslide. That I think it is almost impossible

to understate, to emphasize how seriously it changed the country in 2020 and will have an effect on the country for years and years to come because the trust deficit there, people like Jenna Ellis were being told, and she played a huge role in this because she was on TV saying, Donald Trump won in a landslide. And people around the country look at that

and say, this is an attorney for the president of the United States who has information that must be pretty good because she's an attorney for the president of the United States that is telling her that he won in a landslide. That's exactly how you get people sacking the Capitol because they think that the election is being stolen. A landslide election is being stolen out from under their noses.

And honestly, when they're being told that by an attorney for the president who is so confident she's saying it on television, that responsibility, I mean, she should be crying when she reflects on it because it is so tragic the way that people were misled by, and she's passing the buck to other attorneys, right? And I think that's, you know, again, I don't know what the truth is to that, But she obviously feels badly for doing it, I guess. I mean, maybe those are crocodile tears. But, man. You seem pretty real. And maybe she was getting bad information from, I don't doubt that someone was getting bad information from Sidney Powell

or Rudy Giuliani in 2020. But even she is saying that she failed to do her due diligence. And that is for damn sure. Right. And some of it is a little bit of hubris and youth in the sense that I think it's true that Trump had run through so many attorneys. A hundred percent. That he's shot an inexperienced young woman who's kind of easy to bully and push around by some of the more senior attorneys. And maybe it's youth and hubris that doesn't allow her to ask the

question of, I have so little experience. Yeah. What on earth am I doing in this incredibly pivotal role, advising a president of the United States who's trying to overturn an election? Right. Like, it's not my skills, background, genius that got me here. Nobody else would do this. And then to ask yourself, well, why would nobody else do this? A, because he doesn't pay them.

B, because they looked at it and they're like, the facts are not on your side here. And one of the most wonderful things that the United States kind of has given to the world is the peaceful transfer of power. We've delivered a lot of pain to the world, but the transfer of power over thousands of years has been a place where so many people have died just for the pursuit of vanity and power by different factions. And to have developed for hundreds of years a way to transfer that power from one side to another, from one faction to another, without people dying, is an innovation that we just can't kind of allow to just slide away because one guy didn't like the results of the election that leads to that transfer of power. And so you try to undermine that, you come for the king and you miss, you're going to

get a $5,000 fine to the Georgia Secretary of State. And what she's doing there is not quibbling with the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's mail-in voting laws, right? She's saying Donald Trump won in a landslide. And Sidney Powell was out talking about Dominion voting machines. And by the way, while all of this is happening, Mark Zuckerberg is steering millions of dollars into a partisan electioneering project that people behind it actually told Time magazine was, like, they essentially, Molly Ball wrote a piece basically being like, this was a conspiracy, but it was a good one to, quote, rig the election. So while you're talking about Dominion voting machines and Donald Trump winning in a landslide, there are actual serious questions about money in

politics and money in elections being raised, and nobody is talking about them anymore because Jenna Ellis was saying Donald Trump won in a landslide. Just really quickly before we get to Mark Reynolds, I'll read Jonathan Turley. He said, Ellis is the type of plea that tends to concentrate the mind. And Turley has been generally favorable to Trump. He's a George Washington University law professor, hardly like a creature of the conservative movement, but somebody who has kind of come to Trump's defense in some of these cases and talking about how their lawfare. Powell pleaded to relatively minor charges. So she pleaded, as people remember last week, involving unauthorized access to voting machines in areas. Those charges tend to be easy to prove. It is not clear if she would tie Trump to a conspiracy or racketeering.

Ellis pleaded guilty to false statements that could conceivably implicate the president if she claims that he was aware of the falsity and facilitated the crime. Moreover, Ellis recently broke with Trump. She called him a malignant narcissist who cannot admit mistakes and said she would never vote for him again. Meanwhile, we can put element four, C4, up on the screen. Just yesterday, ABC News reported that Donald Trump's ex-chief of staff, as all of this was going down, Mark Meadows, was granted immunity and told the special counsel that he warned Donald Trump about

2020 election claims. Now, this report says Meadows, quote, repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 election that allegations of significant voting fraud were baseless and that Trump had been, quote, dishonest with his quick claim of victory right after the polls closed. So to Turley's point about Ellis potentially implicating Donald Trump in this conspiracy that Fannie Willis has charged him with, Fannie Willis has charged him with, that is now a position Mark Meadows reportedly is in. I think the story has been questioned by people close to Meadows. I think they're saying that it's not necessarily true. But we'll see. He's going to testify to it anyway.

That's the thing. What are people saying is true? How do you mean? So you said that people close to Trump don't think Meadows' claim is true? I think people close to Meadows have said this story is not necessarily accurate. And that could mean different things. Oh, interesting. I see. I see. I see. Yeah. And again, I remember when we were going through the RICO indictment out of Georgia, one of the unfortunate things about it is that a lot of the conspiracy charges against people like Jenna Ellis

was obviously lawfare and was obviously ridiculous. But then there were kernels in that lawsuit. It was like two or three of them where Willis shows that people like Ellis, I don't remember if she was specifically one of them, but people in Trump's legal circle and Trump himself, there were a couple of instances where they were obviously spreading things they knew that were not true. And if that had just been like the tight indictment instead of like conspiracy because they booked a conference room and whatever else, man, that would be really devastating, but maybe it's actually, maybe that's how they, maybe they did that intentionally,

to get people like Ellis to flip by just flooding the zone with different charges and Meadows too. So moving over to the Senate side, progressive senators and House members have been under a lot of pressure from supporters of Palestinian rights lately to back a ceasefire in Gaza. If we can put up this first element here, it began with nearly 300 Bernie Sanders alumni calling on the senator to back a ceasefire in Gaza. It is now well over 330 former staff members for Bernie Sanders' congressional offices and his presidential campaign. So in the letter sent Tuesday, which is provided to The Intercept, former staffers asked Sanders to introduce a Senate-side companion to the ceasefire now resolution in the House to support an end to U.S. funding, quote, for war crimes against the Palestinian people, the expansion of settlements, and the occupation of Palestinian lands, unquote, and to support an end to the blockade of Gaza.

The letter writes, President Biden clearly values your counsel, as is shown by the ways you've managed to shape the outcomes of this presidency. The staffers wrote, we urge you to make it clear what is at stake in this crisis politically, morally, and strategically. They also released a video. It's up on my Twitter feed. I don't know if we, I don't think we have the video here. Is that right? That has a bunch of the staffers directing comments directly to Bernie Sanders, who has called for kind of the bombs to stop on all side, which a lot of people are like, that's close enough to a ceasefire. And that is saying stop firing, stop and cease, same thing. What they're saying is introduce a Senate resolution so that there's something to organize around. The House has a resolution that

people can, you know, the members of the House can sign on to. The Senate does not have one. Saying Bernie Sanders could be the one to put that in. On the other side of the progressive wing in the Senate, you've got John Fetterman, who has been one of the kind of most outspoken, unconditional supporters of Israel's war on Gaza since it began. Here he is at a Pod Save America event recently. You know, it's to remember that Hamas doesn't want peace. He doesn't want to be negotiated with or, I mean, and, you know, they massacred, you know, innocent children, women, and now they have over 200 hostages with them right now as well, too. So I really believe that I'm always going to decide to stand on the side of Israel,

you know, in this place. So one of the things that Fetterman's critics have pointed out is that it's so, and we can go back to the primary that he had last cycle. He worked very closely with DMFI, Democratic Majority for Israel, on his Israel position paper. Like he reached out to them, like the Jewish Insider has reported this. I've done some reporting on this. Reached out to them, said, here's, you know, we'd like to hear from you. So they had a meeting. Then they constructed an Israel-Palestine, you know, policy platform, sent it back to DMFI. DMFI said, this is pretty good. And they've said this all in the right. This is pretty good. Here are the changes we'd

like to see. Kicked it back to the Fetterman campaign. He's like, we're good to go. And the politics underlying all that were that Conor Lamb, who's a conservative Democrat also running for Senate, had been very publicly pleading for super PAC support. His brother was out there explicitly saying, we can beat Fetterman, but we don't have the money. We need a super PAC to come in. Here are the messages that you could run. We can win.

And AIPAC and DMFI looked at the Fetterman interaction regarding Israel-Palestine payment and said, we're not going to back Conor Lamb. We're not backing Fetterman, but we're not going to back Conor Lamb. So that's the previous context. The future context is that Pennsylvania is a swing state. And so if AIPAC decided that it wanted to get in, in a general election, you know, they could certainly do that. And so according to people close to him, this has never been an issue. This is not one that's like coming from the heart. Like for a lot of people. That's interesting because he's a creature of the left. Right. But for a lot of people, including Summer Lee, AOC, others, they've said publicly,

growing up, Israel-Palestine was not an issue that we talked about. Like in a lot of working class communities. Right. You don't think about it. It just doesn't come up. Yeah. It doesn't mean that you don't, you know, it's just. Foreign policy in general. Foreign policy in general. Unless your community is being shipped to war, which is very true in the 2000s. And a little bit of it comes through in that video. It sounded like for a second he was referring to Hamas as like a person, like a leader of an organization rather than the organization itself. He said he and then he said they. Right.

And so people, but so the politics of this are if I get on the wrong side of it, I can face, you know, millions and millions of dollars. Now, lots of his former staff and The Intercept reported this too, if we can put up this next element, have sent a letter to Fetterman as well, urging him to support an Israel Hamas ceasefire. This is kind of part of this very unusual bubbling up of dissent from kind of staff members and young people around the country. You also had, if we can put up this next element, the political director for Ro Khanna. He started on a Monday, and it was really how it started, how it's going. It's like professional news. I'm joining Ro Khanna. He started on a Monday, and it was really how it started, how it's going.

It's like professional news. I'm joining Ro Khanna's office. Two weeks later, he tried to get Representative Ro Khanna to sponsor Rashida Tlaib's ceasefire now resolution. He refused. Personal note, I resigned from my job on Monday because of a refusal to call for a ceasefire. I'll be doing everything in my power to stand against war. Ro Khanna gave me a statement saying, you know, that he's still, they're still tight. He's a passionate support, passionate voice for human rights for Palestine. I will continue to call for protecting civilian life, humanitarian aid, Khanna said, and living up to the standards of the Geneva Convention, but would not be signing on to leave. So this is Adam Raymer resigning within two weeks of starting over in Connors' office. So it's a real kind of, would you call it grassroots? I don't know,

because it's a little higher level than grassroots. You've seen some of it over in the State Department. There's so much kind of hostility to the State Department policy. Blinken had to have a listening session with dozens of members. Josh Paul, a veteran employee, as we have up here, resigned in protest, putting up a letter explaining that he felt like the unconditional support for Israel was trending in such a dangerous direction that he couldn't stand by it. So it'll be interesting to see how this kind of almost generational divide continues to influence American policy. So this is one of the reasons this issue is, I think, politically,

one of the toughest and most interesting issues from a political perspective is that elite opinion on Israel and Palestine is in and of itself divided, as opposed to elite opinion on Medicare for all or elite opinion on same-sex marriage. There's a legitimate divide among elites when it comes to Israel and Palestine. And so you see some people in positions of power saying, you know, the media is pro-Israel. We have seen really bad media coverage from people who are pro-Israel, and we have seen really bad media coverage from people who are pro-Palestine. We have seen really bad arguments from people who are pro-Israel, and we've seen really bad arguments from powerful people who are pro-Palestine.

And what you just said about the generational divide is really interesting because I wonder if that actually is where the split in elite opinion comes in. Because both sides are right that the media is in some ways pro-Israel and the media is in some ways pro-Palestine because there are people on both sides of that divide in elite circles, which is super unusual for any of these issues. You just don't see that happening. There are no elites that, for instance, support Donald Trump. It's so rare. I mean, there are a couple billionaires and people in conservative media that are supportive of Donald Trump, but we're talking it's like nine you know, nine to one ratio. But it's more split. And it's not wrong to say that there are positions of power that are disproportionately pro-Israel. But it's also not wrong to say there are people in positions of power, for instance, the State Department, all the way up the chain in Ro Khanna's office, to the point where there's

enough staffers to put these letters together and to really challenge Bernie Sanders. The Biden administration itself is kind of split. You had Karine Jean-Pierre pivoting. This was a super interesting clip from Tuesday, I'm sorry, from Monday, when she pivoted. She was asked about anti-Semitism and immediately pivoted to xenophobia against Muslims. And then the White House tried to backtrack that. I think that reflects the internal kind of ideological tug of war that is in all elite circles, not so much on the right, but it's especially acute on the left, that you have people who are very vehemently supportive of Israel and people who are vehemently supportive of Palestine. And that is, I just find that to be very unusual on almost any other issue.

And I think also when you get these kind of less elite communications operations, like with Kirby and Karine Jean-Pierre, you end up accidentally getting more honest stuff out of them. Interesting. Because a good communicator would not have made that mistake that KGP made. A good communicator would not have made the mistakes that Kirby has been making lately. And being honest. And just, yeah, a little bit too much honesty coming through. Yeah. And then you'd be like, oh, whoa. Your job is not to be honest.

Yes, your job is propaganda. Our job is to be as honest as possible. Your job. You're supposed to be the propagandist. You're supposed to make the sift through this to get to the truth, not just kind of accidentally drop it out here. Yeah, exactly. Another phenomenon developing on the left has been kind of cancel culture coming home to roost on a lot of the people who have been pushing for support for Palestinian rights over

the past several weeks. The biggest, not the biggest, but I think the moment that got the most attention was from a man named Michael Eisen. If we can put this first one up. He posted, I've been informed that I'm being replaced as the editor-in-chief of eLife for retweeting an Onion piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians. What is eLife? It does not matter. Nobody knows. It's a thing. It's apparently a

big enough thing that has a lot of other employees because you had other, you know, since then you have had, I'm looking at it now, 17.6 million views on this tweet, even if you think Elon Musk is inflating that by 10x, it's still been passed around rapidly and significantly. And you've had a number of other eLife managers and employees coming out and saying, I'm stepping down or I reject this notion that our editor-in-chief should be fired for posting an Onion clip. But it's not just that. You're seeing it all over the place. A writer was – a sports writer was fired for – actually, this one – I don't know about that one.

This was a guy. Yeah, this was a guy who he said this post sucks. Solidarity with Palestine always. Because the 76ers. It was on top of a 76ers thing just saying that, you know, mourning the hundreds of innocent lives lost. There are a lot of people who kind of crossed lines of decency and ended up losing jobs over that. And I think that's different. Yes.

Than expressing a political opinion and losing your job over that. And I think that's different than expressing a political opinion and losing your job over it. Because everybody says you don't have a right to a job. And okay, you don't have a right to a job. But also, we have a right to defend you for losing your job over a political statement. But if you cross lines of decency, then that's a slightly different situation. But a lot of these are not that case. You had the 92nd Street Y canceled a Viet Thang win event because he signed an open letter supporting Palestine, but there was nothing offensive in that. Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times has a great column that picks up on wins, kind of cancellation. Literally,

his event was canceled. She writes about how Nathan Thrall had a bunch of events canceled. He had written a great book called A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, which is about a kind of father who's searching for a lost Palestinian boy in the West Bank and uses that narrative to write about daily life for Palestinians in the West Bank, a bunch of organizations said, we cannot do anything that humanizes Palestinians in this moment. So canceled a bunch of those events. You had somebody who was chanting Free Palestine. Yeah, this is the next element. This one here on the London Tube, who was then like suspended from work. You had a Canadian member of,

I don't know if it's Parliament, I don't know all of the Canada's like legal system, but you know, she said she stood with Palestine and was censured and kicked out of her left-wing party. The NDP kicked her out of the party. The Knesset, I think we have this next one here. Knesset suspended a lawmaker. This is Israeli's Knesset for Ofer Kasif for criticizing Israel's war on Gaza in a way that everybody I think would acknowledge is within bounds. Well, obviously not everybody because the Knesset kind of running him out of here. And so one of the things that Michelle Goldberg touched on in her piece was that for years,

people like her on the left have been saying, be careful with this cancel culture because it's going to be used against you. And she and other people like her would say, just in principle, you should not, you know, you should be supportive of free speech. It shouldn't need to be utilitarian and pragmatic for you. But if it needs to be, guess what? The shoe will be on the other foot. And also, if you're on the left, the shoe is always on the other foot. Like, you're always going to get kicked with this. And so you should. Depending whether you're really on the left. Right, exactly. So now there are people saying, where are the people on the left to stand up for free expression? Yeah. And it turns out that has been so polarized and an element of the right that there's now nobody to stand for them. And I think they've muddied the waters in a really unfortunate way too, because let's put this next element up on the screen. This is five.

I saw this and this is a reporter for the Daily Signal. Governor DeSantis just ordered the University of Florida and the University of South Florida to deactivate their quote, students for justice and Palestine groups for violating Florida's laws against anti-Semitism. And also for, you can see in this letter here, based on the national SJP's support of terrorism and consultation with Governor DeSantis, the student chapter must be deactivated. So they're making this argument that SJP had offered material support to a foreign enemy, essentially because they had claimed that Operation Al-Aqsa flood was, you know, they needed to mobilize in support of the, quote, operation, because they had used that

word that this was material support to, like, a terrorist organization, essentially, and thereby, under Florida law, they needed to be unrecognized. And we talked a lot about the Stop WOKE Act when Ron DeSantis came out with it. And there was some really overly broad language in it that I really didn't like, especially as a conservative who kind of saw the free speech problem for what it was. And over the last decade, I wasn't super happy with everything in that. And so I saw that tweet and I was like, what the like, what is going on? Like, this sounds ridiculous. And I still think the justification that they came up with was ridiculous precisely because of a point that you just made. I want to actually read from the SJP toolkit that DeSantis is referencing because I took a look at it and I was like, my God.

They wrote, today we witnessed a historic win for the Palestinian resistance across land, air, and sea. Our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the facade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation of Palestine is near. They say national liberation is near. Glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people. They also say when people are occupied, resistance is justified. Normalize the resistance. These events are the natural and justified response to decades of oppression and dehumanization. And that is in reference to, it says the Palestinian people have the right to return to their homeland and free themselves from the complete land, air, and sea siege they've been subjected to. Then here's another one. Rather, liberating colonized land is a real process that requires

confrontation by any means necessary in essence decolonization is a call to action a commitment to the restoration of indigenous sovereignty it calls upon us to engage in meaningful acts that go beyond symbolism and rhetoric resistance comes in all forms armed struggle general strikes and popular demonstration all of it is legitimate and all of it is necessary and of course this is in reference to an attack that was targeting civilians. And it's parroting, by the way, some of the language from Israel when they say by any means necessary. That's actually what a lot of people on the left are criticizing from Israel right now, by any means necessary. Okay, so that means shutting down the water, the electricity to Gaza. That means bombing civilian spaces, hospitals, etc., etc.

And that's exactly what people who support Palestine right now are objecting to from Israel. And this toolkit includes templates with paragliders in them. And we all know what that means. That means supporting the paragliders who just mauled civilians down in Israel. And so it's completely reasonable that the University of Florida would have in its code of conduct something that prevents that, because there's political disagreements and then there's decency disagreements. And where our problem comes in is when people on the right and some people on the left inflate the definitions of terms like anti-Semitism to implicate reasonable political disagreements and say that because Ilhan Omar said something in favor of Palestine, she is anti-Semitic. I don't know whether Ilhan

Omar is anti-Semitic, but I do know that supporting Palestine is not necessarily definitionally anti-Semitic. The left, that's one of the ways we see language creep on the right. I think we have seen it, as Michelle Goldberg points out, much more from the left in the last 10 years. Terms like bigotry, terms like white supremacy have been inflated to include reasonable disagreements. But this is the problem with that.

This is precisely the problem with that, is it makes it impossible. It becomes a free speech conflict when you have people that are justifying the slaughter of civilians and mobilizing to support it, not just making abstract esoteric arguments in favor of it, but doing activism to support that. It becomes a free speech conflict instead of this is just a normal student code of conflict. Yeah, well, I think we have to distinguish between kind of private companies and public institutions here. And when I say that there's a distinction between kind of political disagreements and decency on the private sector side. What I mean by that is if, because you really,

just like somebody doesn't have a right to a job, somebody doesn't have a right to other people defending them if they get fired. The way you earn that right is you stay within bounds of decency. But if you're within those bounds of decency, but your politics are off, people don't like what your politics say, then I think everybody should defend your right to not be fired, even from the private sector. Because McCarthyism ultimately hit a lot of people in the private sector. But I think public sector protections have to be even much more expansive than that. And I think, you know, as deplorable as what Jewish Voices for Peace chapter is saying here, I think it still falls all within the realm of speech. Reasonable boundaries. Well, and even

if you don't think it's decent, it doesn't matter if it's decent or not, it's still speech. And so this Daily Signal claim that they violated laws against anti-Semitism is nonsense because there are no laws against anti-Semitism. Oh, the Ron DeSantis claim. Yeah. Well, the Daily Signal. Is supportive of it. Yeah, right. The tweet from the Daily Signal there.

There aren't laws against anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism should be condemned. It's deplorable. But it's not illegal. Nor should it be. Speech, we have First Amendment protections. Yes. In this, in this country. What they're leaning on, as you said, is the word material. Right. Material support for a terrorist organization, Hamas, a terrorist organization. Material has always been understood to mean material, like money or other tangible material support. Speech support has never been that. Even if you said on September 11, 2001, that you were happy that al-Qaeda had done what it did,

that would be protected speech. And it's important to protect the most deplorable speech because that's where they restrict it. The things that you disagree with the most are the things you have to defend the right to make. Now, people have zeroed in on we're going to have a mass mobilization. That's a rally. They're just having a rally. They're going to have 20 people chanting somewhere. The SJP people were giving templates for like social media. Yeah, that's all speech. To me, that's all speech. It's all just standard organizing.

It's rallies. It's speeches. It's posting on social media. And we don't want to get to a place where you're criminalizing posting on social media or holding rallies. No, I mean, I agree with that. I think there's a much better rationale than material support for a terrorist organization that they could have found, which would have been like in the student code of conduct about being respectful. And, you know, those I got charged with one of those in college. They are dangerous and dangerous, too.

They've been used against conservatives at private and public schools. They defended me and they dropped it. See, that's and so, yes, although that's what I'm saying exactly is that the left has muddied the waters over the last 10 years to the point where those are rendered completely meaningless. Even when you have people saying what this toolkit said, it is rendered completely meaningless. Even when you have people saying what this toolkit said, it is rendered completely meaningless. Like if there's that like 0.001% of cases that are brought have legitimacy and maybe this was one of those cases. And like, we can't even have that conversation because it all just gets muddied into a speech conversation instead of just like, like at some point we have to be able,nobody in this country, for the most part, believes that there should be zero limits on speech.

Like, the material support for a terrorist group is a great example. Like, we do have limits on some of this stuff. And I feel like I'm as close to the boundary as you can possibly get on that. Like, free speech absolutes us to the point that it's possible. And so I don't really want to see anybody criminalized or punished for speech. And that's why I think it's stupid to do this. At the same time, I do think it's unfortunate the waters have been muddied to the point where you can say stuff like this and we have to have this conversation about cancellation. It's not

cancel culture. All the other examples I agree with you are cancel culture. This one is not. I think a lot of this stuff, by the way, I think is not. Okay, anyway, we got to wrap and move on to the guests. We got the guests in here. We're going to talk about the movement to bring psychedelics out of the shadows. Stick around for that. All right, joining us now is Jesse Gold, former Army Ranger and founder of

the Heroic Hearts Project. Going to talk about the kind of growing kind of movement to bring psychedelics kind of out of the shadows and into public. We're also joined by General Martin Steele, who is with Reason for Hope. General Steele, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Honored to be with you. You got it. And Jesse, this is our first time having one guest live and one guest remote.

So we appreciate you guys doing this. You're here at a fortuitous or unfortunitous time because your issue is in the news. Yesterday we covered this Alaska Air bizarre situation where it looked like a pilot might have been trying to do some type of crash by suicide. The pilot has said that it was his first time ever taking psilocybin, mushrooms, and thought he was dreaming and tried to pull, tried to basically shut the plane down to wake up. And speaking of waking up, as soon as I heard that, I was like, this sounds like a nightmare for Jesse. So when you saw this news report, what did it make you think about the way that this issue has kind of been playing politically around the country? Because I want to get into the – it's so alive in so many states around the country. Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for having me.

And I'm glad we can test your guys' systems to see how it rolls. And I'm so honored to be joined by the general, who's also doing some amazing stuff. For me, it's more fortuitous because these conversations are coming in terms of America's perception of psychedelics and what we immediately jump to. And for me, this news story, there's a lot more to unfold. If you read it, it just kind of lumps into different pieces. And it's that media association that media does of this thing bad happened, psychedelics, uh-oh, this guy went crazy, right? It's very reefer madness-esque. You could take this article 100 years ago, and they could say the same thing with cannabis and be like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Whereas now that'd seem ridiculous, right?

So I'm not saying psilocybin had nothing to do with it, but there's also many other factors that they noted in there, including 40 hours of no sleep, right? Including one article I read that this gentleman was going to San Francisco to go onto a flight. So that's kind of basic adult rules. Don't do psilocybin for the first time if you're going to do some sort of flight. Don't do it on a plane and don't do it if you haven't slept for 40 hours. Yeah. And so this is, no matter what, psychedelics are coming.

Psilocybin itself has been declared a breakthrough therapy by the FDA for depression. These are starting to be a main staple in mental health as we pass laws, but we still have these stigma hurdles that we have to overcome. And lazy media like this does not help because it doesn't delve into it. It's just that clickbaity, hey, this is a crazy story. Let's throw in psychedelics in there. Let's not explain anything further. Let's not get any more information about it. But people are immediately going to do that association. You can do anything else. For instance, they always do this when there's some sort of tragedy. Oh, this guy visited a mosque a week ago. Is there some sort of correlation?

Never dive into the actual facts around it. The other issue, and this is a much longer issue, is the mental health issue. It's known that pilots are afraid of addressing mental health concerns because they could lose their job. A friend who runs a similar nonprofit, No Fallen Heroes, he comes from a top gun fighter pilot and actually works with pilots through psychedelics because when they retire, they have been dealing with their mental health issues and their only resort is to turn to alcohol. So sorry to shock people who are flying, but there is a crisis of many veterans who become pilots, many others who have mental health issues. And these are the people who are flying our planes because they have unaddressed mental

health issues. And to just lump it in of psychedelics are going to cause crazy people, there's no factual evidence to support that. In fact, if we had an honest conversation, SSRIs and other mental health medication actually have a strong correlation, at least 8% cause psychosis. There's never been similar research showing that association with psychedelics. And that's the big pharma advertising you just don't hear, Ryan. General Steele, I want to bring you in here to ask basically what your path was to advocacy in this space, because as

we were just talking about, there are decades of stigma to overcome, essentially. So for you, how did you come to this point advocating on behalf of these important medications? Well, I want to thank you for having me again. I think if I had to summarize it in one word at my age, it's frustration. A little bit in line with what Jesse said in his answer to your previous question. It's frustration with the lack of urgency from our government for bold initiatives to improve the mental health situation in our country, which we are in a crisis. from the Marine Corps in 1999, and have worked with scientists looking at comorbidities with

traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress, military sexual trauma across the spectrum, and looking at viable alternatives to SSRIs and the frustration with the treatment protocols in the Veterans Administration health system, which have been lack of confidence for veterans. And so people like Jesse, who are inspirational to me and part of the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition, which I have the privilege to be the co-founder and leader of, there are over 45 organizations, we're all of the same ilk from coming from an experience and a frustration that we. It's about research that needs to be done in these medications, just like what was mentioned here, MDMA and psilocybin. And that's what we're doing with the Breakthrough Therapies Act, HR 1393 and S689 with co-sponsors on both sides of the aisle, bicameral support of getting legislation passed,

which would reschedule these medicines to be able to do much more research in the space, moving them from Schedule 1, which is an illegal medicine, to Schedule 2, to schedule two because they have been granted that condition from the FDA and getting research done and expanding access to all Americans who are experiencing these traumas in the mental health arena. It doesn't matter whether they're veterans or civilians or first responders, the medical field, pilots, just like what Jesse brought out. We just have to do a better job. So what brought me here was the frustration that it's not moving, it's not moving fast enough, and that far too many veterans have gone outside our country, and Jesse can speak to this because he's a living example of helping those veterans, but go outside our country to get treatment using these medicines that save

their lives that they can't get in the United States legally. It's either underground or taking a risk of being arrested. So for me, it's changing the law to do that. And not just our veterans, but also our president's son. So I wanted to, we talk a lot about MDMA and mushrooms, but Ibogaine is one that doesn't get enough attention relative to the amount, the ability it has demonstrated to help people battle with addiction. And so Hunter Biden is known to the amount, the ability it has demonstrated to help people battle with addiction. And so Hunter Biden is known to have gone, I think, was it Mexico? More than likely. Yeah, for an Ibogaine treatment. And his sobriety, I think, is understood by people

close to him, including his father, to be connected to Ibogaine. And so what are we seeing when it comes to the VA and to federal legislation or state legislation to open that up either to veterans, others, and what can you tell us about Ibogaine in general? Absolutely. We're getting all the good poster child for psychedelics today. Although if it moves Hunter from that Hunter to, you know, one who's just, you know, doing paintings for donors. No, absolutely. And, you know, on our side, everybody deserves some sort of form of healing. And what we're seeing from the statistics coming from the VA and other organizations is that modern Western accepted medicine is just not doing it.

The rates within the VA are abysmal. And we see with the suicide rates, I think the VA just came out and they're always revising it, which just shows that they don't even have a basic handle on it. Anywhere from 22 to 44 veterans commit suicide a day, right? And that just, this is over 20 years of war, which is even more shocking now that people are talking about getting into another war without even addressing this underlying issue that's affecting hundreds of thousands of veterans. So there's across the board of many of these different psychedelics are almost being rediscovered by the Western world of how effective they are only because the research has been squashed by, you know, these sort of media articles, the war on drugs, government propaganda,

which has been very effective. Ibogaine has been particularly effective with addiction. So they've established clinics in Mexico. There's a couple in Canada. And where addiction rates generally have abysmal sort of, you know, these Malibu resorts, more than often people go into recidivism. But Ibogaine has actually shown very effective results where people go in with opioid addiction and they go out of it not having that addiction, at least for a time being. And then there's also the same sort of psychological benefit where they can understand the root trauma that caused them that addiction in the first place. So it gives them this window of opportunity to really change their life in an effective way. And we're seeing this across the board with different psychedelics in different ways.

And so there is research going on, but it's all been private funded through organizations like ours and sort of shoulders turned from governments. And so, for instance, General Steele is working on a bill with Kentucky to finally get in government funding for Ibogaine research from settlements, from the opioid crisis, the funds from that. Yeah, General Steele, can you tell us about that Kentucky bill? Does it have serious prospects? We believe it does. There have been three hearings. We've been involved in the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition, assisting the Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission in the state of Kentucky,

which has been meeting in regards specifically to using a proposed $42 million toward Ibogaine research and development out of this fund that Jesse just said. Our position is that we think that this has great promise by researching it. We're thrilled to be working with the state of Kentucky who's out front on this because of the opioid crisis and the deaths that they have due to overdose and addiction and the success that Ibogaine has proven to be so effective against. It's clear that the treatments, as we've said up to this point, aren't working, and Ibogaine isn't the answer for everyone, but from our perspective, it has tremendous great promise. There was a hearing just last week, a third, I've testified there before that commission. But a hearing last week, we had a member of the FDA who clearly is talking about the need to balance the potential risk and benefit of Ibogaine through proper testing and research and is absolutely that they'll be considering the condition that we're in in this crisis and that Ibogaine is a viable next step alternative.

And Jesse, in early October, Gavin Newsom vetoed a psychedelic piece of legislation out in California. In his veto message, he said he wanted something more orderly, it seemed like, sent back to him. Tell us what happened there and what's next in California, potentially. Yeah, and this is very indicative of the frustration that General Steele mentioned earlier. This has been an over three-year process, many iterations. By the time we actually got it through both the houses in California, bipartisan support, wide popular support, it would have been an easy bill for Governor Newsom to sign. And what everybody speculates is it's because of his looking forward to what's next in his

sort of career. And using the veto, which in my opinion, in this case, is very undemocratic when it gets to that level of passing all this with a lot of work and everybody agreed it was a good bill, sort of baseline, and just a very basic people should not be criminalized for having personal possession of just grown psychedelics. So not even LSD, that's synthetic. So just mushrooms, just all this other kind of stuff. As we can see, people are already using it illegally.

But because we criminalize it, we put this sort of blockade of any other people talking about it. There's a stigma around it. So any other organizations that can help out, that can bring much value to education, like you should not take mushrooms for the first time before possibly piloting a plane. Right, right.

A baseline education. It has been prevented because of this criminality. And people are, we're seeing this, seeking their own mental health relief because of the failure of this system. All of this news is showing how much the system is failing. And so very disappointed in Governor Newsom. And, you know, it's, it's the very politician thing where he had this, hey, if you had just done this, it would have been great. He had more than three years to tell us. And it's, it's for the veteran population. A lot of us are

disappointed because this is what we come to expect. These politicians will say, hey, I support the troops. Hey, I have these veteran friends over here next time around. But what they do is they kick the can. They utilize our name, our voice to get where they need. But when we ask them the very basic to help us, they do not. And again, I want to circle back. This is so important right now because we just got out of 20 years of war. There's over 600,000 just from the past 20 years of war veterans with PTSD. There has not been effective legislation on a federal level to resolve this or address this or even talk about this. We haven't even looked at why we had 20

years of failed war and there's already people salivating about getting into the next war. The contractors get paid up front. We're still there hat in hand. My friends have to go to Capitol Hill and beg politicians to pay attention to the suicide rate. There's no reason with that many veterans dying from suicide that this should not be a national crisis. We show how fast the government can work when it wants to, but there has not been the same sort of urgency around veterans and

mental health issues, which is very tragic. And in my opinion, Governor Newsom's decision was self-serving and falls right in line with what we come to expect from politicians. And General Steele, I'm curious what the reaction has been from your kind of former comrades and colleagues in the military to you coming out and taking a position on this. Do you hear more, good for you, this is desperately needed, or do you hear more, there goes crazy hippie General Steele out? Well, I don't hear the latter, at least not to my face. I would say my generation, I'm a Vietnam era military member, two tours of combat in Vietnam. My father,

stepfather, I never knew my real father, was a prisoner of war in World War II. And my son had three tours of combat in Afghanistan. So we span the whole gamut. But the support that I've received from my peers, once they are educated in regards to what and why, they clearly understand the crisis and the mental health situation. I would say my generation of warrior is saying to me, thank you for what you're doing and all of the people of the coalition, these veteran service organizations and groups like Jesse, I wish we would have had that for us because, as Jesse said early on, I mean, alcohol was the drug of choice.

It's a problem for all of my peers and excessive use of alcohol, and we never got our arms around this, and the situation now with SSRIs and the VA is just making it worse. We're not getting any better. So tremendous amount of support. A lot of them want to know more. They are studying what we're doing and why, but on the whole, they're firm believers. I've had no pushback to summarize the answer from any of my peers or even the leaders that I had that were ahead of me. I mean,

I was a three-star general. My four-star people that I'm very, very close to that are also retired now, all of them very much support what we're doing because, as Jesse indicated, 600,000 out of the global war on terror, a 20-year war, and we haven't even touched the surface yet of them coming to the forefront with their issues. And we're still not wrapping our arms around the needs for viable alternative therapies, which we believe psychedelic assisted therapy will be a major player

in changing the mental health crisis in our country. You're both optimistic. Yeah, and General Steele, I also promised our viewers earlier in the show that I'd pick your brain on some basic military questions. And Jesse, if you have any takes on these too, we'd love them. I've got two questions. One, and since you're a veteran of Vietnam, I'm curious for your take on what the role the tunnels that Hamas has built over the years in Gaza might play in a land invasion, given that in Vietnam the tunnel system was so effective for guerrilla warfare

and that there was a tunnel system in Afghanistan that was also problematic for American troops that got less attention. And the second, and maybe this is an ignorant question, why is Hamas so able to build missiles and rockets that they constantly are able to fire into Israel, but apparently has zero anti-aircraft capacity? That I just can't understand. Either one of you want to take either one of those? I'd be glad to start. Sure. Go ahead, General. Opening with the tunnel situation. It's obviously very complex. They've spent years doing it. And I believe that just as in the case in Vietnam, they were problematic, as you said. They're going to be much more problematic if there's a ground, if and when the ground invasion takes place. So there are significant obstacles to overcome. A lot of challenges like we had in Vietnam.

Some of my high school classmates were of the size, if you will, physical size, that they were known affectionately as tunnel rats. And they were traumatized by their experience going into the tunnels. Tremendous warriors did the job, but traumatized by that experience. So in the case of your second question, I would say they're being more supplied with these weapons of rockets than manufacturing them. I watched your program the other day. I thought it was very thoughtful as you were looking in these kinds of areas and questions. But I think it's more

external supplies that are providing them with those capabilities. And the third question regarding why don't they have anti-air capabilities? I'm not qualified to answer that right now. Yeah, from the tunnel, it's just, it would be a nightmare. I mean, if you remember, I mean... You were nodding your head at the Afghanistan tunnels. Afghanistan tunnels, I mean, but I was also thinking like World War II, Japan had notorious for the tunnels, and that factored into our decision of how entrenched they were.

And especially without our understanding. It's a completely different warfare. And it would be unlike what we've seen. And Afghanistan generally is pretty open, pretty flat. So that allowed a lot more air support, all sorts of other intelligence that we just want to have. But then we're factoring not only the urban warfare and the tunnels, which we really just haven't seen for quite a while and just the density of the population. It factors into all these other dynamics because if you're going into there and you're going against the Hamas that's not going to wear uniforms and you're in this very dense population,

it's going to be chaos in a lot of factors. And then you're bringing in other serious military, potentially, like Iran, as well as what happened in Afghanistan when I was over there. There was an estimation that this was a little bit deeper into the war, that the majority of the people we were fighting weren't even Taliban or from Afghanistan. The vast majority were from other countries, other networks, surrounding countries that were just there because that's where the fight was. where it's going to be sort of that ideological, not only fighting us, fighting Israel in this centered spot that's just going to be a hotbed. And again, we have not even done an after actions review on the last wars. Why were we there for 20 years? And neither the general are our peaceniks, you know, like I would reenlist again if I was at that age. And there's an unspoken agreement or there should be in any culture or any country between the serving veterans

and the politicians. We will risk our lives, but we expect them to have intelligent analysis of the wars we get into, right? And we did not have that analysis with the previous wars. And I'm not saying one way or the other of that, but we need to actually factor in the real cost, not just the cost to the war contractors, but the lives as well as the mental health issues that we have not even factored in with these past few wars. And the very least we can do is at least research therapies that could be beneficial to people coming home with the moral wounds and the emotional and psychological wounds as well as the physical ones. And so the organization's

Reason for Hope, Heroic Hearts Project. Where can people find more information on this? So heroicartsproject.org is our website and as the general said, our main goal is that we help connect veterans to countries where this is legal. As tragic as that sounds, veterans are going to other countries to get life-saving support. That's where we come into play. You're gonna make sure they do it as safely as possible. As safely with support so these sort of stories don't happen. If the general, I think it's reasonforhope.org, he can correct me if that's wrong. No, that's correct. And the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition also, which is comprised of these over 45 veteran service organizations that we have, all part of doing the same thing that Jesse just said, advocacy in this space.

We really appreciate you guys joining us and for the fight you're waging. Thank you so much. Absolutely. I want to tell you— Go ahead, General Steele. Please, General. Well, I just want to say thank you for what you're doing, too. Having had the opportunity to look at some of your work, it's thoughtful, thought-provoking, but very necessary right now.

And so affording us the opportunity to come on to talk about this specific issue, we hope we have an opportunity to come back. But this is the space. If we're going to do something differently, because what we've done and what we are currently doing is the true definition of insanity, providing the same treatment protocols that do not work for this population.

As it comes forward, we're not there yet with the 600,000. As they come forward, it's like the tip of the iceberg right now. And it's the Herculean work that Jesse Gould is doing in his organizations and others, but to have to go outside our country to get treatment to save your life is unconscionable. And it is the definition of suicide to think that you can do the same thing over and over that we have been doing now and get a different result. So thank you for what you're doing in this space to help us get the message out. All right. Well, thank you for saying you're doing in this space to help us get the message out. All right. Well, thank you for saying so. I think we have a new Breaking Points premium

subscriber there. I hope so. I think General Steel's hooked. It's good you say that, Ryan, because you can now go to BreakingPoints.com to subscribe as our producers are telling us to make sure we remind you, BreakingPoints.com. And the thing is with CounterPoints, if you are a premium subscriber, you get the full show uninterrupted early on YouTube as opposed to the few clips in the show. And Spotify and all those other corporate platforms. Right, yeah.

So you get to support our work and continue coverage of issues that mainstream media, so-called mainstream media, doesn't want to touch, like psychedelics for veterans. Super important. You don't often hear about it elsewhere. And if you subscribe here, we will do our best to continue bringing coverage just like that. All right. Crystal and Sagar will be here tomorrow. We'll be back here next week. Thanks for joining us. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

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