Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/10/24: SEC Account Hacked Causing Bitcoin Chaos, ICJ Lawyer Says Israel Will Lose Genocide Case, Fauci Flip Flops In Congress, WH In Dark On SecDef Cancer, Police Clash In Secret Synagogue Tunnels, Don Lemon Returns, Israel Critics Purged On Twitter

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss the SEC social media account being hacked causing Bitcoin chaos, ICJ lawyer says Israel will lose genocide case, Fauci flip flops on gain of function to avoid perjury, White House admits Biden didn't know about Sec Def hospitalization and cancer, police clash after secret Synagogue tunnels exposed, Don Lemon returns with new show, and Israel critics purged on Twitter.    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/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel yesterday. We're going to talk about what he said publicly after meetings with leaders across the region. We're also going to get into this insane Bitcoin hack of the SEC. Emily, what else we got today?

The White House faced some really tough questions in the briefing yesterday over Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's apparently unknown health condition to the White House. So the president doesn't seem to have been cued in on what's going on with the Secretary of Defense. We have some great clips from the briefing yesterday. We're going to cover the most bizarre story in recent memory, and that would be the Crown Heights tunnels. Speaking of good video, we've got some good video in that block. It's indescribable.

You're just going to have to sit around and wait for that one. And while we try to describe the indescribable. You'll have to just watch it. If you're listening to this on the podcast, go find some videos of what happened in Crown Heights. It's going to blow your mind. And in some great news, Don Lemon is back. And we're all over the story. He never left my heart.

Not in your heart, right. That's important. We also finally got, I think, probably the best graphic of all time because Ken Klippenstein is here. And we're just referring to him as Kenny Clips now. He's Kenny Klipsch. He and a bunch of other lefty journalists were suspended yesterday. He's going to talk about what his brief time kicked off of Twitter was like because there was an outrage and he and a bunch of the others were reinstated. He also has a big scoop coming later today. He probably won't be ready in time for this show, but we'll post that once it's up. That's going to be interesting.

That's all I can say at this point. So Kenny Clips is here. Kenny Clips will be here. Before Kenny Clips though, Ryan, can you tell us a little bit about what's been swirling around the SEC just in like the last 12 hours? Yeah, so we can put up this first element here. But basically, what happened is somebody was able to hack the SEC's Twitter account. And I'm calling it Twitter because it's twitter.com. And as long as he's using twitter.com, it's Twitter. All right. So somebody hacked the SEC's Twitter account and posted on it basically that the SEC had approved EFT Bitcoin products or EFT crypto products. There was a lawsuit against the SEC by crypto backers that said you have to allow EFTs, which are basically

a way for institutional and other kind of retail investors to get invested in something without putting their actual money in it. So you don't actually have to buy the Bitcoin or if you want to do, you know, anything else, the S&P 500. You can buy an EFT that kind of mirrors the performance of the S&P. And what they're saying is there should be an EFT that mirrors the performance of, say, Bitcoin. And so the lawsuit was successful. And so there is an upcoming decision rule from the SEC that the Bitcoin world is eagerly anticipating. I think Bitcoin is up like 60% over the last several months in anticipation of this ruling. So somebody got a hold of the SEC's account and jumped the gun. They first, I don't know, what's the next element that we have here? This is the, yeah, so let's put this up.

This is roughly two times as much market cap was destroyed by the SEC's tweet as was lost in the FTX blow up. Right, because it sent things in a tailspin. And so people are like making and losing money all over the place. As some of the people in the crypto world accurately said afterwards, if this happened, actually, I think it was a Winklavoss twin that I saw quoted. One of the Winklavai. One of the Winklavai said if this would happen at any publicly traded company, the SEC would be demanding

an investigation. So now Twitter has posted, this is from Twitter, their safety. We can confirm that the account, SECgov, was compromised and we have completed a preliminary investigation. Based on our investigation, the compromise was not due to any breach of X's systems, that's Twitter, but rather due to an unidentified individual obtaining control over a phone number associated with the SEC account through a third party. We can also confirm that the account did not have two-factor authentication enabled at

the time the account was compromised. We encourage all users to enable this extra layer of security. More information and tips on how to keep your account secure can be found in our help center. One of the scandals that Musk first brought to Twitter was making people pay for two-factor. This is incredibly dangerous because everybody should have two-factor. If you're watching this and you don't have two-factor, get it. Basically, that means... If you work at the SEC.

If you work at the SEC. If you work at the SEC, do the authenticator app. Go beyond just two-factor with a phone number. Two-factor means just having your password is not enough to hack into your phone. Because if you don't have two-factor, you can also not just guess at somebody's password, but you can hit the forgot password. And if they have the phone associated with the account, then that request then goes to that phone. And that seems to be what happened. So they basically hit forgot password on SEC's Twitter account. It sent something to a phone that they had gotten access to through some third-party vendor. And then they reset the password, went in there,

and made a fake SEC announcement. And billions of dollars changed hands. Let's put the next element up on the screen. This is delicious. Here's a tweet from the SEC from October. Careful what you read on the internet. The best source of information about the SEC is the SEC. If that source of information, actually, Ryan, is that the SEC is incapable of handling the most basic of tasks, then indeed the best source of information about the SEC is the SEC. If what Twitter says is true, Twitter is a biased source here because, you know, they're on the line, they're on the hook here as well. But they're making very definitive statements.

And when you make a clear statement like that, I tend to give them, like I tend to assume they're probably telling the truth. Yeah, they came out hard. Because if it's something that can be detected as false and you're dealing with the SEC, you're going to get in a lot of trouble. Yeah. So I just assume that they're telling the truth here. And if that's the case, what an extraordinary blunder from whoever was running the SEC's Twitter account. And if it turns out that the SEC had some intern, they're like, yeah, it's Twitter. Let an intern run the account. That's insane because tweets move markets. As we saw with some hilarious tweets about like insulin is free, like right after Elon Musk bought Twitter and allowed anybody to be verified.

People were buying like the names of fake companies and posting things and moving billions of dollars around. Right. And sometimes when people hack a government account, they do something that is sort of a slapstick troll. This was a much better troll than just saying something like Joe Biden sucks. And what's so funny, and then we'll move on to some more serious news, is that Bitcoin and crypto are trying to show that they can be like responsible members of the financial community. And they're days away from getting this announcement from the SEC. And somebody, some hacker preempts it by hacking the SEC. I was like, all right, yeah, sure. Bring them on in. What could go wrong? This seems fine. Yeah, what a crazy story. And a

reminder of how vulnerable the markets are. and especially just a tweet is one thing, but you have vulnerability in the market because a tweet can change the market, but then also it's really easy for a tweet to be posted. Like these two layers of security or these layers of stability, I should say, are always really vulnerable. Right, and their account is SECGov. The problem Twitter had earlier was they were verifying whatever. And so you could get, you know, SECBov and post something and like

fool people for five minutes. And that's enough to move hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, absolutely. Ryan, Secretary Blinken was in Israel yesterday and addressed some of the questions about the lawsuit that's been covered on this show. Tell us a little bit about what Blinken had to say when he was in Israel yesterday facing questions actually about the genocide claims. Yeah, he actually – so here's from his opening remarks at his press briefing yesterday where he brings up the genocide charges that South Africa has filed. South Africa has been joined by Malaysia and Turkey at this point. France has said that they will respect the decision of the International Court of Justice, though they have not joined the prosecution yet. One, as I think was discussed on the show yesterday, one Israeli Knesset member has said, Ofer Kasif has said that he has endorsed also those genocide charges, which is

fascinating development. But let's play Blinken yesterday. We believe the submission against Israel to the International Court of Justice distracts the world from all of these important efforts. And moreover, the charge of genocide is meritless. It's particularly gallant given that those who are attacking Israel – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, as well as their support of Iran – continue to openly call for the annihilation of Israel and the mass murder of Jews. On this trip, I came to Israel after meeting with the leaders of Turkey, Greece, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia.

All of those leaders share our concern about the spread of the conflict. Nonetheless, 90% of Gaza's population continues to face acute food insecurity, according to the United Nations. For children, the effects of long periods without sufficient food can have lifelong consequences. So within about a minute of saying that the charges of genocide are meritless and baseless, he adds, oh, and by the way, the United Nations says that 90% of Palestinians in Gaza are on the brink of starvation. And the charge of genocide- How do we square that?

So this is South Africa at the International Court of Justice. And Ryan mentioned, joined by these other countries now. So one of the people who has actually argued successfully at the International Court of Justice. Francis Boyle went on Democracy Now and had a really interesting perspective on what could happen with this particular suit going forward, too. We have a clip of that we can roll now. I was the first lawyer ever to win anything under the Genocide Convention from the International Court of Justice that goes back to 1921. I single-handedly won two world court orders for the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina against Yugoslavia to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide. And based on my careful review of all the documents so far submitted by the

Republic of South Africa, I believe South Africa will win an order against Israel to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Palestinians. Under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, all contracting parties, 153 states, will then be obliged, quote, to prevent, unquote, the genocide by Israel against the Palestinians. Second, when the world court gives this cease and desist order against Israel, the Biden administration will stand condemned under Article 3, paragraph E of the Genocide Convention that criminalizes complicity in genocide. And Ryan, I wonder actually if Blinken is addressing that and sort of preemptively in his scripted remarks, because as we just heard Boyle say, at least from the perspective of the ICJ, there's a case before that court, they're going to, they have a good, South Africa has a good chance of winning this case, which then creates legal obligations, you know, for the United States, and which then puts the United States in an even trickier position vis-a-vis the Houthis, who say that they are currently, right now, basically enacting their responsibilities and obligations under Article I of the Convention around the Prevention of Genocide, that all states have a duty to

intervene to stop genocide. Not just to not do genocide themselves, but if they are aware of it happening, it's their obligation to step in. And that's related to the way that the world did not step in during the Holocaust. In fact, the United States famously kind of turning away Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust and sending them back. And so the result was this law, this international law that says you're supposed to intervene. The Houthis say that they're operating under that pretext. If the International Court of Justice says, in fact, there is an international obligation to stop this, that makes the U.S. threats against the Houthis that much harder, I think, to sustain morally. Completely changes that. But to sustain morally, I feel like is, we could have a debate

on that. But to sustain even just as a member of the Security Council and a leading nation. It's embarrassing and hypocritical and all that, yeah. But also I would imagine there are further legal machinations that would interfere going forward that, you know, you have to sort of, from the U.S., I mean, maybe if you're Blinken, you say, yeah, we can swat these down, you know, like a fly swatter, like left and right as they come up. I don't think that's sustainable at all when you get into exactly what you're just saying with how it affects other combatants in situations. Yeah, and not to tease the news that Ken Klippenstein is going to have later today, but it implicates that exact question. The U.S.'s role in this war and what its legal exposure is.

And related to that, and we don't have this clip enough of looking at Blinken, we can just read some of what he said at this press conference. This is all related to the humanitarian crisis that the Israeli blockade and bombardment has created. And so at the center of that and behind the scenes is this dispute between Israel and the United Nations over how to get humanitarian aid in. Israel does not want the UN involved at all. They basically think the UN is like a cat's paw for Hamas. And so you had recently had Senators Chris Van Holl and Jeff Merkley go over to Rafah Crossing, and every aid worker that you talk to says there is not enough aid getting in because of the logistical difficulties thrown up by Israel around the idea, you know, they say it's

about, you know, making sure that no weapons wind up in the hands of Hamas. And Israel is responding to a real logistical challenge presented by Hamas, which actually, you know, there is evidence and there's a question of how widespread it is, but there is evidence of, for example, gunmen taking over trucks, taking the aid from the trucks and all of that. That is a real problem for Israel. Yeah. Well, there's a huge breakdown. You know, there's a coming social breakdown because of the way that everything has collapsed and you just have 2 million people living in tight quarters and nobody getting enough food, water, or medicine. Right. Although even if you were able to smuggle in a couple weapons, like let's imagine that you could.

Let's say the UN completely somehow failed to allow a few boxes of bullets or guns to go through. It's the most kind of well-equipped military in the world against 10,000, 20,000, how many are left? People just hold up. Is that worth starving 2 million people over? And that's granting 100% of the benefit of the doubt to the Israeli argument, rather than taking a lot of the Israeli officials at their word, which is that they actually believe that the starvation policy is the goal itself, not an unfortunate byproduct, not a bug, but a feature. Right, right. No, absolutely. And so Blinken in his press briefing brought up the UN and he said, and you have kind of, this is diplomacy,

so you have to kind of read between the lines a little bit, but he says, the United Nations is playing an indispensable role in addressing the immense humanitarian needs in Gaza. There is simply no alternative. I spoke last night with the UN's new senior humanitarian reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, Sigrid Kog, about all these efforts that are underway. And then he says, Sigrid Kaag is someone I worked very closely with a few years ago when she led the UN mission that destroyed the Assad regime's chemical weapons in Syria. So I can say from experience, she has what it takes to get this job done. She has America's full support.

She must have Israel's as well. So they're blinking very clearly, but kind of going, how would you describe that, like kind of elliptical language. But he's saying, we support the UN, and we want the UN involved in this. The UN has to be involved in this. But then he says, she must have Israel's as well, meaning she doesn't yet have Israel's support. And it raises the question of like, what's the point of being a superpower if you have to like beat around the bush and like beg and cajole to get your priorities enacted in the face of the greatest humanitarian crisis that we've seen on this planet in a very long time? It'll be interesting to see how this transpires because, to your point earlier,

and we've talked about this a lot, there's the tug of war internally within the Knesset, within Israel's own government about how to best prosecute this war. You have some people talking about Dresden. You have some people talking about the very real concerns of the people in Gaza. And it's difficult to know. And actually, it's difficult to know because I think it's unclear within the Netanyahu administration itself what the real policy is. Is the real policy that is the real end here,

that starvation is the way to prosecute the war? Is the end here that you have to sort of keep the United States happy, keep your sort of international partners happy, play nice with the UN, and you also have to, you know, do what is morally right and ensure that innocent civilians are able to eat and drink clean water and have medical care? All of that, I think, is genuinely unclear because Israel is divided on how to, what is the way to go forward. And so that's where the U.S., what is the point of being a superpower if you have to kind of beat around the bush? And you can't even get your client to do what you need to do. Will they? I mean, so what we just saw in the last month is the U.S. say, let's draw this war back.

Let's sort of do an indefinite pause on the parking lot dynamics here in Gaza as the new year starts. That's exactly what happened. And so, I mean, we obviously are pulling some serious strings. Although you're still seeing airstrikes. Right. I guess fewer. They've shifted to the, what are they saying, precision operations, even though they were. Still hitting residential buildings and killing children.

But yes, it's less than it was. They also had always said they were doing precision too. And this goes back to how unclear the strategy of the war is. They were talking about how they were doing precision. At the same time, they were talking about turning Gaza into a parking lot. Precision versus parking lot. Like this has been the theme of their stated strategy is that it's muddled. And to see how muddled it is elsewhere in the country, fascinating development reported by Axios here.

You can put up this last element. So basically, Netanyahu's on a call. And the element we have up here is Ask Zelensky, UAE rebuffs Bibi request to pay Palestinian workers barred from Israel. So Netanyahu, right after October 7th, basically told West Bank Palestinian workers they could no longer travel into Israel to work anymore. So now 150,000 or so Palestinian workers are owed unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, the right-wing elements of Netanyahu's government, well, the furthest right-wing elements, Smotrich, Ben-Gavir, and others, have insisted that no money, because I think, who's the finance minister? Smotrich. He's like, they're all Nazis. Everyone in Gaza is a Nazi, and they're terrorists in the West Bank, and I'm not sending them their money. So this is something that Blinken was asked about at the press briefing yesterday.

This is Palestinian Authority money that is sitting in Israeli accounts that Israel has blocked from getting to the Palestinian Authority. Now, Shin Bet and the military establishment in Israel said, this is a horrible idea. Like, set the ethics aside of whose money it is. Why are you going to create enormous economic-based instability in the West Bank, like, at this very moment? Like, this is not what we need. But Smotrich, Ben-Gavir, and others have said, if you release that money to them, we're quitting the government. We will leave. And Netanyahu apparently believes that he can't keep together a coalition without the far right. So what does

he do? He calls up Mohammed bin Zayed over at the UAE. He's like, yeah, they've got money over it. Emirati's got money. And bin Zayed was so appalled by the request that they leaked it to the press. And so Netanyahu said, hey, can you pay the unemployment benefits of these Palestinian workers that I'm barring from Israel? And he's like, are you joking? Right. And to show how ridiculous he thought the request was, he said, why don't you go ask Zelensky? Ask Zelensky. Zelensky's gotten a lot of money from your friends lately.

He's got a lot sitting around. Go ask him for some money if you've got a problem. Or give the Palestinians their money. Or let them work. Like, what's your long-term strategy here? The way that Gaza turned into the complete economic basket case that it's been for the last two decades is not because of, say, Hamas decided to turn it into some terror den. It's because Gazans were no longer allowed to leave and the entire economy was based on interchange and exchange with the rest of Israel. And so what's left then, well, just guess we're going to fight. Yeah, negotiating with, again, this is where Netanyahu is in a serious

jam when it comes to not an unpredictable one, and he knew that all along. I mean, if this ever happened, they understood exactly what kind of problems they would be facing. This is obviously one of them when you're looking at the same dynamics we just talked about with the UN when it comes to this money, that in order for him to maintain his coalition, he has to keep Smotrich, Ben-Gavir happy. And to keep them happy, you have to piss a lot of other people off. And you have to- Including all these people you owe money to.

Including that and including the United States. And so, again, none of this is simple. It's obviously extremely complicated, both strategically and politically. Morally is the other question. And when you kind of are, I think there's a benefit in some sense of being here in the United States, you can sort of see things in a way that's not even just the United States. I mean, if you're outside of the war zone, you have the benefit of, for example, some clarity, additional clarity that, you know, you don't necessarily always have. That doesn't mean we know better. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that you're at least able to take a step back

and emotionally see that there's a real moral problem for everyone. And to the extent it's complicated, it's complicated from Netanyahu's perspective of trying to stay in power in an untenable situation. But I mean, genuinely also, he's got of trying to stay in power in an untenable situation. But I mean, genuinely also. He's got the world held hostage in a way because, you know, if he leaves office, he might go to jail because of these previous corruption charges. So he's just doing any dance that he can and doing anything to stay in power. And also. I feel like the rest of the world should be like, OK, fine, we won't prosecute you for these corruption charges.

You will just rationally come to some end of this. Now, I think a lot of the world would like to see him prosecuted for war crimes, so that's complicated. But having all of this held hostage by his corruption charges from the past, it just makes it that much more difficult to then sort through the question of what coalition ought to be running the government. Also, I mean, it is a complicated question when it comes to whether or not by helping civilians you're arming your enemy. And to some extent you absolutely are helping your enemy when you are taking care of civilians. But that's something that after World War II we kind of came to the table and said, you know, there's a serious give and take here that needs that there. Here's how we've sort of mapped this out morally, legally. And that's, you know, nobody's,

I'm not saying that's easy, at least. That's genuinely a very complicated moral question. But again, you know, we can see pretty clearly what's happened to civilians in Gaza. But the dynamic can be the reverse in a way. And that's why the national security establishment wants these Palestinians to get paid. Because actually by not paying them, you're making life much more difficult for the Israeli national security establishment, which does not want a gigantic uprising in the West Bank right now. They'll take it some other times, perhaps, when they can focus all of their energies on suppressing it.

But when they're trying to pick a fight with Iran, with Hezbollah, and engaged in this wholesale slaughter down in Gaza, to have millions of Palestinians in the West Bank livid is just bad timing. Absolutely. But the ideologues in that government are like, we don't care. They're just going for it. Right. Well, and their goals are different than, certainly different than our goals. We talked about this last week at Yahoo, no two-state solution. President Biden, who is in the United States in general, who are a huge part of this war in terms of munitions, about 20% of the Israeli military budget comes to the United States every year,

say two-state solution. Not a minor difference. It's a huge, huge difference. And it's one that continues, obviously, to plague the prosecution of the war from our perspective, from Israel's perspective. If you're not on the same page about some of the war from our perspective, from Israel's perspective. If you're not on the same page about some of these very basic end goals, like Netanyahu is not with Smotrich and Ben-Gabir, huge problems. Anthony Fauci spent the last two days on Capitol Hill in giving closed door testimony to the select subcommittee investigating the coronavirus pandemic. They talked about it an awful lot, but we're only hearing it from leaks so far.

From Republicans, basically. Mostly from, yeah. I actually haven't seen any leaks coming from Democrats. I don't even know if they were in the room. Debbie Dingell talked to the press a little bit. So obviously, Democrat from Michigan talked to the press a little bit and said, you know, it's political that we're here to begin with. But basically what we know is from Republicans. I don't know about you, but I found actually the lack of media coverage of this to be interesting because we have seen some heightened, just in the last couple of months, criticism of Fauci from the press. Nothing like I think he deserves. But there has been a little bit more scrutiny. And it's at least an interesting story. Pretty much crickets from the press. Nothing like I think he deserves, but there has been a little bit more scrutiny,

and it's at least an interesting story, and pretty much crickets from the media. I think everything is kind of overshadowed by the war in Gaza, but yes, there does seem to be a little bit of a moving on from the media, also without public testimony, without those sots to play it in the clip, and to circulate on Twitter, sots to play it in the clip and to circulate on Twitter and then to also wind up in the evening news. You know, cable news, you're less likely to get that kind of coverage. That's what people want from it. So we do have a cable news sot. We do have a cable news sot. Well, first, let's put this first element up on the screen because we have, as Ryan said, we have gotten some stuff from these

meetings so far, mostly all from Republicans. So he's nine-hour closed-door grilling, and that was just day one. This is the headline that we just put up on the screen. Day two happened yesterday. So this is from the Republican Select Committee on the coronavirusemic. They say he's completed his two-day, 14-hour transcribed interview with the COVID Select Committee. And the most important highlights from day two, they said Fauci claimed that the, quote, six feet apart social distancing recommendation promoted by federal health officials was likely not based on any data. Quote, it just sort of appeared. That's a great one. Which is, like, that part I kind of knew at the time. Like, it was a brand new virus. People

were like, you should stay six feet apart. It's like, well, who said six feet? Like, five feet, you're in trouble. Seven feet, you're not. Like, I think common sense said they just kind of made that up. Approximately two Fauci's apart. Two, yeah. Fauci acknowledged the lab leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory, Republicans said. They also said he had admitted that America's vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic could increase vaccine hesitancy in the future. And actually, that's what the chairman, Brad

Wenstrup, really focused on in his press release about what happened yesterday. So in his press release, he said, after two days of testimony and 14 hours of questioning, and by the way, this just came out as we were starting taping, many things became evident. During his interview today, Dr. Fauci claimed that the policies and mandates he promoted may unfortunately increase vaccine hesitancy for years to come. He testified that the lab leak hypothesis, which was often suppressed, was in fact not a conspiracy theory. Further, the social distancing recommendations forced on Americans, quote, sort of appeared

and were likely not based on any scientific data. So, Ryan, that's what Wenstrup chose to focus on. That's where I'm like, okay, but breathing right in somebody's face when you're sick. Shouldn't do it. It's based on some data. Like, I mean, during the plague, throughout, you know, people social distance because if you're sick, you stay away from other people. Like, that's why you don't go to work when you're sick. You don't go to school when you're sick. Like, social distance has been understood by humans for thousands of years.

So, like, for him to come in and be like, they implemented this brand new thing called social distancing. It's like, I don't want to be around him if he's got a cough. Right. So we're coming on the heels of day... Like this thing that they tell you to cover your mouth now when you cough. Believe it or not. No scientific backup whatsoever. So we're coming on the end of day two here. But the big takeaway from day one was that, and we can put this next element up on the screen right now too, is that as the committee said, Fauci claimed he, quote, did not recall pertinent COVID-19 information or conversations more than 100 times on day one. So that's reporting from the New York Post, who was quoting Brad Renstrup,

who sort of did his running play-by-play of what happened in that room. Now, Fauci, according to the committee, profusely defended his previous testimony where he said that the NIH did not fund or does not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. And today, they said, so Monday, he repeatedly played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function in an attempt to avoid conceding that NIH funded this dangerous research. Ryan, that is where the rubber is going to meet the road. And that's exactly what the segment we have is addressing. Yeah. So Fauci did an interview with Mehdi Hassan back in, I think, last summer or whatever. And I actually talked to Mehdi ahead of the interview, you know, because he knows that's something I've been covering a lot.

And he was asking for, you know, just strategizing around the interview. And I pointed him to this interview that Fauci gave, I think, back in either 2012 or 2014, back when there was this debate over whether or not to ban or pause gain-of-function research. And he was a strong advocate of not banning, not pausing. Fauci was. Yeah. And in his interview, he said, in that interview back 10 years ago, he said, it's possible that there could be a mistake in using gain-of-function research that could lead to

a global pandemic. And we have to acknowledge that. However, I think the benefits of the research outweigh the costs. That was his opinion at the time. METI asked him if he still held that opinion. And he ended up dancing around the definition of gain of function a lot without really kind of answering the question directly because it's not, you either have to disavow

your previous comment or you have to sound like a maniac. Yeah, and this is what he's been doing back and forth with Rand Paul too, and we've asked Rand Paul about this on that show too. So here's some of the dancing that he did which is probably similar to what you're gonna read in the transcript when it eventually gets released. Here's Fauci with METI.

We put aside gain-of-function because that's so confusing what a gain-of-function is, is that any research that needs to be brought up to a greater degree of scrutiny had to be researched at that time, the operative definition, that actually was making an enhancement of the pathogenesis or the transmissibility of a pathogen that is highly likely known to be very transmissible, giving morbidity and mortality in humans. And the studies that were done that were funded through a United States organization with a subaward to EcoHealth Alliance was looking at bad viruses that have never been shown to infect humans. So by definition, the operative definition of the gain of function of concern, the NIH was not funding that. And that's when I said... So just to be clear for our viewers, because the viewers and me are not up to this like you are,

your position is we did fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but we didn't fund gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, therefore you did not lie to Congress. I just want to clarify. I want to clarify. We did not fund gain of function research according to the operative definition of what gain of function-function research was. So the problem with his answer there, he keeps going back to operative definition.

Yeah. EcoHealth lost its, basically lost its grant for doing gain-of-function research without informing the NIH about it. They came up with an agreement with the NIH, which we know because the Intercept got these documents through FOIA, that said if there was a one-log expansion in pathogenicity, that would count as gain-of-function and they would report back to the NIH. They never did that. Ultimately, and for a variety of reasons, they had their grant rescinded. And in that rescission, and barred from future funding, and in that letter from the NIH, it says that they conducted gain-of-function research outside of the protocol.

So that is what makes it impossible to square what Fauci is saying when it comes to the operative definition. Why was the NIH operating under a different operative definition than the one that you say was operative? Right. And so Emily Kopp of U.S. Right to Know had a really good point on Twitter yesterday. She said Fauci appears to be redefining gain-of-function research in order to escape a perjury conviction. And so, again, that's why Republicans really want to get him on the record in this transcribed testimony because that's clearly what he's trying to do. And if you listen to him in that conversation with Maddie, if you listen to him in any conversation now in which he's asked or if he's pressed on this question of gain of function, he should have known when he was testifying before Congress, and he did know actually when he was testifying before Congress, that this was going to be an issue. And that's why he's always been playing sort of fast and loose with it. But even so, when you look back at how he was

originally defining gain of function, it's so, so obvious what he's doing now. And nobody wants to be convicted of perjury. So, hey, man, you got to do what you got to do. But you shouldn't have lied in the first place. And you shouldn't have done any of this in the first place. And I mean, good on the Republicans for pushing him on this. It seems almost impossible to get convicted of perjury before Congress nowadays. But he did seem to have a willful intent to mislead Congress about the research that he was funding.

Absolutely. Which he now acknowledges is not a conspiracy theory to say that it may have emerged from the lab that he knew he was financing through a subaward. Yeah. He knew that. Yeah. imagine you're the guy who like fought an internal battle against people who were trying to stop gain-of-function research and successfully stopped it in the Obama administration because they thought it was so dangerous. He gets it restarted, but only under these very strict conditions. He then goes around those strict conditions and funds the Wuhan lab. A pandemic breaks out within, you know,

pretty quickly after this research starts to get funded. You can imagine he doesn't know for certain exactly what happened, but what do you, if you're him, what are you going to think? Right. How's it going to look? Even if it's, even if you're innocent, it's not going to look good. Right. Now you've seen the movie where like, like all of a sudden the guy has a gun in his hand, but he didn't actually kill the person. Right. He's, he then tries to figure out a way that he's not going to wind up in prison for the rest of his life,

even if he knows he's innocent. So even if he thought he was innocent, he was lying to try to get out of it. To try to say, well, it's the wet market. It's crazy. And also we weren't funding what we were funding. Yes. It's a web of lies.

I don't know if we have this next element. It's a tweet from Justin Goodman over at, yeah tweet from Justin Goodman over at White Coat Waste. We've had him on this show before, too. He says that this is another, speaking of the web of lies, Fauci knows that foreign animal labs he funded are exempt from oversight due to an illegal loophole. Under Fauci, NIAID funded more foreign animal labs than any NIH organization and admitted to GAO that it never inspected one. And so this is in response to different things that Fauci testified about. So this is not even just about gain of function. This was the select subcommittee tweeted. Fauci was unable to confirm if NIAID has any mechanisms to conduct oversight of the foreign laboratories they fund.

And Goodman is saying, yeah, he knows that they're exempt from oversight because of this illegal loophole. And they were funding all kinds of foreign animal labs on a different scale under Fauci than had been seen recently before that. So he's in a world of trouble. Whether there's any consequences for him, I think, is the open question now. All right, so that's a story about public officials misleading the public in a way I deeply care about. We now have a story about a public official misleading the public in a way I kind of don't care about, but it's really funny. Although I'm sad for Lloyd Austin. It sounds like he's still

in the hospital. Yeah. So let's talk about the problems that the White House is facing, because the White House press corps has found itself a scandal, and it's got questions that it wants answered. It is pretty absurd when you think about it. It's really crazy. Nobody would get away with this in a six-person office, let alone- Or in 1995, right? Bill Clinton, if this happens under his watch, this is the story that is leading all of the networks. It is the headline. And I mean, obviously, there are two wars going on right now. So in some ways, that makes the story more important. In some ways, it makes it less important. But the president seems to have not known that his defense secretary was undergoing serious medical treatment for a very serious condition.

It raises the question of whether it matters that anybody has their hand on the wheel. So let's put up this first element here. As part of Secretary Austin's—this is a statement. As part of Secretary Austin's routinely recommended health screening, he has undergone regular prostate surveillance. Changes in his lab evaluation in early December 2023 identified prostate cancer, which required treatment. December 22nd, he was admitted to Walter Reed National, Walter Reed and underwent a minimally invasive surgical procedure called a prostatectomy to

treat and cure prostate cancer. It seemed to go fine. He went home. On January 1st, New Year's Day, he was admitted back to Walter Reed with complications from the December 22nd procedure, including nausea, severe abdominal, hip, and leg pain. An initial evaluation revealed a urinary tract infection. January 2nd, the decision was made to transfer him to the ICU for close monitoring and a higher level of care. Now, they say that under no time during this was he sedated. And so you hear ICU and you think, all right, this guy's like in a coma, like that's just how the public hears it. Right. He was getting intensive care, but he was not sedated, which seems to be

the rationale that they would be relying on to say, well, okay, I was working from home. Right. Working from the ICU, managing two wars from the ICU. So the White House press corps, just battering the White House over this. I think we have John Kirby getting knocked around here. We learned also today that Secretary Austin, when he went into the hospital for the first time on December 22nd, he knew he was gonna be

under general anesthesia, he knew he was going to be under general anesthesia, he knew he was going to be spending the night and transferred authority to his deputy secretary. Was the White House informed then that the authority was going to be transferred? No. So the president has known for, I guess, five days now that Secretary Austin was in the hospital, but he wasn't informed why? Mr. He was not informed until last Friday that Secretary Austin was in the hospital.

He was not informed until this morning that the root cause of that hospitalization was prostate cancer. The Presser Is that because the White House knew and didn't inform the President, or because Secretary Austin chose not to share that with the President? Mr. Nobody at the White House knew

that Secretary Austin had prostate cancer until this morning, and the President was informed immediately after we were informed. The Press Okay. Last week, we learned that Jake Sullivan, I believe, found out about the fact that Secretary Austin was hospitalized on Thursday morning. So I just want to clarify, are you saying the president found out a day later

than the NSC did? No, Jake was informed, our national security advisor was informed that Secretary Austin was in the hospital and had been for some time. He found out late Thursday afternoon and he informed, he and the chief of staff, Mr. Zients, informed the president later that evening, early that evening, not long after they learned. They informed the president directly, Thursday evening. So Ryan, when you think about-

Didn't he say Friday first? Yes. And so when you think about all of the, when you think about- Didn't he say Friday first? Yes. And so when you think about all of the operations that are happening every single day, every single hour, really, both in Ukraine and in Israel, I think this becomes less of a sort of Washington intrigue scandal and more of a serious one that raises to another question, which is, does anybody even care if Biden is in the loop on this? Is Austin actually saying, don't tell the guy because he's not running this administration? That's the real, that's the biggest question for me is that, is this just that people know that Biden isn't even doing anything that like, it was crazy. If that was the case though, you'd at least tell the chief of staff,

the White House chief of staff. Because they are doing it. You would tell Jake Sullivan. You'd tell Tony Blinken. Although Jake Sullivan knew first. They did tell Jake Sullivan after a long time. Because Jake was in a meeting. And he's like, where's Lloyd? What's going on? Where's Lloyd? Where is he? And eventually somebody's like, oh, yeah, by the way, I guess he's in the hospital. I think it's his war crime alibi. So when he goes to the Hague, I'm like, I was in the ICU. Yeah, you can't blame me for anything. This is not me. I don't think that's going to fly because it's only a couple of days. He was doing war crimes before it. He was supporting war crimes from the ICU and he's still supporting war crimes. But again, when you think about the decisions that are going through the Pentagon,

high-level life and death decisions that are going through the Pentagon on an hourly basis because there are now two wars happening, let alone all of the various conflicts around the world, but two hot conflicts right now that we are funding to a serious degree. And you think that you can just keep this quiet, keep this from the president for as long as you did, something else is going on. That's not just that Lloyd Austin was, you know, he's a very private person. You know, he just didn't want the public. He didn't want to leak to the public. He didn't want the president to worry about him. There's something else going on there. But it's also a story that the White House press corps loves because there are answers that they

can get, questions that they can ask, and it's shorn of any kind of political valence. There's no substance. I mean, okay, yeah, there should be people running the show. There's substance there, but it's shorn of ideological substance. And they love the non-ideological stories. Agreed completely. Palace intrigue. Right. Right. Personnel questions.

There's nothing they love more than personnel. Perfect personnel intrigue. Yeah, absolutely. Because you can say it matters because it does. And you can look tough. And you're going to challenge the White House hard. Right. Ducey's question was funny.

Like, what kind of president is this? Or something like that. It's like, all right. I mean, fair. was funny. Like, what kind of president is this? Or something like that. It's like, all right, I mean, fair. Fair enough. It's pretty unusual. Yeah. I'm trying to think if this would have happened under the Trump administration. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. But he'd be so hypocritical from Democrats in particular because they don't want Trump involved. Well, I was going to say. They don't want Trump talking to his cabinet secretaries. They just want some deep state just running it. Well, that's what it reminds me of. It's actually kind of an interesting question because in the Trump administration, there were people who wished they weren't operating with the oversight of the president

because think of how Trump had- Everybody tried to avoid him. He put the CEO of Exxon in charge of the president because, you know, think of like how Trump had- Everybody tried to avoid him. He put the, like, the CEO of Exxon in charge of the State Department. Yeah, that's right. And then you had John Bolton in the White House. But he also had people who were way more, I'm not saying they are isolationists, but more isolationists sort of on the spectrum of, you know, interventionists to isolationists. And so he constantly had this, like, pull, tug of war happening in his own administration ideologically.

And people were playing each other against each other as like little pawns to see who could get to the president, to see, you know, who could put a crazy article on the president's desk and make John Bolton look bad or whatever it is. And so absolutely it would have happened in the Trump administration because there were people who didn't want Donald Trump to be involved. They didn't want him to oversee what they were doing in foreign policy, because then maybe one of the less interventionist people in his administration would try to persuade him to take different steps. Well, maybe if Biden takes his hand off the gazette tiller a little bit, there would be less unconditional support for what Israel's doing there. That's why I think this is interesting, because it does have that sort of like Trumpian, there's, does the Pentagon want to operate without oversight of the White House? And is this part of sort of giving the White House the middle finger and trying to operate more freely? I don't know, but there's something interesting there.

Let's get to the important news. Tunnels. All right, so in Crown Heights, police somehow stumbled on a network of tunnels built underneath a historic synagogue there in the Orthodox community. And we can get, there are a couple of theories about what was going on here. We have this first element that we can throw up here. This is footage of mayhem that broke out after the police were like, look, you can't just be digging massive tunnels underneath this synagogue. We're going to have to clear this out. They refused to clear out.

And so as you can see in the video, they handcuffed using those little plastic cuffs the first person that was stuck in the tunnel. And that's when all hell broke loose. And the congregants started fighting back. And you see a little bit of pepper spray type stuff getting doused. And then you see people start to rip the wooden walls off the side of the synagogue. And here's footage of the tunnels themselves, which are,

you know, go down underneath and then kind of, it seems like, well, anyway, let's get into the theories about what's going on. So there's two theories. One, some kids run amok. But I want to hear, the kids run amok theory is great. It's like some teenagers were told not to do this. And you know how kids today are. Kids these days. Kids these days.

And they just went ahead and dug these tunnels. This is from Libs of TikTok. This is a tweet sort of saying, Gen Z was taught that nothing is more important than their feelings, and now they're emboldened to act entitled and spoiled with zero regard or respect for others. We keep seeing this time and again in all our institutions. We must fix the broken education system. The future of our country depends on it. And this is her saying, the disgraceful teen, this is how she starts, who dug underneath a well-respected synagogue, did so on their own after being explicitly told not to. They went against synagogue leadership. And so, yes, Ryan, that is one of the theories. These are woke

tunnels. See, that's not so much wokeness as it is. Just generationally Gen Z. Kids these days. Their phones and their TikToks. So this went massively viral on TikTok. A lot of the tunnel videos first started cropping up. Massive virality on social media, especially on TikTok. So the theory. Go ahead. Well, I was just going to say. It's so absurd, but let's address it first.

So either way, one thing we do know is that the tunnels weren't just being dug by some bored kids for the hell of it, right? Like it wasn't just, you know, a screw you to authorities. This is a fairly, Rolling Stone describes it as quotidian, but a fairly serious dispute, internecine dispute among different sects in Crown Heights. So in reality, the explanation for the tunnels was at least somewhat more quotidian, rolling stone, right? So the tunnels were the result of an ongoing dispute between the Chabad Lubavitch community and a more extremist splinter sect, which has long been embroiled in turmoil over ownership of the building that is housing the headquarters. Members of the splinter group believe that the rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who led the Chabad

Lubavitch movement before his death at the age of 92. His alleged death. In 1994, is the messiah. And that is a claim that the mainstream Chabad movement rejects. And so this had started happening. The extremists believe that he's still alive, like, and wants them to do this, basically, right? It's crazy. I mean, it's just, it's a crazy, crazy story. And so Rolling Stone goes on to say in 2006, a court determined that the mainstream Chabad Lubavitch community had control over the building. So it's located on the Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn's heavily Hasidic Crown Heights, as Rolling Stone says. Yet there has still been tension between the

two groups for all of this time, with the newspaper The Jewish Chronicle reporting today that about six months ago, a small group of members from the Messianic movement started construction on a network of underground tunnels in order to gain illegal access to the building. So six months ago. And this was, there were some of those videos that were popping up about a month ago, maybe a little longer ago than that, actually. And it sort of stayed a local story. Of people popping out of the street? Just people. Do we have that one while we're chatting?

We do have more VO here that we can roll. This is the next element that we can put up on the screen just so you can sort of start to see what this looked like. And I'll read more here from Rolling Stone. They say, at first, the internecine dispute between what is essentially two small sects of the already small Crown Heights Orthodox Jewish community primarily garnered only local media interests. The mainstream Chabad Lubavitch community also immediately made it clear that it did not endorse the tunnels, with Chairman Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky issuing a statement saying that Chabad Lubavitch community is pained by the vandalism of a group of young agitators who damaged the synagogue below Chabad headquarters, and he

called their actions odious. Now, Ryan, Rolling Stone also notes that this started taking off when conspiracy theories that are pretty obviously anti-Semitic about satanic ritualistic sex abuse from kind of QAnon-adjacent accounts started to spread, and that was maybe the fuel that took this from a local news story to a national one. But also the image of the guy walking out of the sidewalk. If you're listening to this on the podcast, we're playing the clip of this guy that went viral, the big old hat climbing out of, basically through a grate out of the sidewalk onto the street and then walking off. And just imagine you're walking down the street

and you see that and try to describe it later to friends. You won't believe what I saw today. Well, there was that guy on Twitter saying he was hearing people speak Yiddish. Under the sidewalk or something? Well, he said, I live in like a ground floor apartment building and there's nothing. He's like, I can't have no explanation for it I don't think I lived in Crown Heights, but that tweet started going viral too again I actually don't think the anti-semitic conspiracy theories are what made this story viral I think this story went viral because it's absolutely because it's crazy. It's a crazy story

It's a crazy story. I love New York to yes the Italian cop talking talking to the dudes before all hell pops off. Maybe we have, add some of that in post. That was just a great classic New York clip, too. Perfect. He's like, what are you guys doing here? You can't just do this. He says something like, this is America.

I'm going to have to clear the whole shul, yeah. Yeah. We've got to fix this by tonight. Yeah. Because also, there are real concerns now that there's significant structuralawl. Yeah. Yeah. We got to fix this by tonight. Yeah. Because also there are real concerns now that there are that there's significant structural damage. Right. Like you can't like you can't just take sledgehammers to underneath historic buildings and not have some concern. Yeah. You know, not not to be like, you know, the structural engineer guy who's like insisting on everything being done by the

book. But come on, guys. Gravity's a thing. No, seriously. And like as often as I have some like libertarian impulses on these domestic questions, for example, there's a woman in Herndon who's gone viral on TikTok for digging a tunnel underneath her own house. More for the hell of it. But she has some like sort of explanation that actually might be well described as quotidian, probably a better description there. But she is like now being investigated by the city. And again, even as somebody with libertarian impulses, it's like, you can see in some of these videos, there's a house not far away from her. So if you don't know what you're doing, you can cause other people's property to collapse. You can make it unsafe. Your freedom to dig a tunnel ends

underneath my property. I think it would be a fair libertarian. Or near enough to my property that you're damaging my property. Libertarians are all about their own property rights too. Yeah, to an extent. It just depends. Some of them, I guess. We don't need to get into it probably. But again, at its heart, what is a crazy dispute comes down to a messianic sect of Judaism, which, again, those questions of the Jewish Messiah loom very heavily over the conflict over the West Bank and over that land in particular. So this stuff, you know, this is a sort of silly embodiment or manifestation of it, but these are ancient questions that mean a lot to people to the point where they will dig tunnels under Crown Heights. It popped onto the House floor, if you remember, when Republicans

tried to or did push a resolution that said specifically, like, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. And Jerry Nadler, who represents some Orthodox communities in New York, went to the House floor and said, this is absurd for many, many reasons. But one particular reason it's absurd is that I have anti-Zionist constituents who believe that you cannot bring Israel, that humans cannot bring Israel onto the earth. Only the Messiah can bring Israel onto the earth. And that is their interpretation. How dare you call them anti-Semitic for that anti-Zionist interpretation. Right. I mean, I just saw it on Christmas, the birth of the Messiah. Although this one particular sect not exactly covering itself in glory in this moment.

No, covering itself in a lot of dirt. A lot of dirt. A lot of dirt. But no, I mean, the questions of the Messiah are so central to not just Israeli culture and politics, but Western culture. Again, like we just celebrated Christmas in this country. For Christians, it's about the Messiah. Again, ancient questions that mean a lot to people that they're willing to actually lay down their lives in the Middle East right now is what we're seeing. And dig tunnels in other cases if they're in Crown Heights.

Well, speaking of the return. The return of the Messiah. Don Lemon is back. If you were wondering if Don Lemon would return, here he is. Not three days, more like three months, but he's back. So Don Lemon is announcing his new program, which will be airing on Twitter and elsewhere, I guess. But I think primarily he's saying it will premiere on Twitter. We can put up this first element.

This is Don Lemon, a CNN employee of 17 years. He said, I've heard you, and today I am back. Bigger, bolder, freer. That's what was missing was Don Lemon. We need him unleashed. My new media company's first project is The Don Lemon Show. It will be available to everyone easily, whenever and wherever you want it, streaming on the platform

to where the conversations are happening. And you'll find it first on Twitter, which he calls X for some reason. The biggest space for free speech in the world. I know now more than ever that we need a place for honest debate and discussion without the hall monitors. This is just the beginning, so stay tuned.

Stay tuned. Okay. I just want to say my favorite part of his statement is where he starts with, quote, I've heard you, which is just a brilliant PR move from someone who stumbles through life trying to orchestrate his own PR, presumably because actually the greatest bit of color in any profile, I think, written in modern history is when it's like GQ where Esquire sat down and profiled Don Lemon, went to a restaurant with him. Someone ordered sorbet. The writer ordered sorbet and Don Lemon corrected him and said, it's pronounced sorbet. That's so good.

Really, and that made it into the profile. So Don Lemon saying, I've heard you, implying, you're just letting the reader know that people are clamoring for more Don Lemon. Are you suggesting that the volume from the groundswell was not audible to your ears? I hadn't heard it, Ryan, but maybe that's because I was tuned into the fact that by the time he left CNN, he had had horrible ratings, both in primetime and then on the morning show that they tried to move him to. They used the Nikki Haley thing about her being past her prime sort of as the fig leaf to finally get rid of Don Lemon, it seemed like. But his ratings were bad. People were not clamoring for Don Lemon, even when he was on CNN.

And to his point, he would say, that's why, because I was on CNN and I was just caged in. Tucker Carlson responded, we have this next element. Tucker, also who used to work at CNN, I believe they overlapped, Ryan. Tucker responds, congratulations, it's a new world, welcome. And Don replies, thanks, Tucker. Now, it is to Tucker's benefit to have more people do their shows on X because it encourages Elon Musk to sort of build up the infrastructure for X as a video platform. It creates the expectation that X is a political video platform. And so I understand why he's ushering Don Lemon into this new era. But the idea that Don Lemon was shackled by CNN is outrageous. And we have

some video, actually, that's just delightful, that proves that he was never really just it was just it was too hard for don he was suffocated by jeff zucker and chris licht over at cnn here's don lemon on a leash black people if you really want to fix the problem here's just five things that you should think about doing is it fair to say this because i'm not a mommy but is it mommy brain just because you can have a baby it doesn't mean you should i'm not a mommy, but is it mommy brain? Just because you can have a baby, it doesn't mean you should. I'm not sexist, by the way. I don't mean to be crude, okay? Yeah.

There are ways not to perform oral sex if you... Oh. ...have not to do it. I resuscitate her! I gotta say, everywhere I go, and you know what I'm gonna ask him, people say, hey, that guy's on your show. Is he really running for president? But just because you have the right, does it mean that you should?

There are, what did he say about oral sex? I mean, it's just amazing. Why? Sean Amanpour was like, what? Go watch that on the Free Beacon's YouTube channel because the whole thing is absolutely hilarious. There's more to it. I actually believe or not that goes on for like another minute of Don Lemon saying outrageously funny things. And it's funny, Ryan, because Chris Cuomo then went to News Nation. He mounted a comeback after he also left CNN in disgrace with bad news ratings

and a serious ethical scandal that would basically end the career of any journalist in the crib. Are we calling what Chris Cuomo did a comeback? No, probably not. But he actually tried. He's tried to mount a comeback. Right. And he has been on different people's shows. And he's trying to be taken seriously. Don Lemon is now trying to do the very same thing. They are two of the people who I think created so much distrust in media unnecessarily. They are two of the biggest people who did that from not just during the Trump administration, before the Trump administration, during COVID, the way Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon both treated Andrew Cuomo. It was, I mean, these things seriously so distrust

in media. There are a lot of good reporters, believe it or not, who are over there in Ukraine, who are doing reporting from Israel right now, putting their lives on the line to get into Gaza, some of them on CNN. And these two jokers just laughed their way through the last decade, saying the dumbest stuff possible, just making everybody hate the media. I never quite understood the Don Lemon phenomenon. I would see the right get livid at him as some kind of symbol of the left, but I never quite understood. From that series of clips, he certainly doesn't come off as somebody who's remotely associated with the left. Where would you put Don Lemon in our kind of ecosystem of politics? I think he's actually a perfect embodiment of the left, hear me out, in that he's not a leftist, but he is culturally left on the issues that get you into the Manhattan cocktail party circuit.

So he's willing to, for example, on his air one time, he had Rick Wilson and I think it was like Wajahat Ali laughing at Rick Wilson's just reprehensible and not funny. I mean, I'm willing to laugh at these things, but just not funny impression of Trump supporters as like toothless rubes or something. I think he said like that. And they're just wheezing through their laughs on the air. And so he's willing to be kind of culturally a signal that he is on the right. He agrees with you on all the right things, but there's no way that he supports, you know, Medicare for all or like any of these serious leftist policy proposals economically. He doesn't want to forfeit the power of the neoliberal sort of establishment. He doesn't want to eat into any of that.

The dude just wants to make a ton of money, hang out in Martha's Vineyard, and wear super expensive suits. Like, that's all he wants. Well, Martha's Vineyard, beautiful. So I hear. And he wants to be taken seriously as like an intellect, which is why he wears all of his glasses. I've been to Cape Cod. Cape Cod is beautiful. I assume Martha's Vineyard is also beautiful. But anyway, that's sort of like the left has allowed itself to be, because of those cultural issues, publicly, in the perception of a lot of people in middle America, co-opted by people like Don Lemon. So it's clear why that there's a platform on something like CNN for that or why there was for a long time. But is there an audience for it that you have to build independently?

I mean, I assume out of the gate, Musk will juice his numbers just to try to encourage new people to come in. So be like, wow. And also he'll do some ridiculous things that will get like people gawking. Yeah. He's going to do more of what he did during Trayvon Martin, telling people to pull up their pants. He's going to do more of that because it's always been a performance. You know, he knows that this, does he fully believe what he's saying? Sometimes. Does it draw an organic audience? Well, the thing is you can do really well in niches now and it doesn't do well on CNN. I don't know if there's a niche audience for warmed over centrist performative sanctimony on Twitter. I kind of doubt it. Not on Twitter. No, that's gone. But you can do better because

you have way less overhead and there's fewer expectations for you to be the voice of America on primetime on a cable news network every day. So he'll probably be able to at least seem like he's doing fine, at least at first. But by the way, Crystal was all over this yesterday. She was like, I have called Don Lemon's right-wing turn from the beginning. So we'll see, because he will know that on X, the best way to get attention is going to be a performative contrarian. At two, Don. I know, this hit Ryan hard. We've lost Don. Don has fallen. As goes Dawn, so goes the nation. All right, up next, Kenny Clips to talk about his brief suspension from Twitter

and what it was like to see his life flash before his eyes. Stick around for that. All right, we're happy to be joined now by Kenny Clips, also known as Ken the White, not Ken the Gray anymore. He has defeated the Balrog and is here in studio with us. Ken Clippenstein of The Intercept. Amazing story. We hope that you're doing okay after the trauma you suffered yesterday, but we have a lot to dig into. So we're going to talk with Ken after we wrap this show about a story that it's going to be published at The Intercept later today. don't want to tease too much about that.

But for now, we want to talk about deeply traumatic experience that he went through. I'm kidding. It's somewhat serious as well, though. So yesterday morning or late last night, a ton of accounts on Twitter got suspended. We can put this first element up. Here's a handful of them. Yours was among them, TrueAnonPod, Rob Rousseau, with a podcast with Jordan Ewell, Alan McLeod. All of these are critics of Israel. But many, many more than just this. Z Squirrel is a kind of polarizing account.

It was an anti-imperialist account. And even, so we're running a piece at The Intercept that I think will be up today by somebody who was resigning from the DNC in protest of what's happening in Gaza. And he emailed me that morning. He was like, I was caught up in this purge. So it went beyond even kind of, you know, higher visibility accounts and spread out into some others. But it was fairly quickly undone after a lot of kind of public outrage. And Musk himself, well, before we get to Ken, we can put Musk up himself if we have this next element. He said, I will investigate. Obviously, it is okay to be critical of anything, but it is not okay to call for extreme violence as that is illegal. Apart from the UN exemption, where officials from countries recognized by the UN can say what, apart from the UN exemption where officials from countries

recognized by the UN can say what they say at the UN. For the record, I do not personally agree with your views. I forget who he's responding to here. Nonetheless, maybe it was Jackson Hinkle. The point of freedom of speech is allowing those whose views you disagree with to express those views. So first of all, do you have any idea what might have triggered this? Like when you went back through your posts from the last couple of weeks, was there anything where you're like, oh, I crossed the line there? I was uncharacteristically quiet over the last couple of weeks. I must have been one of the only people that didn't comment on the unfolding scandal with the professors torching each other. That's what was missing. Which I'm wholly

insupportive. Anything that burns down these academic institutions, I'm fine with. But I didn't actually say anything about it. It was actually one of the only times that I couldn't go back and find stuff that I might have said that would have pissed people off. So I was a little bit surprised by it. But the serious point, I mean, there's a funny side of this. The serious side is how little disclosure there is. I found out about the ban the same way you guys did and everyone else which was rolling over in bed seeing my phone You know getting blown up with text messages and calls asking what happened didn't know what they were talking about Everyone is like we've noticed that Ken is suspended Ken you must return That's how I found out and I never got an email from Twitter, you know in the past

It's been you get suspended. They send you a message, you know, people maybe complain that the appeal system doesn't work expeditiously enough or the way they wish. But there was at least some kind of a mechanism to tell you, here's what happened, here's why we determined this. Nothing. And I still haven't gotten anything, even subsequent to the reinstatement. I got an email saying, you've been reinstated. No explanation about what happened. So how are they going to prevent this from happening again if they don't even understand? There's been no disclosure around what exactly

went wrong. Well, and that's interesting because Elon Musk seems to be implying there that, to his knowledge, there was some algorithmic sweep of people who may have called for violence. And sometimes the algorithm, everybody knows this, if you're trying to target people who have called for violence, you can sweep up all kinds of different mentions of one word that the algorithm is looking for and using as a target word. But that's... Yeah, no, I'm not a call for violence kind of guy. I don't think it would go well for me. I'm not a very tough guy physically, so I'm not going to push for anything in that direction. But that's what, so I'm, again, like Ryan, trying to piece together, what it sounds like is Elon Musk is saying Twitter has some sort of algorithmic sweep that is supposed to detect calls for violence.

And one of the ironies of all of this is that Lee Fong and I at The Intercept reported on the mechanism by which the federal government is communicating with the social media platforms to, in the past, take down or, you know, communicate to them what they perceive to be threats about. COVID. Right. The war in Afghanistan seemed to be expanding. And, you know, I think that led to the Twitter files that Elon has touted as of historic importance and something we need to focus on. The question now is what's going on with respect to Israel with these platforms? When I see him say something like that, it makes me wonder. I'm not talking about the Israeli government.

I'm talking about the US intelligence community, which has its own set of interests around disinformation concerning the war on Hamas. And was regularly meeting, we know, with the intelligence community, at least in the lead up to the 2020 election. And I think Elon has said that that's not happening now. But, I mean, it's just really hard to know. Doing it on its own. So I'm just curious mechanically.

So you hear, hey, Ken, how'd you get suspended? So what happened when you open up Twitter? It just wouldn't, I couldn't post, I couldn't do anything. It still let me look at things. You could look at your account? Yeah, I could look at things, but it said you have been permanently suspended at the bottom. And so I couldn't message anyone. Permanently?

Yeah. And again, I don't know how I would have appealed it because there was no decision sent to me. There was no saying like if you want to appeal this decision, go here. Yeah. Potential context for this is not just the Bill Ackman kind of. Which I've never commented on, by the way. I must be one of the few people that didn't. So the EU. Congratulations. The EU is not interested in the First Amendment in the way we are because we have not made them like official states. Right. They don't have a First Amendment.

And so they have a policy where they're pushing Twitter. They're telling Twitter that they have insufficiently would lump pro-Hamas and anti-Israel or anti-IDF or anti-Gaza war into the same thing. That is the operative question in all this. And unfortunately the people with the political tendency most likely to care about that kind of chilling effect on speech are the ones that have such strong views on Israel that they're not saying anything about this right now. So we find ourselves in a really difficult situation where I think there's a real risk of what you're describing happening.

But the political factions that might have raised issue with that are inclined to say, well, you know, let's go after Hamas, let's go after these anti-Israel factions. Right, and you've seen Glenn, our former colleague Glenn Greenwald, tangling a ton with the right because he was in lockstep alliance with them in support of free speech and especially speech that you find abhorrent. He's right. turn on Israel, on this question of Israel. It's like, well, we don't actually mean we'll defend

the speech rights of people who are critical of this Israeli assault. The right doesn't really, and say this as someone on the right, the right doesn't really have a clear idea of what it means by free speech. Just that it means it's against political correctness. Everyone sort of agrees on that. This is something that got under my skin about all this. I got banned, boo-hoo, poor me, who cares? The important part in all this is the discourse around speech and what kind of process

we're gonna have in place for this guy that claims to be free speech. And something I saw people say again and again is, ha-ha, Ken cheered on people getting banned before and now it happened to him. I have never once cheered anyone getting banned because I don't believe, if you're making calls to violence, yes, that's one thing. But anything that's constitutionally protected, to the extent that we can, we should try to support that. I've always said that. So this kind of lazy dichotomy of

left doesn't care about this, right cares. It's like it just doesn't capture not only me, but I suspect a lot of people don't fit into these categories, you know? No, and I think that's what Twitter does to our brains. It gamifies things like free speech so that you can get a bunch of retweets by trying to dunk on Ken or whatever. It's just an easy, it's a shortcut to virality, which is obviously very cheap. Do you think it's possible that this was a gift from Elon Musk to you, Ken, for your mental health? I'm kidding. I do think I did pretty well on Substack. I got a lot of newsletter subscribers. So shout out Elon for that. Thank you. If you could do that, if you could do this again at some point. As long as it's temporary. Yeah. Well,

the other thing I was going to say, Ken, is Elon Musk talks all the time that one of the big reasons he bought Twitter was to ban Ken Clips. To take on Kenny Clips. My FOILer, Beth Borden, had a really funny comparison. She likes to call it, what was it, when Obama was roasting Trump. And you can see the gears turning in Trump's head, like, I'm going to destroy this guy. She's like, yep, that was you in 2020. And that's why we're all stuck with El Presidente Elon. Well, he talks about how important X is as a free speech platform. Don Lemon talks about how important X is as a free speech platform, an ally certainly to you and others in this difficult time. But if that is true, if Elon Musk really believes that this is such an important platform because it shapes the discourse, it shapes news coverage.

And I agree, all of that stuff is absolutely true. It does shape news coverage. Then it should be a paramount priority for him to protect journalists. Because for example, we're going to talk to you in a little bit about a big scoop you have coming out today. And presumably, if X is such a big and important part of journalism and discourse, that's, I mean, serious to protect your ability to communicate. Yeah, I would love for him to live up to the precepts that he espouses. You know, I'm obviously someone who has a history with him and I'm not a fan of his, but when he claimed to care about free speech, I was obviously skeptical, but I would have been the, you know, first person to say, you know, great job if he followed through on that because that's the most important thing. And he did. Yeah, right. I'm doing

it now. Good job. Thank you. Before we wrap this, I do want to talk about the logical extension of this argument around calls for violence came up when it came to the Hamas account or a Hamas account. I think it was Kassam 2024. Yes, that's right. Connected to the Hamas military wing. So, Musk did ban this account and he was then pressed on it by Jackson Hinkle on Twitter and asking why ban this but not other accounts that call for violence. Musk said, this was a tough call. While many government leaders, including the USA, do call for killing people, we have a

UN exemption rule. If a government is recognized by the UN, we will not suspend their accounts. Hamas is not recognized as a government by the UN, so was suspended. Jackson then responded, I understand the rule, but I don't understand why it's only being applied to Palestinian accounts. Here are a few examples of pro-Israeli accounts that have not been held accountable for violating the same rule. He quotes Laura Loomer saying, expel all jihadists from Congress and turn Gaza into a parking lot. He quotes somebody else saying, flatten everything, spare no school, no children's hospital, no old age home, delete their entire gene pool off the face of the earth.

He quotes Bethany Mandel saying, not nuking these effing animals is the only restraint I expect, and that's only because the cloud would hurt Israelis. Laura Loomer, again, I support the complete destruction of Gaza. They have had more than enough time to evacuate. I 100% support this, just so we are clear, and you can find others. So he responds to this, in general, suspensions should be even-handed. We are also very reluctant to have permanent suspensions, so people should expect a series of temporary suspensions that become longer rather than instant permanent suspensions. All of this suggests that the banning of Kassam 2024,

then all of these other accounts getting caught up in this ban that was then overturned because of the public reaction, followed by him saying people should expect temporary suspensions rather than instant permanent suspensions, suggests something was deliberate here. Totally. Because you described an instant permanent suspension, and now he's saying, well, okay, maybe that's not the way to do it. Is he going to have to ban like Laura Loomer for a few hours? Mm-hmm well flies in the face of his claim that you know Oh, this was just a spam thing and a few people got caught up in it

Then why is it every single account they could find people that had voiced criticisms of Israel literally? I couldn't find a single example that didn't fit that Hmm. That is interesting. I mean it's not surprising and it seems like he's Suggesting that he might actually now have to do a tit-for-tat thing so he looks balanced. Bethy Mandel, watch out. It's a problem when you start to play this game. And that's why you can't play the game to begin with. It's why as people were really prescient about this, and I was questioning it at the time a little bit, when Alex Jones was first banned, that was sort of what toppled Twitter's house

of cards. When they got rid of Alex Jones, it was like, okay, here we go, careening down the slippery slope. And it didn't seem like it at the time, but everything after that proved it really was that. If you're going to play the game at all, it's not going to work well ideologically for one side unless it's free speech. Unless you carve out a convicted of defamation, found liable for defamation on the platform. Yeah. Which they could have said that with Alex Jones. And then at least you have a standard that you then universally apply.

Right. Like if Ken is found to have defamed somebody. In fact, is what Elon pledged to do when he first, he said he wants to bring things in accordance with the host nation laws around speech. Right. Make your Kenny Clipped joke. What was my, oh, it should have been Kenny Clipped.

Yes. Our little, we have Kenny Clips on there. But I guess, because his clips are back. He was using safety scissors. It wasn't very sharp. Kenny Clipped would have been good. Anyway, Ken, thanks for joining us. Thanks, guys.

And later today, I think we'll have this next segment that we're going to pause now and record. But I guess that's going to do it for us for this show. So thanks, everybody, for joining us. Do we have any plugs? Go to BreakingPoints.com. Yeah, BreakingPoints.com. Get your premium subscription. That's right, premium subscription.

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