Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/1/23: Israel Bombs Refugee Camp, Yemen Launches Attacks On Israel, Biden's Doubt Of Casualty Numbers Exposed, West Bank Violence, Abortion And Weed Elections, Hawley Citizens United, Rand Paul On Covid Origins

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Israel admitting they bombed a Gaza refugee camp, Yemen escalates attacks on Israel, Ryan exposes Biden's lies on Gaza Health Ministry credibility, West Bank settler violence explodes, key elections coming up on weed and abortions, Josh Hawley pushes to overturn Citizens United, and Rand Paul joins to discuss his new book on the origins of Covid. 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 back to CounterPoints. Later in the show, we're going to be interviewing Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Before that, we're going to be interviewing Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Before that, we're going to get to some updates on the Israeli war in Gaza. We're going to talk about some developments in the West Bank. Settlers have been rampaging, abusing Palestinians there. And we're going to talk about a really disturbing new TikTok trend coming out of the West Bank, in which IDF soldiers and now Israeli civilians are kind of humiliating Palestinians just for a kind of a TikTok dance. What else we got today? Well, there are elections next week. So we're now into November. Happy November, everyone. That means next week, Tuesday, there are some big elections coming up. Of course, Ohio, we've been covering that for a little bit.

But we're going to— Abortion and marijuana in Ohio. Yep, both of them on the ballot at the same time. My doppelganger, Tate Reeves, is facing off against Elvis Presley's cousin down in Mississippi. Do people say you look— Actual tight race. Is it just you that says you look like Tate Reeves? I wish it was just me.

It's not the most flattering thing that anybody's ever said about me. And a Republican of all people, Josh Hawley, is introducing a bill that would undercut Citizens United. We're going to dive into all of that. But Ryan, we have so many updates to get to. The situation in the Middle East changes on a minute-by-minute basis. We're always looking at regionally what other developments are happening. Yemen, for example, yesterday is one of those examples of how this can become even bigger

and broader. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. Let's start, though, with the attack on the refugee camp, Jabalia, from yesterday. We have a first element here you can put on the screen. This is some footage from the bombing of the refugee camp in Jabalia. 50 confirmed dead so far, according to reports, about 150 missing. Ryan, since we saw this, and if you're watching this, you see people carrying bodies out of the rubble. Since this happened yesterday, there was another bombing of the same camp actually just today before we started taping this, right? Right this hour, we're getting news. Yusuf Mounir, who's been a guest on this program before, actually just a couple of weeks ago, I believe, was reporting that there's been another airstrike in this same refugee camp just within the last

couple of hours. The previous one, witnesses said seven or eight missiles struck the area, just annihilating entire apartment blocks. The new strike, according to Munir, is a similar annihilating blocks of apartments, creating massive craters. And what's remarkable is the way that even Wolf Blitzer, and we'll talk about Wolf Blitzer's background in a second, was appalled at the carnage that he was witnessing. I think we have him on CNN here last night. But even if that Hamas commander was there amidst all those Palestinian refugees who are in that Jabalia refugee camp. Israel still went ahead and dropped a bomb there, attempting to kill this Hamas commander,

knowing that a lot of innocent civilians, men, women, and children, presumably would be killed. Is that what I'm hearing? That's not what you're hearing, Wolf. We, again, we're focused on this commander, again, you'll get more data who this man was, killed many, many Israelis. We're doing everything we can. It's a very complicated battle space. There could be infrastructure there. There could be tunnels there.

We're still looking into it, and we'll give you more data as the hour moves ahead. But you know that there are a lot of refugees, a lot of innocent civilians, men, women, and children in that refugee camp as well, right? This is the tragedy of War Wolf. I mean, we, as you know, we've been saying for days, move south. Civilians that are not involved with Hamas, please move south. I'm just trying to get a little bit more information. You knew there were civilians there. You knew there were refugees, all sorts of refugees,

but you decided to still drop a bomb on that refugee camp attempting to kill the Samas commander. By the way, was he killed? I can't confirm yet. There'll be more updated. Yes, we know that he was killed. It's like the best journalism I've seen from

Wolf Blitzer in years. Did you notice in there that he said that there might have been tunnels there? Yes. You can't blow up an entire refugee camp filled with people because there might be tunnels underneath it. I mean, clearly they can and they're going to, but. If there are tunnels, then say there are tunnels. And if there is, they haven't named still yet. They just did. Nassim Abu Ajina, who was listed as a battalion commander and was involved in commanding one of the battalions that was involved in a massacre at the Kibbutzim outside of Gaza. So, but not a high, a person with direct culpability in the atrocities that were committed on October 7th, but not a high level commander either. Yeah. And I think that was a big problem

yesterday. I'm glad that they've since named him, but all day yesterday, as you're getting questioned like this and saying, we can't name the guy yet, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's a real problem to not be able to say publicly why you did it. And if you're, and the tunnel thing to your point actually reminded me of that. And so, I mean, again, we've had these conversations for weeks now and I think generally disagree on some big points. I do think, and we're going to get into actually another clip of Wolf Blitzer, I think this is a really big problem going forward, obviously, for public facing, forward facing Israeli officials who are going

to go on the media and have this conversation. Right. And Wolf Blitzer, in the 1970s, wrote and edited an AIPAC newsletter. He spent the 1980s as a correspondent in Tel Aviv. Right before he became a household name in the Gulf War, he was a Washington-based correspondent for an Israeli newspaper. This is somebody who literally worked for AIPAC, who is saying, let me get this right. You knew that there were hundreds, thousands of civilians in this area, and you dropped these high-explosive bombs anyway, right there. And he said, this is a tragedy of war is what the IDF spokesperson said. Well, it's also a war crime. Well, and that's, okay, so we're going to play the next clip, but we talked about this in reference to John Kirby last week. John Kirby

gave that answer. We'll talk a little bit more about it in the next segment, where he said war is ugly. And I think he used the word messy. It's bloody. It's Bloody, right. True. Right. Well, yes. And I think I said something like this is, at least it's honest. And I mean, that's the problem with, in this clip in particular, at one point he says, well, it's the tragedy of war. And in another point, he sort of dodges and jumps around. It is true that Israel did tell people to evacuate. It's doing the same thing right now with hospitals

in Gaza. Palestinians are saying, we don't have anywhere to go because Israel has continued to bomb the South. And so you leave your house, you go to these, according to the Associated Press, some of these shelters are triple overflow. They're completely packed, yes, obviously. And so you just have this impossible situation where Israel has an enemy that says it should be wiped off the face of the earth and just massacred civilians. But that enemy also lives in a densely populated, tiny, crowded territory, is careful about how it conducts its operations in civilian areas. So it's a horrible situation.

You have to be able to answer questions like that from Wolf Blitzer. Right. And the U.S. saying from the mouth of the president and then from the mouth of Kirby that civilian casualties are the price of war. They're unfortunate, but it's the price of war. It's just this is what happens in war, is a green light to Israel to do what it's doing. And so as the United States expresses concerns about the loss of civilian life in this strike, remember that they are the ones that ahead of time gave it the green light by creating the space to allow for it to happen. Somebody pointed out that in 2002 or maybe 2003, right after, very soon after 9-11, Israel struck the leader of Hamas and a founder of Hamas and killed him,

along with seven civilians. George W. Bush put out one of the sternest kind of statements condemning the action, condemning the loss of civilian life, saying that there's no justification, even if you're attacking the commander, like the commander, not a battalion commander, but like the head of Hamas. Killing seven civilians along the way is an unacceptable price to pay. That's George W. Bush, who later would have more blood on his hands than probably any president in 100 years. And for him to say that this is too much, and now to get very little reaction from the White House to who knows how many civilian casualties we're going to have. And it's almost untoward to be kind of quibbling over the numbers when you look at those images. So here's Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, testifying before Congress and getting interrupted by Medea Benjamin of Code Pink. Not shrinking back. Not in the face of Russia's aggression against Ukraine.

Not in the face of an intensifying strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific and around the world. If the witness will suspend, and I ask that everyone again respect this hearing, we will suspend until the room is closed. So we still don't have any sense of, other than the plan that was floated by the Military Intelligence Bureau to just completely clear out Gaza, of where this is going. Right. Like what, okay, they killed this battalion commander along with countless other civilians. They're going to try to kill other Hamas battalion commanders. They say they're going to dismantle the organization, whatever that actually means. Because the organization, broadly speaking, has some significant level of support from the Palestinian people, which means that whatever

organization you dismantle, the one that is put in its place will have a similar politics. Or else they won't win the support of the people. As you'll hear a lot of Palestinians say, the party that advocates negotiations with Israel is out of political favor because they've been negotiating for 30 to 40 years, and over those 30 to 40 years, the economy has gotten worse. Their travel restrictions have gotten tighter. They're down at electricity four hours a day before the strike. There's no hope, no sense of dignity connected to those negotiations. So you're going to wind up with somebody who says, well, we're going to then confront Israel.

Likely. Right. So logically, that seems to leave the IDF, the intelligence ministry plan of we're going to clear out the north, occupy it, and then we're going to clear out the south and push the Palestinians into Sinai Peninsula. Is that your sense of, what's your sense of what the actual plan is here? I have no sense of what the actual plan is. And that's not surprising at all because there was no sense of what the actual plan is in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's no sense of what the actual plan is short of, quote, whatever it takes in Ukraine. To the tune of billions and billions of dollars, perhaps close to 100,000 casualties on both sides, if not more,

there is no plan. And I do, again, this is not in, we have to have room for Israel to disincentivize the conduct of Hamas. Israel cannot say we will not retaliate because that gives Hamas a green light to massacre more civilians. So that can't be the case either. But I just don't have confidence in Western war strategy anymore. And I don't think, I also think, we're going to talk about this with Lindsey Graham in a little bit. I think when you listen to IDF commanders, it's really hard to understand or to give them the benefit of the doubt and the fog of war mentality. Because again, like some things are up in the air, but I don't see anything concrete. I don't see what are you going to do about, let's say hundreds of civilians die. Hamas is, even though their leaders are in Qatar, you get the battalion commander guys,

they're out of the way. Does that make the situation better or worse? At what point does that make the situation better and worse? And how does that make the situation better or worse? And then what do you do afterwards? And actually, the news reports indicate that's still being discussed as opposed to, well, we've had this terrorist threat living next to us for years. What is the, if they massacre civilians and a ground war is necessitated, what is the

next step? There's just, I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying that you have to have that if you are going to wage war on the scale. It's also not clear strategically what Hamas was going for, like where they saw this ending. And that kind of sets up our next conversation here. One of the things that Hamas leadership suggested in the wake of their October 7th massacre was that they were hoping for a broader conflagration. That they were, you had to kind of read between the lines of some of their interviews. They were saying, you know, other actors can choose what they would want to do, but I hope that they would kind of live up to their broad commitments. Speaking to Iran and others, saying that Iran has claimed that it's, you know, implacably hostile to Israel, so stand up, you know, defend us. Like, they didn't go all the way to saying that, but it was very clear that that's what they meant. So if we can put up this element, this is the,

Yemen's Houthi government has now declared war on Israel. Right. And this comes after they launched a couple of kind of drones and missiles toward Israel, but saying that they're going to be kind of ramping up that level of assault. What that exactly means is unclear given kind of Israeli defenses, Iron Dome, and also U.S. You know, the U.S. said that they intercepted some of those Houthi missiles previously. So at the same time, you have Egypt, if we can put this up here. Egypt has moved tanks to the Rafah border. And this is not, I don't think, precipitating any type of invasion or anything like that. But I

think this is a response to the public reports, both from the Netanyahu-connected think tank, which produced a paper basically calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, plus the Israeli intelligence ministry, which as everybody points out is a small kind of just policy organization, yet run by a, you know, Likud politician with links to Netanyahu. They also put out a paper gaming out what it would look like to ethnically cleanse Gaza. And part of that plan, essential to that plan, is pushing people through the Rafah border closing into the Sinai Peninsula. So I think Egypt sending troops to that, sending tanks there is to say, no, like you're not doing this. We're not going to allow this to happen.

And back to the Houthis, I mean, so their slogan, this Reuters was, I was reminded of this in a Reuters article yesterday, is death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory to Islam. This is the Houthis? Yeah, this is the Houthis. Some of the Houthi rallies are just like wildly anti-Semitic. Right. Just that kind of rhetoric. Right. Whereas Hamas has actually taken out of its charter.

This is not Hamas apologia, but their charter used to say, you know, kill all the Jews. They literally. Now they say it's actually we're just against Israel and it's Israel that links Judaism with Zionism and we don't. Right. They like control F'd for Jews. Like they replaced Jews with Israel in their charter like in 2017. It was like 1987. The original charter was blatantly anti-Semitic. And then sort of. But the Houthis are still rocking with the original charter was blatantly anti-Semitic. And then they sort of-

Right. But the Houthis are still rocking with the original. Yeah, exactly. But that's, I mean, so again, I don't think, it doesn't mean much as of right now. What it does mean though, is that there's more potential. It's another sort of, it's not a huge point of escalation, but it does show that as these things ratchet up, as you have one escalation on top of another and they start to snowball, other people get dragged into this. The Saudis can get dragged into this really easily in a way that, I mean, it's just a total powder keg when these things start to, the dominoes start to fall. And, you know, I don't think this is

the most concerning thing that's happened, but it's pretty concerning. I don't want to be numb to it. Right. And it comes after Erdogan's like hinting at a rally that he could send ships down there, that he could intervene militarily. Because I think a lot of people around the world are watching this and saying, this can't happen. Like, let's say, largely defenseless civilian population getting just pounded around the clock. And it feels like you should be able to call someone and say, look what's happening. This is happening in broad daylight. Somebody stop this.

And then there comes the realization that there's nobody to stop this. And so then you have pressure from populations in Turkey and Egypt and elsewhere to say, do something, stop this. They don't want to get involved in a regional war either. But most wars start by people, are started by people and involve people who never wanted to be involved in war in the first place. And I do think there are some, I mean, the sort of axis of resistance. I do think there are some people and some leaders who would gladly get into a regional war. I mean, Hamas is a good example of that. That sort of question, just to go back to your question about what was their strategy, what is their kind of end goal of the massacre that they plotted apparently for some two years?

I think obviously they had to know where that would go, immediately where that would go. I think everybody knew immediately where that would go. As soon as it happened, everybody understood that we were going to in all likelihood see a ground invasion. We were going to see mass civilian casualties. And that's the problem on the other hand with a ceasefire. There's a really legitimate question about what that means for the safety

of people in Israel, what that means for the future of Israel. But it's, again, like, I think the media conversation about this is wildly unhelpful, and it allows and it enables the IDF representatives and Lindsey Graham, who we keep teasing, we are going to get to him because he was on CNN last night, to make a lot of sort of facile statements. And it's useless. What am I supposed to argue against? Lindsey Graham's crazy warmongering? I don't even think it represents the position of the Pentagon. I think he wants it to represent the position of the Pentagon and the White House, which is why he's out there wish casting. Last week, in a low moment for this administration, President Biden was asked about the contradiction between Netanyahu's claim that he was doing all he could to minimize civilian casualties and the fact that on the ground, more than 6,000 people had been

killed in just the first few weeks. He responded like this. Do these numbers say to you that he is ignoring that message? What they say to me is I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I'm sure innocents have been killed, and it's the price of waging a war. News outlets quickly noted that the numbers reported by Hamas in previous wars had been broadly found to be accurate by human rights and relief organizations, the United Nations, and even Israel itself. Truly showing how absurd Biden's claim was, the State Department itself routinely relies on the Gaza Ministry of Health despite its connections to Hamas, which rules over Gaza. Yet still,

defenders of Israel's assault have suggested that the list released by the Ministry of Health is meaningless, that it might just be a collection of random names. Now, it turns out that a few weeks ago, I reached out to a source I'd met doing previous reporting. His name's Maram Aldada, and he was born and raised in Gaza, but now lives in Orlando. Still, he's been in regular contact with his family over there. I reached out to ask how his family was doing, and he said that 30 people on his mother's side and seven on his father's had been killed so far. A week later, I had him on my Intercept podcast, Deconstructed, to talk about what life was like for his family in Gaza amid the bombing.

But because Maram had told me about the killings before the Ministry of Health's list came out, that meant we could compare the two lists. And if his relatives were on it, it would mean that the list is not just filled with random names, but that each name does represent the tragic snuffing out of a life. So the list was first released in Arabic and includes the ID numbers given out by Israel to Palestinians, as well as their age and gender. My colleague, Maryam Saleh, who speaks Arabic, helped me go through it, and the ministry later released an English-language version as well. We found 43 of his 46 relatives on the ministry's list. The youngest, Tahani, was just a baby, not yet a year old, and the oldest was a 71-year-old grandmother. What has struck people

the most about the denial of the slaughter and the hand-waving it away as just the price of war is how different it was when the White House was talking about civilian casualties in Ukraine. Here's now this news with a quick comparison. Being honest about the fact that there have been civilian casualties and that there likely will be more is being honest because that's what war is. It's brutal. It's ugly. It's messy. I've said that before. President also said that yesterday. Doesn't mean we have to like it. in Ukraine, what his forces are doing in Ukraine, and think that any ethical, moral individual could justify that. It's difficult to look at the images. Sorry. It's difficult to look at some of the images and imagine that any well-thinking, serious, mature leader would do that. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, by the way, there have been just under 10,000 civilian casualties.

In Gaza, already more than 3,000 children have been killed. The health ministry's new death toll has climbed above 8,000. Hassan El-Tayyeb noted on Twitter that according to Save the Children, the number of children killed in Gaza over the last three weeks has surpassed the number of children killed in wars around the world over the past three years combined. And so now that we know that the Ministry of Health list that is being put out in Gaza does have the names of real people who have actually died, you know, it kind of, I think, puts the White House in a difficult position because the attempt to say that, ah, well, this is just coming from Hamas, we can't really believe this, is belied by that fact that there are real people on that list, real people who led real lives that were ended in the last couple of weeks, combined with the images that we're seeing. And you see John Kirby talk about how hard it is to look at the images of civilians killed in Ukraine. That's equally true in Gaza. And so I wonder if you're starting to see any shift. You had John Kirby do this

like weird West Wing video yesterday. Did you see this? No. He's doing a walk and talk. Oh, boy. And he's talking about how there's a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. And here are all the things that the United States is doing to alleviate the humanitarian crisis. Which seemed at least to suggest that there was some awareness that the world was turning on them on

this. It's remarkable. Israel has taken global sympathy and torched it faster than anybody I've ever seen. The entire world was united behind Israel on October 7th after the atrocities carried out by Hamas. And the response has just obliterated that empathy and sympathy. And I think some of that was inevitable because I do think that there are some activists and particular lawmakers who had no room for, almost immediately were calling for a ceasefire and calling for Israel not to retaliate. And that's a ridiculous position. But even so, it's a ridiculous position that, you know, we have no limit on civilian casualties, that the whatever it takes position in Ukraine, like these are also ridiculous positions. And so we have Graham on that. Yeah, I think we have something else before that. But yeah, it's it's that's a position that Lindsey Graham has taken. We'll get to that in just a second how deep that sense of betrayal among Arab Americans goes, with only 17 percent

of Arab American voters saying they will vote for Biden in 2024, a staggering drop from 59 percent in 2020. So in 2020, 59 percent of Arab American voters say they're going to vote for Biden. Now that number is 17 percent. So James Zogby, who is the founder and the president of the Arab American Institute, says, quote, this is the most dramatic shift over the shortest period of time I've ever seen. This is a really interesting point from time. The poll results are likely to increase concerns among Democrats about Biden standing with Arab Americans heading into 2024, particularly in Michigan, where roughly 277,000 Arab Americans call home and Biden won in 2020 by a margin of 155,000 votes. That's a huge blow to his ability to win Michigan, that's for sure.

There's an interesting primary unfolding in Houston, Texas. This Democratic challenger named Pervez Aguon, who I actually wrote about a couple months ago, maybe back at The Intercept, is challenging kind of a backbench Democrat, sturdy AIPAC ally named Lizzie Fletcher. That primary, I think, is not until March. So we won't get a look at how that's unfolding until then, but he is running his campaign just head on kind of against Fletcher over Fletcher's support for Israel's war effort, Fletcher's unconditional support for Israel's war effort. And if he is able to kind of campaign on that, he would be basically the first candidate, I think, ever to oust an incumbent for being too unconditionally supportive of Israel. That has never happened before. And if that happens, you still have nine months between

that and the election. Now, I don't think we should be making war and peace decisions based on polling and focus groups, because these are questions of morality and good and evil. On the other hand, that is an extraordinary swing away from Biden. And it also puts voters, Arab voters in particular, or anybody who is sympathetic to Palestinian dignity, in such a difficult position because you just had Trump's ambassador to Israel. I think he was suggesting that anybody who's a foreign exchange student and is a quote unquote Hamas supporter, he doesn't really mean Hamas supporter, he means anybody who's kind of critical of Israel's war in Gaza, should be deported. And you've started to see that from elements of the

right, that if you're here on a visa and we don't like your political views around the Israel-Palestine question, you're out of here. And so people are faced with the choice of sitting the election out or actively working against Biden and helping to elect someone who's then going to try to deport foreign exchange students, calling them supporters of Hamas, or voting for Biden, who is actively overseeing this just ongoing war crime. Yeah. And without getting too much into the campus stuff, you know, if you look at the Students for Justice in Palestine toolkit, it does concern me if there are people who are on visas here and we're sharing the paraglider template that was in the Students for Justice in Palestine toolkit. Like, I actually went and looked at the toolkit and I was like,

holy smokes, this is some wild stuff. Not entirely unsurprising, but if there's somebody on a foreign visa here who's like, yay, terrorism, which is what the paragliders were engaged in. And that's not representative of Palestine, but it is Hamas. That's, yeah, I mean, I would have an issue with that. But I think the broader point about Arab Americans looking at the Biden administration is completely a serious one for Democrats. And it's also, I mean, in some respects, Republicans had made inroads with Arab Americans, especially in Michigan, actually in the D.C. area on some of these education issues. That is not going to be a durable coalition, that's for sure, going forward. Now, we do have

the Lindsey Graham clip that we've been teasing because it's, I think, actually very useful. This is Lindsey Graham on Abby Phillips' show on CNN Tuesday night. Is there a threshold for you, and do you think there should be one for the United States government, at which the U.S. would say, let's hold off for a second in terms of civilian casualties? Is there a point at which you would start to question the talent? If somebody asked us after World War II, is there a limit what you would do to make sure that Japan and Germany don't conquer the world? Is there any limit what Israel should do to the people who are trying to slaughter the Jews?

The answer is no. There is no limit, but here's what you need to do. Be smart. Let's try to limit civilian casualties the best we can. Let's put humanitarian aid in areas that protect the innocent. I'm all for that. But this idea that Israel has to apologize for attacking Hamas, who's embedded with their own population, needs to stop. The goal is to destroy Hamas. Hamas is creating these casualties, not Israel. So I'm supposed to trust Lindsey Graham,

who just was a huge backer of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and of drone strikes to limit civilian casualties. I don't. Especially when he's saying he basically doesn't care. Well, and that's, there's a really easy answer to that question, by the way, which is I cannot answer it. I cannot tell you because that's fodder for enemies. Ben Shapiro, who I'm sure a lot of our viewers don't like, I think actually made a really legitimate point here when he said, if you answer the question, you allow Hamas to hit that number of civilian casualties and then pressure the West to just be like, okay, we're done. We're totally backing out of this. So just

don't answer the question. You don't have to answer the question. You can actually explain that if that's really what your concern is. But But then again that's asking us or ascribing to Lindsey Graham the sense of concern about it that I'm genuinely unclear on whether that actually exists, but the question would not be asked if There was there was a sense that there was genuine concern about civilian cattle. there was an actual attempt being made. It's only when you have people start to say, look, it's just a price of doing business. It's sad, but we just have to do it. Then that's when you say, okay, well, what's the price? Like, you're just saying it's a price.

What's the price? And if the posture were, no civilian casualties are okay, we're going to do everything we can to minimize them. And we're going to be critical of Hamas for its hiding behind civilians, but we're going to be the civilized ones. And so, okay, we're going to say that they have a human shield. We're not going to shoot at them. To say that, well, they have a human shield, therefore, unfortunately, we had to shoot and kill the innocent civilian. Right. Does not make you the civilized one in that exchange. Kirby was actually asked about this from a Palestinian reporter in the White House. Basically the same question. Interesting back and forth.

Let's roll that. Thousands of Palestinian civilians have fallen so far, including 160 of my own relatives. And I'm just wondering, how many Palestinian civilians need to be killed before the United States called for a ceasefire? First of all, my condolences to you and your family. Are you in touch with some? Well, not as much as I can. Not as much as you'd like to be, yeah.

But I'm very sorry to hear that. I'm very sorry to hear that. And so I can see this is obviously personal for you. I can tell you it's personal like to be, yeah. But I'm very sorry to hear that. I'm very sorry to hear that. And so I can see this is obviously personal for you. I can tell you it's personal for the president, too. We don't want to see any more civilian casualties. that is that Hamas benefits to the tune of being able to refit, renew themselves, plan and execute additional attacks. And as I said yesterday, right now is not the time for a general ceasefire. It is, however, the time to consider pauses in the fighting long enough so that folks like your relatives and family members

can get this credibly needed humanitarian assistance and perhaps a way to get out if they want to get out so we're supporting that and we'll see what we can do do you notice what he's well humanitarian pauses from time to time like that's a that's kind of an assumption that this is going to go on for a very long time. That was kind of chilling and disturbing to hear. You saw him raise his hand right afterwards. His next question was also a good one. He asked about whether or not the United States would guarantee that if civilians were pushed out of Gaza, that they'd be allowed the right of return because a lot of Palestinian civilians were guaranteed that right in both 1948, 1967, 1973, and it never came to pass.

And a lot of people in Gaza can see their old farms and their old land from behind the fence. And so a lot of them say, we're not going to the desert because we're not going to be able to come back. And Kirby's response was, our policy is not to have some sort of permanent settlement outside of Gaza for the people who call that home. We want them to be able to go back home and do so safely and effectively. We are not calling for them their permanent refuge from the country. But again, it's good to have that on the record. But if you try to kind of show this clip at the border when you're trying to get back in, I'm not sure it's going to work. No, and that's exactly what we were just talking about. Okay, so what is your plan? You're evacuating. We already have what, some 1.4 million,

I think is the latest report I saw, displaced Gazans that have gone south, to the south of Gaza, as Israel and the United States have said is the plan, and then to move people into Egypt as is possible, etc., etc. Okay, so what is the plan to bring people back in a way that makes Israel feel as though, and reasonably they have concerns, it can exist safely without another October 7th happening right away or in the near future. How do you do that? And how do you tell people to leave their homes and the land that they're clinging to

and that they believe in and then say, yeah, you're going to come back and this is also going to please the other stakeholder who's prosecuting this war? We have basically just John Kirby saying we want to do it. That is the extent of what we know about this plan from both Israel and the United States is that we know that we want to do it. Great step. How are you going to do it? Because it's an impossible, it's a feat. It's a feat. And there's just no clear sign. And again, this is also what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. We had really nebulous goals and we had a, you know, a just, and well, I shouldn't say that. We had, I definitely

shouldn't say that. But we had, so after 9-11, obviously, we had reason to go after Al-Qaeda. So that pretense had that sort of sheen of a just cause. And what happened was a disaster. Let's use the word quagmire. It was a quagmire because we had nebulous plans for what we would do in the power vacuum that continued what we would do with civilians. And as much as I understand and support Israel's right to retaliate, I know we disagree on that point, and believe that Israel faces an existential threat, I don't trust our government. I don't trust Western governments to prosecute this war justly. Moving to the West Bank, and there's a related point to be made there, in that intelligence ministry

document that was leaked the other day, there was a piece that didn't get talked about much, but it proposed, you know, one of the proposals was a complete cleansing of Gaza, pushing everyone into the Sinai Desert. Another of the proposals in there was, which they rejected, but said, here's an idea that you could consider, was to have the Palestinian Authority, which operates in the West Bank, also run Gaza. And it said, that is not desirable for Israel because the status quo of Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank keeps Palestinians divided, which is then an obstacle to Palestinian statehood. And so the obstacle is described in the document as a good thing for Israel. Like they want the division. Netanyahu policy that Hamas is actually good for the interests of Israel because

Hamas is not a negotiating partner that can be taken seriously. Discredits the Palestinian cause. And implicitly in that, there's going to be some Israeli civilian casualties from Hamas rockets and Hamas border raids, but that's the price of making sure that there's no Palestinian statehood. October 7th put a price tag on that far beyond what Netanyahu could have expected. To see a document post-October 7th still say that the status quo of a divided Gaza and West Bank is preferable because it prevents Palestinian statehood is just chilling. Because it desecrates the memory of all of the Israeli civilians who were killed as a consequence of that strategy. And so that also raises the question of what is going on in the West Bank.

That's what we're going to talk about here. If we can put up this first element. So this is Palestinian Authority-run West Bank. That's what we're going to talk about here. We can put up this first element. So this is Palestinian Authority-run West Bank. Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank is rising. Now, over the past year, violence in the West Bank from settlers and from the IDF toward Palestinians was already at kind of record levels over the years. But we've seen pogroms directed at Palestinians that have been kind of ramped up to a completely new level. And again, this is not Hamas. This is a Palestinian authority, which Palestinians see as an arm of the Israeli occupation. Like post-Arafat, who there's an interesting documentary on how he was killed

that alleges that Israel poisoned Arafat. Post-Arafat, the Palestinian Authority is seen by a lot of Palestinians as just kind of another, just a wing, just an arm of the Israeli occupation. Yet, this is what we're getting in the West Bank. I think that's actually an important point of context. Before October 7th, violence and casualties were already basically coming close to record levels over the past couple of decades, both for Israelis and Palestinians. And so tensions, you know, it did come out of, it felt like it came out of the blue. It did not actually really come out of the blue. There was a lot of, I mean, there was an incredible amount of tension. And that's another reason that, you know, instead of, and we were just talking about

this in the last segment, instead of the paragliders and whatever else, what Hamas did, and to your point, it's likely that Netanyahu knows this, and people in Israel know this, what they did was set back the cause of Palestinians. And so instead of the paragliders and, you know, saying that this is the cost of decolonization, et cetera, et cetera, that's a completely misplaced celebration of, you know, what has it been called? The, you know, the decolonization effort, the, you know, retaliation, et cetera, et cetera. That set back the Palestinian cause enormously. And Israel knows that. Many Palestinians know that. And so again, that's just another example of how

poorly served so many civilians are by world leadership, their own leadership in that area. Yeah. And it feels like the settlers and the IDF and the West Bank are using the focus on the war in Gaza to ramp up the policy that was already being implemented. You can put up C2 here. This is from Haaretz. The U.S. threatens to stop supplying guns after Ben-Gavir gives them out at political events. Ben-Gavir, ultra far right. There isn't enough adjectives to describe how far right this Netanyahu minister is. And he wouldn't rebuke them.

No, he'd say add some more onto it. He's handing out weapons to Israeli settlers who can then kind of use them in the pogroms and the clearing out of these territories. I think we've decided we're not going to play it. People can find it on their own. There is extremely disturbing Abu Ghraib-like footage circulating online of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank being kind of beaten,

held naked, dragged across hardscrabble dirt ground, just abused in some of the most horrific ways you can imagine. And again, West Bank, this is happening in the West Bank. This is not happening in Hamas-controlled Gaza. I think we have C3 here, Jewish Voices for Peace, saying the footage of Israeli soldiers torturing Palestinian men in the West Bank is horrific. The Israeli military has brutally abused Palestinian prisoners for decades. As the Israeli military wages a genocidal war in Gaza, its soldiers are no longer hiding this abuse from the public. And part and parcel of this entire strategy is also humiliation. And that

gets us to the TikTok trend that we're talking about here. There's a song, it has a name, I don't know the name of the song, but it's a typical TikTok trend where people are doing basically the same thing to a little dance to the same song and everybody's participating across society except this one is people who have captured young Palestinians and blindfolded them in handcuffs and then humiliating them with this dance being done at weddings, being, you know, children, Israeli children are doing it. We can play a couple of videos or what you would have seen if you were watching is a couple of videos of Israelis driving cars. The first video had what appeared to be a group of Palestinian hostages in the back

of the car, and the driver was sort of laughing along to the meme. And then in the second video, again, Israeli driving a car and a group of kids. A prominent journalist, I believe. A prominent journalist. So a group of kids sort of mock having their hands tied together, having their hands cuffed, kind of bopping along to the song and smiling in the background. Yeah. And Palestinians and Israelis have to live together in this part of the world. Like they have all decided that this is where they're going to live. And it just seems like there's just no recognition of that fact that I feel like there can be, if there's just, you know, enough walls built, enough fences,

enough attacking back and forth, that somehow that will resolve itself. But that's not the case. It's just enormously difficult to imagine, you know, the effort that it takes to resist that sort of human, the negative human impulses when you've seen and just given the numbers, basically everyone in Israel knows somebody who was killed and slaughtered by terrorists in the massacre. And the worst human impulses bring us to positions like those, bring us to sort of laughing and smiling about the mistreatment of other people, of civilians. And we saw that, again, they keep going to Iraq and Afghanistan, and you invoked Abu Ghraib. We have seen that impulse take us. And I do think over Hamas, we have the moral high ground. That is not helpful. That is allowing us to forfeit the moral high ground in ways, and I'm sort of conflating the U.S. and Israel, and appropriately

so, and the broader West, but that's giving in to the very, very worst of us. It's not easy. And a lot of this is going on post-October 7th in the West Bank, but these types of humiliations are endemic to the occupation. And so that's also why it's an interesting question of what would the Gazans even say if you said okay the Palestinian Authority is going to be administering Gaza at this point well the Palestinian Authority administers the West Bank and it's brutal like why would we want that and there's I mean there's there's generations of anti-semitism in you know there's there's generations of anti-Semitism. There's just such a deep-seated and endemic hatred that we would be foolish to ignore in Gaza, in the West Bank. But there's also, we can't ignore it when you see videos like this either. Absolutely not.

And what we can do is not have John Kirby say, well, we be able to have Palestinians come back like we want them to leave and be confident They'll be able to come back when the plan is To have again people living in extremely close proximity You know the the there there is no end to the October 7th cycle and the post October 7th cycle There's just going to be a whole lot of civilians caught in a rinse and repeat. Let's do some rapid fire election stuff back here in the United States. You've pulled some examples that I didn't even know were on the ballot. And actually, the first one is a really important one. This is Ohio, the story that we've

been covering on issue one in Ohio. I had no idea. And this seems to me so important to the story that weed is also on the ballot, that when people are going to vote on issue one, which we covered similar ballot measures in Michigan and Kansas over the course of the last year, that's actually partially what inspired pro-abortion activists and actually anti-abortion activists to want this on the ballot and to fight for this on the ballot going forward, that's really what they were looking at. And now you add to all of that energy, people are going to be going to vote on weed. Not a good sign for the anti-abortion people on my side of that issue. I know, Emily saw that.

I was like, oh boy. There goes another five points. Yeah. So the reason that the anti-abortion crowd pushed for that amendment back in August, which would have made, which would have required a 60% threshold for questions to be successful was because this has been polling at 58, 59% right at that line. Maybe it would have gotten over, maybe it wouldn't have. Now it only needs 50% because that maneuver was defeated. To amend the Ohio Constitution, it enshrines, basically says that you can make, as NPR describes it, reproductive health care decisions, including abortion. That is a constitutional guarantee in Ohio, should this pass next week.

So I think it's going to pass. You've probably been following it a little bit more closely. Generally, it seems like it's well ahead. But what's your sense from people on the ground? I think it's absolutely going to pass. And now that I know weed's on the ballot, I don't even think it's going to be that close. Weed should pass. This is a recreational.

It would allow stores. It basically would regulate it similarly to alcohol. It would have a bureau of cannabis or whatever help to oversee it. Yeah, it creates like an entire department, right? An entire sort of regulatory infrastructure. Tax structure that then funds schools, treatment centers, and all that sort of stuff. So yeah, you can have two and a half ounces of cannabis and up to 15 grams of cannabis extract if you're over the age of 21. And that's possession. You can have up to six cannabis plants or as many as 12 if there are at least two adults, 20 or older in the household, which is kind of a funny detail. Like if there's two of you, you can go up to 12 plants. Fair enough. So if you're in Ohio, do go out and vote. Come on. Do your civic duty. Get this done. And again, as we talk about issue one, it's incredibly serious because people on the anti-abortion side and the kind of conservative movement space say, we saw what

happened in Kansas. We saw what happened in Michigan. We're basically getting routed in red and purple states, states that we feel comfortable in, states like Kansas, Ohio is a place where they see this as kind of the test lab for the United States. This is a state that has rural areas, urban areas, that has a total cross-section of America in it, but generally is red. Generally, in recent years, has leaned right. And if you can't keep abortion out of the constitution in Ohio, all of the dominoes will fall across the rest of the country and the left is going to pour money into those remaining red states because a lot of blue states post Dobbs were able to sort of shore up their constitutions or allow for abortion, find ways to allow for abortion

in the aftermath of Dobbs and the sort of post-war landscape. They say, well, we can basically do this in all of these individual states if we put enough money into it because it's unpopular. Right. So far, the anti-abortion movement has taken L's in Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, looking like Ohio. And yeah, like you said, it raises the question, where can they win? What would be a state if they can't win Kansas? Mississippi, maybe? Kansas is, I actually am tempted to give people the sort of devil's advocate argument in Kansas because the way that referendum was written was insane. Same with the Kentucky one. And the Kansas one was, if I'm remembering correctly, that was the first one. And it really caught people off guard. It was right after Roe.

Right. And so people didn't immediately realize how unpopular. A lot of people on the right didn't immediately realize how much they were actually going to have to make that argument, that the ball was in their court, that they were going to have to proactively sort of make the argument for what abortion law looks like after Roe. And they allowed the left to come in and just absolutely bulldoze them. They didn't realize how unpopular. And that's actually, I think, a real problem with the pro-life movement is not sort of understanding how unpopular the position is. So know your assets. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And so and understand the reality on the ground, which is that these arguments are really, really hard to make. It doesn't mean you shouldn't make

them. Of course, I don't think that. But you have to you have to make them well. And so the consequence of what happens in Ohio could be tons of money and political resources being expended around the country to specifically target red states. And I think it's very likely that this passes. And I think it's very likely that dominoes, from the perspective of somebody on the right and in the pro-life space, those dominoes are going to continue to fall around the country after next week. Potentially groundbreaking referendum in Maine. This is an interesting one. Yeah. So right now there's two utilities, utility monopolies in Maine.

This would be, I think, D3. People hate the utility monopolies. There's nothing that unites people, you know, more quickly and more strongly than hatred of your local utility. And so what this would do is it would create Pine Tree Power, which would be a basically publicly owned and run, consumer owned and run power company where the positions would be elected, which would be interesting because now you're going to have nuclear and gas and solar and wind people running candidates to be on the utility. I'm sure they've thought all

this through. Yes. I would hope so, at least. There's a huge debate over, is this going to save money? Because ultimately what this comes down to, people like the ideas in general, but the real question is, am I going to pay more? Am I going to pay less for electricity? And importantly in Maine, is it going to be more reliable or less reliable? A place like Maine with, you know, it's called pine tree power. When you've got trees all over the state and you're getting snow four or five months out of the year, you can have a lot of power disruptions. And so the ability to keep power going is key to keeping popularity. And so this referendum would then basically

get rid of both utilities and combine them into one, one kind of people-owned utility, which I think would be worth a shot. Come on, Maine, try it. Well, the industry, interestingly enough, has been sort of dangling the, and this is from Maine Public, the article you just saw on the screen, arguing that, quote, this could ultimately stall renewable energy development. Of course, yeah. So trying to drive the wedge between the hippies and their quest for a public utility, saying it's either the environment here or it's the duopoly. I'm sure, yes.

Choose one or the other. This duopoly deeply cares about the transition to renewables, no doubt. The independent economic analysis suggested that it could save potentially $800 million over the next however many years. But there will be some upfront costs, basically, to buy out the utilities and transition over. So we'll see. We'll see if people's kind of fear of the unknown and fear of change overrides their kind of desire to take control of their own utility and how much faith people have in their kind of own collective democratic ability to run, to do big things. Well, it's surely this also,

I mean, really, really fascinating, A, the initiative and B, what could come of it. But also surely there's, this is opening a lot of doors and piquing the interest of the industry as of right now. They obviously don't want to get obliterated, but they have to know that there'll be plenty of opportunities for grift and cronyism should this actually pass, because the transition period sounds like it'll be a mess. True, but hard to be more corrupt than like an energy monopoly. Yeah, it's like PG&E, like at this point, just formalize the public nature of it and let people vote. Right. There's never been a benign monopoly. Like that's just not how they work. That's just doesn't happen. So moving down to Mississippi, my man, Tate Reeves.

Ryan, Ryan gets, apparently Ryan has told he looks like Tate Reeves. I've told that too often. We put up, what do we have, D4 here. These are numbers from 538, which show if you're Reeves, a disturbingly close race. The Democratic Governors Association kind of put out its own poll, which take with a grain of salt, obviously, from mid-October that has Reeves only up one. Previous polling had Reeves up anywhere between eight and 17 points, aside from kind of a Brandon Presley internal poll that they put out in the summer that you should take with extra, extra grains of salt that had the race even. Now, Brandon Presley, if that name sounds familiar to you, yes, that is the king's cousin.

It's Mississippi. Yeah, it is Elvis Presley's cousin. So, and we can put up this next one here of, I guess, was this D5? So, Tate Reeves, this is Mississippi Today, a huge story breaking late in the campaign. Tate Reeves' top political donors received $1.4 billion with a B in state contracts from his agency. This kind of slots into the public scandal that you're probably already familiar with involving Brett Favre and using welfare money to do whatever Brett Favre was doing with welfare money. And so it raises the question, is there any way that a Republican can lose in Mississippi? And if there is, it's at the hands of Brandon

Presley. He's not just Elvis' cousin. He's an elected official in a Republican-leaning district who the Republicans over there love him. So he speaks the populist language. So it's like you have an ideal Democratic candidate on one hand. You have just the platonic anti-ideal of a candidate on the Republican side. No offense to my man. Is that enough to lose in Mississippi? I doubt it, but what do you think? You know, it's funny. I was talking to actually some journalism students from Mississippi yesterday before we even decided to cover this topic. And they specifically mentioned Mississippi Today's coverage of the election. We were kind of talking about journalism. And they said it's a little bit delusional. There's this kind of idea that

Presley's really close when, from some of the perspectives that I was hearing, it's still kind of a real long shot that Mississippi is really not vulnerable. I don't, I obviously- Yeah, no, you might be right. I have no idea. That's just what I heard from those folks. And it does seem to me like the Democratic poll there is an outlier. There was one poll that had them even from back in August, but the others- That was a Presley poll.

Right. Yeah. The others from the last couple of months look like you have reeves up by a fairly comfortable margin, eight to 11 points. Although polling in these state races is just really hard to trust anymore, extremely hard to trust anymore. I think they probably feel pretty okay on the Tate-Reeves campaign, and pretty okay is, what can you do? In the age of Trump and Biden, both Democrats and Republicans, if you have a couple polls that have you up 8 and 11, you're like, I'm pretty okay. That's probably the best you can do. And it feels like deep blue states are so much more willing to elect Republican governors than the reverse. Like Vermont, the Republican governor.

Kentucky's got a Dem. Kentucky has a Dem, but almost all of New England had Republicans in the last 10 years. Maryland doesn't right now, but for a long time had Larry Hogan. Louisiana elected a Democrat who was just, they now have a Republican there. But that's kind of interesting. And Kansas actually has a Democratic government. And those are two areas where there's still that transit, like there's such a historical gravitation towards Republicans in New England and a historical gravitation towards Democrats. And so I think those margins, when there are marginal elections, the margins of people who will still vote, you know, people in my family, for example, in Wisconsin, you know, lifetime union members, deep Catholics who will literally not vote for Republican, even though

they probably align with Republicans on almost every issue except for probably like union support, but almost everything else down the line, they'll never vote for Republican. And we all kind of know people who are in that camp. I think that's probably still is why Republicans are able to get elected in New England and Democrats are able to get elected in Louisiana. I mean, Richard Shelby of Alabama was a Democrat. He was. Till what? 84, I think. Yeah. He just left the Senate. But yeah, I think there's still some of that muscle memory. And so the reverse is going on in Western Pennsylvania, if we can put up D5. You got

some interesting elections there. First of all, there's a Pennsylvania Supreme Court election, which Democrats could lose and still control the court four to three. But if they win it is a kind of Bernie crat lefty, Sarah Imamorano, won the primary there, but is now locked in a very fierce race with a popular Republican. And Republicans feel like if they ever have a chance to win, and county executive is the biggest position. That's what Scott Walker was. Right. That's the, in the Pennsylvania political structure, like to be Allegheny county executive is bigger. That's a bigger deal than like being Pittsburgh mayor or whatever. And so they feel like they have a real chance to upset Democrats here. Their argument is that Sarah's too far left. And it'll be interesting

to see how or if the kind of war in Gaza plays into this election. It shouldn't, because obviously the Allegheny County executive has nothing to do with what's going on in Israel-Palestine. But it's a hot issue and is an emotional one and is going to probably bring people out on both sides. And so if, I forget the guy's name even, but if the Republican wins, we'll have to learn his name because he will immediately become kind of a candidate for governor and for Senate, having, you know, having won in a blue area. So we'll see. Separately, there's a DA race where a criminal justice reformer won previously and is kind of being challenged by a Democrat who just registered as a Republican. And so that's one way that in these kind of deep blue areas,

you can get around the fact of not being able to win a primary. You just switch parties and run in the general election. So that'll be an interesting one too, and a test of kind of the criminal justice reform, which reminds me, we should mention Wesley Bell, a criminal justice reformer in St. Louis, who was elected prosecutor out there, is now challenging Cori Bush and really hitting her kind of from the right. And I suspect it's going to have a lot of support from, I don't think he's hit her yet on that, but I suspect that we'll see a lot of, I suspect we'll see Israel-Palestine play in that race a lot. It's a fairly robust Jewish community in the St. Louis area, isn't there? I don't know much about St. Louis, really, actually.

I really don't know much about St. Louis. I've driven through it. It's got that arch. Yes. I stopped and we looked at the arch. That's about all I got on St. Louis for you. So these races are happening on Tuesday. We'll be back here on Wednesday. And actually, Brian, I feel like this is your bread and butter. I love covering elections with you, election nights. That's right. We'll be here the day after the elections. You have eyes all over the country. It's actually amazing.

You have all of these little, it's your memory. You're able to just recall these little races and know the dynamics. I just mostly follow the Twitter account, at Daniel, T-A-N-I-E-L. Just follow him on every election night and then you seem like an expert. He'll tell you what you need to know. Although obviously some hugely consequential things on the ballot, things that are not just important for people in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, but will have ramifications in terms of funding and money all over the country, a ripple effect for the next couple of years and in the presidential cycle as

well, because everyone here in Washington is taking cues from these races in terms of what's going to happen over the course of the next year. Also, Virginia, of course. That's right, Virginia. Let's put bets now. The woman who was busted. Oh, the Washington Post woman. The Washington Post busted her on camera doing whatever the website was. I don't know. I ignored that entire story. The Republicans have since taken like explicit photos of her and mailed them to like every voter in the district. This is counterproductive. With a like note on the mail that said, do not open if you're under 18, which every 14-year-old in that district immediately

opened. They're like, porn is disgusting and unbecoming. Here's some of it in the mail. Here's some mailed directly to your house, which I point out to Emily. Throughout most of the 20th century, that would have been intercepted and they would have been arrested. Yes, yes. Thankfully, those laws have been overturned, and Republicans are taking advantage of it. So does she win or what? I don't know. I actually don't know. It's a Richmond suburb.

Yeah. And her seat could decide control of the chamber, which would then put pressure on Youngkin to push forward on an abortion ban or something. So we'll see if the Republican kind of move backfired or if this district is not also not, it's kind of a buttoned up place. And remember with Virginia, Youngkin has really staked his political future on the outcome of this election. And I think a lot of the signs are really not great for Youngkin at this point. I think he wasn't able to get as much money for the races that he wanted to out of national Republican organizations so just a

Really important night next Tuesday and some of these random races that when they're settled will help us piece together a better puzzle of what the landscape looks like going into the presidential election and will obviously affect voters and People living in these states that have big ballot measures and elections coming up I kind of want to go to that Richmond district. It's not that far. Yeah, we should just go to some precincts and just ask people, get their take on how they're voting on this. Because people have written her off.

I don't think that you can. I think it's going to be close. Yeah, I mean, my instinct would be to say actually that she wins because I don't think this stuff lands like it used to. It's an absurd story. But this is a post-Trump era. And people have sort of put those usual kind of boundaries aside and said, you know, I mean, that's how Joe Biden won. Everybody's looking at this guy.

He's senile. And they're like, well, we just don't want Donald Trump. We don't want Republicans. He's not the other person. Yeah, exactly. So we've kind of crossed that Rubicon. And with her husband husband she was on camera with. Ugh, you're right. Family values. So come on. Yeah. It was monogamous, in the bounds of marriage. Yeah. And she did it voluntarily. Of course, yes. Consenting adults leaves people alone. Yeah, leave them alone.

Well, I don't know. Josh Hawley now wants to overturn Citizens United. This is an amazing story. This is just an amazing story. So this was a scoop from RealClearPolitics, Philip Wegman yesterday, obviously a friend of the show. Josh Hawley told him that he was introducing a bill that would undercut Citizens United. Obviously, a legislator can't reverse a Supreme Court decision, but you can introduce a bill. That's kind of a ridiculous rebuttal, actually, because that's sort of the whole point of Congress is to make these laws and the courts interpret them and say when something is unconstitutional, it goes too far.

But very much money in politics is the business of Congress. Congress just refuses to act on some of these questions. And it's unlikely that this Hawley bill will go particularly far. But Hawley makes this argument against Citizens United, which was the rallying cry of the conservative movement just 10 years ago, because Citizens United itself is a group of the conservative movement. Dave Bossie, who became very instrumental in Trump world, leader of Citizens United, they were punished essentially by a law that was interpreted in a way that was not allowing them to broadcast anti-Hillary, anti-Hillary Clinton, anti sort of political establishment messaging.

And the court made that decision back in 2010. It paved the way for basically the super PAC structure. You've been covering this longer than I have and you probably have some interesting thoughts on this. But Josh Hawley is making his argument in the language of originalism. He's saying there is no originalist argument for equating corporations' speech and human beings' speech and saying that that is both equally protected under the First Amendment. So not only did he sort of come out and make this absolutely vigorous argument against this longstanding conservative position on speech, Mitch McConnell himself has been a huge champion of Citizens United

and a huge opponent on any limits to political spending in elections. Hawley comes out on fire against that and also makes the argument from a conservative perspective. So he's sort of using Rooseveltian, and Phil points this out in the story, arguments about business and lobbying and private interests influence in politics. But then he also talks about originalism

and the sort of conservative approach to constitutionalism and says Citizens United flies in the face of all of that. Now, this obviously rankled Mitch McConnell. We can put the next element up in the screen. I actually shouldn't say obviously, because why is Mitch McConnell getting all upset and hot and bothered about a bill that is likely going nowhere? Well, because he knows that this is a really powerful argument with Republican voters. Jake Sherman of Punchbowl reports that McConnell went after Hawley in a closed Senate Republican meeting yesterday. Hawley signed on to the End Citizens United bill. McConnell told Hawley that he's only in the Senate because of the Senate Leadership Fund, which accepts unlimited contributions. And then McConnell warned that anyone who signs on will get heavy incoming from the right. Absolutely true. Total threat and a serious threat. But by the way,

Mitch McConnell saying as your argument that because Josh Hawley was elected by bad rules, he should not protest those bad rules. That is not an argument. It is the laziest argument and the dumbest argument you could possibly muster in defense of your position. But McConnell probably feels like a parent, you know, who's like left-wing kid is complaining about whatever. Just got back from his first semester at Oberlin. Right. He's like, how do you think this tax, without this inequality in this tax structure, you wouldn't have been at Oberlin.

Right. You never would have done it. So that's Hawley. Hawley's the Oberlin kid complaining about it. Good for Hawley, though. But Hawley is more than the Oberlin kid. I mean, this is a guy whose legal pedigree is, in terms of conservative legal circles, he's very accomplished. He's a former state attorney general.

I think he clerked for Alito on the Supreme Court. I mean, his pedigree is very impressive. So it's not as though he's like some young whippersnapper who doesn't really know much about the court and is coming in and firing off. And I think that's why it bothered McConnell. Yeah. And look, I welcome converts. I question how sincere it is. Is it just political posturing because he knows it's not going to pass? But his argument, as Philip quoted him, is I am an originalist and I don't think you can make an originalist case for it from a raw power perspective the way that McConnell and this and the conservative Supreme Court kind of rammed it through up until since United it was broadly understood that the Constitution gives the government broad power to regulate elections because without faith in elections everything

else crumbles but you need you need that and so therefore you can do a little extra to make sure that people believe in them. In Citizens United, the argument was made that as long as spending is done independently, and that's their word, independently, then there can't be a quid pro quo. Right. Because- You gave to a super PAC. Right. You gave to a super PAC, not to the candidate. And as long as the super PAC never spoke to the candidate, then how could the candidate possibly owe the super PAC anything? Right. You gave to a super PAC, not to the candidate. And if as long as the super PAC never spoke to the candidate, then how could the candidate possibly owe the super PAC anything?

Right. That was transparently silly. It's pretty dumb. Right. But we've since seen that people who are elected by super PACs or beaten by super PACs very much are then kind of controlled by those super PACs. McConnell undermines the entire argument right there. He says, look, you're dependent on these super PACs. How dare you? Well, the whole reasoning in Citizens United was that there's independence between super PACs and the candidates. So then how can McConnell come in and say- Such a good point. It's such a good point.

You depended on them. He just made the counter argument proudly. Right. But it's not an intellectual argument. It's a, it's a power argument. Well, and that's okay. So from the conservative perspective, by talking about citizens United, uh, the group citizens United, not the case, uh, they will make this point. And there is very much legitimate. There's very much a legitimate argument here that, uh, the left sort of controls the federal bureaucracy. And when I very much legitimate, there's very much a legitimate argument here that the left sort of controls the federal bureaucracy. And when I say the left, I mean really the kind of center left, not the left left, not like Bernie controls the federal bureaucracy. But the sort of center left controls the federal bureaucracy.

They control Hollywood. They control these various institutions, levers of power. The one thing conservatives have any say in, the one major institution, again, this is as the argument goes, is Wall Street, is the business sector. That's the one place where conservatives feel like they have allies in this larger landscape. And so that's why they said, Citizens United, the raw power argument, here's the legitimate, here's the sort of the virtue

behind equating corporations and people. It's because we have absolutely, like we will be punished if we air something critical of Hillary because the federal bureaucracy and all of these laws about campaign finance, et cetera, will be weaponized by the kind of center left bureaucracy against conservative speech.

And so opening up this can of worms on super PACs and campaign spending is the only way that conservatives can compete with the Hollywood superstructure, can compete with all of these various institutions, holding them back. But now Josh Hawley sees that and is like, Wall Street, and this is a part of the argument he's making to people like McConnell, Wall Street actually hates conservatives. It might find alliances with Republicans when it comes to taxes and limited government. Does Wall Street love limited government? No, of course not, but they do sometimes. Sometimes they really want to limit a government. Other times they want more

government because it will help their monopoly or whatever it is, as we were talking about earlier. And so they will sometimes make these alliances with Republicans more often than not. But then on the cultural side, Josh Hawley looks at, for instance, what the MLB did with Georgia's voting law back in 2020 and is like, these people are not your friends. You seriously thought that this was the one alliance in all of these institutions that would benefit you. You're wrong about that. And maybe Josh Hawley was wrong about that. I don't know where he stood on Citizens United originally. But to the point about the sort of the raw power argument, yeah, I mean, I think punishing people for being critical of Hillary Clinton is a real problem. At the same

time, equating corporations with human beings, as Mitt Romney sort of smugly, famously quipped about. Corporations are people, my friend. Yeah, just sort of smugly like winking into the camera when he says it. It's just disgusting. And I think before we move on to Rand Paul, it's interesting to think about whether or not the FEC really blew it in going after Citizens United. So for people that don't know the story, Citizens United created basically a documentary hit piece on Hillary. It was an ad, but it was like an hour and a half long ad or something like that. And they wanted to then spend money to air it. And the FEC said, you can't do that within 60 days of the general election or 30 days of the primary, whatever it was. And they said, well, that's not fair. This is just speech. And FEC should have been like,

you know what? Just run your little Hillary documentary. It's fine. We don't need to set precedent on the landmark case. Right. Because the court's not looking good for us right now. And we're going to just obliterate our ability to regulate anything, which they did. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, this is Citizens United. And again, like you, I really value your perspective on this because you saw this happen in real time. What it did to campaign spending was enormous. And I have heard, I was glad Hawley introduced this bill, and I don't know if this bill in itself is the right answer, but conservatives have basically completely swept under the rug the issue of campaign spending

and campaign finance reform. And then again, that's not to endorse like a McCain fine gold solution either it is simply to say that Since Citizens United campaign spending has gotten so completely Insane and out of control There's there has to be a conservative answer that is not corporations or people my friend and there's literally no conversation about it I've heard it from like Orrin Cass and now from Josh Hawley. But there's basically been no discussion about it. So let's have the conversation because we have to come to some solution here. The status quo is horrific. Well, Hawley's welcome. That's right. You can see where Rand Paul sits on this. Yeah, that's right. We have Rand Paul. Senator Rand Paul is going to be with us right after this.

We are very pleased to be joined now by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is the author of the new book, Deception, the Great COVID Cover-Up. We're eager to dive into this book and all of Senator Rand Paul's work on this extremely important issue. First, I want to get your thoughts, Senator Paul, on your exchange yesterday with Christopher Wray, which is actually entirely related to what you wrote about in the book. And I just want to ask you about one of his quotes in particular. You're pushing him on the FBI's conduct with social media companies. And you say, to my knowledge, or Christopher Wray said, and answered your question, to my knowledge, our agents conducted themselves in compliance with the law throughout. And that's in response to your question. To my knowledge, our agents conducted themselves in compliance with the law throughout. And that's in response to your question about whether or not they were attacking constitutionally allowed protected speech. I want to ask, did Christopher Wray

perjure himself yesterday based on what we know from reporting and other sources, you mentioned depositions, about how the FBI conducted itself during the pandemic in relation to constitutionally protected speech? You know, I think it's an open question. You know, one of the things that they say they were involved with was election integrity. But what if election integrity involves a dossier that was forwarded by a campaign, a political campaign,

the Clinton campaign, the Steele dossier, forwarded, and then a lot of these things are predicated upon that. What if there's a Hunter Biden laptop that then is suppressed? It seems to me that there is in this area constitutionally protected speech that you could have an opinion one way or the other, but to somehow say that the government should be suppressing this is a real problem. Now, to my mind, what I've been most interested in is whether or not the virus originated in the lab in Wuhan. For over a year, Facebook suppressed that, and they said they did it at the behest of the FBI. They basically said the FBI came to us and said there's going to be a lot of misinformation out there, particularly maybe misinformation

with regard to elections, but also misinformation about China. And they were worried that too much bashing of China was going on. And so there is a question of whether or not the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security, or frankly, the CDC or the White House directly was involved. I want to know what was going on in these meetings. I want to see the minutes of these meetings. I don't want to hear the characterization from Director Wray or the characterization from Secretary Mayorkas that they weren't censoring. Let's hear what they were discussing. And what I ask people to imagine is

imagine at the end of this interview, you are given a surprise visit by the FBI and they want to discuss our interview and they want to discuss which portions of what I said they consider to be misinformation or disinformation. I'm guessing you would resist. I'm guessing you would be outraged. It's the same outrage we should have towards anybody from the government meeting with social media companies as well. On the question of the origin of COVID, which is really the subject of this book. I'm curious what your interactions have been like, you know, kind of behind the scenes with Democrats over the last couple of years. As I try to think about Democrats who are open to even kind of interrogating the question, I can think of Representative Brendan Boyle, a Democrat over in the House, and a handful of

other Democrats. I'm not sure I can think of many on the Senate side, if any. And I'm wondering, what was it like? Did you try to reach across the aisle and find Democrats who could make this less of a partisan issue so that you could get to the truth of the matter? And what were those conversations like? From the very beginning, I reached out to Democrat chairmen of committee because the Biden administration, and to be fair, the Trump administration, said they wouldn't

reveal any data to anyone who didn't have the signature of a chairman. So I've worked with both the chairman of the health committee, Bernie Sanders, as well as the chair of Homeland Security, both of which I'm one of the top Republicans on, to try to get information. But I have to get their signature. But the only way I've been able to get the signature is really usually by trading. I have to hold up like a dozen nominees, hold up two dozen pieces of legislation, and I have to play hardball. And I release things in exchange for signatures to get records. But then the White House still resists. Even when I get a Democrat to sign on, the White House resists. I'm having more trouble getting NIH grants

that are unclassified than I am in talking to the CIA. And that's saying something because the CIA doesn't divulge much of anything, but the NIH and HHS is actually worse. So it's been a real struggle, but it's not for lack of trying. And it is still, to me, a curious fact that the Democrats are disinterested. There just has been no interest on the side of Democrats to investigating this or to doing much. Now, we're slowly getting

breakthroughs. I've started working with Chairman Peters, and he signed a few letters, and we're actually talking about doing some joint hearings. But it's very, very slow. And to me, the comparison I like to make is that if you want to have a hearing and your allegation is that the plastic in your water bottle causes cancer, I think we've had two dozen of those hearings. But if a million people died from a disease and we all can pretty much document a lot of people died from COVID, both here and worldwide. We haven't had real hearings as to could we possibly have been the cause? Could we possibly have funded the lab that

allowed this leak to happen? And shouldn't we reform our safety procedures, our scrutiny? You would think they'd be all over this. And yet the mainstream media, as well as the Democrat Party, which sometimes there's not much difference, really have done nothing other than sort of recommend million-dollar prizes for Anthony Fauci and put his, he's got his mask now on the Smithsonian, his Washington Nationals mask, which is of absolutely no health benefit and actually was a disservice to all of us to recommend anybody at risk would wear a cotton mask because basically that's just malpractice. It's bad advice. We need to think about tighter regulations for the health and safety of the entire globe. And these are very democratic sounding arguments.

You know, you're a libertarian talking about more regulations. You would think that their kind of intent would go up and say, hey, there might be, even if I don't want to get into some China bashing, we should regulate this more tightly. So what would you hear back? Did they understand the underlying kind of information or no? I think that, you know, we live in different worlds. We have different tribes. We look at different news. I don't think they've really read or have been too much interested in the origins of this. But here's what I've tried with Bernie Sanders. Jeffrey Sachs is a progressive economist. He's been a high-ranking UN consultant.

He's been in every progressive wing of a lot of things you can imagine, but he's also an honest progressive. And I'm a big fan of his, actually. He headed the Lancet report. He initially started out thinking that in all likelihood, Anthony Fauci, Peter Day, Zach, all these people probably came from animals. He investigated it for 18 months and came to the opposite conclusion. Well, he was also known as Bernie Sanders' economist. I mean, he was a supporter of Bernie Sanders during his presidential election. I thought, well, wow, why don't I get him to see if he can help me get Bernie to be interested? And we actually did set up a meeting where he was there and Bernie came by, I believe, and said hello. But we still have had trouble.

And Bernie privately will say, well, yeah, maybe, you know, you've got a point, this and that. Then we get stiff-armed by his staff. And to date, we haven't had one signature. We're not even talking about a hearing. We're talking about a signature requesting records. And this really, at one point in time, it was us against them, the legislative branch against the executive branch. Now it's all Republican, Democrat.

And they, on this issue, have decided that the Democrat position is to support the government and government secrecy. And it's disappointing. But it's not for my lack of trying to get cooperation. It's just that I've gotten no cooperation. Yeah. And I want to get to that question, actually, of motivation and Peter Daszak, because you have a quote in your book from Peter Dajak where, as you say,

he's sort of bragging about all of the different coronaviruses that could exist. He said, you know, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had discovered over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses. And you write, so yes, it's quite possible there are many coronaviruses the Chinese have not been forthcoming about. You also write about Fauci. He knew one thing for certain. He had funded those labs. He had publicly supported gain-of-function research and had purposely allowed that research to avoid the scrutiny of the Pandemic Pathogen Committee. And we can only conclude that he weighed the odds and decided that the cover-up was his best option. This is all happening under the nose of the Trump administration. And I wonder to what extent you believe this implicates the United States government. You talked about it a little bit earlier in this conversation, but

the Chinese government is certainly implicated here. It's just, it's hard to get around the issue given all we know about Daszak and Fauci at this point, that the United States may have been complicit A, in the pandemic, complicit at best A, in the pandemic, and then B, in covering up our role in the pandemic's origins. And that seems to be a grave reflection on America. You know, the thing is, is that it's easy for us to believe that the totalitarian government in China might cover things up. In fact, they've covered up their death rate. They covered up their transmissibility. They initially said it didn't transmit human to human. We now know that the three people who got sick first with this in all likelihood worked in the lab of the gain-of-function scientist, Dr. Xi, and it occurred in November of 2019,

didn't start in January. It was rip-roaring by January, but it really probably started in November. So we expect that from Chinese totalitarian government. You wouldn't expect it so much from our government. One of the things about democracy or representative government is supposed to be openness and transparency that makes us so much different. But we've had the same thing here. And I've told people that this conspiracy involves hundreds of people in our government. And people are aghast and they say, oh, no way. That's crazy. Hundreds of people. Well, I think George Carlin explained it best. Conspiracy theories are not necessary where interests converge. And the interest here is that if you touched any money that went to Wuhan

and you think the virus might have come out of that lab, anybody that was involved with funding the lab or involved with this at all feels a self-interest in preserving or obscuring the fact that they were related to this. So Anthony Fauci's first responses were, no funding went to Wuhan at all. And he's basically lying because it went through a conduit. It went through an eco-health and a secondary grant. And then he got over that argument and he said, well, no gain of function research went there. But then we find private emails or that everything virtually that he said in private is the opposite of what he was saying in public. We find a private email that summarizes a February 1st, 2020 conversation.

And in that email, he says, all the virologists got together today worldwide, and we all kind of agree. It looks like the virus has been manipulated in a lab. And so we think that it's very possible that it came to the lab. And we're equally suspicious or even more suspicious because we know they do gain of function research. And he described some experiments. Well, the experiments he described were funded by the NIH, funded by his division. They have a grant number on there acknowledging their funding.

And so basically in private, he's basically admitting that exactly everything that he denies in public. And it's the same for the others. There's a Christian Anderson who says at one point, this is no fringe theory. This is no conspiracy theory in a private email. But in public, he's calling everybody a kook or a nut who brings this up. And then you have the whole idea that was the government involved in suppressing the knowledge of this on social media? And I absolutely believe that we will find, I think actually the Missouri versus Biden depositions

have already shown the government was involved with trying to suppress anybody or any story that had to do with the virus coming from the lab in Wuhan. And we're at a place now where Anthony Fauci himself even acknowledges that it is an open possibility that the Wuhan lab may have been kind of the origin of the coronavirus. So given that he acknowledges at this point that it's possible, that raises a lot of questions about how we ought to think about gain-of-function research going forward. We have more labs around the world doing this dangerous research than we had before the pandemic started. Monica Bertinoli has been nominated to run the NIH. You asked her what her position was on gain-of-function research.

I think White Coat Waste published some of those responses. You've obviously seen them since she responded to you. How would you characterize her response, and how will you be voting on her if and when she comes to the floor? I'd say her responses were mostly bureaucraties, mamby-pamby, nothing definitive, but really no acknowledgement of the danger of gain of function, saying we've got all these controls in place and we're doing a good job, just look the other way. Well, we do have some controls, but one of the points we make in the book is that the

pandemic safety committee, the research never went there. The pandemic committee doesn't have the ability or power to reach out and look at grants. They have to be volunteered. And so what I asked Fauci about this, he says, my experts have looked up and down. They've looked at this research and it's not gained a function. Well, then show us the deliberations. We still haven't seen those deliberations. And explain yourself why you chose to go around the Pandemic Safety Committee and allow this funding to go to Wuhan and understand that it was a terrible judgment error on his part to allow it to go around the Safety Committee and make the judgment on his own, because in the end, this may well have led to the pandemic.

So there are a great deal of problems, and I don't think she recognizes the absolute need to reform the system. We need a much strengthened regulatory apparatus, pandemic regulatory safety apparatus over this. I don't think she recognizes that. The other reason I'll vote against her is that in her career, she's received over $200 million in grants from Pfizer. And if Pfizer were just developing drugs, it wouldn't be such a big deal. But they develop drugs that then the government mandates and the government pushes. And they may say, oh, it's not a mandate. Well, once you make it sort of strongly worded by the CDC and government, filters down to governors who may mandate it, but also filters to school systems who say, oh, we're making the kids get this because the CDC

says we should. So in some ways, they are giving mandates for a drug that a private company makes money off of. And she's been intimately associated with that company in a large, multi-million dollar way. I just think it'll be hard. I mean, I think she should probably, the better part of valor would be to recuse herself from all decisions concerning Pfizer. And I didn't get that in my answers either. Republicans have been focused a lot on Chinese culpability and will say China unleashed this deadly virus on the world. Do you think Republicans have done too much finger pointing at China and not enough finger pointing at our own government for what it may have unleashed on the world?

You know, I met with the Chinese attache. The ambassador wasn't here. So I met with the second in charge. And I tried to convince her of that, that this doesn't have to be about just beating up China. We funded most of this. We were complicit in it. So really, the blame should go all around and shouldn't be just directed at China. And I'm not a big basher of things, of things China. I'm not for trade embargoes. I'm not for banning all business with China. I'm for not giving them research money and making sure that we try to get answers from them. But I think trade with China has largely benefited the United States. And so I'm not for abolishing trade. But I think trade with China has largely benefited the United States. And so I'm not for abolishing trade. So I do think the voices, particularly in my caucus,

are beating the drums daily for war. And I think that left unabated, we will have problems with the rashness of the voices, particularly coming from my side, but really both sides. And so whenever I hear everybody wanting to engage in war, particularly with another my side, but really both sides. And so whenever I hear everybody wanting to engage in war, particularly with another nuclear power, I've tried to become hopefully a saner voice for moving slowly, diplomacy and not, even though I do blame the virus on the coming out of the lab, I also blame ourselves as well and don't want to make it just that, oh, this is, we're going to rupture and have no relations with China, which I think would be a mistake. And speaking of war, I wanted to ask you one question about the war that's going on in Gaza right now. A couple of days after,

October 7th, you were on Fox News and you said, let's let Israel do what they need to do, which is to have a punishing response to the people in Gaza to say, no more, we are not going to let this happen. We've now seen what that punishing response has been, a minimum of 8,000 plus casualties. We've seen what appear to amount to war crimes from Israel Defense Forces targeting entire apartment buildings, entire blocks. Do you stand by that original claim? And what do you feel like should be done now? Should there be a ceasefire at this point? I think when you see the horrific images of young people being mowed down with automatic weapons at a concert, images of whole families being killed, it's hard not to be moved by that and understand Israel's desire to want

to respond and to try to wipe out particularly the military leadership of this. But you're right, they're embedded in a civilian population and many civilians have died. And this is ultimately a judgment that Israel will have to make, whether or not the disruption of Hamas chain and command is now sufficient, or whether they go on. Because you are right, as more civilians die in Gaza, not intentionally, but as they die in Gaza, there is always the question, are 10 new terrorists created for every civilian that was killed? The same can be said of the drone attacks throughout Africa, the drone attacks that killed a humanitarian worker after our soldiers died in Afghanistan as we were leaving. So there always is the question of blowback. And ultimately, that

decision has to be made by Israel. And I think that the reporting on it will make a big difference. There was a great article recently talking about this by Bonnie Christian that was in Reason Magazine. And the way she ended her article to me was just amazing, almost poetic or from a novel talking about how we descend into moral chaos if we let ourselves be consumed by revenge, either revenge of Palestinians, civilians that were innocently killed, or Israeli civilians that were innocently killed, or Israeli citizens that were innocently killed. If we let ourselves, we'll descend into sort of a moral chaos

that really is ever escalating and never ending. And so there has to come a time when we do talk about how do you make things better in Gaza? But I'll tell you, it's hard to in the midst of the death and carnage. I was there in 2013 and spoke with Netanyahu about trying to facilitate and allow Gaza to open their own port. And I said, maybe you do it like they did the Panama Canal for so many years with joint security by Israel and Gaza,

but allow them to collect their own duties and allow them to have some income coming into a port. And his response to me, and this wasn't after a massacre, this was in more of a relative time of peace. He says they have a port in Israel. And that kind of thinking won't get to a point where, you know, we can have a peaceful arrangement. But on the other side, I mean, if they were sitting here, they'd say, how do you negotiate with a country that says, we want to wipe you off the map, and they kill civilians. It's a very, very difficult situation. But ultimately, if you want peace, you want stability,

and you want the end of a lifetime of terrorism, there has to be something that allows the Gaza, those who live in Gaza, to prosper and thrive. But you understand the problem. If they're bombing Israel, it's going to be very hard as well. Senator Rand Paul, also the author of the new book, Deception, the Great COVID Cover-Up. Thank you so much for your time this morning. Thank you. That does it for us today on this edition of Counterpoints. It was a really interesting interview, Ryan. Yeah, I think he's right. And I think he needs to,

in the sense that you ask a lot of questions about what the goal is here of this assault at this point and whether it's even going to kind of blow back on Israel. If that's how people need to think about it to get themselves into a place where they think about a ceasefire, I guess we'll take that. The book, by the way, it's like 550 pages or something. It's a very long book. It's a big book. And, you know, we saw a lot of blowups just on that point between Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham type Republicans during the Obama years. He was a really interesting voice during the Obama years, actually. And he mentioned dronings just now. And so I actually wonder, I think your question was really helpful. I actually wonder to what extent we're going to see that going forward

during this administration. Yeah, we'll see. All right. Well, that does it for us. Elections next Tuesday. We'll be here. We'll be helping break down the results on Wednesday. Make sure to subscribe to the premium version of Breaking Points to get the full show uninterrupted straight to your inbox early. Before everyone else gets to watch it, you can see the full video on YouTube and Vimeo. So make sure to subscribe to Breaking Points Premium to support the great work that Crystal and Sagar do and to make shows like this possible. We so appreciate you watching and hope you have a great week. All right. See you next week. This is an iHeart Podcast.