Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/3/24: Israel Assassinates Hamas Leader In Lebanon, Harvard President Resigns, Kimmel Threatens Lawsuit After Epstein Allegations, Congress Caught Profiting From Israel War, And Tech Leader Exposes Industry Pro-Israel Bias

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss Israel assassinating a top Iranian leader in Lebanon, family member tears into NYT for inaccurate Oct 7th report, Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns, Jimmy Kimmel threatens Aaron Rogers with lawsuit over Epstein allegation, Congress caught profiting from Israel war, and tech leader Paul Biggar exposes the industries Pro-Israel bias.   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. I hope everybody had a good holiday break. I hope everyone had a chance to read my book. There's going to be a quiz on it at the end of this show. Are you going to be ready for it? Oh, absolutely.

Excellent. She had already read it. I was his outcast with flying colors. But we've got a big show today because we have some of the largest and most significant, I think, political and military developments in the end of December with a post where he called out a lot of people that he was directly doing business with, calling them apologists for genocide, telling them, you can keep your money. And we're going to talk to him about what the last two or three weeks has been like since then. Because I think a lot of people, whether it's this issue or others, have always kind of dreamed of the idea of telling everyone in their professional lives

to just go pound sand and I don't ever want to see you again. He actually did it. He did the Tom Cruise thing from that show. Jerry Maguire. Yes, he did the Jerry Maguire thing. Now I'm worried you're going to Jerry Maguire everybody here. Or they did the Dave Chappelle thing from Half Baked. Right, yeah. Anyway. You're going to do that too, probably. One day. One day. But you're cool. Sweet. Well, we also be, this is kind of in some ways related to what we're all talking about with Israel, obviously, because it kicked it all off. But the president of Harvard resigned yesterday, was pretty clearly pushed into her resignation amid allegations of plagiarism. There was an

Epstein story that basically didn't happen. So we're going to break down. A lot of John Doe's getting called out. That sounds maybe like anti-news, but we're going to break down exactly why this didn't turn out. The list that was supposed to be released yesterday, everyone was anticipating it, a list of John Doe names. Why do they keep teasing us with this? They're never going to tell us anything. It's been temporarily delayed. So we'll stay on the case and we'll kind of explain what happened too. And then unusual whales, the great unusual whales, heroic unusual whales is out with a 2023 report on congressional trading that Ryan, honestly,

I think should be one of the biggest stories in the country. It is so repulsive. It also goes back to Israel in a lot of ways, too. So members of Congress are still allowed to trade stocks. Of course. Like despite them promising we're going to take care of that under the last Congress, that despite Kevin McCarthy saying it was going to be the very first thing that he took care of when he took power, American people gave him that power. He's now trading stocks as a private citizen.

Yeah. So congratulations to everybody except for the American people gave him that power. He's now trading stocks as a private citizen. Yeah. So congratulations to everybody except for the American people. It should not go without note that Ryan is wearing his Christmas tie. That's right. For everyone who follows along with the saga of Ryan's ties and Ryan's Christmas ties in particular, it's a nice tie. Get used to this one in 2024. You're going to be seeing a lot of it. It's in the rotation. That's right. It is indeed.

Well, let's start with the breaking news out of the Middle East. Ryan, I'm really curious for how you were reacting yesterday to the sites from Beirut, Lebanon. Yesterday, we got news that the IDF accomplished its most significant assassination to date of a top Hamas political figure, but this one was in Beirut. Here's footage from the aftermath of that attack. So we're told that Salih al-Arori, who was a deputy political leader in Hamas's political wing, was killed in that attack. He had been a target of Israel's for a very long time. The U.S. had had him on a hit list as well. This is the highest ranking official that Israel has killed since October 7th, according to the reports that we're getting. The fact that it did not happen in Gaza, but instead in Beirut is creating concern about

the escalation, the spiraling escalation of this conflict, but also from the other direction, raising questions among some people that if they have this intelligence capacity and if this is what they civilians at the same time, with a casualty rate climbing over 22,000, with a lot of people unable to find food all day long at this point. If they'd have taken a more targeted approach, I think they would have maintained more support around the world. Yeah, that's an interesting point, because there have been quotes about precision versus turning Gaza into a parking lot. And there's been completely, I would say, contradictory points being made depending on who's talking from the Israeli government about whether the goal is to turn Gaza into a parking lot or whether the goal is precision, the precision versus parking lot approach.

And do we have A2 here? Yeah. Okay. So I think we used A2, but here's A3. This is, to Ryan's point, senior Hamas or Hamas has informed mediators. So senior Hamas officials that are involved in mediations, they've said they're freezing all hostage negotiations until further notice. There are still dozens of hostages. We don't know how many exactly are alive. That's another difficult thing of all of this. I think it's still north of 100 hostages now frozen in the aftermath of this attack. And a lot of these hostages are actually

active duty soldiers that are going to be much more difficult for Israel to exchange because exchanging civilians, exchanging a civilian hostage for kind of civilian hostages held in Israeli prisons under administrative detention or something like that is an easier negotiation when it comes to trading kind of prisoners of war, like active duty soldiers who were captured in combat. Then Hamas asks for much more significant concessions in order to trade those back. Then there's the complication that because the IDF completely melted away on October 7th for so many hours, that allowed a bunch of just gangs and random fighters to make their way through the fence and into some of these Israeli areas.

And so what people are saying is that Hamas doesn't even know where all of the hostages are. And that's a big problem for the negotiations as well, because Hamas can trade the hostages that Hamas has, but you just had some thugs and gangs come in and grab people. And so where are they? And who negotiates for them? All of that in the context of this assassination just blowing up the talks. Yeah, and we have actually some footage we can roll here of the fallout in the streets of Beirut and in Jordan and other places, right? Yeah, so you can see the protest on the screen here. And if you're listening to the show, you can see a big crowd walking down the street of Beirut protesting what had just unfolded. It's nighttime, so it is probably not too far removed from the event itself taking place.

Ryan, then this is all coming in the context, and importantly in the context, of President Biden saying what we want is kind of a cessation. He might not use that word, of course, because it's so charged, but a cessation of the invasion around the new year. And that's exactly what appears to be on the table in Gaza that Israel is saying we are kind of pausing. We're working on hostage negotiations. And then this. And the kind of the historical path that led us up to this neighborhood is also pretty interesting. So this was in the Dahia neighborhood. To run it back to how you even have a Hamas leader hanging out in that out of Jordan, they go into southern Lebanon. And then Israel pushes the PLO from there up into Beirut and southern Lebanon. And then in 1982, they invade southern Lebanon with this kind of scorched earth approach to get the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, out of Beirut. Because their

idea is that we're not going after the Lebanese people, we're not going after the Palestinian people, we're just going to root out the PLO and then everything will be okay, which sounds familiar. They finally agree, the PLO agrees, okay, after so much civilian death, after such a broad assault on the civilian infrastructure in Lebanon, which was deliberately done to kind of turn the civilian population in Lebanon against the PLO. The PLO agrees with international mediators that they will leave. They will get on boats, leave the port of Beirut, they go to Tunisia and other places. The agreement that they got from the US and from other international forces was that there

would be an international force that would protect the civilian population. Because they're saying, look, if we're going to leave to protect the civilians, then somebody has to protect them. You can't just leave them at the mercy of the IDF. Right after the last PLO official gets on a boat, the international forces leave. Israel then, IDF carries out some of the most brutal massacres in Israel's history in southern Lebanon. The names of them ring out today. And so they then occupy Lebanon up until 2000. They leave after kind of a little guerrilla war in which Hezbollah has become

like a real force between 82 and 2000 in reaction to this war. Then in 2006, they invade again. And they destroy the Dahia neighborhood so massively that it creates this thing called the Dahia Doctrine. Because there had been some Hezbollah fighters that were using this neighborhood, the one where we just saw the images from, to launch some rockets from there. And so they said, they came up with what's called the Dahiya Doctrine. If any civilian area is used by fighters to fight against the IDF, we're going to just completely annihilate in a disproportionate way. Flatten it.

Flatten it. Parking lot. They're going to turn it into a parking lot. So it became known as the Dahiya Doctrine. And that's in fact what they did. The Lebanese war turned into a disaster for Israel, but also for Lebanon. But you've heard, you had a lot of people saying that what they're doing now in Gaza is the Dahiya Doctrine. They're just executing this doctrine. Just interesting coincidence that now Hamas is in Dahiya and that they're bombing, bombing the leader there. Yeah, that is really interesting. And actually speaking of Gaza, we can put this next element

up on the screen. Israel's current plan, according to this thread from NBC, an NBC news reporter, Israel's current plan for Gaza after Hamas involves local Palestinian clans rather than the PA administering areas and taking responsibility for civilian needs, an Israeli official tells NBC News. Israel's government also wants an inspection mechanism on the Gaza-Egypt border to prevent weapons smuggling controlled by Israel on the Gazan side. Israel also wants a temporary security zone on Gaza's perimeter, but has not said publicly whether that would be on Israeli or Palestinian land. All of this is expected to be discussed in an Israeli cabinet meeting at 9 p.m. That's yesterday, local time, the Israeli official says.

As Antony Blinken, our Secretary of State, prepares to visit the region, this is explosive, Ryan. Their plan for Gaza after Hamas involves Palestinian clans rather than the PA. This is a total change in the order. And not surprising in the wake of October 7th, but we haven't seen some of these ideas, these kind of vague notions fleshed out into specific policy proposals so far. And what we get from this is Palestinian clans. We get temporary security zone from this and an inspection mechanism on the Gaza-Egypt border. Big news yesterday just on that front. Right. And what they seem to be doing is just throwing things against the wall. See what happens. To see what will stick. And for this plan, this plan was

immediately rejected by everybody who knows anything about anything. They're like, what are you talking about clans? You're not having clans. Seriously, what are you talking about? That's not going to happen. The only way that something like that works is if it's a pretty minuscule refugee camp. And that actually fits in with comments that we saw from Ben-Gavir and Smotrich yesterday, which flowed into then this confrontation, a public confrontation with the United States, a public confrontation with the United States. So let's start with Ben-Gavir, if we can put up this. So he writes, the war presents an opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza. This is Ben-Gavir telling reporters. Then he says, we cannot withdraw from any territory we are in in the Gaza Strip. Not only do I not rule out Jewish settlement there, I believe it is also an important thing. So this is the thing of saying the quiet

part out loud. So when he says the quiet part out loud, Matt Miller, my buddy over at the State Department, he responds, quote, the United States rejects the inflammatory and irresponsible statements from Israeli Minister Smotrich, who said basically the same thing, and Ben-Gavir. There should be no mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. Zero in on that should word, because you also had, let me find this, you had the UN ambassador. Oh, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Linda Thomas-Greenfield. I have her quote here, too.

We don't have the element. So she responded later that same day. She said, quote, in a statement, there should be no mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, and we reject the recent inflammatory statements from Israeli ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamir Ben-Gavir. So very similar wording from both Matt Miller at the State Department and Lydda Thomas-Greenfield over at the United Nations, our ambassador over there. Note the word should. These are diplomats who invest enormous amounts of weight in all of the words that they choose. And for them to be deliberately choosing the word should rather than will, there will not be,

or there shall not be, I think indicates where the United States is at this point and how aggressive they're willing to be. Because what else have they said? There should not be 2,000 pound bombs dropped in large civilian neighborhoods. And Israel's like, okay, maybe there shouldn't be, but guess what? There are. So the U.S., by expressing its kind of opinion on the matter, rather than issuing a directive of what can be done with its assistance, is a huge discrepancy. And I think it also speaks to what they see as reasonably, or let's not even say reasonable, what they see as plausible. Because let's put the next element up on the screen. This is how Ben-Gavir responded.

This got hot. Really hot. So you can see it on the screen. This is the translation from Hebrew. Really appreciate the United States of America, but with all due respect, we are not another star on the American flag. The United States is our best friend, but first of all, we will do what is best for the state of Israel. The migration of hundreds of thousands from Gaza will allow the residents of the enclave to return home and live

in security and protect the IDF soldiers. Ryan, first your reaction, and second, my reaction is just, I don't think that makes anybody safer. I don't think anybody's made safer by that point. Like in addition to just the phrasing, I don't think that's making anybody, does it accomplish the post-October 7th goal of protecting and securing Israel? I don't think so. Yeah, I'm more interested in your take on this because me, I'm already baked in on this. And I found it just utterly outrageous that this top official from the government that we fund is going to tell us publicly to our face, no, that we are going to engage in an ethnic cleansing of this area. It's not a humiliation to us as well as being just evil. But that's where I am. What I'm curious

about is does he start losing people who have been more supportive or more sympathetic toward what they've been doing over the last two months? So that's why I'm curious what you think of it, but also what, how people are, how people who've been supportive of kind of the IDF's effort here are seeing this, because now it's getting so difficult. Like Ted, if Ted Cruz were here, you know, he'd be like, I condemn nothing. But it'd be very difficult for him to suggest that this is now a targeted operation against Hamas and that if Hamas would just surrender, this would be over. When you have Israeli government officials saying explicitly, no, no, no, no, no. What we're trying to do is get everybody out. Everybody out of Gaza. Yeah, no. And we can't rule out settlements in Gaza.

And in fact, we insist on them. Right. And so, again, I would probably differ from Ted Cruz and other probably mainstream Republicans on the point of whether or not that's wise. And I think, though, that what, to your point, what they would say actually is they'd probably come Republicans on the point of whether or not that's wise. And I think though that what, to your point, what they would say actually is they'd probably come down on the side of Ben-Gavir because they feel that the Biden administration has been insufficiently supportive of Israel, that the Biden administration's public posture of support of Israel is undercut by all kinds of things, by its support for the UN, by the refugees. What more could Biden do? If Biden were basically Ben Gavir's deputy, what more could he even have done?

I mean, that's right, because everything that the Biden administration has done, and this is a great example of where mainstream Republicans would say Biden has been insufficiently supportive because we know that Biden was negotiating behind the scenes for a drawdown in the new year. And that's something that people in Israel, sort of hard right people in Israel were uncomfortable with. And that a lot of people here disagreed with saying that as soon as we get to this period of the new year, this should become a precision operation, which is sort of a tell in and of itself, of course. Yeah, become one. Yeah, become a precision operation. So I think that's what they would say. It's hard for me to argue that position because I don't believe that position. I don't buy that position myself.

But I think actually that's, Crystal and I were talking about this yesterday. For us to be huge participants in a war, where fundamentally we are on different pages. The United States having the president say two state solution, two state solution, two state solution, and having Netanyahu say absolutely for years no two state solution, it's not possible, one state solution. And you have billions of dollars of money, but then also munitions pouring into this war effort, tens of thousands of people's lives lost. And fundamentally, you don't agree on the end. And it's a very dangerous place to be because

then there's disagreement on some of these smaller points that adds up to a horrifying picture of a quagmire. It's the recipe for a quagmire. Or a recipe for what they call the peace between the lion and the lamb, where instead of you do wind up with a one-state solution, except it's because you've gotten rid of all the Palestinians. A dangerous one-state solution, by the way, because you have pushed everybody into countries that are not that far away from you. Still very close. Well, they're trying to push them into Europe and the United States as well. Still, so Lebanon, these places are not that far.

And that's a... Right, and we've seen how that worked out before. Powder keg, yeah, absolutely. To read a little bit more from Matt Miller's statement, he wrote, we have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land. So there is a will. So give the United States credit there. And will remain Palestinian land with Hamas no longer in control of its future

and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel. But this is exactly what we were just talking about, the two-state solution. You have a completely different, it's not like Ben-Gavir is just a member of parliament, the Knesset. He is literally part of the government. That's, to have two people on such dramatically different pages at the exact same time, when you have the U.S. as such a huge participant financially and in terms of resources in this war, that's outrageous. And words don't mean anything if the weapons continue to flow. As long as we continue to enable the military assault, which then makes the settlements possible, and if after that we enable the importation of all of the steel and the copper and the construction equipment and

other things that you need to build the Four Seasons Gaza that the IDF will want to construct there. It doesn't matter what we say. Matt Miller here says, that is the future we seek in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, the surrounding region and the world. If that's the future we seek, why are we funding the exact opposite future? Right, right. Yeah. Raise the questions of whether or not that's what we actually seek. To the point where you're being clapped back at on Twitter by the government that you're backing. I mean, to your point, it's embarrassing and it should be frightening. Even if you are on point, it's embarrassing and it should be frightening. Even if you are on different sides of this argument, it should be frightening just because it shows the extent to which this war can careen out of control. Well, I mean, it's already,

obviously, it's war, it's out of control, but could careen into a broader regional conflict. And we started this block by talking about Lebanon. This is just an absolute powder keg. There's no clear sense of direction from our government, from anybody's government at this point. The only people with a sense of clear direction seem to be Smotrich and Ben-Gavir. Right. They have their eye on the prize. And they are voices in their own government. Netanyahu, who has done nothing to kind us make anybody believe that they're doing anything other than supporting. But what does he even think? Yeah, about that exact question. We'll learn more about that in the days ahead. Ryan, we wanted to talk a little bit about the back and forth over.

We can put this next element up on the screen. A lot of people probably saw this. The New York Times dropped an article in the last several days that detailed their investigation. You can see the headline there, Screams Without Words, How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7th that was published just a few days ago. And it has some just incredibly disturbing allegations. Let me just read from it a little bit in case people haven't been following sort of the broader conversation about it. Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the Kibbutzim, they brutalized women. A two-month investigation by the Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women

were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on October 7th. Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones, and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers, and rape counselors, the Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appeared to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated. Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush's half-naked body was found, sprawled on the road at a third location. And I'm reading sort of from the relevant excerpts

of the article, and pay attention to the wording and the sourcing as well. The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site in a similar state as Ms. Abdush's legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas. Ryan, it didn't stop there, unfortunately, as unfortunate as it is to even delve into this. a relative, the sister of one of the women that is discussed in this article. Right. One of the main women that you mentioned in the article. Very much

one of the main women. She's described in a subsection if you've read the story as the woman in the black dress. Right. The woman in the black dress. And her family talks in your attempts for the story and was not pleased with the outcome. Right. They were shocked at what they read. And so her sister posts on Instagram,

people have since verified that this is in fact her sister. This is A9. Yeah, we can put up A9. So basically what she's saying here is that there wasn't time for her to be raped and that the New York Times never told them that they were going to discuss her death in terms of sexual assault. We can talk about how we can clarify and contextualize this in a moment, but just want to read a little bit

to people who are on the podcast. So she writes, the appearance is not easy. And she's talking about a video that the Times looked at, but it is clear that the dress will be up and not in a normal way. The head is half burned because they threw a grenade on the car so that it won't look like I justify what they did there. The scum did much worse deeds. She's talking about Hamas here. Yes, they tried. Yes, they cut off heads and parts of bodies. But in the case of my sister, they did not. And why not? And so she says, at 6.51, Gal sends us a message to the WhatsApp group. We are on the border. You don't understand what's going on. What explosions are there? We'll get out of here. At seven o'clock, my brother-in-law

calls his brother and says that they were shot in the wave. She is grunking how in four minutes they also raped and burned. So the sister's argument that she's making here on Instagram is that it just simply wasn't possible because they were in their car and had a grenade thrown at it. And so the Times has not yet responded to this charge from the sister. But this was one of the central allegations that the Times built its story around. So I just wanted to raise this one here, and we'll continue to follow this because the New York Times story has been used quite heavily in the last four or five days, not just to kind of justify the ongoing assault on Gazan civilians, but also then to kind of condemn anybody who has been critical of the assault and say, well, clearly you don't care

about all of these atrocities that were committed. But to me, if you're going to write a piece of this heightened importance, you've got to be a lot more careful than this. But it also feels like a moment where if you as a reporter, as a media organization, feel like the wind is at your back, so to speak, that the thrust of public opinion is all in one direction, then you get sloppy. You report things that aren't backed up in the same way that you would. In other words, if the New York Times did a piece where they were kind of challenging the conventional narrative around what happened on October 7th, they would have those anecdotes so buttoned down that a hurricane wouldn't be able to lift them

off the ground. But if you're writing a narrative that is in line with the conventional understanding and then just advancing it a little bit, you're much less careful about what you're putting because everybody's gonna you know gobble it up and share it no matter what. And because anybody who raises questions about it is then immediately asked whether or not they're a rape apologist. I think it's always worth noting when a major news organization or any news organization for that matter faces a serious accusation of misreporting something, especially in something as sensitive as you were

talking to the family of somebody who was basically blown to bits in an ambush at a music festival. And you get that story egregiously wrong according to these allegations. I think that's always worth noting. On the other hand, Ryan, I'm curious if I just present you with a question that might be on some viewers' minds, which is why focus on it? It's true. This is a bad—and you kind of just answered this question. taped interrogations with Hamas militants that, you know, again, you have to put some stock in the IDF if you take this as gospel. And I'm not saying that all of these taped interrogations that we've gotten have been perfectly, you know, that there hasn't been any editing or any coercion or anything like that. That always happens. But also, people who are capable of great evil and

great violence are capable of great evil and great violence. And that's what we saw carried out on October 7th. So, I do take those admissions from Hamas militants themselves in their own words, which you can see and watch on the internet seriously. And so, the focus that I've seen online about this time story, from my perspective, has been disproportionate. But it's interesting to me because I think it speaks to one of the strange realities about the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is that elite opinion. It's one of the very few topics on which elite opinion is genuinely polarized. You know, it's not like, for example, let's see, it's not like, what's a good example of like a lot of cultural things. Gay marriage, for example, you're not going to get the same amount of debate on that among cultural elites or probably among the broader country, but even 10 years ago, than you would

among the general population on this. And we're going to talk about this in the next block, even at Harvard, there are bitter disagreements between the Bill Ackmans and the Claudine Gays and other professors. And that's where I think people see that in media, there are these competing narratives. Sometimes you get a narrative from the New York Times that is incredibly pro-Israel. Sometimes you get a narrative from the Associated Press or Reuters and like, you know, maybe that's a little too credulous of Hamas, what Hamas is telling you, et cetera, et cetera. So that's where I actually find the response to the story interesting. But I'm just pitching that question because I'm guessing

it's on people's minds. And the first thing I'd say is there's a great book people should read by Christina Lamb called Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, which is about the history of rape as a weapon of war. It's something that has been overlooked by the largely male kind of military historian demographic. And so the possibility that there was zero sexual violence on October 7th is basically close to zero. It is something that happens in war. When the New York Times leads its most significant two-month-long investigation with a particular anecdote. Because their article begins, at first, she was known simply as the woman in the black dress.

In a grainy video, you can see her. And that is then challenged directly by her sister. And challenged in a way that says, look, your timeline doesn't line up. Like a grenade was thrown on the car right she was blown up um and the new york times doesn't present in this article any other evidence other than kind of this very this this snippet of video other than they say um based largely on the video evidence which was verified by the new york times so they saw the video, Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she became a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the October 7th attacks. Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck, they brutalized women. And so if the symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women is this anecdote, which is at the very top of the New York Times high profile story, and it is sourced to Israeli

police officials anonymously, and her sister is publicly contradicting the possibility of it even happening. It requires further investigation. It may be that the sister who is in shock, who is suffering through a tremendous grief, and may want something to be different than it is. That may be. That's true. But this warrants more investigation rather than just sitting here and saying, well, Israeli police officials say this. So, yeah. And the New York Times has a snippet of video. Yeah. But the video is not of a rape. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I think that's a totally fair point, especially because the way both statements from competing sides, especially in the middle of any war, are treated by the press is an extremely important question because people's lives are on the line. Like, for example, with some hospital bombings.

Retaliations, the people who are making those decisions whether or not to retaliate are certainly following the press. And the press is certainly getting information from intelligence, but also from its own reporting and all of that. So yes, I mean, this, that actually, when government is saying something, media is taking that, A, what is government either lying about or getting flat out wrong and just being sloppy with facts for the sake of propaganda? And then B, how is media treating those claims with skepticism? Totally important. Because trigger warning, explicit content warning, all those things. One reason there's been so much focus on this article is because of the height of, and like the explosive

nature of some of the allegations, some of them rising to the level of this is really hard to believe and isn't backed up by forensic evidence, video, other things. One witness that they have here, and I'll read people this, and I think people will understand when I read this why some people are skeptical of some of this reporting, and also why some people are like, this justifies what's going on at this moment. The woman, this is the New York Times writes, the first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back. She said she then watched another woman shredded into

pieces while one terrorist raped her, she said. Another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast. One continues to rape her and the other throws her breast to someone else and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road. This anecdote made it into the New York Times, which the New York Times is saying is credible. That people were, that Hamas terrorists. It's a named eyewitness, isn't it? It's a named eyewitness. Her last name is Sapir.

Said that they used a box cutter and were throwing a breast around back and forth like some type of a sporting event. And they do have another person who was hiding in the same spot. He said he and Sapir were part of a group of friends who had met up at the party. In an interview, he said he barely lifted his head to look at the road but he also described seeing a woman raped and killed so there's a second witness but he's they don't they don't quote him like they don't you know he doesn't he's saying he didn't he didn't look up and then this and then the store and then the story ends there basically at this moment so it leaves people wondering, like, what happened here?

Were there really people throwing body parts around the road? And nobody else saw this. There's no video of this. There's no dash cam video of this. There's no, where are these bodies? Like, did they get picked up? Did Hamas take them back to Gaza? Like, if bodies were mutilated in this fashion, we would have them. Like, you would think, right?

Although, I mean, I guess it depends because we know at the music festival, and we can put the next element, the last element for this block up on the screen. Some of the security situation, we already know that in the response, the IDF may have hurt a whole lot of people. And so that is just to say bodies may be mutilated in ways that are even after terrible mutilations happen to them from shelling and burning and whatnot, that it would be hard to make that determination. And so, yeah, the survivors of the October 7th concert are seeking $56 million in damages from Israeli security forces. And we'll have to follow that lawsuit closely because that's substantiated. There's no question that they have serious claims. And their main claim comes from the fact that on Friday night, they were already getting very credible reports that an assault was coming on

late Friday night, early Saturday morning. On Friday, the IDF approved the concert rave event, musical event, festival, to go for an extra day. And it said it's okay. If they had said, no, we're getting, because the IDF is responsible for this event, which is happening just across the fence from Gaza. The IDF knew that there were all of these intelligence reports that something could be happening. If they had said, no, the permit you had, which was just for a couple of days, it ends now. Like, we're not extending it for another day. Everybody go home. 300 plus people would still be alive.

Yeah. If not more than that. Yes. Right. It was how many were killed at the concert? Like it was at least, I think it was at least 300. So yes.

Plus the rest completely traumatized yeah absolutely running for their lives and and others others captured taken hostage and may have been killed either in a bombing died of dysentery or hopefully still alive and will be released at some point. Yeah, absolutely. So they're suing, in a landmark case, the IDF for what I think everyone across the spectrum agrees is a monumental failure. In the aftermath of October 7th, the president of Harvard came under fire, the former president of Harvard, we should say Claudine Gay. We can put the first element up on the screen. She published a letter yesterday resigning from her post atop Harvard. She was the first black female president of Harvard. She, in the aftermath of October 7th, was called before Congress essentially to respond to allegations that Harvard had not been as harsh on these speech questions that pertain to pro-Palestinian students versus pro-Israel students. And Republicans grilled Claudine Gay. They grilled the presidents of Penn. And it was MIT. Yeah. The president of Penn resigned

right away afterwards. And Claudine Gay, in the meanwhile, so Claudine Gay, meanwhile, got hit with a ton of allegations of plagiarism that originated actually from CounterPoint's guest, Chris Ruffo and Aaron Sabarium, who's an excellent reporter over at the Washington Free Beacon. Although they were bouncing around the internet, I had read, as part of kind of an anti-DEI attack on gay. Like people were accusing her of being unqualified and boosted just because she was a black woman. So she, yes.

And just bouncing around on like racist 4chan things before it kind of migrated into the discourse. Yeah. By Rufo really seems to be, I don't know how much credit he gets, like if he was the one that first surfaced them, if he gave them the New York Post or what. He did follow up on tips and the same with Saberian that as soon as, so basically this is why it's related to October 7th, even though these are plagiarism allegations throughout the course of her career, is that they started getting tips. Rufo and Sparian started getting tips because people were so pissed off about her testimony in front of Congress. In which she kind of copped to this legalese or resorted to this legalese to defend Harvard's speech policies. And that's where this is, you know,

like, there's this so many different conversations happening in this one conversation alone that you have to sort of disentangle these things, which is, I think the speech policy is absolutely correct. Like, I think the speech policy that she was defending is absolutely correct. And on the other hand, I think that she was using this awful like HR language to mask hypocritical approaches to speech. So conservative students are obviously punished and their speech is restricted disproportionately in different cases. or Congress, and has no sense of moral clarity, and just is incapable of defending with any real vigor and principle her position on free speech. It just was a circus. To me, it was a bad answer given by both Penn and Harvard, because Elise Stefanik said, yes or no question, can calling for the genocide of Jews get you caught up in the disciplinary process at your college? I think she asked for a yes or no

answer. Just say yes. Right. Because there are certainly are situations where it could. Right. And then you say yes. Of course, each individual case depends on the context, what words were used and in what context. Yeah. And, you know, because there was a famous case of a professor at Penn who he said, all I want for Christmas is white genocide. Mm-hmm. Yep. Just a joke. Or was he, he was at Drexel. Maybe it was Drexel, yeah. Philadelphia. So it was a joke. But if you say that just, that there's a strict no context rule, he's done. And everybody's telling an obvious joke, you know It's done if context can't be allowed. But they should have just said yes.

And then you force Stefanik then to kind of get into the weeds, which is what the MIT president did. She said, well, I haven't heard anybody saying that on campus. What are you talking about? And Stefanik came back with, well, there have been people who've chanted intifada, which is Arabic for the word uprising. And at that point, you're like, well, I'd have to see a lot of context in order to say that, you know, I understand why people receive that in a violent fashion because the second intifada was quite violent. There were suicide bombings involved. But the word intifada just means uprising. There's a news outlet that covers Israel-Palestine called Electronic Intifada.

Yeah. Like, just is reading that calling for genocide? No, of course not. And she's kept her job. And she has so far kept her job, but they're coming for her next. Anyway, go ahead. Well, yeah, no, no, no. Let's put this up on the screen so we can see the examples of plagiarism. The Free Beacon actually made this very handy illustration where you can see highlighted text between Claudine Gay's work. She's a political scientist. I think she studied economics at Stanford and taught. She's taught political science for a while. And you can just see the text being highlighted. That's the same. We can put the next element up as well now, too. You could go to the Free Beacon website to read all of these examples. And you can see them in Rufo's work as well. too. You could go to the Free Beacon website to read all of these examples

and you can see them in Rufo's work as well. It's also worth noting the Associated Press headline just this morning. I mean, this is one of the best that I've ever seen among bad Associated Press headlines. Harvard's president resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges. Plagiarism. Again like this is what Jonathan Chait already yesterday in the, in New York Magazine was accusing Rufo of weaponizing quote, like high standards of excellence. Something like that. One of, one of those phrases, um, like exceptional standards or standards of excellence, something to that degree, which is just stop, pause, and listen to yourself. That's a weird way to talk about what happened because there are a lot of students at Harvard

who looked at Claudine Gay and said, if I did what you did here, and a lot of it was not citing works that she later added citations to, Harvard tried to kind of wiggle out of this and not, you know, punish her at all. But when you have students saying, listen, I would be kicked out of Harvard and my career would be severely affected if I had done all of these things. And the president, I'm to hear the president is keeping her job with no punishments whatsoever. She just has to add citations. I feel like that's where it became most untenable. On the other hand, the Harvard Corporation, which is this sort of secretive corporation that runs Harvard, has apparently been taking the backlash from people like Bill Ackman really seriously.

And Lee Fong actually found an example. First, let's put B4 up on the screen. This is Elise Stefanik taking a little bit of a victory lap before. It's a tweet from Elise Stefanik saying, two down. Harvard knows that this long overdue forced resignation of the anti-Semitic plagiarist president is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history. There we have the inflation of the term anti-Semitic, quite an inflation of anti-Semitic. And let's put up this Lee Fong tweet where he's responding to, I believe it was, this is the next element, Bill Ackman saying, you know, next up MIT to the point that Ryan made. And Lee responded, now they're going after yet another university president, MIT's Sally

Kornblith, who also declined to censor pro-Palestinian student speech. They're making it very clear this is about enforcing pro-Israel dogma, nothing else. So Ryan, that's to the point you made, that it's not stopping with clotting gay. Right, and obviously this wasn't about plagiarism, which then makes a lot of her defenders look bad because everybody knows this is not about plagiarism. Then when they find these very solid examples of what everybody understands to be plagiarism, her when they find these very solid examples of what everybody understands to be plagiarism, her defenders have to defend the plagiarism because they're defending the meta fight rather than that one. Rather than to me, you just have to be like, look, it's true that you would not have been, this plagiarism would not have been uncovered if not for

the kind of witch hunt that came out of that hearing. Like, they came for you, trying to get you fired, and they found this pretext to get you fired. However, the pretext is legitimate. You're busted. Sorry. Right, exactly. Too bad. Like, you shouldn't have plagiarized. Like, and there are a lot of academics who are in academics to get to other positions, such as president of a university. And in order to get there, you have to get your PhD and you have to be published in respectable journals. Those are boxes that you have to check.

And for those academics, they're kind of just checking those boxes while they're working the politics and getting – and that's fine. If you want to be president of Harvard, that's a cool ambition. I'm not saying everybody has to be like just in the stacks of books at the library. You could be next. That's right. You've got Harvard colors on your tie. I suggested Rashid Khalidi, author of 100 Years War, a great Palestinian-American scholar, as the next president of Harvard. Because Harvard originally said, you know what, we probably would get rid of President Gay based on these initial plagiarism allegations, but it will look like we're caving to Bill Ackman and the rest of this mob.

And Chris Ruffo. And Ruffo. We don't want to do that. So they stuck by her for a while. Right. But then the plagiarism allegations were just too much. And so if they really want to get back at Rufo and Ackman, Rashid Khalidi for Harvard Press. Doubled that further left.

Yeah. So this is from the New York Times. They say initially faculty reaction was mixed with some saying the charges were serious and other calling the examples minor, including some of the people that were plagiarized from. Professors from both camps questioned the seemingly ideological nature of the effort to publicize them, but— Clearly ideological. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But as more allegations surfaced, faculty support for Dr. Gay began to erode,

particularly as questions arose about what procedures the corporation, which normally has no involvement in scholarly matters, had used to investigate. So people were actually dissatisfied with the nature of the investigations, of the investigation, which they thought was sort of a charade and a rubber stamp. And that is all sort of bubbling. And that's where Claudine Gay, who, by the way, this is the shortest tenure for any president of Harvard since 1636, which is when Harvard was founded. She was the first black president and the second woman ever to lead Harvard University. So you can see where Harvard was reluctant to part ways with her, anticipating already charges of racism. Claudine Gay's resignation letter is in no way an apology for the plagiarism.

She defends her work. She does not apologize for anything and says that she, that this is, some people have said she blames racism for what happened to her. I think she just kind of invokes it, obviously. The initial allegations of plagiarism were surfaced by people who were upset that a black woman was made president of Harvard. You're talking about what allegedly was on 4chan. Back in those 4chan threads or whatever. Now, they were surfaced because she plagiarized. And clearly even like- They were able to surface them because she was plagiarized.

But yes, she's not wrong that the initial people who found them and then leaked them and surfaced them to Ruffo and the other folks were animated by anger at the fact that they thought this black woman didn't deserve to be president of Harvard. Like that, she's not wrong about that. I think there's always, if you're a black woman in America and you're in a position of, in a high profile position, there's always going to be a racialized element. But you also have to, because you know that, you can't be that sloppy with your work. Clearly what she was doing is she's, all of these areas were like kind of, it's what you would call the B matter of your articles where you're just kind of summarizing. And it's so like, I'm glad I'm not an academic because some of it's so boring. Like you have to like summarize all of this prior research that's done before you get to your own original

research. So your literal job is to take other people's work, summarize it, cite it, and so that people have the context for what your original contribution is coming afterwards. And so in those places where she's summarizing what other people's work is, she's just copying and pasting lines, dropping them into her own work, changing them a little bit, usually citing where she got it from, but sometimes not citing. Apparently 40 plus times are in that right ballpark. Yeah. And so then you're busted. You just have to be more careful about how you do it. The whole thing is copying because you're just reiterating what people have previously said. And so I understand

why some academics are like, this is not serious, because this is just the grunt work. This is the busy work of academia rather than the original work that we're supposed to be focused on. But look, they're the ones that set this stupid framework up. They live by it and die by it. It reminds me of, in a weird way, a lot of what happens on the right with Donald Trump, which is that you are completely correct that the people coming after Donald Trump for X, Y, and Z have ulterior motives. Right. Yes. They're not really just the broken clock, however, is right. Right. Yes. And then the broken payoffs to porn stars. Absolutely. Yes. And then still the broken clock is right twice a day.

And sometimes it's like he clearly is seriously being accused of doing something that is clearly wrong. Al Capone did cheat on his taxes. Al Capone did cheat. And that is the moral of the story, really. Al Capone did cheat on his taxes. Although he had no choice because you can't like honestly file a criminal enterprise with the IRS. That was a little on him. He was in a catch-22. A little bit of a pickle, yeah.

A highly anticipated set of names in one of Virginia Jafray's cases. Actually, this is a 2015 case against Dillian Maxwell. Virginia Jafray is one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent, Epstein accusers and accusers against Maxwell as well. There was a list of names that was set to be made public, as many people actually know, just yesterday. What happened instead is that as everybody was anticipating the release of these names,, according to leaks to ABC News and other outlets, were going to include dozens of mentions of Bill Clinton and potentially Donald Trump as well. That was postponed until January 22nd because of a filing from one of the Jane Does mentioned in the case who would have been or successfully

said she would be in danger if her name was released. Now, the judge was going to shield victims' names, but the list is going to be kind of a mix of the accused and accusers. So it was, you know, there was a lot sort of legally on the line. And whether we actually ever get the list of names on January 22nd is an open question, obviously. Much of this information that we were set to get was probably already out in the public. And in fact, reporting suggests that a lot of this was already going to be known. Nevertheless, everyone, myself included, probably you as well, Ryan, were kind of on tent or hooks waiting for this information to be

released because when it comes to the case of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and all of their various connections to intelligence, which really, after, of course, the many, many victims who suffered over the years, is first and foremost in this story, especially from a political lens. This was a very useful bit of information, even if much of it is already known. To that point, one of those people who was on tenterhooks was Aaron Rodgers, who went after Jimmy Kimmel. So some Disney on Disney violence, because Rodgers was on Pat McAfee's ESPN show and called out Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy Kimmel responded. I think we have the video that we can roll of Rogers on the McAfee show. Watch this. It has something to do with the Epstein list that came out.

Feels like it. It's supposed to be coming out soon. That's supposed to be coming out soon. Look at this guy. He's been waiting in his wine cellar. I've been waiting in my wine cellar for this guy. A lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, are really hoping that doesn't happen. Please. All right. All right. Obviously, a clip from this particular program was run on Jimmy Kimmel's show. Whenever Aaron brought up the list and then Jimmy mocked him for it,

Aaron has not forgotten about that. But here we are sitting right in front of that nice bottle of scotch. What do you say? I'm waiting to celebrate something. Oh, yeah. He's been waiting. That's the one. I'll tell you what, if that list comes out, I definitely will be popping some sort of

bottle. So that was from the middle of the day yesterday as everyone was waiting for the list to be released. It could have happened basically at any point yesterday. And Rod Rogers goes on ESPN, calls out Jimmy Kimmel, also an ABC host. Did he say Jimmy Kimmel was on it? Yeah. So here's Jimmy Kimmel's response, invoking that great Key and Peele sketch. Dear A-asshole, for the record, I've not met, flown with, visited, or had any contact whatsoever with Epstein, nor will you find my name on any quote list other than the clearly phony nonsense that soft-brained wackos like

yourself can't seem to distinguish from reality. Your reckless words put my family in danger. Keep it up, and we will debate the facts further in court. I sort of think that Jimmy Kimmel just strice and affected the whole situation. Like, a throwaway comment from Aaron Rodgers on a televised podcast, maybe could have let that one go unless it like for some reason started picking up a bunch of steam. And maybe it had, I don't know, but I probably would have let that one go. I don't know. It's hard to say because once in this world of information being completely untethered from reality, if your name starts to circulate kind of in orbit with Epstein, there's just no way to pull it out.

But your question is an interesting one. Did Kimmel accidentally propel it into orbit rather than just ignoring it? He probably saw a bunch of stuff coming out of that Rogers podcast, which then pushed him to make a public statement about it. He's right that it definitely puts his family in danger. There's no question about that. Yeah. And he would know if he's going to be on the list. If he says he's not, he's not. That's pretty clear. So the list is supposed to have 187 names on it. That includes Epstein's employees, his co-conspirators, some perpetrators, but also victims.

And it was one of the victims who requested that the names be withheld for now. Yeah. I'll be shocked if they ever actually release any of these names. Again, we're... Each person is allowed to petition to keep their name hidden. So, I mean, I would love to have my faith restored in this process, but I don't understand how we're ever going to learn anything out of this. So, for example, this is the ABC News reporting.

They say the documents stem from a 2015 civil lawsuit centered on allegations that Epstein's one-time paramour, Ghislaine Maxwell, facilitated the sexual abuse of Virginia Jafray, an alleged trafficking victim. Jafray also accused Epstein and Maxwell of directing her to have sex with Prince Andrew and several other prominent men. Prince Andrew denied the allegations. Most of the prominent names that appear in the documents are already associated in some way with Epstein for allegations of wrongdoing, for having worked with him, flown on his planes, etc., etc. In some instances, the only appearances of the names are in potential witness lists or in proposed terms for searches of electronic records. So, ABC News at one point says something like, you know, Bill Clinton is expected to appear in the documents, of these hundreds of sealed court filings from the 2015 civil suit.

But Bill Clinton is not, I think as the ABC News turn of phrase was like, he's not been accused of any wrongdoing. It's like, well, Virginia Jafray accuses Bill Clinton of being on the island, of being at Little St. James. That's wrongdoing. That is wrongdoing in and of itself. Period. Doing wrong. Yeah, that's wrongdoing. That is wrongdoing in and of itself. Period. Doing wrong. Yeah, that's doing wrong. Also, there's a picture of him getting the massage from the underage. You remember that? From the seemingly, or the very young looking woman.

Oh, like getting a shoulder rub or something? Yeah, the shoulder rub. Yeah, which is just, man. And in other news, Virginia Jafray has also accused Alan Dershowitz. Well, she's backed off that. Well, she got slapped with a defamation suit from Dershowitz. Right. And so now she says that she believes that that was a case of mistaken identity and all suits between Dershowitz and Giuffre have been dropped as a result of that, which has freed up Dershowitz for his next effort.

There was reporting that Israel wants to hire Alan Dershowitz to represent it at the, basically at the International Criminal Court, where it's being accused of carrying out genocide by South Africa, also now joined by Malaysia. This is an ongoing case. I think it would be the first one since Bosnia, although that happens in real time. The Rwanda one was so fast that the prosecutions didn't come until after genocide was over. In Bosnia. There were prosecutions brought during the conflict, which did then kind of trigger intervention. So we'll see where that goes. Dershowitz was asked for comment and said that he's not commenting. He did not deny or confirm that he would be representing Israel at the criminal court. Right., again, to Ryan's point, will these names ever be released? I don't know. I wouldn't put money on it. But, you know, one of the big, this is just like.

But hey, I'd love to be wrong. Same. And we've got a couple of weeks to find out. But then there might be another delay. When you're dealing with hundreds of people, you're dealing with hundreds or hundreds of documents and at least dozens of people you're dealing, that means with dozens of legal teams and all likelihoods. So there's kind of a never ending road ahead of us you're dealing, that means with dozens of legal teams in all likelihood. So there's kind of a never-ending road ahead of us. And again, we're talking about a civil case from 2015 that has already seen a million twists and turns. I was just on the court document list, and it's already like eight pages long if you go to the reports of all of the filings in the case. So there's a lot more to come on this. But I always think with Epstein, the main thing to remember is that there is reporting. There is people who have said on

the record that they believe he's tied to Mossad. They believe that he is tied to either Israeli intelligence or American intelligence in different ways. And again, victims first and foremost here, but from a political lens, that is probably the most important thing to keep in mind, and we already have plenty of evidence to suggest that's exactly what was going on. Speaking of a sordid list of names, Unusual Wales is out with its annual report on congressional insider trading, if we can put up this element. Unusual, his first report was back in 2020, and it helped reinvigorate the debate over whether or not members of Congress should be able to trade, which includes roughly 100% of the public saying that they should not be able to trade. Yeah, including many members of Congress

who will say it as well. Including members of Congress, coupled with the secret forces inside Congress to continue to allow the trading to continue. Nancy Pelosi said that she would ban trading. What happened back in the 2022 congressional cycle was, if you remember, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put forward what's known as a discharge petition, which is you have a bill that leadership is not allowing to get to the floor. You create a discharge petition that if it gets 218 signatures, it is forced onto the floor. So she introduced a discharge petition. It started gaining momentum, and Pelosi jumped out and said, I promise that we're going to do this by the end of the year. Pelosi's team then kind of interfered with the negotiations, blew that up. One thing leads to another. Wouldn't you know it, the congressional term expires without the ban ever getting enacted.

Kevin McCarthy, while he was in the minority, promised that his number one goal, first thing he would do when he took over the House of Representatives was that he was going to use the Republican majority to ban congressional insider trading. Kevin McCarthy, no longer with us as Speaker of the House, did not ban congressional trading, which leads us to, I guess, the third, fourth unusual Wales report on insider trading. It actually, amusingly, has Republicans slightly underperforming the S&P over the year. S&P had a good year. Good old Biden. But with Democrats overperforming, the S&P rose at 25% Democrats. So it's very hard to guess the returns that members of Congress are generating.

So he pegs Democrats at 31%, Republicans at 18%, because you don't know exactly when they bought the stock. So therefore, you don't know if they've sold it when necessarily if they've sold it by at this point. He annualizes returns. So there's a lot of estimating going on to come up with these numbers. But what you can certainly find is suspiciously well-timed trades from a number of members of Congress. My favorite is when you match them to their committees, as Unusual Wales does here, which is the most outrageous part of all of this. And why, again, I think this report from American hero Unusual Wales should be a huge national story, because you just put the element

up on the screen about Dems beating Republicans. Republicans did pretty well on the Senate side, but this is about how they're trading when it comes to war. Numerous members in Congress, unusual Wales writes, traded war stocks before the Israel-Gaza-Palestine conflict. We present the above table, that's the one on the screen, without comment, noting that SPI is up only 10% since the conflict. Well, members who traded these war stocks have often outperformed. They said they saw something far worse at the start of the Ukraine conflict. You should read that report too because it's equally a stomach churning. But based on the portfolios of members who would benefit from war stocks is what you're looking at

here on the screen. I added our tweet for reference as our highlighting of the war conflict was part of Kevin Hearn losing his run for U.S. Congress Speaker. And Tommy Tuberville is a good example of this. I've definitely- He's like addicted to day trading. He's addicted to day trading, seriously addicted to day trading. So he bought puts against Elon Musk's Tesla in 2023. He was doing a lot of stuff with Tesla, actually. Then he disclosed $250,000 in futures trading of wheat, corn, soy, and cattle in August of 2023. He sits on the Senate Committee for Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.

There's also a farm bill that was being discussed, and the can was kind of kicked. So another thing to keep in mind, he purchased $45,000 in Huma. So that's a penny stock in July, and he repeated that purchase right when the Ukraine war started. And that ended up being used in the Ukraine war for tissue implants, and he's on armed services. So another thing just to keep in mind is that, yes, these are annualized, and they're not perfect estimates. There's no question about it. But at the same time, just in and of itself, the fact that they're trading, it's outrageous. And in the past, Unusual Wells and other reporters have found connections between whether or not a company lobbied a member of Congress and how well that member of Congress

then traded the stock. Because what often happens is that, let's say, Huma or whatever, you've got a defense company that comes in and talks to a member of Congress and says, we need help with the Pentagon. Help us get through this process. Here's this thing that we make that's really good. And in the meeting, they will tell the member of Congress, oh, by the way, in March, we're going to get through FDA phase three, or we have a new kind of microprocessor that's coming online. It's going to be amazing. And so the member of Congress then gets that information from that meeting,

might help them at the Pentagon, and then also buys the stock. And then because they have that access to that early information, they make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so it's a way for a company to put cash into a brown paper bag and leave it on the desk without putting cash in a brown paper bag and leaving it on the desk. No money is changed hands. It's just a little, hey, yeah, we've got a contract coming through. It's going to be worth $1.5 billion in two weeks. When that's announced, you don't even have to say when that's announced, our stock is going to pop.

The member of Congress is like, which day? Two weeks? You're going to announce that? Good to know. That's exactly why it has to all be blind or banned completely. I mean, there's just no other way to do it. Marjorie Taylor Greene beat Ro Khanna last year, according to these estimates. And we've talked to, we've pressed Ro on this issue, actually. His wife is wealthy, and her advisor makes trades. It kills Ro, sure.

But it is difficult if it's your spouse who's doing it because it makes it look like you're the one doing it. But that's why. And Roe has been one of the most outspoken in favor of a band. A band that would include spouses. Yes, absolutely. Because your spouse is at all those dinners with you too. They're sitting at the tables with the lobbyists, traveling to the junkets and all of that stuff. So there's just no question. And overhearing phone calls and all of those. So there's just no question that it's, and to your

point about Roe, even he understands that. Yeah. And the bigger point is it creates the appearance of corruption or conflict of interest to people in the public, even if there isn't any, like even if there's no connection whatsoever. People are just like, come on. Right. And Unusual Wales reminds us of this Dan Crenshaw quote where he says something to the extent of this is the only way for, yeah, he says you have no way to better yourself as a congressman other than trading stocks, which is something that's a kind of popular refrain on Capitol Hill is that compared to what they could be making in the lobbying sector, members of Congress are just doing

public service, making that 180K or whatever it is now. I think it's still around 180K. And that's not enough money to have two houses because you have to have one in your district and you have to sleep somewhere in Washington, D.C. and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, of course, we have to engage in corrupt conduct to do that. What else do you expect us to do but be corrupt? Oh, an update, by the way, to our last block and a clarification. It's the International Court of Justice where South Africa has brought the charges against Israel. Dershowitz.

Not the International Criminal Court. The one that Dershowitz is maybe or maybe not defending Israel. Right. And Turkey has now joined and is backing the South African. So you now have a NATO member taking Israel to the International Court of Justice for genocide. Yeah. Well, the other thing, I think just to close the loop on the unusual whales segment, Congress beat the market overall. And of 100 trading members, 33 percent beat the market with their portfolios. One unusual thing, unusual whales, unusual thing that unusual whales discovers, they write, a general rule I found is that if Congress members are up for reelection in 2024, then they've severely decreased and or stopped trading their activity in the last year and points to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Nancy Pelosi, and all of her fun

NVIDIA activity. So the number of trading is down. The number of members disclosing trades is down. But the values of those transactions are comparable to years past, says Unusual Whale. So they've been selling more stocks than buying. But they've also been selling more government securities than in previous years. And they were buying more corporate securities in the last two years as well. So important patterns to look out for in the years ahead. But hopefully we can just all agree to ban this shit in the years ahead. So

we don't even have to see this. Put Unusual Whales out of business, guys. That'd be nice. Yeah, that'd be nice. All right, Ryan, Paul Bigger is our guest up next. You explained a little bit earlier in the show about why we're talking to Paul because of this viral blog that he wrote, some of which was directed at his own people he's in business with. So he's going to join us on the show next. Yeah, stick around for that. All right, we're now joined by Paul Bigger, who's the founder of CircleCI, as well as Dark Lang. Paul's also the author of a viral blog post

put up on December 14th called I Can't Sleep. Paul, thanks so much for joining us here on CounterPoints. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And so I wanted to read people a little bit of your post so they have some context for this this if we can put up this first element. You write at one point in this really harrowing essay, you write, I don't know what to do, but I know these are not my people. Who can work with people whitewashing genocide? Are we supposed to pretend it's business as usual as we send our friends intros, frolic at conferences, discuss monetization strategy.

To Ed Sim, Erica Brescia, Michael Deering, and especially Matt Ako, we're done. I'll never pitch you again, never ask for help, never send intros or recommend you. I'm done with Bold Start and DCVC and Harrison Metal and Redpoint. I'm also done with Bessemer and Sequoia and First Round. I'm ashamed that these are some of my biggest supporters over the years, the people who invested in me twice, the people who helped, who advised. I cannot work with the people whitewashing a killing. The people know it's happening and cover for it. And so, Paul, can you give us a little bit of kind of context about, you know, first of all, how you came to the decision to kind of write this post? And what is Darkline? What is CircleCI? Contextualize, situate yourself in the tech

world for our audience. Sure. Sure. So, CircleCI is what they call in tech a unicorn, right? It's a company that's worth a billion dollars. And there's a lot of these now. There's about a thousand of them. And we were, CircleCI was sort of early in the most recent tech boom, the one that went from about 2010 to 2021, and was one of the large companies in a particular space called continuous integration,

which is sort of developer workflow. And so that is, you know, once you find one of these, you have a certain cachet in the industry, and you find it easier to raise a next round and next fundraising round. You know a lot of investors, you've built up your you, you know, a lot of investors, you've built up your network. You're sort of, you're sort of in that little bit. And so that, that, that's sort of like my position in the industry. It's not, you know, I'm not like Brian Chesky or Mark Zuckerberg or anything like that. I'm like

two tiers down, but I'm also not the bottom tier or not the people who are just sort of joining the industry. And so the context for writing the blog post was simply like, how can we do business as usual during this thing that's going on during the war on the people of Gaza? You know, at the time, South Africa had not invoked the Genocide Convention, but I think it was clear to anyone who was paying attention that there was a genocide going on. And I kept seeing pro-Israel posts, and I kept seeing people who were saying,

basically, Israel had the right to do anything it liked, or in a couple of cases, people focusing on what I still consider to be pro-Israeli propaganda. So for example, the focus on Harvard, on Claudine Gay, on the anti-Semitism at universities, those are all look away from the genocide that's happening in Gaza. And the reason I wrote the post is just literally I couldn't sleep. Like I was seeing these images every day, as many of us are, and just being like, how can we do work when this thing is happening? Yeah, and there's something really interesting

here you write. I wasn't ready to see that my friends are brown shirts, which you sort of just mentioned, that they actively cheer on the genocide, the anger, the desire, the need even for retribution against innocent civilians. I wasn't ready for my friends being camp guards, party officials, propagandists. And one thing from the right that's interesting about that is I've basically seen people on the right similarly write that about people that they would consider pro-Palestinian. And I wanted to ask you, Paul, maybe to talk a little bit about how the polarization on this issue has affected tech and maybe some of the response that you've gotten since this letter has gone, this post has gone viral speaks to that. Because they're really, this is really a battle ideologically in so many different sectors, but it's particularly hit tech this time.

It has hit tech. I think what we have is that a lot of the top of tech, so investors, they're much more right-wing, they're much wealthier. And a lot of the bottom of tech is much more left-wing, much more liberal. And the center tech is just sort of the founders. At the start of their career, they are typically, I'd say that the junior founders are more left-wing and the senior founders are more right-wing as they get sort of more pulled into the institution that is Silicon Valley. So it is an ideological thing. And one of the funny things that keeps coming up is whenever you have Irish people in tech, they are predominantly left or they are predominantly on the side of Palestine. And the reason for that, of course, is that we were a colony,

we were an oppressed people, and we recognize what we see in Palestine. And I think that a lot of the reason that there's so much support for Israel in tech is that Silicon Valley was, you know, originally it was almost a DARPA creation, right? There's a lot of alignment with the defense industry, with sort of, with U.S. interests. You know, tech is very centered in the U.S. And a lot of the people who are senior in tech are, you know, part of the status quo and part of,

and this is even before we get into the amount of cross-investment with Israel and a lot of people making money by doing so. So there's definitely a large ideological component to this. And I suppose that I realized that, but I was surprised at how much ideology could go and enable the sort of extremist, I mean, I'm just going to call it a genocide because that's what it is that's being enabled by Israel. You would think that there were lines that would never be crossed. And I think that's kind of what surprised me. Yeah. And some of the comments you flagged as kind of triggering the post, when you mentioned Matt Akko, you linked to one of his tweets where he's referring to Palestinians. And he says, there's not a lot of innocents. Of the 2 million routinely cited, a huge majority share 100% of the subhuman goals of Hamas. He puts free Palestine in quotes because they delight in the cruelty. The subhuman savagery is intrinsic to the culture and the movement.

Really kind of just literally dehumanizing language coming from somebody that you had worked for. So I can imagine where this came from. But I'm curious, how brutal was this response from people you criticized? And what else did you hear in the wake of this, in the two now, almost two and a half weeks since this? There's been a handful of people who I've seen make similar comments to Madhaka, the sort of dehumanizing comments, the sort of thing really.

Regardless of what side you're on, no one should ever say about another human being. It's not someone I know, but it's someone who is pretty senior at OpenAI and someone who was forced to apologize, but wasn't actually removed from his job despite being than Matt Occo, I would say. Another one was Andreas Gahl, who is a tech CEO, and he was well known for being the CTO of Mozilla. And he said equally dehumanizing stuff weeks ago. And I challenged him on Twitter before he made his account private. I would say that the majority of what is out there is what I would term pro-Israeli propaganda. It is taking the talking points that are coming out from these, often from Israel, sometimes from the IDF. There was this phenomenal discussion, sub-stacked by Lee Fang and Jack Poulsen, who are independent journalists, who chronicled the story of how Paddy Cosgrave, who's the CEO of WebSummit, how he got taken down, how he got fired. And so you start to see the same strategies and the same talking points coming from many,

many different investors. All of a sudden, Harvard was a really, really important thing to talk about and anti-Semitism universities. That was the real discussion that everyone wanted to talk about. And then you see that spread throughout the New York Times. You see Claudine Gay eventually resigned, I think, yesterday. You know, this is all part of a, you know, the same people with the same ideology controlling the conversation

and making it impossible to say, well, there's 30,000 people that have been killed by Israel, by Israeli soldiers dropping bombs on apartments. You know, it's like, how is it that, on the one hand, we're talking about that, and on the other hand, you know, everyone's like tweeting about like, oh, from the river to the sea, it's such a triggering term for me, you know? And so since then, you've launched Tech for Palestine. Like, how did that come together? So basically, after I posted that blog post,

everyone reached out to me. And I just started taking meetings and just talking to people and seeing, you know, I had no real plans for it. And what happened was I started connecting people together. And eventually there became a Discord. And eventually we launched publicly yesterday, techforpalestine.org. And we had another 300 people join our Discord from the original sort of tight group of about 40 people. And basically, there's an awful, awful lot of people in tech who are looking to make a difference, who see the genocide that's happening and say, this is not okay, and who want to make a difference. And we're trying to help organize that, connect engineers and others to people who are doing projects and run projects ourselves. And all

of them are about changing the ability to speak up about Palestine. It has been, as we've seen, it has been okay for people to say massively dehumanizing things so long as they're pro-Israel. Obviously, we don't want and we don't see dehumanizing things being said by the supporters of Palestine, but we want to enable people to say genocide is not okay. Having normal lives without having bombs dropped on you is a future that we want to see for Palestine and advocate for the end of what has been an incredibly long Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people. You mentioned OpenAI earlier, and it reminded me actually of Elon Musk's involvement both in Ukraine, and obviously he famously went over to Israel, I think it was just about a month ago. And so I'm curious as to from that 30,000 foot view, these are people that the people

that you call out, the people that you work around with enormous power and in some cases unregulated power at their fingertips. And this whole experience, I'm just curious as to what it tells you maybe about the culture of tech and how ideology and power are kind of mingling in one industry with potentially devastating consequences, with potentially wonderful consequences, but largely in a way that makes average people feel powerless in so many different cases. There has long been this idea in tech that we are the people who know better than everyone else. I would say that the large shift in tech from about 2007 onwards is that the doers, the engineers,

we're the people who know better than everyone else. And so we should get to control that. And Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, when he was leader of Y Combinator, which is one of the most influential sort of creator of startups in the industry, he made clear that, oh, the press has turned on Silicon Valley. The press has turned against us. We have to ignore what is being said

in the population at large and just focus on what we're doing because we know better. You see similar things in Facebook. Facebook is massively powerful and they were led by this internal idea that engagement and making money, those are the things that are good for us. And that led to genocide in Myanmar. It led, of course, to the massive disinformation campaigns over the last couple of US elections. So tech, yes, it is supremely powerful. It is massively unregulated. And now as we're essentially being ushered into this new AI era, we see that people at the top of the most important AI organization are incredibly biased. And the bias is one of the problems that we are going to face throughout this AI era because the way that this data is trained, how people look at training these AI

models, the biases of the people who collect and put together the data is reflected in the data. And that is going to permeate into everything and already has. We're already seeing AI being used to target civilians in Palestine, in Gaza, for example. Or in China, yeah. Yeah. And so you talked about how your first company became a unicorn. Did that kind of billion-dollar valuation enable what you were able to do? Or how difficult has your new company's financial situation been made by your decision to speak out? I think one of the reasons that I spoke out is that I recognized I was in probably the best position from a risk perspective. So as an entrepreneur, I'm pretty risk-tolerant. Anyway, it's kind of fine. It's what we do.

But also because I had cashed out a bit of my old company because I didn't have a financial risk, really. And also my new company, Darklang, I say it's new, it's seven years old. It's not doing that well. And so our next round of funding would have been an angel round anyway. It would have been from a bunch of mid to high net worth individuals. It wouldn't have been talking to the same investors. And we had a plan to be cashflow positive and to get off the VC track a little bit anyway. So I was pretty well positioned for it. And so it was something where I realized that I had less to fear than most people. And when I posted it, and everyone reached out to me and tons of people in tech, lots of founders were saying, we can't say anything, you know, these are our investors. These are the people we're

afraid to speak out against, even though we know what's right. So, you know, it's clear that I was one of the few people who had that risk profile. And so it made it easier to take the stand. It's interesting you say that because I kind of feel the same way, sometimes not financially speaking, but the news organization where I work for, the Intercept, gives us total freedom to say whatever we want about a particular issue, which most journalists don't have. So in some ways I feel kind of obligated to take that opportunity because I have less risk than others do. understand the situation. It doesn't make it less nerve-wracking or difficult, but to not have the same kind of immediate consequences makes it more doable. But anyway, Paul, no, go ahead. I know it's funny you mentioned that. I got a piece published about a better new thing, Tech for Palestine, published in TechCrunch yesterday, which is, you know, having a pro-Palestine

piece in a tech publication is like rare. But at the same time, you know, I looked through it and it was, you know, it was edited very carefully to be, I guess what I'm saying is that one can perceive the amount of censorship at news organizations like you're saying. Yeah, no doubt. Well, Paul, thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. All right, that'll do it for us this week.

Yeah, and you know, Ryan, that's actually— Actually, not for me. I'll be back tomorrow. That's right. You will be back with Crystal, so you're going to have just a full lib show. Yeah, so make sure that you macro-dose tomorrow before you watch Ryan and Crystal talk about, I don't know, presumably taxes. More taxes, yeah. You know, you said something interesting there, though, which reminds me also that Crystal and Sagar give us really the freedom to do what we want and say what we want. That's true. They certainly have never suggested that we restrict anything. No. Well, obviously, sometimes they force us at risk of great force to talk about UFOs.

But no, in all seriousness, we're so grateful for that here. I realize I mentioned China in that last interview segment, but AI is being used here in the United States to target civilians as well. We're seeing that deployed all over the world. And so we'll certainly be covering those things. And to segue into that, it really is the audience that makes it possible. So therefore, go to breakingpoints.com, become a premium subscriber, tell them you know Sagar saga you'll maybe get a little discount yeah and we're kicking around a little friday that's right possibility that we keep forgetting looking at that friday show yes so keep keep subscribing the the more subscribers we have the the more opportunity we have then to do a friday show yeah and let us know if there's anything

that you think would work best or you want us to to keep in mind as we think about that we're always happy to hear that. But we will be back here next Wednesday with more CounterPoints, more CounterPoints in 2024. So we appreciate everyone watching. See you later. This is an iHeart Podcast.