Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/9/24: Israel Demands US Occupy Gaza, Israelis Push Oct 7 Friendly Fire Investigation, Ceasefire Protesters Blockade NY Streets, Nikki Surges Ahead Of Iowa, Loose Bolts Found On Boeing Planes, Mehdi Hasan Out At MSNBC, And New Podcast On Abolitionist John Brown

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss Israel demanding the US occupy Gaza, Israelis demand investigation into Oct 7 friendly fire, Israel politician joins South Africa genocide case, Krystal and Saagar debate Gaza ceasefire protester tactics, Nikki Haley surges ahead of Iowa caucus, loose bolts found on multiple Boeing planes, Mehdi Hasan out at MSNBC over Israel criticism, and Jeff Stein joins to discuss his new podcast on revolutionary abolitionist John Brown.   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.

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Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots to get to this morning. Israeli officials claiming they are shifting to a different phase of the conflict as they are floating. Yet another supposed plan for what may come in the day after. We will break all of that down for you.

We also have a member of the Knesset who is signing on to South Africa's claims of genocide against Israel, leading to huge political ramifications for him. There's a whole freakout going on over that. So we'll break that down for you. Also got some interesting ways that that conflict is flowing into domestic politics, protesters disrupting Joe Biden during a speech down in Charleston. So we'll show you those images. We also have the Iowa caucuses next week. Next week. And a new poll is showing Nikki Haley surging into a single digit deficit with Trump in New Hampshire. So she is definitely surging, closing the gap. Is it enough? Is it too late? All of that. We'll show you their closing ads as well as they head into Iowa. A lot of

interesting stuff going on there. Also have some updates for you as we're learning more about what may have caused that door to blow off of a jet while they were in the air. This was the subject of Sagar's monologue yesterday. So we're getting a little bit of insight into what the hell may be going on there. And it is not good news. We also have some media updates for you. Mehdi Hassan, out at MSNBC. He has chosen to leave after his show was canceled. So we will break down the reasons why, perhaps. He was sidelined there. Also excited to talk to Jeff Stein.

He has a new podcast breaking down the history of abolitionist John Brown, which is really fascinating. Highly recommend. Yeah, it's going to be fun to talk to him about that. Before we get to that, though, if you guys can help us out and sign up for a premium membership, we've got our RFK Junior focus group that is going to be happening on Thursday. Our crew is going there. We're going to be filming it. Our great moderator, James Johnson, and our friends over at JLP Partners. But these do cost a lot of money. So if you can help us out, sign up for a premium membership. And we actually are going to allow premium members, you guys can submit questions that we will take into consideration to ask for the focus group. You can do that in the

AMA section of the website. So if you would like to try and submit one, you can become a premium member or existing members can do that as well. We always want to try and keep this, you know, we want to keep it within the BP universe just to show that we're a little bit different over here. So anyway, breakingpoints.com if you can help us out. Yeah, and we're formulating those questions and ideas now. So go ahead and send them in if you have ideas of what you want to know from RFK Junior supporters. All right, let's go ahead and get to the very latest out of Israel. Put this up on the screen from the Wall Street Journal. This was quite an extraordinary interview overall that the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant gave.

The headline here, Israel plans for next phase of Gaza war, Defense Minister says. And in this piece, they kind of buried the lead. So Galant is floating, and this is not official government policy, but this is what he's floating. He says, as he sees it, a multinational task force should be set up in the day after in Gaza, led by the U.S. with European and Middle Eastern partners, they should oversee the rehabilitation of Gaza. This, of course, comes after last week you had those far-right ministers, Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, making very clear that they believe the appropriate day-after plan in Gaza is ethnic cleansing. Of course, we've had Netanyahu reports that he is interested in the same. We've had multiple, we've had a plan come out from a government ministry laying out

three different options. And the one that they said they preferred the most was pushing Palestinians out of Gaza. The idea being basically to make all of Gaza uninhabitable, mission accomplished there. And then to pressure the U.S. and others that this is the humanitarian solution is to forcibly remove Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. I think it's worth noting in terms of Yoav Galant, with regards to this war, he has been hand in glove with Netanyahu. He actually at one point was fired by Netanyahu. I don't know if you remember this. It sparked huge protests over the judicial coup that Netanyahu was pushing through that is now in dispute, the Supreme Court of the country overturning that and causing yet another crisis because of that.

So there's been friction with them on the past. There's more details of what Yoav Galant is floating here in The Guardian. Let's go and put this up on the screen. They said, under Galant's plan, which is not official policy and has yet to be submitted to other ministers, Israel's offensive in Gaza would continue until hostages taken on October 7th were freed and Hamas's military and governing capabilities dismantled. Then the outline says a new phase would begin

during which Hamas will not control Gaza and will not pose a security threat with unspecified Palestinian bodies, apparently local civil servants or communal leaders assuming the territory's governance. Gallant said that Israel would reserve its right to operate inside the territory, but there would be no Israeli civilian presence in the Gaza Strip after the goals of war have been achieved. Gaza residents are Palestinian, therefore Palestinian bodies will be in charge with the condition that there will be no hostile

actions or threats against the state of Israel. Earlier this week, Israeli media reported military and intelligence officials favored dividing Gaza into regions and subregions with civil administration and the distribution of humanitarian aid in each area entrusted to local leaders seen as trustworthy. Many people describing this as sort of a Bantustan plan relating it to the ghettos that were established in South Africa. Yeah, the biggest problem that we have with this entire thing is it's obvious that they don't have a unified plan that they agree on. And their most convenient one is to offload the responsibility onto the United States. And the saddest thing, Crystal, is I cannot rule out that our people, our leaders, are not dumb enough to actually want to sign up to something like that. They're like, oh, well, it would just be too disruptive. It's like, absolutely not. Israel is responsible for this. They need to pay for all of the reconstruction. And they also are the ones who need to pay

for administration. And I think that the reason that they are trying to get out right now is because, Crystal, they, you know, we covered this. They had a hundred something soldiers who were wounded in a single day yesterday. The IDF announced this morning that nine of them were killed just yesterday, yesterday, that were killed inside of Gaza. That was not just included in the Hezbollah attacks. We need to understand here that the occupation, and actually, if I went and I read the descriptions of the IDF soldiers who were all killed, they were all in combat engineers brigades, meaning that they were involved in demolition or some sort of occupation-like activity. This is where I

believe the vast majority of their future casualties are all going to come from. And if you read again the incidents, ambushed in Khan Yunis, ambushed in Gaza City, involved in a demolition activity, they want us, the Europeans and the Middle Eastern partners, to somehow be responsible and to catch all of the flak, the bullets, and eventually elevate us to something called primary occupation status? Absolutely not. And I think that they might be, might be realizing the nightmare that they've now signed themselves up for. Of course, the preferred solution for the most right-wing ministers is going to be ethnic cleansing, but it becomes clear that they're, I think they are starting to see what they have created and that mess, and they're going to try to extricate themselves by pushing the bill onto the United States, to the UN and others, which I think is outrageous. I mean, they are the ones who have to—they should bear 100 percent of the cost for all of this.

Not one dollar of this should come from the U.S. So I read it differently. This plan by Yoav Galant, which there's a reason why I floated that there was previously tension and distance between him and Netanyahu. I don't think that this really is representative whatsoever of what the Israeli government really wants to do. Remember, the U.S. position is supposedly that, you know, what we want is the Palestinian Authority to be bolstered, to be enabled to take some governing role in Gaza, and then for a two-state solution process to be seriously undertaken. There is zero appetite for that in the Israeli government. And even Yoav Galant, who is, sorry, based on his comments around this war, a total psycho, but he's what counts for like a moderate in this administration. Even he doesn't mention

the Palestinian Authority or any of the things that the U.S. is allegedly pushing for here. I think what happened is you have not just Smotrich, not just Ben-Gavir, but Netanyahu, Herzog. You can read through the list of Israeli cabinet members and Likud party members and military officials and journalists and commentators who are all pushing the ethnic cleansing plan. You can look at the polling of Jewish Israelis who overwhelmingly think that is the right solution. And so you had this burgeoning pressure because they said it too many times, too clearly and too out loud, where even the U.S. felt the need to put out this little statement of like, oh, we disagree with this, et cetera, et cetera. So I view this plan less as a

real serious idea of what they want to do than a bit of ass covering of like, oh, no, that's not really representative of what we want. Look, here's another idea that we're floating out there. And by the way, they went ahead to make sure that idea was like also completely unpalatable to the U.S., putting the assignment for reconstruction of Gaza and some sort of oversight of Gaza onto the U.S. and to the U.N. So that's how I read this in terms of, you know, the dynamics and the push and pull supposedly between the U.S. and the Israelis. I think it's very clear based on the actions in the strip, based on the comments from everyone from Netanyahu on down, including Smotrich, including Ben-Gavir, what they really want is the ethnic cleansing plan. That is what they have been executing effectively and that

they're just floating this option as like a bit of a public ass covering. You may certainly be right. I do think that they're, I think actually this seems more likely to me just because of the outrageous, I mean, there's just no, in my opinion, I do not think it would be a palatable situation, both to America, to Egypt, to all these other Middle Eastern countries. I think a full-scale regional war would be more likely than acceptance of a genuine ethnic cleansing, at least in terms of expulsion from the Gaza Strip. Now, starvation and all that, that's a different story, and certainly because we're in something like that. I guess the net effect doesn't necessarily matter. But, you know, this seems to me as if something that could arrive, sadly, as some middle ground solution, quote unquote, as horrible and awful as it would be, I think, for everybody involved. Now, let's go and put this next one, please, up on the screen because this highlights the expanding nature of the conversation.

Because we're here talking right now about Gaza. But the likelihood right now of the regional war, which we touched on yesterday, demonstrates that these people are hellbent on expanding the war, largely, I believe, to be able to keep their hold on power. Because, of course, the Israeli people, you know, Netanyahu's got, what, a 4%, 6% approval rating? But as long as this thing goes on, it's better off for him. And he says to the Wall Street Journal that Hezbollah knows, quote, we can copy and paste Gaza to Beirut. Now, there is zero question in my mind, and I'm curious what you think, that a copy and paste of Gaza to Beirut would erupt in a full-scale regional war because of Hezbollah, because of Iran, and certainly because Lebanon is a

sovereign nation with partners and allies in the region. They're just already, we're at such a massive breaking point in terms of the relations between Jordan and Israel, Jordan, the United States, Egypt, and others. If they were to do that and effectively declare war on the nation of Lebanon with Hezbollah somehow caught in between, I just don't have any doubt in my mind it would erupt and the US would almost certainly become involved. So first of all, the idea is a fantasy. But disturbingly, the more that they begin to talk this way, it just feels like 2002 all over again. Put the next one, please, up on the screen. Because the way that they talk here, he says, my basic view is that we are fighting an axis, not a single enemy. Iran is building up military power around Israel in order to use it. It's

the exact same playbook, Crystal, of they've shoddily tempted their so-called mission post October 7th in Gaza. They're realizing already that this is not going the way that they wanted it to be, and they're trying to sell it to the public. So now, just like President George W. Bush did in 2002, the axis of evil becomes a thing, and now we're starting to beat the drum towards Hezbollah. And then we've all seen this movie before, but America doesn't have, I think, the courage or really the resolve to stand up and just be like, this is not going to happen. We actually put your finger or whatever on the scale, and we just seem to be incredibly impotent in our handling of this entire situation, which is humiliating, honestly, especially if we do get involved in this war.

It will be 100% on Joe Biden. And it is 100% on Joe Biden. I mean, they have completely bypassed Congress. These, you know, national security Democrats who were like former CIA agents. Even they are freaking out. They're the one. Yeah. Alyssa Slotkin and these people and former, you know, people who served in the military

as well. They're looking at this situation. They're saying this is a potential disaster for us. You have, as we covered yesterday, defense officials furiously leaking to the Washington Post and the Huffington Post and seemingly anyone who will listen to them of like, you know, they don't really care about the human toll being, you know, the horrors that are being inflicted on the people in Gaza. But they're looking at this and they said every single war game that we scenario that we play out with an escalated war against Hezbollah is a total disaster. It ends in complete nightmare.

So it's not like we're the ones that are just inventing this out of whole cloth. Our own military and defense establishment is playing this out and saying this does not end in a good place. And yet you see all these articles about this hand-wringing and nowhere in there do they explain that there is one very clear way to ratchet down the hostilities, and that's to have a negotiated settlement and a ceasefire for the fighting and the bombing of Gaza to stop. That gets the sound of this whole entire mess. So in any case, there's also these comments from Yoav Galan and others in the Israeli political class and the defense establishment in Israel that they're, quote, shifting to a new phase of the war. It's going that they're, quote, shifting to a

new phase of the war. It's going to be less, you know, just like all-out assault and more targeted. We'll see. We have not seen that yet. They've been sort of floating this since the beginning of the year. And yet we've seen some of the deadliest strikes and deadliest days in this entire assault, even in the new year. And they mentioned in particular, you know, that there's going to be issues with Rafah, where I think over a million Palestinians have gathered at this point. That's at the border with Egypt there. And now, you know, originally it was, oh, Hamas' command and control is in the north and we've got to flatten that and destroy it. Well, they did that. That's destroyed. It's uninhabitable. There's basically nothing left there. Then it was, oh, we got to move to Khan

Yunus. That's where Hamas really is. Okay, well, they've destroyed neighborhoods in Khan Yunus, massive death tolls there. Now they're saying, oh, well, really, they're in Rafah, so we've got to move there. And the human toll is going to be absolutely devastating. And at the same time, the humiliation for the US just continues. Put this next piece up on the screen. Israel to tell Antony Blinken, who is in the region right now, that Palestinians cannot return to the north of Gaza without a hostage deal. Now, hanging over this elephant in the room that doesn't even get mentioned in this piece, I believe, is that there is basically nothing to return to in the north of Gaza in terms of any sort of civilian infrastructure that can sustain life. But let me read you a little bit of this. They say the big picture, making progress toward the return of Palestinians to their homes and ensuring they are not forcibly displaced from Gaza is one

of the goals of Blinken's talks in Israel this week. The Biden administration has expressed concerns over recent statements from some radical right-wing Israeli ministers who have called for Palestinians to be driven out of the Strip. It's not only them, by the way. What they're saying, Palestinian civilians must be able to return home as soon as conditions allow, Blinken said on Sunday in a press conference with the Qatari prime minister in Doha. They cannot and they must not be pressed to leave Gaza, he stressed. But behind the scenes, Israeli sources told Axios, while Israel doesn't in principle oppose allowing Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, officials will tell Blinken such a move needs to be part of a new hostage deal. Let me be clear. Hamas should

release the hostages. No doubt about it. It is a war crime to hold especially civilians as hostages. It is unacceptable. They should release the hostages. What is Israel doing here? They're basically holding the people of Gaza hostage based on these hostilities and demanding that their wants and needs be fulfilled in order for people just to return to the rubble of their homes that have been overwhelmingly destroyed in northern Gaza. And as I said before, Sagar, I mean, it's just the it's so clear that the U.S.'s words and rhetoric mean zero, nothing. Right. Because they see that they can do what they want and, you know, they keep pushing like, okay, what if we attack a hospital? What if we do that? Will they go along with us? Yes, we will. What if we flatten all of northern Gaza? What if we impose a complete siege? What if half of Gaza residents are starving? Will they do anything to push back?

The answer has been no. So why would they listen to our little pearl clutching, hand wringing comments about what we want to see when there's zero willingness to back it up with anything other than those words? No, I can't disagree with that at all. I think this is an outrageous decision and a statement. And to be communicated again to the United States, two wrongs don't make a right. I mean, we saw the videos just yesterday of those Israeli girls who are still being held hostage. They got like blood on their face or whatever. It's horrifying. But then, you know, you can't erase and say that their captivity is going to be subject to a million or so people who are living in a tent, you know, on the brink of starvation by the border.

I mean, this is, you know, insanity. And then, as you said in tandem, where are they supposed to go? I mean, the more and more I look at this, I'm just genuinely so humiliated on behalf of the United States of America. Like, if you go back and you read and you think about the way that even past presidents who, you know, not necessarily the strongest people. There's a famous quote of Bill Clinton behind the scenes saying, who the hell does this guy think he is when talking about the Israeli prime minister? And he said, you know, who needs to remind who of who the superpower is here? And as as you know, increasingly, it's clear they don't care

or listen to what we think. And by the way, that's fine. They're a sovereign country. They can do what they want. But, you know, when they're also got their hand out like this, asking for emergency replenishment of their artillery shells and their weapons and all this other stuff, then, you know, we got to have a little bit of respect here and just say that this is clearly, look, take Israel out of it. And this has been my entire, you know, position from day one. Israel, Palestine, I'll put it all out because I don't like to think about quote unquote humanitarian stuff because you get really bogged down in the details.

Strategically, this has been a disaster. This has heightened tensions for us in the Middle East. We started to redirect tens of billions of dollars of military resources. We stand on the brink of a regional war in a region that we already lost two wars that we've just come 25 years or so off of. What possible reason would we want to get involved in this? And the humanitarian situation is both upstream and downstream of this, which is why we should be absolutely focused on making sure this doesn't happen. And, you know, Israel cannot be talking about their hostages and the emotional situation of this and then try to hold hostage the million or so people who have been kicked out of their

homes. It just doesn't bear any scrutiny. And if anything, it's just going to multiply the criticism against them because, you know, let's be honest, the sheer numbers of the Palestinians is what, 10,000 to one of the Israeli hostages that are being held here. And the sympathy that they had on October 7th has evaporated, you know, in the entire eyes of the world. I saw it all over Europe, just so people know. When I was in Europe, the amount of Palestinian flag and activism, stuff that was in public spaces.

I was at the International Red Cross Museum in Geneva, Switzerland. It had a big thing. It's like, you know, war crimes are wrong and everything. Even war has rules. I sent you that photo. This is all over the world. You know, it's only right here in America that, you know, our discourse is so screwed up. I don't know what it is.

I read an editorial or op-ed, I guess, in Haaretz, which, of course, is an Israeli media outlet that was saying, listen, whether you agree with the genocide charges or not, we went through people accusing us of being occupiers to accusing us of ethnic cleansing and genocide. That's where we are and with plenty of merit. So yeah, I mean, in terms of Israeli security, in terms of any sort of humanitarianism, in terms of any sort of international law, in terms of any desires for peace and not blowing this up into a larger conflagration. It's all a complete and utter disaster. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

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AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. At the same time, there is some real friction in Israeli society, especially over what happened on October 7th, how October 7th happened in the first place, why it was not disrupted, especially now that we know there were plenty of indications in advance that this was going to happen. Then the response itself has come under incredible scrutiny. And this is getting, this is really blowing up at this point. So put this up on the screen. There's now demands for an investigation into what exactly happened at Kibbutz Biyeri in what they're describing as the tank fire incident. Now, I wanted to make sure to cover this because we haven't covered it yet. There have been inklings for a while, but we wanted to wait until there was more concrete proof that some of the deaths that occurred at this kibbutz were caused by Israeli military fire. Now, let me be

clear. The overwhelming number of deaths on October 7th, as far as the evidence shows, was committed by Hamas. This is not an attempt to undercut the horrors of that day or the horrors and atrocities that were committed by Hamas. However, let me read from this piece in Haaretz. They say, there is no demand more justified than that of relatives of people killed in the hostage incident at Kibbutz Biyari to investigate the army's actions and to receive answers about the circumstances of their loved one's death. Moreover, the families should not have to make this demand alone. The IDF must give them and the public an explanation for the army's conduct on October 7th outside the home of Pesce Cohen. Above all, it must disclose

whether the so-called Hannibal Directive, and I'll explain what that is in a moment, which states that hostage-taking should be prevented even at the price of harm to our own forces, was used against the Israelis held hostage in that house. So they're saying what happened here and the actual direct cause of death of so many people at Pesce Cohen's house in this kibbutz, this needs to be investigated. So what is the Hannibal directive as a little bit of context and backstory here? Put this up on the screen from Al Jazeera. So the directive known as the Hannibal procedure or Hannibal Protocol is an Israeli military policy that stipulates the use of maximum force in the event of a soldier being potentially kidnapped. This is according to a

former soldier and co-founder of an activist group called Breaking the Silence. Quote, you will open fire without constraints in order to prevent the abduction, he said, adding that the use of force is carried, adding that the use of force is carried out even at the risk of killing a captive soldier. In addition to firing at the abductor, soldiers can fire at junctions, roads, highways, and other pathways opponents may take a kidnapped soldier through. The Israeli military has denied the interpretation of the directive, but there have been other indications and reports in the past that this has been utilized. And so the allegation here is that the people who were on the scene, the IDF officers who were on the scene,

rather than risking people being taken hostage, which we know is a very emotional issue, they decided to fire on this house, killing almost everybody who was inside. This is now based on a New York Times report, put this up on the screen, of what unfolded at that kibbutz. The headline here is the day Hamas came. And this is the pivotal moment. So they're interviewing this man, General Hiram, who was sort of leading the action or directing the action from the Israeli side at this kibbutz. And in the story, they write, as the dusk approached, the SWAT commander and General Hiram began to argue. The SWAT commander thought more kidnappers might surrender. The general wanted the situation

resolved by nightfall. Minutes later, the militants launched a rocket-propelled grenade, according to the general and other witnesses who spoke to the Times. Quote, the negotiations are over, General Hiram recalled, telling the tank commander, break in even at the cost of civilian casualties. The tank fired two light shells at the house. Shrapnel from the second shell hit Mr. Dagan, that's one of the hostages, in the neck, severing an artery and killing him, according to his wife, who was one of the only people who survived here. During the melee, the kidnappers were also killed. Only two of the 14 hostages survived. So one of them, this Ms. Porat, who they indicate there, she had actually, one of the kidnappers surrendered,

took off his shirt to show he wasn't wearing a suicide vest, took her with him as a human shield, really, and brought her out. That's how she was able to survive. And part of what's critical about that context is then the Israeli military officers who are there on the scene, they interview her and she tells them there are 14 hostages in this house. So it's not like they didn't know that there were civilians there in the house when General Hiram tells the New York Times he gives the order to fire, for the tank to fire on this house, and everyone save for one person who remained inside is ultimately killed. So that is causing a huge fracture within Israeli society

about what the hell happened on October 7th and how many of the people who were killed were actually at the hands of the IDF executing the quote-unquote Hannibal Directive. Yeah, that's the big question. I mean, there's been a lot of discussion about this now for months on end and a lot of speculation about helicopter fire and the level of casualties and all of that. But it's like you said, Crystal, we really wanted to wait for like ironclad evidence. You've got a general here who says he ordered them to go in regardless of casualties. Pretty ironclad. That's pretty good in terms of evidence. And then you've got here the Haaretz investigation citing the people inside the community who say and ask

whether the directive was in play or not. And that's obviously one of those where you should have a real question about that in a democracy or in a society. Imagine if that was U.S And by the way, it's a legitimate one. Honestly, I could see both sides. There was that whole debate when people thought Dick Cheney might have shot down United 93. And it's like, well, are you going to allow it to crash into the Capitol? What do you do? How can you tell their innocent lives? It's a genuine moral quandary for a leader. And that's why you should have practices and all these other things in place for decision-making. Clearly, they had that in the past. Hostages have been a very emotional problem for Israel many, many times, and it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility, but that's something that they did, and it does appear, at least in small instance,

that they did it almost certainly here in this case. But you get to debate that in a democratic society, and I think that's the big question. Unfortunately, and I'm really glad the way that you phrase it at the beginning, no one's trying to say that the vast majority of the people who were killed were not done so by Hamas. But it's also a legitimate question, as it would be on 9-11. It doesn't obscure the 9-11 hijackers if a plane was shot out of the sky. Clearly, you know, it was a direct result of that, but it's still a legitimate question about things that we, you know, that were done in our name or in this case in the Israeli name, authority and policy. And what it means now, I think, for how does it translate to the existing hostages? We already know that, what is it, three of the hostages were shot and killed by IDF soldiers even when they were waving

white flags around. We know that some have been reported dead. Now, Hamas claims that it's because of an airstrike. We do know that the hostages who were freed and who eventually met with Netanyahu said, you have no idea what you're doing. We heard the airstrikes above us all the time. These are genuine questions. I mean, so then the question is, is that directive still in place today? There's a current report that Yawa or Yaha, whatever, Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, is currently surrounding himself with all of the existing Israeli hostages. Not outside the realm of possibility. ISIS leaders did it all the time throughout Syria. America decided we will never hit somebody if they're going to be surrounded by civilian casualties. And by and large, we were pretty good about it. We, in some cases, waited almost two years just

to hit someone for the one time that they slipped up. Well, what if the Israelis are getting impatient? Are they going to make that airstrike or not? And then just blame Hamas. That's a genuine question. I mean, you know, and it's one of those where it could be genuinely downstream of this right here. And considering that all of global politics is surrounding like this with the sun, I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility. And this is the terror that hostage families are expressing exactly. And let me also say the other reason why it matters to parse these details of what happened on October 7th, even though it's frankly, it's uncomfortable because you don't want to sound like you're minimizing it. And I really am not, right? It really was horrific. There were genuine

atrocities. But we have seen the way that Israeli politicians and military officials have used fake stories to justify the level of horror that has been inflicted on Gaza. 40 beheaded babies. Not true. That's babies. Not true. That's true. Not true, right? And that's not me, that's Haaretz did an investigation. Many of the most gruesome and grisly stories,

the baby in the oven, right? A pregnant woman having a baby cut out of her, these things were not true. Now, there were plenty of other horrors that were true, but these fake stories were weaponized to justify the treatment of all Palestinians like they were animals, starving them, bombing them. Now, 12,000 kids dead, you know, 90% civilian casualties.

These fake stories were weaponized. And so that's why it matters to get these details really correct. What was the number of civilian casualties that were actually inflicted by Hamas? What was that number? It matters. It just in the interest of accuracy and understanding, truly understanding the events of that day. So that's why I thought it was worthwhile to spend some time on this story and the uproar that it's caused in Israeli society because we were, they were caught many times lying about what actually unfolded in that day in a way that has allowed them to, you know, make a more, a stronger case. Not that any atrocity on

that day would justify what they've done in Gaza, but that's the way that these stories and the events of these that day have been covered up and weaponized to incredibly horrific effect. Played out in my own life. Not even three weeks ago, I was having dinner with some of my friends. All of them are very, very pro-Israel. I don't bring it up. In general, I don't bring up anything. But it's one of those where, you know, you're sitting, people are talking and all of that, and they're like, Sagar, you know, we've been listening to some of the, what you guys have been saying. And it's like, how come you have so much concern for Palestinians? And I was like, well, you know, first of all, you know, I just look at it genuinely impartially. Like I have equal compassion for both.

And they're like, yeah, but what about the beheaded babies? And I was like, look, I don't want to get into a discussion here at this Mexican suburban restaurant, but the Israeli media themselves are the ones who disagree with it. They had no idea. They had no clue. You know, these are, there's your casual news consumers and I'm not putting them down. It's, they're living their lives. You know, they're going about doing something. They're like, well, what about the baby in the oven? And I was, they're like, how can you, you know, how can you, you know, move past something like that? And I was like, look, again, I don't want to ruin your empanadas, but that's not true.

And I was like, I can pull it up here, you know, on my phone. And I was like, look, again, I don't want to ruin your empanadas, but that's not true. And I was like, I can pull it up here, you know, on my phone. And I was like, and then when we take the emotion out of it a little bit, you know, we start to have even a little bit more of a conversation. And somebody's like, so what is the plan exactly? And he's like, so where are all these Palestinians? He's like, where did they go? And I was like, yeah, it's a good question, isn't it? And I was like, you should look into it. And it's one of those where that's how you have the conversation. But it just, it showed me in real time. I'm like, wow, this stuff is, goes deep, you know, in terms of people who are casual news consumers, people who are picking these things up and then how they can, and I, you know, to a certain extent you can understand

where like, well, anybody responsible for something like that has got to invite a similar type of response. But then when you take that out of it, you start, like you said, I don't think they genuinely had thought in that moment, where did all these Palestinian people have to go? And that's what happens whenever you casually consume some of these things. And again, I'm not putting these people down. These are good friends of mine. The point is just that a lot of people live like this, genuinely about in their daily lives. And what we try to do here on the show is just present you a very, very, very, you know, it's black and white is easy. The gray zone and all this other stuff, that's where most of real life takes place. And when you can talk in that, as I did with my friends, you can do it in a non-confrontational way and you can actually

arrive at a very different place. And I think that's what we're trying to do here right now. And that's part of the reason why we're doing this story. So let me go ahead and touch the third rail here. The other thing that has been in dispute is whether there was widespread systematic rape on October 7th. And maybe there was. I'm not saying there wasn't. I'm certainly not saying there was no sexual violence on that day. I actually think it would be relatively preposterous to imagine there was no sexual violence on that day. However, the claim of mass systematized sexual assault has not been backed up by evidence. And at this point, based on all of the lies they've been caught in at this point, I think it is entirely appropriate to say there needs to be some sufficient level of evidence to justify these

claims. Ryan and Emily actually reported on, there was a New York Times article that sought to dig in to this question of sexual violence on October 7th. And one of the primary witnesses, families that they focused on after this report came out said, we did not think that our daughter was raped. We did not know that this was the intention of your article. And just imagine if that was your daughter who was killed on that day and you have a reporter who comes to you basically under false pretenses to sort of use you to try to make a point. Now, again, I am not saying that nothing happened. I don't know. But the evidence that has so far been proffered is insufficient to justify the claim of mass systematized rape on that day. And again, you might say, well, why does this matter? Like, it was horrible. Isn't

that enough for you? Like, why are you nitpicking here? And I would just go back to the fact that the horrible stories that were many in often in many cases fabricated in order to elicit emotional response were used to justify horrors being inflicted on Palestinians. And so, you know, that and just accuracy does matter. Like actually knowing for the historical record what really unfolded as best as we possibly can on that day does matter. Truth matters a lot. Like you said, it would be actually absurd to have the idea that a bunch of guys, you know, thousands of guys who flooded into a country, you know, and with weapons and crazed bloodlust did not commit sexual violence. It also would be absurd to just take any, you know, account which has frequently been caught, you know, either being fabricated or exaggerated and just believe it and hold truth. Facts matter, of course, for the historical record. And we've also seen throughout history how exaggerations and fakeries are often used to

justify the worst of a response, such that in this moment of intense information overflow and all that, I actually think it matters the most today than it ever did in the past because there is so much out there to quote unquote support whatever you want. I think you can fully convince yourself that the beheaded baby story and the oven story are 100% true if you just Googled it. Online, if you read the three stories that were to back it up, it takes a lot of time and effort. And that's part of why the news is exhausting for so many people. And also because they don't want to talk about it over dinner.

I get it. I 100% do. But, you know, if you're going to engage in it, if you're going to think about it, more importantly as an informed citizen, I would urge you to try and do a lot of what we're trying to do. Yeah. Last thing I'll mention on this is, as you mentioned, the, you know, the teenage girls that are still being held by Hamas.

And they were highlighted, you know, extensively in the media yesterday, and I understand why. Left down at the account is that at least some of them are in the IDF. So they're not civilians, which changes the nature of the story and the way you feel about it. So in any case, it's important to have all of these details out there and to, as best we can, try to accurately sort through what the evidence suggests actually happened on that day. And that's something that the Israeli society right now is grappling with themselves. At the same time, there is another uproar in Israel over a Knesset member who is signing on to the South Africa claim at the ICJ that Israel is in the process of committing a genocide. Put this up on the screen. So the headline here is Israeli MK causes uproar in Knesset after signing

petition accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza after Ofer Kasif, MK in the Arab Jewish Hadash Child Party, signed the South Africa petition. Fellow Knesset members called for his removal. Kasif explained his reasoning, saying, my constitutional duty is to Israeli society, not to the government who calls for ethnic cleansing and even actual genocide. His signature is added to those of over 200 citizens of Israel who have also signed on to that petition. I'm reading from this report right now, expected to be presented to the court toward the beginning of the hearings, which start on Thursday. The petition reads in part, the information that there's a process by which if you can collect 70 signatures from cabinet members from across the Knesset, then you can begin a process that

could lead to his removal. And they have now obtained those 70 signatures. So the process is moving forward to attempt to remove him from the Knesset. He explained his reasoning in a post on Twitter. Put this up on the screen. This translation is per Google Translate, so forgive any inaccuracies here. But according to Google Translate, what he said is, my constitutional duty is to Israeli society and all of its residents, not to a government whose members in its coalition are calling for ethnic cleansing and even actual genocide. They are the ones who hurt the country and the people. They are the ones who led South Africa to turn to the Hague, that me and my friends.

And when the government acts against society, the state, and its citizens, especially when it sacrifices them and commits crimes in their name on the altar of maintaining its existence, it is my right and even my duty to warn about this and do everything I can within the law to stop it. I will not give up the fight for our existence as a moral society. This is the true patriotism, no revenge wars and calls for extermination, no unnecessary bloodshed, and no sacrifice of kidnapped citizens and soldiers in false wars. This is not the first time that this man has, by the way, been temporarily suspended and removed from the Knesset over his activism. And I wanted to play for you a piece of an interview that he gave a while back. This was, I think, roughly two years ago,

just to give you a sense of his sort of like passion and his committed advocacy. Take a listen. I'm a member of the Knesset, but the police is not interested in that. They don't care about my immunity. They don't care about my rights. They just care about protecting the criminal settlers who invade here. And you see, they keep shooting now. They keep shooting here, although the demonstrators are peaceful. They didn't do anything. We didn't do anything. This is the police.

This is the police of this fascist government that protects the criminal settlers against the Palestinian indigenous. So we see the level of pushback that occurs when you dissent here in the U.S. on Israel-Palestine when you stand up for Palestinian rights and dignity. And here he is in Israel where people are getting arrested for social media posts and, you know, society is in fever pitch at the moment. And I think it's incredibly courageous to do this, to sign onto this petition, to speak out really at all at this moment. Yeah, I'm really interested to actually see how it goes in terms of Israeli society. And actually, you know, I watched your whole video on the breakdown, how it's going to continue in the ICJ process, because that actually, I didn't realize that some of the ramifications of

what it means because they're a signatory to it. And also for what the geopolitical situation in the future, we've already seen it right now with Putin in terms of his inability to travel in some cases. So, you know, something like that and apply it to Israel will be extraordinary in terms of their overall situation. So yeah, it's going to be very interesting to see how it plays out. Yeah. I watched an analysis and we maybe play this on Thursday because that's when the public hearings start. But Norm Finkelstein was talking about how he thought this may break down. And, you know, unfortunately, like you would hope that these things were unbiased and it's just going to look at the merits, et cetera. It's very political, which is why Israel's pushback is less on the merits and more according to what's been reported,

pressuring diplomats to get various countries to put out statements and, you know, play like a political game to try to pressure the judges that will be hearing this case at the ICJ. There are 15 judges and Norm was going through, you know, each one of them. He thought it was unlikely that South Africa would prevail because even countries like China and Russia, you might think would side with them, but there's a real question mark because then does that open? Does Russia fear that that opens Pandora's box and invites scrutiny on them? Does China fear that it opens Pandora's box and invites scrutiny on them for their treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority? So even countries like that that you might think would be

on South Africa's side, there's a real question mark. So in any case, it's going to be, I think it's important that South Africa did it. I think the case they filed is incredibly detailed. The legal standard that has to be met right now is not like a final finding of genocide. It's just that it is plausible that that's what's being committed right now. And I think, you know, in my opinion, if you look at the civilian death, if you look at the levels of starvation, if you look at the vast number of comments, they have six pages of comments from various Israeli officials talking about Palestinians as human animals and saying they want to destroy all of Gaza and 2023, et cetera. I think it is certainly plausible that that's exactly what's happening, but we'll

see how this all unfolds and whether the activism here from this member of Knesset means anything. The last thing I wanted to close with in this section is there was, just to show you that this conversation is important even within Israeli society, there was a Haaretz op-ed, we can put this up on the screen, that is basically saying that South Africa really has a point. Good luck to the ICJ. Israelis should hope it will decree to stop the Gaza operation. Israel did not go to war in order to commit genocide, this person's opinion.

There is no doubt about that, but it is committing it in practice even without intending to. Every day that goes by in this war with its hundreds of deaths reinforces the suspicion. So even an Israeli newspaper here with an op-ed calling for the ICJ to side with South Africa and find that it is plausible that Israel is in fact committing genocide. Yeah, it's going to be fascinating to see how it plays out. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time. Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was

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4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the war on drugs podcast we are back in a big way in a very big way real people real perspectives this is kind of star-studded a little bit man we got uh Ricky Williams NFL player Heisman Trophy winner it's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne.

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Tate McRae, The Offspring, Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. So yesterday, President Joe Biden went down to Charleston, South Carolina to give a political speech at the Mother Emanuel AME Church. That is where, of course, Dylann Roof massacred so many people in a horrific incident. While Biden was speaking, he was interrupted by protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. Let's take a listen. Without the truth, there's no light. Without light, there's no path from this darkness. If you really care about the lives lost here, then you should learn the lives lost in Cease fire now! Cease fire now! That's all right. That's all right. That's all right. Cease fire now! Cease fire now! Cease fire now! George Washington! George Washington! George Washington! I understand their passion.

And I've been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza. I'm using all that I can to do that. So that is the way that unfolded. You know, from my perspective, when you have protesters who are demanding an end to the mass murder of children and other innocents and the response is four more years. It is a very dark, very dark situation. I mean, listen, I would love soccer for Joe Biden in particular, but for all politicians who are enabling this to have to face these types of protests and face the horrors of what they're enabling, I would love for them to have to deal with that every single day. And, you know, the Biden campaign and the Biden administration, their theory of the case of why, oh, young people, like they'll get over it. Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, they'll get over it. When they remember that it's Donald Trump on the ballot, they'll show back up, they'll come back around. And they think that this will be in the quote, rear view mirror. And I think actions like this, which have persisted for

months at this point are a very clear demonstration that no, they're not getting over it. And there is no going back to a time before this was all enabled by Joe Biden. Yeah, I was interested to play this. And actually, maybe if you don't mind, could you set up the next element? Because I think this is good to be an instructive conversation about protest, about its place in American life, usefulness, counter productivity and all of that. Yes. So there were also yesterday mass protests in New York City. We can go and put this up on the screen where pro-ceasefire protesters shut down three different bridges. You can see this is the Brooklyn Bridge. They also shut down the Holland Tunnel. That's what you're looking at here. And here we have Manhattan Bridge. And I think we had one more bridge. And this is an individual who is upset because he is being delayed. I would probably be upset, too. And he's yelling at the protesters, getting out of his car, shoving them, becoming irate.

So this was the scene that unfolded in New York yesterday. And here you have police who are sawing through, I believe, the chains that they had, like, chained themselves together. And a number of people were arrested in these protests, which shut down traffic for, I believe, roughly like hour and a half, two hours yesterday in New York City. Yeah. So the reason I would think this is a good juxtaposition for me personally, and I know you disagree, is that I have zero issues with the protests of the president of the United States. But these protests drive me absolutely crazy. And not only are they counterproductive, but I went back and I did

a lot of reading. And my favorite book on this subject about the new left and the rise of this type of protest and belief was, it's called Days of Rage. And what it is, is that if you actually see the way that they rhetoric that was these organized things where they call them actions. Action is a traditional word in new left activism, and it goes back to the days of the Weather Underground, of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and many of these other crackpot groups from back in that time. And those people had a fundamental belief that if you set off 1,000 bombs or whatever, what the Weather Underground and these types of groups did, if you kidnap Patty Hearst, if you, you know, create awareness, quote unquote, and you basically make life miserable and annoying for people, that they will rise up the great proletariat against the establishment. And instead, actually, it was completely counterproductive. these groups, they supported law enforcement, and they turned against the very causes which the protest movements of the 1960s on civil rights and on Vietnam were extraordinarily successful.

So what I would say to these Palestinian groups is that blocking working class people from traffic or a man from his daughter preventing people from picking or dropping off from school or from going to work is not only counterproductive, but it's fundamentally stupid, and it misses the point of who is actually in power for quote-unquote awareness. So for example, remember the debate about the lady who followed Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom and yelled at her, and everyone's like, this is an outrageous brief. And I was like, hey, sorry. Eat shit. You are a politician. It is what it is. I'm not saying it's pleasant. You can resign. Go for it. I don't care. But at the end of the day, I believe in maximalist protests against people who are in

power. But blocking normal folks from traffic, just as many of these climate folks have done, also the people who throw, you know, what is it, blood or whatever on these Van Gogh paintings and all that, this is just classic new left activism. And folks, you're going to lose, just like the Black Panthers did, just like the Weather Underground, just like these other folks. So if you believe in making an impact, this is just the wrong, wrong thing to do. And I think you should be arrested. I don't think you should be doing or allowed to be doing such like this. It just doesn't work. And it just, it misses the point about the center of gravity for Israel is not in the American populace. The American populace supports a ceasefire. It is in Joe Biden,

the United States Senate and the the D.C. establishment. So go outside the White House and protest all day long. And in fact, you know, go back and read the Hey Hey LBJ chants. They drove him nuts. And they arguably did have an impact on Vietnam policy. But blocking a Brooklyn man from going to see his daughter, I don't know, man. That's just so wrong to me. So I disagree on basically every level. Go ahead. So they've been protesting outside the White House every day. Do you know what impact it's had?

Nothing. Well, I've been on for five years, but it has still happened. So to conflate this completely nonviolent protest with the weather underground, 100% nonviolent protest here, blocking traffic, blocking bridges, blocking tunnels. To conflate that with the weather underground, that is just wildly wrong and inappropriate. I'm talking about the theory. So let me, okay, but let me talk about the theory here. So first of all, number one, do I think that the cause of attempting to stop babies from being bombed and an entire population from being starved is important, vital, and urgent enough to inconvenience people, to justify inconveniencing

people. That's the first test. That's the first thing you object to. Yes, I do. I think it justifies inconveniencing people because of the vast scale, unprecedented nature of the horrors that are being inflicted. That's number one. Number two, the question, is it effective? Listen, we can't really know in real time, but protests like mass protests like this come out of the media era where the goal isn't, to persuade that gentleman in the car who's very irate or even, you know, the people immediately there in New York. The goal is to get media attention to draw eyeballs to your cause. Did they accomplish that? Yes, 100 percent.

Have we covered any of the protests outside the White House? No. No, that's not true. Are we covering now the, you know, the protests that interrupted Joe Biden and these protests, which I think were very creative, in fact, which disrupted life in New York City? Yes. So does it pass the test of it garners eyeballs? Yes. Second piece of what makes a protest effective, does it win people over to your cause? And I'm not talking about overall majority opinion, although that can happen too. And usually when that happens is when there is a disproportionate response from police and other authorities that garner sympathy for the activists.

You know, they were arrested. I wouldn't call the response to be disproportionate or the sort of thing that would garner that sort of sympathy. But did it draw the sort of attention that could win more activists to their cause? Yes. Third question, to your point, already a majority of the American public agrees overwhelmingly, wants a ceasefire. The one person who is determinative on this is Joe Biden. It's all about Joe Biden, right? And what is Joe Biden telling himself right now? Because obviously he doesn't care about babies being killed in Gaza, it's pretty clear.

Obviously he doesn't care about the humanitarian situation. Apparently he doesn't care about babies being killed in Gaza, it's pretty clear. Obviously, he doesn't care about the humanitarian situation. Apparently, he doesn't care about the possibility of the U.S. getting drawn into war, at least not enough to actually do something about it. What he might care about is his political prospects. They're telling themselves that this is going to be in the rear view mirror. And these protests day after day, these mass actions day after day are a clear message aimed directly at Joe Biden. No, it won't be. We are not going away. These disruptions are not going away. Life is not going to be normal again for you, certainly, until you stop the bombing in Gaza.

So on those metrics of success, just as a tactic, I think it passes. And the last thing, which is perhaps the most important to me, is, you know, if I look back at like nonviolent protesters against past horrors, you know, slavery, right, the abolitionists, those who protested against like the Holocaust, those who were protesting Jim Crow, again, nonviolently. I could not possibly, even if I thought the tactic was like a little foolish or not going to work or whatever, which again, I don't think that's the case here. But even if I did, could I find it in my heart to criticize the people who are on the right side of history, who are trying to do everything they can to try to force some sort of an end to the horrors that are being inflicted here? No, there's no way I could find it in my heart to do that. So I totally understand where you're coming from. But the reason why I've compared it to that is about the theory of the case, which is about making life

more miserable in a democracy. And I, you know what, I can hear the emotion in your voice. And I just think it's a fundamental disagreement. I mean, at the end of the day, the people who are dying here are not American citizens, even in the case of Vietnam, like this was about American soldiers. But what I would disagree with is that you were saying, you know, we did cover a protest at the White House. We sent our own Mac over there in order to do the filming. But it took five, 10 years, you know, of protests against Vietnam. That's simply, you know, you don't get to have immediate gratification in American life. In five or 10 years, there won't be a single Palestinian left in Gaza. I mean, that's the thing. It's so immediate. And our people are not dying yet. Actually, our soldiers came very close to being killed thanks to this conflict.

Very true. Iraqi militias, you know, firing on them while they're sleeping in barracks. So the risk is incredibly real. These are our tax dollars that are paying for these 2,000 pound bunker buster bombs that are being dropped on civilians in Gaza. So to be like, oh, this doesn't really concern—of course it does. And clearly, these protesters feel that incredibly, incredibly deeply. That's why they're doing whatever they can think of to do to try to disrupt this, try to put pressure on Joe Biden. Because, listen, it—honestly, it's not—unfortunately, it's not about winning people over in a democracy. Because if that was the case, it'd be over already. Yes, that's true. It would be over already. This is not a democratic action. This is about pressuring Joe Biden and persuading him that this is not going away. This

is not going to be in the rearview mirror. And so, yes, I do think that attention-grabbing actions like this could move the needle. Maybe. I mean, listen, there's no guarantees, but could move the needle here. Let's reverse and look back. What was the result of 1968, of the mass protest movement? What ended up happening? A landslide election for Richard Nixon, who wanted to crack down on protests. The silent majority who despised and were angry at the hippies who had taken over the cities and were doing many of the same things here. There are no pro-Palestinian politicians on the ballot. So it's not like there's the ballot. My point, my point only being that the vast majority of people, as we also saw post-BLM, turned against the BLM movement. You know, you could use the same

justification for much of the looting and other things that accompanied the BLM riots. No, but those were, you cannot compare non-violent protests with protests that in some instance turned violent. Yes, absolutely. Like, That is not a fair comparison to me. But let's look about the BLM riot. Okay, let's look at the BLM nonviolent marches themselves and about eventually what occurred, which was a mass social chilling against anybody, including people like me, who spoke out against what we thought was a ridiculous cause. At the time, what ended up happening is that huge amounts of people felt as if they could not speak out then

at the time and ended up supporting more pro-police policies. The net effect of BLM has had no impact on the overall cause. I don't see that analogy here because the people who feel they can't speak out right now are the people who are trying to defend Palestinians. So it's completely, it's completely reversed. And again, I think what people responded to because the original peaceful marches, I mean, you remember it was overwhelmingly popular. You had huge constituencies, millions of people out in the streets, et cetera, et cetera. I think what caused the backlash is the looting, is the violence that broke out in plenty of locations. There's no analogy here. There is no looting. There is no violence. This

is a completely like textbook nonviolent civil action that is occurring here. And like I said, even if I thought it was like foolish, which again, I don't, there is no way that I could look at what's unfolding in Gaza and be like, where there are such clear villains and be like, oh, these people who are on the right side of history, they're the ones that I'm going to complain about. They're the ones that I'm going to criticize. I just don't think much of this right side of history stuff ends up standing up because the truth is, I mean, everybody thinks that whenever they're involved. It's a genocide. No, well, first of all, I actually want to agree with that. It is a genocide. At the very least, it is a mass killing of civilians. If there is a right

side of history that has ever been clear, which yes, you're right, in many instances, it's a judgment call. I think it's pretty compelling which is the right side of history that has ever been clear, which yes, you're right. In many instances, it's a judgment call. I think it's pretty compelling which is the right side of history here, just based on the numbers of civilians who are being massacred and starved at the moment. So I think that the mass killing, slaughter, and all that, here's the thing. I not only have condemned it, I've talked about it with you now for two months straight. I'm talking about we live in a democracy, you know, actually, not even inconveniencing. Who knows? What if you stopped an ambulance as we saw during Bridgegate? We'd know about it by now. Maybe, maybe, but they personally could have done and they were willing to take that risk. That's fine. You're allowed to

do that as an American citizen. I think that as long as it's nonviolent, absolutely. And I don't think you should be treated badly. We're talking about what is the overall net democratic effect? And I think it's incredibly counterproductive. And then generally, it goes back to that disagreement that we have here about new left tactics, where yes, it bled into violence in the case of the weather underground. But fundamentally, what it came from was that they believed they could no longer work within the corridors of power in order to pressure them. And they were wrong. I believe that they were absolutely wrong.

And because of that, they ended up seeding, actually, and fusing much of the new left with the Democratic politicians, which allowed the overall Nixonian takeover. So what I would say to many of these people who are doing this is that turning the regular populace against you makes it so that the more politically popular choice for Eric Adams and for Joe Biden would be to crack down on these protesters. It would be to send the police and beat the shit out of them. And guess what would happen then? Guess what would happen then? I actually don't know. Public opinion would turn in favor of the protesters. I don't think so. You look at the civil rights movement. What caused the public to really turn and be on their side?

It's when they unleashed dogs on the protesters because they felt the same way. They're like, these people are annoying. They're taking over our cities. This rabble needs to go. If you have a protest that is inconveniencing no one, you know what it's going to do? Absolutely freaking nothing. But you should inconvenience the right people, which are the people in power. You should go outside the White House and you should scream, which is what they should. Listen, that's what

they did in Vietnam. And you can say that it didn't have an effect. I think it had a tremendous effect to the occupation of that ground about that White House. I think that those protests that were eventually, for example, at that time, college sit-ins did nothing. Screaming outside the White House had a massive impact on overall US policy. Or for example, when President Nixon showed up at the Lincoln Memorial in order to talk with the protesters there and to figure out, he's like, why can I not connect with those folks? That was occupation of a federal monument and a specific protest against a policy. But the overall American populace dramatically rejected this, as we can see from the historical

record. And I would disagree because at the time, what shocked the Northern conscious is that they were already on the side of the civil rights protesters. Here, they had not seen the validation of that cause. But Israel is a 50-50 split. It is not even close to the same. Not in terms of a ceasefire, but again, Sagar, the idea that having a majority of people support a ceasefire is going to change anything is clearly not true. Like, that's clearly not true. So, in my opinion, the most effective thing is to try to create pressure that convinces Joe Biden that this is not going away. your best hope because it really comes down to this one senile old man who is diluting himself into, you know, justifying atrocities and is turned out to be a complete monster. That's your whole goal. And so listen, are there guarantees that this action or any other action is going to

influence this one senile old man? No. But anything that you're doing that is aimed at persuading him and his political coterie that this is not going away and that people feel really strongly about this, so strongly they're willing to shut down bridges in Manhattan and piss off a bunch of motorists. Yeah, but that's costless to them. The cost is paid by the motorists. I mean, that's kind of my point. And we'll just view this differently because given the 10 kids every day are losing their legs in Gaza, right? Half of the population is starving to death. 90% doesn't have a meal a day. It has already been rendered uninhabitable. The level of destruction is beyond Dresden and some of the other horrors of the past. That's where we are. So when I put that up against inconveniencing motorists for a couple hours during rush hour, I'm sorry, but I think it justifies that inconvenience. But can't you see how you could

say that for anything? I mean, you could make that for literally for any cause that you sufficiently believe in. And so I'm not putting down, you can believe whatever you want, but I mean, the really- Tagar, that's called moral relativism. But it is moral relativism. No, it's not. Everybody believes, January 6th, people believe that they were saving democracy. That doesn't justify what they were doing. That's my point. What they believe and the facts and the reality of civilian death is, I mean, these are two very

different things. So yes, in a sense, everything is subjective, but in another sense, like it's very clear what's unfolding here. And when you just stack up the number of innocent lives that are lost, you know, to put that against inconveniencing people. Yes, I think it's yes. I think it's justified. And like I said, I there is no way that I can criticize these people who I admire, who I wish I was more like them to have the courage to go out and do these sorts of things and try to affect change. Try to, you know, rescue the lives of people that they don't even know in the Gaza Strip. But that's kind of my point is that I actually think you're doing far more of a service to the cause sitting here and we're talking, you know, having an intelligent conversation and we're talking about the news

and you probably changed 10 times more minds than any of those people have. So I disagree with that actually completely. And I just think that is that justification is one that anybody could use for anything. Yeah, but sometimes it will be right and sometimes it would not be. But who decides that? Nobody decides that. I mean, look, I could give the exact counter case, which is that these people, you know, the Israeli case on this is these people support Hamas. We're making sure that the safety of our- And what I said is not a lie. I mean, what they helped is they helped elect him. At the very least,

they lived under the rule. I don't believe this, to be clear. I'm giving what they could say. So obviously, we need to make sure that we have a safe zone around our territory. We have the military capability to do so. If they don't, history belongs to the victors. So be it. You guys did the same thing. So you're just a total moral relativist. There is no right and wrong. You can't say a genocide is wrong. Ethnic cleansing is wrong. These are things that are worth and can mean people to protest over. I think it's really action is wrong. I'm saying, though, that you can make this case in any form and that such then, that's why baseline rules overall matter. And that you should make sure that you're trying to – look, I just simply don't believe in doing things that aren't going to do anything. So, for example, that's why I think this is deeply counterproductive, blocking people in traffic.

Same with the climate change thing. Do I think anthropogenic climate change is real? Yes. Do I think that defacing Van Gogh paintings and all that is going to do with that about it? No. And that's why I believe in nuclear power. And that's why I talk about it here on the show. I don't think that's productive either. This is different. This is a different action. And it's much more targeted and it's much more immediate. There is a very clear demand. There's a very clear individual who needs to be influenced. And so I just, I just basically disagree on every level. I disagree that it's not effective. I disagree

that it is wrong in morally wrong in any sort of sense. These people are morally righteous to me. There's never been anything more clear. And number three, I just like, there are villains right now, very clear villains. One of them is like, you know, a mile away from here in the White House. And to spend any time criticizing the people who are trying to avert atrocities. I think that's fair, Crystal. But if you were, let's, what if they crossed into the realm of violence, then what? Well, then that's a different story. But we're not talking about this. This is nonviolent. But then we do have to draw. This is nonviolent. There are, you know, realms within people operate. All right. Within nonviolence, nonviolent protests. Will I criticize nonviolent. There are realms within people operating. All right. So then we get to talk about it. Within nonviolent protests, will I criticize nonviolent protesters who are saying no to

genocide now or any other time in the past? No, I will not criticize them. I just think that when we talk about effectiveness and about power and about what actually matters and what moves the needle, I don't see this as moving that at all. I think the Biden one actually might. And in fact, if that continues, that's something that he's going to have to deal with. You have to try lots of things. And again, contentious politics, like they are contentious for a reason. If they're not upsetting anyone or irritating anyone or causing any friction,

they go completely unnoticed and they're completely pointless. You may be right, but then we can't complain then whenever causes that we don't support subject themselves to the same level of tactics. And that's more where, you know, I see not only media treatment. Like the anti-vax people who took over the city in Canada. Right. It didn't really work though, unfortunately for them. You know, I mean, they got cleared out by the police. The Canadian populace largely turned against them. They had a massive police state crackdown. From what I can tell, Trudeau got himself reelected. But again, I just don't agree with this moral relativism of like, who can even say what's right or wrong?

And all causes could theoretically be just. It's like, okay, but there are some things that should be really clearly off the table that we should be very able to very clearly say this is right and this is wrong. And to me, again, this is the most clear-cut instance I've perhaps ever seen in my life. Okay. We're going to agree to disagree. Let's move on to the next one. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution.

But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast.

Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is.

Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case.

They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter.

She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

At the same time, we've got to turn over to domestic politics, what's happening here in America. It's primary season. We've got a shocking new poll here. Let's put it up there on the screen. And what does it show? My God, Nikki Haley coming within single digits in a CNN poll, up 12 points since November,

Trump standing at 39 points, Haley 32, Chris Christie 12, Vivek 8, and DeSantis 5. So Nikki Haley certainly surging, at least that certainly seems to be the consensus, and not just in this poll, Crystal, but in a variety of other ones that we have seen. And it actually fits, I think, with Trump's overall strategy. He no longer has been talking as much about Ron DeSantis. He's been talking much more about her. He took that opportunity on the pulpit to go after her for her slavery comments about the Civil War. Man, I wish I'd been here for that. Let's take a listen. You know, they asked her about the Civil War. Why did it start? How did it start? She didn't use the word slavery, which was interesting. I don't know that it's going to have an impact, but, you know, I'd say slavery is sort of the obvious answer. It's

supposed to, it's supposed to about three paragraphs of bullshit. Paragraphs of bullshit. This man has to be so damn funny. He's so good. You gotta give it to him. You have to hand it to him. He gets to the crux of it. It's also funny because I haven't gotten to weigh in on this, and there's nothing I actually hate more than lost cause stuff. And so for her, she, I believed, didn't know, or she did not have a real position on this. She in her head was like, well, I can't say it's about slavery because these GOP voters are so racist that they're going to get mad at me for saying it. Whereas Trump is like, slavery instead of free paragraphs is bullshit.

And he's overwhelmingly more popular than her. It's such a disdain to voters. It's also the context of him being a New Yorker. Yes. And her being a South Carolinian who's imbibed all of this weird lost cause bullshit where it's like, I can't say it's slavery.

Even the way she approached the question, remember she was like, oh, this is a tough question. Yes, I watched it. She was like, well, it's like, actually, it's not. It's not a tough question. It's like the most tough one. It should be. You can say states' rights about slavery if you want. It should be the easiest question of all time.

But yeah, Trump, unfortunately, using his superpower of humor there to great effect. Trump is the true master of this art. Now, we have seen Nikki Haley in her last ad in Iowa. This seems to be the way that she wants to draw a difference between her and Donald Trump. Here she's talking about a president with grit and grace, a different style, and not a name from the past while flashing images of the two. Let's take a listen to that. A president with grit and grace, a different style, not a name from the past, your family deserves a border secured, an economy restored, a nation respected. Our moment is now. Our mission is clear. Let's save our country and secure our future, and let's move forward together toward our destiny in a strong and proud America. Pretty cookie cutter message there that you see, Crystal. But the, you know, it's interesting that

that's as far as she'll go whenever it comes to criticizing Trump. That's it. Just a name, not a name from the past, a name from the future. But I got to be honest, she's done extraordinarily more better than I thought she would in New Hampshire. It does, though, like I've always said, it kind of makes sense. She is the natural anti-Trump candidate. She embodies everything from the past. So people who might have liked Dick Cheney and that type of politics, this is who you should vote for.

Well, after Ron kind of fell off and was like super awkward and not gaining traction or whatever, the donors all got behind Nikki. She had that first debate, which was very effective, which, you know, she actually garnered a bump in the polls from her debate performances, continued to climb from there, at least in New Hampshire.

I mean, my question for you, like, I guess her theory is, all right, Iowa's whatever. I'm going to lose there. And she even said something weird like New Hampshire will correct what happens in Iowa, which was like a little bit too much to quiet part out loud. But anyway, her theory is then if she goes and has this upset win in New Hampshire, that's going to completely change the game. It's going to show that someone else can win. And then she'll just pick up a head of steam from there and be able to roll on through. I mean, do you think that there's anything to that case? Because I don't really think there is. I don't either. Let me make the devil's advocate case, which is like, you know, Trump feels so invincible and his whole reputation is staked

on being a winner. And if Nikki Birdbrain Haley comes out and beats him in New Hampshire, a state that historically he did well in in the past, that that would be a real blow to him. And then that would open people up. You probably have everybody else drop out of the race at that point. It would be head to head, Nikki versus Trump. And maybe that will open people up to this idea that it's actually time to move on. If there's a case, that's it. I don't think it's practical, but let's look to a little bit of history. I mean, it's complicated because you're comparing apples to oranges, but you know, Bill Clinton crashes in Iowa, comes to New Hampshire, the comeback kid. He gets the headline, goes through Super Tuesday, does pretty well, seals it all up, and he owes it all to New Hampshire.

To this day, he says, that's where I, you know, officially won the presidency. You could flip it, though, and you can look at the fact that Barack Obama won Iowa. Then he lost New Hampshire, but because he won Iowa, he was able to win South Carolina. So I can give two examples, you know, where it did matter and where it didn't. I think for Trump, New Hampshire is really the first primary ever won in the race. I still think he's probably going to win. There's also a big question mark here. Are these polls even right, Crystal? How the hell do we know? You could see mass movement toward, like, what if the final tally? If I recall in 2016, the poll was slightly off, especially because the effects of a Trump win in Iowa have not been factored into this. So you have the inevitability argument about, oh, well, Trump just won Iowa, so we'll do something a little bit different here.

There's a lot of contravening elements here where overall I just don't think any of it matters because in South Carolina, her own home state, in traditional politics, she should drop out if she doesn't win. If you can't win your own home state, you should never continue in the race. That's generally how it goes. So then we have Super Tuesday and Nevada, which, you know, come afterwards. Trump is, you know, crushing by a mile. And people forget California is now part of Super Tuesday. Trump is up in California by 50 points. I mean, it's just not even a competition right now.

So, again, I don't agree with this analysis, but I'm going to play devil's advocate and try to take Nikki's side here. So what worked for Barack Obama, why he had such a surge after Iowa, is it effectively created a permission structure for a lot of people who wanted to vote for him, but didn't know if he could really win and black voters in particular. And that's why he goes on to succeed in South Carolina and the rest is history. Maybe there's some group of Republican voters who are kind of sick of Trump and kind of sick of the chaos and don't really want this dude with all these criminal indictments hanging over his head and all that he entails. Maybe they would like some sort of a break from him and to move to, you know, what does Nikki say? Like, not a name of the past.

Yes. Maybe there's some group out there that feels like, ah, but everybody's with Trump and I just got to stick with Trump. And we got to back up Trump because he's under attack from the liberals, et cetera, et cetera. And so maybe if you do see a state go for Nikki Haley, maybe there is some group that needs that permission structure to jump from the Trump train to the Nikki ship. Listen, anything is possible in America, all right? So the real question- He's going to freak out if he loses New Hampshire. The only thing I would say is there's such high expectations for Trump at this point too. If he wins Iowa but underperforms, that also is kind of a problem. You're not wrong. So let's say he wins New Hampshire by two points

and then she can have a theory of the case or whatever. So why she could win South Carolina, we could see it. Although I still don't think it's really gonna happen. Let's also give Ron DeSantis his due. This is his last ad in Iowa. Let's take a listen. Wall Street funded Nikki Haley just said in New Hampshire. You know Iowa starts it.

You know that you correct it. Haley disparages the caucuses and insults you. It's Ron DeSantis who embodies and defends Iowa's values of faith, family, and freedom. He's tirelessly working to earn your support. Donald Trump is running for his issues. Nikki Haley's running for her donors' issues. I'm running for your issues. I'm Ron DeSantis, and I approve this message. Okay, I mean, it's probably the best that he can do. Things not looking necessarily the best for him right now. But it's sort of pathetic that he's even taking aim at Nikki at this point, right?

Well, I think it's just that she's bleeding into— Here, can we please put C5 up on the screen, the maps, guys? Because this is his only chance right now, where if you look at the two side by side, he clearly has done way more events in 57 counties. But Crystal, if you look at the number of events and the counties where he did them, I went back and checked. These are all the places which Ted Cruz actually won in 2016. So he is trying to recreate the Ted Cruz victory of 2016 in the Iowa caucuses. What I would just say is that's a footnote to

history for a reason is, guess what? It didn't matter. The only thing that ended up happening is Ted won Iowa and he won Texas. So it didn't exactly work out so well for him in the overall. The thing is for DeSantis is this is a last ditch effort. He's hoping and praying for more of a surprise in the caucuses. But overall, if we can put the next one up, guys, the other maps, what's really sad about this is the overall decline of retail politics. Because Nikki Haley, she's done 51 events in 30 counties. I mean, look at Vivek. He's done 239 events in 94 counties. 35 years ago, that actually mattered. And yet, if you look at the polls of where he is in Iowa, it's like 4%, maybe 5%. The sad truth is, is that this whole

visiting all 99 counties of Iowa and spending time on the ground, like season six or whatever of the West Wing, that stuff just, it doesn't matter anymore. You know, it's all national. It all comes down to television and the internet and what people are consuming and the issue set in terms of them attending an event. Yeah, sometimes it can be a relative predictor, but on the margins, it doesn't really matter anymore. No, it doesn't. The retail politics, the traditional campaign events are basically like a Potemkin village for the reality, to cover the reality that your campaign is just all about media. And if you misunderstand that, you just misunderstand the nature of modern politics. The one thing, the Iowa caucuses are

unique in that because of the nature of having to go in at thing, the Iowa caucuses are unique in that because of the nature of having to go in at a certain time and this weird process and whatever, it does matter that you have effective organization on the ground. And I genuinely don't know which campaign has good organization on the ground and which doesn't. I just don't know. I haven't, you know, I haven't seen much reporting about it. I do know that the DeSantis campaign has been in complete disarray and they had this whole week after week after week and a total leadership crisis there. And then they're like, all right, we'll use this other super PAC. So the top level signs that this is a well-organized campaign aren't there. But, hey, I don't know.

Maybe on the ground in Iowa they've done a good job, effective job organizing, and that's what they're betting on. It's possible. I mean, just to return to New Hampshire and to underscore, you know, we've seen this too. Let's put this up there from ARG in the more recently Republican poll. We could put C4, please, up on the screen. I mean, what you see here is Donald Trump at 37 percent, Nikki Haley at 33 percent. Chris Christie, I mean, he's actually at 10 percent. Previously, he was at 13. He's really screwing Nikki at this point. Yeah, he certainly is. Ron DeSantis is at five. Previously, he was at six. And Vin Vivek Ramaswamy at four and five. So DeSantis, you know,

competing with Vivek for the Jeb position of New Hampshire. For the Biden position in New Hampshire. Yeah, right. There you go. That's the case for maybe why it might work out. But things looking pretty good right now, I think, for Donald Trump. The Nikki Haley position and the victory that she would want to see is one where she would beat Trump in that slight margin and it would lead to some sort of, you know, some sort of momentum about something in South Carolina. But there's just not a lot of evidence that bears any of it out. Yeah. We'll see how it happens. You know, you never know. right? Crazier things have happened before. I will say, just to emphasize again, you know, it's difficult to say,

okay, if this person drops out, then all their voters are going to go in one place. Yeah, nobody knows. But we know that the Chris Christie voters are not going to go to Donald Trump. Right, right. That one is like as clear as it probably gets. They're probably likely to go majority to Nikki Haley. And so it's funny that effectively Chris Christie, who was the most aggressive Trump critic in the race, may be giving him exactly the boost that he needs in New Hampshire in order to prevail over Nikki. We'll see how it all plays out. And as you said, listen, we should take all these polls with a massive grain of salt anyway. I actually, I'm excited to see because the last Iowa poll is going to come out soon,

and we will see. It's always fun to compare that to the actual results. And usually it's not. I mean, it's close-ish, but it can be pretty far off. And that's just the nature of the beast, especially with the caucuses where it's like, if you don't get enough votes here, then you can do a second choice. It's such an insane system. And honestly, we should do over with it.

But that's a whole other conversation. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company

dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and

6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives.

This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne.

We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug ban. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug man. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now

isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

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Brian Adams, Ed Sheeran, Fade, Chlorilla, Jelly Roll, Sean Fogarty, Lil Wayne, LL Cool J, Mariah Carey, Maroon 5, Sammy Hagar, Tate McRae, Let's move on to Boeing. Wanted to give an update here because it's very, very important news.

Let's put this up there on the screen. What you can see here, this was reported by the Air Current, fantastic aviation-related news outlet. And they're reporting that United yesterday found loose bolts on plug doors during their 737 MAX 9 inspections. This news report is very important because what it demonstrated is that this form of the aircraft where you have a door plug over what was traditionally going to be a door, which was installed by a separate Boeing supplier, Spirit Aerosystems, appears to have problems across the fleet of the 737 Max 9. This shows us that it's not necessarily a maintenance issue ascribed to Alaska Airlines. This is, you know, kind of both of the types of, both the airlines which received

the delivery of the vehicles and most importantly, Crystal, the aircraft in question were all delivered between September, November 2022 and September of 2023 and would not have had their heavy maintenance check that would occur after 4,000 to 6,000 hours of flights, aka two to three years. So this was after immediate delivery relatively recently. It was found in at least five United aircraft. The more troubling news, though, is that afterwards, what we saw is that Alaska Airlines announced late last night that they also had found loose bolts on door plugs in their 737 MAX 9s that they have within their fleet. This traces us back then to that question about Boeing and Spirit Aerosystems. And so this is actually something I did not know.

Boeing outsources its fuselage to Spirit Aerosystems. They build the actual fuselages. So Alaska and United are the ones who have the specific type of configuration with the door plug. It is installed by Spirit Aerosystems, but it is then delivered for Boeing. So this does not take the responsibility away from Boeing. In fact, this basically heightens it, and it's going to have huge questions around their guidance to the overall fleet that remains and how the hell are you not catching this, guys? We got multiple of these loose bolts. The big question right now

in the current Alaska Airline incident is whether those door plug bolts, Crystal, were even installed, whether they had fallen off and that's part of the reason why you had the decompression or whether they had loosened and then fell off mid-flight, which is what led to the incident. But the loose bolt, yeah, it's horrifying. Because I said this yesterday, if this happened at cruising altitude, there'd be a lot of dead people. In fact, the entire plane could have burst apart. It's called catastrophic decompression or something like that. Just to show you, though, the economic impact of

this, it's massive already for Boeing. Let's put this up there. Boeing stock, you know, the Dow drop yesterday was almost entirely due to Boeing. Their stock down now by 9%. Spirit Aerosystems down actually even further. They're going to have huge questions for the NTSB. Should we buy the ZipSocker? Should we buy it? It's a recommendation? I don't know, man. Honestly, I'd probably buy Airbus stock. I actually don't even know if you can, but because I think it's a European company. But the overall point just gets to my monologue yesterday. And that's kind of why I wanted to do this is, guys, this is really bad. This is a flagship American company. Once again, failure of maintenance or sorry, once again, failure of

regulatory regime, failure here of Boeing. We have here a company that's bought some 60-some billion dollars worth of its own stock since 2014, and now we've delivered two, you know, at the very least two aircraft which have problems. Now, we don't know 100% that this lies with Boeing, but it is very difficult not to look at this and say manufacturing error happens sometimes, and to a certain extent, I mean, if you and I outsource an element of our business for our overall products, you and I are still responsible for quality control. No, I mean, we have people who work on our graphics and all that. But like, what would I say? Like, oh, it's the graphic guy's fault? Never. You know, like, it's our responsibility. We put out a product. And this is a much less

life and death situation that's happening over at Boeing. So I think it's pretty crazy, you know, to see some of this news. I also want to give credit to David Sirota and his team over at Lever News. They have some relevant, they just broke a story that's very relevant to, their headline is Boeing supplier that's Spirit, what's it called? Spirit Aero. Spirit Aero Systems. Aero Systems. Ignored warnings of excessive amount of defects, according to former employees. Weeks before Alaska Airlines' terrifying debacle, one of the aircraft's manufacturers was accused of systematically ignoring safety problems. And what they say is that they were also asked,

they allege, that this employee alleged they were asked by corporate officials to falsify records to cover up these defects. One of the employees at Spirit Aerosystems, which reportedly manufactured the door plug that blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight, allegedly told company officials about an excessive amount of defects. This is according to a federal complaint and corresponding internal corporate documents that were reviewed by the leper. According to the court documents, the employee told a colleague that he believed it was just a matter of time until a major defect escaped to a customer. So is this relevant also to what unfolded here? Raises certainly a lot

of questions. Oh yeah, massive questions. It's like what's happening in terms of our oversight and just in general. Look, Spirit Aerosystems, and I went back yesterday and dug even deeper about, you know, a Boeing company, how they've moved their headquarters. They've had mergers in the past. People who work for the company have been whistleblowing now for 20-some odd years about the financialization of this company, the moving away from engineering, and the promotion of these MBAs. It all goes back to everything I talked about yesterday, about the takeover of financialization of stock price. The airplane is merely a function to boost the stock. The stock is not a reflection right now of the airplane. And what's really embarrassing

is that this is a duopoly system. Our only other option is a European company called Airbus. I mean, this was and is a bedrock of American manufacturing, national defense base. It's critical to our national security. And to a certain extent, I mean, the public basically owns this company already. We bailed them out how many times? 2008. Because of their stock buybacks. Because of their stock buybacks. And so we have no say over the way that they're conducting themselves, even though they take tens of billions of dollars in bailouts, not to mention all these military contracts that we have with the company. So pretty devastating. Final thing that we can put up there on the screen here is from a leak

by United Pilots themselves, where this is an internal email where they tell them not to leak the email, but the pilots immediately did. And they're like, yeah, this new memo shows us that we are hoping to return this aircraft to service, quote, in the next several days. But this is going to lead to public, you know, loss of public confidence. United has, you know, a lot of these aircraft in its fleet. There's huge, you know, commercial implications right now because hundreds of flights have been canceled both by Alaska and by United. And overall, I just think it dramatically undermines confidence in Boeing and in its capabilities, which if you're in the future and you're one of these airlines, which plane are you buying?

You know, you have to. This is a big question. So we'll see, you know, in terms of what the overall fallout is on this. I recommend following that news outlet, the AirCard. They've been doing fantastic reporting. All signs right now point to some sort of manufacturing problem. Would you get on one of these planes right now? Well, it's not. We can't right now because to some sort of manufacturing problem. Would you get on one of these planes right now? Well, it's not.

We can't right now because they're all grounded. If the NTSB cleared it, yeah, I think I would. I've got enough confidence. The 737, what is it, MAX 9? 737 MAX 9. Look, I mean, if the NTSB says that the issue is the door plug and they tighten it up, yeah. You know why I'm relatively confident is that a piece of that plane blew out of the sky and they still were able to land it. In fact, you could look at it the other way and say, wow, what a miracle of engineering.

Yeah, but as you said, if they were a little further up, the story would be very different. Nine out of 200 might have died. It's a pretty good odds. You like that stuff. I've gotten so much more risk averse as I've gotten older. Like something about after I had kids, I became so much more risk averse. I don't think so. I'd be thinking about it the whole time I was on that plane and just be, even if everything was fine, which overwhelming chances are everything would

be fine. I'd be so miserable during that flight that I couldn't take it. You might be right. But as you know, I'm a credit card fanatic and chasing airline status. So there's no way I'd even be seated in that row. Of course, I'd be at the bulkhead seat where I belong. Don't pay for them, to be clear. You never pay for them. You always use your points and you use these things in order to get it. I should do a whole monologue at some point about how to game the system, but that's a different conversation. Turning over to the media, there's another casualty of Israel on the airwaves of American television. Mehdi Hassan, the MSNBC host whose show was cancelled, has announced he is officially

leaving, it appears by choice, after MSNBC leadership took that decision. Here's what he had to say. It's been an absolute blast doing this live show on MSNBC for the past three years with an amazing team of producers behind me and with all of you watching at home. It's been a privilege, it's been a pleasure. But as we begin 2024 with an election coming, a war still ongoing and too many Trump trials, honestly, to even keep track of. And with this show going away, I've decided that it's time for me to look for a new challenge. Tonight is not just my final episode of The Mehdi Hassan Show. It's my last day with MSNBC. Yes, I've decided to leave. To be clear, I am so proud, so, so proud of what we've

achieved on this show, on this network. And I can't thank you all enough for tuning in and for your support and for your feedback. But as I say, new year, new plans. So my respect for Mehdi has gone up significantly. There was no way, in my opinion, he could stay there. Untenable situation. If he did, I mean, imagine being canceled for something he said. And specifically, whenever it's such a contentious issue that he clearly cares about a lot. And then he fired his ass. I mean, it's outrageous. So good for him. He should have left. That's the right thing to do. You have no other choice in this business. And there's consequences for him to leaving. I mean, Mehdi will never work in mainstream media again. I assume he has children.

Absolutely. Financially. I've got a mortgage. And who knows what provisions there are in his contract about how long he has to stay on the sidelines

and non-compete and non-disclosure and all of that crap. It's not like you can just, you know, unfortunately these contracts are very binding on talent, probably in a way

that's illegal and needs to be challenged. But in any case, you know, many people are pointing out, I think rightly so, that this cancellation of his show, which ultimately forces his hand and forces him to leave, comes after he has been a very clear dissident voice on the network in favor of Palestinian rights. And what Mehdi is kind of famous for, which we've shown you here a number of times, is he is genuinely a very effective interviewer. And, you know, he pressed people like John Bolton on his show, for example. But there is, this is a rumor, so I don't know if this is accurate, but there's a lot of suggestions that the decision to cancel his show came after a

particularly contentious interview that we covered here on this show because it made significant news in which he pressed a Bibi Netanyahu spokesperson on air about what they were doing in Gaza. Let's take a listen to a little bit of that. It'll be good for the people of Gaza who deserve better than this terrible, authoritarian, extreme Hamas regime. The people of Gaza are still alive. As I say, more than 11,000 people dead, reported dead, 4,000 children. I just want to pull up Hamas. Hamas's numbers. You say Hamas's numbers. I should point out, just pull up on the screen. In the last two major Gaza conflicts, 2009 and 2014, the Israeli military's death tolls

matched Hamas's health ministry death tolls. So and the UN human rights groups all agree that those numbers are credible. They control all the images coming out of Gaza. Have you seen one picture of a single dead Hamas terrorist in the fighting in Gaza? Not one. Is that by accident?

Or is that because Hamas can control, Hamas can control the information coming out of Gaza? Mark, you asked me a question and you said you would be brief. I haven't, you're right, but I have seen lots of children with my own lying eyes

being pulled from the rubble. Because they're the pictures Hamas wants you to brief. I haven't. You're right. But I have seen lots of children with my own lying eyes being pulled from the rubble. Because they're the pictures Hamas wants you to see. Exactly my point, Wendy. They're the pictures Hamas wants you to see. But they're also people your government has killed. You accept that, right? You've killed children? Or do you deny that?

No, I do not. I do not. I do not. First of all, you don't know how those people died, those children. Oh, wow. First of all, we don't want to see a single child killed. Why does that give you permission to accept Hamas's numbers? I don't understand.

I didn't ask about Hamas's numbers. I said to you that your military spokesman— No, but you were quoting to me before Hamas's numbers, Mehdi. You were quoting to me Hamas's numbers. Because the entire U.N. and the human rights community and the American intelligence community on Friday said they trust those numbers. But you're dodging my question mark.

So you can see, very heated. That's an extraordinary moment where. Yeah, that was crazy. Mehdi says, you are denying that you killed these. Oh, I don't know how they died. I mean, that is that was wild. There was another moment in that interview we covered as well, where he was pressing him on some of the misinformation they got caught putting out. Specifically, remember this, what was just a calendar that was on the wall that they were like, oh, this is where Hamas is saying, you know, they're logging in for their hostage

watching duties. So he's very effective at this. It was shortly after this that his show gets canceled. We also know that the, you know, head of the ADL had gone on MSNBC and was going after Mehdi in particular, but all three of the Muslim anchors who have been critical of the Israeli response in Gaza. We also know that all three of those Muslim anchors were sidelined in different ways shortly after October 7th. So it surely seems like Mehdi is being punished for actually being good at his job and making powerful people uncomfortable. As people can go watch, I got a lot of criticisms of the man,

but I won't lay it here because I admire him for leaving. I think that's what you should do, especially when somebody is trying to censor you like this. And I genuinely, even though I disagree with him, I wish him the best. And I think that he'll probably do well in the independent space. And, you know, we're happy to have him on the show anytime.

Yep. If you dissent too much, cause too much friction with powerful people, Cable News wants nothing to do with you. And Mehdi is just the latest casualty of that. I think that we can say very confidently. Very sad. Okay. We've got a great guest standing by, Jeff Stein.

Let's get to it. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley

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It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote.

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders.

I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her, and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister.

There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Excited to be joined today by Jeff Stein, who is a reporter for The Washington Post and great friend of the show, but more importantly for today,

host of a new podcast called American Carnage that is on radical abolitionist John Brown, which is fantastic. I really recommend it to people. Great to have you, Jeff. Thank you guys so much for having me on. It's exciting to join independent media. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Before I ask the first question, let's just get a taste of what this podcast is all about. We have a bit of the trailer that you released. Let's take a listen. John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave.

John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in them to be a soldier in the army of the Lord. He's gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord. His soul is marching on. Glory, glory, hallelujah. Glory, glory, hallelujah. Explain to people what fascinates you about him and what were some of the questions you were trying to answer in this podcast series. Do you guys recognize that movie? No, I didn't actually.

It's from like a terrible, atrocious, impossible to watch Reagan movie from the 40s. Oh, really? It's all about like glorifying the post-slavery side in the war. Oh, interesting. Oh, God. What's it called?

I'll send you guys later. I'll look at it later. And yet, despite the attempt to make John Brown look crazy in that film, he looks awesome. He's really interesting and really cool and really fascinating. And I think the reason we got into this and the reason I got into this was because I don't think that political science is a thing. I kind of agree with you, but why? People think that political science is almost like taking an approach like chemistry or physics to how political change happens, how political processes unfold.

And the reality is, that sounds like you might agree, that from my perspective at least, historical events involve so many variables and so many inputs. And it is impossible to try to get it down to the beaker and the lab equipment that you put in a chem lab, right? And so the historians want to look at what happened in the past and try to draw links rather than try to say, what are the elements that create a historical moment or create a moment?

And with that in mind, I think the reason John Brown is so interesting is because he forces us to reckon with what is actually what causes change in this country. And I actually think you guys understand this intuitively at a real level where we have this conception, right? This idea that is very much like the official Washington world where I operate, where people are presented every four years, like a list of ideas. And then their agency consists of going to the ballot box and being like, I like this, or I like that. You would look at a restaurant, you know, it's like, oh, here's the menu. But what that elides, right, is like, what is going on on the menu? how do we decide like what the political process is giving people the choice between and When you look at John Brown's story

It's this question of how did this issue that when John Brown was first emerging on the scene? Was not even really a German people's heads. I mean abolitionism Much less, you know the racial egalitarianism that John Brown believed in, was so unbelievably fringe. For 3% of the population. More fringe than the people you guys have on here. People like yourself. People like me, yeah. And so what is the process, the historical process by which someone tries to move that, to shift that?

And that's what I found so riveting and so captivating. How do you, W.E.B. Du Bois, his biography of Brown, it's interesting because some of the historians today I think are much more accurate than like the historians from 50, 60, 100 years ago as Du Bois is. But they don't write in a way that touches the soul the way that someone like Du Bois or James Baldwin can. And what Du Bois says is that, what Brown reveals is that historical processes really shift by people who are able to activate the part of our consciences that are not explicable parts of the political process.

So things that we understand intuitively are immoral or wrong somewhere deep in our core, it takes someone in the public, maybe media, maybe an activist, maybe a radical abolitionist who starts invading federal armories. It takes someone to activate our latent sense of morality and justice. And that the idea that political change is instead driven by people at the top giving options that then people vote on is missing how important that activation process is. Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting because Brown was, you could see, there's many ways, right? There's like the great man theories, there's structuralist theory, there's like many others. I basically subscribe to all three, which is why I also don't believe

in political science. But if you're to go and you're going to look at it, we could see like, why Brown, right? Because Nat Turner's rebellion is what, 20 years before? It's crushed completely, right? And actually the Northern public is like, oh my God, this is horrifying. Why is it that Brown himself, like right when it happened, it was like the perfect moment to awaken exactly like you said, and to also draw the right contrast, right? So like Brown, and there's everybody, it's so crazy when you look at his story. It's like Robert E. Lee is involved in the John Brown, you know, question. You're like, oh my God, like what a precursor. And then- And John Wilkes Booth is out.

Exactly. You got John Wilkes Booth. It's like, how is this all like, it's like a story. It's like a movie and yet it was real life. So what did you find when you were teasing that out as to why his spoke to people at that moment when, like I said, Turner and all these other folks, it didn't work out at all? And give people a little TLDR if we have some non-John Brown buffs in the audience. So on October 16, 1859, John Brown and about 20 men will invade a federal armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. The idea of this raid is that Brown is going to, I mean, as you said, it is cinematic. Yeah, literally. Which is why it makes such a good story for a podcast. Right. Brown and his little guerrilla army, he wanted more men, but he really, he just decided that the place that they were training was at risk of being exposed. So he and about 20 men will

invade this federal armory at Harpers Ferry, and they will go around the nearby plantations, liberating slaves, including the slaves owned by the great-grandnephew of George Washington. They take these two amazing heirlooms, a pistol that the Marquis de Lafayette had given George Washington and a sword that Frederick the Great had given George Washington. And they take those and they free George Washington's descendant slaves. And then they come back to Harper's Ferry and they've taken this town. And that is when this moment that I've been really focused on recently is like,

why doesn't John Brown leave? Because the whole conception of this raid is that they're gonna take these freed slaves, they're gonna ride off into the Appalachian Mountains. And from there, they will launch little raids on southern plantations, free more slaves, and eventually build this massive black colony that will destabilize the slave system, which is ambitious, certainly, but not super crazy, I don't think. It has some logic to it. It has logic to it. It has more logic than staying in the armory, getting your sons killed, and then getting on trial. What are you doing, John?

Get out. But what really happens, when Brown stays, then the militias of Harper's Faire, the white militias come and then the federal government sends the US Marines, as you were saying, under Robert E. Lee later, the leader of the Confederacy to crush John Brown. And what happens in the immediate aftermath is kind of similar to what you see after Nat Turner, where people are outraged and they want this guy killed. And even the northern abolitionists who were his allies say, oh, maybe there's legal jeopardy here. I want nothing to do with this.

And so you have this massive immediate reaction that this guy is bad. And then partly because he's white, right, unlike Nat Turner. Yes. But also partly because he's able to articulate himself in a way Nat Turner never is. John Brown in the aftermath of the raid is going to be put on trial, which again, Nat Turner does not have this luxury of having a public audience where he can articulate and sound clear and level-headed and appeal. And then he becomes this martyr, right? Because he's facing his death. He's just watched his sons be brutally maimed and die in his arms. And the tragedy of the story and the fact that I think

we can get into this. I have so much to say about John Brown, as you can tell, but he really was not that violent at Harper's Ferry. We can debate his actions in Kansas, which are more morally ambivalent, I think. But in Harper's Ferry, I think part of the reason that he gets trapped there is because he is concerned for the well-being of his white hostages and he treats them well. And this becomes part of the historical record after the fact. A handful of people do die at Harper's Ferry, but he's really in a defensive crouch. I mean, his attitude is like, let me liberate as many slaves and escape. And they're not going around. I mean, I think a lot of people have this misapprehension of Brown as this, you know, crazy white boy who went around just slaughtering

slaveholders. It's much more, he was not intending on killing a lot of plantation owners in the South. And so that combined with the fact that Virginia, you know, while Brown still is like suffering from wounds to his head, he has this massive kidney injury. There's a scene where he's in court because the slaveholders are so insane that they insist on speeding up this trial, even though he is unable to stand up. So they wheel this cot into the courtroom and he has to pull the blanket over his face. So his stoicism in that moment and on the gallows where even the Confederates will recognize that he was incredibly brave in the face of death, that sort of like sense of valor, that sort of machismo helps turn his image. And I think

that is a big part of the reason that the nation was ready to receive his message in a way that they weren't for nothing. I absolutely think you're right. And then what do you see as the reverberating impacts of that? I mean, almost what you're describing is like through what came to be seen as his valor, selflessness, his willing to die, his willing to sacrifice his own kids on behalf of a cause that he saw as being so righteous

that it really caused people to sort of awaken in them their own sense of injustice and change the opinion. So how does that reverberate throughout history? How does that help create the conditions that lead you know, lead to the Civil War? It's a great question. I mean, John Brown, there's this fascinating, like,

self-fulfilling dynamic that begins to happen in the South, where the South is really determined after, even though John Brown is so exceptional as an abolitionist, he and his 20 guys are so unlike all the other abolitionists who, you know, William Lloyd Garrison is the other most prominent abolitionist at this point. And he is an adamant pacifist. And he looks down on what John Brown is doing and thinks it's all rubbish. And so John Brown is really exceptional. But because the South wants to make John Brown out to be like the prototypical abolitionist and northerner, they begin accusing everyone else in the North

of being an abolitionist like John Brown. And so there's this weird effect that begins to happen where because the South starts saying these insane things about all the Northern abolitionists, equating them to John Brown, eventually the northern abolitionists are like, well, maybe we do believe in him because their response is so disproportionate and so insane. Yeah, I think it's actually, so just to pick up on that, really what happened is that the fire eaters, which are the people who wanted to get out of the union and to have secession, they saw it as a validation of their worst fears. And they're like, well, if they're going to do it to us anyways, we may as well arm up and we may as well secede and then people were well

hold on a second you can't actually secede here and it's like if you're gonna you're not gonna take all this federal property and all that with you and really the it increased i think militarism in the south which in turn like you said showed the north they were like okay we genuinely have no other option but yeah the paranoia became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Exactly. Because when the South was insistent on seeing everyone in the North as John Brown, they started doing things in response to that that actually turned people in the North into militants, right? Because the South started arming themselves. Literally. Yeah. And I got into like a Twitter argument with someone who was like, it was super rational for the South to secede. I mean, maybe, maybe because like at that point when Lincoln won in 1860, you see like the end of the expansion of slavery. And so like maybe

the political balance of power is going to shift in a way that, that is, you know, spells the death knell of, of the South, and therefore they should take their shot and try to get England on their side of the war, and maybe that's their best gamble. But to me, you look at the stated intention of Lincoln, and this is why, I mean, I'm curious what you guys think about this,

because to me, the answer to the question who freed the slaves, right? I mean, you have the Lincoln monument up there, but it's Lincoln, that's what people say. Lincoln was not talking, who freed the slaves, right? I mean, you have the Lincoln monument up there behind you. It's like, it's Lincoln. That's what people say. Lincoln was not talking about freeing the slaves until events forced his hands. Like, do you know who really wanted to free the slaves? It was John Brown.

And the idea— Wait, so are you telling me Nikki Haley lied to me and the Civil War was actually about slavery? Is that what you're saying? Anytime Nikki Haley wants to come on American Carnage. Honestly, glad to have her discuss John Brown. Jeff, how do you grapple with this moral question that you present at the beginning of your podcast? It's basically like, how do you think about someone who some people would define as a domestic terrorist, John Brown, especially like you said, for the actions that helped spark this bleeding Kansas period, which was incredibly, you know, bloody and violent. How do you grapple with someone who is like violent, but on behalf of a clearly just cause? I think it's a difficult question. I mean,

we get into like all the competing historical debates in the podcast just very quickly to have time to explain what happened in Kansas. So the fate of the expansion of slavery will fall to Kansas. I know this is kind of boring, but in 1854, Congress says they passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gives the rights of the people in the territory to decide via election whether that territory enters the Union as a free or slave state. And that's really important because it will determine the balance of power within Congress. And at this point, the pro-slavery border ruffians from Missouri interfere with the elections.

They steal the elections. They completely pollute democracy. And they start going around killing the anti-slavery side. And so that's kind of the stakes of what happens when John Brown is fed up by all this. And he gets a credible threat that some pro-slavery guys from Missouri might go around and annihilate, is the term they use, him and his sons. And at that point, Brown decides to stop this pacifistic campaign, to finally take retribution. He and his men will execute five men in the middle of the night with these swords,

gashing their body and cutting them. It's all grisly and bloody. And if there's any Dan Carlin hardcore history fans out here, I promise you'll not be disappointed in our podcast. But the question becomes, right, like, was the killing of five people who were not slaveholders, not plantation owners, not even particularly crucial to the pro-slavery side in Kansas, were they, was that a justified killing? And I would say the majority of historians that I read for this project say that they're not. But the ones that do say he was justified will really point out that you know what was also terrorism? You know what was also violence? Was slavery. And we talk about Brown's killings as this form of like terroristic violence. And these historians who are more sympathetic to Brown will argue, and I think quite understandably that we never talk about the slaveholders

or the founding fathers who kept people violently against their will as a form of terrorism. But how is it not, right? And so if you consider slavery to be a form of warfare, which seems legitimate, at least in theory to me, then why is Brown responding to that terrorism by killing these guys, not a form of engaging the battlefield? That's the counterpoint. It also belies the fact that there was massive violence on the pro-slavery side, too, to kick all these abolitionist voters out. Out of Kansas. Yeah, exactly. Massive, I mean, absolute bloodshed. So I could sit here and talk about this all day.

We're running out of time. So Jeff, where can people find the podcast? What should they do? Rate, subscribe? American Carnage on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Patreon. If you want to throw three bucks our way, we'd be super grateful as well, but no pressure. We'll put a link down in the description. It's really interesting. It's obviously very relevant to the current moment in terms of the violent in Gaza and discussions about Hamas

and a lot of the same sort of like moral and ethical questions. I'm not going to like say it's equivalent, but there are some echoes here. A few years ago that John Brown is the 19th century Hamas and Hezbollah equivalent. And I will leave it to, you have to listen to the podcast. He's going to try to keep his Washington Post job as well and not fully comment on that particular dynamic. Don't step in that. That's our job. But Jeff, it really is fascinating.

I'm learning a lot from listening to it. And it's causing me to think a lot too, like I said, about current moral quandary. So thank you so much. It's great to see you. Congratulations. Great to see you, man. True pleasure, Bjorn.

Thanks, guys. Good job. Thank you. All right. We'll see you guys later. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes.

But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English.

I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios.

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