Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/19/24: SCOTUS To Back Biden Censorship, Don Lemon Humiliated In Elon Interview, Trump Fails To Get $450M Bond, Biden Ducks Trump Debate, RFK Jr VP Pick, Real Estate Agent Doomsday, Shocking Boeing Whistleblower Update, Dem Blasts Israel UNRWA Lies, Finkelstein Dogwalks Destiny On Israel

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss SCOTUS set to back Biden censorship on social media, Don Lemon humiliated in Elon interview, Trump fails to get bond for $450 million, Biden ducks Trump debate challenge, RFK Jr VP pick, real estate agent doomsday, shocking new Boeing whistleblower details, Dem Senator blasts Israel lies on UNRWA, Israel arrests journos during hospital raid, Norm Finkelstein dogwalks Destiny in Israel debate.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/ Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Many big things that are happening this week. So we had

big SCOTUS oral arguments yesterday about a case that is absolutely vital to free speech and bad news did not appear to go well for team free speech. Also, the Don Lemon versus Elon Musk interview also did not go that well for free speech. So we'll show you some of the lowlights, highlights, whatever you want to call it. From that, interesting moments. RFK Jr. has apparently chosen his vice presidential pick. There are some reported out rumors about who that may be. That announcement is set for next week in Oakland. So we tell you what we know there.

We also want to break down. This is actually incredibly consequential. Huge landmark shift in the housing market that could completely upend the entire real estate industry. Not a lie. Not a joke, as Joe Biden would say. Not a joke. So we'll get into that and what that could mean for you. We also have some more disturbing details about the death

of that Boeing whistleblower. You just cannot believe the latest things that have come out. We're also taking a look at the latest out of Israel. They have once again raided Al-Shifa Hospital. We'll break that down for you. We have a new report about the extent of the famine and starvation that is being caused by Israel in the Gaza Strip. And the Biden administration making some very noteworthy comments, calling out Bibi directly as they escalate their rhetorical concern for civilians in the Gaza Strip. I'm also going to do, this is going to be, whatever. I'm going to break down that big debate from Lex Friedman. It was Destiny, Norm Finkelstein, Maureen Rabbani, and Benny Morris, who's an Israeli historian. It was very interesting. I'm taking a look at some of the building blocks of Israeli propaganda as on display during this debate. Excellent. I'm excited

for that. It's going to be long, just a heads up for everybody. It took me a while, but it's going to be good. The freaking debate was five hours long. So I promise my monologue will be a lot shorter than the debate itself was. Well, I think personally, yeah. First, it was like the meme whenever I saw the run length where it's like, I'm happy for you. I'm sorry for you. I'm not sure what happened. I ain't reading all that.

Kyle and I had a long drive down South Carolina. So we just knocked it out then. Well, then I'm very happy that you are taking the time to synthesize it for everybody. Before we get to that, thank you to everybody. Couple of things. Number one, on the emails to our premium subscribers. We are working on it. We're going to maintain.

Continue to watch your inbox. Everything should be delivered correctly today. If it is not, just send us an email, and we will try and figure it out for you. Number two, as we teased yesterday, we do have big announcements coming for our premium subscribers. In particular, you're going to want to sign up at BreakingPoints.com. You're looking at a major upgrade in our premium service. We cannot get into all of the details, but for those who are with us, you are really going to enjoy it, and it's just really going to be better for you. So BreakingPoints.com, as I said, you can sign up today, and we have the discount that is going on.

Indeed. Let's start with the Supreme Court. As Crystal said, team free speech didn't do so well before the Supreme Court. We've put together some elements from the audio of the actual hearings, where the case that was brought forward was won by two Republican attorney generals against the Biden administration, stemming from 2021. That case revolves, if people are familiar, for example, White House officials contacting social media companies and pressuring them to censor and take down what they alleged was COVID-19 misinformation. So we have two kind of sides

of the different arguments to see how they were received before the court, and we'll break down even more of it afterwards. First, let's start with Justice Samuel Alito kind of coming down on the free speech side. Let's take a listen. Exchanged between the White House and other federal officials and Facebook in particular, but also some of the other platforms. And I see that the White House and federal officials are repeatedly saying that Facebook and the federal government should be partners. We are on the same team. Officials are demanding answers. I want an answer. I want it right away. When they're unhappy, they curse them out. There are regular meetings. There is constant pestering of Facebook and some of the other platforms, and they want to have regular

meetings, and they suggest rules that should be applied, and why don't you tell us everything that you're going to do so we can help you, and we can look it over. And I thought, wow, I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media, our representatives over there, if you did that to them, what do you think the reaction would be? Yeah, well, he's actually making a pretty good point there, Chris. So imagine if a government official ever came to us and was like, hey, how about you change some of your talking points and the way they think? I mean, maybe they would do it to us because we're not as established in their eyes, but I mean, they could try and do it to The New York Times. The New York Times would probably just publish the entire thing.

It would never be treated that way. I thought it was an important point from Samuel Alito because what he is ascribing there is he is saying and noting both the Facebook role as a publisher and then noting also the Biden administration's way that the norms have evolved such that they have different ways they might deal with The New York Times, for example, as opposed to a mass platform of communication for everybody. Yeah. And I mean, the reality is the government does communicate with The New York Times, you know, especially when they're reporting out something that contains potentially classified information. And there's a question of whether it could harm national security. There is a give and take there. But I think what he's getting to is that the extent and nature of the communications here, the amount of basically badgering from the government when it came to these platforms, is way beyond what you would think was appropriate when it comes to other, more traditional media. And we would understand it more clearly as wildly inappropriate if these types of communications, swearing, badgering, constant meetings, not just, okay,

vis-a-vis this one particular story, let's make sure that we're not harming national security, but on a variety of topics and consistently over time. We would easily see that as inappropriate when it comes to the New York Times, the Washington Post. Yet because it's social media, and we get sort of like fuzzy in our head about what these platforms are and what they mean to society, then it becomes entirely less clear. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so then to show everybody the counter side of how it looks is Katonji Brown Jackson, Justice Jackson, talking and raising about how the First Amendment may actually be an obstacle then to important functions of the government. Let's take a listen to what she had to say. So my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods. I mean, what would you have the government do? I've heard you say a couple of times that the government can post its own speech. But in my hypothetical, you know, kids, this is not safe.

Don't do it. It's not going to get it done. And so I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country. And you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information. So can you help me? Because I'm really worried about that, because you've got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government's perspective, and you're saying that the government can't interact with the source of those problems. So as you can see, using and kind of worried that the First Amendment is going in front of the government's ability to at least coerce agencies, social media companies, and others

to censor information that they don't like. Let's put this up there on the screen. Unfortunately, Justice Jackson's line of questioning and the skepticism of it seemed to really carry the day from all of the write-ups of the correspondence that were present for the multi-hour arguments. What they really note is that the vast majority appeared to believe that with the way that there's ruling and the merits of the case were brought forward, that the solicitors of these Republican states were not able to demonstrate what a clear and extended harm would be like. And then furthermore, what they were really worried about was, quote, hamstringing the government power. It's very likely that a conservative justice,

at least a majority of conservative justice, will rule with the liberal justices and that this will come out in favor of the Biden administration, Crystal. Yeah. I frankly find the type of language that she was using there terrifying. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, what she said is, my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways. That is part of what the First Amendment is about when it comes to ensuring First Amendment rights for the citizens of this country. And nothing about this case says that the government can't put out there, you know, part of this had to do with COVID and the COVID vaccine, right?

Nothing says the government can't put out their view of the vaccine, their recommendations with regard to the vaccine, whatever information that they want. That is not being constrained whatsoever by what we're talking about here. badgering and in some ways implicitly threatening these social media companies to toe their line and quash the speech of individual citizens who have a different view that they want to express. That's what that comes down to. So the view that seemed to, you know, rule the day or win the day on this court, and not just from Katonji Brown Jackson, although I thought her reasoning here was particularly terrifying, was that no, the government's rights to censor and control information that they deem as bad as if they have a monopoly on truth, that is the thing that we're going to prioritize. And I find that wrong. I find it horrifying. I think that it is a slippery slope. And I think it also, Sagar,

really ignores something that liberals like Katonji Brown Jackson would clearly see in a different setting, which even if the government is not directly saying, like, we're going to pull your contracts, we're going to shut you down, we're going to break you up if you don't do what we say, because the government is so large and does have those powers within it, the very nature of those conversations contains a power dynamic that is implicitly threatening in and of itself. And I think that piece was also completely ignored here. And again, I think usually liberals see those power dynamics and ascribe a lot of merit to them. Here, that all seems to be completely invisible. One other thing I wanted

to point out, which is just kind of an irony, and it was something that Fire, the free speech organization in their friend of the court brief talked about, and they are very much on the side of free speech. I think they're a very solid and consistent and principled organization. They pointed out that they take the side of free speech, even though some of the Republicans who are behind this suit and what constrained the Biden administration's ability are sort of on the other side in these other free speech cases that we talked about, where they want to give states the power to censor and control speech. So there is an irony here, you know, implicit in the Republican position. But to me, this isn't a right-left Republican Democrat thing. This really does come down to the First Amendment. And you can see by the unanimity

in the court here that it's not a left-right Republican Democrat thing. And it appears that they're very likely to come down on the wrong side of this one. It's particularly Justices Kavanaugh and Kagan, both of whom who worked. Kagan, for example, was the Solicitor General under Barack Obama. Kavanaugh worked as a political operative in the Bush White House. Both of them were taking a line of questioning, which was very, very heavily slanted towards executive power. We can put this next one, please, up on the screen, because I found one write-up actually very illuminating from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, where she asks in a hypothetical where if any Louisiana government officials were, say, doxed, followed by social media posts about

how people should rally and do something about this, could the FBI, she queried, quote, really encourage social media platforms to take down these posts? Now, the solicitor general of the state said, well, no, because if what the FBI is trying to do is trying to persuade a speech intermediary to take down a private third party speech, that would be an abridgment of speech to which Justice Barrett did not agree with that line of questioning. And I mean, that's ridiculous for a number of reasons. Number one, doxing is already against the, like, it's a violation of the terms of service of all of these platforms. Why would the FBI, quote, need to encourage it? And this is the whole point.

If you just have a consistent set of rules, then the government has to operate under the same rules as everybody else. But when you have this hodgepodge system, and this really gets to both the failure of social media regulation as well as government action, well, then the government with its immense leverage and its power, I mean, look, any of us, if any of us who have ever been on the receiving end of a phone call from the White House with that infamous no-caller ID or from the EOP address is like, whoa, every single time anyone that comes in, I don't care if you're in the media. I don't care if you see it regularly. Every time you see it, you pay attention. You have to pay attention whenever you're Twitter, whenever you're Facebook or any of these other organizations. We saw so many of this crystal during the Twitter

files. Remember the FBI flagging all of those ridiculous posts. And I mean, yeah, they'd be finding one guy with six followers who'd be like, Hey guys, the election's on posts. And I mean, yeah, they'd be finding one guy with six followers who'd be like, hey guys, the election's on Wednesday. And they're like, hey, you gotta take this down. You gotta shut this down. You gotta shut this thing down. And guess what? They actually did it though. They really did do it. And if anything, you know, it's very concerning that these justices are not taking into account that the vast majority of the time they do comply with what the government wants them to do. And especially here in the COVID case, because this is even in a heightened environment. I think we talked a little bit about this yesterday, for example, in the constituents being blocked case, where in the

middle of a lockdown, you had a guy who was critical of his local, like, I forget who it was, it was like the city manager or something like that of their lockdown policy. And the guy blocked him. And it's like, well, if you're in the middle of lockdown, you only have the ability to communicate and to articulate some of these things online. As some of these cases were happening, then your ability to express yourself freely online without government censorship becomes even more important. So really imagine this in a heightened, like a wartime scenario, a pandemic scenario where government power is even more expanded than normal. And they're really coming down on the ability of the executive to just do what they want. I think it's a real travesty. They absolutely are. It sort of reminds me of the way that they have so narrowly defined

corruption. Oh, good point. Where it literally has to be like, Sagar, here is some money in exchange for doing this thing for me. And then you do the thing and it's like in writing and on video and it has to be that direct. It seems like if you did have some direct government threat or corrosion of like, you know, Facebook, we're going to break you up if you don't take down that post saying election day is on Wednesday instead of being on Tuesday, then maybe they would say, okay, that's inappropriate. But if they're just having some friendly meetings, some coffees where they're yelling at them every day and swearing at them and pressuring them,

but there's no direct coercion, then that's okay. It's this sort of very narrow defining of what would be inappropriate here that does remind me of the way that they have ruled with regard to corruption. Just to break down a little bit more of sort of the technical legal pieces of this case, and this was reflected in that SCOTUS blog piece, there's basically three potential decision points in terms of how they will rule. One is always this question of standing, whether the parties who sued even have grounds to sue, whether they were actually injured. There's some question about that because these are states that brought this suit. States don't technically have First Amendment rights. It applies to citizens. So there's some question about that. Then there's the merits themselves. And then there's the idea that the original ruling that came from an appeals court was too broad because it applied to all social media

platforms when the individuals in question were not using all social media platforms. So the government is saying, OK, even if you find with them, the judgment should be very limited to just the social media platforms that were involved here. So those are sort of the three main pieces that SCOTUSblog breaks down they're going to have to make decisions on. And they appear to even be skeptical of this question of standing, Sagar. Yeah, I mean, that's where, look, the danger of it from the ruling, and it does seem very, very likely that this is going down at a pretty big margin is that the government, both the Biden administration, possibly a future Trump administration, can call up Facebook and call up any of these

people and tell them to take stuff down. Now, obviously, they can't force them. But, you know, Glenn Greenwald made a really good point about how Mark Zuckerberg, you know, publicly had talked, well, I think on the Lex Reuben podcast, on the Joe Rogan podcast as well, about how the FBI is coming to them all the time with all of this, you know, fakery. And that's what led to the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was a 100% true story. It was preempted by government action. It wasn't just the private bureaucrats at Twitter. So go ahead. One last point, just to drive it home. We'll leave the TikTok debate for another day. But you agree with me that the reason that the TikTok thing has legs right now is because they're upset about the pro-Palestine view. Oh, no question. Yeah, that's true. these powers to quash pro-Palestinian debate and viewpoints on a wide variety of social media platforms. That is absolutely possible that that's happening right now. And the Supreme Court could

be siding with the government to say, yes, that's appropriate. Yes, you have an interest in doing that, et cetera. If Trump gets back in the White House, I mean, if you don't like Donald, maybe you love Joe Biden and you're comfy with him having these powers. Put the shoe on the other foot and think about the way that Donald Trump and his administration could use these powers to quash any sort of debate and dissent that they find uncomfortable and they don't like. You do not want to hand the guy. This is like, you know, what we learned with the Patriot Act. You don't want to hand the government these types of powers when it comes to core key liberties that are supposed to be enshrined in the Constitution vis-a-vis our

citizens. So this looks like a very, very dire and distressing direction that they're going in. That's well said. You're right. You can apply it to everything, Ukraine, Palestine, any, and pick your issue. That's something, if it's controversial, you can guarantee that the government is involved. Don Lemon finally dropped his interview with Elon Musk. We'll brush over some of the ketamine parts of which we've already discussed. Frankly, not that all that controversial. And let's get to the debate around censorship, the First Amendment, and moderation, which Don really is incapable of wrapping his head around. Let's take a listen. Do you think if there, if you... moderated yourself more, if there was better content

moderation on the platform, that you wouldn't have to answer these questions from reporters about the Great Replacement Theory as it relates to Democrats? I don't have to answer these questions. The Great Replacement Theory as it relates to Jewish people. Do't have to answer these questions. The Great Replacement Theory as it relates to Jewish people. Do you think that? I don't have to answer questions from reporters. Don, the only reason I'm doing this interview

is because you're on the X platform and you asked for it. Otherwise, I would not do this interview. So you don't think, do you think that you wouldn't get in trouble or you wouldn't be criticized for these things? I'm criticized possibly. I could care less. You don't care? No, I don't care. Why not? I don't think people I could care less. You don't care? No, I don't care. Why not?

I don't think people should care what the media thinks about them. They're terrible judges of character. Even someone who has one of the biggest social media and biggest information platforms in the world, you don't think, you don't care?

You don't think that there's, you have any x.com or you have any responsibility to the truth or moderating the platform? You're conflating the truth with the media and I think the media is not truthful. You recently called content moderation though,

a digital chastity belt. Do you think that, you believe that X and you have some responsibility to moderate hate speech on the platform? I think we have a responsibility to adhere to the law, and we have a responsibility to be transparent about when things are shown, why they're shown. So that's why we open source our algorithm. I think once you start going beyond the law, now you're putting your thumb on the scale.

We don't want to put our thumb on the scale. It doesn't concern you that hate speech is gone, research shows that it's gone up on the platform since you took over. That's not concerning to you? I believe that is false. In fact, the research that I've seen says it went down. So what they will typically do is they will count the number of posts, but not count the number of views.

So what matters is, was that post given high visibility, or like one person see it? And if you look at the number of views of how many times was hate content viewed on our platform, it is down substantially. Yeah. Well, that's not what the study shows. And you said you like transparency. I'm going to show you this and you can get a study that will tell you whatever you want. But this is these are just a handful of extremely you look at those anti-Semitic and racist tropes and tweets,

and as of this morning, they're still on X. And from your own content policy, these posts should have been deleted. So why haven't they been deleted? Why are they still there? Do you...? Uh, we delete things if they are illegal. But these have been up there for a while.

Are they illegal? They're not illegal, but they're hateful, We delete things if they are illegal. But these have been up there for a while. Are they illegal? They're not illegal, but they're hateful, and they can lead to violence. As I just read to you, the shooters, you know, in all of these mass shootings attributed social media to radicalizing them. So, Don, you love censorship, is what you're saying?

No, I don't love censorship. Then why are you asking... I believe in moderation, but I don't believe in... Censorship is a... Moderation is a propaganda word for censorship. You can find, like, you can sign up right now and do a hundred things that are hateful. But if nobody reads it, it doesn't matter.

So, you can think of X as being, it's much like the internet. It's not some tiny publication with like 20 articles a day. It's 500 million. But everyone has the opportunity to read it, Elon. And they don't have the opportunity to read the internet. Are you suggesting we should shut down the internet? No. Okay, we're all much dumber for having listened to that.

That was hard to listen to. Entire conversation. But okay, let's try and extrapolate anything important from it. Number one, Elon is correct when he's like, you can find a fake study to say anything. But by and large, I actually find his counter even more annoying because he's embracing this idea of algorithmic deranking. I don't believe in any of that. I believe that hate speech is free speech and that you should be allowed to put it up. I mean, look, you can have an offensive meme or all that.

And Don was like, why is that still up? And then he confuses it being illegal with it, well, maybe not illegal, but why should it be up there? I'm like, well, it's not illegal. That's why it should stay up there. So both of them are kind of talking in fakery, which much of this is an advertising problem, which belies Elon's entire business model itself. That's kind of secondary.

But I think the bigger problem is that Don cannot like literally wrap his head around that correct counter where he's like, well, people could read this. It could lead to X, Y or Z with the idea that it could be extended. This links very much with our Supreme Court case that we just talked about, and that overall, it's a complete lack of understanding of First Amendment. It's like truly wrapped in a censorious mindset.

So I thought it was just idiocy really all the way around. Don Lemon clearly has a very bad case of CNN brain. Yeah. And it is not letting go. His firing and, you know, being out and now being independent or whatever has not changed the way he views the world one inch. Because so clearly the area that I think would be more difficult for Elon to respond to is you claim to be this avatar of free speech,

but you're not. I mean, even his view, and we've discussed this on the show before, that he articulates of like, I follow the law. Well, okay, in this country where we have a First Amendment, that may work out fine. And by the way, he hasn't followed, you know, strictly just what the law requires in this country. And we'll get to that in a moment. But when you think about a repressive regime that doesn't have free speech, his policy is still not a free speech commitment, but I will follow the law. And so you have him, you know, for example, in India, Twitter censored this documentary that was critical of Modi.

They took that down. This is something that The Intercept and Ryan Grim reported on. So if it is a, and Jack Dorsey brought this up as well when we spoke with him, that actually they were much more willing under Jack to rebuff repressive countries that were demanding censorship in that may be consistent with their own repressive laws in their country than Elon has been. So a commitment to I will strictly follow the law, no matter what the law says, is not actually a free speech commitment. So that's number one. Number two, you know, I just mentioned the Modi thing. We also have had the example right now, post-October 7th, of Elon saying that he's going to ban the terms

from the river to the sea and decolonization with regards to Israel and Palestine. How is that a commitment to free speech? So those are the areas where I would like to see him respond. I would like to see him attempt to answer because there's a significant distance between how he has held himself out and the way he has actually run this platform. But because Don has such CNN brain, the problem has to be on the other side that he's not censoring enough. He's not being censorious enough. He's not doing enough, quote unquote, moderation. And so you end up with this, you know, sort of crazy making, quote unquote, debate. And then the other pieces you point out, Sagar, is Elon is also saying something here that is, I would say, also inconsistent with free speech that he's like, well, yeah, technically we leave

this stuff up on the platform, but we basically bury it so no one can see it. And Don can't really wrap his head around what he's talking about. I mean, he's talking here about shadow banning. He's talking about using the algorithm to suppress this type of content so absolutely no one can see it. And that's another area that would be interesting to dig into. But it seems to me like he's not really even grasping what Elon is saying. I mean, in fairness, Elon doesn't want to use terms like shadow ban because that sounds bad. So he's not being really straightforward about what he's trying to articulate. He's like a little cagey about it, but that's clearly what he's laying out.

And I think that that is worth exploration as well, but that none of that happens. Yeah, there's a moment that we didn't include in this clip because it was already very long. But where Don gets in this fight with mainstream media would never post this type of hateful content. He's still standing for CNN even after all of this. So anyway, there you go. There's been no evolution, I guess is what I would say. It's not an accident that immediately after he was fired, the first place he goes back to is CNN. Yeah. That's exactly kind of, you know, can't teach an old dog new tricks.

His overall mindset is just completely devoid of any, like, grasp of the First Amendment, which is genuinely concerning for somebody who's allegedly been in broadcast for, like, what, 20-something years? Maybe 30 years now at this point and who made his whole career. And then, you know, it's also, so it's very counter because the moment that Elon fires him or doesn't sign his contract or whatever, he's like, well, I thought you believed in free speech. I'm like, dude, you don't believe in free speech. So which one is it, bro? Like, what are we actually doing here?

And then, you know, I just find it so egregious. Every time, they do this to Zuckerberg, they did it to Jack, now they're doing it to Elon. Any of these people, they find like the worst content, like why is this still up there? It's like, guys, they're not defending the content. It's about the principle. I mean, for example, I'll touch the third rail. I don't think Kanye should have been banned for tweeting a swastika. Swastika's a hateful symbol. I abhor it. That said, well, and he even posted it genuinely in a pro-Nazi way. Not illegal. Sorry. He should be allowed to do it. And guess what? He suffered private consequences. It's not like

it worked out for him all that well. You don't need to take it down for no reason. I'll give another one. He banned the Elon jet account for no reason except for the fact that he alleged that it was doxing. It's bullshit. It's completely wrong. It's like, sorry. Yeah, I get it's probably annoying. That said, you can do it for any celebrity, including Taylor Swift or any of these other folks. So sorry. That's I guess the price it is to be like ultra wealthy. Good for you. You can afford you can afford like hyper around the clock security. So that's just what comes with the territory. He still always reaches for it in a shadow banning sense and others. I still believe that the greatest golden age of the internet was like 2011 or so, right when Twitter was still calling themselves a free speech swing of the

free speech party. Everything let fly. Everything was equal in an algorithm. And yeah, it led to some uncomfortable things, but you know, that's And yeah, it led to some uncomfortable things. But, you know, that's part of what it means to live in a free and an open society. And that's when the internet was a tool of dissonance. And it was a tool of people being able to speak out. And unfortunately, what we've seen is instead like a mainstream capture of the internet. It's part of why the Supreme Court case and this Don Lemon thing really go together. It's because that elite mindset about the ability to police what and how and the rules around these things is their most treasured power, especially as they continue to lose it in the number of viewers that they have.

Yeah, I mean, there's just a whole lack of confidence in the sort of baseline concepts of, you know, they're supposed to be bedrock to America, including free speech, including a commitment to democracy. They're so terrified of if you actually allowed people to self-govern what that would look like. And so, you know, it's a it's an anti-democratic backlash. And you see it with liberals. You see it with conservatives when it comes to speech that they don't like as well. It really is an elite-led phenomenon. And, you know, none of that was really grappled with in this particular debate. I guess I would say, bottom line, you know, it made me a little more sympathetic to Elon pulling the plug afterwards because he was just like, wow, that was bad and ridiculous. And I don't think that I really

want to lend my dollars. But it also made me question the original. Like, why did you think that this was going to go well to start with? What was it in the Don Lemon lexicon body of work that you thought was really worth like supporting and lifting up. So I guess that's what I gave him. That's my counter. I'm like, dude, why did you think that he had changed at all? Like, if anyone could have told you that, anybody who's ever worked with Don Lemon, read any of the stories about Don Lemon,

have watched him in that thing, he's an egomaniac who is dedicated to a very specific worldview. And when you hired him, there was no evidence that he had changed whatsoever. So, you know, if anything, I don't have any particular sympathy for Elon. No, I mean, I don't either. I don't either. Listen, if Don Lemon had started his show and he was doing things that were interesting and he'd learned something from his experience, these things happen, you know, when you get let go from a job, it can be a like,

you know, a real shakeup moment for you and your perspective can change. It did for me when I got fired from MSNBC. So I can speak to that. But clearly none of that has yet occurred. So we'll continue to see. This is pretty consequential news. Let's go and put this up on the screen. filing his team saying that he cannot secure a bond to cover that 454 million judgment he was spurned apparently by 30 different companies as he sought that bond. Let me read you a little bit of this. They disclosed on Monday it failed to secure roughly half billion dollar bond in that civil fraud case in New York, raising the prospect that the state could seek to freeze some of his bank accounts and seize some of his marquee properties. That is now seriously

on the table. The court filing coming one week before the bond is due suggests the former president might soon face a financial crisis unless an appeals court comes to his rescue. He is asking the appeals court to pause that $454 million judgment. Again, remember, this is from the civil fraud case about him inflating asset values to secure loans and things of that nature. Otherwise, the New York Attorney General's office, which brought the case, might soon move to collect from Mr. Trump. They go on to say, although the former president boasts of his billions, his net worth is derived largely from the value of his real estate, which bond companies rarely accept as collateral. Apparently, he has more than $350 million in cash, which is a lot of money, but it is short of the nearly half a billion dollars that he would need in order to secure

this bond. Still, even if the higher court rejects his appeal, he's not entirely out of options. He might appeal to the state's highest court, quickly sell an asset, or seek help from a wealthy supporter. So he was, Sagar, able to secure a nearly $100 million bond with regard to the E. Jean Carroll case. But there are two problems here.

I mean, number one, these insurance companies just normally don't do bonds of this size, half a billion dollars. case. But there are two problems here. I mean, number one, these insurance companies just normally don't do bonds of this size, half a billion dollars. And number two, as they point out, since most of his collateral would be in real estate, they usually don't use that as collateral. And so none of these companies, the 30 that they reportedly went to, were willing to take it. Letitia James, the attorney general who was pushing this case, she has not commented yet about what she is going to do. But this is real. We're at the point now where she could actually put liens on his accounts, where she

could seize some of his iconic properties in New York in order to, you know, obtain this amount of money while this appeals process plays out. So it is truly a wild scenario here. Yeah. What they said is that he has not ruled out his corporate entities declaring bankruptcy, which would halt that judgment. But apparently in the 1990s, Trump did go bankrupt. He was very weary of that entire experience. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can see his whole political brand is the billionaire, you know, wealthy, successful, always wins, etc. So having to declare bankruptcy doesn't really jive with that image that he has created over decades.

The other question is, I mean, he's probably just going to have to sell something. He's going to have to do a fire sale or, you know, he's going to have to come up with some way in order to meet this just because it's such a colossal amount of money or to take out some incredibly like onerous high interest loan. But this is the reason we're covering everyone is because this is personally a major, major threat. It also leads to the possibility that he would have to be able to tap campaign cash or raise some sort of fund from supporters and others in order to help bail him out of something like this. But even then, I mean, a colossal half a billion dollar bond. I mean, that that's more than I think Bill Clinton spent in the entire 1992 campaign, let alone for the

billion or so that the Trump campaign and the associated people are going to have to drop in the general election that's going on right now. So this is a serious problem for him. Yeah. And there are definitely legal limits on how much, you know, political cash can be used. I don't believe it can be used at all to pay this, you know, $454 million judgment. But he just did that big RNC shakeup, cleaned house, making sure he's got, you know, full of loyalists there, a lot of fundraising consultants, I think, to make sure that they are able to pay whatever legal bills they are legally allowed to pay. And then we've also seen the way that the party apparatus has been used to funnel cash through his businesses, you know, the whole hold events at his hotel, et cetera, et cetera. So I do think part of that house cleaning at the RNC is to make sure that in whatever ways they can possibly, you know, color the law to help bolster his personal finances, they will be in position to do that. But it is an extraordinary moment. I mean, we'll have to see

what direction the court takes. We'll have to see how aggressive Letitia James is in terms of going ahead and fire-sailing assets, seizing assets, putting liens on his accounts. But there's no doubt that, listen, he's a very wealthy man. Half a billion dollars, that was still a lot of money for literally anyone on the planet. Anyone on the planet. And multi-billionaires don't have access to that much cash. Who's got a half a billion dollars just sitting around in cash?

I mean, literally about no one, right? Maybe some drug lord or something like that who has to keep it in cash. I mean, literally about no one, right? Maybe some like drug Lord or something like that, who has to keep it in cash. But, um, so this is, this is, I know there's been a lot of in the past, you know, liberal just always not as rich as he says, et cetera, et cetera, which probably isn't as rich as he says, but he is a very wealthy man. This is enough money that is a genuine threat to his personal, um, cash financial position. There was some other news that I can't even believe that this name has resurfaced, but put this up on the screen. Apparently, Trump may enlist, ready for this, Paul Manafort back into his campaign.

And the way The Washington Post frames this is, you know, just gives me like PTSD. He was criticized for Russia ties. Former campaign manager was pardoned by Trump for bank and tax fraud convictions and accusations. He had hid millions that he made consulting for pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians, including Yanukovych. Yannikovich. You'll recall that whole Konstantin Kalimnik situation to bring up some more blasts from the past in terms of the Russiagate narrative. Manafort passed some polling to Kalimnik, who was tied in with Russian intelligence. And I think this part of the case against Manafort was legitimate. He made millions. He hid it in these offshore bank accounts so we wouldn't have to pay taxes on it. Led this incredibly luxurious lifestyle that he

really didn't have the cash to completely afford, especially not if he was actually paying taxes. So that was what ended up bringing him down. But apparently Trump wants to bring him in, in particular, they say, with regard to organizing the RNC. That's what he did last time. Yeah. Oh, that's true. That is what he did last time. He's a longtime figure in Republican politics going back to, I mean, what, who was his first that he worked for? Richard Nixon. So yeah, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone were kind of OGs back in the day. They had their own firm and then Roger eventually went his own way. Manafort kind of made his big name in Washington, made tens of millions of dollars representing like any regime in the world that wanted to hire him.

This is always what annoyed me, too. They're calling me a Russian stooge. I'm like, he's not a Russian stooge. He's just a paid stooge. He's like, it was like, oh, Azerbaijan. This is the definition of a grifter right here. Yeah, it's like, oh, Azerbaijan? Cool.

You know, any regime out there, no matter who you are, whatever you're doing, what you're asking for, he would rep you. He would take your money. He didn't file for FARA, which is what the Mueller team got him on. It's a foreign agent registration act. Here's the thing. I mean, every lobbyist in town who's lobbying for these governments is technically a violation. Well, they got him on tax and bank fraud. They also got him on tax fraud. And that part was actually, I mean, he was stashing his money overseas in these Caribbean bank accounts and whatever to avoid paying taxes. Not defending the man. He's a very typical D.C. character. Absolutely.

I guess is what I would say. He is far from the only one who will take whatever skeezy client from a horrific, repressive, corrupt regime or whatever, whoever has cash to pay, they're willing to get in bed with. That's who Paul Manafort is. Trump apparently likes the fact that he, you know, that he did time on his behalf and he stayed loyal. He wrote some book about, you know, the state and how he's politically persecuted, et cetera, et cetera. And so Trump wants to get him back in the fold because he appreciated that loyalty. It's not a done deal yet, but at least according to this report, Trump is very inclined towards this because he appreciates the way he stood tall for him.

He didn't take his plea deal, right? Who was his, I forget his debt, but this is the thing. I've blacked all this Mueller stuff out of my head because it was so useless and dumb. I forgot Paul Manafort even existed, to be honest with you. Look, Manafort,

he's not a terrible political operative. He's very old school. He almost certainly would do a fine job at the RNC. He was pardoned, right, by Trump. So he's not technically a felon, I guess, or maybe he was. Maybe he was commuted or something. I'm not 100% sure. But my point is, is just that, look, for the job that they're asking him to do, he'd probably be fine.

He did a fine enough job last time around. The Mueller investigation never found any, you know, trying to influence the RNC or any of these other shenanigans that were going on. So whatever. Who cares? He probably is more competent than some of the other idiots that Trump has around him from time to time. The other thing we wanted to highlight around Trump is that he is pressing hard for a debate with Joe Biden. He made a true social post about this yesterday, also raised it in a recent Fox News interview. Let's take a listen to what he had to say. You want to debate Joe Biden anytime, anyplace?

I'll even debate him in your show. Well, I'll be happy to host it. I'll do it anytime, anyplace. Anytime, anyplace, Crystal. Unfortunately, though, Biden seems to be pressing back a little bit against this, if we could put this up there. He recently was asked about it and said, quote, I don't know if he's serious. I don't know if he's serious when he's asked whether he was going to debate Trump ahead of the 2024 election. The reason that's noteworthy to me, Crystal, is that that is not about will you debate him now. That's if you will debate him ever. At all. And, I mean, increasingly, I don't know, increasingly it does look likely that Biden may back out.

That said, because Trump has committed to the anytime, anyplace, he even said he would participate in a DNC debate, anything that's either with the Commission on Presidential Debates or elsewhere. It does seem like the onus is on Biden to then try and work within that framework. I'm curious. I mean, if I were him, I also wouldn't want to debate, right? You know, you don't necessarily want that on display for everybody. Yeah. I mean, if he could do an even serviceable job, he should do it. Oh, yeah. I agree. As we saw with, I mean, from a democracy standpoint, obviously he should do it. Okay. Let's just talk about political tactics. If we saw with the State of the Union how low the bar is for Joe

Biden, for the media to declare him a victor, I mean, if he can come out in a debate against Trump and even do okay, then I think this would benefit him tremendously because this is the biggest question that people have in their minds. It's certainly one of the biggest questions people have in their minds about Joe Biden. Just is he up to the task? So if you get him on the, you know, whatever the right drug cocktail is that they've put him on before that worked out for the State of the Union, worked out for him several years ago in that debate against Bernie Sanders, if they could have a confidence that he could even perform adequately, adequately, then I think this

would be a win for him because, you know, the expectations for Trump are high. He is seen as a performer. He's seen as, you know, this sort of political animal who can get up in front of a crowd and really do his thing. His debates against Hillary Clinton and the Republican GOP cast of characters back in 2016 are still legendary. That's still the expectation people have for him. The expectations for Joe Biden are literally on the floor. So, you know, that's but that's the question. Does his staff even think that he can perform?

He can meet those incredibly, incredibly low expectations. And I think that's probably what being is being debated behind the scenes right now. So obviously, I mean, I think our position is clear. Democratically, they should all debate. In fact, they should have way more than three debates. The current CPD structure is completely stupid. There were many times in the past where we had a lot more debates, or we could have one big debate and it could be several hours long. There's no reason that foreign policy should be the last, like the ugly stepchild debate. They're always like, the economy debate, the foreign policy. It's like, well, hold on, who asked for that? Also, the current format is totally rigged by the CPD and all that. I've done some monologues on

this. The town hall format as well, which I do like, but as long as it's, it needs to be more raucous. It needs to be less pre-screened. So there are a lot of ways that we could get to that. But if I were the Biden team, and I'm talking purely selfishly, even though I do believe that he should debate, I probably wouldn't do it. Because the vast majority of evidence that we have says that the debates don't matter at all whenever it comes to the polls, unless there is an insane moment. And even then, it has to have been in the media monoculture era. These days, most people know who they're voting for, or they make up their minds close to election day, and their minds are not swayed by a debate clip. It's usually like, hey, what's the price of gas today?

Or like, oh, well, yeah, I guess my bank account is doing well. People vote for all kinds of reasons. My only point being that there's enough political science debate that if you think that the risk is high enough of him having a complete brain short, I wouldn't do it if I were him, which is tragic because I think that's probably where he'll end up. Yeah. Yeah. I need more information about what his actual condition is. Fair enough. To make that judgment, because I agree with you. Typically debates don't matter, even though our perception is that they do and they can temporarily have an impact in the polls, but by and large, geopolitical science says they don't have a huge impact. I think if they were ever going to matter, though, it would be right now.

And that's because that question of his age and his capabilities is so central to people's concerns. So if he was able to turn in a, like I said, an adequate, I don't even want to go to the level of solid, right? An adequate, non-embarrassing, no, remember that time his eye exploded on stage? Nothing the level of solid, right? And adequate, non-embarrassing. No, remember that time as I like exploded on stage, like nothing like that can happen, right? Okay. If he, remember the first debate he had with Trump last time around, he actually won, not because he did such a great job, but because Trump was so freaking obnoxious. If you could guarantee you could turn in that level of performance again, I think it would

be well worth it. And I think it could actually have a lasting impact because, you know, the one-off of him doing all right at the State of the Union, reading from a teleprompter, that is going to fade. People need more proof of life from him before they're going to be comfortable showing up again and handing him another four years. So for that reason, I do think it could potentially be more consequential than debates typically are. So listen, obviously, I'm cheering for them to get in the ring. And I do want to reflect on the fact that already we have sort of accepted and normalized the idea that these people don't have, even people seeking the highest office in the land, don't have to

debate. Joe Biden didn't debate his primary opponents. Donald Trump didn't debate his primary opponents. So it's not like Trump would be able to use against Joe Biden like, oh, you won't even debate. You don't want to debate. I mean, I'm sure he will try to do that. But you can turn right around. OK, well, you wouldn't debate Nikki Haley. You wouldn't debate Ron DeSantis. So we've sort of already broken that norm of expecting these people to have to subject themselves to that process. I think that's a tremendous loss for the country. I genuinely do. Totally agree.

I mean, think about this. The last time that the two of these men debated was the 2020 election back during COVID. Right. That's the last time that we saw either of these men who want to represent us for another four years that were on the stage, and the likelihood that we will see them again on the stage appears to be less and less, which is genuinely— Look, here's the other reason why debates matter. Because sometimes when they become president, you're like, hey, during the debate, you said you were going to do this, and then you didn't do it.

So why did you change your mind? That happens a lot. That's why getting people on the record is so important, not for media purposes, for your purposes, so you can actually hold people accountable. So there's a lot of reasons why this is really, really bad, but unfortunately it does look like that's where things are headed. Yes, indeed. We are expected to get an RFK Jr. vice presidential announcement next week. That's right. Next Tuesday. And there was a leak, some potentially accurate, I don't know, reporting from Mediaite. They seem to have an in in the RFK Jr. campaign,

Mediaite. Maybe. We'll see. Yeah, we'll see if this pans out. I'm still skeptical of some of this. We'll talk about it. Okay. So here's who they are saying is going to be RFK's pick. A woman named Nicole Shanahan, who they describe as a California-based attorney and entrepreneur, once married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. That is who Mediaite is claiming that RFK Jr. is going to pick. Shanahan has apparently already been involved with the campaign, at least from an arm's length distance. She was the one who funded and put together that Kennedy Super Bowl commercial that we showed you that was like heavy on the Kennedy nostalgia that we both thought

was very effective and very smart. And so she, obviously having divorced Sergey Brin, has a good amount of money to lend to the effort. And according to their source at Mediaite, that is a key part of his interest in her. They said, quote, she might be infusing millions of dollars in the campaign to help fund the ballot initiative. That's the effort to get his name on the ballots, which makes her attractive financially. However, this source, and I guess this is why they're leaking it to Mediaite, they say she lacks the qualifications to actually do the job. They also say that she aligns with him on numerous issues.

The campaign is also looking for a candidate who can help finance the ballot access initiative that will be crucial if Kennedy stands a chance of competing in the election. So to be honest with you, this is the first I'd heard of her. Apparently there was some dust up with the Wall Street Journal where they had reported that while she was separated from Sergey Brin, but still married to him, not yet divorced, that she and Elon Musk had an affair. Musk vociferously denied this. It was also reported this was like, you know, real rupturous, one could understand, and his relationship with Sergey Brin. So there was that whole situation.

Everyone involved, I think, basically denies this happened, but the Wall Street Journal stands by it. So make of that what you will. Listen, I have no idea. Yeah. From what I heard, he ain't no Boy Scout himself, Mr. Brin. I'll just leave it at that. But from what we understand, at least with some of the reporting, the only reason I knew who she was is because she was married to Sergey Brin, but also because I knew that she had donated quite a bit of money to the RFK Jr.

Super PAC previously, which does raise some questions here about pay to play if she does get the eventual tap for vice president. Don't forget, this is not 100% done. RFK Jr. was asked about this last night by Chris Cuomo. He said he was considering her. He did not say that she was officially the pick or any of that. We still have Aaron Rodgers, who was in the running, Mike Rowe, some of these other individuals, Tulsi Gabbard as well, Andrew Yang, apparently. These are all people that the domain names, at least for all these people, had been registered. They'd been approached. We don't know who is in the running or not. Tulsi was asked, I would know about running as Trump's vice

president. She did seem to answer affirmatively as if she would be willing to do something like that. Let's put this up there on the screen in terms of the reporting. This is from a guy I really trust, Teddy Schleifer. We've had him on the show previously. He does a really good job covering Silicon Valley specifically. And he says, forget Aaron Rodgers. What if the next vice president is Nicole Shanahan? There's a lot of buzz in the RFK Jr. circle that Shanahan, who is that philanthropist and the native of Oakland where Kennedy VP is soon to take place, could be the choice. Of course, no decision is final. This is from the RFK Jr. campaign itself.

They say, oh boy, this media, they were sure about Aaron. Now they're sure about Nicole. Tomorrow they'll be sure about somebody else. The truth is they're just going to have to wait until we all get to celebrate Bobby's brilliant running mate together in 10 days. While I can't share a name, I will say I could not be more thrilled with this decision. He ran a thorough process and he has chosen a vice president who is truly worthy of the American people. So I guess that will be the big question, Crystal, as to who exactly he does pick. I am not as sure maybe as she is that the pick is actually certain because this is what people do all the time. They float them

and then see what the reception is. Aaron Rodgers, maybe how would the sports world freak? How can he handle the attention? What about Mike Rowe? Mike Rowe seems to have, Mike Rowe posted positively about it. What about Jesse Ventura? Ryan and I talked about that.

I actually think Jesse would be a cool pick. I like Jesse. Jesse's wild. He's a wild man. That's why I love him. You can't control that man, let me tell you. He's going to do what he's going to do. If we're going for it, let's go for it, okay? Let's not pick some Google heiress or whatever. Let's pick somebody who's really going to shake things up because that's what he's claiming. So anyways, I have no idea. That said, though, the recent actions by the White House show that they're still not 100 percent writing off the RFK Jr. campaign. They are definitely still looking at him as a little bit of a threat. Yeah. So let me get to that in one minute. I just want to say a couple more things about

Nicole Shanahan. First of all, if it is her, it does say something about the way they're thinking about the biggest challenges in the campaign. It reveals that having the money to get on the ballot is the number one. So then maybe it's a good strategy. Yeah. If you if you were primarily concerned about electoral appeal, I mean, no offense to Nicole Shannon. This is the first I've ever heard of her. I have zero opinion of her, positive, negative or otherwise, although it does say that she was a bundler for Pete Buttigieg. So I do hold that against her. And I'll tell you a little bit more about what we know about her politics in a minute. But, you know, if you were really looking for an electoral pop, I think you would go for more of a celebrity household name.

Right, Aaron Rodgers. To add to the Kennedy name, you know, I think that probably would make more sense. I don't know necessarily, Aaron. I mean, maybe. People freaking love these, you know, know, athletic. I said last time you should pick him. It's just, it's a headline. It's everybody in America. Everyone talk about it. You couldn't help but talk about it. This, you know, Nicole Shanahan, no one knows who she, very few people know who she is. So it doesn't really impact the ticket one way or another. I mean, and perhaps that is part of the calculus too, that RFK Jr. wants to be the guy on the ticket, right? If you're RFK Jr. and Jesse Ventura, Jesse Ventura is a gigantic personality.

You are not going to outshine Jesse Ventura. No, I don't care who you are in this great nation. You are not going to outshine Jesse Ventura. So perhaps that's part of the calculus as well. Her politics up to this point, she's been very focused on, you know, what would read as sort of traditionally liberal positions. She's been very focused on reproductive health and justice. She talked in this interview that she gave to Teddy Schliefer a while ago, not in connection to this RFK Jr. chat. But she talked about how that was really important to her.

She talks a lot about the environment being very important to her. Of course, that has been part of Bobby Kennedy's career as a lawyer as well. So you can see how they may be simpatico there. I haven't seen anything about vaccines or COVID or any of those pieces that were more sort of traditional, standard, liberal positions that were at least identified in this interview, which also meshes with the fact that she was apparently behind Pete Buttigieg last time around. So anyway, that's the little bit that we know about her. But yes, Sagar, you are correct that there is apparently this is a great display of pettiness, I think, coming from the White House. So on St. Patrick's Day, they hosted at the White House with Joe Biden, like the entire Kennedy clan minus RFK Jr.

Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. Kennedy family sans RFK Jr. poses with Biden at the White House. I mean, if you look at the picture, I don't think we have the picture. We should have grabbed that. But if you look at the picture, I mean, there's dozens of Kennedys there and very conspicuously absent. RFK Jr. In addition, Kerry Kennedy, one of Mr. Kennedy's sisters, posted that picture of the family on Twitter at the White House with Mr. Biden and said, President Biden, you make the world better. What a lie. Mr. Biden responded

to the Post Saga from one proud Irish family to another. It was good. Mr. Biden responded to the post-sogger, from one proud Irish family to another, it was good to have you all back at the White House. So definitely a pointed jab there at RFK Jr. And they've also enlisted Liz Smith and others to directly try to combat the third-party efforts, not only from RFK Jr., but Cornel West, Jill Stein, and potentially others. Yes. Look, I think it's very- They're taking it seriously, which they need to. They should take it seriously. Well, and that's, look, maybe you changed my mind a little bit. One of the reasons why I said Aaron Rodgers, because everybody knows Aaron Rodgers. He's super famous. And that would possibly lead to a groundswell of campaign donations, and then you

can get on the ballot. The other way is you pick a rich lady, and she pays for your ballot access. Right. Not a bad strategy. So if anything, let's just give on the ballot. The other way is you pick a rich lady, and she pays for your ballot access. Not a bad strategy. So if anything, let's just give people the option. Everything is about options, about putting your name on that ballot. If it's going to cost $25, $30, $50 million or something like that, it's probably just more efficient to pick somebody

who has that on tap or who knows a bunch of other rich people who are bundlers. So it could be that that is the correct strategy, and especially if this is an inoffensive pick, you know, in some ways, you know, RFK Jr., just because he is such a lightning rod in so many ways, you pick somebody who's a blank slate and people don't know very much about, that's also not terrible. You know, Aaron himself, him and Bobby are very aligned on certain policy issues, specifically whenever it comes to COVID, that could lead to more of a valence on the campaign that he doesn't want. He wants it to just be blank slate such that you can project anything that you want on top of it. And that's probably his best bet to eat into any of the margins

whenever it comes to the general election. I don't know. We'll see. I mean, number one hurdle is getting on the ballot. So if this is going to help you achieve that aim, it probably is the right goal. Again, with all the caveats that we don't even really know if this is Nicole Shanahan is going to be the pick or not. Although, listen, in addition to being in Oakland, which she, what is from, whatever, she is from Oakland. They also did register Kennedy Shanahan and, you know, that, but they also registered another number of different ones. So signs are pointing that she's at least in the running. That's confirmed by Amaryllis Fox that she was certainly considered, although obviously they're not saying whether she is the pick yet or not.

We will all wait and find out next week. Last piece here, I just had to get this in because I love this article. With the St. Patrick's Day Irish-American tie-in, Al Jazeera did a great write-up about how Ireland is disowning Joe Biden as one of their native sons. Put this up on the screen. Ireland, they say, has long been one of Palestine's foremost Western supporters. Country was the first EU member to endorse the Palestinian state. And after October 7, Irish lawmakers were among the first in the West to call for a ceasefire. The Irish public support is even more robust than their politicians. About 80% of Irish people believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Many have called for a boycott of a White House meeting that just occurred in light of this

fierce support. An Israeli minister recently told Palestinians to go to Ireland or the desert. And so the Irish public has largely turned on Joe Biden in November. A mural of Biden and his ancestors' hometown was spattered over with red paint, along with the words genocide, Joe. But they go on to interview also a bunch of Irish Americans who are similarly disgusted with the Israel, the unconditional support of Israel and the aiding and abetting of, what they and I see and the ICJ says is plausibly a genocide. And so lots of great quotes here about just how disgusted they are with Joe Biden. You know how seriously he takes his Irishness and how much he loves being part of this tribe.

That said, Crystal, the Irish PM was here in Washington like yesterday and I think talked to Biden at the gridiron dinner. So I don't know, maybe it's not. He said some pretty pointed things, though, about Palestinian civilians. What's his name? Varadkar? Leo Varadkar, I forget. I also, they refer to him as something different. I'm not even gonna try and pronounce it.

It starts with a T. Tayshia or something like that. Whatever. Sorry, Irish people. I'm marrying into an Irish family. Betraying this right now. I guess I should know this. But it's one of those where...

Anyway, as I understand it, he's still here. Mr. Varadkar was here in Washington. I know for sure at this very fancy party, because there were images that came out of him and Biden. But you are right that Biden takes his Irishness very, very seriously, to the point where he was like, didn't want to meet, he didn't want to, what was it, appear too obsequious to the royal family because of his Irish American heritage, which is a whole other thing that I won't get into right now. Yeah. So apparently the prime minister made some very pointed comments about why the Irish

have such historic empathy with the Palestinians, with Biden having to stand there. Oh, that makes sense. So that did occur. Okay. At the same time, there has been a titanic development in the real estate market. We brought everybody the details previously of a lawsuit filed against the National Association of Realtors by a group of sellers who are saying that they're buying and selling commission prices were artificially high, thus seeking and taking money away from them. So let's go and put this up there on the screen. As a result of that successful lawsuit, there has now been an

agreement by the National Association of Realtors that will do away with the automatic 6% commission in which the buyer's agent splits the commission with the seller. So I know that this is a little bit complicated, but effectively what it boils down to is that the taking away of this automatic commission-free structure, commission structure, which has been in place, Crystal, for now the last 30 years, it will open up and reduce the amount of commission that both sellers and buyers will sell overall. Currently, as I said, the national average of real estate commission is 5.57%, roughly six, especially in a higher end market. It is now being projected that that will

drop to some 1 to 1.5%, meaning that the sellers will be able to hold on to a significant chunk more of their money and that the automatic nature in which the buyer's agent does not take a fee from the buyer and then splits the commission with the seller takes away any potential conflict of interest where the buyer technically is working for the seller takes away any potential conflict of interest where the buyer technically is working for the seller, has a direct financial incentive to possibly work and to collude and to keep prices artificially high. This means that the lack of upfront fee gives consumers a lot more optionality. They could then opt into entering a negotiation with that buyer's agent in the beginning and be like, look,

okay, we will pay you a 3% fee, but I need a ton of concierge service. No, I'm actually only going to pay you 10 grand. I'm just going to pay you cash upfront. So it's going to open up all kinds of interesting possibilities. And most importantly, this is a huge, huge blow to anybody who is in the real estate game right now and who has been, frankly, making a killing from what I really perceive here as like a cartel rent-seeking behavior. The more and more that I research the entire thing. So the way it currently works, just to try to break this down,

because to be honest with you, even though I've purchased a home, I didn't really know the ins and outs of how this all worked, which is partly by design that you don't even really understand the fee structures and what you're signing up for here. So the seller's side pays both agents,

both the agent representing the seller and the agent representing the buyer. Okay, if you are the buyer's agent, you know from the MLS listings what the commission is going to be on each of the houses that you're showing. Your client doesn't know that. So you have an incentive to show and prioritize

and hype for your client the listings that are going to secure the highest commission for you, not necessarily the listings that are most ideal for your client. Now, of course, they would claim, and I'm sure this is true in many cases, that listen, if you don't do a good job and you don't sell any house, then you don't get any commission. And so you have every incentive to actually show the listings that will be most specifically tailor-made for your client. But you do have this financial incentive to show the ones

with the highest commissions, which again, your client has no access to and no way of really knowing in advance what the commission is going to be in any given house. In addition, because of the way this market works right now, and we should say this works this way in the US, it doesn't work this way in most of the world, because of the way this works and the fee being paid and fronted all on the seller's side, that has also, that basically gets put into the price of the house. And so it artificially elevates house prices by a certain amount as well. So one of the expectations here is that this change in the fee structure and making this all transparent is going to potentially lower the actual listing

prices of houses overall. Not that I'd expect a huge shift, but this could be reflected in housing prices. Now, if you are the seller of a home, this is going to impact you because you're no longer on the hook for both sides of the transaction. If you are a buyer, now, ultimately, you are going to be paying this in terms of a higher housing price. Instead of paying it through your mortgage, your housing, higher housing price, you're now likely to have to pay something up front. So I do think for a lot of buyers, they will experience this as inferior

because now you're going to have to pony up some cash to your agent up front. And, you know, previously you were able to, this was reflected in your mortgage, so this is rolled into, you know, your expectation of everything and your agreement with the bank, et cetera. Now you may actually need to have that cash up front, which eats into what you can pay in terms of down payment. So I don't want to say that this is like, you know, all around going to be perceived as advantageous for everyone, even though I agree when this shakes out in the long term, I do think it is going to lead to lower costs being paid by both the buyer and the seller, a much more transparent market and incentives being much more aligned between the agents themselves and the clients they're representing. Yeah. And then to address that, because I think it's a fair concern, we can put this Axios piece up on the screen. The reason I love this is because it's just all about options now, whenever you're buying and you're selling. So for example, as you just said,

how will the buyers get paid? There's multiple possibilities. You can have a flat fee out of the buyer's pocket. So if you have the cash, great, you can just pay a simple fee. Or the buyer will agree to pay then a percentage of that sale price to the broker or even pay possibly an hourly rate. Even better, maybe skip having a broker at all. And then third, the real estate industry is saying that a seller can still cover the buyer's agent fee. It will just have to be negotiated in the deal process. So let's say you want to roll this all into your mortgage and you want to make it a part of this consolidation. Fine. That's within your purview. This means then that you have to be a little bit more educated,

but you have a lot more financial options. And, you know, I'm not going to look right now, the average sale price in this country, $417,000 is according to the Fed. 6% of that is 25 grand. That's a lot of money. That's a third of the average salary in an entire year. Sure, when you spread it out across a mortgage, you may not notice it as much, but let's not ignore this, okay? That's how people in real estate have been making a ton of money, just flipping buys and sells and representing that. So this makes it so that especially lower quality realtors, they're done. Because what it means is that when you drop that average price to 1 to 1.5, all of the chaff that is currently amongst the 1.5 million people in this country who have a real estate license, the vast majority of those people very rarely make a sale in the

first place. And this explains, I tweeted this kind of as a joke, but I think I've said it previously. I always wondered, you know, you always meet people in your life who are just like going around and they're always like, I'm studying for my real estate license. And I was like, why? I really wonder, are they really making all this money? And, you know, reading the details of this, I'm like, oh yeah, they're making a ton of money. It's like you don't have to do all that much, especially in a high cost of living area where, I mean, here in the DMV, the average sale price in some neighborhoods in the DMV is a million bucks. So 6% of that is $60,000 that you can make off of a single transaction. You just do two and you've made a pretty good nut for some part-time work. All of that going away just

means that there's more power, and ultimately too, for sellers. Because housing is such a holder of equity and is the number one way that people reach a positive net worth in this country, this is very advantageous because it means that you can hold on to a lot more of your home equity whenever you do come time to realize that gain, if and ever, that you need to. Again, $25,000, maybe $50,000, up to $70,000, depending on the price of your home in any area, that can mean quite a bit for retirement, for inheritance, for a lot of other purposes. Listen, it is truly a seismic shift. And I mean, the industry is reacting as such. It really is huge. I think there'll probably be a period where things haven't settled out, where there's

all kinds of different arrangements and people are trying to figure it out, probably settle into some new model that is sort of the typical and the standard, the default, while you'll have more optionality, as Sagar is pointing out. But I think it'll take a while for that to shake out exactly how this is going to look going forward. You know, I do think in terms of the number of people who are realtors, especially like you said, those who aren't super high performing, it is going to be a real blow to their livelihood. I support a just transition

for them, but I think overall it will make the market better for, you know, the people who are actually trying to buy and sell homes. And by the way, you know, we could put this next piece up on the screen about just where the housing market is. Home prices continue to hit new highs. We had a new all-time high in December. We had a period where prices had basically flatlined, but in most markets, they have either, you know, stayed stable or continued to rise.

And prices, especially with mortgage rates being significantly higher than they used to be, prices and affordability, it really is a disaster for people who are trying to get their first foot on the rung of the home ownership ladder. And I'm sorry, guys, but they are not predicting that there's any relief in sight in terms of prices. And the expectation is that potentially this shift could lead to even more housing demand and more churn in the market, but you still have a problem of low inventory that is really hindering things and really keeping prices at that incredibly elevated level. The likelihood actually is that the housing market is only going to heat up even more because interest rates are already dropping.

I believe that the average mortgage is somewhere around 6% right now. The Fed is projected to cut rates sometime in the middle of the summer. We'll probably settle around like 4%, which is not all that much higher than where it was in 2021. That's enough where there'll be some normalization. The sellers will then have been relatively comfortable with the fact that prices have not been moving as much previously and they're willing to press the button. But the problem has been on new construction. We don't have a lot of new construction inventory that's coming online. And in general, especially here in the Northeast, we have a massive housing crisis.

Same thing in the coast. So I did a whole monologue yesterday about census, about where people are moving. Unsurprisingly, I went and I actually sent this to our group thing. If you look at new housing inventory, dramatically, it is all in these red states with very little housing regulation.

It's Texas, it's Florida, it's Tennessee. It's a lot of places with decent enough weather, but more importantly, they just have a lot more inventory. They have cheaper, it's Florida, it's Tennessee. It's a lot of places with decent enough weather, but more importantly, they just have a lot more inventory. They have cheaper stuff that's coming online. We got to build more. We got to build more. And that's the bottom line. And we got to help people too, because these prices have gotten so high. And this is something that Joe Biden floated like a small solution for, but we got to help people with the down payments because as it stands right now, the number of people who are first-time homebuyers who rely on mom and dad or some other wealthy friend or relative in order to be able to front a sufficient down payment has gone to all-time highs, putting it out of reach

and locking in these generational wealth trends where if you don't have the luxury of growing up with a mom and dad who can front you that down payment, you're likely to be locked out of the housing market for a very long time, if not forever. On inheritance too. So I have been learning a lot about tax law and I've learned about the step-up basis. I know we've talked about this previously. What an insane law where if you, and this is the way that people really transfer wealth in this country. It's not about handing over dollars. You put all your money into real estate. Let's say you buy a house 35 years ago. Whenever you die, the value of the house gets quote unquote stepped up to your heirs, meaning

that let's say you bought a house for 100 grand and it's worth a million bucks. Well, upon your death, when it transfers for your heirs, if they sell it, they don't pay any capital gain over the value of where it was when you died, not the value of the $100,000, the $900,000 capital gain. So you actually have less of an incentive to sell if you want to have a more tax efficient way of transferring things over to your heirs. It's a total loophole. And obviously you can understand why that leads to all these real estate barons just passing stuff down because then you can take, you know, refinance or whatever to pull value out of the mortgage and then never pay any tax on any of this. So anyway, the more I learn about this, I'm like, man, this tax code is so rigged in favor of the rich.

It is the most insane thing I've ever learned. Although to be honest, listen, this is a whole other conversation, but given what we're funding in Israel right now, I've never been more anti-tax than I am right now. I'm feeling more libertarian every day. Like, you know what? These people got a freaking point. Well, what would be good is some sort of like, the taxpayer has to have a referendum on certain things that they have to pay for.

I actually, I kind of like that idea. 100% support that. Because then, you know, anytime they want to spend extra money, like Ukraine or something like that, they want 60 billion. It's like, okay, well then you have to prove as to why. I don't know that. Because then, you know, anytime they want to spend extra money, like Ukraine or something like that, they want $60 billion. It's like, okay, well, then you have to prove as to why. I don't know if anybody knows this, but the total amount of our tax revenue that brought in last year is now only enough to pay the interest on the debt right now.

So there's a lot that's going on. Let's move on to the next part about Boeing. This is something we wanted to make sure we got into the show, an update on the story we did yesterday. The Boeing whistleblower John Barnett, who allegedly died by suicide, his friend came forward in an interview and said that there was no way that he killed himself, that he had told her previously if he was ever found dead by suicide, that it was almost certainly a result of the murder.

Well, we are learning even more about the circumstances of his death, which are very fishy. Let's put this up there on the screen. It turns out Mr. Barnett was planning to drive home to Louisiana after his deposition on March 8th, before Boeing lawyers asked him to stay one more day to finish his testimony. His body was then found on the morning of March 9th. So he was planning on going home. He stayed an extra day last minute. As result of that last minute stay, he is then found dead the next morning. Again, Charleston police claiming that this is an apparent suicide from the circumstances, but a lot of the details do not continue to add up. Let's go to the next one. As they show, Mr. Barnett was planning to start that drive after completing that testimony, and then something, quote, happened overnight at his

hotel room, and he is found dead the next morning. This is direct testimony here from the people who were involved. They say John was really tired and he didn't want to testify anymore that day. He wanted to drive home to Louisiana starting that evening as he had planned, told his mom he'd be home on Sunday, and it took him two days to drive home. I suggested we break for a week or two. The Boeing lawyers took the position. No more depositions could be taken until Mr. Barnett had completed his testimony. Let's go to the next part here. This is especially important. The previous day, Barnett was on a roll. The video camera had recorded the event. He testified for four hours in questioning. This was following seven hours of cross-examination

by Boeing lawyers. He was really happy telling his side of the story, excited to field our questions, and he was doing a great job. Quote, it was explosive stuff. As I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, this is the best witness I've ever seen. At one point, says his lawyer, the Boeing lawyer protested that Barnett was reciting the details of incidents from a decade ago and specific dates without looking at documents. As his lawyer recalled, Barnett fired back, I know these documents inside and out. I have had to live it. So, Crystal, from the interviews, from all the testimony now, this man was an explosive witness with deep knowledge as to Boeing misconduct. And then, by Boeing's own request, he ends up staying an extra day, and he's found dead the next morning. So, you can riddle me

that one if you want to. People can judge for themselves. Yeah, you can make up your own mind. Of events. And this lawsuit was with regards to, you know, he was a longtime Boeing employee. Obviously, according to this account and also interviews he's given, I mean, this has been put on display for the public. He had extraordinarily detailed knowledge. He was an extraordinarily compelling witness. This particular lawsuit had to do with his allegations that he was basically bullied and retaliated against and pushed out because of, you know, raising the concerns, some of which we heard him raise in interviews and have been documented. He wants to go home. Testimony is pushed by the Boeing side to continue for another day. And then he is found dead. And his friend says he told her explicitly that if he was found dead, it was not a suicide. this man is out of the way. They have perhaps never been under as much scrutiny as they are right now. The number of incidents involving Boeing planes that are, you know, happening on

a near daily basis are insane. Of course, the situation with the door plug coming out, you know, and endangering the lives of everyone on board has invited incredible scrutiny, including a potential criminal investigation. So there is a lot on the line for Boeing right now. And Mr. Barnett was right at the heart of that. Yeah. And, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that one of the things that Mr. Barnett had alleged in his whistleblowing lawsuit is charging that Boeing violated the Department of Labor statutes that said it was unlawful to retaliate against a whistleblower. He had alleged whistleblower retaliation, and he was actually seeking compensation from the company as part of this lawsuit, saying he was blackballed and

didn't deserve what he was owed to him because his bosses failed to heed all of the warnings that he had given them. And he said that he was suffering from PTSD as a result of the way that he was treated. So look, I think Boeing is gonna try and say, oh, he's a mentally disturbed individual and all of that. But from all of the testimony that they have right now, I mean, it's just one where, look, so much of it too is so, it's so sketchy.

For example, they say that all of his stuff was packed up, you know, whenever he was found dead. Why would you pack something up if you thought you were, if you're a hoarding commit suicide? I mean, there's a lot of things, you know, in the overall like minute by minute account of his death and of how his body was found and all that. That still doesn't make a lot of sense. This all took place at a Holiday Inn. I'd love to see some camera footage about that room and all that. And potentially even if he was blackmailed, we have no idea. It's certainly possible that he was mentally disturbed and fell pressure to this. But the more that we learn about it,

the sketchier and sketchier the circumstances get. So just wanted to flag that for everybody. There was one other, well, there were a number of pieces of information in this report that were new as far as I know. I recommend you read it. This was Yahoo, I believe, that put this all together. And one of the things that they said was that when he was found, there was some sort of a note that was with him. We don't know the contents of that note. We don't know what, you know, it allegedly says or didn't say. So that's another thing to keep an eye on. But obviously, massive, massive questions here about the circumstances surrounding his death. Okay. All right. All right. Let's move on to the very latest out of Israel and especially with regards to our government's unconditional support for their assault and annihilation of the Gaza Strip.

We have more rhetorical pushback from the Biden administration, especially vis-a-vis Bibi Netanyahu. This is Jake Sullivan yesterday talking about how Biden rejects the straw man that Bibi has laid out, that invading Rafah is necessary to beat Hamas. Let's take a listen to how he framed that. The Israeli government is now talking about launching a major military operation in Rafah. The president and the prime minister spoke at length about Rafah today. The president explained why he is so deeply concerned about the prospect of Israel conducting major military operations in Rafah of the kind it conducted in Gaza City and Khan Yunis. First, more than a million people have taken refuge in Rafah.

They went from Gaza City to Khan Yunis and then to Rafah. They have nowhere else to go. Gaza's other major cities have largely been destroyed. And Israel has not presented us or the world with a plan for how or where they would safely move those civilians, let alone feed and house them and ensure access to basic things like sanitation. Second, Rafah is a primary entry point for humanitarian assistance into Gaza from Egypt and from Israel. An invasion would shut that down, or at least put it at grave risk, right at the moment when it is most sorely needed. Third, Rafah is on the border with Egypt, which has voiced its deep alarm over a major military operation there, and has even raised questions about its future relationship with Israel as a

result of any impending military operation. Now, the president has rejected and did again today, the straw man, that raising questions about Rafah is the same as raising questions about defeating Hamas. That's just nonsense. Our position is that Hamas should not be allowed to save Haven and Rafah or anywhere else, but a major ground operation there would be a mistake. It would lead to more innocent civilian deaths, worsen the already dire humanitarian crisis, deepen the anarchy in Gaza, and further isolate Israel internationally. More importantly, the key goals Israel wants to achieve in Rafah can be done by other means. On the call today, President Biden asked the prime minister

to send a senior interagency team composed of military, intelligence, and humanitarian officials to Washington in the coming days to hear U.S. concerns about Israel's current Rafah planning and to lay out an alternative approach that would target key Hamas elements in Rafah and secure the Egypt-Gaza border without a major ground invasion. So there you go. Again, Sagar, I'm curious your reaction, but, you know,

sort of upping the ante in terms of the level of rhetoric. What I'm not hearing is still any actual concrete policy change. Look, I think that they're trying, I mean, from their perspective, they have tried to delay this as long as they have. They believe that it was, they believe it's been successful at least so far because it hasn't happened. From what I understand, there is a new hostage negotiation, temporary ceasefire, thing happening right in Qatar. I don't know, lived through this movie before. Remember when we were supposed to get that done before Ramadan? We've lived through many of these movies before.

That said, people are still talking. It's not necessarily a bad thing. They're trying to forestall it. At the very least, I think what the Biden administration has tried to do is hold off any sort of assault during the month of Ramadan, which the Israelis keep saying that they won't do, but then they still haven't done it, at least so far. I'm not exactly sure. What I do know is that increasingly, that from the White House's perspective, there's been spit in the face now so many times

that they are beginning to look ridiculous where they're like, well, we've asked the Israelis to do this and it's not happening. Well, we've asked the Israelis to do this and it's not happening. And they rely on obfuscations or just non-acknowledgement. And in this particular case, if there is a Rubicon cross with Rafah invasion,

it would just be even more humiliating to them. But again, from the Israeli perspective, why is there, why would they heed their warning? There's no reason to do it. Biden literally said himself on tape, on camera that he will never condition aid to Israel. He says I will never leave Israel. That's like, okay. So you can have Jake Sullivan on here, pushing back on your straw men all you want. You said you would never leave Israel. You said you would never condition aid, you know, specifically called out Iron Dome. But, you know, in this same sentence where he's supposedly laying out a red line, he's immediately saying, well, there really is no red line. And again, words are fine.

Bibi does not care about words. That is very clear. So they had to escalate from like, you know, those leaks that used to come where they're having tough conversations to now coming to the podium and doing some rhetorical pushback and, you know, greenlining Schumer's speech, calling for a new governor. These, you know, these things are noteworthy.

I'm going to show you a few more noteworthy comments from other Democratic politicians. As long as there is no change in policy, it literally doesn't matter. And I don't think that they have pushed back anything with regard to Roth. Remember, we were looking at those reports when Bibi started talking about going into Roth and it became clear they had these plans saying, well, they're not really ready to do this right now. We saw this in Haratz had a whole analysis of like, they're 100% going to go in, but they're not prepared to,

they don't have the troops on the ground. They don't have the plan worked up, et cetera, et cetera. So it's no surprise that has taken a while for them to be able to execute on these plans. But make no mistake about it, Jake Sullivan calling them out for their straw man is not going to dissuade them from continuing the horrors that we have seen, as none of the rhetoric has dissuaded them from continuing the horrors that we have seen as none of the rhetoric has dissuaded them from continuing, for example, starving this entire population. Put a pin in that because I've got more on that. I think part of the context, let's put this next piece up on the screen, for why you're seeing this different rhetoric from the Biden White House is because they have finally belatedly realized that his unconditional support for Israel is a disaster for his electoral aspirations. This NBC News report is so revealing

on a number of levels. So headline here, behind the scenes, Biden has grown angry and anxious about reelection effort. In a private meeting at the White House in January, allies of the president just told him his poll numbers in Michigan and Georgia, kind of important states, had dropped over his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas. Both are battleground states. He narrowly won four years ago, as we all know. He began to shout and swear. A lawmaker familiar with the meeting said he believed he had been doing what was right despite the political fallout, he told the group. So I think that part is in some ways the most revealing, Sagar, because it's not like he's rethinking

what he did. He still thinks he's right. He's just upset about the political fallout, which is why they're attempting this messaging shift from we're behind Israel to we have problems with what Israel is doing. We're just too impotent and ineffective to actually change course. Yeah, that makes sense. At the same time, you know, this also very noteworthy, Nancy Pelosi is even now directly calling out Israel for their starvation policy. Let's take a listen to what she had to say. The issue of food in Gaza is a very big one. And either the Prime Minister Netanyahu is unaware or ill-informed, but the head of the world's central kitchen, Jose Andres, who's there, as you mentioned, Cindy McCain, World Food Program, and any other of these entities that are there to feed

the people will tell you there is starvation, there is famine, there is dehydration, because Israel has not allowed the food and the humanitarian assistance to go right in. So this is significant, Sagar, because in order to be in accordance with American U.S. law, you cannot ship weapons to a country that is blocking humanitarian aid. And so the fact that Nancy Pelosi is saying that outright is basically an admission that we have been violating U.S. law. Israel's just signed, been compelled to sign this letter, you know, certifying that they're not blocking humanitarian assistance, which is just a complete lie. And we also had Senator Van Hollen similarly indicating they are not in compliance and saying it very directly. Let's take a listen

to that as well. You said last week, senators need to read the classified report prepared by the director of national intelligence about the Netanyahu government claims about that agency. You seem to be implying that the links to terror groups are unfounded. Oh, there's no doubt that the claim that Prime Minister Netanyahu and others are making that somehow UNRWA is a proxy for Hamas are just flat out lies. That's a flat out lie. If you look at the person who's in charge of operations on the ground in Gaza for UNRWA, it's about a 20-year U.S. Army veteran. You can be sure he is not in cahoots with Hamas. Netanyahu has wanted to get

rid of UNRWA since at least 2017. That's been his goal, not just in Gaza, but also in the other places you talked about. And if you get rid of UNRWA in Gaza today, it is the primary distribution system for food and aid. So if you cut off funding for UNRWA in Gaza entirely, it means more people will starve, more people won't get the medical assistance they need. And so it would be a huge mistake to cut them off. Israel has until March 24th to turn in a letter. They reportedly did so. Are they in compliance? No, they're not. Not as of today. And you're right. This is a very important tool that the Biden administration's put forward applies to Israel and any other country that receives U.S. military assistance. Will President Biden's administration say that they're not in compliance? Are you confident?

I hope they will, because President Biden himself has repeatedly said that the Netanyahu government is unnecessarily restricting desperately needed humanitarian assistance. I mean, the president has said it a number of times. He said no excuses. So it may be that the minister of defense in Israel signed this, but I cannot imagine a scenario right now where Secretary Blinken can find that that promise is credible and reliable when the day it was signed, clearly the Netanyahu government is not in compliance because we see that they're continuing to restrict humanitarian assistance. So then the, I'm not criticizing here because I think that was a good exchange, but the

follow-up question, Soccer, is, okay, well, are you going to vote for continued military aid given the fact that you're certifying that they are not in compliance? Because that's really the bottom line here. You can express your bleeding heart liberalism by saying Israel is starving Gazans and they're blocking humanitarian aid, all of which is completely true. But if you're still going to vote for the weapons to ship, what difference does it make what you say? Well, the problem is they're not even voting right now because the Obama, the Biden administration is going around their back doors to ship weapons to them

with no congressional authorization. And this kind of calls back to what we were talking about. Previously, they did this with Ukraine, they're doing it with Israel. Like the imperial state basically just has the ability to ship weapons to whoever they want with no authority whatsoever. I remember eight months ago, they were telling us the Ukrainians were going to run out of weapons.

Then they just devalued the weapon stock of everything so that they could tap even more. It's all fakery. They're doing the same thing right now with Israel. I was thinking about this with regards to this whole bullshit temporary peer situations. If you wanted to build a peer for Americans or infrastructure for Americans, there'd be a whole process. It wouldn't happen. It's the bottom line. And yet when it's, you know, this temporary boondoggle port for some ass covering PR move for the Biden administration, pretend like they care about the fact that people are starving to death. Oh, that can happen right away.

It's like, what the hell is this system that we're operating under? Literally. No, they have total unilateral authority. It's totally wrong. I mean, yeah, the temporary pier, it's going to cost billions and billions of dollars. Nobody voted for it. Nobody authorized it. Nobody has to fund it. The president has the ability to deploy it, use all these forces, and not a single one of us can do a thing. And yeah, I mean, look, often it can be a meme, and it can be low IQ, I think, be like, oh, we have

all this money for people over there and nothing for people over here. But here, you are right. Try building anything in the United States of America. Try building that same temporary pier to benefit Flint, Michigan or whatever. What was that bridge that fell down, like Memphis or something like that? No, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, that's what it was.

There was one in Pennsylvania. It took the governor. He did it fast, and it was still not even as fast as something like this. So it's a digression, but it does show you how we've got all the money in the world for Israel, Ukraine, Afghanistan, anywhere else. But whenever it comes to our own people, it's a lot more difficult, and that's because it's anti-democratic. We've also got health care for Havana syndrome, which is proven officially fake. But, oh, health care for, let's say, you know, the people in East Palestine who were poisoned. Oh, good luck. Good luck.

That's right. Just to underscore how dire the situation is and to rebut the lies that are being pushed now on the Israeli side that, oh, there's no humanitarian crisis. Oh, no one's starving to death. These are all lies, et cetera. Lies that are being pushed, by the way, by AIPAC to our members of Congress, elected officials, by lobbyists right here in D.C. Oxfam has a new report on the specifics of the many ways in which Israel is, in fact, blocking aid. We can put this up on the screen. So they flagged seven different methods that Israel is using to block aid, resulting predictably in the starvation of the entire people. I mean, the level of starvation, hunger, famine in the Gaza Strip has reached absolutely horrifying,

unthinkable levels. And it is, I just have no words for the fact that we are standing by and allowing this to occur. So they say, number one, they only allow aid in via two crossings into Gaza. They are intentionally leading this dysfunctional and undersized inspection system so that even, you know, what goes through those two crossings is minimal and wildly inadequate. They are routinely and arbitrarily rejecting items of aid as having dual military use. We're talking about, you know, things like fuel generators, including other items vital for a meaningful humanitarian response, like protective gear and communications kit. I know one example I saw, Sagar, is they were blocking tents from coming in after you've

displaced basically this entire population. They've cracked down on humanitarian missions, basically sealing off northern Gaza. That's the area where the level of hunger is the most acute and where the people that we have seen, the children and babies that we have seen literally starving to death are predominantly in northern Gaza. Israel's assault has caught Gaza's own aid workers, they write, and international agencies partners inside a practically uninhabitable environment of mass displacement and deprivation. So the aid workers themselves obviously subject to these same conditions. So how can they perform their duties to help the rest of the population when they

themselves are struggling and starving and suffering under severe deprivation? Israel is rendered nowhere in Gaza safe, they write, amid the forcible and often multiple displacements of almost the entire population. You displace the entire population, that's going to make aid distribution pretty difficult and dramatically spike the need, which is why there needs to be dramatically more trucks of aid coming into Gaza after October 7th than there were before. And they're not even able to meet what was going in before, not even close. And they say their attacks are disproportionate and indiscriminate upon civilian and humanitarian

assets, including people such as solar, water, power and sanitation plants, UN premises, hospitals, roads and aid convoys and warehouses, even when these assets are supposedly deconflicted after their coordinates have been shared for protection. roads and aid convoys and warehouses, even when these assets are supposedly deconflicted after their coordinates have been shared for protection. That's obviously something we have covered a number of times. But some of the numbers here, 75% of sewage, of solid waste is now being dumped in random sites. 97% of groundwater has been made unfit for human use. And they write the Israeli state is using starvation as a weapon of war, which is just thoroughly undeniable at this point. Yeah, I think it also raises the question about this aid. Are they going to inspect the U.S.

military port whenever we build it or not? Because I'm starting to suspect, given all of this, that there is going to be at least some clearance. And it's like, that is outrageous, right? That they will be flagging things that we are giving as potentially dual use or whatever, which you could claim about anything, right? I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. What was it they rejected a pair of scissors, like medical scissors, because they could have been used as a weapon?

It's ridiculous. I encourage people to go read this for themselves. You really should, because you can actually see it. Yeah, and rejecting things like anesthetics. And so you have children getting amputations. I mean, it's just beyond belief. It doesn't make any sense. And speaking of striking civilian assets, the Israeli military for, I believe, the fourth time has once again raided al-Shifa Hospital.

You can put this up on the screen. This is the Reuters report written very much from a Western perspective, I'll just say. They say Israeli forces killed 20 gunmen in raid at Gaza's al-Shifa hospital, according to the IDF, according to the IDF. In any case, they say the Palestinian health authorities claim this has caused multiple casualties, set off a fierce fire in one of the buildings. Special forces supported by infantry and tanks conducted what they describe as a precise operation based on intelligence. The hospital was again being used by Hamas leaders, were fired upon when they entered the compound, the military said. Al-Shifa, the Gaza Strip's biggest hospital before the war, is now one of the only health care facilities that is even partially operational in the north of the territory, is also housing hundreds of displaced civilians. They have a quote from a father of two

who was nearby. He says, suddenly we started to hear sounds of explosions, several bombings, and soon tanks started to roll. They came from the Western Road and headed toward al-Shifa. Then sounds of gunfire and explosions increased. Footage circulated on social media appeared to show an Israeli tank blocking the main gate of al-Shifa. While this operation was being conducted, they apparently detained at least one journalist for some 12 hours and beat him while they detained him. He was there at al-Shifa to cover whatever this quote-unquote precise operation was going to be.

Put this up on the screen. And said they arrested and beat this journalist. It was their report on what happened. An Al Jazeera journalist who was there with his press fest on, etc. Media watchdogs, they say, are decrying Ismail al Ghul's arrest from al-Shifa hospital where thousands of civilians are trapped. He was there early on Monday with his crew and other reporters to cover the Israeli army's fourth raid into the hospital where thousands of civilians are trapped. Witnesses said al-Jazeera reporter was dragged away by Israeli forces who also destroyed the broadcasting vehicles of news crews at the medical facility. He has since been freed after 12 hours in Israeli custody. That reporter himself said

that after his release that Israeli forces had destroyed media equipment, they had arrested other journalists as well, according to him, that had gathered in a room that was being used by media teams. He said the journalists were stripped of their clothes, forced to lie on their stomachs as they were blindfolded, and their hands tied. This is no surprise, of course, because, Sagar, they have killed at least 95 journalists and media workers, the overwhelming majority of them Palestinians, since October 7th. This is the largest toll of journalists that we have ever seen killed in an offensive like this. And of course, you know, raises, listen, al-Shifa was the place that they claimed had the Hamas command and control center underneath. There was a whole big propaganda campaign around this. Even mainstream pro-Israel

outlets like the New York Times have said they never proffered evidence to match the extraordinary claims that were made not only by the Israelis, but by our own government in the wake of that initial raid. And you see how these things just become normalized, where now they can raid al-Shifa and it, you know, barely gets any attention. And by the way, can arrest and detain journalists so they can't show what is actually happening on the ground. Gee, I wonder what they have to hide. Yeah, we tried to look actually for footage because we wanted to be able to show it here on our show. Let's put this last part up on the screen. This is also very important, is that one of the men who was killed was a member of the Gazan civilian police force who the Biden administration had actually

specifically asked Israel to stop targeting, even though it is, quote unquote, Hamas run, because it is leading to a, quote, total breakdown of law and order and is significantly exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. And I know this may sound facetious, but I actually did some research into this. And kind of the way that we can think about it is Hamas runs the Gaza Strip. So if you're in a civilian capacity, you're technically part of Hamas. So the way that we can think about that is why was de-Baathification during the Iraq War such a bad idea? For those who are not familiar, what we said is that anybody who was part of the Ba'ath party who was under Saddam could no longer be qualified

to serve in government. The thing is, is that just like them in a totalitarian state, well, if you are part of the sewage company, then you're part of the Ba'ath party. If you're a teacher, you're part of the Ba'ath party. If you are part of any civilian administration, that doesn't mean that you cared or you believed in Saddam. It just means that you wanted a job. And so this is very similar. Again, as I understand it from the US point of view as to why there is a significant difference between the militant arm and the civilian arm, a lot of these guys are, quote unquote, Hamas in name only. They never had anything to do with any militancy. It was just in terms of providing some civil administration.

I've been running the damn place for 17 years, so it wouldn't be crazy to think that these people don't exist. Yeah. You've created conditions. Israel has created conditions of absolute desperation, chaos, and anarchy in northern Gaza in particular because they completely destroyed the area. I mean, we've seen the images of the level of devastation, which is very near complete. You have Hamas is the government. So, you know, even if you have civilian police officers who still want to do the job, they're fearful of coming out because they'll get killed like this dude.

Yeah, that's right. So who is supposed to shepherd those aid convoys through and get them to the intended desperate civilian population? Israel sure as hell isn't doing it. They're firing on people who are desperately trying to grab some flour off the truck multiple times, not just the flour massacre that got attention of over 100 Palestinians killed. We've now had multiple incidents of them firing on people who are desperately just seeking food. So this is the reason why the Biden administration has said, hey, stop killing police because there

is no other force of civil society that could create any sort of order. But I mean, at this point, it's honestly too far gone. But I think it just illustrates, once again, the way that things have become normalized in this conflict, the attacks on all sorts of civilian infrastructure institutions. They get sort of floated. There's a PR campaign. They try to convince the media and Biden and what all that we have to do this for Hamas. And then they do it four more times. Either, you know, it says something about how poorly you're executing this war, that this same infrastructure has been, you know, re-inhabited, in your words, by Hamas, or more likely you have been lying this whole time. And I think the fact that they intentionally detained the journalists who were there to cover what was going on is quite indicative

of what is actually happening there on the ground. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Podcaster Lex Friedman recently hosted a roughly five-hour-long debate on Israel-Palestine that was frustrating, combative at times, but nevertheless extraordinarily revealing. The debate featured author and scholar Norman Finkelstein, analyst and researcher Muin Rabbani arguing the Palestinian perspective. On the pro-Zionist side, you had author and historian Betty Morris and YouTuber Stephen Bunnell, also known as Destiny. Now, if your immediate reaction is that one of these individuals doesn't quite fit in with the rest, you are

correct. And it was painfully obvious the entire five hours that Destiny was wildly on side of his depth. In fact, although many of the viral clips from the debate involved Destiny's humiliation at the hands of Norm Finkelstein, the truth is that for most of the debate, he was kind of irrelevant, sitting like a child at the grown-ups table. His presence was nevertheless useful for helping to illustrate the combination of ignorance, willful blindness, and debate bro tricks of the trade that are required to fully defend the Israeli position at this point in time. Benny Morris and Destiny threw every propaganda device in the Hasbara playbook up against the wall to see what would stick.

So let's see how it went in the face of what at this point is an undeniable and indefensible reality. So first up, any good Hasbara campaign has got to start with a fairytale view of history. Now, in this history, the only permitted victims are Jewish people who no doubt were horribly victimized in the Holocaust. And in this history, the only just response to those atrocities is not for the U.S. or the U.K. or Germany or the Soviet Union to provide justice, peace, and safety for the Jewish people, but rather to impose that burden entirely on a people who had nothing to do with the Holocaust and who had, in fact, been by and large living peaceably alongside indigenous Jews for centuries. In other words, the only solution to a European atrocity was to give license to an additional atrocity, the ethnic cleansing of the native Arab-Palestinian population from their own land.

And the only acceptable response of that Palestinian population was then to meekly accept their dispossession. To do otherwise is to prove that Arabs from the beginning were violent, unreasonable, and anti-Semitic. This was a matter of quite a lot of debate at the beginning of the podcast. Here, for example, is Destiny challenging the idea that expulsion, or ethnic cleansing, was a core and necessary element of Zionism from the outset. A claim that gets brought up a lot has to do with the inevitability of transfer in Zionism, or the idea that as soon as the Jews envisioned a state in Palestine, they knew that it would involve some mass transfer of population, perhaps a mass expulsion.

I'm sure we'll talk about Plan D or Plan D at some point. The issue that I run into is while you can find quotes from leaders, while you can find maybe desires expressed in diaries, I feel like it's hard to truly ever know if there would have been mass transfer in the face of Arab peace, because I feel like every time there was a huge deal on the table that would have had a sizable Jewish and Arab population living together, the Arabs would reject it out of hand. So for instance, when we say that transfer was inevitable, when we say that Zionists would have never accepted, you know, a sizable Arab population, how do you explain the acceptance of the 47 partition plan

that would have had a huge Arab population living in the Jewish state? Is your contention that after the acceptance of that, after the establishment of that state, that Jews would have slowly started to expel all of these Arab citizens from their country? Or how do you explain that in Luson a couple of years later that Israel was willing to formally annex the Gaza Strip and make 200,000 or so people those citizens. But I'm just curious, how do we get this idea of Zionism always means mass transfer when there were times, at least early on in the history of Israel and a little bit before it, where Israel would have accepted a state that would have had a massive Arab population in it? Is your idea that they would have just slowly expelled them afterwards? Yes. In fact, expulsion or apartheid is the only logical outcome of establishing a Jewish state in a land that was and is majority Muslim Arab. Zionist leaders at the time were pretty

open about this and about the necessity of violence and conflict with that indigenous population. For example, Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department, said in 1940, quote, "'Between ourselves, it must be clear "'that there is no room for both peoples "'together in this country. "'We shall not achieve our goal "'if the Arabs are in this small country.

"'There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs "'from here to neighboring countries, all of them. "'Not one village, not one tribe, should be left. So, pretty clear cut. And there are plenty of other historical quotes besides that that make it clear early Zionist leaders realized their ideology would inevitably result in conflict with Palestinians. Some acknowledged that Arab resistance was in fact logical and even just, and that they would also fervently resist displacement if the roles had been reversed. Now, it is this point about the reasonable and in fact inevitable nature of Palestinian resistance to Zionism that Muin Rabbani picks up on. that Palestinians in rejecting the original 1948 UN partition plan were out of line,

or even that it was inherently anti-Semitic to reject a Jewish state being established on a portion of their land at all. I mean, one doesn't have to sympathize with the Palestinians to recognize that they have now been a stateless people for 75 years. Can you name any country, yours for example, or yours, that would be prepared to give 55%, 25%, 10% of your country to the Palestinians? Of course not. And so the issue was not the existence of Jews in Palestine. They had been there for centuries. And of course they had ties to Palestine and particularly to Jerusalem and other places going back centuries, if not millennia.

But the idea of establishing an exclusively Jewish state at the expense of those who are already living there. I think it was right to reject that. And I don't think we can look back now, 75 years later, and say, well, you should have accepted losing 55% of your homeland because you ended up losing 78% of it, and the remaining 22% was occupied in 1967. That's not how things work. And I can imagine an American rejecting giving 10% of the United States to the Palestinians. And if that rejection leads to war and you lose half your country, I doubt that 50 years from now

you're going to say, well, maybe I should have accepted that. So they didn't accept the establishment of an explicitly Jewish state because the inevitable outcome was some version of exactly the apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and now out-and-out genocide that we are seeing play out. This was a point that Norman Finkelstein made quite eloquently talking about the version of nationalism Zionism represents. Most theorists of nationalism say there are two kinds of nationalism. One is a nationalism based on citizenship. You become a citizen, you're integral to the country. That's sometimes called political nationalism. And then there's another kind of nationalism, and that says the state should not belong to its citizens. It should belong to an ethnic group.

Each ethnic group should have its own state. It's usually called the German Romantic idea of nationalism. Zionism is squarely in the German romantic idea. That was the whole point of Zionism. We don't want to be Bundists just become a Jewish people in England or France. We want our own state. Like the Arabs in the 23 states. Before we get to the Arabs, let's stick to the Jews for a moment or the Zionists. We want our own state. And in that concept of wanting your own state, the minority at best lives on sufferance and at worst, get expelled. That's the logic of the German Romantic Zionist idea of a state.

That's why they're Zionists. So the truth is, the desires of the early Zionists, especially after the Holocaust, but even before, given the number of violent pogroms in Europe, were completely understandable. As the cause of Black nationalism, a similar nationalist ideology, given the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and other discrimination, also so understandable. But it's also true that though their aspirations were understandable, in reality, Palestine was not a land without a people. And realization of those Zionist

aspirations in Palestine required committing grave injustices against the people who were presently living in that land. Now, in order to accept the fairytale version of history and to accept the current fairytale version of Israel, the version Joe Biden seems to believe wholeheartedly in, where the Israeli government would never intentionally target civilians or engage in apartheid or have ethnic cleansing as a policy goal, in order to accept those Disney versions of reality, you gotta make a bedrock underlying assumption that Western powers in every instance have good intentions and Palestinians in every instance have bad intentions. Now, oftentimes these assumptions are based in racist worldviews in which Westerners are

inherently civilized and Arabs are inherently barbarians. Netanyahu hints at this when he describes their genocidal assault on Gaza as being a conflict between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. This unshakable belief in the goodness of Western powers was evident throughout the debate. In a jaw-dropping moment, Destiny reveals himself to be fully captured by an almost religious devotion to that benevolent view of Western powers.

Take a listen. It was correctly brought up that I believe that Ben-Gurion had, I think Shlomo Benjamin describes it as an obsession with getting validation or support from Western states, Great Britain, and then a couple decades later it becomes- That explains the Suez War, the Suez Crisis. Yeah, exactly. Correct. That was one of the major motivators, the idea to work with Britain and

France on a military operation against Arabs. Imperial stooge. But then the question, again, I go back to, if that is true, if Ben-Gurion, if the early Israel saw themselves as a Western fashion nation, how could we possibly imagine that they would have engaged in the transfer of some 400,000 Arabs after accepting the partition plan? Would that not have completely and totally destroyed their legitimacy in the eyes of the entire Western world? Would it not have been? How not? If you thought the U.S. and the U.K. would object at any point to naked barbarism against Palestinians, then the past several months should have thoroughly disabused you of this notion.

The idea that Israel and its allies are always operating with good intentions is also incredibly apparent in how incredulous Benny Morris and Destiny both are at the notion Israel would intentionally target civilians. Now, you would be very familiar with the arguments that were proffered in that section of the debate. Essentially, both of them argued that if civilians are killed, then they must have been human shields or at the very worst, they were regrettably killed due to the one-off actions of a few rogue soldiers. Such atrocities could not possibly be the result of official Israeli government policy.

Of course, a look at the evidence renders this view absurd. After October 7th, the Israeli Defense Minister announced to the world a top-down policy of complete siege of the civilian population. That collective punishment has continued to a sufficient extent that children are now literally starving to death, and Gaza is now the site of the worst levels of acute hunger in the entire world. This, in and of itself, disproves the fantasy that Israeli governments would never target civilians intentionally. That's to say nothing of the vast destruction and death toll, which is inconsistent with the view that the problem of civilian casualties is simply the result of a few bad apples. The entire Gaza Strip population has clearly been targeted.

Now, in the debate, Muin Rabbani does a phenomenal job of identifying this massive blind spot and hypocrisy when it comes to the judgment of Israeli or Western actions versus Palestinian actions. This particular section has to do with documented Israeli atrocities committed against civilians in Lebanon. Take a listen. It sounds cold to say it, but war is tragic and civilians die. There is no war that this has not happened in in the history of all of humankind. The statement that Israel might take care not to target civilians is not incompatible with a diary entry from someone who said they saw civilians getting killed. I think that sometimes we do a lot of weird games when we talk about

international humanitarian law or laws that govern conflict, but we say things like civilians dying is a war crime or civilian homes or hospitals getting destroyed is necessarily a war crime or is necessarily somebody intentionally targeting civilians without making distinctions between military targets or civilian ones. I think that when we analyze different attacks, or when we talk about the conduct of the military, I think it's important to understand like prospectively from the unit of analysis of the actual military committing the acts, what's happening and what are the decisions being made, rather than just saying retrospectively, oh, well, a lot of civilians died. Not very many, you know, military people died, comparatively speaking. So it must have been war crimes, especially when you've got another side.

I'll fast forward to Hamas, that intentionally attempts to induce those same civilian numbers. Because Hamas is guilty of any war crime that you would potentially accuse, and this is according to Amnesty International, people that Norm loves to cite. Hamas is guilty of all of these same war crimes, of them failing to take care of the civilian population, of them essentially utilizing human shields to try to fire rockets free from attack. Essentially? Essentially, yes. I'm just saying that essentially, in terms of how international law defines it, not how Amnesty International defines it, but Amnesty International describes

times of human shielding, but they don't actually apply the correct international legal standard. You don't know what's the correct international law. You haven't the clue. I absolutely don't know. You haven't the clue. I think you can't find it on Wikipedia. I'm just saying, believe it or not, the entire Geneva Convergence is all on Wikipedia. It's a wonderful website. But I'm just saying that on the Hamas, believe it or not, the entire Geneva Convergence is all on Wikipedia. It's a wonderful website. But I'm just saying, I'm just saying that on the Hamas side, if there's an attempt to induce this type of military activity, attempt to induce civilian harm, that it's not just enough to say like, well, here's a diary entry where a guy talks about how tragic these attacks

are. I think the problem with your statement is that if you go back and listen to it, the first part of it is war is hell. Civilians die. It's a fact of life. And you state that in a very factual matter. Then when you start talking about Hamas, all of a sudden you've discovered morality. And you've discovered condemnation.

And you've discovered intent. Muin absolutely bodied him there. When it's Hamas, the bad intent is assumed. Destiny has zero trouble calling their actions war crimes. When it's Israel, war is hell. And the default assumption is that they were trying to achieve legitimate military objectives and the civilians just got in the way. But double standards and hypocrisy are not the only way of denying Israel is committing war crimes. When left with no other options, one can simply deny basic reality.

Here is Benny Morris resorting to this tactic when confronted with the starvation of Palestinians. As of today, one quarter of the population of Gaza is starving. That means 500,000 children are starving, are on the verge of famine. They keep saying on the verge of famine. They keep saying on the verge of. I have not seen one Palestinian die of starvation in these last four months. Not one. They're always on the verge.

They have been documented cases. I haven't seen them. Yesterday Al Jazeera said six and the day before that they said two. So those are the two. That number probably dies in Israel of starvation also. I don't think there's famine in Israel. There isn't. There isn't in the Gaza Strip either.

It's something which is produced for the Western... There are infants dying due to an engineered lack of access to food and nutrition. I don't think it's engineered. I think if the Hamas stopped shooting, perhaps... Unfortunately, unfortunately... As you said, engineered. I think Amnesty, excuse me, Human Rights Watch called it using starvation as a weapon. That's called engineering. Benny Morris claimed there, I have not seen one Palestinian die of starvation.

Maybe you need to spend some more time on TikTok where you might get actually information versus whatever propaganda networks you are currently being fed from. Yes, Palestinian children and infants are dying of starvation. Yes, it is because of an intentional series of Israeli policies. In fact, Oxfam, as we discussed before, just released a new report detailing the many methods that Israel is using to intentionally starve Palestinians. That includes blocking it entirely, using an arbitrarily bureaucratic and restrictive process to block the aid, indiscriminately targeting civilians, including aid workers, rendering distribution impossible. In the face of these undeniable facts, which are too awful to defend without resorting to outright Nazi rhetoric,

the only option left is just to flat-out deny reality. There's no other choice if you're committed to painting Israel as a moral actor. For his part, Destiny was inclined to pull from the debate bro playbook in order to distract and attempt to put Norm and Muin both on the defensive. One of these tactics was on display as the debate participants argued over whether or not Israel is in fact committing genocide. Now, in this section, Destiny attempted to throw up a smokescreen of complexity to, number one, try to make it appear as if Norm's correct interpretation of the ICJ finding was wrong, thereby dodging the actual implication of that international court's ruling that the South African case alleging genocide was in fact plausible. And two, in order to make the

question of genocide seem so complex and technical that no lay person could possibly understand it, and you're a fool to even try. You also get to enjoy some of Norm's unbridled contempt for destiny in this exchange. Take a look. To even make it to plausible. That is not true. That is not what plausible means. It is absolutely not. You're dead wrong. Mr. Borelli, please don't teach me about the English language. So the declaration of Judge Moyn said that the court is not asked in the present phase. As qualifying. The court is not asked at this present phase of the proceedings to determine whether South Africa's allegations of genocide are well-founded. They're not well-founded. They're not even well-founded.

You said that plausible was a high standard. It is absolutely not. It is a misrepresentation of the strength of the case against Israel, just like the majority of the quotes they have in this case are. And also you said it was an extremely well-founded case. They spend like one-fourth of all of the quotations, some even pulled from the Goldstone report, that actually deal with the intent part, which is, by the way, I think you guys, I don't know if you use the phrase, the dolo specialis,

that the intentional part of genocide. I don't know that term. I think it's called dolo specialis. It's the most important part of genocide, which is proving the highly special intent to commit genocide. It's possible that Israel could- That's mens reum.

No. It should prove it. The mens reum, yes, I understand the state of mind, but for genocide, there is, it's called dolus specialis. It's a highly special intent. Did you read the case? Yeah. Oh, it's a highly special intent, dolus specialis. And if you don't know this obscure legal term, then apparently you can't possibly understand the concept of genocide.

It's a neat way for Destiny to dismiss the targeting of civilians, the collective punishment, the direct quotes of high-level Israeli officials admitting their genocidal intent, because only Destiny at the table possesses this super special knowledge, and so only he is qualified to judge whether Israel has in fact met the bar of this highly special intent. Now, as our friend Yegor details on Twitter, there is nothing magical about the Latin legal term deus specialis. It just means specific intent. In other words, you can't accidentally do a genocide.

You gotta have specific intent, something that Norm and Wien clearly demonstrate in their comments that they fully understand. Furthermore, there is actually debate, for what it's worth, in the international law community about how such intent can be established, since usually, usually, governments do not go around declaring they are doing a genocide. Many scholars argue that as a result, circumstantial evidence could suffice for proving this specific intent to genocide, or dolus specialis, if we're being fancy.

In the case of Israel, however, we don't really have this problem, since everyone from Bibi to President Herzog to the Defense Minister to a wide variety of war cabinet ministers and ruling party members have been happy to give quotes elucidating their genocidal intent, as South Africa accurately detailed in their ICJ filing. This assertion of complexity is a go-to tactic for Israel defenders, and it's quite effective, frankly. Many a liberal concerned about the humanitarian horror unfolding before their eyes can be shut down in an instant by a simple assertion that the situation's really complex, and therefore outside of the understanding of those without encyclopedic knowledge of every twist and turn in the historical record. Now, ironically, Norm, Muin, and Benny actually have that encyclopedic expert knowledge of the conflict, which Destiny is himself completely lacking.

But the tactic is such a go-to that Destiny attempts it anywhere, even when confronted with actual legit experts. And of course, the history, the technical legal minutia, all these things are, of course, complex. But the basics are not difficult to understand. Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their land. They live under occupation and blockade, both of which are illegal. They are currently being slaughtered and starved en masse. You don't need to know what Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary in 1896 in order to understand these things, although Norm, Owen, and Benny actually do know such specific details. Relatedly, I don't think it's inappropriate for non-experts like Destiny,

or myself for that matter, to have opinions and to voice them and to defend them and to debate them, even with experts. I might just recommend a little bit of humility, awareness of the bounds of your technical knowledge as compared to legit historians who have spent their entire adult lives studying all of the details. Now there is one final tactic consistently deployed by Destiny and Benny in this debate, which is worth illuminating, and that is the inconsistent appeal to international law. Now when it suits Israelis, such as when discussing the original UN partition plan, then international law is everything. It's binding. When it doesn't suit them, such as when being held accountable for illegal

settlements and war crimes, it's irrelevant. It's useless. Who cares? This selective appeal to international law came out several times throughout the debate, but perhaps most notably in an exchange between Norm and Benny, in which Norm decries the illegal blockade of Gaza and Benny replies that the judgment of these international bodies is irrelevant. No one cares and that we should, quote, forget the law. Take a listen. They were shooting rockets at Israel for 20 years. Why is that illegal to blockade Gaza?

He thinks they're bottle rockets. Why is it illegal? I'll tell you why. You don't rocket your neighbor. You rocket your neighbor. Expect consequences. I'll tell you why. Expect consequences. I'll tell you why. Expect consequences.

But that works both ways. I know. I know. I've heard that. Professor Morris, I'll tell you why. Because every human rights, humanitarian, and UN organization in the world has said that the blockade is a form of collective punishment, which is illegal under international law. Forget the legal. The word illegal is...

You think a blockade... You don't understand the way the world works. Yeah. These things are irrelevant. And you think confining... Because that's the blockade. Yes, you don't... Confining a million children.

That's the choice of Hamas. Confining a million children in what the economists called a human rubbish sheep. The economists supported Israel in this war and continue to support Israel. What International Committee of Red Cross called a sinking ship, what the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called a toxic slum. It is a slum. You think under international law, you think it's legitimate. Forget the law. Hey, I know you want to forget the law. What about morality?

It's what every Israeli fears the most. What? The law. No, no, no. As Sipi Lutni said, I studied international law. I oppose international law. Of course you don't want to hear about the law. Then it's got nothing to do with anything.

Okay, so here's the thing. Yeah. Then don't complain about October 7th. Did you hear me complain? If you want to say forget about the law, then there is no international humanitarian law. There's no distinction between civilians and combatants. There should be.

And so now you're doing what Muin said. You're becoming very selective about the law. If you want to forget about the law. So Norm refers there to what Muin had said previously about the selective appeal to international law. In fact, Muin did sum up this point quite brilliantly and succinctly. If you want to dismiss international law, that's fine. But then you have to do it consistently. You can't set standards for the Palestinians, but reject applying those standards to Israel.

If we're going to have the law of the jungle, then we can all be beasts and not only some of us. And I think so it's either that or you have certain agreed standards that are intended to regulate our conduct, all of our conduct, not just some of us. So does international law matter or do we all live by the law of the jungle? Might makes right. It's a good place to wrap up because that's really the horrors of World War II withstand the genocide being committed in front of our eyes with the direct aid of our country, the world's quote-unquote superpower? Will distinctions between civilians and combatants or prohibitions on war crimes or genocide, will any of that survive this moment? Or will we drop even the pretense of pretending to care about these concepts and leave it, as Muin says, the law of the jungle where we can all be beasts? Because

even the propaganda smokescreen, carefully erected over decades, cannot block the world from seeing the echoes of those World War II atrocities. You cannot see the images of the wasted, starved bodies of Palestinian children without thinking about the Holocaust. You can't witness the utter destruction of Gaza and not think of Dresden or even Hiroshima. You cannot hear the casual public dehumanization of human beings as animals and vermin and not think of Nazi ideology. The wall of Hasbara has crumbled and we are all left to wrestle with the grave crimes that our leaders are perfectly willing to commit. So Sagar, even though it was- And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. All right, we'll see you guys later. I know it was a long one, but we'll get it to you as long as we can. This is an iHeart Podcast.