Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/27/26: Trump Panic Delays Iran Attack, IDF Chief Says Military Collapsing, Abdul El-Sayed Interview, Jasper Nathaniel on West Bank

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

The BP team discusses Trump extending the deadline to his Iran attack, then we talk to Jasper Nathaniel about the ongoing Settler pogroms in the West Bank. Then in the second half we react to Joe Rogan declaring MAGA to be dorks, answer some AMA questions, and speak to Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed about his upcoming rally with Hasan Piker. Abdul's Campaign Website: https://abdulforsenate.com/ Jasper Nathaniel Substack: https://www.infinitejaz.com/   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Formula One a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Everybody, happy Friday. How's everybody feeling? Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Feeling good before the markets close. So we'll see what happens. Before the market's open, you mean. Griffin's always monitoring the situation. He's just addicted to watching the markets. Well, it's actually a good thing, an important thing to watch,

since apparently we conduct all of our foreign policy and wage war based on the schedule of the market and what the bond yield is today, literally. So I actually do think we should pay close attention to that. We can start with some of that. But just to give people a preview, we've got a bunch of updates in terms of the Iran war, new possibility of 10,000 more ground troops that's being floated. Jasper Nathaniel is going to join us to talk about the uptick in Pogroms in the West Bank and, you know, what is going on there. There's also a weird phenomenon that I want to get his take on.

Have you guys seen like Richie Torres and Baccia and all these like very pro-Israel people, A-PAC, coming out and being like, this settler terrorism is out of control. So I'm curious what is going on behind the scenes with that one as well. And then we've got Abdul Al-Saiyad, who of course running for the Senate in Michigan and facing a lot of. of backlash and criticism over his choice to do a rally with the very controversial Hassan Piker. So it's a good week to speak with him as well. Absolutely. Well, why don't we get to thank God for the procrastinators out there. We've got a 10-day extension from Trump, which we're excited about here.

Trump says, as per Iranian government request, please let this statement serve to represent that I am pausing the period of energy plant destruction. by 10 days to Monday, April 6 at 8 p.m. Eastern Time talks are ongoing and despite erroneous statements to the contrary by the fake news media and others, they're going very well. Thank you for your attention to this matter, Ryan. This is obviously extremely significant because the previous deadline was due to expire today when markets closed. Everybody was watching and waiting to see if there was going to be, and this is still, I think, a possibility, if there's going to be some sort of a ground invasion.

this weekend. I don't think this announcement changes anything. But, Ryan, maybe you could speak to what the Iranians are saying about, you know, whether or not there has been some sort of negotiation and whether, you know, they, in fact, were the ones asking for this extension. Yeah. And the Wall Street Journal actually last night confirmed Jeremy's reporting. Journal was sourcing it to mediators, you know, mediators sources in the mediation team. And Jeremy was sourcing it to Iranian officials. So then they were basically saying the same thing. And it's also been wild to just notice that, like,

if you've been following Jeremy's reporting, you're consistently getting accurate information about what's going on here. If you're following, like, the Axios, kind of New York Times, stuff that gets put out by the Israelis and the Americans, they're just actively lying to you constantly through, you know, for whatever strategic purposes they have. but it seems like for whatever reason most Western media just is not capable of or not interested in kind of sorting through that because it goes to this like well this this anonymous person who's

very powerful wet cough or whoever said it therefore it's news even if it's not true and and that kind of construction has led to like just massive amounts of misinformation getting circulated So what we know now is that the Iranians, in response to a collection of different ideas that were thrown their way from like three different like Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, everybody's like sending information from Whitkoff and the Americans over to the Iranians about what they're interested in. So as Jeremy was wording, the Iranians made a counter proposal that said like, here are some baseline things that if we agree on, we'll do, you know, we can. move towards a ceasefire and then some long-form discussion. Wall Street Journal has something similar to that. And the journal and Jeremy both reported that the U.S. did not respond to that. And so that's where we are now with the Americans kind of very blatantly kind of threatening

some type of amphibious assault somewhere. They seem to be suggesting that it's Carg Island. Netanyahu said, you know, he expects a ceasefire this weekend, which is a blaring, like, warning that the opposite is going to happen. The fact that they're talking so much about Carg Island probably suggests something else is going to go on. But that's where we are now. And yeah, Trump, did people even remember Trump's five-day thing? My assumption is that when Trump gives a long deadline, people, like, don't even take it seriously. when he gives a 48-hour one, like, okay, 48 hours, we need to watch that.

But when he changed it to five, I thought everyone just forgot about it. Yeah. Maybe somebody reminded him. Hey, remember you did that five-day thing? That's coming up. And he's like, oh, okay. I think that was the correct approach because he's just, as he goes, he's freelancing. Speaking of five, he boomer maxed out on the five last night.

And you guys see the clips from this. He called into the five last night. told Dana Perino how beautiful she was, said that he was bragging about how he played the gay national anthem. He got asked if the Ayatollah was gay, and he said that he did very well with gay voters. Oh, my God. It's like, unreal. We're in the middle of a war. And that is how the president spent his evening. Well, I have been reliably told that we should wage war based on how LGBTQ-friendly various regimes are.

So if this new Ayatollah is going to throw a Tehran Pride Parade, we may be out. That may be the off-ramp, Emily. So it's going to be important information. Yeah. Don't think that's happening. Emily's probably right on that, yeah. I do want to put up, Griffin, can you put up the bond market thing? And because I do think this is genuinely extremely central.

I mean, not just in terms of this war, but when Trump tacoed on the tariffs, when he has made other actions in the financial markets, when he's made other actions in the financial markets, when he's, when he's. He's, you know, previously backed down from threats. It seems to always happen when the bond market begins, when the yields begin to go up. What does that mean? I mean, one of the things that it means most obviously is just the borrowing cost of the United States are getting very, very expensive. That is one of the primary things that we, our tax dollars, go to at this point. And Trump seems to be very leery of those rates ticking up too high. What I've heard from analysts and Ryan Financebro can weigh in here is that, like, 4.4.

0.5% is kind of a red line for like, oh, this is getting to be bad. And so he sees these bond yields ticking up. He also sees oil going up. He sees the stock market going down. And then he comes out with this 10 days, actually. Now, what was really, I think, the most significant thing that I saw is that the markets, they did not really, this didn't work. Previously, you know, the previous deadline of, you know, oh, we'll give you five days and we're negotiating, blah, blah, blah. which was obviously a blatant market manipulation as well, that actually succeeded. The markets were like, okay, cool. There's apparently some negotiations going on. Oil came down into the 80s. You know, the markets went back up. This time, he said that. There was a little bit of a bounce.

And then it went right back to where it was. So his ability to jawbone and market manipulate through true social posts seems to have expired. And that to me is extraordinarily significant because the whole central part, of the Iranian strategy is to cause global economic pain. And that has been forestalled a bit by Trump's ability to, you know, bullshit his way to like markets not completely collapsing. He seems to have run out of runway on that front. Yeah, he can only go back to that well so many times. And traders, I guess now are like, it's interesting because if even if you're a traitor and you think that Trump is lying about talks,

but you think that the crowd will believe that Trump is being honest about talks and therefore there'll be a surge, then you jump in and you ride the wave. So everyone has to kind of be on the same page that this guy's full of it. Otherwise, you just go with the crowd. Like, okay, this is fake, but like I'm going to take this 2%. It seems like now people are like, okay, Trump says there's talks. I need more sources.

and so does everyone else. Because if I buy, I'm now the idiot because everyone else is like, no, like how many times you're going to lie about this? Everyone else is going to sell. So, yeah,

and the Iranians have said that this whole, we requested seven days and Trump gave 10 is absurd. Like, this did not happen. There was, this isn't even a mischaracterization of a conversation

because there weren't even any conversations. Like, they're now making these like Chinese AI videos. is making fun of these fake talks. Like, have you seen, like, some of these, the Iranians are putting out, um, of like Trump just making up, uh, making up these negotiations. So, yeah, this is just not happening.

It's all makes those tense. Like, please give us seven days until you bomb our power plants. Like, what, that's not a thing that anybody says. Or like, hey, or. You know, um, I think the position is do not bomb them. Yeah, or, hey, you know, um, I see. that you're running out of interceptors, how about we give you 10 days to, like, restock and get it together? I mean, that's just, you know, the Iranians are in the poll position right now.

Strategically, the U.S. has accomplished zero of their strategic objectives. There's all sorts of reporting we talked about on the show yesterday about how Israel in particular is really running low on a bunch of their interceptor stockpiles. But the U.S. is as well and obviously our allies. So, I mean, in what world would it make sense for the Iranians to be like, You guys need a break. It's cool. Take 10 days. Come back to us. You know, we'll send you some messages. Go focus on Hezbollah. Yeah, right. Yeah, go focus on Hezbollah and you're like reign of terror in the West Bank and the genocide you continue to commit in Gaza. Also, we're going to make sure to communicate with you some electronically so you can come and target our leaders again and mass murderous once again. Like none of this makes any sense. But, you know, I do think the market piece is really, really significant since that seems to be. how basically Trump operates. I mean, it's the one thing he really seems to like care about and focus on. And there have been very few instances, Emily, where Trump hasn't been able to like basically bullshit his way out of a jam.

But oil is a physical commodity. There is a real, a tangible thing behind it. And every day that the straight of Hormuz is de facto basically shut down. That's another day when, you know, some 15 billion, 15 million barrels of oil. are not going into the market. And at some point, that reality does hit. One of the thing that we learned yesterday is, remember Trump with this whole, like, oh, they gave me a great gift. They gave me a great gift. It had to do with oil and gas, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, he put out there that what it was was them letting some tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, which, first of all, they have been letting some tankers through the Strait of Hormuz.

They have long said, hey, it's not really shut. It's just like, you got to pay us $2 million. You've got to be not at war with us. And it needs to be denominated in Chinese yuan. But yesterday we learned that even even that conception of like, oh, they let tankers through was not true. There's no indication from the tanker tracking that any tankers were getting through, let alone Trump said like eight. They let eight tankers through. So I'm not sure where this particular fantasy or delusion came from.

I think a few ships might have gotten through that didn't have a lot of oil on them as kind of one take is that it was them showing. that A, we are the people that can do this. Yeah. And so we'll let this. The level of control they have, basically. Yeah, we'll let this ship through that is meaningless just to show that we can do it. So that you see, we are the toll booth guys. Like, that's who you're talking to right now.

The parliament there is codifying into law. They're like control over and the tolling system. Yep. Just as Egypt's, you know, a major source of Egypt's revenue is, is, uh, tolling ship. that go through the Suez Canal. And so the Iranians are like, if it works for them, why can't it work? It's also one of their demands that they've put forward in terms of a resolution of the conflict. Yeah.

And how long do we, like, what measures do we have to take? How long do we have to be waging this war for Trump to declare a victory and change the state of affairs in Hormuz right now? That's a really frightening thought because there's no. clear path at the moment. Trump is obviously feeling good about negotiations. It does seem like he believes it's going to be much easier that it actually, I mean, we saw that with Ukraine and Russia. He's come out and said since. That's a tough one, harder than I thought. And there's something cavalier about his comments on Iran, particularly this week, because we're getting reporting, who knows how true it is, but we're getting reporting from inside of the White House.

that he's getting tired of the war and he's ready to move on. It's like, well, 13 people, at least 13 service members have died. Many have been wounded, double digits of serious injuries. And for what? Because Iran has not been put out of a position

to continue rebuilding, right? Post-Midnight Hammer, that's why we were told it was the right time to do epic theory, is that Iran had been rebuilding its missiles, its launch, and had intentions for its new... Like, none of that is changing at all.

So if he wants to declare some type of PR victory and have the state of affairs be worse, then you look at another six months and see what happens down the road. And the other thing I was just add is, I agree, a lot of this feels very similar to Liberation Day tweeting and market manipulation

with different promises and intentionally saying, things to move the numbers. And I guess I wonder when people start picking up on what you're doing, when it's a war, does that do your efforts to manipulate markets have to get more extreme? What happens when Trump has to be more extreme in order to have these effects on the markets, whether it's calming them or something else? So that's a nice thought to consider on Friday. I just hope, Brian, that whoever was trying to inside trade off of Trump's announcement yesterday got their asses handed to them after the markets didn't react the way that they expected them to. You're out there. You're such an idiot. You can't even make money insider trading off of stuff.

It does seem like one plausible path that Trump sees, not that it's realistic necessarily, but that he thinks might exist, is send a bunch of Delta Force people somewhere into Iran, claim that you grab. some nuclear material and then get out and then say we're done. Like we obliterated it before and now we've taken all of the obliterated material. And so they are now harmless to the world and we have to quit. In one of those Iranian AI videos, they had a Lego version of Trump like crying and holding up a sign that said victory. So like they see that Trump. is going to declare victory at some point.

And then the camera pans to the back and his Lego, like, backside is on fire. So wouldn't it be melting? It was definitely melting, too. It was melting and on fire. Yeah, smoking and on fire. Yeah, it was not a good scene back there. It belied the victory sign a little bit.

But they clearly know or suspect that that's what he's looking for. And don't trust a word that he's. saying like they're they're they're you know there's reporting that they're they're not messaging electronically you know there have been so many instances of trump offering a ceasefire deal with the purpose of pulling people together to discuss that deal and then trying to kill them they're not fools like they they have pattern recognition yeah unlike us apparently right we really need we really need a segment of Griffin doing a film breakdown of all of the Iranian propaganda of it is going to come out.

Yes. I think it's the one time I'm pro AI. Like I do think that like AI slot videos should be allowed in like the political meme sphere because there seems to be a lot of value from it. Emily, you asked what is the reason that we're doing all this? I think J.D. Vance has a new answer that I'd like to play for everybody here. That also might have to do with some of the nuclear that Ryan is speaking about. Let's take a listen.

When I say options, I think it's important the American people know, options for what? And it's options to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon. You talk about people who walk into a crowded supermarket and have a vest on, and they blow up the vest and a couple of people get killed, and that's a terrible tragedy. What happens when what's on the vest is not something that can kill a couple of people, but can kill many, many tens of thousands of people. That is the most important American national security objective that exists for any administration at any time is you don't want the worst people in the world to have a nuclear weapon.

That's why the president is doing this. That's why the president cares so much about this particular issue. So that's why we're doing it. Nuclear armed vests, that's also a plot from a season of 24, Jack Bauer. Maybe that's where they pulled that from. And Emily, did you even think about what if they had sharks with nuclear vests? What if they figure out how to fly at, you know, superhuman? human speeds. Did you even consider that? What that would mean for America's safety and security?

Chris, I think about nuclear sharks all of the time. All of the time. Apparently, there are some sharks right now who have gotten into the cocaine that's been dumped into the ocean. New York Post has this story. So not a laughing matter, folks. But the- We deserve that, honestly. But the thing is, like, none of us downplay, this is what the corporate press is constantly downplaying, like, the actual nuclear threat. Like, they love to talk about war. and to all of that. But like it's constantly looming over the world. Like in ways that the corporate media just like breezes past.

Like it's no big deal. So I don't want to downplay the genuine threat that could exist from something like that. But again, it reminds me exactly of this day, last week, the Diego Garcia situation where everybody was smugly taking their dub and being like, Hey, you fools, you didn't think Iran posed an imminent threat. Look at how far they can launch missiles. And it's like, go look at the map of North Korea's nuclear missile range, Saudi Arabia's nuclear missile range, Putin's nuclear missile range, or I mean, ballistic missile range, and nuclear range, of course, too. But like, go take a look at that.

This exists. Other countries already have it. So if this is a predicate for war, we're going to have to go into North Korea next, because they're also a dictatorial death cult, and probably in different ways from Iran, actually, that make them even more unpredictable. So, and harder to negotiate with. So what are we doing here? Well, if we're worried about if we're worried about undeclared nuclear arsenals being held by rogue states that constantly threaten their neighbors in the world, yeah, there's another place you might want to look other than Iran. And to the point that we endlessly make, I mean, I was thinking about. this when you guys were talking earlier, Iran after the 12-day war, even though there was

dissatisfaction with the government, which has been for a long time, in terms of their defensive and offensive capabilities, they were strengthened by the 12-day war because they got to learn a lot about what they could do, what their vulnerabilities were, they were able to increase their amount of domestic production, of ballistic missiles, Shahid drones, and really prepare. So in the same respect, you know, in terms of if you're concerned about a nuclear threat or nuclear revest or whatever bullshit he made up, there is nothing that has made the Iranians more likely to move in the direction than the actions that we have taken. Okay. You murdered the guy who had the, you know, anti-nuclear fatwa. So great job. You've made it abundantly clear to Iran that

as long as they do not have a nuclear weapon, they will always be menaced by the U.S. Israel. So if that's, yes, I do not want to see nuclear proliferation, but if I was advising the Iranians, like it's very obvious the logic that we have created, not just in Iran, but around the world. So the whole, the whole conception is so ass backwards that you can't even begin to wrap your hat around it. Like, yes, you have made the world more unsafe. And by the way, American people know that. You know, there's polling that we just covered yesterday, where if you ask people, do you think the Iran war is making us more or less safe? Majority, clear majority say it's making us less safe.

And that's now at the beginning of this war when we've just gotten started here and it's as popular as it's ever going to be. So a few other war updates. The Pentagon is considering deploying an additional 10,000 troops to buoy whatever potential action may occur, potentially over the weekend or coming weeks. and Trump also has decided to sign an executive emergency order to fund TSA to resolve our TSA lines at the airport. Did you guys catch that? I had one more disparate thought on the nuclear thing. I do think, to Ryan's point, some type of Delta action with nuclear material is how Trump is right now.

And that may be why J.D. Vance went in that direction at the press or yesterday, the cabinet meeting yesterday. because, yeah, I think that might be, they might be priming the public for something like that if you're able to show a tangible Maduro-style operation, which, again, a lot of reporting suggests that's what Trump, that's what kind of nudged Trump partially towards action. As he had been getting a lot of people in his ear who wanted to go into Iran saying, look at this, successful in-out the type of like military operation. you can boast about, makes America look strong, et cetera. And that's the type of thing he could say, we did it. We're winding down. We just had a successful Delta Forest recovery of enriched uranium underground. So I would keep an eye on something like that, too. Ryan, what were you? I was just going to ask Ryan a question. I remember early in the war, you were like, Iran should just put like a suitcase in the desert that says nuclear material

and let's so gentle Delta Force operas going, we got it, guys, you know, mission accomplished. Make it look really cinematic. Yeah. Glowing green. Some Erica Kirk's sparklers go off when you pick it up or whatever. Yeah. Anyway, I actually want to play out that scenario a little bit, Ryan. If you, let's say there is some, you know, semi-performative, you know, special operator stunt where they get something that they can claim is nuclear material or whatever.

And they're like, we did it. You know, mission accomplished. Good luck with the straight-of-hoer moves. Europeans. You guys figure it out. we got our own oil, we didn't really need it, goodbye. What would happen then? Like, do you think that the Iranians would take that as an opportunity to be like,

you're really, way to go, guys. Good work. Let's negotiate an end to this and come to. I mean, how would that actually play out? Because that seems to me part of the problem is even if there was some performative, you know, operation that didn't end in mass death, which it is very likely to. and Trump was able to claim some sort of a victory, it doesn't seem at all clear to me

that that comes close to ending the conflict. It depends on what Trump is willing to do alongside that. We don't know exactly what was in the semi-formal response that the Iranians gave to the Americans yet. Hopefully we will over the next couple of days. But we know in general,

kind of what they've been asking for. They want permanent sanctions relief. And they, you know, they want their sovereignty over Hormuz respected. And there's an enormous amount of kind of Iranian capital that is frozen, that they want unfrozen. They've been telling their population that they're demanding reparations and won't end the war until they get reparations for the girls' school and all the other assaults on civilian infrastructure. You can imagine a world where the unfreezing of those reserves counts as the reparations. reparations or some sort of like sanctions relief or something like that yeah and then what is what do

the guarantees look like for another attack you know they have what iran keeps saying is that they don't trust guarantees anymore the guarantee that they want is that Israel and the United States have felt so much pain that they don't want to touch the stove again that they've been so burned that they're not doing this again for 20 years um and so they'd have to then calculate whether or not they've kind of burned them enough. But I do think it's possible, depending on what they agreed to, that if the U.S. declared victory left, you know, they also want, they also want the U.S. bases dismantled.

And they are currently dismantled. Like, we'd have to remantle them, rebuild those suckers. And maybe, you know, and Iran would have a say in that, you know, if, like, you rebuild these, we'll start shooting at it. you again. So you can imagine a world where they do a great, but it's a humiliating set of concessions. Like the U.S. will have gone into war with a certain amount of treasure, a certain amount of weapon stocks, bases intact all across the region, and Iran sanctioned, and then we'll be leaving the war with Iran unsanctioned and with our bases, you know, completely torched.

And a lot of our industrial, you know, military and things. base spent such that we're like stealing NATO's weapons and shipping them to the region with all of the intelligence saying that, you know, China plans to absorb Taiwan in like, what, 27, 28, whatever it is. I wish I could give the person credit, but I saw a good post on ex-lastite. Someone said TSMC is the straight of her moves of China. Yeah, except we actually, I think, more harmed potentially by, you know, the loss of TSM. It's a matter of keeping the lights on, like infrastructure. Yeah, because we do, you know, we are a net energy exporter. Like, we do have some, some buffer on that front that the rest of the world does not, frankly, enjoy outside of like Russian, to some extent, actually, China. But, yeah, on the chips, I mean, we've completely, we've completely fumbled on that. And, you know, with regard to the strato hermuse, obviously it's not just oil. It's, we've talked about fertilizer, helium. There's, you know, food. There's all sorts of ways that.

this gets screwed up. And, you know, I think we all have a pretty good understanding of the way these things compound, given the experience with the combination of the Ukraine War and COVID. So, you know, the, it seems like the market reality may be starting to set in that even if Trump wants a taco, there is not a taco available to him at the moment. And, you know, I guess all the traders have started to realize that they all believe that this is not going to be possible and that the physical realities are going to set in. You know, I saw, I was just looking at the markets, you know, there still look, you know, everything's down this morning except oil, which is up.

You've got, you know, the Brent is at 110 and you've got the WTI at 9680. So almost even $100 a barrel for that, which is the, you know, the domestic product. So in any case, it's not good as we had in. here to the weekend. I guess lastly, guys, before we move on, we could talk a little bit about TSA before we move on to get Jasper Nathaniel in here. But there seemed to be, it seemed almost certain that there was going to be some sort of a ground invasion this weekend. And Griffin, I mentioned now we've got like, oh, we're going to maybe bring in 10,000 war troops. There's already been troops that have been brought into the region, these Marines, the, you know,

the paratroopers. But do you guys think that Trump's new deadline? changes any of that strategy. I also saw they had huge storms in the region, at least like yesterday. That could be a factor in terms of any sort of significant military action. What are you guys feeling about the timeline? It's also the weather. Have you seen this?

Yeah, that's what I was just mentioning. Yeah, the weather is really bad there right now. So I think that kind of shuts it down. They were even talking about tornadoes. Very unusual for that region, I think. One other possible to throw up before, if Jasper's not here yet is this

at DropSite we reported on these efforts by China to get Guadar which is here let me put it up just so people

can see what we're talking about so right here so here's a Pakistan Iran border right here if you see if you look at Guadar

right here it's right at the mouth of the Gulf that then heads into kind of the straight of Hormuz And China has desperately wanted this port of Guadar.

And we are fueling a insurgency kind of in the Beloke region of Pakistan here in the south. There's some beloc population over in Iran. We were hoping that we'd be able to fuel some cross-border violence. We haven't been able to do that. So maybe we just try to like seize with the Pakistanis say like, we're taking Guadar. And China, you're like, you're out of there. And that's the win. Because that gives us some then ability to project power back towards Hormuz.

Yeah. I've heard some people kicking that around. It doesn't really make any sense, but like they need something. I listened to an interview with Trita and John Mearsheimer this morning. And Trita was floating that there's a few islands that are like contested between Iran and U.S. and that maybe that, and that was one of the things that was floated in that Axios report, maybe the idea is like to take those islands for UAE because the other Gulf countries agree with, you know, UAE's assessment that these rightfully belong to them.

And so it would like make your Gulf allies happy. You could claim some sort of win. Again, it's in sort of a strategic position. It doesn't really change anything in terms of your ability to reopen the Strait of Hermuz and do what you want with it. but perhaps that's like the wind that they could claim. I don't know. It seems kind of far-fetched to me that any of this is going to really be convincing. Iran said if they try that, they're going to just flatten Dubai.

Like, they don't make, like, what they've been doing to it so far look like pinpricks. Ryan, have you seen these threats also of, like, the Iranian saying maybe they'll change the borders in the region, threatening to basically like annex UAE and Bahrain? Yeah. And, yeah, they're feeling good. sense like that's i don't suspect that they're actually going to do that um but that's that's the that's the that's the point that they're at and like but you know barraine has a pretty pro-erranian population yeah um Dubai is like it never it never quite understood why dubai felt so comfortable

and confident in in all of its saber-rattling against against iran like it like it like it like Like, are you insane? Like, just for people's, just to remind people, put this back up, like, does anybody have a map? Like, when they do this, like, look at Dubai. And look at Iran. Like, you're, like, you think you're going to, like, bully this, like, gigantic mountainous country that's just, like, just across the straight here.

And then, yeah, here's Bahrain right over here. It's like the level of overconfidence here. that they could just do this with impunity, I guess reflected a real confidence in the invincibility of the U.S. security umbrella. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I think they were really confident

that the Iranian government would totally collapse. I guess. I don't know. I mean, but I mean, they have to realize, you would think there would be some reckoning with reality. I mean, these are these family monarchies that we prop up. I was just looking at up to make sure my numbers were correct.

The entire Emirati population, like the citizen population is about a million people, okay? They make up in their own country, they make up about 10% of the population. It's overwhelmingly either like rich foreigners or this indentured servant labor force from around the region. And so, yeah, I mean, you're not really in a position to, you don't have a strong hand to play here. And obviously, their whole brand and economic model is built on the, the idea, the mirage, that it's completely safe. And, you know, you can park your capital here and you can have your luxury vacation here. And like, that's their whole thing. And already that's

basically shattered and potentially irreparably so. Yeah. We do we do breaking news, by the way. Let me put this on the screen. Chuck Schumer, as we're recording this, just announced it looks like they do indeed have a deal. He says, quote, after weeks of negotiations, Republicans caved to our demands to fund DHS without a blank check for ICE and CBP. His full statement says, in the wake of the murders of Renee Good and Alex Prattie, Senate Democrats were clear, no blank check for a lawless ICE and Border Patrol. He goes on to say, I'm very proud of our Democratic caucus through it all. Senate Democrats stood united. No wavering. No backing down. We held the line. Just to, I don't know if clarification is the right word on this, but basically Democrats are getting nothing,

because, I mean, they're in the minority. So they got their public stand. But what Republicans are now doing is threatening to fund ICE, like, in perpetuity, not quite perpetuity, but like at an even higher level in the reconciliation package that's going to come up. So a moral victory, perhaps, for Democrats who managed to keep the government shut down for a long time and make the stand as Chuck Schumer invokes Alex Prattie and Renee Good, literally in the first paragraph. off. But make no mistake, Republicans are now going to put a lot of funding in the reconciliation package that's coming up. Also not a huge win for Republicans either who are in the majority

and weren't able to keep their own priorities. Can you put that statement back up? There's an exquisitely democratic line there at the bottom of it. And this, you know, to the, to this victory belongs to workers, really. The TSA workers did an illegal wildcat, you know, sick out. They all called in sick at once, kind of in a semi-organized fashion and really put pressure on both parties here. But the line at the bottom here, they say, where's the line about the militia? We held firm in our opposition. Donald Trump's rogue and deadly militia should not get more funding without serious reforms.

So Donald Trump has a rogue and deadly militia. We're not giving them money yet. And the Democrats want to reform it. Just a few reforms to your- Rogue deadly militia. Just had better training, Ryan. Go body cams on your rogue and deadly militia. On your rogue deadly militia.

Yes. Yeah. So at least the line should go back to normal. That's what's important. I saw House Speaker Mike Johnson at an event last night talking about the Golden Age. Like he invented some new award or something. He was at some event where there was a new award being given out.

It was like, do you have to ask me? These boomers and their friggin awards, man. Well, he's not even a boomer. I think he's J.X. But he gets upset. But he knows who he's, who's, what audience he's playing to. But just to take a glimpse at the political instincts of Republican leadership right now to be talking about the golden age when you have lines for TSA that are during spring break

and Easter five hours long at major airports. That is a new level of stupid. I mean, even for them, it's atrocious. Yeah. And gas probably hitting, is it at $4 average yet this morning? I can take a look at AAA. Ryan, real quick, if you can update us on the what happened with the, since we're talking about Democratic incompetence and cowardice, what happened with the war powers resolution

and what the latest is there? Yeah, it looks like they're going to punt until mid-April. And so the reason that we're even discussing a war power's resolution, is that Josh Godheimer and the kind of pro-war tiny faction put forward a counter war powers resolution to Rokana and Massey's in the beginning. Because they were saying, you know, this is a very common tactic up on Capitol Hill where something is getting momentum that has actual substance, and people who are trying to derail it will try to create some weaker vehicle that people can then glom on to.

that doesn't do anything but still captures the kind of public anger. So they put out this war powers resolution that said, oh, the war has to end within 30 days or something. And Con and Massey were like, no, we're talking about two-day. So they didn't end up voting on Godheimer's. But once they were done with Conn and Massey's, Godheimer's was sitting there. And so then there was pressure put as the,

I think it was March 31st or something as a deadline for when this resolution says the war should end. they said well let's vote on this one and so then they agreed okay fine you know because they had introduced it and they're they're kind of stuck because like this is yours how are you going to be against your thing they forgot that time moves forward and that eventually they'd be in they'd be stuck and so you know uh they they lost what three democrat three or four democrats on the last one and if those at all flipped they would have they would have won since then um maxed Massey is still a yes.

I talked to Warren Davidson yesterday. He said he's still a yes. And I actually reached out to Nancy Mays, who had said that she was for it. And Democrats were saying, well, we don't trust Nancy Mays. You know, she talks a big game, but then she doesn't actually vote the way she's talking. Mays said that,

Mace told me that she had not heard from Democrats. So if Democrats are actually concerned, like they could actually reach out to her. Now Massey has been in contact with her, I've been told. So whether or not she's going to actually, how she would vote, okay, we don't know. There happens to be a mechanism where you can determine how somebody will vote on something. And you go to the house floor. It's called voting.

There was this, maybe, I don't know if I can find it quick enough. We do have to get to Jasper in a second. Our intern, okay, yeah, Lillianna Frank's era. our Capitol Hill intern got Greg Meeks in the hallway twice and said, you know, why are you going to punt this until April? It looks like she has the votes. And he says, well, you go talk to these Republicans. Go talk to them.

And you come back and tell me if they're going to vote for it. And so she's like, well, Mace, Davidson and Massey, like, they all say they're going to vote for it. He's like, ah, whatever. Go ask him again. Go ask him again. They just don't want to vote until the war's over. Until it doesn't matter.

Yeah. Their argument is we want to win and we're not sure that we have the votes yet. And we want to be sure. So people can decide for themselves how credible they think that is and why they think all a sudden mid-April they're going to have the votes. Like what if you haven't even talked to Mace yet? Like what are you doing between now and mid-April? To secure anyone's votes.

Yeah. What are you doing? Yeah. And Muscoitz. With Musquist, his interest, Jared Musquins, he was one of the first opponents of this, and they came around to it. And then he announced on Wednesday that his wife was having routine surgery and he wasn't going to be in Washington again until like mid-April.

It's like, hmm. Well, he has a primary challenger, so he may be feeling the heat. Shout out to Oliver Larkin. Yes, indeed. All right. Shurlots. Looks like it's not going to happen unless there's like a furious pressure. today. Looks like it's not going to happen.

Okay. Well, on that note, let's get to Jasper Nathaniel, who's going to give us some updates on the West Bank. Jasper, how's it going? Hey. So, Jasper Forces independent journalist and author of the Infinite Jazz Substack and great friend of the show and great friend of DropSight. Great to see you, Jasper. You too. So just start by giving us a little bit of an update.

Obviously, there's ongoing terror campaigns from settlers back by the Israeli government in the West Bank. But there's been a recent spike in violence. What is the latest? Well, the latest is that the settlers are doing what they're being told by their government, basically. You know, the spike in settler violence, it started years ago. It started actually before October 7th when this new government came in and had all these settlers like Smutrich and Ben Gavir in these leadership positions who immediately empowered the settlers. Then after October 7th, they started using, you know, security justifications and started arming and deploying settlers as sort of like what they called regional defense battalions. I would say the latest surge comes with the start of the new war in Iran, where.

I mean, it's hard to say if the settlers feel that people are not watching them. I think it's more just a sort of, like, jingoistic feeling of, you know, Israelist fighting. So we're going to do some more fighting now. But the very latest explosion in violence in just the last week actually came after a young settler, an 18-year-old settler, was killed in some sort of a car accident or potentially a car ramming attack. And so, but I think the details of what happened here are really important because basically these two young settlers set out from an outposts to go on what they call a land patrol. Now, to understand what a land patrol is, first helps to understand what is this outpost.

So if you go to the outposts crowdfunding page where they raise money, including from the family of the boy who the young man who was killed. It says explicitly they are there to be the spearhead of activities that are meant to expel Palestinians from the land and spread Jewish presence across the West Bank. And so, you know, the settlers don't hide the fact that when they build these outposts, it is for the explicit goal of expelling Palestinians and, you know, just creating Jewish territory. At the funeral of the young man who was killed, a friend of his said the same thing. you know, Yehuda was on a strategic mission, one of the most important missions for Israel, to expel Palestinians from the land. And when you listen to the settler leaders, when they talk

about what these land patrols are for, it is, again, it's not to, you know, maintain stability or keep the peace. They are, they say, we are out there trying to generate friction. In other words, they are trying to incite a response from the Palestinians that they will then use to justify a sort of massive show of force. And so this young man was killed on Saturday. It's unclear, to be fair. I mean, I've looked at all the evidence, and it's just impossible to say right now

if it was in fact an accident or if it was a ramming attack. But even if we assume that it was a ramming attack, that is what the settlers are out there agitating for, is to be attacked in some way, to then justify exactly what happened after, which was that the settler leaders all came out and started explicitly calling for revenge for the murder of Yehuda,

the one who his own father at his funeral called him a sacrifice for the settlement movement. So now they all go on call for revenge. Smotrich actually goes up at the funeral, and he says specifically, we will now settle all of Judea and Samaria. We are going to erase the letters of the Oslo Accords, as in A, B, and C. And then what follows is the settlers go and follow that command. They go out and they start creating new output. they go into A, B, and C.

And in doing this, they're attacking Palestinians. Just yesterday, settlers who were setting up a new outpost, shot and killed a Palestinian. And so, you know, there's this sort of line that people say, which is like, the Israeli government is enabling this violence. Or they're not cracking down on the violence. But that is actually really understating it because they are directly coordinating it.

They are funding it. They are arming it. And ultimately, like, it is a state project. And so the settlers, you know, sometimes their actions become too grotesque for even sort of Israel supporters to defend and they come out and they condemn it. But then the next day, quietly below the headlines, Israel is sending money to these illegal outposts. It is retroactively legalizing them. So to answer your question, Crystal, in a more succinct way, what we're seeing is, an explosion in settler violence

exactly as the settlement movement is designed and planned at the highest levels of the Israeli government. And you mentioned the alphabet and the Oslo, of course. I wanted to put this up really quickly. Description here, in the past 24 hours, five new settlement outposts were erected,

three in Area A, one in Area B, one in Area C, deliberate placement where once the Oslo Accords drew lines, no more. And so the message is delivered plainly. The National Court of Justice has spoken. The finding is clear Israel's presence is unlawful. The response is clear still. It will not be complied with. It will not be enforced. So what are these, like, what do these settlements look like? And what can you inherit? Maybe I can, like, and maybe I can put this up while you're talking,

but like, can you explain to people what this area A, B, and C are and why it's significant that they're planning to wipe it out? And maybe Jasper also like what it looks like if you're, what it physically is like for people. Going between and down. Yeah, so area A, B, and seats from the Oslo Accords, or the Oslo Two Accords, actually, in the mid, early, mid-90s. And the idea was, was the West Bank remained Palestinian land under an Israeli military occupation. So it was not transferring ownership of the land into Israeli hands. What it was doing was dividing up the West Bank in terms of who would administer and govern different parts of it.

And so area A remained entirely in the hands of the Palestinian Authority, which means that the PA ostensibly has control over things like, you know, basic municipal functions like, you know, waste management and, you know, paying the salaries of public school teachers and things like that, but also security as well. So area A traditionally has been off limits for Israeli settlers. Area B is sort of a split. It's technically the administrative function is the Palestinian Authority. Security is a combination of the IDF and the PA. And then area C is entirely under Israeli control, even though there are lots of Palestinians who live in Area C. Now, for a long time, these illegal outposts, which is basically,

basically when settlers, to answer your question, Emily, it's when settlers peel off from a settlement. They go into Palestinian land where they are not supposed to be. And they basically, you know, plant an Israeli flag, put up a tent, you know, bring in like a couple of containers. And if all goes to plan for them, it basically metastasizes and it grows and more settlers move in. And then eventually, you know, they get, they start getting money from the state. And the idea would be that, at some point the state actually retroactively recognizes it as a legal formal settlement. And so, you know, that's important because the message to these settlers who are breaking Israeli law by going out and creating outposts is, if you stick it out for long enough, we will authorize you and turn you into a real settlement and you'll start getting money and funds and, you know, construction paid for by the state and armed.

Too big to fail. And so the project of expelling Palestinians from area C and turning it into all Jewish land has been remarkably successful in the last couple of years, basically. And so what you're seeing now is the settlers are setting their sites higher and they're going into areas B and even more notably into area A where traditionally they did not go at all. And again, you know, this is explicitly what. the highest members of the government have been calling for them to do. And it's also not just what they've been calling for them to do. In February, you may remember, there were these cabinet decisions that said that the Israeli military is now allowed to go into areas A and B for things like, you know,

environmental protection and, you know, protecting heritage. So they have already created all these sort of formal pretences for the military to be able to go into areas A and B. And now the settlers are following suit and they are fulfilling the plan of the, of the Smotritches of the world, of just erasing the Oslo lines and taking over the entire West Bank. To that point, Jasper, the IDF chief warned about some of the things to talk about here. The IDF is on the verge of collapse after 900 straight days. Of course, because reservists are being sent to Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank,

and there's no ultra-Orthodox conscription laws that have been passed. But also the cabinet has approved, like you said, legalization of dozens of more outposts and farms in the West Bank, requiring additional troops to protect them, as well as Jewish national terrorism is surging there. So it seems like these West Bank expansions have been, you know, draining what little reserves they have left. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, your audience probably knows

that a lot of people basically attribute the ability of Hamas and other Palestinian militants to so easily break through the border with Gaza on October 7th, they attribute that to the fact that so much of the IDF was in the West Bank protecting settlements. And it should be said that the military, the IDF, is actually obligated to protect settlers wherever they go in the West Bank. And so, you know, it, to be, to be fair to the IDF, I mean, there are, I have, I have encountered foot soldiers there, not necessarily like commanders, but I've encountered people on the ground who basically, at least they seem like they can't stand the settlers because they are causing problems for them. They're constantly going into Palestinian villages. And then it's just a hassle for the soldiers to have to go and defend them. And it's not to say that, you know, this is because they're benevolent and they care about.

the Palestinians, but like it's a pain in the ass for them. They're causing them problems. But what's happening now with the military is that, you know, the higher levels of the military, what's called the Central Command, which oversees the West Bank, is now becoming more ideologically aligned with the settler movement. And so there is much less resistance to go and, you know, defend these settlers when they go off on these little excursions to create outposts across areas, A, B, and C. You know, in the case of the, um, the, um, um, the, um, um, Who was that, Griffin, who said that? Was that Zemir or was that Avi Bluth?

Let me try to look into that while you talk. Because I say the IDF chief of staff. Okay. Yeah, I think that was Zemir. I mean, he has sort of taken a position of, you know, being, he's one of these guys that comes out and condemns the settler files. Zemir. And, yeah, and that is, you know, like the politically expedient thing to do, both on the national

and the international or mostly. on the international level because people don't like, in general, to see these videos of these sort of feral, masked settlers, you know, beating innocent Palestinians. He takes this position that, you know, it's a problem. I haven't heard, Jasper, is that a lot of these kids are coming out of the foster care program and kind of being groomed into just then becoming violent in these reasons. What did you discover while you're over there about these kids? Like, often it looks like 15, 16, 17-year-old, just angry, adolescent.

like lunatic, like crazy-looking kids. Well, they're all over the map. I mean, some of them are, you know, were troubled kids in Israel who were basically adopted by an outpost that had registered itself as some sort of a foster home. And then they're, you know, basically conscripted into this holy war on Palestinians, which I think we could all agree is basically child abuse. But some of them are homegrown. Exactly.

Some of them are homegrown. I mean, Yehuda Sherman, the boy, the 18-year-old who was killed, his father just did an interview with a settler newspaper where he was boasting about the fact that when he was 11 years old, he was going out on his own into the hills to reinforce them. So we're talking about an 11-year-old whose parents, whose parents are sending him out to do land patrols, which again is, you know, ultimately to provoke Palestinians into a violent response. And so, you know, a lot of these guys that you see and like I've encountered lots of settlers on, you know, land patrols. What it basically means is it's like it's like when when me and my brother were young and that, you know, I would get right in his face and like go like this and be like, I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. And you wait for him to respond. And then you can say he hit me.

I mean, that is literally what they are doing. And again, it makes sense when you think about it. It's like these are, you know, troubled kids who, you know, were not. raised right, basically. That's what they're out there doing. And then eventually, listen, like, you know, Smotrich grew up as one of these kids. So did Ben Gavir. And, you know, I don't think we're going to excuse what they've become now. But I mean, it's just to say that like, this has been their entire lives. They are born and raised in this environment where, like you said, they're child soldiers, basically. Well, Jasper, I was going to ask, because I think this is one of the

interesting undercurrents that doesn't get enough attention. You mentioned how there's more ideological alignment within the IDF and the subtler movement. I wanted to ask if you could tell us a little bit of, like, just give us more background on that. Like, why has that happened recently? Why does it seem like that's grown recently? Yeah. Well, just to sort of take a step back, I mean, you know, the IDF as like an institution, think of it as an, you know, an institution the same way that like the U.S., the Pentagon is its own sort of institution distinct from, you know, the executive in some ways. So as an institution, it has not always been ideologically aligned with the settlement movement. And in fact, for decades, there were open clashes between soldiers and settlers in the West Bank

because the soldiers were interested in ruling with an iron fist and sort of maintaining stability in the West Bank, whereas the settlers were, like I said, agitating for war. And so there were actual fights. You know, there's these videos you see of settlers going and like tearing down, excuse me, going and tearing down outposts and the settlers throwing tantrums and fighting back. Over the years, I mean, that still happens from time to time, I should say, but the leadership of the military have been installed as, you know, they've been handpicked as people who are aligned with the settler movement. So, you know, Smotrich, what he did to basically foment this was he installed himself in the defense ministry.

He created a new position. He called an additional minister in the ministry of defense. He then within the defense ministry created something called the settlement administration. And what it was was basically a shadow government to oversee the West Bank still within the auspices of the military because it's a military occupation. So by international law, it has to be governed by the military. So now you have the settlement administration, which is technically a branch of the Defense Department of the Defense Ministry, which is overseen by an extremist ideological settler, Smotrich, and he has just installed his cronies into all these positions of power there.

And that has seeped into the actual, like, the central command to the fighting arm of the military as well. And so, you know, like Avi Bluth is an interesting character. He is the head of the Central Command, which basically means he's like the general in charge of the West Bank. He is one of these guys that is constantly coming out and condemning the violent settlers. He always makes a big show of it. In fact, like a week ago, he sent a letter basically saying how the violent settlers were putting all of Israel at risk. What he's doing quietly behind the scenes is this was reported from within the military in an Israeli paper in Wynet. He has a henchman, a guy who reports directly to him that goes and,

visits these outposts when they're formed. He works directly with the leader of the outpost to make sure they have an armed guard, to make sure they have the logistical support that they need, and to basically help them map out how they're going to expand and how they will have, you know, reinforcements from the military. And so it's all this, you know, sort of, you know, out of one side of their mouth. They condemn the violence. Out of the other side, they're working directly with the settlers to help them expand. And, you know, it's it's clearly just a state project. Well, speaking of condemning the violence, me and Ryan have been wondering online over this week. American politicians have all of a sudden started condemning the West Bank violence. We've been seeing Zionists, liberal Zionists, Democrat politicians and all sorts of people over the last week or so come out and say, these West Bank settlers have to stop. We have to condemn this violence. And even people that are very staunch Zionists, people like Emily Schrader, and others who are, you know, the talking heads on Pierce Morgan

that have been laundering so much of the Israeli genocide. They're like, no, this is actually where we stopped. It seems like some sort of like call went out that this is the time to talk about it. And I don't know if Ryan, if you want to add any more to that point. Yeah, you got Richie Torres, Stan Goldman, and then APEC itself, after a couple of days, put out its own statement saying, this has to stop.

This is outrageous. Yeah. In such a way that before APEC came out with its statement, people were like, oh, this seems coordinated like a memo went out. Like it is time to do a ritual round of denouncing of settlers. And then APEC came out and go, yeah, there is the memo. Yeah. So, yeah. How do we understand this round of denunciations from Richie Torres and others who have said that any, you know, have said that any.

criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, yet here they come. Like, what's going on here? So I'm just going to come out and say, like, I'm not convinced it was coordinated. I mean, it's certainly possible that it was, but it's actually nothing new that, you know, liberal Zionists, particularly Democrats, will condemn settler violence. It's a good point that you didn't have a whole lot of Republican Zionists. There's some Christians I saw, like I saw Rod Dreher and some other Christians coming Well, I mean, look, I mean, what liberal Zionism is sort of, you know, one of the tenets that it's built on is the idea of a two-state solution being the, you know, the solution to this.

To have a two-state solution, you obviously need the West Bank to be part of the Palestinian state or at least part of the West Bank to be the Palestinian state. The settlers from the very beginning, from, you know, 67 and certainly up to the present are just shouting as loud as I can. There will never be a Palestinian state here. And we are going to make sure of that by creating facts on the ground, by, you know, building settlements across the West Bank. And so what they're doing is just like literally, you know, they're going to the people who are saying there's going to be a two-state solution. And they're like, yeah, just try, try us. And so, you know, when you think about it like that, the settlement movement, not even just the violent settlers, but the settlement movement as a whole is a really big political problem for liberal Zionists because they are, you know, precluding the opportunity for the two-state solution, which liberal Zionism depends on. And so it's it's not that difficult of a position to come out and condemn.

you know, these violent settlers who are just like viscerally, you know, we don't like looking at them. We don't like seeing what they're doing. And politically, they are, you know, trying to wipe out the possibility of this two-state solution. Once the two-state solution is off the table, which I think materially it is, but, you know, it's still sort of, you know, used as a rhetorical and political tool. But once it's off the table, it's much more difficult to just sort of unconditionally support Israel. And so, you know, I think that, you know, a Dan Goldman or Richie Torres, when they come out and condemn settler violence, what they're basically doing is like releasing, you know, pressure from this machine that allows them to just provide unconditional support for Israel. This is their sort of plausible deniability, their way of saying, like, well, we're not going to defend, you know, the worst of what they're doing.

You know, we still need to, you know, have an idea of a two-state solution in order to take our pro-Israel positions. And so I think, I mean, to me, it looked kind of like a chain reaction. I mean, the videos were getting really bad. And one guy came out and condemned and then another one. And then the Israeli leaders started condemning. And then APEC came out and did it. It's certainly possible there was a memo, but it should just be said that like, this is not actually new.

I mean, the settlement movement is generally not supported even by liberal Zionists in America. The problem is, you know, these people are not willing. to actually do what needs to be done to put a stop to it, which would be, you know, an ultimatum to the Israeli government. Unless you, you know, stop funding the settlers, unless you start evacuating these outposts. And in my mind, it would be evacuating, you know, hundreds of thousands of settlers, actually. Unless you do that, you're not getting another dollar from us. But they're not going to do that. Instead, what the Goldman's and the Richie Torres do is keep on telling the Israeli government, the ones who are behind the settlement movement to get the settlers in line,

which is just, you know, ridiculous on its face. Yeah. And it's also like, I mean, I think the reason me and Ryan felt it was maybe slightly more coordinated this time is because there was new faces doing it. Like, I think we had, was it Chris Cuomo came out and was like, WTF. And it's like, where are you been, man? Like, this has been going on for quite a while. And then like, I mentioned Emily Schrader.

And it's, there's kind of just a dissonance between, you know, like what you're. willing to defend and allow. I mean, she said, this is wrong. But then, you know, I do have her husband here in Israel posing with some of the rapists from the setam prison rape riot where they're, you know, bringing them on and showing them around on Israeli TV. So, you know, it's interesting what this is to me, it's like, yeah, I mean, That is almost, I mean, it's sort of a perfect illustration of the way that a good liberal Zionist will, you know, come out and say one thing and then go and do another.

Because if you are supporting the Israeli government in any way right now, just to be, you know, very clear about it, if you're supporting the Israeli government, you're supporting a completely lawless, you know, rogue government that is supporting these violence. militias who are who have complete impunity they have arms from the government they have money they have housing they have tax subsidies they get everything they need from the government who are going out and committing this violence and so like it is it is really just i mean the reason frankly that i often appreciate the settlers so much just from a sort of reporting perspective is because they don't hide these things they just come out and say it i mean it's it's amazing to watch like Leo Leibovitz, who is an editor at large for Tablet, which at one time was a sort of, you know, nominally respectable Jewish publication, wrote this long post where he basically said, you know, the settler violence is really a response to Palestinian aggression. And the settlers, on the other hand, are like, no, no, we're going into their communities and provoking them and trying to get them to be violent towards us. It's the Louis Thoreau documentary that came out last year

just had some like incredible moments. I mean, I have so many just like, I mean, when you, when you, I had a settler say to me a couple of years ago when I was telling him about my own experience in this town called Sebastian, where these soldiers came in and were just completely belligerent, like shooting into the air and into the ground, you know, pointing their weapons at us, throwing us around. And I asked him, like, do you think that that is helpful? Like, do you think that that is, you know, helping to maintain stability?

And what he said to me was, do you think that it was helpful for the U.S. military to go into Iraq and, you know, make sure that, you know, they were not able to, you know, use a nuclear weapon on the United States? And I thought that he was actually taking my side for a second. And then I realized the point he was making was that it's good that the U.S. military was in Iraq because then we were able to stop them from, you know, launching their nuclear weapon. And so, you know, that is the reality that they're living in, one in which, like, you need to be in all of these Palestinian communities, you know, terrorizing people and roughing them up to make sure that they can't launch their imaginary, you know, in the case of Iraq, their imaginary nuclear weapon at us in the case of these many times quiet Palestinian communities. communities, like, there's no armed resistance there whatsoever. So it's just entirely, they are there to, you know, be a permanent military occupation and to terrorize people. All right. Well, Jasper, thank you so much for giving us the download on all of that and for staying on top of this topic for us. Where can more people?

Crystal had to run to something else. She was not angered. Crystal left and protest. Just to be clear. Crystal left to go settle the West Bank. Okay, good. Yeah, I mean, you know, I please, you know, consider subscribing to my sub-sag, Infinite Jazz, just JAZ. Most of the stuff I put there is free. If you can't afford it, I try to keep it free for people who can't afford it.

So, you know, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I have a 20% off right now. And I'm publishing something either later today or tomorrow outlining a lot of what we just talked about, which I think will be a good sort of explainer on all of this. So definitely check out my subsect. All right. I appreciate your work, brother. Have a good rest of your Friday. We'll see you soon. Thanks. Thanks all. Okay. That's going to do it for us for this half of the show. Let's head on over to the second half. If you want to check that out, ask us questions, all that good stuff. Breaking Points.com. We'll see you over there in just a moment. All right, what's up? Dorks.

Uh, that's going to lead right into this first clip here on this side of the show. Um, you got to get fired for that. Apparently, apparently MAGA is dorks now, according to one Joseph Rogan. Let's take a listen. Oh, the praise make America great again. I don't care. Then fine. That phrase suck.

Here's the thing. Like, first of all, America is great. Would make America greater, I'm down. But make America great again. And then it becomes a movement of a bunch of fucking dorks. A lot of these really weird fucking uninteresting, unintelligent people that have got something and they cling to. And there's a lot of people that are just real genuine patriots.

They're all lumped into this one group and you've got to accept the dorks too. Fuck that. I can't tell you how funny this is. Emily, where on the roster of MAGA do you think Joe Rogan has encountered the dork MAGA? Like, who do you think he's referring to there? Well, what's so funny about this is a year ago, when Doge was happening, MAGA was on the top of the world. Yes, New York Magazine was framing MAGA as the quote, cruel kids club. And that birthed a million think pieces about how conservatives became cool.

And I'm telling you, as somebody who sat through dozens of panels about how, like at CPAC over the years, about how to make conservatives. is cool that always made you want to die. I have so many stories about this, but it was an obsession of the right for years about how they couldn't own culture and how the right couldn't be ever perceived as cool. Did it matter or not? Should the Wright get into Hollywood? Everyone, like, oh, the, what was it, the Lincoln Society of Conservative Hollywood. We've got some people in there.

They've infiltrated. I can't tell you how funny it is. to see that all come crashing down because it was built on the MAGA House of Cards, the Trump House of Cards that the Trump had this vibe shift post butler where it was real. Like it actually, that was genuinely real. All of these like different people were like, that guy's a badass. And there was like six months where MAGA was at the top of the world because the American people were so sick of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Democrats had this like ailing, well, octogenarian, almost octogenarian as the president of the United States who couldn't complete a sentence. And juxtaposed with that, yeah, Trump and Elon Musk to some people seemed cool. And younger people post-COVID were interested in different ideas. And I was sitting back watching this thinking for the Republican Party, that's not sustainable. That's just not sustainable because, I don't even think it's sustainable for any political party. We all remember when Obama came into office on the Hope and Change mantle. And we look back on that 10 years later, like, or what, 15 years later, and it's like, those guys were a bunch of dorks and rock the vote shirts. Like, politics is, you have to, well, it's dorky because people have to now put on team jerseys. And when you're putting on team jerseys, it makes you not cool because that means you're, like, going to obscure the truth and you're not going to be interested in, like, transparency.

And this is an era of very low institutional trust. So reppping an institution is not going to be cool ever, ever. I just don't understand why. I don't know. I mean, I don't, did people really think MAGA was cool? Honestly, God, like, that's a real question. I don't know. It's got to be, who do you think it is, Ryan? Who do you think Joe is being triggered by here? Is it the Cash Patel hockey locker room videos? Yeah, probably. Is it the White House? Is it the White House, government tweets. Like where is Rogan finding this dork factor from?

The irony of course is that my mind goes immediately to Elon Musk. Yeah. Right. The one guy he still likes. Who's still on Rogan. Maybe it's Cash Patel and it's like chugging his bud light or whatever.

Maybe. I don't know. But yeah, what's going on? Is he like, I saw a clip from CPAC. where you got it right here. Roll that one, yeah. Are we talking about this young kid?

Yeah. Now, this guy, this guy reads the same thing, yeah. And this guy visually, this is central casting for dork. So let's hear direct from the dorks. Oh, it's looking cool. I just, I get the vibe. A lot of people I knew who just wrote to a truck because of how it was cool in, like, high school,

or just now just being like, I can't bring a guy. Yeah, so this is, it was, transgressive against the dominant culture of the time, which was, as Ryan wrote about in Elephant in the Zoom, was this increasingly rigid ideological conformity pushed by, you know, everywhere from Wall Street with ESG to the media referring to people as against their will as Latin X. And so it was transgressive to support Trump. And so I guess to answer my own question, there's a moment where that could have been. perceived as like genuinely cool because there was something like, again, subversive anti-establishment,

whether or not you believe that. You know, Trump ended up getting inaugurated with all of the tech CEOs behind him, which the question at the time in my mind is, is this him saying, I have conquered you? Or is this him saying you have conquered me? And we know how it turned out. And if you know anything about politics, you probably could have guessed how it turned out. But I think there was, for a lot of young people who were around in the COVID period and like cultural taste makers who were around in the COVID period, this moment where there was catharsis.

And Griffin, you would know about these vibes. Like in California, there was this, and you were probably in New York at the time, but like you could, there was this something that was like artistic catharsis to be found in Trump being the most unusual, like unusual place to project that onto. I mean, yeah, that's a whole other bag of,

worms that has to deal with a lot of like specific entertainment industry issues. But yeah, I mean, where where does this go now that they're not cool anymore? I'm not sure. And I'm specifically interested in in Rogan and, you know, Rogan's a little late to this because there's a few other people whose fingers were a little more to the wind on this. Andrew Schultz has been coming out sort of against the Trump movement a little bit quicker and people like that. So we'll be interested to see where these guys go next.

And is it, then are they, I mean, I don't know if they're going to flip or if a lot of these guys are just going to remove themselves from politics. Because like, if it's like another Democrat standard bearer, I don't see them being like, oh, now this is counterculture. I think they're just not going to vote now. What do you think, Ryan? Well, Fuentes is telling us people to vote Democratic. Oh, right. Mm-hmm. To mess with them.

Yeah, like, what's so amazing is that Trump did all of this to himself. Like right now we're seeing some like Catastrifically hot weather And we're looking at maybe You know Historic drought conditions You know throughout much of the Mountain West and then Southwest

So like we're had There's going to be some external pressure on the Trump administration But other than that He's had a remarkably smooth glide Through this first year plus All of the problems that he has either the chaos around the tariffs, the multiple wars,

like the, you know, ice violence around the country, like these are all the product of his decisions. This is not a Katrina that he's, you know, failing to respond to effectively. It's his own stuff, which, which to me makes him a kind of uniquely bad president. Like he's mishandling the crises that he is producing. And so, yeah, people are like,

all right, you know, this is not cool. Like, this is not transgressive. Like, this is actually making my life much more difficult. In our poll, a week ago, we had, like, half the country was saying that they thought the Iran war would make their life more difficult. And that was a week ago. I think you probably see 60, 70 percent at this point. Now, gas and DC is up to, like, 450. A lot of people are looking at oil prices, but like what people care about is what that, what the number says at the pump. And then how that filters through prices when it comes to, you know, plastic, um, uh, grocery, grocery prices, which are heavily fueled by, you know, the price of plastic,

actually. Uh, and then we're going to, if we start seeing shortages of stuff, like COVID style shortages, but not driven by an external event like COVID, driven by Trump's own decision. So, yeah. And my theory of this has always been that the right was reading too much into the extent to which Rogan and others rallying around Trump was much more anti-left than pro-right. So it wasn't as though people were like, we love Liberation Day tariffs. We can't wait to be liberated by these tariffs. We love mass deportations.

We can't wait to see them. It was more F that, like, and this has been, yeah, like the CPAC set. And like, I've literally like spoken at CPAC. And it's even worse than it's ever been before. Like, it's bad. It's like genuinely a sign that the conservative movement, the energy has been sucked out of the conservative movement, just as everyone thought the conservative movement

had been inflated by MAGA to its, like, record level of momentum and size. And that was always a mistake because so much of what was pumping it up, we see this in the debate over Israel. Megan Kelly has pushed back. Who else has pushed back on this MAGA label? I'm trying to think of another good example. She said, I'm not MAGA. I'm MAGA adjacent.

I'm an independent. I voted for both parties and presidential elections my whole life. And I think people were like lumping Rogan in with actual MAGA and Megan in with actual MAGA and other people in with actual MAGA and assumed we won because now people are, They're all MAGA. It's like, no, they're anti-left more than they are MAGA. That's the big priority that drew people to them.

So anyway. Very interesting. Now, New Fox News poll has the country, you know, the country was against the war, but kind of, you know, in the beginning, the public is ready to support war in general. So the fact that he was only at like 50-50 was not good news for him. New Fox News poll has 57% against, 41% approval. So he's even underwater on the war itself. The effects of the war, he's way underwater. Yeah.

And I do also think there might be a Charlie Kirk element to all of this because Charlie was, for lack of a better word, like cool within the movement. And then when he was gone, there's been a lot of woke scolding, a lot of arguments about his character, what he believed, what he didn't. And then the establishment tried to,

replace him with Brillen Holleyhand. So the, Oh, isn't it Brylin? Whatever. The trajectory has been incredibly dorkish. Who was like going around campuses and being like, it is our mandate to support. It's like a little Lindsey Graham.

Yeah, just straight from his private jet or whatever, I believe was one of the videos. So yeah, they haven't really had a lot of figures. And I really do think the Cash Patel thing has, has tainted a dorkiness outside of the Elon stuff to all of this. But I think this leads us perfectly to some of our AMA questions that we'll get to really quickly right now before we get to Dr. Abdul-El-Said.

Someone asks, this is chart dog, asks, what's up with the weird Twitter posts from the White House account? No idea. And I mean, so for folks who have not been paying attention to the whitehouse. dot gov official Twitter account. There's a vibe that I can only describe as school shooter adjacent. Just like very vague. They've got that Columbine aura.

Yes, very Columbiney. They've been posting these, if you're just listening on audio, these odd digitized photos of J.D. Vance and Trump. I really have no idea what's going on here. That's Ruby. That's Ruby on the couch. Okay, nice. No, it's from the city of the union. You can catch it straight from the digital.

I like that, Emily. No, and someone else. Someone used AI to do that. I forget who it was. I would give them credit if I had it. There's also been these bizarre, like there's a bizarre, like three or four second video of people's feet in like a room talking about a plan. Like, there's these very, very bizarre posts. Emily, like, what has the reaction been on the conservative side?

Is this based trolling or is this just bizarre? It's completely bizarre. And maybe it's also intended to be a troll and they're going to do some big reveal. I'm guessing that they're building up to some big reveal. I have no idea. But I will say when they put out that bowling video in the earlier days of the war, that was, I just heard a lot of internal chit-chaf, people being like what the actual fuck is happening at the social media team. Even like on the right, people were like what the actual fuck is happening.

Like that is so even for our expectations of, you know, this administration on social media. media, the president himself posts the craziest shit on social media. But even then, this was like, completely insane and shameful. So that definitely, I'm sure that made its way up to the people who are doing this. I don't know who the people are doing this are. But I have no theory of the case other than they're trolling in some obscure way. That doesn't even matter anymore. Because, like, what are we going to do about it? Be like, what's up with the weird social media? posts. Not going to change anything. All right. This next one should be

for Ryan. This comes from Chase Leonard or Chase the Swift. Could an American private company set up in Cuba and sell diesel to the hospitals and other medical facilities? No. No, you could, no, you could not.

They guidelines that the Treasury Department, Department has put out say that any private business that imports, that legally imports gasoline or diesel cannot give it to, cannot sell it or give it to the public sector, like not allowed. So the best that you could have happen is that enough private companies bring in oil and diesel and that brings down the price. and then somehow it gets diverted to the hospitals, but they couldn't participate in that legally.

Now this Russian tanker is on its way because I think Putin really likes to, likes the idea of not being the obvious bad guy. And so how many days out are we now? It's, you know, it's the Anatoli Kaladkin. It's, you know, so far it's still going. And it's refusing to back down. So in Cuba, like, everybody was talking about that.

That's how bleak it is. It's like people are like tracking like, where is this Russian tanker? Is it going to make it? We don't know. Is it going to turn back? But so we'll see. It's, you know, within days we should know whether or not the U.S. is willing to like militarily confront this, this oil tanker.

that is planning to deliver oil to Cuba. Okay, well, we're making Putin look like the good guy. Mission accomplished. That's not easily done. Yep, some say it couldn't be done. Trump said, hold my beer. All right, well, on that note, we've got Dr. Abdul al-Sayyad, who's running for Senate in Michigan, let it have been.

All right, joining us now, Dr. Abdul-Syad, Senate candidate in the great state of Michigan, getting attention toward his campaign thanks to all of his other, you know, serious opponents in the race, A-PAC and some other groups, all condemning a rally that he hosted this week with Hassan Piker,

who I was just on a trip to Cuba with, which, so the kind of denunt, the Hassan Piker denunciation cycle moved kind of seamlessly, you know, from denouncing everybody who went to Cuba to now denouncing Senate candidate in Michigan for campaigning with him. Dr. Elsaid, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.

Ryan, it's always a pleasure to be with you all. And we have not hosted our rallies yet. They're coming up at the University of Michigan and Michigan State. And April 7th, if folks have not signed up, I hope you'll come. We'll also have Representative Summer Lee. We're looking forward to it.

What was the, it was the announcement of the rally that got everybody angry? Like, where did it? Because you had actually announced it, think like a week earlier. So like what was what was it that triggered this round of like viral like cancellation outrage? You know, I don't even know. And the point that you made in the first place is that we're talking about somebody whose job it is to talk to groups of people that you would think people running for public office would want to be talking to. They're the

folks I want to be talking to. And a big frustration that we've often had is that too often the people who should be voting for Democrats are not showing up to elections at all. And the question is, where are we missing them? Why are we not able to move our message? Well, I think part of it is that too many politicians don't have a message that these folks care about because they are on the wrong side of locking these same folks out. And on the other, it's that we're not actually going to the places that these folks are. I mean, we remember the whole 2024 discourse about whether or not the vice president should have gone on Rogan. So my question is, what is wrong with going and talking to a group of people who have been let down by our politics, cast aside by politicians

who weren't talking to the issues that they're talking to. And I'll just say this, the logic of this is kind of crazy given the fact that Hassan was invited to stream live from the DNC in 2024. And so I'm only doing what Vice President Harris did in the first place. I think the question then I would ask any of the folks who are so frustrated about this is why wasn't there so much more outrage when she did it. Yeah. Until they kicked him out, I think, third or fourth day, but that's a different story. There were some quotes here from Mallier McMurro, who's running against you, about Hassan. To quote this from the Jewish insider, she says, it is somebody who says extremely offensive

things in order to generate clicks, views, and followers, which is not entirely different from somebody like Nick Flentes. That is not somebody you should be campaigning with at a moment when there's clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state. How do you bring everybody together when there are difficult conversations where there are easy answers? I'll leave that question to you, Abdul. I'm trying to have conversations with everybody. And I agree that there's a lot of pain and trauma across our state. There has been so much pain and trauma across our state. That's why I've always tried to name that pain and trauma from the jump. You go back a couple of years. We have watched as Israel has decimated

Gaza in a genocide. And it took two years for my opponent to call it what it was, a genocide. So if we want to be in the business of understanding pain and trauma, I think it's important for us to name pain and trauma. And herein lies exactly the double standard. When we talk about the pain of trauma of some groups of people that gets ignored, it gets ignored by the same politicians who tend to ignore the kinds of people who listen to Hassan Piker or Twitch stream every single day. I'm trying to have a conversation with everybody. I was proud last Saturday to spend my Saturday morning in Jewish prayer services, I was invited in and I was so grateful to get to share space. At the end of the day, I think it is absolutely critical for us to understand that pain begets

pain. And the only way that we heal pain is by going and addressing the circumstances that cause it. That's what I'm trying to do. And then all of this seems completely separated from the foundational issues that people are feeling pain on across our state. Everywhere I go, people tell me about the fact that they cannot afford anything as simple as gas. They can't afford their rent. they can't afford their groceries, and they certainly can't afford health care. I'm trying to have conversations about how we unlock our current system, take money out of politics through corporate bribery, how we address the fact that we need to put more money back in people's pockets

by standing with unions and small businesses, and finally guaranteeing every single person health care through Medicare for all. Those are the conversations I'm having with people, whether they are in town halls in places like Ishpaming, on Twitch with people like Hassan, or in churches in places like Detroit. And those are the conversations I think we need to be focused on. Go ahead, Crystal.

Sorry, I was just going to ask. And nice to see you, Abdul, sorry for being late. I had a thing I had to do. Now I'm back. But I wanted to make sure I got a chance to speak with you, at least for a little bit. But I was curious, actually, if people are bringing this up to you when you're having online events or when you're having town halls in the district, is this, you know, are they raising concerns about the rally with Hassan or things Hassan's head or, you know, what your stance is, et cetera.

You know, it's interesting. Every room I walk into, two things happen. Number one, somebody who's usually older than 60 comes up and says, wow, there are so many young people here. And then one of those young people comes up to me and says, hey, I heard you on Hassan. I just think one of the problems with our politics is that we tend to do politics for consumption by people who talk about politics like sport. And if you're somebody who can consume politics like sports, by definition that says something about your general privilege, I'm trying to have conversations with people for whom politics. is foundational to being able to afford a dignified life. And I know that a lot of those folks feel exed out of our political conversation

because it's had by people who they know do not share their life experiences and could not care less about them. I do. I'm a physician. I trained to take care of people to make sure government works for people as a health director, both in Detroit and Wayne County. I want to go to the places where people who feel locked out of our politics are actually paying attention.

And those are the conversations that I want to be having. It's the reason why young people show up to our events because they understand that I'm not trying to talk down to anybody. I'm not trying to talk in language that is not accessible to everybody. I'm trying to talk about real problems that real people face in real places where people actually go. There's no question that from, you know, like a Laura Lumer or others, you've experienced them on the subject of some outright bigotry. There's also the issue of, you know, just the synagogue tragedy that happened several weeks ago now.

And I wanted to ask, Abdul, how you navigate questions about potential extremism in Michigan, where people are, like, maybe asking you to answer for people who are doing horrible things. Like, what does that been like on the campaign trail? So I imagine that's a, some of those conversations get difficult. Although, as you say, you're probably hearing more about affordability than anything else. After the terrible, horrific attack on Temple Israel, I was quite clear that anti-Semitism has no place in America, that we have a responsibility to stand up for Jewish people against anti-Semitism. It's the reason why I have been clear from the get that we have to stand up for Jewish people and against anti-Semitism,

and that starts with recognizing that any attempt to tie something that's happening on the part of a foreign government abroad to people in Michigan as a function of their faith is wrong and it's anti-Semitic. And I released a statement because I wanted folks to understand and put in context what happened. You had a guy who lost niece and nephew, children in an attack. And in his rage and pain, he displaced it on people who never, ever should have been the victims of his violence. I want us to understand that anti-Semitism is wrong, but also hurt people. hurt people. And we have to understand the context in which pain is created and then pain gets displaced if we're serious about uprooting that kind of pain. We released a four and a half minute

statement about exactly what happened and how I felt about it. So I stand in solidarity with Jewish Michiganders and Jewish Americans, frankly Jewish Israelis. I stand in solidarity with Jewish people because I believe anti-Semitism to be wrong. And I also understand that what the state of Israel is doing in terms of the genocide that it perpetrated, in Gaza, in terms of the war that it has pushed an idiot like Donald Trump into finally taking action to pursue in the ways in which they are trying to annex southern Lebanon or decimate the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. That's all wrong. And we can say multiple things are wrong at the same time without trying to use any of them as justification for another. In fact,

I think if we're serious about trying to uproot the kind of violence that we are seeing take hold, we have to be able to acknowledge the pain that creates it, and we have to do something about addressing it. And I just think that that's where leadership ought to start. Anyone who wants to tell you that some pain is more important than other pain, anyone who wants to tell you that somehow we can't talk about context for pain is not serious about actually addressing pain. They're usually trying to weaponize it for their own political ends.

And what I found so striking about the kind of democratic establishment conversation around Hassan Piker in general, And there was this like third way article that third way column op ed that they published. I think it was in the Wall Street Journal saying that like the Democratic Party needs to draw a bright line. And Hassan Piker needs to be on the other side of it. He cannot be in this, you know, in this space, in this coalition because he is anti-Semitic. It's just a foundational kind of belief and claim that is made. And I just saw on, but which I think most people that watch this program, if they have ever watched Assam Piger, just know that that's false.

A lot of people, though, would probably have not seen him and might assume, oh, maybe he is. I saw that somebody made a 30-minute compilation, which obviously we don't have 30 minutes and I won't have to play it. It's reacted the whole thing. Yeah, it's 30, 30 straight minutes of Asan Piker calling out anti-Semitism and telling his all. audience that it is, you know, anti-Semitic to conflate Judaism with Israel and on and on. Like, there are not many people kind of in the public space, I think, where you can even make a 30-minute compilation. A lot of people say it. That's like an extraordinary, and that's just what they found, you know, throughout this. And so I'm curious, like, on the ground, how, like,

how how kind of dominant and how prevalent is kind of the understanding of who he is and then and what end and also how kind of prevalent

is the assumption among kind of older people who don't know what Twitch is do they just kind of accept it as fact oh this guy's anti-Semitic or they haven't even heard of it like where like because as a candidate

you're much kind of more into the public and the grassroots than a lot of other people. So what is your sense of what people? understand about this controversy? The vast majority of people don't know who he is and they don't understand what the whole issue is about.

They're more concerned about how I want to make sure that they have health care through Medicare for all. And then you have folks like Third Way. The reason that Third Way is so angry right now is because they are corporate-backed entity that is intended to launder the old ideas that led us into this unaffordability crisis in the first place. And we've got people like Hassan talking to young people about how we can actually get past that.

how we can actually elect politicians who really want to guarantee us health care, who don't take corporate money, they get real upset because, well, we're all coming for all that they hold dear, a system that sucks money out of our pockets into the hands of the richest people in society by way of policies that fail to regulate corporations, whether they're providing us utilities or healthcare or flights. And, well, I understand why Third Way is angry, but they're using a cheap scapegoat to be able to get at that.

And then, look, the guy streams for eight hours, every single day, it's not hard to take things out of context and then try to paint him with that. And then because you called him a particular tag to make that tag stick because nobody really has the time to comb through except for this person who made the 30-minute compilation, to look at all of the times in which he took particular pains to differentiate between anti-Semitism and the actions of the state of Israel. Look, at the end of the day, I just this morning responded to, the leader of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt,

who consistently tries to obfuscate, deliberately tries to obfuscate the state of Israel and APAC for the Jewish people. And you would think that somebody who has a platform principally focused on trying to protect Jewish people would understand the foundational risk of that and the foundational anti-Semitism in that.

But instead, he's trying to use the concept of anti-Semitism to argue that any kind of anti-Semitism to argue that any, sort of criticism of Israel or any sort of criticism of APEC, which is a MAGA-backed political action committee intent on making sure that our public policy backstops, whatever it is that Israeli leaders want to do, he wants to extend the concept of anti-Semitism to defend that too. And I'm so sorry, but when you're talking about a state that is engaged in genocide at worst, but also engaged in war crimes and engaged in apartheid, it is not possible to try to use

that concept to defend what they're doing. And I just think it's really critical for all of us to be willing to have a clear, direct, and specific engagement with the notion that, yes, it is okay to criticize a foreign government that engages in genocide. And no, it is not okay to criticize a whole group of people simply because some people want you to think that one is the same as the other. They are not. The Jewish people are light onto the world. Antisemitism is wrong. Judaism is a beautiful faith. I got to experience it myself on Saturday. The state of Israel has done terrible things,

is engaged in doing terrible things, and is dragging our country alongside it by way of A-PAC, which is spending huge amounts of money to silence people like me. All of those things are true, and they need to be kept separate if we're serious about actually empowering people, because that's the whole goal here, whether they're Jewish people in America or in Israel,

or they're Palestinians, or they're Iranian folk, or their Americans just trying to afford their groceries and their health care, all of us would do better if we stopped pretending that some violence inflicted on the part of a foreign government somehow has to be defended by everybody who shares a particular faith. Yeah, I think, and forgive me if this point's been made before I jumped in the conversation. I think there's also an irony here from, you know, I saw your opponent, Mallory McMorough, who's now very critical of, you know, Hassan Piker and you doing anything with Hassan Piker. right after Trump won, she was one of many who was like, we got to reach out to these, you know, the Joe Rogans of the world, the podcast guys where these young men are. I mean, this was a very common analysis and especially a common analysis from like the third way part of the party. But, you know, that's only when it's, you know, people who code right. When it's someone who's on the left who has a huge following among young men in particular, then, oh, this is totally out of bounds. And I think you're right, Abdul and your analysis.

that is just basically because they're panicking because they're losing control of the party. I mean, the distance between where the base of the Democratic Party is and where the elected party leadership, you know, remains, especially on the issue of Israel, but on a variety of issues besides, is gigantic and seems like something that is unsustainable. So in light of that, I mean, you're running to be part of a new wave of Democrats who approaches, you know, a whole range of issues very differently. one of the things the Democratic base is very disgusted with is the failed leadership of Chuck Schumer in the Senate. So I wonder where you are on the question of whether he should remain leader. You know who might pick what for leader would be? It would be Senator Chris Van Hollen. I really, really hope he's running.

And I've said clearly, I do not agree with Senator Schumer on almost anything when it comes to the question of continued support for Israel, when it comes to the question of continuing to take corporate money into our politics. And at the same time, I also understand that my critique is bigger than one individual. A lot of folks who don't actually want to level a serious critique on the party about our willingness to take corporate money to pass corporate policy, want to blame it all on the feet of one person. And I'm just saying that I don't know who the alternatives are. So show me my alternatives and I will choose the leader who has the best shot at being able to get money out of politics, put money in pockets, and pass Medicare for all.

But I also don't want us to get deluded into thinking that the very same thing, that the very same people who take the very same corporate money, but then tell you that they want to go after Chuck Schumer are actually serious about solving the problem because they're going to find themselves somebody else who's willing to pass that same exact kind of policy that continues to launder corporate money into our politics. So it's just, it's bigger than one person. You know, my positions have been absolutely clear about where I stand on genocide, where I stand on corporate money and politics, where I stand on Medicare for All, where I stand on abolishing ICE. And I'm looking for a leader who can advance those goals, hold this Trump administration accountable for

the next two years of this administration and then get us to a position where we're leading on hope for the things that we can do to actually build the kind of America that we need and deserve. John Fuderman. There's only one. Don't dare speak his name, Emily. Abdul, I have another question for you. Unifying character for everybody to rally around. Sorry, go ahead. So, you know, I want to talk about something else that young people care about outside of Hassan Piker, and that's AI. Now, Bernie has been making a lot. lot about AI data centers wanting to pause AI growth, regulate it. And he said things as apocalyptic as it'll change our entire society and it might even destroy the world, our direct things that

Bernie has been saying. We also see with young people, their jobs straight out of college are going down and their futures are looking bleaker. Where do you stand on AI and how do you want to lead on the issue of AI? Well, I'll tell you this, it definitely has that potential. And there are real risks. There's also real opportunities. You know, anybody who's messed around with Claude or ChatGPT understands that there's real potential in this technology. The thing about any life-changing technology, though,

is that you have to balance the risk from the benefit. And the risks that I see coming are manifold. One is that it could potentially fundamentally and inalterably change the social contract when it comes to the ability for people to actually sell their intellectual capital on a market for money to live their lives. and if you are starting to automate out what was traditionally knowledge work out of an economy,

where does that go? And what do you do when you are now potentially creating a circumstance where 15 to 20% of young people are not just unemployed but unemployable as a function of it? The second question is this topic of P. Doom, right, which used to be a term that they used in the old years of AI like two years ago, which was the probability that AI would create existential doom. And we know, we know. know the risks of this. We know that if this falls into the wrong hands, we know that if it's able to escape human control, that there's potentially catastrophic risks there. And then there's the environmental footprint. It's not like AI just happens out of thin air. You need huge amounts of compute, sucking up huge amounts of electricity, potentially using huge amounts of water to cool it,

and that has physical consequences in communities like ours. So when it comes to the regulation, I think we need it. And the problem right now is a lot of the folks who understand it best, are taking money from the very same corporations who want zero regulation at all. And a lot of the folks who want to regulate are not as close to the technology. I aim to try and solve that as somebody who understands the development of this technology and also has not taken money from the corporations that are trying to tell us that somehow they know better for our whole entire future. And when it comes to data centers, I've been very clear.

We put out a terms of engagement. This has been a live issue. There were 15 data center projects proposed in Michigan in the last year alone. and there are many, many more slated for 2026. And our terms of engagement are thus. If you want to open a data center in Michigan, you better meet the following terms. Number one, if you're promising jobs,

you need to create all the jobs you said you were going to create and they need to be good union local jobs. Number two, there cannot be any increase in our electricity costs. In fact, you should be invested in reducing costs and some of the revenue that is passed on to utilities needs to be spent to improve our reliability. Three, there should be closed-loop systems, meaning you cannot connect to the water infrastructure

and to our water resources and think that you could just pollute our water to cool your computing in your data centers. Four, that there has to be a community benefits agreement that is negotiated and prepaid in terms of what you are going to provide a local community if you're bringing a data center in.

And then all of this needs to be reinforceable via very, very clear, very steep fees to make sure that data center operators are held accountable. That said, I am working. because this is all happening so fast. We're talking about an outlay of money that is greater than the amount of money

that we spent to build the federal highway system under Dwight Eisenhower. You're talking about huge amounts of capital. So we need federal legislation. We've needed federal legislation and things like an actual regulatory agency at the federal level that can hold some of these hyperscalers accountable,

the ability to make sure that you know your customer when you're selling them compute so you're not selling it to some actor who wants to use this for malevolent means, the ability to just make sure we have rigorous testing standards so these models don't go rogue. All of that is stuff we should have had two years ago, and we're only now starting to talk about.

So we need leaders who both understand this technology and are not bought off by the corporations who are building it, and I'm hoping I can offer that kind of leadership in the Senate. Let me ask you one horse race question. For people who aren't following this race, we've talked about Mallory McMorro, who's kind of running in the, Elizabeth Warren, maybe center left lane, she has a Warren's endorsement, trying to be kind of a Goldilocks candidate in between you and Haley Stevens, who's had enormous amount of APAC support in her previous race and is understood, you know, clearly the APAC candidate here, but seems to be hoping for a huge influx of APAC money, which has not arrived yet.

The race is in the doldrums of early August is the election, which might, you know, could potentially depress some turnout. Polls seem to have it pretty neck and neck and neck, like almost a three-way tie. McMorro put one out, showing her ahead, Stevens, but you're always like, everybody's right within a couple of points. McMorough herself, I've seen some of my reporting from a couple months ago resurfacing lately. McMorough herself had, according to one of her top campaign volunteers, sent in an APAC questionnaire. Maybe it was a DMFI questionnaire. We don't know. She hasn't released it.

That was supposedly very, very, they loved it, like the pro-Israel lobby loved it in hopes of not necessarily getting APEC spending on her behalf, but keeping APEC from supporting Haley Stevens. So with a three-way race, it's tricky. Like if they, you know, if they spend money attacking you, they could boost McMorrow and they still lose. If they don't, maybe then you edge it out. Like, what are you hearing kind of through the grapevine about where APEC is in this race,

what McMorough is trying to do, what Stevens is trying to do? And, you know, what's the path in the next few months that allows you to kind of break out of this three-way stalemate. Yeah, well, you're right. Both of my opponents just released poll numbers. In one of their polls, I have the highest favorability in the other poll. After all the voters are informed, I go up over the other two. That puts us in some really good positioning.

When both of your opponent's internal polls show you pretty strong, you recognize why it is that they are now engaging in what seems to be a pretty coordinated smear campaign about a campaign event I'm doing with a Twitch streamer. So all of that is to say, you know, I don't know what they're trying to do. I'm not in those camps. I'm just a lot more focused on having a conversation with the folks in my state. They understand that I've run before. And I'm saying the exact same things I said then now. I want to get money out of politics. I think corporations have choked our economy out for their best interest and against ours. In the eight years since I started saying it, it's all just gotten worse. It's less affordable than it was. I want to guarantee you health care because I know we could. do it. I literally wrote a book about how to do that. And I want to make sure that we're standing with unions and small businesses rather than big corporations who automate away our jobs.

That's what I've always been about. And we're going to continue to take our campaign across the state. We've been to 90 cities now, 300 public events. We know that our campaign is resonating. I also know that because of my clarity about my values when it comes to foundational human rights for Palestinians in the fact that I don't think a special interest, funded by MAGA billionaires should be able to sway our foreign policy in the form of APAC, that they're going to spend huge amounts of money to beat me. And so I ask good people if they believe in a politics where we believe in human rights for literally everybody, where we believe in the equal rights to dignity and self-determination

for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians alike. If you believe that corporations and special interests shouldn't be able to buy our politics, I hope that you'll support us. Go to AbdulforSennet.com and invest. At the end of the day, my job is to have that connection with Michiganders, we know that there's going to be tremendous amounts of corporate and special interest money sloshing around. And I'm just asking good people if you believe in my brand of politics and want to see somebody in the U.S. Senate who's trying to be honest with you about what we can have, not trying to tell you what you can't have and shouldn't fight for,

not trying to tell you corporate talking points that are washed through a campaign, then I hope folks will support us. All right. Well, thank you, Dr. Crystal, I think I'll do it unless you have any final questions. Nope, that'll do it. All right. Well, good luck. Doctor, and when is this rally happening, this infamous rally? April 7th. If you're in Ann Arbor or if you're in East Lansing, come on through. We'd love to see you.

Okay, very cool. We'll leave all that in a link in the description. Thank you for joining us and we'll speak to you again soon. Bye, Abdul, thank you. Thanks, y'all. Appreciate you. All right. That's going to wrap us out for this Friday show.

Okay. Yeah, thanks, Abdul. We appreciate you. Thanks, guys. Catch you later. Appreciate having me. Talk to you soon. All right.

Crystal return for the end line here. Emily and I kind of switched to swap down. Yeah. It's yes. I mean, I don't know if we want to talk anymore about all this smear stuff. We got through plenty in the interview. But I just have to say with the Hassan stuff, like the real truth bomb is, Hassan is probably one of the biggest bulwarks against anti-Semitism on the lap out of anyone.

I agree. Because there are a lot of other content creators out there that are far less measured and consistent. And want to conflate the two because they think it's good for their audience, growth. That's right. Yes. They like to flirt with it because, yes, because there's a big audience for it. And then the other thing is that, you know, you have a lot of young men who it's like, which way Western man, Nick Fuentes or Hassan Piper. Or Husson Piker. Which one do you guys want them to choose? Yeah. Right. And so look, if you're looking at, you know, Israel pressuring at, look, again, Donald Trump got us into the war with Iran. But Israel, no doubt, wanted us there and you're watching the committed genocide and all in these like speech crackdowns, et cetera. And you don't have the left perspective offered by Hassan Piker.

who is not talking about the Jews, but is talking about, you know, international human rights and everybody having equal rights and that Israel does not reflect the entirety of the Jewish people, even though they claim that they do. And that is part of what is creating this anti-Semitism. If you don't have that and all you're hearing is Nick Fuentes, you might think that that neo-Nazi worldview makes some sense. So I think you're absolutely right about that, Griffin, that he is incredibly important. And, you know, when I hear him talk, for example, about Tucker Carlson, he's always very careful. to talk about, like, you know, the problems with Tucker's worldview overall, even in the context of like, yeah, you did a great job with Ted Cruz. Yeah, I did a great job with Mike Huckabee, et cetera.

So I completely agree with that point. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, just they got to be careful because it does seem like the liberal centrist Dems have been trying to figure out where, how do they, because the left is on the rise, how do they articulate a difference? And if this is what they're going to articulate, that Hassan Pike, is like Nick Fuentes. Like, I'm sorry, Mallory McMorrow, you're not ready for prime time.

Like, this is not, you cannot walk out on the stage and say that with a straight face. It's absolutely ridiculous. And if you look at someone like Gavin Newsom, what did he do after the election? He had Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Steve fucking Bannon, and there wasn't any smoke for any of those people at all. Yeah. For having those conversations. I mean, I think it just smacks of desperation because, you know, I mean, the polls that have just come out do look pretty good for Abdul,

seem to show him gaining some steam. And more broadly, like I was saying, the pro-Zionist, you know, like everything for Israel, always Israel, whatever Israel wants crowd, recognizes that they're in a really dire position with the base of the Democratic Party. I mean, the recent poll that came out, I think, only 13% of Democrats had a favorable view of Israel. 13%. And that's one of the, honestly, that's one of the better polls I've seen for Israel with the Democratic base at this point. So, you know, they're trying all kinds of desperate tactics, like all the, you know, shenanigans they pulled in Illinois, for example.

And so I'm curious to see what they end up doing, how they end up playing in this race, because they are trying to figure out. They recognize that they've won these sort of democratic debate. So now it's, you know, the small deed, democratic debate. And so now it's how can we use all these sort of like, you know, shady tactics to obfuscate and confuse. And none of it has anything to do with Israel. Of course, the ads that they're running and all of that. But, you know, that's kind of where they are. And so this is the latest tactic they've deployed of like, oh, if you have anything to do with Hassan Piker, then you are an anti-Semite.

Mm-hmm. And this is also as Hassan has been doing more candidate interviews. So the Democratic Party is realized. that he is becoming the Joe Rogan of the left, that if you are a candidate that wants to get out there, you have to go sit down next to him and you have to have good answers, and that can't be acceptable.

Like, he can't be... Like, Gavin Newton was about to do it, but he's... And then he backed down a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. So Steve Bannon is fine for Ducezap, but Hassan Piker too far. Well, I'll just, in that vein,

I'll mention that, you know, I'm hosting this event, Progressive Victory, asked me to, along with a bunch of candidates who are running in some existing officeholders, and Hassan Piker will be involved. So I guess every one of those very many candidates are involved in this event, which is tomorrow evening, I guess all of them decided that the risk was decidedly worth it for them in terms of their campaigns. Yeah.

Maybe they can go on the third way live stream with like 10 concurrent viewers. It's almost not even a risk. All of them big donors, though. No, that's true. The cost benefit is you get the boost. You get the publicity. The cost is that Jonathan Greenblatt attacks you and APAC attacks you. That's not even a cost anymore in Democratic primaries.

That's a benefit. It's benefit benefit at this point. Like, oh, third way doesn't like this candidate. All right, let me learn more about them. Yeah. You know, it's funny you say that because I had that same reaction to this whole flop with Abdul, where the polls have been very close. And most of the polls have had him, you know, slightly behind the other two candidates.

And then with all of this, I'm like, they're only going to help him with this. You know, this is only going to help to you. Because what he needed was, in my opinion, you know, watching from afar and not following the race all that closely. But it was a challenge for him to try to separate with Mallory McMorrow. You know, the difference with Haley Stevens is very clear. But she is trying to find this way of massaging these issues and sort of making it unclear which one of them is really the quote unquote progressive candidate. And, you know, this helps draw a pretty bright red line for him, which is something that he had, you know, my estimation had been kind of a challenge for them in the campaign. So, yeah, we'll see.

All right. Well, we'll see all that. There'll be links emailed out to everyone for those live streams that Crystal will be attending. And of course, we will continue monitoring the situation as markets close in just a few hours. So I'm sure we're expecting quite a lot of news updates in the next. couple hours. It's great. We should just shift the show to work on the weekends. Cash Patel's personal email was hacked, so hopefully we will... Oh, okay. Interesting things from that too. It's another thing. Crystal, you're beaming. You're beaming on that one. You're very excited. You know Keystone Cash is sending some crazy things on email that he should not be sending.

A hundred percent. Look for that and more. And if not, we'll see you on Monday. Bye, bye. Lori Siegel, and on my new podcast, Mostly Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world. I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real world cafe right here in New York City. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you. Mostly Human is your playbook for how tech can work for you. Anyone can now be an entrepreneur. Anyone can build an app. And it's very empowering. Listen to Mostly Human on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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