Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/3/23 Weekly Roundup: Part Time Jobs Rise, Tom Cotton's Lab Leak Theory Smeared, Angela Davis Discovers Ancestors on Mayflower, Ken Klippenstein on Pentagon's War Plan for Iran

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

In this Weekly Roundup we cover the rise of Part Time jobs, a look at the journalists who smeared Tom Cotton's Lab Leak theory, Angela Davis going on Find Your Roots to discover her ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and Ken Klippenstein joins us in studio to talk about his latest piece discovering that the Pentagon developed a contingency plan for War with Iran.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Their headline is, More Americans are turning to part-time jobs. The number of people working part-time rose by 1.2 million in December and January. Most were people who chose it, so they're not being forced into it. And the quote they have here is, Let me give you a few more of the numbers here. So as I said, it rose by 1.2 million and most of that increase, 857,000 workers, part-time workers, was driven by people who

work part-time by choice, not because they were unable to find full-time work or because their hours were cut. The total number of people working part-time voluntarily, 22.1 million in January, is now almost six times the 4.1 million who were working part-time, but who are working part-time, but would prefer full-time hours. That's the highest ratio in two decades. And of course, looks very different from the first months of the pandemic when, you know, there was a huge crash and people were just taking whatever work that they could find. Now you have people who, you know, this is part of a whole reorientation that we've been talking about here for a long time, where people who are in the fortunate position where they don't have to work full time are reassessing their life

priorities. And they're saying, hey, maybe instead of the 60 hours, maybe I work three days a week and maybe I have more time with my kids. Maybe I'm spending more time on hobbies. Maybe I have an interest or a small business that I want to get off the ground. And they're changing their whole set of priorities within their life in a way that I think is positive. It reminds me of the four-day week study that has been making the rounds. Yeah, I was thinking about that too. 15% of workers who participated in the study said no amount of money on earth would convince them to go back to a five day a week work. Like, nope, not for sale.

It's like you're saying, a lot of people who are mid-30s even, sometimes not even with kids, are deciding to quit their job. They're transitioning into part-time work and they're just pursuing either hobbies or a lot of them are just spending a lot more time with family. So this is a big part-time revolution. I mean, still it's only 16%, but the trend line with the highest ratio since two decades also shows you where things are headed in terms of preference. And that is going to bleed into the bigger companies who are just going to have to make it work. They'll either move to like a four-day work week, which is longer or a ton more hybridization. You basically, if you're hiring right now for a generic white

collar job, good luck trying to say five day a week in person. That is very rare with the choices workforce. People just won't take it. They'll say, no, I'm not going to do it anymore. Right. Well, I mean, the four day work week thing is actually a really important piece to bring up because this was a huge trial. It's the largest study that they've done on four day work week. And they basically found workers were happier. They were less stressed. They got as much stuff done. And the companies at the end of it, almost all uniformly continued it. Yes. Because so it wasn't just good for the workers, like the corporations themselves found that this was beneficial for them. So I think more employers

need to and should lean into the idea of, all right, we don't have the standard 40-hour work week. People are still expected to, you know, to deliver. But getting out of this archaic idea of what matters is the number of, like, hours that you literally have your butt in the chair. Yeah. And some of that rethinking certainly happened during the pandemic when obviously people are forced to work remotely. And this is all, you know, white collar office workers that we're talking here, which is, you know, a sort of relatively privileged group. But that forced a rethink on the part of workers for sure. And I feel like the boss class is kind of,

you know, they're kind of late to catch up to a new way of thinking about these things instead of embracing like, listen, if you get your work done, you get your work done. I don't really care what you're doing with your day or what hours you're doing it in. They're going in the direction of what sort of surveillance technology can we invest in to make sure that your eyes are on the screen

for the right percentage of time or that you're doing whatever you're supposed to be doing during the technical office hours. So I do feel like they're a little bit late to the trend here. They're not going to win. There's no question. Flexibility is here to stay. It will be the growing trend now for decades, and we're all just going to have to figure it out. I think it's a good thing. I think people should have more flexibility.

And especially, you know, if you can go part-time and make it work. And, you know, it also opens up whole swaths of the country. A lot of people literally only where they live because of the commute. I mean if you don't have to what if you know you can live an hour outside and they quote one guy who's like a part-time tech worker who moved started a new family farm with his parents and raises chickens that sounds nice it would never be able to do that if he didn't if he didn't have yeah this flexibility so anyway yeah it's great work as like a religion has been the case for certainly our entire lives And so to the extent that people are rethinking that I think that is incredibly healthy Not just for those people but for all of society is a fun chart. Somebody actually sent me this it is that in

1976 the share of people who said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life Over was surpassed by people saying being well off financially and the gap between those two exploded during the 1980s where 80 percent of people now saying it's more important to be better off financially than it is to develop a meaningful philosophy of life so the flip of that even have a slightness right there yeah it's sick well you know it's not a surprise 1970 the explosion of financialization in the US economy trade free trade, etc But but you know if you have a decline within that and you come more to where words we were People were a lot happier in the 1960s. So I think it shows why yeah positive trend. We'll take it

So some new revelations from the US government they say actually lab leak Yep, this seems to be the most likely one from the energy department and apparently the FBI. Didn't take a genius, Ryan. We've both been covering this now for a long time. But a lot of journalists and other prominent figures in the media humiliated themselves on this subject. And let's just say we're going to keep some of the receipts. You know, why not? Let's put this up there on the screen.

So what do we got? Oh, very interesting. So here you have Tom Nichols, the so-called death of expertise guy, saying, arguing with the conspiracy theorists rarely goes well. It gives people advancing a theory to keep repeating it as just a hypothesis, as Cotton does here. Every time you ask him, he'll repeat it, say it's unlikely, and just say he's asking questions. Well, Cotton wasn't correct that it was a bioweapons program, but he does appear to have been correct that it did come from an actual Wuhan Institute of Virology where the U.S. government now claims what the intelligence points to. However, go ahead. There is evidence that there's a bioweapons program underway there.

Yeah, that's right. But COVID wasn't part of it. Right. Good point. We don't know. Yes. We don't know. And we certainly can't go.

There's no reason to go there. I will not say that it is part of it yet. But it could also be part of a bioweapons program and be an accidental leak. Whenever people hear bioweapons program, then they think, oh, no, well, then it was intentional. But DARPA, they went for DARPA funding, which they call biodefense. defense and if that was if it was a lot if it if it came out of that kind of recipe that was created for the DARPA uh application uh then that would actually make it part of like a defense or offensive operation but it's still an accident doesn't necessarily mean it right and then my personal favorite is Ann Applebaum who said for Tom Cotton wow this is just like Soviet

propagandists who tried to convince the world the CIA invented AIDS. And Applebaum is literally on the board of global disinformation in trying to dismantle. So that's interesting. And what does this show you? You have the ambassador, the Chinese ambassador that Face the Nation had on their program saying that it was a conspiracy theory. And then you also had CNN saying, quote, fact-checking Tom Cotton's claims about the coronavirus. I mean, all of these people absolutely beclowned themselves in retrospect. Even saw Mehdi Hassan yesterday saying, it's not our fault that we labeled this conspiracy theorist.

It's the conspiracy theorist's fault for co-opting what was a genuine theory called lab-league. And it's like, well, maybe you're not supposed to use your personal feelings against Trump or somebody who's saying China virus or whatever to keep away from the facts of what's been happening here. That's actually, I've very much appreciated the intercept on this. I know Mara, who I've talked to before,

I mean, she's not like some China hawk or whatever. She just always wanted to get to the bottom of this. And what did we learn from those documents, from the FOIA documents on the EcoHealth Alliance and the NIH and how they were circumventing their own procedures and how they've been pouring millions of dollars of funding into this lab? Like that alone should just be the scandal, period. It doesn't have to be political. Yeah, and that's what makes me so proud of the Intercepts reporting because we actually didn't go into it with, like, an agenda one way or the other. Like, what's going on? We were like, this is a real open question.

Right, right. What documents can we find that can shed some light on this question? And that's what it ought to be. Because it also never, and by the way, in Mehdi's defense, he's, as far as I know, the only cable host who actually pressed Fauci on this. That's true. And, you know, Fauci did his ducking and dodging, but he did say like the interceptors reported this, you've said this. But it never made sense to me. And maybe you could unpack some of it for me, how this became so partisan,

because like, I understand why if you're doing research about the effect of the minimum wage, the effect of minimum wage on, say, joblessness, that people who oppose a minimum wage will see in the data that it raises unemployment and then they'll have their talking points and people who support the minimum wage will find their own studies. Like, I understand how that epistemologically kind of devolves into a partisan fight. This, what? How is this democratic? Look, it's simple. And it came from day one. Nancy Pelosi, remember, saying we can't discriminate against Chinatown.

But she's the biggest hawk. Oh, the Chinatown in San Francisco saying that it was sparking hate crime. It became an anti-Asian hate thing. And look, I'm not saying that there hasn't been violent crimes against Asian people, although a lot of that is product of just violent crime in San Francisco and New York. Some people don't really like to talk about that one. But the point that I'm making is that it became immediately that the idea was if we acknowledge this, if we talk about it, it's racist against Asian people in America, which, of course, is ludicrous.

And the part to me that didn't make sense about that is that the non-bigoted explanation was that it was actually these rural redneck Chinese who were eating bat soup. Right, yeah. You're right. That to me— Crystal talks about that all the time. She's like, so it's less racist to say that these like peasant Chinese were eating bat soup at wet markets, which apparently is not that common of a phenomenon. Right. And Wuhan is like a city of like 20 million people.

Yes. Super sophisticated. Yeah. But we played on these tropes and these bigotries that Western people have about rural Chinese people to say, oh, it's the bats. Yeah. You know those Chinese people always eating those bats? That's the woke answer. Right. Listen.

That we were doing joint U.S. and Chinese research in a lab right near there, and there was an accident, that's the bigoted explanation that... I don't know. The whole thing is ridiculous. And from day one, so many of these reporters, the New York

Times, Don McNeil, straight up admitted he didn't take lab leaks seriously because he trusted Dr. Fauci, as we've been talking about. And a lot of these people have egg on their face. Beyond that, a lot of the social media censors have the straight up need to apologize to many of the figures who were deplatformed and smeared as conspiracy theory.

It took a long time until you were able to talk about this. Wasn't Facebook taking your account down? Yes, Twitter did it as well. They took down the Zero Hedge account for talking about the bioweapons thesis. And look, from day one, it was like, well, the lab is there. And they were studying back coronaviruses. Maybe it came out of there. Oh, it turns out it's not consistent with evolution. Every scrap of evidence from day one has pointed to the Wuhan lab. In my opinion, you had to be an idiot to believe the natural origin thesis outside of two months into it. When we already knew from independent analysis that the furin cleavage site looked like it was inserted into the virus.

That's it. Pack it up and go home. Well, that's why in early February you had that conference call with these scientists. Christian Anderson and all these people. In early February, you had that conference call with these scientists who are now the most outspoken opponents of the idea, saying, this looks like it came from the lab. As we look at the cleavage side, as we look at the relationship here, to me, some guys are saying, I'm 70-30 lab, I'm 60-40 lab, I'm 50-50 lab. Some saying, I can't see any explanation for how this has a natural origin. Those same dudes then, like three days later, are organizing a letter saying that the science

has settled on this. Well, it's certainly settled now, I think. Maybe we'll find out eventually. Not quite. It's still not quite, like, there's no... Well, the smoking gun is dead because they covered it up. It's gone. And people say we'll never know, and I just don't know if that's true.

Like, I still do think that we could know. Like, there still could be... There's evidence that the NIH and that the U.S. has access to that has not been revealed yet, related to Ralph Baric's lab and some other places. So it's not just the Chinese, you know, who have a lack of transparency on this. And maybe we will get something more out of China.

Like, I think it's too early to say that we'll never know. Okay. Well, I hope so. At this point, personally, I've got all I need. Yeah. I think most people should. I'm pretty confident. Yes.

I don't even, I barely even say hypothesis anymore. Because I'm like, at this point, the natural origin hypothesis is the one that's bunk. It has far less evidence on its side. But we'll let the rest of the mainstream catch up with that one. And we will see you guys later. Angela Davis appeared on Skip Gates' show where he searches people's genealogy. And boy, was she stunned by what he found. Let's roll this.

Any idea what you're looking at? That is a list of the passengers on the Mayflower. No, I can't believe this. My ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower. Your ancestors came on the Mayflower. You are descended from one of the 101 people who sailed on the Mayflower. Oof. That's a little bit too much to deal with right now. Did you ever in your wildest dreams think that you may have descended from people who laid the foundation for this country? Never. Never.

Amazing clip. It's easy to see why it went viral. Henry Louis Gates' show on PBS, I think it's called Finding Your Roots, occasionally has a moment like this. He discovered Angela Davis is a distant relative of William Brewster, one of, as Gates said there, the Puritans to arrive on the Mayflower. He was fleeing persecution, religious persecution, drama, one of the major sort of founders of the Plymouth Bay Colony.

And so there are a number of different ways that I think people can kind of interpret what this means about America, what it means about Angela Davis, et cetera. One of the things that always strikes me when these types of situations arise is kind of the rape culture associated with slavery. Because now there were free blacks in New England, you know, from the 1700s on. So it is certainly within the realm of possibility that there was some type of relationship

that was not rape that produced this, but that possibility is extraordinarily slim. Most likely, you're talking about somehow you wind up in a situation of slavery that produces this type of outcome. Because that is where most of those family trees intersected. No, absolutely. And you can imagine then why, actually, it shouldn't be that surprising to Angela Davis. And I'm sure it was just sort of the shock of the moment because she's obviously very well aware of that history.

Also, it's the Mayflower. It's the Mayflower. It's the icon of colonization and exploration and America and everything. Yeah. Which is, again, why it's easy to see that it went viral. I wanted to ask you, Ryan, about the significance of Angela Davis, obviously on the left, the right, as she sort of makes her college campus appearances, et cetera, the right, myself included, will weigh in on that and ask, you know, these lavish speaking fees that come to Angela Davis, who was once on the FBI's most wanted list for her role in a very complicated situation back in the 70s.

And ended up going to jail and then being acquitted. So Angela Davis's role in the contemporary left as—and Henry Louis Gates Jr., by the way, was involved in the Beer Summit, the famous Beer Summit that everyone seems to have forgotten about in the Obama administration, where he accused a white Boston cop basically of racially profiling him as he was trying to break into his own house. Which he did, right? I don't know. I think that's still an open question as to whether it was like malicious racial profiling.

But Obama then brought the officer and Henry Louis Gates to the White House for the Beer Summit, and Angela Davis, going back to her, as we're now involved in this DEI, what people call wokeness, cancel culture discussion, is there a significance to Angela Davis being the person here who's learning about the William Brewster Plymouth colony relationship? Sure. I mean, she is an iconic and also polarizing figure on the left. The specific crime that she was accused of,

so basically somebody tried to break a couple guys out of prison in California and used weapons that Angela Davis had purchased and the assailant died. and used weapons that Angela Davis had purchased. And the assailant died, other people died. It became an atrocity. And Angela Davis was then arrested for buying the guns that were used. But an all-white jury actually acquitted her,

although she spent, I think, more than a year kind of in jail between the charges and the trial and her then being found not guilty. Obviously, the FBI was cracking down on Black Panthers and leftists at the time. And this was a part of that. And from there, you know, she went on to be one of the more kind of celebrated writers and academics in on on the left over the years, you know, viewed with an enormous amount of moral authority, you know, fell into more controversy over the last several years when, if you remember, a Birmingham Jewish organization gave her some lifetime award and then rescinded it, saying that her views on Israel, she's supportive of the boycott of Israel, made it so that they no longer wanted her to get this award.

And so then that produced a lot of backlash, saying that it's unfair to call her an anti-Semite just because of her position on Israeli abuses towards Palestinians. But she has maintained her cultural cachet, for sure. So to have somebody who has been part of our culture for 50 years, to learn that she came from the Mayflower, is pretty amazing. Well, let's put the next element up on the screen because I think this was a good take from Michael Brendan Doherty of National Review. So a take coming from the right that wasn't just, you know, owning the libs. He said, think about it from both perspectives.

Almost certainly exploitation played its role, but someone who came on the Mayflower has a radical like Angela Davis as a descendant. America is huge. Talk of divorce is senseless in light of this reality. Obviously, I think the reason this clip popped on the right is because there's a lot of momentum that seeks to hold people accountable for the sins of their ancestors because of the color of their skin right now. So that is white Americans who are being held accountable or want to be, the argumentation goes, or should be held accountable, as the argument goes, for the sins of previous white Americans,

this complicates that. Obviously, when exploitation, obviously, as Doherty says there, may have played a role, yes. But then, on the other hand, sometimes it didn't. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't hand, sometimes it didn't. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't. Sometimes it didn't. And that makes it a very difficult sort of reality. The reality is much more complicated and in some ways much more beautiful in that American

sense that William Brewster—the line from William Brewster to Angela Davis—is sort of thoroughly American, that you can descend from the lineage of somebody who founded the Plymouth colony and be a sort of black radical and someone who's allowed to have, rightfully, who's fought for all of these different metrics of progress for black Americans, et cetera, et cetera. But I think we'd have to know a lot more to say whether or not it's complicated, because if it is what we assume, and he says exploitation, he's talking about rape, you wouldn't say that the product of a rape bears any responsibility or any kind of culpability or even relationship to the power structures

that produce that. No, but that's the thing. We don't know. And sort of trying to categorically say we do know is a problem. Right. But we can certainly make a very educated guess. Oh, absolutely. Of how that...

But then codifying things legally into policy, I think, is a really different question. Right, which shows why it would be better, I think, to produce a social democratic society that elevated everybody. Yeah. Rather than saying, well, we're going to go back 400 years and figure out whether there was consent between these ancestors um to determine whether you are going to get some form of reparations that you know that just falls apart pretty quickly let's go back to the skip gates thing real quick because i mean it'd be one thing if the cop and this is this was july 2009 uh he's trying he came back from a trip he's like couldn't find his keys.

He's trying to get into his house. He's in Cambridge. It'd be one thing if the cop stops him, is rude to him, asks him, who are you? And kind of gets aggressive. You could say, look, let's do the protect and serve thing. Let's not be hostile with people until we know what's going on, but they went further They put the guy in cuffs and arrested him. Well, he started arguing and saying do you know like basically? I don't think you know you're messing with yeah, which is understandable again because he's going into his own house. He's Henry Louis Gates

Yeah, it's a kid and this is a Cambridge police. I. I think I said earlier Boston, but Cambridge police. Speaking of Plymouth and the settling of Massachusetts, here you have, this is happening in Cambridge, a Harvard professor, a Cambridge cop. He's an old man, too. It's like, you can't ask a neighbor, hey, is this actually Henry Louis Gates Jr.? You can't type it in your phone.

And so, again, you can understand entirely why Henry Louis Gates Jr. would be furious. And would be—this is one of the things I think the right got wrong about the kind of Beer Summit discourse back in 2009, is that you can understand why somebody of his age who has lived through the America that he's lived through would be on guard and would sort of have that reflexive upset over being treated that way on his own porch by a cop. That doesn't mean the cop was acting in a racist fashion necessarily, but you can understand why Gates would jump to that conclusion. And I'm not saying this is how he felt, but there's also a sense of survivor's guilt among a lot of people who escape oppression and escape a marginal circumstance and get to Cambridge, get to an endowed professorship, get to a place where you're on speaking terms with presidents, while so many people that you grew up with are still living in these brutal conditions. And so I think that that kind of cuts against somebody like Gates' willingness to kind of bow down to an officer who is treating him in that way because he feels like, I've made a lot of compromises to get where I am, but I'm going to stand up for myself on my own porch.

You know, I think it's really interesting that this is on his show and with Angela Davis, because it's a good reminder from the beer summit to from the arc of like early Obama years to Biden years now that our media discourse has done the entire country basically a disservice by just erasing any nuance from these really complicated conversations. And I think that's had positive—I think that's had negative effects for both sides of the debate, whether or not you think one side is right or wrong. Ultimately, it's just what's wrong is the lack of seriousness and nuance that our media culture in the age of Twitter, which was very new in 2009, has brought to these conversations because we're forced to make snap judgments for the algorithm. We're not forced to, but people do

make snap judgments for the algorithm to be involved in the discourse as quickly as they possibly can. And that brings us to, I think, a totally flattened dialogue about that. And I do think on the question of how this complicates things it also has to complicate the mythology of the Mayflower Like it has to remind people That what they learned in third grade about about that landing It has has many other layers to it that have you know combined to produce the fabric of this society I think the schools have definitely moved in that direction to the point of perhaps overreach,

which we would probably disagree on at this point. But, and again, we don't actually know where down the line exploitation, if that was the case, occurred. It could have been, you know, it's just, it's really hard to know. But fascinating reminder of how unique this country is. There are more cases like this and you could say unique in a bad way, but I think the way of looking at it that I prefer, the Michael Brendan Doherty way, is to say there are people who legitimately were white supremacists from another age who

have paved the way for the Angela Davises of the world. Well, that's for sure. So one of our great partners, Ken Klippenstein of The Intercept, has some bombshell new reporting. Let's go and put this up on the screen here, guys. Pentagon developed contingency plan for war with Iran. In January, the U.S. and Israel conducted the largest joint military exercise in history. And obviously, Ken is here with me now. Great to see you, sir. Good to be with Iran. In January, the U.S. and Israel conducted the largest joint military exercise in history. And obviously, Ken is here with me now. Great to see you, sir. Good to be with you. All right. So just tell us a little bit of what you found here. Yeah. So this CON plan, which stands

for concept plan, is basically a war plan that the military does to try to game out how a scenario would happen and how they would fight a war with partner nations. And what's interesting about this is I think there's this misconception that the military has plans for every single thing, but the reality, and I interviewed in this story, is I interviewed an advisor to the Joint Chiefs who himself was a military planner under the Marine Corps Special Operations Command. These con plans in particular are very expensive to do

because you have to get buy-in not just from DOD but from outside agencies like the State Department as well as the White House. So these tend to be pretty rare. The last time that there was an Iran con plan reported was in 2002 in the run-up to the Iraq war. And so this is the first indication that they've had any kind of update to those plans. And the code name for it is Support Sentry. And basically what's interesting about it is that it takes place in the context of a huge shift regionally in terms of the U.S.'s relationship with Israel.

So under the Trump administration, they passed what was called the Abrams Accords, which were sort of pitched as a peace accord. And to some extent it was that because it did normalize relations between the Arab Gulf states and Israel. But an unintended consequence of that is that it made it so that they can negotiate together as a bloc for what they want. And basically their common enemy in that region now that they've normalized relations is Iran. And so the concern on the part of people I interviewed in this story and a lot of military planners too is that we're going to get dragged into a conflict that Washington doesn't necessarily want

because Israel is now able to coordinate with the Arab Gulf states to do these sort of things. Give us a little bit more of the history on this, because I think this is important, obviously, back under the Obama-Biden administration. They negotiated the Iranian nuclear deal. Israel's very unhappy. Netanyahu came, gave this sort of infamous speech in front of Congress. Then Trump comes in, he backs out of that deal. Biden campaigned on getting back into it. He has not actually done that. There was sort of a window of time at the beginning of this administration that was probably the most likely time for him to get in. And so now, I mean, what you're showing here and what seems to be the

case from other activities as well is that we're sort of backing the Israeli view of a much more brazenly aggressive approach to Iran. Is that a fair characterization? And what else are we seeing in that regard? Oh, totally. To give you an example, recently, this was just a couple of weeks ago, the U.S. ambassador to Israel made a statement publicly saying, whatever Israel wants to do to handle the alleged nuclear threat in Iran. We have their back. And there were so many questions to the State Department press secretary about that. It was kind of interesting. They didn't walk it back.

Now, they didn't say like, oh, we're totally on board with that. But they were like, we supported the Israelis and our partners in the region. So that's going to be a signal to a country like Israel, which recently, according to The New York Times, conducted a drone strike in Iran, where they blew up a, I think it was a military production factory. And that's one of a bunch of covert operations that they've been doing, killed a nuclear scientist not long ago. And so when you have a green light like that, you have to imagine that the Israelis are going to take that in a certain way. And so the question now is, how far are they going to go? We had, as you mentioned before, the biggest U.S. military exercise in history. And I think something

that's important for the audience to understand is that war is not when the troops go into the country. That war is a continuum and it's an entire plan. There's a lot of logistics and planning. That was the point of my reporting, this con plan, the concept plan, is to give people the idea that the planning is happening, that in addition to that, the military exercises are happening. And that has the effect, if you look at the Iranian government statement in response to that military exercise, the Iranians started having their own military exercise. And I think it was a lieutenant general in charge of, I think it was the army, he said, military exercises are the war before war. And I thought that that was a pretty good

way to put it. The war before war. Regarding those drone strikes, I mean, there were a couple things, the Israeli drone strikes on Iran, there were a couple things that I found noteworthy. Number one, it came right in the wake of those giant military exercises. Number two, typically when Israel has engaged in these type of attacks on Iran,

and we'll put aside in you know, in Ukraine, oh, territorial sovereignty, et cetera. Here we have a different view, apparently. Usually we say, oh, we don't really know what happened. Here they came out and said it was Israel. I found that to be noteworthy because it was almost an endorsement of the actions that normally we try to keep ourselves

a little more removed from. Exactly, and that's the effect that this regional shift has had. Another point I make in the story is that historically Israel has been put under the combatant command of European command in the US military and that sort of seems not very intuitive like why would Israel being under European command instead of Central Command which is the Middle East command. President Trump in his capacity as commander-in-chief is able to change something like that which he did with an order in the last few days of his administration. He

moved Israel from European command to Central command. I started interviewing, you know, former military officers trying to get a sense of why that, what that change meant, because there's hardly any reporting on it. And it turns out there's good reason to have Israel under European command, because that makes it so that they're not fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Arab Gulf states, and it just keeps our combatant command separate from the full extent of what their interests are in that region, insulates us a little bit from having to respond to problems that might be in the Israelis' interest but not necessarily ours. But now that they're on central command along with the rest of them, that's completely changed the state of play

in the region and not only aligned the Arab Gulf states with Israel, but also puts us on the hook to respond to problems that happened with regard to Israel that we wouldn't have responded to when they were under European command. And finally, there was news recently, this is from the UN agency, the IAEA, that uranium purity in Iran is just 7% off from bomb making levels. What do you make of this news and the timing of the news? I think it's eerily reminiscent of the run-up to Iraq. Again, I'm not talking 2002. I'm talking the Clinton administration when the UN is putting out all these statements, hand-wringing about nuclear enrichment on the part of the Iraqi government. And then the effect that that has is

it stokes a lot of anxiety in the public. You know, I want to be very clear. I don't want the Iranians to get nuclear weapons. That's going to trigger an arms race in the region. Saudi Arabia has made its own moves towards a nuclear program. So has the UAE. That would be very dangerous. You know, I'm opposed to all of that. However, if you look at what our intelligence community's conclusions have been in the nuclear posture review, which it seems no one read,

they state very clearly that they have no evidence. This is as close as a quote as I can remember. They have no evidence that the Iranians actually want a quote as I can remember, they have no evidence that the Iranians actually want a nuclear weapon. Now you can say, why are they enriching? They want to get to the point where they're near to it if they feel they need to hurry up and get one as a deterrent kind of thing. But our best intelligence, the CIA director reiterated this in an interview just a couple of days ago, also said we have no evidence that they're actually going to cross that line into full-on enrichment as opposed to getting to the point where they could do it quickly.

And I said the last one was the last, but I think it's important to get this as well, because under the Obama administration, in my opinion, the Iranian nuclear deal was one of their greatest achievements. Trump was just opposed to whatever Obama did reflexively. He backs out of it. And as I said before, Biden ran on we're going to get back into this deal that we walked away from. How did that fall apart? And to the point now where I don't think there's any expectation from anyone that it's really possible or feasible for this deal to be rekindled. I think that's a really important angle to all this because Trump is in the past. We can wring our hands all we want about what he did or didn't do.

The reality is that Biden didn't reverse those things. Biden as commander-in-chief could send Israel back to European command. Biden as commander-in-chief has all sorts of a suite of options in terms of changing the relationship. The best impression I get from folks in the defense community that I talk to is not so much that he hates the Iran deal, but is that he just did not prioritize it to the extent that he needs to. More focused on domestic stuff, didn't care as much about foreign regional policy. When you do that, the policy gets farmed out to the autopilot of the military community, which is always going to be escalate, escalate, escalate, which I think is what we're seeing in the region. Yeah, I think that's right. And in the meantime, while they

squandered time on the U.S. side, there's now a more hardline leader in Iran. And of course, now you have the complicating factor of them allegedly providing support and drones to Russia, which again, just creates a more adversarial relationship between us and Iran, makes it much more difficult to imagine getting back into any sort of deal. Really important reporting, guys. I really encourage you to read through the whole thing because as Ken points out, listen, before a war actually happens, these are all of the sort of preparations that occur so that they can build the case, so they can build the preparedness, so they can then go and sell it to the American public. So Ken, thank you so much. Great reporting. Thanks for having me. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there's a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've seen a lot of stuff over 30

years, you know, some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and We Need to Talk is tapping in.

I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like, that's what's really important, and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.