Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/4/24: SCOTUS 9-0 In Trump Ballot Case, Kamala Gaslights On Ceasefire, US Airdrops Gaza Aid, Non-Whites Shift To Trump, Biden Avoids College Campuses, Nikki Wins DC, CNN Anchor Rips Biden On Israel, NYT Chaos After Debunked Oct 7 Report, Flour Massacre Evidence Exposes Israel Lies, Elon Sues Sam Altman

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss SCOTUS 9-0 ruling in Trump's favor on ballot access, Kamala gaslights on ceasefire, US airdrops Gaza aid, women and non-whites shift to Trump, Biden terrified of college campus events, Nikki wins DC primary as uncommitted looms, Biden's favorite CNN anchor trashes his Gaza policy, NYT chaos after Oct 7 report debunked, flour massacre evidence disproves Israel lies, Elon sues Sam Altman in AI dispute.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Hi, everyone. We have some major breaking news. We just wrapped our show. And of course, we received the big news of the day. The Supreme Court has now ruled 9-0 to reject

the Colorado Supreme Court decision that would have held Donald J. Trump off of the ballot in that state. The Colorado Supreme Court affirming a Colorado Secretary of State decision ruling that Donald Trump was not allowed on the ballot because he had violated the 14th Amendment in their estimation. The 9-0 decision is a bit complicated, Crystal, and we can break it down for everyone. Let's put it up there on the screen. While they unanimously agree that the Colorado Supreme Court went too far and the Colorado Secretary of State in their disqualification of Donald Trump on the ballot, the majority opinion, which includes six out of the nine justices, effectively says that this was overstepping the role of Congress, that Congress, through its enumeration of the

14th Amendment, not only had to have that stand, but would have to pass a piece of legislation that specifically lays out which individuals and how were to be disqualified from office under the 14th Amendment. Three of the liberal justices, Katonji Brown Jackson, Justice Sotomayor, and Justice Elena Kagan, dissented from that majority opinion, but found with the 9-0 unanimous decision that Colorado had gone beyond the terms of the 14th Amendment. So basically, the majority opinion and where this justification now comes down is Colorado went too far, and that in the future, that Congress itself must pass specifically

which types of individuals, why and how, are disqualified from the ballot, and that the hodgepodge nature of allowing secretaries of state like Maine or Colorado or others could not stand this, what they all unanimously found. So very impactful case, probably the most significant one since Bush versus Gore in terms of that decision. But this one, a little bit different in its findings. Yeah. It wasn't surprising the direction that this went in. Just to emphasize one of the things you're saying there, that piece about the majority rule that Congress basically has to pass a law in order for this section of the Constitution to apply. My recollection from

when I was researching this previously is that would mean that this provision is not self-executing. Some parts of the Constitution just they are what they are and they are, you know, available for enforcement as they are. And others actually require an act of Congress. That's what the majority is saying. That's the piece that a minority of the liberal justices are saying, hey, we don't agree with that part. That part goes further than we need to in this decision. Just as a reminder, I want to read to people the text of Amendment 14, Section 3, just so we have a recollection of what we're talking about here. So it says, no person shall be a senator or representative in Congress or elector of

president and vice president or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States or under any state who, having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress or as an officer of the United States or as a member of any state legislature or as an executive or judicial officer of any state to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. That last piece, the fact that it points in the amendment to Congress, was part of what they used as a justification for saying, well, that sort of indicates that what they really mean is Congress has the final say in how this provision is applied. One other thing that I wanted to note here is that they do not appear to have taken any stand

or said anything about whether or not they believed that Donald Trump engaged in an insurrection or gave aid or comfort to an insurrection. And that was not actually even the focus of his team's argument. In this case, they were focused more on these technical legal questions. Does the president of the United States count as a, quote, officer of the United States or as an office holder of the United States? Who does this responsibility fall to? And I wanted to read a little bit of the liberals who had the dissenting view that they agreed that Colorado went too far. They agreed that they did not have the power to enforce this particular piece of the Constitution. But they said they should have had a more limited ruling. They say if it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case,

then it is necessary not to decide more. That of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more. That's from actually the Dobbs decision. That fundamental principle of judicial restraint is practically as old as our republic. This court is authorized to say what the law is only because those who apply a rule to particular cases must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. That's Marbury versus Madison. Today, the court departs from that vital principle, deciding not just this case, but challenges that might arise in the future. In this case, the court must decide whether Colorado may keep a presidential candidate off the ballot on the ground that he is an oath-breaking insurrectionist and thus disqualified

from holding federal office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Allowing Colorado to do so would, we agree, create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork at odds with our nation's federalism principles. That is enough to resolve this case, yet the majority goes further. And again, they go on to point out this piece of their interpretation that the body that has the ability to enforce this provision is Congress. That's the piece that they dissent on, even as they agree overall. Yeah, it's actually interesting, too. Trump's argument, as I'm understanding here from what they write, was to hold that the Section 3 disqualifies, quote, every oath-breaking insurrectionist, except, as they write,

the most powerful one, because he was arguing that the president was not in effect a quote unquote office holder of the United States. He says, actually though, both of these results are inconsistent, both Colorado and President Trump's argument about the highest office in the land. Thus, they then use the contextual point to Congress and say both of the Trump argument and Colorado argument are inconsistent with the historical basis of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. And thus, they're establishing this new standard for how this is going to work in the first place. So I know it's kind of complicated, legalese and all that. The net effect is obvious. It's Colorado lost. Maine and all these other states are not allowed to do this. I guess it invites an interesting question because

one of the things that we had talked to here before is if they had ruled in the way that the liberals had wanted to them, then this would have been a different question post the conviction if it were to happen of January 6th on that case. Because there's going to be a big argument there on a legal standard about free speech. But Supreme Court now making it so that even if any of that were to occur, Congress itself by two-thirds would have to pass a law being like, yeah, that qualifies as an explicit event under X, Y, and Z. And that's how we are able to remove somebody from the ballot. So this is one setting a pretty high standard, effectively politically impossible today, but you know, who knows what it would look like in the future that we as a Congress and a people are the only ones who will be able to establish some sort of law where states could act in this manner. After Biden mania sweeps the nation and they've got a 70 seat majority in the Senate and a majority in the House, they can pass this law deeming that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist. Just to underscore, I'll give an example there.

So if they had ruled in the more limited way that the liberal justices wanted them to and basically lived unresolved, okay, they're saying Colorado can't do this, but we're not going to really say what the process would be that would meet our standards. Then if you had someone like Trump who was actually found guilty of insurrection through the criminal system, then you could have an argument again of like, okay, well, now does this apply? The Supreme Court, first of all, Donald Trump has not been charged with insurrection. I just want to be clear about this. I'm just talking in hypotheticals here. But the Supreme Court has closed that door and said, no, no, this has to be explicitly done through congressional legislation. But as I said, not making any sort of determination

of whether or not, in their view, Donald Trump did incite or aid or abet, whatever the language is, an insurrection. So that's where we are. Just a reminder, too, there's still quite a few cases for Trump before the Supreme Court. We still have the immunity case where we heard some of the arguments around there. That wasn't really expected today. This one, I believe, had to have an expedited opinion in order to resolve this before the election. And there may even be some more that come to the court. So all of that will affect the overall trial date for the eventual January 6th trial. So stay tuned. This is not the first breaking news segment that we're likely to do on the subject. We'll see you guys later. Netanyahu, which is interesting. And this comes, of course, as the U.S. is dropping the teeniest, tiniest, most measly bit of aid on in Gaza in what is honestly a humiliating situation for the United

States of America. So we'll break all of that down for you. We have more really bad polls for Joe Biden, both from The Wall Street Journal and from The New York Times. I feel like we say this every week, but I also feel like every week things just keep getting worse and worse for him. Getting more data. The picture keeps becoming more clear. And we also have some specific numbers about just how unhappy the Democratic base is with his policy vis-a-vis Israel. Also, speaking of that, Super Tuesday is tomorrow. We'll tell you what to expect, what states are set to vote, and also how you can register a protest vote if you live in one of those states. One of Biden's favorite CNN anchors is roasting him also for his Israel policy. New York Times is in absolute chaos as we have been tracking here.

They're now being accused by the union of racially profiling in a leak investigation that has to do with that supposed expose on sexual assault being weaponized by Hamas on October 7th. The reporter who's been breaking a lot of these stories from The Intercept is going to join us to break all of that down for you. We also have a lot of answers now about that flower massacre that we covered last week. I'm going to break that down in my monologue. And Sagar is taking a look at Elon's AI lawsuit, which has huge implications. And for once, I am actually on Team Elon on this one.

Yeah, I think I will convert everyone to pro-Elon, at least on this topic. On this particular instance. On this very particular one. In the meantime, let's go and put this up there on the screen. We have got a live stream that is coming for everybody on March 7th for the State of the Union. We will have an exclusive premium-only live stream after the State of the Union, where you guys get to ask questions live, and the four of us will answer from here at the desk. So we'll have the CounterPoints crew with us. We'll preview, we'll lead into it, we'll watch it all live together, and then we will react on the other side before we go into premium content. So if you want to participate in that,

breakingpoints.com to become a premium subscriber today. All right. So let's go ahead and get to the very latest with regards to Israel. Kamala Harris making some news yesterday. This got a lot of attention. We'll talk about whether or not it should have gotten a lot of attention on the other side. But at Edmund Pettus Bridge commemorating a historic civil rights event, she called for a temporary ceasefire and used some more, I guess, strenuous language with regards to Israel's assault on Gaza. Let's take a listen to what she had to say. And given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire

for at least the next six weeks, which is what is currently on the table. This will get the hostages out and get a significant amount of aid in. This would allow us to build something more enduring to ensure Israel is secure and to respect the right of the Palestinian people to dignity, freedom, and self-determination. So she says immediate ceasefire there, but what she's really talking about is just the same temporary ceasefire that they've been pushing for, which, you know, is unlikely to happen because Hamas wants a permanent ceasefire. So it was weird to me, Sagar, because people were like making a big deal on it. Yes, yes. But she's just actually backing the same. I immediately picked up on the Biden administration policy for a while now. Right. So I saw like everything, everyone, people were like,

oh, my gosh, Kamala breaks with Biden. And I was like, well, did you listen? Because it says to build an enduring thing that leads to a release of hostages. I'm like, this is the current framework that has been put forth by the Biden. I'm like, this is the current framework that has been put forth by the Biden administration, by the Egyptians, by the Qataris, by the Israelis and Hamas. Now, let's be clear in terms of quote unquote agreement, the Biden administration claims that the Israelis have agreed to it, quote unquote, in principle, there has been no vote in the Israeli war cabinet or acceptance by those cabinet officials. We have yet to hear word from Hamas as to whether they would agree on it. As I understand it, Crystal, a lot of it comes down to

they want an itemized list of the state of the hostages, which I'm not exactly sure. That's what they claim. I'm not exactly sure what Hamas' pushback is. As you said, they want a permanent ceasefire. There could be a lot of posturing going on. We don't exactly know for sure. But for some reason, this was interpreted as a departure in policy when, sure, I mean, you can use rhetoric all you want. Yeah. It doesn't change anything at all in terms of where the ground is. The very most you can say is that the rhetoric was a little different here. For her to talk about the immense scale of the suffering of Palestinians, that is a shift in tone. Yeah, that's fair. And I do think that that

shift in tone, as basically meaningless as it ends up being, is a direct result of the protest vote in Michigan, the immense amount of polling at this point that shows that the Biden administration has a huge problem in particular with the base of their own party and that it extends way beyond just Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, basically extends throughout the entire Democratic base. We're going to give you some polls in the next segment that back that up. But, Sagar, you know what? I have really read into this along with, let's put this next piece up on the screen, Kamala Harris also meeting with Benny Gantz. He is a member of the Israeli security cabinet in D.C. today. They're going to talk about this temporary ceasefire. They're

supposed to talk about humanitarian aid and a variety of other things. Noteworthy that Gantz is seen as a potential opponent of Bibi Netanyahu, a potential replacement, his approval rating much higher than Netanyahu. You know, he's sort of framed as a moderate. He's really not. This is a former IDF chief of staff. This is also a very hawkish guy. But the fact that he came here and that the US invited him here over the objections of Netanyahu, who did not approve this trip, which by the way, by Israeli law, you're supposed to have the approval of the prime minister. This is sort of seen as a slap in the face of Bibi or a strong signal to Bibi or whatever. Again, it ends up being pretty meaningless because they're not

actually changing the policy, but they have shifted from just out and out. We're defending Israel. We're defending everything they're doing to trying to gaslight you into believing that, oh, we're doing everything we can and we really do want to cease fire. We're just, you know, these people, they're obstinate. We can't convince them. We can't persuade them. And for the millionth time, you have a million tools at your disposal if you actually wanted to use leverage to compel them to take a different course, but you remain unwilling to use those tools. So this is basically, you know, a different variety of all of those reports we're getting, you know, those leaked reports of always having

tough conversations behind the scenes with Bibi. This is just basically the new phase. At this point, you can't really defend Israel. The writing's on the wall with regard to the Democratic base. So they have to shift postures and pretend like they're working really hard to change the outcome on the ground, even though the reality is very clear that the policy is the exact same of unconditional support and not using any leverage to try to change behavior. I read it as Biden can't meet with Gantz because he's not a head of state, so they had to send the number two. I also saw Gantz confirm that he'll be meeting with the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. But I also see it similarly in terms of they think they have a Bibi problem, as opposed to, I mean, if we look at Gantz, I mean, this is one of the people who has been

the most vociferous in arguing for war with Lebanon and for the continuation and the expansion of the war. It's not just to Bibi's benefit, right? That's right. There are some important domestic political differences between Gantz and Netanyahu that matter in an Israeli context, but for our purposes, they're basically united on the war front. So in that, then, what we have to understand is what I think is happening is that they're trying to reframe it away from Bibi to try and send a signal that the U.S. subtly supports Benny Gantz,

where the policy, though, would not change. And look, as people, you and I, who have now followed this basically day in and day out, there is no substantive daylight at all, really, between these two men on the way that the war should be prosecuted. Furthermore, in terms of whatever some sort of future coalition would look like, there is no coalition in the future where Gantz would be able to arise. That does not also include many of the people who support Bibi right now. So it's not like a whole lot of things would change. I do think that there has been obviously some adjustment post-Michigan and then tension for Super Tuesday and some of the fallout, which we will discuss. But substantively, I don't see a single change right now in the policy.

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. No, I mean, the Biden administration, both with the policy they announced vis-a-vis the sanctions of these four violent settlers and with their focus on the problems of Bibi Netanyahu or Ben-Gavir or Smotrich specifically, they want to pretend like this is an issue of like a few bad apples versus a whole of government and the fact that all of Israeli society is basically behind the way this war has been prosecuted, with the exception of, you know, the coalition behind the hostage families who want a deal in order to secure the release of the hostages. I also want to say another thing about that potential hostage deal that has been driving me crazy. The framing in the Western press and

coming also from the Biden administration, Kamala Harris, you even heard it a little bit there in the comments she played, is that if the deal fails, it's because Hamas is just being unreasonable. Well, I just want to be clear. What Hamas is saying is effectively, not that they're like good actors, I'm not saying that or anything, guys, but just so we understand their position. They see that Netanyahu has said, listen, even if we secure this deal afterwards, we're going into Rafah where 1.3 million Palestinians have been pushed and are sheltering in absolutely already dire and dangerous conditions. Okay. So they're saying, no, we don't want just a temporary pause in the genocide. We want it to stop completely,

especially since this is hanging over all of the heads of the Palestinian civilians there in Rafah. So, you know, to frame this as just like, oh, it's just the Palestinian side that's being unreasonable, I think is disingenuous and negotiation requires both sides to, you know, come to the table. And at this point, it should be incredibly clear and it would be consistent with what not only the Democratic base, but the overwhelming majority of Americans want to push for a permanent ceasefire. Gaza is already all but destroyed. I mean, the level of hunger, starvation, which we're about to get to is just horrifying. The medical system has completely broken down.

Every civilian target you can imagine has been targeted and destroyed. Northern Gaza is completely destroyed. There's nothing to go back to there. So the annihilation is virtually complete, and I guess they want to finish off the job in Rafah, and that is effectively what the Palestinian side is objecting to. With regard to that immense scale of suffering. The Biden administration has responded by dropping, airdropping the teeniest, tiniest bit of aid that you can imagine. Go ahead and show these images. You can see some, as many people online called it, like Hunger Games ass humanitarian aid drop here. You can see Palestinians running to the ocean to try to secure some food for their

families, which are, you know, as we've reported, babies now officially dying of starvation. Some of the images that are coming out of people who are children whose bodies are wasted is horrifying. There isn't a person in the Gaza Strip who has sufficient food at this point. The amount of aid trucks that have been allowed in by Israel has plummeted precipitously. Even after that ICJ ruling, those aid truck deliveries are down by 40 percent. And honestly, Sagar, the fact that the U.S. has to resort to this, which it's 38,000 meals, which is enough for one meal for 2% of the population, just so we understand the math here. You know, this is an attempt for them to solve their

conscience. But it's also such a humiliation. Like, we give Israel so much money. We give them total diplomatic cover at the UN. We back them nonstop. And we can't even get our humanitarian aid trucks into the Gaza Strip. We can't do that. We have to, you know, drop things in, you know, just this piddly amount. It's absolutely embarrassing that this is what they have come to. But because they're not willing to use any sort of aid or leverage, this is where we are. No, I'm actually furious about it because, number one, let's put this up there on the screen. As you can see up in front of you, dropping aid from planes, quote, is expensive and inefficient. Why do it?

Well, really what they arrive at, and this, again, is why I'm furious, is that we are eating the cost here with the Royal Jordanians. It probably would cost well into the millions of dollars to try and do something like this. It's incredibly inefficient. It's super expensive. And the solution is actually quite obvious. Just let the trucks that are already prepaid into the damn Gaza Strip, which are the ones which carry all of the food. But they won't do it. And then apparently, we won't even ask them to do it. Or we won't. Or I guess we've asked them. They said no. So it's like, well, this is what we're resorting to. And what exactly does this mean?

What's the precedent? Are we going to now unilaterally airdrop all of this? I mean, in my opinion, Israel should be paying for literally 100% of all this. They're going to want to create the entire situation. Or we can bill them and you can take it out of the aid that we've been providing them. I would be totally fine with something like that. But this is a humiliation in terms of we have to resort to these. I mean, it's not even really fair to call it half-ass like, you know, what for two percent

Two measures to try and do something like this when the solution is just staring us right in the face And you know, we all know what this is. It's basically PR at this point I actually think it's I actually don't think I think it's moral to be honest because you're almost giving people hope that something like this will continue I mean think about any billions and billions and trillions of dollars like it would cost if you wantedoral, to be honest, because you're almost giving people hope that something like this will continue. I mean, think about how many billions and billions and trillions of dollars it would cost if you wanted to be able to supply the entire place, the Strip, by aid. It's not going to happen. I don't think it should happen on opera. I think they're the ones that should do it.

I mean, it's just very obvious that the actual answer is a ceasefire, not a six-week and then you can get back to murdering civilians en masse, a ceasefire, and a massive influx of humanitarian aid. Remember, the Gaza Strip, because of the longstanding Israeli blockade, has been dependent on aid far before October 7th. And now they're getting many fewer trucks in than they were before. And obviously their capability to produce their own food is completely ravaged. Bakeries have been destroyed. Obviously there's no imports coming in. Farmland has been razed and destroyed.

Orchards have been destroyed. And there's no ability of Palestinians to move even within the Gaza Strip without completely risking their lives. So it is a dire and desperate situation. The answer is very clear, which is a ceasefire and a massive surge of humanitarian aid. This does literally nothing, except maybe like Joe Biden can sleep a little better at night because he feels like he did something. It is a total PR move. And it fits again with the Kamala Harris comments, you know, a little more vociferous language with her meeting with Benny Gantz.

And then you add this humanitarian aid drop. They are trying to change their image with regards to this conflict. They're not trying to change the policy, but they're trying, they think they have an image problem. And this is part of what came out to Sagar after the uncommitted vote in Michigan last week. You saw a bunch of like Democratic flak types being like, oh, well, you know, they need to change the way they're being perceived on this issue. No, you need to change the policy and then the perception will change along with it. But they're trying to trick people. And I'm seeing also like all of their shills on Twitter and

whatever. Also trying to say, don't you understand Joe Biden's working day and night to try to secure a ceasefire. So they're trying to change the messaging here without actually trying to change the policy. And these a drops are just, you know, a PR stunt in an attempt to try to change that image. John Kirby was asked, you know, a very good question about, hey, why are we helping Israel starve Palestinians effectively? And you'll see his response basically. But Hamas, it's all their fault, et cetera, et cetera. Israel bears no responsibility ever for any of their actions in the Gaza Strip because of October 7th, apparently. And then we've also got in there Joe Biden, you know, inspiring portrait of leadership mixing up Israel and Ukraine multiple times as he announces this airdrop policy. Let's take a listen to that.

Israel itself has tried to to help with the delivery of humanitarian assistance. As I said, they tried airdrops themselves just a week or so ago on their own accord. So why are so many people still starving? It's a war zone and there's nowhere else for them to go. It's not like in some other conflicts where they can easily flee. And let's not forget how this started, okay? There'd be no need for airdrops if Hamas hadn't chosen to break what was a ceasefire in place on the 6th of October. So let's not forget how this started. If you haven't done it, I encourage you to go online and read the 2017 manifesto of Hamas. I know you're smiling, but you should do it. Because if you don't have any... Wait, let me finish. Let me finish. This is an organization that has military capabilities and

has every intent of wiping Israel and the Israeli people off the map. That has to be unacceptable to everybody. Mr. Sinwar chose to start this war. There was a ceasefire in place. He broke it. Do you think that the Israelis were defending themselves legitimately when they killed a hundred people yesterday? There had been too many people killed over the course of this conflict. The president has said that himself. In the coming days, we're going to join with our friends in Jordan and others in Friday, airdrops of additional food and supplies in the Ukraine and seek to continue to open up other avenues into Ukraine, including the possibility of a Marine Corps to deliver large amounts of humanitarian assistance. So just to be really clear, I mean, this logic is so bankrupt, it's unbelievable. Basically,

you could defend literally anything being done by Israel and the Gaza Strip based on this logic of, well, Hamas started it, which, you know, we'll leave aside the many decades that preceded October 7th. But one atrocity which was committed on October 7th, without a doubt, those atrocities do not deserve or do not merit or do not justify additional atrocities committed by Israel. But, you know, this is the continued line. And then when they're asked about specific horrors perpetrated by the Israeli forces, it's this very sanitized, very generic, oh, too many civilians have been killed. Well, but you won't condemn those killings. You won't change your policy to try to thwart those killings. You just allow this to go on and on and on. Under this logic, we could have nuked Afghanistan. It's like, okay,

is that what we should have done? The Taliban started it. I mean, that's one of the, and remember, look, there was probably would have been at least some little support, you know, here in the US. It's not like that was a non-existent rhetorical position in the aftermath after 9-11. What would most people have said? Like, yeah, that's probably too far, right? Because that's what it all comes down to. It's like, well, do we want to actually solve the problem? What exactly is the future and all of that going to hold? Can we put A7 up there on the screen, please? Because this really comes back to something that we highlighted actually from the very beginning of the war, is that the way that you're conducting the war, you are making it nearly impossible for what the future is going to look like, where it is controlled in any way

and doesn't explode into further violence. They say lack of plan for governing Gaza formed the backdrop to deadly convoy chaos. Look, ignore the passive language and all of that that is in front of you. But the crux of the point is actually correct, which is that at the end of the day, whenever you have no legitimate partner that is on the ground and you're wiping out all of the infrastructure and you are conducting the war in such a way that the civilian populace is totally united against you, and there is no legitimate governing authority, and you are going to fire on people whenever they're swarming a bunch of food, you are setting the conditions for exactly the same course that happened in Mogadishu in Somalia after the outbreak of the civil war. And don't forget, that has not to this day still been

resolved more than 30-some years later. They are basically creating that in that territory without any plan and without a plan that is legitimate in the eyes of the people under which the war is being conducted. On top of that, we'll probably cover this tomorrow, you're actually continuing settlement policy and having a government that is directly opposed to any legitimate governing authority, meaning you really only have two options, which is, you know, Hunger Games, Somalia, or, you know, you take security responsibility. And they kind of want to have some sort of middle ground. But the net result is terrible because it will increase terrorism.

But most importantly, it will increase starvation and very likely absolute mass disaster, you know, for I think many decades to come. I mean, I object to the framing that there's no plan because I think we're watching the plan unfold. I think Netanyahu has intentionally kept the plan, quote unquote, vague. Maybe you're right. So that he can sort of play both sides. But we can see in the actions what the plan is. The only question is whether they will be able to fully accomplish that. I mean, the initial plan is complete annihilation.

And then you force the hand of the international community of like, well, there's nowhere for them to go back to. And there's no one who can run this area. What are we going to do? I guess we just have to resettle. I mean, they even announced that they were going to keep security control, quote unquote, of the Gaza Strip, that they were going to create a buffer zone. Those are two things that the U.S. supposedly objected to, but that plan was released with no real objections from the United States of America. So, you know, in pushing the population all the way to Rafah, where they're pressed up against the Egyptian border, in destroying the entirety of the Gaza Strip, I think we see the plan unfolding, even as they keep it a little bit vague so that the U.S.

doesn't have to completely confront the reality of what they have planned, which in theory, at least, we would potentially maybe object to. One more piece that I thought was noteworthy with regard to the aid drop of the 38,000 meals, this piddly amount and the circumstances under which we ended up doing that. This is a former ambassador, put this up on the screen, former ambassador to Algeria and also former ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford. He says, I've seen Israel humiliate previous U.S. administrations, but aside from murderous 1967 Israeli airstrike against the U.S. Navy ship Liberty, now forcing USA to do airdrops of aid to Gaza as if USA is no better than Egypt and Jordan, is Israel's worst humiliation of USA I've ever seen. I should add that USA will do humanitarian aid airdrops to Gazans if the Israeli Air Force graciously agrees not to shoot down the American planes over Gaza.

And he goes on to clarify it, too, because someone asked him, what do you mean better than Egypt and Jordan? And he's just saying, you know, with regards to our position, the amount of aid that we fund, you would think that we would have a lot more say over the situation, but we don't. And so we're reduced to this pathetic PR stunt situation. Yeah. Robert Ford is a very, very credible individual. I would definitely, look, he's somebody that we should be listening to on this, on this situation. Yes, indeed. All right. Let's talk about the polls. Crystal mentioned at the top of the show every week, we've got news that's terrible for Joe Biden, but listen, we're not the ones who create the news. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. What have we got from a brand new New York times? Sienna poll says if the 2024

election were held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were Joe Biden and Donald Trump? Donald Trump at 48%. Joe Biden, 43%. 10% say they don't know and or refuse to answer. But the next one really delves into so many of the problems that Biden faces with various different groups. If we can please show that to everybody. So here's what we've got. Trump has a plus four lead. Amongst men, Trump has a plus seven lead. This one actually takes scale. Amongst women, Trump has plus one lead. That's never happened before when Donald Trump was on the ballot. Amongst whites, Trump plus 11. Amongst Hispanics, Trump plus two. Amongst blacks, it says Biden plus 51. However, Crystal, that could be deceiving because you're actually

supposed to be leading by 70 amongst black Americans. You're not supposed to be leading by 50. I've talked here before. If just 10% of the black vote goes differently, then Republicans would win some 300 and something votes in the electoral college. Now, amongst rural voters, Trump plus 32. Suburban, Biden plus three. That's a bad number. You actually should be winning that by much more. Urban voters, Biden plus 28. So basically amongst every demographic subgroup, Biden is either underwater or not leading by the margins that he needs to amongst very critical parts of the Democratic coalition. And this isn't just a single poll that we have here. The Wall Street Journal basically confirming these results the same day.

If we can go to the next one there, please. And we can show everyone here, even in a five-way race where you've got everybody from RFK Jr. to Cornel West and Jill Stein on the ballot, Trump is at 40%. Biden is at 35%. So it's becoming clear here that while Trump will lose some support from the third party candidates, RFK Jr. getting 9%, Cornel West at 2% and Jill Stein at 1%, a lot of that support crystal is bled from Joe Biden, at least enough to continue the Trump lead in a general election that would include all of them there. And then not to mention, everyone's like, well, RFK, will he get the ballot or not? Well, he's already on Arizona and Georgia, or at least he has enough ballots to get on Arizona and Georgia. That could be enough, honestly, to swing the entire thing. That's it.

You only need a couple percent. It is important to note, I'm sure there he's going to face all kinds of lawsuits. So there's no guarantees that he'll be on the ballots and even those states. But there's no doubt that he's a problem for Joe Biden. Jill Stein is likely to be on the ballot in basically every state. That's a problem for Joe Biden, even if you're talking about one or two percent difference. But I mean, even without them, he's losing easily without them. And historically, now things may be different now. We don't know. But usually Trump support is actually understated. So we've never been in a situation either with Hillary Clinton or with Joe Biden where the Democratic candidate was behind Trump. And consistently, this isn't just like one poll that's an outlier.

It's poll after poll after poll that shows Donald Trump beating Joe Biden. If you dig into more of the numbers on that New York Times Siena poll, what comes out is a trend that we've been tracking for a long time, which is so-called class D alignment, where historically you have non-white in particular working class voters going overwhelmingly for Democrats. And that's not the case any longer in this poll. And that's the place where Joe Biden seems to be bleeding the most support. So they say in this write-up of the New York Times poll that Mr. Biden won 72% of non-white, non-college voters in 2020, providing him with a nearly 50-point edge over Trump. Now that edge That edge is down to just six points, 47 percent to 41 percent. So what was a 50 point edge for Joe Biden and the Democrats among non-college, non-white voters is now down to a six percent edge.

To be honest with you, Sagar, looking at the numbers among these different demographic groups, I'm like, how is he even as close to Trump as he is? That you are losing women to Donald Trump? That's crazy. The modern era of politics has been defined by a huge gender gap with women going significantly towards Democrats and men going towards Republicans. Not so, according to this poll. Now, again, it's not an outlier. Okay. Now maybe some of these demographic groups, you could say, okay, well, maybe it's a small sample size. Other polls show different, a different picture with regard to these demographic groups, but especially with

regard to non-white, non-college voters, this is a trend we've been tracking for a long time and it spells doom for Joe Biden and the Democrats if this is what things actually look like on election day. Yeah, so what we could see very clearly is flashing warning signs across the entire electorate. Also, I feel like we glossed over Hispanics, Trump plus two amongst Hispanics. Anybody want to tell me? I mean, this is a group where George W. Bush was considered the most successful Republican amongst Hispanics because he won 40% of the vote of the Hispanic vote in the year 2000. Had never topped really that. Roughly, Trump came within 30 some percent, including the South Texas like Laredo swing.

But for him to actually get now, it seems 50 at the very least. What I have seen is that the vast majority of this number is likely Hispanic men. And this actually tracks across all male groups, both black and Hispanic, is that you're not only seeing class de-alignment, unfortunately, and I did a whole monologue on this, you're actually seeing a lot of gender de-alignment as well, where a lot of men are starting to vote Republican, or at least identifying more with the right, and then women identifying more with the left. Now, we're going to show you, though, some of the cope.

So here, let's put this up on the screen. We have Obama's former campaign manager, Jim Messina. He says, Well, here's what he forgets, folks. Primary voters are not general election voters. Michigan minus 10. Best predictor of elections equals how voters vote, and they are voting for Dems and for Biden. Well, here's what he forgets, folks. Primary voters are not general election voters, number one. Now, he's not wrong that it's not something to look at, but that is not in any way. As I understand it, Crystal, primary voter turnout is not a good predictor at all of eventual general election turnout. And in fact, the smart point

that he would have made is not about this. It would be about all the slew of special elections and the midterms that we have, because really that's the only thing saving them. Well, the only thing saving them is that the polls were totally wrong in 2022. Every special election Democrats have overperformed and that's it. So just don't believe them. I mean, that's a tough sell, you know, given what we have here, but they have a point. We know it would be stupid not to. It would be stupid to discount it. But this, this is ridiculous. You know, whatever this nonsense is.

Yeah. Well, put the next one up on the screen. There's actually a response to him from another Obama era person, Jon Favreau here, Pod Save Bro. He says, wise words from Dan Pfeiffer, another Pod Save Bro. Instead of dismissing the polls, we should embrace the idea Trump can win this election and then use that frightening notion to re-energize the anti-MAGA majority that delivered victories in 18, 19, 22, 22, and 23. Telling people what they want to hear may be satisfying in the short term, but it rarely works out. So they're saying like jujitsu move, use the fact that we're down in the polls actually as a motivator. And you actually had on Morning Joe, another one of Biden's favorite programs, apparently, distressingly, you had

Donnie Deutsch saying basically the way Democrats need to go about trying to win is by scaring the hell out of people about Donald Trump, effectively. And that's really the only thing they ever try to do, right? They don't try to offer people anything. They don't try to really make an affirmative case. They are still banking on going back to that same old, same old playbook of yes, but Trump. So you may be pissed off about X and Y and Z, but Trump. So you got to stick with us and you got to vote for us. And I mean, yeah, it worked for them in 2022. It worked for them in 2020 well enough, but those margins have been very thin. And these polls, you cannot look at them and not think that they have a very, very big problem on their hands. Yeah. I mean, it's just so obvious whenever you see it. And I think, I think a lot of what flashes as well, Crystal, is Biden's age is just such an intense, like,

it is such an intense factor for so many voters. And it's one of those where the media is forced to cover it every once in a while, whenever the special counsel is like, hey, he didn't remember when his own son died in an interview. And then he's like, well, how dare he bring that up? And then they're like, well, according to the transcript, you brought it up, sir.

And then you weren't able to remember it. It's unfixable. And so when you have an unfixable, glaring problem, which everybody on earth, you know, can understand and empathize with a voter as to why they wouldn't want to vote for him. I mean, I look at that,

I'm like, Jesus, man needs to go immediately. I can't imagine him in there for another four years. But then you add on all of the attendant chaos of Israel, the economy. I mean, there's immigration. If we look at the issue by issue polling, immigration is its lowest approval rating. Gaza is number two, actually. And then the economy, number three. Each of those are so highly determinative for the way that both independents and others who very rarely vote or who may not come out to vote find it in themselves. They're simply unable to vote for you. And then age, I think, just pushes you over the edge. So there's major, major warning signs here. And especially your thing with Trump, as we covered today,

as we covered in our last show, Trump has now successfully pushed the vast majority of his trial dates, either very close to the election day or possibly after the election day. So the worst issue for him may actually not even come before people actually cast votes. So combine those two factors, things are looking good right now for Trump. Let me also say one thing about immigration because they had their like dueling border visits last week and Joe Biden was like, I call on Donald Trump to work with me on a bipartisan, you know, border security bill. And it's like, you're putting the morality of that aside so you guys can go back and watch the Congress debate on immigration if you're hungry for that content at the moment. I don't have the energy. But your whole case is supposed to be that Trump is so awful that we cannot have another four years of that.

And core to that case from Democrats has always been about his basically fascism at the border. And now you're like, you know what? We're going to compete with him. We want to work with him on the fascism at the border. And, you know, we also want to like keep the kids in cages and we're just as horrible and cruel as the Republicans. It's like, what kind of, and they think this is some kind of an own, like, no, you have just accepted the entire Republican messaging around immigration. And so how are you supposed to, you know, your whole tactic is like to scare people about Donald Trump. And I think there are some legitimate things, by the way, to be scared about, about a second Trump term. But on one of the issues that he was the most extreme, the most aggressive about, you're going to just go ahead and accept his case and reach out a hand to work

with him on implementing those policies? it makes no sense to me whatsoever. And so, you know, to me, yet another political fail. And as you were just alluding to, Sagar, the problems for the Democratic Party and for Joe Biden go so far beyond any one demographic group. And in fact, some of the biggest issues are with their own base, which we're going to show you in a minute, that they're apparently terrified of even setting foot on a freaking college campus because of Israel protests, which, you know, you have a lot of not just young people, but a lot of people who are saying, you know, morally, I just I think that this is a genocide. And morally, I just cannot pull the lever for someone who I believe is funding and supporting a genocide that's happening right now in front of my eyes on social media. Well, let's go to that part then. And the Wall Street Journal helpfully actually dug into some of this. So let's go ahead and put this up

there, please, on the screen. What you can see there in front of you is that this is amongst the vast majority of voters. So it says, do you think Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip in response to October 7th have gone too far, not gone far enough, or been about right? 42% say gone too far, so that's a plurality. 24% say been about right. Not gone far enough is 19%, and don't know and or refuse is 15%.

But a pretty clear plurality there, which is saying that they said gone too far. Let's go to the next slide, please, because this is where you can actually see something very interesting, too. It says, when you think about the war between Israel and Hamas, do you think that the U.S. is doing too much, too little, or about the right amount to support the Israeli people or in the Palestinian people? So amongst the amount of people who are asked that question about Israeli people, now 30% of the electorate is saying that actually the US is doing too much to support the Israeli people. 25% say too little. 32% say about the right amount. So a significant

8% increase since December of 2023, whenever you're asked whether you're doing too much or too little. Now, when you flip it, you can see the exact same rise in the amount of people who now say that the US is doing too little to support the Palestinian people. Only 24% say that they are doing too much, but 33% say too little, 25% say that they are doing about the right amount. And then the don't know number is roughly 17%, 15% or whatever across both demographics. I think when you combine those two things, you can see a clear trend line. And furthermore, as we have covered here, if you see, and just to the next one, just because I can show everyone again, is that Gaza is now is number two most

unpopular issue, which is crazy whenever you consider it against inflation, economy, and Ukraine. Somehow 46% approval rating on Ukraine. I would love to meet and to talk to those people, especially if you're into the Gaza thing. You should watch some of our segments. It's actually one of the highest approval ratings on any issue. Please don't get me started on this.

The people who consume our Gaza content should also consume our Israel content. That said, what we could show people here is that electorally, this is a major, major problem. And what you alluded to in particular on the campuses is one where it is actually significantly curtailing his ability to go out and campaign. So we have a clip here just to show you what is facing, you know, the Bidens as they cross the country. Jill Biden was actually at an event in Arizona where she was interrupted by a ceasefire protester. Here's what's awaiting Biden on college campuses. And Crystal, you flagged this report,

which you can put up there and you could react to is, quote, how Biden aides are trying to shield the president from protests where a Democratic President, Crystal, is unable to go on college campuses. Incredible. So they say they're taking increasingly extraordinary steps to minimize disruptions from pro-Palestinian protests at his events. They're making them smaller. They're withholding their precise locations. And they're avoiding college campuses altogether. A Democratic president cannot go to college campuses. Think about what that means in terms of the modern Democratic base and coalition that they rely upon. They cannot set foot on college campuses. In at least one instance, considering hiring a private company to vet attendees. Now, that specific

report is with regard to this big fundraiser they have planned that's going to be Biden, Clinton, and Obama. It's on March 28th in New York City. Just for anyone who lives in New York City, by the way, expectations are that it's going to be at Radio City Music Hall, but they have not actually released that information for exactly this reason. They've also upped the ticket price to try to price out any potential protesters, any potential riffraff that might come in with ideas about, you know, standing up and protesting. They say that a turning point in their thinking was Biden gave a speech in Virginia that was interrupted multiple times with protests. So they are so terrified of their own base that they basically can't campaign. I

mean, that's the reality. They can't do big rallies. They can't do big events. They can't go to college campuses. Kamala Harris was supposed to do some big college campus tour that was postponed or canceled or whatever because they're so fearful of having to actually face these people who have huge issues with their policy vis-a-vis Israel face-to-face. I also found this line, Sager, in this report just incredibly sad. And I have to note it here. They say the moderator of that discussion with the three presidents is going to be late-night host Stephen Colbert, whom the campaign sees as a low-risk, friendly choice. The people familiar with the planning said.

How do you agree to do that? I hope somebody leaks that. Think of how far that man has fallen. Remember the White House correspondent? I mean, he handed George W. Bush his ass while he was sitting right there over the Iraq war. And now you're being handpicked because you're a low-risk, friendly choice, that is so sad. I cannot—as someone who used to love the Colbert rapport— Mm-hmm. Me too. —that is, like, the saddest fall I can possibly imagine. So that's where we are. But I wanted to highlight one other thing from the polls,

especially the polling we put up earlier from the Wall Street Journal about Israel. Basically, young people in the Democratic coalition have won the argument in Wall Street Journal about Israel. Basically, young people in the Democratic coalition have won the argument in the Democratic Party about Israel. They found that there is no longer much of an age gap in the Democratic base with regards to how they view Israel and their conduct in the Gaza Strip. Some 40 percent of Democrats under age 40 said the U.S. was doing too much to help the Israeli people, compared with 33% of Democrats age 40 and older. So a seven-point difference. But back in December, that gap was 24 points. Maybe even more telling, among Democrats age 40 and older, 71% said Israel had gone too far in responding to Hamas. That is identical to the share of Democrats under age 40.

So, you know, originally, the Biden view was like, oh, none of this is going to matter. People are going to get over it by election day. Then the view was, well, we're going to have to find some suburban women to overcome the Arab-American opposition in the state of Michigan. Now that COPE is like, well, it's just Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans and young people, which is kind of a large part of your base. But it becomes really clear when you look at these numbers that the problem is way bigger than one demographic group. And that was reflected in the uncommitted vote, which, yes, was strongest in Arab American areas and in college towns. But there was a significant uncommitted vote across the entire state of Michigan.

So they've got huge issues on their hands. And that's why, you know, to tie it back into what we were talking about with regards to airdrops and Kamala Harris's comments and her meeting with Benny Gantz and whatever, that's why they are trying so aggressively to change their posture and their framing of this issue, even as, again, they are wholly unwilling to actually change the policy, which is clearly the thing that needs to happen in order to move any of these numbers. Very likely. And we will see some of those results on Super Tuesday. That's a good transition to the next part. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Super Tuesday is

tomorrow. What is it? Who is voting? So we actually have a very useful map that we have right there in front of you. We've got Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Utah, and California. And so of course, California is the prize possession in that primary because they have the most amount of delegates. Texas is going to be number two there. This is where, you know, between Trump and Biden, I think we all know who is going to win. So the real questions about what's going to happen underneath that is the strength of the Nikki Haley vote. I did want to give everybody an update. Crystal Nikki Haley did make history yesterday here in Washington, D.C. She is the first GOP woman to ever win a contest with 2,000 votes and 60%

of the D.C. vote. Her campaign, with all seriousness, said that it showed that those who worked closely with Trump in Washington, D.C. are the ones who rejected him. Oh, that's what they said. That's hilarious. Yeah, that's a spin. Nikki winning D.C. is like too perfect. I saw it. I saw a lot of Nikki signs on my drive in to Washington this morning, and I just kept thinking, how in all good conscience can you think that this is in any way electorally beneficial to you? So the one contest which she will likely win in this entire thing is Washington, D.C., not her home state, you know, traditionally something you want to do when you're a politician.

So we're going to see what the Nikki percentage is in all this. I'm really curious actually to watch it in the most populous states, places like Texas, places like California, not just in terms of the delegates that she's going to get, but that's a good test for what the national popular vote may be, you know, whenever it comes to Trump and in places where everybody assumes Trump is going to win, whether and why people would want to cast an anti-Trump vote within the Republican Party. I'm curious on that. The second part is uncommitted, which you have flagged here. We actually have a very useful map that we can put here up on the screen.

This was – how do we pronounce this gentleman's name? I've been saying Edingermentum is how I'm going with it. Edingermentum. As we understand it, he's an anonymous poster on Twitter, but he's actually very good. Worth a follow, guys. He is worth a follow. He does a very good job in terms of compiling polling results and maps and such things. This is from his sub stack.

What you can see is actually in front of you are the various ways that uncommitted works. So in some of the states, you can vote uncommitted. In some, you can vote uncommitted, but all write-in votes are counted. Some, you cannot vote uncommitted, but blank ballots are counted. In some, you can vote uncommitted, but all write-in votes are counted. Some, you cannot vote uncommitted, but blank ballots are counted. In some, you can't vote uncommitted. You have only write-ins, but only write-ins that are qualified candidates count. And in some, you can't vote uncommitted write-ins and are not provided. Some, there are no primary, and some have already voted.

So as you can see in front of you, if you are interested, you can just take a screenshot or something of this and see which state you're actually in. But, yeah, I'm always reminded of how insane sometimes the U.S. electoral system is in various different states and how they run certain things. I remember I was asking you on the phone. I was like, hey, can I vote? I'm not sure if I'm registered in a party. You're like, oh, we don't do that here. And I'm like, what? Like, what a crazy state.

Except for the states. Yeah, I mean, it's good. You know, in principle, I support it. I don't know. It's just weird when you move around like I do. I'm kind of in favor of having some like more federal standardization of whatever. We'll save that for another day. Actually, put that map just back up on the screen. I want to flag a couple of states here to keep an eye on. Unfortunately, our state of Virginia, Sagar, you cannot vote uncommitted. They do have write-ins, but they only count write-ins for

quote unquote qualified candidates, which is such a bullshit. Yeah, how does that work? Right? Isn't that so obnoxious? So, but you have, among other Super Tuesday states, a lot of eyes are going to be on Minnesota, which has a significant Muslim population and where there has been some organizing with regard to uncommitted. And you can vote uncommitted in the state of Minnesota. The other state that kind of jumped out at me is Colorado, which obviously has, you know, significant young, a lot of college towns, activist base. That's another place where you can vote uncommitted. So that is noteworthy as well. Vermont is another one I would pay attention to, you know, being a great hippie state that I love. You cannot vote uncommitted, but all write-in

votes are counted, so there may be some sort of a write-in effort there. I did see something like I never would have expected, also highlighted actually by Endurmentum this morning, which is one of the indivisible chapters in Colorado is backing the uncommitted vote. And if I don't know if you guys know anything about indivisible, I don't know what it is. It's like the most like lib Trump era resistance organization move on. You could sort of like that. Yeah. And so for them to be backing uncommitted was kind of noteworthy. It's gone very like lib mainstream for them to be backing, which I thought was interesting. Got it. Well, across the pond, our friends in the UK

also had an interesting election. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. George Galloway, who some of you may know as longtime anti-war activist, is going to be back in parliament after basically running a campaign for his seat all on Gaza and on protest of Rishi Sunak's policy of supporting Israel. So he will be taking his common seat for the Workers' Party of Britain after polling some 12,335 votes, more than 6,000 votes than any other candidate in the race. So that's pretty extraordinary. He was previously a labor MP up until 2003 as an independent then for kids' situations between 2003 and 2015. But he really has made a name for himself both there and even here and some various

U.S. Western programs as being a very consistent force against Iraq war, the U.S. and British involvement, and now against Western policy in Israel. So an interesting signal on Ukraine as well. It's an important signal. I mean, you should remember too, you know, across the pond, things work very differently. The Europeans have always, their governments may be supporting Israel right now, but their populations have been way more Israel skeptic. And I'm not just talking about the Islamic population in Europe. Like the overall Western European population has been far more skeptical of the Israeli government, specifically on BDS and on settlements for decades longer than any even nascent left movement here in the United States. We have a fascinating

interview with Mr. Galloway, actually, on Sky News, where he really gave it back to his interviewer. Let's take a listen. The prime minister is saying that he wants God. We're talking about little Rishi Sunak in the fag end of his prime ministership. Don't talk to me as if he's come down from the mount with tablets of stone, the things that he says are somehow meant to awe me. They may awe you, they don't awe me. A lot of people have just watched what the Prime Minister said. This is your opportunity to respond to what he said. He says that there are forces here at home trying to tear us apart.

He is implying you are a divisive figure. You have run an election campaign that has tried to appeal, particularly, not entirely, to one section of the community. Who won the election? Me or Rishi Sunak? I've got the democratic mandate here, not Rishi Sunak. He didn't even come second. He was lucky to come third. So don't put to me statements made by Rishi Sunak as if I'm supposed to be impressed by them. He don't impress me much. We at Sky have spent some time today on the

streets of Rochdale and there are people who say that they feel intimidated by people like you and the people that have supported you. I have just one. And they have pointed out that you have concentrated your campaign on foreign affairs and they worry that Rochdale will not be the winner. I have a mandate. That's my answer to you. I was just elected with a thumping majority by the electorate in Rochdale. That's all that matters to me. Yeah, he's right. And you know, like I said, he won 40% of the vote. As he pointed to the Conservative Party, only won 12 percent of the vote. Yeah. But yeah, he's like, I love a good British shitster politician. There's just nothing better than it.

So I'm I'm going to enjoy seeing him in the House. Sorry, in the House of Commons. Yes. He will. He will definitely make a name. Yeah. Just to give a little bit of background on this election and to be perfectly honest with you, I didn't know who this person was before this moment. I've looked at his policies, we'll just call them very heterodox. But he ran this, I mean, what's significant about this campaign is he really did lean into Israel, Gaza, and also that this seat that he's won isn't, you know, the largest Muslim area that, you know, is, that is in this region. So they have about 30% Muslim population in Rochdale. So significant, but it's far from a majority. The other thing that is noteworthy here, the labor candidate, and this is an area that usually goes for labor. The labor candidate was

forced to drop out because of some, what I would say were genuinely anti-Semitic comments. And so he was forced out. And so you had kind of this like vacuum situation. But the reason I thought it was noteworthy is both because this guy is obviously quite a character in that interview was hilarious. And I love how they're freaking out about, you know, the workings of democracy where he got more votes than labor and the Tories combined, by the way. But the other thing is, you know, it is a signal of not that these things are all parallel, but it's a signal of how much electoral power, how much care and concern there is for this issue. And a lot of times, you know, some of the politics here are reflective of what is going on in the UK. So that's part of why I thought it

was noteworthy, especially going into Super Tuesday with the possibility of more uncommitted votes. I think politicians who have underestimated the amount of emotion and concern about these policies of unconditional support, I think that they have, you know, made, obviously they've made a moral mistake, but in terms of their own political prospects, I also think they have made a dire mistake. And it's very clear with regards to the pull of the Democratic base, they do not agree with Joe Biden on his unconditional support of Israel. And I don't think his little PR aid drop or sending Kamala out to say the word cease fire even as what they're really talking about is what they used to be calling a quote unquote

humanitarian pause. I don't think that's going to fix the problem for them. Yeah, well, we'll watch with great interest. Oh, I should have said this. On CounterPoints, Wednesday morning, we will both be on the show to break down Super Tuesday results, especially because California is going to be such an impactful part of it. And the polls don't close there until most of our viewership here on the East Coast, including us, will have wanted to go to bed. So we will break it down for you early Eastern time. That way it will be breaking for you right whenever you wake up with bright and shiny in the morning with those results. We're early to bed people here, guys. Sorry. We will stay up late, but within reason, okay? And California is not reasonable. By the way,

daylight savings time is soon. So expect a rant coming to you very quickly. Let's go to the media part. Yes, absolutely. So I wanted to highlight for you guys a really significant monologue from CNN's Fareed Zakaria. Part of why this is noteworthy is because remember that previous report had come out listing who Joe Biden's favorite like news personalities were. Well, one of them was Fareed Zakaria, and he rakes him across the coals for his Israel policy. Let's take a listen to a little bit of that. When Hamas launched its gruesome terror attack on Israel on October 7th of last year,

President Biden made a decision based on conviction and calculation. He announced his complete solidarity with the country. Biden must have calculated that the only way to have any influence on Israel would be to hug it close, show real empathy, send it the arms it needed, and thus earn Israel's trust to shape its response. It was a thought-through strategy, but it has failed almost completely. From the start, the administration urged the Israelis to consider proportionality in their response to Hamas. Israel heard it and went ahead with one of the most extensive bombing campaigns in this

century against a population of about 2.2 million people that, by Israel's own estimates, contained about 30,000 Hamas militants. By one January estimate, more than half of buildings across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The administration counseled Israel against a large ground invasion of Gaza, advising it to take a narrower, targeted approach aimed at eliminating Hamas militants and infrastructure. The Israeli government had lots of long meetings with U.S. officials, and then again went ahead

with the ground invasion. The Biden team urged a humanitarian pause, but only got a brief one when it was able to get the government of Qatar to broker a hostage exchange. After initial operations wound up, American officials told Israeli officials that what was done in the north of Gaza could not be done to the south. Yet after telling people to move to the south to get out of harm's way, Israel then proceeded

to bomb the south in a manner that President Biden himself admitted is indiscriminate. The U.S. has repeatedly pressured Israel to make greater efforts to protect innocent civilians, but to little avail. Now it has been counseling against an invasion of Rafah, the city nestled close to Egypt, where over a million Palestinians have huddled together. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to invade Rafah, whether another hostage deal is made or not. Washington has warned that after the war, there should be no Israeli seizure of land in Gaza and no new Israeli occupation of the territory. The Israeli government's plans are to do both. The result

is that American policy on the Gaza war now appears hapless, ineffective, and immoral. So he says that the Biden policy on the Gaza war has been hapless, ineffective, and immoral. Sagar, I don't have to tell you how unusual it is to hear those sorts of things on CNN, which we're going to cover the level of propaganda on CNN and the amount of internal pushback and upset about the double standards with regard to Israel and the Palestinians. But the fact that one of Biden's favorite commentators took such an aggressive approach, and I think lays out pretty aptly looking back over the course of this war, how when we, you know, meekly ask for something at every turn, Israel has been like, no, screw you. He puts it all in context

pretty well. One of the things I hate about Biden is that he doesn't have a coherent worldview. He kind of just trusts his instincts and he's very obstinate regardless of what he chooses. Sometimes it works to my benefit, like Afghanistan. On Ukraine, doesn't necessarily work to our benefit. On Israel, I think it's the same thing. One of the things, well, look, I disagree vehemently with the worldview of Fareed Zakaria and of Thomas Friedman, but you have to hand it to them. They are genuinely consistent, like in terms of the way that they view the world. And so within their framework, which is probably most aligned with Biden, I think it is clearly noteworthy what they are saying.

I couldn't help but think also of one of Biden's favorite columnists, Thomas Friedman. And actually we have this, we can put it up there on the screen. He wrote it just a couple of days ago on February 27th, where he writes, Israel is losing its greatest asset, which is acceptance. And he writes, quote, I do not think Israelis or the Biden administration fully appreciate the rage that is bubbling around the world, fueled by social media and TV footage over the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians with US supplied weapons in Israel's war on Gaza. Hamas has much to answer for in triggering this human tragedy, but Israel and the U.S. are seen as driving events now and getting most of the blame. That such anger is boiling over in the Arab world is obvious, but I heard it over and over again in conversations in

India from the past week. That is even more telling because the Hindu-dominated government of Prime Minister Modi is the only major power in the global support that has even supported Israel and blamed Hamas. That many civilian deaths in a relatively short war would be problematic in any context. The point, though, that I think of what he is showing within this is that it is not just the Arab world, where, to be fair, he did write the column from, so that probably is going to change a little bit of his outlook. More so, it's what I think I've brought this up, and you as well, in the context of a lot of this is, guys, regardless of whether you support the war or not, you know, rhetorically, Israel will not be the same as a nation in terms of its sovereign relations with others. I think that was a huge mistake because it's a tiny

little strip of land that relies on global trade to keep it afloat. You know, you can't have a high-tech nation and Tel Aviv and startup and all that in the desert if you got nobody to sell it to, especially when you're in a country with what, like the population of 11 million. It just doesn't work. So especially also when you have to import a decent amount of labor from the people who now hate you even more to run, you know, to clean your toilets or whatever. I mean this is all a very precarious situation that they were already sitting on. And the point of his column and I think of Farid as well is to show that the international acceptance where people were like more unhappy with Israel even in the Arab world. But we're not idiots.

We could see the Abraham Accords and normalization. It was going in a different direction. Very self-interested. They've changed things completely, right? Things are more like the 1973 consensus today than ever since that time period. And that's a huge strategic catastrophe. That's something that Israel worked decades to try and get away from. And I think this has made them a lot less safe. And also the US.S. too, by aligning ourselves with it, we always know how to pick them, right? To make sure that people are aligned against us in a region too, where we were trying our best, at least allegedly, to get out of because it wasn't all that strategically important to us. And we keep just getting pulled back in by our over and

over again by our mistakes. So I think overall, it's been an absolute strategic disaster. I mean, think about Biden has lost individual, indivisible chapters. Unbelievable. Like the backbone of the lib resistance. He's lost Fareed Zakaria. He's lost Thomas Friedman. He's lost. There was, I don't know if you watched this interview that Bernie Sanders did with Alex

Wagner, which, I mean, there were some issues there, but this is MSNBC, you know, primetime MSNBC and Alex Wagner, primetime MSNBC. And Alex Wagner saying this policy of shipping bombs and then dropping this piddly bit of aid is in it. You can't reconcile it. It's irreconcilable. Yeah. So the fact that you have, you know, that much like across the board, mainstream liberal criticism is really something. And I do think that's why they're trying to, what do they

say, put lipstick on a pig? They are trying to change the image of their approach to this conflict. That's why they're sending out Kamala Harris to talk about the immense suffering of Palestinians and to call for this immediate ceasefire. Of course, it'll only be temporary, and then we'll get right back to the killing. But that's why they're trying to change the image. And, you know, for the once again, what really needs to change is the actual policy here. Although, you know, it's it's not beyond people like Thomas Friedman to get tricked by just like the new packaging put on the policy. So we'll see. But, you know, to your point about Israel, they are placing a huge bet. And this is basically, you know, because Netanyahu, both for ideological reasons, but also because he wants to keep this war going so he can,

you know, hopefully hang on to power by his fingertips. That's what his plan is. They're placing a huge bet that they can get away with a complete, you know, modern day ethnic cleansing, colonization, annihilation that we're all watching in real time and that they will be able to get away with it. That's what they're betting on. We can all see the images. We can see what's happening. We can see the massacres. We can see the destruction. We can see the babies shriveled up, their bodies wasted, dying literally of starvation. The horrible image of a child who has been, you know, withered away and is fighting for his life right now that has gone viral. These images of horror are everywhere. And they're hoping

that with our backing, they will be able to get away with it. That's the bet. We'll see. Yeah, I think that's well said, Crystal. And we have a good guest who's going to be joining us now to break down some of this media chaos. Let's get to it. So we have a bunch of media ground to cover both with regards to CNN and also the New York Times with Daniel Bogoslaw, who joins us now. He's a reporter for The Intercept, who's been breaking some incredibly important stories there. Great to see you, Daniel. Good to see you, Dan. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. So let's start with this story that you just put out about CNN. You got an internal leak, put this up on the screen, that reveals that Christiane Amanpour actually expressed in an internal meeting along with a number of other staffers great concern

over CNN's coverage of the Israel assault on the Gaza Strip. She mentioned that you've got sort of hypocrisy. I don't think that was the word that she used, but go ahead and break down for us what you heard in this leaked meeting. Sure. Well, I think the largest takeaway from this was the continued confirmation of an earlier report I did about the concerns raised by the CNN internal protocol for all Israel coverage. It's called the Second Eyes Alias. It's basically an internal system that ensures all news concerning Israel or Palestine is run through a team of editors, largely comprised of Jerusalem Bureau staff members.

And the rationale given by CNN is to ensure that subject matter experts and people on the ground have an opportunity to touch and oversee the reporting of an extremely sensitive issue. getting out Israel coverage, and also ultimately shaped the editorial line regarding Israel and Palestine by prioritizing IDF statements at the top of pieces. And basically just the system, while justified by CNN executives and editors for ensuring accuracy really resulted in a degradation of the Israel coverage. And that was confirmed this week when we published a story about an internal meeting at CNN where even Christiane Amanpour, the chief international correspondent, similarly expressed concern about a double standard that was created through this protocol. And her concern was echoed by a number of other staffers who were present at this meeting who said that they felt delegitimized by CNN's coverage. They felt that it was delegitimizing CNN's standing in the region. And according to one staffer, turning on CNN was

more concerning than the bombs falling around them while they were covering Israel's attack in Lebanon. So Daniel, you've also been at the forefront of exposing some of what's going on over at the New York Times. And there has now been a witch hunt that has been started inside the Times, not necessarily to question some of the reporting around their October 7 rape story, but instead to find out who are the people who have been leaking to you. So what do you make of a media organization starting a leak investigation, even though they themselves subsist on leaks, whenever it's something that makes them look bad, given your reporting? Well, I think it confirms a lot of what we heard throughout the course of reporting about the internal structural flaws present at the New York Times. Instead of trying to listen to the reporters who they trust to put out accurate news from dangerous and challenging places, who are speaking up and saying, this story did not meet the standards

which we all try to hold ourselves to as reporters and editors. The Times is completely ignoring the people on the ground. They're ignoring the people who make that newspaper function and provide it with the reporting that it is the foundation of the whole thing. And they're saying, no, we're going to crack down. And as a source pointed out, people do not leak because they're hyper-radicalized partisans. That is the picture that I think the Times is trying to paint, that these are people who are stepping out of line, who are prioritizing their own personal politics over the good of the institution. But as one source pointed out, it's actually the opposite is true. For almost all leakers, be they government officials or New York Times staffers, leaking is

a course of last resort when the official channels for attempting to reform catastrophic system failures break down. And I think that's certainly what all of us who've been reporting on this have noticed and observed talking to people on the inside. I just want to remind people, too, what the story is that you reported out. And as we referenced, this has to do with what they build as this blockbuster intensive investigation into sexual assault being used systematically as a weapon of war by Hamas on October 7th. And there were three reporters who were bylined on that piece. Immediately after it was published, it came under a lot of scrutiny. Actually, one of the main victims in the story,

her family, she was murdered on October 7th by Hamas. Her family freaked out. They rebutted the reports. They said, you interviewed us under false pretenses. We had no idea that this was about a rape. We actually do not believe that she was raped. We have no evidence that she was raped. And actually, we have evidence in the other direction that she was not raped. Some of the, quote unquote, eyewitnesses that they cited had changed their stories. There were all sorts of issues here. And you all received this leak that The Daily, their premier podcast, had planned an episode around this blockbuster investigation that they eventually ended up shelving because they either had to soften the language and raise questions and make it less ambiguous than the report, which was very conclusive in asserting what happened,

or go with the original reporting, which had sort of fallen apart under scrutiny, or shelve it all together. And that's what they ultimately decided to do. You all have since reported additional information about Anat Schwartz, who was revealed online by Sea Squirrel to have effectively no background in journalism, but to have served previously in the IDF in intelligence unit. Another of the reporters byline on the piece, Adam Sella, also had very limited experience. And these were the two reporters charged with the extensive, quote unquote, on the ground investigation. So there's been a lot of tumult around this piece, around how these reporters with no experience got to work at the premier elite media institution in probably

the world. And so the response to that from the New York Times isn't, gosh, what happened here? How do we get this report wrong? What are the issues? How did these journalists, quote unquote journalists, with really no experience, how'd they get put on this piece? No, the response has been to go after the people to shine the light on the problem that is actually unfolding at the Times. And there's another shoe to drop here. This was also a number of outlets got their hands on this letter that came from the Times Union. Put this up on the screen from the Washington Post. The union is saying not only are you doing this leak hunt, but you are racially targeting, you are racially profiling your employees, assuming that anyone with, you know, who's

presumably like Arab American or Muslim or who has some sort of identity that you think may be skeptical of Israel's line, you are singling them out and targeting them here. Talk about this piece of it, because, I mean, they say directly, we demand the time cease what has become a destructive and racially targeted witch hunt in response to the reports that you all have put out. Sure. So, you know, I think what the union is referring to here is the sort of interrogation of members of a Middle East affinity group within the New York Times. And the Times pushed back on the union statement and said that this is inaccurate. And if you actually look at the spread of the people that we've interrogated,

you'll see that we're not racially profiling our staffers. We're interrogating everyone, don't worry. Yeah, but again, it's shocking that each step of this process, staffers. We're interrogating everyone. Don't worry. Yeah. But again, it's shocking that, you know, each step of this process, you know, you have an opportunity for newsroom leadership to take responsibility, to reassure the reporters who work extremely hard and put their lives at risk at times to cover this reporting. And there's an opportunity to actually welcome real feedback from the people who are on the ground doing this, who want to

see the paper succeed, who work there. For many of them, that's the end of the line. That's the top goal for so many reporters to get in there. And that notion that there are reporters who have invested so much in this company would be willing to throw it all away for frivolous personal reasons instead of for wanting to see the organization succeed is proof of concept for perhaps why some of these flaws and failures

have been allowed to fester and exist for so long. Daniel, Ryan had predicted online that this leak investigation was likely to backfire and trigger additional leaks because of people being upset by this response. You know, has that prediction come to fruition? Are you having more staffers come to you? Are you hearing more from your sources? Yeah, I mean, I can't speak to Ryan's Rolodex, but I know certainly that has been the case for myself. Yes. All right. Well, good. We look forward to seeing more of it. Appreciate your work, Dan. Thanks, Daniel. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. Okay, Crystal, what are you looking at? Chaotic incident, a crush of bodies, food aid-related deaths. Western media rushed to create fog-of-war confusion after a straightforward massacre by Israeli forces left over 100 Palestinians dead and more than 700 wounded.

Their headlines and stories followed a classic playbook. Rather than straightforwardly report what we know based on video, audio, and visual evidence, eyewitness testimony, and reports of doctors who treated the wounded, they instead attempted to shroud the whole, quote, chaotic incident in mystery, thereby running cover for the war criminals who committed this atrocity, the Israeli government, which set the genocidal policy,

and the United States, which backs them every step of the way. This in spite of the fact that in many instances, if these news outlets simply followed their own reports to their logical conclusion, the fact that Israeli forces murdered starving Palestinians as they sought food becomes undeniable. Here's a report by Al Jazeera, who had reporters on the ground that day. In the early hours of the morning, thousands of people flocked to Al Rashid Road, southwest of Gaza City, desperate for aid. Instead,

survivors say they walked into a trap. By the time the sun rose, the extent of the horror was clear. The dead and the dying lying side by side, gunned down by Israeli fire. The Israelis just opened random fire on us as if it was a trap. Once we approached the aid trucks, the Israeli tanks and warplanes started firing on us. If this continues like this, we do not want any aid delivered at all. Every convoy coming means another massacre. The IDF, in a series of shifting explanations, attempted to undercut the testimony of Palestinians on the ground. There's three different explanations we're hearing from

the IDF so far. Initially, it was that there was a stampede that caused loads of people to die. Then there was a suggestion that a truck had actually, driven by a civilian driver, had mown down a load of the Palestinians. Then there was a suggestion that actually this was potentially Hamas. Now, obviously, the fact that A, the IDF has been caught lying often, and B, their story kept changing throughout the day, should make you highly skeptical, to say the least, of their account. But news outlets nevertheless gave it great credence. What's more, the one piece of supposed evidence that Israel offered for their version of events was revealed to be selectively edited. And even that video, on careful review, backed up the clear-cut evidence that this was not a

chaotic incident, but another massacre courtesy of the IDF. Both the New York Times and BBC Verify noted that this video, which the Israelis offered as evidence of a stampede, was edited and the Israelis refused to provide the original footage. Per the New York Times, quote, the video, which does not include audio, was edited by the Israeli military with multiple clips spliced together, leaving out a key moment before many in the crowd begin running away from the trucks, with some people crawling behind walls appearing to take cover. Gee, wonder what caused them to flee. Wonder why audio of the gunfire, I mean stampede, was not included. BBC Verify notes that the video shows events in two

different locations. In a portion of the footage, you can actually see Israeli tanks and motionless bodies depicted by the red boxes strewn across the ground. Now, this video alone is highly suggestive of what actually occurred, but we've got quite a bit more evidence just to eliminate any potential doubt. Al Jazeera released footage from nearby, which was verified by both the Times and BBC. And in that video, you can hear volleys of gunfire and see tracer rounds in the sky coming from a nearby Israeli military base. Tracer rounds, by the way, are used to mark targets for soldiers to fire on. Here is a portion of that video. Now, the Israelis in one of their shifting fabrications here claim their soldiers did fire some warning shots, but that the deaths were definitely caused by a stampede.

Well, there is a pretty easy way to know whether or not that's true. You can ask the doctors and hospitals who treated the victims to find out what type of injuries they were actually treating. Sure enough, those doctors say the overwhelming majority of their patients were being treated for gunshot wounds, not broken bones and other injuries consistent with the stampede. The head of Al-Auda Hospital told the Associated Press that 80% of the injured at his hospital had been struck by gunfire. So of the 176 wounded, 142 had gunshot wounds. The director of Kamal Adwan Hospital said 100% of their injured were treated for gunshot wounds. He also said that the majority of those wounds were to the head, neck, or chest. In other words,

attempted kill shots, contrary to that IDF claim that soldiers had felt unsafe and so fired non-lethal shots at Palestinians' legs. And if you don't trust the claims of these hospital administrators, the UN has since sent a team to investigate and confirmed exactly the same information. They found a, quote, large number of gunshot wounds in the wake of what has now been dubbed the Flower Massacre. Ditto Euromed Human Rights Monitor, which had researchers there on the ground from the very first moments of this horror, and they confirmed the nature of the wounds, which were, again, overwhelmingly from gunfire, not due to a stampede. Now, the nature of the

wounds sustained is about as definitive a piece of evidence as you could possibly get. One side says people died in a stampede. The other side says gunfire. The wounded and dead are riddled with bullets. Case closed. But of course, that hasn't stopped the media from throwing up their hands. How can one possibly know what happened? What even are facts and reality really? Alan McLeod has done a great job capturing many of the most egregious headlines. Although to be perfectly honest, open up literally any Western outlet and you can easily pull your own sample of atrocious headlines. CNN went with at least 100 killed and 700 injured in chaotic incident where IDF opened fire as people waited for food in Gaza, Palestinian officials

say. Now this one checks a whole lot of manufacturing consent boxes. This is a chaotic incident, not a massacre. The IDF, quote, opened fire, but that gunfire isn't then connected to the deaths. And just for good measure, the whole chaotic incident is qualified as only being based on the word of Palestinian officials. And, you know, who can trust those Hamas-loving barbarians anyway? Forbes says more than 100 Palestinians killed while waiting for food, health ministry says. Here, Israel isn't even mentioned. Were the Palestinians food poison?

Were they hit by a tornado? Who knows? And again, this is all only per the Health Ministry, so how can anyone really know if any of this even happened? The Guardian, in a similar vein, invented an entirely new category of cause of death. Apparently these Gazans were struck down not by bullets, but they suffered food aid-related deaths. The New York Times decided to compose a tortured haiku in an attempt to avoid ascribing any blame to Israel. Here's their headline.

As hungry Gazans crowd a convoy, a crush of bodies, Israeli gunshots, and a deadly toll. In a later, even more outrageous post, they seem to suggest that it was actually Israel's generosity which backfired here. Quote, disastrous convoy was part of new Israeli effort to hand out more aid in Gaza. Really? I can't begin to explain my absolute contempt for all of these ghouls because although anyone who wants to know the facts about this massacre can easily find them, the truth is the press attempts to confuse an office gate, they worked. They needed just to delay enough, just to confuse enough, for Americans to avoid the totality of the absolute horror that we are paying for and running cover for. They need just enough, well, it's complicated, for people to shrug their shoulders at the unfortunate food aid-related deaths from the chaotic incident

and then just move on. And they need to allow the Biden administration's paid propagandists to be able to point to the conflicting accounts to avoid having to respond to this carnage directly, which, by the way, is exactly what State Department spokesman Matthew Miller did. So do you think that Israelis complying with this ICJ ruling? And do you believe, do you agree that today's attack near Gaza on starving people waiting for humanitarian assistance violates this ICJs? MR PRICE So again, let me just say I don't believe

we have established the facts of what actually happened today, but it is important that those facts be established, which is why we have called for an investigation and we'll look forward to the results of that investigation. As I've seen, there are conflicting accounts and we don't know the ground truth of what happened. Conflicting accounts. We don't know the ground truth of what happened. We call for Israel to investigate themselves. Meanwhile, new horrors are being inflicted on innocent Palestinians so rapidly we can barely even keep track. In fact, more aid seekers were shot by the IDF since the Flower Massacre. Yet again, a new war crime is being normalized. Now, the Biden administration wants to assuage their

conscience and do a little PR move by dropping enough aid to feed one meal to 1.6% of the population in Gaza, a single meal, while supplying the bombs and bullets that have enabled this continued slaughter. They can gaslight an obscure reality all that they want, but the blood on their hands is undeniable. And Sagar, I saw the IDF put out the results of their investigation. You'll never guess what they said. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, Elon Musk has been in the headlines a lot in the last year or so, mostly for various political or Twitter-based reasons. But in recent days, he's actually made them in a way that doesn't conveniently align with the culture wars and instead reminds us of the pre-political Elon, who for years has been a Cassandra on artificial intelligence and his belief that if not responsibly handled would be a catastrophe for the human race. He made big news this week with a major lawsuit against OpenAI. That's the group that he helped

co-found in 2015, which goes far beyond his most recent split with leader Sam Altman and cuts to the heart of debates around AI and its recent rapid development. The lawsuit effectively alleges that Altman and OpenAI have breached the original founding of the mission on the organization by becoming a de facto arm of the Microsoft Corporation and putting profits ahead of the mission originally of open source AI that would be beneficial to humanity. So the lawsuit is worth reading in its entirety, as Elon particularly takes aim at the most recent kerfuffle that involved Altman's brief ouster, and it notes that the board of OpenAI has been cleansed largely of those who believe in their original mission of developing AI for the benefit of humanity. After the purge of the board and the subsequent reinstatement of Altman, Elon alleges that OpenAI has both already achieved artificial general intelligence and has decided to sell the benefits of that to Microsoft, the most valuable technology company in the world. He writes in his lawsuit, quote,

Mr. Altman has handpicked a new board that lacks technical expertise or any substantial background in AI governance, with the previous board had, by design, adding, new board consists of members with more experience in profit-centric enterprises or politics, rather than in AI ethics and in governance. They were also reportedly, quote, big fans of Altman, as he says in the lawsuit. It doesn't take a genius to see that Elon is right, since the new board members literally includes

the sellout neoliberal economist Larry Summers. Furthermore, Elon points out, quote, with this restructuring, OpenAI Inc. has abandoned its nonprofit mission of developing AGI for the benefit of humanity broadly, thereby keeping it out of the hands of a large for-profit corporation in which vast power will be unduly concentrated. Much of the lawsuit relies on a technicality that's going to play out in court. Effectively, it boils down to whether you think OpenAI has effectively achieved so-called artificial general intelligence or not. AGI is the catch-all term of an AI

that is capable of thinking for itself and for surpassing purely human control. Per Elon's telling, OpenAI's current licensing deal with Microsoft is a sham that relies on a definition where OpenAI and Microsoft have an exclusive agreement on, quote, pre-AGI technology. This so-called pre-AGI tech

that Microsoft is then incorporating into its vast office empire has boosted the valuation of OpenAI to some $80 to $100 billion, and it has been tremendously impactful to the Microsoft Corporation stock. A paradox that Elon's lawsuit points out is that OpenAI has a direct financial incentive to say that it has not achieved so-called AGI, because if it has, it would then instruct the board and the company to decide whether to then exit its Microsoft license and instead then ensure the technology is used for the benefit of humanity.

This points out the fundamental disconnect within OpenAI itself. It is a structure as both a non-profit and a for-profit enterprise, where people are getting, on the for-profit side, stupendously rich. So put it in simpler terms. Have you ever known a group of people, no matter how well-meaning, who would simply turn off one of the biggest money spigots in the world for some far-off philosophical principles? The reason that the lawsuit, in my opinion, is imperative is it actually would instruct a jury, if it proceeds that far, to rule on what exactly AGI is, taking the definition out of the hands of the creators and beneficiaries of the tech, and instead establishing a new standard. The standard may sound facetious, but hundreds of billions of dollars here are on

the line. More importantly, it actually puts the debate into the public realm where it belongs. The biggest problem with AI research right now is that the immense cost of R&D has monopolized much of the development in the hands of the existing big tech players, each with their own incentive to use AI for their own profitable aim and not to worry about any of the social problems. OpenAI in its founding in 2015

was set up explicitly to avoid this trap, to pursue nonprofit research and to bol non-profit research, and to bolster an open source environment, which technology startups could then build themselves on top of. Basically, it would concentrate the R&D costs within open AI, but then allow potentially millions of businesses to piggyback off of them and to level the playing field against Microsoft, Google, and others. Their sense transformation, basically into a for-profit company,

has destroyed much of that vision and has set back any dream of an original open source environment. Open source, as I have laid out in a previous monologue on the subject, is, in my opinion, the only way to really solve many of these problems that we have before us on AI. Ideological capture of big tech companies, ruthless pursuit of profit over any sense of responsibility, monopolization, complete lack of transparency, but most important of all is the public say in what is already acknowledged as a world-changing technology.

This lawsuit is the first fight in what I hope is a general public awareness of this issue, that we have very little time to actually get ahead of. Because if we don't, then the lawsuit, and even the discussion around this, is moot. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, they will just be bigger and stronger than they ever were before. They'll buy their way out of

any more scrutiny, leaving us simply to bow to our existing and new overlords. So it's a really interesting lawsuit, Crystal. Yeah. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Okay, guys, thank you so much for watching. We really appreciate it, and we will see you all tomorrow.