Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/6/24: Nikki Haley Drops Out Refusing To Endorse Trump, Dem Revolt In Super Tuesday Uncommitted Vote, Victoria Nuland Resigns, Kyrsten Sinema Retires, Israel Threatens Lebanon War As Hezbollah Fires Rockets, And Red Sea Cables Destroyed As Houthi Attacks Continue

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss Nikki Haley dropping out refusing to endorse Trump, Dems revolt in Super Tuesday uncommitted vote, Victoria Nuland resigns, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema announces retirement, Hezbollah fires rockets as Israel threatens escalation, Red Sea cables cut as Houthi attacks continue.   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. All right. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. We've got a big Super Tuesday show. We're going to be joined by some hotshot YouTubers in a second. But let's talk about

State of the Union first. Yeah, State of the Union. Speaking of those hotshot YouTubers, they're joining us for the Super Tuesday Breakdown. But Sagar, Crystal, Ryan, and myself will be here for the State of the Union pre-show starting tomorrow at 8.30 p.m. Then live, Sagar's not happy about this, starting at 10 p.m., way past his bedtime, to take questions from premium subscribers. So make sure you stay tuned for that. Get a premium subscription if you want to watch. On that note, though. Basically a private screening after the State of the Union. Yes. With Saga, Crystal, me and you.

So that we can translate Biden's mongrel. Breakingpoints.com. Go there now. Breakingpoints.com. Do not miss that. Let's bring those hot new YouTubers in. Saga and Crystal, thank you so much for joining us for Super Tuesday Show. Thank you for having us. Thanks, guys.

I can't tell you how nice it is not to have to set up the show myself. This is great. I can't tell you how nice it is not to have someone shouting good morning at an ungodly decibel level. Oh, no, come on. That's their favorite part.

By the way, for the record, 10 p.m. also way past my bedtime. I'm just not as much of a wimp about it as Sagar is. You guys are more than people. Guys, between the bedtime and daylight savings, this is just like my Vietnam. But whatever.

These are the sacrifices that you're willing to make for the viewers. That's right. And we deeply appreciate it. After Crystal and Sagar leave, we're going to talk about the cartoon villain

Victoria Nuland. Yes. Giving an arrest, which suggests probably a big strategic change in Ukraine policy is on the horizon. The other cartoon villain, Kirsten Stammer, also leaving. The world desperately needed some good news, and both of these women gave us some of that, so we really appreciate that.

And of course, we'll have some updates on the latest in the war in Gaza. So I don't want to keep going on the cartoon villain trend, but I will because the big news this morning is that Nikki Haley has dropped out of the presidential race after getting clobbered, clobbered in every state with the exception of Ryan's favorite state, Vermont, yesterday by double digits. Nikki Haley ended up winning Vermont with about a three-point margin so far

as we can tell. But in other states, I think the closest was Utah, and she lost Utah by 18 points. So if you're watching, you can see the delegate count here overall, 995 delegates for Donald Trump, 89 delegates for Nikki Haley. Trump needs 1,200, so actually 1,215, to win the nomination precisely. He's already at 995, and he has healthy leads basically in most of the polls across the country on this one. I'll start with you, Sagar. Reaction to your favorite, your personal hero, Nikki Haley, dropping out of the race. And I'll say she had a lot of money. She was dropping some money. Some donors were dropping her, but she could have kept going. So just your thoughts on her dropping out.

I mean, it's just about the credible case. It's been a long time coming now for Nikki Haley dropping out. I guess it is a tough day for the brown ceiling here of Indian American GOP politicians who are running out. But overall, I think whenever we look at her candidacy, we are seeing a couple of things. I will give her at least some credit, as loathe as I am. She did win, you know, 20, 30 percent of the vote in a lot of the primaries that happened last night. She certainly did get the D.C. primary, I guess, and she proved her constituency. And I think some of the themes that we'll be talking about today have less to do with the Nikki Haley candidacy than what that type of voter who even craves

something like that, what are they going to do in November? So I think that's the big question on the Republican side. And I think the theme of today's show is that both of these candidates have critical parts of their coalition where there are big question marks as to what they're actually going to do whenever it does come to the general election. Crystal, on that note, we can put A2 up on the screen. This is the margin in Vermont, so everyone can see exactly how well Nikki Haley did in Vermont. So she prevents Trump from getting that 50-state sweep, just barely.

But, Crystal, it is true. Sager is absolutely right that Nikki Haley came away in some of these states. She spent a lot of money, outspent a lot of her competition along the way, but she did come around 30 to 40 percent in some of these contests, even in swing states, critical states like South Carolina, something to that effect. So whether or not she endorses Trump is a huge question. What do you expect to see from Nikki Haley on that front? Well, let me say, first of all, that I do want to give credit where credit is due. At the beginning of this contest, if you had told me Nikki Haley would be the last person standing with Trump, if you told me she was going to win a single state in the country, I would have said not a chance. So in a sense, I do think she

was sort of vindicated. But her decision to stay in this long was kind of vindicated by the fact that she did win a state. She did perform reasonably well in some of these other states that went on Super Tuesday. It makes the overall performance a little bit less embarrassing, a little bit less humiliating. Prove the point that there is some constituency for her. We know that is not a majority constituency in the Republican Party. It's largely like highly educated people who kind of like Joe Biden and are very possibly going to vote for him in the Republican Party. It's largely like highly educated people who kind of like Joe Biden and are very possibly going to vote for him in the fall. But she demonstrated there was something there in terms of her pitch. And so she did outperform what I expected of her for whatever that is worth. In terms of her dropout speech today, the reporting is she is not going to endorse Trump.

She's saying he needs to basically win over independents and moderates like herself who were backing her. I also want to say, you know, I think the political framing of Nikki Haley really demonstrates some of the oddities and perversions of the Trump era that she's considered the quote unquote moderate. When if you just look at the ideology, you know, head to head, you cannot put her in any sort of moderate ideological lane. But the one thing that really came out in all of the exit polling in every single state that's voted so far is actually the biggest dividing line in the Republican Party is whether or not they bought in to stop the steal. You know, the Nikki Haley voters, overwhelmingly, she won people who said, you know what, Joe Biden actually won. Overwhelmingly, Donald Trump wins people who say, no, it was, you know, it was rigged, stop the steal, et cetera, et cetera. So Trump really did successfully make that the litmus test and the dividing line in the Republican Party. And, you know, if you were on the wrong side of that question,

then you basically had no hope in this primary. And by the way, one interesting point, I think you're going to end up having 60 or 70,000 voters in Vermont total deciding this Republican primary. And Vermont is an open primary state. This is a very close election. Like, the chance that a bunch of Democrats, you know, I'm not,

not saying by any means a majority, but a non-trivial number of Democrats I think showed up and were like, what's the point of voting in the Democratic primary? I'm going to, I'm going to jump in here and vote against, uh, and vote against Trump. I think a lot of Republicans actually did that in West Virginia in 2016, for instance, and went in and voted for Bernie, uh, against Hillary, Hillary Clinton. But we do have Trump's, we move to that. We do have Trump's speech, uh, for instance, and went in and voted for Bernie against Hillary Clinton. But we do have Trump's, we'll move to that, we do have Trump's speech last night, in which he did not mention Nikki Haley, just went right at Joe Biden. Let's play some Trump here. November 5th is going to go down as the single most important day in the history of our country. We're going to take it and we're going to make it like it should be respected. Right now, we're not respected.

Right now, our country is known as a joke. It's a joke. Other leaders who I speak to, other leaders can't believe what happened to us because three years ago, we were the most respected country anywhere in the world by far. We were doing things that nobody could believe. China was paying us billions and billions of dollars. In 25 years, they paid us nothing, zero, not 10 cents. I was getting billions of dollars. And they were happy about it, as happy as you can be. Of course, maybe there's reasons for things having happened. But they were not so happy with certain things, I guess, based on things that took place. But we were getting along with everybody. We were getting along and we were respected by everybody. We had no wars. Remember when I had the debate with Hillary Clinton?

She said, look, look at him. Look at that personality. He's going to cause wars, wars. I said, no, my personality is going to keep us out of wars. And that's what happened. So Ryan is losing it. I mean, there were no wars. He started riffing at one point about the military's goggles. I don't know if anyone else caught that. And the gold, just the selling gold along the side from Newsmax, just so perfect. Yeah, it's great. Like, no, no, gold along the side from Newsmax, just so perfect. Yeah, it's great. Like, no, no. That's the Republican Party.

So there's a lot of sort of, go ahead, Sagar. Well, I just think, you know, this is the frame. Trump is the cult of personality. I want to pick up on where Bristol left off. He has successfully, I mean, talked about this ad nauseum during the Trump era, if people want to go back and watch. He successfully defined MAGA as a complete litmus test on him and him alone, on impeachment, on stop the steal, on allegiance to him as a party figure, instead of really defining it along any sort of policy line. Actually, you can see a lot of that in some of the primary results that happened last night. Because remember, it wasn't just what was going on with the presidential election. And down in Texas,

we saw several judges, for example, face serious problems in their primaries who had ruled against Ken Paxton, for example, on election lawsuits. That actually shows me that it's not just the Trump top line, you know, versus him and Nikki Haley. It's his successful takeover. And whenever he does push certain things like stop the steal, he says, this is the dividing line. Voters are not willing to just come out for him. They're also willing to come out for anybody who appeared to have wronged him. And then, look, these are not national races, you know, per se, but the Texas GOP successfully was able to argue that any judge, even if they're typical Bush-style Republicans that ruled to limit the ability of Ken Paxton to try and to, you know, whatever, whatever he was doing with the 2020 election, that that was enough in order to make

sure that they were to face challenges. And we saw that in some of the other primary challenges, all really across the entire country last night for the specific type of America first, you know, as in Trump type person blowing it out. And then a more traditional type like Dan Crenshaw, I believe you highlighted this, Emily, you know, not doing nearly as well as he did last time around. His margin is down by quite a bit, actually. And this is probably a good point to put these Loudoun County results up on the screen. So control room, I'm going to go and start with A5 here. Loudoun County, Virginia was hyped in the media. This is from, by the way, if you're looking at this, this is the results from 2016. Loudoun County is really hyped by the media as

one of the key swing counties. It's sort of a bellwether county that you can take a look at here for how the mood is. And Marco Rubio cleaned up pretty handily back in 2016, 40% of the vote. Ted Cruz himself had about 15% of the vote. Even John Kasich got about 11% of the vote. And Trump was only at 28% of the vote back then. Now, contrast that. I don't know if we have this image. We can put it up if we do. But contrast that with what happened last night, 2024. Trump won Loudoun County really clearly, a very wealthy county. And it's outside of Washington, D.C., northern Virginia. So you wouldn't necessarily you would think actually Nikki Haley with all the defense contractors out there, as Trump said, he didn't start any new wars, that Nikki Haley with all the defense contractors out there. As Trump said, he didn't start any new wars

that Nikki Haley might be really popular in Loudoun County. She wasn't, even though she had been able to pick up big chunks of the vote. It just hasn't been quite enough. There's something about Trump, Crystal, that Republican voters will not shake. And maybe it's to Sager's point, it does remind me a little bit of the Tea Party years. It's sort of this binary establishment and anti-establishment. And if you're someone who's uncomfortable with the anti-establishment, maybe you gravitate towards a Nikki Haley. But if you're uncomfortable with the establishment, even if Trump says the craziest thing, shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, you still prefer him. Yeah, I mean, just to reflect specifically on the Loudoun County results, some of those people who voted for Marco Rubio or John Kasich, they're just Democrats now,

right? They're not voting in a Republican primary. So you can't necessarily say like Nikki Haley underperformed what they did because probably a lot of those people that voted for Marco Rubio were like showing up to stay strong for Joe Biden last night in Loudoun County or whatever. Actually, Marianne Williamson, if memory serves, did quite well in Loudoun County last night for whatever reason. But, you know, the other thing about the Trump domination of the Republican Party is obviously it works out well for Trump, just like the Obama domination of the Democratic Party, that worked out very well for Barack Obama. It doesn't work out very well for the rest of the Republican Party

because the things that Donald Trump can get away with, the shooting someone on Fifth Avenue or whatever wacky crap comes out of his mouth or his legal problems or whatever, other candidates can't get away with. And so that's a big part of the story of why 2022 was such an underperformance for Republicans. Because yeah, a bunch of these like Trump fringe weirdos who were

absolutely repellent to just normal people won the primary. And then lo and behold, got blown out in a state like Pennsylvania where they're losing by double digits when they should have, you know, basically been a lock to win in that year. And that's both the governor's level and, you know, with Fetterman and Oz, which is that's a whole other story. But North Carolina is an example of this last night. The Republican nominee for governor there is apparently really wacky. You know, I haven't looked into all of these statements, but people are circulating online all kinds of things that he's said that are really out there in North Carolina. I mean, that's a state where Republicans should easily win the governorship. But at the state level, they will, voters will pick a Democrat, you know, especially when you're talking about a state race and not a federal race.

So they very likely handed Democrats, you know, potential victory in that state when that was completely unnecessary because of how fringe some of these candidates have become, following in the quote unquote anti-establishment mold of Donald Trump. At this point, that framing to me is not really accurate given this is the guy who served the establishment quite handily when he was in office. You could see a lot of Wall Street. You've seen people like Jamie Dimon and others saying like, yeah, it wouldn't be so bad to have him again, sort of reconciling themselves to him.

The Davos said perfectly fine with another Trump presidency. So the vibe is anti-establishment. The reality is very different. Let's get some video because for the control room, just a heads up, I'm going to do A4 and A9 here because these are two videos that Nikki Haley got of, or Nikki Haley, Nikki was out there talking to voters, filming herself. No, MSNBC got of Nikki Haley voters. And these are somewhat amusing clips. Let's start with A4. This is actually a Trump voter, Republican voter. Let's roll that. Nikki Haley is is irrelevant. Why irrelevant?

Because it's obvious that she's just there representing the rhino part of the Republican Party. And she has no chance. And she knows it. and everyone knows it. It's self-evident. Did you vote for Trump in 2020? I did. And what made you switch from Trump to Nikki Haley? The man is a lunatic, and I think he's terrible for the country. What are you thinking about when you say that? Just that he lies, he cheats, he's bankrupted millions of businesses and people, and I don't see anything good about him. Let me ask, if Donald Trump is the nominee in November, do you support Joe Biden over Donald Trump? Nope. What do you do? I don't know. It will be a hard decision.

Two North Carolina voters there. Ryan, what do you make of it? We didn't do the one who told CNN that the reason he isn't going to vote for Nikki Haley is because she doesn't have balls to scratch, which is apparently a prerequisite for being a good president, according to this guy. A good female president. Any president. It's a universal requirement. So, yeah, we have more on this. A good female president. Any president. It's a universal requirement.

So yeah, we have more on this. So if we put A7 up on the screen, there's some really interesting exit poll results. This is California. Will you vote for the Republican nominee regardless of who it is? Trump voters answered yes, 71%. 22% said no. Haley voters, only 26 percent said yes. Sixty nine percent said no. And then we can go to a eight as well for some more exit polling results. This is North Carolina Republican primary voters. Haley voters, Biden job approval, 48 percent, 48 percent of Nikki Haley voters, North Carolina approve of Joe Biden, 52% disapprove. Now you go to Trump voters, 2% approve of Joe Biden, 96% disapprove. I'd love to know, Sagar, who those 2% of approving voters are. Hey, they exist. We covered actually in our show yesterday that 10% or so of Biden voters are actually going to be voting for Trump this time around.

If we look at some of the swing data that Nate Silver dug into. But, you know, look, I think, again, the theme of our show for today and for next with the Democratic bloc is that there are parts of these coalitions where they're genuinely up for grabs across either from the other or in terms of taking votes away. I would also be remiss if I didn't say that RFK Jr. appears to have qualified for the ballot in Nevada, or he at least attained enough signatures yesterday. So that's another critical battleground state that kind of throws everything into whack here. So what are these people going to do? Are they going to come out to vote for Biden? Like that lady, for example, she's like, I don't know, it's going to be a hard decision. She come out to vote for Biden? Like that lady, for example, she's like, I don't know. It's going to be a hard decision.

She may just not vote. A lot of people don't vote, actually. Or they just don't vote at the top of the ticket. They could go third party. So there's a significant amount of chaos factor that I think goes into this election. And I've been continuing, I've been doing a lot more research on the 1992 presidential election just to look at how things worked out. Well, you have to, right? You know, yesterday, by the way,

I shouted out the 92 Bill Clinton nominee speech. It's on YouTube. I've been going back and watching some of the debates with Ross Perot, who, by the way, was unfairly maligned at the time. But the point is, is that Bill Clinton only won the popular vote by some 42%. He did win some 300 votes,

300 some electoral college votes. But the Perot candidacy and also the ability to strip some of it away from H.W. Bush was critical, actually, in getting Clinton across the finish line. So, I mean, increasingly, I am seeing enough chaos in there that you could see either of these candidates, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, actually win the electoral college and the presidential election with not even close to a majority of the overall popular vote because you have so many of these different constituencies that are upper grabs and you have multitudes of third-party candidacies and record high dissatisfaction with both of these incumbents. So it's a very, very different dynamic than 2020. And one of the key differences you just hit on,

it's the level of dissatisfaction. So in 1992, what's interesting is that I think the public kind of was okay with George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Like the people who voted for Ross Perot, they didn't like the system. They didn't trust the whole thing. They thought the country was going off the rails.

But personally, when it came to Bush and Clinton, they didn't think that they were going to destroy the country. That their election to the White House would be the end of the American experiment. None of them really thought that. Today, you have significant portions of both electorates that think if the other person wins, it's the end of the world. And I don't know what that does to third party voting. Like it has some, I think, influence on how people think about third parties, but I'm not quite sure yet how that works out.

Yeah, well, that's basically what you just laid out is what the Biden campaign in particular is counting on. They're hoping that that revulsion and that sense of existentialism. I mean, this is what, you know, Biden and we're telling the New Yorker in that interview that got a lot of attention. Basically, like, yeah, they're mad now. They'll come around when they really think about Donald Trump being back in office. And maybe and certainly for a large proportion of the electorate and the Democratic base, that's certainly true.

I'm just not sure that it holds as strongly as it did in 2020, or even as strongly as in 2016, when it was a real question mark of what a Trump presidency would even look like. And it was a little, you know, potentially more terrifying because it was just completely unknown. Now you have people like, well, it wasn't great, but we got through four years. So maybe this world isn't literally going to end. You know, I wanted to just react to, because it's a big media conversation, understandably so, about Nikki Haley voters

saying they're not necessarily going to vote for Donald Trump in the fall. I think the fact that you have such high approval rating for Joe Biden among Nikki Haley voters tells you something about who her electorate actually was, like who was voting for Nikki Haley. And I think it was mostly not Republicans. Even the independents who voted for her, there are a lot of people who call themselves independents, but really when it comes down to it, they're either every election voting D or every election voting R. And since there wasn't much of a contest on the Democratic side, I do think you had overwhelmingly those types of independents saying, well, you know, I really think Trump's a maniac, so let me cross over and try to boost

my girl Vicky for the primary. And, you know, at the end of the day, I'm probably coming back home to Joe Biden. So, you know, I think it's a warning sign. I think it's something to pay attention to. But my guess is the, you know, suburban college educated people who are going to be horrified by Trump and vote for Democrats because of it, like that ship has probably already sailed. We've probably already seen that realignment occur over the years that he has been in public office. Totally agree, Crystal.

And let's just wrap up this block by noting that turnout was down. I mean, that's extremely important to all of this, to the 1992 factor and to the 1992 factor as well. This is our transition to our next block where we're going to talk about the results in the Democratic Party primary. But that third party factor is looming very large. We have no idea what's going to happen. We know No Labels has said that they'll think about this after Super Tuesday.

Nikki Haley has said she's a conservative Republican. She's not interested in the No Labels ticket. Kyrsten Sinema just conspicuously dropped out of her Senate race in Arizona and retired yesterday. Nikki Haley said she couldn't do No Lab labels because that would mean running with the Democrat. Well, Kyrsten Sinema is an independent, so we will see where all of that goes. RFK Jr. still polls enough to be more than a factor than Jill Stein was in 2016. So there's so much to talk about with that. Ryan, let's talk about what happened in the Democratic primary last night, because some of these results were really interesting. Huge shout out to American Samoa.

Yes, American Joe Biden lost American Samoa to a guy who's extraordinarily famous here. In the mainland. On the mainland. But otherwise, he was embarrassed in a lot of states by the uncommitted vote, basically, across the country. We do not have a speech to show you from Joe Biden, because even though he is running for reelection, he did not give a Super Tuesday victory speech. Instead, he kind of stared blankly out at a crowd after mumbling that he would get in trouble if he took questions. It's almost too painful a video to even subject you guys to, so we're not even going to show it because that would make us complicit in the elder abuse that is being dealt out to Joe Biden. Not that I have any sympathy for him given what he's doing in Gaza right now. So you

kind of guess what he has coming to him, yet it's still kind of painful and sad to watch. That's for sure. All right, so let's get to what the voters are doing to him. We can start in Minnesota. Let's put this first one up here. Kind of a shocking to the establishment result in Minnesota with close to 20% of the electorate voting uncommitted. This is a campaign that had about a week to organize itself. And that's on top of 8% for Dean Phillips, by the way.

So almost 30%, just between the two of those against Biden. So they spent about $5,000 over the course of a week, something like that, to organize this campaign. Organizers for that campaign were telling me over the course of the week that they actually expected to outperform Michigan because the phone banking that they were doing was just landing on voter after voter after voter who was telling them, yeah, we're already uncommitted. Basically, it was organic. It spread from New Hampshire over to Michigan and then into Minnesota. In Ilhan Omar's district, which is number five in Minnesota, they'll win at least a delegate. They may win three delegates at least across the state.

That means the party process in Minnesota is going to send at least three people to Minnesota who will be representing kind of a free Palestine ceasefire and the war in Gaza vote. Huge Somali Muslim population, obviously, outside Minneapolis. But there was also this, you know, the correlation between age and support for uncommitted was basically one to one. The younger a precinct was, the stronger the support was. There was one precinct that had something like 80% for uncommitted. That must be a fun neighborhood. So the governor addressed this. We have a clip of that. Let's roll Tim Waltz, Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz. About 40,000 votes right now, 20% of

the vote going to uncommitted. And we've seen that already in this primary in Michigan. What message are voters in your state trying to send to President Biden? And what do you want to see President Biden do in response? Yeah, look, they're engaged. We're really proud in Minnesota. Civic responsibility has some of the highest voter turnouts. These are voters that are deeply concerned, as we all are. The situation in Gaza is intolerable. And I think trying to find a solution, a lasting two-state solution, certainly the president's move towards humanitarian aid and asking us to get to a ceasefire, that's what they're asking to be heard. And that's what they should be doing.

We've gone through this before. And we know that now we make sure we've got eight months. We start bringing these folks back in. We listen to what they're saying. That's a healthy thing that's happening here. But I would note that the former president lost twice as many votes here in Minnesota to Nikki Haley. And I've seen some of these exit polls out of North Carolina and others. 80% of folks said they're not voting for him who voted for Nikki Haley. We'll get these folks back. I think it's take them seriously. Their message is clear that they think this is an intolerable situation and that we can do more. And I think the president's hearing that. All right, let's bring back Crystal and

Sagar into the conversation. Crystal, what do you make of it? Not only in Minnesota, North Carolina, Colorado, around the country, Minnesota had the strongest performance for uncommitted, but around the country, it was clear that there is like widespread dissatisfaction with Biden and with his war effort. What did you make of it? Yeah, when you combine uncommitted and keep in mind that not all of these states had uncommitted on the ballot, which is why you should consider the votes for Marianne and the votes for Dean and the votes for uncommitted.

I think you should count all of those as basically Biden protest votes and also whatever other candidates, Cenk and the other like unknown candidates that popped up on some of these ballots. So quite significant. The Minnesota performance is nothing short of astonishing. And I heard this talking point over and over again on CNN, like, oh, sure, Biden lost a few votes, but look at Nikki Haley eating into Trump.

It is a very different deal to vote for an actual candidate and also, by the way, for it to be a lot of Democrats and independents who are voting for that actual candidate than to have voters taking the time out of their day to show up to directly say, screw you and your disgusting immoral policy vis-a-vis Gaza. I mean, that is extraordinary. With no money. Think of how much money Nikki Haley spent. There was almost literally no money spent on this effort in Minnesota. It popped up in a week's time and outperformed by percentages what was done in Michigan. So I think it is absolutely extraordinary.

And I do think that you have seen a rhetorical shift from the Biden administration directly because of this uncommitted protest vote. So you saw Kamala Harris with some more strenuous language backing basically the same policy. But you also see all of the Dem flacks out there instead of going back to, oh, well, Israel has a right to defend itself. Now the line is, well, Biden is working day and night to try to secure this ceasefire. And he hears them and he agrees with them. So basically trying to gaslight. But you can see there has been an impact and that they are feeling pressure. You couple that with the just abject horror of the flower massacre. And I think you do see that they are feeling some kind of pressure from this movement,

which will only continue and grow post-Super Tuesday. And once again, the results show this is not just a problem with Arab Americans. This isn't just a problem with Muslim Americans or some other narrow demographic group. If you are a Democrat and you want to win the presidency of the United States once again, you need young people to show up for you and not to stay home. And young people are sending you as loud and clear a message as they possibly can that this current posture vis-a-vis Israel and Gaza is utterly unacceptable. And Biden wouldn't have won without a pretty decent surge from young voters in 2020.

And his margins- He wouldn't have the Senate either. Yeah, absolutely. And Ryan, one second, Ryan, can you break down the other states for everybody? The uncommitted? Yes, because I know that we have all the other states there. Do we have the element that we can put up here? Yeah, we should. All right. So yeah, let's run through these quickly. So there we've got North Carolina rocking in at 13%, which is pretty strong performance, at least as strong as Michigan.

Move to the next one. We got Massachusetts coming in at almost 10% with another nearly 5% for Dean Phillips. Move on to the Colorado primary, what, eight, almost 9%, plus then a handful. So you're looking at almost 20% kind of protest votes with about 10% there. And then the Oklahoma primary, almost 10% of Oklahoma Democrats saying uncommitted, like end this war. And if the Democratic Party was- But also nine and nine for Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson. Yes. Right, right. Which is also a protest vote at this point. Yes. And so if the party was an actual power-seeking operation that ran rationally, somebody like the guy you

just saw, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, he'd be the nominee. He'd probably waltz into the White House. Instead- Dad joke. Yeah. Do you like that one? No, you loved it. Instead, to waltz, you know, into the White House. Instead- Dad joke. Yeah. Do you like that one? No, you loved it. Instead, to Crystal's point, all we're getting is this kind of change in rhetoric. And if you boil down what their change in rhetoric is, it's, we are not complicit in this evil. We are just too weak and incompetent to stop it, which is, okay, I guess that makes us feel better about it, maybe, but that's not much of a selling point at all. Well, actually, this is interesting because in California, here's establishment darling Adam Schiff. If we put B6 up on the screen, the primary, this is a huge primary

election in California. People know the high profile candidates, Katie Porter, Barbara Lee. Now, Steve Garvey actually did better than Katie Porter and Barbara Lee's margins here or their percentages here put together. So this goes to the jungle primary runoff type situation. Adam Schiff secured 33 percent of the vote. I'm just curious, Ryan, Crystal Sager, what your take is on, you know, with the Middle East weighing so heavily on Democratic voters' minds, Adam Schiff is a Biden establishment ally, also a conspiracy monger and weirdo. But that aside, I mean, that's a... It did not weigh in here in this California primary. It's very, it's very interesting. Barbara Lee, you know, uh, faring, faring terribly.

I was actually in California over, over the weekend, uh, talking, talking to a voter, uh, who is, his primary issue was, uh, anti-war. And later in the conversation, he said, I hope Barbara Lee wins her reelection. I was like, actually, you know, she's running for Senate. He's like, well, he's like, no way. That's awesome. That's, that's, that's so cool. It's like what he's like no way that's awesome that's that's that's so cool it's like barb barbara lee is so screwed like this is like this is like her base and he didn't even know uh that she was running which goes to the problem for anybody running

in california that is just so insanely expensive but saga uh what do you make of that well california obviously is basically a rigged youged electoral system. So let's all be honest around that, especially with the dynamics that you just highlighted. Also, just to pick up on that, we have a shot here of some of these protesters who are interrupting Adam Schiff. And this goes to the question of how that will play out in the actual general election. Let's take a listen to so as everybody could see i mean this is going to be an ever-present problem i think for many of these establishment democratic politicians we covered previously on our show about how joe biden is going to like extensive lengths not to campaign at college campuses. Pretty humiliating. We're the sitting Democratic president. You can't go to a college campus. Honestly, Ryan, that may be why he didn't do a victory speech last night. And they're just

terrified. As I understand it, they've been contracting some third party security service to try and screen people before you go in. I mean, once we've gotten to that point, you know, things are not looking good for you. And it is humiliating because you've not only got the votes in terms of uncommitted, but you've also got the physical manifestation of that at every public appearance that you make from here on thus far. So overall, I mean, I'm just coming back to the same Trump issue where Crystal is right. Many of those people who voted in the primary are just probably Democrats. Here, though, you know, we have probably a bigger problem just given the gap between like the policy that would actually have to happen to even get

maybe half of these people back in the door. It's very likely that he could, if there is a fatal blow in November, there will be many, many reasons as to why that happened, but it's very likely we can trace a lot of it back to here and to this right now. A Democrat not being able to go to a college campus is like a Republican who couldn't campaign in the villages, Florida. And underscoring that point, if we could put up B3 and then Chris, I want to get your response to this, the element B3, this polling that shows that even among Republicans, 30% of Republicans want arms shipments blocked to Israel, but 62% of voters who supported Biden in 2020 want the U.S. to block weapons shipments to Israel. Ceasefire and blocking weapons shipments is not a divisive or controversial position. It is the overwhelming majority position of Democratic voters.

Yet it is in stark contrast to what the president is actually doing, Crystal. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I continue to bring this up, but I am struck by the poll that found that a majority of Joe Biden 2020 voters say Israel is committing a genocide. And you just cannot possibly overstate the sea change in American politics that has occurred vis-a-vis the view of Israel

and the view of our relationship with regards to Israel. And so when you see the actions of someone like Joe Biden, who's been in D.C. for 50 years and has this view of Israel that dates back, you know, hasn't progressed since 1970 and whatever he thought of it at the time. The other thing is that, you know, one of his ironclad like rules of the road in politics is you never lose by being too pro-Israel. Because there's much more funding on that side. I'm just not trying to be an anti-Semitic comment. It's just a statement of reality, given the funding behind AIPAC and how influential that has been and how comparatively... I mean, there's basically no funding benefit to be gained

on the Palestinian side of the equation. And also, typically, the people who vote on that issue are the people who are most vociferously lockstep for whatever it is that Israel wants to do. That particular dynamic may well be changing. I think that's the piece that is different that Biden and many other Democratic politicians really haven't accounted for, that now you have this very, very impassioned and frankly radicalized group of predominantly, but not exclusively, young voters who are voting directly on this issue. And so I think that's part of, you know, where the disconnect and why they've been so slow to even change the rhetoric

with regards to Israel and Palestine, let alone they still haven't changed the policy. So this is a massive issue that, you know, there are videos every day coming out of Kirsten Gillibrand's town hall, you know, so many protesters there, AOC getting chased out of a movie theater because she won't call it a genocide. Adam Schiff getting shouted down at his own victory speech. Every single Democrat is being held to account for this monstrous, abhorrent policy that, again, a majority of their own party says makes them complicit in a genocide. So I think the political landscape has completely flipped in a way that many of these politicians haven't accounted for. Just to throw on a couple things specifically about California, don't claim to be a political expert in the ins and outs of

California politics. I do want to mention Adam Schiff spent, I think, more money propping up the Republican candidate than he did even on his own campaign because he wanted to make sure he wasn't up against another Democrat in the fall because he feels very confident, of course, in California. He can beat a Republican. He wasn't so confident he could beat, say, Katie Porter or Barbara Lee head to head. The other thing is my understanding, based on what I've seen of the messaging in that race, is that none of them really put Gaza at the core of their messaging. And yes, Barbara Lee is seen as generally anti-war,

but she hasn't been leading the charge in the way that, say, a Rashida Tlaib or like an Ilhan Omar has. And California also, their uncommitted vote, protest vote on Super Tuesday was one of the lower ones of the states that actually went for whatever reason, I'm not really sure why. I think it's also worth mentioning while we're in California that both George Gascon in LA and Jose Garza in Travis County, which, Sagar, you're obviously very familiar with, held onto their seats in these pretty competitive Democratic primaries. Not super close either, and that contrasts with the mood of the country back in 2022, where it was sort of like, oh, you know, Democrats are going to have to attack to the center

in order to make up from this backlash of 2020. Well, then Dobbs came down, and we're here and Israel happened. So I think there's just, there's so much going on with young voters in particular for Democrats that if there's going to be a wake up call, you would think the results that are coming in showing, you know, some, some seriously alarming drops in enthusiasm for Joe Biden that could affect turnout, could affect his margins, could affect third parties. These would be those red flags, those warning signs. But Ryan, there was a glaring red flag last night in American Samoa in the form of Jason Palmer. Jason Palmer ran what is, I think, it's got to be the coolest campaign ever. So he beat Biden for the delegates from American Samoa. Congratulations

to, yes, Jason Palmer. Very, very well known here in the mainland. Let's play a little bit of the case that he made to American Samoan voters. I'm asking for your support and vote and would love to talk to you about why I believe I'm the best candidate for American Samoa, a beautiful and diverse territory that needs much more attention and support from our federal government. You're probably wondering, who is this Jason Palmer? I've never heard of him before. Well, in the mainland, I'm actually very well known. I mean, I can vouch for that, right? Yes. That's my man.

That is the man. As soon as I saw him, I'm like, Jason Palmer, the man. I don't know if you saw Fox News call the race for Jason Palmer, but Brett Baer was really confused in the video. He was like, I don't know who that is. He's out of touch. He's out of touch. Jason Palmer's huge. And Jason Palmer looks like he's a realtor in suburban Minneapolis or something.

He's got the Martin Luther King. He's never been to American Samoa ever. I have a dream speech in the background. It's just like if you were watching the video, he really had a framed picture of Martin Luther King giving his American, giving his I have a dream speech behind him. I mean, it was just perfect in so many ways, Ryan. Yeah, incredible. Congratulations to Jason Palmer. Chris Lanzaga, are you voting for him? Oh, yeah, maybe. Absolutely. I'm going to write him in in the fall. He's a very well-known figure, you know. I've known about him for years.

He's big on TikTok, I think. I don't know. The Zoomers love him. The kids love him. So good for Jason Palmer. Very, very exciting. Love to see it. Well, Sagar, I want to toss this last element to you in the block. This is more results out of Texas. Again, I think the theme of this block when it comes to how Biden performed last night on Super Tuesday, we can go ahead and put B10 up on the screen. Just some really some of the signs from the polling that's found Biden starting to flag with Hispanic voters, Black voters, young voters started to show up in the returns yesterday. Talk to us a little bit about these results from Cameron County. Yeah, I had big eyes in South

Texas just because that was such a big flip that we saw that happened in 2020. In some cases, moving like 40 to 50 percent of the vote from Hillary Clinton to Trump. What you saw last night was actually pretty fascinating. It's not just Cameron County, but what we tried to highlight there is a lot of the results all across South Texas, where you actually saw a pretty significant protest vote for Armando Perez Serrato, who is a Democrat. He's kind of an all over the place gentleman, but critically was somebody who came out very hard

against Joe Biden, said that he was too old, disagreed with him on the Israel policy, went after a lot of the establishment Democrats. That showed me that he was one of the most polling protest vote candidates, but it was localized to South Texas, where he spent a lot of the time actually campaigning on. And I think what it kind of highlights for us here on show is

that regardless of where people are, you know, in Minnesota, we saw some Dean Phillips voters and uncommitted voters. Mary Ann actually did quite well here in Virginia, where Crystal and I are, you know, in certain places where there were younger voters, South Texas, everyone is localizing some of their dissent against Biden. And then that comes down to how are they actually going to come out and vote? And if you couple dissent of the existing Democrats and then the Republican like surge of 2020 and really in 2022 as well in South Texas, I think that it will fundamentally change the electoral map of Texas such that the Republican suburbs will vote Democrat, but they will make up for it with a lot

of non-white, non-college educated voters. And I found that really interesting in the results last night. Yeah. And my understanding from what's going on around there is that a lot of this just feels kind of cultural. Like the area is just becoming culturally Republican, like it's just in the water. Like it used to be culturally Democrat, like you're a Democrat because you live in this area. Now all- Because there's fluoride in the water. It's the fluoride.

I mean, I think some of it is the media, like the Spanish language takeover by the right wing of the media that is dominant there, I think, is where kind of you get that in the water. Like that's kind of what makes the water is what you consume on Facebook and also then through the Spanish language television. But yeah, is that your read, Sagar and Emily, that it's just becoming just like you're just, you just are a Republican. Like, I think this is going to go from a Democratic stronghold to pretty soon being

just Republican territory. Look, I don't think the labels are useful. It's just like the Tejano kind of libertarian identity has been there for a long time, in some cases longer than even many people who have lived in Texas who are white. So my point is just that trying to apply like national like it's the right would take over the media and all that. I just don't really think it's accurate. I think a lot of it just comes back to the fact that they truly felt screwed by the, they felt abandoned by Democrats on a couple of key issues. Inflation was a huge one actually in 2020 in 2020. I believe, if I remember, gas and COVID checks were a huge reason why people voted for Trump

back then. But when you continue into 2022, immigration had become a massive, you know, a massive, massive issue down there. I mean, not just there, really across the entire country. I think last night we saw it was one of the number one things that people said that they were voting on or was their top priority, especially in the Republican Party. So my point is just that it doesn't come back to media. It comes down to, I think, actually genuinely local conditions and to a broader, more libertarian aesthetic identity, combined with some cultural conservatism that has existed there for more than

100 years now at this point. It's a very unique part of the country. I encourage everybody to go if you can. It's a pretty fascinating place. And there's just a ghoulish segment on MSNBC last night. I don't know if everyone saw this, but it was Jen Psaki, Rachel Maddow, Joy Ann Reid laughing about how, yes, exit polls found Republican voters in Virginia were very concerned about immigration. And Jen Psaki was like, I live in Virginia, come on. And then I think one of them, Rachel Maddow, was like, well, it's very close to West Virginia in this completely obnoxious way. And it's worth noting that just a few days ago, a Venezuelan migrant who was here illegally was charged with sexual assault against a 14-year-old in Virginia. So wherever you stand on the

immigration issue, it has changed communities all over the country. So I think that was another. I mean, Jen Psaki is still close with Biden world and representative of Biden world. And that's sort of sticking your head in the sand. You guys have any final thoughts on this before we kick you out and talk about Victoria Nuland? I like Crystal Go. You opened a can of worms with those immigrant comments. I'll just say that, you know, I do think that a lot of the concern which we see spike around election times fed by right-wing media is a sort of like ginned up moral panic, not to say that it's not a legitimate issue. And to respond to the MSNBC people, treating voters with contempt is always the wrong move. So perhaps I'll say those unifying comments rather than starting a shit storm here. Last two thoughts with regards to the Democratic results. Number one, just wanted to flag that the dude in California, David Min, I believe is his

name, who is running to replace Katie Porter in her seat. He had four and a half million dollars of APAC money spent against him in that primary, and he still was able to succeed and was the top finishing Democrat and will go on to the general election. And one other note about him, this guy is not where I am on Gaza and Israel. He's very pro-Israel, but he was like mildly critical of Benjamin Netanyahu, which by the way, overwhelmingly Israelis are extremely critical of Benjamin Netanyahu, but that's the reason they poured all these millions into that race. He was able to overcome that. That is somewhat encouraging.

So I want to put that on there. And then the last note with regards to the revolt among young people. In a number of these special elections where the result really turned on, you know, access to abortion and outrage over the overturning of Roe versus Wade, it was a surge in young people, an unexpected surge in young people in those special elections that helped Democrats secure those victories. If you are dismissing the concerns of these young people,

if you are thinking they're just gonna get over what they see and what I see as a genocide, you have another thing coming. Shifting your rhetoric is not gonna be enough. They see right through it. And that was, I think, very clear in the results last night, especially in the state of Minnesota. Yeah, Dave Minray is fascinating because nobody could really understand why AIPAC was spending millions of dollars against this guy who's not even that critical of Israel. The only thing

people could land on is his campaign concluded that they're just trying to soften him up for the general election against the Republican in a swing district, which suggests that AIPAC is moving very much like the NRA did. The NRA was a bipartisan organization for decades. And then as there became some criticism within the Democratic Party, the NRA decided we're not going to be bipartisan anymore. We're just going to be a Republican organization. And it doesn't matter if a Democrat says they support us. We just feel safer over here with Republicans. We saw how that worked out for the NRA. But when it comes to AIPAC yesterday, we're going to talk about this later in the show. Benny Gantz is here in Washington, D.C.

Mike Johnson declined to meet with him. Yeah, that was fascinating. Careful with this alliance with the MAGA wing of the party here, Israel. I'm not exactly sure this is so well thought out. I'm excited to hear your guys' segment on that, because I saw some of your analysis, Ryan, and I thought it was really astute. I think on the AIPAC side, it's just like the Joker quote, like it's about sending a message. And I think that's, they've got unlimited amounts

of money now at this point. I mean, they're more cash flush, I think, than they've ever been, probably at the peak of their spending powers. And, you know, in certain ways, like their entire organization was dedicated and exists specifically for a moment like this, where even if public opinion is turning, that they can flex their weight, you know, in such a way that they can try and enforce what they want. So, you know, in a certain way, like they're really fulfilling their mandate, I think. Yeah, you know, they certainly are. So again, on Thursday, we'll be here, the four of us. I don't know if all four of us are starting at 830. We'll figure it out. Be here at 830 while we preview the State of the Union. And then at 10 o'clock, there will be for premium subscribers, kind of Q&A analysis.

And we'll do that as long as Sagar can stay awake. Yeah, I'll try. I'm going to try my best. All right. Thank you guys for having us. Thank you for having us. We appreciate you. Yeah, thanks, y'all.

Have fun. You can take your tie off, Sagar. Take it easy. Seismic news coming out of Ukraine. Victoria Nuland, who has overseen effectively America's strategy in Ukraine and with regards to Russia for more than 10 years, you would argue, is stepping down, signaling, we can put this element up, signaling a likely strategic shift coming forward. If we could put up this second element here, this is a post on Twitter that was going around. I think it's not terribly unfair. The guy wrote, big news, likely signaling a major policy shift. Newland has run point on our Russia-Europe policy

ever since we helped engineer the Maidan coup d'etat. The results after 10 years are in. Ukraine is destroyed and has permanently lost Crimea and its main industrial region. Europe de-industrializing. Russia permanently alienated and tighter than ever with China, India, and Iran. Much of the world refused to isolate Russia and suffered no consequences. Institutions central to U.S. dollar hegemony no longer viewed as neutral. Nord Stream, we're going to talk about this later when we talk, when we get to the Houthis and the cables, the fiber optic cables. Nord Stream broke the seal on sabotaging international infrastructure. Russian military capabilities significantly increased, not decreased. Countries like Iran, North Korea, et cetera, have seen that short of

total war, NATO conventional capabilities are quite limited. He writes still, Nuland is one of those undead creatures in Washington who has only ever failed upward, so her resignation probably indicates her usefulness has finally run out. You know, this is one of those posts where you look and you're like, no lies detected. Basically, and you know, Ryan, this, I don't know if this was a Freudian slip, but I thought it was really funny when you opened this block. You said big news out of Ukraine, when technically it really is big news out of Ukraine, though she is a U.S. diplomat. There's a quote here from Secretary of State Tony Blinken who said, it's Toria's leadership on Ukraine that diplomats and students of foreign policy will study for years to come. This is what he said in a written statement.

No lies detected there either. Her efforts have been indispensable to confronting Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, marshalling a global coalition to ensure his strategic failure. And that's where the lies are sort of starting to be detected. But it's absolutely true that she will be studied for years to come. And I would also just add to this, Ryan, I think Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden himself, remember, who was point man on Ukraine for the Obama administration, and obviously had different family ties through Hunter to the Ukrainian economy, although I'll set that aside for the moment because I don't even think it matters entirely in this context, because I

think Joe Biden would be utterly committed to Ukraine and to Zelensky and to their sort of goal to remain as a bulwark against Putinism as they see it, no matter what. And there is the reading of this as a seismic shift that I genuinely wonder about because, for example, Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden, and Tony Blinken are still running policy. And it's rare that a diplomat can become so influential that she becomes kind of like a figure and a power center in her own right. And Nuland did that with regard to Ukraine, Europe, and Russia. Brett McGurk is getting there when it comes to kind of Mideast policy. We'll see if he survives this particular moment. Don Lew, a State Department official in South Asia,

if he has another five, ten years as he's been doing there ineffectively, but effectively for, you know, American imperial interests, you know, he could rise to the level of a Nuland, but she is kind of in a league of her own. And in something that does not bode necessarily well for Ukrainians who are hoping that, you know, American policy is going to stay the course, put up this next element here. This is from the Associated Press. It says, Nuland will be replaced temporarily as undersecretary by another career diplomat, John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan who oversaw the U.S. withdrawal from the country. Everything's fine. Yeah, right. Yes. Good hands. Right. It's like you work at a

major corporation and they introduce these new consultants who are going to help us right size the place. And they're going to be meeting with each of you for 15 minutes. And it's going to it's just going to pop up on your calendar. And don't worry about it. Don't worry. It's going to be fine. Big. Yeah. The huge vibes with that comparison here. I actually want to skip ahead to our last element. This is C5 because I think this is from the All In podcast. It's David Sachs talking about Victoria Nuland. And I think this is super relevant and well put. He actually, you're going to hear him compare Nuland to being what Fauci was to COVID to Ukraine. And his co-hosts are sort of laughing and enjoying this. It is amusing,

but I think it's amusing because it's a really good way to look at it. Let's roll C5 here. Newland is the Fauci of this situation, okay? The same way that Fauci was supposed to be protecting us from viruses and then funded gain-of-function research. Now we got a label. You just got labeled COVID-19 misinformation. Victoria Newland was supposed to be our chief diplomat with respect to Russia and Eastern Europe. And what did she do instead?

She ginned up this conflict. Ginned up. We backed an insurrection in Ukraine in 2014. Jason, if you didn't like the insurrection of January 6th, let me tell you, you aren't going to like the insurrection that she staged in Ukraine because they brought in these Ukrainian far-right nationalists as the muscle. She was the State Department official who was responsible for backing this insurrection of a democratically elected leader in Ukraine in

2014 named Yanukovych, okay? And you know what? It's really actually pretty hard in America to talk about the Maidan uprising accurately and honestly without sounding like a lunatic. Yes, yeah. And so, for instance, and so we're gonna play a documentary that gets into Nuland's role and the role of John McCain and Chris Murphy in this as well.

She showed up and started handing out like gets into Newland's role and the role of John McCain and Chris Murphy in this as well. She showed up and started handing out basically baked goods symbolically in a gesture that was covered a lot by Western media in the Maidan Square to show. CIA brownies. Yeah, show U.S. support for this operation. And why I say it's very hard to talk about it honestly without sounding like a total crank is because uh there there was a massacre in in the maidan square that led to the far right uh basically taking over there were then allegations that it was a false flag that the that it was actually the far right themselves uh that that opened fire on made on protesters in order to instigate uh this entire thing. There was then a huge internal investigation done by the subsequent Ukrainian governments, and that investigation has never been published. It's completed,

and we just don't have it. Very serious, credible people who have looked very closely at this do not dismiss that out of hand. And the far, far right figures, the most far right figures who were involved in that uprising hijacked the entire thing. And, you know, with direct kind of neo-Nazi connections went right into the government that Victoria Nuland helped to facilitate. So let's roll a little bit of the history of that moment. this by the way is from Oliver Stone's documentary which I really recommend like I said, everything's Oliver Stone's a crank but this is based on like Actual history like these things really happened. You can hate Oliver Stone. You can think he's a crank

But this is what happened. It's called the Ukraine on fire. It was released in 2016 And so here he's actually talking to Viktor Yanukovych, who David Sachs obviously just mentioned. That was intercepted. It was a call between the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffrey Pyatt. Questions of credibility are being raised after a private chat between two top U.S. diplomats was leaked online. I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience. He's the guy, you know, what he needs is Cleach and Tony Book on the outside.

I just think Cleach going in, he's going to be at that level working for Yatsenyuk. It's just not going to work. Yeah, no, I think that's right. Okay. Good. Would you want us to try to set up a call with him as the next step? Sullivan's come back to me, VFR, saying you need Biden, and I said probably tomorrow for an attaboy and to get the deets to stick. So Biden's willing. So you had this remarkable phone call where you have these two senior officials of the U.S. government apparently talking about a coup or how they were planning to restructure the government of Ukraine. So just a heads up, that was not the clip

where he was with Yanukovych. Sorry, that was my bad. But he does extensive interviews with Yanukovych in this documentary. Right. And just to be transparent, Yanukovych is a Russian leaning guy. So, but that's what's interesting is he seemed like he was trying to make overtures to the EU. And people remember the lobbying scheme that Paul Manafort got caught up in when he was at Mercury Public Affairs, a huge, powerful lobbying firm. And the Podesta group, Tony Podesta, ended up having to retroactively file as a registered lobbyist on behalf of Ukraine because he was representing, and again, you sound like a crank when you talk about this, but it's true, the Party of Regions, Yanukovych's party. They set up a shell think tank called the European

Center for a Modern Ukraine in order to avoid registering on behalf of Farah. Now, eventually, through really great reporting by Ken Vogel and others, it came to be completely apparent that this was a shell think tank representing a political party in Ukraine. And they were trying basically to help Yanukovych get closer to the West. They were talking extensively to Hillary Clinton's State Department. You can see that in their retroactive filings. So this was all super tangled with Western interests. It's the same thing when you go down the Burisma rabbit hole and you realize how connected to sort of political power Burisma was and then Hunter Biden was and then Joe Biden was just sort of by association. Western interests in Ukraine have been pushing in, making money off of Ukrainian

politics in really disgusting ways. And I think one of the things, and Ryan, I'm curious, because you probably remember this, covering this when it happened with Maidan and when the Newland phone call came out, people were shocked, although they shouldn't have been, by her tone of voice, where she was just looking at Ukraine and Donbass like a chessboard. Right, right. And because our media sucks, like the thing that made a ton of news out of that call, which presumably was intercepted by Russia, by the way, and then leaked, was when she said, F the EU. It's like, who do we want to go to EOC, EU? And she's like, F the EU. And because she said it like that and said that, that became the big piece of news out of it. And the German chancellor said,

you know, how dare she say that? Like, you know, the EU, like, actually, like, legitimately, like, how dare she say that? Like, the EU has much more, ought to have much more say over what's going on with regard to Ukraine than the United States would. Setting aside the idea that either of them should be dictating kind of who runs Ukraine. But I think that the Biden, the Hunter Biden, the Burisma, the lobbying, the Manafort stuff, like I think that's all like interesting, but I also think it's peripheral. Because like when you have these kind of global power struggles, you've got on the one hand, the kind of foundational chess playing between, you know, major powers that are driven by geopolitics between kind of the EU, the United States and Russia, you've got those main forces. Then you've got parasites that just

kind of feed off of the host that is this thing. You've got people like Manafort, just none of them care. Hunter Biden, they don't care. They're just like, oh, there's a clash of interests here. Anytime there's a clash of interests, there's gonna be money that's moving around and we're gonna try to make some of that money. And so you can think whatever you wanna think

about the peripheral stuff and go ahead and lock all the people up as far as I'm concerned, but the actual power play, the actual geopolitics underway are what they appear to be. Like Victoria Nuland did come up with the structure of the new Ukrainian government.

Like she kicked around the names, this is who we should put in. This is who should be on the outside. And that is in fact what ended up happening. Like that, that that's, that's what happened. The guy that you're talking about, Ole Tianybuk, is a, is basically a neo-Nazi. Like McCain met with him. Yes. Yes. Newland is propping him up there. Yes. And then they're calling everyone a Nazi here, by the way. Like I said, we sound crazy, but like, no, no, like just, just Google this. Just Google this guy. Like it's a, it's a hard right neo-Nazi party that we kind of pushed

into power. And then Russia responded immediately by that, that little quiet little green men thing where they, they sent in all these folks into Crimea and they just popped up and they're like Crimea is ours now. And the new far right government was hyper, hyper nationalist and the eastern Ukraine was supportive, was more Yanukovych country and more Russian speaking, this new far-right government came in and effectively banned speaking Russian in public and a war breaks out in the Donbass, in the Eastern Ukraine region.

And 10 years later, here we are. So we go back to that guy's original point. Even if you take her at her own goals, like her goal, you can agree or disagree with it. You can think it's cynical. You can think it's evil. You can think it's, you know, imperialism. It didn't, it also didn't work. Nope. Like she lost, she's losing. That's why I loved the Fauci comparison because it's like him saying our goal is to enhance the pathogens to protect us enhance the pathogens, to protect us from the pathogens.

Stop pandemics. Yeah, exactly. So his goal was public health. Her goal was peace. And by those very standards, absolutely nothing. He certainly didn't stop the pandemic. That's the funny thing. Even if you believe that

it did not come out of the lab in Wuhan, the lab in Wuhan's goal was to detect a pandemic before it goes global. Well done. And either way, it started either in the lab or within a couple miles of the lab, and they didn't stop it. Just great work all around everyone. Good work all around. Yanukovych did end up fleeing to take shelter in Russia after a scuttled EU deal, basically. And a lot of people thought that when Putin came back to Kiev, he was going to try

to put Yanukovych or somebody like him back on top of a puppet government. And then again, it's this argument about Victoria Nuland, by her own standards, and so often with US policy, still treating everything like it's the Cold War, but even during the Cold War, you end up pushing people who may have been amenable to making deals with the EU further into the hands of Putin, which was not your goal, but counterintuitively to you, but intuitively to everyone else, is like very obviously going to be the outcome sometimes. I do have one question before we wrap to you, Ryan. We also got to talk about her husband before we wrap, but go ahead. Yes. My question was going to be, actually, this is perfect. My question was going to be,

the CIA report in New York Times comes out last week about the sort of deep, longstanding CIA operations in Ukraine, which we knew about from other reporting. But I think it was very clearly a coordinated leak by people in the intelligence community to get the New York Times to report that, you know, the American intelligence community had been trying to steer the Ukrainian intelligence in the right direction over all these years, but Ukrainian intelligence just kept going rogue and doing their own thing. It sort of felt like a cover your ass leak. And then the next week, Victoria Nuland is gone. I'm not tying those together in any conspiratorial way. I'm just genuinely curious what you think, Ryan, if Victoria Nuland is leaving because she lost clout, because her argument started to look

more obviously like it had failed. But then at the same time, that brings us back to Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken and Joe Biden themselves. I mean, I would assume that she stepped aside in protest of her own, you know, policy objectives, not, not, uh, no longer carrying the day. Like I would guess that she's, whatever she was arguing for, um, is, is no longer the thing that's going to happen. This is not the, this is not the type of, uh, person who's, who's will to power just has them stepping away at any key moments. Right, that's true. So that's my suspicion. And that's why universally people who watch this

are saying this is likely to signal a significant strategic shift regarding American policy in Ukraine. Now, let's talk about the husband. Yeah, her husband, Robert Kaplan. That's a Real Housewives quote, by the way. You should know, let's talk about the husband. Yeah, her husband, Robert Kaplan. That's a Real Housewives quote, by the way. You should know. Should we talk about the husband?

It's the nine-year anniversary of the Amsterdam dinner for the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, by the way. We didn't even celebrate it. We should talk about the husband. Let's talk about the husband. Real Housewives of Foggy Bottom. So Robert Kaplan is one of the leading kind of neocons, and she too has been in the neocon circle. So if this was like one of these marriages where the people have divergent politics, then who cares who she's married to?

But her politics and Robert Kaplan's politics pretty clearly overlap. Now, we don't have as much public writing, you know, from Nuland because she's been an internal operator basically her entire career. But we do have it from Robert Kaplan, who was, you know, co-founder basically of the neoconservative movement in the 1990s that orchestrated the invasion of Iraq and the rest of that disastrous kind of American, you know, aggressively imperial policy, rather than the kind of Newland attempts to do imperialism, which is color revolutions and manipulating behind the scenes, but both towards the same end, spreading democracy. Working great.

Yeah, it's just synergy all just across the board. I actually like the real house as a foggy bottom reference because it's basically how this is operating. Not, I don't mean that in like a sexist way because obviously Victoria Nuland is not a housewife and that's sort of the joke about the housewives themselves. No, she's the brains of that family. I mean, but it's, it's just how DC works. That's the swamp for you in a nutshell. All right, let's move on to the huge news out of Arizona. Kirsten Sinema shocked the political world yesterday by announcing she was stepping down. She was retiring.

I think we have some video that we can roll of Kirsten Sinema queued up. She gave what sounded sort of conspicuously like a no-labels thing, but she's also said that she is not interested in the no-labels ticket. Just listen to what Kyrsten Sinema said in this video. The only political victories that matter these days are symbolic. Attacking your opponents on cable news or social media. Comprom compromise is a dirty word. We've arrived at that crossroad and we chose anger and division. I believe in my approach, but it's not what America wants right now. I love Arizona and I am so proud of what we've delivered. Because I choose civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done, I will leave the Senate at the end of this year. So she didn't want to run against Carrie Lake, right?

Yeah. And so polls have her under 10% in the election. Ruben Gallego said that he would challenge her if she didn't support Biden's kind of domestic policy agenda. She thwarted Biden's domestic policy agenda. So Gallego did jump into the race. Gallego is a couple points behind Lake and polls, I think, in general. But with Sinema gobbling up single digits, but non-trivial single digits, that was making it a tough race for him. Probably not a ton of Kerry Lake and Kyrsten Sinema crossover voters. No, no. But a lot of Sinema and Gallego crossover voters. She was an independent technically, but ran as a Dem last time.

Right, exactly. But I think that this makes Gallego, you know, if we were doing the counterpoints needle and said lean Dem at this point in the Arizona Senate race as a result of her dropping out of this. You know, the thing that might have been kind of peak Kyrsten Sinema came during the $15 minimum wage vote. And if we can play this here, I think what drove people nuts is that here she is coming out on the Senate floor in her just Gen X costume and giving the thumbs down like this, like kind of enthusiastic thumbs down to a $15 an hour minimum wage. I asked somebody on Twitter when that happened to come up with a nice edit of it with the Four Non-Blondes What's Up song. It's so good. We're not going to play it here because we don't want this video to get taken down because they want to hide the truth from you.

That was a Four Non-blondes moment right there it's just so incredible to see you know these these are the leading lights of of my generation it's the two sides of the gen x coin right like you either end up being ryan grimmer kirsten cinema yeah so she started out like me basically yes like a fringe anti-war protest. Wiccan. Yeah. She was working with Code Pink. She protested the 2004 convention, whichever convention was down in Miami.

She was out there in the streets protesting it. She was elected as basically a progressive in the Arizona legislature. And then she was just on grease skids from left to right. She was elected to the House, still somewhat normie dem. She wins in 2018 in the Senate, fairly standard Democratic line at that point, but very quickly became kind of the biggest thorn in the left side. If she wanted, she could have held that seat, you know, indefinitely. It was hers. It'll be interesting to see where her corporate payout comes from. I think speeches will be lucrative for her. Like she can show up at associations and get 20, 30 grand a pop

just to like, maybe even more than that, you know, to speak to like the dental association so that they can like say like, oh, look, we've got Kirsten, Kirsten cinema here. She could do some consulting, I think on for some corporations, um, just so that like, she could be like a rainmaker, somebody who like meets with clients and helps bring them on. She's very charming personally. She loves to like, you know, have nice dinners, drink nice wine. She interned at a private equity owned vineyard winery

while she was a Senator. She likes the good life, good for her. And so she can get that financed, I think. And rainmaking is almost more important than kind of doing the strategy, like bringing in those big clients. So she could get that financed, I think. And rainmaking is almost more important than kind of doing the strategy, like bringing in those big clients. So she can do that. She's not going to be able to lobby a lot of Democrats, that's for sure. They're not going to want to take her calls.

But she can call a lot of these Republicans. I think they really like her personally. Yeah, and it's not like Republican voters like her personally, but powerful Republicans do. She's got their cell numbers. She knows what's going on. And I should say her committee assignments in terms of where that payout might come from, she was on Homeland Security, she was on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, she was on Appropriations. There's plenty of money to be made for Kyrsten Sinema now. I do think that it's interesting. No Labels said they're going to decide within the week

after Super Tuesday. There are tons of leaks coming out of No Labels said they're going to decide within the week after Super Tuesday. There are tons of leaks coming out of No Labels and places like Politico that it's an absolute disaster behind the scenes. Of course. Big donors feel like No Labels missed their moment, that they should have had someone jump in. They should have begged a Joe Manchin or a Kyrsten Sinema to jump into the race. Or a Larry Hogan. They did beg them. But they should have done it successfully and gotten them to jump into the race or a Larry Hogan, but they should have done it successfully and gotten them to jump into

the race. Manchin obviously said he didn't want to be a spoiler, but Kyrsten Sinema is an independent. She actually left the Democratic Party. She came out and gave this address about how compromise is a dirty word. That is one of the great misleading lines of no labels that, you know, if we just compromised more, which is a total code for if we just grifted more, if we just got those centrist members from wealthy districts to agree to spend more money for their friends, then everything would work out. It's like, that is absolutely true. We could pass tons of legislation if we got these populists out of Washington, whether they're on the left or the right. I remember when we had, not too long ago, Sam Godaldig and his colleague on the show to

talk about how actually the wealthiest districts on the House side tend to be the most centrist districts and the poorest districts tend to be the populist districts. And that's what the no labels conversation is really about. They think, of course, it all trickles down and helps the poor when you spend money, which is the argument they've been making for Ukraine, that we're just, we're rebuilding America's industrial belt because of this Ukraine spending, which is also not even true. Yeah, I think Mike Williams and Sam Godaldi, when they came on and talked about that report, if I remember correctly, and you guys watch that, so you might remember, the richest caucus in the country is the No Labels Caucus, which the No Labels sponsored the Problem Solvers Caucus. And so the No Labels theory has been tried, like Sinema tried it.

Like she very closely hewed to the demands of the private equity industry and the way that they think the Congress ought to legislate. And she wound up at like 8%. Yeah. And that's actually doing better than she ought to have because the private equity world is less than 8%. Yeah. Just while we're talking about Kirsten said I need to make an important correction. She was not herself a Wiccan. This is reading from a friend of the show, Philip Wegman, who wrote this article back in October 2018.

He broke a story, and I just got to read the prose here. Rep Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, is not a witch, but she has been known to hang out with witches. It was during the height of the Iraq War when Sinema, then a far left— It was the 90s, man. Everybody was wicked. Everyone was dabbling. Then a far left protest organizer summoned supernatural help to help stop the Iraq War. Emails obtained from the Washington Examiner show cinema inviting a prominent coven of feminist witches in Arizona called Pagan Cluster to celebrate International Women's Day and protest the war in March of 2003. The arc of Kirsten's cinema is truly... She basically lived my life in March of 2003. The arc of Kyrsten Sinema is truly-

She basically lived my life in the 90s. I was gonna say, it's a fascinating arc, but I also feel like you go in one of two directions, right? Like you either think that, and that's what drives me crazy about no labels is they spend so much money trying to convince normal Americans that what's super edgy is their idea of like compromise.

And it's bullshit. It's just a code word for corporatism. Um, there's nothing edgy about it. It's, it's not like the, like even the, the category, no labels, even the name, no labels. They're trying to make it sound hip and cool. Uh, even though it's basically like the dad tennis shoes of politics. Sorry, that was racist. My pet theory on Sinema, and I'd love to, maybe we can get her on after she's no longer a senator and just put this to her because I'm curious. I used to talk to her a decent amount when she was in the House of Representatives

before she made her right-wing turn. And so my pet theory is that the, the far left that she was a, that she was a significant like daily part of back in the nineties, two thousands, I can testify can be a pretty toxic and unpleasant place. And I wonder if she mistook that the top, the individual toxicity that you have to put up with in the service of the agenda, the mission, the common good for what the left represents, because she has a visceral kind of personal hatred for the left that really can't, as far as I believe, be explained any other way. She talks about, you know, that all we want to do is like, you know, go after, you know, each other's

opponents. Like, you know, nobody goes after anybody harder do is like, you know, go after, you know, each other's opponents. Like, you know, nobody goes after anybody harder than Sinema goes after the left. Yeah. And it's got to be something there. Maybe she'll tell us. Well, I'll put on my calendar a year from now. We'll have her on. We'll have her on and we'll just put her on the couch and, you know, figure out like what happened. I think it's deeply personal. As the four non-blondes would ask. Exactly. But I think to Kyrsten Sinema and Tulsi Gabbard, there's something, people like that. There's something that is very personal because there's this feeling, and I'm sure actually a lot of our viewers feel it, that the party, the Democratic Party that you were used to supporting,

it feels like if you look at certain issues, went crazy. And if you don't like the squad and you're still like an anti-corporate, anti-establishment Democrat, you're going to be like, well, what the hell am I going to do? And then Kirsten suddenly gets some money thrown at her. She's an independent. So again, I think it's both sides of the Gen X coin represented. And for people curious about what I'm talking about, if you've ever done, let's say, organizing with the Green Party, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, then you don't. He almost sold t-shirts at Woodstock 99. Fun Ryan Grimm fact. I did sell Nader t-shirts at Madison Square Garden when he was running for office.

All right, let's move on to the Middle East. Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel yesterday. Ryan, do you want to tee up basically some of the developments that just happened in the last 24 hours? Yeah, we can put this first VO up. This is a pretty significant launching of missiles from Hezbollah into Israel. This is an escalation. You can see the Iron Dome there intercepting most of these missiles. And from what we understand, the Iron Dome either successfully intercepted every launch or they fell harmlessly elsewhere. Like, we don't have word of any Israeli casualties.

Put this next element, Israel says it's preparing how it's going to respond. It's going through military options. There has been the talk of opening up a second front between Israel and Lebanon up in the north has been as much a topic of conversation in the Israeli media practically as the war down in the south that Israel is waging against Gaza with the, you know, it's hard, you know, basically in Israel in the government now you've got the far right and the right. And so you have a strong faction that is basically making the case, just do it all now. Like it's time to seize, you know, fully seize the Golan Heights and lock that down like that. You're Syria, forget about it. You're never touching this again. And to go back into Lebanon

and seize territory there in a buffer zone between them and Hezbollah. One of the problems domestically that the Israeli population has been facing has been shortage of housing, basically. Housing prices over the years. And that partly explains all of the West Bank settlements. It's like, if you got NIMBY over here, well, we got, how about Yes in somebody else's backyard? So you go in and you build all these settlements and you subsidize settlers to live there

and then commute just a half an hour to Tel Aviv or whatever. Just free roads that go right through, whereas if you're Palestinian, you can't drive on those roads. It takes you six hours to get anywhere. Now you can't go anywhere at all. Since October 7th, a lot of Israelis in the north and south have kind of pushed back into the middle of the country, staying with friends and otherwise getting apartments or houses and further driving up the housing crunch there. And so one of the missions of the Israeli government is to push north and south

so that people can return to their homes there. Because if they don't, they've got this extraordinarily difficult pressure cooker to push north and south so that people can return to their homes there. Because if they don't, they've got this extraordinarily difficult pressure cooker situation going on. Problem, of course, as it has always been for the Israeli project, is that there are already people there. And so working that out means either expelling those people or killing them. And to start a second front, a sort of serious second front, let's say in retaliation for this,

when they're already at such a low point in global opinion and the war not going great and this Rafah incursion expected at any point is a moment of like top, you know, heightened risk. Because at the same time, and then I'll shut up, in the West Bank, you've got, you know, complete economic meltdown from Israel withholding payments that, you know, keeping Palestinians money from the Palestinians and banning Palestinians from going from the West Bank to their jobs elsewhere in Israel. So that's a pressure cooker. So it's at the same time that you have net outward migration from Israel and a collapsing economy. And I actually don't want

you to shut up, Brian, because I want to get your take on the fiber optic cables. We can put this next element up on the screen from Forbes. Four fiber optic cables damaged in Red Sea, here's what we know. That's the way Forbes put it. But I'm actually more curious, Ryan, about what you know. Right. So the Houthis have been saying that not only are they going to stop shipping through the Red Sea that is headed to an Israeli port or a ship is associated with either Israel or the coalition that is arming Israel. So they're doing that, but they also have threatened global infrastructure, such as targeting these fiber optic cables. We talked earlier in the program about the blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, kind of breaking the seal on the idea

that countries as part of their geopolitics are gonna go around and destroy massive pieces of civilian infrastructure that connect countries together. So the Red Sea blockade is driving up, is driving the Israeli economy into the ground, like massively. It's hurting the European economy significantly. It's driving up prices somewhat here. Like it is a contributor to inflation, but not as much as it, you know, will be if it continues on. But this is, yes,

another escalation here, all for just the continuation of a war that the entire world just wants to see Israel stop. And you teased this earlier in the show, but the next element here is a report from Pablo Menriquez, who says, source familiar with the speaker's priorities. So speaker Mike Johnson, we can confirm continues to be a real person. His priorities this week tells, told Mike Johnson that he is too busy to meet with Benny Gantz. Now, Benny Gantz is Israel's minister of defense. That is very interesting. Right, he met with some members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He's here in the United States ginning up support for Israel's war effort. There is a famous quote, I forget which Israeli prime minister said it,

but I think it was about George W. Bush. He was like, look, I wanted to get Bush on the phone. They told me, he's giving a speech in Philadelphia. He's like, I don't care what the president's doing. I want to talk to him now. They went on stage, pulled the president of the United States off the stage and put him on the phone with the Israeli prime minister. And his point was, that is the access that we have to American corridors of power at the very top. Now, Benny Gantz, at the height of this war, can't get a meeting with the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Pretty interesting. A longtime supporter of Israel, too.

Right. And this is after the APAC has made this strategic decision to wage war with significant elements of the Democratic coalition. Go after Dave Min in California, even though he's not even that critical of Israel, just because it seems like they prefer a Republican. If you have a Democrat and a Republican, and both of them are supportive of Israel, AIPAC used to stay out of that. Now in this Dave Min race, that's breaking a new seal of being a kind of almost hyper-partisan organization, even as they continue to support Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Steny Hoyer, you know, Democratic, they still have tight relationships with Democratic leadership. They're really putting all their eggs in the GOP basket, while the GOP is putting its eggs in the MAGA basket. And the MAGA and AIPAC might not be the most long-lasting relationship for, I think,

pretty obvious reasons. And, you know, I know shutdown coverage gets repetitive because it is, and it feels like we're all just in a holding pattern, but the government is set to shut down on Saturday if the House of Representatives doesn't pass spending bills. So Mike Johnson genuinely may have been, it's possible, too busy to meet with Benny Gantz, although Ryan, in your book, shows us about Democrats, but even with Republicans, of course with Republicans, basically you clear your schedule if you need to talk with the Israeli Minister of Defense. But Mike Johnson is hurtling towards a shutdown, and part of that is because there's disagreement

on Ukraine funding, which Democrats and centrist Republicans have insisted on tying to Israel funding. And so Johnson is now the bill, the sort of two-tiered minibus. You know, the Republicans said we're not going to govern by omnibus anymore. They've continued to govern by omnibus. So now Mike Johnson's plan was to try to not trick the Freedom Caucus but appease the Freedom Caucus by saying we're gonna do two tiers, so two minibuses. They released the text of those. The Freedom Caucus is wildly unhappy with it.

Ukraine and Israel funding is on the table because the government is hurtling towards potential shutdown if there isn't a deal agreed to. Freedom Caucus doesn't have a lot of incentive because they represent districts that don't care if the government shuts down. And normally that's okay, but Mike Johnson has such a thin margin that not only could the government shut down, but then he could be vacated from his chair. So he may genuinely not have a lot of time to meet with Benny Gantz, but you know why Benny Gantz wanted to meet with him. And that's because the Ukraine and Israel funding has been tied together. And that in and of itself is tied to this shutdown conversation. And I'm curious where you think some of this skepticism of Israel is coming from, from the MAGA side. Is it the isolationism? Is it some of the, you know, there's some genuine anti-Semitism out there among some in the base. Or is it something else? What's going on here? Normally the Republican House Speaker is going to take any call, take any meeting from an Israeli official who's here in the United States.

To not do that is seismic. What's your read? There's a lot of opposition to Israel among young Democrats, obviously, as we've covered many times on the show. I mean, you can't really overstate that. But Israel still polls relatively well in the whole country. Now, polling is different. It depends on what questions you're asking. It depends on how you're asking the questions. But Republican voters in general are supportive of Israel. That said, I've seen cracks in that foundation, as I'm sure many people have. And you especially hear that from sort of the hardcore MAGA wing. And usually when you see that rhetoric, at least in my experience, it's been tied to domestic affairs. So basically the line that

we have so many problems here. We have so many people struggling to get by here. And actually, you used to hear that a lot from the left. You heard it from both left and right isolationist wings over the course of American history. It's not a new argument, but it does seem like it's gaining traction, especially now that the Ukraine and Israel funding is tied together. It's just the same thing with Ukraine. We're spending billions of dollars on this war that doesn't directly affect the everyday lives of your average American, everyday life of your average American, as people see it. So it gets harder to sell foreign conflicts when people feel like they're being left behind in

their own country. And a lot of those people are voting Republican now. So I don't think it's huge, but I do think it exists. And I think it's growing. I also saw, I think it was Mike Cernovich that was talking about this. I'm curious at how much traction is on the right for this. I saw some criticism of Israel connected to both its attempted expulsion of a lot of Armenian Christians from the Armenian quarter. They have been there for thousands of years continuously. Not this like, we were here 2,000, 2,500 years ago and then yada, yada, yada, we're back. It's like no, the Armenian quarter

has been the Armenian quarter practically since the beginning of time. And then also that Israel was arming and equipping a basic ethnic cleansing against Armenian Christians from there and you have the sort of Azeris on one side, the Russians on one side, and you feel like a lot of Americans – I think Tucker has talked about this before. Tucker Carlson has talked about this before. interests over, like this weird prioritization of different foreign interests in a way that a lot of Americans, this is the argument, would be upset to if the media covered it and to see what had happened to the Armenian Christians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Yeah, like that's... If people want a background on that, I did a Deconstructed episode on that maybe six months or a year ago. Just Google like De deconstructed Nagorno-Karabakh

and that'll give you the whole background of this really fascinating and disturbing situation that Israel has played a key role in arming and equipping the kind of bad guys in this story. Yeah, the Nagorno-Karabakh thing has gotten, it's gotten. It's starting to get some traction. Yeah traction yeah absolutely and you're starting to hear people talk about it um and i think specifically because of ukraine but the armenian christian quarter in jerusalem uh you combine those two things it could get more and more traction i haven't seen the damn break yet uh but again when people feel like domestically they're getting screwed over and over again that's those arguments get very very powerful powerful. Yeah, and I wouldn't feel too bad for Israeli strategists who blew it on this one,

because their entire kind of thinking was, oh, let's team up with these Christian Zionists, because they seem to believe that they need to support Israel because we're somehow going to bring about a second coming through our own annihilation. Yeah, that'll be a good, like, that'll be a well-thought-out alliance. They had, I forget, who's that crazy guy who spoke at the March for Israel? I don't even know his name, and I'm a white evangelical Christian. He's an abject anti-Semitic lunatic. Yeah. And they hitched their wagon to him. Right. So if that wagon goes off the cliff, they really only have themselves to blame. Yeah. Yes. And I maintain that that's, you know, there are some really big voices in

that space. I don't think a lot of, I don't know, broadly, I don't think it has a ton of clout in the movement anymore. I feel like I heard a lot more about it during the Bush era. Right, it was more the origin, and it's kind of like people are like, oh, really? What's going on? But obviously, a lot of Christians do feel very tied to that land and feel like it's important for America to be involved in protecting it and keeping it safe, and that leads people to support Israel. The other reason that they felt like they had a good alliance there was there was this

Islamophobic overlap between, between it's like, hey, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But if you link up with another religious group, because that religious group is bigoted toward other religious groups, don't be group is bigoted toward other religious groups, don't be shocked when they turn on you next. It's a crazy tangled set of different interests. That does it for us on today's edition of Counterpoints. But don't worry, because we'll be back on the channel tomorrow for the State of the Union. It's tomorrow, goodness. I know, it's tomorrow. This is one of the biggest news weeks of the year. State of the Union is going to, the pre-show is going to start at 8.30. The State of the Union, this is one of the biggest news weeks of the year. The State of the Union is going to, the pre-show is going to start at 8.30.

The State of the Union starts at 9 p.m. We will be back at 10.30, or I'm sorry, at 10 p.m. taking questions from premium subscribers. So now's your chance to become a premium subscriber. You get the full CounterPoint show, totally uncut. You get to see all of the segments as opposed to the few we choose to put up on YouTube. So if you're not a premium subscriber, we certainly would appreciate and hope that we provide enough premium content behind the scenes. I think questions are going to be super fun tomorrow after the State of the Union. All right. Looking forward to it.

We'll see you guys tomorrow. Take it easy. This is an iHeart Podcast.