Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/1/24: Cops Crackdown On Student Protests, Bibi Freaks Over ICC Warrants, Judge Threatens To Arrest Trump, DEA To Reschedule Weed, Dems Save Mike Johnson From Ouster, Decline Of Christianity In America

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss police and pro-Israel supporters cracking down on campuses, Bibi freaks over ICC warrants, judge threatens Trump with arrest over gag order, DEA moves to reschedule marijuana, Dems say they will save Mike Johnson from ouster, and the decline of Christianity in America.   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.

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But enough with that. Let's get to the show. All right, good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. There was a massive crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters on campuses across the country by pro-Israel demonstrators out at UCLA and by pro-Israel proxies, NYPD, over at Columbia University. We're going to unpack all of that. Emily, what else we got today? Oh, we've got mugs. We have mugs. We have mugs. We can actually put this up on the screen. We are now a mug company with a new show. That's, I think, the new mission is to sell mugs. That's actually put this up on the screen. We are now a mug company with a new show. That's, I think, the new mission is to sell mugs. That's what we're here to do.

CounterPoint's mugs, made in the USA, union-decorated microwave and dishwasher, safe, available now. Awfully expensive, but if it makes you feel better, all of the money will be taken by middlemen, and very little will get to us. Well, it'll go to unions and U.S. workers. That's true. So good middlemen. Good. If ever there were middlemen. Well-organized middlemen.

Good for them. We're going to talk about the Trump interview at Time Magazine. He has just an incredible ability to continue to make himself look bad in these interviews, put out positions that are just contrary to what the general public wants. We're going to unpack a bunch of that. Is that an accurate reading? He's also really good at making journalists look bad. So like, well, he's making himself look bad. Yeah, it's just, it's everyone. Also, Joe Biden is moving to reschedule marijuana from schedule one to schedule three. We'll talk about when that's going to happen and what the implications of it are.

Democrats are teaming up with Mike Johnson to make sure that there's no more drama around the speaker's race. They've announced that they will support him if Marjorie Taylor Greene goes forward with her motion to vacate the chair. So it would be tabled in a massive down vote for MTG. Weird development, interesting, kind of uniparty in Congress. Proud uniparty. And then a friend of yours, the author of what, Pagan America? Pagan America, which is what Ryan always says. He's like this pagan America. He's describing my America. Yes, right. It's America. But yeah, it'll be interesting to hear some from the right. And John's got a super interesting new book out that we can talk about. Ryan, some days we say we have a really big show, but we're just kind of saying that for

the hell of it to have something to say. Today we have a big show. We would never lie. But you know, every show is a big show, of course. But this is really a big show because footage continues to roll in like by the minute from these campuses. They were wild overnight. UCLA in particular erupted into violent clashes last night. NYPD cleared out the

Columbia encampment and the barricades. Let's start there. Yeah, so Columbia University, after the university attempted to clear out the encampment there, what protesters called an autonomous group of mostly students and some faculty occupied Hamilton Hall, which was the site of an, we can roll some of this footage here, which is a site of the famous occupation in 1968 by anti-Vietnam War protesters. They renamed it Hind Hall for the six-year-old Hind Riyab, who was the girl that many of you probably remember. She made the desperate, harrowing phone call to rescue workers saying that her entire family had been killed by the IDF, and she was begging them to rescue her before it got dark.

Two rescue workers were sent out to her as the world was kind of captivated by this intense situation. They'd learned only days later that the IDF had actually attacked the car again and attacked the rescue workers and she had died. So the protesters renamed Hamilton Hall, named for Alexander Hamilton, Hind Hall. Last night, he called it Bear Mars, mobile accessibility ramp system or something like that. You just saw this on your screen. In fact, it was that big truck that rolled up to the hall. Siege equipment from a medieval era.

Absolutely. Or from a highly industrial era, where they have an actual... What you saw on your screen, speaking of captivating, was NYPD walking up this sort of, how would you even describe it, like a ramp that's on top of the truck into the window of the building. And the other thing you saw on your screen there was a violent clash outside the hall as the protesters sort of tried to form human barricades to prevent the police from going in and clearing out the encampment that was sort of set up inside of the hall that you mentioned, Ryan, that had been, you know, everyone has seen by now the videos of the chairs being stacked in front of the doors and the students and other protesters formed the human chain. So you had NYPD going into the window several stories up,

and then you had them also trying to clear people from that sort of human chain system at the bottom of the building and that's what was unfolding at Columbia last night. And then so if people were following along on the Guardian's live blog for instance they shut it down for the night they said all right everybody's been arrested and the Columbia University is asking the NYPD to stay on campus effectively through the middle of May so that they can have their graduation. About an hour later, live blogs around the world popped back up because, and we can roll this here, pro-Israel rioters at UCLA began attacking the encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles. We have footage of that here

if we want to roll some of that. So you guys say... Oh, God. You got that man. I'll take it. I'll hit you. Oh, ****. ****. Oh, ****. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. In some of that footage, you may or may not have been able to hear it. The pro-Israel mob was shouting at the one guy outside the barricades there, you're by yourself. Right after they shouted, you're by yourself, several of them grabbed him, dragged him out, and start beating him rather mercilessly.

There also emerged footage of pro-Israel protesters yelling at a woman. They yelled, you stand no chance, old lady. Let's roll that clip. Yeah! You also heard F you, old lady. Yeah. And there's photos actually also, the fireworks there, take note. I mean, people just saw people launching fireworks into the encampment. It was a really dangerous thing to do. There's an image that someone, a photographer for the AFP took of one of the counter-protesters actually throwing a

barricade or looking to throw a barricade in the direction of some people. You can see how completely dangerous this is. Now, you may be wondering who these people are. We're wondering actually the exact same question. The protest group, the anti-Israel protest group on campus says these are, quote, Zionist aggressors, I'm reading from the NBC News live blog here, who are not UCLA students that have been, quote, incessantly, verbally, and physically harassing us, violently trying to storm the camp, and threatening us with weapons. Another update, just this morning, the University of Arizona said late yesterday that they responded to a, quote, unlawful assembly on campus by

deploying a, quote, chemical irritant munitions or chemical irritant munitions. So there are 40— Tear gas, probably. Probably a tear gas or a pepper ball type situation. But there are 40 of these encampments, more than that, spread out around the country. And so this question about UCLA, if you now have, you know, as they describe them as, quote, Zionist aggressors, if you now have counter-protesters starting to come into these demonstrations, you have LAPD, you have NYPD in some of the schools in the bigger cities, this is a recipe for a serious danger right now. That's, I shouldn't say flourishing,

but really it is flourishing, starting to spread, proliferate around campuses. Yeah. And whether they're students or not, Zionist aggressors probably is objectively true. Like they're Zionists. And they're being aggressive. Yeah. They're being aggressive. They might not even take issue with that description. No, I think it's just flatly true. But we don't know who they are. We don't know whether they're students. And this was similar actually to just last week when we were talking to Safia Salfi, a student in the Columbia encampment who joined us live from the broadcast. Even they are having a hard time determining who the sort of pro-Palestine demonstrators are in some cases, whether they're students or when you're in a big city. It's just very easy for members of the community and hangers-on to sow chaos.

Yeah. It's worth talking about the rhetoric that helped lead to this. We can put up this next element, the statement from President Biden that was put out just yesterday morning, echoing some of his other statements. He said, President Biden has stood against repugnant anti-Semitic smears and violent rhetoric his entire life. He condemns the use of the term intifada as he has the other tragic and dangerous hate speech displayed in recent days. President Biden respects the right to free expression, but protests must be peaceful and lawful. Forcibly taking over buildings is not peaceful, it is wrong. And hate speech and hate symbols have no place in America.

Intifada, by the way, is an Arabic term for uprising. And it can mean violent or nonviolent. Right. Just as uprising can be an uprising, in English can be either violent or nonviolent. Somebody pointed out that the Holocaust Museum in its Arabic translation refers to the Warsaw Intifada. It's an uprising. So there's nothing, you know, there's nothing inherently violent about the word Intifada. There's definitely nothing inherently anti-Semitic about it. There are many people who receive that connotation,

you know, when they hear it. But this is... Because it's been used in prior... Right, because the second intifada did include, you know, suicide bombings and serious violence. And that's the one that most people are, you know, familiar with rather than kind of the term itself. But this is not the first time Biden and the White House have condemned these protests in a blanket way as anti-Semitic. And so you can read this to me as a green light, both to the NYP to do what they did at Columbia, and also to the pro-Israel mob at UCLA to do what they did. He has, just like the US in the kind of Israel-Palestine conflict, we claim that we're playing a role as a mediator, but we are 100% on one side of the conflict. Here again, President Biden clearly citing 100% kind of with the pro-Israel protesters. And there has been virtually no violence whatsoever from campus protesters throughout the several weeks of these

encampments. There have been moments where you could say that you've seen some signs that have been anti-Semitic. There have been some old protesters who have wandered nearby with vile anti-Semitic signs. But there haven't been any accusations of any violence. Except they did it to get into the building. They smashed through the window. They smashed their way into the building, no doubt about that. And by the way, that was a, I don't believe that the woman who did that was a student. I believe that this has been reported. It was like a 63-year-old outside organizer who, I mean, maybe that was the strategy, to have someone else smash into,

with a hammer, I think it was, into the building. That was in 68, too. Like you had Tom Hayden, for instance, was a lead organizer of the 1968 occupation. And he proudly called himself an outside agitator. Like they would, you know, these, they would go from campus to campus, you know, helping the students organize. Yeah. And your point about Biden is a really interesting one because it's also Chuck Schumer, who's come out and like condemned what happening as, quote unquote, lawlessness. And again, I mean, it's correct that some of this absolutely is lawlessness. But to the Biden point, it speaks to the sort of political difficulties of Democrats in the United States who are trying desperately not to lose votes in Dearborn because they need Michigan.

And so they put out statements like that one. But meanwhile, like the value of a news program like ours, I think is emphasized by moments like this because NPR, when they were covering this, just clashes erupted. Like no clue what happened one way or the other. New York Times writes, after UCLA declared a pro-Palestinian encampment illegal on Tuesday night, clashes broke out and administrators called in the police for help. The LAPD said that it was responding because of, quote, multiple acts of violence within the large encampment. Those are words and those are sentences, but they convey no information. What's ironic is over at The Intercept a week or so ago, my colleague Jeremy Scahill and I published their internal private style guide, which urged reporters not to use words like slaughter or massacre because they were imprecise. They said, and don't use the word occupied territory.

That's imprecise. Say Gaza. say West Bank. Don't say occupied Gaza. They're charged, right? Yeah, but they don't say they're charged. What they said in the memo is that they're imprecise. Right. They say we aim for precision.

They aim for precision when they're trying to euphemize Israeli violence. When they're talking about the violence from last night, all of a sudden, the goal of precision just completely out the window. Just clashes broke out. Where's the precision? All of a sudden, the hunt for precision becomes a hunt for making the sentences as vague as possible so that people are just like, ah, isn't that a shame? All of these encampments broke out across the country and now there's violence. It must be the pro-Palestinian protesters getting violent. I think that's a really interesting contrast. Let's also roll this thing that we have from

MSNBC. Lawrence O'Donnell was reacting live on MSNBC last night while they were doing a toss-off. Let's roll this MSNBC last night while they were doing a toss-off. Let's roll this, MSNBC last night. What we have seen on the videos so far is actually the most organized and calmest and most professional police intervention we've ever seen on a college campus. You know, that's a weird way to describe what happened last night, Ryan. And I say that as somebody who comes to this from, I think we probably disagree on this. I am sick of, A, being told that it's anti-Semitic to disagree with everything that Israel says. I'm so sick of it.

And at the same time, I'm sick of being told that it's a blanketly pro-Israel thing to question any of these protests and people smashing into a hall. Kids are trying to take finals, stacking up chairs, barricading themselves, forming human chains. And just like I'm sick of it. I think those people actually should be like face consequences. That's what civil disobedience is. So I'm just sick of this like stupid binary. And even then, looking at what was happening in New York last night, juxtaposing it with Lawrence O'Donnell is a hell of a contrast.

Maybe it shows our sliding scale, because I guess if you compare the NYPD's militarized response to what the intense police violence at VCU, for instance, or down at UT Austin, I guess it was less violent. But it also, the kind of just the optics of it, the gigantic siege equipment rolling through the street. Yeah. The riot police, the counterterrorism units being brought in. For students. They didn't wield batons like it was 1968 at the Chicago Convention. Yeah.

Or UT Austin like this week. But it still gives off the appearance of an extraordinarily authoritarian situation. For college students. Who are, yes, they smash the windows, but they're not violent. They're not dangerous to other people. Yeah. And that's why, by the way, it's also extremely unhelpful. And this is where I thought our interview last week with Safia was really helpful because it's very, very important to the point of precision to not just use these sort of blanket smears against the students. I actually wrote a long piece in The Federalist about this a couple days ago because you end up completely misunderstanding what they're doing and misunderstanding what they say they're there to do. Crystal sent a great tweet this morning about how at Brown University handled their protests completely different.

They actually just like held a vote on divestment and dealt with the- They agreed to Schedule 1, yeah. Right, they agreed to Schedule 1, but like actually dealt with the demand that the protesters were making, which was very specifically divestment. That isn't to say they haven't broadened it, but the point of the encampment was to force a vote on divestment. And I get that if you give in to those protests, like you can create a bigger situation. But I think everyone on Columbia's university, Columbia University's campus right now says this has been wildly mismanaged by the school, whether you're on one side or the other. Everyone agrees like Columbia

completely, completely botched this. Yeah. And so Brown will hold a divestment vote in October of next year on whether to continue investing in general and in Israeli companies. Or was it, I don't know, is it specifically connected? Oh, I think it's funds specifically connected to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, as the New York Times reports. University of Chicago has also handled this in a much more kind of reasonable and civil way. They said, look, this encampment is breaking our rules, but we also, as a principle, support free expression. And as long as they're not disrupting people's ability to do their own expression, people's ability to get to class, as long as they're not endangering public safety,

we're going to give some leeway here. We're going to encourage people to express themselves other ways, but we're not going to bring in a militarized response here. UCLA in some ways did the same thing, but it was the kind of pro-israel demonstrators that that escalated things last night But only after you know, not only Biden's comments, but also UCLA itself saying okay This is an illegal encampment that that seems to have given the counter protesters The green light to go ahead and do do what they did. Yeah. No, I mean it's It's been like the University of Chicago response was, I actually think, kind of pitch perfect. And they've been doing pitch perfect responses to these type of things.

They're, like, actually consistent in the free speech space. There's the University of Chicago letter that was, some people may be familiar with, actually, like, a really big deal when it started circulating almost 10 years ago, now pushing back on some of the schools that were giving in to crazy speech demands of the left, actually, and so to see the consistency on this from places like University of Chicago. Nice to see consistency. Heartening. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely is. And the last point I would make is to the protesters, particularly the ones at UCLA and elsewhere, who feel like their strategy of non-violence is no longer effective, that it can't be effective in the face of this violent response. I would say, you know, effective non-violence is always met with violence.

Yeah. But that is part of its virtue. Like that is part of its value. It exposes the cruel face of the system that you're opposing. That is the fundamental premise of civil disobedience, is the civility of it. And that's why those images are so poignant from the American civil rights era of just abject stoicism on the faces of people who are confronting consequences for violating certain laws, but are doing it just stoically. And that's baked into the American narrative about how that changed hearts and minds. People believe so deeply in this, that rather than giving in to the forces of incivility, rather than, you know, joining the people who, as you know, we talked to Safia about this, I've talked to other students at Columbia

about this, the hangers-on who come with, or even some of the students who say things that are legitimately a cause for violence or are not civil, instead of giving into that or returning it with violence, there's so much power, to your point, Ryan, in remaining civil in the face of aggression. Yeah, so I would say stay true to your nonviolent values, not in spite of the violence, but because of and in the face of the violence from counter protesters. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case,

bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for.

If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She was a decorated veteran,

a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't.

I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right?

And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was, my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is. And they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's like really the GOAT. Like he's a legend.

So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me. Just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good. Like, that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that, I'm really happy. Or my family in general.

Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move on to the violence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly addressing the rumors that he kind of got going, that the International Criminal Court may launch charges against him and senior leaders of Israel for war crimes. Let's roll Netanyahu here. The International Criminal Court in The Hague is contemplating issuing arrest warrants

against senior Israeli government and military officials as war criminals. This would be an outrage of historic proportions. International bodies like the ICC arose in the wake of the Holocaust committed against the Jewish people. They were set up to prevent such horrors, to prevent future genocides. Yet now, the international court is trying to put Israel in the dock. It's trying to put us in the dock as we defend ourselves against genocidal terrorists and regimes, Iran of course, that openly works to destroy the one and only Jewish state. Branding Israel's leaders and soldiers as war criminals will pour jet fuel

on the fires of anti-Semitism, those fires that are already raging on the campuses of America and across capitals around the world. It will also be the first time that a democratic country fighting for its life according to the rules of war is itself accused of war crimes. The Israeli army, the IDF, is one of the most moral militaries in the world. It takes endless measures to protect civilians, we've heard that before. So Netanyahu pressured the US to come out publicly and defend Israel against the rumors that Israel appears to have started itself, that the ICC was coming at them, and the White House did. The White House said, we do not believe that the ICC has jurisdiction over Israel. Their argument they're making is that Israel has not signed on to the ICC itself. However, Palestinians have. And when the

ICC launched charges against Vladimir Putin, the U.S. applauded those charges. Russia is not a signatory to the ICC, but Ukraine is. And that is why the ICC has jurisdiction. If you are committing a crime against a member, a signatory of the ICC, then the ICC has jurisdiction whether you're a signatory or not. That was the principle that the White House believed when the ICC charged Putin. All of a sudden, that doesn't apply anymore in this case. Not long after the U.S. gave Netanyahu the assurances that he wanted, Netanyahu came out and said that even if he cuts a hostage deal with Hamas, he is still going to launch an invasion into Rafah. It's very interesting to hear Netanyahu alluding to these sort of international rules that were largely agreed upon in the wake of the Holocaust. And he referenced that directly. And to see the

way that they are used selectively and as blunt force objects. I mean, it is exactly true that we all, we've talked about this many times. We came together after World War II, after the Holocaust, the level of industrial slaughter the world had never seen and said, this is, and that's, you know, includes things like Dresden and nuclear weapons. We came together and said, this is not sustainable for humanity. And these are the new sort of ethical... Ever again. Yeah, right.

And these are the ethical guidelines that we'll look to going forward. And we agree with them when we want to agree with them, when it's a blunt force object that we can use against enemies for the sake of our own foreign policy goals. And then we say, well, those are non-binding, or nobody signed on to that, or whatever. It's just the sanctimony that goes behind the United States and its allies in the West wielding them, not just like the Putin thing is such a good example.

I mean, it was just the level of credibility we assigned to it when we wanted to use it there. I mean, that's as good an example as you can get. Yeah, so much for the rules-based international order. Meanwhile, there's reporting, if we can put up this next element, that the U.S. is contemplating accepting significant numbers of Palestinian refugees who are trying to flee Gaza. And what's fascinating about this news is that, for the most part, we have accepted very few dozens of Palestinian refugees over the years. And when we have, it is refugees who are claiming political asylum from Hamas. And Hamas is a vindictive organization toward its critics, absolutely. And so people who are kind of dissidents and critics of Hamas,

some have been legitimately granted refugee status here in the United States. Not many. Not many, like dozens. Yeah, I pulled the numbers last night. It's actually kind of shocking. Like 60-something or what is it? Last 10 years, U.S. has resettled more than 400,000 refugees from CBS fleeing violence. And in 2023, 56 Palestinian refugees.

So that was 0.09% of 60,000 refugees in that 12-month period. Right. And so in order to boost that number up to the number of people who need actual safe havens at this point, what the U.S. would have to do is grant them asylum basically from themselves. Because they would have to grant them asylum from Israel, from the IDF, from the military campaign. They need Egypt's cooperation. But the legal rationale for accepting this many refugees from Gaza would be that they are persecuted by Israel. And we are supplying the weapons and the political support and the global support for that very persecution, which we are then going to give asylum against.

So we'll be giving them asylum in our country against ourselves, basically. Yeah, we talk about this when we talk about the border. So asylum is actually a much more narrow category than it's often used. And then it's been used in our southern border in particular. So you have to prove that you're being targeted based on your nationality, religion, or your political views. And so you can see pretty easily how that argument can be made. And you can pull a million quotes from Israeli government on this point and talk about what's happened in your community in Gaza when you're applying for asylum. Now, they absolutely could still use Hamas.

And that could be the rationale that a lot of them give. But they could also, you can see, start making an argument in the other direction. And it reminds me, actually, Ryan, of howS. sanctioned that unit of the IDF recently. It's the same sort of strange circular logic. And listen, if people as refugees are coming to the United States and they want to be citizens of the United States, that's great. I think that's awesome. There's public polling out of Palestine that suggests a big chunk of the population there, and polling is tough there. But this is from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in December. 72% of Palestinians

quote, believe that Hamas's decision to launch the October 7th attack was correct. Now, again, we can debate what that means, but it definitely means fundamental disagreement with US foreign policy. And you can understand why people in Palestine would have a very hostile approach towards United States or perspective towards United States foreign policy. So does this sow discord in communities? I don't know that enough people will be accepted that it will sow discord around communities, to be honest. In 56 in 2023, that was one of the most violent recent years on record in Palestine. And so that's what a lot of people on the right are worried about. You know, we're going to import a bunch of people who hate America. I don't know that they're going to be

able to get enough people out that that becomes a problem, to be honest. Yeah. And the Israeli governments, you know, put out a lot of white papers and other, and trial balloons showing that the plan was to depopulate, you know, Gaza going in. And so on the one hand, this plays into the effort to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of Palestinians and then rebuild it as Israelis on, as Jared Kushner said, waterfront property. Maybe they'll use Kushner's quote in their asylum applications. At the same time, the area is going to be uninhabitable for many years. It's the northern Gaza, for instance. So a normal bomb ordinance getting dropped from a plane in a battlefield or fired elsewhere has something like a 10% failure rate.

Israel does not use these weapons normally. You know, they're dropping them in areas where they're going to have a much higher failure rate. And so maybe you're pushing 20% failure rate. And you're talking of, you know, thousands and thousands of bombs being dropped on on Gaza Those are fairly stable unexploded ordnance until they are disrupted by a bulldozer or some type of construction during a rebuilding process the It's impossible to overstate how time-consuming it is to extract these weapons in Northwest Washington DC where they did

Where they did basically chemical weapons testing during World War I, they are still to this day finding unexploded mustard gas ordinances in Washington, D.C., near American University, where that research was carried out more than 100 years later. And so it's just going to be borderline impossible for hundreds of thousands of people to return to their homes anytime soon, which means they're going to have to live somewhere. And just before we wrap, let's put this poll up on the screen. This is reporting in the Jerusalem Post about a new poll published by N12. Over half of the Israeli public believes that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should resign immediately, including 28% of those who voted for the bloc that supports Netanyahu. 48% of Israelis believe Defense Minister Galat should

resign immediately. Wow. I mean, like, if you keep going down the line here, there's 50% believe the IDF chief of staff should resign. 56% believe that the head of Shin Bet should resign right now. I mean, 54% of respondents said that the elections should be held earlier. So that's not just opposition to Netanyahu. That's immediate, urgent opposition to Netanyahu. And obviously, in Israel, there's opposition from both sides. So people who are more hardcore that want Netanyahu to go even harder than he has gone. And then there are people who disagree that he's already gone too far. And then he's been mismanaging the situations and incompetent.

But all that is to say, this is a pretty untenable situation for Netanyahu and his coalition at the moment in Israel. It's been a strategic failure in every sense of the word, up and down, from Netanyahu and his managing of the conflict before and after October 7th. Yeah, and the Israeli public is picking up on that, no doubt about it. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds

of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case,

bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still

somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for.

If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her, until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that

to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop.

It's Black Music Month, and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was, my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me, and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is. And they're starting to be like, yo,

your dad's like really the GOAT. Like he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me. Just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good. Like that's what's really important. And that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that, I'm really happy

or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Donald Trump, just yesterday, he was back in court. And as day nine on the hush money trial, Donald Trump was held in violation of his gag order. Once again, it's the second time that he's actually been sanctioned for violating the gag order. And there's kind of some interesting nuance in this particular ruling because the judge, Juan Merchan, fined Donald Trump, but he said because he was criticizing expected trial witnesses. So that would be Michael Cohen in particular. That's a big one.

Stormy Daniels, that's a big one. He's criticized the makeup of the jury pool. But what Merchan said is that it's specifically related. Like you can talk about the trial, but it's specifically, you cannot keep talking about these expected witnesses. And that's obviously a pretty huge distinction because it addresses the central issue of Donald Trump's argument, which is I have to be able, like this is the middle of a campaign. I have to be able to make my case to the public So you have to let me talk about this trial. I'm running for president United States So Merchant narrowed it and said this is specifically about you know talking about so he said specifically about the the key witnesses here

Not just about the case in general and then Donald Trump sat for an interview with Time that was released yesterday that was just full of incredible quotes. Just a lot happening. When he said he was barred from commenting on the makeup of the jury because it's Trump, I thought he was talking about makeup. Because he would do that. He would do that. Every year he's got opinions on Fashion Week. But no, apparently he's talking about the jury itself.

And you're not supposed to do, you know, that violates the gag order. And so he got a thousand dollar fine for each kind of Truth Social tweet he put up. Yeah. A thousand dollars for nine posts and he was made to delete the post. And the judge said, you know, you could get incarceratory penalties next time. And he removed the posts, by the way. He did. He took them down. Yeah. So he removed seven from Truth Social and two from his campaign website, and he owes $9,000. He could, you know, end up with, as you said, Ryan, the consequences could only increase. But the fact that he actually took down all of the posts, it looks like he's throwing in the towel on this particular complaint. And actually, I think it's kind of a fair decision that you can't be going after the key witnesses. You can

still talk about the trial, though. I guess that gives him a little roadmap to making his case in the public. Just be careful there, Mr. President. I would love to get your take on his time interview, though. Let's highlight a couple of them. I mean, so if you go on Time's website, and we can put this element up on the screen, they do the thing where they give you the amount of time it'll take to read the article. 83 minutes. 83 minutes, an 83-minute read. He had this really, it must have been a two-hour interview, would be my guess, after you account for the editing, for clarity and everything that goes into publishing a transcript. And I love when they just

publish the transcript, the raw transcript. We pulled a couple of highlights from it. He basically, the journalist basically got Trump to touch on everything under the sun. But we can move to this first poll quote because I want to start with the economy. Because, you know, honestly, we're talking a lot about foreign policy on this show and in the discourse in general, for obvious reasons, a lot of American voters are going to be primarily voting on the economy when they go to the polls in November. So this is Trump saying, he's getting asked by the journalist about his 10% tariff on all imports and a 60% tariff on Chinese imports, asked if that's still his plan. And Trump says, quote, it may be more than that. Right. I actually thought that was very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And then he said it may be a

derivative of that derivative that I don't know what he means by derivative there. Nobody knows. And right. And so the reporter presses like really could be more than 10 percent. He's saying, yes, yes, it could be. And then he says it's not actually gonna raise prices. It's just gonna cost China money And it's gonna put a bunch of money in Chinese coffers That's you can see that's nonsense like it's fine to support tariffs Yeah, and I think the tariffs, you know have a real serious role to play when it comes to you know building your Domestic manufacturing base like that's they they're important

But in the immediate term they're gonna cause inflation like they're gonna prices are gonna go up like that's how that's how tariffs operate Well, this created a whole point to this like created huge debate on econ Twitter yesterday about the technical definition of inflation Because a lot of people were saying Donald Trump is campaigning against inflation but also campaigning on a tariff. And then economists were like, actually, this is an important distinction. Inflation is not the same as price increases. And Ryan, you just need to be with precision here. No, but they're right. But it's interesting.

They're true. That's right. From an economic textbook perspective, those are different things. Inflation refers to just when there's kind of more money in the economy. You mean chasing like a smaller number of, you know, or not enough goods. Like that's inflation. But from the perspective of somebody who's going to the store. Yeah, it's the same.

And buying something. Yes. They see the price rising. And people are people don't kind of object to the concept of inflation, but they're okay with price increases. They don't like when things cost more and when their wages are not keeping up with the cost of things going up. That's something. And, you know, in some ways they don't care whether it's greedflation from corporations. Right. Oh, rising prices, whether it's supply shocks from the pandemic and the reopening of the economy and the ports being all cluttered or whether it's fiscal policy, monetary policy.

Like what people don't like is when they go to the grocery store and it used to cost fifty50 for a bag and now it's $80 for a bag or whatever. That's what they don't like. And so Trump is going to learn that the hard way if he doesn't figure out a way to come at this in a way that gets prices down. Yeah. And it's true that, for example, Joe Biden has no control over greedflation. I shouldn't say no control. He doesn't have a lot of control over greedflation. you know in us he sort of but I mean just even like hit policy wise These are private businesses making terrible decisions as private businesses and good decisions for themselves decisions for themselves You know, you gotta have some money for the buybacks, but China figures out a way to get corporations to You know, so it's actually an interesting point. John Kenneth Galbraith

included prices in his understanding of the government's role in the economy. Like we understand that the government and through the Fed plays a role in inflation, plays a role in unemployment and labor and wages. And we always had understood that the government also played a role in prices. In the 70s, we moved away from that. And we said, understood that the government also played a role in prices. In the 70s, we moved away from that. And we said, well, prices, what can you do? Just like the weather. But actually, it is a function of a government and private sector interacting.

And so we could actually come in and mess with prices if we wanted to. And I think we should. But anyway, that's a side point. But it's interesting because, right, the voters are always going to blame, you know, in the same way that Joe Biden is getting a lot of blame for, you know, even I think he deserves some of the blame. He spent a ton of money and that's always behind inflation. But there's also a component of this, even from the right, I agree, that was greedflation. And voters just don't want to hear you scapegoat. They know prices are higher. They don't want you to downplay higher prices and they don't want you to scapegoat, whether it's China or greedy CEOs. I think Donald Trump is probably better at communicating why he, you know, ascribed some of the blame to China in these cases. But he will

learn that lesson. Nonetheless, he had a pretty good economy during his administration until COVID hit. And what's going to happen if you have a 10% tariff, he's going to have to confront people who are upset about that. And we saw it kind of happen with farmers and all of that over the course of the administration. And he maintained some, I think, pretty impressive levels of support from farmers. But in a way, yes, the Biden lesson can also be the Trump lesson that, you know, when people are paying higher prices, they don't want to hear excuses from the president. Even if the president himself is not waving his magic wand or couldn't wave a magic wand and tackle things. One thing also, Brian, my apologies for the control.

I skipped this, but let's put B2 up on the screen, because if I were interviewing Donald Trump right now, this is basically the question that I would want the answer to. You know, if a president doesn't get immunity, this is what Trump tells Time about the Supreme Court case that's pending right now. He said, quote, then Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes. Trump said that if presidents do get immunity, he went on to say basically, that's great, that Joe Biden will not be prosecuted for his many crimes. But, you know, and said that he wouldn't, you know, push for, or implied, basically argued that he wouldn't push for Joe Biden if presidents have immunity to then be responsible for all of these different allegations, alleged crimes that Joe Biden has been involved with. But I think that's really one of the most important questions is what we see

from Donald Trump in the next Trump administration, potentially, if he is elected president. Voters should know exactly how he plans to wield the state, wield the powers of the state against political opponents, because that's what he's campaigning against right now. Yeah. How vindictive do you think he will be if he becomes president? Is he going to throw the Justice Department at a bunch of his enemies? I think it's really hard to say, because he likes being liked. And the last administration was really torn in two different directions from sort of the hardcore right people and then the neoconservative moderates. And he never really figured that out himself, like which balance worked best. He was intentionally having them fight each other over what his policy should be. So I just, I really have a hard time making a prediction on

that. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, I think he probably will. I think he's so angry about what he's going through now that he feels it's unjust and a witch hunt and election interference and persecution that I think he will. I think he'll try. Whether or not the wheels can get rolled through the Justice Department is another question, but I think he'll definitely try. So we'll put B5 up on the screen here because time got him to respond to questions about the war as well in Israel. I want to know, you said you want to get Israel to wind down the war. You said it needs to get over with. How are you going to make that happen? The reporter asked, would you consider withholding aid? Trump really wouldn't give a clear answer to that question about withholding aid. He said,

I think that Israel has done one thing very badly, public relations. No argument there, Ryan. I don't think that the Israel Defense Fund or any other group should be sending out pictures every night of buildings falling down and being bombed with possibly people in those buildings every single night, which is what they do. That's obviously not just a public relations argument, which is why I chuckled a little bit, because he's framing it as a public relations argument, which is why I chuckled a little bit because he's he's framing it as a public relations argument And he's avoiding answering the question about whether he would withhold aid But that's also when you're talking about buildings that might have people in them That's also him criticizing the policy. I don't know what he would do if he was in office

Obviously he was cozy with Netanyahu even though he's not been cozy with him at least rhetorically in the press now Again, I think it's very hard to predict what you see come out of a second Trump administration, but at least interesting that the father-in-law of Jared Kushner is talking that way. It's an interesting way to smuggle in criticism because it's completely acceptable on the pro Israel side to say that Israel hasn't been good at its PR. Right. Like that's always a fine thing for any kind of ally to criticize their own organization or group of. PR, right. PR, bad PR. You're great, you're doing great, everything you're doing is great, people just don't understand

how great you are. Right. That's basically what that's saying. But your point is exactly right. He doesn't talk about PR then, he talks about war crimes. Yeah. He talks about bombing civilians and flattening buildings. And then he does talk about the PR reaction to that. They then broadcast

that. So he's seeing the fact that Israel's broadcasting a lot of its crimes. And whether he's seeing a lot of kind of the IDF soldiers and their TikToks and their reels where they're wearing women's clothing or where they're blowing up mosques or blowing up schools or like riding around on children's bikes. Partying on the other side of the wall. Yeah, like all of this stuff is being broadcast. So it is a combination of war crimes that is a fundamental problem of substance, but then also the lack of shame about them and the broadcasting of them to the world. So yeah, and I think one thing that bothers him is that it causes problems for him.

Now it causes bigger problems for Biden, so he's happy with that at the moment. But I think he's like, in his mind, he's like, guys, he said, just in the same way he said, you've got to wrap this up. You've got to get this over with. He's like, what are you doing, you know, bombing a building full of civilians and then broadcasting that? Like, that's not going to play well. It's not a moral argument, like, you shouldn't do that. It's an argument that this is not going to be effective in your mission of which I'm aligned, with which I'm aligned. And again, that's why I think it's interesting that that like, again, this is the father-in-law

of Jared Kushner, Jared Kushner, and people, Trump gives him credit actually, in fact, for heading up Middle East Israel policy basically under Trump's watch. And what they did by moving the embassy and just completely allying the United States with, you know, the goals of the Netanyahu administration, essentially. Not that that's new for United States foreign policy, but there was an enthusiasm for that alliance that I think was very specific to the Trump administration. So that's why I find potentially Donald Trump coming into office again, likely based on reporting, bringing Jared Kushner back into the administration. That's, I think, genuinely an interesting contrast.

And even casual observers at the time warned that Kushner's approach to the Abraham Accords of pretending that the Palestine question didn't exist and just trying to reach normalization with Saudi and the UAE and Israel and others was not going to work because Palestinians do exist and it was going to lead to some type of an explosion. That was the warning. But you can't completely blame the Trump administration for that because the Biden administration came in January 2021 and had every opportunity to say, whoever let this kid run Middle East policy for the United States was an idiot, and we're not going to continue following that course. Instead, they basically followed the Kushner policy going forward. They did not reenter the Iran deal. They discarded the Obama

approach to the region and adopted the Trump approach. And we wound up with this. Let's do his two-state. Yeah. So he was asked about potential solutions. I thought this was also kind of a bit insightful from Trump in an interesting way. Do you think an outcome of that war between Israel and Hamas should be a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians? Trump says, most people thought it was going to be a two-state solution. I'm not sure a two-state solution anymore is going to work. Everybody was talking about two states, even when I was there. I was saying, what do you like here? Do you like two states? Now people are going back to, it depends

where you are. Every day it changes now. If Israel's making, and here's the insightful part, if Israel's making progress, they don't want two states. They want everything. And if Israel's not making progress, he goes on, sometimes they talk about two-state solution. Two-state solution seemed to be the idea that people liked most, the policy or the idea that people liked above.

This is like really the benefit of Donald Trump. In some cases, he comes in with no like rhetorical allegiance to either side of the debate. Doesn't care. And is just like perceptive in the sneakiest ways sometimes because he like has this like weird business mindset and he hasn't been reading scripts from full of talking points from like the RNC for 20 years. So he just is freewheeling, and sometimes it has disastrous consequences. Other times, it's weirdly perceptive.

Yeah, when things are going well for Israel, as Trump observes, they just want everything. Why would they agree to two states? It's only when they're on their heels that they say, okay, maybe we'll agree to that. And the cushions of the world, again, this is interesting because I'm saying this as somebody broadly on the right, it's frustrating. Any criticism of Israel, you are lumped into this category as like pro-Hamas, pro-antisemitism or enabling antisemitism. This is Donald Trump openly criticizing Israel when nobody forced him to. This interview was not particularly tough on him on that question. Like it pushed him. It was fair,

but it wasn't like hostile. It wasn't saying like you need to criticize Israel right now or you will sacrifice all of your credibility. It wasn't doing that. He just went there. And I actually think that's really interesting. And real quickly, and then we can move on to weed. I did want to ask you about, maybe you have some insight into this, the Mifepristone question. So he gets asked, do you think women should be able to get the abortion pill Mifepristone? And he says, well, I have an opinion on that, but I'm not going to explain. I'm not going to say it yet, but I have pretty strong views on that, and I'll be releasing it probably over the next week. So this is the abortion pill, which the Supreme Court has said is legal. Do you have any insight?

Is he actually going to put something out in a week? Is he just making that up? I haven't heard anything about that. Is there any speculation about where he lands on this? Because this is a huge issue because if you're in a red state that has banned abortion, but you can still get access to this, it's a game changer. It's why abortions have increased post-Dobbs. There's this mass movement towards Mifepirstone, and it now accounts for a massive proportion of abortions. People are learning about it now, right, thanks to Dobbs. Yeah, exactly. So I haven't heard any rumblings that he's planning to make an announcement on this,

which could that doesn't mean he's not planning to make an announcement. Frankly, if I had to guess where he stands on this personally, I actually still think that could diverge from whatever his policy is, because this interview similarly, like he wouldn't give an answer on what he would definitively do about military aid, conditioning military aid to Israel. He also would not give an answer about what he would do with abortion. And he kept saying, it's up to the states, it's up to the states. You're hypothetical, I won't answer because it's so impossible.

You're never going to have 60 votes in the Senate. So I can't answer your question about whether I would sign a 15-week ban, etc., etc. On this, I think it's possible he announces a policy really similar to what he announced with abortion in general, that he's just supportive of leaving it up to the states, basically. That upset a lot of people in the anti-abortion movement. But I don't know whether that reflects what he's saying when he says he has a very strong opinion on it, because his very strong opinion could potentially not be reflected by whatever policy he announces. I think he's, you know, privately you hear that he's kind of icked out by anti-abortion people, that he feels like they're weird religious extremists and, you know, is personally not

hardcore anti-abortion. So I would, if I had to guess, I would say he's probably pro-Mephepristone personally. But whether that is whatever policy he announces is a completely different question. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try.

She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into,

call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.

She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her. Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right?

And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was, my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me,

and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is, and they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's like really the GOAT. Like, he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family? It means a lot to me.

Just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good. Like that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that, I'm really happy. Or my family in general. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide,

listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, the DEA is making big moves on marijuana. So back in election year 2022, if you remember,

the Biden administration did two things during the midterms at once. They pardoned every nonviolent weed offender, but the more significant thing they did at that time was they asked the kind of federal bureaucracy to study whether or not marijuana belonged in Schedule 1. Now Schedule 1 is the most restrictive category for an illegal drug. It means it has zero medical benefit and a high potential for abuse. You could say that the stronger weed lately has a significant potential for abuse,

but the zero medical benefit has always been completely absurd. But it was clear at that moment that he was teeing up a 2024 move. Now, HHS and the FDA both signed off on reclassifying marijuana, moving it out of Schedule 1. The DEA has been dragging its feet, as you can imagine the DEA does. But yesterday, the Associated Press reported, and we can put this up, that the DEA finally is getting in line and recommending back to the White House that they do what everybody else said they ought to do, which is reschedule marijuana from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3. Now, Schedule 3 says it has some medical value. So there's been some reporting that this would help with tax liabilities for marijuana firms, cannabis companies. But that's not necessarily the case because Schedule 3 is still quite restrictive. Because right now, if you are a marijuana business, you basically have, it's basically impossible to write off a lot of your costs,

which means you have exorbitant tax bill at the end because you don't pay taxes on your profits like a normal business. You pay taxes on all of your revenue because you can't write off your costs because your costs are illegal under federal law. At the same time, you don't have access to banking, which puts people at serious risk because they're moving cash around, you know, gigantic, you know, trucks going back and forth filled with cash from homes to businesses. And so this is much less than what a lot of advocates would want, you know, have wanted, but it will help on sentencing, you know, with mandatory minimums. It also helps importantly with research. Right now, if you want to research marijuana, which so many people in the medical field want to do because there are significant medical benefits, like getting access, it's hilarious. Like if you want to get gummies or

weed, you walk down the street and you buy them. If you want to do research on cannabis at the university setting, it's impossible. Right, right. Like there are like a handful of studies that have gone through like 10 years of like fighting with the DEA. So the researchers just go like getting dime bags on the corner. They just research something else because they can't then get, they can't get the university to approve the studies. And so they just go study something else. So now at least this will lead to an explosion of actual research in the U.S.

because around the world people are able to study it. So that'll help. This is still months away though. It's got to go to the Office of Managing Budget. There's a comment period. And this could drag out till after the election. Sager's not here to complain. But Sager can take pride in the fact that not much is going to change in the near term. Yeah, I was going to say. And you know, Sager's arguments are serious. And I think a lot of our viewers probably, as much as we make fun of him, I think a lot of our viewers probably know this. But Ryan, if you duck to what you're right, you can see this Ryan Grimm book,

This Is Your Country on Drugs, The Secret History of Getting High in America. If ever there were an expert on the history of getting high in America, buy This Is Your Country on Drugs by Ryan Grimm for the expert take. It is pretty amazing. Like that book came out in 2009. And you could sort of, if you squinted, see the direction that things were going in the final chapter. But to get to this place in my lifetime is kind of interesting. That's what I was actually going to ask you about because I think that that's a bit like when we were talking about this a little bit yesterday This is a really big deal. I used to work. I was actually a weed lobbyist, right? That's right, 2004

I worked for the marijuana policy project on state level lobbying high-powered This is funny is the weed lobbyists now actually are high-powered. It's like John Boehner. Yes Now they have John Boehner. Right, but back then, and that's what's interesting about the schedule classifications, that right now, while this OMB process goes on, it's still classified Schedule 1 alongside heroin, LSD, and yet you have people like John Boehner advocating for, what was he doing? Was it cannabis?

Yeah. So the other thing I was interested in here is if it's a Schedule 3 drug, you still have significant DEA regulations, but that means that 15,000 cannabis dispensaries in the U.S. that exist right now would have to register with the DEA. I'm reading from the Associated Press report here. That means they have to go along with these fairly strict reporting requirements. Which I think they're not going to do. Well, it sounds like the DEA is not even in a position to handle those reporting requirements. So in a sense, if this plays out, even in the direction that's good for some of these dispensaries

is up in the air financially because now they have this massive burden of reporting the DEA in ways that they weren't before. It'll at least reduce the incentive for the DEA, I think, to break down the doors of cannabis dispensaries. But they've largely moved away from that and left it. They've basically started leaving it up to localities. In the beginning days, like in the Bush administration, when medical cannabis facilities first started opening, you'd have the DEA in standoffs with local police who were supportive of the dispensaries. They've somewhat moved away from that. We have not yet gotten to a rational system, but it now gives Congress more ability to rationalize, I think, the system because the DEA is sort

of given a little bit of permission. Chuck Schumer is trying to put something related to cannabis into the FAA. He's trying to put weed banking into the FAA reauthorization. He keeps trying to do it because Schumer know, Schumer in particular sees, you know, weed and student debt as, you know, key ways to try to, you know, win the support of young people in particular. So, yeah, and that's this complete unevenness culturally in terms of policy. That's really fascinating here and for the other side of this argument because I'm still kind of ambivalent I do commend people to go watch some of Saugers monologues on this topic because I do think Ryan you mentioned this earlier there is a level of potency that

Increased rapidly just in the last several decades That's totally relevant to what's happening on underdeveloped brains when they're smoking weed. Like, this is some serious research in that space that's worth paying attention to if you're a parent. Yeah, and substance abuse is a problem, no matter what the substance. The question for me has always been, should it be criminalized? Is the answer to lock people up?

Yeah. And I don't think so. But that doesn't mean we're ever going to get to a rational place either. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother.

She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people.

Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now I'm curious, do they Digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was, my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Yeah. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is. And they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's like really the GOAT.

Like he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family it means a lot to me just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good like that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better so the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that i'm really happy or my family in general let's talk about the music that moves us to hear this and more on how music and culture collide. Listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Breaking news from Capitol Hill.

Mike Johnson continues to be a real person. Ryan and I have followed these developments for weeks now. Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, sounds completely made up, and yet he continues to be the Republican Speaker of the House. He does exist. I've seen him in person now. He's real. But the real takeaway from what's happening on Capitol Hill right now is that Democrats made a decision yesterday to ally themselves formally with Mike Johnson in his battle against House Republicans. So Marjorie Taylor Greene's motion to vacate, and we can put this first element up on the screen. This is a tweet from Jake Sherman over at Punchbowl that House Democratic leadership has said they will vote to table that Marjorie Taylor Greene motion to vacate if she forces a vote on it, which is called privileging the motion. So she filed the

motion weeks ago. Thomas Massey signed onto it after after the Ukraine uniparty vote for an aid vote that we talked about last week. And speaking of Thomas Massey, we can put the next element up on the screen. He tweeted yesterday at Representative Jeffries and Speaker Johnson, not sure who's in charge. So asking both of you, are you still working together to eliminate the motion to vacate so you can share power forever? This was in response to a Mike Johnson tweet on April 18th, talking about how many people, to borrow a phrase from Trump, many people have been encouraging him to endorse a new rule to raise the threshold on the motion to vacate. Super quick primer on the motion to vacate. It sounds like a technical parliamentary procedure term. What it actually means is that it existed in Congress until Nancy Pelosi took it away after watching what happened to John Boehner. We somehow managed to not talk about

John Boehner twice in this show in 2024. But John Boehner was, he had a motion to vacate filed against him by Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan back in the day. They never ended up privileging it. They forced Boehner to resign. Nancy Pelosi saw that and changed the rule that had existed for all of Congress's history, basically, and said, this is not happening to me. I'm not going to have challenges to my power just because one of my members wants to file and privilege this motion to vacate. So what Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi's successor, is doing right now is saying, we're saving Mike Johnson's ass. Because if Marjorie Taylor Greene forces this motion to vacate, it privileges it and gets a vote, and I'm out of

here, or that Johnson is out of here, we'd rather have Mike Johnson in power. And that's saving Republicans from a cycle of chaos in the middle of an election year because, Ryan, I'm curious for your perspective on this, Democrats realize that they can get a lot of their priorities over the hurdle of Republican House leadership, Republican majority in the House because they have the Senate and the presidency. They feel like they can get probably a lot of earmarking, pork type stuff out of funding bills. FAA is coming up, foreign bills coming up in the future by aligning themselves with Mike Johnson now. And I think you have to presume that there was some type of an arrangement

when it came to passage of, you know, they avoided a government shutdown, they funded the wars in Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and Democrats provided a lot of muscle for that. But, you know, Speaker Johnson had to go along and put it on the floor. And so you can imagine that this commitment from Hakeem Jeffries is not coming out of nowhere, that it comes out of those talks and that collaboration, that cooperation from before. I think the Democrats think, okay, yeah, chaos is fun. It's nice when Republicans are shooting at each other.

And if you could have them voting for Speaker again for a week or two, it makes them look like losers. But yeah, I think to your point, their priority was getting the wars funded. And so they'd rather have that than a marginal kind of political advantage. And, you know, they still get plenty of infighting. Like there's lots of Republican finger pointing. So they can have the best of all worlds. Speaking of books written by Ryan Grimm, you can also see the squad behind you. Stacking them up back there. The thing that I wanted to ask you was actually if this is demoralizing to the squad and to members of Justice Dems when they see this happening. Because I bet to a lot of their voters, you see this happening, it is demoralizing and it's infuriating.

I mean, it might be demoralizing to their base, but probably not to them personally. Because they've been courted. They've been lockstep with Jeffries. They voted for Jeffries every step of the way. They didn't mount anybody to challenge Jeffries. And they did not like that funding for the war in Israel moved through, but they all were supportive of the money for the war in Ukraine for the most part. So I don't see a whole lot of daylight between them and Jeffries

on these questions. You know, it deprives, you know, now the question would be, would Republicans bail out a Jeffries speakership in the future? No. You don't think so? No. Let them go down? Because I can just imagine Republican voters after that happened flooding town halls. It would be like Tea Party all over again. And Republicans are just, I think, kind of keyed into getting the different parliamentary machinations, probably post Tea Party, because this was such a big deal with Boehner. And I just see like actually less of that on the left, that they pay really close attention to the different maneuvers that leadership uses to kind of screw over populists. But on the right, that's a pretty mainstream like hobby horse of people in the conservative movement is following what's happening in the sort of like

meat grinder on Capitol Hill. So I think people would be pretty furious about that. You know, Mike Johnson, just I don't think there would be some people who would, you know, you could maybe get 15 to 20. So it kind of depends on how big the majority is. There's maybe a way to make the math work. But I don't know. I think that would be unlikely. What it means is today is May 1st. Happy May Day. And you're not going to have any kind of House speaker drama between now and November until after the election. Right. Which again, if I'm a Democratic voter, I'm watching this and saying, what the hell are you doing? Let them do this. Let them fight. It's the middle of an election year. Why are you going out of your way to save Mike Johnson, who just said, for example,

we have a biblical mandate to step in with Israel? Tell me if I'm still correct on this. Johnson was known as a terrible fundraiser. Is he still a bad fundraiser? Has he stepped his game up? Because if not, like one of the unspoken reasons or unspoken publicly reasons that Democrats were so happy to see Kevin McCarthy go is that he was a voracious fundraiser, tens to hundreds of millions of dollars for Republican candidates. And taking that chess piece off the board meant that that was tens of millions of dollars that might not get raised and then spent against Democratic candidates. The week after he was ousted, they had to cancel some gigantic fundraiser in Texas. And you would think that material interests alone would get these donors to write these

checks to the political party that is benefiting their material interests alone would get these donors to write these checks to the political party that is benefiting their material interests. But they also need to be sweet-talked. They want that rubber chicken. They want the speeches. They want the glad-handing. They want the photo. They want their kid to get the internship and the chance to whisper in the ear of the speaker. And without that, they're going to give less money. So if it's still the case that Johnson is a lousy fundraiser, Hakeem Jeffries is probably thinking, let him continue as speaker. Yeah, he's not Kevin McCarthy. That's basically what I've heard in those circles. He may have, he could step his game up. That's still not going to make him Kevin McCarthy. And, you know, there's mixed donor opinions on

some of these uniparty priorities, especially in the right now, Ukraine, et cetera. I think the donors are a little, some of these rich Republicans are probably put off by his true believer. Well, he's also a true believer and a dominionist type. Yes. You mean religious? Yeah. Whereas some of the rich Republicans, yeah, they go to church and they talk about it. But they're like, ooh, this guy. No. He really means this stuff.

Well, Donald Trump himself was a Republican donor. And he's not going to be like persuaded by the dispensationalist biblical mandate philosophy about supporting. Theoretical arguments about how church, the separation of church and state is a myth. People are probably icked up by Mike Johnson, yeah, in that respect. But who knows how, I mean, he can be selling himself in a number of different ways behind closed doors. But, you know, there's still going to be plenty of money that lobbyists have to throw around in the defense industry and sector.

So maybe that'll help him because he got the bill over the line. That said, with sort of a lot of Republican voters as sort of, not voters, donors, mainstream Republican donors, they're not going to be happy about the border being left out of that bill. That too. But speaking of religious controversies. That's right.

You've got the author of the new book, Pagan America. Yeah, so he means it in a different way than you do, Ryan. Ryan sees Pagan America and he thinks, we did it. Mission accomplished. Conquered. The banner up. Yeah. America has fallen. Yeah. We'll be joined right after this by my colleague at The Federalist,

John Daniel Davidson, whose new book, Pagan America, is out right now. Stick around. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero. She was stoic, modest, tough. Someone who inspired people. Everyone thought they knew her. Until they didn't. I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real? Is this real? Is this real? Is this real?

I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment that was, you know, dying. This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. My favorite line on there was,

my son and my daughter gonna be proud when they hear my old tapes. Now I'm curious, do they like rap along now? Yeah, because I bring him on tour with me, and he's getting older now too. So his friends are starting to understand what that type of music is. And they're starting to be like, yo, your dad's, like, really the GOAT. Like, he's a legend. So he gets it. What does it mean to leave behind a music legacy for your family?

It means a lot to me. Just having a good catalog and just being able to make people feel good. Like, that's what's really important, and that's what stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better. So the fact that my kids get to benefit off of that I'm really happy or my family in general let's talk about the music that moves us to hear this and more on how music and culture collide listen to we need to talk from the black effect podcast network on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast all right we're joined now joined now by John Daniel Davidson. He's my colleague at The Federalist where he's a senior editor. But for the purposes of this conversation,

he's also the author of a new book, Pagan America. John, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Of course. Now, a lot of our viewers and actually a lot of the country is frankly not Christian, not practicing Christian in the way that you write about in this book, and definitely probably looks at this and says, what does pagan America mean? And I'm not even just talking about people on the left. What do you mean by pagan America, and what does that mean for people who aren't right now going to church every Sunday and honestly would hear your description of paganism that you're going to give and say, okay, so it means we've separated church and state. Good.

Yeah, right. Okay. So pagan America is an argument that there's really only one alternative to Christianity and it's not secularism. It's paganism, right? And I don't mean that in a post-Christian era that we're in, as you say, you know, many people in this country, a growing number of people are not practicing Christians and a growing number don't even identify as Christians. I think in about 30, 20 or 30 years, we'll have Christianity as a self-identified group, as a minority in this country for the first time ever. And they might hear post-Christian America and think, and Ryan, you probably hear that and you think, okay. I think, okay, post-Christian America is fine. Part of the argument of the book is that America, as we know it and understand it, is only possible with a Christian people. In other words, a people who accept basic normative claims of Christian doctrine. Chief among them, the doctrine of Imago Dei, that each person is created in the image and likeness of God and therefore has inherent dignity from whence we get rights, freedom of speech, religion, consent of the governed.

All of the things that we associate with our American system of government and our American way of life are products of Christian civilization. They can't exist on their own outside of that context, right? Outside of that context, they eventually devolve into a form of post-Christian neo-paganism, and that's the era that we're emerging into today as we shed our Christian civilization. We're also going to shed those things that we associate with our American way of life that I just enumerated. And the reason is because there's no basis for them outside of a Christian moral cosmology that posits what human beings are

and what their relationship to God is and what their relationship to one another should be. So I pride myself in reading all the books before we interview the author, and I just did not have time to get to this one, so I apologize, so I'm coming in totally kind of blank. But why is that the case? Why can't just appreciation for civic virtue

and love of country and just general morality be enough to stitch together a people? Well, general morality has to be based on something, a vision of the world, a vision of what human beings are, right? So pagan morality, and this holds true across vast expanses of time and geography and cultures, is that if you are not part of my group, then it's my moral duty to take what you have or subjugate you for the benefit of me and my people, right? And that's what we see over and over again throughout history, the history of pagan peoples and cultures.

Right. So let me ask about, so we've been a Christian nation for a couple hundred years. We have launched more wars than any other nation, maybe in history. Like in the 200 plus years that we've been a country. We've done some subjugating. We've done some subjugating. There have been only a few years out of all of those years, even during our isolation, quote unquote, isolationist period while we're enacting a genocide, that we were not at war with other people and subjugating them. So either it's not true that Christianity allows us in a meaningful way to see others as equals and treat them as we would like to be treated, or we are just overriding that as an impulse. When is this Christianity going to kick in? Well, I want to be careful we don't mistake an ideal for, you know, history is contingent and we're never going to attain the ideal of like human equality, right? Or a perfect realization of Christian moral ideals.

The United States didn't do it. European civilization didn't do it. I don't think anyone's ever going to get it, right? But that doesn't negate the fundamental sort of philosophical and moral claims of Christianity, right? Christianity, as opposed to many other moral and religious systems, does claim inequality between people. And that's where we get things like human rights, the basis for human rights and human dignity. So why can't you take it out? Like in a post-Christian America, why can't you say we like the ideas that came from Christianity? Golden rules, golden. We're taking the Christ out of it. And like, we just. Yeah. Christless Christianity, in other words, or a secular humanism, right? This is the argument

that Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins would make, right? They want the culture without the cult, but you can't have the culture without the cult because the culture relies on the religion and the religious claims as the source of its vitality, the source of its coherence, right? Why should a people who are post-Christian retain Christian moral virtues, right? Why should I think that all men are created equal when clearly, in many ways, people are not equal? We see inequality all around us. And why shouldn't we adopt a pagan morality that says, you know, inequality, and this is, you know, the ancient Aristotle said this, you know, the ancient pagans, they understood inequality means that some people are naturally slaves and

some people are naturally rulers. And if you're poor, that fate has decided that you should be poor, and that's your lot. Christianity brought a moral revolution to this pagan morality and this pagan cosmology and posited a radically new way of understanding the world and our relations. And it launched a radical shift in human civilizations that had never before been seen. And so America is one expression of that, right? And I mean, we can have different interpretations of American history. European civilization is of course where we came from, but we're entering, and this is what the book argues, we're entering this new unprecedented era, a post-Christian era. And my argument is we should not expect the Christian cosmology,

the Christian moral virtues that organized the West for all these centuries to remain intact, cut off from the source of their vitality, right? We should expect something new. And the new thing we should expect is a resurgence of this pagan mentality, the pagan ethos, which is one that's based on force and coercion. But I guess I'm still trying to figure out,

like I was saying earlier, when does the Christianity kick in? Like if the country's founded on these Christian ideals and the country had Christians supporting slavery, Christians supporting the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, Christians supporting the Spanish-American War, the Philippines.

These were departures. I think these are departures from Christianity. Absolutely. Okay. Let's- I mean, these are departures from the claims of Christianity, right? It's sort of like true communism has never been tried. Well, I- People mock that idea when actual communists will say, look- When's the communism going to kick in? Yeah. When's the communism? Like you say, well, the Soviet great. Cuba wasn't great. Well, then that wasn't real communism.

But what I'm saying is communism only had like a 200 year run. Christianity has had 2000 years. Right. And, and, and, well, I mean, I don't know about you, but I think that Christianity has produced a greatest civilization the world's ever seen. Right. Which one's that? The one that we're sitting in right now. Right. But certainly a fairer and juster world than we've seen before. Well, that's what I'm saying. I mean, consider something like, you know, the Roman Empire, right? We have a tendency, I guess, since the Enlightenment to sort of romanticize the pagan past and the Roman world and the Greek world. Those are slave societies. Most people in the Roman Empire were slaves. They didn't have anything like rights, right? If you were a Roman citizen or a Roman aristocrat,

you could do whatever you wanted to people who were in a lower station. You could rape them, you could murder them, you could discard them. And it wasn't seen so far from not being any kind of moral censure. It was like a mark of your rank that you were able to do this. This is true all through pagan societies, as I said, across time and cultures. But what about the Ottoman Empire? What about a lot of the Chinese Empire, like throughout Chinese history? Like you had people who had probably far more rights than they had. The slave societies too.

And abolished slavery later actually in most of the Ottoman areas than were in the West. And what's interesting about that I think actually is one of the grossest arguments, one of the grossest Christian arguments in favor of slavery in the United States was these are not people. And what's interesting about that is because you know as soon as you acknowledge these are human beings and you're a Christian you have to treat them equally as human beings. Which is the abolitionist argument. Well I was gonna say if you could talk because that's in the book about how Christians get blamed for perpetrating slavery I think rightfully there was a Christian argument that was

made in favor of slavery it's a Christian argument that's made in front of awful imperialism and it to your point, ethnic cleansing. But if you go to, if you talk about what happened when Columbus arrived, it was Bartolome de las Casas that was saying this is awful from a Christian perspective. Yeah, so the debates over, you know, what should the proper disposition of Christian Europeans be toward the indigenous peoples of the Americas? That was a debate that was initiated by Catholic monks and scholars in Spain, right? Who had these debates. Well, I'm sure the indigenous had a view on it too. No, I'm saying from the European perspective of what should our disposition be toward these peoples in the new world? And there was a debate about their humanity, about what responsibilities

the Catholic Church and the Crown had to these people. It was the kind of debate, you know, the fact that they were having a debate about this at all, I would say, is a product of Christian civilization. It's not the kind of thing that would have been debated in a pagan society at all. It would have been absolutely just subjugate these people. The debates in the Ottoman Empire, the debates in China, debates in Japan, like there's everybody debates. I'm talking about a debate about whether or not these people should be just enslaved like animals and treated as such. Or should their inherent dignity and humanity be recognized as children of God and our goal should be to bring them. Greeks and the Romans all debated that.

And they did on one side. I mean Aristotle debated the, he disagreed with the practice, how slavery was practiced, but he accepted at the very beginning of the politics, he accepts the premise of natural slavery and natural rulers. His quibble is with the implementation of it, not with the philosophical position that slavery is a natural state for some people. And this was common, but this was never accepted in Christianity in centuries and centuries of Catholic Europe. It was only in a modern context in the 19th, when the antebellum South posited this very unchristian, very pagan argument that slavery was natural and it was an aborition, it was

a departure from how Christianity had been approaching this issue for centuries and centuries, not only in the New World. There was a people rule against slavery in like 1100. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I mean, the idea of human rights or of peace, that war should be confined and non-combatants should be protected. These were things that medieval Catholic Europe came up with. That's true. But one reason for that is that these Christians were doing more war than anybody else in history. Than who? Than Genghis Khan? I mean, come on. More war than who? Genghis Khan is the exception.

More war than North Americans, South Americans, Chinese, Africans. More war than the Aztecs? I don't know. More war than... Yeah, I mean, yeah. More war than the Egyptians, the Comanche. Yeah, look around the world. Look at the biggest wars and the U.S. and Europe.

You're talking about modern, like World War I and World War II, is what you're talking about, right? Yeah, but if you look at how far they went. Well, World War II was a pagan war, right? I mean, Nazi Germany was a post-Christian society. The Soviet Union was a post-Christian society. Nietzsche's primary argument against Christianity was that it was, in some ways, too... I think Nazis were pagan. I think Nazis were pagan. Nazis were absolutely pagan. So Nazis were honest enough, like the Marquis de Sade, right,

to say, if we're going to reject Christianity, then the Christian morality has got to go. There's no basis to treat people as though they have inherent dignity and worth. Let's just liquidate all these people. But they tried to keep the trappings. They liked some of the trappings of Christianity, but they took Christ, quite literally took Christ out of the Christianity. And didn't they go after the communists as godless? The Nazis were, their god was sort of the pagan Volk, right? Very clearly hearkening back to a pre-Christian, even in their aesthetics, right? It was Nordic, yeah. You know, there's no sense in which the Nazis were a manifestation of Christian cosmology,

right? This was very clearly post-Christian. And so when I say post-Christian, and the reason I say the Nazis were at least honest about it, is that if you get rid of the Christian claims, you eventually have to get rid of the Christian morality too. So I mentioned the Marquis de Sade during the Enlightenment, there was this rejection, overt rejection of Christianity and specifically attacks against the Catholic Church. Marquis de Sade said, well, not only should we attack Christianity, but we should sweep away Christian morality as well. There's no reason why the strong should, you know, scrape and bow before the weak. That's against nature, right? That's what Nietzsche said, too. Yeah, and that's what Marquis de Sade, that's what Nietzsche said, that's what,

you know, the Nazis said, right? And that is what pagan society, that's the principle in which pagan societies had always been organized. And what I'm saying is that Christian civilization was organized on different principles, never fully realized, right? Ideals that we are always moving toward, never quite going to achieve because this is the world and we're fallen, you know, people are what they are. But the ideal and the claim, the ontological claim about what people are was fundamentally different than what pagans posited. Last word, right? No, go ahead, read this book. But I don't know, I think if the U.S. is held up as the example, as the most Christian nation nation that doesn't bode well for linking nationalism

and Christianity, just based on our behavior over the last 200 years. I was going to say, what's somewhat interesting about this conversation is that all three of us share a very similar foreign policy at the moment. I don't know what your guys' foreign policy is. He's a full Latinist. But no, I mean, we pretty much agree on what's happening right now.

All that is to say, I actually think this was very helpful to have a conversation from the right. We do a lot on the left. We do. It was great to have one from the right. Well, I appreciate y'all having me on. Read the book, and then we'll come back and talk about it some more. And then we'll do a fist fight. There we go.

It'll be a see who can triumph in a contest of strength. We're not Christians. We're not Christians. Well, if you leave me out of it, it would be kind of Christian. Keep the women, the vulnerable out of this fight. All right. John Daniel Davidson, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it. All right, Ryan, that does it for us on today's edition of CounterPoints. But it's worth reminding people that in addition to the mugs, a premium subscription will actually also cheers our mugs on these mugs, will also get you early access to the Friday show. So premium subscription, if you go to BreakingPoints.com, the episode we're taping for Friday will hit your inbox on Thursday. You can also get the mugs at

breakingpoints.com. And this is a hell of a Friday show. I'll say that much. And I mean, we can tell you who's going to be on because one of the guests has been talking about it all week on his streaming program. We're going to have Omar Badar, and we're going to have a streamer who is better known as, I think, Mr. Benelli. I don't get these kinds of jokes. I'm too out of that rabbit hole. You and Sagar have been having fun with these jokes and producer Mac. He goes by Destiny.

Yes. And why we had him on is an open question. TBD. Yeah, we'll see how it goes. But that's the point of the conversation. I think the best argument that you could make for it is that he makes a lot of the arguments that you see very frequently from the pro-Israel crowd, and he makes them very effectively. And so I think it's useful to see people kind of push back against them and counter

them. I think it's good them. Even if he just started learning about this issue in the last six months. Which is true of a lot of people. And normie politics are worth talking about because that's, again, like by definition, they're probably representative of a broad swath of the country who doesn't, for a living, think constantly about these issues and hear every update in the news. So I think it's a contrast that's well worth developing. And it'll be a really interesting conversation. So we're doing these every Friday now. We started with Don Lemon last week. Another questionable decision.

But we have a lot of really interesting ideas lined up for the future. So breakingpoints.com for subscription there. You'll get the episode in your inbox Thursday night. You can also get the wonderful mugs. I took Don Lemon's advice. I broke out my lighter jacket. I didn't even notice. I mean, I used to wear this deep into the fall. My wife was like, you can't wear that in the fall and the winter. It's a good spring. But it's spring now. So spring. Bringing it back. So subscribe for more of Ryan's fashion tips and to see what color jacket he wears on any given Wednesday. All right, see you guys Thursday evening.

If you subscribe, Friday morning if you don't. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband.

The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones, the Black Information Network delivers the facts, the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7

because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years, you know, some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.