Chapo Trap House - 1041 - Memos of Understanding feat. Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill (6/1/26)

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Ryan and Jeremy of Drop Site News return on Day 94 of the Special Military Operation in Iran, with breaking news about the ongoing ceasefire negotiations. We survey the (bleak) state of affairs across the globe, from Lebanon to Palestine to the looming regime change in Cuba. We also discuss the Israel lobby’s attempted counterinsurgency and the “Israel Day Parade” in NYC. Subscribe to Drop Site here: https://www.dropsitenews.com/

Hello, everybody. It's Monday, June 1st, and this is your chopo. On today's episode, Felix and I are once again joined by our good friends from DropSight, Ryan Grimm and Jeremy Skahill. Ryan, Jeremy, welcome back. Always lovely to be here. Hey, good to be here. So, gentlemen, I have been told that as of 2 p.m. Eastern Standard time, DropSite, you have some breaking news about the ongoing negotiations of Iran War. Would you care to share with us on today's show? No, I hate to scoop you guys, but the news is we did it. We won. Yeah, I was going to say. We are very close to a deal. I just got this update on my Nokia N-Gage.

Iran is agreeing to go back to Zoroastrian. No more Islam in that country. A few words to like iron out, but basically that's the deal. Yeah, yeah. Felix Biederman. Axios correspondent. Yeah. Obviously, there's a scoop, but my joke has been scoop because obviously, like I was going to say,

let me guess, ceasefire imminent, all but a few details still to be worked out. Is that what I'm hearing? So just but seriously to begin, like, following this, like over the last couple of months, like there is a very distinct pattern to like basically every week there is an assurance that a ceasefire deal is. imminent. And then by Friday, it's like they tear it up and they say, no, no, they're playing games. You're going to go back to killing all of them. And then by Monday, it's just like another assurance of a ceasefire. But, but Jeremy, like, where do, where do things stand now? Because

I've been saying that like, it just seems like everybody knows what the stakes are. But Donald Trump, for whatever reason, either because Israel won't let him, there's no way to put a leash on them, or because he just can't admit that we've been stalemated here. We've been checkmated by by Iran, that they're going to essentially try to restart the war and do the same thing they did in the initial stages of it again in the hopes that it'll work this time. But like, Jeremy, where do things stand now in terms of the negotiations between Iran and the United States and Israel? Yeah. I mean, let's remember. So there, you know, for the past couple months, there's technically been a ceasefire, but it was originally conceived of as like a two-week ceasefire. And,

and they had that round of talks in Islamabad. And, you know, then we had this episode. that took place where like Trump said that J.D. Vance was on an airplane and the Iranians were saying to me and the handful of other journalists that regularly speak to them, like, we have no intention of going there. And then the White House was like, oh, wait a minute, no, it's going to be Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff. And the Iranians are saying to us, no, we have no intention of going there. And in fact, Abasarachi, their foreign minister, was literally in Islamabad at the time. And while Trump was publicly saying that like Steve and Jared are like munching peanuts on the plane on their way to Islamabad, Arachi leaves the country.

And it turned out that the Iranians were telling the truth. And Trump was like, you know, completely in his Tasmanian devil, you know, tailspin with his narrative. And basically ever since then, what's happened is that there's been indirect exchanges of concepts for how to create what Trump and company started calling, like, from the real estate world, a memorandum of understanding. And, you know, Iran put forward its ideas. The Trump administration put forward its ideas. And basically what's happened in the last, you know, week or so is that the Iranians said, we're going to do this in two tracks. In terms of the memorandum of understanding, the issues that we're willing to address is bringing an end, you know, an official declared end to the military conflict, to the war.

that must apply also to all the theaters of conflict. Lebanon most of obvious. Yeah. Yeah. And they've specifically drilled down to Lebanon. And when it first emerged that this was like a central demand that the Iranian said was a red line, that's when Netanyahu really ratcheted up the killing machine and began expanding the Israeli occupation deeper and deeper into Lebanon to the point now where they're in control of an enormous swath of territory. and they've now moved north of the Latani River.

And so, you know, this morning that they were dropping leaflets on southern Beirut, that they're evacuating, like the, what's being referred to is the suburbs of Beirut, which is just like the city of Beirut, basically. Yeah, I mean, these are these forced expulsion orders that the Israelis did throughout the Gaza genocide and continue to do actually in Gaza, despite the fact that there's supposedly a ceasefire there, and that they increasingly are doing in Lebanon. So the Iranians put forward their terms for this memorandum of understanding and said, you know, it has to bring an end to the war, that there's going to be a framework for future discussions on the highly enriched uranium, the nuclear dust, as Donald Trump calls it.

The Strait of Hormuz is going to be reopened, but the Iranians have said that the first step must be Trump lifting the blockade. And then Iran would commit to within 30 days bringing traffic back up to the level it was actually. before Trump and Netanyahu started this war. And on the nuclear issue, like, this is the one that Trump has been really obsessed with. He wants to be able to say that, like, he's solved the nuclear issue in a way that Barack Hussein Obama couldn't. And so what I understand is that the Iranians literally brought on some psychologists to help them craft their responses to Trump in recent days.

I'm not joking about this. This is serious. And that they've started having what they referred to as seen. senior psychologists starting to approve the messages that they send via mediators because they've determined that Trump is so mentally unstable that they needed like mental health professionals to help kind of craft the messaging on this. So we will be charging as toll at the straight-of-form views, but how does that make you feel? Well, so, okay, look, the Iranians do, they, the first track is this memorandum of understanding.

Trump is demanding that they basically put up front all these commitments about the nuclear issue. The Iranians in a calm way have been saying these are complicated issues. You know, you guys sent your son-in-law, Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff instead of like actual nuclear experts the last time we tried to do this. And we're going to need more time on that. We're not going to just like put up front everything that we're willing to put on the table. So it seems like where they're heading is that Iran is going to restate its long-held position that it doesn't have any intention of having a nuclear weapon. And that's been Iranian policy for a very long time. And it was subject of a fatwa issued by the Supreme Leader decades ago.

But Trump's going to then pretend that he's won some victory because he's gotten Iran to say this. But what the Iranians aren't going to do or what they've said they're not going to do is like start saying what's going to happen with the highly enriched uranium. But there's this second track that's going on. And we're unlikely to like see much of this come out into public, even though Trump would want it to. And that is that there are these discussions about what are the starting, What is the starting framework for the nuclear negotiation issue? And what I heard from Iranian officials is that they're willing to discuss a 10-year moratorium on enriching above 3.6 percent, that they're willing to dilute the enriched uranium that is

currently above 20 percent, you know, so that it's downgraded, but that Iran maintains its right to have a civilian nuclear program. But this isn't something that they're going to like put in writing. This is a sort of second track. And so Trump, though, is insisting on having, like, a capitulation narrative, a victory narrative. And the Iranians believed, like, less than one week ago, that the mediators had what was kind of a final text to, this was, like, late last week, a final text to this memorandum

of understanding. And the Iranians said, but we're not going to say anything about this because Trump is so unstable. The markets are still open. and we're going to wait and see what Trump says after the market's close. Sure enough, the market's close. Trump has met with his national security team, and he starts throwing new terms into the equation. The Iranians are watching what Netanyahu's doing in Lebanon.

They're watching the ceasefire be systematically violated in Gaza. They're watching Trump say his military blockade is going to stay in force in the Strait of Hormuz. And now, state-affiliated media organizations in Iran are saying that the Iranians are going to suspend negotiations until these other issues are resolved. Another big second point seems to be the unfreezing of all of these Iranian assets, like hundreds of billions of dollars. Like, is that part of the negotiating deal? Because it seems to me that, like, more than anything,

Trump doesn't want to have a dollar amount that is greater than the billions that Obama unfrozed in the, like, the deal that he did. It's a central point. I mean, I was talking about the basic contours of a deal from the U.S. perspective and, like, what Iran is putting on the table. But from Iran's perspective, ceasefire in Lebanon is, they've said it's a red line. They've said that there's not going to be any action on the Strait of Hormuz unless there's a substantial number of billions of dollars of Iranian frozen assets repatriated.

And recently, Mohamed Ghalibov, the lead negotiator for Iran and Abbasarachi, the foreign minister, were in Qatar with top financial officials from Iran, meeting with senior Iranian officials and senior Iranian financial officials. And part of what might be happening is that they're looking for a way to unfreeze some of those Iranian funds while giving Trump some ability to claim that he's not giving them any money. But clearly the Iranians, at least up until this moment that we're speaking, are saying that there's not going to be any significant movement on their part unless a substantial amount of money is repatriated.

I've heard the figure $12.5 billion tossed around. I think the Iranians initially were asking for $25 billion in this MOU round of things. So I think it's unlikely that the Iranians are going to do anything substantive unless there's a ceasefire in Lebanon or some action toward a ceasefire in Lebanon that they consider to be worth something and the repatriation of money. The question is, what are we going to see in public? They're aware that Trump needs to spin his narrative. And they said that to a degree, they're willing to be flexible with kind of humoring him on that. But it has its limits. And what they say is they killed 3,500 people.

They opened this war not just by assassinating our Supreme Leader, but by murdering 165 people in a girls school, almost, you know, the vast majority of them little girls. So they're saying, yeah, we're willing to be flexible, but we have our lines on that. And we're not going to do something that just allows Trump to run around and do a victory parade on the graves of Iranian schoolgirls. Well, so like I guess, like, where does that leave like things going ahead?

Because like it seems likely to me that, Trump, for whatever reason, like I said, because like if a red line for this memorandum of understanding or any potential ceasefire or end to the hostilities is an end to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that is going on right now. And like, not to undersell that, they are killing thousands of people and, you know, doing so in a way that bears all the harm marks of their operation in Gaza, double triple tapping rescue medics, hot bombing hospitals and ghouls, you know, like vacating huge swaths of land, forcing people to flee. And then like with some vague, oh, like, oh, we're just simply giving them notice so that they can avoid our bombs when

we destroy all of their homes and, you know, like everything where they live, we're going to raise to the ground. But like, left unspoken is this idea that, oh, like, yeah, we're going to allow them to come back at some point when like every member of the Israeli government, Basil Smartrich was just in New York this weekend, walking down Fifth Avenue. I'll get to that in a second. But like, They've been very clear that this is a mission of creating a, quote, buffer zone, which will then become a frontier, which will then become part of greater Israel. Like, there's two ways. Yeah. I mean, there's two ways of looking at this. One way of looking at it is that the Israelis understand that Trump is going to have to make some representation about Israel's genocidal operations in Lebanon. And so what they're doing now is they're going scorched earth. They're trying to occupy as much territory as they can, and that their hope is that what happens is that they agree to stop firing.

Hezbollah agrees to stop firing, but the Israelis continue to remain entrenched north of the Latani holding strategically important positions. And they create their new yellow line fiction, that this is the new buffer zone. That's one possibility. And history suggests that that is one we should seriously look at because right before deals, or it seems like deals are getting close, Israel really ratches up. up the killing. They did that throughout Gaza when it seemed like deals were going to be happening. So that's one possibility is that the Israelis are aware that something is going to happen,

and they don't have any illusions about it being permanent, but that they may have to take a break from the genocidal operations for a while, and they want to remain entrenched north of Lutani. That's one possibility. The other possibility is that this is going to go nowhere, and the Iranians really meant what they said. They're going to hold this as a red line. Trump isn't going to put the Israelis in check, and then the ball is back in Trump's court. What is he going to do? If the United States and Israel resume their bombing of Iran, the Persian Gulf, the Arab states and the Persian Gulf are going to get absolutely lit up, especially the United Arab Emirates. I mean, already Kuwait has been hit at least twice in recent days when the U.S. has bombed Iran,

and the Iranians have remarkably good intelligence on the targets that they're hitting, far more than the U.S. will ever admit. And even this is bleeding out now in the New York Times and elsewhere that they did far more damage. So the stakes for Trump of resuming this war in a major capacity would be massive. The Iranians are saying, by the way, that the next step of this is going to be Bob Almonda, that the Red Sea is going to get blockaded again. And that's where the U.S. and other powers have been trying to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz predominantly off the western coast of Saudi Arabia. If that blockade gets reimposed, if the Strait of Hormuz is basically shut down,

if the U.S. is bombing Iran and Iran is lighting up all of these GCC countries again, and parenthetically, they may choose not to bomb certain countries that they're having increasingly good diplomatic relations with. And many, the populations of those countries, by the way, do not want this war to start up again. They got absolutely pummeled. They're terrified of this situation. economically, it's been devastating. All of those countries' populations are very nervous about this.

So, you know, Trump is really on the USS Quagmire right now, and the Iranians have an enormous amount of leverage. That's true. But Iran is also suffering. You know, the consequences for Iran are also quite severe on an economic level, but it's far more resilient than the U.S. and Israel assessed. And I would say that right now, Trump is more likely to want to try to make a deal than not. And the question is, how is he going to capitulate on some of the core things that Iran is demanding while still lying his way through a victory narrative? And to make one kind of obvious point, when Trump started this war in February, you know, he had two, you know, fully armed aircraft carrier groups in the region. And Israel had pretty much a full battery of ballistic missile defenses,

even though they had used up a decent number of them during the 12-day war, and the U.S. and Israel still got cooked. So what he's talking about doing now is going back in with only one aircraft carrier group, right? The other one, the like Undy's caught fire and it had to go home. As we reported, the ballistic missile interceptors that Israel has in its possession is down to double digits, which means that they have to rely very heavily on the U.S. Navy's interceptors in the Mediterranean.

and we're low on those too. Oh, and also, it's getting really hot over there. So, like, to be on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East is one thing in February. It's another thing altogether in June and July. So. In no care for the summertime blues. So if Trump couldn't win the first time around with all of the cards in his hand, now that he's played them all, I don't see how he expects this to go any better for him

a second time around. But he's just crazy. I mean, like these people, first of all, the Israeli influence is strong enough, and Trump is just erratic and nutty enough where they may actually decide, oh, we're going to start bombing again. And I'm saying that Iran's track record is impeccable when it comes to saying what they're going to do and then doing it on a military level. And, you know, I think Iran's ballistic missile and drone capacity is at a much stronger

level than the U.S. has led the world to believe. There's been mainstream corporate news reporting on that that seems makes it pretty clear that that's the case. I mean, it's, it is going to be like 4th of July throughout the Persian Gulf if the U.S. bombs. And it's going to be, they are going to absolutely light up that region and start massively attacking Israel again. I mean, I guess where I was going with this is that it seems to be like there are two factors here. Like if, if some sort of peace deal is to be had. And like, as you laid out from Iran's standpoint, if a red line is Israel has to vacate Lebanon, like they have to cease military operations in Lebanon that will involve the United States telling Israel no or curbing their ambitions for like their, you know, Laban's realm or whatever.

And an additional to that, it will also involve the United States having to basically, not admit outright, but basically behind closed doors acknowledge that we have been, been checkmated in the Persian Gulf by Iran. I don't see that. I don't see either of those things happening. No, no, no, no. Look, look, Will, what I'm saying, I'm not saying that I think there's going to be a real ceasefire. What I'm saying is that I think that what Trump and company may try, you know, there was this thing that Marco Rubio floated either today or yesterday in a briefing, where he was saying that, you know, that the U.S. was proposing that if Hezbollah stops firing first, that they'll get the Israelis to not fire back. That was sort of what they said.

And so I could see the U.S. and the mediators trying to come up with some concoction where it's like, okay, the Israelis are going to hold their position. They're not going to move further in than where they are right now. And at a certain hour, no one is going to fire anymore. And we're going to get Hezbollah to agree to it. We're going to get Israel to agree to it. They're going to try to pitch that to the Iranians. Now, whether Hezbollah would agree to that, I doubt they would make a decision without consulting with Iran because they're intricately linked right now, whether the world wants to accept. that or not. From the Iranian perspective, if they were to essentially abandon Lebanon and agree to

some fictional appearance of like a ceasefire, this would have devastating consequences for Iran's reputation. And there are concerns among Lebanese Shia. I've spoken with prominent Lebanese political analysts who are concerned that that could happen. It's not that they're not supportive of Iran. It's not that they don't admire Iran or recognize it as a massive ally to Hezbollah, but there is concerned, given all of the things on the table. But, you know, the Iranians are saying, no, we will not do that. And the past 48 hours, I think one of the main problems Trump has had is that the Iranians keep saying, we're not going to do any negotiating until this scorched earth stuff stops in Lebanon.

The devil's in the details. The Israelis have a Ph.D. in violating ceasefires. the U.S. Board of Peace, Sham, and Gaza, the entire thing, the whole point of that was to put this international facade of legitimacy on Israel's expansionist wars. And the whole thing now is just a sort of crack factory for the Israeli agenda run by this Bulgarian diplomat Mladenov, whose speeches sound like he's an Israeli official now. So, yeah, I mean, like I guess that releases is back to like my initial suspicion, which is that like, whoever is in Hegset's Pentagon, who's ever advising him, is going to concoct a plan in conjunction with Israel that'll sell it to Donald Trump to just be like,

it'll work this time. Or we'll do the same thing that we tried to do back in February and March, but it'll work again this time, that there's more pressure to be had. And then as you laid out, what happens to the Gulf countries, what happens to oil prices over the world, it really just seems like the entire world now is held hostage to Israel and their ambitions to conquer the Middle East. And like America is the only country that can tell them to stop. And I don't see any indication that anyone in our government is capable of doing that for whatever reason. It's incredible because we are continuing a war. The United States is continuing a war with Iran so that Israel can invade Lebanon.

Yeah. Like it's one thing if Israel, wants us to go to war with Iran. And we're like, okay, we'll go to war with Iran for you. It's not even Iran. It's Lebanon. It's completely insane. It's like so far around the bend. And it must not be breaking through to people quite yet. Although it doesn't have to break through. People are down, you know, Trump's approval is down to 30 because, you know, he's destroying everything around them. So they don't even have to like look beyond. But the idea that all of this is happening just so that Israel can continue to pummel Lebanon, just has an extra layer of depravity to it.

I mean, one final note on this, you know, if you look at it from Iran's perspective, and I mentioned this before, yes, I think the Iranian economy is going to face a massive, massive challenge. The Israelis, in a way, I think would be fine with the military operations ending because I think part of their calculation is that they've made the ground more fertile for covert influencing operations inside of Iran. You know, Merriam Adelson's paper Israel Hayoum the other day ran a piece about this Mossad division that was established explicitly to engage in internal disruption and insurgent activities inside of Iran.

And I think that, you know, from the Israeli perspective, if you know, this quote unquote ends, a different kind of war restarts picking up from January and the operations where they're arming people and using the cover of overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrators to then try to create a violent insurrection inside of the country. So I don't know that Israel's like, oh, my God, we don't want Trump to stop this. I think the Lebanon thing has been, you know, the Iran war in a way was a two-hander for Netanyahu. On the one hand, he gets the U.S. into this open, overt, hot war against Iran, which he had been agitating for since the 1990s. And on the other hand, it gives him cover to do what he's doing right now,

which is to occupy more territory in Lebanon than Israel has in decades, where they're able to now move north of the Latani River. And I think that Netanyahu really believes that's going to be our new border, our new buffer zone. And so Lebanon in many ways is, is really where the focus should be right now, because I think geostrategically, it's clear. The war against Iran is going to continue one way or the other. And the Israelis and the Americans absolutely are going to try to create an internal rebellion against the state. No question about that.

But Lebanon, they're trying to smash the Lebanese state. They want there to be a civil war. They have these talks going on between the Lebanese government and the Israelis, which the entire purpose of it is to try to enlist the Lebanese army as the counter-reesome. insurgency force alongside the Americans and the Israelis against Hezbollah. And so the Israeli plan is to shatter states. It's why they bombed the whole conventional military in Syria after Assad fled. They want they they bombed the entire conventional military. They wanted Iran to be massively bombed. It's conventional military to be massively bombed and wiped out. They want to shatter

the state in Lebanon. They want to say, oh, 70% of Gaza is the new standard before we get to 100%. The entire thing is to shatter these societies completely and Netanyahu is getting that right now. To turn slightly to like domestic political concerns. Like Ryan, you mentioned how unpopular this war is and what an anchor it is around Trump's neck because basically not only did he explicitly run against going to war with Iran, he can't even sell it to his own people in terms of like, what is the benefit to America here? Like, well, why are we doing this? Is it to stop Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz and having nuclear weapons, like which they didn't have

and like the straight of room was open before the fucking war started but like that being said I've been following on drop site like and I'm interested in how like both for the Republicans and the Democrats right now in terms of domestic political considerations Israel has become like an anchor

and it's something that they tried not to address but now they have to address it and I think what we're seeing are like what you're reporting would suggest is that they're the Israel lobby in America is adapting and sort of mutating in a number of interesting ways to sort of allow their candidates to publicly disavow them while still funding them and like behind closed doors more or less

agreeing with their entire agenda. Could you sketch out a little bit of how that is shaking out? Yeah, it's been a really interesting and kind of fast evolution. Up until really 2020, APEC and APEC never had a super PAC. Like what they would do is they would have tons of, you know, both Jewish and Christian Zionists in a particular congressional district, and they would make individual donations to the candidates. And that was really enough for them to, you know, basically make a few examples of a few people and then keep everybody in line from that. Then 2020, they threw this offshoot called Democratic majority for Israel, DMFI, they finally get into the Super PAC game.

And actually, their first spend ever was against Bernie Sanders, which is kind of, kind of ironic. And then they spent, you know, very heavily to try to stop Jamal Bowman, if you remember, from beating this guy, Elliot Engel, who was one of the most hardcore Zionists in the house. And he was chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, kind of incredible to see him ousted. And APEC watching that was like, okay, our pup, DMFI clearly isn't up to the task. we need to do our own super PAC. So in 2022, they come in with like 50 million in super PAC spending.

2024, they come in with $100 million in super PAC spending. But now they're so toxic that this cycle, they are funneling it through all of these kind of pop-up packs and shell packs where the pack will, you know, on the surface be supportive of, in one case, science and medicine. Like in a couple other cases, they're just kind of completely made up. out of nowhere, like they'll be called like, uh, my favorite one is a affordable Chicago now. That was one they used in Illinois, like stealing from Mom Dani. They're like, I think they took a little extra pleasure from grabbing the affordable label.

Uh, and then they move millions of dollars through the pack and then it shuts down, you know, once, you know, once that race is over. Another, you know, another one they've used is, is about, you know, pro choice America or, you know, like democratic women. Uh, and so they move, they move money from one pack. to another pack to another pack, and then they create a new pack, and then that pack doesn't have to disclose its donors until after the next election. That's what they're doing in, and they're doing in San Francisco now. Their DMFI is spending throughout California, like outwardly. But they've really started to take umbrage at, at us and others who are kind of following the money. They're like, why do you, why are you so obsessed with us? Why do you, why do you have to, you know, focus only on us?

And it's, it's, it's, what's wild is that they are literally the only interest group that does this. Like, nobody else is that toxic, which is kind of an incredible thought. Like, we've got crypto. We've got AI. You got big oil. You've got Wall Street. Like, none of those interest groups think that they are so toxic that they have to hide the source of their funding. Like, when crypto goes out and spends, I mean, it sucks that crypto spends 10 million dollars in a race.

but when they do it, it's like they're doing it through their crypto pack. Like they don't create, maybe they will eventually, but they're not toxic enough according to their own polling. And the same with the AI groups. Like the AI super PACs are spending tens of millions of dollars across the country, but they do it through the AI super PAC because if you tell voters, oh, this is an AI super PAC, people are like, okay, like, whatever, like probably don't like special interest money, but it's like, I'm not going to vote against this person just specific.

because this Super PAC is supporting them, but that is the case now for APAC. APAC, and we did a poll on this in Michigan, basically asking people if APAC support was a proxy for all other things. And even moderate voters, like, answered yes to that. He said, the statement was like, if APAC, if a candidate won't stand up to APAC, I don't believe that they'll, you know, fight for me on other issues. And even moderate Democrats in the Michigan primary said overwhelmingly that they believe that. So APAC has been, become the bat signal. So now they're trying to make sure nobody can follow them. It's so interesting that that is, that seems to be like the first line, the, the, the first retort that any, no matter whether it is

someone like, um, who's that fucking, Corey Walker, like someone who like just is a weeb for Judaism and Zionism and has spent their entire life writing for like fifth tier, um, Jewish identity magazines or whether it is like the death star of the Zionist lobby. They all have the same thing when you talk about any of their, any of their mechanations, anything they do, any of the slimy shit they do to their opponents, any of the hundreds of millions of dollars they funnel into whatever, the response is always like, oh, why do you think this is so important? You know, actually, most people like don't care about fucking Israel.

It's like, okay, then why don't you like get into pickleball? Right. And it's special, like, it's one thing when it's like one of those shitty writers that like, you know, every article they write is like either, you know, the secret Judaism of backgammon. And then the other half of their articles are just like dare Sturber, but just ethnically inverted. But when it's APEC itself, it's so fucking funny. It is like if in James Bond, if Blowfield was like, you must really have a hard on for me. Yes. Because, yeah, in Illinois, for instance, like, APACs and their and they're like fake super PACs made up like something like 60% of all spending.

Like that includes all the candidates like personal money that they raised, all the other super PACs. So I was like, why are you spending so much time focusing on this group that? spending 60% of the money in the races. It's like, I don't know. Why are we doing that? I would like to find out, I always, my favorite elected position in all of Illinois politics is the Cook County Water Reclamation

District. And I've never known what it is. The only reason I know what it is, is I remember like going to the dog park with my mom when I was like 11. And her friend was like, oh, you should really devote for my friend, you know, Jerry Snickers for Water Reclamation because he's really good at water. And I remember thinking like, you know, even 11 like that's, that guy's life sucks.

What a loser. But I wonder if like, how low does it go? Because I always thought the most ridiculous thing was like, you remember when Daniel Biss shived Carlos Rosa in. Oh, yes. When he was running for governor, yeah. Yeah, when Pritzker ended up winning. I always thought that was so ridiculous because how could you look people in the eye and tell them the lieutenant governor of Illinois, the state in the dead middle of fucking America, the lieutenant governor, he has to be pro-Israel or it just, it's crystal knock tomorrow.

How could you look people in the eye and tell them that? But with that much money, they probably have, like, favored candidates for Water Reclamation district manager. APEC or, like, you know, Democratic majority, one of the cutout groups, one of these Mirage groups you guys have talked about, they have probably spent like $20,000 here or there on like a coroner's race. Who's going to be the county coroner? Oh, I could see having, for instance, the Manhattan coroner in your pocket would, uh, well, that's that's different. You might be advantageous in certain circumstances. I mean, like, the coroner of, like, Lee's summit mystery. You never know where anyone someone's going to die, you know?

Maybe we'll cover all your bases. Maybe we'll talk about, maybe we'll just real quick. Maybe we'll talk about Cuban a little bit later, but I was, I met a Cuban official a week or two ago who had just gotten here to the United States to work for the, uh, the Cuban embassy here. And he was like, yes, I was like, well, what's your portfolio? He's like, well, I've got media. I have academics.

I have lobbying in Washington. I have, and he named like nonprofits. He named like five other things. And I was like, you know the pro-Israel lobby has like four people for like Colgate University. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

There is probably multiple Halel chapters at Hamburger University. Well, like, the thing is like they're still spending money and it still works, right? Like, I mean, they just got mass. out of Kentucky. And, you know, like they're, they're spending heavily against Abdul Saeed in Michigan. They got two candidates there that they don't know which one to support. There's, you know, Platner in Maine, you know, he's texting hose on the side. We'll see it. We'll see if that amounts to anything. But the point is like, their money still spends and it still works. And look, on the Republican side, getting rid of Massey is one thing, because that's Republican primary

voters. But for Democratic primary voters, the question of Israel and particularly the issue of genocide is like, that's become a sticking point and it's become a problem. And I think that I've noticed recently and like, Ryan, drop sites reporting, I seem to like confirm this is it seems like, confirm this is it seems like the Israel lobby is giving a pass to certain democratic politicians to say in a primary, yes, I think Israel committed to genocide in Gaza or like we should, you know, theoretically cut off offensive weapons sales to Israel or we should, you know, I don't know, tidy up our foreign and military aid to Israel to say that. But then behind closed doors, I'm thinking of Jack Slossberg in New York City and then Scott Wiener out in California,

that behind closed doors they're just saying to their same donors, yeah, like, I don't believe in any of that. Like, they've been given a pass to say the thing that you have to say now in a Democratic primary, which is to recognize the very real and ongoing genocide that Israel is carrying out and saying, well, we should do something about that. But then behind closed door is saying the exact opposite. Yeah, we just had some crazy reporting on that yesterday, where in that crazy race with Scott Wiener, Chakra Barty, and Connie Chan, there's also this pro-Israel, very eccentric candidate in San Francisco.

Marie, I forget her name. She was dialing for dollars in May. She gets a list. She's calling all the pro-Israel supporters. And she calls Moses Lubitsky, who's the real estate developer in San Francisco. And he's also like president of Washington Institute for near. he's policy, like major AAC donor. And she tells him, like, I'm the only pro-Israel candidate in the race.

Like, can you get behind me? And he tells her, well, I'm behind Weiner. My network's behind Weiner. He told me he has only said that it's a genocide because he kind of has to. So I get it. And so, you know, he's a supporter of Israel. We're sticking with him. She told that story publicly.

Didn't name the donor. I talked to a source who was on the, call and said, yeah, it was this, it was Moses. I asked Moses. He didn't deny it. He said, whatever I said to Scott and Marie, that's that's for you to tell them. And Scott Weiner's spokesperson denied that he said it. But yeah, it goes to, and maybe, maybe Weiner was lying to Moses, but some lying is going on. And APEC is recognizing that what they used to be able to demand of Democrats, they can't demand anymore. So you're right that you're spotting that. That they're, that they're allowing a lot more criticism to sneak in.

They're also running into some problems where they're secretly backing candidates and then kind of losing control of them after they get to office. So like they secretly back this woman, Maxine Dexter, against Primala Jaya Paul's sister out in Portland in 2024. Now that she's in Congress, she's like, that money's toxic. I regret taking any of it. I'll never take APEC money again. Netanyahu's a war criminal and he's committing a genocide.

This woman in North Carolina, Valerie Foucher, they spent millions electing her. She just beat Nita Alam, you know, strong pro-Palestine candidate in a very close race in North Carolina. She's saying the same thing, genocide, war criminal. So they're spending money on these candidates and they're like losing half of them. And they're then, they're signing letters. They're voting, you know, with Rashida on things. It's like, but, you know, maybe they can just, if they can just hold the line long enough for Israel to be able to kind of lock in its project, that's enough for them. Because the spending does still matter.

Well, speaking of genocidal war criminals, I mentioned it a little earlier in the show. New York City was nice enough to host a parade for one this weekend. And in case you don't know, it was like the Israel Day parade in New York on Sunday. Controversal because Zoran Mandani elected not to attend it, first New York City mayor ever to do that for obvious reasons. But like, for the last like three years now, particularly in New York City, I remember when the Colombian encampens were happening, anytime there's a pro-Palestinian protest or activism of any kind, anything said at one of those or any person there has to be accounted for by any organizer or anyone who spoke at that rally.

And like they were saying from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. They're saying globalized the intifada. That's a call to violence. What are we to make of a figure like Basil Smotrits walking proudly down Fifth Avenue with half of New York's politics, half of New York cities or New York. state and cities, politicians basically arm and arm with him. This is a guy who is literally in charge of the ethnic cleansing project of greater Israel and the West Bank and elsewhere.

Like, I won't hold my breath to wait for anyone to ask them to condemn their fellow parade goers on Sunday. People are often saying, you know, imagine if the reverse were happening. But there is no way to imagine it because there is nobody, you know, in a mirror image, doing remotely what they are doing. They're the only people right now in the world doing this. There's a lot of violence in Sudan, and it would be good if that conflict would end

that the UAE would stop backing it. But nobody is carrying out one genocide in Gaza. As you said, the same practice is going on in southern Lebanon. And then just, you know, freely walking through New York City, you would expect in a normal world everyone who spoke there to be getting hounded. Like here's a list of quotes about, not just quotes, but actions that Smotrists are undertaken in the last

year or two. But look at the, I mean, if you, if you fly up to like 30,000 feet and you look at this in the context of what's happened since the Gaza genocide began, just on the issue of international justice or the international criminal court. And of course, you know, the international criminal court was not established to prosecute war criminals like Israelis or Americans. And in fact, the U.S. government refuses still to ratify the Rome Treaty. And in fact, there remains legislation on the books in the United States that was referred to as the Hague Invasion Act when it was first introduced in the early 2000s, and it became law under George Bush endorsed by both Democrats and Republicans that explicitly states that if any U.S. personnel are brought to the Hague

to be prosecuted for war crimes or any personnel of U.S. allied countries, and Israel is specifically listed, that the commander-in-chief is authorized to engage, in military operations to liberate them from the Hague. And that's why human rights organizations called it the Hague Invasion Act. Fast forward to right now, you have Benjamin Netanyahu, who has an international arrest warrant out for him, Joav Galant, who has an international arrest warrant out for him. Bezal Smotrich now, we understand, is in the process of having an arrest warrant put out for him.

And he's being welcome to, all of these figures are being regularly welcome to the United States, to Britain, to Germany, and elsewhere. All of these powerful Western countries are now doing what they've said they've intended to do with international justice, which is to ensure that it is never going to be used to hold any of them accountable. And it used to be that when war criminals from Guatemala or the dirty wars in Central and Latin America, if they came into the United States, they ran the risk of being hit with law lawsuit papers by attorneys working with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who then were going

to use universal jurisdiction and sue them for their war crimes in U.S. courts. Those laws then largely got abolished. And what we're with, I mean, Bezal Smotrich, these guys are cartoonish, murderous villains. No question about it. But in the bigger picture, if you take this and you combine it with what Trump has done with getting the United Nations to endorse his fraudulent Board of Peace, which Trump is portraying as a new privatized alternative. when in reality it's just like a scam. It literally is a Ponzi scheme. There's been almost no money put into that thing

except the United Arab Emirates. And that money is almost certainly going in some way as kickback back to the Trump family. It's remarkable what they've done. But the end result of it is that they're actually implementing what Democrats and Republicans voted for when that Hague invasion act was passed, which is we don't believe that basic standards

of international justice should apply. to our war criminals or our friends who are war criminals. Yeah, absolutely. And just the lesson I'll say on this is like a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the protests outside the Park East Synagogue when they hosted a real estate expo to auction off land in the West Bank to Americans who would like to move there at the expense of the people already living there. And a lot of that, like a lot of the defense of that was like, this is a religious institution.

It's, it's, they're just Jews living in New York City. They don't support the settler movement. but Smotrich spoke at Parkey's synagogue just yesterday. You know, so it's like a little hard to wash your hands of it when you're inviting this guy to speak at your synagogue. But, Jeremy, there's another thing I wanted to ask you about. Like, we were talking to Ryan about the ways in which now that Israel has become at least like a political, I wouldn't say a political problem, a political inconvenience for a lot of people running for office in this country. And one of the demands is either the recognition of calling it a genocide.

But then another demand would be the cutting off of arms sales and military aid. to the nation that is doing this genocide. I don't know if you saw it. I was hoping you could explain to me. I saw a report this week of some of a proposal that was suggested that would essentially merge the American and Israeli military. Like, do you know what I'm referring to? And could you explain that?

We're not merged it to essentially, I don't know, like, give Israel like the passwords to our fucking Gmail login so that like, so that any, like, so that the arms sales or any shipment of arms between these two entities would essentially be off books because they would be on paper one entity. Ryan, I think, can give the breakdown of that, but just one, before Ryan does that, like one bigger picture thing that relates to this and the discussion, you know, I'm not a political journalist. I mean, I defer to Ryan on these issues, but, you know, based on just my observations of this

and being immersed in, you know, in covering these wars that are happening, the discourse in the United States, if you look at the way that, for instance, Bernie Sanders talks about the Gaza genocide or about Israel, he almost never uses the word Israel. He refers to it as Netanyahu's extremist right-wing government. And of course, you know, there's a reason that he does this. This isn't accidental. He's not having a brain slip. Like, this is, you know, this is how Sanders is choosing to do this. And it's, I don't mean to necessarily single out Bernie Sanders because he's not the only one doing this, but he's the one that is most prominent in. hearing this. I think that what we're seeing in that, though, I think that posture is going to go

much more mainstream within the Democratic Party. And, you know, Israel may have early elections. You know, the Knesset voted to dissolve itself. It could trigger early elections, but it seems like if they don't happen early, they're going to happen by October. The opposition to Netanyahu is also genocidal and is also, you know, some of the critique of Netanyahu is that he didn't succeed enough. He hasn't actually sewn up any of these things. He hasn't actually definitively won. But I think that one of the challenges going forward is that if the broader public allows themselves to just say, oh, the new reality is that Democrats are condemning the Gaza genocide

and they kind of try to put everything under the boat of Netanyahu and say, well, we sunk that boat now or that boat is no longer operational. Israel's good again. We can reset the relationship. I think that's something that's dangerous. it's embodied in that notion that keeps getting reinforced that the problem is Netanyahu. That is a overwhelmingly genocidal society right now from top to bottom. And that's what's been exposed to the world right now.

And so if the Democrats try to get away with just sort of saying, well, let's shove it all into the Netanyahu box and kick it off the cliff, that's no good. And that means that the relationship is going to endure. And what they're trying to do with this kind of shift of the money and the relationship is is extremely clever and so clever, I suspect that this is what they will do. Like under the current regime, the U.S. sends billions of dollars basically through the State Department to Israel and to support its like, you know, purchases of our weapons. And then as a result, you get some, you know, State Department bureaucrats who look around

and say, you know, are you raping your detainees? Are you blocking humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza? Are you using white phosphorus? It's like asking these annoying questions and then getting blocked, you know, by their superiors in the State Department and saying we're going to give them the money anyway. But it also creates a very clear paper trail for people to focus on and to say, I see this money that goes from us to Israel. I want it to stop. And you can then pass legislation and block it and you can have debates about it. So what they're proposing to do is basically switch it over to the Pentagon, eliminate the kind of above board money.

money and say, okay, you win. You got us. We're not giving Israel any money. Of course, if access gets his wish, there's a $1.5 trillion budget that can't be audited. And you embed the Israeli security apparatus inside that completely uncheckable institution. And it is already so deeply embedded because so many big tech companies, every big tech company has purchased countless Israeli startups and a lot of them for kind of cyber weapons and cyber surveillance technology but facial recognition like you name it

and so those are all already embedded and then you move the kind of Israeli cooperation into the Pentagon and the thinking is okay Ilhan Omar like how are you going to stop this like what bill are you going to write? Because if it's all just the Pentagon's budget and that goes up every year and can't be audited it's just essentially a black box, then you can't say, oh, like, don't chip these weapons.

You can't ship these weapons. It's all just one thing at that point. It's all one thing. And so at that point, like, the fight has to be over sanctions. Because if you're, if the country's actually under sanctions, then that relationship is illegal. But you can, you can just see how steep of a climb you're talking about to get there. To move to a slightly different part of the world, but it is very much related to everything we've been discussing. today. And that is Cuba. I want to bring up Cuba because, like, Ryan, I've seen you speak

about how, like, it's very clear that, like, Marco Rubio, Cuba's always been his focus, like, his backers, sort of like the South Florida, Miami, Cuban community. This has been sort of like their crown jewel. This has been their North Star for decades, which is overthrowing Cuba's government and like, I don't know, just getting Meyer Lansky back in control of the island. But, like, the Iran war has been, I guess, sort of a speed bump to that. But like, because of how big a speed bump it's been and everything Jeremy was talking about in terms of like how deep a quagmire we are in and how it is essentially demonstrating to the entire world in a very real way, maybe for the first time ever, like the true limits of American power. And that we're likely like, we're not going to bend Iran to our will and that they're going to essentially like win. Because of that, like it makes this current government, a thousand times more dangerous, especially to any country in this hemisphere. In Cuba being the number one target on that list of like, I mean, it's not, they're not exactly hiding it.

It seems very clear that regardless of any outcome that happens in Iran, they are looking at regime change in Cuba as number one with a bullet because they couldn't affect a regime change in Iran. And they look at Cuba as a much softer target. Like, where, where does, where does Cuba stand right now? in terms of the conditions of life on the island. And like, how is their government preparing or, I don't know, like stealing themselves for what could very well be like another Bay of Pigs situation?

Yeah. And on top of that, they just did some like congressional redistricting. So all of a sudden there's like competitive house elections down there. So that's even more incentive to kind of whip up a war frenzy and, you know, send the Delta Force into, into Havana just to satisfy that. But it is, it is bleak. it is bad. Like if you think about the basic functions of a government, picking up the trash and keeping the lights on are kind of first among them. And with this full spectrum oil blockade of the island that's been going on since December, January, with the exception of that one Russian tanker that Trump let through amid all of the kind of attention that was on the island when that delegation went there, it's bad. like regular national blackouts, garbage everywhere, and that's in Havana.

Like people say outside of Havana, it's much worse. Health outcomes, you know, are going down, have been going down over the past couple of years. It's because both Biden and Trump really, you know, put their boot on the neck of Cuba after Obama had opened things up. And so even during the special period in the 90s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and they were going through, you know, an extraordinary amount of suffering, like, everybody on the island losing significant amounts of weight even. The health outcomes didn't go down that much because the healthcare system was always the crown jewel of the revolution. But even there, you're seeing infant mortality go up. You're seeing life expectancy go down. And so, and you also had in 2019, Cuba kind of opened up the internet. And so they've been getting significant

amounts of social media onto the island since then. Right. at the same time, Trump really cracks down on sanctions-wise, and then COVID hits. And then Biden, instead of lifting sanctions amid COVID, like, tightened them. And so at the same time that Cuban people were getting access to social media and seeing what's going on in the U.S. and in South America, things have just been getting worse and worse and worse, like every day since 2019 with a real ratching up when Venezuela was taken down by. Trump and Rubio. And so that has created like genuine like resentment from a lot of people on the island towards the government. So like the thing that the U.S. has been trying to achieve for decades,

they have like made some inroads into that by, you know, they've killed enough babies. They've starved enough people. And then that people are are very frustrated and you're starting to see some protests pop up. But it's really unclear to me. Maybe you guys or Jeremy has some idea, like how they get anything other than a failed state on the other side of this. Does Meyer Lansky have kids or grandkids? Well, I mean, like, Jeremy, as you were saying, like, if the goal is to just smash states, then like having a failed state, even if it creates a refugee crisis, isn't really a problem for them. As long as it is destroyed and, you know, under the boot.

I mean, you know, like, you know, just capitulated the United States. I mean, if you look at Syria just as an example, you know, where they, the, they, they, they, they, bomb the conventional military infrastructure, and then you look at the relationship that's developing between Ahmed al-Shara, Abu Jalani, and Trump, and the Syrian government and Israel. You know, the failed state opportunity there is we can now mold it into something different. And, you know, what Ryan is saying in the case of Cuba, like, they don't have really a Delci-Rodriguez option. in Cuba because of the nature of the Cuban Revolution, because of the way that the state was created. There's a way in which, too, there's, you know, I don't think these are analogous situations,

but there is some comparison that's worthwhile between Iran and Cuba, and that is that both countries spent, had a multi-decade project of preparing for these scenarios. And Cuba is a nation of institutions. The mistake is always to assume that it's just about one person or a cult of personality. I mean, the U.S. was always saying when Fidel Castro dies, the entire thing is going to implode. Just as one historical example, in Yugoslavia, when Yosep. Rose Tito died in the early 1980s, for 10 years after Tito died, he was the only ruler from 1945 odd, and he led the partisans in the fight against the fascist. They literally had a period for 10 years where the state functioned on

the notion of Iposedly Tito Tito, Tito, like after Tito Tito, where they would literally discuss, how would Tito have run? But what would Tito do? What would Tito do? It was literally a thing. That, of course, didn't go, you know, didn't go well because then it ended up in this heinous, bloody civil war filled with, you know, war criminals and it chopped the whole place into pieces. But in the case of Cuba, I mean, I was thinking when I saw it. saw that they issued this indictment against, I think he's 94 years old, Raul Castro. I was thinking, okay, there's going to be some kind of, you know, made for TV operation. And Rubio would maybe even put on a flight jacket and go along with them.

And they're going to like literally wheel Raul Castro, like, you know, into a chopper and fly him back to the United States. Hey, old people love South Florida, you know. But it's like, but so if you imagine it, what does it look like? I mean, the idea of like Bay of Pigs 2.0, you know, you, you, or this time though, with the Marines or whatever, you know, like it's like sent up the main goal. You know, yeah. I mean, to what end? Okay, you go in and you occupy it.

If you're going to like see, you want to seize it, what, as now a U.S. territory? You want to what? You want to kill the president of Cuba. He's a replaceable figure. You know, this isn't, you know, it's, it's, you ask like, what is the end game here, militarily. And it's like, I think probably there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the government in Cuba, as Ryan has stated. I think that the U.S. has tried to use its strangulation policy where you force people into such a desperate situation that it starts to really resonate.

Oh, my God, the only solution is to change the government. But to what end? Since 1959, that state has functioned, you know, as a communist, socialist, revolutionary state for better or for worse, and it built institutions. So what is the game there, that Rubio becomes the governor of Cuba? It's not like Cubans are going to be like, yay, we love the United States. I mean, there's a divided society. Get United Healthcare into the country. We'd love to have Blue Cross Blue Shield. They'd love to find out what that's like. That would be a way to create a revolution.

Yeah. Put them on hold with United Health. I said this. I think we talked about this last time. Last time we were here, but I really do feel like what we've kind of witnessed in Trump 2.0 is he's managed to embody every single heinous aspect of American political history and White House history. He's got like the 1950s origin stories of the CIA stuff going on. He's got sort of like the open imperial regime change stuff of like the neocons. He's got the like, you know, corruption of Nixon, but like on steroids to, an unimaginable degree.

I mean, Nixon's corruption looks quaint compared to this. But it's like, if you literally, and then, and then he sometimes will throw in a little bit of Bill Clinton, like military humanism that we're bombing you to save you kind of stuff. But he's, he somehow has managed to just embody the absolute ugliest faces of America possible. And he's going to put his face on a $250 bill. It's just like, it's a remarkable moment we're living. I guess it's like something that, that you, you brought.

up to begin the show that I've been thinking about ever since. And look, you know, if you portray your sources, I don't want a therapist in Tehran to start getting assassinated by Except. But like, when you talk to the Iranians about how they're using, like, a psychologist to, like, craft their responses to Trump to, like, I don't know, like, to make it go down easier or to speak language that he understands or will respond to. Like, can you give us any example of that? Like, how are they couching this message in therapy speaker?

They literally said that they've seen positive results from it. They talked about it in kind of a clinical way that we started to see, you know, positive results after we brought on the senior psychologist. I mean, look, none of that should be surprising. When the Iranian delegations were in Oman, when they were in Geneva, when they were in Islamabad, they're bringing a multidisciplinary team of people, including PhD specialists in American studies who are whose entire life. That is so funny to contrast to who we're sending are the dopes that we're sending over there. Like it really is. You know, I don't, at some of the things

that Iranian officials so calmly and matter-of-factly explain their approach to things. And when you listen to it, it makes sense. They're bringing people with a wide range of expertise. Of course you're going to have a psychologist or a mental health professional analyzing this guy. I mean, the CIA does this all the time when they deal with adversaries around the world. So it shouldn't be shocking that the Iranians are doing this. What makes it kind of comical is that Trump is so obviously mentally deranged. And so when the Iranians talk about it, it's sort of like, you know, show us on the doll where the late Supreme Leader hurt you. You know, it's, it's, but like,

when we start off, like, it does seem like a big consideration is like, how can they, like, we all, we all, like, we said, like, these are their standards to even talk, even to talk in the first place, let alone end this conflict. But like, those are things that, like, they're not going to budge on and that Trump, like, absolutely cannot be seen to capitulate on. Like, he's very sensitive about this. He has to have a big victory. He has to be able to declare victory. So, like, is there a way even possible to psychologically manipulate or massage the language that you use to talk about it so that it will appear for Trump's own ego or domestic political consideration?

I think that this is a big win for him. But I think there's two reasons, but I think there's two reasons why there hasn't been a memorandum of understanding. One is that Trump cannot find that victory narrative that's going to work. And the Iranians just, they just won't cross the line to give it to him for reasons that have to do with their red lines and reasons that have to do with the fact that they feel that it would be a total insult to the dead in Iran to do it. And also because they said from the beginning, they view this as an existential war. So I think that is one reason there hasn't been a memorandum of understanding is that Trump's people cannot threaten their way into getting Iran to agree to give him what he wants, which is some fraudulent thing that he can pin on the board. The second, though, is Israel. And there was a moment where I was speaking to Iranian officials and they were telling me that the Pakistani mediators, this was late last week, the Pakistani mediators had told them that they had spoken to Trump and that it really seemed like the terms were getting finalized.

then the Qataris, who the Iranians were glad to bring in to the equation, because they felt that the Qataris had more legitimate sway with Trump than the Pakistanis. I mean, Ryan and Murtaza can talk all about the relationship between Trump and the Pakistanis, but they felt that there was a more reliable mediator in Qatar. The Qataris then, a short time after the Pakistani spoke to Trump, speak to Trump, and they come back to the Iranians and they say, it's not a good situation. This all happened within the span of some hours, Will, where I heard first, that the Pakistanis were saying this, then later the Qataris say this. And it turned out the Qatari's were right. And that Trump then goes ballistic again and starts talking about

we're going to need to bomb them again. And then the U.S. starts throwing new terms at it. Why did that happen? For those two reasons, he couldn't get the narrative. He kept wanting to get a way to say victory and his advisors are sitting there and saying, yeah, but that's going to get poked apart. And that's why Trump's having this tantrum about the New York Times and CNN and others that they refuse to say how much winning I'm doing, no matter how many times I tell them I'm winning, they just won't admit that I'm winning. And, you know, yelling at like David Sanger, who is like, you know, a scribe for the kind of national security state. It's like, when I watched that, I was like, I almost was like on Trump's side in that moment where I'm like, yeah, no more at him.

But then the other part is Israel. The scandal here isn't just that like this was war for Israel stuff. Like, yes, there's a legitimate discussion to be had there. But it's not just about war for Israel stuff. It's that Israel was able to so effectively contaminate the intelligence pipeline. I mean, all of this business about how easy it was going to be. And the idea that like on the fourth day of the bombing, Steve Whitkoff is texting a Basarachi. This is an early March and saying, isn't it about time to start talking, you know, about how to wrap this thing up? They seem to legitimately believe if they did these leadership strikes that it was going to cause an implosion and a revolution in the country. Israel, I don't.

don't think was just like, oh, God, we were wrong. I think that part of it is that they're contaminating the intelligence process. And the scandal here is how seriously that intelligence is taken by Trump and his inner circle. And when you fire and marginalize actual intelligence professionals, you know, for whatever anybody thinks about Tulsi Gabbard, you know, who was the director of national intelligence, she had a track record of being very critical about U.S. war mongering specifically toward Iran. And they kept her completely out of all of these discussions. I'm not trying to pretend that she didn't become a sycophant for that administration.

But this was somebody who would have, you would have wanted in the room to say, what's the other view of this? I mean, she did, upon testifying for Congress about what the consensus of the national intelligence community was about Iran's nuclear program is that they didn't have one. And we're not likely to. So, and then now she's gone. So, you know, I spoke to, I spoke to people who,

who are, we're going to be in the Trump administration. and their nominations got killed by Israel. You know, Danny Davis, for instance, who's a multi-decade military veteran, he was supposed to be Tulsi Gabbard's deputy. And Danny Davis said to me recently, you know, that the people that he's in touch with in the inner circle, that if you speak out of school and you are giving a dissenting voice,

you're kicked out and you probably are going to be fired. So the only people that stick around are, the people willing to be quiet and zip their lips or the people that just convert to sycophantism like Marco Rubio because they've just sold their soul. And they're like, we're all in now. And, and, you know, we're going to fluff Trump and give him trophies and medals and, you know, talk about how great it is if he's faces on the $250 bill. I mean, it's so, yeah. I can't wait for the UFC fight. But like, I mean, like, in addition, like, the scandal here being like, yes, it does seem like Israel got America into a war that it wanted us to fight for.

for decades. But now that we're in the war and it's going badly, I mean, like, attendant to that is the idea that we can't, like, for whatever, for whatever reason, right, and feel free to speculate. But like, now we can't get out of this war or even negotiate any kind of truce if Israel won't let us do it. Yeah, but while we were talking here, Trump posted on truth social that he had a great talk with Netanyahu and that he also had a great talk through highly respected representatives with Hezbollah and that they're going to agree to stop shooting at each other. But in a way, it seems like also what I was saying, like he doesn't say anything about, he said

the Israelis are not going to invade Beirut. And the troops that were on their way there are turning back. But that's not like they're going to withdraw from, you know, north of the Latani or they're going to vacate, you know, the multi-hundreds or 2,000 kilometers of Lebanon, square kilometers of Lebanon that they're currently occupying. That's the Israeli game. I mean, like, it's again, but like, it seems like they are taking territory. And like they're expanding that.

They're not beyond the Latani River. They're expanding that yellow line. But as far as their actual operations in southern Lebanon right now, it does seem like they are facing a brutal and really like unwinnable guerrilla warfare against Azbala right now. Because like every day I see a new video of one of those like drones on like fishing line crash into some APC or something like that. like they're taking territory but are like how is there actually strategically militarily?

Like how are they actually performing in southern Lebanon right now? Because like from what I can tell, it seems like they're not winning this brutal guerrilla warfare that has bullets fighting. They're killing thousands of people. They took a crusader castle yesterday. But like it's hard to get casualty reports. But like it seems like this is a brutal and hellacious war that they've gotten themselves into. And it looks like that within an hour or two of taking that crusader castle, they took another

casualty because, you know, as, as like people were pointing out, like, well, that's a crusader castle. Like, that's not actually a useful castle. Ryan, it's a castle. It's a castle. It's a castle. It's strategic. It's fortified.

What more do you need here? Got the hilltop. Yeah. I mean, you know, they're doing a good job of ethnically cleansing, huge portions of it. They are effectively killing enormous numbers of medics and journalists and making, you know, making the place. uninhabitable. They're also taking, you know, significant numbers of casualties, as you said. I mean, this seems like kind of a replay of Gaza. Like, they were very efficient in killing hundreds

of thousands of people and destroying, like, any fabric of civil or, you know, basic, basic human life. But they were still taking casualties. Like, the enemy was still engaging them in the field up until, like, the last day before the ceasefire. And by the way, they still haven't disarmed either. Right. Or nor have they left. And that seems like it's going pretty much according to the exact same way with Hezbollah. Like, they're still taking. losses every day and I'm sure they're killing far more people than they're losing, but like the enemy is still engaging them pretty much on a daily basis in South Lebanon. You know, I mean, Will, one, I just got, I just got done with, with spending a week talking to senior leaders of Hamas and

Palestinian Islamic jihad. And I, you know, I also talked to Hezbollah officials. I talk to Iranian officials. And, you know, I think, you know, there's a recognition among all of the forces within the axis of resistance, that Israel has gotten unprecedented levels of support from the United States during this three-year period, that Netanyahu has won tactical victories for sure. And the question is, what happens in the medium in the long term? You know, like James Baldwin wrote, God gave no other rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time. And, you know, I think of talking to Muhammad al-Hindi, one of the, he was a pediatric surgeon and one of the co-founders of Palestinian Islamic jihad. And he was saying that, you know, I was asking, why hasn't there been more of an uprising in the occupied West Bank since October 7th? And we were talking about the way that the Palestinian Authority collaborated with the Israelis and they attacked the armed resistance. But he said that this is a pot and they're holding the lid on it and it's boiling. And he's, and he's, and he's, and he's, and he's,

He said another intifada is coming. It's absolutely coming. And so I guess what I'm saying is that it may look as though history is unfolding a certain way right now and that Netanyahu is at the apex of his career and that his project is succeeding. But the Palestinians didn't raise the white flag. Hezbollah, we were told, was decimated and they've come up with new, cheap, innovative ways to inflict casualties on the Israelis. the Iranians stunned the United States and Israel with the way that they retaliated and the way that they were able to build leverage and the way that they used asymmetric tactics to completely dominate the straight of Hormuz.

And you can't kill everyone. They just can't. The Israelis cannot kill everyone. So the fire is going to come next time. It's a question of how is that fire going to start and what are the tactics going to be? And I think that they're going to be unexpected. So, you know, we could talk maybe in three years or five years and maybe we'll be witnessing a completely unexpected new form of resistance that emerges in multiple fronts against the entire Zionist project. Yeah, I always think about this.

You know, you called back to the much wanted pager operation, which, you know, just endless nauseating victory laps among dedicated. Zionists and people who are more, people more just into the American Empire project, just as a great example of the genius and the innovation of the Anglo-American, Israeli, Western Axis of evil. And, you know, if you were, if you were someone who, you know, perhaps like me, 2006 was a huge moment for you where you finally saw Israel get its nose broken. Yeah, it was, it seemed pretty horrifying. But I remember at the time talking to people about it and saying that, you know, when Hezbo was formed, you would not believe how unbelievably awful fucking conditions were when that

movement started. It's not to say that all of these things can be written off and you just wipe the dirt off your shoulders and pat all those fucking dozens of not hundreds of poor children who were blinded and crippled for life and say we'll get them next time but looking forward it just i don't see even among the most deluded supporters of israel and the most eluded advocates of the american empire you just cannot have a state that is in especially now in a state of perpetual warfare and conquest. Even if you go back nearly 100 years, Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany,

states where they were at constant warfare and were extracting natural resources and forcing people to free labor and getting as much economic exploitation out of their victims as they could, that still was unsustainable past a certain point. Israel doesn't even seem interested in doing that. They just want to ethnically cleanse as many people as possible, make as many people who come to try to help,

like doctors or journalists or whoever, try to kill them, make them miserable, make the doctors that are indigenous to these places, make them too heartbroken to help by killing all their families. But at a certain point, you just cannot spend, you know, 40, 50, 60, 70, $200 billion a fucking year for this with a country of light that's about the size of New York City,

especially when all the other things that Israel, all the other things that keep the Israeli economy going, tourism, appealing to this sense of identity politics, of your true home is here. You're safer here than ever. When that pot, when the lid bursts off that pot, who is actually going to want to give up their life in Long Island and maybe eat some of the worst pizza they've ever had in their life,

get on a bus and get shredded by a nail bomb? How is their pharmaceutical industry? How is their tech industry? How is any of this going to work when they cannot even protect the skies over Tel Aviv? you know, like everyone here, I'm reticent of any premature triumphalism, but I agree entirely. It just does not,

taking a 10, 20, 30 year broader view of it, this just cannot be maintained. This just cannot be maintained. And it just seems like the more horrors they unleash on people, they create that many more people with resolve. I mean, I don't know. I'm sure you guys saw those interviews with Qasam fighters where they talked to them, these guys who were doing these incredibly courageous things,

things that if you put them in a movie, people would never stop talking about them, running up to tanks and track pants, sticking proximity minds on them, grabbing soldiers out of them. All these guys, when they talked to them, they said, I wanted to be a gym. teacher. You know, I, I wanted to be a baker. I ran a restaurant, but I could not stand by while this happens. And forever many people they kill, it seems like they're creating that many more who will fight like Sinwar did to the last bits of strength in their body. And I just don't, I mean, just to pick up on what you're saying, too, I mean, I was talking with some colleagues about this the other day.

You know, I mean, if you, I speak to the, to the political leadership of Hamas regularly. And, you know, it's like every single one of those guys, their sons were in the Qasam brigades. Or, you know, and many of them, their sons were Nukbah were special forces within the Qasem brigades. You know, Basim, one of the top negotiators, two of his sons were killed. Ghazi Hamad, another negotiator. His son was one of the fighters that was murdered after the ceasefire in the, tunnels of Rafa.

Khalil Alhaya, the political leader and top negotiator of Hamas, has had four of his sons killed, multiple grandchildren. These guys have had their wives killed, their mothers killed. You look at Yair Netanyahu partying in, you know, South. You look at the, at the Trump sons or Whitkoff's sons. This is like tacitus level story here where these guys, no, where these guys, they're literally their sons are fighting the war. and they're portrayed as, oh, these are billionaires living in, you know, luxury somewhere.

I mean, first of all, that's a total lie, a complete and total lie. But secondly, the entire narrative is a complete fraud. And it relates to what you're saying, Felix, about the doctors or the lawyer or the engineer. You know, Palestinians are like all other people in the world. You think that what they want to do is be living in tunnels and eating, multi-year-old MREs and constantly having to figure out new ways to attack the murderous occupation forces in their community. They want to be dentists. They want to be doctors. They want to be lawyers. And so when you recognize, when you humanize them and you say, wow, what would I do if my life

was like that? Then you have trouble with your narratives because you're saying, wait a minute, that could be my neighbor. That could be my cousin. That could be me if I was facing those kinds of conditions. Those are the narratives that they don't want anyone to talk about. And so to bring it full circle, the generation that carried out the first and second intifada's, the image that they grew up with was the rock at the tank, throwing the rock at the tank. This generation, the next generation, has grown up watching the leader of Hamas, Yakhash Sinwar, literally die in battle, facing down against a high-tech robot flying in to the shelled building that he was in after engaging in a firefight on the front lines of the war while Netanyahu was hiding.

He was in his 70s too, right? Like, how old was he did that? And he spent 22 years in an Israeli prison and hand translated the memoirs of Shimbab and Mossad figures into Arabic and then distributed them to other prisoners. So it's like, you know, Palestinians can have all kinds of debates and discussions about Hamas, but facts are facts. And if you look at it just on a basic level like that, the generation of Palestinians that have grown up under this genocide, under this merciless collective punishment,

the images of heroism that they've seen are people dropping improvised explosive devices into Israeli tanks or fighting to the last breath in a tunnel against a nuclear power trying to murder all of their people or ethnically cleanse them. This is not nothing. This will remain in the psyche of this generation of Palestinians for generations to come. Absolutely. Yeah. The comparison I always make is, and it originally came up when I was talking with somebody

about Ansarawa, where whenever you talk about this, people always like to point out, like, was it just like a holiday party or something? You're like, let me talk about us. It sounded like you were going there where it's like, Uncle Floyd, what did you do last week? Let me tell you about it. But, but my, you know, people always bring up that like, oh, they committed this atrocity or like, you know, on their flag it says like death to Jews. And the point I always bring up is when we watch the show Band of Brothers or we read the book, these real accounts. And we love these guys, Nixon, Spears.

Garnier, we love their exploits, were astounded by what these ordinary men did. At the time, you know, America was segregated. It was legal to rape your wife.

The military was segregated too. It was a completely different country. And the, but we still celebrate the heroics of these guys. And were these guys, were these guys given like some super soldier serum?

No, I mean, they had more, they were capable of more endurance and thinking on their feet and maybe they were a bit braver than the average guy. But these were all just normal guys for whatever reason. They were thrust into the situation where they weren't just forced to do these incredible things,

but were inspired to do them. I always think about that, I mean, this is a real thing from the, book, it's dramatized in the show, but that scene of spears running to link up with that company across German artillery and the entire German line, I have lost count of how many videos I've seen of Qasom fighters doing things exactly like that. And just, yeah, going back to your original point, these are not like, there's this weird dualistic thing with how Hasbarus and Zionists talk about Palestinian.

where on one hand, they're these subhuman orcs that only exist to enjoy violence and desecrate beautiful, pristine Israeli women and rip apart any functioning society out of a mix of jealousy

and racial animus. And on the other hand, they're also pathetic cowards. And they could never, they could never create something as brilliant as the fucking cherry tomato or waves. But really, they are just, they're regular people who, through a mix of circumstances,

found themselves doing things that neither you nor I nor really anyone listening to this. I don't know if any of us could picture any of ourselves doing these things. Situations push people to incredible exploits, but just the scale and the scope of the courage of these people. I think that's a great point. Just the difference it makes between seeing the courageous but ultimately doomed image of someone throwing a

rocket a tank and now the image of actually making your oppressors live in fucking terror. That is such a big difference. And right, it's not to say that horrors that are

being experienced now and whatever unimaginable horrors will come the future are just, you know, we'll walk it off. But it's, I really don't think the Israelis have an appreciation for the kinds of things they've unleashed in, again, what are ultimately normal people with normal hopes and dreams and fears and anxieties and wishes. And it is just something that you, I'm sorry, you just don't see an Israeli society. I'm sure there are, you know, many thousands of troops that if you could do any type, you could do like an ultimate, whatever that Spike TV show is, where they go, what if the Vikings fought the samurai?

I'm sure there's a few guys that would have like a high stat rating. But what are they ultimately fighting for? They're fighting for racial invective and the Eternal Paradise where you do 43% purity Mali while listening to a clown. Remix of the Mortal Kombat soundtrack. They're not fighting for their dignity. These guys are doing extraordinary things so that one day they, at least their children can live those ordinary lives they wish. And there's just no one in Israel who I feel like is motivated in that same way.

So, so Felix, what you're saying is you condemn Hamas. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. We got, we got to close it out there. We got to let Jeremy and Ryan run. but Jeremy and Ryan, thank you for being part

of our memorandum of understanding here on today's show and please keep up the great... Deal is closer than ever. Yeah, yeah. Please keep up the great work at Dropside.

It is my... It is the essential news source for me and I read it every day so really thank you for your work at Dropsite and thanks for coming on to the show today. Jeremy, Skihill, Ryan Grimm from Dropsite, everybody. But till next time, everybody.

Thanks and bye-bye. Take care. Hey, yeah.