Chapo Trap House - 848 - Straight Drop Kitchen feat. Ryan Grim & Jeremy Scahill (7/8/24)

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

We’re joined by Ryan Grim & Jeremy Scahill of the NEW independent journalism venture Drop Site News. We look at how the Biden campaign meltdown has pushed the war in Palestine out of the news, and the relationship between Biden’s long history of bad policies and the current crises he’s leading. Plus, mainstream media’s failed coverage of both topics, and some Drop Site reporting on Democratic megadonors gives a glimpse into Joe Biden’s aggrieved and petty motivations. Support Jeremy & Ryan’s independent journalism and check out Drop Site at: https://dropsitenews.com/

All I wanna be is a joker All I wanna be is a joker Hello everybody, it's Monday, July 8th, and we've got Chapo coming at you. Joining us on today's program are two journalists that we've had on the show before who have just as of this morning, decamped from the interset to hang out their own shingle at DropSiteNews.com. Please welcome to the show Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill. Boys, welcome to the show and how does it feel to be independent? Feels liberating. Tell you what, what do you think, Jeremy? I mean, the first stop had to be to come into the trap house. Well, it's been way too long.

You come to the trap house for that straight drop. And that's what we're talking about here today. Gentlemen, it's it's been an extraordinary couple of weeks in American politics. But the thing I want to start talking about is while the Democratic Party and the National Press Corps is scrambling to metabolize the current reality of Biden's

diminishing mental capacity and what they're going to do about this presidential election. There's a certain part of me that feels that they are in some sense relieved to not be talking about what's happening in Gaza right now, because as of the end of the school year, most of the protests have been physically removed from public presence in American life. And reporting, I mean, it seems the national press has dropped off the cliff in terms of what's going on in Gaza. But like in the last two weeks of like as Biden hemorrhages support from people like, you know, when Rob Reiner and Stephen King jump off the bag wagon, it's a bandwagon, it's really hard. But the refrain I keep hearing from these Biden supporters, like even as they say, it's time for him to go, is that

he's just such a decent man who served this country and the world with such dignity and class and respect. But now it's time for him to step aside. Jeremy, I haven't talked to you in a while, so I'd like to ask your comments. In light of what I saw just on Sunday, a report from the British medical journal, The Lancet, published an article that estimates the death toll in Gaza could be as high as 186,000 people or more, up to 8% of the population. So I would just like to like, could you contrast the last two weeks or so in Gaza with the last two weeks of presidential politics in this country and Joe Biden's enduring decency as a president and a man.

Yeah, you know, I mean, this is this is something to the people used to try to say about George Bush. Oh, you know, he'd be a good guy to have a beer with. And, you know, I mean, when in reality, George Bush, as the governor of Texas was, you know, a mass murderer who was unleashing the death penalty, you know, like, like he was popping M and M's and, um, you know, and then became a global mass murderer when he became president. I've never believed that you judge American presidents based on how they treat their family members or whether or not you think they would be fun to watch a football match with. And, and the thing about Joe Biden is that, you know,

and I did a big series, right he was elected called Empire Politician. So I dug really deep into his life. I watched every documentary. I read all of his books. Um, Biden does have a compelling personal story on one level. I mean, that guy went through horrifying, unspeakable personal tragedy when he lost his wife and his children in a, in a car crash. And I think that there is a legitimate human level, uh, that Biden is able to

connect with people on, even though now he's you know Wandering looking for the mashed potatoes. I think you know, I think that that's real on a personal level But that's not how we should be judging presidents on a political level. This is a career sociopath when you take the issue of Israel and Gaza Joe Biden stands out as perhaps the single most and Gaza, Joe Biden stands out as perhaps the single most passionate supporter of Israel when it's been at its most obscenely violent, when it's been mass killing Palestinians. This is a guy who, when he was a young senator, met with the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who was presiding over the invasion of Lebanon, indiscriminately killing civilians. And, and Joe Biden in this meeting with Menachem Begin told him, uh, that he,

Biden would authorize the killing of women and children if Canada was, was, you know, posing a threat to the United States, the way that Lebanon was posing a threat to, uh, to Israel at the time. Um, this is a guy who has never met an Israeli mass murder campaign that he didn't only love, but enthusiastically endorsed or in the case of being a Senator, vice president, president helped to facilitate, um, regarding the Lancet study, you know, th this has been something that Ryan and I have been looking at for a long time.

People like to say, Oh, the, you know, the Hamas ministry of health, you know, these are their, their numbers and that, you know, they're not accurate. I agree. They're probably not accurate at all. They're probably very, very low. And even the IDF, when you catch them at an honest moment, which is rare, will acknowledge that they believe that those statistics are more accurate than Israeli estimates. I think it's quite likely that there are dramatically more deaths of people in Gaza, much more dramatic than we understand right now, because the health ministry has guidelines where they

have to see the body, they have to have an identification. There actually is a process. Hamas is not just the Qassam Brigades that does the raids into Israel on October 7th. This was a civil authority that whatever you think about Hamas as a movement was picking up the garbage, was running the hospitals, and they actually had a real health ministry with real rules for counting the dead. And history has shown that they have accurately reflected the bodies that have come in there and the cause of death that they can ascertain through medical evaluation. This is a mass murder that has been facilitated, funded, legally defended, politically defended,

diplomatically defended, and armed to the teeth by the United States and by a president of the United States who's been in politics longer than any American politician alive today. And in between naps, this guy is thinking up new ways to support a, an, an utter genocidal mass murder that has been unleashed on 2.3 million people. I mean,

like to your point about like, you know, the difficulty is fully quantifying the scale of mass death. I mean, you kind of have to get pretty graphic But like a lot of a lot of the most like heinous mass murders that Israel has committed You know in this incredibly population dense a part of the world like you can't Distinguish like one body from the other when they're done with it.

Like they, they've launched such a high volume of munitions that like, you know, we've all seen the videos of people just putting body parts into bags. The destruction is so unbelievable that like, yeah, how could you count that? It would be impossible. I mean, did you see this? Did you see this video the other day of this little girl whose entire lower section of her face was blown off? Yeah, I saw that.

You know, I mean, Ryan and I both have talked to doctors throughout the course of these past nine months who've been working in these hospitals, including doctors from the United States, from Canada and elsewhere, who are saying that they're seeing injuries to children that don't even exist in medical journals. An eye surgeon that I interviewed from Toronto who was there is describing shrapnel embedding into the eye sockets of children

and how the human reaction causes the eyes to open when you're in shock and that shrapnel is coming in. I mean, it's the number of amputations that are being done with no anesthetics. You have fathers who are going out to get snacks for their kids in the morning, scrounging for food to come back and discover that the child has been blown up and they're taking that snack and they're putting it in. They're saying, I'm going to bury you with this.

I'm so sorry that I left you to go and get this. I mean, this is sick. It is utterly sick. And this is entirely sponsored and armed by this administration and by the entirety of the American bipartisan political entity. Yeah, no, there's also something perverse about the way that he's described as a decent and honest man, given what comes out of his mouth. You know, this is the guy who goes around saying,

I saw pictures of beheaded babies. I was shown video of mass rape. I've seen evidence of families being burned alive. And then you go to the White House, you're like, so he has seen this evidence? Like, where did he see this evidence? Can you provide some of this evidence? And they'll say, no, so he has seen this evidence? Like where did he see this evidence? Can you provide some of this evidence? And they'll say, no, he actually has not seen that evidence.

And he'll say that evidence doesn't actually exist. And then he'll continue saying it later. Yeah. I don't see how no one brought up, like it's taken this long for like, you know, regular publications to talk about his complete mental shortcomings, his complete unraveling. It took the worst debate in the history of televised debates and not him repeatedly saying he had seen these pictures and videos that don't fucking exist.

Yeah, no controversy about whether they exist. Like they will say on the record they don't exist. And Jeremy, to your point about the the Gaza Health Ministry, you'll also remember that Joe Biden cast those figures into doubt or implied that they were a suspect in some way before, you know, not really giving an explanation for why that's the case. And I don't think that this is something that can be dismissed or attributed to his senility. I think this is a matter of US.S. policy and the policy of the Democratic Party. Felix, to your point about even identifying bodies,

I saw today there was a report in 972mag.com. The headline is, I'm bored so I shoot. The Israeli Army's approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza. And this is based on the anonymous accounts of Israeli soldiers. And in it, it says, the testimonies paint a picture of a landscape littered with civilian corpses, which are left to rot or be eaten by stray animals. The army only hides them from view ahead of the arrival of international aid convoys so that images of people in advanced stages of decay don't come out.

I mean, this is the reality of it, know, this presidential election and the assurances that Joe Biden has been doing a good job in office. And I'm just I'm just so struck by this this complete compartmentalization in the media and in the Democratic Party between saying that a president is a good man who's doing a good job as president, who's actively facilitating something like this occurring. Yeah. And you know, with Donald Trump, you know, I mean, I think it's possible that if Trump had been president when October 7th happened, that there would have been some difference in policy on the margins.

I think, for instance, that the specter of Trump actually overtly authorizing American drone strikes in Gaza is a possibility. But the number of things that you could identify and say, well, maybe it would have been, this would have happened if Trump were there. It's so minor that this is a devastating commentary on the nature of American power and on Joe Biden and his administration. I mean, the reality is that Joe Biden could have stopped this many, many months ago. In 2021, it took one phone call from Biden to Netanyahu to say, it's done here.

And within two days, there was an Egyptian brokered ceasefire when Biden was initially president and the Israelis did an 11-day bombing campaign against Gaza killed a couple hundred people, but I think I'm a more relevant point of discussion You know to both the point you and Felix were making is to go back and look at 2018 and 2019 When Yahya Sinwar the Gaza head of Hamas who is now being portrayed as the boogeyman You know, he's the Hitler figure of this war and he's portrayed as a rat hiding in a tunnel. This is a guy who spent 22, almost 23 years in Israeli prison, speaks fluid

Hebrew, translated the memoirs of multiple shin bedheads from Hebrew into Arabic, hand wrote them, comes out of prison, becomes what effectively the head of state in Gaza and is widely believed to be the mastermind of the October 7th attacks. But you know, you had Yahya Sinwar in 2018 and 2019 endorsing nonviolent marches under the banner of the great march of return to the concentration camp fence, that is the wall that keeps the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza trapped inside. He endorsed the nonviolent actions there. And what did the Israelis do?

IDF snipers held a competition where they tried to see who could shoot the most kneecaps of unarmed protesters. And some of them actually spoke to Haaretz on the record and talked about sniping unarmed Palestinian demonstrators who were there in a nonviolent great march of return. The problem is not that the West or the United States has an issue with armed resistance on the part of the Palestinians. They have a problem with any resistance. And the message that has been consistently sent

to the people of Gaza, to Palestinians in general, is there is no legitimate form of resistance that you are allowed to engage in. When they do it nonviolently, they have their kneecaps blown off in a macabre sniper shootout game that the IDF sponsors. Yeah, that has frustrated me this entire time that that just gets completely glossed over.

It's not even like it happened a long time ago. It literally happened during the Biden presidency. It has been useful in the sense that like, you know, if you hear someone ask it, you know, asking basically why Palestinians aren't doing that, the exact thing they tried three years ago and, you know, saw entire families crippled over, it's at least useful in that, you know, you don't have to listen to that person ever again, that they do not pay attention to this shit at all or fucking know anything. I want to return to October 7th for a second, Jeremy and Ryan, because I'm wondering if

you've been following the the reporting and herets confirming what has been reported upon by many other independent media outlets, Electronic Intifada among them, that many of the victims of October 7th were basically killed by what's known as the Hannibal Directive, that they were that there was an order given that no cars were allowed to return to Gaza, so that it was an open fire on everything there. What do you expect? Do you expect now that Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, is reporting this and it's pretty much incontestable?

How do you think that this will or will not be sort of absorbed into the official narrative about October 7? I don't think it will be in the United States. I mean, people should read the piece. the official narrative about October 7th? I don't think it will be in the United States. I mean, people should read the piece. It confirms what, like you said, it confirms a lot of the independent reporting that they basically were trying to drone strike every single car heading back

into Gaza, whether it had hostages or not, and perhaps preferably if it did have hostages. But I don't think it'll seep through. Because if you read the coverage, you'll constantly hear this refrain of, you know, there were 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7th, and it will always say, you know, mostly or nearly all of them civilians. Sometimes it'll just say innocent Israelis. When they talk about the Palestinians killed now, the new

directive that has come down after camera kind of pressured the AP and other organizations, it'll say the Hamas run, the Ministry of Health, does not distinguish between civilians and militants. The juxtaposition between the two is untenable logically and you'll often see them in the exact same paragraph together. So it's hard to imagine how one more contradiction would work its way, would actually bother the press coverage. Also, just to, I think, Will, it's actually,

it's important to flesh this out a little bit, what you're talking about here. I mean, I'm sure people that listen to this show have heard you guys talk about this before. But the Hannibal doctrine is based on the notion that if an Israeli soldier is potentially going to be dragged back by Hamas or another armed resistance group to Gaza and held prisoner, that it is better to take that soldier out to kill that soldier. And the attempted, you know. Better at that is really than a bargaining chip

that the Palestinians can have. And the thing is that, you know, Haaretz is a complicated newspaper. It's a liberal Zionist newspaper that does incredibly important investigative reporting. And also at times is you know endorsing actions that you know all of us would say wow this is this is obscene that you're endorsing this but Haaretz has some really good reporters they've done

some incredibly important investigative work and the fact that it is a respected Israeli news outlet makes it extremely important they've also done really good reporting on some of the other episodes that took place that may not have been Hann by their own forces who shelled this house and killed some of the Palestinian fighters that had taken control of the house, but also killed Israeli civilians. There were 695 or so civilians that the Israeli Social Security Agency has documented to have been killed. I think that each one of those people's families have a right to understand the circumstances

under which they died. But the fact is that the Israeli government has tried to cover this up. They've denied that there was the use of the Hannibal Doctrine. They tried to minimize the notion that there were so-called friendly fire incidents. And the more that you have Israeli investigative news organizations digging into this, the more that it is vindicating independent journalists in the United States and elsewhere who have been raising this issue for a long time, not because they're conspiracy theorists, but because they've been following Israeli actions for a long time.

I mean, Ali Abunimah at Electronic Intifada is not writing this stuff in a vacuum. This isn't just empty conjecture on his part. He has been a master's level student of the Israeli state for his entire adult life and recognize his pattern. So, you know, I think what we're looking at here is a mountain of lies and exaggerations that was constructed to justify the unjustifiable, which is a scorched earth genocidal campaign to try to annihilate Palestinians as a people in Gaza. It's not that Israeli civilians didn't die. Of course Israeli civilians died.

It's not that Hamas didn't kill Israeli civilians. Of course Hamas killed Israeli civilians. The question is how many civilians were killed by Hamas, how many deaths that day were as a result of the way that the Israeli state decided to respond to this and how many of those people were intentionally killed under a Hannibal doctrine style operation. These are basic journalistic questions. It shouldn't be controversial to ask this. And in the US press, it's a far more incendiary question than it is in Israel. Israel has been seeing mainstream news organizations taking on this question. Not to heap praise on them, it's just to say it puts to shame some of what you see in the American corporate media where it's like, oh no, they killed 2,000 civilians. Well, no, they didn't kill 2,000 civilians. And actually, how come Hamas

was able to just walk through these military bases? They didn't just take hostages. They didn't just take soldiers prisoners. They took hard drives. They took intelligence. I don't think the world understands now the extent to which this was a epic catastrophe, even beyond the human consequences to Israel. We don't know the extent of what Hamas was able to take when they got onto those military bases. Jeremy, speaking about the you know, like the ongoing edifice of lies, which is used to buttress this really unspeakable ongoing atrocity. One of the last big pieces you and Ryan did

for the Intercept was your sort of, I guess, audit of the New York Times big splash, screams without words piece about Amos weaponizing rape as a tool, as a weapon of war. In terms of reporting that piece, like how do you regard like the New York Times efforts to contain the glaring the glaring glaring journalistic malpractice that went on in that piece? And then as a side to that, why what

does it say to you about the fact that the New York Times could do a piece of journalism that consequential and get it so blatantly wrong, and that none of their competitors, be it the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post, had picked it up and stuck them with it? I'm gonna let Ryan start start on that and then I'll pick up. One of the New York Times reporters that I was talking to during the reporting for this piece kind of raised that point actually. She said, you know, who's going to check us?

You know, 20 years ago, there was much more of a check on the New York Times from its competitors. When they had their WMD fiasco, at least they found some scapegoats. When they had their Jason Blair fiasco, they fired some editors. And they ordered an actual review into this guy Jason Blair's fabrications and fabulations.

And some of the editors who ordered the review ended up getting fired as a result of it. By the time they got to Caliphate, the era of accountability internally was basically over. They famously got rid of their ombudsman and said that Twitter was basically going to be their ombudsman. That hasn't worked out because they just don't respond.

I think most American liberal consumers have decided they only need one kind of national newspaper to subscribe to they've decided the one that's got the recipes and the wordles is the one that they're gonna subscribe to it's the New York Times and Everybody else has has faded away and there's just there's just there's nobody to go to to check them So there was you know, they intercept now there's gonna be drop site news But internally they have nothing. And there are going to be independent outlets that challenge them. But I think what makes us a little bit different is because they know who we are and we have

beaten them on different stories throughout our careers, we've earned some level of respect, even if they don't necessarily like us. And so they have to listen. When we reach out to New York Times for comment, like they scramble, whereas a lot of others, they can just ignore. When I when I read, I read the New York Times Screams Without Word piece very carefully and I was pouring over it, like waiting to get to the money graph. What was astonishing to me about that piece is that if you read it carefully, it's very clear that what's Annette Schwarzman or whatever

was given the task of like, find us evidence of all these mass rape atrocities. And it's very clear from that piece that she couldn't find any, and that she went back to the same sources that, you know, circulated. These are the original mendacious and false accounts of, you know, beheaded babies and babies cooked in ovens and things like that. But like, the New York Times very clearly gave her, her and her cousin or whatever,

the remit to to find the evidence of this. And then the fact that they published this article as evidence of it, when it was very clear in their own article that she couldn't find any evidence of it. Well, I remember like they they fly in, you know, they parachute in Jeffrey Gettleman, you know, who's one of their marquee reporters. And so he's like the lead byline on this, but they then outsource the actual quote unquote reporting to Anat Schwartz, who had no reporting experience whatsoever. And then the cousin of her partner, Adam Sela, who prior to that was basically like a food

blogger. What's funny is that the New York Times demanded that we issue a correction when we when we wrote our piece, because I had written that Adam Sela was a not Schwartz's nephew. And they pointed out to me that actually they're not. She and her partner are not married and it's his nephew. So this is wrong. We demand. We do the issue, the correction. Yeah.

No, no. So I was like, I said to right, we were all talking about. We're like,. We demand the correction. Yeah. So then I was like, I said to Ryan, we were all talking about, we're like, Oh, come the fuck on. I'm like, no, no, no, actually, you know what? Let's issue that correction issue that let's like apologize. We are so sorry that we, instead of saying that her life, it was her life partner that she's not married to nephew, that it's her nephew. Oh my God, we've committed a cardinal sin. How about the fact that you guys fabricated a bunch of stuff like to try to cover your rear end in this thing

to try to protect Jeffrey Gettleman's reputation and to try to set yourself up for the Pulitzer Prize. Their report was part of the package that won the George Polk Award. Remember when Jeffrey Gettleman appeared with Hillary Clinton like the week after this occurred and on stage said, look, my job as a reporter is just to like pass on stories here. Not to provide evidence.

It's not really about facts. It's not about evidence. It's about clearing house for stories or information, whether it's... One story in that though that Ryan and I, you know, and we have a colleague that we worked with on the ground, you know, in Israel, a great researcher. And you know, we were just kind of looking at, you know, what are the specific stories that they've told in Screams Without Words? And so we focused on one, you know, on one story where they say that there was an Israeli military paramedic who was on the scene at Kibbutz Biri and that he encountered two,

the bodies of two teenage girls who had been murdered and appeared to have been raped and that they, one of them had semen spread on her back. And we went through and we identified based on public records in Israel and public reporting who these individuals were that they must have been talking about. And then we called the kibbutz and the kibbutz said you know this horrifying things happened here but these girls were not sexually assaulted and the grandmother who lives in Britain said you know that it's terrible to have to say this but they were just murdered you know meaning like that they weren't raped and you know eventually the New York Times so we went to

the New York Times and we asked them about that. We said that Kibbutz has put this on the record. The Kibbutz also said that they hadn't spoken to a Not Schwarz, the reporter from the New York Times. So it appeared that they didn't even do like basic vetting. As Ryan has pointed out many times, that so-called paramedic who was the witness there was being presented, shopped around to news organizations to tell this story. And at times he said it happened in Kibbutz Nahal Oz.

Other times he said it happened in Kibbutz Beery. The New York Times wrote us back and said, we're standing by our story. And then sometime later, the Israeli military forces show the New York Times a video of the soldiers who actually encountered these specific teenagers. And it was made very clear to them that what they had printed was not true.

And they have not issued a correction. They issued an update, right? Yeah, they did a quiet update. And then there's sort of running defense for the original paramedic, oh, he may have misremembered which kibbutzit was at. But it's like, this is the standard at the New York Times? I mean, this is this is outrageous that they did this because this this is one of

the import of this story is of the justification enormous is enormous. So the fact you get any even like forget forget whether it's someone's life partner or nephew. I mean, this is like life or death stuff that they're intentionally fucking up. And to my point about like, why that like why use because usually

when like the New York Times had some big embarrassing fiasco, it becomes a media story that's like a feeding frenzy because everyone likes to beat up on the big kid in class or see them fall in their face. But the fact that no one's really

done this other than the Intercept and now presumably drop site news, I just it just says to me that the fix is in on this, that the fix is in on this and like, you know, which certainly makes we'll get to it in the latter half of the show, but it certainly makes this idea that the media is somehow in collusion against Biden really, really quite grim and hilarious.

And what the what the press what what the press did instead in this case is when they would acknowledge that the Times piece had fallen apart, let's say The Guardian or or The Washington Washington Post or CNN, I think did a piece saying, oh, it looks like lots of problems emerging with this piece. They would then link to, they'd say, however, of course, it doesn't mean that the underlying story is untrue regarding what Hamas did.

It just means that the New York Times failed in its reporting of it. And then they would link to say the Guardian or other outlets that relied on the exact same sources that The Times did that had already been debunked and had fallen apart. What The Times had presented to the world was that we went beyond these lunatics that you heard from in the very beginning who said all these crazy things about a fetus being cut out of a mother and beheaded and the 40 beheaded babies, all of those people had been discredited because they had just said complete fabrications.

What the Times says is that we actually confirmed real things, not this crazy stuff that you heard in the very beginning. And so what the media did is they just went back to the crazy stuff from the very beginning and so yeah It's all true, but the times really screwed up So yeah fixes it well as long as we're talking about the paper of record my favorite newspaper There's a headline here that I think is relevant Jeremy to some of the reporting that you're working on regarding ceasefire negotiations This is a headline from the other day of the times Hamas's ceasefire proposal includes a familiar sticking point, a subhead.

Hamas wants assurances that Israel won't restart the war after some hostages comes home. Israel says it needs the option. So the familiar sticking point in the ceasefire negotiations is will there actually be a ceasefire or will the war continue or not? Yeah. I mean, and you know, I guess I'll get a little bit ahead of it, but we're going to publish a series of articles at DropSite News in the coming days. I think the first one is going to drop on Tuesday, July 9th, where I've spent an extensive

period of time interviewing people from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the two groups that spearheaded the October 7th operations that they call Al-Aqsa Flood. And I've also been talking to Hamas officials who are on the negotiating team that has been dealing with the Americans, with the Israelis, Qatar, Egypt, et cetera. And what I've been hearing recently

is that Hamas' impression now of what's happened is that, like one Hamas official said that it's like Israel is treating the Americans like the babysitter. They keep crying for the babysitter to come in and fix things for them. And Hamas has the impression that the US is really actually fed up. I mean, I know we have the whole kind of fictitious Biden is losing his patience and oh my God, he's so mad at his great, great friend, Bibi. But I mean, like on a practical level, the sense that I'm getting is that the perception in the room now is that Israel is acting loony in these negotiations.

And the fact is that Daniel Higare, the spokesperson, the chief spokesperson for the IDF, acknowledged recently that there isn't, you're not going to defeat Hamas militarily. And you know, the fact is that Netanyahu has linked the continuation of this war to his political survival. You know, William Burns, the CIA director, is very aware of that. Hamas is very aware of that. Hamas sources have also told me that, look, you know, we have 20,000 or so fighters for nine months, we have fought off a military force of a nuclear armed

power that has the backing of the United States, Britain, and many other powerful nations in the world. And we have our own red lines. You know, Hamas is part of the fabric of Palestinian politics, and you are not going to destroy ideas with military force. Now, none of this is, you know, as do with me, you know, some grand defense of Hamas. I'm just telling you the fact that Hamas is coming into this and they're saying, if you're going to reserve the right to just collectively punish

you know, the survivors in this concentration camp and you say that it's your right to just continue to use heinous munitions that are decapitating children, blowing off limbs, bombing hospitals, bombing schools, trapping people under rubble. I was just on a reporting trip where I was in the presence of a woman and her daughter who were pulled out of the rubble in Gaza. And they, they were lucky ones who managed to get out to get medical treatment. This, this is real stuff that is happening here. And so, you know, Netanyahu is, is, is entrenched in this position where he is linking his own political survival to a continuation of this war and, and the

United States is enabling this. No, I mean, the fact of the matter is that it seems like what Hamas is willing to do is enter into some form of a phased negotiation. It does appear that they may be taking off the table the notion of an immediate declaration of a permanent ceasefire, but my understanding is that they are very clear that a comprehensive deal has to include a full cessation of Israeli scorched earth against Gaza and a pullback of Israeli troops. And it doesn't seem like Israel is going to do that.

So my prediction would be that we're going to see some movement on this, maybe some exchange of captives. But I think a comprehensive deal is still quite a ways off in large part because Netanyahu believes that he's finished if the war is finished. I mean, I think you make a good point about the like, you know, there's there's there's the phony for public consumption, like all of Biden's consternations are like he's cursing on the phone with Netanyahu. But at the same time, as you said, practically, do you think that the Biden White House wants to go into

the summer before an election without even a phony ceasefire deal? No, this is the point that I'm getting at. It's not about principle. Israelis can't even give them that. Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, look, I think

that the Biden plan, if we rewind like six weeks ago or so, I think that when, remember when Biden was when, what's the guy's name, Seth Seth Meyers, when he was licking the ice cream cone and he said, I think we might have a deal here. You remember that when Biden was when, what's the guy's name? Seth, Seth Meyers, when he was licking the ice cream cone and he said, I think we might have a deal here. You remember that when Biden was like, talk about this, like, yeah, like by Friday, this

was like, you know, a couple months ago or whatever. And I think that really what, you know, what these guys thought was, okay, we're going to dump everything onto the bad ship Netanyahu. We're going to say, oh my God, this whole thing was just this, you know, this rascal Netanyahu. We're going to say, oh my God, this whole thing was just this rascal Netanyahu. And then they had these meetings in Washington with Benny Gantz. And then they're kind of courting Yoav Galant, the defense minister.

And I really think kind of what Biden was thinking is, or I wouldn't accuse Biden of thinking, what the people around Biden were thinking was we can just load this whole thing onto the bad ship Netanyahu and then sink it in time to then make our way into campaigning on other issues. And Netanyahu very clearly is entertaining the idea of waiting out Biden in hopes that Trump wins.

The question is part of it has to do with internal politics in Israel, whether the public there is going to tolerate a continuation of this with Netanyahu. But the other part of it is what kind of force is Biden willing to use against Netanyahu at this point to date? He hasn't used any this whole nonsense about, Oh, we withheld some munitions, complete farce. Like, you know, this, this was, you know, a delayed delivery of a couple of bombs, basically. So Biden hasn't pulled out any of the big

guns of American power and it's not clear that he's willing to do it at this point. Jeremy, I'm wondering what it's like for you as you know a journalist who's covered the national security state ably and covered it very critically but still as a Western journalist what is it like to secure an interview with representatives of Hamas or their negotiating teams or Palestinian Islamic jihad? I mean this should just be basic journalism. I mean you know there was an era when Dan Rather would fly to Baghdad and sit down and interview Saddam Hussein. People interviewed you know Slobodan Milosevic. CNN journalists interviewed Osama bin Laden. This shouldn't

be controversial at all. I mean we we're being told these people are the equivalent of the Nazis and their actions are being compared to the Holocaust. Responsible journalism dictates that you go and fact check the powerful, but not just that. You interview those people and you get a sense of, well, what is their perspective here? This is just good journalism. This is just good journalism.

This is just responsible journalism. You're not a conveyor belt for anyone's agenda, but absolutely you should be talking to these people. And I think that part of what has happened in our media environment is that if you do the job of journalism, that part of the job of journalism, which is to go to the other side of the barrel of the gun and say, like, let's talk to the people

that we're told is the enemy, that you get smeared for it. I remember there was years ago, when Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and I was talking with you guys about this in the past, when Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was really in the news a lot in Yemen, and you had the so-called underwear bomber, and you had Anwar al-laqi

You know that book dirty wars that I wrote that deals a lot with his life story There was a point at which I granted anonymity to an al-qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula spokesperson and And it had to do with them proclaiming that they were involved with the attacks on the nightclub in in Paris, France And there was this big hubbub in the media about, oh, the intercept has given anonymity to an AQAP spokesperson, and I got attacked, and et cetera. But then other news outlets started to do it as well, because sometimes it's in the

public interest to interview people that are being hunted by the most powerful nations in the world. And you interview them because journalism is supposed to be about providing people with information, not telling them how to think. So it's not necessarily easy to cultivate relationships with sources who are being hunted by Israel or the United States, but I think it's the journalistically responsible thing to do and I'll make no apologies for doing it. And what happened?

Nobody said anything. Nobody said anything. Nobody said anything except me and the post out there and the local, uh, you know, race, you know, he said, I did nothing to stop Russia's invasion of, of Ukraine. In fact, he said, I think I encouraged Russia from growing. I encouraged, I think he encouraged Russia going in. I mean, you know, I'm reading from the list of lies. First of all, he was made up, both suckers and losers.

I was with, he called Americans in the cemetery from World War I suckers and losers. And so this guy's going to have to start to answer for what he did. suckers and losers. And so this guy's going to have to start to answer for what he did. They shift gears for a little bit. And as long as we're talking about interviewing people who are morally and spiritually dubious.

Ryan, the first the first story up at DropSight News, if we're going to talk about, like, not what Biden's thinking, but what the people around him are thinking. You have an interview up today with like a major Biden backer who is like who gave you sort of an insight into like what the bride and

rider dies or thinking and so I think some actually some very telling and trenchant insight into what Biden's mentality like what binds a mindset is this is why he has dug in so hard on staying in this race despite losing the support of I mean, I don't know how many people are counting now but like, because you talk a little bit about who you interviewed and what what he had to say about Biden's mindset and what he feels is like why he feels Biden is still the best man for the job. Yeah, we didn't do it on purpose, but I kind of love that we're launching DropSight with first

Dimitri Melhorn, Reid Hoffman's right hand man and himself a super rich Democratic donor, followed by Hamas. That's a nice spectrum to cover because, look, you got to talk to everybody. You got to get all sides. Wait, before Ryan goes out, can I just tell you guys something really, really that only I could say on the Trap House? One Hamas guy said to me when I was like,

some people I've met in person, some people I've been interviewing remotely and I was like going to use Google meet for one of the things. And he said Hamas prefers zoom. Wow. Well, I feel, I feel like we have a pretty good accounting of like the preferred apps of the access of resistance and, um, non-aligned blocks. WhatsApp is very big in a non-aligned blocks. WhatsApp is very big in non-aligned countries.

Telegram and now Zoom are part of the axis of resistance. But the interview only goes 40 minutes because they don't have the premium. They have paid for the premium. What platform do the ride or die Biden people use when they're talking to you? They will usually send you a Google meet, but then they'll take whatever you send them. Yeah, Dimitri. So Dimitri is that he's like a one word. He's like a one name guy in in democratic circles like Dimitri.

What does Dimitri think? Like that's how powerful this guy has become because he not only directs Reid Hoffman's money. He not only has his own, you know He's only worth hundreds of millions, but it's still substantial And but he has kind of collected a group of donors around him who kind of believe that you know He has insights that that other people are missing. He works very closely with DMFI Democratic Majority For Israel and Mark Mark Melman very huge anti-squad guy. He's dumped enormous amounts of money

into taking out Cory Bush. This is the kind of guy that we're talking about. And he did have one insight that I found genuinely useful that I hadn't quite pondered yet, which is that Joe Biden believes. And first of all, you have to understand that Joe Biden is one of the most, even for other politicians, one of the most self-confident and arrogant guys out

there. And the gap between his self-confidence and him deserving that self-confidence might be even the widest. But he believes that in 2016, and he's probably right about this, that he should not have allowed himself to be talked out of running. That if he could have gotten the nomination, that he would have beaten Trump. What I think he doesn't understand is that basically anybody other than Hillary kind of would have beaten Trump that year. In his mind, he's the only one that would have beaten Trump,

or he would have beaten Trump. These idiots told him not to do it. He didn't do it. And now we got Charlottesville. So then in 2020, he runs. Barack Obama tells him, Joe, you don't have to do it. He didn't do it. And now we got Charlottesville. So then in 2020, he runs, Barack Obama tells him, Joe, you don't have to do this. All the cool kids are telling him, you're done, Joe. You really shouldn't do this. He's getting just completely wasted in the first three primaries. And then he wins. He's come from behind, he beats Donald Trump,

and he saves the world. That's how DeBitre explains his thinking. So he's saying, he beats Donald Trump and he saves the world. Like that's how DeBitre explains his thinking. So he's saying he thinks that he was right the last two times, everybody else was wrong, and why is it any different this time around? And so unless the polls just completely bottom out on him, you know, he's going to white-knuckle it as all the way to November. Right, I thought that was interesting because I think that I think that is very true. And I think it speaks to a lot of like why Biden is so recalcitrant because he feels like, like, you know, earlier today, he was railing against elites in the Democratic Party,

which I thought was hilarious. Like, what? Who are the elites other than you? Like, what are you talking about? But the thing is, he's right. If he made the wrong choice, the people who told him that not to run, because this was Hillary's time, they fucked him and they fucked this whole country. But the thing is, he's doing the exact same thing now to his own party and the country.

So, like, I mean, I just like there's no there's no there's no meeting. You know, there's no meeting between the synapses and his brain at this point. But, yeah, I mean, I just think it's like, wait, how dug in he is on this is like, yeah, he saw the mistake that the party made in the past by anointing Hillary. And then he's demanding that they make the same mistake for him right now. He loves to describe himself as the only guy who's ever beaten Trump. And maybe Felix, it was you that was saying this on Twitter the other day. It's not like we've had 12 elections.

And also Trump has lost almost everything. Like he lost it. Trump has never won a fucking midterm as the leader of the party. He's not this electoral monster. I saw, you know, uh, the greatest journalists in the world, Aaron Rupar was, uh, w w w was, was saying this that, um, Hey, look guys, I would prefer that Biden wouldn't be 86 at the end of his second term, but there's no silver bullet to defeat Trump. We need everything that works. And this just works like we like he's Anderson Silva in 2012. It's, it's insane. We talked about this

with, uh, with, uh, Josh and, uh, Dave Weigel, but just the sort of true but stupid data science people do with American elections. There just have not been enough of them where you can go, oh, well, like every single time there's been an election, you know, where this district in fucking Ohio does this. No, there's not enough data to work with. Yeah, and that guy, Alan Lichtman, who goes around bragging about how he's predicted eight of nine presidential elections. If your whole job is just predicting a presidential election, and you've got all the polls

that you can look at, and you actually missed one of them in the last nine, and you're still selling yourself as this like, yeah, opportunities to sell your wares here only comes around every four years or so. And you still bricked on one. The entire, the entire like Biden posture, you know, from 2020 to now, it does, you know, to bring the analogy back to sports, being a successful politician is a lot like being a successful athlete in that I believe in both, you do

have to have a certain level of self belief that crosses over into delusion, right? In order to think that you could be elected president or even a senator or a rep, you have to have some set of delusional fucking self beliefs. The same, the same set of delusions that allow someone to become like a champion fighter or win a super bowl. These are also the same delusions that cause, you know, like a 47 year old Tito Ortiz to go out there and get knocked out. And actually, no one on earth sounds more like current day Tito Ortiz than Joe Biden. Well, I mean, there's a part in Axios today by Jim Van De Hei and Mike Allen.

And like the sort of the the the poll code here is that lawmakers and top Democrats feel duped by Biden, his press office, his campaign co chairman, Jeffrey Katzberger, Jeffrey Katzenberg, his top aides, they all promised the president was sharper than ever. To paraphrase the lovely Catherine Krieger, were these people surprised to find out Joe Biden didn't actually have their nose? Like the press has been carrying water on this issue.

The debate was just so bad that now it's become a part of objective reality and the media can't ignore it. So they're doubling down now that they're going they're going in the other direction. And then now it's like every single thing. And people around Biden are leaking

like a sieve right now, too. Did you see the thing about like the instructions for how to walk to a podium? Yes. Yes. I saw people defend this by saying, well, like, look, everything in the White House is super choreographed. They gave this to Obama in his 40s. You know what the fucking difference is when they gave Obama instructions

in his 40s, walk to the podium this way. He followed them. He was able to achieve what was laid out in there. They're giving Biden like Biden is playing a point and click adventure game for the 1990s and failing. He's failing. You know, but you know what, you know what else, what also, what also is in the mix here? I mean, I don't want to bog us down with this conversation, but remember

how like completely checked out, cashed out Biden was in that primary and like, and then, you know, leading up to that today was kind of- Jeremy, his eyes started bleeding on stage in one of the debates and his teeth fell out. I mean, you, since, since I'm here with some resident narcotics experts,

I mean, what drug is it that they actually were like pumping Biden with at that time to like- I think speedball, I literally think you guys be ball. I think it's a speedball because it's the only thing where it's like, but like Biden's always been like a prick. He's like a re he he's more like Nixon on a personal level than Trump is, I think he's he's he's like a very, he's a very like prickly resentful, bitter asshole asshole which is why all this like saving the soul of the nation shit was always so funny but like to get take the edge off that

because like you can't even give him bad news or he'll freak out there's something like i don't know there's like a morphine or something analog in there but then to pick it up because he's so fucking old there's obviously like, you know, dexies, something that they probably used to give like, you two pilots. I think they give them a speed ball because it will, like even if you're that old and decrepit, it will make you feel great for probably like two hours,

and then immediately after, it's like someone hit you over the head with a Looney Tunes mallet. I always learned something from this show and now I get to be the one asking you questions. But what I wanted to make a more serious point though, which is there's this issue of like his, you know, how he's acting right now.

And then the, you know, the picture of like, go sit over here, pat the nice girl on the head, try not to smell her hair. But then there's the, but then there's the like multi decade, decade track record of lying that like, I mean, I haven't seen people talking about this that, that much recently, but this is so relevant. I mean, it's not just that he's like completely tapped out right now.

He has a really long track record of blatantly lying about all sorts of things. You know, that this stuff about South Africa, the inflation of his, uh, his role in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and how he was an advisor to Golda Meir, you know, the corn pop story, you know, the Martin Luther King. I mean, it's like, but his whole career, and then the plagiarism stuff and, you know, stealing Neil Kinnick's speech and all this stuff.

Neil Kinnick! His entire career has just been lie after lie after lie after lie. Mass murder, mass murder, lie, lock black people up, lie, go to war, lie, help lie us into Iraq. I mean, it's unbelievable. I mean, yes. Okay. Fine. He's completely caked out. He's, you know, looking for the mashed potatoes at the party and can't find them, but it's like the guy's whole career should be the scandal. Yeah. His whole career should be the scandal.

It always amazed me when like they would talk about his amazing experience and how good he was at getting things done. Because like even if you remove like the insane lying, his shitty personality, just every, everything awful on a personal level, that he has been on the wrong side of like pretty much every major decision for his entire career. He was anti-busting, he was pro rock war.

He was so singularly helpful in getting Clarence Thomas in this report. I don't like, you could count on maybe one hand, the major decisions where he came up where he came out on the right side of that for his entire fucking long career. And by total accident. Yeah, just to twist gears again to like look at maybe like look at the other side of the presidential election. I want

to talk a little bit about because it's been getting a lot of press in the last week or so. The the the much touted Project 2025. Now, Ryan, this has been this has been picking up some heat and Trump has tried to distance himself from it. And it does look like it's a pretty pretty effective rhetorical tool for the Democrats, because essentially like what Project 2025 states is the platform of the Republican Party for the last 30 or 40 years. I mean, am I wrong here? Is there anything in Project 2025

that the Republican Party hasn't been in one way or another supportive of throughout my entire life? And like, but like, corollary to that is like, there's factional stuff, yeah. But a corollary to that is like, obviously like the Republican Party putting out a,

like, you know, a manifesto is electoral poison for them, because if people actually like they're, you know, getting rid of getting rid of divorce and recreational sex, not exactly a winning platform in a national election. But at the same time, I'm struck by the utter lack of any vision or democratic equivalent of Project 2025. So I was wondering if you could just talk about like Project 2025, what's actually in it, what's at stake?

Why is it a unique liability for the Republicans? But also, why do the Democrats not have any competing vision to counter this project? And it's such a liability because of the things that you pointed to that, like, you know, being against a divorce, being against divorce and the other social conservative stuff that they throw in there. It's kind of a hodgepodge and in some cases it includes like multiple different positions. Like it'll say like some of us in the coalition believe this, others in the coalition believe

that, which from a political perspective is foolish to put in there because then it's just gonna be picked out. It reminds me of the way that Rick Scott got dragged around by Mitch McConnell when he came out and said he was gonna raise taxes on every poor person in the country. And McConnell had to say, we're not gonna do this, but it didn't matter because Rick Scott, I think, was the head of the NRSC at that time. And so all the Democrats could just say, look, this is what this guy said he wants to do.

We're putting in our ads and, you know, PolitiFact is going to let us get away with it because he said it's true. But it also does represent a real kind of, you know, coalescing movement around, you know, it's the Trump nationalist, you know, political movement feeling its oats. Like, you know, they were shocked to come into power and just didn't have the horses at all. Like they really feel like the reason that they lost to the deep state in the first term is that they just didn't have the players to put out in the field. That there were just too many, whatever you want to call them, opponents of Trump embedded

inside the federal government. And so they have spent the last four years trying to prepare for a successful revolution. And if they take the palace this time, they're going to clean out the guard, clean everything out and they're actually going to deliver it. Like they're going to be ready this time. So it also reflects a seriousness in a lot of ways. And like I moderated a debate a couple, there's a zero hedge debate a week or two ago, and there were two Trump guys, Jack Pasobiec or whatever that is.

I see him on Twitter all the time. The other one, Ryan Grodusky or Grodusky. I mean, I came out of that like just, just like, Whoa, these guys are fucking nuts. These guys are, these guys are legitimately insane. Like they were talking about sending the national guard into American cities to like deport everybody that were talking about going to war with the Mexican cartels, like the things you talk about, but they're like, they're like seriously drawing up plans for this stuff.

They're the bleeding edge of this Trump movement. But there's some serious insanity, you know, going on with with that with that crew. Well, just like in one of the Democrats, like it seems to be like their their counter to the Project 2025 is to adopt the policies of the Republican administration from four years ago. This is yes to immigration. It's like, oh, we're not going to send the National Guard into the cities. We're just going to end, you know, being able to claim asylum at the border.

Biden even said in his press conference when he announced that he was adopting Trump's policy, he said, but I but I will never adopt Trump's rhetoric. Good. Thanks for that. I guess what I'm trying to make here is that like, if we're to take seriously, like how blood curdling some of this stuff is or like should they get gain untrammeled access to the federal government again? Like they're pretty much stating what they plan to do with it, whether whether they will achieve it or not is sort of immaterial to me. Like it's scary enough as it is.

But like what accounts for the Democratic Party is like where is the Democratic Party's Project 2025? Where is even in any of their effort to like get rid of blue notes to appoint judges before on a note in the next three weeks? Do they have to do this shit? Like, I don't think I think they don't believe their own propaganda. And you can see it in the 2028 candidates like Newsom, Whitmer, and all these others you on the one hand, you have Democrats warning that if Trump wins in 2024, there will never be another presidential election.

Like that's it. Meanwhile, you have every serious Democrat on the bench saying, you know what, I'm going to take a pass this time. I'm going to let Biden come. Yeah, yeah, they're all lining up to run to the presidential election is not going to happen if Biden loses. It's like, I'm going to go ahead and guess you guys don't necessarily believe the rhetoric here. I think like project 2025, right? It, I agree with you in that like, it's, it's a mix of things where like, some of it is just like outright incoherent or like,

just so unpopular that I don't know if it could get off the ground some of it is like You know very clear express and terrifying goals, obviously but that like one thing I do find kind of interesting with it is that One of the big problems that like the the Bannon faction ran into big problems that like the, the Bannon faction ran into during their sort of brief attempt, their brief war during the like more Kushner faction in the Trump White House that they ultimately lost is that when you're trying to like staff

an executive branch with like, you know, fucking based economic nationalists or whatever, when you go around trying to hire people from the places that you hire people from in DC There's still like aren't enough of those people to staff a federal government Look if they even accomplish like 10% of the stuff that's in 2025 it's bad obviously very bad But I don't think the literal amount of people you would need for it is quite there Like that was a repeated issue with the Trump administration Just their their trouble in filling out the administrative state that they needed

They ended up hiring so many fucking like weird losers like that cash Patel fucker That that who's that guy guy Ezra Watnick cone like all these just fucking losers who just all immediately got arrested instantly at Bernie would have faced that problem too if he'd have won in 2016 absolutely like you would have had Ryan Grim press secretary yeah he would have had my grim press secretary. Yeah, they would have been calling you guys. Do any of you guys know anything about the Department of Energy? My favorite part of that Kareen press conference recently,

when she was talking about how all these world leaders can attest to Biden's mental strength, the second person she mentioned was Bibi Netanyahu. He'll tell you Joe Biden's just, he's awful. His handshake is still firm as a rock. But listen, as I'm listening to you guys, I mean, this is not, you guys are more in the weeds on this stuff than I am, but I look at this

and sort of say like, how is it not that then this is the moment when everyone is going to realize that the nature of this system that produces this reality is indicative of a fundamental rot? The idea that the... Alan Nairn, who was one of my role models in journalism, a great investigative reporter who uncovered CIA support for death squads in Central America and the coup in Haiti in the 1990s that overthrew Aristide, you know, he always says that hypocrisy has its virtue and that when the Democrats are in power, at least there's a common language that you can argue with them, you know, over.

But that's becoming less and less true. And when you look at what has happened in the embrace of these right-wing policies that have been a hallmark of Biden's career, but it's becoming institutionalized, and you look at what Biden has chosen to do over the past nine months in Gaza, knowing that he was going to face this election that they're portraying as like, you know, we need to ward off the apocalypse. These are all conscious choices that this party made. The party made a choice to consolidate around Biden.

The party is making these choices and they are constantly banking on the notion that people are going to vote from a position of fear. I don't want Donald Trump to be president. I mean, I absolutely do not want Donald Trump to be president, but I also don't want Joe Biden to be president. It's not, it's, it has not, it's not even about his mental acuity. It's because of Biden's career, his record, the kind of a politician that he is. It's not enough to just say, you know, it, it reminds me of like these doomsday cults

where they say, oh, the world is gonna end in this year. And then it doesn't. And then they say, oh, well, actually a new, you know, a new sort of stone tablet has come down for me. And it's actually gonna be in five years. And it's like, that's how the Democrats are. They're like a death cult that keeps telling you that the world is gonna end if you don't do what they,

you know, what they tell you to do. And this is really, it's sick. You just, you can't keep telling people this is the most important one, especially when you are oscillating between this is so important. This is the only guy that can do this. And wouldn't it be mean if we kick this old fuck out? Or what he said in the Stephanopoulos interview where he said, as long as I do my best and try hard, then that's good enough for me. Yeah.

Oh yeah. I'm glad you'll be happy. What was your tweet Ryan about if you go to a surgeon? Oh yeah. The 81 year old surgeon looking over you and the operating family. This procedure is really about the friends we're going to make along the way. Yeah. The other problem is that we have like a, they call it a party system, but it's more of a politician system. Yeah. It's like a membership association. It's not really a political party. Yeah. It's not. It's because it doesn't have a collective agenda. Like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have their own agendas and they are the agendas

of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. And so right now they're looking at the situation. They're saying, okay, look, it looks like Biden is certainly going to lose. But if I push Biden over and we end up replacing Biden with Kamala and Kamala loses, then do I own Kamala's loss? Like, is that on me a little bit because I played a role in this? And I, you know, Matt Crispin talks about all this, talks about this all the time. There's liberals unwilling to take any responsibility for anything.

It's just much easier from Schumer's perspective to just step back and say, you know what, if I don't do anything here and Biden loses, then I'm not at fault. So that's the smarter play for me. That's the savvy play for me right now. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And you know, early on in this latest, you know, assault on Gaza and Palestine, I described

the United States and Israel's relationship as a murder-suicide pact. And it's good to know the Democratic Party has adopted that same relationship for them and their voters and the entire country. But by the way, that thought just reminded me, Felix or Will, I might have told one of you this, but Matt's line about how liberals refuse to take responsibility for anything was like a key thought in my mind as Jeremy and I were contemplating what to do about the Intercept and you know, whether to launch something new, because we could have just kind of just coasted and continued like doing our work in a siloed kind of way. But we just we decided, you know, we actually there is a responsibility here to build something, build an institution like we like independent investigative journalism has to exist, and we gotta take risks for it. And so, kind of a thank you to Matt for putting that in my head. I don't wanna be one of those liberals

who just never makes any decisions and just winds up with the fascists throwing them in the basement anyway. One of his greatest quotes and another Matt quote that I have been ruminating on a lot, this election especially, is I think one of the most timeless things he's ever said, that Trump versus Biden comes down to demonious acts versus Dan Quinn.

One of the most astute statements ever. Well, I think that's a perfect place to wrap up this conversation with our thoughts with our, our often with Matt Christman. And you know, we think about him often, even though his presence on the show has been, you know, he's not been on the show recently, as we all know, but our thoughts are still very much with Matt and his thoughts and his words and his life all the time. And hopefully we'll hear from him sometime soon. But only time will tell. And I can't I can't wait for this Spanish civil war book.

Uh, absolutely. Ryan, Jeremy, I want to thank you so much for your time and coming, coming to talk to us about the new site, uh, drop, do drop site news.com. If people would like to subscribe, please visit drop site news.com. Thanks guys. Thank you guys so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Cheers. Till next time everybody. Bye. Bye. Take care