Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac opens up a 10 pack

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

Ari is on the road coaching the University of Vermont’s frisbee team in college nationals (Go Ari!). So this week, Isaac is going to do some mini coverage on ten topics that have been on his mind. Buckle up.You can watch our latest video, Isaac's interview with former Congressman Ken Buck (CO-04) ⁠here⁠.Check the next episode of our new podcast series, The Undecideds. In episode 3, our focus shifts from Donald Trump toward President Joe Biden. Much has been made in the media about his age and memory and whether he’s cognitively capable of handling another term. But an unanticipated performance at the State of the Union reignited his base and left many questioning that narrative. And while Donald Trump faces a jury of his peers in court, the court of public opinion continues to weigh in on the effectiveness of Biden’s foreign policies, with an eye to the conflicts between Israel and Palestine, Ukraine and Russia, and our own protracted clash at our southern border.  Our undecided voters share their observations on the current commander in chief and how his decisions on the world stage affect their decision in the voting booth. You can listen to Episode 3 ⁠⁠here.⁠⁠Today’s clickables: Intro (0:28), #1 - Mike Johnson and Democrats (2:06), #2 - The Polls (5:11), #3 - Anti-Semitism bill w/Amanda Berman (8:26), #4 - Michelle Obama doesn’t want to be President. Ever. (27:48), #5 Michael Cohen is not a credible witness (30:14) #6 - Penn protests (32:16), #7 - Enabling (38:08), #8 - You can’t redefine words (39:53), #9 - Unintended consequences of protesting (42:04), #10 - We should have gotten involved sooner (43:48)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and we are doing something a little different for today's Sunday podcast. My faithful co-host, Ari Weitzman, is a little bit tied up with some obligations the next couple of weeks. He's got college nationals for the University of Vermont Frisbee team he's coaching. And so next week, he'll actually be at nationals for the university of vermont frisbee team he's coaching and so next week he'll actually be at nationals coaching during our normal recording time and this week he had some can't miss practices pop up so it's just me flying solo on the podcast plus one guest who we brought on uh which i'm excited about and curious to hear people's thoughts and reflections

on before we jump in i just want to set the table here a little bit i'm going to do something a which I'm excited about and curious to hear people's thoughts and reflections on. Before we jump in, I just want to set the table here a little bit. I'm going to do something a little different for this Sunday podcast. I was kind of thinking about a format and I decided I'm going to just do what maybe we'll call a 10-pack. I'm going to open up a 10-pack. Sometimes Bill Simmons on his podcast opens up a six-pack. I love that format where he just kind of jumps through some topics and does some sort of mini topic coverage. And that's what I'd like to do today. You know, I've done this in my writing in the newsletter sometimes with, figured this was an easy way to do it, and I could do it even without Ari and just riff a little bit. And so that's going to be the format. I'm going to run through those 10 things, and I hope you guys enjoy it. All right. First thing I want to jump in on, number one, is this very weird dynamic that is forming between Democrats and Speaker Mike Johnson, which is sort of a big story, but maybe it should just be a bigger story than it is. There is a really, really bizarre reliance that is coming now.

Democrats saved Mike Johnson, basically, from being ousted by Republicans. They could have voted in unison to remove him as speaker. It feels like maybe they expected something for that, which is rational to a degree, but I think is totally unrealistic. I mean, I didn't expect him to act any differently based on what they did. But the upshot of it is basically that they feel like he's indebted to them. And I saw this really bizarre story in Axios, which was about how Mike Johnson went to the Trump trial in Manhattan and basically did a gaggle with the press and called the whole thing a witch hunt and said, you know, some inflammatory stuff in defense of Trump about how Democrats are going after him, all this stuff.

And then Axios quoted all these Democrats who were like, if he keeps this up, we're not going to save him next time. If he keeps doing this, then that's the end of that. And certainly this will be a topic of discussion in our next vote, the next time Republicans try and remove him. And I was watching it like, are you guys, did you expect something different? What actually did they think was going to happen? different like what actually did they think was going to happen the the reason to keep mike johnson as speaker is not because he isn't going to go be a trump loyalist he's obviously a trump i mean he he couldn't make it clearer that he's a trump loyalist the reason to keep mike johnson

as speaker is that he's shown a willingness to work with people and he seemed to be a decent guy and he actually is open-minded enough to, you know, move to a Democrat position. He's, he's actually open-minded enough and not so partisan that he will get sort of entrapped by his far right wing. That's the reason to keep Mike Johnson in power. If you're Democrats and the litmus test is like, we're never going to stand behind anybody who's loyal to Donald Trump, we're going to have a lot of problems. They need to get over that ASAP. I think Mike Johnson is a decent dude, a surprisingly good politician who's willing to work across the aisle. And if you're the minority in the House, if you're the Democratic minority in the House, he's about as good as it gets. So these weird threats that they're going to stop saving Mike Johnson because he shows

up at Trump's trial and bashes the media and Democrats is just bizarre nonsense and doesn't make any sense to me. All right, that's number one. Number two is the polls. I want to talk just for a moment about the polls and some of the polling stuff we've seen recently because I'm getting a little skeptical. I don't know how else to put it except to say that, that I'm just, I'm just not sure if I believe them. And I don't know if that's a naive thing to think or a silly position, but Ari sent me this tweet from this guy who I was not familiar with. sent me this tweet from this guy who I was not familiar with. He's a political analyst and a columnist, and it looks like his name is Cliston Brown. He's got a small Twitter following, and he

posted this thread that got a lot of traction, and it popped on Ari's radar, and he sent it to me. He cited some recent polling that was showing that Trump's winning by 13% in Nevada and leading in New Jersey. So he makes the case that basically the polling is just completely 100% screwed, that if you believe Trump is winning by 13% in Nevada and leading in New Jersey, you need to step away from Twitter and get help. And I think he's right. I actually think this is right. I read this thread. He said, six months out from an election, people have a tendency to spout off. They're pissed off about one thing or another. They're just hawking out of their asses right now, basically. Screw Biden, I'm going to vote for RFK. When things get serious in a few months, they're going to get real.

I think that's right. I feel weird saying it or I feel silly saying it because I don't want to just scoff at people who do the polling stuff for a living, but I just don't buy it. Trump very well may be in a better position than Biden is, but I don't think it's the margin that people are saying right now. It doesn't make sense with the Senate race stuff because there are a lot of these Senate races where Democrats are just pulling ahead of Republicans, where Biden is still behind Trump. It's bizarre because Democrats keep winning elections. It's bizarre for a lot of reasons. It's bizarre for a lot of reasons. I just, yeah, I don't know. I think this guy's onto something. I think we are overreacting to the polls. And I'm starting to subscribe to this camp that's just like, we've now had a few years where there's just kind of crappy polling throughout election season, and we just keep falling for it. And I'm not going to fall for it this time. So and that isn't to say the polls are wrong. Overall, close to Election Day within a month or two of Election Day, the polls have actually been pretty good in the last two elections in 2022 and 2020 and 2016. They were bad, obviously, but I am just a lot more sympathetic to this position that we are just making a bunch of noise out of stuff we shouldn't be. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

All right, number three. I wrote recently about this anti-Semitism bill in Congress, and I'm bringing in a guest for this one because I talked about how I thought this anti-Semitism bill that was passed in the House was a major threat to free speech. And I wrote a pretty kind of absolutist take about it where I just said, this is terrible. This is total madness. And there's going to be a lot of issues with this. And I got an email from a Tangle reader, this woman named Amanda Berman. She's the founder and executive director of the Zionist movement. She also is a civil rights attorney, which is why I wanted to talk to her. And she basically wrote in to tell me, hey, I'm a free speech absolutist. I've actually litigated cases about anti-Semitism related to Title VI violations and the First and Fourteenth

Amendment and all this stuff. I am an expert in this space, she said, more or less. And you are wrong. You have this wrong. You're misunderstanding this bill. And I think you and other members of Congress are misrepresenting it. So I said, awesome. Appreciate the criticism. Love this email. I'm actually recording a podcast today about it. Will you come on and talk to me? Because I had this item. I wanted to talk about this bill, and she accepted the invitation. So I would like to welcome Amanda Berman to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's awesome to be here. So I'm going to assume that some readers are kind of familiar with my position, but I'll just start by maybe stating some of my concerns again, which is that this bill, as I understand it, and I recognize that I might be misunderstanding it, is basically attaching itself to this definition of anti-Semitism that I feel like encompasses some broader criticisms of Israel as things that might

fall into, you know, what we're defining as anti-Semitism and as a result could act to stymie some free speech and that in these civil rights cases that come up, we might see that definition kind of bring in some people who get sued or whatever, get into trouble under the law, under this legislation and effectively are being, accused of antisemitism for things that I might define as being more anti-Zionist or anti-Israel rhetoric. And so I don't know maybe where I'm getting lost, but I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about what you think this bill is going to do, why you think this definition works, and some of your experience kind of navigating this in the legal sense. So thanks so much again for having me and for the question. And, you know, one thing I want to start

by saying is that to the extent that you are misunderstanding the bill, a lot of people, including many members of Congress, are also misunderstanding the bill. And that's because this conversation has been so intentionally weaponized over such a long period of time. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IRA definition of antisemitism is the world recognized definition of antisemitism. It world-recognized definition of antisemitism. It was created over the last several decades by a group of civil society leaders, experts in the field of Holocaust education, people across Europe who know how antisemitism rises and tends to take over entire societies and have identified the ways that antisemitism were at

the time rising quite astronomically across Europe. So it was a real world experience definition of antisemitism. It wasn't an ivory tower thing. It wasn't an academic debate. It was this is how antisemitism has shown up and is showing up today in the world. And this was like in the early 2000s that this definition was created. What's important to know about the bill, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which passed the House last week, and as we understand it will have lots of challenges in the Senate, people are trying to make this a partisan issue, but actually almost an identical bill passed the Senate unanimously several years ago. I mean, think about how rare it is for

anything to happen unanimously in the Senate. An almost identical bill to this, it was also called the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, passed the Senate unanimously several years ago and was held out by a Republican in the House, Chairman Goodlatte at the time, who's no longer in Congress. I think that was 2019. The bill, the Anti Antisemitism Awareness Act, asks the Department of Education to refer to this definition of antisemitism when it is considering Title VI cases within the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education. What happens and where there's confusion is what the process is for OCR or for a federal court, because Title VI claims can also be brought to a federal court. They don't have to go to DOE, but oftentimes they do. The process of

determining whether or not to open up one of those complaints and to pursue an investigation requires the Department of Education or a court to consider the free speech rights of the people who are engaged in anti-Semitic speech. So when we're thinking about the definition, what often happens is people say the IRA definition goes too far in equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism or, you know, saying that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. I have a lot to say about that, but it's not really the point because people say it's a free speech issue to use the IRA definition. And so their response to that, a lot of these people have proposed two different definitions of antisemitism that they say don't have the same

free speech issues. Now, the distinction between these definitions is about what constitutes anti-Semitism. But at the end of the day, the process that OCR or a federal court has to go through to determine whether or not to investigate a complaint, they're going to look at that definition and say, it looks like this could be anti-Semitism. It could fall under our jurisdiction. It is something that we should investigate to determine whether or not there's a violation of Title VI. And then they're going to pursue the investigation. The question of whether or not it's antisemitic does not mean that anyone

is going to be punished for it. So, and I don't know, I think I'm kind of all over the place here, but the reason why I mentioned the other two definitions is because if it were really a free speech issue there is no definition of anti-semitism that would satisfy the free speech people and I just want to say I am a free speech absolutist you have a right to be an anti-semite and to say anti-semitic things anywhere in America but certainly on public university campuses, private universities too, but it's a slightly different legal analysis. You have a right to be an anti-Semite and to say anti-Semitic things. You have a right to say Zionist ethno-nationalists are welcome on this campus. You have a right to point at Jewish

students and say, you're a Zionist genocidal colonizer who kills Palestinian babies for sport. You're allowed to say that. And the Jewish students or anyone questioning whether Jewish students who can't access the benefits and privileges of their university campus because everywhere they turn, somebody is harassing them or intimidating them, they have a right to say this is anti-Semitism. And the definitions help whoever at DOE who is not familiar with classical or contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism understand, oh, that is anti-Semitism. Oh, that's not just criticism of Israel. That's something we should look deeper to determine when considering the full context of the situation, whether this person's civil rights were violated. And they're going to be looking at a totality of the circumstances.

They're not going to look at one individual person speaking something anti-Semitic. And the question they're going to have to ask is, did all of this anti-Semitic activity contribute to a pervasively hostile environment? It is not a low bar. It is not an easy standard. Did all of this, the totality of the circumstances, contribute to a pervasively hostile environment that the university administration was made aware of, had an opportunity to cure, and didn't cure? And the last important thing I'm going to say about that is that when the university says, I'm seeing all this antisemitism, when administrators become aware that students are saying that they can't access the benefits and opportunities of the campus,

and that's how you determine whether there is a Title VI violation, if Jewish students are coming to them and saying, I can't access the benefits and opportunities of this campus, and I'm considering bringing a Title VI claim, and I need you to do something about it. The administrators cannot shut down the anti-Semitic speech. They don't have that right because students have the right to speak and to be bigots. You have the right in a free country to be a bigot. That's what freedom is. The university has to respond. The response of curing the anti-Semitic environment is saying, I see that there is a problem. I care about my Jewish students. If you need an escort to class, we're going to get that. We're going to beef up security outside of Hillel and Jewish sororities and fraternities. We're going to make sure that your professors are not punishing you

for being Jewish or Zionist, that they're not calling you out or harassing you in class, that nobody is linking arms and blocking you from accessing the library. If we have to remove people who are blocking access to the library, we will. We don't want to do that, but we will. They cannot punish the speech because then they'll be sued rightfully by the anti-Semitic speakers. So it's a difficult dance for the administration, but that's what it means to cure the hostile environment. And the definition, whatever definition gets applied, say you take one of the other definitions that in my view only exist to undermine IRA, like that is the reason why people created other definitions in the first place. Let's say you take one of those definitions. Those definitions also identify

anti-Semitic speech. And so if the Department of Education can't label anything anti-Semitic for fear of violating people's free speech rights, they also can't use the nexus definition. They also can't use the Jerusalem Declaration. So the argument that somehow it's a free speech thing if it's IRA and it's not a free speech thing if it's IRA and it's not a free speech thing if it's nexus doesn't make any sense legally. I know I just said a lot of stuff. I think I am grasping it though. I mean, that's a super helpful context. I guess maybe to condense it a little bit, and I'm going to try and say it back to you the way I think I understand it, and you can tell me if this sounds right to you, is that by using this definition, it doesn't create a scenario where a student who says that

the existence of the state of Israel is some kind of racist endeavor or something is going to end up being sued and go to court for violating some students' rights. It's more that students who are experiencing these kinds of protests or this environment on campus are able to hold the campus accountable for not curing that environment in some way or not offering some kind of remedy for the environment. And even in that scenario, they're going to be able to say, these are examples of antisemitism I experienced under this definition and go to a court. And then a court has to kind of weigh that against the

free speech issue and what the campus's actions were and what the college's actions were and kind of take all those things into account into one larger sort of legal challenge. Does that sound right? I think it's accurate. And again, what a court or the Department of Education is looking at at the end of their analysis of a Title VI complaint is, was this group of students, were they denied the benefits and privileges that a university has to offer them? Because the environment at that school was so pervasively hostile that they could not go to class, access extracurriculars, be part of clubs,

know that their professors were grading them fairly without judging them for their identities or, you know, I don't think Zionism is a political belief, but let's say it is, you still can't judge somebody for their political belief. The question is not, who should we punish? The question is, is this campus a place where Jewish students can get a real education, the same education that's offered to every other group of students. And to be honest, one of the sort of interesting things that I'm wondering about a lot of the, I imagine, forthcoming Title VI complaints coming after all of these encampments is that the encampments have shut down schools entirely for everyone.

And the Title VI question is, was this group unfairly targeted in a way that this group could not access the benefits and privileges that other students can access? And because of the encampments, nobody seems to be able to access school. And so I think that might actually present a challenge for people who are saying that it's a Title VI violation for Jewish students. But the point is, the question for those who are saying that it's a Title VI violation for Jewish students. But the point is, the question for those who are analyzing the complaint is whether Jewish students can benefit from being members of the campus community. The question is not who gets punished, because at the end of the day, we already know who gets punished under the statute, and it is the university.

under the statute, and it is the university. Under Title VI, the resolution, essentially, the sort of the stick, you know, for when there is an adjudication that says that Title VI was violated, is that the university could lose federal funding. The students who are participating in anti-Semitic speech, to the extent that it is pure speech cannot be punished for exercising their free speech rights. Now, they can, of course, be punished for engaging in expressive conduct that is harassing or intimidating or is physically abusive in any way or is, you know, again, physically encroaching on someone's rights or ability to access a university building or something like that. Of course, they can be punished for that. But pure speech cannot be punished. And that is where I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding because people think that once the IRA definition is,

you know, adopted in this way, that anybody who quote unquote violates it is, you know, somehow going to be silenced. There is no operation of any statute, including Title VI, that would ever allow something like that. It's just not how it works. Okay, so I have one last question, I guess, about this, which is, you know, I totally, it's not hard for me to conceive of a world where, you know, members of Congress are misunderstanding this bill, or someone like me is reading what members of Congress are misunderstanding this bill or someone like me is reading what members of Congress are saying about the bill and opinion writers and whatever

and maybe not seeing the larger picture. I guess one thing that did catch my eye was also that the ACLU came out against the bill. And I'm curious what your interpretation of that is or why you think an organization like that, who I imagine is a room full of people just as qualified as you are, kind of seeing it so differently. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu,

a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases

have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Thank you. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. Well, it's a great question. I appreciate the question. And I'm genuinely heartbroken to say that I think that the ACLU stopped defending free speech a long time ago.

The ACLU was born to be a free speech organization. You know, they're well known for working with Alan Dershowitz in what I would say are his better years to represent Nazis who were marching in Skokie, Illinois, you know, quite offensive to the many Holocaust survivors who lived in Skokie, Illinois. Nazis have a right to spout anti-Semitic things have criticized the ACLU for becoming so ideological and, frankly, for being inconsistent in the way that they conceive of free speech. When I say that you have a right to be a bigot in America, I mean you have a right to be an anti-Semite. You have a right to be a racist. You have a right to be an Islamophobe. I obviously don't endorse any of that behavior, but the First Amendment is first because it's the foundation of all other rights. You have to be allowed to be a complete asshole in America and to spout bigoted things. If you only hold one, if you want if if free speech doesn't apply when there are micro aggressions against

any group but then when there are macro aggressions against jews everybody invokes the first amendment you have a double standard problem it's not so much about the free speech problem anymore it becomes the double standard problem and i think that's really what's been going on in a lot of the college education scenarios where you you know, schools like Harvard and Penn, my alma mater, have an F on the FIRE ranking for free speech on campus for quite a long time. It goes far beyond, you know, the past year because they don't allow bigoted speech on campus because they do shut down speakers that they think are going to offend people on campus. And, you know, frankly, I think it's a problem in education where students are not being exposed to bad ideas and learning how to articulate

better ideas and learning how to confront, you know, bigotry and racism and homophobia and all of these horrible ideas with better ideas. They're not being exposed generally to a plethora of different ideological viewpoints. And the ACLU, I think, unfortunately, has been contributing to this dynamic in a lot of ways. And again, you don't have to take it from me. There's criticism from really well-respected legal organizations saying that, unfortunately, it's simply a double standard. It's just that when anti-Semitism is part of the picture, everybody invokes free speech. I think it's also partisan in the sense that if there were white supremacists coming onto campus to target Jews, everybody would call that out without hesitation. But when it's left-wing antisemitism, people are much more hesitant to do it for any number of reasons. Awesome. Amanda Berman, thank you so much for the time. I appreciate you coming on the show

and I look forward to your future emails about my legal analysis. I just really appreciate everything you do and really grateful for the opportunity to be here. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. All right. Thank you, Amanda. That was awesome. I appreciate her dropping in. Now we're on to number four. Stephen A. Smith said something on his show, and multiple people said this to me. Stephen A. Smith, for those who don't know, he's the very famous bombastic sports commentator who loves having smoking hot takes and whatever else. And he's talking more and more about politics recently, which I actually love. I think he's an interesting person to hear from about politics.

But he went on this brief rant, a tangent about how Michelle Obama would win. I don't know how else to say this. Everyone needs to shut up about the Michelle Obama thing. I'm not kidding. I get emails almost once a day. I mean, definitely multiple times a week from people asking me about Michelle Obama and either conservatives saying they're going to replace Biden with Michelle Obama or liberals writing in to say, what if we put Michelle Obama on the ticket? Michelle Obama does not want to be president. This is never happening. Calling this a pipe dream is too kind of a word. It's mass delusion. It is like, no, it's she will not this year, not in future elections. She's never going to run for

office. Everything we know about her was that she actually hated when Obama was president. She hated being in the White House. She hated the kind of public exposure they got. Obama, President Obama has written about this and, you know, his biographies are in personal essays. I can't remember which, maybe both. I've read his words about this, like the fact that it was really hard on them and it was a really tough decision from the run for president because she so badly didn't want it because she knew everything that was going to happen was going to happen. And she was probably right about most of it. I mean, seems like being Obama was probably really awful a lot of times, like being accused of not being American and all these other things and going through all that and all the exposure the kids got and everything. So just stop. Michelle Obama doesn't

want to be in the White House. They're not going to find a way to bring Barack Obama back through being the president's husband. It's just not happening. Please stop talking about her. No, is the answer. Okay, great. All right, number five. I saw a headline today I just had to comment on because it was so over the top. MSNBC ran a headline, and I'm literally going to read this to you verbatim, how Michael Cohen's past lies make him a more credible witness. I'm going to read that one more time. MSNBC ran a headline that said, how Michael Cohen's past lies make him a more credible witness.

past lies make him a more credible witness. I'm not going to name the opinion writer who published this piece because oftentimes editors are the ones who make headlines. The argument was basically that Cohen has lied a bunch in the past, yes, but he has lied for the benefit of Trump. He's lied to protect Trump. And so these lies actually make him more credible now that he's testifying against Trump. I get it. But also, stop. If you're writing a headline that says how Michael Cohen's past lies make him a more credible witness, you are spun. You are dizzy with partisan mental gymnastics. Michael Cohen in no world is a credible witness. I'm not saying what he's saying in this trial, what he's saying in this trial very well might be true. In fact, I think a lot of what he's saying in this trial is true, like we wrote about on Wednesday. Michael Cohen is not a credible witness

and somebody lying previously under oath and going to jail for lying to Congress, to investigators, to courtroom, to the IRS, to banks, that does not make them a more credible witness. And if you have twisted yourself into a pretzel to make that argument, you're doing it out

of partisan fervor, which is what this piece was. So just no. Okay? Just no. All right, number six. I went to the Penn protest. By the time you guys are listening to this, there might be a YouTube video out about it. If you haven't seen that video yet, if you're not sure, go to Tangle News on YouTube, see if the

video is up. I just wanted to say a few things about it here on the podcast, because I know some people are just podcast listeners. It was an interesting experience. It was a little bizarre. There were weird moments. There were moments of tension, all sorts of different stuff. For the most part, the protest was very mellow. And I want to emphasize something that doesn't get talked about at all in this press coverage. At these encampments, these kids, well, we'll talk about that in a moment, but the ones who are students, whatever, the protesters, the people at the encampments, they're there for 24 hours a day. They're sleeping there. They're staying there all

day. You know, maybe the students are going to class, whatever, but they're eating their meals there. They're having, you know, meetings. They're doing group talks. They're chanting. They're marching around campus, whatever. They go back and sleep in the encampment 24 hours a day. The stuff you're seeing on the news is like a 20 second soundbite out of an entire 24 hour a day. The stuff you're seeing on the news is like a 20 second soundbite out of an entire 24 hour day. So a lot of what's happening is just these kids sitting around doing nothing. I went to the Penn protest. I interviewed a bunch of people. I tried to talk to a bunch of people. It was for the most part, very mellow and non-obtrusive, did not strike me as super threatening. I'm a Jew. I'm a Zionist. I did not feel nervous or scared being there. It was not a

super duper tense thing. There were some moments of weird tension. The weirdest thing, the thing that I think justifies what Penn did in the 12 hours after we left, which was they brought in the police and cleared the entire camp and out, is it's very obvious that the vast majority of the people are not Penn students. That's not cool. If you are a Penn administrator and there are non-students camping on your campus,

occupying a lawn on your campus, camping on your campus, occupying a lawn on your campus, we're not talking about just like student free speech rights and all this stuff. Even if they're there at the invitation of students who are on your campus. If I was a student at Penn and there were a bunch of activists, professional activists, just camping out on my campus, obstructing stuff, whatever. And I went and saw these people. Some of them look like they're 40s, 50s, 60s. Some of them are students from other schools who are now on Penn's campus using Penn's facilities for various things, whatever it is. You're entering a different territory. When they arrested all these students, nine of the 33 of the people arrested were students. So, you know, the other 24 were not students. That's something. And that's roughly how I would have ballparked it based on what I saw was that like a third or less were Penn students. That's weird.

that's weird the other thing is weird is there's these like gatekeepers to the encampment who stop certain people and don't let them in also problematic i got stopped and was not allowed in despite the fact that was media i asked to go in they said no no cameras allowed i said okay cool i'll leave the camera and mic behind i just want to come in and experience what it's like and then they made me wait outside the gate and they texted some thread, these quote unquote marshals who are like protecting the encampment. And they all look up my news organization and are texting each other and they're doing it in front of me. And then they're just like, sorry, it's a no. Like we've some powers that be that I can't see or interact with have determined that you're not allowed in. And while this is going on, I'm catching some of the marshals filming me, taking pictures of me. Just, you know, it's okay. I'm there with a camera. I'm trying to interview people.

I'm press, but they're like pretending to be some sort of security apparatus or something. It's, it feels weird. And or something. It feels weird. And I get why that feels weird. And I understand why it feels weird to some people. And it felt weird to me. And it wasn't intimidating, but it was a little bit off-putting and annoying and a little unsettling, maybe, I would say. So the protests were a little bit weird. That happened. We're going to release a video about it. It was mellow and about what I expected, which was a little bit weird. That happened. We're going to release a video about it. It was mellow and about what I expected, which was a little bit boring. The student liaison I talked to, who was from Temple, not Penn, but the student representative they gave me to speak to somebody,

he was really well-versed in a lot of lefty talking points and said a bunch of stuff that was kind of incoherent and I thought, divorced from reality. I mean, he tried to draw a straight line from Penn's quote-unquote occupation of West Philadelphia by expanding into West Philly and displacing people in West Philly to the occupation in Gaza. You lose me a little bit when you do that kind of stuff. And I wasn't there to debate. I wasn't there to fight. I was there to genuinely just hear people's perspective. But I heard some things that just sort of made me scoff a bit. That was one of them. So I encourage you to go check out the video, see if it's up yet. It should be up by now. Give it a listen or a watch and

share it. We worked hard on it and I'm excited that we got to do this and that I got to go experience this stuff up close and in person. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. to shout down a speaker that comes to campus. This is all pre-October 7th stuff. Like, if you let these demonstrations go where they're just able to cancel certain people and prevent certain people from participating in the campus life, then it empowers a certain level of belief that it's just okay to have those kinds of tactics to, quote unquote, take control of the campus. And I think the campus is screwed up by letting a lot of that stuff slide. And then I also think just the more progressive lefty culture has screwed up by labeling it racist to call something like coronavirus the Wuhan flu or whatever. Because even if you agree that that's a racist or

inflammatory way of describing COVID, which I totally understand, you are setting the bar for what is acceptable and unacceptable speech really low. And you're saying that we're going to react strongly to certain things. So if it's not okay to say, you know, Wuhan flu, but then you say it is okay for chance about Intifada on campus, you just have some inherent tension, which brings me to number eight. And these are a few in a row about the protests, but they all feel really relevant to the stuff that's going on right now. You can't just redefine words. I am very sympathetic to the fact that an expression or chant, like from the river to the sea, means different things to different people. intifada is a word that has a meaning and it has a colloquial

meaning and it has you know like a a traditional arabic definition and whatever you know there There are different ways to kind of interpret it, but there's no world in which calls for an intifada could be reasonably interpreted as a peaceful piece of rhetoric. So don't just tell us that it is. It isn't. it is. It isn't. When I was on the Penn campus, one of the things that I observed, and we talked about this in the video, is there was an Israeli woman there who was trying to show solidarity with Jewish students on campus. And she got in an argument, one of the protesters, about them standing next to a sign calling for Intifada. And I got to say, I think she's right. She said, she's like, I am an Israeli. I lived through the second Intifada. Car bombings, terrorism, random killings in the street, that's what the second Intifada was. And the call for an uprising and the fight for a free Palestine is one thing. There's language that has a lot of meaning to other people. And I think the

folks on the left who are just pretending that something like intifada is like an innocuous call for some protest movement, you're being unreasonably narrow-minded and insensitive to what that word has meant for decades. And you don't just get to redefine words. I'm sorry, decades. And you don't just get to redefine words. I'm sorry. You don't. You just don't. And so I'm not about that. And I sympathize with the people who are just watching words get redefined in front of them and growing really frustrated by it. All right. Last thing I'm going to say about some of the protest movement stuff, and this is number nine. I got a really interesting note from a reader who lives in Harlem who said something they observed after the protests happened was some of the protesters marched from Columbia into Harlem and they brought with them this significant NYPD presence into Harlem. And the kind of escalatory tactics

they took that evening actually caused this person's daughter's preschool to close for the whole week. And she said to me, look, for my family, the preschool closure is a real headache. But for a lot of the Harlem families who use this preschool, that happening to them is like a matter of keeping their job or not because they can't get childcare, they can't go into work, they get into trouble. She also expressed that many of them told her about how distressing it was to have this huge NYPD presence on their block now because the protesters had marched into their community. And it's just like this unintended consequence of some of this stuff that I wrote about last week. And it was a really sharp example of it that I just want to throw out there.

And I know there's a few criticisms of the protesters here, and I'm not just trying to hammer them again. I mean, I've written about this at length. We talked about it at length. I obviously have very complex feelings about it, but this is a great example of just like, you just don't know sometimes what the repercussions of certain protest actions are going to be. I think this is a good example

of how it might go south a little bit. All right, number 10. Last thing I just want to say, and this is just something that's itching, just like the beginnings, the seedlings of an idea that I'm sort of struggling with that makes me really uncomfortable, which is I've been reading these commentaries about the Ukraine war and Israel's war in Gaza. And there are two threads that came up in both that I found really compelling, which were this idea that a full-throated invasion

or a full-throated war effort in the very beginning would have shortened the length of the war, reduced the amount of suffering, and given a decisive victory to a side that, at the time the war started, maybe had a moral high ground. And I found that interesting enough to just sort of throw out there. The argument for Ukraine is pretty simple. It's, we didn't believe that they had a chance to defend themselves against Russia. And we sort of sat on our hands a little bit in the beginning. And then we sent support when we saw that they were putting up a fight. And what happens in an alternative universe where we throw our full weight behind Ukraine really early on in the war, and all of the EU throws resources behind them, even maybe soldiers. I mean, not what I would have done, but I'm just

saying even maybe soldiers, actual military infrastructure, whatever it is, and they win the war in a matter of months, how much better and different that would have been than this protracted war we have now. And the same is kind of true for Israel. Even if you're somebody who views Israel as immoral and you don't want to see the state exist and you hate Israel, you're anti-Zionist and you loathe their army and whatever, there's an argument that if Israel had just gone in, quote unquote, full throttle, whatever, into Gaza and swept the whole country looking for Hamas and did this in five or six days and got out, that we'd be in a much, much better place than we are now, where they gave warnings, they waited, and then they sent in some soldiers

into the North, and they kind of worked their way slowly down, and they pulled back, and they came back in, and they waited for approvals from the US, and they did all this stuff. And now it's like we're almost eight months into the war. Tons of civilians have died. Lots of Hamas have been killed, of course, but they're stuck. And now they're trying to do this Rafah invasion and fighting's breaking out again in Central Israel and in the North. And these territories and areas they used to hold, they don't seem to hold as strongly anymore. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, we're in a long war now.

oh, we're in a long war now. Maybe a case that future learning is rip the bandaid off, do the thing, especially in the case of Ukraine, I think. I think the argument is stronger there, is give them the full-throated support from the beginning, win the war swiftly, and then you're done. Just a thought. Makes me very uncomfortable because war is pain and suffering and death and all these horrible things. But in retrospect, I think maybe there's an argument on both sides. All right. That's it for my 10-pack for the podcast today. I'd be curious what you guys thought about this format. So feel free to write in if you have some thoughts. And we'll be back next week. Have a good one.

Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. If you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada,

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