The President's Daily Brief - May 3rd, 2024: Bankrolling Anarchy, US-Saudi Pact, & AI Nuclear Risks

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

In this episode of The President's Daily Brief:   We begin with a closer look at the ongoing anti-Israel protests on university campuses across the country, delving into the sources of funding that fuel these demonstrations.   Next, we explore the impending historic agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia, which could significantly alter the dynamics in the Middle East by providing security guarantees to the kingdom and potentially setting the stage for diplomatic ties with Israel.   We also discuss the urgent appeals from US officials to China and Russia, cautioning against the use of Artificial Intelligence in controlling their nuclear arsenals due to the risk of catastrophic errors.   In the Back of the Brief, we uncover new documents released by the House Homeland Security Committee that show the majority of nearly 400,000 migrants eligible for the Biden Administration's mass parole program are converging on a single state.   To listen to the show ad-free, become a premium member of The President’s Daily Brief by visiting PDBPremium.com.   Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of The President's Daily Brief.   Email: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Mike Baker. ears on the world stage. Let's get briefed. As anti-Israel protests continue to disrupt university campuses nationwide, we'll start off today's show with an in-depth exploration of the funding sources behind these demonstrations. And I'll give you a hint. The students aren't using their allowances from Mom and Dad to pay for them. Later in the show, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are reportedly nearing a historic agreement which could transform the Middle East by offering. securing security guarantees to the kingdom and potentially paving the way for diplomatic relations with Israel. Plus, U.S. officials are urging China and Russia to avoid allowing artificial

intelligence to control their nuclear arsenals. Yeah, that seems reasonable, warning that a single misstep could lead to nuclear catastrophe. That's a statement of the obvious. And in today's back of the brief, newly released documents from the House Homeland Security Committee reveal that the vast majority of the nearly 400,000 migrants eligible for the Biden administration's mass parole program are heading to a single state. Any guesses which one? Okay, that, that, to be fair, wasn't my best effort at teasing a segment, but we'll have details coming up. First, today's PDB spotlight. I want to begin with the anti-Semitic upheaval. that seems to be consuming college campuses across the country as a clearer picture begins to emerge

regarding just who is funding the anti-Israel movement. As we've noted, evidence and arrest records indicate that a large percentage of the anti-Israel agitators engaged in the campus protests aren't even students, suggesting that the movement is far from organic. Now, this begs the obvious question, who is behind the broader movement? And how are they funding the anti-Semitic chaos. Now, when I say the obvious question, apparently it hasn't been obvious to much of the media, which seems keen to paint these demonstrations as just kids being kids, exercising their God-given right to protest. While it's still hard to pin down all the details, a shadowy and vast network of radical pro-Palestinian non-governmental organizations or NGOs

have emerged as the vanguard of the demonstrations. According to a report, from the Jerusalem-based group NGO Monitor. The protests have been tightly coordinated by several of these anti-Semitic groups, some of which have ties to designated terrorist organizations. The NGOs include education for just peace in the Middle East, students for justice in Palestine, the U.S. campaign for Palestinian rights, and Samadun, all of which have either voiced support for

or tried to excuse the savage 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas. These groups often give grants to students to participate in pro-Palestinian activism on campus. They in turn receive funding from non-profits, like the Westchester People's Action Coalition, the Tides Network, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. You know, when the Rockefeller Brothers set up their fund, I doubt that they imagine that one day the fund administrators would be doling out cash to terrorist sympathizers. But there you go. Notably, a common feature between these groups is their non-transparent funding, which appears designed to obscure their operations, and that's according to the NGO monitor and common sense.

Students for Justice in Palestine, for example, which has allegedly been one of the main coordinators of the protests, has never registered as a charity, which, of course, is by design, making a paper trail very hard to come by. They have more than 250 chapters across the country, and according to the New York Post, have been linked to encampments at Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, Ohio State, and Emory. As I mentioned, some of these groups also appear to have ties to foreign terrorist organizations. Samadun, for example, is reportedly closely linked with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the U.S. has long designated a terror group.

The U.S. campaign for Palestinian rights, meanwhile, serves as a fiscal sponsor for the Palestinian BDS National Committee, It's an umbrella group whose members reportedly include terrorist groups, such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. The U.S. campaign for Palestinian rights has also emerged as a major force behind the campus protests. A recent report by the New York Post found that the group paid fellows at three U.S. colleges to agitate and organize campaigns to demand divestment. They found that in some cases, activists are paid stipends of $2,800 to $7,800 for their disruptive efforts. Another arm of this network is the legal services provided to NGOs and activists through groups like Palestine Legal. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, via the Tides Center, donated nearly half a million to Palestine Legal over the past few years. We should note that the Tide Center is part of the overarching Tides Network,

which receives a significant portion of their funding from, oh, well, look at that, George Sorosch's Open Society Foundation. Reporting from the Daily Mail has also pinpointed the previously mentioned group Students for Justice in Palestine as the central force on the ground driving the upheaval at American universities. According to the Daily Mail, citing a report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and policy, Students for Justice in Palestine receives more than three million dollars a year from a litany of charities, including one with links to Hamas. That charity, known as American Muslims for Palestine, is currently under investigation by the Attorney General of Virginia. The group is alleged to be a reconstituted charity that was previously found liable

for funding Hamas. They give grants of between $500 and $2,000 to pro-Palestine student groups through organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine. It was co-founded. by Berkeley lecturer, Khatem Bazian, who also helped create students for justice in Palestine. Now, that group, again, Students for Justice in Palestine, I'm sounding like a broken record here, also receives indirect funding from Soros-linked charities, as well as, here we go again, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Officials with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy said, quote, it's clear that individuals who previously worked for Hamas-linked charities are now a driving

force behind campus protests. As these groups continue to encourage students to intimidate their Jewish peers, calls have intensified for Congress to thoroughly investigate any potential ties between the protesters, their funders, and foreign terrorist groups. Coming up next, we explore a potentially historic agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, and also look at why U.S. officials are urgently advising China and Russia against letting artificial. intelligence govern their nuclear arsenals. Well, not to spoil that story, but it's because taking the humans out of the decision-making process when you're talking about launching nukes, well, it's a bad idea. I'll be right back.

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Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. Welcome back. While the world has been focused on the potential ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, there's another regional agreement that's currently in the works that could dramatically change the dynamics in the Middle East. and that's a mutual defense pact between the United States and Saudi Arabia. This plan has been in the works for quite a long time, but it was derailed by Hamas's attacks on October 7th and the subsequent Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza. And that, of course, was one of the objectives of the brutal attacks by the Iranian proxy.

However, Washington and Riyadh returned to the negotiating table in recent months, and, according to officials close to the negotiations, a final draft of the deal could be on the table, within weeks. While visiting Riyadh on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told reporters, quote, the work that Saudi Arabia and the United States have been doing together in terms of our own agreements, I think, he said, is potentially very close to completion, end quote. According to our report in Bloomberg, under the plan that's currently being discussed, Saudi Arabia could gain access to high-tech U.S. weaponry that was previously restricted. In exchange, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salvin,

as MBS, would agree to restrict Chinese technology in his country's most critical networks in return for significant U.S. investments in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, as well as American assistance in developing its civilian nuclear program. The agreement would also give Saudi Arabia a security guarantee from the United States, something that would likely require Senate approval in order to be implemented. Now, there's one other potential party to this deal, and that's Israel. As originally conceived, the plan would include the normalization of relations between the Jewish state and Saudi Arabia. It's hard to overstate how enormous that this would be for Israel in efforts to counter the threat of Iran, especially in light of its recent direct exchange of

fire with the Islamic Republic. However, any deal is going to hinge on buy-in from Prime Minister Netanyahu, which is going to be a major hurdle. In return for the normalization, Netanyahu would have to bring the war in Gaza to an end and agree to a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood. While normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia has been a long-term ambition of Netanyahu, his current goal of eradicating Hamas might take precedence. Should Netanyahu balk at the deal, there is word that the U.S. and the Saudis are working on a more modest bilateral agreement, which has been dubbed Plan B. Seriously? That's what they came up with?

let's call it Plan B. Plan B would be a more limited defense pact between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which could potentially expand if Israel were to commit to a two-state solution, at which point they would then revert to what I imagine they call Plan A. Moving now from the Middle East to the digital realm and the still new frontier of artificial intelligence. If you're a fan of the Terminator series, you'll remember that mankind in the movie is nearly wiped out in a nuclear exchange triggered by Skynet, and artificial intelligence developed to run military systems. Well, that may be closer to reality than you think,

and the U.S. is reportedly trying to avoid that scenario. While the U.S. military has been integrating AI into certain military systems, the government has drawn a red line at allowing it to control nuclear weapons, and now the U.S. is urging Moscow and Beijing to make the same commitment. On Thursday, State Department arms control official Paul Dean told an online briefing that Washington had made a, quote, clear and strong commitment that humans had total control over nuclear weapons. He added, quote, we would welcome a similar statement by China and the Russian Federation. The commitment comes as regulators, warned that AI is facing what one foreign official has

ominously dubbed the Oppenheimer moment of our generation. There are now rising calls on governments to develop their own laws to restrict its application to military technology before it's too late. There are currently nine countries that possess nuclear weapons, with an estimated 12,700 warheads between them. That's a lot of warheads. Only three of those countries, the U.S., UK, and France, have vowed to keep them under the control of humans. Russia, China, India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea have made no sense. such vow. It's hard to believe, but as of right now, there is no international treaty that exists that would restrict the development of what's called lethal autonomous weapon systems. In other words,

it remains perfectly legal under international law for an algorithm to determine when it's appropriate to hit the button. And in fact, the former Soviet Union during the Cold War did create a system that removed the human from the decision-making process. They called it the dead-hand system. The idea was if the Kremlin and all responsible military leaders were killed in a first strike, the dead-hand system would be able to respond with a counter-strike. Happily, of course, the system was never put into action. Up next in today's back of the brief, documents subpoenaed by the House Homeland Security Committee indicate that hundreds of thousands of migrants eligible for the Biden administration's mass parole program are all headed to the

Sunshine State. You're welcome, Florida. I'll be right back. In today's back of the brief, I want to turn our attention back to the crisis at the U.S. southern border as documents surface showing that the Biden administration is sending the majority of paroled migrants to Florida. As a reminder, the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, instituted the policy in January of 2023, at the instruction of the White House, of course, to allow into the country 30,000 migrants a month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela, in what the administration calls a humanitarian parole program. Since that time, more than 400,000 migrants have passed into the U.S. under the program,

according to a report from the New York Post. Notably, an inordinate number of these migrants have been sent direct. to one state, and that would be Florida. It's almost like the White House looked at the map and said, huh, where do we need more Democrats? A Department of Homeland Security document, subpoenaed by the House Homeland Security Committee, shows that between January and August of 2023,

some 200,000 migrants came into the U.S. under the parole program. Florida received roughly 150,000 of these migrants. Now, my math sometimes can be suspect, but I believe that's close to, what, 75% with 90,000 sent to Miami and roughly 60,000 to Fort Lauderdale. Republican Representative Mark Green of Tennessee, who chairs the committee, said, quote, these documents expose the egregious lengths that Secretary Mayorkas will go to to ensure inadmissible aliens reach every corner of the country.

Secretary Mayorkas's parole program is an unlawful sleight of hand used to hide the worsening border crisis. from the American people, end quote. Now, several experts who spoke to the New York Post said the roughly 400,000 who have come in under the program will likely end up staying inside the U.S. indefinitely. The Biden administration is not expected to go after any of those who overstay their two-year parole period, and officials at ICE are already buried under 7 million-plus immigration cases

that they're trying to actively monitor. Tom Holman, who served as ICE director under and President Donald Trump told the post, quote, they're overwhelming the system, which more than likely will result in these people staying here forever, end quote. And that, my friends, is the president's daily brief for Friday, 3 May. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me at PDB at thefirsttv.com. And as you've probably heard me mentioned before, to listen to the show ad-free, become a premium member of the president's daily brief by visiting pdbpremium.com. It's the finest value dollar for dollar in the podcast news industry.

I'm Mike Baker. I'll be back later today with the PDB afternoon bulletin. Until then, stay informed, stay safe, stay cool.