The Young Turks - AI Takes Control - September 14, 2026

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Murtaza Hussein joins the show as Houthis escalate tensions in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Trump dismisses calls to slow AI development while Anthropic and other AI leaders warn about the risks of moving too quickly. "Thanks to today's sponsors: Get 40% OFF the Ground News Vantage Plan when you sign up at ground.news/tyt Stay informed without the media spin at ground.news/tyt Visit www.sleep.me/tyt to get up to $255 off your Chilipad 2.0 with code TYT Use Code TYT for 20% OFF at TruDiagnostic.com Posting a job is easy at upwork.com Use less data, get paid by switching to Noble Mobile: https://go.tyt.com/getnoble Hosts: Ana Kasparian, Daniel Bessner SUBSCRIBE on⁠ YOUTUBE⁠ ☞ ⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@TheYoungTurks⁠ FOLLOW US ON: ⁠FACEBOOK⁠  ☞  ⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/theyoungturks⁠ ⁠TWITTER⁠  ☞      ⁠ https://twitter.com/TheYoungTurks⁠ ⁠INSTAGRAM⁠  ☞ ⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/theyoungturks⁠ ⁠TIKTOK⁠  ☞ ⁠         https://www.tiktok.com/@theyoungturks⁠ 👕⁠MERCH⁠  ☞⁠      https:/www.shoptyt.com⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Bacon. Begat! News in this insane news cycle that it is impossible to cover everything that's going on today. But have no fear, we're going to go through the most important stories, if you ask me, including updates to some of the disastrous foreign policy decisions that President Trump has made, what that means for the global oil market, what it means for energy shortages. And I'm sure Saudi Arabia is thinking what it means for the future of Saudi Arabia to help us kind of parse through those topics today.

Murtazzo Hussein, reporter from DropSight News, will be joining us at the top of the show. We're also going to have Daniel Bessner, who is just a wonderful foreign policy analyst, also a professor and the host of American prestige. He will be co-hosting with me in the second hour of the show today. So as always, given the moment that we're in, it will be a very heavy foreign policy show today. However, obviously we're going to discuss artificial intelligence and all the various CEOs and executives who are now coming out to say, yeah, we've got a lot to worry about here. We need to slow down. But how credible are those claims?

Is there an ulterior motive? We're going to talk about that as well. As always, just want to encourage you to like and share the stream if you're watching us live. It's a free and easy way to help support our show and keep us independent. You could also become a paying member by going to t.yt.com slash join or just hit that join button if you're watching on YouTube. All right. Well, without further ado, let's get into the first story. You're concerned at all about the Houthi seizure of Param Island and the Red Sea?

And what is the U.S. going to respond to that? You know, like, concern certainly. It's something that we're keeping pretty close tabs on. We actually feel like we are on top of the situation. Do you? Because to be honest with you, Vice President J.D. Vance doesn't really seem like he's on top of things. Neither does the whole of the United States government. Now, VP Vance also claimed that the U.S. has been engaging in direct negotiations and talks with Ansar Allah,

which the West refers to as the Houthis, but for the purpose of, as of being accurate on this show, we will moving forward refer to them as Ansar Allah. So what comes next now that the now that Ansar al-La has essentially taken control of the Babal-Mandab Strait? Obviously the Hormu Strait remains problematic for the West, considering the fact that Iran is able to carry out strikes against vessels transiting through it. And Saudi Arabia seems to be in a lot of trouble. Now let's go through the big, updates from over the weekend and today. Over the weekend, Onsara Law continued carrying out strikes against Saudi Arabia. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman desperately reached out to

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for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Trump, a few times, I believe twice, if not more than that, begging for U.S. military intervention, Trump declined, saying that we will assist when it comes to intelligence sharing, but that's about it. Now, how did we get here? Well, over the past two weeks alone, Saudi Arabia has faced Iran-backed attacks from the east, the south and the north. According to the New York Times, a Saudi oil tanker was struck in the

Strait of Hormuz at the end of August, killing two sailors. Obviously, they've been trading strikes ever since. And then on Friday, on Surilah, which had already declared a blockade on Saudi oil shipments through the Red Sea, seized territory along the Babal Mandab straight and defeated Saudi allied forces in Yemen. Then on the exact same day, the Saudi authorities announced that they had been forced to shut down a critical oil pipeline known as the East-West pipeline after an Iraqi militia carried out a drone attack. Now, this is the exact scenario in which Saudi Arabia thought the United States would spring into action in order to provide security, protection, military intervention for them. That's the whole point of Saudi Arabia.

Arabia investing so much in, you know, military bases in their country, U.S. military bases in particular. They've spent a lot of money on U.S. manufactured weaponry. And they've also spent quite a bit of money, you know, trying to appeal to the Trump family. If you can recall, they invested $2 billion into Jared Kushner's hedge fund. So they were under the impression that, hey, when a day like today comes, we can rely on the United States for security. However, MBS called Trump, that's Mohammed bin Solomon, called Trump on Friday and then again Thursday at first, and then on Friday, begging for help. But when the Crown Prince asked Trump last week to take military action, as I mentioned earlier, Trump declined. And in fact, here is what Trump told reporters

during his trip to Ireland on Saturday. He's called us and they don't want to fight with us. They let us know. They don't want me to go after. They don't want us to go after them. They've called and they've talked to us and they don't want us to, they would much prefer not having us involved. And they're letting most ships go through. There's just one country that they're not too happy with and we'll get that straight in death. Okay, so there are two major problems with what you heard Trump say there. First, Ansar al-a denies that they ever reached out to the United States telling them that they don't want the U.S. involved militarily.

And I, look, you shouldn't take anyone. claims at face value, but President Donald Trump in particular has been caught lying again and again and again. In fact, later in the show, there's another huge lie involving Ukraine that we'll get into. But the other thing is, let me read you their statement. So an Ansarala political official says, quote, we did not communicate with Trump, nor did we ask him not to attack us. Now, the second issue with what you heard Trump say in that video is if domestic or diplomatic,

I should say, negotiations is how Trump intends to solve Saudi Arabia's issues. Well, there's bad, there's more bad news for the Saudis because there was supposed to be a meeting between officials from Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Gulf countries. It was supposed to take place today. But yesterday we learned that that meeting was canceled. Michael Ratney, who's a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told the times, quote, right now the Saudis are really frustrated in some sense. It's their worst case scenario. So what comes next? What does this mean for the future of oil trade? How is it going to impact the United States economically or the global economy economically? Luckily here to answer some of those questions is drop site reporter Murtaza Hussein. Mirtaza, thank you so much for joining us.

Great to be here, Anna. Thanks, sir. So let's get started with what I think is a really important contextual question before we move forward with other questions. And that really has to do with the way Ansar ala is depicted here in U.S. media. You know, they've really been described almost like this rag-tag team of unorganized radicals who don't really know what they're doing. And I think that that downplaying of their capabilities and the influence they have in Yemen kind of put us at a disadvantage because they were underestimated. So can you talk a little bit about what Ansar al-a-a-law is, the type of power.

are they have in Yemen and why it is that the United States, including our media apparatus, has decided to kind of downplay their capabilities. Sure. So, you know, to your point, Ansarola, is the government of at least part of Yemen, the northwestern quadrant of the country in their zone of sovereignty is expanding, as we see over the last week or so. But, you know, very crucially, you know, like a government, it has technocrats, it controls major cities and so forth, administers them. But very crucially, a lot of the senior military officers, I think the majority, a significant majority of senior military officers

from the former Yemeni government when it collapsed, they defected to join Ansarala in this movement, and they use their training and so forth to professionalize to a certain degree. It's military operations. They have, you could say, a preponderance of professional military officers in the country who were part of the former government. And that actually means that they are much more sophisticated than, you know, people may have the misconception.

People think that they're just wearing sandals and so forth and running around the AK-47s. It is a poor country in general. And obviously, they don't have the same level of equipment that a NATO country would have and so forth. But despite that, they have military professionalism and organization and commanders and so forth. They have tremendous fortifications. And by some accounts have told to me they have significant manufacturing. capacity in the mountains of northwestern Yemen where they're based. So this is really like a proto government and a proto state.

And very importantly, it seems like they have more professional military officers, more state capacity perhaps than their rivals in the international recognized Yemeni government, which is based in Eden, and more eastern parts of the country. They seem like most of the military forces are people who are paid or they're mercenaries, you could say, people who are working for the UAE or people working for Saudi Arabia. They're not as invested ideologically in what they're doing and so forth. So that puts them a tremendous disadvantage when they're fighting against Ansarola or the Houthis, as some people call them.

So I think it's not surprising that they were able to roll over these forces in the past week and this offensive that they launched. Really, the success that's been taking place in containing Ansarola over the last decade or so, because it's been a global coalition more or less aligned against them, not just regional countries like Saudi Arabia or the U.EE, but the United States, the UK, the U.S., at the star of Trump's term, fought a very extensive air campaign, a very brutal air campaign against Ansarola in northwestern Yemen. And that did not succeed. That actually ended in operational failure. So when you played that clip of Trump really demurring and claiming falsely, it seems that he was communicating with them and they didn't want to fight, they just want to talk things over. That was really recognition of the fact that the U.S. has not wanted to get back into a conflict with Ansar ala. Because that last conflict, while failing to deter them and also put at risk several U.S. aircraft carriers, several aircraft were lost during the conflict.

Many, many drones were also lost, which are running in short supply, Reaper drones and so forth. So, you know, that's a real problem. They really don't want to fight this war with them again. And they are a significant formidable force, which also has another advantage over the Yemeniour, government and even over the Saudi government in ways that their cause to some degree is seen as legitimate by a significant number of Yemenis. They were fighting against Israel. They're fighting against the United States. They were aligned with Gaza that really did draw a lot of popularity in Yemen and throughout the Arab world, really. So they do have that more of a zealous sort of

faction supporting them. And that really does manifest you can see in this offensive. And the success it seems to have achieved in controlling the capturing the coastal areas around the Babel Mandab and potentially even capturing the city of Thais next as well, too, which is being encircled, which would be another significant victory for the group. So yeah, it's really not just a ragtag group. This is really a proto state. And if they do consolidate, they could hold over more of Yemen. It could be much more influential and powerful government in the years to come if that were done the past. But you know, what's really fascinating is, you know, I recall last year, President Donald Trump ignored the urging of Benjamin Netanyahu, which is rare, as we all know,

when it came to continuing conflict and war against the Ansar al-La in Yemen. Trump said, no, we're done, we're pulling out, we're not dealing with this anymore. He knew that this is a formidable force, yet my understanding is the West encouraged Saudi Arabia to reignite warfare against Ansarala. And that led to where we are today. Why would the West pressure Saudi Arabia to do this? I mean, it's been a disaster. Well, you know, it's really related to the Iran war.

And the Iran war has really been a catastrophe for the Gulf countries, the Gulf Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, but others as well. So this current fighting with Ansar al-A, it actually started in July. And it was not initiated by Ansarala. It was initiated by the Saudis. the Saudis in response to actually a flight that arrived at Sana'a airport from Iran, which contained a delegation of people from Ansarala, maybe some Iranians and others who had attended the funeral of Ayatollah Khamini. So when they came back from the funeral, the Saudis were trying to stop them from landing

or send a threat that people should not be flying to this airport because they've been maintaining a blockade of their territory by air and by land. and so forth. So of a quarantine around them for many, many years. And they were afraid that the quarantine would start breaking if flights started landing freely from Iran or elsewhere in Sana. So they bombed Sanaai Airport. And they use very expensive British munitions, storm shadow missiles, which are extremely exquisite is the word they use. They take a long time to manufacture.

And they're very expensive. And they're really in great need, but in Ukraine, actually. And they use them to destroy not any facilities that they're. airport as far as we know, but basically bomb the shoulder of the runway to send like a threat to the Ansar al-a movement, not to try to break this blockade. And it was kind of funny because, you know, I can't say anything else, but it's kind of like darkly amusing. But Ansarala didn't just retaliate for that attack in a proportionate way by doing a symbolic attack in Saudi Arabia. They really escalated to a tremendous degree immediately. They started bombing Saudi oil facilities,

Inside Saudi Arabia, hitting pipelines, hitting refineries, hating storage facilities for oil. And they started launching this offensive inside Yemen against these Saudi-backed groups. And, you know, fast forward now September, that offensive has made tremendous progress. And they've captured now the city of Mocha on the Red Sea and the Babelmandib. They captured these islands, which I think J.D. Vance was asked about earlier. Those islands are several of them, but they're literally in the Babel So if you were at one of the islands, Param Island, you could actually stand in the island.

You don't even need sophisticated radar equipment or sensors and so forth. You could just use the AK-47 or a RPG or something and hit ships just by eyesight from the island. It's tremendously useful if you wanted to shut down the Babel Manddab, which they may decide to do now. Right. And the Bob Al-Mundab is even more narrow than the Strait of Hormuz, if I remember. remember correctly. Yeah, it's narrowest point, especially where Param Island is, is tremendously narrow. It's a real choke point. So, you know, for them to be able to control that or even to have the ability to credibly threaten it, it's a tremendous shift in the war. And now what they've done in addition to that, as part of this offensive, is that they've hit really hard Saudi, a particular Saudi pipeline called

the Petro Line, which is the East-West Saudi bypass for the Strait of Formos. So, So the reason of Saudi oil production exports didn't really drop that much during the war is because they had the petrol lines. So when the straight got shut down, they started pumping things across the country, the entire breadth of the country. And you exporting it through the Red Sea through the petrol line. From what we see from open source information, at least three major pumping stations of the petrol line were completely destroyed by Ansarla in the last week. Several parts of the pipeline itself were also hit. And it could be even more damage because one thing has been really.

common theme in the wars that the GCC countries have had this like totalitarian censorship regime to try to keep any information by the damage out. But we're seeing a lot despite that from satellite images. So what that means is, you know, it's really unlikely, it'll be very difficult for them to continue exporting oil as long as straightforward moves and remains shut. It doesn't look like the U.S. is going to help them defeat the Houthis or, you know, push them back to save this part, make their pipeline defensible again. So I think there's going to incentivize those voices calling for a compromise with Iran to put some sort of new regime on the straightforward moves such as that because I think the red sea in the Babel Mand, it may now become too dangerous to export oil going forward.

That's amazing. I mean, I have to hand it to the Iranians in regard to their whole strategy with the access of resistance because it's been pretty effective. I mean, even when it comes to Hezbollah, and, you know, obviously Israel hasn't done. defeated Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, despite the fact that Israel continues to wipe out entire villages, dozens of villages in southern Lebanon, including Christian villages, by the way, have been totally wiped out and leveled. But Hezbollah remains, likely because the types of military actions Israel takes only furthers, you know, a desire to join the resistance. I mean, how could it not? But last question on this before we move on to other things. So what does this mean for the

future of, I guess, the multipolar world that we're already living in. There's no question about that. I think the multipolarity, though, becomes a little more complicated with the rise of Iran as a potential world power, considering how much control they're going to have and I do have on the global oil and liquefied natural gas supply. What are your thoughts on that? And if that is the case, what do you think the next move is for the United States? Sure, you know, and everything I say, I'll add with the caveat that this is still a flu situation, and we don't know exactly how it's going to shake out. But I will say that if you were a look at situation from the end of February till today, and you would have told anyone that, you know,

at this point in the war, Iran is not still just still in power, that the same government is still in power, and they're still hitting American targets and still fighting in the strait and elsewhere. But they also control another waterway now, effectively. they've actually increased their level of control since the war started. That would suggest operational failure and strategic defeat in the war for the United States. And then by extension, despite the tremendous losses that Iran has taken, both in human losses and infrastructure and economically, their strategic position is actually improved now at this point in the war. And I do think it's quite notable now that there was intended to be a foreign ministerial level conference

between the GCC states and Iran today. It was postponed because of, I think, the, you know, more chaos caused by this Houthi offensive, Ansar al-Assensive in Yemen. But I do think it's going to happen at some point in some form. But the GCC states, these are the states which rely very much on the United States. And not just very much, they rely primarily on the United States for everything, for security, for stability and so forth. At the start of the war, I know from just like talking to people before the war,

it's not like they were keen on the war happening. Maybe they were nervous about it or they didn't fully feel like they were the ones driving decisions. But they did acquiesce to it. They didn't go along with it. They knew exactly what was going to happen. And what had been told to them was in effect that, you know, just give us a month, like give us America and Israel a month. And then we'll make this Iran problem go away for you forever.

And maybe it'll be a painful month and there'll be some sort of, you know, discomfort and unrest in that. period, but once that month or so was over, you'll have a completely clear strategic landscape going forward without this problem you had with Iran for so many years. So we're like six, seven months into this now. Iran, as I mentioned, is not going anywhere. They would never have imagined that the straight would be, you know, it's not completely blocked, heavily contested and disrupted for all that time. It's a catastrophe for all these countries. So now they have meeting with Iran to sort of try to figure out something that would be. give a new modus vivendi that's going to be a significant part on iranian terms now because

from the iranian perspective whether you made the decision or not you went along and supported and facilitated and attack against us new your neighbor for one better or worse and now you know you're going to need to do something to rectify that relationship and if you were buying planes for trump and bribing trump for all these years and his family or maybe you're going to have to make something nice for us now to make us accept a new a new more of the venue where we continue to get along and have some deals with each other. And I'll have one final point that at the BRICS conference, we mentioned multipolarity. At the BRICS conference that happened over the weekend, there was a significant meeting between the Iranians and the UAE,

and they made some conciliate story statements. They were pictured together, leadership of the country and so forth. So I do think that despite the fact the situation not settled, we are going to see a new status quo where Iran has more influence over the Gulf Arab states. more influence over the Strait of Formuz and the American bases and the American presidents that were there. It was really gambled on this war. And the gamble, regardless what happens, it did not pay off. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that. And, you know, strategically speaking, Iran is making good decisions when it comes to its involvement or reaction to this war. So their goal has been to push the United States out of the region,

which is why while the U.S. seems to ham-handedly just strike civilian infrastructure and elementary schools, Iran has focused on striking U.S. military bases in the region, thus destroying them. And now there are all sorts of discussions underway in the U.S. where it appears the overwhelming decision is going to be to no longer rebuild those bases because it's going to be too expensive. And rather than serving as a way of providing security to these countries, it is actually. actually made these countries a target by Iran. At the same time, Saudi Arabia, after having two conversations with Trump urging him to help with military intervention, Trump says no, he declines. And Saudi Arabia starts reaching out to other leaders in the region. I know that they have

a meeting set up with the leader of Egypt. But more importantly, they're apparently engaging in negotiations with Iran to try to get their oil through the Strait of Hormuz, which is exactly what Iran wants. They want to be the, you know, essentially the dominant power in that region that's making decisions alongside Gulf Arab countries and Saudi Arabia. So we'll see how that all plays out. But so far, it looks like it's going in the direction that, you know, Iran was hoping for. We have to take a break because we're out of time. But Murtaza, it's okay if the answer is no. Would you be willing to stay for one more segment? Because there's one other story I'd like to cover with you. Yeah, I can say. Okay, perfect. We're going to take a quick break.

everyone, we'll be right back to talk a little bit about some new reporting about fracturing within Iran between the moderates and the hardliners. Don't miss it. We'll be right back. What's up, everyone? Welcome to our first social break of the day. Art Guy writes in in our member section and says, I'd say it was pointless for Trump to be trying to lie his way out of the situation, but the market still seem to be taking everything he says as true for some reason. Yeah, I mean, And if anything, how this war has played out and how the markets have reacted to it gives you a sense of how broken the stock market really is. So we'll talk about that later in the show. Jenks left tricep of Fury says, you only gave him a plane in billions, Saudi Arabia.

What have you done for the orange buffoon lately? Yeah, I mean, Trump is a con man. And if you're putting all your eggs in the Trump basket, you're probably going to run into some trouble as Saudi Arabia. is realizing right now. Jack Callahan says, the hell with Saudi Arabia, the hell with Israel, just get out of the Middle East. I think that would be the right course of action. And we should actually engage with Iran diplomatically, especially since it is a problem that we have a shortage of energy right now. So I think the only path forward is to, in good faith, engage in negotiations. The problem is Trump has lied so many times. The Iranians don't trust him.

And so it remains to be seen whether Iran would even want to engage in negotiations with the United States at this point. But overall, I agree with you. We should leave the region and we should negotiate peacefully. All right, we've got, let's go to our members on YouTube.com where a dad dude says, should I feel bad rooting for the Houthis? Trump's administration is authoritarian, so I'm not going to answer that question, honestly. Let's move on. Welcome back to TYT, everyone, Anna Kasparian and Murtaza Hussein with you. Murtaza is one of the incredible reporters over at DropSight.

So please support DropSight and the work that Murtaza does. Before we get to the next story though, just a quick note about one of our partners and its chapter. So there are a lot of scams out there when it comes to Medicare. And if you are worried that you're not getting the best possible, you know, Medicare coverage at the lowest possible price. All you need to do is go to Chapter. So we put the graphic up so you can call them their numbers right there. So Chapter is an independent Medicare advisor. They're the only ones who compare literally every single plan nationwide. The best plan for

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And you can skip these scams and call Chapter today. It's 805-201-2-275. 805-201-2-275. All right, everybody. Let's get to our next story. I want to talk a little bit about something that caught my attention in the New York Times over the weekend. So the New York Times is alleging that emboldened hardliners in Tehran have essentially started making certain decisions without authorization from the moderates, if you will. The piece is titled how Iran's hardliners prevailed and sabotaged U.S. peace deal.

So the whole thesis of this article is that the more hardline faction within Iran worked independently to skirt the possibility of a peace deal with the United States, which they understandably do not trust. They do not trust the U.S. Iranian forces opened fire on three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz that were transiting through an unauthorized route closer to the coast of Oman. And if you guys can remember, that's what kind of reignited kinetic action. between the United States and Iran. The attack set a Qatari-LNG tanker on fire and also damaged other vessels.

Iranian president, Masoud Peschkian, was outraged by this and tried to figure out who was behind the strikes. So he reached out to General Ahmed Vahidi. That's the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He denied it. You know, others in Iran denied that they called for these strikes to be carried out. And then it turns out that a fringe hardline faction had decided to act on its own. Ultimately, those clandestine efforts derailed a push by more moderate pragmatists in Iran to reach an end to hostilities with the United States and repair their nation's ailing

economy. Three Iranian officials said inquiries by the government and security forces trace the decision to strike the three commercial ships in July to the cleric Hosen Taib, an influential spymaster who had opposed the peace deal with the U.S. from the outset, Tayaab also had been telling the new Supreme Leader that Iran had made a mistake in ending the war and agreeing to the deal. So that's the memorandum of understanding that kind of ended kinetic action between the United States and Iran, but obviously it was reignited later. Now, in a recent speech, Tayaab said that he was not opposed to diplomatic negotiations with the United States, but

that negotiations that ignore the rights of our people and concede to the excessive demands of the enemy have no place in Iran's politics. And it seems that this hardline approach has some favorability among the Iranian public. So the Times also reports that on the streets and on state television in Iran, meanwhile, the hardliners openly attack the negotiating team and its peace deal. Abbas Arakshi, by the way, is part of the more moderate wing. And at nightly rallies, crowds chanted for a return to war. So this is the New York Times. And as with anything reported by legacy media, you shouldn't take anything at face value. And I didn't, which is why I have Murtaza Hussein, reporter from DropSight News joining us to share his thoughts on this. Because Mertaza,

I don't deny for a second that there are hardliners in Iran. But what I'm having difficulty really buying is that the way this whole thing is framed is like, the United States really wanted diplomatic negotiations and they wanted a peace deal. But it was those pesky hardliners in Iran who reignited kinetic warfare with the United States. I don't like that framing and I don't believe that framing, but I'm curious what you think. Yeah, you know, I think that there is reason to be skeptical of the story. And you know, with the caveat that obviously everybody would have full inside transparency into how the sourcing and things like that. But there are a couple of things about which kind of strike me as

notable and give me some sense of pause. The first and most important point is that literally since the war started, this narrative has been promoted very vigorously that there are significant fractures in the decision-making apparatus of the Iranian government. I think I heard that pretty much from maybe the second day of the war. And there's a particular reason that one would want to promote such a narrative, which is that if you could say that the Iranian government's losing capacity to control its different state organs, losing capacity control, the actions of military officers, individual units. Then you're getting somewhere closer to like a Syria or Libya style situation where the country implodes. So that's actually been the goal of the American-Israeli war, the big aiding, to have this kind of fracturing and dissolution, basically, of the Iranian government,

such that no one's able to really exert political control over it anymore. And then it can just kind of dissolve that way. There's really been no indication of that. And quite the opposite, the Iranian government has surprised everybody by demand, the level to which they've been able to maintain its institutional coherence. They actually successfully even carried out a succession, leadership succession, in the midst of the active phase of the war. And then one of the heaviest part of the bombing was happening in April. And, you know, if they could survive that period, it's very, it's less and less likely that the district. solution will be coming a lid down the pipe. So I kind of see the story is almost very familiar

and sort of like a bit of a tired narrative at this point. And if you look at some of the personalities involved too, it just seems unlikely that they would strike out on their own and contravene a policy which had been approved by Mushabakhamini and had the buy-in of senior IRGC officials. There is differences. People in the Iranian government, there are different factions and different views, but I actually think that the governing faction right now is almost pretty solidly consolidated around a particular approach to the situation. Like you mentioned Abbas Arachchi and people say he's a moderate and so forth. You know, I don't even know if that's even an appropriate term in this case because, you know,

he's a foreign minister, but he himself is the IRGC person. And so was Muhammad Bagargalibati and so forth. And most of the senior decision makers now in the country, the people who are more of the you could say reformist view, the reformist parties and so forth. They're really excluded from decision making right now. And they've lost their credibility to a degree because they advocated detente and conciliation with the U.S. for many, many years. And they kept getting punched in the face over that with the nuclear deal, assassination of Kassan Soleimani, last year's war. Now this year's war, no one's really listening to them anymore. And their opinions don't really

have much weight for good or ill. So I don't think that there are these divisions. are being laid out here. It strikes me as somewhat unlikely in the in the present case. But it does seem like it would be a narrative that if one were tried to promote it right now and he got traction, it would be politically useful to the U.S. and Israel at this phase. Because it would suggest that the war is not completely even a failure. If you could say the Iranian government is completely dysfunctional now, then you'd say great than at least the war accomplished that.

I'm very skeptical. And with respect to individual reporters at all these institutions, some of them who are good and so forth, forth. In general, I have view all these reports from institutional media at this point with a degree of skepticism because they're based on these anonymous leaks and the leakers themselves have motives and they're trying to shape the coverage. And unfortunately, in many cases, the institutions have been quite prejudiced or willing to allow themselves be used to be shaped as coverage, which we've seen at this point now does not seem to correspond

with reality in many cases. I mean, it's foreign policy reporting 101 when it comes to these institutions. So you're absolutely right about that. They're so excited to get a scoop that they just simply regurgitate what the leakers are telling them without really questioning whether the leakers have that ulterior motive. They have their own agenda. And to be sure, this particular piece in the times did rely solely on anonymous sources. Now, with that in mind, you know, you mentioned Mostaba Hamine, and he was mentioned in the context of this article because apparently he is the individual who tapped this cleric to move forward with this attack in the Strait of Hormuz back in July. And what I thought was really fascinating in the article was Massoud Peshkian's frustration over the fact that no one has seen or even heard the voice of Moshabha Kamenei.

In fact, some wonder whether he's even alive or if this is just a group of hardliners who are pretending like. like he's alive and giving them orders in order to carry out what they've been carrying out in the Strait of Hormuz. What do you make of all of it? Because I do find it a little strange that we haven't seen or heard the Grand Ayatollah. You know, of course, it's a Supreme Leader. Sorry about that. Yeah. No, of course, it is interesting and curious. I will say that today, apparently, Masu Peseshkian said that he had met him and he is alive and the country is benefiting from his leadership. But I think there are a lot of people inside and outside Iran who have questions about this. I think, and this is corresponding with

American intelligence assessments which we made public, is that he's likely alive, but likely he's seriously injured. You know, the war in the fighting, the initial bombings, his wife was killed, his daughter was killed, and his father was killed. It's very likely he may have been in the same vicinity and he was injured at that time. I think that's the most Occam's razor, the most sensible interpretation of what the situation is, such that his presence in the public, before he'd been sufficiently healed or able to be in public, may not be in the interest of the Iranian government, or maybe he's not up to it. Also, it's possible that, you know, they are concerned about it being assassinated and so forth.

The two things may correspond with one another. But I think it would be unlikely that they would be claiming he's alive to this level. At this point, if there was not some truth to it, because, you know, even if they can suspend predulity for the broader international public, and even a section of the population. They have their own base to be accountable to in some respects. And had he died in the war, he would have been useful as a martyr as well too. There are other people who could have played the role of the Supreme Leader.

They didn't need him per se. In many ways, he was a controversial choice. Maybe a defined choice you could say given the way the war early phases went down and what happened to his family. So I think that it's probably likely he's alive but injured. Are we going to see him in the future? I don't know, maybe we will. maybe we won't. The funny thing is that if you look in the context of Iranian culture and the

Shia culture that's been prevalent in Iran for over a millennium, or not over a millennium, but maybe five centuries since it converted from Sunniism, the idea of occultation in someone who's a leader, a spiritual leader, or a political leader not being seen is sort of a part of the ideology in a way. So it's kind of drawing on consistent themes in Iranian cultural history such that maybe it's very strange to outsiders, but it's not as unheard of as they may be within a certain interpretation of Iranian history. So that's my two sense about it.

I do think it is likely he's alive. But I also do think that in the absence of him being very visible and playing a visible public role in managing the country, the country probably is being in significant part governed by a contortion of individuals who are associated with the IRC. And between whom I do not think that there's tremendous ideological differences, to be honest. I think that they for the most part agree about the big picture of questions about how

managed their relationship with the United States at this stage. Final question for you is about Israel, because some who are furious about the fact that the United States was persuaded into starting this war on its behalf, are irritated that, you know, you see oil and gas infrastructure being bombed, you see our allies getting, you know, bombed, You see U.S. military bases in our allied countries in the region being bombed. But, you know, Iran has, for the most part, stayed away from bombing Israel directly. So I actually think that Iran is carrying out their strategy exactly right, because their whole point is to push the United States out of that region. And the United States is only there in that region, not to protect Gulf countries, but specifically to protect Israel. So if U.S. bases are destroyed, if Iran continues to succeed in pushing the U.S. out, and you have a more hardline approach in Iran, what does this mean for the future of Israel? I'm asking you to predict. So there's a lot of speculation here. Nonetheless, I'm curious what you think. I want to tell you about a new podcast series I'm enjoying from future hindsight, Occupy an unfinished uprising. Occupy Wall Street is the story of the improbable becoming possible. 2008, millions of people were devastated by an economic crash caused by Wall Street greed.

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Well, you know, I think what's likely to happen and you even see here and see current and former U.S. military officials talk about this quite openly now, are that these Persian Gulf military and naval bases will likely not be rebuilt. For some of the reasons you mentioned

earlier in the show, but also because politically, it'd be difficult to rebuild them after what's happened. and how they prove to be a liability and so forth for the countries that are the hosts. But also, those bases are just not useful anymore. If there's a military or naval base, which has now been demonstrated and proven that it can be rendered inoperable or unsafe to operate within about 48 hours or less, because of the new technological nature of war and the capacity for strike capabilities that the Iranian government now has, the drones and missiles and so forth,

then there's no point rebuilding. Why would you spend all the money to rebuild something which is going to be useless within 24 hours of a war starting in anyways? You're going to abandon it. The issue is that if you abandon some of these bases, especially the Bahrain Fifth Fleet naval base, it becomes very hard to exert control over the Strait of Formos and exert control of the Persian Gulf

because you won't be able to have a logistics chain which is sufficiently durable to allow ships, maintain a permanent and thoroughgoing naval presence in that region. So I think that naval presence really may come to an end. And a lot of these air bases also will be shut down. They're just not safe anymore. What will likely happen is that CENTCOM will relocate further away from Iran. And I think that they'll consolidate themselves in Israel in the end. So instead of this huge network and, you know, real thick forests of bases and sensors that they built throughout the region, CENTCOM will limit itself much, much more so just to Israel. Maybe Jordan,

maybe parts of Western Saudi Arabia, but I think the heart of Sencom and the U.S. military presence will be Israel going forward. And that also raises problems because if you destroyed or evacuated your bases in the rest of the region, Iran won't have to invest in so much in medium and short range ballistic missiles anymore. They can focus all their efforts and reconstitution their program on long-range missiles. We can hit Israel. And Israel in some ways is a very defensible target for missiles because the population centers and infrastructure are so bunched up that you can really cluster your anti-missile defenses around those. But at the same time, they're all bunched up.

It's not that many of them. And if you can drain the interceptive batteries or disable them, then a couple hundred ballistic missiles can do a tremendous amount of damage. So I think that it'll be very difficult to continue the containment policy against Iran going forward. The real wildcard question now is what the Gulf Arab states do. And I think it's really a pivotal moment for them in a way because if you look at the history of these states, they were created in effect by Britain. And they're created by Britain to facilitate the British imperial presence in that part of the world. When the British Empire started collapsing at the end of World War II, they handed off these imperial possessions to the United States. And they didn't do it formally in name, but in effect, that's exactly what happened.

Now if the American Empire is no longer able to hold on to them because, you know, this nature of war has changed and U.S. power is in relative decline globally. They can't hold on to everything at once. Then are you going to try to be independent now for the first time ever? Can you stand on your own feet? Can you live without the U.S.? Can you make new alliances? Can you come to a motive of the vendee with your neighbors? That's going to be a tremendous question.

I think that they're struggling with an answer at the moment. I've heard different things. Some of them just feel that no matter how. bad the U.S. is no matter how much the screaming is sober, we just have to keep doing what they say because we don't know what else to do. That's been expressed publicly and privately by many golf officials. Some of them have

tried to think of new ideas like this Mecca pack with Turkey and Pakistan. I think that's very, that idea is interesting, but it's very much in its nascency. But what can they do really? I think that they really are caught in a really difficult place. And I want one final point that this whole situation,

the petro dollar and the Saudi relationship with American elite going back many, many decades, up to the current Trump administration and their ties to Trump and his sons and Jared Kushner and so forth. It was all based on preventing this, preventing this exact thing that's happening. You're not supposed to let us get bombed. That's why you have these bases here. And if we do get bombed, you're going to jump in and save us immediately and make that stop.

It turns out that the U.S. cannot do that. They cannot live up to their end of the bargain. So are we going to keep bribing and paying off American officials and, you know, funding their antics and wasting billions of dollars and this thing, which is actually engaging you even more. Or are you going to come up with something? Can you come up with something which allows you to be independent, allows you to have a peaceful relationship with their neighbors, some sort of compromises you may have to make?

Can these countries do that? I think if they can do it, maybe they can survive and still thrive in the years to come. But it will require them to become something other than what they have been throughout their history literally since they're founding. You'll have to orient themselves to something. towards something other than London or Washington, which has been their nature literally for a century or more now. So that's a telling question. If this conference happens between Iran and the Gulf of UCC, we may see some of that happening. Mertaza, your reporting and analysis is indispensable. Thank you so much for joining us and for being so generous with your time.

Have a great night and hope to see you soon. My pleasure, Anna. Thank you. All right, everybody. We have to take a break. When we come back, a giant segment updating you. on the AI-related chaos that's ensuing in our country. I'm going to do my best to go through the most important elements of it. You don't want to miss it. We'll be right back. Everyone, welcome back to our social break. Pocketful of WTF says, is it true that YouTube is removing TYT channel from its streaming service?

Streaming service meaning YouTube TV, which is distinct from, you know, YouTube.com, the online version. And the answer is yes. And it looks like they might have taken out two other random channels to make it appear as though it's not due to our anti-Israel commentary. This is my speculation. I don't know for sure. But I'll just leave it there. All right. Moon goose draft.

By the way, the hardest thing for me to do, and everyone at TYT knows this because we have internal discussions about what to do about our financial woes. hate asking for money. Like it is the most painful thing for me to do. I don't even like reading live reads, as you guys can probably tell. But I care about covering what's happening in Gaza, in Lebanon. I care about it so much that I'm going to have to get over my hangups and just ask you guys, if you can, please consider becoming paying members. Please consider supporting our show because we want to continue doing this reporting. And as you know, there is an orchestrated effort to destroy us, you know, financially speaking, so we won't be able to do what we're doing. So special thanks to our members, special thanks to everyone that's helped carry us through hard

times. We are experiencing hard times yet again. And your help means the world to us. Back to the show. Welcome back to TYT. I'm your host, Anna Kasparian. Before we get to the second hour of the show with my good friend, Danny Bessner, I wanted to talk a little bit about artificial intelligence. In fact, we're going to kind of dissect an episode of Tucker Carlson's show in the bonus episode. He actually interviewed an expert on artificial intelligence and what the actual threat or risk is. So tune in for that if you happen to be a paying member, t.wit.com slash join to become a member if you're not already. But for the purposes of this segment, I kind of want to talk about what happened over the weekend with these AI executives, essentially coming out to say, yo, the whistleblowers are right.

Let's get into it. In a post overnight, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman writing, where we will need the help of our government is for international coordination. But first, we should do what we can ourselves. Echoing Anthropic CEO, Dario Amadez call to slow down the technology before it overtakes human control. If we build in the right way, I think the probability of something bad happening is very low. If we build in the wrong way, the probability of something bad happening is very high.

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Several executives in the tech industry are now sounding the alarm over the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Now, the people you'd least expect are now calling for a slowdown in the name of safety. But is there an ulterior motive here? That's the question that many are asking. And are these risks or threats hyperbole? Are they being exaggerated?

Now, on Saturday, the chief executive of Anthropic, Dario Amadeh, wrote an essay arguing that the AI, that AI was advancing too quickly for researchers to continue building it safely. He proposed that independent auditors monitor AI labs, safety work, and that regulators allow the labs to work together to coordinate safety standards. Now, some of the new details that we're learning about in regard to the threat of AI has to do with, you know, Dario Amadez model, Anthropic being able to hack a different AI company. So that kind of rang alarm bells for him. But others did co-sign the message from Amade, including Sam Altman, Open AI's chief executive, which immediately made me think that. that the questions about ulterior motives are valid. We'll get to that in just a minute. Elon Musk signed on. That's of course Space X's chief executive and the head of Deep Mind or Google's Deep

Mind's chair came out and agreed with Amadez message as well. So they all agreed that there is a need for a slower pace and they also provided some specifics as to why they believe that. Take a look. In an essay, Amade, whose company runs Claude, writing, A Swarm of Rogue AI agents could be capable of taking over the entire Internet in just six to 12 months, and saying AI could be used for cyber attacks or to create biological weapons. Amade pointing to an incident in July where Open AI models went rogue, escaping a secure environment controlled by humans and hacking another company called Hugging Face.

Altman posting, I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier, Elon Musk and top executives from Microsoft and Google also saying they agree. So is it actually true that artificial intelligence could lead to the development of, say, biological weapons, right? Like that sounds absolutely terrifying. Well, the truth is there is some evidence that it could happen, and that's according to some biosecurity experts. So in June, scientists and AI executive signed an open letter calling for new controls on the fabrication of DNA. because AI can now speed up the design of toxins and viruses. And as we know, that's better left to Anthony Fauci and the gain of function research that he's behind. It's not a good joke. I'll move on.

In August, scientists reported that they had used AI to build viruses not seen in nature. And on Thursday, Anthropic announced that it had blocked several attempts to use its models by people who might have been. trying to weaponize pathogens. So Amadei actually touched on this in his open letter regarding AI safety, writing that, quote, it would be wise to ban using AI for the production of biological weapons or allowing users to do so. And so, I mean, it's kind of shocking. Like he's calling on lawmakers, regulators to regulate artificial intelligence and implement certain bans. Now, not everyone agrees, and that's important to keep in mind as well. So for instance, there's a guy named Drew Endy. He's a synthetic biologist at Stanford University.

He co-authored a report on biosecurity just last year. He thinks that the risks that we're now hearing about from these AI executives are a bit exaggerated, but he doesn't entirely dismiss the claims that are being made. He says the current chatbots only pose a modest risk when it comes to biological weapons. Oh, only a modest risk? But, but Like this is a guy who's pushing back and the best he can do is say, there's a modest risk. Now, he does have a point for how AI can, you know, so, okay, how AI can retrieve, you know, certain information quickly or find connections between previous findings that had gone overlooked by actual human scientists, for instance.

But currently, these AI chatbots do not have a deep understanding of biology beyond what researchers have already discovered. So that's the claim that he's making. But ND does admit that that could change with further development of like AI superintelligence, right? Or artificial super intelligence, I should say. So he says that scientists are building new AI models that can to a certain extent teach themselves biology instead of books and other texts, these models are trained on raw data about DNA and cells. And already these models can generate genomes for viable viruses that are not found in nature. So it is possible that these models may eventually be able to use these new genomes to create new weapons, okay, biological

weapons. For example, scientists at Stanford University and the ARC Institute built one such model, It's called the Evo 2, which they trained on the DNA sequences of millions of species. Evo 2 leaned or learned, I should say, learned hidden patterns in genes, enabling the creation of new kinds of enzymes. Then the researchers put Evo 2 through an additional round of training on genomes from one group of closely related viruses. And here's what happened. Known as microvirids, they are harmless to humans, only infected. the bacteria that I'm not even going to try to pronounce. I think that's E. coli. Evo 2 offered up hundreds of thousands of new microvirate genomes, 16 of which gave rise to real

viruses. To safeguard Evo 2, its creators have not trained it on viruses that infect humans or other related species. But in theory, such a version of Evo 2 might be able to produce a variation on smallpox viruses. So look, this isn't, you know, random AI CEOs who might have an ulterior motive claiming this. This is what the researchers have been able to find through their research. And it does seem to pose a threat. Still, Thomas Inglesby, who's the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security,

argues that this provides far more to bad actors than could gather with, like, simple Google web searches. So he says that it aims for the information to be usable. It allows users to go back and forth infinite numbers, a number of times, to troubleshoot and explain in more detail while providing just the right technical resources to back things up. With enough training data, these AI systems will be able to make predictions of more lethal, contagious, immune evasive variants. So as a result, Inglsby is concerned that one day these AI models could create viruses that are novel, not just variants. And indeed, Anthropic has warned that its AI chatbot received queries for information about influenza and other pathogens appear to have come from state-run labs rather than lone biohackers.

So look, regardless of these dire warnings coming from the very people who would profit handsomely from the rapid development of AI without, you know, the government getting involved with safeguards or regulations, President Trump seems undeterred in his quest to rapidly develop these AI models. House Speaker Mike Johnson, for instance, has doubled down saying that AI companies should not be regulated by our lawmakers and should regulate themselves. And in fact, here's Trump speaking to reporters on a golf course in Ireland. Take a look. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces and bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up. And they're bringing up things that won't happen. But whoever wins with AI wins.

Trump's former AIs are firing back at the tech CEOs saying, you guys are the frontier. Stop pretending you need anyone else's permission. Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You need proven experts who can execute on what you need right now. I know I run a small business. Upwork is where businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals for specialized work from software development and AI implementation to marketing and design and business operations. Upwork gives your business fast access to highly skilled specialists with deep expertise so

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The Trump administration suspended them last year and has yet to issue new standard. So it gives you a sense of how far Trump is willing to go in order to accelerate the development of AI, even knowing that that accelerated development could make Americans and just the globe, the world population, less safe. David Sachs, as you saw in that last video, is Trump's so-called AI czar. And he suggests that these AI executives should just, you know, if they want to slow down, there's really nothing stopping them from doing so and they should regulate themselves. Now, some believe that Amadeh and others, by the way, are sensationalizing AI risks in order to

make it harder for other companies to compete with leading AI companies. Essentially, what's being proposed here would solidify the power that the already existing AI models have and it would freeze out some of the other AI startups. And there is some concern about that. Sachs questioned why tech companies needed government intervention to slow down their AI development when nothing has stopped them from doing so on their own. In other words, regulate yourselves. He says, quote, the easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. And so far, several Republican lawmakers have

signaled that they have absolutely no interest in regulating artificial intelligence. So let's go to John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas. He says if developers of artificial intelligence wants to slow down development of their product, they are free to do so. One thing is for sure, their competitors won't, including our nation's adversaries. And in an essay published on Sunday, Aidan Gomez, who's the chief executive of the Canadian AI startup cohere, also expressed concern about possible ulterior motives, saying should a handful of select market-dominant AI companies from Silicon Valley get to define the rules and safety standards of a generational technology for the entire world? These oligopolis, he argues, are now requesting to bend competition

rules and be permitted to dictate the terms for everyone else, a wolf and sheep's clothing, a cartel by any other name. Now, Amadei suggested in his essay that AI companies accept scrutiny of their products by embedding evaluators from third-party organizations. But critics point out something that I think is legitimate, which is the fact that, you know, the companies that he suggested happen to be companies that are very friendly with anthropic, that have a good relationship with anthropic. So redwood research is one and the other one is meter. And so Bill Gurley, who's a venture capitalist, noticed that and said, if we're going to regulate, it can't be anyone that they know and they can't write the rules. Meanwhile, China has weighed in on all of this.

Of course, we're all supposed to be terrified of China beating us in AI. And here's what they had to say. So China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to a question about Amade's essay saying that all parties should work together when it comes to making sure AI is safe. All companies worldwide that are working on AI, fear mongering, confrontation, and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one's interest. So Trump saw that as no, no, no, no, they want the United States to fall behind when it comes to the development of AI and we can't let that happen. We got to go, go, go, go, go, go, go. I mean, look, China is treated as an adversary to the United States. So you should be skeptical of what both sides are saying.

China's really presenting itself as we want to pursue this in a way that's safe for the globe. At the same time, it is very likely that these AI CEOs based in the United States do have ulterior motives. I certainly don't trust Sam Altman of all people, but calling for regulation has led to a massive dip in the stock market when it comes to these AI companies. So by coming out and saying these things, financially speaking, they are, at least in the short term, harming themselves. But one thing that I don't doubt at this point is that there are real risks at play,

And we are not proceeding with caution. Unfortunately, whatever effort there was for the Biden administration to implement regulations to proceed with caution have been thrown out the window by the Trump administration. So I don't have much trust in our institutions or our political leadership. We're going to have to wait and see how this develops. But while I want to leave you with something optimistic, I can't. I'm not optimistic when it comes to the development of AI. And I don't think we have actual adults in the room.

So we'll see what happens. For now, we've got to take a break. Daniel Bessner joins us for the second hour. Don't miss it. If you're Christian, in fact, I will fight for you to have your religious liberty and practice your Christianity. I believe in that. I don't believe in Christianity, which means that you do not get to dictate the way I live my life based on your religion. I don't care what the Bible says. You have every right in the world. All those women who identify with your religion have every right in the world to not get an abortion, to not take birth control. But they do not have

the right to dictate my life and what I decide to do with my body. I don't care about your goddamn religion. I'm so tired of having non-stop conversations about what the Bible says. You live your life in the way that you interpret the Bible. Again, I don't care, but you don't get to take the Bible and tell me, while the Bible says this, in this chapter and this verse, I don't care. I don't care, I don't believe in it, and I have the right based on our Constitution to not believe in it. when left unscathed. Ain't a whole lot left. I don't know why they need any more mom.

Let us get clear. The United States provided $18 billion in military aid to Israel. Netanyahu indiscriminate bombardment have killed more than 50,000 civilians, 60% of whom are women, children, paramedics, and journalists, all of this is against basic human decency. You don't starve children with absolutely no humanitarian aid getting into Gaza. It is a war crime. It is illegal for the United States government to provide Israel with more offensive weapons. We'll not forgive us. We've been on our phones too much. I feel like we just need to touch grass or something.

I told you. I mean, you know what? Let's actually do it. Let's touch the grass. Andrew Yang? It's not racist, right? It's him. Yes, it is I.

Andrew Yang out here giving money away, as usual. Wait, but literally? Do you use a phone? Noble mobile will cut your wireless bill in half every month, and you get paid even more if you log off, look up, and touch grass. Oh, I actually have some grass if you... I don't think that's the kind of grass. Not that kind of grass, unfortunately.

Whoa. Wait, what the... Whoa. I guess that kind of... China grass works too. All grass works. All grass and we get cash? Did you see that? Babe. Go, boom, over. Make it rain. Make it rain. Make it rain. Make it rain. That didn't rain so good. But now it's raining good.

Corruption, injustice. The system is rigged against you. Every day, we're blasted by a flurry of terrible news from every angle, which can make it challenging to stay positive and know how to fight back. The damage report is your solution. I'm John Adrola, and my daily morning show cuts through the noise. and exposes the real damage being done to our country, the world, and how we can fight back against it. Corporate greed crushing workers, we'll name names. Politicians selling you out for their corporate overlords, we've got the receipts. Climate disaster, economic collapse, the rise of fascism, no spin, no establishment talking points, just the truth that you need to survive and resist. But it's not all doom and gloom.

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He's given speeches and, I don't know, doing political stuff. But I will be hosting throughout the week with co-hosts, and I'm very excited about it, switches things up a little bit. But before we get to our next story and my co-hosts for the second hour, I just want to thank James Kelly for the incredibly generous super chat. He writes in and says, love TYT and all you guys stand for. Thank you, James. It really, really means a lot to us. And thank you for the financial support at a time when TYT is being targeted, financially speaking. Anyway, we've got a lot more news to get to, and luckily joining us today to cover that news with me is Daniel Bessner, host of American prestige and just an all-out wonderful person to comment on anything foreign policy related or politically related. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me, Anna. Really happy to be here. So there's a story we didn't get to in the first hour that I think your commentary on would be really useful. So let's get into it. Let's talk about the economic ramifications of everything that's transpiring right now in the Middle East. Well, I mean, it's clearly, oh, sorry, sorry. Should be paying the lowest interest rate in the world, regardless of their formulas. I know more about formulas than anybody.

And we're the best credit in the world. We make other countries rich. We can turn that off in two minutes. You understand that. And the market see about a 90% chance of a rate hike announced on Wednesday. A rate hike by the Federal Reserve kind of goes against what Trump is saying about how wonderful our economic situation is here in the U.S. In reality, inflation is up and the Federal Reserve is in fact likely to raise interest rates this week. But President Trump, as you can imagine, has warned his hand-picked Fed chair, Kevin Warsh.

Don't even think about it. But Warsh has kind of backed into a corner. Let me explain. The problem is, according to the CPI inflation report, inflation has run up above the fed's 2% target for 66 months in a row. And it's not getting any better with the ongoing war in the Middle East. So the latest report showed that year over year inflation is at 3.4%. At the same time, US consumer prices rose more than expected in August.

So the reason Trump wants to lower rates makes a lot of sense. Lower rates for you, for normal Americans, means lower costs in borrowing lower cost when it comes to your auto loan, your mortgage. It also translates to a lower cost in servicing federal debt, which is now past $40 trillion. So Trump, he's addicted to debt. And he has spent a lot of money while also cutting federal revenue by giving massive tax cuts to AI companies, corporations, the top 1%. You guys get the picture. So Trump even made this point recently while speaking to reporters about we got to lower interest rates. We're in so much debt and we got to cut the costs in servicing that debt. Take a look.

Each point in interest in this country that we pay costs us $650 billion. We should be at 1% or a half a percent. We shouldn't be at 4%. We have other countries at a half a percent. And yet, if it weren't for us, they'd be bankrupt countries. Okay. So as always, Trump exaggerated in what he just said there, although the general point he's making is correct. So the fact of the matter is if interest rates come down by a mere 1%, it will save the federal government $60 billion in interest. So he's right in wanting the interest rates to be lower, but you actually have to, I don't know, implement foreign policy that would be convinced. to allowing for the Fed to lower interest rates.

You know, you would want to do something about inflation and engaging in a war in the Middle East on behalf of Israel, which has now jeopardized, you know, global oil supply, obviously leads to an inflationary environment. And by the way, unfortunately, the president's foreign policy decisions continue to be terrible. The Iran war has led to major disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, in which, of course, a ton of oil and liquefied natural gas would transit through. Saudi Arabia deciding to reignite kinetic warfare against Ansar al-Ala has allowed Ansar al-Sah to take control of the Bab al-Mendeb

straight, thus shutting that down. And it has already resulted in a shortage of certain fuels that are incredibly necessary for our economy to run smoothly. Take a look. Diesel has never been more expensive than it is right now. Last week, it crossed over $6 a gallon for the first time ever. Look at Now it's well above that. 623, a gallon, a new record high, dramatically more expensive than it was before the war started. This is also being driven by the war with Iran and the fact that China is restricting its own exports to prevent fuel shortages at home. But the risk is that diesel is going to get even more expensive because look what's going on in the oil market. We're seeing a four and a half percent increase for Brent today, above $109 a barrel flirting with the highs of late last week. Now this oil jump today reflects the latest violence in the Middle East, in particular this east-west pipeline shut down. Now this is not a household name, but this is a big deal because Saudi Arabia has been using this pipeline to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

Normally its oil goes through the straight and out to the rest of the world, but because the Strait of Hormuz has been stuck due to the war, they've been using this pipeline to get out to the Red Sea through the Suez Canal and to the rest of the world. But now the pipeline is shut down. shut down. This is a big deal because the pipeline, its capacity is 7 million barrels per day. That's about 7% of world supply. I just, all right. So we can expect, according to economic experts, a 9% spike in the cost of heating your home this fall and winter. If you use natural gas, you're looking at a 6% spike.

However, if you use heating oil, that percentage actually jumps up to a whopping 31% increase. in the cost. That's insane. And, you know, higher energy prices obviously translate to overall inflation in the economy, especially as it pertains to diesel, which is incredibly necessary for, you know, the transport of goods and services. Okay, all of that in mind, before we talk about what the experts are saying about the Federal Reserve this week and how they're likely to increase interest rates, I want to bring in Daniel Bessner, a host of American prestige, a wonderful podcast that you guys should all be subscribed to if you're not already. also has a substack page that you should be subscribed to. Daniel, I want to get your overall

thoughts on all of this. Okay, what do you think? I mean, the overall thought is that the United States is playing an increasingly destabilizing role on the world stage. And I think the role that China played there was very crucial because one of the reasons that oil hasn't been even higher, gas hasn't been even higher priced is because China was releasing part of its own strategic reserve to try to play an international stabilizing function. But so many months into the Iran war, it's essentially no longer able to do that without threatening its own domestic supply. So you have this moment where the United States led led by Trump, I mean to some degree the United States has always been the gorilla in the room.

But with Trump, I don't know, instead of a 600 pound gorilla, it's a 2,000 pound gorilla, is going around totally destabilizing the global economy. And the whole sort of concordat, the deal that the United States made, with the world in 1945 after the end of World War II in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is that it was going to be a relatively stabilizing force in international relations. And that wasn't always the case,

obviously, with the various wars that we fought over the course of the last 80 or so years. But to some degree, particularly if you were living in Central Europe or Western Europe or Japan, that has been true. But what is now happening is that that deal that the United States made with the world is coming apart. So I think this is really crucial when you're thinking about what are the

next 10, 15, 25 years going to look like when most nations around the world now view the United States as a country that is able to be just incredibly destabilizing, almost doubling gas and oil prices in the span of less than a year. So I think this is the big macro thing that's happening. And the sort of other thing is that it shows countries like Saudi Arabia, which have long been American allies, you know, our famed allies and partners, that they're no longer able to rely on the United States in the way that we were. Because correct me if I'm wrong, but what destroyed that pipeline was an attack from Iraq, the country that we went to defend democracy. So you can see a lot of chickens coming home to roost in this one event. And I think what you're

going to see going forward are our countries like Saudi Arabia beginning to, if not detats themselves from the United States because that's almost a decades-long project, but to begin to look elsewhere for countries that they could rely on not to totally destabilize their entire economy. And then there's the domestic factor, which we could talk about, but I'll throw it back to you. Yeah, I actually do want to weigh in, I want you to weigh in on the domestic factor. But before you do, one more question about the international ramifications of all of this. I was kind of shocked to learn that Israel, which pushed for this war, obviously, against Iran, actually has a pretty okay economic situation, especially as it pertains to inflation.

Apparently, you know, their Fed isn't increasing the money supply, and that's keeping inflation, you know, relative to the United States, certainly, in a much better place, which was infuriating to me because I think out of air, any country on the global stage that should suffer the ramifications of what's going on right now, it should be Israel since they're the ones who wanted this war and somehow they're skirting responsibility or the consequences. But talk to me about what you envisioned for the future of Israel, especially with emboldened Iran, with hardliners, you know, in charge, with U.S. military bases being completely destroyed in Gulf countries and other countries in the region.

those bases were basically there, not to keep those countries safe, but to keep Israel safe. Then you have Ansar al-La really increasing and solidifying their power in Yemen and their influence when it comes to the straight, the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Isn't Israel in a lot of trouble right now? Or do you think, no, this is exactly what they wanted. And somehow they're going to use this to their advantage. My favorite fact about Israel is that they have universal health care and also heavily governs. subsidized college with as we both knows does not exist here. I think there's a couple of things going on. I was recently reading a poll about Israeli public opinion and there's actually

increasing concern that Israel is becoming what is called and you know the literature quote unquote most people know a pariah state. There's significant concern amongst the Israeli public even as many people there still support the war in Gaza and still support the war in Iran that this cannot go on forever. So if we're just thinking practically, I think what is likely to happen is that the Israeli government and military is going to try to, quote, unquote, finish the job in Gaza, continues to do apartheid in the West Bank. And if I had to sort of look out five, 10 years, is that whoever is coming next is going to try to blame this on Netanyahu and the Netanyahu regime as a means to try to reincorporate Israel into sort of normal politics, normal international

arena because just from a material level, Israel cannot survive in the way that it did without a powerful patron like the United States. And I don't think that China is going to be on the verge of supporting Israel. So the question for Israeli politics in the next five, ten years is, are they going to be able to do that? Are they going to be able to prevent becoming a generally a state that's a pariah in the international system? Because if they don't, I think you're right. I think that it's going to be very difficult for them to rely on future American administrations. There's obviously a more far right group right now, you know, the Nick Fuentes of the world that are extraordinarily anti-Israel. There's a cohort around Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green that is also anti-Israel. But it's

really in the Democratic Party that this has become a sign of something. And I think it's become a sign of whether or not you can trust a politician. I think I think it's correct. And, and, you know, the people around Biden would argue that, you know, Gaza isn't at the top of the list of Americans' concerns. And you and I might want that to be otherwise, but I think it is true. But I think Israel has become almost a synecdochie for whether you're able to trust a politician. So even if the Democratic Party establishment might want it to be otherwise, I think it's going to be difficult for Democrats to win, not only in quote unquote blue states, but at the now, level more broadly if they align with Israel. And so Israelis aren't silly. They know what's

going on. So I think this is the problem they face. So let's get back to what's likely to happen with interest rates because, well, there's some interesting polling I want to get to, but also, you know, the economic experts who are getting interviewed in various media outlets are saying, yeah, it would be insane if the Fed didn't increase interest rates. So the inflation data led traders to boost expectations for a Fed hike with 86% chance of a move in September and two increases priced in by the end of the year. And so unusual Wales, which is a fun X account to follow if you want to keep tabs on what's happening with stock market and things like that. They write that Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan say that they now expect the Fed to hike rates this

week. And then Reuters also pulled economists on what they think. And a majority said that a rake hike will happen. An 85% majority of economists, 86 of 101 in the Reuters survey conducted after Friday's inflation report said that the Fed would raise rates by a quarter percentage point to 3.75% to 4% at its September 15 through 16 meeting. And that would actually be the first rate hike since July of 2023. And just to kind of put that in perspective, okay, that's a dramatic reversal of last week's survey results showing more than two-thirds expecting the Fed to hold interest rates, not hike them. Fifty-three percent of forecasters, 37 out of 70, expect at least one further rate increase by end March. And so I think increasing the rates

actually make sense in the context that we're currently existing in. But I also think that the big problem here is the financialization of our economy, our obsession with debt. There's a lot at play that our media has not really explained to the American public. And I'm hoping briefly you can explain what's going on. Sure. You know you're in a good economy when there's a total flip in what people think are going to happen within the span of basically a week.

So in effect, what traditional and small-see conservative economic knowledge or learning would say is that you're trying to prevent inflation by increasing interest rates. This is a way to make it money more expensive to borrow. And so through doing that, you're going to prevent inflation. However, the Trump administration's entire promise was that you're going to decrease interest rates because that is the way that you could do things like purchase houses for cheaper and purchase these goods because that basically when you take out a loan, the interest rate will be lower so that over time you'll be paying less. So this is why Trump is, I think, so vehement about not raising interest rates because this is the entire, you know, the way that I joke about it, the quote-unquote socialistic element of the national socialist project that he is trying to promote. But traditional economic knowledge says that you can't do that.

So then the question, what you're, I think, to look for here is that what is going to win out? Is it economics or politics? Because obviously Trump appointed Warsh because he wants to someone who's friendly to his quote unquote America first agenda of low interest rates, which, you know, are good for certain things. Like I would like to buy a home and have it be cheaper, but are bad for other things, because then it allows companies to do things like spend a ton of money cheaply and buy every other company like we know has happened in the media. So the big problem, though, of course, of course is that our entire economy is based

on a financialized system, which is effectively outside the hands of ordinary Americans. One thing that you'll note is that there's no discussion. no one's polling Americans about what they want. It's totally polling and people who work for basically high finance, you know, Goldman Sachs and whatnot. So I mean, this is the big political thing for Trump, particularly in the advance of the midterms. Because if it just comes and becomes increasingly clear as it already is to most people, but even more clear to Trump's base that he's not able to pull the levers that would allow them, for example, to borrow money to buy a home, that's going to have a significant effect on the midterms. And so I think this is,

is what's going down right now, the fight between politics and traditional economic thinking. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And as always, President Trump never likes to take responsibility for his actions, especially when it leads to inflation, something he swore up and down on the campaign trail that he was going to prioritize fixing. Obviously, he did the opposite. And what I think is really interesting is obviously the inflation that we're experiencing right now is tied to his foreign policy decisions in the Middle East, his ill-fated decision to go to war against Iran. Yet he is deciding to find a scapegoat and blame it on that scapegoat instead. And that scapegoat happens to be Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. So on Sunday, he insisted that his war with Iran was

not to blame for the price rise, saying that this isn't done by the Middle East. This is done by what's happening with Russia and Ukraine. And look, to be sure, it is contributing to this issue, but I wouldn't say that this is the main culprit, okay? Trump also told reporters in Ireland, Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia, let him go after targets, but not diesel fuel because he's causing a shortage. Now, Ukraine has carried out drone strikes against refineries in Russia, which again,

And does contribute to the issue here. Later, Trump claimed this, though. He said, Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian energy targets. Russia has agreed to do likewise. The world's diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia-Ukraine war, not Iran. Okay, except Ukraine denies they ever agreed to this. If Ukraine denies it, I have a hard time believing that Russia actually agreed to what Trump claimed. And yeah, I mean, final word from you on what's transpiring here with the blame game.

Yeah, I mean, he's obviously lying. And the real question is, like you said, it's not to say it has no effect, but to compare it to the Strait of Hormuz, and then to compare it to the Iran-backed destruction of the Saudi pipeline. It's not even comparable. It's like an ant and a mojo.

So the question, of course, as always, if we're thinking domestic politics, is obviously the independents have already abandoned him. But is this going to be so ridiculous that it's going to eat into the proverbial 33% of people who support his BS? I don't know. Or are we just in a world where nothing matters? And those people are always going to be behind Trump or whatever, Republican, which is a depressing world. But it does seem to be the one that we're in. But obviously, that's a lie. I think everyone knows it's a lie. I think he knows it's a lie. but this is the world of the House of Mirrors that we presently live in, where it just doesn't matter. If you do see something that we haven't seen in a very long time, which is the eating away of that proverbial 33%. That would be, I think, a good sign of something that there could be an actual transformation in American politics,

because we are kind of approaching to borrow Malcolm Gladwell's infamous phrase, the tipping point. It's so obviously caused by something that was totally purposeless that he had gotten high on his own supply from Venezuela. And he tried to do a decapitation strike in Iran. And if you knew anything about Iran, that was going to be a very unlikely thing to happen. And now oil prices are through the roof. So one hopes that we'll see some change and maybe we will. When we come back from the break, I want to kind of talk a little bit about Trump promising to alleviate the economic pressure Americans are feeling with these $5,000 dividend checks, as he likes to call it.

What is the reality that you will be receiving a check for $5,000? And more importantly, what are members of Congress saying about it since they're the ones who would have to, you know, allocate the money? By the way, where would the money come from? We're $40 trillion in debt. That and more, when we come back from the break, don't miss it. Welcome back to the show, everyone. James Kelly writes in it says, so crazy theory.

But for some reason, I feel that someone or a group of people are trying to create a virus that will take out a certain group of people targeted by DNA. I really hope that's not the case. I don't have that fear at the moment, but I can understand why you would have that fear at the moment. Elliot writes in and says, meanwhile, Trump promises to put $5,000 on our children's credit card so he can fight Netanyahu's war.

It's not his money that he's paying out. It's our and our next generation's money. Well, Elliot, we are going to weigh in on that topic in the next segment. So stick around for that. YTP renewed says, imagine where we'd be if we swore off OPEC oil. Well, you know, I do think that a case can be made that maybe nationalizing one oil company that's given the task of replenishing our strategic petroleum reserve might be a good idea. You know, I do think we need to rethink the way the global oil trade works and what the United

States does with its own natural resources. Viva Viva Samud Pact Resistor says IDF whistleblowers say troops were told to shoot civilians and children in kill zones at aid lines and across unmarked lines and then shift blame that Iran chants death to America and Israel. I'll read the rest of it when we come back. Back everyone. I was reading Viva Samud Pack resistors. super chat, but then we ran out of time. So I'm going to read it again here in its entirety. IDF whistleblowers say troops were told to shoot civilians and children in kill zones at aid lines and across unmarked lines and then shift blame to Iran because they chant death to America. And Israel, even anonymous, deranged officers describe industrial scale killing, AI targeting,

where's daddy, striking homes, knowing children were inside. Everything you're saying is correct. In fact, if we have time today, we're going to talk a little bit about that film made by Israeli filmmakers called Naza. And in that film, they talk to IDF whistleblowers who, you know, describe all of this horrible stuff that you're describing. Anyway, but for now, I want to go to our next story, which of course has to do with Trump's $5,000 checks that he's allegedly going to send to American adults, which no one should believe. Anyway, let's get into it. And now they say, oh, the 5,000. The 5,000's going to happen 100%. And the reason is because our country is taking in billions and billions of dollars.

And it's going to happen because the people deserve it because they were treated so badly by the Democrats and by fighting. President Trump insists that he's seriously going to send American adults $5,000 dividend checks, as he calls it, if Republicans keep control of the house. House and the Senate after the midterms, which sounds like a bit of a bribe, if you ask me, but nonetheless, even with the $1.3 trillion price tag that comes along with sending $5,000 dividend checks, he claims it would be a simple thing to accomplish, simple thing to achieve. But it's really not. And in my opinion, it's not going to happen. So if it's so easy and affordable

to send Americans checks, why after the midterms? Why not right now? Well, he talks about that in the next clip. You have Congress now, so why don't you do the checks now versus after the election? Because I don't want to do it now because if the Democrats go to get in, our country will be in Campbell and they won't be able to do it. Tremendous amounts of money. We're taking in over 20 billion dollars in terms of that money will be thrown out. If the Democrats get in, they won't be able to pay it. You've also gone bankrupt six times, but okay. Look, there are 270 million American adults. So again, if each person gets $5,000 checks, that would amount to $1.3 trillion. And we're in an economic situation right now where Bissent's Treasury Secretary Scott Bissent is like desperately trying to manipulate the bond market by doing bond buybacks.

And it's not working because investors aren't interested in buying U.S. Treasury's where we're 40 trillion. million dollars in debt. So how does going into further debt make any sense in this scenario? And more importantly, where would the money come from? Because members of Trump's administration swear up and down, we are not going to rely on tax revenue to do this. And that makes it really difficult to figure out where the money would come from. Honestly, Daniel Bessner, I think this is all BS. And I don't even know why we're having a discussion about it. Like, I thought this story would just go away by now, but we're still entertaining it. Like, do you think he might actually try to do this? No. I thought he had said some at one point. It was going to be from the savings from the tariffs.

Yes. No matter how you slice that doesn't work. I mean, this is really outrageous. I think, I think you're right. We should underline, he's just doing political bribery. It's, it's like actually outrageous. One one more norm bites the dust. But in that clip, he's literally just saying, I'm going to bribe you, and the only way you're going to get your money is if the Republicans win the midterms, which is definitely illegal. There's no way that an elected politician is able to do that. Even under the Supreme Court ruling where the executive in the executing of their functions cannot be held accountable, this seems to be like not really in that, but whatever.

And this is what I think is actually important to bring it to something more important that might actually happen is this. The Democrats need to start holding people accountable for stuff like this. Like, this is just so outrageous. Not only did he go bankrupt six times on it, but he also has made so much. money and his family's made so much money off these crypto exchanges and these businesses that have been getting sweetheart deals like Obama got a Netflix deal which is like obviously not great but at least he was out of office. Trump is just running rampant like like a tin pot dictator which is what he wants to

be but he doesn't even care about the dictator party just wants to be you know edie on mean at the end of his life just super wealthy but no I don't think it's going to happen I think it's this sort of dead cat bounce of the socialistic elements that or the populist in this country elements that he came into office promising that aren't ever going to happen. He's most interested in making money for his family and finishing that ballroom. But I find it unlikely that I'm going to get a $5,000 check before November. Yeah, I think you're right. And to your point about how tariffs would not pay for this, keep in mind, again, $1.3 trillion to hand out those $5,000 dividend checks. The president's tariffs have generated roughly $341 billion in net revenue since the start

of 2025. And that's according to the Treasury Department's data. So it's not like some random anti-Trump analysts put this information out. And remember, the Supreme Court also struck down some of his tariffs, ordering him to refund $166 billion of what was collected. And of course, the companies were able to get those refunds, not the consumers who did bear the burden of those taxes, essentially, on international imports. Trump also claims that over $20 trillion has been invested into the United States under his second term, which is complete and utter nonsense. It's a lie. In fact, the White House's own website claimed that there had been $11.2 trillion in major investment announcements. This term, not over $20 trillion. And even the White House's

figure was a major exaggeration of actual investment. So how did he even arrive at that number? The White House was counting trillions of dollars in vague investment pledges, pledges that were about bilateral trade or economic exchange rather than investment in the U.S. and vague statements that didn't even rise to the level of the pledges. And then I'll give you one example. The White House figure includes pledges from U.S.-based companies as well as foreign entities, federal data shows that new foreign direct investment in the U.S. was about $232 billion in 2025. And even without a dedicated revenue stream for these $5,000 checks, some in Trump's cabinet absolutely insists that it will happen.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, I mean, just what I want you guys to get from this next video is how effortlessly this guy lies. Take a look. There are so many ways that President Trump can use our economy and the amazing value that we have, that he can make money not from tax money. And this is key. Not tax money. This is going to be non-tax money. You know, one of my favorites, as you know, is like the Trump platinum card where people can

extend their visa up to 270 days and pay us $5 million. We have a wait list of more than 100,000 people want to come. That's $500 billion, right? We can earn the money that Donald Trump wants to pay out, not from the deficit and not from taxpayers. I just feel like we're being ruled by like the slimyest group of stereotypical used car salesmen, which I will say use car salesmen don't necessarily fit the stereotype. But if you think of the stereotype, this cabinet is like full to the brim with those types of people.

thoughts, Daniel. Well, that's the guy who stopped paying 9-11 families quite soon after September 11th attack as we talk in the wake of that. I mean, I genuinely don't know how people like this sleep at night. They're just lying to everyone's faces. They have no interest in anyone but themselves. And frankly, they think everyone else is an idiot. And given their success, I don't know, maybe they're right. And so this is why I do think we need a transformation in political culture and to actually hold people who broke the law.

actually hold them accountable. I'm not saying just go after people who are in the opposite political party, but if you broke an American law, then you should suffer the consequences for that. And something tells me that almost all of these guys have broken American law. So I could only hope that the Democratic Party does something. Again, it's just more and more outrageous. And as we kind of come to the end of the Trump era, he's an old guy. I don't think in seven years we're going to be talking about him. I think it's now time to reassess what elements of our political culture allowed this to happen and the sort of the blanket lying, the disdain for ordinary people, the lack of interest in actually allowing people to live

meaningful lives is something that really needs to be taken seriously because otherwise you're just going to have like you said these slimy guys, hashtag not all used car salesmen but used car salesman as people. Just lie to us over and over again and just spit in our face and tell us it's raining. And I hope that comes to an end. Yeah, I agree. But I'm going to push back on one thing because I'm really curious what you have to say about this. You know, in 2020, the Democratic Party had dangled $2,000 COVID checks when it came to the special Senate races in Georgia.

So if the Democrats went in those two Senate races, we're going to send out those $2,000 COVID checks. Biden eventually did send out $1,400 COVID checks. But, you know, what would you say to those who are like, okay, you want to hold Trump accountable, accountable for bribery? What about the Democrats? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm no friend of the Democratic Party. No, absolutely. Hold them.

I mean, hold them accountable as well. The Democrats just do it worse and less than the Republicans. And there's elements of here, not so much in what we've talked about so far because it's so connected to Iran. But there are elements of what's going on that are connected to the Unip Party, you know, and Nancy Pelosi's stock trading where if you put $1,000, in that app that just traded what her stock trades were. You would have made a ton of money, stuff like that. So we're all sort of swimming in the same septic tank of American politics. But the Republicans, particularly under Trump, have just become more brazen about it.

They're more P.T. Barnum-esque than Democrats who do it, like with Nancy Pelosi and sort of in a nice pantsuit. But no, absolutely. I'm not limiting this only to the Republican Party. I don't think there's going to be any genuine change for all of us. who are in this together, which is everyone who's not in the elite, unless people in both parties who broke the law are held accountable. Absolutely. So I want to skip ahead to G-block because I'm so curious what your comments are on this. Tucker Carlson, of all people, has been pretty vocal in defending Abdul al-Said, who is running

for a Senate seat in Michigan. So let's get into the details on that. Turns out Mike Rogers, who is the Republican challenger to Abdul al-Said for a Senate seat in Michigan, has been torn to shreds in Friday's edition of the Tucker Carlson newsletter. And look, Carlson even defended Dr. El-Said in his podcast, and he got a lot of heat from Republicans on that. And it's notable because Mike Rogers is a Republican who's running against Abdul al-Said, who is the Democrat. So here's what you need to know. Last Tuesday, the New York Post published the following piece. Abdul al-Said condemned U.S. response to 9-11 that scarred millions in resurfaced podcast comments. So the piece dug up remarks that Al-Said made on his old podcast, America dissected in 2021.

He said in it, 9-11 scarred our country in profound ways. But what we did after 9-11, and guard millions of other people. When we talk about 9-11, we often fail to center them. There's more. El-Sayed contended that after the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon, the U.S. wasted trillions of dollars to wage war that we could or that we would ultimately lose and condemned what he called an era of death destruction and destitution. Mike Rogers responded to this by saying it is disqualifying.

for a U.S. Senate candidate to believe that Americans should center their grief from 9-11. Abdullah Syed's attitude towards the worst tragedy in American history is disgusting and makes him completely unfit to serve in public office. Now, of course he would say that. He wants to win that sentence seat. I happen to believe with what Abdulah Sayad said. And I think we should actually learn lessons from our failures. However, Tucker Carlson puts out a newsletter and he wrote at length about how he actually agrees with what Al-Sayy had said. Hold on a second. Disgusting, understanding that the Bush administration was wrong to kill hundreds of thousands of people and waste trillions of dollars in Iraq, even though, again, Iraq did not do 9-11 is disgusting.

We are really not sure who Mike Rogers is, but if anyone in Michigan's Senate race is unfit to serve in public office, it is him. Slaughtering thousands of innocent people is atrocious, no matter who is responsible if Rogers is deranged enough to think that jihadis are evil for murdering enough Americans to fill a Division III hockey arena, but that the Pentagon deserves two thumbs up for killing enough to pack Ohio State's football stadium multiple times, that he cannot possibly have the judgment necessary to adequately serve the needs of American voters. One more excerpt. He writes, there is nothing remotely crazy about El-Sayed's remarks. They are approximately as scandalous as a weatherman declaring that clouds carry rainwater.

El-Sahed did not celebrate airplane hijackings or cheerlead Al-Qaeda. He simply said that the U.S. conducting terrorism of its own in response to 9-11 was not exactly an appropriate reaction. He's obviously right. Okay, one more excerpt. We hope the good people of Michigan keep Rogers far away from Washington. Okay, so again, this is Tucker Carlson's newsletter. This isn't Bernie Sanders' newsletter. This is Tucker Carlson's. And many people, including individuals in our own audience, are still incredibly skeptical of Tucker Carlson. They think that he's angling for a potential presidential run. But in researching his show, Daniel, before deciding whether or not I would go on his podcast, I realized he's kind of had, you know, a slow and steady evolution on foreign policy matter.

that is very favorable to what the left believes on foreign policy. What is your take on this? Yeah, I mean, with Tucker, my understanding is that it emerges from this Christian notion because so many Christians were killed during the war on terror, which I'm fine. I mean, however you get there, I'm glad you got there. And I think the statement of Rogers, again, is just another example of this infantilization of ordinary Americans that sometimes Americans allow themselves to be infantilized. And I think it's just important to run down the facts because the number of

of this, of the global war on terror have actually been cruncted and they're really abominable. So the war and terror, which ultimately just very quickly, it really focuses on five countries, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan, roughly between 2001 and 2023, and 940,000 people were directly killed by post-9-11 operations. And of these, 432,000 were civilians. So about, a little less than half were just civilians. Beyond that, you know, wars don't result in nothing. You know, you get wounded by wars, you become ill, drinking water gets contaminated. So in addition to the 940,000 people that just died directly, between 3.6 and 3.8 million people died of indirect costs in these post-9-11 war zones due to get like water contamination.

you're forced to move, famine, you can't get food. So that means that the total cost between 2001 and 2023, and I should underline as calculated by Brown University's Watson Schools Costs of War Project, where they have all of the data, between 4.5 and 4.7 million people died, and that number keeps on going up. That's almost equivalent to the Holocaust of the Jews in World War II. So I think it's really important to just confront that reality,

and what that says about the use of American power abroad. And Anna, exactly like you said, if we don't learn from that, then what are we doing not only as a country and not only as Americans, but as people, the death and destruction that was rained down on these five countries is terrible. And every person, regardless of political affiliation, regardless if you thought that the United States should have had an active military response to 9-11, which many Americans did, and I understand that argument, this was not that response.

Between 4.5 and 4.70 million people killed as a result of post 9-11 war zone activities is really atrocious. So I think that I'm glad that Tucker Carlson here is on the right side of history. And this needs to become the common sense. After Vietnam, people weren't like, oh, Vietnam was a good war. There's been various attempts to try to claim that, but they're always really nipped in the bud. something similar needs to happen with the global war and terror. People who were alive during that could never forget, you know, to borrow the phrase that was used about the Holocaust in 9-11, we should also never forget these victims who were the victims of American hubris and American

military might that was used abroad, really wantonly. You know, I've always wanted to see you on Tucker Carlson's podcast because I think you'd be a really, really great guest. And you'd be a great guest on a topic that he discusses regularly, which is why, you know, I'm a regular listener to his podcast specifically for that reason, and he has a lot of interesting guests on to comment on these things. But, you know, a bigger question, broader question that I have for you, has less to do with policy and more to do with how the left should think strategically about accomplishing some of its goals, some of its policy aims. And for me, obviously, there's the economic component of all of that, which to some

extent, you know, Tucker Carlson would agree with the left on a few things. But when it comes to foreign policy, even though he's very much a conservative, he hasn't moved away from his social conservatism. He went from being a neocon to now being one of the most important voices on the right in pushing back against neoconservatism. And so I understand the discomfort people on the left feel in forming any type of coalition that includes voices on the right, on. any issue. But on this, I just feel like it's so incredibly important to find common ground with Americans across the political spectrum and work together to apply pressure to our politicians. Because I don't see this as something that should be considered a partisan issue. There's

no reason why Republican voters should be in favor of this, right? And in fact, younger Republicans, younger conservatives are very much against neo-conservative foreign policy. So how do you approach something like this when you have someone like Tucker Carlson who has, let's say, a perspective on immigration that we do not agree with? You know, he's a hardliner anti-immigration person. But on issues like this, we do agree with him. How do you approach that? To me, it's actually not that difficult because politics is not a realm of philosophical pure morality because obviously you're going to have to make coalitions. This is just the nature of politics.

Max Weber, the German social theorist, wrote about this just after World War I or as World War I was winding down. There's like different moralities operate in different spheres of life. The morality of the seminar room is different from the morality of politics. And how many bills has Bernie Sanders co-sponsored with people who are on the right? To me, it's not even a serious area of inquiry. You're not able, if you are to engage in politics, to maintain that type of pure morality. So of course, I mean, of course you have to build coalitions with people on certain issue areas if you want things like the American Empire to be drawn down. And it's interesting because I always have a response to the anti-immigrant conservative argument, which is that you're anti-imperialist, right? Tucker, you recognize that we did this abroad.

Of course people are going to be coming to this country. The United States has destabilized Latin America for centuries upon centuries at this point. It's not like people love leaving their homes in Central America and Mexico to come to the United States. The American Empire has literally forced that. So to me, that is actually the ethics of allowing immigration is that you can't be a world-besriding empire and then just cut off the borders. It doesn't work that way. You're literally causing the immigration. So that's always my response to the conservative anti-immigrant position. Well, actually, to his credit, he has connected those dots.

And I think that might actually be part of what's motivating his takes on foreign policy, to his credit, because most people in media don't connect those dots, either intentionally or because they're morons and just aren't smart enough to do it. True, true. Final part of this is what Tucker Carlson said on his own podcast. This is him and his own words talking about the whole debacle with Abdul al-Sayed. Take a look at this. Abdul al-Syad who's running in Michigan

against Mike Rogers who as you and I know probably the most pro-intel neocon they couldn't find anybody else to run in Michigan for the United States who by the way lost already why are they running him again anybody want to tell me that Mike Rogers is really I wouldn't vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint

right and so that's the candidate the guy a literal loser who lost when Donald Trump won the state just to show you how much of a headwind he had is back. It's basically a tool of Israel and the intel agencies. How would you run someone like that? Exactly. It doesn't even make sense. No, Abdul al-Sayyad was on Pod Save America and he was asked to respond or react to that clip.

Let's see what he said. Former Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, was talking about your opponent, Mike Rogers, recently and he said, quote, I wouldn't vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint. Would you make of that? And is that an endorsement of you? Are we going to do a Tucker event, maybe in Detroit? I'm not likely. By unlikely, I mean, no. I'm just imagining all the opposite.

Like, wait, so there's a possibility. Wait a minute. Tucker, he's here this week. But look, I mean, I think what you get in Tucker's calls into somebody who's seen up close a lot of the corruption inside MAGA. And what I think he sees in Mike Rogers is what all of us see in Mike Rogers.

whose only interest is power and the money he can make off of power. So at least say what you will about Tucker. There are a lot of things that Tucker and I are going to disagree with, but he can see the corruption and the cowardice in the man. And it's just so off-putting when you actually have to look at in the eye. So why not include Tucker Carlson in a rally, given the fact that he does have a giant following, mostly independence and some conservatives.

couldn't that potentially help Abdul al-Sayed in his campaigning? What are your thoughts? I mean, he's clearly afraid of the liberal media, right? I mean, this is what I read that. And this is, again, this infantile media that we have, this moronic media, as you aptly refer to them, this is what he's worried about. Because if he did something like that, how many op-eds would be written about how this evil coalition he's making him, because we live in a capitalist democracy, he's worried about donors if that was, if that were to happen. And so he himself, not a stupid guy, he's making his own political calculation effectively that the Tucker, the alliance with Tucker will not be worth, I think probably the potential

money that his campaign would lose. And he might be right. This is a no classic cost benefit calculation. I wish we didn't live in a country where he had to make calculations like that. But I mean, that's clearly what he is doing. Yeah, I think you're right. All right. Well, that does it for the main show before we head on over to our members-only bonus episode. I just want to thank you, Daniel, for being generous with your time and co-hosting with me today. Let everyone know where they can find your work and support you. Sure. I mean, number one would be to check out my substack, Imperialist Realism. We wrote a really fun free piece today on the Coyote versus Acme movie, Anna, where we talk about monopolization and like how the movie basically says monopolies are here

to stay. I think it's a really interesting read. And then, of course, please check us out the podcast American prestige on any of your podcast apps. And Anna, it was a genuine pleasure. Always a pleasure to see you. Thank you so much for having me on. Of course, my pleasure. We'll do it again soon. Have a great night.

Bye. All right. And good night to everybody else. If you're a member, stick around. We're going to have our members-only bonus episode for everyone else. Have a wonderful night or consider becoming a member. TYT.com slash join. We'll see you there.

Do you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad. I get it. I'm Siyah and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today, I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll.

So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.