The Young Turks - Zealots For War

Episode Date: October 14, 2023

HOSTS: Cenk Uygur (@CenkUygur) Rayyvana (@RayyvanaTTV) and Ramesh Srinivasan (@rameshmedia) SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ https://www.youtube.com/user/theyoungturks FACEBOOK: ☞ https://www.facebook.com/theyoungturks TWITTER: ☞ https://www.twitter.com/theyoungturks INSTAGRAM: ☞ https://www.instagram.com/theyoungturks TIKTOK: ☞ https://www.tiktok.com/@theyoungturks 👕 Merch: https://shoptyt.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. Woo! Drop my team, Free watching, Free MacD, Bexie,

Drop it. All right, Power Power Power Panel, Jake Hugo, Rayvana and Ramesh Sternovason. You guys know, Ramesh is a UCLA professor, he's an author and an incredible expert on some of the things we're going to talk about today. Great to have you back, brother. Thanks, thanks, Jen. Great to be here with you. Great to be with you. Also, Rayvana. All right. You as well. And of course, Ray Bonnas on Rebel Headquarters, we're already checking out our videos.

Everybody knows that. Okay, all right, Ray, we do, of course, unfortunately have morbid news given the war situation at hand. We do have more interesting, different news later in the program as well on AI of a lot of different sorts and lobbying for AI. That's so interesting. But stay here. We've got to give you the unfortunate but dramatic and important news from Gaza first. take it away. Yeah, absolutely. As Jank mentioned, horrifying news coming out of Gaza, so we're going to start with this video. Evacuate or else. Northern Gaza is being pounded relentlessly

by Israeli strides, reducing entire neighborhoods to rubble. Every morning, we wake up to killings and death, as residents says. We don't know where to go. We don't know where safe. The IDF has reportedly started conducting local raids on the ground in Gaza a day after ordering 1.1 million Palestinians to evacuate their homes, which is impossible. It's not feasible. And we'll get into specifically why that's not possible in the most densely populated place on Earth in a minute. But before that, we have to talk about everything that's happened so far. Now, ahead of this ground invasion from CNN, Israeli forces dropped about 6,000. You heard me right, you read that right, 6,000 bombs on Gaza between October 7th and 12th. The Israeli Air Force said in a statement, Thursday.

Now, on top of that, Human Rights Watch also found that the IDF used white phosphorus in Gaza, which can severely burn people and set fire to civilian structures. and as I mentioned, such a densely populated area. Of course, the IDF denies this. It's a war crime. They're going to deny it. It doesn't make it not true. Now, at least 423,000 Gazans have already been displaced by the airstrikes, a little more on that.

For six days, Israeli warplanes have pounded Gaza with airstrikes that have reduced streets and homes to rubble and killed more than 1,799 people. including 583 children and injured 7,388 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. And those numbers continue to increase every hour of every day, it seems. And obviously we have to mention as well that over 1,300 Israelis have been killed by Hamas, many of whom were civilians. As I mentioned previously, the IDF has called for those 1.1 million Gaza. living in the north to move south. And Israeli government has cut off power to Gaza.

So many people living there don't have any charge in their cell phones anymore. They don't have a way to receive this information. So what the IDF did was dropped leaflets from planes into Gaza, calling for the residents to head south. So here's what those leaflets said. Civilians of Gaza City evacuate south for your own safety and the safety of your families. distance yourself from Hamas terrorists who are using you as human shields. And the following days, the IDF will continue to operate significantly in Gaza City and make extensive efforts to avoid harming civilians. And I'll explain to you shortly why that statement is just

blatantly false, a complete lie. But before we get to that, we need to discuss why it's not possible to evacuate 1.1 million people from Gaza. Again, it's one of the most densely populated places on earth. So here's a little bit more detail on what this order from Israel means for the people of Gaza. Israel has called for everyone north of the wetland called Wadi Gaza, including Gaza city, to evacuate south, some 1.1 million people. But it's not just homes that must be evacuated. This area contains at least 10 hospitals, 3 UN-run compounds and 2 refugee camps. From the top of Gaza to the Wadi, it's only about 10 miles, a four-hour walk on clear roads. But since Saturday, there have been more than 6,000 airstrikes across Gaza, leaving many

roads unpassable. And if the deadline is to be met, since announcing it last night, 46,000 people would have had to cross from north of Gaza to the south every single hour. And for everybody saying, why don't they just leave? First of all, it's the largest open-air prison in the world. The people living there do not have freedom of movement, but also the southern exit into Egypt, known as the Rafa Crossing, has been closed, leaving them with absolutely nowhere to go. In fact, it was also bombed.

The roads there were extensively bombed. So even if it was open, they wouldn't be able to get there safely. And thankfully, the UN has aggressively spoken out against what Israel is ordering. Here's a statement from the United Nations. Nations considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences. The United Nations strongly appeals for any such order, if confirmed, to be rescinded, avoiding what could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation. And they stop short of calling it, what I will call it right now, genocide. An attempted genocide of the

Palestinian people is what's coming. And the Palestinian people know that. And it's being cheered on by Western politicians and Western media. And we'll get into that. in a second, but it's not clear when this 24 hour evacuation period began or when it's supposed to end. But as I mentioned, it was a blatant lie on behalf of the IDF that they're trying to limit civilian casualties by spreading the word to evacuate. Because as Gaza residents in the north attempted to flee south, the IDF bombed their bus caravans. 70 people were killed and 200 were injured in an Israeli strike on a convoy of civilians heading from northern Gaza to central Gaza. according to the Palestinian government press office. So now what we're seeing is a lot of Gazans are choosing to stay in the north and they're protesting in the streets saying that they would rather die.

They would rather die than be further humiliated by the idea of. And despite over 1,800 people being killed already in Gaza, excuse me, Benjamin Netanyahu said this today. I'm telling you, it's only the beginning. I'm not going to give you additional details, but it is only the, only the beginning, the beginning of a genocide, which is only bolstered by what Israeli president Isaac Herzog said today, that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the deadly attacks of Hamas. Here's what he said. It's an entire nation out there that is responsible. It's not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It's absolutely not true. They could

have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime, which took over Gaza in a coup deta. He's blaming innocent men, women, and children for the crimes of Hamas, advocating for collective punishment of the people of Palestine. That is a war crime. And it's being cheerleaded, like I said, by Western politicians, it's being cheerleaded by the Biden administration. Because this is what the White House press secretary had to say when a reporter asked her what she thought of calls for peace. The question was, well, there have been some members of Congress who have called for a ceasefire and they have not gone as far as backing the administration's call for support for Israel. She responded like this. So look, I've seen some of those statements

this weekend and we're going to continue to be very clear. We believe they are wrong. We believe they're repugnant and we believe they're disgraceful. Repugnant and disgraceful. Calling for peace is repugnant and disgraceful. Then I guess I'm repugnant and just disgraceful because I refuse to sit idly by while this genocide is about to be carried out on the Palestinian people. I'm sorry, I'm emotional, but this is an emotional time.

And we're watching our politicians celebrate this, and it's mortifying and disgusting. So Hamas' attack against Israel was morally wrong, strategically wrong, wrong in every way, and not just wrong, but abhorned. But we don't control Hamas, and we didn't know it was coming. But we can influence Israel, and Israel is saying we are going to kill those people now. And so there's no conflict in saying what Hamas did was unimaginable and awful and saying, do not kill thousands of innocent civilians in Palestine. There is no conflict between those two things.

You can say both of those things at the same time. And by the way, here let me say a note to the demagogues, okay? So when someone says maybe we should not kill those Palestinian civilians, saying, oh, you're helping Hamas is not going to work here, okay? You can take that crap and send it somewhere else. I don't care what kind of demagoguing and propaganda you're going to do. We are not in favor of killing those civilians. Don't tell me that, oh, golly, gee, it was all an accident when you bomb the bus full of civilians,

kill 70 of them, and then go, oh, well, no, not oh well. You say, well, Hamas did it. Are you saying that, is that your standard now? Is Israel using the Hamas standard? That is a very fair question. Because I would hope, I would beg and beseech Israel to not use the Hamas standard. So look, and then here's another demagogue thing to say, well, why don't they just leave? Okay, either you're saying you're profoundly ignorant when you say that, or you're saying, ha, ha, we know they can't leave.

We know that they're trapped inside of Gaza, they won't, they can't get out from Israel, they can't get out from Egypt, they have a naval and air blockade. There is literally no way to leave Gaza. It is a tiny little area with 2.2 million people packed in it, half of them under the age of 18. Dropping 6,000 bombs. Now the Hamas rockets are awful, they kill people, et cetera. So I'm not saying this to minimize the Hamas rockets, but they are much, much, much smaller than the Israeli bombs. The Israeli bombs, as you just saw with your own eyes, level whole buildings at a time. And the Palestinians don't have iron dome.

Israel has iron dope. It doesn't make anything Hamas did justifiable. But that's not the point. The point is you're not Hamas. You're supposed to be a democracy? Okay, we have a thousand things to say. I want to let remission here. But one last thing for now,

if you say I'm going to cut their water and gas and electricity and everything they need to sustain, themselves. And if the kids are in the on incubators and people are on life support in the hospitals, and I'm going to cut their electricity and let them die, you're saying I run an open air prison. I run up a place where they cannot escape and where I will kill them at whenever I want to. Now Israel doesn't wantonly kill them most of the time, right? So they're not, you know, they do, but in, but they do from time to time. And they definitely keep them as prisoners.

There is no question in the world. And they say, and one of the reasons for the occupation is, well, we can't trust these savages. And so since we can't trust them, we need to hold them basically hostage. We're holding two million people hostage. And so when Hamas is something barbaric like this, we're going to punish all two million. because that's why we were keeping them as prisoners in the first place. So that if you dare mess with us, we cut their water so they can't drink. We cut their electricity.

So they can't live if they're in the hospitals. Because we have them as hostages. Be honest about it. Be honest about it. What Hamas did is unjustifiable, in my opinion, morally in any way, shape, or form. But the occupation is also completely morally, unjustifiable. And if you're hurt by that fact, okay, I hear you, people get super emotional about their own identity. I do, everybody does, we're all human. But I'm asking you to get

beyond that and see the facts. There is no occupation that can be justified like this, and certainly not for 56 years, Ramesh. We have to start and end with the sense of compassion and care for the sanctity of life, right? And it's quite clear in this situation that Palestinian lives don't matter, specifically the lives of peoples in Gaza, don't matter nearly to the extent that other lives do, right? And I think that that is what we're getting at here. Keep in mind, everybody, as you both alluded to, Hamas has been, I'm sorry, excuse me, Gaza has been an opener prison, as you said, administered in an apartheid type state since 2006. So that means nearly half of the entire population of the Gaza Strip, around 2 million or so

people, have been born and grown up in an open-air prison. There is no place for the refugees in Gaza to head to. This is something I know firsthand. We can talk about it more. I've spent time in the Sinai. I have multiple friends in Gaza and Gaza and friends who were unable to migrate since 2013 when the Egyptians bombed the tunnels, which were the main source, underground source of supplies, health care, water, and so on.

So this gets to, I think, a very, very important question. Who cares about Palestinian lives? And what does it take to protect Palestinian people's lives, recognizing that, that the ways Palestinian lives have been infringed upon, especially in the Gaza Strip, but also to a lesser extent, but also brutal extent through settler colonialism in the West Bank has led to a situation where brutal, terroristic, deplorable acts were taken up by Hamas. The rockets really don't tend to have much effect, but they came in with parachutes and so on and carried out a brutal, brutal, a set of attacks.

So think about this, a few million people living in one of the most densely populated places in the world. Think about, you know, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, three times more density of population in Gaza City who are being told, you got to go, but they have nowhere to go to. They can't access the sea. They can't access Egypt through the Sinai. They can't access Israel for obvious reasons, right? They have nowhere to go. The Ukrainians had a refugee corridor. Palestinians do not.

So I want to ask the question, what is the end game here for the Israelis and why has our government not taken actually any sense of moral responsibility or compassion for Palestinian lives to try to end this as soon as possible, to de-escalate this and bring this at the minimum to a ceasefire? What is the end game? And so many of my Jewish friends, including Israeli friends, are not supportive of what going on here, but they often tell me we have almost a psychic fear of what they call collective annihilation.

We know where that came from and we understand and have compassion for how that has been imprinted upon Israeli peoples and Jewish peoples around the world. But is the solution to a fear of collective annihilation, the collective annihilation or the collective punishment, which is a war crime, it's a crime against humanity of another set of peoples? An eye for an eye makes the whole world blinds, you know? Someone pretty famous once said that. So what are we gonna do? What's the end game here?

Why is our media not asking any of these tough questions? Why can not the most powerful nation in the history of the world do something to stop this? To stop this. That does not justify what Hamas did, but it doesn't come out of a lack of context. So look, there's one other commentator that we want to get to, who seem to be celebrating this. And I'm gonna let Ray get to that in a second. But I want to make sure everybody understand this.

Like, one of the things, I'm worried about a lot of things. I'm worried about innocent Palestinian civilians. I'm worried about the Israeli hostages that are there. By the way, when you bomb a building, what if they have the hostage in the building? So who are we helping? What are we doing, right? But one of the things that I'm worried about is that

that these actions by the Israeli government accidentally help Hamas. Because I asked the same question, Ramesh asked about this Israeli action, about Hamas. You heard me ask that several times this week. What's the end game? You go butcher these poor innocent people. How does that get any support for your cause? It doesn't make any sense. It makes you the bad guy.

It makes you look like a monster. It seems to validate the stereotypes that people have about you, about Palestinians, about Muslims. It's such a terrible thing to do. But maybe this was their end game. Maybe the end game was provoke Israel into an overreaction that is so large that it horrifies the world. Because there is no end to the occupation. Israel at this point is saying, we're not even offering you any peace treaties.

We're not going to the table. We're not negotiating. So your occupation and your imprisonment will pretty much be. forever. And we need you to reject all of your leaders. We need you to reject everyone that ends and come to us with people who will tell us what we want to hear. That is not how you negotiate with your enemies. You cannot say to your enemies, I hate you. So why don't you give me someone who will agree with me instead of you? That's not how it works. Imagine if Hamas went in and said, I hate Netanyahu. Why don't you give me some Israeli that's

going to agree with the Palestinians instead? That's an absurd request. It's an insane request. You negotiate with enemies. You don't negotiate with friends and when you need a peace treaty. Do not, do not, if that was Hamas's trap, please do not fall into that trap. It doesn't help the Palestinians and it doesn't help the Israelis. And so I'm going to ask a hypothetical at the end to all of you, not just our host here, but to the audience, but now to the issue of the civilians being killed. What President Herzog said, and I've seen President Herzog be reasonable in other instances, but this is not his, this was a terrible moment for him. Because think about the consequences of what he says. Other than moral consequences of

saying the civilians are guilty. The civilians shouldn't have supported Hamas. The civilians, it's the entire nation that's at fault. But President Herzog, that's what? One of the hardest parts of getting older is feeling like something's off in your body, but not knowing exactly what. It's not just aging. It's often, your hormones too. When they fall out of balance, everything feels off. But here's the good news. This doesn't have to be the story of your next chapter. Hormone Harmony by Happy Mammoth is an herbal formula made with science-backed ingredients designed to fine-tune your hormones by balancing estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, and even stress hormones like cortisol. It helps with common issues

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Hamas says, Hamas says, well, you guys elected then, Yahoo, and you elected these right wing government and this right wing government will keep us occupied forever. So we had no choice but to attack your civilians. Do not agree with Hamas. Do not agree with Hamas. That is a terrible idea. Newsmax host, Greg Kelly, celebrated the idea of totally annihilating Gaza. Take a look. And Israel right now is doing a fantastic job, pounding Gaza night and day. It's exactly what they deserve.

Take a look at the, from the ground perspective, what it looks like. I mean, it's kind of hard to believe, though, as this to me looks like total victory, right? total annihilation doesn't work that way. You still have to go in with the ground troops. 50% of the people who live in Gaza are children. The average age of a Gaza resident is 18 years old, and that was Greg Kelly. I don't mean to be crude, but horny at the idea of annihilating an entire group of people, gleefully cheering on the genocide of the Palestinian people.

And just to give a little bit of context about the conditions, Greg Kelly, who's never suffered a moment in his life, the conditions that the people of Gaza have to live through, 97% of them don't have access to clean drinking water. Because they don't have access to clean drinking water, instances of kidney disease is particularly prevalent in Gaza. They don't have the medical equipment to be able to adequately treat those diseases because Israel won't let them have it. So they have to get special passes from the Israeli government to get treatment, which can and do get revoked for any or no reason whatsoever. The unemployment rate is 50%.

The youth unemployment rate is 70%. There are previous liberation organizations that were more secular, more inspiring were undermined by the Israeli state who bolstered and funded Hamas, as recently as 2019. Benjamin Netanyahu is on the record speaking to members of his party in the Knesset saying, in order to prevent the establishment of an Israeli state, We need to continue to bolster and send money to Hamas. I mean, these are the conditions that these people have to suffer through.

And there is, again, Greg Kelly, who's never suffered a moment in his life, smiling, smiling in the face of genocide, utterly repulsive. Yeah, yeah. It's, as I said, about 50% of the population of Gaza were born in an open airport. their entire lives have been in an apartheid state. You can imagine what their lives are like. Their lives have already been foreclosed from the time they were born. The average life expectancy in Gaza, the last time I checked, is almost 30 years lower than life expectancy in the countries in the world with the highest life expectancy, which by the way is not us in the United States.

It gets to the key point of what lives matter on this planet, right? Right? Sub-Saharan Africans, their lives don't matter. They're drowned in the Mediterranean. Central Americans, their lives don't matter. You know, apprehend them at the Mexico-G Guatemala border. Yemenis, their lives didn't matter. Ukrainian's their lives matter maybe a little bit more. What's going on here? It's very clear how this game is being set up for all of us. And I also just want to note, and you know, the Greg Kelly example is just one of many examples I've seen. I've been combing mainstream media, it drives me insane, as you know. over the last week or so since Saturday. It's unbelievable to me how the shock that's been created out of this series of events has been used to legitimate and normalize the continued destruction and the amplification of violence by the Israeli state with the U.S. and West's full backing. This is the shock doctrine, a very famous book by Naomi Klein that was written to discuss things like 9-11 and everything that happens afterward.

And that's what we're seeing happening right in front of us right now. So again, I want to ask the Israeli state or the U.S. government or whoever, Macron, anybody, what is your end game here? Is it the continued incarceration of Palestinian peoples, which clearly in it of itself, to your point, Jank, is not really working? It might be working for the right-wing Israeli government as well as Hamas, but it's not working for anyone else, right? It's not working for anyone else.

What is their endgame? Is it the collective annihilation of all Palestinians? Is it some sort of like, let's get back to having them in prison and be obedient servants? That didn't work because it got worse and worse and worse. What's their end game? What's their vision? Does any of that vision have any respect for Palestinian life given that these are kids we're talking about? Yeah.

So what Netanyahu and the Israeli government is doing right now is incinerating the moral high ground. They had it. They had it for the first time and for so long they had the moral high ground and the whole world was with them. And we empathize. And you could say, hey, maybe the whole world wasn't with them. But a giant part of the world was with them. And even their critics, I have criticized the occupation for decades. And even I said, oh my God, look at my heart breaks, right?

It's because it's not even. There's a giant difference between opposing government action and killing civilians. Okay, now though, Netanyahu says, okay, let's help Hamas. Let's give them the moral high ground back. What are you doing? What are you doing? And so let's feed into their plan of making us look like the bad guys by being the bad guys. So are you, am I asking Israel for restraint even though they're badly hurt?

Yes, you ask for the restraint, not in good times. You ask for the restraint when you're hurt and we ask you to rise above it. And so that's for Israel. For the people that are monsters like Greg Kelly here in America, if you say, hey, listen, I love Israeli civilian citizens, I have friends and family in Israel, et cetera, and they got hostages over there, we're gonna do what's necessary. We can argue and debate about what's necessary, okay? But I understand that, I understand that way of thinking.

But when you celebrate the mass deaths of 583 children and say, looks like total victory to me. You're a disgusting person. So if you're out there and your heart broke for the Israelis and you want, you understand the need for striking back and trying to get the hostages, et cetera, please do not cross over to celebrating. If you celebrate this death and destruction, then you're saying something about yourself as opposed to your enemies, okay? I'm going to leave you with the hypothetical in a second, but you wanted to say one more. I really do. I mean, my heart is broken for all my Israeli brothers and sisters who have been, who have been targeted. And you know, a lot of these people at this music festival, they're probably people

like me. I love going to music festivals. They weren't, they're not, they were never the problem, right? But at the same time, I just, it's just so, so important to recognize how this also could really help the Netanyahu regime, this shock doctrine, just like it helped George Bush. It's, I'm not trying to make them totally equivalent, right after 9-11. It, it helped Bush, vicious onslaught upon upon this world that we're living with still today. So as the Netanyahu regime becomes more and more authoritarian, more and more neo-fascist, cutting out the judiciary, this can give them a blank check to do whatever horrific things they want to do, recognizing that multiple members of this administration are already convicted

for supporting terror against Palestinian peoples. So, so that is certainly possible and that's why the right wing of all sides drive us to war and conflict because they gain from it. But so far, the Israeli civilians, at least in the first poll, have proven way smarter than us because 86% of them blame Netanyahu for getting the intelligence wrong and failing at his core job of protecting Israelis. And I think they are those Israeli civilians are exactly right. Do not get deluded by right wing monsters who gain from war and conflict and death. Lay the blame where it belongs 100% on Hamas, but also on the people who did not do the intelligence to protect you. And lastly, I mean, this is not for our hosts. I've decided I'm just, I want you to think about this if you're in the audience.

So let's say empathy for the Israelis, right? Your family, I want you to empathize not theoretically, but feel it, okay? So you have to think about it, what if it happened to me? Your family gets brutally killed. I know I'd be in a rage. I'd be in a giant, uncontrollable rage, okay? And then they tell you, the guys who did it are in that building. But if you bomb that building, you're going to get your revenge and you're going to get your justice,

but you're going to kill 10 innocent civilians. Would you do it? Would you do it if it was five innocent people? And we use civilians, and it sounds like almost war lingo. A grandmother, a child, an aunt, an uncle, and a sister. Would you bomb the building? You're going to get the bad guys, and you're going to get your vengeance. And I think, I know I would want righteous vengeance, okay?

But those other, the two kids, the grandmother had said, they're going to die. I hope you don't say yes. I know I wouldn't say yes. I'd rather stormed a building myself to try to get the bad guys, but protect the grandmother and the two kids and the aunt and the uncle. I hope you say the same thing. But right now, as much as our heart went out to Israel in the beginning of the week, and throughout the week, and it still goes out to them to the civilians,

please do not bomb the building. It's not the right thing to do. But that's the decision they're making. So everyone, we're trying to get everyone to do the right thing. I know it's an impossible task, and especially after you've been hurt. But that's when, that's when heroes arise. That's also when bad guys arise. So right now, we haven't seen the heroes yet.

I hope they arise out of Israel. All right, we'll be back. All right, back on T.I.T. Jank, Ramesh and Rayvana with you guys. Also, Medio Domingay, Patricia, New York, and Tiny Dancer Dragon. They all just became young Turks. They hit the join button below and became part of our family or community. We appreciate you. You could also do it at tyt.com slash join in Mafia Gaming. One of our YouTube members wrote in proud member. We appreciate you.

And we're proud to be your voice and that you've chosen this show to get honest reporting. All right, Ray. So on the network this week, we've been covering conservatives who are capitalizing on the situation in Occupy Palestine to further advance their warhockery, as it were. A surprising voice has pushed back against these demands for more brutality and more war. Laura Ingram. Now let me be blunt here. That's why I always am, but we need to make sure that the justified retribution campaign led by Israel against Hamas does not turn into the U.S. being thrown into another forever war, this time with Iran.

It's not every day that you hear Laura Ingram act as a voice of reason. A sentence I could honestly say, I never imagined I would hear come out of my own mouth. But apparently, yesterday was that day because on last night's episode of the Ingram angle, she spoke out against the frenzied war mongering that we're seeing in the right wing, as well as from some centrist Democrats as the war in occupied Palestine, supposedly teetering on the edge of a broader regional conflict. Now, specifically, Ingram was calling out the following statements from Senator Lindsay Graham, and let's all watch this pathetic warhawk salivate at the thought of even more death and destruction.

I would bomb Iran's oil infrastructure. The money financing terrorism comes from Iran. You're saying that you would want the United States and Israel to bomb Iran, even in the absence of direct evidence. Yes, I would do a joint military operation. I tell the Iranians today, if the war escalates, you will pay up. price. It is now timed to dismantle the financing system of terrorism. I don't want to reward them. I want to punish them. Senator Graham has also said that this is a holy war, Senator Haggerty. I mean, I think when I start hearing that, I get concerned. And we'll get into

what Senator Haggerty had to say in response in a second. But, Jank, first, I want to talk about that you and I discussed on the show on Monday, these opportunistic warhawks demanding war with Iran in the face of little to know evidence. They had anything to do with the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians. In fact, we cited one source from the Wall Street Journal that put together apparent evidence. And now it's been found out that that reporter has a history and has lost jobs as a journalist for fabricating evidence. And the Wall Street Journal itself has walked back that, which was the only report. that definitively tied Iran to the Hamas attack. But that's not going to stop Lindsay Graham, right?

That's not going to stop these people who stand to gain a lot, financially, politically by demanding more disgusting brutality. Yeah, so guys, there's concerns about a wider war here. We're going to discuss that later in the show. But and Hezbollah has attacked from the north into Israel and Israel's of course attacked back in. And so you've got Lebanon, you've got Gaza. But these guys, they can, you know, as they showed earlier in the week, they could do significant damage if they get inside Israel. But significant damages in losing, you know, around a thousand civilians.

And some of the people that were killed were soldiers, 12, 1,300 overall, right? Yeah. But they cannot win a war against Israel. That's preposterous. There is no war here. So Israel will obliterate anyone who attacks them. And we just showed you earlier in the show, the obliteration of Gaza. It's like saying Uruguay is a real danger to America.

and we must, we must just absolutely destroy everything in our path. That's crazy talk. So, but you can't have a real war if you drag Iran into it. Iran's four times the size of Iraq. Iran has a real military. Why are we going to go and endanger Israel by dragging them into a war with a giant country like Iran? That doesn't make any sense. That lunatic Netanyahu has been saying that all this time.

Why? Because he would personally gain from it. And he has shown now a number of times he could care less about Israeli civilians. But yes, you politically, you go more towards right wingers when there's war. When he thinks I have these corruption charges, I didn't do any intelligence to catch Hamas doing this. And he's been agitating for a war with Iran for a long time. Nothing would endanger it, like in terms of a core existential threat to Israel, the only thing that I could possibly imagine is needlessly starting a war with Iran.

Because that could spiral out of control, because it could be not just Iran. But if you start a war with a giant nation like that, it embarrasses the other Muslim nations who sit by and watch Muslims get massacred, which is what's going to happen. Israel's going to start it with a giant lead, right? And then when the West joins in and they see no one likes the government of Iran. The Sunni Muslims hate the government of Iran, which is Shia. I know it's hard for people to understand if you're not familiar with it. But Iran has almost no allies.

Yes, they have Russia that they're still hanging on to. But Russia's now isolated. The only way to get them allies is by attacking them. It is maniacal to the extreme degree. And hence Lindsey Graham. Lizzie Graham is one of the worst warmongers of my lifetime. He's one of the most, even though he's a sniveling little coward who likes to lick the boots of his masters, okay? But his masters are not just Donald Trump.

They're also his donors, which are defense contractors and oil companies. The minute you drop the first bomb in Iran, gas prices will be double what they are now. And then Lizzie Graham will go, oh, did my benefactors make trillion? of dollars while you all got murdered? Oh, golly, gee, I guess that was another mistake, just like we did in Iraq. Lindsay Graham's one of the worst human beings on Earth, and we should go nowhere near this insanity of attacking Iran, especially when there's no evidence just like Iraq. Lunatics, total utter lunatics.

Ramesh. Yeah. Netanyahu and the right wing Israeli government does have a lot of interest in the United States getting into something with Iran so we can do their dirty work for them. And I also think it's worth noting that the Chinese, though there are certainly no saints on many levels, did broker a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Chinese did that. And the Chinese have also offered to host peace talks between the Ukrainians and Russians and so on. Chinese have their own interests. That doesn't make them evil, but at least there's multilateralism occurring there.

I also think it's important, worth noting that Israel has carried out extra territorial attacks systematically over the years in places like Syria and Iran, killed multiple Iranian nuclear scientists and conducted bombings, which hasn't been reported very widely, certainly not by mainstream media, in Syria, just in the last couple of days, the airport in Damascus, Aleppo, and so on, right? So these are over Israeli borders attacks committed by Israel. But I think it gets this story gets me to like the biggest question, which is where is the anti-war movement? And why are some sort of apparitions of the anti-war movement more visible in certain senses by the Laura Ingrams or the isolationists who actually in certain ways promote more civil war and xenophobia within our country? and why have so-called liberals, why do they have no pulse for stopping war? Where is the anti-war movement in this country? Is it because of this perversion of the military industrial complex that not only has power over particularly heinous politicians like Lindsey Graham, but Biden himself and mainstream

Democrats? But there's a very ironic ray of hope here, and it's buried in this story, which is some Some portion of the right wing have now joined the anti-war movement. So they're a couple of decades late, but we'll take it, there's plenty of room, okay? So to answer a measure's question, we all know and he knows, it's mainstream media. They celebrate war at every turn, and they say, and right now there's like people proposing that anyone who does a protest of the deaths of the Palestinian civilians now should be banned or arrested, et cetera.

So you're not even allowed to speak out in favor of stopping massacres, right? So, and mainstream media always glorifies war and, and always paints the anti-war movement as if they're fringe radicals. Oh, look at these radicals who don't want to kill people endlessly. That's not a radical position. Yeah. That's the human position, unlike the monsters who work in our politics and media in this country. So, but Laura Ingram isn't going to tell you that she's against.

starting a war with Iran, unless a giant portion of her audience is saying that. So she's trying to get ratings by appealing to them, that is very good news. Now the right wing voters, they're often misdirected, and it doesn't mean that they became massively enlightened and they're right about every issue, and they join us in every effort. But we don't need that, democracy is a messy thing, we don't have to agree on everything. But if you guys are against the war with Iran, which a lot of right wingers are now. Most of the left wing is definitely opposed to a war with Iran. We can unite against the establishment warmongers who think yes, but on the other hand, oil

prices are gonna go up and our stock portfolios are gonna look great, right? So no, we fight against those monsters and we can be united in that effort. Okay, we are so disastrously out of time, guys. So we gotta take another break here. When we come back, we've got more stories for you guys. Really compelling things happen today, as you can tell, a lot more when we come back. All right, back on the Young Turks, Jane Huger, Ramesh Stern-Avason, at Ray, Ivana. So guys, we're going to do a story about Vivek Ramoswamy and Sean Hedy. Unfortunately, we don't have time for it today. But I do want to tell you. And by the way,

I actually agreed with Vivek Ramoswami. So that's apparently the hell froze over. And so okay. But Vivek Ramoswami is going to be on the show on Monday. So do not miss Monday's show. We change things around so that Anna and I will be interviewing them. So Anna and I interviewing Vivek Ramoswami on Monday, do not miss that. Ray, tell us the next story. So the next story is an age-old story of corruption in Washington brought into the digital age, I suppose, because it's about AI. A new report from Politico dives into the inner workings of a billionaire-backed network of AI fellows

and key congressional offices that are helping to shape AI policy. Now, the key player in this is an organization called Open Philanthropy. Their self-described philanthropic funder, whose mission is to help, you know, according to them, help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. So a little bit from that excellent reporting from Politico. The fellows funded by Open Philanthropy, which is financed primarily by billionaire Facebook co-founder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskowitz and his wife, Carrie Tuna, are already involved in negotiations that will shape Capitol Hills accelerating plans to regulate AI. Now, they've been acting through

the Horizon Institute for Public Service, which is a nonprofit that open philanthropy has effectively created in 2022. Now, the group is funding the salaries of tech fellows and some key Senate offices. So a little bit more on that. Current and former Horizon AI fellows with salaries funded by Open Philanthropy are now working at the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department, as well as in the House Science Committee and Senate Commerce Committee, two crucial bodies in the development of AI rules. They also populate key think tanks shaping AI policy, including the Rand Corporation and Georgetown University Center for Security and Emerging Technology, according to the Horizon

website. In 2022, Open Philanthropy set aside. nearly $3 million to pay for what ultimately became the initial cohort of Horizon Fellows. So now Open Philanthropy has attempted to convince people that they're entirely separate from Horizon, but it's very obvious that the organization is just using Horizon as an attempt to mask the fellow's ties to the company. Now, because Horizon is considered a nonprofit, the money that Open Philanthropy has spent on Horizon Fellows since its initial grant is something that we can't know. Now this opens the door to multiple conflicts of interest. A little bit more on that. Tim Stratton, director of the Congressional Oversight Initiative at the project on government

oversight, said congressional fellows should not be allowed to work on issues where their funding organization has specific policy interest at play. He added that fellows should not draft legislation or educate lawmakers on topics where their backers conceivably stand to gain a dynamic apparently at play in the case of Horizon's fellowship program given open philanthropy's ties to open AI and anthropic. Now, when asked about the ethical and conflict of interest, excuse me, issue, Horizon co-founder and executive director Remko Zwetzlute said the fellowship program is not for the pursuit of particular policy goals, does not screen applicants for belief in long-term AI risks, and

includes fellows with a diverse set of views on AI's existential dangers. And we're talking about AI. So this might be a little bit complicated. So I'll just sort of make this analogy that the political article made when speaking to so what I think quite succinctly. They likened it to if APAC had a non-profit wing of its organization that was funding foreign policy, Middle Eastern foreign policy fellows in congressional offices, that would be clearly, clearly a conflict of interest. But that is precisely what is happening here. So I'll open it to you guys now. We've got a little bit more, but for your thoughts on this. All right. Thank you for running the story because it gives me an opportunity to talk about what's actually going on with AI. So this is, you know,

these are comments I've made multiple times on the Young Turks and other networks. The AI systems that generally are being spoken about today are not traditional AI systems. They're using our own personal data collected by large server farms to mine and process that data because the storage and processing of data has become exponentially cheaper over time, which is an amazing technical development. They're using all of our personal data to basically create systems that can emulate human behavior, that can mimic human behavior. So that's just what that kind of said. Any time you see words in especially in relation to tech like open or philanthropy or innovation or disruption, that's a sign usually that they're trying to brand you out

and bait and switch you, right? So the term open is like the gospel in tech worlds, you know, which I come out of in some ways. Open AI is not open because they don't disclose what data is being gathered about us or what they're doing with that data, how long they're retaining it for, and what their, how their business models associatedly. Similarly here, okay? So what that is doing is actually masking the actual tasks that need to be done to actually regulate AI so it serves people, laborers, our planet, and so on. And the other thing that they're doing, and this story alludes to it, is they, and it's a common thing we've seen, especially with the emergence of GPT, open AI and so on. We're the only ones who can regulate these things because we're the only

ones who know what's actually going on. Never mind that we call ourselves open. We're the only ones who actually know what's going on. We being tech CEOs, investors, you know, those people. And that's because intentionally these systems are built in opaque ways based on the surveillance and capture of personal data. They have intentionally built systems that order the world for us in ways that 99.9% of us have no visibility or accountability over. So that's why you hear about the Terminator scenario, which is there's an existential risk. That's why you hear about, you know, we're the ones best left to regulate all of this ourselves. That all masks the realities of what these AI systems are doing, which is threatening workers at a time where, thankfully, we have more unionization energy than ever, than like recent history from what I can remember.

They mask the racist and incarcerating aspects of these technologies. They're being used in prisons, police departments, and so on. They're misidentifying people who are as criminals, who are not criminals, because they're merely black. These are all examples of what we could call algorithmic violence or AI level violence. So every time one of these stories like this drops, and I'm so glad the Young Turks cover stories like this, we have to actually look at beneath the veneer and all the branding like fancy branding language that tech companies always use, what is actually at stake? It's a threat to the working class and a threat to our own personal data.

Instead, you can imagine how machine learning systems, including large language model systems like chat GPT, could actually serve everybody. That would take actual regulation because that would involve people who actually care about the working class, about citizens, about democracy, and so on. The main existential risk is the possibility of building an AI system that can do mass-scale disinformation. And that is a realistic scenario, but that's kind of already happening, by the way. So I think the main thing here to recognize is they are shielding themselves from actual regulation. So what if the National Labor Relations Board was the actual regulator of these systems?

What of the FTC was the actual agent that could actually change these systems? I think there's a lot of possibility to transform the relationship between systems of all kinds and our democracy and our economy to support everybody, but that is absolutely not what's happening. So just don't believe the hype. Don't believe the hype when it comes to what tech companies always push out upon us, because they're not tech companies. They're the wealthiest and most powerful companies in many cases in their history of their world. Many of them are military contractors too, and that's very worth noting. Yeah, that last part especially is deeply, deeply concerning. Ramesh knows this pretty much as well as anybody does.

So I'll just comment on, look, even if it's philanthropy or it's a nonprofit, first of all, a lot of things are disguised as nonprofits that are nefarious. But even if they meant well, you cannot allow outside forces to embed inside the government. As Rayvana mentioned, Apex theoretically a nonprofit, right? But they are for the benefit of a different country. But you could pick anything. Saudi Arabia has tons of non-profits. Are we going to let them embed inside the United States government?

That's crazy, right? And so I'm worried about the wholesale takeover of our government. And there's another thing that is, in a sense, AI, that has already taken over the government. It's called corporations. So we created corporations like we created AI and we wrote the code for corporations. And the code we wrote was disastrously wrong. We wrote only one line of code, maximize profit. And when you do that and you let that AI machine run wild, it maximizes profit at the cost of everything in its path, including us, the humans that created those corporations.

And what do they do? They eventually figured out how to buy the Supreme Court. And this is exactly the core of our problem that I explained in the book that I just wrote, Justice is Coming. And they then took, after they taken over the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court allowed for bribery, which then allowed them to take over all the rest of government. Now, the embeds they have in our government are the senators and representatives themselves. So now here comes new embeds within those embeds. But the only people not represent in all of this is us, the actual human beings that this democracy is supposed to serve. There's something deeply wrong in Washington. We have to take our government back

from all of these things that we created that have now run amok and are now controlling us rather than the other way around, which is how it was supposed to be. Okay, I know we're really short on time, apparently we're out of time. Okay, thank you for your expertise. for a mesh and for your analysis. We appreciate you. Ray, excellent job. Thank you. You can check out Ray Vaughan on Rebel headquarters. We're going to come back and talk about the situation in Gaza a little bit more worrying about a wider of war. Ben Gleeves going to join us, and he's got a slightly different perspective, and that's good, open-minded, open-hearted. We are open to all these conversations, and let's make sure we're hearing everybody's perspective.

We're doing that when we return. Stay right here. Thanks for listening to the full episode of the Young Turks. Support our work, listen to ad-free, access members-only bonus content, and more by subscribing to Apple Podcasts at apple.com slash t-y-t. I'm your host, Shank Huger, and I'll see you soon.