In this episode of America First, host Nicholas J. Fuentes and host Alex Blumberg discuss the latest developments in the Israeli political situation, including the recent judicial reform package passed by the Israeli government, and the opposition's refusal to vote for it. They also discuss the controversial rebranding of the site as "X" by Elon Musk, and what that means for the future of the whole thing. They also talk about the Barbie review controversy, and whether or not it was a good or bad thing. And, of course, there's the latest update to the site from Elon Musk's new product, "AnX". All that and much more on tonight's show! Subscribe to America First to get immediate access to all of our newest shows and listen to them live wherever you get your favorite shows streaming on most major podcasting platforms. Subscribe today using our podcasting platform, so you never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Use the promo code: "AVFM" to receive 20% off your first month with discount code "avfm" when you shop at amazon.com/amazingfirst and receive $5 or more when you become a patron. We're giving away a free copy of our new ad-free version of the newest issue of the new issue of VaynerMedia's newest issue, "The Best Fiends magazine, "America First". The Best of AVFM, featuring Nick and Alex's newest book, "Avenues". Subscribe now! Subscribe here! We'll be giving away $5 and get 10% off the entire issue, plus a free shipping and shipping anywhere else gets $5 off their first month, plus free shipping throughout the world, plus an ad-only deal, and a free VIP membership, too! and a $10 discount when you buy a VIP membership starts shipping nationwide, and get an ad discount when they get a product review starts shipping through amazon Primeknit starts shipping their first week of the service starts shipping the deal starts on the service gets $24 or two places get $49 or they get $99 or two weeks get $29 or more, they also get $5,99 get $4 VIP gets a VIP discount, and they get VIP access starts shipping a product they can choose a deal, they get it starts shipping free, they'll also get 5 VIP access to the service? Thanks, Nick talks about it all!
Transcript
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00:01:09.000Last night, he did a tweet and he talked about the politics of it.
00:01:13.000And then this morning, at like 8.30, he updated the thread and said, oh, but I also want to talk about how it was meta, ironic, and this and that.
00:01:26.000That's like Brill copied my interview.
00:01:30.000So I think it was an important contribution to the dialogue on the film.
00:01:37.000Anyway, our featured story tonight is about the Civil War, which I don't think is actually going to wind up happening, at least not this week, which is now happening in Israel.
00:01:51.000And this comes in response to the proposed judicial reform by Netanyahu, the first part of which was passed yesterday in the Israeli Knesset with no votes from the opposition who abstained from the vote, or rather they weren't even present for it.
00:02:09.000And so tonight we'll talk about the judicial reform package, we'll talk about what passed yesterday,
00:02:18.000Because it's got some pretty major ramifications for our relationship with the state of Israel, and many of those in Israel say that it fundamentally changes the character of the Israeli state.
00:02:32.000We'll talk about what they mean by that.
00:02:34.000What does the left-wing opposition in that country mean by that?
00:02:42.000And you may remember we actually talked about the judicial reform earlier this year.
00:02:46.000The entire thing was supposed to pass, I believe, in March.
00:02:51.000I want to say it was March or February, but earlier this year in the spring or end of the winter.
00:02:59.000They had planned on pushing the whole thing, but they had to stop because there were mass protests that threatened to shut down the entire country.
00:03:07.000There was a general strike being planned.
00:05:47.000But, before we get into all the news, I want to remind you to smash the follow button here on Cozy, get a push notification whenever I go live.
00:08:23.000The boss baby is a little tired tonight.
00:08:25.000I've been realizing what a boss baby I really am.
00:08:28.000I was talking to Andre Anglin the other day, and we got in a little bit of a tiff.
00:08:34.000I mean, we're good and everything, but, you know, we just had this back and forth, and I got a little shitty with him, and he's like, bro, you don't need to be so aggressive all the time.
00:09:51.000Before I went live, somebody showed me that Andrew Klavan from the Daily Wire did a whole stream about me today, and I saw the YouTube video.
00:10:49.000It's interesting that Tate has been completely thrown under the bus even though he never even talked about the Jews.
00:10:54.000You know, they both, him and his brother, want to attack me for talking about Jewish power and they're getting thrown under the bus all the same.
00:11:15.000And so while they are pushing some things that I support, like their attitude about women and some other things, fundamentally we disagree because they are in support of this self-improvement and the pursuit of money and women and that kind of thing.
00:11:35.000But with both of those things being said, the fact that one, they have shied away from the Jewish topic really without any benefit, and then second, outside of the fact that we're fundamentally different because they push this hollow self-improvement materialism and I'm pushing something completely different than that, you know, with that in mind, with that preface in mind,
00:12:02.000I really do believe that there is some coordinated thing, attack, going on against anybody, lately especially, that isn't kosher.
00:12:13.000And I know that's been going on forever, and I know that affects everybody that isn't kosher.
00:12:18.000But it's really amazing that there's like a hit that has been put out.
00:12:23.000Anybody that has any kind of cultural or political influence that is not down with like the Zio Israel thing, they are being subject to an unprecedented attack.
00:12:36.000Not just from the left, but increasingly from their own side.
00:12:39.000Now, that's always been the case for me.
00:12:41.000But they've also been making this big push lately against Andrew Tate.
00:12:45.000They've also made a big push against Steven Crowder.
00:12:52.000But I've always said, and others have always said, he's one of the better ones.
00:12:56.000And he even made a big push against Ben Shapiro and Daily Wire earlier in the year.
00:13:02.000And so, looking at it one way, it's like this entire year has been a blindside against very specific people like Crowder, Tate, me, even Project Veritas.
00:13:59.000And I saw Clavin give a speech about this, and again, there were some other tweets about this all over the last week, basically since my rally.
00:14:07.000And I think what him and I have in common is we're both really pushing an anti-establishment message.
00:14:13.000As much as I have my disagreements with Tate, and we've feuded in certain ways, and I've called for him to be put in jail, at the same time, he is pushing a vision of conservatism, which is fundamentally at odds with this
00:14:38.000I'll also say it is a constant sign of my success that I'm even still talked about because you know that for years they tried desperately just to ignore me.
00:14:52.000They would, and they would do petty, petty things like refuse to say my name.
00:14:57.000Do you remember Ben Shapiro gave a full speech in 2019 during the Griper War about me without saying my name?
00:15:05.000They would just refuse to say my name, for some reason.
00:15:09.000And I'm sure that's how they would prefer it to be, is to be able to ignore me, be able not to say my name.
00:15:16.000But we are at this point now, we're years into this.
00:15:20.000I've been banned from everything, I'm on layers of censorship.
00:15:24.000I remember the SPLC, they were so triumphant, they said, once we ban Nick Fuentes from Twitter, it is over for him.
00:16:28.000I said after Charlottesville, there's a tidal wave of white identity coming, and nobody can stop it, and they know it.
00:16:36.000Here we are six years later and it's indisputable, it's irrefutable that this was the case.
00:16:42.000So anyway, I just thought I'd throw that out there.
00:16:46.000I saw this clip and it's like, what a day, what a time when the day has come that Andrew Klavan has to do a whole show about me and Tate, right?
00:18:38.000I believe it was spring 2022 when this idea was first put out there and when Elon began to buy shares in Twitter and begin a hostile takeover.
00:19:23.000Necessary to transform Twitter, but unlike Meta and Alphabet, possible to actually for one man to change it.
00:19:32.000And the promise was that it would be on Twitter that Elon would be able to make these changes.
00:19:38.000He could take the company private and he could make it a platform where, unlike all the other social media platforms, anything that is permitted under the law would be permitted on the platform.
00:19:48.000And he said that would provide a public social good, a political good,
00:19:53.000And it's also in the spirit of what our nation represents that we have a First Amendment and that doesn't just mean that the government has to refrain from censoring but it also means that we believe in a spirit
00:20:08.000That you actually don't have an open society if you have these major tech companies which are oligopolies or monopolies which contract with the federal government and they're basically censoring on behalf of the government.
00:20:22.000It's a distinction without a difference.
00:20:25.000And so Elon Musk purchased Twitter about a year ago and as we know he very quickly ran into some very complex problems.
00:20:36.000And the problem with social media, as I've said many times before, is it is not as simple as changing the community guidelines.
00:20:46.000Because it's really not even the social platforms that are doing the censoring.
00:20:55.000The social platforms are not the ones doing the censoring.
00:21:01.000And we know that because even if a social platform wanted to protect speech, they couldn't.
00:21:09.000And they couldn't because of the business model of the social platform and the other technological bottlenecks that a social platform has to deal with.
00:21:21.000And so I'll give you a perfect example, which we talked about a lot back last year when Elon Musk first took over Twitter.
00:21:29.000Back in 2020, during the George Floyd riots, Donald Trump put out a statement and said that when the looting starts, the shooting starts.
00:21:37.000And controversially, Facebook refused to censor that post.
00:21:42.000Because Facebook said that this is a statement by the sitting president.
00:21:47.000And therefore, there's a special consideration.
00:21:52.000It's not like this is a random person calling for the death of protesters.
00:21:56.000This is the head of state of this nation.
00:21:59.000And so there's maybe a public good in being neutral as a channel, as a medium, social media.
00:22:07.000There's a public good in being neutral towards a statement like that and allowing that to remain on the platform.
00:22:16.000But there were activist groups like the ADL and the SPLC and others who said that the post must be taken down.
00:22:23.000They met with Zuckerberg, they met with the board, and Facebook stood their ground.
00:22:28.000So ADL organized an advertiser boycott.
00:22:32.000They put out a front page advertisement in the LA Times, which they paid a fortune for, and they called for all advertisers to boycott their ad spending on the Facebook platform.
00:22:43.000Within three months, Facebook had reversed course.
00:22:47.000They took the President's post off the platform.
00:23:28.000The other issue it highlights, aside from the fact that there are other interested parties that want censorship, is that Facebook, like Twitter, like YouTube, even to some extent like Amazon, to a lesser extent though, so much of their business is inextricably bound up in the stock market, is bound up in advertisers.
00:23:58.000Twitter gets 92% of its revenue from advertisements.
00:24:03.000And these are companies that are barely profitable.
00:24:06.000It's actually not a very profitable business because the user base doesn't pay.
00:24:12.000It's the advertisers that pay for the data of the user base.
00:24:15.000What's more, companies like Facebook and Twitter are coming under fire from Google
00:24:22.000And Apple, which are making it harder for them to exploit user data to sell to advertisers.
00:24:28.000This is also something that's been going on now for years, which a lot of people don't talk about, is that companies like Google and like Apple are waging a silent war against these advertiser-based businesses.
00:24:43.000Apple wants to protect the privacy of its users, and so that puts them in opposition to Facebook, which wants all the users' data.
00:24:52.000And anyway, that's really neither here nor there, but the point is they've already been under pressure from Apple.
00:24:58.000They've already been under regulatory pressure about user privacy and some of these class action suits and statutes that have been passed in different states.
00:25:08.000And so the social media companies are facing pressure from the activist groups.
00:25:13.000There's also this bottleneck about their profitability.
00:25:16.000All their money comes from these parties which are very much implicated in the censorship conversation.
00:25:24.000If the activist groups can leverage the advertisers by taking out media pieces against them, and it hurts their stock price, they also become another interested party in advancing censorship.
00:25:37.000Toyota and McDonald's and you name it, any other big company, it becomes a brand risk for them, largely because of the activist groups, but regardless it becomes a brand risk for them to advertise on a platform that doesn't have uniform censorship.
00:25:57.000And then the other dimension, and this is, although there are more, the other dimension is the app stores.
00:26:04.000Apple accounts for half or a little bit more than half of the market for smartphones in the United States of America.
00:26:13.000And on their phones, they control all the software that can be downloaded through their Apple App Store.
00:26:20.000Every piece of software that goes on to an Apple iPhone or a tablet or a Macintosh for that matter has to be approved, although to a lesser extent with the Mac computer, but it has to be approved by the Apple App Store.
00:26:57.000Even if you don't censor, the app store wants you to censor.
00:27:01.000And to some extent it happens on an Android as well.
00:27:04.000Although an Android is less strict, you still will be banned from the Google Play Store or other platforms that host software on those phones.
00:27:14.000So there's still a hit to market share on those products as well.
00:27:45.000Because if you want your platform to have total free speech, you've got to worry about activist groups, you've got to worry about replacing all the revenue that comes from advertisers, and at the end of the day, maybe the biggest problem is the Apple App Store still has the terms of service.
00:28:03.000And so then you gotta worry about how do I get my software onto the hardware of half the smartphones in America if we have free speech.
00:28:12.000So it's a very complex dilemma, which Elon Musk has begun to try to solve by creating other revenue streams for the platform by introducing Twitter Blue and trying to incentivize people to purchase that and create a subscription income for Twitter, although that's still not nearly where it needs to be.
00:28:33.000He is trying to incentivize users to post different content and keep the engagement on the site high by incentivizing users to make longer form content or video content.
00:28:45.000And that leads us to the decision that was made this weekend, which is to change Twitter to X. And maybe this is still part of the preface.
00:29:20.000They didn't just change the name of Twitter, he's really taking Twitter and making it a subsidiary of an entirely new company which is supposed to handle everything.
00:29:35.000Micro-blog meaning very tiny blogs and 280 characters.
00:29:40.000And that is the Twitter business, but Elon Musk has said that it's supposed to now be one aspect of an application which manages everything.
00:29:49.000Short-form video, long-form video, live streaming, micro-blogging, macro-blogging, digital transactions, perhaps cryptocurrency, a storefront, all these kinds of things are supposed to be integrated into one.
00:30:05.000And so for me, I've been very frustrated at the lack of progress with Twitter, but with all that being said, it's a very complex problem, it's been a very short time, and what Elon Musk has to do in order to make this a free speech platform is he has to circumvent the App Store,
00:30:23.000He has to replace the revenue model of Twitter in order to make it immune and insulated from the activists and from the advertisers.
00:30:34.000Well that involves basically restructuring the entire company.
00:30:38.000It means that Twitter is not going to be profitable for a long time.
00:30:41.000It means they've got to eliminate their costs.
00:30:44.000Or cut them down as much as possible and then more.
00:30:47.000It means they've got to find novel ways to create revenue.
00:30:50.000And so what we're seeing over the course of this year is not simply that Elon Musk was going to come in and say, okay, say whatever you want, or that he was going to come on and just extract more money in the conventional ways.
00:31:05.000But it's that Elon Musk, in order to achieve free speech, has to reinvent the wheel.
00:31:12.000How do you have free speech on the platform?
00:31:16.000How are you going to have free speech on the platform?
00:31:18.000You need a completely new way to make money.
00:31:21.000And not just a new way, but you need a way that's going to replace all the money that you've ever made in the last 15 years.
00:31:28.000And on top of that, you need to make it in such a way that it can circumvent the App Store.
00:31:36.000In some way it needs to basically change social media as we know it because all social media is subject to these pressures and to this structure.
00:33:08.000He says, quote, Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app.
00:33:19.000This is not simply a company renaming itself but doing the same thing.
00:33:23.000The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth like birds tweeting.
00:33:30.000But now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.
00:33:34.000In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world.
00:33:40.000The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird.
00:33:46.000And so when you see that statement, it starts to fall into place.
00:33:53.000And what we're seeing is that Twitter is not even really going to be the same company at all.
00:33:58.000This is not, as he said, this is not Elon Musk buying Twitter and it's the same company.
00:34:04.000It's not him buying Twitter and running Twitter in a better way or Twitter with different rules.
00:34:10.000He says Twitter is now being integrated or subordinated into or assimilated into a completely new project which is called X, which is supposed to be the everything platform.
00:34:23.000So that's why he's changing the name, because it used to be the case it was just these microblogs, like birds tweeting, but now it's live streaming, now it's long form video, multiple hours, it's video hosting.
00:34:35.000It's gonna be financial transactions, it's gonna be direct communications, encrypted communications, it's stories, it's everything.
00:34:46.000Hence, it has to be bigger than tweeting, because it's sort of outlived the functionality of that.
00:34:55.000And he says, and this is interesting, specifically in this statement, so that's the explanation, is that it's... and if you understand where the name Twitter comes from, it was like birds tweeting in a tree to each other, like chirping.
00:35:07.000In other words, like a staccato short sound, like a 180 or 140 character message, as it initially was, between birds, between people.
00:35:17.000He says, well, now it's not just that anymore.
00:35:27.000But then he says, and this is the interesting part, he says, but it's not just about accelerating the creation of this Everything app, where it's supposed to do everything.
00:35:35.000He says it's also now, at the same time that it's about making the Everything app, he says it's also about protecting free speech.
00:35:45.000And that to me is the most interesting part about the statement.
00:35:47.000He says at the beginning, he says Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X. So it's not just about creating this company, which is what I just said, making it from just tweets to now everything, but he says it's also about the original mission of buying Twitter, which is to protect free speech on Twitter.
00:36:12.000And this leads me to believe that the purpose of Axe, perhaps, is to create an entirely new model that makes free speech possible.
00:37:06.000And so what Elon Musk is really doing here, what it appears to be, or what he says he's doing, is basically reinventing the social platform so that it can have free speech.
00:38:07.000Or, you can make a company that is so big, and therefore sells other things, therefore is making a huge amount of revenue selling other products, and a small part of the expense
00:38:41.000The activity of a social platform, monetize the function of the social platform.
00:38:46.000If I have a company, if I'm Walmart, and my primary business is department stores, but then I also have social media on the side, there's not pressure to monetize the social platform functionality, as an example.
00:39:01.000And it appears to be this is what is happening with X, is it's primarily going to be a financial platform,
00:39:09.000A financial platform, a video hosting platform, maybe they're building their own, they want to build a digital infrastructure like servers and that kind of thing in the way that Amazon is.
00:39:22.000Because understand Amazon is a perfect example.
00:39:52.000Video game live streaming and they're cornering the market on grocery stores and they're now cornering the market even on something like server space.
00:39:59.000So it seems like X is modeling itself not off of Instagram or off of Facebook, but it seems as though X is modeling itself off of Amazon instead.
00:40:12.000Which is make as much money as possible, do everything, and then you can also provide another service.
00:40:20.000In the same way that Google provided YouTube.
00:40:23.000YouTube existed before Google, and YouTube was not even profitable under Google for a long time, but it didn't matter because it was supported by Google under Alphabet.
00:40:34.000In the same way that perhaps Elon Musk sees an everything app,
00:40:39.000Supporting Twitter as part of an umbrella company and that to me would make more sense and only under that scenario could Twitter really be free speech.
00:40:51.000If Amazon were to create a social platform, conceivably they could have free speech because they would be insulated from the normal pressures that a Facebook would have to support.
00:41:04.000Being controlled by advertisers effectively.
00:41:08.000So that's what seems to be what's happening at X. And I don't know that for sure, but that seems to be the case.
00:41:14.000And maybe above all what this points to is a convergence.
00:41:19.000And we've seen that and people have made jokes about this, like for example, you go on Facebook and Facebook has integrated the features of every other app.
00:41:56.000The umbrella company sort of does a little of everything in the same way that now TikTok says that they're going to do a short form content like Twitter and Instagram says they're going to do threads and do a micro blog like Twitter but it seems like all of these companies across the board
00:42:13.000The trajectory is towards convergence.
00:42:17.000Meaning that these major social media companies, they may start out doing one or another thing, but eventually they all integrate every other feature from every other platform, and it looks like it's headed towards these platforms doing everything.
00:42:33.000And people have their entire life on that platform.
00:42:39.000And maybe X is the most ambitious and maybe forward-thinking, ahead-of-its-curve iteration of this more than any other.
00:42:48.000It seems, in other words, that the future belongs to Amazon, not Facebook.
00:42:53.000The future belongs to the Everything app more than it does a TikTok or a Snapchat.
00:42:59.000The future belongs to a company that has everything.
00:43:03.000And these are, if you know this, these are the richest companies in the history of the world.
00:43:14.000These five are the biggest, by market cap, biggest companies in the country.
00:43:18.000They're the biggest companies in the world.
00:43:20.000Outside of, you know, comparable companies that do the same thing in China like Alibaba, you know, or the big oil companies like Saudi Aramco.
00:43:29.000But these are some of the biggest companies in the world.
00:43:31.000They have a trillion or a two trillion dollar market cap and it appears they want to horizontally and vertically integrate everything.
00:43:39.000They have so much cash, they're so big, now it seems like there are legitimate attempts to integrate everything.
00:43:45.000And Amazon is maybe the best example of that.
00:43:48.000Amazon, which owns now Twitch, The Washington Post.
00:43:53.000It owns Whole Foods, which is a grocery store.
00:43:56.000It also is the number one bookseller in the country.
00:44:00.000It's the biggest e-commerce retailer, it's the biggest proprietor of server space, Amazon AWS, and that's just, off the top of my head, some of their bigger and more well-known businesses.
00:44:12.000And it seems now that Elon Musk, who runs two existing, or two or three, very massive companies, Tesla and SpaceX, is now making a bid to do that further.
00:44:48.000And there's a deep dive we could go into you know what his endgame is and who this guy really is because he's from the PayPal mafia and he's friends with Teal and you know so there's some suspicious stuff going on there but that's another show.
00:45:01.000So anyway that's the rebranded and and again if this is the case then it's not gonna be flip a switch and Twitter has free speech it means you literally have to reinvent everything and that's gonna take a period of years.
00:45:15.000I don't know how optimistic I am that he's ultimately going to let everybody on the platform, but if he was going to, this is probably what he would have to do.
00:45:27.000So, I don't know if that's any consolation, but at least it's something different, you know?
00:45:34.000I guess we'll have to wait and see if that's going to be better or worse, but it's hard to imagine how it could be much worse than it was before.
00:45:41.000So that's Twitter and that's the rebrand.
00:45:50.000And again, we covered this at the beginning of the year.
00:45:53.000Netanyahu introducing this major judicial reform package and it was ready to go.
00:46:02.000I mean, he was about to pass this, although there were massive protests which prevented him from doing this.
00:46:09.000Long story short, Netanyahu has been indicted for corruption, or at least he's under investigation for corruption.
00:46:16.000And it looks like he's guilty, and it looks like a prosecutor is getting closer and closer to indicting him and throwing him in jail.
00:46:24.000So Netanyahu wants to go in and basically change how the Supreme Court works, change how the entire judicial system works, so that he can stop this investigation and so he can clear out the Supreme Court and prevent it from being an obstacle to his party's objective, which is to basically destroy the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
00:46:44.000He wants all of the mandate of Palestine to be Israel.
00:46:50.000He doesn't want any kind of Palestinian state west of the Jordan River.
00:46:54.000And it seems that the only organ of government which can thwart that agenda is the Supreme Court.
00:47:00.000So this is really the gist, is that this year Netanyahu wants to pass this reform, overhaul how the Supreme Court works, and prevent it from checking his power, prevent it from removing him from office, and prevent it from stopping his overarching policy objectives.
00:47:17.000So earlier this year he was set to pass this reform and then his defense minister resigned or was fired because he put out a statement opposing the judicial reform.
00:47:28.000So when the Netanyahu government fired this widely respected defense minister, civil society erupted.
00:47:40.000The schools threatened to close indefinitely.
00:47:42.000The highways were shut down by protesters.
00:47:45.000Parts of the military were threatening to resign or to quit in protest of the law.
00:47:53.000And so we did a... I did a whole show about this I think back in March.
00:47:58.000Israel was on the brink of collapse unless Netanyahu backed down from the bill.
00:48:03.000So he backed down and he said that he would go back and he would negotiate with the opposition and he was going to postpone a vote on the bill until the summer.
00:48:13.000And so this weekend, a part of that bill was passed, and it appears that they're going to do it in a piece-by-piece way.
00:48:21.000This part of the bill was passed in the Israeli Knesset with no votes from the opposition.
00:48:26.000They didn't even show up at a protest.
00:48:30.000And this would eliminate the reasonableness standard that the Israeli Supreme Court can use to strike down a law.
00:48:40.000So Israel does not have a constitution like we have.
00:48:43.000They have what's called basic laws, which are fundamental laws, which would supersede other laws.
00:48:49.000And so this is a new basic law that says that the Supreme Court cannot use reasonableness as a justification to strike something down.
00:49:00.000One of Netanyahu's chosen ministers was not allowed to become a part of his cabinet because he had been indicted on some tax charge, some corruption charge related to not paying his taxes.
00:49:14.000And the Israeli Supreme Court said under the reasonableness standard that he could not be administering, be unreasonable according to a reasonable person.
00:49:24.000And so now that standard is no longer part of the Supreme Court's discretion to shut down a law.
00:49:31.000And this is a story from the New York Times.
00:49:47.000The Knesset approved the measure, which limits the Supreme Court's oversight of government action and curtails its ability to veto decisions and appointments on the basis of reasonability, with a unanimous vote.
00:50:00.000All 64 members of the governing coalition were in favor, while the rest abstained in protest after the two sides failed to reach a compromise.
00:50:09.000Netanyahu's proposed judicial reforms have been hotly debated since the longest-serving Prime Minister in Israeli history returned to power in December at the helm of the most right-wing government ever to lead the country.
00:50:21.000While his government claimed the moves were necessary to restore the balance between the branches of government, critics have argued that it effectively neuters the Supreme Court and, with it, the notion of a democratic Israel.
00:50:33.000And so again, this is just one part of a much more comprehensive judicial reform package.
00:50:40.000They eliminated this reasonableness standard, but they also want to do more.
00:50:45.000They effectively want to make it so that the Israeli Supreme Court cannot veto laws by the Knesset.
00:50:52.000They want to make it so that the Israeli Knesset can control most of the seats on the Supreme Court and can overrule the Supreme Court.
00:51:00.000And so if that's the case, then it basically means that the Israeli Supreme Court has no power.
00:51:08.000And it's this Likud coalition government, Likud is the right-wing nationalist party in Israel, this Likud coalition government led by Netanyahu, if they have control of the Knesset and therefore have the Prime Minister's office,
00:51:26.000If they were not checked by the Supreme Court, they would effectively get to decide everything that happens in the country.
00:51:34.000The Supreme Court wouldn't stop them, and there would be a unified executive and legislature, and so that would be it.
00:51:41.000Netanyahu could basically rule like a dictator with a coalition that is very right-wing and at the same time run by religious extremists.
00:51:50.000So you would have an extremely right-wing religious government in Israel with no Supreme Court stopping it, no checks on its power,
00:51:59.000And, conventionally, that'd be something that I would support, except for that it's an anti-Christ religion.
00:52:06.000If you had something like this happening in Italy under the Catholic Church, I would support it.
00:52:12.000Or if this was happening in Russia under the Orthodox Church, I would support it.
00:52:16.000If this was happening in the United States, I would support it.
00:52:20.000But the religious fundamentalists that are in charge of this regime are people that hate Jesus Christ, and they hate the gospel, and hate the cross, and they hate Christianity, and they want us all dead.
00:52:33.000The head rabbi for the Sephardic Jews in Israel said 10 years ago that the goyim, which is cattle, which is in their mind the Gentiles, he said the goyim work and we eat.
00:52:48.000They are slaves and we're the only human beings.
00:52:52.000These are the religious extremists that are running the country.
00:52:56.000Their finance minister several weeks ago gave a speech behind a podium with a map of greater Israel, which means they want an Israeli state that stretches from the Sinai Peninsula all the way to the Euphrates River.
00:53:08.000So that means they want to invade Egypt, they want to invade Jordan, they want to invade Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria.
00:53:17.000So it's warmongers and it's anti-Christ, Christ killers.
00:53:22.000This is who's running this right-wing government.
00:53:24.000And this is what they want to achieve.
00:53:26.000So, you know, if you're saying, oh, that sounds so based, it's a religious fundamentalist government, it's a right-wing government.
00:53:31.000Well, it's not just any right-wing government.
00:53:34.000It's a right-wing theocratic government that is run by the devil.
00:53:38.000It is a right-wing theocratic government that is run by the synagogue of Satan.
00:53:45.000...is to bulldoze all the neighboring Arab Muslim states and rebuild the Third Temple and prepare for the arrival of the Antichrist, who will persecute Christians.
00:53:57.000That is, if you look at the literature, this is what they want to achieve.
00:54:02.000They believe their Messiah hasn't come, which means they need to build a strong Jewish state in Palestine.
00:54:09.000They need to rebuild their Third Temple, which involves neutering the Muslim world so they can bulldoze the Dome on the Rock.
00:54:16.000And then once they do that, it will be the end of the world and their Jewish Antichrist will come and unify the world religions and then kill all Christians.
00:54:49.000Israel's main workers union is said to be considering a strike with thousands of reservists with the Israeli Defense Forces warning in the weeks leading up to the vote that they would not report to duty if the reform passed.
00:55:03.000President Joe Biden issued a rare public critique of its Middle Eastern ally on Sunday, urging the Israeli government to work toward a compromise rather than rushing the divisive legislation.
00:55:15.000And again, this is just the beginning.
00:55:20.000They want to get rid of the reasonableness standard, then they want to get rid of any check on their power, and then once that is accomplished, then they basically have free reign.
00:55:31.000And that gets to the significance of it.
00:55:34.000This is from Haaretz, which is a left-wing Israeli paper.
00:55:38.000It says the dispute is part of a wider ideological and cultural standoff between Netanyahu's government and its supporters who want to make Israel into a more religious and nationalist state and their opponents who hold a more secular and pluralist vision of the country.
00:55:54.000The governing coalition says the court has too much leeway to intervene in political decisions and that it undermines Israeli democracy by giving unelected judges too much power over lawmakers.
00:56:05.000The coalition says the court has too often acted against right-wing interests, for instance by preventing construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, or striking down certain privileges granted to ultra-Orthodox Jews, like exemption from military service.
00:56:22.000Opponents fear the measure will make the court much less able to prevent government overreach.
00:56:28.000They say the government, unbound by independent courts, may find it easier to end the persecution of Mr. Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges.
00:56:37.000Critics also fear that the changes might allow the government, the most right-wing and religiously conservative in history, to restrict civil liberties or undermine secular aspects of society.
00:56:49.000In a speech on Monday night, Mr. Netanyahu suggested that his government could pursue more of the judicial overhaul plan in November, but he wanted to allow time for talks about it with the opposition.
00:57:01.000And so this is really what it's about.
00:57:04.000The Israeli Jews over there say that it's a question of the character of the Israeli state.
00:57:10.000And this is a battle that's been going on for 70 years within Israel between these war hawks and religious extremists and nationalists, and then on the other side, the more liberal-minded Jews.
00:57:24.000And the debate is whether Israel is a religious state.
00:57:28.000Is it an ethno-nationalist religious state that is run by ethnic Jews, religious Jews, and they want to have one state, no Palestinians, no Muslims, no Christians, and effectively formally become an apartheid state?
00:57:43.000Or is it going to become a Western liberal democracy where there is a two-state solution and there are going to be Muslims and Arabs beside Jews?
00:57:58.000And so critics of the law there say that this changes the character of the state because it will centralize all power in the hands of a religious nationalist majority which can govern without any checks.
00:58:13.000On the other hand, the way that we have to see this is that the Likud Party, which would govern this, has massive influence on our government.
00:58:22.000And all the things that you've seen over the last 20, 25 years, 30 years, so much of it, most of it, has come from this party, has come from the Likud Party and its antecedents, which have been in Israel for decades.
00:58:37.000Various Israeli terror groups and influence organizations.
00:58:41.000It is all channeled through these same people over generations.
00:58:45.000And so it's not just any coalition taking power and eliminating liberal democracy.
00:58:51.000It's an anti-christian, zealous Zionist group which wields so much influence over the American government and specifically the American right wing.
00:59:03.000It's not just anybody that's taking over the country.
00:59:08.000Netanyahu takes over the country and effectively ends the prosecution of him, so he doesn't face any accountability, he will not be removed from office, there is no more investigation of his crimes like he's good, so it's saving his ass politically.
00:59:26.000And then at the same time, they say that the number one thing that the Israeli Supreme Court has prevented over the course of decades
00:59:33.000is the expansion of civilian settlements in the occupied West Bank which is a major source of contention.
00:59:40.000This is condemned by virtually every country, including our own.
00:59:45.000Since 1967, we have condemned civilian settlements in the West Bank.
01:00:58.000That's what their head rabbis believe in.
01:01:01.000It's what their far-right religious extremists in the cabinet believe.
01:01:06.000They want to dominate their neighbors, expand their borders far beyond Palestine, so that they can rebuild the Third Temple and bring about the apocalypse.
01:01:45.000And it's all towards the goal of securing and strengthening Israel against its neighbors so that it can make consistently more and more aggressive moves for the purpose not of achieving safety and security, but of achieving something very dark and sinister and apocalyptic.
01:02:02.000Because remember, this is a people that hates Jesus Christ.
01:02:05.000That's why they tried to outlaw the gospel in this country three months ago.
01:02:34.000All we can do is root for and cheer for the left-wing regime in Israel.
01:02:38.000We have to root for a civil war in that country, for civil unrest.
01:02:43.000It is better for America, it's better for Christians and the American right-wing if this government is toppled in some fashion.
01:02:49.000If it's Netanyahu going to jail, or if it's the protesters succeeding.
01:02:54.000Sadly though, Netanyahu is playing it very smart by dragging this out over the period of a year, it prevents the opposition from coalescing.
01:03:02.000A coup has to be lightning fast to succeed.
01:03:05.000And they almost succeeded earlier in the year.
01:03:08.000But they allowed Netanyahu to draw it out over the course of many months, and pass one part of it, and he'll draw it out for many more months, and then he'll pass another part of it, and then he'll do the same, and before you know it...
01:03:24.000All the opposition will have lost its steam.
01:03:27.000They will have lost their moment and the reform will be passed and then they can't be stopped.
01:06:51.000And furthermore, they cast us as the villains, meaning that in point of fact they are scapegoating us for the very crime of killing Christ on the cross.
01:11:43.000He's like, well, I would debate Nick on Fresh and Fit because, you know, he's already gonna be on there so it's not my audience, I'm not giving him anything.
01:11:50.000It's like, so if, you know, in other words, he's not gonna debate me unless he, in his mind, I have nothing to gain from it and he's gaining.
01:12:04.000I already beat him on every topic now.
01:12:05.000Because if they tried to do that now, every Muslim country would go to war with them and it wouldn't be, you know, they would have a big problem, basically.
01:14:44.000You talked about Protestant Reformation few days back.
01:14:47.000Do you give any credence to people like Huss and Luther in criticizing church for luxury and selling of indulgences or you think it was an excuse?
01:14:54.000No, I'm totally against Protestantism.