Despite the media s best attempts to turn Kamala Harris into a massive front-runner in the Democratic primary race, it is not working. Despite the best efforts to push her to a broad lead in the presidential race, she cannot do it. A brand new CNN poll shows a dead heat between her and Donald Trump, 48% to 47%. Meanwhile, MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle said on Friday that there is no reason to ask Kamala a difficult question. Why is she doing so? Is it because she has no obligation to do so? Or is it because it will hurt her chances of winning the nomination? And what will she do about it if she doesn t talk more about it? And why is she not asking difficult questions? All that and much more on today s episode of The FiveThirtyEight podcast. Plus, the latest on the latest in the Kamala vs. Donald Trump race, including the latest CNN poll numbers and why she needs to do more than just friendly interviews to get out there and get her name on the ballot. And why she s not going to win the 2020 Democratic primary and why it s going to be a disaster for her or not in 2020 And much, much more MORE! Subscribe to FiveThirtyeight on Apple Podcasts and leave us your thoughts and reactions in the comments section below. Subscribe and tell us what you thought of the latest news and take us on your thoughts on this episode of the podcast! Subscribe, like, share it on social media! and let us know what you think about it on your feed and what you re listening to it means to you are listening to us on Instapaper! or share it with a friend about it and what s your favorite podcasting platform or podcasting experience is going to do in the next episode of What Is a Woman? or what s a woman you're listening to do on it? and who s getting the most important thing you like it's the most influential thing you should listen to on your favorite thing you're watching on your social media platform or what you should do on the most influencer should do next? Thank you for listening to this episode? Thanks for listening and sharing it on Insta little bit more of your thoughts, tweet us about it! v=Q&t=5q&t = 5Q&referencing us on it and we'll get a shoutout!
00:01:41.000According to this poll, 59% of Latinos voting for Harris, 40% for Trump.
00:01:46.000Again, if those numbers stick, she loses the election.
00:01:51.000She's winning among voters younger than 30, 55 to 38, but these are not good numbers for Kamala Harris.
00:01:57.000And it appears that the Trump campaign has basically settled into stasis.
00:02:01.000I believe that the Trump campaign basically believes at this point that everything is baked into the cake, nothing is going to change from now until the election, unless it's a sort of exogenous circumstance, a world event, that harms her campaign.
00:02:12.000So better just sit back on your laurels and ride it out.
00:02:15.000Now, I actually don't think it's a bad strategy.
00:02:16.000I think that Trump, at this point, his entire goal has to be just pouring money into ads that attack Kamala Harris' record and point out that she is just Joe Biden with a fresh coat of paint.
00:02:27.000And that's all that Kamala Harris' candidacy is.
00:02:29.000They literally swapped out one face for another face on the same exact machine.
00:02:37.000Okay, so, if Trump does that, then she's got a real problem, which is why she's been running ads in the swing states trying to define herself.
00:02:44.000She realizes that she's not vulnerable in attacking Donald Trump.
00:03:37.000She's doing that because she realizes she has to reintroduce herself to the public, but she's picking the worst available opportunity to do that.
00:03:43.000The MSNBC crowd is already gonna vote for Kamala Harris.
00:03:46.000Ain't an MSNBC voter who is voting for Donald Trump.
00:04:28.000And so there are some things you might not know her answer to.
00:04:33.000And in 2024, unlike 2016 for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is, and the kind of threat he is to democracy.
00:04:44.000Okay, and that is the person that they're choosing to interview Kamala, and you can see why.
00:04:48.000Well, of course they're gonna pick the journalist who says that Kamala doesn't need to answer questions to ask Kamala the questions.
00:04:54.000That is an obvious hack for the campaign.
00:04:57.000But here is a wireless hack that can cut your cell phone bill in half every single month.
00:05:01.000The big phone providers want you to believe you need unlimited data so they can overcharge you.
00:06:05.000I'm not just talking about the stuff she said back in 2019.
00:06:07.000We'll get to that in a moment, because every single day, there's a new revelation of something nuts she said in 2019, and then she'll be asked about it, and she'll run screaming to the hills with her hair on fire.
00:06:16.000I'm talking about the stuff she's saying right now.
00:06:18.000So yesterday, Kamala Harris made clear her most radical proposition.
00:06:23.000She was asked about killing the filibuster, and here's what she had to say.
00:06:30.000I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.
00:06:51.000First of all, it's not even clear whether the federal Congress has the authority to do that.
00:06:58.000If you're talking about, like, an interstate crime, then perhaps.
00:07:02.000If you're talking about, like, an intrastate crime, which is what criminalizing late-term abortion, for example, in many states does, not clear that the federal government has the authority to simply reinstate Roe by fiat of Congress.
00:07:14.000The point is that she wants to kill the filibuster.
00:07:16.000And the filibuster, for those who are unfamiliar with the legal jargon, the filibuster is effectively a 60-vote threshold to pass controversial legislation in Congress.
00:07:30.000If there's a budget bill, for example, there's a process called budget sequestration in which you can use 51 votes to basically trump the filibuster.
00:07:37.000But the filibuster tries to guarantee that there is widespread agreement about a policy before it passes.
00:07:43.000So, for example, it made a big difference with Obamacare that Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate, thanks to a rigged race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman in Minnesota that achieved a 60th vote for them that allowed Obamacare to pass with 60 votes.
00:07:57.000The filibuster usually has been applied to a wide variety of circumstances, and Democrats have played around with it.
00:08:02.000So, the Democrats, for a while, used the filibuster against judicial nominees.
00:08:07.000And it turns out that that was not a good idea.
00:08:10.000And then they killed the filibuster for judicial nominees when it was on their side.
00:08:13.000And that allowed Mitch McConnell to put in place a bunch of federal justices and federal judges who are of the right side of the aisle in terms of originalism.
00:08:24.000The filibuster is the slowdown process available in Congress to maintain the constitutional idea that there ought to be broad-scale agreement on major shifts in American policy.
00:08:36.000It requires 60 votes in order to go forward.
00:08:43.000But it has become sort of the last resort of bipartisanship in the Congress as the administrative state has grown, and as we've changed the constitutional rules, and as the scope of the federal government has grown.
00:08:55.000There used to be all sorts of checks and balances in the original constitutional structure against Congress moving really fast in really broad ways.
00:09:02.000Namely, it was a Congress of delegated powers, and if you actually weren't acting within the delegated powers, well then, the states wouldn't pay attention to you, or the Supreme Court would strike it down.
00:09:11.000And then over the course of the 20th century, the executive branch started to assume extraordinary functions that really belonged to the legislature.
00:09:18.000They would, just through regulation, do massive things.
00:09:21.000Congress expanded its purview to include pretty much everything that quote-unquote affected interstate commerce.
00:09:28.000And the Supreme Court, which had been packed by the left, effectively decided that it was going to allow Congress to usurp all of that authority.
00:09:35.000So as the authority of the federal Congress increased, the filibuster became the brake on that process.
00:09:44.000There was an attempt to filibuster, for example, the Civil Rights Act, and that failed.
00:09:48.000There have been many attempts to filibuster particular acts of Congress, and those filibusters have failed.
00:09:53.000However, the general standard, which is that for a big change in American public life, you have to at least overcome a filibuster.
00:09:59.000You have to show that the American people, writ large, have elected people who, broadly speaking, agree with one another.
00:10:05.000That has been a provision that has kept the United States in a state of semi-solidity With regard to its politics for a long time, incrementalism is one of the effects of the filibuster.
00:10:17.000You have to move more slowly than you otherwise would.
00:10:19.000Otherwise, this government would look very much like the parliamentary governments that you see in Europe.
00:10:25.000For example, when one side takes the majority, they simply put into place everything they want.
00:10:30.000The other side comes back in, they put in place everything they want, and policy swivels wildly from side to side.
00:10:36.000The United States was not built for that.
00:10:38.000The filibuster is an element of that gridlock.
00:10:40.000Kamala Harris wanting to kill the filibuster with regard to Roe basically means she wants to kill the filibuster with regard to everything.
00:10:46.000If you kill the filibuster, understand that it's not just with regard to Roe vs. Wade.
00:10:53.000She's saying she wants to kill the filibuster with regard to Roe vs. Wade.
00:10:56.000And because she wants to put back in place federal legislation that forces legal abortion
00:11:28.000What they really mean is they would love to do it.
00:11:30.000If Democrats take the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, and they kill the filibuster, what you will end up with is a permanent rigging of the American government on behalf of Democrats.
00:11:43.000Understand, I'm interested about abortion.
00:11:45.000I promise you, with 51 votes, Democrats will kill the filibuster, and then they will attempt to create two new states through congressional fiat.
00:11:54.000They'll create a state of Washington, D.C., which will have two permanent Democratic senators, thus permanently shifting the balance of power in the Senate on behalf of Democrats.
00:12:02.000They'll also presumably add Puerto Rico as a state represented in the United States Senate.
00:12:07.000Now, historically speaking, when states were added to the federal government, to the federal Senate, when those states were added, typically you would have a state that was added that was a Democrat state and a Republican state.
00:12:18.000This is why Alaska and Hawaii actually entered the union at about the same time.
00:12:23.000The reason is, believe it or not, at the time, Alaska was a Democrat state and Hawaii was a Republican state.
00:12:27.000Now, of course, they've switched places.
00:12:29.000But what Democrats want to do is add four seats to the Senate and thereby guarantee themselves a permanent working majority.
00:12:35.000And having killed the filibuster, they can then do whatever they want.
00:12:38.000They can limit jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.
00:12:40.000They can run roughshod over all the checks and balances.
00:12:43.000And this has been a progressive Democratic goal since the beginning of the 20th century.
00:12:47.000If you go back to Woodrow Wilson, Woodrow Wilson was openly talking about how the Constitution was basically a document written by befuddled, dead white men in order to stop the march of progress.
00:12:58.000And what you really needed was a powerful, centralized government he thought located in the presidency in order to ram through the change that you needed.
00:13:06.000The administrative state really gets its start under Woodrow Wilson for precisely this reason.
00:13:10.000He famously suggested the president should be as big a man as the law allows.
00:13:15.000And he wanted the law to allow the presidency to be really, really big.
00:13:23.000Now, of course, the sword can swing both ways.
00:13:25.000When Democrats originally got rid of the filibuster for judicial nominees on behalf of their own judicial nominees, they then allowed Mitch McConnell to do the same with regard to his judicial nominees on the Republican side of the aisle.
00:13:38.000However, Democrats are not thinking about that.
00:13:41.000What they are thinking about is how do we permanently rig the rules of the game so that Republicans can never again control the branches of government.
00:13:50.000By the way, they want to do this in the house as well.
00:13:52.000Well, if rewriting the constitutional structure is something that might cause you to lose some sleep, then perhaps you need a Helix sleep mattress.
00:13:58.000A couple years back, I was tossing and turning all night.
00:14:01.000Then I decided to try a Helix mattress.
00:14:02.000Let me tell you, it is a game changer.
00:14:55.000With Helix, better sleep starts right now.
00:14:58.000One of their first moves would be to kill the filibuster, presumably, for things like the John Lewis Act.
00:15:03.000Which is an act designed to enshrine ballot harvesting as federal law, allowing Democratic front groups to go out and effectively just go house-to-house to all of their friends, pick up their ballots, and shovel those in the mailbox, whether or not those people were really interested in voting or not.
00:15:20.000Basically, the more you pay your get-out-the-vote effort, the more votes you get.
00:15:23.000Not because you're convincing anybody, but because you geotarget all of the people you want, and then you go to the homeless guy, and you give him a ballot, and you say, I want you to punch these things, and then you bring it back in.
00:15:34.000The Democrats, presumably, would then force through the so-called Equality Act, which is a complete violation of religious freedom in the United States.
00:15:40.000And when you say, okay, well, if you were to push that through, then the Supreme Court would fight back.
00:15:45.000Yes, and then that will be used as the predicate by a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House in order to pack the Supreme Court, in order to forcibly retire Republican-appointed justices.
00:15:56.000So, when people say that this election really, really matters, it wouldn't matter so much if people weren't screwing around with the mechanisms of government itself.
00:16:05.000I've said this to Democrats throughout this race.
00:16:07.000Democrats are constantly saying, Donald Trump, he's a threat to democracy.
00:16:10.000Look at him, a threat to democracy with all of his January 6th and all of his election talk and denialism and all.
00:16:18.000I didn't like a lot of what Donald Trump said between election 2020 and January 6th.
00:16:22.000I thought that he was saying things that were legally untrue.
00:16:25.000And when he was talking about how the vice president had the unilateral ability to simply negate state certified votes, I thought that that was not true.
00:16:33.000However, Donald Trump's various blasphemies with regard to the constitutional system were not, in fact, a threat to the constitutional system.
00:16:42.000Joe Biden has threatened the constitutional system, not only by activating elements of the executive branch to ram down things like vaccine mandates that are well outside their purview.
00:16:55.000We literally had to sue the federal government to stop that, by the way.
00:16:58.000Not only that, but by opening the door to fundamentally rewriting the actual structures of how the government works in order to enshrine a permanent majority, that is actual screwing around with the Republic.
00:17:11.000And if that becomes the case, if it becomes, anytime you have an electoral democracy, a republic, anytime you have that, there's a bargain that takes place between the citizens and their government.
00:17:21.000That bargain is, we will all abide by the rules because we understand that in the next election, we might be the ones in control.
00:17:28.000That has always been the bargain of any democratic or republican form of government, has been the idea that when you vote, you might lose this time, but you might win next time.
00:17:36.000If the rules of the game are permanently rigged in favor of one side, That is not a republic that will last.
00:17:44.000Because what it means is that you now have a dictatorship of the supposed majority.
00:17:49.000And a dictatorship of the majority is not likely to be abided by by the disaffected minority.
00:17:56.000It's exactly why the founding fathers put in place all these checks and balances.
00:18:07.000Getting rid of the Senate filibuster, if Democrats have a majority in the House and the Senate, and Kamala Harris is the President, it does, in fact, mean the end of the current functioning of the United States government and the entry into an imperial period of complete democratic dominance.
00:18:42.000Because the common agreement, which is that we at least have to, if we're going to play a game, then there has to be a shot that either of us can win.
00:19:32.000She is, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden before her, somebody who wants to fundamentally change the way that government works in the United States.
00:19:40.000Now there are some Democrats who are attempting to make a pragmatic case for why Democrats shouldn't end the filibuster.
00:19:45.000They say, you know, you should act with caution.
00:19:47.000But the reality is that as the AOC wing of the party takes over, there's going to be more and more pressure, obviously, for Democrats to change the actual functioning rules.
00:19:56.000And they're going to do so on behalf of some of the most insane policy ever.
00:19:58.000This is the reason, by the way, why Kamala Harris will not commit to rejecting her old policies.
00:20:04.000Remember, she has said that you shouldn't take any of the things she said in 2019 all that seriously.
00:20:09.000You know, she was running for president at the time.
00:20:11.000It was a much more left-wing Democratic Party.
00:20:13.000The American public was much more open to radical, stupid ideas.
00:20:18.000But she refuses to walk away from any of the policies in terms of whether she would implement them.
00:21:03.000Because she literally won't say about anything.
00:21:05.000So, for example, Kamala Harris has spent two decades opposing the death penalty.
00:21:10.000She opposed the death penalty so strongly that she refused to apply it while she was Attorney General.
00:21:13.000She would just not go for it while she was Attorney General of the state of California.
00:21:18.000Well, in a shift, the Democratic Party changed its official platform this summer to remove opposition to the death penalty.
00:21:24.000That, of course, the opposition to the death penalty is a very unpopular view among Americans who see child molesters who murder children as people who probably should not be breathing the same air.
00:21:33.000A proposition with which I heartily agree.
00:21:36.000However, Kamala Harris was asked whether she would support legislation or sign an executive order to end the death penalty, and her campaign, once again, would not respond.
00:21:45.000And this is the way that she has been acting throughout the campaign.
00:21:49.000She'll send out surrogates to shift a position, and then when asked if she will still sign the bill with her original position, she'll go AWOL.
00:21:57.000This is the reason why she won't answer questions.
00:21:59.000Because she still believes all the things she used to believe.
00:22:03.000And she will change the rules in order to achieve those things.
00:22:06.000Kamala Harris constantly runs away from questions.
00:22:22.000I eat well, and Balance of Nature fits into my day-to-day.
00:22:25.000Imagine trying to eat 31 different fruits and veggies every single day.
00:22:28.000That sounds miserable and time-consuming.
00:22:30.000With Balance of Nature fruits and veggies, there's never been a more convenient dietary supplement to ensure you get a wide variety of fruits and veggies daily.
00:22:36.000Balance of Nature takes fruits and veggies, they freeze dry them, they turn them into a powder,
00:22:40.000and then they put them into a capsule.
00:22:41.000You take your fruit and veggie capsules every day, and then your body knows precisely what to do with them.
00:22:46.000It's kosher, which means I can just pop those things right into the protein smoothie.
00:22:49.000Go to balanceofnature.com, use promo code Shapiro for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer.
00:22:53.000Plus, get a free bottle of Fiber and Spice.
00:23:09.000I'm not sure that it's going to work in this campaign.
00:23:11.000She's playing this double game where you are supposed to pretend that she is a well-established figure with a set of principles, but if you ask her about the principles, it's really bad.
00:23:19.000So she's simultaneously avoiding the cameras, but then showing up for the cameras to shake hands and give the goofy grin and make weird hand motions.
00:23:27.000One of the things that she has been doing, by the way, is avoiding these so-called Al Smith dinners.
00:23:31.000There's a big dinner that happens every year.
00:23:34.000It's sort of this source of much revelry in New York.
00:23:41.000The Al Smith dinner is where a bunch of candidates show up and then they make jokes.
00:23:44.000So there's all sorts of video, for example, of Donald Trump showing up to the Al Smith dinner and making some self-referential jokes.
00:23:51.000Everyone that I'm aware of, every candidate, Democrat, Republican, has showed up to the Al Smith dinner and read some jokes written by professional comedians.
00:24:09.000She's not capable of being a regular, normal human.
00:24:12.000I understand there's, again, this attempt to turn her into a regular person.
00:24:16.000Kamala Harris is not a regular person.
00:24:18.000Kamala Harris literally had to have her campaign staff in 2019-2020 Do a mock dinner party in order so she could prep for a real dinner party.
00:24:27.000I don't know how many times you've had to do that.
00:24:29.000Like actually set out silverware in China in order to mock up a dinner party because it's so important you do well at this donor dinner.
00:24:40.000So here is Cardinal Dolan of New York saying he was disappointed she won't attend the Al Smith dinner.
00:24:44.000I think there's another reason, which is she is so wildly pro-abortion.
00:24:48.000And her administration would in fact be wildly anti-Catholic.
00:24:52.000Because Catholic social teachings are directly opposed to the Kamala Harris individual authenticity, live your truth, pro-abortion platform.
00:25:00.000I think that would have been a problem for her.
00:27:09.000Well, Kamala's tax plan is not going to work for you, but there is something that will work for you.
00:27:13.000Efficient business finance management.
00:27:16.000If you want to know how to run your company's finances smoother than a well-oiled machine, you need to check out Ramp.
00:27:20.000Ramp is a corporate card and spend management software.
00:27:22.000It's designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.
00:27:26.000Ramp gives your finance team unprecedented control over company spending.
00:27:29.000You can issue cards to every employee with actual limits and restrictions, a novel concept in today's world of runaway expenses.
00:27:34.000Ramp's accounting software automatically collects receipts and categorizes your expenses in real time.
00:27:39.000No more chasing down receipts like a dog after a squirrel.
00:27:41.000Your employees won't waste hours on expense reports, allowing you to close your books eight times faster.
00:27:46.000Unlike most so-called money-saving solutions, RAMP actually puts cash back in your pocket.
00:27:50.000Businesses using RAMP save an average of 5% in their very first year.
00:27:54.000Plus, it's easier to set up than my son's Lego sets.
00:27:56.000You can get started, issue virtual and physical cards, and start making payments in less than 15 minutes, whether you have 5 employees or 5,000.
00:28:02.000And now you get $250 when you join RAMP.
00:28:14.000Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, again, on the economy, she's lagging.
00:28:18.000And there are some indicators that the economy is not quite as sanguine as the Federal Reserve would make it out to be.
00:28:24.000Yesterday, CNBC's Rick Santelli pointed out there was a huge miss on consumer confidence, that Americans are feeling a little squirrelly about the economy, that actually the injection of new money into the system by lowering the interest rates by the Federal Reserve, that actually is not quieting a lot of concerns.
00:28:41.000We are looking at some big misses here on Consumer Confidence.
00:28:44.000We're expecting a headline number to be around 104.
00:29:40.000They benefit the people that need the help the most to restore their income so they can meet the higher cost of living today.
00:29:51.000Meanwhile, the Harris co-chair is out there suggesting, this is Chris Coons, that the real problem is that the American people just don't understand their own feelings about the economy.
00:29:59.000By the way, whenever you're arguing this, you're losing.
00:30:04.000If the American people have a perception about a thing, whether they are right or whether they are wrong, if you argue that they just are misunderstanding, that they just don't get it, If you're arguing that, you're losing because all of those people's feelings matter in the sense that they are going to vote.
00:30:18.000Again, they might be wrong, but they ain't gonna vote based on you telling them that they are misfeeling or something.
00:30:39.000Meanwhile, Kamala Harris pushing out every inflationary policy she can think of.
00:30:43.000As Edward Pinto points out at the Wall Street Journal, her housing plan is going to inflate
00:30:47.000the prices on housing and create shortages.
00:30:50.000A signature feature of Kamala Harris's housing plan is providing first-time homebuyers with
00:30:54.000$25,000,000 in down payment support at a total cost of $100 billion over four years.
00:30:59.000Absent a severe recession, this policy is all but certain to lead to higher home prices.
00:31:03.000That's because the 4 million program recipients would become price setters for all buyers in their neighborhood.
00:31:08.000According to the American Enterprise Institute's Housing Center, 77% of all home purchases would be subject to this home buyer tax, causing the price of those homes to increase by 3.6%.
00:31:19.000Over four years, the increase in home prices would total $175 billion, more than the $100 billion cost of the program.
00:31:25.000The price increase would show up in higher revenue for sellers, thus acting as a wealth transfer to people who are trying to sell.
00:31:32.000However, the problem is that if you don't actually increase the supply, then the prices will just continue to go up.
00:31:38.000And right now, the supply is not going to increase because of all the regulations.
00:31:44.000Also, because Kamala Harris and her team all over the country keep pushing idiocies like rent control.
00:31:49.000Now, the truth is that there is a really easy way to bring down the price of rent and the price of mortgages, and that's make it easier to build.
00:31:58.000Because over in Argentina, where Javier Mille has been wielding the chainsaw that he promised he would wield, he has just completely scrapped rent controls, and now the real estate market is doing amazing.
00:32:12.000According to the Wall Street Journal, For years, Argentina imposed one of the world's strictest rent control laws.
00:32:18.000Now the country's new president, Javier Mille, has scrapped the rental law, along with most government price controls, in a fiscal experiment that he is conducting to revive South America's second biggest economy.
00:32:27.000The Argentine capital is undergoing a rental market boom.
00:32:30.000Landlords are rushing to put their properties back on the market, with Buenos Aires rental supplies increasing by over 170%.
00:32:38.000While rents are still up in nominal terms, many renters are getting better deals than ever, with a 40% decline in the real price of rental properties when adjusted for inflation since last October.
00:32:48.000In other words, his economic shock therapy is working.
00:32:50.000It turns out deregulation of the economy leads to lower prices and better products.
00:32:55.000Precisely the opposite of what is promised by Kamala Harris and her economic team.
00:33:00.000This is why Americans don't trust Kamala Harris on the economy or on anything else.
00:33:05.000And this is an insuperable problem for her.
00:33:07.000Again, she has gotten the best eight weeks of media coverage in human history.
00:33:12.000And she is currently leading in the national polling average by maybe 2%.
00:33:17.000And in the States, she's not leading at all.
00:33:21.000In fact, it appears that the gap that emerged between Harris and Trump after she jumped in is starting to close again.
00:33:28.000It's never been very big and it's starting to close again.
00:33:30.000And if you look at the swing state polls, what you see is that every single, I'll repeat this until the cows come home, every single swing state is within the margin of error.
00:33:41.000And they seem to be moving just a little bit back toward Trump at this point.
00:33:45.000And it's only going to get worse for her.
00:33:46.000Because what can she do to make Fetch happen?
00:33:49.000What can she do to recapture the magic?
00:33:53.000And then there are the exogenous events.
00:33:55.000One of those big exogenous events is happening right now in the Middle East.
00:33:58.000A ground invasion by Israel into Lebanon is going to come.
00:34:01.000It is going to happen because it has to happen because Hezbollah's rocket capabilities must be dismantled by the Israelis before they reestablish any level of command and control.
00:34:10.000The Israelis are currently conducting one of the most sophisticated and successful military operations in all of human history.
00:34:16.000And Kamala Harris is probably going to oppose it.
00:35:06.000Because the Harris-Biden White House has been a disaster area on the Middle East throughout this entire October 7th conflict.
00:35:14.000And before, the Biden-Harris campaign set, that White House set the Middle East on fire.
00:35:19.000They actively dissociated from the Saudis.
00:35:21.000They actively dissociated from the Israelis.
00:35:23.000They decided to side with the Palestinians.
00:35:25.000They decided to side with the Iranians.
00:35:27.000They decided they were going to quote-unquote reopen negotiations with some of the world's worst people.
00:35:32.000And then it turns out the Iranians activated their proxies on every front against Israel in an attempt to forestall any sort of deal between the Israelis and the Saudis.
00:35:40.000Well, now Israel is fighting back and they're flexing their muscle.
00:35:43.000They are currently involved in the most sophisticated and successful military operation, probably in modern history, in what they have been doing in Lebanon.
00:35:50.000From the beeper operation, to operation blowing up the walkie talkies, to taking out 50% of all long-range munitions of Hezbollah inside of 24 hours.
00:35:59.000They are currently targeting Hezbollah so thoroughly that Hezbollah has been left with significant shortages of ability to actually fire on Israel.
00:36:07.000So last night they fired a cruise missile at Tel Aviv.
00:36:10.000It was shot down by David's Sling, which is sort of a longer range version of the famed Iron Dome.
00:36:15.000They've been shooting down rockets pretty much daily now that are flying toward Haifa.
00:36:21.000Israel, its population has suffered I believe one fatal casualty at this point compared to the hundreds of people who have died who are Hezbollah members or associated with Hezbollah or hanging out in the apartments above Hezbollah in targeted strikes.
00:36:34.000Some half million Lebanese have fled areas where they were directly next to Hezbollah emplacements and now Israel is presumably going to have to conduct some sort of ground operation in southern Lebanon to re-insure their own security.
00:36:47.000There's been talk about them moving to the Latani River which is A few dozen miles into Lebanon and then re-establishing a security cordon there.
00:36:54.000They might actually have to move north of that.
00:36:56.000There are a bunch of rivers in Lebanon that sort of cut horizontally across the country.
00:37:01.000Israel may have to move further north than the Latani River in order to ensure the security of the state of Israel.
00:37:07.000And for those who are complaining, why isn't the UN doing it?
00:37:09.000The answer is Israel tried to have the UN do it and the UN immediately gave it over to Hezbollah in 2000.
00:37:15.000Israel completely withdrew from Lebanon in the year 2000.
00:37:19.000This is one country attacking another country and then getting its ass kicked.
00:37:24.000The problem, of course, is that this creates a problem for Kamala Harris.
00:37:27.000When Israel wins, many people on Kamala Harris's side of the aisle do not like it, which is why, presumably, the Biden-Harris administration continues to slow-walk aid to Israel in a fight with an adversarial terror group.
00:37:38.000Today, Senators Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell sent a letter to Joe Biden pointing out that the administration is delaying three critical types of military weapons or equipment.
00:37:47.000MK-84 bombs, which are bombs required to hit Hamas's deeply buried tunnels and military infrastructure in Gaza, as well as Hezbollah tunnels.
00:39:03.000Well, as an adult, Greta, you might at some point want to read a book.
00:39:10.000The fact that Greta Thunberg was ever put out there as some sort of moral exemplar is absolutely beyond me, and she demonstrates her absolute intellectual inferiority every time she opens her dumb mouth.
00:39:19.000Here she was calling for a Palestinian boycott against Chevron.
00:40:50.000He's the person who made the phrase of black bodies the most ubiquitous, as though black people don't have bodies until he said black bodies.
00:41:13.000His first book, Between the World and Me, is a piece of tripe, in which he explicitly talks about sitting on a rooftop, watching the towers go down on 9-11, and feeling nothing because one time a cop was mean to him.
00:41:26.000The fact that anyone takes him seriously is beyond me, but the New Yorker put him on the cover of New Yorker magazine to talk about, of all things, Israel and the Palestinians.
00:41:42.000He goes over there, he sees people who are living in poverty, he immediately assumes they're like black Americans, and because in his own mind, black Americans are an oppressed class, this means that the Palestinians who support terrorism are an oppressed class, and thus it is just a simple debate between good and evil, victim and victimizer, always for Ta-Nehisi Coates.
00:42:00.000The fact that anyone treated this guy as worthy of winning things like the Pulitzer Prize is absolutely insane.
00:42:10.000But, they did try him out on the cover of a magazine.
00:42:12.000We all have to pretend that he knows things, even though he doesn't know anything.
00:42:16.000These are the kinds of people that Kamala Harris is pandering to.
00:42:18.000Or maybe she's pandering to University of Michigan students who were protesting yesterday in favor of Hamas.
00:42:23.000When I say in favor of Hamas, I mean literally in favor of Hamas.
00:42:26.000They are walking with a sign in this march that says, Gaza to Beirut, one struggle, and it has the upside down red triangles.
00:42:36.000Those upside down red triangles, by the way, the reason those are important, that is the marking that Hamas puts on potential targets for bombings.
00:42:44.000So you have terrorist supporters marching through University of Michigan.
00:42:47.000These are the people that Kamala Harris is seeking to win over.
00:44:53.000Okay, but this is gonna be a problem for Kamala Harris because on the one hand, Americans really don't like surrender to terrorist groups.
00:45:00.000In fact, Israel is kind of a popular proposition in the United States.
00:45:04.000On the other side, she's got a bunch of terror supporters in her own caucus.
00:45:08.000So she will get caught between a rock and a hard place, which is why I think you are seeing the Trump campaign doing a good job by just standing there and pointing the finger at Kamala Harris and defining her.
00:46:23.000He's chief foreign correspondent for Fox News.
00:46:25.000He's been reporting in enormous respects from the Middle East, obviously, over the course of the last year.
00:46:30.000He has a brand new book releasing October 1st, titled Black Saturday, an unfiltered account of the October 7th attack on Israel and the war in Gaza.
00:46:37.000Trey, thanks for the work you're doing and welcome to the show.
00:46:44.000So first of all, I assume you're in the Middle East right now, given all of the events that are happening on the ground over there.
00:46:50.000What is your latest update on the situation on the ground?
00:46:53.000The Israeli military is performing what appears to be one of the most successful military operations in the early stages that has happened in modern military history.
00:47:03.000Right now I'm reporting on the ground in Israel's third largest city of Haifa.
00:47:08.000And as I'm overlooking the port here in Haifa, we have seen a number of rockets incoming even today.
00:47:14.000Israel's missile defense system, the Iron Dome, is intercepting much of the fire that is targeting these communities across northern Israel.
00:47:21.000But today, Hezbollah escalated their attacks, firing a ballistic missile toward Israel's second largest city of Tel Aviv.
00:47:27.000There's a real understanding on the ground that while Israel is doing what they can to reduce Hezbollah's capabilities with the Israeli Air Force, they are preparing for the possibility of a ground operation into southern Lebanon.
00:47:39.000And even just a few moments ago, the Israelis announced they will be calling up two reserve brigades to ensure that the ground forces are in place if that decision is made.
00:47:50.000And we've been told by sources and by the Israeli government that their estimate is that they've taken out about 50% of the long-range weaponry that Hezbollah had stored in places ranging from southern Lebanon to the Beqaa Valley, which is sort of to the northeast of Lebanon.
00:48:05.000That still leaves an enormous number of short-range rockets obviously intact, and Hezbollah is heavily manned up along that southern border, although it appears they've lost much of their command and control structure.
00:48:15.000The leadership of Hezbollah appears to be meeting In a room alone, the only person being alive at the top of the structure appears to be Hassan Nasrallah at this point.
00:48:24.000And the Israelis launched this campaign to target Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and even their positions in the north to try and reduce those rocket and missile capabilities.
00:48:33.000And Israeli officials, as recently as last year, before October 7th, when this all began, were briefing that they believed if Hezbollah launched an attack against Israel, the early days of that war would see thousands of rockets and missiles raining down on Israeli cities.
00:48:47.000It would see blackouts and really challenging situations, not just for the northern part of Israel, but also the central part.
00:48:56.000And this is in part to the proactive stance that Israel has taken to try and target these launching positions.
00:49:02.000It was also just a few weeks ago that we saw Hezbollah was preparing a massive barrage.
00:49:07.000Israeli intelligence picked that up and they were able to conduct preemptive strikes.
00:49:10.000So we are seeing the Israeli intelligence and military capabilities operating together.
00:49:16.000They are trying to target as many of these positions as possible, understanding that, as you said, they still have the capability to launch things like ballistic missiles toward major population centers like Tel Aviv.
00:49:26.000And this is a significant threat, and it could be coupled with intense and increased fighting with the ground operation.
00:49:35.000You know, Trey, one of the things I think that when I talk to Israelis has been striking about the current operation is how efficient, how thorough it has been in comparison with what happened on October 7th, which of course is the subject of your book, Black Saturday.
00:49:47.000One of the things that I think was so shocking to the Israeli psyche, and frankly to the Western psyche generally, is there was this idea that the Israeli intelligence apparatus was extremely effective.
00:49:56.000And we've seen them flex that muscle over the course of the last couple of months.
00:49:59.000From the killing of Ismail Chania in Tehran to the beeper operation in Lebanon and yet October 7th took the Israelis completely by surprise.
00:50:07.000I remember waking up on the morning of Simchat Torah over here in the United States and obviously I'm Orthodox and we're picking up the phone.
00:50:12.000We started getting updates from security, you know, friends and family who are under assault in cities in the southern area of Israel in the so-called Gaza envelope.
00:50:22.000So why don't you tell me about the situation, you know, on October 7th from your perspective because that's what the book is about.
00:50:29.000And I write about this throughout Black Saturday, my experience going to the Gaza border on that morning, not knowing that this was an infiltration of Israel.
00:50:37.000At the time, my team and I thought this was a rocket attack, as we'd seen many times in the past.
00:50:41.000And so there was a clear intelligence failure in the Israeli military and government about What the preparations were in the days before October 7th, I mean, to have thousands of these gunmen cross into Israel, into these communities that were largely unprotected along the border and slaughter people in their homes.
00:50:59.000And the Israeli army simply didn't get there in time to take the battle back to Hamas.
00:51:04.000And that is why so many people were killed and why so many were dragged into Gaza as hostages of Hamas.
00:51:11.000And so on Black Saturday, my team and I went to the border.
00:51:14.000We were aiming to go to a town called Sderot that has about 30,000 people.
00:51:19.000Many people who have visited Israel have been to this community because you can look right into Gaza.
00:51:23.000It's a community that's filled with bomb shelters.
00:51:26.000But as we drove there and we got closer, we stopped at one intersection and got out of the car because we saw an ambulance pulled over.
00:51:34.000And this was the first indication that this attack was different than anything we'd seen before covering the region for the past 10 years.
00:51:41.000And the book takes the reader not just through my perspective on that morning, also from the perspective of Israeli soldiers, of civilians, of hostages who were taken into Gaza and then later released as part of the November ceasefire deal.
00:51:55.000I interviewed people who were held in the tunnels beneath Gaza.
00:51:58.000I also speak with Palestinian civilians and Hamas officials, pressing them on the questions that I had about the massacre that took place on October 7th, and then some of the things that unfolded as the war was developing inside Gaza.
00:52:12.000So I mean let's talk about that latter part because obviously that's that's a part that the media have focused heavily on is the cost of the war in Gaza itself.
00:52:20.000Hamas launched this war presumably without thinking about the civilians or actively knowing actually that many many civilians were going to be killed.
00:52:27.000their entire tunnel apparatus was built under civilian areas
00:52:29.000with the explicit goal of forcing the Israelis to kill civilians in order to get to them,
00:52:34.000in order to generate presumably Western support for some sort of ceasefire,
00:52:38.000which is actually what many people in the West have been seeking.
00:52:41.000When you spoke to Hamas officials, when you spoke to terrorist leaders,
00:52:44.000what was their perspective on what they were trying to accomplish on October 7th
00:53:02.000And whenever I would pose questions about what happened in the kibbutzim, in these communities along the border, my team and I went into Kafr Aza, we went into Bari, we went to the Nova Festival site, in many cases before they were cleared.
00:53:16.000And we saw the bodies that were spread throughout these communities, the massacre that took place against a civilian population.
00:53:22.000And when I posed these questions about why this took place and why these people who actually, in Israeli society, are considered on the left wing, many of them peace activists to try and help Gazan civilians, were slaughtered, they lied.
00:53:35.000And they said only soldiers were targeted, only military bases were targeted along the border.
00:53:39.000And I told them that simply is not true.
00:53:42.000And as the war developed, some of the sources that I had for years would send me messages and they would send video clips of my reporting when I embedded with the Israeli military inside Gaza, saying that it was fake and it was made up, even though it was real reporting happening in real time.
00:53:57.000And I was giving them an opportunity as a journalist on the ground in the Middle East to comment on the reporting.
00:54:03.000Comment on the tunnel that I entered underneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
00:54:07.000And they simply didn't want to in many cases, and when they did want to comment, they were trying to spin me.
00:54:12.000And so I thought it was important in Black Saturday, in this new upcoming book, to talk with Israeli leadership and Hamas leadership, because I think it gives the reader a real perspective about what these officials believe about October 7th, but also about the war that is still unfolding inside Gaza as we speak.
00:54:29.000You know, Trey, what you're saying here is so amazingly important, and it does raise the question of why so many members of the media, people who have not been on the ground, seem to very often just buy the Hamas line.
00:54:40.000Because Hamas does lie on a routine basis.
00:54:56.000And that, of course, is going to take a major humanitarian toll.
00:54:59.000And yet the story in the West seems to have been, for most of the media, that Israel was
00:55:03.000pursuing some sort of deeply non-humanitarian mission in the Gaza Strip with indiscriminate
00:55:08.000fire being a regular feature of how the Israelis are going about their business, which is,
00:55:13.000number one, ignorant of how an urban war is fought.
00:55:15.000Number two, it's ignorant of how the political system in Israel even works.
00:55:18.000I mean, the reality is that before October 7th, Israel has been a very deeply divided political society in which many of the different parties are working, really, at odds with one another.
00:55:29.000And yet, when it came to the military operations in the Gaza Strip, that's being run by the IDF.
00:55:35.000That's being run by probably the most bipartisan institution that exists in the state of Israel.
00:55:40.000The Israeli society is absolutely divided and even more so today as the war continues and there are still more than a hundred hostages, some of them dead, some of them alive, being held by Hamas inside Gaza.
00:55:51.000And this has put pressure on the Israeli government and military and raised questions about how the war is being conducted, how the negotiations are being conducted.
00:55:59.000And that's part of our role covering all of this.
00:56:01.000But I can tell you, I entered Gaza five separate times on military embeds.
00:56:05.000And it is a challenging environment to operate in as a journalist, but also I feel it's my role as a journalist to talk to everyone involved.
00:56:12.000And so if you go back and you watch our pieces from Shifa Hospital, for example, a place that I once entered at night with the Israeli military as they raided the facility, and then a week later during the daytime, and I write about this in Black Saturday, sort of the disconnect between day and night inside Gaza, but during the daytime in bed, I spoke with Israeli officials on the ground, people like Daniel Hagari, the top spokesman for the Israeli military, and also with Palestinian civilians who were taking a UN bus that had been coordinated with the Israeli military to the south of Gaza, where they were evacuating to.
00:56:45.000And I always tell people, It's critical to put everything in this story into context because as journalists, no one is asking us to not report on what's happening inside Gaza.
00:56:55.000But we also have to talk about October 7th.
00:56:57.000We have to talk about Black Saturday and how all of this began.
00:57:01.000Part of my role on the ground here is to speak with everyone involved.
00:57:06.000It's to talk with the civilians who survived the massacre, to get their stories, to make sure that people don't forget about the first day of this war, this massacre that took place unexpectedly, on a holiday, as people were at home on Shabbat.
00:57:19.000But also to speak with Palestinian civilians about what the war has been like for them, what they hope for the future of Gaza, if they want Hamas in control of Gaza, after what happened and this that took place.
00:57:29.000And I explain to people that the answers that I get in gathering all this information, they often exist on a spectrum.
00:57:35.000Sometimes, and this was true even before the war, before October 7th, You'd find people in Gaza from like the Al-Qassam Brigades, for example, and their whole life's mission is to slaughter Israelis and Jews and to take over the state of Israel.
00:57:49.000You'd also meet Palestinian civilians that were frustrated with Hamas leadership that wanted to run their businesses in Gaza City.
00:57:55.000They wanted to run an ice cream shop or sell paper at a store in the heart of Gaza.
00:57:59.000And so I try to gather all of these stories, get the information to our viewers, and then let them decide based on the facts that they see and the information that they receive from the ground, from our reporting on the front lines.
00:58:11.000So, when you're talking with Gazan civilians, this has become a major issue because when you're talking about the future of what's going to happen next in Gaza, this obviously has major ramifications.
00:58:18.000When you're talking with Gazan civilians, you spoke obviously with many of them before October 7th, you've spoken with many since October 7th.
00:58:27.000What is the perception of what they wish would happen next?
00:58:29.000What was their perception of October 7th, both in the immediate aftermath and then as the war progressed, when obviously things got a lot worse for Gazan civilians on the ground?
00:58:38.000It's a really interesting question, and I found in the course of my reporting for this new book, Black Saturday, that some civilians, even ones who live in the United States, there's a woman that I interview and I was in touch with her as the war was developing in Gaza, someone connected me with her, and I was trying to get a better idea of what was happening on the ground there, and she actually lives in Utah.
00:58:56.000And I found her views to be very extreme from the point of Palestinian civilians, even.
00:59:04.000And she talked about the resistance fighters in Hamas.
00:59:06.000And she talked about October 7th in almost a positive light.
00:59:10.000And then I also spoke with Palestinian civilians, like a doctor named Raed Mosa, who worked for UNRWA, but he was educated in Israel.
00:59:18.000And he had friends in Tel Aviv, Israeli doctors that he studied with.
00:59:22.000And these were two examples of two people who spoke English who were able to speak to me about the situation inside Gaza.
00:59:28.000Both civilians, not fighting on behalf of Hamas, but that had drastically different views.
00:59:33.000And interestingly, one lived in the United States.
00:59:35.000And actually, both of them now are living in the United States because this doctor was able to go to America on an O-1 visa.
00:59:41.000But his reaction when I asked him about October 7th and what he did was, Reaching out to his friends in Tel Aviv to make sure they were okay.
00:59:48.000Now, there were other people that I asked and they really didn't care.
00:59:51.000They could care less about the situation.
00:59:53.000So, in terms of the future though of Gaza and who will be in control and what the people of Gaza want, I think the focus now is on survival for many Gazans.
01:00:01.000Living through a war for a year is challenging for civilians.
01:00:04.000Many have been displaced inside Gaza and are living in tents.
01:00:08.000And so, a lot of people are curious about what comes next, what the leadership will look like.
01:00:13.000We just did a story recently along the border at the Karim Shalom crossing and I felt this was actually the best opportunity I've had throughout the war to speak with Palestinian civilians about their experience.
01:00:24.000The Israelis and the Emiratis worked to evacuate injured Palestinian children from Gaza.
01:00:29.000And I spoke with these Palestinians on the border as they were evacuating, as part of an evacuation that was coordinated by the Israelis.
01:00:36.000And even these people had a variety of different views.
01:00:38.000Some people I spoke to were just so thankful to get out of Gaza and get the much-needed medical treatment that they needed.
01:00:44.000Others were quite frustrated, and they said, look, the injuries that I have were caused by the Israeli air campaign against Gaza.
01:00:50.000And so I think the future of Gaza, it's an open-ended question.
01:00:53.000But I always, as in the course of the reporting, you'll notice from the book, have insisted that two things can be true at once.
01:01:00.000That October 7th was the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
01:01:05.000And we shouldn't stop talking about that.
01:01:06.000We shouldn't stop talking about the hostages that are still being held inside Gaza.
01:01:10.000Also, the Israeli campaign against Hamas in Gaza led to the highest death toll among Palestinians in the history of their people.
01:01:18.000And we can talk about those two things at the same time.
01:01:20.000And we can talk about the protection of civilians amid war, but we can't forget about how this all started.
01:01:25.000And that's been sort of the course of my reporting as we speak with Palestinians, as we speak with Israelis and officials here on the ground.
01:01:33.000Well, the book again is Black Saturday, an unfiltered account of the October 7th attack on Israel and the war in Gaza by Trey Gings.
01:01:38.000Trey, really appreciate what you're doing and thanks for your reporting.