Vladimir Putin feels like he has the ability to do exactly what it is that he wants, and the reason he feels that way is because of a combination of splits on the right in the United States and the left in the EU, as well as splits in the European coalition with regard to Russia and Vladimir Putin's role as a global power broker. This week, Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader in Ukraine, is taking aim at the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, with a new book, Putin s Great Idea: How He Became a Great Leader. written by Alex Vasyarev and Alex Blumberg. This episode was produced and edited by David Rothkopf. Our theme music is Come Alone by my main amigo, Evan Handyside. Our ad music is by Build Buildings, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. We are part of the Robots Radio Network. See all the great network radio shows on the airwaves. Subscribe to our new network Radio Row. Get exclusive ad-free versions of our shows wherever you get your favourite shows and listen to them 24/7. If you decide to become a patron, we'll send you a virtual virtual assistant on Audible, Podcoin, iTunes, and Podcoin. Send us your voice messages to sws@whatiwatchedtonight.co.uk and we'll get them on the show on the next episode of Robots Radio. Thank you for listening to Robots Radio and all the best vlogs we get a chance to respond to your questions and thoughts on the answers to them! in the comments section. Music: "Space Junk" by Skynyrd by John Rocha, "The Good, the Bad, The Good, The Bad, the Weird, The Weird, the Good, and The Weirdest Thing by Squeepers, by Jon Sorrentino "Goodbye" by Sisyphus, "Good Morning America" by Fergie, "Bye Bye Bye Bye, Goodbye, bye bye, bye Bye Bye bye, Bye, bye, Love Birds" by Mr. & Good Morning, bye. - Your Thoughts? - John R. by Kristian "Podcasts? by Sveezer, by Kevin McLeod and "AstroFabulous? " by . by , "Aristotle
00:00:00.000One of the great qualities of dictatorship is that dictators can hold the line even as democracies start to fade.
00:00:05.000That, of course, is the theory of pretty much every dictator across history when faced with a democratic rival.
00:00:12.000That is certainly the theory of Vladimir Putin today, whether it is in Ukraine or whether it's with regard to him just killing, you know, the people who oppose him, people like Alexei Navalny.
00:00:22.000And it is becoming very clear this week That Vladimir Putin is now settling all family business.
00:00:26.000This is the week where he feels like he has the ability to do exactly what it is that he wants.
00:00:30.000And the reason he feels that way is because of a combination of splits on the right in the United States and a combination of splits on the left in the United States, as well as splits in the European coalition with regard to Russia.
00:00:42.000When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, there was pretty much unanimity that this was not something that the West could allow to stand.
00:00:49.000You couldn't have Vladimir Putin simply waltzing into Kiev, taking over the country, killing Vladimir Zelensky, and essentially setting up a puppet dictatorship and turning Ukraine into a second Belarus.
00:00:57.000You couldn't have that because it would put Russia directly on the borders of a wide variety of NATO countries, including Hungary and Poland.
00:01:04.000You couldn't have it because it would certainly threaten former Soviet satellite states like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, all of which are deeply fearful of a Putin-led incursion into their territory, Finland as well.
00:01:17.000You couldn't have it because Ukraine actually is a relatively major producer of products like wheat and oil.
00:01:24.000And mostly you couldn't have it because Vladimir Putin has interests that are antithetical to those of the West.
00:01:28.000And for all of the talk about over the last 25 years about how Vladimir Putin was just on the cusp of moderating, how there was going to be a moment when Vladimir Putin was welcomed into the family of nations and then he would just be nice to everybody.
00:01:41.000Every single president of my lifetime has tried a reset with Vladimir Putin.
00:01:46.000George W. Bush famously looked into Putin's eyes and thought he had a sense of his soul.
00:01:51.000And then you had Barack Obama, who literally sent Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, to Moscow to give them a button that didn't actually say reset, but was supposed to be a reset button.
00:02:05.000And then you had Vladimir Putin being offered flexibility by Barack Obama in 2012 in the lead up to the 2012 election.
00:02:12.000And then Donald Trump came into the office and the basic assumption was that Donald Trump was going to lead to a warm relationship with Putin.
00:02:18.000And now you have Joe Biden who came into office and was immediately pretty soft on Russia in terms of sort of geopolitical strategy, as George W. Bush once put it.
00:02:28.000That take has been proved false time and time again.
00:02:31.000Vladimir Putin is a highly intelligent, highly skilled adversary of the United States.
00:02:36.000His interests do not align with the interests of the West.
00:02:39.000The chief Russian motivation, and this has been true for literally centuries, is territorial ambition.
00:02:44.000This has been true since the time of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.
00:02:47.000I mean, if you want to go back even further, this has been true since Ivan the Terrible, in that the fact is that if you look at Russian history or have any sense of Russian history, Russia's great leaders are always measured by the amount of land they control, which makes a certain amount of geopolitical sense if you are Russia, because again, Russia is a giant step, meaning it is open to invasion from all sides.
00:03:07.000And so if you're Russian, one of the things that historically you have attempted to do is expand your borders so as to prevent invasion from all sides.
00:03:15.000Now, at a certain point, That defensive justification becomes an offensive strategy in which you're invading sovereign nations that exist all around you and attempting to control top-down.
00:03:24.000But Russia has always been an empire since the time of Muscovy.
00:03:29.000And now you are watching as Vladimir Putin tries to Expand the boundaries of what he sees as his new empire.
00:03:36.000And he himself compared himself to Peter the Great just a couple of years ago after the invasion of Ukraine.
00:03:42.000And when you watch the interview that he did with Tucker Carlson, where the first 35 minutes is dedicated to his idea of Russian claims to Ukraine, in which he actually sort of makes the claim that Russia has claims to Poland and Hungary as well.
00:03:55.000When he says that sort of stuff, we ought to take that seriously.
00:03:58.000He's actually spelling out what he actively thinks.
00:04:00.000Now, there are a bunch of people on the left who think that Vladimir Putin is doing this because he is offended by the muscularity of the West.
00:04:06.000That if only the West had been more conciliatory toward Vladimir Putin, then Russia would not, in fact, be an adversarial force.
00:04:13.000That everything that Vladimir Putin does is blowback to the West.
00:04:16.000That is the theory of people on the left who are very much vacillating with regard to what Vladimir Putin is trying to do.
00:04:24.000And then there are a couple of theories on the right, and those theories range from the blowback theory, people ripping that off from John Mearsheimer, the foreign policy scholar, who I think is wrong about a great many things.
00:04:35.000John Mearsheimer has sort of theorized that it's NATO's expansion that drove Putin to invade South Ossetia, for example, in Georgia, or drove Putin to invade Crimea and the Donbass region, originally in 2014, and then invade the rest of Ukraine in 2022.
00:04:50.000There's that theory, which again is coincident with the left-wing blowback theory of American foreign policy that dates all the way back to people like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.
00:04:58.000We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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00:06:00.000And then there is a theory that Russia is actually a bulwark against secular leftism.
00:06:05.000That Russia actively is a highly religious country that is very anti much of the left-wing ideology with regard to, say, gender and sex and sexuality that the West has fallen for.
00:06:19.000And so they've built up in their minds a lot of people the idea that because Russians are socially conservative as a general matter, which they are, that this is somehow what Vladimir Putin represents, as opposed to he has a population that is socially conservative and also that is not his actual ambition.
00:06:32.000His actual ambition is not in defense of, say, social conservatism.
00:06:35.000His ambition is in defense of Russian territorial ambition.
00:06:41.000It's a category error, in other words, for many people on the right.
00:06:44.000Many people on the right have made that same category error, for example, with Sharia law countries in the Islamic world.
00:06:49.000It suggested that because those countries are, quote-unquote, socially conservative, that somehow those countries have a commonality with, say, American conservatism, American Christian conservatism.
00:06:57.000And the answer there is no, they really don't.
00:07:00.000Their ambitions are not the same as your ambitions.
00:07:03.000And what this really reveals is a schism in the United States, broadly writ, And in the West broadly written, Europe as well, a schism about whether the West has any sense of internal solidity.
00:07:16.000Because if Putin is able to split the West on the basis of perceived values or perceived anti-Westernism.
00:07:23.000And that says there are a lot of people in the West who really don't like the West very much, on the one hand, and a lot of people in the West who believe that the greater threat to the United States might be their neighbors who disagree with them about social politics, as opposed to people like Vladimir Putin.
00:07:35.000Not that Vladimir Putin is a direct threat to people in the United States, like right this instant, but he's a very large indirect threat to people in the United States because geopolitics actually matters.
00:07:44.000When you cut off shipping routes, when you destroy the sources of international trade, When you threaten American allies, these are things that actually will matter to American citizens writ large.
00:07:54.000Okay, so Vladimir Putin is figuring that the history of the United States since World War II is, if you can split the American public, you can win.
00:08:03.000And it doesn't matter how weak you are.
00:08:08.000This has been true since Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.
00:08:11.000It was true of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
00:08:13.000It was true of Sharia law, Iranian forces in Iraq.
00:08:18.000If you can outlast the United States, you will win.
00:08:20.000And the time for outlasting is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
00:08:23.000So it used to be that in order to outlast the American public, you would have to wait a decade.
00:08:28.000And now because of the velocity of social media, And because of the ability of people to see these arguments in real time and split from each other and polarize very quickly, what you're seeing is that the West is sapped of its will incredibly quickly on nearly every conflict.
00:08:42.000When there is a conflict with true evil, You see, Western powers immediately leap to fight the evil and then pretty quickly start to doubt themselves and figure, okay, I think we're done here.
00:08:55.000Now, this would be a time when political leadership actually mattered, but there's a complete dearth of political leadership on both sides of the political aisle on these matters.
00:09:02.000Joe Biden is utterly incapable of articulating the rationale why Americans should care if Russia invades Ukraine.
00:09:08.000He does not even attempt to articulate it.
00:09:10.000He just spouts words like democracy, Without taking full stock of the actual situation for Americans.
00:09:18.000Because Americans look at Joe Biden and say things like democracy, and they say, wait, hold up a second.
00:09:22.000Ukraine, first of all, is an extraordinarily imperfect democracy.
00:09:27.000The Freedom House score for Ukraine is like 39.
00:09:29.000Russia is like 7, but Ukraine is like 39.
00:09:31.000So it's not like an amazing wellspring of democracy.
00:09:37.000And so when you say democracy over and over, Americans are like, well, is that really what Ukraine is about?
00:09:41.000And then Americans say, well, if that's what Ukraine is really about, then why are we allies with, say, Saudi Arabia?
00:09:46.000Because Saudi Arabia obviously is not a democracy.
00:09:47.000By the way, a lot of our allies who are not democracy start to get very nervous when they hear democracy talk coming from Joe Biden, because they're like, OK, so what are you going to Arab spring us over here?
00:09:56.000The real reason why the United States is pursuing A defense of Ukraine is because we have geo-strategic interest in degrading the Russian military capacity to expand beyond its own borders, threaten shipping lanes, threatening supply resources, increasing the power of enemies of America and America's allies.
00:10:15.000Russia has formed a de facto coalition with China and Iran at this point.
00:10:19.000And that de facto coalition threatens America's allies all around the world and threatens freedom of the seas, for example, everywhere from the Taiwan Strait to the Straits of Malacca to the Red Sea.
00:10:31.000That coalition is extremely dangerous.
00:10:33.000And the United States does have a geopolitical interest in downgrading that.
00:10:36.000But that's not something that Joe Biden can explain because he can't say words anymore.
00:10:40.000And probably doesn't understand the words that he is saying right now.
00:10:43.000And on the right, there's a split about whether these things even matter.
00:10:47.000There's this bizarre idea that has arisen on large parts of the right that America can become autarkic, that suddenly global economics don't matter at all, that if things go to hell in a handbasket with regard to the freedom of the seas in these particular areas, it won't affect American citizens in any way.
00:11:04.000If shipping starts to be truly endangered the way that it is in the Red Sea, in any of the other areas that I just mentioned, the amount of money that Americans are going to pay is going to be so much larger than whatever checks we are signing to Ukraine, it will make our heads spin.
00:11:17.000If you loved the inflation of the first couple of years of the Biden era, wait until freedom of the seas goes away.
00:11:22.000It's something that you're going to enjoy.
00:11:24.000Okay, so in any case, Vladimir Putin knows all of this because all he has to do is just keep pressing.
00:12:22.000More likely, it turns into a corrupt oligarchy in which the leader uses his position in order to enrich himself and his friends in order to ensure his own power and destroys his adversaries.
00:12:32.000And one of the best ways to maintain your own power is to destroy things like internal property rights and political freedoms.
00:12:37.000Because if you give property rights, that may lead to the creation of a monetary base from which a threat can mount against you.
00:12:43.000So Vladimir Putin has been very, very bad for the Russian people.
00:12:47.000If you don't believe me, all you have to do is look at the various GDPs per capita in the former Soviet satellite states.
00:12:53.000GDP per capita right now in states like Poland.
00:12:58.000Poland is a former Soviet satellite state.
00:13:01.000GDP per capita there is about $18,000.
00:13:20.000Vladimir Putin has not been a boon to Russia.
00:13:22.000Okay, putting all that aside again, Vladimir Putin is winning right now because all he feels he has to do is outlast.
00:13:29.000Not only that, the weaponry that we are shipping to Ukraine in defense is much more expensive than the weaponry that Vladimir Putin is using in offense in Ukraine.
00:13:39.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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00:14:43.000The reason that Vladimir Putin is able to ramp up his production, which can last probably effectively another two to three years, at the levels that he is currently producing, they're spending like 6% of their GDP on defense, by which we mean offense, in places like Ukraine.
00:14:58.000That's unsustainable for an economy that's truly unworkable in Russia.
00:15:13.000It's damaged everybody, but it has certainly hit Russia.
00:15:15.000You can see it in terms of the inflation rate, but the reality is that Russia can produce kind of crappy old machinery and ammo, and it costs a lot less money than defensive machinery.
00:15:28.000By the way, you see this all over the globe.
00:15:30.000It costs Hamas like 50 bucks to create a Katyusha rocket that they can shoot into an Israeli city, and it costs Israel like $50,000 every time they fire an Iron Dome.
00:15:37.000That sort of stuff happens all the time across the globe.
00:15:40.000It's one of the reasons why the Houthis are being effective in the Red Sea right now.
00:15:42.000Offensive measures that are basic and dumb cost almost nothing.
00:15:45.000Defensive measures, which have to be sophisticated to stop the offensive measures, are very, very expensive.
00:15:51.000Which is why, from a financial point of view, offense is better than defense.
00:15:56.000From a financial point of view, during war, in the moment, right now, destroying the enemy's capacity to make war is actually easier than defending against the war that they are attempting to fight against you.
00:16:06.000Again, all of this is just predicate to the fact that Vladimir Putin really is feeling his oats right now.
00:16:12.000So not only did he almost certainly kill Alexei Navalny.
00:16:15.000I say almost certainly because, you know, you try to be a little careful about these things, but he killed Alexei.
00:16:20.000Alexei Navalny did not die of natural causes in a prison at the age of 47 after being poisoned by Vladimir Putin just about four years ago, and then immediately arrested upon his return to Russia, sentenced to a gulag for 30 plus years, and then he randomly dies.
00:16:36.000Especially not for Vladimir Putin, who makes a habit of killing his political opponents.
00:16:40.000And in fact, unsurprisingly, the Kremlin has now rejected international calls, according to Axios, for an independent investigation into Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's death in prison.
00:16:49.000Navalny's allies and family, of course, say that they suspect high-level Russian authorities were involved in his death, which, of course, is absolutely true, I'm sure.
00:16:56.000The European Council said Mr. Navalny's unexpected and shocking death is yet another sign of the accelerating and systematic repression in Russia.
00:17:03.000Kremlin has, they've refused to release his body because they're afraid that if they release his body then they're gonna discover the poison on him or the bruises on him or the broken bones or whatever it is.
00:17:13.000The country's prison services said he died suddenly after a walk.
00:17:16.000They claimed he fell unconscious after feeling sick and could not be resuscitated.
00:17:21.000Of course, all of this has sort of outsized impact in the West because there was a very famous HBO documentary made about Alexei Navalny, that won Best Picture, Best Documentary at the Oscars just a couple of years ago.
00:17:33.000It is a very, very compelling documentary all about his poisoning and his attempt to track down the people who poisoned him, which he actually does.
00:17:40.000He actually calls one of his poisoners on the phone and gets them to admit the whole thing on the phone.
00:17:44.000The very tail end of that documentary, Alexei Navalny actually is asked, what is your message to the Russian people in case you're murdered?
00:18:38.000So either his murder is a reflection of Putin feeling threatened, or his murder is a reflection of the fact that Putin thinks he can get away with nearly anything at this point.
00:18:47.000And it seems more like the latter, especially because they're not being shy about anything that they are doing right now.
00:18:52.000Vladimir Putin, according to the Russian news agency, the Russian government has now filed charges against Oleg Navalny, who is the brother of Alexei Navalny.
00:19:03.000They said, wanted under an article of the criminal code.
00:19:06.000They did not specify what article Navalny's brother was even wanted under.
00:19:09.000So they're just arresting Alexei Navalny's relatives who are in Russia right now in an attempt to presumably quash any blowback from their decision to kill Alexei Navalny.
00:19:19.000Not just that, on Tuesday, Russia's main security agency said that they had arrested another American citizen.
00:19:26.000This person's a dual citizen of Russia and the United States on accusations of committing state treason by raising funds for Ukraine.
00:19:33.000The FSB identified the detainee as a 33-year-old woman who lives in Los Angeles.
00:19:37.000Apparently, she had raised $51 for a Ukrainian organization that bought weapons and other equipment for Ukraine's military.
00:19:46.000That's because she had sent $50 to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based nonprofit organization that sends assistance to the country.
00:19:52.000And, uh, the FSB released via Russian state media a video that showed the woman wearing a white hat that covered her eyes being handcuffed and escorted by masked security service officers.
00:20:02.000If convicted, she faces 20 years in prison.
00:20:05.000And, of course, this makes perfect sense considering that Russia is making just a bounty off of American citizens they kidnap.
00:20:12.000If they arrest Britney Griner for being foolish enough to fly to Russia with pot in her bag, and then they throw her in prison, they can get, like, an actual high-level Russian arms dealer released in return for that.
00:20:23.000They're still holding the Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich.
00:20:26.000They have no compunction about just randomly kidnapping American citizens.
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00:21:39.000Again, a Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine has now been apparently murdered.
00:21:43.000According to the New York Times, Maxim Kuzminov pulled off a daring escape last summer when he defected to Ukraine and handed his military helicopter over to Ukrainian commandos in exchange for half a million bucks.
00:21:53.000Ukraine trumpeted the defection as a major coup.
00:21:55.000In Vladimir Putin's Russia, he was guilty of treason.
00:21:57.000Ukrainian intelligence officials warned Kuzminov his life's in danger.
00:22:00.000They urged him not to leave the country.
00:22:02.000Instead, he moved with his money to a small resort town on Spain's Mediterranean coast.
00:22:10.000Two Spanish police officials with knowledge of the case said the body of a man found riddled with bullets last week in the coastal town of Villa Joyosa belonged to Mr. Kuzminov.
00:22:20.000Andrey Chernyak, representative of Ukraine's military intel, said he could confirm the fact of his death.
00:22:27.000There was no information about the possible assailants or motive.
00:22:32.000So, very difficult to imagine that this person was not, I mean, riddled with bullets in a random town in Spain.
00:23:27.000According to Yahoo News, the Biden administration will impose
00:23:30.000major sanctions on Russia in response to the death of Navalny.
00:23:34.000John Kirby, White House National Security Communications Advisor, said the new sanctions are designed to hold Russia accountable for what happened to Navalny, as well as all its actions over the course of this vicious and brutal war that has raged in Ukraine for two years.
00:23:45.000Apparently, they're going to unveil the sanctions package on Friday.
00:23:49.000The question, of course, is how has that worked so far?
00:23:51.000Because, of course, the economic sanctions have not done tremendous damage to Putin or his inner circle.
00:23:59.000The realistic answer here is that there are actually things that Biden could do.
00:24:04.000This is one of the things that's truly amazing about Biden.
00:24:06.000He will use executive power to try to cram down a vaccine mandate on 80 million Americans using the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
00:24:14.000He will attempt, illegally, to alleviate student loan debt by simply Deciding that you no longer have to pay it, using his executive power.
00:24:22.000But the one area of American law where the president does have tremendous outsized power is in foreign policy, and Biden barely uses it.
00:24:29.000He won't do it to shut down the border.
00:24:31.000He won't do it to actually take measures he could take to punish, for example, the Russians.
00:24:37.000And he is weak-kneed because, again, virtually everyone on all sides in the United States is incredibly divided.
00:24:41.000What this situation highlights is really not the evil of Vladimir Putin, it's the weakness of the West.
00:24:47.000According to Bret Stephens writing over at the New York Times, he says there are four broad approaches that could theoretically be used by Biden with regard to Putin.
00:24:56.000According to Bill Browder, who's an investor and political activist, who has a really shocking book that he wrote about his experiences facing down Putin.
00:25:05.000He was a financier who worked in Russia for years and years and years, and then was targeted because one of his business partners was Sergei Metnitsky, who was killed in prison by the Putin regime.
00:25:22.000His suggestion is that You could enact legislation to confiscate frozen Russian bank reserves for the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine, theoretically.
00:25:32.000Now everybody's been very unwilling to do that because they're afraid that there would be a flight from dollar assets if that sort of thing happened, which you understand, right?
00:25:39.000If you are a foreign actor and you're afraid that the United States is going to confiscate your money if it's held in American dollars, this could harm the American dollar.
00:25:49.000With that said, you may have to take those sorts of risks if you hope to actually punish a dictator.
00:25:55.000Theoretically, you could back dissidents in more significant ways and stop with these hostage trades.
00:26:02.000If you continue with these hostage trades, Putin is just going to take more hostages.
00:26:07.000And finally, you could actually do the thing that Biden really will not do, and that is jack up American production in the oil and natural gas sector.
00:26:18.000I mean, it's an opportunity, frankly, for America's economy.
00:26:22.000The fact that Europe is now cut off from Russian oil supplies would be an opportunity for the United States to jack up its LNG production and start shipping all of that stuff over to Europe.
00:26:31.000Instead, Joe Biden is so enthralled to his radical left on the environment that he refuses to do any of that sort of stuff.
00:26:37.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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00:27:27.000I mean, it sure seems like something, as you've said a few times, given that he refuses to criticize him, that he seems to be a fanboy of him.
00:27:54.000Now we have someone who had the honor of serving in the White House, didn't consider it an honor, didn't consider his oath of office to protect and fend the Constitution.
00:28:06.000And on this week, speaking out the way he did about Navalny shows you that he is a person without values.
00:28:14.000He looks like he's going to be a person without dollars either, but the values are what concern us.
00:28:20.000Yes, the dollars... I don't know what he has on him, but I think it's probably financial.
00:28:26.000Either something financial he has on him, or something on the come.
00:28:31.000Okay, so now it's just speculation about Trump and Putin as opposed to, you know, actually not slow walking the aid to Ukraine as Joe Biden has done for literal years, taking the middle position on everything.
00:29:40.000And meanwhile, the Democrats are fully divided on Israel and whether to support, you know, America's democratic ally in the Middle East that provides America with intelligence resources and acts essentially as a land-based aircraft carrier for United States interests in the Middle East.
00:29:55.000And we're telling them, you can't defend yourselves against Hamas to the extent that you take out Hamas in Rafah city.
00:30:04.000That is what the Biden administration is completely split on this sort of stuff.
00:30:08.000According to Politico, the Israel-Hamas conflict is opening new rifts in the House Democratic Caucus, with the second Congressional Progressive Caucus quitting the group.
00:30:16.000Over the war, and Representative Rashida Tlaib backing an activist campaign to undermine President Joe Biden in the Michigan Democratic Primary.
00:30:23.000The new development to underscore that more than four months in, Israel's military operations in Gaza are still causing a painful rift within the Democratic Party.
00:30:32.000Well, I mean, it's not Israel's military operations.
00:30:35.000Like, this thing was not initiated by Israel.
00:30:37.000It was initiated by Hamas, committing the greatest atrocity against Jews since World War II.
00:30:42.000And yet, this is somehow shattering the Democratic coalition.
00:30:46.000Largely because, again, the Democratic Party is split between their crazy wing and their actual sort of traditional base, which tends to be more pro-Israel.
00:30:55.000The younger, insane generation that has been trained on nonsense by the garbage reporters at the Washington Post and New York Times, they continue to push the Biden administration to simply concede to Hamas.
00:31:06.000And so what you have is a split inside the administration.
00:31:08.000You'll have members of the Biden administration out there talking about how they need to put pressure on Israel, and then you'll simultaneously have John Kirby out there talking about how Israel is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties.
00:31:17.000They're speaking two languages to two different groups of people.
00:31:22.000And so you see these two things come into conflict for the Democratic Party.
00:31:25.000And Russia looks at this and they say, look, you guys can't even get your act together on like the most morally obvious conflict in modern world right now.
00:31:32.000The conflict between, again, a Democratic ally of the United States that was attacked in a fashion that for its size dwarfs 9-11.
00:31:41.000And you can't even get on board with them extirpating a terrorist group.
00:31:46.000You can't, like, why would Russia think that they can't outlast?
00:33:17.000Okay, so that is a universal proposition in Israel, but Pelosi and the left, they are trying to appease their left-wing base by blaming Netanyahu, but then they're asked an obvious question.
00:33:28.000So then why are you supporting the Israeli government?
00:33:30.000And they can't answer that question because, again, they're constantly splitting the baby.
00:33:37.000that if you don't like what Israel is doing, and the President has made it clear that some of what Israel is doing he doesn't like, and you go on supplying them with hardware to do those things, you own this operation every bit as much as they do, don't you?
00:33:54.000We have always supported Israel as our national security friend, largely because it was in our interest to do so.
00:34:02.000Largely because we had shared values and only democracy in the region.
00:34:09.000The behavior of Netanyahu is, in my view, inexcusable in terms of how it has affected the collateral damage to children and families and the rest.
00:34:19.000But nobody can take away the right of any country to defend itself that has been brutally attacked in that way.
00:34:30.000That's the policy of the entire war cabinet, and Israel has currently lost about 240 soldiers in Gaza when they have complete air superiority.
00:34:38.000They're doing that to avoid collateral damage.
00:34:40.000But again, America's enemies, including Iran, Russia, Iran, China, they see American weakness.
00:34:46.000They see Western divisions, and they are exploiting that weakness and division right now, which is why Houthi attacks, for example, in the Red Sea are working.
00:34:54.000According to the Wall Street Journal, a cargo ship is at risk of sinking in the Gulf of Aden after being hit by a Yemen-based Houthi missile in the most significant strike since the Iran-backed group started launching attacks last fall.
00:35:04.000The increasingly audacious attacks come despite weeks of U.S.
00:35:06.000airstrikes and highlight the challenges of deterring the group.
00:35:14.000Persistent Houthi strikes are raising new questions for the Biden administration about how to bring the attacks to a halt and prevent the continuing war in the Gaza Strip from fueling a more destabilizing regional conflict.
00:35:23.000The answer there is, you let Israel destroy its enemies, and you destroy your own enemies, and that is how you actually win wars.
00:35:29.000But if the West refuses to win wars, then its enemies will.
00:35:32.000In just one second, we'll get to how all of this is impacting Joe Biden's re-elect efforts.
00:35:44.000But you don't have to be a president to look like one.
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00:36:45.000Because remember, the vast majority of the Jewish community By Jewish community, I mean people who are born into a Jewish family, for example, are not observant, do not care about Jewish precepts, do not care about Israel.
00:36:57.000There is an increasing percentage of Jews who are realizing that the left really, really don't like Jews a lot.
00:37:02.000But with that said, that is an amazing number.
00:37:05.000Usually in every election, 70, 75, 80% of Jews vote for the Democrats because the vast majority of Jews are secular leftists who have no relationship with their religion at all.
00:37:13.000But according to this polling data, Again, the suburbs are split 39-39.
00:37:20.000Men are 47-40 in New York for Donald Trump, according to this Siena poll.
00:37:25.000You know, whether that is true or not, the bottom line is that Joe Biden is in a seriously weakened position in his re-elect effort.
00:37:33.000Again, the latest head-to-head polls between Trump and Biden continue to show Trump with a durable lead.
00:37:41.000A Rasmussen Report poll that came out just last week shows Trump up 6, 47 to 41.
00:37:51.000In other words, Joe Biden seems to be stuck in the low 40s, and there's not a lot he can do to change that, especially because, again, the thing that's reinforcing weakness on the world stage is the fact that the president is physically weak.
00:38:02.000It's like he's the physical manifestation of his own policies.
00:38:06.000So yesterday Joe Biden was was facing down the stairs of Air Force One again and it went real poorly.
00:38:29.000And then a reporter asked Joe Biden if Gavin Newsom is going to replace him on the ticket, and Joe Biden started speaking Swahili or something.
00:39:35.000Which means, once again, folks, if you wish Donald Trump to win, and I'm somebody who in a Trump versus Biden race wishes Donald Trump to win, If you wish Trump to win, then he needs to ratchet down the crazy.
00:39:47.000The entire campaign for Joe Biden is going to be Donald Trump is crazy.
00:39:58.000Here was CNN reporting that yesterday.
00:40:02.000President Biden is ordering his campaign to get far more aggressive when it comes to his likely opponent.
00:40:07.000This brand new reporting from CNN's MJ Lee is that Biden personally instructed his top campaign aides recently to spend even more time painting Trump as unhinged and calling out his inflammatory rhetoric.
00:40:20.000Two sources tell MJ that the thrust of Biden's instruction was to significantly ramp up the campaign's efforts to highlight the crazy S. That Trump says in public.
00:41:20.000So Donald Trump did an interview with Laura Ingraham last night on Fox News, and he said some good things, as always.
00:41:25.000There's some good Trump and there's some bad Trump.
00:41:27.000Stop providing material to your enemies.
00:41:29.000First rule of politics, don't interrupt your opponents when they're making a mistake.
00:41:32.000So, here's what Trump said that was good.
00:41:34.000He said he wants a debate with Joe Biden.
00:41:35.000Now, Joe Biden ain't gonna give him a debate.
00:41:37.000He's not gonna give him a debate for a variety of reasons.
00:41:39.000He's gonna be able to say that Trump wouldn't give anybody else a debate in the primaries, which is true.
00:41:43.000He's also going to say that he's not going to debate somebody who tried to steal the election of 2020 after losing it and who is now going to be convicted of crimes and all this kind of stuff.
00:42:43.000You should be encouraging your people to use mail-in ballots.
00:42:46.000Anything that gets them to vote would be the thing that you should be telling them to do.
00:42:51.000Donald Trump told people not to vote by mail in 2020 and he lost.
00:42:54.000If he had told people to vote by mail, there is a better than 50% chance that he would have won because that was a very close election in the swing state and Republicans refused to vote by mail because Donald Trump told them they should not vote by mail.
00:43:06.000And the problem is this, even if 90% of the people that Donald Trump told not to vote by mail showed up on polling day and voted, 10% didn't, and those votes were never entered into the ballot box.
00:43:19.000You know where Republicans have won broad victories?
00:43:21.000In places like Florida, where the governor of the state, DeSantis, he actually said, yeah, go vote by mail, do whatever you have to do to vote, vote legally, do what you need to do, vote early, but vote for us.
00:43:36.000Unless you're actually going to fight the law in the courts and have laws changed, no return about mail-in voting, you have to play by the rules that are on the field right now.
00:43:49.000It means you're going to lose if you do that sort of stuff.
00:43:51.000Here is Trump ripping on mail-in ballots.
00:43:53.000Laura's trying to save him, by the way.
00:43:55.000That was a lot of the interview last night, is Laura Ingraham trying to save Trump from himself and Trump being like, nah, I'm gonna run directly into that tree.
00:45:28.000Namely, Joe Biden is an awful president on every front.
00:45:31.000Namely, he is in fact being persecuted by Joe Biden's Department of Justice and a wide variety of other public officials who are misusing and abusing their office to target him.
00:46:28.000Now, in this New York civil fraud case, this Judge Arthur Engeron ruled against you for almost half a billion dollars, plus the interest that runs every day.
00:46:41.000When I first read this, it was like $87,000 a day.
00:46:44.000How would you put up that kind of money?
00:47:37.000And now, it is also true that much of the stuff that the media are portraying as foolishness and craziness and all this stuff will have no impact on the race.
00:47:44.000So there's certain stuff that may have an impact, and then there's stuff that won't have an impact.
00:47:47.000One of the things that's not going to have an impact, but that the media made a big deal out of, is that over the weekend Donald Trump went to something called SneakerCon.
00:47:53.000Now, this kind of stuff, it's stupid, like, it's laughable, but is it going to hurt Trump in any way?
00:49:31.000It's the other kind of stuff that is a problem for Donald Trump.
00:49:35.000Okay, meanwhile, the left continues to demonstrate its absolute inability to deal with the immigration issue.
00:49:42.000New York City is a full-scale disaster area.
00:49:45.000So, New York City is now, I'm kidding you not, they are giving migrants a debit card, according to Nicole Gelinas writing for the New York Post.
00:49:55.000Mayor Eric Adams is giving out prepaid cash cards to migrants and apparently it will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID check, no restrictions, no fraud control.
00:50:08.000So why exactly give up the credit cards or the debit cards?
00:50:12.000The mayor's office said that they were trying to solve a problem is that migrants staying in hotels don't eat all their food.
00:50:18.000And Doc Go, the city's no-bid emergency contractor to provide migrants three meals a day, throws away up to 5,000 meals daily, wasting $7.2 million a year.
00:50:27.000And so the idea is you give them a debit card and they go and they buy their own meals and it will save you money.
00:50:32.000Or alternatively, if you want to incentivize people to illegally immigrate, tell them they can come to New York City and get a free $10,000 gift for doing so.
00:50:38.000In the state of Florida, we give like a $10,000 bonus to cops who move down here because we want more cops.
00:50:42.000What do you think happens when you give a $10,000 bonus to people who cross the border illegally?
00:50:46.000And things are going well in New York.
00:50:47.000Tape emerged yesterday of migrants attacking cops in a New York City migrant shelter.
00:50:51.000here was apparently the cops are attempting to detain a suspect
00:51:05.000at the randall's island migrant shelter and um...
00:51:09.000And migrants started throwing objects at the cops.
00:51:14.000Also people cursing at them in Spanish.
00:51:16.000The suspect seen in the video is wearing a white shirt and being detained by the police.