Timcast IRL - Tim Pool - Houthis ATTACK Saudi Oil Tankers, Iran War EXPANDS ft Mike Benz & Josie TRHL | Timcast IRL

00:02:27.000 Today, the Guardian is reporting today that the Middle East crisis is getting out of control.

00:02:34.000 The Houthis have been attacking ships that are in the Red Sea.

00:02:37.000 You've got Iran that are going after ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

00:02:41.000 This is a big problem, clearly, and it's led the Saudis to be concerned with getting nuclear weapons, which is something that the U.S. has been trying to avoid.

00:02:49.000 But apparently, the U.S. approved it, and now the deal might be in limbo or the U.S. might not be approving it.

00:02:57.000 But we're going to talk about that.

00:02:59.000 The House has passed.

00:03:00.000 A $1.15 trillion NDAA.

00:03:04.000 Now, the NDAA is something the government passes every year because it's the National Defense Authorization Act.

00:03:10.000 This particular year, there is a provision in the NDAA that has some kind of merging of U.S. intel and military with the Israeli intel and military.

00:03:23.000 This is a problem for a lot of people, and so we're going to discuss that.

00:03:28.000 Rand Paul has told, or has, has, Put up a website, I guess, that has a bunch more information about COVID and the leaks and the lab leak theory.

00:03:38.000 I guess Dr. Fauci is now in more hot water, allegedly in more hot water.

00:03:43.000 We'll see if anything comes.

00:03:44.000 We're going to talk about that a whole lot.

00:03:47.000 And there was a stabbing in New York, in New York City, and the attacker yelled Allahu Akbar as he stabbed two men.

00:03:55.000 So this is something that obviously we're going to talk about here.

00:03:59.000 And one more big issue that we're talking about is there's been 20 deaths.

00:04:04.000 Currently linked to ChatGPT so far.

00:04:08.000 So, OpenAI is facing litigation over this.

00:04:11.000 AI is going to be something that is going to be in our lives, and we're going to talk about the ramifications for that.

00:04:17.000 So, but before we get into any and all of that stuff, we want you to head on over to Bunker Branding and go ahead and pick up some Timcast merch.

00:04:25.000 There's right now we're showing you Ian's Betrayal.

00:04:28.000 It's a bunch of the people from the Timcast crew.

00:04:30.000 I'm over here in the back shooting at Ian.

00:04:33.000 I mean, you've all seen me talk to Ian, and you know that I would never.

00:04:38.000 Ever harm Ian because he's a wonderful person.

00:04:41.000 Um, but head on over to Bunker Bunker Branding.

00:04:43.000 Also, head on over to rumble.com so you can join us for the after show.

00:04:48.000 Head on over to timcast.com where you can join our Discord and call in to the after show.

00:04:54.000 But joining us tonight to talk about all of the things that we mentioned, Mike Benz.

00:04:59.000 Hello, how are you, Mike?

00:05:01.000 Who are you?

00:05:01.000 Great, I'm just a guy on the internet.

00:05:05.000 Okay, then.

00:05:06.000 Uh, I mean, you guys know Mike, right?

00:05:08.000 He's been here before, so you know, he'll talk about the blob and he'll probably talk about CIA and.

00:05:12.000 Seems like we'll probably have some a couple things to say about the uh the Rand Paul Fauci stuff.

00:05:17.000 So Josie's here tonight.

00:05:19.000 Hi, everybody.

00:05:20.000 I'm Josie.

00:05:20.000 I'm the redheaded libertarian.

00:05:22.000 I'm on X, uh, I don't know, baby machine and queen of the trads.

00:05:29.000 Oh, hi, guys.

00:05:30.000 Uh, two days in a row.

00:05:31.000 How's it going?

00:05:32.000 Uh, Brett, uh, what's up?

00:05:34.000 Sorry, I just said I appreciate you.

00:05:35.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:05:36.000 I'm what they call the B team here.

00:05:38.000 They pull me in when everybody's out of town, and that's okay.

00:05:41.000 I'm normally doing PCC live five days a week, Monday through Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern.

00:05:46.000 You should join us there.

00:05:47.000 It's a lot of fun, but we've got politics to get into, right, Carter?

00:05:49.000 We do.

00:05:50.000 I'm Carter Banks.

00:05:51.000 Thanks for watching tonight.

00:05:52.000 We've got Phil hosting, and Brett is here, Mike Benz, and Josie, the redheaded libertarian.

00:05:56.000 I'm glad you all came.

00:05:57.000 Let's get to the news.

00:05:58.000 So, from Reuters right now, Trump vows to punish Iran for Houthi attacks in the Red Sea as oil surges over $100.

00:05:58.000 All right.

00:06:07.000 From Dubai, U.S. President Donald Trump promised on Thursday major military punishment for Iran and its Houthi allies after the Yemeni fighters struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, extending the Middle East war to a second major shipping choke point.

00:06:20.000 Fears that disruption could widen further to block another sea route sent global prices surging in one of the steepest rises of the war.

00:06:27.000 Brent crude rose more than 6%, breaking through $100 of ale for the first time since May.

00:06:32.000 Two weeks into the effective collapse of an interim truce meant to end the war, the U.S. military launched another round of airstrikes on Iran overnight into Thursday, prompting Iran to fire at neighboring Arab countries that house U.S. bases.

00:06:43.000 Iranian state media said a missile struck Kushem Island on the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday evening, raising the prospect of further night attacks.

00:06:50.000 In a conflict well into its fifth month that has already killed thousands and raised fears of a global economic downturn.

00:06:58.000 The Houthis getting involved in this and going after the Red Sea, it really is an escalation that could cause significant problems to the economy.

00:07:08.000 The U.S. had really kind of had basically oil shipping and prices relatively managed, especially considering the predictions in February and April.

00:07:22.000 People were talking about $200 a gallon or $200 a barrel.

00:07:25.000 Oil and the price of gas was going to go through the roof.

00:07:29.000 And it seemed like, as long as the conflict stayed in the Strait of Hormuz and between Iran and the U.S., that seemed like that was going to be kind of the same.

00:07:39.000 But the Houthis getting involved now, going after the Red Sea, making sure that the problem escalates further across the region, is something that is likely to continue to drive up oil prices.

00:07:52.000 And it's going to be something that's going to make an already generally unpopular war very unpopular with the American people if the price of gas.

00:08:00.000 Continues to go up.

00:08:02.000 Yeah.

00:08:03.000 I mean, the second front being opened is obviously going to cause a lot of headaches.

00:08:11.000 One of the things that brought the price of oil down was the fact that a lot of ships were not, they respected the threat, so to speak, of shipping containers being blown up and vessels being blown up in the strait.

00:08:26.000 And a deal looked like it was forthcoming on the table.

00:08:31.000 The deal terms would be expected.

00:08:34.000 It was always just around the corner for about a month and a half after about the 70 day mark in the war.

00:08:42.000 And then, basically, since the conflict reignited kinetically, we're now in this situation where ships did attempt to go through and then were getting blown up.

00:08:54.000 That caused an escalation in the prices.

00:08:57.000 And then with the Houthis now opening up a second front, There's a question about whether any shipping is going to be able to move basically through either front.

00:09:09.000 And that is obviously going to have a number of spiral effects. 0.90

00:09:15.000 Yeah, I mean, we're not able to contain the Houthis. 0.96

00:09:18.000 We tried to neutralize the Houthi problem last year with limited success. 0.95

00:09:24.000 Yeah, I mean, when it's an issue of the Strait of Hormuz, you have to worry about stuff that's coming out of any of those particular Gulf states.

00:09:32.000 But when it comes to the Red Sea, Then that's something where you're dealing with a lot of global traffic.

00:09:41.000 It's not just oil.

00:09:44.000 Going through the Red Sea to get to the Med is one thing.

00:09:49.000 Going around the Horn of Africa is a totally different thing.

00:09:52.000 I've heard that it takes an additional 14 days to get around Africa or something.

00:09:59.000 And that's for any product that comes basically from Asia and heads to the West.

00:10:06.000 So all of Europe has got to worry about this.

00:10:08.000 Obviously, the US does.

00:10:10.000 I mean, I guess less so because you could feasibly or you could conceive of them going across the Pacific, but I don't know anything about shipping lanes.

00:10:16.000 I don't know what it's like to go across the Pacific or if that even happens very much.

00:10:20.000 That's why we need the Sub Saharan Canal. 0.71

00:10:23.000 Just make a canal straight through Eritrea, Ethiopia, just all of it's a straight line.

00:10:29.000 We call it the Donald Trump Sub Saharan Canal.

00:10:31.000 There's talk of building, or at least the Saudis were talking about trying to divert around the.

00:10:37.000 Trying to do an overland kind of like railway type thing to be able to move, you know, kind of by.

00:10:43.000 But that creates its own problems.

00:10:45.000 Now you're creating, you know, bridges and. 0.55

00:10:49.000 I mean, this is what we were classically doing to destabilize Syria is, you know, if you have oil pipelines or you have logistics over land, you can just bomb the logistics online. 0.83

00:10:59.000 And the Houthis have no compunction about attacking that stuff. 0.76

00:11:02.000 So, what do they do? 0.73

00:11:03.000 Look, going into midterms, what do they do to try and stabilize oil prices?

00:11:08.000 Because it doesn't look like this is stopping anytime soon.

00:11:10.000 And, like we've said before, midterms are largely predicated upon whether people are feeling it in their wallets.

00:11:15.000 This can't stand if it makes it all the way to there.

00:11:18.000 They're going to lose even more.

00:11:19.000 Than people already are imagining they're going to.

00:11:22.000 They're going to do what they always do borrow against our reserves.

00:11:26.000 Yeah, they do do that all the time.

00:11:28.000 Well, the ticking time bomb question is the reserves.

00:11:32.000 I mean, one of the things that I think was shocking to a lot of people is various disclosures made around the time the MOU was announced that part of the attempt to strike the deal was based on a perception that.

00:11:52.000 We were running low on oil reserves and had to actually strike some sort of detente in order to mitigate reserves from being depleted.

00:12:02.000 And that was one of the things that I believe the Iranian foreign minister on X in announcing the MOU said that, you know, the admin was in a position of desperation and that's why they did it.

00:12:14.000 And then you had some contemporaneous statements around the depleted reserves, and who knows what's true or not true there.

00:12:20.000 But that.

00:12:23.000 There is, if this escalates, it could make an MOU 2.0 a kind of functional necessity to strike ahead of the midterms.

00:12:34.000 Yeah, I don't know if I have a strong take on what it means for the midterms.

00:12:41.000 I don't know how fast they can get a significant amount of Venezuelan crude actually into the market, you know, as oil that can be refined or whatever.

00:12:52.000 I don't know.

00:12:53.000 You know, I don't have a strong take.

00:12:55.000 I do think that the Republicans are in a great position outside of this conflict.

00:13:02.000 But considering, you know, how much damage has already been done to Iran, I don't know that Iran is going to go ahead and be like, okay, if the U.S. were to say pull out and stop, right?

00:13:10.000 Like, so there's a lot of people that are anti war that are like, just stop, right?

00:13:14.000 Just stop.

00:13:14.000 It's a terrible idea.

00:13:15.000 This is not going well.

00:13:17.000 Just stop. 1.00

00:13:18.000 If that were to happen, Iran's, it doesn't go back to normal. 1.00

00:13:22.000 You know, Iran's not going to be, okay, you stop, blah, blah, blah. 1.00

00:13:25.000 It'll be fine now. 0.88

00:13:26.000 Um, You know, the rules have all changed regarding probably the Strait of Hormuz.

00:13:31.000 So you're going to likely have to have the military guarding ships that want to go through the Strait of Hormuz, if at all.

00:13:38.000 Or Iran's going to say, well, we're just going to, you know, close the Strait when we feel like it or what have you, trying to apply pressure.

00:13:44.000 So the idea that just pulling out fixes things, I don't see that as realistic.

00:13:51.000 And so I'm not sure that there's any solution that the U.S. has that's good about the midterms.

00:13:57.000 I think the The most that the Republicans can rely on now is they can, first of all, like Josie said, Donald Trump can go into the strategic reserves, which I think is a bad idea.

00:14:09.000 But at the end of the day, especially for political motivations, that's a terrible idea.

00:14:14.000 But that's possibly what they're going to do.

00:14:17.000 And then they have to rely on how unpopular the Democrats are now.

00:14:21.000 And the Democrats are not looking particularly well.

00:14:24.000 We just had something on CNN a couple days ago where the Democrats at this point in 2018 or whatever was up by like 16 points.

00:14:38.000 And in 2000, I'm not sure exactly what it was, I'm not sure the dates, but the last two elections, they were up by like 16 and up by 10.

00:14:45.000 And now their lead is only plus four.

00:14:48.000 Which is like within the margin of error.

00:14:50.000 So, granted, the Republicans are in a very precarious position right now.

00:14:55.000 And I don't think that it's likely that they're going to take the House or that they're going to take back the Senate.

00:15:00.000 But they could keep the House even with those kind of numbers because there's redistricting and the bad polling numbers that the Democrats are getting because of all the DSA candidates that are making a lot of noise in the news and stuff.

00:15:16.000 And I think the American people, specifically people that are likely to go out and vote.

00:15:21.000 In the midterms, I don't think that they like the messages that they're hearing from the DSA.

00:15:25.000 And they're underfunded because of the USAID shutdown.

00:15:28.000 Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, that's honestly like, I think Tim was talking about it the other day.

00:15:32.000 I think they have like 30 million or something like that.

00:15:34.000 I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it's, it's a, like the Republicans have like almost a billion dollars through all the PACs and stuff.

00:15:41.000 And I think the Democrats have something like 300 million or something like that, but it's a significant deficit.

00:15:46.000 And when you have very little money and a bad message, you know, you don't motivate people to go to the polls again.

00:15:54.000 Especially when you're dealing with the people that like the DSA, they're young people, they're people that are not high propensity voters, and you're dealing with the people that are the high propensity voters.

00:16:03.000 They're people that have some property, they got houses.

00:16:06.000 They don't want to hear people saying, Oh, we're going to take your landlords because they're Airbnb's houses, and they don't want to hear that someone wants to be elected that's going to take away their property or something like that.

00:16:20.000 And that's what they hear when they hear socialism.

00:16:24.000 Young people are favorable to the idea or the term socialism.

00:16:27.000 They think of it as just health care and, and, you know, free school.

00:16:31.000 Older people, boomers, and, and people in my generation, like they have a different understanding of socialism.

00:16:37.000 They understand that there's a lot of expropriation, a lot of things that go along with it.

00:16:41.000 So these high propensity voters, the boomers, they know exactly or they have a certain conception of what the DSA is talking about, which likely actually aligns with what the DSA means. 0.64

00:16:53.000 And they're not going to vote for them. 0.73

00:16:55.000 Is there a gap in the younger age of voters who show up for midterm elections in the left versus the right?

00:17:02.000 Like, do more Democrats or more Republicans show up?

00:17:05.000 Because I know that in general, young people don't vote unless it's the national elections and stuff like that or presidential election.

00:17:11.000 Is there a gap between the left and the right and who shows up for midterms?

00:17:15.000 I don't have numbers, but my gut instinct is yes, because the left are the activists.

00:17:23.000 Well, that's what I was saying. 0.72

00:17:25.000 Imagine what you were saying was that you're saying that like Republicans or at least boomers who want to keep their property are more likely to show up for this election because it's a midterm and the rest of the kids are going to stay home.

00:17:36.000 But the way I think about it is that the activists are the ones that show up for all the elections.

00:17:39.000 That's why they win the school boards, that's why they win the local elections.

00:17:43.000 I think that's a good instinct.

00:17:44.000 But at the same time, I think that the number of actual activists out there that'll get out and vote they're not funded anymore either.

00:17:51.000 They're not.

00:17:52.000 But compared to the number of boomers, because Gen Z is a smaller generation, anyways, there are fewer people in Gen Z.

00:18:00.000 And so you're dealing with, even if the numbers were 50 50, Gen Z being right and left, you're dealing with 5 or 10% that are actually the activists.

00:18:10.000 And you've got all the boomers that are out there going to say, I don't want to elect someone that's going to take things away from me.

00:18:20.000 And I don't know, there are only certain districts where these people are running and they have some kind of. 0.97

00:18:29.000 You know, grassroots support or what have you.

00:18:32.000 But I think to Mike's point, without the USAID money, they just don't have the reserves to be able to get out there and say, hey, you know, we're going to make a serious push.

00:18:43.000 And I don't know how useful past precedent and data is on this because, you know, the MAGA revolution really changed a lot of young Republican dynamics.

00:18:54.000 You know, it used to be the case that the Republican Party was sort of all older, you know, the classic quote if you're, you know, if you're.

00:19:02.000 If you're young and conservative, you don't have a heart.

00:19:06.000 If you're old and liberal, you don't have a brain, sort of thing.

00:19:10.000 And so you had a natural skewing of the younger demographic, I think, showing up just in the midterms, just by virtue of the young Democrats being the activist class. 0.71

00:19:20.000 But I think that with the MAGA movement, you had a lot of young people, Charlie and the turning point sort of revolution, with diehards who would show up in, I suspect, in. 0.58

00:19:36.000 In numbers that Republican movements of the past did not.

00:19:42.000 And I think that actually in the 2024 election, didn't Trump win, at least in the white demographic?

00:19:48.000 But I believe it was a historical sort of young people demo that was captured in 2024.

00:19:54.000 And the key question is going to be, in my view, the mobilization of the new sort of nouveau MAGA hesitant, the kind of MAGA diehards who may or may not be feeling disenchanted because of.

00:20:10.000 Uh, you know, certain policy pursuits of the admin, and this gets you know to a number of issues that are kind of playing out contemporaneously, even in the Iran situation.

00:20:23.000 You know, the reason the MOU blew apart was because of the Israel Lebanon uh provision in the MOU.

00:20:31.000 Uh, and when you know the Israel sort of continued the ingress into Lebanon, that was perceived as a violation of the MOU, then Iran began. 0.70

00:20:41.000 You know, firing on ships saying, you know, listen, we told you, you can't do this while Israel's in Lebanon.

00:20:47.000 And there's sort of a tactical question about whether or not, you know, senior leadership in the admin can sort of get some detente in Lebanon from the Israeli side, whether or not there's a sort of Israeli perception that doing so is the thing to do chronically or the thing to do tactically in order to give support to. 0.51

00:21:12.000 Basically, you know, Republican chances of keeping that.

00:21:15.000 This is one of the things that was talked about was like, is it, do you have a kind of Minsk Accord replay where in 2014, 2015, 2016, the Biden admin was striking these sort of detentes with Russia in the Ukraine Donbass war, but not really striking a peace that was intended to be permanent, but rather to kind of reload because, you know, there was a sort of a need to reload.

00:21:44.000 And there's a question of whether.

00:21:46.000 An MOU 2.0 is kind of struck with Israeli cooperation in order to get through the midterm, stabilize prices, and then immediately ratchet back up.

00:21:58.000 But the problem is that's now been telegraphed pretty widely.

00:22:01.000 And you're basically telling voters, we are sort of doing this as a temporary thing.

00:22:08.000 And then as soon as you vote, you know, vote us back in, we're going to relaunch this war you didn't want.

00:22:13.000 So, you know, that's like a tough thing to speak to the sort of MAGA hesitance now.

00:22:19.000 And since that's the core demographic that, in my view, will determine the midterms, you know, there's a real Rubik's Cube that's difficult to solve here politically.

00:22:30.000 I think that it's going to be really hard in the midterms because the coalition that got Trump elected has been shattered.

00:22:39.000 So it wasn't just MAGA that got Trump elected.

00:22:41.000 It was sort of the America First variation.

00:22:45.000 It was MAHA, the MAHA moms.

00:22:48.000 It was the libertarians.

00:22:49.000 It was the disaffected liberals.

00:22:50.000 And they all came together on a common cause like, you know what?

00:22:52.000 We want healthier kids.

00:22:53.000 We don't want war.

00:22:54.000 We want the spending to be cut.

00:22:55.000 And there's a lot of them that feel betrayed now because a lot of those promises were broken.

00:23:01.000 And, you know, as a libertarian, I will say right up, in the first three months of Donald Trump's presidency, he made at the Libertarian Convention 32 promises to the libertarians.

00:23:10.000 He made 20 to the world, but he made 32 to the libertarians, implied promises like, I'm the anti war president, and then actual promises.

00:23:19.000 And he fulfilled 16 of those promises in the first three months, and then it stopped.

00:23:24.000 And when it stopped, so did we, we ended up losing everybody that was in the administration for us, or everybody that was, I mean, we lost Thomas Massey, we lost MTG, we lost Joe Kent.

00:23:34.000 You know, Tulsi's gone.

00:23:35.000 So, who's left?

00:23:36.000 RFK.

00:23:37.000 That's really it.

00:23:38.000 And then we're in war, and then everything is anti Semitic.

00:23:42.000 So, people are just feeling disaffected, and disaffected people don't vote.

00:23:46.000 They don't take a vote.

00:23:47.000 16 is way better than most presidents.

00:23:49.000 Yes.

00:23:50.000 Yeah.

00:23:51.000 I was so optimistic in those first three months, and then it was like a switch flipped.

00:23:57.000 Well, I mean, not to sound like I'm just cheerleading the administration, but I think that the things that Trump promised that he hasn't been able to deliver.

00:24:08.000 Likely were not within the scope of the presidency, unless you want to list them off.

00:24:14.000 I have them written down.

00:24:14.000 I don't have them all memorized.

00:24:17.000 The point that I'm making is Trump will run his face.

00:24:20.000 And a lot of times he'll say, Yes, I'm going to do this, or I want to do that, or what have you.

00:24:24.000 And that doesn't mean that it's actually in the scope of the presidency.

00:24:29.000 And I think a lot of people that are critical of Donald Trump, a lot of times they were expecting more than a president could deliver.

00:24:38.000 That being said, The whole idea of like the MAGA coalition being shattered and stuff, I don't know, like, I'm not particularly plugged in with like the MAHA stuff.

00:24:47.000 That was never my kind of perspective.

00:24:51.000 But I understand that there are a lot of people that feel like the president hasn't delivered for them.

00:24:57.000 And, you know, as far as because my major concern was deportations and ending the just the caravans of people coming in.

00:25:10.000 For me, I'm like, all right, you know, at the very least, we've got that.

00:25:13.000 So, I mean, I'm not like, oh, this has been, you know, gangbusters and stuff.

00:25:20.000 But it's like you have to have some level of like expectation that's not at the highest level, right?

00:25:25.000 Like I said last night on the show, I said, I expected maybe we get some continued tax cuts for the citizens and we get some deportation.

00:25:34.000 That was about where I expected it to be.

00:25:36.000 But the point was, he advertised himself as somebody who was going to tear down the system and build something new.

00:25:41.000 Now, maybe I'm just politically naive, but I just, or Whatever, but I didn't imagine that to be possible.

00:25:46.000 And I imagine all presidents as over promising.

00:25:49.000 So, if you can get two to three of the things that they're talking about, well, that's, you know, it's, you know, not getting more doesn't mean I'm going to go vote for Ro Khanna or a Democrat.

00:26:01.000 But I, to Josie's point, though, like if people don't feel like they've got enough, no matter how much they've got, right?

00:26:08.000 Just like a situation when it comes to, like, you know, we talk about kitchen table issues.

00:26:13.000 It doesn't matter how much money someone's making, it's do they feel like their dollar is going as far as it should?

00:26:19.000 Because people, People vote on feelings.

00:26:21.000 So, if there are people out there that were like, Look, I wanted Donald Trump to do this, and they don't feel like he's doing the things that they want, you can't get them up to go to the polls, especially when it's an off year.

00:26:33.000 Done the glyphosate stuff.

00:26:34.000 Yeah, it what?

00:26:36.000 The glyphosate.

00:26:37.000 Remember the one show I was like, I woke up one day and I just see like one issue voters on glyphosate.

00:26:42.000 And I'm just like, Bro.

00:26:44.000 I don't even know what, I like, I know that that's a mob thing, but it is.

00:26:48.000 It's round up and it's illegal in other countries and it really affects the quality of our food. 0.98

00:26:52.000 That's why when you go to Italy, You feel fine when you eat like wheat, but when you come to America, you feel like crap.

00:26:59.000 And Roundup was being sued, I think, or Bayer, Bayer, who they kind of got over $11 billion they were sued for. 0.86

00:27:06.000 And I think it isn't one of the things that they passed saying, oh, you can't sue them.

00:27:09.000 Yeah, you can't sue them.

00:27:10.000 You can't sue them anymore.

00:27:11.000 So, and when they're giving, they were sued over cancer.

00:27:13.000 People were getting cancer and they were sued for $11 billion.

00:27:16.000 You can't sue anymore.

00:27:17.000 And I get it.

00:27:18.000 Is it because you can't sue because they were found guilty?

00:27:20.000 It's because you can't sue because they're just like COVID.

00:27:25.000 Did they, were they found guilty and they had to, or were they, Was the finding against the company that?

00:27:30.000 I'm not sure those logistics of it, but you can't sue this big corporation anymore.

00:27:35.000 You're not allowed to.

00:27:36.000 And it was like, I saw that. 0.62

00:27:37.000 I'm like, look, I get it, because especially if you're branding yourself as Maha, then this is a singular issue that you care about extremely.

00:27:44.000 But I don't buy that if the next Democrat comes into office, that they're going to have strong positions on glyphosate either.

00:27:52.000 And I guess it's like cutting your nose off to spit your face.

00:27:55.000 But I get it.

00:27:55.000 Like a lot of people felt like they were let down with those promises.

00:27:59.000 And the other thing is Charlie Kirk's.

00:28:01.000 Murders also shattered the coalition in the same way.

00:28:04.000 You mentioned Turning Point earlier.

00:28:06.000 Like fundraising and Turning Point isn't the same fundamentally that it was a couple of years ago.

00:28:13.000 And that's another blow against the administration, they don't have that access to the youth in the same way that they did before, as far as fundraising and getting the kids out and really active in the community.

00:28:23.000 Everybody knows that when it comes to door knocking, Democrats do it a thousand times better and they're a thousand times more effective.

00:28:29.000 Well, exactly.

00:28:30.000 And that is how they became what they are, the behemoth that they are.

00:28:34.000 And this goes back to. 0.54

00:28:36.000 Um, McCarthy and it goes into the Vietnam War.

00:28:40.000 They know how to get together, they know how to mobilize, and they know how to get things done.

00:28:44.000 And the fact that they vote in midterms means that they get into the school boards and they get into the selectmen, and they get all these small little places where they infiltrate and then they work their way up in the system from there.

00:28:56.000 They change the laws, exactly.

00:28:57.000 And they change the laws, they work their way up, they influence your children, and that's how it's always been.

00:29:02.000 So that's why McCarthy didn't go far enough.

00:29:06.000 I seconded on that point.

00:29:08.000 Um, we're gonna jump to this story, and it.

00:29:10.000 Ties in with what we were talking about.

00:29:11.000 So, from the Washington Post, the Saudi nuclear deal is in doubt as Trump adds a new condition regarding Israel.

00:29:17.000 A day after the agreement was signed, the president laid out a new requirement that the Saudis normalize relations with Israel.

00:29:22.000 Nothing like signing a deal and changing the rules afterwards.

00:29:26.000 Saudi Arabia would need to normalize relations with Israel to receive the U.S. nuclear technology it has long sought, President Donald Trump said Thursday, adding a new and potentially deal ending stipulation to an agreement signed just a day earlier.

00:29:38.000 The nuclear deal, which was fiercely opposed by Israel and others concerned about nuclear proliferation, I'm not sure if it's really nuclear proliferation when it comes to Israel being concerned about the Saudis, but either way, is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, Trump said in a social media post, referring to the effort from his first term to normalize relations between Israel and the Muslim majority countries from which it had long been estranged.

00:29:58.000 The Saudis have thus far refused to join the accord.

00:30:02.000 It was the latest whiplash inducing policy shift from the White House, which had faced down considerable political opposition to push forward with the Saudi deal.

00:30:11.000 The Biden administration also discussed a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, but tied any agreement to opening diplomatic relations with Israel, a move that has the potential to reshape dynamics in the Middle East, but which remains distant.

00:30:24.000 If the Saudis don't join the Abraham Accords, the deal is off, White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levett said a few hours after Trump's post, responding to questions from reporters.

00:30:33.000 I know that obviously one of the big problems that the administration and other previous administrations have noted about Iran getting a nuclear weapon is it will be.

00:30:45.000 It would force Saudi Arabia to get it. 0.97

00:30:47.000 Can I ask an R-tarted question first? 1.00

00:30:47.000 Or you would basically. 1.00

00:30:50.000 Is this talking about nuclear weapons or nuclear energy?

00:30:52.000 Nuclear energy?

00:30:54.000 It's energy, but the issue is any civilian nuclear energy program can be.

00:30:58.000 It's sort of de facto dual use.

00:31:00.000 Okay.

00:31:00.000 Yes, that changes the whole.

00:31:02.000 Yeah, because, I mean, look, Saudi Arabia is sitting on a ton of oil, so it's not like they particularly need nuclear energy, but.

00:31:10.000 Well, the idea is by shifting to nuclear energy, they can export more of that oil.

00:31:14.000 Okay.

00:31:15.000 And that also would help bring down. 0.52

00:31:19.000 By putting more supply on the market, it helps bring down the price of it.

00:31:25.000 In a time like this, when there could be permanent perturbations in the global supply because of this, this would actually help a lot in a lot of ways.

00:31:35.000 And this is part of the broader Saudi strategy of diversifying into non oil fields.

00:31:43.000 And they're doing this in all sorts of areas.

00:31:45.000 You were just talking, Brett and I were just talking about that this morning on PCC.

00:31:48.000 2030, or whatever they call their operation.

00:31:51.000 That's why WWE is so heavily featured over there now.

00:31:55.000 They have the comedians out there to do the shows.

00:31:57.000 They want to become not just a destination for American entertainment or American citizens, but a net exporter for a lot of the stuff.

00:32:06.000 The idea is it's almost like being a cocaine dealer.

00:32:09.000 If you wean yourself off the coke habit, you have more to ship.

00:32:13.000 This is the 10 crack commandments, the biggie never get high on your own supply.

00:32:17.000 They can just use all that supply as revenue rather than having to.

00:32:21.000 You know, use it domestically to power everything.

00:32:23.000 To be fair, I'm of the opinion that burning oil is probably not the best use for it, considering it's basically like the wonder.

00:32:34.000 Like, it's basically like modern society fuel.

00:32:37.000 Like, everything we use is made of oil petrochemicals, fertilizer, all the plastics, every, you know, all the tires, like all of this stuff that pharmaceuticals, yeah, that makes modern life possible.

00:32:50.000 Like, it's all a derivative of oil.

00:32:52.000 And so just burning it in, in, In cars, does honestly seem when you have other alternatives, uh, it does seem kind of like a waste.

00:33:00.000 I mean, I know I'm a little bit biased because I've got an electric car, but like, you know, there are far better uses for oil, and it so it makes sense to not need to burn as much as we do.

00:33:11.000 And if Saudi Arabia wants to get on nuclear power, I mean, I do feel like the Saudi government is fairly responsible as an international kind of organization.

00:33:24.000 But I think that there are a lot of elements in the, in the, uh, like in Saudi Arabia that are very, very, uh, hostile to the U.S. still.

00:33:33.000 I mean, you look at the, you look at the, the, um, the 9 11, how many people from, for 9 11 were, were Saudis and stuff.

00:33:42.000 Um, Oh, come on.

00:33:46.000 No, no, I saw your face, though.

00:33:48.000 It's not like they were from, you know, it's not like they were Russians from, you know, they were from Moscow or whatever, no matter who funded them or whatever.

00:33:58.000 But so I do think that there are a lot of elements.

00:34:00.000 Was it CIA chief in Riyadh at the time?

00:34:03.000 I don't know.

00:34:04.000 Who was it?

00:34:04.000 John Brennan?

00:34:05.000 Oh, yeah.

00:34:06.000 Oh, yeah.

00:34:07.000 Wasn't he Muslim?

00:34:07.000 Yes, he missed.

00:34:08.000 I guess he just missed the.

00:34:11.000 Have you ever read Michael Springman, the visa chief?

00:34:15.000 In the State Department consulate at the time, who was surrounded 75% of the staff with CIA, wrote this book called Visas for Terrorists about that whole affair.

00:34:25.000 And it's eye opening.

00:34:27.000 You know, the thing that sucks is he's still walking around free. 0.76

00:34:30.000 Well, yeah, but the pressure's on him.

00:34:33.000 But, anyways, more to the point, I don't think that the Saudis having nuclear power is such a big threat to the US. 0.76

00:34:43.000 But I do think that, you know, Putting making a deal and then saying, Oh, you have to change the deal after it's been agreed to that's a massive problem. 0.94

00:34:53.000 Like, you can't sit there and be like, Oh, now you have to go ahead and hang out with our friend, too.

00:34:57.000 It's like, Ah, you know, like you've already set the conditions for the deal, you know.

00:35:02.000 So, yeah, I mean, so what you have is kind of a left hand, right hand relationship with the Saudis and the Israelis in the Middle East, which, you know, in each case goes back 80 years.

00:35:14.000 And in particular, the Republican Party.

00:35:19.000 And within that, especially the MAGA movement, the Saudis have been early and often supporters.

00:35:27.000 Both the Israelis and Saudis came together in support of Trump, really, ahead of the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, in large part because both the Saudis and Israelis hated the Iran deal that Obama struck.

00:35:44.000 And this caused MBS and Saudi and the Netanyahu government in Israel to really clamor behind Trump.

00:35:51.000 Trump as a counter Iran maximalist.

00:35:55.000 And it really brought the Saudis and Israelis together in an alignment against Iran from the Saudi perspective because Iran competes commercially and from the Israeli perspective because of the security and other sort of regional dominance concerns.

00:36:13.000 But what's, yeah, I think that this is basically a way of tanking it.

00:36:17.000 This condition, Saudi is not going to agree to.

00:36:20.000 And it looks like the administration just.

00:36:24.000 Purely speculative, just how it reads on its face is that they wanted to do this, and then the Israeli delegation put a lot of pressure on and said, You have to add this.

00:36:35.000 And our delegation, knowing it would kill the deal, but wanting to respect the Israelis, laid it on the table and it basically kills it.

00:36:43.000 So I think this is basically late stage pressure from the Israeli side.

00:36:50.000 And this is because of the local rivalry.

00:36:53.000 The Israelis don't want the Saudis to be able to have this capacity. 0.61

00:36:58.000 MBS and Saudi have said that they would only develop nuclear weapons if Iran did. 0.68

00:37:05.000 But obviously, the Saudis being a nuclear power sort of changes the security balance in case there's ever a conflict between the Israelis and the Saudis, which is without the U.S. sort of peacemaking that is not off the table, you know, sometime in the decades ahead.

00:37:23.000 But once you have nukes, you have nukes forever. 0.89

00:37:26.000 And You know, this could also cause a domino.

00:37:29.000 You know, what other Gulf states, you say, hey, the Saudis have it, you know, us as well.

00:37:34.000 And then it would.

00:37:36.000 Do you think it'd be likely that if the Saudis were to get, you know, like some kind of nuclear weapon, do you think that they would be like, oh, you know, UAE will go ahead and we'll give you this technology or, you know, something along those lines? 0.87

00:37:50.000 Yeah, it's quite possible.

00:37:51.000 I mean, the Saudis are kind of the alliance kingmakers in the region.

00:37:58.000 And.

00:37:59.000 You know, this also is something that I think, you know, the Democrats have a.

00:38:05.000 are currently in a bind in terms of Middle East relations because of the legacy Iran deal and some of the just stakeholder relationships with donors and whatnot with the DNC, where the Democrats are in large part significantly opposed to both MBS and Saudi and the Netanyahu government.

00:38:27.000 And I don't think that, for example, A Democrat administration would want to strike this sort of deal with the Saudis and give them this dual use capacity.

00:38:41.000 So I think there's sort of a time sensitivity to try to do this right now from the administration side.

00:38:49.000 But, like I said, I think this is a way of basically calling the deal off.

00:38:53.000 All right, we're going to jump to another story that actually involves Israel.

00:39:01.000 From Fox News, chaos erupts as the House passes $1.15 trillion defense bill with Israel provision.

00:39:08.000 And I don't know why this is part of the headline, but it says, Stop stoking Jew hatred.

00:39:15.000 I don't know who said that.

00:39:16.000 We'll get into that.

00:39:16.000 Let's see.

00:39:18.000 From Fox News, the House passed its $1.5 trillion annual defense policy bill Wednesday after a bipartisan revolt over a provision expanding U.S. Israel defense technology cooperation.

00:39:29.000 The fiscal year 2027 NDAA passed 216 to 212.

00:39:34.000 With Republicans largely supporting and Democrats mostly opposing the measure.

00:39:38.000 The annual bill, which sets Pentagon policy and typically draws broad bipartisan support, received only six Democrat votes, as much of the caucus objected to Section 219 and the Republican backed amendment restricting transgender care and easing access to personal guns on military bases.

00:39:55.000 Is it really, like, really?

00:39:57.000 That's something they're going to talk about?

00:39:58.000 Anyways, opposition came from a coalition of progressive Democrats and Republican skeptics of U.S. support for Israel.

00:40:06.000 Who accused congressional leaders of shielding the provision from scrutiny after lawmakers were denied a separate vote to remove it?

00:40:12.000 A fight erupted as support for Israel has weakened among House Democrats and some America First Republicans during the war in Gaza and the widening conflict with Iran.

00:40:20.000 Just one week earlier, 103 Democrats joined Rep. Thomas Massey from Kentucky in voting to block $3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel.

00:40:28.000 For opponents, Section 219 would move the relationship in the opposite direction by embedding U.S. Israel cooperation more deeply inside the Pentagon's weapons development and.

00:40:37.000 And the acquisition system.

00:40:38.000 The provision would direct the War Secretary to designate a Pentagon executive agent to coordinate and accelerate bilateral defense research, testing, and industrial cooperation.

00:40:48.000 Critics argue that the structure would make the relationship harder for future administrations or Congress to unwind and could shift parts of the partnership away from highly visible aid votes into less visible technology, procurement, and production arrangements.

00:41:00.000 Supporters said it would coordinate longstanding programs and give the United States faster access to Israeli defense technology.

00:41:07.000 Josie, you were saying that this is, and I've heard a lot of libertarians saying that this is merging the U.S. military with Iran.

00:41:15.000 And I'm sorry, with Israel. 0.81

00:41:16.000 I'm probably going to do that again too. 0.66

00:41:18.000 I ran.

00:41:19.000 And that was, has, I've, like, as soon as I saw that, I was like, I'm so die that they're merging the militaries.

00:41:26.000 So this, it sounds like they're basically taking existing programs and making cooperation easier.

00:41:34.000 What do you know about this?

00:41:35.000 So, first, it's a semantic argument.

00:41:37.000 This is what happens because the concerns about this are very real, okay?

00:41:41.000 But the people who are concerned about it aren't wording it quite right.

00:41:44.000 It's not a merger of the militaries.

00:41:46.000 And when they say that, then, It's trivialized, and people who are in support of this are able to trivialize it.

00:41:53.000 So, it's merging their military industrial complexes, essentially, is what that is.

00:42:00.000 So, it significantly undermines American sovereignty. 0.75

00:42:03.000 Okay, it embeds Israeli tech into our weapons programs and our supply chains. 0.58

00:42:09.000 And as the article said, it makes it so that Congress, who would normally vote on this every year with appropriations, can't do that anymore.

00:42:16.000 It's going to be a different thing.

00:42:18.000 So, they can't choose and be like, okay, maybe we don't want this this year.

00:42:21.000 They won't be able to do that.

00:42:22.000 And it also makes decoupling in the future almost impossible at this point because we know NDAAs.

00:42:29.000 Nothing ever gets changed in them.

00:42:30.000 That's why we have the Propaganda Act was pretty much abolished.

00:42:36.000 The Smith Munt Authorization Act.

00:42:38.000 Exactly, exactly.

00:42:39.000 So it lifted the domestic dissemination ban.

00:42:41.000 We're never going to get that back.

00:42:42.000 So as soon as it goes into that, it's a really bad thing.

00:42:45.000 And what's big about this is that, yes, we do have these past agreements, but what it's doing is it's making our military depend indefinitely.

00:42:55.000 On the industry success and the policy success of a foreign nation.

00:43:00.000 And once we're in that position, we have stared far too long into the abyss and we are becoming the foreign entanglement in the permanent alliance that George Washington warned us about.

00:43:13.000 And there's a slew of other issues that come with this too.

00:43:16.000 Like we talked about an agent that's going to oversee all of this.

00:43:19.000 Executive agent.

00:43:20.000 Yes, an executive agent.

00:43:21.000 So our founders didn't think we were ever going to merge military industrial complexes with another country.

00:43:27.000 So the closest thing we have to this in the Constitution is.

00:43:30.000 Treaty law, but they're bypassing the treaty law.

00:43:32.000 This isn't even a treaty.

00:43:33.000 This is something entirely different.

00:43:35.000 So there's no check and no balance for this guy.

00:43:37.000 What is it?

00:43:38.000 They're going to have to make something up and it's not going to be constitutional.

00:43:40.000 And then we have to get into espionage.

00:43:42.000 Okay.

00:43:43.000 Oh my gosh, Josie, our greatest ally, they would never spy on us.

00:43:47.000 Oh, Congrats.

00:43:48.000 Well, I mean, everybody knows that.

00:43:52.000 So the Pentagon's DIA last month said that they did a risk assessment on Israeli spying.

00:44:02.000 And they rank them at the highest level possible, the critical.

00:44:06.000 They're critically spying on us.

00:44:07.000 And four weeks later, we're like, oh, you know what's a great idea for these people who are critically spying on us?

00:44:12.000 Let's merge our tech or let's merge their tech with our military.

00:44:16.000 What a great idea.

00:44:17.000 That sounds insane to me. 0.97

00:44:18.000 And of course, since I'm not being really nice to Israel right now, let's talk about Qatar. 0.92

00:44:23.000 Okay?

00:44:24.000 Qatar, didn't they give our country a plane?

00:44:28.000 They gave our country a plane, right?

00:44:29.000 For our president to fly around in.

00:44:31.000 Now, when that happened, weren't there.

00:44:34.000 Weren't there very legitimate concerns about safety and tech and spying that happened in that time?

00:44:41.000 Yes, there were.

00:44:43.000 So, this isn't good when anybody does this.

00:44:46.000 As a consistent person, I'm against all of that.

00:44:49.000 And let's get into the votes.

00:44:50.000 So, Thomas Massey put forth an amendment.

00:44:54.000 And in that amendment, he said, let's strip the NDAA of Section 219.

00:44:59.000 And the Rules Committee took one look at it and they're like, absolutely not.

00:45:03.000 And they made an executive decision.

00:45:04.000 They didn't send it off to the House and it just kind of vanished.

00:45:09.000 But what they did send to the House was the rules as they existed.

00:45:12.000 And that included blocking Massey's.

00:45:15.000 Amendment to strip the NDAA andor strip 219 out of the NDAA and like protect the ND or protect the 219 in the NDAA.

00:45:27.000 And everybody except Massey, all the Republicans voted in favor of that.

00:45:32.000 So then the NDAA comes and it's time to vote for the NDAA.

00:45:35.000 And six Republicans joined Thomas Massey in saying, I'm going to vote against this because of section 219.

00:45:40.000 But that vote was meaningless and that vote was performative and that vote was safe because they just voted.

00:45:47.000 For the rules that blocked Thomas Massey from stripping that amendment.

00:45:53.000 And so that's all I have to say about that.

00:45:55.000 Well, so there's the Section 219.

00:45:58.000 They were also talking about Democrats were not backing it because of amendments restricting transgender care and easing cases and easing access to personal guns on military bases.

00:46:10.000 Is that just like misdirection or is that something that.

00:46:15.000 Well, I think what they're getting at is there may have been some pro Israel Democrats who.

00:46:21.000 were torn with their own between their own coalition because it's a package deal.

00:46:25.000 You know, if you vote for this, then you are also voting for restricting the transgender care sort of thing.

00:46:32.000 So there may have been some, you know, the vote tally may have been slightly different.

00:46:38.000 I think it's just all they're trying to get at there.

00:46:39.000 These directions.

00:46:40.000 I mean, this is one of the closest.

00:46:42.000 The NDA usually passes very easily, right?

00:46:45.000 I mean, even when there was the, I forget what it was, but there's been a couple times where, you know, libertarians were, Pretty concerned about NDAs.

00:46:57.000 I think generally they are, but there have been a few issues about monitoring of.

00:47:01.000 Yeah, even the Smith Munt repeal.

00:47:03.000 The Modernization Act was tucked into an NDA.

00:47:05.000 That's why you couldn't get it out.

00:47:07.000 It's the must pass, especially right now when we're in multiple wars.

00:47:10.000 Yeah.

00:47:11.000 And that was on almost every continent.

00:47:13.000 14 years ago, too.

00:47:14.000 2012.

00:47:15.000 Yeah.

00:47:15.000 It was 2012.

00:47:16.000 So that's 14 years ago.

00:47:18.000 Yeah.

00:47:18.000 And also locking people up without any.

00:47:20.000 Yeah.

00:47:21.000 And definitely that was in an NDA.

00:47:22.000 And they still get passed with basically very broad bipartisan support.

00:47:27.000 We love FISA here.

00:47:29.000 And, but on this.

00:47:30.000 You know, there are a couple of things about it that are, you know, a little bit eye popping in light of everything else playing out around the MAGA coalition dynamics.

00:47:41.000 And, you know, as we talked about, Republican, you know, sort of MAGA hesitant voter mobilization, you know, that this has been a wedge issue, I would say, since the 12 day war last year.

00:47:54.000 You know, for this to be happening just a couple months ahead of the midterms, when sort of the key coalition base that you're trying to mobilize are those.

00:48:05.000 You know, that you may have lost because of prior endeavors around this issue.

00:48:11.000 You know, there is a very real path dependency problem with this.

00:48:16.000 Like a couple examples.

00:48:18.000 So, you know, when we sell F 35s to foreign countries, you know, they want the latest and greatest jets and we sell them for a huge markup.

00:48:29.000 But at the end of the day, we kind of have a kill switch on the tech.

00:48:33.000 If they don't get in a conflict with them or if they're ever being intransigent in negotiations on trade or any oil or anything else, we can always threaten to, hey, you're going to turn the keys off on the fighter jets and you're going to be left with nothing.

00:48:51.000 And so there is a dependence on the underlying tech to say nothing of the issues around the fact that.

00:49:00.000 They could be bugged, for example.

00:49:01.000 There could be, you know, sort of, you know, encryption things on the back end that, you know, you're not aware of.

00:49:09.000 And this stuff is not necessarily all open source.

00:49:14.000 And there's an issue that I remember happened around AI and the Pentagon trying to get Anthropic out of the AI chain.

00:49:23.000 And I spoke to folks in the Pentagon around this because Anthropic is a very, very heavy DNC Democrat. 0.59

00:49:31.000 Kind of cesspool. 0.70

00:49:32.000 But they do, Claude really is the best in class right now in AI as it currently stands.

00:49:39.000 But there were problems between Anthropic and the Pentagon and all this kind of political stuff.

00:49:45.000 But the Pentagon was having a real hard time getting Anthropic out of their systems because the interoperability problem is vast.

00:49:53.000 You have so many systems that run on it and you can't just piecemeal change one thing without another thing getting affected.

00:50:01.000 And you form a sort of Structural dependency at the base layer that would be prohibitively expensive or time consuming with sensitive in process things happening that you just can't branch off of it in the way that you might desire because you have this sort of core dependency.

00:50:25.000 And you could see something similar happening with respect to this 219, where if, for example, one of the questions when you think about this Saudi deal, And as I mentioned, this looks like this was some kind of late stage intervention by the Israeli delegation.

00:50:44.000 And the White House sort of sided with the Israeli delegation on it and inserted this provision, knowing it would kill the US Saudi deal.

00:50:52.000 And the question is well, what kind of leverage can a foreign country deploy, for example, when the delegation makes that ask?

00:51:01.000 And sometimes it's over trade, sometimes it's over industrial concerns, sometimes it's over security ones.

00:51:06.000 But another one is.

00:51:08.000 You know, if you don't do this, then we will cut off your access to this.

00:51:13.000 We will limit our, you know, security, our technology.

00:51:18.000 And once you have Pentagon systems that are dependent on that base route, that becomes another point of leverage in any negotiation, whether it's security related or not.

00:51:31.000 And, you know, now there already are significant Pentagon dependencies on this.

00:51:35.000 I mean, the sort of Unit 8200 and Amman, you know, type Israeli tech.

00:51:42.000 Is already in significant use at the Pentagon level.

00:51:46.000 So it's not like this is something from nothing, but the legal requirement to do it and the fact that it is Pentagon wide, the executive agent has a Pentagon wide, this is not like one, you know, just one thing.

00:52:02.000 This is all Pentagon systems, effectively, that will have this sort of mandatory Israeli military industrial complex integration.

00:52:12.000 And there's really no precedent for this.

00:52:14.000 Sort of thing.

00:52:15.000 And it's happening concomitantly with the push, I believe, by Tom Cotton for mandatory intelligence sharing, making it illegal to not share certain classified information with Israeli counterparts.

00:52:27.000 And what does that look like?

00:52:29.000 A mandatory intelligence sharing, right?

00:52:32.000 So, obviously, well, not obviously.

00:52:35.000 I would presume that doesn't mean every bit of intelligence that the U.S. comes up with or produces.

00:52:42.000 Is it only stuff that's pertinent to Israel or is it anything that Israel comes and says they want?

00:52:48.000 And how would the Department of War say, well, this stuff you can have or this stuff you can't have if there's some kind of legal framework that says you have to give it to them?

00:52:58.000 Well, this is 622 from Tom Cotton, who is the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman.

00:53:06.000 He sponsored this.

00:53:08.000 And this is not just the Pentagon, this is the entire intelligence community.

00:53:12.000 And it primarily relates to things around regional threats.

00:53:17.000 But it goes broader than that.

00:53:19.000 It includes plans and intentions of both state and non state actors.

00:53:24.000 So, for example, if the CIA were to learn about plans or intentions of Hezbollah, or something, or the Houthis, or the Iranians, or the Qataris, and it would have an impact materially, potentially, on Israeli foreign policy or national security.

00:53:43.000 That effectively, the intelligence community would be required by law, it would be illegal not to share that with the Israelis unless the president himself intervenes and puts forward a justifiable legal reason under U.S. national security not to.

00:54:02.000 So it creates a legal. 0.54

00:54:05.000 Mandate only overridable by the president himself.

00:54:09.000 And that is something that, in good times, is something that can be a good practice when you're dealing with an ally.

00:54:20.000 But that's also, it sort of presupposes zero degrees of daylight around interests.

00:54:27.000 And that's something that, you know, is, when it's done by the legislature, is hard to undo.

00:54:34.000 And it's sort of.

00:54:36.000 Creates a signaling to even try to undo it.

00:54:41.000 It's almost like to undo it in the future is to sort of attack the alliance itself and has its own political baggage.

00:54:50.000 But it, you know, the fact that it's coming from the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the most, you know, powerful person in the Senate overseeing the CIA, shows you the kind of institutional support there is for that.

00:55:04.000 And there is the question about.

00:55:07.000 This is one more sort of mandatory integration.

00:55:10.000 It would be literally illegal not to do it.

00:55:15.000 So it represents a permanent change in the way we handle our own classified documents.

00:55:21.000 And so that's also happening concurrently with this 219.

00:55:27.000 All right.

00:55:28.000 I think we're going to jump to another story that Mike has some info on.

00:55:34.000 From Fox News Rand Paul releases docs that reveal FBI halted border inspection of virus research over Wuhan lab links.

00:55:42.000 Mike sent me a boatload of links, but we're going to read the story here first.

00:55:46.000 Agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection were preparing to question a British zoologist and disease ecology expert upon his return to the United States from the World Health Organization's investigation into the origins of COVID 19 before the FBI intervened and asked agents to stand down, according to files released Monday by Senator Rand Paul.

00:56:05.000 They told the public a COVID lab leak wasn't possible, wasn't plausible, Rand wrote on X. Their own private messages say otherwise.

00:56:12.000 Today, I'm launching the reading room where the public can view records related to my ongoing investigation, not just conclusions, but the actual documents.

00:56:19.000 It's funny that they called him by his first name there, huh?

00:56:22.000 The documents show CBP's National Targeting Center flagged Peter Dazzek as a high person of interest ahead of his February 5th, 2021 arrival at JFK International Airport.

00:56:33.000 Dazzek, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance, was flagged because of more than 15 years of collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and his longstanding relationship with its lead researcher, Zheng Li Shi, as well as his role as principal investigator on National Institutes of Health grants and funding bat coronavirus research in China.

00:56:54.000 Much of the funding Dazic received was put forward towards gain of function research, the documents state.

00:56:58.000 Now, the gain of function research stuff, Fauci swore up and down that that didn't happen, right?

00:57:05.000 And he lied.

00:57:05.000 And he did it under oath.

00:57:07.000 He lied under oath, and then he got a pardon for the crime.

00:57:10.000 That was the Biden administration pardon to me.

00:57:12.000 Yes.

00:57:13.000 Yes.

00:57:14.000 So, why don't you go ahead and unpack a little bit of this for the viewers so they understand exactly what the reading room means and what kind of information Rand Paul has kind of made available?

00:57:26.000 So, this is coming from Senator Rand Paul, who has been an absolute pitbull on this issue since the pandemic itself.

00:57:34.000 But this is sort of a continuation in a long line of disclosures that he's obtained around the intelligence community relationship with COVID, around the researchers, around the sort of cover up in media institutions.

00:57:50.000 What was just made public by Senator Paul were.

00:57:57.000 The Slack messages between the authors of the proximal origin paper in March 2020, which was the sort of official explanation at the early stages of the outbreak about how this could not possibly humanly, scientifically, theoretically, hypothetically, at all have come from a lab, namely the Wuhan lab, that this was zoonotic in origin.

00:58:23.000 This came from probably a pangolin, you know, sort of thing.

00:58:29.000 And that soup, right?

00:58:30.000 Yes, right, right.

00:58:31.000 Well, this was this paper was highly influential in quelling the early questions about the Wuhan lab.

00:58:41.000 And what Senator Paul just published were the internal communications between the authors of this paper, showing that they didn't believe anything that they were saying and that they were lying, they knew they were lying, and then they themselves.

00:58:59.000 Subsequently, got more and more shocked about the disclosures around the Wuhan lab.

00:59:04.000 So, to name a few highlights that stand out about this, they were frequently referring to, they said that the majority of the researchers that they spoke to thought it leaked from a lab.

00:59:18.000 They admitted in their own Slack chats that they lied about, there's a line in the Proximal Origins report where it tries to downplay the.

00:59:30.000 The gain of function bat born coronavirus research being done at the Wuhan lab saying that this is done all over the world in BSL2 labs, like lower security.

00:59:41.000 You know, this research is done all over the world. 0.93

00:59:43.000 The fact that it's done in the Wuhan lab doesn't say much because it's done everywhere.

00:59:49.000 So if they were, you know, this, so it's really not that significant that this was also done in Wuhan.

00:59:56.000 And that was the Bryce Nichols tweet that you sent, right?

00:59:58.000 Yeah.

00:59:59.000 So right here.

01:00:00.000 And what they say is, but that isn't, if you see, it says, We describe in the paper and say that this work is performed all over the world, but that isn't true.

01:00:09.000 It's exclusively been going on at the Wuhan lab.

01:00:12.000 And so, you know, for six years, you know, the official explanation is oh, this is an ordinary course, it happens all over the world, but turns out it was only happening at the very lab where the intelligence community assessment is that it leaked from and where the outbreak, I mean, it broke out in Wuhan, China, and at the BSL 4 lab, which is the highest security lab.

01:00:35.000 You know, the BSL 4 lab is the star of Outbreak, the 1995 Dustin Hoffman movie.

01:00:40.000 You know, it's like, you know, this.

01:00:43.000 But what I'm getting at here is this was a lie that they told knowingly in order to quell this.

01:00:51.000 And then they seem to get so convinced in these messages that they're frequently referring, joking, that they're surprised that it leaked in Wuhan and that it didn't leak in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the UNC Chapel Hill lab is.

01:01:08.000 And that was, of course, run by Ralph Barrick and the EcoHealth and Peter Daschick boys.

01:01:15.000 Daschick and Barrick are kind of the two.

01:01:17.000 Domestic stars of this, Ralph Barrick, Rand Paul showed, had been working with the CIA and ODI on bat borne coronavirus research.

01:01:28.000 He published their redacted comms in 2015 and the like.

01:01:33.000 But this goes back to USAID.

01:01:36.000 One of the most significant parts of these revelations, in my view, is the DARPA diffuse and preempt programs.

01:01:44.000 The DARPA, so effectively, and I sent you one of the.

01:01:48.000 The comms on this, if you can put it up on the screen at some point.

01:01:52.000 This is the DARPA diffuse and DARPA preempt comms on this.

01:01:58.000 So here's what shocked even the authors of the March 2020 Proximal Origins paper, the cover up paper.

01:02:07.000 They did not know until 2021, a year after they published this paper, that Peter Daschick had proposed, together with Ralph Barrick, a gain of function.

01:02:20.000 Program to do bat borne coronavirus, super juicing bat borne coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab to DARPA in 2018, just one year before the outbreak.

01:02:32.000 And this is something, so basically, the unique feature of SARS CoV 2 was this insertion of a fern cleavage site that is evidently never been seen in a beta coronavirus before. 0.81

01:02:53.000 And this is a very unique feature.

01:02:54.000 That sort of distinguishes what COVID is.

01:02:58.000 And as it turns out, Peter Daschik himself, together with his USAID funded team, proposed to DARPA to create the very thing that COVID turned out to be the year before COVID happened at the very lab in the very town it broke out in.

01:03:21.000 And so, when you, because these Slack messages go into that later time period, They describe what was an effective betrayal in their view that they came out and published this paper,

01:03:36.000 not knowing, you know, they were covering up for Dashik and Barak, not knowing that they had proposed to DARPA to actually create the biological identical equivalent of what COVID is in that very lab.

01:03:55.000 And now, this is the part, this is the piece that you're talking about from DARPA, right?

01:03:58.000 Dr. Ralph Barrick testified to Rand Paul's committee in April that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency preempt program solicited proposals for gain of function experiments almost two years before the COVID 19 pandemic, right?

01:04:10.000 Well, that's Barrick's testimony about it.

01:04:12.000 But if you look for the comms between, I believe, Christian Anderson and on it, you can see how they reacted to the news that I believe the group Drastic published.

01:04:25.000 They learned what's so funny is these insiders.

01:04:28.000 In the virology, epidemiology profession, these esteemed researchers and scientifically acclaimed high profile figures learned about the DARPA proposal the same time as the internet did and were themselves gobsmacked that they went out on the line to defend Dashik and Barak, not saying it couldn't have been a lab leak.

01:04:55.000 And then they learned, oh my God, they were actually creating.

01:04:59.000 COVID in the lab, in that very lab where it leaked from.

01:05:04.000 Now, the defense on this is that, so basically you had two programs happening simultaneously.

01:05:14.000 You had a USAID program and a DARPA program.

01:05:18.000 USAID in 2009 created something called PREDICT.

01:05:22.000 And this was basically a global program to collect hundreds of thousands of virus samples.

01:05:31.000 And then run various experiments on them in order to sort of chronicle potential outbreaks and develop vaccines, you know, to defend against them.

01:05:42.000 That's where the gain of function comes in.

01:05:43.000 You superjuice a virus in order to create a vaccine to defend against in case that virus makes the jump, that variant of it.

01:05:54.000 And so USAID had been funding Dashik, Barak, that whole team for basically 15 years, from 2009.

01:06:04.000 Up until 2024, USAID had been running this program.

01:06:09.000 And in particular, what USAID did, it funded Peter Daschik to go into the Yunnan bat caves in southern China and collect tens of thousands of bat samples to bring to the lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute for Virology.

01:06:26.000 And so Daschik had this very deep relationship with the Wuhan lab on USAID payroll to bring all of these bat samples to be tested on in Wuhan.

01:06:38.000 For basically a decade before the outbreak in 2019.

01:06:44.000 Then in 2018, Dashik applies for this DARPA grant to say, listen, we have all these USAID funded bat samples in the lab.

01:06:54.000 We want to superjuice them with gain of function and we want to insert a fern cleavage site into this to make it more easy to modify.

01:07:04.000 Basically making monster bugs.

01:07:07.000 And DARPA had this pre existing preempt program.

01:07:07.000 Right.

01:07:10.000 So you had these two, you had The USAID Predict program and the DARPA Preempt program.

01:07:14.000 And this was sort of the USAID was funding, you know, collecting the bat samples, and DARPA was sort of, you know, developing vaccines on the basis of all the samples that USAID and the maintenance of the, you know, research community and everything that USAID was funding.

01:07:30.000 So while Dashik and Barak are working basically with both of these, USAID and DARPA, they go to the DARPA side of this, knowing that the USAID program money was about to run out.

01:07:44.000 I believe in 2020 or something like that.

01:07:47.000 Dashik pitches in 2018 this diffuse proposal under the preempt program to do this.

01:07:56.000 And the official story is that DARPA declined this grant, this proposal.

01:08:03.000 And so the idea was even though it looks shady as hell that the EcoHealth Alliance network, working directly with the Wuhan lab, was proposing to create COVID under the diffuse proposal, at the end of the day, DARPA said no, right?

01:08:22.000 So they didn't get the DARPA money, is the official story on this, to do this.

01:08:27.000 But the question is, could they have taken that USAID money or the NIH grants that they had and done it anyway for a number of reasons?

01:08:36.000 They could claim scientific breakthroughs, they could show some success, they could simply, they're already in the lab experimenting on these just because DARPA didn't go through with it, or maybe was there, were there comms?

01:08:50.000 Like we still don't have the DARPA side of this.

01:08:52.000 This is one of these things where getting the internal DARPA comms would be huge on this.

01:08:59.000 There's going to be a contracting officer.

01:09:01.000 There's going to be all levels up and down the chain reviewing this.

01:09:06.000 Congress doesn't have the ability to pull people from DARPA in and have them testify, or is it classified stuff?

01:09:14.000 I mean, ostensibly, they would be able to do it behind closed doors.

01:09:17.000 Well, this is my ask since Dr. Paul, if you're listening, get the DARPA internal comms.

01:09:26.000 I know that you're deposing Fauci or something next week.

01:09:30.000 You know, you've.

01:09:31.000 Done excellent diligence on the CIA and ODNI and NIH and now the Proximal Origins front.

01:09:38.000 But the DARPA internal comms will be very revealing in terms of the continuing relationship.

01:09:45.000 For example, we don't know the reason that the diffuse proposal was turned down.

01:09:50.000 It could be that they may not have thought it was viable, maybe come back after you've shown signs of success.

01:09:56.000 There could have been comms that said, listen, we're not going to give you the money at this point.

01:10:01.000 You know, if you have a more promising blueprint for the amount of money that you're asking for, come back and show.

01:10:08.000 This is a common thing that happens with these grant and contract negotiations listen, it sounds good in concept, but we don't want to bet on this startup proposal unless you have already shown it's got a high likelihood of success.

01:10:20.000 So it's very possible that even if he didn't get authorized by DARPA to do it, that he did it in order to qualify for a renewed proposal.

01:10:29.000 But then the outbreak happened the very next year, potentially with the very samples that he.

01:10:35.000 Could have been running those experiments on.

01:10:37.000 The question was, is he doing it anyway?

01:10:41.000 Were they doing it anyway?

01:10:43.000 And there's a number of ways to get at that.

01:10:45.000 One is the DARPA communications, another is the USAID communications, another are the Columbia and the UC Davis communications, because the USAID program was administered by UC Davis and Columbia and Stephen Morrison, that network.

01:11:01.000 And to date, we don't have any of those comms, files, records, emails, chat logs, any of that.

01:11:08.000 It goes dark at the Dashik level, but Dashik was reporting up to his grant officers at NIH, at USAID, at DARPA under the preempt.

01:11:21.000 And we need all of that.

01:11:22.000 And we need it all unredacted.

01:11:25.000 There should be nothing at this point that undermines US national security about those communications.

01:11:30.000 Nominally, these were not, you know, this is not a classified program at NIH or AID or DARPA.

01:11:37.000 And so that's the next logical step.

01:11:39.000 We should have a stack of.

01:11:41.000 JFK files level, you know, 100,000 documents over the course of all these years between Dashik, Barak, and the various grant officers.

01:11:52.000 Okay, so what kind of, I mean, what's the likelihood that any of these communications would be able to be brought to, like, the public?

01:12:06.000 Is this stuff that's, like I said, classified or is it something that you could actually show the American people?

01:12:11.000 Well, this comes down to a threshold decision that the administration will be forced to make if this is how much transparency to give on this.

01:12:21.000 I texted you a very revealing, comedic moment in this Slack chat between the cover up artists there.

01:12:30.000 If you can pull up the quote around the Chinese conference, it says $15,000 and $15 million.

01:12:39.000 And if you look for the one where he says, I'm about to give this talk.

01:12:46.000 From KGA to KGA to Bob on Chinese speaking fee.

01:12:51.000 Yeah, yeah, the Chinese speaking fee.

01:12:54.000 This comedic relief gets to the sort of heart of the issue about disclosure and whether or not this can or might be made public.

01:13:09.000 Give me one second here.

01:13:12.000 It was a speaking fee for what?

01:13:13.000 For just like a conference or something?

01:13:15.000 I almost don't want to reveal the punchline because it's so funny.

01:13:19.000 And you have to remember the context that this is playing out in the middle of the first Trump administration blaming China.

01:13:27.000 And you have these sort of Chinese affiliated researchers who are, okay, so on Chinese speaking, so these are, again, authors of this cover up report.

01:13:37.000 Chinese speaking fee reply back and ask for $15,000, and you'll say the virus is all natural, $150,000, and you'll say it's from America.

01:13:46.000 Or 15 million, and you'll say Donald Trump made it. 0.78

01:13:49.000 Perfect.

01:13:50.000 So this is a joke?

01:13:52.000 Yeah, well, it's a joke, but it gets to the heart of the diplomatic sensitivities around disclosure, around the USAID DARPA side of all this.

01:14:02.000 Yeah.

01:14:03.000 Which is that, you know, the official story is, I mean, there's, I guess, several competing official stories at this point, but nominally leaked from a lab in China, but it was done in collaboration with US researchers.

01:14:20.000 Funded by the US government.

01:14:23.000 And so there is, if you remember at the time, the first Trump administration was almost campaigning on a global Chinese funded global compensation fund for creating COVID.

01:14:38.000 It came from China.

01:14:39.000 And this was that.

01:14:42.000 And then you had the sort of Democrat apparatus saying that's xenophobic and, you know, there's a knockout game being played in New York City because of people attacking Chinese people over this and what.

01:14:54.000 This became this question about the role of Chinese complicity in this.

01:14:59.000 Now, the problem, and in my view, one of the significant blockages in getting disclosure to this point, and one of the reasons, in my view, the CIA and ODNI documents have to be so deeply redacted, and there's been so much national security interference in this issue, is because of the fact that, you know, if you're going to blame it on Zhang Li Xi in China, who was her collaborator?

01:15:21.000 It was Ralph Barrett, it was Peter Daschik, it was the whole.

01:15:26.000 They were all on US government payroll, military payroll, NIH payroll, USAID payroll.

01:15:31.000 And we'd been working with that lab for 15 years doing it there.

01:15:34.000 But the question is, if it turns out that Dashik and Barak were basically the progenitors of this, could that cause a diplomatic kerfuffle saying that it was an American program that created COVID?

01:15:50.000 It's literally a Scooby Doo situation where you pull the mask off and it's just America underneath the mask.

01:15:56.000 Well, that, I think, is the tail risk of solving the mystery.

01:16:02.000 So, what do you think the general public even sees this now?

01:16:06.000 Do they have a take?

01:16:07.000 I don't know.

01:16:07.000 Like one of the things about COVID, and I guess the great thing about following up on this is that the public sentiment isn't there to continue to follow up on this like the way people would like, right?

01:16:16.000 Like somebody who's following it closely understands what happened was an unbelievable betrayal of the world in a sense.

01:16:23.000 And for America to be at the heart of this, that's a huge problem.

01:16:26.000 But a lot of the general public has moved on and want to either pretend it didn't happen or they're not curious enough to ask, you know, was this something that came from a lab? 0.52

01:16:35.000 Was it from bat soup?

01:16:38.000 Outside of working directly in the political sphere, I don't see a lot of curiosity around it. 1.00

01:16:45.000 So I don't even know what the average person thinks about what happened.

01:16:48.000 Well, I think that because there are so many technical layers and such a large cast of characters in fields that very few people work in, I mean, you're talking about like virology and veterinary medicine, too hard for the average person to digest.

01:17:03.000 And you're talking about a million of government agencies and this all.

01:17:08.000 I think that the public's interest would be reignited were you to find a smoking gun that easily answers the story and goes, oh, that's why I had to, you know, lock down my kid.

01:17:21.000 Oh, that's what.

01:17:22.000 But the problem is, is, you know, this is a long term mystery to solve, and there's episodic updates.

01:17:29.000 And, you know, there's, I think it's going to take that level of effort over, you know, the months and years ahead to sort of get deeper and deeper.

01:17:39.000 Toward a sort of consensus answer.

01:17:42.000 But I do think that the opposition to investigating it has substantially gone away.

01:17:46.000 What you had before was basically a block on investigating it.

01:17:50.000 And while I think that sort of the curiosity level has gone down, so has the institutional opposition in a lot of respects.

01:18:01.000 And so, you know, the work continues.

01:18:04.000 But I do think it's a living issue because one of the things, like Elon Musk was just interviewed, I think earlier today or yesterday, you know, about.

01:18:12.000 How shutting down USAID makes us more at risk about breakout pandemics.

01:18:18.000 And right now, Ebola is circulating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it's because we shut down USAID.

01:18:23.000 I had no idea that USAID had anything to do with funding the pandemic.

01:18:27.000 The fact that USAID may have actually created COVID is not a good look for arguing that we should fund, you know, that USAID was doing any good with respect to Ebola response or SARS or MERS.

01:18:42.000 How many other outbreaks did USAID actually cause rather than?

01:18:46.000 Prevent when we set up these programs in the very countries where the outbreak occurred.

01:18:51.000 Is this the first time that, like, so this is the first time that I've heard that USAID was involved with COVID?

01:18:57.000 Is that something that generally the public is aware of, or is this new information, or?

01:19:02.000 It has received less attention, I think, just because people hear DARPA and they go, Ooh, DARPA.

01:19:09.000 People hear the CIA, oh, Ralph Barrack was working with the CIA, you know, and Fauci was such a big presence.

01:19:15.000 And anyone that knows you knows that USAID and CIA are basically the same thing.

01:19:20.000 And most extensive relationship with it.

01:19:23.000 It was in that article that you pulled up when it said that Peter Dasch had a 15 year relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

01:19:31.000 Well, date back to 2024, 15 years.

01:19:34.000 It's 2009.

01:19:35.000 That was when USAID Predict was stood up.

01:19:38.000 And in fact, when the outbreak first happened, Dashik and Klan gave a quote to the press about wow, it's incredible that SARS CoV 2 has a 99.6% biographic or basically biological match to the bats that we found in the Horseshoe Caves in Yunnan that we brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology on a USAID grant.

01:20:07.000 And that was seen as like USAID was bragging about that in the early parts of the pandemic to say, oh, this puts us in ready position to try to find a vaccine because serendipitously we happen to have the exact bat samples that match, you know, this SARS CoV 2.

01:20:28.000 How connected were they to the American medical companies that were trying to find a vaccine for this when we should have had a head start from the beginning?

01:20:36.000 Well, I mean, intensely.

01:20:38.000 I mean, they, this, there's a very, very deep relationship between USAID, DARPA, and the pharmaceutical companies.

01:20:46.000 I mean, we've had multiple secretaries of defense who straight up came straight there.

01:20:51.000 I mean, think about Donald Rumsfeld.

01:20:53.000 He was on, he was, he was the head of Gilead before he was made the, you know, Gilead, which made Remdesivir during COVID.

01:21:01.000 You know, he was the, what, chairman of the board of Gilead right before he was plucked to be the secretary of, Or the Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, and then off to the races with anthrax and all this stuff, getting all the biodefense stuff set up by that very Pentagon.

01:21:21.000 And what happens is these US government agencies make the markets for Pfizer and JJ and Merck and all these companies overseas.

01:21:31.000 The State Department, USAID, and military programs create basically the markets for sale, distribution, Ability to offload backlogged products.

01:21:45.000 And just even if a country doesn't want it, we basically use our diplomatic leverage.

01:21:50.000 We use the humanitarian assistance to help them pay for Pfizer products.

01:21:56.000 And we do this everywhere Africa, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Far East Asia.

01:22:04.000 And so there's this very deep relationship between the pharmaceutical companies and the national security complex, in part because the national security complex.

01:22:12.000 When they declare a pandemic or when they declare a public health initiative, they're selling the products and forcing the sale in many respects.

01:22:20.000 In order to be, if you want to get your IMF loan distribution so that your friggin' Zambian economy doesn't go insolvent, you have to respond to this public health thing by buying Pfizer products.

01:22:31.000 Nothing says cronyism quite like creating the problem so that you can sell them the solution. 0.78

01:22:37.000 I don't even know how much I buy that.

01:22:38.000 Like you mentioned the idea of the smoking gun, but like you said earlier, Fauci lied under oath about gain of function research.

01:22:45.000 And if the average person doesn't comprehend how serious that is, I just think there's a whole lot of apathy from the general public.

01:22:52.000 It's very acute when it's going on, but as soon as they're out again, they're not being surrounded by people with masks that remind them of what's going on, and they're back living in the world again, that desire for change kind of goes away.

01:23:05.000 The pardon that he got is a big part of why people have this kind of, it was a big contributor to the cynicism that people feel.

01:23:15.000 They're just like, look, man, It's rigged, right?

01:23:18.000 Like, he clearly lied under oath about something that killed a boatload of people around the world and basically shredded our civil liberties for a year and a half.

01:23:30.000 And the Biden administration just said, Yeah, you're fine.

01:23:34.000 You know, like, and he had an instrumental role in the production of it.

01:23:41.000 But to the admin's credit, they just arrested a couple months ago his right-hand man, David Morans, who was the guy who was deleting, you know, uh, Tricks we learned from the FOIA lady to make documents disappear after they've already been legally requested under subpoena or Freedom of Information Act.

01:23:57.000 And so, you know, there has been, I think, an earnest attempt by the Justice Department to go back.

01:24:02.000 This Justice Department.

01:24:03.000 Yeah.

01:24:03.000 Yes.

01:24:04.000 I mean, the David Moran's one is a big one.

01:24:07.000 And, you know, they hit him with, you know, basically obstruction, concealment, destruction of federal records, violations of the Records Act, which is something that he was bragging about.

01:24:20.000 We knew about that under the Biden administration, the David Moran's emails and.

01:24:25.000 You know, the destruction of evidence about the cover up.

01:24:28.000 And they did go, the Justice Department did hit him with, I think, like 15 years worth of charges.

01:24:34.000 And, but, you know, Fauci is protected.

01:24:37.000 There is one way that Fauci can go to prison.

01:24:39.000 It's not going to be for a long time and it's not going to be for what he should go to prison for forever.

01:24:44.000 Rand Paul is calling him to testify.

01:24:46.000 If he refuses to testify, then they need to Steve Bannon him.

01:24:50.000 And that's the only way he will go to jail.

01:24:52.000 Yeah.

01:24:52.000 I mean, I mean, yeah, it'd be nice if he, you know, If he's like, no, I'm not going to go, and they just say, okay, we're going to get you for your contempt of Congress, I mean, he's deep, deep, deep swamp.

01:25:03.000 So he's like a John Brennan.

01:25:05.000 They're never going to go to jail.

01:25:06.000 I think John Bolton's going to go to jail.

01:25:07.000 He's never going to go to jail.

01:25:09.000 So they have sets of rules that they would use on Steve Bannon that they're not going to use on Fauci, but that is a way.

01:25:15.000 But the point that I'm making is like, that's not going to be satisfactory because the point is the reason people are so cynical nowadays is because.

01:25:29.000 You know, they always get away with it, right?

01:25:31.000 That's essentially how everyone feels.

01:25:33.000 And even if he goes to jail for a year, people are going to be like, that's not enough.

01:25:37.000 Because, again, consider the magnitude of what happened, right?

01:25:41.000 Shut the whole world down.

01:25:43.000 Yeah.

01:25:43.000 Worse than that, they put him on magazine covers and just put him on school.

01:25:47.000 He was on women's underwear. 0.56

01:25:48.000 Do you remember that? 0.99

01:25:49.000 I mean, well, that does suck. 0.96

01:25:51.000 And it's bad that he got, you know, he was treated as some kind of. 0.98

01:25:56.000 He was treated as a deity. 0.89

01:25:57.000 He was put on like candles that Hispanic people burn. 0.98

01:26:01.000 He was put on them. 1.00

01:26:01.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:26:02.000 The point that I'm making is like he did something like the reason that everybody is feel has felt like they don't, you know, they can't make ends meet is largely because COVID shut the global economy down basically for a year and change.

01:26:18.000 And we printed all this money because of COVID.

01:26:20.000 Like he's he was instrumental in ruining a lot of people's lives.

01:26:27.000 And by a lot of people, I mean a lot of people, not just in the US, but around the world.

01:26:31.000 Like the whole world shut down.

01:26:34.000 So, like, I understand that, like, you know, the glorification of Fauci is bad and he got treated like a rock star.

01:26:41.000 It's bad.

01:26:42.000 But you're not going to satisfy people that had to watch their grandparents die through a glass window by saying, oh, he goes to jail for a year.

01:26:55.000 This is the kind of stuff that.

01:26:56.000 I would be okay with him.

01:26:58.000 If I had the choice of nothing or jail for a year, I'd take jail for a year.

01:27:01.000 Would I be satisfied?

01:27:02.000 No, but I'd smile a little bit.

01:27:05.000 But it's not justice.

01:27:05.000 I'd be a little happy.

01:27:07.000 No, it's not.

01:27:08.000 But I mean, the larger justice is structural reform.

01:27:12.000 I mean, if you shut down a mafia, but the mafia boss escapes to some island in a non extradition country, the problem is we don't want something like this to happen again.

01:27:23.000 And we want to root out the structural problems that were exposed by this whole thing happening.

01:27:29.000 And, for example, there have been some very big structural changes.

01:27:33.000 Just shut down USAID, shut down USAID, which arguably created this.

01:27:38.000 And for example, at NIH with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, you know, cut tens of millions of dollars of grants to do social media control around mis and disinformation around public health threats.

01:27:51.000 That was something that, you know, was part of the cover up was the censorship of being able to talk about it.

01:28:00.000 So no one could dispute something like the Proximal Origins paper.

01:28:03.000 To dispute it was to have a terms of service violation on the tech platforms, which was flagged by tens of thousands of government funded censors.

01:28:11.000 And we've cut all that grant funding, and we've sent a very powerful message to future aspiring professional censors.

01:28:18.000 This is not a good business to be in.

01:28:20.000 You lose one election, and there goes all you're going to, you know, you're going to have to get a service job in the gig economy because we are not in that business anymore.

01:28:29.000 We've done structural reform to the way NIH and HHS grants work like that.

01:28:34.000 And if you do that across a number of layers, you know, I think you can get to a point where there's a general feeling of accountability.

01:28:42.000 But I don't think that we're fully there yet.

01:28:44.000 Yeah, I think that so.

01:28:45.000 This is part of, you know, this kind of goes back to what we're saying about the midterms and stuff.

01:28:50.000 Like people vote on, you know, they vote on kitchen table issues.

01:28:55.000 And the people that are most critical of the Trump administration, they'll show, they'll say, well, you know, he hasn't got Fauci.

01:29:02.000 And again, I point to the fact that, like, look, he was pardoned by the Biden administration.

01:29:06.000 And so really, you're asking Trump to do something that he doesn't have the power to do.

01:29:12.000 And you're blaming Trump.

01:29:14.000 For not having the power to do something.

01:29:16.000 Like, you can't, you don't want a president to come in and say, well, we're just going to send the FBI to wrap him up.

01:29:25.000 No, look, that's totally true.

01:29:28.000 But there are other layers to this, like the one that I said about the Chinese speaking fee sort of comedy moment, which is when the CIA stonewalls Sandra Paul, when ODI, when a government agency is not responding to requests for transparency on this.

01:29:48.000 The White House could force that to happen.

01:29:52.000 All it takes is a phone call.

01:29:53.000 Hey, make public everything about COVID.

01:29:56.000 Hey, you're not turning over these documents, turn them over.

01:30:02.000 There are things that could be done on this that are not outside.

01:30:09.000 The point that I'm making, at least as far as the midterms and more broadly, go ahead.

01:30:14.000 Sorry, just to complete this point, think about what happened with Senator Paul's hearing.

01:30:19.000 With the CIA whistleblower on COVID around Fauci interference in the intelligence community.

01:30:25.000 This, if you can pull it up, actually, the, if you just, you can probably find this through Google by saying CIA Spock's S P O X, like X, and then Twitter or X account, like response to Rand Paul CIA whistleblower hearing.

01:30:49.000 This was about what specifically?

01:30:52.000 This is Jim Erdman.

01:30:52.000 When was this?

01:30:54.000 This was the CIA whistleblower.

01:30:56.000 There you go.

01:30:57.000 Yeah, see that top one right there?

01:30:59.000 So, this was the CIA whistleblower who was working on, I believe, the COVID public health analyst type stuff, who basically reported about, told the Rand Pauls committee in a public hearing about how Tony Fauci personally intervened and pressured the intelligence community to change its assessment about the lab leak.

01:31:26.000 And then various elements of the intelligence community assessment about COVID were.

01:31:32.000 Personally manipulated by Fauci and his minions.

01:31:35.000 And this just happened, what was this, May, two months ago?

01:31:40.000 And so that was spearheaded by the legislative branch, Chairman Paul.

01:31:46.000 But the executive branch, which is the administration, the official response to the CIA around this hearing was to attack the legislative branch for having a public hearing.

01:32:00.000 That was the last tweet that they actually put up.

01:32:02.000 Back in, that was the most recent tweet they've ever seen.

01:32:05.000 Yes, but they did this the same day.

01:32:06.000 The committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing a CIA agency officer for testimony today without notifying CIA, despite having already obtained closed door testimony from the individual previously.

01:32:16.000 The witness testifying today is not appearing as a whistleblower in pursuit of truth, but instead in response to the subpoena issued by Chairman Paul.

01:32:23.000 This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing.

01:32:28.000 As the CIA has already assessed, COVID 19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.

01:32:35.000 Now, this is not.

01:32:37.000 This is not an honest thing to say.

01:32:41.000 That nothing in that testimony challenged the conclusion about a lab leak.

01:32:45.000 If anything, it supported it.

01:32:46.000 It was about how Dr. Fauci and his minions personally intervened on the CIA and ODI at the time in order to change their hypothesis about it being a lab leak.

01:32:58.000 It's more evidence for the very thing that they are disingenuously claiming that it somehow undermines.

01:33:05.000 Of course, it's not undermining it, but what it does is it reflects poorly on the agency.

01:33:10.000 About how the agency acted as a political instrument, operating at the behest of political pressure from the Fauci establishment rather than making an independent assessment of what caused COVID.

01:33:22.000 But that's an executive branch agency.

01:33:24.000 That is not something that is outside the control or influence of the administration.

01:33:30.000 They report directly to the White House.

01:33:32.000 And so the picture is complicated on that front.

01:33:36.000 I understand what you're saying, but the point that I'm making is when you're offered a binary choice, Right.

01:33:42.000 And your options are either Republicans and at this particular context, your Republican representative or your Democrat representative or staying home.

01:33:53.000 So you've got three options, right?

01:33:55.000 If you stay home and Democrats win, then this doesn't get any better.

01:34:02.000 You don't get any support.

01:34:04.000 Of course, 100%.

01:34:05.000 To Josie's point, the like what Josie was saying, the option about the Steve Bannon option, you know, he declines to show up, you hit him with contempt charges.

01:34:15.000 100% of Democrats are going to back Fauci on that.

01:34:18.000 Yeah.

01:34:18.000 And you're going to have enough Republicans to get over the threshold.

01:34:22.000 You're going, like, for example, John Cornyn just is holding up the Senate nominations for ambassador of Doug Mastriano and Kerry Lake right now until the Trump administration administers the PEPFAR funds, the USAID PEPFAR money, you know, so basically in Africa.

01:34:42.000 So he's basically, so you have a Republican senator from Texas.

01:34:46.000 What an odd demand.

01:34:48.000 Saying that he is not going to allow Kerry Lake or Doug Mastriano, two MAGA stalwarts, to become U.S. ambassadors until the Trump administration administers U.S. aid money for AIDS in Africa.

01:35:02.000 Now, why is that?

01:35:03.000 I mean, look, you look at the paperwork.

01:35:06.000 I mean, guys, you're sponsored by Gilead.

01:35:11.000 He's backed by the pharmaceutical folks.

01:35:14.000 Look, I'm not going to draw too many tea leaves on that, but it sort of speaks for itself.

01:35:18.000 But it gets to do you think that Sandra Cornham would.

01:35:22.000 You know, who's he going to side with on the contempt, you know, the criminal contempt, you know, issuance by Congress over Fauci? 0.96

01:35:33.000 You think he's going to side with the pharmaceutical donors, or you think he's going to side with the maggot? 0.69

01:35:38.000 Well, Cornyn doesn't like Trump anyways, right?

01:35:42.000 Well, that's the Ken Paxton race, right?

01:35:44.000 That's the Ken Paxton race.

01:35:45.000 Yeah, he's, yeah.

01:35:47.000 But it was, it took a long time for POTUS to, you know, come out in support of Paxton.

01:35:52.000 You know, there's a complicated relationship, I think, that exists because.

01:35:56.000 Trump ultimately needs all these folks to back a budget.

01:36:00.000 You know, if not, they side with the Democrats.

01:36:02.000 This is how a lot of the doge cuts were not kept by Congress.

01:36:06.000 And then there's a question how much political leverage does the White House want to exert?

01:36:12.000 And it comes down to a log trade.

01:36:13.000 You know, at the end of the day, if they decide not to go or to abstain or to vote with Democrats, the White House can't get anything done.

01:36:21.000 There's not a large enough majority of MAGA folks.

01:36:26.000 And that's to my broader point, right?

01:36:29.000 So after the midterms, If the Republicans were to lose the House, because they're probably going to keep the Senate, it still looks like that.

01:36:37.000 But if they were to lose the House, all advances stop.

01:36:43.000 The House of Representatives, they're going to start doing the impeach Trump.

01:36:48.000 They're going to start doing everything they kind of do.

01:36:50.000 We'll slow everything down as well.

01:36:53.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:36:54.000 So I guess my broader point is it's like when you've got a bad option or a worse option, You and you have a binary choice.

01:37:03.000 You like to say, well, we didn't because all the stuff you listed that Trump has done in the administration, right?

01:37:09.000 Like just the USAID cuts, that's a huge thing, right?

01:37:14.000 Like all the stuff that they attempted to do with Doge, they didn't get even a majority of it, but they did make some cuts with Doge.

01:37:22.000 And there's a lot of things that we've talked about here tonight that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for a Republican administration coming in, if it wasn't for Donald Trump.

01:37:32.000 You know, the fact that Fauci.

01:37:36.000 Was given immunity or pardoned, you know, that was probably not even by Joe Biden.

01:37:42.000 It was by someone in his administration that actually, you know, probably signed with the auto pen or at least told him that he should because, you know, we don't know exactly how much Joe Biden knew from day to day what was going on.

01:37:55.000 And so I understand being upset with Trump, but the way that people, you know, characterize Trump as doing nothing and that is just flatly wrong.

01:38:06.000 And when you've got a binary choice, you know, you're, you're, You're looking at a situation of like, look, you can go with bad or you can go with worse.

01:38:13.000 I don't think, and Josie, maybe if you want to, I feel like I've been talking a lot.

01:38:20.000 I'll just say one thing and then I'll just like.

01:38:22.000 It's a big topic.

01:38:23.000 I don't think that in general, the voter mobilization issue for the Republicans is about Trump not doing enough on various things.

01:38:34.000 I think it's the things that he has done in the MAGA stalwart camp versus the thing that proactively.

01:38:41.000 Versus the things that he's done proactively that the MAGA stalwart camp firmly disagrees with.

01:38:46.000 Not apathy or the like.

01:38:49.000 It's that the things that have affirmatively been done and that are good and things that have affirmatively been done that are bad is sort of in the crosshairs.

01:38:59.000 And I think that the key issue for that demographic of sort of MAGA voters in 2024 as they go into 2026 are right now shaping up to be issues around sort of the.

01:39:12.000 Is pro Israel foreign policy side on the right versus the woke wokeness stuff on the left?

01:39:20.000 And there is that choice that that demographic is sort of faced with where it's they don't like the Democrats, they don't like the woke stuff, but they also do not like a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget and Section 219 and an Iran war and, you know, Section 622 and the like.

01:39:40.000 And so they are sort of caught in this crosshairs where they don't like this direction.

01:39:46.000 But they don't like this.

01:39:47.000 And there's this weird irony where the very woke faction on the left is the most hardcore anti Israel side, which is their main gripe.

01:39:59.000 So there's this weird triangle where there is no option because everything's a package deal.

01:40:07.000 Josie, is it 2004 again? 0.99

01:40:09.000 Are the libertarians in a position where they're like, well, the Democrats suck and the Republicans suck, so we're just going to stay home? 0.99

01:40:16.000 Because I remember back in 2004, 2008, Everybody hated George Bush. 0.99

01:40:22.000 You know, libertarians hated him.

01:40:25.000 They didn't really like the Democrats either.

01:40:28.000 I don't think that the Democrats were as offensive back then because the woke thing hadn't really kicked off.

01:40:35.000 They were just liberal, like heavy Democrat almost.

01:40:37.000 Yeah.

01:40:38.000 So do you think, you know, being tapped into the libertarians far more than I am nowadays, like, do you think libertarians are most likely to just stay home?

01:40:48.000 Or do you think that they're actually going to say, well, I really, really don't like the. 0.58

01:40:52.000 The Israel stuff.

01:40:52.000 So I'm actually going to vote with the Democrats because they're more critical of Israel.

01:40:59.000 They're more Israel skeptical.

01:41:00.000 Libertarians won't vote with Democrats largely.

01:41:03.000 They will either vote for their third party as like a protest vote or they will stay home. 0.64

01:41:09.000 Because what we have, when you vote Republican or Democrat right now, the way libertarians see it, you get a gay war or you get a holy war.

01:41:17.000 So the choice is which would I rather? 0.89

01:41:18.000 Would I rather have the holy war that's going to lead us into the second coming and the end of the world? 0.98

01:41:24.000 Or do I want the gay war where, you know, they're like, we remember the last 10 years, we were being silenced. 0.98

01:41:32.000 There was a censorship to a level we've never seen. 0.99

01:41:35.000 The world was mentally ill.

01:41:37.000 Like everybody didn't know what gender they were. 0.65

01:41:39.000 And we still have some of that, but it's like people are waking up and we're seeing that with the main election where the Nazi didn't quite work out.

01:41:46.000 So now we're going to try this guy that thinks he's a woman and is clearly not.

01:41:51.000 I love him.

01:41:52.000 I love him because I want him to be.

01:41:55.000 Put on the national stage.

01:41:57.000 I want people to see what the Democrats are backing.

01:42:00.000 I hope he gets the nod.

01:42:01.000 Libertarians in Maine may vote for him just for the memes.

01:42:08.000 I want that guy to go to Congress.

01:42:09.000 I want him to go to this, especially to the Senate, where like everybody's got their nose in the air and they think they're so special, you know?

01:42:15.000 Yep.

01:42:16.000 So that's the way that I see it. 0.95

01:42:17.000 You have to decide if you want to have a gay war or a holy war or just not vote at all and see which one you get. 0.91

01:42:23.000 The big L libertarians, like the Chase Oliver types, that's the gay war. 0.96

01:42:27.000 Yes. 0.95

01:42:28.000 Actually, no, they're in support of the gay world. 0.83

01:42:31.000 They're in support of the gay world. 0.58

01:42:32.000 On the gay side of the gay world. 0.84

01:42:33.000 On the gay side, but they'll vote for their own person.

01:42:37.000 They're not going to leave.

01:42:39.000 They're going to vote for the libertarian.

01:42:40.000 These are the diehard libertarians.

01:42:41.000 And honestly, how I see it, I'm a small L libertarian.

01:42:44.000 So I'm a libertarian by just in principle.

01:42:48.000 I'm not affiliated with the party, but I was doing some stuff with them to kind of help with the crossover.

01:42:55.000 So I was going somewhere with that and I completely forgot.

01:42:59.000 Happens all the time.

01:43:00.000 Yeah.

01:43:01.000 I mean, a big part of it is because, like you said, a lot of the stuff that's quote unquote woke feels like it's fallen by the wayside.

01:43:07.000 Even though we had the Sophie Cunningham story pulled up.

01:43:11.000 What I was thinking about is like those stories.

01:43:12.000 Talk about the actor show.

01:43:13.000 Yeah, I know.

01:43:14.000 But like those stories feel like a distraction now.

01:43:16.000 Like when we get into stuff about gender politics, especially in sports, it's important, but it feels like for a lot of people, it's politically distracting because the general public has made their thoughts on it fairly clear.

01:43:29.000 And while these debates are still going on, it doesn't feel as expedient or as necessary as talking about what's going on perhaps in Iran because it's affecting our gas prices, our ability to get around, your business has suffered.

01:43:41.000 Everything suffers in that sense.

01:43:43.000 So you really are caught between two choices that are really bad.

01:43:46.000 Now, the one we were talking about that was going on during the Biden administration, that felt like it hit us more at home because it was all encompassing in your way of life, whereas one of them seems to be tied more to your pocket.

01:43:57.000 I mean, you could be talking about nuclear proliferation and maybe it's the end of the world, but we've been dealing with wars in the Middle East for as long as any of us has been alive.

01:44:06.000 All of that being said, the other stuff felt closer to home, but it now feels like it's more in our rear view, even though it's.

01:44:12.000 Probably always going to be this omnipresent thing that will make a comeback after somebody spends a term in office, things change.

01:44:20.000 It doesn't really ever go away.

01:44:22.000 I remember what I was going to say.

01:44:24.000 Libertarians should vote for a smaller level in the same way that the communists did, because that's how we infiltrate.

01:44:32.000 Communists are not human.

01:44:35.000 And that's not me.

01:44:36.000 That's literally what's written into the code of our country.

01:44:39.000 But it's a bottom up approach.

01:44:41.000 So if you're going to vote for a libertarian, you're going to vote for them in your school board, you're going to vote for them for your sheriff, you're going to vote for them in your select board.

01:44:46.000 And those Are the libertarians that are going to get into office?

01:44:48.000 If you do the protest vote, they're never going to get into office because back with Perot, when he was a spoiler, they were like, oh no, we can never have this happen again.

01:44:57.000 So in the future, libertarians or any third party are going to need to have five polls where you get 15%, and we're going to choose those polls.

01:45:07.000 So it's designed so that libertarians can never compete.

01:45:10.000 And it's very hard because you're going to have the DSA candidates down there winning the elections and getting the laws changed.

01:45:15.000 Exactly.

01:45:16.000 So what are they doing when they try to get up to a higher level?

01:45:19.000 They're infiltrating the Democrats.

01:45:20.000 Yeah.

01:45:21.000 So that's the way to do it.

01:45:22.000 That's how you do it.

01:45:23.000 All right, we're going to go to one last story here.

01:45:25.000 From the New York Post, a New York City attacker yelled Allahu Akbar as he randomly stabbed two men near Central Park, according to victim witness, says the commission.

01:45:35.000 Two men were stabbed in an unprovoked rampage on the Upper West Side near Central Park on Thursday afternoon by a deranged attacker yelling Allahu Akbar during both attacks, police commissioner Jessica Tisch said.

01:45:47.000 Investigators were probing whether the suspect, Raul Morales, 51, was motivated by hate, though Tisch said.

01:45:54.000 Tish also said the initial investigation suggests that the mental health may have been a factor.

01:45:59.000 Detectives are continuing to work the case and determine motive, but according to victim and witness statements, Morales yelled, Allahu Akbar, meaning God is the greatest in Arabic during both attacks, the top cop said in a statement.

01:46:11.000 The NYPD is currently evaluating whether this is a potential hate crime, she wrote.

01:46:16.000 Is it possible or is it likely that nowadays, because of the internet and because of the U.S. involvement so heavily in the Middle East for the past 20 years, do you think that that?

01:46:28.000 That this kind of exclamation is like a meme because I do see people that are, I mean, even Donald Trump, you know, I think he said inshallah, you know, and it's weak.

01:46:38.000 And the point that I'm making is, you know, I see people in it that are, you know, not Muslims saying inshallah all the time on the internet because of the meme for it, you know, like it's, it's a, you know, it's a meme.

01:46:50.000 Does the meme make it all the way to Stabby Stab?

01:46:52.000 I don't know if it makes it all the way to that.

01:46:54.000 I think the Stabby Stab comes from Crazy Guy, but Crazy Guy's meme. 0.92

01:46:58.000 Yeah, but, you know, it's a crazy guy. 0.91

01:47:01.000 Raul Morales. 0.92

01:47:02.000 He doesn't really sound Indian.

01:47:04.000 No, I mean, it doesn't sound.

01:47:05.000 It doesn't really sound.

01:47:06.000 You know, usually it's something a little more Arabic. 0.93

01:47:10.000 I do want to talk about hate crimes in general.

01:47:12.000 Now, do you think hate crimes are like.

01:47:16.000 Do you believe in hate crimes?

01:47:17.000 No.

01:47:18.000 Good.

01:47:18.000 We're all on that same page.

01:47:18.000 Okay.

01:47:20.000 I don't believe that a crime.

01:47:21.000 Hate crimes are thought crimes.

01:47:22.000 Yes, exactly.

01:47:23.000 And I don't believe that a crime is any more heinous because of the intention of why you did it.

01:47:26.000 If you murder a child because you're a psychopath or if you murder a child because you don't like their skin, you still murdered a child.

01:47:32.000 You're still just as. 0.98

01:47:33.000 It's just as heinous.

01:47:35.000 So we all oppose that.

01:47:36.000 Okay.

01:47:36.000 Just going into this, they're investigating whether it's a hate crime.

01:47:39.000 I just wanted to get that on the table that hate crimes are thought crimes.

01:47:42.000 No, a terrorism crime.

01:47:44.000 Yeah.

01:47:44.000 A terrorism crime, that's something to look into.

01:47:47.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:47:47.000 Because he said Allahu Akbar, it makes me think that it would be. 1.00

01:47:51.000 Makes me think he's a Hispanic guy that's mentally ill. 1.00

01:47:53.000 He attacked an Asian saying that. 1.00

01:47:53.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:47:55.000 I mean, yeah.

01:47:56.000 Yeah.

01:47:56.000 I mean, so that, and honestly, I don't think.

01:47:59.000 I mean, it's New York, so it's whoever is in the vicinity that he's going to attack.

01:48:02.000 So I don't know.

01:48:03.000 It could have been targeted.

01:48:04.000 Try to figure that out.

01:48:04.000 I'm sure they're going to.

01:48:06.000 I think this is unlikely to be actually terrorism.

01:48:09.000 I do think that it's kind of like a crazy dude that was just like, you know, honestly, he was, as gross as it is, he was memeing because this kind of, these kind of things, if you're at all on the internet, you see these kind of things all the time with people just saying things because they, you know, it's become part of the national consciousness or whatever.

01:48:31.000 Celebrities are saying inshallah.

01:48:32.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:48:34.000 That's part of why I thought of it.

01:48:35.000 What's inshallah mean? 0.91

01:48:37.000 Inshallah. 1.00

01:48:37.000 God willing. 1.00

01:48:38.000 Oh. 0.86

01:48:39.000 I would go further than Josie and say, not just get rid of the concept of a hate crime, but get rid of the concept of a mental health defense.

01:48:45.000 Yeah.

01:48:46.000 Yeah.

01:48:46.000 If somebody is mentally defective, that's even worse.

01:48:49.000 Yes. 0.99

01:48:50.000 Then, like, definitely get them off the streets.

01:48:52.000 Definitely put them in jail for life.

01:48:53.000 Yeah.

01:48:53.000 Why do they soften the crime when it's like you should spend more?

01:48:56.000 Now you, now it's like we know there's going to be recidivism because even if you atone for this crime, you're mentally broken.

01:49:03.000 Why is that though?

01:49:04.000 Like, why is it baked into our legal system to show that type of compassion?

01:49:08.000 The argument is they don't actually know what they're doing.

01:49:11.000 And with The proper mental health treatment, they could reintegrate into society and be a normal person.

01:49:16.000 But unfortunately, they do the same thing with pedophiles.

01:49:19.000 Well, that's just have a little, you know, they just need to help some help.

01:49:22.000 That's a whole different topic that deserves a whole different means of punishment.

01:49:28.000 And pedophilia shouldn't be treated as if it's a mental illness.

01:49:31.000 It's treated like it's a mental illness.

01:49:33.000 But when it comes to, you know, the argument of, oh, you know, these people, once they get actual, you know, the help that they need, then they can go back into society.

01:49:33.000 It's a violent assault.

01:49:42.000 But one of the things that you see consistently with People that are struggling with mental illness, especially if they're severely mentally ill like this, you give people medication and they start taking their medication and then they feel better.

01:49:55.000 And then, invariably, and not all the time, of course, but very often, people start thinking, I don't need this anymore because I'm okay now.

01:50:03.000 The medication fixed it.

01:50:05.000 Now I don't need to take my medication.

01:50:07.000 They stop taking the medication and then the condition returns because it's not something that goes away with medication.

01:50:12.000 The medication treats the symptoms, it treats whatever the mental illness is.

01:50:17.000 It doesn't actually fix a person that has a mental illness.

01:50:22.000 It doesn't make the mental illness actually go away.

01:50:25.000 It's the medication, you know, changing the way they perceive the world.

01:50:29.000 So putting people on medication and just saying, okay, go back into the world, you have to have someone that monitors them, make sure that they're taking their medication.

01:50:37.000 And when you're dealing with what frequently happens is people that are homeless or drug users, like that kind of thing, the people that are mentally ill and homeless and drug users, it's a Venn diagram that gets real close to a circle.

01:50:51.000 I used to date a girl that was in the nursing field as a prescriber and stuff, and she dealt with a lot of people that were.

01:50:59.000 Mentally ill, and that's what happened.

01:51:01.000 It would be, you know, they would get them into the facility, they would give them medication, the medication would work, they would feel better, and then they'd be let loose again.

01:51:09.000 And then three, four months later, they were back because they stopped taking their medication, started using drugs again.

01:51:16.000 Um, so the idea that you can have someone that's very mentally ill and be like, okay, well, now you can go back into society like that is just as bad as taking someone that's incredibly violent and saying, okay, you can go back into society.

01:51:31.000 People talk about the point of You know, incarceration is to rehabilitate them.

01:51:38.000 And that's not the point of it.

01:51:40.000 The point of it is to take the people that are dangerous and can't function in society out of society.

01:51:47.000 Now, it's, you know, it may be a hard pill for some people to swallow.

01:51:51.000 And sure, there are people that make mistakes and end up in jail because they did something dumb that they don't normally do, but, or they wouldn't normally do under normal conditions.

01:52:00.000 But the fact of the matter is, the point of incarceration is to take dangerous people out of society.

01:52:06.000 And put them somewhere where they can't hurt other people.

01:52:10.000 And to treat it, to treat people that are mentally ill differently than you treat someone that has a recidivism for violent attacks, that's a bad policy.

01:52:24.000 Whether you be a person that just can't control your temper and attacks people for no reason or is just likely to attack someone because you're a violent person, or if you're a person that's mentally ill and the voices told you to stab that guy.

01:52:39.000 For everyone else in society, it's the same.

01:52:42.000 It doesn't matter why you did it, just like we're talking about hate crimes.

01:52:45.000 It doesn't matter that you did it because you don't like the way this person looks or you don't like this person's background or whatever.

01:52:54.000 You still committed a violent act and you can't know someone else's mind, you can't know their thoughts.

01:52:59.000 So the solution is you go to jail and we take you out of society.

01:53:04.000 No, you just abolish the prisons.

01:53:06.000 That's what the ESA wants to do. 0.87

01:53:08.000 What do we think about reopening asylums? 1.00

01:53:10.000 I think it's a great idea. 0.99

01:53:13.000 There are dangers, of course, because, you know, especially kids.

01:53:16.000 Thanks, Reagan.

01:53:17.000 They can be abused in the same way that jail can be abused. 0.87

01:53:19.000 Well, not only that, I mean, the way that, you know, historically, the way that communist countries would get rid of people they didn't like is they would say, oh, he's a crazy person.

01:53:30.000 Look, he's talking about these crazy ideas.

01:53:32.000 Like, you know, he's talking out against the party.

01:53:35.000 And so we have to.

01:53:36.000 Modern day oubliette.

01:53:37.000 Yeah.

01:53:38.000 Well, yeah.

01:53:39.000 Well, you see them doing this with COSA and the Kids Online Safety Act type thing, where they're making an argument.

01:53:48.000 Basically, the kids should be banned from social media or should have certain access restrictions, or there should be platform accountability for algorithms that have addictive content.

01:53:59.000 But all they mean, if you listen, like this lawsuit being led against Facebook by the state of California, I mean, Gavin Newsom's wife basically gave the game away about why they're bringing the lawsuits because her kids were watching Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

01:54:17.000 But they're cloaking it as a mental health problem.

01:54:19.000 They're basically saying it's a mental health problem.

01:54:22.000 You know, if you listen to right wing conservative aligned content, and that the platforms have to be punished for allowing a basically competitive marketplace of ideas because the wrong ideas give kids mental health problems.

01:54:36.000 Their platforms aren't strong enough, so they make our platforms illegal. 0.99

01:54:40.000 You know, one of the things that, and I do think that there should be asylums, right? 1.00

01:54:44.000 I do think that when it comes to people that are, you know, that are violent and mentally ill, they should be removed from society. 1.00

01:54:50.000 They probably shouldn't go to regular prison because.

01:54:54.000 Then they're just going to be violent in regular prison, making regular prison even worse.

01:54:59.000 But one of the things that I think is a significant concern is you'll see people on the left, if they get into positions of authority and power, they'll go after religious people. 0.93

01:55:13.000 They'll say, Your religion is a crazy person religion.

01:55:16.000 The way that you, you know, normal Christians or normal people don't think this, like, and so your religion makes you, you know, makes you suspect. 0.90

01:55:26.000 I mean, The Biden administration had already been targeting religious people and stuff. 0.53

01:55:31.000 Yeah, targeting Catholics.

01:55:32.000 So, yeah, they would absolutely do that again.

01:55:35.000 So, it's a double edged sword and it's a very, very dangerous thing to allow the government to commit people without oversight.

01:55:47.000 But at the same time, when you've got someone that is obviously dangerous, then I think it's an all right thing. 0.60

01:55:54.000 Yeah, I mean, even without opening asylums, I mean, just think about the nature of an insanity defense. 0.95

01:55:58.000 If someone is eligible for 10 years in prison and then they tell me they're also insane, I go 20 years in prison.

01:56:04.000 I don't say five.

01:56:05.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:56:06.000 Like, what's the recidivism rate for someone who's friggin' insane? 0.98

01:56:06.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:56:09.000 We're looking at the guy who killed Arena, who stabbed her in the neck.

01:56:13.000 Yeah, he should. 0.96

01:56:14.000 I mean, he can't stand trial because he's too crazy, but let's let him out of jail. 0.85

01:56:18.000 Into the oubliette. 0.82

01:56:20.000 All right, we're going to go to super chat.

01:56:21.000 So, why don't you smash the like button, share the show with your friends, head on over to rumble.com and become a member there, join Rumble so that way you can watch the after show and then head on.

01:56:30.000 Head on over to timcast.com and join the discord so you can call in.

01:56:34.000 But right now, we're going to go ahead and read some of your rumble rants and super chats.

01:56:39.000 Lifetime to go to the bathroom.

01:56:40.000 Yeah, you do.

01:56:41.000 I mean, someone might have a question for you.

01:56:42.000 Is it a changeover?

01:56:43.000 No, no, you're looking to wait five minutes.

01:56:43.000 Not yet.

01:56:47.000 Let's see.

01:56:49.000 I need Mike's help.

01:56:50.000 This is from Tekken something.

01:56:53.000 I need Mike's help.

01:56:54.000 Are we supposed to like the CIA?

01:56:56.000 Are we supposed to hate the CIA?

01:56:57.000 Are they a necessary evil? 0.99

01:56:59.000 Should they be destroyed?

01:57:00.000 I'm so confused.

01:57:02.000 I get these types of questions all the time, and I always refer to the.

01:57:06.000 If you go on Google and you type in chess sitting with tension, I'm going to just describe broadly how I see this.

01:57:14.000 Do not try to arrive at the good bad answer if you are asking this question.

01:57:22.000 Just see things plainly for what they are and try to get past the normative.

01:57:28.000 This question is usually a symptom of somebody who is uncomfortable with the tension on the board.

01:57:35.000 They see some good things.

01:57:36.000 They see some bad things.

01:57:38.000 They see some really ugly things.

01:57:40.000 They're trying to say, is it good or is it bad, so that I can cross this off the list of something that I am concerned about, so that I can focus on something else or I can put this to bed and there's no longer any tension in my head about what this thing is.

01:57:55.000 And you will never get there.

01:57:56.000 You will never get to a point where there is no tension on this issue, whether it's about intelligence collection, whether it's about covert action, whether it's about hawks or doves in terms of America's role in global leadership and what we need to do.

01:58:18.000 It's a dirty world out there, and dirty work sometimes has to get done in order to protect ourselves or in order to stay ahead of problems or in order to shift the balance of power in various places or regions or industries or whatever.

01:58:31.000 And the attempt to label the whole thing good or bad is an attempt to relieve the tension on the board that you feel having to juggle all these things.

01:58:42.000 But if you just recognize that this is just a chessboard with a lot of pieces on it and just try to understand the pieces and make your own judgment about any particular piece, the answer will sort of come to you any given month or any given period of your life where you agree or disagree with what it's doing.

01:59:02.000 And be guided by the reforms that you seek to make rather than a top down good evil.

01:59:09.000 And this is something I mention on our show a lot.

01:59:11.000 This is why the CIA propaganda arm has spent so much time in Hollywood because they want to give the uninitiated and the people who don't have the will to look super closely into it a generic feeling of positivity that they're working towards U.S. interests, which generically means your interests, which is why they've been working with Hollywood to help the.

01:59:32.000 Accuracy of their movies for decades.

01:59:34.000 But we are initiated.

01:59:37.000 Who asked that question?

01:59:39.000 I don't remember.

01:59:40.000 Let's see.

01:59:41.000 I can't even see his phone. 0.97

01:59:42.000 Technic liar.

01:59:45.000 I'd say with MKUltra, Bay of Pigs, Iranian coup, the Phoenix, the Iran Contra, the post 9 11 behavior, it's okay to not like them.

01:59:45.000 Technic liar.

01:59:56.000 I think that I'm going to go with Thomas Sowell, where there is no right or wrong.

02:00:00.000 There is only trade offs.

02:00:02.000 You get a little of what you want and you get.

02:00:05.000 A little of what you don't want.

02:00:06.000 And that's kind of the way that reality in life is.

02:00:11.000 So let's see.

02:00:12.000 From Carlo Magno Cal Phil needs to read articles with rock and roll enthusiasm.

02:00:19.000 How's that?

02:00:20.000 A little better?

02:00:20.000 Good.

02:00:21.000 I love it.

02:00:23.000 From Taylor says The roundup suit failed because they were being sued for something they aren't required to do and state law can't override federal law.

02:00:31.000 You don't want states making laws targeting companies they don't like.

02:00:35.000 I don't know enough about.

02:00:37.000 The details of the suit to actually speak on that.

02:00:40.000 But yeah, you got that out.

02:00:44.000 HawkDude83 says, Hey, Tim Cast, big fan, Mike.

02:00:46.000 Tim, is there really a difference between hero and anti hero?

02:00:50.000 Has there ever been an anti hero that became a hero?

02:00:54.000 I always want, I always relate to the anti hero.

02:00:57.000 I mean, I'd say Green Goblin.

02:00:59.000 Gaston from Beauty and the Beast was an anti hero, and I will die on that hill.

02:01:05.000 John Wake.

02:01:06.000 It depends on how far they've gone initially and what you're.

02:01:11.000 Thoughts are on, you know, the like, for instance, the Punisher kills a lot of bad guys, but it depends on whether you think that that's justified.

02:01:19.000 Are you a strong proponent of the legal system that these people go be put in front of a judge?

02:01:23.000 Like Daredevil will, you know, it's like Batman, right?

02:01:27.000 He doesn't matter how many times he brings them to Arkham Asylum, they're going to get out and kill a bunch of people.

02:01:31.000 There are a lot of people that are okay with him.

02:01:34.000 He never does, you know, at least not when he's in the proper timeline, making that decision, but the anti heroes will.

02:01:40.000 And so it's a matter of personal preference.

02:01:43.000 I don't know what the body count is on Deadpool or Wolverine, but either of those two, they don't have a problem with killing the bad guys.

02:01:50.000 You could say that an anti hero can act heroically.

02:01:53.000 I don't think that there's anything wrong with that.

02:01:55.000 If, in fact, a lot of it would end up being that they learn to make those choices as it goes on.

02:02:00.000 A more interesting story is to see an anti hero shed that skin and become a hero in the eyes of the public.

02:02:06.000 I don't know why you can't just give Batman or Superman a law enforcement badge and just deputize them to use lethal force against people who are using lethal force.

02:02:15.000 Like, why don't they just, I mean, it won't?

02:02:18.000 Well, from a storytelling perspective, it's not as interesting.

02:02:20.000 But, like, then it's over.

02:02:22.000 Boom, it's over.

02:02:23.000 They're protected.

02:02:23.000 It's like a.

02:02:25.000 They're protected like the police are when they shoot people.

02:02:27.000 Also, yeah, he's got.

02:02:28.000 He wears a body cam.

02:02:29.000 And he can be sued in court if he uses unlawful force.

02:02:29.000 He wears.

02:02:32.000 But he's got a mask on.

02:02:33.000 He's got his identity concealed, so there's no way to properly prosecute him.

02:02:37.000 We do the same thing with spies.

02:02:39.000 They have a double identity.

02:02:41.000 So, like I said, smash the like button.

02:02:41.000 All right.

02:02:43.000 Share the show with all your friends.

02:02:44.000 Mike, thanks for joining us.

02:02:45.000 Appreciate it.

02:02:46.000 Where can people find you?

02:02:47.000 Find me on X at MikeBenCyber.

02:02:49.000 Also, same on YouTube, Instagram, Rumble, all that jazz.

02:02:53.000 Josie.

02:02:54.000 You can find me on X, T R H L official.

02:02:56.000 You can find me on YouTube at The Josie Show, underscores in between the words, and Casbrew Coffee.

02:03:03.000 I have a coffee and is very patriotic, and I would suggest going over to CasbrewToffee.com and checking out my delicious, amazing coffee.

02:03:11.000 If you guys want to follow me, I am on Instagram and on X at Brett Dasivic on both those platforms.

02:03:16.000 You should check out PCC.

02:03:17.000 We are live five days a week, Monday through Friday, 3 p.m. Eastern, which is, of course, noon Pacific.

02:03:22.000 Tomorrow we will be going live at 2 p.m. Eastern, celebrating episode 1100 of the show.

02:03:27.000 We celebrate.

02:03:28.000 Every hundred episodes because it is a good thing to appreciate it when you have it.

02:03:32.000 So you should join us there.

02:03:33.000 Also, if you are a member of the Timcast Discord, I do shows twice a month at 7 p.m. doing small shows, cover a couple of topics, hang out with you guys.

02:03:41.000 I'll be there on Saturday night.

02:03:42.000 I will see you there.

02:03:44.000 I'm Carter Banks.

02:03:45.000 You can find me at Carter Banks on X and at Carter Banks Official on Instagram.

02:03:50.000 Record label is at Trash House Records on YouTube.

02:03:53.000 Got a new song up there.

02:03:54.000 Y'all should go check it out.

02:03:56.000 Yeah.

02:03:57.000 Let's get into the after show.

02:03:58.000 Phil.

02:03:59.000 Don't forget, tomorrow, if you're a Tim Cast Discord member, you can come on down to the Casper Coffee Shop in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

02:04:08.000 Come hang out.

02:04:09.000 I'm going to be there.

02:04:10.000 Ian's going to be there.

02:04:11.000 Tim's going to be there.

02:04:12.000 A bunch of people will be there.

02:04:13.000 I'm not sure who else is going to be there.

02:04:14.000 I'll be there as well.

02:04:15.000 Ian's going to change the weather.

02:04:15.000 Josephine.

02:04:17.000 I think it starts around 7.

02:04:17.000 So come on down.

02:04:19.000 If you're a Discord member, or is it just, do you have to have an advanced ticket?

02:04:24.000 I'm not sure.

02:04:25.000 Can we sell out the tickets?

02:04:26.000 Yeah, they're sold out.

02:04:27.000 They're tickets.

02:04:28.000 It's a thing that Olivia Clear would know more about than I would.

02:04:31.000 But.

02:04:32.000 Tweet at Olivia Clare.

02:04:33.000 She'll help you out.

02:04:34.000 I'm Phil that remains on X. I'm Phil that remains on Patreon.

02:04:37.000 You can check us out on Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, YouTube, Spotify, and Deezer.

02:04:37.000 The band is all that remains.

02:04:41.000 Stick around for that Rumble after show that starts now.

02:07:05.000 Yep. 1.00

02:07:05.000 Josie says the Jews are after. 1.00

02:07:07.000 They are. 1.00

02:07:08.000 They are.

02:07:08.000 Yeah.

02:07:09.000 Her ex account got locked while she was talking about Section 219.

02:07:14.000 I shit you not, I have a post of a screenshot with a timestamp on my page while I was talking about Section 219.

02:07:20.000 I got locked out of my account. 0.98

02:07:22.000 I will say, so we did a video last week about clavicular in Israel.

02:07:27.000 And we made a thumbnail that said Zionist chill?

02:07:32.000 And then clickbait farm maxing. 0.68

02:07:34.000 Well, yes.

02:07:35.000 And then also, and the thumbnail says clavicular accused of selling out.

02:07:39.000 To Israel.

02:07:40.000 And for some reason, the video couldn't get over like a thousand views.

02:07:45.000 And worse than that, not a single comment, which I don't believe for one second on YouTube.

02:07:51.000 I don't know what that was about.

02:07:53.000 Perhaps it was just an error.

02:07:55.000 But I deleted it and I re uploaded it.

02:07:58.000 It's coming out tomorrow without any of those identifiers.

02:08:01.000 We'll see what happens.

02:08:02.000 We're going to see if the Jews are after you too or if they're just after me. 0.53

02:08:06.000 Hillary, the Jews after you for any reason?

02:08:09.000 I'm not. 1.00

02:08:10.000 Particularly interested in Israel or the Jews.

02:08:14.000 So, because of that, the libertarians are after me.

02:08:17.000 Neither of them are.

02:08:17.000 Neither of them are, though.

02:08:18.000 Well, no, no, no.

02:08:19.000 But the thing is, I'm on this show every day and I'm not critical enough of Israel because I'm just kind of like they're 6,000 miles away and I don't really worry about them much.

02:08:29.000 So, the left say that I'm a genocide, a pretendicide enabler, and the right says that I'm a Jewish shill.

02:08:39.000 If Equatorial Guinea.

02:08:40.000 Was involved in our country, I would be opposed to them too. 0.98

02:08:44.000 It doesn't matter.

02:08:45.000 I'm opposed to everybody involved.

02:08:45.000 I'm America only.

02:08:48.000 When it was Ukraine three years ago, that was the big thing.

02:08:50.000 It was Ukraine was involved in everything and they were bringing Zelensky onto the floor and waving the Ukraine flags around.

02:08:55.000 And that was disgusting and anti American behavior. 0.99

02:08:57.000 It was very gay. 1.00

02:08:58.000 Yes. 0.99

02:08:59.000 I saw that he was nominated for like what, like a Nobel Peace Prize this year?

02:09:05.000 I have no idea.

02:09:05.000 How?

02:09:07.000 Have we forgotten what he did?

02:09:09.000 He was shuttering churches, he was arresting American journalists and they were dying in custody.

02:09:14.000 I mean, they were censoring speech.

02:09:15.000 They were conscripting people to fight.

02:09:18.000 Coach Redpill, right?

02:09:19.000 That passed away.

02:09:19.000 Coach Redpill.

02:09:21.000 So, look, I don't have any particular affinity for Israel.

02:09:21.000 Yeah.

02:09:28.000 I don't worry.

02:09:29.000 You just don't care.

02:09:30.000 I really don't.

02:09:31.000 I mean, I don't worry about other wars that are going on around the world.

02:09:35.000 I have my own opinions on what the situation with Iran is.

02:09:41.000 And you can read about it on my Patreon.

02:09:43.000 The day the strike started, I wrote a piece on what I really thought about the.

02:09:47.000 The strikes on Iran and how, like, what the whole geopolitical situation for that was.

02:09:55.000 I don't believe that the U.S. is going to war for Israel.

02:09:59.000 I don't believe that there is a genocide in Gaza.

02:10:03.000 And I'm not particularly partial to the Palestinian plight because, well, I mean, there's a lot of terrorists in Gaza, or there was a lot of terrorists in Gaza. 0.53

02:10:14.000 So for me, it's like I'm not really interested in either side. 0.88

02:10:17.000 Do you believe that the Iran war is a net positive?

02:10:22.000 That's yet to be seen.

02:10:23.000 You're not sure yet.

02:10:24.000 Okay.

02:10:24.000 Yeah, that's yet to be seen.

02:10:25.000 I think that the Iran war is a lot about China and the U.S. trying to weaken China.

02:10:32.000 And whether or not that will be successful still remains to be seen.

02:10:35.000 But when you look at the U.S. actions on the Panama Canal and then Venezuela.

02:10:43.000 It's an energy.

02:10:44.000 It's like a race to the moon, but it's a race for energy.

02:10:47.000 Yeah.

02:10:47.000 And really, it boils down to, in my opinion, they're doing their best to.

02:10:53.000 They don't want to actually go kinetic with China, at least right now, we don't.

02:10:58.000 And so they're doing their best to slow China's ability to make war and to engage in any kind of kinetic activities.

02:11:06.000 What Mike was talking about when the Super Chat came in about whether you like or dislike or how you feel about the CIA is how I feel a lot about foreign policy in the absence of like, you know, when you come on here and people have this deep understanding of the way things work with American foreign policy, how it relates to war.

02:11:25.000 And I don't run under the idea that, you know, just.

02:11:30.000 All war bad all the time because I understand that America has to put America's own interests first.

02:11:35.000 And not to say that I want war, but it's just I don't feel comfortable having that discussion or advocating for anything like that.

02:11:43.000 Because, like, look, they're not asking me to go fight.

02:11:45.000 They never have.

02:11:45.000 They never would.

02:11:46.000 I was born deaf in one ear and it would have never been able to, you know, enter the military anyways.

02:11:53.000 But I also understand that America needs to put its own interests first.

02:11:56.000 So it's always one of those things where I'm never truly comfortable having those discussions because I see a lot of people who have very nuanced perspectives on all of these things.

02:12:04.000 And I'm like, look, I don't know if I'm the person that you're going to come to for an answer on this.

02:12:08.000 So you should just stay out of it.

02:12:09.000 My position is non interventionism.

02:12:11.000 I'm not an isolationist.

02:12:13.000 I'm a non interventionist.

02:12:15.000 So that comes down to I don't want to do offense.

02:12:19.000 I don't want to empire the world.

02:12:20.000 I just want to.

02:12:21.000 Securing trade routes is okay, but.

02:12:23.000 That's fine.

02:12:24.000 Like that's a defensive strategy.

02:12:27.000 I mean, even when Thomas Jefferson, the Barbary pirates, that was because they were attacking sailors.

02:12:33.000 So that wasn't offensive.

02:12:34.000 That was him doing it. 0.90

02:12:34.000 They were enslaving Americans. 0.90

02:12:36.000 Yes, they were. 0.99

02:12:36.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.99

02:12:37.000 And Thomas Jefferson, who is.

02:12:39.000 He is as libertarian as they come.

02:12:41.000 Was like, well, I got to get in there and defend the sailors.

02:12:43.000 As far as presidents, yeah, he probably was.

02:12:45.000 Yeah, he was very.

02:12:46.000 I mean, there was Calvin Coolidge, who obviously was the most libertarian of all, but when it comes to the founding fathers, the most libertarian would have been Thomas Jefferson by a long shot.

02:12:56.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:12:56.000 All right, let's talk about chicks with dicks. 0.99

02:12:59.000 Chicks with dicks. 1.00

02:13:00.000 Sophie Cunningham says it's common sense to keep trans athletes out of women's sports. 0.99

02:13:05.000 Indianapolis, Indiana fever guard Sophie Cunningham doubled down Wednesday on comments she made in a recently published ESPN article saying it's common sense.

02:13:13.000 To bar transgender athletes from competing in women's sports.

02:13:16.000 In the ESPN article, Cunningham said she wanted to protect young girls in the locker room and that they shouldn't have to go against biological men.

02:13:24.000 I said what I said.

02:13:25.000 I think it's very kind of common sense, Cunningham said before Indiana's 123 to 88 victory over the Connecticut Sun on Wednesday.

02:13:33.000 And I think I'll always believe it.

02:13:35.000 What was that?

02:13:35.000 I like the inclusion of that part.

02:13:37.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:13:37.000 They routed him.

02:13:38.000 Brittany Griner, I think she plays for Connecticut still. 1.00

02:13:41.000 And so she probably smoked too much weed before the show or before the game. 0.99

02:13:46.000 I think.

02:13:46.000 And I think I'll always believe that.

02:13:48.000 I think it's really important to protect children, and that's little girls who are also involved in that category.

02:13:52.000 I stand on what I said.

02:13:54.000 The participation of transgender athletes in sports has become an increasingly politicized issue, with the Supreme Court recently upholding individual state bans on trans athletes competing in sports alongside cisgender athletes.

02:14:05.000 Just the fact that they use the term cisgender, I'm not particularly sure.

02:14:08.000 Cis is a slur?

02:14:10.000 No, I think that, I think, like, I don't think of it like a slur, but I think they should just say normal.

02:14:17.000 No, no, no, no.

02:14:18.000 I'll tell you why it's a slur.

02:14:19.000 So it is a slur and it's used to marginalize normal people.

02:14:23.000 And they say, no, no, it's not a slur.

02:14:25.000 It's a prefix, is what they'll say.

02:14:26.000 It's not a slur.

02:14:27.000 It's a prefix. 1.00

02:14:27.000 And to that I respond, okay, homo. 1.00

02:14:32.000 The best thing they can do in these situations is to not turn her into like a right wing spokesperson. 0.99

02:14:38.000 We need more people because she said, she's very Riley Gaines.

02:14:41.000 She says, I'm not political for the most part.

02:14:43.000 She cares about this issue and she does more good for the issue by caring about this one and not having to do like, Ads for Patriot Dirt or something like that.

02:14:52.000 Like, as soon as you become like a spokesman or a figure for a political cause, then you're dismissed out of hand by people who are, first of all, those who are already extremely politically radicalized.

02:15:03.000 But even the ones who are not will look at the fact that you're now some type of avatar for an entire political movement and they can dismiss your thoughts out of hand.

02:15:12.000 I think that she's more powerful having this issue that she'll speak on when it comes up.

02:15:16.000 But otherwise, she stays out of it because it doesn't matter to her.

02:15:19.000 I think it matters.

02:15:20.000 This is such an important issue to me.

02:15:22.000 I am a mother of girl athletes that are playing or going to play at a pretty high level.

02:15:27.000 Um, so I was living in Massachusetts and there was co ed soccer, and I have it on video because that was my only choice.

02:15:33.000 My daughter's like, I want to play, and I'm like, You're gonna play with boys, and she's like, Well, I want to play.

02:15:37.000 I there is in seventh grade, she's playing soccer against a boy, and I have it on film, and he just bodies her.

02:15:45.000 My daughter is tiny, she's a tiny little thing, and this, I mean, this is like bigger than you.

02:15:51.000 Yep, yeah, so this is a big kid who does that, and I'm like, I can't have her play soccer anymore, and that's her dream.

02:15:56.000 She wants to play soccer. 0.98

02:15:58.000 You know, professionally.

02:15:58.000 So, one of the reasons that I moved from Massachusetts to Florida was to protect my kids.

02:16:03.000 It's to protect my kids.

02:16:04.000 And they don't, that's illegal.

02:16:05.000 You can't do that in Florida.

02:16:06.000 They tried, but you can't do that.

02:16:09.000 So, my daughter's able to excel.

02:16:10.000 She's all county and she's offensive player of the year and she's MVP and she's excellent and she's got two SEC schools looking at her and she just visited Stetson, you know.

02:16:22.000 So, when it comes to boys and girls sports, I say, get out of my daughter's sport.

02:16:30.000 That's what I say as a mother. 0.99

02:16:33.000 Yeah, I mean, look, I think that everyone, at least everyone here at Timcast generally, is of the opinion that trans women, dudes, shouldn't be playing in girls' sports. 0.61

02:16:48.000 I think, especially when it comes to kids, you know, but I think just overall.

02:16:54.000 There have been over, as of last year, the count was over 900 accolades taken from girls and given to boys.

02:17:01.000 And that includes scholarships, that includes trophies, that includes titles. 0.51

02:17:05.000 I mean, I'm all for taking things from women, but you know, that's fair. 1.00

02:17:10.000 We don't deserve much. 1.00

02:17:11.000 I just think the nonchalantness of this is really important.

02:17:14.000 Like, I think the fact that she didn't feel like she had to turn it into more than it was, she didn't try to stand on a bunch of other ideas.

02:17:21.000 She's simply stating it as Phil, you were saying something the other day about when people bring up voter ID and they try to join them on the playing field they're on, you're just giving them leverage by even entertaining the discussion.

02:17:34.000 Don't entertain the discussion. 1.00

02:17:35.000 Like, this is stupid. 1.00

02:17:37.000 I disagree. 1.00

02:17:38.000 And then move on. 1.00

02:17:38.000 When someone calls me a racist, I just say, fuck off. 1.00

02:17:42.000 Right. 1.00

02:17:42.000 Or someone says that I'm a bigot or someone says that I'm whatever. 1.00

02:17:45.000 I'm just, fuck off. 1.00

02:17:46.000 Anytime somebody says something like that to me, I say, thanks. 1.00

02:17:48.000 I learned everything I know from your mom.

02:17:51.000 And it seems to really hit hard.

02:17:52.000 Your mom jokes are always good.

02:17:53.000 But the point is, like, if you engage with people that make arguments like that, you're giving their argument credibility by saying, this is something I need to defend myself from.

02:18:05.000 You're a reasonable person and you're making a reasonable argument.

02:18:09.000 So I have to defend myself from it. 1.00

02:18:11.000 If you just say, Shut up. 1.00

02:18:13.000 You know, that's bullshit or fuck off or whatever. 1.00

02:18:16.000 Then you're dismissing them out of hand and you're not giving them the respect to engage in the argument. 1.00

02:18:22.000 And so, like, we were sitting here, it was Libby and someone else, and they were talking about the argument being made.

02:18:28.000 And they were like, oh, it was, you know, the voter ID thing. 0.81

02:18:30.000 They were like, oh, look how ridiculous it is. 0.98

02:18:32.000 And it was bordering on the Democrats or the real racists. 0.99

02:18:36.000 And I hate that. 0.62

02:18:37.000 But, like, they were like, well, you know, of course, you know, of course, black people can get IDs. 1.00

02:18:43.000 And, oh, you know, women and I'm like, guys, they know it's bullshit. 0.98

02:18:47.000 So, like engaging in the argument that they want to make is giving them something. 0.99

02:18:54.000 Give them nothing. 1.00

02:18:55.000 Tell them to fuck off. 1.00

02:18:57.000 Cut it down in a way where you just laugh at them. 1.00

02:19:00.000 Yeah.

02:19:01.000 It discredits them.

02:19:01.000 Yeah.

02:19:02.000 It makes them embarrassed.

02:19:04.000 Okay, clown shoes.

02:19:05.000 You know.

02:19:06.000 But all right, we're going to go to your calls right now to the people in the Discord.

02:19:11.000 You know, I never have a problem with Discord except for when I'm sitting here behind Tim's computer.

02:19:18.000 Let's see, who do we got?

02:19:20.000 Every night. 1.00

02:19:21.000 Ragda.

02:19:21.000 What's up, man?

02:19:22.000 What up, dude?

02:19:23.000 Oh, Alex, right?

02:19:24.000 Yeah, Alex.

02:19:25.000 How are you doing?

02:19:27.000 Doing well, guys.

02:19:28.000 How about you?

02:19:29.000 Doing well.

02:19:29.000 Thanks for calling in.

02:19:31.000 Thank you as well.

02:19:31.000 Thanks for taking my call.

02:19:33.000 Yeah, Resident Serb here once again.

02:19:36.000 I got a question for Mike, actually.

02:19:40.000 I'm going to start with the question, first of all.

02:19:41.000 Yeah, let's go direct.

02:19:42.000 He's leaving.

02:19:45.000 Hold on a second. 1.00

02:19:46.000 Mike just got a little autistic. 1.00

02:19:48.000 Oh, I don't know if Mike wants to look at the sword. 1.00

02:19:50.000 I guess you can on the after show.

02:19:51.000 This, yeah, you can have that on the after show.

02:19:55.000 I can pull out my Glock.

02:19:56.000 Mike just found a sword.

02:19:57.000 So, all right, Mike, he's got a question for you.

02:19:59.000 You're ready.

02:20:02.000 Hello.

02:20:03.000 I guess, yeah.

02:20:03.000 Hi, Mike.

02:20:05.000 Let me just go with the question directly.

02:20:07.000 So, recently there's been a lot of geopolitical changes, and I'm curious.

02:20:12.000 First of all, how do China and Russia actually project soft power abroad?

02:20:19.000 Which other major powers still matter globally?

02:20:24.000 And are the big players mostly locked in rivalry, you know, kind of like a two block thing?

02:20:31.000 Or are there, you know, real alliances still these days?

02:20:36.000 And how have those relationships changed recently?

02:20:41.000 Great questions.

02:20:42.000 So, how Russia and China exert soft power are slightly different.

02:20:49.000 China, I think, is much more sophisticated.

02:20:53.000 Russia's primary means of soft power is through financial entanglements between Russian oligarchs and comparable oligarchs in partnered countries.

02:21:07.000 So, for example, one of the ways that the Cold War reignited in the early 2000s was through European dependence on Russian oil and gas, which allowed Russia to reassert soft power influence.

02:21:27.000 Over countries, be they Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, the Balkan countries, and the like, because the transit revenue from the natural gas being sourced in Russia made a lot of people in those countries rich.

02:21:46.000 And because of Russian oil exports, it makes a lot of people rich in foreign countries that are effectively importing Russian oil.

02:21:58.000 Or whose businesses depend on that Russian oil.

02:22:01.000 And so we call that financial or economic soft power projection.

02:22:06.000 It's a very different.

02:22:08.000 Now, we use that as well, economic soft power, in myriad ways.

02:22:15.000 But that is, I would argue, Russia's primary means of doing it at an impactful level, which is to say that capturing a foreign country's oligarchs by effectively getting them on direct or indirect payroll makes.

02:22:32.000 Powerful figures in that country, economically entangled, dependent, and supportive of pro Russian narratives, interests, the like.

02:22:44.000 We incorporate that, but we also incorporate a much more expansive informational soft power, institutional soft power, human soft power networks on the ground.

02:22:55.000 We go after the labor unions, the media organizations, the public health ecosystems.

02:23:03.000 The education systems, the court systems, rule of law, the legislative, the executive, the judicial branches of the government, full spectrum.

02:23:14.000 And that is because we've invested a lot more in that institution building, whereas Russia does not have very robust institution building.

02:23:24.000 They don't have huge networks of NGOs, nonprofit organizations, think tanks that do, for example, Now, China is much more sophisticated in that way than Russia.

02:23:38.000 China has a version light, I would say, of what we have.

02:23:45.000 Primarily, the way China really captures a country, if you look at Africa, for example, through debt trap diplomacy or through financial entanglements that are not necessarily about building a powerful oligarch who's got a lot of clout, for example, in Romania or Bulgaria, but what they will do is.

02:24:05.000 Basically, build roads, ports, and then take in infrastructure.

02:24:09.000 Right, infrastructure and the like.

02:24:11.000 And now that's something that we do as well, but China has focused on that.

02:24:19.000 And in particular, because they don't have to spend as much on hard power, they don't have 800 military bases.

02:24:25.000 And they've also not incurred, because they're soft power, they do what I call value based diplomacy as opposed to values based diplomacy.

02:24:37.000 We will do that sort of thing, but we will.

02:24:41.000 We will make it a quid pro quo that in addition to us getting an equity interest in some port or us having some easement to some land with minerals or the like or some trade deal being struck, we will also impose various soft power conditions like you have to reverse your ban on gay marriage. 0.94

02:25:00.000 You have to allow. 0.98

02:25:03.000 Right.

02:25:03.000 And so we use values based diplomacy nominally as a soft power exertion because it tilts the hearts and minds, at least in theory, towards a sort of Western orbit.

02:25:14.000 And off of a sort of Russian Chinese heteronormative, et cetera.

02:25:21.000 We fold values into it, but that also causes a lot of resentment.

02:25:24.000 Whereas when the Chinese go in, they will have this economic soft power, but since they don't force a structural, cultural, sort of heritage reorganization of the country's values, it's a raw value play.

02:25:39.000 And we find ourselves in China sort of outgunned diplomatically, frankly.

02:25:44.000 I remember when I got to the State Department.

02:25:47.000 And one of my roles was chairing basically the U.S. government position on the International Telecommunications Union and being briefed by my deputy that we were only fighting for parity with China and to sort of neutralize Chinese initiatives there because we didn't have really the votes to take an aggressive posture because all 54 countries in the African Union were siding with the Chinese delegation on this.

02:26:17.000 And so I guess that was the first part of your question the differences that.

02:26:21.000 Your second question was about the great power competition aspect?

02:26:26.000 How has this changed recently?

02:26:28.000 Because I've noticed recently in Europe, especially, there's been a lot of changes in how everybody's positioning themselves in relation to different powers globally.

02:26:38.000 So, kind of ties into the last part of my.

02:26:41.000 I wanted to add this as well, just to tie it into this.

02:26:43.000 So, do you think at this point Europe is actually an independent actor at any level?

02:26:51.000 Which countries would be independent?

02:26:54.000 And are there any?

02:26:55.000 Or are all countries in Europe at this point basically just influenced by Russia, China, or America?

02:27:01.000 Or maybe Middle East?

02:27:02.000 Yeah, I've heard people sort of banty about that framework about sovereign versus non sovereign, independent versus non independent countries.

02:27:12.000 I don't find that to be a particularly useful framing.

02:27:14.000 I mean, every I would argue it's hard not to see the United States.

02:27:19.000 I mean, who's independent in the United States?

02:27:22.000 I don't know that countries really make decisions because it's in their national interests.

02:27:26.000 I think that the politically appointed representatives deal with a diverse set of interests between voters and donors.

02:27:36.000 Often represent the interests of donors over voters.

02:27:40.000 And what you have is basically a stakeholder soup to which politicians are dependent on, even in nominally independent countries.

02:27:47.000 And oftentimes that involves foreign actors as well, or oligarchs that provide an institutional or amplification or financial support base and the like.

02:27:58.000 But certainly the EU, because of hostilities with the Trump administration under term one and term two, Is trying to pivot off of the US alliance in certain core respects, not the least of which there's a digital strategic autonomy initiative around their tech stack.

02:28:19.000 And this is where, I guess.

02:28:21.000 Yes, they're trying something to do.

02:28:22.000 The blue sky, the Euro sky plot, the digital regulation around the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.

02:28:31.000 And the Russia China relationship is right now being reshaped because of the energy dynamics.

02:28:38.000 Whereas Russia used to export.

02:28:42.000 All of its gas to Europe because of the US led sanctions in 2014, combined with the EU heavy adoption of that and the support for the war against Russia and the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines and the like.

02:28:57.000 Russia is constructing natural gas to sell to China instead.

02:29:03.000 And these gas pipelines are 30 year marriages.

02:29:05.000 And so China gets the benefit of extremely cheap, basically discounted.

02:29:12.000 Gas that used to be cheap gas for Europe. 0.57

02:29:15.000 And so I think that you've seen, you know, a kind of, I don't want to say new Sino Soviet alliance, but, you know, the war on Russia has basically made, I think, Russia and China closer.

02:29:31.000 They still have a lot of, you know, differences, distinctions in their own conflicts.

02:29:35.000 But, you know, certainly I think just out of economic necessity, especially with the secondary sanctions and the like that have been.

02:29:43.000 Popping up.

02:29:45.000 China is increasingly a customer of Russia, which creates its own oligarch to oligarch relationships, whereas China also has a lot more international latitude.

02:29:54.000 And so I can see the EU pivoting to China, Canada pivoting to China, a lot of NATO partners pivoting to China rather than the US.

02:30:05.000 And that's one of the sensitivities diplomatically in terms of our crackdown.

02:30:08.000 How far can you push Europe before they turn to China?

02:30:11.000 Yeah.

02:30:13.000 That's kind of what I know.

02:30:14.000 I mean, China has been gaining a lot of influence, not only in Serbia.

02:30:18.000 Serbia has been Chinese for kind of a long time now.

02:30:21.000 I mean, I'm not sure what we are at this point.

02:30:24.000 It's kind of a confusing situation.

02:30:25.000 First of all, I just want to thank you for the analysis of the Bringing Down a Dictator.

02:30:30.000 I think I watched it about four times so far.

02:30:34.000 But I have to tell you one interesting thing follow up on the people there.

02:30:40.000 People from the documentary that you'd mentioned, the two faces there are still active.

02:30:45.000 Oh, yes, of course.

02:30:46.000 Canvas and the other one is, I think, Center for Nonviolent Comp.

02:30:52.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:30:53.000 Something, something, something.

02:30:55.000 No, they're hugely involved in all of our street protests, AstroTurf work, our rent to riot work.

02:31:00.000 That's the thing I'm kind of confused now.

02:31:02.000 So, because Serbia is now in an interesting position, we're kind of in between China, America, and Russia.

02:31:09.000 We're trying to divest from Russian oil.

02:31:12.000 America's forcing us to do that.

02:31:15.000 We're getting a lot of deals for data centers and for other things from America at the same time.

02:31:19.000 Trump likes us so far, as far as I can see.

02:31:22.000 And China still invests money, but I'm not sure what's happening.

02:31:27.000 Right.

02:31:28.000 Well, I mean, think about the Hungary situation.

02:31:30.000 Like, since we were just talking about the great power sort of play there, Hungary turned to China in primary part because of the EU and Democrat, you know, sort of pressure and sort of neocon pressure on the Orban government.

02:31:47.000 And so China was, whereas China represents kind of a counterpart trading partner for the EU, sorry, against the United States, countries like.

02:32:01.000 Hungary turned to China because their funds, they had $38 billion locked up in the EU and various pressures being put on them from the US government and USAID.

02:32:11.000 And so China really is a very flexible swing player that way.

02:32:15.000 And they are good in the business of, I mean, think about even the state of California.

02:32:22.000 I mean, China is in many respects bailing out many parts of the California state budget.

02:32:28.000 San Francisco solved its homeless problem in one weekend when the Chinese economic delegation came.

02:32:33.000 Because of that interplay, I think they see that as an opportunity to get their own sort of interests represented and get access to various ports and infrastructure and soft power nodes.

02:32:47.000 Yeah, but that's the thing.

02:32:49.000 In Serbia, I'm not sure right now what's going on because our protesters who are protesting the government are pro EU, anti.

02:32:57.000 Actually, I don't know even if they're pro EU at this point.

02:33:02.000 I think Russia's been increasing their soft power influence technically in China.

02:33:06.000 I don't know if it's noticeable yet, but I don't know.

02:33:10.000 Just something I'm noticing.

02:33:12.000 They've started doing something like Eurovision Alternative.

02:33:16.000 Yeah.

02:33:17.000 They started that thing.

02:33:19.000 They started investing in universities here in Serbia, and China has also been doing that.

02:33:24.000 No.

02:33:25.000 And in Serbia, an interesting thing is happening.

02:33:27.000 We're kind of desecularizing our university, at least one of them.

02:33:33.000 I have a little bit of context that I can add to this particular conversation about Russia.

02:33:37.000 So just recently, my band got an.

02:33:40.000 An extremely generous offer to go play shows in Russia.

02:33:46.000 We're not going.

02:33:48.000 Don't be surprised.

02:33:49.000 I'm not going to Russia as long as.

02:33:52.000 You're worried about getting trapped there.

02:33:53.000 Well, I mean, I'm not so much worried about getting trapped. 0.76

02:33:55.000 I'm not going there to Moscow and St. Petersburg as long as Ukraine is shooting, you know, flying drones into places in what's called. 0.59

02:34:04.000 But we've been there before.

02:34:05.000 It's been a while.

02:34:06.000 I think the last time we went was 2012.

02:34:08.000 Well, that was during the Russian reset.

02:34:10.000 Yeah.

02:34:11.000 And I think it was 2012.

02:34:13.000 Maybe it was 2011.

02:34:15.000 2010, 2012.

02:34:16.000 That was when we had a detente. 0.95

02:34:18.000 That was when Russia was the good guy for a minute there. 0.67

02:34:21.000 And this offer is significantly bigger.

02:34:26.000 I'm not going to talk about how much it is, but it's significantly bigger.

02:34:29.000 And they're talking about paying for hotels, paying for flights, which normally you get an offer and that's what it is.

02:34:35.000 And you have to get there and pay for everything.

02:34:38.000 But they're talking about everything's included.

02:34:40.000 They'll pay for all of it.

02:34:42.000 And we get a big, you know, big check.

02:34:45.000 And there's a friend of mine's band that's, I believe they're currently over there or they're going over there shortly.

02:34:52.000 And I, Imagine the offer was substantial, just like ours.

02:34:57.000 So, I think that you're probably, you know, you're probably, or this probably aligns with what you're talking about about soft power, you know, Russia trying to reach out and do soft power stuff.

02:35:08.000 I've now done 16 hours of subscriber content on the CIA and the music industry and how we do the exact same thing with these international concerts and, you know, especially in the music industry and the intelligence world.

02:35:21.000 And I'll put clips of it on my main timeline, but I've This is, I love this subject so much.

02:35:26.000 People accuse me of being a Fed because I'm in a metal band that tours.

02:35:30.000 Like, they're like, oh, you know, you're a Fed.

02:35:33.000 You're the CIA started Rockstars and blah, blah, blah.

02:35:36.000 And it's like, well, look, I mean, just because the CIA had a hand in this kind of stuff doesn't mean that every band that ever goes on tour is actually a Fed.

02:35:46.000 Remember when Bono played in the tunnels of Ukraine, like played underground for Ukraine, and we're supposed to think that's not propaganda to get us to support the war?

02:35:54.000 I ain't going to Ukraine either, as long as there's a war going on.

02:35:58.000 When the war ends and there's a real armistice or something where they're not shooting at each other, then we'll talk about going to those parts of Europe.

02:36:07.000 The other issue around the Russia thing is having that on your passport at this moment when the Democrats.

02:36:16.000 That's very good.

02:36:18.000 That's an immediate counterintelligence threat in the eyes of the Southern District of New York and the entrenched sort of FBI careers where the moment power snaps back the other way.

02:36:32.000 I mean, they went after Trump.

02:36:33.000 They investigated Trump for his real estate dealings in Russia in the 1980s when he was the president in 2017.

02:36:41.000 And not only that, our European booking agent said, look, if you go do this, there are other booking agents and festivals that will not book you.

02:36:52.000 Oh, exactly.

02:36:53.000 So I know the exact associations.

02:36:53.000 Blah, blah, blah.

02:36:55.000 That's my association.

02:36:58.000 But, anyways, do you have anything you want to add?

02:37:01.000 Nothing too special.

02:37:02.000 Just wanted to shout out the Discord.

02:37:04.000 Forgot the first two times.

02:37:06.000 But gotta say, even though I'm Serbian, really great place to meet people.

02:37:10.000 Thank you guys for everything.

02:37:12.000 And, Phil, one thing.

02:37:14.000 Yes.

02:37:14.000 I noticed you're really anti communist.

02:37:16.000 So if you ever need somebody to teach you about communism or how much to hate it, I'm your guy.

02:37:21.000 Bro, do you have an X account?

02:37:25.000 I have an X account.

02:37:25.000 I'm not very active.

02:37:26.000 I mostly just troll.

02:37:27.000 Do you follow me?

02:37:29.000 Yep.

02:37:31.000 Like tweet at me or reply to the top tweet that I have now, and I'll make sure that I follow you.

02:37:39.000 Thanks, bro. 1.00

02:37:40.000 My top tweet right now is I said literal imbeciles about some people that are saying something stupid. 0.99

02:37:46.000 So just point, be like, hey, I called into the after show and I'll follow you. 1.00

02:37:50.000 And all right.

02:37:51.000 Okay.

02:37:52.000 I'm just commenting.

02:37:53.000 It's me.

02:37:54.000 Awesome.

02:37:54.000 All right, man.

02:37:55.000 Thanks.

02:37:56.000 Thank you, man.

02:37:57.000 Bromance.

02:37:58.000 I mean, I love an anti communist.

02:38:00.000 So let's see.

02:38:04.000 Come on there.

02:38:06.000 Angry. 1.00

02:38:06.000 Angry fat white guy. 1.00

02:38:08.000 He's still muted because the Discord is slow. 1.00

02:38:10.000 Angry fat white guy. 0.99

02:38:11.000 What's up, man? 0.99

02:38:12.000 What up?

02:38:14.000 Paul, I'm going to lead off today with an apology.

02:38:16.000 I'm three whiskeys in, and this is a topic with which I'm very familiar.

02:38:20.000 But I'm going to come after Mike Benz.

02:38:23.000 I'm going to try and be professional, nice, and polite.

02:38:25.000 But what I want to talk about is Section 219 of the NDAA.

02:38:30.000 Man, there's a lot of misinformation.

02:38:33.000 I hate using that word, but there's a lot of misinformation on social media talking about, oh, it's giving up sovereignty and it's merging our militaries. 0.97

02:38:41.000 And that's complete and utter horseshit. 0.87

02:38:43.000 And I don't know much about you. 0.97

02:38:45.000 I just looked you up today.

02:38:47.000 I apologize for that.

02:38:48.000 You're off to a very bad start.

02:38:49.000 I understand you.

02:38:50.000 You did a brief stint at the State Department.

02:38:53.000 You did some speech writing, but I don't see any experience in the military or foreign military sales or security assistance.

02:39:01.000 That happens to be my life.

02:39:04.000 Section 219 does not merge our military with Israel, it doesn't give them anything.

02:39:08.000 I think that I explicitly stated it didn't.

02:39:12.000 When did I say it's a full merger of the militaries?

02:39:15.000 You didn't even watch the show, dude.

02:39:18.000 So I'm not directly quoting you, it's the general gist and sentiment, but you seem opposed to it, right?

02:39:24.000 Is that a fair assessment?

02:39:25.000 Yeah, I don't like it.

02:39:28.000 Okay.

02:39:29.000 Let me tell you why you should.

02:39:32.000 So it does very few things.

02:39:32.000 All right.

02:39:35.000 It requires the Secretary of War to appoint an executive agent.

02:39:39.000 And by the way, I already, dude, did you watch the show?

02:39:42.000 I already laid this out the executive agent department wide and went through the whole thing.

02:39:47.000 Teach me something I don't know.

02:39:49.000 How about that, Mr. Expert?

02:39:50.000 So what it does do, it gives Israel nothing, but it gives us access to Iron Dome. 0.96

02:39:56.000 Iron Beam and David Sling, and some other tech that the Israelis have that we don't. 0.54

02:40:02.000 And it gives us the opportunity to produce these systems domestically, which gives us control of the supply line and lets us augment American industry, right?

02:40:14.000 There are a lot of things that Israel has advances in that we don't like anti tunneling technology, which we already covered.

02:40:25.000 I've covered everything you've said so far.

02:40:27.000 I've covered everything you've said so far.

02:40:29.000 My key issue was around the interoperability and path dependency problem.

02:40:33.000 Solve that one for me.

02:40:35.000 Okay, what's your problem with interoperability?

02:40:37.000 Because interoperability is one of the things I do.

02:40:40.000 Did you watch the show before you said all this?

02:40:42.000 Because so far you've said like 12 things wrong.

02:40:45.000 I did watch the show.

02:40:47.000 So you heard me mention the interoperability problem, right?

02:40:51.000 So you should remember it, right?

02:40:54.000 No, I don't recall specifically your words on interoperability.

02:40:57.000 Okay.

02:40:58.000 What is your interoperability?

02:40:59.000 Like, refresh my memory.

02:41:00.000 And I'm not trying to be antagonistic here.

02:41:02.000 Right.

02:41:03.000 So I see the interoperability and path dependency problems as being interrelated.

02:41:09.000 What you're doing is you're building it into our supply chain.

02:41:12.000 You're building basically foreign military industrial complex sourced technology, military tools, weapons systems into our dependencies for deploying.

02:41:30.000 And operationalizing our military tech stack.

02:41:35.000 This allows someone else in the chain besides our own sovereign government to have input and influence over our ability to actually use our own weapon systems.

02:41:47.000 I gave the analogy, if you recall, around Anthropic and the difficulty that the Pentagon currently has around revamping our AI because over basically three years of the Biden administration, you had.

02:42:02.000 Anthropic as the lead AI system.

02:42:05.000 And given the conflicts between Anthropic and the Trump administration, the Pentagon cannot quickly or easily or cheaply revamp its AI systems.

02:42:14.000 It can't get Anthropic out because it's had several years of deep entrenchment within all of our systems.

02:42:21.000 There is an interoperability problem that that has caused.

02:42:24.000 So we can't just go with another contractor and just quickly shift everything without major, expensive, difficult overhauls of the whole thing.

02:42:34.000 And in addition, What that allows Anthropic to do is make various decisions because we're reliant on its tech stack.

02:42:43.000 It has a vote in our ability to operationalize those systems.

02:42:49.000 Now, I actually think, and this happened, for example, with our autonomous kill drones, right?

02:42:54.000 Anthropic said it does not want, it basically said that the Pentagon cannot use Claude's systems to be able to autonomously kill people, with Claude just making the You know, the kill decision.

02:43:09.000 They want a human in the chain.

02:43:10.000 Now, I actually thought that was a good thing.

02:43:13.000 I don't like the idea of AI determining whether or not, you know, someone should live or die.

02:43:18.000 I do think there should be a human in the chain.

02:43:20.000 But in that case, the Pentagon wanted the autonomous kill system.

02:43:25.000 And Anthropic held it up and said, no, we're just not going to let you do that.

02:43:29.000 We're not going to allow Claude to be used that way.

02:43:32.000 And there was a big court dispute and there was a big contract dispute.

02:43:35.000 What happens when it's a sovereign, when it's a foreign government?

02:43:39.000 That gets the ability to make that decision about intelligence, about targeting, about huge underlying missile defense systems.

02:43:48.000 Then, when you are in negotiations with that country or with another country, but that other foreign country has a say in it or wants to intervene, they can threaten all sorts of cooperation, like in that, because you are.

02:44:06.000 I see your reservations.

02:44:08.000 They are not a factor.

02:44:10.000 This is a path that's already been traveled.

02:44:12.000 For example, I already covered how those dependencies already exist in many respects because of so much of Israeli tech that's already built into Palestine.

02:44:21.000 No, not with military systems.

02:44:23.000 Are you familiar with NASAMS?

02:44:24.000 It's a joint U.S. Norwegian missile defense system, air defense system, right?

02:44:31.000 It's actually what protects our capital.

02:44:34.000 We have procedural controls, policy controls in place, we have technological controls in place, which one of them being, for example, the risk management framework.

02:44:45.000 It's a free source.

02:44:46.000 You can look it up.

02:44:48.000 We do a lot of due diligence and we have technological control in place.

02:44:53.000 So, in terms of risk management framework, it's a whole bunch of monumental lists of all these controls, whether technological or procedure or physical security.

02:45:04.000 Yeah, dude, we have this with a ton of countries.

02:45:06.000 When there's a cross the mean.

02:45:07.000 We have this with a ton of countries with one off projects.

02:45:11.000 What we don't have and what we've never had before is a mandatory full sweep that forces it at basically.

02:45:21.000 Every level, and that is this broad and sweeping.

02:45:25.000 We don't do it.

02:45:26.000 DOD CIO and DSCA have these, and the NSA have these policies and procedures and restrictions in place specifically to protect against any kind of cross domain intrusion.

02:45:38.000 So, are you telling me that there's an executive agent who has full Pentagon integration command to make sure that all of our whole tech stack from RD all the way up into operations is.

02:45:55.000 Is folded, is done jointly with Norway.

02:46:00.000 Is that what you're saying?

02:46:01.000 No, not for Norway.

02:46:02.000 We have one that does it for everyone, but not a singular agent.

02:46:08.000 That's what this bill would do for cases of collaboration with Israel.

02:46:13.000 This is an agent representing effectively a mandatory integration with a foreign country.

02:46:19.000 We don't have that relationship with any foreign country.

02:46:21.000 We do joint development or joint intelligence or joint military activity with all of our allies virtually.

02:46:29.000 We don't have anything like this with anyone.

02:46:32.000 We never have.

02:46:33.000 And what I'm saying is, in the beginning, it will look.

02:46:37.000 Relatively benign in the sense that you are nominally helping each other by joining forces and having this kind of fusion at the development and then integration level.

02:46:54.000 But that creates a lobby unto itself and it creates dependencies.

02:46:58.000 And in the first couple months, it will all look very normal in terms of just an expanded version of what we do one off with other countries.

02:47:07.000 But over the course of years, this becomes.

02:47:10.000 Whole weapons systems, whole defense systems, whole RD chains, whole AI systems that are inseparable from each other.

02:47:18.000 And that creates a huge problem if, say, you don't want to do that anymore or you want to go in a different direction.

02:47:27.000 Now, also, this other partner has something over you in any negotiation because you are dependent on them for that.

02:47:35.000 And that is something that is one thing when you're doing it with NIH grants, it's another thing when you're doing it with your military.

02:47:41.000 Angry, angry.

02:47:43.000 I think you misunderstand how it's going to develop.

02:47:52.000 Angry Fat Guy.

02:47:54.000 Angry Fat Guy.

02:47:56.000 We got to wrap this up, though.

02:47:57.000 I appreciate you calling.

02:47:58.000 You got anything you want to shout out?

02:48:00.000 Yeah, Phil.

02:48:01.000 Why don't you follow me back on Twitter?

02:48:04.000 It hurts, man.

02:48:05.000 It hurts.

02:48:07.000 Angry Fat White Guy, white spelled YT.

02:48:07.000 I got it.

02:48:10.000 Okay, I'll take a look.

02:48:12.000 All right, well, thanks for taking my call.

02:48:12.000 Okay.

02:48:15.000 I would love to talk to you more.

02:48:17.000 Maybe I'll hitch up on Twitter, Mr. Benz.

02:48:18.000 All right, man.

02:48:19.000 Thanks for calling.

02:48:21.000 All right.

02:48:22.000 We got, let's see, we got Fujin. 0.89

02:48:26.000 Fujin.

02:48:28.000 Fujin, what's up?

02:48:29.000 What up, dude?

02:48:30.000 Hey, yo.

02:48:30.000 Hey.

02:48:33.000 Yeah.

02:48:34.000 So, how's everybody doing, by the way?

02:48:36.000 Doing well, man.

02:48:37.000 Thanks for calling in.

02:48:38.000 How are you?

02:48:39.000 Yeah, doing well.

02:48:40.000 Not bad.

02:48:42.000 That was very lively of a conversation.

02:48:44.000 You know, actually, I want to say one thing further to that.

02:48:48.000 What would be the Israeli response if we did the exact same thing?

02:48:53.000 But you swapped out Israel with Saudi Arabia. 0.70

02:48:56.000 Qatar is the. 0.93

02:48:58.000 Yeah, that's the deal. 0.96

02:48:58.000 Or Qatar. 0.96

02:48:59.000 This is such a normal.

02:49:00.000 No, but even Saudi Arabia.

02:49:01.000 Yep.

02:49:01.000 Even Saudi Arabia.

02:49:03.000 If this bill was with another country, what do you think the Israeli response would be?

02:49:08.000 Oh my God. 0.52

02:49:10.000 This is your.

02:49:12.000 You don't think they would use.

02:49:13.000 They would oppose that?

02:49:16.000 There was a meltdown when Qatar gave a country a plane, a meltdown.

02:49:21.000 And it was because of the safety. 1.00

02:49:22.000 And I agree with that.

02:49:23.000 It was because they're worried that.

02:49:24.000 There could be tech in there that could track our president and spy on personal, confident conversations that he might have in the plane.

02:49:31.000 And I understand that.

02:49:32.000 And that's a.

02:49:33.000 So this isn't different.

02:49:35.000 This isn't different.

02:49:37.000 He's not here to litigate.

02:49:38.000 So what's on?

02:49:41.000 What's up, Fujin?

02:49:42.000 Fujin.

02:49:44.000 Oh, no.

02:49:45.000 Do we lose Fujin?

02:49:46.000 He is.

02:49:47.000 Oh, there you are.

02:49:48.000 Hello.

02:49:49.000 I'm here. 0.99

02:49:52.000 I was letting angry fat white guy. 1.00

02:49:55.000 Get his piece in there. 0.99

02:49:57.000 But yeah, anyways, yeah, I agree.

02:50:01.000 I mean, I work in that industry.

02:50:03.000 So I understand that, you know, Israel is a, but they're very good at technology.

02:50:10.000 And I'll leave it at that.

02:50:12.000 You know, I work with a lot of their software and things of that nature.

02:50:16.000 It can be very invasive.

02:50:18.000 We don't know exactly what it does in our systems.

02:50:22.000 So, you know, the U.S. government is very careful about how they handle it.

02:50:26.000 But, you know, sometimes they're asleep and that can be a problem.

02:50:30.000 Congress deserves to be able to, they have a duty to vote on this every time in appropriations every time it.

02:50:36.000 Comes up and they're kind of stripping.

02:50:39.000 They're stripping any future ability to vote on this and decide, maybe we don't want it this. 0.54

02:50:42.000 Hey Fujin, we got a, we got a bit of a uh yeah, cap tonight.

02:50:46.000 So what's your question?

02:50:47.000 Yeah so um, my question is around.

02:50:50.000 Um well, my question is for Mike Benz.

02:50:53.000 Um, you recently did like an interview on um on some podcasts or whatever the case was, and you were I.

02:51:00.000 I didn't quite understand your position when you were referring to Mike Milli uh, Having a sort of a military strategy or policy or something to that extent.

02:51:13.000 And Mike Milley was mentioning that.

02:51:15.000 Well, and that's Mark Milley.

02:51:17.000 You're talking about the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Mark Milley.

02:51:20.000 Yes, exactly, the SECDEF.

02:51:23.000 He was saying during the Biden era that we should be pushing riots and things of that nature in countries when there are foreign adversaries that are potentially getting involved.

02:51:40.000 And potentially things that become threatening to the United States or things that can potentially hurt the US, right?

02:51:49.000 So I wanted to hear your perspective from the conversation, aside from that comment you made.

02:51:56.000 You went into an example about China and how China had, there was a military member that saw a sign in West Africa that showed how China was trying to get involved with West Africa and how they could potentially build a port.

02:52:13.000 And how that was a bad thing for us to intervene with the government due to the economic factors that we were involved with West Africa and we halted their.

02:52:25.000 I'm familiar with it.

02:52:26.000 What's your question about it?

02:52:27.000 Yeah.

02:52:28.000 So particularly, is that an issue for you that if the United States is using that type of soft power to try to intervene when China is trying to build ports in these countries to expand their power and their reach?

02:52:28.000 Yeah.

02:52:44.000 The primary reason that I brought up this anecdote, which, you know, just to recap for folks, involved basically the 2021 Special Forces prospectus put out with guidance for the vision of Special Forces operations.

02:52:59.000 And what it involved was instigating a race riot between Africans and Chinese in order to block a hypothetical port infrastructure deal that a West African country with access to the Atlantic Ocean would be doing with the government of China if the State Department.

02:53:18.000 Private diplomacy failed.

02:53:20.000 How could you destabilize the country internally in order to give more leverage to the State Department to convince the African country to block the Chinese deal?

02:53:32.000 And what this involved was an information warfare campaign to inflame racial grievances between African workers and Chinese business owners, and then to bring in USAID to give job fairs to the striking workers so that they would be economically motivated to go on strike.

02:53:51.000 Against Chinese companies because they would be paid by U.S. tax dollars via U.S. aid rather than by their Chinese employers.

02:53:59.000 And that is basically a special forces military operation conducted over multiple theaters, social media, labor unions, political back channeling, international media campaigns, and the like, in order to bring about a political outcome that's not achievable by the State Department alone. 0.52

02:54:19.000 The reason that I brought that up was not to make a moral good or bad argument about the use of dirty work.

02:54:28.000 By the special forces to counter Chinese influence.

02:54:32.000 The reason I brought that up primarily was about USAID.

02:54:37.000 USAID, in that case, is not.

02:54:40.000 What you will see on usaspending.gov about that grant is that we are providing economic opportunity in West Africa to impoverished workers, or we're doing some business development.

02:54:57.000 We're doing sort of support for local labor unions because of some.

02:55:03.000 You know, global universalist humanitarian principle, some pie in the sky, you know, high minded principle about, you know, helping poor people in a foreign country.

02:55:17.000 And what you don't actually see is that it's actually a special forces operation where we just need to give tens of thousands of riotous people money to go on the streets and destabilize the country's internal affairs.

02:55:32.000 The main reason I was bringing that up was about USAID.

02:55:36.000 As a CIA military intelligence front, and that you simply never see that in USAID public facing documents.

02:55:45.000 And so that was not about, you know, how hawkish or dovish we should be about Chinese influence.

02:55:54.000 It was about, it's basically a thrust around what USAID actually is.

02:56:01.000 Okay.

02:56:02.000 So then my follow up question to that is how should it be handled?

02:56:08.000 If it's not being done by USAID, which by the way, I detest USAID, right?

02:56:15.000 But the question is I agree with the outcome and with the, you know, like I'm an American citizen.

02:56:24.000 I would like to see these types of things happen because I don't want to see the American hegemony be dismantled, particularly by the CCP, right?

02:56:34.000 Yeah.

02:56:35.000 So, what would be the alternative route to that?

02:56:39.000 If it's not being done, if it's not being conducted in the way that it was being done under Billy.

02:56:45.000 Well, this gets to a larger question about just how dirty dirty work should be.

02:56:50.000 And one of the problems is when you have the Pentagon in the business of racial rent a riots, the deliberate stoking of racially motivated street protests, that in the era of social media and international solidarity movements has a lot of spillover impact into U.S. domestic affairs and the solidarity networks that exist here.

02:57:13.000 And in that West African example, there may not be that much spillover when you're inflaming a race war between the Africans and Chinese.

02:57:22.000 But what happens, and by the way, it might, but who knows?

02:57:25.000 But what happens, for example, when you're doing that in Eastern Europe?

02:57:29.000 What happens when you're doing that in Brazil?

02:57:31.000 What happens when you're doing that?

02:57:33.000 I mean, this is a big thing.

02:57:34.000 For example, USAID gave just tens of millions of dollars to Afro Brazilians ahead of the Lula election because the black Brazilian population voted disproportionately Lula.

02:57:47.000 So we capacity built, and we're doing the same thing in Cuba, by the way. 0.60

02:57:52.000 I hate communist governments.

02:57:55.000 I don't like the Cuban government. 1.00

02:57:56.000 I think they suck. 0.98

02:57:58.000 At the same time, when I look at something like the USAID and National Endowment for Democracy planning documents to inflame racial tensions between the Afro Cubans and the sort of white Cuban population, angling up grievances around underrepresentation at the higher levels of the Cuban government, I think, gee, you don't think that's going to have any spillover effect in Miami, in Tampa, in. 0.98

02:58:27.000 In the US, in terms of those, you're going to have all sorts of US domestic politic interchange.

02:58:35.000 I mean, we see, for example, Secretary Rubio talking about the interchange of ideas between Cubans and Americans.

02:58:42.000 And this, when you have these kind of global news stories around racial conflict, we have these same racial groups in the United States.

02:58:55.000 And when this is being done as covert action, When this is being done as a classified, you're not even allowed to know as a U.S. citizen.

02:59:02.000 It's illegal for them to even tell you that they're stoking race wars.

02:59:07.000 And then you look at these same figures who happen to play very weird roles in racial conflicts here in the United States.

02:59:14.000 For example, the BLM destabilization in the summer of 2020 and the actions of Mark Milley there.

02:59:21.000 Mark Milley was basically opposed to the president in his handling of the BLM riots, he was Trump's chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

02:59:30.000 And you look at the sort of military reticence to try to defuse those or invoke the Insurrection Act in order to actually have enough boots on the ground to deal with those riots.

02:59:42.000 I don't like the Pentagon being in the business of deliberately and methodically stoking race riots. 0.53

02:59:49.000 I think that if you have to use covert action to do that, it has got to be something.

02:59:55.000 You got to be avoiding World War III.

02:59:58.000 This has got to be a, you better be stopping a nuclear bomb.

03:00:01.000 If it's a port deal, there's, you know, get the treasury involved.

03:00:05.000 How about that?

03:00:06.000 You know, how about threaten 400% tariffs? 1.00

03:00:10.000 This sort of work, even though it might be cheaper, even though it might be expedient, even though it might bring about an immediate turn of events, you know, in the country, is a dangerous black, you know, black arts thing to dabble in. 0.99

03:00:26.000 But frankly, I wasn't even raising that for that purpose. 1.00

03:00:29.000 I was mostly raising it just to help illustrate.

03:00:32.000 What a USA jobs fair is.

03:00:34.000 You think if the special forces are proposing that in West Africa, you don't think they're proposing that in East Africa?

03:00:40.000 You don't think they're proposing that in Colombia?

03:00:42.000 You don't think that's what a USA jobs fair in Pakistan is really doing?

03:00:45.000 That was really the reason I was bringing it up.

03:00:47.000 Okay.

03:00:48.000 Yeah, so it's mainly second and third order effects that you're concerned about.

03:00:55.000 And they bring that home.

03:00:56.000 If you look at what those people's next jobs are after they leave the Pentagon, they will, like, it is so frequent.

03:01:03.000 And this is what we saw basically this whole professional class that is trained in stoking these kinds of riots at USAID, at state, at Pentagon, at CIA came home and formed the 2017 resistance. 0.92

03:01:17.000 And then, you know, we're involved in everything from BLM to the pussy, you know, pussy hat marches, you know, to everything. 0.89

03:01:24.000 And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 0.76

03:01:27.000 When you create a professional class of people who do that, they get their next jobs domestically and bring that here.

03:01:34.000 And then the thing that you were doing is black arts.

03:01:37.000 To stop a port deal in China suddenly becomes black arts that you're using in Chicago or LA or Baltimore in order to stop authoritarianism at home.

03:01:49.000 At home.

03:01:49.000 Yeah.

03:01:50.000 You have anything you want to add?

03:01:54.000 No, that's it.

03:01:56.000 These are very communist tactics.

03:01:58.000 Yep.

03:01:58.000 So I agree with you and I appreciate it.

03:02:01.000 Nope.

03:02:02.000 The only thing I want to add is Phil, I see that you're not very good at dabbling in the AI space.

03:02:10.000 I was a former AI engineer.

03:02:12.000 So if you have any queries about or anything like that, feel free to ask me.

03:02:17.000 There's got to be some kind of running joke with people mogging Phil for stuff that he's good at doing.

03:02:23.000 I'm not an expert at AI.

03:02:26.000 I'm just probably one of the more experienced people here.

03:02:31.000 Not even the most experienced, but I appreciate the offer.

03:02:35.000 Well, if you want to build a platform or you want to build automated marketing campaigns through AI, feel free to reach out to me.

03:02:42.000 Awesome, man.

03:02:42.000 Appreciate you.

03:02:44.000 Thanks for the call, Fujin.

03:02:45.000 Take care.

03:02:46.000 All right.

03:02:47.000 Bye-bye.

03:02:48.000 Cheers.

03:02:49.000 Got one more.

03:02:50.000 What do we got?

03:02:50.000 All right.

03:02:51.000 Sir Jackoff.

03:02:53.000 Sir Jackoff.

03:02:55.000 Once the Discord catches up.

03:03:00.000 Is he still alive?

03:03:01.000 Hey, Sir Jackoff, what's up, dude?

03:03:03.000 Man, I hope they're still breathing because I kind of wanted to loop them in a little bit into my question.

03:03:07.000 And, Mike, I know you're new around here, but it's supposed to be the Discord members who talk too long, not you.

03:03:12.000 I'm just kidding.

03:03:13.000 It's different on us, not you.

03:03:14.000 Anyways, straight to the questions because I know we're short on time.

03:03:18.000 Is there any room, or maybe will there be a path in the future for forgiveness on the right, but just in the political sphere in general?

03:03:26.000 This question was slightly inspired by other ones.

03:03:30.000 Everybody's other favorite subject besides the Jews, but Lauren Southern's drama and all that.

03:03:36.000 I know that we all fall short in the glory of God.

03:03:38.000 So there's something to be said about someone who's willing to be open about their mistakes and genuinely seeking forgiveness.

03:03:44.000 Trump and Elon aren't the shiniest characters either, but yet we welcome them in this fight.

03:03:49.000 And is there such a thing as finding honest actors and bringing them back into the full week? 0.51

03:03:55.000 Why don't we get Josie in this?

03:03:57.000 I feel like you've got a take on this.

03:03:59.000 So was your question specifically about Lauren or people like Lauren?

03:04:03.000 No, not just Lauren, but just using her as an example.

03:04:06.000 She's been very open about things that she's done.

03:04:09.000 Who knows if she's completely honest about everything?

03:04:12.000 I don't know all the details, to be honest.

03:04:13.000 I'm just using her as an example.

03:04:15.000 But I think of influences like JD DeLay, who hangs out with the unsubscribed guys.

03:04:20.000 He's like a former felon.

03:04:21.000 He was in prison. 1.00

03:04:23.000 He's openly talked about putting things in his butt. 0.99

03:04:25.000 He's been around the block a few times, but now he's very much like a you need to behave yourself. 0.98

03:04:30.000 And I think it's a good influence in at least the reformed felon kind of category.

03:04:34.000 But where else do we see this?

03:04:36.000 We can see this in the right?

03:04:38.000 So, the only unforgivable sin is blaspheming the Holy Spirit.

03:04:43.000 And that's, yes.

03:04:44.000 And that's doubting the Holy Spirit's grace to turn somebody's life around.

03:04:49.000 So, I go very liberally.

03:04:51.000 If there's somebody who's like, who found God, and there's a lot of people, there's a lot of bad actors.

03:04:56.000 There's a lot of bad actors who are like, I found God. 1.00

03:04:58.000 And then they try to have a platform off it after being like a piece of shit their whole life. 0.99

03:05:03.000 There are a lot of bad actors, but there are a lot of good actors too. 0.99

03:05:05.000 So, I try to make it a point to give everybody a little bit of grace.

03:05:08.000 I don't pull up their old tweets and, you know, like, Try to never forgive them.

03:05:13.000 And when they apologize, you accept that apology.

03:05:15.000 You know, like when people apologize and you just double down and be like, oh, so you're admitting that you were guilty and there's no grace there.

03:05:23.000 I don't like that.

03:05:24.000 I think that's ugly.

03:05:25.000 So when it comes to people like Lauren, who may be, I don't know, turning herself around, I'm not sure.

03:05:31.000 She recently came after me on Piers Morgan and I forgave her for that.

03:05:35.000 So it's just a matter of using your own grace.

03:05:39.000 If you're Christian or if you're not Christian, you know, try not to blaspheme the Holy Spirit and give the Holy Spirit the reason.

03:05:47.000 Was it the reason of the doubt?

03:05:48.000 What phrase am I thinking of that I can't think of now?

03:05:50.000 Benefit of the doubt.

03:05:51.000 Benefit of the doubt.

03:05:52.000 Thank you.

03:05:52.000 Yes.

03:05:53.000 I thought I was having a stroke.

03:05:55.000 So, benefit of the doubt moving forward.

03:05:55.000 Yes.

03:05:57.000 I mean, that's what I would recommend doing.

03:05:59.000 There's very few people who I can't forgive.

03:06:04.000 And the hardest thing you can do is forgive someone who's not sorry because forgiveness isn't for them.

03:06:09.000 It's for you.

03:06:12.000 Yeah.

03:06:14.000 I don't know.

03:06:14.000 I just, y'all had some conversations earlier in the night about the MAGA coalition just breaking apart everywhere.

03:06:19.000 And there's a Of reasons for that. 0.84

03:06:22.000 Well, my position in the MAGA coalition is I'm for the, I believe the holy war is less of a threat than the gay war. 0.96

03:06:29.000 I will take my chances with the second coming of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ because that's nothing I have power over. 0.97

03:06:35.000 I have no power over when that happens. 1.00

03:06:38.000 So I do have power over gay wars. 1.00

03:06:40.000 So I just feel like I'm safer with the holy war. 0.98

03:06:43.000 So with the coalition shattered, it's just a demoralized people and they don't have the same priorities as the MAGA coalition where it's just whatever Trump does, we're going to be in line with.

03:06:56.000 They have a set of values that don't change with Trump changing.

03:07:01.000 So they were non interventionists from the beginning.

03:07:04.000 Trump was a non interventionist from the beginning.

03:07:06.000 MAGA was a non interventionist from the beginning.

03:07:08.000 But the minute they went to war with Iran, MAGA got behind it.

03:07:11.000 And the non interventionists were like, I don't get behind this.

03:07:15.000 So when it comes to forgiving, I think that that's kind of like a different sort of angle.

03:07:25.000 Because you're still kind of waiting to see what happens.

03:07:28.000 You know, it's not finalized.

03:07:30.000 Like, I don't know, he could end the war tomorrow.

03:07:32.000 Who knows?

03:07:33.000 You know, so forgiving and just saying, I'm going to vote this way.

03:07:36.000 People are demoralized.

03:07:37.000 Demoralized people don't vote.

03:07:38.000 They're not ready to forgive.

03:07:40.000 It's not the way that they see this going.

03:07:43.000 And I think if you look at the MAGA coalition, it's very much, I mean, almost everybody in it is in some ways, at least at a significant level, a castaway from an unforgiving.

03:07:59.000 Like, I mean, if you think about, I mean, even the early days when you had like the Brett Weinstein Evergreen College affair, I mean, you had a lot of these types of Elon Musk, you know, who was a Democrat, you know, and it was like a lot of people came to MAGA because they were a part of, say, the liberal left or parts of, you know,

03:08:24.000 parts of other political pockets that were just totally unforgiving and the purity test was intolerable.

03:08:29.000 And they were sort of cast out with no path to redemption, and they ended up on MAGA Island because it was the only place that would accept them and didn't care about the baggage that they had from their activities.

03:08:43.000 And I mean, our vice president, JD Vance, was a never-Trumper in 2016 and voted for Evan McMullen, the CIA agent, put up by Bill Crystal.

03:08:54.000 Who were you?

03:08:55.000 I mean, Tulsi Gabbard, our ODI chief, was a Democrat in the last election cycle.

03:09:00.000 Voted for Bobby Kennedy.

03:09:02.000 Trump in the 2024 election before they joined forces.

03:09:07.000 I mean, half our cabinet secretaries were at one point hostile to MAGA and the like and came from pockets hostile near and far.

03:09:21.000 And I do think that you lose people.

03:09:24.000 Like, for example, I think that there is a threat that you will have a disaffected MAGA class who voted Trump in 2024, who right now may vote.

03:09:36.000 Either sit out the midterms or dabble in pockets of Democrat sphere just over the Israel issue, for example.

03:09:45.000 And that's just because of a perceived hostility on portions of the MAGA right that are pro Israel and draw a purity litmus test there.

03:09:55.000 And so, like, you see this and you see it, you know, in vice versa in certain respects.

03:10:00.000 But there is a.

03:10:05.000 I see this development with the purity tests developing that way.

03:10:09.000 But at the same time, you do need to hash out these issues.

03:10:13.000 You know, you will have aggrieved junior partners.

03:10:16.000 Who feel that the senior partners in the coalition are getting everything they want while they're getting very little or less of what they want.

03:10:23.000 And so, you know, these disputes do have to be worked out.

03:10:27.000 But, you know, what often happens when they grow too large and unresolved is you have what happened to the Democrats in 2024.

03:10:33.000 When Joe Biden was.

03:10:36.000 As a cultural movement gets bigger, so does the purity test.

03:10:40.000 I know y'all are short on time, so I'll just go ahead and get to like my shout outs.

03:10:45.000 Josie, please look into the fat electrician, Wendigoon. 1.00

03:10:49.000 Laura Lodge and King Trout.

03:10:51.000 I know you have a lot of knowledge on American history, but these guys also have a bunch of other niche American history that I think will just kind of maybe round out some of your other experiences.

03:11:02.000 Sorry, that sounded kind of condescending.

03:11:04.000 I didn't mean it like that.

03:11:06.000 But I don't know.

03:11:06.000 It would be an interesting collab, I think, to see happen.

03:11:10.000 And then also to Brett, if he's even still alive at this point, I think that Vigilance, Vigilance, Citizen Vigilante was a like, Just a comedy movie that like passed by everybody. 0.97

03:11:25.000 That shit was hilarious. 0.96

03:11:26.000 It took itself way too seriously. 1.00

03:11:28.000 There is a straight up whole like five minute long sex scene that the dude gets off to. 0.93

03:11:33.000 The fact that there's mold on his building that he rents out to the prostitution ring or whatever. 1.00

03:11:38.000 He's like, man, these fucking tenants aren't taking care of my property. 1.00

03:11:40.000 And he busts a nut. 1.00

03:11:41.000 It's kind of crazy. 1.00

03:11:43.000 It's the German. 1.00

03:11:46.000 It was, yeah. 0.62

03:11:47.000 Nobody goes to Uwe Bull for subtlety.

03:11:50.000 That is for sure.

03:11:51.000 Like, I will not be psyoped by the right. 0.83

03:11:53.000 Into caring about Uwe Boll movies just because he made a movie about immigration. 0.99

03:11:58.000 I don't give a fuck. 0.98

03:11:59.000 Like, if I'm supposed to pretend that, you know, Christopher Nolan is the most evil filmmaker of all time now and Uwe Boll is the way to go, you're too deep into politics at this point. 0.99

03:12:10.000 All right.

03:12:11.000 So that's going to wrap it up for us.

03:12:13.000 Thank you, Mike, for joining us.

03:12:14.000 I appreciate it.

03:12:16.000 Guys, we will see you tomorrow.

Timcast IRL - Tim Pool - July 23, 2026

Houthis ATTACK Saudi Oil Tankers, Iran War EXPANDS ft Mike Benz & Josie TRHL | Timcast IRL

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