Game of Thrones Actor Liam Cunningham on Gaza Activism and UK Censorship; Journalist Zaid Jilani on Mamdani, Epstein, the State of the Dems, and More
Irish actor and activist Liam Cunningham discusses the growing outrage over Israel's destruction of Gaza and why he has been vocal about Israel's atrocities. Plus: journalist Zaid Jilani on more Epstein case fallout, why establishment Democrats fear Zohran Mamdani, and a senator to watch in the Democratic party. ---------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a, is it Thursday, June 10th or July 10th?
Oh, it's June, it's July 10th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, there are times when we can not cover everything that is going on that we think deserves attention.
And one of the ways we tried to rectify that is to bring on guests whom we believe are highly informed, engaging, and provocative.
We have two guests tonight for you who are most certainly all of those things.
The first is Liam Cunningham, who is the longtime working Irish actor, likely best known for his central role as Davad Seaworth in the HBO hit series Game of Thrones.
But for our purposes, he is also a very passionate political activist and analyst who has spent decades involved in political activism.
In the last two years, focused, like many people, on the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
We'll talk to him about all of that, about the levels of oppression around this topic in Hollywood, in the UK, in Europe more broadly.
Why it seems that some governments, including his own in Dublin, have become so much more outspoken than others on this issue, and whether he sees any progress in how public opinion globally is changing on the issue of Israel for the better.
Then we'll talk right after that to the very independent, heterodox, and cantankerous journalist, which I mean in the most flattering way, Zed Jelani.
He was my colleague for years at The Intercept until he left for all the right reasons.
His work has been appearing with some frequency in outlets like Unheard, Compact, and The New York Times.
He also has his own fantastic sub-stack, which we'll talk about when he's here.
We're going to talk about a wide range of topics with him, including the fallout from the DOJ's announcement that it's closing the Epstein investigation with no further disclosures, the state of the race for New York City mayor, where Jaron Mandani's primary win has sent a lot of people, especially the city's richest, into full meltdown mode.
We'll talk about why Zed looks at his own state's senator, John Osop, the Democrat from Georgia, as a model for an effective politician and specifically Democratic politician with a bright future, and much, much more.
Quick programming note, as you know, System Update is available in podcast form as well.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after they first appear live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all their major podcasting platforms.
So if you rate, review, and follow our program there, it really helps spread the visibility of our show.
now welcome to a new episode of system update starting right now William Cunningham is an award-winning Irish actor, as I said, best known for his role in HBO's series Game of Thrones, and various outlets, including the Irish Times, have called him one of Ireland's greatest actors.
But he's also become increasingly known.
He's actually been a political activist for decades, but recently for activism surrounding the people of Gaza, he helped to organize and become a spokesperson for the Freedom Flotilla, where Greta Thunberg and other colleagues were arrested and deported by the Israeli government for attempting to deliver aid to the people of Gaza when the IDF was blockading it.
I followed his work for some time, especially his political work.
And we are delighted to have him as his debut appearance.
Hope it's not the last on the show.
Liam, it's great to see you.
I know it's so late in Dublin.
I really appreciate your staying up to talk with us.
No, that's fine.
It's way past my bedtime, but an absolute for you, sir, anything.
I really appreciate that.
All right, so let's begin with what I just mentioned, which is the role that you played in kind of helping to organize and becoming a very well-known spokesperson for the boat that was intended to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza as a way of circumventing the IDF's blockade of food and water and medicine and the like.
You know, it was, I think a lot of people didn't realize at the time what an actually dangerous and courageous mission it was.
I remember in 2011, a very similar flotilla attempted essentially the same thing to deliver the people of Gaza food when there was a blockade there.
And the IDF actually attacked that ship, killed 10 people on board.
You had Nobel Prize winners, Holocaust survivors, and the IDF just didn't care.
They violently attacked it.
What was the impetus for your involvement in this particular action, even knowing how kind of dangerous and provocative it might be?
Well, it's a moral choice as it is with any of these things.
And I suppose, first of all, I mean, I get asked quite a few times, what is it with the Irish?
Why are they so open to arms about their concern for the Palestinian cause?
So by way of a little bit of background, I suppose most of your viewers and listeners would know that Ireland was occupied for seven, eight hundred years by the British.
But during that time, we suffered two genocides when Oliver Cromwell and his new model army in the 17th century came in.
And British figures estimated that between 20 and 40% of the Irish population were slaughtered, were murdered.
And again, we had the famine, which we romantically in Ireland call the Great Hunger.
And that was in the 1840s.
And we lost a million people to starvation.
And it's one of the main reasons, or it is the reason that there's so many Irish Americans at the moment and so many Irish in America, was because we had to abandon our country because the people that were occupying us at the time were slaughtering us wholesale.
They did the same thing in India as well.
So our sympathies are very much with the plight of the Palestinian people.
And therefore, I feel I have a duty to speak up for the people who are being occupied.
And I've never been a fan of injustice.
So therefore, the lack of real action from this side of the water led to the fine people who were on that boat, including the wonderful Greta Thunberg.
I probably would have been on that boat because I never came to it, but we only managed to get Eight people on board and four crews.
So there was only 12 people able to go because of the drone strike the previous, the month before.
And your reference to the Mavi Marmara, when 10 people, the people who were involved in the flotilla at that time, told me that some of the Israeli soldiers, when they abseiled on and started the murder, they were carrying photographs given to them by their superiors of who not to kill.
I mean, that's how cynical that was.
Yeah, and I should note there, too, that there was an American citizen among one of the 10 people who was dead.
He was of Turkish origin, but it was yet another case of the IDF using American weapons, American monies to kill American citizens that they do constantly all the time.
And so many self-proclaimed Uber patriots in the United States seem to side with Israel even when they kill American citizens, as they've, as I said, done with some degree of frequency.
You know, let me dig into that a little bit, the history of Ireland and occupation and the like, because I do think this is something that a lot of times people in countries that don't quite have that history have difficulty understanding.
There's, of course, like a big debate about whether Israel is an apartheid state.
I don't think it's a debate.
I think it's indisputably true.
Many top Israeli officials have said that as well, including Netanyahu, who's own chief of the Mossad from 2015, who said it a month before the October 7th attack.
In the United States and in the West, it's depicted, if you use that word, as proof that you're anti-Semite.
But I took my kids, I don't know, maybe a year ago to South Africa, and there's a lot of apartheid museums.
And I've thought Israel was an apartheid state before, but when you go and look at the kind of residue of South Africa apartheid, the similarities are so striking, which is why so many South African people.
Go ahead.
It's not just the similarity.
In the mid-80s, I lived in Zimbabwe, which was an enormous apartheid state.
And I arrived in Zimbabwe four years after the end of Rhodesia.
But I think you're being overly generous regarding the debate about apartheid, because many, many South Africans have said that the apartheid in Israel was worse than anything South Africans suffered under the apartheid regime there.
And that's the current leadership.
The indigenous government officials, including Desmond Tutu, and including Nelson Mandela, have said that the apartheid in Israel was worse.
So, I mean, if these South Africans are saying that, it's time to sit up.
And I think it's proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that that's exactly what's going on.
Yeah, Mandela, I remember he went on this tour of the United States and the West and could have been, you know, the most beloved hero of the West.
And he came and, you know, said exactly those sorts of things.
He visited Cuba and talked about how they were one of the few allies when they were in their struggle.
So I think the individual country's history has so much influence on how people in those countries see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But let me ask you about the conflict with the British, because I think one thing that a lot of people know about it is the struggle of Northern Ireland for independence, the use of violence to resist occupation and the like.
You know, people always talk about Israel's right to self-defense.
I guess my question for you is, how do you see the Palestinians' right to self-defense in terms of using violence, in terms of, and how do you see that with the IRA as well?
Well, in the case of the Palestinians, it's enshrined in international law that anybody under occupation is under international law allowed to use any method to end the oppression.
And I mean, that's a fact.
And to the best of my knowledge, I think out of 193, I mean, everybody talks about Hamas being a terrorist organization.
The United Nations, to the best of my knowledge, refers to Hamas as a political movement.
And there's only 35 of 195 countries that refer to that have prescribed Hamas as a terrorist organization.
So it's not a given.
The West's perception is not the world's perception of what Hamas is.
And it doesn't matter what my position on that is.
But as regards international law, they have every right to resist an occupation.
And we call it the occupied territories.
The United Nations calls it the occupied territories.
And under occupation, you have a right to resist your oppressor.
These are facts.
These are not opinions.
And they must be respected.
And that's one of the reasons I'm desperately apoplectic with the disrespect to international law and the support that the Palestinian people should have to remove the occupiers from their land.
One of the things I think it's important to note about you for people who don't know this is that, you know, in your expression, and people probably have this sense already from the first couple of answers you've given, that you're not just a critic of Israel, but paying lip service to their right to exist as a state or whatever, you, I think, are very, very, one might say radical relative to Western discourse, not just relative to Western discourse.
Not that that's a high bar to clear, but in terms of what you were even just saying, like the right of Hamas to use violence to resist Israeli occupation, the fact that they're more a political movement than a terrorist organization.
I mean, these things are, well, really out there.
And you are a working actor and have worked in film and television for a long time.
And I don't think it's any secret that within Hollywood, within Western entertainment more broadly, lots of people have been punished.
I'm talking about people of big stature.
Susan Storandon had her talent agent drop her after some mild comments protesting this.
There's a lot of examples.
Is that something that you ever consider or have been concerned about that it might prejudice your ability to work?
No, not really.
Because I take my job extraordinarily seriously.
If somebody has the judgment to employ me, it's my belief that I've got to work to the best of my ability.
I think that's what a reasonable employee does: to do the best job that they can when people put faith in you to employ you.
Because, I mean, I am the product, so to speak.
I'm not producing anything.
I don't make any widgets.
I am it.
And I'm very committed to any job that I do, which is why I'm a bit fuzzy about these things, because I'm very careful about what I commit to.
But I cannot shield my eyes to what I'm seeing.
And it's primarily cowardice on everybody's part.
Everybody's afraid to upset the oppressors, the occupiers.
I don't see that.
I mean, the bottom line is, I mean, if you take a step back and be objective about what I do, I play dress up for a living.
I mean, that's what I do.
I take it very seriously, but that's what I do.
And something's more important than that.
And it's, and just to give you the full picture, I've had an extraordinarily extraordinary dislike of injustice.
And the first time I visited refugees was for Syrian refugees when we went over with HBO and the International Rescue Committee.
And we visited Greece and Thessaloniki and Labos.
And from there, the South Sudanese refugees, I was in northern Uganda and South Sudan.
In fact, during the last season of Game of Thrones when we were filming, I didn't tell them I was going.
And on the first night in Juba, there was gunshots just outside the compound we were staying in, which worried me intensely because we wouldn't have been able to finish the show, especially as I hadn't told them I was going.
I was on a break.
So it's the plight of the people with no voice who have been stepped on for geopolitics and for the race for resources and land grabs and that sort of stuff, I find nauseating.
And it's not, you know, it's, I mean, we see it at a pinnacle at the moment with the genocide that's going on now.
But I've watched it with, you know, Syrian refugees and as I said, with South Sudanese refugees.
It's a worldwide problem.
But my heart at the moment, obviously, is very much with the Palestinian people and obviously what's going on in Sudan as well, which is obscene.
But something has to be done about this because the world order is breaking down as we speak.
Let me ask you about that because you are somebody who has spoken for many causes, often with some degree of risk in the sense that if you defend any cause that's at all controversial, it has various risks that can come to you.
I think that's not a controversial statement to make.
But one of the things that I've been, I guess, heartened by, and it's hard to find anything to be heartened by when we're talking about Gaza, is the fact that there are a huge number of people who previously weren't particularly engaged in politics generally, or at least avoided the Israel issue out of all kinds of fears or other instincts of self-preservation, who feel like this is unlike other kinds of injustices that they've seen in terms of scale and scope and dehumanization, at least insofar as ones that the West has supported.
How would you, and you are somebody who has seen up close things that you were just describing that are atrocious, and maybe it's hard to rank these things, but in the scope of just kind of dehumanization, war crimes, genocide, utter dehumanization, where do you rank this in terms of other things that you've seen in your lifetime?
Oh my God.
Listen, it's up there.
It's up there with the Vietnam War, I suppose, except this is systematic.
That was armies on the ground and it was uniformed people on both sides.
But what we're seeing now, and it's in 4K on TV.
We have a live stream genocide and ethnic cleansing going on.
And mass starvation.
Exactly.
100%.
100%.
And only in the last, what, 48 hours, the Israelis have said these concentration camps.
I mean, even Haretz, the Israeli newspapers, have announced that these concentration camps that they're building, the Israelis have announced that anybody who is outside them is to be eliminated.
I mean, it's an official order now from the Israeli government.
I mean, what sort of a world are we living in when our leaders, our international world leaders, as in the EU, are standing by and still waffling and still talking to each other and still arguing about what they're going to do in the hope that Israel will stop doing it or a ceasefire will come along so they don't have to discuss it anymore.
That's what I'm astonished at.
And you mentioned briefly about more people getting involved.
Yes, they are.
The streets.
I mean, you have to look at the streets around the world.
People are getting sick of it because the masks are off political leaders, the people who are all talk and literally no action.
And people are getting really tired of it.
The protests are not going away.
They're getting bigger.
They're getting larger.
They're becoming more sustained.
And there will come a tipping point.
I don't know when it's going to be, but you can feel it's getting closer.
I don't know what social disruption, whatever it may be, is coming because our political leaders are not doing what we want them to do.
And that is to assist in stopping this carnage.
I was on Piers Morgan's show yesterday to talk about Gaza with an Israeli American journalist who very much defends the Israeli government.
It was a debate.
And Piers Morgan is one of those people who have kind of done a 180, was very supportive of the Israeli destruction of Gaza for quite a long time.
At some point, he decided, oh my God, this is too much.
This is not what I signed up for, even though it was very clear what the Israelis were going to do right from the beginning.
They really didn't hide it.
They were very explicit about it.
But I think that kind of sea change that you were describing does eventually seep into other people.
And maybe the most striking example I saw, I don't know if you saw this, but Aleister Campbell, the kind of Blairite, center-right, laborite who hates the left and distanced himself, a long time supporter of Israel, was a big time supporter of the war in Iraq, actually said on that podcast that he has earlier today that there's no debate anymore.
It's absolutely a genocide.
There's no getting around it.
And so when you see people like this who aren't inclined to really care that much or to speak courageously, do you think that's indicative of the fact that they're starting to feel a threat to their power, to their position, or even their legacy?
Well, I think I tweeted something today about that the Nazi journalist who in the Nuremberg trials, although he wasn't involved in the violence, was very apologetic about it and was a clarion call for various horrific things that the Nazis did in the Nuremberg trials.
Yeah, that's the guy, yeah.
And they hung him.
They hung him.
So I don't know.
I mean, you know, the decent person in me wants to think that these people have finally been convinced that they're coming around to seeing what this actually is.
But there is another, there's a little portion of me is kind of going, are these boys covering their ass now?
Especially when you consider that, you know, Alistair Campbell was the man behind the 45-minute warning that the weapons of mass destruction.
He was the communications boy, wasn't he, for Tony Blair.
And a lot of people called for him after the Iraq war to be investigated at the very least.
So he has traveled quite a distance and he has used the G word as well.
So, I mean, if they're losing people from the establishment of that, from the immediate establishment of that level and Piers, as we're seeing, and he was a big defender of Israel, as you said, to see him come around like that when they're losing.
I think, wasn't it, there was a famous saying that, was it Nixon during the Vietnam War said the war was over, we've lost Cronkite when they lost Walter Cronkite.
Right.
Yeah, so I think there's a bit of a Cronkite moment perhaps going on.
That's the positive aspect of my mind says that maybe these guys and girls are coming around eventually to see that their position is indefensible.
And that, you know, if they lose the legacy media, then maybe the politicians will follow.
Just to push back a little bit against that optimism, and I know I was the one who raised the optimism in the first place, but I just want to kind of understand from your perspective why this is.
One of the things we've seen in the UK, and I realize you're not a British subject, subject to the British Crown, but you're obviously a close observer of what goes on there and in Europe and the like, is this intensified crackdown on people who are speaking out in ways that similar to you're speaking out.
We saw the prosecution under terrorism owes of the lead singer of Knecap for songs and chants that they did as part of their music show, obviously, by Dylan, is now, I mean, I saw a kind of left-wing music festival who canceled him today.
The director was saying, we didn't want to do this.
There's forces bigger than us.
We kind of got required.
And they're criminally investigating him.
And in general, you know, from the start, there's been this attempt to criminalize speech that is critical of Israel in all kinds of ways, not just in the UK, but certainly oftentimes the UK leads the way.
And they just not only criminalized Palestine action as a terrorist group, even as they all withdraw the terrorist designation for the leader of al-Qaeda in Syria and for his group in Syria, but now Palestine action is considered a terrorist group.
And the Metropolitan Police issued a statement that is right out of Orwell or worse, saying if you're going to these demonstrations and anyone speaking positively of Palestine action, waving a flag in support of them, you will be arrested and subject to Terrorism Act violations as well.
And they actually did that.
They arrested, including an 18-year-old woman there.
What is not, I mean, you talked about the Ireland's, the history of Ireland as to why it has been outspoken against what Israel is doing.
What is it about the UK that makes them so subservient to and devoted to Israel, but also willing to crack down on their own citizen speech in order to do that?
Well, essentially what they've done is they've backed the wrong horse at the beginning.
They painted themselves into a corner and now they find themselves doing stuff that is worthy of Arwen.
If you look at it, this is how cynical it is.
As regards Palestine action, they knew they couldn't get out across the line as a terrorist group unless they threw it in with, I think, either two or three other groups, and one of them being a very nasty neo-Nazi crowd.
I mean, that's how cynical it was.
They knew it wouldn't even stand up on its own merits to just isolate Palestine action and try and call people who painted the engine of a refueling jet with red paint and at the same time turning around and making apologies and providing services to the Israeli air fleet, the fighter bombers and all that sort of stuff.
And then you can turn around and call somebody a terrorist for direct action that doesn't hurt anybody, is not violent in any shape or form.
And to call that terrorism is, I mean, it's a dystopian present.
I feel like I've woken up in some ulterior world, where alternative world, where a certain section of our society has gone insane, and another section is psychopathic, and another section is utterly cowardly.
But I mean, the master of, I think people are seeing it, the journalists are seeing it, the very obedient journalists are actually starting to come around and say, look, this is horrific.
It's indefensible.
And there's a change.
It's not a sea change, but I would definitely say that the tide has most definitely turned.
Yeah, I agree with that a lot.
And I think obviously people like you have been speaking out about this from the beginning and not just speaking out, but taking action as well is a major factor in why that has happened.
So I'm really grateful for the work that you've done for using your platform for the way that you have.
And especially staying up so late to make your debut appearance.
Like I said, we're going to keep harassing you to come back on, but it was great finally speaking with you.
I really appreciate it.
No, it was very nice, very nice to talk to Glenn.
I hope you have me back anytime, sir.
Absolutely.
Have a great evening.
Have a great evening.
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So we're going to talk to one of my favorite independent journalists, Ed Jelani, in just a second.
I'm not sure if he's on the line or not.
I haven't gotten any breaking news on that.
He is, actually.
But before we get to that, I just wanted, I mentioned in that interview with Liam, and by the way, I find him really fantastic.
I mean, I watched Game of Thrones like most of the world and wasn't really aware at the time of just what a courageous and outspoken and committed activist that he really is.
So it was great to have him on the show.
And we're going to get to that in a second, but I just wanted to talk about what I alluded to when I spoke with him, which is my appearance on the Piers Morgan show.
We actually taped it yesterday.
It's out today.
Usually I don't like to go on that show if I'm part of a panel.
I often, in fact, quite often, way more often than not, say no.
But this was an opportunity to debate two topics that I really want to be heard on, which was Israel-Gaza and the U.S. support for it on the one hand, and then also the U.S. support for the war in Ukraine on the other.
And we had an opportunity to debate.
It wasn't a big panel.
It was just two other people, one of whom is an Israeli-American journalist, Emily Schrader, the other who's a member, a very outspoken member of the Ukrainian parliament.
Obviously, she's constantly flattering Donald Trump, saying peace through strength means giving Ukraine weapons.
Make America great again also somehow means giving America weapons.
But one of the reasons I don't like to go on that show often is because it's often the case, seemingly by design, that it turns into or generates into this kind of screaming match, just like kind of a circus.
You're almost expected to throw poop for like monkeys for people's enjoyment.
This was not that.
This was a reasonably restrained, civil, and very substantive, I thought, debate because I had the opportunity to really kind of dissect the defenses of both Israel and Ukraine that we so often hear in a way that was, I think, very constructive.
The debate is on YouTube on Piers Morgan Show.
So if you want to see that, I encourage you to watch it.
We have a little clip or a little trailer that they made for the debate.
We'll just show you this quickly and it gets a Zed.
What they're doing is so repellent and morally obnoxious and atrocious to the world that they want to hide it.
But there are a lot of pieces of evidence that this is genocide.
That's not true.
Like many of the things that you just said, it's not true.
They want the Palestinians in Gaza either out or concentrated in tiny little concentration camps.
If you look at it on its face, this isn't actually an attempt at ethnic cleansing.
It's an attempt to protect civilian lives.
We get a lot of emotion thrown at us by Putin.
Finally, that President Trump's patience with Putin has been exhausted.
The world has changed.
You're not the superpower that dictates to the rest of the world.
People told Trump that, and I guess he needed six months for him to figure out on his own.
He has launched the most massive attack on Ukraine, showing he really doesn't care.
This public slap on the face should be something that would tip the scale for President Trump.
All right, so that was a little taste of it, but just a little taste.
So I encourage you to watch that.
All right, let's get to our very esteemed guest, Jed Zolani, writes the American Saga on Substack, really one of my favorite Substacks.
He covers American politics, culture, journalism, a lot of other things as well.
We worked together for several years at the Intercept until, like I said, before he left for all the right reasons.
His writing has appeared in many of the top news outlets in the United States.
He's becoming increasingly more visible, compact, and unheard in even the New York Times.
And he joins us tonight to discuss a wide array of issues that are on his mind.
And we are always happy to see him.
Said, good evening.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Yes, great to be here, Glenn.
All right, so we have covered the last couple of weeks the issue of the Epstein investigation and particularly what is the very clear and to a lot of people in the MAGA movement, very disturbing conflict between the very adamant,
definitive, authoritative accusations that not MAGA influencers, but the people who are now at the helm of the FBI, like Dan Bogino and Cash Patel, and the head of the Justice Department, including Pam Bondi, and Trump's own personal lawyer, who's now the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey,
Alina Hobovin, and J.D. Vance as well, Donald Trump Jr., who constantly spent years accusing the Biden administration of concealing the client list of Jeffrey Epstein's to protect powerful predators and pedophiles like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton and others whom they named.
Also, that they know that Jeffrey Epstein didn't commit suicide and that the evidence of that is also being hidden.
They vowed once they got in to release not just the client list, but all the other files, as well as the proof that he didn't commit suicide.
And lo and behold, we're just five months into the administration.
And they're not saying, Jed, we haven't found anything yet.
They're saying, we saw everything.
There's nothing here.
There's no client list.
There's no incriminating information.
There was never any blackmail.
And we know for sure that he killed himself.
The exact opposite of everything that they've been saying for many years.
Not speculating, but actually saying.
The one question they haven't answered is whether he worked with our foreign intelligence agencies, which we'll get to in a second.
But I'm just kind of wondering what you make of what is obviously a very disturbing issue to watch people do a 180 as soon as they get into power, but also what you think the enduring reaction of Mago and Trump supporters will be.
Yeah, I mean, I think this is an example of what actually happens when the dog catches the car, right?
For years, we were told, mostly by Republicans, and I think people beyond that had interest in this case, that there was a gigantic cover-up around Jeffrey Epstein, around not only his client list, but also potentially other very powerful people who were in and around his orbit.
It was kind of insinuated or implied that a lot of them were Democrats, and that's why President Biden had not aggressively pursued this and made disclosures around the case.
And then I think the doc kind of caught the car when Trump took power again.
I think there was a heavy expectation on him to do a full disclosure here.
We did see earlier this year that there were some right-wing influencers like those of TikTok, Chaya, and some other folks who were given binders about Epstein, but the binders were full of redactions.
It really wasn't anything particularly new in them, right?
And so I think that's also every document in the binder was already publicly available.
They were part of the lawsuits and what was disclosed.
Not a single document that hadn't been publicly disclosed.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And so like, you know, and then I don't remember who, where it was.
It might have been on Rogan's show where Cash Patel went on Rogan's show earlier this year.
It was on some podcasts.
It was Theobon Rogue, one of those shows.
And he said that, you know, as the best of his knowledge, Epstein did commit suicide.
And basically the public facts that were admitted and exposed are the correct ones.
And I think that was kind of the first like crust, right, of the online base looking at this and saying, wait, what are you talking about?
Like your exact cohort of people told us for years that you suspect there's a gigantic cover-up.
And then if given power, you would actually do something about it.
Right.
And then you would help, you know, turn the narrative on its head and actually expose what happened.
Could even go as far as Epstein having not killed himself.
Maybe they're being a conspiracy to kill him.
And then obviously seeing the complicity of a broader network of powerful people around us, you know, we knew that Epstein was tied into all kinds of people he had met with.
For instance, former prime minister Ehud Barak from Israel, dozens of times.
He actually connected Noam Chomsky with Ehud Barak.
This was someone who was very well tied into not only U.S. government figures here, but many figures overseas, including in Israel.
And now we're being told there's nothing to see here, right?
So, you know, it's possible that some of what the Trump administration is saying today is true, that, hey, look, Epstein did commit suicide, that there isn't some kind of broader network of people who are complicit in child sex trafficking, so on and so forth.
But then you have to ask yourself, like, why were these same people saying the opposite for years?
Were they playing a con then or are they playing the con now?
Right.
And it's, I think it's a question a lot of Trump's base, particularly his online base, people who are very interested, I think, in the Epstein files and the Epstein case.
I think it is creating a real kind of discordant vibe among them, right?
Like, I think there is like, you know, I don't know if you saw Alex Jones.
Alex Jones has been going crazy about this topic, right?
Yeah, well, so that's kind of what I want to zero in on.
I do have some questions about the Epstein case that I think are worth reviewing, notwithstanding the proclamation.
There's nothing to see or it's time to move on.
Trump said, how dare you talk about something so irrelevant?
It's like, are you kidding?
But the typical caricature of MAGA, of MAGA influencers, MA operatives, MA pundits and journalists, is that they're basically part of a cult, that Trump has built a cult of personality around him.
And as a result, nobody who's associated with MAGA will ever really criticize him because as a cult is, you don't ever question or criticize the leader.
And I think we've seen that caricature debunked multiple times, starting with the whole controversy over whether, as Eon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy won an increased number of H-1Bs, which a lot of them rightfully said.
What do you mean?
We're going to import more foreign workers?
I thought the idea was to make more jobs for Americans.
You saw it a little bit with when he resumed the bombing of Yemen, although no one really cares about Yemen.
We're always bombing it.
No one cares that much.
But you saw some mutterings like, wait, why are we doing this?
Certainly saw it with the hint that we're not going to deport people who are here illegally, but working for important industries, industries important to Trump, hotels and farms and like.
Saw it with the bombing of Iran, but you're really seeing it here.
So that's a lot of pushback, a lot of dissent from a group of people who are often typically accused of being a cult who will never question Donald Trump.
Wondering what you make of all that and what it says about these mugged people.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think that there are certain folks kind of in the influencer network or universe who do see themselves as waking up every day and saying, why, whatever Trump did was a win, right?
There are people like that.
And there's people like that on the left, right?
On the kind of the people, I think jokingly referred to them as blue and not, you know, Democratic influencers who do that.
On the other hand, I think there's quite a few people in Trump's orbit and network who really believed in this, right?
And like, you can't go after someone's core beliefs and not expect some kind of backlash, like whether it's with Donald Trump and the Republicans or the Democrats.
And I think that a big part of what the Republicans kind of are facing right now is kind of an identity crisis, right?
Even putting Epstein aside, like remember QAnon, right like this was a right-wing movement of people who believed that there was an elite cabbal that was kind of protecting a pedophile ring right and it was heavily implied that the pedophiles were largely democrats i think a lot of people out there in the country really did expect that trump would come in and that he would expose a lot of these big guys he would expose a lot of the intricate conspiracies that existed throughout uh the democratic party throughout the u.s federal government and they haven't seen that not only not on epstein but like in general right like even the people maybe who chanted locker up when it came to his rallies with hillary clinton i mean
Trump never pursued Hillary Clinton in any serious way.
And I think that faction of people is going to be somewhat disappointed.
I think you may even see it have some wider impact in the political party in terms of enthusiasm for turning out for voting in the future.
Because remember, Trump won't even be on the ballot anymore, right?
Like, I mean, unless he does the Steve Bannon thing and somehow gets a third term, he's not going to be on the ballot in the midterms.
He's not going to be on the ballot in 2028, right?
Whoever's trying to take his mantle and run with his movement has to actually deliver certain things for them.
In order to have that cohesive coalition going forward.
And I think that's a challenge for someone like J.D. Vance, who I think himself actually had some really funny and compelling tweets a few years ago about how, hey, we discovered this Epstein guy.
He's really powerful.
They say he killed himself and we never talked about it again, right?
Well, now Trump is saying we shouldn't talk about it again.
Now Trump is bored of the topic, right?
Of course, Trump had a friendship with Epstein, even though there's no evidence that Trump was tied into these crimes.
I guess what I'm saying is that in order to have a cohesive coalition and keep them together going forward, you do actually have to deliver certain things for them, right?
It can't just purely be Trump's charm or charisma or his personality, particularly when he's not going to be the guy leading the coalition after a few years from now.
Yeah, J.D. Vance actually tweeted an article that he said he thinks about all the time and he urged everybody to go read it.
It was basically an article saying it's rational and reasonable for people to believe QAnon, given how blatantly...
our government covers up massive pedophilia rings like the Epstein case and kind of depicted the Epstein case as being the Rosetta stone that deciphers all of the rot and corruption of globalists.
And now they're hearing, you know, from Trump himself, you know, scolding a journalist for even asking a question about it and saying it's time for it to move on.
There's no more talk about Epstein.
I want to ask you, you know, I do think that the Epstein case took on a kind of mythological sentiment that spurred a lot of unhinged conspiracy theories.
You mentioned the Chomsky thing.
You know, I remember when the Wall Street Journal published on its front page top headline that Chomsky had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein a couple of times and instantly everybody was like, oh, Chomsky was on the island and he was, you know, having sex with 12-year-old girls as well.
And that was the kind of stuff that just, you know, and it might be up for understandable reasons, but really got deranged as these kind of conspiracy theories can.
But there clearly are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding all of this.
Like, where did Jeffrey Epstein's wealth come from?
And did he have connections with the Israeli government in terms of the activities in which he was engaged or more broadly?
And one of the things that really struck me, Zed is the reporter who provoked Trump's anger and said, it's time to move on.
The only question he asked was, is there any evidence that Jeffrey Epstein worked with or for foreigner intelligence or domestic intelligence agencies?
To me, that's like the real substantive question.
There may be others, there are others, but that's the one that really we ought to know.
And after Trump scolded the journalists and say, how dare you focus and ask us about some trivial thing about some dead creep when we have all these important things to get to, Pam Bonnie did actually answer it, kind of, and what she basically said was she has no idea.
She has no knowledge about whether Jeffrey Epstein is connected to any intelligence agency and she'll get back to us.
How is it remotely possible, Zed, that they purported to do an investigation, looked all in the storage rooms and under the beds and behind the brooms and everything like they claimed, and it never once occurred to them to even wonder if Jeffrey Epstein had connections to foreign intelligence agencies, even though that was absolutely central to MAGA discourse for four years?
Yeah, I mean, Sager and Jetty and Tucker Carlson recently did a podcast, and this was one of the topics that came up.
And actually, their theory for why Trump maybe is not super enthusiastic about revealing all this or even being transparent about it, even if there isn't anything there.
He's not very enthusiastic about it.
Their theory was it's not so much that maybe Trump was involved with this Isla and Lolita Express, so on and so forth, but maybe that Trump is actually fearful of intelligence agencies, right?
You know, they pointed out correctly that the CIA, Mossad, so on and so forth, these intelligence agencies often have off-the-books businesses and things that they can use to launder money, to move resources around, to get ins and out in markets and governments around the world.
We know that Epstein was very friendly with the Israeli government, that I believe either his father or father-in-law had been involved in some kind of Israeli intelligence or something adjacent to that.
I remember reading about that.
It wouldn't surprise me if he had some kind of tie into them.
Now, does that mean that he was an asset or a spy for them?
I mean, I think that's something that would have to be confirmed with more evidence than we have.
But there's certainly a lot of reason to suspect that he had some kind of connection or formal or maybe even a formal connection with either Israeli or American intelligence.
And that's what I think would end with someone like Trump clamming up, right?
Because he wouldn't want to step on those toes, right?
Like he, I think Netanyahu was actually there, you know, around the same time that Trump was being asked this question, right?
Like this would be a very sensitive question for Netanyahu as well in terms of his country's domestic politics and their international reputation, right?
And I think those sensitivities might be something that could actually spook someone like that on Trump.
It could be something that spooked Pam Ba and Nikash Patel, so on and so forth, because that's something where you don't want to get on the wrong side of it, right?
I think Trump got on the wrong side of a lot of the intelligencies during the first term with the Russian gate stuff, right?
Like they all suspected that he was too soft on Putin, he's too soft on Russia and they made his life difficult in many ways, right?
And I think that Trump, in my experience, Trump tends to, when he sees someone as powerful and it has the ability to hurt them, he almost like respects them more or he like just kind of shies away from them some more, right?
Like he's someone who kind of sees power in that way.
He doesn't necessarily rush forward to eagerly confront things like that.
And I actually think that Sager and Tucker's theory about this is possibly valid, that even if Trump doesn't know for a fact this was the case, he's not super eager to look into it because it could end up stepping on some powerful toes.
I absolutely think that is exactly what's going on here.
And that's why I found it so notable that they didn't even deny.
They could have denied it falsely like they did with everything else and nothing here when it comes to, they didn't do that.
She was like, hmm, never thought of that.
Don't have any knowledge about it.
Let me look into that and get back to you.
I wouldn't recommend holding your breath for her to get back to you.
The Daily Caller today published in a kind of Trump critical article, the mountain of evidence that connects Jeffrey Epstein to the Israeli government.
He was there all the time.
He toured military bases.
He had access to the top officials.
His primary benefactor, the source of his mysterious wealth, one of them, Les Wexner, is a hardcore Zionist with ties to the Israeli government and every major Zionist group around the world.
Khusain Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, the British billionaire, was an acknowledged and admitted Mossad agent working in all kinds of ways with Israeli intelligence.
So the evidence of this is substantial.
Nope, not just positive, but substantial enough for people to be demanding answers.
And yet they've, you know, and that was the thing that struck me is they could have just dragged it on more, you know, and pretended that they're investigating.
It was after five months, they just like, we look, there's nothing here, we're closing this, you're not getting any other documents, move on.
And that to me seemed like it was kind of a centralized order.
Yeah, and you have to remember, everyone has to remember something, is that the Department of Justice and the FBI and the federal government overall have more investigative resources and abilities at their disposal than just about anyone, right?
Like no journalist could freely look into people's financial records, into their personal belongings, subpoena people to bring them for testimony, so on and so forth.
Similar to what the federal government could do, right?
So it is actually kind of shocking that they would act like they really can't do much or like they don't want to do much after years of kind of hyping it up into something that they wanted to pursue or something that they heavily implied the opposition party, the Democrats were covering up for.
And, you know, that there may actually be something there to where like a lot of, I haven't seen a whole lot of Democratic members of Congress or elected officials be opportunistic here and say, hey, you guys must be hiding something about Epstein.
And, you know, part of the reason for that is that, you know, Bill Clinton was an Epstein friend.
I think, you know, people like Steven Pinker, Larry Summers, like, I feel like Bill Gates.
Yeah, like the Democratic, like smarty click of people around Boston and Cambridge, right?
Like a lot of them knew Epstein, right?
Epstein was tied into those college, those universities in that area.
And I think that maybe Democrats have some sensitivity about this as well because of that.
You know, maybe they would be scared that they would find something related to one of their one of their associates.
But yeah, I mean, look, it's either an all-time fake out now or it was an all-time fake out in the years prior to where they were implying that something was here and that they wanted to pursue it and then they just drop it like that.
Right.
And I don't blame people, I think, in Trump's base who are confused by it and who are asking more from the person that they elected.
Yeah, especially since they were promised this specifically.
And, you know, look, at the end of the day, if now we're supposed to believe that Dan Bongino and Kash Patel and the whole crew and everything they were saying about the Epstein case was all completely untrue for all these years, despite how definitively they were asserting it, you would think then that they owe a lot of apologies to people, to the Biden officials they accused of corruptly concealing this evidence to protect powerful predators and pedophiles.
They constantly implied Bill Gates was on the list and that he was one of the main reasons this list wasn't being concealed.
And, you know, also there are a lot of people, there were people in the Trump administration, not just before they got there, who were making very specific promises about things they had seen that were shocking, that were going to come out.
But if now they want to insist that they're now telling the truth, they owe public apologies to a lot of people, which I'm quite certain are not going to be forthcoming.
All right, let's change gears a little bit.
In fact, I would almost hold my breath for Pam Bondi to get back to us on whether he has intel ties than I would for those public apologies to be forthcoming, although both are probably fatal if you were to hold your breath for either of those.
All right, let me do a little transition.
If you want to grab some kind of water, I hope you're fine now with your coughing and the like.
I want to talk about the New York mayoral race and the victory, the quite stunning and sweeping victory by Zoran Mandani against the scion of one of the most powerful political dynasties in all of American politics over the last 50 years, which is the Cuomo family.
You just vanquished him and the billionaires behind him and all the Wall Street and real estate interests.
And one of the things I love about you, Zad, as a journalist and like just as an analyst is it's always hard to predict how you're going to see things because you don't at all wed yourself to one party or one side or one ideology.
It's one of the things I appreciate most about you.
And you've been somebody quite critical of left-wing political movements, especially a lot of the excesses of Black Lives Matter.
You've talked a lot about your opposition to this anti-police sentiment and the like.
And Zoron, in a lot of ways, comes out of that faction.
He comes out of DSA in New York, that kind of like, you know, left-wing millennial Gen Z crowd that gave AOC the 10,000 votes she needed to defeat Joe Crawley, has a lot of statements riding that Black Lives Matter wave about defund the police and the like.
And you seem, at the very least, anti-Mandani.
Like you dislike a lot of the attacks on him.
You think they're quite ugly and racist and just sort of improper.
And I certainly agree with that.
But you also seem somewhat optimistic about him from a governance perspective.
I'm wondering how you see him in the context of all the things you've worked on.
Yeah, I'm glad you asked about that because I did a piece for the Washington Post actually about some of the kind of racial, ethnic, religious backlash.
And I think that's taken over a lot of the discussion, right?
You know, you have a member of Congress suggesting he should be deported.
You have other people suggesting he's an Islamist and so on and so forth.
And, you know, that stuff's just, you know, a little bit of a throwback to the Bush era or even Obama era kind of phobias and panicking.
But I think the more interesting and sophisticated like critique is that like, okay, Mamdani is 33 years old.
He's never run like a giant institution before, like New York City, America's largest city.
And, you know, just a few years ago, when he was in his 20s, he was fully on board with everything, you know, the DSA, which is a pretty left-wing organization, wanted to do from defunding the police to changing various requirements within the public high schools about how people get in and kind of relax them to kind of help diversify them or bring in more black and Latino students.
I think he had, he was definitely like your kind of run-of-the-mill online left-winger in much of his 20s, right?
And I think people are right to have a little bit of skepticism about whether that kind of approach could actually run a large city.
But I think also we need to think about how politics works and how people evolve as they rise up the ranks, right?
Like think about some of the people who've been in political power in our country, ranging from Barack Obama and Bill Clinton to Joe Biden and sort of how they evolve their thinking over the trajectory of their lives.
I mean, Bill Clinton was a kind of an anti-war hippie in the 60s and 70s, and then he eventually became the great triangulator, right?
Like he revived the conservative Democratic movement in the United States in the 1990s, right?
And I think that pathway and trajectory is actually quite common for Democrats.
The difference is, though, with Mohamedani, he's doing this trajectory very quickly, right?
He's one of the youngest people to ever take the position.
I don't know if he's actually the youngest, but he certainly is on the younger side.
And so any kind of evolving of his points of view or any kind of trajectory that I would follow would be very swift and narrow, right?
And I think during his campaign, he did do certain things.
Like one, say he wanted to preserve the high-stakes test that's used to admit students to the elite public high schools in New York City, right?
A lot of sort of black and Latino activists did not like that test.
They think it favors Asians, so on and so forth.
And he used to be with those people, right?
But he moderated on that issue.
He says he no longer is interested in defunding the police.
He said he's even open to keeping this current NYPD commissioner who's been there under Eric Adams, right?
Who's not, doesn't have a reputation as any kind of left libertarian type person, right?
So I think in a few ways, Mamdani is showing that, hey, look, it's very different from holding a seat in the state assembly from a very progressive district, from holding the mayorality of a very large city that I think is probably overall kind of center left, right?
I don't think New York City is a hardcore left-wing city.
You know, it's not something, it's not even Portland or Seattle, right?
Like it's New York.
It's had Republican mayors in the past, like Ruby Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg was mayor there as well.
I think fears about things like subway safety and cleanliness, about crime are still present.
And I think he does kind of understand that he has to thread the needle and navigate that a little bit.
And I think part of what gave me some hope that he might be willing to do that and hear other people out who are not just on, you know, the left libertarian side is that in his campaign, I think he assembled actually a pretty vast coalition, right?
I mean, he had everyone from, yes, the young DSA kids out in Brooklyn to Yemeni and Bangladeshi shopkeepers, which were actually part of, I think, Eric Adams' base before, to winning almost 60% of the vote in one of the highest primary totals.
I think maybe the actual, the highest number of votes for a primary in New York City's history because the other all right, Zed seems sort of froze.
We're going to try and get Zed back.
I suppose I could wait.
I could like do a stream of consciousness reaction to things that Zed has said.
I could share with you other thoughts and experiences that I've had in my life, things that might be on my mind.
I think Zed is back, actually.
Zed, are you back with us?
Can you hear me?
Yes, I am back.
All right.
So yeah, you seem to have frozen, but I think I got the gist of that.
So I want to just delve in a little bit to a couple of things that you said.
I think comparing him to other of these candidates is really interesting.
Bill Clinton, by the way, was very young when he was elected president.
He was, I think, 42, 43, something like that.
You know, very, very young to be elected president.
The only experience he previously had had was attorney general of a very small state, Arkansas, then governor of that state.
So it's not like he had this massive executive experience.
Obama on some level had might have even been less prepared.
I mean, he was in the Senate for like two years before he decided to run for president, had been a state legislature before that, never was the executive of anything.
And, you know, obviously Donald Trump was twice elected, certainly in 2016, without having had any elective office experience previously.
I think you have to go back to Dwight Eisenhower for a president who got elected without working up the elective ladder.
And, you know, he was a five-star general who was credited for overseeing the military victory in World War II.
So he was certainly someone entrenched in Washington politics for a long time.
So Trump, too, is a kind of unique figure.
And I think the thing that all three of those have in common, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, is they're extremely charismatic figures who in many ways transcended ideology.
They kind of couldn't be put in a box.
And what all three of them did was electrify not just their base voters, but a lot of people who never voted before, a lot of people who had given up on elected politics because they just were too disillusioned.
And in a lot of ways, I see a lot of commonalities with Zoron and those three examples.
One of the biggest problems the Democratic Party has is with young men, and he won young men by a massive margin.
I mean, and it wasn't just that he won young male voters, and even male voters generally, but a lot of them came out for the first time to vote for him.
You know, he has this.
I heard with Obama once in 2008, an analyst after his victory, and it was a shocking victory just given his trajectory, talking about what Obama did that so few politicians can do is bring out voters who don't otherwise vote, that that's sort of the political goal, because you're always going to have the partisan voters who are going to vote for you kind of no matter what.
So you have Zaran Mandani like bringing that electricity, bringing that kind of invigorating, that sense of hope.
And as you say, appealing to a cross-range of voters.
There's a lot of caricatures that he only got rich people.
In New York, obviously, you can't win an election with just rich people.
He actually, I think the only two blocks that he didn't win were the poorest, people under 50,000, who are black voters, who tend to be kind of more loyal to the Democratic, familiar Democratic names like Andrew Cuomo, and the very rich, the richest, who also voted for Andrew Cuomo on the Upper East and West Side.
And he won kind of everything in between, you know, working class, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class.
So it was a pretty sweeping coalition too.
And yet, and I know you think that the resistance to him among Democratic Party elites is overstated, but there's certainly a marked lack of enthusiasm for his victory, to put it very minimally, among Democratic elites, which would not be there if he were a more kind of establishment candidate.
So I'm wondering what you think this means for Democratic Party politics and how they might, you know, try and improve their standing going forward.
Yeah, actually, I think that the response from Democratic elites, like the slow endorsements, some members kind of denouncing him in some ways.
I mean, I think John Fetterman just said that he's not even a Democrat, which is not true.
I mean, he was elected to the legislature in New York as a Democrat.
He's elected as mayor.
He has a Democratic nomination.
It's actually Cuomo and Eric Adams who are running as independents.
But I think actually the resistance is 100% about probably about Israel, right?
Like this idea or sense that he's not aligned with particularly New York Democrats, I think, which is, you know, I think it has the largest Jewish population of any city outside of Tel Aviv, probably, or outside of Israel.
That's correct.
That's correct.
I think, right.
I think that someone like Hakeem Jeffries, who is seen as kind of a party manager in the house, who's constantly raising money from people left and right, I think that these people probably are hearing a lot from that kind of donor, big wig, consultant type class of people who are very much tied into that politics, and that they're kind of trying to walk a line, right?
Like I don't see any of these people really likely endorsing Cuomo or Adams.
One reason being they can't win and two, because I think the Democratic voters in New York were pretty resounding.
I mean, it was a victory of about 13 points, which was like very solid margin, right?
Like that was not a narrow defeat for Cuomo.
So I don't really see them endorsing that side, but I do see the trepidation as probably being mostly related to Israel because I think Mamdani is seen as someone who is close to the, you know, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, who is close to these factions and groups that I think that make people like Chaim Saban or like major Jewish Dem donors, like very uneasy and queasy, right?
So they're trying to kind of feel him out in that regard.
I actually think if everything else were the same, just like his social policy platform, education, policing, blah, blah, blah, I actually think they wouldn't mind it at all.
Like in their minds, they're probably thinking if anything goes too far, we'll just block it in the city council or, you know, so on and so forth.
But I actually think the Israel part in particular is very, very dicey for the Democrats because we've seen a massive swing in public opinion among Democratic voters on Israel.
And actually, what's his face?
James Carville, he was recently on a podcast talking about this.
And the New York Post, of course, took something about globalizing Intifada.
And it's like, oh, he should never say that.
Of course, he's never said it.
He never said it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
No, he never said it.
But something Carville said was very important was that Carville said that among younger Jewish voters, Israel is not as big of a deal anymore.
Right.
And I think a lot of that, if you look at like the voter distribution and turnout in New York City, I believe the largest group actually was 30 to people ages 30 to 34.
So that's Mamdani's age bracket, right?
That's kind of younger millennials, right?
And I think that that transformation that's happened at kind of the voter level has not really translated into democratic leadership because their entire lives, they were told, you can basically just got to say, we stand with Israel.
I'm pro-Israel.
And it's very simple-minded slogans.
If you say them, then, you know, APAC, ADL, AJC, all these groups will not call you anti-Semitic, anti-Israel.
They won't spend money against you.
You'll be able to fundraise very easily.
I think that inculcation to that type of politics for decades, Schumer or someone like Kaprim Jeffries has been very, very powerful for them.
And they weren't quite caught up to where the voters in the Democratic Party were turning on that so swiftly over the past two years.
And actually, I think James Carville actually knew it exactly.
I mean, he's, I think he's a smart guy.
He's worked a lot of elections.
He knows his stuff.
And he understood that for Democratic voters, it's no longer a deal breaker, right?
And I think the leadership just old and fixed in their ways, and they're just kind of scared, right?
Like one of my Jewish friends actually told me one time that he thinks that institutional Washington, D.C. actually is kind of anti-Semitic because they think that like, if you say something disagreeing about Israel, the Jews will destroy you, right?
Like that's what, that's their mindset, right?
They're terrified of that.
And it's really not true.
I mean, there are interest groups that are very aligned with the Israeli government, but like, you know, you, there's more diversity of opinion than there used to be 10 or 20 years ago, right?
There's particularly among, I think in the Jewish population, there's a generational split and divide.
And I think Mamdani saw that.
I was actually shocked that he like had a nuanced response to being asked about globalizing to fada.
I don't know if I was in his shoes, if I would have given a nuanced response.
I maybe would have just been like, I don't say that.
And I don't like people saying that.
But no, he actually gave a nuanced response and it didn't seem to hurt him at all in the election.
So maybe he even had a better read of the electorate than I did or than a lot of other people did.
So yeah, I think, I just think among like 60 to 70 year old Democratic elites who are used to thinking it's career suicide to say any of this, that's why they have trepidation.
I don't think it has anything to do with the social, economic, domestic policy he was talking about.
They can always manage that, you know, or trip him up on there if they want.
But I do think Israel is the entire entire reason for any kind of hesitancy on endorsing.
Yeah, I think we're exactly right.
I think, you know, two good examples of that are Bernie Sanders, who did get pushback.
He obviously wasn't the favored candidate of the establishment, but it was nowhere near the meltdown that we're seeing with Zoran.
And that's because Bernie over the years, despite being critical of Israel, has always been a clear Zionist.
I mean, he's always defended Israel's right to exist.
He actually, after October 7th, when asked about a ceasefire, he's like, no ceasefire.
That would only help Hamas.
And AIPAC praised him.
So Bernie always has had one foot in that kind of establishment view of Israel and therefore wasn't very threatening.
And you look at, by contrast, Jeremy Corbyn, who when he became labor leader, the meltdown was severe.
He was an unapologetic critic of Israel.
And not only was the attack on him that he was an anti-Semite, which was utterly fabricated and insane, but it was revealed by a Labor Party's own investigation that they sabotaged him in the general election on purpose, that they would rather have lost to Boris Johnson than won with Jeremy Corbyn.
And again, I think that is because of the fear of the Israel issue.
And also, like, look, like, Bernie is like a Jewish guy.
He's like comically like New York accent, the whole nine yards, right?
Like, and it doesn't mean that APAC loves him.
Like, I remember Haim Saban, who's a major Israel aligned donor, wrote, like, a really angry letter to a bunch of Democrats about Bernie.
And, like, it was just like a boomer comment thread.
But, like, you know, he still clashes with that side.
But the fact that he's Jewish, he's like an older white guy who's Jewish does help him.
I think.
I think someone like Mamdani, a young brown guy, like, that just strikes fear in the heart of lots of these people.
Like, there is an element of racism in it because they feel like they can't trust someone like that.
Like, he's like, at the end of the day, they think, okay, maybe Bernie will clash with Net Young.
Maybe he doesn't like this war, but he's still one of us, right?
Like, he's still in the family, right?
Whereas Mamdani is seen as like a hostile.
And I think that is part of it.
Like, now, on the other hand, if Mamdani acted like Richie Torres and he started defending everything Israel did, I think they would see him as like the greatest asset in the world, right?
Like, oh my God, we got one of, we got one of the brown guys with us.
But when he voices the same concerns that, you know, it's very common among Democratic voters now, I do think that makes him a threat.
And I think they probably think they can't win him over, right?
Like, I feel like people who are kind of in the middle, like, I don't know, like a Jerry Nadler type, they can tolerate that, that Nadler doesn't like, that they criticize the war sometimes because like he's still in our group, but like we can still kind of work with them.
Mom Donnie is like DEF CON one for these people, right?
Like I think, I think that's a big part of it.
No, without doubt, without any doubt at all.
And, you know, I think that, yeah, everything about him just kind of reads as a political outsider.
He had no support from the Democratic Party.
And I do think it's interesting, too, that if he had even moderated some on Israel, let alone become, you know, this sort of like Richie Torres figure, that would, and this is the change in the electorate that you were referencing with James Carpille, although I think I'd go much further than James Carpill,
which is a lot of these young voters will not support, they certainly wouldn't be enthusiastic about or campaign and canvass for a candidate who is equivocating on what a lot of young Democrats believe is the greatest issue, moral and ethical litmus test at the moment, which is where you stand on the genocide in Gaza.
And I mean, it's like the Democratic Party, despite seeing everything that happened in 2024 with Kamala and how many people didn't turn out over that issue, how many Muslim groups refused to endorse or even endorse Trump over those issues.
You know, they just, as you said, it's part being so ossified because of how old they are.
And it's just something that they've been indoctrinated with for decades.
But also they are petrified of the pro-Israel lobby.
They watched $15 million get poured into a primary challenge against Corey Bush and Jamal Bowman, both of which lost.
They've watched that happen many, many times.
Not that they're omnipotent, AIPAC, but they certainly have a lot of ability to do that to strike fear in the hearts of people.
And I think that's why.
All right, Ted, I cannot let you go without asking you.
You have been, I think, almost singular in your belief that the senator of your state, which is Georgia, and one day when you're on, I'm going to ask you about how you're being a resident of Georgia has shaped your politics.
I think it's so interesting to hear that.
But one of the senators from Georgia is John Ossoff, who is a young Jewish, I think like you could say like half establishment, half not member of the Democratic Party.
He doesn't get a lot of attention because he doesn't do a lot of theatrics, which I think is one of the things you like about him, but he also does like a lot of really substantive work.
He just kind of puts, he wants to be a legislator and not like a social media star, I think is the way I would describe it.
I only pay attention to him and know about him because of all your fanboying over him.
But it was, you know, I think there's a sense that he's one of the most vulnerable members of the Senate because he's from Georgia, which Trump won, which has a Republican governor, Republican state officials all throughout it.
He's a first-term senator.
That's usually when they're most vulnerable.
And yet he just announced this massive fundraising haul of $10 million on top of the $5 million that he already $15 million in the bank.
I do think APAC would like to remove him because he has been pretty outspoken as a young Jewish Democrat on Israel.
But why are you so high on him?
Like, why to you is he kind of the model of what a good politician should be?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if he would say I'm a fanboy of him, right?
Like, I feel like when it comes to my elected officials, when I get a chance to talk to them, you know, usually I'm trying to push them or give them some constructive advice.
But I do think that he, I think that, look, I was born and raised in Georgia.
I was born in 1988.
So I'm, you know, I'm a millennial, a little bit older than Zoron.
I have a few years on Zoron.
But, you know, my congressional delegation was never known for being very conservative with civil or human rights, right?
Like it wasn't like even Zell Miller, who was like our populist governor, who did a lot of great things establishing free college and expanding free, you know, or subsidized pre-K and preschool and so on and so forth.
Even he, you know, was also known for being very tough on crime, establishing these boot cams for people and being very outspoken about it.
And I think the difference with someone like Ozoff and Warnock is that we're seeing a generational shift in Georgia's population, right?
And that the points of view that they express, I think, are very well aligned with people who are like in their 30s and 40s in Georgia, which is that, you know, I don't think that they are necessarily leftists or progressives in the sense that you might see in New England or out on the coast, but that they actually do want to see a shift from kind of the older mentalities that had been, I think, governing Georgia and both parties that I think was often kind of dismissive of the rights of people like immigrants, the rights of people like foreigners, people who were behind bars in prison.
And I think you see that in things like Asof leading these really high profile investigations into the federal prison system, right?
Seeing that women who were giving birth behind bars were often treated horribly, right?
Like they're treated like in third world type conditions.
I always remember something John said at the end of one of those hearings was that, look, I just, we just witnessed all this testimony about how horrible these women were treated.
And yet we have the nerve to go around the world and tell them about human rights, right?
And I don't think he was saying that politically because there's like no, there's no like political reason to say that.
I think that's just how he honestly felt, right?
Like he, his background actually before he went to the Senate is his family had a bunch of wealth.
And he used that inherited wealth not to go buy mansions and yachts and things like that, but to fund journalism.
And so he did a lot of documentaries in the Middle East across the world looking at the human rights issues.
And I think that's a lot of what his tenure in the Senate has been, right?
I think he really wants to investigate how and why government power is being used.
And I think that's a lot of what disturbs him about Trump, honestly.
Like, I don't think, you know, it's not that Asof is not in sync with like the normal democratic, social, or economic policy agenda.
I think it more or less is.
He's not on the progressive end of things.
He's probably in the center of things on that.
But I think what really drives him is that civil and human rights commitment.
Right.
And I think balancing that with like Israel politics has been a challenge for him because I think as soon pretty much as soon as he got into the Senate, he was pushing for things like when Shereen Abu Akhla, the American Arab American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera, was killed in the West Bank.
That was under the Biden administration.
You know, a bunch of independent investigations suggested that an IDF soldier just shot her, right?
Like she wasn't here.
Snipe her in the head.
Right.
And I remember seeing that John worked actually with Mitt Romney of all people.
And like he sent a letter to Biden saying, look, you have to investigate.
This is one of our own.
This is an American.
We want a full independent investigation.
We're not satisfied with what the Israelis did.
It's very unusual to just see like a senator from Georgia take interest in that and then also like enlist a high-profile Republican to do it.
Now, of course, Biden never investigated it and nothing ever came of it.
But it was kind of a signal that like he cares about this, right?
Like he thinks that a member of Congress should actually be expressing oversight over.
And I find him interesting.
I also think that he seems to be in a very kind of good political spot, right?
Like I actually think the Republicans cannot defeat him.
They don't really have a candidate on the field who can do it.
And to me, more than saying anything about that John or Reverend Warnock, it says something about how the state of Georgia has changed, right?
Like the state of Georgia really is not an old South state anymore.
It's not a progressive state.
But I don't know.
This is something actually I'm writing on.
I'm writing a much longer piece for a fellowship I'm doing for New America about how the state of Georgia has changed over the past 10 or 20 years.
I'm doing this as part of a fellowship with a bunch of other journalists all over the country.
And I just think that John and Reverend Warnock in particular are an example of that, right?
Like how the southern electorate is changing and how they're kind of the worldview of the people over here is changing quite a bit.
And yeah, I could see either one of them running for president.
And I think at that point, I won't be the person, you know, you say it's fanboying, but I just like writing about them because they're interesting.
I won't be the only person writing about them.
I think if particularly if the Democrats win the governor's seat in Georgia, to where if Warren Nakarasov ran for president, they could just pop in a new Democrat.
So I think a lot more people will be interested in them after 26.
Yeah, by fanboying, to be clear, I just mean that you're not often full of praise, even if you have criticism for a politician.
And I hear you speaking more positively of him than I do of most politicians.
So you do your job of pushing back.
I just want to say one thing about him, which is there was a clip.
And by the way, there's one thing I like about Josh Hawley as well, that Josh Hawley constantly has hearings where he just calls before the Senate executives of major companies in essentially every industry, and he comes very prepared and just pounds them on the way in which they screw over consumers with hidden fees and unfair consumer practices and contrast it to the amount of pay they're getting, despite the company not really benefiting the country, in fact, harming the country in all sorts of ways.
And this one exchange I saw with John Osoff was at a budgetary hearing where I believe Health and Human Services had submitted a budget or maybe it was the CDC and they proposed some massive cut in the payroll of the agency and he was just trying to understand how many people are you cutting?
How many doctors are you firing?
Actually, it was the VA.
How many doctors are you firing?
How many nurses are you firing?
And the person who prepared the budget was just like, I can't give you that information.
And he was just indignant, not on ideological grounds, but like on governance and competence grounds.
How can you come before our committee, request approval for this budget that has massive cuts in payroll and personnel?
And you can't tell us who you're going to fire to meet to get these cuts.
And he was just offended, like I said, just kind of on a substantive basis, not a very sexy topic, you know, approval of budgetary hearings or whether they're sufficiently informative.
But, you know, it just, I think, showed his seriousness in how he looks at his job.
And that already puts him in front of a ton of people in both houses who, like I said, I think are more interested in being social media stars or cable stars than anything else.
All right, Zed, always great to talk to you.
Always Great to see you.
I hope people will follow your sub stack where they can keep track of a lot of your commentary, that you are making more and more appearances in a lot of major media outlets, which I think is great as well.
