Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman give a reasoned and balanced assessment of the last few days after Hamas led a terrorist attack in the Southern part of Israel. They discuss the historical context of this conflict and the political ramifications that Benjamin Netanyahu might have to go through. They then turn to the shit show in the House with Jim Jordan the favorite to win the Speaker, further cementing the GOP as a non-serious party. They finish with Robert Kennedy Jr announcing he will be running for president as an independent and what that means for both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
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Nick, you know, we sometimes have fun on the show and, you know, we're dealing with a lot of serious things.
So, you know, sometimes you have to laugh in order to break the tension, particularly when you're dealing with some really scary things.
But we have a really serious show today.
Oh, we do.
Sorry, I thought you were.
I didn't realize.
At any rate, yes, we have to talk about, you know, what's going on in Israel right now.
And, you know, it's not even just the size of the attack.
It's just how it was done.
Every facet that we need to talk about is going to make it worse and sound Worse, but it's really, really, really important to, uh, to pull this apart and understand where we are so we can figure out what, uh, how to, how to, you know, get through this.
It's hugely important.
And, and, you know, just to speak for myself and, and I have to assume you and a lot of our listeners, cause the Muckrake podcast is a very particular type of podcast.
Um, I, I know for me, uh, when it comes to things of this magnitude, such as the attacks in Israel and the ongoing conflict there, um, it's a really frightening, upsetting thing.
It's truly, truly horrifying, but it helps me to understand it, to think about it, to pull it apart, put it back together.
What we know so far, before we get into the minutiae of the actual event, historical context, and also forecasting into the future and what we're watching.
For those who haven't heard or maybe have avoided it and need to get caught up to speed, On Saturday, Hamas began a completely unprecedented, out-of-nowhere attack against Israel.
Militants stormed the border by land, air, and sea after a bombardment of rockets.
They attacked dozens of towns, sites, and bases.
So far, the tally is over 800-plus dead in Israel, a thousand or more wounded, or thousands wounded, hundreds have been kidnapped.
Since then, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared war and said that Israel will respond with unprecedented force.
Already over 560 plus, at last count, Palestinians have been killed in retaliations.
It has been announced that there will be a total blockade of Gaza with food, water, and electricity cut off.
The defense minister has called them animals.
That is a war crime.
The USS Gerald Ford is en route to the region and Hamas has already gone on the record and said that Iran assisted with this attack.
They got the go-ahead with Iran.
We'll talk more about this in the near future.
And unfortunately where we are right now, Hamas has promised with any future retaliations that they will possibly execute prisoners.
Nick, there is a lot going on here, a lot to talk about, but I wanted to obviously go to you with what have to be complicated and painful feelings.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we have a very, very close family friend whose son was there at the rave at one of the kibbutzes.
And so they're not sure where he is or what's going on with him.
And it's possible he's one of these hostages that we're talking about.
So it really, you know, it's somebody I know.
I met the kid, you know, when he was young and before they moved to Israel.
So, um, and the, and the mother is, you know, somebody I grew up with.
So, uh, you know, when it, when it feels that way, I don't even think I need needed that to make this feel as close to home as, uh, it would be anyway.
But, um, you know, if, if you want to just do the math, there's it's 1200 people are now Israelis are dead.
And considering the population overall of Israel, it's the equivalent of like 60,000 people in America being killed in one day on a, by a terrorist attack.
which is unprecedented.
No one's ever seen anything like this.
And, um, you know, it's, I don't know where do we want to begin because certainly it's just frightening to have to imagine that where you're at a, uh, and by the way, the irony here is I would imagine most of the kids that were at this, uh, at the Kibitz celebrating the music festival were probably people who are very sympathetic to the at the Kibitz celebrating the music festival were probably people who are very sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, you know, and, um, that, that the polling skews along those lines where like the younger kids and they get out of the army and they just wanted to have a two state solution and figure out
So, um, you know, but it's very traumatic to have to even put your mindset into like how that all unfolded.
There's videos all over the place that are awful.
I wish I hadn't seen.
Um, but it just goes to show you, you know, what, what they're facing, I think is maybe the thing we can take from this right away.
You know, when it comes to big giant geopolitical flashpoint stories, which this is, um, I like to start by reminding people, we can talk about Israel.
We can talk about Hamas.
We can talk about any number of things.
Um, These are proper nouns.
These are states, organizations, you name it.
We're dealing with people here, and you know, like one of the things that we have to talk about, again, we bring historical context, we talk about geopolitical maneuvers, what to expect, what to look for, all of that stuff, because we want to keep people informed, and we want to get information out there.
We need to remember As as these numbers go higher and higher as as all of these people are being killed or wounded or kidnapped and or traumatized on a daily basis, they're living, breathing human beings.
We don't need to sit here and you know, just because and I'll lay my cards on the table.
I think the Palestinians have been oppressed for decades.
I think that Israel has largely behaved as an apartheid state.
I think Palestinians deserve human dignity the same way that I think Jews deserve somewhere to call their own.
And you know, it doesn't have to be this or that.
There are so many There's so many fingers to point in this thing.
On one hand, the Palestinians should be treated better.
On the other hand, there is absolutely no excuse for what Hamas has done here.
It is barbarism and horrific, and it is awful all the way around.
So I just want to remind people, before we get into the minutiae of this stuff, we're talking about living, breathing human beings, and human beings deserve better than this.
They deserve better than to be oppressed.
They deserve better than to be killed.
They deserve better than to be terrorized and to be treated in any of these ways.
This is an absolute tragedy in any way, shape or form that you cut it.
And I think anybody who else, anybody who wants to get into it in any other way is going about it the wrong way.
These are living, breathing human beings.
And this situation, as it gets worse, is going to hurt living, breathing human beings.
Yeah, I mean, listen, there isn't... I'm extremely sympathetic to the play, and you're hearing a lot of the watchwords coming out about, like, open-air prison in Gaza, which is what they've been living in, and apartheid, which... That may or may not be true.
I think it's true, you know, especially from their perspective, but I think that the context we're missing, and I would love to maybe just go into some of the historical context to kind of get that out of the way, because that might just be easier to get into this, but But you have to understand that if you're wondering, okay, it's an open-air prison that they're calling this in Gaza, but you have to understand who the captors are.
The captors are Hamas.
They're the ones who are creating this situation where Israel then, you know, has to fence them off and have all the checkpoints and cause all these different issues.
You know, we also realize that the Palestinian Authority doesn't really have any control over any of this.
They can't go to Hamas and say, hey, you shouldn't do that or give back the hostages.
They have no control over any of this.
So why would Israel negotiate with them, with the Palestinian authorities, you know, in the West Bank?
You know what I mean?
So it's like this is the people who are being held hostage when you're talking about Gaza are these innocent people that want to just live their lives in Gaza.
But it's it's Hamas that creates so much of that.
And unfortunately, when you saw, we've had issues where like suicide bombers were blowing themselves up a lot in Israel.
So they built a wall, they installed hundreds of checkpoints, which made life miserable for Palestinians, but the bombing stopped.
So if you're looking at it from the Israeli perspective, I don't know, you know, that was like, we had to do that because otherwise innocent people on buses were just getting blown up, you know, weekly.
But there was never any kind of negotiation there because Hamas would never accept anything but Israel being wiped off the map.
You know, the Palestinian Authority has no problem.
They would like to have a peaceful two-state solution.
That would be great, but they can't control Hamas.
And so as long as Hamas is around, they're going to have the issues like this.
Yeah, the Palestinians, unfortunately, like for a really long time now, have found themselves in the middle of all of these passion plays one way or another.
It doesn't help, of course, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a corrupt authoritarian and he has used this situation to his advantage over and over again.
You know, he has been in this authoritarian push now for years, largely has used this conflict, has sort of played it as an instrument at times.
Meanwhile, Hamas has done the exact same thing with the backing of Iran.
So what you have, again, is a situation where you have a lot of different forces and entities that are all manipulating a situation to the detriment of people who live in Gaza and people who live in Israel.
You know, and we can sit here and say Israelis, we can say Palestinians, but what we're talking about are human beings who are underneath the banners of certain different things that other people are pushing and moving and, you know, it's been an incredibly deadly year in Gaza, which is, you know, part of the reason why this has happened.
And, you know, you look at all of this and there's nothing good here.
You know what I mean?
Like there's nothing like I and this is one of the things that pisses me off when people talk about geopolitics, whether you know it was the aftermath of September 11th, which we have to talk about, you know, here here in a bit in terms of how things are playing out.
There's no easy narrative here.
There's no easily digestible sort of situation.
Like, this is a very complex, nuanced, tragic situation that has played out.
And unfortunately, it has happened at a really terrible time in history.
It has happened in a really terrible situation in terms of how the geopolitical landscape is set up.
It's a mess.
It's an absolute mess, and there's no easy solution.
Going in and absolutely destroying the Gaza Strip, just absolutely laying it to waste, is not going to fix this.
Just retaliatory strikes aren't going to fix this.
It is an absolute mess that has been made here, and there's no easy way out of it.
Just my initial reaction is sadness of the tragedy of this thing, and also just a sheer horror at the magnitude and complexity of it.
Well, and listen, it has to be said that when Hamas was planning this for months and months with Iran's backing, they knew what the response was going to be.
They knew that innocent Palestinians were going to get slaughtered like this.
They want this to happen because this is part of their thing where they think the international community will now condemn Israel and be on their side, which is what's been happening for a long time in the past.
In a historical context, and just I want to say something real fast because you're exactly right.
I want people to understand this.
The goal of terrorism is not to inflict a wound that is so bad it leads to the collapse of a state.
It's to inflict a wound that bleeds a state and also leads to a reaction that can then gather people to your cause.
We saw this with 9-11.
This is the history of terrorism.
This is how it works.
That is the ideology of it.
You're exactly right.
The hope here is to go ahead and inspire more violence that will then go ahead and radicalize and change the situation.
I just want to give people that context.
And so any innocent Palestinians that die in the next few days in response to what they did, their blood is on Hamas's hands.
And that needs to be clear.
And I think that's going to give Israel some cover for a few days before everybody condemns them for what they're doing.
Because, you know, Netanyahu just spoke to the country.
And, you know, it's hard to have to figure out exactly what they're trying to say, what they want to do, because they want to get rid of Hamas.
Well Hamas embeds themselves in every kind of residential area too so you know and that was always this argument well if Israel could just fight the way Hamas is fighting that they would just level everything and you can't do that either but I don't think it's politicizing it because we can flip the other side and look at how Netanyahu has run this country recently We've already seen the divisions he's in.
He's inspired by by trying to get rid of the Supreme Court's ability to govern or to to weigh in on on cases, which meant which we saw was thousands upon thousands of military people were going to refuse to serve.
All of these things serve to just, you know, weaken the security state to the point where they would miss something like this.
And it's not a stretch.
I don't know how politically you'd make this by looking at the possibility that Netanyahu is going to take advantage of this.
This is going to be an opportunity which he could say, sorry, we have to suspend all of your normal liberties for the foreseeable future until one day we can get this all sorted out.
And that would probably directly help him get rid of the issues he's dealing with now with corruption that would get him out of office.
Now let's go, we can go, you know, to the, to the historical context where Golda Meir had to resign after the Yom Kippur War because of a similar failure.
And it was, you know, it's 50 years of the day, or the day after 50 years of when it happened.
And she had to resign after, you know, the two weeks of the war, and they could not figure, you know, as they're pointing fingers at how they, Equally had the same issue with not being prepared for the attack.
You know, I don't know.
I don't see it Netanyahu following that that thing, even though he probably should.
And that's the precedent.
Netanyahu should be out on his ass.
That's and should have been a long time ago.
A few points on exactly what you brought up, because they're all really, really good points.
First things first is just to remind people that as much as right wing parties and individuals will tell you that they are stronger on security, they're terrible at it.
They always are.
It's not a coincidence that 9-11 happened on George W. Bush's watch.
It's not a coincidence this happened on Netanyahu's watch.
Because what actually goes along with this is corruption and also hubris and also an inability to look into these things.
I also, on that point, need to tell people The United States missed this too, and it's important as we've talked about.
We have to understand that the state is very powerful and it enjoys technology and surveillance powers, the types of which the history has never seen.
But the state has been strangled to the point where it lacks the ability to protect itself basically anymore, which is one of the reasons why, of course, there's more and more and more robust methods that are being put forward.
This right here.
is an indictment of Netanyahu.
It's also an indictment of the intelligence agencies.
My understanding from what I've looked up, and I've had some conversations about this, is that the training for this was right out in the open.
This was not a very well-hit operation, and all the signs were there, just like 9-11, by the way.
Everybody said, you know, the system is blinking red.
So do not trust right-wing authoritarians when they tell you they'll keep you safer, in part because they don't want to keep you safer.
You know, like this is a perfect situation for Netanyahu.
Of course, I don't think he's the type of person who's going to resign or take responsibility for this.
But in the past couple of days, there have been a lot of problems with international coverage of this, and we'll get into those specifics in a bit and how that sort of plays into the larger picture.
But Israeli media has been very critical of Netanyahu in this regard.
And I think it shows that a lot of people are sick of his act, they're sick of his division, what he's done to this country.
That gives me hope.
And I hope this makes sense, Nick, because this is a thing that we're going to dissect a little bit later.
Israel has a very particular role in geopolitics.
It's strange.
And that is, what actually happens in Israel is kind of actually ignored by the larger world community, and the larger world community's narratives and perception of what happens in Israel actually hold more sway on what happens in geopolitics.
And I'll be more specific about that in just a second, but But right now in what's happening, it's weirdly not the way Israelis are reacting to this and how Israeli media is reacting to this.
It's how the international community is reacting to it that's actually changing things and moving things at a strange pace.
So I don't know what's going to happen with him.
I don't know how the response is going to be.
But I what we've seen from him and his cabinet and the people around him is that this is going to get very brutal very quickly.
Nick, I was talking to somebody earlier today.
I said, you know, if somebody came back in time and told me that they unleashed, like, strategic nuclear weapons, which, you know, the world's most open secret is that Israel doesn't have nuclear weapons.
They do.
And, like, if you told me that happened, I wouldn't be that shocked at this point.
You know what I mean?
Like, Netanyahu, I think he's capable of a lot of things.
And this blockade is already really, really problematic.
That group will go for it.
And that is I think them and Hamas in that way, form a really ugly feedback loop.
You know what I mean?
Like I think that I think that's going to go further before they don't need to use a nuclear bomb if they're going to attack Gaza.
No, they haven't.
And the same result could happen.
They don't need to even use nukes to do that.
I just wanted to point out a couple of the political stuff here.
In Netanyahu's speech, he goes, the divisions between us are over politically.
The leadership must also be united.
He called on opposition leaders to establish a national unity government without preconditions.
And it just sounds to me like he's going to afford it because, you know, he's got a lot of radical people in this government who nobody really wants and they want ridiculous things as part of their policies.
And it sounds to me like he's telling anybody else who wants to argue with that that they now are suddenly silenced and they cannot be part of that.
Can I, can I do a quick rejoinder?
I agree that you don't need strategic nuclear weapons in Gaza in order to take care of it.
I think if it were to happen, it would be more of a metaphorical thing.
You know what I mean?
Like this is what happens.
Because one of the things, and I'll go ahead and touch on it just to be clear.
When you watch this stuff play out, you both have to pay attention to what is being said and what isn't being said.
We're now, we're recording this, by the way, on Monday, October 9th.
Um, you know what you're not hearing a lot of right now in all of this?
You're not hearing the word Iran in a lot of this.
Iran backed this and gave it the okay and has constantly worked with Hamas.
That's not an accident.
It's not like Netanyahu and the Israeli government and allies have suddenly said, you know what, we're not worried about Iran.
They are working feverishly behind the scenes to keep that In containment, you know what I mean?
It's to keep that from growing larger because that is, once that Pandora's box is open, there's not a whole lot else to do, right?
That's where things get really, really ugly.
So, no, I think it's about how these sort of things give and take and what the metaphors and what the actions sort of like come into focus.
But yeah, you're exactly right.
There's no need to do it.
Like, a lot of this, there's not going to be a lot of need.
A lot of it is going to be about, you know, making an example and a deterrence.
Right.
Well, you know, and what's not being said then is Iran is being backed by Russia.
That's the larger thing, which we'll get to in a second.
That is a big, big thing we have to talk about.
I mean, and at this point, which connects to like, well, you know, when Trump had the Russian ambassador in the Oval Office and he was giving away Israeli secrets, like, Did any of that intelligence ultimately help them with this?
And you're not going to, you know, and again, you don't see any of the right wing politicians in America talking anything but wanting to blame Biden for, you know, the $6 billion he offered in humanitarian aid to the Iranians, which hasn't even been spent yet.
Interestingly enough, I think, this is an aside, so Golda Meir had to step down because fingers started getting pointed and she was the, you know, the buck stopped with her.
That was in 73.
Nixon steps down because clearly it was corrupt and his own party went to him and told him he had to step down.
Bush is in a similar situation as far as 9-11 happens that Golda Meir was.
He gets fucking re-elected.
Yep.
So think about the difference there.
And what is it?
Senate 1893.
30 years later, the climate now is something that there's no accountability even at that point in 2004 when he gets reelected.
And in fact, he's celebrated and everyone galvanized around him and won really handily.
So that's where we are.
We are.
That's why this is what Netanyahu exists in now as well in that same kind of environment.
So I have basically three scenarios that I think are possible here.
And, you know, for all I know, something will happen while we're recording this that will blast all of them out of the water and replace it with something else.
I have what I call the best scenario, which is cooler heads prevail.
There is some sort of it's going to be tragic and brutal.
And on the other side of it, somehow or another, we find a way to mitigate the violence.
We have a really bad, awful, like, the other two scenarios are just awful.
This is a very good container for the geopolitical tensions in the world to pour into.
Like, a perfect container.
Saturday was my birthday, and I woke up and watched this thing, and was immediately, like, I felt like I was watching Sarajevo, you know, prior to World War I.
Like, this is the type of thing where you have the authoritarian right that is creating its own group.
You have liberal democracies which are trying to stave this off.
Of course, on one side you have Russia, China, Iran.
Netanyahu has provided sort of a bridge between those things.
He's flirted with this stuff, which puts Israel in a strange place.
How they react to this, where they go with this, can sort of go into that.
I think keeping Iran like we were talking about, like keeping Iran out of the mix of this is one of the only ways that you can avoid this becoming a larger international mess, right?
Because Israel has a weird spot in this.
The cultural markers of the authoritarian versus liberal democracy fight is the authoritarians have a white identity push to them, right?
And right now, this is following along white versus Middle Eastern sort of lines.
This is how it becomes predictable.
This is how a lot of this stuff happens.
The War on Terror shows us that white supremacy wins out a lot of the time, and that's where things drive.
If Iran gets pulled into it, all of a sudden, it's more than that.
You know what I mean?
If Iran gets pulled into this, all of a sudden, then the lines start getting a lot starker.
That's a bad situation.
That is a World War III situation.
The third, Nick, and this is what worries me, and I would love to hear what you have to think about this.
The thing that worries me here is that in times of attacks and wars in all of this, all societies creep to the right.
You know what I mean?
Like, and depending on how they're getting with each other, you know, after 9-11, I mean, the Democratic Party signed on to these wars almost immediately.
The media, you know, MSNBC, leftist MSNBC was absolutely on board with the invasion of Iraq.
You saw liberal intellectuals and public figures and politicians like really going rightward.
This could overall internationally create a slow or quick movement to the right.
It's also spilling over into Lebanon as it is now with Hezbollah, which, you know, is really a worrying sign, too, because now it's a multiple front war that they have to deal with, which, you know, they're calling up a lot of reserves.
They have an army, Israel, to support that in theory.
But as we keep finding out more and more about the security apparatus that we think that is sort of in the shadows and operates in America and Israel anywhere, it is not nearly as robust as I think we are as organized as we would.
And what's weird, you know, when it comes to Lebanon, Nick, is, like, you know who's actually playing a big role there?
The UN.
That's actually the type of stuff that the UN is good for.
It's not going to pass any resolutions.
Like the Security Council won't deal with this, of course.
But like that's what they're there for is like to be able to go in.
So I feel like there could be some mitigating of the Lebanon situation.
They're trying to basically isolate this thing is what's trying to happen.
They're trying to basically sort of firewall it around.
I don't know that that's going to happen because right now the way that the world, the world's a tinderbox.
We are sitting on a really full tinderbox because all these situations are perfect for a really, really bad situation.
I'm hoping, knocking on wood, that we can avoid that.
But the elements are there.
Yeah, there's a couple more things to talk about.
I mean, there was almost no response militarily from Israel for the longest time during that Saturday attack.
So they were able to go from house to house and neighborhood and neighborhood and take hostages and kill people without any kind of response for a long time.
It's a lot like 911, where there was no response, they could not get you know, planes in the air, everything was completely haphazard.
You know, because again, If they had responded properly, then you would have been able to mitigate so many of these senseless killings that these terrorists were pulling off.
Now, the political side again comes up because you're seeing a lot of people trying to say, well, if you're if you support Ukraine, how can you possibly support Israel?
And if there isn't another more disgusting comparison, if you want to talk about the attack on Saturday versus what happened to Ukraine and with Russia, these are two things that shouldn't be compared like that.
And certainly, you know, Israel has blood on its hands.
There's no question that it's not you know, it's killed Palestinians throughout all these years.
There's just no comparison to the attack on Saturday, what they did.
And again, you have a group in Hamas that wants to drag them into this global conflict that can continue to get bigger and bigger.
They don't really care whether or not it kills a lot of their own people.
We also need to talk about the misinformation that's coming out because You know you have Elon Musk taking over Twitter and if you're trying to follow along with what's going on and there's a couple of these threads that like videos keep coming out and then they're like and they get shared millions of times and viewed millions of times it turns out it's a fucking video game.
It's not what's going on in Israel right now or Gaza.
And yet these people are doing it.
Why?
Because Musk decided to make it really easy to people to get verified and then make money.
So everyone is going to lie off their rocker because they figure they'll get impressions and clicks and views and they'll make money off of this.
Meanwhile, you know, poisoning the well of ideology, the very least across the entire world for, you know, for a dollar.
That's that that could be one of the worst things to come out of.
Well, it's certainly not.
It could be bad.
I I'm glad that you brought up Twitter and also Ukraine, because that that brings us to another point in all of this.
You know, we want to create stereotypes in our heads.
You know, there are things that are very, very large and scary and involve, you know, complex expertise in order to fully understand.
That's one of the reasons, again, why we do this show and why we go into stuff like this.
We want to make everything easier for ourselves.
You know what I mean?
Like, you're on this side, you're on that side, and this is a very complex situation.
It's a very nuanced situation, and we're not always comfortable with that.
Here is where we do need to compare and contrast what happened in Ukraine and what is happening in Israel, and that's when it comes to the social media space.
Because for those who don't remember, Ukraine, like Twitter, was absolutely taken over by misinformation.
It became a mis-info, dis-info warfare space.
And basically every single day on Twitter and on social media, it was like a teetering top, Nick, about whether or not it would fall over, would information get out, would, you know, whatever.
Ukraine is another flashpoint.
That has been effectively firewalled off.
You know what I mean?
Like at any moment, it could have spilled into Poland.
Belarus was trying to get involved.
Like, you have all these situations where, and again, I don't want to scare people.
I want to be honest about what's going on.
If you're constantly juggling balls, you stop juggling balls at some point because you can't juggle them forever.
You can't wall off every situation.
When it comes to Israel, There's already an unbelievable amount of misinfo and disinfo out there.
Already.
If this is going to turn into a brutal and bloody war of attrition with also, like, terrorism, one of the main things that it does is it attempts to infiltrate the space and the imagination and the narrative of things.
This is why you have, you know, shock videos and things that nobody should have to watch in the first place.
Twitter being under the control of someone like Elon Musk makes it so much worse.
It makes the problem so much worse.
And the fact that these social media sites and their algorithms are driven by controversial, upsetting, disturbing things, that makes the situation worse.
So it's bad.
It's really, really bad.
And it's something that over the next, like, I don't know, days, weeks, months, whatever this is, Like, we are so much more in danger because these things are set up and because they work the way that they do.
Yeah, and by the way, the Palestinians don't even get that much respect or support from other Arab nations in the area either.
They don't necessarily want to be part of this.
You know, Jordan and Israel are trying to get closer together in relations, and Egypt is already on normal relations, so it's like Hamas has sort of a fear of more of these countries finally figuring some things out and getting more normal on their relations and stuff, so that is a serious problem there.
There's something else I was going to say, but Oh, you know, and then Musk is out there, you know, recommending, you know, citizen journalism, and on the ground, that's what you have to trust, as we know, and he won't even say the true posters, like, just try and be as truthful as you can, you know, and so people can respect that and whatever, but, like, he recommended two accounts, one of which, to follow for all this, one of which is brilliantly anti-Semitic, like, it took no time to go through that timeline to find horrible shit about Jews,
So, you know, in the best case scenario is he didn't vet it, he didn't look through it, whatever he just saw, he's impetuous or impulsive and he just does stuff.
But maybe not, you know.
Is this whole attack on the ADL from a few weeks ago part of all of this?
You know, is this part of like some interesting plan?
Like if you want to be a conspiracy theorist, then you would say for sure Trump's thing with the Russian ambassador was ADL attacks, all these things to kind of prime the pump for For what this attack was going to be.
It's all, it's just terrible.
And there's the fact that there isn't any kind of oversight at Twitter now.
It just continues to probably ultimately will doom the site itself.
So I suspect that maybe that's going to, you know, force more and more people off of it.
Just to be very clear, the anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews absolutely coincide with the rise of fascism and authoritarianism.
All of this stuff.
I mean, it's not an accident.
You know, whether it's planned or it runs parallel or it's just interconnected, like those things all work.
Do not forget, again, that there is an international authoritarian movement that shares plans, supports one another, works together, coincides with each other.
It's...
It's a lot.
So we're going to... The last thing I'll say about this is that, you know, for an organization like Hamas, if you're looking at some of the issues they have in Gaza, there's not enough food, there's not enough water, they can't support their people.
It's like, all right, fine, then hijack food trucks, hijack water, you know, and like steal that stuff to bring into Gaza or whatever.
Like that would, in my mind, would end up being the justification for a lot of that stuff.
Not just going to murder, you know, innocent people who are not, you know, or just at a festival or in their house.
Like, that's the problem here.
I mean, you could even argue, fine, you're supposed to attack like military installations, right?
That's the that's the rules they won't play by.
And that too, but like, it's that that seems to resonate, like, fine, like, that would be the solution if you really were sincere about wanting to help the people in Gaza.
Yeah, it comes down to power.
So we're going to keep covering this.
I guarantee this isn't the last time we talk about this situation, because there is so much to this and so much to watch and keep an eye on.
And I just hope again that we can mitigate as much tragedy as possible.
It's terrible.
Speaking of terrible, Nick, we gotta get to another story, which is it looks like the Republican Party in the House Freedom Caucus has figured out who they want as their new Speaker of the House.
Everything right now is pointing towards Ohio Representative Jim Jordan.
You know, let's just look at some of his stats and things he has to call his own, which is that he was a January 6th attempted The Coup collaborator, when he was an Ohio State wrestling coach, he covered up sexual abuse, which is just awful.
And it looks like Donald Trump has endorsed him.
It looks like the path is laid out for him.
Jim Jordan, probably the next Speaker of the House, Mick.
So you feel strongly about that?
Because I keep seeing things going back and forth about whether he could possibly get the votes.
But you feel like that's what it looks like?
I feel, you know, Steve Scalise, I think, has an outsider's shot at possibly getting it.
But, I mean, the House Freedom Caucus, they're in with Jordan.
And if he wants it, if he's interested in it, it feels like it's his position to lose.
Fair enough.
I mean, McCarthy today wouldn't even rule out if they wanted to nominate him again.
And he was right.
It's not worth it.
Right.
I'm just saying.
I mean, he's got the support of 96 percent of the Republican Party.
Right.
But that's probably the math.
I don't think anybody else does.
That's how ridiculous this is with, you know, five people can make this decision and we need to make a thing.
You know, we didn't even get into the fact that there aren't, we don't have ambassadors in Israel or anywhere in that region because Rand Paul has been holding this up, amongst others, because he wants somehow for the State Department to release COVID, you know, information, how it was really weaponized from China, of which State Department doesn't really even have this information for him.
By the way, I'm so glad that the construction of the Senate as a minoritarian institution that was going to keep control of things on behalf of the rich and the powerful in order to, like, do things like this.
Great work, Framers.
Great, great constitutional design you've got there.
Right.
Oh, and by the way, you mentioned that it was a total failure of intelligence.
And remember, you asked me like what I would do if I had my choice in the government.
I said ambassador.
And then we touched upon this briefly in the notion of it's kind of there's a spy aspect to that, right?
There's intelligence gathering.
So here are the countries that we don't have ambassadors in right now.
Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Oman and Kuwait.
Wait, are those important?
Is there anything going on in that region?
No, those are those posts that you hear stuff about that and you'd be aware they're training.
And again, this is all because of some political thing that doesn't even, they're making up as outrage and it goes back to Jim Jordan because that's how he governs, or doesn't govern, I don't know.
That's what the party is!
The word governed is really upset with me for using that term, but he's an outrage machine.
That's all he does.
He doesn't do anything but kind of scream and yell and not wear ties.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
The Republican Party is not a serious party.
They are a tool of their wealthy donors in order to push their agenda.
And politically, all they do is exploit outrage and anger from the white population of the United States of America.
That's it.
And really, you know, you look at someone like Jim Jordan, and what you just brought up is exactly right.
The Republican Party has made America less safe and has consistently.
Jim Jordan actually is the perfect candidate for Speaker of the House from the Republican Party.
Again, this is a person who attempted to overthrow the government.
This is a person who actually engaged in like a cover-up of abuse of young people.
Uh, like, you know, as they sit there and say that they're all for protecting people from, you know, pedophiles and all of this.
Like, this is who they are.
It's a party of hypocrites and people who shouldn't be allowed in government.
Nick, I sent you this.
We're going to listen to it in just a second.
This is testimony against Jim Jordan.
This is the captain of the wrestling team at Ohio State.
For those who don't know this story, maybe they've only heard about in social media.
When Jim Jordan was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, there was a culture of systemic sexual abuse.
This is the captain of that team testifying that Jim Jordan begged him to cover up that abuse.
This is disgusting.
You people have the power to do something.
Ohio State is too arrogant.
They think it's going to go away.
Jim Jordan called me crying.
Crying.
Groveling.
On 4th of July.
Begging me to go against my brother.
Begging me.
Crying for a half hour.
That's the kind of cover-ups that's going on there.
Now, you guys can sit and act like it's not going on, but I got a lot of other stuff here.
Emails that were taken out of my mailbox.
That's a crime.
Your next Speaker of the House, possibly, ladies and gentlemen.
Just absolutely wretched stuff.
Again, this is a party without any moral or ethical center, without any principles whatsoever.
It's a party that deserves to go away.
Yeah.
And then, you know, we can just talk about Ohio State somehow.
You know, there was another with the gymnasts issue as well with sexual assault.
And then, you know, they had the Penn State issue.
These things just get... Michigan State.
It's all over the place.
Yes.
Yeah.
Michigan State.
Yeah.
And it's like, you get these people in power, like the coaches who've been there for a long time and have, you know, wield tremendous power and are unaccountable, tend to, they get away with this stuff.
It's, it's, uh, You know, again, the hits keep coming, Jared.
They keep coming.
Real fast, we got to cover this before we get out of here, Nick.
Robert Kennedy Jr.
has announced that he is going to drop out of the Democratic primary.
He is going to run as an independent.
He announces this as he also announces he's going to go to the border.
First of all, good riddance, asshole.
Second of all, we need to talk about what effect this will have on the presidential race, but also There's a lot to think about here.
The media was publishing one article after another and one segment after another saying that he stood a real chance of beating Joe Biden.
He's not even going to make it to the first contest.
What a dumb horse race thing.
The right has infiltrated now, like the Democratic primary has tried to influence Democratic voters.
It really is on the move, and it's not surprising, but it doesn't make it any less disgusting.
Right.
Well, it's interesting because the right is now getting upset because there's a perception that RFK Jr.
is going to affect Trump's numbers in the election.
Which is interesting considering that he was in the Democratic primary, I suppose, on that side.
Although, no one ever really believes that.
What do you think?
Is this one of those Ross Perot kind of situations?
Although, again, let's make it clear.
I've seen pretty compelling evidence that Ross Perot didn't necessarily win the election for Clinton.
It seemed like he was going to win anyway.
Do you feel like Kennedy is going to take votes from Trump or from Biden?
I think, and I'm glad you brought up the election with Clinton and Bush and Perot.
What did Bush in there was probably that the first Iraq war happened too early and the economic downturn happened too late.
That's probably what happened.
Well, wait, wait, you're saying it happened as if, oops, we got into the war.
No, no, no, it's not.
It's not like it just spontaneously occurred.
He scheduled it and he scheduled it too early.
Like, yes, you were right.
Exactly.
And, you know, I don't think Robert Kennedy Jr.
is going to cost Joe Biden the election.
It doesn't feel good.
Uh, I think, um, from an analyst standpoint, I will be interested to see what his final vote total is.
I think you'll be able to put a number finally on like the anti-vax movement.
That's the entirety of what it is.
And also the liberal to a liberal pipeline that is available.
It'll be very fascinating numbers wise.
I don't think he's going to cost the election for Joe Biden, but I think it is of note that He's been an op the entire time.
This was a strategy to try and hurt Joe Biden from the very beginning to peel off Democratic voters, bring them into the Republican right wing fold.
And I mean, that's what he's done from the very beginning.
That was the entire point.
And the fact that our media missed that and continually trumpeted him up for horse race purposes, I think is really problematic.
Yeah, and I think you're right.
We're going to finally get that number of anti-vaxxers in the country.
And by the way, with Trump, we should get the hard number for how many MAGA people there are.
The problem is you have way too many of these middle-of-the-road Republicans who will just vote for Trump anyway and mess all those numbers up, right?
That's what's really frustrating about this whole situation we're in politically, is that too many of these people on that side, especially people who have already lived through Nixon, have no problem just voting for Trump again, despite That they should know a lot better.
Absolutely.
All right, everybody.
That's going to bring this melancholy episode of the Monkrague Podcast to an end.
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If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
