Representative Thomas Massie critiques government surveillance expansion, opposing FISA bills and arguing against equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism despite AIPAC's $90,000 ad campaign. He questions U.S. aid to Israel and Ukraine, citing the military-industrial complex's need for conflict, while admitting ignorance regarding Netanyahu's historical funding of Hamas until confronted by host Dave Smith. The episode concludes by analyzing Gaza's humanitarian crisis through New York Times op-eds and a Darrell Cooper analogy on indefinite occupation, highlighting the paradox where U.S. support hinders the promotion of freedom globally. [Automatically generated summary]
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Unprecedented Government Overreach00:09:57
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Thrilled to have returning to the show the best congressman in the country, Representative Thomas Massey.
How are you, sir?
Thanks for coming back on.
Oh, I'm doing well.
Lots going on this week right before Christmas.
Yes.
Well, going into Christmas, it must be tough for you because you are a congressman, but you're also a human person.
And it's tough to be both.
It's got to be tough.
It's a job made for lizard people, sir, but somehow you pull it off.
Well, listen, this is the week where they hang things over your head and say that if you don't pass this, for instance, an extension of FISA, then you will be here over Christmas and you won't be at home with your kids and grandkids.
And so they do use that.
If there's any bit of human DNA in you, any little bit of human decency and a desire to be with your family, they will use it against you to get a bill passed in this week.
So what exactly is going on with this spying thing?
From what I've understood, there's two proposals right now.
And you know a lot more about this than I do.
But from what I've been reading, this is like a pretty drastic expansion of the interpretation of spying powers by the feds.
Yeah, so there are actually two bills.
There's the Jim Jordan Judiciary Bill, which I'm a part of.
I'm on the Judiciary Committee.
That's got reforms.
The main thing that it has is a warrant requirement if you want to spy on Americans.
Now, that should be redundant with our Fourth Amendment, which requires that and probable cause.
But we've got to tell the FBI, you got to get a warrant.
Anyway, that's in the Judiciary Bill.
Then there's the Mike Turner Intel Committee bill, which basically says it's got a veneer of reform, but it's in some ways expanding the program to like just Wi-Fi at McDonald's.
So they're going from just Google and the telecoms to Wi-Fi providers to try and spy on Americans.
So not good.
And so this week they were trying to set up a beauty pageant.
They were going to have a vote on both bills on the floor of the House.
This is kind of unprecedented.
And whichever one got the most votes, they were going to send to the Senate.
That's a bad reason for a lot of ideas.
So we shot that down, thankfully.
The only bill that should come to the floor is the Jim Jordan bill.
But what they're doing instead, and what they were going to do anyway, is they're attaching the FISA surveillance warrantless surveillance program to the National Defense Authorization Act.
And they're trying to pass that.
They're trying to suspend the rules.
Our House rules don't permit you to actually do that.
So they would have to go through the Rules Committee, which I also serve on.
I'm on Judiciary and I'm on the Rules Committee.
Every time they try to do this stuff, I pop up.
They're like, wait, you're on that committee too.
So we stopped the beauty pageant for the two FISA bills.
And we would stop in the Rules Committee this attaching FISA to the National Defense Authorization Bill, except they're going to bypass the Rules Committee, bring it to the floor of the House, suspend all the rules.
And they have the right to do that under our House of Representatives if they can get a two-thirds vote.
And that's what they're trying for right now.
They're whipping the votes as we speak.
Is the opposition to this, is it more Democrat or Republican?
I mean, I know you're often kind of the lone Republican voice against some of this stuff.
It's a very fascinating breakdown.
If you look at the Jim Jordan bill, the judiciary bill, it's got the most conservative members of the House and the most liberal members of the House, like Zoe Lofgren and Jaya Paul.
Right.
And even Gerald Nadler is for the judiciary version.
Now, all three of those Democrats are on the judiciary committee.
And so we've got the sides of the conference covered, but the middle of the Congress, which would be moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats, are kind of more in favor of supporting the establishment spy operations.
And so it doesn't cleave left and right.
It cleaves center versus outside of the center.
So it's very interesting.
So both bills are bipartisan, both proposals.
Right.
It is interesting because there's somehow in the United States of America today, the people who want to turn us into the Soviet Union are considered moderates, which is just kind of a strange dynamic.
All right.
So I want to ask you, you took a lot of heat over the last couple of weeks for your positions on a couple of bills regarding Israel and the current war going on there.
You said you voted against, I think you were, I believe you were the lone Republican to vote against that ridiculous thing equating anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism, which was clearly kind of laid out like, hey, we're about to vote on this big funding package.
So real quick, we want to get on the record that you're a racist if you don't think we should be giving away money when we're $30 plus trillion dollars in debt.
And then there was the vote for the funding package, which you voted against.
And yeah, and you also had the nerve to tweet a Drake meme, which I have been told was a literal holocaust that you did that.
So that was very wrong of you, sir.
Anyway, so why did you take those votes that you did?
So there have been 18 votes that I've counted in the last six weeks in support of Israel.
Or, you know, that's the title.
By the way, I support Israel.
Okay.
I just haven't voted for these virtue signals that actually go the wrong way if you read into them.
If I were just voting on the title of these bills, I probably would have voted for most of them, except for the one that sends $14 billion to Israel.
I'm not voting for that to any country.
I'm not singling out Israel or for any war for that matter.
So I have taken some heat.
AIPAC has run $90,000 of ads against me in my congressional district, trying to bring some heat on me, which is fine, you know, whatever.
It hasn't changed my votes.
We've taken a lot of votes since then.
I'm still voting the same way.
I'm worried about free speech.
And, you know, these are virtue signals.
They're to build support for the money that they're trying to send to Israel.
But there's something else involved.
I think they're trying to make it hard for anybody to criticize the war that is going on between Gaza or Hamas and Israel.
They don't want you to be able to criticize Israel.
So they're having all these resolutions that say anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and other various forms of that on the floor.
And so it's sort of like the iron dome of the First Amendment.
First Amendment is there's a force field around Israel now, and you can't criticize that or else they'll strike it down with a congressional resolution.
Yeah, and it does.
It's just it's so reminiscent of kind of the George W. Bush Republican strategy of like, if you criticize the war, then you hate America and you love terrorists or something like that.
And it's just, it's all so incredibly stupid.
But anyway, you'd love Putin if you don't send another $60 billion to Ukraine.
Now, that's a good transition now.
So what's going on with the funding to Ukraine?
Because it seems like that's actually coming to an end and not going to pass before Christmas.
If it does pass, I think there's a general feeling here that may be the last tranche of money.
Because support is the question is, is there enough support to get this passed or not?
If there is, there's barely support and it's withering.
The statements coming even from Zelensky are they're just trying to hold ground.
They don't talk about retaking ground.
And he really, and we need to help him, needs to start discussing some kind of diplomatic end to this conflict.
And, you know, we've got to be realists on both sides of this.
It's almost impossible to find out how many casualties have happened on both sides of this.
Now, there are people in the media will be happy to tell you there've been 300,000 Russian casualties.
And then you ask them how many Ukrainian casualties.
And well, there were 100 or something.
Like, it's just ridiculous.
We need to end this war.
Zelensky's over here.
He's gone to the Senate, where I think they're more supportive in the Senate than they are in the House.
So he went there because he might get booed in the House.
And then he met with all the military industrial complex yesterday as well, had his picture with them.
So he's here doing the rounds.
You know, since the war in Afghanistan has ended, there's about a $50 billion hole in revenues per year for these companies.
And so they have to generate it there at Ukraine.
And now with that sort of phasing out, they want to send $14 billion to Israel.
There's probably some physical equation you could write, continuity of the military industrial complex.
The Military Industrial Complex00:09:56
All of the foreign wars we're funding sums up to about $50 billion every year, regardless of where we are.
Man, can we just start like a program of bombing oceans or something like that?
Like if they're just going to get their money one way or the other, could we not drop them on people?
And like they could still get their money?
Anyway, that's probably not going to work.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Let me ask you this because I was somewhat surprised and not like crazy surprised, but I was a little bit surprised when you endorsed DeSantis for president earlier, I think, this summer.
Since then, you know, he was always, let's say he, he wasn't very clear about what his position on Ukraine was, but he's very clear what his position on Israel is.
Does that change things at all for you?
Or the fact that this guy would basically be running on we are supporting another foreign war while we're 30 plus trillion dollars in debt.
I mean, you and him certainly would not vote the same way on this aid package to Israel, right?
Well, Ron DeSantis is not Ron Paul.
Okay.
I'll be the first to admit that.
One of the reasons I endorse Ron DeSantis is I know him.
He's a real human.
I served with him for six years in the House of Representatives and we talked through these issues.
Like we went out to dinner and we talked about the, you know, the gun control and the foreign aid and all of these issues.
I know his wife.
And I'm not saying that, you know, my wife knows his wife.
Like they would hang out together.
They're real people.
He's an honest person.
And you really, I don't have that much insight into these other candidates.
Definitely he and I voted differently on these issues in the House of Representatives.
But if you look at the times we voted differently, it was 430 to three and he wasn't one of the three.
It's not like he's outside of the mainstream, you know, Republican narrative.
But I wouldn't call him a neocon, for instance.
I think he's a realist.
He's somewhere between my position.
He's definitely no Nikki Haley who wants to bomb Iran.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
I forgot about that old John McCain.
Jeez, God, there.
Okay.
All right.
Fair enough.
And do you think, what do you think about the presidential race?
Do you have like a feeling about how this is all going and whether you think, I mean, Donald Trump's got a huge lead in the polls, but he's also got all of these court cases.
Joe Biden looks like a light breeze could kill him at any moment.
I don't know.
Who do you think ends up being our next president?
I think it'll be fairly well decided after Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina.
You know, I'm still holding out hope for my guy.
I'll support the Republican nominee.
Does this look like a hostage video now?
Are my eyes reading the Chiron above me?
But with different levels of enthusiasm, shall we say.
And I certainly hope that Joe Biden loses.
You just can't have four more years of him.
Well, I certainly agree with you on not wanting four more years of Biden.
And I do think just for the audience or for if this gets clipped and gets in front of other audiences there, it should be pointed out that, you know, as around the last time I had you on the show in 2020, you were like the lone voice who stood up against those insane spending packages that were so largely responsible for the price inflation that followed.
And Donald Trump was, let's say, very unfair to you at the time when he was president and really sent his people to like harass you and stuff for having the nerve to say like, we should have a vote before we pass the largest spending package in human history.
So you have a right to be.
I didn't say anything bad about Donald Trump at that time during the CARES Act, but he said just for merely asking for a recorded vote, he called me a third rate grandstander and said that I should be kicked out of the GOP.
Now, we have since buried the hatchet.
Okay.
He was against me in that primary.
Then he was for me in my last primary.
And he called me a first-rate defender of the Constitution in my last primary.
So we'll see where he ends up at this primary.
But the thing about it is, Dave, I don't care what people say.
I'm just like, I'm 10 years into this congressional experiment for myself running for office and just trying to vote my conscience for the whole 10 years.
And it's worked out for me so far.
I've had people against me who are no longer here in Congress.
Liz Cheney and Adam Kinziger Max donated to my primary opponent.
And guess what?
I'm here and they're not.
So I just don't worry about this stuff too much.
Yeah, I think you're kind of the last Ron Paulian in Congress in that sense, that it does seem like you're just like, I'm going to vote my conscience, my conscience, the chips will fall where they may.
And that's that.
So I really do.
We love that about you.
Quickly, before you go here, I just, there's a couple other things that I wanted to address with you, a couple other, these topics that you've been bringing up.
So what was this?
You had proposed an amendment to not enforce car companies for the cars.
What's the term I'm looking for here?
A kill switch for cars.
Explain this to me in my audience because I do not understand this at all, but it scares me.
Yeah, very quickly in 2021, as part of that big infrastructure package, the Democrats got inserted into a bill that, frankly, most of them probably didn't read because they were disputing me in the debate on the floor of the House that this provision was even in law and I had to read the law to them.
They got a provision inserted that says by 2026, every auto manufacturer has to have an automated kill switch in the car that basically monitors your driving and determines if you're impaired, not drunk, not under the influence, but impaired.
And if you're impaired, it will automatically disable your car.
And so I, in the funding process, when we were still trying to do the 12 bills, by the way, we'd given up on the 12 bills.
But when we were still doing the 12 bills, I was able to offer an amendment to defund this kill switch provision.
And I thought it would sail through.
I actually thought they would let it go on a voice vote.
I was having to debate with my staff.
Should I ask for a recorded vote if they let this pass on a voice vote?
And I get there.
Not only did they not let it pass and they asked for a recorded vote, there were over a dozen Republicans who voted against this amendment.
They voted to keep like the nanny state in place to expand the nanny state, over a dozen Republicans.
They actually had two Democrats vote with me.
And okay, I hope you're, yeah, it looks like you're sitting down.
So I will tell you who one of these two Democrats was.
It was AOC voted to defund the Kill Switch amendment.
And what's funny is I went, she asked me about it and she was concerned about civil liberties.
And I said, I have exactly the same concerns.
And I told her, here's who will attack you.
Mother's against drunk driving.
So I want you to go into this knowing what you're getting into.
And I said, oh, by the way, they're APAC's running $90,000 of ads in my district saying that I always vote with you.
It's about time you vote with me once on a provision.
So she actually voted to defund the kill switch.
I thought that was great.
Well, good for her.
She should, we, we make fun of her when she's wrong about stuff, but she should get credit for the things she's good on.
And I will also give her credit for, you know, they've, they've, you know, the squad touch might go say some things that me or you wouldn't agree with about the Israel war.
But man, there is some courage it takes right now to kind of stand up against when the war drums start beating, it's, it gets a lot of people to just kind of go along with it because, oh, you don't want to be called all the names that you're going to get called if you oppose it.
So I credit everybody up there who is at least trying to be somewhat sane during all of this.
Somewhat consistent.
Yeah, I did.
You know, they voted twice to censure Rashida Tlaib for things that she said, not for things that she did, but for things that she said.
And I voted against both of those resolutions to censure her because look, Dave, that could be me.
Courage to Stand Against War00:02:53
Like when I went against the CARES Act, I was the only one who would stand up and say this is going to cause inflation and shortages, shutting down our government.
It's going to cause our country is going to cause more harm than good.
And I'll tell you what, if they could have censured me, if they had had time to do it that day, they would have got probably nearly unanimous vote on that.
Yeah.
No, it's something that is definitely something to always keep in mind.
All right.
Well, Congressman, thank you so much for taking the time.
I hope you come back and visit us again real soon.
Keep fighting the good fight.
And I hope you do get home to your family for Christmas this year.
I'm sure you will.
When it comes down to it, the rest of those guys up there all want to get home too.
So they'll vote, you know, and you'll get your loan vote against it and then go home.
By the way, I just realized the show is called Part of the Problem.
I've been here over 10 years now.
I guess I'm part of the problem in Congress.
So thanks for having me on your appropriately named show for me.
Absolutely, Congressman.
Take care.
Thanks.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, Robert the Fire Bernstein.
How are you, sir?
Dude, that was awesome.
Thomas Massey on the show.
Very cool to have Thomas Massey join us.
Hopefully, we'll make that a regular thing with him coming on, doing some short segments.
Earning Yield on Gold00:16:15
It's a little different for us.
Usually we do a full show with somebody, but that was cool.
That was cool of him to come join in.
Oh, I should mention, by the way, because I didn't plug it up top, me and you, we're celebrating New Year's together right here in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Live stand-up comedy show with both of us and Chris Vega is going to be on it as well.
And then a live part of the problem and then like a meet and greet hangout afterward.
You can watch me and Rob make out at midnight as we bring in the new year.
So come on out to that.
Anything else you want to promote?
End of year thing will hopefully be out Friday, Saturday.
So, you know, if you haven't checked out my YouTube channel yet, Robbie the Fire, I put out Run Your Mouth a couple days a week and you can check out the fourth annual end of your recap.
Oh, yeah.
Hell yeah.
Those things are always great.
I'm looking forward to seeing it.
Okay, so we were just talking to Congressman Massey about some of his votes on the war in Israel or in Gaza, to be more specific.
There's not that much war going on in Israel.
But so anyway, he voted against the funding package there.
There were two articles over the last couple days in the New York Times that were quite devastating for the Israeli side of this.
And it's interesting because we kind of discussed a couple episodes ago how Israel is really losing the internet, you know, PR war.
But they still were doing okay in the corporate media realm.
This is very devastating for Israel, that there were these two big pieces in the New York Times, you know, the paper of record, really, really making them look bad.
The first piece that ran on Sunday, it was almost, it was almost an only slightly watered down version of something that you would see on anti-war.com.
I mean, like it really reminded me actually quite a bit of the piece that Scott Horton and Connor Friedman put out a month earlier.
It wasn't quite, you know, they held back a little bit more than that, but the article was titled Buying Quiet Inside the Israeli Plan that Propped Up Hamas.
And the subtitle is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled that a strong Hamas, but not too strong, would keep the peace and reduce pressure for a Palestinian state.
And if you go through the article, and I highly suggest everybody read it, it really lays out a devastating case, a really very devastating case that this was just, this was the plan to support Hamas so that, so that these people, and think about this, because obviously I've been hitting this point for, you know, for quite a while now, but I want people to really think about and understand what this means.
Because the surface level explanation that the Israelis or the Biden administration or anyone like that will give is that Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th.
Gaza voted for them into a plurality in 2005.
So this represents them because remember, you had an election once, you know, where at a time when half the population there was five.
But you had that election there once.
And so now we're justified in, yeah, some innocent Palestinians are going to die, but we have to kill this Hamas group that's so terrible that you guys voted for.
But the actual story here is that Netanyahu was intentionally supporting this group.
And why?
Because then the people of Palestine would never get their freedom.
So he was supporting them so that they can never have their own independence.
Then this group that he was supporting ends up, he doesn't protect his own people from them and then uses them as an excuse to now be allowed to kill the innocent people who he was supporting this group to make sure never got their freedom.
And think about how like second fucked up that is.
But anyway, it's right there in the New York Times now.
So it is, there is something nice about that because it's not for whatever reason, you know, as much as they all should be discredited for an average person.
It's just a little bit different to say, hey, go read this at antiwar.com versus, hey, go read this in the New York Times right there.
read it and weep.
Anyway, go ahead, Rob.
I also thought to me the most scathing part of that, because they were a little bit wishy-washy on the whether or not Netanyahu has had a direct policy of empowering Hamas.
Like they had quotes of people saying it, but they were saying, you know, that's not an absolute.
But what they were saying was an absolute, which is also inherently self-contradictory, was that they were sending payments to Hamas.
And I guess the theory on making payments to Hamas the way I understood it was that they were bribing the Hamas elites with here's enough money to run your government in exchange for basically don't come murder us.
And that worked well for Netanyahu because that also meant that he wouldn't have to actually do a two-state solution with who he calls a terrorist government.
Here's the most scathing piece about that to me.
I thought the storyline from Israel was they almost viewed like Hamas like how you can't handle hand any item to a baby because a baby might kill himself with it.
You got to be careful with the electrical outlet, like everything around a baby, they could loony tunes into an art, an object for killing themselves and you got to watch them.
And so the storyline with Hamas was, look, we even, they even had water pipes and they converted that into rockets.
And so there is literally nothing that we can provide them with.
If we provide them with food and water, that might just, or we give them fuel.
It's just going to the terrorists.
That's a really insane thing to claim when you're sending them money.
When you're sending them the one thing that could get them access to anything, and you're even doing it while this is apparently, I mean, according to the article, maybe I read it wrong, but Kater Cotter, however that's pronounced, said, hey, do you want us to stop these payments?
And they said no.
So while they're declining general resources that could actually help the civilians there under the basis that any resources that are given will only go to Hamas, they're literally handing them cash.
Dude, they set a limit on how far out their fishermen can go to fish before Israeli soldiers will force them to turn back around.
They have open, they have, they have machine gun robots that will mow you down if you get too close to their fence.
They won't allow like international humanitarian organizations to ship in humanitarian supplies because they say it has to all be inspected by them or whatever.
And yet at the same time, they're funding or, you know, people will, I don't know, like parse your words here, but they're allowing funding to come into the worst group within this region.
Like, I'm sorry.
Yes, that is, that is damning.
That's just none of this adds up.
None of this makes sense.
So Liam Costgrove, who is, he, he works over at Zero Hedge, and he also works for the Gray Zone.
He was the guy who set up the debate between me and Laura Loomer.
And he sent me this.
He did a piece, like a little video piece where he's confronting some of these congressmen.
And he had like some clips of me and Scott Horton and stuff in it too.
Here, let's just play a little bit of this because I thought this was really interesting, very revealing.
And it's kind of on the same topic as this New York Times piece.
So let's play a little bit of this video.
So are you aware that Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government were funding and propping up Hamas?
Say that again.
No, I didn't lose track.
I'm not sure what the funding apparatus means or is.
Shouldn't you look into this before we'd send billions of dollars over to Israel?
It was Benjamin Netanyahu's strategy for years to prop up Hamas.
A short history of Hamas is that the Mossad deliberately helped to facilitate their rise and even directly finance their rise in order to create a right-wing religious alternative to the PLO.
specifically because then there would be no negotiating a state for the Palestinians because no one in the international community is going to look at Hamas, this terrorist organization, and say, yeah, we recognize them.
So the plan was to undermine the more secular Palestinian authority types so that they wouldn't be in control.
Hamas would be in control and then no one would ever negotiate their state.
We have breaking news out of Israel this morning where Hamas has launched a surprise attack within Israel's borders overnight.
The day after on October 8th, there was a big piece in the Times of Israel about this.
There was a front page of Herets.
These are big newspapers in Israel.
It's mind-boggling to me that this element gets left out of the conversation in America.
It's not left out of the conversation in Israel.
Like their newspapers are all talking about this.
The United States stands united in the face of the horrific, barbaric attacks on our greatest ally in the Middle East, Israel.
The brutality is unlike anything we've seen in modern times.
With misinformation and the horrible pro-Hamas demonstrations across the world, the U.S. Congress must reaffirm our unwavering support for Israel.
We stand with Israel.
We stand with Israel today and forever.
Quick question on Israel.
Are you aware of the reports that prior to October 7th and over the years, Benjamin Netanyahu was actively funding and propping up Hamas?
I've not seen that report.
You've not seen that report.
This is in Heretz, Times of Israel, very pro-Israel alex.
I criticize them for this policy.
I haven't seen a credible report on that.
You have not.
And by the way, I mean, you can find direct quotes from Benjamin Netanyahu saying this in his own words, saying that you must support Hamas.
We must continue funding and supporting Hamas.
I want to read something to you.
This quote, anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support the bolstering of Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.
This is part of our strategy to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.
That was Prime Minister Netanyahu in 2019, supporting Hamas because he knows that as long as Hamas remains there, he can always argue that there is no partner for peace.
You have women who are just living their lives in Israel.
They were raped repeatedly.
Children taken out of their womb.
So now to argue for ceasefires or now to argue for the plight of the Palestinian people when the political group that they elected and keep in power fomented and executed a heinous terrorist attack?
No, that's ridiculous.
Are you familiar with the reports that Benjamin Netanyahu over the years has been actively funding Hamas?
No, I'm not aware of the report.
I do want to read this.
This is in Heretz.
This is in Times of Israel over there.
It is for pro-Israel papers.
I don't do hot takes.
I want to read everything before I make a comment because something like that is a very key thing.
I'm not sure what the funding apparatus means or is.
Is it aid into Gaza?
Is it direct aid as Hamas?
I don't know.
He's directly quoted saying, he just support Hamas to undermine Palestinians.
This is in Forex.
But let me, the thing is, I got to read it.
Richard Sale in the UPI.
Okay, let's pause it here.
If you guys want to watch the full video, it's about 11 minutes long.
And if you follow me on Twitter at Comic Dave Smith, I tweeted it so you can go find it there.
This is what was so great about the video, what I thought was really interesting that it kind of illuminates.
And this is something that is, I think it's kind of tough for people to understand this, but, or maybe not.
Maybe it's getting easier to understand it.
But there is kind of this thing that's always existed, which I will say is a somewhat fair question, where people will say that, Well, look, maybe there's intelligence that these guys are seeing that we're not seeing, you know?
Maybe that's why that when they get in there, they get shown this intelligence and they're like, oh my God, this situation is totally different than what it seems like to you podcasters out there who don't really know what you're talking about.
You know, um, maybe that's what happens.
Maybe that's why every president ends up going to war, even when they said they wouldn't, because they get in there and they show them the real information.
Then it's like, oh, shit, we got to go to war, you know?
But I just love this video because it really just shows you right there.
It's not, it's not that these guys think there's a different explanation for why Netanyahu was saying we need to support Hamas.
It's not that they know this, but they also know they've never heard of this.
They've never heard all these guys, the guys who are actual congressmen who are voting on these funding of this war get confronted with this and they're like, what are you talking about?
I haven't seen that report.
But he's not even referring to one report.
He's referring to, he's saying, oh, there was, it was front page news in the Times of Israel and Heretz days after October 7th.
Now you could add the New York Times into there too.
But that wasn't their like, that wasn't some initial report.
That was what they already knew about the situation.
And they were just writing about it because they just had this huge terrorist attack.
The point is that these guys, actual congressmen, don't know anything.
It's not that they know some information that we don't know.
They have never heard of this because they just get there.
And it's just crazy where he goes, well, I'd like to see that report.
I'd like to take that into consideration.
I'm not going to make a statement before I read that.
I wouldn't just say something without really knowing something about it.
It's like, yeah, but you're up there in Congress rallying everybody for how we have to support these guys.
And you're unaware of anything about the history of it.
You don't know one of the most like crucial details that anybody, if anybody, and I'm not even saying like a professional historian or nothing like that.
I'm saying like me or you or anybody who's going to be like, oh, I'm going to talk about this topic because like I've read a few books about it and I think I know a little something about it would know this, would know that this is an element to this whole conflict.
And like these congressmen are just like totally like, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Don't you think that's kind of crazy?
Yeah, it's pretty damning that you can do guerrilla journalism like that, put a microphone right in front of them.
I would think that you would at least have to be aware of it and go, well, here's why that's not true.
Those are isolated statements.
That wasn't actually the policy.
Right.
You would have to actually have a different take and be able to address it.
And I mean, the statements are limited enough.
I could see how you might have other intelligence, as you said, or be able to redirect it.
But it does seem to me, as you said, if you're actually calling for, you know, total support and sending more money to the government that, you know, that this happened under their watch and that the only solution is actually punishing the civilians in Gaza and giving more bombs for them to, you know, target or not necessarily target civilians with, but are being used against civilians, you'd have to at least be aware of this.
And you wouldn't want to be caught with your pants down of not knowing this pretty important piece of information.
But that, right.
And then the thing, great, right.
So you're totally reasonable if you had some type of rebuttal to it.
Like if you were like, yeah, look, Benjamin Netanyahu said that, but he was saying that to his Likud party members, like he was saying that to other right-wingers in Israel.
And he was kind of trying to calm them down.
And he didn't really mean this.
And, you know, we don't know if the money flowing from Qatar was really related to, you know, like if there was something like that, then okay, you have a response to it.
Ending the Internment Camps00:05:42
They've just never heard of this.
And then you realize what is really what no pun intended there.
Is really the uh.
The issue with this, this conflict, is that it's like much like for most of the American people.
It's true for congressmen too.
They just don't know anything about the story.
They don't know anything about the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, like if they, if they don't know details like this and they've never even heard of it and this is stuff that again, has like been in the news.
You know what I mean.
Like that they don't even know this.
What can I really expect that they've sat down and studied the history of all of this and they really know what the beef is here.
You know, part of the reason why the people fall into kind of like the neoconservative language of, you know, they hate us for our freedom or stuff like that is because there's a very convenient element to believing it.
And the convenient element to believing they hate us for our freedom is that, oh, great.
Now I don't have to read anything, right?
I don't have to read a book about nothing because I've already figured this out.
They just hate us for our freedom.
So we got to fight a war against them and all that.
And it's just not, none of that's exactly right.
And like, anyway, it's just, you know, to view this situation between Israel and Palestine and to, you know, take out the fact, like what Israel has done to the Palestinian people to remove that entirely.
And this is, you know, I would just say one more element of what Israel's done to the Palestinian people is also like supporting, you know, because also you have to think about it.
Like there's, there's a lot of elements to this.
Like Hamas is not exactly a government, but they are whatever in Gaza.
They're more in control than any other Palestinians there are.
I mean, they're not as much in control as Israel is, but they're more in control.
You know what I mean?
I like, I think it was Fortin who said it first, but I like the toughest gang in a prison type is a good way to think of them.
And that's still like, that sucks for the rest of the people in that prison that they got to live with the toughest gang in that prison imposing on them.
So it's just like one more thing that Israel's kind of done to the Palestinians.
And if you just remove all of that, how are you ever going to get to the bottom of what this really should be?
You know, Darrell Cooper had, there was a way that he put it.
And I thought this was a really great, you know, none of these analogies are perfect, but I thought it was really like a great way to think about it is that he goes, so he was like, you know how they had Japanese internment camps in World War II?
He goes, so try to picture it like there were, so we intern these Japanese people, we seize their property, we grab them and their families, we put them in these in these, you know, whatever internment camps.
And let's imagine some of the Japanese resist and they start, you know, they go up to the fence and they start trying to like, whatever, they start throwing rocks at some of the military guys who are guarding the internment camp.
And so they send tanks in and they just fuck a bunch of people up in there, blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
And then they keep them there and they keep them there for the whole rest of the year, you know?
And throughout this year, there are waves of occasional like violent, you know, violent uprisings from these Japanese who are in this internment camp.
And then every time it's followed by a military action that comes in and just kills a bunch of people and shuts the thing down.
And now, you know, resentment starts to grow and there's anti-American feelings within these Japanese, you know, and there's, and they have these like occasional, you know, like violent outbursts.
Okay.
Then you fast forward to current day and we've never let them go.
In fact, the overwhelming majority of them have been born into this internment camp.
They've never been out.
They've never known anything else other than this.
And the whole time it's been this cycle of an uprising and then a violent military response and just over and over and over again.
And now there's tons more anti-American sentiment in there because their parents have raised their kids, telling them about how awful America's been to them for their entire lives, right?
And so now there's the situation.
And now America is going, well, we can't let them out of this internment camp because now they hate America so much.
This would be a very dangerous situation for us to just let.
And by the way, you could see where there's not nothing to that point, right?
It might be dangerous to just open the gates now, right?
But I think if you look at the example like that, you just understand that it's kind of self-evident that it's just inexcusable to keep them here anymore.
Like you just can't do this, dude.
You just can't put people in an internment camp and then just keep them there forever.
And whatever problems are going to come from ending the internment camp, you just got to deal with it, dude.
They're only going to get worse and worse and worse.
And I think that's kind of the way to think about the Israeli-Palestine situation.
Of course, it's not perfect analogy.
None of them are.
But I really liked that Darrell Cooper like thought experiment because it just, it kind of does let you know that it's like, even when you think about the very nature of this, the conversation where people will say, well, if the Palestinians do X, Y, and Z, then Israel will grant them their statehood.
Western Civilization's Failure00:14:21
Even just think about the framing of that.
What do you mean you'll grant them their statehood?
What is that?
How could anyone in the United States of America, when our founding document is the Declaration of Independence?
How could anybody ever think that way?
Grant you your statehood?
Who are you?
Who is anybody else to claim the right to decide when a group of people can have their independence?
And that's it.
That's what the whole thing comes down to.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Additionally, on the topic of what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, there was another article in the New York Times.
This one might have been more damning.
Did you get a chance to read this piece, Rob?
Yes, sir, I did.
The title is, it's an op-ed in the New York Times, and the title is, We Are No Strangers to Human Suffering.
We've seen nothing like the Siege of Gaza.
And there's basically six leaders of different aid groups who have worked in, let's say, major humanitarian crisis areas over the years.
And they say that it's nothing compared to Gaza in terms of the sheer level of suffering, destruction and death of innocent people.
So again, this gets into some of the other stuff that people who have much more knowledge of military conflicts than I think me or you do.
I mean, there's like who have talked quite a bit about this, but it's not when people just say like, oh, well, it's they started the war and war is hell.
And that's, you know, innocent people die in wars.
And that's just unfortunately the reality of the world.
It's go read this piece.
It's actually quite a bit worse than that.
And that Israel is actually fighting this war in a way that is just totally like unacceptable in the modern world.
And is not like, it's not just the same as how even the United States of America has conducted itself in a lot of these wars where a lot of innocent people have died, but that they have like total and utter disregard to measures that would limit civilian casualties at all.
Yeah, I read the piece and there were other articles today.
One of complaints that even the guidance of what homes needed to be left and what areas were going to be safe.
So for all the talk of leaflets, apparently it's not that clear.
There's also an article in the Wall Street Journal that when they're clearing out territories, I guess they're rounding up men that could be in Hamas, which essentially, I guess, means like 18 to 25 year olds.
And a lot of times they're being undressed and then, I guess, questioned and then released once they're found not to be in Hamas, which I don't think is a typical protocol for warfare of assumed guilty until not guilty with an addition of undressing people.
But like you said, as it filters into the mainstream media with the coverage, and I mean, it's a little odd to read the Times and trust the Times with the, like, with everything I saw from them from COVID and on most other topics.
Or like you read the op-eds of the way they cover economics and, you know, we'd rip right through that.
But as it does seem like Israel is not handling this in a way that seems to be skirting the issue of not, you know, bringing pain to civilians, seeing mainstream coverage with titles like that and with clear evidence of hardship on the civilians on the area does seem quite damning.
Yeah.
And it's crazy.
It's crazy to me that none of them, it's crazy that they don't realize the fundamental insight that you had at the very beginning of all of this, which is like kind of like, hey, you're not going to be able to sell this.
You're going to lose this PR.
It's just, it's, it's really wild that in a time when the world's eyes are on Israel in a way that I've never seen them before, you know, like everybody is paying attention to this thing, or at least a lot more so than ever have, that they're being this reckless and this like callous.
And I don't know, you have some feeling of like, but don't you just to save your own ass, don't like, let's just take it as a given that Palestinian life means nothing.
It's worthless.
Okay, fine.
Just assume that.
But just for your own like, you know, self-interest, like, don't you think that like you notice that like a lot of other people in the world don't agree with you that Palestinian life is worthless.
And they're getting pretty offended by the way you're conducting this war.
And I think this is what Blinkett was saying when he told Netanyahu that he has weeks, not months.
You know, it was like he was saying like, it wasn't like some like, oh, we have this moral problem with what you're doing.
He was just saying like, you're not going to be able to get away with this because like everyone's watching and they see what you're doing now.
And yeah, I saw, I haven't dug deep enough into it, but I did see that Max Blumenthal had reported that basically, yeah, those pictures of where they had all these guys stripped down.
And they filmed a thing where one of them was giving over a gun or something like that.
And he was basically like, yo, this was totally fabricated.
And they told the Israeli public that, look, we got this big division of Hamas and this is there for, yeah, what a big victory for us, you know?
And you can imagine the people of Israel are like, you know, they're still, you know, just experienced October 7th.
So they're sitting there and feeling kind of like, all right, we got something there, you know?
And then it turns out like, these were all just like fucking random people.
They were just people that happened to be like around military age men.
And so they put them down there.
But it's, oh, no, it turns out this guy was a baker and this guy was something else.
And like these guys were not Hamas militants.
I don't know exactly if that's true.
I will say that if you know anything about Hamas, the idea that a whole group of them like that surrendered seems very unlikely.
That's not how those guys go out.
You know, like they're more like jihadist suicide bomber types.
Those guys are, they're, they're willing to die.
However you feel about their, you know, however you feel about how evil they are, like these aren't the type of people who like put their hands up and say, don't shoot.
These are the type of people who go out for seeking martyrdom, you know?
So it just seems, it seems like it's unlikely that that's correct.
And now it is true.
Now Max Blumenthal is reporting that like, oh, no, they've actually traced back who a lot of these people are.
And if that's right, then you go, yeah, look at that.
It's just one more thing in the drop of like what you're doing to these people.
I'm kind of caught in a weird position here.
And I think what it is to be a libertarian and to be the right kind of libertarian like I am is it's sometimes it's these things it kind of seems almost paradoxical, although I think it's not.
I think it's actually like the consistent way to view things.
But, you know, like just being like in some ways, right?
Like I'm, I'm like the most bleeding heart left winger, but I'm also the harshest right winger.
You know what I mean?
Like there's like, there's these things that seem kind of all over the place, politically speaking.
But I think it actually makes sense to be all of those things.
But I get one of the criticisms that I get a lot, especially like when I do bigger shows, is that people will say they're like, oh, Dave just blames America for everything.
And that's like your foreign policy is all U.S. always bad.
Everything's always America's fault.
You know, if Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine, what are you talking about?
You're talking about how the U.S. and NATO provoked him.
And if Hamas pulls off October 7th, what are you talking about?
You're talking about how the U.S. backs Israel, who did all this stuff to the Palestinians, you know?
And like, I, you know, the criticism will be something like, oh, you know, other people also have agency and there's other bad guys throughout the world and you don't have to blame America for everything.
But the thing is that I, it's just, that's the situation in all of these conflicts.
That's not to take away agency from anyone else or pretend that no one else can do anything bad, but it's just like after World War II, we inherited the world empire.
We took over all of the European empires and the Japanese empire, man control of the Middle East and all of this.
We had everything except the Soviet Union.
And then when the Soviet Union fell, we were just the lone globe, lone global empire.
And so, yeah, it's we share a disproportionate amount of the responsibility for fucking all of that up.
But the thing is that in my heart of hearts, on some level, I'm like, I'm a Western chauvinist.
Like I think Western civilization is better than everybody else.
That's my honest like view is that I just think, I mean, look, we like freedom and free markets and individual liberty.
That's totally a.
That is conceived in Western civilization.
There's not even a conception of any of that outside of it.
And for all of human history, there's never truly a conception of like individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism.
That's like, that wasn't even an idea.
It's Western civilization that gave birth to that.
I would like to just be in the position of feeling better than everybody else.
Because I think we kind of are.
And like, I'm fine with that.
I think we should be that we should be lecturing the rest of the world about how crazy it is that they're not free.
And how, you know, like, and the truth is that if Israel wasn't doing all of the shit to the Palestinians that they're doing, my guess is that the Palestinians would set up a society that would not be exactly what I think is ideal, you know?
And you certainly enjoy a lot more freedom in Israel proper than you do in any other country in that region.
And that counts.
Like, it just doesn't count in the conflict.
You know what I mean?
Like, but it counts in terms of how you should think of Israel.
Like, okay, I like these countries that are kind of free.
And you know what I mean?
Like that's, and there is a lot more freedom for their own people there.
The problem is that it's like, what you're doing to these people is just wrong.
And you can't get around that.
So like in my heart of hearts, I want to be some like grumpy right winger who's like, yeah, we're better than everybody else.
The problem is that we're just not being that.
And so now I'm like, I can't pretend that's not true.
You know what I mean?
It's like if we have like, and that's the weird thing about being a libertarian, right?
Is that you can kind of recognize all of this.
So you can recognize, right, Rob, that there's a lot of people who just kind of like live their lives the wrong way.
And then they bitch and moan about how they can't get ahead or they bitch and moan about how America is a racist place or America is fucked up and blah, blah, blah.
And really you're like, no, dude, you just didn't, there's opportunity all around you.
You just didn't work that hard.
You just made the wrong decisions.
Like this other guy owns a business now because every weekend of his life after he got off of his nine to five, he spent working on this business.
And now years later, he was able to quit his nine to five and the business pays his full income and blah, blah, blah.
And you know what you did?
You drank beer on the weekends.
And that's why you're still working this shitty job and not where he is.
You know what I mean?
There's situations like that.
And I'd love for that just to be my attitude.
I'd love to just be a grumpy right winger who is like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
But then I just look at all these government policies that are fucking over poor people all the time.
And you're like, okay, so now I can't just say that because you got to be like, hey, okay, end this policy of fucking these people over and then let me yell at them about how they have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Just stop doing that so I can be the grumpy right winger that I want to be.
Does that make sense?
You know what I'm saying?
Like, just stop fucking over the Palestinians so that when they get it wrong, I can agree with you and be like, you guys really should be more like the Israelis.
And then we can hate on Muslims and burqas and everything that's more fun.
Well, that's right.
But that's exactly right.
And then it would be easy to say, this is such a disgrace that you don't allow your people to be free.
What the hell are you doing?
Come join us in the modern day.
What are you doing in the Stone Age, not letting your people be free?
then our government will be like, oh, let's prop up all the Islamists because they'll take out the Arab nationalists and that we like that group more.
And then they turn around and go, well, look at them.
They're all a bunch of Islamists.
And you're like, well, now we can't do that.
All right.
Listen, I got to wrap the show up there.
But this was a good one.
It was fun having Thomas Massey on.
And me and Rob will be back with a brand new episode very soon.