Krystal and Saagar discuss reports that 20% of IDF deaths are friendly fire as brutal fighting continues, allegations that the IDF committed a massacre of civilians inside a school in Gaza, Hunter gives public testimony while Republicans hold him in contempt, Tech firms break ground on plans for a new era of "company towns", Schumer reveals the UFO coverup in Congress, an Obama linked wife to a Harvard professor caught on camera harassing a woman's "terrorist scarf", and Saagar debunks the latest lies on the war in Ukraine.
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Good morning, everybody, Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today.
What do we have, Crystal, Indeed, we do lots to get to this morning. We have updates coming out of Israel. The battles are getting bloodier, and we also have a new look at exactly how Palestinians in Gaza felt about Hamas prior to October seventh, and some indications of how support has only grown because of what happened on October seventh and the Israeli reponse. We also have Hunter Biden looks like he's going to be held in contempt, refusing to testify privately, although he does say he is willing to testify publicly, So we'll break all of that.
Down for you.
Also, a fascinating report on how a bunch of tech giants are building housing new sort of like modern day company towns. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong there? We'll look at that. Sacer's had a special report for you on the latest some very sketchy doings with regard to UFO transparency. We also have a clip that went viral coming out of Harvard yet another former Obama official, this time their wife stalking a student who's wearing FIA, tracing her of wearing a terrorist scarf. Yeah, you got to see it to believe it. And Sagara also has a report on the war in Ukraine. Before we get to any of that, though, we're really excited. Later today we're going to be filming another interview with RFP Junior. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen scager. What is the release schedule for this one?
Yes, so our premium members will be able to watch it first, as promised for all of our big interviews that will drop tonight. For the public, it will drop some time tomorrow, so you guys stay tuned. You can become a Breaking Points if you remember right now breakingpoints dot Com, and you can take advantage of our discount if you want to go ahead and sign up to watch it early and or support all of our work going into the election. We plan on covering RFK Junior extensively because we have seen effectively like a media blackout cover up where they will.
Include him in the polls, but they just like pretend he doesn't exist.
Is probably going to be the most consequential independent candidates since Ross Parrow, and yet nobody seems to be discussing that.
Yeah, well, a'sk him about it.
A bunch of stuff we want to get into with him. Really excited to talk to him again, you know state of his campaign.
There was just a.
Report about all the difficulties of getting on the ballot, so talking some of the nitty gritty of that, how he's thinking about potentially staffing an administration VP picks. Of course, I got a lot of questions for him about Israel and other issues of the day. So really looking forward to that conversation. And we should have a good hour with him to get into a bunch of different stuff, So cond be great.
Stay tuned for that.
All right, let's go on and jump into the news. Put this up on the screen. So the Israeli government and the IDF have been trying to portray an image of victory as they have you know, basically already completely destroyed northern Gaza, massive death toll, massive civilian death toll. Well, we're now starting to get these little glimpses into how the ground operation is actually going for IDF soldiers, and we have this report from Wynut Apparently one fifth of the IDF troop fatalities suffered in Gaza have actually been due to friendly fire or accidents. This again according to the IDF. According to data, at least twenty of one hundred and five deaths since the launch of ground operations not caused by enemy fire. Military says they are working to ensure troops safety. Now a couple of notes here. We covered previously how Harats did investigation and uncovered that the number of injured IDF soldiers had been dramatically understated. They went to the hospitals and said, okay, how many have you taken in? How many IDAF soldiers have you treated? Those numbers were far greater than what the IDEA had admitted to. So when you're getting official IDA statistics, I think you have to take them with a grain of salt at this point. But nevertheless, Occer, I mean, this shows extraordinary development if you have this higher proportion of the fatalities coming from friendly fire.
Yeah, well this is the acknowledged friendly fire, and like you said, I think that's really what we have to focus in on. And one of the things I think that we wanted to try and highlight for everybody here is that the next phase of this is looking unfortunately as predicted, as chaotic and as bloody, and could actually be far more costly to the IDF as this continues. Because the initial military operation was a lot of use of air power. Now the initial ground operation too, we saw the IDEF take some casualties. It does definitely appear that they are covering some things up. But the reason why this friendly fire number is so important is it demonstrates how chaotic the situation is on the ground. I mean, for twenty percent of acknowledged casualties and debts to be friendly fire incidents, that's an extraordinary number, not really on par with many Western military and any modern style campaign. It just highlights the chaotic nature of urban combat. Also just about you know, frankly, troops who probably haven't seen a lot of combat in the past, and now they're doing this. In the first place, you've got a lot of reservists who are there. US military dealt with a lot of that, and it's one of the reasons that I wanted to highlight this. As well as a battle wear about to get into. These two things militarily demonstrate the ongoing difficulty of what continuing to operate in this environment is going to look like friendly fire and as well as unfortunately, the ongoing nature of occupying Gaza for the IDF. Whenever you've got a battle which we're about to show everyone, which took place in North Gaza, in an occupied area which was declared safe already, in which had very little airpower, it ends up being crystaled the deadliest incident so far for the IDF in the entire war.
And before I show you that, there is one other note that I want to make about this report on friendly fire, all of the friendly fire incidents that the IDF is claiming post October seventh, they have a note in here in that report from why Not. And I believe this is like you know, Google translated. The English is a little bit clunky, but bear with me. They say casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October seventh, But the IDF believes that beyond the operational investigations of the events, it would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents due to the immense and complex quantity of them that took place in the Kibbutzam and southern Israeli communities, due to the challenging situations the soldiers were in at the time. So we've already had some indications that some most of the killing was certainly.
Done by Hamas. We're not downplaying that.
Keep that in mind with all of this, but that some of the deaths on October seventh on the Israeli side were because of friendly fire, and they acknowledged this in this report, but they also say we have no interest in looking into it.
We're not going to do an investigation.
We don't think it would be morally what do they say morally sound to investigate what the hell unfolded on that.
I think they're going to say that now. I think a lot of Israelis are going to want more answers on that. In the quote unquote post war period. Another reason why nets On Yahu is trying his best to get as far away from that as possible. But we've teased the battle, so why don't we go ahead and play some of it now, just to give people an idea of what this looked like. This was a battle in which ten IDF soldiers lost their lives, not only just ten, but eight out of the ten of them actually were officers. And it happened after Hamas actually ambushed an IDF small team. It was only four guys who ended up having to be rescued in an hour's long firefight. And again this is in an area of Gaza which was declared safe, where they did not think that it was ongoing. It ends up again being the deadliest battle actually that's happened on the ground so far.
Let's go out and play some of it.
Okay, we know.
This is footage released by the way, by the idea. You know we've played you Hamas's propaganda battle footage.
This is the IDF propaganda battle footage.
But again it gives you some uh, some sense of how difficult, how brutal things are on the ground. Let's put up the details of what happened in what may have been the deadliest incident so far. On the Israeli side. This is part of the times of Israel. Ten soldiers, including two quite senior officers, killed in Gaza fighting and what they describe as a deadly ambush. From what I could tell from the description here, you basically had four soldiers who went into this cluster of three buildings. Again, as Soccer mentioned, this was near Gaza City, not in Gaza City, but in that part of northern Gaza that they have claimed they've basically, you know, eliminated all the terrors and pushed everybody out into southern Gaza.
Will not so.
In this instance, they thought that these buildings had been abandoned, surrounding a courtyard to carry out searches and found the entrance of a tunnel. As the troops entered one of the buildings, Hamas Terris ambushed them, hurling grenades, detonating an explosive device and opening fire on them. Then you know they're calling for help. Their superiors come in and try to rescue them. All four of those original soldiers lost their lives, along with a number of the other soldiers who came in to try to rescue the situation.
Yeah, I think it again, just to highlight it, it took place in an area that you thought was peaceful. Then you go into a building, it turns out there's an ID in there. I and d E their injuris or kills everybody. Then everybody's terrified. And so what really highlighted to me is you had everybody up from a battalion commander on downward, colonels, lieutenant colonels who somehow became involved in this operation, grabbed their rifles and decided to storm in there, and then multiple of them were actually killed. The search and rescue operation, the commanders of the operation and obviously Hamas got the drop on them in terms of the ambush what that looked like.
It ended up being an hours long.
Firefight just to secure the entire area. And this highlights the nightmare of what actual military occupation is going to be. I don't think it's an accident that the deadliest incident so far took place in a so called safe area. And this is what it is rolling going to look like when you're trying to occupy this city in the long run. And I think certainly, just like we found out in Iraq, you know, it turned out that the initial three weeks mission accomplished phase was probably the easiest part of the entire Iraq war, and it was the follow on the holding the population, securing the area, and all of that ended up being some of the deadliest and most brutal fighting.
And you can't bomb your way out of that one.
And this is really what the reality of this type of military operation will look like and probably will continue to look like for months, if not years to come, if they're going to a remain engaged like this.
So that's sort of like the zoomed in view of what this looks like on the ground, and one of the deadliest incidents on the Israeli side that we know about thus far.
Let zoom mount.
Economists had a good report about sort of where they are in terms of their alleged goal of eradicating Hamas. And you know, it's not that they've made no progress or done nothing, but they're nowhere near that goal, which I've always thought was a fantasy, the idea that you could completely eliminate Hamas.
Put this up on the screen.
They write in this piece, the IDF may have destroyed as much as half of Hamas's force, although even that the numbers don't really add up the overall death numbers that we know of in Gaza roughly eighteen thousand, and at least sixty percent of those are women and children.
So if you're saying.
Maybe they've destroyed half of Hamas's force of perhaps thirty thousand fighters, I'm just not sure where you're getting that math from.
May have come directly from the IDF.
But even if you take those numbers, which are probably way overstated of how well they've done in eliminating Hamas members, Hamas still has thousands who merge from tunnels to carry out ambush's on Israeli soldiers, like the incident that we just told you about. In addition, you have about one hundred Israeli soldiers according to the IDF, who have been killed. Again, I would take those numbers with a grain of salt. Hamas still holding, of course, more than one hundred and thirty hostages who were not released when the two sides called that truce and exchanged captives in November. Those hostages, of course, continue to be at grave risk, and Hamas has indicated that more than a dozen of them have actually been killed. Now they're saying it's because of the Israeli assault certainly possible, but we don't really know the circumstances surrounding that. They say here that they are in danger from constant bombing. Of course, on December eighth, Israeli soldiers were wounded in a failed attempt to rescue a hostage. Hamas later showed grewsome footage of a dead hostage, a twenty five year old Israeli civilian, and claims that the Israelis killed him in their rescue attempt. Israel that Hamas murdered the man shown in the video, so competing claims around what happened there. They go on to talk about though, okay, outside of the rank and file.
Fighters, that's where we are.
They're at best have killed half, probably a lot fewer than that, and there are still thousands more to run out of tunnels, not to mention the new recruits that you are creating with your mass terror campaign on the Gaza Strip. Nor has Israel managed to obliterate Hamas's leadership or destroy its infrastructure. The IDF has killed a number of senior field commanders, but ya Ya Sinoir, the group's overall boss, and two of their commanders of their fighting force have so far survived. That is thanks in part to Hamas's network one hundreds of miles of tunnel, which Israel's failed to destroy despite its firepower and its drone born surveillance capabilities. So even at the best case sub scenario, Israel's nowhere near eradicating even the existing Hamas fighting force. And that's before we talk about, you know, the longer term impacts and the way that this has spiked support for Hamas both in Gaza and in the West Bank.
Yeah, I think that's what the economist piece really highlights. The military reality. Even if you accept the most rosy, you know, kind of body count like figures that we would release during Vietnam, even within that you've still got fifty percent of the fighters that remain active. Another thing they point out is that the political sustainability of the campaign, you know, Romay is basically winding up in terms of US support. President Biden and Secretary Blincoln both apparently telling that to now, you've got to wrap things up by the end of the year. That's only sixteen days away. And so then what's the next day going to look like? What are exactly are you going to do? What is the plan for the Gaza strip. We counterpoints brought everybody the news, the net, and Yahu outright rejected any idea of not only a two state solution, but of a Palestinian authority governing US. It's like, well what now, Well, in a break it you buy it scenario, especially hopefully that America is not dumb enough to go in there and to clean up Israel's masks for them. They're the ones who are going to be responsible for it, and in a way they morally should be. It's like you went in, you destroyed most of the city. You're doing this under the guys who are killing all of these people. Now you're responsible for security, You're responsible for the civilian population. You're responsible providing water, food, security, and even, let's say, even if they don't care about any of that, continue their military operations against them US. You have to have staging areas like in Gaza, North Gaza. That's what all those guys were doing there in the first place. So I'm really starting to see a lot of signs and a lot of military analysts I spoke to as well, that this is going to be a brutal and bloody campaign where once you moved past things that you can bomb and you have to actually come in there clear out areas. It's a painful, step by step type process, and you're actually responsible for holding this ground. More and more of these types of incidence, the one where ten IDs soldiers lost their lives just in a single battle, and now you have the chaotic nature of it revealed in the friendly fire incidents. It just shows people and I think Israeli's two that is their future. That's what the future is going to look like for as long as that they remain active inside of it.
Based on the comments from NATANYAHUO, you know, asking his senior aid to develop plans to quote unquote fin out the population of Gaza. Based on the report that came out from that. Yes, I know sort of side ministry that everyone's saying is not that all that important, but weigh the different options for what happens after the war in Gaza, where they said, listen, ideally we're going to push all.
These people into Egypt.
Based on the fact that they are floating legislation and plans here in the US that apparently has some bipartisan support about hey, we're going to push the regional countries to take in this number of refugees in Egypt and this many in Jordan, et cetera, et cetera. To me, it seems very clear what their ideal situation is. What they want to do is to make Gaza uninhabitable and then use the humanitarian crisis to say, well, the only humanitarian thing to do is to resettle these people in Egypt, to resettle them in Jordan, to resettle perhaps some of them in the United States, and that's, you know, and frame this total ethnic cleansing as some sort of humanitarian solution. Now, Egypt has publicly been very against this threatened war. The US has publicly been very against this. But if we get to that place where I mean, already you know they're now flooding the tunnels with seawater to destroy the infrastructure. Okay, you can say understandable. On the other hand, this is going to destroy the groundwater for generations to come. Northern Gaza is already completely destroyed and unlivable. Now the INDSTRM discriminate bombing campaign has moved to the south, rendering.
Those areas unlivable.
They've raised farmland, they've destroyed greenhouses, et cetera. So to me, that seems very clear that that's the path that they want to pursue. That in their minds, net Yahoo and his government want to move towards. The only question is whether or not the US is going to enable that or accept it, if they're going to do more than sort of weekly protest and let the thing unfold. So I think to me, it seems very clear that that's the goal, whether or not they're able to ultimately.
Whether it's I'm a broken record, whether it's a goal or not, we're actually not. The check is the Arab States. I think the Arab States would threaten literal war if that were to happen. Egypt has already said that they'll sacrifice millions of life, and here's the thing, it is actually a matter of national survival. And also they don't want them, I mean the Egyptians. Cec for example. Apparently by the way, CEC is very popular. Then ever, you know why he doesn't want these Palestinians because a bunch of these Hamas guys are Islamus, and CEC hates Islmas. He became to power by overthrowing the Muslim brotherhood. The King of Jordan goes to sleep every night and praise for his life to make sure that the Muslim Brotherhood and all these Palestinians are now living in his country aren't going to uprise against him because there's nothing that he could do about it. If you think he's gonna let in a bunch of Gosms, no way, I mean all of these people. And then I guess the next question is America. Now, I think that some people are dumb enough to have, you know, millions of people come and resettle here. But I would say hell no to that one. I think it's all Israel's fault. So they're boxed in. They can want, they can want many things for what's realistically going to happen.
They're responsible for this.
They can come to the scenario now, or they could come to scenario six months from now. But in my opinion, this whole ethnic cleansing plan of Theirs, it it's just not gonna work.
There's just no political sustainability for it.
The last thing I'll say about that before we move on to the next piece is obviously ethnic cleansing is wrong and bad and incredibly immoral. It also seems to me incredibly foolish to think that if you just displace Palestinians to other countries that they're going to give up the fight. You know, if you push them out of Gaza into Egypt, let's say, or into other surrounding countries, you think they're just going to like lay down and die and accept that they've lost.
No, they're not. They're not.
I think as long as there is breath in their body and any scrap of hope that they could reclaim some semblance of their lost land, they're going to continue to fight. So the idea that that plan would be any sort of security improvement for Israel, I think is also a fantasy.
All right. So to the point of.
How Israel's brutality is actually playing into Hamasa's hands in terms of swelling support for their ranks and for their approach, there was a horrific report eyewitnessed testimony followed by some visual on the ground confirmation of execution style shootings by IDF soldiers of women and children inside of the school. Let's go and put this up. This is from a report by Al Jazeera. I'm just going to narrate here what we're seeing. These are distressing images as they are warning here. You can see the camera is going into a school. They're showing the what they describe as horrific aftermath of an assault on this school.
This is in northern Gaza.
What you can see are appears desks, chairs that have been burnt up, completely destroyed. You can see they're walking here into one of the classrooms where they claim bodies were piled up after eyewitnesses say they were killed execution style. This man was one of the eyewitnesses. He says, we found the bodies in the classrooms. He says there's no sign of any missiles or shells. In other words, they were execution style, just gun to the head executions. All those who were in the building were executed from point blank. The Israeli sold open fire on them. He goes on to say many families came searching for their children. They found them all killed. They were all killed, executed at gunpoint. There was another woman who they spoke with as well, who had a similar story about the way that these women and children were killed. She says the Israeli soldiers came in and opened fire on them. They took all men, then entered classrooms, open fire on a woman and all the children with her. The when said there were new born children among them. The Israeli soldiers executed those innocent families at point blank. So you have the combination of eyewitness testimony along with the bodies that were recovered and the evidence that they had been killed by bullets versus missiles, adding up to you know, a really horrific situation. It's not also the first time that there have been accusations that Israelis have murdered people execution style, murdered civilians in Gaza execution style.
Unfortunately.
You know, this is something that's a very dark period of Israeli history in terms of the Kibia massacre involving Israeli Sharon. This is very well known amongst a lot of Palestinians, and I think it also just highlights the need for independent reporting and you know, un organizations others, you know, just like we allowed actually during the invasion of Iraq, in order to make sure that incidents like this don't happen or they're investigated properly. The IDF actually, as far as I understand, Crystal has not addressed what's happened here, so.
Obviously they need to give an explanation.
I'm and look at you know, it's possible somebody else did, I guess, But if they're going to be responsible for it, then they need to actually come forward with some sort of explanation as to what this was. And I just think it's an independent reviews types of scenario. Desperate for what we need one thing to highlight, just for everybody to watch out for. Is Apparently CNN was able to get a camera insteade of Gaza. They're they're gonna air Crystal some of their footage later today. I'm actually very anxious to see it. It's the first Western footage that will come out of Gaza which has not been censored by the IDF because she went in this Clarista Award who was there at the fall of Kabble and Afghanistan. She went in actually with an Amarati medical team and there was no censorship. She was also on the ground in some of the areas for She was also on the ground in some of the areas for hospitals, etc. So this is exactly why we need people on the ground to be able to investigate scenarios like this.
Absolutely, Okay, so let's ask the question, then, what is all of this brutality actually gaining Israel and how do Palestinians in.
Gaza at least, how did they feel.
About Hamas Because we've also had you know, numerous Israeli pundits, officials American politicians claiming there are no innocent Palestinians in Gaza because they all support Hamas well, that is really not the case. Let's put this up on the screen. This polling is fascinating to me. So this survey was in the field right up until October seventh. It just happened that you had this air Barometer poll where they do in person surveys, in the field right up until October seventh. Okay, So, first of all, how much trust do you have in the Hamas led government? The top response by far among all age groups. More, you know, overwhelming plurality of roughly forty five percent say none at all, no trust whatsoever in the Hamas led government. All right, let's go to the next one. How responsive do you feel like the Hamas led government is to what people want? Again, overwhelming plurality say, not very responsive at all, so not exactly glowing reviews there. And the second highest response was not responsive at all. So not very and not at all were the two highest responses all right, let's go ahead to the next one. What do you think is the most effective way to have a say here to be able to influence a mas led government decision. The number one answer nothing is effective nothing. The second highest answer is working through personal connections, so basically corruption direction. Okay, so that's really interesting, very dim views of Hamas. There was a huge sense seventy eight percent had said that the availability of food was a moderate or severe problem in Gaza. Now you might think that perhaps that's, you know, they would blame the Israeli government and their blockade, which certainly takes you know, deserves quite a bit of the blame for that state of affairs. But actually the largest number said that they blamed the Hamas led government for the fact that, you know, just on a basic like how am I doing, how's my family doing? Am I able to get enough to eat? The Hamas took most of the blame in terms of who they were pointing a finger at. I thought this was interesting too. So Hamas, of course they say their goal is to destroy the Israeli state. Majority of survey respondents the favor of two state solutions, so there are at odds even with political goals and here what you say, what you see is which party of any do you feel closest to Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, which quote unquote runs the West Bank, or Hamas, and Hamas actually wins out. They also asked in a theoretical presidential election where you had the head of Hamas versus the head of the Palestinian Authority versus Marwan Barghuti, who's an imprisoned member of the Central Committee of Fatah, actually only twenty four percent, so that they would vote for the Hamas leader. Barguti received the largest share at thirty two percent. He's again that imprisoned activist, and Mahmudabas, the head of the PA, received twelve percent, So they were not too impressed with Hamas as a governing authority. But Sager, there are a lot of signs. You know, at this point, you can't pull Gaza because there's not on going war and no one can get in there. But there are a lot of signs that support for Hamas has actually dramatically increased because of the brutality of the Israeli crackdown, and that is consistent with history. You know, if you look at the polling and that's one of the things that they talk about in this piece. If you look at polling over time, it's almost a one to one relationship. The harsher the conditions imposed by the Israelis or the more brutal attacks that are being waged, the higher the support for the more militant terrorist organizations when there seems like there's some actual path to peace and prosperity through nonviolent means. Lo and behold support for militant groups like Hamasti creases. It doesn't take rocket scientists.
No, it's not.
And we have a lot of historical precedent we can talk about here. You know, I'll turn to Vietnam. We've been talking about it a lot here. You know, the Communists were not popular. There were a million, a lot of people who fled the north to the South because they didn't want to live under communism. But after the sustained bombing campaigns and the corruption of the South Vietnamese government and all that became to be more evident. Even though people didn't necessarily want to live under communism, you were able to basically mesh together like a communist and nationalist philosophy for why you should support the VC and the NBA against the American invader and the foreign puppets. So even though they inherently prior to foreign intervention actually very likely it looked like they could have been defeated, it was actually American intervention itself, and the strength of it made it such that it actually ballooned their ranks and made them even more popular.
There was also a line in here that really struck out to me.
Quote Hamas led government may be uninterested in peace, but it is empirically wrong for Israeli political leaders to accuse all Gosins of the same. In fact, most Gosins are open to a permanent and a peaceful solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Yet the views of the people who live in Gaza are often misrepresented in public discourse, even as surveys such as Arab Barometer consistently show how different these narratives are from reality. I would also say this is exactly why from a strategic perspective, this made a lot of sense for Hamas, where you've only got fifty percent of the population are spoiled, so that support you between you and Palestinian and Islamic jihad. So what do you do you launch a war to not only legitimize yourself as the only fighting actor against the Israelis, but then you use the response to say, we're the only ones for standing up, and that's why you've got to support me. Again, very very similar to the way that the Vietcong and others operated in the Vietnam War. So and this ultimately there were the victors got to study what exactly made them effective. And I think on the way that this fight now continues and how that all looks for the center of gravity of that population, who they support, what they support, what they look like as legitimate. I really see this polling as a tragedy to just say that so many of the people who lived under their rule, and this is so obvious. As usual, most human beings are human beings. They just want to live in peace, They want enough food to eat, and they don't want to live in a corrupt government where they have to pay somebody so that they can send their kid to college. That sucks no matter where you are and no matter what religion you are. So obviously they didn't like it. Now that doesn't mean that they're pro Israel, let's be clear about that. But they're pro something a little bit different. And this is another reason too, why the Israeli strategy of propping up Hamas was very important to them, because I actually think they knew that this was real, and that one of the reasons why they want to continue those Katari cash injections is we got to keep Hamas up there because actually there's a whole lot of palest Indians who would accept something very different, but that would be very inconvenient for the right right wing government and coalition inside. Now, obviously it's way past October seventh. Who the hell knows for this poll, you know stands right now. A lot of these people could be dead, that's another question. A lot of the moderates and all those other folks who definitely did not support a Moss from day one, they could be gone. And now what you have more of a literate population, people who've lived through war, and we know how that looks like throughout history too.
Absolutely, and there are legitimate questions over whether israel Is is intentionally targeting that potential nonviolent, more moderate leadership class that the intellectuals, the doctors, you know. I did a whole monologue on this earlier in the week with that poet Rafat, who was assassinated. There's really no doubt that there's an investigation that was conducted by a human rights organization that found, you know, they directly targeted specifically the apartment that he was in with his sister, killing him and other family members. He had received death threats from the Israeli government multiple times, so he was very definitely directly targeted, this poet. And there's been a massive loss of intellectuals and thought leaders within the Gaza population from this war. So I think is a very open question whether Israel is directly intentionally targeting them for exactly this reason. Let's go and put this next piece up on the strands of fascinating and report from the BBC. They interviewed a number of political scientists in the West Bank and they also have some numbers to back up what we've discussed before, which is that support for Hamas in the West Bank. We don't know in Gaza, but in the West Bank has been skyrocketing. One political scientist described the October seventh attacks as a turning point for Palestinians just as they were a shocking turning point for Israelis that political scientist said, the people, especially in the new generation, are backing Hamas now more than at any other moment. He told me, in the previous thirty years, there were no models, no idols for.
The new generation.
Now they see there is something different, a different story is being created.
And this was really pretty extraordinary.
As well, because obviously Fetad and Hamas have been bitter enemy for years as well. But this political scientist theorizes that both Fatah and Hamas are well aware they're complementary to each other, and I think we'll see real integration between the two movements. This is the greatest fear of you know, BB Netanyahu and others who are like minded. They don't want to see any sort of Palestinian unified front. It's a divide and conquer strategy, and it's also elevating the extremists, so you can say, hey, I've got no partner for peace, even as a majority Palestinians in Gaza say we want a two state solution, and even as he and his government are very clear about how they do not want a peaceful two state solution. We'll get to that in just a moment. One of these political scientists goes on to say, the Palestinian authority realize targeting Hamas would not eradicate it because it's an ideological movement rooted within the Palestinian people. In Hamas is fully aware it cannot establish an independent Palestinian state without the help of Fatas, So that's why he's arguing that they realize that they need each other.
But you know they track here. How there has.
Been a real change in viewpoint among the Palestinian population. Again, this is in the West Bank, not Gaza. Could be totally different, but I think there are probably some similarities here.
And remember in the West Bank.
The brutality of what's unfolding there is nothing like, of course what's unfolding in Gaza. But there has also been a lot of violence there. More than two hundred Palestinians have been killed since October seventh in the West Bank as well, you know, partly at the hands of the IDF, partly at the hands of these extremist settlers.
Yeah, we don't know. You know, it's interesting.
Actually something just came across my radar because you had a top Hamas official actually who just did an interview with all monitor and which he suggested that the group would quote adhere to the PLO organization stance on Israel aka floating Israeli recognition. You can read that two ways. One is that their quote unquote suing for peace. I would rate it very much like you are, Crystal, is that they're trying to become the legitimate successor for whatever this post movement is going to look like, both for the West Bank and for Gaza. Yeah, and when you read comments like that, I would put it very much as they are recognizing their political hold here on power and what the next step for them may look like for but not only to survive, but also to become the genuine governing authorities. So actually, you know, I think you can really look at that polling in some of the now increase for support Hamas in the West Bank really is a tragedy to say that while the Palestinian authority itself was corrupt, the ideas which they were built upon, which was palestine an identity, not nonviolent resistance, I guess per se, but at least post OSLO some sort of cooperation to state scenario that was a relative majoritarian position amongst a lot of Palestinians. But it was the extremists really who tried to overthrow it, and they may actually set it back by I mean, who knows, not even decades.
I would say, you know, maybe a century something like that.
Extremists in the on the Palestinian side and extremists on the Israeli side basically teamed up, not directly, but in a manner of speaking to derail any sort of a peace process.
And it worked.
It did work.
They worked, they won, you know, and now here we are where we are today. To go back to you while let's talk about some of those extremists now they run the Israeli government.
This is an interview with the Israelian with an.
Israeli ambassador on Sky News where she's being pressed over okay, you know, you all say there's no partner for peace on the Palestine.
He's like, do you all want a two state solution? Take a listen to.
Us state solution. There's still a chance for a two state solutions.
I think it's about time for the world to realize the old's look power that I'm failed on the seventh of October, and we need to build a new one. And in order to build the.
News that new one, include the Palestinians living in a state of their own.
The biggest question is what type of Palestinians are. The other side is what Israeli state? The answer is absolutely no one. I'll tell you why. Well, then the moment, the reason there is no is because the Palestine.
Without offering mark state to Palestine.
How can the Israel knows today and the world should know now. The reason the Oslo courts failed is because the Palestinians never wanted to have a state next to Israel. They want to have a state from the river to the sea. So why are you obsessed with a formula that never worked, that created this radical people in the other side? Why are you obsessed with that?
So she says to a two state solution, absolutely not. This is not surprising. I mean, this has been the position of Natanyahu, the Luquid Party, certainly his extremists coalition partners for years. These are people who've been opposed to OSLO from the beginning of OSLO, for literally decades. But to have it so out there, brazenly stated no hedging in the open is extraordinary for a number of reasons. I mean, it blows up one of the central myths in American politics about what's unfolding in Israel, where it's all the problems are on the Palestinian side. There's no partner for peace there, Joe Bidena said, his stated his key stated objective with regard to Israel Palestine is ultimately to get to a two state solution. And here you have the government that you're supporting unconditionally and shipping arms to and whatever, and pretending like this is on the table, saying absolutely not. Your key foreign policy priority is one hundred percent off the table.
We have zero interest in it. We will do whatever we can to block it.
Yeah, I would know too. It's not just the Biden administration.
This has been US policy basically since nineteen sixty seven or since the Oslo courts especially, but also has always been the legitimate, at least political aim of the US State Department. Even under the Trump administration, they never abandoned this, even though they might have done it in practice. So, I mean, I think it's extraordinary crystal because we don't hear it in English. We can hear it in Hebrew. And I don't know why it's different, but it is just different. Whenever you have to hit Google Translate versus when you see somebody on Sky News. Who's a representative of that government? But I think it's it. Look, the Biden administration too has to grapple with this of you keep saying you want X, they say they don't actually want that. So what are we doing here? What is the actual political end? And how exactly do you come to that? Part of the reason why I think they want the Israelis to wrap up their campaign.
But I mean that's not going to do anything.
You could stop the military campaign tomorrow, you could even have a quote unquote cease fire. The political end is the one that we've all been working towards, supposedly for fifty years. It's like, well, now, what are we going to do?
Well?
The other thing is, even if you take the governments out of it, take Amas out of it, take the net Yahoo government out of it, and look at the polling of the populations, you actually have far more support for two state solution among Palestinians than you do among Israelis.
At this point. We talked to that pollster Dahlia Shindlin.
Yes, earlier in the week. I really recommend people go and listen to that. She was really really insightful in terms of Israeli public opinion. She's a writer for Howard, she's a political scientist and a polster. And it's been a long time since two state solution has been a majority position in Israeli politics. And she said, you know, it hasn't dropped off of that much during this current war, but it's nowhere near majority.
I believe.
She said, support was somewhere around thirty percent for a two state solution, so you actually have more sentiment and that you know, that's why these politicians, that's why they get elected. The net Yahoo government doesn't just come out of nowhere, right, That's why they get elected because there's some public support for the positions that they're taking, and you know, the idea of okay, we can just maintain the status quo forever. This was fairly popular, not just on the right but sort of throughout Israeli politics for probably since the second Into fought. I would say, if I had to pinpoint at a time, but you know, look at people who would do this research and don't take my word for it on that one. But it's been a long time since the two state solutions really been a majority position in the Israeli public.
It's certainly not now.
So that's the other that's the other puncture to the fantasy that the Biden administration and every other American presidential administration has been peddling that there's some ongoing.
Peace process that you've got.
You know, the Israelis really invested in how can we get peace and the Palestinians that are standing in the way.
At best, it's a lot more complicated than that.
At the same time, there's a lot of stuff going on with Hunter Biden. So yesterday, the House of Representatives officially has passed an impeachment inquiry into President Biden relating to Hunter Biden's business dealings.
Here is the moment that that happened. On this vote, the a's are two twenty one, and then a's are two twelve. The resolution is adopted, that objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table.
That is an official impeachment inquiry. For those who covered the two impeachments, which we did, certainly, the impeachment inquiry is the predecessor to a formal impeachment. It basically authorizes Congress gives them subpoena power to look into and to investigate whatever they deem necessary as opposed to what's put forward to them in the resolution, and also though came at the exact same time that Hunter Biden actually appeared publicly on Capitol Hill answering questions of where's Hunter with I am right here? He is offering to testify to Congress publicly about his business dealings, but refusing to comply with a subpoena to investigator to be answer to investigators in private.
Here's what Hunter had to say.
But I'm also here today to correct how the Maga wright has portrayed me for their political purposes. For six years, I have been the target of the unrelenting Trump attack machine shouting Where's Hunter? Well, here's my answer. I am here. Let me state as clearly as I can. My father was not financially involved in my business, not as a practicing lawyer, not as a board member of Barisma, not in my partnership with a Chinese private businessman, not in my investments at home nor abroad, and certainly not as an artist by cherry picking lines from a bank statement, manipulating texts I sent, editing the testimony of my friends and former business partners, and misstating personal information that was stolen from me. There is no fairness or decency in what these Republicans are doing. I am here to testify at a public hearing today to answer any of the committee's legitimate questions.
So Christal, there's a lot actually going on there. First of all, I believe that's the first time he's ever acknowledged that the Biden laptop is real, because it said he said it was stolen from me. Now, first of all, it wasn't stolen. He was so high on drugs they forgot that he left laptop.
I thought it bore all the question disinformation.
That's whatever. Now there's a lot going on.
I do love how he used to list all of his shady things, like in my Chinese private equity, in my.
Board membership of Brisma.
Also on the art piece, it just so happened that what Democratic donors happened to pay top dollar for brand new artists.
Okay, there's a lot to be said, I think about that.
It does, though, come at the same time that the House Republicans are now likely to hold Biden in contempt the way that the Democrats did for Steve Bannon when he refused to comply with a subpoena. Here is James Comer and Jim Jordan immediately responding to Hunter's statements. Here's what they had to say on Capitol Hill immediately after to.
Vena and to the President's son, that we expect him to come.
In and be depotentcided. This is a normal.
Process and an investigation. This has been a serious, credible, transparent investigation from day one. We've published four bank memorandums, We've had countless press conferences. This is an investigation about public corruption at the highest level. We accumulated mountains of evidence that's concerning to an overwhelming majority of Americans. We have specific questions in there, and I think we're going to allow you in there to see the piles and piles of documents, of bank statements, of emails, of text messages that we've worked very hard on in this committee over the last eight or nine months.
Finally, I would say this, mister Biden's counsel and the White House of both argued that the reason he couldn't come for a deposition was because there wasn't a formal vote.
For an impeachment inquiry.
Well, that's going to happen in a few hours.
We think it's going to pass.
We think the House of Representatives will go on record with the power that solely resides in the House to say we are in an official impeachment inquiry phase of our oversight, and when that happens, we'll see what their excuse is.
Then they should have been here today. But once we take that vote.
We expect him to come in a for his interview, for his deposition, and frankly, we'll also, I think, look at contempt proceedings as we move forward.
So Crystal, so the beef around public versus private, I know it sounds nebulous, but yeah, from what I understand and what I've looked into, the public proceeding will not be able to last as long in the way that the private ones go. So the private ones, as we saw with Devin Archer and others, not only are you testifying under oath, but you're not just testifying to members of Congress.
You're testifying as well.
To investigators, people who are deputized lawyers who work for the House of Representatives for the committee, so that it's more of like a police proceeding than you would think of like a public hearing, and in that they would go probably nine ten hours in some cases, and they'd be like, what about this payment? What about this payment? All just under oath and if you lie, of course you're going to be violating it and you be held in contempt and charged with that. That is the beef over that now, in terms of what Comer and Jordan are looking into and what they're going with, the latest report that I've seen that looks like the most direct thing that should be looked at was this from just last week, Hunter Biden's company made direct payments to Joe Biden. These involved the earnings on Hunter Biden's company that were then made directly to President Biden. Now this is being billed by the Biden team as Hunter having paid him back for I think it's cars, personal loans, et cetera. That's not necessarily illegal, but I'm not sure yet If the paperwork involves there, then it does, though of course raised.
A question of like, well, what are you doing it for?
I actually think the sketchiest thing and that you weren't there whenever I covered this was the main thing that the big red flag from Hunter's spending over twenty seventeen to twenty twenty whenever he was on drugs and all that was not all of the payments to hookers and all that, because I was actually itemized.
It was the one.
Point seven Yeah, I also want to say, what is it difference between hooker's and adult entertainment. I'm still trying to figure that out, because that's like six hundred grand whenever you combine that.
But that's a whole other conversation.
Is the one point seven million dollars in ATM withdrawals of cash cash, and so that's actually the one where there's most area for inquiry of corruption and who are you paying to? As I said at the time, presumably a large chunk of that went to drug dealers. I do find it difficult to believe that he was able to even consume and still be alive one point silvern million.
Dollars worth of drugs, because.
That's an exceptional guy.
Maybe, I mean, he is exceptional in a lot of ways. Anyway, I'm curious why you think about all this.
I mean, it's such a mess because listen, obviously, I want public officials to be investigated for corruption. I want them to be held accountable for corruption. I want there to be a much more stringent standard of corruption than what the Supreme Court, you know, even counts as corruption. At this point, I don't think there's any doubt that Hunter was trading on the Biden name and his dad's access to power and insinuating to these various shady characters he's doing business with that he could get him extra y or z. I mean, why else do you put Hunter Biden on boards and pay him, you know, invest in his funds, et cetera, et cetera.
Why else do you buy his artwork?
I don't think there's like to me, there's no question that there's a very high level of shadiness.
But Republicans have been investigating in this for a year now and they really haven't come up with much.
So the other piece of this, you know, on the public versus private testament, I understand their perspective that you lay down of like, no, we want to go through this other process that's behind closed doors, so it's not like a circus in the theater, et cetera, et cetera. But if you're Hunter Biden, you're also thinking number one, there was you know, Steve Bannon, other Trump Trump related people who refuse to testify when they were subpoena, so the precedent has been set. And number two, if you do it behind closed doors, then they can And we've seen this before, including with Devin Archer, selectively leak the parts that may be out of context, may be misleading, that they feel are the most damning. Whereas he apparently feels some level of confidence that he's able to testify publicly that it would come out at least okay for him, and it's not a good look for Republicans that they're afraid of that It's like, all right, this guy's here, he wants to testify, Like what are you afraid of? If you won't do it behind closed doors, why not take the next best thing with regard to the impeachment investigation, You know, I sort of feel similarly, like, first of all, unfortunately I feel like no one really even cares about these impeachment inquiries anymore. This is more a stop to the base than any sort of a legitimate fact finding mission. This is impeachment inquiries are now just sort of like a standard issue part of politics. And some of the haziness of what this impeachment inquiry is even really about was laid out when one Republican was asking another like, what are actually the high crimes and misdemeanors that we're looking into? And they couldn't just succinctly.
Define it, So I don't know.
I to me, at this point, this is like the least of Joe Biden's worries. And I think Republicans are more performing for their base to show like, no, we're not a mess, No we're not a train wreck, we're actually getting things done here. Then they are making any you know, real like attempts at fighting corruption or even appealing to a broader political base than their constituents.
It's definitely an introduce pe issue. It's also a thing of retribution. They did it twice to Trump. You know, they did it. They had multiple you know, they leaked all the how many times Adam Shift leaked you know, Mueller investigation testimony and all that. So they're like, screw them, We're going to do the exact same thing back.
I do agree. I think it's going to be normalized.
I think it is now basically every president is going to have some sort of impeachment degree against them. I am not necessarily against it for corruption purposes especially, I'm really enjoying getting all the visibility into the first family's finances.
You're like, oh, that's very interesting.
We have this going on, the president's brothers being called to testify. The more that we normalize like shame against trading and openness, I actually think it's a net benefit to all of that. So I would like to see Hunter Biden testify in some sort, either publicly or privately. I absolutely, I mean the tax investigation was incredibly eye opening. I'm really glad that the judge stepped in and was like, this is too sweetheart of a deal, because the public actually does deserve to know about all this cash that is being here, About the fact that Beisma changed his payroll and cut it in half after Trump was elected and Biden no longer had a control of the Ukraine portfolio. It's like the most naked thing that you can see in all of his financial records. So I think all of that should be normalized in terms of this investigation all that. Obviously, they don't have a quote smoking gun yet the payments that they directly have been able to prove so far are either not papered over properly, they haven't been able to show. But you know, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to continue to investigate it now, per se.
I don't think politically politically it depends.
There is some polling to indicate that if people had been able to get more information about the quote unquote hunter Biden laptop, that then they would have been able to have they would have made a different choice. I'm not sure how true that actually is, but you never know. If they do stumble across something or any of that, it becomes a political scandal for the White House. You could see a scenario where they would have some impact on the election. I don't think it'll be number one, especially because Trump is the number two person that other people are gonna be weighing up against.
Yeah, you don't know, I'm sure, and it's certainly possible that they come up with, you know, that they're able to find, now that they have these other tools at their disposal, something that's more of a direct link. But you know, I also think the other piece of this is because it's been very one sided and because there's been a lot of overreaching and overstatements about what it is that they've identified thus far, any anybody outside of the Republican base is just sort of like dismissing this as a Republican witch hunt and not paying too close attention to, you know, the details here of exactly what's going on. So at this who knows what could develop in the future. You never know, But as of today, as I said, I think this is like the least of Joe Bidensbury.
Well, let's move on to the next part here. This is the biggest problem for a lot of people housing. Every time we cover it, we see a tremendous response, and we want to continue.
On that beat.
There's a fascinating and really honestly troubling thing happening as housing becomes.
More and more unaffordable.
We've talked about in the past private equity giants coming and buying single family homes. But the real end state for this are company towns. So you would have large industrial employers, just like Henry Ford did, and they had what company can I forget what it's called script or something like that, that they allowed people to trade inside of the inside Ford village. You can have forward bucks that you can trade different things from. Somehow none of it ever ends up into actual money into your bank account. Well, the new development of this appears to be Google and other big tech companies that are building new housing that they would then own and make it available for their employees. So let's gohe and put this up there on the screen. This is from Business Inside. It says meet your new landlord, Google. And what they lay out here is a huge proposed development in Mountain View, California, one of the most expensive places in.
The entire country.
There are seven thousand new homes, three distinct neighborhoods, three hundred square feet of retail and community community space. None of it bears the name Google. But what they say is that these corporations are using their considerable sway and resources to build modern company towns many cities that will feature all the trappings of traditional civic life, housing, shops, and public spaces. The projects won't have corporate logos.
On the buildings.
Many of the units will be technically available to the general public, not just employees, but in the grand scheme of real estate, they are distinct. After running up against the housing shortages, companies like Google, Meta and Disney are now taking matters into their own hands, and they will create places that have no names, even technically attached to them, Middlefield Park, Willow Village. They could might as well be though, called Zucktown or Google Cities. So we have some of the quotes. We can put this one up the screen. For example, Google's North Bay Shore project. The new community will replace a suburban office park with the sprawling new neighborhood in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Let's go to the next one.
They say that the plan calls, as I said, for seven thousand new homes across a mix of income levels, as well as parks, restaurant, shops, and more than three million square feet of office space on one hundred and fifty three acres. Let's go to the Zuckerberg one now, please, you can see here from what they quote about Facebook. Last year, Menlo Park, which is where Facebook is headquartered, voted in favor of a plan for a Facebook fifty nine acre project, known affectionately or cynically as Zucktown. It promises seventeen hundred homes as well as office, hotel and retail. Now we have one included with Walt Disney, the Walt Disney Corporation. They say that Disney World, so this is in Florida, plans to break ground next year on fourteen hundred affordable housing units across eight many acres, a few miles from its flagship theme in Florida, the company said in the spring, and the reason that they would be doing it is specifically for its employees and temporary housing, so crystal, as you can see from what's happening here, we've got Walt Disney, we've got Zuckerberg, we've got Google. All these people that are moving in and it's actually really I think it's terrible for a variety of reasons. One is that it makes it so that the employees are totally reliant on the company. This was the problem with the original company towns. So let's say you're working at Google and you've got a new job somewhere else. Now you're not just giving up your job, you're getting up your house, you're giving up all this other stuff. It can become a little bit of a golden prison. But that's more for white collar employees. It also makes it so that even more of available commercial or sorry, available residential real estate is getting zoned to big fortune. Five hundred companies are going to use it than to their own ends and not allow people to come pick and choose as they may for what they would privately be able to either lease and or own. So if this is the available housing stock and you're going to shrink it to what they can own, it's not it's not good and it has a bad track record history wise, just.
Have a bad track record, and there's a reason for that. I mean, it really is like everything old is new again. My dad and his side of the family, they're from West Virginia, so I have a lot of and his dad was a coal miner, so I have a lot of familiarity with like the West Virginia mining company towns and same thing. They sort of framed it as this like humanitarian like you know, virtue signaling of oh, we're going to build all this housing and then workers can live so close to their job and you know, we're going to have great school system, et cetera.
Et cetera.
But just think about from your perspective, you want to have your boss in charge of also like where you live and be paying rent to them. Let's say you have a problem with the house, because we're not talking about you owning your home, they own it. You're paying rent to them. Let's say you have a problem with the housing. Let's say they you know, aren't fixing the plumbing or some other issue which happens all the time in a you know, landlord renty situation. Are you going to feel confident, you know, raising a fuss about that. So the real goal here for these companies is not altruistic. They're wrapping it in, oh, there's an affordable housing crisis, and some of these units are going to be for people who's you know, below median income, et cetera, et cetera. The real goal is to have more control over their working population and to get butts back in seats in the office after the remote work revolution, and to hopefully turn a buck while they're doing it as well. So it's very troubling, it's very dystopian, and it fits also with the trends of you know, we've talked about the way that permanent capital has gotten in the game of buying up all these single family homes. They're making it more and more impossible for people to be able to have their own home, own their own home, have control over their own lives, et cetera. So think about, okay, for those of you who live in neighborhoods, that have hoas and have homeowners association, like is Google going to now be involved in like the running of your homeowners association? Those things are a nightmare to begin with withoud getting your boss involved in it as well, because that's what happened in the company towns of your They would run the schools, they would stack the local political officials so that all of the policies that passed were beneficial to them, and it ended up being really a sort of catastrophe for workers and for worker autonomy in particular. The other thing that of course comes to my mind here is let's say there's a union drive, you know, and you're dependent for your housing on your boss, not just your job. It's already scary enough to engage in a union drive and to push for a union when it's quote unquote just your job at risk. Now your housing is at risk too, very very dystopian potential scenarios that are quite obvious, and the parent to see how it could fold out.
It also shows you how these municipalities become weights.
So actually, back in the.
Day, there was a time when the governments would even pay their employees, not in dollars, their payment script because they have towns themselves. They ended up having to outlaw that during the Great Depression because governments were printing script and it didn't end up pegging it or have any monetary value. But we had to learn a lot of those lis since from the eighteen eighties all the way up till the nineteen thirties when this became really popular because of the amount of control, and that when those companies went busted, then the whole.
Thing just gets totally wiped out.
What they even point out here is that we have a modern day version of this where because everybody's bidding for HQ two, for Google, and all these municipalities really want this, they're giving them tremendous amount of tax breaks and including they're relying on them to fund the housing that's successible to them.
But this creates all kinds.
Of skewed tax incentives where you're totally reliant on the major employer to do everything for you. And then again, what if they change their decision, What if a city down the road is willing to offer them something, then things could change. There's a lot of dangers. I think, Yeah, you continue to go down this road.
And are you going to give preference in terms of hiring to people who say they want to live in your neighborhoods. You know, are you going to prefer them over someone who wants to live outside known their own home or whatever. So, the fact that you have such a disastrous housing landscape, especially in a lot of California, but in all kinds of places across the country, it creates this predatory opportunity for these companies to posture like they're doing something that's altruistic for the community, altruistic for their employees, when really all they're seeking is more money and more control.
Yeah, next part here. UFO has been waiting to give an update on this one.
Now.
The top line is, we brought everybody the news about the UFO Transparency Amendment. It was included by the Senate specifically Senator Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds.
Was a bipartisan bill.
It actually passed passed the sedit with like eighty seven votes, massive support. It ended up, unfortunately being gutted in the House of Representatives, specifically by two individuals were Mike Rogers and Turner. These two individuals were very close ties to the intelligence community, basically working at the behest of the Pentagon and the CIA to kill any transparency efforts which would have required both the setting up commissions would have required mandatory disclosure. A lot of people UFO community are actually very upset about this, and they're also now highlighting a very interesting speech which was given by Senator Schumer yesterday upon the passage of the NDAA, where he protested against the House of Representatives stripping out these transparency blocks and specifically said, based upon presumably what he knows, he gets the highest level of intelligence briefing of a genuine cover up that's taking place here.
Here's what Senator Schumer have to.
Say, Closure Act that he and I co sponsored and portions of which we will pass in the NDAA. I say to my friend that unidentified unanimous phenomena are of immense interest and curiosity to the American people. But with that curiosity comes the risk for confusion, disinformation, and mistrust, especially if the government isn't prepared to be transparent. The United States government has gathered a great deal of information about UAPs over many decades, but has refused to share with the American people. That is wrong, and additionally, it breeds mistrust. We've also been notified by multiple credible sources that information on UAPs has also been withheld from Congress, which, if true, is a violation of the laws requiring full notification to the legislative branch.
A lot of important things here talking about wild it is, and it's like these things just happen and they float into the ether and everybody thinks it's too wacky, so they don't want to cover it.
I mean, this is the Senate Majority leader. Now. Look, politicians lie all the time.
But one of the reasons why I thought the legislation was so important is it doesn't rely on individual testimony of a whistleblower or a legislator of I saw this, my uncle saw that, or any of that. It was straight up like, look, if you have info, you have to legally disclose it.
That's it.
It's very simple, and I think it's very telling that they ended up covering it up.
Now.
Dave Grush, the initial UFO whistleblower, kind of spark a lot of this, gave some of his reaction on News Nation immediately after.
Here's what he had to say.
What we're witnessing right now is quite frankly the greatest legislative failure in American history. You know, you had a very strong amendment for government transparency on this issue. Whether you believe my allegations or not, we need to advocate for the executive branch, you know, the office of the President through executive action to in state such a body to advise him on the best course of action. Now that you know Congress has failed to legislate appropriately.
Yeah, well, I would hope to see that. I'm not going to hold my breath.
And I think that's the unfortunate part of it is that there's no statutory things that are in place. One of the reasons why the JFK Records Assassination Act was so important was.
Because it let everybody see in the open.
Every time they push us declassification, we all know what's happening here.
But the fact was is that previously you just pretend they moved on. We already had the WARC Commission, just got ready the WARR commission.
And then they opened it up and then they still have parts of it declassified. Why everybody involved is dead or you just don't want us to know truly what happened. I think the fact that now we have to rely on presidents. I mean, if you have to rely on the capricious political leanings of the executive branch.
You're already screwed. You're s crewed.
So I will say the only hopeful note that I've been told is that this is that there were a lot of people who are inside the government who are really reliant on this legislation.
They want to do the right thing. They're like, I want to go through the official channels. This isn't this.
But if Congress is going to engage in a full blown cover up, you know, at the behast, then they're going to have to come out and quote unquote unauthorized, uncontrolled type disclosure. So it's possible, actually we will see even more than we might have through a legal process. But you have to always remember a lot of these people are terrified of being prosecuted and thrown in jail for the rest of their life or worse, you know, which is that we've seen some allegations.
So curious what you think, Crystal.
Yeah, I think your analogy to the JFK Wreckers Act is really important because it's not like that solved the problem, but it gave people a tool so that you could sue and say, hey, this is what you're required to do under law, you're not meaning your obligations, and so we're going to take you to court. And also it exposed the lack of transparency because you could see the short between what they were supposed to do and what they were actually doing. So I think you know this, that's a very analogous situation here. And it also reminds me similarly of the Stock Act, which requires.
Disclosure of stock trades.
And it's not that that's solved corruption in government, but again, it gave good government activists and grassroots activists in the public a tool where you could see at least some of what's going on and expose it. You could also see the gaps between what people are supposed to disclose and what they are actually disclosing, and how often they're failing to disclose what they're required to under that regulation. So to me, it sort of fits in a similar category here.
I want to know more.
From you, Sagura about what you made of Schumer's comments, because to me, that was pretty extraordinary to have Chuck Schumer like I can't imagine he would just make accusations like that.
Willy nilly has he been a like which side of this.
Has he been on has he been a real transparency advocate or has he been you know, kind of in the middle, or what's the deal, Chuck is a.
Recent convert Okay, I kind of came out of nowhere. We're not really sure or why we will take it. I look, I have no ideas. Remember the Gang the Gang of Eight are the people who are supposedly the members of Congress who get the most insight to the US intelligence community. Although you know that you can't necessarily rely on that. If I had to guess, you know, maybe he had somebody who came to him. He was moved very much by Dave Grush or some other whistleblowers others who had spoken to him.
This actually happens a lot. You'll have people who are in the government.
They'll go to a member of Congress because members of Congress also have security clearance, so like, here's what I know, and here's what's happening inside the government, and then the Congress will come This is kind of like the Church Committee many other transparency efforts. They will come through because they have clearance, and then they will enforce a provision in the government which will require then disclosure. But I mean the exact statement from Schumer is that there is an actual cover up, right. He says, for the government to obtain and he recovered UAP material or biological remains that may have been provided to private entities in the past and thereby hidden from Congress and the American people. That's a direct quote from Senator Rounds, an Idaho senator, a Republican here who is working with Senator Schumer. I mean they are alleging, I mean effectively saying that they have knowledge of something. Same too with Grush. If you look a little bit more and you dig in some of the things that he's talked about, he's now saying he's got some firsthand knowledge of things that happened.
But and I get it. You know, everybody who's.
Watching this is frustrated because they're like, oh, it's always a guy or from a guy.
And I agree.
That's why I don't want to rely on Dave Grush. I don't want to rely on Chuck Schumer. I don't want to rely on Mike Rounds or any of these other people that have come out because you can't prove any of that. I want something you can see in my hands like documents. That's why some of the all the stuff from the past, to me, all these government records about Roswell, about Blue Book, about the cover ups and the history, and I've talked about all that. That's so compelling to me because these are the people who are actually involved in the program who lied about Roswell, then came out and then wrote down, you know, classified records all that that didn't come out for decades later. And you read this and you can't even believe, you know, some of what you're saying. Most of it we've now moved past. So the Disclosure Act, unfortunately, I was even led to believe by a lot of people involved. They said they thought they really were going to get past it. But it really does seem that the two individuals here, Turner and Rogers just just it was a absolute non starter. They were like, this is going this was Tier one, top priority. And then you got to ask yourself, why imagine the JFK thing. If a member of Congress who had such big ties to CIA and Pentagon just blocked the JFK, or somebody like Arlen Spector, if anybody remembers that was he was a senator from Pennsylvania. He was on the Warrant Commission, and he came up with the magic bullet theory. Imagine if at the time that he was lobbying hard openly in the public against jfk assassination. We all know what's happening there, we know why, and yet for somehow with this the press, everybody just moves past it. It's like me and a bunch of other guys on Twitter, I don't understand it. I think everybody just thinks it's wacky and they think it's you know, they don't want to be tainted by looking like a kook.
But this is the Senate majority leader.
This is not you know, this isn't just daily mail articles and things like that are happening well.
And the other dynamic that could be playing out here is, you know, members of Congress can really get in their feelings when they when there's like a turf four and an ego battle too, Like if they feel like they're being lied to and like you know, members of the executive branch are not being upfront with them. That can create a certain dynamic there. But also so it's Turner and Rogers who are the So isn't Turner, the guy who like worked in the defense industry and tastes like tons of like aerospace.
Offense, aerospace defense contractor, dont like in terms of donations, is out in the open.
And wasn't it Rogers, wasn't he like FBI exactly?
This is what I'm saying.
It's just checking that I had to write people in my head.
Look, Brush did an interview with Tucker Carlson yesterday.
I recommend you look at it. You know, he continues to speak out, and it props to the guy. I'm trying to get him here.
On the show as well. I'd like to talk to him a little bit.
But in general, what you continue is it's everything you have now is out in the old open, So it's up to you.
And also it's up to a lot of us.
Like we got close this time around, maybe we can do it next time. But it's going to do it's going to take a long time. I think this is evidence of just how big of an uphill battle the people face just again to get official transparency. I don't know why it should be so difficult, but maybe it tells us something.
So we've got a little viral clip we wanted to share with you guys, amidst all the concern nationwide about harassment and anti Semitism and hate speech on campus. This video went viral of a woman we don't see her on camera and she decides to remain anonymous, apparently wearing.
The Kafia scarf, which is associated.
With Palestinian cause, walking around Cambridge near Harvard and getting harassed and stalked by this woman. I'll go ahead and play it for you, and on the other side, I'll reveal who this woman turns out to be.
Take a look.
Between you and people who wanted to murder you.
Hi, camera, thank you for walking through the neighborhoods and making him families feel unsafe.
With your with your tourist spurtant.
Palestinians felt pretty unsafe when it's really occupied their country.
You know, I'm glad you're sad oftaughter of civilians.
I'm not so she's alleging she's making people feel unsafe by wearing a scarf. Okay, turns out this woman's name is Eve Gerber and she is the wife of former Obama administration official and still very prominent economist who works at at Harvard, Jason Furman. He's a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School. Very much reminiscent of our friend Stuart.
Yeah, Jason Furman literally might be, aside from Thomas Friedman, the most preeminent economist in this country.
I'm not kidding.
Also well fly because he gets in these like Twitter battles and goes on podcasts, very visible, very known and very visible, and obviously was an Obama official. And now his wife is out there. The woman who is wearing the scarf. According to her, Eve Gerbert stopped her car over, pulled over to get out and harass her and accuse her of wearing a quote unquote terrorist scarf and making people feel unsafe. I mean, it's insane on a lot of levels. I also have to comment on the fact that they're like wild turkeys or something.
Yeah, we're wonder I don't know what's going on.
Yeah, anyway, we'll put that part to the side.
But you know, it really shines a light on some of the claims of people feeling unsafe and the crackdowns on campus, on what I would describe as crackdowns on free speech based on people like her saying that a literal scarf is making her feel unsafe. This is insane and it's like outrageous harassment that she's stalking this girl and accusing her of supporting terrorism because of a scarf that she's wearing.
Yeah, it's not.
I mean, that's like the biggest Karen Energy I've ever seen. It's just ridiculous obviously. And yeah, I mean the double standard here in terms of who imagine if the person was wearing a yamaga and walking through Dearborn, Michigan's you think you think that I was gonna.
Go virus someone's stalking them and accusing them where, Yeah, it would be totally I mean that would be front page news. Every politician in America would be getting asked about it. And who was really being made unsafe here? The person who stops her car and like follows this woman because she doesn't like her scarf, or the student who was being stalked by this total psycho.
It's just so it's so crazy to me that somebody who is so rich and so privileged would be driving through their neighborhood and pull their car over just to engage in an altercation with their who did nothing to them, Who's walking through their neighborhood Yet like you said too, with the scarf, I assume that this lady knows what that scarf me A lot of people don't even know what the scarf is. You know, when I lived in the Middle East, everybody had that scarf.
I even had one. We thought it was cool. People even wore it was part of their sob or whatever.
And it was one of those where it wasn't even a statement on Palestin.
It was just a scarf.
It was not even a political statement. What if she had pulled over or said something to somebody who wasn't even doing it, And yet even if they were. I see people who walk around Washington anywhere. You know, in this country, you should to beople wearing Magas shirts whenever being get on a plane.
What are you going to say something to them?
Or is somebody who's wearing like a BLM shirt whenever I'm walking my dog.
Same thing. Let people live. Why do you care?
Makes no It literally has zero impact on your life. And that look, if you are actively threatening one of your neighbors, this is what that's a very different conversation. But you're just walking down the street and somebody yells at you. Yeah, that reminds The only time I've ever experienced something like that is when I wasn't wearing a mask in the middle of the outside, by the way, and I was on the phone and somebody across the street yelled at me.
By the way, listen.
I want to be clear, like this conversation about anti Semitism rising, like I have seen genuine incidents of anti Summitism, you know, here and around the world. I do not doubt for a second that there is an increase in anti Semitism, for a variety of reasons. One of them is that groups like the ADL in so down in quitting every Jewish person in the entire world with a state that is at best pushing for an ethnic cleansing and it worst on its way to a genocide that could make juice unsafe and spike anti Semitism. Of course, it's on the bigots themselves for their actions and for their the hatred that they hold. But when you see things like this, it also calls into question, to say the very least, you know, the ADL puts ount some report that's like, oh, anti Semitic incidents have increased by three hundred percent. Well, is this the kind of thing that you would classify as a quote unquote anti semitic incident. Someone wearing a cafia's scarf or someone protesting at a rally and saying a chant that they don't like is that classified as a quote unquote anti semitic incident? Because apparently this woman wearing the wrong scarf is making Eve Gerber feel that she and others in a neighborhood are unsafe.
Well, you're scratching the service here, Chris Soll.
I've been talking about this for a long time, don't I Basically, and this will be controversial, I don't care. I don't believe most quote unquote hate statistics. Anytime somebody's like, oh it was a hate crime, Like, yeah, what was it? And the reason why is because I don't trust these classification regimes the FBI.
They compile these statistics, they do it based.
Upon local crime stats and all these other but they don't verify the actual criteria.
For the reason why.
For example, I've talked about this before, mass shooting. Well, Obama dropped the mass shooting definition from four to three. Okay, so now there's more mass shootings. Well, are there really more mass shootings? And then what is so called mass shooting. It turns out a huge bulk of people where three people get shot or more are mass suicide? Tragic and gang violence? Are those mass shootings in the same way that a school shooting is. So it's you know, you look at this, it's the same with a lot of these hate speech. Well what do they say? They say the N word, Okay, that's hate speech. Did they say get out of here? It's like, well, what was the context? And I know that this can be controversial, But the reason why I'm so I reject so much of this is I watched all of this come to four in the campus regime and then eventually make its way to the government, where like we said, you know, the hate incident would be somebody like Bubba from NASCAR who says that there's a noose on a tree and ignites like a national incident, and it turns out that that didn't actually happen at all. I've watched too many of these that my now smile at rule and maybe this is callous. Is my default is.
I don't believe you.
I don't you have to prove evidence, because we've just seen too many of these used for disgusting ends. I would apply the same thing to anti semitism. It's like, well, what are we talking about here, Like what's real? Where I went to school, GW famous incident there was a girl who claimed that people were drawing swastikas on her dorm room or maybe around it on her whiteboard or something like that, and this everybody freaked out. GW is a very large Jewish population, so they installed cameras. Secretly, it turned out that the girl was drawing the swastikas herself.
It's like sick. It's like you're sick in the head. It's like you're trying to ignite hatred. But there's a lot of that.
Let's be real in terms of attention seeking, in terms of you know, being at the center of attention and trying to push political narratives. So I would have everybody to urge extra caution every time you see one of these things. Just look for the details the incidents. The SMALLT rule has never failed me, and it.
Disgusts me too, because it means when you use the term for things that are not anti Semitic, like wearing a scarf, for example, then you make the term meaningless. And so when there are genuine incidents. You know, there was a Manora that was apparently a display that was smash. Now we don't know who did it and whatever, but when there are genuine incidents, then you've cheapened the language surrounding it, and you know that's bad for everyone. So the last thing that I'll say about this this video and then we'll get to you know, another one of these sort of like disputed incidents that I felt like we needed to cover because we covered the original video and so anyway, we'll get into that at a minute. But you know, this also comes after those three men of Palestinian origin were shot students, two of whom were wearing the Kafias scarf. Now we still don't know, you know, the details of why they were targeted, but they were walking down the stare read in Vermont, speaking a combination of Arabic and English, two of them wearing the scarf, and then out of nowhere, this dude comes and shoots them. So in any case, you know, there seems to be this scarf inciting a lot of passions that are insane. This is it is a political statement. I don't think that there's anything wrong with making a political statement. With your attire. People should not be stoked. They certainly shouldn't be shot for daring to express solidarity with the Palestinian people. All right, So this other piece, you know, I feel sort of complicated about covering this, but let me just we'll just get into it. Early on, right after October seventh, there were all these protests, and we covered here how there was just like this outright genocidal language that seemed to be coming from all directions.
I think we covered on October ten.
And one of the most prominent examples that we covered and many other news outlets covered, was this protest in Australia where, among other anti Semitic chance, some of the protesters were allegedly chanting gas the Jews. Horrific and noteworthy because in the Australian context, that could actually meet the criminal threshold for threatening or inciting violence, whereas the other antisemitic chants, which have been more confirmed than that one that we're being chanted, would not meet that threshold of inciting violence. So it becomes a huge story here, and certainly in Australia, there's a massive police investigation that was launched, and so far nothing has come out of that. Police investigation. There's an independent Australian outlet, and this is why I was not sure whether to cover this story or not, but I felt like we should since we covered the original video. I don't know anything about this outlet. I did look it up. They seem activist, but somewhat legit. They've been around from since nineteen ninety nine. Anyway, they are claiming that they have sources and we can put this up on the screen, who are giving them information about that investigation go going on into this chant. There has not been any other video that has emerged with people chanting that specific thing.
They say. Nobody can verify it.
The original video was released from this right wing Jewish group called the Australian Jewish Association. They have refused to provide the original video. There was an analysis that was performed by verification experts that found a number of signs that suggest the audio was edited. This review that this outlet Kriiche was able to see, noted that the audio is on a sync with the video in places a section of the audio is repeated during a clip. Some audio was repeated while different clips were being shown. These suggest that additional editing was done. Beyond splicing different video clips together. So in any case, at the best you can say this video has been sort of called into question. Now the other anti Semitic, the f the Jews chants, which are also absolutely horrific, are more confirmed.
So you may say, like, well, why are you parsing this? What does it matter?
There were anti semitic chance, And I would just say for two reasons. Number One, we showed the video and so I feel like it's important to correct the record if it needs to be corrected. Number Two, it's another illustration of how even things to which are widely disseminated by mass media outlets can be called into question. And number three, I do think the details matter, and we've seen this in some of the alleged atrocities which have now been debugged from October seventh. October seventh was horrific enough as it was. You didn't need to add all of these things which have now been debuggd like the beheaded babies and the babies in the oven, and the children that were tied together that Ntanyahu said, we're all burned together. Those things didn't happen. Other horrific atrocities did occur. So in any case, That's why I felt like it was important to cover this clarification about this video and the questions that have been raised about its veracity.
Well, the reason why it's important is because it's set off a firestorm. I think rightfully, if we thought it was real and now it turns out it may not be real, I think that's always important, especially here, for us to correct it and to look at it. And it was used as justification for our why for you know, similar rhetoric I think on a lot of the Israeli sides.
So look, and by the way, if.
Anybody can wants to see if any of that's faked, let me know, I'll be happy to talk about it here. But I think it's important, you know, to look and to make sure that things are real. We've had a number of incidents already, have a lot of fake news that spread everywhere, you know, with a lot of these allegations that were used specifically to hype people up, and just like Iraq, just like post nine eleven and all of that, a lot of it falls apart, but the actions at the time remain the same. Anthrax that's a whole other one. A lot of these things were used for a very specific purpose. It's why again I'm so I am so deeply dubious of almost anything that seems unbelievably, because sometimes it is unbelievable.
All right, Tyler, what you're looking at it?
Well?
President Selenski arrived in Washington Tuesday with a single message, give US sixty one billion in military aid or you are the friend of Putin. He was aided in this message by President Biden and Democrats, who implored Republicans to dropped their demand and for border security in exchange for the AIDS passage. He was also granted a major assist by the US intelligence community, who leaked rosy prospects for Ukraine to the American press. The press predictably lapped it up and breathlessly reported the following Russia has lost nearly ninety percent of its pre war army to death or injury, totaling some three hundred and fifteen thousand losses of the initial three hundred and sixty thousand that stood in the army before the February twenty twenty two invasion. Additionally, they assessed that Russia has lost two thirds of his existing tank force and some twenty two hundred tanks out of existing thirty five hundred. By any metric, this is humiliating. Russia, before the invasion was considered a world class military and while it was not on par with forces from the US or the UK, for example, the idea that they would have trouble conquering Ukraine entirely.
Was not a question.
But then, what the intelligence assessments and the media is not telling you is what does Russia look like today? First and foremost that must be understood is this basic fact. Russia is not a West country. In a normal Western country, when you lose three hundred thousand guys, you have democratic revolt.
In Russia.
The elite genuinely does not care, and the population also doesn't seem to care much. In fact, the most recent independent polling out of Russia tells US seventy five percent of the population supports the war in Ukraine. Bizarrely, the number of death pensions now being paid to widows has actually made the war more popular in the poorest regions. Why because the death benefits more than many of these impoverished people would ever earn in a normal economy. For many, fighting and dying in Ukraine is now a very logical economic choice. Furthermore, Russia has now turned to its eternal strength, its vast population and economic resources to plug the whole. Just days ago, Putin ordered the armed forces to expand to a total of one point three to two million active troops, four times what with the start of the invasion.
For the Ukraine.
There have been no widespread draft riots now in months, so that peers to have solved their manpower issues. And let's turn to the tank production again. It's genuinely embarrassing to lose that many tanks. But what they fail to tell you is that Russia went from a country that in twenty twenty produced only thirty tanks to one that this year has delivered twenty two hundred, the exact number that they lost since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion. Furthermore, they have no dedicated They've now dedicated thirty percent of their entire spending to just defense.
War production has ramped up.
To levels where they outpaced nearly all of NATO in artillery production, and they have achieved a three percent unemployment rate because so many are now imployed in the war effort. War spending alone is not only keeping the economy afloat. It's actually making many Russians better off on the aggregate than they were before. There's actually a good argument to be made Russia is stronger today than they were before the invasion of Ukraine. Yes, they lost three hundred thousand men. That only matters if you care about human life.
They don't.
They've tripled the size of their armed forces. They've tested which tactics that work and don't on the battlefield. They've hardened their supply chain to produce more arms than ever before, with nothing.
The West can do at about it.
As for oil, they are selling it at high prices to nations who don't agree with the Western boycott and will continue to do so.
So that's Russia.
Let's think about Ukraine, which is currently asking for sixty one billion. In his bid for more money, Zelenski actually was forced to admit things are far more dire than appearance's sake. In one of his meetings with senators, he said Ukraine is now considering opening the draft to all men over the age of forty. This comes after Ukraine has already confirmed the average age of its current military is forty three years old. Reminding me of the Army of northern Virginia and its last legs, or Hitler's Volkstrom policy, where teenagers and old men were drafted in the last defense of the German homeland. Ukraine is at a point where its manpower problems are far worse, probably than any military capability problems they have, especially so when it's the only answer to the question of what is your plan to win? If it's based on having fifty year old men run into a trench for another year at the chance of a few square miles of territory before peace negotiation is launched, what are we doing here? The answer is simple. Our policy towards Ukraine has been nothing short of a disaster. Russia is militarily stronger, Ukraine appears on the brink of literal societal collapse. If this continues for another year. NATO is actually weaker than it was before the invasion. Two years into the war, France now has the number of heavy artillery pieces that Russia loses every month. Germany has enough AMMO to last two days of war. The last in the UK is now considering taking out museum tanks and giving them to Ukraine because they cannot produce enough. The theory behind the US support was to strengthen NATO. In reality it has been to cover for them so they don't have to take care of their own backyard.
Every single metric the policy he has failed.
If the West is not wise up here, there will not be a Ukraine to seek a peace deal because Russia will just achieve outright total military victory. Billions of dollars are already been wasted. Hundreds of thousands are dead. This is what America has to show for it just the latest in a string of strategic defeats since Vietnam. It is obviously time to try something very very different. How crazy is that? The museum piece angle and also on.
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Thank you so much for watching. We really appreciate it. We've got the RFK junior interview later on. It will post for our premium subscribers later today, and then it will be available widely for everybody tomorrow. Stay tuned, become a Supremium member if you can, and we will see you all later.