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4/30/24: Young Voters Abandon Biden Over Israel, Biden Hits 70 Year Approval Low, Heated Campus Protest Debate, Israel Deems Men In Rafah Hamas, Mearsheimer Wrecks Piers Morgan, Professor Claims Campus Protests Due To No Sex, Jill Stein On Her 2024 Campaign

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Published Apr 30, 2024, 3:40 PM

Krystal and Saagar discuss young voters abandoning Biden over Israel, Biden approval hits 70 year low, heated debate on campus protests, Israel deems all men in Rafah Hamas, John Mearsheimer wrecks Piers Morgan, professor claims Gaza protests are caused by lack of sex, and Jill Stein joins to discuss her 2024 campaign.

 

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Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here, and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.

We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio ad staff give you, guys, the best independent.

Coverage that is possible.

If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody, Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal, Indeed we do.

There's a hell of a lot unfolding around the country as we speak.

We're going to start the show with some additional exclusive polls here with Jail Partners about how Israel may impact twenty twenty four. We've got it broken down by age demographic and pretty fascinating look at how different age groups are viewing this conflict. We've also got a look at a new bad poll for by actually a couple new bad polls for Biden, both in terms of the overall general electorate and also in terms of the battleground states.

We've been tracking some wild crackdowns. We've got some unbelievable video for you coming out of ut Austin. We also have at Columbia student protesters have taken over the same campus building that they did back in nineteen sixty eight, obviously very intentional there. Also getting reports out of Virginia's VCU where they are tear gassed protesters, So a lot unfolding there. We're also taking a look this morning at the housing market and a little bit of a helpful story some state and federal pushback on the trend of Wall Street buying up single family housing and making it wildly unaffordable. Something a little bit hopeful there. Something not so hopeful though.

Israel is reportedly preparing to install checkpoints to make sure that men are locked into RAFA when they begin they're all out assault. Take a look at that, and also some recent comments from Tony Blincoln and potential progress on ceasefire ICC, possible arrest warrants. A lot going on there. We also want to show you a notable exchange between Piers Morgan and John Mehersheimer. Very interesting, it's so good, very divergent ideological views of America's role in the world, So worth getting into that.

I've got a monologue.

I'm looking ahead all of the people who are so very confused why anyone would protest their government helping to participate in genocide in the Gaza.

Strip and big news.

Essential candidate for the Green Party, doctor Jill Stein, is going to join us. Very noteworthy for her to be here this week. We showed you yesterday she was arrested and assaulted by a police officer with a bike. Want to check in on how she's doing and what her goals are for her campaign.

So really honest to be joined by her this y Yeah.

We got really lucky.

We booked her a long time ago and then it just so happened that this entire thing had happened. So we're going to debrief the incident with her, if we appreciate. Everybody's been signing up to support us. So we had that exclusive poll yesterday. We're going to debut even more of the information. Now today we've got a candidate interview here with Jill Stein. So this is really what we're all about, which is doing something that mainstream media is physically incapable of actually asking real questions, delving into their effect. We're showing everything that we've got to you and with Jill Stein, we're going to hear her out the way that we will hear out any independent candidate for president, given the fact that she's going to get ballot access most likely in many of these states, and of course was blamed for Hillary's loss in twenty sixteen, she was blamed.

Obviously, it's complete bs.

We are very proud to be able to give her a platform to hear her out and speak for democracy. So she will have a highly consequential role in this election. We're going to give her the due that most people are not willing to do. So anyway you can help us out at Breakingpoints dot com, we would really appreciate it. As Christl said, though, we do have a lot more exclusive polling. Today, we're going to break it down in terms of how Americans feel about the Israel Palestine conflict. And we're also going to break it down by age. So why don't we go ahead and start with our very first one. We can go and put this up there on the screen. These are the top line numbers, guys. As a reminder, who do you most trust to handle foreign policy on the Israel Palestine conflict.

There's a bad number here for.

Joe Biden, Joe Biden thirty one percent, Donald Trump thirty five percent, Robert Kennedy Junior nine percent don't know at twenty five percent, So obviously a little bit there up for grabs.

But let's break it down by age now if we can go.

To the next one, because this is the most consequential, and I'm just going to read for by age demographic as it is before you, guys, so you understand again the question is who do you most trust to handle foreign policy on the Israel Palestine conflict. So starting with the eighteen to twenty nine demographic, Joe Biden twenty one percent, Donald Trump thirty one percent, Robert Kennedy Junior thirteen percent, don't know thirty six percent. Now we're moving to the thirty to forty nine twenty eight percent for Joe Biden, thirty four percent for Donald Trump, twelve percent for Robert Kennedy Junior, twenty six percent for don't know. For fifty to sixty four, we have thirty five percent Joe Biden, thirty six percent, Donald Trump seven percent, Robert Kennedy Junior twenty two percent for don't know. But then amongst boomers, this is where things get interesting, sixty five plus thirty nine percent for Joe Biden, forty percent for Donald Trump, five percent for RFK Junior, sixteen percent for don't know. So it is very clear here again, Crystal, that Joe Biden's best numbers on who you trust for Israel Palestine are amongst the fifty to sixty four and the sixty five plus demographic, relatively tied with Donald Trump in those two. But when you go actually to younger voters, it is Trump who leads, presumably amongst younger Republicans, but Joe Biden has absolutely no trust amongst the younger demographics.

Oh yeah, yeah, Well, if you look at every single age demographic, I mean, many of these are within the margin of ra especially among the older groups, but Trump edges them ount in every category. So listen the reality, of course, in terms of how they would handle this conflict, it's probably very similar. All three of these candidates are extremely pro Israel, basically locksteck step in their views. We're going to talk later about, you know, Trump truth that they need to stop the protests. So he's a little more like vociferous and clear in his language. But Joe Biden has been overseeing this authoritarian crackdown.

Don't know what RFK Junior would do. Haven't heard him comment.

On this specifically, not that he hasn't said anything. I haven't seen him say anything. But they're basically aligned on the policy. So there's not a lot here to dissent from. But in terms of the political impact, you know, it continues to show that for young people in particular, there is a sizable minority. I'm not saying it's a majority, but a sizable minority for whom this is the number one issue. This is the issue they will vote or not vote on, and he's lost them. I don't think there's anything he could do at this point to make it up to them, because it's been almost seven months now. They've watched these horrors unfold. They've seen the way they've been routinely smeared from the White House podium, and yeah, all of your cajoling is not going to do any good. And they're like, your guy is helping with the genocide and by the way, smears us at every single chance that he gets.

You don't want.

So it is a dire political situation for Joe Biden.

Something I was thinking about too, is that there's an more honest pro Israel support for Donald Trump, because Trump doesn't even pretend, whereas with Biden. He does basically have the same policy visa of the Israel, but then rhetorically, you know, is of course trying to appease like you know, human rights concerns and others. RFK Junior also the same much like Trumps just like, yeah, I support Israel like one hundred percent. So you know, in a certain way, there's an honest, like at least representation I think by both Trump and I guess RFK Junior to a certain extent, Whereas with Biden. You know, on a policy level, anybody who's smart enough to pay attention to the conflict, they know there's also about him having the power, like he actually has the powers and acted that.

And I think that's the key part.

That's it is if you look at his overall approval ratings and other polls on Israel Palestine, it's one of it is the worst area for him because you have people who are vehemently pro Israel, who are like, how dare you even suggest that Israel should exactly writing things in or say that that's over the top. Their response and then you have people who are like this as a genocide, and I hate that you're overseeing a genocide. I mean, you know, I'm not alone and feeling like many of the things I was most terrified under Trump are coming true before my eyes under Joe Biden. So yeah, you are really not pleasing anyone at this point. You're certainly not pleasing your own base, which is wildly at odds with what your policy has truly been. And the bottom line is, this isn't unfolding under Donald Trump, it isn't unfolding under RFK Junior. It's unfolding under your watch. And so if people who are not happy with the direction of the policy in any direction, they're gonna blame you. So it makes sense from that perspective that you know Donald Trump would edge him out. But it's not like he has a huge clear lead here on the conflict either, because I don't think people feel like he's particularly trustworthy when it comes to foreign affairs either.

I think we can think of Israel like abortion.

It is a very animating issue for some people, and amongst those people, they're going to have real witness. Taks Yea from talking more about in the pro life community in particular, and so if we think about it that way, it actually makes sense electorally.

You're going to see this in our next graphic.

Let's go and put this up there on the screen, because this illustrates a little bit of what we're talking about. How do you feel Joe Biden is handling the conflict? So doing well is twenty seven percent neither well or badly, eighteen percent doing badly, forty nine percent don't know. Six Let's go to the next part. This again breaks it down by age. I'll start with eighteen to twenty nine demographic for Joe Biden doing well eighteen percent neither, seventeen percent doing badly, fifty four percent, eleven percent is don't know.

Yeah, that's right, majority of people.

Now, actually, amongst the thirty to forty nine, you see similar numbers. Twenty six percent say he's doing well, eighteen percent neither, doing badly is forty eight percent. That's, you know, forty eight percent of people. That's a pretty decent amount, definitely plurality within that age group. And then don't know at eight fifty to sixty four you see similar twenty nine percent doing well, twenty one percent neither well or badly, forty seven percent doing badly, three percent don't know. And then amongst boomers, this again there's some interesting numbers. Thirty two percent doing well, so definitely the highest percentage of people say it's doing well, fourteen percent saying neither well or badly, so basically a wash. But you still got a full fifty fifty percent of people boomer saying doing badly, probably more pro Israel in the way that they think about it in four percent say don't know. So interesting that the fifty plus demographic has more definite opinions on where he's doing well or badly, but there is a sizeable doing badly.

Figure. Let's go to the next one, because this is probably.

Near majorities in every single age group. That's right, even with the option of don't know, it's still near majorities in every age group.

That's like, you suck absolutely. Now, this is the key question. Actually, are you more or less likely to support a candidate as strong as supports Israel more likely thirty five percent, doesn't matter, thirty one percent less likely, eighteen percent don't know, sixteen so it is not a you know majority, It's not even the biggest number by far. In this Israel is a wash for most people, and that makes sense. But again amongst that fervor, let's break it down by age, because this is where it matters the most. Are you more or less likely to support a candidate strong in sports is real? Amongst eighteen to twenty nine, Here we see twenty four percent more likely, twenty six percent doesn't matter. But you've got a third who're saying thirty one percent less likely, eighteen percent don't know. Now amongst the rest of the age groups, so like, for example, thirty to forty nine, twenty seven percent more likely, thirty five percent doesn't matter, nineteen percent less likely, twenty percent don't know, fifty to sixty four thirty five percent more likely, thirty four percent doesn't matter, fifteen percent less likely, sixteen percent don't know. But then here amongst boomers you can actually see the switch. Fifty six percent say more likely to support somebody who's strongly supports is reel, twenty seven percent don't know, less likely, eight and ten amongst that don't know.

Figure for the boomer.

So overall you've got a pretty decent chunk there of eighteen to twenty nine year olds in the less likely category, and then you've got a big chunk there of boomers in the more likely category. So that is the big generation square off their crystal overall. Again, I mean, nobody should pretend the entire election is going to be determined on this. The question is only about this, you know. Again, the pro lifers pro lifers within the GOP maybe twenty percent, fifteen percent, you know, at best, but they rule the day for a reason, because you needed them to get you over that finish line. So we should think about it as a minority which has sizeable voting power and is a very important part of the overall constituency because of young voters and their importance for turnout in a high turnout election.

Well that's the thing. No one's saying this is going to be the top issue for everyone, but given what is likely to be a very close election, it actually could be determinative. You only need a relatively small minority of people who are voting on this issue for it to be the determinative factor. I'm looking at Listen, anytime you look at these subsamples in one poll taken with grains of salt, et cetera. But in the recent CNN poll among voters age eighteen to thirty five, you've got Trump beating Biden by eleven points, Trump beating Biden among young voters by eleven points. As a reminder, back in April of twenty twenty, heading into that election, Biden was up on Trump by thirty one points in this same pole. So not all of that is Israel Pales nine, but some of it is because we know how we can see what's unfolding on college campuses around the country, we can see how important this issue is to a certain segment of young voters in particular, and so in fact, it really could be determinative. We also asked that question the other way, in terms of are you more or less likely to support a candidate that strongly supports palastine and can put these numbers up on the screen. So here you've got the top line numbers, and you've got eighteen percent who are saying it's more likely, and you've got thirty one percent plurality saying it's less likely. Thirty another thirty one percent say I don't really care. Let's put the age numbers up, because once again you see the divide among the youngest demographic thirty six percent say, hey, if that cand it strongly supports Palestine, that makes me more likely to want to vote for them, and the less likely category is only twenty three percent. Total reversal among you know, the older you go up the demographic chain, you've got Among sixty five plus, only seven percent say support for Palestine makes them more likely and forty eight percent say that it makes it less likely. And also keep in mind, you know, we also broke out these pull numbers by media consumption habits, and it's exactly what you'd expect. Young voters are overwhelmingly a majority strong Madri I think was like fifty nine percent are getting their news from social media to include TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, and older voters are overwhelmingly getting there is from cable news. Now, part of that is those platforms, because those the demographics they're serving, they serve content that fits their pre existing views. And part of that is, I would say, in particular when it comes to cable news, shaping their view of the conflict and really helping to reinforce and further strengthen this divide between the demographics. But that's also an important part of what we're seeing here and you know, it also helps make sense why like Joe Biden, for example, in spite of the fact that the Democratic Party is not with him on this policy. But as you point out over and over again, I mean young people, they vote, but it's not in the same numbers as the oldest demographics. Not to mention, Joe Biden is three hundred and twenty three years old, So these are the people that he like, identifies with most and who shares their worldview. So it's both ideological and it's political. And then when you add in the influence of APAC money and the military industrial conflict complex, that's how you end up with this very flexing situation where you've got a Democratic president who seems to be willing to sacrifice his own reelection because in his political career it has never politically been the wrong move to support Israel too strongly. No politician in his experience has ever paid a price for that. He may here be the first one. Given how clearly animating this is for young voters above all other demographics.

It's very possible.

Again, you know, we have no idea what effect this will all have on the margins, but this is and I have to put numbers here behind this, because people get angry, they're like, what do you mean young people don't vote? Only about fifty two percent of eligible voters between eighteen to twenty nine voted in the twenty twenty election, and that was eight percent higher than the twenty and sixteen election.

Just so people understand.

So actually, in twenty sixteen, the majority of young people didn't vote who were eligible to vote. Now, what do everybody think that the number is? For the boomers age sixty five plus, seventy percent of them voted in this twenty sixteen election, seventy four percent of them voted in the twenty twenty election. Now, if we're a high turnout elect twenty twenty is a record high for turnout, there's actually no expectation that we should come even close to that if we see changes, let's say, and vote by mail or in general. I mean, twenty twenty was just such a high tension political year in a lot of respects. While people are upset, people feel a little bit more tuned out than ever from politics today. We know that, by the way, from data. There is tons of data out there that shows that news consumption not our show necessarily, but like all for general election news is at a record low for this time around. Yeah, that is very indicative of people tuning out, which means they're not going to vote. So if we have a lower turnout election, you have you burn out. You turn out at like, you know, forty to fifty percent again, but the boomer turnout remains steady at normal levels, or just say it normalized this to seventy again, you're going to see a big increase in the amount of people who are voting who are older. Now, a lot of changes to this right, Abortion scrambled everything. So don't get me wrong. If anything, I personally would bet on record high Democratic women turnout more than anything because of abortion. Now, those people, you know, I don't know what they feel about Israel, but I know they definitely care about abortion more than anything else. So they're still going to be coming out. I wouldn't write Biden off. I continue to see that though, Crystal. There are a lot of people out there who are like Biden is cooked and all that. But you know, having sat in the studio for the twenty twenty two election, it just been burned, you know, and seen too much with the referendums and all that I refuse to discount any you know, context of a surprise because of the abortion question, which I always want to lay out in these segments.

In my view, it's really fifty fifty.

I agree with that.

I really think it's fifty to fifty.

I mean, on the one hand, obviously, as we're talking about Joe Biden has huge issues with young people. He does huge issues if you look at his approvalry. I mean, this is supposed to be the core of the Democratic base, and they hate his guts. I mean, his approval rating is at its lowest among that demographic.

That should be the verse.

He should, judging by recent Democratic Party history, have his highest approval rating among young voters, and they despise him. Abortion is the other side of the coin, though. I mean, it's a disaster for the Royal Republican Party, and it has specifically been a disaster provably in election after election for Republicans. So it's not just ballid initiatives. It really has translated into strong democratic performance when people actually have to show up and vote. On the other hand, those are special elections that turn out as smaller what happens in a general election. There are way too many factors, and the polls are way too unreliable to actually say who is up, who was down, how this is all likely to unfold. And then you also have all the Trump courtroom drama, which God knows what that's going to do, if anything. So anyone who's telling you like, for sure this person's going to win it, for sure that person's going to win, they have no idea.

They have no idea. We have no idea.

All we can tell you is some of the factors that are going into this mix, and it is a truly complicated brup.

We are only trying to present you what most people don't. And this is my biggest problem with cable is that they are all about just single narratives. They don't prepare their audiences for I mean, it would be the easiest thing in the world Biden has cooked. That's an easy way to get views. We're not going to lie to you people because you look like an idiot, you know, and that's a lot of people did look that way back in twenty twenty two. It's very important what we're trying to do here is present the whole picture for what everybody can take away. So thank you for supporting this polling, because it really does, you know, help me at least understand like the effects of it and kind of wrap my head around it.

And I hope it does the same for everybody too.

Let's get to some of those general election polls that we're talking about and some of the mainstream media who are now all noticing a very consistent trend. Every poll that there is that exists. Maybe it's flawed, maybe it's not. It certainly shows Trump with a massive edge. Here is CNN admitting as such on their own program.

Let's take a listen.

Our new poll, which was conducted by SSRs, finds is leading Biden, who has ample work to do with his base and with independent voters who were breaking to his GOP rival and the head to head raise, Forty nine percent of voters say they'd picked Trump for president, compared to forty three percent for Biden. That's a nine point Trump advantage with independent voters. And add in third party candidates and Trump's lead jumps even more. He has forty two percent to Biden's thirty three percent, and Robert F. Kennedy Junior gets sixteen percent of the vote. Our poll also underscores the challenges of incumbency and that voters four years later have a better view of Trump's presidency compared to Biden's fifty five percent say Trump's time in office was success, with only thirty nine percent saying the same about Biden's presidency.

So you can see that there's a huge disapproval there with Joe Biden. You can see Trump almost six point lead outside the margin of error being admitted. And again, you know, the other confounding variable here for the Biden question is just about how people feel about him.

Let's put this up there please. I mean, this is just straordinary.

This is not something that you want as your headline that is going in to the election. Biden is the least popular president in seventy years, below even Nixon and Jimmy Carter. At this point in his presidency, Trump, whenever he was in this part of his presidency, had a forty six percent approval rating ahead of the election. Keep in mind that was during the COVID nightmare back in April of twenty twenty. Think about how insane that period was. Even Nixon and Carter had fifty three and forty seven percent respectively. I mean, Eisenhower had a seventy three percent. He was the highest there at this point in his presidency. But Biden really is in a league of his own in terms of low approval. Now I want to say this is the caveat, and I've been thinking about this a lot. There are two elections that this will turn out to be. It's either going to be nineteen sixty eight, which I did a hole monologue on, or it's going to be nineteen forty eight.

And let me explain. Nineteen forty eight was Harry S.

Truman. He went into the election historically unpopular. People were fed up, union strikes, there was rapid inflation, but there was, you know, all this change after post World War two Korea, there was like there was a crisis. The Berlin Lyft. Korea came a little bit later, but more what I'm saying is there's a lot of geopolitical you know, consternation, and every poll that was out there, the Gallup polling, I think it was a major one at the time, was like Truman's cook, there's nowhere, never going to happen. Truman ends up mounting kind of a run from behind campaign. The famous Dewey defeats Truman, which if he holds up, and he ends up winning based upon flogging the rest of the political establishment, saying that Thomas Dewey and that do nothing Congress were the real ones that were responsible for the problem, not him, and he gets himself elected as a shock to the entire country. The other inverse is, like I said nineteen sixty eight, nineteen sixty eight, where you see a split of the Democratic coalition over Vietnam, you have all the chaos of RFK Junior, RFK Senior. They're you know, dividing the coalition. Hubert Humphrey, he's unable to consolidate that. You have a third party candidate like George Wallace. It's about thirteen percent of the vote in the South. Richard Nixon is able to carry it law and order message about forty percent of the vote for popular vote. He ends up winning a stunning electoral college victory. So one of those two is going to happen. If Biden wins, is going to be forty eight. And if Biden loses, I think it's going to be in nineteen sixty eight.

Very interesting, very interesting. I mean I just keep thinking about, like, what are the core reasons people voted for Joe Biden in the first place because they thought he was like a nice guy, because they wanted to end the chaos.

That's it.

Yeah, Well they don't think he's a nice guy anymore. He's not a nice guy. Regardless of what you know they said at the White House Correspondence dinner about how decent he is whatever, He's not a good guy if people don't feel that way about him anymore. And number two, there's chaos. So you're not making an affirmative case for your presidence. You haven't bothered to tell anyone that you're even going to like try to do anything in particular with the second term. So why would what is the affirmative case for Joe Biden's time around. On the other hand, people were really frigging hey, Donald Trump to and they don't necessarily want to go back to that time period either. And the more that we get into the election cycle, you know, it's early, like right now, yes, CNN's numbers say people have fond memories of the Trump time period. They think it was more successful than the Biden time period. You know, there's a little bit of rose colored glasses there and whatever. But as we get more into the election cycle, and people have to deal with Donald Trump in their face all day every day, in his court romantics and whatever the hell else he's going to say and do it between now an election day, does that change the feeling is abortion is the rollback of rights that people had kind of taken for granted and the horror stories that we're seeing in state after state after state. Does that end up being the determinive factor? Because it's certainly, you know, if we're looking at the election results so far, it really has been, and that in that way, the polls have actually been skewed against Democrats. Democrats have been outperforming the polls in a lot of these places because they are not anticipating the surge of voters who are disgusted with extremist abortion policy and states and localities across the country. So that's the landscape we're looking at. And then you know, there's a lot of questions about obviously they have poured gasoline on the fire about to talk about some of the extraordinary, very nineteen sixty eight esque scenes playing out in college campuses across the country. This really does divide the Democratic base. It also really pretends very ill for how the DNC is going to go and the level of chaos that is going to be on display there as you know, Joe Biden continues his unconditional support for Israel no matter what. We don't know what is about to happen with regards to RAFA and the additional whores that could unfold there. So there's just a you know, there's a lot going on. And the bottom line is this is the election that almost no one wanted. No one wanted this rematch, no one wanted it. But there was very little Democrat There was basically democracy completely shut out on the Democratic side, the Republican base still very fond of Trump, and you know, very little contest ultimately there either And so the overwhelming majority of Americans who were like, isn't there anyone else we could run? Aren't there any other choices from the two major parties we could have?

No?

And that's why you see such low interest and excitement about this election cycle, because the people who are going to actually, you know, actually going to throw this election one way or the other are the people who say, I don't like either of these dudes, I don't want either of them to be president. But I guess at the end of the day, I have to pick. So that's where we are as a country. It's not exactly an aspirational choice.

No, it is not aspirational. That's why, you know, if I had to bet, it's so hard to pick. Obviously, I don't know what's going to happen. But part of the thing that did happen in nineteen sixty eight is there also was not a lot of excitement. Remember, people knew Richard Nixon, and they knew a lot about him, and they didn't necessarily like him all that much. People also knew a lot about Hubert Humphrey. His name may be dead today, but at the time he was the vice president, he was a very known quantity. He was a star Democrat, but they didn't trust him because he was taught by LBJ. There was not a lot of insightment. People really felt like under attack in nineteen sixty eight, and there was like a chaos in this in the middle of the chest, which is something that I would probably say is very analogous today. Let's put the next one up there on the screen. You can also see this too, which is what Chrystal was talking about in terms of how tight things are going to be the latest CBS News poll out of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, the so called what is it Blue Walls, I think we dropped out, Well, what are the polls there?

So very very tight race, very tight race.

Now currently, what we see in Michigan if you look at the current rating for how people say the state of the economy is thirty eight percent in Michigan, thirty eight percent Pennsylvania, forty two percent Wisconsin.

But then look at how people feel about Trump.

Looking back during the Trump era, here was whether they think the economy was good sixty two percent, sixty one percent, sixty two percent. That is such a strong number that I just can't get over. It was highly determinative. If you look at the end of the year since the COVID pandemic, whether people think the things have gotten better. It's in the twenties for people in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If you look at people who say understands people like me. For Biden, in August of twenty twenty, it was at forty four percent today it's forty For Trump, it was thirty seven percent now it's forty two.

So but Trump is actually beating.

Biden category that Biden used to have that John.

That is one of the most important things about him, is like, yeah, I no, he says crazy stuff, but he seems like a nice guy and he feels like he understands me. And that's one of those two where if you look at each one of these states, how does Biden make you feel? Worried? Number one response in the state of Pennsylvania. Worried number one response in the state of Pennsylvania. If you look at who you rate the state of if you basically if you just look at finances where they're doing better, it's in the twenties and all three states. So it's like on all the pocketbook stuff, all the traditional rules of politics, Like I said, Biden should be cooked. This should not even be a question. He's Jimmy Carter and there's no a single thing but Trump. I mean, you know the fact that it's still tight. He's got his own confounding variables there. Yeah, and it is very possible that he could still lose. One of the things I looked at is also state by state Senate elections, which can be very predictive. Carrie Lake right now is down by like double digits in Arizona. She really, Yeah, it's a disaster. Same thing in Pennsylvania. Bob Casey is crushing David McCormick for ten percent. So that's another one you want to look at too, because you take Biden Trump out of it and you see a huge lead for the Democrat there. That's another sign. Sometimes sometimes you know, split ticket of voting in these days very very rare, so it could indicate some hidden Democratic strength.

Interesting, that is very interesting. I mean the irony is I think if Democrats had chosen like, you know, random relatively generic Democrat, I think they be beating Trump pretty easily. I think if Republicans had chosen you know, random relatively generic Republican, I think they be biting beating bind very easily. It's like, you know, so they both put up their like weakest possible contenders, and yeah, we'll see who wins.

I don't know, see how she all plays out.

We'll see, folks, it's going to be a fun one.

A lot of time between now and then. Let's go ahead and get to some of what is unfolding around the country, some extraordinary scenes. We want to start at Columbia University, which really has been kind of ground zero for these protests and for the crackdown on these protests. So we can put these images up on the screen. You're talking about the echoes of nineteen sixty eight. So here we have protesters taking over Hamilton Hall on campus that was one of the same buildings that nineteen sixty eight anti Vietnam War protesters took over at that time. You can see they have hung a flag that says hins Hall. That's a reference to that little girl who It was horrible. I did a whole modelogue about it.

She was in a.

Car, her family was killed by an IDF strike. She was still alive, she was able to call the Red Crescent. She was begging for them to and help her. They stayed on the line with her, they got the route deconflicted so they could come and save her. And not only was she assassinated by the IDF, this little six year old, adorable girl, but her would be rescuers also assassinated by the IDF and documented on the scene. That ambulance coming to save her was just a block away. So Hinshall in honor of Hint and her loss of life. So again, these echoes of nineteen sixty eight now being very intentionally stoked, and that connectivity very intentionally created by the protesters at Columbia. I'll give you some more updates on Columbia in a minute, because I want to show you some of the scenes out of ut Austin, where Texas Governor Greg Abbott has decided to go full crackdown mode. Any of his pretend pretenses around free speech clearly gone. Here you can see police taking out someone carrying them their hands are found. Here, you see these officers coming in in what appears to be riot gear, approaching the student protesters. Here you see some cop beating the hell out of someone. Fist flying there as you know, the cops are pushing up against the protesters. Here we see people being sprayed mace I assume, as they try to clear on this this area, in this encampment.

And then this is incredible.

So after the police cleared the whole area, this is protesters coming back in and the police actually having to retreat.

And then this is my favorite.

I don't know if you guys can hear this in the background, but they're chanting you failed Uvaldi. Because DPS was there on the scene at Valdi and While they're pretty courageous when it comes to beating up unarmed college kids, not so courageous when it came to rescuing these poor babies who were trapped and being murdered inside of that elementary school and ultimately bleeding. So just extraordinary scenes there. I don't know how many arrests were made, but student protesters at u T Austin very determined, even in spite of the crackdown, to come back in and reset up the encampment, restart the protest. Reportedly soccer from the scenes on the ground, the protests have only grown in size as a result of this attempted crackdown. So we can put Greg Abbott's sweet up on the screen. Like I said, all of his free speech commentary previously is now out the window. He says, no encampments will be allowed. Instead, arrests are being made. Your thoughts on what is unfolding there.

It does look like about one hundred demonstra This is k kV U E ABC got to give a shout out to the local media and they're seeing at least one hundred demonstrators there arrested. Returning back to that Hamilton Hall, that monologue that I gave, Yeah, it's very significant.

I mean, they obviously did it on purpose.

So nineteen sixty eight, that building, Hamilton Hall, was actually occupied by the VA non war protesters and they barricaded themselves inside.

I will say, maybe.

You'll disagree with me, Crystal, I think it was a mistake because one of the reasons one of the things that they did is a significant amount of property destruction. And they blew open the doors with with metal, you know, and broke the glass and all of that. You can think that's significantly if you want, but once you crossed into the line of straight up property damage, and you know, we're no longer in the real realm of like camping on private property, which is university and that obviously you know, it's very different. It's actual like destruction of property. That and barricading themselves inside vandalization. You're setting yourself up for some sort of police demonstration. And so I'll be honest, I think it was a mistake what they did because destroying property and vandalizing. Now at the same time, look Columbia, you know, I don't really know what their deal is because Columbia says the Columbia is like you haved until two pm, and we were all prepared. We were like, Okay, here we go, let's go. And then two pm comes and goes and nothing happen, and the Columbia University faculty are all there and then they start getting suspended, but there's no actual enforcement. So in a certain sense, it's like you're setting deadlines and then nothing is happening. So I feel like they've chosen the worst of all worlds. If you're gonna have rules, you're going to enforce them and enforce them. But if not, they're in this tricky situation. I will also say, in the student's defense, one of the things that Columbia prides itself on is its history of student activism, right, and they sell themselves about like, listen, we are so sorry about what happened in nineteen sixty eight, and it was a huge on their website to go it.

Yet literally it took a decade to recover.

From that leaders of activists, So in a certain sense, Columbia does not have anybody but itself to blame. But I do think it was a huge mistake to vandalize property and to break into the building, because you're setting yourself up for a crackdown. And I've said this before. You know, as long as people are peaceful, I think it's fine. But you start breaking stuff, burning stuff, vandalizing stuff, I'm not gonna lost EmPATH before.

Well, here's the thing in terms of Columbia's response, because they threw everything at these students for a holy, peaceful protest.

And in the beginning, you're in the beginning.

Yes, they broad in the cops, they threatened the National Guard, they suspended students indiscriminately. And so when you throw the whole kitchen sink at them to begin with, well, you got nothing left, They got nothing left to fear. I mean, this is something that I've come to realize as a parent in terms of, like, you know, disciplining children.

It's your biggest fears.

They realize that, like you don't actually have any power over them. Carefully, Ella don't want the same, but at a certain extent, like you know, I can't, I can ground, I can tell you away the foot. Once you've done all the things, what else is there to do? And so that's what Columbia did here. They're cracked out at the beginning, was so aggressive, We're gonna send in the cops and it's going to be aggressive, and we're threatened the National Guard and all these politicians are gonna they're gonna smear its anti semis, we're going to kick you on a school and you're we're gonna graduate.

You're not allowed to set foot on campus.

And when the students were like, all right, well that's happened, what else is there left to be threatened with?

I agree, which is what you're pointing to is And this is why it was such a mistake to initially send in the NYPD, because initially this is a peaceful protest. Yes they're in violation of rules, but it was they sent in the cops and then there was a huge backlash, and then they tried negotiation, and that's a big mistake because, as you said, you're suspending people, you're sending in the cops, and you're kind of boxing people into a corner. But then you're giving them deadlines. You're not enforcing the deadlines because you're obviously, look, these people, they have no idea what to do. They're terrified of the headline and sending in the NYPD again and inviting a new backlash, and so they kind of ratcheted up the ante. I mean, if you think about it, this is a bad analogy, but it's like a prison, right, So it's like when you have good behavior and then you have a violation of that.

I just watched that whole Unlocked thing on Netflix, but.

It's very instructive about how people feel and like, like you were saying about enforcement and rules, is okay, if you have a medium in action, you should be met with a medium sized reasonable response. So the reasonable response at that time would have been to do what they did in the interim, which is meet with them and be like, okay, guys, like what's going on here. Hey, we have commencement in two weeks. You're all going home. If you don't clear out, you're gonna get suspended. That's going to be a problem, and you don't want that. You've paid all this money. You know, we have all this going on, and I think you know that we're we're talking about lowering tension. But they threw the cops in. There was a huge mistake that said. Now though, you know, by box people into a corner and also kind of both throwing the cops and then backing down, they've set very unclear expectations, and now we have property damage and a wholesale you know, occupation of the hall, and unfortunately, I do think it's going to end in some tear gas or something, and there's no other what other options they have, there's no other way to clear people out. You're gonna barricade yourself inside of the hall, Like, what are you going to do? And especially if they start vandalizing, which they already did, you know to get in there.

Well you should just you know, do what students want you to do, which is to divest.

No, no, I know, I know, but that's.

Not gonna happen. But yeah, but why not? Unstand that? But why not?

Because there was a vote Columbia barn and it was overwhelming in favor of diving out.

But the students don't control the endowment.

But like, if you have faculty and students that are overwhelmingly like, just do this thing, then why not just do that thing?

And then you won't have.

Your whole occupied and you won't have to send in the cops, et cetera. But you know, I think bottom line is, like I said, these students have already been kicked on school and arrested, so.

There will summary. We don't we don't really know. Here's what I also would say this, don't throw your future away for this.

I know some of these protesters. Please don't do this. Your parents spent a lot of mine.

I disagree with you.

You want to get your spell if they're like, what are you going to do?

These are people who have agency and who feel like they're standing against the genocide and I can't.

I'm proud of them. I think it's incredible.

Be a footnote to history. You're going to be in some idiot long YouTube and me but who can talk to you will know you're not going to have a degree. You will know a bunch of money.

There are more things to achieve in life than like getting your startup funded or getting hired by Wall Street.

Yeah, they're gonna know.

You do you can be a teacher, you know.

These are Yes, these are young people, but they're also adults, and they're also perfectly capable of making their own decisions about what's important to them in their lives and the way that they want to live. They're not buying into this crap, this part of actually what's in my monologue. They're not buying into this crop about the only success that matters is success in terms of a capitalist marketplace. They have values. Those values are important to them. They're willing to I think it's incredibly admirable that they're willing to sacrifice in many instances for people they don't know and we'll never meet. Like that's extraordinary and I think it's brave. I think they're to be commended, not scolded for making the wrong life decisions.

I'm not going to scold anybody. I'm telling you I wouldn't do it, and you're.

Not doing it. You didn't do it, and it's fine.

But ten years ago, nobody remembers a fucking thing that I said. And there's a good reason for that. You do, but you do, no, I certainly do.

You do a lot.

And they will know when they're old and gray and they look back and everyone else is pretending to have been on the right side, they will know where they were, and they will know what they can tell their kids about what they do.

That's not going to feed you or your kids.

I mean, ask some of these Vietnam War people how it all worked out for them, and what is it nineteen that's twenty years later, So nineteen eighty eight, we elected Reagan. You know, we had your own contra and all that, Like, did it really make a difference what happened to a lot of those folks? Not much petered out, Nixon got elected. Law and order skyhigh. Murder rates most exactly are.

Such a real it's such a clinical view of the world though, feel like, basically nothing matters, No protest matters. You know your genuine concern about this, you're protesting the government, you're disrupting political speeches. Nothing you do matters, So just like go out and get your bag. I think that's I think that's a really cynical, not nothing and disturbing view of the world.

Not nothing matters, but a very little does matter.

Listen, here's the bottom line.

We know what will happen if these protests don't proceed, if these kids don't risk the things that they're risking. That again, I think they should be absolutely commended for we know what will happen, absolutely nothing.

We don't know what will happen if they try.

And we've seen at least that there has been some pressure placed on the administration, and I think that's important. And we see globally this is another thing I have in my monologue. We see that the people in Gaza see them, these Palestinians and Gaza are being starved to death and threatened with bombing, and the entire male population and Rafa now basically threatened with execution and murder. They see these protests and it means something to them. I mean, not alone, is I think significant and important. And you see the way that international problem mean you see the way Netanyahu is kind of freaking out about the fact that there's international pressure and these students are part of that larger movement.

So, yeah, there are no guarantees here.

You're right there was a backlash to the Vietnam War protesters, and you're right that could happen again. But we know damn well what happens if these kids do nothing, and that is the status quo perseveres Palestinians are probably you know, kick down on their land altogether, continue to be murdered, continue to be slaughtered. We know that's what happens. If they don't protest. They think there's a chance they could change something, and I applaud them for doing it.

They may be right. I think they're wrong.

I think it's a misreading of history and of power and of how that all works. Now again, I'm I would take it back. I don't want to scold people. I would only give you some advice that when you're very young, it can be really easy to get caught up and whatever the current thing of the day is. I'm trying to think back from twenty twelve or whatever, when whenever I was in college, Daca, that was a big one. All right, people, Mars or Doca. Oh, this was all over. Sorry, you know, look it ended up working out nothing like I'm just I'm just asking people to have a little bit of historical literacy and to be mindful that actions are gonna have consequence. Now you're an adult, you do whatever you want to do, and I support your right to do that. And I've spoken here openly I support people's right to protest and all that. I would just caution folks to not get caught up and to think, you know, this ain't nineteen sixty six and sell ma Alabama and all that. And there's too often, you know, lack of thinking about these consequences. Let's think back to BLM. I mean, people took to the streets. They thought this was going to be a revolution. What's the actual lasting consequence? You almost got Donald Trump reelected. You know, you have a sky high murder rate. Nothing change in terms of police action. So I hope you felt better. But like that's pretty much it, you know. I mean, and a bunch of grifters got to buy mansions in Los Angeles, like you didn't change.

You're just arguing for, like, give up.

No, I mean, that is your understand.

That is what you're arguing. Give up, don't try, don't bother. If you care about something, you know what, keep your mouth shut, stay home and go get your bag.

That's what you're arguing for.

And I think, listen, the reality is, we know how hard it is to have our democracy actually reflect what people.

Want in the will of the people.

But I don't know why you're even doing what you're doing here and caring about politics. If you think, then nothing ever matters and nothing ever changes. Obviously, we've had protest movements in our history that have mattered, have changed. We can look back at LGBTQ rights in the very recent past, where there was an organized movement and there was protests, and guess what change came and it mattered, and it happened the Black Lives Matter protest situation. I think part of what happened there and led to a backlash that you're right, absolutely nothing changed is number one the co optation, as you said by Grifter's. Number two, the lack of any sort of like organized specific demands, and number three the fact that in direct contrast to these protests you actually had real widespread violence and property destruction and damage.

You have not had that here.

I totally agree and I commend these people. I said it from the beginning. I'll explain then you know why am I sitting here Because I want to convince people and understand how power really works in this country and the ways in which it can change.

So let's think about the Civil rights era.

There's a great series of books called The Parting of the Waters is three three series.

I highly recommend people read it.

A misreading of history is I think that Martin Luther King Junior in the cell Alabama March is the only thing that mattered, and it's totally wrong. LACP working with Lyndon Johnson and with the US Senate over a period of twenty five years in the legislative process, using and using the protest movement and then specifically co opt and hit the powers of center that mattered, actually resulted in the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act on top of the assassination of John F.

Kennedy.

It was the perfect moment for it to actually be able to come through. That's how it worked, right. So it's not just taking to the streets. Now, I'm not going to diminish the people who took the streets, right, but they're not actually the ones who really changed anything. Well, it was Lbjr. And it was the people that were Hubert Humphrey and all the cocktail.

What they didn't matter.

I mean, it mattered a.

Lot less than the NAACP and then Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and the leaders.

But you're pretending like what's happening on Columbia is the only thing happening in the entire country. I mean, again, this movement has already won the argument. This movement has already dramatically changed public opinion, especially in terms of young people.

This movement has made it.

But for the first time, you know, Canni's like Summer Lee can actually be out and out oppositional to critical of Israel and Apec didn't even try to defeat her because they knew she was.

Too strong, she was gonna win.

For the first time, there is actual political weight on the side of the Palestinians where it's only been on one side previously. So those are all changes that are being made. And by the way, as I said, this is not the only thing that's happening. You also have organizations that are forming, that have formed, that are designed to put money on the other side of the equation. Organized on the other side of the equation, you have unions that have gotten involved, who have come out in favor of ceasefires and putting their organizational weight in might behind it. So to pretend like this is the only thing that's happening, and so you know, so it's not going to matter. To pretend that protests just haven't ever mattered in history. I just think that that is I think it's preposterous. I think it's nihilistic, and I just think it's ASTiP.

I don't think that it doesn't matter.

I think that it is part of a broader hole, and I would encourage people to not overestimate what part of one is and underestimate the life. I completely agree with you on the Union part, on the Congress part, and that you know, why do we spend so much time here? That shit really does matter? Like who really votes for x Y? You know A to Ukraine? Why do you think we spend so much time here? Or I care so much about Congress and the way that Ukraine ad matters and explaining all this shit about parliamentary procedure because that's the stuff that really governs our lives, like me taking to the streets and if I started an anti Ukraine war protest, which I would love to participate in, if anybody ever wants to let me know the next one that is happening, it's matter, But that's my point. It wouldn't do anything. It actually wouldn't do anything. No, if I spend all my time here and I win the argument and I try and work, you know, pressure lawmakers to actually do something that's going to be a little bit different, and explaining to the people here about how some of that stuff works and to the limited extent that we actually have a check in our huge democratic system, that is a real understanding. I think of kind of how the power works. Again to when you're twenty one years old, you don't have any power regardless. So yeah, this is probably your best bet in terms of participating in the whole. I am only saying you should also think about your future and what it's like in the you know, in a way, it's a little bit nihilistic to think that me getting expelled from school over participate or you know, breaking down a Hamilton Hall window is going to change the world. Like, I'm sorry, you know, the most likely outcome is that you're screwed. Ten years from now, nobody remembers you don't have a degree, you got expelled, and now you're what one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt. You know, I worry about those people too. I mean, I'm certainly how are they going to be able to buy a house or whatever. Actually, the single worst situation you can be in is to have no degree and all of the attendant Ivy League school debt, which none no wonder a lot of these people are going to be in. That's just, you know, in a way, that's nihilism as well, thinking that this is the most important thing that's ever going to happen in your life.

The truth is it's not. Almost by a large.

Channel for the things that you believe in, and you're willing to bear a costs and a consequence. I think is what we call like courage and is admirable. And yeah, they know that there is a potential price that they are paying. They're not stupid, quite aware of that. Their administration of Columbia has made them quite aware of that. The political leads, the media clause have made them quite aware of that. And Bill Ackman threatening to keep them from ever being hired like that should already happen, being doxed and smeared. Why do you think they all wear masks at the protest?

That's why. Okay, they're very well aware of.

The consequences and they're doing it anyway, and I think they deserve to be commended for that. If we can move on to the next element though, to update on what Columbia is actually doing. So, as Soccer mentioned previously, you had a two pm deadline issued to specifically the protesters that were in the encampment, saying listen, you need to clear on here or we're going to clear you out effectively. In advance of that, you can put B three up on the screen. You actually had very moving scenes of these people wearing the orange vest.

These are all faculty.

In these like designated vests so that they can be clearly identified as such. And you can see quite a number of Columbia University faculty who are linking arms here and surrounding the encampment to try to protect these students. You also had a march of at least one thousand students, quite a number who were encircling the encampment as well, also in an effort to protect the students who were in camp there. But you know, we were watching closely. Two PM came and went, and there was no visible action. There were some reports of cops outside of the university to sort of stand and buy, but there were no actual police action to clear out the encampment as we had seen previously. But we did get this news put this up on the screen from Axios. Reportedly, Columbia did then start instead of using force to clear out the encampment, they just started suspending everyone. So Ben Chang, vice president for Communications at Columbia, confirmed suspensions had begun at a press briefing at five pm, three apps or hours after the school had set that deadline. Didn't say how many students are going to be suspended but confirmed, they'll be unable to finish the semester, unable to graduate, and they're also going to be barred from entering any campus housing or academic buildings. So that is the Columbia response. I don't think it's probably going to do anything to tamp down the continued protests. Korein John Pierre, Biden's press secretary, was asked about free speech rights and had this to say.

I see administration's response specifically to the use of police force in some of these college campus protests.

You saw is at DNA University, Ohio State m LDT, Austin.

Yeah, so again I'm going to be really repetitive here. Americans have the right to peace fully protest within the law. That is really important here. Anti Semitism is dangerous. I know, I've seen We've seen the videos that have pretty much gone viral out there, and I can't speak to that.

We may have more to say.

About those videos once we look into that, once you know, we'd have to look into them. Just don't have anything to share beyond that.

I mean, listen, regardless of what, But did you know anti semitism is bad? Thank you for that public service announcement. I really appreciate. Think about this, like whether you think that these kids deserve to have their skulls cracked and thrown in prison, or whether you think that they are exercising their First Amendment rights and deserve to not be smeared. Anti Sell like this is unfolding at campuses across the country and this is all you have to say about it.

It's so pathetic.

And she basically says she's not aware.

I mean, in a certain sense, I don't really want the White House to be involved in Colombia, Like we can have it a couple of ways. Yeah, the White in my opinion, the federal government shuld have nothing to say about what's going on Columbia. That should be a matter at Columbia as a private university, and it's a private place. As long as the First Amendment rights are protected, I don't really give a shit. You know, private university can do whatever they want now. At the same time, though, we live in the age where everybody has to have an opinion on everything.

Well, the RKA already weighed in, right.

And they weigh in all the time for you know, like some random crime or wherever if it's a transperson, right, they were like, oh my god, this is like the greatest paddic in the history of the world or something like that, like trans policy at the University of Ohio. It's like, well, if you're going to weigh in on that, then you can't really be saying, well, I'm not really aware, but anti semitism is bad and no on this particular one, I haven't seen the videos or whatever. It's like, it's very selective in the way that things are. Yeah, so we can have it both ways. I prefer the former, but you guys have chosen this.

And well, here's the thing. I mean, many of these institutions are public universities. It's not like it's only columb we're talking about you know, U see Austin, We're talking about Virginia, Tag. We were talking about all sorts of public university state schools across the country where there are First Amendment rights have to be respected. So in that way, it really is a federal government issue. And then also it's so hypocritical with all their like democracies on the ballot and Trump's authoritarian whatever, and you're watching this unfold you cheered it you provide a cover for it with your bullshit statement smearing all these kids as anti semites, and now you've got nothing to say about them all being you know, arrested and based and tear gased at VCU faculty, elderly faculty, being thrown on the ground and assault. I mean, this is insane, and you're just like, yeah, I haven't seen it. I'm not really aware any of my next question.

Right utterly, and it is bullshit, as you and I know that these people haven't seen because they're more online ten times than we are, so it's like you saw it, of course exactly.

Of course.

Meanwhile, you have Trump making very go to B seven, you have Trump making very clear what he thinks about this, you know, any sort of like free speech pretense clearly over. He just says, stop the protests now. So him and Joe Biden, Greeen, Jean Pierre all on the same page apparently on this one. No daylight between them. You know, we didn't make up an element for this. But you have Senator Marsha Blackburn, who was another one who five seconds ago, oh, free speech people have to be allowed to descend college campuses, blah blah, blah. Now she's calling some students to be put on a terrorist no fly list. Okay, that's the sort of thing that's happening in the United States Congress right now, led in part by Speaker Mike Johnson, who had this to say recently, we're.

Looking at very seriously reducing or eliminating any federal funds at all to campuses who cannot maintain basic safety and security of true students. I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say that this is what it's come to, but that's what we're looking at. We're looking at some other things as well. I mean, if you're a foreign student here and you're participating in this madness, you don't have a right to do that. Maybe your visa should not be extended, Maybe it should be revoked if you're going to threaten your own classmates here or come here for that purpose.

So we've got yesterday we covered Richie Torres and Mike Lawler the Columbia Acts. They want to install anti Semitism monitors to make sure no one is saying a rally chant that they don't like at schools and threaten their federal fundation if someone says something somewhere that is unacceptable to Benjamin Nett.

Yahoo.

Now you've got Mike Johnson also threatening federal funding and student visas for any foreign students who are participating in protests that they don't like or are participating in wrong think. And you've got Marsha Blackburn saying put these kids on the no fly list. I mean, it's extraordinary. You know, I should have predicted it because we both knew both sides were posture about free speech like Republicans. We knew they were posturing about like pretending to care about as long as it didn't conflict with their values. It would take an issue like this where there's such elite bipartisan consensus effect, Yes for the full crackdown, because it's exactly like you know, Poster Rock War and Patriot Act. It's when they agree and they use the full force of the federal government to enforce their elite consensus, that's when things get the ugliest.

No, it's terrifying.

The no fileists in particular is nuts. I'm currently re listening to our listening to the latest season of Cereal. I actually highly recommend it. It's about the Guantanamo Bay and just putting myself back in time fifteen years ago, You're like, oh yeah, this country lost is freaking mine and this was wild stuff in terms of what we allowed in terms of the the Fourth Amendment rights and just so many ways in which we bridge that gap. We don't need to be going back there. No fly lists are completely unconstitutional. They shouldn't even exist in the first place. The implementation of this was a huge disaster in any US that is in place on a no filist for participating in a protest against foreign government is as Unamerican as it gets. The only thing I'll say is, don't threaten me with a good time in terms of provoking federal funding from Ivy League universities, because if that's what it takes, then they're all going to burn to the ground and I'm not going to be all that upset about it. I do agree, though, Crystal, as we had talked about, if the impetus is that and if federal funding is contingent on being Zionist or notugh, I mean, that's a bridge too far from me. All I want is to see these places burn to the ground anyways. But it is very clear that this is a carrot and a stick and the big problem is that we all know they're not actually going to do it. Columbia will buckle, and that this will only lead to a morson storious environment in terms of all Ivy League universities, a strengthening of DEI, decrease with the First Amendment, a decrease really of civil rights and of equal protection for everybody. And that is why I'm going to oppose it, as you know, if that's the way.

That's going, because it's the precedent being said is we're going to use the full weight and force of the federal government to enforce a particular ideology on a school that's right. And whether it's this ideology or another ideology that is by you know, endorsed by an elite consensus or by whatever power party is in power, once you open that door, there is no walking back through.

It, as it is with the Patriot Act.

So anyway, that was our look at what's happening, a little bit of what's happening around the country, and I think there are many more dramatic scenes to unfold between now and graduation day, and certainly between now and the DNC. All right, guys, thanks to sacronize a little spirited, unplanned debate. We no longer have time to talk about housing today, so don't worry. We'll bring in that story in the future room and make sure we get to doctor Jillstein on time. So let's god and move on to the very latest with regards to Israel, because there is a whole lot that is consequential that is happening there, in particular the possibility of a ceasefire deal, the imminent possibility of a RAPA invasion, and the imminent possibility of ic C arrest warrant. And these things may seem disconnected, but there actually are all connected. I'll get to that in a moment, But first of all, let's listen to how Sanctuary State Tony Blinken is talking about this potential ceasefire deal.

Moss has before a proposal that is extraordinarily, extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel. And in this moment, the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a ceasefire is a Moss. They have to decide, and they have to decide quickly.

Oh, an extraordinarily generous offer. Wow, Wow, Let's see what's in this extraordinarily generous offer that's been made. Put this up on the screen from the New York Times. So the offer includes a forty day ceasefire, that's it, forty days, and the release of potentially thousands of Palacitan prisoners in exchange for the Israeli hostages. Apparently the big concession is releasing Instead of releasing forty hostages, the Israeli government is prepared to settle for only thirty three. And you know, frankly, there's a lot of reports that many of the hostages have been killed.

I mean, they've been in an active.

War zone for seven months now and subject to the same you know, siege conditions as everyone else in the Gaza strip. So you have pretty wide distance between the Hamas position, which is not only we want a permanent ceasefire, not forty days, a permanent ceasefire. And this is a critical piece too. They want people to be able to return to northern Gaza, to whatever's left of northern Gaza, and that's been something that the Israeli government has been adamantly opposed to by very one sided framing here of Oh, the whole problem.

Is with Hamas.

Obviously, these are negotiations. Both sides have to give and take. But to present this as like extraordinarily generous and the best offer and how could they possibly refuse Sagara, I think is very disingenuous.

Yeah, it's just the key sticking point between them is that Israel says we're going to continue the war no matter what, and the ceasefire is just like a temporary thing on the way, and Hamas, of course they're trying to use their leverage, which are hostages, and they're like, no, we're gonna give up these hostages and then the war just needs to end.

Period.

I mean, this is a huge problem in Israeli society too, because this is how they they are. Really, what Israel wants is to have their cake and eat it too. They want to get their they want the hostages out. There were huge pro you know, it's funny we cover protests in America. In Tel Aviv they're lighting shit on fire in the middle of the street yesterday because there's a huge protest continuing around hostages, around the conduct of the war and nets on Yahoo. So the big what they want to do is they want to release all the hostages, which releases the pressure valve and Israeli society because then there won't be any more pressure on the government to conduct the war or differently. But they don't want to commit to ending the war at all. So this is obviously the key sticking point. If I had to guess what Blincoln and the Biden administration's theory of the case here is is that and one I don't think he's unreasonable is once guns stopped firing for forty days, it's very difficult to restart the guns.

Now.

That said, if I had to bet anybody who would do it, I think that the Israelis would. And that's part of the conundrum that we really face here is that Bbe and his coalition and really Israeli society, I think we'll be honest, they want to go into Rafa, and they want to destroy it, and they want to level it. America doesn't want that, you know. Biden, for domestic reasons and for geopolitical reasons is like, hey, the more violence that we have, the more problems I have here at home and abroad. So we're really stuck because we don't want this to happen period. This is a delaying action with the hope that we can achieve some permanency, spire or whatever. In the future, but unfortunately, I don't think it's possible with the current Israelis on the other side.

Of the table well, and with the US unwilling to use leverage to enforce any kind of outcome. I mean, just like asking Boebe nicely, obviously.

Is it worked, and it's not going to work.

So you're absolutely right that there's no reason to expect that even if they do secure this forty day cease fire deal, Phoebe has promised, he repeatedly, just promised again, and you were sending it to me, that we will go into Rafa, whether there's a temporary cease fire or not.

We are going in.

Another thing that I want to point out, which we talked about at the time, but for some reason the mainstream media is I know what reason, but they just chose to ignore the beginning is that hamas said, offered almost immediately and all for all deal, all hostages in exchange for palest to mean prisoners and the family members of the hostages. They sort of just learned about this, at least some of them, and are realizing like, oh, you Bbe Night, now you've all of your talk about your concern for the hostages This is all bullshit. This has just been an emotional manipulation tactic because if they were actually your number one priority, they would have been returned already. So there's that at the same point, you know, they're trying to use. First of all, Rafa has taken on this horrifying symbolic importance, both in terms of.

You know, Bob's making the case.

That the reason they haven't achieved victory yet is because I haven't gone into Rafa and your right saga that I think Israeli public overwhelmingly is in favor of continuing the annihilation into Rafa, where you have one point three million Palestinians who are sheltering right there along the border with Egypt. This is also being used as negotiating leverage, basically a threat of we're going to do more horrors and atrocities in Rafa if you don't secure this you know, limited forty day cease fire deal. And we're getting some truly dystopian, horrifying indications of what exactly is planned for Rafa. Let's put this up on the screen. So this is according to Middle East I, Israel is planning a ring of checkpoints around Rafa to prevent any men quote unquote military age men from fleeing the Rafa assault, So they say here the checkpoints are designed to allow some women and children to leave Rafa ahead of an expected Israeli offensive, but unarmed civilian Palestinian men will likely be separated from their families and remain trapped in Rafa during an expected Israeli assault. Previously unreported disclosure of Israel's construction of a ring of checkpoints around Rafa underscores how Israel's pushing ahead with plans to attack that city, where over one million displaced Palestinians are sheltering intents and makeshift camps. So, Sagar, this is directly a war on men. That fits very much with the assumption that we've seen from the Israeli government, official policy, and frankly media buy in that if a man was killed, if even a sixteen year old boy was killed, they must inherently just be because they're a man of military age, they must be a terrorist ergo, they're a legitimate target. That's the way they have been operating. But this is another level of codifying into their approach that if you are a man, any man within what we can colorably describe as military age, then you deserve to be tortured, kidnap bombed, and ultimately killed.

Yeah, this has its roots in kind of counterinsurgency policy, except what they're missing is that they didn't have any effort to separate like non terrorists from actual terrorists. We usually, I mean, this has done and done in the past, for example, giving everybody opportunity to flee and then saying anybody who remains in the city will be considered.

You know, it's.

Basically like a free fire zone in Pauza City, right exactly. But what they should do, what you really want to do, is, if you actually wanted to do this, you separate the male population from the terrorist population.

Now if that sounds easy, and it's not easy.

It does require a lot of death, but it also requires actually using your military and putting them at risk, which is something that you know, it's been a while since we've seen Israelis engage in active combat like actually on the ground.

They're just not willing to do it.

They're just basically willing to take as many civilian casualties as possible while keeping their own men safe. Now, in theory, you would be like, well, why wouldn't anybody do that, Well, America didn't do that in the Iraq War and in Afghanistan. You can have plenty of criticisms of our military, but people extraordinary measures and many American lives were lost specifically to try and prevent situations like this from happening, which is basically just everybody is declared, you know, free fire zone. There are may be very limited instances, but commanders and the overall eth those of the military is that is not the way that you can fight in a country which you're occupying with a huge you know, millions and millions of people that are there, including millions of men. In this scenario, they're basically just putting all that aside and engaging in whatever they would want. And I think it's just going to be further evidence, you know, against them and their lack of really in their lack of willingness to fight as a.

First world military.

There are no first world military on Earth that would ever fight this way period.

I feel very comfortable.

Saying that many people are putting out that part of what led the ICJ to conclude that Sir Berncia was a genocide was the all out slaughter of men. Eight thousand men who were murdered. They are very similar like their men, So we're going to kill them, and we're just going to assume their military age. There was also a motive of quote unquote revenge that was offered as justification. There so a lot of historical echoes. But you know, this is this is deeply chilling. And the reason I say that the media has been complicit in allowing this framework is I mean both in terms of they're just overall coverage, but the way they have assumed from the beginning that okay, any casualties, any deaths outside of the women and children, we're just going to assume, according to the Israeli government, that these are Hamas militants who are legitimate targets by the allowance of the really military to operate in such a way.

I mean, this is this is.

Part of why the IDF murdered their own hostages, both because they were they were men and because they were in this you know, kill zone where they just assume anyone who's still there must be a Hamas militant. And so this is the part of the way that you've ended up with these overwhelming civilian casualties So in any case, RAFA is being used both as a political tool for Phoebe to hold on to power and say victory awaits if we just go in and destroy RAFA. It's also being used as a bargaining chip in terms of these ceasefire negotiations. I wanted to just put this up on the screen so people know what's going on, just in terms of how Hamas is positioning themselves. Is this another thing that you know is unlikely to be covered by many mainstream outlets. So you had a Hamas official who was saying, actually that they would lay down their arms, they would demilitarize if you established a Palestin Union state along the nineteen sixty seven borders. This isn't the first time they're saying it. But you know, then you can think that they're not serious. I think that's entirely legitimate to be like, yeah, but you can't take their word for it. But you do have Benjamin Natanya who very clearly like, we will never allow Palisinian state and I'm opposed to it with every five from my being. And you do have the Hamas people saying, actually, we will lay down our arms and accept to state solution. Which is contrary to their more genocidal rhetoric from the past. So make of that what you will. Let me put this next piece up on the screen, because this is also incredibly important and connects together potential ceasefire RAFA and ICC arrest warrants. Apparently, the US and their allies are basically threatening the ICC that if they do issue arrest warrants for the Israelis, then we're gonna we're going to blow up the piece. They're not going to be any kind of truths. There's not gonna be any kind of even temporary ceasefire. So this is you know, what was described as a quiet diplomatic effort, it's really just a threat. It's like basically threatening, can tinue the slaughter of Palestinians if they dare actually issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and others and Sagar. There's been obvious total hypocrisy with regard to the ICC, you know, and they're issuing arrest warrants for Russia that we were, well, thank you for doing a great job. This is incredibly important now when it's our great friends the Israelis who have listened. Just by the numbers, the slaughter has been vastly greater from the Israelis visavi the Palestinians in a much shorter period of time. Now this is illegitimate, and we have to take actions. And you've got you've got members who are threatening Members of Congress who were threatening to pass legislation to target the ICC and retaliation. You got the Wall Street Journal editorial board threatening some sort of you know, retaliation against the ICC. So very different response when it comes to Israel.

It didn't work out so well, did it. Whenever a year ago it was genocide at Boucha, whenever, like fifty people were killed. But now they're like, oh no, we can't be used. It's just so ridiculous. Shows you the US policy, by the way, which I oppose these things in the first place. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. This is my personal favorite pet peeve, the US military peer in Gaza. You guys, remember it was supposed to have been built by now, it's supposed cost about one hundred.

Fifty million dollars.

Well now it's actually scheduled to be built late and it will cost about three hundred and twenty million dollars. Could have predicted three hundred and twenty million dollars and pictures are now coming out. You know, I would note Crystal that the Port of Baltimore is not yet fully functional, but apparently we have all the money in the world to build a humanitarian aid peer which is going to put American troops at risk off the coast of Gaza. When the easiest thing that you could do is to just be like, hey, is real, this le's to my aid in there, you know, by road that seems like a lot keeper and a lot easier for US.

Thousands miles and miles of trucks right backed up at these best worts, you don't need a They did actually start construction on the pier, by the way, We did see some movier started today.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're already like basically the deadline for when they said the thing would be complete. But yeah, the obvious answer is let in the trucks that are lined up at the border. You can use a little bit of US pressure and leverage to make that happen instead of this whole peer debacle, which I think it's worth once again mentioning that BB floated, Hey, maybe we'll use this peer to help with our ethnic cleansing program and help Palestinians, help them voluntarily migrate out of the territory that we utterly bombed, ucimated, destroyed, and left unfit to have to live in.

Just ridiculous, totally ridiculous.

Absolutely, this is just some of the best TV that you can watch. Professor John Meersheimer, who have been trying to get on the show for quite a long time.

So Professor, if you do hear this, we would love to have you.

Personal hero and inspiration of mine, joined Piers Morgan for an interview and there was a clash of ideologies like one that you've never seen here. You basically seeo liberal neo conservatism personified in Piers Morgan is John Meerscheimer with utter realism, and you tell me which comports more with reality.

Let's take a lesson.

You want to remember that if you look at what's happening in the conventional war, it looks like Putin's going to win. Despite the fact that we've now passed this large scale arms package for Ukraine, Putin is likely to win.

Why is that not a terrible thing for America and the West.

Because you have to prioritize the threats that you face in the world. And the fact of the matter is that what happens in Ukraine does not matter that much to the United States. I know, for people like you, this is a life and death matter. The thought of any country on the planet that the West defends losing is a major defeat and has catastrophic consequences. I mean, you felt this way about US pulling out of Afghanistan, but I think that places like Thatistan, places like Ukraine, don't matter that I didn't really I felt with Afghanistan America should have kept a small military presence there to maintain some kind of order.

And I think I was justified in saying that given what's happened, since I thought throwing the country back to the Taliban was a catastrophic error of judgment, and it wouldn't have happened in the way it's happened if America kept a couple of thousand troops there, as it does all around the world in endless bass. So it seemed to me, having done many, many years of hard work in Afghanistan as a response to nine to eleven, to then simply just overnight throw everybody out and leave the country to the Taliban, particularly for women's rights, never mind, nothing else I thought was an abrogation of America's duty and the UK.

Right. But this is your worldview, which is the United States has a responsibility to be everywhere and.

Everywhere, but it should certainly be preserving freedom and democracy. Otherwise, why self style yourself as leader of the free world? A leader of the free world, and America still has I think half the world's military firepower, I'm obviously one of the biggest economies. You either are that entity leader of the free world or you're not. And if you are, then what comes with that is a responsibility to protect freedom and democracy when it comes under attack from tatalitarian regimes, I would think.

I think if you look at the history of American foreign policy, it's very hard to make the case that our principal goal has to bend to protect freedom and democracy. The United States has a rich history of overthrowing democracies around the world, and we have a rich history of siding with some of the world's biggest dictators. So this idea that we're out there protecting freedom and democracy and it's our principal goal, in my opinion, doesn't mesh with reality.

Very diplomatically, I love him so much.

He is such an old He's been on it for years. You guys should read his books and his interviews. He's an incredible person. But what he does so effectively there is watch it with peers on Afghanistan. Right, He's like, you want to stay there forever? He's like, I don't. I didn't say that. I just thought, which it's a couple of thousand troops to protect women's rights forever, forever.

Right, So what's that?

And I just love He's like, well, the fact is that what happened in Ukraine doesn't matter very much to the United States. And this is the thing that what John gets at the most is that this can sound cold blooded, but in practice it's more moral because when you don't cast yourself as the freedom and democracy defender and all of that, and you make choices that are actually in your interest in the long run, then you don't end up meddling in other countries and creating a goddamn mess that for the people that are actually over there, or like this Israel, you know thing, for example, would any of this even have happened if America wasn't the total guaranteur of Israel's security.

Never in a million years, not a chance, because they would get checked by the Arab powers. Now same in Ukraine and Russia.

Would we there really be this invasion? I know, I already know comment brigade is coming from me on this one, but I'll argue till I'm bluwing the face. The NATO expansion in the nineteen nineties was a horrific disaster for the United States to croach and encroach all the way up to all these Baltic states which are utterly useless to American security too. And then even just yesterday, Crystal, the US Ambassador to NATO, said Ukraine will be a part of NATO.

The US ambassador is out there.

But you know, even if you don't even if you don't accept that, right, even if you look at Putin's rider and you're like, listen, he's an imperialist.

He wants to conquer terry. Sorry, okay, you.

Know, even if you think that without our intervention, I think it's ninety percent likely there would have been a deal at the beginning, because the Ukrainians would have looked at this and like there's like we have no chance here, we have to settle, Like it's not ideal, but we have to settle and we're gonna have to give some things up.

And it is what it is.

And you wouldn't have, you know, again, a war and men of generation at least of Ukrainian men who've been sent to the slaughter and you know, horrors unfolding there and they were dragged into it by us. So, you know, we, you and I have a different view of the world. I would like us to actually like stand up for the values we pretend to, but to actually look at American history and think that we do. It's it's precious right, It's precious to still hold on to that view. We literally fund we are seventy three percent of the world's dictatorships, and you're like freedom and democracy even in Afghanistan, like the you know, the women's rights. I support women's rights. Yeah, but then we've got our buddies, Saudi Arabia not exactly like feminist icons over here, and we're happy to fund them. We're talking about you know, Biden's like obsessed with this pipe dream of normalization, and we're going to provide them with security guarantees in exchange for them normalizing relations with Israel, like get on of here with your idea that we're protecting freedom and democracy around the world. Okay, yeah, I mean it's it's just utterly preposterous. It's never been more preposterous than it is right now when you see what we're enabling and encouraging and funding and supplying these railings to do to the Palestinians in direct contravention of the international law that we pretended to support when it came to Russia.

That's part of what I'm saying. That's why I won't eve want to pretend anymore. I'd be like America, this was good for America. You know what we care about Saudi Arabian we deal with these barbarians is because we want oil. That's it, period. That's you know, let's be all, let's all be honest. Qatar, same deal, natural gas. It's the second amount of natural gas we're going to do trade with you, period.

And the story.

Let's just stop, because that's what opens up the gateway to Oh now we've got to deploy US military assets to dive so that Talibans, that girls in Cobble can go to school.

Ridiculous.

I mean, it's just this is exactly what drove me crazy about the entire thing. When you don't pretend, as I said, it leads to better outcomes. I mean, as look at what up in Afghanistan. Hour we propped people up and then we fell down. We wasted a hundred billion dollars people. If it worked out for them, it's been a terrible outcome. It would have been better if we left them to sort it out for themselves.

And same with the Israelis.

If Israelis actually have to deal with this Jewish homeland, you know, post nineteen seventy eight, that they have to defend against the Arabs, what do you think you're going to do? You're going to have diplomacy with your neighbors. Now, everyone says that that's completely impossible. People can deal with anything, even when they hate each other. Yes, sometimes it will lead to war, but the instinct of survival whenever you have two relatively equal, you know, military powers.

Look at the Egyptians in the Israelis, it's lasted for decades. They're not stupid.

Yeah, they don't like each other necessarily, but they're like, look, we don't want to kill each other anymore. It's all good, shake hands and we'll just divide this thing up. That's a model for how actual balance works. So this is my case for Professor Meerscheimer's view of the world. It's considered a moral but I actually really believe it leads to a more stable international system. So anyway, I really enjoy the interview. I encourage people to go and to watch the whole thing.

Yeah. Absolutely, it's very revealing, an interesting.

Exchange, Crystal, what are you taking a look at?

Well?

Liberal Zionists appear to be going through some things right now. They don't want to totally accept bb Nannya who's framing of college kids as literal Nazis, But they can't just accept that perhaps these students protesting the murder of Palestinian civilians might have a little bit of a point. They're also not ready to one hundred percent co signed Jonathan Greenblatt of ADL's assertion that student protesters are Iranian proxies Akinda, Hezbla or Hamas. But they would also like to try to undermine the protesters in their own special way, because to admit that these are genuine humanitarian protesters would be to force a hard reckoning for these individuals who see themselves as virtuous and like to imagine that they would have stood alongside past protest movements against past injustices. But the current protests can't really be against injustices, right. Can't be that college kids are genuinely horrified by kids being blown apart and rushed under rubble. Must be something else, right, But what could that something else be. That's where things get really interesting and the mental gymnastics get really wild. So let's start with this one. Professor Scott Galloway, Don Lemon, and Bill Maher. They got together last weekend to offer their insightful analysis of exactly what's going on here now. For Lemon and mar opposing genocide, it's just a fad that all the kids, cool kids are into. Galloway had a bit of a more unique take, though. Take a listen.

Part of the problem is young people aren't having enough secks, and so they go on the hunt for fake threats. And the most popular threat throughout history. Type into google anti Semitism and pick your century and you're going to find it. A Jewish girl onna way to get a manicure is not your mortal lenoma.

Stop it for God's.

So there you go.

College kids they're just not having enough sex, so they became rabid anti semites. In response, do you people realize how insane you sound? Yeah, I'm sure if they were just getting laid more often, they stopped caring about babies who are starving to death, that must be the real issue here. Galloway, by the way, seems to apply this sex analysis to all kinds of things that young people are into. I remember distinctly how he berated young men for bidding up game stop rather than trying to get laid peers. This is kind of a whole ideology for them, and is deployed every time the youths do something that he can't quite explain or wrap us head around. Meanwhile, Sann's Freed Zakaria, he had a somewhat jettler version of Galloway's take, wrote an entire column for CNN wrestling with why it is that college campuses have become a center of protest that's never happened before. For for Reid, it's not because students are horrified by their tax dollars being used to drop two thousand pound bombs on refugee camps, or because of a backlash to the authoritarian crackdown on those protesting these atrocities. It's really because these students are lonely, and a piece titled why the Gods of War has spun campuses into chaos, he writes, it's difficult to know what to make of the turmoil on college campuses these days, the protests, polarization, intimidation, and general bitterness. In a revealing article in The Wall Street Journal, higher education reporter Douglas Belkin sets these events against a broader backdrop, the disappearance of a sense of community. He points to research demonstrating that college students today are lonelier, less resilient, and more disengaged than their predecessors. The university communities they populate are socially fragmented, diminished, and less vibrant. One wonders whether this loss of community has led to more distrust, sharper disagreements, and more anger. People are encountering one another at these protests, often for the first time, often as strangers. Zacario goes on to talk about ras who are upset students went to zoom into dorm meetings rather than go to them in person, and look, it's legitimate to talk about the erosion of community in America. We've done it too, in general and on campus specifically. But I find it baffling how difficult it is for so much of the liberal elite class to just accept many people are profoundly upset by children being starved and killed en Mass, I see this response actually all the time. Are you so emotional? Why do you care about this so much? I don't know, Maybe because I've spent the last seven months seeing kids being amputated on without anesthetic, bodies buried alive, still screaming, listening to the panicked call from a little girl named Hind who watched her family murder and was then assassinated alongside her would be rescuers. What kind of a sick person we have to be to not be emotional about these things? And yes, it should be tense when you're interacting with those who would seek to justify those sorts of atrocities. To mister Zakaria, these tense and emotional reactions, they're actually a sign of mental health, not dysfunction. They're a sign of humanity, not disconnect and indifference. We're not done yet. Nate Silver had a phenomenal contribution to this weird inability to understand that young people are horrified by horrors. Since his brand is being the rational data guy, he opined that these other more impressionable human beings are just responding to base tribal instincts. Silver's contribution was sparked by the Musicans of Substack writer Philip Lemoyne, who wrote this on Twitter, quote, My basic model of student protests is that in general, students don't know shit about what they're testing against. They do it because it's cool, makes them feel like they're part of something important, and they want to be with their friends. In the last majority of cases, their beliefs on the topic are very superficial. They just repeat slogans they don't really understand. But that's not a problem for them because it's primarily about signaling group membership run loyalty to specific ideas, to which Silver replied, this is probably right. Most people don't form political opinions through deep examination of the issues or reasoning from first principles. It's more like picking some particular fashion label or way of dressing, especially for younger people who face more peer pressure. First of all, have any of you guys actually talk to these young people, because if you do you'll find many are deeply informed. In fact, plenty have a direct connection to the conflict themselves. Perhaps you should speak as Ryan and Emiley did to the women organizing at the Colombia encampment, who is both well informed, well adjusted, and quite insightful. Perhaps you should speak as we did to Motas Salem, who has been confronting members of Congress and Capital ill is now involved with GWU's campus protests. Motas has lost one hundred plus family members in Gaza. I would wager he knows a hell of a lot more about it than Nate Silver does.

Here's the other thing.

Though liberals love to use this, it's complicated and you just don't understand as a dodge on Israel and Palestine, but it's actually not innocents.

They're being slaughtered.

You don't need a PhD in Middle Eastern studies to be human being who thinks that's wrong, and it is, yes, quite emotional about that. Posing genocide is not some cool, fashionable trend that kids are just jumping on to have fun and make friends. Do you understand, Nate Silver, These young people are taking tremendous risk, They're facing tremendous consequences. Their schools are putting snipers on the roof and sicking cops on them. They're being pursued by private investigators and they're being arrested. Billionaires are dosing them and promising to end in their careers before they even begin. But you think they're just risking it all for an in group fad cool thing to do. Is your soul really so deadened? You can't even conceive of idealistic young people sincerely just opposing a genocide, even if you don't think it's a genocide. They do, and many scholars and international bodies, by the way, agree with them, But you can't fathom being outraged by such a thing. That's us far more about you than it says about them. But I couldn't end without. One of my favorite contributions to this whole discourse came from this VC startup investor lady, who professed that she was deeply confused by all of this campus activism. She wrote, can I ask why do all these students from top schools want to be activists to begin with? Like you got such high grades in SAT scores, I'm surprised so many of you apparently want to be MLK instead of lead some industry. Now, books could be written about the mindset and ideology that would lead to such a question and to such confusion. It's honestly pitch perfect gen X liberalism, from the fixation on the high grades and SATs to the deep befuttlement at smart students wanting to emulate NLK, literally one of the most consequential men in all of American history. It's feasd to on mind that has fully embraced the notion that the only achievements which are worthwhile it are be found in the capitalist marketplace. Get your startup funded, make enough money to become an angel investor, wrap it all up in a female empowerment narrative to put a nice, virtuous bow on all of it. Do well by doing good, they said, she can't conceive of organizing a protest movement as legitimate achievement unless it's part of an Ivy League college admissions essay or a line in your bio for Fordes thirty under thirty. By the way, after being relentlessly dragged, she did delete the tweet, But you know who's having no trouble understanding appreciating the college campus protest movement Palston means in Gaza. In what is a truly beautiful display. Falstonian children young adults in RAFA held a rally to show their appreciation for the American solid Some even spray paint in their tents with messages like the ones that you can see here. This says, in part, thank you students and solidarity with Gaza. Your message has reached us. Another one directly said thank you Columbia. Yeah, thank you Colombia. Thank you for risking your career futures in the hope that Palestinians might have a.

Future at all. And soccer I couldn't even put into this monologue all and if you.

Want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot Com.

Very honored to be joined this morning by Green Party presidential candidate and activist doctor Jill Stein.

It is so great to have you.

Welcome, great to.

You, mass, So great to be yes, really great to be with you. Ball, Thanks Crystal and Slider.

Yeah, of course. So I guess my first question for you is just actually are you okay? Because we watch it, we can put this up on the screen. We watch some pretty extraordinary footage of you being assaulted with a police officers by here and ultimately being arrested as part of a campus protest. So maybe you could just tell us what happened and you know what the fallout was, and if you're doing okay.

So you know, we were at an event, a campaign event at a public library just a couple of blocks away, and a student several students had attended, who were you know, really inspirational, I have to say. And afterwards one of these students asked us to come and support their their encampment, which we said, of course, thank you so much. You're putting everything on the line here for all of us, for our rights of free speech, our rights of protest, and you know, really expressing American public horror at this genocide that we are funding.

So we went to show support.

When we got there, I was asked, along with two of the elected officials for Saint Louis who were also there, some two of the older men or older women, I guess you would say, uh, to go speak with the administration and to see if we could help de escalate. We tried, we you know, and they seem to back off for a couple of hours, and then then the students asked us to join their line at the front to see if the eyes of the world through a presidential candidate platform might discourage their worst abuses. And you know, it didn't, and you know, in some ways, I think we may have even been targeted. My campaign manager and deputy campaign manager were also there, and we were really assaulted with these bicycles and what you see happening in that footage while we're practically being pushed over onto our backs, you know, and as a person with osteoporosis, I was not anxious to be pushed over, you know, onto my neck and risk a neck fracture.

Yeah.

In that footage right there, they are they're trying to force us back onto the ground. That's the officer on the right there picks up one of my feet as we are just about to fall over backwards. He picks up one of my feet to further destabilize me, and I, you know, in trying to maintain my balance, I struggled to get free and then he yelled at me that I had just assaulted him because he was in the way of my foot as he was toppling me backwards.

Onto my head.

So I'm now accused not only of trespassing, I think we're all accused of resisting arrest, and I'm accused of assaulting a police officer.

Well, they're charging with you with assaulting a police officer.

Is that hysterical or what?

Oh my god, that's outrageous, absolutely unbelievable.

Yeah, I can't believe it was pulled up in court, but that's the way they're starting.

Yeah, right, well, let him test it out.

If anything, it will be good to publicity, I think for the campaign right now.

Well, that's one of the things we booked this before.

One of the things just zooming out a little bit we want to hear from you is what are you hoping to get out of this campig?

What would your day one agenda be?

Okay, So day one agenda is picking up the phone and calling Bibnet Yahoo and telling him that our support has ended, you know, until the occupation is over, until the genocidal war on Gaza is over, and until the apartheid state is over, that Israel needs to comply with international law. So on day one, the flow of weapons stop. It's actually illegal for the Congress to be appropriating and the president to be transferring weapons right now.

It's a violation of US law. We should not be arming.

Uh, you know, human rights abusers, and this is human rights abuse on steroids. So that's uh, that's number one, you know.

Number two.

Uh, the political prisoners like Julian Nsange and Edward Snowden, Leonard Peltier, et cetera. They go free. Also, amnesty to those who are serving prison time for the non violent simple possession and use and cultivation of cannabis. That's over. We instruct the the Drug Enforcement Agency to begin addressing substance use as a public health problem, not a criminal problem.

Those things begin.

Also, we declare an environmental emergency, a climate emergency, which in fact we have, and that enables us to basically stop the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, which needs to happen on an urgent basis, and it also unleashes hundreds of billions of dollars to basically create jobs in the renewable energy sector, in conservation efficiency, weatherization of homes and school buildings, government buildings, et cetera. It enables us to begin that transition that we urgently need to do because the climate crisis is you know, by all signs is actually exploding. It's sort of off the radar right now because we're focused on you know, the human rights emergency, you know, the blood on our screens right now, but we do have an ongoing climate emergency as well. So those are some of the very first things that we could do on day one, even without the support and consent of the Congress. But in my view, you know, our administration would operate in a very different way from our predecessors. The president would not simply be the commander in chief. The president would be the organizer in chief, enabling people to achieve those things that we need urgency urgently, like a Medicare for all system that would save us half a trillion dollars, by the way, just from reducing the waste and inefficiency the paper pushing the big CEO salaries, et cetera in our current healthcare system that wastes one out of every three healthcare dollars instead of putting them into health You know, the overhead in our current system is thirty three percent. With Medicare it's three per So there are enormous efficiencies.

Uh.

People across the political spectrum, you know, are experiencing this incredible crisis in our healthcare system, and that's something we can begin to meet on day one.

Doctor Seinier, obviously a veteran of many protests movements, and I know you are regularly talking to two young people, young student organizers, et cetera. You are you surprised at the breadth of the protest movement? Are you surprised by the way that you know, these these kids watching the genocide that's unfolding with our taxpayer dollars, the way that this has struck a nerve, and the extraordinary nature of their response.

It really is extraordinary. And they are in fact risking everything, you know, they are risking expulsion, They're risking homelessness. Uh, they are risking all that they've invested into their you know, into their education and their degrees. I am really unbelievably impressed and inspired by how they are putting everything on the line, you know, both for our basic American values and our right to free speech and to protest, and they're, you know, standing against this horrific genocide, and they're standing up for you know, what the majority of Americans feel, what nations around the world have expressed, but the international Court of Justice has expressed they are really I think they're expressing our highest you know, ideals as you know, as human beings who are ultimately part of the same civilization here, you know, And in our campaign, we you know, we have a saying which is that as Gaza goes, we all go. We're looking at the normalization of the torture and murder of children on an industrial scale. This should not be normalized. We're also looking at the destruction of international law and human rights. So, you know, all of us are incredibly at risk for what's going on right now. And it's just such a tribute to the you know, the moral fiber and the courage of these students that they are willing to stand up and say it stops here because they are entirely you know, in their rights to be doing this.

You know, this is a critical issue that needs discussion.

As someone from the Jewish community myself, I am very aware of what a rude wake up it is to come to terms with what Zionism actually is, and you know, and to reject Zionism is not anti Semitic, and that is a you know, it's a really repressive mythology to imply as such. So you know, the students are are are undertaking a discussion that has to be had, and this has to be had also.

On our campuses.

As someone who grew up during the Civil rights movement, you know, in the sixties, the same thing.

Was going on.

It was very hard for people in dominant white culture to come to terms with, you know, with essentially white racism that part of all of our institutions, and there were enormous efforts made to criminalize people who were raising these issues of basic civil rights and it was a very hard discussion. But it has to happen, and our universities should be supporting this discussion. It's a sad commentary on our universities that they are so dependent on the financial support and the contracts and so forth from you know, from the war industry and you know, Boeing, et cetera. You know that they have all these contracts that they are dependent on. You know, it reflects the degree to which we've become a war economy, militarized economy, and that has to be fixed as well.

One of the things I wanted to get your take on, ma'am, is obviously you're not going to be the only non bipartisan candidate two party system in the race. So what are your thoughts on doctor Cornell West and Robert Kennedy Junior, who presumably will be facing up against on the ballot across in November.

That's right, you know, I think Americans deserve choices. You know, this should be a part of our system. We should also have ranked choice voting so that multiple candidates are not perceived as a threat. But the reality is our campaign is the only pro worker, anti war, anti genocide campaign that is on track right now to be on the ballot as a choice across the country. Doctor West, you know, we have essentially identical agendas. But doctor West had decided to go solo. In doing so, he gave up his ballot access. He gave up what was worth at the time some five million dollars of a ballot lines, because the Greens have preserved and protect their ballot lines. So we began this race with almost seventy five percent of the work done. He gave that up, and those costs have greatly inflated, I think because of the number of independent candidates now seeking ballot status, So the cost of getting support has really gone up. Robert RFK will certainly be on the ballot, but we have a completely different agenda. I think, you know, in fact, there are going to be three pro war, pro genocide candidates on the ballot. I hope they will split the pro war vote among them, and our campaign will be the one anti war, anti genocide choice that's on the ballot. We already have, as I said, more than seventy five percent of the work done, and we are well on our way to completing that. Doctor West, you know, has founded a new party. They are struggling to get on the ballot. They have a couple of lines mainly going through other small parties, but you know, they don't really have any realistic pathway forward. To get on the ballot in California or Texas, one needs hundreds of thousands of signatures.

I don't think that's going to happen.

It's very unlikely, and we have, you know, the majority of the difficult states are already behind us.

New York is where we have a you know.

New York past a very oppressive ballot access law really as a hidden poison pill within a budget law. In twenty twenty two, I think it was where they tripled their requirement. It's now probably the most difficult state in the country where the requirement is for forty five thousand so called valid signatures, meaning the signature has to match exactly the registration signatures. So if your middle initial is Jane, but you put j period, your signature can be discounted.

People try to do that.

So you can't just get forty five thousand signatures. You have to try to get at least eighty or ninety thousand signatures in six weeks.

This is almost impossible.

But you know we are we are full more you know, attempting to do this because this is just you know, this is blatant political repression. It's an attempt to silence a political competition which is supposed to be the heart of our democracy.

Yeah.

Yeah, Well it's weird because Democrats run New York and I thought that they were saying their pro democracy and democracy was on the ballots.

So it's very strange.

We'll have to have to discuss with them what exactly is going on there. Speaking of what's going on with Democrats, I want to get your reaction to some interesting commentary from James Carvill, who had some choice words for young people who may not be fully on board with another term of Joe Biden. Many young people, of course, see him as back in the genocide. Let's take a listen to what mister Carville had to say. We'll get your reaction on the other side.

If they get a hold, there will be no government left, there'll be no rights left, you'll live under theocracy. You'll end up Christian nationalism. But that's all right. You know, fucking twenty six year old, you don't feel like the elections in part and they they're not addressing the issues that I care about. So my advice to tell these young people to get off your motherfucking ass and go vote, because you should vote like your entire future, in the entire future of this United States depends on it, because quite frankly.

It does.

And that's not an exaggeration.

Your reaction there, doctor Stein.

Well, I do agree with him that we really should be voting like our lives depend on it, because in fact they do. But you know, it's an extremely anti democratic sentiment to say that people shouldn't have choices, especially when people are clamoring for choices.

That's nuts.

And to say that people should continue to support the parties and the candidates that have essentially thrown them under the bus is absolutely nuts. You know, we say, don't listen to what they say, listen to what they do, and what they do has been an unmitigated disaster for most working people. You know, some sixty three percent are living paycheck to paycheck. Half of all renters are economically strapped, you know, just distress, trying to keep a roof over their head, that is paying more than thirty percent, well over thirty percent in New York State. It's like fifty or sixty percent of your income just to keep a roof over your head.

You know.

Poles of young people show that half of half of young people describe themselves as hopeless. One quarter of young people have considered doing harm to themselves within two weeks of the pole.

You know.

So these are really horrific indicators about the state of our world.

If we just keep you know, keep our.

Heads down and take marching orders from the political and economic elites that are doing just fine, thank you very much. You know, if we continue doing as they tell us, we will continue going in this direction, which is, you know, we are in.

A tailspin right now.

It's like we're in the airplane and the engine has stopped, and that airplane is you know, it is going into a tailspin.

And people see what's happening.

You know, whether you look at the crushing inequality, the impending ecological collapse across the board, you know, the Colorado River is about to run out of water. The Washington Post ran a night is Colorado River matter because it supplies the California agriculture system, which feeds half the fruits and vegetables in the country are coming basically from the Colorado River. The Colorado River is within one to two years of not making it out of Lake Mead because of you know, persistent drought, and there is no Plan B. The Washington Post ran a headline about a year ago that used the term. They described this as the doomsday scenario. We are in that stay scenario right now, you know, in several parameters, and you know there is no Plan B. So we need a different way for it. We do need to vote like our lives depend on it. And anyone who suggests that they own your vote and that they are entitled to your vote should disqualify themselves right then and there from any consideration of receiving your vote, Well said.

Go ahead.

I was just going to say, doctor Sigin.

Just to follow up on that, and so to sort of play devil's advocate here. You know, the last you got blamed in twenty sixteen wrongly for helping to elect Donald Trump. No doubt, if Donald Trump gets elected again, you're going to be part of the reason they said that they didn't win, that it was your fault. You know, you're siphoning off votes that rightly should have gone to Joe Biden. And what is your response to that? What is your response to people who say, listen, you may like what doctor Stein has to say, you may support her opposition to genocide as one example, But at the end of the day, it's either going to be Biden or Trump.

It's a binary choice.

So if you're not voting for Joe Biden, you're de facto voting for Donald Trump or helping Donald Trump get back to the White House.

Well, you know, to tell you the truth, I regard it as a badge of honor. You know, I consider myself very powerful to have determined the outcome of elections. And beyond that, you know, I actually don't waste my time because the majority of Americans are really hurting for something else.

You know.

The the numbers are off the charts right now. The Gallop Gallop does a poll every year. It's like sixty three percent now, a record high, who want another choice, who want another candidate because they feel like they have been thrown under the bus quite enough. And I usually feel like people who are you know, being good little boys and girls and parroting the propaganda of the DNC, I generally feel sorry for them, like that they are in an abusive relationship.

It's an abusive.

Political relationship, and you know, they need to break up with that abusive political partner. And I hope that they will come to that someday. But I don't feel like it's my responsibility to help them out of it, you know. And yes, I think Donald Trump would be a really scary president. And yes I think that Joe Biden is a really scary president.

I think fascism is here right now.

We're seeing it, you know, rolling out on our campuses and you know, around the country.

Fascism, he's here.

There is no greater trademark of fascism than genocide.

I think we've got that now, you know, we've.

Got oodles of fascism around us, and I think that solution to fascism is democracy. It's not the suppression of you know, our political views and our political debates. We have to stand up and assert our democracy. If people are concerned about vote splitting, which I must say is not supported by the facts, the facts suggest that nearly, you know, like two thirds of our votes are coming from people who otherwise won't vote.

They just won't. And right now that is off the charts.

If you look at, for example, the New York State Democratic primary about three weeks ago, there was a twelve percent so called uncommitted, but there was an eighty three percent no show, eighty three percent relative to the numbers who came out for Joe Biden in twenty twenty at a time when the race was already decided. You know, it's not like, oh, you know, it was an active race back then. No, it wasn't. It had already been settled. Joe Biden had been coronated. But people were participating in the Democratic Party. Now they are not, you know, now they are basically voting with their feet. So, you know, I think this is we need to sees the moment here because we're all kind of going over the cliff right now.

You know, in whatever to mension you want to look at.

We're in really bad shape and we need to take back the reins of our democracy, you know, take back the promise of our democracy and have debate and dialogue. You know, and to your credit, breaking points is one of the few places where that debate has had.

This needs to be the norm, not the exception.

You know.

We need anti trust laws enacted against our corporate media. We need the Internet and social media to be regulated as a public utility, not you know, the playground for billionaires to kind of do what they want in collaboration with you know, government security agencies behind the scenes, you know, censoring our discussion. We need to re establ you know, we need to get money out of politics and have publicly funded elections at a cost that could be massively reduced if we are in fact using the public airwaves for public purpose. We can have publicly funded elections without having this legal you know, this legalized bribery, which is essentially how our elections are run right now, you know. And then money pouring into our elections now, particularly through undisclosed vehicles using either super PACs or dark money which can contribute to super PACs you know, through the Democratic Party now or the Republicans using this this institution called Victory Funds, which I think was started by the Clinton campaign in twenty sixteen, a single donor can write a check for over six hundred thousand dollars a single donor, and it basically gets you know, gets laundered and comes back to a single campaign and a single candidate, which enables you know, single donors with deep pockets to have inordinate influence on our political institutions. This is you know, this has everything to do with why they are completely sold out and incapable of serving the American people. In the Green Party, we do not take corporate packs. We don't take we don't sanction super packs, we don't countenance them, and we you know, we dissapow any super pac. You know, we work by the rules. You know, we are a small donor campaign. I think our average donation is somewhere around ten or fifteen dollars. You know, that's that needs to be the norm and not the exceptions, so that you know, we're in this situation now we have the best democracy money can buy and it is no democracy at.

All, well said ma'am, and we appreciate your void of vote of confidence.

And Crystal sold my question.

So I think we're good to go, and we want to appreciate you very much for joining us. All candidates should and we hope to see you on every ballot in the country. So thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you, doctor Stein. Thank you for your time today. We're grateful.

Thank you so much. Good to be absolutely it's our pleasure.

Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. If you could support us, we'd help us out. We have candidate interviews, exclusive polling. We're really working our way up to the twenty twenty four election. Counterpoints got an awesome show for everybody tomorrow and an even banner show for everybody on Friday. If people are gonna love this, So if you can again support us Breaking Points otherwise, Counterpoints will see tomorrow.

We'll see you on Thursday.

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