5/1/24: Cops Crackdown On Student Protests, Bibi Freaks Over ICC Warrants, Judge Threatens To Arrest Trump, DEA To Reschedule Weed, Dems Save Mike Johnson From Ouster, Decline Of Christianity In America

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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let's get to the show.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
All right, Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
There was a massive crackdown on pro Palestime protesters on
campuses across.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
The country, by pro Israel demonstrators.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Out at UCLA and by pro Israel proxies NYPD over
at Columbia University. We're going to unpack all of that, Emily.
What else we've got today? Oh, we've got mugs.

Speaker 4 (00:43):
We have mugs. We have mugs. We can actually put
this up on the screen. We are now a mug
company with a news show. That's the that's I think
the new mission. Yes, to sell mugs. That's what we're
here to do. Counterpoints. Mugs made in the USA, Union decorated,
even dishwasher safe available now awfully expensive.

Speaker 3 (01:03):
But if it makes you feel better. All of the
money will be taken by middlemen, and very little we'll.

Speaker 4 (01:07):
Get to us. Well, it'll go to unions and US workers.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
That's true. So good middlemen, well organized middlemen. Good for them.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
We're going to talk about the Trump interview at Time Magazine.
He has just an incredible ability to continue to make
himself look bad in these interviews, put out positions that
are just contrary to what the general public once.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
We're going to unpack a bunch of that. Is that
an accurate reading.

Speaker 4 (01:32):
He's also really good at making journalists look bad, so
like while he's making himself look bad. Yeah, it's ever one.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Also, Joe Biden is moving to reschedule marijuana from Schedule
one to Schedule three. We'll talk about when that's going
to happen and what the implications of it are. Democrats
are teaming up with Mike Johnson to make sure that
there's no more drama around the speaker's race. They've announced
that they will support him if Marjorie Taylor Green goes

(01:59):
forward with her motion to vacate the chair so it
would be tabled in a massive down vote for MTG.
Weird development, interesting kind of uniparty in Congress Proud and
then a friend of yours, author of Pagan America.

Speaker 4 (02:14):
Hagan America, which is what Ryan always says. Serious, this pagan.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
America, cribbing my America.

Speaker 4 (02:20):
Yes, right, it's America. But yeah, it'll be interested to
hear some from the right. And John's got a super
interesting new book out that we can talk about.

Speaker 5 (02:28):
Ryan.

Speaker 4 (02:28):
Some days we say we have a really big show,
but we're just kind of saying that for the hell
of it to have something to say. Today, we have
a big never love, we would never lie. But you
know it every shows a big show, of course, but
this is really a big show. Because footage continues to
roll in, like by the minute from these campuses. They
were wild overnight. UCLA in particular, erupted into violent clashes

(02:49):
last night with NYPD cleared out the Columbia encampment and
the barricades. Let's start there.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, so Columbia University.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
After the university attempted to clear out the encampment, there
what protesters called an autonomous group of mostly students and
some faculty occupied Hamilton Hall, which was the site of
an ocy. We can roll some of this footage here,
which is the site of the famous occupation in nineteen
sixty eight by anti Vietnam War protesters. They renamed it

(03:21):
hind Hall for the six year old Hindri Yab, who
was the girl that many of you probably remember. She
made the desperate, harrowing phone call to rescue workers saying
that her entire family had been killed by the IDF
and she was begging them to.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Rescue her before it got dark. To rescue.

Speaker 3 (03:44):
Rescue workers were sent out to her as the world
was kind of captivated by this intense situation. They'd learned
only days later that the IDF had actually attacked the
car again and attacked the rest workers and she had died.
So the protesters renamed Hamilton Hall, named for Alexander Hamilton,

(04:06):
hind Hall. Last night, a called a bear Mars mobile
accessibility ramp system or something like that.

Speaker 4 (04:14):
You just saw this on your screen. In fact, it
was that big truck.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Like rolled up to the huge equipment from like a
medieval or.

Speaker 4 (04:21):
From a highly industrial era where they have like an
actual from what you saw on your screen, speaking of captivating,
was NYPD walking up this sort of how would you
even describe it? Like a ramp that's on top of
the truck into the window of the building, and the
other thing you saw on your screen there was a
violent clash outside the hall as the protesters sort of

(04:43):
tried to form human barricades to prevent the police from
going in and clearing out the encampment that was sort
of set up inside of the hall that you mentioned Ryan,
that had been you know, everyone was seen by now
the videos of the chairs being stacked in front of
the doors and the students and other protesters formed the
human chain. So you had NYPD going into the window

(05:04):
several stories up, and then you had them also trying
to clear people from that sort of human chain system
at the bottom of the building. And that's what was
unfolding at Columbia last night.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
And then so if people were following along on the
Guardians live blog, for instance, they shut.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
It down for the night.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
They said, all right, everybody's been arrested, and the Columbia
University is asking the NYPD to stay on campus effectively
through the middle of May so that they can have
their graduation. About an hour later, live blogs around the
world popped back up because we can roll this here.
Pro Israel rioters at UCLA began attacking the encampment at

(05:47):
the University of California, Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
We have footage of that here if we want to
roll some of that.

Speaker 6 (06:06):
Approaching plan beyond that, there's nobody else.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
In some of that footage. You may or may not
have been able to hear it.

Speaker 3 (06:32):
The pro Israel mob was shouting at the one at
the one guy outside the barricades there, you're by yourself.
Right after they shouted your you're by yourself, several of
them grab him, drag him out and start beating him
rather rather mercilessly. Are also emerged footage of pro Israel
protesters yelling at a woman. They yelled, you stand no chance,

(06:55):
old lady. Let's roll that clip and you also heard
f you old lady.

Speaker 4 (07:14):
Yeah, And there's photos actually also the fireworks there. Take note,
I mean people just saw people launching fireworks into the
encampment was a really dangerous thing to do. There's an
image that someone, a photographer for the AFP, took of
one of the counter protesters actually throwing a barricade or
looking to throw a barricade in the direction of some people.
You can see how completely dangerous this is. Now you

(07:35):
may be wondering who these people are. We're wondering actually
the exact same question. The protest group, the Ante Israel
protest group on campus says, these are quote Zionist aggressors
I'm reading from the NBC News lifelog here, who are
not UCLA students that have been quote incessantly verbally and
physically harassing us, violently trying to storm the camp and
threatening us with weapons. Another update just this morning, the

(07:58):
University of Arizona late yesterday that they responded to a
quote unlawful assembly on campus by deploying a quote chemical
irtant munitions or chemical irritant munitions. So there are forty Yes,
that's probably a tear gresser of pepper ball type situation,
but there are forty of these encampments more than that
spread out around the country. And so this question about UCLA.

(08:21):
If you now have you know, as they describe them
as quote Zionist aggressors, if you now have counter protesters
starting to come into these demonstrations, you have LAPD, you
have NYPD in some of the schools in the bigger cities.
This is a recipe for serious danger right now. That's
I shouldn't say flourishing, but really it is flourishing, starting
to spread, proliferate around campuses.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah, and whether their students are not Zionist digressors probably
is objectively true, like they're Zionists and.

Speaker 4 (08:49):
They're being aggressive. Yes, they might not even take issue
with that description.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
It's just flatly true.

Speaker 4 (08:54):
But we don't know who they are, we don't know
whether they're students. And this was similar actually to just
last week when we were talking to Sofia Selfia, a
student in the Colombia encampment who joined uslide from the broadcast.
Even they are having a hard time determining who the
sort of pro Palestine demonstrators are in some cases, whether
they're students or when you're in a big city, it's
just very easy for members of the community and hangers

(09:16):
on to sow chaos.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah, it's worth talking about the rhetoric that helped lead
to this. We can put up this next element, the
statement from President Biden that was put out just yesterday morning,
Echoing some of his other statements. He said, President Biden
has stood against repugnant anti Semitic smears and violent rhetoric
his entire life. He condemns the use of the term antifada,

(09:39):
as he has the other tragic and dangerous hate speech
displayed in recent days. President Biden respects the right to
free expression, but protests must be peaceful and lawful. Forcibly,
taking over buildings is not peaceful, it is wrong, and
hate speech and hate symbols have no place in America.
Anti Fada, by the way, is an Arabic term for

(10:00):
the uprising uh and it can It can mean violent
or non violent, just just as uprising can be an
up and uprising in English can be either violent or
non violent. Somebody pointed out that the Holocaust Museum, in
its Arabic translation, refers to the warsaw antifada.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
It's an uprising.

Speaker 3 (10:18):
So there's nothing, you know, there's nothing inherently violent about
the word antifada. There's definitely nothing inherently anti Semitic about it.
There are many people who receive that connotation, you know,
when when they hear it.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
But this is because it's used in.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
Because the second Antifada did include you know, suicide bombings
and and and serious violence, and that's the one that
that most people are familiar with, rather than the kind
of the term itself.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
But this is not the first time.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
Biden in the White House, you know, have have condemned
these these protests in a blanket way as anti semitic.
And so you can read this to me as a
green light both to the NYP to do what they
did at Colombia and also to the pro Israel mob
and UCLA to do what they did. He has just
just like the US in the kind of Israel Palestine conflict.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
We we claim that we're.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
Playing a role as a mediator, but we are one
hundred percent on one side of the conflict. Here again,
President Biden clearly signing one hundred percent kind of with
the pro Israel protesters.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
And there has been virtually no violence.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
Whatsoever from campus protesters throughout throughout the several weeks of
these encampments. There have been moments where you could say,
you've seen some signs that have been anti semitic. Yeah,
there have been some, you know, some like old protesters
who have like you know, wandered nearby with like vile
anti semitic signs, But there haven't been any accusations of

(11:48):
any violence.

Speaker 4 (11:49):
Except any of them they did to get into the building,
they smashed.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
They smashed their way into the building, no doubt.

Speaker 4 (11:55):
About that, And that was a I don't believe that
the woman who did that was a student. I believe
that this has been reported it was like a sixty
three year old outside organizer who I mean, maybe that
was the strategy to have someone else smash into with
a hammer. I think it was into the building that.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Was in sixty eight too, Like you had.

Speaker 3 (12:11):
Tom Hayden, for instance, was the lead organizer of the
ninety sixty eight occupation, and he proudly called himself an
outside agitator, like they would keep you know, these they
would go from campus to campus, you know, helping the
students organize.

Speaker 4 (12:25):
Yeah, and your point about Biden is a really interesting
one because it's also Chuck Schumer who's come out and
like condemned what was happening is quote unquote lawlessness. And
again I mean, like it's correct that some of this
absolutely is lawlessness. But to the Biden point, it speaks
to the sort of political difficulties of Democrats in the
United States who are trying desperately not to lose votes

(12:48):
in dearborn right because they need Michigan, and so they
put out statements like that one.

Speaker 3 (12:53):
But meanwhile, like the value of a news program like ours,
I think is emphasized by moments like this, because are
when they are covering this, just clashes erupted, no clue
what happened one way or the other. New York Times
writes after UCLA declared a pro Palestinian encampment illegal on
Tuesday night, clashes broke out and administrators called in the

(13:16):
police for help. The LAPD said that it was responded
because of quote, multiple acts of violence within the large encampment.
Those are words, those are sentences, but they convey no information.
What's ironic is over at the intercept. A week or
so ago, my colleague Jeremy Skhiale and I published their
internal private style guide, which urged reporters not to use

(13:39):
words like slaughter or massacre because they were imprecise, they said,
and don't use the word occupied territory.

Speaker 1 (13:48):
That's imprecise. Say Gaza West Bank. Don't say occupied.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
They're charged, right, yeah, but they don't say they're charged.
What they said in the memo is that they're imprecise.
They say we for precision. They aim for precision. When
they're trying to euphemize is rarely violence. When they're talking
about when they're talking about the violence from last night,

(14:13):
all of a sudden, the goal of precision just completely
out the window.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Just clashes broke out. Where's the precision?

Speaker 3 (14:22):
All of a sudden, the hunt for precision becomes a
hunt for making the sentences as vague as possible so
that people are just like ah, in that shame. All
of these encampments broke out across the country, and now
there's violence. It must must be the pro pousetating protesters
getting violent.

Speaker 4 (14:39):
I think that's a really interesting contrast. Let's also roll
this thing that we have from MSNBC. Lawrence O'Donnell was
reacting live on MSNBC last night while they were doing
a toss off. Let's roll this MSNBC last night.

Speaker 7 (14:50):
What we have seen on the videos so far is
actually the most organized and calmest and most professional police
intervention we've ever seen on a college campus.

Speaker 4 (15:02):
You know, that's a weird way to describe what happened
last night. Ryan and I say that as somebody who
comes to this from I think we probably disagree on this.
I am sick of a being told that it's you know,
anti Semitic to disagree with everything that Israel says like that,
I'm so sick of it, and the same time, I'm

(15:23):
sick of saying being told that it's like anti or
that it's just a blanketly pro Israel thing to question
any of these protests and people smashing into a hall,
kids are trying to take finals, stacking up chairs, barricading themselves,
forming human chains, and just like I'm sick of it,
I think those people actually should be like, face consequences.
That's what civil disobedience is. So I'm just sick of

(15:44):
this like stupid binary And even then, looking at what
was happening in New York last night and chextaposing it
with Laurence O'Donnell is a hell of a contrast.

Speaker 3 (15:55):
Maybe it shows our sliding scale, because I guess if
you compare the NYPD's aultarized response to what the intense
police violence at VCU, for instance, or down at UT Austin,
I guess it was less violent.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
But it also the kind of just.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
The optics of it, the gigantic siege equipment rolling through
the street, the riot police, the counter terrorism units being
brought in for students. They didn't wield batons like it
was nineteen sixty eight. At the Chicago Convention or ut
Austin like this week. But it still gives off the

(16:34):
appearance of an extraordinarily authoritarian situation for college students and
to just who are Yes, they smashed the windows, but
they're not violent, they're not they're not they're not dangerous
to other people.

Speaker 4 (16:47):
Yeah, and that's why, By the way, it's also extremely unhelpful.
And this is where I thought our interview last week
with Sofia was really helpful, because it's very, very important
to the point of precision to not just use these
sort of blankets smears against the students. Actually wrote along
piece in the Federalists about this a couple of days ago,
because you end up completely misunderstanding what they're doing and
misunderstanding what they say they're there to do. Crystal Sen's

(17:09):
a great tweet this morning about how at Brown University
handled their protests completely different. They actually just like held
a vote on divestment and dealt.

Speaker 1 (17:19):
With schedule one.

Speaker 4 (17:20):
Yeah, right, they agreed to schedule vote, but like actually
dealt with the demand that the protesters were making, which
was very specifically divestment. That isn't to say they haven't
broadened it, but the point of the encampment was to
force a vote on divestment. And I get that if
you give in to those protests, like you can create
a bigger situation. But I think everyone on Columbia's university

(17:40):
Columbia University's campus right now says this has been wildly
mismanaged by the school. Whether you're on one side or
the other, everyone agrees, like Colombia completely completely botched this.

Speaker 3 (17:50):
Yeah, and so Brown will hold a divestment vote in
October of next year on whether to continue investing in
general and Israeli companies or was it was is it
specifically connected, Oh, it's I think it's fund specifically connected
to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. As The New
York Times reports, University of Chicago has also handled this

(18:13):
in a much more kind of reasonable and civil way.
They said, look that these this encampment is breaking our rules,
but we also as a principal, support free expression. And
as long as they're not disrupting people's ability to do
their own expression, people's ability to get the class, as
long as they're not endangering public safety.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
We're going to give some leeway here. We're going to.

Speaker 3 (18:35):
Encourage people to express themselves other ways, but we're not
going to bring in a militarized response here.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
UCLA in some ways did the same thing.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
It was, but it was the kind of pro Israel
demonstrators that that that escalated things last night, but only
after you know, not only Biden's comments, but also UCLA
itself saying okay, this is an illegal encampment that that
seems to have given the counter protest there's the green
light to go ahead and do what they did.

Speaker 4 (19:04):
Yeah, no, I mean it's it's been like the University
of Chicago response was I actually think kind of pitch perfect,
and they've been doing pitch perfect responses to these type
of things. They're like actually consistent in the free speech,
free speech space. There's the University of Chicago letter that
was some people may be familiar with actually like a
really big deal when it started circulating almost ten years

(19:25):
ago now, pushing back on some of the schools that
were giving into crazy speech demands of the left. Actually,
and so to see the consistency on this from places
like universities, I have to see consistency heartening. Yeah, absolutely
absolutely is.

Speaker 3 (19:37):
Last point I would make is to the protesters, particularly
ones at UCLA and elsewhere who feel like their strategy
of nonviolence is no longer effective, that it can't be
effective in the face of this violent response. I would say,
you know, effect of non violence is always met with violence. Yeah,

(19:59):
but that is part of it's virtue. Like that is
that is part of its value. It exposes the cruel
face of the system that you're opposing.

Speaker 4 (20:09):
That is the fundamental premise of civil disobedience is the
civility of it. And that's why those images are are
so poignant from the American civil rights era of just
abject stoicism on the faces of people who are, you know,
confronting consequences for violating certain laws, but are doing it
just stoically. And that's baked into the American narrative about

(20:32):
how that changed hearts and minds that people believe so
deeply in this that rather than giving in to the
forces of inscibility, rather than you know, joining the people
who as you know, we talked to Savia about this
and talked to other students of Columbia about this. The
hangers on who come with or even some of the
students who say things that are legitimately calls for violence
or are not civil instead of giving into that or

(20:54):
returning it with violence. There's so much power to your point, Ryan,
and remaining civil in the face of aggress Yes.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
So I would say stay true, stay true to your
non violent values, not in spite of the violence, but
you know, because of and in the face of the
violence from counter protesters. Let's move on to the violence.
Prime Minister Benjamin Nenyaho publicly addressing the rumors that he

(21:23):
kind of got going that the International Criminal Court may
launch charges against him and senior leaders of Israel for
war crimes.

Speaker 1 (21:33):
Let's roll Nenyahu here.

Speaker 5 (21:34):
The International Criminal Court in the League is contemplating issuing
arrest wants against senior Israeli government and military officials as
war criminals. This would be an outrage of historic proportions.
International bodies like the icy c arose in the wake
of the Holocaust committed against the Jewish people. They were

(21:58):
set up to prevent such ores, to prevent future genocides.
Yet now the International Court is trying to put Israel
in the dock. It's trying to put us in the
dock as we defend ourselves against genocidal terrorists and regimes Iran.
Of course that openly works to destroy the one and

(22:20):
only Jewish state. Branding Israel's leaders and soldiers as war criminals,
will pour jet fuel on the fires of anti Semitism,
those fires that are already raging on the campuses of
America and across capitals around the world. It will also
be the first time that a democratic country fighting for
its life according to the rules of war is it

(22:42):
self accused of war crimes. The Israeli army, the idea,
is one of the most moral militaries in the world.

Speaker 3 (22:49):
It takes endless measures to practivilians. We've heard that before.
So the NENYAHUO pressured the US to come out publicly
and defend Israel against the rumors that Israel peers to
have started itself, that the ICC was coming at them,
and the White House did. The White House said, we
do not believe that the ICC has jurisdiction over Israel.

(23:10):
Their argument they're making is that Israel has not signed
on to the ICC itself. However, Palestinians have, and when
the ICC launched charges against Vladimir Putin, the US applauded
those charges. Russia is not a signatory to the ICC,
but Ukraine is, and that is why the ICC has jurisdiction.

(23:32):
If you are committing a crime against a member, a
signatory of the ICC, then the ICC has jurisdiction whether
you're a signatory or not. That was the principle that
the White House believed when the ICC charged putin all
of a sudden, that doesn't apply anymore in this case.
Not long after the US gave that Yahoo the assurance

(23:54):
that he wanted, that Yahoo came out and said that
even if he cuts a hostage deal with Hamas, he
is still going to launch an invasion into Rafa.

Speaker 4 (24:06):
It's very interesting to hear Net and Yahoo alluding to
these sort of international rules that were largely agreed upon
in the wake of the Holocaust, and he referenced that directly,
and to see the way that they are used selectively
and as blunt forced objects. I mean, it is exactly
true that we all we've talked about this many times.

(24:27):
We came together after World War Two, after the Holocaust,
the level of industrial slaughter the world had never seen
and stead this is and that's you know, includes things
like Dresden and nuclear weapons. We came together and said
there this is not sustainable for humanity, and these are
the new sort of ethical again. Yeah, right, And these

(24:48):
are the ethical guidelines that we'll look to going forward,
and we agree with them when we want to agree
with them, when it's blunt forth first object that we
can use against enemies for the sake of our in
foreign policy goals. And then we say, well, those are
non binding or nobody signed on to that or whatever.
It's just the sanctimony that goes behind the United States

(25:09):
AND's allies in the West wielding them. Not just like
the Putin thing is such a good example. I mean,
it was just the level of credibility we assigned to
it when we wanted to use it there. I mean,
that's as good an example as you can get.

Speaker 1 (25:23):
Yeah, so much for the rules based international order.

Speaker 3 (25:26):
Meanwhile, there's there's reporting where you can put up this
next element that the US is contemplating accepting significant numbers
of Palestinian refugees who were trying to flee Gaza. And
what's fascinating about this news is that, you know, for
the most part, we have accepted very few dozens of

(25:50):
Palestinian refugees over the years, and when we have it
is refugees who are claiming political asylum from Hamas, and
HAMAS is a vindictive organization toward its critics absolutely, and
so people who are kind of dissidence again and critics

(26:11):
of Hamas like have some have been legitimately granted refugee
status here in the United States.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
Not many, not many, like dozens.

Speaker 4 (26:19):
Yeah, no, I pulled the numbers last night. It's actually
kind of shocking.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
Sixty something, what is it?

Speaker 4 (26:23):
Last ten years, US has resettled more than four hundred
thousand refugees from CBS CBS fleeing violence, and in twenty
twenty three fifty six Palestinian refugees, So that was points.
There are nine percent of sixty thousand refugees in that
twelve month period.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Right, and so in order to in order to boost
that number up to the number of people who need
actual safe havens at this point, what the US would
have to do is grant them asylum basically from themselves,
because they would have to grant them asylum from Israel,
from the idea, from the military campaign.

Speaker 4 (26:58):
They need Egypt's cooperation.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
But the legal rationale for accepting this many refugees from
Gaza would be that they are persecuted by Israel and
we are supplying the weapons and the political support and
the global the global support for that very persecution which
we are then going to give asylum against. So we'll

(27:23):
be giving them asilum in our country against ourselves.

Speaker 1 (27:26):
Basically.

Speaker 4 (27:27):
Yeah, we talk about this when we talk about the border.
So asylum is actually much more narrow category than it's
often used. And then it's been used in our southern
border in particular. So you have to prove that you're
being targeted based on your nationality, religion, or your political views.
And so you can see pretty easily how that argument
can be made, and you can pull a million quotes
from Israeli government on this point and talk about what's happened,

(27:49):
you know, in your community in Gaza when you're applying
for asylum. Now, they absolutely could still use hamas and
you know they could, that could be the rationale that
a lot of them give, but they could also you
can see start making an argument in the other direction.
And it reminds me, actually, Ryan of how the US
sanctioned that unit of the idea recently. Is like it's

(28:11):
the same sort of strange circular logic and listen, if
people as refugees are coming to the United States and
they want to be citizens of the United States. That's great.
I think that's awesome. There's public polling out of Palestine
that suggests a big chunk of the population there in
Polling is tough there. But this is when the Palestinian

(28:33):
Center for Policy and Survey Research in December, seventy two
percent of Palestinians quote believe that Hamasa's decision to launch
the October seventh attack was correct. Now, again, we can
debate what that means, but it definitely means this fundamental
disagreement with US foreign policy, and you can understand why
people in Palestine would have a very hostile approach towards

(28:53):
United sert perspective towards the United States foreign policy. So
does this so discord and communities. I don't know that
enough people will be accepted that it'll so discord around communities.
To be honest with fifty six and twenty twenty three,
that was one of the most violent recent years on
record in Palestine. And so that's what a lot of
people on the right are worried about. You know, we're

(29:14):
going to import a bunch of people who hate America.
I don't know that they're going to be able to
get enough people out that that becomes a problem, to
be honest.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
Yeah, and the Israeli governments, you know, put out a
lot of white papers and other and trial balloons showing
that the plan was to depopulate you know, Gaza going
in and so yeah, on the one hand, this this
plays into the effort to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip
of Palestinians and then and rebuild it as Israeli's on

(29:42):
as Jared Kushner said, you know, waterfront, waterfront property.

Speaker 4 (29:47):
Maybe they'll use Kushner's quote the never silent abligations.

Speaker 3 (29:52):
At the same time, the area is going to be
uninhabitable for many years. It's the nor Northern Gaza for instance.
You know, so a normal bomb an ordinance getting dropped
from a plane in a battlefield or fired elsewhere, it
has something like a ten percent failure rate. Israel does
not use these weapons normally. You know, they're dropping them

(30:15):
in areas where they're going to have a much higher
failure rate. And so maybe you're pushing twenty percent failure
rate and you're talking of you know, thousands and thousands
of bombs being dropped on Gaza. Those are fairly stable
unexploded ordinance until they are disrupted by a bulldozer or
some type of construction during a rebuilding process. It's impossible

(30:37):
to overstate how time consuming it is to extract these
weapons in northwest Washington, d C. Where they did where
they did basically chemical weapons testing during World War One.
They are still to this day finding unexploded like mustard
gas ordinances in Washington, d C. Near American University where

(30:59):
that research which was carried out more than one hundred
years later.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
And so.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
It's just going to be borderline impossible for hundreds of
thousands of people to return to their homes anytime soon,
which means they're going to have to live somewhere.

Speaker 4 (31:15):
And just before we wrap, let's put this poll up
on the screen. This is reporting in the Jerusalem Post
about a new poll published by end twelve. Over half
of the Israeli public beliefs that Prime Minister Benjamin Ninyaho
should resign immediately, including twenty eight percent of those who
voted for the block that supports nt Yahoo. Forty eight
percent of Israeli's believe Defense Minister Galant should resign immediately.

Speaker 8 (31:37):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (31:37):
I mean, like if you keep going down the line,
here there's fifty percent believe the idea of chief of
staff should resign, fifty six percent believe that the head
of Shinbet should resign right now. I mean fifty four
percent of respondent said that the elections should be held earlier.
So that's not just opposition in net Yahoo. That's immediate,
urgent opposition to Net Yahoo. And obviously in Israel there's

(32:00):
opposition from uh like, both sides. So people who are
you know, more hardcore that want, you know, Net Yahoo
to go even harder than he has gone. And then
there are people who disagree that he was, thinking he's
already gone too far, and then he's been you know,
mismanaging the situations and incompetent. But all that is to say,
this is a pretty untenable situation for net Yahoo and

(32:21):
his coalition at the moment.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
In Israel, it's been a strategic failure in every sense
of the word world word up and down from net
Yahoo and his managing of the conflict before and after
October seventh.

Speaker 4 (32:33):
Yeah, and the Israeli public is picking up on that,
no doubt about it. Donald Trump just yesterday he was
back in court and as day nine, day nine on
the hush money trial. Donald Trump was held in violation
of his gag order once again. It's the second time

(32:54):
that he's actually been sanctioned for violating the gag order.
And this is there's kind of some interesting new one
in this particular ruling because the judge one Merchant find
Donald Trump, but he said because he was criticizing expected
trial witnesses, So that would be Michael Cohen in particular.
That's a big one, Stormy Daniels, that's a big one.

(33:15):
He's criticized the makeup of the jury pool. But what
Merchant said is that it's specifically related, like you can
talk about the trial, but it's specifically you cannot keep
talking about these expected witnesses. And that's obviously a pretty
huge distinction because it addresses the central issue of Donald
Trump's argument, which is I have to be able, like

(33:37):
this is the middle of a campaign. I have to
be able to make my case to the public, So
you have to let me talk about this trial. I'm
running for president of the United States. So Merchant narrowed
it and said, this is specifically about you know, talking
about so specifically about the key witnesses here, not just
about the case in General. And then Donald Trump sat
for an interview with Time that was released yesterday that

(33:59):
was just of incredible quotes. Yeah, just a lot happening.

Speaker 3 (34:04):
When he when he said he was barred from commenting
on the makeup of the jury because it's Trump.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
I thought he was talking about makeup, because he would
do that. He would do that.

Speaker 3 (34:13):
He's got every year, he's got opinions on fashion Week.
But no, apparently he's talking about the jury itself, and
you're not supposed to do.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
You know, that violates the gag order.

Speaker 3 (34:22):
And so he got a thousand dollars fine for each
kind of truth Social tweet.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
He put up, yeah, one.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Thousand dollars for nine posts, and he was made to
delete the posts and the judge said, you know you
you could get incarceratory penalties next time.

Speaker 4 (34:37):
And he removed the posts. By the way he did,
he took them down. So he removed seven from truth
Social and two from his campaign website, and he owes
nine thousand dollars. He could, you know, end up with
as you said, Ryan, the consequences could only increase. But
the fact that he actually took down all of the posts,
it looks like he's throwing in the towel in most

(34:58):
particular on this particular point. And actually, I think it's
kind of a fair decision that you can't be going
after the key witnesses. You can still talk about the trial, though.
I guess that gives him a little roadmap to making
his case in the public.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
Just be careful there, mister president. I'd love to get
your take on his Time interview, though. Let's highlight a
couple of them.

Speaker 4 (35:20):
I mean, so if you go on Time's website and
we can put this element up on the screen, they
do the thing where they give you the amount of
time it'll take to read the article eighty three minutes.
The eighty three minute read he had this. Really it
must have been a two hour interview, would be my guess,
after you account for the editing, for clarity and everything
that goes into publishing a transcript. And I love when

(35:40):
they just published the transcript, the raw transcript. We pulled
a couple of highlights from it. He basically the journalist
basically got Trump to touch on everything under the sun.
But we can move to this first poll quote because
I want to start with the economy, because you know, honestly,
we're talking a lot about foreign policy on this show
and the discourse in general. For obvious reasons, a lot

(36:02):
of American voters are going to be primarily voting on
the economy when they go to the polls in November.
So this is Trump saying he's getting asked by the
journalist about his ten percent tariff funal imports and a
sixty percent tariff on Chinese imports. Asked if that's still
his plan, and Trump says, quote, it may be more
than that. RN. I actually thought that was very interesting.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
Yeah, yeah, And then he and then he's may be
a derivative of that.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
Derivative of that. I don't know what he means by
derivative there, nobody knows, And you're right. And so the
reporter press is like, really, it could could be more
than ten percent. He's saying, yes, yes, it could be.
And then he says it's not actually going to raise prices.
It's just going to cost China money and it's going
to put a bunch of money in Chinese coffers. That's

(36:49):
you can that's nonsense, Like it's fine to support tariffs.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
Yeah, and I think that tariffs.

Speaker 3 (36:55):
You know, have a real serious role to play when
it comes to building your domestic manufacturing base, like that's
they're important, but in the immediate term, they're going to
cause inflation, like they're going to prices are going to
go up, Like that's how that's how tariffs operate.

Speaker 4 (37:11):
Well, this created a huge point. This like created a
huge debate on econ Twitter yesterday about the technical definition
of inflation because a lot of people were saying Donald
Trump is campaigning against inflation but also campaigning on a tariff.
And then economists were like, actually, this important distinction. Inflation
is not the same as like pricing creases and Ryan
you just you just need to be precision here, right.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
No, but they're right, But it's interesting they're true that.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
That's right from a from an economic textbook perspective, there
those are those are different things. And inflation refers to
just when there's kind of more money in the economy,
mean chasing like a smaller number of you know, or
not enough goods, Like that's inflation. But from the perspective
of somebody who's going to the store, yeah, it's the same.

(37:56):
It's the same buying something. Yes, they see the price rise,
and people aren't people don't kind of object to the
concept of inflation, but they're okay with price increases. They
don't like when things cost more and when their wages
are not keeping up with the cost of things going up.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
That's something.

Speaker 3 (38:16):
And you know, in some ways they don't care whether
it's greedflation from corporations, right oh, rising prices, whether it's
supply shocks from the pandemic and the reopening of the
economy and the port's being all cluttered, or whether it's
fiscal policy monetary policy. Like, what people don't like is
when they go to the grocery store and it used

(38:37):
to cost fifty dollars for a bag and I was eighty.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
Dollars for a bag or whatever. That's what they don't like.

Speaker 3 (38:41):
And so Trump is going to learn that the hard
way if he doesn't figure out a way to come
at this in a way that gets prices down.

Speaker 4 (38:51):
Yeah, and it's true that, for example, Joe Biden has
no control over greedflation. I shouldn't say no control. He
doesn't have a lot of control over greedflation, but you know,
unless he sort of. But I mean, just even like
policy wise, these are private businesses making terrible decisions as
private businesses.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
And good decisions for themselves.

Speaker 4 (39:09):
Make good decisions for themselves. You know, you got to
have some money for the buybacks, but.

Speaker 3 (39:13):
Try to figure out a way to get corporations to
you know.

Speaker 1 (39:18):
So it's actually an interesting point.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
John Kenneth Gallbraith included prices in his understanding of the
government's role in the economy. Like we understand that the
government and through the FED, plays a role in inflation,
plays a role in unemployment and labor and wages, and
we always have had understood that the government also played
a role in prices. In the seventies, we moved away

(39:42):
from that and we said, well, prices, what can you do,
just like the weather. But actually it is a function
of a government and private sector interacting. And so we
could actually come in and mess with prices if we
wanted to, and I think we should.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
But anyway, that's a side point.

Speaker 4 (39:59):
But it's interesting because right the voters are always going
to blame, you know, in the same way that Joe
Biden is getting a lot of blame for you know,
even I think he deserves some of the blame. He
spent a ton of money and that's always behind inflation.
But there's also a component of this, even from the right.
I agree that was gre inflation, and voters just don't
want to hear you scapegoat They know prices are higher,

(40:20):
they don't want you to downplay higher prices, and they
don't want you to scapegoat whether it's China or greedy CEOs.
I think Donald Trump is probably better at communicating why
he you know, describes some of the blame to China
in these cases, but he will learn that lesson. Nonetheless,
he had a pretty good economy during his administration until
COVID hit. And what's going to happen if you know

(40:41):
you have a ten percent tariff, it's he's going to
have to confront people who are upset about that. And
we saw it kind of happen with farmers and all
of that over the course of the administration, and he
maintained some I think, pretty impressive levels of support from farmers.
But in a way, yes, it's the Biden lesson can
also be the Trump lesson that you know, when people
are paying higher prices, they don't want to hear excuses

(41:04):
from the president, even if the president himself is not
waving his magic wand or couldn't wave a magic wand
and tackle things one thing. Also Bran, my apologies to
the control and I skipped this, but let's put B
two up on the screen, because if I were interviewing
Donald Trump right now, this is basically the question that
I would want the answer to. You know, they if president,

(41:25):
if a president doesn't get immunity. This is what Trump
tells Time about the Supreme Court case that's pending right now.
He said, quote, then Biden, I am sure will be
prosecuted for all of his crimes. Trump said that if
presidents do get immunity, He went on to say, basically,
that's great that Joe Biden will not be prosecuted for

(41:45):
his many crimes, but you know, and said that he wouldn't,
you know, push for or implied basically argued that he
wouldn't push for Joe Biden if presidents have immunity to
then be responsible for all of these different allegations alleged
crimes that Joe Biden has been involved with. But I
think that's really one of the most important questions is
what we see from Donald Trump in the next Trump

(42:07):
administration potentially if he is elected president, voters should know
exactly how he plans to wield the state wield the
powers of the state against political opponents, because that's what
he's campaigning against right now.

Speaker 3 (42:20):
Yeah, how vindictive do you think he will be if
he becomes president? Is he going to throw the Justice
Department at a bunch of his enemies.

Speaker 4 (42:27):
I think it's really hard to say, because he likes
being liked, and he in the last administration was really
torn in two different directions from sort of the hardcore
right people and then the neo conservative moderates, And you know,
he never really figured that out himself, like which balance
you know worked best. He was intentionally having them fight

(42:48):
each other over what his policy should be. So I
just really have a hard time making a prediction on that.
I don't know. What do you think?

Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yeah, I think he probably will be.

Speaker 3 (42:57):
I think he'll I think he's so angry about what
he's going through now that he feels it's unjust and
a witch hunt and election interference and persecution, that I
think he would that. I think he will. I think
he'll try. Whether or not the wheels can get rolled
through the Justice Department is another question, but I think
he'll definitely try.

Speaker 4 (43:18):
So we'll put be five up on the screen here
because time got him to respond to questions about the
war as well in Israel. I want to know you
said you want to get Israel to wind down the war.
You said it needs to get over with. How are
you going to make that happen? The reporter asked, would
you consider withholding aid? Trump really wouldn't give a clear
answer to that question about withholding aid. He said, I

(43:39):
think that Israel has done one thing very badly public relations.
No argument there, Ryan. I don't think that the Israel
Defense Fund or any other group should be sending out
pictures every night of buildings falling down and being bombed
with possibly people in those buildings every single night, which
is what they do. That's obviously not just a public
relations argument, which is why I chuckle the lad but

(43:59):
because he's framing in as a public relations argument and
he's avoiding answering the question about whether he would withhold AID.
But that's also when you're talking about buildings that might
have people in them. That's also him criticizing the policy.
I don't know what he would do if he was
in office. Obviously he was cozy with Netanyahu, even though
he's not been cozy with him, at least rhetorically in
the press. Now again, I think it's it's very hard

(44:22):
to predict what you see come out of a second
Trump administration, but at least interesting that the father in
law of Jared Kushner is talking that way.

Speaker 3 (44:30):
It's an interesting way to smuggle in criticism because it's
completely acceptable on the pro Israel side to say that
ITUAL hasn't been good at it's PR right like that.
That's always a fine thing for any kind of ally
to criticize their their.

Speaker 1 (44:44):
Own organization or group of PR.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
PR bad PR. You're great, You're doing great. Everything you're
doing is great. People just don't understand how great you are.
That's basically what that's saying. But your point is exactly right.
He doesn't talk about PR. Then he talks about war crimes,
talks about about bombing civilians and flattening buildings, and then
he does talk about the PR reaction to that. They
then broadcast that, so he you know, he's seeing the

(45:09):
fact that Israel's broadcasting a lot of its crimes, and
whether he's seeing a lot of the kind of the
IDF soldiers and they're and their tiktoks and they're and
their reels where they're wearing women's clothing, or whether they're
blowing up moss or blowing up schools or like riding
around on children's bikes.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
Yeah, like all of this stuff is being broadcast.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
So it is a combination of war crimes that is
that are a fundamental problem of substance, but then also
the lack of shame about them and the broadcasting of
them to the world. So yeah, he's see and and
I think one thing that bothers him is that it
causes problems for him now, it causes bigger problems for Biden.
So he's happy with that at the moment. But I

(45:52):
think he's like, in his mind, he's like, guys, like
he said, just just in the same way he said,
you've got to wrap this up. You've got to get
this over with. He's like, what are you doing, you know,
bombing a building full of civilians and then broadcasting that,
Like that's not going to play well. It's not a
moral argument like you shouldn't do that. It's an argument
that this is not going to be effective in your mission,

(46:16):
of which I'm aligned with, which I'm aliged.

Speaker 4 (46:18):
And again that's why I think it's interesting that like
again this is the father in law of Jared Kushner,
Jared Kushner's, and people Trump gives him credit actually in
fact for heading up Middle East Israel policy basically under
Trump's watch. And what they did by moving the embassy
and uh just completely allying the United States with you know,

(46:40):
the goals of the net Yahoo administration essentially, not that
you know that's new for the United States foreign policy,
but it was the sort of there was a an
enthusiasm for that alliance that I think was very specific
to the Trump administration. So that's why I find you know,
potentially Donald Trump coming into office again likely likely based

(47:05):
on reporting, bringing Jared Kushner back into the administration. That's
I think genuinely an interesting contrast.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
And even casual observers at the time warned that Kushner's
approach to the Abraham Accords of pretending that the Palestine
question didn't exist and just trying to reach normalization with
Saudi and the UAE and Israel and others was not
going to work because Palestinians do exist, and it was
going to lead to some type of an explosion.

Speaker 1 (47:33):
That was the warning.

Speaker 3 (47:35):
But you can't completely blame the Trump administration for that,
because the Biden administration came in January twenty twenty one
and had every opportunity to say, whoever let this kid
run Middle East policy for the United States was an idiot,
and we're not going to continue following that course. Instead,
they basically followed the Kushner policy going forward. They did

(47:58):
not re enter the deal, They discarded the Obama approach
to the region and adopted the Trump approach, and we
wound up with this let's do his two states. Yeah,
so he was asked about potential solutions. I thought this
This was also kind of a bit insightful from Trump
in an interesting way. Do you think an outcome of

(48:19):
that war between Israel and Hamas should be a two
state solution between Israelis and Palestinians? Trump says, most people
thought it was going to be a two state solution.
I'm not sure a two state solution anymore is going
to work. Everybody was talking about two states. Even when
I was there, I was saying, what do you like here?
Do you like two states?

Speaker 1 (48:37):
Now?

Speaker 3 (48:38):
People are going back to it depends where you are
every day. It changes now if Israel's making and here's
the insightful part and if Israel's making progress, yes, they
don't want two states, they want everything right, And if
Israel's not making progresses he goes on, sometimes they talk
about two state solution. Two state solutions seem to be
the idea that people liked most, the policy or the
idea that people liked above this.

Speaker 4 (48:59):
Is like really the benefit of Donald Trump. In some
cases he comes in with no like rhetorical allegiance to
either side of the debate, and it's just like perceptive
in the sneakiest ways sometimes because he has this like
weird business mindset and he hasn't been reading scripts from
full of talking points from like the RNC for twenty years,

(49:21):
so he just is like free wheeling, and sometimes it
has disastrous consequences. Other times it's weirdly perceptive.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
Yeah, when things are going well for Israel, as Trump observes,
they just want everything. Why would they agree to two states.

Speaker 3 (49:33):
It's only when they're on their heels that they say, okay,
maybe we'll maybe we'll agree to that.

Speaker 4 (49:40):
And the cushions of the world. Again, this is interesting
because I'm saying this as somebody broadly on the right.
It's frustrating any criticism of Israel. You are lumped into
this category as like pro hamas pro anti Semitism or
enabling anti Semitism. This is Donald Trump openly criticizing Israel
when nobody forced him to. This interview was not particularly

(50:02):
tough on him on that question, like it pushed him.
It was fair, but it wasn't like hostile. It wasn't
saying like, you need to criticize Israel right now, or
you will, you know, sacrifice all of your credibility. It
wasn't doing that. He just went there, and I actually
think that's really.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
Interesting and real quickly, and then we can move on
to to Weed.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
I did want to ask you about maybe you have
some insight into this the myth of pristone questions. So
he gets asked, do you think women should be able
to get the abortion pill myf of pristone? And he says, well,
I have an opinion on that, but I'm not going
to explain. I'm not going to say it yet, but
I have pretty strong views on that, and I'll be
releasing it probably over the next week. So this is

(50:43):
the abortion pill, which the Supreme Court has said is legal.
Do you have any insight what is he actually going
to put something out in a week.

Speaker 1 (50:52):
Is he just making that up?

Speaker 3 (50:53):
Where is there any speculation about where he lands on this,
because this is a huge issue because if you're in
a red state that has banned abortion, but you can
still get access to this, it's a game changer.

Speaker 4 (51:07):
It's why abortions have increased post obs. There's this mass
movement towards Smith of Perstone, and it now accounts for
a massive.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
Proportion learning about it now do yeah.

Speaker 4 (51:18):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I haven't heard any rumblings that
he's planning to make an announcement on this, which could
That doesn't mean he's not planning to make an announcement
on it. Frankly, if I had to guess where he
stands on this personally, I actually still think that could
diverge from whatever his policy is because this interview is
similarly like he wouldn't give an answer on what he

(51:38):
would definitively do about military aid, conditioning military aid to Israel.
He also would not give an answer about what he
would do with abortion, and he kept saying it's up
to the states, it's up to the states. You're hypothetical.
I won't answer because it's so impossible. You're never gonna
have sixty votes in the Senate, So I can't answer
your question about whether I would sign a fifteen week ban,

(51:58):
et cetera, et cetera. On this. I think it's possible
he announces a policy really similar to what he announced
with abortion in general, that he's just supportive of leaving
it up to the states. Basically that upset a lot
of people in the anti abortion movement. But I don't
know whether that reflects what he's saying when he says
he has a very strong opinion on it, because his

(52:19):
very strong opinion could potentially not be reflected by whatever
policy he announces. I think he's, you know, privately, you
hear that he's kind of icked out by anti abortion people,
that he feels like they're weird religious extremists, and you know,
is personally not hardcore anti abortion. So I would if
I had a guess, I would say he's probably prof
for pristone personally, But whether that is whatever policy he

(52:42):
announces is a completely different question.

Speaker 3 (52:47):
Well, the DEA is making big moves on marijuana. So
back in the election year twenty twenty two, if you remember,
the Biden administration did two things during the mid terms.
At once they pardoned every non violent weed defender. But
the more significant thing they did at that time was
they asked the confederal bureaucracy to study whether or not

(53:11):
marijuana belonged.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
In Schedule one.

Speaker 3 (53:15):
Now, Schedule one is the most restrictive category for an
illegal drug. It means it has zero medical benefit and
a high potential for abuse. You could say that the
stronger weed lately has a significant potential for abuse, but
the zero medical benefit has always been completely absurd. But

(53:36):
it was clear at that moment that he was teeing
up a twenty twenty four move. Now, HHS and the
FDA both signed off on reclassifying marijuana, moving it out
of Schedule one. The DEA has been dragging its feet,
as you can as you can imagine the DEA does.
But yesterday the Associated Press reported, and we can put
this up, that the DA finally is getting in line

(53:58):
and recommending back to the White House that they do
what everybody else said they ought to do, which is
reschedule marijuana from Schedule one to Schedule three.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
Now, Schedule three says it has some medical value, So
there's been some reporting that this would help with.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
Tax liabilities for marijuana firms, cannabis company. You know, it's
because so basically one of the but that's not necessarily
the case.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
Because Schedule three is still quite restrictive.

Speaker 3 (54:34):
Because right now, if you are marijuana business, you basically
have it's basically impossible to write off a lot of
your costs, which means you have exorbitant tax bill at
the end because you don't pay taxes on your profits
like a normal business. You pay taxes on all of
your revenue because you can't write off your costs because
your costs are illegal under federal law. At the same time,

(54:54):
you don't have access to banking, which puts people at
serious risks because they're moving cash around, you know, gigantic
you know, trucks going back and forth filled with cash
from homes to businesses. And so this is much less
than what a lot of advocates would want, you know,
have have wanted, but it will it will help on sentencing,

(55:16):
you know, you know, with mandatory minimums. It also helps
importantly with research. Right now, if you want to research marijuana,
which so many people in the medical field want to
do because there are significant medical benefits like getting access.

Speaker 1 (55:34):
It's it's hilarious.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
Like if you want to get gummies or weed, you
walk down the street and you buy them. If you
want to do research on cannabis at the university setting,
it's impossible, right right, Like there are like a handful
of studies that have gone through like ten years of
like fighting with the DA.

Speaker 4 (55:52):
So the research just like getting dime bags on the corner.

Speaker 3 (55:55):
They just research something else because they can't then get
they can't get the university to approve the studies, and
so they just go study something else. So now at
least this will lead to an explosion of actual you
know research, you know into in the US because around
the world people are able to study it.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
So so so that'll help.

Speaker 3 (56:14):
This is still months away though, Yeah, it's got to
go to the Office of Managing Budget. There's a comment period,
and you know, this could drag out till after the
after the election. Sager is not here to complain, but
to you know, Sager, can you know, take pride in
the fact that not much it's going to.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
Change it in the near term.

Speaker 4 (56:34):
I was going to say, and you know, sccer's arguments
are serious, and I think a lot of our viewers,
probably as much as we make fun of him. I
think a lot of our viewers probably know this, but
right if you duck to what you're right, you can
see this Ryan Grimm book, This is Your Country Drugs,
The Secret History of Getting High in America. If ever
there were an expert on the history of getting high

(56:55):
in America by This is Your Country on Drugs by
Ryan Grimm, for the expert take it is.

Speaker 3 (57:00):
Are you amazing like that? That book came out in
two thousand and nine and you could sort of if
you squinted, see the direction that things were going in
the final chapter.

Speaker 1 (57:10):
But to get to this place in my lifetime is
kind of interesting.

Speaker 4 (57:14):
That's what I was actually going to ask you about,
because I think that's when we were talking about this
a little bit yesterday. This is a really big deal.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
I used to work. I was actually a weed lobbyist, right,
that's right, two thousand and four.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
I worked for the Marijuana Policy Project on state level lobbying.

Speaker 4 (57:28):
High powered, very funny. This is funny is the weed
lobbyists now actually are high powered. It's like John Bayner, yes,
value of John Bayner, right, but back then, and that's
what's interesting about the schedule classifications that right now while
this O and B process goes on, it's still classified
Schedule one alongside like heroin LSD, And yet you have
people like John Bayner advocating for what was he doing,

(57:50):
Like was it cannabis? Yeah, So the other thing I
was interested in here is if it's a Schedule three drug,
you're still still a significant DEA regulations. But that means
that fifteen thousand cannabis dispensaries in the US that exist
right now would have to register with the DEA. I'm
reading from the Associated Press report report here. That means

(58:10):
they have to go along with these like fairly strict
reporting requirements, and.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
I think what they're not going to do well.

Speaker 4 (58:17):
It sounds like the DEA is not even in a
position to handle those reporting requirements. So, in a sense,
if this plays out, even in the direction that's good
for some of these dispensaries, is up in the air
financially because now they have this massive burden of reporting
the DEA in ways that they weren't before.

Speaker 3 (58:35):
It'll at least, you know, reduce the incentive for the
DEA I think, to break down the doors of cannabis dispensaries.
But you know, they've largely moved away from that and
left it. They've basically started leaving it up to localities.
In the beginning days, like in the Bush administration, when
medical cannabis facilities first started opening, you'd have the DEA

(58:58):
in standoff with like local police who were supportive of
the dispensaries. They've they've somewhat moved away from that. We
have not yet gotten to a rational system, but it would,
you know. But it now gives Congress, you know, more
ability to rationalize I think the system because the DA

(59:20):
is sort of given a little bit of permission. Chuck
Schumer is trying to put something related to cannabis into
the FAA's trying to put He's trying to put weed
banking into.

Speaker 1 (59:28):
The FAA reauthorization.

Speaker 3 (59:31):
He keeps trying to do it because you know that
by you know, Schumer in particular sees you know, weed
and student debt as you know, key ways to try
to uh, you know, win the support of young people
in particular.

Speaker 4 (59:46):
So, uh yeah, And this is complete un evenness culturally
in terms of policy. That's really fascinating here. And for
the other side of this argument, because I'm so kind
of ambivalent, I do commend people to go watch some
of Sager's model on this topic, because I don't think
Grant you mentioned this earlier. There is a level of
potency that increased rapidly just in the last several decades.

(01:00:08):
That's totally relevant to what's happening on underdeveloped brains when
they're smoking weed like that. This is some serious research
in that space that's paying attention to.

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
If you're a parent, Yeah, and substance abuse is a
problem no matter what the substance. The question for me
has always been should it be criminalized?

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
You know? Is the answer to lock people up?

Speaker 4 (01:00:31):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
And I don't. I don't think so. But it doesn't
mean we're ever going to get to a rational place either.

Speaker 4 (01:00:40):
Breaking news from Capitol Hill, Mike Johnson continues to be
a real person. Ryan and I have followed these developments
for weeks now. Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House sounds
completely made up, and yet he continues to be the
Republican Speaker of the House does exist.

Speaker 1 (01:00:55):
He's real.

Speaker 4 (01:00:56):
But the real takeaway from what's happening on Capitol Hill
right now is that Democrats made a decision yesterday to
ally themselves formally with Mike Johnson in his battle against
House Republicans. So Marjorie Taylor Green's motion to vacate and
we can put this first element up on the screen.
This is a tweet from Jake Sherman over at punch
Bowl that House Democratic leadership has said they will vote

(01:01:17):
to table that Marjorie Taylor Green motion to vacate if
she forces a vote on it, which is called privileging
the motions. So she filed the motion weeks ago. Thomas
Massey signed onto it after the Ukraine Party vote for
an AID vote that we talked about last week, and Thomas,
speaking of Thomas Massey, we can put the next element
up on the screen. He tweeted yesterday at Representative Jeffreys

(01:01:40):
and Speaker Johnson. Not sure who's in charge, so asking
both of you, are you still working together to eliminate
the motion of vakate so you can share power forever.
This was in response to a Mike Johnson sweet on
April eighteenth talking about how many people to borrow a
phrase from Trump. Many people have been encouraging him to
endorse a new rule to raise the threshold on the

(01:02:01):
motion to vacate. Super quick primer on the motion to vacate.
It sounds like a technical parliamentary procedure term. What it
actually means is that it existed in Congress until Nancy
Pelosi took it away after watching what happened to John Bayner.
We somehow managed not to talk about John Bayner twice
in this show in twenty twenty four. But John Bayner
was He had a motion of vakate filed against him

(01:02:23):
by Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan back in the day.
They never ended up privileging it. They forced Bayner to resign.
Nancy Pelosi saw that and changed the rule that had
existed for all of Congress's history basically and said, this
is not happening to me. I'm not going to have
challenges to my power just because one of my members
wants to file and privilege this motion to vacate. So

(01:02:44):
what Hakim Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi's successor, is doing right now
is saying, we're saving Mike Johnson's ass because if Marjor
Taylor Green forces this motion to vacate, it privileges it
and gets a vote and I'm out of here, or
that Johnson is out of here, we'd rather have Mike
Johnson in power, and that's saving Republicans from a cycle

(01:03:07):
of chaos in the middle of an election year. Because
I'm curious for your perspective on this. Democrats realize that
they can get a lot of their priorities over the
hurdle of Republican House leadership, Republican majority in the House,
because they have the Senate and the presidency. They feel
like they can get probably a lot of earmarking porks

(01:03:28):
that type stuff out of funding bills FAA is coming up,
farm bills coming up in the future by aligning themselves
with Mike Johnson.

Speaker 3 (01:03:36):
Now, and I think you have to presume that there
was some type of an arrangement. It came to a
passage of you they avoided a government shutdown, they funded
the wars and Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and Democrats provided a
lot of muscle for that, but you know, Speaker Johnson
had to go along and put it on the floor.

(01:03:57):
And so you can imagine that this, uh, this commitment
from Hakeem Jeffers is not coming out of nowhere, that
it comes out of those those talks, and that that collaboration,
that cooperation from before. You know, it's I think that
Democrats think, Okay, yeah, chaos is fun, Like it's nice

(01:04:18):
when you know Republicans are shooting at each other and
if you could have them, you know, voting for Speaker
again for a week or two, it makes them, it
makes them look like losers. But yeah, I think to
your point, their priority was getting the getting the wars funded.
So they'd rather have that than a than a marginal
and a political advantage. And you know they still get

(01:04:40):
plenty of infighting, Like there's lots of Republican finger pointing speak.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
They can have the best of all worlds.

Speaker 4 (01:04:45):
Speaking of books written by Ryan Grimm. You can all
see the squad behind you.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
And we're backing them up back there.

Speaker 4 (01:04:50):
The thing that I wanted to ask you was, actually,
if this is demoralizing to the squad and to members
of sort of justice Dems when they see this happening,
because I bet to a lot of their voters you
see this happening, it is demoralizing and it's infuriating.

Speaker 3 (01:05:06):
I mean, it might be demoralizing to their to their base,
but probably not to them personally.

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
Because they've been because they've been locked up.

Speaker 3 (01:05:14):
With Jeffries, Like they voted for Jeffries every every step
of the way. They didn't mount anybody to challenge Jeffreys
and they they you know, they did not like that
is funding for the war in Israel moved through, but
they all were supportive of the money for the war
in Ukraine for the most part. So uh, I don't

(01:05:35):
see a whole lot of daylight between them and Jeffreys
on on these on these questions. You know, it deprives
you know, now the question would be, would Republicans bail
out a Jeffries speakership in the future, No, you don't
think so, No, let them let them.

Speaker 4 (01:05:51):
Go down, because I can just imagine Republican voters after
that happened in town halls be like Tea Party all
over again. And Republicans are just I think, kind of
keyed into getting the different parliamentary machinations probably post Tea
Party because this was such a big deal with Bayer,

(01:06:12):
and I just see like, actually less of that on
the left that they pay really close attention to the
different maneuvers that leadership uses to kind of screw over populists.
But on the right that's a pretty mainstream, like hobby
horse of people in the conservative movement is following what's
happening in the sort of like meat grinder on Capitol Hills.

(01:06:34):
So I think people would be pretty furious about that,
you know, the Mike Johns is just I don't think
there would be some people who would you know, you
could maybe get fifteen to twenty. So it kind of
depends on how big the majority is. There's maybe a
way to make the math work, but I don't know.
I think that's it would be unlikely.

Speaker 3 (01:06:51):
What it means is today is made first Happy may Day,
and you're not going to have any kind of House
speaker drama between now and November until after the election, right.

Speaker 4 (01:07:01):
Which, again, if I'm a Democratic voter, I'm watching this
and say saying, what the hell are you doing? Like
let them do this, like let them fight. It's a
middle of an election year. Why are you going out
of your way to save Mike Johnson who just said,
for example, we have a biblical mandate Johnson to step
in with Israel.

Speaker 3 (01:07:22):
Tell me if I'm still correct on this. Johnson was
known as a terrible fundraiser. Is he still a bad fundraiser?
Has he stepped his game up? Because if not, like
one of the unspoken reasons or unspoken publicly reasons that
Democrats were so happy to see Kevin McCarthy go is
that he was a voracious fundraiser tends to hundreds of

(01:07:46):
millions of dollars for Republican candidates, and taking that chess
piece off the board meant that that was tens of
millions of dollars that might not get raised and then
spent against Democratic candidates. You know, the week after he
was ousted, they had to cancel some gigantic fundraiser in Texas.
And you would think that material interests alone would get

(01:08:09):
these donors to write these checks to the political party
that is benefiting their material interests.

Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
But they also need to be sweet talked. They want
that rubber chicken.

Speaker 3 (01:08:19):
They want the speeches, they want the glad handing, they
want they want the photo. They want their kid to
get the internship and the chance to like whisper in
the ear of the speaker. And without that, you know
they're going to give less money. So if it's still
the case that Johnson is a lousy fundraiser, Keem Jefferies
is probably thinking let him continue as speaker.

Speaker 4 (01:08:40):
He's not Kevin McCarthy. That's basically what I've heard in
those circles. He may have he could step his game up,
that's still not going to make him Kevin McCarthy. And
you know, there's mixed donor opinions on some of these
uniparty priorities, especially in the right now, Ukraine, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (01:08:55):
I think the donors don't are a little Some of
these rich Republicans are probably put off by his true believer.

Speaker 1 (01:09:01):
Well he's also a true believer.

Speaker 4 (01:09:04):
And I mean religious, yeah, right.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Whereas some of the rich problems. Yeah, they go to
church and they talk about it, but they're like, oh,
this guy he really means this stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:09:15):
We Donald Trump himself was a Republican donor, and he's
not going to be like persuaded by the dispensationalist biblical
mandate philosophy about supporting.

Speaker 3 (01:09:25):
Theoretical arguments about how church the separation of church and
state is a myth.

Speaker 4 (01:09:29):
People are probably aicked up by Mike Johnson, yeah, in
that respect, but who knows how. I mean, he can
be selling himself in a number of different ways behind
closed doors. But you know, there's still there's still gonna
be plenty of money that lobbyists have to throw around
in the defense industry and sector. So maybe that'll help
him because he got the bill over the line that
said with sort of a lot of Republican voters are

(01:09:50):
sort of not voters donors, mainstream Republican donors. They're not
going to be happy about the border being left out
of that bill.

Speaker 1 (01:09:56):
So too.

Speaker 3 (01:09:58):
But speaking of religious that's right. The author of the
new book Pagan America.

Speaker 4 (01:10:04):
Yes, he means it in a different way than you do, right, Ryan,
he's Pagan America, and he thinks we did it mentioned
accomplish the banner up.

Speaker 1 (01:10:13):
Yet America has fallen.

Speaker 4 (01:10:14):
Yeah. We'll be joined right after this by my college
get the Federalist, Daniel Davidson, whose new book Pagan America
is out right now stick around all right. We're joined
now by John Daniel Davidson. He's my colleague at The Federalist,
where he's a senior editor, but for the purposes of
this conversation, he's also the author of a new book,
Pagan America. John, Welcome to the show.

Speaker 8 (01:10:34):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 4 (01:10:35):
Of course, now, a lot of our viewers, and actually
a lot of the country is frankly not Christian, not
practicing Christian in the way that you write about in
this book and definitely probably looks at this and says,
what does pagan America mean? And I'm not even just
talking about people on the left, What do you mean
by pagan America? And what does that mean for people

(01:10:57):
who aren't right now going to church every Sunday? And honestly,
would hear your description of paganism that you're going to
give and say, okay, so it means we've separated a
church and state.

Speaker 9 (01:11:06):
Good, yeah, right, Okay, So pagan America is an argument
that there's really only one alternative to Christianity, and it's
not secularism. Its pit's paganism, right, And I don't mean
that in a post Christian era that we're in, as
you say, you know, many people in this country, a

(01:11:26):
growing number of people are not practicing Christians, and a
growing number don't even identify as Christians. I think in
about thirty twenty or thirty years, we'll have Christianity as
a self identified group as a minority in this country
for the first time ever.

Speaker 4 (01:11:39):
Right, they might hear post Christian America thing, I think,
and Ryan, you probably hear that and you think, okay, I.

Speaker 9 (01:11:43):
Think, okay, post Christian America is fine. Part of the
argument of the book is that America as we know
it and understand it is only possible with a Christian people,
in other words, a people who accept basic normative claims
of Christian doctrine, chief among them the doctrine of imago
day that each person is created in the image and

(01:12:04):
likeness of God and therefore has inherent dignity. From whence
we get rights, freedom of speech, religion, consent of the governed.
All of the things that we associate with our American
system of government and our American way of life are
products of Christian civilization. They can't exist on their own
outside of that context. Outside of that context, they eventually

(01:12:29):
devolve into a form of post Christian neopaganism. And that's
the era that we're emerging into today. As we shed
our Christian civilization, we're also going to shed those things
that we associate with our American way of life that
I just enumerated, And the reason is because there's no
basis for them outside of a Christian moral cosmology that

(01:12:52):
posits what human beings are and what their relationship to
God is, and what the relationship to one another should be.

Speaker 1 (01:13:00):
So I pride myself in reading all the books.

Speaker 3 (01:13:04):
Before we interview the author, and I just did not
have time to that's fine, to get to this one,
So I apologize. So I'm coming in totally kind of blank.
But why is that the case? Why can't just appreciation
for civic virtue and love of country and just general
morality like be enough to stitch together of people.

Speaker 9 (01:13:25):
Well, general morality has to be based on something a
vision of the world or a vision of what human
beings are.

Speaker 8 (01:13:32):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:13:33):
So pagan morality, and this holds true across vast expanses
of time in geography and cultures, is that if you
are not part of my group, then it's my moral
duty to take what you have or subjugate you for
the benefit of me and my people.

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:13:51):
And that's what we see over and over again throughout history,
the history of pagan peoples and cultures.

Speaker 1 (01:13:57):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
So let me ask you about so in a Christian
nation for a couple hundred years, we have launched more
wars than any other nation maybe in history. Like in
the two hundred plus years that we've been a country,
We've done some subjugating, We've done some subjugating. There have
been only a few years out of all of those years,
even during our isolation quote unquote isolations period while we're

(01:14:20):
enacting a genocide, that we were not at war with
other people in subjugating them. So what Either it's not
true that Christianity allows us in a meaningful way to
see others as as equals and then and treat them
as we would like to be treated, or we are
just overriding that as an impulse, like when when is

(01:14:42):
this Christianity going to kick in?

Speaker 8 (01:14:45):
Well, I wouldn't miss I want to be careful.

Speaker 9 (01:14:47):
We don't mistake an ideal for you know, the history
is contingent and and and we're never going to attain
the ideal of like human equality right or or a
perfect realization of Christian moral ideals. The United States didn't
do it, European civilization didn't do it. I don't think

(01:15:08):
anyone's ever going to get it right. But that doesn't
negate the fundamental sort of philosophical and moral claims of Christianity.

Speaker 8 (01:15:17):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:15:18):
Christianity, as opposed to many other moral and religious systems,
does claim in equality between people, and that's that's where
we get things like human rights.

Speaker 8 (01:15:27):
The basis for human rights and human dignity.

Speaker 4 (01:15:31):
So why can't you take it out in a post
Christian America? Why can't you say, we like the ideas
that came from Gold rules Gold, we're taking the Christ
out of it and like we just.

Speaker 9 (01:15:41):
Yeah, christless Christianity in other words, or a or a
a secular humanism. Right, this is the argument you know
that the Stephen Pinker or Richard Dawkins would make.

Speaker 8 (01:15:53):
Right. You know, they want the culture without the cults.

Speaker 9 (01:15:56):
But you can't have the culture without the cults because
the culture relies on the religion, and the religious claims
as the source of its vitality, the source of its coherence. Right,
Why should a people who are post Christian retain Christian
moral virtues?

Speaker 7 (01:16:15):
Right?

Speaker 9 (01:16:16):
Why should I think that all men are created equal
when clearly in many ways people are not equal. We
see inequality all around us. And and why shouldn't we
adopt a pagan morality that says, you know, any question?
And this is you know, the ancient Aristotle said this.
You know, the ancient pagans they understood inequality means that

(01:16:38):
some people are naturally slaves and some people are naturally rulers.

Speaker 8 (01:16:41):
And and if.

Speaker 9 (01:16:43):
You're poor, that fate has decided that you should be poor,
and that's your lot. Christianity, you know, brought a moral
revolution to this this pagan morality and this pagan cosmology
and positive a radically new way of understanding the world
and our relations, and it launched a radical shift in
human civilizations that had never before been seen. And so

(01:17:05):
America is one expression of that, right, And I mean,
we can have different interpretations of American history. European civilization
is of course where we came from. But we're entering,
and this is what the book argues, We're entering this
new of unprecedented era, a post Christian era. And my
argument is we should not expect the Christian cosmology, the

(01:17:27):
Christian moral virtues that organized the West for all these centuries,
to remain intact, cut off from the source of their vitality, right,
and we should expect something new. And the new thing
we should expect is a resurgence of this pagan mentality,
the pagan ethos, which is one that's based on force
and coercion.

Speaker 3 (01:17:47):
But I guess I'm still trying to figure out, like
I was saying earlier, when does the Christianity kick in
If the country's founded on these Christian ideals, and the
country had Christians supporting slavery, Christians supporting the ethnic cleansing
of Native Americans, Christians supporting the Spanish Marian War.

Speaker 1 (01:18:06):
The film.

Speaker 9 (01:18:07):
I think these are departures from from Christianity absolutely, Okay,
let's I mean, these are departures from themes of Christianity.

Speaker 3 (01:18:14):
It's sort of like true communism has never been tried. Well,
people mock that idea when you when when actual communists will.

Speaker 1 (01:18:21):
Say, looks the communism is going to kick in.

Speaker 3 (01:18:23):
Yeah, when's it communy? Like you say, well, the Soviet
Union wasn't Cuba wasn't great. Well, then that wasn't real communism.
But christ what I'm saying, Communism only had like.

Speaker 1 (01:18:31):
A two hundred year run. Christianity has had two thousand years.

Speaker 8 (01:18:34):
Right, and and well, I mean, I don't know about you, but.

Speaker 9 (01:18:38):
I think that Christianity has produced a great civilization the
world's ever seen. Right, which one is that this is
the one that we're sitting in right now, right, that's.

Speaker 4 (01:18:46):
Certainly a fairer, indjuster world than we've seen before.

Speaker 8 (01:18:50):
Well, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 9 (01:18:51):
I mean, consider something like you know, the Roman Empire. Right,
we have a tendency, I guess, since the Enlightenment to
sort of romanticize the pagan past and in the Roman world,
in the Greek world, those are slave societies. Most people
in the Roman Empire were slaves that they didn't have
anything like rights. Right, if you were a Roman citizen

(01:19:11):
or a Roman aristocrat, you could do whatever you wanted to.

Speaker 8 (01:19:14):
People who were a lower in a lower station than you.

Speaker 9 (01:19:16):
You could rape them, you could murder them, you could
you could discard them. And there wasn't seen so far
from not being any kind of moral censure. It was
it was like a mark of your rank that you
were able to do this. This is true all through
pagan societies, as I said, across time and cultures.

Speaker 3 (01:19:34):
Well, what about what about the Ottoman Empire? What about
a lot of Chinese Empire, like throughout Chinese history, like
you had, Yeah, people who had probably far more right
slave societies too, I mean.

Speaker 4 (01:19:48):
Abolished slavery later actually in most of the Ottoman areas
than were in the West. And what's interesting about that,
I think actually is a lot one of the grossest arguments,
one of the grossest Christian arguments in favor of slavery
the United States was these are not people. And what's
interesting about that is because you know, as soon as
you acknowledge these are human beings and you're a Christian,
you have to treat them equally as human beings.

Speaker 8 (01:20:10):
Is the abolitionist argument.

Speaker 4 (01:20:11):
Right. Well, I was going to say, if you could talk,
because that's in the book about how Christians get blamed
for perpetrating slavery. I think rightfully, there was a Christian
argument that was made in favor of slavery. Christian argument
that's made in front of awful imperialism and to your point,
ethnic cleansing. But if you go to if you talk
about what happened when Columbus arrived, it was bartol Madeli's

(01:20:32):
Cassas that was saying this is awful from Christian perspective.

Speaker 9 (01:20:36):
Yeah, so the debates over you know, what should yeah,
what should the proper disposition of Christian Europeans be toward
the indigenous peoples of the Americas. That was a debate
that was initiated by Catholic monks and scholars in Spain
right who.

Speaker 1 (01:20:53):
Had debates had a view on it too.

Speaker 9 (01:20:57):
No, I'm saying from the European perspective of what should
our disposition be towards these peoples in the New World.

Speaker 5 (01:21:03):
Uh.

Speaker 9 (01:21:04):
And there was a there was a debate about their humanity,
about what responsibilities the Catholic Church and the crown had
to these people.

Speaker 8 (01:21:10):
It was the kind of debate, you know.

Speaker 9 (01:21:13):
The fact that they were having a debate about this
at all, I would say, is a product of Christian civilization.
It's not the kind of thing that would have been
debated in a pagan society at all.

Speaker 8 (01:21:20):
It would have been absolutely just these people.

Speaker 1 (01:21:24):
The debates in the Ottoman Empire, the debates in China,
debates in Japan, like there's everybody debates.

Speaker 2 (01:21:29):
Uh.

Speaker 9 (01:21:30):
I'm talking about a debate about whether or not these
people should be just enslaved like animals and treated as such,
or should their inherent dignity and humanity be recognized as
children of God and our goal should be.

Speaker 1 (01:21:46):
To bring them breaks and the Romans all debated that.

Speaker 2 (01:21:49):
Uh.

Speaker 9 (01:21:50):
And on one side, I mean, Aristotle debated the He
disagreed with the the practice how slavery was practiced, but
he accepted at the very beginning of the politics he
accepts the premise of natural slavery and natural rulers. His
quibble is with the implementation of it, not not with
the philosophical position that slavery is a natural state for

(01:22:11):
some people. And this is this was common, but this
was never accepted in Christianity in centuries and centuries of
Catholic Europe. It was only in a modern context in
the nineteenth century when the Antebellum South posited this very Unchristian,
very pagan argument that slavery was natural, and it was

(01:22:33):
that aberration was a departure from how Christianity had been
approaching this issue for centuries and centuries, not.

Speaker 4 (01:22:41):
Only in the New World in eleven hundred.

Speaker 8 (01:22:43):
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 9 (01:22:44):
I mean the idea of human rights or of peace,
of you know, that that war should should be confined
and noncombatants should be protected. These were things that medieval
Catholic Europe came up with.

Speaker 1 (01:22:56):
That's true. But one reason for that is that these
Christians were doing more war than anybody else, and.

Speaker 9 (01:23:03):
Who than Genghis Khan.

Speaker 3 (01:23:08):
Genghis Khan is the exception, more more war, uh than
North American, South Americans, Chinese after more.

Speaker 8 (01:23:15):
War than the Aztecs.

Speaker 9 (01:23:16):
I don't know, more war than you know, I mean,
yea more war than the Egyptians commanche.

Speaker 1 (01:23:22):
Yeah, you know, look look around the world, like look
at the biggest wars and the US and Europe.

Speaker 8 (01:23:27):
You're talking about modern one like World War one, world
War two.

Speaker 3 (01:23:30):
But if you're talking about right, yeah, but if you
look at how far they went.

Speaker 9 (01:23:34):
Well, World War two was a pagan war, right, I
mean Nazi Germany it was a post Christian society. Uh,
Communist the Soviet Union was a post Christian society.

Speaker 8 (01:23:43):
These were these.

Speaker 4 (01:23:44):
Were Nietzsche's primary argument against Christianity.

Speaker 1 (01:23:47):
It was that it was in some ways to Nazis
were pagan.

Speaker 8 (01:23:52):
I think Nazis, Yeah, Nazis were absolutely pagan.

Speaker 9 (01:23:55):
So Nazis were honest enough, like the Marquis de Right
to say, if we're going to reject Christianity, then we
then the Christian morality has got to go. There's no
basis to treat people as though they have inherent dignity
and worth.

Speaker 8 (01:24:08):
Let's just liquidate all these people.

Speaker 4 (01:24:10):
They tried to keep the trappings, they liked some of
the trappings of Christianity, but they took Christ quite literally,
took Christ out of the Christianity.

Speaker 1 (01:24:16):
And then they go after the Communists as godless.

Speaker 9 (01:24:19):
The Nazis where their god was sort of the pagan vulk. Right,
this very clearly hearkening back to a pre Christian even
in their aesthetics.

Speaker 5 (01:24:30):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:24:31):
You know, there's no sense in which the Nazis were
a manifestation of Christian cosmology, right, this was this was
very clearly post Christian. And so when I say post Christian,
and the reason I say the Nazis were at least
honest about it is that if you get rid of
the Christian claims, you eventually have to get rid of

(01:24:52):
the Christian morality too.

Speaker 8 (01:24:54):
So I mentioned the Marquis de Sade. During the Enlightenment
there was.

Speaker 9 (01:24:57):
This rejection, overt rejection of Christianity and specifically attacks against
the Catholic Church. Marquis de Sade said, well, not only
should we attack Christianity, but we should sweep away Christian
morality as well. There's no reason why the strong should
you know, scrape and bow before the week. That that's
against nature. Right, That's yeah, that's what and that's what

(01:25:19):
Marquis de said, That's what Nia said, That's what you
know the Nazis said, right, And that is what Pagan
society's the principle in which Pagan societies had always been organized.
And what I'm saying is that Christian civilization was organized
on different principles, never fully realized right, ideals that we
are always moving toward, never never quite going to achieve

(01:25:40):
because this is this is the world, and we're falling.
You know, people are what they are, but the ideal
and the claim, the ontological claim about what people are
was fundamentally different than what Pagan's positive.

Speaker 1 (01:25:56):
No go ahead for this, But I don't know. I
think if if the US is held up as the
example as the most Christian nation, that doesn't bode well for.

Speaker 3 (01:26:09):
Linking nationalism and Christianity. We'll just based on our behavior
over the last two hundred years.

Speaker 4 (01:26:15):
Somewhat interesting about this conversation is that all three of
us share very similar foreign policy at the moment.

Speaker 8 (01:26:21):
So I don't know what your guys foreign policy is.

Speaker 4 (01:26:24):
He's a full but no, I mean, we pretty much
agree on what's happening right now. All that is to say,
I actually think it was this was very helpful to
have a conversation from the right.

Speaker 1 (01:26:36):
We do a lot on the left and we do.

Speaker 4 (01:26:38):
He's great to have one from the right.

Speaker 8 (01:26:39):
Well, I appreciate y'all having me on. You read the
book and then we'll come back and talk about it.

Speaker 4 (01:26:44):
A fist fight. It'll be a to see who can
try and Christian, well, if you leave me out of
it would be kind of Christian. Keep the women, the
vulnerable out of the fist fight, all right, John Daniel Davidson.

Speaker 8 (01:26:59):
Thanks for joining us, Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:27:00):
Appreciate it, all right.

Speaker 4 (01:27:01):
Ryan, And that does it for us on today's edition
of Counterpoints. But it's worth reminding people that in addition
to the mugs, a premium subscription will actually also cheers
our mugs on. These mugs will also get you early
access to the Friday show. So premium subscription, if you
go to Breakingpoints dot com, the episode we're taping for

(01:27:23):
Friday will hit your inbox on Thursday. You can also
get the mugs at Breaking Points dot Breakingpoints dot com.
And this is a hell of a Friday show, I'll
say that much.

Speaker 3 (01:27:33):
And I mean we can tell you who's going to
be on because one of the guests has been talking
about it all week on his streaming program. We're gonna
have Omar Padar and we're going to have a streamer
who is better known as I think mister Bonelli.

Speaker 4 (01:27:48):
Jokes, I'm too out of that rabbit hole like Eve
and Sager, been having fun with these.

Speaker 3 (01:27:54):
These he goes, he goes, he goes by Destiny, Yes,
and like why we had them on as an open
question TBD.

Speaker 1 (01:28:05):
Yeah, we'll see how.

Speaker 4 (01:28:06):
But that's the point of the conversation.

Speaker 3 (01:28:08):
I think the best argument that you could make for
it is that he makes a lot of the arguments
that you see very frequently from the pro Israel It's
a crowd, and he makes them very effectively, and so
I think it's useful to see people kind of push
back against them and encounter them. I think if he
just started learning about this issue in the last six months.

Speaker 4 (01:28:30):
Which is true of a lot of people, and normally
politics are worth talking about because that's again like by definition,
they're probably representative of a broad swath of the country
who doesn't for a living think constantly about these issues
and here every update in the news. So I think
it's a contrast that's well worth developing and it'll be
a really interesting conversation. So we're doing these every Friday now.

(01:28:54):
We started with dun Lemon.

Speaker 1 (01:28:56):
Last another questionable decision.

Speaker 4 (01:29:00):
But we have a lot of really interesting ideas lined
up for the future. So Breakingpoints dot Com for subscription.
There you'll get the episode in your inbox Thursday night.
You can also get the wonderful mugs.

Speaker 1 (01:29:10):
I took Don Lemon's advice. I broke out my lighter jacket.

Speaker 4 (01:29:13):
I didn't even notice.

Speaker 3 (01:29:14):
I mean, I used to wear this deep into the fall.
My wife was like, you can't wear that in the fall.

Speaker 1 (01:29:19):
In the winter, it's a good spring, but it's a
spring now, so bringing it back.

Speaker 4 (01:29:23):
So subscribe for more of Ryan's fashion tips and to
see what color jacket he wears on any given Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):
I see you guys Thursday evening if you subscribe, Friday
morning if you don't.

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