2/17/26: Randy Fine Islamophobia, Israel West Bank Annexation, Lindsey Graham Pushes Iran War, James Talarico Censored By CBS

27:40And then Israel will come in and, you know, build industrial cities and factories and, you know, perhaps settlements too. So it's, you know, this is actually, this was in the playbook. This is in the Smotrich blueprint that he ran 2017, where he doesn't say we're going to genocide the Palestinians in the West Bank. He doesn't even say we're going to run them off the land. He says, look, let's just be practical here. There's not room for both of us here. There's not room for two countries, for two states. So let's give them some options. Option one is they can live as colonial subjects under Israel.

28:18Option two is they can leave and maybe we'll even give them money to leave. And they probably will because they want a better life somewhere. And option three, if they don't do that, is we'll fight to the death and we'll probably kill them. And so all of these different methods of getting the Palestinians off the land from the brute force to suffocating policies to now just saying, look, it's really bad here. Don't you want to just have a better life somewhere? Take this money and go. I mean, all of it is working to one end, which is to get the Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza. Welcome to the A-Building.

28:52I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.

29:35This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Jesper, I want to get your reaction to a couple of recent clips of Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. Let's roll this first one where Lindsey— Look at the South Carolina slash Tel Aviv. Yeah, slash Tel Aviv. He says he goes there every two weeks. Every two weeks? Not bad. Probably more often than he's in South Carolina. All right, here's Lindsey Graham talking about the future of wars.

30:12The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel because if you're not one step ahead of the enemy, you suffer. The most clever, creative military forces on the planet are here in Israel because they have to be to survive. So what we're looking at is that Israel is advancing down the road of new weaponry far beyond us. And it would be nice to have a process where we could be partners. We have one more clip, Jasper. That's a great clip to get your take on because you've done so much work in the space. But let's roll E5 first, more of Senator Lindsey Graham. Could our soldiers be hit in the region?

30:49Absolutely, they could. Can Iran respond if we have an all-out attack? Absolutely, they can. I think the risk associated with that is far less than the risk associated with blinking and pulling the plug and not helping the people as you promised. So the future of war in Israel, Jasper, you know all about that. Tell us what Lindsey Graham would actually probably agree with you that he's talking about. Yeah, I saw that clip and I mean, it was one of these moments of like, I don't know if he could take it back, if he could, or if he just, you know, wants to be saying the quiet part out loud. I mean, there's a number of things he could be talking about.

31:27One of them is, you know, the fact that Israel is actually, you know, testing out new weaponry, in many cases, American weapons that will then go straight to the American military after it's been tested out there. I think, of course, the US, many, many hawks in the government, including our Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, have long wanted war with Iran. Israel is, of course, wants more than anything, or Netanyahu certainly wants more than anything to take out the regime in Iran. And so they're a good sort of proxy to get that war going. But also, I mean, I think it should be said that, like, you know, many people have noted that the genocide in Gaza has sort of, you know, stripped away the last pretenses of a rules-based order.

32:16It's shown that, you know, the stronger country can do whatever it wants, not just to Gaza, where, you know, They use October 7th as a pretense. But in Lebanon and in Syria and in the West Bank and anywhere they want, the stronger country can just go in and dominate with force, as the US has done in Venezuela and potentially in Cuba. And so I think Lindsey Graham is sort of projecting his fantasies of empire onto this situation. And he's saying that, yes, they're going to help us out with the war on Iran, with everything we want to do. They're helping test our weapons. But also, like, Israel is setting the new standard.

32:58This is how warfare is going to work. This is how empires are going to work going forward. And just watch. Yeah. Well, and speak a little bit to the Trump administration context here as well. I saw Trump made some throwaway comment, I believe it was last week, about, like, oh, we don't want to see them taking over the West Bank. But we also know that, of course, one of his top contributors, Miriam Adelson, reportedly gave him some hundred million dollars plus in exchange for, hey, you're going to you're going to let them annex the West Bank. And it reminded me also very much of the many reports of how upset Biden was about Netanyahu doing blah, blah, blah.

33:31But it never amounts to any sort of action. Do you think there's any possibility that he would see this brazen land grab as a threat to some of the things he wants? I mean, mostly he just wants bragging rights about his quote unquote peace deal and his, you know, his peace board, etc. How do you see those pieces fitting in? Well, the annexation of the West Bank is even before Trump. You know, it's been done in a way that is deliberately meant to provide plausible deniability to Israel. So they haven't just come out and said we've annexed the West Bank or we have declared sovereignty over the West Bank.

34:09They are putting in place all these policies that, like I said, are stripping control away from the military occupation and from the Palestinian Authority and giving it to Israel, basically to the settlers, one step at a time, which amounts to a de facto annexation. But I think that beyond that, Trump obviously acts in his own self-interest. I don't even think he knows where the West Bank is. I don't think he could point to it on a map. There are two things that could potentially cause him to speak up, which he actually has done in the past. The first one would be if the Abraham Accords or the normalization deal is threatened.

34:51So in 2020, the UAE actually threatened to pull out of normalization if Israel, if Netanyahu pushed forward an annexation effort that he was making. Trump immediately came out and told Netanyahu he couldn't do it. And obviously, it's because it was going to cause him to lose his big foreign policy achievement, the Abraham Accords, from the first term. So far, there's no indication that the UAE is threatening that this time around. Qatar has – a lot of these Arab states who are either already normalizing with Israel or who are considering it have issued these completely toothless threats. So I don't see that as a factor right now.

35:32The other thing which I have even less hope for is that somebody points out to Trump that, you know, I think point 19 in your 20 point peace plan says that the Palestinians have to have a path to statehood, to self-determination. And what they're doing in the West Bank, which would be in theory in a parallel universe where the settlement movement was forced out, the West Bank would be the bulk of the Palestinian state in terms of land and population. And if somebody points out to Trump that, you know, all of these new policies in the West Bank are making it completely physically impossible, legally impossible for the Palestinians to have a state, there goes your whole peace plan.

36:14And again, you know, it's a legacy play for him. So I think that in theory, he could say, oh, wait a minute, these guys are screwing up my plan. But it doesn't look like that's happening. Well, final point on that from me, Jasper. Jeremy Scahill at Dropsite is now reporting a senior Hamas official has told him that Hamas will not accede to the sweeping demands, as Jeremy writes from Trump and Netanyahu, that the Palestinian resistance disarm, nor will it submit to a total demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. What's your reaction hearing that, Jasper, actually, in light of everything you just said?

36:47Yeah, I mean, listen, like, I'm not going to get into the details of the 20-point plan and like what is and is impossible. But I'll just say that, like, if I was a Palestinian living in Gaza right now, I would be very concerned about the idea of completely disarming. Knowing what's been done to us, not just over the course of two years, but also in theoretically in times of peace, you know, during the March of Great Return. hundreds of people were killed, thousands were maimed by Israeli snipers during a peaceful protest. And so, you know, the position that they want the Palestinians to be put in, you know, just at 100 % complete mercy of the state and this military that has been massacring them for years and for decades, really.

37:36Yeah, I don't know why they would trust that that would then finally lead to them being able to live in peace. And so, look, I think that the peace plan was, you know, it was designed to fail, maybe not by Trump himself, but I think everybody in Israel knew it was going to fail. I mean, Netanyahu was saying one thing to the U.S. press and another thing to the Israeli press about, yeah, don't worry, we're not going to actually, you know, we're not going to actually stop trying to destroy Hamas. We're not going to actually let them have a state. And so to me, this is just like the completely predictable outcome of what was always a sham peace process.

38:13And I don't know what's going to happen. But with guys like Kushner and, you know, Whitcoff and Trump and Tony Blair and then Yahoo in control, I mean, it looks pretty bleak. Yeah. I mean, that really is kind of my last question is you said earlier that the plan for Gaza and the plan for the West Bank have effectively converged with that plan being make people so miserable that they leave or that we just, you know, completely subjugate them or if they step on a line, we kill them. I mean, do you think that plan is going to work? Well, it's working in the sense that they are getting more and more land literally every day.

38:53I mean, yesterday or two days ago on Sunday, the Israeli government approved a land registration drive in the West Bank in Area C, which means that they will now go through all of the land in Area C, which is like 60 percent of the West Bank, force Palestinians to prove that they own the land, which is impossible for many of them to do because they've not been able to get titles since 1967. And anything that they can't prove becomes theirs. And so, you know, that is just one of any number of policies that will never get any coverage in the Western press that is just, you know, tightening Israel's grip on the West Bank.

39:29It will drive Palestinians off the land. So in one sense, yes, it's going to work. In another sense. I mean, I know lots of Palestinian people. I've spent a lot of time in the West Bank and a lot of them are just not going to leave. They're just not going to leave. And I think the same is probably true of a lot of people in Gaza. To be clear, I think a lot of people would leave. And I mean, I'm certainly not in a position to judge somebody for wanting to have a more peaceful life for them and their family, but a lot of people just will not. And so I certainly don't see a sort of neat resolution that, you know, Israel just gains control of everything anytime soon.

40:09I think it's going to be bloody and messy. And, you know, the only thing that could really stop Israel is a weapons ban from the U.S., in my opinion. Yeah. Jasper, thank you so much for your reporting and for spending some time with us this morning. We're very grateful. My pleasure. Thanks both. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.

40:51It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're happy to be joined right now by Will Creeley, who is the legal director over at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Express.

41:38Will, thanks for joining us. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Of course. There's a lot of news on the free expression front to get to, actually starting with something that broke overnight. We can put the deadline tear sheet up on the screen. This is F3. Stephen Colbert is saying that CBS told him he could not interview an interview he had already recorded with Democratic Senate primary candidate James Tallarico of Texas on the late show. Now Tallarico posted the clip anyway, but people in the FCC camp are saying actually it was because CBS would need to or CBS should feel in some sense responsible to then quote unquote platform Jasmine Crockett for the equal time rule.

42:26So this is starting to really get traction as we're talking right now. Will, could you give us your legal perspective, having followed a lot of these cases, and particularly the FCC and Trump 2.0, what's going on here? Yeah, there's a lot to get to. First of all, I think it's of a piece with what we've seen from the FCC over the past year, a very aggressive, very expansive understanding of their legal authority to, frankly, bully broadcasters into taking political lines that the FCC would like them to take. I think that there's an equal time rule that requires broadcasters generally to provide equal time on what are called bona fide news broadcast news programs to candidates running for the same office.

43:13For a long time, the FCC has understood this to mean really news broadcasts, not things like Saturday Night Live or other kind of comedy talk shows. But recently, over the past year and a half, we've seen a push to expand the equal time rule to things like Saturday Night Live. We had Kamala Harris when she was running appear on Saturday Night Live. And NBC then offered Donald Trump time on a NASCAR broadcast. A couple of points here, though. The candidate has to request that equal time. I'm not clear that that's happened here. And between what happened last week with The View and FCC Commissioner Brennan Carr pushing for The View to provide equal time, it seems like this is of a piece with that.

43:56Again, it's just part of a very aggressive, very expansive understanding of the FCC's authority. And I think it should make all of us a little bit nervous. The FCC does not have the power to be the nation's editor-in-chief or the nation's censor-in-chief, but that's what they're increasingly acting like. I think the piece about The View is really important for people to understand. And for those who don't know, the FCC launched a probe last week into ABC's The View after an interview with James Tallarico. And so, you know, part of the reason why they launched these probes or threatened these lawsuits is not just about that one media outlet or media property.

44:32It's so that other places like CBS and like Stephen Colbert and the executives there say, oh, maybe this is too hot to touch. we are going to self-censor without even the FCC potentially even getting involved here because we see what happened over there on The View. That's exactly right. It's designed to send a message to, if you will, chill expression on our airwaves. You know, I am old enough to remember two years ago when Brendan Carr said it's not the job of the FCC to be intruding itself, making political decisions for our nation's broadcasters. But that Brendan Carr is long gone. And what we have now is something else.

45:10We have a FCC that's willing to push its authority to make broadcasters think twice about the errors that they view on their show. I just want to note that all this is wildly unsuccessful. I logged on to the Stephen Colbert YouTube channel just before hopping on here, and it has something like 650 ,000 views overnight. You know, they should ask Barbra Streisand how well it goes when you try and shut people up. Yeah, that's such a great point. Last thought on this before we get to Bondi, Will, is I've interviewed Brendan Carr before, and I think one point he makes a persuasive case on is the underlying law here that does actually say broadcasters who are acting or broadcasters have a duty to act in the public interest.

45:53And that's where all of this stems from. And he says, you know, and this is obviously I don't want to say tongue in cheek, but because he would say it's totally sincere. He says he has the duty responsibility to enforce that. He's not making the rules. He's just enforcing them. But he has said before, it might be time to think whether or not that's just completely outdated. Do you think, well, that's a fair case that even having this rule on the books seems like it's already putting the government in a precarious position? Absolutely, I do. And even if we take Chairman Carr, this word as to just calling balls and strikes per his existing legal authority, again, I want to make two points.

46:32First of all, that's different than what he said as commissioner when he said that the FCC should and has to, per law, abide by its First Amendment responsibilities before any federal statutory authority. And second of all, FIRE just submitted a comment just last year arguing that the FCC should really go back and delete a number of its content-based regulations. They're outdated. They provide the opportunity for political mischief like we've seen in the past year with leveraging political messaging for merger approval. And they really reflect in an era where we had scarcity. Right. We had only a couple of broadcasters in town.

47:09You know, I'm old enough to remember seeing just what I had on the three major networks in Fox. And those days are long gone, as I referenced. Right. You can go to YouTube and see whatever political candidate you want as much as you want. Those rules no longer make sense, and they provide the federal government with a cudgel to swing at folks they don't like. Right, because we don't see this uniformly enforced. This happens in certain instances with candidates that they don't want to get a higher profile with certain commentary that they then pull out the hammer that they can wield here. All right, let's talk about this lawsuit that your organization, FIRE, has filed.

47:47Let's put F1 up on the screen. I think this is really significant. Fire sues Bondi and Noem for censoring Facebook group and app reporting ICE activity. So in this in this release, you say the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is suing Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, on behalf of Kay Rosato and Mark Hodges, who respectively created a Facebook group and an app that hosted video footage of ICE operations to inform the public and hold our government accountable. Talk to us about what happened here and what you are alleging the government did to pressure these tech companies to censor these accounts.

48:24Sure thing. Well, Rosado had a Facebook group that allowed community members to report to each other on what was happening when ICE surged in Chicago. The idea was to let neighbors talk to each other about what they were seeing. So, you know, not just to quote unquote evade ICE, but also just to give a heads up. You know, maybe maybe your your commute is going to be crazy or maybe, you know, you don't want your kids walking past masked armed federal agents. You know, all kinds of reasons that you might want to be aware of what ICE is doing. And I should note right at the outset that is fully protected by the First Amendment.

49:01You have the right to comment on law enforcement movements. You've got the right to record police, including ICE. Those are public servants. They work for us. You have the First Amendment right to criticize them. You have the First Amendment right to protest. You have the First Amendment right to record. I just want to be very clear. A lot of debate on Twitter about those points. A lot of Twitter lawyers telling me that that's actually impeding law enforcement. No, it's not. Can you break that down, actually, Will? What is the legal background of the definition of impede in that context? Right.

49:28Right. If I'm impeding somebody, I'm going in and obstructing them. Usually there's some kind of physical aspect. If I'm recording them across the street, I'm not impeding law enforcement operations. There's a Supreme Court case called Hill v. City of Houston where a man is watching a Houston police department officer arresting another man. And he says something like, why don't you pick on someone your own size? And then he gets arrested for obstructing and interfering with that arrest. The court says, no, this is the difference between the United States and a police state. We have the right to comment and criticize law enforcement even while they're in the process of administering an arrest.

50:06In other words, kind of impede means what it says it means, right? It's more than just words. It's more than just recording. If a law enforcement officer tells you to back up, you should probably back up. But if you're recording or certainly if you're on a Facebook group talking about what ICE is doing, that's fully protected by the First Amendment. We're not talking about some kind of secret police state yet. And that's what we're fighting to prevent. There was also some reporting I wanted to get your reaction to in The New York Times. we can put F2 up on the screen about how often the government is pressuring social media companies not only to take down content, but to reveal the identities of some of the people who are trying to remain anonymous for understandable reasons, frankly, behind accounts that are posting anti-ICE content.

50:53Part of this reads, the Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose ICE by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers, and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency. One of the things that we have really appreciated here about FIRE is that you have stood for free speech regardless of partisanship. So under the Biden administration where there were abuses, you all were right there. And now under the Trump administration with extraordinary abuses. You continue to be on the side of the First Amendment.

51:27Can you put this in context in terms of what is happening here, how extensive it is, and what sort of a threat to free speech this ultimately represents? Yeah, this feels like a full court press from the administration to go after anybody who dares criticize, report upon, track what's happening with ICE in the Department of Homeland Security. So in our lawsuit, we're pushing back against pressure brought by the Attorney General and Secretary Noem on Facebook and Apple to remove the apps and the Facebook groups that report on ICE. That's unconstitutional. That's jawboning. As you say, we opposed it under the Biden administration, and we're sure as hell oppose it here when it's being used by the Trump administration as a kind of indirect, coercive censorship, trying to put the screws on a private actor to remove speech that's protected, but that the administration doesn't like.

52:19And here with this latest reporting from the New York Times and also a couple of weeks before from the Washington Post, we're again seeing this very aggressive, very expansive understanding of what constitutes some kind of criminal activity or some kind of suspicious activity that the federal government can track. So they're issuing these administrative subpoenas to social media companies and asking them to provide all the details about those users. And really what I think anybody can see just from a common sense standpoint, is the intention is to chill speech. They want you to think twice before you say, you know, to hell with ICE on social media, because you don't want to get that knock on the door.

52:55That's not a free society. That's not the United States of America that we love. And I don't care what administration is doing that. That should outrage everybody. In this country, we have a right to criticize police without worrying that you're going to get some knock on the door, as folks have been getting, because your social media company turned over all your information to the feds. I mean, what the hell are we even talking about? This is crazy. In the broader question of the anti-ICE activism, the legal, I'm genuinely curious, Wolf, for the legal perspective on publicly available information.

53:28If you have people following ICE agents in public and then communicating, coordinating in a signal group saying they're here, they're there, these license plates are in the public domain, so using them for one reason or the other. is there any legal standard that coordination constitutes impeding or obstructing? Because that's the argument that gets made. But it seems like there maybe isn't a lot of precedent on what that actually is or what it could be. But you probably know the existing precedent, Will. Well, I appreciate the question because it's an important one, right? There is speech integral to criminal conduct.

54:07If you are coordinating a bank robbery, and then you go ahead and you try and execute the plan, at that point, the coordination is part of the eventual criminality. But the really important threshold is that there has to be that criminality. Just talking with each other about where ICE is or where your next protest is going to be, that's all protected. You have to have the step from just protected protest and protected speech as some kind of criminal activity. And that's a high bar, and it should be a high bar in our free society. And that's what I'm not seeing here. The federal government is pushing a very broad interpretation of doxing.

54:42Doxing is not a legal term of art. There's no crime against doxing. Just as you say, if the information is in the public, if law enforcement is walking around in public, you can report on them. You can call up your friend and text them on signal, whatever, and say, hey, they're over here. That's protected activity. If you say, hey, they're over here, let's jump them. Okay, now we're talking about something else. But we haven't seen any evidence of that. And you've got to be really wary of the government blurring the lines between just talking about somebody and actually doing something. There's a big difference between speech and action, and we need to keep that sacrosanct.

55:12Well, I think the administration themselves are not very confident in their legal standing here because according to this New York Times piece, they say in September, they sent meta these administrative subpoenas, which are just basically like pieces of paper that they're like, yeah, we think we should be able to do this. To identify the people behind Instagram accounts that posted about ICE raids in California, according to ACLU, the subpoenas were challenged in court. DHS withdrew the request for information before a judge could rule. And I think there's another instance where they document the same tactic where when there's pushback and they say, you can't do this, we're going to court.

55:48They're like, nevermind, we're good. Because they don't feel that they are on solid legal ground here and they don't want an actual judge's ruling because now they can live in this sort of, you know, amorphous like, well, we think we have this power. But if you get an actual legal decision, then you can no longer live in that state of ambiguity. And, you know, you have to decide whether you're going to listen to the courts or whether you're going to flagrantly violate their orders, which, of course, they've done thousands of times as well. That's exactly right. You know, they seem like habitual line steppers.

56:18You know, you've got to push back a little bit and then, And maybe we'll get some space to operate. Let me plug right now, if any of your viewers are dealing with one of these administrative subpoenas or think you might be, please get in touch with us at FIRE.org. We'd love to hear from you. Because just as you say, the only way to really win here is to fight back. You have a first-man right, but it doesn't mean much if you don't fight to exercise it. That's why we're so proud of our brave plaintiffs in our ICE cases, in our lawsuit against Noam and Bondi. It takes a lot of guts to stand up and fight.

56:47And that's what we're here to help you do. Yeah, and that's why we're so grateful for the work that you guys do because a lot of people out there on their own as individuals would be terrifying to go up against the federal government. I'm sure it's still terrifying to go up against the federal government, but at least they have some great allies and people like yourself. Will, thank you so much for joining us today. We're really grateful for your time. Yeah, thank you. It's been my pleasure. Thank you both. All right, guys, that does it for us. Make sure to check out Sagar's episode with Andrew Schultz.

57:13I believe that will come out tomorrow, and Emily and Ryan will be in for the show previously known as Counterpoints tomorrow. Oh, is it not a bro show? Oh, I don't know. We should check and see if it's a bro show. Okay. I'll check and see. It doesn't matter for you. Mystery show. Yeah, mystery show. It'll be like those, you know, little packages that kids get and they unbox them. You won't know until you unbox the episode. Remember the candy, like the Wonderball? It was like, what's in the Wonderball? No, I don't. But that sounds fun. This might be a younger millennial thing. My daughter's very into these, like, unboxing and the mystery, like, you know, stuffy plushies that are inside the boxes.

57:47That's where my brain is. Oh, so this is the version of that. Yes. I love it. All right. In any case, someone will see you here tomorrow and have a great day. See you, everyone.

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