8/6/26: Ben Shapiro Grocery Meltdown, Plane Downed By US Military, Tucker 3rd Party Manifesto, Israeli Mole At The UN

25:00it turned out to be a kid's party balloon. Regardless, it was later reported that the cutting-edge weapon was taken for a test drive a week before the FAA and Pentagon officials had a chance to discuss how to safely implement the laser device, making it a small miracle that nobody was killed. Not every use of an experimental aerospace weapon goes off without a hitch. New reporting reveals that a testing of an experimental GPS jammer resulted in a medical plane crashing into the side of a mountain. The horrifying incident happened in May when a small twin-engine medevac aircraft carrying two pilots and two medical workers departed from Roswell, New Mexico, heading west for the small mountain village of Rusodo.

25:45The crew became the victim of electronic warfare exercise being conducted at White Sands Missile Range, a test which rendered their navigational system completely inoperable. Due to the combination of low visibility and air traffic control that was stretched far beyond capacity, three other planes also reported navigation disruption due to GPS jamming. The pilots failed to register a mountainous formation between their plane and their landing strip. Pilot and crash analysts said that the visual effect of that approach would have been stupefying. When the lights go out, you know that you are in big trouble.

26:20The disoriented crew ran straight into the side of the mountain they never saw, resulting in the loss of every life on board. It is the first instance known where a military GPS jammer played a role in the downing of a civilian plane in U.S. airspace. So that's the official story, Brian, as that's out right now from Wired magazine. On its face, absolutely bonkers and insane. You know, a lot of people in the UFO community, they sent it to me. It's very interesting. Even if it's true, this alone is a massive scandal. etc i have some questions white sands base long known for ufo uh in the ufo world for testing a lot of rumors and other reports going back all the way to the 1960s immediately is what a lot of us flagged when the el paso shutdown happened cbp shooting at cartel drones just to me never passed the sniff test even as crazy as cbp and ice and all this like i'm sorry these drug drones they cross the border every single day we have drone jamming technology i guess you could believe that Trump's ICE or CBP would be so insane to do something like that, resulting in the NOTAM that was issued over El Paso in the middle of the night, totally shut down the airport.

27:29It does, though, I mean, it happened in Roswell, New Mexico. So we're talking about Roswell, obviously, again, the site of the original UFO crash here in the United States. If you believe the official story, you're an idiot. But when you look at what's happened here, it's very clear, why are we testing this GPS jamming device? Now, maybe it's for drone warfare. It certainly does have, you know, a – it has an explanation. Iran, drones, Ukraine, and all of that. But a lot of that stuff we know already exists, is in the works, has been tested previously before. We're shooting experimental lasers up into the sky to shoot things down.

28:05Seems like something you may want to do if you're worried about things that are flying up in your airspace. So I know I'm taking people a bit far. This is my personal, you know, pet kind of thing. But even if we just take it on its face, it does appear that four people died here in a GPS jamming caused by the United States military. And it's a medevac flight. Yeah. And I'm also curious what happened to the person who the flight was trying to rescue because they appear not to be on it. Right. But if the. They were probably inbound. Right. I believe. That's what the reporting seems to indicate. So if they needed emergency evacuation and their plane crashed, there may be an additional victim on top of that.

28:49So what are the questions that they think? So they think this is – they're trying to shoot down UFOs or something? Maybe. Yeah. I mean it's been one of the – look, I mean one of the – so let's say if we take it back to one of the most credible UFO sighting in American history. off of the coast of California. One of the things that was reported was interference with their own onboard technology, was their inability, or they were tracking it, as we saw in the 2017 footage that was released by the New York Times between the Tic Tac and some of these other UFO craft that were caught on video. But there has long been reports of many of these pilots of interference with their own craft.

29:32And of course, if you have something flying around, you would want to try and to bring it down, Maybe with experimental GPS jamming. Not even GPS. Again, we're taking it at their word. We don't really know. Experimental lasers that are able to shoot things out of the sky. I just, again, find it crazy that this is being used for cartel drones. That does not pass the smell test to me at all. Small drones like that. I mean, if you listen to people who are in prison, right now, you've got small drones that drop drugs off in the middle of prison yards. Apparently, this is extremely common. This is the way they get drugs that are independent.

30:06The idea that this is not a known quantity is ridiculous. We have well-known drone jamming and drone enforcement, which doesn't interfere with civilian aircraft. Here in Washington, D.C., it's not like you can just fly a drone over the National Mall. It's going down instantly, and we have all kinds of tech that is non-experimental. So it just seems to me that something crazy was going on at this missile base to be using such an extraordinary technology, which is interfering both with the civilian craft where a bunch of people crashed and died, but multiple other aircraft on the scene as verified now by these internal reports by WIRED.

30:42So that's all I'm saying, you know, more general. And again, what I'm trying to say is even if it has nothing to do with UFOs, what an insane situation regardless. As you're testing an experimental jammer and you cause a crash of four people, that in and of itself is a massive scandal, which is getting no attention. We also recently had, and this is where I'll steel man my own case, we just had an incident here in Washington where Marine One, the president's helicopter, a civilian aircraft was able to get within a mile of it because of bad air traffic control. And this is after the crash that happened at Washington Reagan Airport where you had the helicopter and the civilian airliner collide.

31:23No after action report, which has actually changed all much of anything and multiple close calls that continue to happen because of air traffic control. So I just put all this together and we have two things. You know, obviously you could have incompetence and insanity, but the government is an easy explanation. There is, in my opinion, again, potential for something more. That's all. Either way, like utterly reckless. Yes. To, I mean, they claim that they warned the pilots that there was GPS jamming, but like. Hard to believe. Heading into this mountainous region. In the night. Trying to land that plane without GPS.

32:01And they're kind of, it's not like they got a warning days in advance. So what's the emergency? Like anybody who's taking off and heading to that airstrip should be told. Also, what are you doing? Get out of here with this freaking GPS jamming stuff. Well, you know. That's why they shut down that El Paso space, right? Yeah, so they shut down El Paso because of the lasers, the experimental lasers. Again, I just, I still, it never passed a smell test to me. You do not shoot experimental lasers in the sky at aircraft causing the shutdown of a civilian airport for nothing. I will never believe the cartel drone story.

32:39and combine it with this, it's clear that at White Sands, again, a long, long history of UFO sightings, of experiments, of all kinds of crazy technology and things that have been tested here. The fact that this happened in Roswell, New Mexico, a lot of questions that surround this incident. Meanwhile, I wonder if the cartels are going to start using those first-person... The FPV drones? They probably do. ...ethernet connected so that they can't be jammed because they only need... I think they do. I'm pretty sure, actually, what I have, I read a report from one of the cartel strongholds where they have their own GPS jamming technology.

33:16I bet they do. To not allow rivals to use drones to surveil them. Right, because. And the Mexican government. Some cartel, one cartel killed another cartel boss with a drone dropping the thing on his little tent. Straight out of Syria, out of Ukraine. It's crazy. Okay, let's get to Tucker.

33:38Betrayal Weekly is back with brand new stories. From threatening text messages disturbing a small Midwestern town. It was from an unknown number. Who else is getting these messages? Why did it start with us? To long cons and stolen identities. Who lies about being this sick? This was the last time I ever believed a word she said. New voices, each with the courage to tell their own story. He said, I have been kidnapped. Okay, just try and act normal. He was essentially on the run. Every family has secrets. The rug had been pulled from underneath me. Oh my God. It was right in front of my face and I didn't even see it.

34:26Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

34:54is, well, actually bulls**t. Fortunately, we're both people who know how to read studies, parse data, and can tell you what's worth trying out and what you can safely ignore. Each episode, we tackle the health news of the week and then take a deeper dive into a misunderstood health and wellness topic, like... What's the deal with peptides? What's the deal with GLP-1s? What's the deal with creatine? What's the deal with cupping? What's the deal with sleep? So join us for a weekly dose of sanity. It might actually be just what the doctor... Or the economist... Ordered. Listen to Wellness Actually on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

35:36It's Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. This season, we've got some awesome guests ready to dole out advice. Guests like Tiffany Haddish kind of slide into people's DMs. I like Bumble. Also, girl, FarmersOnly.com. Estate sales, funerals, auctions. are usually good. There's a lot of good men there. Grocery stores near gyms. Darcy Carden. I remember being like, I know this is good advice, but I really don't want to do that. So you didn't take her advice? I didn't take her advice. Are you still friends with that woman? No. She actually was kind of toxic. Neil deGrasse Tyson. I spent my whole life looking up.

36:13I was a geek kid. I had a telescope at age 12. And so... So you didn't have sex for a long time? Sherry Oteri. Were you a soap opera person? Young and restless. Okay. Well, first of all, you should know it's the young and the restless. I can't even believe you're mispronouncing the title. Some of us abbreviate it because we've been so weird for so many years. T.S. Madison. Are you into poly? No, no, I don't think so. No, I could have told you no on that. Girl, why are you not into poly? Just based on what she's wearing and the way her hair is styled. She is not into poly, okay? Girl, try poly.

36:47Anna Faris, Dave Franco, Madeline Klein, Hannah Gadsby, Adam Scott, Wanda Sykes, and more. Listen to Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

37:06Turning now to Tucker Carlson, the potential for a third party. Here's Joe Kent on TYT previewing it. Let's take a listen. Somebody needs to begin work immediately on one question, which is what unites all of us. It's probably not going to be that hard because most of the divisions that we think are irreparable, they're chasms, there's no way I have anything in common with that person. If my daughter married him, I'd freak out. Most of those divisions are artificial. They were actually foisted on us by our leaders whose incompetence and graph needed a cover. There are smart people who've been saying this for a long time.

37:50That's not to say there aren't natural differences between people. Of course there are. Including between races. Of course there are. But are they bigger than the things we have in common? No, they're not. But they've been exacerbated and inflamed and intentionally highlighted as part of a long-term project to divert our attention from what is now very obviously true, which is that both parties have colluded against the population to make their lives better and our lives worse. There's kind of no arguing that that's a fact at this point. And unfortunately, they have been extremely successful. So if you're going to fix it and rebuild this country and turn it into a place that the grandchildren you hopefully will have can inherit and thrive, you're going to need to do something about the pressing question of American identity.

38:41What does it mean to be an American? But it's fixable. You just have to try. And we will be trying. And we'll tell you as we continue to do that. So, very interesting point here. He says, we don't want Israel dictating our foreign policy. We don't want any more foreign wars. This was followed up by Tucker himself saying he was going to make a major announcement yesterday in a 90-minute long stream. Here's a taste of what some of that was. Let's take a listen. So, Joe, tell us, could it potentially be a new third party? It certainly could. I mean, when I got together with Tucker, with Thomas Massey, Marjorie Taylor Greene, as we were just kind of comparing notes, most of us came to the conclusion that most Americans that we talk to, they're sick of the Republicans, they're sick of the Democrats.

39:32Now, most of us, you know, have been in Trump world for quite some time. All of us kind of had our own, you know, break, to put it politely, with the Trump administration. And even a lot of like hardcore Trump supporters right now, they feel very betrayed. I mean, one of the core tenets of President Trump's agenda was no more endless wars. We felt, I mean, I became a Trump supporter in 16 when Trump went after Jeb Bush on the debate stage because I served and fought in Iraq, lost lots of friends there. we have all come to our own conclusions that look this is not working and the the confines of the traditional republican party the traditional democrat party most people are just sick of that and so we do think that there is i i would say from you know a lot of your viewers from people who find themselves you know more on the left people who find themselves more on the right we we don't think the current political system is working just because of the results on the ground No matter who we vote for, we get another war in the Middle East.

40:26No matter who we vote for, AIPAC and these major donors, most of whom most Americans don't even know, they dictate a policy that sends our best young men and women off to go fight in die-informed battlefields. They make our taxes go up, and then they give us nothing back in return. So that was the big tease there from Tucker at the end around third party. Apparently it was a 10-point plan. Let's put F4 up here on the screen. Ryan and I will react. Here's what Tucker laid out. Number one, fair. The same rules should apply to presidents, federal agents, and elites such as Jeffrey Epstein. Agreed?

40:59Yeah. So far. Take it. Sovereign. Carlson says Israel pushed the United States to the Iran war through bribery, threat, or both, while described by foreign lobbying, corporate control of government, as forms of slavery along with high interest debt. Yes. Amen. Debt. Yeah. Yep. Reductive. America should rebuild farming, manufacturing, craftsmanship, while rejecting an economy dominated by finance, real estate speculation, surveillance system, and weapons. Check. Sign me up. On board. Beautiful. Urban planners deliberately uglified American cities portraying brutalist architecture, graffiti, public drug use, and violent crime as deliberate attacks on the public.

41:32Pretty good stuff. I'm for it. Huh? Yeah, but public drug use? Public drug? Yeah, take it aside. You're cool with that? Yeah, what do you think? Okay. Listen, I just want to make sure. I want to make sure that the guy who literally wrote the book on why drugs should be legalized is grappling with what that means. I said in the book, you also have to keep it under control. Otherwise, they're going to ban it again. Right, which is what we eventually will. Take it inside. Unless it's a concert, then that's fine. Ryan's still on board. I like it. Healthy. Carlson embraces RFK's food agenda, calls for universal sobriety, and said widespread use of drugs such as Xanax, Adderall, SSRIs have left Americans half-addled.

42:09If you want to do a public health campaign towards sobriety and that sort of thing, I'm fine with that. But when it drifts into banning stuff and jailing people, then I'm out. You shouldn't jail people for using fentanyl in the park in front of children. You don't think so? No. So what would you do with that person? They need treatment. Okay. But what if they don't want treatment? We need to have, well, are they committing crimes? If they're committing other crimes, then - You can't be a drug addict and not commit crime. Being a drug addict by definition is - I'm talking about other crimes outside of that.

42:43Well, how do you think they're funding their lifestyle? Then go catch them. Prosecute them for that. Okay, so we're still together. All right, a little bit. Universal sobriety, I like that one. Six, honest. Government officials should be punished for lying to citizens. Most classified records, including on JFK assassination 9-11, should be open. Okay? Yeah, we're good. We're in. Optimistic. Carlson argues having children is a biological imperative, the foundation of long-term thinking, blaming aging and childless elites for policies that disregard future generations. True. We need more people.

43:16You're a father of four, right? You're actually, I mean, for a leftist. I'm doing my part. You're majorly doing your part. So, okay, we're all in. Wise. Schools should teach how the physical world actually works, what he calls unchanging facts about human nature, including innate differences between men and women rather than credentials, screens, and technological fads. I haven't listened. To be fair, I have not listened to any of this. This is literally. Right, this is Axios. Because it's 95 minutes. It came out late last night. We had to do the show this morning. This is the write-up. I do like this non-credentials, tech screens and technological fads thing and teaching how the world works.

43:52Again, I don't know exactly what he said, but how crazy is it in the United States they don't teach you about debt? Like in high school, they don't actually do basics of personal finance. You have to memorize cell structure. Fine, fine, but they don't tell you like, hey, if you take out a credit card, this is how annual percentage interest works, APR. This is what it means. If you don't do a minimum payment, then this is how long you're going to be in debt. This is the process of getting a mortgage. This is what a mortgage is. I mean, so much of it is like a black hole. So, okay, I think we're on board so far.

44:29Decent. The United States should apologize and pay restitution for killing noncombatants, reverse the Trump's Department of War rebrand, stop funding allies that commit what Carlson called genocide, citing Israel. I think we're on board? Check, right? Check. I actually disagree with Tucker on the Department of War. I think we should keep the name because it's the only honest name. Department of Defense is bullshit. We've launched more wars under Department of Defense than we did under Department of War. Department of War was an understanding that when we use it, it was for war. And so the public was like, well, we shouldn't use it then.

45:02Right. So under D.O.W., we actually fought less. So that's my bigger disagreement. Finally, and this is where I think everything will start to come apart for you, Ryan. Carlson calls for halting immigration until the effects of AI become clearer, ending benefits for undocumented immigrants, and making English the sole language of a federal document and ballots. See, I'm okay with some reform around our immigration system, and I think we should be able to come up with something. But this is exactly where I get nervous because what I don't see in here, we're not done yet, is taking on the super rich.

45:37Now, fairness, which is number one there. I think fairness is where he would say that. But he also, like, fairness, he shoehorns in a lot of, like, anti-DEI stuff. So I would put in going after the super rich. See, Nolan Tucker, though, he doesn't care about taxing rich people. I mean, he attacks constantly. I mean, I did a segment with him five years ago where he started talking about taxing Jeff Bezos. So it's like. So he's for it. I would say so, yeah. I'm not going to speak for him. But I, you know, saying let's not pay our credit card debt or any of that. I'll be on a show actually in a few weeks.

46:08So I'll ask him. To me, taking on this oligarch class has to be at the center of any bipartisan, transpartisan, whatever you want to call it, agenda that brings both sides together. Because if you don't, what the oligarch class is going to do is fuel the cultural wars over the things that he says we shouldn't be arguing about. And my fear of the populist rights advocacy in this arena has always been that it will take energy that's aimed at the oligarchs and direct it towards immigrants and say that that's the problem. So on the one hand, there's plenty of immigration policy reform that I think a sensible left can agree with, like a Bernie Sanders style left can agree with.

46:58But if that becomes a deflection away from the oligarch class, then I'm out. We have to take on the oligarchs. You take on the oligarchs, then let's talk about immigration. If you were to ask a true – someone like me who opposes mass immigration and oligarchy, we would point out that the oligarchs are the people who wanted mass immigration for cheap labor to exploit, which is literally true, to drive down wages and to make it. So, I mean, that's where – But they can find cheap labor by just moving their factories all over the world. Right. But now if you have a – well, let's look at the Trump administration.

47:31What has the Trump administration done? They have made it so that you have enforcement, quote, on immigration, but with none of the crackdown on mass capital. Lawyers on any of the corporations which employ them, mandatory E-Verify, any of the hotel chains, any of these people. That would be – frankly, if you want people to just self-deport, make it illegal to work in the United States illegally. It's really actually not that difficult. They refuse to do that because a huge number of these companies, stock prices, meat prices, all that stuff would go up. I'm acknowledging that. I just did a segment about burritos, but I will be honest with you that if you enforce immigration very effectively, there will be some sort of a price increase.

48:12That's just basically it. And the only way to fix that is because, and we talked about this in an earlier segment, because we have not had economic growth much at all over the last 20 to 30 years, yet the very rich have gotten much richer. we have all gotten poorer to make that possible. And one way that we have kind of staved off a real collapse of the, complete and total collapse of the middle class is what Tucker talks about is debt. Yeah. So we're kind of, that's basically kind of foaming the runway for this crash landing that is coming. Right. The middle class is trading away its assets, giving the assets to the rich, taking on debt so that their quality of life doesn't deteriorate too quickly.

48:58But when the next crisis comes, that's going to say, oh, well, you no longer are interesting to us. Now let's do the turn, though, after we've said all this is good. Third parties are bad. Sorry, I'll say it. They don't work. Do we have anything else, though? That wasn't 10. Oh, that was 10. Oh, that was all 10? Yeah, that was all 10. Okay. But see, Ryan, this is, look, Joe, nice guy. Obviously, I like Tucker, you know. But third parties don't work. I mean, there's no third party which is meaningfully going to win. If you want the only so there we have a very recent test case which had a promise of working is ended up being Trump who screwed them and the leaders of said third party where you actually saw a third party candidate who was very effective with this coalition.

49:40His name is RFK Jr. You can hate RFK Jr. RFK Jr. was independent candidate, originally Democratic candidate. Maha was part of the coalition. Trump called him and said, look, I need Maha as part of my coalition. You will be my HHS secretary. You will come and campaign for me. You will get X, Y, and Z. Now, obviously, Trump ends up subsuming that. Corporate interests and all that take over. However, Maha got X, Y, or Z thing. This stupid shit that they're obsessed with, like cane sugar Coke at Steak and Shake. Whatever. All right. But my point being that they took Maha and subsumed it into the Republican Party.

50:17No matter what you think of whether that was effective, politically, it was a strategy, right? So to the extent that we have now seen multiple third party efforts, it is very obvious, ask the DSA, what they did is they took their party, their activism, their platform. They said, we're going to do what Trump did to the Republican Party. We're going to take it over. Same with the Tea Party wave, for example. You run within the primary. You work against the establishment. Now, for a very effective third party, what ends up happening is that it doesn't actually have any capacity to win, but it can pressure a major party to subsume it and to integrate some of its options.

50:54We've seen this many times of popular challengers throughout history. Huey Long, FDR, right? What does he do? He's afraid of Huey, so he starts to adopt some more economic populist positions, other things that he didn't necessarily want to do. We've seen this also with Maha. We've seen it with Ross Perot. I mean, many tenants of Ross Perot's original campaign are now standard issue talking points of the Republican Party today. But they are not actually going to win. And so in this case, it seems to me that if this is the platform that you want, you set this platform, maybe not necessarily as a third party, and then you say, within our two-party system, whichever party is more likely to agree more with me, we will become part of said party and we will hold that party to account with this set of principles.

51:43That's the only way that it actually works. I know people get mad about this. People like to dream and all this about Republican Party. But, sorry, third party, it's just not going to happen. Taking over the major parties is the only way it works. You can say I'm perpetuating the duopoly. I'm sorry. That's bullshit. There's too much evidence. Now, from what we've seen, look at Kashama Sawant. You know, she just ran as a, what, independent or whatever. She got stomped, humiliated in this race. And so, look, we have the evidence. It's out there. I'm sorry. It doesn't work. You can use it to try to get another party to cater to you.

52:16I'm cool with that. Totally fine. But that is the most effective way that you're, that is the only effectiveness that you will ever have as a group of third party. What does work is having a grassroots organization that is organized around a set of principles that then tries to, yes, pressure either party. And so free consulting advice for Tucker's new thing. They need a DSA, but they call it DNA. Democratic National. Nationalists of America. Anything with the word nationalist, the press is just going to beat you up. Democratic Patriots of America. Patriots, I like that. DPA? Yeah, that's good.

52:50Or RPA, Republican Patriots of America. See, I would just do a callback to the revolution, Sons of Liberty or something like that. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's true. A lot of these Patriot groups have all stolen that. I would find, maybe Bull Moose. I like Bull Moose. The Bull Moose party. Bull Moose is totally, I think I have Bull Moose. Yeah, right over there. Bull Moose mug that I have back there. The no-nothings? Yeah. I mean, you know, they got very unfairly treated in history, Ryan, in my opinion. Well, the American Party is what they went for. I know we're going late, but no-nothing is a perfect example.

53:23No-nothing-ism became completely enmeshed and absorbed by the Republican Party of the day. The amount of, you know, Lincoln actually was very, had a real, like, he had to really, he really struggled with no-nothing-ism as part of his coalition. having to deal with all these German and these Irish immigrants and the brigades. And I mean, obviously with the New York City draft riots and having to balance all of that. But the know nothing is actually a perfect example of know nothing is eventually just gets absorbed into both of the coalitions post-Civil War. The only time a new political party would actually be capable of winning, like the Republican Party of 1860, is you need an issue which destroyed Wiggery, which was slavery, Where northern Wiggery and southern Wiggery fundamentally could not reconcile because of slavery.

54:14That was the one thing that was going to – and so there's no issue like that in the Republican Party today. There simply isn't. That is going to – where a person who has this position cannot live with the other person. It doesn't exist. And so that's why it's such a unique time that that even happened. But we should respect why that happened and be very sober-minded about where we are. I also think some of the both-sides-ism is kind of lame, in my opinion, because – and look, this is just objectively. You have an entire democratic revolution right now happening of candidates who are rejecting Israel.

54:50That's not happening on the Republican side. I wish it were happening on the Republican side. It's not happening, period. Thomas Massey got his ass stomped in his primary. So, you know, if you're going to do a cost-benefit analysis, and I encourage people to do that, to be realistic when they vote, they should say, okay, if this is my number one issue, this is the side where I'm going to go, right? And you could use third-party activism to pressure, but in and of itself, it doesn't have a chance. That's the truth. And I'll tell them that, you know, if we would ever talk about it. Okay. I got to go on there, too.

55:20You should. I was supposed to go on. I had a scheduling issue. Oh, is that what happened? We'll get you back on. Get back on there. Okay. Make my wealth tax case directly at the whole... I'm telling you, I don't think you would object whatsoever. Again, my personal view, not speaking for him, but I would find it very difficult to see him... We'll find out. ...something like that. All right. Let's get to Murtaza Hussaini standing by. So the head of the Washington office of UNICEF, which is the UN agency responsible for the welfare of children, is a man named Yavlishner. This is an Israeli official who in the 2010s was working at the United Nations.

55:58DropSite News has some new reporting revealing that while Lishner was at the United Nations, he was acting effectively as a mole for the state of Israel. To discuss that report and the fallout from it is my DropSite colleague, Murtaza Hussain. Maz, thanks for being here on Breaking Points. Good to see you, man. You could see us. Yeah, so really kind of, it's one of those stories that is shocking and not surprising, but the details of it are quite incredible, particularly given the fact that Lichner remains as the head of the Washington office of UNICEF. So walk us through a little bit of how he wound up.

56:40And later I want to hear, if you can tell us as much as you can about the reporting behind this, because that's also really interesting. But how does Yav Lichner wind up at the United Nations at all? Sure. So this story is based on a set of emails from 2014 and 2015. It's a little while ago that were posted on this website that we've used for other stories, distributed denial of secrets. It's a cache of leaked emails from the then-Israeli ambassador to the UN, Ron Prostor. And Lichner, before he worked for the UN itself, he worked for ProSor. He was working with the mission, the Israeli mission and so forth.

57:24And ProSor worked really hard to get Lichner into the UN, as we can see in his emails. And one individual people probably know who was very integral in getting him in that role was Samantha Power. Samantha Power seemed to work very closely with ProSor in many ways when she was at the UN. and Proso was very keen on Lichner getting into the UN system itself and he asked her to make recommendations, make a few phone calls, apply pressure and other incentives to UN officials to get him in there. And then this is around early 2014. By May 2014, he's in there and almost immediately after getting into the UN, And he begins leaking information, confidential reports and documents and internal correspondence to his former colleagues at the Israeli mission and other Israeli diplomats.

58:20So, you know, it's very interesting. A U.S. official at the behest of an Israeli official got a certain individual into a role within the U.N. And then immediately upon that happening, that individual starts sharing insider political intelligence and confidential documents and so forth with the Israeli government. So that's kind of the chain of how this started. And, you know, as you mentioned in your introduction, Ryan, this gentleman has continued to rise in the ranks of the U.N. in the years since, such that he holds a quite influential office at UNICEF in D.C. So he's here in Washington. He is, I mean, can we call it what it is?

59:00Like, you call him an Israeli mole. Like, he literally worked to pass information to the Israeli government. Why do they have an incentive to have somebody embedded in UNICEF? I also find it a bit ironic, as I understand that they were often accusing UN personnel of being Hamas themselves. well you know it's funny because in the story itself i never really editorialized per se about uh you know what this person was exactly i just described what they were doing right and the description is basically all on their own communications in the email so as i said like they got the role then immediately upon getting the role and for a very prolonged period of time As long as the emails go, they're leaking information to the Israeli government thereafter.

59:46So it does very much look like the behavior of somebody who was input in an organization as a mole or a spy or something to that effect to basically undermine it or shape its operations and so forth. That's what the information strongly suggests. And I suggest people read the article and draw their own conclusions. But, you know, it's their own communications. So, you know, if you look in the broader picture, there are a lot of countries that would surely like to manipulate the operations of global governance organizations, the IMF, World Bank, the UN and so forth, because they feel they can obtain political benefit from that or they feel that they're facing scrutiny from these organizations that they would like to defray.

1:00:29And at this time, Israel was probably not as unpopular as it is today. It was kind of walking down the path through various wars in Gaza to reaching the present state. But, you know, they were facing scrutiny for the occupation of the West Bank, the conduct of the 2014 war in Gaza, which killed a large number of civilians. and they were seeking ways to mute that criticism or, you know, end it or even turn it around at the United Nations, which is a forum for global public opinion in many ways. And having individuals on the inside who are able to provide information and advice and guidance and confidential information and documents is a good way of doing that.

1:01:10I imagine there are a lot of countries who would like to do that. But in this case, what's different is that the U.S. government was helping seemingly the Israelis input their person into this role in the U.N. such that they could play that role. So not every country has the assistance of Samantha Power or other U.S. officials to, you know, do this form of entryism, so to speak, into an organization. And, you know, I'll add one very quick point, too, is that the UN, in a way, if you think about it, it's kind of like a utopian idea of the organization, because the idea is that people will come and work here.

1:01:44And in doing so, they will shed their national identities or downgrade them in importance and embrace a universalistic identity based on their membership in the UN. And that's actually what we referenced in our story, the UN's official code of conduct and regulations. They ask that you see yourself as exclusively international official and non-national official. That's a very interesting sort of unique way of framing someone's membership in an organization. And I think some people maybe are capable of doing that. They will put aside their national identification entirely and focus only on the interests of the organization.

1:02:19But for other people, the tribal identity or national identity is extremely overpowering and strong. I mean, they will never abandon it in favor of what the U.N. is asking in this case. And in that case, of course, you're going to have people who are leaking information and things like that. And again, it could be many countries. But in this case, because of American assistance, perhaps, it was much more easy for the Israelis to do that. And while you didn't editorialize in the piece, there's an interesting moment where Lishner himself is preparing talking points for the ambassador, Prozer, to describe Lishner.

1:02:54And in his own talking points, he says Yahav has very good political and analytical skills. He knows exactly what member states' political positions are. He's an intelligence officer in training and was a political officer in the Israel embassy in the UK, working with the MPs in the House of Commons and Lords. So according to his own self-assessment, he calls himself an intelligence officer in training. uh what kind of so what what i one piece of pushback i've seen uh sort of attempting to formulate is uh goes to that question of you know whether you can actually divide your national and international um you know affiliations uh and and your service to your country and says well it's not like working for the cia where you're secreting out information in the u.n you're sort of allowed to share information.

1:03:46What are you allowed to share? What aren't you supposed to share? What type of information was he sharing with the Israelis that has drawn criticism from UN officials in the time since your story has been published? Yeah, so we spoke to some UN officials to try to get a sense of their interpretation of the conduct, and one individual was a former Assistant Secretary General. And, you know, his view is that the conduct described in the emails is completely adverse to the ethos and the rules of the United Nations, because, you know, you're undermining the interests of the organization by leaking private correspondence, private reports, reports which are marked confidential, specifically, and requested UN officials not to disseminate and so forth.

1:04:34And, you know, there are other things in there, there were accounts of private meetings between UN officials and officials of the Egyptian government or the Iraqi government or other global governance organizations, internal accounts from the Secretary General's circle of individuals who, you know, jockeying for positions and, you know, political appointments and so forth, which are forecoming, even unpublished draft texts of then Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's remarks, which Lichner was saying, he was telling his former colleagues, he's going to help change them to be more favorable to Israel and so forth.

1:05:09So this is tremendously undermining the UN's impartiality or undermining its ability to push forward policies and so forth. And there were also specifically some reports of killings of Palestinian teenagers in the West Bank that the UN was receiving inquiries about from reporters. Liffner, according to emails, he was involved in sharing information about that privately with Israeli officials and also giving them proactive advice how to respond to this and frame their own response. And, you know, tellingly, a lot of these emails are sent from a Gmail account because, you know, if you work for an organization and you want to hide your communication, you often move to a private email account such that your communications, which you don't want people to see, cannot be queried by somebody inside the organization.

1:05:59That's why Hillary Clinton used a personal email account, for instance, to do things some years ago. It's very common for people in government to do that when they don't want people to see. So I think that it was all very something that the U.N. would completely disapprove of. The issue is that unlike the CIA, unlike the U.S. government, the U.N. does have a classification system and confidentiality and so forth. But there's not the same enforcement mechanism. It's not that you will go to jail if you do this or you will even be fired necessarily. it's more like an honor system when maybe, you know, if it's such an important subject, maybe you should have more of a rigorous, you know, regime to prevent from leaks of information.

1:06:37But in the absence of that, it's sort of a broken system a little bit. It's a bit more porous and that should be given the gravity of the matters at hand. Great story, Maz. Appreciate you joining us, sir. Thank you. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. Fro Show, it's always fun talking with you. It's good to see you. My friend, there will be a Friday show for everybody tomorrow. See you then. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was?

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