Republicans Suddenly Have Plans Next Week

26:12That's wildalaskan.com slash crooked for$35 off your first order. Thanks to Wild Alaskan Company for sponsoring this episode. Pod Save America is brought to you by Blinds.com. There's a version of your home you haven't lived in yet, where the light behaves how you want, where the rooms feel finished, where you sleep until you decide to wake up, not when the sun does. Blinds.com has spent 30 years making it easy to find the perfect fit with over 25 million windows covered and 50 ,000 five-star reviews. You can feel confident you're in good hands. Whether you want to go full DIY, bring in licensed and vetted pros to handle the measure and install, or land somewhere in between, you're always in control.

26:44They make it simple to choose the level of support that works best for you with flexibility every step of the way. Need help picking the right style? Book a free consultation with one of Blinds.com's award-winning design experts. No pushy salespeople, no awkward in-home visits, just real advice on your schedule. They'll even ship samples to your door fast and free. Choose from a huge variety of style options of prices that fit any budget. Everything is backed by Blinds.com's 100 % satisfaction guarantee because at Blinds.com, the only thing they treat better than Windows is you. And I love Blinds.com.

27:12You can customize the window covering. You get free samples sent right to your door. You can easily add insulation at checkout if you don't trust yourself to do it, you know, that's great. A huge selection. Right now, Blinds.com is giving our listeners an exclusive$50 off when you spend$500 or more. Just use code CROOKED at checkout. Limited time offer. Rules and restrictions apply. See Blinds.com for details. All right, let's talk about the Democrats who just wrapped up their final competitive primary of a very, very long 2026. On Tuesday, my home state went to the polls and overwhelmingly chose Ed Markey to be the Democratic Senate nominee from Massachusetts.

27:47The incumbent senator easily fended off a challenge from Congressman Seth Moulton, who attempted to make the race a referendum on generational change in the Democratic Party. Moulton is 47, Markey is 80. But with the backing of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, he made the race about his progressive bona fides, telling Politico, quote, it's not about your age, it's about the age of your ideas. Isn't that a longtime ax statement, ax quote? I feel like I've heard that so many times. Anyway, all these things get recycled. Did he do that because Obama was so young? We were young, but we had old ideas?

28:18No, Axe used to suggest that Biden used that line. Oh, that's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. It's not about your age. It's about the age of your ideas. And I am the youngest guy in this race when it comes to ideas. What do you think of this victory for the gerontocracy? I think it exposed the limits of generational change campaigns, which is Moulton's campaign really just was, Markey's old, I'm young, without ever being able to explain what was lost for Massachusetts voters by Markey's age and what would have been gained by Moulton's younger age. And usually the case is the younger candidate is the one more in touch with young voters.

28:59But from a policy perspective, Markey was much more in touch with what young voters actually wanted on healthcare, on climate, on Israel, being the sponsor of the Green New Deal. And if you're the young candidate running on a committee of generational change, you can't win young voters, you're not going to win. In fact, you'll probably lose by 30 points as Moulton did. The other backdrop to this – there are a couple other backdrops to this. One is Marky is 80, but not every 80-year-old is the same. And he seems very – like you watch him in the debates. He's very with it and energetic. and he didn't have a moment like Biden did at the debate or John Larson, the candidate from Connecticut, had when he sort of froze on the House floor that sort of haunted him.

29:40And so he seemed, you know, like you look at him, you're like, that guy can do the job. But what also is different here than it was perhaps in Maine, both for Biden in 2024 and in Maine for Janet Mills, is this is a safe seat. It's Massachusetts. So there wasn't this question of electability, Like, can he hack it in a really tough campaign? Right? It's like he wins his primary. He wins. If something happens, a Democratic governor appoints him. It's like it's not – there just wasn't this question of ability to actually defeat Republicans. And so he won. He won so easily that he actually even won Moulton's congressional district by about eight points, I think.

30:20Yeah, I think Moulton only won his, like, hometown and some of the surrounding towns. Yeah. Moulton was my congressman, or at least my hometown's congressman, who will now be represented by Dan Coe, former Biden advisor who was in. So there's a couple of other House primaries. That was one of them where I think the results showed that, like, these things are complicated and they don't always fit a narrative. Right. So in the sixth, which is what Moulton used to represent, Dan Coe beat the more progressive challenger there. Now it was an open seat. they're both fairly young so there's that Stephen Lynch 71 year old congressman from sort of southern Massachusetts he faced a primary challenge from our old White House intern Patrick Roth he was one of the first class of interns in the Obama White House 2009 no press oh your office Dan my office he was great but he so 71 Patrick's 39.

31:26Medicare for All. Fuck, our interns are 39. I know, right? Hit Lynch on Lake and Riley Act. So you had a younger, more progressive challenger with an older, more conservative incumbent. And he came, you know, he got first time first time candidate came within like 10 points closer than Lynch has ever had in a primary challenge since he's had that seat. But, you know, that that speaks to even even the progressive versus more moderate thing. It doesn't always fit with the narrative, too. So some and I only point that out because I think we're always like trying to fit all of these races into, OK, is it old versus young?

32:06But this one was progressive versus moderate. And those are the only two things that matter. And sometimes it's like personalities matter, where you are matter, how many people know you, how many people are paying attention to the race, like all kinds of factors go into this. At this point, after when so many people knocked out, that candidates are not caught off guard anymore. Like, Diana DeGette treated it like every other election where she had faced a challenge. And before she knew it, she was in huge trouble. This is a case where these candidates knew to be – in part because it was going on with Markey, but they knew to be in the district, be campaigning, be raising money, be doing stuff, and give them a better chance to fend it off.

32:42Yeah. All right. So in another sign of where the party may or may not be headed, Politico ran a story about Democrats in competitive races rejecting the support of their party's last presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. On top of Josh Turek, Rob Sand, and Mary Peltola, who we talked about the other week, Playbook got similar answers about Kamala from the Democratic Senate nominee in Kansas, Adam Hamilton, as well as Rebecca Cook, who's running in a very flippable Wisconsin congressional district and has received the endorsement of Bernie Sanders and campaigns with him. Harris acknowledged this sentiment for the first time today, saying in a phone interview with Peter Alexander of MS Now that she supports these candidates, quote, doing whatever they need to do to win.

33:24Harris will be on the trail next week campaigning for Aaron Ford in Nevada, who Tommy just talked to this week. And she's recently endorsed and races in New Hampshire, California and Tennessee. What do you make of Harris's approach here and sort of just this general story, which sort of was a, you know, now has been sort of churning for a couple of weeks? I think this is sort of a bullshit test for Harris. Like it's an unfair question. Like name the national Democrat other than possibly Barack Obama who would be invited to campaign in Kansas, Iowa, Alaska, like a true national figure. Well, I mean, it's tough.

34:05Would Joe Biden be invited? Would Gavin Newsom be invited? No, but can I ask you a question? Yeah. So I agree with that. And I agree that it's a bullshit test for Kamala Harris alone to pass. And all those other people who are running should be asked the same question, right? Or potentially running in 2028. Don't you think we need a nominee in 2028 who will be welcomed in a lot more difficult spaces, in a lot more difficult spaces? The real test to me is not Kansas, Iowa, Alaska. The real test is Georgia, congressional districts like Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania, Kate Connelly's race against Michael Ollip.

34:46Are you invited to campaign in purple states, states that you lost by a couple hundred thousand votes at most last time around? Are you invited to campaign for Abdul in Michigan? That to me is the fair test. Well, I bring it up because I was thinking about you mentioned Obama, Obama now, whatever. Yeah, of course, people want him. Think about 06, right? Yeah, no, he campaigned everywhere. He's the only one. And you know who they didn't want in many places? Clinton. John Kerry. And Hillary Clinton. Well, I was saying in 06, John Kerry had just been the nominee, right? And lost. And people didn't want John Kerry anywhere.

35:18But Barack Obama, the black guy named Barack Hussein Obama from Chicago, was invited everywhere. And you would hope – and again, this is tough, right? Because maybe if John Ossoff wins Georgia, you'd say, oh, well, most candidates in purple and light red states would want Ossoff there. But like there's no other midterm between now and now in 2028. So some of the candidates that might be welcomed in those areas and could be great presidential candidates, James Tallarico, like they're currently running in races right now. Yeah. So it's like you think about the people who are – some of the people who are thinking of running are not well-known enough to be truly polarizing.

35:57Like I imagine Mark Kelly would be invited a lot of places. Yeah. He's an astronaut, but he's not a national political figure in a way. I'd be curious about Pete Buttigieg. That's a good one. He's been a lot of places actually. He's been a lot of places. There's one thing to go to all these red places and you will see candidates in like these really, really hard states will want national democrats to get attention for their race. but would like Josh Turek win a campaign with Pete who won the Iowa caucus would be interesting. That's the good question. That's a great question. Now if I was advising Josh Turek I would say have no national Democrats in the state.

36:27Like none. Right. Like what is the upside for you at this point? I'd be very curious to know if Kamala Harris will campaign in Georgia for Keisha Lance Bottoms who worked for her and where her ability to turn out the black vote could matter a lot in that race. You know, will she campaign in Pennsylvania? North Carolina is interesting. I imagine Rick Cooper is not going to want anyone in his state. He doesn't need it. But that's just to me, I read that story this morning and was just like, this is just an unfair question to ask of Kamala Harris when, you know, when Obama was president, he wasn't going to deep red states to campaign.

37:02There has been a lot of focus on Kamala Harris around this, but like you are completely right to say like, what about Gavin Newsom? What about any of these other, you know, what about AOC? I do find it interesting that, I mean, and he is a national political figure now who is very well-liked in the party and beyond the party, Bernie Sanders, campaigning with Rebecca Cook. And Rebecca Cook is not like a DSA lefty candidate. She's a pretty moderate working class candidate in a pretty red district in Wisconsin and clearly feels that Bernie Sanders by her side is helpful. Here's my question. Does Bernie come back to Michigan before election day for Abdul?

37:42Yes, I think so. I would think so. Do you think AOC comes back? good question yeah i don't know i don't know maybe she goes to ann arbor maybe she goes you know i could i could see her on college campuses i mean i would if if abdul was asking me i wouldn't be i would not i would be totally i would say i'd be totally fine with him campaigning like you're already there's a gazillion like they want to put you with bernie sanders and aoc and an ad all you have to do is run his ads for the primary of abdul with aoc and bernie and so you might as well get the benefits of it on college campuses and places like that.

38:15I do think there'll be people from the Adul campaign and the Michigan Democratic Party at the Detroit airport just watching to see if Hassan Piker gets off the plane. Make sure he doesn't go to any of it. They're wondering, like, do they have access to the no-fly list? Can we have a state-based no-fly list? But yeah, no, I think Bernie's probably a plus for Adul in the homestretch, for sure. Okay, one last item that's become a big midterm issue and will almost certainly become an even bigger 2028 issue, AI and data centers. The same week that Donald Trump told Americans who oppose data center construction that they're going to end up, quote, backwards and poor, Democrats began pointing out that nearly every single Republican in Congress voted to prevent states and cities and towns from regulating the construction of data centers and voted to give tax breaks to AI companies that build data centers, especially in rural areas.

39:09Nearly one in five data centers currently under construction got these tax breaks thanks to the Republican Congress. This was part of Trump's big bill that also made massive Medicaid cuts. If I were running against an incumbent Republican member of Congress, I think I would spend the next 60 days absolutely hammering my opponent for voting to cut Medicaid, cut taxes for billionaires, cut taxes for AI companies so they can build data centers in your backyard. All in the same bill. Then you throw in their support for the war and Trump's tariffs, making things more expensive. And like, that's your campaign.

39:46Are they going to put the data centers on the sites of the rural hospitals they close with their Medicaid cuts? Perfect idea. That's an ad. See? There you go. Free idea, people. Close the rural. Yeah. Close the rural hospital. Put in a data center. Tax cuts to the data center. You're paying more. Yeah. I mean, it's all right there. I think, what do you think of that hit? I think it's a great hit. I didn't know that about the one big beautiful bill. In fact, I know about it because you tweeted it. I did. And then I saw you mentioned a Politico story as one of the people pushing this. Oh, wow. Look at that.

40:17I saw it from Brandon Duke on Twitter who had found it in the bill, the liberal policy guy. And so then I was like, holy shit, is that real? And then suddenly I saw Hakeem Jeffries talking about it at a press conference. And I was like, all right, we're off to the races. Let's get that shit in an ad. One tweet can change the world. No. No, I don't think it was my tweet at all. I don't think anyone saw it. Progressives also just launched a more aggressive approach to AI. On Thursday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Greg Kassar announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would, quote, permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and pause, quote, AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules.

41:01Speaking of that hypothetical regulator, Politico reports that Mark Zuckerberg had a secret call with Donald Trump where he expressed concerns about plans for a national AI regulator. You don't say. And here's what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said about calls to regulate AI when he sat down with Howard Nutlik at the G20 on Wednesday. As industry leaders do often do is to do interviews. I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we're not going to have AI in our country as it was to say we're not going to have electricity in our country back 100 plus years ago. My prediction is we won't be talking about AI as much as we do in a decade from now.

41:41Because we'll all be dead? Because we'll just expect it everywhere. You know, like a kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful. A fantastic message to parents. Hey, parents, your kids will never be smarter than the machine that I'm building that we want no guardrails around whatsoever. And by the way, bulldoze that hospital nearby because we're putting in a data center. Just can we unpack this comment for one second? Let's first begin by stipulating that Sam Altman is a very bad spokesperson.

42:21He's probably bad. He's maybe bad in many ways, but he's not a good spokesperson for his industry. Like, what is the point he's making that your gigantic supercomputer, in which you much build data centers on every corner to power, is smarter than an eight-year-old? Of course it is. You know what's smarter than an eight-year-old? The computers we had last year or two years ago. No, I think he's saying your kids will never, no matter, grown into adults, they'll never be. Of course they're not. That's the point of computers. Look. Look at this forklift we built. It's stronger than any man. That's the whole fucking point of having the forklift.

42:54Look at these cars that are faster than any human can run. Yes, that's it. Like, that doesn't even make any sense. Well, no, but this raises a good point about Bernie's bill as well, right? Because what Bernie and Kassar put out is, so ban artificial superintelligence. This is also known as ASI, right? You might also hear AGI, that's artificial general intelligence, which is AI that matches human level reasoning. Now, right now, the people that build the AI, the hyperscalers, whatever the fuck they are, Sam Altman, all the rest of them, they don't think that we have quite reached AGI yet. But maybe we're about to have reached AGI.

43:33I have an announcement. Have we already done it? Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAge. Oh, because they do Astra. He announced it today. Yeah, they have Astra. So they think. Well, they think. But this is the problem is that no one knows – none of these people know exactly. Like there's no, oh, we have definitely reached AGI because no one can define exactly what human level of reasoning and intelligence is. Like it's sort of a – I guess it's just sort of a vibe. Same thing with artificial superintelligence, which is they say we haven't reached yet, but you clearly say that we've reached with the forklift a long time ago.

44:04Just saying that we can make things that are stronger and smarter than people. We have been doing that for a long time. Just basic computers. I think what Bernie's getting at is like some of these AI leaders and the people that are in these companies like Sam Altman have already and Elon Musk have already said like, oh, sometimes we may not be able to control these machines at some point. And Bernie's point is if you can't control the machines, then why are you building the fucking machines if they're beyond human control? Which is a good question. That's a great question. It's a good question.

44:31I don't know that the ban actually works or how it works or that it has like it seems like more of a like he's planting a flag in the ground than an actual plan here. But it does raise the point that, again, that people like Sam Altman are like, well, you know, the kids aren't going to be ever as smart as AI. and Greg Brockman saying, oh, we've hit artificial general intelligence and ooh, the hugging face disaster where a bunch of AI agents got out of the sandbox and found the internet and suddenly, you know, took over everything and tried to hide from humans and it's like, and then they all look at this and like, well, this is bad.

45:07This is bad. Five alarms. Everyone should be really worried about this. But anyway, we're going to go back to work. We're going to keep building this because China, we don't want China to have it. If China develops the technology to, you know, render humanity extinct. We got to get that too. We got to get that too. I tweeted basically after some of the data center stuff a few weeks ago, I tweeted that the, from a, like, just from a pure step back communications messaging perspective, the people who do politics and policy and communications at the AI companies have done an absolutely miserable fucking job.

45:43And one of the points is that these people go out all the time and they proudly and callously tout, as Sam Altman always does, the cataclysmic consequences of the product. And I heard from a lot of people who – like both publicly and then privately who work in the industry or around the industry who say, no, no. A lot of people who work in AI are really concerned about this. They're genuinely concerned about it. And they feel obligated to express that concern. And I actually do believe a lot of people who work in the industry are concerned. I think that's a lot of what drives – it's like OpenAI exists because everyone thought Google was too dangerous and then Anthropic exists because the people at Anthropic thought it was too dangerous and I can't wait to find out what the next thing is.

46:26But the problem is you're saying how dangerous your product is. On one hand, on the other hand, you're pushing rapidly for an IPO as fast as possible in order to get liquidity to your investors. Yep. And so it's just there is this like one day we're going to destroy the world. The other day we're going to buy the world with the money we make from destroying the world. Well, and you're also calling Donald Trump like Mark Zuckerberg or I guess Trump called him and saying, but I don't want a regulator. I don't want a regulator. And, you know, Sam Altman's like, well, you know, it's voluntary. We want these voluntary standards.

46:59But of course, we're abiding by them because we want to work with the government on this because we're, you know, we're nice guys. But like they don't really want the regulation. the way they fight the regulation is by saying we have to win this race or else china's going to win and then they go out and say oh yeah but this is really dangerous but also still no regulation thank you we'll take care of it it really is telling everyone we'll take care of it we're going to build the data centers whether you like it or not and uh and fuck off which is why i'm you and i saw some some private polling that data centers are down to like 20 approval yeah it's a true bipartisan issue.

47:33And I've almost never seen an issue reach this level of intensity this quickly. People would rather have a nuclear power plant or a prison or a methadone clinic. They were all more favorable being built in your community than a fucking AI data center. And when they tested it with, oh, and the company building the data center will provide the power and will make sure that they bear all the costs and the people in the community do not, people don't buy it. It goes up a couple percent, but people just don't trust the AI companies on this, even when you do it ostensibly the right way and make sure that the AI companies bear all the costs and that people in these communities are held harmless.

48:21They just don't trust that that's going to happen. They don't trust big tech. Why would they? Yeah, it's a fair point. So I think this I mean, you know, I do hope obviously there's a smorgasbord of things for Democrats to run on in the midterms. But I think and hope this will be one of the big issues. And then certainly this will be a big issue in 2028. And I think in 2028, the challenge is going to be staking out positions on this that are responsive to the populist furor out there while also being like realistic and responsible. Right. Because like and I don't say that to be like, oh, we need to find a middle ground.

49:01But these people are developing the technology. Much of it is already here. So the question is, like, how do we put the we actually do need to get guardrails around them. So we just do need to pass something. That's right. Okay. One last thing before we get to Tommy's interview with Jasper Nathaniel. A little news about someone, you know, Jasper's an actual journalist. This is about someone who plays a journalist on TV. Maria Bartiromo is out at Fox News. So Fox, this happened this morning, Thursday morning. Fox released a rather vague statement about why that just said, we thank Maria for her work over the last 12 and a half years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.

49:39But Oliver Darcy at Status News has the scoop on Thursday afternoon. It says, after Trump delivered his unhinged primetime speech in which he pushed more conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Remember that? Remember the China thing? I am told, this is Oliver writing this, I am told that Fox News issued guidance to senior employees instructing them to steer clear of giving credence to Trump's delusional claims. I'm told that the guidance was issued in writing, but ultimately Bartiromo spilled the secret, statuses learned, divulging to the White House that Trump's speech had received scant coverage on the channel because network bosses had ordered it so.

50:18I'm even told the text message in which Fox News brass offered their guidance was shared by Bartiromo with the White House. In doing so, Bartiromo not only effectively betrayed her employer, but also disclosed confidential company information, violating the terms of her employment agreement. What do you think about that? Well, it's more interesting, I guess, than what we all thought when her resignation or firing was announced. We thought she was being the White House press secretary. And I believe she was on your list. That would have been pretty interesting, I think. Was she on your list of potential?

50:46So I think she was too, but I had knocked a few people off the list, so I couldn't remember. But if you remember that she was on my list. I remember that because you said that earlier today. That's why. Oh, maybe that's something now. At one point, she was on my list. Yeah. And she still could. She still could become press secretary. It's not ruled out. My number one choice, Rachel Campos Duffy, has been really out on a media tour recently auditioning for this task. Yeah, in all the – maybe in all the wrong ways. I wouldn't say she's doing a great job. All the wrong ways for you if you were hiring the White House press secretary.

51:15Yeah, that's pretty wild. It is funny that – I mean it's Maria Bartiromo, whatever, but sort of the internal drama at Fox where like the president gives this speech about China interfering in the election. Everyone thinks it's bullshit. It was sort of weird on Fox not to hear it. And sure enough, it was because I guess defamation lawsuits work. If you lose three quarters of a billion dollars for putting a bunch of crazy shit on your TV, you might learn a lesson from it. And they certainly did. And then went so far as to fire her for fucking snitching on them to Donald Trump. And she is a huge election denier.

51:49Like she is huge. Prior to the Dominion thing, she was like deep into this. I mean, as most financial journalists would be. Man, she has had a journey. Once upon a time, she was like a fairly normal journalist. Yes, she was very, very popular CNBC anchor. Can't wait to see where she ends up next. All right, up next, Tommy's interview with independent journalist Jasper Nathaniel.

52:20Pods of America is brought to you by Stamps.com. We could all use a few more hours, even minutes in the day for ourselves. Don't I know it. Skip your trip to the post office and stop letting mailing steal your precious little time with Stamps.com. With Stamps.com, you can print postage and shipping labels from your computer or phone 24-7 with up to 90 % off UPS, USPS, FedEx, and more. No lines, no trips, no waiting. Get everything done in minutes and even schedule free pickups so carriers come right to you. Whether you're sending letters, contracts, important legal documents, packages, ballots that you just made yourself.

52:53Those famous homemade ballots with a human touch. Stamps.com makes mailing simple for businesses of all sizes, including multi-location offices. You can even send certified mail with proof of delivery right from your desk. I mean, we love stamps.com. We've been using it since 2017 when Crooked started. And we were like, we don't have time to go to the post office. We're trying to build a business here. Yeah, we're trying to do commerce. And so we use stamps.com and boy, is it great. Trying to harness the promise of one of the greatest forces for good in the history of the world, capitalism. Oh, yeah.

53:26If mailing is taking more time and more money than it should, try Stamps.com free for four weeks and get a welcome kit. Go to Stamps.com slash PSA to get this offer today. That's S-T-A-M-P-S dot com slash PSA. Stamps.com slash PSA. Taxes and fees apply. Hey, it's John. Last year, 2 ,500 people joined us at Crooked Con for conversations with some of the smartest organizers, least annoying politicians, and most interesting voices in politics about how to fix this mess. We're doing it again November 5th through the 7th in Washington, D.C. With even more podcast panels and workshops. Plus, there will be drinks, which we'll need after the midterms, no matter which way they go.

54:06Get your tickets at CrookedCon.com, where we'll also announce the lineup. If you're a Friends of the Pod subscriber, a limited number of discounted tickets are still available. Get them before they run out. See you at CricketCon.

54:22My guest today is an independent journalist focused on stories from inside the occupied West Bank. Jasper Nathaniel, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Great to see you. We've talked. We've Zoomed. I've never met you in person. It's great to have you in LA. Yeah, thanks for having me here. If you guys want to find Jasper's work, first of all, you can go to Substack and search for Infinite Jazz or go to infinitejazz1z.com. He's totally self-funded. He's an independent journalist. So if you sign up for a paid subscription, we're sending you back to the West Bank, it sounds like. That's right.

54:53Thank you. But other Potsdam America folks get on board. So I wanted to have this conversation with you today because we've talked a lot about Gaza on this show. I don't think we've talked about the West Bank much ever. And for a variety of reasons that we'll get into, I think the West Bank could have bigger political implications and could be an even more fundamental part of the 2028 Democratic primary in particular. For listeners who want some context or unfamiliar with the issue or the area, the West Bank is a little piece of territory. They've got Jordan to their east, Israel, everywhere else.

55:26It's home to about 3 million Palestinians, nearly 700 ,000 Israeli settlers. And so when you hear people talk about a two-state solution and the creation of a Palestinian state, The majority of the territory for that state was supposed to be the West Bank. But for decades now, the West Bank has been carved up and stolen by Israeli settlers. And so when politicians say to you, I support a two-state solution, I think the next question has to be, okay, where's the territory? Where's the state you're talking about? Where we draw on those borders. And so we'll get into all that in a minute. But first, let's just do the basics.

56:00So Jasper, can you explain to listeners like what is the Israeli settler movement and how has it changed since the October 7th attacks in 2023? Okay. So just to take an even bigger step back, I mean, Israel, when then it's 1948 borders, which are the borders that are recognized by – under international law, expanded in 1967 after the Six-Day War was fought. So basically Israel took Gaza from Egypt. They took the West Bank from Jordan and they took a couple other territories. And the West Bank became under international law an occupied territory. And that's not just a like euphemism or a phrase.

56:46So that actually has legal implications that Israel is ostensibly supposed to adhere to based on the Hague Convention and the Geneva Convention. And what those laws amount to is that this is a temporary occupation. Israel is temporarily administering the territory as it works out a security situation. With its military. With its military. It's a military occupation. Exactly. And so what that means is that the Israeli government is not allowed to govern the West Bank. It has to actually, again, by international law, be governed by the Israeli military. And the other thing that it means is that Israel cannot do anything to put down permanent roots in the West Bank because it has to be temporary.

57:27And so when you hear people say the settlement project is fundamentally illegal, it's because the settlement project is about settling, putting down roots in the West Bank, and the entire project is illegal. Right. So the settlement movement starts right after 1967 basically. And the sort of religious tenets of it are that the West Bank is – you've probably heard the settlers or Mike Huckabee or maybe John Fetterman, I'm not sure, called Judea and Samaria. What that refers to is the ancient kingdoms of Israel. So Samaria was a kingdom in the north. Judea was a kingdom in the south. And if you talk to a settler or even Nanyahu, I think, what they will say is Judea and Samaria has more biblical significance to Jews than any other part of either Israel, certainly Gaza, which has virtually no biblical significance to Jews.

58:24And so the reason I give that background is because there is a faction of people in Israel or of Jews around the world actually who care about this territory much more than they care about anything else. And a thing that you hear a lot from settlers is they'll say, if Israel has the right to claim the land within its 1948 borders based on the Jewish people's connection to the land, well, we have a much stronger connection here. The connection in Samaria is much stronger than it is in Tel Aviv. So why don't we get to claim this? And so the settlement movement basically is acting on that. And they are trying to build what they call facts on the ground, which is Jewish settlements across the West Bank to turn it into part of Israel, basically.

59:06And since the October 7th attacks, my understanding is that settler activity and violence has just ratcheted up and up and up, right? Yes. Although, I mean, this violence actually started before October 7th, as in like this big escalation. So at the end of 2022, there was this election in Israel and then Yahoo forms this government with these far right factions that had been considered out of bounds even in Israeli politics, which is really far right. So you had guys like Itamar Ben-Gavir in the Jewish Power Party and Bezalel Smotrich in the Religious Zionism Party. Both of them are settlers themselves.

59:40They take ministerial positions immediately. And Smotrich, who is a completely messianic settler who has been open about saying that his life's goal is to create Jewish sovereignty across Judea and Samaria and to bury a Palestinian state. What he does is he pulls up this sort of incredible sleight of hand where he installs himself inside the defense ministry. He just makes up a title, Additional Minister in the Ministry of Defense. And what he does is he clears out all of these career bureaucrats inside of the defense ministry who had managed the bureaucracy of the occupation. And he installs all of these settler ideologues.

1:00:20So it should be familiar to people who have followed what Doge did or what RFK has done at Health and Human Services. Like you clear out all the people who had done the basic – put up the basic red tape that at least made it a little difficult to build a settlement. And he puts in all these people who are just rubber stamping every new request to build a new settlement or to authorize an outpost or to call in stateland or something like that. And simultaneously, Ben Gavir, who becomes a national security minister, directs the police to stop enforcing certain criminal laws against settlers. They remove what's called administrative detention against settlers.

1:00:57And they basically just give the settlers permission to run wild. And then the sort of last part of this is that the Israeli government and the IDF and the settlement movement begin working together like never before. And the settler attacks on Palestinian villages, and we can probably get into this more later, but they're not random. I mean, they are attacking villages that are in strategic spots that Israel wants to take over to cut off territorial continuity for Palestinians or to create a new road that connects two settlements. And so basically what I'm getting at is like the violence has spun out of control, but it's not chaos.

1:01:37This is very much part of the central state project in the West Bank, which is to create Jewish sovereignty across the whole territory. And just according to the UN, the number of settler attacks has increased every year since the October 7th attacks in 2023. 2026 is on pace to have more than 2 ,000 violent settler attacks in the West Bank alone. But despite that frequency and volume of violence, very few of these stories get reported in Western media or breakthrough. One incident that did break through in Western media in a big way was one, an incident you documented back in October of 2025. We're going to watch that footage and then I want you to describe what's happening.

1:02:51So for folks listening and not watching, that was footage of this mass settler brutally beating an old woman and then a group of activists. And then we see footage from far away of you literally sprinting down a hill away from a mob. So what happened there? So this is in a village called Termasaya in the West Bank, which is just east of Ramallah. And it's actually one of these villages that is made up of largely American citizens. And so it was the olive harvest, which has for a long time been one of the most violent times of year for Palestinians because it's when settlers know exactly where they can find Palestinians away from their homes and they can attack.

1:03:27them while they're doing this thing that's very important to them. And so I went out with a group of farmers in Termasaya into their olive fields, which recently settlers had built a new outpost there. Now, what an outpost is, is it is an Israeli settlement that does not even have Israel's approval yet. So it's basically a bunch of settlers have peeled off from an authorized settlement, planted a flag somewhere and said, we live here now. And so - They just set up a camp, literally? Yes. Literally, they set up a couple tents and a shipping container and they start living there. And by the way, they know the guy who started the settlement.

1:04:03His name is Amishav Mallet. He's a real person with a real name and a criminal history, frankly. Everybody knows who he is. So we go into the olive fields. Immediately, we see this guy, Mallet, points a gun at us, threatens us, tells us to get out of the olive fields. We find another way in. And to make a long story short, we got trapped in these olive fields by settlers who had guns and were threatening us. And this is Palestinian land. And a lot of it is privately owned by American citizens, actually, for whatever that's worth. I run into a group of IDF soldiers and basically plead with them to help give us safe passage out of the olive fields.

1:04:39They agree. And then they lead us to come follow them. And then right as we reach – me and a Palestinian farmer, we reach where the Israeli soldiers are. They speed away. And that's when that mob of settlers appears and chased me through the olive fields. Then I documented the clip of that woman, Umsava, being clubbed almost to death by a settler. All in all in that attack, I want to say five people were hospitalized. Homes were torched. And – How old is the woman in that clip? She's – I believe she's in her 60s and she's a grandmother and she was out there picking olives. But I think what's like really instructive about this incident actually is that it was one of the few settler attacks that on some level sort of broke through.

1:05:29It was covered in – I mean it was a huge story in Israel proper and it was covered in the mainstream Western media to a certain extent. And I think it's because there's no way to spin a video of a masked settler clubbing an old woman. And so it actually created a PR crisis for Israel. Yeah. And so what they did was they went out and they made an extraordinarily rare arrest of the guy who clubbed her. Now, the reason I bring this up is because I actually – the Israeli authorities reached out to me about this because it was my footage. And I basically, you know, what I said to them is, you know, as well as I do that the guy you arrested is a foot soldier.

1:06:12This is a nobody. We know where he came from. He came from the outpost, which is in the middle of the Termasaya olive fields. You know where it is. You know the guy who's leading it. If you want to end the terror in this community, you have to dismantle that outpost. And these guys told me on the phone, just watch. That's what we're going to do. Fast forward to my visit in June. I went back to Termasaya. what had been a couple of shipping containers is now eight shipping containers. What had been maybe one family living there is now maybe a dozen families living there. Amishav Melod is still patrolling the olive fields with his gun.

1:06:44The IDF is there hanging out with them, praying, smoking cigarettes, breaking bread. And the people of Termasai just now can't even consider trying to get to their land. And so again, it's like, I bring this up because the way settler violence is sometimes covered to the extent it's ever covered in the Western media, it looks like a couple of sort of feral, misguided youth. And that's certainly how like Nanyad describes them. Bad apples are randomly attacking a village. But the Amishav Melet is a well-connected guy. He is working with high-ranking members of the IDF and in the Knesset, in the Israeli government, to build this outpost here and push the Palestinians off their land to expand the Shiloh settlement, actually.

1:07:32And so every place where you're seeing settlers attacking Palestinians is a place where the powers that be in the Israeli government and the military and the settler movement have decided not just we want to go, you know, launch a pogrom against these people, but this is a strategic point for us to take in our effort to bury the idea of a Palestinian state. And so that is why the violence is so widespread right now. It's because it's calculated and it's methodical and it's being designed at the highest levels of the Israeli government. I want to get you – ask you more about those connections to the government in a second.

1:08:06But I mean, look, you're an American. You're a journalist. In the longer version of that video, you're yelling press, American press. One would assume that would afford you some protection from the settlers, not because they love Americans, but because they know that beating up an American is going to lead to blowback and a call from the embassy to the Israeli government. And that could maybe lead to consequences, whereas beating up a Palestinian is almost never going to lead to consequences. But just a couple of days ago, a crew from NBC News was interviewing a Palestinian woman. A car full of settlers drives up.

1:08:38They jump out. They beat the shit out of all of them with clubs and then speed away. Did that surprise you? Does that reflect a new level of impunity? No, that didn't surprise me at all. You know, these attacks are completely ubiquitous in the West Bank. The only unusual thing that happened there was that a mainstream outlet went to one of these villages that is seeing a lot of violence. And they ran into the settlers who lived there and they got attacked. I mean, that's what happens. It's the same reason why Congressman Ro Khanna had his bus hijacked when he was driving through the South Teebron Hills.

1:09:11These people came out and said, oh, it's a hoax. You know, it was a setup. What a coincidence. Like, no, go drive through the South Teebron Hills. That place is run by the violent settlers and the military that supports them. So this is just what happens there. And as a journalist, I mean, like you said, I certainly am much more protected at every level than my Palestinian friends and my Palestinian colleagues, journalists. But I've been going to the West Bank for years now. And each time I go, the settlers seem less and less inhibited in physically attacking me. and I'm visibly not Palestinian and I'm usually speaking and they know I'm American and they just have no hesitation whatsoever in attacking me.

1:09:53And yes, it's because they know in all likelihood they will be celebrated and rewarded for this. And I'm not exaggerating, by the way, and this is covered in the Israeli press. So there's nothing conspiratorial about this. The settlers who are committing the violence are considered the tip of the spear for the central Israeli state project of ethnically cleansing the land from the river to the sea. And so they know that somebody like me who's there to report on what they're doing, I'm an enemy of the state. They consider me an enemy of the state. And the people attacking me know that maybe if push comes to shove, Huckabee will have to condemn them or so-and-so will condemn them.

1:10:30But there's almost no chance that they're actually going to go to jail or do any real jail time. And if anything, it's going to elevate their status in the movement. Yeah. Before I ask you about the government ties. Is there any sort of data about Palestinian attacks on Jews in the West Bank? Because that's sort of the whataboutism you always hear, like, what about violence or terrorism against Jewish communities in the West Bank in particular? Well, strictly from a numbers perspective, since October 7, 2023, the ratio of Palestinians who have been killed by Israelis to Israelis who have been killed by Palestinians is about 30 to one.

1:11:05So there's no comparison from a numbers perspective. I will also tell you that the communities in the West Bank that are most under attack, that are seeing the most violence, are the most defenseless ones. These are shepherding villages where there's no history of armed resistance, where there's barely even any infrastructure, let alone weapons, and they're being attacked because they are the easiest targets and the easiest ones to chase off the land. So anybody who claims that settler violence is a response to Palestinian violence, Well, if that was the case, you would expect to see the settler violence going after places that do have some history of armed resistance, which exists in the West Bank.

1:11:41But that's not where it's happening. It's happening mostly in these completely defenseless Bedouin villages. But the last thing I just want to say about this is the numbers about the violence and the murder obviously tell a story. But the violence against Palestinians in the West Bank goes so much deeper than that. I mean, these villages that we're talking about that are under attack, it's difficult to describe what the feeling of just pervasive terror in the air is like in these places. You can't go to sleep there because every single night settlers are coming in their ATVs. They're flying drones.

1:12:17They're firing guns. They're putting floodlights into homes. They're beating the crap out of people. Sometimes they're killing people. They're burning down homes. They're burning homes with people still in them. young men in these villages who were students or farmers or mechanics are now forced to be the sort of de facto security in these places. They don't have any weapons though. If they dare to throw a rock at a Palestinian, they might be killed by an Israeli soldier who's invading the village with the settlers and then called a terrorist for throwing a stone. And so like the terror just goes, the violence and terror and just suffocation of all life goes so deep that any question about who's doing the violence under whom, I mean, you can just go to those numbers, but also you have to look at who is suffocating the life out of whom in the West Bank.

1:13:05Just like day-to-day cruelty, violence all day.

1:13:17Pots of America is brought to you by Sundays. When it comes to pet food, companies have a lot of cost-cutting measures and filler ingredients at their disposal, but Sundays made a deliberate choice. Real human-grade meat. No fillers, no synthetic vitamin premixes, nothing you can't pronounce. A vet developed it because she wanted food she could actually stand behind. Sundays for Dogs recipes contains over 80 % all-natural meat, roughly twice the meat content of some leading frozen brands, plus nutrient-rich ingredients like kale, ginger, blueberries, gently air-dried rather than exposed to high heat.

1:13:45No fillers, no synthetic additives, no chemicals, just simple, complete nutrition. It doesn't look or smell like dog food. It looks like high quality jerky and it's a vet founded and vet formulated created by Dr. Tori Waxman to meet her high standards as both a veterinarian and a dog parent. And the best part, it's effortless. No fridge, no freezer, no prep, no mess. Just scoop and serve. You get the quality of a home cooked meal with the ease of kibble. Over a hundred thousand dogs are now eating Sundays and many dog parents are noticing the same things. Shinier coats, better digestion, more energy, and finally getting excited at mealtime.

1:14:15Even the pickiest eaters. Plus it applies to their dogs as well. Share your dog's experience with the food. Loves it. More energy? Not this dog. I mean, she's barking more, but I don't think that's a food problem. No, I don't think that's. I don't think... I mean, you know, Leo's barking more, and when he eats his Sundays for dogs, then he's not barking. Is Leo actually barking more lately? Yeah. Pundit is too. They're aging because our dogs are siblings, by coincidence, which is another story, but genuinely a coincidence, but regardless... Not in the office. It's very specific. It's at home. Like when I walk in every night, he is just barking nonstop and I try to give him a treat and I try to pet him and he just keeps barking.

1:14:54He has to like take some time to settle down. Yeah, they're getting old. They're getting ornery, you know? Yeah. But man, they love the dog food. They do. They sure do. Make the switch to Sundays. Go right now to sundaysfordogs.com slash crooked and get 50 % off your first order or you can use code crooked at checkout. That's 50 % off your first order at sundaysfordogs.com slash crooked, sundaysfordogs.com slash crooked or use code crooked at checkout. Hey, it's John. Last year, 2 ,500 people joined us at Crooked Con for conversations with some of the smartest organizers, least annoying politicians, and most interesting voices in politics about how to fix this mess.

1:15:26We're doing it again November 5th through the 7th in Washington, D.C. with even more podcast panels and workshops. Plus, there will be drinks, which we'll need after the midterms, no matter which way they go. Get your tickets at CrookedCon.com, where we'll also announce the lineup. If you're a Friends of the Pod subscriber, a limited number of discounted tickets are still available. Get them before they run out. See you at CricketCon.

1:15:55So like we were just saying, you know, when these stories do break through, when Israeli officials are forced to respond, it's some version of, you know, a couple bad apples. Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, to his credit, I think he called some of these recent Israeli settlers terrorists, which they are. But he also kind of does the few bad apples shit. Like you said, though, anyone actually paying attention knows that the Israeli government is complicit in and supportive of these settlers. You've described them as the tip of the sphere for the state-backed annexation process. Can you tell us more about how the government is backing these attackers and sort of what the endgame is?

1:16:34Sure. For starters, Bezal Smotrich, who I mentioned before, he is essentially running the military occupation right now, which is in charge of things like construction tenders and zoning permits and transportation and checkpoints and whatnot. So he's already controlling life in the West Bank. He is also the finance minister and they are diverting a disproportionate amount of tax revenue and funds into not just the settlements but the illegal outposts. And so every dollar that goes into the Israeli government through taxes or aid or whatever it is, a disproportionate amount of that is going directly to building out roads that connect illegal outposts to one another.

1:17:18It's giving them guns. And by the way, obviously, U.S. taxpayer dollars are paying for this stuff too, for bulldozers. And so the Israeli government is supporting the settler movement on a very material level. But I think, again, it goes to like – there was in fact a time not that long ago when there was some sort of – there was a little bit of real estate between the settlement movement and the government and the IDF. I mean, there were certainly like alliances across them and there was a lot – there was political and ideological overlap. But a lot of the time, the IDF and the settlers were fighting with each other because the IDF was ostensibly trying to maintain security with an iron.

1:18:00Police them, shut down their settlements. Exactly. We'll shut down the illegal outposts at least because they saw those settlers as troublemakers. Today in the West Bank, the head of the Central Command, which is basically the commander of the IDF in the West Bank, he's a settler himself. He appointed a guy, and again, what I'm saying now, this was first reported in the Israeli press. He appointed someone whose full-time job is to go to these illegal outposts to meet with the settler leaders there and discuss with them what their needs are in terms of funding, in terms of infrastructure, in terms of weapons, but also to pull out maps and talk about what are the places where they want to expand to.

1:18:36And what that means is these are the places that we're going to launch attacks. And then they launched these attacks. Over 60 Palestinian communities have actually been fully ethnically cleansed, chased off of their land since October 7th. Sometimes it makes a little bit of news. Usually it doesn't. But then what happens when nobody's paying attention anymore is the Israeli government retroactively legalizes that outpost and it becomes a settlement. And so what that means is that the violent settlers, when I say they're the tip of the spear, they are quite literally the ones clearing the land.

1:19:10Maybe occasionally they'll be condemned for PR purposes. But then when nobody's paying attention anymore, that now became a new settlement or a neighborhood of an existing settlement or something. So it is quite literally all part of the same project. And you're talking about Smotrich. There's another guy, Itzmar Ben-Gabir, who just to be clear is part of the Israeli government. Bibi Netanyahu did not win the last election outright. It's a parliamentary system, so we had to build a coalition of other parties to get enough votes in the Knesset to rule. Ben Gavir is the national security minister.

1:19:43It's hard to, like, describe how extreme he is without sounding hyperbolic. Like, he used to have a photo on his wall of a guy named Baruch Goldstein, who is a terrorist who I think he machine gunned something like 29 Palestinians. A Brooklyn Jew, by the way. Who are praying. Like me. Yeah. He recently posted an AI video that we're going to show for you guys of himself sending Palestinians on train tracks into a prison. They go in fat. They come out crying and skinny. I think it's deliberately designed to look like a concentration camp. Absolutely. Let's watch that.

1:20:45So it's pretty sickening stuff. Israel's election is coming up in October. Everyone would like to see Netanyahu lose. We would like to see this current coalition blown up so that people like Ben-Gavir are no longer in power. However, the person most likely to replace Netanyahu is a guy named Gadi Eisenkot. A lot of Israel supporters in the US who are mad about, who are supporters of Israel, but are mad about what happened in Gaza, for example, talk about getting rid of Netanyahu like it's a panacea, but the alternatives aren't great when it comes to the West Bank, right? Can you talk a little bit about that?

1:21:22Yeah. I mean, the main opposition candidate is a guy named Gadi Eisenkot, who he is considered by some to be the sort of centrist, liberal savior of Israel. In fairness to him, he is less openly extreme than Netanyahu or Ben Gavir or Smotrich. But I guess I'll just give two quick, a couple of quick anecdotes about him. The first one, Eisenkot developed the doctrine that the IDF uses, which basically states that if you apply disproportionate force to civilian infrastructure in enemy territories, then you will pressure the civilians there to pressure their government. That is why all of Gaza's civilian infrastructure was destroyed.

1:22:08I mean, it is because of that doctrine basically. And so this is the guy who created that. The second thing I want to say about him is that earlier this year, he visited one of the most infamously violent outposts in the West Bank to meet with the leaders there. in a clear signal that if the government changes hands, don't worry. Like you still got a man on the inside. There's no reason to visit a violent outpost, which again is illegal even under Israeli law. There's no reason to make that visit unless you are sending a clear political signal to them. And the third thing I'll say is he has had to come out time and time again and reiterate he is against the creation of a Palestinian state, against it.

1:22:49It will never happen under his watch, he says. And so, you know, like, again, I mean, I'm not going to pretend that there would be no difference between him and Netanyahu or like if they replace the defense minister or the national security minister or whatever. But the fundamentals are still there. I mean, there's still a project to ethnically cleanse the West Bank and to ethnically cleanse Gaza and parts of Lebanon and, you know, who knows where else between the river and the sea. And that's that is there's nothing in the existing Israeli political system that shows that that could change. I do also want to quickly go back to the Ben-Gabir thing real quick though.

1:23:27I mean, I think that video is instructive in some ways because first of all, it's an accurate representation of what's happening. I mean, besides like how they show Palestinians being like overweight going in, I suppose that's just ridiculous. But there is an actual policy of starving Palestinians in Israeli prisons, a literal policy. Ben Gavir, when he came into power, he instructed the prisons to cut down on the food rations, among many other things, to cut down on the number of beds they get. So many cells are overcrowded. There's policies of actual torture. The Israeli Supreme Court last year ruled that the Israeli prison system was not feeding their Palestinian prisoners enough to survive and instructed them to remedy that.

1:24:14And Ben Gavir just said, no thanks. So there is literally a policy of starvation. And there's over 10 ,000 Palestinian prisoners. Thousands of them are being held without charge. Many of them are children. And so, you know, including American children, including American children. The reason I bring this up is just because there is this tendency among, I think, liberal supporters of Israel to describe Ben Gavir as a sort of fringe figure. And what I always come back to is that that Nick Kristof story op-ed in The New York Times about what's happening in the Israeli prisons, about rape and sexual assault in Israeli prisons.

1:24:46And the same people that are willing to condemn Ben-Gavir and condemn videos like that called that blood libel, accused Kristoff of blood libel. And they acted completely incredulous that something like that could happen in an Israeli prison. And so it's kind of like what you said. This guy's in charge. Ben-Gavir runs the prison system. He runs the police force. He's in charge of law and order in Israel and the occupied territories. And so if you can see a video like that and condemn it, you really need to take that next step and say, with his power, what has he actually done? Besides what he's showing us right here in this video.

1:25:24And we give him rifles. There are videos of him handing out like M4s. That are being handed to settlers in the West Bank. They're being used to kill Americans among others. I'm sure the people who are listening to this who are frustrated and feel like this is like two liberals you know, coming down hard on Israel and they feel like there's maybe too much of this in the conversation. And I just want to point out that the New York Times recently featured, ran this piece that featured a bunch of top retired Israeli military officials who went to the West Bank and were just horrified by what they saw.

1:25:57The headline was these generals fought for Israel and now they see Jewish terrorism as the threat. A retired major general says, quote, what the settlers are doing here is the real threat to Israel. This is more concerning to me than Iran, Gaza, or Lebanon. Another says this is ethnic cleansing. To put it simply, a retired Air Force general says once a society behaves this way, that society is doomed. He even compared the efforts to Nazi-era efforts to erase the Jewish people. you know if you or I made those comments Jasper like the ADL well that is a direct for our heads but to those Israeli generals that is a direct violation of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism to compare Israel to Nazis and so I'm I'm waiting for Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL to come out and condemn these Israeli generals for for saying those things but no I mean listen there there is no other side of this story of what's happening in the West Bank there just simply isn't.

1:26:50Anybody who is still defending the settlement movement or the IDF there or just Israel's policy in the West Bank, you're just not looking at what's actually happening. When you have IDF generals and that article like lists their accomplishments of like the extreme violence is the phrase that they committed in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, in all these places. If those people are coming out and saying it, then I mean, it's just again, And it's like, as far as I'm concerned, yeah, there's just no argument anymore that this is not happening. And you're the most hawkish hawks. The most hawkish hawks.

1:27:26This worries me more than Iran. And I do want to say that, like, you know, the way this is being talked about among a lot of Israelis, including these guys, is that it's a threat to Israel. It's a huge PR issue for Israel, first of all. These videos, you know, of Palestinians being attacked by settlers, it looks bad for Israel. It's creating all this bad press. So they recognize that it's a problem for Israel. What you don't hear nearly enough of is talking about the principal issue here, which is the Palestinians who are being violently attacked and having their homes stolen and whatnot. And so I just I want to point that out.

1:27:57Yeah. And the hope for a Palestinian state. So, look, you know, you and I have talked on Pase of the World, my foreign policy show a couple of times. We've talked about your reporting on the show more often than that. But I wanted to have this conversation on this show, the more kind of domestic political show, because I think I hope that these issues are going to be a big part of the 2028 Democratic primary. And generally, I think we all should be talking about how what's happening is existential and a threat to any hope of a Palestinian state or a two state solution. I know you're a journalist.

1:28:28You're not like a policy white paper guy. But are there Democrats out there proposing ideas that you think are good or ideas that you wish they would propose or implement? I'm going to answer that question a little bit differently. There are Democrats who are saying some things that I think are positive. Chris Van Hollen being I think the sort of the lead one and are talking more openly about like what is happening in the West Bank and in Gaza and whatnot. And it's good to see a shift in that direction. I think that there is still a refusal to face the reality of what's happening because it is politically inconvenient.

1:29:12And let me give you like one specific example of that. It's very easy for a Democrat to come out and say Palestinians should have a right to live in dignity. It's very easy to condemn settler violence. There's nothing hard about that for a Democrat to do. it's much more difficult to say these Palestinians who are being attacked by armed settlers how are they going to defend themselves how are you when you are in a Palestinian community and you have settlers with machine guns and a military behind them coming into the village burning their homes killing their people attacking them how are they supposed to defend themselves And I think that the question about cutting off military aid to Israel, I think I'm glad that that has sort of been mainstreamed or at least like the Overton window has shifted on it.

1:30:05But the next question becomes how are the Palestinians supposed to defend themselves? And I would just like to hear that talked about by democratic politicians. I think the second thing is like I just – I can't bear to hear them talk about a two-state solution anymore. or if you're going to talk about a two-state solution, this is basically what I'm asking of democratic politicians. You are talking about creating a Palestinian state, creating enough territory in the West Bank for Palestinians to have an actual state. The Israeli government from the left to the right is against that. The Israeli military is directly fighting against that.

1:30:45The settlers are certainly against it. So at that point, if you're going to create a Palestinian state there, you're going to war with Israel. You are literally – you have to go to war with Israel to create a Palestinian state. And so if you are talking about a two-state solution, you have to also explain your plan for going to war with Israel to create that state. But in lieu of that, I think that they should be talking – to the extent they're talking about solutions at all, beyond things like a full arms embargo is a one-state solution. because what you have right now is a single state, an apartheid state.

1:31:18And all you got to do is say, all these people living under occupation are now citizens too. And then you can actually have a democracy. It won't be a Jewish state anymore, but it'll be a democracy and it'll have Jewish people and Muslims and Christians living there. But you cannot have both a... I mean, look, the reality is it is not... With the situation as it is today, where there is no possibility of creating an actual Palestinian state there. It can't be both the Jewish state and a democracy, right? I mean, it is a democracy when you give everybody the right to vote, and then it is no longer a majority Jewish state.

1:31:57And so that's a reality that politicians have to reckon with. And again, nobody is talking about killing all the Jews there or anything insane like that. We're talking about just giving equal rights to everybody who lives there. Well, yeah. I mean, I think what you're doing here is kind of popping bubbles and the fictions that are still a part – such a central part of the talking points, right? Like I think in reality, there is no way for innocent villagers to defend themselves against a well-armed settler movement and the idea. So the conversation sort of has to be what can the international community do to put structures in place to defend them, whether it's like the UN or something.

1:32:32But it also, Tommy, I mean, it's also like when people – when politicians talk about a Palestinian state, even the ostensibly pro-Palestine ones say, well, it will be a demilitarized state. Why? Why should the Palestinians be demilitarized when they are being literally killed every single day? I mean that like the double standard there is just – it's staggering. And I just think that like the way – I mean listen, a Palestinian with a gun is considered a terrorist to the mainstream media and to politicians. Like it doesn't matter how they got that gun. It doesn't matter what they're using it for, if it's for self-defense or whatever.

1:33:07They're just considered a terrorist. And that needs to change. I mean – and again, like I'm not prescribing solutions here. But I want to say if you can acknowledge that there are terrorists roaming the West Bank, Jewish terrorists roaming the West Bank, terrorizing communities, killing people, how do you propose those people protect themselves? And it's up to you how you want to talk about doing that. But I would like to see that reality acknowledged as opposed to politicians just saying the sort of like easy basic things about – We need two states living side by side. Yeah. And we don't – condemning the violent settlers and condemning Smotrich and Ben Gavir and blah, blah, blah.

1:33:44It's like – Yeah. It's a little bigger than that. Oh, for sure. I mean, I think we're both getting like moving past kind of the broken conversation of a decade ago. Those talking points were kind of not operative for a very long time, even before October 7th, frankly. And also, I think, you know, the reality of the idea that you would forcibly expel hundreds of thousands of settlers from the West Bank would lead to a massive military conflict. There would be all sorts of resistance from within the Israeli government. So it seems very unlikely to happen. So what's the next thing that we're talking about?

1:34:14I think it's kind of the point we're both getting at here. Last question for you. I mean, you are, you're Jewish. A lot of Jewish Americans, friends, family of mine grew up hearing a very different story about Israel than the one, you know, we've been telling for the last 40 minutes. How does it feel for you to go to the West Bank to witness his occupation and oppression? Like kind of what part of your own upbringing and religion do you kind of bring to this work? Well, I mean, first I want to say that it's not fair that because I'm Jewish, my voice, like it carries more weight to some people.

1:34:44I mean, everything that I'm reporting has been reported on by Palestinians for much longer than I've been doing it. And I just want to sort of establish that. Now, to your question, I mean, I'm 100 percent Jewish, despite what many people online like to say about me. What do they say? They just say you're a fake Jew, you're a capo, you're a Nazi, you're a traitor, you're a ham sandwich, blah, blah, blah. Elon Musk tweeting about genetic makeup. I did see that. Yeah. Nothing could go wrong there. Right. Yeah, talking about the Jews of genius. Yeah, that's always a good game to go into. So my – and I'm Jewish but also on my mom's side, my grandparents escaped the Holocaust.

1:35:26Most of my mom's mother's family was exterminated. My mom's dad came from – they escaped the Russian pogroms. On my dad's side, his parents lived in Iraq and Baghdad. They were Jews in Baghdad for generations. and they had to leave when there was a rise in anti-Semitism as well. So the point I'm making is just that like I grew up in a house that was Jewish and that had a very real sense of deadly anti-Semitism. As far as like how our Jewishness manifested, I think it was in two main ways. The first one was questioning and challenging everything and that includes the stories we heard about the Jewish state and some difficult questions about that.

1:36:12And it also taught me the expression that you hear more now, which is never again means never again for anyone. And at the end of the day, another way to say that is like valuing human life. And when I go to the West Bank, the reality is people know I'm Jewish. I mean I tell people and they just know at this point. And it is the Palestinians who are feeding me and taking me into their homes and protecting me. And it is Jewish settlers and soldiers who are trying to kill me. And it does sort of beg the question about what sort of Jewishness this is. You know, these Israelis who are trying to kill me are practicing.

1:36:54The last thing I want to say about this, though, is that I think that as a, you know, speaking as a Jewish American, again, who had a bar mitzvah, who has been Jewish my whole life, since people like to say you're an as a Jew, who still goes to synagogue, it is we are long overdue as Jewish Americans to have a reckoning with what our institutions and our organizations and our synagogues have facilitated and enabled. And on one level, that is just the sort of unwavering support that the institutions have given to Israel and the way they have defended Israel through a genocide, through ethnic cleansing, through all these things.

1:37:35But it actually goes beyond that. It goes to, I mean, frankly, material support for terror. And so what I'm talking about here is things like the Jewish National Fund, which is the organization that provides those little blue tin tzedakah boxes in synagogues where people put in their loose change. And then that money goes to Israel. It's in thousands of synagogues across the country. A lot of that money goes to bringing non-native invasive trees into Israel, which service basically, they're planting trees that are basically like serving as tinder for forest fires over there. That's neither here nor there.

1:38:10Another place that money has gone, this came out earlier this year, was that money was going directly to an organization that is training the hilltop youth, the most violent settlers in the West Bank, training them to be little foot soldiers, little child soldiers in the West Bank attacking Palestinians. This was reported in the times of Israel. So again, you are talking about thousands of synagogues across the country who are providing material support for terror against Palestinians. And I'm not suggesting that every, you know, like my Jewish family or every Jewish person knows this is happening on a material level.

1:38:46But I think it is past time for people to take a close look at not just what the Jewish institutions represent, but what they are actually supporting and ask yourself, is this what being Jewish is? Is this what it's supposed to be? Is this valuing human life? And I mean, frankly, it's upsetting. It's really upsetting. And the way I deal with it is by doing the work that I do and by talking about things like this. And I refuse to accept that the religion is irredeemable or anything. And I'm not suggesting anything like that, but this is what the institutions are supporting. And listen, Jonathan Grieblad of the ADL, he's called you an anti-Semite, right?

1:39:25Oh, yeah. Because I thought that Yahweh dragged us into the world. So it's just like it's so – these institutions, these Jewish institutions are so corrupt and broken and it goes so deep. Really encourage Jewish Americans to think more deeply about this and think about like what does it mean to you to be Jewish? What do you want to support? What do you want to represent? And yeah, I hope people ask those questions. Well, your reporting on what's happening in the West Bank has been invaluable to me. And I think it would be great if folks would check it out. Again, go to Substack. It's Infinite Jazz 1Z.

1:40:02Infinite Jazz. If you get a paid subscription, you can pay to fund Jasper's next trip to the West Bank. So thanks for coming in. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.

1:40:18Thanks to Jasper Nathaniel for coming on the show. Love It will be back on Sunday with a conversation with the host of Crooked's new podcast, Still Counting, which brings back the voices of 538 and will be out Wednesday evenings starting September 9th. Have a good weekend, everyone. Bye, everyone. Fucking stealing my lines here at the end. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Faris Safari with Ree Cherlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hefcoat, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, David Tolles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single.

1:40:47Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

1:40:54Hey, it's John. Last year, 2 ,500 people joined us at Crooked Con for conversations with some of the smartest organizers, least annoying politicians, and most interesting voices in politics about how to fix this mess. We're doing it again November 5th through the 7th in Washington, D.C. With even more podcast panels and workshops. Plus, there will be drinks, which we'll need after the midterms, no matter which way they go. Get your tickets at CrookedCon.com, where we'll also announce the lineup. If you're a Friends of the Pod subscriber, a limited number of discounted tickets are still available.

1:41:24Get them before they run out. See you at CricketCon.