977 - The Next Day feat. Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill

All I wanna make is hell jumble.

All I wanna make is ill jumble.

We need a problems and bracelets.

All I wanna make is ill

Hello, everybody.

It's Monday, October 13th, and this is your Chapo.

Real quick,

if you'll permit me some promo at the top of the show, I just would like to remind everyone: on October 28th, Hessa and I are doing a live stream of the classic horror film Reanimator.

So that's for your Halloween viewing pleasure.

Hessa and I will be live streaming Reanimator on October 28th.

Links will be in the show description.

Now, enough of that.

Let's start the program.

On today's show, Felix and I are once again joined from DropSight, Ryan Grimm and Jeremy Scahill.

The boys back in the house.

Ryan and Jeremy, welcome back.

How are you doing, gentlemen?

Great to be here.

Obviously, every time we get the DropSight boys on, it's going to be a fairly grim episode, not just in terms of the sort of double entendre of Ryan's name, but just the subject matter we're going to be covering.

Because we hate them.

Yeah.

Oh, I know the subject matter.

We all agree on something.

Before we get into the specifics of the ceasefire plan proposal, whether it really is a ceasefire, the situation in Gaza and the situation in the American media that continues to get better and better every day,

I figured we start with sort of from the lighter side of this weekend's news.

And that is President Donald Trump, he's really he's visiting Israel right now, and he addressed the Knesset.

and had some great comments where just as only Trump does, just says the things out loud that everyone else around him spends their lifeblood denying constantly.

But his recent comments, addressing Miriam Adelson, who is sitting in the Knesset as he addressed the Israeli parliament, says, he said, Miriam and Sheldon Adelson visited the White House more than anyone.

Stand up, Miriam.

Look at her.

She has $60 billion in her bank account, and she loves Israel very much.

And then, yeah, he went on to say they moved the

embassy for her to Jerusalem.

And he also said, I once asked Miriam if she loves America,

which does she love more, America or Israel?

And she didn't answer.

So that

might just be Israel.

So,

Ryan and Jeremy,

how is the international community receiving the wit and wisdom of Donald Trump?

And more importantly, how does the American media, how do you think they're going to metabolize his comments about Miriam Adelson and her $60 billion?

I mean, he's in a real mood for nagging both her and Netanyahu.

If you noticed,

J.D.

Vance went on the Sunday shows this weekend and

unprompted in his first answer to a question that had nothing to do with anything, he said, and by the way, did you see that Netanyahu got booed by a bunch of Israelis and President Trump was cheered by that same crowd?

And then he like...

pivots to say, and it's unfair that the American media only covered Netanyahu getting booed and didn't cover Trump getting cheered.

But Trump made that same point directly to Netanyahu, where he told him, like, baby, I'm more popular than you are in Israel.

It's like this kind of alpha thing that he likes to play, which also happens to be true, I think.

We can speak to why ever that is, but

he likes to lord it over him.

And he loves talking about how the Adelsons...

you know, spent more time at the White House than anybody else and that he gave them the Golan Heights

and they did it for money.

He just loves saying the quiet part out loud, right in the Knesset.

That's the thing about Trump for a lot of the pearl clutching about him.

And there are definitely some uniquely dangerous aspects to Trump and we shouldn't downplay those.

But in general,

I even saw Trump in this way in his first term to an extent, but it's really clear in this second time around that Trump is just like, he's the embodiment of

America saying the quiet part out loud and you know he's he is fully within in in terms of his actions he's fully within the scope of um you know of kind of american leadership uh you know over the decades but he just he's just really open about it and you have this added dose of the personal family corruption i mean it was on on a very serious level watching that scene in the knesset was like watching the inverse of like the nuremberg trials it would it would be like if it would be like if the if the nazis instead of like like going in front of like, instead of Herman Gohing and all those guys like sitting in the gallows, they were like having like a big celebration.

And then like, you know, Eisenhower comes over to like cheer them on.

That's what it felt like.

Because, and Trump is saying, you know, and Bibi, he used to call me and ask me for weapons.

And then, you know, we would just give him all the weapons.

And he did a great job of using the weapons.

And, you know, there's applause after applause.

It's sick.

Like when you actually split screen that with the utter destruction in Gaza and you're watching Palestinian captives who are being released in the exchange deal coming out in like wheelchairs.

And, you know, you're, you're, you're seeing that there are journalists still being murdered.

And Gaza City is, you know, a wasteland of rubble.

And we're, you know, Trump himself is acknowledging he's like, you know, 70,000 people have died.

That's a whole lot of retribution.

It's much higher than that.

And maybe we'll see when they send forensic teams in.

But on the one hand, you have all of these out-in-the-open war criminals celebrating each other.

You have Trump then, you know, getting Maryam Edelson to stand up and she gets a standing ovation.

And I mean, one of the funny things about it is Trump says, you know, oh, it's 60 billion in the bank.

And then

she clearly made some like motion.

And Trump's like, oh, no, she's saying it's more than that.

You know, so

he's saying all of that.

And then you had this extraordinary moment where Trump call with Israel Katz, the president of Israel and the speaker of the Knesset next to him.

He then says, give Bibi a pardon.

And then the camera pans to Bibi and Netanyahu is like, he's looking at Trump.

He's looking at Katz.

He's looking at Trump.

I mean, Trump is doing these things that happen behind the scenes, but he does it all right out in the open

in every possible way.

There was also this.

comment he made about Hamas on Air Force One that was to me really reflecting on the pressure.

Yeah, yeah, Ryan, could you talk about that?

Like someone, because someone referenced the fact that like post-this ceasefire deal, Hamas seems to be,

I don't know, like

how how would you say, like, I don't know,

cracking down.

Yeah, yeah, like on collaborators and like these, some of these gangs that have been stealing the aid under the cover of the Israeli military.

And they've like already killed a few people and they're, I don't know, administering law and order in Gaza again to a certain degree.

What were Trump's comments when asked about that?

Yeah, and I think it's because Trump, you know, he really lacks like any sentimentality or, you know, or moral core or and has just never has absorbed any of the kind of

mythologizing about the United States.

It bizarrely kind of allows him to see things more clearly than other American presidents.

The most famous example being him telling Bill O'Reilly or whoever it was, well, you know, we've killed a lot of people too, Bill.

And so when it comes to this, they asked him about, you know, Hamas.

And he's like, well, look, you know, it's a pretty dangerous place.

You know, we don't want crime to get out of hand.

And

we told them that it's okay, you know, that

they're going to need to restore order and you know he said i think it's gonna be fine you know we're we're we're good with it it's it's a very strange moment of like allowing actual agency and rationality to hamas yeah it reminds me of what he said um

after they um

you know the uh season 87th of you're gonna find out why why we don't have health care in yemen and they just gave up after like a few weeks and he said he said yeah and and sir a lot they're actually pretty tough

what can what can you do i mean it's it's why everyone who works for him i would call like a goy slave but he's more of like a goy servant like he gets a paycheck

he can he can kind of think for himself sometimes well um this is also like in the context there's this like gaza peace summit uh happening i mean like you know i mean nauseating to put it in those terms but trump also said it's a tremendous day for the middle east and it's just an honor to be a part of it.

We're going to be signing a document that's going to spell out a lot of rules and regulations, and it's really working out incredibly well.

So, like,

Jeremy Ryan, like,

what is the scope of some of these rules and regulations?

And I guess, like, the main question that I, and I think a lot of people have, is, like, what are the chances that this is an actual ceasefire deal?

Like, will Israel cease their fire once they've gotten their hostages back, as they just have, apparently?

I mean, I think we have to see this in the context of

Israel's 77-year project.

I don't think that

Netanyahu necessarily wanted this path that Trump pushed on him.

And

I think we have to operate with some nuance here.

If we're talking about this particular deal, I do think that there was a division between Trump and Netanyahu.

I don't think Netanyahu necessarily wanted this exact deal.

I think Trump was right in what he told Netanyahu, which is basically, I'm saving you, because the fact was that Netanyahu was utterly failing to achieve their stated objectives in Gaza.

I mean,

they were unable to defeat

an insurgency of guys armed with homemade weapons, with repurposed Israeli ordnance, who are wearing like Adidas flip-flops.

and have like a remarkable bravery compared to the Israeli soldiers who wear diapers.

These guys are walking up and they're literally dropping homemade explosive devices into their tanks at point-blank range.

They weren't going to get their captives back militarily.

It just wasn't happening.

So there's a way in which I think Trump was right that he saved Netanyahu.

Trump keeps saying, oh, now everybody loves Israel, which of course is a complete fraud and a lie.

But I do think that he saved him from his own agenda in this short term.

In the bigger picture, though,

I would view this as Israel accepting a kind of strategic repositioning.

The war of annihilation, that's not off the table.

And you don't have to read too deeply between the lines to hear it from Israeli officials.

So, you know, I think that Israel will keep the ceasefire for some period in the way Israel always does, which means they're going to continue to bomb, they're going to continue to strike, they'll continue to violate it.

But the massive air campaign,

I think, is going to come largely to a halt.

And part of it is just because of the configuration or the constellation of parties that Trump has involved with this thing.

Where the rubber is going to hit the road on this is, is there really going to be an international force deployed?

You know, are you going to have Arab and Islamic countries sending in an international armed force?

Cece of Egypt, who Trump was praising today for being awesome at cracking down on crime in Egypt,

CC is saying, you know, we want some Americans also on the ground there.

There are going to be 200 Americans that are going to play some kind of a role, but they're not supposed to be inside of Gaza.

But the point I'm getting at here is: if you read the 20-point plan,

on the one hand, they say, oh, we're going to have a technocratic committee of Palestinians that are going to be governing the Gaza Strip, and Hamas is not going to be allowed to participate in that.

On the other hand, this so-called board of peace

is going to be in charge of that board of Palestinians.

But then on a technical level, what they're saying is the Israeli forces don't have to withdraw beyond this minimal repositioning they did for the exchange of captives until an international force comes in and until there is a certified demilitarization of uh they you know they're talking about Hamas but they mean of all Palestinian resistance that's going to be a huge battle you know going forward and so part of what like you know in the cuck festival that Trump sponsored in Sharm el-Sheikh where he got all of these guys to come up and you know they're they're kissing the ring of Trump you know, you had only Mahmoud Abbas

who is representing the Palestinians.

I think that was intentional.

What they're trying to do here is say, the only Palestinian that we want here has to be a really unpopular old man

who has called Hamas dogs and has served as basically a default agent of the Israeli occupation, because what they're trying to do is crush the Palestinian resistance.

And so, you know, this entire ceremony going from Israel with the inverse Nuremberg tribunal to then the cuck fest that they held in Sharm el-Sheikh and then only having Mahmoud Abbas be the one representing it combined with this discussion of a Tony Blair or actually he said the other day maybe Tony Blair is not popular enough to run it that's what Trump said on his plane so he has to check and see if

Tony I like Tony but he might not be popular enough to run this thing um so the point is that it's it's like it it's it's a neo-colonial plan

on you know on its surface.

And the question is, what is the response from Palestinians going to be to this?

Ryan was talking about Hamas, you know, coming, you know, coming back onto the street.

And you have to remember, Hamas is not just an Islamic resistance movement.

It's not just the Qassam brigades.

It was the governing authority.

They were picking up the trash.

They were doing payroll.

They were administering the hospitals.

They were the police.

And Israel, when Hamas government police would go out to try to stop looters, Israel would kill the police.

and in protection of the looters.

And so we saw this in Iraq.

And I know all of us are familiar with this history.

When they did that disastrous debathification, they lay off anybody who had any affiliation with the Baath Party.

They get a quarter of a million Iraqi soldiers to join the resistance.

That's when the American soldiers started getting killed in large numbers.

And you had chaos.

I think they're going to hit a point.

And I think Trump.

I think Trump in his own way understood that when he answered the question Ryan's talk was talking about on the plane, you know, where he said, oh, we've given them some limited window to restore law and order.

Eventually, they're going to realize that all of these things that Hamas was doing as a governing authority, they actually need those things.

And who are they?

Are they going to have like what Emirati forces are going to be like, you know, disarming the Qassam brigades?

I don't think so.

You know, and so the whole thing is going to careen toward an epic disaster.

And I think some of these Arab and Islamic rulers understand that and they're trying to play their own chess game right now with Trump.

It's kind of amazing how anyone, everyone in

like the last 20 or 30 years, everyone who has comprehensively run out of ideas for anything in the Middle East, they all come to the same conclusion.

Let's send in Emirati troops to handle it.

It's fucking incredible.

Like,

I remember in 2016,

when

one of the Democratic primary debates,

Bernie said something about how his plan for Syria was basically like,

send in the Saudi troops.

You know,

the greatest,

You thought that Easy Company was good at keeping order in those last two episodes of Band of Brothers.

Wait till you see the fucking losers and idiots

in the Saudi military, the ones who are Colombian mercenaries.

That had to have been a fucking Matt Dust thing.

But it's whenever anyone is completely out of ideas, they just, they have nothing, they have nothing left.

They're like, yeah,

the Qatarian Omani military will take care of this.

I don't does anyone believe that?

No, not especially after their last deployment.

I think it was in like 2017, the Emiratis sent their own citizens into Yemen to do battle.

And something like 32, people can look it up, 32 or 36 of them died in like a single battle.

And all the Emiratis that I talked to, they all described it as their 9-11.

Like the entire country was shaken to its core.

Because if you think about it, there's like, what, tens of thousands of Emirati citizens?

There's not a lot of actual Emiratis and to lose three dozen of them, and these are guys who probably individually were either worth or would inherit, you know, the entire GDP of like Philadelphia.

And to have like 30 plus of those guys killed,

they were like absolutely not.

They withdrew all their forces the next day.

They were on the phone with Columbia and all the other mercenary factories.

And so they're done.

Like they're not putting Emirati citizens anywhere near a bullet can fly.

Speaking of

in terms of being near where bullets or bombs can fly,

a lot of the media reporting on this ceasefire deal points to Israel's bombing of Qatar and their attempt to bomb the Hamas delegation in Qatar as something of a tipping point,

at least for Donald Trump personally, where finally he was like, he had had enough with this.

Like, what do you make of that reporting on the role of Israel's bombing of Qatar being like, I don't know, know, a tipping point for Donald Trump and just him finally doing what any American president could have done over the last two years and just said, enough is enough.

This is the deal.

Take it or it's over.

I don't buy it in.

I don't buy it, but I'll explain why I'm saying that.

I think it's highly unlikely that Trump was in any way taken by surprise that this bombing of Hamas's offices took place.

I think the question is whether he greenlit it, you know, was was

part of the actual operation,

or he just allowed it to happen.

But this story that they floated where it was like the U.S.

military informed Trump up, like, something's going on.

The Israelis are heading toward the place where we have U.S.

CENTCOM and where the Qataris have U.S.

air defense systems.

Like, it's outrageously, it's a hilarious joke that like the U.S.

military, oh my God, Trump, Mr.

President, there's like Israeli planes are coming into Qatar.

I don't buy that at all.

But secondly, then they're like, and I told Steve, Witkoff, and Steve just couldn't reach the Emir of Qatar in time.

You know, Steve messed up.

He couldn't get him on WhatsApp.

And oops, you know, we were only able to tell them 10 minutes after the bombing had taken place, which is what the Qatari said.

So

I think it's highly likely because in the lead up to that, it happened on September 9th.

In the lead up to that, you had the chief of staff of the Israeli army say they were going to start targeting Hamas leaders abroad.

And you also had Trump making veiled threats toward those Hamas leaders abroad.

So just to set that out there, I think that there should be a really serious probing of what potential U.S.

role there was in this strike that took place.

But setting that aside, I do think that the,

you know, the

reaction from the Qataris toward the Americans was something that unsettled.

Trump

in part because of all the business that they want to be doing with these guys.

And I think Trump felt like, I have a problem here.

You know, Jared Kushner's business is bankrolled by the Qataris, the Saudis, and the Emiratis, you know, Affinity Partners, his firm.

It's billions of dollars coming in from the Gulf, and they're going to make an enormous amount of money on this boondoggle in Gaza if it in any way moves forward.

So I think part of it was that Trump was just shaken that his business partners were really pissed off about this.

But again, I think it also had to do with Charlie Kirk's assassination, with people within MAGA world, you know, the kind of simmering anti-Israel sentiment that is brewing within his part of his base.

And I think that he looked at that, started to look at Netanyahu as like an albatross around his neck.

And I think that Trump, you know, he's a man who recognizes these opportunities.

I think he realized so many things were sort of like in the air that he could easily grab at the same time and take them all.

I'm, you know, I want to get the Nobel Prize.

I'm going to be able to have this like incredible business relationship for my family, you know, that's going to endure for many, many years to come with all of these, you know, these Gulf states.

And

Netanyahu is driving Israel into the ground.

And probably you had some even ultra-Zionists who were saying in his ear, you got to bail Netanyahu out right now.

So, you know, I think that we tend to want, and especially if you're in the world of like Axios or whatever, you want these like neatly tied up narratives to explain why Trump does what he did.

But I don't think it was like he was shocked that the Israelis bombed Qatar.

I I think it was more that he recognized,

I let them do this thing or I participated in it, and I don't like the heat I'm getting off of this.

So like, I want to get this thing done.

And then what do they do?

He turns around and he gives Qatar an unprecedented security, mutual security pact that is almost verbatim like Article 5 of NATO.

You know, I mean, no other Arab country, the Saudis are looking at that and they're like, wait a minute,

we've been kissing the ring forever.

And how did the Qataris get this thing?

So, you know, and then and then they have them now coming to the bottom.

They didn't give Trump an airplane.

You got to give him a plane.

The airplane, yeah.

We talked about that last time when we were hanging out with you guys.

But yeah, so I think it's a whole configuration of interests.

And Trump really sort of sees the moment.

And, you know,

he views himself as like,

yeah, like he's coming in to conquer.

And he talks about it being 3,000 years and he's ending this war.

And I really think he believes his own garbage, you know, like, but, but I give him credit.

He, he recognized there's a lot of balls in the air and I can grab every single one of them simultaneously.

Yeah, Jeremy, I completely agree with you.

I think like for

like 99%

of things relating to the two entities,

Israel and America are the same thing.

Trump and Israel, same fucking thing.

Their interests completely overlap.

And there is almost

like comprehensive coordination on almost almost anything you see, no matter how many fucking stories you see about whatever president at the time is outraged by whatever Israel did.

And I think like this fits Trump's pattern of like,

I'm going to vaguely hint at a thing, the thing will happen.

And then when it doesn't turn out like how I thought, I'll back away from it.

I think like I, it seems like he thought that

maybe striking the leadership in Qatar would like bring them to heel or something stupid like that.

And then when it didn't, it only like irritated the Emiratis who are pumping his shitcoin.

Did he just, they're pumping $2 billion into their shitcoin company.

Like, they're kind of geniuses, but like he, he, he saw that, I don't know how he didn't like put two and two together before, but it, you know,

I, it really follows a pattern with him.

I guess like the next thing I want to talk about is,

like, Ryan and Jeremy like what are you hearing from like your sources in Gaza the people you work with there like what is the the feeling like the mood in Gaza right now as like I don't know like maybe people can breathe for like half a second it seems at least from the people I follow it seems like an uneasy relief as there is some like ADA is getting in now and they begin to like have some space to rebuild but they are still living in essentially the apocalypse but like what what is the situation now in terms of like life in gaza and then also like for the thousand plus people now who have been released as part of this prisoner exchange, who are now emerging from these like Israeli torture camps and being sent home in quotation marks to an absolute wasteland.

What are you hearing from people in Gaza about their attitude about this ceasefire?

Immediately after the ceasefire,

everything I was hearing was

just kind of hope that it was actually going to happen and a fear

that it would be like so many of the other moments where they got up hope uh and and a and a resignation and almost like a hollowness to the fact that it was going to be some type of brutal like deal that was kind of foisted on them coupled with this needs to end like we are absolutely desperate like we're starving to death we we're living in tents and that and the the like fortunate people are living in tents like significant numbers of people living outside of tents

and just needed relief from that.

Even if, like, even in the past, when there was this talk before the Doha bombing of the 60-day ceasefire,

there was hope that even that would happen, knowing full well that that would mean, at best, the war starts again in 60 days, but maybe even less than that.

But just the idea that it would stop for a couple days.

It's like,

give us something.

And the idea that you're going to open up five or six crossings and bring in food and medicine is also lifesaving for people on the brink of it.

And people are moving en masse

back to what used to be their homes and beginning the process of rebuilding.

Something, what, Jeremy, half a million people or so have

gone north

since the ceasefire.

So that's representative of some hope and an effort of rebuilding.

But I mean, drops out, you guys also had an article over the weekend about like just like on their way out the door, like occupation soldiers sabotaging like the largest sewage treatment plant in Gaza.

So just like continue, just getting one last look in to make sure that whatever reconstruction takes place or whatever life emerges as they have to abide by this ceasefire technically will be continue to be hell on earth.

Yeah, and this was a this was a piece by two great reporters that that contribute to drop site, Eunice Tarawi and Yanif Kogan.

And

they were monitoring

social media accounts of Israeli soldiers and saw this pattern where they were, and some of it was set to music, like ACDC and

other bands

torching houses, burning food stocks.

and then going after this treatment plant that you're referencing.

And I mean, Ryan was in touch with the Israeli military about it, and he can tell you what their response was

to our request for comment.

But this is the standard operating procedure.

And

for them to do it

as the ceasefire comes into effect is not shocking.

It's that

we have the documented evidence that they were doing it.

And it really, there's something deeply evil.

When you look at it, it's...

you know it it pales in comparison to the epic nature of the crimes that they've committed against human beings you know they're largely building you know burning structures but there's a sadistic evil that you kind of feel when you look at these videos, right, Ryan?

I mean, it's like a...

I mean, well, I just, just as a comment, like, it's because, Jeremy, like, as you mentioned earlier.

It is really like, I can't conceive of anything in this conflict in terms of winners and losers, because, like, it certainly isn't the Palestinian people.

I mean, considering what they've endured for two years and more than that, if you want to take the holistic view.

But in terms of the stated military goals of the occupation army and the Netanyahu government, this was a failure.

They failed to achieve their goals.

And this is after two years of waging

a war, in quotation marks, unrestrained entirely by international law and backed by the most powerful country in the world, to not appeal from any other of our allied nations.

They just let them do whatever they want for two years.

And it didn't work.

They did not get the people, Palestinian people, or Gaza to surrender.

And now they have to abide by this ceasefire.

Like, they, it's such a stark contrast that

in the last moments of the war, while the Israelis were sabotaging civilian infrastructure, like the basic, the basic things that any civilization needs, like,

barbarossa shit that Qassam brigades were still successfully pulling off al-Ghul shots.

In the last hours before the conflict ended, they were still taking out Israeli officers.

Yeah, and this is also a plant that was basically built with a lot of German investment.

So it also raises this question of like, who does Israel think they are?

Like,

you know, it's evil and sadistic on so many levels.

And the people that are going to suffer from it are the ones who won't now have a sewage treatment plant.

But also, by what right does Israel destroy

a sewage treatment plant built by Germany?

Well, Germany's probably already, they've probably already apologized for building it.

Right, yes.

But knowing that they're not going to be the ones that pay to have it rebuilt.

And also,

and this has been in headlines in Israeli media for years now.

You know, when

the conflict gets to a certain height, and this includes even pre-October 7th, and sewage treatment kind of shuts down in Gaza, raw sewage washes up on the shores.

the beaches of Israel above it.

The current goes counterclockwise in the Mediterranean there.

So to completely shut down the largest sewage treatment plant in Gaza City,

yet not remove the population,

is going to have very obvious effects for Israeli beaches, too.

So it's like, after all of the different layers of evil here, still, what are you doing?

Like, why are you, like, why are you even doing this to yourself?

Like, why are you pissing in the wind?

That is a perfect, perfect metaphor.

Like,

all you can do is.

Happy to

All you can make someone else drink it.

You're doing the butterfly in like 10-year-old human shit just to spite someone else.

I wanted to, you know, something I wanted to share with your broader community too.

You know,

I speak regularly with

people within the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

And have, you know, we've done a lot of reporting about

their strategy and these negotiations.

And just to share with you, like, some insight that relates to something Felix was saying earlier: you know, Hamas had signed this, um,

they had they had signed their agreement on August 18th to like the earlier ultimatum of Trump, where he said, like, if you don't sign this, you know, things are going to get really bad.

It was called the like Witcoff framework.

And as Ryan said, this would have been like a 60-day deal for half of the captives, and then Israel almost certainly would have, like, would have resumed the war.

But Hamas made all these concessions, they agree to this thing on August 18th.

Israel doesn't respond to it at all.

Instead, two days after Hamas agrees to the ultimatum, basically, they invade Gaza City, saying that they're going to forcibly expel a million people.

And then it's just like scorched earth terror bombing.

And then on September 9th, they try to assassinate the negotiators and the senior leadership of Hamas.

They fail to kill any of them, but they did kill Khalil Alhayah,

Khalil Al-Hayya's son, and injured his wife, his daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren, because they didn't just hit the Hamas offices.

They hit the apartment where Khalil Alhaya stays

in Doha.

And then like nothing happens.

And then

Trump drops this.

And by the way, when they bombed them, they were meeting to discuss a 100-word, it was literally, we obtained it, a 100-word basically like email from Donald Trump describing his peace plan.

So they gather and they're trying to discuss how to respond to this.

And that's when they bombed them, when they pulled all the negotiators together.

So then nothing happens.

And then Trump drops this thing, this 20-point plan.

And so I'm talking to the Hamas and Islamic Jihad and other negotiators.

And the debate within

the broader Palestinian

sort of delegation on this was between rejecting it outright or trying to find a way to give Trump the impression that they're accepting.

you know, the basic thrust of his agreement without actually doing that.

And so what they did is they split this 20-point plan into two parts.

And Hamas and Islamic Jihad negotiators said, what we're going to tell Trump is because we're fighting the war and we have the captives, we will agree to enter into negotiations to accept your part of the plan that deals with the acute war, the withdrawal of Israeli forces, the ceasefire, the exchange of captives.

But these other issues, we don't have a mandate.

from the Palestinian people to negotiate them because Palestine is

a diverse tapestry of political movements.

And to their surprise, I was talking to them when the Trump response comes in on Truth Social, Um, Trump's like, great, Hamas wants to make a deal.

And so they felt like they had really, and if you read that political response from Hamas, it's quite a brilliant strategic work of like strategic diplomacy.

Um, you know, these guys are highly educated people, too.

Like, you know, I think Americans have a cartoonish view.

You have doctors, veterinarians, engineers, lawyers, political scientists.

Like, it's a real, these are smart people.

And that document was quite interesting.

So then

what you had was that they had to make concessions because Israel did not fully withdraw.

They just moved back to the yellow line on Trump's map that he released.

It's just a repositioning.

They've given up almost all of their strategic leverage in releasing the captives.

They did get 250 long-term Palestinian prisoners out.

They didn't get any of the highest-profile prisoners, including Marwan Barghuti or Ahmed Sadat, but they got 1,900 or so Palestinians or 1,800 Palestinians who had been kidnapped from Gaza after October 7th, and then 250 people serving long-terms or multiple life sentences.

They got them out.

From their perspective, there was a tactical

victory, isn't what they're saying, but there was a tactical achievement because they didn't concede anything about we're going to disarm, we're going to demilitarize, Hamas is going to disband.

They didn't agree to any of those things.

What they said is all of these issues need to be discussed with a wider cross-section of Palestinians, but we will make a deal to end this acute war.

And that's what happened here.

So, from their perspective,

they're saying

we fought Israel to the point where Trump had to bail them out because they failed to defeat us militarily.

Now, the real war begins.

And to go back to what I said at the beginning, I think the strategy now from Israel and Trump is to try to pretend that there is no such thing as the Palestinian resistance and that the agreement is they all have to go away and Palestine will be totally demilitarized.

This is going to go to a much broader cross-section of Palestinian society.

This isn't going to get resolved in any kind of

clean way at all.

This is why I say Israel accepted this as a complicated strategic repositioning in their ultimate war of annihilation.

And they're going to try to continue on with it, either with these kinds of agreements where they Oslo the whole thing to death or resuming the military onslaught again at some point in time if the ultimatum of you need to all be completely demilitarized and agreed a third-class citizenship if we even allow you to live.

That's basically what's on the table.

Well in terms of like another strategic repositioning, I was interested to follow the reaction of a lot of like the

you know like the most hardcore like Zionist elements in the American media and government and in Trump's coalition in terms of how they responded to this ceasefire.

Because I'm thinking specifically of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

It was very clear from their public statements that they did not want this ceasefire deal and they wanted the war to continue.

But they knew that they knew with Trump had backed them into a corner.

So they had to release these sort of like tepidly

tepid statements basically being like, yeah, this is good.

We like this.

Like, what do you make of the sort of the Zionist right wing in this country and Israel and their reaction to this, to what Trump did and like the establishment, at least in theory, of a ceasefire?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think you said that right.

And I think if you noticed the thing that they pivoted to really quickly was

this projection that the pro-Palestine side, they're not celebrating.

See, we told you these people are the worst.

Like, they're not out here celebrating.

And I think they were projecting their own.

I thought you all wanted a ceasefire deal.

Where's everyone in the streets cheering Donald Trump, right?

Like, it's like, it's like

the previous two years just didn't happen.

Like, we have to do that.

And they also did that.

Yeah.

They also did that for a day or two while Israel was still bombing and had not agreed to the ceasefire yet.

Like,

they were demanding demanding like a pre-celebration on the part of people.

Israel's Knesset or Israel's cabinet punted the vote like three times.

And it seems like only under some pressure did they finally agree.

And as Felix said, after getting a couple more of their soldiers killed

and then burning a lot of stuff and bombing a lot of stuff needlessly over a couple of days,

then they finally agree to it.

But yeah, I think that they don't really know

where to go with it because, like every war, and I think this is a point maybe Felix has made before

that they don't have a way to end these wars.

Like the way that they end wars is they get told by the United States that the war is over.

So this is just, this is just, I mean, they should, they should know better how to handle this by now.

Yeah, it's, um, we, we talked about, we first talked about that

during the Biden administration, actually, how

they, it was clear in the first year or so that they thought this would follow the model that you saw in Lebanon 40 years ago, that you saw in Lebanon, you know, 16 years ago,

that you saw, you know, in cast lead, graves, all that, all that other shit that they, they have like a 30 to 60 day window of just doing the worst shit imaginable, aerial racial annihilation campaign,

just sabotage on the deepest level.

And then at a certain point, America and maybe just for

propriety's sake,

you know,

a few other partners in the Anglo-American empire go, okay, that's enough.

And they yank the leash.

And then for the next like 10 years, they could go, oh, we would have wiped them all out if they didn't tug our leash.

But this time, yeah, it seemed like it was,

they were thrilled not to have the leash tugged, but then they didn't know where to go from there.

Yeah, but also where this goes next, if you know the FDD people and or sort of the ultra-Zionists that are watching this, I think that they recognize, and I think this is ultimately the peace that Netanyahu made with like whatever minor

tactical disagreements he had with Trump.

There is a way in which this is setting the whole situation up for

Israel to transition from the acute campaign to annihilate every possible Palestinian in Gaza to

a kind of slow-death operation for some period of time.

And I keep bringing up Oslo as the example because the great achievement from the Israeli perspective of Oslo is that it allowed Israel to continue its perpetual war, to continue with the expansion of illegal settlements, with annexation, to demonize the Palestinians Palestinians as the terrorists.

It was huge money-making enterprise.

For the last fucking 25 years, all I've ever heard is, oh, we gave the Palestinians peace at Oslo, and then they spent north.

And that's why we have to do this now.

Like, that's why it's been so successful because they can always point to Oslo to say, oh, well,

we gave them the state in Oslo, but they just didn't want to accept it.

Because

we never stopped building settlements in their state.

The scariest thing about Oslo is that everyone still goes, oh, I'm against settlements.

Yeah.

Every American politician.

But it's, it's, it, yeah, and I mean, both of you are making point, like that, this is what I'm getting at, that

I think we're in, in a, in an incredibly, we're, we're on the eve of an incredibly different kind of dangerous era because you now have all of these Arab states and Islamic countries that are kind of in the fold in one way or another, even though Trump announced a plan that had, that was totally different in multiple terms than the one that they thought he was about to announce.

You know, and then Jared Kushner and Ron Dermer and Steve Witkoff are sitting there editing this thing that they got sign-off on from all these Muslim countries, and they roll it out.

And the foreign ministers of those countries are like, wait a minute, this isn't the document.

And instead of really saying, wait a minute, we're drawing a line in the sand here.

The original document said, Israel will not annex the West Bank.

That's gone from

what Trump and Netanyahu rolled out at the White House.

Instead of doing that, they use diplomatic language.

Oh, there's still details.

Some of them privately said to media, well, this was different than what we signed off on.

It was the Pakistani foreign minister who was the one who came out and said, this is a totally different document.

But Qatar, Saudi, all of them, they handled it like this.

So they're now all in this Trump orbit.

It's like the orb in the first administration.

They're all

under the Trump spell right now.

Netanyahu, this is great for Netanyahu on so many levels.

Tactically, I think the Palestinian negotiators, they got the best deal they could have gotten under the circumstances they had.

Because the alternative, you know, in terms of if you if you want this to end, you know, the genocide to end without fighting Israel to a military stalemate, which could have gone on for months, if not years, I think they recognized it as

We, you know, the cost-benefit analysis to what kind of a deal we're looking at.

I think they felt like it was the best deal they could get, short of saying we're going to continue fighting the war.

And what the mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey told Hamas, and I got this from sources that were in the meetings, was like, you're going to be facing now Trump all in even more than he already has been.

Israel can do whatever he wants in Gaza.

Israel can do whatever it wants in Gaza.

And you're going to have the public perception.

that you've now rejected all these Muslim and Arab countries.

And Hamas's people said, but you told us that this is not even the deal that you guys signed.

So why didn't any of you say this?

And they said, well, you know, Trump is a difficult guy.

And, you know, they basically said it is what it is.

So the Palestinians, from their perspective, they're looking at this and they're saying, okay, the only option we have is to separate this.

We'll negotiate an end to the war.

It's not exactly what we wanted, but we feel like we're getting some achievements here.

And we don't surrender.

There's no white flag.

There's no agreement to demilitarize.

But it's bad.

Like, I really...

The thing that I take heart in is that the acute genocide has ended right now.

And my God, God, like people need to have a chance to breathe, to eat, and hopefully never does it resume again in Gaza.

But when I say it's bad, I'm talking about the future because this was clumsily brilliant, what Trump and company did.

And it set it up.

And I think Netanyahu and Israel are so

thrilled with what they're looking at right now

because Trump saved them from their own...

from themselves.

If I could turn now to the American media.

Basically, Dropsight

did a story that I wanted to have you guys on to talk about because it basically confirmed what I've suspected for years or what anyone with half a brain has suspected for years, which is that a lot of prominent political pundits in America have active and undisclosed financial relationships with Israel.

They're essentially doing public PR, doing public diplomacy for Israel.

And I'm speaking specifically about Douglas Murray and David Frum.

What can you tell us about your reporting and their undisclosed relationship with the Israeli government?

yeah and we we don't we don't have any evidence of money flowing from Israel to them interestingly when it comes to Douglas Murray uh in these emails that that we reviewed my colleague Maz and I um reviewed these emails that were dumped by from Ron Prozer's inbox he's that he used to be the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations now he's the Israeli ambassador to Germany that they found Douglas Murray hosting a fundraiser for the IDF, or basically for

a nonprofit that gives money to support the IDF and raising a billion pounds.

I don't know how much a billion pounds it was in 2014.

I assume that's a million.

I assume that's a lot of money.

500 kilograms.

Yeah, there you go.

When it comes to Frum,

he and Douglas Murray and Seth Mandel were all basically competing.

to draft speeches for

the Israeli ambassador.

From, of course, former speechwriter, journalist.

Then he became a speechwriter for Bush, famously did the Axis of Evil line.

And then, you know, basically since then, he's been this kind of anti-Trump resistance journalist over at the Atlantic.

But

separated by one day.

Hashtag resistance.

Don't come to me.

Hashtag resistance.

Yeah, this is

not the resistance.

The real resistance.

So he, separated by one day, he emails the ambassador a draft of the speech that he and Seth Mandel are working on,

and emails him a request to interview him for a profile in the Atlantic that he then goes and produces and calls this guy, you know, tough.

And you know, it's a

total what you would expect David Frum would write about the Israeli ambassador.

I was looking, it would have been hilarious if he said, and the one thing they all say about him is he's a gifted speech maker.

The rhetoric just

his pros just sits.

His prose just sits.

and

yeah, it's like utterly ridiculous.

It's like, what, like, I mean, I think it's fascinating, at least just in terms of like, I mean, from is a guy, you know, obviously I've been aware of him for a while, but Douglas Murray has become a guy that I'm unfortunately recently made aware of because he has been one of the most bloodthirsty propagandists on behalf of the genocide that's just been carried out.

And like, one of the lines that he always brings up is that, like, oh, you've never been to the aid Chuck Points.

Like, you've never been been to Gaza.

So, like, how can you talk about it?

But, like, he went there on like basically a junket with the Israeli military while he is doing all this undisclosed work for the government and military of Israel.

So, it's just like, is this projection or what?

And, like, and what do they organize?

Like, what do the media companies that these people work for have to say about their undisclosed relationship with a foreign government?

And, you know, he said, you know, I, and to Dave Smith, everybody's probably seen this clip by now.

He said, I have a rule of journalism, you know, where I won't comment

on an area of the world unless I have been.

And if he hadn't used the word journalism in there, you'd be like, all right, well, this is just a guy who's an advocate for Israel.

He carries himself as a journalist.

He claims to be doing journalism.

And in that case, he was saying he was doing superior journalism that should give his insights greater credibility.

And yeah, as you said, we now know, okay, yes, you did travel to these crossings.

You are also doing undisclosed fundraising for the IDF.

You were writing speeches for at least this Israeli ambassador.

Like that's what we know of because this Israeli ambassador's inbox has

been exposed, probably by Iran, actually.

Like it seems like the Iranian

Ministry of Intelligence got into this guy's inbox and posted it.

or gave it to this nonprofit.

And then Moz was able to get access to it through that.

So that's the one we know about.

Who knows what else he has been doing?

So to hold that up as

some sort of evidence of your journalistic credibility is outrageous.

I've heard from a bunch of different media reporters who have said that they have

been unable to get any comment from the news organizations that these are affiliated with.

Douglas Murray is an opinion columnist for the free press, so I don't expect his boss is going to come down too hard

on him.

But Jeffrey Goldberg, you know, former prison guard

at the IDF, has not commented yet either on this.

And this is, it's interesting.

I told Ryan he should set up a signal.

He should have set up a signal group and just said that

it's Pete Hankseth.

We're grabbing some brews in Bombing Yemen tomorrow.

By the way, did you make any speeches?

Yeah.

From I Need 400 Words.

I need a new access.

Yeah.

But, you know, this is a kind of story that 10 years ago would create a scandal in Washington.

And

today,

I think they'll just try to just wait it out.

Well,

you brought up Barry and the free press because you had another piece come out that I wanted to talk about, which

basically looked into their reporting

on all of these like basically disabled children who they claim became emaciated not from a lack of food or malnutrition, but because of pre-existing conditions.

And that, like, the

sort of display of these like skeletal-looking children, some of whom who had like cerebral palsy or other, you know, complicating conditions, is in some way exonerating of this idea that Israel is deliberately starving Gaza to death.

What did you find in your reporting?

Well, A, I think, I mean, the first thing I should say is what you found in your reporting is that the Free Press did no actual reporting

in their article.

But like,

how did you do this story and what did you uncover?

Yeah, typically in journalism, if you're going to write about a subject and particularly write about their health condition, you would try to speak to them or their family or people who know them or

medical providers who've worked with them.

Free press didn't try to do any of that.

So we asked Maha Husseini, a reporter who was based in Gaza City,

to call the families and

just

look into these cases.

Say, like, what happened?

Like, and And let's not start also

with the siege necessarily.

Like, one of the cases, for instance,

the child was born in December of 2023.

So the last two months of her mother's pregnancy, they had been displaced.

They were under absolutely intense bombing.

Not the kind of conditions that are

the best for a healthy birth.

And so the child, yes, was born with slight muscle weakness in December 2023.

But already you'd have to say it's hard to disconnect that entirely from the Israeli campaign that's going on.

But then, like in that case, for instance, the family was able to provide us before photos of the child before on March 2nd, Israel closed off

the crossings and did not allow food and medicine.

into Gaza for a very long stretch, well into May, and then showed after photos.

And

it's just very clear to anybody who cares that it was the lack of, shockingly, it's the lack of food and the lack of

access to medical treatment that caused a deterioration of the condition,

not the condition itself.

In all of the cases

where they had a medical condition, they were treating it okay until they were deprived of

food, but also deprived of medicine.

And we also found some basic bizarre errors.

Like they said they investigated the cases of 12 children.

Actually two of them were adults.

They only did 10.

And like me and our intern MJ, like

we read this piece like 50 times.

We're like, this is impossible.

Like the headline says they did 12.

Like that's a specific number.

But there's only nine named here.

And then there's a 10th where they link to a thing.

So we're generously giving them 10.

It's like you didn't even like, did nobody read this piece?

If you say you're going to do 12, do 12.

It's so utterly bizarre.

Well, like, it's, it's, it's the laziness of it.

It's like this half-assed attempt, but like, you know, for an outlet like the free press who wants to do, wants to, you know, manage the, I don't know, public perception of Israel in the United States, they've been doing a bang-up job of it.

But like, this is, Ryan, this is a question I've been asking myself because, like, when I, when you consider like, you know, the Barry regime at CBS News now like the sale of TikTok and like all of the ways in which like sort of newer social media and then the sort of more traditional media institutions are now being placed under like a direct receivership of like pro-Zionist propaganda I really I really have to question like Do they think that like the problem with public opinion on Israel is that they just haven't been doing enough of what they've always been doing?

Because it's not like CBS News prior to this was some sort of bastion of Palestinian solidarity or Palestinian journalism or even like, if you would ever see a Palestinian on CBS News.

But like, obviously, like, their attempts to turn the boat around in terms of public opinion, particularly among young people as it relates to the Zionist project, has been an utter failure.

Like, for the people, like, what is your perception of the people involved in this?

Do they think that they just like don't, that like, that their messages just aren't getting out there enough?

Or, like,

or is it, is this not really about public opinion?

Because, like, that's what I come around to.

It's just like, they just want to see a TV show that flatters their, like, the donors and people who own these companies.

They just want to see on TV their worldview reflected back at them.

And they're aware enough that public opinion doesn't matter one way or another in terms of their ability to achieve their goals.

Like,

what do you think the calculus is in here in this very heavy-handed attempt to do this kind of insane propaganda on behalf of a country that is now basically universally loathed because of what it's done?

I don't think you can underestimate the amount of genuine paranoia that exists and the seeing of hostility to Israel absolutely everywhere.

And you're totally right about CBS News, but the irony is that when 60 Minutes did a report, which nobody saw because nobody watches 60 Minutes anymore, but when 60 Minutes did a report where they interviewed like half a dozen officials who had resigned from the State Department over the Biden administration's Gaza policy, that was like the turning point.

That's when it seems like they're like, all right, this has to stop.

Like we need to, we need to, we need to clamp down.

We need to clamp down on this.

And when it comes to TikTok, you keep, and Instagram too,

for that matter, you keep seeing these kind of Zionist propaganda saying that it's this Qatar and Van Jones was even saying this.

Qatar and Iran are force feeding as part of their geopolitical strategy, force feeding all of these images of dead Gaza babies, as Van Jones kept repeating, into the feeds of Americans.

And that is their genuine belief, I think, that

Iran and Qatar are doing this without ever asking

where do those images come from?

Yeah, why are there so many images of the same thing?

Yeah, I mean, I think that I mean, I think, Will, you're partially right that a lot of this is just like on-demand programming for people with like,

you know, tens of billions of dollars to throw around.

But it really is like, you cannot underestimate also like the extent to which like they fully believe the things they say now about the media.

Like, I thought one of the most

remarkable things

on the Israeli side and the pro-Israel side in America.

over these last two years was how they don't in previous times they would bitch about like the mainstream media or whatever but there was this understanding that like you know a place like be the bbc or the new york times had to maintain some sense of propriety to to vaguely represent what is going on in reality so that they can more effectively uh

you know propagate and spin for israel they seem to completely lack that understanding now.

And this is like by far the most openly in the tank I've ever seen the New York Times or the BBC for Israel.

And it still wasn't enough.

And that is partially paranoia, but partially like, partially also the curse of getting everything you want.

It's still

feeling besieged in a way.

Well, it's like the more besieged they feel in so much as like they have to confront the idea that people in this country and the world regard Palestinians as human beings and their deaths as an outrage.

I think like they need to, like, it doesn't matter, a public opinion doesn't matter, but they just need to enforce compliance, at least publicly, even with ever more stricter discipline.

And I think like that's, that's what we're seeing now.

And to underline Felix's point, I think you're, you're rank-and-file, kind of run-of-the-mill pro-Israel person, not one who's on television or writing a column, but just everyday person in the country.

They genuinely believe that the New York Times is against them.

Like that the New York Times is unfair and is like pro-Hamas.

And

when you have that genuine belief in comparison to the reality of what's going on, it's just impossible to kind of close that circle.

So then you just have to buy everything at that point.

I think also on the elite side, I think it is

a lot of it is just that like Barry Weiss is their per like that, that's their perfect avatar, obviously.

That's their perfect kind of political figure or pundit.

But I think it's also like

there is some genuinely like correct perception on their part that like

the norms and standards of uh political media, we we could broadly say, are breaking down.

The things that would we all understand that would like get you fired or uh, you know, banish you from public life, there isn't there is no longer like a shared universal consensus on what those things are.

There is a a, it's whatever, whatever system we had for this for the last 20 years, it seems like it is completely broken down.

And it seems like they are, you know, they're they're positioning for whatever comes next, whatever is established after this, whatever is built from the wreckage, that it retains part of the old norm that you still, that is re anything about Israel is still the third rail, that any, any acknowledgement from a media figure that Palestinians are human beings at all, much less anything else,

that will still get you banished from public life.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, absolutely.

And I think also like with Barry, I think there's like sort of a similar element with Charlie Kirk here in that I think the people who donate money, like who give them a lot of money and fund their careers, just need to see a young person on TV who shares their beliefs.

And I really think that's a lot of it.

I think they need to like have this sort of like vichy millennial who mouths everything that they believe to sort of like reassure them that like the next generation that's going to replace them isn't wholly opposed to everything that they believe and have spent billions of dollars supporting.

Right.

Yeah.

And Barry scratches all of the itches because she also tells them, you know, you're not the problem.

It's your, it's your grandkids.

Like your grandkids are wrong.

about you.

And like

and they're wrong because they've been programmed with images by TikTok.

So the solution to that is we're just going to program TikTok.

So like that will get them to change their their point of view.

And destroy the colleges.

Like, yeah, it's the colleges.

But

in a broader sense, I mean, what we're seeing, and it's, you know, there's also

an aspect to this in the independent media more in our sphere of the world where

there is such

epic

sort of hatred of the old guard establishment media and it cuts across political lines and it's a and it creates a situation of both both opportunity and danger on the one hand, you know, because of the, you know, when you dismantle those systems, I mean, I could speak for three hours about the problems of the New York Times, certainly.

But the thing about the New York Times is

it was manufacturing consent.

It was remarkably effective at it.

It was an organ of statism, you know, and empire.

And it certainly played that role in the in the Gaza genocide.

But when the New York Times, and there are good journalists that work at the New York Times, when the New York Times does something that is really good journalism, it's high impact and it carries weight to it and has the ability to change policy, both for better and good.

When you then dismantle that and then the kind of crazy barn gets opened, which is what we're witnessing right now,

you know,

it's the Wild West.

And I think that

one of the things that

the Barry Weissization of that sphere of the media is doing is making it look like the New York Times somehow was

like this great alternative to it.

When in reality, the New York Times, I mean, Ryan and I did so much reporting on the role of the New York Times in facilitating this genocide, in perpetrating the most odious dehumanization narratives about Palestinians and picking up glory and awards for these utterly criminal stories that they did, you know, aimed at dehumanizing Palestinians.

But we're in this space now where also I think we need to look at it and say,

what we all believe in building is something that recognizes the moment that we're in, but doesn't lose basic things like fact-checking and real reporting.

and working with reporters on the ground in countries.

And, you know,

I have both fears and excitement about the nature of the media landscape today.

But one of the things that we're really trying to do at Dropsite, like we don't publish hot takes, we don't publish op-eds, we don't publish strict opinion pieces.

Our like mantra is that anything that we publish has to have reporting in it.

It has to have information in it that people aren't going to get somewhere else, which is actually basic journalism.

But we really, we turn down really good opinion pieces because that's not what we're going to do.

And part of it is because that's going away.

That kind of journalism is disappearing.

um and and so you know i think i think we need more journalists that are about something that stand for something to say let's embrace the the parts of journalism that are the essentials um because if we lose those institutions it it's the onus is on us to protect it if we lose institutions of fact-checking and reporting and being there this is incredibly dangerous incredibly dangerous where everything is just the truth is relative no sometimes the truth is just true you know

sometimes the truth is just true

I saw somebody making a point recently that

what

Barry Weiss and all the oligarch-controlled media is showing is that at least compared to like the neoliberal profit maximizing,

the profit maximizing media was better.

Because at least that had

some guardrails around it, where these kind of oligarch-controlled media outlets are just ideological.

I mean, not even ideological, but just.

That's a good point.

Like, either in terms of a bottom line or as in terms of effective propaganda, that free press piece that you guys sort of debunked about like these kids aren't really starving to death.

They just have, you know, severe medical conditions that are that have been made gravely worse for some unidentified reason.

Like, not only is that like,

it is just so obviously ghoulish and lazy, like, it just, it, it undermines both the bottom line of like getting subscribers, but it also undermines the bottom line of being an effective consent factory.

Right.

Cause all you have to do is now anytime the free press comes at you, oh,

uh, you guys did the Gaza famine myth, right?

Like that was your article.

Okay.

Not interested in anything else you've got to say.

Yeah.

What Jeremy said about,

you know, the

what things will look like when the New York Times is no longer

the, you know, that there's no longer this weight that you could put behind like a big story that I think is true for like

most large media concerns now after this.

What I think is so interesting about it is it's, it kind of echoes something we saw during the Biden years, where it started with like the whole thing about disinformation, where it manifested in these insane ways where like, do you remember when people would get fucking like suspended for a month for posting that Hunter Biden story?

Yeah, yeah.

You used to get fucking auto-modded if you posted the picture of Andrew Gillam passed out.

Andrew Gillam wasn't even doing anything at that point.

But

it was so sensuous and crazy.

And

it was incredibly robust, though.

They really figured out a way to

reassert their authority in this new age.

And the most remarkable thing about it is they blew it all.

They spent all their remaining capital on fucking Brandon, on Brandon and Israel.

Yeah.

And

like now, now all these like psychopaths who think that like the problem is that like 60, 60 Minutes has been like that all the writers belong to PIJ or some shit.

They're going to try the same thing the Brandon people did.

With a, with an even like less trusted and less respected, less robust media.

It's fucking fascinating.

Like not not only that, not only that.

All these Trump people, all these Trump people who talked about like how the mainstream media is so shitty, everyone's leaving the legacy media.

By the way, it's great.

We're taking it over.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And not only that, but in terms of like the brandinification of everything, is like, given that, like, and we're seeing this now in Kamala's book tour, where she's like, why?

Don't protest me.

You protest Donald Trump, who's president now, because of me and Joe Biden.

You know?

Like,

because of how wedded they are to Israel and how much of their political capital and credibility they were willing to just incinerate to keep this going.

It's also opening up a lane on the far right to start talking about Israel in a way that is, I'm sorry, quite frankly, a lot more honest than anything I've heard from like MSNBC over the last two years.

So you have, for whatever her reasons, a figure like Marjorie Taylor Greene saying, what you're seeing in Gaza is mass murder and it's not just actors who are doing propaganda.

And like, you know, they don't have to like credit Marjorie Taylor Greene too much with that very basic elemental observation of reality, but you should rather be more angry about why it's Marjorie Taylor Greene that's reaping the credibility that comes with stating the obvious truth when every single liberal or Democratic politician or media figure has been hedging.

And I want to, and speaking of that, I want to talk real quick about Van Jones, because you mentioned earlier that it came out this week that

we talked about his comments about dead babies on real time with Bill Maher.

But it came out that he's a part of this journalism initiative that is funded by the hard Israeli right to just like to provide mentorship to journalists and political figures to like basically toe the line on Israel.

What can you tell us about Van Jones's response to that?

Yeah, this was a piece by our colleague, Sharif Abdel Qadus.

So

we had a big week of lighting these people up.

But yeah, so it's this fellowship,

the Karsh Fellowship, the Karsh Initiative or something.

Yeah, the Karsh Initiative.

And the woman who launched and funded the Karsh Initiative said out loud, publicly, that the purpose of it was to help Israel win the information war.

Not a purpose, the purpose.

Like, that's the goal of this fellowship.

And so she brought in all of these

people from the New York Times, you know, Van Jones, actually, I think Sharon Otterman, I think, the New York Times reporter who covered all of the campus protests for the New York Times, like is brought in

to do a fellowship here.

And

the Times gave him a response that basically defending their participation in it.

Van Jones did the comical thing where he says fake news alert and then proceeds to confirm every single detail of the article.

managed to get community noted.

Like, do you have any idea how hard it is to get a community note on anything related to Israel at this point?

And even that,

even that community notes was like, you're on their website, guy.

I mean, that was what, like, Sharif is not like a Twitter combatant.

You know, he's a, he's a serious journalist and he's not like, you know, he's not hanging out in the sewer with the likes of us.

But he, um, you know, when he saw Van Jones post that fake news alert on Twitter, he Sharif texted me and he's like, should I even respond to this?

And I was like, you absolutely should respond to it.

And he's like, oh, I'm not really a combatant on these things.

And he did like the right thing.

I mean, Sharif said, which part is fake news?

And you literally are listed as a mentor on their site.

And then Sharif just posted two images, one of them showing he's a mentor and the other showing the bio of him that appears on the site.

Because what he was saying is, you know, this is all fake.

I give speeches, you know, 100 speeches a year on a wide range of topics.

But he literally, it's like, it's like watching some cheesy 80s courtroom drama where the lawyer's like, never ask the person person on the stand a question you don't know the answer to.

Never tweet that it's fake news when actually you're on their website.

Well, wasn't part of his response like he was like, hey, I do this for free.

You don't need to pay me.

Yeah,

and here's the New York Times quote.

They said, it's ridiculous to suggest participation as a mentor in this fellowship is anything other than helping to build the reporting skills necessary for the next generation of independent journalists.

Like that's the New York Times.

The reporting skill is necessary to do the next screens without words, Bulitzer Prize winner.

But like

with the Times, this is especially galling because like it has long been an enforced policy at the Times that if you are, forget Palestinian, but if you are like Arab or Muslim and you work for the Times, you cannot cover any story that relates to Israel or Palestine because

you are too close to it.

You have an emotional investment in it.

You can't be objective.

And then this was like where you're literally getting paid money to be a mentor for a program whose sole purpose is to help Israel win the, quote, information war.

That apparently is not a conflict of interest, just like with fucking Douglas Murray and David Frome.

When Ryan and I, you know, going back to early on in the genocide, we're doing, you know, numerous stories about what was happening inside of the, you know, of the New York Times at the time.

And, you know, we heard from many staffers that there was a witch hunt that was overwhelmingly, and the perception was that it was being aimed disproportionately at non-white journalists, particularly Arab journalists, and suspicion that they were leaking

and

just because of

their cultural, religious, or racial identity that they became the suspects.

And it was a real

heinous atmosphere inside of the New York Times.

But when it comes to what Sharif reported on,

the Times outright defends it.

And it's actually,

on one hand, it's kind of shocking that they would do that and not come up with something more clever to say or kind of thread the needle in some manner, but they really went all in in saying that it's defensible.

And I would encourage people just to look at it, look at Sharif's story yourself and read what the purpose of this fellowship is.

And then look at the New York Times response and then look at the way that the New York Times treated its own staffers when they were suspecting them of leaking about erroneous stories that the New York Times was on the verge of publishing.

Or about go ahead, Ryan.

One more quote from the founder of this fellow, the funder of this fellowship.

Here's what she says.

Quote, the Israel story is on the facts side.

So you're already starting from a good place because the truth is, at the end of the day, the IDF is the most moral army in the world.

The Israeli population is made up of Christians, Druze, and Arabs, and Israelis.

Jews, it runs the gamut.

And so there's no apartheid there.

And I think if you just go through each of those things systematically, the facts are on the Israeli side.

So this is the kind of thing that the Times thinks it's okay to be teaching the future of independent journalists.

And like, and it's, and it's fascinating because like you mentioned that, like, simultaneously, like, there is real journalism done at places like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

There are still professional people who work there, and there are still stories that get through the filter.

And I'm thinking about

that this mentality institutionally can exist at the same time as they published an irrefutable article, the one about all of the x-ray scans of sniper bullets in the heads of children.

Oh, that had to run.

Notice that had to run in the opinion section and was written by doctors who had been in Gaza.

So like their own.

Times journalists, yeah.

Right.

Though their own journalists couldn't get that.

And they wouldn't, would they even have put it in the news side

is an interesting question.

Like the opinion side gets a little more leeway.

Everything that's going to be.

I mean, an interesting contrast to that is

that the Washington Post has a handful of journalists that have been doing like really...

phenomenal journalism doing kind of forensic investigations of claims made by Israel or of strikes at the Washington Post.

And it's quite like, you know, it's

really quite interesting.

I mean, I've always been like a hate reader of all of these papers.

I still continue to read all of them.

But

when you're reading them, you recognize that there actually is a lot of good journalism that happens at major publications that put money behind it because, you know, there are real journalists there.

What we learned in our investigations, Ryan and myself, was the role of people like Joe Kahn and others

the higher-up positions at the New York Times, who really appear to be total ideologues.

And it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, Amy Goodman and I would often talk about this, that you don't like really need a conspiracy anymore.

It's not like you need the fat guys with the cigars in the back room because they just do it.

You know, they just, they, they know their marching orders.

But these past two years of the Gaza genocide, it seems pretty clear, both from what we can ascertain publicly, but also what we know from our reporting privately, that

there was an intervention that took place constantly from people in high leadership positions at the New York Times to ensure that the coverage would give an overarching impression that was in line with Israel's war.

That seems quite clear, both based on our reporting and just by reading the paper.

And Jeremy's point about these forensic units that are popping up in these papers is a really key one.

Actually, the BBC Verify just did a really good video that confirmed all of our reporting about the IDF, you know, looting and burning its way out of Gaza.

But at the times, you remember that story

where a bunch of like Israeli hooligans were

going around Amsterdam like

the soccer thugs.

And they got beat up by the most handsome man of all time.

Yes.

And the New York Times

Visual Investigations Unit or whatever they call it, like did some very good reporting on that that showed like exactly what had happened.

And New York was asleep while this was going on.

When New York woke up, they literally flipped the script and basically rewrote the story.

And as we learned internally, the visual investigation people took their names off of the story.

They're like, we don't want anything to do with this.

This is not true.

And

these units inside these mainstream outlets consistently are doing the best reporting because

they're basing it on satellite images, videos that they find on the internet, and just actual reality.

So they just say, here's what we found.

Here are the things that we can prove happened.

And that turns out to be a better way of doing journalism than, well,

we think that it was a pogrom in Amsterdam.

And so that's what we're just going to put in the headline.

One final thing, at least related to the New York Times.

Just today, there's been this, just over the weekend and today, there's been this supposed document that's attributed to Yahweh Sinwar that's made its way into the New York Times.

And it, what it purports to show is that, like, his plans for October 7th and like his strategy of burning and attacking these kibbutzes and then getting Hezbollah and other Access of Resistance members to join the fight.

Now, since it's the New York Times and everything we've just discussed here, I think we should ask, like, what, how do you rate the veracity of this document and like what it says in the New York Times?

Are you aware of this?

Yeah, I'm curious for Jeremy's take because the Times has in the past

published, you know, clearly fake documents that the Israeli intelligence services passed to them.

So that's got to be your first impression.

Second, the way that they said they authenticated it was by talking to seven Israeli officials.

And it's like, guys, like you got it from Israeli officials.

You can't authenticate it.

So their sources confirmed the sources confirmed.

Somebody gives me a document.

Great.

Is this document authentic?

Yes, it is, Ryan.

Excellent.

I mean,

there's two,

I mean, there's two basic ways of looking at this.

And we're actually working on this story right now and taking a much closer look at it.

So I'm going to reserve comment about the veracity of it.

But I will say that we did a story some months ago

where the New York Times reported on a document that purported to show a connection or a nexus between Iran and Hamas in preparing for the October 7th attacks.

And

they quoted a guy that they said was a former Hamas official who remains in contact with the group.

And

he,

they didn't quote anybody else sort of validating the document, but they hung the thing sort of on this one guy.

So we went and found that guy and talked to him.

And he said that the reporter from the New York Times would only show him like very limited parts of the document.

And they don't say that they only showed him part of it, but they basically used

his guessing based on a limited amount of information that they showed him to make the piece definitive.

And

so, even if the document is legitimate, I'm not saying that it is because we're looking into it, but even if it's an authentic document,

the way that the New York Times reported on it, because now it's been published in full, was highly misleading and dramatically oversimplified, and told their readers to draw conclusions that even the document itself doesn't, because the Times didn't publish the document when they did their story on it.

It then came out later.

But what I would say is that while there is some history of Israel pushing and peddling fake documents, this happened in BILT, the largest and most powerful newspaper in Germany.

They published totally fake documents about Hamas that had been peddled to them.

Another publication in Britain did the same.

The New York Times has published

really

kind of fanciful interpretations based on IDF claims about what documents show, but implying that sort of the dot they've done their own review of the documents.

All of that is true.

But I think the most insidious part of this is that when they do have something that is legitimate or is real, the way that they then report on it, when you then look at the primary source documents, is crazy town.

It's not accurate.

It's bad journalism.

So we're, you know, stand by because we're looking at this carefully.

But even what we already know is, let's say this document is authentic, it doesn't even say what the New York Times claimed it said.

It's sort of like

when a movie gets panned, and then like the studio will release ads for the movie where they'll quote critics, but it'll be like, this movie is ellipses

good.

Yeah, and that's, that's the best, that's the main reason to think that this like document might be actually authentic, that the New York Times had to stretch so far to say something misleading about it.

Like if

you're going to make an inauthentic document, you would,

you know, Israel, when they make their like the audio recordings between two Palestinians,

they don't leave, they don't leave any room for you to be curious.

They're like, you know, that was, I saw Sinoir plant that bomb, you know, in the crib.

Yes, and I told him, do not plant bombs in children's cribs.

That's terrible.

And so the fact that they had to twist this one so much, you know, means that we need to look closer.

That maybe it actually is authentic.

And they're obsessed with, they're obsessed with like the Yahya Sinwar.

Remember also the stories about like how Sinoir was like getting fat in a tunnel and you know was like hanging out.

And then meanwhile he when he he dies in battle with the Israelis and they do an autopsy and he had

not eaten in days and

he doesn't go down in a tunnel, quote unquote, hiding like a rat.

He had been

chewing into soldiers.

One of the most plainly heroic

acts of bravery we've seen.

They didn't realize

how brave it made him look.

That story, too, about how he got fat in the tunnels, it's like, who's your fucking source on that story like who's the guy who knows sinoir's location but is like i have to tell the new york he's getting fat i'm too afraid to confront him directly but they were doing this

story about it maybe maybe he'll start doing intermittent fasting

I mean, like, I follow everything, like, all, like, everybody.

I'm following the big picture, but like, the one area that I really

am confident that I know is the area relating to these negotiations and sort of the perspective of the resistance.

And

because it's like almost all I do, you know, reporting-wise, right now.

And the New York Times also did these stories about how the new commander who took over as head of the Kassam Brigades thinks this about the negotiations or wants this to happen as a result of the negotiations.

It all turned out to be a complete lie.

A total and complete lie.

So I sometimes like I'm I just have one small part of this whole genocide that I have sort of focused on as a reporter to try to give people information that is like real, that they can do something with and that no other outlets are really doing right now.

Like we have a commitment to do this at dropsight.

And the number of lies that I've uncovered, just like passing by every day reading it is astonishing.

So if you then expand that out out of side of the little lane that I operate in in this story and you think about the whole spectrum,

it's one of the most epic lies, a series of lies that have ever been told.

These two years, it's just

an avalanche of lies that have descended upon the world.

And it would take, you know, it would take a full army of journalists to dismantle it.

And the problem is that many journalists are part of it.

You know, it's just astonishing.

All right, Ryan Grimm, Jeremy Scahill, Dropsight News.

We're going to leave it there for today.

I want to thank you both for your time and for the work you've been doing at Dropsight, which has continues to be invaluable in terms of

my media diet.

So once again, thanks so much for your time, guys.

Well, thank you, fellas.

All right, and one last plug at the end.

I'll plug it once again: Hess and I, Reanimator, October 28th.

Come watch it, do a live stream with us.

Come watch an awesome horror movie.

And then also check out our new merchandise at chopotraphouse.store.

That does it for today's show, everybody.

Till next time, bye-bye.