The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm John Favreau.

I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

On today's show, we're going to get into the news that inflation and jobless claims are higher, the latest with the looming government shutdown, and Tommy's interview with Senator Chris Van Holland, who stopped by the studio on Wednesday.

But we're going to spend the first part of the show on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old conservative activist and media personality who was very close to Donald Trump in the White House.

A killer who, as of this recording, has yet to be found, fired a single shot.

from a rooftop that hit Kirk in the neck while he was answering questions from students during an event at Utah Valley University.

It was what he did for a living.

He'd go places and hold events where he talked to people who cared about politics and tried to organize them.

Among the many reasons I've been so shaken up by this assassination is admittedly the most self-interested, which is

that's what we do too.

That's what other media figures and politicians and organizers and activists do all over the country every day to see if we can argue and persuade and maybe change some minds.

Charlie Kirk did that for more than a decade, and he probably encountered hundreds, if not thousands, of libs like us who didn't just disagree with his pretty extreme views, but found them odious and even hateful.

And do you know what they did?

They debated him and yelled at him and probably called him some awful and maybe well-deserved names, but

they didn't hurt him.

They didn't commit political violence.

This person did.

And now a father of two young children is dead.

And now some people might decide that participating in politics and organizing is not worth the risk.

And some other people might decide that committing political violence is worth the risk.

And I think that's a pretty fucking scary place to be.

So that's where I am today.

Dan,

where are you at?

You know, I went, when I first heard the news, it was a very 2025 experience where I was scrolling my phone.

I saw a report.

I believed it might be misinformation because it's the internet in 2025.

And then I saw the video.

And because it's the internet in 2025, I wondered if it was a deep fake.

And then when I heard the actual news, I had the same reaction you did, right?

And there is self-interest there as well, because even though I disagreed with every word that probably that Charlie Kirk ever said, we've disagreed with him vehemently.

We just talked about him on this podcast two weeks ago for the things he said about Taylor Swift that we found odious.

The idea of anyone, left, right, or center, being gunned down for doing politics, for saying their opinions in public is a horrifying thing.

And I was horrified because I also knew he had two young children.

and a wife that you can have empathy for his family without having to celebrate him in any way, shape, or form and to agree with him in any way, to have empathy that there are two kids who now do not have a father, a wife who does not have a husband.

And I also was horrified because I knew what was going to happen.

I knew what the reactions would be.

I worried about what the right would do to use this as a pretext for something much worse.

I knew that there was our president.

who we will talk about later, was incapable of speaking to the moment in a way that you would always hope in something like this.

And it's just, it is a very dark day because it's not an isolated incident, as we also talk about.

It comes in,

this is something that we've, it says something about where this country is right now and where it's going, both the assassination of Charlie Cook, the things that happened before it, and how so many people, particularly on the right, but not exclusively on the right, reacted to it.

So in terms of where this investigation stands right now, we have been getting some mixed messages from the podcasters running the the FBI, Dan.

Cash Patel, who apparently loves to live tweet a manhunt,

first posted that the shooter was in custody.

Then two hours later, he posted again to say that the person had been released after questioning.

That is unusual for the FBI director to update people on that.

Then the FBI posted photos of a person of interest, a male figure wearing a black long-sleeved t-shirt with an American flag on it, a baseball cap and dark glasses.

The police recovered what they think is the murder weapon, a high-powered bolt-action rifle wrapped in a towel and discarded in the woods.

At first, there were also unverified reports that the ammo recovered with the rifle was engraved with statements, quote, expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology.

And then a senior law enforcement official walked that back, telling the Times that the report had not been verified by the government and, quote, did not match other summaries of the evidence and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted.

This is why everyone should be very careful with information that comes out early, unverified reports.

And I guess now we have to not take anything the FBI director says as truth because he might retweet, you may tweet something else completely contradictory a couple hours later.

So I guess we have to wait for that as well.

But the case will probably be solved soon because Cash Patel and Dan Bongino have flown to Utah to personally oversee the people who have decades more law enforcement experience than either of them.

It doesn't quite feel like the buttoned up operation we've come to expect from federal law enforcement, does it?

No, it is extremely bizarre and frankly, probably counterproductive for the director and the deputy director of the FBI to go

to the scene of the crime for something like this.

Yeah.

I guess in fairness, podcasters have solved a lot of mysteries over the years and maybe they're on the case.

I don't know.

But there is a, you know, we, there is this competition within the right to

take this as seriously as possible.

Not just the crime, but the but just the entire incident, right?

You have the flags at half masks for a private citizen.

You have J.D.

Vance canceling his appearance at a 9-11 memorial ceremony to fly Air Force 2 to Utah to pick up Charlie Kirk's casket and take it to his home of Arizona, right?

You have the director and the deputy director of the FBI stopping what they are doing.

There are lots of investigations happening all over this country that they are not involved in to focus on this.

And I can't imagine that having these two guys there is going to do anything to increase the likelihood or the speed by which the local officials on the scene apprehend this individual.

I'm sure, just from a law enforcement perspective as well, as you think about hopefully apprehending this person and then trying them, just like telling people we got this person in questioning and then now we're releasing them and then there's this other person, like it can't help the case.

No.

Or, I mean, it might not matter, but it's usually risks that law enforcement don't take.

So, as you mentioned, you know,

it's now obvious, if it wasn't obvious already, that we are in a deepening cycle of political violence

and the violence is targeting and it's committed by people on all points of the ideological spectrum, some people who don't even have cohesive, coherent ideological views.

In 2011, Gabby Giffords was shot at a town hall.

That's when you and I were still in the White House.

In 2017, Steve Scalise was shot at a congressional baseball game.

That was the same year progressive activist Heather Heyer was killed by a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville.

There was the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, the rioters who tried to kill members of Congress and the vice president and seriously wounded police officers on January 6th, the man who tried to kidnap Nancy Pelosi and nearly killed her husband in 2022.

the attempts on Trump's life in Pennsylvania and in Florida, the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's house getting set on fire, the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers outside a party in Washington, the assassination of Melissa Hortman, the speaker of the Minnesota House and her husband, and the shooting just the other week at CDC headquarters, where a gunman sprayed 180 rounds and took the life of a police officer over the COVID vaccine.

Any thoughts on why we're seeing the surge?

What we do about it?

Where the country goes from here?

Well, we've seen this before, right?

I had a long conversation with Heather Crax Richardson on this podcast this past Sunday about other periods in our history that felt like this.

She mentioned two, the period right before the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction, but obviously there's also the 1960s and 70s where we had the assassination of John Kennedy, Robert F.

Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Megha Revers.

We had the Weatherman bombings.

We had two assassination attempts on Gerald Ford.

And so we've been through this before.

We had in the 90s, there was the uptick in militia violence that ended with the Oklahoma City bombing.

So we have been here before.

I think that what makes this feel

worse now, or at least potentially more dangerous now, is we have a couple other factors in place.

Like we have never been more politically polarized.

The idea of the parties coming together to jointly condemn political violence, to work together in an even-handed way to combat it seems much less likely than at almost any other time, with the possible exception of immediately prior to the Civil War.

We are living in a social media-driven ecosystem, which doesn't just amplify, but incentivizes some of the most outrageous, most outlandish, and most dangerous

comments that people can make.

We have,

guns have never been easier to get in this country.

So we don't yet know how the weapon in this incident was acquired, but we know that just guns are readily available to people who may want to seek violence.

So all those things push us in a pretty dangerous direction.

And this is the important point, as we've seen in all the examples I give, is that political violence begets political violence.

Right.

And we don't have, as we'll talk about, we don't have leadership right now who is willing to calm things down or try to calm things down, but instead is actually trying to ratchet things up.

And that's a huge fucking problem and not something that we've dealt with, at least at the presidential level.

So, from the moment that the news broke that Kirk had been shot,

it was obvious that this was a political act and it would generate intensely political pressure that has certainly borne out over the last 24 hours.

Let's start with the reaction from the left.

I don't know about you.

I have yet to see a statement from an elected Democrat or media figure or prominent progressive that has not offered anything but condolences,

condemned political violence, urged restraint from Biden, Harris, Obama, the Clintons on down.

I have seen a number of mostly anonymous social media accounts with barely any followers say some absolutely horrific things.

And I've seen a few random people get fired for posting awful things only because right-wing influencers are finding those people and those anonymous media accounts and amplifying them, which only stirs the pot, of course.

It is obviously impossible to prevent random, mostly anonymous social media accounts from posting crazy shit.

I said this last night on YouTube.

We talked about this, but do we know how many are bots?

We do not.

Do we know how much AI is involved in some of this?

We do not.

Do we know how many are just not even American?

They're just posting from somewhere around the world.

We do not.

And that is not to say that that's what they all are, right?

There are plenty of people who are actually people posting these things, but we we just don't know.

And social media makes it seem like we are swimming in it, when in fact, that is not necessarily the case in the real world.

In fact, I am pretty sure it is not.

And in a country of 330 million people, right, like there are going to be people who say

horrible things and react to this in a horrible way.

On the other hand, it is pretty disturbing, right?

It's just so like anything, what are Democrats supposed to do about this?

Because, you know, we get tagged with it.

I mean, there is this massive asymmetry here, which is every single Democrat is being held accountable for something that some random person said.

Like you said, whether that person is a real person, which in some cases they certainly are because these people who have been fired from various jobs at universities and elsewhere are

those are actual people.

And there are very prominent MAGA media personalities, Republican officials, people with the ear of the president of the United States saying truly horrendous things, calling Democrats a domestic terror organization things like that um and so for every democrat to be held accountable for every anonymous account seems quite unfair when republicans are not being held accountable for what people they know and are advised by and consort with say so that seems very unfair there is

i think

a

just

Maybe it's the world we live in now.

Maybe it's something that was always there, but is amplified simply by social media because the things that people would say privately are now being broadcast across the internet publicly

is

just

amongst some people, and it's a small number of people.

We've seen this in other incidents, right?

We saw this around the

murder of the United Healthcare CEO.

Is just an inability to find empathy, right?

Or to think that having empathy is somehow showing weakness or

consent to

or agreement with the worst views of the victim.

Right.

Yeah.

And I think that that, you know, and that is another thing that spreads, right?

That becomes a debate online.

That, like political violence, that res, that response to violence is, begets more responses like that because it creates this debate.

And, you know, that you sort of get this one-upsmanship about how outrageous can you be?

You know, what's the most aggressive stand you can take?

And it puts us in a very bad place.

But I do want to just emphasize this one thing, that I do not believe that

Democrats, the American people, elected Democrats, everyday Democrats, people listening to the show

agree with those comments.

There are some who believe that, but that does not represent.

And I also don't believe that some of the worst comments that we're seeing from Republicans represents the view of most Trump voters.

I think most people see this and are horrified whether it is the murder of the Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House or a conservative activist.

And they think that is both of those things are bad and they both have to stop and that we have to do something in this country to get a hold of that.

That's how I think most people feel.

Yeah.

I mean, the accounts that I've seen, you know, because people are picking them out that have glorified this or

celebrated this or said so-and-so's next or all that kind of, like, I do not.

know any of those people.

I've never heard from any of them.

Like they're just, that is a tiny percentage of people.

There is another category of people on the left.

And, you know, and I have heard from these people, I've seen this, this, this posting, which is like, I'm sorry, I don't condone violence.

I don't want to celebrate violence, but I don't feel bad.

I don't feel sympathy for Charlie Kirk.

And he was a horrible person and he had said horrible things.

And I would just say for, and I get that, I would just say, like, you do not have to feel.

You don't have to feel sympathy for Charlie Kirk if you don't want.

I'm certainly not calling for that.

You can feel however you feel.

And you don't have to grieve him.

You don't have to forgive him, you actually just don't have to say anything about him at all.

I think if you are going to say something publicly,

then because we live in this world that you just described,

it is useful to think: what do you want your words to achieve?

And who do you want to persuade?

And what action do you want people to take?

And I think that for us

on our side, we are facing a very difficult situation right now because

we are a party or a movement or whatever you want to call us that very much believes in democracy.

And we are facing an opposition that has certainly acted for the last several years like they do not.

And

part of this is how do we define our values and our principles so that they are not just in opposition to them and that these are values and principles that we hold on to no matter what they do.

Because if we don't, they are not values and principles.

I believe that we are all created equal, that we all have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I think that we all deserve equal protection under the law.

I think we all deserve a basic standard of living.

I think we all deserve the protections in the Constitution.

No matter what you look like, who you are, where you come from, what language you speak, your gender identity, your sexual orientation, or how you vote.

If we believe that,

do we stop having those principles because the other side is so terrible and because they want to violate those principles and because they want to take away our rights?

Do we say, okay, because you don't care about my free speech or you don't care or you don't see me as a full person, then I'm now not, I'm going to change my principles so that I don't see you as a full person either.

And because you don't want me as part of the American experiment, now I don't want you as part of the American experiment either.

Because that means that those principles weren't real.

They have to be universal to be principles.

If this is what we believe as a movement, as a party, if we believe in democracy, we believe in pluralism, we believe that we got to respect and treat everyone else with dignity, then we have to hold on to those principles even when people are not respecting us.

And that's fucking hard.

It's really fucking hard.

And it's not fair.

And it's not fair.

And it's just, it's where we are.

But if we go down that road,

then

not only are we not going to win, but I don't know what we're going to be as a country.

This, where we are right now is something I've been worried about for a long time, which is we were progressives, Democrats, pro-democracy people had enough faith in the system that we could lose an election and come back.

And that was the, as horrified as everyone was in the response to Trump when he won in 2016, what did people do?

What was the response?

They engaged in peaceful protest at the women's march.

They started political organizations.

They ran for office.

They organized.

They made phone calls.

This new president, who we don't think should have won, but did win, starts to try to take away everyone's health care.

Everyone goes to, starts calling Capitol Hill.

They go to Capitol Hill.

They protest.

They win elections to get power back.

They take the House back.

They take the Senate back.

They take the White House back.

And the way things have played out from the 2024 election to now have reduced people's belief and faith that's that the way to solve problems is traditional politics, that you can do it through the system.

And I understand that sentiment.

I am deeply worried about the sanctity of our election system.

I'm deeply worried about our ability to win elections when Donald Trump very well could deploy ICE agents to stand outside of precincts that they don't want Democrats to turn out to.

That you could send the troops into cities to to make it hard to get to the polls.

Like I worry about that too.

But if we give up the idea that

the way to stop Donald Trump is for us to organize, to vote, to be citizens, then the whole system collapses.

Like that is it.

I know.

I think some people think it's like we're trying to say, we got to be as good as them.

Or, you know, when they go low, we go high.

And we're better than that.

It's not about that.

It's about, it's about us, right?

It's about the system that we want to live in.

It's about the country we want to live in.

We want to live in a country that is free from violence, where we can say what we want to say, where we can do what we want to do.

Like that's, that's what this is actually about.

And you're right.

People have lost faith in that.

And I totally understand that.

I go back to that

tweet from Sean Illing that I mentioned on YouTube last night, which is it's either conversation or violence.

And I saw someone say, Yeah, I don't know why we're still trying to persuade these people.

These people, we can't persuade any of these people.

We just have to, we have to mass deprogram them.

I saw that mass deprogramming.

I saw that.

I said, mass deprogramming them.

And I was like, well, what do you think the mass deprogramming is?

That's also persuasion.

First of all, you don't know what mass deprogramming actually is, and I don't think it's ever worked, but that's also persuasion.

What do you think a protest is?

A protest is a form of persuasion.

You are trying to send a message by having your bodies in the street.

A strike, a mass strike is a form of persuasion.

Sitting outside a congressional office is a form of persuasion.

It is all forms of persuasion until you get to violence.

And there's a lot of people who I know do not want violence and do not think it's the answer, but also think that persuasion and politics is too difficult and too hard and too unfair when the other side has done what they've done.

And I get that, but there is no other option.

Someone sent this in our Discord this morning and I watched it.

It's one of my favorite or most memorable speeches from robert f kennedy um this is not this is the speech he gave after martin luther king was killed it's not the speech in indianapolis where he tells the famous one where he tells the crowd that for the were they for the crowdfunding for the first time the mindless men the next day the mindless menace of violence speech which is i would encourage everyone to

read it watch it well i guess you have to listen to read it or listen to it because i think there's only audio i i i listen to it on youtube but just the way he talks about the dangers of this cycle, right?

The danger when violence becomes the norm, the way in which we solve problems in this country, either political or personal in any other way, this the deeply dangerous downward spiral that is.

And that the only solution here is the ballot, not the bullet.

It's just a very powerful remark.

And it is.

You listen to that and it just does make you wonder, like, who could make in this moment could make that argument in a way that people would believe because I do think that's what people want I really maybe maybe I am the naive one maybe we are still puffing uh Obama hope fumes but I do believe that the vast majority of the American people do not want where we are they hate that we are this divided and there are certainly political partisans and we are among them who live in that divide and we have very strong feelings about it, but the vast majority of the country want something better than this.

And the question is, is there someone,

hopefully from our side, who can speak to that desire, who can make people actually believe that there is something better than what we're in right now?

Because what we're in right now fucking sucks.

Here's

one of the many statements about Kirk's death.

The statement calls it, a wound to the soul of our nation.

Whether we agree or disagree with the words a man speaks, we must never lose sight of his humanity,

nor forget the sacred dignity that lives within each and every person.

We must not allow righteous anger to harden into hatred, nor trade the dream of America for the nightmare of division.

That was a statement from Martin Luther King Jr.'s children that they put out.

Charlie Kirk called their father an awful person and said that the passage of the Civil Rights Act was a mistake.

They surely knew that.

That is the statement they put out.

That is grace.

That is a hard thing to do.

And,

you know, it's a lesson.

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All right, let's get to the

right.

You can imagine the reaction has also been fairly intense.

One bright spot was Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican who actually has an initiative called Disagree Better.

Quaint.

I like it.

Here's a sampling of what he said on Wednesday evening when the situation was still incredibly raw.

We desperately need leaders in our country, but more than the leaders, we just need

every single person in this country

to think about where we are and where we want to be.

To ask ourselves,

is this it?

Is this what 250 years has wrought on us?

Unfortunately, for all of us, many of the most influential figures on the right have struck a much darker tone in their posts.

Elon Musk posted, The left is the party of murder.

Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Rychik, this is war.

Andrew Tate, civil war.

Laura Loomer, it's time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single leftist organization.

The left is a national security threat.

Mike Chernovich, congressional hearings now, every billionaire funding, far left-wing extremism.

Soros, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, massive RICO investigations now.

And Stephen Miller, who called the Democratic Party a, quote, domestic extremist organization, even before Kirk shooting multiple times, added, quote, the fate of millions depends upon the defeat of this wicked ideology.

What ideology?

The one that, quote, hates everything that is good, is at war with family and nature, that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth.

Okay.

And things weren't much better off social media.

Let's look.

The Democrats just killed Charlie Kirk today.

They're desperate.

They're losing.

They want to intimidate you and me and everybody else.

Charlie Kirk's a casualty of war.

We're in this country.

When is the Democrats going to stand up and apologize for the hatred and the lies that they have fed their base that's led to these actions?

They are at war with us.

Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.

Luckily, all of this was moderated by the video message released on Wednesday night by our commander-in-chief, national leader, Donald Trump.

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals.

This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.

Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.

When you clicked on that video, did you have even the Even the smallest bit of naive hope that maybe he would try to be even somewhat presidential?

I I did not, John.

Yeah.

And it was actually worse than I thought.

Me too.

It just says

so much about how what low regard everyone in the country, Democrats, Republicans, Trump supporters, the media has for Trump's humanity that no one, not a single person expected him to do what any other president would do at this time, or frankly, any other human would do, which is to try to unite the country.

He could not admit to, as Spencer Cox very eloquently did, the fact that political violence is happening on both sides, that a Democratic legislator was murdered in her home just a few months ago.

That someone tried to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan, tried to burn down the home of the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania.

It's happening on both sides, and he can't say that because it doesn't fit his political narrative.

And so he couldn't, like, there are times when Trump has just simply failed because he lacks any sort of gene for empathy.

But this was actually worse.

He poured gas on the fire by using the term radical left.

And it just,

Donald Trump

enabled

and then pardoned the perpetrators of the largest mass incident of political violence in recent American history.

And because he has no capacity for introspection, he just glosses right over that.

And it's, it's just, it's very bad.

It's very dangerous.

And I left that feeling so dark and so frankly so concerned about what comes next.

I mean,

he gave that speech with absolutely no knowledge.

They didn't have a suspect.

They don't have a motive.

It seems like it was, for all we know right now, it was just one person,

not a radical left, not organizations, not one person who shot Charlie Kirk.

Just like it was one person who killed Melissa Hortman and her husband, and one person who went and beat the shit out of Paul Pelosi, and one person who tried to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler and another one in Florida.

And this idea that there is an assassination attempt or an assassination, and he doesn't even know who the person is.

There's no suspect in custody.

They don't have any leads that the president would know about last night because clearly that we're recording this Thursday afternoon, we still don't know.

And he would just give that speech at a time like that and then start to threaten left-wing organizations that funded.

What are you talking about?

What is he accusing them of?

Like, I thought, don't we all have the protections of free speech?

Didn't he run?

to protect free speech?

Wasn't that a big part of the movement?

Because free speech is protected unless you directly incite someone to do something urgently right away.

That is the standard for what is not protected under free speech.

Other than that, free speech is protected.

So is free speech protected for all of us?

Or is free speech just protected for MAGA folks when they want to say stuff?

But if anyone else says stuff, then we're going to find you and fire you and arrest you.

And the State Department says they're not letting immigrants in who might have

said something bad about Charlie Kirk's assassination on Twitter.

Like what, this goes back to my, like, what are the standards here?

Is free speech for everyone or is free speech just for the regime in power?

Well, it's been very clear since the moment Trump took office that this whole idea of freedom of speech that they ran on, this ending of cancer culture is bullshit.

They just wanted to be the ones in power who could do the canceling, who could dictate the speech, who could police the speech.

That That is why they are, that's what's happening with the law firms, that's what's happening with the universities.

It is what, it is why they, the president directed his Department of Justice to investigate people who spoke out and said that the election was won legitimately in 2020.

I mean, this is, it's like, it's, it's absurd that, but this is what is happening.

It's just,

it's like we, everyone has such low expectations for Trump.

Right.

That he gets away with so much.

Like, this is a deeply dangerous, deeply irresponsible thing that he did last night.

Like, you're right.

He had no information, none.

And you and I have been in meetings about when a president can speak and what we know and the dangers of going out before you know anything.

And he did not wait, did not care, and just only did this in a way that advanced his chosen political narrative.

The country be damned, more political violence be damned, only to help himself and his political allies is what this was about.

And it's just so deeply cynical and deeply dangerous that, like, he, like, I mean, I just don't even know what to say about it.

It's so bad.

And it was very planned, right?

It wasn't one of his off-the-cuff comments either.

Yeah.

And look, like, I, I, you know, you read some of the coverage today, and and Charlie Kirk was like, you know, family to the Trumps and a lot of people in the White House and that movement.

And he was a very big deal in that movement.

A lot of people were very J.D.

Vance.

They were very, very close to him.

And you can imagine, like, I can imagine if we were in the White House and someone like really close to us, who we'd been in politics with for a long time, was assassinated like that, that I could see myself saying something where I like flew off the handle and said something in public that I wish I could take back.

So like, this is not that, right?

Like, I would, I would give them the grace to say a few crazy things because they're angry.

This is like a much more, we're going to defund these organizations.

We're going to go after them.

We're going to prosecute.

We're at war right now.

It's a problem.

This is like, you don't want to sound like a fucking crazy person, but like,

this is not what you,

a horrific assassination happens to someone that you're ostensibly close to and care about.

And like the reaction is not,

even if the reaction is pure, we must avenge his killer.

We must bring justice to this killer and bring this person to justice.

You understand that?

But like, we're going to now go to war with the entire Democratic Party and the left, like millions and millions of Americans who just happen to believe differently than you do.

And this idea that what they've been doing too is if you call them authoritarians, if you say that he's consolidating power like an authoritarian would, or that it's a fascist regime or a totalitarian regime or any of this kind of stuff, then you can't do that because then you are inciting violence as well.

Well, no.

We have to, because then that means that you can be an authoritarian regime and no one can oppose you because if they oppose you and call it out, then you can just say, no, you're inciting violence and you're dangerous.

Like that doesn't work.

We all happen to believe that, yes, he is engaging in authoritarian consolidation right now.

He's acting like an authoritarian.

And the way to oppose that is not violence.

It should not be violence.

Not only is it morally repugnant, it's ineffective.

So it's like,

yes, we're going to be able to say that this administration, what he's doing is lawless.

It is against the spirit of the Constitution, if not the letter of the Constitution.

It looks like other authoritarian regimes in the past, and that the way to oppose it is through electoral politics and peaceful, nonviolent protest.

I mean, if you'll remember in 2024, after the

first attempted assassination on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, there was this whole effort from the right, the Republican Party, the right-wing media to try to police everyone's language, which is if you correctly said that Trump wanted to be a dictator, you were inciting violence.

If you correctly said that Trump wanted to use the government to go after his political opponents, you were inciting violence.

And

it's an attempt to cow Democrats into silence, to not make the case, to cow citizens into silence.

What is different now is that they have the entire full force of the federal government to police language, right?

They have the FBI and the Department of Justice to investigate the people they want to investigate.

They have the IRS to go after these organizations.

They have the bully pulpit of the White House to shape the narrative as they see fit.

Like, that's why this is so dangerous.

It's a bunch of like red hand civility bullshit before, and it's up to Democrats to decide whether they're going to fall for that or not.

But now it's real.

And we have seen this

through ever since, basically ever since January 6th, you are looking in the prosecutions of Trump.

You are Republicans are, there are people on the right, many of whom now work in the White House who are looking for a pretext to use the power of the government to shut down political political opposition in this country, to lock in power.

And

that is the language that people are using right now.

And that is something that Trump could have disabused if he was a different person in those remarks.

And he did not.

He actually enabled it.

And I don't have the answers to what to do about this if this starts, but I would say that if you are someone who opposes Donald Trump and opposes his movement, then, and they go after someone, even if you don't agree with that person, even if it's some organization you haven't heard of, like we all got to speak up and stand together on this because

they have already been doing this.

They are counting on, you know, picking on and targeting people who are unsympathetic characters, right?

John Bolton, we've talked about this, or some organization that people, or, or they'll go after pro-Palestinian protesters, right?

So they're looking for, to target people where there are wedges within the anti-Trump movement and we can't let that happen.

They go after someone.

We all stand up for that person.

That's the only piece of advice I have right now.

I don't know if you have anything else.

No, I agree with that.

And I think this is particularly true when it comes to the trans community.

Yeah.

Right.

We've already seen in these first reports is an attempt to turn this into yet another justification for, you know, government-wide discrimination and hatred towards trans people.

And for whether we have all these conversations about what role trans policies played in the election and all of that, the point is, is the President of the United States and his allies are trying to dehumanize American citizens and we stand up for them, no matter what the poll says.

And you do that because

it's the trans community now.

It's someone else next, right?

And so, like, just, it's absolutely essential.

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Okay.

Best we can do for a lighter topic today is the deteriorating state of the economy and the impending government shutdown.

I'll start with the former.

On Thursday, we learned that consumer prices climbed higher than expected in August, raising inflation to 2.9%.

The Labor Department also reported a surprise increase in weekly unemployment claims, the highest it's been since October 2021.

Both pieces of data make the Fed's job harder, though reports suggest that they're still likely to announce an interest rate cut when they meet next week, though it's unclear how large it will be.

Trump, of course, has made his position known through post-threats and a scheme to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook and secure a Trump-friendly majority on the Fed.

On Tuesday, a federal judge said Trump didn't have sufficient cause to fire Cook.

The administration appealed that ruling on Thursday, asking the appellate court to remove Cook from the board by Monday.

So we'll see.

That's also the same day Senate Republicans are hoping to confirm Stephen Moran, one of Trump's top economic advisors, to the Fed board.

Moran said he plans to keep his White House job while serving as temporary Fed governor because we love and respect the Fed's independence in the White House, don't we?

So my sense of this, we don't know what's going to happen with the rate cut, but my sense is that the political impact of a rate cut, even if it's a big one like Trump wants, is probably short-lived or even non-existent.

What do you think?

I think that's probably right.

The increase in interest rates was an under-discussed topic in the 2024 election.

Because we talked a lot about inflation and food prices and gas prices and housing prices, that's all incredibly important.

But higher interest rates lock people into their homes.

It makes it hard for people to, if they have, if they bought their home, if they have a mortgage with a lower interest rate, they're not going to sell their home and get a new one.

If the newest interest rate is going to be higher, makes it so it affects housing prices, affects housing stock availability, affects credit card payments, getting a new car,

all the above.

Having said that,

a small rate cut that is just sort of an isolated incident is going to have be dwarfed by the rapidly increasing price of groceries

in terms of political impact.

And the bigger risk here is that Trump is going to get his rate cut against the better judgment of the Fed, which could lead to more inflation.

So he would be much better off, because I know long-term thinking is his skill, to wait until inflation has come down more and then get a series of much larger rate cuts at subsequent meetings to really boost the economy.

Instead, he's going to get this short-term thinking he wants now, which could make it harder to get more rate cuts down the line.

And by the way, this tends to be what happens in, or what has happened in countries where the ruler decides to take over the Fed or

this is why the Fed is independent because when that happens, usually they are looking for short-term political gain, which a rate cut could get you, but then long-term, you're fucked.

And, you know, I saw our old colleague Jason Fuhrman react to some of the numbers today and say, like,

we are heading into stagflation territory, which is, which is that's you're going to get high unemployment and high inflation.

So

two great tastes that taste great together.

Yes.

Not good.

One move move that's also great for a deteriorating economy, shutting down the government.

We talked about this a bit on Tuesday's show, but I want to get your thoughts on the latest.

Republicans seem to be coalescing around a short-term extension.

So October 1 is the deadline, and they are thinking about

try to move a short-term extension that gives them time to figure out a budget sometime in November or December.

Thune, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, has basically closed the door on including an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies in such a a plan.

Schumer told reporters this week, quote, what the Republicans have proposed is not good enough to get our votes, though not all Democrats are on board.

John Fetterman, no surprise there, said shutdowns are wrong no matter who triggers them.

And Tim Kaine said he's open to a short-term extension that lets them figure out the ACA subsidies by the end of the year.

What do you think about the current state of things?

And what's your take on Ezra Klein's piece, which is reportedly all the buzz among Senate Democrats, that Democrats should just refuse to fund what Ezra is calling Trump's authoritarian consolidation.

So I want to say this unequivocally.

Morally, politically, strategically, I think Democrats cannot vote to fund Trump's authoritarian takeover of our government.

I simply think you can't do it.

If you believe,

as all these Democrats claim to believe, that Trump is gathering power,

he is violating the people's freedoms, he's abridging the Constitution, he's doing all things.

If you believe that, you cannot simply vote to keep his government going in the same way.

You simply cannot do it.

That is, it is politically, there are two reasons why you cannot do it.

One is you're telling everyone that Trump is this huge threat to our democracy, that what he is doing is wrong, that our government is being corrupted, that our democracy is in danger.

And your response is then just to do what you would normally do and just let the government keep going without a fight.

The dissonance between those two positions is why people

would fuel the distrust and anger at the Democratic Party.

More importantly,

we have been trying for nine months.

The Democratic Party has been trying for nine months to grab the country by the lapels and say, here is what is happening.

This is bad.

There are massed ICE agents taking, disappearing people off the streets.

There are politically motivated investigations happening.

in the in the Department of Justice that Trump is violating court orders.

These things are, we need people to understand why this is dangerous.

And this is the one moment where he might possibly be able to grab the country's attention to make this case.

And if you let that moment pass, there will not be another one between now and the midterms, maybe not until between now and 2028.

And so you, I think you absolutely have to do it.

I think there is, this is high risk.

I listened to your guys' conversation on Tuesday where all of your feelings were on the table, right?

You're very like, and I get it.

I've been, you and I had this conversation off mic last week.

Like I wrestled a lot with, I have a piece sitting in my inbox or in my drafts folder, very much like Ezra's.

And I can't finish it because the hard part is, what's the end game?

Right.

What are you demanding?

And I have all the same concerns you guys had about,

I don't, I think that in Ezra's piece, he's perhaps a little naive about how the press would actually cover this.

I think they would blame Democrats.

I think I have real concerns about Democratic,

who our messengers are.

Can the Senate Democrats and Senate Democratic leadership really go out there and make a case to the country?

And this could blow up in our face.

But

here's what I think is we are in a dangerous situation.

And when you're in a situation like this, you have to be willing to take on high-risk strategies.

So the choice is either just keep losing or to actually have a chance to win a fight.

And if you don't have the fight, you don't have a chance.

And so, like, I get it.

It could be very bad for us.

Like, there could be, and we should not,

no one should look, should dismiss the dangers of a shutdown, both to the economy and to the people who depend on government services.

Like there's very real things here, but having, but just like that is real, but we, like, you have, if you think that things are going the way we think they are, then you have to be willing to have a fight, even if you might lose that fight.

I do think you're right.

I've been thinking about this too, about the

way the press will cover this.

Because I think what, if I was Trump, what Trump will do is, especially if they get the, there's any kind of rate cut next week, then he'll be like, you know, everything was on the everything was going great, finally got the rate cut, and now the demo, now the economy is doing bad because the Democrats have shut down the government, and that's his message.

And the Democrats are ruining everything and they're radical left, and they're committing all this violence, and now they're shutting down the government.

And you can see the political press, you know, just going along with that one.

Here's the good news, Sean.

Yeah, no one reads it.

Yeah, I mean, that's one thing we learned 2024 election.

It's not the problem we thought it was.

Yeah, yeah, maybe.

I do think you're right.

It's about, I mean,

it's about people in the party going out and communicating a forceful message and locking arms and making sure they're all, you know, not saying the same thing so they sound like robots with talking points, but like basically on the same page

and being forceful about it and creative and how they break through.

And I do, I do worry about that.

I do worry about that.

And

what are you asking for?

I do think that is a,

that's kind of a baseline you have to get.

This is where I've had the most struggle because there are lots of things you could ask for.

All of them individually seem small to your complaints, where you're like, we're doing this because democracy is in peril because there's an authority to take over.

And the response to that is, we need

additional premium support for the Affordable Care Act, which is a very important thing.

That is a very, like, that is in a

18-month extension.

Yeah.

And with, you know, in a normal, I think you, you very accurately in the Tuesday Pod described how this plays, how this could play itself out.

And in a normal world where you're having a typical budget fight, then that's a great thing to ask for, right?

It's the, I mean, the Republican, this was dumb and they paid a huge steep political price, but Republicans shut down the government because they wanted to defund the Affordable Care Act.

They weren't going to vote to fund it.

And so this is sort of the inverse, like a small board inverse of that.

I think I can't come up with a single thing that is worthy of it.

So I think you can come up with 10 things.

Have a long list of things that you want.

And it should be everything from restoring USAID

to the ACA to reopening the Department of Education.

Like have a bunch of use, use your demand list as a way to communicate what's happening, right?

A new set of, you know, due process for ICE or whatever.

Like

you're not going to get all of it.

You may only get one of those things, but it makes it easier to

at least, I think that is one way to solve the problem of every individual thing feels small in this moment, which is where I sort of been really struggling for weeks on this.

Yeah.

No, I think that's that's probably right.

Okay, when we come back from the break, you'll hear Tommy's conversation with Senator Van Hollen about the assassination, his visit to Gaza, his fight for Kilmar Brego-Garcia, and lots more.

Before we get to that, there is a new episode of Polar Coaster Out, Dan.

What did you guys talk about?

Well, we recorded this on Tuesday of this past week, and Caroline and I talked about the new polls that came out over the weekend that that show that Trump's political position is actually quite poor.

When you really look at these polls, it makes you wonder why so many people are so are preemptively surrendering to Trump.

He is in a very historically poor position.

His

approval rating is down.

His ratings in the economy are putrid.

Two-thirds of the country think he is raising their grocery prices, and they are rejecting his views on sending the National Guard places and vaccine policy.

And so we really dug into that.

We also talked about the new polling in the New York City City Merrill race and what and why it helps explain why Donald Trump is doing so much to help Andrew Cuobo in that race.

All right.

If you want to hear the full conversation or ask Dan a question yourself, subscribe to Crooked Subscription now on Substack, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or visit crooked.com/slash friends to learn more.

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I'm excited to welcome to the show Maryland Senator Chris Van Holland.

Senator, thank you for joining us today.

Tommy, it's good to be with you.

So I know you just recently got back from a trip to Jerusalem and the West Bank.

I'm very excited to talk with you about what you saw, but I did have to ask you first about a couple of breaking news stories.

We're talking at 2.40 p.m.

Pacific time on Wednesday.

We just learned that tpusa founder and conservative activist charlie kirk was murdered at his own event in utah this is obviously horrific unjustifiable it's an evil act um as of this recording the shooter is still on the loose we don't know who it was we don't know their motive but a lot of people are worried you know myself very much included that this is just the latest example of what feels like kind of constant escalating political violence.

And so my question is, like, how do you think we can calm things down?

And how do we keep this evil from spreading?

Well, it is another horrible moment for the country.

And this really is evil.

And we have to get back to the place where we as a country can have robust disagreements on political issues without violence.

I mean, violence is just unacceptable.

It's never the answer.

And all of us,

no matter where we are on the political spectrum, need to make clear that vigorous debate is one thing.

Violence is unacceptable, period.

And all of us have a role to play in making it clear that it's unacceptable.

Yeah.

And also, I think I would add dehumanization to that list, you know, because I think it's really easy to demonize your opponents, to call them names.

And look,

I'm talking to myself here, too.

But God, then you see a picture of Charlie Kirk with his two little kids.

And it's hard not to imagine yourself and his shoes and the impact on that family and kind of what this will mean for them going forward.

Well, look, that's exactly right.

At the end of the day, all of us

are peoples and all of us need to make sure that we remember our common humanity.

And in the midst of political battle, I agree.

It's too easy to demonize people.

And when you demonize

them in different ways,

then it becomes too quick a road, I think, to the dehumanization that you've talked about and from dehumanization to the kind of awful killing we just saw.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, I just think about his family right now.

And of course, we'll keep covering the story as we learn more.

I also wanted to ask you about, you know, there's this incident overnight on Tuesday night where more than a dozen Russian drones entered Polish airspace.

I believe NATO had to scramble a number of air assets to shoot them down.

There was this reaction from Trump on Truth Social that was kind of odd, like a passive voice observation.

He wrote, what's with Russia violating Poland's airspace with drones?

Here we go, exclamation point.

Do you think this was a deliberate provocation by the Russians?

And if so, like, what do you think happens next when it comes to sort of the NATO response?

Well, I know they're claiming that it wasn't deliberate, but

they lie through their teeth all the time.

And so I think this is a consequence of the fact that they don't see the U.S.

response as

credible any longer with respect to protecting and supporting the people of Ukraine, right?

We've made it clear from the beginning we're not going with the United States.

We're not going to put our own boots on the ground.

I agree, we should not.

But we have had this commitment to provide them with military support and economic support as a country that's under attack, whose freedom is under attack, whose democracy is under attack.

And from the very beginning of this administration, from the Trump administration, he has thrown the Ukrainian people under the bus.

He's coded it up to Putin.

And let's just be real.

I mean, Putin has played him like a fiddle.

Putin got the meeting, summit meeting in Alaska.

And instead of

calming things down and making progress or opening up a meeting between Putin and Zelensky.

We've seen increased aggression, increased Russian attacks inside of Ukraine, and now we see this.

So this is an unfortunate result of the fact that Putin has no respect for the president of the United States, despite the fact that he says otherwise.

Yeah.

Also on Tuesday, the Israeli government conducted airstrikes.

I've seen reports of 10 different airstrikes on a gathering of Hamas leaders in Qatar that were meeting.

They were there to discuss Trump's latest ceasefire proposal, hoping to begin a process to end the war in Gaza.

There's some debate over what the Trump administration knew or maybe when they were notified.

I was wondering what your reaction was to seeing this.

Well,

my reaction is that if you're taking out the folks that are gathered to review the latest proposal to release the hostages and enter into a ceasefire,

clearly you're not interested in achieving a ceasefire or the release of the hostages.

And the Netanyahu government has not really been interested in ending the war.

And I met recently with hostage families actually who said the same thing: that Netanyahu has prioritized his own political survival over the survival of their loved ones.

This was, as we've seen, one case where I don't know what the backstory is, but at least the Trump administration

said publicly that it's a very bad idea, Netanyahu, to attack Hamas on the soil of Qatar because they are the mediators in

this negotiation, as well as, you know,

being

a country that hosts lots of American military folks.

Yeah, up to 10,000.

Yes, up to 10,000.

So

look,

this was an action that again demonstrates that Netanyahu has no interest in ending the war in Gaza and is only put in his own political survival first and

not the people of Israel or the people of Gaza or anybody else.

It's only Netanyahu.

Yeah.

Last question before we get to your trip.

So the administration, as you know, has moved a lot of military assets to the Caribbean.

I've seen reports that there are now eight destroyers there, 10 F-35s were moved to the region, thousands of Marines, thousands of sailors.

There's reports that a submarine was moved to the Caribbean.

The Trump administration claims this is about drug interdiction, but that's a lot of firepower to take out a speedboat, right?

And so I'm just wondering, do you worry that this presages something larger, like a direct conflict with Venezuela?

Well, with Secretary

Marco Rubio,

it's very possible.

This is part of a long-term plan to get us into a much bigger conflict with Venezuela, including armed conflict.

Whether that's the goal or not,

the fact that they simply shot this boat out of the water, you know, thousands of miles from the United States, 11 people killed, this is an extrajudicial killing.

I mean, this is an illegal action.

The Trump administration has not yet put forward their legal justification.

But beyond that, if you're really interested in interdicting drugs, what you do is you stop the boat, you board the boat, and you try to follow upstream, right?

You try to find the big fish, not the little fish

on the boat running.

El Chapo is not usually on the drug running.

You know, I think

that's exactly.

And, you know, I think people should know that this administration's also proposed very deep cuts to the funding.

for the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, as well as other counter-narcotic efforts, efforts to go after some of the true ringleaders.

So they're cutting that budget.

They're reducing those resources while engaging in this extrajudicial killing.

Yeah, it's pretty horrifying.

Okay, so you visited the West Bank in Jerusalem.

I know you tried to get into Gaza, but were denied access by the Israeli government.

I think you and Senator Merkley even tried to just fly over Gaza in an airplane doing airdrops of assistance and were denied access.

Again, I'd love to hear why that access was denied.

But just big picture.

I mean, what did you learn on this trip about what's happening in Gaza that you didn't know before?

Well, you're absolutely right.

Senator Merkley and I went.

We went to Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt.

Overall goal to really take a close look, as close as we could get,

to this horrific humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

And really what the trip came away with was a lot of factual information supporting, unfortunately,

what we now realize is going on in Gaza, which is that the Netanyahu government, as one of its war aims,

wants to displace 2 million people in Gaza, some of them within Gaza right now.

But their ultimate goal, and they've been very open about this, is really to remove all Palestinians from Gaza, which is ethnic cleansing.

And what we did was went to various sites and witnessed firsthand the restrictions on allowing delivery of life-saving food and other humanitarian supplies into Gaza.

We went to the Rafah on the Egyptian side of the border.

And as you know, on the Gaza side of the border, there used to be a city of Rafah.

In fact, when I was there back in January 2024, that was a vibrant city of about 215,000 people.

When we went up to a high point on the Egyptian side of the border and looked in,

rubble.

Just rubble, right?

Remember that during the Biden administration, their red line was Rafah.

Don't go into Rafah.

Don't go too fast.

It's gone.

That city is gone.

And so.

You're saying the entire city has been flattened based on what you're saying.

Yeah, I mean, if you look with your naked eye, it really is rubble.

And you've probably seen some of the

satellite photos before and after.

And

it's flattened.

And it's just one example of what's happening within side of Gaza in terms of just the destruction, the level of destruction of civilian infrastructure, houses, schools, and of course,

you know, now over 60,000 people dead, half of them women and children.

And so on top of that, though, you have this effort to really prevent.

life-saving humanitarian assistance from getting to starving people.

Well, yeah, I want to ask you about that because Senator Merkley, who is with you on this trip, posted a video where he said the two of you received a briefing about aid reaching Gaza that he said just didn't reflect reality at all.

I think Senator Merkley called it pure propaganda.

Who gave you that briefing?

And what was the line they were trying to sell?

And what's the reality as far as you can tell?

Sure.

That was really a joint briefing at a place called Karim Shalom, which is down in, you know, it's in sort of southern Israel,

close to the Egyptian Gaza-Israeli border.

It's one of the two main crossing points now from Israel into Egypt.

It's where you've seen trucks having a very difficult time, in so many cases, getting stuff through, things being rejected by COGAT, including maternity kits, because they have these teeny little scissors in them.

So the briefing was from COGAT.

These are sort of the Israeli authorities that are in charge of

controlling the delivery of food and other humanitarian assistance into Gaza.

The other was GHF,

the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

This is the organization that has led to

people having to storm just a very few sites for food and really become a death trap.

And so the stories that they provided, for example, GHF essentially denied that they had become a place for killing fields.

Even though we later in our trip, Tommy met with some doctors who'd been on the ground close by who reported that every time GHF opened these four sites or one of the four sites, they would prepare the boutique bags.

Because as people, desperate, hungry people, starving people, fled to try to get some food for themselves or their family, they were in many cases shot and killed.

The estimate's over a thousand people.

And, you know, GHF essentially

said they weren't in any way responsible for any of this happening.

But when you set up four sites

after

about a 75-day total blockade of food, four sites for 2 million people to get food,

It's perfectly predictable that starving people will rush those sites.

What's not predictable is that so many would be shot and killed, including by the IDF.

Yeah, I mean, there are some really awful stories coming about about sniper teams just sort of indiscriminately shooting people, taking up bodies.

There's this BBC report about like a biker gang that's been doing security.

I mean, just the reporting is awful.

I mean, I think, look, part of what we're getting at here is people who care deeply about what's happening in Gaza, who want to end the war, I think a lot of them feel despondent because, look,

when October 7th happened, I watched it and I thought, this is evil.

This is like an indefensible act of terror.

But I also thought to myself, this is going to unleash hell on the civilian population in Gaza, many of whom probably hate Hamas with every fiber of their being, right?

But even knowing that, even knowing how brutal that response is going to be, I'm still stunned by where we're at almost nearly two years later, right?

It just seems like

the situation on the ground is getting worse every day.

It's not just the bombardment anymore.

It's this constant on and off switch of starvation.

And I feel like I just, I no longer know, it's like you can't scream loud enough.

No one is listening.

You cannot make this war end.

And I'm just wondering what your advice is to people who feel that way and who just feel like the world is just watching as this horror is inflicted on people in Gaza.

And also the United States is completely complicit in it.

Well, we are.

So first of all,

people need to keep screaming about this, right?

We cannot be silent in the face of what's happening right now in Gaza.

Senator Merkley and I have both said many times that Israel was perfectly within its rights to go after Hamas after the horrific October 7th massacres that took place in Israel.

In fact, they had a duty to do so.

But what has happened has gone way beyond the net Yahoo government targeting Hamas to imposing collective punishment on the Palestinian people.

And that is where you see this this awful level of destruction.

And

what really hurts from the perspective of the US citizen is: number one, the sheer inhumanity of all of it, but that we are complicit in this.

And so, what can we do?

I mean, many of us have been trying to cut off US taxpayer-funded military assistance to the Netanyahu government that it's for use in Gaza.

I mean, we held a vote in the United States Senate in the middle of the total blockade, the total blockade on food in the Gaza and said we should not be providing 2,000-pound bombs in the middle of this blockade.

People are starving.

And, you know, unfortunately, we had no Republicans.

We also didn't have on that vote very many Democrats.

Now, I think people are hopefully finally waking up.

This has been a problem that, you know, we had during the Biden administration.

I mean, they were feckless when it came to stopping what's happening.

And now you have a complete blank check with Netanyahu.

So

I know I'm restating the frustration and the problem.

I think we all of us collectively as Americans need to recognize that we are complicit in this and we need to call upon our government to stop.

Yeah, I mean, look,

as a party, look, I mean, you've been working on this a long time.

I've been following these issues for a long time.

Like 27 U.S.

senators voting to cut off weapons shipment to Israel would be unthinkable five years ago, right?

It's a sea change, relatively speaking.

But at the same time, I still feel strongly that elected officials in the party are way, way, way behind, not the base, but like the majority of Democratic Party voters.

And I'm wondering why you think there's still that disparity.

But also, I mean, I feel like the United States is way behind most other countries, right?

I mean, we are still funneling weapons to the Netanyahu government.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister of Spain just outlined nine steps to stop what he calls a genocide in Gaza.

That includes the permanent ban on arms sales to Israel and a ban on the use of Spanish ports or airspace to transport fuel or weapons to Israel.

I feel like that position is like quickly becoming the norm internationally.

Well, the United States clearly has the leverage to

change the behavior of the Netanyahu government

in Gaza.

And we just have refused to exercise our leverage and influence, whether it comes to weapons that are being used in Gaza, to the UN Security Council, where we're always the loner out there, people saying, stop the starvation, stop.

We vote otherwise.

I think it is really a bad reflection on the Democratic Party.

in Congress that we don't have more of our colleagues stepping forward.

You asked what the cause is.

I think there are many causes.

One of them is that many members, and this is not Democratic issue or Republican issue, really

listen to what AIPAC does.

And APAC, in my view, has become a very destructive force in American politics.

I don't think they're good for Israel.

I don't think they're good for the United States.

But they have a lot of influence here on Capitol Hill and in political campaigns.

And so I think it's really important for the Democratic Party to begin to call out AIPAC and make it clear that,

you know, APAC's continued attacks on anybody who speaks out against what the Net Yahoo government is doing is unacceptable.

Yeah.

Do you think Democrats should stop taking money from APAC?

I do.

I think that APAC is got

not only its regular contributions, but they've actually gotten into the business of being a super PAC

lately.

And so I do think it's important that Democratic parties around the country begin to deal with super PACs broadly.

I mean, APAC's one of them, but deal with other super PACs as well in terms of candidates making it clear they won't accept

super PAC money.

Obviously, they don't have total control over that, but I think we need a much

bigger deterrent within our party

to having this super PAC money coming in.

In the case of APAC, APAC, you're talking about a lot of Republican contributions coming into Democratic primaries, for example.

You know, APAC is running ads against me because of my position

on the situation in Gaza.

So I think it's really important that Democrats wake up on this issue.

Yeah, or at least be clear-eyed.

I think APAC, as you said, they attack any Democrat that disagrees with Netanyahu.

They repeatedly interfere in Democratic primary campaigns, usually by running ads through sort of affiliated PACs that have nothing to do with Israel.

It's like random other issues that they think will be damaging.

APAC has endorsed election deniers and insurrectionists.

And it's just so obvious to me that their preferred candidate is Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

And I just think we should all just be honest about that.

Well, that's absolutely right.

I mean, they are essentially a rubber stamp for Netanyahu, who now has been in power in Israel for a very long long time, a couple timeouts, but for the most part,

the leader of Israel.

And AIPAC has essentially

been the amen chorus for Netanyahu and his policies, both in Gaza now, but also on the West Bank, where we've seen an increase in settler violence, an effort to push more and more Palestinians off of their land, and an open declaration of war against a future two-state solution possibility, which, as you know,

by the day

is becoming more and more remote as a possibility.

Aaron Powell, yeah, I wanted to ask you about that because I know you're just in the West Bank.

I mean, as we've discussed, the West Bank has been carved up already by Israeli settlements.

The Israeli government just approved another settlement block that's called E1.

I won't get into all the details, but just the gist is it would, if constructed, would divide the West Bank into four parts essentially that are disconnected and make it impossible for the West Bank to constitute a contiguous Palestinian state in any real sense.

Given those facts on the ground, given sort of sentiment in Israel right now, given the hopelessness that Palestinians feel about the political process and their political leadership, isn't the two-state solution kind of dead or at least like a thing you can say you're for to avoid talking about kind of the harder reality?

I think that's very fair.

And I think it's increasingly the case.

I've been somebody who's not only held out hope for a two-state solution because it's the one approach that assures you know both self-determination and security and dignity to Israelis and Palestinians alike, but it has more and more become sort of a convenient way to deflect the conversation over bigger issues.

Like if we don't have a two-state solution, what does that mean?

Are you going to give Palestinians rights?

Are they going to get to vote?

Are they treated equally under the law in one state?

These are questions that too many people want to avoid.

Now, people like Smotrich, who's, you know, as part of the Netanyahu government, are very clear.

They will not have rights, period.

And their idea is to essentially put them into little, the Palestinians, the little enclaves, bantu stands, and have

two different legal regimes.

I mean, that is the definition of apartheid.

And people don't want to go down.

the road to that conversation.

And I understand it.

A two-state solution would avoid that.

But those are the kind of the difficult conversations that are being put off.

And I think, especially given what you just said about this E1 block, which would totally sever the ability of Palestinians to move from north to south within the West Bank, and what's happening right now with more settler outposts going up and more illegal outposts, even illegal under Israeli law, being legalized, it's becoming more and more untenable.

I think, you know, between now and the end of the year, we will have a final verdict on whether there's any chance left.

Yeah.

One other question about your trip.

I mean, I know you met with families of American citizens who have been killed by settlers in the West Bank.

I know you raised the issue of Mohamed Zahir Ibrahim, who's a 16-year-old, 16-year-old American citizen who has been rotting in an Israeli detention center since I believe February for the crime of allegedly throwing rocks on an empty street.

So I know you raised that with, I think, the Israeli government and I think, maybe Ambassador Hakabir is his team.

Just wondering if there's any progress, as far as you know, on getting Muhammad out, if there's anything you think listeners could do to push the issue.

And just generally speaking, like, how is there not

outrage that an American kid is rotting in an Israeli prison?

Like, why aren't there 535 statements from Congress a day?

Well, it is an outrage.

And we did raise it with Israeli government officials, and we raised it with the American embassy folks there and we are continuing to push because as you say,

this is a kid who was accused, I believe, of throwing stones.

They deny it, but even if you're talking about throwing stones, you know, this guy is locked up, cannot, you know, pre-trial detention.

And unfortunately, this is the sad reality.

um for palestinians every day and i often make the point uh tommy that if you can't get justice for an American citizen, then imagine the

situation and the impunity with which Palestinians are treated.

And this is an issue I've raised repeatedly.

Look, I've been front and center

when you've got Israeli Americans who are being mistreated or killed.

And in the case of October 7th by Hamas, or taken hostage.

But here we have a government, an Israeli government that's supposed to be our great ally, and yet we've had American citizens detained, but also five American citizens killed, murdered by either settlers or killed by the IDF, and no accountability.

It's like, okay, we're looking into it, and it never materializes.

And, you know, this includes like a, I think it was a 14, 15 year old kid who ended up with like 40 bullets through his body because he was in an olive grove, which, by the way, was on Palestinian, in the Palestinian area.

In any event, it is outrageous that the United States government has not done more to get justice for its own citizens.

We say that our number one priority is to protect Americans overseas, and yet when it comes to the government of Israel, we're not getting any accountability.

Yeah, and by the way, this is not

just a critique of Donald Trump.

I mean, Shireen Abu Akla

was one of the most famous journalists in the Arab world, Al Jazeera journalist for 25 years, I believe.

An American citizen was shot by an Israeli sniper while covering events in the West Bank.

And as far as I could tell, the Biden administration did nothing.

to get answers or get justice.

The Biden administration was totally hapless on this.

Secretary Blinken said at the time he would have an independent investigation.

We never got an independent investigation.

There was a American report done by General Fenzel that got classified.

I've been trying to get it unclassified

because at the very least, people need to know the truth about the very loose, what, you know, people call it rules of engagement.

I mean, that means what your rules are for when you shoot people without thinking first

or without checking first.

And there's no doubt that because we haven't pursued accountability in the case of Shireen Abu Akhle and demanded that the government of Israel change its rules of engagement,

I should back up.

We did demand it, but we never actually followed through.

And the result is more people are getting killed, including more American citizens.

Yeah, it's just impunity.

Well, Senator, look, I just want to say thank you for your moral leadership on this issue, for your political courage on this issue.

I know that, you know, not a lot of political careers are built on the back of, you know, calling out AIPAC by name and criticizing the Israeli government.

And also, you know, for your trip to El Salvador back in April and helping to secure the release of Kilmar Obrego-Garcia, I feel like this is a moment when Democrats in this country are pretty demoralized.

And we're all looking around to see who is showing leadership and doing things that feel inspiring and important.

And you've been a big part of a lot of that work.

And I just want to say thank you for that and keep it up.

And, you know, we're we're grateful.

Thank you for your strong voice, your world voice on all these issues, because I do think people are really sick and tired of what they perceive as too much finger in the wind and not enough

clarity of purpose.

And so I think all of us as Americans and certainly members of the Democratic Party need to really focus on our core values and not create these double standards that we sometimes apply.

Well said.

Well, thank you, Senator.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

That's our show for today.

Thanks to Chris Van Hollen for coming on.

Tommy Lovett, and I will be back with a new show on Tuesday.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Bye, everyone.

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