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“Get Out Now!” Iran Threatens Massive Attacks on Apple, Google, Palantir, and more, Trump responds
01:23:09
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, I'm Josh Spiegel, host of the podcast Lunatic in the Newsroom. If you enjoy journalism that drifts into mild panic, wild overthinking, and a guaranteed nervous breakdown, Lunatic in the Newsroom is for you.
- [00:12]
B
It's news like you've never heard before. The only newsroom with a panic button. You'll laugh, you'll cry and gasp in
- [00:20]
A
horror as the show spirals completely out of control. It's not just news, it's emotionally unstable.
- [00:26]
B
Lunatic in the Newsroom. Listen today.
- [00:30]
C
Hi, this is Alex Kanchowitz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a longtime reporter and an on air contributor to cnbc. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:06]
A
Welcome in, everybody, on this Tuesday. So glad to have you here. And it is getting uncomfortable in this war with Iran as they have now just issued a big statement against massive American companies within a blast radius of of Google, Amazon, Cisco, Apple, Meta, IBM, if you work in those companies, get out now. Because as of April 1, they are legitimate targets if any of their members continue to be executed by the Trump administration. So things just took a whole different turn. Which we're gonna talk about.
- [01:39]
B
Yes.
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D
What does that mean? We're also gonna talk later in the show to Ramzi Barut. He's a Palestinian journalist and author, an academic. Now he says we wanna talk to him about the new law in the Knesset where Israel has given them to execute by hanging any Palestinian prisoner that they have that's been convicted of attacking Israelis. Well, they have a 99% between 96 and 99% conviction rate. And so are we gonna see mass gallows now of Palestinians who did not get a fair trial? It's terrifying. It's something the international community has to and has condemned. But so what? What's gonna prevent this? It's a horrifying think of what can be shown to us on our screen now. Right.
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A
We saw the Knesset, you know, popping champagne bottles. Yeah. We get to execute Palestinians, you know, in a much larger capacity. 17,000 of them.
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D
Yeah. You guys, what, what world are we living in that this is gonna I mean they're already being tortured and raped, but now what? And so we are gonna talk about it. It's uncomfortable to be sure, but horrible.
- [02:42]
A
We're also gonna talk about oil shocks, what that means for the US Economy with Brandon Weickert is gonna be here. We're gonna talk about the Iran war, the oil piece of this. I just wanna ask Brandon specifically about these American scientists over this plasma UFO technology. Where are they going? Is the Chinese, are the Chinese responsible? How many Chinese scientists have also been disappeared by the United States in their program? So this like tit for tat. We're going to talk about these disappearing scientists.
- [03:11]
D
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- [04:46]
A
all right, well we're going to turn now to our top story. Get in your super chats if you can as well any kind of questions you have for Brandon about what's going on in this war. We will try to take them Here in a well, we are starting today with some critical updates on the Iranian war. This morning, Iran issued a bombshell statement essentially drawing a line in the sand. They announced that as of April 1, any execution of their government staff will trigger a massive response. They specifically threatened to attack Microsoft, Google, Apple, facilities worldwide, just Cisco, HP, Oracle, Meta, IBM, Dell. I think that's Palantir, Nvidia, GP, JP, Morgan, Spire Solutions, GE, Tesla, G42, Boeing. I mean, this is just a short list. We advise the employees of these institutions to immediately leave their workplaces to preserve their lives. Residents around these terrorist companies in all countries of the region should also leave their area within 1km radius and move to a safe place. Companies that are actively participating in terrorist designs will face countermeasures for every assassination target. And then the list there. These companies should expect the destruction of their related units from 8pm Tehran time on Wednesday, April 1, for every assassination in Iran. So, wow. This is a direct pressure move aimed at the Trump administration, whose key supporters have massive stakes in these tech giants. Of course, Apple alone that $500 billion US investment in manufacturing in the United States. So this is a, I mean, this is a massive response and escalation you continue to execute through assassinations of, you know, members of our military leadership, irgc, heads of our government, which Trump openly jokes about. Then we will destroy your American companies. What kind of pressure will he receive from the tech oligarchs, which basically run the White House anyway? Right.
- [06:52]
D
Well, which is a terrifying tit for tat because over the weekend, Israel targeted steel factories inside of Iran which were not owned by the Iranian government, perhaps supplemented. But then that means private companies that boost your economy are fair game. That's the, that's the message. That's what we. We did this first. That's what our side did.
- [07:14]
E
Yeah, yeah.
- [07:17]
A
Next we want to talk about US Boots on the ground. There's a question of whether this is just bluffing to, you know, like a show of force for Iran to buckle. Special Forces sources claim they are locked and loaded for something much bigger, a much bigger invasion, something that could last eight days or 80 days. And lastly, President Trump posted on Truth Social this morning, telling Britain and Europe that they're on their own for oil and they should man up and send ships to the Strait of Hormuz to get involved. I'll read that quote here in just a moment. So with all of this unfolding, someone closely watching the situation, doing a stellar job at it on X is Brandon Weickert. He is the host of the NatSet podcast, former Hill insider knows Washington inner workings and has to take a shower on a regular basis because of the inner workings of Washington.
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D
The swamp.
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A
The swamp. And Brandon is back with us. Great to see you again, Brandon. Welcome back to the show.
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B
And it's ironic because I live in Florida, in US I actually have a swamp right here in my backyard. So I have both literal and metaphorical swamp. So.
- [08:22]
A
Well, hey, by the way, check out 1945. Com. What? He's one of the chief bottle washers over there. Senior security editor at 1945.com. Great job. Love reading what you guys write.
- [08:33]
B
And also Natsack guy at Emerald tv, where I'm getting ready to drop a big report on the satellite issue that you want. We want, you want to talk to me about.
- [08:42]
A
Absolutely. So we're going to talk about the satellite stuff or talk about the latest developments with ground troops and all of that. So let's, let's start with that, that response from Iran and this April 1st sort of deadline, if you hit one of ours, we're going to, we're going to destroy Apple, we'll go after Google, we're going to hit all of these major tech companies as a response. What do you make of that?
- [09:03]
B
Well, I think the Iranians, I think I said this last time I was on with you. The Iranians have demonstrated they are a professional force. They are not Arabs, you know, that are poorly fed and poorly prepared for war. This is a very serious force and they are moving, they are countering us. Every time we go up the escalation ladder, they go right up there with us. And so it's, you know, as they said, it's tit for tat. You kill our leaders. We've killed, we've killed a lot of their leaders for over the last three weeks. Okay, we're going to go after the, the next economic strut. We've gone after the, the oil, the natural gas. We've gone of the tourism of the, the region. With that support, the Arab states in Israel. We've gone after helium supplies which are vital for semiconductor creation. So goodbye AI now we're going to target the tech sector in the region. Remember last year, President Trump, this was really a coup de grace for him. It's been undone now by this war. But last year, Trump went to Riyadh, he went to Qatar, he went to the uae and he had that whirlwind diplomatic tour where he made hundreds of billions of dollars of deals for America. And a lot of it was predicated on joint tech development for the AI sector. David Sachs was there, the former AI czar for Trump. And so now the Iranians are saying, okay, we're went after this, the, these, these tech companies in the region. And it's partly because, or largely because they assume in Iran, and I think they're not wrong to assume this, that at least some of those tech companies are being used by the west to create the conditions in Iran electronically for regime change. Remember, 40,000 Starlink terminals were discovered in the Islamic Republic of Iran during those protests. That kind of sparked this whole conflict in many respects from Dec until about February of this year. 40,000 terminals. That means that somebody had the money to purchase and procure and deliver high end Starlink terminals to the people who were trying to overthrow the Iranian regime. So it's not surprising to me that the Islamic Republic would target these tech companies in the Middle East.
- [11:18]
A
Well, well, Trump says, can I just, well go ahead.
- [11:21]
D
Can I just point out that's fact based. In fact, we've reported on this for years. We have two things we can refer to. One is the Stanford Report, the Graphica Report, that the United States conducts psyops in specifically Iran and Afghanistan using social media like Meta. So we know that that's true. Also we had the Google walkout about two years ago when Google employees were protesting that the technology was being used to track and target Palestinians. So those are fact based type. That's not, it's real. So I don't know exactly how to, how do we, you know, think about that as Americans knowing that we use those things. They're American companies, but they're used for nefarious purposes.
- [12:07]
B
Well, we have to remember that if we're talking about social media, a lot of these social media companies can find their origins in, in Q Tel, which is a CIA venture capital, you know, arm of the CIA. The reason that Facebook, one of the reasons Facebook got the early investments it got from certain part was because our intelligence services wanted the facial recognition. They were trying to train software. They were going to gain access to the database of, you know, faces in the Facebook in the early 2000s and they were going to learn facial recognition and they were going to use that as part of their, their data aggregation systems. That is now at a very complex level. But back then it was relatively rudimentary, you know, so you know, you've had intelligence services, the Israeli intelligence services all over the development of these social media platforms. And that's just one aspect of the tech sector. I mean the tech sector is itself and sort of an unofficial arm of the military industrial complex. I mean go back to 1947, Silicon Valley. The first, you know, the first groups that were out there were the early Bell Labs, which were military funded innovation hubs. And then eventually, you know, it evolved into this kind of quasi private sector endeavor. But it all began in the 40s, mid to late 40s, with the initial telecommunications investments, the initial investments into what we call technology development today, that all started with the US military, with the National Security Agency. So all this tech sector, the social media, all of it is derived at least in part from our military industrial complex.
- [13:49]
D
May I just correct myself, it was a Google sit in, it wasn't a walkout. The walkout was over sexual harassment. And in fact, all of those employees
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B
go hand in hand, right?
- [13:59]
D
You're sitting place, you're leaving a place. All of those employees were fired. So those people are safe from being bombed right now. So they were at least protected.
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A
So I was gonna ask, I mean my point in jumping in there was just to say President Trump today in a truth social post said they're decimated. Iran is decimated, all but gone. So how, I can't square that. I don't understand how they're able to pull this off. They'd be able to target all of America's major tech companies.
- [14:26]
B
According to decimated the. The President and Pollyanna Pete have the ability to time travel apparently into the past. And the end is the beginning. And the beginning. I feel like I'm in a Smashing Pumpkin song. You know, the end of the beginning. The beginning is the end. Ultimately, the fact is they've been saying that they were smashed and defeated on day one, right? And I just spoke for my show, I just did a pre recorded interview with the great Andre Martinoff, who is a Russian military expert, but he works in America. He's a, he's a, he's a technological guy for the military. He does defense contracting. He told me point blank because the Iranians won the war on day one. And part of that is because we do not understand what we're up against. Part of that is because we weren't serious. And what we were trying to achieve, we had. We still don't know what the objectives are. I was watching a clip from Sunday, the Sunday shows. Marco Rubio, the secretary of everything was, you know, claiming that, you know, the, the Iranian navy and air force are destroyed, which is how we know we can end this war. Well, it's like, dude, that's like the Iraqi navy, like that was never Even a real threat. Right. What are we talking about? Well, it's because they're changing the goal posts, and so, you know, we don't even know if we're winning anymore. I don't think we are. And I'm sorry, I lost in. In that. In that diatribe. I lost your question. But.
- [15:44]
A
Well, just the idea that they've been decimated. And so then if they're decimated, boots
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B
on the ground degraded. Right, exactly. So that if they've been. If everything's so successful, why is the 82nd Airborne deploying from the Fort Bragg. You know, where they're located in Fort Bragg? Why are they going to strippers and basically giving away all their money to strippers? And why are they selling all of their possessions before they leave? This, to me, does not sound like war is over. This sounds like a major escalation. And it's. It's very scary because, you know, I have family members, I have friends in the armed services. They're going to be going over there. I have somebody I know who's already deploying, and it's. Nobody sounds really jazzed about this. Nobody's really excited. And if you're selling your possessions and spending all your money on, you know, strippers and booze before you leave, the probability is you don't think you're coming back, which is definitely not a good mindset for the force to be in before they deploy on whatever crazy mission Trump has planned for them or Trump wants them to go on, because I don't believe planning in this administration should go together at all.
- [16:50]
A
So one of these strippers has gone viral. And. Yeah, a different kind of way for saying this. We'll play this here to put a point on what you're saying here. Listen to this stripper. Sorry, we'll come back. Let me figure out where that sound is coming from there, Philip.
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C
In the meantime, I was gonna say that was pretty epic.
- [17:15]
A
Yeah, I don't know where that extra sound's coming from. Go ahead, Philip.
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C
While we're waiting, can I ask a question? Because something I'm not really clear on. So this threat from Iran on. On these American companies, is this specifically in the. In the Middle east region? I mean. Or this isn't an actual threat on, like, you know, like Seattle?
- [17:32]
E
Right.
- [17:33]
B
It sounds like it's just in the region. That's what it sounds like. And I wasn't very clear on that either. But you have to remember there's also a translation problem here, because I read it that the little post that they made. It did sound kind of choppy, I don't think. I think I said this to you before. It's not that they lack the capability, the Iranians, to attack us on the home front. They absolutely have that capability. I think they've already got people infiltrated here. The question is, if they're doing this well, as I suspect they're doing, by doing what they've been doing in the region, not going beyond the region, why would they want to risk alienating Americans who are already on the fence about supporting this war? So I am very doubtful that they're going to try to attack the home front yet. I think what they're going to do is target the region. They're trying to basically break the economic underpinning of the Arab world. They made a very calculated decision at the start of the war to put all their might and pressure on the Arab states, believing, I think, rightly, that the Arab states were the weak link of the three, the US Israel, and the Arab states. The Iranians assessed, I think, correctly, that those Arab states are the weak link. And if they go after their economies consistently like they've been, those Arab states will buckle. And I actually think this is part of a covert strategy by Iran. It's actually a brilliant strategy. Again, they're trying to create so much chaos in these Arab states that a few of them end up. The regimes there that are pro American and pro Israeli, those regimes end up being overthrown by more Islamist elements, which is already starting to see the sort of out the. The outgrowth of that happening on the periphery. And I think it's only going to get worse as the situation in those countries get worse.
- [19:21]
D
Right. In 2007, I was assigned a article to write for Wired about the tech bubble in Dubai. There's a lot of presence there for American tech companies. A lot. A lot more than you would think. We're ready for the stripper, I believe.
- [19:37]
A
Well, we'll see if we can get the stripper audio here, but I just wanted. This has been viewed millions of times. Do you know what that was, Philip? Let's see.
- [19:43]
C
I can still see it happening, whatever it was.
- [19:46]
A
Where is that sound coming from? I don't know where that's coming from.
- [19:48]
C
I have no idea.
- [19:49]
A
Never.
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C
Laptop.
- [19:50]
A
Yeah. I don't know what's going on.
- [19:52]
D
Maybe we're being protected from something.
- [19:54]
A
Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, this video of this stripper. Just take the screenshot at least, Philip. I won't play it, but this is like she went viral again. Millions of views for admitting that, like, these soldiers are coming in and just giving their money, basically saying they're being deployed, and people say, oh, well, we're gonna toss to a stripper to get some factual information. I trust her over any politician, quite honestly.
- [20:14]
B
You know, during the 2008 recession, the reason that Michael Burry. And this was documented in that movie, the Big Short. It is a true story. The reason those GU guys that successfully shorted the market in 2008 and made all that money when everybody else got, you know, lost everything, was one of the things they did was they talked to strippers in Florida, and they. They were figuring out from talking to strippers why. Why, you know, the economy was getting ready to go off a cliff. And it was. It was very interesting. So this. It was called the stripper index, and I think there's a stripper index for Fort Bragg now as well. And I. And I think that, you know, we should probably be paying more attention to what they're seeing.
- [20:53]
A
Yeah, they're saying we're gonna be deployed. I. What do I have to live for? I might not come.
- [20:57]
B
I'm not might.
- [20:58]
A
I might not be coming back.
- [21:00]
D
That's literally a plot in Memphis Bell. Have you ever seen that movie?
- [21:03]
B
No, I have not.
- [21:04]
D
Where he goes. What? You need to watch that movie.
- [21:06]
A
Classic World War II movie.
- [21:08]
D
Where.
- [21:09]
B
Wasn't that a. Yeah, that was a. Wasn't a Barry Levinson movie. I. I never.
- [21:13]
D
I never saw Sarah Jessica Parker's husband, Matthew Broderick goes to a stripper thinking he might die. Yeah, it's. Watch that movie. It's. It's a.
- [21:22]
B
But this is happening on such a. I'm sure that happens before every conflict, but it's happening on such a scale, you start to think maybe. Maybe these guys know something that we don't, which is, you know, they're going into a hardened environment. I mean, this is not Iraq. You know, again, I was talking to Martin off just now, and he was talking about the fortuitous geography of Iraq. I mean, it was perfect for the kind of armor advance and the kind of air power that we enjoy that allows us to have overwhelming dominance. That is not the case. It's the exact opposite. In neighboring Iran, it's basically like trying to invade Switzerland. And not even the Nazi Nazis tried to invade Switzerland at the height of their power in World War II because of all the mountains. It's the same thing in Iran.
- [22:05]
A
So I want to talk about some of your targets you mentioned for possible landing sites. We talked. Conorak KHARG. Island here on the show. And some suggestions that why would the Pentagon, why would the United States be sort of telegraphing a potential invasion spot? Is it all just bluster? Is it all just, just this fake buildup of forces as bluster as fakery in order to drive an off ramp for President Trump and that no American forces are going to actually have boots on the ground? What do you make of that?
- [22:35]
B
I pray every day that we get Taco Tuesday and I pray every day that he's somehow going to wake up out of this torpor that he's in and realize that this is the end, not just of his presidency, but likely of the Republican Party, as well as probably the end of American power projection in the region if he goes through with this. And we're seeing hints where he's saying, saying that supposedly he's open to quitting right now. And we're seeing the Iranian president apparently is floating a counter proposal that I don't think the Americans are going to take, though, because it's pretty, it's pretty serious in terms of the Iranians keep the Strait of Hormuz as a toll booth and they get paid in the petro yuan instead of the petro dollar. So it's pretty much the end of America's, you know, dollar as the primary reserve currency, at least in that part of the world. So I don't know if to get taco and failing that, then that gets us into what does he do because he's stuck. Like I said last time, we're in an escalation trap. It's called that for a reason you can't get out. So he next is either going to quit and be humiliated and just deal with the, the blowback from that. Probably the best option. But given the people around him and given who he's listening to, one Mark Levin, for instance, it seems like he's going to be reaching for the next rung on that escalation line ladder. And that's when you get into what's next. It's ground forces. And it could be one of those targets we discussed last time, or that could be a trick. And it could be really he wants to do this Tom Clancy, like, you know, uranium hunt in the heart of, of Iran by rotating 82nd Airborne Marine Corps expeditionary units and the large number of special forces and CIA paramilitary guys to go hunt for these, these lost or missing uranium deposits or the barrels of uranium like it's some kind of, you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark episode or something. But ultimately that's even crazier in some ways than landing on Kharg or those coastal areas because you have to penetrate deep inside Iranian airspace, which remains contested. Contrary to what Pollyanna Pete says, it's very much a contested environment. Then you have to get our troops into position. They've got to be able to jump in there. And then when they get down there, they have to actually spend the time, you know, identifying where this uranium is and either taking it or destroying it. And good luck with all of that. I mean, in the meanwhile, the Iranians are not just going to be sitting around, you know, dozing off.
- [25:06]
D
Right. Yesterday on our show, Clayton said that the IDF has never accompanied US Forces for any boots on the ground operation. And I guess I'd never thought of that and I was sure shocked. Why is that in? Can you, Is there any reason that they should, that they would provide any use value? I mean, it's clearly a war that was put on order by Israel. Do they not have the capability? Like I'm, my mind blown by piggyback.
- [25:38]
B
They piggyback. I mean first is with the air power, right? They piggyback on our, on our capabilities. So yes, they're striking hard in Iran and they've got the air corridor over Syria, but ultimately their planes need to be refueled. They don't have the refueling infrastructure to do that. They rely on American refuelers. And now you're seeing our refuelers get shot down. It's very hard to replace these. We're already having a refueler crisis irrespective of what was going on with this war. Now this war is just exacerbating that which is going to have real, real implications if we ever, God forbid, have to go to war with China. Because those refuelers are even more important for us in the Indo Pacific because of the geography of the region than they are in the Middle East. So the Israelis are piggybacking on us and of course they take our money, they take our, our, our, our stockpiles and they use them. But have they ever accompanied us into war? They have not. There was an attempt initially or suggestion in 1991 that they assist us going against Saddam, but that was ultimately shot down by, I believe, leave The President George H.W. bush, because he was worried it would offend the Arab sensibilities that were in that coalition. But in subsequent wars, the Israelis never even volunteered to help us. You know, they never got involved with Afghanistan or Iraq. I mean even the, even the Romanians sent those bomb sniffing monkeys to Iraq in 2003. I mean, they couldn't have even. In fact, I had it on good authority that in the initial days of our, of our operations in what's known as the Sunni Triangle of Iraq, after we invaded and after Al Qaeda and Iraq got going the insurgency, I was told by multiple intelligence, now retired people, that in fact Mossad was on the ground in the Sunni Triangle, but they were working against our intelligence guys who were trying to go after the insurgency that was attacking our troops. And who knows why. But there are incidents where Israeli intelligence supposedly was complicating our efforts to pursue certain jihadists in the Sunni Triangle in 2004, 2005.
- [27:54]
A
I want to ask you about these aircraft because this number is being held close to the vest. But we did see that this key E3 AWACS were damaged in these Iranian attacks at Saudi Arabia.
- [28:05]
B
I mean, let's be clear. Yeah, it was destroyed. They're saying it's damaged, but that's part of the censorship, right?
- [28:10]
A
It was totally destroyed. You see the images of. It's totally destroyed. But nevertheless, this is just one of many F35s that are supposed to be unhittable, also attacked and hit. But the list seems to be now into the dozens. According to reports I've been reading upwards of or close to 30, maybe 27 US aircraft that have now been shot down. What are, what, what numbers are you hearing? Hearing? Maybe that number is low or high, it ranges.
- [28:35]
B
I mean, you're not going to get any accurate information. We've taken on a lot of the Israeli sort of media doctrine, which is basically just lie about everything, which, okay, you understand in war it has to be bodyguarded by a veil of lies. But ultimately at some point it becomes obscene. And I would say we're at the obscene level now with the amount of lies and misdirections. And so it has been dozens of aircraft destroyed or damaged. The key thing is with those III spy planes that came in, the reason they were pulled in at all and sent to Saudi Arabia was because in the early days of this war, the Iranians destroyed key US expensive radar networks that were on the ground in the Middle East. And those radar networks were essentially because they allowed us early warning if the Iranians were sending missiles or drones or hypersonic weapons at our bases or Israel in the region. And those were completely destroyed and damaged and taken offline at the beginning of the war. Which means we had a lot of gaps in what we could see, which is why another reason the Iranian missiles have been getting through and doing so much damage. So to, to plug those gaps, apps we brought in the mobile radar and on those planes. But the Iranians have such good intelligence in the region, which indicates to me they have really good access to not just Russian and Chinese intelligence, signals intelligence, but they probably also have a very vast and growing now network of people on the ground in these Arab countries who are keeping tabs on all of our forces and sending, you know, their locations to the Iranian military. Military. They were able to knock out those spy planes that we sent the day that they arrived. We didn't even have time to refuel them and send them up to do a mission. They landed, the guys got out to take a break, and then all of a sudden the Iranians opened up. So they tracked these planes from the beginning of their entry into the Middle east to the point that they landed and then they took them out once they were on the tarmac. And in fact I was told the reason that the USS Gerald R. Ford, the carrier that was, you know, supposedly taken out by a laundry fire, the reason that that was moved a few days ago from Suda Bay, Greece to Croatia, was likely because the Greeks rolled up a Iranian spy ring right before the arrival of the carrier. And there was concern among our people that the Greeks didn't get all the Iranians and that the Iranians, Iranians there were going to range the target of the parked Gerald R. Ford so that a Iranian long range missile or hypersonic weapon could easily destroy the Gerald R. Ford in port. So we moved it out of the range of those Iranian system into this, I'm forgetting the name of it, this facility in Croatia that is supposedly just beyond what the Iranians can reach. That, that should show you guys, guys, how serious of capabilities the Iranians to this day just were being defeated on day one. They still possess these capabilities that are keeping our navy away. Just one other thing. I'll just add, you know, Pete and, and Raisin Kane keep going on about how we destroyed the navy of Iran. I actually think that if they keep saying that, it makes us look even worse because the way I look at it, the Iranians are still keeping the straight of Hormuz closed. They're keeping our navy, which is still very much active in the region, away while they supposedly don't have a navy at all. I mean, how embarrassing for us, right?
- [32:12]
A
Great point.
- [32:14]
C
I, I just can't help but like make like the analogy I see is like we started the fight by sucker punching the person, then we turned around, lifted our hands in victory. It like lifted our hands in victory and we can't figure out how they got on our back and are punching us in the back of the head. Like, if you're gonna sucker punch somebody, you got to follow it up with another punch or two.
- [32:30]
B
Or it's like exactly right. Or it's like somebody who's probably not very much in shape, who shouldn't be starting a fight, getting a lucky blow in the beginning and then finding out the other guy, you know, he's actually built for this and he's able to sustain the hit and then hit back twice as hard. That is what we are seeing here.
- [32:49]
D
Right.
- [32:50]
B
You know, the American way of war is all about short termism. Everything is about we've got to go in hard, big and fast and get the heck out. And we got to just, we got to completely shock and all them. Well, ultimately our adversaries have figured out that's our way of war. And how do you beat that kind of warfare? You beat it with time and space. And that is exactly what the Iranians have done. They have embraced the insurgency model. They've buried it to high end missile, hypersonic weapons and drone systems systems. And they've, they've used the geography of their country, which is very difficult to attack, and they've really used it to, to as an advantage to drag us through what was supposed to be at most a 96 hour war. We're now going into month one or month two rather, and there's no end in sight. Not really. Not really. And the Iranians keep escalating every time we do, indicating they're not done. They've got plenty of time and space left and, and they've expanded the war. I don't even call it the Iran war anymore. I call it the Middle east war because it's now affecting the entire region.
- [33:55]
A
Yeah, we're going to talk about the Chinese piece of this in a moment here. Jill, Jill, be nice or I'll be nice. Says 212, says, how is Trump going to get us out of this war? Like, what is the, what's the off ramp?
- [34:07]
B
There is no. This is why. I mean, the only thing you can do is just say, basically, I'm out, I'm quitting. Tag, you're it. Europe and Middle east and I'm going to bring everybody home. And you know, we're going to have to focus on. Here's the problem though with that. And I was, I was on with Megyn Kelly this afternoon and you know, I walked her through this, that the problem that most Americans, and I think Trump himself don't fully understand is that it's not a question of do we have all the resources we need to survive this kind of, you know, global conflagration. Here in the United States and in the Western Hemisphere, we have, have them. The problem is, in the case of oil, for instance, our oil companies, they are private companies that are interested in making money. They're not interested in the, the public good. No company is. They're interested in shareholder, maximizing shareholder value. It has never been in their economic interest to go to 100% or beyond full production of oil and natural gas in the United States because then they lose. You know, oversupply means the price goes down too much. They have to keep oil, the international price of oil in a range, usually it's between, I think $62 and $88. It might be $72, but it's in this sweet spot that the, the oil companies like to have it. That's where it's profitable. And yet it doesn't kill their consumers. It doesn't kill their consumer base. So that is why the United States has never fully developed its own domestic industries, its own domestic capabilities, because they don't want to have this thing go down too much because then they don't make a return on investment. So when we talk about, well, you know, why don't we just abandon the Strait of Hormuz? It doesn't really matter for the oil. We have our own here. It's because we're not fully producing oil here. We're still bringing in some from overseas. We're sort of doing it tepidly because we want to keep the prices at a certain rate, range. And now what you're seeing is we're being hoist by our own petard because we can't just now say, okay, world tag, you're it. We've got our own stuff here. That's not how it works. It takes time to max out the production. You've got to get the companies to do it. The companies still are saying, ah, we don't really want to do it. It's a lot of money we have to invest to expand production, to enhance our, you know, to modernize our systems and our equipment to handle that new load. And so, so there's, there's a lot of inputs that have to go in for us to no longer be affected by things like the straight of Hormuz closure. And that's not even talking about the fertilizer. That's not talking about the helium that's been cut off because Qatar is no longer producing. You know, it's, it we don't have, we're not fully contained. Had we listened and done what Trump said to do in 2016, where we re industrialized America over the course of his first term, we might be in a better position now, unfortunately, Wall street and the Democrats and the Republican establishment stop that from happening. And so here we are, we're still exposed.
- [37:04]
D
Right. I want to talk about how this will affect Americans specifically. There's someone in the chat says, is this a leftist channel? We are not a leftist channel. And if you're still Trump voter, okay, I mean, if you're still thinking in terms of partisan politics, politics, and you don't realize that both sides are aligned on the war, then you're asking the wrong question. That's a dumb question.
- [37:25]
B
There is, you know, my buddy Michael Yan is convinced that actually what we're seeing is part of a larger plan. And if you look at the groups that are being empowered by higher oil rates, if you look at the way, I mean, the elites are benefiting one way or the other from this. So there's an argument to be made, made. And I think Jan is, you know, he's one of my friends, he's one of the greats. I, I, you know, he's.
- [37:51]
A
Yesterday I was in the middle of something, he called me yesterday and he said, clayton, I've heard no one talking about this. We're going to have Michael on later this week. But he said, I think that they want the destruction of Israel as well.
- [38:04]
B
Yes, he said that to me on my podcast two weeks ago. That's his big thing because he thinks that the Israel Israelis are problematic for the globalists. So they have no problem sacrificing Israel if it means that it destroys the United States. And let's face it, what we're witnessing now is the end of the unipolar world order that we built at the end of the Cold War. And in that destruction, it isn't just going to affect the outer parts of the world. It's going to have really devastating impacts here in the United States. States. And as you look at what's going on already, where we were already having affordability crises, we were already teetering on the brink of civil unrest across the country. We're already more divided than we've been. Now you add in high oil prices and what's going to happen as a result. Goldman Sachs says that, well, before you
- [38:56]
D
go into this, I want to put up your own infographic that you talked about how this is going to affect Americans and the, the middle of April. I mean, it's gonna feel really great. April 15th, filing my taxes to pay for this torture on myself. So can you please, as you continue your thought, explain what we're seeing here?
- [39:14]
B
Yeah, well, I would just say also because somebody was like, you used AI for that. I said, yes, I, I used AI to create a graphic. Yeah.
- [39:21]
A
You didn't hire a graphic artist to make your. I mean, give me a break.
- [39:25]
B
Took me two seconds.
- [39:26]
C
I'm leaving. I'm out of here. I'm out of here.
- [39:29]
A
I would, too.
- [39:30]
B
I did use, I did use chat GPT for that and I gave all the information and there you go. So, yeah, you're seeing basically, you know, we're not going to run out of oil. It's just going to get more expensive by the middle of next, well, middle of this month, really, April 15th. And that's because the US is not, like I just said, the US is not going to change the production value at home because the companies are still trying to figure out is this war going to be really long term. And you have a lot of people on Wall street and the commodity market going, there's no way Trump's going to continue this. And then of course, you have Trump every time the market is about to open saying, oh, I got a deal. You know, he's goosing the markets that way. So you have the manipulation of the market. So as long as that's going on, what that does is that that denies the ability of corporate stakeholders in these oil industries from saying, maybe we should start putting money into, into creating more domestic output. Maybe we're going to feel a pinch in the short term, but the sooner we start putting that money into permanent expansion, we'll be able to then, in the medium and long run, be able to equalize those prices for the American people. But you don't have that conversation because the commodities guys, the Wall street guys, are still saying, there's no way this is going to last. There's going to be a correction. Trump's going to back out, he's going to taco. So that's part of the issue here. But by April 15th, 18th, basically all the oil that we had harvested from around the world before prices started increasing, before the Strait of Hormuz was closed, that runs out. And then what we're left with is the stuff that we're getting from the, from, from our own backyard, the stuff that we're getting from the Western Hemisphere in general and yeah it'll be there. You're not going to see the kinds of what, what my friend Elizabeth Buchanan down in Australia is experiencing right now which are to going gas lines shortages. You're not going to be seeing that really going on here. What you're going to be seeing though is really significant spikes in the, in the oil price for average people and well for everybody. And what that's going to do is it's going to over time cause and I I mean like by the summer cause intro inflation to go back up. So it's at around I think two point some odd percent now. It's okay. Inflation rate is better than it was under bond Biden that is set according to Goldman Sachs. As these prices go up over the next few weeks and months that will trigger a rise in inflation to around 4.5% which will then of course prompt the, the, the Fed to come in under Jerome Powell especially to then spike interest rates which of course is just going to kill the economy. I mean that, that's it pretty much for the U S economy. And then we're talking about this going into, into August and September where you're probably at the height of this, this you know, recession or whatever you want to call. I don't know if you want to say the R word but it's economic downturn and then that's going into November and goodbye Republican Party, hello Democrats and hello impeachment and likely removal by the Democrats if they get the numbers I think they're going to get of President Trump if this persists like going on now.
- [42:36]
D
Can I, you know we can't file our taxes anymore with the check because they've shut that down now you have to file online. I wanted to just put a middle finger in the memo as I file my taxes.
- [42:47]
A
Yeah.
- [42:48]
D
This April middle finger emoji. But anyway the spirit is there. That's the spirit with which I will file my taxes.
- [42:54]
A
I want to ask you, I want to ask you about the Chinese piece of all of this and maybe even the Russian piece of all of this. Of this. So this, I wanted to talk to you specifically about this because over the past couple of weeks a number of American scientists have gone missing.
- [43:11]
B
Yeah.
- [43:12]
A
That have worked on really advanced plasma technology. I think reverse engineering of advanced weaponry that may have been, may have come from UFO craft downed down to aircraft and the reverse engine engineering. And you posted something interesting which I think because you know people get like bogged down oh it's aliens, it's aliens and you Said, well no, it's not aliens that are disappearing. These American scientists all of a sudden maybe you can walk us through what you believe is actually happening.
- [43:43]
B
Yeah, so I'm just gonna. And the reason I have to put these, these God awful readers is because I'm blind as a bat now. But so you mentioned the six American Science and this is where it gets really wild. This is the article that I'm getting ready to drop at Nat Sec guy on Emerald TV. I went in and I found that in mid March 2026, three of China's top defense scientists, Zhao Jing, who's a nuclear weapons expert, Wu Man Ching who's a radar and metamaterials expert, we Yi Yen, which who is a missile systems expert, they were all quietly around erased from the Chinese Academy of Engineering's website, which means they're no longer among the living. Then just a few days after that, hypersonics expert Yan Hong, who's one of the key figures working on plasma aerodynamics, died suddenly at just 56 years old. So now what I did is I took that list of five Chinese scientists and I paired it with what those six scientists American scientists were working on. And they have massive overlap. So what the, what these scientists for the Americans were doing for our military, these five or four or five Chinese scientists were doing for their military. So what that tells me is that, and this is the conclusion of Spoiler alert. This is the conclusion of my essay. What, what this tells me is that their shadow boxing going on between the United States and China. China. I think that there, that this is a shaping operation in the run up to the big war between the United States and China and we're trying to take out each other's brain power because the, you know, the modern warfare map is not just about geography. It's not just about bullets and bombs and technology. It's about the people who make the technology and the bullets and the bombs work. And if you knock out the brain power power, you've knocked out the ability to sustain high end warfare at least for a period of time. We saw, by the way, this is not the first time something this has happened. There's a great show called the Americans. A large storyline on that show and it was based on true stories because I know one of the. Yeah, it was based on true stories.
- [46:00]
A
We lived down the street from that Montclair in Montclair, New Jersey.
- [46:03]
B
That's right, that's right. And so they were killing Soviet scientists were trying to kill you. They were trying to, to kill Soviet scientists We were trying to kill, or sorry, we were trying to kill Soviet scientists. They were trying to kill our scientists. The Iranians and the Israelis do it all the time. The Israelis whack Iranian scientists all the time. So this is not unprecedented in the annals of modern warfare. But what's. What I find fascinating are the systems they were working on. I don't believe they were alien systems. I know we disagree on that. I think the United States, and now Russia and China. China have for years been playing with very advanced systems in the desert, in our case, in the desert. And I think that they're actually many years ahead of what we have off the shelf. And I think all this talk about aliens and stuff, it's all very conveniently timed for a moment in which we know the Chinese have caught up to us conventionally, technologically. And so now suddenly we're saying, oh, we're bringing out, you know, plasma and, and, you know, anti grass gravity. Well, maybe it is real, but. And I think it is probably real, but I don't know if it's from aliens. It might just be from, you know, Nazi scientists that we inherited at the end of the Second World War. I mean, who knows? But the point is, I think there's shadow boxing going on here between our intelligence service and likely the Chinese service killing each other's scientists in this next generation technology arena before we even really get to World War iii.
- [47:24]
A
Philip, you were gonna say something.
- [47:27]
C
Yeah, so I'm just, I'm just sitting here, I'm listening to you like, like, just letting my mind wander. But like when it seems like there's such a, like an aggravated attack on the US Education system from within, like they're going after universities, like some of these top universities, like, then it just all, all an adversary would have to do is wait about five years.
- [47:45]
A
Yeah.
- [47:45]
C
And then there won't be there. We won't have the education. They won't even need to kill our scientists.
- [47:49]
B
This is the basis of that hilarious meme of, you know, shows Xi Jinping with an accentuated jaw, looking very muscular. And the tagline is Xi does nothing, still wins. And that's basically the Chinese mindset is just wait them out. Right. 5,000 year old civilization. We can wait out the Americans. It's the same mentality of the Persians, by the way. Just stretch out the war, make them bleed a little bit, and they'll quit because they don't have the patience. We're thousands of years old. So there you go.
- [48:21]
A
The art of doing nothing.
- [48:23]
B
Yeah, yeah. And so that is the mentality in China. And really they benefit quite significantly. I would just say I was sitting, I gave a briefing to a group of Air Force generals back in 2021, and one of the generals there was assigned to Silicon Valley, and I thought there was assigned to Silicon Valley. He said, yeah, I'm a liaison for certain projects we're doing, doing the Pentagon, the Air Force, and in Silicon Valley. So that's very cool. And he said, yeah. He goes, you know, I'm really troubled, though, because I go, why? He goes, well, a lot of brilliant young people work at Google. I said, yeah. He said, but a lot of them hate America. And I said, well, it's the education system. And he said, I'm realizing this now. And I said, you know, General, the single greatest threat, and I still maintain this, the single greatest national security threat to the United States. It's not China. It's not Russia, Iran, Al Qaeda or anything like that. Like that. It's the Department of Education. And it's the stuff that they're teaching our kids. And then if you want to throw in the national debt, you can do that too. But, but the, the human capital is what makes a country competitive, is what makes a country dominant. And we have had declining, significantly declining human capital for many, many years. It's become almost terminal now, the decline.
- [49:35]
A
Let's talk about the satellites, because this is the. Another big piece of this, right. And what's kind of going on behind, behind the scenes right now with maybe the sort of satellite warfare you, you've been tweeting about this. You want to talk about the satellites?
- [49:47]
B
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I don't know if you've been seeing, but on Twitter, people are filming, they're getting wigged out by it. There are all these meteors, supposedly fireballs in the sky in places like Texas. I think Ohio is another one that's been seeing a lot of them.
- [50:00]
A
Yeah.
- [50:00]
B
And ultimately I do not believe maybe some of them are, but I, I don't believe these are all meteors. I think what you're seeing are the debris from satellites that are being shot down in low earth orbit. And I posted this morning, it looks like, wish I had it up. There was, it was a very funny way that they framed it. I think they called it an explosive fragmentary event. SpaceX claims two of their, their starlinks were suffered an explosive fragmentary event event. What it means is they were hit by something and then they exploded. And what were they hit by? Well, it could have been space debris. There's a lot of it up there. But given the context of what's going on on the ground on Earth, I would argue it was probably an anti satellite weapon of some kind. And we know for instance that the, the, the United States or somebody gave the Protesters in Iran 40,000 Starlinks, part of their protest test movement. We know that in 2023, Elon Musk gave all those Starlink terminals to Ukraine. And the Russians have now been using Starlink in their conflict. So what we're seeing now is Starlink, which was not originally meant to be a combat system of any kind, is now being used in some capacity. It's being used in some capacity for offensive capabilities. And ultimately, ultimately they're being, they're being I think taken out. We know the Russians have developed, we know the Russians have developed the Kalinka system and I think the Tow Ball system as well, which are specifically designed to knock down Starling satellites. And also by the way, I'll just add one other thing, another input here. We have long suspected, I say we, I say people I know in the Missile Defense Agency and people like the now deceased Dr. Peter Pry, my friend David Pine who worked with Peter. All of these people have long said for about a decade that the Iranians placed electromagnetic pulse weapons on satellites in orbit. And that Space Force, what is now Space Force, has been tracking it for years. And we might be witnessing also preemptive shoot downs of these suspected EMP bomb satellites as part of our escalation against Iran.
- [52:19]
A
That's been a big concern from a number of our guests who've said, you know, EMP attacks on our infrastructure and it wouldn't take much for entire electric grid to be wiped out.
- [52:29]
B
One EMP detonated 50 miles above the continental United States will knock out 90 to 95% of the electric grid and there is no restoring it for a minimum of two years. And I guarantee you it ain't coming back online line in two years. Especially when you consider the, the, the physical gear needed to restore the electrical grid comes from China.
- [52:53]
A
Yeah, right. And we don't have it. Well, Brandon, we thank you so much. We look forward to reading your piece. I want to dive more deeply into these missing.
- [53:02]
B
I'll send it to you guys.
- [53:03]
A
It's a great piece. Fascinating that these Chinese scientists are. There's this massive overlap here with these United States scientists who've gone missing. Um, it's remarkable. Yeah. You and I can disagree on where they got this tech from. I've heard from Special, Special Forces and involvement in the secret space Program specifically that this was accidentally discovered as part of crash retrieval from UAPs, you know, long time ago.
- [53:28]
B
Well, I don't have any special knowledge on that. I just, I find. I just, I think that we have a lot of extraordinary people, and I think we have a lot of extraordinary. I mean, go back to Tesla. He was playing with technology that was hidden. And go back to the Nazis. I mean, we know at Pena Mundo the Nazis were playing with really advanced systems that they developed that we inherited. And so that's why I think it's. I think the alien thing might be a cover story, but I don't have any, you know, I don't have anybody on the inside that could tell me one way or the other. This is just my opinion.
- [53:58]
A
Yeah, I think the COVID story. Well, I would just say this because I could talk about this all day and my wife will give me a side eye, but I think the COVID story piece of it is like, well, every time you look up in the sky, oh, that's definitely an alien craft. No, that's US Military. That's definitely these advanced technologies. But I think at the core of it core, a lot of this technology, the Nazi technology came from, from these crash retrieval programs. Russia, China. And we, we all have it. We all have it in different striations and.
- [54:25]
D
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, well, I do want to get to our next topic, which is the new Israeli execution law. And we have another guest to talk about, although I've sure you have relevant thoughts as well. But we're going to let you go this.
- [54:38]
B
Okay.
- [54:39]
D
But yeah, well, hold that thought. Okay. Because we do have a whole guest about it. But yes, that's a fodder for another time. So coming up, we're going to talk about that. Brandon Weikert, thank you so much for being so generous with your time.
- [54:52]
A
Thanks, Brandon.
- [54:53]
E
Great.
- [54:54]
A
Really appreciate it.
- [54:55]
D
Okay. All right, so, yes, that is what we're going to talk about next because. Because the Israeli Knesset is celebrating with nooses and champagnes. Yay. We get to kill people. Are we going to see mass executions on our screens? It's already been an assault on our psyche to watch the total destruction of civilian life in Gaza. Is there more to come? So we're going to talk about that in just a second. But first.
- [55:17]
A
But first, I want to tell you about, obviously what's happening right now. Europe is going full bore trying to get their hands on as much gold as they can because there is a disaster unfolding. The United States maybe is moving less quickly to get as much gold and silver as they possibly can and precious metals. But that's exactly why we're seeing this. We're seeing a rejiggering of the world right now all around. You heard from Sergey Lavrov just this morning on the Russian side that there's a new world order being that is emerging. You're having all of these countries now settling transactions in the Chinese yuan in order to pass through the Strait of, of Hormuz. This is the de dollarization that is happening right before our eyes. So the US dollar not only $40 trillion in debt, but we are actively removing the petrodollar from the playing field. And that's exactly what's happening right now. So we are big advocates of protecting your family with precious metals. Even if you've got a few thousand dollars just like sitting in your savings account and you want to think about transferring it over to gold or silver, now might be the time. We started talking about gold years ago on this show and it was I think 17 an ounce. It's now I'm just looking at gold prices today. It is now. I think it was 45. Oh, it's up. Yeah, now it's up. Look at this. 4,600 right now as we are live at this point, 4, 600 and silver up 75 an ounce. So up 3%. Up 6% right now amid all of this volatility. So that's why our friends at Lear Capital can actually help you. They're an American company and they've been around for decades. They can help you. Just give them a phone call. They're an American company. They'll talk to you on the phone. No pressure at all. Any questions you have, they will answer it. They have a team dedicated just to our show to be able to answer any questions you have. If you call them. 1-800-613-3557 for your free gold guide. Again, they've been helping Americans for years. We use them personally. I mean we have gold shipped right to our gun safe, be able to store in our house or off site in a, in a guarded facility. We also do that as well. Which they have a facility that they work with in Delaware. So it's under 24 hour security. You can do whatever makes you feel happy. Some people are like, you don't own gold unless it's in your house. Others are like, I don't want it in my house. So it's totally up to you what you do. Gold and silver, give them a call or go to learredacted.com and you can qualify for up to $20,000 in free bonus medals with a qualified purchase. They've been around since 1997-180061-33557.
- [57:53]
D
Israel's parliament passed a law making death by hanging a default sentence for for Palestinians convicted in military court of deadly attacks against Israelis. While Israelis who kill Palestinians face no such death penalty. This appears to be an obvious move towards their goal of continued extinction of the Palestinians. The legislation, which is scheduled to take effect in just 30 days, was passed on Monday. Everyone in the Knesset who voted in favor voted along alongside Prime Minister Netanyahu. Now, this is deeply disturbing given the fact that Israel currently has, by many estimates, about 14,000 Palestinian prisoners held, many of them children and women, held without charge or trial. The United nations is warning that this has vague and over broad definitions of terrorists, meaning the death penalty could be applied to very simple measures, things we may not consider death penalty worthy. It's terrifying. After the bill passed, Israel's National Security Minister, Ben Gavir, was seen celebrating. Watch this short video.
- [59:15]
C
No leg.
- [59:22]
D
You get the point. As one group of rabbis put it, celebrating death like a scoreboard is not justice. It is moral collapse. Joining me to discuss is Ramsey Barood. He is the author of a new book called before the Flood, a Gaza Family Memoir across the generations of Colonial invasion, occupation and war in Palestine. It is a heartbreaking narrative about the lives of Palestinians from the Nakba to today. So, Ramsey, thank you so much for joining us. Before I get your reaction to this terrifying law, I just want to confess that I finished your book on a plane recently. The woman I was sat next to had to ask me if I was okay because I was sobbing. These are the stories we are not supposed to know. And I want to confess that I felt ashamed for the understanding that I lacked about this story, for some of the questions I've asked you in the past without a full understanding. It's my job to know this and so many of us don't. Your book is haunting and devastating and beautifully written. So I just wanted to put it out there. I want to talk about your book in a second. But first, can I get you to explain the implications of this new law for Palestinians and why we might be right to be terrified of it.
- [60:38]
E
Absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me, Natalie. And, and I, I must say, before I answer your your question, not so many people have that degree of intellect, intellectual integrity as you do. And I, I truly appreciate that.
- [60:52]
D
Thank you.
- [60:53]
E
Regarding this particular lie, it has to be placed within Context, we are dealing here with a government that has just and in fact is still carrying out a genocide against the palest Palestinians in Gaza, where mass rape of women in Gaza has been reported extensively by various human rights organizations, where the killing and the wounding of nearly a quarter of a million Palestinians, if not more at this point. And this is kind of the lowest estimates. So we are talking about mass extermination of Palestinians in Gaza. And it already exists within a system of apartheid that is being recognized, recognized as apartheid not only by leading human rights organizations, but also by Israeli leading human rights organizations such as B'Tselem and others. So this is not something that just happening on the margins or something so new or shocking. It is shocking in only one sense, that the likes of war criminals like Mingvi is standing there on camera just drinking champagne and celebrating as if the killing of people who are resisting for their homeland is an achievement and it's worth being proud of. But also this is the very man who has not just justified the genocide in Gaza, but also has called those who carried out rape of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. He called them and defended them as heroes. So the moral standards, I appreciate the statement by the rabbis, but the moral standards doesn't exist at all. Even by the kind of the so called soft version of Zionism, it just doesn't exist.
- [62:40]
D
Well, can you, I'm sorry, can you talk to me though about the immediacy of the people who were currently hostages to the idf and so many of them there are held without charge or trial on the justification of administrative detention. What will happen? Are we talking within 30 days? They face the gallows.
- [63:05]
E
That's right. So we are looking here at several groups of Palestinian prisoners and I think this is important context, so thank you for that. Number one, you have the 14,000 that you spoke of. But there are thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, Gaza who are not accounted for. We don't know how many. Some people say up to 10,000. I mean I have relatives who might be either dead or in prison. We don't know. And we petition the Israeli, you know, Israeli courts using Israeli Arab lawyers to tell us if they are dead or alive. We don't know. So there are thousands of Palestinians from Gaza that their faith is. Their faith is completely un. Unclear. Then you have thousands of people who are held as administrative detainees. These are people who are held with no charge, with no trial and who can stay in prison indefinitely with their imprisonment being pushed anywhere between three to six months at a time. But it could go on for Years and years. And many of them tend to be intellectuals, academics like Khalidajarra, one of the biggest advocates. She's a lawyer and an academic and one of the biggest advocates of women rights in Palestine. She was in administrative detention for years and many others are kind of sharing that fate. And we also know that if Israel accuses the Palestinians of carrying out an attack that is a lethal attack according to this law. Attack against whom? Isn't Israeli civilian intelligence Aviv? You know, the same as an Israeli armed Israeli settler in the west bank who is a colonialist and he's working with the Israeli army. Is that settler also a civilian and who is an Israeli? Is an Israeli a soldier carrying out a genocide in Gaza? So it gets very complicated. But the nuances in the law makes it so open that basically any Palestinian with any drummed up charge charges can indeed be killed within a very. Within 90 days of the conviction. Shall the military court decide that this person has indeed carried out what they call illegal attack?
- [65:20]
D
Well, you mentioned B'tselem. This is an Israeli information center for human rights. They have condemned this with the strongest language and they point out that the courts have an approximately 96% conviction rate based largely on confessions extracted under duress and torture during interrogations. If you don't mind, can you please tell us the story of your relative who was interrogated for information he did not have and the torture and how it broke him for the rest of his life and we will understand what we're dealing with. Would you mind sharing that story, please, that you tell in your book?
- [65:59]
E
Absolutely. Just, just a story, small correction, I think, not your correction, but correcting Bailem Bailim is saying 96%. Amnesty International in a report today said 99%. So basically, you know, kind of keeping the margin of error in mind, we are talking about, you know, just direct conviction with no evidence and with no kind of legal, you know, due process and that sort of thing. The thing about, you know, and many of my relatives had to go through it, I had to go through it myself when I lived in Gaza. Because in Palestine, whatever you need to do, we are not talking about people getting involved in resistance or military attacks. We're not even talking about people who are politically active. If you are a Gazan and who is trying to leave to Egypt or a Palestinian in the west bank who's trying to leave to Jordan to complete your education or to meet family or go for medical reasons, you have to meet with the shin bait. The shin bait is the Israeli intelligence that is basically kind of The Israeli equivalent of the FBI. The same thing that back in the day when Palestinians were still somewhat allowed to leave from the west bank, from Gaza to the west bank, they had to go through the so called Eretz checkpoint and they had to meet with the FBI, with the Shin Bait. And then you have this kind of exchanges that must happen. First of all, if they find out that you have anything that may make them suspect that you did something that they consider wrong, or you are a member of a family that happened, that a member of that family may have been imprisoned by Israel, then you are immediately a suspect and you have to be interrogated and at times even tortured. And many people would enter into these interrogations and never leave. And I had to go through it myself when I tried to leave to Egypt to complete my education many years ago and it just happened. There was a member of the Barroud family that was accused by Israel back in his youth in the 60s of having joined the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization. What I had to go through, I was a child, I was 18 years old at the time. What I had to go through, the intimidation, the threat, the harassment, the gun being put into my head to give them information about a person who was at the time in his 60s. But it is typical. This is what we Palestinians have to go through all the time. There was also the latest story about the child, the one year old child. Child, yes, who's who. They discovered that they used the child to extract conviction confessions from his father by. By burning him with cigarette butts, by cutting him. A child, a baby. It's everywhere. It's, it's international media news, it's not just Palestinian media and there is total outrage. Even though this is essentially what happens all the time now. The father is still in prison and he could in fact be convicted based on confessions that were taken out from him to save the life of his one year old baby. He could indeed be one of the people that could be in fact executed. Shall this law not be reversed? And I don't think it will be so this is the reality that Palestinians have to endure on a daily basis. On one hand it is heartbreaking and very saddening because we do have many family members in prison and we don't know what are the charges and we can't get hold of them. So we don't know what their fate is going to be like. But on the other hand, there's an element of relief that the world is beginning to see what we have always known and the world did not Believe us or did not want to listen to our story.
- [70:00]
D
Right. The story that hit me really hard is the specific details of the Ehab in the book and how he was only 20. They tied him to a chair, didn't let him sleep for hours on end to extract torture, and once he would stop bleeding, they would start all over again. These are the types of stories. And can you tell us what they were after specifically?
- [70:27]
E
Well, that's the thing. I mean, we know that according to the book, it have eventually been joined the resistance movements, and he was killed in the early parts of the genocide. But everything has a genesis. It's easy to look at Ahab and say, well, he was part of the resistance and so forth. But how did this whole thing started? It essentially started when I have brother Wael, my cousin also was killed during what we call the Black Sunday, an event that happened during the second interference, father, in the early 1990s, in which Ahab was basically shot in the throat while standing outside his house in the Shati refugee camp. Ahab at the time was a child. He was a baby, and he saw all of this. He saw his brother being brought into the house. He saw his brother bleeding to death. He saw all of this. And he almost went mute, in a sense. He had this. And I remember this particular scene when we. We went to the funeral and we met Ahab, and we were very concerned about this child who witnessed all of this. But Ihab kept saying, everything is fine. He was acting like a man. It's time for him to kind of take charge in all of this. And it was just heartbreaking to see a child now being forced into this position, that he has to take a moral stance at six years old or seven years old. And eventually what happened is that he did join the popular committees, kind of distributing flyers declaring strikes, writing on walls, graffitis, all these kind of nonviolent sorts of activism. And he was arrested over that. And that's when the torture process began and lasted back and forth. Imprisonment, torture, dungeons and all that sorts of things. And eventually it happened. Did in fact, join an actual resistance movement leading to his killing during the early part of the genocide.
- [72:26]
D
Right. And I apologize. I think it was Wael that I got the names confused and the stories of the brothers. It's horrible. Now, one of the things you described, which I don't think I understood before, was the Israeli army's intent to mow the lawn, which is a figure year of speech referring to the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians. But they say every now and again, you have to mow the lawn. And the reason being is if they break the spirits, if they make them afraid enough of the Israeli government, if they intimidate them enough, it's basically like you break a dog, you break a horse, and then they will be completely at your control. And this seems to me, I feel broken over it. I'm terrified. But your book betrays the spirit of being willing to be broken in a way that I cannot understand. I cannot. And so can you explain to me what the effect of this will be? What if we do start to see videos of innocent Palestinians on the gallows? Can you respond to that?
- [73:34]
E
Right. You know, we've been talking about the genesis of all these stories. The genesis of the execution of Palestinians actually does not start now. It started during the British Mandate when Britain executed three Palestinian activists back in the 1930s. And these activists who basically were being used as a lesson to break the spirit, the collective spirit of the Palestinians and make them seize their opponents uprising, the famous 1936 uprising, which I also discussed in the book. But the opposite became true. These three individuals became legends in Palestinian culture. I can't tell you how many stories and songs and movies and films and theaters and paintings and art and all sorts of intellectual expressions that was created based on executing these three young actors, activists back in 1936. Yet Israel insists on repeating the same mistakes. They are under the impression, they know that a lot of this is psychology. Natalie. This is not. I mean, you hear about the firepower, the Israeli, the F15s and the Merkava tanks and all of that. In actuality, this is marginal to the story. The story is about fear. It's about psychology. Israel wants to break the spirit of the Palestinians. In fact, this kind of thing, the executing of Palestinian prisoners or the intention to do so, the rape of Palestinian women, all of this is part of what they call politics of humiliation. They want to humiliate the Palestinians. They want to raise the price of resistance or steadfastness or so much mood to the extent that Palestinians think twice before engaging in anything that Israel does not like, meaning fight for their freedom, resist for their liberation. So they know very well that Palestinians are not going to stop resisting, because those are being, you know, some Palestinians are being executed to the contrary, those who will be executed, and I still hope and pray that the international community, whatever remains of it or its credibility, will do something to stop this madness. But arguing that it might not happen and will have no effect on the Israelis, those who will be executed will actually live in a more Iconic way among ordinary Palestinians. It will not slow down the resistance in any way. But again, it's about psychology. I remember in the very first few days of the genocide, Moshe Figlian, who was a very top official in the Israeli, Israeli Likud Party and very close to Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister, he was on Israeli television and he said something extremely telling for me. He said, what worries me is that the Muslims, he didn't even say the Palestinians, the Gazan, the Arabs, the Middle Easterns, no, the Muslims are not afraid of us anymore. Why is it so essential for Israel to impose the elevation element of fear on everybody? And that's what it is. They want to impose fear because if you are afraid, you are paralyzed. You can't do anything about your fate. And that's what they can't figure out. This is the code that they cannot crack, that of the Palestinians. How can anybody continue to resist under these horrific conditions? The execution law is not going to change anything. To the contrary, it's going to make Palestinians more and more determined. But it will give Benvir this rare opportunity to stand in a very heroic way, drinking champagne, sipping champagne on cameras, telling his own people that I am your ultimate savior. We all know very well that nothing is gonna come out of it except more criminality and more harm to the Palestinians. But the resistance of ordinary Palestinians will not stop.
- [77:34]
D
But we both know that in practice it will mean that if your child is scooped up by the IDF for any minor infraction or any accusation or lack of accusation, you will not see them again. And it could be just a direct line to an execution. And that's what the international community has to absolutely say. This cannot stand. Now, just last week, the Guardian published this report showing that Israelis who murder Palestinians in the west bank are not prosecuted, have not taken been since 2020, despite an increase in deaths of Palestinians in the West Bank. And you tell stories of sort of regular taking of Palestinian lives not by the idf, but by civilians. Civilians killing Israeli, civilians killing Palestinians. And so can you just draw this out for us because it's your lived experience better than I can see it in a news article?
- [78:36]
E
Article, that's right. So this is something that Israel kind of. This is the kind of misinformation that is really intended to confuse people, Because a lot of people don't know the difference between what is a settler? Because the term settler itself is not terribly alarming, especially for Americans. I mean, this is a country that was established based on settlements and settlers. But we're not talking about settlers, as in a group of people going to somewhere else to make a life for themselves, regardless of what the outcome of that decision is. In Israel, settlements and settlers are just a completely different category. These are people who are armed and they take their children, their families, and they move to illegally occupied territories that are recognized as illegally occupied under international law and in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and numerous other international national laws. They locate there. But to locate there, you have to displace someone, so they displace the Palestinians. Well, we have to build your settlement on someone else's land. So they robbed the land of the Palestinians. Well, some of these places have trees and orchards. Will you have to destroy them? So they kind of completely transform not only the demography, but also the topography of the west bank. And they keep building settlements and they keep pushing Palestinians in what Israeli professor Ilan Pape refers to as the incremental genocide. You kind of like creating this process in which essentially it leads to genocide. But it happens in a very soft or slow dynamics that doesn't create headline news the same way that the Gaza genocide has created. So as a result, result, now you have in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem and the west bank, you have over 600,000 illegal Israeli settlers living in numerous settlements that are fortified as military zones that are protected by the Israeli army. And they work very well together. They don't operate separately. As sometimes the media gives the impression what Israel calls illegal settlements is different than what we, an international law calls illegal settlements. And I think this is a very important facet here. Illegal settlements from an Israeli point of view are those who are not being sanctioned to be taken for strategic purposes by the Israeli government. These are just random settler groups go and take land, let's say in Hebron or two, Karim or Jenin. And they said, this is ours. The government says, well, it is illegal until we say it's legal. And that's what the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has done. They have legalized hundreds of little outposts that have previously been seen as illegal. So so as a result, you have an army of settlers protected by a much larger army of the IDF that are, you know, expropriated Palestinian land and pushing Palestinians out of their land, building walls, building trenches, creating Jewish only bypass roads. These are roads that you can only be an Israeli Jew in order for you to drive on. Palestinians are not by law allowed to drive on this. And how do you know who's a Palestinian and who's Israeli Jew and who's not by the color of the license plate numbers, every race, every ethnicity has a different license plate number. You know who's Gazan, you know who's West Banker, you know who's an Israeli Jew. And that kind of changes how you know this, how the people of the west bank, be it the illegal settlers or the West Bankers themselves behave. When you are in an Israeli checkpoint, and I've been in many of them in the past, you are a Palestinian, you have to wait here sometimes for hours, sometimes you stay overnight, sometimes they send you back, back. But if you are an Israeli Jew coming with a different colored license plate number, they know you immediately and they let you go. This is the everyday apartheid reality, very well documented, of course, by Israeli, international and Palestinian human rights groups. And that's the kind of reality that you also do not see in our media that is always looking for sound bites and looking for always prioritizing the Israeli point of view, which creates a lot of confusion, illusion in the minds of people.
- [83:02]
D
Well, Ramsey, I'd like to talk further about your book now that we understand the moment that we're in because I think this is important historical context. But before we do that, I'd like to say goodbye to my audience right now because we're going to do this as a separate conversation. So I would like to talk further about this. And so if you're watching the live show, right. Please seek this out so you can hear more about these stories. These stories we're not supposed to hear. There's a story I want to tell about. I think her name is the bride of Yair, the bride of a story about an Israeli mowing over four Palestinians in his car causing an uprising. These are things that just are not everyday stories to us and I think it's important that they become so seek this piece out separately because I'm going to keep Ramsey for after the show and we'll talk about these things. For now, I want to say goodbye to you. We will be back tomorrow. Thank you so much for joining us. Make sure you're subscribed to redacted if you haven't already hit that bell notification. Make sure you get a notice every time we go live and have new content. Let us know what you think of this. Are you shocked about it? How do you feel? We really appreciate your feedback as well. Thank you so much for joining us today, you guys. We will see you tomorrow here on redacted. The sun's shining, birds are singing and all feels right in the winter until
- [84:20]
B
the season changes and suddenly you lose your motivation to get out of bed.
- [84:24]
C
In fact, one in five people experience
- [84:26]
B
some form of depression, no matter the season or time of year.
- [84:30]
D
At the American Psychiatric association foundation, our vision is to build a mentally healthy nation for all because we want you to live your best life and be
- [84:38]
E
your best you all year round.
- [84:40]
C
Please visit mentallyhealthynation.org to learn more.