Republicans Suddenly Have Plans Next Week

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If you missed some of your favorite crooked pods this week, don't worry. You can now catch up on the week's best moments on MSNow on Saturday night. MSNow is streaming an episode of highlights from your favorite crooked pods, packing as much analysis, funny moments, and 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MSNow aired every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern 6 p.m. Pacific. Welcome to Potset of America. I'm John Fever.

I'm Dan Fiverr. Okay, Dan, we got a big show today. Trump's running midterm ads about himself and hoarding his super pack money. The Republicans are finding excuses to skip next week's Trump Apollosa midterm convention. President's face is now on a $1 coin. The gerontocracy prevailed in Massachusetts this week. Kamala Harris is shrugging off some Democrats rejecting her endorsement and Republicans have a new pro data center vote to explain.

Then you'll hear Tommy's conversation with Jasper Nathaniel and independent journalist who's been reporting on the ground in the West Bank. All right, Dan, with 60 days until the midterms, Donald Trump and Democrats, completely agree on what the election should be about. Donald Trump Republican candidates and campaigns aren't exactly thrilled with the president constantly telling voters to pretend he's on the ballot on account of his 38% approval rating. But there isn't much they can do about it. On Wednesday night, Trump summoned some of the most vulnerable Republicans in Congress to the White House so that he could helpfully say each of their names on camera and deliver the welcome news that he will be hitting the road.

For 35 Republican candidates in the last 30 days of the election, Trump super PAC also dipped into its $400 million war chest to shell out just under a million dollars kind of poultry.

For its first midterm ad featuring who else Donald Trump, let's take a look. You know, the toughest, most resilient person that I've ever met and nothing was going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he lost. In the world, these courage, vision and inspiration, it is still turning to America. There is no challenge Americans cannot overcome. No frontier too vast for us to conquer. And our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free.

What the fuck was that? Oh man, it's so good. I know you do a little show called Political Experts React, but ads campaign ads. That has to be one of the most useless ads I've ever seen. Yes, it. Let me let me use the industry term in sucks.

It's like, let's put aside the obvious strategic blender of putting in the ad, the very unpopular incumbent president who is mired in a very dumb war right now. Let's just put that aside. Yep. This ad and then there's another ad that has a similar tone, but actually mentioned some policies, those are the two ads they put up. I mean, at least that's something.

“But here's the thing, both those ads, they're just so tonally off.”

They are victory laps at a time in which no one thinks America is winning. You have Jardys and Americans who have countries on the wrong track, you have in some polls seven and ten voters with the economy negatively. And here you have this doofus doing this victory lap about all the great things he's done to help America and no one buys it.

Wouldn't never make an ad like this. This was an ad made for one swing voter and that swing voter was Donald J. Trump.

“So we can feel better about itself. That's what this was.”

I understand that. I even think if you were trying to make Donald Trump feel better about himself, you wouldn't create an ad like that. You'd like create an ad about how he was great and did a bunch of things and a cup. Like there's not even accomplishments in that ad. It's just like courage, vision, courage, America, America.

But also it's just and it takes for it's so lazy because it's takes from the state of the union, which he delivered as if he was on Xanx. So there's a new Washington post story that despite assurances from Trump's political advisors,

quote, Republicans are increasingly skeptical and suspicious that Trump's actually going to spend his $400 million war chest on the midterms.

And they have concluded that it's already too late. Some Republicans on campaigns. And that Trump is holding on to the money for his own purposes. I guess my initial reaction after reading that story and watching that ad is, "Do they really want more ads like that?"

“Is that what they're hoping he'll spend the money on?”

I have imagined that's not what they're hoping for. I'm not even sure what his own purposes are. I mean, I guess he could steal the money and no one would have prosecuted him. They've listed passing on the money to his chosen successor in 2008. Post presidential travel pet projects at like his library, which is estimated to cost around a billion dollars.

Going to be a skyscraper in Miami.

I'm not even sure the legality of transferring any money. He can't give any of this money to another federal candidate. So he couldn't give it to JD Vance or Marka Ruby or Pete Hexat. They're taking crews wherever the Republican nominee is. He can't give any of it to anyone on the ballot now. He can't give it to the RNC or the NRCC.

I don't know. I'm sure he could legally give it to his library. He could steal it. He could run ads in supportive JD Vance or whoever else in 2028. But even if he, whatever reason he's not spending money, which I'm sure is a stupid reason. He's already wasted the huge advantage.

When you have a huge money advantage, you can deploy it early when your opponents don't have money. Because money invested in infrastructure, technology, organizing staff in ten months before the election is worth ten times the money invested one month before the election. And so, and because he's waited so long, he's already going to pay through the nose for any ads he does. He does buy because add time has been bought up and they are just truly these local TV stations. They are these it's the last days of disco for them and they are gouging every super back as much as possible.

So like he is he's already wasted his advantage in a huge way. How much does this matter because I assume that even if he doesn't spend another dime. Republicans still have a pretty significant cash advantage over Democrats. Not just because of the RNC DNC debacle more of a DNC debacle. But also I think the Senate and House committees on the Republicans side have more than the Democrats as well.

And the Republican super PACs other than the Trump super PAC have more money than the Democratic super PACs. And so I was actually just a must because already starting to spend well from his super PAC. I was looking at the competitive, which is the amount of money being spent in each state. For an starting next week and it gets alarming very fast. The disparity between what Republicans are spending on TV and Democrats are spending is large.

Now the one hopeful caveat I would give you is dollars a dollar is a bad way of measuring this because a super PAC. A dollar you need three dollars a super PAC money to essentially get one dollar of campaign money because by law. Let's say it's James Delrico versus the even must super PAC. Telerico can buy an ad. I'm making these numbers up for.

“Let's say if he cost Telerico $10 a net it will cost the Republicans $30 a net because by law you have to.”

The TV stations have to offer the candidates the lowest available rate and the making gouges for PACs. But the Republican money is flowing and so this would just be on top of that. It does, you know, the place where I think it's going to matter most is Texas. There are a lot of Republicans who do not want to give money can pass and he's a terrible fundraiser. The.

The institutional Senate Republican donors hate can pass and because they like John Coran and they spend a gazillion dollars to try to save John Coran. And James Delrico is raised truly ungodly sums of money. And so if Trump does not come in to help PACs and it's not really clear where that money is going to come from.

They'll probably want to spend on digital ads all over the place too and there's no limit there. I mean, like there's no lower rate for candidates there is there is that's just. No, they can everyone can gouge everyone. That's what I figured. So either way, it's like it seems more like an internal fight between, you know, Trump and his advisors and Republican candidates.

But at the end of the day, it's not like we should be celebrating the fact that Trump may not spend his $400 million.

“I think it'd be best if he did not for us, but if he did not spend it did not.”

Yeah, like where we are really hanging on by a threat here to try to stay competitive in all these places and we're going to see. Particularly in some of the the harder states for us where that Republicans spending advantage is going to start to hurt. And so if you could take a half a billion nearly a half billion dollars and keep that in the sidelines, I would endorse that decision. Are they diminishing returns at some point? Oh, for sure, for sure, but it's just these races are so close.

The Republicans have so much money that it would be, like we don't, we are limited in our ability to expand the map because of our money troubles. It's not even money troubles. The Democrats, the Senate and House Democrats have done a very good job of raising money, but they're probably just raised a lot more.

And so it's just, let's try to, if Trump does not want to spend $400 million and that's not spent, that does reduce their money managed by $400 million.

That's, that's good, I guess everyone else listening, you can go to votesaveamerica.com. We have plenty of great candidates and very, very competitive races. Some of the most competitive races in the House and the Senate and down ballot who you can donate to. So every dollar counts at this point. Just to, to hammer home for people how truly excited Republicans are about Trump's plan to make the midterms about Trump.

Our friends at Politico surveyed more than 70 Republican candidates and members of Congress. About whether they plan to attend Trump's midterm convention in Dallas next week, which, of course, the RNC chair is calling Trump a polusa. Good branding.

Let's just say there are a surprisingly coincidental number of scheduling conflicts.

45 of these Republicans said they're not going dozens more decline to share their plans, not a lot of people touting their plans to attend. CNN tried to pin down a few Republicans in the halls of Congress this week to see if they were going to go. Let's see how it went. I'm planning to go to the Republican convention next week. I'm planning to be a registered.

Nope, you cannot. But you get to pick which of those two places you're in and you chose not the convention. Someone interviewed Max Miller asked him about it and he said, "No, I want to be spending the time with my family." That's tough one.

“So, Dan, what if the president throws a party for his party and no one comes?”

They'll be like most birthday parties that Trump had from age 5 to 14. I think they have like 2,000 people attending so far. I saw somewhere and I think they interviewed Timbershatt about it or a Republican member of Congress and he said, "Oh, I don't know. Most of the most people, and then up to $100,000 for some folks." I see this convention as primarily an opportunity for Democrats.

Because now I imagine they're going to spend if they're halfway smart, which I don't suggest that they are Republicans. They will at least spend the convention like driving up Democrats and negatives or trying to unload the autopile on all the different Democrats running for in the midterms. And so I imagine that's probably what they'll do. But I feel like for Democrats just having Trump up there speaking and also connecting all the Republicans who are attending who are in competitive races to Trump will be a boon to Democrats.

Like, Mike Rogers is going, apparently, which is why John Husted, who's running against Shared Brown and Ohio is going. Mike Holler, I think it's going. Susan Collins, wisely, to Jay Mart said that she is not going, but yeah, I'm surprised that Rogers and Husted are going. Yeah, it's all very strange.

“Like, in the end of the day, I think it's a gigantic waste of time energy and money like what?”

And making us stay up there's in it because you and I record in the pot after the answer. Yes, the true losers are us. But it's like, what non-political person is going to consume any of this content?

It's not going to be covered live on television like an actual convention.

“It's not going to get the media attention of an actual convention.”

It's not going to have the pomp and circumstance and actual convention. And it kind of is like an unlearning of all the lessons that work for publics in 2024. Like when they succeeded was when they were communicating in non-political spaces. So they decided to have a giant political party that looks like the most political thing possible to do their main messaging. Yeah, as one Republican strategist said, the coverage is going to be all about whatever the crazy shit the president decides to say.

Yeah, which is about right. Now, if you're a Republican candidate who can't make the convention or get the president to campaign with you, fear not, he's going to do everything he can to make sure voters are thinking about him when they go to the polls. For example, the US Mint began selling $1 Trump coins this week. Trump's face on a coin, legal tender.

You can buy 25 coin rolls for the low price of just $61. Just a question, that's $25 one dollar coins for $61, just in case you're going to have a calculator on hand. That works out to about $2.44 per one dollar coin. Why would someone do that, John? Well, Dan apparently quite a few people have done it because 150,000 were printed or made by the Mint or whatever the fuck you say.

I think they're minted. I think they mint them. Oh, there is a verb for it. There you go. There minted.

They're minted. Go ahead. Make fun of me for that. And I went on the website of the Mint website just to see if I could buy a document. Yeah.

Wow. They're already sold up.

“And we're sure that money goes to the treasury, right?”

No. No, I'm sure he pockets it. And I'm sure that they were purchased by, I don't know, Maga Inc. The Trump family.

Yes. The Trump family. I think it's more likely to be someone with a case before the Department of Justice. Yes. So it's legal tender, meaning that you can use it as real money.

All right, it's a dollar coin, but legal tender doesn't guarantee every store will accept Trump coins. Federal law generally lets private businesses decide what forms of payment they'll accept. So you can refuse a Trump coin as someone tries to pay you in a Trump coin. Just good information for people to have.

Interesting. I think it is funny that it's going to now cost you four Trump coins to put a gallon of gas in your car. We shouldn't measure all the costs of the war and Trump coins. Yes.

Speaking of the war, you can take those coins with you on your next trip through the Trump straight, which is what the president has suggested renaming the straight-of-war moves. Just to make sure people forever associate a geopolitical disaster that's led to a global energy crisis with the man responsible Donald J. Trump. How many Trump coins will it take to make sure that happens?

You think that he renames that because I would pay all my Trump coins to make sure that the straight-of-war moves has renamed the Trump straight. It's like renaming the Baghdad airport, the George W. Bush international airport impact. Just a little bit corn is custer hill. Yes.

Just so everyone can always associate Donald Trump with the straight-of-war moves.

I don't even understand how he got to that point in this thinking. It isn't just because some of these other things he floated. Gulf of America, Lake America, no of. Obviously, they happened. This one he was asked about in the oval today or yesterday.

“Can't remember any of the days Wednesday, who knows?”

And the asked him if he was serious and he was like, no, no. I was just thrown it out there. I was just thrown it out there. Did you get the wrong one? Yeah, even he probably realized, is that what I want to put my name on the straight-of-war

moves where they're shooting down, shooting at oil tankers, still six months into this war that I had promised put in a couple weeks. Yeah, not his best idea, John. Did you see the Wall Street Journal story about how Trump is contemplating just declaring the Iran war over?

The thing that's so funny about this is he's done it so many times. Yes. Yes. Is that line is buried in a story that's entirely the rest of the story. Every other word in that story is about how they're extending the deployments for troops

into 2027.

Like, I've never seen that headline thinking that was quite stupid.

Then going back, when I went back and read the story, I was like, this can't be the same story. Because this entire story is about the war continuing and how much longer the troops are going to be there. But like, I don't even, like, well, he would declare it so over. He did do the mission accomplished truth last week.

I thought, I thought it was over.

He did.

“I think, um, so Alex Ward with the story Wall Street Journal, a great reporter, and there's been some other reporting around those two.”

I believe what they're thinking is, um, they want to have a whole bunch of troops there deployed maybe into 2027. Because, but the same time, they want everyone ahead of the midterms to think that the war is over. Really beyond the midterms. So who knows?

I could see Trump planning some announcement. Some more formal announcement where he says the war is over.

Maybe he'll do it at Trump a police at the convention.

Or maybe he'll do it in October when it's closer to election day. And then they want to have the troops there for afterwards, so they can resume the bombing if they need to resume the bombing and the military strikes and all the rest after the midterms are over. So maybe that's it.

“Well, let's just play this out for a second.”

So let's say, let's say it happens to Trump a bullseye. Next Thursday night, you and I are sitting by our computer is waiting to podcast. Trump makes this big announcement to clears the war over. It says the end of major combat operations in the Trump, the straight of Trump. And then, and then immediately after that, Iran shoots a missile at something.

And then we respond. Yep. Then what happens? Well, we're just, that's just, that doesn't count. That's not part of the old war.

That's part of a new thing that they're just, we're just mowing the grass. And in this modern media environment, people know the war is going on. Not be picking up the newspaper off their front suit, but by going to the gas station. They're not going to stop going the gas station. No, they're not.

And there's been a lot of their Trump coins, but the gas station. Unlike a lot of other Trump ideas, this one seems not particularly well thought out. No. I mean, if you dig into all this, there seems to be, and we talked about this a little on Tuesday's pod. But like, there seems to be a thought that, because we have successfully navigated either around the straight of four moves,

or helped ships through the straight of four moves, so we're getting more oil out than we did before.

That perhaps we could all live with, you know, or maybe that the ultimate goal is like 60 to 70 percent of pre-war levels of oil getting out of the straight of four moves.

And maybe if we can get that, then every time Iran fires off a missile and we fire back. Then it'll sort of just fade into the background eventually, and people won't really pay much attention to it. Now, again, that's still 50,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East. So at some point, they'll probably want to come home to their families, and their families will be wondering where they are. So I don't know how they're going to get around that either.

I think for the problem for Trump here, whose twofold one is, as long as gas prices remain elevated, over not where they are right now. But where they were before this whole thing started, that's the main political prime for Trump, the main pressure point. But the other thing here is the political problem is not the failure to end the war, is the decision to start the war. That was the fundamental breaking of faith with what so many people, even people who did not really like Trump thought he stood for, which was no foreign wars, no forever wars.

And so once he did that, and it was a giant mess, and it continued on, and gas prices went up, and people suffered, and people died. I don't think any of that goes away, because we get to a very sort of quiet behind the scenes, it's really get attention, you know, missile exchange, every periodic missile exchange with Iran. See, Navigator had a new poll today that found 20% of Trump, 20, 24 voters regret voting for him, and the number one reason cited is Iran. 45% cited the war with Iran in Trump's foreign policy, and then close behind it, 43% cited prices in the cost of living, which is because of the war, mostly the other part is because of Trump's tariffs, the other war, the trade war.

And when you do this in focus groups, the words you hear are broken promises, like that's the thing, and the both of those fall under the broken promises category. Yep. Pots of America is brought to you by Wild the Laskan Company, the difference between low and high quality seafood is enormous, but it's also one of those things that's tough to accurately assess for yourself in the grocery store.

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Right now, Blinds.com is giving our listeners an exclusive $50 off when you spend $500 or more. Just use code, click it and check out. Limited time offer rules and restrictions apply. See Blinds.com for details. Alright, let's talk about the Democrats who just wrapped up their final competitive primary of a very, very long 26. On Tuesday, my home state went to the polls and overwhelmingly chose Ed Markey to be the Democratic Senate nominee from Massachusetts.

The incumbent Senator easily fended off a challenge from Congressman Seth Molten, who attempted to make the race a referendum. A generational change in the Democratic Party. Molten is 47. Marky is 80. But with the backing of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, he made the race about his progressive Bonnefides telling Politico, quote, "It's not about your age. It's about the age of your ideas." Isn't that a longtime acts statement, acts quote?

I feel like I've heard that so many times. Anyway, all these things get recited. Did he do that because Obama was so young? We were young. We know that he has acts used to suggest that Biden used that line. Oh, that's right. That's right. That's right. It's not about your age. It's about the age of your ideas.

And I am the youngest guy in this race when it comes to ideas.

“What do you think of this victory for the Jaren'tocracy?”

I think it exposed the limits of generational change campaigns, which is, Molten's campaign really just was. Marky's old, I'm young, without ever being able to explain what was lost for Massachusetts voters by Marky's age. And what would have been gained by Molten's younger age. And usually the case is the younger can is the one more in touch with young voters. But from a policy perspective, Marky was much more in touch with what young voters actually wanted on health care, on climate, on Israel.

You know, being the sponsor of the Green New Deal. And if you're the young candidate running on a presidential change, you can't win young voters. You're not going to win. In fact, you'll probably lose by 30 points as Molten did. The other backdrop to this, and there are a couple of backdrops to this. One is, Marky is 80, but not every 80 year old is the same.

And he seems very, like you watch him in the debates. He's very, he's very with it in energetic. And, you know, and he didn't have a moment like Biden did at the debate or John Larson. They can't hit it from Connecticut ahead when he sort of froze on the house floor that sort of haunted him. And so he seems, you know, like, you look at him. You're like, "That guy can do the job." But what also with his different here than it was perhaps in Maine, both for Biden and 2024 and in Maine from Janet Mills is, this is the same seat.

It's Massachusetts. So there wasn't this question of electability.

“Like, can he hack it in a general in a really tough campaign?”

Right? It's like he wins his primary. He wins. If something happens, a Democratic government appoints him. It's like, it's not. There just wasn't this question of ability to actually defeat Republicans. And so he won the one. So easily, he actually even won Molten's congressional district by about eight points, I think. Yeah, I think Molten only won his, like, hometown and some surrounding towns.

Yeah, Molten was my congressman when I, or at least my hometown's congressman, who will now be represented by Dan Coe, former Biden advisor, who was in. So there's a couple other house primaries. That was one of them, where I think it's the results showed that, like,

these things are complicated and they don't always fit a narrative, right?

Challenger there. Now it was an open seat. They're both fairly young. So there's that.

Stephen Lynch, 71 year old congressman from sort of Southern Massachusetts. He faced a primary challenge from our old White House intern, Patrick Roth. He was one of the first class of interns in the Obama White House 2009. For a speech running at us? No press. Oh, your office, Dan.

My office. Um, he was great. Yeah, no press. But he, so 71, uh, Patrick's 39, um, Medicare for all. Well, he turns her 39.

I know, right? Hit Lynch on Lake and Riley Act. So you had a younger, more progressive Challenger with an older, uh, more conservative, incumbent. And you came, you know, he got the first time, first time candidate came within, like, 10 points. Well, those were the lunches ever had, uh, in a primary challenge and she said that seat. But, you know, that that speaks to, even, even the progressive versus more moderate thing.

It doesn't always fit with the narrative, too.

“So some, and I only point that out because I think we're always like trying to fit all of these races into, okay,”

is it old versus young? But this one was progressive versus moderate. And those are the only two things that matter. And sometimes it's like, personalities matter, where you are, matter how many people know you, how many people are paying attention to the race, like, all kinds of factors going to this. At this point in the, after when so many people knocked out that candidates are not caught off guard anymore. Like, Diana to get, did, treated, treated, like, any of every other election, where she had faced so challenge,

and before she knew it, she was in huge trouble. This is a case where these candidates knew, knew to be, knew to be, part because it was going on with Marky, but they knew to be in the district, be campaigning, be raising money, be doing stuff, and give them a better chance to fend it off. Yeah. All right. So in another sign of where the party may or may not be headed,

political renastory about Democrats in competitive races, rejecting the support of their party's last presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. On top of Josh Turric, Rob Sand and Mary Peltola, who we talked about the other week, playbook got similar answers about Kamala from the Democratic Senate nominee in Kansas, Adam Hamilton, as well as Rebecca Cook, who's running in a very flippable,

Wisconsin congressional district, and has received the endorsement of Bernie Sanders and campaigns with him.

Harris acknowledged this sentiment for the first time today,

saying in a phone interview with Peter Alexander of MSNow that she supports these candidates "doing whatever they need to do to win." Harris will be on the trail next week, campaigning for Aaron Ford and Nevada, who Tommy just talked to this week, and she's recently endorsed and races in New Hampshire, California and Tennessee. What do you make of Harris' approach here, and sort of just this general story,

“which sort of is now has been sort of churning for a couple of weeks?”

I think this is sort of a bullshit test for Harris. Like it's an unfair question, like name the national Democrat, other than possibly Barack Obama, who would be invited to campaign in Kansas, Iowa, Alaska. Like a true national figure. Well, I mean, would you be invited? Would Gavin Newsom be invited?

No, but can I ask you a question? Yeah. So I agree with that, and I agree that it's a bullshit test for Kamala Harris alone in the past. And all those other people who are running should be asked the same question, or potentially running 2028.

Don't you think we need a nominee, in 2028, who will be welcomed in a lot more difficult space, and a lot more difficult. Well, this is the real test to me is not Kansas, Iowa, Alaska. The real test is Georgia. Congressional districts like Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania, Kate Connelly's,

“race against Michael, like, can you campaign in, are you invited to campaign in purple states?”

States that you lost by, you know, a couple hundred thousand votes at most. Last time, are you invited to campaign for a dual in Michigan? That to me is the fair test. Well, I bring it up because I was thinking about, you mentioned Obama. Obama now, whatever you have, of course, people want him.

Think about a sex, right? Yeah. And he can't even turn into anyone. And, you know, who they didn't want in many places. Clinton.

John Kerry. And Hillary Clinton. Well, I was saying, you know, sex. John Kerry had just been the nominee, right? Yeah.

And lost, and people didn't want John Kerry anywhere. But Barack Obama, the black-eyed named Barack and Obama from Chicago, was invited everywhere. And you would hope. And again, it's, this is tough, right?

Because maybe if John Ossov wins Georgia, you'd say, oh, well, most candidates in purple and light red states would want Ossov there. But like, there's no other midterm between now and now in 2028. So some of the candidates that might be welcomed in those areas

and could be great, presidential candidates, James Telerico.

Yeah, yeah.

“So it's like, you think about the people who are,”

some of the people who are thinking of running

or not well-known enough to be truly polarizing. Like, imagine Mark Kelly, we invited a lot of places. Yeah. He's an astronaut. You know, he, but he's not a national political figure in a way.

I'd be curious about people to judge, you know? That's a good one. He's been a lot of places, actually. Yeah. And he's been in places.

And there's one thing to go to all these red places and you will see candidates in like these red, these really, really hard states will want national Democrats to get attention for their race. But with, like, Josh Chorick, when I campaign with Pete

who won the Iowa, that's going to be interesting. That's the great question. That's the great question. Now, if I was advising Josh Chorick, I would say you have no national Democrats at the state.

Like, none. Right. Like, what is the upside for you at this point? I'd be very curious to know if Kamala Harris will campaign in Georgia for Kishelman's bottom.

So, who worked for her?

And where her ability to turn out the black vote

couldn't matter a lot in that race. You know, was she campaigned in Pennsylvania? North Carolina is interesting. I imagine Mark Kelly was not going to want anyone in his state.

He doesn't need it. Right. But that's just to me. I read that story this morning. And it was just like this.

It's just an unfair question to ask of Kamala Harris when, you know, when Obama was president, he wasn't going to deep red states to campaign. There has been a lot of focus on Kamala Harris around this, but like, you are completely right to say,

like, what about Gavin Newsom? What about any of these other, you know, what about AOC? Yeah. I do find it interesting that, I mean,

and he is a national political figure now who is very well-liked in the party and beyond the party Bernie Sanders, campaigning with Rebecca Cook.

And Rebecca Cook is not like a DSA lefty candidate.

She's a pretty moderate working class candidate and a pretty red district in Wisconsin and clearly feels that Bernie Sanders by her side is helpful. Here's my question.

Does Bernie come back to Michigan before election day for Ebedo? Yes. I think so. I would get some.

Do the gay or see you come back? Good question. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe she goes to Ann Arbor.

Maybe she go, you know, I could see her on college campuses. I mean, I would, if I'm dual with ASKP, I would not,

I would be totally, I would say I'd be totally fine with him campaigning. Here are ready. There's a gazelle, like they want to put you with Bernie Sanders and AOC and mad.

“All you have to do is run his ass for the primary”

of Ebedo with AOC and Bernie. And so you might as well get the benefits of it on college campuses and places like that. I do think there will be people in the dual campaign and the Michigan Democratic Party at the Detroit airport,

just watching to see if a soundpiker gets off the plane. I'm sure you don't go to any of that. Yeah. They're what are like, do they've access to the no fly list?

Can we have a state-based no fly list? But yeah. No, I think I think Bernie's probably a plus for dual in the home stretch. For sure. Okay.

One last item that's become a big midterm issue and will almost certainly become an even bigger 2028 issue, AI and data centers. The same week, the Donald Trump told Americans who oppose data center construction

that they're going to end up quote backwards and poor. Democrats began pointing out that nearly every single Republican in Congress voted to prevent states and cities and towns from regulating the construction of data centers and voted to give tax breaks to AI companies that build data centers,

especially in rural areas. Nearly one in five data centers. Currently under construction got these tax breaks. Thanks to the Republican Congress. This was part of Trump's big bill that also made massive Medicaid cuts.

If I were running against an incumbent Republican member of Congress,

“I think I would spend the next 60 days absolutely hammering my opponent”

for voting to cut Medicaid, cut taxes for billionaires, cut taxes for AI companies so they can build data centers in your back yard. All in the same bill. When you throw in their support for the war and Trump's tariffs, make things more expensive and like that's your campaign.

Are they going to put the data centers on the sites of the rural hospitals they close with their Medicaid cuts? Perfect. That's an ad. See, there you go.

Frantic people. Close the world. Yeah, close the rural hospital. Put in a data center. The tax cuts to the data center.

You're paying more. Yep. I mean, it's all right there. I think what do you think of that hit? I think it's a great hit.

I know that about the one big beautiful bit. I know about it because you tweeted it. I did it. I saw you mentioned in a political story as one of the people pushing this. Oh, wow.

Look at that. I saw it from Brandon Duke on Twitter, who had founded in the bill. Liberal policy guy. And so then I was like, holy shit. Is that real?

And then suddenly I saw he came Jeffries talking about it in a press conference. And I was like, all right. We're off to the races. Let's get that shit in an ad. Once we can change the world.

No. No. I don't think it was my tweet at all. It's like anyone saw it. Progressives also just launched a more aggressive approach to AI.

On Thursday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Greg Kasar announced the Ban Artificial Super Intelligence Act,

And pause, quote, AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules. Speaking of that hypothetical regulator, political reports that Mark Zuckerberg had a secret call with Donald Trump, where he expressed concerns about plans for a national AI regulator. You don't say.

And here's what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said about calls to regulate AI when he sat down with Howard Nutlick

at the G20 on Wednesday. As industry leaders do, often do is to do interviews. Always. Yeah.

“I think it would be approximately as a bad of an idea to say we're not going to have AI in our country.”

As it was to say we're not going to have electricity in our country. You know, back a hundred plus years ago. My prediction is we won't be talking about AI as much as we do in a decade from now. Because we'll be dead because we'll just expect it everywhere. You know, like, a kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI.

But here she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful.

You're a fantastic message to parents. Hey, parents, your kids will never be smarter than the machine that I'm building that we had won. No guardrails around whatsoever. And by the way, bulldoze that hospital nearby because we're putting in a data center. Just can we unpack this comment for one second? Let's first begin by stipulating that same Altman is a very bad spokesperson.

He's probably bad if he's maybe bad in many ways, but he's not a good spokesperson for his industry. Like, what is the point he's making that your gigantic super computer wouldn't which you much build data centers on every quarter to power is smarter than a eight year old? Of course it is. You know what's smarter than a eight year old? The computers we had last year or two years ago.

“I think he's saying your kids will never, no matter what grown into adults, never, that's the point of computers.”

Look, look at this forklift we built it stronger than any man. That's the whole point of having the forecliff. These cars that are faster than any human can run. Yes, that's it. Like that doesn't even make any sense. Well, no, but this raises a good point about Bernie's bill as well, right? Because what Bernie and Casar put out is so ban artificial super intelligence.

This is also known as ASI, right? You might also hear AGI. That's artificial general intelligence, which is AI that matches human level reasoning. Now, right now, the people that build the AI, the hyperscalers. We're in the fuck they are, Sam Altman, all the rest of them. They don't think that we have quite reached AGI yet, but maybe we're about to have reached AGI.

Haven't announced it. Well, we already done it and we just did it. Greg Brockman, the president. He now said today. Yeah, they have that.

Yeah, so they think.

Well, they think, no, this is the, but this is the problem is that no one knows.

None of these people know exactly like there's no, we have definitely reached AGI. Because no one can define exactly what human level reasoning and intelligence is. Like, it's sort of a, I guess it's just sort of a vibe. Same thing with artificial super intelligence, which is, they say we haven't reached it, but you clearly say that we've reached with the forklift a long time ago.

Just saying that we can make things that are stronger and stronger than people. Basically that's a long time. Just basic computers.

“I think what Bernie's getting at is like, some of these AI leaders and the people that are in these companies like Sam Altman have already”

in Elon Musk have already said, like, oh, sometimes we may not be able to control these machines at some point. And Bernie's point is if you can't control the machines, then why are you building the fucking machines? If they're beyond human control. Which is a good question. That's a great question.

It's a good question. I don't know that the ban actually works or how it works or that it has teeth like it seems like more of a, like he's planting a flag in the ground than an actual plan here. But it does raise the point that again, that people like Sam Altman are like, well, you know, the kids aren't going to be ever as smart as AI and Greg Brockman saying, oh, we've hit artificial general intelligence and the hugging face disaster where a bunch of AI agents got out of the sandbox and found the internet.

And suddenly, you know, took over everything and tried to hide from humans and it's like, and then they all look at this and like, well, this is bad. This is bad. Five alarms. Everyone should be really worried about this, but anyway, we're going to go back to work. We're going to keep building this because China. We don't want China to have it. We want if China, if China develops the technology to, you know, render humanity extinct. We got to get that too. We got to get that too. I tweeted basically after some of the data centers of a few weeks ago, I tweeted that the, from a, like, just from a pure step back communications messaging perspective.

The people who do politics and policy and communications at the AI companies have done an absolutely miserable fucking job. And one of the points is that these people go out all the time when they are, they proudly, and callously tell us, as Sam Altman always does.

And I heard from a lot of people who, like, publicly and then privately who work in the industry or around the industry who say, no, no. A lot of the people who work in AI are really concerned about this. They're genuinely concerned about it. And they want, they feel, but obligated to express that concern.

“And I actually do believe a lot to people who work in the industry or concern, I think that's a lot of what drives, you know, it's like,”

Open AI exists because everyone thought Google was too dangerous and then anthropically exist because of people at a private thought to do it.

Today address and I can't wait to find out what the next thing is, but the problem is, you're saying how dangerous your product is

on one hand, the other hand, you're pushing rapidly for an IPO as fast as possible in order to get liquidity to your investors. Yep. And so it's just, there is this, like, one day we're going to destroy the world, the other day we're going to buy the world with the money we make from destroying the world. Well, and you're also calling Donald Trump, like Mark Zuckerberg or, I guess, Trump called him and saying, but I don't want to regulate her. I don't want to regulate her and, you know, Sam Altman's like, well, it's voluntary, we want these voluntary standards, but of course we're abiding by them because we want to work with the government on this because we're, you know, we're nice guys, but like, they don't really want the regulation.

The way they fight the regulation is by saying, we have to win this race or else China's going to win. And then they go out and say, oh yeah, but this is really dangerous, but also still no regulation. Thank you. We'll take care of it. It really is telling everyone, we'll take care of it. We're going to build the data centers, whether you like it or not, and fuck off. Yeah, which is why I you and I saw some some private polling, the data centers are down to like 20% approval.

Yeah, it's a true bipartisan issue. And I have almost never seen an issue reach this level of intensity this quickly.

People would rather have a nuclear power plant or a prison or a methadone clinic. They were all more favorable being built in your community than a fucking AI data center. And when they tested it with, oh, and the company building the data center will provide the power and we'll make sure that they're bear all the costs and the people in the community not people don't buy it. It goes up a couple percent, but people just don't trust the AI companies on this even when you do it ostensibly the right way

and make sure that the AI companies bear all the costs and that people in these communities are held harmless. They just don't trust that that's going to happen. And they don't trust big tech. Why would that? Yeah, it's fair point.

“So I think this, I mean, you know, I do hope, obviously there's a smorgous board of things for Democrats to run on in the midterms.”

But I think, and hope, this will be one of the big issues, and then certainly this will be a big issue in 2028. And I think in 2028, the challenge is going to be staking out positions on this that are responsive to the populist fear out there. Well, also being realistic and responsible, right, because like, and I don't say that to be like, oh, we need to find the middle ground, but these people are developing the technology much of it is already here. So the question is, like, how do we put the, we actually do need to get guardrails around them, so we just do need to pass something.

That's right. Okay, one last thing before we get to Tommy's interview with Jasper Nathaniel, a little news about someone, you know, Jasper's an actual journalist, this is about someone who plays a journalist on TV. Maria Bardaromo is out at Fox News. So Fox, that happened this morning, Thursday morning, Fox released a rather vague statement about why that just said, we thank Maria for her work over the last 12 and a half years and wish her all the best on her next chapter. But Oliver Darcy, it's status news has the scoop Thursday afternoon.

“It says after Trump delivered his unhinged primed time speech in which he pushed more conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Remember that, remember the China thing.”

I am told this is Oliver writing this, I am told that Fox News issued guidance to senior employees instructing them to steer clear of giving credence to Trump's delusional claims.

I'm told that the guidance was issued in writing, but ultimately, Bardaromo spilled the secret statuses learned,

divulging to the White House that Trump's speech had received scant coverage on the channel because network bosses had ordered it. So I'm even told the text message in which Fox News brass offered their guidance was shared by Bardaromo with the White House. In doing so, Bardaromo not only effectively betrayed her employer, but also disclosed confidential company information violating the terms of her employment agreement. What do you think about that? Well, it's more interesting, I guess, than what we all thought when she went her resignation or firing was announced, we thought she was going to the White House Press Secretary.

And I believe she was, I would have been pretty interesting, I think. Well, she on your list of potentials. So I think she was too, but I had knocked a few people off of this, so I couldn't remember, but if you remember that she was on my mind.

At one point, she was on my list, yeah. And she still could. She still could become press secretary. I would say my number one choice, Rachel Campos stuffy has been really out on a media tour recently auditioning for this task. Yeah, and all the, maybe in all the wrong ways. Maybe I wouldn't say she's doing a great job. All the wrong ways for you if you were hiring the White House Press Secretary.

Yeah, that's pretty wild. It is funny that, I mean, it's Maria Bardaromo, whatever, but sort of the internal drama at Fox, where like the president gives the speech about, you know, China interfering the election, everyone thinks it's bullshit. It's sort of weird on Fox and not to hear it. And then sure enough, it was because I guess defamation lawsuits work.

If you lose three quarters of a billion dollars for putting a bunch of crazy shit on your TV, you might learn a lesson from it.

And they certainly didn't. And then when so far as to fire her for, uh, fucking snitching on them to Donald Trump. And she is a huge election to nire, like she is, here it is. Prior to the dominion thing, she was like, deep into this. I mean, as most financial journalists would be to be into a whole man. She has had a journey. Once upon a time, she was like a fairly normal journalist. Yes, she was very, very popular CMBC anchor.

Can't wait to see where she ends up next. All right, up next time, he's interviewed with independent journalist Jasper Nathaniel.

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That's STAMPS.com/PSA. Taxes and fees apply. I'm Nate Silver. I'm Gailindruk. And I'm Claire Malone.

We're back. This time with our friends at Crooked Media for a new show called Still Counting. Yeah, numbers are hard. It takes her easy. And frankly, numbers have only gotten harder.

What does the data actually cite?

“How do we reconcile that with the other things that we're seeing in American politics and around the world?”

And how do we use that data to understand or maybe even dare to predict the future of American politics? New episodes every Wednesday starting September 9th. Subscribe to Still Counting on YouTube.com/At Still Counting Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. My guest today is an independent journalist focused on stories from inside the occupied West Bank. Jasper Nathaniel.

Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Great to see you. We've talked. We've we've zoomed.

I've never met you in person.

It's great to have you in LA. Yeah. If you guys want to find Jasper's work. First of all, you go to Substack and search for infinite jazz or go to infinite jazz onesie.com. So he's totally self-funded.

He's an independent journalist. So if you sign up for a paid subscription. We're sending you back to the West Bank. It sounds like that's right. Thank you.

But other pots in America folks get on board. So I wanted to have this conversation with you today because we've talked a lot about Gaza on this show. I don't think we've talked about the West Bank much ever. And for a variety of reasons that we'll get into.

“I think the West Bank could have bigger political implications and could be an even more”

fundamental part of the 2028 Democratic primary in particular. For listeners who who, you know, want some context or unfamiliar with the issue or the area. The West Bank is a little piece of territory. They've got Jordan on the to their east Israel everywhere else.

It's home to about 3 million Palestinians nearly 700,000 Israeli settlers.

And so when you hear people talk about a two-state solution and the creation of a Palestinian state, the majority of the territory for that state was supposed to be the West Bank. But for decades now, the West Bank has been carved up and stolen by Israeli settlers.

I think the next question has to be, okay, where's the territory? Where's the state you're talking about? Where we drawn those borders. And so we'll get it's all of that in a minute.

But first let's just do the basics.

“Jasmer, can you explain to listeners what is the Israeli settler movement?”

And how is it changed since the October 7th attacks in 2023? Okay, so just to take an even bigger step back, Israel, when then it's 1948 borders, which are the borders that are recognized by under international law, and that expanded in 1967 after the 6th day war was fought. So basically Israel took Gaza from Egypt.

They took the West Bank from Jordan and they took a couple other territories. And the West Bank became under international law and occupied territory. And that's not just a like euphemism or a phrase. So that actually has legal implications that Israel is ostensibly supposed to adhere to.

“Based on the hate convention and the Geneva convention.”

And what those laws amount to is that this is a temporary occupation. Israel is temporarily administering the territory as it works out a security situation with its military. With its military, it's a military occupation, exactly. And so what that means is that the Israeli government is not allowed to govern the West Bank. It has to actually, again, by international, it will be governed by the Israeli military.

And the other thing that it means is that Israel cannot do anything to put down permanent routes in the West Bank. Because it has to be temporary. And so when you hear people say the settlement project is fundamentally illegal. It's because the settlement project is about settling, you know, putting down routes in the West Bank and the entire project is illegal.

So the settlement movement starts right after 1967, basically.

And the sort of religious tenants of it are that the West Bank is, you know, you've probably heard that the settlers or Mike Huckabee or, you know, maybe John Fetterman. I'm not sure, called Judea and Samaria. Right. What that refers to is the ancient kingdoms of Israel. So Samaria was the kingdom in the north, Judea was the kingdom in the south.

And you know, if you talk to a settler or even Nenya who, I think, what they will say is, Judea and Samaria has more biblical significance to Jews than any other part of either Israel, certainly Gaza, which is virtually no biblical significance to Jews. And so the reason I get that background is because there is a faction of people in Israel or Jews around the world actually who care about the territory much more than they care about anything else. And a thing that you hear a lot from settlers, they'll say if Israel has a right to claim the land within its 1948 borders based on the Jewish people's connection to the land.

Well, we have a much stronger connection here. The connection in Samaria is much stronger than it is in Tel Aviv. Right. So why don't we get to claim this? And so the settlement movement basically is acting on that.

And they are trying to build what, you know, they call facts on the ground, which is Jewish settlements across the West Bank. To turn it into part of Israel, basically.

“And since the October 7th attacks, my understanding is that solar activity in violence has just ratcheted up and up, right?”

Yes, although I mean, this violence actually started before October 7th, as in like this big escalation. So in, at the end of 2022, you know, there was a selection in Israel and Nenya who forms this government with these far right factions that had been considered out of bounds even in Israeli politics, which is really far right. You know, so you had guys like, it and are Ben Gavir in the Jewish power party and Bezelal Smotrich in the religious Zionism party, both of them are settlers themselves. They take ministerial positions immediately.

And Smotrich, who is a completely messianic settler who has been open about saying that his life's goal is to create Jewish sovereignty across Judean, Samaria, and to bury Palestinian state.

What he does is he pulls up this sort of incredible, slight of hand where he installs himself inside the defense ministry.

He just makes up a title, additional minister in the ministry of defense. And what he does is he clears out all of these career bureaucrats inside of the defense ministry who had managed the bureaucracy of the occupation. And he installs all of these settler ideologues. So it should be familiar to people who have followed what Doge did or, you know, RFK is on it helping human services. Like you clear out all the people who had, you know, done the basic put up the basic red tape that at least made it a little difficult to build a settlement.

And he puts in all these people who are just rubber stamping every new request to build a new settlement or to authorize an outpost or to, you know, call and state land or something like that.

They removed what's called administrative detention against settlers and they basically just give the settler's permission to run wild.

“And then the sort of last part of this is that the Israeli government and the idea and the settlement movement begin working together like never before.”

And the settler attacks on Palestinian villages and we can probably get into this more later, but they're not random. I mean, they are attacking villages that are in strategic spots that Israel wants to take over to cut off territorial continuity for Palestinians or to, you know, create a new road that connects to settlements. And so basically what I'm getting at is like the violence has spun out of control, but it is it's not chaos. This is very much part of delivered the central state project in the West Bank, which is to create Jewish sovereignty across the whole territory.

And just according to the UN, the number of settler attacks has increased every year since the October 7th attacks in 2023, 2026 is on pace to have more than 2,000 violent settler attacks in the West Bank alone.

But despite that frequency and volume of violence, very few of these stories get reported in Western media or break through.

One incident that did break through in Western media in a big way was one, an incident you documented back in October of 2025. We're going to watch that footage and then I want you to describe what's happening. Oh my god, come on, oh my god, hey, hey, hey, hey. So for folks listening and not watching that was footage of this mass settler brutally beating an old woman in the group of activists.

“And then we see footage from far away of you literally sprinting down a hill away from a mob. So what happened there?”

So this is an a village called Termisa in the West Bank, which is just east of Ramallah. And it's actually one of these villages that is made up of largely American citizens. And so it was the all of harvest, which is for a long time, been one of the most violent times of year for Palestinians because it's when. And so I went out with a group of farmers in Termisa, into their all of fields, which recently, settlers had built a new outpost there. Now what an outpost is is it is in his really settlement that does not even have Israel's approval yet. So it's basically a bunch of settlers have peeled off from an authorized settlement, planted a flag somewhere and said, you know, we live here now.

And so it's like set up a camp, literally. Yes, literally they set up a couple of tents and a like shipping container and they start living there. So and by the way, they know the guy who started this settlement, his name is Amashav Melat, he's a real person with a real name and a criminal history frankly, everybody knows who he is. So we go into the all fields immediately. We see this guy Melat points a gun at us threatens us tells us to get out of the all of fields. We find another way in and to make a long story short, we got trapped in these all of fields by settlers who had guns and were threatening us and this is Palestinian land and a lot of it is privately owned by American citizens actually for whatever that's worth.

I run into a group of IDF soldiers and basically plead with them to help give us safe passage out of the all of fields they agree and then.

They lead us to come follow them and then right as we reach me in a Palestinian farmer, we reach where these really soldiers are they speed away and that's when that mob of settlers appears and chase me through the all of fields.

“Then I documented the clip of that woman and Sava being clubbed almost death by settler all in all in that attack. I want to say five people were hospitalized homes were torched and how was the woman in that clip?”

She's I believe she's in her 60s and she's grandmother and she was out there you know picking olives. But I think what's like really instructive about this incident actually is that it was one of the few settler attacks that on some level sort of broke through it was covered in. It was a huge story in Israel proper and was covered in the mainstream western media to a certain extent and I think it's because there's no way to spin a video of a masked settler clubbing in old woman. And so it actually created a PR crisis for Israel. And so what they did was they went out and they made an extraordinarily rare arrest of the guy who clubbed her.

You know as well as I do that the guy you arrested is a foot soldier this is a nobody. We know where he came from he came from the outpost which is in the middle of the term as I all of fields you know where it is you know the guy who's leading it.

“If you want to end the terror in this community you have to dismantle that outpost and these guys told me on the phone just watch that's what we're going to do.”

Fast forward to my visit in June. I went back to Termasaya what had been a couple of shipping containers is now eight shipping containers. What happened maybe one family living there is now maybe a dozen families living there. I'm a child now that is still patrolling the all fields with his gun. The IDF is there hanging out with them praying smoking cigarettes breaking bread and the people of Termasaya just now can't even consider trying to get to their land. And so again it's like. I bring this up because the way settler violence is sometimes covered to the extent it's ever covered in the in the western media it looks like a couple of sort of feral. You know misguided youth and that's certainly how like then yeah.

That's what it's like. It's like that apple describes and bad apples are randomly attacking a village but the the Amishav mellit is a well connected guy he is working with high ranking members of the IDF and in the canesit in the Israeli government to build this outpost here and push the Palestinians off their land to expand the shield settlement actually and so every place where you're seeing

that was attacking Palestinians is a place where the powers that be in the Israeli government and the military and the settler movement have decided.

“Not just we want to go you know launch a pagram against these people but this is a strategic point for us to take in our effort to bury the idea of a Palestinian state.”

And so so that is why the violence is so widespread right now it's because it's calculated and it's methodical and it's being designed at the highest levels of the Israeli government. I want to get you asking more about those connections to the government a second but look you're an American you're a journalist in the longer version of that video you're yelling press American press. One would assume that would afford you some protection from the settlers not because they love Americans but because they know that beating up an American is going to lead to

low back and a call from the embassy to these really government and that could maybe lead to consequences whereas beating up a Palestinian is almost never going to lead to consequences.

But just a couple days ago a crew from NBC news was interviewing a Palestinian woman a car full of settlers drives up they jumped out they beat the shit out of all of them with clubs and then speed away. Did that surprise you does that reflect a new level of impunity? It did surprise me at all. You know these attacks are completely ubiquitous in the West Bank what the only unusual thing that happened there

was that a mainstream outlet went to one of these villages that is seeing a lot of violence and they ran into the settlers who live there and they got attacked.

“I mean that's what happens. It's the same reason why Congressman Rokana had his bus hijacked when he was driving through the Saltybron Hills.”

These people came out and said oh it's a hoax you know it was a set up what a coincidence like no go drive through the Saltybron Hills. That place is run by the violent settlers and the military that supports them. So this is just what happens there as a journalist. I mean like you said I certainly am and much more protected at every level than my Palestinian friends and my Palestinian colleagues journalist. But I've been going to the West Bank for years now and each time I go the settlers seem less and less inhibited in physically attacking me.

And you know I'm visibly not Palestinian and I'm usually speaking and they know I'm American and they just have no hesitation whatsoever in attacking me. And yes it's because they know in all likelihood they will be celebrated and rewarded for this and I'm not exaggerating by the way and this is covered in these really press so there's nothing conspiratorial about this. The settlers who are committing the violence are considered the tip of the spear for the central is really state project of ethnically cleansing the land from the river to the sea.

But they know that somebody like me who's there to report on what they're doing I'm an enemy of the state. They consider me an enemy of the state and the people attacking me know that maybe if you know push comes to shove huckabee will have to condemn them or so and so will condemn them. But there's almost no chance that they're actually going to go to jail or do any real jail time and if anything it's going to elevate their status in the movement. Yeah, but before I ask you about the government ties is there any sort of data about Palestinian attacks on Jews in the West Bank because that's sort of the what about is and you always hear what about violence or terrorism against Jewish communities in the West Bank in particular.

Well, strictly from a numbers perspective since October 7, 2023 the ratio of Palestinians who have been killed by Israelis to Israelis who have been killed by Palestinians is about 30 to one.

These are shepherding villages where there's no history of armed resistance where there's barely even any infrastructure or let own weapons and they're being attacked because they are the easiest targets and the easiest ones to chase off the land. So anybody who claims that settler violence is a response to Palestinian violence, well, that was a case you would expect to see the settler violence going after places that do have some history of armed resistance, which exist in the West Bank, but that's not where it's happening, right, it's happening mostly in these completely defenseless bedwin builders, but the last thing I just want to say is about this is, you know, the numbers about the violence and the murder obviously tell a story.

But the violence against Palestinians in the West Bank goes so much deeper than that. I mean, these villages that we're talking about that are under attack, it's difficult to describe what the feeling of just pervasive terror in the air is like in these places. You can't go to sleep there because every single night settlers are coming in their ATVs, they're flying drones, they're firing guns, they're putting flash us floodlights into homes, they're beating the crap out of people, sometimes they're killing people, they're burning down homes, they're burning homes with people still in them.

People, young men in these villages who were students or farmers or mechanics are now forced to be the sort of de facto security in these places, they don't have any weapons though, if they dare to throw a rock at a Palestinian, they might be killed by an Israeli soldier who's invading the village with the settlers and then called a terrorist for throwing a stone.

And so the terror just goes, the violence and terror and just supplication of all life goes so deep that any, you know, question about who's doing the violence under whom.

“I mean, you can just go to those numbers, but also you have to look at who is suppicating the life out of whom in the West Bank.”

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This time with our friends at Crooked Media for a new show called Still Counting. Yeah, numbers are hard, it takes very easy. And frankly, numbers have only gotten harder. What does the data actually cite?

“How do we reconcile that with the other things that we're seeing in American politics and around the world?”

And how do you use that data to understand or maybe even dare to predict the future of American politics? New episodes every Wednesday starting September 9th. Subscribe to Still Counting on YouTube.com/atstillcountingpodcast or wherever you get your podcasts. So like we were just saying, you know, when the stories do break through, when it's really officials are forced to respond.

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, to his credit, I think he called some of these recent Israeli settlers terrorists, which they are.

But he also kind of does the few bad apples shit. Like you said, though, anyone actually paying attention knows that the Israeli government is complicit in and supportive of these settlers. You've described them as the tip of this fear for the state-backed annexation process.

“Can you tell us more about how the government is backing these attackers and sort of what the end game is?”

Sure. For starters, Bezbel Smotorich, who I mentioned before, he is essentially running the military occupation right now, which is in charge of things like construction tenders and zoning permits and, you know, transportation and checkpoints and whatnot.

So he's already controlling life in the West Bank, but he is also the finance minister.

And they have, they are diverting a disproportionate amount of tax revenue and funds into not just the settlements, but the illegal outposts. And so every dollar that goes into the Israeli government through taxes or, you know, aid or whatever it is, a disproportionate amount of that is going directly to building out roads that connect illegal outpost to one another. It's giving them guns and by the way, obviously US taxpayer dollars are paying for this stuff too for bulldozers and so the Israeli government is supporting the settler movement on a very material level.

But I think again, it goes to like, there was in fact a time, not that long ago when there was some sort of, there was a little bit of real estate between the settlement movement and the government and the idea.

“I mean, there were certainly like alliances across them and there was a lot, there was political and ideological overlap.”

But a lot of the time the IDF and the settlers were fighting with each other because the idea was ostensibly trying to, you know, maintain security with at least them shut down their settlements. Exactly, we'll shut down the illegal outposts. Because they saw the settlers as trouble makers.

Today in the West Bank, the head of the Central Command, which is basically the commander of the IDF and the West Bank, he's a settler himself.

He appointed a guy and again, what I'm saying now, this was first reported in the Israeli press. He appointed someone who's full-time job is to go to these illegal outposts to meet with the settler leaders there and discuss with them what their needs are in terms of funding in terms of infrastructure in terms of weapons. But also to pull out maps and talk about what are the places where they want to expand to and what that means is these are the places that we're going to launch attacks. And then they launch these attacks over 60 Palestinian communities have actually been fully ethnically cleansed, chased off of their land since October 7th.

Sometimes it makes a little bit of news, usually it doesn't. But then what happens when nobody's paying attention anymore is these really government retroactively legalizes that outpost and it becomes a settlement. And so what that means is that the violent settlers when I say they're the tip of the spear, they are quite literally the ones clearing the land, maybe occasionally they'll be condemned for PR purposes. But then when nobody's paying attention anymore, that now became a new settlement or a neighborhood of an existing settlement or something.

So it is quite literally all part of the same project. And you're talking about Smotriarch, there's another guy, it's Mar Ben Gavier, who just to be clear is part of the Israeli government. BB Nanyahu did not win the last election outright. It's a parliamentary system, so we had to build a coalition of other parties to get enough votes in the canesit to rule. Ben Gavier is the National Security Minister.

It's hard to describe how extreme he is without sounding hyperbolic.

“Just to have a photo on his wall of a guy named Baruch Goldstein, who is a terrorist who, I think he machine gunned something like 29 Palestinian.”

Brooklyn Jew, who were pranked. Yeah, he recently posted an AI video that we're going to show for you guys of himself sending Palestinians on train tracks into a prison. They go in fat, they come out crying in skinny, they think it's deliberately designed to look like a concentration camp. Absolutely. Let's watch that.

So it's pretty sickening stuff. Israel's elections coming up in October. Everyone would like to see Netanyahu lose. We'd like to see this current coalition blown up so that people like Ben Gavier are no longer in power. However, the person most likely to replace Netanyahu is a guy named Gotti Eisencoat.

People talk about getting rid of Netanyahu, like it's a panacea.

“But the alternatives aren't great when it comes to the West Bank, right?”

You talk a little bit about that. Yeah. I mean, the main opposition candidate is a guy named Gotti Eisencoat, who he is considered by some to be the sort of centrist liberal savior of Israel. In fairness to him, he is less openly extreme than Netanyahu or Ben Gavier or Smotrich.

But I guess I'll just give two quick, a couple quick anecdotes about him, the first one.

Eisencoat developed the doctrine that the IDF uses, which basically states that if you apply disproportionate force to civilian infrastructure in enemy territories, then you will pressure the civilians there to pressure their government. That is why all of Gaza's civilian infrastructure was destroyed. I mean, it is because of that doctrine, basically. And so this is a guy who created that. The second thing I want to say about him is that earlier this year, he visited one of the most infamously violent outposts in the West Bank

to meet with the leaders there in a clear signal that if the government changes hands don't worry, like you still got a man on the inside. There's no reason to visit a violent outpost, which, again, is illegal even under Israeli law. There's no reason to make that visit unless you are sending a clear political signal to them. And the third thing I'll say is he has had to come out time and time again and reiterate, he is against the creation of a Palestinian state.

Against it, it will never happen under his watch, he says.

And so again, I mean, I'm not going to pretend that there would be no difference between him and Netanyahu or like if they replace the defense minister or the National Security Minister or whatever. But the fundamentals are still there. I mean, there's still a project to ethnically cleanse the West Bank and to ethnically cleanse Gaza and parts of Lebanon and, you know, who knows where else between the river and the sea. And that's, that is, there's nothing in the existing Israeli political system that shows that could change.

I do also want to quickly go back to the Bengibir thing real quick though.

“I mean, I think that video is instructive in some ways, because first of all, it's an accurate,”

it's an accurate representation of what's happening. I mean, besides how, you know, they show Palestinians is being like, you know, overweight going in. I suppose that's just ridiculous. But there is an actual policy of starving Palestinians in Israeli prisons, a literal policy. Ben Gavir when he came into power, he instructed the prisons to cut down on the food rations, among many other things. So cut down on the number of beds they get. So some that many cells are overcrowded, there's policies of actual torture.

The Israeli Supreme Court last year ruled that the Israeli prison system was not feeding their Palestinian prisoners enough to survive. And instructed them to remedy that, and Ben Gavir just had no thanks. So there is literally a policy of starvation, and there's over 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, thousands of them are being held without charge, many of them are children. And so, you know, including American children, including American children, the reason I bring this up is just because there is this tendency among,

“I think, liberal supporters of Israel to describe Ben Gavir as a sort of fringe figure.”

And what I always come back to is that that Nick Christoff story, I'll bet in the New York Times about what's happening in these really prisons, about, about rape and sexual assault in Israeli prisons. And the same people that are willing to condemn Ben Gavir and condemn videos like that, called that bloodlible accused Christoff of bloodlible. And they acted completely incredulous that something like that could happen in Israeli prison, and so it's kind of like what you said. This guy is in charge. Ben Gavir runs the prison system. He runs the police force. He's in charge of law and order in Israel and the occupied territories.

And so, if you can see a video like that and condemn it, you really need to take that next step and say, with his power, what has he actually done besides what he's showing us right here in this video. And you give him rifles. We, they're videos that him can bring out like their own force that are being handed to, set orders in the West Bank that are being used to kill Americans among others. I'm sure the people who are listening to this who are frustrated and feel like this is like two liberals coming down hard on Israel and they feel like there's maybe too much of this in the conversation.

I just want to point out that the New York Times recently featured around this piece that featured a bunch of top retired Israeli military officials who went to the West Bank and were just horrified by what they saw. The headline was these generals fought for Israel and now they see Jewish terrorism as the threat. A retired major general says, quote, what the settlers are doing here is the real threat to Israel. This is more concerning to me than Iran, Gaza or Lebanon.

You know, if you were I made those comments, Jasper, like the ADL.

Well, that is a direct for our head, but to those Israeli generals, that is a direct violation of the IHRA, definition of anti-Semitism, to compare Israel to Nazis. And so I'm waiting for Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL to come out and condemn these Israeli generals for saying those things, but no, I mean, listen. There is no other side of this story of what's happening in the West Bank. There just simply isn't anybody who is still defending the settlement movement or the IDF there or just Israel's policy in the West Bank.

You're just not looking at what's actually happening. When you have IDF generals in that article, like lists their accomplishments of like the extreme violence as the phrase that they committed in the West Bank in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syrian, all these places. If those people are coming out and saying it, then I mean, it's just, again, it's like as far as I'm concerned, yeah, there's just no argument anymore that this is not happening. And the most hawkish hawks are even more than Iran. And I do want to say that, like, you know, the way this is being talked about among a lot of Israelis, including these guys, is that it's a threat to Israel.

It's a huge PR issue for Israel, first of all. These videos of Palestinians being attacked by settlers, it looks bad for Israel, it's creating all this bad press.

So they recognize that it's a problem for Israel, but you don't hear nearly enough of it's talking about the principle issue here, which is a Palestinian who are being violently attacked and having their homestone and whatnot. And so I just, I want to, you know, point that out. Yeah, and the hope for a Palestinian state. So look, you know, you and I have talked on Pazayah the world, my foreign policy show a couple of times, we've talked about your reporting on the show more often than that.

“But I wanted to have this conversation on this show, the more kind of domestic political show, because I think I hope that these issues are going to be a big part of the 2021 Democratic primary.”

In general, you know, I think we all should be talking about how what's happening is existential and threat to any hope of a Palestinian state or a two-state solution.

I know you're a journalist, you're not like a policy white paper guy, but are there Democrats out there proposing ideas that you think are good or ideas that you wish they would propose or implement? I'm going to answer that question a little bit differently. There are Democrats who are saying some things that I think are positive. In Holland, I think the sort of the lead one, and are talking more openly about like what is happening in the West Bank and in Gaza and whatnot, and I, you know, like it's good to see a shift in that direction.

“I think that there is still a refusal to face the reality of what's happening, because it is politically inconvenient, and let me give you like one specific example of that.”

It's very easy for a Democrat to come out and say, "Palestinians should have a right to live in dignity." It's very easy to condemn settler violence. There's nothing hard about that for a Democrat to do. It's much more difficult to say, these Palestinians who are being attacked by armed settlers, how are they going to defend themselves? How are you when you are in a Palestinian community, and you have settlers with machine guns, and a military behind them coming into the village, burning their homes, killing their people, attacking them, how are they supposed to defend themselves?

I think the question about cutting off military aid to Israel, I think I'm glad that that has sort of been mainstreamed, or at least like the overturned window has shifted on it, but the next question becomes, "How are the Palestinians supposed to defend themselves?" And I would just like to hear that talked about by Democratic politicians. I think the second thing is, I can't bear to hear them talk about a two-state solution anymore. Or, if you're going to talk about a two-state solution, this is basically what I'm asking of Democratic politicians.

You're talking about creating a Palestinian state, creating enough territory in the West Bank for Palestinians to have an actual state. The Israeli government from the left to the right is against that. The Israeli military is directly fighting against that. The settlers are certainly against it. So at that point, if you're going to create a Palestinian state there, you're going to war with Israel.

“You are literally, you have to go to war with Israel to create a Palestinian state. And so if you are talking about a two-state solution, you have to also explain your plan for going to war with Israel to create that state.”

But in lieu of that, I think that they should be talking to the extent they're talking about solutions at all, beyond things like a full arms embargo, is a one-state solution.

And then you can actually have a democracy. It won't be a Jewish state anymore, but it'll be a democracy. And it'll have Jewish people and Muslims and Christians living there. But you cannot have both a, I mean, look, the reality is there's, it is not, with the situation as it is today, where there is no possibility of creating an actual Palestinian state there, it can't be both the Jewish state and a democracy. Right? I mean, it is a democracy when you give everybody the right to vote, and then it is no longer a majority Jewish state.

And so that's just a reality that politicians have to reckon with. And again, nobody is talking about, you know, killing all the Jews there or anything insane like that. We're talking about just giving equal rights to everybody who lives there. Well, yeah, I mean, I think what you're doing here is kind of popping bubbles and the the fictions that are still apart such a central part of the talking points, right? Like I think in reality, there is no way for innocent villagers to defend themselves against a well-armed settler movement and the idea.

So the conversation sort of has to be what can the international community do to put structures in place to defend them, whether it's a UN or something. But it also taught me, I mean, it's also like when politicians talk about a Palestinian state, even the, you know, a stance like Propal Simon say, "Well, it'll be a demilitarized state." Why? Why should the Palestinians be demilitarized when they are being literally killed every single day? I mean, that like the double standard there is just it's staggering and and I just think that like the way, I mean, listen, a Palestinian with a gun is considered a terrorist to the mainstream media.

And to politicians, like it doesn't matter how they got that gun. It doesn't matter what they're using and for if it's for self-defense or whatever, they're just considered a terrorist. And that needs to change. I mean, and again, like I'm not prescribing solutions here, but I want to say, if you can acknowledge that there are terrorists roaming the West Bank, Jewish terrorist roaming the West Bank, terrorizing communities, killing people, how do you propose those people protect themselves? And it's up to you how you want to talk about doing that. But I would like to see that reality acknowledged as opposed to politicians just saying the sort of like easy basic things about these two states living side by side.

Yeah, and you know, you don't, you know, condemning the violent set of orders and condemning Smotritch and then you're being involved like like, yeah, it's a little bigger than that.

“Oh, for sure. I mean, I think we're both getting like moving past kind of the broken conversation of a decade ago, those talking points were kind of not operative for a very long time, even before October 7th, frankly.”

And also, I think, you know, the reality of the idea that you would forcibly expel hundreds of thousands of settlers from the West Bank would lead to a massive military conflict. There would be all sorts of resistance from within these really government, so it seems very unlikely to happen. So what's the next thing that we're talking about. I think it's kind of the point we're both getting out here. Last question for you. I mean, you are your Jewish, a lot of Jewish Americans, friends, family, mine grew up hearing a very different story about Israel than the one, you know, we've been telling for the last 40 years.

How does it feel for you to go to the West Bank to witness his occupation and oppression and what part of your own upbringing and religion do you kind of bring to this work?

Well, I mean, first I want to say that it's not fair that because I'm Jewish, my voice like it carries more weight to some people.

I mean, everything that I'm reporting has been reported on by Palestinians for much longer than I've been doing it.

“And I just want to sort of establish that. Now to your question, I mean, I'm 100% Jewish, despite what many people online, like to say about me, what do they say?”

They just say you're a fake Jew, you're a copo, you're a Nazi, you're a traitor, you're a ham sandwich, blah blah blah. Zealand must tweeting about genetic makeup.

I did see that. Yeah, that's not thing to go wrong there. Right. Right. Yeah, that's always a good game to go into.

So my, and you know, I'm Jewish, but also my, on my mom's side, my grandparents escaped the Holocaust. Most of my mom's mother's family was exterminated. My mom's dad came from, they escaped the Russian pogroms. On my dad's side, his parents lived in Iraq and Baghdad. They were Jews and Baghdad for generations. And they had to leave when there was a rise in anti-Semitism as well. So the point I'm making is just like I grew up in a house that was Jewish and that had a very real sense of deadly anti-Semitism.

“As far as like how our Jewishness manifested, I think it was in two main ways. The first one was questioning and challenging everything.”

And that includes the stories we heard about the Jewish state and some difficult questions about that.

And it also taught me, you know, the expression that you hear more now, which is never again means never again for anyone.

And, you know, when I go to the West Bank, the reality is, people know I'm Jewish. I mean, I tell people and they just know at this point.

And it is the Palestinians who are feeding me and taking me into their homes and protecting me. And it is Jewish settlers and soldiers who are trying to kill me. And it does sort of beg the question about what sort of Jewishness this is. You know, these Israelis who are trying to kill me are practicing.

“The last thing I want to say about this though is that I think that as a, you know, speaking as a Jewish American again,”

who had a bar mitzvah, who has been Jewish my whole life since people like to say you're an as a Jew.

Who still goes to synagogue, it is we are long overdue as Jewish Americans to have a reckoning with what our institutions and our organizations and our synagogues have facilitated and enabled. And, you know, on one level that is just the sort of unwavering support that the institutions have given to Israel. And the way they have defended Israel, you know, through a genocide, through ethnic cleansing, through all these things. And it actually goes beyond that. It goes to, I mean, frankly, material support for terror.

And so what I'm talking about here is things like the Jewish National Fund, which is the organization that provides those little blue tin sedacoboxes in synagogues where people put in their loose change. And, and then that money goes to Israel. It's in thousands of synagogues across the country.

A lot of that money goes to bringing non-native and base of trees into Israel, which service basically, they're planting trees that are basically like serving as Tinder for forest fires over there.

Oh, that's not either here nor there. Great. Another place that money has gone, this came out earlier this year, was that money was going directly to an organization that is training the hilltop youth. The most violent settlers in the West Bank training them to be little foot soldiers, little child soldiers in the West Bank attacking Palestinians. This is, this was reported in the times of Israel. So again, you are talking about thousands of synagogues across the country who are providing material support for terror against Palestinians.

And I'm not suggesting that every, you know, like my Jewish family, every Jewish person knows this is happening on a material level. But I think it is pastime for people to take a close look at not just what the Jewish institutions represent, but what they are actually supporting and ask yourself, "Is this what being Jewish is? Is this what it's supposed to be? Is this value in human life?" And I mean, frankly, it's upsetting. It's really upsetting. And the way I deal with it is by doing the work that I do. And by talking about things like this, and you know, I refuse to accept that the religion is irredeemable or anything, and I'm not suggesting anything like that, but this is what the institutions are supporting.

And listen, Jonathan Grieble, out of the ADL, he's called UN anti-Semite, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, because I mean, like that. Yeah, I would like that. So it's, so you know, it's just like it's so, these institutions, these Jewish institutions are so corrupt and broken and, and it goes so deep, really encouraged Jewish Americans to think more deeply about this and think about like, "What does it mean to you to be Jewish? What do you want to support? What do you want to represent?"

“And yeah, I hope people ask those questions. Well, you're reporting on what's happening in the West Bank has been invaluable to me, and I think it would be great if folks would check it out.”

Again, go to Sub-Sack. It's infinite jazz, onesy, infinite jazz. If you get a paid subscription, you can pay to fund Jasper's next trip to the West Bank. So, thanks for coming in. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Thanks to Jasper Nathaniel for coming on the show. Love it. We'll be back on Sunday with a conversation with the hosts of Cricket's new podcast Still Counting, which brings back the voices of 538 and will be out Wednesday evenings, starting September 9th. Have a good weekend, everyone. Bye, everyone. I can still have my lines here at the end.

Pads of America is a Cricket Media Production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts and Ferris Safari, with Reed-Chirlin, Elijah Cone and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hefcoat, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, David Tolz, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is probably unionized with the writer's guild of America East. I'm Nate Silver. I'm Gailindruk. And I'm Claire Malone. We're back. This time with our friends at Cricket Media for a new show called Still Counting.

“Yeah, numbers are hard. It takes very easy. And frankly, numbers have only gotten harder. What does the data actually cite?”

How do we reconcile that with the other things that we're seeing in American politics and around the world? And how do you use that data to understand or maybe even dare to predict the future of American politics?