Genocide Hustle

[MUSIC] >> Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast today is Thursday September 24th, 2026. I'm John Puthore. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. >> Hi, John. >> And senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth. >> Hi, John. >> Well, as we record this, the news of the day or the news that I think will be of most interest to us today has not happened yet. That is Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before the United Nations General Assembly. We are being promised some kind of fireworks there. And we don't know what that means. But there was an important reminder of in the midst of this three-year campaign to delegitimize Israel after October 7th and act as though its behavior is illegitimate criminal, genocidal, all of that. A very awful tragic but necessary reminder of what it is, Israel faces and why it conducts itself the way it conducts itself took place yesterday when Israel's ambassador to the United States Yechil Leiter discovered that his son had been and the world learned that his son had been nearly killed in a terrorist attack in Israel. And is still fighting for his life, I believe, after surgeries. And Leiter, who is born in American, had another son who died fighting for Israel in Gaza. And he is Israel's ambassador here in Washington, which is where I am speaking to you from today. So one man emigrates to Israel to be a part of the Jewish state, succeeds professionally personally as a man of faith, has a strong and powerful family and the very same day that his son was rushed into surgery as a victim of a terrorist attack. His daughter came to the hospital to see his son to daughter's nine months pregnant. Her water broke and she gave birth to Yechil Leiter's latest grandchild. All of this, I think, summarizes in chrysalis or creates and chrysalis an image of the real Israel, the real fight, the real thing, which is that it is a country whose citizenry has been targeted for, has been the target of the campaigns against the state because those who wish the state ill or wanted to destroy it or wish to supplant it or whatever have never successfully developed the means to do so except to act as though every single living Israeli is a combatant and is on the battlefield and should be and should be dealt with accordingly. So that's where I began today with the news that the already infamous documentary, Naza, is it is so important to the makers of Naza, this documentary that I believe makes the libelous false, scandalously libelous claim that Israel not only killed Hamas fighters in their homes but deliberately did so in order to kill their families and at the purpose of doing these strikes on Hamas leaders, Hamas fighters, Hamas combatants where they lived was not to take them out but to take their families out to to create this genocidal atmosphere and there are 24 unnamed Israelis supposedly from Unit 8200, one of the elites intelligence units in the Israeli army who claim that they have the goods on this and this happening. I mean, let's not only say that the news this morning was that you've all over Ham one of the one of the two makers of Naza has announced that they're going to release it for free on the internet in November to get it out to as many people as possible thus indicating that the real purpose of this work which know it was a secret, no one knew that it existed until it showed up at the Venice Film Festival. Its purpose is the de-legenemization of Israel by very left-wing Israelis who are joining in this effort now explicitly to say that the Warren Gaza was unmerited, unjustified and that the purpose of it was to commit a genocide against against the Palestinians and Gaza an interesting claim given that from everything that we know now 70,000 people died over the course of the two years of the act of fighting two and a half million people live in Gaza and 50,000 of them were classified not only by Israel but by reputable third-party counters as being combatants meaning that in this war that took place in civil precincts because there was no battlefield because the Hamas lived and worked and did everything it did integrated and woven into the fabric of society on the Gaza Strip. The population in Gaza I believe is now larger than it was on October 7th, therefore raising the astounding question of the genocide that features the growth of the population of the of the people being genocide it and this is what Bebe Netanyahu was walking into today at the UN where apparently 70 nations have already walked out of the general assembly meeting so that they would not have to hear him and where Antonio Gutierrez, the secretary of general UN yesterday, said that he had never seen a worse case of killing murder and devastation than he had seen in Gaza an absolutely preposterous claim given that he was sitting where he was sitting where we were sitting on January 8th and 9th in 2026 not exactly watching because we didn't see it on television but living through 48 hours free in which the Iranian government killed 40,000 of its own people in an effort to tamp down the possibility of an uprising that would take the government out so within our own memory in the last nine months there was an event worse than Gaza and there have been events worse than Gaza throughout the Gaza War elsewhere in the world and wars elsewhere in the world so. The guy literally presided over another African genocide in Ethiopia it was maybe not the numbers of Rwanda but everything else about it was the same it was like watching a Rwanda, the UN watching the Rwanda unfold and going look over there at Gaza. Right so the world that we are living in is a world in which the brazenness of the big lie is of course part of the strategy of the big lie is that you tell the most outrageous version of an untruth because of the natural creduleness of people who say well even if it's exaggerated surely there's something to it that it's like X, Y, or Z and some of the fact the mayors Israel had spent 10 years doing what it could not to go to war in Gaza mowing the lawn doing this thing called the conceptia where they where they contracted with Qatar and other nations to keep money flowing into Hamas's hands and then would have to go and mow the lawn as it were when Hamas would strike at Israel with rockets and things like that but Israel did not want to go to war because it did everything could not to go to war with Gaza, Israel's. The campaign, the election campaign that will end on October 27th in Israel, oddly enough does not appear to be centering on this, but is in part going to be about how Israelis deal with the fact that they helped bring the Gaza war upon themselves. They helped bring the October 7th matter upon themselves because their government believed falsely that it had matters under control, far from pursuing a strategy of killing off Hamas. They were helping to provide lifelines to Hamas to keep it going so that they could direct their attention elsewhere largely to Iran. And again, this is the world that we're living in, in which what I just told you is the truth. This is what we're hearing is kind of a lie. John, your point about the idea that, excuse me, even if it's not strictly true that there's a genocide, something bad is going on, reminded me of Abdul El Sayed, one on Scott Galloway's podcast a few days ago and Galloway pushed back on the genocide lie. And El Sayed's strategy, well, had a few aspects to it, but one was to turn the word into a mere semantic issue. So he would say, look, there's tens of thousands of children dead and you want to quibble over a word, which is sort of exactly what you're saying here. And the other extraordinary thing about El Sayed's defense of the lie is that he said, look, the point is we use that term, I'm paraphrasing, because we don't want to, we don't want it to get to a genocide, right? So we're sounding the alarm of genocide now, which would be like saying, I think someone has a make commit homicide. So I'm going to say he committed homicide. A future crime. Yes. Exactly. Welcome to minority report and the future crimes. And also, it's the most important thing in the entire world to them that the word genocide is used. That's something that they cannot, they cannot seriously deny. I mean, they'll try, but nothing matters more to them than that people use the term genocide because they need something that simplifies what's happening into a good and evil so they don't have to understand or confront any sort of nuance. These are simple-minded people who are desperately in need of living a simple-minded life. And they want the rest of us to live that life, too. They don't, imagine if they couldn't use the word genocide for a second, okay? When, when Maclamore or whoever gets up there on stage, when El Sayed gets at, you know, when he's at a, when he's campaigning and a campaign stop, any of these guys, AOC into a fundraising email, substitute the word genocide for what actually happened, which is known as war, right? The language, the whole thing, the whole tone changes, right? Because their whole point is to say, well, if a genocide is not your red line, then I don't know what is. Well, if you think, you know, you think, well, artists shouldn't speak up about politics, but if genocide is not an exception to your rule, then I don't know what is. If not genocide, we're talking about a genocide here. If genocide, the whole thing is just the presumption that everybody knows that Israel is evil and the Palestinians are blameless, the way it has always been. But genocide is the word for that. They don't even know necessarily what it means, but they know that it means you don't have to argue and they know that it means you don't have to explain. But what really happened was a war and Israel didn't start that war. And so you have to use these terms almost as euphemisms, which is the way that they're using them because it's a big sign that says, please don't ask me any questions. Okay, everybody. Let's talk about Quince. 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I mean at the whole point, I think that the semantics here, these are very important observations because war is a war, war is a terrible thing, nobody, civilians get killed and wars particularly if the wars are being conducted in urban areas where as opposed to sort of like in the middle of a field in rural Pennsylvania or australists or Boradino or wherever these large pieces of unoccupied land, that farming land or arable land or something like that where armies can manage to line up opposite each other and then what football is based on, right? The sort of football is a war game and football takes place on an open field with two sides going each other, flanks, ends, you know, fakes around the up the middle, around the side all of that, that's not what this kind of war is and it wasn't this way because the Hamas believed and I think wisely that it's strength or wisely is not the right word but I'm sort of cleverly or evilly but with clever intent that it would maximize its advantage, the only advantage that it had fighting against the Israelis was that every single person that Hamas was holding a baby in his arms metaphorically was standing there with a gun ready to shoot in his Rayleigh while holding one of his own children with the gun to his own child's head which is another reason why this not as a documentary is so offensive and gravely, you know, I mean, the garbles like and it's a fact under the rules of morality as we understand them and under the rules of war if there are any such things in international law which there aren't really but at least they there are some guidepost notion, if you are combatant in an urban area living amongst civilians and those civilians are killed with you present, you the moral blame for the death of those civilians attaches to the combatant living among the civilians. It does not attach to the army to the other army particularly not when that other army invaded as a result of a provocation or you know invaded after an attack. We understand this, the Geneva conventions are written with all kinds of provisos about this, you need to wear a uniform, you need to, you know, they're very, it's why uniforms exist as a matter of international law that uniforms exist to separate out people who are actively combatants and more from the civilian populations in which they live. So Hamas not only didn't do that but it built the battlefield for itself to sort of entrap Israel or you know take the hostages underground into the tunnels, use the tunnels as a way of evading above ground, killing and capture, placing bases in hospitals, placing bases in schools. My nephew who spent more than 200 days in Gaza as a reservist at the age of 39, by the way, just to give you an idea of what it's like to be live in a country where that goes to war in this fashion, a man with two children, almost 40 years old, who had served 20 years earlier in Gaza, helping do disengagement. He said after his time there that they never entered a building. He and his compatriots never entered a building, a single building that was not an arms cache. Their purpose was they were clearing out. They were going through Gaza systematically to clear out hidden weapons caches. They were not like frontline soldiers, but they were there to clear out hidden weapons caches to keep those people from running into those buildings and grabbing guns and shooting at Israelis. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of buildings and every single one of them in the basement and a closet and somewhere or other, there was an arms cache. There was no building in Gaza that was not part of the Hamas battlefield. Therefore the war, yeah, go ahead, sorry. I think this is all true, of course, but I think that had Israel done nothing or close to nothing in response to October 7th, we'd be dealing with a fire hose of genocide lies because Israel has been called genocide air before October 7th and the activists were out in the streets, but the problem was activists were out in the streets of the West within 24 hours of October 7th, and they would say, well, the open air, under the circumstances, the imaginary circumstances where Israel did nothing in response, the activists would say, well, the open air prison of Gaza is genocide by other means anyway, genocide, genocide, genocide. They would attack it. All of this brings up something that I think I haven't brought up before. I don't think, but I think it's very relevant and important. Part of my job at commentary is to get images for articles, things that have posted appear on the website and so on. Seth writes something about Hamas. I have to go to these services that we purchase news photos from and try to match it to the article, right? So someone writes something about Hamas and I'll go to get images and I search, put in Hamas. What do you get back? IDF soldiers in tanks. Okay, put in Hamas fighters. Gods and children in rubble and so on. Hamas doesn't exist in the media. That's why, I mean, that's part of why they're out of this discussion. We don't see them. No one knows their names. We don't know who they are. All we see are people on stretchers, you know, reaching out for food, weeping, wrapped up in body bags, things like that. On the other side, you can get a picture of the IDF. You can get a picture of the IDF in tanks, flying jets, holding guns, patrolling. You know who the leaders are, the generals appear. They make statements. So it's kind of extraordinary vanishing of Hamas. I mean, people say that, you know, Israel doesn't allow the press. And well, there are people taking pictures all over Gaza. I see them every day. Good luck. They don't go, they don't go, they don't go snapping away in the face of Hamas soldiers. Try that and see what happens. Well, that's what that's what Motaz Azaz recent interview made so much news for, right? He's a, he's a, he's a, Gazan-born journalist who, uh, podcaster, whatever journalist, but he's been making the podcast rounds recently. And when he did an Arabic podcast and talked about all these things, and he said, like, if you, you can't get news out of Gaza, that Hamas doesn't want out of Gaza. It's just not possible. It's, it's just, or images and he, right, or images, right? And he was saying that people, you know, people get shot in the face for less than, you know, uh, asking a follow-up question. I mean, you, you simply can't get the information out if they don't want it out. And this is something, again, what's frustrating about this is that we knew this just as we knew that they accused Israel of genocide on October 6th. And before, you know, the response and all that stuff, it's, it's like watching a loop, right? It's, it's, it's maddening in, in, it's sameness. It's genocide. And then they, the Palestinians pull off, you know, most Srebrenica like massacre at a music festival to begin a war, right? Like a Srebrenica at the beginning of a war, rather than it's, some along the way. And it's Israel genocide again. And it's like nothing, literally nothing changes about the reaction to it. And so this Azazah interview where he says, you know, it, Hamas is in full control and nobody goes against them. If you go against them, they'll shoot you in the face and all the stuff. It's, it's news, but it's also not news in a really important way. Because he's not the first Arab, he's not the first Palestinian to say this, right? We have Palestinians in and around the media that say this. We have, you know, we've seen interview or read pieces from Palestinian to personally have been arrested and tortured by Hamas. And they say, I've been arrested and tortured by Hamas. Here's what I did to, to earn that. Here's what they did to me. Here's what they do to us in Gaza. Here's what I can say now that I'm free and outside of Gaza and in Europe or the United States or whatever, something like that. And this, these things go around. And then it just happens again. So it's news, but it's, it's not because we're not learning anything new. We're just being reminded that everything they say about Israel is a lie. It's just, it's like a reminder. It's like, by the way, don't forget. And it feels almost gratuitously trolling at times to me. You know what I mean? It feels like you watch, for example, Hamas, the fact that Hamas puts out the obituary notices of journalists and doctors without borders and all these civilian people, right? That is an act of almost like the purest trolling. You could, that's like, that's like Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign ministry style trolling. That's like that, that's, that's the, the top level trolling. That's them saying, oh, by the way, all these people were, we're not civilians, they all actually were part of Hamas. You know, eight, eight months after the last story, regarding this particular, these particular people is run by the New York Times and, and BBC and everybody saying, okay, Israel killed this family of journalists and doctors or whatever. And so there's something, there's a contempt, and I've written about this before, Hamas holds a special contempt for its useful idiots in the West. It really could not respect them less. They will parrot its talking points, go out on a limb, and then Hamas, not a journalist who did some sort of deep investigation, Hamas will post the obituary notice. The more, the martyr, we mourn the martyr, so-and-so, who they just had everybody write was a journalist a few months ago. So there, there is, it's almost like that there, there, there is some kind of unhealthy relationship here, between the, the West and the media and Hamas in, in which they just kind of let Hamas abuse them, openly, and humiliate them, openly, and that's okay because the result is dead Jews. And that's what, they will, they will allow themselves to be publicly humiliated by a fascist, terrorist organization, 6,000 miles away because it puts Jews in New York and Washington and Australia and Manchester in danger. And I can't just, one more point about this. So Hamas commits this trotious massacre, and unprecedented on October 7th. And the Western media immediately turn Hamas solely into the quote, Gaza Ministry of Health. That's, that's, it's only, that's like, it's alter ego now. Yeah, you know, there's, there's no Hamas. There's the Gaza Ministry of Health. I want to take off its glasses, and it's Hamas, and it puts its glasses on, and it's the Ministry of Health. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, what's astounding to me is we're, we're having this conversation because of the circumstances of this day, right, that Yahoo speaking at the UN, Good talk. a little bit about the polling, revealing how things are going for Abdul Al-Sayed and what's going on there. The war in Gaza has been over for a year. There is no war in Gaza, it's been over for a year. We are having this conversation as though the war is ongoing. We are having this conversation as though the war had not been settled with, I think, Donald Lloyd is really triumphing in this one sense, which is that I will confess myself to having been skeptical in the extreme that this could be achieved, that with the exception of the very tragic victims of murder in the tunnels, that so many of the hostages came home and when they returned to Israel after their captivity, that signified the end of the that signified the end of the war pretty much. And now there is the status quo in which Israel functionally controls 60% or so of the territory on the Gaza Strip militarily, with hopes that there is going to be some kind of a process toward a new, whatever it is, the Gaza Department of whatever that piece board is called, whatever kind of modality it can help create to lead to a new civilian leadership or some form of leadership there. And this conversation is taking place as though hostilities are ongoing. The effort to keep this in the forefront of the conversation in the United States and in the West and in the world is a propaganda campaign that this is the rear view mirror we're talking about here. Gaza, the documentary, is about something that stopped happening more than a year ago. Abdullah Sayed is running a senatorial campaign in Michigan that does not center on Gaza and the Palestinians because he is attempting to center his campaign as he keeps whining about in these interviews and stuff on healthcare costs and data centers and other things like that. But of course the secret sauce to getting him the nomination, the first place was his position as an extreme advocate for essentially for the true genocidal organization here, which was Hamas. We don't need to be talking about this. You know, a conversation could be had about what on earth to do to try to make it possible for the people of Gaza to go back to living assemblies of normal life or whatever you would call it or creating political processes by which the Palestinians and their two or doubts that is the West Bank and Hamas have a political future. Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority now, I believe in the 22nd year of his four-year term as president of the Palestinian Authority, is speaking also today at the UN. He's 90 or 91 years old, amazingly like the father of Henry Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews. He's been dying of the same liver failure for 20 of those 24 years. We should all live to have such liver failure since he is still running, he's still the dictatorial head of discleptocratic nightmarish, whatever you call it, administrative regime. Why aren't we talking about that? Why aren't we talking about what's going to happen with him and Hamas, Gaza and this? Why is this conversation still at Israel? Because nobody cares about the Gossips, nobody cares, nobody gives a shit about the Gossips, nobody. They claim there's a genocide, there's no genocide. The population is growing, it's not shrinking. The condition of the people of Gaza is probably as we now know from the food aid stories. There was no obesity problem with younger Gossips apparently earlier this year because so much food aid was going in that they were eating themselves sick. This is not a joke. This is like a real thing I'm saying here. I'm not being. Right. And also, even the things that they say are part of that food thing. They'll say, "Well, Israel's sending in unhealthy food or whatever, high caloric things." It's kind of like this, there's like, what was it? One girl's that movie where she tries to trick one of the other girls into eating high fat bars. Yeah, right. Right, high fat bars saying, you know, because they're protein, whatever, whatever. That is the one speck of truth to this is that the Western media has convinced the world that they need to send in high calorie foods, right? The Jordanians, air-dropping food are not Israel deciding to send ice cream bars into Gaza. The whole world has been fooled into thinking that what this place needs is humus and extra fatty couscous or something and not just like regular food. When the truth is it was pretty much like a regular place and you see that because you also notice on social media all the people who post pictures of pre-October 7th Gaza and say, "Look at what they took from us. Look how beautiful. Look what they took from us." You know, in his book, The Road to Wigan Pier, which is a story of the poor working class of England in the 1930s, George Orwell, one of the great, now lesser known, but once it's very well-known books of the 20th century, George Orwell wrote about how well-meaning people who wish to help the poor live a better life were, he described them, he used this, he said of them that they would go into these neighborhoods and try to give people vegetables and lettuce and carrots and vegetables so that they would eat more healthily because they were eating high-starchy, high-fatty foods and that his famous quote Orwell was, he called them "sandle-wearing pistachio-colored, sandle-wearing pistachio-colored shirt-wearing vegetarians doing yoga exercises" among other things. I bring this up only to say that it is ever thus that the well-meaning, you know, socially aware people who wish to help those less fortunate than they have no clue what their lives are like so they go in and say, "Well, you know, what's really important is that you have a measured and measurable and balanced diet," and what Orwell says in the Rotoyan Puris, where I'm here, I'm talking to you about coal miners, do you know what it's like to be a coal miner? Do you know what life is like on a coal mine? It's hell on earth, it's hell on earth to be a coal miner, they come out of the mine, they're covered in sweat, they've been breathing and, you know, stuff that's going to give them black lung, they come out and they want to eat something that tastes good because it's one of the few pleasures that they have in life is that they want to go and eat something that's good. And we have this bizarre recapitulation of this. Food aid going into Gaza is an act of genocide because what's being supplied isn't kale and on leave and I mean, I don't know what else. It is ever thus with the Mrs. Jelly Bies of the World or Jelly Bees of the World, the famous character from Dickens, who is so caring about the problems and difficulties of the poor and unfortunate that she starves in the glexerone children. Interesting. Brought to mind this week because people have been likening Nicole Hannah Jones to Mrs. Jelly Bees of this astounding Dickensian character and one of the peerless satirical portraits of clueless liberalism or do-good-or-ism, let's say, in this regard. So, yeah, so food aid is going in like crazy into Gaza and that's also part of that's also bad. So if they were starving, it was bad. If they have, if they're ingesting too many calories a day, that's bad because, you know, what they should be doing is working on their core, doing Pilates. And if Israel measures the calories that they send in Israel Mangala. How can you, how can you, how can you, how can you be so scientific? It's bad when Israel evacuates civilians in advance of a campaign against Gaza. That's, that's ethnic cleansing or something. That's, you know, dispossession. Genocide by evacuation. Right. So that's the nasi, by the way, that's what connects it to what we started with. What John brought up at the beginning, the nasa documentary, document, I always have to put that in quotes. But the nasa film, right? Because that's the theme of the nasa film is what Israel does to avoid civilian casualties. Yeah. Yeah. You have to, you enter into this saying, okay, nasa stands for, it's an acronym for civilian casualties. Israel built a world leading, you know, AI infused system to predict civilian casualties. So the next question is why, why did they do this? Either because they wanted to reduce civilian casualties or because for funsies, like what, what goes through a person's mind when they look at this and they say, I'm going to try to figure out how I can paint this as Israel being evil. And that's the, that's the creative writing assignment in class today. How would you turn, how would you take Israel measuring civilian casualties and requiring its units to have strikes approved with the number of civilian casualties on the screen before ordering that strike? How would you paint that as evil? And it's really hard to do. nasa is a heavy lift, not because the world doesn't want to know the world loves this stuff and people eat it up. But because there's almost like, there's a common sense problem at the outset of this, which is that Israel created the system to predict civilian casualties. The IDF did, they were, this wasn't like the UN forced Israel to use this technology, right? It wasn't drop site that came up with the technology and now Israel is in a tough position. The Israelis constantly do this. So as Abe mentioned, what happens when they're, when they want to go into Rafa? Everybody knows they have to go into Rafa at some point in the war. There's just no question. They have, they have things to do in Rafa. It's a crossing. It's the one major crossing. It is a town that is split itself, the town between two, between Egypt and Gaza. And there are tunnels underneath. This Rafa cannot be ignored. It's the border crossing to the Muslim world. So it's only a matter of when. So what does Israel do? It takes months to draw up plans to evacuate the Rafa area. And in the end, during the course of the, they weren't all evacuated right at the beginning, but as they're going, they literally, they go into Rafa and then they evacuate in neighborhood. They stop and they evacuate this part of Rafa and then they go further and then they evacuate. Literally, this is what they did. They, they didn't even to not just, they didn't, they didn't, they did not just delay going into Rafa. They delayed the mission as it was happening. They did it in slow motion so that they could get out of harm's way. One million civilians, one, you know, that wasn't possible. That wasn't possible because we heard from him to go. Kamala Harris saw the maps. Kamala Harris, almost the president of the United States, you know, she, she saw the maps and she said, you can't go into Rafa because there's no way to do this. I saw the maps, which apparently were, you know, she saw maps of torrents, thousand oaks and, you know, and the, the northern part of the San Fernando Valley and mistook them for Rafa and said, I, I don't know how they're going to get out on the 101. You know, it's just very crowded there. Who boy? And you know, how long it took them to, to do that, to move that population out? Was it seven days? Seven like seven days. Once it was underway. Yeah, once it was underway. So, I mean, the overall point here is that that, you know, comes to New York to speak at the UN General Assembly literally having to rhetorically fight a war that's been over for a year because it's, it was never about the war. This is all about delegitimizing Israel and, and two interesting details to move on to the domestic effect of this here in the United States, the New York Times. And CNN have a poll, have a poll out today of three senatorial campaigns, Troy Jackson's the, the campaign between Susan Collins and Troy Jackson and Maine, between Mr. Papas and John Sanunu in New Hampshire and Abdul El Sayyad and Mike Rogers in Michigan. According to this poll, Collins is leading in Maine, but Papas, the Democrat is beating Sunu in New Hampshire and Abdul El Sayyad is five points up on Mike Rogers in Michigan. Two interesting details here. One of them is that according to the New York Times, New York Times asked people in Michigan their opinion of Hassan Piker, of course the notorious streamer podcaster, whatever who is the, who you think is the, you know, is the chain around around El Sayyad's neck. He refuses to disavow Piker, who is a, you know, who suhates America, you know, is an open anti-Semite, you know, supports, supports the killing of Americans, all of that, likes 9/11. So despite now nine months of coverage of Hassan Piker, Prof. New York Times, you know, he's, he's the, he's the most famous non elective elected person in this election, I think you could, you could say sort of like as an emergent personality. 54% of people in Michigan have not heard of Hassan Piker, according to this poll, asked to, you know, what is your view of Hassan Piker? 54% say they've never, never heard of him. I know to make it at, and the, the poll as it's conducted and the details in it are, as is often the case in these, in, in polling before, you know, six weeks for an election in a close race, apparently seems to be a close race. A lot of these details don't add up. Like in Michigan, Rogers is losing, but apparently more people in Michigan say that he cares about people like them than El Sayed does. But El Sayed is, is way ahead on issues involving healthcare and data, data centers. If you think that the selection is going to be about healthcare and data centers and he, these numbers look good for El Sayed on healthcare and data centers, then maybe it makes sense that he is, you know, in the high 40s and Rogers is in the middle of low 40s. I don't think, I don't think it's a question that Rogers is not running a particularly inspired or, or clever or interesting campaign and does not seem to be a particularly strong candidate on his own. But, um, things are not adding up right and I'm trying to figure out as often one does looking at polls that don't quite pass the smell test. What's going on and you don't want to be a poll on why you don't want it to be one of those people who, you know, rescues the polls and says they're over sampling this or I'm sampling that. But the times his own explanation of its polling, which basically now said these three races, which the Democrats must win all three if they are to have a prayer of taking control of the Senate, all three. Uh, uh, here's what, um, first of all, uh, 44% of Democrats say they identify as democratic socialists, uh, among the people who are polled. Something wrong with that number. Uh, it does not compute with a whole bunch of other things that we know about what happens when you ask people about socialism. But I want to read the details of how the poll was conducted. Interviewers spoke with about 600 voters per state between September 15th and 22nd, uh, um, conducted, uh, by telephone using live interviewers, uh, 95% of respondents were contacted on their cell phones. 235,000 calls were made and 85,000 voters, uh, were, uh, were contacted, uh, were contacted, which is to say they made 235,000 calls to more than a 5,000 voters. The total number of voters who were contacted in these calls was 1800. So, they made, they tried to contact 85,000 people to get 1,800 respondents. Just to give you a sense of how polling works now. Nobody answers the phone for pollsters and therefore they then have to ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll. But to do that says the New York Times, we give more way to respondents from demographic groups that are underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. Note how they did this. They said that they are very careful to try to figure out how people underrepresented in the survey vote, like people without a college degree. But that's not the only people who are underrepresented in the surveys. That just sounds better for them because they're saying, see, we're trying to figure out who the Trump voter is going to vote for. They mean black people, they mean Hispanic people, and I think they also mean Arab Americans, although now I don't think there's any reason to think that Arab Americans aren't responding to polls and Michigan to say that they're voting for Abdul El Sayed. They sampling margin of error of 2.8 percentage points when the three states are analyzed together, but about 5 percentage points in each state. So we have a poll in which Abdul El Sayed is up mic Rogers, is up on mic Rogers by five points in Michigan, a poll that has a margin of error of five. In the history of polling, this close to an election, I'm not sure you would report a poll that has a five percent margin of error in this way. It's one thing to say that you can figure out what the attitude is and the three states taken together like about democratic socialism. I think this is a heartening poll bizarrely, therefore, for those of us who are very worried about Abdul El Sayed winning. The raw number may suggest that he is up whatever that raw number may be, but there's a lot of there's a lot of juju, magic, predictive, blathery, blather skype going on here that would suggest that at the very, at the best, it's a jump ball between El Sayed and Rogers. And then it gets to us how we talk about this. We talk about Hassan Piker. They're having this very, this conversation like Gaza. Then we have these conversations about low information voters. The voters who are going to decide these elections because they're undecided in the middle and they're not just going to vote for whoever. And one thing you know about them is that they don't know what the hell is going on. They don't read the news. They don't follow the news. They're not even going to really follow it on TikTok. They don't know who Hassan Piker is one of the most discussed people in America over the last year. So given all of this, it's very hard for people like us to make any sense out of what's going to happen in November because you have to sort of throw yourself into the mindset of a person who literally doesn't know where anything is conversation about Gaza. They know there's an Israel. They know there's a Gaza. They know that there were bombs and that people were being blown up. And that's all they know, they don't know who Hassan Piker is, they don't know who anybody is. They don't know what went on there. And so the higher information voters, the voters who want to vote for Abdul-Assad for ideological reasons are skewing the democratic sample because clearly in the state like Michigan, there's enormous numbers of people who have no idea the first thing about the thing that is the centerpiece of his campaign. I'm sort of blathering here. I got two hours of sleep last night. Is what I'm saying triggering resonating with you guys about? Well, I have this thought, sadly, it's not as heartening as it's not heartening. Heartening is the wrong word. I shouldn't have used the word heartening. I mean, because you should of course be a 10% of the polls, not right. My fear is that the propaganda is what, if anything, it's what gets through to the lowest information voters. It's the big scary headlines. It's the genocide, right? If you don't know anything else, the propaganda will make sure that you at least associate Israel with genocide and Abdul-Assad with wanting to stop genocide, that's my fear. Okay, so I'm going to close out. And on top of everything else, by the way, is just that the question hanging over all of this and this week was about arresting BB, just to sort of put a fine point on it. All the people coming to the UNGA and all of these issues, we're talking about all of these speeches, but we actually had like three news cycles based on, is the Israeli prime minister going to be arrested in New York? And Abdul-Assad was confronted or not confronted, it's not the right word, but was speaking before college students in Michigan yesterday, I believe, and a student asked him to talk about why it was that he had not more fully or in any way, shape or form, supported the Iranian people against the genocidaires of their own regime that killed 40,000 of them in January. And Elsa had will not say that what the Iranian regime did was wrong. He won't say it, and he will not speak negatively about people in his own state who had supportive rallies for the Iranian regime after the killing of the Itoa Khamenei in particular and the regime leaders there were pro-anti-American and anti-Israel pro-Islamic Republic of Iran demonstrations in Michigan, and he is just, he is no enemies, he has no enemies in a world in which there is any confrontation between the Arab world and the West. He is on the side of the Arab world, he is against the West, and he is muscling his way through this election without doing what a lot of us might have thought, clever or player might have done, which is figure out some way to snake his way through a partial condemnation of this or whatever of that, it is pretty striking. You know what else is pretty striking, slow horses on Apple, 6 season, just started second episode out this week, one of the most delightful television shows ever made, and basically a kind of dark workplace comedy about disgraced members of British intelligence working in a rubber room, basically a place where they are sent in order to either drive them out and get them to quit or for them to do no harm because they have been looked at by the leaders of British intelligence and said that they need, they are disgraced and they need to be like shoved to the side, and yet somehow each season they manage to foil a major terrorist plot that is going to kill 500,000 people in London almost every year, or with the central dazzlingly great beyond great beyond unbelievably great performance by Gary Oldman as the amazing reprobate, dirty, farty, Jackson Lamb, the head of the Slough House, the slow horses, who is of course sort of like the ultimate Colombo, he is the ultimate, he is the greatest intelligence agent who has ever lived and has ended up being cashiered in this way. For reasons that we are I think are going to get to as the seasons progress because clearly he is the only person in British intelligence who knows what he's doing since he keeps helping foil these plots, anyway that's Apple TV, you know, now the prestige streamer broadcaster of all time, you know, producing the best shows on television or on your TV screen without question. And so if you haven't watched, you could by the way, you could probably just start, if you haven't seen it, you don't need to go back to season one, I mean you can sort of fill in the gaps, I think even though you're starting in the middle with the aftermath of the death of our sort of stand-in, our audience stand-in, River Cartwright, the young agent who literally did do, did save Britain from a major terrorist attack. and was scapegoated unfairly and sent to the Slough House for reasons that again remain relatively and oddly elusive. So that's slow horses on Apple TV. So we'll be back tomorrow for Seth and Abe and John Pothor. It's Keith Tachem over here. I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother Isabel Zalvis-Maris. Dan used to always say "Hungry Dogs run faster James" and I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon and this is a really terrific list I think. You'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams, yay! BJ Novak, yay! Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad, and Popolio. Okay maybe not Popolio, but who knows, maybe he'll show up. Hungry Dogs run faster. Thank you grandma for turning me into a hopeless obsessive compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you thank you thank you. Hey this is Jeremy Stern. And I'm Walter Russell Mead. We're the host of What Really Matters. 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