Back to episode — Episode 2981 CWSA 10/07/25
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y mentally ill. But that's our politics today. Representative Anna Luna she was on the Danny Jones podcast and she was talking about influencers who are being paid to push narratives. And I thought to myself I still don't know even one influencer who pushed a narrative for money. Do you? When I hear the names of the influencers it's always these super young ones that I've never seen even once and…
← Previous segment →rry I'm not soliciting for money there. There's no way I'd do that. Not a chance in hell. But I'm a little bit insulted. I've not been offered.
It's sort of like being a straight guy and you know one day you realize that no gay man has ever hit on you. Have you ever had that experience? Like one day you'll just say wait a minute. Not a single gay guy has ever hit on me. Well maybe I'm not gay but I kind of like them to want to. Don't you think it would be cool if they wanted to? You know be kind of a compliment. Same thing.
All right. So here's the question. Do you think that AIPAC, the American group that lobbies in favor of Israel, they would say they're lobbying in favor of the United States? That's how they get away with the FARA stuff. So what do you think are the rules for whether or not you're FARA, meaning that you have to register as a foreign agent who's trying to influence America? What do you think the rules are?
Well I thought I wrote that down. I definitely did. The rules are all right here's the legal basis for AIPAC. If Israel were paying AIPAC and then AIPAC were giving money to politicians that would be a FARA problem because that would be a foreign country using some Americans to influence their fate.
However if the money doesn't come from Israel but rather comes from billionaires and other small donors then as long as they're Americans it's Americans giving money to an American entity AIPAC and that is not FARA because it's Americans doing what Americans want to do.
However I think we'd all agree that Israel is kind of a special case and that if Americans are giving money to AIPAC it's sort of they're doing it for Israel. You know now they're doing it for themselves as well because they would legitimately be supporters of Israel. They're not making it up. They really are supporters. But if the purpose of it seems more beneficial to Israel than it does to America that's where it gets a little dicey but it's still completely legal.
So I guess what matters is where the funding comes from. So you got that. And that to me that seems like a technicality. I think most of you would say the same thing. So there's no direct there's also no direct control of AIPAC by anybody who's an Israeli well anybody who lives in Israel. I don't know if there are any dual citizens but so they don't have anybody on the board who's an Israeli trying to manipulate the board. So that's important.
So they're not getting money and they're not directly being run by somebody in Israel. And apparently AIPAC falls better into another category. So they just registered into this other category called the Lobbying Disclosure Act exemption. And that allows AIPAC to disclose expenditures, I got this from Grok by the way, allows AIPAC to disclose expenditures and contacts with Congress without full FARA as long as it doesn't represent a foreign government directly.
So it's the directly part that does a lot of work. Directly. Well how about if AIPAC wanted the US to he
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lp Israel militarily with Gaza? Don't you think that would be direct? That's about as direct as you could get. But then you might say well that's just what everybody wants. So it's not like AIPAC is the one entity that wants Israel to fight back against Gaza or against Hamas. So anyway it gets kind of murky is what I'm saying. By the way today is not only October 7th the horrible anniversary of…
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