Um, I don't think that will work.

And I think also, I agree with you, Will, that we are heading towards a re-escalation, and the reason is because both sides of this are treating it as a negotiation.

I mean, one thing that's interesting about this conflict is that you have the diplomatic tracks and the military tracks both proceeding apace in parallel with each other, and that's been the case since before the war.

And before the war, they were trying to negotiate for a deal, and Iran was not gonna cede on the core bottom lines of its sovereign position.

And so, you know, the United States, with the backing and influence of Israel, um, decided to try and shift the calculus by imposing the costs of actual warfare.

And now we're at a place where despite what Trump thinks about, you know, his military victor, d- victory on the battlefield, Iran has realized something extremely important, which is that the main pressure card that the United States has is not game-changing.

They withstood it.

And I'm, I'm, I'm just wondering, like, do, do either of you have any concern that, like, they're going to consider pressing that button?

Mm-hmm.

Right, and this is, like, when we talk about the rules-based order, the reason why we say it's both real and not real is because US hegemony is comprised by both coercion and consent.

So it actually gets the world, the, the states of the world to buy into this by making these promises and saying, "We're gonna apply the rules," or, "The rules will apply evenly to people," like, yes, this kind of legal equality between small states and big states, and the US is willing to go along with that, so long as it doesn't threaten their posture, and that's makes sense, right? If they're, if they hold down the status quo, everyone...

The rule applying equally to everyone maintains power relations.

And so the US kind of, through this system, maintains its own exceptionalism, where it says, "We're actually gonna be the ones that hold down this order and police it, so we have to be able to go outside the rules and regulations, especially when it comes to military force, to make sure that everyone's playing fair, and there's no threats to the system from the outside." But in order to sustain that, they need everyone to buy in to a certain extent, so they can't do too much to undermine the consent structures.

Yeah.

Like, Bernie has come out and, like, essentially endorsed some of Trump's policies on immigration.

You have, you know, not that she's anywhere on the left, but you have Hillary Clinton also talking about, bragging about, uh, how many people, um, were deported before Trump came into office under her husband's administration, and then also Obama, you know, who was called the deporter-in-chief, right? And so if you just default to that kind of nationalism, A, it's not gonna, it's not gonna work as a persuasive tool, because you're not gonna out xenophobia the Republicans, and B, you're not gonna actually satisfy your constituency with an explanation, because you're only addressing a small part of the problem.

Yeah.

Um, and, you know, had some guys go out there and make statements about, you know, what the conditions for a disarmament could be.

But they basically just didn't fully close the door on some of this stuff.

So, like, one of the aspects was the, you know, Hamas leaving political power and ceding authority to the creation of a technocratic committee of Palestinians with, um, representatives from different factions and groups.

They basically said that they're not interested in a foreign authority coming in and governing Gaza, but they could talk about, um, the creation of a technocratic body.

Um, and so the expectation was that this might be treated as a denial of, uh, or a rejection of the plan, which is how the Israelis had characterized it before, and, um, and, and also the Americans as well.

Um, but for whatever reason, and we can talk about why, um, and why this happened when it did, uh, the, the Trump administration basically decided to read this as Hamas accepting the proposal.

Yeah.

... is being sort of indoctrinated to this anti-Israel sentiment.

Yeah, so you have like...

I mean, I think part of the, yeah, part of the panic around college campuses is this marriage of that specific panic with respect to the Zionist movement of being like, "Oh, shit.

The young, there's this huge generational split and we're losing long-term, our long-term prospect, um, at support," mixed with a preexisting, like, libidinal obsession with college campuses that is just in elite media and also the right wing panic around critical race theory, and I think all of those have, like, dovetailed together to produce this mobit.

Um, but that, so, so we're talking about the, the...

Okay, so like, there is this, like, kind of preexisting psychological profile for someone who might consume a film like this, um, but there is also, Brace, as you're saying, the kind of top-down narrative construction, and that's where things get really insidious here.

We, we, we mentioned that the film tries to push this totally false narrative or story that there is, um, you know, that there are connections, material or otherwise, between Palestinian resistance groups on the ground and the people who are protesting a- against genocide in their institutions and, and in their communities.

Yeah.