Pod Save America - Intentions for 2024 with Sam Sanders (Exclusive Clip)

We're taking a much needed break to gear up for 2024, but we're excited to share an exclusive clip from Friend Of The Pod Sam Sanders' weekly podcast Vibe Check. Each week on Vibe Check, Sam, Saeed Jones, and Zach Stafford make sense of what’s going on in news and culture – and how it all feels. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.

Duration: 16m
Broadcast on: 26 Dec 2023
Audio Format: other

Hey, everyone. Sam Sanders here. So John, John, Tommy and Dan are taking a much needed break to gear up for 2024. And in the meantime, I'm here to give you all some fun content. You may recall me as a guest on Pod Save America previously, but I also co-host a podcast called Vibe Check. And I'm very excited to share right here in this feed today an exclusive clip from the newest episode of Vibe Check. With y'all right here, in this clip, me and my co-host, Zach and Said, we're going to look back at some of the most important news moments of this year, specifically the war in Israel and Palestine and what it says about America's changing place in the world. Also, this year being the year of protest sweeping every industry across the country and perhaps showing us a new way forward for our politics. And then thirdly, abortion on the ballot. This year has seen referendums in many states across the country and the aftermath of Roe falling. These referendums kind of forecast what next year's election might be. I'm calling it the control election. We'll explain. All right, here's my chat with Zach and Said on those stories and more.

All right, we're back. We're going to keep this conversation going, talking about the biggest moments of the year. I want us to use this segment to talk about our biggest newsy or political moments of 2023. And Zach, we're going to start with you. All right. Well, I think the story that has defined this year for me in so many ways is the Israel Hamas conflict that began on October 7th when Hamas attacked Israel, resulting in a thousand people dead and the responding attack from Israel that has now engulfed the entire region. This is a story that is, I would say once in a decade, type of levels. It's something that has really stopped the world. Everyone's thinking about it. It's constantly on the news. It's constantly a conversation I'm having with friends and family and something I'm constantly just waking up and thinking about. And it will continue to go on for a while. So I think it's been an ongoing thing that's been gone on for over 70 years. And we've hit this new inflection point that I think has just boiled over and changed our lives in so many ways that I'm still figuring out. So for me, that's the big story of the year. Absolutely. Both because of what happened, the terrorist attack on October 7th, but also, I would say Israel, in my opinion, just factually disproportionate response, what Palestinian people are enduring and trying to survive, has been harrowing just to observe, right, to say nothing of people there directly. And in terms of the future of news, like where we go into 2024, I don't think that this is a news topic. I think you're right. This is a abandoned the river for a lot of people. I think many people's relationships to political ideas, ideas regarding politics, nationhood, war, violence, and each other. How you feel about how the people around you feel about this topic is certainly heightened. And I think getting to the real, the awakening aspect of it, people owning their politics is probably a net good, but this is costly. How many thousands of people have died so that we can have a richer understanding of politics? That doesn't sound like a silver lining I want to embrace. For me, this conflict has really shown the ways in which America has moved from being a leader on the world stage to an outlier. When you look at the number of countries that are increasingly and consistently calling for ceasefire on the region, it's now a majority of the world, the vast majority of the world. You know who the outliers are? Israel and the U.S. and maybe France. I love that. Let's dig deeper because it's also President Biden is an outlier compared to most U.S. citizens. Most Americans are like ceasefire is clearly the way to go.

Transcription truncated.