“So, here in Lebanon, what is happening is [...] these attacks are becoming part of almost everyday life, and this is something kind of horrible to say, honestly. But, everything's in a holding pattern and Israel just keeps trying to poke, right? To poke at Hezbollah, to poke at Hamas, to poke at Fatah, which is, Fatah are their allies, essentially,” said Esteban Carrillo, an Ecuadorian journalist and editor of The Cradle based in Beirut, who spoke to Sputnik’s The Backstory.

“The Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, the armed wing of Fatah, do fight against Israeli occupation. But the political side of Fatah, led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is very close to Israel. They have been for years now.”

“Even with the sonic booms that these Israeli warplanes do over the city on a daily basis, essentially trying to wage this type of psychological warfare. They just kind of become part of day to day. And I think this is one of the most honestly astonishing things about this country, about Lebanon that I've come to learn, is that the people are not afraid. You know, I wouldn't call anyone here in Lebanon afraid. And I'm sure people in the US embassy or the Canadian embassy, British embassy are kind of afraid,” the journalist explained.

“The Democrats really showed that this is a hawkish party and really neoconservatives are in charge of the party,” noted CovertAction Magazine managing editor Jeremy Kuzmarov on Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program. “They brought out Leon Panetta earlier tonight. He's a former CIA director who was a key mastermind of the drone war and a key figure behind Russiagate and a key supporter of Hillary Clinton.”

“They're celebrating this war in Ukraine [that] siphoned off billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars into a sinkhole just like Afghanistan, and a lot of those weapons have been stolen. And this party is cheerleading for that.”

“The money that's got into Ukraine is far greater than Israel and many civilians have been killed with those US weapons,” noted CovertAction Magazine managing editor Jeremy Kuzmarov on Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program.

“The reporting on Ukraine has been abysmal,” Kuzmarov claimed. “It's been totally Russophobic, totally one-sided.”

“When they can't even acknowledge the arguments of the other side, they can't even acknowledge there could be any validity, any critique or any pro-Russian statement or anything about the war in Ukraine that doesn't exactly match their view. That's because they know their arguments are not strong, that they don't really have truth on their side. They can't even acknowledge any critical view,” said the journalist and author Caleb Maupin who joined The Critical Hour.

“...[Americans] who think that things might not be great with the inflation and the crumbling infrastructure while we spend billions on wars, they are denigrating the country and how dare they by questioning things. I mean, this is the level of discourse that we’ve got here. Just this kind of love it or leave it,” Maupin added.

“The Kennedys are synonymous with the Democratic Party in a way that I don't know if younger voters necessarily appreciate fully,” said cartoonist Ted Rall, who appeared on Sputnik’s The Backstory program. “It's absolutely shocking to Americans, I would say, over the age of, say, 45, to think that any Kennedy would endorse any Republican ever.”

“The Democratic Party spent over a hundred million dollars kicking him off the ballot so that he was forced to spend all of his time in court – not to mention a lot of his money paying lawyers in court – just to stay on the ballot while Democrats were trying to get him tossed from state after state on a technicality,” Rall noted.

“If a guy as rich as Bobby Kennedy Jr. and with a running mate as rich as Nicole Shanahan – she's supposedly worth a billion dollars… don't have access to the ballot in this country, that's a major issue that we need to talk about,” he claimed. “This is why we have a duopoly. This is the nature of the duopoly.”

“I thought that speech was ridiculous and if I were a betting man I would say that it lost the election for the Democrats in November,” said Jeter. “I don't know who she thinks her audience was when she attacks Vladimir Putin. If I may paraphrase Muhammad Ali, Vladimir Putin ain’t never called me the N-word.”

“Most people, particularly in the states and particularly the people who she's depending on to win this election, Blacks and particularly Black men, particularly in Philadelphia and Detroit and Milwaukee – I don't think they care so much about Kim Jong Un, about Vladimir Putin, about the threat from China,” he continued. “I think they care a lot about jobs, wages, debt reduction, things like that. So I thought that speech was almost odd and that it seemed to lack self-awareness about exactly who the Democrats are and who they need.”

“It's almost like we've wandered into a Tower of Babble and come out on the other side babbling. We don't even speak the same language anymore. This is just a bewildering turn of affairs which I can only attribute to the end of empire.”