Glenn Greenwald
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Biden Wanted $33B More For Ukraine. Congress Quickly Raised it to $40B. Who Benefits?
Tens of billions, soon to be much more, are flying out of U.S. coffers to Ukraine as Americans suffer, showing who runs the U.S. Government, and for whose benefit.
November 01, 2022
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US President Joe Biden speaks about the conflict in Ukraine during a visit to the Lockheed Martins Pike County Operations facility on May 3, 2022 (Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)

This article was originally published on Substack on May 10, 2022

From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Biden White House has repeatedly announced large and seemingly random amounts of money that it intends to send to fuel the war in Ukraine. The latest such dispatch, pursuant to an initial $3.5 billion fund authorized by Congress early on, was announced on Friday; “Biden says U.S. will send $1.3 billion in additional military and economic support to Ukraine,” read the CNBC headline. This was preceded by a series of new lavish spending packages for the war, unveiled every two to three weeks, starting on the third day of the war:

  • Feb. 26: “Biden approves $350 million in military aid for Ukraine": Reuters;

  • Mar. 16: “Biden announces $800 million in military aid for Ukraine”: The New York Times;

  • Mar. 30: “Ukraine to receive additional $500 million in aid from U.S., Biden announces”: NBC News;

  • Apr. 12: “U.S. to announce $750 million more in weapons for Ukraine, officials say": Reuters;

  • May 6: “Biden announces new $150 million weapons package for Ukraine”: Reuters.

Those amounts by themselves are in excess of $3 billion; by the end of April, the total U.S. expenditure on the war in Ukraine was close to $14 billion, drawn from the additional $13.5 billion Congress authorized in mid-March. While some of that is earmarked for economic and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine, most of it will go into the coffers of the weapons industry — including Raytheon, on whose Board of Directors the current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, sat immediately before being chosen by Biden to run the Pentagon. As CNN put it: “about $6.5 billion, roughly half of the aid package, will go to the US Department of Defense so it can deploy troops to the region and send defense equipment to Ukraine.”

As enormous as those sums already are, they were dwarfed by the Biden administration's announcement on April 28 that it “is asking Congress for $33 billion in funding to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than double the $14 billion in support authorized so far.” The White House itself acknowledges that the vast majority of that new spending package will go to the purchase of weaponry and other military assets: “$20.4 billion in additional security and military assistance for Ukraine and for U.S. efforts to strengthen European security in cooperation with our NATO allies and other partners in the region.”

It is difficult to put into context how enormous these expenditures are — particularly since the war is only ten weeks old, and U.S. officials predict/hope that this war will last not months but years. That ensures that the ultimate amounts will be significantly higher still.

The amounts allocated thus far — the new Biden request of $33 billion combined with the $14 billion already spent — already exceed the average annual amount the U.S. spent for its own war in Afghanistan ($46 billion). In the twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan which ended just eight months ago, there was at least some pretense of a self-defense rationale given the claim that the Taliban had harbored Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda at the time of the 9/11 attack. Now the U.S. will spend more than that annual average after just ten weeks of a war in Ukraine that nobody claims has any remote connection to American self-defense.

Even more amazingly, the total amount spent by the U.S. on the Russia/Ukraine war in less than three months is close to Russia's total military budget for the entire year ($65.9 billion). While Washington depicts Russia as some sort of grave and existential menace to the U.S., the reality is that the U.S. spends more than ten times on its military what Russia spends on its military each year; indeed, the U.S. spends three times more than the second-highest military spender, China, and more than the next twelve countries combined.

But as gargantuan as Biden's already-spent and newly requested sums are — for a ten-week war in which the U.S. claims not to be a belligerent — it was apparently woefully inadequate in the eyes of the bipartisan establishment in Congress, who is ostensibly elected to serve the needs and interests of American citizens, not Ukrainians. Leaders of both parties instantly decreed that Biden's $33 billion request was not enough. They thus raised it to $40 billion — a more than 20% increase over the White House's request — and are now working together to create an accelerated procedure to ensure immediate passage and disbursement of these weapons and funds to the war zone in Ukraine. "Time is of the essence – and we cannot afford to wait,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a letter to House members, adding: "This package, which builds on the robust support already secured by Congress, will be pivotal in helping Ukraine defend not only its nation but democracy for the world." (See update below).

We have long ago left the realm of debating why it is in the interest of American citizens to pour our country's resources into this war, to say nothing of risking a direct war and possibly catastrophic nuclear escalation with Russia, the country with the largest nuclear stockpile, with the US close behind. Indeed, one could argue that the U.S. government entered this war and rapidly escalated its involvement without this critical question — which should be fundamental to any policy decision of the U.S. government — being asked at all.

This omission — a failure to address how the interests of ordinary Americans are served by the U.S. government's escalating role in this conflict — is particularly glaring given the steadfast and oft-stated view of former President Barack Obama that Ukraine is and always will be of vital interest to Russia, but is not of vital interest to the U.S. For that reason, Obama repeatedly resisted bipartisan demands that he send lethal arms to Ukraine, a step he was deeply reluctant to take due to his belief that the U.S. should not provoke Moscow over an interest as remote as Ukraine (ironically, Trump — who was accused by the U.S. media for years of being a Kremlin asset, controlled by Putin through blackmail — did send lethal arms to Ukraine despite how provocative doing so was to Russia).

While it is extremely difficult to isolate any benefit to ordinary American citizens from all of this, it requires no effort to see that there is a tiny group of Americans who do benefit greatly from this massive expenditure of funds. That is the industry of weapons manufacturers. So fortunate are they that the White House has met with them on several occasions to urge them to expand their capacity to produce sophisticated weapons so that the U.S. government can buy them in massive quantities:

Top U.S. defense officials will meet with the chief executives of the eight largest U.S. defense contractors to discuss industry’s capacity to meet Ukraine’s weapons needs if the war with Russia continues for years.

 

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told reporters Tuesday she plans to participate in a classified roundtable with defense CEOs on Wednesday to discuss “what can we do to help them, what do they need to generate supply"….

 

“We will discuss industry proposals to accelerate production of existing systems and develop new, modernized capabilities critical to the Department’s ongoing security assistance to Ukraine and long-term readiness of U.S. and ally/partner forces,” the official added.

On May 3, Biden visited a Lockheed Martin facility (see lead photo) and “praised the… plant that manufactures Javelin anti-tank missiles, saying their work was critical to the Ukrainian war effort and to the defense of democracy itself.”

Indeed, by transferring so much military equipment to Ukraine, the U.S. has depleted its own stockpiles, necessitating their replenishment with mass government purchases. One need not be a conspiracy theorist to marvel at the great fortune of this industry, having lost their primary weapons market just eight months ago when the U.S. war in Afghanistan finally ended, only to now be gifted with an even greater and more lucrative opportunity to sell their weapons by virtue of the protracted and always-escalating U.S. role in Ukraine. Raytheon, the primary manufacturer of Javelins along with Lockheed, has been particularly fortunate that its large stockpile, no longer needed for Afghanistan, is now being ordered in larger-than-ever quantities by its former Board member, now running the Pentagon, for shipment to Ukraine. Their stock prices have bulged nicely since the start of the war:

But how does any of this benefit the vast majority of Americans? Does that even matter? As of 2020, almost 30 million Americans are without any health insurance. Over the weekend, USA Today warned of “the ongoing infant formula shortage,” in which “nearly 40% of popular baby formula brands were sold out at retailers across the U.S. during the week starting April 24.” So many Americans are unable to afford college for their children that close to a majority are delaying plans or eliminating them all together. Meanwhile, “monthly poverty remained elevated in February 2022, with a 14.4 percent poverty rate for the total US population….Overall, 6 million more individuals were in poverty in February relative to December.” The latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau found that “approximately 42.5 million Americans [are] living below the poverty line.” Americans with diabetes often struggle to buy life-saving insulin. And on and on and on.

Now, if the U.S. were invaded or otherwise attacked by another country, or its vital interests were directly threatened, one would of course expect the U.S. government to expend large sums in order to protect and defend the national security of the country and its citizens. But can anyone advance a cogent argument, let alone a persuasive one, that Americans are somehow endangered by the war in Ukraine? Clearly, they are far more endangered by the U.S. response to the war in Ukraine than the war itself; after all, a nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Russia has long been ranked by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as one of the two greatest threats facing humanity.


One would usually expect the American left, or whatever passes it for these days, to be indignant about the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars for weapons while ordinary Americans suffer. But the American left, such that it exists, is barely visible when it comes to debates over the war in Ukraine, while American liberals stand in virtual unity with the establishment wing of the Republican Party behind the Biden administration in support for the escalating U.S. role in the war in Ukraine. A few stray voices (such as Noam Chomsky) have joined large parts of the international leftin urging a diplomatic solution in lieu of war and criticizing Biden for insufficient efforts to forge one, but the U.S. left and American liberals are almost entirely silent if not supportive.

That has left the traditionally left-wing argument about war opposition to the populist right. “You can’t find baby formula in the United States right now but Congress is voting today to send $40 billion to Ukraine," said Donald Trump, Jr. on Tuesday, echoing what one would expect to hear from the 2016 version of Bernie Sanders or the pre-victory AOC. “In the America LAST $40 BILLION Ukraine FIRST bill that we are voting on tonight, there is authorization for funds to be given to the CIA for who knows what and who knows how much? But NO BABY FORMULA for American mothers!” explained Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Christian Walker, the conservative influencer and son of GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia, today observed: “Biden should go apply to be the President of Ukraine since he clearly cares more about them than the U.S.” Chomsky himself caused controversy last week when he said that there is only one statesman of any stature in the West urging a diplomatic solution “and his name is Donald J. Trump.”

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1520752370472341504?s=20&t=FDDjsg_7HVGTA1pMmt7vTQ

Meanwhile, the only place where dissent is heard over the Biden administration's war policy is on the 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. programs on Fox News, hosted, respectively, by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, who routinely demand to know how ordinary Americans are benefiting from this increasing U.S. involvement. On CNN, NBC, and in the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, there is virtually lockstep unity in favor of the U.S. role in this war; the only question that is permitted, as usual, is whether the U.S. is doing enough or whether it should do more.

That the U.S. has no legitimate role to play in this war, or that its escalating involvement comes at the expense of American citizens, the people they are supposed to be serving, provokes immediate accusations that one is spreading Russian propaganda and is a Kremlin agent. That is therefore an anti-war view that is all but prohibited in those corporate liberal media venues. Meanwhile, mainstream Democratic House members, such as Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), are now openly talking about the war in Ukraine as if it is the U.S.'s own:

Whatever else is true, the claim with which we are bombarded by the corporate press — the two parties agree on nothing; they are constantly at each other's throats; they have radically different views of the world — is patently untrue, at least when it comes time for the U.S. to join in new wars. Typically, what we see in such situations is what we are seeing now: the establishment wings of both parties are in complete lockstep unity, always breathlessly supporting the new proposed U.S. role in any new war, eager to empty the coffers of the U.S. Treasury and transfer it to the weapons industry while their constituents suffer.

One can believe that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is profoundly unjust and has produced horrific outcomes while still questioning what legitimate interests the U.S. has in participating in this war to this extent. Even if one fervently believes that helping Ukrainians fight Russia is a moral good, surely the U.S. government should be prioritizing the ability of its own citizens to live above the poverty line, have health insurance, send their kids to college, and buy insulin and baby formula.

There are always horrific wars raging, typically with a clear aggressor, but that does not mean that the U.S. can or should assume responsibility for the war absent its own vital interests and the interests of its citizens being directly at stake. In what conceivable sense are American citizens benefiting from this enormous expenditure of their resources and the increasing energy and attention being devoted by their leaders to Ukraine rather than to their lives and the multi-pronged deprivations that define them?

CORRECTION (May 10, 2022, 20:47 pm ET): This article was edited shortly after publication to reflect that Russia's total annual military budget is $65.9 billion, not $65.9 million.

UPDATE (May 10, 2022, 22:39 pm ET): Shortly after publication of this article, the $40 billion package for the war in Ukraine passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 368-57. According to CNN: “All 57 votes in opposition were from Republicans.”

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Glenn Reacts to Breaking News: American Pope Chosen, Trump and Netanyahu Split Over War with Iran, MAHA Drama, and More
System Update #451

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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 The headline news in most countries in the world is the selection of Cardinal Robert Prevost to be the new leader of the Catholic Church, replacing the prior Pope, Francis, who died late last month. Prevost is now known as Pope Leo XIV. 

Born in Chicago, he is the first-ever American Pope in the history of the Catholic Church, though, as a fluent Spanish speaker, he has also done substantial work in the church in Latin America. He's widely viewed as a close ally of Pope Francis and, to some extent, at least likely to follow in his footsteps. 

I do think the reaction of political and media figures in the U.S. to his selection is worthy of attention. As is true for almost everything now, his life and worldview were instantly reduced to a handful of tweets, and then grinded through the ideological and political prism to instantly determine whether he's good or bad – a very strange discourse, especially for someone that nobody who was commenting on him knew anything about prior to the moment he was unveiled. We'll tell you all about it. 

Then, we have several other topics. It was a big news day including all sorts of significant movements and events taking place in the Middle East with reports of a clear split between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and thus between the U.S. and Israel and Trump's selection of the close RFK Jr. ally Casey Means as Surgeon General, which caused far more indignation and accusations than, at least, I expected. Time permitting, we will also explain the withdrawal of Ed Martin to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Moments ago, Trump announced his new selection and that person is Jeanine Pirro, better known to Fox News viewers as Judge Jeanine. So, we'll tell you about all of that. 

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Early this morning, white smoke emitted from the Vatican, which, as most of you know, signifies that the conclave of cardinals assembled in the Vatican has chosen a new pope. The new Pope that they agreed on is the first-ever American pope. He was born in Chicago, he is fully American, he obviously speaks English in an Americanized way, which would be very strange hearing the Pope speak in Americanized English, but, obviously, that's his first language – although he speaks several others as well. 

As I said at the start, he was a close ally of Pope Francis who was regarded as a reformer or on the more progressive wing of the Catholic Church, although the progressive wing of this Catholic Church is still quite conservative, it's a very conservative institution by its very nature, by its age, by its function, by its purpose, by its dogma. But one of the things that Francis did was he was very, very outspoken about the growing income inequality in the world, the need to be humane to immigrants. He was also, I suppose I could say, a critic of the destruction of Gaza, but certainly a defender of the rights and suffering of the Palestinian people. Whether Pope Leo XIV follows some of that or all of that remains to be seen; he's been a little bit of a cryptic figure, not really seeking out those kinds of controversies. It's a little bit unclear, I think, even to Church Insiders, where he stands on them. 

Here is the scene at St. Peter's Basilica early this morning, you see the new Pope standing on the balcony with people cheering. This is his first public appearance as the new Pope. 

Video. Pope Leo XIV, St. Peter’s Basilica. May 8, 2025.

The faithful of the Catholic Church are always going to welcome a new pope with that sort of extremely happy, welcoming, loving and positive emotion, and that's what you saw today. 

I'm not a theologian, I'm by no means a historian of the Catholic Church, but the pope always does have this religious role. Obviously, he's the head of the Catholic Church, this 2,000-year-old institution, but he also typically has a political profile. I mean, he's the head of the Vatican, which in theory is an independent state inside of Italy and popes have always played a significant political role. I talked about some of Pope Francis's views. I remember growing up in the 1980s when Pope John Paul II was aligned very much with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. 

There were times when the pope followed the Church's longstanding opposition to and contempt for communism, given that communism, by its dogma, seeks to eradicate religion, it's the opioid of the people, as communists see it. So, there was always a strong political alignment between some popes and conservative politicians. Then, recently, there has been a greater alignment – I don't want to say with left-wing politicians because certainly on social issues, the Church still has very positions widely considered conservative on things like abortion, which they vehemently oppose, as well as same-sex marriage which though they've softened a little bit the rhetoric about obviously they still oppose that but they also have been traditionally associated with certain I guess you could say left-wing positions. After all, if you read the gospel, the gospel is not a teaching of support for elites or for venerating the wealthy. Jesus spent his time, according to all four books of the gospel, ministering to prostitutes, lepers and the most downtrodden, so that has always been part of the church's mission: to minister to the poor, to care for the poor. 

Then, also the same position that makes them so opposed to abortion, namely the sanctity of human life and the sin of extinguishing it, has also led them to be opposed to the death penalty. That was certainly Pope Francis' position, and I believe it's Pope Leo XIV's as well. 

Here is Donald Trump's reaction, because, again, I understand why people want to put him immediately through a political prism of saying, Oh, is he like MAGA, is he like Republican, is he Democrat, is he liberal? Even though the Church really does transcend those kinds of characterizations, especially just trying to reduce someone who's been in the Church their whole life to a few tweets you found and then want to place them on the political spectrum. It almost is like a non-sequitur, but that's what a lot of people were doing. Donald Trump did not do that. He posted this:

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I saw somebody satirizing Trump by saying, “Tomorrow he's going to say, ‘Hey, there are a lot of people who are saying the reason an American pope got chosen for the first time is because of me. I don't know if it's true, but it probably is.’ That's a very Trumpian way to say it, but obviously that was satire. What I just read to you is what he said, I would say very proper and well-crafted congratulations that were appropriate for a president. 

His Vice President, JD Vance, interestingly, is somebody who this new Pope has criticized on social media, at least twice in the last six months, and here is what JD Vance said, also an appropriate statement, no acknowledgement of the fact that the Pope has criticized JD Vance personally and things he believes in and things he has said, JD Vance is Catholic and so, obviously, he is expressing the sentiments of what I would assume are the sentiments of most Catholics around the world, where he said, quote:

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 I was online when this happened. I went online, actually, when I heard that there was a new pope selected. It's a significant moment for anyone who pays attention to world events, world politics and also religion, obviously. 

There was this hour period between when the white smoke was emitted, signaling the selection of a new pope, and before the pope was announced, during which a very conservative cardinal, for whatever reason, people started assuming that that's who was selected and in the betting markets, he just skyrocketed to like 70%, 80%, and everybody else who were the favorites or dark horses started dropping. And so, people were very happy because he was a conservative choice. But then, when they unveiled the pope, it wasn't him. It was instead Robert Prevost. And at first, American politicians and pundits were celebrating the fact that we now have an American pope for the first time in the history of the Catholic Church and the history of the United States. 

Immediately, people started to find tweets. He didn't tweet often about non-Church matters. He tweeted very sporadically about the Pope, the Pope's health and just generalized kind of conventional sentiments that cardinals express in behalf of their Catholicism, but he did actually have some political tweets as well that, one after the next, every sort of 20 minutes, emerged and a lot of MAGA people, a lot of right-wing people went from celebrating this choice to immediately panicking almost, or at least denouncing the choice on the ground that this is not somebody who aligns with their political ideology. 

So, here's something he posted in February of this year, so just two months ago. The tweet that he wrote says:

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And then it links to an article that he didn't write, that's not his sentence, that's really like the headline to the article, but he's obviously endorsing it. 

What happened there was that JD Vance had given an interview where I think somebody asked him about the religious mandate, the Catholic imperative, to care for immigrants and to care for people who are expelled from the country or stateless. To defend on a religious ground why he believed in a hardline stand, JD Vance said there's a Catholic doctrine that says, first, you take care of your family, then you take of your community and then you take care of your city, your state, your country and then after that, only then, you care about the rest of the people in the world. 

There is a Catholic doctrine that was affirmed more or less that way, but it's been rejected by the Church, it's not the prevailing view of Catholicism, it doesn't really reflect Catholic action in terms of how it reacts in world and this is what the new Pope was pointing to, an article arguing why JD Vance's views of what the teachings of Catholicism are when it comes to prioritizing who you care about and who you don't is Catholic dogma. The new Pope said Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others; your love for humanity, for other human beings, is just the love of Jesus. That was his view. 

In 2015, when Donald Trump was running for the first time on a very anti-immigrant platform – not just a platform, but the way he was speaking about immigrants, it didn't sit well, apparently, with the new Pope either – because, on that date, he cited an article by Cardinal Dolan. 

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And then Laura Loomer, the quite effective influencer, I guess you could call her Trump whisperer, I mean, she's one of the few people who gets away with constantly bashing the administration of the White House. Still, the more she does it, the more her influence and credibility seem to grow with Trump. When she complains about people, they often end up being dispatched or fired in the case of some people as well, but she replied to that tweet today with this comment:

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So, I guess she thinks the Pope is both woke and Marxist. She's Jewish, but within like, I guess two hours, she was able to summarize his entire worldview based on a few tweets. And she's here to say that this Pope is both Marxist and woke. It's kind of odd for a deeply religious figure, someone who's devoted his entire life to spreading the word of Jesus, to simultaneously be a Marxist. It's sort of an incompatible doctrine, but who knows, maybe she's right. I don't think there's a lot of evidence for that, but she seems to think so. 

Here's Sean Davis, a very smart right-wing commentator and analyst who is also Catholic:

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Which, again, if you look at just these disconnected tweets, you could put those together and make a lot of leaps of reasoning and maybe assume that. But certainly, he's pro-immigrant. I mean, the Catholic Church has always been pro-immigrant, and you can go back hundreds of years and you're going to find that. 

Megyn Kelly, who is also Catholic, said after all these tweets emerged:

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That doesn't seem likely to me, to put it mildly. And again, I'm not really sure why people are finding these sentiments surprising; they seem to align extremely well with what the Catholic Church is often – I don't want to say always, but often –represented. 

Mike Cernovich, another right-wing influencer whom I also often find insightful, said:

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There has been this sense for some time – again, I’m not a theologian – but there has been this sense that the Catholic Church, since the reforms in the early '60s, has basically been sacrilegious or even satanic, not true Catholics. Those sentiments have sometimes grown among the Orthodox wing of the Catholic Church. I guess that's what's being channeled there. 

Here is Jack Posobiec. He is Catholic. He was in the Vatican, and he said this:

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And I do think that's an interesting observation because, as I said, the Pope in the modern world and actually in the ancient world going back many, many centuries to the time it began, always had this dual function of being the interpretive body that defines the meaning of God's word through Jesus Christ. But then, also obviously playing a very political role, the Church is very powerful, it's very wealthy and it influences a lot of people. It's inherently a political position as well and this is what you often hear from Catholics. If the pope says something they dislike, they're like, “That's political, that's not canon. You don't have to assume that's the word of God.” 

Amazingly, a lot of this was based on a handful of tweets that they were trying to reduce this Pope to being, oh, he's not MAGA, he is anti-Trump. They found some voting records that they claimed proved he was a Republican, so maybe he was like an anti-Trump or a never-Trumper. But then, obviously, some of them thought he was a woke Marxist as well. 

Here's Matt Walsh, who is not just Catholic but someone who speaks a lot about the Church and Catholicism. He did not react well to this attempt to reduce the Pope to nothing more than someone who you can just place on the American ideological spectrum. And he said this:

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And there were other tweets as well that we didn't include here. The new Pope retweeted a tweet from Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from 2017 when Trump just got elected, where Chris Murphy was basically saying, “We need to do everything possible to fight against and resist this new authoritarianism,” so the new Pope retweeted Chris Murphy, the Democratic Senator. He also retweeted very recently, I think it was one of his last tweets, a different cardinal who was reacting to the meeting between El Salvador’s President Bukele and President Trump in the Oval Office where they kind of mocked the whole notion of court-stopping immigrants being sent to El Salvador. The cardinal reacted with horror and indignation that they seemed to be so cavalier about the fate of these people, who hadn't even been given due process, that they were just putting them into dungeons for life in a country they'd never been to and the new Pope retweeted that indignation from a cardinal in response to that policy of sending people to El Salvador. 

Again, I'm not surprised personally that the Pope is conservative on social issues, anti-abortion, opposed to same sex marriage, opposed to the death penalty, which is not a conservative view. I'm not surprised that he teaches compassion and empathy for immigrants, including people who are illegally entering countries. This seems very consistent, very compatible with the Catholic Church to me, as somebody who has not paid the closest of attention in a scholarly way, but certainly as someone who understands Catholicism to the extent I do, so, I don't really understand all this acrimony, all this kind of panic, this antagonism.

Also, when you're a cardinal or when you were within the Catholic Church, he rose pretty quickly as a result of his relationship with Francis, there's not always total freedom to express your worldview or who you are and what you believe and what your priorities are. And so, we'll see with this new Pope what he decides to make of his position and I think only then will we really know his ideology or place on the ideological spectrum if a pope can even be placed on that.  I think as Matt Walsh actually said, and I basically agree with it, in a way, the idea of the pope and the Catholic Church transcends modern political debates, even though they sometimes have an impact on it. 

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All right, let's move to the next topic, which is these reports that there has been a breach in the relationship between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. 

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Christopher Rufo: On Civil Liberties, the American Founding, Academic Freedom, and More
System Update #450

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Tonight: Regardless of what you think of him or really about any issue, there's no denying the profound influence that tonight's guest, Christopher Rufo, has had on conservative politics and state and federal policy more broadly, though he has often focused on educational debates and educational institutions – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, appointed him to a key position to transform that state's New School from an institution largely producing left-wing thought to one that is more aligned with conservative educational dogma and policy. He was also instrumental in publicizing the plagiarism of Harvard President Claudine Gay, which, along with issues regarding campus Israel protests and antisemitism, led to her firing after only six months in that position. He has become one of the most influential voices shaping the views of leading conservative politicians and media figures. 

Rufo appeared on our program once before: back in 2023, where we spent an hour exploring his core beliefs and goals, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not. The conversation was spirited but unfailingly civil, and I think, illuminating of some of the controversies surrounding his work. 

What promoted Rufo's appearance tonight were comments that I had made about him and other right-wing figures in an interview I gave about the Trump administration to Reason Magazine. Rufo saw those comments, noted them and objected to them on X. It led to a back and forth but it became rapidly apparent - at least to me - that social media was the absolute worst venue to try to sort through those issues we were discussing, some of which have a lot of complexity and nuance to them: things like the core values of the American Founding, the values and views that most influenced the founders and how all of those questions apply to our current political debates, especially over civil liberties and the freedom of academic institutions. 

So, I suggested that we remove the conversation to a platform more suitable for a constructive exchange and he quickly agreed to come on this program for us to do so. 

His official biography does not really capture Rufo's influence and accomplishments, but for those unfamiliar with it, he is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute. He is also a contributing editor of City Journal, where his writings explore a range of issues, including critical race theory, gender ideology, homelessness, addiction, crime, and the decline of American cities. He has been published in Fox and the New York Post and has been the subject of numerous corporate media profiles, the most recent of which is a lengthy interview he gave to the New York Times just last month. He's the author of the New York Times bestselling book, “America's Cultural Revolution,” and as a filmmaker, he has directed four documentaries for PBS, Netflix, and international television, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities. 

The issues we hope to discuss are, in my view, some of the most consequential for American politics and the West more broadly, and I'm very much looking forward to our exploration of our agreements and our disagreements on all of those questions. 


G. Greenwald: Chris, good evening, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on and agreeing to do this.

So, it's interesting, when I was thinking about how to do this, how to conduct our discussion, the issues that we discussed, even though it was just a few tweets, were so far reaching and kind of complex that I had so many things I wanted to talk to you about, so the hard part was figuring out what to kind of focus on. 

There was a series of tweets that you posted in response to that interview I had given in Reason, where I basically said, and it was part of a larger conversation, I was asked specifically about you, that I think you're very shrewd and influential and successful operative and journalist but, to me, it seems like you've gotten to the point where you care more about this kind of Machiavellian quest for power than you do about principles. 

And in response, you said this:

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NIH Ends Fauci's Brutal Dog Experiments; MTG and Massie Shut Down Law to Criminalize Israel Boycotts
System Update #449

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Former senior health official who lurked around Washington for 40 years, Anthony Fauci was, well before COVID, highly polarizing and, in many cases, widely disliked. When many of the truths of COVID and his behavior during that pandemic were revealed, he was jettisoned into an entirely new category of the hero/villain narrative that plagues so much of our politics. 

But one constant in his long career was that he was always a robust advocate for and a funder of – an ample funder of – some of the most grotesque, cruelest and pointless medical experimentations on animals in government labs paid for by the government, especially dogs. And when doing these experiments on dogs which have almost no medical value, they often chose on purpose for beagles as their breed of choice because as anyone who has spent any time with beagles will tell you, they have a particularly loving, docile and trustworthy instinct when they are with animals, which makes it very easy to deceive them. 

Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste, is our guest to talk about the major win animal advocacy groups led by the very bipartisan White Coat Lab group scored today. The National Institute of Health, now run by Jay Bhattacharya, under the direction of HHS Secretary RFK Jr., announced that they were eliminating the last government-funded lab experiments on beagles: that was the lab that conducted the so-called barbaric septic shock experiment, and I'll save you the description until later. 

Then, Reason's magazine Matthew Petti wrote an excellent article today, a really good piece of journalism that broke down and analyzed the statute in very clear detail and concluded that it "would arguably be the most draconian measure of this kind to date". He is our second guest tonight. 

Some laws are so extreme and shocking that you can't actually believe anyone in Congress actually proposed them, and for me, this is one. As is true for most of the pro-Israel measures in Washington, it had a long list of co-sponsors from both parties. 

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Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste Project, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that just got done heralding, explaining and it exposed and has held Dr. Fauci accountable for many things, including funding the Wuhan lab, as well as testing cruel, gratuitous, and pointless testing on dogs generally and beagles specifically. For more than two decades, Justin has led successful and award-winning grassroots and lobbying campaigns to end cruel taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs, cats, primates, and other animals. I've long been an admirer of that group and his work, and we're really delighted to have him join us tonight. 

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