Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
New SBF Indictment Exposes How Washington Really Works. Plus, Investigative Reporter Lee Fang In-Studio!
Video Transcript: System Update #45
February 25, 2023
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Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Rumble on Thursday February 23, 2023. Watch the full episode here or listen to the podcast on Spotify

The Justice Department has issued a superseding indictment of Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of what the government now alleges was essentially a Ponzi scheme, the crypto exchange firm FTX. This new DOJ document sheds significant light on the actions of Bankman-Fried and his close associates, some of whom are still unnamed, but whose identity as liberal political strategist is basically an open secret in Washington. But this document sheds even more considerable light on how Washington really functions, how easily the media is manipulated, and how money converts Washington politicians into mindless puppets willing to defend positions completely at odds with their claimed ideology and lifelong worldview and we’ll look at highly illustrative examples of that. 

For our interview segment, we have a very special guest with us right here in our studio, not mediated through a screen, but personally, physically in our studio, Lee Fang, who is one of the best hires I ever advocated for at The Intercept. There were some bad ones. He was one of the best, and I regard him as one of the nation's really best and most dogged investigative journalists. He’ll talk to us about this new indictment, what it reveals about the role money plays in Washington, all of which has been a major focus of Lee's work for years. We'll also explore with him the ways in which woke ideology and woke symbols are being exploited by large corporate interest to co-opt these movements with money and use them as an imprimatur to signal that these sleaze and the swamp politics is something benevolent. Lee has also focused on that. He's the perfect guest to talk about all of this even if it weren't for the luck that he happens to be physically present in our city. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. 


Monologue

 

Back in December, the crypto world, but also the world of Washington lobbyists and politics was shaken at its foundations when Sam Bankman-Fried, once heralded as the new Morgan, as someone pioneering a new form of philanthropy, was arrested in the Bahamas, where his crypto exchange company, FTX, has long been based. He was arrested because the United States had sought his indictment as the firm essentially collapsed all around him in what became – and we should wait for the trial and the evidence presented there, if there is one, if he doesn't plead guilty to be sure that it is all true, he's entitled to due process just like everybody else. But there's a lot of evidence to show that what clearly happened, and much of this he has admitted, is that it was basically a gigantic Ponzi scheme. He was encouraging people to invest and to deposit in his crypto exchange and then he was using that money for his own personal self-interest and personal benefit while pretending to secure the depositors. 

He was doing that in large part to buy influence in Washington at the very highest levels of Washington politics in order to build his iconography, that most of the media bought into, that he was some kind of a hero figure, a savior presented as the good billionaire because he was spending so much of his time openly donating to Democratic Party politicians and to left liberal and what he called ‘woke causes,’ doing that in public to cultivate favor with the media, while at the same time donating to Republicans only with dark money and in secret, because he knew that if he were seen as a Republican Party donor, the media – the neutral, nonpartisan media – would end up giving him a far less favorable coverage and he would also be subject to a lot more investigative and regulatory scrutiny. 

So, the game he was playing in Washington, as revealed by this new indictment, sheds more light, I think, on Washington and how its key players function than it does on him. He's essentially just a con artist and a crook who is likely going to prison for a very long time. The size and scope of it was mammoth, but there's nothing particularly novel or pioneering about what he did. What really is important here is the way he ingratiated himself into Washington, to its top and most influential and powerful people in the United States and in the West, cultivated almost unanimously worshiping media coverage, using tactics that we're going to look at and in the process, insulated himself from regulatory scrutiny by simply buying off politicians, using as gurus, liberal political strategists who are right now in a lot of trouble. 

I always want to emphasize that when it comes to indictments issued by the Justice Department or local prosecutors, they deserve a lot of skepticism. I'm often very disturbed at how people treat indictments and charging documents issued by prosecutors as the gospel truth. The media does that all the time, so I want to avoid doing that. It's not just a cursory throwaway line for me to say he deserves due process. I do want to look at these documents with some degree of skepticism, but I really want to focus on what we can demonstrate and prove with concrete evidence outside of the four corners of the indictment. And that's what I'm going to focus on. And I will show you that evidence as well. 

Just to give you a sense for how successful his scheme was to ingratiate himself into the highest levels of political power in the West and to build for himself this hagiography, this completely blind and one-sided media worship, there's so many things we can show you, but here's one picture. It's a picture of him sitting on stage at an art conference in the Bahamas where he was based, with Bill Clinton, the former United States president, and Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Great Britain, and suffice to say, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are known for many things. One of them is not doing things for free. And so, one can only imagine the amount of money, the gargantuan sums of money they were paid to go and sit with him on that stage while he wore his slovenly clothes that he liked to wear to signal that he was too important to even bother putting on a suit. This is part of his genius that he just wears ratty clothes. It was also designed to communicate that he wasn't in it for the money. He doesn't like the finer things in life. He was part of this movement that is designed to, in their view, pioneer how charity is done by using a very utilitarian calculus in order to maximize the impact of charitable giving. It was designed to essentially get as rich as possible. They claim with the intention of giving the world the way in the most humane and benevolent form. Obviously, that all turned out to be a gigantic fraud, like everything else connected to him. 

But it wasn't just these retired political figures who flew around the world getting paid many millions of dollars to use their influence for whoever has a paycheck to give them. Tony Blair has been, in his post prime minister life, consulting with the most despotic and brutal and savage regimes on the planet, getting millions of millions of dollars to help renovate their image, even though the substance of their governance never changes. But he was targeting the most important people when it came to whether or not crypto and the industry would be regulated in a way that might actually bring scrutiny to the fact that he was engaged in. 

So, here you can see, for example, someone with whom he curried particular favor, which is the longtime Californian Democratic member of the House, who has had her own ethics investigations in the past, Maxine Waters. The reason she's so important is because she has long been the chair, until the Republicans took over the House, of the House Financial Services Committee, the committee that would have investigated and sought to provide oversight and even regulated the crypto industry, had these people on that committee, led by Maxine Waters, not been drowning in all sorts of favoritism from this industry. And here you can see an expression of her affection for what she often called this genius and this young man and how successful this campaign was. Take a look. 

(Video 00:24:47)

There you see her blowing a nice little kiss to Sam Bankman-Fried. \Waving goodbye. Thank you so much for becoming essentially the largest investor or the second largest investor in the Democratic Party. We absolutely love you. We adore you. I don't think it's odd that, as the chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee that's supposed to be overseeing and regulating your industry, that I'm blowing a big kiss to you because you've drowned our political party and money. That's just the way Washington works. And that's why I say I think that the indictment is actually an indictment, more so, at least for our purposes, of Washington and its top players, than it is Sam Bankman-Fried, who one day will be thought of as Bernie Madoff or just some kind of ordinary crook who stole on a massive scale, but not using particularly interesting means of doing so. 

So here is the superseding indictment. A superseding indictment is basically a way that the Justice Department ends up charging somebody with a crime, a series of crimes, in order to gain their arrest and their extradition from the Bahamas, which they did. And then, as they investigate and they discover more facts, they want to add new charges and new facts to the indictment. So, they issue – basically another indictment. It adds charges. He's now facing more felony charges. It actually adds more detail as well for what prosecutors, again, claim took place. 

So here you see the caption of the case. It's entitled “The United States of America versus Samuel Bankman-Fried, a.k.a. SBF.” It's in the Southern District of New York, which is where a lot of financial fraud cases are tried and there you see the superseding indictment that was issued today. So, let's take a look at just a couple of the most significant revelations for our purposes. 

We begin with the first paragraph that essentially gives the sense for what this indictment is alleging. And it reads,  

 

 …including, among other things, to support the operations and investment of RTX and Alameda [which is a related firm that he controlled] to fund speculative venture investments, to make charitable contributions, to enrich himself and to try to purchase influence over cryptocurrency regulation in Washington, D.C., by steering tens of millions of dollars of illegal campaign contributions to both Democrats and Republicans (SBF. Superseding Indictment. Feb. 23, 2023).

 

As I mentioned earlier, the way he would essentially do this is he would openly tout the donations he made to Democratic Party causes to Democratic Party entities like state parties and Democratic politicians and all kinds of left liberal activist causes but then he would hide the donations he was making to Republicans because, as he himself said, in an interview he gave, once it was clear that he was about to be extradited, everybody knows that the way you curry media’s favor is by showing them that you're a Democrat. 

I mean, it's an amazing indictment of the corporate media – that insists they're nonpartisan and objective and a fair arbiter of facts – that he's saying, look, everybody knows that if you want the media to like you, you have to prove that you're on the side of the Democratic Party and that you're going to use your money for liberal causes. That's how you curry favor with the media. You get a big favorable media image, and that helps you avoid congressional and regulatory scrutiny. That's something he's saying explicitly in interviews and now the government in this document, as we're about to show you, is saying it as well. 

The indictment continues. This is, again, part of what the government is alleging against him. 

[…] and at relevant times, Bankman-Fried required that his co conspirators and others who work for him to communicate using encrypted and ephemeral messaging platforms that self-deleted, thereby preventing regulators and law enforcement from later obtaining a record of his misdeeds (SBF. Superseding Indictment. Feb. 23, 2023).

 

 

The reason why I highlighted this passage is this is actually something that is appearing more frequently and that I find bothersome. It has become almost the default position of the government that if you use encrypted communications, which is a technological innovation that already existed prior to the Snowden revelations but became very popular in the wake of those revelations, that enable you to communicate without being surveilled, or at least in a way that makes it much more difficult, that is presumptive evidence that you're doing something wrong. In other words, if you don't want the government watching what you're doing, the government believes that that is presumptive evidence that you are a guilty party – that the only people who seek privacy are people with something to hide. And they insert this in here to try and kind of color the perception of Sam Bankman-Fried in a negative way by saying “he used encryption”. He tried to prevent us from having access to the things he was saying. There are lots of people who are using encryption and don't want the government knowing what they're saying and doing who aren’t criminals. So, I just highlighted that one part because this is appearing more and more now in charging documents, and it shows the government's perception that privacy is only for bad people and if you're a good citizen, you should have no problem with the government knowing what it is you're doing and saying. 

Let's get into the section that describes the meat of the matter for our purposes, which is how he basically stole the money of his depositors, people who deposited money in this crypto exchange and used it to do many things, including buying political influence in Washington. And let's look at the people he seems to have purchased and how that ended up helping and protecting his scheme from being discovered for so long –  there are a lot of victims here. There are people who lost their entire life savings, people who invested large sums of money in this cryptocurrency exchange, and that money has now gone. He gave it away. He bought luxury items like that, but he also gave it to politicians. He also bought out media outlets, made gigantic donations to ProPublica, to The Intercept. I'm about to interview a reporter from The Intercept and The Intercept has said that they're considering the ethical questions of whether they should return that money. To my knowledge, they've yet to do so. So, he bought off not just politicians, but media outlets as well. And here's what the government says about all that: 

 

Samuel Bankman-Fried, the defendant, perpetuated his campaign finance scheme, at least in part to improve his personal standing in Washington, D.C., increase FTX’s profile and curry favor with candidates that could help pass legislation favorable to FTX or Bankman-Fried’s personal agenda, including legislation concerning regulatory oversight over FTX and its industry. To accomplish these goals, Bankman-Fried caused substantial contributions to be made in support of candidates of both major political parties and across the political spectrum. Bankman-Fried, however, did not want to be known as a left leaning partisan or to have his name publicly attached to Republican candidates. In those instances when he wanted to obscure his association with certain contributions, Bankman-Fried and others conspired to and did have those contributions made in the name of CC1 and CC2 (SBF. Superseding Indictment. Feb. 23, 2023).

 

Those are co conspirators. So, what they're essentially accusing him of doing is donating money to Republicans and Republican leading causes. But he didn't want the media to know he was doing that because he knows that the media hates everybody who donates to Republicans. He wanted to buy influence from Republicans, so he got other people to donate that money for him. And it's obviously illegal to make donations by getting other people to donate for you, in part because it's a form of fraud, and, in part, because it allows you to circumvent campaign finance laws. If I can only donate $5,000, but I get ten of my friends to donate for me, I'm now able to donate $50,000 to a candidate by pretending that there's 10 people who are donating, when in fact it's all coming from me. And that's one of the things he's also accused of doing. The indictment goes on. 

For instance, in around 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried, the defendant, and others agreed that he and his co conspirators should contribute at least $1,000,000 to a super PAC that was supporting a candidate running for United States congressional seat and appeared to be affiliated with pro-LGBT issues and selected CC1 to be the contributor.

 

A political consultant working for Bankman-Fried asked CC1 to make the contribution and told CC1 “In general, you being the center left face of our spending will mean you giving a lot of woke shit for transactional purposes”. CC1 expressed discomfort with making the contribution in his name, but agreed there was not anyone “trusted at FTX [who was] bi/gay in a position to make the contribution at the direction of Bankman-Fried and individuals working for him. CC1 nonetheless contributed to the PAC (SBF. Superseding Indictment. Feb. 23, 2023).

 

Let's just break that down. Sam Bankman-Fried, who didn't know Washington very well, especially progressive politics, wanted somebody to help him as a guide through this world where he wanted to buy influence, knowing that if anyone was going to regulate crypto, it was probably going to be the Democratic Party, the left wing that tends to favor regulation more than Republicans. 

He got an unnamed political consultant who, as I said, the identity of that person is an open secret in Washington – we're about to show you some articles that suggest who it might be, I'm not saying for sure it is, but who that might be – and that political strategist who's known for a lot of things, including inventing the hashtag Abolish ICE, #abolishice, told him that if you want favorable coverage in Washington, the way to do that is by giving to the Republicans, by progressive politicians, and by donating to candidates associated with LGBTQ causes. Then you're woke. You have the halo of woke ideology around you. The media will love you. The Democratic Party will think that you're benevolent and that you don't need regulatory scrutiny. These are the rules we all know that Washington runs by and that the media runs by. But it's rare to see it laid out with such explicit light as not only this indictment is done, but as a lot of media reporting has done as well. 

While he was waiting to come to United States to stand trial – I think in this moment before he was indicted, he was speaking publicly, even though his lawyers were obviously trying not to, because I think he believed deep down that he might have been guilty of reckless handling of finances, but that he could not possibly be a malicious person. After all, the corporate media in the United States has spent years heralding him as the new J.P. Morgan, as the new figure that was going to revolutionize how charity is done, how altruism is done. “Effective altruism” is what they called it. And he internalized this PR about himself. And so, he thought, I'm never going to be arrested. I have the most powerful friends in the world. Maxine Waters blows kisses at me. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton are at my beck and call. They get on a plane and come down to the Bahamas when I summon them and give them a check. He has in his brain these hangers on, his minions, who have been heralding his greatness for years. That's how reckless he was. He started talking to the media, knowing that indictments were coming – the dumbest thing that you could do. 

In the process of doing that, he spoke by Twitter DM to a reporter at Vox who published the key excerpts. And here you can see, it looks like any other Twitter DM because he's using Twitter to talk to a reporter at Vox and it's really interesting but he ends up telling her, she says to him, “So, the ethics stuff” [ meaning all that stuff you were talking about being an alter as being a philanthropist] “that was basically a front?”, she asked him. “People like you if you win and hate you if you lose. And that's all how it all really works”. And he responds this way: “Yeah, I mean, that's not “all” of it, but it's a lot. The worst quadrant is “sketchy + lose” the best is “win + clean”. “Clean and lose” is bad, but not terrible.” 

So, he's saying what I needed to do was win and in order to win, I needed to build a positive PR image that the media and Washington would eat up. 

And in the next exchange, this is where he explains exactly what he learned. She says: “You were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers” – because he just admitted to her that the ethics branding was bullshit, that it was just a front, all that talk about effective altruism. He's saying the idea is to win. And that was just a tool to help us win. And so, when she asked him, “You were really good at talking about ethics”. This is what he said: “Ya. I had to be. It's what reputations are made up to some extent. I feel bad for those who get fucked by it, but this by this dumb game which we woke Westerners play, where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.” 

Do you see what he's saying there? He's saying that if you want to be revered by the press corps and get away with whatever you want to get away with, it's a very simple game to play. All you have to do is affirm left liberal cultural orthodoxies be associated with woke causes. Give your money to woke causes. The media will love you and you will win. That's the game he was playing because that's the game that he learned and it worked. Think about what this says about the media and about people who exploit this ideology and these causes in order to do what he did. 

As I mentioned before, it's more or less an open secret who was guiding him through this Washington maze and taught him all of these things about how Washington works. I'm not suggesting this person is guilty of any crimes. He's not yet been charged with any crimes. But if I were him, I would not be sleeping well at night, given what we know that he did. Here's The New Republic, a left leaning journal, to put that mildly. The headline reads “Progressive Buddy of Sam Bankman-Fried,” and t's a profile of this activist named Sean McElwee and there you see the subheadline: “The “Abolish ICE” activist and founder of Data for Progress, allegedly helped steer donations for the FTX head toward pro-crypto candidates.” This is who was guiding Sam Bankman-Fried in telling him how you succeed in progressive politics. He used to be a hardcore leftist. Like I said, he invented the hashtag “Abolish ICE” campaign. He then converted that fame into creating this group called Data for Progress, which is designed to help Democratic Party candidates promote progressive causes. He kind of fell out of favor with the left because he started making a lot of pragmatic compromises, doing business with a lot of unsavory people like Sam Bankman-Fried but this was his political origins. Here's what The New Republic said about him. “By now, we've all heard of Sam Bankman-Fried […]”. Remember, this is December 2022, when the whole house of cards has fallen. 

[…] the erstwhile head of failed cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, who faces charges of fraud, money laundering and illegal political campaign contributions. But who is Sean McElwee, his equally scandal-ridden advisor and ally? McElwee, a former New Republic contributor, was once hailed as a progressive wunderkind. He started the viral “Abolish Ice” Movement on Twitter and in 2018 founded the progressive think tank Data for Progress, which focused on influencing public policy through polling data. 

 

His personal influence grew rapidly as well. McElwee regularly hosted parties in New York and Washington that were attended by younger politicos, as well as established lawmakers, including Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. President Biden's administration began working regularly with Data for Progress. Over the past couple of years, McElwee and Bankman-Fried grew close. Bankman-Fried set up a super PAC aimed at supporting Democrats who focused on pandemic preparedness, and he hired data for progress to do polling. 

 

But in reality, New York Magazine reported on Thursday, many of the Democrats Bankman-Fried backed were pro-crypto. “This was not just about directing donations to candidates”, Max Berger, a progressive strategist and former McElwee ally, told the Magazine, “This was about Sean running a political strategy designed to shield crypto from government oversight so that crypto billionaires could continue to rip off working people” (The New Republic. Dec. 22, 2022).

 

Crypto billionaires like Sam Bankman-Fried. So, you have this progressive hero who branded himself as a hardcore leftist, revolutionizing Washington with his brilliant leftist strategies, in reality, creating the political strategy Sam Bankman-Fried used to buy influence with all of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party – but the Republican Party in secret, the Democratic Party publicly – to buy favor with the media that Sean McElwee played like a violin, knowing that the way you get ahead in media in Washington is by aligning yourselves with left liberal cultural issues and progressive causes. 

Just to give you an idea of how much John McElwee promoted – one member of Congress in particular, Ritchie Torres, is kind of the living, breathing embodiment of how woke politics is exploited to perpetuate status quo power. We've talked about this before on this show. The first time that I ever realized this and saw this was when the British counterpart to the NSA, the GCHQ, the spy agency, in 2015, lit up its futuristic UFO headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag, basically to say,” I know you hate us, we spy on everybody, but we love the LGBT community.” That's why the CIA started celebrating Women's Day and creating ads about their agents being nonbinary, transwomen and all of that, co-opting and putting on the veneer of woke ideology onto the most corrupt, militaristic and corporatist institutions to give them a veneer of something rebellious and inspiring. We talked about that in the context of Hakeem Jeffries, the most sleazy corporate K Street swamp creature in Washington, rising to the head of the House Democratic Caucus and having the Squad talk about how he was the first black member, first black leader of a political party in Congress to make him seem like he was so progressive and revolutionary when in reality he serves status quo power. Barack Obama was probably Exhibit A in how effective that can be. 

And so, now you have Ritchie Torres, who is not only black and from the Dominican Republic, but also gay. He's from the South Bronx. He grew up with a single mother. He has a genuinely inspiring political story. He has every single intersectional box checked off, and they see him as a very powerful and potent weapon. He has very significant aspirations to rise in Democratic Party politics, and even though he has extremely conventional politics,they will depict him as some sort of young challenge to the status quo. And so, this became Richie Torres, one of the personal projects of Sean McElwee and Sam Bankman-Fried. And let's just look at how this was done, this particular example. 

So, here's Sean McElwee, in July of 2020, supporting Ritchie Torres as he was running for Congress for the first time. It was a crowded field of Democratic primary challengers, one of those long time incumbents who had represented the South Bronx for decades, retired. And so, the seat opened up and you have Sean McElwee reporting, promoting Richie Torres in the beginning. Here's a tweet: “Child poverty is a choice. The Coronavirus pandemic demands we end it. New on the blog from @RitchieTorres."  

So, he's promoting Ritchie Torres all the time. Here's another Sean McElwee tweet promoting a poll that his progressive group Data for Progress took, saying “Progressives have three weeks to prevent an anti-choice homophobe from being elected in the most Democratic district in the country by consolidating behind Ritchie Torres”, using this polling data to tell leftists, Look, Ritchie Torres, who loves the crypto industry, is a very vocal supporter of Israel, kind of an odd thing for a congressman from the South Bronx to make this his priority, but Sean McElwee architected Ritchie Torres, his rise to win this congressional seat and win this primary by promoting him all the time. 

Here you see Sean McElwee and David Shor, who are these kinds of young, hip political progressive consultants holding a fundraiser for Ritchie Torres in 2022, by which point Richie Torres is already a member of Congress. He won that election in 2020, and once you win the primary, you automatically win that district. It's a 85 to 15 Democratic Party district. So, Richie Torres is running for reelection in 2022. He had no opposition. He didn't even have a primary challenger. He was unopposed in the Democratic Party Primary. He was sure to win the Democratic nomination and then sure to win the general election, because, as I said, it's an 85/15 Democratic district. And yet, Sean McElwee And David Shor are holding a very expensive fundraiser for Ritchie Torres. Why does Ritchie Torres need large amounts of campaign finance when his reelection is guaranteed? Because this is how you buy influence. So, here's, the prices for attending this event are 1,000, 2,900, 4,000, $5,800, and you contribute to ActBlue. So, this is that personal project – Ritchie Torres. 

As it turns out, of the people who donated a lot of money to Ritchie Torres in 2022 was Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother Gabriel Bankman-Fried. For some reason, they took a lot of interest in donating a lot of money to somebody who had no political opposition: Ritchie Torres. Here you see some of the data. 2,900, 2,902, 2,900, 2900, 2900. Both Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother. 

Remember, the Justice Department is alleging that what they were doing was funneling huge amounts of money way beyond what campaign finance allows by having basically people who were donating Sam Bankman-Fried’s money but pretending it was coming from somebody else. This is what Dinesh D'Souza was prosecuted and went to jail for, for essentially doing this. 

So, another person who donated to Ritchie Torres's nonexistent 2022 reelection campaign was Sean McElwee, the progressive hero who became Sam Bankman-Fried’s guru. Nobody knows how Sean McElwee has enough money to be making large scale donations like this. Another $6,000 to a person who has no political opposition. The government says Sam Bankman-Fried was getting people close to him, as I just read you, to donate for him. And this is obviously somebody who's the perfect, “candidate,” as I said. And so, they were very interested in associating themselves with Richie Torres, this rising star in the Democratic Party, who's black, who has family from the Dominican Republic, who is gay. Every single possible box. 

Here is a list of the people that the government suspects were making donations that were really for Sam Bankman-Fried, including his brother. There you see Sean McElwee, several other people as well. And the list of the Democratic Party candidates here to whom they donated this money using what the Justice Department believes was this scheme and you see, Greg Sarsour, the new, very progressive member of Congress, young from Austin, Texas. You see on this list Maggie Hassan, who was a senator from New Hampshire. Maxwell Frost, the Gen-Z member of Congress who was just newly elected and the number one recipient of funds that the government believes is related to Sam Bankman-Fried: Ritchie Torres. He got almost $32,000, again, for a political campaign that just simply didn't exist. So, pouring a lot of money into Richie Torres's coffers became a major priority of Sam Bankman-Fried and of his guru, Sean McElwee. 

And just to be clear, we submitted a lot of questions prior to the show, earlier today, to Congressman Torres, which he did not answer. He has an open invitation to come on my show as I indicated to him to talk about this and anything else that he might want to talk about. And lo and behold, in a major coincidence, after getting deluged with all this money from Sam Bankman-Fried and his political guru, Sean McElwee – remember money that did not belong to Sam Bankman-Fried that he stole from working people – Richie Torres, amazingly, became a very vocal advocate of cryptocurrency, something you would not ordinarily associate with a progressive member of Congress, elected to the from the South Bronx. 

Here's a tweet from Richard Torres in March 2022:

Crypto is the future”, he wrote. “It could enable the poor to make payments and remittances without long delays and high fees. It could enable artists and musicians to earn a living. It could challenge the concentrated power of Big Tech and Wall Street. My Op-Ed” (March 17, 2022).

 

And there's an op-ed in the New York Daily News headlined “A Liberal Case for Cryptocurrency”. 

Do you see how they constantly take these corporatist policies, this Ponzi scheme, and justify it using woke terminology? They pretend, constantly, that they're fighting for the working person, for marginalized groups, while serving the agenda of this corrupt billionaire. 

We're going to talk to Lee in just a little bit, who has reported endlessly on this tactic, Sam Bankman-Fried and Sean McElwee didn't pioneer it. They just exploited it at a much greater rate.

Ritchie Torres didn't only sing the praises of cryptocurrency, he intervened along with seven of his colleagues in Congress, into an investigation that was underway into Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. 

Here, from the American Prospect, in November of 2020, they report: “Congressmembers Tried to Stop the SEC's Inquiry Into FTX”. So, there was an attempt by the SEC to investigate FTX. Presumably they would have discovered the Ponzi scheme and for all that was, eight members of Congress whom the American Prospect has dubbed the “Blockchain eight” wrote “a bipartisan letter in March attempting to chill the SEC's information request to crypto firms. FTX was one of those. 

Here's what the article says. 

 

The Securities and Exchange Commission was seeking information from collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX earlier this year, The Prospect has confirmed, bringing a new perspective to an effort by a bipartisan group of congress members to slow down that investigation (The American Prospect. Nov.23, 2022).

 

So, the SEC was doing their job, suspecting something was amiss here with FTX and, then, a bipartisan group of eight members of Congress intervened to try and slow down that investigation. 

The March letter from eight House members – four Democrats and four Republicans – questioned the SEC's authority to make informal inquiries to crypto and blockchain companies and intimated that the requests violated federal law. They were telling me, as you see, you have no right to investigate crypto. 

The eight members were Reps. Emmer, Donalds, Auchincloss, Warren Davidson (R-OH), Ted Budd (R-NC), Darren Soto (D-FL) Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Ritchie Torres (D-NY). Budd was elected this year to the U.S.Senate. (The American Prospect. Nov.23, 2022). 

 

This is how the game in Washington is played, exactly right here. They forward to Ritchie  all this money, even though he doesn't need it – because he has no opposition – but he keeps it in his coffers. Money is power in Washington. He starts singing the praises of whatever you tell him to say. He suddenly becomes a vocal crypto advocate and he even helps intervene into an investigation that the SEC was trying to conduct to determine whether there was fraud at FTX and potentially an investigation that could have uncovered this fraud and saved hundreds of thousands of people from losing billions of dollars of their hard earned savings. 

Now, just to be clear, I also see potential not so much in cryptocurrency as in the underlying technology of blockchain, because my interest is more in its ability to provide a way for decentralization to happen. Jack Dorsey has often talked about how his regret with Twitter was that he didn't build it on blockchain technology to decentralize it, to make centralized censorship impossible. It also makes it much harder for surveillance to take place. We're going to be interviewing Edward Snowden in the next few weeks about his view of cryptocurrency and why he's excited about blockchain technology. And I actually try, I've tried over the past couple of years to tell people on the left that their reflexive opposition to cryptocurrency and blockchain is misguided because of these benefits. 

Back in December of 2021, I interviewed an anonymous activist who calls himself “the blockchain socialist,” who advocates blockchain technology and crypto currency from a left wing perspective. I also did a separate interview with Alex Gladstein, who essentially talked about the promises of cryptocurrency to do things like overthrow the dollar as the world's reserve currency. The dollar as the world's reserve currency is what enables the United States to borrow endless sums of money, to feed all of our endless wars and the benefits of that. 

So, I'm not an opponent of cryptocurrency, but I know that there's a lot of left wing opposition to it, which is why it's so enlightening to see people who have affiliated themselves with progressive causes to suddenly be on board with the crypto chain as money from Sam Bankman-Fried is pouring into their wallet, which is how Washington works to the point where, again, this is a bipartisan scam. 

Here you have on CNBC a Democratic Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, who's part of the center left of the Democratic Party, singing the praises of crypto, pretending that they want to introduce some regulation but it's really regulation written by the crypto industry to give the illusion of cryptocurrency regulation while protecting the industry from any actual regulatory oversight. Just listen to how she gushes about how this works.  

By the way, she's with Senator Lummis, who's a Republican from, I believe, South Dakota. So here is yet another example of a bipartisan consensus, something that we're always told never happens. But here, watch both of them sing the praises of crypto. 

(Video 00:58:00)

 

CNBC: Hey, Senators, two questions for you. One is and I'm sure you saw this a little over a month ago. The largest 401k manager in the country announced that they were going to offer Bitcoin to users or to consumers. Companies have to choose to allow their employees to put Bitcoin in there. For one case, the Labor Department came out and said, “This is a terrible idea”. What do you think?

 

Senator Lummis: I think the Labor Department's wrong. I think it's a wonderful idea. It should be part of a diversified asset allocation and it should be on the end of the spectrum of a store of value. Obviously, if you have a fully diversified asset allocation, you have some assets that you want to produce income in the short run. You also want some assets that are just a store of value. And I think that's where Bitcoin really shines. I think it's some of the hardest money that's ever been created in the world, and for that reason, it belongs as a slice of a diversified asset allocation for retirement funds. 

 

CNBC: Senator Gillibrand, do you agree or disagree? 

 

Sen. Gillibrand: No, I agree. And that's why this piece of legislation is so important and why it's so timely. Once you create basic infrastructure around these types of digital assets, where there are disclosure requirements, where they have a regulator, where there's full transparency, that is going to create the safety and soundness in the market, that will give other people comfort that this is a market that is here to stay. It's one that is properly regulated and one that has oversight and accountability. And that's what this legislation is going to do. So, while many people are comfortable with where these digital assets are being used or offered today, once the regulatory frameworks are put around it, there will be more comfort there. 



So, a lot of times the most important stories are the ones that receive the least amount of media attention. I always am amazed whenever I think about it to this very day that we do not know and likely never will know, for example, the client list of Jeffrey Epstein, who was in his various books, whether or not there was surveillance footage or blackmail material on the people who ended up falling into his web. 

Well, we know that many of the most powerful people in the world, from Donald Trump and Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew and lots of other people, spent time on that island. Whenever there's no partisan angle to the story, people seem to agree that it doesn't need to be scrutinized because there's no partisan benefit to it. 

This is, I think, similar – this case of Sam Bankman-Fried as I said, his particular crime is not that interesting. The way in which his tentacles were all throughout Washington is extremely interesting. And I believe there's a lot of people who are very, very worried about where this investigation is going and not only because it's important unto itself to find out who got dirty by this money and how, but also because of the amazing line it says on these media dynamics, on who's for sale in Washington, how easily purchased they are and how it all works. This is a story that I believe is only in the beginning that's going to grow and grow and grow in terms of its revelations about a lot of people. I know for sure there's a lot of people sleeping very poorly who are involved in these stories, including some of the ones we mentioned and others as well. And we absolutely are going to continue to follow this story vigilantly as it unfolds and we're going to also do that with the help of our next guest. 



So, for our interview segment, I am very delighted to welcome into our studio here, in Brazil with us, the great investigative journalist Lee Fang. He was on our show a couple of weeks ago talking about one of the blockbuster stories that he did on the Twitter Files. He has spent his career talking exactly about these issues. He has kind of made his way, starting off in progressive media outlets. He's now at The Intercept, but he is somebody who has always risen above ideological and partisan politics. 

He's for me, even though he's still kind of youngish, a very old school investigative journalist, he is the perfect guest to talk about this, all of this and the implications of it. And we're about to do that in just a minute.

 


The Interview: Lee Fang



G. Greenwald: I am really delighted to welcome into our studio my longtime colleague, my friend, and someone who is really a credit to American journalism. And there aren’t many people about whom I say that. Lee Fang, it's great to see you. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. 

 

Lee Fang: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Yeah, it is great for you to be here. I agree as well, especially tonight, given that we have something that is perfectly within the intersection, if I can use that word, of the reporting that you've been doing for years, which is the way in which money buys influence across the political spectrum. So why don't we just begin with your reaction to this new indictment and some of the revelations it contains? 

 

Lee Fang: Well, in some ways, this indictment is extraordinary. You have this very young billionaire who took money from his customers and really spread it across the political system. If you look at the size and scale of this alleged fraud, it's extraordinary. It's unprecedented. Obviously, using straw donations. If that's true, that's  illegal. And at the same time, it's also kind of benign and ordinary. What Sam Bankman-Fried is accused of is what every major industry does, this attempt to buy influence on both sides of the aisle and when it comes to Democrats, to progressives, to institutions where cultural liberalism is dominant in the media or at universities, using these kinds of signals around, you know, social justice language, around cultural liberalism, around identity politics, that's a great way to conceal influence peddling, to make it seem to provide like a veneer of righteousness to buying off influence and influencing the process. And that's what Sam Bankman-Fried was doing but, again, that's what the airlines do, the banks, that's what the regular tech industry does. It's how Washington basically works. 

 

G. Greenwald:  One of the things that I think angered the political establishment most about Donald Trump's political campaign in 2016 was – I don't know if you remember this specific moment – but in one of the debates, he basically stood up and said, “All Washington is a scam and when I was on the other side of the process as just kind of a billionaire, as somebody who is in the private sector, all I had to do was just write a check to any politician in either party, and with some exceptions, but not many, they would call me up and they would say, “What is it that I can do for you?” And whatever he needed them to do, they would do it in exchange for that check that he was willing to offer. He was famously a guest at Bill and Hillary Clinton's wedding that showed how ensconced he was in this political culture.

Having been somebody who has looked for so long at the way in which both parties operate under the scheme that you just described, how have you come to see the fights between the two parties that we're supposed to believe are so intractable and so fundamental? Do you see that more as theater and these parties serving kind of the same masters, or do you see the fights between these two parties as being often very genuine? 

 

Lee Fang: I think on the big picture issues, on taxes, who pays and who doesn't, on regulation of businesses, of how basically the economy is run, there is broad bipartisan consensus and there's an effort to use the emotionally evocative culture war issues as a way to distract people, to divide people, to kind of harness the polarization in society, to keep the status quo for major corporations and special interests. And we see this playing out in so many ways in Washington. You know, there was an effort in the last Congress to crack down on the power of Big Tech. This is something that a lot of politicians have talked about. I think we all recognize the power of Facebook, of Amazon, of Google and the other tech giants. You look at this kind of simultaneous exploitation of the culture war when there was a legislative effort to kind of crack down on the way that Google and Facebook share advertising revenue with newspapers and media companies. 

What the Silicon Valley Giants did is they took money, they gave it to front groups, and they ran ads in targeted districts that exploited the culture war without talking about the actual underlying bill. For Democratic districts, they ran ads that said that if we pass this legislation, we will have more hate speech and more hate groups on the Internet. Don't allow your legislator to support hate speech and other neo-Nazi groups because, you know, sharing ad tech revenue will mean more Breitbarts or whatever. And on the right, they said, okay, look, this is an effort to actually censor conservatives and this is a way for Washington liberals to kind of crush you under their thumb like they always do. 

It's like, okay, this is a way no one's actually talking about the underlying bill. This is a way to get people angry and upset about legislation they probably don't understand. 

 

G. Greenwald:  You know, I think about this issue a lot because you don't, on the one hand, want to completely dismiss the importance of what is this umbrella group of culture war issues. They do matter to people. People feel strongly about whether abortion should be legal or criminalized. People feel strongly about whether same sex marriages ought to be recognized under the law or not. They feel strongly about whether children should have access to puberty-blocking medication and even surgeries in order to change their gender and you go down the list if you want to even group in things like gun control and crime policy. Sometimes those get grouped into culture war issues as well, though I think they're kind of outside of it. 

So, on the one hand, these issues are not trivial; people feel strongly about them. They can affect people's lives. On the other hand, the more we are at each other's throats about those issues, the more we're focused incessantly on what a lot of times are easier political fights to have, right?, it's easier to fight with your neighbor about what books a school is going to include in their curriculum than it is to say, deconstruct the hegemony of Goldman Sachs and the CIA. So, it's tempting to do that because the results are more immediate. The more we're doing that, though, the happier power centers are, because the more we're fighting with one another, the less we're focused on that. 

What do you think, and I realize you tend to look at these things as a journalist, but having presented that problem that you just described, what is the way to kind of get people to find that right balance? 

 

Lee Fang: I mean, that's a tough question. I think that if you read about these issues and how people talk about them, whether there's, you know, nonprofit think tanks, the different media outlets, what have you, there just isn't a lot of understanding of the other side in an attempt to genuinely engage on the issues. 

But there is this kind of overarching effort to exploit, to flatten actual points of difference and cynically exploit them to make us hate each other. Another example of the Big Tech crackdown: Amazon has faced criticism around counterfeit goods on their platform as they face legislation in the last year to kind of crack down on that. They pay a number of Asian, African American and Latino groups that went out and lobbied on their behalf and said, “Look, if you require more photo ID and user verification for resellers on online platforms, well, that sounds a lot like voter ID, therefore, it's racist.” You know, that's a way to flatten the debate, not to actually talk about the nuanced policy issues. That's an emotional shortcut to get people angry, to then join Amazon and be their de facto lobbyist because they've been recruited into the culture war. 

 

G. Greenwald:  I started writing about politics in May 2005, and this is right around the time we were obviously already in Iraq, you know, with the major military force of a couple hundred thousand troops, and neocons were very eager to change the government in Iran. And there was that anonymous tip– it probably came from Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz, maybe even David Frum – that was leaked that said “real men go to Tehran – like Baghdad is not enough. We want to go to Iran”. And out of nowhere, there started to appear all of these stories about the abuse and mistreatment of gay men by the Iranian government, about gay men hanging from cranes and the like, and all these kinds of neoconservatives who didn't even have the slightest interest ever in any LGBT issues, much less the plight of Iranian gay men, suddenly started exploiting these kinds of social justice causes to gin up hatred among Democrats toward the Iranian regime by saying, “look at how they oppress gay men.” This has now become a major way that the West supports and sustains support for imperialism, militarism, even if it's done in Ukraine, you know, lobbies LGBT people and look at this like trans soldiers, but Putin and the Russians hate gay men and Jews in Israel and Palestine. If you go to Israel, they'll take you to all the nice gay clubs in Tel Aviv and they'll tell you that Hamas tanks gay men, in order to get you to be more on the side of Israel, you have focus on the use of those kinds of tactics in the domestic context when it comes to economic policy.  

That's what one of the articles that we want to ask you about, from Lee Fang, on the screen, from The Intercept. It's from 2022. The headline is “Lobbyists Mingle With Congress under the Banner of Celebrating Diversity,” and the subheadline is “Corporate lobbyists are sponsoring events celebrating racial progress to advocate for their clients’ business interests”. These are corporate lobbyists who are on K Street, whose job it is to generate profit, and they're using this kind of agenda of racial progress, post-George Floyd, to promote their corporatist agenda. Talk about that specific example and what that shows about how this works. 

 

Lee Fang: Yeah, this is how money flows into the Democratic side in Congress. You know, it would be untoward to kind of have a welcome event for Congress that has an official banner that says ExxonMobil and Waste Management and Goldman Sachs. That would be obviously problematic for a lot of left leaning lawmakers or lawmakers that campaigned on social change.  

But all you have to do to conceal that kind of nasty image would still have that same effect of lobbyists cozying up and partying with legislative staff and lawmakers and gaining influence, the kind of day to day transaction-based economy of Capitol Hill is to use a diversity event. The Tri- Caucus, the Asian American, Hispanic and Black congressional caucuses have their own affiliate nonprofits that are almost 100% corporate-funded. Their boards are dominated by corporate lobbyists when they make decisions on who to endorse. Often that's actually done by the corporate lobbyists that fund those congressional caucus nonprofits. And just this new Congress that was recently gaveled in, you have parties almost every week celebrating, you know, Lunar New Year for Asian-Americans. And there's this article where we mentioned a number of Hispanic and Latino caucus events. And again, these are lobbyist organized, just absolute swamp activities where – if we looked at the pictures posted on social media from these events, and you zoom in and it's one congressional staffer for Hakeem Jeffries next to a pharmaceutical lobbyist, next to another lawmaker, next to another bank lobbyist – it's just the same kind of cesspool but under this banner of promoting diversity and inclusion. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Yeah, that's what I was saying. I mean, in a way, I think is the perfect guest for this new one day, because one of the things the indictment reveals is just how cynical Sam Bankman-Fried and his political guru Sean McElwee became about let's just associate yourself with these woke causes and that will immunize you not only from regulatory scrutiny but also from negative media attention. This is something you've been spending a lot of time on, which is why I say he didn't invent it. He just kind of detected it and they used it. There's another example and by the way, since we went over a little time and I want to continue to explore this utterly while we have him, we also are now streaming on Locals, which will be our aftershow as well.  

Let's put this other article that is similar in theme to the one that you uncovered. There is the article from 2022 to the evolution of union busting, and it's entitled “Breaking Unions With the Language of Diversity and Social Justice”. Obviously, supporting unions has been – and unionizing and organizing unions – has been a long time cause of the left. And yet I've noticed all the time now that when corporations want to persuade their workers to reject unionization and the organization of unions, they of course, don't say, “Oh, you're going to eat into our bottom line”. That's not the kind of rhetoric that appeals to people. They, instead, smuggle in this kind of social justice language as a way of sabotaging union drives. Talk about some of the things that you've uncovered as part of that report. 

 

Lee Fang: Yeah, this was a fun story. I attended a number of conferences that are sponsored by the union suppression industry. This is a $300 million a year industry where, you know, major corporations hire special consultants that go into a company that's facing a union threat, and they hold captive meeting seminars with employees to dissuade them, because there's typically a vote to decide if workers can join a union or not. This has gone on for a very long time. It's a very sophisticated industry and, back in the day, they used threats of violence. There were weapons used and intimidation on the picket line, kind of threats to offshore jobs in the seventies and eighties, which were often actuated. But in the last decade, we've seen a very sharp turn where a lot of workers and more left leaning industries, the tech industry, Starbucks, RTI, companies that kind of have a large number of liberal Democrat employees, they're facing a growing movement to unionize, to join the labor movement. And you see these union avoidance consultants rebranding. They're becoming diversity consultants, DTI consultants, and they're going in and saying, look, you don't need to join a union to have your voice at the company. We can just talk about issues around identity. It's a very intimate way to kind of connect to an employee and they get people alternatives. They say instead of joining a labor union, they will create an employee resource group. This is a special club where you have an association of gay or Asian or what have you employees. And you know, you'll have a pizza party once a month and we'll have a hotline if you have any issues. But just don't join a labor union because they would actually – they don't say this part - but they would actually cost the company money. 

I mean, the thing of the day, whether it's lobbying Congress or what we just talked about or this kind of union busting, they want to take away decisions that change the kind of power structure where more power would be, redistributed to workers, to common people and they want to keep those decisions in the hands of investors and management. And this is the same thing where the attempts to crush this growing labor movement we've seen in the last few years are adopting the language of the kind of symbols and rhetoric of social justice activists and explicitly using these demands for diversity and inclusion as kind of a Jiu Jitsu to undermine this effort at unionization. 

 

G. Greenwald: I mean, it's so incredibly cynical and yet so remarkably effective because anything that has that kind of branding is assumed at this point to be something appealing and attractive. 

 And just speaking of which, I think I started really noticing a kind of seat change where these sorts of things are concerned, maybe 10 or 15 years ago when it came to Al Sharpton, because a lot of people don't remember when Al Sharpton ran for president in, I believe it was, 2004, he kind of occupied the Jesse Jackson Lane. Obviously, the comparison of them all being African American candidates but it went beyond that, which was very ideological. They were running as left wing critics of the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson was a very harsh critic of the Democratic Party and actually had a pretty successful 1988, I believe, primary run, where he won multiple primaries, multiple states with this message that the Democratic Party was abandoning its working class roots and was becoming the party of corporations. And Al Sharpton kind of took up that mantle and in 2004 was attacking John Kerry and John Edwards and that kind of wing of the Democratic Party, saying that they're too much in bed with corporations and lobbyists and the likel. And then, suddenly, I started noticing that a lot of times Al Sharpton would start to appear and give his support for exactly the kind of corporatist bills and other legislative initiatives that he would typically have denounced for years from the left. And there was clearly a flow of money going from a lot of these corporations into his activist groups. What has your journalism revealed about Al Sharpton in the kind of – to me, he seems like a pioneer in this circle and he has often talked about this and many times before saying why should we as influential black people, also get the same kind of lobbyist funding that influential white lobbyists get as well? What is that kind of signal to you? 

 

Lee Fang: Well, I mean, he kind of represents this kind of schism in the Democratic Party that – from the New Deal through the Great Society, – you have this kind of very materialist, grounded focus of the Democratic Party that advance civil rights, at the same time advancing universal economic policy, increasing the social safety net of cracking down on corporate power, making sure workers have a seat at the table. And there was kind of a break in the sixties where you had this movement towards neoliberal identity politics. A lot of activist entrepreneurs embraced this rhetoric and ideology of black capitalism that Sharpton now represents. And, you know, he's […] 

 

G. Greenwald:  That very much to his benefit, for sure, from like an MSNBC contrast to all sorts of other ways. 

 

Lee Fang: I mean, even that MSNBC contract is fascinating. When MSNBC was purchased by Comcast, there was an incredible lobbying effort because the DOJ and other regulatory authorities were looking at this from an antitrust perspective. This is a major, you know, concentration of economic power. And Al Sharpton led the effort to lobby legislators saying, “Look, Comcast and MSNBC are devoted to diversity and inclusion. And look, they're going to set aside for nonwhite, black or Asian or whatever content on their cable shows”. And it certainly worked. It was approved. 

 

G. Greenwald:  I think that is really amazing. I mean, the idea that Al Sharpton, the Al Sharpton of the eighties, nineties and the early aughts would go to bat for a major corporation like Comcast and lobby the Justice Department against enforcing antitrust laws by, you know – wasn't really called woke ideology then – but by appealing to those kinds of social justice symbols is amazing in and of itself. I guess it should be a gigantic red flag. But that was a case where he really got paid by Comcast when he was hired for what was a very poorly reviewed show, he was terrible on camera, he could barely read a teleprompter. Nobody watched that program. The contract was multi-millions of dollars. And they finally got rid of him on prime time and they put him on the weekend where he's still getting paid. You know, it's such an overt quid pro quo, but it was done with Al Sharpton, you know, invoking these kinds of left wing causes for what was clearly a corporatist agenda. 

 

Lee Fang: Go on YouTube and the National Action Network Sharpton's organization has an annual conference and watch their proceedings. It's every bigwig of the Democratic Party people, teachers, Obama, Hillary, what have you going and, you know, singing his praises and talking at the conference. And then, each event is interspersed with corporate lobbyists coming up and thanking the National Action Network for what they're doing and pledging their money to his group. And what you don't see during the conference is how the National Action Network and Al Sharpton then go and mobilize civil rights groups. And, you know, he has his own network for their regulatory tax and other corporate issues on Capitol Hill. I mean, last year, Al Sharpton was calling legislators, asking them to drop the provision of the Biden legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, that had to do with the carried interest loophole that would have attacked hedge fund managers and private equity bosses to make sure that they paid a fair rate in taxes. Right now, they can pay capital gains less than their own secretaries and janitors. What he's not done in the last year is he's paid by Reynolds America, the big tobacco company. And he's now working with George Floyd's family and then bringing them to press conferences, saying that the FDA's effort to crack down on menthol cigarettes is racist. This is what he does. I mean, this is this is just I mean, this. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Is Al Sharpton. And he shows up to say that whatever legislation you're against or whatever America is and you want to burn off is itself racist. And it's  a business. It's a racket. 

 

Lee Fang: It's a business that D.C. operates around. And, you know, in particular, it works. And there are different ways to influence Republican conservative audiences based on their values, on corporations. The same corporation will fund Al Sharpton and a number of LGBT causes. And meanwhile, to influence Republicans, they'll fund. 

 

G. Greenwald:  What, Newt Gingrich? 

 

Lee Fang:  Newt Gingrich and, you know, more jingoistic kind of religious organizations that have appeal and cachet with Republican audiences. It's a dual strategy that, again, exploits the polarization in America. But if you live in, you know, it's particularly effective for the media and for universities where these ideas are dominant and in states that have a lot of power – where I'm based in California and states like New York, it's essentially a one party state. In California, there's a super majority of Democrats in the legislature, a Democratic governor. You know, Biden wins by a huge majority there. But it's a state that's still incredibly unequal. It's a state where corporations win most of the major policy battles. And again, it's using the same kind of strategy that Sharpton – I don't know if he pioneered – but he's certainly very effective at taking social justice rhetoric and deploying it to basically manipulate voters into agreeing with the corporate bottom line. We've seen this with Prop 22, Prop 15, with efforts to reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals. They pay off lots of different identity groups, and they accuse their opponents of being bigoted and they eventually manipulate voters into agreeing with them because we have this kind of proposition system to change the state constitution every two years. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Yeah, you could get anything done in Democratic Party or basketball circles, as your colleague Ryan Grim has done a great job of reporting as well, that within these progressive organizations, they basically implode on each other because of this, without accusing the people you're trying to feed in some way of supporting bigotry or white supremacy. So even when it comes to just like the most financially oriented corporatist policies that are designed to protect the wealthy, somehow they end up having, you know, sort of like the Al Sharpton's of that state, people who purport to be professionals, activists on behalf of some ethnic group or racial group going to bat for these corporations, claiming that whatever legislative or regulatory proposal is pending to restrict their power is in some way racist or white supremacists. It's amazing to watch. 

 

Lee Fang: I want to share one quick anecdote, because this is maybe personal to you. We talk a little bit about the captains of industry, Big Tech and banking, whatnot. But this is just how legislation is done in California. I went to Sacramento a few years ago and there was an effort to regulate minks, mink farming, you know, fur coats. And, you know, the mink farming industry is incredibly cruel. These are territorial animals. So, when you put them in crates right next to each other and they can kind of sense each other nearby, they go insane. They start chewing off their own paws. So, when the California legislature sought to regulate this industry, the fur coat industry paid off and we got the text messages, they were offering $100 gift certificates or cash or whatever to a number of students to take a bus to Sacramento and were told to testify against this legislation. They did not say they were with the fur industry, that they're paid by the fur industry. They brought young African American men to say fur coats are part of our culture, and they show a level of socioeconomic status. And doing this and cracking down on fur coats is racist. And they brought in a Native American. And they say that fur coats are part of our indigenous culture and any effort to regulate this is racist against our people. Incredibly cynical stuff, but this just kind of shows how much it runs the gamut, whether you're a big bank or airline or, you know, Sam Bankman-Fried, a fur coat dealer in L.A. who paid off these young students to testify on your behalf. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Yeah, that's right. I mean, the Sam Bankman-Fried part of this, isn't that he invented it. It's just because of the scope of the fraud. It's just going to shed so much light on how it actually works. 

While I have you, just a couple of quick last questions. The last time you were on my show, as I said, you were here because we were talking about the work you did on the Twitter Files and the story you did about the media, the military, rather, deploying fake identities on Twitter, something that we hear only Iran and Russia and China and all the bad countries do. What is the status of your work on the torture files as a continuing? Do you have other stories coming out and what do you make of the way in which the media really, on day one, announce that this is a trivial story, that it was done corruptly and that most revelations that have emerged and that will continue to emerge have just been declared something that they intend to completely ignore. 

 

Lee Fang: I have not conducted any recent searches. I had a few days at Twitter HQ in December and one or two days after that, but I've done very little new searches. I've got a number of emails that I'm still working on. I'm going to produce more stories based on those documents, on the media's treatment of this reporting. The New York Times covered my story, the CENTCOM story that I appeared on your show to discuss.. But, you know, just generally, regarding the coverage of the story, I've been disappointed but not surprised. These revelations were incredible just to see the kind of daily and aggressive FBI influence on issues both weighty and mundane. The FBI was contacting them every other day, executives at Twitter, for The New York Times and other media outlets to ignore that, which I think is very strange and maybe reflects some type of professional jealousy or something else. It's hard to kind of divine their intentions. And, you know, Michael Sullenberger's revelations using the Twitter Files on how much Jim Baker and other Twitter executives were involved in the censorship of The New York Post… 

 

G. Greenwald:  Former FBI general counsel that went to Twitter as the deputy general counsel. 

 

Lee Fang: Yes. Thank you. And you know that that's very newsworthy, but not just given the role of the Hunter Biden laptop now and the new Congress being investigated, but just that the role of that, that whole story and unprecedented nature of the suppression of it in 2020, for the major media outlets to completely ignore this, except for Fox News and maybe a few other conservative outlets. You know, I find it ridiculous. And, you know, again, but not surprising. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Yeah, and a testament to my faith and trust in those institutions have collapsed across most demographic groups in the United States. And independent media really so clearly is the wave of the future. People just don't trust these outlets any longer. 

Last question, and it's kind of curious, like whenever there's a potential to really blow a big, gigantic hole in the way Washington works like this, Sam Bankman-fried investigation does. Again, not the part of how he stole money, but the part of how he used it for political influence implicates a lot of political figures, implicates a lot of political consultants. People who were just getting money in all sorts of various ways are incredibly powerful. House Financial Services Committee that Maxine Waters has chaired for seven years. I always kind of believe that they're going to find a way to shut it down. I mean, to this day it is. Is amazing, is it not, that the way in which the Jeffrey Epstein investigation was conducted, he never got to trial because he ended up dying beforehand. And then the way they did the Maxwell trial to make it as narrow as possible, the charges against her and what evidence was admissible. So, we saw none of the client list or the potential leverage they might have had is really striking. And there's been no journalistic revelations of this part either. I mean, Julie Brown at The Miami Herald has done great work, but the bulk of it has remained hidden. I feel like whenever you have a story like this that can really threaten the power centers in Washington, they will find a way to shut it down. What is your expectation about the potential for this investigation going forward to keep revealing things like this document today revealed? 

 

Lee Fang: Well, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that more of the truth and more revelations come to light. But yeah, you're right that there's a lot of prosecutorial discretion. And the direction that the DOJ takes could provide incredible amounts of sunlight to what Sam Bankman-Fried was doing. Or they could take certain plea deals and take the investigation in another direction that kind of conceals what was going on. I don't know. I mean, there's been some boost in terms of just more media scrutiny. Of course, you know, the bankruptcy filings are also interesting. The fact that they're going through Chapter 11 and, you know, their companies being taken apart, that also provides a little bit more insight into what they were doing. We had a story recently looking at that and how they're paying off just endless think tanks and consultants and PR firms, a little bit like the indictment today revealed. But again, I don't know. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Yeah. Well, we'll most certainly keep following that. And I don't know how long you're going to be here, but we'll probably be hectoring you to come back on the show. We have a lot more to talk about with you, as always. Your work is, I think, important and always really interesting. So, I'm really thrilled that we were able to bring you here into the studio and spend the time talking to you. Thanks for being here. 

 

Lee Fang: It's awesome to be here in the studio. Looks great. Thanks for having me. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Absolutely.  

 

So that concludes our show for this evening, since we did go a little long for it tonight, as we said, we streamed the last part of this on Locals that will constitute our aftershow for tonight. 

We will be back Tuesday for our aftershow on Locals. Tuesday and Thursday are the days we do that. We will be back tomorrow night. We typically have Michael Tracey on to chat with. That's sort of a punching bag for me, which I think the audience likes. He likes to try and fight back as well, and I think people find that amusing too. So, we'll try and have him on for tomorrow night. 

Thank you very much for continuing to watch: the numbers of our audience continue to grow. Remember as well that we are now available on those podcasting platforms also and following us there helps increase the visibility. So, if you use Spotify or Apple, please follow the show System Update on there and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night. 7 p.m. EST, exclusively here on Rumble.

 

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Briahna Joy Gray on Dems in Disarray, the "Big Beautiful Bill," Biden Cover-Up Receipts and More; Plus: Interview with Journalist Katie Halper
System Update #461

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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Glenn Greenwald is away this week. 

I’m Briahna Joy Gray, the guest host for this episode. 

You might know me from my own podcast, “Bad Faith,” or from my previous hosting responsibilities over at The Hill’s “Rising,” less of a free speech platform than this one. 

Today, I'll be walking through the implosion of the Democratic Party, the pathetic hunt for a Joe Rogan of the left, the party's instinct for corporate self-preservation over real populist reform and the media cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline. 

Afterward, I'll be joined by independent left podcaster and co-host of “Useful Idiots” podcast, Katie Halper, to continue the conversation about how the DNC is continuing to try to rig elections in favor of incumbents, even as they repeatedly keep dying in office, and the likelihood that there might be more independent third-party runs in 2028, a la RFK Jr.'s 2024 attempt. Now, let's get right into it. 

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For a decade now, corporate Democrats have been warning that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the Republic. During Trump's first term, much of that handwriting seemed to be hyperbolic – Trump derangement syndrome, if you will. His big legislative accomplishment was in line with the policy priorities of your typical establishment Republican: a $1.7 trillion tax cut that went overwhelmingly to the rich.

There was some good stuff too: unlike Biden, he didn't start any new wars. While he continued to fund Israel's genocide in Gaza and crack down on free speech rights of Americans who protested the said genocide, Trump did accomplish the temporary cease-fire that AOC merely claimed Kamala was “working tirelessly” to achieve. 

But now that President Trump is finally following through on some of his less popular and less populist policy commitments, like the Medicaid cuts, included in his Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the House last week, or throwing markets into disarray with his erratic application of tariffs, which can be good policy.

Establishment Democrats seem almost happy to have something to justify their hatred of Trump. So, you see, the less populist Trump behaves, the more it disguises the Democrats' own failure to meet the needs of the people. Some Democrats are outright advising that the way they should respond to this alleged “existential crisis” is to simply do nothing: Just sit back and wait to benefit from the backlash. 

You don't have to take my word for it: Listen to a veteran DNC advisor, James Carville, describe the strategy: 

Video. James Carville, The View. February 18, 2025.

Fiddle while Rome burns, the expert says, then exploit the tragedy. 

But so far, the backlash isn't coming. A new Economist/YouGov poll, out yesterday, shows that while GOP favorability is low, at negative 11%, Democrats are doing even worse, at negative 21%; 41% of Americans still view Republicans favorably, while a mere 36% of Americans view Democrats favorably. 

These polls come as no surprise to those of us who consume independent media. I mean, just look around: Democrats are in the throes of a credibility crisis that arose out of Joe Biden's obvious unfitness to run for president. 

They're trying to distract from their complicity and the cover-up, but going all in on the idea that it was Biden himself, his family, and his closest advisors that hid his decline from the party and the public until it was too late, not the liberal media. But it's hard to call Biden's infirmary a “cover-up” when it was out in the public for all of us to see and comment on. The president was confusing Haifa and Rafah, mixing up the president of Egypt and the president of Mexico, and even dodged culpability in the classified documents case on the basis that he didn't have the mental competence to knowingly take the files. 

He even seemed to wander off at the G7 Conference a year ago, like a distracted child. 

Video. Joe Biden, The Economic Times. June 14, 2024.

His mental lapses were evident as far back as the 2020 primary, during which presidential candidates Julian Castro and Cory Booker had the temerity to call him out for not remembering what he had just said at the primary debate. This clip is from way back in 2019, when Dems still could have avoided the albatross of a historically old and declining candidate around their necks. What did they do instead? Disappear both Castro and Booker, once rising stars from the ranks of up-and-coming leadership. 

Video. Cory Booker, CNN. September 13, 2019.

You heard it there. The mainstream media accused anyone who noticed Biden's obvious decline of being motivated by Trump-like conservative politics. “Believe our Trump derangement syndrome, not your lying eyes,” they seem to say. 

Reuters reported the story about Biden wandering off at the G7 as “lacking context.” Meanwhile, his inability to finish sentences was “contextualized” as a mere stutter. 

Jake Tapper, one of the authors of the book “Original Sin,” which sheds light on the extent of Biden's mental infirmity, was himself one of the original apologists for Biden's cognitive decline. A few good mainstream pundits on MSNBC question the co-author on Tapper's own complicity. 

Video. Alex Thompson, MSNBC, May 26, 2025.

That was some good questioning. And I got to say, I don't think we need medical degrees to be able to accurately observe what was going on with Joe Biden. We didn't need this new book to know the truth either. Independent media, along with the voters, knew what was been going on for years. 

Biden's midterm rating was worse than any other elected president on record and, back in August 2023, polls show that 77% of Americans, including 69% of Democrats, thought Biden was too old to be president. But Democrats wouldn't listen. Or rather, they simply didn't care. 

Now, as part of the media's effort to whitewash its own complicity, the same media figures who were involved in the cover-up are claiming, well, they had to defend Biden's mental competency because no one else primaried him. They were stuck with him as a candidate. This, even as the party shut down the possibility of a primary from the jump. 

Contrast former DNC chair, Jamie Harrison, making that incredible claim that anyone could have primaried Biden if they wanted to, followed by Biden/Harris spokesperson turned MSNBC “journalist,” Symone Sanders, proclaiming that under no circumstances will there be a primary. 

Video. Jaime Harrisson, Symone Sander, MSNBC. 

“If folks wanted to primary Joe Biden, there was nobody to tell them that they couldn't?” Is he serious? The mendacity is frankly shocking. As Symone admitted, Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson did throw their hats in the ring, as said RFK Jr., and you can hear how much respect they got for doing so reflected in Symone's smite tone and her inability to pronounce Marianne's name. Then don't forget, RFK Jr. also ran as a Democrat before the party pushed about and it's no surprise why he left the Dems.

 The Democratic Party, its pundits and politicians, were simply all behind Joe Biden, no matter how ill-fated his electoral chances were from the get-go. And while they want to memory hole their role in setting Dems up to fail, I have the receipts. 

Take “Pod Save America,” one of the most popular liberal podcasts in the country. These former Obama speech writers turned media moguls finally admitted that Biden wasn't fit to lead after Biden's disastrous debate with Trump. But the hindsight is 2020. Listen to how hostile they were in conversation with moderate primary candidate, Democrat Dean Phillips, when he joined their show during the primary season that wasn't. 

Video. Phillips, Pod Save America. November 20, 2023.

Phillips and I do not share the same politics, but he was right. At a certain point, internal polls show that Biden could not win. According to “Original Sin,” the Jake Tapper book, Biden traded trails rather in every battleground state, and the race that tightened in states he won comfortably back in 2020. But the voters don't matter, the polls don't matter, not to Democrats. What matters to the Democratic Party elites is who they choose to top the ticket. 

As Bernie Sanders’s former national press secretary in 2020, I know this all too well. In two back-to-back election cycles, the Democratic Party ignored polls that showed Bernie was more electable than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden against Donald Trump. 

Now, this is not some Monday morning quarterbacking from a disgruntled leftist. Democratic Party insider Donna Brazile admitted the primary was rigged back in 2017.

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson admit as much in “Original Sin.”  They admit it! The election was rigged. But even with all of the faux mea culpas happening around Biden's lack of mental fitness, the Democrats STILL refuse to act any differently going forward, to learn a lesson from their past mistakes. Tapper and Thompson write that Bernie was perceived to be unable to attract Black voters, but Bernie was the only candidate in 2020 who matched Biden's popularity with that group, while also outstripping the field when it came to Latino voters

Bernie remains popular. Not only have he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez been turning out tens of thousands of voters across the country during their anti-oligarchy tour, including in deep red states. Bernie's recent appearance on the “Flagrant” podcast, with Andrew Schultz, had a whole room of popular podcast “Bros” clamoring for the exact “democratic socialism” establishment Dems insisted would turn off the public!

Everybody's saying it. Look, it seems obvious that left populism is the way for Democrats to push back against Trump's right populism, which unfortunately, is increasingly informed by the tech billionaires that fund his campaign rather than the working-class real populists who voted him into office. You've got to ask yourself, is pardoning reality TV stars convicted of tax fraud really improving your ability to support your family? 

What about growing the military budget (and the deficit) at the same time while cutting special education funding? 

What about shifting wealth from the bottom 60% of working-age households to the top income brackets? 

Look, no matter what your politics are, two parties that are competing for the support of working-class Americans instead of aligning with corrupt billionaires would be a good thing! But you can't convince someone of something they're paid not to understand. Which is why Democrats are, instead of embracing popular policies like Medicare for all or a tax on billionaires, are choosing to spend millions of dollars to figure out how to, get this, speak to American men. I really wish I were kidding here.

You really can't make this stuff up. Dems are obsessed with finding the Joe Rogan of the left, but they could not be barking up a wronger tree. 

Hilariously, they seem to be tapping one of their most insidious surrogates, Oliva Juliana, to “message better” on men while continuing to treat Sanders – the man who was literally endorsed by the actual Joe Rogan back in 2020 – as a pariah. 

Video. James Carville, The Daily Beast. May 2025.

To be clear, Carville hasn't won an election since Bill Clinton in the ‘90s, but I digress. 

The reason why Democrats’ mission to find their own Joe Rogan will fail is obvious: to be a credible interlocutor in the political space, you have to be willing to say the true thing when it's hard, even when it is critical of your party. Especially when it's critical of your party. The popular “Manosphere” podcaster, Andrew Schultz, gets it. 

Video. Andrew Schultz, Flagrant.  May 28, 2025.

Even on MSNBC, a guest of Ayman's show was also able to identify the core issue here. 

Video. Ayman Mohyeldin, MSNBC. May 24, 2025.

See, right there at the end is a great summary of the impossibility of what Democrats think they're going to achieve. “We need an authentic voice that's going to become popular organically, and we need to control them.” 

Good luck with that, Democrats. Good luck with that. 

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Briahna Joy Gray: Back with Katie Halper. You know her from the “Katie Halper” podcast and as co-host of “Useful Idiots” with Aaron Maté. Welcome to System Update. 

Katie Halper: Thanks, Brie. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Katie, it's a pleasure. I can't wait to pick your brain about some of the viral clips, especially from the sort of Manosphere podcast arena that have gone viral precisely because of how well Bernie Sanders himself and his ideas have translated into his sphere, that Democrats have insisted were so right-wing and so far gone, and they spent so many years vilifying but now seem to be trying to enter into those kinds of spaces. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: I think it's funny because, of course, Bri, not to be self-promoting, but they're searching for the – what is it? – left-wing Joe Rogan. What about Briahna Joy Gray and Katie Halper to take the mantle? 

It is ironic that the same people who were throwing Bernie under the bus, smearing him, attacking him, are now saying that he has some kind of messaging that's good for the democrats. There's always this obsession with messaging over content and program, but that's kind of another issue. 

I think people continue to smear Bernie Sanders but to the extent that they are praising him, they're praising him now because they know he's not going to run. So, I think they think it's safe for them to praise his ideas because they actually are either just paying lip service to it or they are afraid of Bernie's more progressive stances that challenge the status quo. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I think that really gets to the core of the issue that the Democratic Party for years has managed to try to frame themselves as somehow different than the establishment wing of the Republican Party, despite having, substantively, the same corporate donors by leaning and going all in on identity politics.

There's been a backlash against that. They're saying, okay, well, now we've got to find some other messaging prong when the whole reason why they went all in on identity politics and now we're going all in this idea that they just get the right man who's lift enough weights to say the right thing that they will also be able to compete, it's because they're allergic, their corporate base makes them allergic to actually advancing the kind of ideas that made Bernie popular in the first place acting like this guy was somehow a ball of charisma as much as I liked his sort of like a grumpy straightforward persona. He wasn't winning hearts and minds because he was a charm generator. It was because, as Joe Rogan himself said when he was endorsing Bernie Sanders back in 2020, he's a man who's been saying the same thing for the last 40 years, and he has credibility. He's trustworthy. And it's amazing to rewatch that endorsement now that the Democrats are in the middle of this incredible credibility crisis. 

I want to ask you specifically about this book, “Original Sin,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. I don't know if you had seen that clip before, that super cut that Ayman put together on MSNBC of Jake Tapper doing exactly what is sort of criticized in this book, although I will say this book stays away mostly from media criticism and focuses on the idea that it was Biden in his inner circle that knew the truth and were just lying to everybody else and everybody else was sort of deceived by them, including the liberal media. What do you make of that sort of framing there? Is Jake Tapper really innocent in all of this? 

Katie Halper: I mean, I joke that Jake Tapper was well-positioned to write a book about a cover-up because he participated in the cover-up. So, he does probably have some inside knowledge and real insight into it. But no, I mean, you alluded to this and the mashup that I'm in proves this. Jake Tapper was doing the exact kind of cover-up and running of interference that you and I have commented on the media doing for Joe Biden, for the DNC, for centrist Democrats, that we know that they do, they love to do. And so, it is rich seeing someone who participated in that cover-up profiting off of a book about a cover-up and he's hawking that product on his shows and on the various CNN shows that he appears on and all the appearances he's been doing. And I think at the end, once again, it's fine for people to have the eureka moments in hindsight. Somehow, it never happens in real time. And he keeps making these media appearances and talking about how he has a great humility, and his co-writer talks about the humility, which is, I guess, as close as to a mea culpa that we'll get, but that's not, I'm always so frustrated when people say humility like they always do these humble brags. I'm truly humbled by, insert whatever praise, so that's just a little pet peeve I have with that word. 

But, yeah, I think that Jake Tapper, like much of the media, keeps making the same mistakes. They're warmongers for every war. I mean, the cover-up, is disgusting but another disgusting thing is that he has spread so many lies about Palestinians and has run so much interference, much like he ran so much interference for the Biden campaign, he's running so much interference for IDF and he and Dana Bash have done such a disgusting job at vilifying Palestinians, Palestinian Americans like Rashida Tlaib, but all Palestinians, and taking every single rumor and fabricating a narrative and running with it and never correcting it. 

Tapper and Dana Bash pushed the mass rape Hamas narrative that has been totally debunked; they've never corrected it and, at the same time, they've ever once acknowledged the fact that there's video footage of Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian,  – what I would call hostage, what our media calls prisoner or detainee, but I think, to be consistent we should say hostage – and it's one thing to push a debunked narrative and never correct it, but at least acknowledge the fact that we do know of people who are raped by Israelis, but the fact they don't acknowledge that and that this is something that mainstream Israeli media covers shows that they really don't care about sexual violence. They don't about rape and they're happy to be doing PR for a genocidal state. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, I think it's a really…

Katie Halper: Sorry, we're talking about cover-ups, but they're related. 

Briahna Joy Gray: No, I think that's a really important point because there is something deeply ironic and dissonant about Jake Tapper in particular. I don't know that Alex Thompson and it could be similarly described as hypocritical, but Jake Tapper for sure, go doing the press rounds about a cover-up while still actively participating in a misinformation campaign, at least as significant as the lies about the Steele dossier or claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was misinformation. I mean, someone else had another super cut sort of juxtaposing what he's saying now about Hunter Biden with what he said back then about Hunter Biden and framing any and every criticism of Joe Biden or just observation from people who actually love Joe Biden, that doesn't seem to be up to his best, he's not the same Joe Biden who was vice president back in 2008/2012 cycles, as somehow being Trumpy as though supporting Donald Trump, even if that were your perspective, precludes you from seeing the truth with your own eyes. And Katie, this is what's so frustrating about Democrats, and frankly, my concern with some folks on the left who seem to be taking this sort of measured praise for the enthusiasm Bernie and AOC are capturing on these anti-oligarchy tours and predicting that there's going to be real change to the Democratic Party this time, how optimistic are you that we're likely to see the Democrats learning from the lessons of the past? And if not, why aren't you optimistic? 

Katie Halper: Right. Yeah, I mean, I think that, unfortunately, the Democrats would really rather lose to Trump than have someone like Bernie in power. But you're asking a slightly different question, right? You're kind of saying, well, what suggests that the Democrats will deliver anything, even with this good messaging that Bernie and AOC are bringing? And certainly, they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to Gaza, but, sure, on economic issues, Bernie, especially, is excellent. 

I think that the problem is, and you've spoken a lot about this, Bri, it's great to have fresh ideas, fresh policies, fresh but also consistent. I mean, as you alluded to earlier, Bernie's been saying the same thing for decades and that is something that I think has endears him justifiably to lots of people. But the question is, will the Democratic Party actually allow for any of these policies to take hold? [audio problems]

So, there's a lot of rotating villain phenomenon, right? 

So, I think that the Democrats really love to pretend that they can't get things done, that they'd love to get things done. But the truth is they just don't want to get them done. They don't want to see these things because they're as beholden to their donors as the Republicans are, they're just better on social issues often. And to the extent that they're better on social issues, they certainly are willing to sacrifice these social issues in the name of fundraising, which is why, for instance, neither Obama nor Biden codified Roe v. Wade. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up Roe v. Wade because I have more optimistic folks, left side of the aisle saying, “Oh, no, this didn't waste strategy, whatever you think of it, it's likely to work” because look at how well Joe Biden did in midterms.” And I think in retrospect, and I think some of us at the time reported that we suspected that there was not a red wave in 2022, it was not a signal that voters were actually secretly happy with Joe Biden. Polls at the time showed, as I said in my radar, that he had historically low favorability at that time. What people were coming out to vote for was not Joe Biden; it was for Roe v. Wade. It was to express their discontent with Roe being overturned and anti-abortion laws being put into effect in all the country. And a lot of red states like Kansas, bipartisan majorities came out to defend those kinds of formerly constitutional rights. 

I want to ask you, though, about this particular clip where Chuck Todd, even someone who is very much an establishment pundit, seems to think and maybe even seems to hope that there will, unlike 2024, when the Democrats completely shut down a primary, that there will not just be a primary, but that there'll be independent third-party style candidates, a la RFK Jr., running in that race. Let's take a look. 

Video. Chuck Todd, The Chuck Toddcast. May 27, 2025.

Briahna Joy Gray: I don't even know where to start with that, Katie. Why a military guy? Why this Bill McRaven person, who apparently is the former chancellor of the University of Texas system? And why the optimism that we're going to have someone operating outside of the two-party system, from this person who is very much an establishment pundit? 

Katie Halper: Right. And who really, I think, took part in a mocking of third-party candidates that so much of the corporate media took part in. I think that it's interesting you asked about why it has to be a military figure. And I think this speaks to how much the media and our political elites are so obsessed with optics and messaging and so inattentive to substance. So, it's not about what this person's going to offer. It's not about the changes that they're going to bring to people's lives in any qualitative or meaningful way. It's about whether they can tap into people's, I don't know, like, crushes on military figures or tap into our militaristic society. It does have a bizarre obsession, I think, with optics that, again, I think is because no one who is powerful, no political or media elites actually want to see real changes. So, they just want to have kind of like different presentations that get people excited, but nobody wants to see the actual changes happen. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yes. It’s a different kind of identity politics. It's the same thing as, like, yeah, like the Joe Rogan of the left thing. It's like they think that they can find a podcaster who lifts enough weights. I guess that's why we're just disqualified Katie. We're not, we don't lift heavy… 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I know. I do a lot of repetition of light weights, right? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Right. It's totally vibe-based. 

Now look, of course, there is a, like a substantive claim for having a veteran, but I think it also misses the mainstream pundits' missing how much we are in a sort of anti-interventionist/isolationist/anti-war moment in both parties. And that's exactly why someone like Trump, who definitely ran as an anti-interventionist and didn't start any new wars, at least in his first term, was so popular. So them saying a military guy, I mean, I think someone like Matthew Ho, who ran on the Green Party for a Senate in North Carolina some years back, could be exactly that kind of guy because he served and learned from his service exactly why we shouldn't be sending troops to fight pointless wars and ruining lives all because young kids see no other avenue to access things like healthcare and a quality education. That could be your guide, but we know Chuck Todd isn't going to throw his hat in behind a Green Party leftist, kind of Bernie-style candidate like Matthew Ho. 

Katie Halper: Right. I mean, I think you're right that it would be great to have a military figure who was anti-war. I mean those are extremely powerful voices and they have a lot of credibility and, of course, more importantly they're anti-war which is something that wins votes, but also is obviously good for the planet and good for all people on the planet, except for people who work in the arms industry and people who support genocide. 

But I think that it is interesting to see people again, the very same people, who, I mean, I think it was Chuck Todd who said Bernie Sanders would get “hammered and sickled,” he actually said that to him, see them act poetic about working outside of the duopoly. They acknowledge that the two-party system doesn't work, but what were they doing except for running interference for this two-party system? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, absolutely. And just as the final nail in the coffin, which is perhaps a metaphor, now that I said it out loud, that's in poor taste. If we pull up the graphic, a significant number of Democrats who have quite literally died in office, a margin that would have prevented the Democrats or enabled the Democrats to block the passage of Biden's big, beautiful budget bill in the House had they stayed alive. 

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Now, remember, DNC vice chair David Hogg got an enormous amount of pushback simply saying you wanted to start a pack that funded challengers to incumbents, observing accurately that younger members of the party like AOC and people who are outsiders like Bernie Sanders are the ones that have managed to capture whatever energy is left in the husk of the Democrat Party. And for that, Democrat elites have rallied the ranks to literally push him out of his position at the DNC and are frankly using sort of identity politics as a lever to get him out. Even as Democrats are unable to whip sufficient votes to block win priorities, precisely because their members are so old and enfeebled that they are quite literally dying in office. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I mean, of course, the final nail in the coffin was the perfect turn of phrase. But what better represents the narcissism and selfishness and moribund nature of the Democrats than the way that they are refusing to resign? Because, again, the Democrats are constantly fearmongering – and I want to be clear, I mean, Trump is something to be feared. I mean, he's not an anti-war candidate. He is terrible for many reasons.  The Democrats often criticize him for the things that aren't even that bad, which is another irony. But they say he's an existential threat, he's a fascist and yet if they're so worried about this, why don't they retire so that they have a better chance of having someone from the Democratic Party who can vote against his bill? I mean literally, his bill passed because Democrats refused to resign despite having been very sick or old. It reminds me also of the way that if Kamala Harris cared so much about defeating Trump, if this was the most important election ever, then why didn't she listen to the base, which was clamoring for her to depart from Biden on several issues and most notably on Gaza. We know now from someone who worked with her, it was because she didn't want to be rude, and it's not, it's gauche to depart from your president's policies when you're the running mate. 

We also know that Joe Biden said, I don't want any daylight between us, kid. And so, for Biden, his legacy, much like these Democrats who are dying in office, their legacies are more important than defeating Trump and Trumpism or helping the people that they claim to serve. For Kamala, I guess, ruffling feathers was more important– or not upsetting donors, or not being able to run around with Liz Cheney, or not incurring the wrath of AIPAC. So, it just belies the whole claim that this is something that is an existential threat. 

I think that I mean we are facing existential threats. We're facing existential threats that neither party is willing to deal with, especially when it comes to climate change. But it's very hard to convince people that you're taking this seriously as an existential threat when you don't do the minimal things needed to either win an election or prevent a Republican from taking your seat in the case of people who are not resigning. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it's really hard, frankly, to see in concurrent election cycles the voting population stand up and clearly, clearly be clamoring for a legitimate, sincere populism. I mean, the outrage around inflation, cost of living, housing prices, gas prices, food prices, education prices. These are the sectors that are driving inflation and which are causing life to be so precarious for so many Americans and it's nice now that Democrats are like acknowledging that economic precarity, economic anxiety is a real thing because for I don't know like eight years after the 2015-2016 cycle they acted if you said well yeah people voted for Trump because of economic anxiety they said that oh that's just racism that's just a synonym for racism we won't take that argument so now they're finally embracing it and trying to say we're going to do a Joe Rogan sort of a situation. But again, they're not backing any of those policies. You're still getting Democrats out here arguing against baseline things like raising the minimum wage, which hasn't been raised since Bush was in office. The longest period without a minimum wage raise since it was invented in like the 1930s.

And meanwhile, Americans are struggling. So this huge lane is opening up. Meanwhile, on the right side of the aisle, I think people who voted for Donald Trump in good faith hoping that he was going to follow the sort of banded wing of his party and do real economic populism are seeing that Bannon is engaged in a battle with the other wing of the party that frankly bought the election, the tech wing, the Elon Musk's, the Marc Andreessen's, the folks who are very openly saying, “We need to do AI, we need to put the public out of business, we're going to make all of these arguments that legitimize defunding the welfare state that so many Americans, including so many American in very low-income red states in the South and elsewhere, are relying upon to survive.”

And we can do that because we literally bought this election. And I'm afraid that that tech wing, the billionaire wing, who has no alignment and interest with the working-class in this country, most of whom are frankly not even American or relatively recent transplants are going to win out and it's going to be too late for a genuine populism to actually restore a democracy that reflects people's values. What do you think? 

Katie Halper: I think it's a justifiable fear. And I think what you're saying it really does ring true. Again, we've seen in the cases of the leadership of both parties, we have seen a real embrace of anti-populism, right? And one of the most frustrating things was to see people equate Bernie Sanders with Donald Trump because there's a big difference between actual populism and pseudo populism, just like there's a big difference between being anti-war and being pseudo-anti-war. And Trump is great at appealing to populist sentiments. But of course, he's not someone who cares about the working class, the middle class. He is someone who, in some ways, is more dangerous than traditional Republicans because he talks a good talk. He knows how to sound like he's a populist. He knows how to sound like he's against the status quo. But of course, in some ways, the most dangerous thing to have is someone who substantively is status quo, but performatively and stylistically is not. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it is interesting to see float things like, we’re going to do a tax on the rich, right? But then walk it back. And you can read that in a couple of different ways. You can say Donald Trump is just a bad faith actor. He never met in the first place, or you can write it as, well, he actually is the one who's got a good sense of what the wind is blowing and what the base wants. And maybe he would be happy to do a little bit. He's a billionaire himself.  I wouldn't take it too far that he was willing, would be willing to do too redistributive justice to return the hard working, increased productivity of the working-classes back into their pockets the way that it was 50 years ago or so before a bunch of laws redistributed it to the very top, including Trump's own 2017 tax cuts. I won't take it too far, but there's a way you could read it that says, well, maybe Trump did get a sense that you need bread and roses. You need to get the masses a little bit to keep them on your team and that the corporate interests within his own party won't even let him do the bare minimum. And so, it's not clear to me how much there is a real war between the Steve Bannon's who seem to be more genuinely committed to working-class politics, even if it's also mixed in with sort of a nativism and some other unsavory aspects that I personally don't agree with. And this is like the raw, open, we don't need workers anymore. We're going to do AI, we're going to feed you cricket slop and you're going to like it, we don't even need humanity, we're to be on the moon types. And like my concern, I don't know how to read it, but if I had to pick, I would much rather the Steve Bannon's – I can't believe I'm saying this, but I would rather the Steve Bannon’s wing of the Republican Party went out. The problem is the Steve Banning wing of the Republican Party didn't spend half a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. 

Katie Halper: Right. And I think he also doesn't appeal to certain segments, demographically speaking, who are very powerful. I mean, again, I think that it is kind of a funny thing to say, I hope that Steve Bannon wins. But of course, I do think that populists, you can work across the aisle with economic populists on certain issues, whereas there's nothing you can work with Elon Musk types about, right? They are scarier in many ways, and their policies are scarier, and there's very little overlap between the populist left and the populist right, to the extent that you can even have a populist right. But yeah, certainly I think that the Elon Musk wing is more frightening than the, I mean, they're both frightening, but yeah, I guess if. I mean, Bri, you're not someone who likes the lesser of two evils, but maybe that's the furthest I can say is that Steve Bannon is the lesser of two evils when it comes to the Bannon wing or the Elon Musk wing. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Amen to that. I can't disagree, Katie. I really appreciate your willingness to talk through some of this with me. This was cathartic for me because watching all of this happen in real time has been difficult. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it with you, talk about it here on Glenn's amazing platform, and to continue to follow the Democrats' self-destruction cycle and incredible cope over their complicity and the great Biden cover-up. Thank you, Katie.

Katie Halper: Thank you, Thanks, Bri. Thanks Glenn.

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Trump Admin's War with Harvard, Fallout from Wednesday's DC Killing, and More; Plus: Lee Fang on Epstein's Dark Legacy in the USVI
System Update #460

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: There was major news this week, and we always try to devote our Friday night show to covering as much of that as possible, both through our “Week in Review” segment as well as the Q&A session, where we take questions from our Locals members and get to as many of them as we can. As always, we have a wide range of very probing questions from our followers on Locals – I'd expect nothing less from my viewers – and we'll try to answer as many of those as we can. 

Before we do that, we talk to the friend of the show, the intrepid independent journalist, Lee Fang, about numerous issues this week, including a new article he published on his Substack which investigates how officials in the Virgin Islands, where Jeffrey Epstein's notoriously bought that island, have been fraudulently profiting from victim funds and the residue from his presence. 

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Our guest tonight to help us go over some news events of the week as well as some investigative reporting that he has published this week, is a good friend of the show the independent journalist I've worked with at The Intercept, who has been published in many places now. He has one of the best Substack pages in the country where he does his investigative journalism and commentaries, Lee Fang.  

G. Greenwald: Lee, it’s always great to see you. 

Lee Fang: Hey Glenn, great to see you. Thanks for having me. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, so I want to start with the murder of these two Israeli embassy officials in Washington. We did a whole show on it last night, but the fallout sort of continues. 

I don't think we need to go into the question of whether there was any moral justness to these murders. I don't think any moral framework that I at least I recognize as valid suggests that anything other than unjust and horrific but there are a lot of attempts to exploit these murders beyond just expressing grief for the victims or condemnation for the shooter, including, essentially, immediately attempting to suggest that anyone who criticizes Israel or its war in Gaza in some sort of harsh way, or over some imaginary arbitrary line, is responsible for the killing as much as the shooter is, if not more so, and therefore we need to do something about that because that's spawning antisemitism and endangerment for Jews. What's your reaction to all that? 

Lee Fang: Look, I'm concerned about the kind of creeping martyrdom politics that have been coming into our system really for the last few decades. We see it more and more escalating on both the far left and the far right, whether it's far left activists seizing upon every kind of video of a police killing to make broad assumptions about the American criminal justice system and to engage in riots and calls for abolishing police, whether the far right who grab hold of any kind of immigrant crime or immigrant murder to say that we need to deport all immigrants or engage in some kind of draconian crackdown on immigrants. 

Now, we see this kind of increasingly in our Israel-Palestine debate where partisans are seizing upon this heinous crime that happened just a few days ago and really weaponizing it to engage in some type of collective punishment for their political opposition to claim all people who support peace in Palestine, justice or equal rights in that region, are somehow guilty of violence, that this act of political violence reflects on every American who supports peace or a cease-fire in Gaza. I mean, it's a little bit absurd, but it's kind of a continuation of this cycle of saying we want collective punishment on our political enemies, we want to weaponize any kind of tragic death into a partisan football, or just or partisan cudgel, to beat our political opponents. 

G. Greenwald: I actually started noticing it for the first time, I think, back in like 2005, 2006, right when I created my blog, started writing about politics. At the time, there was this blogger who was very pro-War on Terror, like very much of the view that we are at war with Islam after 9/11. Ironically, he became a sort of liberal resistance. His name was Charles Johnson. He wrote a blog called The Little Green Footballs. And one of the things he would do every day when he was in like his War on Terror fanatical stage was he had a daily occurring segment or a weekly occurring segment and he would title it “Religion of Peace” and he just published some sort of random robbery or burglary or assault or rape or violent crime that some Muslim somewhere in the world engaged in and thought that because he was constantly doing it, it was somehow making this point about Muslims in general being a menace. 

Obviously, you can do that to any race. You could do that to black people, you could do that to white people, you could do that to Christians, you could do that with Muslims, you can do that to Jews. When I recently was condemning or objecting to Matt Walsh, who went on Tucker Carlson to say it's better to leave kids in foster care and orphanages than to allow them to be adopted by same sex couples, I remember all these people replying to me, would show me stories about gay men molesting children and for everyone that they could show me, I could show them 20+ uncles molesting nieces at the age of five or some father molesting his daughter. It's such a stupid obviously, fallacious way to try to demonize a certain group of people and, obviously, the minute something like last night happens, we're supposed to believe that anyone now who condemns the war in Gaza is somehow a homicidal maniac or wants to kill Jews or wants to be antisemitic even though you can find literally every day Israel supporters in the United States saying the most nauseating things about Gazans. 

I mean, you can find Israeli officials in the last week saying Gazan babies are enemies because they grow up to be terrorists; “There's no such thing as innocent Gazans,” one official said we should segregate all the women and babies and children in Gaza and put them on one side and then put all the men 13 and above, so “13-year-old men,” they were calling them, and put then on another side and just execute all the men. It's such sophistry to try to argue this way, and yet it's done so often. 

Lee Fang: All connects back to my previous point that these are emotional arguments. They're not logical, they're not rational, they're certainly not empirical. It's very emotionally arresting when you see one of these police shooting videos. Often, they're without context, but even if the cop was in the wrong and was doing something unjust, that doesn't reflect on the millions of police-civilian interactions and all the thousands of different police jurisdictions that have completely different rules in training people will make sweeping assumptions about American policing after one of these very emotional videos. The same for an immigrant killing an American. You can see why someone could say that's unjust. This person was not supposed to be there, they're guests in our home and they're out killing or raping individuals, therefore, all immigrants are criminals or dangerous. It's that type of argument, and it's just being driven into overdrive with social media, with the kind of incentives around war. 

You have very well-financed pro-Israel advocacy groups. It's not just AIPAC, the super PAC and lobbying group, but dozens of other pro-Israel advocacy groups spending tens of millions of dollars per year pushing the U.S. foreign policy in one direction. So, for them to have this very tragic event that they can weaponize and use against their political opponents, they continue this push so that the U.S. stands in lockstep support of the Israeli government. Of course, that's what they'll do, but this is kind of an escalation we've seen in society over many years. It's just this dynamic that is very tribal, that is crude. It kind of appeals to the most basic instinct among us, and it really should be rejected. 

There are some principled Israel supporters and conservatives who have spoken out against this attempt to weaponize these tragic events, but it's really disappointing seeing people from across the board taking this and just saying, “We should have more censorship. We should support crackdowns on students. We should restrict speech. We should really support ethnic cleansing in Gaza because of it.” It is absurd. 

G. Greenwald: What makes it so much worse is, let's say, over the past decade, but especially as this kind of left-wing cultural war reached its apex with the word zenith, depending on your perspective with things like Me Too and then the Black Lives Matter riots of the fall of 2019, or 2020. Just then, the kind of wave that produced, of all sorts of language controls, taking premises to these completely preposterous conclusions. Most conservatives, in fact, almost by definition, were vehemently opposed to these sorts of victimhood narratives, these group-based grievances, these attempts to curb speech in the name that it made people uncomfortable or incited violence against them. And most of them, not all, but most of them, have now done an exact 180. 

All day yesterday, you heard people saying things like “There's systemic racism against Jews,” “Your speeches inciting antisemitism and bigotry.” Who knew that Donald Trump would be elected, and, within the first four months, his main cause and the main cause of his movement would be to declare a racism epidemic all around the world and the need to control speech to prevent it and protect these minority groups? 

It sounds very familiar, but just from a different direction. One of the people who was most vehemently opposed to this sort of left-wing oppression is Steven Pinker who was a very well-known biologist at Harvard and also a very vocal supporter of Israel but a very vocal critic of this sort of left-wing repression that has appeared on campuses and elsewhere. He has an article in The New York Times today that I thought was super interesting because it's also in the context of this attack by the Trump administration on Harvard and he said: “[…] For what it’s worth, I have experienced no antisemitism in my two decades at Harvard, and nor have other prominent Jewish faculty members. […] (The New York Times, May 23, 2025.)

So, we're talking here about this epidemic. I was reading some people yesterday, who were Jewish people in media, Jake Sherman was one, there were others, saying, “It's incredibly terrifying to be a Jew in America.” Not only did I live in the United States for, I think, 37 years, as an American Jew, and I'm there all the time. I've never once experienced an antisemitic assault or comments or anything like that, nor has anyone I know, and yet you're hearing this kind of wildly exaggerated set of claims about how Jews are endangered. 

So, he says: “My own discomfort instead is captured in a Crimson essay by the Harvard senior Jacob Miller, who called the claim that one in four Jewish students feels “physically unsafe” on campus “an absurd statistic I struggle to take seriously as someone who publicly and proudly wears a kippah around campus each day.” […] (The New York Times May 23, 2025.)

So that's not just a Jewish person, that's someone who wears a Kippah around campus every day and he's saying it's preposterous that people are saying there's some epidemic of antisemitism at Harvard. 

I mean, what he's basically saying there is that everything I thought I was supporting, fighting against when it was coming from the left, these group-based narratives, this attempt to restrict speech, this is a wild exaggeration of the danger of certain minority groups in the United States is now being flooding our discourse, from Israel supporters, he's making the point that it just sounds extremely familiar to him, but from the other direction. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, I mean, everything he's describing is pretty much accurate. The tools of wokeness that these kinds of studies claim astronomical levels of bigotry in society, you look back at 2020, a lot of Asian American groups claimed that anti-Asian hate crimes were skyrocketing. 

G. Greenwald: What was the name of that group? Stop Asian Hate? 

Lee Fang: Stop Asian Hate, yes, which was a spin out of Chinese for Affirmative Action. But this group, if you look carefully in their kind of footnotes of how they were quantifying anti-Asian hate, they were taking tweets that were critical of the lab leak theory or floating the lab leak theory that the COVID-19 virus might have come from Wuhan, China, and other kind of China critical tweets as examples of anti-Asian American hate crimes. So, they were grouping actual forms of violence, where, a lot of times, you don't know the intent. Perhaps someone of one race attacked someone else of another race. Is that a hate crime? It's context-dependent, but they were taking a broad brush on those. Then, they were juicing the numbers by taking tweets of something that they claimed was hateful, but turned out to be just a true fact, or likely a true fact, that the virus escaped from a bioweapons lab in China. 

Now, for the antisemitism kind of crisis or hysteria that we're in today, you look at the ADL and other pro-Israel advocacy groups at these studies that show a 300%, 500%, 1,000% increase in antisemitism. You look at the footnotes, and it's the exact same dynamic. It's folks who are critical of Israel in a completely neutral way, saying they just disagree with Israel's policies. That's deemed now antisemitic: groups like Jewish Voices for Peace, a Jewish-led leftist group that is critical of Israel's policies, holding rallies around the country. Each of these rallies in the ADL's report is tagged as an antisemitism hate event. So, that's how they're quantifying this gigantic, skyrocketing antisemitism problem. 

This would be laughably absurd if it weren't being weaponized and used by our government to crack down on speech and to defund science and medical research at universities around the country, but that's exactly what's happening. The Trump administration is citing these statistics and similar statistics when they're going after Harvard University and other universities, when they are cutting federal funding and when attempting to impose speech codes like the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which redefines antisemitism to include some criticism of Israel, and it's part of this kind of an investigation of Harvard around civil rights violations.

I mean if you zoomed out and just looked at the evidence, any normal person would laugh it off; any kind of ordinary person looking at what's been assembled as supposed examples of antisemitism are, you know, either incredibly minor or absolutely manufactured. And yet, this is the crisis that we're living in today. I wouldn't defend Harvard University on almost any other grounds. This is a school that acts like a hedge fund, that's accumulated huge amounts, that has deplatformed speakers in the past, that is kind of a platform for privilege, for billionaire donors to at times donate and get their kids into the school, and has engaged in some racial discrimination in the past, although the recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action have kind of rolled that back. Yet this current Trump administration attack, demanding that the school create safe spaces for Jewish students, create speech codes, preventing students from criticizing or even discussing Israeli policies, even getting rid of some of their departments that study the Middle East or study Israel's history or Palestinian history, I mean, it just kind of shocks  that they're doing this with absolutely no evidence. 

G. Greenwald: I mean, the idea that Harvard is some place that's hostile to Jews is almost as funny as that time the ADL issued a statement saying it's time for Hollywood to include Jews in their pro-diversity policies because Jews have been excluded for long enough from Hollywood and you just can't believe it's even being said. 

By the way, the thing that you mentioned about COVID drove me very crazy at the time and to this very day when I think about it, it still drives me crazy, which was It was really the Lancet letter, the proximal causes, notorious Lancet Letter that decreed well before they had any idea if it was remotely true what they were saying, that we know for certain that COVID came from the zoonotic leap, from animal to human, and that any attempt to suggest that it came from a lab leak in Wuhan was essentially racist and like an attack on our Chinese colleagues or whatever. Then, it immediately became canon that anyone who even raised the possibility that it might've come from a lab leak was being racist against Chinese people. 

The New York Times COVID reporter who became the COVID reporter when the real COVID reporter got fired because he said some things that upset a bunch of very wealthy teenagers whose parents paid for them to go on a field trip to Peru or something with him and they were offended by what he said, and so he got fired. So, they put this woman in, and she said one day we're going to grapple with the fact that this lab leak theory is racist, but I guess today is not the day. 

One always drove me so crazy about this. Besides the fact that who cares what theory was racist about where COVID came from? Like, all that mattered was what the truth was? Who cares which theory was more racist? It was like, where did it actually come from? But the idea that it was somehow more racist to say that COVID came from a highly sophisticated research lab in Wuhan, funded and partnered with the United States than saying, “Oh, Chinese people have these disgusting, filthy, primitive eating habits where they consume these filthy bats in wet markets and therefore got the coronavirus because they were the ones who were just eating things they shouldn't,” like the far more racist theory was the one they were insisting on, to this day insist on. It just always drove me crazy. Of course, the overwhelming evidence now is that it did come from that lab leak funded by the United States. 

All right, let me ask you about this article you wrote in your Substack

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So, I think it's a little bit self-explanatory, but you go into some really disturbing and interesting detail about what these funds that were set up for Jeffrey Epstein's victims and how much opportunity there was for Virgin Islands officials to profit from their protection that they gave him. What is it that you've been finding? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, so the Jeffrey Epstein saga is still not solved. There are still many unanswered questions. In February, the Trump administration promised to release unredacted files. The FBI, when they raided Jeffrey Epstein’s homes in 2018, collected CD-ROMs, other recordings, binders, all these files that remain unreleased to this day. They're sitting in a warehouse, the FBI warehouse in Winchester, Virginia and still, nothing has really been released. 

The documents that were supposedly released by the Trump administration were all previously released disclosures. There's nothing new there. My story takes a look at the other side of this, where the national media has really not paid attention. Many of the most important disclosures about Jeffrey Epstein's political network, how he's paid off politicians, particularly politicians in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but also some politicians in the territorial U.S., were released very suddenly and briefly during a lawsuit in 2023 between J.P. Morgan and the Virgin Islands. 

This sudden disclosure was kind of accidental because the U.S. Virgin Islands was hoping to win some settlement money from these crimes, a form of accountability after his death. They really did not expect it, but J.P. Morgan hit back hard, and it countersued and alleged that the Islands' officials were far more complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's criminal operations. From those disclosures, we got hundreds of emails, depositions, and other documents showing how Jeffrey Epstein kind of methodically paid off local politicians, customs agents, various governors and law enforcement agents to receive exemptions from the sex offender list in the Virgin Islands to travel back and forth. As he was bringing young girls, aged between 12 and 15, to his island, customs agents saw that and looked the other way, they refused to check on their safety. There's really just a litany of red flags he was raising, and yet he was paying off politicians to allow him to run his criminal enterprise. 

This piece kind of looks at how the governor, Albert Bryan, closed that window of disclosure. He quickly settled the lawsuit, he fired the attorney general, leading the JP Morgan lawsuit, he later replaced the attorney with one of Epstein's own lawyers, who serves to this day in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He promised that this legal settlement money would be used to prevent another Epstein criminal enterprise by using it to counter human trafficking, sex abuse, and that type of thing. Instead, it's being used as a piggy bank. Legislators there don't know exactly how the money's being spent but for what we do know, it is going to backdate government wages, it's going to vendor payments, it's going to a series of earmarks refurbishing various buildings in the Virgin Islands. There's very little transparency on how this money is being used and it's an ultimate irony or perhaps an injustice that the governor, who now controls these funds, is almost a quarter billion dollars of money, was part and parcel to the Epstein enterprise. He was receiving regular donations and gifts from Epstein. He was the one responsible for giving Epstein special tax breaks and then later pushing for his exemption from the sex offender list. 

So, while we have this kind of national conversation about the Epstein saga, and it's mostly focused on these documents in Virginia that are held by the FBI, which deserve to be disclosed, there are still so many unanswered questions and a lack of accountability in the Virgin Islands. 

G. Greenwald: It's interesting, for the last four years during the Biden administration, the Epstein files, as they've been called, were a major topic on right-wing media, especially independent right-wing media. Two people in particular, who are very influential and popular in that realm, went around constantly talking about whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, the doubts about why we should think that, as well as just bashing the FBI every day for concealing the Epstein files. 

Those two people were Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, who are now the Assistant Director and the Director of the FBI. And they, I'm sure you saw them on Fox News earlier this week, and one of the questions they got was about the Epstein documents. The interviewer said, “Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself? And they both said, “Yes, Jeffrey Epstein absolutely killed himself. We saw the documents.” They were very uncomfortable, but they're saying we saw the documents that prove he killed himself. 

Well, all of you, including Donald Trump, ran on the platform of making the Epstein files public. Why haven't we seen these documents that convinced them of that? But more so, I think the biggest, most interesting question in the Epstein case is, and always has been, “Was Jeffrey Epstein working with or for foreign intelligence agencies?” And it's a binary question. Maybe there's more complexity to it. 

But why is it, do you think, that after four, almost five months, in office, not just the Trump administration, but the very people who kind of built their reputation, in part, on banging the table about the Epstein files, about crushing and bashing Christopher Wray and the FBI for not releasing them, are now in charge of the FBI, and these documents are still not released; not a single one, that wasn't previously public has been released. 

Lee Fang: Well, I was in your program last year to discuss our lengthy investigation about why every […] that influence operation in the U.S., that attempts to change our laws, change who gets elected to Congress, affect American policy – there is an effort to enforce the Foreign Agent Registration Act, so that they disclose their lobbying activities, except for Israel. There is very ample evidence that the Israeli government – and its evidence from Israel, from Israeli news outlets and from Israeli investigations – shows that show Israeli government is pouring millions and millions of dollars over the last 10 years into influence operations in the U.S. and there's been a conscious effort to avoid far registration. 

The Epstein saga kind of raises many two-tier justice questions: one is just generally broadly about the wealthy in society because they were working with Epstein, facilitating his crimes, potentially engaging in sex crimes with him. They are kind of protected from scrutiny. If this were any ordinary American, any lower-class American, they could expect severe penalties and a severe form of justice, but because these are the rich and powerful, they do not receive the same level of scrutiny. Then, for your question around the Israel issue, there is… 

G. Greenwald: To be clear, I didn't say Israel. I just wondered whether he was working for any foreign intelligence agency. 

Lee Fang: Well, many would say that there might be an Israel issue. Interestingly enough, within the J.P. Morgan litigation, the kind of discovery process in some of the exhibits that were filed in the Virgin Islands case, many of the emails between former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein and some of his associates were disclosed in that litigation in 2023. It was really just an incredible window into Epstein's network. Many other emails of VIP individuals who received help from Jeffrey Epstein, who gave him donations or asked him to “manage their money,” even though it wasn't clear what he was doing with the money, or were traveling to his island, or to his New York home, these were details that were ferreted out from the J.P. Morgan case. Perhaps, again, that's why they moved so quickly to settle it, to close that case. But yes, I think just generally, whether it's Israel or another country… 

G. Greenwald: Maybe it's like Sweden, or Nigeria, but we should know. 

Lee Fang: We don't know, it could be Finland. It's really any of those Nordic countries, but the fact that we don't have these answers and they're sitting on servers, not just with the FBI, right? 

In just this countersuit from J.P. Morgan, they were able to get a huge amount of discovery from Epstein's servers, from his estate, from his associates. He had a close network, Richard Kahn, [Darren] Indyke, […], these three or four individuals who helped arrange many of his financial affairs and helped with the facilitation of his operations in this one little litigation, we were able to see kind of peer into his world. If the government wanted to, if this was a priority for either the Biden administration or the Trump administration, they could make it happen because these emails we know exist. 

G. Greenwald: And I think it's worth noting, and this to me is one of the most persuasive pieces of evidence, that when Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2010 in South Florida when he was trafficking minors into his home in West Palm Beach to have sex with them and eventually got caught, the U.S. Attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, who eventually ended up in the Justice Department, is the one who presided over this extremely shockingly generous plea bargain he got where, I mean, his charges were sex trafficking minors. Everybody who does that goes to prison for a long, long time. And he basically got something like 12 months, six months in prison, a suspended sentence and like community service or whatever. And then he was done and he went back right to… 

Lee Fang: Yeah, he got to spend most of it at home, right? He didn't even spend much of the time. 

G. Greenwald: Right, he started at home. Exactly. Alex Acosta, years later, when asked, “Why would you give a sex trafficker of minors such an incredibly light sentence?” He said, “I was told that he was Intelligence and to leave him alone.” 

So, there's every reason to believe that he had some connection to foreign intelligence. There were a lot of people with whom he was a close associate, including Jelaine Maxwell, whose father, Robert Maxwell, was most definitely a Mossad member; Les Wexner, who is the multi-billionaire who made Jeffrey Epstein rich, who has all kinds of ties to Israel. A lot of people try to say, “Oh, it was probably Qatar.” They always try to say like, “Oh, the country that's really influencing our politics and buying our politics is Qatar.” That was something Bari Weiss just published. I have a feeling that if Jeffrey Epstein were working for Qatari intelligence, that was something we would know and have known very quickly. 

The fact that you have two very hawkish people on the Epstein question, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who have been running around for years demanding full disclosure, outraged that it's not coming, and now they're suddenly the ones running the FBI and yet there's still not a single document, not one, release that hadn't already been seen – they did that ridiculous, humiliating debate where they called those right-wing influencers like Libs of TikTok and others to the White House and they gave them binders that said, “Epstein files set - phase one” and they were all waving around that binder and it turned out every single document in that binder had been already publicly disclosed long ago – it does really start to make you wonder, doesn’t it? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, this reporting, these details have not been easy. Some of this is a source from just the Virgin Islands for my story, a source from the Virgin Islands’ legislature. I talked to lawmakers there, I looked at litigation files, some which had never been published, even though there were litigation files from 2023, but also, the Virgin Islands operate in kind of a weird space, to U.S. territory, but they do not have an online system for just routine campaign finance disclosures. I had to pay a University of Virgin Islands journalism student to go in person and request documents and then pay an exorbitant fee, just to make photocopies and then have those sent to me.

Reporting this out over the last few months on a story that really should have been public way earlier was not easy to do, but it's clear that for Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, they don't have to do all these kinds of extra steps that I engaged in. This is not a question of ability, this is the question of will. Do they have the political will? Do they have the kind of wherewithal to weather the criticism, the kind of pressure from elite groups, potentially foreign intelligence agencies, by disclosing this information that could be very harmful to the political and kind of intelligence elite? 

G. Greenwald: And the fact that you do that reporting that is often expensive is another good reason for people to join your Substack, aside from the quality of the reporting that they get if they do. 

All right, let me ask you this last question. You're somebody who began journalism, associated primarily with the left. You worked at left-wing think tanks, not necessarily hardcore leftist think tanks, but you wrote for The Nation. You worked for the Center for American Progress, and you had a pretty left-wing outlook on things. You began to kind of have a breach with the around issues like crime and race, things that you were previously talking about, but crime was a really big one that, the left was constantly opposed to, almost reflexively, to any efforts to take crime seriously, to have the police emboldened or empowered to arrest criminals. You were particularly incensed by things like “defund the police,” that movement that arose in the wake of the George Floyd killing. And that has been something that you've taken seriously for a very long and in part because of your personal experience growing up in a mixed-race, working-class environment where there were a lot of working-class residents constantly victimized by violent crime. 

Now you live in California and San Francisco, where there's a lot of crime, obviously, including from immigrants who enter the country illegally. So as somebody who has taken those issues seriously, like the need to really crack down more on crime and violent criminals, as well as, you know, the flow of immigrants across the border, how do you look at thus far the Trump administration's efforts to crack down on people who have entered the country, especially those who have engaged in some sort of violence? 

Lee Fang: I see kind of like a lot of the same examples you've highlighted on the show as draconian as probably unconstitutional, illegal, immoral. If you look at what the Trump administration has done in terms of sending Venezuelans to CECOT, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador, I think it's morally horrendous. The Washington Post recently reported that many of the individuals that were sent there were people who were cleared for asylum status, who had protested Maduro, and then fled here after doing so.

Which senator was the one who encouraged people to rise up against the Maduro government in Venezuela and said that if you came to this country, we would provide new asylum protections and TPS protections to protect you? That was Marco Rubio. He led that.

So, just the absurdity, the kind of partisan cruelty for him to turn around and take those same individuals and send them to this prison without any due process is disgusting. Broadly speaking, I look at the kind of confirmation hearings this week for the USCIS role that the immigration wing of the Department of Homeland Security, that kind of manages a lot of the visa programs, and they're saying a lot of things that I think make sense, talking about the role of foreign workers, of these kind of temporary visa programs that were initially created 20 years ago, 30 years ago, like the one H1-B program and then the OPT program to encourage just the most skilled, scarce workers that we don't have in this country. These programs have ballooned into a kind of internal job replacement program where corporations are bringing millions of workers in who will work for lower wages for tech-related software and IT jobs. 

The Trump administration, which initially, back in January, rejected attempts to reform programs, is now kind of changing its tune and is considering a reform of these programs. This is something that Bernie Sanders and many of the more traditional class-focused left have talked about for a very long time. I don't see any problem with that. The other kind of enforcement areas of just like how do you get folks who are in this country illegally out of this country and then how do you prioritize to make sure that you're doing it in a way that's just and fair, it's a mixed record, right? 

At the end of the day, the Trump administration, on a month-to-month basis, has deported less than the Biden administration, compared to last year. There are some different variables here. There are fewer border crossings this year than last. You can also compare this year between this year and the last few years of the Obama administration, which had way more deportations. Again, there's a different variable there. There's more police ICE collaboration back in the Obama years than this year. There's simply not as much collaboration between police agencies and ICE in 2025, so it's perhaps not possible. So, it's hard to compare. If you look at some of the extreme measures they've taken against speech, ongoing after legal students who are here to study and who have protested Israel, and focusing on them to deport them. That's clearly absurd. The CECOT prison is absurd. I think for the rest of their kind of agenda, it's a mix. There's some good and bad. And I think just in terms of a policy, a lot of it just hasn't come into effect yet. The deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, they've relied on these kinds of very theatrical and flamboyant expressions of police state strength. “We're going to throw them into prisons in El Salvador, we're going to send them to Libya, we're going to put them in South Sudan,” things like that. But the reality is that there have been no mass deportations as promised by the Trump campaign. They've spent huge amounts of time and energy and money instead of going after them almost right away, as you said, people in this country who are completely law-abiding, who are here with green cards or student visas, for the crime of protesting Israel or criticizing Israel. And so in lieu of getting what they were told for 10 years from Donald Trump they would get, which is mass deportations, they're instead getting this massive crackdown on speech under the guise of immigration policy aimed at protecting this foreign country, Israel, from criticism and people have really not noticed, given all these kinds of sideshows over the Alien Enemies Act and shipping them to El Salvador and the fact that the integration deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

All right, Lee, thank you so much. It was great to see you, as always. I'm sure we'll have you back on our show soon. I hope you have a good evening 

Lee Fang: Thanks, Glenn. Have a good weekend. 

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All right, Friday night is for our interaction with our Locals members, but also in front of our entire Rumble audience. The reason we do that, as I've said before, is I think interaction with your audience is of the most importance. I have always hated the model of journalism that's monolog inform, where some journalists just step on a mountain top and bequeath to people the truth. I think it's very important to hear critiques and questions and interact. And we do that throughout the week on Locals. So, let's get into them. We have a lot of good ones tonight. I want to try to get to as many as possible. 

The first one is from @ChristianaK, who says:

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I talked a little bit with Lee about this and he said something I completely agree with, which is, I never thought I would be defending Harvard in my life. Especially over the last, say, 10 years, Harvard really has become a place which is almost ground zero for censoring speech. It's often ideologically homogenous. It's become just this kind of closed circle, a very specific, idiosyncratic, academic-ish left-wing culture war homogeneity. There's a lot wrong with academia in general. 

All that said, I find academia to be extremely important. I think it's a vital part of society. If you go back to the Enlightenment, which I regard as the founding principles of Western civilization, at least in the modern era, in terms of our political values and the like, academics talk frequently about the need to have at least one place in society where everything is up for grabs in terms of what you can debate, what you could challenge. There are no taboos, there are no pieties. I think having an institution in society like that, where everything is studied, everything is questioned and everything is poked at, is vital. It helped me learn a lot. 

It really stimulated my interest intellectually that there were all sorts of things out there that had been about questioning these long-term pieties and you were free to express the things that you wanted to express. I think it is quite disappointing, quite harmful, quite tragic that in so many ways our universities have become these ideologically homogenized outposts of political activism at the expense of what should be this academic freedom.

 Nonetheless, it really is true that one of the things that has been most responsible for America's success, economically, technologically, politically, socially and militarily, has been research that takes place at our highest institutions. Everywhere in the world, people look at Harvard and talk about Harvard with great admiration and awe. Here in Brazil, if somebody went to study at Harvard, even for a year, and they come back and they say, “Oh, I studied at Harvard,” it imparts them with immense credibility, and that's how it's looked at around the world. I mean, Harvard is one of the symbols of American greatness. It's been a leading college for 450 years, same as Yale, Brown and Princeton, but Harvard, especially globally, is at the top. 

So, I think, if you're going to have a government that suddenly decides that it's going to wage a major war to try to destroy what have always been America's leading academic institutions, it’s kind of out of the blue, just start attacking it in every conceivable way, I think everybody should be very guarded about why that's happening. 

In general, leading academic institutions and the government have had extremely close partnerships. The reason the federal government gives money to places like Harvard and Yale, and all sorts of other schools, is not because the government is being benevolent. It's not because the government wants it to have a nice gender studies program. Sometimes it's to fortify financial aid so that not only rich people from rich families can go to the top schools, but mostly it's for paying for research projects that the United States government once undertook. It was federal-funded research programs at our universities that led to the invention of the internet in the United States and American dominance over the internet for all those years. It came right out of the federal funding of academic institutions, cures and medical treatments, scientific advances and technological advances that often were things the government wanted done for military use. 

When you have well-funded research programs, that's how you attract the greatest minds from all around the world and that only fortifies the institution. Without these research facilities, it basically just becomes like a liberal arts school for 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds, as opposed to institutions where the highest-level research and innovations take place. On top of that, it's the question of why these institutions are being attacked. 

In the case of Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Princeton and all the others that the Trump administration has targeted, there has been one argument that I think is a valid one, which is that there has been discrimination in the admissions process for a long time. It was considered affirmative action, where you would purposely go out of your way to divide all the applicants into groups of race, to ensure that there was a representative percentage from each group. Part of that was to correct historical injustices, other parts of it were to have a more diverse campus. I think there was a time when you could make that argument that was necessary and over time we've gotten to the point where we've decided that that's no longer necessary that it's actually a form of racism in its own way and courts have stepped in and begun to rule against those sorts of practices and they had to scale back greatly on them. 

So, I understand that objection, but the much bigger reason, as we know, is that these schools allowed protests against Israel to take place. For many years – you can go back to 2010, 2012, 2014 – all of these groups that are funded by Israel or Israeli loyal billionaires were obsessed with American college campuses because they knew that that's where the primary activism against Israel was based on this boycott, divestment and sanctions model that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa. Israel and its loyalists were petrified that that would work in American campuses. They knew a lot of the anti-Israel sentiment was being talked about and allowed on American campuses and they set out this whole anti-woke thing if you go and look at it, all these people who were obsessed with Israel, who led this anti-woke movement on college campuses, were doing it, in part, because they hated American colleges because it allowed too much Israel criticism. The Trump administration is saying that you have allowed too much antisemitism, meaning Israel criticism on your campus; they're actually forcing institutions to put their Middle East Studies program under receivership so the government can control what is taught in Middle East Studies programs. 

Who thought that the role of the U.S. government was to control the curricula of how adult academics who teach adult students can do their curriculum, can pick their course materials? But that's what the Trump administration is doing. And it's all because of Israel, to some extent, it's because they perceive it's kind of a left-wing institution, they want to attack it. But they've already denied funding these schools. 

Here from AP News on April 15: “Trump administration freezes $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard over campus activism (AP News. April 15, 2025.)

We know what that “campus activism” means: the Israel protests that you allowed. Harvard said, “Look, you've gone too far. We made a lot of concessions, but we're about to become a branch of the Trump administration if we go too far, we're going to sue instead.” And they sued, that's when the government went ballistic. 

Today, Homeland Security announced that they were canceling the student visas of all Harvard students, revoking them immediately, and would refuse to give student visas for any international students that want to go to Harvard in the future. So only 25% of Harvard has international students. It's a way that the United States spreads pro-American sentiment. People want to come to the United States, they want to study in the United States, they get integrated into American culture. It has great benefits for the U.S. As I said, people look at Harvard as this place that everyone around the world wants to go to, or Yale, or Princeton, or Columbia, Stanford, whatever. 

The idea that Harvard, of all places – its current president is Jewish, most of its past presidents, close to a majority, if not an overall majority over the last 30 years, have been Jewish. Larry Summers is one of the people who ran Harvard for the longest. Their biggest donors are overwhelmingly Jewish. Jews do very, very well at Harvard. The idea that it's some kind of cesspool of antisemitism is laughable. 

But as we know, any criticism of Israel is now deemed antisemitic and that's what's driving the Trump administration. So, now, you take these huge numbers of foreign students who have spent years pursuing PhD programs, a lot of them are going to graduate and stay in the United States and become extremely productive members American society, and even if they don't, even if go back to their countries, they're obviously going to have a connection to the United States, and now you take all these people who have put years and years into their studies, and out of nowhere, they're instantly told “Your visa is revoked and you can try to get into another school, we'll extend your visa then, but if you don't, Harvard doesn't have any more student visas. We're revoking them all, and we're banning Harvard from accepting any foreign students in the future”. 

This is basically on the verge of destroying Harvard, notwithstanding their $50 billion endowment. As Lee said, this $50 billion endowment almost makes them like a hedge fund. So, I don't have sympathy for Harvard, but it is true that denying them all federal money, destroying and forcing them to dismantle all research programs, and then disallowing any international students will absolutely cripple this institution that has for 500 years been the pinnacle of American greatness, a symbol of it, and a crucial tool in soft power. 

It's just yet another way that this government got into power and decided that one of its goals, if not its number one goal, was to punish anybody who was criticizing Israel. I think it's incredibly dangerous. What we've done is we basically turned the United States into a country where a requirement to enter, to study, or to work is that you love Israel and worship Israel, or that you at least agree that you were framed from ever criticizing it. We're just sacrificing so much of our national interest for this foreign country. 

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Question #2. It’s from @Kurt_Malone, who asked the following:

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This has been a controversy taking place among various journalists. I've certainly talked a lot before about how many of the people who have very lucratively branded themselves as free speech champions over the last several years, but who are really just Israel loyalists, who are doing this to attack college campuses and now have turned around.

Now you’re looking at this massive First Amendment attack in the name of stopping Israel criticism and they either barely care, barely mention it, occasionally mutter some mild opposition to say they have done it, they did or oftentimes, even support it.

Bari Weiss, yesterday, in response to the murder of the two Israeli embassy staffers, basically said anyone who's been attacking Israel or denouncing it in harsh ways, or its supporters, has blood on their hands. So, there are a lot of people who have built a large audience, mostly conservatives, right-wing people, or MAGA people, by championing free speech because over the past 10 years, conservative speech has been one of the main targets of censorship. And so, these people who are independent media outlets, who rely on subscription money from their viewers, it's a big problem in independent media. I've talked about it before. It's a problem in corporate media as well, that a lot of people don't want to say things that will ever alienate or offend their audience because they know if they do, there's a good chance that they'll lose subscribers, which is how they make their money. 

I've talked about it before, as an independent journalist, I also have that dynamic. After October 7, we lost a lot of subscribers who were pro-Israel and didn't want to hear my critiques of Israel and who still don't. We still lose subscribers over that. But over time, if you actually build yourself and your audience with a look to the long term as somebody who has integrity and you build an audience of people who know that you can't come and expect that you're going to always hear what you want to hear but you're always going to, at least, hear the honest perspective and an argument behind it, then you build an idea of people who respect your integrity and aren't here for validation,  which I would suggest is a much more valuable audience to have. 

So there have been some disputes. One of the people who has been most criticized for this is a friend of mine. So, I'm reluctant to speak specifically about him. You can go see these arguments. I will say, one of the reasons why I think it's so important to me that I have a great distance from the kind of social scene in Washington and New York and politics and media is because it is corrupting, it is difficult. If you end up immersed in a social circle and you end being friends with all these politicians who you're supposed to be adversarial to, or other journalists whom you're supposed to criticize because there is a sort of ethical, I think, valid principle, that if somebody is really your friend, I don't mean acquaintance, I don't mean somebody who you say hi to occasionally, but somebody who's really a friend is doing something you disagree with, to turn around and denounce them publicly. It's a real conflict in principles between, on the one hand, you want to hold people accountable and critique them when they deserve it, but on the other hand, like turning around and just publicly denouncing a friend is hard. 

So for the most part, that's why I avoid that social circle. I see it all the time. You see Jake Tapper in this book with all these journalists going around and talking about how they've known these Biden White House officials forever. And so, when they said there's nothing wrong with Biden, they didn't think they were being lied to; they believed them. They didn't want to criticize these people. That's what being friends can do to journalists or to, and I think it's a major reason why Washington is so corrupt, media and politics. They all live in the same neighborhoods and they all socialize with each other. They're all intermarried, the media and the political class. And so, they're anything but adversarial to each other, but I will say there's this idea that some of the people are saying, “Look, I don't want to comment on Israel and Palestine because I don't know enough about it, it's too complicated, it is just not an issue I want to talk about.” And then there's a resulting critique. No, the reason you don't want to talk about it is because you don’t want to defend Israel or the censorship being implemented in the United States in its name. After all, you would be obviously betraying everything you ever said you believed in. But you also don't want to denounce it because you have a lot of people who support Donald Trump or Israel in your audience and you're afraid of alienating them and losing money from saying what it is that you believe. 

So, let me just say, quickly, a few things about this because it is a growing controversy. One is that I actually am somebody who has always tried to, who strongly believes in the idea that there's nobody who can be an expert in everything. There's no person who has expert-level or specialized knowledge in every debate. 

It's always been so important to me never to report on, comment on, or analyze topics that I don't actually understand better than just the ordinary person who's not paying much attention. I've always only covered a handful of issues at one time that I believe I have some kind of specialized knowledge or expertise in, or some unique perspective that's informed, so that I can basically place a claim on the audience's time if I want to write about something or talk about something. I do agree that if there's something you don't understand well, if there is something that you haven't covered, it's best just not to talk about it. 

That said, once there's an issue that becomes so significant, maybe tariffs is an example, which is something that Trump's tariff policy was something I ordinarily would not talk about since I'm the last person who can give you a good microeconomic assessment of tariffs and the like. But I can talk about other aspects related to it. I can have people on my show that I've talked to, that I asked about, because some issues are just too big to ignore. And the war in Israel, especially if you're an American citizen whose government is paying for that war and arming that war, given that world organizations have called this a genocide, people have said this is the worst war in their lifetime that they've ever seen, even an Israeli former Prime Minister came out and said today that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, two million people being starved to death. Our government is paying for it, at the same time, there are major implications in the United States, on Americans and our basic constitutional rights. It's just not an issue that I think you can just say, “Yeah, I don't understand that. I think I'm going to avoid that.” I'm not saying you have to cover it every day, I'm saying you have super didactic opinions about it, but I think it's kind of an abdication of your responsibility if you have influence on a platform to just refuse to talk about the most significant issues that the entire world is discussing, especially when they directly affect the causes that you have claimed you're most invested in. 

Again, I think there are a lot of people in the sort of what had been called the international dark web, as they self-glorifyingly named themselves, who pretended to be free speech advocates, who have now abandoned that because the real loyalty was to Israel. And then some people just haven't really spoken much about it because audience capture is very real in independent media. It's not like you're either super noble and you don't care about it, or you're just integrity-free, greedy money, sucking pig. There are a lot of nuances, and there's a big spectrum between those two things. But I do think it's very important if you're going to have any credibility that you do everything possible to ensure that you never have a fear of your own audience and that you have this view that it's better to lose some audience and subscribers short-term or maybe even long-term that you won't replace, especially if you're somebody who's built a big platform and making a very good living doing this, than it is to just have the goal to build the biggest audience possible by avoiding ever telling them anything that might make them at all upset.

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 Question #3 is from @teardrinker who says:

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So, just for those of you who didn't see it, there's this big controversy in Brazil, actually a major epidemic in Brazil. Brazil, under this very unpopular president, in 2017, legalized gambling basically overnight. As a result, all these apps popped up to allow people to put their money into these accounts and then start betting on sporting events or all sorts of things online, playing casino games. Huge numbers of people, millions of people, Brazil's a country with a huge economic inequality, have become addicted to gambling, to these apps on their phones. The minute they get government assistance that is supposed to feed their family, or their paycheck, they transfer the whole thing into their gambling account. They've been told that it's a way to get rich, to escape poverty. And you have people massively in debt, losing everything, destroying their families over this gambling addiction. 

A major reason why is that you have these Instagram influencers who have tens of millions of followers who show people their super glamorous, luxurious lifestyle. These betting companies are paying these influencers to tell their young audience, their poor audience, “Oh, you should go bet. Use this betting app. You can make so much money.” And they show videos of the influencers betting and making money that are often fake. And not only do these influencers get millions of dollars to lead their poor and young audience into betting but they get percentages of whatever losses their audience has, which is profit for the betting app. And we showed you a part of an investigation that the Brazilian Senate is doing on this. 

And so, here's this question:

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Okay, it's so interesting because I have always taken a very libertarian approach to all of these issues. My general philosophy is that if you are an adult, you have the absolute right to consent to whatever behavior you want to engage in, as long as it's not directly harming somebody else. And by that, I mean like punching somebody or attacking somebody violently. I don't mean like blowing your money on some stupid, ill-advised shopping spree and then harming your family because now they can't pay their bills. I mean, direct harm. 

I believe that about pretty much everything. What drugs people take, what alcohol they consume, whether they gamble, whether what kind of sex they engage in with other adults consensually, my view of that has always been very strongly this libertarian view that adults should be able to make whatever choices they want that involve consent, and it's nobody's business to stop them. You can have public campaigns about the dangers of alcoholism or drug addiction. I'm all for that, so you give people information, but I don't believe in intervening, and I think they are responsible for the choices that they make. 

I have begun to rethink and retreat from that absolute libertarian view of people's choices a bit. I'll explain why. We're really entering a dystopian society, and we've had this for a long time, a dystopian world, where there are parts of the world that are extremely affluent and that most of the world is incomprehensibly poor. And you have things now, like for example, we talked about this before, we'll probably do some reporting on it because I want to learn more about it, but you have these affluent Europeans, I'm sure Americans as well, who need a kidney transplant and there's nobody who's compatible, who will give them a kidney. So they're traveling to countries in West Africa that people are barely at a subsistence level. And they're paying them $20,000, $30,000 and $40,000 to donate a kidney. I mean, is that something that we really should say is nobody's business? You have two adults in a transaction, one selling their organ to the other so that they can feed their children. Or is there something like incredibly exploitative about that to the point where it's very hard to say that that's actually consensual? 

I've been thinking the same thing about surrogacy arrangements. You have very wealthy couples. Most of them, by the way, are not gay couples; most of them are straight couples, contrary to belief, overwhelmingly straight couples, although the number of gay couples doing it as well has increased. And they want a baby. They can't produce a baby for whatever reason. Gay couples can't procreate. A lot of straight couples can’t either. Sometimes they don't want to, the woman doesn't want to carry a baby. 

So, they find a woman who needs $30,000, $50,000, whatever, $100,000 to carry their baby with an agreement that the minute that baby is born, the biological mother just hands over the baby, has no rights to it. Probably, if you asked me 10, 15 years ago, I would have said, “Yeah, that's their own choice. Who is the state, or anyone, to intervene in that transaction?” 

I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of women who do that are not very, very harmed psychologically. And again, as people get richer and the rich-poor gap increases, these kinds of transactions are going to become more and more complex. What about couples in the West who can't procreate and want to adopt but don't want to go through the adoption process? And so, they go to Africa, or they go to Asia, to extremely poor countries, and they pay some family. They say, “Hey, I see you have a healthy three-month-old infant, or a six-month infant, or a two-year-old, we want one of those. If we pay you $100,000, can we take your kid?” I mean, that's the same thing, right? That's very consensual, it's transactional, but is anyone going to say they have no qualms about that? 

I think sometimes Americans have problems understanding what poverty around the world is if you haven't lived in a country where it exists. What's considered poor in the United States, I mean, now it's become a little more severe, but what is considered poverty in the United States is nothing like what is considered poverty in most places in the world. There may be people who don't have access to clean water, don't have access to healthcare, don't have access to anything. And the internet is everywhere, and people are influenced. That's why they're called influencers. 

That's the same with gambling. So, I'm not saying that people who end up gambling and losing everything and destroying their lives and the lives of their family have no responsibility. Of course, they have some. Nobody forced them to do it. I've stopped thinking that all these things have this kind of pure, beautiful, consensual character to them because I have trouble seeing that as purely consensual. And again, I'm not saying it should be banned. I'm not even saying necessarily that I think it's the role of the state to stop it, but it doesn't make it so that it's perfectly fine either. Yeah, this is something I've been reconsidering. I think there's a lot of pressure for exploitation. 

As for this word “gaslighting,” I just, in general, hate new words that pop up and become part of the ethos. And especially gaslight was used mostly by a kind of MeToo movement. It was part of that MeToo lexicon where I think the excesses of Me Too have been well-documented. I oppose them from the beginning. I hate mob justice. I hate the idea that accusations should be treated as true with no evidence. I don't trust any human being, man, woman, anybody, with that level of power to say, “Oh, your accusations, they have to be inherently believed.” And that's where gaslighting came, a very, kind of vague accusation that people began making against their husbands or their boyfriends to claim that their relationship was, quote-unquote, “toxic.” I understand what it means. 

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Next question, @kkotwas asked:

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 It's funny, I was going to ask Lee a very similar question. I think that there has been a drastic, visible, palpable, documentable, severe turn in public opinion both in the United States and globally toward Israel. Israelis are talking about how they're becoming a “pariah state.” The level of dehumanization and cruelty and suffering and killing that Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians for 17 months, as we've all watched it live every day and that they're saying they're going to continue to perpetrate basically until these people are in concentration camps, driven out of their land – and imagine the level of violence that's going to cause. They are announcing that they are entering Gaza. They're going to take to it all, they're going to bomb whatever's left, they're going to force Palestinians to leave, the ones who don't are going to be in concentration camps, a little walled-off, fenced-off areas that they get to stay in, surrounded by the IDF. These are concentration camps. 

It has turned the world against Israel in ways never previously seen since the creation of Israel in 1948. And they know that, polling data shows it. You see countries that have been among the most vocal Israeli supporters and allies for a variety of political reasons, like Canada, the U.K. and France, jointly issuing a statement, vehemently condemning Israel, not merely a mouth condemnation. Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant have been officially indicted by the International Criminal Court as war criminals. They have to avoid certain countries. IDF soldiers are afraid to go to various countries. There are projects to make sure they get arrested or chased out of the country, which happened in Brazil. We actually interviewed the head of one of the groups that tracks IDF soldiers who participated in crimes in Gaza, because all these countries are signatories to various conventions that forced them to arrest people on their soil who have committed war crimes. One almost got arrested in Brazil, he got snuck out at the last second. 

And then Israeli tourists as well are being met with all sorts of hostility and I think that's why there have been these desperate attempts to censor Israel criticism, to criminalize it, to attack these universities over it, to arrest and deport people for criticizing or protesting Israel; these are acts of desperation. 

And yeah, I don't think that the murder of two Israeli staffers, as terrible as it obviously is, and the scope of what's happening in Gaza that's been happening for the last 18 months, that will continue to happen unless it's stopped for the next year or so, or however long, I think it's going to be a speed bump. 

Israel supporters are hoping they can turn it into something much greater, but I don't think it's going to succeed, given how Israelis are still not just destroying all of Gaza and the people in Gaza, but saying some of the most Nazi-like horrific things, including Israeli officials that think we should separate the women and the children and then take all men 13 years over and exterminate them. They're all them saying Gazan babies are enemies, there are no innocent Gazan babies, they grew up to be terrorists. Really sick, sick stuff. They don't think the world is good. I want to say tolerate, but I don't think there's any stopping Israel in the sense that they're an apocalyptic cult, and it would take some political will on the part of the West and the United States, almost like a humanitarian intervention, to really stop it. 

But I think Israel is going to pay a huge price for a long, long time; they have all kinds of internal dissent. Netanyahu is consolidating all sorts of undemocratic power. They were in a civil war before October 7 over the Supreme Court, whether orthodox Israelis have to serve in the military, and they have a lot of internal tension. People are fleeing the country. So no, I do not think these two murders of last night are going to radically change the trajectory of how Israel is perceived. 

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All right, the @farside asks:

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I've been saying this from the beginning. Every time there’s a Supreme Court ruling against the invocation of the AEA, where they're required to give the new process. Now, a Trump-appointed judge and an appellate court have said Trump's not even allowed to invoke the AEA: it's only for wartime. And then you have a bunch of Trump supporters saying, “But what do you mean? We voted for mass deportation. Are we supposed to give trials to 20 million people?” 

I've always turned to emphasize, I think it's now finally being understood, not just for me, but others, that the problem is that you have a deportation system instead of laws. It's very easy. You just deport. You show they're not in the country illegally, you send them back to their home country. The problem is that Trump didn't want to use that. He wanted to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. Something that has only been invoked three times before, during wartime, the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, because it gives Trump immense power, far more power than he has otherwise. 

So, automatically, the president's powers increase in times of war, the deference that courts give a president when there's a wartime emergency automatically increases. So, by declaring war, Trump's already consolidated more power. And then, the Alien Enemies Act gives him almost unfettered power to do anything to people he declares to be an alien enemy. He can just put them in camps. 

Remember, he sent them to Guantanamo and that's the policy that FDR invoked to put Japanese Americans in camps. You don't have to send them back to their home country. That way, you can just send them to El Salvador, a country they've never been to and have nothing to do with, and put them into prison. And you can send them to Libya. You can send them to South Sudan, which the Trump administration is now talking about doing and in the process of doing. The Trump Administration came in wanting to ensure, and I think understandably in a way, because Trump’s first term was basically characterized by constant subversion of the president's authority. Trump was boxed in all the time, he was sabotaged, and they were determined to not allow that to happen by this big bureaucracy, by the deep state, by the administrative state. And so, they came in determined to have a plan to allow Trump to do whatever he wanted with no constraints. The Alien Enemies Act was part of that.

The problem is that it is a very severe law, only intended for wartime. And even then, as the Supreme Court said, 9-0, when it said they're all entitled to habeas hearings before being removed under the AEA, even people suspected of being Nazi sympathizers, Nazi operatives inside the United States were given a hearing before they were detained or deported. All these legal controversies around deportation are not about deportation itself; they're about the AEA, which Trump invoked, because of the extraordinary powers that it gives him. 

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All right, I think this is the last question. It's from @65wakai:

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Yeah, that's a very complex question to answer in a short period. It all depends on how long people have been there. I mean, there's obviously an indigenous population in the United States that American settlers and colonialists went to war with, massacred, and now they have rights recognized by the United States, including their own sovereignty inside reservations. There are indigenous people in Brazil who came way before Portuguese colonization. Primarily in the Amazon, there are tribes that are still undisturbed, unconnected to the world. It's a little hard to say that they don't have rights to Brazil, where they've been for who knows how long. Same with Africa. 

If you're talking about Israel and Palestine, I think the problem there is that it's not really a claim that, “Oh, my people have a right to this land.” It's really that “God gave my people this land,” it's not, “Oh, we've been here for a long time, therefore, we should have it,” it's that “God said this is ours.” 

I do not think that theological claims about what God wants and who God wants to be in certain places are a valid claim for that land. We have a geopolitical system of solving diplomatic conflicts, which the world recognizes, and the Israelis are lucky, because for a long time, it didn't look like this. Would Israel, with certain borders, the 1967 borders, with the West Bank and Gaza belonging to the Palestinians and most Israelis who now want to steal the West Bank in Gaza and act against all international law and take it for only Jews, are doing so because they believe that God has bestowed them that. And I think that's a much different question. It's one of the things that bothers me about Zionism as an ideology: it inherently depends upon a Jewish supremacy that, at least within Israel, Jews will always be supreme and I don't think that it's an ideology that leads to anything good.

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Israeli Embassy Staffers Killed in DC: Reactions and Implications; DHS Terminates Student Visas for Harvard
System Update #459

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.  

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There's a lot to talk about because a cold-blooded murder happened last night on the streets of Washington, D.C., as a gunman apparently targeted people associated with an event held at the Capital Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was hosting a reception for young diplomats. The two victims, a couple in their mid-20s, soon to be engaged, were both staffers at the Israeli embassy in Washington. The shooter left behind a manifesto stating he was doing it, killing people, to protest Israel's ongoing destruction of Gaza, and he yelled pro-Palestinian slogans, including “Free Palestine,” once he was arrested. 

It goes without saying, or at least it should, that randomly targeting people you don't know for murder is morally unjust in all cases, regardless of the justness of the cause in whose name you're doing it. But the reaction to this violence predictably lurched very quickly. We'll look at all the ramifications and the attempts to use these killings for various agendas. 

Then, the Department of Homeland Security announced today that it was immediately revoking all international student visas for Harvard, forcing all students to try to find another school or face deportation from the United States. All of this comes as the Irish rap band Kneecaps has been formally charged with terrorism crimes by the U.K. government – terrorism crimes – for featuring a sign at one of their shows in support of Gaza and against Israel, as well as using images of Hezbollah in their show. As global public opinion grows against Israel, threatening to make it, in the words of an Israeli official, a "pariah state", the censorship campaign and the efforts to suppress Israel's criticisms become more severe and more desperate every day. 

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What happened last night in Washington, D.C., by all appearances, and we should definitely wait for more investigations and for facts to unfold because often things aren't what they appear to be in the first day or week, but by all appearance it seems as though somebody very committed to the cause of protesting the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza decided that, even though the world is starting to realize what's going on, even though the U.S. government itself understands that the population is turning against it, that there's simply nothing that will be done to stop the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel – based on some very twisted moral reasoning, that he thought it was justified and helpful – to randomly gun down too young Americans with ties to Israel although he presumably didn't even know they had ties to Israel at the time that he did it. 

It was a couple that was going to be engaged when they went to Israel next week, She was Jewish, grew up in a Jewish family, had very strong ties to Isreal, had often gone there but when she would go there, she would work on with the groups that try to bridge gaps between Israelis and Palestinians to kind of create dialog between the two, to try to encourage peaceful coexistence. 

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