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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Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

I highly recommend the first 24 minutes with Bruce Fein, a lawyer specializing in constitutional and international law. He was appointed by R. Reagan as assistant deputy AG:
https://pca.st/episode/a64c9e94-cb4a-4f9c-9f12-d5d883f2b261

I think we need a Sunday evening Breaking News segment! The revelations that Tulsi just dropped on the world is HISTORIC!

Double-Down News: Epstein EXPOSED: Trump, Mossad & The Elite’s Dark Secrets [14m,5hrs ago]

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Trump Promises More Weapons for Ukraine; Trump Again Accuses Dems of Fabricating Epstein Files
System Update #487

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, President Trump campaigned repeatedly on denouncing Joe Biden's policy of arming Ukraine in its war with Russia and vowing to end the war as soon as he got into office. Like so many of his promises, none of this happened, and now Trump, rather than ending Biden's war policy, is doubling down on it. With the NATO chief in the White House today, the supreme militarist Mark Rutte, Trump announced a new plan to arm Ukraine by sending the weapons through NATO, which he claims will pay for them. We'll see. A report in the Financial Times today also says Trump told Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy to try to use missiles to strike the key Russian cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Imagine if Russia had told a proxy of theirs, “We'll give you weapons, and we want you to strike New York, Los Angeles, and Washington.” This came after Joe Biden and his transition out of the White House for the first time authorized Ukrainian strikes inside Russia. Trump's policies are wrong and dangerous for the exact same reasons Biden's policy was in Ukraine, as we went over many times when he was president, and it's crucial to examine why that is and what Trump is doing. 

Also, when Trump first addressed the anger among his own supporters for having announced that he was closing the Epstein investigation with zero disclosures forthcoming, he did so by waving his hand and instructing everyone that this topic was far too trivial and insignificant to merit any attention, and he thus directed everyone to move on and simply stop talking about it. Some obeyed Trump, of course, but many did not, and he was thus compelled to return several times to address the obvious 180 his administration has done with regard to whether the various issues in this case would be investigated and whether the documents suitable for publication would be disclosed. 

But each time Trump has tried to calm his angry base with additional statements, he has only made things worse. How long can this charade go on? We'll examine the latest. 

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One of the most significant policies of the Biden administration was the decision unanimously supported by every single member of the Democratic Congress, but also a majority of members of the establishment Republicans as well, to arm and fund the war in Ukraine. There were a lot of reasons why people objected to that, especially people on the right-wing populist faction who were supporting Trump. One of them was a cost issue, but another was just how dangerous it was. 

Why was Russia our enemy? Why are we making them our enemy? Why are they claiming that the war in Ukraine, which is about who governs the various provinces in the east of Ukraine, has anything to do with the lives of American citizens? And also, Russia is a nuclear power, which has made clear that they regard this war as existential to their national security. Something that the CIA has long said all the way back to the Bush administration, when Victoria Nuland and Condoleezza Rice wanted to put Ukraine in NATO. The head of the CIA under Obama, Bill Burns, who was in the Bush administration as well, wrote a memo that ended up being leaked by WikiLeaks, which basically said, Ukraine and NATO is a red line for Russia, not just for Putin and his supporters, but for even liberal anti-Putin critics, everyone in the entire political spectrum in Russia regards any NATO influence or presence in this country on the other side of its border – that was twice used to invade Russia in the 20th century, killing tens of millions of Russians in two world wars – obviously a very sensitive part of their border that they consider it existential, whereas the West does not. 

Putin was asking that the U.S. and NATO agree that Ukraine will never be a NATO member and the U.S. under Biden refused. And that was at least part of the reason why Putin then went into Ukraine. There were others. We've been over these many times, but Donald Trump had been steadfast in his opposition to Biden's policy of arming the war in Ukraine and promising repeatedly that as soon as he got into office, he would just tell each of them to cut it out, would threaten each or hold sanctions over their heads or whatever he had to do and the war would end very, very quickly. None of that has happened. Trump has increasingly come to blame Vladimir Putin principally for that, despite the flamboyant conflict he had in the White House with Zelenskyy. 

He's now done a 180 on the question of Ukraine as well. He is now announcing a massive influx of weapons from the United States to Ukraine that he intends to put through NATO, claiming that NATO countries are going to buy it from the U.S. through some unknown mechanism. NATO countries are already saying, “We're not going to wait for these weapons to get here. We're just going to send them to Ukraine, knowing that the U.S. is going to replenish our stockpile.” 

For all the talk about how Trump was splitting with Western Europe and questioning the value of NATO, here is the NATO chief, Mark Rutte, in the White House today. He's one of those EU maniacs who just want war in every way. When Trump went to the NATO summit a couple of weeks ago, Mark Rutte was so grateful that Trump had signaled that he was going to start funding and arming Ukraine again that he actually sat there and flattered Trump in the way that Trump loves them most. He actually called him daddy – you're kind of like a daddy. Sometimes, if the two sides aren't doing what you want, the daddy has to come and impose discipline, calling Trump daddy in front of the cameras. But of course, knowing that, although pretty embarrassing, that's how you can flatter and ingratiate yourself and then start influencing Trump. 

Today, the NATO chief was at the White House next to Trump and that's when Trump announced this new policy. Here it is. 

Video. Donald Trump, Mark Rutte, White House. July 14, 2025.

This claim that NATO agreed to 5% is through accounting smoke and mirrors. All they did was expand the definition of what “defense spending” includes. So it includes, in large part, the amount of money they've been pouring into the war in Russia, that they've been sending to Ukraine, but it also includes things like they can build infrastructure and, as long as they can demonstrate it has some connection to the military, that gets counted as military spending. 

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Is There Evidence of Epstein's Ties to Israel? Yes: Ample. Brazil's Chief Censor Orders Rumble to Ban US Citizen and Turn Over Data
System Update #486

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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President Trump last week reacted with anger and dismissiveness when a reporter asked his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, at the White House, whether Jeffrey Epstein had connections with a foreign or domestic intelligence agency: “That's too trivial to even discuss,” Trump decreed. For her part, AG Bondi said she had no idea whether Epstein had any such ties, as if it were the first time she ever heard of that or considered it, and said she'd get back to us with the answer. Do not hold your breath. 

Then, after Tucker Carlson over the weekend said, at Charlie Kirk's Turning Points U.S.A. Conference, that he believes Epstein has ties to Israeli intelligence – something he said everyone in Washington knows – the attacks on Carlson were as intense and unified as anything I've ever seen. Former Israeli Prime Minister, Neftali Bennett, issued a carefully worded but enraged denial toward Carlson, vowing that he "won't take it anymore." 

Is there evidence that the serial pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein had ties to the Israeli government and its intelligence agencies, such as the Mossad? In a word: yes. Note that I did not say there was ‘proof’ – that's different – because only the U.S. government can show us the definitive evidence about this question, one way or the other, something that bizarrely they simply refused to do. We'll review all that evidence linking Epstein to the Israelis, not so much to prove that Epstein was an Israeli agent since we can't do that, but to demonstrate that there is very ample ground for asking that question and demanding the Trump administration show us what they have on this topic and all topics related to Jeffrey Epstein. 

Then: Just last week, President Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian products, in part, he said, because Brazil's Supreme Court and its chief censorship judge, Alexandre de Moraes, have been attacking the free speech rights of American citizens and American companies. Note, Trump said he was attacking the free speech rights of American citizens and American companies. Trump was referring at least in large part, if not exclusively, to Rumble, which was blocked from all of Brazil by Moraes for failure to obey his censorship orders. Now, as if to prove Trump's point, Moraes issued one of the most draconian orders yet, clearly defying Trump and provoking him into further action. We'll cover all that.

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There are a lot of issues swirling around the Epstein case, and there have been for quite a long time, but I have always said, going back years – and this year leading up to the expectation that the Trump administration would finally give us the answers that its key officials had long been promising – that the most significant unanswered question, at least one of them, was whether Jeffrey Epstein had ties with or worked with or for an intelligence agency, foreign or domestic. 

The reason that's an important question is an obvious one. Namely, that intelligence agencies want as much dirt on people as they can get. That's why they spy on people. It's why they invent invasive surveillance technologies. The Israelis are masters of this. Most of the most pernicious spying programs, like Pegasus, emanate from Israel. The Israelis are notorious for using intelligence against “their allies,” like the United States, spying in person and spying digitally. 

Jeffrey Epstein was obviously somebody who had access to the most elite circles of the most powerful people who spent a great deal of time with him, consorting with him, staying with him, visiting him, flying with him, going to his island, even after he was convicted of soliciting minors for prostitution and having sex with minors. 

How is that even possible? You know somebody has been convicted or pled guilty to using minors as prostitutes, minors who can't consent, who are basically raped if you have sex with them, which is what Jeffrey Epstein did, and then you say, come to my house, I'm going to fly with you on your plane, I'm going to be your friend, I'm to spend a lot of time with you. Of course, all of that finally came to a head in 2018 when the evidence became overwhelming of all he had gotten away with and all the questions swirling around him, the U.S. government indicted him and then he allegedly committed suicide in prison. 

So, there have been a lot of questions, but, to me, the biggest one has always been if he was working with or for any foreign intelligence in part because his wealth was massive, clearly that of a multibillionaire. No one knows where his wealth came from. He was working as a teacher at a private high school, the Dalton School, even though he had no college degree, and then suddenly appeared out of nowhere as one of the world's richest people and couldn't explain to anybody what was the source of his vast wealth. He had cameras in all of these homes where all of this sex with underage people was taking place. It's exactly the kind of thing that any intelligence agency would die to get their hands on, especially if they have leverage over him; that's the one thing you would want from him, that kind of information. 

When Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino and the Trump administration announced they were closing this case because they found nothing incriminating, they ran to Axios, of all places, and leaked a memo on Sunday night announcing to the public that they found nothing incriminating. There was no blackmail. He definitely killed himself. No, there was no client list, even though they repeatedly said there was. But one thing they did not say is whether he was working with or for foreign intelligence agencies or domestic intelligence agencies, which is something that people have been asking for a long time. They didn't even address it. That's not one of the things they denied. They didn't even bother to address it, and so a very conscientious reporter, who I believe works for the New York Post, went to the White House during one of President Trump's press briefings, where his cabinet was, including Pam Bondi, and he asked Pam Bondi exactly that question. This is where Trump erupted with anger and said, "Move on, this is not even worth talking about.' And Pam Bondi basically said, "I don't know, never thought of it.". 

Here's just a reminder of what happened.

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UN Gaza Investigator Francesca Albanese on US Sanctions Against Her; Plus: Glenn Takes Your Questions on Trump's Pressure on Brazil, Sam Harris, Bill Ackman and More
System Update #485

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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It is very well-documented on this show and elsewhere that critics of Israel are not only smeared and maligned but are often officially punished by the U.S. government and other Western nations. Few people have endured more such attacks than our guest tonight: the Italian specialist in human rights law and the U.N. Rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese. 

And for doing her job and doing it well, Albanese has now not only been widely branded an anti-Semite, of course, but is also being punished by multiple Western governments as well as Israel in all sorts of ways. Those reprisals against her, again, for the crime of documenting Israeli crimes in Gaza and the West Bank – her job – severely escalated this week when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the imposition of American sanctions against her personally, against her finances, her travel and other abilities in her life. His announcement, not coincidentally, came just days after the U.N. publicized her report about the role of American Big Tech companies – including Google, Amazon and Palantir – in working with the IDF and profiting off of the destruction of Gaza. She'll join us tonight to talk about her work and the ongoing attacks against her. 

Then: as you likely know, every Friday night we try to reserve all of our shows or a significant part of our shows for a Q&A session with the members of our Locals. As usual, we have a wide range of questions, and we’ll answer some of them.

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The Interview: Francesca Albanese

Our guest tonight, the U.N. Rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, in a lot of ways, is a tribute to the remarkable courage and relentless investigative work and the refusal to back down when documenting Israeli war crimes in Palestine by the Israelis. 

Of course, people always accuse her and the U.N. generally of obsessing on Israel. It's not true. There are U.N. Rapporteurs for human rights abuses in countless other countries. I just named some of them: North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, Colombia, Burundi, Iran, and many others as well. The idea that the U.N. focuses only on Israel or that it somehow obsesses on Israel is laughable. 

Francesca Albanese’s job, in particular, is to document as a rapporteur, which is a legal position where international human rights lawyers volunteer their time pro bono to work on matters documenting human rights abuses in various areas for the U.N. Her role is to do so documenting the abuses by the Israeli government, paid for and armed by the U.S. and other Western governments and that's the work she's been doing.

She has also been involved throughout her life in all kinds of other human rights abuses throughout the world that have nothing to do with Israel. She's traveling this week in Bosnia, where she's commemorating the massacres against Bosnian Muslims during the 1990s. She has been involved in refugee crises and migrant abuses, or abuses in Afghanistan. This is just part of her work, but it's the part of her work that, unlike all the other things she's done, which have provoked retaliation, because in the U.S. and the West, it's increasingly viewed as not just amoral but criminal to criticize Israel. 

You need no further proof than the announcement this week by the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio – the U.S. Secretary of State, not the Secretary of State for Israel – announcing punishments on her, and this is what he said on July 10. He posted on X: 

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Notice what Secretary Rubio did not accuse her of lying or publishing fabrications, or manipulating evidence, or spreading disinformation. The anger is over the accuracy of her work and it's not a coincidence that, the day before Secretary Rubio announced those sanctions, the Washington Post documented a report that the U.N. issues that was authored and overseen by Francesca Albanese, that was specifically designed to demonstrate how major Big Tech companies, including Google, along with Palantir, Amazon and others, are providing weapons, and by weapons I mean tech weapons, surveillance weapons, military weapons to Israel and to the IDF to profit off of the destruction, the ethnic cleansing in Gaza. In many ways, U.S. Big Tech companies are more powerful than the U.S. government. They're central to the U.S. military-industrial complex. They all have massive contracts with the U.S. intelligence agency. 

But knowing exactly that, she decided that it was important to document the role of industrial forces in what is happening in the IDF. And for that, she got the announcement as – you'll never guess – antisemitic, by the co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, who is a Russian Jewish immigrant to the United States, a U.S. citizen, co-founded Google, a multibillionaire, one of the world's 10 richest people. 

The Washington Post got hold of internal dialogue from internal chats from Google, where he made it clear to Google employees that they should never even be discussed because the U.N. itself is transparently antisemitic. The headline was: “Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Calls U.N. ‘Transparently Antisemitic’ After Report on Tech Firms and Gaza.” His argument was that the use of “genocide,” not to talk about what was done to Jews 80 years ago, but to talk about what's being done by Israel today, is inherently antisemitic. 

Genocide is a term you can apply to every country on the planet except Israel, according to the multi-multibillionaire co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin. That shows you, again, there was nothing in the report that he said was false. They're not angry that she published false information designed to malign the reputation of Google. They're angry that you published true information about Google's role in the IDF. 

For all the conservative claims about how much they hate Big Tech, they are completely in bed with Big Tech and the U.S. military-industrial complex and the intelligence community are completely in bed with Big Tech. We've documented that many times before. We did a whole show on the role of Palantir

And for as much retaliation as you will suffer if you criticize Israel, documenting the role of America's largest tech companies and its partnership with the IDF and its profiteering off of the destruction of Gaza, is a red line that apparently Marco Rubio decided merits sanctions. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. 

I'm sure there have been calls for her sanctioning or other punishment – of course, calling her an anti-Semite, the way everyone who criticizes Israel is called an anti-Semite, everybody knows that formula by now – but the American government sanctioning her because of criticism of Israel – and obviously she's documenting as well the vital role the U.S. and Europeans are playing in arming and financing that war. All things again, that's her job to do. Nobody can test the veracity of it. They're now going to block her finances, prevent her from using credit cards and bank accounts, whatever they can do with these sanctions. 

One of the impressive things about Francesca Albanese, many things, is that she doesn't speak from a place of ideology. She doesn't speak from a place of political bias. She's an international human rights lawyer and an academic who is best known for her role as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the situation on human rights in Palestine, but she was only appointed to that position in 2022. She has done lots of other work throughout her life. She's a scholar at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of International Migration. She has been in the news recently because of Gaza and the proposals against her, but as I said, she's done human rights advocacy and work concerning migrants, concerning Bosnian Muslims or Afghanistan, concerning a whole variety of other issues as well, and she's never suffered a reprisal before until her work starting in 2022 focused on the attack by the IDF against the people of Gaza, which even Israeli genocide experts who have stood up and defended her say is a genocide. 

So the fact that she's done this work, knowing the attack she was going to get, the fact that's she's unbothered by these attacks, that she continues to be one of the most informed, eloquent and courageous spokespersons objecting to what I do think is the atrocity of our time, which is the Israeli destruction of Gaza, makes her, in my view, extremely admirable and worthy of respect, but also somebody very worth listening to. There are few people who know more about the situation than she. It's our pleasure to welcome her to the show this evening. 


G. Greenwald: Ms. Albanese, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. We are very interested in your case. I want to begin with a common criticism that I hear frequently of people like yourself, who focus a lot on the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing taking place there, the genocide, which is, “Oh, you seem very obsessed with Israel; you don't really seem to care much about other human rights violations.” 

I know one of the things you're doing now is traveling; we had a little bit of a hard time scheduling. Where are you traveling today and for what purpose? 

Francesca Albanese: I just arrived in Sarajevo from Srebrenica. I've been invited to speak after Slovenia, after London, after Madrid, to speak to the people here about what's going on in the occupied Palestinian territory, particularly in Gaza. I was honored to accept the invitation in this context, where the genocide survivors are hosting a space to talk about all genocides. 

Today I went to Srebrenica to pay tribute to the survivors and the victims. It was very heavy and there is so much that I'm still processing this, but something that really touched me was the nerve of some Western officials who, on the one hand, said, “Oh, we have always been with you and we will be with you forever.” No, no, there was no NATO when the Bosnian people were slaughtered, especially those in Srebrenica. 

The people in Srebrenica were not even forced out of Srebrenica, because there was a safe area under U.N. supervision and the U.N. itself didn't protect the people. So, 30 years later, these people have the nerve to come and deliver messages from afar. The population is still so devastated, [inaudible] and say, well, I will not let you rewrite it. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, it's important in and of itself to talk about that massacre in Bosnia, but also to underscore how universalized your human rights focus has been. It's not like you just focus on Israel and Palestine, other than the job that you have. But let me ask you about the specific job that you have, because I think a lot of people don't understand the function generally of U.N. Rapporteurs, but also the specific function that you serve as the U.N. Rapporteur for Palestine, for the occupiers of Palestine. So, can you talk about what it is that your job at the U.N. as an official is intended to be, both generally and specifically, in your case? 

Francesca Albanese: United Nations special rapporteurs are experts of the United Nations, appointed by the Human Rights Council to serve for a term of three or six years, in my case, documenting and supporting given human rights situations. It can be thematic issues like reporting on the state of the right to food, the prevention of torture, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. There are also a number of mandates that have a country focus, for example, Iran, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the occupied Palestinian territories. So, my responsibility as per the resolution that created this mandate is to document, report and investigate reported violations of international law committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory. 

Is it an obsession to focus on Israel? Not really, because when the mandate was created, the Palestinian authorities, or whatever people think that the Palestinians have, were not even in existence. And so Israel was and still remains the occupying power ruling through a brutal regime of oppression and apartheid over the Palestinians and this is why this mandate is still in function. I would be the happiest to be the last special Rapporteur in the occupied Palestinian territories and see the end of the forever occupation, apartheid, and justice for the genocide that is still ongoing.  

G. Greenwald: One of the reasons why you're even more in the news this week than you often are is because the U.S. State Department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that there were going to be a whole variety of sanctions directed at you for your criticisms essentially of Israel, which is your job at the U.N., and I want to get into a lot of the other reprisals that you face, but I want to just focus on this for the moment because it's new. 

It struck me, and I'm wondering whether it also struck you as important, that the last thing you did as rapporteur before being sanctioned was the publication of this report detailing the role that key U.S. tech companies such as Google and Amazon and others play in providing the IDF with technology, with intelligence, with all kinds of instruments and weapons that they use in their destruction of Gaza. Can you talk a little bit about what this report was and whether you think that it was the proximate cause or the last straw before sanctions were imposed on you? 

Francesca Albanese: Yes, my last report is the outcome of an investigation that started about eight months ago and has led me to collect information through various sources, submissions, investigative journalists, forensic experts, economists, civil society scholars, lawyers; about 1,000 entities that operate in the occupied Palestinian territory as private sector, which includes a broad range of entities, from arms manufacturers, tech companies, construction machinery-related companies, like producing anything from bulldozers, or anything to build the infrastructure from water grids to roads and rails, until banks, pension funds, supply chain companies, and universities. 

I've realized by looking at this puzzle and organizing all the elements, that Israel has maintained what had already been called by many economists and scholars an economy of the occupation. I have realized that each sector and various companies for sectors, advancing the displacement and replacement of the Palestinians. For example, to take control of their land and emptying it of Palestinians, Israel has used weapons, bulldozers and other machines, it has used surveillance technology to segregate the Palestinians and make sure that their life would grow increasingly constrained to the benefit of the expansion of the colonies, in which, meanwhile, there would be the realization of the second pillar of the Israeli economy, the replacement of the Palestinians through the construction on their land of colonies, water grid, electricity grid and rails, roads, and then the installation of companies to produce and sell goods from dates to wines to beauty products from the Dead Sea, etc. Then, there would be a network to sell these products. 

But all of these would not have been possible without the enablers – banks, pension funds, and other providers of financial resources, and universities and other institutions, charities – lending legitimacy to Israel. Israel's economy is inseparable from that of the occupation. 

So, my report says, first and foremost, we need to stop this fiction of there is a good Israel within the Green Line and a bad Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory because when everything is so ingrained, all the more now that there are proceedings against Israel for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and in the last 20 months, and this is the last point [inaudible] the facts without bothering the legal framework, is that while the Israeli economy was nosediving in many respects in free fall and Israelis were losing jobs and livelihoods, the Israeli stock exchange kept on rising, amassing $220 billion, which means an increase of +170%. How is it possible? It’s because there have been companies that have profited from the escalation of violence and the genocidal violence in Gaza.

For example, the companies in particular, arms manufacturers. Israel has sophisticated, perfected, even changed and made its weapons more lethal, which have been provided through these companies directly or through member states like the United States, Germany, and others. But also Israel wouldn't have been able to do that without the banks that, at the moment of great crisis, increased deficit and fall of the credit rating, like credit trust, in that case, it's been the banks and other financial institutions intervening to supply Israel with all the resources it needed. And meanwhile, all the other companies, which should have disengaged decades ago, have continued to stay engaged and provide tools that have allowed not just Israel to continue the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank, but that have contributed to the extrajudicial killings and other genocidal acts, including the pulverization of Gaza. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, and I should note that it has often been the case that these kinds of sustained occupations and massacres have often used the nation's industries as a tool for doing so. Obviously, Nazi Germany relied on it to a great extent, but many others as well. 

But I guess one of the things I'm trying to get at is that, in the United States government's mind, these companies, Apple, Google, Amazon, Palantir and others, are kind of the crowning jewel of American power. They're very integrated into the U.S. military, the U.S. intelligence community. They provide a lot of money to a lot of politicians in Washington. And you have been the target of extreme criticism from the Trump administration, even before that, from the Biden administration. And it seems like these sanctions came right as your report was issued implicating these companies in this ethnic cleansing and genocide, and I'm wondering if you think that was what provoked these sanctions. 

Francesca Albanese: Look, first, let me tell for the benefit of your audience, that by no means would I like people to think that this is an exhaustive list. My report contains reference to 48 entities, 60, if we could see, there are also the parents, subsidiaries, franchisees and licensees, but this is not the list, this is just a set of cases which are illustrative of an overall criminal endeavor. All these companies have been put on notice. I gave them time to check the facts that were contested. I have prepared a tailored legal analysis for each company telling them all the violations they were taking part of by the very fact, according to international law, of engaging in a situation which is as unlawful as the one that Israel maintains in the occupied Palestinian territory – that the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to dismantle, totally and unconditionally, dismantle the settlements, withdraw the troops and stop exploiting Palestinian natural resources, stop practicing racial discrimination and apartheid. This is the decision of the ICJ. 

In the face of this, in the face of criminal proceedings, in the face of proceedings for genocide, companies, entities that have stayed engaged have at least contributed not just to the violation of the self-determination of the Palestinian people and the perpetual occupation that Israel maintains on their land, but also other ancillary violations by being directly linked, contributing to, and even in certain cases, causing the human rights violations. 

Some of these violations, like extracting from the quarries in the West Bank as a German Heidelberg company has done, can amount to pillage. So, I've put everyone on notice from Booking.com, Google, Amazon, Palantir, Elbit. They could have responded. Some of them have: a small number, 18. The others have completely ignored my facts, all of my facts and legal analysis. 

The thing is that, you see, Glenn, my report has not been challenged substantively. It has given rise to a hurricane of aggravated violence against me, which is not new. I'm not new to this constant smear, defamation and reputational damage from the United States, which is unacceptable because I'm just a legal expert serving pro bono the United Nations. The U.S., as a member of the United Nations, should respect my work, should engage with my work, instead of engaging in senseless attacks. But all the more it's clear what is happening here. I've touched a nerve, a nerve that resonates with the Palestinians, that alerts consumers, that may ignite litigation, civil suits, and other criminal proceedings against these companies. 

Besides this, people understand that there is a direct link between the laboratory that Palestine has become at the end of decades of experimentation of all sorts of military, surveillance and other techniques by Israel that then have been marketed handsomely for, again, for decades and sold to all dictatorships first and foremost and many states as we speak. But also, people make a link between the profits that companies like Amazon or Airbnb make, including in the context of a genocide, and the profits that these companies make in our own system in Europe and elsewhere. So, these companies have become rights holders without corresponding obligation; it is the usual operating outside the law for those who detain power, where multinationals today hold more power than states and therefore more power than us. 

I understand why, Glenn, universities have cracked down so harshly on students, because the students have been the ones exposing their complicity with the military industry, their complicities with Israeli apartheid. The university realized, like the Technical University of Munich, that probably losing this partnership will cause its bankruptcy. So it was better to go harsh on the students. And this is what has led probably the United States administration to conclude that I'm a threat to a global economy because I'm provoking an awakening that has not been there before, through the tragedy of the Palestinians. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, so often the worst attacks on someone come not when they lie, but when they tell the truth, the truth that people want most to hide and I think that's happened repeatedly in our case. And I do think it's worth noting that there are very few people who have been the target of just a more systemic, organized, official smear campaign over the last almost two years now than you have been. I don't mean comments online, I mean very coordinated attacks from multiple governments led by Israel, led by the United States and now you have these sanctions. I don't know if you're under legal constraints in terms of what you can say about them, but can you talk to whatever extent you can about the effects that these sanctions are likely to have on you, your life, your finances, your travel, anything else? 

Francesca Albanese: Glenn, honestly, it's not even about legal restraints, is that, believe it or not, I've had very brief conversations both with my family and my legal advisors, because I've been busy traveling across Slovenia and now Bosnia. I need to pause and look at this. I need to let it sink in, because my reflex as a lawyer is the 1946 Convention on Private Privileges and Immunities prohibits the United States from doing what it's doing and would make total sense for me to start advocating so, a member state, any member state take the United States before the International Court of Justice because enough with this mafia-style, intimidation techniques. This is unsustainable, not just for me, but for the system. We need to protect the multilateral arena. We will miss human rights very much when we don't have them anymore. 

However, I've not done it again, probably because I'm really coming to terms with this, which is huge, but also, I don't want to distract anyone from member states to civil society from our priority, which is to stop the genocide in Gaza. 

I mean, yesterday, yes, I woke up to the news of the sanctions. I mean, I had heard about that and then I read the night before and then I needed to get some time to realize what it was. But then I had my cup of tea, I had my shower, I spoke with my kids and went on with my life. Well, again, dozens and dozens of Palestinians were killed yesterday alone. And this is every day in Gaza. People are being starved. I'm so exhausted to see the bodies of dying kids, starving kids in the arms of their moms. It's something that we cannot tolerate, we cannot, and I don't know what kind of monstrosity has infected all of us.

Right now, Glenn, what member states should be doing, especially those in the Mediterranean area, should send their navies with doctors, nurses, and real humanitarian aid, food, baby formula, medicines, everything that is needed for the Palestinians to overcome the current difficulty. It's a tragedy. And that thing that people call the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a death trap. And I do see the criminality in it. It looks like a joint criminal enterprise. And this must stop. So this is my priority. And no, I'm not even thinking of the sanctions and impact that they will have on me. This is the state I am in right now. 

G. Greenwald: I think a lot of people share your horror and almost the inability to express it in words at this point, anymore, not just what's happening there, but the way in which the world is not just standing by, but much of the Western world is funding and arming and enabling it. 

I just have a last question out of respect for your time, I know you have limited time because you're traveling. I do think it's so important that you mention that your background is in human rights law. That's when everything is steeped in. You're not talking out of ideology or politics, let alone antisemitism or anything else that you're accused of. And you used two words to describe Israel and what's happening, which is apartheid and genocide. And you're by far not the only person to use those words. High level Israeli officials have called what the Israeli treatment of Palestinians are as apartheid. Huge numbers of Israeli genocide experts have used genocide as the word. But, as somebody with the legal background and the international law background that you have, how do you understand those two terms briefly, and why do you think they apply to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians – apartheid and genocide? 

Francesca Albanese: Look, Palestine for me has been such a learning environment also to connect the dots and break the walls or the silos that contain the legal knowledge. You know that in our field, you have specialized human rights lawyers or international humanitarian law experts or genocide experts. Well, Palestine allows you in real time to understand it all.

Taking the land and the resources from people, forcibly displace them, this is the essence of settler colonialism. Israel has used as other settler colonial endeavors, think of South Africa, but also think of Algeria, think of other places where colonialism has been accompanied by the transfer of civilians from the metropolis from another place by apartheid. Apartheid is an institutionalized system of racial segregation entailing inhumane acts and we cannot claim that we have had a system in the history of settler colonialism that was not apartheid. South Africa has given us the term apartheid, but apartheid is everywhere. There is a legal dualism that then reflects in policy and practices in a given country, place, state among citizens, distinguishing them and separating them according to racial lines. And Israel does it. It does it inside Israel, because Palestinians have Israeli citizenship, but they have less rights, but it does so, especially in the occupied Palestinian territory. Israeli settlers have been under Israeli civil law and Palestinians are under Israeli military rule, military orders, draconian military orders written by soldiers, enforced by soldiers and reviewed in military courts, including for children. By soldiers. 

Genocide, I've realized throughout history, genocide is the intentional destruction of a group as such in its essence and can take place through acts of killing, but not exclusively. There are genocides that have been committed exclusively through creating the conditions of life calculated to destroy and also the separation of children, but also another act of genocide is the severe bodily and mental harm. And I would like to see who today can keep on claiming, I mean, anyone with a grain of decency, that what happens is not a genocide. 

However, settler colonialism carries inside the dormant gene of genocide in its legal sense, which is a very restrictive sense, because genocide as it has been conceived also includes cultural elements which are not protected under the definition of the crime. And look, eventually from Srebrenica and from Sarajevo, I can tell you it takes time. There will be one day where everyone, as an illustrious Palestinian writer has said, everyone will have been against it. Tonight, it's very heavy to carry this responsibility together with many others, like Amnesty International, the Palestinians, first and foremost, Israeli scholars who have denounced the genocide. It's very hard to carry this responsibility of chroniclers of the genocide, who are also trying to stop it with all their might and here we are, facing sanctions because of this. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, well, I had the opportunity to tell you privately, personally, I'm going to tell you again that I think the work you're doing is incredibly courageous. It merits immense amounts of respect and admiration. I know you're not doing it for that reason, but the fact that you're facing so many reprisals and attacks, I think, is a testament to the efficacy of your work, and I don't even need to say I hope you keep going because I know that you will. And we will certainly continue to follow anything that's being done to you, but also the work that you're doing and we hope to talk to you again. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today. 

Francesca Albanese: Thank you, Glenn. May I add something? I would not be me if I didn't do that. It's true that these sanctions hit hard, but I would also spend one second to reflect on and to thank all those who have stood against this, have spoken against this, from special procedures inside the U.N., U.N. officials and the European Union and so many others, so many scholars, organizations, this is incredible. And so, it seems that while, yes, there are chosen victims of constant attacks and defamation, there is also a society that through this constant victimization, which is first and foremost of the Palestinians, not myself, but are waking up and I hope that this awakening will soon allow us to stand together and united against the monstrosity of our time. Thank you very much for having me and the respect and admiration is absolutely mutual Glenn. Thank you. 

G. Greenwald: Thank you, really appreciate it. 

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We are always excited to do the Q&A session where we get questions from our Locals members that we do our best to answer in depth and as many as we can on our Friday night Q&A show. As usual, there's a wide range of questions that have been asked, always quite probing, starting with @Estimarpet who asked:

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We did a whole show on Trump's condemnation of Brazil for its attacks on free speech, which we have repeatedly documented, as well as what he regards as this persecution of the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who faces multiple criminal charges and had already been declared ineligible to run in 2026 and 2030. There is a criminal charge against him for planning or conspiring to implement a coup to prevent Lula from returning to power after he won the 2022 election. It was a coup plan that was never actually done, but they claim that he participated in conspiring and plotting that and it's before the Supreme Court, a five-judge panel on the Supreme Court. 

Bolsonaro’s conviction is basically inevitable, given who the judges are, including Alexandre de Moraes, who's made it his personal mission in life to destroy the Bolsonaro movement through censorship and imprisonment, as well as Lula's personal attorney, who defended Lula when he was facing corruption charges, who then Lula put on the Supreme Court, and also Lula’s Justice Minister who was very loyal to Lula and Lula also put him on the Supreme Court. So, there are three judges right there who it's almost impossible to imagine that they would ever exonerate Bolsonaro and he's likely to face prison time. As a result of his conviction, Lula himself, of course was in prison for one year and eight months for an 11-year corruption conviction that he received that was nullified to allow him to run in 2022, with the reporting we did about the corruption of the anti-corruption probe as the pretext, but it was really because the Supreme Court wanted him released, knowing that he was the only person who could beat Bolsonaro when he ran for a re-election. And Lula did win that election by a tiny margin. 

Trump first issued a statement condemning Brazil for its persecution of Bolsonaro, for its attacks on free speech, and Lula, was hosting the BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which seems to be what really caught Trump's attention on Brazil: he hates BRICS. He regards it as what it is, which is an anti-American competitor. I don't mean anti-American in a malicious sense. I just mean they're there to form an alternative alliance to American hegemony. He said it's anti-American, that it needs to be attacked and any country associated with it will be subject to sanctions. 

Lula then basically came out and said, “This is beneath the dignity of any world leader to threaten countries on social media; it really doesn't deserve a reply.” But he basically waved the flag of sovereignty, saying, “Trump needs to realize the world has changed. We don't want an emperor. We don't have emperors anymore.” And then in response, Trump the next day announced 50% tariff on Brazil, higher than on any country thus far, which he justified based on both an appeal to individual rights and Bolsonaro's political rights, but also a claim that Brazil has been practicing unfair trade practices, even though the U.S. has a multibillion-dollar surplus with Brazil. The U.S. doesn't have a trade deficit with Brazil, but a multibillion-dollar surplus, but Trump has to invoke that rationale as well to justify the tariffs.

Lula immediately, and I think predictably, seized on this announcement in order to wave the banner of sovereignty, to say the only people who should decide Brazil's internal affairs are Brazilians. “We're a sovereign country. We're not going to be threatened or dictated to by some other country.” 

There's some lingering resentment about the role the United States has played in Brazil as the massive superpower in the region. Brazil is the second-largest country in the hemisphere. Brazil has always been very important. In 1964, the CIA perceived that the elected government of Brazil was leaning a little bit too far to the left and this was the Cold War, when any left-wing policies were viewed as aligning with Moscow and communists. The Kennedy administration warned the elected Brazilian president that things like rent control or land distribution were unacceptable to Washington. When he continued, based on sovereignty arguments, to pursue those policies on which he ran, during the Johnson administration, the CIA worked with right-wing generals in Brazil to engineer a military coup that overthrew the elected government and imposed a military dictatorship that governed Brazil with an iron fist for the next 21 years. So, anything about U.S. interference in Brazil still resonates with huge numbers of people.

The U.S. is a crucial commercial trading partner with Brazil. The U.S. does sell a lot to Brazil, but Brazil sells a huge amount to the U.S., second only to China in the amount of their exports. They have commodities like coffee, they have equipment for aviation, they have a lot of oil, and other things that the U.S. can't produce and has been buying it in very large amounts, and obviously, 50% tariffs are going to make it much more difficult to sell in the U.S. market. You can just buy those same products from some other country that's not subject to 50% tariffs. 

There's a lot of concern inside Brazil that this is going to impose economic suffering on Brazilians, which it likely will. And there is a big part of the media that hates Bolsonaro. Lula and the government want to blame this on Bolsonaro and they have a reasonable foundation to blame Bolsonaro for this, which is that Bolsonaro's allies, including Jair Bolsonaro's son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who's a member of Congress, an elected member of Congress, a few months ago announced a leave of absence from the Brazilian Congress and he's in the United States, where he's been working with members of Congress and the executive branch. What they really wanted were sanctions imposed on the notorious member of the Supreme Court, Alexandre de Moraes, who has been overseeing the censorship scheme. The argument is they're censoring not just Brazilian companies but American companies. Rumble is not allowed in Brazil because of its refusal to accept censorship orders. X was banned from Brazil for more than a month. When X didn't have assets in Brazil to pay the fines, Moraes just ordered that money be seized from Starlink’s accounts to pay for X fines on the grounds that they're both associated with Elon Musk, even though they're different corporations. So, there have been a lot of abuses. 

Moraes is also now overseeing the trial. He's overseeing investigation and then the trial of Bolsonaro and many Bolsonaro officials and associates as well. He wants to imprison them. So the Bolsonaro family was hoping to get personal sanctions imposed on Moraes and others on the Supreme Court and in the government, and all these sanctions were approved by all the relevant agencies, including the State Department, by Marco Rubio. Instead, Trump, at the last minute, decided he wanted to have a more flamboyant gesture, something he thought was even more punishing than sanctions, which was a 50% tariff on Brazil. 

Sanctions are targeted against very specific officials and can really make their life difficult – I mean, as we discussed with Francesca Albanese, the sanctions on her can affect their use of credit cards, their bank accounts and their ability to transfer assets. It's all based on the dollars, the reserve currency. It's one of the reasons why BRICS and a lot of other countries are working hard to overthrow the dollar as the reserve currency, because of the massive power it gives the United States to do things like sanctioning people they dislike, who defy it, countries they dislike and defy it. But that would have hurt only the officials. No one would have really cared. They would have still waived the sovereignty banner, but since most people aren't affected by it, it wouldn't have had much political weight. 

The group was not really asking for tariffs. That's what Trump decided to do. And Bolsonaro and associates can't really object or criticize Trump since that was Trump's intervention nominally on behalf of Bolsonaro. I really think Trump was more motivated by a desire to punish Brazil for BRICS, but he did it under the banner of defending Bolsonaro's political rights and persecution, defending free speech in Brazil that has been largely directed at Bolsonaro. 

So, there was no way for Bolsonaro's movement to object to what Trump did. They couldn't denounce Trump. He's one of their most important allies. But it's not really what they wanted, precisely because there's now a good argument to make that, because of Bolsonaro's activism, asking Trump to punish Brazil on his behalf, whatever economic suffering accrues in Brazil now will be the fault of Bolsonaro and his movement. And you have the massive media organizations like Globo and other massive organizations. They've always been dominant in Brazil. They were allies of the dictatorship for a long time, wherever power is. They've become less powerful because of the internet, which is why there's so much focus on Brazil censoring the internet. Globo itself is a big supporter of that. But still, they wield a lot of influence and they've been just nonstop bombarding the airwaves about Trump's attack on Brazil, his invasion of their sovereignty, how Brazilians have to unify under the Brazilian flag in the name of Brazilian sovereignty. 

It's a human instinct to defend one’s tribe. It's the same if a country gets attacked by an external force, no matter how much they hate the government, people are going to unify in the name of their tribe, in the name of their country. We saw that in Iran, where a lot of people who had been vehement opponents of the Iranian government suddenly lined up behind it against Israel because Israel was bombarding their country. We saw it after 9/11 when 50% of the country hated George W. Bush, thought he stole the 2000 election and after 9/11, his approval rating skyrocketed to 90%. When a country is attacked by an external power, nothing unifies the people behind the government more and Lula has become quite unpopular, his government is quite unpopular. He's now in his third term, not consecutive, but third term, running for a fourth term. He'll be 80 next year when he runs for reelection. So, asking the people to make him president until he's 84 years old. He's definitely a very vulnerable incumbent. And they believe, and I think most politicians would believe, that this can be employed against not just Trump, but his allies, the Bolsonaro movement, who they're going to claim engineered this in order to convince people that they should unite behind Lula, who's defending Brazilian sovereignty, the right of Brazil to determine its own affairs. 

What the Brazilian government seems to be banging on, and its allies in the media, of which there are many, is that well, no, in this case, it won't be Lula who will be blamed for the economic suffering that results from these terrorists, but they'll be able to successfully blame it on Bolsonaro and his movement for having induced it, asked Trump for it, etc. I’m not convinced of that at all. I mean, I get that that's the overwhelming media narrative now, and might be for the next couple of weeks, but economic deprivation over the next, say, 14 months until the 2026 election, 15 months, is going to be much more diffuse than that. It's not going to have this proximity to the story. And there's already a pretty widespread unpopularity toward Lula for a whole bunch of reasons, including economic suffering. And I guess it remains to be seen what political effects this will have. 

I do think there are a lot of other things worth asking here about why the United States and Trump. Why is it their place to dictate to other countries what kind of human rights or freedom of expression protections they're supposed to have? Can't help but notice that Trump loves a lot of countries far more dictatorial than the Brazilian government, no matter how authoritarian you think Brazil has become, and I think it has become quite authoritarian. It's kind of difficult to watch Trump herald the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, and then suddenly be like, “Oh, we're punishing Brazil because we're so offended by their lawfare and their attacks on free speech.” When you're in bed with and love some of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet, which has been U.S. foreign policy forever, there’s a lot of stuff like that, to say nothing of Trump's own free speech attacks on people who criticize Israel and the like. 

But as far as the political question is concerned, I'm sure there's going to be a rallying around the flag effect. There is already, I think you can see that, at least at the elite level, kind of among the middle class. But that's a lot different than saying that 15 months from now people are massively out of jobs or paying higher prices, suffering inflation, that they're still going to remember to somehow blame Bolsonaro for that, who hasn't been in power for four years, might even be in prison by then, as opposed to blaming Lula's government. I think they're being a little too clever. 

I certainly know very smart people here in Brazil who believe it's going to help the Lula government, not just now, but for the long term. I guess we'll see. With these kinds of things, the political effects of things, I think it's always very difficult to predict with precision. You have to understand how people think, what information they're consuming. I think we've seen in a lot of democracies, certainly including the U.S., that elite opinion no longer dictates the opinion of the masses. And I think similar dynamics are at play in Brazil. 

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All right., next question is @ButchieOD: 

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I know there are people who think this is not a very important story. Maybe I think it's a more important story because as I think most of you know, I follow tennis very closely. I always have. I play a lot of tennis. It's sort of a sport that I value, that I respect. But I also think even if that's not the case, we don't care about tennis, which is fine, a lot of people don't, it's still an interesting story about how the billionaire mind works and how billionaire power is exerted. 

So, the gist of the story is this: Bill Ackman is a multibillionaire, vulture, finance person who does things like talks down American stocks and then short sells them. He's made billions of dollars not by producing anything of value just by manipulating numbers like Wall Street does oftentimes harming the country. This is where his wealth comes from. He's not Jeff Bezos, who at least produced Amazon and for all the criticism of him, he actually produced something that people use. That's not Bill Ackman. 

Bill Ackman is not only a multibillionaire, but he’s also become particularly more prominent in the last couple of years because he's a fanatical supporter of Israel. He led the campaign to make lists of students at colleges, I'm talking about undergraduates, 18 to 22-year-olds who signed petitions or letters condemning Israel for its war on Gaza. He organized a blacklist of major finance firms and venture capital firms and Wall Street banks and major law firms to agree that they would refuse to hire anyone who is on these lists, trying to make them jobless, basically, for the crime of criticizing a foreign country for which he has great affection, to put it generously, toward which he has supreme loyalty, to put more accurately. And he actually is a tennis fan. He plays a lot of tennis as well. He follows tennis. He actually pours money into professional tennis and he goes to a lot of tournaments. It's just one of the things he likes to do as a billionaire. But he went far beyond that. 

This week, there was an actual professional tournament. It wasn't a ProAm where amateurs come and get to play with pros the way they have in golf sometimes. It was an actual ATP tournament where professional tennis players go. To make matters worse, it's held at the Tennis Hall of Fame. It's supposed to be like sacred ground. The Hall of Fame is there to kind of preserve the most sacred moments in tennis, to honor the people who have achieved the most by admitting them into the Hall of Fame. They have one tournament every year, that's a professional ATP-level tournament, but right before that, in Houston, Rhode Island, in Newport, they have an APT Challenger event, which is kind of like the minor league, sort of like analogous to Triple A in baseball, where it's the kind of up-and-coming players. They're not among the 100 best, but they're kind of in the top 200 or 300. Extremely good. I mean, if you're the 200th best tennis player on the planet, you're extremely good. It's what you do for your work. But a lot of these are younger players, they come from poor countries, they have trouble sustaining themselves economically, and these kinds of tournaments are what they play in to earn some money, but also to make their way up the rankings. It's a serious professional tennis tournament, with a lot at stake for a lot of people. 

Somehow, Bill Ackman wormed his way into having the tournament accept his entry to play as though he were a professional tennis player. It was doubles. He was playing with a doubles partner. And this doubles partner used to be a big tennis star, Jack Sock. He hasn't actually played. He retired from tennis. He now plays pickleball. He's very good. He's a great doubles player. He's won Grand Slam titles in doubles. I'm sure he was paid. He didn't just show up out of benevolence and nobody knows what exactly the arrangement was that induced this tournament to degrade itself by allowing Bill Ackman at the age of 59 to play. But they did, and it was a professional doubles match.  

And Bill Ackman's like a decent player. He is somebody who plays at a tennis club. I'm sure he's taken lessons from some of the best pros. When you have unlimited money, I'm sure that's what he's done. But he's not impressive at all in his tennis abilities. To say nothing of the fact that he's 59 years old. These are all 23-year-olds, 26-year-olds, like the most precisely trained athletes on the planet. And there was Ackman on a court taking somebody else's position and his level of play was so abysmal, so pathetic, I mean, just like, taking balls that are so easy to return and just smacking them into the net or well out of the court, many, many feet out of court, constantly double faulting, couldn't even get a serve in, that for whatever reasons, and I think it's interesting to ask why, the three other players on the quarter who are professionals started to like baby him. They were kind of just hitting the softest balls possible directly to him to try to help him avoid embarrassment, to stroke his ego. I don't know what their motives were, I don't know why they didn't just say, if he wants to play, let him play and we'll smash balls at his face the way they would do to anybody else. So the whole thing ended up being a complete joke. I mean, it just made a complete mockery, a farce out of a professional tennis match. 

Again, if you don't care about tennis, maybe that doesn't bother you. Everybody who cares about tennis was disgusted by this, was horrified by it. It would kind of be like if the triple-A team of the Seattle Mariners, which is the minor league team right below the major leagues – where people who are about to get into the major league are trying to show their skills to get into the major leagues of baseball, people who have spent their whole lives playing baseball, learning baseball, training baseball, they get to that professional level – it'd be like if the Seattle Mariners announced, “Oh, we're going to have one of our starting pitchers be Bill Gates at the age of 63 because he loves baseball.” Never played professionally, just kind of likes to throw the ball around and they just put Bill Gates on the mound in the middle of a real sanctioned Major League Baseball game, just because he's a billionaire and greased whatever wheels he greased and then he just kind of got up there, pawed it up there, couldn't throw the ball to the catcher, like made everything a joke. 

Obviously, the fact that Bill Ackman is a billionaire makes it all the more tawdry, because obviously, there's a lot to do with his vast wealth and the power that comes with it that he exploited to put himself into that position. Just imagine that narcissism, and the need for ego gratification, that you have to have to subject yourself to that. So here's some video of Bill Ackman, I guess. You could call it playing. He's the one dressed in all white. So you can recognize him in just like a series of, not just errors, everybody makes errors when they play tennis, even Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic or Serena Williams, but just like the kind of errors that no pro would ever make, just not even one of them, let alone all of them. 

Video. Bill Ackman. 

You see, the players were laughing in his face. Having watched a good part of this match, I can tell you this was not cherry-picked; this was very illustrative and it was shocking to watch. As I said, everyone in tennis, former players, current players, tennis writers, tennis journalists, column after column, were expressing sickness, disgust and rage. 

Leaving the tennis part aside, we talked about this on the last show, actually, when somebody asked about Peter Thiel's interview with Ross Douthat, where Peter Thiel basically said, when asked if he believes in the continuation or survival of humanity, he had a great deal of difficulty answering yes, and kind of resorted to this deranged transhumanistic vision, at most, that he was willing to say, yes, I think humanity should survive, but in radically altered form. And we talked then about the mentality of billionaires, and I've never had anything to do with billionaires until maybe, I don't know, a decade ago, a little bit more. My first real experience was when I founded The Intercept with Pierre Omidyar, the multibillionaire founder of eBay, who ended up buying PayPal. Honestly, Pierre Omidyar, as billionaires go, is as good as it gets: he kind of withdrew from Silicon Valley, moved his family away from Silicon Valley to an isolated place in Hawaii just so his kids would grow up more normally. He did have like a few years where he was a little bit in the spotlight because he was funding media outlets like The Intercept and other groups, but he's kind of retreated since. He tries to be as humble as possible, but I noticed from the beginning, we knew we purposely formed The Intercept with people who were as anti-authoritarian as possible who were as undeferential to prestige and position as power, and just automatically he would walk in the room – and just like kind of the power and wealth that he has; it's not just wealth, it's wealth that is larger than what small nations have and the amount of power that comes with that – I just watched people naturally become almost sycophantic around him and he was always the center of attention. And of course, he comes with a big team of yes-men and sycophants who are just constantly flattering and bolstering everybody that he has. Like I said, he's as good as it gets. He tries to create a more normal, natural environment, but it's impossible. When you have that level of wealth, multiple 747 jets that you and your family constantly fly on, just buying whatever you want and influencing nations because of your wealth, it does distort the human mind. And if you listen to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel and, to some extent, Elon Musk, they talk about themselves as kind of like the Übermensch, to use a Nietzschean term, like this kind of species of humans that have evolved beyond normal humanity, almost to like a TD type figure. 

That's how they see themselves, that's how other people see them, and so every idea that enters their head, every thought that emanates from their mouth, is constantly subject to reinforcement and flattery, and they believe in their own genius, they believe in their power to do essentially everything. Even though, so many of them, as I've described before – I've gotten to know many more than Pierre – are mediocre or, like, at best, they have an Idiot Savant skill, some coding thing that they were able to create, something and they created it at the right time or might even get like managers of a business. But none of that remotely means they have wisdom or insight about philosophy, science, or political issues, the way they attribute to themselves. They believe they're kind of just all floating – Übermensch, is the best way I can describe it. 

To put yourself in such an embarrassing position where you become the focus of attention in the most negative way possible, where at the age of almost 60, who never even got close to a level of professional tennis, you decide that you're going to insinuate yourself into a professional match, take someone else's position that, like I said, that could have had that position to earn money and rankings, and just believe that you deserve to be on that court, that you belong on that court, the hubris of it – I don't know if you ever noticed, but every time Bill Ackman posts a tweet, it can't be just a tweet. It's like a proclamation, like a dissertation, extremely edited and has the language of a decree. That's the byproduct of self-importance that comes from being a billionaire. He really believes that every utterance, every desire, has to be immediately honored. It's kind of like people who get massive fame and wealth at a very young age, child stars and the like, or heirs to fortunes. Almost always, it is extremely corrupting of mental health, of the ability to understand and relate to the world, to think of yourself in some kind of like remotely humble way. 

Watching Bill Ackman just try to glorify himself as a professional tennis player, have this fantasy and use my wealth to make it a reality in front of everybody... He did have to write a tweet where he kind of swallowed a lot of the criticism. Heather Crowe was very humble and said, "Oh, I'm so much better a player than this usually, but I just couldn't. I was too nervous. My arm didn't work. I couldn't breathe. I was suffused with anxiety and neurosis." It is a real professional tournament. They should have said no. I mean, they want to build tennis as a real sport. It's the fourth-largest sport in the world. And again, it would be like Bill Gates stumbling onto the field and being like, yeah, I want to be the quarterback for a quarter in an NFL game. It's like, the NFL would never allow that. No one would, I mean, it would be the most pathetic thing to watch. That's what this was. And again, even if you don't care about tennis, I think billionaire wealth and the billionaire mindset are really worth understanding. And this gives a pretty vibrant look inside that very, very toxic swamp. 

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Speaking of toxic swamps, we have a question from @QuillDagg. He's not the toxic swamp! It's a question about Sam Harris. And it reads this:

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All right, so some of you may remember this, some may not know, but when I was at The Guardian, and this was April 2013, it was like three months before the Snowden reporting began, I wrote an article on Sam Harris because this is when the new atheist movement was kind of at its peak. 

I didn't pay a lot of attention to it. Atheism is not anything that's ever bothered me. I used to identify as an atheist when I was young. I only don't know now, because I believe in not some organized religious concept of a god, like a Christian god, or a Muslim god, or a Jewish god, whatever, but just in forces larger than ourselves that play a role in how the universe unfolds. But it became a very popular, especially online, but even offline, a popular movement which had a huge following. 

They called themselves the “Four Horsemen,” the four leaders of this movement: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. There's a gigantic following, and in Sam Harris's case, it wasn't just an expression of religious conviction or atheistic advocacy. He commandeered it for blatantly political ends. Sam Harris is Jewish, and he, you'd think, as an atheist, would have contempt for religions equally. And he very conspicuously had contempt for one religion, in particular, you’ll never guess which one: Islam. He also had harsh criticism for Christianity, like Christopher Hitchens did and Richard Dawkins did, and he had very, very, very, conspicuously few criticisms of Judaism. 

But also, it just so happened that all of his political views perfectly aligned with the kind of views someone would have if they were devoted to Israel. Namely, he was a big supporter of the War on Terror. He used to write articles like the Huffington Post, like “Are there good justifications for torture?” clearly intending to remove the taboo for torture, but since he never came out and said I'm pro-torture, just saying here's all the reasons why torture might be justified, if you said “Oh, he wrote a pro-torture article,” he says: “How dare you distort what I said?” 

But everything about U.S. foreign policy from a neocon perspective, Sam Harris was commandeering his supposed new atheism to fuel, and he did it from this position, like, I'm a liberal. My new atheism comes from my liberalism. I hate Islam because it doesn't respect women's rights and gay rights, etc., etc. And it commandeered a lot of liberals into this political agenda; the atheism was kind of like the candy offered at the playground. But the politics were what happened once you lure the kid into the car. And so many liberals thought they were being taught this like very rational, anti-tribalist philosophy, when in fact, at least from Sam Harris' perspective, nothing could have been more tribalistic. 

And he had a podcast about why I don't criticize Israel. But hey, wow, what a coincidence. Here you have a state explicitly constructed around religious identity, the Jewish state, or ethnic tribes that are adjacent to religious identity, Judaism, like the living embodiment of what you're supposed to be against, if you take anything that you're saying seriously. And he'd always talk about the IDF as the most moral army in the world, he talked about why he doesn't criticize Israel and he would somehow try to reconcile his support for Israel. Again, an ethno-religious state based on the supremacy of one particular sectarian faction, Jews, with his posturing as someone who's so rising above it, just a vessel of objectivity, no allegiance to tribe or religious identity or identity politics. He hates all that and yet, noticeably not only would refrain from criticizing Judaism and Israel, even if it was bashing particularly Islam, but Christianity as well, but every other view that he had about bombing, about enemies, it all aligned with what you would expect a standard neocon to believe in and to disseminate and defend. 

Writing this article, I kind of dissected what were the obvious inconsistencies in the new ideas movement as expressed at least by Sam Harris and for suggesting that what he was saying was his worldview was not his worldview, it was a facade in disguise to mask what the real worldview was, that was actually the exact opposite of what he claiming he was, Sam Harris went on a jihad against me that lasted years. Actually, to this day, when my name comes up, he'll just explode and I'm the worst person ever to exist in media. I mean, he pretty much has that with every single person who disagrees with him. He once went on Ezra Klein's podcast, the most anodyne, restrained person in media, practically, tries very hard never to engage in vituperative exchanges or harsh criticism, unlike myself, and he came out of that accusing Ezra, kind of criticizing him in bad faith, distorting all his words. 

And this went on for years with him, just because of that one article. And obviously, I repeatedly defended my views of Sam Harris. But at some point, I just decided he really wasn't worth it any longer. I said what I had to say. He just continued to go on so many shows. You can find him talking about me for years and years and years for that. 

So, Sam Harris has lost a lot of his following. But not all of it. He mostly became this sort of obsessively anti-Trump and obsessively pro-establishment, which didn't surprise me in the least. He was contemptuous of anybody questioning any of the orthodoxies around COVID. He despises Trump. He turned against all the Silicon Valley friends that he used to have, including Elon, as well as people like Joe Rogan, because they were questioning establishment dogma or not seeing Trump as Hitler the way he saw them. 

He had one very notorious clip in 2020, after it became obvious that the media had lied by saying the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, and he basically said, “I consider Trump so blatantly evil and so inferior morally and ethically to Democrats that the most important thing is to stop him. And if that means that somebody lied to do it, I really am not bothered by it. I think it's justifiable. The means justify the end of destroying Trump.” Of course, he denies that's what he said. Everybody can listen to the video. It's exactly what he said. 

As a result, he's lost a big part of his following because even though he claimed to be a liberal, a lot of them were right-wing, a lot of them were just mostly motivated by his contempt for Islam. At one point, he was on Bill Maher with Ben Affleck, who attacked him, quite eloquently actually. But Sam said something like Islam is the mother of all bad ideas. He's supposed to be an atheist, supposed to have contempt for all religions, but no, Islam, for by a huge coincidence, happened to be the one that Sam Harris hated most. A lot of people who were anti-Muslim more than they were anything else found him very appealing. 

Coincidentally, he comes from an extremely wealthy family. His mother was the creator, showrunner and screenwriter of multiple successful shows, including The Golden Girls and Soap – and by the way, Soap is actually a very risqué, but, I thought, very good show in the late 1970s, early 1980s, way ahead of its time. But it's discovered Bill Kristol. Anyway, he comes from a very wealthy, prominent family as well. He kind of has that mindset and the last thing I'll say before showing you this video, which kind of is him finally confessing who he really is, in a way that was just so satisfied to watch him do, is that somehow he's also like, in the intervals, where he's not like screaming at everybody and expressing grievances toward everybody and accusing everybody of being a bad faith attacker of him and spewing contempt for everybody and being filled with resentment and grievance, he somehow also presents himself as a meditation guru. 

He does these videos where he teaches people how to breathe and relax and expel tension and stay in the present. I'm a big believer in meditation and yoga, I believe it, but I've never honestly heard anything less relaxing in my life than Sam Harris' voice. Like even when he's telling you “close your eyes,” “release all tension,” “focus on your breathing,” his voice still sounds so filled with hatred and resentment and anger and grievance that I can't imagine anyone relaxing in any way by listening to Sam Harris' voice. I mean, I don't know. I'd rather listen to Laura Loomer talking about Israel and Palestine to relax than listen to Sam Harris telling me how to breathe. But anyway, there are a lot of people who listen to his meditation videos as well. 

So here's a YouTube show called JewishUncensored, which appears on YouTube. It's hosted by an Orthodox Jew who's an extreme supporter of Israel as well. And he basically says, “Hey, guys, I want to show you Sam Harris talking about Israel and Zionism, because it's remarkable to hear him saying what he says here. Listen to this. 

Video. Sam Harris, JewishUncensored, YouTube. July 6, 2025.

Out of bullshit, you could not say that before October 7, he was not a Zionist. He never once expressed opposition to Zionism and, in fact, he realizes that that claim was totally baseless. And he goes on to describe what he actually said and thought about Israel and Zionism before October 7. Remember, he just said, “I think one of the biggest plagues of the world is sectarianism.” Israel is nothing but, whether you love it or not, a sectarian state. It's called the Jewish state. That's what Zionism is. It guarantees the supremacy of Jews within the state. You cannot reconcile love of Israel and support for Zionism, on the one hand, with your view that sectarianism is the greatest evil on the other. They're completely antithetical. He's basically saying, I believe sectarianism is the great evil, except I have exceptions for my principles, that's called Israel and Zionism. Shockingly, that just so happens to be my own group for which I've made an exception, but it's totally coincidental. I'm extremely objective. I rise above tribalism's pure coincidence. 

He's now trying to suggest, oh, I was an anti-Zionist before October 7, October 7 showed me the virgin. He was always a Zionist. And he even says it right there. He just claims, back then, “I was kind of reluctant.” Like, I hesitated. I realized that it was a complete contradiction of everything I pretended to believe in. But I nonetheless defended it, but with reluctance. 

“The seeming contradiction,” it's just for you idiots out there, for you intellectual mediocre, it may seem like it's a contradiction on the one hand to go around accusing everybody of destroying humanity because of sectarian allegiances, and then at the same time defending a state of Israel based on a philosophy, a new philosophy called Zionism, that's nothing other than a country formed based on sectarian identity and sectarian allegiance. And sectarian superiority. It may seem like there's a contradiction there, to you idiots, even though I think more deeply, so I understand why it's not a contradiction. And then he goes on for this. 

For a long time, in conservative discourse, even more in centrist discourse, there grew a lot of frustration and ultimately contempt for victimhood narratives. Black people saying, “We've been uniquely victimized, so we deserve these special protections,” Latinos saying, “We're uniquely victimize, we have to migrate, we deserve the special protections,” women saying they've been uniquely victimized throughout the ages and they deserve special protections, gay people, trans people, Muslims, all of whom have a version of history based in some truth that they faced extreme amounts of discrimination, oppression and other forms of bigotry and therefore merit special protection. 

We seem to have arrived at this consensus, especially after the excesses of Me Too and the Black Lives Matter movement, that we've gone way too far in that direction. A lot of these historic bigotries and repression aren't nearly as strong as they've been. They've made a lot of progress from them. There's still lingering effects of them, but we've made allot of progress and maybe the best way to move forward isn't to keep reinforcing them by dividing everybody up into groups and treating them differently based on their race or gender, sexual identity, or religion, or instead, just say, you know what, we're all actually the same, and we're going to work to make sure the treatment of everybody is the same but not endlessly treat people differently by emphasizing their divisions based on these demographic characteristics. That was certainly a unifying view of the right, without doubt. 

And yet, so many people claim that Sam Harris is one of them. Or like, you know what? There's one group and only one group that has a meritorious claim to that self-victimhood defense and that just so happens to be Jews, which a lot of people, creating that exception, happen to be, coincidentally. Like, hey, you know what? I can't stand victimhood narratives for any other group. It's totally whiny and snowflake behavior, all fabricated. It’s time to buckle up and stop being so frightened and demanding safety with your little blanket and your therapy dogs. But my group, that's the real one that's discriminating against. 

So that's what you heard the host of the show say. It's like, yes, Sam Harris is finally realizing, everybody hates us. That guy hates us, that guy hates us, antisemitism is everywhere and we, alone, are entitled to form sectarian allegiance based on our sectarian religious identity. Nobody else is, but we are. And Sam Harris is Jewish, he was raised Jewish, and he wants you to believe it's a coincidence that he's finally at the point in middle age where he's willing to admit every principle that I've said that I have, every principle in which I've built my career, every principle that supposedly defined my brand, that made me rich, that created a huge following ring, I want you to know I subordinate all of these principles, I have a huge exception to all of them called Israel and Zionism. 

I'll tell you one of the things I hate most about Sam Harris, the reason why I believe he deserves a particular level of disgust. I can have a certain baseline respect for people who have whatever views they have, even if I find them repellent, who are honest about those views, who don't hide them, who don't pretend that they have an agenda that's different from their actual agenda, whose expressed values and beliefs are actually their values and beliefs, and they're willing to stand up and defend it. Sam Harris is one of the most blatant, brazen frauds ever to present himself as a public intellectual. 

I mean, as I said 12 years ago, I wrote that article based on exposing this entire sham that what Sam Harris claimed his driving force was had nothing to do with his actual agenda or his set of beliefs. And it was the fact that he would deny that – and not just deny it, but accuse anybody who saw it, of being a liar, a bad faith fabulist, someone deliberately distorting his so-clear words because what he feared the most was having people understand what his real agenda was. He's just a standard Jewish neocon who loves Israel and forms his worldview based on that, which is fine.  There are a lot of people in every group who do that. There are people who are Black, who form their worldview based on their membership as a Black person, who see the world through the historical victimhood of Black people or women who do that, or gay people who do, or Muslim people, that's fine, that is in every group. But it was his constant, endless insistence that there's no tribalism to him, there's no sectarianism to him, he hates those things, he rises above it, he's just an objective atheist that lured so many people into his little web. Then, once they got there, they were fed something completely different than what had been promised. And here he is finally admitting it. 

I really think that the person that you should be most wary of is not a person with one particular ideology or the other. Obviously, there are a lot of people who are honest about their views and I find those views repellent but the person I find meriting the most amount of legitimate contempt, disrespect, and discredit are those who are too cowardly to admit what they really think or too conniving and manipulative to admit it. And Sam Harris is the vintage case of somebody who's all of those things. And to watch him just so casually admit that everything he's been saying for his whole life is a huge fraud because he has a gigantic exception to all of it, based on special prerogatives and rights that extend to his group, but to no other, as discussing as it is, it is kind of cathartic as well to have forever Sam Harris's agenda laid bare for all of the world to see in his own words. 

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