Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
One Year Later, Biden Fails to Unite the World Against Russia. Plus, Week in Review with Michael Tracey
Video Transcript: System Update #46
February 28, 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 Friday, Febraury 24, 2023. Watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to the podcast on Spotify

It is the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the decision by the U.S. and its NATO allies to treat the war as its own proxy war, with the U.S. alone appropriating more than $100 billion thus far and counting – almost twice the entire annual Russian military budget – and sending so many weapons to that war zone that America's own weapons stockpiles are dangerously depleted. For months we heard from the media outlets aligned with the U.S. Security State that Joe Biden, with great diplomatic adeptness, had united the entire world against Russia and behind the United States in support of Ukraine. 

Yet – and I know this will shock many of you – these media claims were false and propagandistic from the start. Major newspapers around the world this week, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, acknowledged finally the far different reality: that the world is deeply divided and most of the world refuses to join Biden's call for unity in support of his war policies in that country. The reasons for this are complex and revealing, and we'll spend some time analyzing what accounts for Biden's diplomatic failure. 

Then, as we do regularly on our Friday evening show, we will welcome the independent journalist Michael Tracey to analyze the Week in Review. Michael is currently in Munich, where he spent the week at the annual Munich Security Conference, where –needless to say – the war in Ukraine dominated. We'll talk to him about what he observed, as well as a variety of other news events from this week, including an amazing Wall Street Journal article on how more than half of American colleges – more than half – now have a formal “snitch system” that allows – and encourages – students to anonymously report one another for using “biased” words and reading “problematic” texts. Many of these systems began as a way for students to turn each other in for violations of the university's very rigid COVID-era rules on masks. 

As a reminder, our episodes of System Update are now available on Spotify, Apple and other major podcasting platforms, the day after the show airs, live, here on Rumble. And so, for those of you who want to support the show or listen to podcast form, you can follow us on any of those platforms. It helps boost the visibility of our program. 

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


MONOLOGUE

 

So today is the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine, or at least the part of the war in Ukraine that began when Russia invaded with a very large army on February 24 of last year. The war in Ukraine has actually been raging for at least eight years, ever since 2014, when Victoria Nuland - who seems to end up in charge of Ukraine for the United States no matter which party wins the election - got caught on tape essentially selecting who would be the new president of Ukraine. And there has been a war of independence being waged in the eastern provinces of Ukraine, which don't want to be subject to the rule of a pro-Western, pro-EU government that the United States and NATO played a very large role in ushering in. 

And we've spent a lot of time on this show reporting over the last year, on my written journalism and on the program since we launched, on the events of that war in Ukraine, always trying to ask the same fundamental question, which is why is it that the United States government, if its perspective and priority is helping to improve the lives of the American people, has sent over $100 billion to the war in Ukraine, which is almost double the entire Russian military budget each year – Russia spends almost half on the entire military, its own military, of what the United States has allocated just for that one part of the world. Russia spends 1/15 not even of what the United States spends on its own military. And the question always is how it improves the lives of the American people for the United States government to be engaged in a proxy war over who will rule regions in Eastern Ukraine, or whether those provinces will decide that they want to be independent or subject to the rule of Moscow. We've been asking that question for a full year and we have honestly never heard an answer. 

So instead of revisiting all of that, I want to focus instead for tonight on one specific propagandistic framework that was fed to us from the very beginning of the war, namely that Joe Biden had essentially succeeded in uniting the entire world or the international community behind the United States in support of Ukraine and against Russia – that Russia has been isolated, it has barely any allies, its economy is going to collapse and everyone is on the side of the United States; and NATO, believing that we are on the side of right. They too want to see Ukraine succeed and Russia fail and that was what we were told for months. 

This is something that happens in every war. We are always told that the international community supports the United States and its foreign policy. And there's a fairly amusing chart that has been circulated for decades about what the international community actually means. You can see it here. 

 

 

This is what is genuinely referred to as the international community: the United States and Canada, tiny parts of Western Europe and Austria, Australia and New Zealand, and perhaps Japan. And then, sometimes, you can add into that mix whatever tiny little countries the United States succeeds in bribing in order to be on their side. Remember the coalition of the willing that supported the United States’ invasion of Iraq, which included such world powers as the Marshall Islands? Because sometimes whoever happens to be on board with the United States foreign policy also gets included, but only on an ad hoc basis, in the international community. This is what the international community really means when the United States media – and the U.S. Security State does the same thing – talk about the international community and how the international community is united behind the United States. 

Something very odd happened, though, this week, which is that the two largest newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of which have been steadfastly supportive of Joe Biden's war policy in Ukraine, both ran very detailed and emphatic articles making clear that that is a propagandistic fairy tale, that the world is nowhere near united behind the United States effort to isolate Russia and support Ukraine. Quite the contrary, the world is completely divided, that while there has been unity in the Native Alliance itself in Western Europe and then of course in Eastern Europe as well, which fears Russian domination, the rest of the world, the other continents that actually exist and matter, Latin America, South and Central America, Asia, Africa, many parts of those regions, in fact, the most important parts, are absolutely not in favor of the United States policy toward Ukraine, do not see the war that way at all, and for very interesting reasons have refused to get on board with the United States foreign policy in Ukraine for reasons that I think are really worth exploring. And I have to say that these two articles did, in some cases, quite a good job in detailing the true nature of how we've been deceived every time we've been hearing this fairy tale – often from these papers – and what the reality is, which is much different. 

Let's take a look at why these two newspapers or how these two newspapers revealed the truth - something they sometimes do - they kind of did it on the same day in the same way. And they were also joined in their effort by newspapers around the world, including the largest newspaper here in Brazil, that published an op-ed making very similar points. And I think it's important to see how the United States is viewed from outside of the United States. So often this propaganda that is fed to us – that the United States is in Ukraine because it wants to protect and spread democracy and vanquished tyranny, or because the United States is angry that a country like Russia has violated the sacred rules-based international order – is propaganda that really is for domestic consumption only. The only people who believe that are American media outlets and their employees and then the people who trust and pay attention to those media outlets, which thankfully is a rapidly diminishing number. But around the Western world, when you say those things, you provoke a global laughing fit, and I think that for very good reason. 

So, let's look at a couple of these articles. Here is the one in The New York Times. The headline tells the story in a pretty direct and blunt way “The West Tried To Isolate Russia. It Didn't Work.” 

Have you been hearing this from the media over the last year? I know I haven't. I've been hearing the opposite, that most of the world is united behind Joe Biden, that he has done such a great job diplomatically in keeping everyone on board behind our policy. The reality is much different. The New York Times reports,  

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the West formed what looked like an overwhelming global coalition. 141 countries supported a UN measure demanding that Russia unconditionally withdraw. But the West never won over as much of the world as it initially seemed (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023).  

And let me just interject here. I've never seen that way to me, you can go back and look at articles I was writing and interviews I was giving and even tweets I was posting pointing out that, in fact, as this article is about to point out, many of the most important countries, in fact, many of the largest countries on the planet and the leading democracies were very much opposed to the United States foreign policy in Ukraine and were refusing to join in. The Times says, 

Another 47 countries abstained or missed the vote, including India and China, [which, by the way, happened to be the two most populous countries on the planet.] Many of those “neutral nations” have since provided crucial economic or diplomatic support for Russia (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023).  

And here you see a graphic on the screen which The New York Times published. Essentially, it is the group of countries that abstained and the circles indicate their population size. And here you see China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which essentially are the world's largest democracies in terms of population, right after China. You can now add Brazil into this list as well, which is the sixth largest, most populous country in the world. We're not talking about small countries. They're talking about the largest countries, mostly everyone in the top 20 in terms of the population other than the United States and a couple of its Western allies have refused to join U.S. foreign policy or are actively opposed to it. The New York Times goes on, 

 

And even some of the nations that initially agreed to denounce Russia see the war as someone else's problem – and have since started moving toward a more neutral position (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023).  

 

Here's the chart that I was just talking about and here you see again some of the rationales for why these countries don't see this war as their war. As I've mentioned before, when Lula visited Washington last week, he met with Joe Biden, he was pressured as he was when the German chancellor visited Lula in Brazil to provide munitions to empower the German tanks that are headed toward the German to the Russian border. I don't think it's ever a good idea when German tanks head to the Russian border, but that's what's happening now. And Brazil and its leader said, well, a lot of countries are saying, which is “that’s your war, not ours”. Our war is not with Ukraine or Russia. Our war is to improve the lives of our citizenry. So, we're going to stay out of the war. That's what so many of these countries, including in Africa and, increasingly, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, have been saying. The Times goes on: 

 

A year on, it's becoming clearer: while the West’s core coalition remains remarkably solid [meaning NATO's and Europe’s] it never convinced the rest of the world to isolate Russia. And instead of cleaving in two, the world has fragmented. A vast middle sees Russia's invasion as primarily a European and American problem. Rather than view it as an existential threat, these countries are largely focused on protecting their own interests amid the economic and geopolitical upheaval caused by the invasion (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023).  

 

Why is the U.S. not focused on its own economic prosperity, its own economy and its own interests and the interests of its citizens like these other countries are? 

 

On Thursday, the UN General Assembly endorsed another resolution demanding that Russia withdraw from Ukraine's territory – but China, South Africa, India and many countries in the Global South continued to abstain, underlining their alienation from what they regard as the West's war.

 

A lot of world leaders don't particularly like the idea of one country invading another. But many of them aren't unhappy to see somebody stand up to the United States either. Throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East many governments with strong official ties to the United States and Europe don't see the war as a global threat. Instead, they've positioned themselves as neutral bystanders or arbiters, preserving as much flexibility as they can. 

 

Nearly half of the African countries abstained or were absent from the vote to condemn Russia, suggesting a growing reluctance in many nations to accept an American narrative of right and wrong. Russia has won friends through mindless propaganda [as though the U.S. does not use that] and hard power, with a growing number of countries contracting with Russian mercenaries and buying Russian weapons.

 

In South Africa, ties to Russia go back to Soviet support to end apartheid (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023).  

 

That was when the United States was supporting South African apartheid. The Soviet Union was opposed and now the black leaders of South Africa remember that and have greater allegiance to Russia than the U.S.

 

             Its leaders have seen an opportunity to align more closely with Russia while filling in trade gaps left by Europe and the United States. But like many other African countries, South Africa appears careful to balance its growing ties with Russia against maintaining a relationship with the West. Latin America, with its longstanding relationship with the United States, voted largely alongside its northern neighbor to contain Russia. But cracks have begun to show more prominently in recent months. 

 

             Colombia recently refused a request from the United States to provide weapons to Ukraine, and when visited by Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany last month, President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva of Brazil declined to speak in support of Ukraine, saying, “I think the reason for the war between Russia and Ukraine needs to be clearer” (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023). 

 

This is essentially laying out what I think is a very interesting dichotomy between countries that are looking at the war in Russia and Ukraine and asking what is the best way for us to promote the lives and material well-being of our own citizens. And the answer is by not involving ourselves in this war on the other side of the world, which has nothing to do with us. These countries are concluding that their citizens’ lives will not be improved nor undermined based on the fight over who gets to rule the Donbas. Why would South American leaders or Middle Eastern leaders or African leaders be willing to involve themselves in a war over that? And I think the same question is one that we ought to be asking of our own government. Why is that such an important question for us? Who rules various parts of eastern Ukraine or whether the people of those provinces choose to be independent? 

The Washington Post had an almost equally blunt assessment of Biden's failure to unite the world behind the United States and Ukraine, as the media kept claiming that it did. There you see the Post article from the same day, February 23. The headline is “A Global Divide on the Ukraine War is Deepening.” This is how they framed this:

Russia capitalizes on disillusionment with the United States to win sympathy in the Global South. 

Russia doesn't need to do anything to gain sympathy in the Global South.The Global South regards the United States with great suspicion because of its own experience with the United States. And when they hear this propaganda that the United States is there to fight for democracy, to vanquish tyranny, to support the rule-based international order that not only remember things like the invasion of Iraq, but also the instability and coups and dirty wars that the United States behind the CIA has often brought to those countries. And so, they think it's preposterous that the United States would claim that that's what they're doing in Ukraine. Again, only American media outlets and the people who listen to them believe that. This propaganda is for domestic consumption. 

The Washington Post article says, 

In the years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a reinvigorated Western alliance has rallied against Russia, forging what President Biden has trumpeted as a “global coalition”. Yet a closer look beyond the West suggests the world is far from united on the issues raised by the Ukraine war. 

 

The conflict has exposed a deep global divide and the limits of U.S. influence over a rapidly shifting world order. Evidence abounds that the effort to isolate Putin has failed, and not just among Russian allies that could be expected to back Moscow, such as China and Iran. India announced last week that its trade with Russia has grown by 400% since the invasion. In just the past six weeks, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been welcomed in nine countries in Africa and the Middle East – including South Africa, whose foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, hailed their meeting as “wonderful” and called South Africa and Russia “friends” (The Washington Post. Feb. 23, 2023). 

 

Conversations with people in South Africa, Kenya and India suggest a deeply

ambivalent view of the conflict, informed less by the question of whether Russia was wrong to invade than by current and historical grievances against the West – over colonialism, perceptions of arrogance and the West’s failure to devote as many resources to solving conflicts and human rights abuses in other parts of the world, such as the Palestinian territories, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

 

The Western countries “are hypocritical”, said Bhaskar Dutta, a clerk in Kolkata, India. “These people colonized the entire world. What Russia has done cannot be condoned, but at the same time you cannot blame them wholly” (The Washington Post. Feb. 23, 2023). 

 

 

That is a very common view outside the United States. The post goes on: 

 

This is not a battle between freedom and dictatorship, as Biden often suggests (The Washington Post. Feb. 23, 2023). 

 

Oh, my God. It's not? 

 

It's not a battle between freedom and dictatorship, as Biden often suggests, said William Gumede, who founded and heads the Johannesburg based Democracy Works Foundation, which promotes democracy in Africa. He pointed to the refusal of South Africa, India and Brazil to join Biden's global coalition. The reluctance, he said, is the outgrowth of more than a decade of building resentment against the United States and its allies, which have increasingly lost interest in addressing the problems of the Global South, he said. The coronavirus pandemic, when Western countries locked down and locked out other countries, and President Donald Trump's explicit disdain for Africa [always have to blame Trump] further fueled the resentment (The Washington Post. Feb. 23, 2023). 

 

So, these countries are doing what the United States government should be doing but isn't, which is asking, Why am I going to get involved in this war that has no bearing on the lives of my citizens? It's also because they understand that this fairy tale that the American citizenry is fed in every new war to garner support for their government's endless war posture is a joke, and they know that from their own experience. 

Just to give you an outsider's perspective, there is this article in the Brazilian newspaper Folha of Sao Paulo, it's the largest newspaper in the country – and just for full disclosure, I have now become a columnist with this paper. I just published a column once every other week in this newspaper – and it is an op-ed by a professor of history, Philippe Guerrero. And essentially he is making the same argument. We translated the headline in a key paragraph. It says, “Western Double Standards Explain Global South Apathy Towards The War.” He's saying the reason why the Global South refuses to support the United States is that the Global South and the rest of the world see the hypocrisy of the United States as a condemnation of Russia. “History makes obvious the contradictions between rhetoric and action by Americans and Europeans.” That's the subheadline. 

 

So let me just give you this little excerpt here before we bring on Michael Tracey. 

 

If in the Global North, Ukraine is winning the battle for hearts and minds, in the rest of the world the situation is different. While most nations in the Global South supported U.N. resolutions condemning the Russian invasion and the annexation of portions of Ukraine, this movement has stopped there. No adherence to the Western sanctions against Russia and even less economic or military support for Ukraine. Even if we set aside the elephant in the room – the illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003 […] (Folha de São Paulo. Feb. 23, 2023). 

 

Remember. that makes it kind of difficult for the same exact people that supported that war, like Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Queen of Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, all of whom supported that illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq, and now turn around to the world and say we are morally offended by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Nobody buys that. 

 

He goes on:

The balance is a history of systemic disrespect of international law. The UN charter is clear: unless in cases of self-defense, only the Security Council has the authority to authorize the use of military force (Folha de São Paulo. Feb. 23, 2023). 

 

That's the rules-based international order. Do you think the United States believes that? 

 

In spite of that, the U.S. and its allies and NATO, especially the UK and France, disrespected this rule numerous times in the last decade (Folha de São Paulo. Feb. 23, 2023). 

 

Remember, when they just decided to bomb Libya and remove Gaddafi? Where was the rules-based international order in that? Or the dirty war in Syria that's ongoing? 

The article goes on:

And all of that without taking into account the abuses of the self-defense principle by the U.S. in the context of the War on Terror, which would normalize the idea of preventative attacks against targets designated as “terrorists” in countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East with dramatic consequences. 

 

Facing so many double standards, how can one expect governments and societies in the Global South to unite dispassionately in support of Ukraine? It's for good reason that Western rhetoric, based on principles and morals, like the one that has dominated the discourse around this war sounds hypocritical and brings back the ghosts of a colonial past (Folha de São Paulo. Feb. 23, 2023). 

 

Now just to put that in context – we all know the long list of countries where the CIA during the Cold War and since has engineered coups overthrowing democratically-elected governments, all of which made all that sanctimony about Russia interfering in our sacred democracy in 2016 such a joke. When the U.S. interferes in the democracy of other countries, it does so through violent coups and destabilization regimes, not through a few Facebook and Twitter posts. Countries wish that was how the U.S. intervened. But Brazil is a country that doesn't get talked about much because they happened not to be among the most horrific invasions of the kind, for example, that was carried out in Chile or Indonesia or in Central America, where the United States supported all kinds of despots and truly brutal regimes. But in 1964, the Brazilians had a democratically elected center-left government that defied the warnings of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to cease being so left-wing and their economic policies, such as land reform and rent control. and because of their defiance, the CIA engineered a coup that overthrew Brazil's democratically elected government in 1964 and then proceeded to impose a 21-year brutal and savage military dictatorship that lasted until Brazil finally democratized in 1985. So, if you're a Brazilian and you hear the United States doling out lectures on the importance of the rule-based international order and the need to support democracy and vanquish tyranny, how do you think you're going to react? Having been on the other side of the reality of the United States foreign policy for so long, and not just the propaganda and the rhetoric that the U.S. media spreads on behalf of the CIA and the Pentagon, I think is such a crucial context. And it's good that a year into the war, the truth of what's happening is finally being revealed now. 

I want to show you a couple of videos that I want to watch with Michael Tracey, who I'm delighted has joined us for our typical Friday night gathering for the Week in Review. Michael is in Munich where he's been covering the Munich Security Conference. He has a lot of observations. He's filled with all kinds of energy and excitement to share those with you. 

 

G. Greenwald: Michael, welcome. Before we get into this, I just want to show you a video or two that kind of adds to the point and then get your reaction to all of this. How are you? Are you doing well? 

 

M. Tracey: I’ll have some popcorn and watch the videos. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, you can sit back, enjoy yourself, and have a little buttered popcorn if you want. They're kind of short, so you're going to have to shut your mouth very quickly. 

 

M. Tracey: I'm very good at that. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yes, I heard. I think I've seen the two before. I'm going to show you two short videos that both involve different members of the Pelosi family. Let's start with the elder Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi. Here she is on C-SPAN, talking about how much admiration, deep admiration, she has for George W. Bush. First, let's listen to what she said. 

 

(Video 00:33:44)

N. Pelosi: Once again, I'll just say this honestly, that the Bush family is […] 

 

G. Greenwald: … a little trouble with her notes there. She's kind of stumbling around. Let's hope she gets there. So, let's listen. 

 

N. Pelosi: Once again, I'll just say this honestly, that the Bush family is – because of their humanity, their faith, their generosity of spirit, their compassion [...] 

 

G. Greenwald: George W Bush – their humanity, their generosity of spirit and their compassion – George W Bush, who invaded Iraq and destroyed it, who instituted a worldwide torture regime, who created a due process free for a prison camp at Guantanamo Bay that 22 years later still has people in cages in the middle of an ocean who have never been charged with, let alone convicted, of a crime. This is Nancy Pelosi, heaping praise on the deep goodness and benevolence of this man whom liberals used to call a Nazi 20 years ago. Let's hear the rest. 

 

N. Pelosi: Once again, it's an honor to be associated with President Bush in this. He said this was his second time to be here. I've been here many, many times. So, I've been here with him 100% of the times he's been here, as we were both here for the groundbreaking when I was a speaker and he was president. So, let us again work for peace, work for justice. 

 

G. Greenwald: Just let us work for peace and work for justice, she said. 

Her daughter is Alexandra Pelosi and instead of like someone might do if they have a very famous mother, try in, you know, kind of forge your own path. She has done exactly the opposite. She uses the name Pelosi to make sure everyone knows she's Nancy Pelosi's daughter and she has built her entire career around her mother, up to the point of having just released a documentary about the greatness of her mom. And she went on “The View” to promote it. And she talked about the actual relationship between the Bush and the Pelosi families. Listen to what she said. 

 

(Video 00:35:54)
Alexandra Pelosi: I have been so, so depressed since this happened. And then, last week, I went to Washington to visit my old friend George H. W. Bush. I made a film about George W. Bush in 2000, and he's, I consider he was always a father figure to me [...] 

 

G. Greenwald: Just in case you thought you misheard that George W Bush has always been a father figure to Nancy Pelosi's daughter. 

 

Alexandra Pelosi: […] been very good to me in my life. Did she just call my Bush favorite? I don't. 

 

M. Tracey: Did she disclose that she viewed Bush as a father figure while Bush was actually president? 

 

G. Greenwald: No, no. That was back when they were accusing the Bushes of being a crime family going to war in Iraq in order to generate profits for the oil industry, of which the Bush family was a part. And Dick Cheney. Yeah. And they were constantly comparing George Bush to Hitler. Who knew that all along she considered the Hitler of that era to be her father figure? That seems to be pretty psychologically disturbing but listen to the rest. 

 

Alexandra Pelosi: […] I consider him as always, a father figure to me. He’s been very good to me in my life. He's one of my favorite people, right? And I may not agree with him politically, but he's always been a source of support and strength. And we were laughing about the fact that he invites my mother to events and one time I went to “A Thousand Points of Light”, a George Bush event in Texas, and one of the Bushes gets up and says “And now a great friend of the Bush family, Nancy Pelosi. And the crowd is like, wait, what you don't know about these relationships? But people, even though they disagree in public about certain things like the Iraq war – that Nancy Pelosi voted against, they had a lot of fights about it in public – but they're still – you saw them together last week, you would have thought […]

 

G. Greenwald: So, the reason, Michael, I wanted to add that to the articles that I just read about why nobody buys the U.S. propaganda is because what they're all kind of cackling about the fact that they fight in public is theater, but in reality, they're all part of the same, literally the same family, practically. And people have forgotten as well that Nancy Pelosi, in 2002 and 2003, was the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and therefore one of the members of the Gang of Eight, which gets very special, comprehensive briefings from the intelligence community. She was briefed on all of those War on Terror programs, including domestic spying on American citizens without warrants, the torture regime in Guantanamo, the due process for camps around the world, and the CIA black sites and approved all of them, never objected to any of it.

This is what the world understands and sees, that the entire American elite is actually united, that their fights are for the American public only. It's theater to pretend that there's some sort of grave difference between the establishment wings of both parties but, in reality, Nancy Pelosi, the liberal, reveres George W. Bush the supposed war criminal, because they all support the same policies. And that's why when they want to go around and say that they're there to fight for democracy and human rights, only certain sectors of the American public, including the American media, believe it. 

I know Nancy Pelosi was in Munich where you were. So why don't you share some of your thoughts on sort of this actual divide that the American media is now admitting exists in the world regarding Ukraine? 

 

M. Tracey: Yeah. I saw her staggering out of her car at one point, of course, I couldn't be allowed to approach her – very dangerous, potentially, because she might be actually asked a mildly skeptical question. But I did see her shivering in the cold of Munich and being guided into her next meeting for such affairs as being presented, as she was with a bracelet made of Ukrainian bullet casings. So, she proudly displayed that gift and talked about bipartisanship. Joni Ernst, the Republican senator, was also there and she had a big smile on her face, posing for a photo with a T[-shirt], with a stylized-like advertisement on it for F-16s to be deployed to Ukraine from the U.S. So that was the fashion style that was in vogue at the security conference with these, you know, sassy ladies. You know, one thought that […] 

 

G. Greenwald: Let me just interject there because I think it's just so interesting. So here you have this Munich conference, all over the world the war in Ukraine is being debated – most countries actually want no part of it. And then you have someone supposedly on the very liberal end of the Democratic Party, Nancy Pelosi, with somebody who's presumably a conservative Republican governor of Iowa, Joni Ernst. And on one of the most consequential and divisive questions that, as we just reviewed, is dividing the entire world, they could not be more united, as always. You can throw Marco Rubio and AOC into the mix, and you can throw Lindsey Graham and Bernie Sanders into the mix and there's absolutely no daylight of any kind between them. The American elite continues to be so united on all of these questions to the point that Joni Ernst and Nancy Pelosi are wearing clothing designed to express support for this war and, of course, the rest of the world sees that even if the American media doesn't. 

 

M. Tracey: You know who I even encountered at this Munich Security Conference periphery, in one of the restaurants that they all sort of retreated to huddle and have their slightly tipsy banter about what's the next weapon system to send over to the Donbas - Joe Lieberman was there. He was holding court. Joe Lieberman was supposedly primaried out of the Senate in 2006 because of this vast ideological distance that had emerged between him and his fellow Democrats, particularly on foreign policy.  You wouldn't believe what good spirits he was in with his fellow Democratic senators who were there. I saw him, he was like, hugging, [..] laughing and 100% on the same page with Pelosi okay? Here's one way to think of it. Even if you're of a mindset or if you have a worldview that is left-liberal, where you orient your priorities around these kinds of trendy cultural issues or political or ideology such as it exists – it is focused mainly on identity issues, whether it's gender, race, what have you – if you're of that mindset, well, there's plenty of fodder for you to dislike George W. Bush. George W. Bush and Karl Rove's schemes to propose a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage in 2004 to boost turnout among conservatives for Bush [...] 

 

G. Greenwald: And 2002 as well. That's how they won the midterm election. That was their strategy, too, to get out evangelical voters who were going to go and vote for things like that. That was their mastermind strategy. 

 

M. Tracey: Right. But that's not a deal breaker for Pelosi as much as she might in other circumstances posture her job [at the end] of LGBT rights. I'm not sure what [right] exactly she needs to be championed at the moment. But, nevertheless – but that tells you something because that's not a deal breaker for Pelosi, that Bush engaged in this, you know, anti-gay, homophobic, tyrannical past. But you know what would almost certainly [be a deal] breaker? If she and Bush diverged at all on this question of the Ukraine war, if there was a gulf on that issue, you can bet that she wouldn't be standing on stage wherever she was singing the praises of Bush as this [...] well,  leader and her daughter praising him as this father figure. 

 

G. Greenwald: This is, I think, such an important point. If you look at the people who were actually against the war in Ukraine – there are no people in the Democratic Party, as we know – but in the Republican Party, Matt Gaetz currently has a resolution pending to cut off funding for the war in Ukraine. I guess he thinks $100 billion is more than enough to spend on this country that the U.S. has no vital interest in. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been outspoken from the start. Donald Trump has been increasingly vocal about his opposition to this war. Ron DeSantis actually came out in a Fox interview and made clear that he thought that this open checkbook for [...] 

 

M. Tracey: Give me a break. That's a total nonsense line. Don't fall for that.

 

G. Greenwald: I'm just telling you, you can either judge a politician's views based on what they claim they believe and tell the public they believe and advocate for, or you can try and divine their internal thought process. But all I'm telling you is, as a result of taking that position, he got promptly attacked by establishment Republican outlets like The Bulwark - as you say, nothing is a deal breaker except this. So, people like Rand Paul, who in the beginning has been saying the same thing. These are the people who end up marginalized and cast out toward the fringes. And what it shows is Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio have a lot more in common with Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff than they do with the members of their own party who are opposed to the war in Ukraine. 

 

M. Tracey: Yeah. And just quickly, on DeSantis’ tweet, we don't have to get bogged down in this. I know you covered it this week. I wasn't trying to divine his motive. I just know that the same sort of furor was artificially whipped up when Kevin McCarthy, in September, ahead of the midterms, used the same term “blank check.” 

 

G. Greenwald: Did you see it? He said a lot more than that in that interview. We covered that last night. He didn't just say I'm against an open check. He said I think this idea that Russia is some grave threat to the United States is preposterous. The idea that they're going to go and start invading, in a domino theory, Poland and then Hungary and then Western Europe is ludicrous. They've clearly proven themselves to be a third-rate power. There's no reason we should be considering Russia to be a threat. He said way more than just ‘I'm against an open book’. But anyway, it was actually I was pleasantly surprised to hear him say that. My only point is, as you said, that is the way that you get ejected from the kind of litmus test, the admission ticket to be accepted by the Washington establishment, his support for this war in Ukraine.

Let me show you a statement that was bizarrely issued today out of nowhere by the FBI. I really don't understand why the FBI decided to have its own foreign policy statement. But here you see it. I don't know if you saw it on screen. I'm going to read it to you. It included the name of Christopher Wray, the FBI director, and it's an FBI official whatever, with their logo. And this is what he said, 

 

It has been one year since Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of its neighbor but the FBI has been working with our Ukrainian partners for years to battle Russian aggression there – and we aren't going anywhere. The FBI's commitment to Ukraine remains unwavering, and we will continue to stand against Russia at home and abroad (Feb. 24, 2023). 

 

So, this is the FBI kind of knowing that they're not. 

 

M. Tracey: (laughing) Is that real? 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, it's amazing. Like, what role does the FBI have to play in the war in Ukraine? But this is the admission ticket to gaining popularity. Look, the statement. It’s in blue and yellow, too. I'm not joking. It has a blue background and then the special letters that they want to emphasize are in yellow and the name, Christopher Wray, is also in yellow. So, you have the blue and yellow flag that's being subliminally waved by the FBI, because the FBI knows that they have a lot of problems with conservative voters and with conservative politicians and this is how they get to curry favor with at least the Republican establishment and the media – by declaring their support for Ukraine. 

 

M. Tracey: That's amazing. I hadn't seen that. I would certainly like to know where in the charter authorizes the bureau to have its own autonomous foreign policy, seemingly, where it's pledging to fight Russia as a matter of federal law enforcement. Of course, there are times when the FBI goes to track down a criminal abroad somewhere but just as a matter of geopolitics, it's seeming like it has declared that it's at war with Russia and standing with Ukraine, which, again, is sort of, if you think about what you would expect, the purview of a federal law enforcement agency. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, it just has such immense propaganda. 

Speaking of bipartisanship, this kind of bipartisan club that produces unity and consensus, there's no better example, I think, than Victoria Nuland, who amazingly stays in power no matter which party ends up winning. She was in the government when Bill Clinton was president and exercised a lot of influence. She then ended up as Dick Cheney's primary political advisor in the Iraq war. And you might think that that might have harmed her career, at least in Democratic circles but no, it did not. She immediately reappeared in the Obama administration, working at Hillary Clinton's State Department and then running Ukraine in John Kerry's State Department. The only thing that got her out of government was Donald Trump when she spent four years out of government when Trump was president. – this is why neocons hate Trump so much. And then Biden wins and she's right back, in Antony Blinken’s State Department, running Ukraine. 

And as you've been pointing out, Michael, you've been doing a lot of kind of historical digging over that era and finding that all of the people who are running this war in Ukraine, beginning, of course, with Joe Biden himself, were all people who are part of the club agitating for the invasion of Iraq as well. They never go away. They always remain in power, no matter how grievous their errors. What is it that you've been finding that you think is interesting about a lot of these connections that I think history has forgotten? 

 

M. Tracey: Yeah. I think the breadth of Nuland in Bush’s administration is not adequately understood because it wasn't just that she worked on the staff of the vice president's office when Dick Cheney obviously was the vice president. She was then the U.S. ambassador to NATO under Bush, during a very early period when the momentum around the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO at some points was beginning to jump. 

So, I just happened to come across a clipping today where, in 2005, Donald Rumsfeld. Remember him? 

 

G. Greenwald: I do. 

 

M. Tracey: Great guy. He went to attend some sort of bilateral U.S. Ukraine meeting under the auspices of NATO, if you mind, in the press photo that was taken from that event, who's sitting right by his side? Sure enough, it's Victoria Nuland. And it was there that Rumsfeld affirmed that the United States was in avowed support of Ukraine being on a track toward NATO membership. And so, you can see why somebody like Nuland wouldn't just be ‘incidentally’ invested in this Ukraine war because it was just something that happened to pop up on her agenda and she has this real steadfast dedication to upholding the rules based international order. No. There's a long-standing ideological project that undergirds her sort of fervor. This is another amazing one that I actually hadn’t known and I wonder if you did, talking about her being one of these advisers to Cheney. That's true. But before that, she was dispatched to NATO headquarters to lobby the native member states to provide logistical and operational support to the United States ahead of the invasion of Iraq. And this was in January of 2003. She was the one who was picked, among everybody in the Bush administration, she was the one who carried out the plans that were set forth by Paul Wolfowitz, who is – if you had to think of anyone who was like the ultimate neocon ideologue, who was the neocon’s brain, to the extent that they operate with a brain – that was Paul Wolfowitz. She was allocated by him to go and make this appeal to the other NATO countries to provide complementary support to the upcoming Iraq invasion. So, she played a crucial role in the actual formulation of the logistics that went into launching the invasion of Iraq – she didn't just support it. She was involved in effectuating it. 

 

G. Greenwald: No, she was critical of it. I mean, to do it, as was Anthony Blinken, by the way, as well. This is what I think is so important to understand. What has happened here is – if you look at all the policy, United States establishment, bipartisan policy over the last 20 years – you have these enormous systemic failures. The Iraq war is representative of just the broader wild excesses of the War on Terror – enormous amounts of money disappearing, all kinds of moral lines crossed; the war in Afghanistan, 20 years we were there, we walked out the very next day, the Taliban walked right back into power and accomplished nothing. Huge numbers of lives were lost. The entire thing was just a gigantic debacle from start to finish. 

And then, on the foreign policy front, obviously the most important event was the 2008 financial collapse, which was then managed. The aftermath was first by the Bush administration – by George Bush's then secretary of Treasury, who had come right from Goldman Sachs, which was Hank Paulson. Then, Obama comes in and carries out exactly the same policies as he did with Bush's War on Terror that he had vowed to uproot – Tim Geithner and that old crowd, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, all of those same people from Goldman Sachs in those same economic circles that saved the Wall Street tycoons who had caused the financial crisis at the expense of everybody else. So you have, you know, at the same time that that's happening, elite media institutions are collapsing. So, everything is unraveling in terms of American elite circles, people are distrusting in the most fundamental ways – the bipartisan consensus, the people who are running our country independent of the results of elections. And then, that has been the value of Donald Trump more than anything: they got to say, look, however much you dislike us, this is something, an evil we have never previously seen. This is essentially a Hitler-like figure, and we're going to unite to protect you from this actual evil threat that the likes of which we've never seen. Even though Trump was the first president in decades not to involve the U.S. in a new war, to say nothing of not doing things like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and torture and the financial collapse of 2008. 

And what this ended up doing is absolving all of these people of all of the crimes that they committed together and, as a result, they all are continuously in power. They're in power to this very day. The same group of people that gave you the Iraq war, based on lies; that gave you the abuses of the War on Terror; that gave you the 2008 financial crisis, they're telling you that they love each other. They're united, even though they were calling each other all kinds of names. They never believed them all along. They're part of that same club. As George Carlin said, it's a big club and you're not in it. And these people are. And they continue to exercise hegemonic rule over our politics with no accountability. 

Donald Trump was the most important thing that enabled them to do that. It's what ushered in again these neocons who had been somewhat discredited. The reason why Bill Kristol and David Frum are at The Atlantic and MSNBC and are being cheered by liberals. Nobody even thinks twice about the fact that the war in Ukraine is the byproduct of a Democratic senator, Joe Biden, who is the single most important Democratic senator supporting the war in Iraq when he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; Victoria Nuland, who just constantly appears among them all. It's this rotted establishment that everybody hates, and yet they were able to isolate Donald Trump and create this fairy tale that he was essentially the combination, the kind of unholy lovechild of Satan and Adolf Hitler. So that all you had to do is denounce Donald Trump and then immediately prove that you were on the good side of history and all of these people were able to rejuvenate their reputations and hold hands and remain in power and run the country, as they've been doing for the last 20 years, was such immense corruption and such immense failure. 

 

M. Tracey: Let me give you another layer of that. Okay? So, at this Munich Security Conference, they started giving out as one of their most valued awards –they have these awards that they give out to accomplish, like aspiring young professionals who want to be national security operatives and write policy papers about which country's government to overthrow next. And so, this big, new, heralded award that they bestow yearly now, just recently, is the “John McCain Award.” Okay. So that's on behalf of the entire Western security establishment. They believe that John McCain, the personage of John McCain, rest in peace, best represents the ideological or temperamental or whatever sensibility that they want to transmit by way of this annually bestowed award. 

And let's just think about what that actually indicates, right? Because hopefully there are at least some people viewing this who are old enough to remember when John McCain was actually in a position to be advocating foreign policy prescriptions, in 2008 – and we even talked about this on the show. I think what are the main things that the campaign running against McCain emphasized was that he was totally nuts in terms of just the seismic, world-altering hawkishness that he embodied. Right? And so, John McCain was an outlier to some degree, even, you know, during the Iraq war, before that, I mean, wants to bomb Iran – I think, you know, at one point when Mother Jones was still in somewhat opposition to this tendency, they tallied up all the countries that John McCain had suggested bombing over the course of his career. And it was like in the dozens […] 

 

G. Greenwald: He wanted to remove Assad from Syria. He was behind Obama's regime and really Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice's and Samantha Power's regime change war in Libya. Then he got Lindsey Graham behind him and eventually Marco Rubio and Joe Lieberman. I mean, these were the people who essentially – their entire careers were about nothing other than demanding every single conceivable war that benefited nobody other than a tiny sliver of American leads that impoverished the country, made it debt-ridden and you're right, he is the symbol of aspirational values. The thing to which American and Western leaders are supposed to aspire. And he really stands for nothing other than all of these wars that the United States has fought in the name of changing governments around the world that have immiserated the American population. 

 

M. Tracey: Yeah. And even going back to, you know, earlier in his career, you know, McCain was a die-hard advocate of all of Reagan's incursions and, you know, proxy wars […]

 

G. Greenwald: in Nicaragua, El Salvador and so forth.

 

M. Tracey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, think about this, okay? Remember during the Iraq war, when McCain was beating the war drums, even more bullishly than Bush at times, and Rumsfeld, to circle back, criticized old Europe, what he called old Europe, meaning Germany and France. Both France and Germany now have congealed into this same sort of fanatical war fever consensus in 2023, such that they're perfectly aligned now with the essence of what John McCain stood for. So, think about how bizarre that is to contemplate in terms of the scope and breadth of this new pro-war consensus that you could hardly have imagined. Not too long ago, I mean, Germany and France had been on the spectrum of the Western security establishment, where they would usually try to be at least nominally more conciliatory, or they'd be trying to push back somewhat on the more maximalist designs of like the U.S. or the U.K. or Poland or whatnot. Now, it's all the same blob of just total uninhibited aggression and they don't feel any discomfort at all with having, though, their current values, their current ideological fervor, represented in the personage of John McCain. 

 

G. Greenwald: No, I'm sure the head of the German Green Party or like the prime minister of Finland, their dream is to win the John McCain award. And, you know, the politics are very similar. We interviewed Sarah Wagenknecht, the head of the actual left-wing party in Germany called Die Linke, the left. And it's a very similar dynamic in France, in Germany, obviously here, in the United States, where the only opposition to these kinds of globalist or NATO-based wars come from the populist right and the populist left. In Germany, you have figures like her working in a coalition now with the Alternative for Deutschland, the party that used to be deemed kind of white supremacist, neo-Nazi group because they opposed the war. I found it super interesting. 

Michael, I'm interested to hear what you thought about that. The new prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, was widely deemed to be this new Mussolini figure. I remember just by virtue of mentioning her victory on Twitter, and I kind of did it in a somewhat mocking way about identity politics, by saying, Oh, she's become the first ever […]

 

M. Tracey: Well, you would never do that.  

 

G. Greenwald: No, I would never do that. I just don't know what happened to me on this particular day when I just started to trifle with something as important as identity politics. And I said something like, “Oh, the first ever female PM, she's broken the glass ceiling,” and they all, so easily provoked, started saying that I'm celebrating fascism and Nazism and she's the heir to Mussolini. All of that has disappeared. She's now in very good standing in Western security circles. I believe she's going to meet with Joe Biden soon. That narrative completely disappeared. You may have noticed, simply by virtue of her steadfast support for the war in Ukraine. So just like in the United States, although there's really no populous left to speak of in the United States where this comes from but you have to go to the populist right to hear from Trump and Matt Gaetz and, you know, Rand Paul and Marjorie Taylor Greene, opposition to the war. The same is true in Europe. But the entire center-left and center-right establishment of Europe, as you say, including in the countries that once kind of harbored contempt for neocons, like in France and Germany – where I remember one time I was in a security panel in Paris and I was on the panel with a French intelligence official who spoke with complete contempt in that very French way about, not the immorality, but just the stupidity of the war in Iraq and of neocons and how they sold fairy tales to the entire world. 

I think part of it is the Internet. We're all now feeding on the same propaganda. I also think that the United States is so culturally dominant that this narrative about Russia ended up infiltrating so many of these normal liberals in Europe that these governments were kind of forced to adopt this mode of aggression. And it's only populist politics that's trying to push back against some of this stuff and say this is kind of an insanity, this unified belief in not only nobility, but the strategic wisdom of these endless wars against, you know, Russia and whatever the new enemy of the day is. I saw that there was a panel apparently talking about removing the Iranian regime, which if the people of Iran want to do was fine, but they had the son of the Shah of Iran who was on the panel, somebody who hasn't been to Iran since he was eight years old when his father was forced to flee by the revolution. 

You know, that was like the classic vintage case of how the United States got blowback by overthrowing the government of Iran, replacing him with a brutal dictator in the Shah who was pro-Western and, of course, when the revolution happened, there were all kinds of anti-Americanism because of that. Now they're talking again about reinstalling Shah's son, somebody who hasn't even been to Iran in decades. You know, it's amazing that Europe has gone insane and is fully on board with this neoconservative consensus that dominates the establishment wings of both parties in the United States. 

 

M. Tracey: Well, I mean, just to clarify, it wasn't simply that this Munich Security Conference organization had the son of the Shah there for a panel. They invited him as the de facto representation for the Iranian state, because for the first time, the conference explicitly disinvited, effectively barred, actual representatives of the existing Iranian government, as well as the Russian government, also for the first time. You don't need to be proficient in rocket science to comprehend that that was a de facto endorsement by this Western security order of regime change in both those countries, at least as an aspiration.  

And it was stunning that this was actually being taken as a serious proposal.. He did this press tour where he describes this. He went around and personally lobbied all the countries’ delegations or whatever delegation said for external pressure to be applied on Iran specifically for the purpose of engineering regime change. And he plays coy about whether it's going to be him individually who takes over but, of course, that's the obvious, inescapable conclusion. 

Now, quickly on the Green Party of Germany, right? Okay. So, here's an anecdote. I mean, the Green Party of Germany is like almost the most emblematic example, maybe even more so than the Democratic Party in the U.S., of this total narrative shift to the point where you can't even figure out what principles it's tethered to anymore. 

 

G. Greenwald: They're total fanatics. 

 

M. Tracey: […] because the foreign minister within the coalition government headed by Scholz, and in Germany is this woman, Annalena Baerbock – I think that's how you pronounce it – who is the most ardent and has been since the war started, badgering Scholz to be more aggressive in deploying weapons, totally abolishing the entire foreign policy philosophy that Germany had been maintaining since World War II. So that's out the window, as we know. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, because it has generally been kind of a bad thing when Germany and Russia end up in antagonistic positions regarding wars.

 

M. Tracey: No big deal, all right?

So, there was a panel that they posted for this Russian opposition faction that I guess they're trying to cultivate and present as the rightful steward to the Russian state because they're essentially endorsing regime change in Russia as an aspiration. So, it's headed by Garry Kasparov, of course, people may know the chess grandmaster – who's also a full-time anti-Putin activist and ran for president of Russia in 2008 – although it's sort of weird what exactly happened there, I'm not sure. 

But on this panel, the point of this panel, it was with a couple of other people, including like the former richest man in Russia who was imprisoned by Putin, whom they were really casting as this, you know, saintly sort of reformer, even though he was like one of the oligarchs by a reputation for years and like had a private security force that would do that. I mean, it's a whole backstory. Right? But they were like trying to put this, you know, a noble sheen on him. But the point is that they were more or less in this panel calling for the only resolution to the conflict in Ukraine being ultimate, that's viable, being the removal of the current Russian government and the replacement with an entirely new system so that essentially the dissolution of the Russian Federation. And this guy stood up to ask the question, I didn't know who was at the time, but he said, “How can we convince our leaders to stop beating around the bush, to just come out and say and be loud and proud and demand, unfortunately, that we as a collective Western alliance are dead set up on imposing regime change in force? And it's a good thing and we should be confident in our advocacy of that. And I don't understand the reluctance on the part of some and I mean they know who this was. So I talked to him afterward, not his name. It turns out it's one of the most senior figures in the Green Party of Germany. He's not in office now. He was a senior official named Ralph Fuchs. You know, he was one of the most prominent figures associated with the party. And then he ran for a long time, like a kind of think tank, that's the central think tank tied to the party. So, like something like the Heritage Foundation with the Republican Party, but even more formalized. And yeah he was saying that Garry Kasparov and the people on that panel, as radical as Kasparov is in their desires for what ought to happen to Putin. This guy wanted him to be even more belligerently express and blunt and in-your-face. So, I mean, that's the Green Party […]. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. You know, and we're just a little overtime, normally I wouldn't care but I have to be on Tucker Carlson's show in a few minutes, to talk about Ukraine. But I just wanted to underscore that because one of the things that Sarah Wagenknecht said to me is that I, you know, it's a sort of thing that you think about when you live in a certain country but don't if you don't. She said, obviously, that Russia has very deep trauma over any signs of aggression emanating from Germany – because of those two kinds of very nasty things that happened in the 20th century with those two World Wars, including the second one of which there's real trauma – If you're sitting in Moscow and you hear about German tanks rolling up to your border – imagine hearing a member, the senior member of one of the parties that compose the German government calling for regime change in Russia, Germany calling for a war of regime change in Russia. This is madness.  

Now, just to conclude, Mike, I wanted to talk a little bit about – we're not going to have time but we'll follow up on this next week – the backdrop to all of this is the increasing levels of repression of free speech that are accompanying all of this. I've been doing a lot of reporting and we're going to devote a show next week to the fact that Brazil is about to – they're poised to become – the first country in the democratic world to implement the kinds of laws that exist in places like Saudi Arabia and Singapore and the United Arab Emirates that ban fake news that allowed the government to forcibly remove postings up online that they deem to be false and punish those who spread it, but will obviously immediately turn into the ability to prosecute dissidents on the grounds that they're spreading fake news. They're inviting other Brazilian leaders in journalism. Of course, the journalists are leading this effort. Europe is looking for laws like this as well. We know that they already made it illegal to platform Russian media outlets. And there's an article in the Wall Street Journal today that ties into that so well that 50% of American colleges now have a system that allows and encourages students to anonymously report one another to the faculty. 

There you see it on the screen. The headline was “Stanford Faculty Say Anonymous Student Bias Reports Threaten Free Speech”. They basically have a system that allows a student if they see – and this was provoked because one student saw another reading “Mein Kampf”, something that you kind of are supposed to do if you're studying history or just an interested person in the world – and reported that person for reading the wrong book. And a lot of these systems started to enable students to report other students that they didn't have their mask covered with their nose and just […] 

 

M. Tracey: I was just going to bring that up.

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. And that's where a lot of them began. But this whole climate is consuming the West, where not only are these insane policies proliferating, but the ability to dissent over them is becoming increasingly repressed, not through social stigma, but through formalized means of criminalizing and outlawing all sorts of dissent. You see it in academia, you see it in European institutions, and now you're going to see it in Brazilian law, this law that Brazil is about to pass under Lula's new government. They're looking at it as kind of the test case or the model of how the West and Western governments can seize the power to basically criminalize not just fake news itself, but those who spread it – deeply disturbing as these policies become even more fanatical. 

Michael, we do need to run. I have a cable show to appear on. It's not as big as the show I'm currently on. It's a show, though, that I do try and go on when I'm asked because I try and help the host out as he develops his own audience – Tucker Carlson – I should be on in about 10 minutes talking about Ukraine, but thanks so much for […]. 

 

M. Tracey: Can I have like 30 seconds? 

 

G. Greenwald: Go ahead. Go ahead. 

 

M. Tracey: Yeah. First of all, I'm a little surprised that Lula is instituting this measure because – I don't understand the subtleties as well as you but I would have thought that he would be a bit more skeptical of, like, the novelistic power of the state to regulate speech – didn't he criticized the Twitter banning Trump and so forth? It’s very instructive because I hadn't fully appreciated how granularly they engage in online censorship. If you pull up Twitter and you see you look at the interaction that you had or a president of the United States with somebody who's seen as like unacceptably pro-Russia, they actually go through and they censored individual tweets or even the full accounts and it pops up with a notification censored at the behest of the German government or something to that effect. 

 

G. Greenwald: The censorship regime that has taken hold in Brazil makes the U.S. and the EU look like bastions of liberty. We're going to do an entire show on it next week because this law is genuinely threatening not just to free speech in Brazil but to the entire democratic world. 

Michael, we got to go. I think if you heard that Skype call, that was Tucker's producers neurotically calling. Thanks so much, Michael, for taking the time. Great job reporting this week from Munich. We will talk. 

 

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Dear @ggreenwald_

Gazans protested against Hamas yesterday. This requires twice the bravery—one for the air missiles raining from the sky, and one for the bullets fired straight into their chests by Hamas.

I hope you are not surprised, and I hope you will be their voice. Because in a way, you never were, Glenn—even though some, like me, had asked you on Locals..


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AD_4nXfTDOfqLm1F8ErvHyoZWlUjmu7DV0mKa9IRJfylIjc0a3dBQYXb0YnBhH78mn58rZwhZQmWSqACZGJO65bFco-I7RPutVZkPIX4ye-EEhBoWaa9sbBiz1Gqm5BzAJ0qODhvghIjP3UlBF1n2usEFPc?key=8GjQGcqj-Yiuf-aRWCuZxnnb

Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of mass deportations of those who entered the United States illegally. They just sent 236 people to El Salvador – none of whom is from that country or has anything to do with that country – and they sent them to one of the world's worst and most repressive prisons. And all of this was done without any due process. A federal court already ordered that nobody be deported to El Salvador without a hearing, even ordering that any planes in the air on their way to El Salvador come back but the Trump Justice Department argued that the judge lacked any authority to issue such an order and thus ignored it. 

The United States government, President Trump, in his second term, just ordered a significant bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, which his National Security Advisor says will be a “sustained bombing campaign.” All of this was done without any Congressional approval, let alone any declaration of war. 

As the friend of the show, Michael Tracey, put it, when this new bombing campaign in Yemen was announced, “You will seldom lose money betting on bipartisan continuity in U.S. foreign policy.” 

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Some of you know the reason why I went into journalism and started writing about politics was principally in reaction to what I had perceived to be the grave assault on civil liberties and basic constitutional rights, carried out by the Bush-Cheney administration, in the name of the War on Terror. 

There were many components to what I thought were the attacks on free speech but one of the most significant, one of the most egregious, was that the president, very broadly, under Article II, claimed the right to exercise virtually unlimited power that no court and no one in Congress could limit what he did in his prosecution of the War on Terror. He could ignore congressional statutes as the Bush administration did when it came to spying on Americans and not even courts could issue orders that constrained him in any way. 

Essentially, the president has the full, untrammeled right to carry out whatever he decides is necessary and one of the specific steps that the Bush-Cheney administration did in fact carry out, beyond spying on Americans with no warrants, that I found very alarming was creating a prison camp off of what they thought was American soil in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in Guantánamo, part of Cuba, to create a prison where people were thrown into basically black holes simply because they were accused by the president or the administration of being terrorists – but never actually needing to prove the truth of those accusations. 

These people were imprisoned oftentimes for years based solely on the say-so of the administration. They had no opportunity to have lawyers, they had no opportunity to know what the accusations against them were and they had no opportunity to contest the charges and accusations that were lodged against them. 

When people like me would stand up and say, “How do you just throw people to a black hole for eternity without at least giving them an opportunity to show that they did nothing wrong or to contest the accusations that you're making against them?”, the Bush administration's argument was, “Oh, don't worry, don't worry. All the people we're putting in Guantánamo are terrorists, trust us. We've labeled them terrorists, and they're not just terrorists, but these are the worst of the worst terrorists”, in order to convince everybody not to care about what happened to them, to even be happy about the fact that they were being imprisoned for life with no due process of any kind. 

And it was only in 2008 when the Supreme Court said, under the Constitution, everybody under the power of the U.S. government has the right to habeas corpus, which is a right guaranteed by the Constitution, basically, to go into a court and say that you're being wrongfully detained. 

And once that happened, it turned out, and even the U.S. government admitted, that not a few people, but many of the people that were detained in Guantánamo, were actually guilty of nothing. They were innocent, we're unjustly accused and never had anything to do with any terrorist organizations. Sometimes people in their community would tattle on them because they had some grudge, and the U.S. military would then pick them up based on these gossipy accusations. Many times, it was a mistaken identity. And again, that's not just me saying that, that is the U.S. government admitting it, and that's why there had been a thousand people in Guantánamo, and now, 25 years later, there's fewer than 40, because the U.S. government ended up releasing them all, obviously because they believed they were not a threat and admitted that many of them were never a threat, which is always what will happen if you put power in the hands of any human to censor people, to punish people, to imprison people, they're often going to get it wrong. 

 And so, had the Supreme Court not ruled that Guantánamo detainees had the right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court and see the evidence against them, many of these innocent people would have been held for far more years than they were actually already held in Guantánamo. Some people were held there for 10 or 15 years of their lives and the U.S. government now acknowledges never had any involvement in a terrorist organization. 

 If you go to law school and study the Constitution, if you read the Bill of Rights, due process is central to everything. The idea that the government cannot punish people without giving them an opportunity for some process to know what the accusations are against them and to disprove them or contest them – and the Supreme Court said that even for non-citizens in Guantánamo because the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo was essentially under U.S. sovereignty and that anybody under U.S. sovereignty has the right to invoke the Bill of Rights, which is a document that restricts what the U.S. government can do to anybody. 

This is what we went over in the case of Mahmoud Khalil and the general effort to deport green card holders or visa holders from the United States based on their speech. They have the right to invoke the right of free protest, even though they're not U.S. citizens, which is 150 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence. But it's also true of people who aren't visa holders at all, who don't have any visas, who don't have any green cards, such as Guantánamo detainees. 

President Trump indeed campaigned on a promise to initiate a program of mass deportations against people who enter the United States illegally, who cross the border with no approval of the U.S. government, who have no visa, who have no green card, no legal right to be in the United States. Usually, what deportation means is that you take the person who's in your country illegally and you just send them back to the country of origin, whatever country of which they're a citizen. In that case, the stakes aren't that high. I mean, it is for some people who have been in the United States for a long time, but in general, the reason the public ratified that is that people believe that if you enter the United States illegally, the U.S. government has the right to send you back to your country. You don't go back to prison, you just go back to your country. 

What the Trump administration is now doing is much, much different than the way deportation is carried out. 

Here, from CNN, on February 4, 2025:

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The president of El Salvador has become a kind of darling of the international populist right. There's a lot of admiration for how he eliminated violent crime by just rounding up thousands and thousands and thousands of people and putting them into some of the most repressive prisons – again, rounding them up without much due process. There are obviously a lot of people in those prisons who are violent gang members who deserve to be locked up but some people don't deserve to be locked up, which is what happens when you put people in prison without due process. 

These prisons are designed to keep people forever. They are about the worst place you could want to be, anywhere in the world. There's a maximum-security prison in El Salvador that has been built for gang members who they call terrorists. That's about the worst place you can want to be. But the El Salvadoran president has been currying favor with the Trump administration and said, “If you need a place to send illegal immigrants when you're deporting them, we don't even care if they have anything to do with El Salvador, if they've ever been to El Salvador, if they're citizens of El Salvador, just send them back to us, we will put them into these very repressive prisons and just keep them there” and that's what the United States government under the Trump administration is now doing, not deporting these people in the normal course of deportation. They're not going back to their country of origin, even though in the case of say Venezuelans: the Venezuelan government has made it very clear they will take back all their deported illegal immigrants. They've been taking them back. We're not sending El Salvadorans back to El Salvador, we're sending Venezuelans to El Salvador or any other nationality that the U.S. government decides should be there. 

In other words, we're throwing them into a black hole for life without any charges against them, without any due process. We're knowingly imprisoning people for life with no due process.

 Everything that has been said about Trump in terms of his being a threat to democracy, an autocrat, an authoritarian and someone who intends to ignore the law and replace it with his will, has been predicated on the notion that Trump will abide by no limits. I watched Trump during the first term, repeatedly, when courts invalidated his actions as unconstitutional, observe those court orders. I watched as conservatives constantly ran into federal courts to invalidate Joe Biden's actions.; conservatives went into federal court for rulings that his pressure on social media companies to censor dissent was unconstitutional and that his cancelation of loan guarantees was unconstitutional. There was actually an instance where Democrats called on him to ignore a court order. Biden effectively did that by proceeding with loan cancelations, even after the courts said that doing so needed an act of Congress and that Biden didn't have the right to just do that through a regulatory order or executive order. 

But in general, Trump has abided by judicial orders, and he was asked last month whether there was any chance that he would ignore a court order, or violate court orders, and he said, “Absolutely not. I don't violate court orders. If the court orders something, then that becomes the law, and you appeal it. That's the solution, not to violate it.” And he was very clear on that. 

Now, the way in which the White House is trying to justify these deportations to El Salvador and simultaneously argue that people being sent there to be in prison for life have no right to any hearing, no right to any due process, neither in the United States nor in El Salvador, is because they have invoked, and here you can see the White House order from today: “Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua” (The White House. March 15, 2025.)

In other words, they're saying, just like in World War II, just like in other declared wars, that we've declared war on these Venezuelan drug gangs and once the president is waging a war – and the argument is we've been invaded – then essentially the courts and the Congress have no right, no role to play whatsoever in anything the president decides to do. Similar to the Bush-Cheney argument that in the War on Terror, neither courts nor Congress could limit anything that they did. 

This was the old law that was used during World War II by FDR to provide for the internment of Japanese Americans. There you see the executive order from February 1942:

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It's very difficult to argue that no matter what your view of the problem of illegal immigration is – and I think it's a huge problem; I've talked about the reasons before – it used to be a left-wing cause. When I started doing journalism it was a Bush-Cheney and the Chamber of Commerce’s goal to create amnesty for people in the country, to open up the borders more because large corporations whom Bush and Cheney served wanted a massive labor pool, not just of Americans who they have to pay a high wage to but of people who come into the country illegally who they can pay much less.

It was corporations and the party that served corporations, the Republican Party, that wanted massive migration in the United States and it was the left – people like Bernie Sanders, union leaders and African American groups – that opposed this kind of immigration because the people who would be harmed would be the American worker. It would drive down wages and take away jobs from Americans, primarily Black people and Latinos. 

I'm not contesting, I don't think many people at this point are contesting, that the flow of millions of people into the United States with no controls poses massive societal problems. However, there is no circumstance under which that can be described as a war in the way our prior wars declared by Congress have been. And that's one of the reasons why the judge stepped in.

Here from Politico, earlier today. 

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U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday ordered the Trump administration to immediately halt efforts to remove those Venezuelan migrants until he has more time to consider whether Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act was illegal.

The lawsuit, brought on behalf of five named Venezuelan immigrants, was provisionally turned into a class action — meaning it serves as a block on the deportation of all non-citizens in U.S. custody who are subject to Trump’s proclamation invoking the rarely-used law.

Two aircraft believed to be carrying Venezuelan deportees took off from an airport in Harlingen, Texas, during a break in a video hearing Boasberg conducted Saturday for the lawsuit filed by immigrant-rights advocates. According to flight tracking databases, one plane was bound for San Salvador, El Salvador, and the other for Comayagua, Honduras, and they were in the air nearing their destinations as Boasberg issued his order.

Boasberg said there are serious legal questions about Trump’s rationale for invoking the 1798 law — used only three times in American history — by labeling the criminal gang Tren de Aragua the equivalent of a foreign government. (Politico. March 15, 2025.)

 Anything that the president does that is significant and consequential, certainly, things that he does that are readily used in history are subject to the question of whether the Constitution permits the president to do that. That's why, even though it's not in the Constitution, judges review the constitutionality of the other branches' acts.

The Supreme Court, 200 years ago, said that the only way a constitution makes sense, the only way a document makes sense if you impose limits on the president or the Congress is you have somebody that adjudicates the question of whether the president or the Congress have exceeded their limits in the Constitution. If courts don't have the power to do that, if nobody has the power to do that, then the Constitution is worthless. This is why in Marbury vs. Madison, the Supreme Court, early in the 19th century, in the 1800s, said that the Supreme Court necessarily has that power to say what the law is, otherwise, there's no point in having the law. 

There are many checks on the courts. The only people who ever get to the court, the federal court, are people appointed by the president and then confirmed by the Senate. So, you already have those checks. But then, also, Congress can impeach judges for abusing their power and for acting corruptly – another check on the judiciary. It's not as though there are no checks on the judiciary. 

Congress has a lot of different ways to rearrange the judiciary, to punish the judiciary but, if you don't have a judiciary that determines whether or not the government is violating an individual's constitutional right, those constitutional rights are illusory, they're meaningless. 

Yet, it does seem, in this case, that the Trump administration decided to ignore the court order and they're basically admitting now that they did, although they're justifying why they were allowed to. 

Here, from Axios on Sunday:

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The Trump administration says it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling didn't apply, two senior officials tell Axios.

The White House welcomes that fight. "This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we're going to win," a senior White House official told Axios. (Axios. March 16, 2025.)

It is possible they will win. It's possible the Supreme Court will hold that this is a constitutionally valid invocation of this war power, of this Alien Enemies Act, as applied to this case. It's, I think, quite possible that they won't win. And that's the reason the court ordered an injunction against deportations: precisely to have time to determine whether this power Donald Trump is claiming is being exercised constitutionally and legally. 

No matter how much of a supporter you are of Donald Trump, no matter how much you support the policy that he is enacting – and as I said, this isn't just about the deportation of people in the country illegally, If it were just about deportations, sending people back to their country of origin, the controversy would be far less intense – the issue is that these people who are being sent to El Salvador are being sent there purposefully because the El Salvadorian government has said that they will be immediately put into a maximum-security prison where effectively they will never leave for life. 

Just like in Guantánamo, you shouldn't trust the U.S. government when it says, “Oh, don't worry, we've decided these people are members of a violent drug gang,” because undoubtedly they're going to make mistakes, and they're going to accuse people falsely of being part of that drug gang, and they're going to spend life in prison, in some of the worst conditions, because they were never given even a small opportunity to contest or to prove that the accusations are false or to force the government to prove that they're true. 

 As is true of most things that Trump is doing, he didn't hide the fact that he intended to do this. I say most things that Trump is doing because bombing Yemen was something for which he criticized Joe Biden and now he's doing that but Trump is very open about his plan to invoke this old law that has barely been used three times in American history when we were clearly at war. That's to his credit, but that doesn't mean that the courts are powerless and play no role in determining whether the invocation of that law is actually permissible under the law itself and under the Constitution. That's the way our democracy has worked basically from the beginning as presidents engage in action, Congress passes laws and the courts determine whether those actions are constitutional and legal. It doesn't make the Judiciary supreme because there are a lot of checks on the judiciary still. 

The reason it was a 5-4 decision is not because four of the judges ruled that Guantánamo detainees have no constitutional rights because they're non-citizens. That was not their ruling. All nine of the justices agreed that the detainee status of non-citizens does not preclude their right to invoke constitutional rights. The argument of the Bush administration was, we know there are 125 years of Supreme Court precedent that says that the Bill of Rights applies to everybody within our jurisdiction, but this is Guantánamo Bay. We purposely built the prison outside of the United States to avoid this. The United States is not the sovereign power of Cuba. Cuba is the sovereign power of Cuba. So, our conduct in Cuba is not subject to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the orders of the court. And that was what the court decided on and split on five to four. 

Here, from the CBC, March 2009:

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And that was very much the climate after 9/11: who cares about legal niceties, who cares about constitutional limits? Just pick them all up and kill them all without the slightest regard for whether or not we really know that they're innocent or members of a terrorist organization. 

We were assured by the Bush government over and over and over that the only people in Guantánamo were terrorists, they had done all the necessary vetting to determine that. They weren't just terrorists, but they were “the worst of the worst.” It turns out that so much of that was untrue and the U.S. government has been admitting that over and over ever since. 

Here, from NBC News, in October 2016:

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Mohamedou Ould Slahi was sent back to his native Mauritania after 14 years of captivity, during which he was never charged with a crime.

Slahi, 45, was an engineer for technology companies; he was put in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 under suspicion of being a recruiter for al Qaeda. He'd expressed loyalty to the group in the early 1990s, but his lawyers say that was when he fought with anti-Communist mujahideen in Afghanistan. (NBC News. October 17, 2016.)

“Guantánamo Diary” was a best-selling book about his time in Guantánamo, made into a film where Jodie Foster played his lawyer. We interviewed Mohamedou back in 2021. I had met him in Amsterdam where he is now living, but that is a case where the U.S. government acknowledged that he had no ties to al-Qaeda and released him for that reason and that has been happening over and over for the last 25 years. 

One of the things that has been making me somewhat sick, going back to the first Trump administration, is that the precise people who did what I'm describing in the Bush-Cheney administration – who pioneered this radical Article II theory of executive power that the president is unlimited and can't be constrained by a court or Congress, as part of the War on Terror, that he has the right to put people in prison with no due process – have now morphed into Never Trump people and are constantly criticizing Trump and even depicting him as some unique evil for doing exactly what they did, advocated and implemented less than 20 years ago. 

Here's Bill Kristol on X:

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His fellow Bush-Cheney neocon, David Frum, said much the same:

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Again, these are the people, David Frum and Bill Kristol and all of these Bush-Cheney operatives who are now heroes of liberal punditry, who invented these theories they're now claiming are the hallmarks of autocracy. 

I wrote an article when I first started my blog, An Ideology of Lawlessness, which described how these theories of Article II executive power had been invented out of whole cloth to say that presidents had the power to do whatever they wanted and nobody, not courts or congress, could scrutinize it, or limit it in any way. The presidents had the right to ignore congressional statutes. So, if Congress passes a law saying, you're not allowed to eavesdrop on American citizens without getting a warrant first from the FISA court, Bush and Cheney violated that. They spied on Americans without getting those warrants. Afterward, their argument was, well, we had the right to. We were prosecuting the War on Terror and Congress has no power to limit anything we can do. And the same with the courts. 

 I found that theory incredibly authoritarian and alarming back then. I do not think the founders envisioned a country where a president in any circumstance could act with whatever powers he wants in violation of people's constitutional rights and neither the courts nor the Congress could stop him, including in war, where it is true, the president's powers are at their apex. 

The question here, of course, is if the United States is really at war in the sense that we've always understood that – Venezuelan drug gangs are criminal gangs, they're not a government, they're not a country. We're not at war with Venezuelan drug gangs or at least that's certainly a significant question for the courts to decide before Trump starts rounding people up and throwing them into holes in El Salvador. 

It's not just Never Trump-Bush-Cheney operatives who are condemning what they've done. There are a lot of Democrats and liberals acting as if violating a court order is the one red line that a president can't cross without destroying the entire constitutional order. Even though, as I said, President Biden arguably did that – I think he did do that when he ignored the court order on student loan cancelations – there are prominent Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who were urging Biden to ignore and violate the court order on the ground that it had no legitimacy, not to appeal it, but to just ignore it.

Video. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, CNN. April 8, 2023

That's exactly the argument of the Trump administration now and was the Bush administration back then too: if we deem any act or any check from any other branch to be illegitimate, including courts, we’re just going to ignore them. We shouldn't agree to be bound by court rulings that we consider illegitimate. 

That's exactly what the Trump administration is arguing in court right now. In part, they're saying because it wasn't a written order, it was an oral order and having studied law, having practiced law, I can tell you that nobody ever thought that orders of the court were invalid until they were put in writing. Many judges issue orders orally and they're considered to be orders, but the bigger argument of the Trump administration is the same one AOC marshaled there, which is, that we'll obey court orders when the courts are acting within their legitimate power and since we don't think courts have the right to order us to turn planes around, then we ignore that, we're happy to and we think we were right too. 

Remember when the constitutional convention was held and Benjamin Franklin came out, a woman on the street, in Philadelphia, asked him, “What is it that you created there? He said: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

They understood that despite the fact that central to their whole design was checks and balances never allowing one branch to get too powerful, never allowing one branch to operate without checks, they were counting on every branch always trying to increase their power at the expense of the other. And in this internal conflict, there would be a balance. 

Congress, however, has abdicated its role because they are controlled by Republicans and even without that, they're basically unwilling to exercise their power when it comes to things like their power to declare war. The president constantly involves the U.S. in military conflict without congressional authorization. Congress does nothing about it and, in many ways, the Supreme Court defers a great deal to executive power.

 I do think that ignoring court orders is a red line that shouldn't be crossed. I thought that when Biden did it and when liberals were calling for it and I certainly think that's true now and I also think that we can allow human power to be exercised even in a significant way as long as there's some check and limit on it. Even when it comes to people who enter the country illegally, we should not be sending people to prison for life without any chance whatsoever for them to contest the accusations against them, for them to be able to demonstrate that what they're being accused of is an error because it is certainly going to be the case that a lot of these are errors. 

Since it's not just deportation, but now you're talking about imprisonment for life in El Salvador, a country they have no connection to, the need for due process is even greater. I understand that people want illegal immigrants out of the United States, but they are still human beings and we should not empower the U.S. government to be able to imprison people for life without having some sort of hearing in court to determine whether or not that power is being exercised justly. 

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At this point, it's basically virtually a tradition, like a rite of presidential passage, that every new administration starts bombing Yemen, the Houthis in Yemen. There was bombing by the Bush administration in a limited way as part of the War on Terror in Yemen. President Obama escalated it significantly. He escalated the bombing of alleged terror targets through drones and often attacked the Houthis in Yemen, but he also worked with Saudi Arabia, which waged a full all-out war against the Houthis in Yemen. They regarded them as an arm or an extension of Iranian power, a proxy of Iran, and therefore Saudi Arabia in their competition with Iran, viewed the Houthis controlling Yemen as their enemy. 

The Obama administration worked with the Saudis, provided them with all kinds of weapons, provided them with intelligence about where to strike and the Saudis waged a barbaric war against the Houthis in Yemen creating what all human rights groups recognize was the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet. 

Yemen is the poorest country in the world and the war that Saudi Arabia with the help of the Obama administration brought to Yemen made all of those humanitarian challenges much, much worse, including mass starvation throughout Yemen. 

During the first Trump presidency, there was a bombing of the Houthis in Yemen and then when President Biden got into office, he said he was going to work with Saudi Arabia to stop the war in Yemen, but, after October 7, when the Houthis began attacking ships in protest of the Israeli destruction of Gaza, Biden ordered continuous bombing. 

There were months where there was bombing essentially every day throughout 2024 just constant never-ending bombing. Biden ended up dropping a thousand bombs on Yemen in 2024 alone. European allies dropped a large number as well in conjunction with the United States. So, the United States has been bombing Yemen, bombing the Houthis, for a long, long time. 

The Houthis are probably stronger than they've ever been, the capabilities that they've developed, including the ability to shoot long-range missiles into Israel, which they've done several times, and the success they've had in attacking and seizing ships. Their strength is higher than ever despite all of that bombing, all of that constant warfare that the United States has been waging in various forums in Yemen, going back to the Bush administration.

And this is something that President Trump criticized Joe Biden for doing during the campaign. He said, why is the United States bombing Yemen? That's not the way that you handle things. And yet, not even two months into office, Trump has restarted and seemingly escalated one of the several different wars we have in the Middle East. 

Here, from The New York Times, on March 15:

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We have seen from Trump that he uses threats of war against other countries to achieve the objective of avoiding war. His theory is that the country has to fear that the United States will attack them or bomb them to get them meaningfully at the negotiating table to make concessions. 

But when it comes to Iran, a country that Israel has been pushing the United States to attack and bomb for 15 years – you can go back 15 years and hear Netanyahu warning that Iran was on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon, that it's the United States's responsibility to go in and attack it. The Israelis did in fact bomb Iran after Iranians sent ballistic missiles into Israel, which was in turn a response to the Israeli bombing of Iran's consulate in Damascus and other acts as well. So, there has been a kind of dangerous conflict, militarily, between Israel and Iran. Israel considers Iran to be its most significant threat and enemy and they've been wanting the United States to go fight that war for them or with them. 

Netanyahu urged the United States to invade Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussein, who he also considered to be one of the worst enemies of Israel. He did the same in the Obama administration, urging the United States to launch a dirty war against Bashar Assad and when it finally succeeded later last year, Netanyahu stood up and took credit for it. 

So, there are a lot of wars that have benefited Israel and the Netanyahu government the Israelis have wanted the United States to go and fight for them or with them. And Iran has always been the kind of North Star, the ultimate prize in getting the United States to go and wage war on. 

Although I do believe that Trump's real goal is to get a nuclear deal with Iran that we had with Iran, but Trump judged it to be a poor deal and therefore withdrew from it. When you're bombing very aggressively the Houthis with whom Iran has a relationship and at the same time threatening Iran that you're going to bomb them if they don't stop working with the Houthis, which they're never going to do, you're flirting with a real war that could blow up the entire Middle East. 

After a campaign that Donald Trump ran, twice now, three times really, pledging to keep the United States out of Middle East wars and specifically condemning Biden for bombing Yemen, here's what Trump posted on True Social yesterday: 

Today, I have ordered the United States Military to launch decisive and powerful Military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen. They have waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American, and other, ships, aircraft, and drones.

To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE! […]

Similar language to what he used when he was threatening Gaza and Hamas.

To Iran: Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY! Do NOT threaten the American People, their President, who has received one of the largest mandates in Presidential History, or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!

(Donald Trump, Truth Social. March 15, 2025.) 

The Pentagon released footage of some of the U.S. strikes on Yemen. You can see some of them here. 

Video. US Strikes, Yemen. March 15, 2025.

That's a pretty heavy and destructive bomb. The Yemenis claim that at least 32 civilians were killed in these strikes. The Houthis have made that claim and there are hospitals and the like that have supported that. 

Here is Donald Trump, in June 2023.

Video. Donald Trump, Newsmax. June 24, 2023.

So, “I will be your peacemaker in less than two months in office.” 

Ever since there's been a cease-fire, those attacks on American ships have stopped and the Houthis began attacking Israeli-flagged ships, not American ones, and said they would continue to do so, in protest of the Israeli blockade of all food, electricity and other humanitarian aid entering Gaza. They said, “We're going to continue to attack until Israel lets the humanitarian aid into Gaza until the cease-fire deal that they agreed to would be honored.” 

It would have been much easier for Trump to get the Israelis to simply allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Instead, we decided to bomb the Houthis to shield the right of Israel to block the humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. We're back into fighting Middle East wars in defense really of Israel, given the current posture of what the Houthis have been doing and are saying. 

One of the ways that I often defended Trump's foreign policy of the first term was to point out that it was accurate that Trump was the first president in decades to have not involved the United States in a new war. He inherited some wars from Obama including bombing campaigns against ISIS in Iraq and Syria which he escalated as he promised to do but he didn't involve the United States in any new wars. Trump himself, in 2024, praised himself for that. 

 

I know there are so many Trump supporters justifying Trump's bombing of the Houthis in Yemen, even though Trump himself criticized Biden for doing exactly the same thing. I'd argue Biden had more justification because, at the time, the Houthis were actually attacking American ships. And now they've said they're limiting their attacks to Israeli ships meaning that this bombing campaign is seemingly yet again in protection of Israel and not the United States. 

But to threaten Iran! In what conceivable way is threatening a war with Iran or worse, engaging in one, consistent in any meaningful sense with the America First ideology, with everything Trump has said about avoiding wars? 

There is a real question, and I know this has been taboo for a long time, about the extent of influence and control that the Israelis or those loyal to Israel exercise in the United States. There's a video, we're going to do a deep dive on the Adelsons. We did one before the election about Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the billionaire couple. She's an Israeli American citizen and he's an American citizen who have given more to the Republican Party – they have sometimes given it to other candidates, but they're the most important billionaire donors of the Republican party, and there's a video of them where they admit that their number one goal is not the United States but is Israel. In fact, Sheldon Adelson served in the military very briefly in the late 1950s and he said: I served in the military, but unfortunately it was the military of the United States and not the IDF. I wish it were the IDF. My wife had the honor and privilege of serving in the IDF. And our goal is to be good Zionist citizens. 

You see the attacks within the very beginning days of the Trump administration on the students who are protesting against Israel when the Trump administration is filled with people who regard protesting Israel as one of the worst, most offensive things you can do, claiming that these are immigration violations just coincidentally against people who protested the Israeli war in Gaza. There's an American Jewish student today who was expelled by Columbia for participating in these protests. You have this attack on anti-Israel protesters in the United States going on, you have bombing of a country that, or a group of people in Yemen who are only attacking Israeli ships because they're cutting off and blockading humanitarian aid into Gaza. And now the United States is threatening to go to war with Iran, Israel's worst enemy, a war that Israel has always wanted the United States to go to. 

It’s extra ironic because this is a movement and a president that called itself “America First.” But during the campaign, Trump spoke with Miriam Adelson there to a group of Republican Israel supporters and said, “Yes, we're going to make America great again, but we're also going to make Israel great again.” He talked about how the Adelsons were the most frequent visitors in his first term, that he would constantly give them everything they asked for Israel. He'd even give them more than they asked for sometimes, he boasted. 

If Trump ends up involving the United States in a real war in the Middle East, after everything he described, after everything he promised, after everything he said about his worldview and objectives and ideology, that really could destroy the Trump presidency single-handedly. Middle East wars can do that. And despite all this bombing, the Houthis are stronger than ever. They've learned how to have a very light presence, they can disperse their weapons, and disperse their forces easily to avoid airstrikes, they've learned how to do that after 10 years of constant warfare from the United States and from Saudi Arabia, from Israel as well. 

And there's no objective. What is the objective? We've tried to destroy the Houthis for 10 years and they're able to impede international shipping lanes in the Red Sea and to shoot long-range missiles into Israel. They seem stronger than ever. We're just going to keep dropping bombs, it's like the United States has some sort of obligation to always be at war with someone to always be bombing someone. 

I hope Donald Trump will understand that a reason for his appeal was that he promised to end these kinds of wars, to end this posture of constant bombing. If Americans understand that the reason we're doing this is not so much for the United States, but more so for Israel, I think the damage to the Trump administration will be even greater still. One thing I'm sure of is that whether there's the intention to go to war with Iran or not, these kinds of threats, historically, have been very dangerous because they often lead to war, even when that's not actually the intent. 

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DHS Seizes Greater Control of Columbia and its Departments; Glenn Takes Your Questions on Ukraine, DOGE, and Free Speech
System Update #423

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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Several U.S. government officials sent a letter to Columbia University today that is – without any hyperbole – genuinely chilling. The letter informs Columbia that they must immediately comply with multiple government demands about how they run their private Ivy League university – including putting their Middle East Studies program into receivership for five years and reporting all progress to the U.S. government. 

To sort through all of this we have the ideal guest: Alex Abdo, who is the litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia. He previously worked for years at the ACLU, where he was at the forefront of litigation relating to things like NSA surveillance, encryption, anonymous speech online, government transparency, and the post-9/11 abuses of detainees in U.S. custody. 

And then, we will answer questions submitted all week long by our Locals members. This week's questions are great and cover a wide range of topics. 

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We've obviously been covering, because it's one of the things that we cover most, the extraordinary attack on free speech that has been ushered in by the Trump administration, specifically Homeland Security's arrest of a Columbia University student who was the holder of a green card, which is supposed to bestow and confer permanent resident status. He has that because he's married to an American citizen who happens to be eight months pregnant. 

He was arrested not because he was accused of having committed any crime, but because the State Department under Marco Rubio in secret with no evidence presented invalidated his green card. The minute they did so, they declared him to be on U.S. soil illegally and illegally sent ICE agents to detain him. 

In the meantime, there's an injunction preventing him from being deported. However, all the other students are being targeted for arrest. A second one was arrested today at Columbia. The implications of those kinds of assaults on free speech, arresting and deporting people who are in the United States illegally as a result of their views on Israel or their protest and activism against the war in Israel or against the Biden administration's funding and arming of that war are obviously very significant. We've spent the week analyzing those. 

But today, it was a much more serious escalation, one that genuinely astonishes me. Rather than tell you about it, I just want to show you the letter that was sent by three different government agencies inside the Trump administration – the United States Department of Education, the Health and Human Services Department, as well as the General Services Administration – to Columbia University.

 By the way, it is addressed to the Interim President of Columbia, Katerina Armstrong, as well as David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, co-chairs of the Columbia Board of Trustees. I think if I had a relative who was the co-chair of the Columbia Board of Trustees, that's something that I would know and I don't. So, no relation at least that I know of.

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Just a reminder: the reason the United States government provides funding to universities isn't that they pay for the salaries of professors. It's because that's where research takes place; research into science, technology, medicine, and all sorts of things, supports hospitals and medical facilities and it allows people who don't come from extremely wealthy families to be able to go to our best colleges based on merit. 

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Judge Orders Hearing on Columbia Student Deportation Case; Is the Ukraine Ceasefire Plan Serious? Trump Attacks Thomas Massie for His Budget Vote
System Update #422

 

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: A federal judge in New York held a hearing today on the attempted deportation of Columbia grad student and Green Card holder, Mahmoud Khalil, for the crime of protesting against Israel's wars. 

Among other things, a judge ordered that U.S. immigration officials allow him to speak with his lawyers and also set a date for a hearing to examine the constitutional and free speech rights at issue. 

We'll examine that and we'll also show you part of the debate I was able to participate in on Israel and free speech earlier today on Fox News on Will Cain's show. 

Then: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed to a 30-day cease-fire requested by the Trump administration. As a result, the White House announced that it was lifting its one-day suspension on intelligence sharing and other assistance to Ukraine. Trump officials are now waiting to hear whether Russia will agree to those terms as well. 

So, it leads to the question, is this really a serious step toward a diplomatic end to this horrific war or is this just a ploy by the Ukraine supporters surrounding Trump in the White House and the administration to convince him that the real problem is not Zelenskyy but Putin, and thus ensure the ongoing flow of U.S. financing of that war? I think that's an important question. I don't think it's an easy one to answer, so we'll do our best to delve into it. 

And then finally, Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky on Tuesday did what he often does: he followed his principles and conscience rather than the mandates of political expediency by being the sole Republican in the House to vote against what is called a “continuing resolution”: essentially, a mechanism to keep the government operating even though none of the various budgetary and debt issues have been resolved. In response, Trump attacked Massie explicitly and on two occasions by comparing him to Liz Cheney and urging that Congressman Massie be removed from Congress by a primary challenge. We'll tell you about that and analyze all of its implications. 

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If you talk to any committed civil libertarian, any First Amendment lawyer, or free speech activist,  people who do that for a living, who have made those values central to their life's work, you will hear the same thing all the time, which is that most people – by no means all, but most people – embrace a cause of free speech whenever their side is out of power, or when the views that they like or their political allies are the targets of censorship. Those people will love free speech advocates, they'll support them and they'll applaud them. But the minute there's a change of power or the type of speech that is targeted with censorship changes, the allies of a civil libertarian or free speech advocate, as well as their opponents or enemies, will instantly change on a dime. 

It’s something that everybody who works on these issues is extremely accustomed to and it's not just that it can switch on a dime based on who's being censored this time as opposed to before. The exact argument that had been previously used by one side to justify censorship, to the great dismay and anger of the other side, suddenly becomes the exact argument the new censorship side starts embracing and you watch it happen and you're hearing the exact same arguments from the people who had spent years claiming they opposed censorship and it's hard to believe that they don't realize that what they're saying is exactly what they had spent years before insisting that they opposed. 

That is exactly what has been happening not just in Donald Trump's election, but since really October 7 and even before that, but really in earnest in October 7, we have had a series of very serious escalations in attempts to sanction and limit and control and punish political speech in the name of protecting Israel. We've had legislation designed to expand the definition of antisemitism in the educational context to include all sorts of common criticisms of this foreign state, so that in educational law now, you're allowed to say the United States is a racist entity, you're allowed to say that China's racist, you're allowed to say that Peru is racist, you're allowed to say that Indonesia is a racist and colonial power, but what you're not allowed to do is say that Israel is a racist or colonial project because that is considered antisemitism.

There are all sorts of other instances like that where special censorship rules have been created solely to protect this one foreign state. There are things you cannot say about this foreign government that you're totally free to say about your own government or any other government in the world. Perhaps the gravest and most serious censorship measure that arose from this attempt to shield Israel from criticism and out of concern, to stem the tide of declining support for Israel in the United States was the law that was passed by a bipartisan majority in both the House and the Senate and signed into law by President Biden that forced a sale and divestment of TikTok or the banning of that app, something that Trump for the moment has stopped, but which even sponsors of that bill said, very openly and very explicitly, that the reason they finally got the votes they needed to ban TikTok was because after October 7, there was a perception that young people were turning against Israel, it was urgent to stop them from doing that, and the two things they blamed for that were college campuses and TikTok and that's why college campuses and TikTok had become two of the main targets of censorship because there was an effort to try to ensure that people who were turning against Israel would no longer be able to hear criticisms of U.S. support for Israel, U.S. financing of the Israeli war in Gaza. 

Donald Trump was very open in the campaign about his intentions to punish students on college campuses who had been protesting the Biden administration support for Israel, who had been protesting the Israeli destruction of Gaza. As is true for most of Trump's campaign promises, his administration is making good on that. 

Trump’s administration is filled with loyalists of Israel. Of course, one of his biggest donors was the Israeli American donor, Miriam Adelson, who gave a hundred million dollars and by Trump's own admission said that in return for those donations that she and her now deceased husband, Sheldon Adelson, had been making to the Republican Party, they would constantly come and ask for things and demand things from the U.S. government in order to serve the interests of Israel. And they would often get it as a result of their status as big donors. So, all of this has a very broad, clear, and longstanding context out of which these censorship controversies are now emerging. 

But I don't think I really expected something quite as severe and as much of a deviation from the American tradition to happen so early in the Trump administration as is now happening with the attempt to deport the Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil who is married to an American citizen. His American wife is eight months pregnant. They're about to have a baby.

Typically, American citizens have the right to marry foreign nationals. And when they do marry foreign nationals, they have the right to bring those foreign nationals to live with them in the United States. They get green cards, and they ultimately are on the path to citizenship. Donald Trump twice did that with two different foreign women whom he married, one of whom is now the first lady, Melania Trump, and she was able to get citizenship based on that. 

There was never, ever this notion that green card holders in the United States were somehow barred from expressing controversy of political views, or criticizing the policies of the U.S. government, or engaging in political activism or political protest.  That's what makes the decision to target Mahmoud Khalil, as opposed to any of the other Columbia students who are only in the United States on a student visa, maybe for a couple of years. It would have been, I think, less controversial. That's what makes the decision to target him, in particular extra chilling, the fact that someone who's a green card holder, who's supposed to have the status of a permanent resident in the United States – I'm not suggesting that green card holders can never lose their status; they can and they have on rare occasions if they commit violent crimes – but having green card holders, especially ones married to American citizens, lose the right to stay in the United States and get arrested by immigration authorities and put into deportation as a result of their political views or their political activism is something that is extremely rare in American political history and yet that's what the Trump administration is doing in its second month in office, obviously as a means of shielding Israel from criticism and protest. 

Even if you're somebody who somehow thinks that this is justified, there's no question that it raises serious constitutional questions because nobody honest can possibly deny that there's a very strong political component to all this, that there's a very strong motivation that is based in the viewpoints that are expressed by Mahmoud Khalil that led to his activism. If he had been protesting in favor of Israel, if he had been protesting in support of Donald Trump, if he had been protesting against the governments of Iran, or Russia, or China, there wouldn't be any conservatives who would be demanding his deportation or justifying his deportation. 

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