Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Multiple US Banks Suddenly Collapse—Are “Bailouts” Needed to Avoid Catastrophe? Ft. Matt Stoller
Video Transcript: System Update #54
March 16, 2023
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The U.S. government took very aggressive action over the weekend to save the vast wealth of depositors at Silicon Valley Bank. That 40-year-old institution had become rather unstable of late as a result of rising interest rates that they failed to anticipate and invest in the kind of long-term, high-risk/high-reward vehicles responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, such as mortgage-backed securities.

Late last week, the bank's depositors, composed of bold, wealthy tech investors, as well as startup companies with substantial venture capital, began getting somewhat nervous about the bank’s ability to cover deposits above the $250,000 level, the amount which the FDIC insures for every account and that worry very quickly – in a matter of fewer than two days – turned into full-blown panic and then a bank run that prevented the bank from even coming close to finding the liquidity to cover the mountain of withdraws and transfer requests that poured in from very panicky depositors.

Over the weekend, at the urging of some of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the Biden Treasury Department announced that the U.S. government would ensure that all depositors would be made whole, no matter how much in excess of the $250,000 limit their balance was. 

That move, surprisingly, has provoked a very vitriolic debate between people like, on the one hand, our guest tonight, Matt Stoller, of the American Economics Liberties Project, who insist that this is quite similar, if not in scope, then in kind, to the 2008 Wall Street bailout under the Bush and Obama administrations in which the U.S. government first acted to save the country's richest people who caused the crisis while the middle class and working class were about to suffer. And then on the other side, we have tomorrow night's guest, venture capitalist David Sacks, the first CEO of PayPal and a prominent venture capitalist who has been insisting that the problems at Silicon Valley Bank are not unique to that institution, but instead reflective of a systemic problem, and that without U.S. government intervention, not only Silicon Valley Bank but countless other regional banks would have failed quickly due to contagion, panic and other similar bank runs. We'll examine that debate by speaking first to Matt Stoller tonight and then to David Sachs tomorrow. 

Plus, last night at the Oscars, Hollywood liberals did what Hollywood liberals and liberals generally love to do. They heaped praise on a film, “Navalny,” with the Academy Award for Best Documentary. 

Now, Navalny, as you probably know, is the dissident – an opponent of Vladimir Putin currently imprisoned in Russia for that dissidence – and, in the process, these Hollywood liberals bravely denounced the abuse of a dissident by a faraway government who was an official U.S. enemy, i.e., Russia. In the meantime, these same people, as usual, ignore, if not outright support, their own government's ongoing years-long imprisonment of our own dissident: the journalist Julian Assange. 

This is about far more than who wins some glitzy and increasingly pointless awards but it does say a great deal about how governments are able to get their own citizens – not just our government, but all governments – to constantly focus on the abuses of governments on the other side of the world, over which they exert no control. All of that means forgetting how their own government is doing the same, and often worse. 

As a reminder, System Update is now available in podcast form. We are available on Spotify, Apple and most other major podcasting platforms. The episodes are published in podcast form 12 hours after we first air here, live, on Rumble. If that's your interest, look for that and follow System Update on those platforms.

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


Monologue

 

 So, in order to understand the debate that has been provoked by the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's announcement that the U.S. government would step in - as leading Silicon Valley venture capital has spent the last several days demanding that it do - and protect 100% - every penny - of all depositor’s funds in the now collapsing Silicon Valley Bank, as well as at least one other bank, that is also collapsing rapidly, – on which Barney Frank, ironically, the longtime Democratic congressman who, along with Senator Chris Dodd, authored the legislation after the 2008 financial crisis that was designed to prevent exactly this from happening again – as it turns out, Barney Frank happens to sit on the board of the bank that is the second bank to fail as part of this bank grab, meaning his legislation did not evidently fulfill its promise of preventing a systemic contamination and essentially threat of a financial collapse from happening again as it happened right under his own nose at his own bank. 

Now, in order to understand the debate and it's a complex debate and one that requires expertise – which I am the first to acknowledge I do not possess, which is why we're going to have a guest on tonight who does, who has one view and a guest tomorrow night who also does who has the other – it's very important to remember and understand the 2008 financial crisis and the context of that debate, and that I do feel very comfortable speaking up because I covered it extensively at the time as a journalist involved not only with complex financial instruments, but also the political dynamics that shape our country. 

That financial crisis was a long time in the making. It was something that people were able to predict and actually did predict. Increasingly, Wall Street was able to invest in very, very complex and opaque economic instruments that were highly risky and like all risky instruments, had a high amount of profit. They were able to invest in that because of the rollback, various financial protections that came in the wake of the Great Depression, in the early 1930s, that were designed to keep separate commercial banking activities – that are generally more conservative and risk-averse from investment activities that tend to be riskier. And the idea was to prevent a systemic collapse in the commercial banking sector that led to the Great Depression in the first place. And over the years, especially the Clinton administration and their genius economists like Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, right from Goldman Sachs, decided that these protections from the FDR era were obsolete and banks could be unchained in order to start to become much riskier. And they were heavily rewarded because the Wall Street sector and the banking sector began investing heavily in and funding heavily the Democratic Party as a result of its servitude to the banking industry. They had a lot of Republican support as well during the Clinton administration with all of these rollbacks, and that led to the ability of all kinds of banks with your money, depositor money, to be able to engage in much riskier types of investments. One of the investment schemes that they particularly liked was called mortgage-backed securities, which was when banks would offer loans to people to buy houses and would keep the houses as collateral. And the value, the very high value of the real estate market ensured that those mortgage-backed securities, which were all grouped together, had a great deal of value and could be traded as commodities. Unfortunately, when the real estate market and the real estate bubble collapsed, the value of those mortgage-backed securities collapsed with them. And that led to an unraveling, a very rapid unraveling, of almost all of Wall Street, starting in September and October of 2008. So, during the last several months of the Bush administration, when the Treasury secretary still was Hank Paulson, who before joining the Bush administration as Treasury secretary, had been the CEO of Goldman Sachs, very much of a Wall Street background and his argument was that we need to act immediately to save the financial markets with a gigantic infusion of credit and cash in order to protect the credit markets from collapsing. 

What a lot of people don't remember is that the very first proposal that was negotiated between the Bush White House, as the 2008 presidential action and John McCain, was approaching with congressional leaders, including John Boehner, the then House speaker, and Nancy Pelosi, the then House minority leader and the head of the Democratic Party. Both of them were on board. The establishment wings of both parties were on board with Hank Paulson's plan to give a gigantic infusion of $800 billion into the Wall Street sector to prevent it from collapsing. The warnings were just as grave, in fact, way graver than the ones we're hearing now, that if the government doesn't immediately act to save these Wall Street institutions, the entire system will collapse. There will be bank runs, nobody will trust these institutions any longer, everyone will try and take their money out of the system and not just the U.S. financial system, but the global financial system will collapse. 

That crisis was much greater in scale than the current one, at least so far, but the arguments are very similar. Obviously, there was a lot of resentment that the U.S. government was going to bail out the titans of capitalism after all. The whole idea of capitalism is the reason that you get rich is that you make bets, risky bets. And if you're right, you get rich. But that only works if you also then lose everything when you're wrong. And yet what happened here was they all made very risky bets. They got rich when they were right and then when they were wrong, instead of losing, which is the other side of capitalism, which has to be the other side of capitalism, instead, the U.S. government intervened, stepped in and said, “Oh, don't worry, we're going to back you up. We're going to give you a gigantic infusion of cash to prevent this system from collapsing”. 

Even though it generated a lot of anger – why should the richest people in the world, who caused the crisis in the first place with their recklessness, be protected with taxpayer-funded money? – it nonetheless happened because the argument prevailed that if we didn't protect the richest people on the planet who caused the financial collapse, all of us would suffer because the entire financial system would collapse. And there was an infusion of $700 billion or $800 billion that was nowhere near enough to calm the markets. And then once President Obama was in office, he selected Timothy Geithner as his treasury secretary, who was most known for being an incredibly loyal servant to Wall Street. They infused a lot more money into Wall Street, and Wall Street and its casino went on. Dodd-Frank was the promise of the American people to say, we're going to reform everything so this never happens again. The argument was, look, these institutions are too big to fail. We cannot allow them to fail. We're allowed to watch them succeed and get rich when they're right. But when they're wrong, we can't let them fail. And that created a lot of resentment, political resentment. That first bill sponsored by Hank Paulson, was negotiated with John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, the first time it came up for a vote in the House it actually failed, despite warnings that its failure would cause the implosion of the global economic system. And it failed because a majority of Republicans on the right voted no, as did I believe, up to 90 Democrats, most of whom were from the left wing of the party. And on the day the U.S. government refused, through the vote in the House, to intervene in the markets, the U.S. stock market lost something like 8% of its value; other stock markets around the world lost 10% of its value and there was real panic, which is why they finally ended up coercing members of both political parties to change their vote to yes and to start infusing huge amounts of money into that system.

It did end up saving Wall Street. But the funds that were set aside to help homeowners and working-class people and middle-class people were basically ignored. Huge numbers of them were evicted from their homes and lost their homes in foreclosure and people to this very day are drowning in debt, generational debt, because of that financial crisis. That is absolutely the context for this debate. Namely, is this a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis? Not necessarily yet to the extent that it's of that magnitude, but that the political dynamic is the same, namely all of these libertarian “keep the government out of our lives” anti-socialist tech billionaires in Silicon Valley –  who hate socialism, who hate the idea that the government steps in and helps people who are poor – “Those poor people should be self-sufficient”; “They don't need government help.” The minute their bank and their money are at risk, they start pounding the table. All to be saved. And then, the government comes in and saves them. 

Let me just show you a couple of videos that set the stage for what this debate is and then we're going to go talk to Matt Stoller and see what he thinks and question him on his views. 

First, let me show you the Democratic Congressman, Ro Khanna, whose views on this question are significant for two reasons: one is he absolutely holds himself out as a progressive; he ran on the view that the main problem of the United States is that there's economic inequality – the government far too often acts in favor of the rich and ignores the middle class and the working class and the poor. But he also happens to be the congressman from Silicon Valley. He represents Silicon Valley. And as you can imagine, in order to win that seat, you need the financial support and political support of the very same Silicon Valley tycoons who spent the weekend demanding a bailout for their bank. So, he went on “Face the Nation” on Sunday when he was still in doubt about whether or not the government would act. They had just interviewed Janet Yellen, who gave very mixed signals about whether she intended to do so and this is what Ro Khanna said: 

 

(Video: March 12, 2023)

 

“Face the Nation”: I wonder what you make of the Treasury secretary's remarks. I know you've been in contact with the White House, with Treasury and with FDIC. 

 

Rep. Ro Khanna: I have great respect for Secretary Yellen, but I think we need to have more clarity and greater strength in what the Treasury is saying. First, the principle needs to be that all depositors will be protected and have full access to their accounts Monday morning. 

 

“Face the Nation”: Depositors, meaning those with accounts bigger than $250,000, which is the cutoff for insurance right. 

 

Rep. Ro Khanna: Yes, all of them. There's precedent for this. Chair Powell when he was at Treasury, in 1991, the Bank of New England collapsed. And Chair Powell said the Treasury, coordinated with FDIC and with the Fed, and they insured every depositor. And why did they do it? They didn't want a regional run on the banks. Here's what I'm hearing from people in my constituency. They are getting nodes to pull out of regional banks, and all of this will be consolidated in the top four banks. We don't want that as a nation, especially if you're a progressive. The other thing is the payroll companies that are involved. Some of them have 400,000 folks. They're not going to be able to meet payroll if they don't have access to direct deposit. 

 

 

That is the argument being made. I mean, it's amazing. I think, you know, one of the things I've noticed, as I get older, I'm not yet old, but I'm just saying as I'm getting older, is that I think one of the reasons why history repeats itself so often is because people who are young didn't live through the history and, therefore, don't know about it and other people forget it. 

It's amazing how identical that sounds to the arguments made to bail out Wall Street. It was like nobody wants to help the rich. That's not what this is about. The problem is if we let AIG go under if we let other Wall Street firms go under the way we are, Lehman Brothers go under, the middle class, are going to lose their 401k, they're going to lose their retirement accounts and everybody is going to suffer. 

So, yes, we're going to help the rich but work for progressives. Obama was very much in on that and he said we're not doing it to help the rich. That's just an unfortunate, incidental byproduct. The people who funded my campaigns are, of course, going to get what they want. But that's not why we're doing it. We're doing it to prevent further panic, and further runs on the bank, which would prevent people from having their retirement accounts protected or even having their jobs. Everybody would lose their jobs or there would be no money to pay them etc. 

So, just because it resonates with the arguments made in the 2008 financial crisis doesn't mean it's invalid. I'm just putting in place all bear to note for a minute that if you find that persuasive, that was very similar to the arguments made in the 2008 financial crisis. 

 

In 2018, there was a rollback of bank regulations that a lot of people, beginning where people like Senator Elizabeth Warren in today's New York Times and I'm sure Matt will be on board with their view as well. I saw AOC making this view. Lots of Democrats make this view that part of what Dodd-Frank was designed to do was to make sure that banks got a lot more regulatory scrutiny than they had previously received prior to the 2008 financial crisis. And it was a very complex regulatory scheme that was put into place. And what midsize banks like Silicon Valley Bank began to do was to make the argument through lobbyists, through paid lobbyists, that, look, these regulations are too onerous for us. They make sense for Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, the kind of big four banking institutions. They can sustain this level of regulatory scrutiny. They need it, but we're not anywhere remotely in the same level of danger in terms of the risks that we're taking and especially the impact that would be caused if we do fail. And they wanted the size of the bank that is subject to this added regulatory scrutiny of Dodd-Frank to be increased from $50 billion, which is where Dodd-Frank put it to $250 billion. In other words, any institution with a total amount of deposits or assets under $250 billion would no longer be subject to this heightened scrutiny and that included Silicon Valley Bank, which was one of the banks whose CEO aggressively and actively lobbied. It wasn't like they were just a beneficiary, incidentally. They actually lobbied to change this regulation and to make it laxer, they were able to put together a majority in the first and then in the Trump administration, in 2018, most Republicans joined with a good chunk of Democrats to create a majority in favor of making those changes so that banks like Silicon Valley Bank got much less regulatory scrutiny. And here is President Trump upon signing that legislation explaining his argument for doing so. 

(Video. May 24, 2018)

Pres. D. Trump: The legislation I'm signing today rolls back the crippling Dodd-Frank regulations that are crushing community banks and credit unions nationwide. They were in such trouble. One size fits all. Those rules just don't work. And community banks and credit unions should be regulated the same way and you have to really look at this. They should be regulated the same way with a proviso for safety as in the past when they were vibrant and strong. But they shouldn't be regulated the same way as the large, complex financial institutions. And that's what happened. And they were being put out of business one by one and they weren't lending. Since its passage in 2010, Dodd-Frank has dealt a huge blow to community banking. As a candidate, I pledged that we would rescue these community banks from Dodd-Frank, the disaster of Dodd-Frank. And now we are keeping that commitment and all of the people with me are keeping it. That commitment. 

 

 

So, when I first begin hearing that this is all Trump's fault, that it was due to the 2018 changes to the banking regulation scheme, I was very skeptical because of the obsession, the addiction on the part of the media to blame everything on Trump. And one does have to note that President Biden is the current president. He has been the president for more than two years now, for the first two years of his presidency up until about two months ago his party, the Democratic Party, controlled both houses of Congress. There was never a time during President Trump's presidency when the Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress. Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats controlled the House during this time and yet somehow everything that happened under the Trump presidency gets blamed on Trump, whereas nothing that happened under the Biden administration gets blamed on President Biden. But with that caveat, it does seem clear, having looked at this a lot more, and beginning with that skepticism that you can draw at least something, if not a very clear and direct one between the rollback of this regulation that the Silicon Valley banks demanded, among other banks, and the fact that this bank was allowed to get very rickety, leading to a bank run, although there are still a lot of questions about. 

There you see the Senate roll call vote on the screen. It was 67 to 31. As most of you know, the Senate has been very evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, very 50-50. So you only get a 67 to 31 vote if it's a very bipartisan bill. And that's exactly what happened here. So when you're trying to pick villains or whatever, that's certainly a critical question, as is the question of whether or not this added regulation would have really prevented this from happening. There are a lot of people who believe that what really happened was that the bank was nowhere near as fundamentally unstable as was suggested, that instead, because of an in-artfully worded press release and an attempt to sell off some of these assets to fix their balance sheet, a lot of people in Silicon Valley who follow these things very closely to talk to one another all the time talked themselves into a kind of panic that led to all of them trying to pull out their massive wealth from this bank that caused the bank run to happen, and that the failure of these other banks is not a reflection of systemic problems or even any sort of similar problems, that it was just contagion, that once you see one bank failing and you have your money in a regional bank, you start thinking, “Wow, I want to take my money out of my community bank, a regional bank, and put it in a much safer place like Bank of America or Wells Fargo”. And if that's the case, it's questionable whether or not added regulatory scrutiny would have solved the problem, because maybe there were really problems in this bank that should have caused it to collapse in the first place. I consider that to be one of the unanswered questions that we have to explore. But whatever else is true, the U.S. government has very quickly, very, very quickly responded to the calls of the richest people in our country, as they so often do. And the question is are they acting cautiously and wisely for the good of all of us, rather than acting corruptly to serve the needs of the people who fund both political parties? 


The interview: Matt Stoller

 

So, to help us answer that question for our interview segment tonight, I'm going to speak to one of the most knowledgeable scholars in the country on Big Tech, on Silicon Valley. We've had him on the show many times before. He spent a lot of years working on the political capture of Washington and Congress by big in interest. He's the author of “Goliath: The 100-Year War between Monopoly Power and Democracy”. He's also the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project. He is Matt Stoller, and we're really delighted to speak to him. 

 

M. Stoller:  Hey, thanks for having me. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Okay, So first of all, that was not yet your time to say thanks for having me. I need to first welcome you to the show. Say hello, Matt. Good evening. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. And now you can go ahead and say that. 

 

M. Stoller:  Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah. 

 

G. Greenwald:  I'm happy to have you. You know, you're a veteran in the show. I expect you to know the timing a little bit better. 

But let's get into the substance of the matter. I can scold you for that later. I want to start at the most basic level for people who do not follow these issues obsessively, who are trying to grapple with them and think about their kind of from the first principle, and that includes myself. So, let's just begin with the most basic way of thinking about this which is what is the best way to think about the relationship between a depositor of a bank and the bank itself. Is the person who's depositing money, nothing more than a creditor whose investment the government has decided partially to insure up to $250,000? Or is that kind of an archaic way of thinking about it and there's a different relationship now between bankers and depositors? 

 

M. Stoller:  No, technically that's exactly accurate. And, you know, it's not just that the government decided in the 1930s we had bank runs all the time that was similar to Silicon Valley Bank, except it was everywhere and people would lose everything. And so, the government and banks kind of cut a deal, right? And democratically. And what they said is we are going to make insurance so that if a bank goes under your deposits up to a certain level – the ordinary people don't have more than $250,000 in an account – you're going to be insured, so you're fine. You don't need to worry about your bank unless you are really rich or your business has a lot of cash. 

Then the banks get really cheap funding, so they get to borrow really low cost and then they lend at a higher cost and they essentially get free profit. But in return for essentially being able to use the government's full faith and credit – the government credit card – they have to accept supervision and regulation so that they're not gambling too much with the government's money. And that was kind of the deal and it prevented bank runs, which are horrible, pretty much until – I mean, you could go the seventies, eighties, nineties in various ways – but you know essentially they still prevent bank runs and your bank account up to $250,000 is still safe. 

There's also a variety of other institutions like the Federal Reserve and the Federal Home Loan Bank program which create what is known as the safety net for the banking system. So really, the banking system is a public system. I mean, people think about banks as private institutions and bankers as businesspeople, but really they kind of have a public obligation as well, because they draw so much support from the safety net. But there are good reasons to have a safety net here. 

Now, I have a lot of rage over the situation, but I'm just trying to give you an analysis of why we have FDIC insurance, why your money is probably safe in the bank account unless you have more than 250,000 and setting up for some context to discuss not just Silicon Valley Bank, but the Fed and FDIC also quietly resolved a different bank signature bank in New York, which is only $107 billion of assets and that's a crypto bank and they kind of snuck that one in as well. 

 

G. Greenwald:  That's Barney Frank's bank, right? the bank where he's a director…

 

M. Stoller:  That's right.

 

G. Greenwald: So, I'm going to absolutely, deliberately, provoke your rage as I love to do. It's actually not that hard. But before we get to that, I just want to spend a couple of more minutes on kind of the foundational understanding. So, we have the culture of the basics to work with. 

If this model is correct that you just described – or that I describe and you kind of accept it and then added to – which is, so, I'm someone who grows and I have a lot of money, I want to put my money in a bank and maybe I have a lot of money, not because I'm rich, but because I have a startup company that people just invested in. Someone gave me $50 million because I need startup cash for my company to develop a new technology – to pay the people who are going to develop it for me. I need a place to stick my money. I stick it in Silicon Valley Bank because it's a 40-year institution, it's well-regarded, and it's something that seems profitable. And then let's assume that the people who run the bank do all kinds of bad and reckless things. They lobby the government for less regulatory scrutiny. They make really terrible decisions. They make bad bets. I think everybody understands that those people who make bad bets and who are reckless should lose whatever gains they would have had. And should basically lose everything, especially if the government has to come in and save them. 

Why, though – the depositors who didn't do anything wrong or who didn't bet wrong, they're just putting their money in a bank that has a well-regarded reputation – why should they lose their money? About $250,000. Just because the executives of this bank acted irresponsibly? 

 

M. Stoller:  Well, there are two reasons. First of all, it's uninsured. It's not a secret that the FDIC limit is $250,000. It's plastered everywhere. So, if you're a treasurer of a corporation or a municipality, you know the score and you're choosing to ignore the rules. And that's just capitalism: sometimes you take a loss if you make a bad decision. And the other reason is, first of all, let's just be clear, uninsured depositors are not going to be wiped out. In fact, they'll probably get 80 to 100 cents on the dollar […] 

 

G. Greenwald: Because the government intervened. But had the government not intervened, they would have been wiped out. 

 

M. Stoller:  No, no, no. The government comes in and sells off the assets of the bank and then pays back the uninsured depositors with whatever they get for that. And Silicon Valley Bank, though, it lost money on bonds – those bonds are still high quality, they just dropped in value somewhat. So, what would have happened is the FDIC would have come in and taken those bonds, sold them off and then, today, people would have gotten between 30% and 60% of their uninsured deposits back. Then, over the next 2 to 6 months, they would have gotten whatever remained from the FDIC selling whatever they could for whatever they could get. And it's likely that people would have gotten 80 to 100 cents on the dollar of uninsured deposits back. 

So, there was no way that people were going to be wiped out by this. What might have been some problems getting access to all of their funding immediately? They would have gotten access to some of it immediately, but not all of it. So really, like the panic here and it was panic, it was, I think, kind of silly the idea that you need to backstop so people get 100% of their deposits immediately was just regulators panicking. And that's all this was. 

 

G. Greenwald:  But their argument was, look, even if down the line we get a good amount back, in the meantime, we can't pay our payroll, our businesses are going to go out of business. They're going to lose tons of start-up in them. And the technology they would develop that would drive the future gross domestic product to the United States. That was the argument. 

 

M. Stoller:  No, no, I know. And you've been feeding it to me all day to get me angrier and angrier. So, I appreciate that. 

 

G. Greenwald: (laughs). But what's the answer to that argument? 

 

M. Stoller: Well, these are not innocent people, right? These are rich people. These are powerful people. They know there's a $250,000 limit. So why have they been violating that when in a lot of cases you have treasuries that don't do that? There are services that you can get at banks called cash sweeps, which let you chop up your $10 million into 40 different $250,000 FDIC-insured accounts. Why didn't they use that? 

Well, the answer is because Silicon Valley Bank was not just an innocent bank. What they were doing is they were saying, if you leave the money from your firm or from – if you're a venture capitalist – the firms that you fund, if you leave them as uninsured deposits with us so that we can gamble with them, we will give you what's called “white collar banking services”, which is to say below cost personal lines of credit, below cost mortgages – essentially the kinds of things that politicians are criticized for because it's essentially bribery.  

The Silicon Valley Bank was essentially giving stakeholders in Silicon Valley bribes to keep their money as uninsured deposits so that they could gamble with it. And that's why these guys took a risk. They were also getting much higher interest rates on their uninsured deposits – they were getting more for taking more risks. So, they should bear the costs of that. And not just that but Silicon Valley Bank was also a co-investor in a lot of these firms. So, Silicon Valley Bank had stakes in over 3000 different tech companies and as a condition of those stakes, it was saying you have to have that firm deposit its cash with us in uninsured. So, there were a lot of elements here where there was self-dealing, there was a bad regulatory system, and then there was the Silicon Valley Bank bribing the people who were in charge of other people's money. So, this is a nasty situation. These people do deserve to have a minor haircut off of their deposits. And it would be – it is – completely crazy what the administration has done – and I blame Janet Yellen for this and I blame the Federal Reserve and I blame Joe Biden and I blame Donald Trump – It is absolutely outrageous that they have made these guys whole. All this was just panic and corruption and greed. And it was totally outrageous and disgusting and I am disgusted by it. 

 

G. Greenwald:  So, let me ask you, Matt, if you talk to the people in Silicon Valley who wanted this, this is their argument. Their argument is this: look, there is nothing special about Silicon Valley Bank. The reality is there are a ton of regional banks and community banks in the United States that are suffering in large part because the Fed raised interest rates. So, I don't really get that argument since the Fed always telegraphs, and especially in this case, telegraphed it very loudly they were going to do that. But their argument is we're not any different. And if you don't back this up and if you don't protect depositors, the thing that's going to happen in the next 48 hours, which seems kind of reasonable to me as a prediction, is everyone's going to get spooked towards their money – you heard Roe O'Connor. This is his argument – in a regional bank or in a community bank. And they're all going to say, you know what, I'm getting my money out of there as quickly as I possibly can. I'm going to put it in one of the big four and every regional bank in the United States is going to collapse. And the only thing that's going to prevent that is if Janet Yellen comes in and says, don't worry, we're here to ensure every penny of your deposits. 

Why isn't that a valid argument? 

 

M. Stoller: It's not a valid argument because we have a system that's set up to address that problem. One question that we have to ask is why didn't Silicon Valley Bank have the cash to give to depositors. Well, one reason is that they weren't keeping enough cash on hand because of the deregulatory choices and bad regulatory decisions by the San Francisco Federal Reserve. 

Another reason is that they just didn't have the assets they needed, right? The Federal Reserve is a bank of banks, and if you need a bunch of cash, you can just go to the Federal Reserve and say, I have a bunch of Treasury bonds or loans or mortgage-backed securities or whatever I need to borrow from you. I'll give you these as collateral. You give me the cash and I'll give it to my depositors, when things blow over, they'll come back and redeposited the money. And we have a system that's set up to deal with large demands for cash. 

The reason Silicon Valley Bank couldn't take advantage of that system is they didn't have the necessary collateral because they were insolvent. Most of these regional banks are not insolvent. And also, most of these regional banks are funded by insured deposits, so, people with less than $250,000 who have no reason to move their money. Silicon Valley Bank was funded 97% with uninsured deposits. Signature Bank, which is the other one – that was Barney Frank's bank and Ivanka Trump was on the board of that one before Barney Frank was – that was 90% uninsured deposits. The next most likely bank to fail,  called First Republic, which has about 67% uninsured deposits. And from there, it goes way down. So, we're really not dealing with a system that is – I mean, there's some trouble because the Fed keeps raising rates – but, as you put it, the Fed has telegraphed this. These guys just chose not to hedge because it would – actually their own employees were telling them, you got to hedge. This is really dangerous as interest rates rise. And the bankers were like, yeah, we don't want to, we won't make as much money. They were making these choices, they were remitting some of the extra profits to the uninsured depositors in the form of – what I've said before, these quasi-bribes. And they're pretty unusual bank. Most regional banks are not like this. So, you might have an initial panic. You might take down one or two or three other banks, but it'll blow over and then you will have re-imposed market discipline. Instead, what we did is we said everyone's going to be made whole; Silicon Valley bank depositors who took these massive risks, they're going to be made whole; all banks except for Silicon Valley Bank and Signature, their funding costs are going to go down and we're going to hand them all the full faith and credit of the United States that they can go off and gamble with. And there we go. Problem solved. Like that's what we did. Instead, this is just like a panic. And instead of dealing with banking panics the way that we should, which is to just use sort of like take out the bad banks that are insolvent, you let them go insolvent and everybody else –you lend them to tide over the panic. They freaked out and did a giant bank bailout and I think the reason this is different from 2008 is there are losses [...] 

 

G. Greenwald:  Oh, hold on. I'll probably get there before we get there. I just want to address my audience for one second because people are telling me in my ear that they’re treating you and cheering for you like you're some kind of Huey Long populist and wondering why I've suddenly transformed into Tim Geithner performing Propagandistic Services on behalf of Silicon Valley oligarchs. So, I just want to be very clear that the format of the show, on purpose, and I thought I said this at the beginning, was I was going to have Matt on – whom I know for certain, and somebody very vigorously opposed, in fact, angrily opposed to what the Treasury Department is doing – and I'm presenting him the arguments in favor of this bailout, not because I share those arguments or believe in those arguments, but because I think the best way to  have this show be the most informative, is to allow you to hear Matt responding to the arguments of the people defending this, which are not necessarily my arguments just because they're coming out of my mouth. 

So, let me ask you, Matt, now that I've taken off my Tim Geithner costume – although I'm going to put it back on, the proviso that I'm wearing it on purpose, what about 2008? Because that obviously is the thing that I think a lot of people are thinking about. I've seen lots of debates. Is this a 2008-style bailout? Is this something different? Obviously, the magnitude is a completely different universe but, in terms of the mentality, it seems like what this is, is the government stepping in and defending and protecting the assets of rich people as they did in 2008, because that's whom they serve, because that's who funds them. Is that one of the right ways to think about what's happening here? 

 

M. Stoller:  Yeah, there's a couple of differences between 2018 and then some similarities. I feel like this is like a high school essay. There are similarities and differences. So, the difference is that, in 2008, people were freaking out because the banks had invested in a bunch of crappy mortgages and nobody knew what anything was worth. So it wasn't that there were losses, it was that nobody knew how big the losses were or whether anybody was solvent. So, it was a panic, but it was a panic that was like – it was a very rational reason to panic because you didn't actually know what anything was worth and you didn't know if any institution was worth anything. And neither did any regulators. And it took a while to sort that out.  

In this situation, there are losses, but we know what those losses are. It's pretty open and it's not like we're going to be that surprised. The Fed has been telegraphing that it's raising rates. Everybody knew that Silicon Valley Bank had losses on the books. And then, there’s these other regional banks. We know what they've lost. So, this is not that big a deal. There is some panic in the markets, it's a serious situation but it's not a crisis situation. 

But in terms of the similarities, I think what you see is exactly the same attitude of 2008, in 2023. I mean, one of the differences is, in this case, the stockholders and the bondholders are not getting bailed out, but the uninsured depositors are. So, in that sense, it's, I guess, a little bit better than 2008, because, in 2008, they bailed out the stockholders and the bondholders and then the executives got bonuses. This time, at least they have to give the bonuses before the bailout. But yeah, the attitude is similar. And that is why I'm angry because we've seen this movie before. And in this case, they didn't need to do it. In 2008, I think that they needed to do something, there needed to be capital injections – the way they did it was problematic – but in this case, they didn't actually need to do it. And that was pretty obvious. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Okay, so that's one point. The next thing I want to ask you about, is, as I said, there does seem to be an addiction on the part of the political class to blame anything and everything that happens instantly on Donald Trump and only on him. It absolutely is true that there were rollbacks of Dodd-Frank, in 2018. We played the bill signing where Trump announced the rationale that led him to sign this. It definitely ended up excluding Silicon Valley Bank because, by raising the threshold to $250 billion, from $50 billion, they would have been subject to this scrutiny. And with this change, they ended up excluded. 

What I'm wondering is this: what it seemed to me like in real time – and I've read the accounts of some of these people who are extremely wealthy individuals who tried to take their money out of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday to find that they couldn't do so – but it seemed to me what happened was panic – as you said, in 2008, it was kind of rational, you looked at the markets and there is reason to think these institutions might be insolvent or at least have no idea whether or not they were – in the case of Silicon Valley Bank, they definitely had losses on their balance sheet, but it doesn't seem to me that they had the kind of losses that warranted a panic or a bank run. 

What instead happened is that you have this very incestuous group in Silicon Valley that started whispering to each other “you better take your money out”, “you better take your money out”. That spread very rapidly. It proliferated and everybody took their money out. Of course, Silicon Valley Bank didn't have the liquidity to cover that. If that's true, or some version of that is true, what I'm wondering is let's assume that there hadn't been this rollback of the Dodd-Frank regulations in 2018, that you had the regulators subjecting Silicon Valley Bank to the same stress test that it would have gotten before the rollback in 2018. Is it really that clear that the federal regulators would have blown the whistle on Silicon Valley Bank said its balance sheet is way too risky or way too far away from what is safe or would they have looked at it and said, you probably should do what they ended up doing, selling off some mortgage-backed securities, doing some stuff that you talked about with the Fed in order to bring in more liquidity, unload some longer-term assets – which is what they did, that, in turn, further fueled the fear. I'm just wondering, is it really that clear that if regulators had taken a look at it under the hood, they would have freaked out the way that these depositors did? 

 

M. Stoller: I don't know that it's clear. Yeah, sure, they engineered a bank run, but I don't put it on the depositors – they freaked out for a rational reason which is that the bank might be insolvent and probably what they did was smart. If you think that the bank is not going to have your money and your money's not insured, you should pull it out and get it out before everybody else. That's what causes a bank run. 

So, it was sitting there like it was kindling waiting to go up in flames. And, you know, it just so happened that it was a group of people, I don't know, slack or whatever, or signal, that lit the flames, but that was going to go. I don't know that you can definitively claim that bank or bank regulators would have forced Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank to have more liquidity on hand and to not have made so many egregious bets. I just don't think you could say that definitively. But I do think you can say that it's more likely they would have definitively. However, the other point here is I think there's a sort of 1, 2 problem here because – I worked on Dodd-Frank – and so, first of all, you're welcome. We fixed everything as everybody […] 

 

G. Greenwald:  Including Barney Frank’s bank. 

 

M. Stoller: The dirty secret of Barney Frank is he didn't actually know anything about banking, which was, like, kind of hilarious. But […] 

 

G. Greenwald:  But he had a lot of friends in banking. 

 

M. Stoller:  Right. Well, we could go into a whole thing on Barney Frank. 

But in 2009 and 2010, what we effectively did is we institutionalize too-big-to-fail banks. So, the four or five big banks that are too big to fail, we said we're going to make it too big to fail, and maybe we're going to regulate it a little bit more aggressively. And then there's them and then there's everybody else. 

Then, you move forward and the regional banks, who are very large but not as large as the big banks, they say, well, we want to be able to gamble a little bit more aggressively and then they convince the Republicans to go along. The Republicans never like bank regulators or banks – there was like a really interesting rethinking of significant parts of the Republican orthodoxy agenda like trade and antitrust. But one thing that the rethinking didn't get to, the realignment didn't get to, was banking rules, although I will note that on March 3, a bunch of Senate Republicans sent a letter to the Federal Reserve being like, you better not regulate more aggressively. We passed a bill in 2018 to make sure you don't. And J.D. Vance was not on that letter. There is some reason to think that some of the younger Republicans are changing their thinking. But it is certainly true that, in terms of bank regulation, this is still George W Bush's party, right? It didn't change. 

But I think that this was kind of like a twofer. Like we created the too-big-to-fail problem in the 1990s and 2000 and we institutionalized it with Dodd-Frank and then, we allowed these regional banks to go crazy, in 2018, and created this situation, in 2023, when these regional banks had gambled with other people's money and kind of had this collusive arrangement with these uninsured depositors. 

There was an argument, ‘oh, everybody's going to just go to move their money to JPMorgan because it's essentially a government bank’. It's a somewhat reasonable argument. I think it's overstated. I just don't think there was panic in most places in this country – this was a very online sort of echo chamber. But it's not an unreasonable argument. I think what we have to do now is look at the banking system and say, banks unless you're really small – In which case we can just kick you around because you have no political power – unless you're really small, you are effectively a government bank. And we need to just treat you like you are a government employee. You're a GS-15. You don't get to gamble with taxpayer money and pay yourself large amounts of money in bonuses or share buybacks or whatever. That's kind of where we are and if we want to move away from what is effectively a socialized system, which I think we should, then we should do that but right now, we are at a kind of socialized system, and it is the Democrats under Obama, it was the Republicans under Trump. And then, it's also the Democrats under Biden and Yellen. Although I'll say this, some of the things that Biden was trying to do, like he was trying to put this bank regular name, Saule Omarova, who opposed the 2018 bank deregulation, and she got blocked by essentially the same coalition of people who passed the 2018 bills, which is all the Republicans and then some Democrats. So, it's not totally clear here but what is 100% clear is that, broadly speaking, the political class, entirely in the Republican Party and then some of the Democrats and certainly at Treasury and the Federal Reserve are wholly in favor of bank bailouts for the wealthy and the powerful. You can argue about when they're necessary and when they're not. There were certainly some innocent people who were going to get hurt here but broadly speaking, what just happened was very bad and is an indictment of our regulators and our political class. 

 

G. Greenwald:  In terms of the last question, I mean, I think if you're listening to that and you're Republican, first of all, there's probably a lot of Republicans who want the party to move more in the direction of the J. D. Vance of the world and get away from the Mitch McConnell and the kind of where we're serving the lobbyist class, right? But, nonetheless, even going back to 2008 – with Hank Paulson and George Bush's bailout that both McCain and Obama and Canada had signed on to – the reason it failed at first was that a lot of Republicans voted no. Not a good number, Democrats and Republicans. And their attitude was exactly that, which is like, ‘No, we don't want the banking system nationalized’. We don't want it socialized; we don't want it federalized. But what we also don't want is, when it does fail, you look to the government and we come in and save you. Too bad, you're not getting our help. 

Is that a viable alternative to saying to the banks you're now under federal control? Or will it always be the case that at the end of the day the government's going to have to come in and save the banks because if they don't, the harm is going to be too widespread? 

 

M. Stoller:  Banking is always a public business, right? I mean, that's just that the bankers like to pretend that banking is private and bankers are running private businesses. But the reality is that when you get a bank charter, it's a government license and you get access to a whole social safety net. That is the thousand Federal Home Loan Banks, the FDIC, and all bankers take advantage of it. They want to take advantage of it. And they just bristle at the oversighted regulations because they can't gamble as much. So, it is a public system. But within that context, they have to do or they should do risk management.

 And the question is, how do they get penalized when they don't do adequate risk management? And the way we used to penalize them is their shareholders, their bondholders, uninsured depositors and bankers themselves got penalized. And today, it seems like where we've moved to is that if you're rich and powerful, you get profits, but no losses. Those are just fundamentally different systems, even though both of them are public systems. This last one, I think the one where we've socialized all the losses, I think, it's far more of a step towards kind of a nationalized system. It's just a very terrible nationalized system versus the kind of earlier, hybrid one where they did take losses sometimes. So, I think what we need to just acknowledge is that this is a public-private system and that we have to impose some form of market discipline, but also allow for stability. So, allow for insured deposits, but make sure that if, you're not insured, that you have to do risk management. And then, I would also say that a lot of business people just want a place to put their money that is safe. That's all they want. And why should we force them to be effective what is a government bank like J. P. Morgan or something like that? They should just be able to get an account at the Federal Reserve, right? If they're going to have a government bank, it's either going to have an implicit backstop or it's just going to be explicit. And why not just like it's a public service? So, let's just have it go through the government itself versus what we have now, which is, you know, we're having government banks. It's just we're paying the people, running them way too much and they get to gamble with our money. So, I don't know if I answered your questions, like there are inherently public characteristics of a banking system, but it doesn't have to be sort of a totally nationalizing of the downside, which is what we've been doing over the last 10 or 15 years or so. 

 

G. Greenwald:  But in this case, just to conclude, if you were the Treasury secretary or if you're the president, what would have happened is you would have let Silicon Valley Bank be on its own, have the FDIC come in and take it over, sell off its assets, give the depositors as much as possible over the amount of time and hope that you're right, that it would have only been a couple of banks that would have gone down in the resulting panic but in the system in large, the banking system is fundamentally sound. That's your view. 

 

M. Stoller:  Yeah. And look, if there had been like a broader crisis and, all of a sudden, there was this massive solvency problem – like then you come in and you go to Congress and you say there is going to be a serious banking crisis and we need capital injections and we're going to attach really serious strings to that – but you don't just start with the 16th largest bank in the country, that's just $200 billion of assets and a bunch of venture capitalists. And Larry Summers starts to say, “oh, you have to make my buddies whole”. You don't just respond to that. You have to have real evidence that there is a systemic crisis. Otherwise, it's illegal, right? I mean, the logic is clear. So, that's just where you have to have some ability to stand up to panic. And that's like what these guys don't have, they're just like, you would say boo and they they're like, Oh, where do I write the check? 

 

G. Greenwald:  So, I said in my introduction, that one of the things you study is the capture of government by finance. Is it your view and I know it's hard sometimes to kind of talk about people as a monolith and to know people's motives. But Janet Yellen's been around for a long time, as you can see. If you listen to her, watch her, she obviously is aware of both sides of this argument. 

Is it your view that she wasn't willing to let this panic spread out of fear that it was more systemic and she thought it would be better to capture it, just stop it when it first started? Or do you have the more cynical view that these rich people have tons of power inside the office of these decision-makers – which, of course, they do –  and that's why they ended up getting their way? 

 

M. Stoller:  Well, I don't think those two stories are mutually exclusive. I don't think that any of these actors were acting in bad faith. It would be easier if they were, right? If they were just scheming corruption and they were just like, “aha, I'm going to bail out my rich friends”. It's much worse than that. It's like they actually believe they're their rich friends when they say everything is going to collapse. That's what actually is going on here. They were like, “oh, my gosh, if Larry Summers says that everything's going to collapse, I better act”, right?  They believe, they get spooked easily, and the people that don't are the people that get blocked from being put into office. They bring up Saule Omarova. She would not have stood for this if the Senate had confirmed her at the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, she would have been like, no, this is bullshit. And so, I think that part of the problem here is that the people that you – Janet Yellen has been terrible for a really long time. And, you know, she got bipartisan confirmation and the rest of it ends like you can go back to the the Trump administration and you'd find the same thing. It's the people who are actually really courageous and willing to stand up to the financial power that have a tough time getting confirmed. And so that's kind of, you know, they intentionally select people who are weak, right?, for these positions. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Yeah. All right, Matt. Well, unless there's anything else you feel I need to get off your chest and, you know, you'll always have a welcome spot here to do it. It's like a massage therapy spot. I want to thank you so much for taking the time. It was super enlightening. Gave me a lot of arms to talk to David Sachs tomorrow when I do, about his side of the story. So, if you don't have anything else, let me say goodnight and thank you again for taking the time. 

 

M. Stoller:  All right. Thanks so much, Tim Geithner. 

 

G. Greenwald:  All right. (laughs).


Monologue

 

So last night was the Academy Awards, if you're like most people these days, actually, in America, you did not watch it, even though it used to be one of the events that brought all of Americans together. Increasingly, the ratings are collapsing for all sorts of reasons that we can go into. At some other point, I bet the number of people who could actually name the film that won best film in the 2022 Oscar ceremony is under 4% or 5%. I actually read it this morning and I've already forgotten it. I was about to tell you I'm proud of myself for having done that research, and yet it's already out of my brain. I didn't see that film. I don't think I saw any of the nominees. That's increasingly true for a lot of people. 

So clearly the Oscars have lost a lot of cultural impacts and I nonetheless want to talk about it for a very specific reason. And I'm going to just spend a little bit of time on it because that's all I really deserve. And I'm much less interested in the issue of the Oscars itself than the broader issue that I think it highlights. So just to give you the setup and the issue that I want to talk about is the category of best documentary. And I do have a personal stake in this somewhat, which is that my friend Laura Poitras – who directed Citizenfour, which was the film, a documentary about the work that I did with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong that won the best Documentary Oscar in 2015, was nominated for a film about the opioid crisis that I actually expected was going to win. I haven't seen any of these films other than hers, including the film talk about, so I want to put that card on the table as well. That film that Laura did, which would have been her second Oscar win, ended up not winning. I honestly don't care. Laura has won every award there is in this world, basically, and she didn't need a second Oscar. 

Anyway, the film that did win is a film called Navalny, which is a documentary about the Russian dissident who is currently imprisoned because he is an opponent of the government of Vladimir Putin and you can imagine how popular he is, even though he has said things his whole life that should make him completely anathema to liberal America. He has said some of the most vicious and bigoted denunciations of the Muslims of the world. He was taken off the list of a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty because of some of his most recent statements that he refused to recant. But that doesn't matter. Just like liberals are eager to arm actual neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine. All that it takes these days to be a hero is to either be opposed to Donald Trump or be opposed to Vladimir Putin, and everything else is completely irrelevant. And that's the reason they gave this Oscar for this film about Navalny. And I just want to show you what happened in the two and a half minutes that resulted in them winning (Video). 

 

Presenter: And the Oscar goes to… Navalny. […]Diane Becker, Melanie Miller, Shane Boris…

 

OFF: Director Daniel Roher and his team filmed Alexei Navalny while he was in hiding from the Russian government at a remote location in Germany. 

 

Daniel Roher: Thank you to the Academy. We are humbled to be in the company of such an extraordinary crop of documentary filmmakers. These films redefine what it is to make a documentary. To everyone who helped make our film, you know who you are, your bravery and courage made this film possible. We owe so much to our Bulgarian nerd with his laptop, Christo Grozev. Christo, you risked everything to tell this story, and it's investigative journalists like you and Maria Pevichikh that empower our work. To the Navalny family. Yulia, Dasha and Zakhar, thank you for your courage. The world is with you. 

And there's one person who couldn't be with us here tonight. Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, remains in solitary confinement for what he calls – I want to make sure we get his words exactly right – Vladimir Putin's unjust war of aggression in Ukraine. I would like to dedicate this award to Navalny, to all political prisoners around the world. Alexei, the world has not forgotten your vital message to us all. We cannot, we must not be afraid to oppose dictators and authoritarianism wherever rears its head. I want to invite Yulia to say a few quick remarks. Yulia. 

 

Yulia Navalnaya: Thank you, Daniel. And thank you to everybody. The everybody here. My husband is in prison just for telling the truth. My husband is in prison just for defending democracy. Alexei, I am dreaming the day when you will be free and our country will be free. Stay strong, my love. Thank you. 

 

 

Okay. All incredibly moving, and emotional and obviously, I'm sure people in that room, the people who voted for this film, felt very good about themselves. They were taking a stand against Russia, against the Russian dictatorship. They all were cheering. The person who directed the film that won the Oscar said, “We need to stand up to dictatorship wherever it rears its head”. 

I think one of the things that makes us so notable is that during the Cold War, the idea of whataboutism was often denounced by the U.S. government, and the way they define that was that they would always claim that any time you criticized the Soviet Union and its abridgment of basic liberties and rights, the Soviet government would try and distract attention away from that critique by saying, “well, what about your problem over there in the United States with how you treat black people? Or what about the internment of Japanese Americans?” So, they would kind of distract their own citizens’ attention away from the critiques of their human rights abuses by pointing way over to the other side of the world, the United States. And they would always say, what about this? What about that? What about this? 

Now, the idea that some sort of Soviet practice that they invented is lunacy. Humans have been doing that from the time that they could speak. You say, well, you have this fault and they say, no, what about my neighbor? My neighbor has it far worse. There's a very human practice. The Soviets did not invent theirs, but that was always the framework. That was the idea was the governments do, in fact, use this tactic to distract attention away from their own abuses. 

It's not just the Soviet Union that does that or the Russian government that does that, it's also the United States that does that, we're experts at it. We love to say things like we will stand up for democracy, despotism and tyranny wherever we find it. We will stand up to Navalny, to this person over here in China who's imprisoned unjustly, or this person here in Iran. And, of course, the United States has always had and still does have its own dissidents in prison and one of the leading ones, for example, is Julian Assange. 

And so, it seems very strange to me, very strange, to have a room full of people cheering not just the film, but themselves, for very – it's a very empty and cowardly thing to do, to denounce the government on the other side of the world over which you have absolutely no influence. Denouncing Vladimir Putin or President Xi or the Iranian mullah is really doesn't do anything to change those governments. You have no influence there. It's not a brave thing to do. You're not in danger there. You don't live in those countries. It's always been the case that foreign countries that are enemies of one another criticize each other. That's all this is.

What makes a lot more bravery and that's a lot more consequential, is criticizing the human rights abuses of your own government. And if you don’t ever do that, if instead you're constantly focused on the human rights abuses of other governments, it actually empowers your own government to engage in the same human rights abuses because you're constantly reaffirming its narrative that it's only those bad countries over there that imprison political dissidents and political opponents. We absolutely do the same. Julian Assange is in prison, in part because he exposed the crimes of the United States government, but also because – and I think this is really the bigger part – is, in 2016, he published documents that helped Donald Trump win the election and Hillary Clinton lose the election. Because before that, many Democrats and people on the liberal left are very much in support of Julian Assange and now it's almost impossible to find anyone on the liberal left willing to stand up in defense of Julian Assange. And the only thing that changed was that he did journalism that helped defeat Hillary Clinton. That is the classic case of being a political prisoner. The Biden administration is doing everything possible to keep him in prison for as long as possible, despite never having been convicted of a crime. And it is unimaginable that these same Hollywood liberals would give an award to a dissident like Julian Assange. 

Now, when I said this earlier today, people pointed out that the same Hollywood liberals who vote did, in fact, give an award, the Oscar, to the best documentary that Laura Poitras produced about my work with Edward Snowden. I went up on the Oscars stage. We collected the Oscars, but they were for Laura and for the two producers of that film. But I think especially in the wake of Donald Trump, everything changed in terms of how American liberals think. They've become much more jingoistic and they never like to believe their own government engages in the kinds of abuses that the Russian government engages in. And not only is it just a vapid and cowardly thing to do – spend so much time focused on the bad acts of a government far away from you over which you have no control or you can't change it while ignoring the abuses of your own government – it actually makes it even more difficult to do anything about the abuses of those foreign governments, because if you try, other governments will look at you like you're crazy – like, who are you to lecture us on the rights of dissidents when you imprison your own dissidents yourself? Why would we possibly listen to your lectures? 

There was an incredibly powerful example of this when President Ilham Aliyev, of the above Azerbaijan, who for sure is a savage authoritarian, was confronted by a reporter from the BBC about Azerbaijan's imprisonment and other abuses towards dissidents. And you'll see how he used that argument. Listen to what he said: 

 

(Video. Nov. 9, 2020) 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Why do you think the people question do not have free media and opposition? 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  Because this is what I'm told by independent sources in this country. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Which independence sources?  

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  Many independent sources. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Tell me, which. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  I certainly couldn't name sources. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: If you could name that means you are just inventing this story. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  So, you're saying the media is not under state control? 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Not at all. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  I mean NGOs are the subject of a crackdown. Journalists are the subject of a crackdown. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Not at all. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  Critics are in jail. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: No, no, 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  none of this is true?  

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Absolutely fake. Absolutely. We have free media. We have free Internet. And the number of Internet users in Azerbaijan is more than 80%. Can you imagine the restriction of media in a country where the Internet is free, there is no censorship and 80% of Internet users? This is, again, a biased approach. This is an attempt to create a perception in Western audiences about Azerbaijan. We have opposition, we have NGOs, we have free political activity, we are free media, and we have freedom of speech. But if you raise this question, can I ask you also, how do you assess what's happened to Mr. Assange? Is it a reflection of free media in your country? Let's talk about Assange, how many years he spent in the Ecuadorian embassy and for what? And where is he now? For journalistic activity you kept that person hostage, actually killing him, morally and physically. You did it, not us. And now he's in prison. So, you have no moral right to talk about free media when you do these things. 

 

 

No, no. It seems like a good argument to me. You do, in fact, lose your moral right to criticize the people for conduct in which you yourself engage. That seems basic. And if you are somebody who likes to spend a lot of time talking about the abuses of foreign governments while being indifferent to or even supportive of very similar abuses by your own – and it's absolutely a similar abuse to imprison Alexei Navalny and Julian Assange. I can make arguments just why they're different in favor of the Russian government but I won’t, let's assume that they're very similar. If you're somebody who does very little about that abuse or other abuses by the U.S. government, including cracking down on whistleblowers, putting January 6 defendants, including nonviolent ones in prison and in solitary confinement for months, even though most of them are not accused of using violence at all; keeping Edward Snowden in exile or refusing to let him come back to the country or step foot outside of Russia upon pain of imprisoning him for his courageous work and showing his fellow citizens how our own government was spying on us without warrants illegally and unconstitutionally, as federal courts in our country have ruled, then I think that argument is very valid that not only do you have no moral credibility, but your attempt to solve those problems elsewhere is severely diminished. 

So, as all of those Hollywood liberals clap for themselves, not for Navalny over the filmmakers, but for themselves, for having been so courageous in giving him that award, I think it's very worth thinking about why their focus is so intensely on the bad acts of another government all the way around the other side of the world that our own government tells us to hate, and so rarely on the abuses of our own government. 

 

So that concludes our show for this evening. Remember that we have System Update now available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple and other major platforms published 12 hours after we appear, live, here on Rumble. 

Remember as well that every Tuesday and Thursday we have our live aftershow on Locals where we take your questions, respond to your feedback, listen to your ideas and suggestions about who we should interview and what topics we should cover. To join our Locals community, where you also get free access to all of our journalism, just sign up the join button underneath the video on the Rumble page and that will take you to our Locals community, which we are in the process of building even further. 

As I said, tomorrow night we will have at 7 p.m. EST, our normal time, David Sachs, who's one of those venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, who was urging and who vehemently defends what the U.S. government did in protecting every penny of the depositors of Silicon Valley. So, you'll get to hear me ask the sort of anti-bailout questions to him to kind of complete the debate that we started tonight with Matt Stoller. 

Thank you, as always, for watching. We hope to see you back tomorrow night here and every night at 7 p.m. EST. 

Have a great evening, everybody. 

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System Update #500

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!

AD_4nXeZ4O4xc3AC6Xv7frryn0gRH426dnSiiWL_fHVJUOiYl0GyRu76Tf_ErdSXxAbt8_5IV4kXzpFumx9nFzEAFwyvBJKuSESoXedKaeqEU0JbvwLnTrSW_CnKdpQw8zuiOEQ2N6y3215-SJqPKJrgyg?key=0DG7XNYuAKh3Go88NaPTAg

Welcome to episode 500 of System Update, which means that over the last two years, ever since we launched in December of 2022, 500 times I have sat my ass in this chair, and we have done a program for you. Today is number 500. 

System Update, of course, is our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

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Every Friday night, as we're doing tonight, we take questions solely from our Locals members. We try to answer as many as we can.

 You may have noticed as well that, inspired by Donald Trump, all art today in commemoration of 500 shows is in gold, not our typical green and black. No, everything is gold. We went all out for tonight. So, I really hope you enjoy it.

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The first of which is from @alan_smithee. And he asked this:

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One of the reasons why I didn't talk about it, despite obviously being extremely interested in all three of them and the subject matter that they cover, I obviously am a longtime friend of Tucker’s. I used to be on the show, I think more than anybody else, when he was on Fox News, and now, on his podcast, I'm on frequently, maybe the guest who's been on the most as well, not really sure. It's not a competition. I don't know why I have to keep saying I'm at the top of the charts, but just to indicate the frequency, and he's been on our show before. So, I definitely consider him a friend of mine. Candace, I have a good relationship; I would describe it as friendly. I've chatted with Nick over the years a little bit, certainly not near the same level of interaction. 

I had this issue with Matt Taibbi. I was recently on Briahna Joy Gray's show, but also, I might have even been on a different show, where people were trying to ask me about Matt Taibbi and some of the criticism of him. Yeah, we've gotten questions about Matt Taibbi here as well over the past few months about things like his refusal to comment on Israel and Gaza, his infrequent commentary on the First Amendment issues raised by deporting students who speak critically of Gaza, the imposition of hate speech codes on American campuses by the Trump administration to shield Israel from criticism. 

I'm very honest about the fact that when someone is your friend, when you consider someone as your friend, at least for me, I really don't feel comfortable publicly criticizing them. It's actually one of the reasons why I go out of my way not to be friends or have any social ties with the people I'm supposed to be covering in Washington – politicians, major journalists. I've always thought the fact that I don't live in New York or Washington to be one of the greatest benefits for my journalism because I'm not in the middle of their social scenes. I don’t owe any social niceties to them. I don't feel as though if I criticize them, it's going to affect my social life or put me in uncomfortable positions. I take the obligation of friendship seriously. If you're actually somebody's friend, it comes with loyalty, and part of that loyalty is that, if you have problems with what they do and say, you go to them privately. It would take a lot for me to publicly criticize or down someone I consider my friend.

 I'm just being honest about that. Maybe that's not even the right thing to do. I'm not praising myself. I'm telling you how I feel personally. But again, I think if you live in New York, if you live in Washington, and you're integrated into that political media world, that is one of the reasons why it's so incestuous, why they constantly cover for each other, why there's so much groupthink within it. 

They're always talking to each other, for each order. To be part of these social scenes on which they depend, you have to be welcome. Part of being welcome is that you don't stray too far from their dogma. And I've always aggressively kept a very distant arm's length from people in positions of power, from major media figures, so that I don't feel constrained about giving my honest views or critiques or analysis or reporting on them. 

Occasionally, you do become friends with people almost by accident, who then end up in positions of power. Tulsi Gabbard is a good example. I have no problem criticizing Tulsi Gabbard because, whatever good relations I've had with her before, she's now the director of National Intelligence, and I'm not going to pull punches when I have critiques of Tulsi and I am also going to praise her only because I feel the praise is warranted. 

So, sometimes you just have to accept the fact that somebody has risen to a particular position or entered a type of power position, and there's just no getting around the fact that your job requires honest critique. I don't feel like that's the case for any of the people involved here, Tucker, Candace, or Nick Fuentes. I don't feel like any of them is a government official. Obviously, they all do have a great deal of influence in very different ways. So, I don't want to side with any one of them, nor do I want to necessarily say that I think insults or criticisms that they've launched at each other are warranted, but it is an extremely important conversation, so I also don't want to avoid it entirely, because for one thing these are three people, and obviously people understand how influential Tucker and Candace are. They're arguably the two most prominent conservative journalists/pundits, influencers. Maybe you could put Charlie Kirk in there, maybe Ben Shapiro, but Tucker and Candace are both bigger. I mean, Tucker hosted the most-watched show in the history of cable news for five years at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox. He's been on TV for 25 years before that. And Candace is just a powerhouse. She's a force of nature. Whatever you think of her, whatever you think of the Macron stuff, whatever you're thinking for Israel stuff, whatever, I'm leaving that on the side, I'm just saying. 

The fact of the matter is that when Candace left The Daily Wire, which, of course, is founded and run by Ben Shapiro after she had a falling out with Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, the other co-founder, over her criticism of Israel, which at the time was very mild – she was basically saying, “I don't think we should be bombing and killing children.” – that was pretty much the extent of it which caused this massive upheaval. A lot of people wondered, well, what is she going to do? Just like people wondered what Tucker Carlson was going to do, and they both went on to become, in my view, far more influential. 

I'm not saying that Tucker's position in the mediocre system now is necessarily larger than it is at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox News, but being at the 8 o'clock hour on Fox News comes with a lot of constraints, as he found out when he got fired, despite being the highest rated host on all of cable news. And he's completely liberated of those constraints now, I mean, completely. Completely. He's financially set. Fox is still paying this gigantic contract. He also now has a very successful platform. I mean, he's not worried about saying or doing whatever he wants. I know he feels – he said this before, publicly, not just in our conversations – that there were a lot of things he did as part of his career that he deeply regrets. Just being part of the Washington Group. 

I think he was raised there. I mean, he wasn't raised physically in Washington, but he eventually went there. But his father was very integrated into the U.S. deep state, that we could call it, ties to the CIA, he ran the propaganda arm of the U.S. government, Voice of America, was very, very integrated into that world. He grew up with a lot of wealth and privileges as he will tell you, and so when he got to Washington and got on TV very early on, he really was just immersed in this subculture that led him to believe, or at least not even necessarily to believe but to say a lot of things that he didn't really fully believe, or maybe that you can get yourself to believe things that you don't really believe because you just feel like it's what everyone around you expects you to say. 

Unlike a lot of people who are guilty of the same thing, Tucker has probably more than anybody else been extremely candid about what he regrets, and not only what he regrets, I'm not just talking about support for the Iraq war, I'm talking about the whole support that he gave for George Bush, Dick Cheney, neoconservative ideology, and not just on foreign policy, but also on economic policy and I think it's often overlooked. Everyone sees his head in foreign policies. Even when he was at Fox, he was criticizing Trump for doing things like assassinating General Soleimani, saying, “This is not in our interest. This might be in the interest of neocons or Israel, but why would we risk a war with Iran when that's not in our interest?” He was saying things like that even on Fox. He probably was the single most influential figure who took a lot of MAGA people, a lot of people on the right, and turned them against the war in Ukraine every night. 

I was on his show dozens of times talking about that war to the point where when he got fired from Fox, a bunch of Republican lawmakers ran to Politico or Axios anonymously and celebrated his firing and saying, “Oh, now our lives are going to be much easier. We can now fund the war in Ukraine without as much public pushback.” And that trajectory was because not just that he regretted what he had previously advocated and acknowledged his wrongdoing, but he was and is really determined to kind of repent for it. And he feels like the way to repent for it is by never again allowing himself to be blind. 

He moved out of Washington, used to live in the middle of Georgetown, where Victoria Nuland lived, I think, down the street or the other street. I mean, that's where they all lived. Now, he lives in rural Maine. He also lives on an island in Florida. He purposely took himself to very isolated places that are completely detached from that world, for the same reason as I was just describing. Not only do you feel less constrained, but you see things more clearly. You don't wake up every day and immediately get surrounded by people who are just part of this blob of groupthink and so, you're able to analyze things from a distance. It’s sort of like if you go into a big city and you're on a street corner, the vision that you have of what the city looks like is radically different than if you fly over it because that distance from what you're looking at gives you a better perspective, or at least, maybe not even better, but different. And the same thing happens when you move out of Washington or New York, and you purposely stay away from it, you start to see things more clearly because you're not immersed in it. And I do find that extremely valuable. 

I find that trajectory very, very positive. It's one of the reasons why, probably more than anything else that I've ever done, what caused much of the left turn against me, not all, but much, was number one, my refusal to get on board with Russiagate, but number two, my association with Tucker. I saw early on that there was a real movement within parts of the populist right, which you're now seeing in lots of different ways, not just questioning Israel and foreign policy and war, but also corporatism and the idea of economic populism. And yes, there are lots of deviations from it, but I mean Tucker and a few others were what made me see how real that was and how much of an opportunity there was, and not just to keep yourself in prison in the Democratic Party. 

So, I do believe Tucker's trajectory is real. I do believe that he's sincere and genuine in what he's saying. You never know what's fully in a person's heart, not even your own heart. You can't know for certain. You can deceive yourself about your own motives, your own thoughts and even the people you're closest to, your friends. But I have enough confidence in how well I know him, not just professionally, but personally as well, the time we spent together, the time that we've talked, that I do believe that he's very authentic in what he's saying. I think his trajectory is continuing. I don't think he's stopped at the point where he's going to be. And I think it's been very positive on almost every level. 

So that’s Tucker over here; then let's kind of put Candace in a similar position. I don't know Candace as well, so I can't comment to that degree of confidence about who she is and why she's doing what she's doing, but, two years ago, Candace worked at The Daily Wire, four years ago, she was in Jerusalem with Charlie Kirk celebrating Trump's move of the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, a long-time pipe dream, what seemed like a pipe dream of the furthest, most radicalized Greater Israel fanatics and their supporters in the United States. And there was very little criticism coming from Candace about Israel. In fact, the opposite was true. 

In her case, she's a lot younger than Tucker, she's only been around for not all that long, and I know personally that when you start off doing this work and you're able to spend full time digging into things, if you're minimally a critical thinker, if you're minimally open-minded, your views are going to morph the more you learn, the more you dive into things, the more you experience things. That is healthy and normal. And I do believe that her views, which she most passionately expresses, to which she pays the most attention, are genuine, which isn't the same thing as saying I agree with them all and they're all positive. I'm just saying I believe she also believes the things she's saying. I don't think it's calculated. I don't think it's about grifting. If it were, she could have stayed at The Daily Wire. There are easier ways to make a popular path than doing what she does. 

She defends Harvey Weinstein. She took up that case. There was hardly a public clamoring for that, especially among the audience that she cultivated. Also, the Macron stuff, all the stuff with Israel – she's been excluded from a lot of mainstream corporate media circles to which she used to have complete access and in which she could have risen without limits, obviously She’s very talented, like Tucker, she is a communicator, and she chose a much harder path, and I think that was through genuine conviction. There are many differences between Tucker and Candace, but for that purpose, you can put them together. 

And then you have Nick Fuentes. And just for those of you who haven't seen it, I'm just going to give you this summary of what's happened in the past few months, not going back years. The short version of this is that Nick Fuentes is often very critical of people who seem like they're the closest to him politically. So, he spends a lot of time criticizing Charlie Kirk – I was going to say Ben Shapiro, but I don't think Ben Shapiro is remotely close to Nick Fuentes – but Charlie Kirk on the surface could be. He spent a lot of time criticizing Matt Walsh. And he has also hurled a lot of criticism and might even say insults toward Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. 

In response, Candace Owens invited him for the first time on her podcast. Although I do think they have far more views in common than differences, the podcast was a bit hostile. I would say it's, in part, because Candace had some acrimonious points to raise with him, but also because – and she played some of these clips, I mean, Nick Fuentes had very harshly attacked her and criticized her, calling her a bitch who doesn't know what she's doing, and if you're going to do that, the people who are your targets are not necessarily going to love you, and so this was really the triggering event. 

She invited him to her podcast. He got a huge audience – between Candace and Nick Fuentes, who has a gigantic following online, in some ways you could argue he's as influential these days as Candace and Tucker, and maybe headed for even surpassing them, which again, generationally is natural – but because that interview was acrimonious and brought out a lot of tensions and personal conflicts, it kind of spilled over online because Nick left that interview and started really condemning Candace, accusing her of sandbagging him in the interview and the like, and then they had a big fight online. 

And then, before you knew it, Tucker asked Candace to come to his podcast. So, you're now talking about Candace Owens on Tucker Carlson's podcast, obviously a gigantic interview. And both of them, I don't know if they planned it, but both of them talked about Nick Fuentes in an extremely derogatory way. I mean, Tucker did acknowledge that, which you cannot deny. It's kind of like you can hate Trump all you want, but there's no denying his charisma, his skill in communicating, and the fact that he's very funny. 

For a long time, it was like heresy to say that, but there's no denying that that's true. I have no trouble admitting that people I can't stand are smart. I think Dick Cheney is very smart. I actually think Liz Cheney is very smart, just to give two examples, a lot of other ones as well. You can acknowledge the skills and assets that people have who you dislike or even despise. It’s not inconsistent. So, Tucker did acknowledge, like, look, Nick Fuentes is spectacularly talented. He is like a very rare, generational talent in terms of his ability to go before the camera, attract attention and be charismatic. But he's not like a ranter and a raver. Nick Fuentes is very well read, very, very informed. There aren't a lot of people who know more about the topics Nick Fuentes covers than Nick Fuentes does. It's very impressive. And that combination of being very charismatic, an extremely adept communicator, just kind of a natural camera presence, and having really smart insights that are grounded not in sensationalism or blind ideology, but lots of reading and thinking and critical evaluation, it's very potent. That's the reason why he's becoming so popular that even people at the heights of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson can't really ignore it anymore. 

They talked about Nick Fuentes as though he were just sort of some loser, like Tucker was saying, like, “How did he become so influential? He was just this gay kid living in his mother's basement in Chicago.” And I don't think Tucker quite meant it that way, but that is how some of it came off. Both agreed that he was some sort of psyop to destroy the right, that he maybe was a Fed working for the CIA. 

That led Nick to do a series of shows, a couple of segments, where he just tore into Tucker and Candace, particularly Tucker, in a way that suggests that he was: “How can you possibly call me this, Psyop, or this operative, or this person who works for the CIA, when you spent your whole life inside these circles? Candace Owens was the one working for Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson was working for Rupert Murdoch, making millions; Nick Fuentes wasn't. 

Nick's basic point was, like, you’re all very late to this game, like criticizing Israel, talking about the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States. You've only started doing this last year, whereas I've been doing it for years. This is what I think is at the heart of the matter: there are people who have been talking about Israel in this way for a long time. Noam Chomsky did, Norman Finkelstein did. 

One of the most important events was in 2007 when two of the most prestigious political scientists and international relations scholars in the United States, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote a book called “The Israel Lobby.” First, it was an essay in the London Review of Books, and then it turned into this massive tome, this 700-page book. It’s footnoted to the hilt because they're scholars, and they wrote the book that way. At the time, nobody on the mainstream was willing to say that. It was pretty much confined to the left, where you were free to say it. 

So, at the time, I was more associated with the left, perceived as being on the left. So, I was saying all these things for many years, but it wasn't all that risky for me because of the political camp that people perceived that I was in. I've always had one foot in that left-wing camp back then and one foot in the kind of libertarian, more independent camp, but in both of those camps it was totally fine, totally even welcome to talk about why we do so much for Israel, the evils of Israel, how they control our politics, how we go to war for them, how much money we spend to support them. 

So, I wasn't taking any risks – I've taken risks in my career, but I don't consider that as one – but Nick Fuentes, when he started doing it, was 18 years old, and he had this very promising future inside conservative media. At 18, he'd already been spotted as a talent. He had small shows, but he was making connections with and networking with some of the people who were very influential inside corporate media. People now forget, because now there's a lot of space for talking this way about Israel, but at the time, there was basically none. 

Before Donald Trump, there was almost nobody on the right willing to talk this way about Israel. You had Pat Buchanan, who did it for a long time, going back to the ‘80s, and he was viciously smeared as an anti-Semite. You had Ron Paul, who did the same thing. And then you had Trump kind of come in and create this space, and Nick Fuentes started really looking into it. I'm going into this not because of the personalities, but because I think they raise very broader issues about how all of this has evolved, not just for them, but for the broader discourse. 

Fuentes started off in conservative politics. At first, he thought Israel was our greatest ally and we have to support them: all the standard Republican and conservative views that have dominated both Republican and Democratic Party politics for decades. But then, the more he started questioning it, the more he started becoming vocal about it. And the more he became vocal about it, the more he became shunned inside the conservative media world, in which he had a very bright future. And rather than shutting up, as he was told to do, knowing that that might be better for his career, he couldn't. He just doesn't have that personality type. And he just had to keep examining it and keep saying it, and to say that Nick Fuentes paid a price for that is an understatement. Nick Fuentes has been excluded and booted out of every conceivable precinct of conservative media, even ones that consider themselves radical, dissident and far-right ones. I was playing on the mainstream ones. 

He was physically banned from going to Charlie Kirk's “Turning Points USA” and lots of other conferences like that. He was fired from the media platforms he was starting to develop. He was shunned by the friends that he had made, younger people on the side of the conservative movement. Then, it escalated from there. He got banned from almost every social media platform, including X. Elon Musk eventually reinstated him once he bought X, where he now is, but the only platform where he could be was Telegram. Now, he's on Rumble because Rumble is a genuine free speech platform. He has a show on Rumble that he does, I think, every night or four nights a week, and has found a good-sized audience. But really, it was on Twitter that he got his most attention, and that's why they banned him from Twitter in the pre-Musk era. But it wasn't just that. 

He wasn't just silenced and banned throughout all social media; he was also debanked. He had bank accounts closed, because of his political views, by major banks in the United States. He would get rejected for banking applications. He was put on a No-Fly list, which is the first time I really spoke about Nick, when I raised serious concerns about No-Fly lists being used in this way. His career has been severely impeded, not from what people believe are his racist views about Black people or immigrants; tons of people have those views and are perfectly welcome and fine in right-wing circles. The sole cause of it was his opposition to Israel and his questioning of the power of the Jewish lobby to keep the United States subservient to Israel. It just wasn't said. It was just a taboo. It was one of the third rails of American political discourse that would get anybody fired or destroyed for talking about it. 

Now, a lot of people talk about it, and it's become almost mainstream, but back then, especially on the right, almost nobody did. He paid a huge price, personally, financially, for his career, for his reputation, for his friendships, for his ability to get bank accounts. The government even put him on a no-fly list. And then last year, let's not forget, a homicidal maniac came to his house to try to murder him; shot two of his neighbors and killed them, and showed up at his house with a very large automatic weapon. This person eventually ended up being killed by the police. Another woman showed up at his house, a crazy liberal woman whom he had to pepper-spray. So, he's paid a big price for this. 

I don't want to speak for him, but I definitely identify with this mindset. I've had it too, sometimes, which is that if you are the first person or one of the first people to kind of get out on that plank and you're taking the shots because of it and very few other people are willing to join you,  and then at some point, it becomes a little safer to do it – I'm not saying it's safe; Tucker has also paid a price for it. I mean, half his audience has turned on him. He's now widely attacked by conservatives as being an anti-Semite, a Qatari agent, and Candace as well. So, it's not cost-free at all and Tucker didn't have to do it. He could have just ignored it. So, he's paid for a place too. 

But there's a big difference between Tucker Carlson in his mid-50s with a gigantic multimillion-dollar-year contract with Fox News, coming from the family that he came from, versus Nick Fuentes as a 22-year-old enduring all of that, and he comes from no wealth, no privilege. I think the idea is Nick feels like he was out on that plank, taking all these arrows and punishments, and then, in part, I do think that he helped open the space on the right to start talking more about Israel in a more honest way. It is true that Tucker and Candace, for the most part, hadn't really ever talked about it until after October 7, when, as Nick says, it almost became inevitable. They could have both ignored it. They could've both just spouted a few light lip services to it, but both of them made it very central to their cause, which they didn't have to do. It was not in their interest to do as well. But they did do it. 

But I think he feels like, I'm the one who actually paid the price for this. I was the one who was doing this earlier. Then the two of you come and now start doing it when it's a little bit safer, and also you're more protected because of your platform and standing in wealth, and you want to basically throw me in the garbage and declare me off limits, like, be the gatekeeper that says, you can go up to this point where Tucker and Candace are, but you can't go to Nick Fuentes; he's way too hateful or radical or dangerous or whatever. He feels like they're very late to the game, that he was braver, that he paid a bigger price and then they came along at an easier time and decided that they were the outer limits of where you can go on these discussions about Israel and the like. I'm not saying that's what I think, I'm saying that's what he thinks. I identify with that view. 

I think he would be fine if they would get there and say Nick Fuentes is one of the first people doing this, let's welcome him on our show. But the fact that he's still excluded, to the fact that they called him gay, loser, basically, in his parents' basement, implied that he was working for the CIA or was an agent, probably of Qatar, to destroy the right. I think that's what made him start being resentful, and also, there is this class issue here, which is very real. It's not his fault; Tucker's mother left them when he was very young. Then his father married an heiress from the Swanson fortune. And although she wasn't his mother. It was his stepmother. Obviously, he was living with his father and his stepmother, and they had a very good relationship. She was very good to him. And he ended up having all these benefits from a very young age. First, great wealth and privilege, and then some amount of fame, and then more fame, and then more wealth. And that's more or less been his life. 

Candace, I'm not sure about where she came from, what her family situation was, but once she got very big, she became very wealthy, and then she went to work for The Daily Wire, had a very lucrative contract there, and now she's married to, I heard Nick saying he's British royalty. I don't know if he is, maybe he is. I don't know one way or the other, but I know he's extremely wealthy. And I think there's a class issue there, too, which is like, you two purport to be the kind of warriors for this group of which you're not a part, which has kind of disaffected working-class white people. And Nick's saying, “I actually came from there and now suddenly you two, from your great mountain of wealth and privilege and lifelong or at least in Candace's case, years long, financial power and privilege and status and wealth, whatever, are coming in and trying to talk about me like I'm some loser and yeah I'm a loser in the sense that lots of white people have become trampled on by the United States and that is supposed to be what right-wing populism cares about.” 

So, I thought it was very telling. I do think, if I’m totally honest, it's more personal than substantive. I think Nick feels a lot of resentment for how he's been treated. 

I think Candace and Tucker feel resentment that they put a lot on the line to go where they went and one of the people who has a big influential audience, especially among young conservatives, have kind of gone to war with them. So, I think there's a lot of personal animist and personal resentment driving this, but there's also something very substantive here as well, which is about how people who are a little bit further along on the extremist train sometimes get attacked by the people who are less so, where they want to draw a line and kind of cut off the plank and have you fall off, even though you are on the plank first. I think Nick feels like that's being done to him, and I also think that there is a real class conflict that is driving a lot of this which is very much a part of the conservative world. I mean, huge amounts of conservative influencers, conservative pundits, conservative operatives who claim that they're there to speak for the working-class, for disaffected white people in the United States, are hanging out with billionaires every day and being funded by billionaires and meeting with billionaires and getting invites to the White House and to every center of power. And a lot of compromises are required to do that. And Nick's not willing to make them, and a lot of them are, and that is a substantive issue as well. 

Tucker and Candace, I do think, and they don't get very many invites to those circles. Tucker more than Candace. Tucker because he's been around for so long. He's good friends with people in the Trump administration. He campaigned for Trump, Trump likes him, even though Trump repudiated him and insulted him because of his opposition to the war in Iran. But there are a lot of tension points inside the MAGA movement that are very real, even if some of them are personally driven. We're human beings, we all harbor jealousies and vindictive sentiments and resentments. It's a Herculean effort to try to exclude those as much as possible. We all have to try; some of us do better than others. But none of us is immune from that. So, I'm not suggesting that it's a huge character flaw. I'm just saying I do think that's part of it. But I also think, at least as big of a part, if not bigger, are some of these ideological and class issues who's sort of keeping one foot in decent society and who's willing to say fully what they think without it. And the last thing I'll say is, and this is sort of what I began by saying, which is you can like somebody or not, but it doesn't mean you should lie about their skills or their successes. 

Nick Fuentes, I had a big online following for a few years, but it was very much a kind of online following that was almost like a cult following. It was like a very idiosyncratic group of people. They called themselves the Gropers. They didn't have a lot of cachet or influence outside of their circles, in part because Nick Fuentes wasn't invited anywhere into those more mainstream circles, or even less mainstream far-right circles. He kind of built his entire world himself. 

There are tons of successful podcasters and influencers who really don't have an original thought. They know what they have to get up and say to validate their audience, to show their loyalty to a particular circle. They may even have some talent in terms of rhetoric and communication, some charisma, but they're not very critically minded. They don't do a lot of reading. I can't tell you how often I listen to some of the podcasters of the biggest audience, and you're just like: How are you so ignorant? How do you think about these things? Do you ever stop and breathe and reflect, or read anything? Like read anything substantive in or bound like a Wikipedia page? So, there's a lot of that. 

But go listen to Nick Fuentes, if you haven't. And if you have preconceptions about what he is, I'm not saying that he doesn't say things that are provocative and deliberately cross lines on purpose sometimes, when he doesn't need to, just to cross them. Though I do think it's often purposeful, it's not just about a teenage transgressive instinct. 

So, there are definitely things he said that are offensive. Genuinely so, and not offensive in that, oh my god, you've offended me. But things that I think he would even acknowledge, he often says he doesn't really mean it, he is prone to rhetorical excess, and it's part of the whole presence. But everything that he talks about, he is extremely knowledgeable about and well-versed in. 

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Next question is from @edonk77, who says this:

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All right, the quick Ted Kaczynski story just for anyone who doesn't know it: out of nowhere in the ‘90s, in the Clinton administration, bombs started being sent to mailboxes. They were pretty sophisticated bombs, and they injured and even killed people. It was taking place across the country, and the FBI, the Attorney General, who at the time was Janet Reno, had no idea who was doing it. 

The person who was doing it wrote a letter, believed by the New York Times and the Washington Post, saying, “I will stop if you publish my essay about my ideas and what's motivating me.” And obviously, the instinct of the government is to say, “We’re not going to give in to your terrorist tactics,” which in classic terrorism is kind of what it was: it was violence directed at civilians to induce political and social change.  But it got to the point where the Justice Department was so desperate, they didn't have a first clue about who was doing that. It was like really the perfect crime. They agreed.

So, the Washington Post, maybe the New York Times, too, published this essay by Ted Kaczynski. The reason the Justice Department was willing to do it, aside from the fact that they thought it would help identify who it was, was because they thought what he had written was kind of just such lunacy, madness, that nobody would really read it and even think it deserved attention. And also, they were obviously made it known that the person who wrote that was the person who was sending these violent acts, the terrorist bombs, killing civilians or injuring civilians. They just assumed the hatred for him would overwhelm any interest in what he had to say. 

On one of those bets, they actually turned out to be right, because publishing this essay caused, eventually, Ted Kaczynski's brother, to come forward and say, “I think this is my brother. His writing seems familiar. His ideas are familiar.” That's how they were able to eventually track Ted Kaczynski down. 

Ted Kaczynski was a prodigy, recognized by everybody, as being brilliant – graduated high school at the age of 15, went to Harvard, completed a degree in mathematics. He then went to a PhD program, I think at the University of Chicago, at a top school, and then ended up teaching at Berkeley. And he was on the path of being the youngest ever tenured professor. He was a genuinely brilliant person, not brilliant in the sense that David Frum or Ann Abelbaum gets called brilliant, but genuinely brilliant. 

But what they were very wrong about was the fact that nobody would have any interest in his essay, that nobody would connect to any of his ideas, and that the hatred for Ted Kaczynski, even if people were willing to be open-minded, would make people refuse to read a terrorist essay and take it seriously. At first, that was true, but over time, people started turning to it and saying, “You know what? This seems quite important. There are a lot of ideas here that are very, very relevant and seem prophetic and explain a lot of what previously had been inexplicable.” 

I can't do a good job paraphrasing or summarizing the essay. It's very complex. It's highly worth reading. You can find it free online. It ended up being published in a longer-form, book format. You can read the essay in its long form or the book. But the basic theme of it was that technology was destroying humanity and the ability for human beings to live happy and fulfilled lives. And he traced it back to the Industrial Revolution, but then, how technology has advanced more and more. Before the Industrial Revolution, people were living in small towns, in villages, in nature like they had always lived on farms, had churches, had communities. They were very closely connected to their neighbors, to their extended family and they were living as human beings had lived for thousands of years. We're political and social animals. We need a connection. Without connection, human beings are going to go crazy. 

Eventually, we got to the point Charles Dickens was talking about: the hideous realities of living in gigantic cities as factory workers, completely exploited, working extremely long days for little pay. It is breaking people physically, spiritually, psychologically and emotionally, and that is definitely one of the costs, as we've even gone further down this road. 

And I think it's what Ted Kaczynski predicted, which is that the more technologically we come, the less human, the less fulfilled our natural human needs are. What it means to be human will be consumed by technology and turned into even more exploited tools and objects that barely look at us as humans, arranging our lives so that everything that gives us pleasure and is necessary for happiness is taken away. 

And just quickly on this, there's a Netflix documentary, I've mentioned this before, called “Happiness,” which is a documentary designed to ask, what is human happiness? How do humans acquire happiness? What is necessary and what isn't? And what they found is that a lot of what data reflects is that in many societies where people are economically deprived and without a lot of technology, they're much happier than in much wealthier Western countries. 

This documentary makes a very good case using science, not just pop psychology, about why, oftentimes, technological expansion and wealth expansion undermine human happiness. Ted Kaczynski also warned that, as technology evolved further and further, our societies are less humane, less fulfilling and less connected. And clearly, all of that is true. That is exactly what has happened. I'm not saying we need to dismantle it, but he actually lived those words, he dropped out of the whole matrix basically, when he was, I think 24, left his job as a faculty member and just went into the woods, lived a self-sufficient life off the grid, read, wrote, and did not much else other than working on his writing and his development and thoughts. The more he did that, the more he became convinced that being in the middle of this matrix was uniquely devastating to the ability of humans to be free and happy. 

Of course, that started resonating in America and in Europe and throughout the Western world as people became less and less happy. All the things he was describing as to why, and the role technology plays in that, would obviously exacerbate all that. Remember, this was 1995. I mean, the internet was just starting, but it was nowhere near as dominant in our lives. 

Obviously, with the internet, we often talk to people on phones or on screens. We have our phones everywhere. So, a lot of the human connection and interactivity you once had just walking on the street is now taken away from you because everybody's staring at their phones. You go to restaurants, any restaurant anywhere in the Western world, and you have people who are related, people who are friends, who talk a little, and they both pull out their phones. And before you know it, they're both staring at their phones, and especially with COVID, which forcibly segregated everybody and kept everybody at home, where people even developed a greater dependence on the internet to do everything, including interacting with other humans, this isolation has become far worse and all of the predictable pathologies that come with it that he predicted are also worsening very rapidly, in a very dangerous way. 

I mean, to me, this is the West's greatest problem: spiritual decay that comes from lack of connection. Obviously, there are benefits to technology. We have cures to diseases that we would otherwise die from. The internet makes the world easier, gives you access to things, including reading and information that you otherwise, etc. etc. There are a lot of benefits. But for me, one of the things I think I've learned is that the only real law of the universe is balance, by which I mean for everything that you drive a benefit, there's an equal cost, at least, that offsets it and keeps it in balance. Whatever: fame, wealth, career, success, it all comes with a cost. I definitely think that's the case of technology, and Ted Kaczynski was one of the first people to lay out this case in the way he laid it out. So even though he was a terrorist, even though he killed people, a lot of people began to think, you know what? I think there's a lot of validity here. 

You might ask why he goes to the scene to kill people? He had an academic pedigree. He probably could have gotten this published. I don't really know. I haven't paid much attention lately to this whole episode, so I forgot what the rationale was for that. But in any event, maybe he was also a little imbalanced himself. That probably was true. But, sometimes, being mentally imbalanced or at least mentally alienated, in a way, is necessary to produce insights. Even going back to that last question we talked about, you remove yourself from a certain society or a sector of society, it gives you a much greater clarity of thought because you're no longer connected to it or in it, and you can see it much clearly. I'm sure that's what happens if you just remove yourself completely. 

One of the things the question asked about is left-wing politics. And the person who just asked this question, I'm on the political left, but a lot of his critiques of what left-wings politics is about and the flaws in it, I must admit have validity. And basically, what Ted Kaczynski's warning was, and this definitely proved prophetic, was that the idea would be to make this system of technology and the capitalism that emerged from it invulnerable, so nobody blamed it, nobody wants to undermine it, nobody wants to subvert it, no matter what it's doing to us we're all propagandized to revere it to believe it's all good to believe it's invulnerable, to believe that we benefit from it. And he said one of the ways that that's going to succeed is that people are going to be given kind of culture war fights or social justice causes, which are going to make them feel like they're doing something subversive or radical, when in reality nothing that they're doing is a threat remotely to any real power center.

 Compact Magazine, which is I think a really interesting magazine, it kind of explores the intersection between left and right populism had an article on June 16, 2023, which I really recommend. The headline of it was: “Ted Kaczynski Anti-Left Leftist.” 

Obviously, this vision he's presenting in some ways is left-wing. It's a denunciation of capitalism and its excesses, the Industrial Revolution, and technology, that has a left-wing ethos for sure, but he was also scornful of modern-day, leftist political expression. 

A week or two ago, Ryan Grim as on our show and we were talking about the kind of fraudulent branding of Bari Weiss and The Free Press. There was supposedly a heterodox and dissident when, in reality, it really grew from objecting to a lot of the excesses of the woke movement. And Ryan basically said, if you're talking about kids with blue hair or whatever color hair someone has, or if they're trans or not or whatever, you're not talking about anything that is about the real structure and dissemination of power. It's like catnip. They're happy to have you fight about racism, feminism, yeah, they love racism. They love feminism. Remember the CIA did that whole video, super woke video? They centered like a, what was she? She was, I think, a non-binary Latina who had neurodivergence. And she was just like, “I stand proud and tall and occupy space unapologetically” as a Latino non-binary immigrant, whatever. They're so happy to have that. “Hey, look at our Black generals. We're going to celebrate our Black military officials. We're the Pentagon. Hey, with the FBI, look at all our cool badass women agents or fighter pilots. Look, they're women now.” It's like, “Oh, wow, that's so awesome. We've done so much to change society.” It's that famous cartoon where a Muslim family in Yemen are looking up at the sky and kind of smiling and saying, “I hear the neck bomb is going to be sent, is going to be dropped by a woman pilot.” 

It's just like, here's Hillary Clinton. She's so radical and such a wild departure from everything before, because she's going to be the first female president when there's like nobody more representative of status quo politics than she. So, you vote for her. You feel like you're doing something really like a big blow against the power center and the patriarchy, because now there's a woman and you put her in office and she's going to be the best possible protector of status-quo prerogatives and power centers everywhere, because she presents this illusion that you've done something historic or subversive, when in reality you're just working as hard as you can to entrench the status quo that you think you're working against. 

Ted Kaczynski was incredibly prescient about that as well. There's a lot more to him than what I've gone over. There's a lot to the essay. I just can't do that justice in the time we have, even though I took another hour. 

I did want to give my thoughts on it, but I also highly encourage you to go find the essay, even just start with the essay and I think you'll be amazed if you just sit down and read it, forget about he's the Unabomber, all that. Just read it, and remember it was written in the early to mid-1990s, and so even if some of it seems more familiar now, at the time it was very prescient, but also the way he described it, the historical framework he employed to shed light on how it works, that it's not just some brand new thing, it's gone back, basically traced it back to the Industrial Revolution. There are not very many better ways to spend your time in terms of your brain and your critical thinking, then to go read that essay. 

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All right, here's a few questions on Gaza. 

First from @CatRika:

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@Lightwins2028:

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It actually is incredible that I come here and sit here every night and do this show more or less every night 500 times. I will accept that as well and agree that it is kind of incredible.

And then from @johnmccray:

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I will confess that what we've seen in Gaza over the last 20 months is not just some horrific tragedy or even war on the other side of the world; it is a genocide that involves some of the most twisted cruelty and sadism I have ever witnessed in my life –  obviously, I wasn't alive in World War II, which is why I say ‘in my lifetime.’ However, when you announce that you're blocking all food from entering an enclave that you fully surround and control – and yes, there's a small border with Egypt and Gaza, but the Israeli military is on the other side of that, controlling egress and ingress into it and out of it (besides, the Egyptian dictator is U.S. supported and always has been for decades because he's there to take marching orders from the U.S. regarding Israel).

When you take this concentrated open-air prison enclave, where people can't leave, can't come in, you ban the media from coming in, and you announce to the world you're putting a blockade on any food from entering it, and you knowingly starve them to death, you knowingly blockade food from entering on top of what they're already experiencing – endless bombing, people burning alive in their churches, in their tents, every hospital, every school, all of civilian life being destroyed… The doctors who are there don't have basic medicines. They don't have antibiotics, they don't have feeding formula for babies, they don't have painkillers or anesthesia for the children who come in with their limbs blown off – just the absolute, worst nightmares that human beings could possibly endure for a sustained period, and on top of that, you start starving them to death and then, instead of letting food distribution in from the actual organizations that are experienced in it and actually want to feed the people, you create some new entity that you control – American military contractors that are, for profit, doing the bidding of the IDF, purposely set up so that it barely gives out any food and then it's a death trap – so, you lure starving people in there and you murder them and massacre them regularly, daily… That is a new kind of evil. 

When you’re starving people to death and then saying, “Hey, here are some grains of flour, come here and get them,” and murdering them when they do, when you purposely set up the centers so they barely stay open for more than 15 minutes. People get noticed right before, and they have to trek miles, very dangerously, to get there. They're not allowed to stay there, waiting for the next time to open. They have to go back, and they're killed on the way there. So, they're faced with this Sophie's choice of either having to stay at home and watch their kids starve to death or knowing they risk their lives and their teenage son's lives to go there and try to get food, knowing that a lot of them are going to be murdered, that is a sick new kind of evil. 

And because of how ubiquitous cell phones are, we have to watch it, and we know it's been streamed live every day, throughout the world. We've all seen just the absolute most sickening, hideous human suffering imaginable, a level of sadism that's almost hard to fathom that people are capable of. And while some Israelis are protesting some more now about the end of this war, for the most part, the view of the Israelis has been, I don't care how many civilians we kill, I don't care how many babies are killed. The babies are terrorists. They'll grow up to be Hamas, so I don't care to kill them. 

These are evils that are difficult to endure, even if your work is journalism, even if you look at some of the most horrible things people are doing, you still have to report on them. Even for that, I mean, it's hard to fathom and express, and I know so many people, and I just thought about myself including in this, that you feel so impotent, so your rage is so purposeless, even though it's all-consuming, because the Trump administration doesn't care. It's filled with Israel fanatics, and it's going to support Israel until the very last Gazan is killed. Can you give them all the weapons, all the money, all the diplomatic cover? 

And then of course, the Israelis themselves are so deranged and fanatical that they don't care either. And short of having the world go in and militarily intervene against Israel or arming Hamas, which is not going to happen, there's not a lot you can do. There definitely has been serious measurable changes for the better in how Americans now look at Israel and look at the Israeli action in Gaza, how they look at American funding of Israel. That's not going away. That's a big, big problem for Israel. 

Once you open your eyes to that, you can't unsee it. And you have a lot of people, as we talked about in that first question, fueling it constantly. I hope I'm one of them. I certainly do what I can to do that. But that doesn't mean that any of that is going to stop this war. 

Even in Europe, and I really despise the Western European political elite and media class, they're utterly supportive of Israel. They are loyal to Israel, they arm Israel, fund them, not as much as the United States, but to a great degree. A lot of those historical reasons, guilt over World War II, which Israel expertly exploits – not that it's difficult to exploit the guilt and psychological fragility of Western Europeans, but they do a great job of it. 

So, you're starting to see things like Macron comes out and recognize a Palestinian state, not unimportant, but still a symbolic step. Keir Starmer, he's probably the most despicable politician from a character perspective, an utterly empty, vapid belief-free politician – he's despised in his own country, despised. – He didn't even go that far. He said, “We are going to recognize a Palestinian state unless Israel starts letting food in.” So, Palestinian statehood is not something they're entitled to. It's like a threat that you make to Israel that you're going to give them if the Israelis don't let food in. You see the Germans, who are always the worst for obvious psychological and historical reasons when it comes to standing up to Israel, sort of saying now, “We're going to cut off arms.” 

We'll see how long any of that lasts. The one group of people you do not want to put your faith and trust in to stand for a cause, to hold firm on beliefs, or convictions and values is Western European political elites. They're pathetic. Pathetic. Obviously, there are some exceptions, but as a class, they're nauseating and pathetic. 

I used to think the British elite class was the worst elite class on the planet. While I still think they are definitely in the running, I'm starting to actually think the Germans are more psychologically warped and sickening. I mean, the Germans were also fanatics about the war in Ukraine – fanatics. You put Germans in power, and they don't think about anything other than going to war with Russia. It's really a bizarre repetitive pattern. 

So, I don't want to pretend that there's some quick solution. I do give as much money as I can to them, you can find Palestinian aid and Gaza aid organizations. There's no shortage of verified GoFundMe accounts from people in Gaza telling their stories. And obviously you have to be a little careful not to give to fraudulent ones, but there are easy ways to verify those. Look for trustworthy people on Twitter who vouch for them, things like that. You can donate to that. Even like $50 at a time, whatever you're capable of, $10, $15. Everything is so high-priced in Gaza that sometimes even if they have food available, they can’t afford it. And I think it's also a good way of showing the people in Gaza that the world actually cares about their plight. 

Earlier today, I talked about how Marjorie Taylor Greene has become very outspoken about refusing to serve the agenda of AIPAC and that AIPAC is now on the march against her. They're going to do what they've done to all sorts of politicians which they are now doing to Thomas Massie as well: try to find some fraudulent, politician who lives in their district, who seems demographically appealing to that district, who has the same politics, except they're going to know that AIPAC paid for their political career, paid for the seat in Congress, and they're going to be supremely loyal. 

One of the worst examples – I mean, I can barely look at this person because of how pathetic and sad it is to watch him. They wanted to get Cori Bush out of Congress. If you're conservative and you dislike Cori Bush, AIPAC doesn't dislike her for any of the reasons that you dislike her. They only care about the fact that she's raised questions like, “Why are we sending so much money to Israel when my whole district is filled with people financially struggling, who don't have healthcare, don't have access to education, have no public safety?” Why are we giving all this money to Israel? Why is AIPAC forcing us to do that?” And they were so determined to take Cori Bush out because of her Israel questioning that they found some utterly craven Black politician, nice liberal, nice Democrat, of course. You have to get a liberal, you have to be a Democrat, and probably have to be a Black politician. His name is Wesley Bell, and they paid $15 million – 15,000 million –for one Democratic primary seat in Congress in St. Louis, to replace Cori Bush with somebody exactly like her, except that he's an AIPAC loyalist. And you can just see him on social media and in speeches, standing up for Israel. You know exactly why $15 million was his price tag, and he knows if he wants to keep that seat, he's going to need AIPAC doing the same. And they're going to try to do the same with Thomas Massie. They're going to try to do the same with Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

They're not always successful. They've tried it many times with Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, even, to a smaller extent, AOC. They made some inroads, but for the most part, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are too popular in their Democratic primaries and their Democratic constituencies for that to work. 

In 2022, Ilhan Omar almost lost the Democratic primary. I think she won by a few points. So, she's not invulnerable. They never quite spent the money on her that they spent on people like Cori Bush or Jamaal Bowman. But they have a long history of doing this. And they're clearly doing it to Thomas Massie. If you look at the three top billionaires donating to AIPAC to remove Thomas Massie, they're all Jewish billionaires who are extremely loyal to Israel. 

That's the whole point of this effort that Donald Trump supports. One thing you can do is just look at who AIPAC is trying to remove from Congress and just donate to whoever they want to take out of Congress as a way to thwart them because even if you're a conservative and you see them doing it to some left-wing member of Congress that you don't like, it's not like the person they're going to replace that person with is going to be any more appealing to you. There's no difference, except that that person is going to be bought and paid to be an AIPAC agent, who is going to be devoted to Israel and never question Israel. That's the only difference. 

AIPAC's not taking Cori Bush out of Congress or Jamaal Bowman because they're too left-wing. The only thing they care about is if the person is devoted to Israel. The same with Tom Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene. If they're going to take out members of Congress as punishment for not being loyal enough to Israel, donate to the people they're trying to remove on both sides. If you're on the left, you're not going to agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie, obviously. But the people who are going to come in their place are not going to agree with you politically anymore. The only difference will be that those people will be fanatical Israel supporters, like many in the Republican Party, instead of being among the few to question them. So, that is another way I think you could work. 

I know this is thankless work. There's no immediate gratification, but it does work. Public opinion changes. It really does. And especially with independent media with a free internet, with the deconcentrating of power over the discourse no longer in the hands of a few tiny number of gigantic media corporations controlled by people who are all the same basic political outlook, with the same interests, but now huge gigantic people with big audiences who influence a lot of people completely removed from those circles and that dogma. That is also a big reason for optimism. And if you see the polling change in a pretty substantial way as you do on the Israel question and the Gaza question, keep contributing to that. You don't have to have a gigantic platform. 

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Last question, this is from @coldhotdog:

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All right. The U.S. is sanctioning Brazil, Brazilian officials, and also imposing tariffs on them, not for the reason that Trump has been imposing tariffs on other countries, mainly because he thinks there's unfair trading practices causing a trade deficit. The opposite is true. The United States has a significant trade surplus with Brazil. There's not a trade deficit. So, the tariffs are more – and it was kind of explicit – used as punishment against Brazil for their violation of free speech, their violation to due process, their persecution of political opponents. And obviously, that is not the U.S.'s real goal. 

I wrote an article about this in Folha, where I do reporting, and I'm a columnist in Brazil. And it basically said, Okay, I hope no one takes seriously when the U.S. government says we're upset about the infringements on free speech or the erosions of democracy. It was like a month before Trump announced sanctions on Brazil and tariffs on Brazil, that he went to the Persian Gulf region and heaped praise on Mohammed bin Salman and the leaders of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, heralded them, hugged them, and not for the first time. While I think Brazil is very repressive and I think Moraes is an absolute tyrant, it's in a completely different universe than what happens in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. It's not even close. 

So, any country that's heaping praise on and embracing, hugging and propping up the governments of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Qatar, or the Egyptians, or the Jordanians, of the Bahrainis or whomever, the Philippines, Indonesia, obviously, is not a country that cares about repression inside other countries. Obviously.

The United States doesn't go around the world fighting wars or intervening in other countries because they care about repression. That's the pretext. They love dictators as long as dictators are pro-American. They only have a problem with dictatorial regimes if they defy America, like Cuba or Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, and then you hear “Oh my god, we're the United States, we go and fight for democracies. That is why we have to protect Ukraine.” Even though, arguably, Ukraine has become as repressive as Russia. So, whatever drives the United States, it's not a love for democracy, it is not a contempt for an erosion of liberty, it is not a defense of free speech, obviously, I hope there's no one in my audience who believes that. So, when Trump says, “Oh, we're punishing Brazil because it's become repressive, it’s attacked the free speech,” it's obviously not the reason. 

Then the question that our Locals member is raising, which is a good one.

I don't support the U.S. embargo of Cuba which is now 65 years old. The idea of that was that we're going to change the government of Cuba and free the Cuban people. Obviously, it has not done that. The only thing it's done is make life in Cuba utterly miserable for the population. Same with Venezuela. Same with the sanctions on Iran. So, I don't think that's the role of the United States to go try to change other governments, even if they're pretending, they're changing them out of concern about their oppression when obviously that's not the real reason. 

The reason is they want to replace it with a regime that's more compliant to the United States. And obviously I don't think Trump is intervening in Brazil with punishments and the like because he's concerned in the abstract about free speech. I mean, aside from all the dictatorial regimes we embrace, there's also the attacks on free speech in the United States, which we've gone over many times, including last night, that the Trump administration is spearheading, that the Biden administration before that spearheaded. 

So, the question then becomes, well, what is the real reason? And I want to say, while I view Alexandre de Moraes as a serious menace, as one of the most tyrannically minded people on the planet, even if he's not, say, as powerful or dictatorial as Mohammed bin Salman, just because Brazil is not that kind of society that permits that level of overt, absolute, autocratic tyranny, the way a lot of other countries do that we support prop up, I do think he's a genuine evil figure. Obviously, one of the reasons I talk about it is because I live here. My family is Brazilian. My kids are Brazilian. So, it's something I care about for that reason. And of course, I think the reason why Trump is doing it is because it's not actually a left-wing government in Brazil. Lula is the president. And he was a leftist in his earlier life. He was a labor leader, but he ran for president three times as a leftist, lost. And then finally, in 2002, he was sick of losing. And he wrote this famous letter called Letter to the Brazilian People, where he basically said, “I understand that if I want to be president, I have to moderate. I have to get along with financial centers. This is important for prosperity.” He basically promised not to be a fallaway left-wing dogma to be much more moderate. And then to prove it, he chose a billionaire banker as his vice president, to make clear to financial markets, banks, big corporations inside Brazil that he wasn't going to be a threat. 

They're not leftist at all. But I'm sure in Trump's mind, in the eyes of Marco Rubio, the people who are influencing Trump, he sees a little like basically a communist regime, like a left-wing regime, like from the Cold War, even though it's not remotely that. And I'm not suggesting they're conservative or right-wing. They're not. But they're not communists or even socialists. And part of what Trump's doing is he just looks at Lula and the Brazilian government as an enemy and is convinced, okay, they're our enemy. Let's punish them. If I had to find a justification – I'm not saying I support it, I'm not saying I justify it – but if I had to find a justification, I would say that the real only justification for any of this is the fact that Moraes and the Supreme Court have been now targeting not just America's social media companies. 

So, this is reaching into the United States threatening the free speech rights of American citizens or people legally residing in the United States, attacking and threatening and trying to bully American social media companies. And that is, I believe, an invasion of American sovereignty and an attack on the rights of American citizens. I do think the government, the U.S. government, is duty-bound to draw a very firm line and say, “No, you're not going to cross that line. And if you cross that, we're going to take action against you.” That's the only justification I can think of. 

So, I'm not defending the Magnitsky Act sanctions against Moraes, or even the punitive tariffs against Brazil. I've basically been arguing that if there's anyone who truly is tyrannical in his mindset, who's just absolutely, like, mentally unstable and just an authoritarian tyrant with no limits at all, who's been just vindictive and drunk on his power, it is Alexandre de Moraes. And I do think there's this one justification for the U.S. to cite, to justify taking retaliatory and retributive action against Brazil. 

Obviously, Trump likes Bolsonaro. He strongly identifies with any claims that a politician is being victimized by politicized lawfare because Trump believes as do I, that he himself was the victim of that and he sees when he looks at Bolsonaro a very similar thing happening to Bolsonaro, and I think he feels personally angry by that. So, I think there's some complex motives as well, but other than what I just articulated, I'm not defending the U.S.’s use of sanctions, the exploitation of the dollars in reserve currency to punish the economies of other countries because we don't like what they're doing internally. It's all obviously a fraud and a pretext to say, we're doing it because we care about free speech or due process or whatever. But I think there is a foundation to it, not a very strong one, but a foundation to it that I do think is legitimate. And you know what? I guess, just looking at it from a less principled perspective, I do think Alexandre de Moraes is a completely out-of-control monster. And everyone in Brazil is too scared to stand up to him or too supportive of the fact that he's imprisoning and exiling and silencing Bolsonaro supporters, that there is nobody in Brazil that's capable of stopping him or willing to do so. And the only thing that has really undermined and disrupted him is what Trump just did and now is threatening to do even more with even more invasive sanctions against his wife, against other officials in Brazil. And that is something they have to take very seriously and are taking very seriously. And it's the first time there's been real limits put on it. 

So, from a very kind of instrumentalized, results-based perspective, I confess that I'm happy about where that is leading, even if I do have genuine, really real concerns about the use of American arms and weaponry to do this.

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The Pro-Israel Meltdown Over Mahmoud Khalil's NYT Interview: When is Violence Inevitable?; Why is FIRE Suing Marco Rubio: With 1A Lawyer Conor Fitzpatrick
System Update #499

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

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

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The case of Mahmoud Khalil made national headlines – even international headlines – because he was the very first student who was snatched either off the street or out of his apartment by ICE agents under the Trump administration's brand new policy of expelling Israel critics, who they deem supportive of Hamas, which is basically anyone who criticizes Israel whether they're PhD students on green cards or anything else. 

On June 20, a federal judge ordered Khalil, who is a green card holder, released from ICE detention facilities pending the deportation proceedings on the grounds that he had never been arrested, let alone convicted of anything, and presents no threat to anyone or to the public in general. That release has enabled Khalil to make rounds giving interviews to various outlets, and he gave one last week to the New York Times' columnist and podcast host, Ezra Klein. One excerpt of Khalil's interview went viral, largely due to Israel supporters, of course, who claimed he was apologizing for, if not actively supporting, Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel. We'll examine his comments to see if he did say that, but also to examine the important questions raised about who has the right to use violence and when, who is a terrorist or who is a freedom fighter, and whether anything Khalil said remotely poses a danger to the United States. 

Our guest was Conor Fitzpatrick, a lawyer from FIRE.org, the free speech group the ACLU once was: a group of lawyers and activists passionately devoted to defending free speech against any and all attacks on it, regardless of whether the censorship target is on the right, the left, or anything in between. FIRE announced this week that it was suing Marco Rubio and the U.S. State Department under the First Amendment, arguing that the government has the right to deport foreign nationals, but not to do so as punishment for their political expression. 

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Foto preta e branca de rosto de homem visto de pertoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

We have covered the case of Mahmoud Khalil many times on this show. He was the sort of test case, the canary in the coal mine, showing that the Trump administration intended not to deport all foreign students or most foreign students or just foreign students who expressed a political opinion and engaged in political activism. That's not the Trump Administration's policy at all. They don't even have a policy of deporting foreign students on U.S. soil for criticizing the United States. What they do have is a policy of deporting foreign students in the United States or at American universities who criticize Israel or protest against that foreign country. 

Mahmoud Khalil was detained in his apartment, where he lives with his American wife. She was eight months pregnant; their newborn infant was born. And she's an American citizen. His newborn infant is an American Citizen. And he's a green card on the path to American citizenship. 

Since then, there have been many other cases of students being snatched off the street by plainclothes ICE agents and unmarked cars, including a Tufts PhD student, Rumeysa Ozturk, who the Trump administration admits, did nothing other than co-author an op-ed in the Tuft's student newspaper, where she called on the administration, along with three other students who were co-authors, to implement the student Senate's decision that the administration should divest from Israel. That's all she did. Nothing against Jews, nothing in favor of Hamas, any of that. She just criticized Israel and urged divestment because the student senate had voted for it. It was essentially saying abide. She, too, was snatched off the street, put in ICE detention, and now has been released. And there have been many other cases since. 

In the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the federal court said you can continue the deportation proceeding, but there's no basis or justification for keeping him in a detention prison while all of this proceeds. If you win the deportation process, you can obviously deport him, but there's no reason why he should rot in jail rather than being at home with his wife and child while this process proceeds, because he's never done anything remotely to suggest that he's a threat to anybody. He was never arrested as part of the student protest or any other time in his life, never convicted of a crime, never the subject of a complaint with the police. 

And so, he's now out and he's giving interviews, as is his right. He's given several interviews. One of them was for The New York Times columnist and podcast host, Ezra Klein

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Should Obama Admin Officials Be Prosecuted for Russiagate Lies? Major Escalations in Trump/Brazil Conflict
System Update #498

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

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

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The Russiagate fraud is receiving all sorts of new attention and scrutiny thanks to documents first declassified and then released by Trump's Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. As we reported at length last week, these documents were quite incriminating for various Obama officials, such as former CIA Director James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director Jim Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, as they reveal what was a deliberate attempt to weaponize intelligence findings for purely partisan and political ends in 2016, namely, to manipulate the American electorate into voting for their former Obama administration colleague Hillary Clinton as president, and more importantly, defeating Donald Trump, and then repeatedly lying about it to Congress and the American people. 

Yesterday, it was reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi is not only investigating, which is kind of meaningless, but what's not meaningless is that she's also apparently empaneling a grand jury to investigate whether there was prosecutable criminality at the highest levels of the Obama administration. We'll examine that obviously important question. 

Then, we’ll examine what's driving all his complex escalation of Trump’s decision for 50% tariffs on Brazilian products and what's at stake, and the potential consequences for all sides. 

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I believe it's been obvious, pretty much from the very beginning of the Russiagate hoax, the Russiagate fraud, which I'll remind you, again, was driven by the core conspiracy claim that the Trump campaign officials collaborated and colluded and conspired with the Kremlin to hack into the DNC email server as well as John Podesta's email and disseminate those emails to WikiLeaks and by the broader conspiracy theory that Trump was being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin with sexual material, compromising financial information, personal blackmail as well, and that therefore the Kremlin was basically, once Trump got elected running the country, was a completely unhinged and deranged conspiracy theory from the start for which there was no evidence. 

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