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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Hi glenn!
I'm so very very confused about what is going on rn in regards to Garcia and el Salvador. Did the USC decide 9-0 for him to be returned or that demanding trump return him was beyond the ability of a district court to demand? Does facilitate his return merely mean allow him to come through the border? Was he ordered to be deported in 2019? Does the order of holding get canceled if trump declares m16 a terrorist organization? Is a US president a coequal with the US SC or is one more powerful than the other?
Too much contradictory information for me! What is true? What isnt??

Glenn, as always I appreciate all of your diligent work and your attempt to reach the truth. Unfortunately when it comes to Harvard nobly resisting becoming a tool of the federal government, I find this humorous. The first thing you would have to do to make this in any way reasonable is to demonstrate that they are currently not beholding to other donors and that the money these donors give does not influence their curriculum, the people they hire in either the bureaucratic or the educational departments in the university. If you cannot prove if, or if such an investigation shows that they are influenced by other big money, then all Harvard is doing is choosing one controlling interest over another. And the students receive a slanted education, which of course they perceive as truth. Whether they believe so or not, they have little choice. Rebellion and resistance can easily masquerade as freedom of thought when they are, in fact, a form of conformism to another special interest. ...

April 16, 2025

Dear Glenn.

First of all, and most importantly, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your wonderful courage and your profound intellectual honesty. I love Tucker and I enjoy Jimmy Dore and the GreyZone; but, you are the only one for whom I make an effort to watch every single show. And, your shows are uniformly magnificent. Such a joy to get my news from such a trusted source.

Among the many issues that you’ve addressed with a lovely integrity is the genocide of the Palestinian population at the hands of the Israelis. And, Trump’s sociopathic approach to the topic has been quite disturbing.

Since the moment Trump came down the “golden escalator,” I’ve liked the guy. And, since I met him a year later in a small gathering and realized that “he’s not the guy he plays on TV” (I SWEAR Bill Maher stole my line), I’ve been completely in his camp and - for better or worse - have been dumped by some formerly very dear friends because of it. So, it’s sad to come to the ...

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Week in Review: Trump's Tariffs, Ukraine Negotiations, Possibility of War with Iran, and More with Glenn Greenwald, Lee Fang, & Michael Tracey
System Update #438

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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As a program that covers only two or at the most three issues per night – because we prefer in-depth coverage to sort of cable-style quick five-minute hits of each different news event possible – sometimes, especially these days, it is difficult to keep up with all the news, given how fast and furious things are always happening with this new administration. 

As a result, we're going to try to devote one show per week or so to a sort of “Week in Review,” where we're able to cover more topics than we normally would cover on a typical program by inviting friends of the show on to talk with us about those. 

To help us do that tonight, we are joined by the independent Journalist Lee Fang and the always delightful and agreeable Michael Tracey. 

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Lee Fang is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He covers political and corporate wrongdoing on Substack at leefang.com. He previously wrote and reported for The Intercept where he was my colleague for many years; he has also written at The Nation and reported for Vice. He is an intrepid investigative journalist, always breaking lots of stories, working by himself or with an independent team. We are always happy to welcome him to the show. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions: On Banning Candidates in the Democratic World, Expanding Executive Power, and Trump's Tariffs
System Update #437

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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For various reasons, we had our Q&A show on this show rather than Friday night. The questions that we received cover a wide range of topics, and the ones tonight have all sorts of interesting questions from the escalating use of lawfare in this so-called democratic world to ban anti-establishment candidates from the ballot to some of the ongoing fallout from Trump's tariffs policies, including a bunch of themes related to corporate media.

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Before I get to the questions though, I want to give you some breaking news that happened a few minutes before we came live on the air. I just spent the last 10 to 15 minutes reading about it so I don't have a very in-depth knowledge of it. You may have heard the U.S. government sent to El Salvador a person who was living in the United States, who's married to an American citizen, has a daughter they're raising together, has lived here for years in the U.S., has no charges against him, no problems whatsoever. As a result, there was a hold put on any attempt to remove him or deport him by a deportation court. Yet, he was picked up within the last month and sent to that mega horrific prison in El Salvador, even though there was a court order barring his removal, pending hearings. Even the U.S. government admitted that they sent him there accidentally. That's what they said. “Oops, it was an accident.” 

Now, what do you do if the government admits and mistakenly consigns somebody to one of the worst prisons on the planet, in El Salvador, indefinitely, with no way out, incommunicado: their families can't speak to them, their lawyers can't speak to, they're in El Salvador. 

A federal district court judge about a week ago ordered the U.S. government to do everything possible to get him back, to tell their – let's face it – puppet state in El Salvador, President Bukele, that they want him back. 

Remember, the U.S. government pays for each one of these prisoners to be there. So, it's not like we have no influence there. The whole strategy of Bukele is to do what the United States tells him to do. The Trump White House and Trump supporters were indignant about this order: who are you to tell the president to go get him from El Salvador? The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said, “Well, tell the court to call Salvador.” That was her attitude. 

The injunction then went up on appeal to an appellate court composed of one Reagan appointee and two appointees of Democratic presidents, one Obama and one Clinton, if I'm not mistaken, who, more or less unanimously – they had some differences about the rationale – upheld that injunction and said it's unconscionable to send somebody who you haven't demonstrated any guilt for and when there's a court order barring his removal, to send him to El Salvador for life in prison and then just wash your hands of it. 

The problem is the government doesn't want to go get him because that would be an admission that they sent someone there mistakenly, which they've already admitted in their briefs. That would raise the question, well, how can you send people to a prison in El Salvador without giving them a chance to prove that they're not guilty of the crimes you're accusing them of being gang members and those sorts of things? 

Last night, we reported in detail on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a separate case where five Venezuelans obtained an injunction before they were sent to El Salvador, a country they've never been to, to be put in prison, arguing that they should have the right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court before they're removed and argue that they were wrongfully detained and are wrongfully accused and all nine justices of the Supreme Court – all nine – said that you cannot remove people under the Alien Enemies Act until you first give them a habeas corpus here and they had a disagreement by a 5-4 vote about that proceeding had to be brought where the person is detained.” 

They're detained mostly in Texas or Arizona and already those Venezuelan detainees who had this injunction against them immediately went to court in Texas. Yesterday, a Trump-appointed judge issued an injunction saying the government has to prove that they have evidence that they're guilty of the things they're accusing them, which is gang membership. 

You can still deport people and send them back to their country of origin just by proving they're illegal but if you want to send them to a prison in El Salvador, and if you want to remove them under the Alien Enemies Act, which requires proving that they're an alien enemy: every time it's been invoked – the War of 1812, World War I, World War II – even those accused of being Nazi sympathizers got hearings first. And that's what the U.S. Supreme Court said. Right after that, a Trump-appointed judge in the original court, the district court, issued a ruling saying, “You cannot remove these people as well.” 

We keep hearing about all these left-wing judges. We talked about this before. These are not left-wing judges. A lot of times they're Reagan or Bush judges but in a couple of cases now they've been Trump-appointed judges. 

In fact, yesterday, a different Trump-appointed judge ruled in favor of the Associated Press. As you might recall, the White House issued marching orders to the American media, saying, “You cannot call this the Gulf of Mexico anymore, you have to call it the Gulf of America.” 

I’m not sure when the government thought it obtained the power to dictate to media outlets and journalists what they can say and how they can describe things. When the Associated Press continued to call out the Gulf of Mexico, the Trump White House cut off all access to press pools, briefing rooms, and the like. 

A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled in favor of AP, saying, obviously not everybody's entitled to access to the White House but once you have it, you cannot be punished with removal because of the things you say, because the things that you're saying don't align with the government's orders of what you should say. 

Just before we came on air, the Supreme Court issued another ruling – it was an unsigned ruling, which typically means that it was the opinion of the court unanimously – which involved the case of this one individual who was sent to El Salvador in the way that the administration admitted was sent mistakenly. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to dissolve that injunction saying, “Courts can't rule on how to conduct ourselves diplomatically” and the court said, “No, we are maintaining this injunction” by a 9-0 vote – apparently, there was no dissent.

So, you can't mandate or force the Trump administration to get the prisoner back but they said the government does have to prove they did everything reasonable to facilitate his return and that's the Supreme Court, the last word that has said that the Trump administration has to try and get him back because he should never have been sent there by the Trump administration's admission. 

Congress is completely impotent. They're afraid of Trump, especially the Republicans. As long as he stays very popular within the Republican Party, very few Republicans are willing to defy him. 

Congress in general, well before Trump, has neutered itself. We talked about that last night with David Sirota. They've given up the role that they're supposed to have constitutionally in setting tariff policy. They've especially abdicated their responsibility to authorize wars. The president goes to war all the time like we are now in Yemen without any hint of congressional approval. Obama did the same thing. Biden did the same thing. 

We don't really have an operating congressional branch in any real sense. |As I said, no branch is supposed to be unlimited in its power, it's supposed to have a balance of power that's supposed to be co-equal branches. 

If the president starts violating the law, implementing due process-free procedures of punishment and punishing the press, it's the role of the courts to say, “This violates the Constitution.” This Supreme Court has now twice done that with Trump, and Trump-appointed judges are doing it as well. 

Whatever your views are on all these different assertions of power, you want there to be some check on presidential power, and you don't want any one branch of government getting too powerful. There are all sorts of checks on the judiciary. The only people who can be on the judiciary are ones that the president nominates, even ones the president nominates said they have to go through a confirmation hearing in the Senate – every single judge – and then for wrongdoing, they can be impeached. 

So, they have many different checks and balances on everyone in the branches and you don't want the power to get too concentrated in any one branch, especially the president. As David Sirota said last night, the founders feared most an elected king; they just fought a revolutionary war to free themselves of a monarch. The last thing they wanted to do was to recreate one, but that's what you would have if the president said, “Oh, once I win an election, I'm totally free to do whatever I want. Ignore the Constitution. It doesn't matter. No one can do anything to stop me.” That is not something any American citizen should want. 

 So that's just an update. I'll read the case more carefully but, from what I can gather, that is the essence of the ruling. It's not a complete defeat for Trump because it does recognize the president has the right to conduct diplomacy and they don't want to interfere in that but the order is the government has to do everything reasonable to facilitate their return and then demonstrate to the court the efforts they made so the court can then determine whether they actually tried to do that.

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All right, so let's get to our Mailbag. These are questions that have been submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community. The first one is from @John_Mann. 

AD_4nXcdRzr6sZ9KQq3FHxTXYeAVEqeMpChh786AVQXcqgjXiqJtr6YhmTYfhOScFrEEFWtOe4YyJHpW3_rQgE-hF98iqyAj_D3vt545whwTcGWMk7q8L17MXlubkN60Ij37-Lu7eRd3T4eRNVJ1dvmGskg?key=raEjNIDONd4zGJ8N9tomIcvGI do think it's important when critiquing any institution, including the corporate media, not to romanticize the past. 

It has always been the case, especially throughout the Cold War, that the corporate media would basically serve as a mouthpiece for the CIA, for the Security State. Every time the CIA overthrew a government The New York Times and Time Magazine would herald it as a revolution by the people. 

Conversely, whenever a new pro-United States leader was installed, no matter how tyrannical, they would call it an advancement of democracy. And you can just go back and look at that. I recently did that with the CIA-engineered coup in Brazil to see how The New York Times covered that and it was essentially, “Oh, this was a revolution against a corrupt communist regime.” 

In fact, it was an elected center-left government, and the tyrannical regime was the installment of the right-wing military junta. The worst offender was probably Time Magazine. Henry Luce was the publisher and owner of Time Magazine, he was extremely close to the U.S. government, and a hardcore Cold Warrior. 

Several countries actually enacted laws banning foreign-owned media from being freely circulating in the country as a result of the influence of Time Magazine and how they were just propagandizing the entire world. 

So, there was always this kind of union between the government on the one hand and the corporate media on the other. They worked hand-in-hand. But you did have occasions when that didn't happen, very well-known occasions: when Edward R. Murrow angered his bosses at CBS by vigorously and repeatedly denouncing McCarthyism in the 1950s; Walter Cronkite, in the 1960s, turned against the Vietnam War and editorialized on air – he was the most trusted news person there was saying, “The government's not winning, the U.S. is not winning, the U.S. isn't going to win.” 

Shortly thereafter, we had Watergate, you have the Pentagon Papers that enraged the U.S. government that was done by The New York Times and the Washington Post. So, you definitely had a kind of adversarial relationship at some points. 

But well before Donald Trump, when I first started writing about politics, and I'll talk about this in a second, I didn't intend to start writing about the media. I wasn't trying to be a media critic; I wasn't looking at the world that way. Only over time did I realize that with the War on Terror, the war in Iraq, the problem with the media was they were completely subservient to the National Security State, not to Democrats, not to Republicans, to the National Security State. 

Nonetheless, despite all of that, despite those fundamental problems I used to rail against the corporate media, I would debate them, I'd criticize them, I'd dissect their propaganda when I was writing, every day, in the 2000s and 2010s. I think it has gotten much worse for one reason and one reason only, and that was the emergence of Donald Trump. 

Once Donald Trump emerged, even though I don't think he was more radical than, say, George Bush and Dick Cheney, even from a kind of coastal, liberal perspective. Comportmentally, he was just so offensive to establishment elites, to liberal elites, that the media absolutely despised him, especially once he won and they went completely insane. They really did start including that their journalistic mission no longer mattered, that far more important was the higher mission of defeating Donald Trump, and they just started lying openly. 

We've been through all those lies, the Russiagate, that people forget now, really did drown the country politically for almost three years, only for it to be debunked. They spread the Hunter Biden laptop lie right before the election, which came from the CIA that it was “Russian disinformation.” All the COVID lies, everything Anthony Fauci said was not to be questioned and anyone who questioned it was a conspiracy theorist and on and on, and on. 

And that was really when you see this massive collapse in trust and faith in the media if you look at the graphs. I mean, it has been going down over time and you can even see prior to the advent of the internet, people turning to alternative sources. Talk Radio became very big among conservatives. Millions and millions and millions of people listen to Rush Limbaugh and he fed them every day with arguments about why you can't trust the corporate media. 

But in 2016, it fell off a cliff. That's because most of the media ended up just openly cheering for one of the two parties and that's something they really hadn't done before. 

The media was always liberal in the sense that these people lived in New York or Washington, they were probably more liberal on social issues, but when it came to war, remember, The New York Times and The New Yorker, with Jeffrey Goldberg, did more to sell the war in Iraq than any conservative outlet ever did. Conservatives were already behind the war on Iraq, behind the War on Terror, because it was a Republican administration. They're the ones who made it palatable for liberals to support it, telling liberals, “No, these things are real. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He's in an alliance with al-Qaeda.” 

That central bias was never right v. left or Democrat v. Republican; it really became Democrat v. Republican in 2016 and until the 2024 election. They were just openly and almost explicitly of the view that their journalistic views no longer matter, their journalistic principles no longer matter because of the much higher mission they were serving now – very kind of self-glorifying view of themselves like “No, we're on the front lines of this world-historic battle, this preserve American democracy and keep fascism out of the country.” 

That's what they told themselves. It feels much better than saying, “Oh, yeah, our job is just to report facts, without fear or favor to anybody.” It's kind of boring. They became heroes in liberal America. I mean, all these journalists, they wrote bestselling books, because they were anti-Trump, kind of the Jim Acosta effect. Just like the most mediocre people. Rachel Maddow became like a superstar in liberal America and in mainstream entertainment and all of that. All those people who abandoned their journalistic mission for the much more overtly partisan one. 

And when they did that, the problem was it wasn't like they were just reporting in a way that would help the Democratic Party. That was their mission, that was their goal. And that was what their mindset became. Remember, heading in the 2020 election, I worked for The Intercept, which was created explicitly to avoid attachment to a particular party or an ideology. We were supposed to just be adversarial to the government and that was the first time editors ever tried to stop me from publishing something. It was right before the election. I wanted to write about the revelations of the Hunter Biden laptop, what it showed about Joe Biden's and the Biden family's pursuit of profits in Ukraine and China, and they just said, “No, you cannot do that.”

 I don't think corporate media ever recovered and don't think they ever will recover. I think that trust and faith are gone. The fact that there are so many alternatives now means that people aren't captive of them any longer and you can see their audience disappearing. I mean, the only people who watch cable news are people over 60 or 65. It's true, especially on MSNBC and CNN. If they have like 700,000 viewers in total for a prime-time show, maybe 10%, 70,000 people under the age of 54, 70,000. Do you know how small that is for a massive media corporation in everybody's home because they're on the cable networks? You just see that medium dying and I think they did it to themselves. 

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All right, next question. @Bowds asks:

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I just did a show with two other leftists. One is the European editor of Jacobin, who's based in Europe, and the other is Yanis Varoufakis, who was the former finance minister of Greece and a very smart, I think, figure on the left. And it was about how so many right-wing populists are being banned the minute they start getting too popular, focused on Marine Le Pen’s banning. 

 I was really relieved to hear both of them, both on principle and on pragmatism, warn how dangerous and wrong that was to steal the core right in a democracy, which is to vote and choose your own leaders by banning people who are opposed to the establishment the minute they start doing too well. 

I've learned more about the Le Pen case, both of them have much nuts-and-bolts knowledge of it. I mean, the Marine Le Pen case is such a joke. I mean, it was called “Embezzlement” in the United States. That's what she was charged with and convicted of, which makes it sound like she stole money for herself. That's usually what embezzlement means. That's not what it was at all, it wasn't even close to that. 

Basically, everyone who's a member of the EU Parliament gets a lot of money a month for staff, something like 30,000 euros a month for staff and you can hire people even though they don't really do anything. One of the things Marine Le Pen’s party did was they took a lot of that budget for the parliamentarians they had in the EU, and they used it essentially to hire people, not so much to help with the work of the EU, but more to supplement or bolster salaries of the people who work for her party. 

And what both of them said, and this is the impression I got too, is that it is possible that that happened. Although it's a very gray area and the question becomes like, “Did they do more work on the EU or were they really working more internally on the party?” But there's no self-enrichment. Marine Le Pen didn't steal any money. The idea was she had the people who were getting these salaries work more on the party in France than on the EU work. 

How do you determine who does more of what? But what they all said was that essentially every party does this. Something like 25% of members of the EU Parliament have been found doing things very much like this, and they're not prosecuted criminally. They're required to pay a fine or pay the money back. So, at best, it was a very selective prosecution. They found Marine Le Pen doing something that is commonly done. 

And I think in general, any time you have a candidate who's leading the polls, either probably will win or highly likely to win as in the case of Marine Le Pen, she was certainly a real threat, especially without Macron being able to run and they suddenly get prosecuted on a very iffy crime. 

I'm not talking about murder, rape, kidnapping, racketeering. It's like misuse of funds where nobody gets enriched, kind of like Donald Trump's prosecution in Manhattan for these supposed mischaracterizations of the payments to Stormy Daniels through Michael Cohen, a bookkeeping kind of transgression that would be at best treated like a misdemeanor and rarely prosecuted. 

Whenever you start having that, you immediately, instinctively should wonder, is this person being prosecuted because they're afraid they're going to win an election and don't want to let the people of the country whom polls show close to a majority or even a majority want to elect, to keep them from actually running. And if this were a nice lady case where Marine Le Pen was the only example, maybe you could sit there all night and debate the intricacies of French law and how much other people do it and whatever, but it's so clearly part of the pattern. 

Here in Brazil, Lula's popularity is declining significantly and a lot of polls show Bolsonaro would win if he was able to run in 2026 against Lula, some polls show a tie within the margin of error. But, again, clearly, Bolsonaro would have a chance to win. Clearly, tens of millions of people in Brazil want him to be the president. But they're denied the choice because, in 2023, an electoral court said Bolsonaro is ineligible to run for the next eight years because he cast out on the integrity of the voting process. And they said, “Oh, it's an abuse of power to have done that. You can't run again.” 

And then, obviously, in Romania, we have Calin Georgescu who won the Romanian election and he's the more anti-EU, anti-NATO, pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine war, at least, candidate. The EU hates him, the U.S. hates him and they just invalidated the election. They said, this election doesn't count because Russia used ads on TikTok to help this candidacy, as if the U.S. and the EU weren't massively interfering in all these elections to get the candidate they want elected. 

But it's like, yeah, this election doesn't count. The candidate we don't like won, so it doesn't count. Then as polls showed, for the new election, he was again leading in the polls by an even higher amount because there was a perception in Romania that they were banning him to prevent him from winning, they went back, and said, “You can't run, Russia helped you, you're now ineligible.” There was another populist right figure in his party or an ally who was then also banned. 

This is becoming a trend. The Democrats' principal strategy in the 2024 election was to try to charge Trump with as many crimes as possible, not only convict him of those crimes but even try to put him in prison before 2024. 

It's so obviously a tactic that's being used by people who are claiming that they and they alone are the guardians of democracy. I mean, they're doing the same exact thing with censorship. And I believe that the story is that in 2016, the British people shocked Western liberals by having the U.K. leave the EU, do you know how significant that is? To have the U.K. leave the EU as a result of a referendum of the British people? Just because of perceptions that Brussels hates them, is not caring about their lives, how they don't want to be ruled by these distant bureaucrats and eurocrats in Brussels, and then, three months later, four months later, Donald Trump beats the symbol of establishment, power and dogma, Hillary Clinton. 

And that was when Western liberals decided that they could no longer trust people to be free. They can't trust them to have free speech because if they talk to each other freely and circulate ideas, they can't control what people think and therefore how they vote. That was when this whole disinformation industry arose. 

The whole purpose of the Enlightenment was “No, we were endowed with the capacity for reason.” We can all do that ourselves using free speech, as long as we can debate each other and exchange ideas, we can then make our own choice about what's true and false. That was the whole point of the Enlightenment, on which the American founding, among other things, was based. 

So, they're waging war at the Enlightenment on core Western values, core democratic values, not just of censorship, but now banning people they are fearful to win and they're doing it in the name of saving democracy, kind of like we have to burn down this village to save it. We have to eliminate democracy to save democracy. 

And I think all this is going to happen, kind of, as I was saying last night when we were looking at those polls showing a significant decline in support for Israel in the United States and how the reaction is more censorship to prevent people from spreading anti-Israel arguments that I think it's just going to create a backlash, just like the liberal censorship regime did on issues like race and gender ideology, created resentment and a backlash. I think that's going to happen with Israel, I think it's going to happen here as well. I think people are going to start looking around and figure it out and realize, hey, wait a minute, all these candidates that are leading in the polls that the establishment hates, they're all getting banned. 

It's not that difficult to realize how improbable it is that all of these right-wing populist anti-establishment candidates, right as they're on the verge of winning, just happen to commit crimes in the nick of time to justify banning them from the ballot, whereas all the establishment's favorite candidates are all super clean and law-abiding and driven by nobility and integrity, and they're just abiding by the law. I mean, who believes that? It's always like this. The people who stand up and say, “We are the guardians of democracy” are the ones who censor and ban people from the ballot. 

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All right, next question from @TuckertheDog. I don't know what that means but I'm always happy to take questions from canines. 

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It is not unheard of for journalists to have off-the-record meetings with American political leaders and even foreign leaders. Obviously, why would a foreign leader want to meet in secret with a journalist? Or why would a foreign leader want to be secret with influencers? Because they want to impart to them propaganda about why they should be more aligned with that country's agenda or that leader's way of thinking. 

The people they met with are already very pro-Israel, certainly Dave Rubin. I mean there's a picture that Dave Rubin posted of himself and Netanyahu and it almost looks like he's in the middle of some sort of sexual ecstasy that's like a sustained one, I mean he's standing next to Benjamin Netanyahu who basically is his leader. 

So, I don't know what possible impact that could have. Dave Rubin was already somebody who put Israel at the center of his world. I don't know how he could do that even more. Tim Poole, I don't want to make sweeping statements about his views on Israel. I know he's very pro-Israel, but I just don't know enough to make definitive statements. But it's not that it's that unheard of and my understanding is like Dave Rubin posted a picture of it. I think Tim Pool talked about it. I think that happened after it was disclosed, but they met under a set of rules that journalists use where you can't report on anyone who is at the meeting, you can't report on anything that was discussed, but you can disclose the fact of the meeting and just maybe general impressions. 

So, it was rules of secrecy. They weren't allowed to quote Netanyahu; they weren't allowed to talk about what he said. And I do think this points to a problem in independent media. I think one of the problems that we were just talking about with corporate media is that they became too partisan, too ideological, too willing to act subserviently to a particular faction. The U.S. Security State, the Democratic Party, whatever. 

And I think there's definitely that same problem in independent media. I've talked before about how the easiest way to have financial success and rating success in this new independent media environment is to plant your flag in one faction and say, “This is who I am, this is where I am, this is who I defend, this is the ideology I believe in; I'm never going to deviate from it.” 

You attract all the people who believe in that ideology or who are loyal to that party or to that faction, and they want to hear their views validated all the time. And you can build a very big audience of people who just want to keep informational closure and always have their views validated, never challenged, let alone rejected: a lot of people are making a lot of money in independent media doing that. 

I absolutely believe that the emergence of independent media is a net good just for the reason that it increases the number of alternatives people have. Some people have tried independent media but have not succumbed to that kind of group thing or audience capture, Joe Rogan probably being the best example. 

Joe Rogan does not sit there and just praise the Democratic, the Republican Parties. He's always that kind of a mixture of views. He obviously became the most popular program in the country. 

It's a little different because Joe Rogan's program is not primarily political. Sometimes it's political. But it is cultural. He considers himself a comedian, he has a lot of comedians on, actors, celebrities, and a lot of political content – just kind of along the way there's political content, so, but I'm not playing that political show; it's difficult to be successful as a political show unless you do that. And once you do, in a lot of ways, you become no different than the corporate media. 

They have a lot of proximity to power. If you're suddenly now – because you cheered on MAGA, you cheered on Trump every day – now you're getting invited to the White House, you're being let in on secret meetings, the Trump White House is calling you, giving you little tidbits, to what extent is that really independent media? 

I've always believed it's important to keep people in power at a distance, at an arm's length. The minute you start befriending them, the minute you start talking to them too much, the minute you start succumbing to the temptations of being led into their world – you have people with power, they can open doors, like, oh, I get to go to the White House, I get to have a meeting with a foreign leader, not just a foreign leader but like the Prime Minister of Israel – of course, that's going to compromise your independence. Or maybe not. Of course, maybe you can resist that and fight against that, but it's certainly going to have a big effect. 

That's why I've always hated anything that reeks of journalists and political power merging socially or in any other way, like that White House Correspondence Dinner. I absolutely despise it. It makes me sick to my stomach. They all dress up as if they're at the Oscars and they get to meet like B-list celebrities and chatter at the White House with all these and with the president. It's just so corrupting. It creates just like this culture of Versailles like you're either in the royal court or you're not. 

On some level, the issue of audience capture can actually be more problematic in independent media. It didn't use to be such a problem in corporate media years ago, in the decades I was describing earlier, because when there was only ABC, NBC, and CBS, they were the only games in town – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, your local newspaper. But it was a place everybody felt more or less trusting of in terms of getting the news from because they were not overtly partisan. As I said, they had other biases, but it wasn't so overtly partisan. 

Now, there is absolute audience capture among corporate media. The vast majority of The New York Times subscribers – the vast, vast majority – are liberals. They hate Trump. Same with The Washington Post: they had mass cancelations of subscriptions when Jeff Bezos barred them from endorsing Kamala Harris. Obviously, the cable outlets all have their audiences, and you actually saw that with Fox, which I personally do believe is the most independent of the three cable networks for reasons I can explain, but not really relevant now, but when Trump was telling everybody the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud, that Biden's victory was fraudulent, byproduct of voter fraud, many, maybe even most people on Fox were not on board with that. Some of them actually were opposed to it. Tucker Carlson went on the air and ranted and raved about the dishonesty of Sidney Powell, how she keeps making these grandiose claims and she has all this proof, but then every time he invites her on to show, she won't come on, she never shows this proof. And you saw this migration of a good number of people, a good number of conservatives, away from Fox to Newsmax, and, as a result, Fox started getting more receptive to the fraud narrative. 

That is a kind of audience capture that I think is new for corporate media because they are now all in silos. You know who the audience is of each one of these outlets. But I think with independent media – because shows and independent journalists rely on their viewers not just for ratings, not just to show up, but also for financial support – most independent media shows, most independent journalists can't make a living unless they have their readers and viewers supporting them financially, monthly subscriptions or donations or whatever. That's what independent media rely on mostly. 

Then many of them become afraid to say anything that might alienate them. I mean, I've been through this many times in my career where you take a position that you know is going to alienate a lot of your audience and you can watch them go away, the subscriptions drop and fall. But I would way rather have fewer viewers and make less money and know that I'm not in prison to say things I don't really believe to keep my audience happy. 

I've never had a viewership or a readership that expected me to do that or wanted me to do that and I think it's really commendable for people who consume news to stay with somebody even when they're saying things that are so against your views as long as you think they're doing their best to be honest, you can be challenged by it. I think it's boring to listen to somebody who agrees with me all the time. I really do. I don't like it. I don't find it compelling or engaging. There's too much agreement. It's like we're already on the same wavelength. 

So, I do think independent media is an absolute positive. I've been a big defender of it. I still am. I think free speech on the internet is the most important thing. But I also think there are some important vulnerabilities independent media has, some of which are shared by corporate media and some of them are more inherent to independent media that I think are worth being aware of. 

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The next question is from @aobraun1: 

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I think the most interesting thing about Trump and tariffs, and a lot of people have said this before, is that – and I'm sure you've all seen this – you can go back to the 1980s, Trump was famous when he was young because he was entering the Manhattan real estate market, building big buildings, he was good looking, he always attracted attention, always had a certain charisma, his dating habits attracted all kinds of tabloid attention. He had his first wife, Ivanka. I remember one of us when I lived in New York with whom he had his first four children. And he ended up having a marital affair with Marla Maples. And the media went insane. Like The New York Post, those tabloids every day. 

He was extremely famous for those kinds of things, for his real estate success. He ended up leaving Ivanka Trump and then marrying Marla Maples, whatever, and then he had a third marriage and lots of other things in between and the tabloids loved this. They ate it up. 

You can see an interview with him in the 1980s where he was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, kind of at the height of her popularity on her extremely popular show and she asked him, like, “Would you ever run for president?” and he said, “Ah, probably not.” But he was passionate about one topic in particular and that was the idea that Japan back then, it was not China but Japan, in the ‘80s, that people feared was taking over technologically and economically – they were buying a bunch of land in the United States – that Japan and other countries were taking advantage of the United States in ways that were disgusting, he said, for American leaders to permit, meaning trade deficits, unfair trade practices – it has been a view of Trump's forever. He’s been talking about tariffs and protectionism for a long time. 

So, in terms of the brain trust, it's not like other issues where I think Trump gets influenced to do things. I think this is something that Trump really was devoted to doing, especially this time around. You can see this time he wants to leave his mark. He doesn't care as much about public opinion, about media anger – and this is what I heard too from Trump's circle throughout 2024: they got outflanked in the first turn, they had all kinds of people there to sabotage them, weaseled and embedded into a circle. They didn't really know how Washington worked. Trump was an outsider. He was constantly undercut and sabotaged by generals and by the whole deep state. 

And they are determined to make sure that does not happen again. That was, they worked on that for a long time, at least a full year, and they got in and they were very serious about it. They had a real plan for it. So, this time, most of what's happening is because Trump wants it to happen. Tariffs are probably the leading example. But of course, he's not an economist, he's not a specialist in tariffs, but Trump has a lot of confidence in his own decision-making ability. 

My guess is that the main architect of these tariffs is Peter Navarro, just because he's a fanatical supporter of tariffs. Maybe he talked to his treasury secretary. Maybe he talked to some billionaires whom he trusts. What I know for sure is that when these terrorists were instituted the way they were, people were kind of shocked, including people close to him, and they were harming these billionaires quite a bit. I mean, you could watch Tesla stock imploding. 

When Tim Waltz made fun of Tesla when it was at a very low level, like six weeks ago, two months ago, it was 225, it then went up to 280, 290, and it was back to 210, 215, like losing 20% of its value. Elon Musk is the primary shareholder of Tesla, so that eats in greatly to his net worth, but everyone in the market, people on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, who love Trump, who thought he was going to do everything that they wanted him to do, that he would serve their interests without any kind of hesitation. 

So, I know for a fact, that there was a lot of reporting on this, I've heard this as well, Elon was going to Trump all the time, trying to talk him out of these tariffs, other people were as well, and Trump wouldn't move because he believed in it. And the only thing that got Trump to move, as he himself said, was that people freaked out, they panicked, and they were panic selling. What really alarmed them was not so much the stock market, because the stock market has had many times when it's gone down that way, and it bounced back, they knew the stock market was going to go down, they were willing to endure that. 

What really alarmed them was what happened in the bond market because that reverberated the entire economy very quickly. Imagine that if things didn't get better and Trump kept those tariffs in place through 2025 heading into 2026, by the best estimates, whatever benefit you get from protectionism is going to take some time to show up. Just think about layoffs, the economy slowing down, prices going up, people's 401k being eaten up. 

As I said last night, I have people in my life who don't care much about politics, but they have 401ks and they care quite a lot about the 401k because that's the retirement security and when it starts going like this, it's not just billionaires, it's ordinary people really feeling fear and anger about what's happening. 

Then that reverberates in Republicans and Congress as well, because they serve and are funded by banking interests in Wall Street, but also because a lot of them are true believers in free trade. That's the classic Republican position. But then also they have to run for re-election every two years and 2026 is already looking to be a scary year for Republicans. General midterm elections after an election are terrible for the party in control. The opposition is much more motivated. 

You've already seen in some of these elections for state Senate and House, these kinds of off-year elections, these special elections, and the couple for Congress where Democrats cut into the margins that Trump created very significantly. They were even afraid of Elise Stefanik's seat; if she went to the U.N. and there was an open seat, they were so afraid that they might lose it, even in a Trump 20-plus district, that they withdrew her nomination for U.N. ambassador because that's how much energy there is among Democrats and a lack of interest and energy among Republicans. When Trump's on the ballot, a lot of moderate people don't come out and I'm sure they're petrified about that. So, he was getting it from all directions. 

We'll see what happens. It's very uncharacteristic of Trump to back out, and that is what he did. I don't care what anyone says. They said from the start, these tariffs are staying in place, we don't take care; if the stock market gets angry, you're going to have to grit and bear it, have some short-term pain. We need to radically overhaul our economy. It's not working, which I agree with. 

Free trade globalism has been great for billionaires. It's created massive income inequality and sent the middle class and the working class on this sharp, steep decline of downward mobility. But suspending the tariffs kind of contradicts that message, like, we're going to radically overhaul the system and put in protectionism. Even if they get deals with these countries, if the tariffs don't return, then you haven't really overhauled anything. You've gotten some better deals. But you haven't overhauled the global economy or the American economy. 

But imagine putting those tariffs back in place, what it would do to the stock market, what it would do to the bond market, what it would do to people's perceptions. I don't know if they can put it back. I mean, presidents, no matter how powerful they are, definitely are limited by a lot of other powerful factions. 

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Last point, just not really a question, but speaking of independent media like on Joe Rogan's show, today, I don't know if it was recorded today, but it was released today, they had kind of a debate between Dave Smith on the one hand, who's a libertarian, anti-interventionist, anti-war Israel critic, and Douglas Murray, the British, whatever he is, who's fanatically in favor of Israel and wars, he loves wars, he thinks they're all great. 

There's this phrase I once heard or I once read. It might be something that a lot of people have said. I'm certainly not the first one to say it, but it's really true. I realized as soon as I read it, how true it was. I realized that when I was younger, I kind of absorbed this, that Americans automatically add 20 IQ points to any British person who speaks with a posh British accent, they all think, “Oh, they're so brilliant, so eloquent.” and that they subtract 20 IQ points for anybody who speaks with an American Southern accent. It is so true. 

The relevance of Douglas Murray seems obvious to me, but he went on Joe Rogan's Show today with Dave Smith, Joe Rogan doesn't usually have these kinds of debates. It got very heated. Rogan was clearly more on Dave Smith's side than Douglas Murray's side.

 Usually, Joe Rogan's audience is pretty favorable to the show. Basically, the entire Joe Rogan audience, which, again, is not left-wing, to put it mildly, was completely contemptuous of Douglas Murray. They could not spew enough disgust and contempt for him intellectually, politically and personally. 

I don't think I've ever seen Joe Rogan’s comment section be that universally disgusted and contemptuous of anybody since Matt Yglesias – I mean, I like mean internet comments as much as anybody else, but like, I almost felt uncomfortable reading the comment section when Matt Yglesias went on just because it was so mean, so incessantly mean, so personal. I mean they hated Matt Yglesias. It was when he had that book out about how America should have a billion people in it and they hated the book, they hated the argument, they hated him, they hated how he looked. I mean everything about him. But it came close with Douglas Murray. And I think it's so interesting because Douglas Murray usually won't go anywhere where he's challenged in any meaningful way. 

In fact, after October 7, we asked Douglas Murray to come on our shows several times. At first, he was responding, pretending he would, talking about scheduling, and then he just ghosted us and disappeared and won't come on. He doesn't want to be challenged; he wants to sit back in some chair like he's in a British salon. He loves to hear himself speak, he thinks he's so eloquent and he knows Americans are like, “Oh my god, this is so brilliant,” but he will never be challenged and he was challenged today a lot by David Smith and Joe Rogan. And he just fell apart. Fell apart.

It's really worth watching. It's entertaining. I encourage you to read the comment section as well. But it's not just that it was a good internet fight. They talked about a lot of foreign policy issues. Douglas Murray came on and just became a full-on Karen for the first 15 minutes, like whining and complaining to Joe Rogan about how he's talking to people he shouldn't be talking to, people who aren't worthy of being heard, including Dave Smith. That didn't go well. 

So, I recommend that. It's good when somebody like Douglas Murray, a hardcore Israel fanatic, a complete warmonger, someone who wants to send people to war all the time, but never goes, is actually challenged, not in like an eight-minute cable hit where you really can't get at the person, but it was two and a half hours and it's unrelenting.

I loved it when I was on, but by the third hour I was like, is this ending? It's tiring to focus that much, and when you're getting battered by Dave Smith and more importantly for Douglas Murray by Joe Rogan that way, you can definitely see him falling apart very quickly. So, I really recommend that! 

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As Tariffs Dominate News, Trump and Netanyahu Make Increasingly Militaristic Threats; Plus: Mixed Supreme Court Ruling on Deportation Powers
System Update #435

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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Trump once again hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House – the second time in two months.  Hopefully, this will be a monthly occurrence when Netanyahu comes to Washington and visits his workers every month or so. 

The visit was billed as an attempt by Israel to convince Trump to lift the 17% tariff imposed on that country but, as the visit unfolded, it was clear they were talking at least as much about war in the Middle East, specifically, the prospect of bombing Iran – an American war against Iran, the ultimate dream of Israel and its many supporters in the United States. Many statements were made of great significance – to put it mildly – and we will break those all down for you. 

Then, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a partial victory – and, despite the headlines, it was only a partial victory – as they lifted by a 5-4 vote, the nationwide injunction on these deportations imposed by federal district court Judge Boesberg and the court then required any judicial challenges to the deportation to be brought not as a class action. 

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There are many important world leaders of major countries with whom Donald Trump has not yet met, which is to be expected. He's only been in office not even 90 days. But there's a world leader with whom he has now met twice, hosting that leader at the White House two times in two months. You'll be shocked to learn that the leader who has now visited the White House most is none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Netanyahu went to the White House on April 8 and had a tour, including the part of the White House where Trump has a whole wall of just photos of himself with the Israeli leader. They were both admiring and looking at that. Trump seemed very proud of how many times he met Netanyahu: he talked fondly of Netanyahu in front of the media, including how often he has met with him, how well he knows him – praised him essentially for everything. 

One of the things that was so odd about this meeting, especially the love fest that manifested again between the two leaders, was that the day before, Israel shot and killed a 14-year-old American boy in the West Bank, a foreign government shot and killed that American citizen, 14 years old, in the West Bank, shot dead by Israeli soldiers and rather than the U.S. government saying, "Hey, why did you kill our citizen?” or “We were kind of upset that you shot an American boy,” it was not mentioned in any part of their public communications. 

Here from CNN yesterday:

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We have seen so many times when the IDF or the Israeli government makes a claim to justify their killing of innocent people about what these people were doing to warrant their murder and so often when there's a video that emerges, it turns out the IDF is lying. It happened in 2023, with an American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera shot in the West Bank. Israel originally said that they didn't kill her, it was Palestinians who shot and accidentally killed her, and then there was an investigation, there were videos and there was an autopsy that proved that the bullets came right from an IDF weapon. They ultimately admitted it. 

They eventually even ended up apologizing but that was only because a video was released proving it, as happened last week as well with the killing of medics as we'll show you so. It so often happens, of course, if the Israelis kill even a 14-year-old American boy they'll say, “Oh those are terrorists.” 

I just want to remind you of one thing so often this gets lost: the West Bank is not part of Israel; it has internationally recognized borders when Israel was created and then, even when Israel took more territory in 1967, there are internationally recognized borders. Israel does not own the West Bank. The West Bank does not belong to Israel. 

The Israeli military is brutally, violently occupying the West Bank and has been for decades ruling the lives of the Palestinians who live there in horrific ways that a lot of South African leaders say are even worse than in South African apartheid. There are roads in the West Bank available only for Jews but not for Arabs or Palestinians, they constantly have to wait in line for hours and go through humiliating checkpoints where they're constantly beaten and forced to just engage in humiliating rituals. 

There's also a huge number of settlements, just buildings that Israeli citizens have built, “settlers,” because they want to take that land. They expel Palestinians from their homes and say this is now our home, they have built so much there that it makes a two-state solution impossible because there are so many settlers in the West Bank, even though it doesn't belong to Israel. Some of the Israeli settlers have fanatical religious views; they believe God promised them that land. Others just don't care; they want Israel to expand and are now backed by the IDF, so, they go and pillage villages, they kill Palestinians in the West Bank, and the IDF often stands there, if not aiding them now, given how the government has changed. 

The entire world considers Israeli settlements and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank illegal. So, when you're hearing, “Oh, these boys were throwing rocks,” they're throwing rocks at their military occupiers, who are in tanks: tanks paid for by the United States – some of the most fortified tanks on the planet. 

I just want to ask you, if you’re an American and a foreign military invaded and occupied the United States, would you throw rocks at the military occupier? Would that be terrorism if you did? There's actually a 1984 film about what would happen if the Russian army, then the Soviet army, called Red Don, invaded the United States. Essentially, it glorifies all the American civilians who bravely stood up to their occupiers and killed them, used violence against them and threw rocks at them. But of course, if a foreign military is occupying your land for decades and the whole world considers it illegal, it's not theirs. If you're going to a map, the West Bank is not part of Israel. And yet their military is ruling the lives of those people – who would not think that's justified throwing rocks at the Israeli tanks? What people being occupied wouldn't do that? But in any event, even if they were throwing rocks at tanks, does that justify murdering a 14-year-old American, Palestinian American boy who was in the West Bank? The Israeli defense, the IDF thinks so. They released a video of them killing this American and shooting two other Americans, that they think justifies it. 

Video. Israel Defense Forces, X. April 7, 2025.

It's about a five-second video where you can see a couple of rocks being thrown. And then they came and just kind of shot them all, all three, two wounded, one dead. We talk about 14-and 15-year-old kids here. 

If any other country shot American teenagers, the U.S. government would be very angry but when Israel kills an American citizen, we're on the side of Israel. That's America First. 

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