Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Writing • Culture
Left/Right Alliance Could End Massive Domestic Spying Program, Tucker Carlson Admits Errors, & More
Video Transcript: System Update #57
March 19, 2023
post photo preview

Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Friday March 3, 2023. Watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to the podcast on Spotify

A once highly controversial and radical law, enacted in 2008, that empowers the U.S. government to spy without warrants is once again up for renewal. The Biden administration is demanding that the spying law be not just renewed, but renewed with no reforms or safeguards of any kind. The entire Democratic establishment is predictably in line, as always, behind the Biden administration's demands. But what makes all this interesting and noteworthy – and potentially newsworthy – is that the same left-right populist coalition that just united to vote in favor of Matt Gaetz’s resolution to withdraw troops from Syria is starting to align again against renewal of the spying powers, meaning that, as so often happens, the establishment wings of the two parties will have to unite in defense of the U.S. Security State if Biden's demands for more powers are to be met. 

In other words, if Joe Biden is to win and get the spying powers he's demanding, he'll need Republican establishment votes, presumably in large numbers, in order to do it. We will definitely be following that debate as it unfolds but we want to give you the kind of primer and background on it tonight so that you're ready to not just watch, but hopefully participate in that. 

We will explain the brief history of the spying law, why it is so uniquely pernicious – but more interestingly – the radically changing politics that is making this demand for renewal of the spying bill once something easily accomplished in Washington now, at least, somewhat in doubt. It has to do with the way in which the Republican Party has seriously and increasingly virulent internal debates and how, finally, some members of the left flank of the Democratic Party may be willing to abandon the Democratic establishment – like they just did with the Matt Gaetz vote – and join with the right-wing populists to stop it. I'm not predicting it's going to happen. I find it still unlikely, but it's worth watching and, again, doing what we can to see if we can foster that kind of alliance. 

We'll examine the same theme of this political realignment, or at least the transformation of political opinion, with respect to several other interesting topics - kind of a rapid-fire review of some things that happened this week that I think are tied together by this common theme, including a fascinating new video clip where Tucker Carlson profoundly – and obviously genuinely – apologizes and expresses remorse for spending his career defending what were long time Republican and D.C. orthodoxies. 

We’ll also look at radically changing polling data on the role the U.S. military should be playing in the world and the decreasing appetite among young Americans on both sides of the ideological divide for more interventions. 

We'll examine the significantly changed opinions on COVID as a result of the realization that is now downing on Americans that Dr. Fauci lied to the public for almost two years on purpose and we’ll examine a particularly preposterous culture war controversy at Wellesley College, Hillary Clinton's old stomping ground, that reveals a lot about the rot at the heart of the effort to force Americans to change ideas and change the language on fundamental social reality. Sometimes the lack of cogency reveals itself and collapses onto itself. And this controversy is worth looking at briefly because it illustrates how that can happen. 

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

 


 

 So, there's an extremely new battle that is emerging regarding the ability and power of the U.S. government to spy in mass – including on American citizens – without warrants of any kind. We all learn from childhood that one of the things that is supposed to distinguish the United States from all the other bad countries – the tyrannical ones, the ones that don't give freedom like the home of the free and the brave – is that our government is not permitted to spy on our conversations, to listen to our conversations, to search our homes, to learn anything about us unless they first go and get warrants from a court, an independent court, by demonstrating there's probable cause to believe we've done something wrong. That is fundamental to the American founding; it’s reflected in the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. That's a value inculcated in all of us as Americans from the time of birth. And one of the reasons I began writing about politics in 2005, in the wake of the War on Terror and the civil liberties abuses it ushered in, was because many of these core rights that we've been almost taught to take for granted as Americans were clearly under assault. One of them was the fact that the Bush administration, just about two months after I started writing about politics, got caught secretly and illegally spying on the calls of thousands of Americans without the warrants required by law. 

In 2005, The New York Times was the first to report on what the NSA was doing. There you see the headline: “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts."

There's a really interesting back story to this New York Times article, because you may be thinking, well, that was when the New York Times used to actually be adversarial to the U.S. Security State – they would actually report secrets that the U.S. public had a right to know. You'd be wrong to think that, though I understand why you think that. The New York Times won a Pulitzer for this article. They – as they always do – celebrated the bravery and courage and journalistic skill that they uniquely possessed by winning the Pulitzer. The reality, though, is if you look at the data in that article – it is December of 2005 – so, roughly a year after George Bush was reelected in 2004. And what we learned after all the heroism of The New York Times was celebrated by The New York Times, was that the two reporters who reported this story and won Pulitzers for had actually learned about this program a year and a half earlier, in mid-2004, as the Bush and Cheney administration was running for reelection. Instead of telling Americans about that program, instead of informing the American citizenry that the Bush and Cheney administration were spying on Americans without the warrants required by law – even though the law specifically required they go to the FISA court to obtain warrants before doing this – the New York Times decided it would not publish that story, but would instead conceal it because George Bush summoned the editor and publisher of The New York Times to the White House and told them, in a way that never made sense, that “if you tell Americans that we're spying on them without warrants, it will endanger the safety of American citizens and you will end up with blood on your hands in the event of a next terrorist attack.” 

And The New York Times decided that it would heed those warnings, even though it never made sense. Why would terrorists be helped by learning that the Bush administration was spying on Americans without warrants as opposed to with warrants? That argument never made any sense, but The New York Times concealed it and told the reporters they were not allowed to publish it. Bush was safely elected without Americans learning about this. Maybe he would have been elected anyway. Maybe Americans would have been glad he was doing it. I doubt it. We'll never know that counterfactual because The New York Times hid the story. 

It was only once one of the reporters, James Risen, told the New York Times that he was going to write a book and reveal this story in the book since he wasn't allowed to do it in the Times, only then, did the New York Times say, okay, we'll let you publish it in our paper – because they didn't want to be scooped by their own reporter in his book. Imagine how embarrassing that would be if Jim Risen broke the story in his book and then, it turned out everybody learned that The New York Times wouldn't let him report it in the paper itself, although we did end up learning about that. So that was the only reason The New York Times let him publish the story and they then praised themselves for their heroism, even that they were forced into it. 

When Edward Snowden came to me with the massive archive, seven or eight years later, and I asked him why he didn't go to The New York Times but came to me and then Laura Poitras, he said one of the reasons was he was very nervous that if he were to unravel his life by showing Americans that the NSA was spying on all their conversations, not just in this limited way that the New York Times revealed, but in mass, without the warrants required by law, that The New York Times would do what it did in this case, which hides most of the evidence instead of revealing it – and he would have unraveled his life for nothing. He thought that about every major corporate outlet that he knew was subservient to the U.S. Security State and unwilling to take it on. So, he believed that I would do the story much differently, that I would endure the threats of the U.S. Security State. 

I was attacked by almost everybody in the media for doing this story. I went on “Meet the Press” and David Gregory suggested I should be imprisoned along with Edward Snowden. They were absolutely doing everything possible to coerce and pressure us to stop this reporting and we gave our word to our source, Edward Snowden, that we wouldn't be like The New York Times. We would actually report the story. And we did for the next three years, we, in detail, described what these illegal spying programs were. As a result, federal courts in the United States were able to rule that these programs that we revealed as a result of our source’s courage violated not just the law, but the Constitution. 

That was the case for this spying bill. This spying program violated the law. We had a law in place after the Church Committee investigated the CIA and the NSA in the mid-seventies, that said that the government here on out is barred from spying on the calls of any Americans without first going to the FISA court and getting a warrant. That was what the law required. The Bush and Cheney administration, when they implemented the spying program, did not deny that that program was in violation of that law. They admitted it. I mean, it was clear as day, there was no argument about that. What they argued instead was under Article II of the Constitution, the president basically has unlimited power when it comes to national security even to violate laws enacted by Congress, that national security is the responsibility of the president and no law, no act of Congress, no judicial ruling can limit what he can do. It was a very radical theory of executive power enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attack. But at least back then, as much as I was opposed to it, they had the excuse that we really did actually just suffer a pretty cataclysmic attack on American soil that killed 3000 people, that brought down the World Trade Center, that flew a plane into the Pentagon. So, there was at least that; there was a real war or a real act of war that was pretty traumatic for the United States. But even then, the reason why I started writing about journalism was that I realized that this scheme, warrantless eavesdropping, was a grave threat to everything our republic was supposed to be about, to the privacy rights of American citizens – you can't have the government spying on our calls and reading our e-mails without warrants. And what The New York Times revealed and the reason I ended up devoting my first year and a half of journalism almost exclusively to this story and wrote a book on it was that it was illegal. The president broke the law. Bush and Cheney broke the law by implementing this spying program.

 But that was 2005. Nobody was willing to raise their voice too much in opposition to anything that was done in the name of stopping terrorism. And so, instead of holding Bush and Cheney accountable, impeaching them or investigating them or prosecuting them, what Congress did, on a very bipartisan basis, was enacted a new law, in 2008, that had no purpose other than to retroactively legalize the spying program Bush and Cheney implemented. To say that when the United States government is listening to the calls of people on other soil beside the United States, they're permitted to spy on those calls without warrants even if the calls involve American citizens. Obviously, it's way more common these days for American citizens to talk to foreign nationals. And what that did was essentially hand the power to the president – not just that president, but every president since – to spy on your calls with no warrant as long as they claimed that their target was a foreign national. That means that in thousands of cases every year, the U.S. government, the NSA, spies on your calls without first getting warrants, in direct contravention of the Fourth Amendment. 

At the time, Republicans were fully supportive of the War on Terror. They overwhelmingly voted for that law that the Bush administration wanted but Democrats, the majority of them, at least, voted no. A significant minority voted yes – because back then, Democrats were very supportive of this War on Terror but at least a majority of Democrats voted no. Almost every civil liberties group warned that this was a major threat to our privacy rights – the ACLU, every other major privacy group; press freedom groups because journalists can be spied on. 

So, there was a real division that Republicans were entirely united in support of this while establishment Democrats, a lot of Democrats were opposed, there was vibrant Democratic opposition. Mostly, Democrats were opposed. And I was vehemently opposed. I was writing about it at the time, as I said, I ended up writing my first book on this. 

As often happens, this was all done with the Patriot Act. When the government wants to enact a new radical law it says, “Oh, don't worry. Yes, this power seems extreme. It's completely contrary to everything you were taught about how the Republicans are supposed to function but it's just temporary. You don't have to worry. It's just temporary. Every four years, Congress has to renew it. And the only way this all will continue is if Congress comes determines the emergency is continuing. And, therefore, these powers can't be rescinded yet. 

So just like the Patriot Act, every four years since 2001 has been renewed with almost no opposition – 87 to 11 in the Senate, those kinds of votes – that's what's happened with this law as well. Even though there's basically no War on Terror anymore - no one ever talks about al-Qaida. There's no more al-Qaida or even ISIS. They've been vanquished and defeated. There have been no mass terrorist attacks on American soil in many years, certainly never of the kind which prompted it in the first place, namely 9/11. So, even if you're someone who, in 2002, thought these kinds of wars are necessary, nobody thinks there's a War on Terror of this kind now that justifies a full-scale assault on our civil liberties, especially given how many people now realize that the CIA, the FBI, the NSA cannot be trusted with these powers because they don't use them for their stated purpose, but instead use them to interfere in our domestic politics by spying on people who are their political enemies. 

And yet, during the Obama years, even though Obama ran on a platform to reverse all these things, he too demanded a renewal of this law. And the renewal, as it turned out, happened to come up right in the wake of our Snowden reporting when polls show that people on the right and the left are angry about warrantless spying, were angry about what the NSA was doing. And a bill was introduced in Congress that was extremely bipartisan in the best sense of the word. The co-sponsors were Justin Amash, who at the time was a Tea Party Republican, a libertarian – one of the staunchest opponents of American spying in the Republican Party – and John Conyers, a kind of old-school liberal. Both were from Michigan. One was black and elderly and a liberal and the other one was young and very conservative, but they were both from Michigan. 

There was this strong symbolism to this law to basically eliminate this sort of spying in the wake of the Snowden reporting and other kinds of abuses as well that we revealed. And it was clear this bill was going to pass. It was gathering a lot of steam among both Democrats and Republicans angry about the revelations of the Snowden reporting. And yet that bill ended up at the last second failing by a few votes and the person who saved it –you see her name in the headline of this Foreign Policy article from July 25, 2013 – is Nancy Pelosi: “How Nancy Pelosi Saved the NSA Program”. 

Essentially, Barack Obama called her and said, “Nancy, we're going to lose the spying power.” Remember, this is now 12 years after 9/11 – 2013 – and still Barack Obama – who ran on a platform of not doing this – was insisting that we needed more of these spying powers. And so he called Nancy Pelosi and said, you need to do whatever you have to do - beg, give these people committee assignments, promise them pork barrel spending for their district, get enough votes in the Democratic Party to sabotage this bill. And she did. So this bill, which looked like it was on its way to passing the first-ever congressional rollback of new state powers claimed after 9/11, ended up instead being sabotaged by the Democratic Party and Nancy Pelosi. 

Here you see the explanation of what happened. It's a fascinating history, especially since Biden is now demanding a renewal of the same law, now, another decade later: 

The obituary of Rep. Justin Amash’s amendment to claw back the sweeping powers of the National Security Agency has largely been written as a victory for the White House and NSA chief Keith Alexander, who lobbied the Hill aggressively in the days and hours ahead of Washington's shockingly close vote. But Hill sources say most of the credit for the amendment’s defeat goes to someone else: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It's an odd turn, considering that Pelosi has been on many occasions a vocal surveillance critic. But ahead of the razor-thin 205-217 vote […]

 That was the margin by which this extremely sweeping reform bill failed 205-217. She got about six more Democrats than she needed to make sure this failed.

[…] But ahead of the razor thin vote of 205-217 vote, which would have severely limited the NSA's ability to collect data on Americans’ telephone records if passed, Pelosi privately and aggressively lobbied wayward Democrats to torpedo the amendment, a Democratic committee aide with knowledge of the deliberations tells The Cable. “Pelosi had meetings and made a plea to vote against the amendment and that a much bigger effect on swing Democratic votes against the amendment than anything Alexander had to say”, said the source, keeping in mind concerted White House efforts to influence Congress by Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “Had Pelosi not been as forceful as she had been, it's unlikely there would have been more Democrats for the amendment. 

 

With 111 liberal-to-moderate Democrats voting for the amendment alongside 94 Republicans [as bipartisan as it gets], the vote in no way fell along predictable ideological fault lines. And for a particular breed of Democrat, Pelosi's overtures proved decisive, multiple sources said. “Pelosi had a big effect, on more middle-of-the-road hawkish Democrats who didn't want to be identified with a bunch of lefties (voting for the amendment), said the aide. “As for the Alexander briefings: did they hurt? No, but that was not the central force, at least among House Democrats. Nancy Pelosi's political power far outshines that of Keith Alexander's (Foreign Policy. July 25, 2013) 

 

That is why the U.S. government, to this very day, even in the wake of all that Snowden reporting we did and the public anger over it, that is why that bill continues to exist. 

Four years later, it was renewed again, this time in 2018. And what was remarkable about this was by 2018, Donald Trump was president. And it was very common for Democrats to call Trump a new Hitler to warn that he was attempting to install a new white supremacist dictatorship and that he was an existential threat to the republic. All the things that we still hear and heard back then about Donald Trump from Democrats. And yet, they were able to keep this bill intact – this warrantless spying power fully empowered with no reforms – because the same people who were calling Trump Hitler and a dictator – Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell –join with the Republican establishment to ensure that this bill passed and that efforts to reform it were sabotaged. 

Here is the article that I wrote at the time when the vote happened: “The Same Democrats Who Denounced Donald Trump as a Lawless, Treasonous Authoritarian Just Voted to Give Him Vast Warrantless Spying Powers.” And then I asked, “How can the rhetoric about Trump from Democratic leaders be reconciled with their actions to protect his unchecked power to spy on Americans?” 

So, no matter what happens, this is all theater. The Democrats claim that Bush and Cheney are Nazis for wanting to spy on you with no warrants but then Obama gets into office and Pelosi saves the bill. Trump is in office and the Democrats claim he's Hitler and yet give Hitler the right to spy on Americans with no warrants and prevent any reforms or safeguard oversight from diluting the bill. 

So now fast forward four more years and it's time to renew this bill again. But this time, the chance that it could be renewed is not quite as high as it has been in the past. And that's true for two reasons. One, we're now 21, 22 years after the 9/11 attack. I mean, at some point, it's going to become increasingly difficult to continue to claim that all of these powers that everybody at the time admitted was radical and extreme – even the advocates – but we justified them of an aim that we face a national security emergency in the name of al-Qaida and Muslim extremism at some point. Every year that goes by – when more and more voters don't even remember, that didn't live through it, wake up every day and don't give a single thought to al-Qaida – at some point, there's going to be questioning of whether or not we really need to allow the government to continue to spy on us. And now we're 22 years later and I think it's increasingly difficult to maintain the argument that we actually still face some sort of national security emergency of the kind that should allow Joe Biden to spy on the calls and e-mails of American citizens without warrants. That's one of the reasons why there's difficulty. But the other: there's no question that the Republican Party has radically transformed on these questions. They have seen with their own eyes in the Trump era how readily and casually and aggressively and destructively the U.S. Security State abuses its power, how often it's used not to protect Americans from foreign threats, but to attack Americans for domestic political ends. And there's far greater skepticism about these powers than there ever was before within the Republican Party, which is why a significant wing of the Republican Party, namely the anti-establishment populist wing, is very likely to vote, at least in large numbers, against the Biden administration's request to renew these powers. 

The question is whether there will be now enough Democrats - who during the actual War on Terror were against this - whether they're now going to suddenly change and say, you know what, I actually like these powers, just like the U.S. Security State, even though there's no more War on Terror – imagine that: a Democratic Party that was against these powers when there was a War on Terror and now is ready to say, I'm in favor of these powers, I like these warrantless spying powers.

 But there are some progressives who have signaled that they're ready to join again with the right-wing populists to vote against it. The Biden administration, if they are going to succeed, will need to rely upon the Mitch McConnells and Lindsey Grahams and Marco Rubios and all the establishment pro-war members of the Republican Party with whom they're now currently united on the question of Ukraine and so much else – the whole crowd that got so angry when Ron DeSantis suggested that fueling a proxy war in Ukraine should not be the top priority of the United States. So, the politics have changed dramatically, largely due to changes in the Republican Party, which is more skeptical of the Security State, but also the Democratic Party, which is now much more reverent of the Security State. 

Here is a really interesting article in The Washington Monthly, which is a long-standing kind of establishment Democratic Party organ – a liberal journal, by no means a leftist journal, just an establishment, normal, ordinary Democratic Party journal – entitled “The Case for Keeping Enhanced Surveillance Authority”. Knowing that Joe Biden's request may be in jeopardy, they're already now starting pro-Democratic party pundits to publish articles on why we need these powers. The subheadline here is very interesting because it recognizes the danger: “The MAGA Trump Right and the Greenwald Left want to undo Section 702, which must be renewed this year. Normies in both parties shouldn't let them”. 

This is written by Bill Sayre, who has been a longtime supporter of the U.S. Security State. Even back in 2007, 2008, and 2013, when most Democrats were skeptical, he was a Democrat who was arguing the NSA should be allowed to do whatever they want, that it was overstated what the dangers were of that surveillance power. 

Here is his argument that he's trying to make to get Democrats ready to go to battle to keep the ability of Joe Biden to spy on Americans about the war, inspired by law, 

 

Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, Republicans reveled in their reputation as the national security Party. President George W. Bush quickly and secretly signed an executive order allowing the NSA to eavesdrop, without warrants, on communications between Americans and foreigners with suspected links to terrorism. 

 

When the order was revealed by the New York Times in 2005, many Democrats and civil libertarians questioned whether it violated the law and the Constitution […] 

 

That's not true. Democrats and civil libertarians did not question that. They asserted that definitively because it did violate the law and the Constitution. He then says, 

 

Yet Congress, In a 2008 bipartisan vote, chose to retroactively give Bush's past actions a legal foundation […] 

 

How does that work? How do you retroactively legalize illegal behavior? 

 

[…] Amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act with Section 702 authority. Every House Republican but one voted for the bill, while a slight majority of House Democrats voted against it. In 2012, Obama signed a five-year extension of 702 authority, but the partisan breakdown in the House is similar to 2008, with 60% of House Democrats voting “Nay” compared to just 3% of Republicans. 

 

Six months later, Edward Snowden leaked a trove of NSA documents to Glenn Greenwald, then at The Guardian, and Barton Gellman, then at The Washington Post. Both publications would share a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their coverage of the leaks, even though Greenwald's contributions were particularly opinionated and sensationalized, painting a picture of a needlessly voyeuristic NSA (Washington Monthly. March 14, 2023) 

 

Oh, perish the thought that the NSA might abuse their secret warrantless spying powers in improper ways. 

 

Obama would later sign the USA Freedom Act, which mildly reformed federal surveillance programs, but that left Section 702 – not yet due for a reauthorization – in place. Strong majorities of both House Republicans and Democrats voted in favor. Snowden acolytes sought to take credit for the modest reforms, while lamenting how the surveillance state remained a colossus. Greenwald conceded the bill left “undisturbed the vast bulk of what the NSA does” (Washington Monthly. March 14, 2023)

 

 So that is the current state of affairs as a result of the unity between the Democratic and Republican establishments. The president continues, the White House, the executive branch, and the NSA continue to have the right to spy on your telephone communications if you're speaking to a foreign national or someone not on U.S. soil by simply asserting they believe that person may have ties to terrorist groups or foreign governments without having to get any warrants of any kind, they can just spy at will. 

If you're an American citizen, if you believe in the Constitution, you cannot possibly be comfortable with that power, especially after seeing all the years of how much abuse the U.S. Security State is willing to engage in with the powers that you give them. And yet the politics are such that there's no question; most of the Democratic Party will be united behind it. The only chance they have, as a result of at least some defections on the left flank, is that the Republican establishment joins with them and extends this power. But given polling changes with regard to the U.S. Security State and the vibrant part of the Republican Party that no longer trusts the U.S. Security State and the potential to attract enough progressives – about whom I'm very skeptical when it comes to their willingness to defy the Biden administration – not on a theatrical kind of vote where their votes don't matter, like supporting Matt Gaetz’s resolution to withdraw troops in Syria. But when their votes are needed, I don't believe progressives have the courage. AOC, Bernie, Ilhan Omar, any of them, to tell the Biden administration, I don't care if you need my vote, I'm not giving it to you. But there's at least a potential here to create some noise to be disruptive. And it depends upon the ability of these two factions, the kind of anti-interventionist, populist anti-U.S. Security State right wing of the Republican Party and the part of the left that claims to be that to work together like they just did and can potentially sabotage this bill. But the fact that the U.S., the established wings of both parties are completely united, as always, when it comes to the biggest questions, except for, you know, what we should teach kids about, trans issues in schools and abortion, kind of culture war issues that keep you forgetting about all of this – who's spying on your calls? who's bailing out what banks – when it comes to these kinds of issues, Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Kevin McCarthy have a lot more in common with one another than they do with you. And that has been and continues to be the biggest challenge.


 

 Along the lines of this kind of very interesting realignment, there's a video that I just saw today of Tucker Carlson giving an interview to two young podcast hosts, I believe it's called the “Full Send” podcast. It was just from this week, and I managed to show you a two-minute clip of Tucker Carlson talking about the things that he regrets most in his career and the things of which he's most ashamed. And then let's talk about that in the context of what I've just been describing. 

 

(Video. Full Send podcast. March 10, 2023)

 

Tucker Carlson: I've spent my whole life in the media. My dad was in the media. That is a big part of the revelation that's changed my life is the media are part of the control apparatus. 

 

 

Full Send: Like there's no […]

 

Tucker Carlson: I know. Because you're younger and smarter and you're like, Yeah, 

 

Full Send: Yeah, 

 

Tucker Carlson: But what if you're me and you spent your whole life in that world and to look around and, all of a sudden, you're like, Oh, wow. Not only are they part of the problem, but I spent most of my life being part of the problem – defending the Iraq war like I actually did that. Can you mention you did that? 

 

Full Send: What do you think is one of your biggest regrets in your career? 

 

Tucker Carlson: Defending the Iraq war. 

 

Full Send: That is it? 

 

Tucker Carlson: Well, I've had a million regrets: not being more skeptical, calling people names when I should have listened to what they were saying. Look, when you when someone makes a claim, there's only one question that's important at the very beginning, which is, is the claim true or not? So, I say, you know, you committed murder or you rigged the last election. Before you attacked me as a crazy person for saying that maybe you should explain whether you did it or not. You know what I mean? (Laughs)

 

Full Send: Yeah. 

 

 

Let me just start there, because obviously, the part about the Iraq war got some attention. That was one of the explicit examples he gave. He's said that many, many times before, to his great credit. 

Unlike Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, whose apologies are very begrudging and only when forced because they need to win an election, Tucker, I've heard him say it privately, I've heard him say it publicly many, many times. When he talks about the shame he feels for having publicly advocated the Iraq war, he feels it in the deepest part of his soul, and he hasn't made excuses for himself. He talks about the shame he feels, but what he's describing here, in my view, is even more important. 

What he's describing here is the media's role that it actually plays, which is – independent of all the lies that they tell, which we spend many nights on the show documenting and exposing –  the real function of the corporate media is to say, “Here are the lines inside of which you must remain.” You can have some disagreements within these lines, most of which assume things about the United States and how our country functions - how great and healthy of a democracy it is, and how honest our leaders are. You can have some disagreements there, like what's the level of proper regulation or what's the right tax code, abortion, and you can have arguments about the culture war, but anything outside of those lines – about what the role of the United States in the world is, whether NATO is still ongoing and viable, a whole bunch of questions like that – those immediately get you dismissed – whether COVID came from the lab leak – as a crazy conspiracy theorist. They don't even engage in the substance. The fact that you stepped out of those lines makes you radioactive and unacceptable for a decent society. That is the media's main role. They invite people who stay within those lines. They refuse to hear from people who do not. And that, more than anything, is what they do. And, of course, that requires groupthink. It requires a refusal to think critically. It requires herd behavior, which is what corporations reward most – the ability to just follow rules, follow orders, and not make any noise. 

And what he's saying here are the media in which I work my entire career has had this primary function of dismissing people as crazy or conspiracy theorists or not worthy of attention, the minute they step outside the line, without bothering to engage on the merits and without even asking whether or not what they're saying is correct, that's the last thing that matters. All that matters is they stepped outside of tribal lines and they're now to be expelled. Let's hear the rest. 

 

Tucker Carlson: And for too long I participated in the culture where I was like, anyone who thinks outside these pre-prescribed lanes is crazy, is a conspiracy theorist. And I just really regret that. I'm ashamed that I did that. And partly it was age, partly was the world that I grew up in, so, when you when you look at me and you're like, yeah, “of course they're part of the means of control”, I'm like, that's obvious to you because you're 28. But I just didn't see it at all. At all. And I'm ashamed. 

 

Full Send: Isn't that what the media tries to do, though? 

 

Tucker Carlson: It's their only purpose.

 

Full Send:  Right. 

 

Tucker Carlson: They're not here to inform you, really, even on the big things that really matter, like the economy and war and COVID, like things that really matter, that will affect, you know, their job is not to inform you. They are working for the small group of people who actually run the world. They’re the servants of the petroleum guard, and we should treat them with maximum contempt because they have earned it. 

 

 

So, the media are servants of the small group of people who run the world. The media’s real function is to serve as their kind of enforcers to make sure no one's dissenting too much from the orthodoxies on which they rely to maintain their power. And as a result, Tucker Carlson says they deserve your maximum contempt because they've earned it. A point that I make endlessly on this show is that no matter how much you hate the corporate media, it's not enough. It is literally impossible to overstate not only the damage that they do but the malice with which they do it. And by malice, I don't mean that they're evil masterminds. I mean malice in the sense of the “banality of evil.” The people who go and punch the clock every day, never question what they're doing, but whose work is nonetheless incredibly toxic and harmful. They're just basically sociopathic careerists. But no matter sometimes those people can be the most destructive. 

What I find so fascinating about this clip is the generational divide. So, for someone like Tucker Carlson, who got his start in the 1980s, in the era of the Reagan administration, when the media was really trusted, when there weren't a lot of countervailing voices, where there was not even cable news, and then finally there was a little cable news, but even still, they were owned by the big media corporations that owned the same networks. There was certainly no Internet, no independent media that had a reach. It wasn't very common for people to distrust the media. The media was trusted. Most people assumed that what you got in your newspaper was more or less the truth. People realized it might have been biased, that sometimes they got things wrong, but they, by and large, trusted most institutions of authority, including the corporate media. 

But when Tucker says, “Oh my God, I realized that not only don't they deserve that trust, that they perform the exact opposite function”. You have these two hosts who are in their twenties who are looking at him like, Why are you saying that? As though that's some great epiphany when that's like the starting point? Who doesn't know that? And Tucker recognizes that generational divide, and seems happy about it, as he should be, that it really is true. 

It's one of the things which I'm most optimistic about that every year the corporate media falls into greater and greater disrepute. They are hated more and more, and most of all, people are turning them off, tuning them out and ignoring them. They're losing their audience. And few things are more important and more encouraging than that. And that is one of the vital changes that is now happening and, interestingly, the only kinds of media that are able to maintain an audience are media that despise and work to undermine the orthodoxies of corporate media: Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and independent media like this. Go look at our numbers. Go look at Russell Brand's numbers. Go look at the numbers of the independent media and you'll see nothing but explosive growth as those media outlets failed. 

I know a lot of people think of Tucker as some sort of Republican Party hack. He's not Sean Hannity. They often have radically different views from one hour to the next. Sean Hannity does serve the Republican Party mostly. And Tucker is a dissident. So, the establishment wing of the Republican Party, he hates Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy at least as much as he hates, say, Don Lemon or the CNN executives or NBC or Chuck Schumer. And that's why his audience is as large as it is. That is where the growth is because people no longer trust their own institutions on either the right or the left. The real left, the left that is liberated from the Democratic Party. That is a major cause of encouragement and that is a byproduct of these changing dynamics. 

Let me show you some polling data that was released just this week that underscores the point even more powerfully. So, The Washington Post compiled the evolution of polling data on the question of whether people believe the coronavirus came from a lab leak or a natural transmission. 

 

The Washington Post. March 16, 2023

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/16/lab-leak-theory-polling/

The orange bars on the left are the percentage of people who believe COVID came from a lab leak – the theory that Dr. Fauci and his colleagues early on, three months into the pandemic, dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theory, that was debunked, that only malicious disinformation agents possibly believe that the number of the percentage of Americans who believe that – and the green are the people who believe it occurred naturally, which is the theory that Dr. Fauci and those who controlled through scientific funding vehemently endorsed as early as February of 2020 in The Lancet and then in Nature journal, even though they had no proof to claim that they knew it was true. 

And you see the evolution starting in that first column, which is March of 2020, where 45% of the people believed it was naturally occurring and fewer than 30% of Americans believed it was the lab leak. And as you go across 2020 and then into 2121, that orange line is radically increasing so that by 2023 of March, the last two polls, YouGov and Quinnipiac, close to 70% of Americans – 70% – now believe the most likely theory for the origin of COVID is the lab leak, while only 1015 to 20% of Americans believe that it's naturally evolving – even though every time you turn on the television, there's Dr. Fauci trying to insist you still that it's almost impossible that it came from a lab. He always uses the same phrases designed to impress you that it's molecularly impossible, that anybody who knows about molecular virology understands it had to have come from natural evolution. 

The problem, though, is that Americans have rightly lost faith in the institutions of authority, including our health officials, and they now see that the theory, they were told by Dr. Fauci, whom they originally trusted, was a crazy conspiracy theory, namely, the lab leak, is now a theory that, in fact, major parts of the U.S. government, including the most elite scientific team of the Department of Energy, believes is the most likely theory. And they believe they were misled and lied to. And now, therefore, they believe in the theory that they were told not to believe. This is what's happening across the country. People are losing faith in institutions of authority because they know they've been lied to. They hate the media. They hate these health officials who guided them through COVID, through deceit. They hate the U.S. Security State. And that is a sign of great encouragement and optimism. If you're looking for it in a place where we don't always find it. 

The Quinnipiac poll from March 2023 presents the following breakdown by party: 64% of Americans now believe the lab leak theory is the most likely. Only 22% believe in natural transmission. 87% of Republicans believe it's a lab leak. Independents believe it's a lab leak by 67 to 23% – and now even a plurality of Democrats believe that as well: 42 to 39%. 

So, the attempt to deceive the American public on this question worked for about a year and a half. Remember, Big Tech censored. Is anybody trying to suggest it was a lab leak on the grounds that Anthony Fauci and his colleagues said it was debunked? And now what we have is yet another recognition, overwhelmingly, that people have been lied to. 

If you look at similar polling data when it comes to American wars, you're starting to see overwhelming skepticism on the part of younger Americans on both sides of the aisle. 

 

@EchelonInsights  March 9, 2023.

 

Interestingly, especially Republicans, on the question of whether or not the U.S. should go around the world fighting wars for other countries, even when it comes to the question – and it's a little vague, this question – if China were to invade Taiwan this year, do you think it would or would not be in the United States interest to help defend Taiwan? 

Overall, 49% of Americans say we should. And 51% say either we shouldn't or are unsure. So, it's pretty evenly divided. The only group that is definitive in saying that we should are people over 50 from both parties. Republicans say we should be 55% to 19%. Democrats, 52% to 15% over 50. But for younger people under 50, the most uncertain group are Republicans, young Republicans under 50, who by 42% to 42% are unsure about whether it would be in our interest to defend Taiwan from China. 

I think this is independent of the China-Taiwan issue, simply a byproduct of the fact that these younger people see that their needs as American citizens have been neglected. Billions and billions and billions of dollars go to wars across the other side of the world where they perceive that it has no impact on their lives. Billions and billions of dollars get spent to bail out banks like Silicon Valley Bank and other wealthy people when they need it. And they're faced with a mountain of generational debt, difficulty going to college and finding jobs if they do. And I think it's natural that they're starting to question the U.S. Security State as well.  

Here is a similar but even more decisive result which is “Younger Republicans say Russian victory in Ukraine would be a problem for the U.S. by a 28-point margin. Older Republicans say it would be a problem by a 36-point margin. 

But the question is if Russia were to win the war with Ukraine and take over a large part of its territory, would that be a problem for the United States or not? And while you see in the red that a majority think it would be a problem, you see in this green and gray significant numbers of Republicans, but especially under 50, who are saying either it wouldn't be a problem or they're unsure. And you see in all polls a withering away of support for the idea that the United States should continue to support the war in Ukraine, which is one of the reasons, I believe, why when Ron DeSantis was just asked, now twice, he went out of his way to make it appear that he was separating himself and the Republican establishment and the kind of Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham maximalist rhetoric that is also shared by Joe Biden, that we're in this war with Ukraine until the very end. 

And here you see just in general, younger Republicans are less likely to favor assertive foreign policy positions compared to Republicans over 50 years old. And it goes through multiple issues on every single one. Republicans between 18 and 49 are far more skeptical about the idea that the United States should be going around the world, waging all kinds of wars without having the United States first attacked. That's rhetoric that Ron Paul helped convince people of and I think tapped into, that Donald Trump then came along and noticed in the Republican Party, which is what enabled him to run confidently against Bush-Cheney foreign policy and win the primary by doing so, and is now causing Ron DeSantis, whose foreign policy posture in the House, was more or less aligned with the Republican establishment, starting to separate himself from that view because the Republican base is no longer supportive of policies of endless war and the U.S. Security State. And that is going to change politics. As I've been showing you throughout the last hour in a variety of ways. 


Just to conclude with this last issue that I mentioned.  Well, I really don't like to spend a lot of time on the culture war. I particularly hate delving into the trans debate often for a whole variety of reasons. If you want to hear about that, there are a zillion other people who go out to spend a lot of their time doing it. Mostly, it's just I think it's a distraction from the things I'd rather cover that I don't think get coverage. I'm not saying it's unimportant, but in this case, I want to talk about it because it just shows the authoritarian nature of the liberal left in the United States. 

The way that I think about the culture war – and it probably comes from the fact that I came of age in the 1980s as a gay man, a gay teenager – is that I never could understand why so many adults seemed to have this compulsion to control the lives of other adults, to decide whom people can marry, how they should date. I understand that people have every right to formulate their own moral guide, their moral code for how they live their lives. Obviously, when it comes to people affecting children or other people, we want to consent. That's, of course, an interest to all of us. But on the question of whether adult citizens should have the right to make free choices in their own lives about their consenting behavior, for me, that was a view that originally in the 1980s was more associated with the left, while the right was dominated by the Pat Robertsons and the Jerry Falwells and the moral majorities that wanted to use the force of law to coerce private moral behavior. 

And then, finally, the culture war reached a consensus– not a unanimous one, but a bipartisan one – which basically said, look, you're American, just supposed to be free in your life to make your own decisions. And that's why most same-sex marriage started attracting 70% to 75% of support, including among young conservatives because people just don't want to have the interest to dictate whom other people are marrying, whom their neighbors are dating and whom they're having sex with. It's kind of a “live and let live” society. It's part of the American ethos that I particularly appreciate. 

One of the reasons I'm resentful of the new left-wing posture on culture war issues is because it abandons that core principle. They frequently want to interfere in the private lives of adults and issue judgments about whom you date and how you have sex and whom you marry. They want to regulate it. They want to control it in ways I find increasingly creepy. But the more important thing is that they're not content to just have a societal ethic that says what you do is your own business. They want to force you to affirm beliefs whether or not you actually believe them and even use the language that they demand you believe even when it makes no sense for you to do so. That is an authoritarian impulse, and people can force you to say things that you don't believe. And especially if they can force you to say things that make no sense, no logical, cogent sense. That is real power. And I think a lot of why they keep pushing the envelope is because of that power. It has nothing to do with social justice or any of the other values they invoke. 

So, here's a story that I think illustrates that really well. It's about Wellesley College, which is a traditionally female-only university. As I said, it's where Hillary Clinton was educated, along with a lot of other well-known people – Nora Ephron, Madeleine Albright, Chelsea Clinton, of course. So, the idea is it’s a women-only college. We're only going to allow women. So, the problem now becomes, what about people who don't identify as a man or a woman, like non-binary people? And when I say it's a problem, I mean, it's a problem for these kinds of people. And then also, what about trans men, people who are born biological women who are assigned female at birth, but who now identify as men? Are they allowed to an all-woman’s college or are they allowed in all women's spaces? If you’re being to embrace the precepts of this new gender ideology that you're required to embrace, namely that a trans man is a man, period, and a trans woman is a woman, period, there are really no differences between the two – they're exactly the same. A trans woman is a woman in every sense. A trans man is a man in every sense. Trans men should not be welcomed in all women's spaces. Obviously, they're men. They're men like all other men. And yet Wellesley had a referendum among the students – it's non-binding – but likely will influence the school administration, where they now, for the first time ever, want to admit students who they say are not women. Both nonbinary students and trans men. 

So, in other words, they want to admit men, but not all men, just trans men. So let me just show you first the policy:

 

Wellesley College proudly proclaims itself as a place for “women who will make a difference in the world.” It boasts a long line of celebrated alumnae, including Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Nora Ephron. On Tuesday, its students supported a referendum that had polarized the campus and went straight to the heart of Wellesley's identity as a women's college. The referendum also called for making the college's communications more gender inclusive – for example, using the words “students” or “alumni” instead of “women”. 

 

So, this women-only college now will no longer allow the word women.

 

The vote was in some ways definitional: What is the mission of the women's college? 

 

Presumably, it was to allow women students to attend, but that is no longer the case. 

 

Supporters said that women's colleges have always been safe havens for people facing gender discrimination and that with transpeople under attack across the country, all transgender and non-binary applicants must be able to apply to Wellesley. 

 

Opponents of the referendum said that if trans men or non-binary students were admitted, Wellesley would become effectively coed (The New York Times. March 14, 2023) 

 

Right. That has to be the case. If you believe that trans men are men, that somebody who's born female, who has a biologically female body, but whom one day wakes up and says, I identify as a man and, therefore, is now considered a trans man – without undergoing any surgeries, altering their body in any way, even taking hormones – just that self-declaration is enough. If a trans man can now enter Wellesley according to the logic of gender ideology, Wellesley now admits not only women but also men. But if Wellesley now admits men, why limit it only to trans men? Why not cis men, meaning people born as men? 

There’s supposed to be a prohibition on viewing these two categories as different: trans men here, men here. That's not a permissible distinction. Trans men are men. You are forced to adhere to that and forced to affirm that if you don't affirm that trans women are women and trans men are men, that is inherently transphobic of you. 

And yet they arrogantly told themselves that was right. That comes from nowhere. Just say we're going to allow men in, but only trans men, not cis men, which obviously is based on the distinction that you are prohibited from recognizing, which is that cis men are not really quite men. There's something different. That is a real authoritarian power. When you get to force other people to affirm equations, affirm affirmations that you yourself are free to deny whenever it's convenient to you, that is genuine power. 

That’s a point made by famed lesbian writer Katie Hertzog, whom I find to be one of the most nuanced and effective speakers and writers on this topic – I've had her on my show before. We agree on a whole bunch of concerns we have about this new gender ideology, while also thinking that a lot of the rhetoric of anti-trans activists goes way too far, especially when it comes to trying to control the private lives of adults. This is the point she made about lesbian culture. She said, 

Trans men have long been welcomed in lesbian spaces (and often in their beds) the way cis men are not. Why? Because even people who repeat the slogan tacitly acknowledge that trans men are female (March 14. 2023). 

 

In other words, you have a lesbian bar. Everyone knows lesbian bars are only for women. If you're a cis man and you go to a lesbian bar for any reason, they're probably going to get you expelled immediately and maybe even assaulted because lesbians do not want men in women-only spaces. And yet, as Katie says, in every lesbian bar in the country, trans men are welcomed. How does that make any sense if trans men are really men, as she said? It's based on the recognition, even among people who insist that trans men are men that, in fact, trans men are not really men. Trans men are welcome in lesbian spaces because there's at least a part of them that are actually female. 

And the only reason, as I said, that I'm interested in this is not because I want to spend any time questioning whether trans women are women and trans men are men. It's a completely boring and played-out debate. What interests me is the authoritarianism involved here, the insistence that these people on the left have the right to just force you to take an oath to ideas that you don't believe – and that they don't even believe – and that you are never allowed to question them upon pain of being declared a bigot or worse, losing your job or being excluded from the spaces. But they reserve unto themselves the right to draw the exact distinction they deny exists whenever doing so suits them. And that's what I find so offensive about it. And not just offensive but again, the reason I associated myself decades ago, as so many people did, with the left-liberal view of the culture war, was because of the idea that the point of society is to maximize your ability to self-actualize as a human, to live your life the way you want without interference. And all of this is about the opposite. It's about going into your homes, going into your communities, going into your places of worship, and forcing you to affirm ideas that you don't believe because that is where power is derived. That is what this whole movement is about, is the power to force you to do things you don't want to do. And the greatest power of all – you need real power to do it – is to force people to affirm beliefs they don't share, especially when those beliefs are completely lacking in all internal logic and cohesion. 

So, these may seem like separate stories, and in some ways, of course, they are. But there's a through line that runs all that connects them all, which is that there are very real changes in the identity of the two parties and the core defining beliefs of the factions that identify as left and right. And it's visible on almost every topic, on the Security State, even on the culture war. And while some of these trends are obviously disturbing in this kind of chaos, I find a lot of opportunity, especially the opportunity to finally get people to stop seeing the world through this archaic left-right prism or Republican versus Democrat prism. 

Throw that away and just start going from first principles and whether you trust the institutions of authority that are trying to rule your life. And if you don't, there are a lot more people who will be on your side than if you continue to grab on to these labels that are given to us by people who want to keep us divided. 

 

So that's our show for this evening. For those of you who've been watching and making this show a success, making our audience grow, we're very grateful to you. We think there's a lot of potential. There are ten other live, exclusive shows on Rumble, like Russell Brand and Kim Iverson and others that are coming. We're very excited about the potential and we're grateful for your watching.

community logo
Join the Glenn Greenwald Community
To read more articles like this, sign up and join my community today
25
What else you may like…
Videos
Podcasts
Posts
Articles
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis says Kamala Harris Would Combat "Rampant Antisemitism" on College Campuses

Colorado Governor Jared Polis tells Michael Tracey that Kamala Harris has been a staunch supporter of Israel and that she would rein in the "rampant antisemitism" he says exists on college campuses.

00:04:18
Michael Tracey Interviews Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) in "Spin Room"

Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) tells Michael Tracey that it makes sense for Kamala Harris to welcome Dick Cheney's endorsement because this election is about supporting someone who "respects the rule of law." He then avoids answering whether Dick Cheney respected the Constitution...

00:01:35
Michael Tracey interviews Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA)

Michael interviews Rep. Ted Lieu about Dick Cheney endorsing Kamala and whether he still believes Trump colluded with Russia:

00:03:00
Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

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

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted
WEEKLY WEIGH-IN: Comment Your Questions, Recommendations, and Insights!

What’s happening in politics that you want to talk about? Are there any burning topics you think Glenn needs to cover? Any thoughts you’d like to share?

This post will be pinned to our profile for the remainder of this week, so comment below anytime with your questions, insights, future topic ideas/guest recommendations, etc. Let’s get a conversation going!

Glenn will respond to a few comments here—and may even address some on our next supporters-only After-Show.

Thank you for your continued support through another week of SYSTEM UPDATE with Glenn Greenwald!

We hope you all have a great week!

post photo preview
5 hours ago

yo fam! guess who just got DIAMOND status on this locals 🤩🤩🤩

this means I am OFFICIALLY one of the top Glenn Greenwald superfans, this is so exciting AAAAAA

There are so many people I want to thank, most of all @BookWench and @AliceEverywhere as well as @PaulROC @shainebraskin(?) @[Sorry I forgot your handle, but thanks to you too 😁]

I couldn't have done it without all of your support, this diamond status belongs to all of us.

And remember Fam, make sure to always have each others back, [muscle-emoji] we got a lot of work to do and its dangerous times out there, but at least we have each other. #FreePalestine #SaveGaza

5 hours ago

This is the best Michael Tracey guest host of all time, love it. Real reporting. Real value. Super informative. 10/10

👏👏👏👏👏

(EDIT: LLOOOLLL The 1775 ad was absolutely hillarious 😂😂😂 i might buy that coffee now just because that ad was so funny)

(EDIT #2: -1 point for asking a 10+ min long question in the form of a monolouge, why is Briahna on the show? Is it just to listen to a 10 min long speech by Michael. Please break that up into small questions so the guest can speak. 9/10)

(EDIT #3 -1 Michael you need to learn how to CONTROL YOURSELF and STOP INTERUPTING PEOPLE especially when your guest patiently listened to your monolouge and you asked her for final thoughts. 8/10)

post photo preview
Bezos tells corporate journalists indisputable facts they refuse to acknowledge: The country hates and distrusts them

On Monday night, we covered the embarrassing spectacle that arose from The Washington Post's decision to refrain from endorsing either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump for the 2024 election. Although the Post's editors had predictably prepared an editorial directing its readers to vote for Harris, the decision not to issue such an endorsement came directly from the Post's owner since 2013, Jeff Bezos. 

All of this led to a storm of melodramatic and self-righteous posturing from corporate media personalities and various liberal activists: two categories of people who have effectively merged. To hear them tell it, The Washington Post and outlets like it have enormous credibility with the public and perform an irreplaceable and noble function for all Americans. It is Bezos' directive not to endorse – rather than the endorsement itself – that will irreparably and tragically harm this august newspaper's credibility with the public.

In what dream world are these people living? This is utterly self-serving dreck, a self-flattering fairy tale, that is completely unhinged from any objective reality. Like virtually all corporate media outlets, the Washington Post has no “credibility” to squander. The opposite is true: the mass media is now held in the lowest esteem of any major American institution, somehow even lower than Congress. And the major reason why is that the public perceives – accurately – that large media outlets do not try to tell the truth, but instead lie on purpose to advance their political, ideological, and partisan preferences. 

This media uproar – combined with the non-trivial number of cancellations by subscribers to the Post: reportedly 250,000 individual subscriptions, or 8% of its overall subscription base – caused Bezos himself to write an op-ed explaining his rationale. In doing so, he began with a set of facts that are inarguable, yet ones that most people in corporate media simply refuse to acknowledge: namely, that they cannot continue to do things as they have been doing them because they have fully lost the trust of the public. Entitled "The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media," Bezos wrote:

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

 

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

 

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

 

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. 

These are the indisputable facts that corporate journalists refuse to admit. Acting like spoiled and entitled children, they care only about what they want, but not about the realities that constrain those desires. They become infuriated

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
post photo preview
Media Fabricates Trump’s Call For Liz Cheney’s Execution; Slate Writer Demands Usha Leave JD; Darren Beattie On 2024 & Pakistan
Video Transcript

Watch the full episode HERE

Podcast: Apple - Spotify 

Rumble App: Apple - Google


It's Friday, November 1. That means we're four days away from what is called Election Day, probably about ten days away, if not more, from knowing the outcome. But in any event, we will see. 

Tonight: Anyone who has ever watched this show or followed my journalism in any way knows that the esteem in which I hold corporate media could not possibly be any lower. Before today, I honestly thought there was nothing they could do that would surprise me. I've seen them do it all: lead the country into wars, drown the country in fake scandals from the CIA and FBI, refuse to report on documents right before the 2020 election because it would harm the reputation of the candidate they wanted to win, become the leading agitators for censorship and so much more. I really thought I saw it all from them. Yet, maybe, I was a bit naive because today they managed to sink so low, spreading such blatant, obvious lies that I confess the sheer shamelessness of it surprised me a bit.

 Last night, speaking at an event hosted by Tucker Carlson, former President Donald Trump made a point, a good and important point that I have heard liberals make for decades, namely that there are many people in Washington, such as Liz Cheney, who are what Trump called, quote, “radical warmongers”. As a result, they cheer on every war only because the war is abstract to them because they and their family never have to fight in those wars or bear any of the suffering and horrors from them and, therefore, can cheer without any cost as a result, said Trump. Liz Cheney and people like her should be given a rifle and sent to fight in the war she loves so much and then, afterward, we will see whether she still believes that all these wars should happen and whether she's going to support them simply by the stroke of a pen. Then, he said maybe she will have a different and more responsible view of wars if she has to actually go fight in those wars. 

Somehow, from those comments, virtually the entire media, the Kamala Harris campaign and almost every single liberal pundit with a couple of notable exceptions, distorted Trump's clear comments and distorted them into a call by Trump that Liz Cheney should be executed by a firing squad. It just became this self-righteous, melodramatic spectacle today of all of them expressing such fear and outrage and horror that Trump would call for the execution of his political opponents like the noble Liz Cheney. It's such blatant lying but it also tells us a great deal about the Democratic Party, the liberal worship for the Cheneys, for neocons and militarism and, of course, the willingness of the corporate media to deliberately lie for political ends, something most Americans – polls show – believe they do, because that is, in fact exactly what they do. They lie deliberately for political ends. 

Then: The online journal Slate magazine – yes, I know it does still exist I don't blame you if you didn't know that – but it published one of the most rancid articles I have read in a long time. It basically referred to the discourse, the feminist discourse that has been calling on Usha Vance to divorce her husband, JD Vance, due to his politics and his spot as Trump's running mate. The article ultimately concluded that the reason she won't leave her husband as she should is that she does and thinks whatever her husband tells her to do and think and also argues that she benefits too much from his white male privilege and therefore would never give that up by leaving. Most of all, this article said, she has internalized self-hatred and as a result identifies emotionally and romantically with her white oppressors such as her husband, JD Vance. A recent campaign ad from the Harris camp sounds similar themes about the weakness and helplessness of women. There is no racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia more intense than when someone in a marginalized group that Democrats believe they own steps out of line or thinks for themselves in any way and that's why that's worth examining. 

Finally: Darren Beattie is a political scientist at Duke, a former Trump White House speechwriter and a good friend of the show. He's been on many times to talk about his excellent reporting. He will be on with us tonight to talk about the 2024 election, what he expects from it, what themes and principles are being illustrated by it, as well as something I've been wanting to cover for quite a long time and just never found the time, which is the U.S. supported coup in Pakistan and the resulting unrest in that country caused by the United States there and he has been following that very closely. He interviewed Imran Khan, the now imprisoned and formerly elected president of Pakistan and so he has a lot to say on that topic. I think it's really worth hearing. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
post photo preview
Voices For Gaza: Speaking Out Against Israel's Atrocities
Video Transcript

Watch the full episode HERE

Podcast: Apple - Spotify 

Rumble App: Apple - Google


This is a System Update special revisiting our coverage of Israel's atrocities in Gaza, featuring interviews with Norman Finkelstein and Rashid Khalidi.


Israel-Gaza War 

AD_4nXeBSI_MhMr9lvvsdDNWiWbs515JUbsSV9L_zrEPn5gIs6pmS7NVStr_kBiQk0_oLlG4soxdiBviE5loNe2BrIgtU6G7payMhuwFXMnvdwK4xP1w4c5oSY-sat9BUM0vVejJ5avO5TrWBJBQddPcwqiuU9Xm730Hpkv0f9Tl7A?key=gacTsPpB8QVa7Xke9WmpVErF

When I look back on the 9/11 attack and the various wars that followed under the umbrella of the War on Terror, I think the one thing I recall most is the amount of unity that the United States had and that Americans had in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the intensity of the emotions that attack provoked. As I talked about before, I lived and worked in Manhattan when 9/11 happened. I remember like it was yesterday, the sensation of watching those two buildings in southern Manhattan crumble to the ground on top of 3000 American citizens. The Pentagon was attacked for weeks in New York. You could smell the burning of the rubble of the bodies, of the chemicals. Everywhere you went, there were desperate signs filling every street corner, every streetlamp on every street corner, from desperate families, hoping against hope that their missing loved ones were somehow with amnesia or unconscious or in a hospital instead of the horrible truth, which was that they were almost all dead under the rubble in the World Trade Center. And the emotions that everyone I knew felt, that I felt as well, were extremely out of rage, shock and trauma – and a desire for vengeance. And so, what ended up happening was that the government successfully exploited those very real human emotions. We all watched videos that were heavily provocative and inflammatory to our emotions. Videos of people jumping out of the World Trade Center as the only hope that they had for escaping a fire that was consuming them, of 9/11 calls to families as people had their lives extinguished when those buildings fell on top of them. 

Of course, this generated enormous amounts of disgust and rage and a desire for vengeance against the people responsible. Most people felt that and most people felt that for a long time. That's why the government was able to convince Americans to essentially acquiesce to anything and everything that was done in the name of punishing or destroying the people who were responsible for that horrific attack. That took the form of multiple wars, of the initiation of a worldwide torture regime – that didn't just involve waterboarding, but all sorts of other techniques that had long by the United States been punished as torture, of kidnaping programs, of kidnaping people off the streets of Europe and sending them to Egypt and Syria and other countries that were allied with the United States to be tortured – of due-process-free prisons around the world, including at Bagram and Guantanamo, where people were in prison with no charges. There are still people, of course, in Guantanamo, who have never been charged with any crime, never convicted of any crime and they have sat there for 20 years. There was the hideous, disastrous invasion of Iraq – regime change wars all over the world – and the transformation of our own domestic politics, of the introduction of things like the Patriot Act and mass NSA spying and all kinds of authoritarian projects that seeped into and contaminated Americans’ form of government, all justified in the name of fighting against and destroying the people who launched this horrific attack. 

I think the lesson that most Americans have learned from 9/11 is that a lot of what was done ended up being excessive, abusive, morally shameful, or at the very least just counterproductive. We ended up occupying Afghanistan for 20 years and spent trillions of dollars on this War on Terror, only for, at the end of the 20 years, the Taliban to just waltz back into power as though nothing had happened. Tens of thousands of people, American troops died, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in those countries that we were at war with, died as well for very little benefit, for very little progress that was ultimately made. The lesson ought to have been that no matter how horrific that attack was, no matter how righteous and justified the anger was, what was crucial at the time was to have the ability to use reason rather than emotion to make assessments about the best course of action, and most importantly, to create the space to actually debate what the best course of action was. 

I think more than any other policy, what most bothered me at the time and what ultimately propelled me into journalism was the fact that the climate that had been created in the wake of 9/11 was so repressive. Anybody who was at all well known, at all questioning of government policy done in the name of fighting terrorists, was immediately accused of being an apologist for terrorism or supporting terrorism or being on the side of the terrorists, an incredibly toxic and healthy environment that destroyed the ability to engage in reason and to ask, even if you're horrified by these attacks, even if you find them completely lacking in anything human and you're enraged by them, even if that's true, you still have to question what was the best course of action, as well as whether or not we played any role in creating the climate that caused so many people to want to come to harm the United States. Obviously, 9/11 was not the first terrorist attack in the United States. There was an attack on the World Trade Center just a few years earlier that succeeded a little bit, nowhere near 9/11, obviously; there had been attacks all over the Muslim world against U.S. forces in Lebanon and in Somalia and all kinds of other places. There was an incredible amount of hatred for the United States that ultimately culminated in the 9/11 attack and it took years to be able to create the space to say “Are we doing anything in terms of interfering in that part of the world, in terms of occupying people's lands, in terms of our policies in that region to interfere in and control their lives or using violence against them that have caused the anti-Americanism to exist?” None of this debate was permissible, and I think the lesson of 9/11 – if you look at polling in the United States – most people have learned is that a lot of what was done that most of us supported right in the aftermath of 9/11 because of our anger and rage and our blinding indignation and desire for vengeance, turned out to be, at best, quite misguided. And that it's extremely important, especially when it comes time to war, when emotions are at their highest to create space for permissible debate, for permissible questioning. 

It is an oddity that when the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened and it was time for the United States to get involved in that war, even though there was an attempt made to crush debate or dissent, to call everybody who questioned it a “Russian agent,” just like anyone questioning the War on Terror was called as “on the side of terrorists”, there was still an ability to have that debate. I, in fact, did a lot of programs on the show in the days, weeks, and months after the invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. involvement in that war where I questioned it, where I opposed it, right, where I denounced it and, of course, I got accused of a lot of different things. Being accused of things is something you can do, but there was at least some space to question it, even though there wasn't much. I think there was even more space when it came to the War on Terror. There are a lot of people who are opposed to the Iraq war. There were people after the first few weeks who even opposed the Patriot Act. And yet, somehow, when it's not our wars, but when it's Israel, it seems as though there's even less space to question. In fact, people spent the weekend on the lookout for anybody who was even slightly off note in order to accuse them of being on the side of Hamas or justifying these horrific massacres that fighters for Hamas engaged in deliberately aimed at civilians. 

I think the first thing to note is that in reality, there was virtually nobody defending massacres of civilians against Israeli citizens. There wasn't that. There was nobody. You can always find people advocating any position but, certainly, nobody in power, not just in the U.S. or in the West, defended, justified, or mitigated the atrocities committed by some of those people who invaded Israel, not who attacked police stations or military bases, as some of them did – which are generally considered legitimate targets – but who did things like go to a rave where a large number of young people in their twenties were having an all-night party and then just shot them, massacred them? We don't know how many. 

There are lots of claims in wars that get circulated for which there is no evidence. Things like mass rapes get alleged. Well, we haven't really seen evidence of that, but there were clearly horrific atrocities committed and everyone that I heard at least pretty much is opposed to that, finds that morally repugnant, because even if you think there are legitimate grievances that the Palestinians have, you have to draw the line at basic humanitarianism. You can never sanction the deliberate targeting of civilians. I think there's even an important distinction to be drawn between facts of violence that are likely to cause the death of civilians and you do it anyway – everybody at war does those. 

Remember, the United States did “shock and awe” in Baghdad, you could watch enormous bombs exploding throughout the city and the explicit purpose was to terrorize the population into submission, to use “shock and awe” to force them to surrender, to believe that it was helpless, and obviously, the United States government knew a large number of civilians were going to die in those bombs. And they did. Obviously, the war in Ukraine entails that and every war entails that. When Hamas shoots rockets into Israel, they hope that they're going to hit a police station or a military base, but there's a high likelihood they're going to hit civilian targets and they do it anyway. When Israel goes and drops massive bombs in one of the most densely populated places on Earth, which is Gaza, of course, there's a knowledge that they're going to kill large numbers of civilians in Gaza every time they've done it, and yet they still do it as well. There's still a difference between what you could call collateral damage and going to a place where you immediately see there are only civilians – like a dance festival or rave – and gunning people down. 

There has to still be a moral line that is drawn where nobody can justifiably cross the way a lot of the militants that entered Israel did it. I don't think anybody can possibly in good conscience justify that – and the reality is almost nobody did. In fact, I think the only person I saw who did was somebody who was at a protest in New York City, a pro-Palestinian protest sponsored by the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America. It was a single speaker. No one knows the person's name. Even people at this protest objected to it and said that they disassociated themselves from that. There were a lot of people expressing support for the Palestinian side without justifying what Hamas did and the fact that we had to watch this person search for him and hold him up shows how difficult it was to find people who actually supported the worst actions that Hamas took. But there's a deliberate attempt to suggest that, unless you're 100% on board with everything that Israel does – suggesting that everything they do is justified, everything the Palestinians do is unjustified; the Israelis are the upstanding, morally superior humans, and the Palestinians are animals who don't have human value – unless you're willing to say essentially that, you get accused of being supportive of acts that you're actually actively denouncing. 

Here's the one person that I think people could find, and again, the fact that people at the point of this person who nobody knows was no power, who's not elected official, who has no standing in media, shows how marginalized this view was. 

 

(Video. DSA Pro-Palestinian Demonstration. October 8, 2023)

 

Protester: When the Palestinians break through the fence, they put the. [crowd cheering...] But as you might have seen, there was some sort of Rave or desert Party where they were having a great time until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders, and […] at least several dozen hipsters. But I'm sure they're doing very fine, despite what the New York Post said. [...] 

 

No, obviously they're not doing fine. We all saw the videos of people's corpses lying on the ground because they were shot by the people who invaded Israel. And maybe you had two or three people or four people screaming their approval in this crowd but this was a repulsive position that everybody I know, including people who have long been critics of Israel or support of the Palestinian cause, repudiated. 

And so the idea that if you at all question the Israeli government or if you question the Biden administration's support for it, somehow means that you're a proponent of the worst acts of Hamas is just as intellectually dishonest, just as manipulative, just as designed to suppress dissent as those who claim that opponents of the Iraq war were pro-Saddam Hussein or that people who questioned the War on Terror were on the side of al al-Qaida, or that people who oppose U.S. support for Ukraine are pro-Putin. It's all part of the same tactic you should not fall for and you should not tolerate if you are even a minimally intellectually honest person. 

I, again, understand that the reality is that all those videos that people were subjected to over the weekend, all those claims about atrocities committed against Israelis, obviously have produced a great amount of anger and a great amount of sickness, not just in Israel, but in foreign countries as well, for people who feel an affinity toward Israel – and in the United States, there are a lot of people who feel an affinity for Israel. They're not just American Jews who do, but evangelical Christians, who wield a lot of political power as well, and who feel an affinity toward Israel for religious or cultural reasons, but there's also the foreign policy establishment, neocons, and military who see – and always have – Israel as an important military ally of the United States. So, the energy and the emotion surrounding this topic, I'm aware, are very high and there are not a lot of people who want to hear any questioning right now. And I think it's very important to be careful, but not be willing to refrain from asking questions or making the points that I think ought to be raised. 

One of the things I did when I was thinking about coming on tonight and talking about this war – and how to do it – was I went back and watched the video that I did immediately following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where pretty much the same thing happened. We spent the first day or the first two days bombarded with images of Russian violence against Ukrainians, of Ukrainian civilians crying, of mourning, of grieving, of weeping, the kind of thing that we almost never see when America is involved in wars. We almost never see interviews with the victims of our bombs or our drones but we do get shown that when it comes time for a war the U.S. government wants to instigate support for it. And so, people were just drowning in videos and obviously, if you're a decent person and you look at videos of Ukrainian women crying over the death of their children, you're going to be emotionally moved by that but it can't mean that you're not allowed to question or even oppose your country's involvement in that war, because then you get accused of supporting Russian violence or being indifferent to the suffering of people because there are wars all the time in every part of the world. And obviously, there has to be space for you to say I don't think my government should get involved in this war, or I think this war is more complicated than the morality play we're being presented with. 

So, I went back and watched what I tried to communicate the day after the Russian invasion, knowing that the same kind of propaganda, the same kind of emotional intensity would immediately arrive as it is with us now when it comes to what is a war between Israel and Gaza. I just want to show you a little bit of what I tried to communicate because I think it's so incredibly relevant to what we have to do now and how we have to think about this war that not only involves Israel and Gaza but also the United States and a lot of other countries. So let me just show you a couple of excerpts from February 24, 2022. It was the night of or the day after the Russian invasion. 

 

(Video. System Update. February 24, 2022)

 

Glenn Greenwald: It's always an extraordinarily horrific episode to watch a new war break out any time. That's just always true. And precisely for that reason, we react very emotionally to the outbreak of a new war, as we should, given that, it generally means that large numbers of human beings, innocent civilians, are going to have their lives extinguished. Bombs are falling, destroying cities, destroying ancient structures, disrupting lives, and causing thousands or hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of displaced human beings. Whoever we assign blame to for that war, we naturally are going to have a huge amount of intense emotion toward that country of rage and anger and a desire for vengeance. And conversely, we're going to have an enormous amount of sympathy and a desire to help and protect and defend whoever we regard as the victim. It's for any normal, healthy, well-adjusted human being a time of extremely high emotions. And I think we need to be aware of that for two reasons. The first of which is that any time we're in a state of high emotions, by definition, necessarily, our capacity to reason diminishes. If we're reacting to something with intense emotions, our ability to use rationality, to react to the situation, to analyze it, is crowded out by the intensity of those emotions, even when those emotions are valid particularly when those emotions are valid, as the emotions that are pervasive now, watching what's happening between Russia and Ukraine undoubtedly are. It doesn't matter whether the emotions are valid or not. The mere existence of intense emotions means that we lose our capacity, at least for the moment, to evaluate events and what our response should be and how we should think about them with reason, with rationality. 

 

[…] It's just that we ought to be aware of what the reaction is when our brains are flooded with high emotions when our emotions are part of a collective reaction, therefore, even more intense, given that we're social and political animals and we're tribal and we feed on one another's emotions. And so, the more we all feel intense emotions, collectively, the emotions intensify. 

 

It's important to realize what that means for our reasoning ability, which is our ability or our willingness even to think about things rationally. And the reason, as opposed to these emotions, diminished, we're in a diminished state of reason when we react to things emotionally. And that's why whenever events like this happen, you can go through every single event that you might want to compare a new war to. Look at 9/11, for example: in the days after 9/11, we were all in lockstep about various ideas, emotions and reactions that a month later, two months later, a year later, 20 years later, many of us who embraced those emotions of the time have come to reevaluate and regard as misguided. 

There's no question that a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, we're going to be thinking about these events differently than we're able to think about them right now. And I just think it's important to realize […]

 

I think you're seeing an enormous amount of that. Obviously, you've seen it in Israel, but you're seeing it in the U.S. too. I cannot tell you how many people I've seen – conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats – where there's really very little difference or dissent, even though a lot of people try to claim there is. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of mainstream American politics and the vast majority of the people in both parties have as much unity in support of Israel as they did at this moment in support of Ukraine when Russia invaded. 

There are places around the world that see things much differently. There are thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the Arab world out on the street expressing solidarity for Palestinians. And if you are subjected to that media and that discourse, you would think a lot differently. But the reality is there is a unity of thought and emotion, which sometimes is justified, but it also creates the danger that because we're tribal animals, because we're social and political animals, and especially now with social media, that where we feed on the same collective notions and nobody wants to be cast aside, no one wants to be excluded – societal scorn is a big punishment for social animals – there is a danger that we can get swept away in these emotions. I'm so angry with the Palestinians, with these Hamas monsters, that we are just ready to turn Gaza into a parking lot without regard to the implications of that of the wider world that would spark the humanitarian disaster that would generate. I think it's important to try and step back and use your reason and not just your emotion because we have so many examples where using that emotion led us wildly astray.


Interview with Norman Finkelstein on the Future of Israel’s War in Gaza

ZxuKiBLQLWXUI0pJpuqMJgD6EB5MW4I8no_R--vzJo8CBN84xDdPIKXjKlixaw1T3ObZKt3rMG9XqHcmK3wMGudV6zHxIDO933NGMmbT95tICpUts1LkZPBjXJzXGqIIl02zKAkkPweS

 Originally streamed on April 17, 2024

 

G. Greenwald: Let's begin. I want to spend a lot of our time on the Israeli war in Gaza. But before we get to that, there's a recent issue that involves the Iranian retaliation against the Israelis for the April 1 bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus. How do you see the Iranian response to that? And what do you think is the likelihood that we're on the verge of a major escalation in the war in the Middle East? 

 

Norman Finkelstein: Well, nobody likes to sound like a “Cassandra,” the prophetess of doom in Greek mythology. However, one also has a responsibility that if there is a significant danger lurking—in this case one hesitates to say it—but a terminal danger lurking, then there is a responsibility to sound the alarm. And I do believe that we are facing one of those moments where Israel is hurtling towards the precipice and is determined, one way or another, to drag the rest of humanity with it. 

The only point of departure, in my opinion, that's rational is to start with the theorem, not the thesis. The theorem is Israel is a monolithic state. And I don't say that in a glib way. I don't say it in an emotive way. I think one can say it in, for want of a better word, in a scientific way. The state is certifiably crazy. There are two poles for the entire Israeli spectrum. It's a very small spectrum at this point. At one pole, you can call it the poll of “crackpot realists”—that was a term coined by the sociologist Seawright Mills in his book “The Causes of World War Three.” By “crackpot realist,” he meant those folks who saw war as the only answer to every question, even as they acknowledged or were aware that the war wouldn't solve any problems. It's just their first and their last reflex. They were crackpots, but they were also of completely sound mind. So, in my opinion, a typical exemplar or an exemplar of a crackpot realist would be someone like Professor Danny Morris, Israel's chief historian. He's urbane. He's engaging. He's sophisticated. He's secular. And he's also a crackpot. Again, I don't say that glibly. He advocates attack—he has been for the past 15 years—he's been advocating the attack on Iran. He said that if the West, meaning the United States, doesn't join in, Israel will have to nuke Iran.  He says that the population will have deserved the fate of being incinerated, the tens of millions of them, because they elected the government. Now, Morris must know such an attack will trigger a reaction, if not from Iran, then from Hezbollah, which will be terminal for Israel. And yet, without the least bit being fazed by that prospect, he advocates a nuclear attack on Iran. 

At the other end of this very narrow spectrum are those who advocate what's called the Samson Option. And you can find an interesting analysis of the Samson Option in Professor Noam Chomsky's book “Fateful Triangle.” The Samson Option is very simple—I should also point out the notion that Professor Chomsky pointed to was then elaborated on, about, I guess 5 or 10 years later, I can't remember now, by Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter in a book called “The Samson Option”. Basically, it's very simple: either pretend to be mad, pretend to be crazy, so as to terrify your enemies and your allies—that if they don't do Israel's bidding, Israel is going to bring down the temple on everybody's head. And there are those who are not simply pretending to be crazy, but advocating the Samson Option. They are crazy. They are lunatics. And I do believe there is a significant portion of Israel's political spectrum that is either pretending to be crazy or actually is crazy. As you know, there is a very tiny step from pretending to be crazy to then coming to actually believe the phantoms you have conjured and become crazy. And you saw an illustration of that—and that's just an illustration—you saw it yesterday in the Security Council. If you listened to Gilad Erdan's speech, it was certifiably lunatic. It was lunatic. He starts by saying The Ayatollah is Hitler; the Islamic State is the Third Reich; it's hell-bent on conquering the whole world. Iran is hell-bent on conquering the whole world. He then says Iran is within weeks of acquiring a nuclear weapon and the world has to stop it. And the upshot, or bottom line, is, if the world, to use his terminology, “acts like Chamberlain,” then Israel will have to act like Churchill. 

If you listened to his rhetorical delivery, it was as if he were saying “Who dares to doubt me in this chamber?”—meaning the Security Council. If you listened! He even, at one point, held up an image on his iPad of Israel intercepting a drone over Al-Aqsa Mosque, allegedly intercepting a drone above Al-Aqsa Mosque, and then he said that Israel is the true protector of Islamic holy sites and the Islamic Republic of Iran is the defiler of these holy sites. This is not even the subject of Monty Python. It's not a subject matter of Monty Python. This is lunacy run amok. And if even half of Israeli society and only half of the Israeli political elite think this—in my opinion, it's much more than half—the place is crazy. You know, it's not too long ago, that Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister, said that the whole idea of the “Final Solution” came not from Hitler, but from the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem. I recently debated Benny Morris and he was emphatic that the Mufti of Jerusalem played an important role in the Final Solution. This is just sheer craziness. 

 

G. Greenwald: It's an apologia for Hitler and for Nazis to say, “Oh, they didn't really want to kill the Jews until the Palestinians persuaded them to do so.” 

 

Norman Finkelstein: Well, of course, it's an apologia but for me, the real problem is, they really believe it. I do. I think we're at that point where, as I said, this notion of the Samson Option has two aspects: pretend that you're crazy to get others to do your bidding for fear that you're going to do something lunatic and then, those who are beyond pretending and are prepared in the name of their holy cause, where their backs might be up against the wall—or they think their backs are up against the wall—that they're going to bring down the whole temple, meaning all the goyim are going to go with us. It's a very scary prospect. 

I don't believe that Iran has many options. Some people will say—and it's perfectly rational—that Iran for the sake of humanity should not take the bait. However, I do not believe that Iran has that option. And I will explain to you why. Looking at the historical examples, Israel is determined to go to war. It will keep escalating the provocations, escalating the provocations until it becomes untenable for a government to react with passivity. In 1954, the Israeli leadership, in particular David Ben-Gurion, the then Prime Minister, and Moshe Dayan had decided that they were going to topple the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. As many historians have reported, they escalated the provocations, escalated the provocations, until finally, when Nasser kept resisting what he knew was Israel's intention to launch a war, Israel joined in with France and the UK to invade Egypt. In 1982. Well, I should say in 1981 there was a ceasefire between Israel and the PLO. It was signed in July 1981. But Israel was determined to knock out the PLO, which was based then in southern Lebanon. And even though the PLO kept resisting the provocations, Israel kept bombing South Lebanon, bombing South Lebanon even though there was a ceasefire, escalating, escalating until it became untenable for the PLO not to react. It should be borne in mind that the reason Israel attacked the PLO was because it was too moderate, namely, to push for the two-state settlement, and Israel was afraid that pressures would be brought to bear on it to resolve the conflict for once and for all. But that would force an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, which it wasn't prepared to do. 

 

G. Greenwald: I just want to make a couple of observations about some of the things you said. We did a show last month in which we documented how many U.S. adversaries over the past 25 years have been declared to be the new Hitler, not by random think tankers, but by media outlets and the government of the highest level. And it's essentially every American adversary. Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a new Hitler, obviously. Putin is the new Hitler. Gaddafi was the new Hitler. Assad was the new Hitler. Ho Chi Minh was the new Hitler. Hamas is the new Hitler. In fact, worse than Hitler, we're being told. The one comparison you cannot make is Israel comparing it to the Nazis. But the other point I wanted to make about Benny Morris and this crucial point that you brought up with tone, that I think is so important. I remember 15 years ago when I started realizing this, I wrote an article about how if you use intemperate language or you speak passionately, even if it's completely valid about an injustice, you're immediately deemed a fringe radical, somebody who is almost in the realm of insanity but if you are able to speak in a kind of urbane, sophisticated way, as you said, for Benny Morris and use the language of diplomacy like Bill Kristol, you'll automatically be deemed somebody worthy of mainstream centrism, even though the ideas they're presenting are bloodthirsty and deranged and insane. 

But let me just ask you about what is going on with Iran at this point. Because when Israel bombed the Iranian embassy on April 1 in Damascus, obviously, as you said, there was no way Iran could not react. There's no country in the world that wouldn't retaliate if planes flew over their embassy and deliberately bombed and killed senior military officials. Imagine what the U.S. and the Israelis would do if that happened. I had to […]

 

Norman Finkelstein: Hold on to that for one-half second. The problem is that if they didn't react, we know from past experience exactly what Israel would do. It would keep escalating the provocations up to and including assassinating the Iranian head of state, formally denying it, but with a wink, as “Of course, we did it.” There is no way to stop them. Once they have resolved that a war is necessary and a war is inevitable, once they have resolved, there is no way on God's earth to stop them. That's what the historical record shows. You can hold that, hold back, hold back, as Nasser did until February 1955; hold back, as the PLO did from July 1981 till June 1982; as Hamas did after a ceasefire was agreed upon between Israel and Hamas in June 2008. But Israel will provoke and provoke and provoke because it's resolved on that war. So I do not believe the option of not reacting actually exists. And that, to me, is a very difficult problem. 

As of now, we're facing a moment when Israel has to resolve—not has to resolve, it wants to resolve—three problems. Problem number one, it wants to execute its “final solution” to the Gaza problem. The Gaza problem. Gaza has been a pinprick on Israel's side, believe it or not, since 1949. As one senior official said, in 2015, “We can't keep having these wars of attrition in Gaza. The next conflict has to be the last conflict.” So we have the Gaza “problem.” Then there is the Hezbollah problem. Hezbollah has gone one step too far. It's caused 100,000 Israelis to have to relocate from the northern border. And it has targeted, albeit on military sites only, it's targeted Israeli territory. And number three, the Big Megillah. When I quoted Penny Morris, I quoted him from 2008. Israel keeps repeating and repeating and repeating and Professor Morris has written one op-ed, a second op-ed, a third op-ed, and a fourth op-ed in the U.S. main newspapers saying, we have got to attack Iran. And I do believe because Benjamin Netanyahu knows the American media very well—he's really a virtuoso on it—and he spies an opportunity now. For example, as you can see, Gaza has vanished from the headlines, now everything is about Iran. He spies an opportunity now to carry out or to win what you might call the trifecta: Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran. Another opportunity like this might not come along soon, and they can achieve in their minds—remember, we're talking about lunatics, certifiable lunatics—in their minds, they can achieve, there are three overarching strategic objectives in one […]

 

G. Greenwald: Let me ask you about that. So, as you said, you know, Benny Morris is warning about how Iran is weeks away from a nuclear capability. They've been warning of this. Yeah, they've been warning of this for, you know, almost 15 years. Netanyahu went and presented that primitive little chart at the UN, quite notoriously. When we had John Mearsheimer on our show last week and asked him about the attack on the embassy, he said it's clear that the Israelis want not only a war with Iran but to drag the United States into the war. That has been their goal for a long time. President Biden— I haven't given him much credit lately over the past six months, but at least, in this case, he and other Western leaders seem determined not to have this broad conflagration in the Middle East. They are telling Israel, look, the Iranian attack did almost no damage. There's no reason to go crazy and insane as you're suggesting that they want to. How much at this point do you think the Israeli government cares about Western perception and Western opinion? 

 

Norman Finkelstein: No, that's an excellent question, and I think it's an unanswerable question. Historically, since 1957, Israel has been hesitant about any undertaking, any major military action without the green light or, as in 1967, what's been called the amber or the yellow light from the White House. The reason being, famously, in 1957, after Israel had conquered significant Egyptian territory, it was ordered by President Eisenhower at the time to withdraw. So when 1967 came and 1956 was basically the dress rehearsal, in retrospect, for the 1967 war. The Israelis sent many people to Washington, officially and unofficially, to make sure that LBJ, the president at the time, Lyndon Baines Johnson, wouldn't do what Eisenhower did, namely after Israel, and it knew it would easily conquer the territory of neighboring states, Jordan, Syri, and Egypt, they wanted it to be affirmed that the U.S. under LBJ wouldn't force a withdrawal. So in general, I think it's fair to say that Israel is cognizant of and hesitant to act in the absence of a U.S. at any rate, if not the green light, a yellow light. Where I would somewhat disagree with you, not fully, but somewhat, is when Netanyahu posted or held up that Looney Tunes picture at the U.N. and claimed Iran is near the breakout point, the usual Israeli spiel. There wasn't a war going on. This was Iran trying to, I think, to use the Samson Option idiom, they were pretending to be crazy so as to make everybody terrified at the prospect of defying this crazy state. But now things are significantly different. We are after October 7, there is a huge, insatiable bloodlust in Israel. There is the fear in Israel that what it calls its deterrence capability, meaning the Arab world's fear of Israel, was significantly diminished after October 7, Israel appears to be, I'm not saying it would appear to be, much weaker than had hitherto been imagined. And three, it looked like and looks like an opportunity might be available to them. Every crisis, as the cliche goes, is also an opportunity. So, on October 7, Hezbollah attacked the military sites with that suicide point on Israeli territory. Now, the Iran “attack,” of course, was utterly innocuous. Much more innocuous, incidentally, than Saddam Hussein's Scud missile attacks in 1991, which did a little damage but did some damage. 

 

G. Greenwald: It was innocuous by design. Clearly, the Iranians could have done a lot more had they wanted to. 

 

Norman Finkelstein: It was. And of course, it was innocuous by design, as one commentator pointed out, they mostly used slow-motion drones, which they knew it's like a videogame, shooting them down from the sky. And, you know, Hezbollah has I can't say I know, but the reports are it has 150,000 missiles, of which quite a few we’re told, again, I can’t verify, quite a few are very sophisticated, which means for all the talk about Israel's air defense system, let's remember, Israel is a very tiny place, 150,000 missiles if they're launched, it's curtains for Israel. So, of course, it was purely symbolic. But I would have to add, that I imagine the Iranian leadership together with Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah. They thought very hard about how to react to what happened on April 1. That's what they came up with. I have to assume they had a very sophisticated analysis before they undertook that action. Nasrallah knows Israeli society, I think, better than most Israelis because his mind is not corrupted by the delusions and hallucinations of this crazy state. So I have to assume that they thought this was the most prudent move to make. But my own sense, and I don't want to in any way give the impression of being omniscient or infallible, but my own senses, if Israel has resolved as it did in 1954, 1982, and 2008, if it has resolved that Iran has to be neutered, I would say no amount of restraint will stop them. 


Interview with Rashid Khalidi on Israel-Gaza

AD_4nXc65SnvCaizaSVScEVl2BqBqOq9dAFuJKyRe25jAczQ31Wgl1gEu5ROWRconVOTDlKXd_COIIMDid5OI6FBh3nRu9NVi1l4VDlIB1gmfc01IgBmfwp8B2jIyv76mH1dJKW6m6KYpJcMkyyr1tPpvepzdDBW3k6Fv4rurUih?key=gacTsPpB8QVa7Xke9WmpVErF

Originally streamed on November 30, 2023

 

G. Greenwald: Thinking about that, the Israeli mid-term or long-term plan, meaning what happens when this bombing campaign finally comes to an end, when the ground invasion either turns into some sort of partial occupation, reoccupation of Gaza or some international force or whatever, if you look at the scope of the destruction in northern Gaza – there have been reports that 60% of all buildings, if not destroyed, are architecturally compromised, not safe to inhabit; the sewage system, the electrical system, the hospital system are completely destroyed – I mean, to some extent, northern Gaza has been rendered in a large degree uninhabitable in terms of just any kind of modern society: how would these internally displaced Gazans who are now in southern Gaza and dispersed throughout the country really in any reasonable or meaningful way, get back to any kind of meaningful or normal life in northern Gaza, even if the Israelis were to permit that? 

 

Rashid Khalidi: Well, I think rendering northern Gaza uninhabitable was actually a declared war. The minister of defense got various Israeli generals to say that. And when you cut off electricity and you cut off water, you are, in effect, making the place uninhabitable. When you destroy or render unusable most of the hospitals in northern Gaza or when you destroy schools, when you destroy a variety of other infrastructure, you are rendering northern Gaza uninhabitable. 

The claim is that this was intended to destroy Hamas infrastructure, but my guess is that there was, as they said, a desire to render that part of Gaza at least, uninhabitable. Now you can see that there's a doctrine here. It's a doctrine that was first adopted in 2006 or at least first enunciated after the 2006 war on Lebanon. And it was the so-called Dahya doctrine, Dahya had been the southern suburbs of Beirut, which were flattened by Israeli bombing in 2006. And the man who is now a member of the war cabinet, a former chief of staff by the name of Gadi Eisenkot, that actually annunciated this, he said, “We will not, you know, except proportionality. We will act unproportionately and we will flatten villages. We will do what we did to the Dahya. In other words, we will destroy it in order to destroy it in a punitive fashion. And I think that is what Israel is doing now. What does that mean for the day after? Well, I think it's connected in the first instance to what they were hoping, which is to get people out of Gaza and decrease the Palestinian population within the borders of mandatory Palestine. In other words, to launch another stage of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. If that proves impossible, the next best thing is to squeeze them into a smaller area, maybe push them into southern Gaza. But I don't think that any of these things are necessarily beyond rendering Gaza uninhabitable, which the minister of defense said. I don't think any of these things are entirely clear. And I think, as you suggested, there are multiple factions in this government. The military has its own views. The prime minister, who basically wants to continue the war and not lose this government which keeps him in power – failing, he would go to trial presumably – then, other factions within the government, the Likud Party, the extreme right-wing parties, which want to see cleansing as soon as possible and as much of Palestine as possible and so forth. So, it's to me, frankly, and I'm reading the Israeli press carefully, it's not clear that they have a clear idea or a unified idea of what they want to do with the Gazans. Once this military campaign is over, whenever it's over. 

 

G. Greenwald: On this stated goal of destroying Hamas, I don't think we ever got clarity about exactly what that means although the Israelis made clear from the beginning, from Netanyahu on down, they said we don't mean we're going to erode the power of Hamas. We don't mean we're going to undermine it. We don't mean we're going to weaken Hamas. We mean we're going to destroy it, eradicate it, remove it from existing in Gaza. Obviously, with a war like this, facts are hard to come by. So, let's just take the Israeli numbers, the numbers given by the Israeli military. According to the Israeli military, they have thus far killed 1500 to 2000 Hamas militants. So, let's take the maximum number of 2000. And according to the Israelis as well. There are 30,000 Hamas fighters. So, they've killed 1/15 of all the Hamas fighters that existed at the start of the war. Presumably, there are going to be more anti-Israel radicals and people who hate Israel after the destruction that they've witnessed and after the number of deaths. But let's just keep that number in place: 30,000 Hamas militants. That would mean in order to kill all Hamas militants is the minimum necessary, I would assume, to achieve this goal of destroying Hamas, they would have to kill 15 times more Hamas militants than they have thus far. And at the current rate of civilian death, that would mean that they would basically end up killing 200,000 250,000 Gazans in total. Do you think there is any war in which the world just stands by and watches something like that take place? 

 

Rashid Khalidi: No, absolutely not. The United States wouldn't tolerate it because the Biden administration couldn't tolerate it, because public opinion is already against this war. A majority of Americans are in favor of a cease-fire. They want it to stop. They do not accept the Biden administration and the Israeli government's insistence on continuing the war until, quote-unquote, “Hamas is destroyed,” whatever that means. I mean, whether it means killing 20,000 more Hamas militants and God knows how many thousand more civilians, tens of thousands more civilians, and destroying even more of the infrastructure of Gaza, 60% has already been rendered uninhabitable and unusable. God knows how much more there is to destroy. But I do not think that the world's public opinion, Arab public opinion, but for that matter, American public opinion, will put up with that. I think there'll be a rebellion within the Democratic Party. I think the president would be guaranteed to lose the 2024 election. And I think that he would be obliged to stop this long before we got to those apocalyptic numbers. So, I don't think that there is any possibility of our reaching anything like those numbers, even if those numbers are realistic. I mean, let's assume that they're highly exaggerated, which I think is the case. I don't think there's any chance of killing 10,000 or 20,000 Hamas militants, no matter how many civilians Israel kills, no matter how many tunnels – you read the Israeli military correspondents saying they've done very limited damage to the tunnel system. Well, they've dropped how many thousand tons of bombs a day, a week in Gaza, and they still have only minimally damaged the tunnel system. They've killed 2000, by their estimate, 30,000 militants. It just does not seem to me within the world of possibility that this could go on to that extent. How it stops, however, I don't know. 

 

G. Greenwald: You're somebody who's followed this conflict for most of your career as a scholar, as an academic, as a historian, you've referred to on a couple of occasions this public opinion that has turned against the Democratic Party, against Joe Biden for his support of what's taking place in Israel. I do think there's an interesting dynamic that it is the case that for a lot of years now, maybe going back to 2014, the Israeli-Palestinian issue has pretty much been on the back burner of American politics. You have all these young people who have started to pay attention to politics for the first time. A lot of people have paid attention to politics for the first time only because of Trump. This is the first real look they're getting at Israel and the Democratic Party's relationship with it. And you have these mass protests all over the world, hundreds of thousands of people in major western cities like you have to go back to the Iraq war to find protest on this level. As somebody who has followed this conflict and has been in the middle of it in so many ways for so long now, is this a kind of radical or fundamental change in terms of public opinion and the amount of opposition to what the Israelis are doing and how the U.S is supporting them? 

 

Rashid Khalidi: I mean, there has been a trend in this direction. But I think you put your finger on it. I think that this is a moment when a newly awakened generation with new access to information is for the first time really looking very carefully at things that are happening in Israel and Palestine. And they clearly do not like what they see. There's an NBC poll that came out the other day of voters from 18 to 34: 70% of voters in that age group disapprove of the Biden administration's handling of this war. That's an astonishing percentage. I mean, a majority of Americans want a cease-fire, but that 70% of young voters that goes, Republicans and independents, I mean, that's a remarkable number. And it's part of a trend that I think has really been accentuated by this war. But that's been going on for a very long time in the polling over many years, showing a drift away from sympathy for Israel and towards greater sympathy for the Palestinians and this war has crystallized that, I think. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. So, for those of us who have followed this debate and this conflict for a long time, there are all the arguments that everybody can rehearse in their sleep. You show people the death tolls in Gaza and people say, “Oh, Hamas uses them as human shields,” “Hamas operates from hospitals” – all the arguments everybody knows and knows the responses to. And I do want to ask you about a couple of perspectives that are, I think, the most potent ones that Israelis and pro-Israel supporters in the United States and the West offer and I want to begin by asking you this, in almost every war there are two questions broadly speaking, I think, that need to be asked: Is there a moral or legal justification for the war, for the force being used? And then, Is it a wise use of force, even if it's morally justifiable, will it produce benefits on the whole as opposed to detriment? After the October 7 massacre that did kill hundreds of civilians, whatever that number is, do you think Israel had a legal and moral right to use force in Gaza against the group and the people who perpetrated that attack? 

 

Rashid Khalidi: You know, the problem with that question is it's framing. Gaza has been under siege for 16 years. Israel had assumed that it could live a peaceful, quiet life whilst putting its bootheel on the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And sooner or later, that had to explode. Now it exploded in a particularly ugly fashion with these massacres. It resulted in the highest death toll among Israeli civilians in the entire history of Israel's wars since 1948. So, there was going to be a reaction necessarily, and inevitably. But if you step back one minute, I think it's very clear that if you occupy and if you imprison and blockade and besiege a population, sooner or later that population is going to react violently and negatively. Israelis talk about this as if it's irrational. It's not irrational at all. The nature of the violence that was carried out on that day is, of course, horrific. But when you do this to people and you pretend that “out of sight is out of mind” and you can live a normal life in suburban communities with other people in a cage within a couple of miles of you, you are storing up problems that sooner or later are going to erupt. So, did Israel have a right to occupy? In the first instance. Did Israel have a right to kick those people out in 1948? In the second instance, I mean, you can go on and on and on. The people in Gaza are 80% refugees from the areas that Hamas invaded on October 7.  So, it really depends on where you start and where your perspective is on this. 

If you assume that everything was peaceful and this is France and Germany or this is a country A and country B, where country A simply decides to launch a murderous assault on the civilians of country B, then, of course, country B has the right to a counterattack. But this is not country A and country B, this is an occupier and an occupied population. And this is a settler colonial project where the people living in settlements around the Gaza Strip are living on lands that used to belong to people who now have been living, or their ancestors, their parents and grandparents, have been living as refugees in the Gaza Strip since 1948. 

And you have to factor that in. Does an occupying power have the right to attack an occupied population? You should be asking, I think, those kinds of questions as well as the question “What should Israel have done?” Israel shouldn't have been in occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the first place. There should have been a Palestinian state. There should have been any number of things, the absence of which has led to this horrific situation that we're in, where at least 800 Israeli civilians have been killed, and at least 450 or more Israeli soldiers and security personnel have been killed. And apparently over 15,000 Palestinians, both civilians and militants, have been killed. And we're not at the end of it. I mean, assuming that this cease-fire breaks down over the next several days, we're going to see many, many, much higher casualty tolls. And I think at the end of this, you'd have to ask that question, what was achieved? What was the point of this? Have they stirred up more enmity for Israel? Have they improved Israel's position? Are Israelis more secure as a result of killing 15,000 Palestinians, including a huge number of children, women and other non-combatants? I don't think the answer is yes. I don't think you achieve security in that fashion. I'm not just saying that from an Israeli perspective. I would say that from a Palestinian perspective as well. Now, sooner or later, there has to be a political resolution of this. I don't think we're nearer to a political resolution as a result of this. Not only do I think that because of whatever happened on the 7th of October, but because of the 15 times greater toll that has so far been inflicted by Israel since October 7 – and that toll will only, unfortunately, probably increase. 

 

G. Greenwald: I'm always amazed at the ability of Western media outlets and governments to just define history however they want. They did the same thing with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They just pretended that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the West began in February of 2022, as opposed to having extended many years back, without which you can't possibly understand what happened in February of 2022. And of course, the attempt to pretend that there was no conflict until October 7 and it all started when Hamas invaded Israel. But your answer essentially says that the way for Israel, best thing for Israel, to do from its own perspective, from the perspective of morality and legality, is to resolve the underlying conflict so that there's no more motive for Palestinians to attack Israel. The standard argument which I am interested in hearing your view on, is that Hamas has made very clear they don't want a two-state solution. The reason Netanyahu propped up Hamas was precisely because he thought they would work symbiotically to prevent a two-state solution, so that wouldn't resolve the hostility of Hamas, say Israel defenders. And then I want to ask you: is a two-state solution possible given the extent of this settlement project in the West Bank? 

 

Rashid Khalidi: I mean, my short answer to the second part of your question is no, unless you deal with occupation and colonization, you should not even utter the words two-state solution, a two-state solution which Israel continues to settle, or in which 750,000 Israeli citizens maintain their residents and their colonization of Palestinian lands, is not a two-state solution. It's a one-state solution with a one-state, one Bantustan solution. A situation in which Israel continues its occupation is not a two-state solution, and every Israeli generous offer has included Israeli control of the Jordan River Valley, which means it's not a state. I mean, imagine if a foreign country controlled the border with Mexico and the border with Canada, would the United States be a sovereign state? Of course, not. 

The first part of your question: I think that you have to look at this in terms of how you end this conflict. Do you end it in a fashion that maintains a structural inequality where one group has rights and security at the expense of the rights and security of the other, where one group proclaims – as the Israeli nation’s state law proclaims – that only the Jewish people have the right of sovereignty in the land of Israel, or do you have a solution, whether it's a one state or a two-state solution in which both peoples and every individual have equal rights? How do you do that? I don't know. I don't think that a two-state solution is possible in present circumstances because nobody's talking about the elephants in the room. Nobody's talking about ending Israeli security control. Nobody's talking about ending the settlement. And if you don't do that, even if the Palestinians accept the measly 22% of historic Palestine, which comprises the West Bank, occupied Arab East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, even if they accept that unjust partition of Palestine, you have to get some 50,000 Israelis out of there, or figure out how they continue to live. 

 

G. Greenwald: Heavily armed Israelis, heavily armed Israeli settlers, backed by all major components of the IDF […] 

 

Rashid Khalidi: Precisely. I think those are all obstacles in the way of a two-state solution. There are obstacles in the way of a one-state solution as well. 


Norman Finkelstein on Gaza

AD_4nXcu0M7tjsR__YGSpp9VjKCbgSVioQa69yFMhEAz-oSc0x1VFrelPm8eNEZ_MeIEi9Y8jpVMrUAYw-rEXVcsYdhfK7Vf_XML1nc07WsabhonGiZBxqBwR0tV--V3E-X_vuMsM55QTS3EHG5j7AKP1gGVMOjQsVGsAn8H1wDvJw?key=gacTsPpB8QVa7Xke9WmpVErF

Originally streamed on September 23, 2024

 

G. Greenwald: I think one of the reasons why the war in Gaza got so much attention for the time that it did was in part because of just the sheer brutality of what the Israelis were doing, but also because I think a lot of people who have sort of paid attention to politics only recently, young people, people who only started to get involved with Trump, really had no idea of the extent to which the United States enabled that, paid for it and sort of fueled and never place limits on what the Israelis are permitted to do to the Palestinians. I remember asking you on my show sort of where you put this war in Gaza in the kind of pantheon of horrific war crimes and other types of destruction, and everybody saying it's basically at the top. Yet, that was months ago and this war really hasn't slowed down. I mean, every day, every week, we hear of some new school being bombed or some family being wiped out and of dozens of Palestinians in Gaza just being utterly destroyed. How do you think from a historical perspective, this Israeli destruction of civilian life and civilian infrastructure in Gaza will be understood? 

 

Norman Finkelstein: Well, as the historians like to say, there's continuity and there is change with what preceded it. I think if one uses the negative force that Israel has invoked, if you use their metaphors, what you can say is up until October 7, Israel periodically launched these high-tech killing sprees that they call operations, and the main purpose of these killing sprees – as they said it, not me – their metaphor was to “mow the lawn” in Gaza. That basically meant – well, it had several different features to it – but it didn't mean total annihilation. Come October 7, there was a new goal set by Israel, namely, this time we're not going to mow the lawn in Gaza, we're going to extirpate, pull out by the roots, every blade of grass in Gaza. That took basically three forms – and I should point out, these are overlapping forms, they're not entirely discrete. The first form was an attempted mass, ethnic cleansing of Gaza, namely forcing all the people to the south and then hopefully the gates of Rafah would be open and they would flood into the Sinai desert. That didn't happen because the president of Egypt said no and it seems that the U.S. deferred to President Sisi’s decision. The ethnic cleansing didn't occur in toto. But I think it's not widely known. In large regards, it has succeeded. The estimates are somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 Gazans are no longer in Gaza. They, by hook or by crook were in Egypt. It seems Egypt doesn't allow more than 60,000 Gazans to stay at any one given time. So, you could say – we will take the low estimate – 300,000 have been expelled. They will certainly never return. They are finding a way to get past Egypt, Egypt is a transit point to some other corner of the world. So, if you take the low estimate, that would mean one-seventh of Gaza's population has been successfully and one might add surreptitiously expelled if you take the higher estimate of 500,000. That would be about one-quarter of the population. So even though the kind of ethnic cleansing that was conceived in the early days has not succeeded, it must be said that, in part, it has succeeded. The second possibility, leaving aside the ethnic cleansing, was to make Gaza unlivable. And that goal has succeeded. There's a lot of nonsense, in my opinion, and I have to emphasize “in my opinion” because they don't make any claims of fallibility. There's a lot of nonsense being said about what has happened and continues to happen in Gaza. Number one, as you know, every headline has to have as its subhead “The Israel-Hamas War.” There has not been any meaningful substantive Israel-Hamas war. There has been an Israel-Gaza war and the aim of the Israel-Gaza war is to make Gaza unlivable and uninhabitable. I'm using the language of the Israelis is not my embroidery or embellishment, that's what they say. As the former head of the National Security Council, Giora Islan, and he's not the only one, he's one of the defense ministry Galant's advisers, he has said we're going to leave the people of Gaza with two choices: one, to stay and starve, or two, to leave. That goal, which, in my opinion, was the main goal, that goal has been achieved. I don't like to be a bearer of bad news, on the other hand, if we're speaking to adults, we should treat them respectfully as adults: Gaza is no more, Gaza is gone. The estimates are – if you take the whole of Gaza – half of the infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed. That means, for somebody who doesn't quite grasp that, let's say in New York City, where I happen to reside, and you’re walking down 6th Avenue, just imagine every second building has gone. Or just imagine, walking down 6th Avenue, one side of the street is there, the other side of the street is no longer there. 

There are no universities left in Gaza. There are no schools, colleges, universities, or hospitals. There are barely any hospitals left in Gaza at this point. And so, you might say, well, what about rebuilding? There can't be any rebuilding of Gaza. That's just not true. First of all, the estimates are, by now, there are about 45 million tons of rubble in Gaza. It's estimated it will take 10 to 15 years to just remove the rubble. The rubble is mixed with a lot of unexploded ordnance, toxic substances and also a lot of bodies and even if you managed to remove the rubble, there's no question in my mind what's going to happen: Israel is going to say we're not letting cement into Gaza. It already did that after Cast Lead, it said Hamas would use the cement to build tunnels, we're not going to let cement in and nobody in the international community is going to quarrel with that. They say Hamas built 430 miles of 450 miles of tunnels, which I consider completely nonsense, complete nonsense. All these numbers that everybody repeats moronically from the state of Israel, if they had built 450 miles of tunnels, that would be more – Glenn, I know you lived for a while in New York City – that would be larger than the tunnel system of the New York subway system. The New York subway system has 430 miles of tunnels. Are you going to tell me that Hamas built 450 miles in Gaza, 26 miles long and 35 miles wide? No, but that's the excuse that Israel is going to use and everybody will accept it. So, between the 45 million tons of rubble and the fact that Israel won't let cement in, there is no Gaza anymore.

Read full Article
See More
Available on mobile and TV devices
google store google store app store app store
google store google store app tv store app tv store amazon store amazon store roku store roku store
Powered by Locals