Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Left/Right Alliance Could End Massive Domestic Spying Program, Tucker Carlson Admits Errors, & More
Video Transcript: System Update #57
March 19, 2023
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Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Friday 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.

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Aaron Maté and Special Guests on the U.S. Role in Ukraine, Gaza's Future & More
System Update #462

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

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Tonight, a look at two global crises where the U.S. is deeply involved. From Ukraine to Gaza, are we any closer to peace? For insight on the Ukraine-Russia question, we'll be joined by authors and scholars Jonathan Haslam and Nicolai Petro, and to discuss the latest in Israel-Palestine, we'll hear from Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani. 

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Briahna Joy Gray on Dems in Disarray, the "Big Beautiful Bill," Biden Cover-Up Receipts and More; Plus: Interview with Journalist Katie Halper
System Update #461

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

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Glenn Greenwald is away this week. 

I’m Briahna Joy Gray, the guest host for this episode. 

You might know me from my own podcast, “Bad Faith,” or from my previous hosting responsibilities over at The Hill’s “Rising,” less of a free speech platform than this one. 

Today, I'll be walking through the implosion of the Democratic Party, the pathetic hunt for a Joe Rogan of the left, the party's instinct for corporate self-preservation over real populist reform and the media cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline. 

Afterward, I'll be joined by independent left podcaster and co-host of “Useful Idiots” podcast, Katie Halper, to continue the conversation about how the DNC is continuing to try to rig elections in favor of incumbents, even as they repeatedly keep dying in office, and the likelihood that there might be more independent third-party runs in 2028, a la RFK Jr.'s 2024 attempt. Now, let's get right into it. 

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For a decade now, corporate Democrats have been warning that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the Republic. During Trump's first term, much of that handwriting seemed to be hyperbolic – Trump derangement syndrome, if you will. His big legislative accomplishment was in line with the policy priorities of your typical establishment Republican: a $1.7 trillion tax cut that went overwhelmingly to the rich.

There was some good stuff too: unlike Biden, he didn't start any new wars. While he continued to fund Israel's genocide in Gaza and crack down on free speech rights of Americans who protested the said genocide, Trump did accomplish the temporary cease-fire that AOC merely claimed Kamala was “working tirelessly” to achieve. 

But now that President Trump is finally following through on some of his less popular and less populist policy commitments, like the Medicaid cuts, included in his Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the House last week, or throwing markets into disarray with his erratic application of tariffs, which can be good policy.

Establishment Democrats seem almost happy to have something to justify their hatred of Trump. So, you see, the less populist Trump behaves, the more it disguises the Democrats' own failure to meet the needs of the people. Some Democrats are outright advising that the way they should respond to this alleged “existential crisis” is to simply do nothing: Just sit back and wait to benefit from the backlash. 

You don't have to take my word for it: Listen to a veteran DNC advisor, James Carville, describe the strategy: 

Video. James Carville, The View. February 18, 2025.

Fiddle while Rome burns, the expert says, then exploit the tragedy. 

But so far, the backlash isn't coming. A new Economist/YouGov poll, out yesterday, shows that while GOP favorability is low, at negative 11%, Democrats are doing even worse, at negative 21%; 41% of Americans still view Republicans favorably, while a mere 36% of Americans view Democrats favorably. 

These polls come as no surprise to those of us who consume independent media. I mean, just look around: Democrats are in the throes of a credibility crisis that arose out of Joe Biden's obvious unfitness to run for president. 

They're trying to distract from their complicity and the cover-up, but going all in on the idea that it was Biden himself, his family, and his closest advisors that hid his decline from the party and the public until it was too late, not the liberal media. But it's hard to call Biden's infirmary a “cover-up” when it was out in the public for all of us to see and comment on. The president was confusing Haifa and Rafah, mixing up the president of Egypt and the president of Mexico, and even dodged culpability in the classified documents case on the basis that he didn't have the mental competence to knowingly take the files. 

He even seemed to wander off at the G7 Conference a year ago, like a distracted child. 

Video. Joe Biden, The Economic Times. June 14, 2024.

His mental lapses were evident as far back as the 2020 primary, during which presidential candidates Julian Castro and Cory Booker had the temerity to call him out for not remembering what he had just said at the primary debate. This clip is from way back in 2019, when Dems still could have avoided the albatross of a historically old and declining candidate around their necks. What did they do instead? Disappear both Castro and Booker, once rising stars from the ranks of up-and-coming leadership. 

Video. Cory Booker, CNN. September 13, 2019.

You heard it there. The mainstream media accused anyone who noticed Biden's obvious decline of being motivated by Trump-like conservative politics. “Believe our Trump derangement syndrome, not your lying eyes,” they seem to say. 

Reuters reported the story about Biden wandering off at the G7 as “lacking context.” Meanwhile, his inability to finish sentences was “contextualized” as a mere stutter. 

Jake Tapper, one of the authors of the book “Original Sin,” which sheds light on the extent of Biden's mental infirmity, was himself one of the original apologists for Biden's cognitive decline. A few good mainstream pundits on MSNBC question the co-author on Tapper's own complicity. 

Video. Alex Thompson, MSNBC, May 26, 2025.

That was some good questioning. And I got to say, I don't think we need medical degrees to be able to accurately observe what was going on with Joe Biden. We didn't need this new book to know the truth either. Independent media, along with the voters, knew what was been going on for years. 

Biden's midterm rating was worse than any other elected president on record and, back in August 2023, polls show that 77% of Americans, including 69% of Democrats, thought Biden was too old to be president. But Democrats wouldn't listen. Or rather, they simply didn't care. 

Now, as part of the media's effort to whitewash its own complicity, the same media figures who were involved in the cover-up are claiming, well, they had to defend Biden's mental competency because no one else primaried him. They were stuck with him as a candidate. This, even as the party shut down the possibility of a primary from the jump. 

Contrast former DNC chair, Jamie Harrison, making that incredible claim that anyone could have primaried Biden if they wanted to, followed by Biden/Harris spokesperson turned MSNBC “journalist,” Symone Sanders, proclaiming that under no circumstances will there be a primary. 

Video. Jaime Harrisson, Symone Sander, MSNBC. 

“If folks wanted to primary Joe Biden, there was nobody to tell them that they couldn't?” Is he serious? The mendacity is frankly shocking. As Symone admitted, Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson did throw their hats in the ring, as said RFK Jr., and you can hear how much respect they got for doing so reflected in Symone's smite tone and her inability to pronounce Marianne's name. Then don't forget, RFK Jr. also ran as a Democrat before the party pushed about and it's no surprise why he left the Dems.

 The Democratic Party, its pundits and politicians, were simply all behind Joe Biden, no matter how ill-fated his electoral chances were from the get-go. And while they want to memory hole their role in setting Dems up to fail, I have the receipts. 

Take “Pod Save America,” one of the most popular liberal podcasts in the country. These former Obama speech writers turned media moguls finally admitted that Biden wasn't fit to lead after Biden's disastrous debate with Trump. But the hindsight is 2020. Listen to how hostile they were in conversation with moderate primary candidate, Democrat Dean Phillips, when he joined their show during the primary season that wasn't. 

Video. Phillips, Pod Save America. November 20, 2023.

Phillips and I do not share the same politics, but he was right. At a certain point, internal polls show that Biden could not win. According to “Original Sin,” the Jake Tapper book, Biden traded trails rather in every battleground state, and the race that tightened in states he won comfortably back in 2020. But the voters don't matter, the polls don't matter, not to Democrats. What matters to the Democratic Party elites is who they choose to top the ticket. 

As Bernie Sanders’s former national press secretary in 2020, I know this all too well. In two back-to-back election cycles, the Democratic Party ignored polls that showed Bernie was more electable than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden against Donald Trump. 

Now, this is not some Monday morning quarterbacking from a disgruntled leftist. Democratic Party insider Donna Brazile admitted the primary was rigged back in 2017.

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson admit as much in “Original Sin.”  They admit it! The election was rigged. But even with all of the faux mea culpas happening around Biden's lack of mental fitness, the Democrats STILL refuse to act any differently going forward, to learn a lesson from their past mistakes. Tapper and Thompson write that Bernie was perceived to be unable to attract Black voters, but Bernie was the only candidate in 2020 who matched Biden's popularity with that group, while also outstripping the field when it came to Latino voters

Bernie remains popular. Not only have he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez been turning out tens of thousands of voters across the country during their anti-oligarchy tour, including in deep red states. Bernie's recent appearance on the “Flagrant” podcast, with Andrew Schultz, had a whole room of popular podcast “Bros” clamoring for the exact “democratic socialism” establishment Dems insisted would turn off the public!

Everybody's saying it. Look, it seems obvious that left populism is the way for Democrats to push back against Trump's right populism, which unfortunately, is increasingly informed by the tech billionaires that fund his campaign rather than the working-class real populists who voted him into office. You've got to ask yourself, is pardoning reality TV stars convicted of tax fraud really improving your ability to support your family? 

What about growing the military budget (and the deficit) at the same time while cutting special education funding? 

What about shifting wealth from the bottom 60% of working-age households to the top income brackets? 

Look, no matter what your politics are, two parties that are competing for the support of working-class Americans instead of aligning with corrupt billionaires would be a good thing! But you can't convince someone of something they're paid not to understand. Which is why Democrats are, instead of embracing popular policies like Medicare for all or a tax on billionaires, are choosing to spend millions of dollars to figure out how to, get this, speak to American men. I really wish I were kidding here.

You really can't make this stuff up. Dems are obsessed with finding the Joe Rogan of the left, but they could not be barking up a wronger tree. 

Hilariously, they seem to be tapping one of their most insidious surrogates, Oliva Juliana, to “message better” on men while continuing to treat Sanders – the man who was literally endorsed by the actual Joe Rogan back in 2020 – as a pariah. 

Video. James Carville, The Daily Beast. May 2025.

To be clear, Carville hasn't won an election since Bill Clinton in the ‘90s, but I digress. 

The reason why Democrats’ mission to find their own Joe Rogan will fail is obvious: to be a credible interlocutor in the political space, you have to be willing to say the true thing when it's hard, even when it is critical of your party. Especially when it's critical of your party. The popular “Manosphere” podcaster, Andrew Schultz, gets it. 

Video. Andrew Schultz, Flagrant.  May 28, 2025.

Even on MSNBC, a guest of Ayman's show was also able to identify the core issue here. 

Video. Ayman Mohyeldin, MSNBC. May 24, 2025.

See, right there at the end is a great summary of the impossibility of what Democrats think they're going to achieve. “We need an authentic voice that's going to become popular organically, and we need to control them.” 

Good luck with that, Democrats. Good luck with that. 

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Briahna Joy Gray: Back with Katie Halper. You know her from the “Katie Halper” podcast and as co-host of “Useful Idiots” with Aaron Maté. Welcome to System Update. 

Katie Halper: Thanks, Brie. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Katie, it's a pleasure. I can't wait to pick your brain about some of the viral clips, especially from the sort of Manosphere podcast arena that have gone viral precisely because of how well Bernie Sanders himself and his ideas have translated into his sphere, that Democrats have insisted were so right-wing and so far gone, and they spent so many years vilifying but now seem to be trying to enter into those kinds of spaces. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: I think it's funny because, of course, Bri, not to be self-promoting, but they're searching for the – what is it? – left-wing Joe Rogan. What about Briahna Joy Gray and Katie Halper to take the mantle? 

It is ironic that the same people who were throwing Bernie under the bus, smearing him, attacking him, are now saying that he has some kind of messaging that's good for the democrats. There's always this obsession with messaging over content and program, but that's kind of another issue. 

I think people continue to smear Bernie Sanders but to the extent that they are praising him, they're praising him now because they know he's not going to run. So, I think they think it's safe for them to praise his ideas because they actually are either just paying lip service to it or they are afraid of Bernie's more progressive stances that challenge the status quo. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I think that really gets to the core of the issue that the Democratic Party for years has managed to try to frame themselves as somehow different than the establishment wing of the Republican Party, despite having, substantively, the same corporate donors by leaning and going all in on identity politics.

There's been a backlash against that. They're saying, okay, well, now we've got to find some other messaging prong when the whole reason why they went all in on identity politics and now we're going all in this idea that they just get the right man who's lift enough weights to say the right thing that they will also be able to compete, it's because they're allergic, their corporate base makes them allergic to actually advancing the kind of ideas that made Bernie popular in the first place acting like this guy was somehow a ball of charisma as much as I liked his sort of like a grumpy straightforward persona. He wasn't winning hearts and minds because he was a charm generator. It was because, as Joe Rogan himself said when he was endorsing Bernie Sanders back in 2020, he's a man who's been saying the same thing for the last 40 years, and he has credibility. He's trustworthy. And it's amazing to rewatch that endorsement now that the Democrats are in the middle of this incredible credibility crisis. 

I want to ask you specifically about this book, “Original Sin,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. I don't know if you had seen that clip before, that super cut that Ayman put together on MSNBC of Jake Tapper doing exactly what is sort of criticized in this book, although I will say this book stays away mostly from media criticism and focuses on the idea that it was Biden in his inner circle that knew the truth and were just lying to everybody else and everybody else was sort of deceived by them, including the liberal media. What do you make of that sort of framing there? Is Jake Tapper really innocent in all of this? 

Katie Halper: I mean, I joke that Jake Tapper was well-positioned to write a book about a cover-up because he participated in the cover-up. So, he does probably have some inside knowledge and real insight into it. But no, I mean, you alluded to this and the mashup that I'm in proves this. Jake Tapper was doing the exact kind of cover-up and running of interference that you and I have commented on the media doing for Joe Biden, for the DNC, for centrist Democrats, that we know that they do, they love to do. And so, it is rich seeing someone who participated in that cover-up profiting off of a book about a cover-up and he's hawking that product on his shows and on the various CNN shows that he appears on and all the appearances he's been doing. And I think at the end, once again, it's fine for people to have the eureka moments in hindsight. Somehow, it never happens in real time. And he keeps making these media appearances and talking about how he has a great humility, and his co-writer talks about the humility, which is, I guess, as close as to a mea culpa that we'll get, but that's not, I'm always so frustrated when people say humility like they always do these humble brags. I'm truly humbled by, insert whatever praise, so that's just a little pet peeve I have with that word. 

But, yeah, I think that Jake Tapper, like much of the media, keeps making the same mistakes. They're warmongers for every war. I mean, the cover-up, is disgusting but another disgusting thing is that he has spread so many lies about Palestinians and has run so much interference, much like he ran so much interference for the Biden campaign, he's running so much interference for IDF and he and Dana Bash have done such a disgusting job at vilifying Palestinians, Palestinian Americans like Rashida Tlaib, but all Palestinians, and taking every single rumor and fabricating a narrative and running with it and never correcting it. 

Tapper and Dana Bash pushed the mass rape Hamas narrative that has been totally debunked; they've never corrected it and, at the same time, they've ever once acknowledged the fact that there's video footage of Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian,  – what I would call hostage, what our media calls prisoner or detainee, but I think, to be consistent we should say hostage – and it's one thing to push a debunked narrative and never correct it, but at least acknowledge the fact that we do know of people who are raped by Israelis, but the fact they don't acknowledge that and that this is something that mainstream Israeli media covers shows that they really don't care about sexual violence. They don't about rape and they're happy to be doing PR for a genocidal state. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, I think it's a really…

Katie Halper: Sorry, we're talking about cover-ups, but they're related. 

Briahna Joy Gray: No, I think that's a really important point because there is something deeply ironic and dissonant about Jake Tapper in particular. I don't know that Alex Thompson and it could be similarly described as hypocritical, but Jake Tapper for sure, go doing the press rounds about a cover-up while still actively participating in a misinformation campaign, at least as significant as the lies about the Steele dossier or claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was misinformation. I mean, someone else had another super cut sort of juxtaposing what he's saying now about Hunter Biden with what he said back then about Hunter Biden and framing any and every criticism of Joe Biden or just observation from people who actually love Joe Biden, that doesn't seem to be up to his best, he's not the same Joe Biden who was vice president back in 2008/2012 cycles, as somehow being Trumpy as though supporting Donald Trump, even if that were your perspective, precludes you from seeing the truth with your own eyes. And Katie, this is what's so frustrating about Democrats, and frankly, my concern with some folks on the left who seem to be taking this sort of measured praise for the enthusiasm Bernie and AOC are capturing on these anti-oligarchy tours and predicting that there's going to be real change to the Democratic Party this time, how optimistic are you that we're likely to see the Democrats learning from the lessons of the past? And if not, why aren't you optimistic? 

Katie Halper: Right. Yeah, I mean, I think that, unfortunately, the Democrats would really rather lose to Trump than have someone like Bernie in power. But you're asking a slightly different question, right? You're kind of saying, well, what suggests that the Democrats will deliver anything, even with this good messaging that Bernie and AOC are bringing? And certainly, they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to Gaza, but, sure, on economic issues, Bernie, especially, is excellent. 

I think that the problem is, and you've spoken a lot about this, Bri, it's great to have fresh ideas, fresh policies, fresh but also consistent. I mean, as you alluded to earlier, Bernie's been saying the same thing for decades and that is something that I think has endears him justifiably to lots of people. But the question is, will the Democratic Party actually allow for any of these policies to take hold? [audio problems]

So, there's a lot of rotating villain phenomenon, right? 

So, I think that the Democrats really love to pretend that they can't get things done, that they'd love to get things done. But the truth is they just don't want to get them done. They don't want to see these things because they're as beholden to their donors as the Republicans are, they're just better on social issues often. And to the extent that they're better on social issues, they certainly are willing to sacrifice these social issues in the name of fundraising, which is why, for instance, neither Obama nor Biden codified Roe v. Wade. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up Roe v. Wade because I have more optimistic folks, left side of the aisle saying, “Oh, no, this didn't waste strategy, whatever you think of it, it's likely to work” because look at how well Joe Biden did in midterms.” And I think in retrospect, and I think some of us at the time reported that we suspected that there was not a red wave in 2022, it was not a signal that voters were actually secretly happy with Joe Biden. Polls at the time showed, as I said in my radar, that he had historically low favorability at that time. What people were coming out to vote for was not Joe Biden; it was for Roe v. Wade. It was to express their discontent with Roe being overturned and anti-abortion laws being put into effect in all the country. And a lot of red states like Kansas, bipartisan majorities came out to defend those kinds of formerly constitutional rights. 

I want to ask you, though, about this particular clip where Chuck Todd, even someone who is very much an establishment pundit, seems to think and maybe even seems to hope that there will, unlike 2024, when the Democrats completely shut down a primary, that there will not just be a primary, but that there'll be independent third-party style candidates, a la RFK Jr., running in that race. Let's take a look. 

Video. Chuck Todd, The Chuck Toddcast. May 27, 2025.

Briahna Joy Gray: I don't even know where to start with that, Katie. Why a military guy? Why this Bill McRaven person, who apparently is the former chancellor of the University of Texas system? And why the optimism that we're going to have someone operating outside of the two-party system, from this person who is very much an establishment pundit? 

Katie Halper: Right. And who really, I think, took part in a mocking of third-party candidates that so much of the corporate media took part in. I think that it's interesting you asked about why it has to be a military figure. And I think this speaks to how much the media and our political elites are so obsessed with optics and messaging and so inattentive to substance. So, it's not about what this person's going to offer. It's not about the changes that they're going to bring to people's lives in any qualitative or meaningful way. It's about whether they can tap into people's, I don't know, like, crushes on military figures or tap into our militaristic society. It does have a bizarre obsession, I think, with optics that, again, I think is because no one who is powerful, no political or media elites actually want to see real changes. So, they just want to have kind of like different presentations that get people excited, but nobody wants to see the actual changes happen. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yes. It’s a different kind of identity politics. It's the same thing as, like, yeah, like the Joe Rogan of the left thing. It's like they think that they can find a podcaster who lifts enough weights. I guess that's why we're just disqualified Katie. We're not, we don't lift heavy… 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I know. I do a lot of repetition of light weights, right? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Right. It's totally vibe-based. 

Now look, of course, there is a, like a substantive claim for having a veteran, but I think it also misses the mainstream pundits' missing how much we are in a sort of anti-interventionist/isolationist/anti-war moment in both parties. And that's exactly why someone like Trump, who definitely ran as an anti-interventionist and didn't start any new wars, at least in his first term, was so popular. So them saying a military guy, I mean, I think someone like Matthew Ho, who ran on the Green Party for a Senate in North Carolina some years back, could be exactly that kind of guy because he served and learned from his service exactly why we shouldn't be sending troops to fight pointless wars and ruining lives all because young kids see no other avenue to access things like healthcare and a quality education. That could be your guide, but we know Chuck Todd isn't going to throw his hat in behind a Green Party leftist, kind of Bernie-style candidate like Matthew Ho. 

Katie Halper: Right. I mean, I think you're right that it would be great to have a military figure who was anti-war. I mean those are extremely powerful voices and they have a lot of credibility and, of course, more importantly they're anti-war which is something that wins votes, but also is obviously good for the planet and good for all people on the planet, except for people who work in the arms industry and people who support genocide. 

But I think that it is interesting to see people again, the very same people, who, I mean, I think it was Chuck Todd who said Bernie Sanders would get “hammered and sickled,” he actually said that to him, see them act poetic about working outside of the duopoly. They acknowledge that the two-party system doesn't work, but what were they doing except for running interference for this two-party system? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, absolutely. And just as the final nail in the coffin, which is perhaps a metaphor, now that I said it out loud, that's in poor taste. If we pull up the graphic, a significant number of Democrats who have quite literally died in office, a margin that would have prevented the Democrats or enabled the Democrats to block the passage of Biden's big, beautiful budget bill in the House had they stayed alive. 

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Now, remember, DNC vice chair David Hogg got an enormous amount of pushback simply saying you wanted to start a pack that funded challengers to incumbents, observing accurately that younger members of the party like AOC and people who are outsiders like Bernie Sanders are the ones that have managed to capture whatever energy is left in the husk of the Democrat Party. And for that, Democrat elites have rallied the ranks to literally push him out of his position at the DNC and are frankly using sort of identity politics as a lever to get him out. Even as Democrats are unable to whip sufficient votes to block win priorities, precisely because their members are so old and enfeebled that they are quite literally dying in office. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I mean, of course, the final nail in the coffin was the perfect turn of phrase. But what better represents the narcissism and selfishness and moribund nature of the Democrats than the way that they are refusing to resign? Because, again, the Democrats are constantly fearmongering – and I want to be clear, I mean, Trump is something to be feared. I mean, he's not an anti-war candidate. He is terrible for many reasons.  The Democrats often criticize him for the things that aren't even that bad, which is another irony. But they say he's an existential threat, he's a fascist and yet if they're so worried about this, why don't they retire so that they have a better chance of having someone from the Democratic Party who can vote against his bill? I mean literally, his bill passed because Democrats refused to resign despite having been very sick or old. It reminds me also of the way that if Kamala Harris cared so much about defeating Trump, if this was the most important election ever, then why didn't she listen to the base, which was clamoring for her to depart from Biden on several issues and most notably on Gaza. We know now from someone who worked with her, it was because she didn't want to be rude, and it's not, it's gauche to depart from your president's policies when you're the running mate. 

We also know that Joe Biden said, I don't want any daylight between us, kid. And so, for Biden, his legacy, much like these Democrats who are dying in office, their legacies are more important than defeating Trump and Trumpism or helping the people that they claim to serve. For Kamala, I guess, ruffling feathers was more important– or not upsetting donors, or not being able to run around with Liz Cheney, or not incurring the wrath of AIPAC. So, it just belies the whole claim that this is something that is an existential threat. 

I think that I mean we are facing existential threats. We're facing existential threats that neither party is willing to deal with, especially when it comes to climate change. But it's very hard to convince people that you're taking this seriously as an existential threat when you don't do the minimal things needed to either win an election or prevent a Republican from taking your seat in the case of people who are not resigning. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it's really hard, frankly, to see in concurrent election cycles the voting population stand up and clearly, clearly be clamoring for a legitimate, sincere populism. I mean, the outrage around inflation, cost of living, housing prices, gas prices, food prices, education prices. These are the sectors that are driving inflation and which are causing life to be so precarious for so many Americans and it's nice now that Democrats are like acknowledging that economic precarity, economic anxiety is a real thing because for I don't know like eight years after the 2015-2016 cycle they acted if you said well yeah people voted for Trump because of economic anxiety they said that oh that's just racism that's just a synonym for racism we won't take that argument so now they're finally embracing it and trying to say we're going to do a Joe Rogan sort of a situation. But again, they're not backing any of those policies. You're still getting Democrats out here arguing against baseline things like raising the minimum wage, which hasn't been raised since Bush was in office. The longest period without a minimum wage raise since it was invented in like the 1930s.

And meanwhile, Americans are struggling. So this huge lane is opening up. Meanwhile, on the right side of the aisle, I think people who voted for Donald Trump in good faith hoping that he was going to follow the sort of banded wing of his party and do real economic populism are seeing that Bannon is engaged in a battle with the other wing of the party that frankly bought the election, the tech wing, the Elon Musk's, the Marc Andreessen's, the folks who are very openly saying, “We need to do AI, we need to put the public out of business, we're going to make all of these arguments that legitimize defunding the welfare state that so many Americans, including so many American in very low-income red states in the South and elsewhere, are relying upon to survive.”

And we can do that because we literally bought this election. And I'm afraid that that tech wing, the billionaire wing, who has no alignment and interest with the working-class in this country, most of whom are frankly not even American or relatively recent transplants are going to win out and it's going to be too late for a genuine populism to actually restore a democracy that reflects people's values. What do you think? 

Katie Halper: I think it's a justifiable fear. And I think what you're saying it really does ring true. Again, we've seen in the cases of the leadership of both parties, we have seen a real embrace of anti-populism, right? And one of the most frustrating things was to see people equate Bernie Sanders with Donald Trump because there's a big difference between actual populism and pseudo populism, just like there's a big difference between being anti-war and being pseudo-anti-war. And Trump is great at appealing to populist sentiments. But of course, he's not someone who cares about the working class, the middle class. He is someone who, in some ways, is more dangerous than traditional Republicans because he talks a good talk. He knows how to sound like he's a populist. He knows how to sound like he's against the status quo. But of course, in some ways, the most dangerous thing to have is someone who substantively is status quo, but performatively and stylistically is not. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it is interesting to see float things like, we’re going to do a tax on the rich, right? But then walk it back. And you can read that in a couple of different ways. You can say Donald Trump is just a bad faith actor. He never met in the first place, or you can write it as, well, he actually is the one who's got a good sense of what the wind is blowing and what the base wants. And maybe he would be happy to do a little bit. He's a billionaire himself.  I wouldn't take it too far that he was willing, would be willing to do too redistributive justice to return the hard working, increased productivity of the working-classes back into their pockets the way that it was 50 years ago or so before a bunch of laws redistributed it to the very top, including Trump's own 2017 tax cuts. I won't take it too far, but there's a way you could read it that says, well, maybe Trump did get a sense that you need bread and roses. You need to get the masses a little bit to keep them on your team and that the corporate interests within his own party won't even let him do the bare minimum. And so, it's not clear to me how much there is a real war between the Steve Bannon's who seem to be more genuinely committed to working-class politics, even if it's also mixed in with sort of a nativism and some other unsavory aspects that I personally don't agree with. And this is like the raw, open, we don't need workers anymore. We're going to do AI, we're going to feed you cricket slop and you're going to like it, we don't even need humanity, we're to be on the moon types. And like my concern, I don't know how to read it, but if I had to pick, I would much rather the Steve Bannon's – I can't believe I'm saying this, but I would rather the Steve Bannon’s wing of the Republican Party went out. The problem is the Steve Banning wing of the Republican Party didn't spend half a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. 

Katie Halper: Right. And I think he also doesn't appeal to certain segments, demographically speaking, who are very powerful. I mean, again, I think that it is kind of a funny thing to say, I hope that Steve Bannon wins. But of course, I do think that populists, you can work across the aisle with economic populists on certain issues, whereas there's nothing you can work with Elon Musk types about, right? They are scarier in many ways, and their policies are scarier, and there's very little overlap between the populist left and the populist right, to the extent that you can even have a populist right. But yeah, certainly I think that the Elon Musk wing is more frightening than the, I mean, they're both frightening, but yeah, I guess if. I mean, Bri, you're not someone who likes the lesser of two evils, but maybe that's the furthest I can say is that Steve Bannon is the lesser of two evils when it comes to the Bannon wing or the Elon Musk wing. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Amen to that. I can't disagree, Katie. I really appreciate your willingness to talk through some of this with me. This was cathartic for me because watching all of this happen in real time has been difficult. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it with you, talk about it here on Glenn's amazing platform, and to continue to follow the Democrats' self-destruction cycle and incredible cope over their complicity and the great Biden cover-up. Thank you, Katie.

Katie Halper: Thank you, Thanks, Bri. Thanks Glenn.

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System Update #460

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Tonight: There was major news this week, and we always try to devote our Friday night show to covering as much of that as possible, both through our “Week in Review” segment as well as the Q&A session, where we take questions from our Locals members and get to as many of them as we can. As always, we have a wide range of very probing questions from our followers on Locals – I'd expect nothing less from my viewers – and we'll try to answer as many of those as we can. 

Before we do that, we talk to the friend of the show, the intrepid independent journalist, Lee Fang, about numerous issues this week, including a new article he published on his Substack which investigates how officials in the Virgin Islands, where Jeffrey Epstein's notoriously bought that island, have been fraudulently profiting from victim funds and the residue from his presence. 

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Our guest tonight to help us go over some news events of the week as well as some investigative reporting that he has published this week, is a good friend of the show the independent journalist I've worked with at The Intercept, who has been published in many places now. He has one of the best Substack pages in the country where he does his investigative journalism and commentaries, Lee Fang.  

G. Greenwald: Lee, it’s always great to see you. 

Lee Fang: Hey Glenn, great to see you. Thanks for having me. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, so I want to start with the murder of these two Israeli embassy officials in Washington. We did a whole show on it last night, but the fallout sort of continues. 

I don't think we need to go into the question of whether there was any moral justness to these murders. I don't think any moral framework that I at least I recognize as valid suggests that anything other than unjust and horrific but there are a lot of attempts to exploit these murders beyond just expressing grief for the victims or condemnation for the shooter, including, essentially, immediately attempting to suggest that anyone who criticizes Israel or its war in Gaza in some sort of harsh way, or over some imaginary arbitrary line, is responsible for the killing as much as the shooter is, if not more so, and therefore we need to do something about that because that's spawning antisemitism and endangerment for Jews. What's your reaction to all that? 

Lee Fang: Look, I'm concerned about the kind of creeping martyrdom politics that have been coming into our system really for the last few decades. We see it more and more escalating on both the far left and the far right, whether it's far left activists seizing upon every kind of video of a police killing to make broad assumptions about the American criminal justice system and to engage in riots and calls for abolishing police, whether the far right who grab hold of any kind of immigrant crime or immigrant murder to say that we need to deport all immigrants or engage in some kind of draconian crackdown on immigrants. 

Now, we see this kind of increasingly in our Israel-Palestine debate where partisans are seizing upon this heinous crime that happened just a few days ago and really weaponizing it to engage in some type of collective punishment for their political opposition to claim all people who support peace in Palestine, justice or equal rights in that region, are somehow guilty of violence, that this act of political violence reflects on every American who supports peace or a cease-fire in Gaza. I mean, it's a little bit absurd, but it's kind of a continuation of this cycle of saying we want collective punishment on our political enemies, we want to weaponize any kind of tragic death into a partisan football, or just or partisan cudgel, to beat our political opponents. 

G. Greenwald: I actually started noticing it for the first time, I think, back in like 2005, 2006, right when I created my blog, started writing about politics. At the time, there was this blogger who was very pro-War on Terror, like very much of the view that we are at war with Islam after 9/11. Ironically, he became a sort of liberal resistance. His name was Charles Johnson. He wrote a blog called The Little Green Footballs. And one of the things he would do every day when he was in like his War on Terror fanatical stage was he had a daily occurring segment or a weekly occurring segment and he would title it “Religion of Peace” and he just published some sort of random robbery or burglary or assault or rape or violent crime that some Muslim somewhere in the world engaged in and thought that because he was constantly doing it, it was somehow making this point about Muslims in general being a menace. 

Obviously, you can do that to any race. You could do that to black people, you could do that to white people, you could do that to Christians, you could do that with Muslims, you can do that to Jews. When I recently was condemning or objecting to Matt Walsh, who went on Tucker Carlson to say it's better to leave kids in foster care and orphanages than to allow them to be adopted by same sex couples, I remember all these people replying to me, would show me stories about gay men molesting children and for everyone that they could show me, I could show them 20+ uncles molesting nieces at the age of five or some father molesting his daughter. It's such a stupid obviously, fallacious way to try to demonize a certain group of people and, obviously, the minute something like last night happens, we're supposed to believe that anyone now who condemns the war in Gaza is somehow a homicidal maniac or wants to kill Jews or wants to be antisemitic even though you can find literally every day Israel supporters in the United States saying the most nauseating things about Gazans. 

I mean, you can find Israeli officials in the last week saying Gazan babies are enemies because they grow up to be terrorists; “There's no such thing as innocent Gazans,” one official said we should segregate all the women and babies and children in Gaza and put them on one side and then put all the men 13 and above, so “13-year-old men,” they were calling them, and put then on another side and just execute all the men. It's such sophistry to try to argue this way, and yet it's done so often. 

Lee Fang: All connects back to my previous point that these are emotional arguments. They're not logical, they're not rational, they're certainly not empirical. It's very emotionally arresting when you see one of these police shooting videos. Often, they're without context, but even if the cop was in the wrong and was doing something unjust, that doesn't reflect on the millions of police-civilian interactions and all the thousands of different police jurisdictions that have completely different rules in training people will make sweeping assumptions about American policing after one of these very emotional videos. The same for an immigrant killing an American. You can see why someone could say that's unjust. This person was not supposed to be there, they're guests in our home and they're out killing or raping individuals, therefore, all immigrants are criminals or dangerous. It's that type of argument, and it's just being driven into overdrive with social media, with the kind of incentives around war. 

You have very well-financed pro-Israel advocacy groups. It's not just AIPAC, the super PAC and lobbying group, but dozens of other pro-Israel advocacy groups spending tens of millions of dollars per year pushing the U.S. foreign policy in one direction. So, for them to have this very tragic event that they can weaponize and use against their political opponents, they continue this push so that the U.S. stands in lockstep support of the Israeli government. Of course, that's what they'll do, but this is kind of an escalation we've seen in society over many years. It's just this dynamic that is very tribal, that is crude. It kind of appeals to the most basic instinct among us, and it really should be rejected. 

There are some principled Israel supporters and conservatives who have spoken out against this attempt to weaponize these tragic events, but it's really disappointing seeing people from across the board taking this and just saying, “We should have more censorship. We should support crackdowns on students. We should restrict speech. We should really support ethnic cleansing in Gaza because of it.” It is absurd. 

G. Greenwald: What makes it so much worse is, let's say, over the past decade, but especially as this kind of left-wing cultural war reached its apex with the word zenith, depending on your perspective with things like Me Too and then the Black Lives Matter riots of the fall of 2019, or 2020. Just then, the kind of wave that produced, of all sorts of language controls, taking premises to these completely preposterous conclusions. Most conservatives, in fact, almost by definition, were vehemently opposed to these sorts of victimhood narratives, these group-based grievances, these attempts to curb speech in the name that it made people uncomfortable or incited violence against them. And most of them, not all, but most of them, have now done an exact 180. 

All day yesterday, you heard people saying things like “There's systemic racism against Jews,” “Your speeches inciting antisemitism and bigotry.” Who knew that Donald Trump would be elected, and, within the first four months, his main cause and the main cause of his movement would be to declare a racism epidemic all around the world and the need to control speech to prevent it and protect these minority groups? 

It sounds very familiar, but just from a different direction. One of the people who was most vehemently opposed to this sort of left-wing oppression is Steven Pinker who was a very well-known biologist at Harvard and also a very vocal supporter of Israel but a very vocal critic of this sort of left-wing repression that has appeared on campuses and elsewhere. He has an article in The New York Times today that I thought was super interesting because it's also in the context of this attack by the Trump administration on Harvard and he said: “[…] For what it’s worth, I have experienced no antisemitism in my two decades at Harvard, and nor have other prominent Jewish faculty members. […] (The New York Times, May 23, 2025.)

So, we're talking here about this epidemic. I was reading some people yesterday, who were Jewish people in media, Jake Sherman was one, there were others, saying, “It's incredibly terrifying to be a Jew in America.” Not only did I live in the United States for, I think, 37 years, as an American Jew, and I'm there all the time. I've never once experienced an antisemitic assault or comments or anything like that, nor has anyone I know, and yet you're hearing this kind of wildly exaggerated set of claims about how Jews are endangered. 

So, he says: “My own discomfort instead is captured in a Crimson essay by the Harvard senior Jacob Miller, who called the claim that one in four Jewish students feels “physically unsafe” on campus “an absurd statistic I struggle to take seriously as someone who publicly and proudly wears a kippah around campus each day.” […] (The New York Times May 23, 2025.)

So that's not just a Jewish person, that's someone who wears a Kippah around campus every day and he's saying it's preposterous that people are saying there's some epidemic of antisemitism at Harvard. 

I mean, what he's basically saying there is that everything I thought I was supporting, fighting against when it was coming from the left, these group-based narratives, this attempt to restrict speech, this is a wild exaggeration of the danger of certain minority groups in the United States is now being flooding our discourse, from Israel supporters, he's making the point that it just sounds extremely familiar to him, but from the other direction. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, I mean, everything he's describing is pretty much accurate. The tools of wokeness that these kinds of studies claim astronomical levels of bigotry in society, you look back at 2020, a lot of Asian American groups claimed that anti-Asian hate crimes were skyrocketing. 

G. Greenwald: What was the name of that group? Stop Asian Hate? 

Lee Fang: Stop Asian Hate, yes, which was a spin out of Chinese for Affirmative Action. But this group, if you look carefully in their kind of footnotes of how they were quantifying anti-Asian hate, they were taking tweets that were critical of the lab leak theory or floating the lab leak theory that the COVID-19 virus might have come from Wuhan, China, and other kind of China critical tweets as examples of anti-Asian American hate crimes. So, they were grouping actual forms of violence, where, a lot of times, you don't know the intent. Perhaps someone of one race attacked someone else of another race. Is that a hate crime? It's context-dependent, but they were taking a broad brush on those. Then, they were juicing the numbers by taking tweets of something that they claimed was hateful, but turned out to be just a true fact, or likely a true fact, that the virus escaped from a bioweapons lab in China. 

Now, for the antisemitism kind of crisis or hysteria that we're in today, you look at the ADL and other pro-Israel advocacy groups at these studies that show a 300%, 500%, 1,000% increase in antisemitism. You look at the footnotes, and it's the exact same dynamic. It's folks who are critical of Israel in a completely neutral way, saying they just disagree with Israel's policies. That's deemed now antisemitic: groups like Jewish Voices for Peace, a Jewish-led leftist group that is critical of Israel's policies, holding rallies around the country. Each of these rallies in the ADL's report is tagged as an antisemitism hate event. So, that's how they're quantifying this gigantic, skyrocketing antisemitism problem. 

This would be laughably absurd if it weren't being weaponized and used by our government to crack down on speech and to defund science and medical research at universities around the country, but that's exactly what's happening. The Trump administration is citing these statistics and similar statistics when they're going after Harvard University and other universities, when they are cutting federal funding and when attempting to impose speech codes like the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which redefines antisemitism to include some criticism of Israel, and it's part of this kind of an investigation of Harvard around civil rights violations.

I mean if you zoomed out and just looked at the evidence, any normal person would laugh it off; any kind of ordinary person looking at what's been assembled as supposed examples of antisemitism are, you know, either incredibly minor or absolutely manufactured. And yet, this is the crisis that we're living in today. I wouldn't defend Harvard University on almost any other grounds. This is a school that acts like a hedge fund, that's accumulated huge amounts, that has deplatformed speakers in the past, that is kind of a platform for privilege, for billionaire donors to at times donate and get their kids into the school, and has engaged in some racial discrimination in the past, although the recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action have kind of rolled that back. Yet this current Trump administration attack, demanding that the school create safe spaces for Jewish students, create speech codes, preventing students from criticizing or even discussing Israeli policies, even getting rid of some of their departments that study the Middle East or study Israel's history or Palestinian history, I mean, it just kind of shocks  that they're doing this with absolutely no evidence. 

G. Greenwald: I mean, the idea that Harvard is some place that's hostile to Jews is almost as funny as that time the ADL issued a statement saying it's time for Hollywood to include Jews in their pro-diversity policies because Jews have been excluded for long enough from Hollywood and you just can't believe it's even being said. 

By the way, the thing that you mentioned about COVID drove me very crazy at the time and to this very day when I think about it, it still drives me crazy, which was It was really the Lancet letter, the proximal causes, notorious Lancet Letter that decreed well before they had any idea if it was remotely true what they were saying, that we know for certain that COVID came from the zoonotic leap, from animal to human, and that any attempt to suggest that it came from a lab leak in Wuhan was essentially racist and like an attack on our Chinese colleagues or whatever. Then, it immediately became canon that anyone who even raised the possibility that it might've come from a lab leak was being racist against Chinese people. 

The New York Times COVID reporter who became the COVID reporter when the real COVID reporter got fired because he said some things that upset a bunch of very wealthy teenagers whose parents paid for them to go on a field trip to Peru or something with him and they were offended by what he said, and so he got fired. So, they put this woman in, and she said one day we're going to grapple with the fact that this lab leak theory is racist, but I guess today is not the day. 

One always drove me so crazy about this. Besides the fact that who cares what theory was racist about where COVID came from? Like, all that mattered was what the truth was? Who cares which theory was more racist? It was like, where did it actually come from? But the idea that it was somehow more racist to say that COVID came from a highly sophisticated research lab in Wuhan, funded and partnered with the United States than saying, “Oh, Chinese people have these disgusting, filthy, primitive eating habits where they consume these filthy bats in wet markets and therefore got the coronavirus because they were the ones who were just eating things they shouldn't,” like the far more racist theory was the one they were insisting on, to this day insist on. It just always drove me crazy. Of course, the overwhelming evidence now is that it did come from that lab leak funded by the United States. 

All right, let me ask you about this article you wrote in your Substack

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So, I think it's a little bit self-explanatory, but you go into some really disturbing and interesting detail about what these funds that were set up for Jeffrey Epstein's victims and how much opportunity there was for Virgin Islands officials to profit from their protection that they gave him. What is it that you've been finding? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, so the Jeffrey Epstein saga is still not solved. There are still many unanswered questions. In February, the Trump administration promised to release unredacted files. The FBI, when they raided Jeffrey Epstein’s homes in 2018, collected CD-ROMs, other recordings, binders, all these files that remain unreleased to this day. They're sitting in a warehouse, the FBI warehouse in Winchester, Virginia and still, nothing has really been released. 

The documents that were supposedly released by the Trump administration were all previously released disclosures. There's nothing new there. My story takes a look at the other side of this, where the national media has really not paid attention. Many of the most important disclosures about Jeffrey Epstein's political network, how he's paid off politicians, particularly politicians in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but also some politicians in the territorial U.S., were released very suddenly and briefly during a lawsuit in 2023 between J.P. Morgan and the Virgin Islands. 

This sudden disclosure was kind of accidental because the U.S. Virgin Islands was hoping to win some settlement money from these crimes, a form of accountability after his death. They really did not expect it, but J.P. Morgan hit back hard, and it countersued and alleged that the Islands' officials were far more complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's criminal operations. From those disclosures, we got hundreds of emails, depositions, and other documents showing how Jeffrey Epstein kind of methodically paid off local politicians, customs agents, various governors and law enforcement agents to receive exemptions from the sex offender list in the Virgin Islands to travel back and forth. As he was bringing young girls, aged between 12 and 15, to his island, customs agents saw that and looked the other way, they refused to check on their safety. There's really just a litany of red flags he was raising, and yet he was paying off politicians to allow him to run his criminal enterprise. 

This piece kind of looks at how the governor, Albert Bryan, closed that window of disclosure. He quickly settled the lawsuit, he fired the attorney general, leading the JP Morgan lawsuit, he later replaced the attorney with one of Epstein's own lawyers, who serves to this day in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He promised that this legal settlement money would be used to prevent another Epstein criminal enterprise by using it to counter human trafficking, sex abuse, and that type of thing. Instead, it's being used as a piggy bank. Legislators there don't know exactly how the money's being spent but for what we do know, it is going to backdate government wages, it's going to vendor payments, it's going to a series of earmarks refurbishing various buildings in the Virgin Islands. There's very little transparency on how this money is being used and it's an ultimate irony or perhaps an injustice that the governor, who now controls these funds, is almost a quarter billion dollars of money, was part and parcel to the Epstein enterprise. He was receiving regular donations and gifts from Epstein. He was the one responsible for giving Epstein special tax breaks and then later pushing for his exemption from the sex offender list. 

So, while we have this kind of national conversation about the Epstein saga, and it's mostly focused on these documents in Virginia that are held by the FBI, which deserve to be disclosed, there are still so many unanswered questions and a lack of accountability in the Virgin Islands. 

G. Greenwald: It's interesting, for the last four years during the Biden administration, the Epstein files, as they've been called, were a major topic on right-wing media, especially independent right-wing media. Two people in particular, who are very influential and popular in that realm, went around constantly talking about whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, the doubts about why we should think that, as well as just bashing the FBI every day for concealing the Epstein files. 

Those two people were Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, who are now the Assistant Director and the Director of the FBI. And they, I'm sure you saw them on Fox News earlier this week, and one of the questions they got was about the Epstein documents. The interviewer said, “Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself? And they both said, “Yes, Jeffrey Epstein absolutely killed himself. We saw the documents.” They were very uncomfortable, but they're saying we saw the documents that prove he killed himself. 

Well, all of you, including Donald Trump, ran on the platform of making the Epstein files public. Why haven't we seen these documents that convinced them of that? But more so, I think the biggest, most interesting question in the Epstein case is, and always has been, “Was Jeffrey Epstein working with or for foreign intelligence agencies?” And it's a binary question. Maybe there's more complexity to it. 

But why is it, do you think, that after four, almost five months, in office, not just the Trump administration, but the very people who kind of built their reputation, in part, on banging the table about the Epstein files, about crushing and bashing Christopher Wray and the FBI for not releasing them, are now in charge of the FBI, and these documents are still not released; not a single one, that wasn't previously public has been released. 

Lee Fang: Well, I was in your program last year to discuss our lengthy investigation about why every […] that influence operation in the U.S., that attempts to change our laws, change who gets elected to Congress, affect American policy – there is an effort to enforce the Foreign Agent Registration Act, so that they disclose their lobbying activities, except for Israel. There is very ample evidence that the Israeli government – and its evidence from Israel, from Israeli news outlets and from Israeli investigations – shows that show Israeli government is pouring millions and millions of dollars over the last 10 years into influence operations in the U.S. and there's been a conscious effort to avoid far registration. 

The Epstein saga kind of raises many two-tier justice questions: one is just generally broadly about the wealthy in society because they were working with Epstein, facilitating his crimes, potentially engaging in sex crimes with him. They are kind of protected from scrutiny. If this were any ordinary American, any lower-class American, they could expect severe penalties and a severe form of justice, but because these are the rich and powerful, they do not receive the same level of scrutiny. Then, for your question around the Israel issue, there is… 

G. Greenwald: To be clear, I didn't say Israel. I just wondered whether he was working for any foreign intelligence agency. 

Lee Fang: Well, many would say that there might be an Israel issue. Interestingly enough, within the J.P. Morgan litigation, the kind of discovery process in some of the exhibits that were filed in the Virgin Islands case, many of the emails between former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein and some of his associates were disclosed in that litigation in 2023. It was really just an incredible window into Epstein's network. Many other emails of VIP individuals who received help from Jeffrey Epstein, who gave him donations or asked him to “manage their money,” even though it wasn't clear what he was doing with the money, or were traveling to his island, or to his New York home, these were details that were ferreted out from the J.P. Morgan case. Perhaps, again, that's why they moved so quickly to settle it, to close that case. But yes, I think just generally, whether it's Israel or another country… 

G. Greenwald: Maybe it's like Sweden, or Nigeria, but we should know. 

Lee Fang: We don't know, it could be Finland. It's really any of those Nordic countries, but the fact that we don't have these answers and they're sitting on servers, not just with the FBI, right? 

In just this countersuit from J.P. Morgan, they were able to get a huge amount of discovery from Epstein's servers, from his estate, from his associates. He had a close network, Richard Kahn, [Darren] Indyke, […], these three or four individuals who helped arrange many of his financial affairs and helped with the facilitation of his operations in this one little litigation, we were able to see kind of peer into his world. If the government wanted to, if this was a priority for either the Biden administration or the Trump administration, they could make it happen because these emails we know exist. 

G. Greenwald: And I think it's worth noting, and this to me is one of the most persuasive pieces of evidence, that when Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2010 in South Florida when he was trafficking minors into his home in West Palm Beach to have sex with them and eventually got caught, the U.S. Attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, who eventually ended up in the Justice Department, is the one who presided over this extremely shockingly generous plea bargain he got where, I mean, his charges were sex trafficking minors. Everybody who does that goes to prison for a long, long time. And he basically got something like 12 months, six months in prison, a suspended sentence and like community service or whatever. And then he was done and he went back right to… 

Lee Fang: Yeah, he got to spend most of it at home, right? He didn't even spend much of the time. 

G. Greenwald: Right, he started at home. Exactly. Alex Acosta, years later, when asked, “Why would you give a sex trafficker of minors such an incredibly light sentence?” He said, “I was told that he was Intelligence and to leave him alone.” 

So, there's every reason to believe that he had some connection to foreign intelligence. There were a lot of people with whom he was a close associate, including Jelaine Maxwell, whose father, Robert Maxwell, was most definitely a Mossad member; Les Wexner, who is the multi-billionaire who made Jeffrey Epstein rich, who has all kinds of ties to Israel. A lot of people try to say, “Oh, it was probably Qatar.” They always try to say like, “Oh, the country that's really influencing our politics and buying our politics is Qatar.” That was something Bari Weiss just published. I have a feeling that if Jeffrey Epstein were working for Qatari intelligence, that was something we would know and have known very quickly. 

The fact that you have two very hawkish people on the Epstein question, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who have been running around for years demanding full disclosure, outraged that it's not coming, and now they're suddenly the ones running the FBI and yet there's still not a single document, not one, release that hadn't already been seen – they did that ridiculous, humiliating debate where they called those right-wing influencers like Libs of TikTok and others to the White House and they gave them binders that said, “Epstein files set - phase one” and they were all waving around that binder and it turned out every single document in that binder had been already publicly disclosed long ago – it does really start to make you wonder, doesn’t it? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, this reporting, these details have not been easy. Some of this is a source from just the Virgin Islands for my story, a source from the Virgin Islands’ legislature. I talked to lawmakers there, I looked at litigation files, some which had never been published, even though there were litigation files from 2023, but also, the Virgin Islands operate in kind of a weird space, to U.S. territory, but they do not have an online system for just routine campaign finance disclosures. I had to pay a University of Virgin Islands journalism student to go in person and request documents and then pay an exorbitant fee, just to make photocopies and then have those sent to me.

Reporting this out over the last few months on a story that really should have been public way earlier was not easy to do, but it's clear that for Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, they don't have to do all these kinds of extra steps that I engaged in. This is not a question of ability, this is the question of will. Do they have the political will? Do they have the kind of wherewithal to weather the criticism, the kind of pressure from elite groups, potentially foreign intelligence agencies, by disclosing this information that could be very harmful to the political and kind of intelligence elite? 

G. Greenwald: And the fact that you do that reporting that is often expensive is another good reason for people to join your Substack, aside from the quality of the reporting that they get if they do. 

All right, let me ask you this last question. You're somebody who began journalism, associated primarily with the left. You worked at left-wing think tanks, not necessarily hardcore leftist think tanks, but you wrote for The Nation. You worked for the Center for American Progress, and you had a pretty left-wing outlook on things. You began to kind of have a breach with the around issues like crime and race, things that you were previously talking about, but crime was a really big one that, the left was constantly opposed to, almost reflexively, to any efforts to take crime seriously, to have the police emboldened or empowered to arrest criminals. You were particularly incensed by things like “defund the police,” that movement that arose in the wake of the George Floyd killing. And that has been something that you've taken seriously for a very long and in part because of your personal experience growing up in a mixed-race, working-class environment where there were a lot of working-class residents constantly victimized by violent crime. 

Now you live in California and San Francisco, where there's a lot of crime, obviously, including from immigrants who enter the country illegally. So as somebody who has taken those issues seriously, like the need to really crack down more on crime and violent criminals, as well as, you know, the flow of immigrants across the border, how do you look at thus far the Trump administration's efforts to crack down on people who have entered the country, especially those who have engaged in some sort of violence? 

Lee Fang: I see kind of like a lot of the same examples you've highlighted on the show as draconian as probably unconstitutional, illegal, immoral. If you look at what the Trump administration has done in terms of sending Venezuelans to CECOT, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador, I think it's morally horrendous. The Washington Post recently reported that many of the individuals that were sent there were people who were cleared for asylum status, who had protested Maduro, and then fled here after doing so.

Which senator was the one who encouraged people to rise up against the Maduro government in Venezuela and said that if you came to this country, we would provide new asylum protections and TPS protections to protect you? That was Marco Rubio. He led that.

So, just the absurdity, the kind of partisan cruelty for him to turn around and take those same individuals and send them to this prison without any due process is disgusting. Broadly speaking, I look at the kind of confirmation hearings this week for the USCIS role that the immigration wing of the Department of Homeland Security, that kind of manages a lot of the visa programs, and they're saying a lot of things that I think make sense, talking about the role of foreign workers, of these kind of temporary visa programs that were initially created 20 years ago, 30 years ago, like the one H1-B program and then the OPT program to encourage just the most skilled, scarce workers that we don't have in this country. These programs have ballooned into a kind of internal job replacement program where corporations are bringing millions of workers in who will work for lower wages for tech-related software and IT jobs. 

The Trump administration, which initially, back in January, rejected attempts to reform programs, is now kind of changing its tune and is considering a reform of these programs. This is something that Bernie Sanders and many of the more traditional class-focused left have talked about for a very long time. I don't see any problem with that. The other kind of enforcement areas of just like how do you get folks who are in this country illegally out of this country and then how do you prioritize to make sure that you're doing it in a way that's just and fair, it's a mixed record, right? 

At the end of the day, the Trump administration, on a month-to-month basis, has deported less than the Biden administration, compared to last year. There are some different variables here. There are fewer border crossings this year than last. You can also compare this year between this year and the last few years of the Obama administration, which had way more deportations. Again, there's a different variable there. There's more police ICE collaboration back in the Obama years than this year. There's simply not as much collaboration between police agencies and ICE in 2025, so it's perhaps not possible. So, it's hard to compare. If you look at some of the extreme measures they've taken against speech, ongoing after legal students who are here to study and who have protested Israel, and focusing on them to deport them. That's clearly absurd. The CECOT prison is absurd. I think for the rest of their kind of agenda, it's a mix. There's some good and bad. And I think just in terms of a policy, a lot of it just hasn't come into effect yet. The deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, they've relied on these kinds of very theatrical and flamboyant expressions of police state strength. “We're going to throw them into prisons in El Salvador, we're going to send them to Libya, we're going to put them in South Sudan,” things like that. But the reality is that there have been no mass deportations as promised by the Trump campaign. They've spent huge amounts of time and energy and money instead of going after them almost right away, as you said, people in this country who are completely law-abiding, who are here with green cards or student visas, for the crime of protesting Israel or criticizing Israel. And so in lieu of getting what they were told for 10 years from Donald Trump they would get, which is mass deportations, they're instead getting this massive crackdown on speech under the guise of immigration policy aimed at protecting this foreign country, Israel, from criticism and people have really not noticed, given all these kinds of sideshows over the Alien Enemies Act and shipping them to El Salvador and the fact that the integration deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

All right, Lee, thank you so much. It was great to see you, as always. I'm sure we'll have you back on our show soon. I hope you have a good evening 

Lee Fang: Thanks, Glenn. Have a good weekend. 

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All right, Friday night is for our interaction with our Locals members, but also in front of our entire Rumble audience. The reason we do that, as I've said before, is I think interaction with your audience is of the most importance. I have always hated the model of journalism that's monolog inform, where some journalists just step on a mountain top and bequeath to people the truth. I think it's very important to hear critiques and questions and interact. And we do that throughout the week on Locals. So, let's get into them. We have a lot of good ones tonight. I want to try to get to as many as possible. 

The first one is from @ChristianaK, who says:

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I talked a little bit with Lee about this and he said something I completely agree with, which is, I never thought I would be defending Harvard in my life. Especially over the last, say, 10 years, Harvard really has become a place which is almost ground zero for censoring speech. It's often ideologically homogenous. It's become just this kind of closed circle, a very specific, idiosyncratic, academic-ish left-wing culture war homogeneity. There's a lot wrong with academia in general. 

All that said, I find academia to be extremely important. I think it's a vital part of society. If you go back to the Enlightenment, which I regard as the founding principles of Western civilization, at least in the modern era, in terms of our political values and the like, academics talk frequently about the need to have at least one place in society where everything is up for grabs in terms of what you can debate, what you could challenge. There are no taboos, there are no pieties. I think having an institution in society like that, where everything is studied, everything is questioned and everything is poked at, is vital. It helped me learn a lot. 

It really stimulated my interest intellectually that there were all sorts of things out there that had been about questioning these long-term pieties and you were free to express the things that you wanted to express. I think it is quite disappointing, quite harmful, quite tragic that in so many ways our universities have become these ideologically homogenized outposts of political activism at the expense of what should be this academic freedom.

 Nonetheless, it really is true that one of the things that has been most responsible for America's success, economically, technologically, politically, socially and militarily, has been research that takes place at our highest institutions. Everywhere in the world, people look at Harvard and talk about Harvard with great admiration and awe. Here in Brazil, if somebody went to study at Harvard, even for a year, and they come back and they say, “Oh, I studied at Harvard,” it imparts them with immense credibility, and that's how it's looked at around the world. I mean, Harvard is one of the symbols of American greatness. It's been a leading college for 450 years, same as Yale, Brown and Princeton, but Harvard, especially globally, is at the top. 

So, I think, if you're going to have a government that suddenly decides that it's going to wage a major war to try to destroy what have always been America's leading academic institutions, it’s kind of out of the blue, just start attacking it in every conceivable way, I think everybody should be very guarded about why that's happening. 

In general, leading academic institutions and the government have had extremely close partnerships. The reason the federal government gives money to places like Harvard and Yale, and all sorts of other schools, is not because the government is being benevolent. It's not because the government wants it to have a nice gender studies program. Sometimes it's to fortify financial aid so that not only rich people from rich families can go to the top schools, but mostly it's for paying for research projects that the United States government once undertook. It was federal-funded research programs at our universities that led to the invention of the internet in the United States and American dominance over the internet for all those years. It came right out of the federal funding of academic institutions, cures and medical treatments, scientific advances and technological advances that often were things the government wanted done for military use. 

When you have well-funded research programs, that's how you attract the greatest minds from all around the world and that only fortifies the institution. Without these research facilities, it basically just becomes like a liberal arts school for 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds, as opposed to institutions where the highest-level research and innovations take place. On top of that, it's the question of why these institutions are being attacked. 

In the case of Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Princeton and all the others that the Trump administration has targeted, there has been one argument that I think is a valid one, which is that there has been discrimination in the admissions process for a long time. It was considered affirmative action, where you would purposely go out of your way to divide all the applicants into groups of race, to ensure that there was a representative percentage from each group. Part of that was to correct historical injustices, other parts of it were to have a more diverse campus. I think there was a time when you could make that argument that was necessary and over time we've gotten to the point where we've decided that that's no longer necessary that it's actually a form of racism in its own way and courts have stepped in and begun to rule against those sorts of practices and they had to scale back greatly on them. 

So, I understand that objection, but the much bigger reason, as we know, is that these schools allowed protests against Israel to take place. For many years – you can go back to 2010, 2012, 2014 – all of these groups that are funded by Israel or Israeli loyal billionaires were obsessed with American college campuses because they knew that that's where the primary activism against Israel was based on this boycott, divestment and sanctions model that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa. Israel and its loyalists were petrified that that would work in American campuses. They knew a lot of the anti-Israel sentiment was being talked about and allowed on American campuses and they set out this whole anti-woke thing if you go and look at it, all these people who were obsessed with Israel, who led this anti-woke movement on college campuses, were doing it, in part, because they hated American colleges because it allowed too much Israel criticism. The Trump administration is saying that you have allowed too much antisemitism, meaning Israel criticism on your campus; they're actually forcing institutions to put their Middle East Studies program under receivership so the government can control what is taught in Middle East Studies programs. 

Who thought that the role of the U.S. government was to control the curricula of how adult academics who teach adult students can do their curriculum, can pick their course materials? But that's what the Trump administration is doing. And it's all because of Israel, to some extent, it's because they perceive it's kind of a left-wing institution, they want to attack it. But they've already denied funding these schools. 

Here from AP News on April 15: “Trump administration freezes $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard over campus activism (AP News. April 15, 2025.)

We know what that “campus activism” means: the Israel protests that you allowed. Harvard said, “Look, you've gone too far. We made a lot of concessions, but we're about to become a branch of the Trump administration if we go too far, we're going to sue instead.” And they sued, that's when the government went ballistic. 

Today, Homeland Security announced that they were canceling the student visas of all Harvard students, revoking them immediately, and would refuse to give student visas for any international students that want to go to Harvard in the future. So only 25% of Harvard has international students. It's a way that the United States spreads pro-American sentiment. People want to come to the United States, they want to study in the United States, they get integrated into American culture. It has great benefits for the U.S. As I said, people look at Harvard as this place that everyone around the world wants to go to, or Yale, or Princeton, or Columbia, Stanford, whatever. 

The idea that Harvard, of all places – its current president is Jewish, most of its past presidents, close to a majority, if not an overall majority over the last 30 years, have been Jewish. Larry Summers is one of the people who ran Harvard for the longest. Their biggest donors are overwhelmingly Jewish. Jews do very, very well at Harvard. The idea that it's some kind of cesspool of antisemitism is laughable. 

But as we know, any criticism of Israel is now deemed antisemitic and that's what's driving the Trump administration. So, now, you take these huge numbers of foreign students who have spent years pursuing PhD programs, a lot of them are going to graduate and stay in the United States and become extremely productive members American society, and even if they don't, even if go back to their countries, they're obviously going to have a connection to the United States, and now you take all these people who have put years and years into their studies, and out of nowhere, they're instantly told “Your visa is revoked and you can try to get into another school, we'll extend your visa then, but if you don't, Harvard doesn't have any more student visas. We're revoking them all, and we're banning Harvard from accepting any foreign students in the future”. 

This is basically on the verge of destroying Harvard, notwithstanding their $50 billion endowment. As Lee said, this $50 billion endowment almost makes them like a hedge fund. So, I don't have sympathy for Harvard, but it is true that denying them all federal money, destroying and forcing them to dismantle all research programs, and then disallowing any international students will absolutely cripple this institution that has for 500 years been the pinnacle of American greatness, a symbol of it, and a crucial tool in soft power. 

It's just yet another way that this government got into power and decided that one of its goals, if not its number one goal, was to punish anybody who was criticizing Israel. I think it's incredibly dangerous. What we've done is we basically turned the United States into a country where a requirement to enter, to study, or to work is that you love Israel and worship Israel, or that you at least agree that you were framed from ever criticizing it. We're just sacrificing so much of our national interest for this foreign country. 

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Question #2. It’s from @Kurt_Malone, who asked the following:

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This has been a controversy taking place among various journalists. I've certainly talked a lot before about how many of the people who have very lucratively branded themselves as free speech champions over the last several years, but who are really just Israel loyalists, who are doing this to attack college campuses and now have turned around.

Now you’re looking at this massive First Amendment attack in the name of stopping Israel criticism and they either barely care, barely mention it, occasionally mutter some mild opposition to say they have done it, they did or oftentimes, even support it.

Bari Weiss, yesterday, in response to the murder of the two Israeli embassy staffers, basically said anyone who's been attacking Israel or denouncing it in harsh ways, or its supporters, has blood on their hands. So, there are a lot of people who have built a large audience, mostly conservatives, right-wing people, or MAGA people, by championing free speech because over the past 10 years, conservative speech has been one of the main targets of censorship. And so, these people who are independent media outlets, who rely on subscription money from their viewers, it's a big problem in independent media. I've talked about it before. It's a problem in corporate media as well, that a lot of people don't want to say things that will ever alienate or offend their audience because they know if they do, there's a good chance that they'll lose subscribers, which is how they make their money. 

I've talked about it before, as an independent journalist, I also have that dynamic. After October 7, we lost a lot of subscribers who were pro-Israel and didn't want to hear my critiques of Israel and who still don't. We still lose subscribers over that. But over time, if you actually build yourself and your audience with a look to the long term as somebody who has integrity and you build an audience of people who know that you can't come and expect that you're going to always hear what you want to hear but you're always going to, at least, hear the honest perspective and an argument behind it, then you build an idea of people who respect your integrity and aren't here for validation,  which I would suggest is a much more valuable audience to have. 

So there have been some disputes. One of the people who has been most criticized for this is a friend of mine. So, I'm reluctant to speak specifically about him. You can go see these arguments. I will say, one of the reasons why I think it's so important to me that I have a great distance from the kind of social scene in Washington and New York and politics and media is because it is corrupting, it is difficult. If you end up immersed in a social circle and you end being friends with all these politicians who you're supposed to be adversarial to, or other journalists whom you're supposed to criticize because there is a sort of ethical, I think, valid principle, that if somebody is really your friend, I don't mean acquaintance, I don't mean somebody who you say hi to occasionally, but somebody who's really a friend is doing something you disagree with, to turn around and denounce them publicly. It's a real conflict in principles between, on the one hand, you want to hold people accountable and critique them when they deserve it, but on the other hand, like turning around and just publicly denouncing a friend is hard. 

So for the most part, that's why I avoid that social circle. I see it all the time. You see Jake Tapper in this book with all these journalists going around and talking about how they've known these Biden White House officials forever. And so, when they said there's nothing wrong with Biden, they didn't think they were being lied to; they believed them. They didn't want to criticize these people. That's what being friends can do to journalists or to, and I think it's a major reason why Washington is so corrupt, media and politics. They all live in the same neighborhoods and they all socialize with each other. They're all intermarried, the media and the political class. And so, they're anything but adversarial to each other, but I will say there's this idea that some of the people are saying, “Look, I don't want to comment on Israel and Palestine because I don't know enough about it, it's too complicated, it is just not an issue I want to talk about.” And then there's a resulting critique. No, the reason you don't want to talk about it is because you don’t want to defend Israel or the censorship being implemented in the United States in its name. After all, you would be obviously betraying everything you ever said you believed in. But you also don't want to denounce it because you have a lot of people who support Donald Trump or Israel in your audience and you're afraid of alienating them and losing money from saying what it is that you believe. 

So, let me just say, quickly, a few things about this because it is a growing controversy. One is that I actually am somebody who has always tried to, who strongly believes in the idea that there's nobody who can be an expert in everything. There's no person who has expert-level or specialized knowledge in every debate. 

It's always been so important to me never to report on, comment on, or analyze topics that I don't actually understand better than just the ordinary person who's not paying much attention. I've always only covered a handful of issues at one time that I believe I have some kind of specialized knowledge or expertise in, or some unique perspective that's informed, so that I can basically place a claim on the audience's time if I want to write about something or talk about something. I do agree that if there's something you don't understand well, if there is something that you haven't covered, it's best just not to talk about it. 

That said, once there's an issue that becomes so significant, maybe tariffs is an example, which is something that Trump's tariff policy was something I ordinarily would not talk about since I'm the last person who can give you a good microeconomic assessment of tariffs and the like. But I can talk about other aspects related to it. I can have people on my show that I've talked to, that I asked about, because some issues are just too big to ignore. And the war in Israel, especially if you're an American citizen whose government is paying for that war and arming that war, given that world organizations have called this a genocide, people have said this is the worst war in their lifetime that they've ever seen, even an Israeli former Prime Minister came out and said today that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, two million people being starved to death. Our government is paying for it, at the same time, there are major implications in the United States, on Americans and our basic constitutional rights. It's just not an issue that I think you can just say, “Yeah, I don't understand that. I think I'm going to avoid that.” I'm not saying you have to cover it every day, I'm saying you have super didactic opinions about it, but I think it's kind of an abdication of your responsibility if you have influence on a platform to just refuse to talk about the most significant issues that the entire world is discussing, especially when they directly affect the causes that you have claimed you're most invested in. 

Again, I think there are a lot of people in the sort of what had been called the international dark web, as they self-glorifyingly named themselves, who pretended to be free speech advocates, who have now abandoned that because the real loyalty was to Israel. And then some people just haven't really spoken much about it because audience capture is very real in independent media. It's not like you're either super noble and you don't care about it, or you're just integrity-free, greedy money, sucking pig. There are a lot of nuances, and there's a big spectrum between those two things. But I do think it's very important if you're going to have any credibility that you do everything possible to ensure that you never have a fear of your own audience and that you have this view that it's better to lose some audience and subscribers short-term or maybe even long-term that you won't replace, especially if you're somebody who's built a big platform and making a very good living doing this, than it is to just have the goal to build the biggest audience possible by avoiding ever telling them anything that might make them at all upset.

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 Question #3 is from @teardrinker who says:

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So, just for those of you who didn't see it, there's this big controversy in Brazil, actually a major epidemic in Brazil. Brazil, under this very unpopular president, in 2017, legalized gambling basically overnight. As a result, all these apps popped up to allow people to put their money into these accounts and then start betting on sporting events or all sorts of things online, playing casino games. Huge numbers of people, millions of people, Brazil's a country with a huge economic inequality, have become addicted to gambling, to these apps on their phones. The minute they get government assistance that is supposed to feed their family, or their paycheck, they transfer the whole thing into their gambling account. They've been told that it's a way to get rich, to escape poverty. And you have people massively in debt, losing everything, destroying their families over this gambling addiction. 

A major reason why is that you have these Instagram influencers who have tens of millions of followers who show people their super glamorous, luxurious lifestyle. These betting companies are paying these influencers to tell their young audience, their poor audience, “Oh, you should go bet. Use this betting app. You can make so much money.” And they show videos of the influencers betting and making money that are often fake. And not only do these influencers get millions of dollars to lead their poor and young audience into betting but they get percentages of whatever losses their audience has, which is profit for the betting app. And we showed you a part of an investigation that the Brazilian Senate is doing on this. 

And so, here's this question:

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Okay, it's so interesting because I have always taken a very libertarian approach to all of these issues. My general philosophy is that if you are an adult, you have the absolute right to consent to whatever behavior you want to engage in, as long as it's not directly harming somebody else. And by that, I mean like punching somebody or attacking somebody violently. I don't mean like blowing your money on some stupid, ill-advised shopping spree and then harming your family because now they can't pay their bills. I mean, direct harm. 

I believe that about pretty much everything. What drugs people take, what alcohol they consume, whether they gamble, whether what kind of sex they engage in with other adults consensually, my view of that has always been very strongly this libertarian view that adults should be able to make whatever choices they want that involve consent, and it's nobody's business to stop them. You can have public campaigns about the dangers of alcoholism or drug addiction. I'm all for that, so you give people information, but I don't believe in intervening, and I think they are responsible for the choices that they make. 

I have begun to rethink and retreat from that absolute libertarian view of people's choices a bit. I'll explain why. We're really entering a dystopian society, and we've had this for a long time, a dystopian world, where there are parts of the world that are extremely affluent and that most of the world is incomprehensibly poor. And you have things now, like for example, we talked about this before, we'll probably do some reporting on it because I want to learn more about it, but you have these affluent Europeans, I'm sure Americans as well, who need a kidney transplant and there's nobody who's compatible, who will give them a kidney. So they're traveling to countries in West Africa that people are barely at a subsistence level. And they're paying them $20,000, $30,000 and $40,000 to donate a kidney. I mean, is that something that we really should say is nobody's business? You have two adults in a transaction, one selling their organ to the other so that they can feed their children. Or is there something like incredibly exploitative about that to the point where it's very hard to say that that's actually consensual? 

I've been thinking the same thing about surrogacy arrangements. You have very wealthy couples. Most of them, by the way, are not gay couples; most of them are straight couples, contrary to belief, overwhelmingly straight couples, although the number of gay couples doing it as well has increased. And they want a baby. They can't produce a baby for whatever reason. Gay couples can't procreate. A lot of straight couples can’t either. Sometimes they don't want to, the woman doesn't want to carry a baby. 

So, they find a woman who needs $30,000, $50,000, whatever, $100,000 to carry their baby with an agreement that the minute that baby is born, the biological mother just hands over the baby, has no rights to it. Probably, if you asked me 10, 15 years ago, I would have said, “Yeah, that's their own choice. Who is the state, or anyone, to intervene in that transaction?” 

I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of women who do that are not very, very harmed psychologically. And again, as people get richer and the rich-poor gap increases, these kinds of transactions are going to become more and more complex. What about couples in the West who can't procreate and want to adopt but don't want to go through the adoption process? And so, they go to Africa, or they go to Asia, to extremely poor countries, and they pay some family. They say, “Hey, I see you have a healthy three-month-old infant, or a six-month infant, or a two-year-old, we want one of those. If we pay you $100,000, can we take your kid?” I mean, that's the same thing, right? That's very consensual, it's transactional, but is anyone going to say they have no qualms about that? 

I think sometimes Americans have problems understanding what poverty around the world is if you haven't lived in a country where it exists. What's considered poor in the United States, I mean, now it's become a little more severe, but what is considered poverty in the United States is nothing like what is considered poverty in most places in the world. There may be people who don't have access to clean water, don't have access to healthcare, don't have access to anything. And the internet is everywhere, and people are influenced. That's why they're called influencers. 

That's the same with gambling. So, I'm not saying that people who end up gambling and losing everything and destroying their lives and the lives of their family have no responsibility. Of course, they have some. Nobody forced them to do it. I've stopped thinking that all these things have this kind of pure, beautiful, consensual character to them because I have trouble seeing that as purely consensual. And again, I'm not saying it should be banned. I'm not even saying necessarily that I think it's the role of the state to stop it, but it doesn't make it so that it's perfectly fine either. Yeah, this is something I've been reconsidering. I think there's a lot of pressure for exploitation. 

As for this word “gaslighting,” I just, in general, hate new words that pop up and become part of the ethos. And especially gaslight was used mostly by a kind of MeToo movement. It was part of that MeToo lexicon where I think the excesses of Me Too have been well-documented. I oppose them from the beginning. I hate mob justice. I hate the idea that accusations should be treated as true with no evidence. I don't trust any human being, man, woman, anybody, with that level of power to say, “Oh, your accusations, they have to be inherently believed.” And that's where gaslighting came, a very, kind of vague accusation that people began making against their husbands or their boyfriends to claim that their relationship was, quote-unquote, “toxic.” I understand what it means. 

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Next question, @kkotwas asked:

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 It's funny, I was going to ask Lee a very similar question. I think that there has been a drastic, visible, palpable, documentable, severe turn in public opinion both in the United States and globally toward Israel. Israelis are talking about how they're becoming a “pariah state.” The level of dehumanization and cruelty and suffering and killing that Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians for 17 months, as we've all watched it live every day and that they're saying they're going to continue to perpetrate basically until these people are in concentration camps, driven out of their land – and imagine the level of violence that's going to cause. They are announcing that they are entering Gaza. They're going to take to it all, they're going to bomb whatever's left, they're going to force Palestinians to leave, the ones who don't are going to be in concentration camps, a little walled-off, fenced-off areas that they get to stay in, surrounded by the IDF. These are concentration camps. 

It has turned the world against Israel in ways never previously seen since the creation of Israel in 1948. And they know that, polling data shows it. You see countries that have been among the most vocal Israeli supporters and allies for a variety of political reasons, like Canada, the U.K. and France, jointly issuing a statement, vehemently condemning Israel, not merely a mouth condemnation. Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant have been officially indicted by the International Criminal Court as war criminals. They have to avoid certain countries. IDF soldiers are afraid to go to various countries. There are projects to make sure they get arrested or chased out of the country, which happened in Brazil. We actually interviewed the head of one of the groups that tracks IDF soldiers who participated in crimes in Gaza, because all these countries are signatories to various conventions that forced them to arrest people on their soil who have committed war crimes. One almost got arrested in Brazil, he got snuck out at the last second. 

And then Israeli tourists as well are being met with all sorts of hostility and I think that's why there have been these desperate attempts to censor Israel criticism, to criminalize it, to attack these universities over it, to arrest and deport people for criticizing or protesting Israel; these are acts of desperation. 

And yeah, I don't think that the murder of two Israeli staffers, as terrible as it obviously is, and the scope of what's happening in Gaza that's been happening for the last 18 months, that will continue to happen unless it's stopped for the next year or so, or however long, I think it's going to be a speed bump. 

Israel supporters are hoping they can turn it into something much greater, but I don't think it's going to succeed, given how Israelis are still not just destroying all of Gaza and the people in Gaza, but saying some of the most Nazi-like horrific things, including Israeli officials that think we should separate the women and the children and then take all men 13 years over and exterminate them. They're all them saying Gazan babies are enemies, there are no innocent Gazan babies, they grew up to be terrorists. Really sick, sick stuff. They don't think the world is good. I want to say tolerate, but I don't think there's any stopping Israel in the sense that they're an apocalyptic cult, and it would take some political will on the part of the West and the United States, almost like a humanitarian intervention, to really stop it. 

But I think Israel is going to pay a huge price for a long, long time; they have all kinds of internal dissent. Netanyahu is consolidating all sorts of undemocratic power. They were in a civil war before October 7 over the Supreme Court, whether orthodox Israelis have to serve in the military, and they have a lot of internal tension. People are fleeing the country. So no, I do not think these two murders of last night are going to radically change the trajectory of how Israel is perceived. 

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All right, the @farside asks:

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I've been saying this from the beginning. Every time there’s a Supreme Court ruling against the invocation of the AEA, where they're required to give the new process. Now, a Trump-appointed judge and an appellate court have said Trump's not even allowed to invoke the AEA: it's only for wartime. And then you have a bunch of Trump supporters saying, “But what do you mean? We voted for mass deportation. Are we supposed to give trials to 20 million people?” 

I've always turned to emphasize, I think it's now finally being understood, not just for me, but others, that the problem is that you have a deportation system instead of laws. It's very easy. You just deport. You show they're not in the country illegally, you send them back to their home country. The problem is that Trump didn't want to use that. He wanted to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. Something that has only been invoked three times before, during wartime, the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, because it gives Trump immense power, far more power than he has otherwise. 

So, automatically, the president's powers increase in times of war, the deference that courts give a president when there's a wartime emergency automatically increases. So, by declaring war, Trump's already consolidated more power. And then, the Alien Enemies Act gives him almost unfettered power to do anything to people he declares to be an alien enemy. He can just put them in camps. 

Remember, he sent them to Guantanamo and that's the policy that FDR invoked to put Japanese Americans in camps. You don't have to send them back to their home country. That way, you can just send them to El Salvador, a country they've never been to and have nothing to do with, and put them into prison. And you can send them to Libya. You can send them to South Sudan, which the Trump administration is now talking about doing and in the process of doing. The Trump Administration came in wanting to ensure, and I think understandably in a way, because Trump’s first term was basically characterized by constant subversion of the president's authority. Trump was boxed in all the time, he was sabotaged, and they were determined to not allow that to happen by this big bureaucracy, by the deep state, by the administrative state. And so, they came in determined to have a plan to allow Trump to do whatever he wanted with no constraints. The Alien Enemies Act was part of that.

The problem is that it is a very severe law, only intended for wartime. And even then, as the Supreme Court said, 9-0, when it said they're all entitled to habeas hearings before being removed under the AEA, even people suspected of being Nazi sympathizers, Nazi operatives inside the United States were given a hearing before they were detained or deported. All these legal controversies around deportation are not about deportation itself; they're about the AEA, which Trump invoked, because of the extraordinary powers that it gives him. 

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All right, I think this is the last question. It's from @65wakai:

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Yeah, that's a very complex question to answer in a short period. It all depends on how long people have been there. I mean, there's obviously an indigenous population in the United States that American settlers and colonialists went to war with, massacred, and now they have rights recognized by the United States, including their own sovereignty inside reservations. There are indigenous people in Brazil who came way before Portuguese colonization. Primarily in the Amazon, there are tribes that are still undisturbed, unconnected to the world. It's a little hard to say that they don't have rights to Brazil, where they've been for who knows how long. Same with Africa. 

If you're talking about Israel and Palestine, I think the problem there is that it's not really a claim that, “Oh, my people have a right to this land.” It's really that “God gave my people this land,” it's not, “Oh, we've been here for a long time, therefore, we should have it,” it's that “God said this is ours.” 

I do not think that theological claims about what God wants and who God wants to be in certain places are a valid claim for that land. We have a geopolitical system of solving diplomatic conflicts, which the world recognizes, and the Israelis are lucky, because for a long time, it didn't look like this. Would Israel, with certain borders, the 1967 borders, with the West Bank and Gaza belonging to the Palestinians and most Israelis who now want to steal the West Bank in Gaza and act against all international law and take it for only Jews, are doing so because they believe that God has bestowed them that. And I think that's a much different question. It's one of the things that bothers me about Zionism as an ideology: it inherently depends upon a Jewish supremacy that, at least within Israel, Jews will always be supreme and I don't think that it's an ideology that leads to anything good.

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