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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Prof. John Mearsheimer on U.S.-Israel War with Iran, Gaza, Trump's Foreign Policy, and More
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The past ten days were filled with extremely weighty and consequential events in foreign policy, obviously beginning, of course, with Israel's attack on Iran and then Donald Trump's decision to bomb that country's nuclear facilities. Though that was ended relatively quickly – at least it seems so, and one certainly hopes – the fallout is likely to be vast and will unfold over the next many months. 

The understandable focus on that war in Iran has also served to obscure other perhaps equally significant events, including the still-worsening Israeli destruction of Gaza, the economic and political fallout from this war, the one we just had in Iran, the prospect of future regional conflict there, the ongoing war in Ukraine – remember that? – that's still going on, and also, what we learned from all of these events about Trump's foreign policy. 

Given the importance, but also the complexities, of those developments, we are thrilled to have one of the most knowledgeable and clear-thinking voices anywhere in our political discourse. He is Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer.

 Professor Mearsheimer doesn't need any introduction, especially for our viewers, who have seen him on this show many times over the past several years and is one of our most popular and certainly one of our most enlightening guests. He's the author of the genuinely groundbreaking 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” as well as the highly influential 2014 article in the Journal of Foreign Affairs entitled: "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault.” 

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Why Did Zohran Win in NYC? Plus: Gaza Pulitzer Prize Winner Mosab Abu Toha on the Latest Atrocities
System Update #476

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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In fact, many on the right appear to think that Zohran, who's a leftist Muslim from Uganda, is some sort of unholy love child of Osama bin Laden and Josef Stalin. Establishment Democrats believe, as they did for Bernie's campaign in 2016 and the AOC's win in 2018, in her emergence as a leader of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, that their future as a party will be destroyed by having a young candidate energize huge amounts of young voters, including young male voters with an anti-establishment and economic populist agenda of the range of views that are absolutely hated by their big donors, who demand they adhere to corporatism, the kind of corporatist that most Americans on both sides of the aisle have come to hate. 

First, we will talk to Mosab Abu Toha, who is a Palestinian writer, poet and scholar from Gaza. He lived in Gaza with his family on October 7, after which the massive Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip began. His daughter is an American citizen, which enabled him and his wife to flee to Egypt with their daughter in December, but along the way, he was detained and disappeared by the IDF and was released only under significant international pressure. 

He wrote a series of essays for The New Yorker on the suffering and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, the awarding of which, needless to say, generated outrage and protest. The war in Iran has really served to obscure and hide the still-worsening crimes in Gaza over the last couple of weeks. We think it's very important to talk with someone as informed as he is about the latest Israeli atrocities and what has been happening in Gaza. 

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The Interview: Mosab Abu Toha

As we just noted, Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian writer, he's a poet, a scholar, and has worked hard on various libraries in Gaza as well. He was in Gaza when Israel began its massive assault after the October 7 attack, and he was able to flee with his wife and young daughter, who is an American citizen, though just barely. He was there for about two months when he was about to flee. He is now a Pulitzer Prize winner as a result of a series of essays he wrote last year in The New Yorker that chronicle and powerfully express the extreme human suffering of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and we are delighted to have him with us tonight to understand what has been happening there. 

G. Greenwald: Mosab, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Of course, it is my great pleasure. Thank you so much, Glenn, for having me. 

G. Greenwald: I wish we were meeting under better circumstances, I wish we had something less depressing and horrific to talk about, but the world is what it is. So, I just want to get a little bit of understanding from you since one of the things that you do is convey thoughts and emotions in words as a poet, as a writer, obviously, a now widely recognized one. 

As somebody who's lived in Gaza, it's not new to you to be bombed by the Israelis. Israel has been bombing Gaza, killing civilians over many, many years, but I think it was very obvious for a variety of reasons, not just October 7, but the composition of the current Israeli government, the obvious support the world was going to give them, that this is going to be far worse and quickly it turned out to be. So, you went to Gaza for about two months before you were able to get out. What were those two months like for you and your family? 

Mosab Abu Toha: First of all, it is important to note that I was born in a refugee camp. My parents were born themselves in refugee camps. My grandparents on both sides were expelled from Yaffa in 1948. So, I lived in Gaza all my life and I was a witness and a survivor of so many Israeli assaults. I was wounded in one of the airstrikes in 2008-2009. I survived by chance and I still have the wounds in my body: in my neck, in my forehead, in my cheeks and on my shoulder. So, surviving the genocide in Gaza was not the first time I survived the Israeli aggression. In fact, I was in the United States between 2022-2023. I returned to Gaza in 2023 after I finished my MFA from Syracuse University and I then traveled to the United States again for a literary festival, Palestine Writes, held at UPenn in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. And I returned to Gaza 10 days before October 7 and I resumed my work as a teacher in Gaza. 

G. Greenwald: Can I just interrupt you there, because that literary festival that you're referring to shortly before October 7, as I recall, there was a gigantic movement, this was before October 7, to have that canceled simply because people like you and other Palestinians were participating and speaking critically of Israel. Can you just talk a little bit about that? Then I want to get back to what the experience was in Gaza. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah. I would like to say, Glenn, that the criticism that I or other people are critical of Israel is not true. We are not critical of Israel. All we are doing is exposing the crimes that Israel has been committing, whether it's in the Gaza Strip or in the West Bank. So, I don't care if it was a different country, if it were a different people, I would still do the same thing, because this is happening to me and to my people, to my parents, to my children, and also to my grandchildren. So, it is not that people in Palestine or Palestinians or even pro-Palestinian people who care about human rights, it's not that they are critical of Israel or whatever you call it. It's that people are talking and advocating on behalf of the people who have been living under occupation for 77 years and this is perceived as a crime when you talk about crimes that are committed by a state that has been created in 1948 and that's been funded by, unfortunately, Western countries and also the United States until today, even as they are committing an ongoing genocide. 

So, it is shameful that some of the participants in the festival were canceled or not permitted to be on campus at the University of Pennsylvania in September 2023. But here we are, in 2025, Palestinian people, Palestinian writers and Palestinian journalists have been the main target of the Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian activists and pro-Palestinian activists have been canceled from so many places, even artists, even singers. They were canceled from big events because of what they say about the Palestinian people and their right to exist and to exist with dignity. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, we covered so many censorship-based reactions to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, but I just thought it was important to remember that that's been happening in the United States well before October 7, and in fact, just a week or two before, at one of our great universities, the University of Pennsylvania, where apparently just the mere presence of Palestinian voices in the view of a lot of people justify trying to get the entire event canceled and ended up getting some of the people banned. 

All right, so you went back to Gaza after that event and shortly thereafter, the October 7 attack happened, then followed by this massive Israeli air assault on Gaza, unlike, I think, anything that has happened in Gaza for a long time, despite how terrible and fatal so many of the other ones were. Just in your own words, what was that like, just to be constantly surrounded by death, by the risk of death, by the fear that you would go to bed and not wake up? How did you navigate that? 

Mosab Abu Toha: So, it is important, Glenn, to note that Palestinians in Gaza have been massacred by the Israeli forces, the Israeli army, without – I mean, I was 31 years old when I left Gaza for the last time, I've never, before October 7, in my life, seen an Israeli soldier. Israel was bombing us from the sky, Israel was firing at us from gunboats and warships in the sea, in our sea, just seven or eight nautical miles off our shore. They were shooting at us, they were killing us, they were dropping bombs on us without us seeing. I've never seen an Israeli, not even one Israeli soldier, never seen any Israeli soldier or Israeli civilian, in my life. So, we have been killed, we have been abducted, we have been injured, our houses have been destroyed on top of our families, without us seeing who these people are, who have been killing us without us seeing. 

I mean, they see us from a screen. They see us as dots, black and white dots moving on the ground or maybe structures on the ground. Lately, they have been filming us through their drones, people who are trying to get aid. There are so many videos of people who try to go back to their homes to collect food and then there is footage of an Israeli drone missile hitting them and killing them. 

So, I lived in Gaza all my life and I've never seen an Israeli soldier. I was wounded and I don't know whether that soldier knew or whether that Israeli pilot who dropped the bomb in 2009 knew that they killed seven people in that airstrike and they wounded a 16-year-old child who became a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. 

So, when Israel attacked Gaza, it was not only a military attack. Israel did not only drop bombs, they did not fire bullets at people, unarmed people, but they also shut off electricity, shut off water, shut off food trucks. They control everything, right? So, it's not like Israel just attacked Gaza militarily. No, they blocked everything, even as we are talking, people do not have, not only enough food, because we always talk about the lack of food, the lack of water, the lack of shelter, but there is a lack of medicine. 

One of the relatives of my brother-in-law who was wounded in a strike that killed his brother 20 days ago, and I wrote about him in my last piece in the New Yorker, he was at the hospital, at al-Shifa hospital, and the shrapnel covered his body, and his arms and his body was wrapped in gauze, and he complained to the doctors that he has some pain in his body. And do you know what they gave him? They gave him something like Tylenol, something that you take when you have a headache. There's no medicine in Gaza. And even though there is no healthy food – the kind of food that is entering Gaza is canned food: canned beans, canned peas, sugar and frying oil. There is no fresh food, not only for people to grow normally, but even for those, the dozens of thousands of Palestinians who were injured. There is no healthy food. Fresh food like vegetables, fruit and meat, for them to heal. 

So, people in Gaza are dying several, times and if you allow me I mean because now as we are talking, today in Gaza, it's 2:20 a.m., it's Thursday today, June 26, as we are talking, just in the past hour, Israel bombed a tent in Khan Yunis, killing five people. And before that, yesterday, they killed 101 people all over the Gaza Strip. Of these people, there was a whole family, the Al-Dahdouh family. I wrote their names on my social media, I mean, we don't get to know the names of these people who are killed. The father is named Salah al-Dahdouh, his wife is Salwa al-Dahdouh, their children are Ahmad, son, Abdallah, son, Mostafa, son, and Alaa, his daughter. The brother of the father was killed, and then there was a nephew. So, the Israel attack on Gaza is not by killing them, but even by bombing the internet, bombing the electricity, not allowing people even to report. So, there is difficulty in reporting, not only by not allowing journalists, international journalists, to go to Gaza, but they are also bombing every means that Palestinians can use to report on their miseries and their suffering and their demise. 

So, that's why it is very important to talk about what's happening in Gaza and also in Palestine every day. Israel is killing people in Gaza and Palestine every day. That's why every day we have to speak, to talk, about Palestine. 

G. Greenwald: There's a lot, obviously, we could talk about; we cover a lot of the atrocities pretty much on a daily basis, or close to it, on this show. I do want to get, to that as well, just some of the more recent things that have been happening that, as I said, have been even more covered up than usual, not just by the lack of media in Gaza, international media, and the lack internet, but also by so much attention paid to what was happening in Iran.

I had John Mearsheimer on my show yesterday and we were both talking about how is it that the world can watch what's going on in Gaza, even to the extent that we get to see it, how is it the West, that's paying for it, that's enabling it, can watch what's happening? It's just no one seems to mind, nobody seems to care, nobody seems to be bothered by it, it just kind of goes on, no one is even close to stopping it. 

We just saw Trump order Netanyahu to turn the planes around from Iran, which obviously Biden could have done, Trump could have done at any time, and they just won't. I'm trying to figure out, like, how can this be? 

I think one of the ways that that happens is the language of dehumanization. So, I think a lot of Americans have this perception of what Gaza is, what Palestine is, radically different than the reality. I was interested in the work that you've done in creating libraries in Gaza. You're obviously very well-spoken. You just won a Pulitzer Prize for your writing in English. I've had Gazans on my show before who are very similarly highly educated, well-spoken. 

There is a whole network – there were at least – of Gazan universities and advanced centers of learning that are all now destroyed. Gaza had one of the highest literacy rates in the world before October 7. Some of the best doctors, respected all around the world as specialists in their field. Can you talk about what Gazan society and Gazan culture are like and how it has been just so completely destroyed in the last 20 months? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Sure, yeah, I mean, before I answer your question, I would like to highlight the fact that, for two years now, not a single student in Gaza has gone to school. The schools have become shelters, as we are talking. Just half an hour, at the same time that Israel bombed a tent in Khan Yunis, Israel bombed a classroom on the third floor of a school called Amr Ibn al-Aas in Sheikh Radwan, in Gaza City, and two or three people were reported to be killed. 

So, two years, no schools. So anyone who was five years old when Israel attacked Gaza on October 7 hasn't gone to school for two years. So, if my children were to be there at the moment, my five-year-old would have missed his first and second grades. For two years, students have missed their high school diploma tests. So, people in Gaza are missing not only their lives, but even those who survive are missing a lot in their own lives. 

The Gaza Strip lies on the beach of the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza is rich in its plants and trees. One of the best places in Gaza is a city or town called Beit Lahia and it's very, very famous for the strawberry farms. My father-in-law is a strawberry farmer and they also used to plant corn, onion, watermelon, oranges, and they used to even, I mean, when it is allowed, to export some of the strawberries to the West Bank. But I think Gaza is very beautiful, even though it has been under occupation since 1948 and it's been under siege since 2007. 

Israel controls how much food gets into Gaza, how many hours of electricity is available in Gaza, how much medicine is allowed to enter Gaza, what kind of equipment, medical equipment get into Gaza, how many books get into because when I was trying to build the Edward Said Public Library, two branches in 2017 and 2019 – and unfortunately Israel destroyed the two libraries just like they destroyed all the universities in Gaza – Israel was in control of the entry of these books into Gaza. Sometimes the books would be delayed by months. It usually takes eight weeks for any books or packages to enter Gaza. So, Israel was controlling every single aspect of our lives in Gaza, despite that, we managed to make Gaza as beautiful as we could. 

This campaign of destroying Gaza is nonstop. Israel has been blowing up the houses in Bethlehem: 70%, this is an old statistic, 70% of Gaza has been either destroyed or damaged by not only Israeli airstrikes, while people are sleeping, but even the houses that people had to live in because Israel announced them to be a combat zone. Israel has been systematically blowing these houses up, and there are so many videos of Israeli soldiers documenting the blowing up of neighborhoods and of schools, of their bulldozers destroying a hospital in north Gaza just next to the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahia. 

Israel has systematically been destroying everything in Gaza. So, the question is not about when there will be a cease-fire in Gaza, although the cease-fire is just the beginning of a bigger change in Palestine. The question is, even after the cease-fire, Israel is trying to make it impossible for people to live again. So, let's say there is a cease-fire today. There are no schools in Gaza; 70% of the population in Gaza do not have homes, they are living in tents. Even though they are living in tents, including some of my family members, these tents get bombed. 

Just a few days ago, Glenn, my neighbor was killed in an airstrike when Israel hit a group of people walking next to it. She was inside her tent. These tents are pulled up on the street. So, she was killed while she was inside her tent. Her mother is still critically wounded, and all her brothers were wounded. So, Israel continues to destroy, to decimate as much of Gaza as possible, and there is a systematic destruction of the refugee camps in Gaza. Something that I wrote about in one of my pieces in The New Yorker is that Israel is not only destroying Gaza, the cities, the villages and the towns, but they are also destroying refugee camps. 

The refugee camps after 1948 were groups of tents here and there. Their refugee status continued for years and years, then people started to build rooms from concrete, and, over the years, they started to build multistory buildings. So, the refugee camp changed into a small city. 

So, Israel currently destroyed most, I mean, much of the Jabalia refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in Gaza. So, these are people, now, who lived in the refugee camp or people who were born in refugee camps like me and now are living in tents on the street, and maybe sheltering in a school, in a hospital, these people now are dreaming of returning to the refugee camps. So, this is the fault of the world. 

This is the fault of the word because they left the Palestinian people to live in refugee camps, they left them without protection and they not only left them without protection, they continue to support, to fund Israel's genocide, like the United States cut its funding for UNRWA, which has been responsible for the delivery of aid and for the education of so many people, including me. So, this world is not working properly, really. It's very strange for us to be watching this, even 20 months after the start of the genocide and for me to watch it from here, from the United States. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, it's got to be almost impossible.

I know I don't need to tell you, but for people who are watching, I mean, the control of Gaza by the Israelis – including it probably intensified since they removed troops, which they had there in 2005 – the control that continued was so great that the Israelis had phrases like really macabre, horrific, dark phrases like mowing the lawn, which meant let's just go in and kill some Palestinians or let's put the Palestinians on a diet when they would cut back the amount of food that they allowed in into Gaza. This has been the mentality going on for a long time. 

I want to just to ask you something: we talk a lot about the number of people in Gaza who have been slaughtered since October 7, the Israelis are now open about the fact that they want to make Gaza uninhabitable to force people to leave, to kill them until they leave, to destroy civilization until they leave. It's at least a policy of ethnic cleansing. One thing that I think about a lot, though, is, for the people who do survive, who are able to survive the genocide, survive this ethnic cleansing, this onslaught, I have to think about, how is it possible that they'd have a future? 

I live in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, which is a city, especially in poorer areas, that has a very high level of violence, drug gangs and the like, very high murder rates and I know some people who grew up there and they talk about, one time when I was seven years old, I saw a dead body on the ground twice, when I was in my teenage years, I saw a gun shootout, and they talk about how psychologically scarring that is for life, like to be exposed to those kinds of horrors even once or twice while you're growing up. And here you have this massive civilian population in Gaza, 50% of them are children, and the last two years, their lives have been nothing but bombing and destruction and murder and fear of death. Just psychologically, how do you think that the people who are there who do survive will be able to overcome that and, at some point, return to a normal semblance of life? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Well, this is a very hard question to answer. It's very obvious that the population that's been trying to survive – I mean, I don't like to say that people live in Gaza. No, people are trying to survive in Gaza because there is a difference between living in Gaza and trying to survive a genocide. 

So, these people, for 20 months, at least, haven't lived a single day without suffering, without looking for food, looking for medicine, looking for water. I mean, Glenn, I was in Gaza for the first two months. I remember walking in the street looking for water to fill a bucket of water for my children and for my wife, to wash the dishes, maybe to have a shower in the school, because there are no services in the school shelters, by the way. 

I remember walking in the city and seeing five-year-old children standing in line to fill a bucket of water for their families, or children maybe 10 years old. I saw some of my students standing in line to get a pack of bread and that was in October and November 2023, that was before Israel tightened its genocide. So, these children, five or seven years old, are no longer children. These children are not practicing childhood. 

This is a very dangerous reality and it should also be a signal that there would be a very dangerous future for these children. So, 50% of the population in Gaza is children. So, the question is for the Americans, for the Europeans who have been funding Israel's genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza and also in the West Bank: what do they expect of these Palestinians once this genocide comes on in? So, what kind of people is the world expecting to see in the future? That's a question that I don't have an answer to, but I'm sure that these people, Palestinian people who have been surviving the genocide in Gaza, will no longer be normal. 

I'm not a scientist, I am not a psychologist, but I think people in the world, especially officials, politicians and decision-makers, should think seriously about this. What kind of people are we going to see after the genocide comes to an end? What kind of people are going to be those who have been living under occupation? I don't have an answer to that, but if you think about it, I think there are many answers. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. A couple more questions: there's this old phrase, it's often attributed to Stalin, I'm not really sure. I don't think anyone is sure if he's really the one who said it. It’s this idea that when one person dies, it is a tragedy, when 1000 people die, it's a statistic. We often talk about, oh, 50,000 people are dead or 100,000 people dead in Gaza, and so often, as you said, the names of the people aren't very well known. We don't talk about them; we don't humanize them. 

One of the people who was killed after October 7 is a friend of yours, Refaat Alareer, who was a very well-known and accomplished poet. He has a book, “If I Must Die,” a poem that was turned into a book after he died, which became a bestseller in the United States and the West, and it's really remarkable. I got a copy, I read it and I really encourage people to do so. 

He was killed in an airstrike in December, so just a couple of months after October 7, and he was killed in his house, along with his sister and several of her children. Then, I guess, I don't know, what is it, five months later, his eldest daughter and her grandson were separately killed in airstrikes on their home as well. It just kind of gives you a sense for the number of families being wiped out. 

He was English speaking, he participated in the American Discourse, and one of the things that happened – I think people have really overlooked this, I want to make sure it's not forgotten and I want to get your views on this: after October 7, as we know, there were all these lies that were told about what was done in Israel, that children were killed in ovens, which obviously invokes the Holocaust by design; that babies were cut out of the wombs of their mothers, none of which ended up being true. Refaat, on Twitter, responding to these kinds of insane lies that were being told, mocked them. 

We have the tweet on October 29 where he said, “With or without baking powder?”, obviously mocking the idea that they were killed in ovens, which turned out to be a complete lie: 

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And Bari Weiss, who obviously has a big platform, immediately seized on that and put a target on his back: 

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An obvious distortion of what he said. The claim that Bari Weiss made that babies were killed in an oven was a complete and total lie disseminated by the Israeli government. And then he went the next day and said:

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Then, about a month later, he was dead at a targeted bombing of his home. Lots of human rights groups believe it was deliberate. Can you reflect on him and his work, but also how you see that killing and Bari Weiss's role in at least spreading these lies, if not helping to target him? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Of course. First of all, Refaat was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Gaza, where I studied, where I did my bachelor's degree. He was someone like a mentor. He was one of the founders of “We Are Not Numbers,” which is a group that is dedicated to mentoring emerging writers in Gaza, in the West Bank and also the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. So, Refaat introduced me to that project in 2014-2015, so, in fact, Refaat was killed in his sister's house in Gaza City. His sister, Asmaa, lived in Gaza City, and he also lived in Gaza City, but he evacuated his house, so Refaat, by the time he entered his sister's house, he was bombed in that apartment. He was killed along with his sister Asmaa and four nephews, along with one of Refaat’s brothers. 

Refaat was known for his satire. Of course, he and me and other Palestinians would never believe that any Palestinian, whether it's Hamas or other people, would burn babies, put people in ovens, or behead babies, I don't know what, I mean, even an evil person wouldn't do that. So, of course, he thought that this was a lie, this is a joke or something, and there is no evidence that that happened.

G. Greenwald: And it was proven to be a lie. He was absolutely right. It did not happen. It was a complete fabrication. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you go back, if you go to Refaat’s social media accounts before October 7, you would see a lot of jokes. So that was one of his jokes, and it was used against him. It's like one of the posts when I say, when I commented about an Israeli hostage, Emily Demary, and I said, how on Earth is this soldier a hostage while other Palestinians, like me, who were abducted from checkpoints, from hospitals, from school shelters, are called prisoners or detainees. 

G. Greenwald: Right, they're putting them in danger without any charges, and they're convicted of nothing, and those are prisoners, and yet people who are active IDF soldiers found in tanks, found in combat, who are taken as prisoners of war, those are all hostages. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah, so that was one of my questions. And then that was used against me, until after I won the Pulitzer. Oh, he is denying his status as a hostage; this is an anti-Semite. She called me a Holocaust denier. So, it's really irritating and it's ridiculous even to call someone like me a Holocaust denier, someone who has never talked about the Holocaust. In fact, I have some of the books that are about the holocaust that I relate to, that I feel very outraged when I read about the experiences of the Jewish people at the hands of Europeans, not Palestinians. 

So, Refaat's tweet, and I remember that post when Bari Weiss posted that, just to get a lot of hate, more hate for Refaat. Refaat was a Palestinian poet, essayist, a fiction writer, an editor of a book called “Gaza Writes Back,” which he published in 2014, an anthology of short stories by some of his students at the University of Gaza and other students from other universities. 

It's been devastating that Refaat was killed in his sister's house and then, a few months later, his daughter Shayma was killed with her baby, whom Refaat himself didn't see because his daughter was still pregnant. So, Shayma was killed with her baby, Abd al-Rahman, and with her husband, an engineer called Mohammed Siyam. And, by the way, Glenn, there is something that people don't know, which is that that poem, If I Must Die, which is the title of that book you referred to, in fact that poem was written in 2011 and that poem was dedicated to his daughter Shayma.

G. Greenwald: The one who died in that airstrike with her infant son. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Exactly. So the poem Refaat re-shared the poem after October 7. So that's how people came to know the poem. So, just imagine, in that poem, he's telling his daughter, if I must die, you should live, to tell my stories, to sell my things, to make a kite, that's the meaning of the poem; if I must die let it bring hope, let it be a tale. And we, truth tellers, writers, poets, journalists, we should write the tale of those whose voices were taken away from them by killing them and their families. So that was his message to his daughter, who unfortunately was killed in an air strike. 

So in that poem, to me, it's very clear that the I and the you were killed. That's why the you must become a collective you, that every one of us, the free people of the world who care about the human beings, especially those who have been living under occupation and siege and apartheid for decades, not for months, not four years, for decades, we should be the voices of these people, especially because we know what's happening or what has been happening. 

G. Greenwald: Yes. Mosab, I know you have time constraints. It was such a pleasure speaking with you. I think your voice is uniquely valuable and important to be heard by as many people as possible. So, we're definitely going to be harassing you to come back on the show. I had a lot more to talk about, but I want to respect your time as well, but super appreciative for you to come on. It's great speaking with you. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. 

G. Greenwald: All right, have a good evening. 

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So, I want to talk about the extraordinary victory – and it was truly extraordinary – last night, in the Democratic Party primary, of Zohran Mamdani, who has really vanquished a political dynasty, the Cuomos. 

However, I just want to note, though, in relation to that last segment, that shortly before we went on air, Donald Trump, I guess, just learned for the first time that Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing extremely serious corruption charges and is on trial for those corruption charges. These are not things like an accounting scheme to cover-up payments to a porn star or anything else like Donald Trump was accused of. This is hardcore, real corruption. It would have probably gotten him out of office a long time ago, had it not been for the various wars that he started. Lots of people believe that's one of the reasons why he needed these wars: to stay in office. 

Right before we were going on air, President Trump put out a quite lengthy and passionate, spirited statement on Truth Social in which he essentially said, “I know that Benjamin Netanyahu is now being called to return to his trial on Monday. This is an outrage.” I read it several times and I'm summarizing it very accurately. He said these trials should be canceled and/or Prime Minister Netanyahu should be completely pardoned. Then he went on to say that he and Bibi Netanyahu just secured a very tough, important victory against what he called Israel's longtime enemy, not the United States’ long-term enemy, but Israel's long-time enemy, Iran. 

He's essentially saying we just together fought a war against Israel's enemy, which is, of course, exactly what that war was and the reason why it was fought. Then he went on through this long, lengthy expression of outrage over the fact that Bibi Netanyahu is facing criminal charges. At the end, he said, the United States just saved Israel, and the United States will also now save Bibi Netanyahu. 

So, Trump himself is describing this war as one against Israel's longtime enemy and that the United States just saved Israel. There are a lot of people who get extremely outraged when you observe that it seems like this is another war for Israel being fought, not for the United States' interest, but for Israel, against Israel's enemy, not the United States’ enemy. Yet, President Trump, apparently, sees it that way as well, based on what he's saying, and instead of focusing on the people that he promised to protect and work for, namely the forgotten American worker, remember he's right now back to trying to interfere in the Israeli court system and the Israeli domestic politics by demanding that his very close friend, Bibi Netanyahu, be pardoned because he fought a good war. I don't really understand the relationship between those two things, but that is what President Trump said. 

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Zohran Mamdani's victory last night is extraordinary for a lot of reasons. Back in February, so I'm not talking about a year ago, I'm talking about four months ago. All the polling showed Andrew Cuomo with his gigantic lead. Obviously, he has massive name recognition, part of a beloved political dynasty. I mean, Mario Cuomo, for those who didn't live through that time in the eighties, was probably the most beloved Democrat in a long time. But then he had these two sons, Andrew and Chris, and Chris ended up parlaying that last name and those connections into being a journalist and his other brother, Andrew, was basically groomed to be the president of the United States from a very young age. He went around with his father everywhere, just the absolute classic nepo baby. And then he got all sorts of positions in Democratic Party politics because of his dad. At a very young age, he was made a cabinet secretary in the Clinton administration. In the early 1990s, he married a Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo. 

The entire thing was being shaped, from the very beginning, to groom Andrew Cuomo as part of this political dynasty based on the nepotistic benefits he got from being Mario Cuomo's son, not just to be governor of New York, but to be the president of the United States. That was absolutely where Cuomo is headed. It was supposedly remembered that liberals turned him into the hero of the COVID crisis saying only he was acting with the level of aggression necessary and all of that came completely crashing down because he had a litany of women who credibly accused him of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and this was a couple of years after Democrats made the Me Too movement. His brother also ended up getting fired from CNN because he was plotting with his brother about how to discredit these female accusers while he was still on CNN. And then it turned out that his greatness on COVID, which was his greatest strength that was going to jettison him to the presidency, ended up being one of his worst disgraces because he kept a bunch of old people locked in nursing homes and a lot of them ended up dying as a result. 

We covered all that before, but suffice to say, nonetheless, four years later, he comes back with much less ambition, already the governor of New York with three terms. He resigned in the middle of his third term, having been groomed to be president. 

Now they kind of convinced him, look, you're 67, the only thing there is for you to do is to run for mayor. He clearly thought it was beneath him, wasn't particularly excited, thought his victory was inevitable, and it looked like it was. Who's going to beat a Cuomo in Democratic Party politics? And not just because they're Cuomo, but he has all the billionaire money behind him. 

 

In February, when I really started paying attention to Zohran's campaign, because I could kind of tell it had the big potential to really take off, I could just tally at a lot of political talent, that he was forming a campaign that can really connect. You don't know for sure, but I noted at the time that it seemed very interesting to me that what he was doing was very different. You can see he had a lot of political talent. It reminded me of AOC, where, say what you want about her now, and I have mostly negative things to say about her, there's no denying that she has a kind of charisma and a political talent as well. 

But anyway, still, I mean, even though I was interested in and could see the potential, I never imagined that he would actually win. I just thought, oh, this is going to be a political star, he's probably going to end up attracting a good number of left-wing voters. But never imagined he would defeat the Cuomo dynasty and all the billionaire money behind it. 

As Zohran started increasing in the polls and then clearly became the main threat to Cuomo, huge amounts of billionaire money, largely afraid, in part about Zohran's democratic socialist policy, kind of a type of democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders and AOC. I know people want to call it communism, which just isn't. But obviously, people on Wall Street hated it, which definitely means things like increasing taxes on the rich, redistributing resources to the working class and poor people. It is that philosophy that people on Wall Street hate, that big billionaires hate. Also, he's a very outspoken critic of Israel, which in New York, with a very large Jewish population, a very large pro-Israel faction that's very powerful, is typically not something you can be. I mean, even the Democrats who won, like Ed Koch and Bill de Blasio, have been typically pro-Israel. That's just a red line for any politician who has ambitions in New York. 

He has said things like he supports a boycott and divestment sanction; he's talked about globalizing the intifada. Interestingly, unlike people who, when they run for office, have their past quotes dug up and are confronted with them and they repudiate them immediately, like Kamala Harris reputed everything she said she believed when running for president in the Democratic primary in 2019 and they brought it all to her when she was running in the general election. 

Mamdani did not do any of that. He was asked, “Do you still support the globalizing intifada instead of running away from it?” And he said, “Yeah, I do, but I think it's often distorted. It doesn't mean anything more than a struggle, a resistance, not blowing people up.” He supports boycotting Israel; he didn't repudiate that. He was asked whether, given Benjamin Netanyahu's indictment and the warrants for his arrest issued by the ICC, he would have him arrested if he came to New York, and he said he would. So, obviously, a lot of billionaires like Bill Ackman, whose primary loyalty is to Israel, were desperate to make sure Mamdani didn't win. 

I promise you, Bill Ackman does not care about zoning laws or the efficiency of services in New York. He has about 10 estates all over the world. To the extent he lives in New York, he lives in a $30 million duplex apartment very high above Manhattan, he chauffeured around in cars and the like. That's not his interest. His interest was in stopping somebody who was critical of Israel, and he put huge amounts of money, as did other billionaires, into packs for Andrew Cuomo that largely just attacked Zohran Mamdani as an anti-Semite, all the rest. And none of it worked, even though usually those things are guaranteed to work in any major democratic race. 

It's very difficult when I watch Democrats trying to convince Americans that Donald Trump was a Hitler-like figure, it's like a vicious dictator who was going to put people in camps. One of the reasons why it was so hard to do that, why it was so obviously destined to fail, was because Trump doesn't read that way. Americans watched him for four years in the presidency and they, even the ones who didn't like him, didn't see him as Hitler. And so, this attempt to try to turn Zohran Mamdani into a raging anti-Semite, I mean, we showed you a few of these tweets throughout the week, just absolutely insane ones from people saying his election would be an existential threat to New York Jews. What is he going to do, like round them up from synagogues and put them in concentration camps, is that what Zohran Mamdani is going to do? 

The reason it doesn't work is that you just listen to the guy for three minutes and you see that he is not anything resembling that. He has a lot of policies, especially culture war ones, with which I'm uncomfortable. His economic policies are ones that obviously a lot of people are going to have problems with, but the idea that he's like Osama bin Laden, or Joseph Stalin, that just doesn't work. If you just listen to who he is, how he speaks, what he says – there has to be some alignment with the smears with the person in order for it to work. 

A lot of liberals have this monolithic view that everybody on the right has the same exact views of everything, there are no divisions, and of course you pay attention to right-wing politics, there are major ideological rifts and divisions and debates. We saw it with the Iran war and many other issues already, H-1B visas, all sorts of things. But a lot of people on the right see the Democratic Party as this monolith as well. They think like Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi are the same, like, AOC or Bernie or Zohran, and it's completely untrue. 

New York City doesn't elect socialists. When they elect Democrats, they elect very established – Ed Koch was a very centrist member of Congress for a long time, very pro-Israel, always at war with the left-wing of the Democratic Party, kind of the classic New York city mayor, very outspoken, loud, kind of charismatic in his own sort of way. And even Bill de Blasio, who was considered more progressive, had very close relations with the large New York City developers, even though Wall Street didn't like Bill de Blasio. 

So, it's hard to overstate what a sea change this is. Even if you think New York City is a cesspool of baffling, it's not. I mean, it is in little places, but a citywide election, that's not who wins in New York. 

Here, just to give you a sense of the funding gap. I'm doing this because I want to underscore to you how improbable this victory is, what a reflection of it it is of a remarkable sea change in how American voters are thinking about politics or thinking about elections, what they respond to, what they don't respond to, not just on the left, but on the right, not in Democratic Party or the Republican Party, but across the spectrum. 

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You have three types of funding: campaign funding directly, matching public funds and then aligned super PACs. Andrew Cuomo had at least $35 million, $35.6 million. In second place, was Zohran with 9.1, almost entirely small donors. So, look at this gap, talking about a gap of $25 million – $25 billion for a city-wide race. And that's why people are describing it as such a major upset.

Now, just so you don't think I'm like hopping on some train once it left the station, pretending that I knew all along, I've watched Zohran for quite a while now, but I'm going to show you the reasons why. Back in February, when he was at less than 1% of the polls, I just wanted to draw people's attention to him, even though nobody was paying attention then, because I could see the kind of campaign he was running. I, for the first time, understood what his political talent was. It's just like a native inborn thing that you either have or you don't. He has it. He's a very effective political speaker, but he just kind of has an energy that people find attractive and appealing. And to be clear, I hate the fact that if you analyze somebody's political appeal in a positive way, people are like, “Oh, you're a cheerleader for him. You must love him.” I went through this with Donald Trump for so many years, I would say liberals don't understand Trump's appeal. He's funny, he is charismatic and exciting and he vessels and channels anti-establishment hatred, which is the driving force of American politics and American political life, and you should understand that about him. 

I can admit that the people I can't stand most, Dick Cheney, are very smart. I can acknowledge that attribute of theirs without liking them. So, what I'm saying here is it's important to understand why's Zohran had this political appeal. It doesn't mean you like him or hate him. It's a completely separate question. 

So back in February, I wrote this:

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So, it was clear to me something was happening there. I'm not suggesting I knew he was going to win. I just knew that there was a lot of potential there, people should pay more attention to him. And so the question is, okay, why did this happen? 

So, I want to show you a video that was probably the first thing that really attracted my attention to him and why I thought he was just a very different kind of Democrat. 

 This is at a time when Joy Reid and MSNBC were telling everybody that Trump won simply because white voters are too racist and misogynist to vote for a black woman, which is a very self-certifying, pleasant narrative to tell yourself. But here's what Zohran did. He went specifically to the neighborhoods in New York City that had the biggest swing from Democratic voters to Trump. They weren't the Upper West Side or the East Side. They were poor neighborhoods, working-class neighborhoods, racially diverse neighborhoods, or even predominantly Black or Latino neighborhoods, immigrant neighborhoods. All he did was go around and ask them why they voted for Trump and the things that they told him clearly shaped what he decided to do when forming his own campaign and the issues that he wanted to emphasize. In other words, he went to speak to the people of New York and asked why they were dissatisfied and then formed a campaign to speak to what their dissatisfactions and desires were. Imagine doing that. He didn't go to consultants or political strategists or whatever; he really just went and talked to voters. 

Listen to what happened. Listen to how he did it, too. 

Video. Zohran Mamdani, X. November 15, 2024.

That's a very good sampling of why a lot of people voted for Trump. The Democrats want to send all our money to wars in Ukraine and Israel, we can't afford things, they only care about the wealthy. 

The things that they care about are obvious, the things that they encounter every day in their lives, the bus fares and the cost of rent and the like. And that's what his entire campaign was structured around. 

A lot of people found tweets of his from 2020 when he was in his mid to late twenties, running for New York assembly right during Black Lives Matter. Tons of left-wing culture war, nonsense, lots of extreme positions. He was positioning himself for a very left-wing seat in the state assembly, stuff like defund the police over and over, queer liberation requires defund of the police. Things that, obviously, if you're running in a citywide election, you're not going to run on. And he didn't. He ran a very economic populist campaign, despite being called a communist or a socialist or whatever. 

I want to show you this clip that I also found incredibly interesting. So, this is one that he did in January, when again, people really weren't paying attention to him and he posted a video with a tweet, and the tweet said: “Chicken over rice now costs $10 or more. It's time to make halal eight bucks again.”

Video. Zohran Mamdani, X. January 13, 2025.

 If you live in New York City, one of the things you see everywhere is street vendors. Lots of people buy food from street vendors, like snacks, pretzels, or all kinds of ethnically diverse food that you can eat from. If you don't have time to sit in a restaurant, you grab something from one of these street vendors and, especially in the more working-class neighborhoods, it's where people eat and people are complaining that the price of that food is increasing. If you're Andrew Cuomo, you don't eat at these; you have no idea about any of this. If you're Bill Ackman, obviously you don’t have any clue. You think that voters are going to vote on the fact that Iran is not pro-Israel enough, voters in New York City, that's what they wake up and care about? Just like the Democrats thought voters were going to wake up and care about Trump having praised a fascist, or fascist or Hitler, or whatever, so removed from their lives, or Ukraine. 

This is what populism is. I saw people today, a lot of conservatives, saying when I called it economic populism, “Oh, socialism is an economic populist.” No, when you appeal to people's life, when you tell them the rich and corporations are running roughshod over you, are preventing you from having a survivable or affordable life, and that's what became his keyword is affordability which obviously a lot of New Yorkers are being driven out of New York City, they can't afford it anymore, things are too expensive. 

So, look at what he did in this video. You tell me if this is like some sort of Stalinist communist, at least in terms of how he ran his campaign. He wanted to understand why chicken over rice, something that people eat every day in New York City, especially in more working-class neighborhoods, and why that food has increased. So he did his analysis, and concluded that the solution was to change a few things.

The laws that he's promoting here, the four laws are number one, better access to business licensing, repeal criminal liability for street vendors, services for vendors, and reform the sitting rules. It's almost like libertarian, like “Oh, there's too much bureaucracy, too many too many rigorous permit requirements, they have to pay someone else as a permit owner $20,000 a year, which obviously affects food prices. 

I mean, on top of the very kind of regular person appeal of that, talking about things that people care about a lot, things that are affecting their lives, talking about solutions to them in a very non-ideological way. There's also a lot of humor in there, a lot of kind of flair, something you want to watch. It's not like a lecture, it's not like an angry rant. You look at this and it's not hard to see why he won. 

Now, let me show you the counterattack, the way they thought the Andrew Cuomos of the world thought they were going to sabotage him. It's an amazing thing.

 This is the New York mayoral debate. There were, I think, seven candidates, eight candidates on the stage, and it was hosted by the local NBC News affiliate. And just listen to this question that they thought was important for people wanting to be New York City mayor to answer and how they all answered, except for Zohran. 

Video. New York Mayoral Debate, NBC News. June 4, 2025.

So, do you see how excited Andrew Cuomo got? He really did base a huge part of his campaign on his loyalty to Israel, his love of Israel, his long-time support for Israel, his father's support for Israel, his family's support for Israel. And you heard those voters who voted for Trump when asked why. Did any of them say, “Oh, I think Democrats are insufficiently pro-Israel?” No, no one said that. These people aren't waking up and thinking, I want to make sure my mayor is going to go to Israel as the very first foreign visit. 

It was supposed to be controversial that he said, “Look, I'm the New York City mayor. That's what I'm running for. Not the Secretary of State. I'm not thinking about foreign trips. I'm actually wanting to represent the people of New York City. I'm going to stay here at home and talk to the people I'm supposed to be working for. Why would I plan my overseas trips and make sure Israel is for?” 

“Oh, a lot of them said Israel. One of them, said, “Oh, the Holy Land, Israel.” So that was supposed to be the kind of thing that they thought was going to sabotage him. They have these old ideas on their heads about what you can and can't do. That's why Trump won, too. He broke all of those rules that people thought were still valid and he proved they weren't. 

Now, just a couple of things here. If you want to win in the Democratic primary in New York City, you can't just rely on left-wing voters. Like DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, AOC-Bernie types, that can give you a certain momentum, a certain energy, but you're not going to win a city-wide race just with those kinds of voters. You have to attract a lot of normie, liberal Democrats. That's who lives in New York City. 

 They're not people who hate Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. These are not them. There are some in places like Brooklyn and Queens, but the majority of Democrats in New York City and most liberal American cities are very normal Democrats. They love the democratic establishment; they love Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer represents New York and has forever. That's who they like. That's what you need to attract: those voters. 

 

They've become convinced that the Democrats has this kind of aged stagnant, listless, slow, uninteresting leadership base. And it's true. It's basically an aristocracy. Obviously, the debacle with Biden underscored that more than anything. They were being told they had to get behind someone who was suffering from dementia. And so, they want this kind of new energy, this exciting energy. That's a big part of it. 

It was kind of a referendum on what Democrats want their party to be. They don't want to be voting for a 67-year-old person of politics for 40 years, who has billionaire money behind him as part of the democratic establishment, who was in the Clinton cabinet, have Bill Clinton kind of come in from wherever he is and be like, yeah, I'm endorsing Andrew Cuomo. That's not appealing to these Democrats anymore. They know that they can't keep going down that road. 

So that's part of it. But I really think a big part of is that the primary division, not just American politics, but politics throughout the democratic world, certainly something we've talked a lot about before, is the difference between someone perceived to be part of the establishment and someone who seems to be an outsider, who hates the establishment. There are a lot of people in the United States, millions, who voted twice for President Obama in 2008, 2012, and then voted for Donald Trump in 2016. That's a reason why Trump won. And people who continue to cling to this archaic, obsolete way of understanding American politics, whether it's about left v. right, conservative v. socialist, whatever, they can't process that. 

In 2016, there were a lot of people who were saying to reporters, my two favorite candidates are Trump and Bernie Sanders. And again, same thing, if you think everything's a right v. left, you'd be like, what are these people? They're crazy? That makes no sense. But when you see that things are about hatred for the establishment, a desire to reject establishment candidates and vote for outsiders who seem anti-establishment, you understand why Obama won against, first, Hillary Clinton, and then, John McCain. 

Zohran Mamdani is obviously an outsider candidate, very unknown, very young, doesn't speak like those other candidates, certainly doesn't speak like Andrew Cuomo, doesn't have billionaire backing, is highly critical on a fundamental level of the political establishment. That's a major reason why he won as well. 

I really believe that one of the things that was like Trump's superpower was, as I said, that he didn't care that the things he was saying were supposedly disqualifying. He wouldn't retract them. I remember in 2015 when he had a pretty sizable lead, people were shocked by it. But they thought, “Oh, it's just early. This is the kind of candidate Republicans flirt with but won't actually vote for. They're going to snap it to line at the end and vote for Jeb Bush.”  

In 2015, he gave an interview that's now notorious where he said, when asked about John McCain, who never liked Trump, and he was asked about his heroism and Trump said, “I don't know that he's so heroic. He crashed a plane and got captured. I prefer soldiers and heroes who don't get captured. I think that's what makes you a winner.” I remember the outpouring of articles over the next few days from all the, like, deans of political reporting or whatever, saying, “OK, that's the end of Trump's campaign. You can't criticize John McCain.” And of course, they went to him, “Do you apologize?” “No, I don't apologize. I meant every word I said.” 

And there were so many things like that. Mocking the New York Times reporter who has cerebral palsy, I believe it was some sort of degenerative disease. Over and over, and his refusal to renounce his own statements, actions, and beliefs made him seem more genuine. Even if people don't like the things he has said, the fact that he's saying, “No, that's what I believe,” is a big political asset. 

The fact Zohran, who has a long history of passionate activism in opposition to Israeli aggression, Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Israeli assaults on Gaza, when he would say things like “Globalize Intifada”, which he did, and he was confronted about that a month before the election, and he's like, “No, I'm not going to withdraw that. People distort what that means. They try to make it seem like it means you believe in terrorists, like killing people with car bombs. It's just a word, intifada, an Arabic word for struggle or resistance, including peaceful struggle and resistance for equal rights for the Palestinians.” 

A lot of people may not like that term, a lot of people don't like that term, but I think the fact that he was not running away from it, not apologizing for it, ran a pretty unique campaign as I'm trying to show you, is also a major reason that he won. I just think, again, populism is nothing more than there's a system over here of powerful people, politically powerful, financially powerful people, they do not have your interest in mind, they don't care about you, they're exploiting you, they're abusing you for their own aggrandizement, their own wealth, their own power and I want to fight them on your behalf. That's what economic populism is. 

Go look at what Josh Hawley does, threatening to vote against Trump's bill because it cuts Medicaid, knowing that a lot of Trump voters, the working-class voters, rely on Medicaid. Something really interesting about Josh Hawley, every week he holds like hearings, and he summons executives of all kinds of industries, the airline industry, the meat industry, bankers, and he just pounds them about hidden fees or, the like. Josh Hawley has said the future of the Republican Party is a multiracial working-class coalition, which requires economic populism. Josh Hawley stood with Bernie to stop the COVID bill from being passed and they were going to give out billions and billions of dollars to big business and he demanded that there be direct payments to all Americans, and they got the bill, they tried to stop bill, and they got $600 direct payment to Americans, that's economic populism. And then it went to Trump and Trump said, $600 is enough, I'm vetoing it, I want $2,000 payments, promising to represent the forgotten person. 

That's what economic populism: not serving Wall Street, not serving bankers, not serving real estate developers, not endorsing establishment dogma, not tying yourself to old, decaying people who've just been around for decades, who interest and excite nobody any longer. That's the goal of American politics. I don't think it matters at all to people if it comes from the right or the left. And the lots of things about Zohran, Marjorie Taylor Greene today posted the Statue of Liberty in a burqa, Ari Fleischer said, “New York Jews, you need to evacuate,” as some kind of nation, as I said before, like Joseph Stalin and Osama bin Laden – you look at him, do you think, is that at all what he reads as, what he codes as, is it what seems a convincing attack on him? 

And so, I think there are a lot of lessons here, not just for the Democratic Party, though, certainly not for what American voters respond to and what they don't. And in this case, the lessons are so powerful, so penetrating, that it drove the unlikeliest of people to crush one of the most powerful political dynasties in America, the Cuomos, backed by every institutional advantage you could want, and very poised to – I'm not saying it's certain, but highly likely to become what a lot of people have long said is the second most important position in American politics – as mayor of New York City. New York City, obviously, is the center of American finance, American wealth, massive tourism, a gigantic city, and so that is an important position. That's not a joke. The fact that a 33-year-old Muslim self-identified democratic socialist was able to win despite that history of statements, I think it's very important to derive a lot of lessons from that. And I think anyone interested in understanding politics, let alone winning elections, would be studying him in a very non-judgmental way. It doesn't matter if you hate him, it doesn't matter if you love him. The lessons ought to be the same. 

 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on War with Iran, Executive Power, the Trump Presidency, and More
System Update #473

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

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

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As you probably know, Friday night is when we try to have our Q&A session. The questions are submitted only by our Locals members. We try to do it every Friday night, but when news events are developing, major news events that we have to discuss – and preparations for a huge war, a huge, dangerous, destructive war, are the kind of thing that we're going to cover and often everything is very fast-moving so, oftentimes, we end up having to cover something on Friday and not being able to do the Q&A we wanted. 

The list of questions is always eclectic. We try to choose a variety of topics, people who haven't asked questions and who have, people who are critical and people who aren't, we always look for good-faith, critical comments and we have a couple of those tonight. So, let me just dive into this. You don't need all the prefacing and the explanations. Most of you are probably very familiar with this arrangement and it's not particularly complicated; it doesn't require a lot of explanation. It's just a Q&A. 

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The first question comes from @wineverett:

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All right. I could not agree more with all of that. I think a major reason for Donald Trump's victories and, by victory I mean starting in 2016 when he was never even remotely considered a candidate or politician and he's gunned down the field of all those professional, highly funded Republican politicians starting with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, all through them, got the nomination and then crushed the Clinton political machine, obviously filled with nothing but political animals, long-term professional career politicians, is precisely for this reason. People understand that both political parties speak a language, live in a world, spend money on things, talk about things, vote on things completely detached from their concerns and their lives and that's why they've lost faith and trust in most institutes of authority because they perceive correctly that people in power who are there to essentially represent them care about everything other than what they care about. It's so incredibly obvious from how these people speak to what they say, and Donald Trump was the first to come along and sort of break all those rules that people have come to hate about how they speak, how they talk, what they talk about, the things you're allowed to say and he was basically a weapon to smash that glass, to smash the system that they were so eager to smash. 

Obviously, Donald Trump is now a politician. There's no denying that. It doesn't mean it's bad, it doesn't mean it’s good, he's been president for four years, spent four more years running for president and is now president again. So, the last 10 years of our political lives have been dominated by the political figure of Donald Trump. It's clearly the Trump era of politics. He's not really an outsider force anymore. He can't be president twice, having run a third time and almost won, just constantly running for president for 10 years, and be a political outsider anymore. 

He's still an outsider in a lot of different ways, compartmentally and the like, but it's not as appealing, I think, as it once was and especially now that we're watching in the first five months of this first term, that was consumed by things like tariffs which was a major promise of the Trump campaign, no doubt but I think people ended up feeling like economically they had been beaten upon and crushed for so long, including by the Biden years, that there was, even Trump admitted, short-term pain, the stock market became unstable, it went down, people's investments and retirements funds became less valuable, small businesses struggled. So, that was already kind of a feeling that, wow, we have Trump again, who promised to help us in the working-class, but instead, we seem to be suffering with this tariff policy that we're being told will have long-term benefits, but for the moment, we don't seem to have them. 

And now, political discourse is being dominated by a potential war with Iran that I just don't think most people have spent the last two years caring about. I used to always say about Russia when Democrats are spending all that time on the evils of Putin and the threats posed by Russia, it's just so obvious there's a huge gap between what Democrats spend all their time talking and warning about and what Americans wake up thinking about. I just know that Americans are not waking up worried about Vladimir Putin and the threat posed by Russia. That's not something they're scared about. They were during the Cold War, when nuclear war was very possible, people were taught to go to shelters, which was very much part of the culture, and there was an existential war between communism and capitalism. There was a lot at stake. But people don't worry about Russia anymore. They don't consider Vladimir Putin one of the leading threats to their well-being, unless you are an MSNBC viewer. And so, there was this gigantic gap between what Democrats were talking about and what people care about. I think that's the reason they ended up losing. 

But now you look at what Republicans have talked about. What has Trump done aside from tariffs? He's gotten in and he resumed a bombing campaign in Yemen against Houthis and unleashed the Israelis again to continue their destruction of Gaza, which the United States is paying for. Started deporting, not people in the United States illegally or who have committed crimes, but people who were guilty of the crime of protesting Israel or speaking out against Israel. I think that's what people were worried about: people in the country legally, PhD students, Fulbright scholars, biologists, chemists, with nothing but a record of achievement, being booted out with a new precedent because they spoke out against Israel. I mean, people were definitely worried about illegal immigration, especially people who are dangerous to their children or their communities. You think they're worried about Harvard and Yale biologists who wrote up ads about Israel? So, a lot of that as well. 

And now we have this war with Iran, which, if you ask, you can get polling answers or polling data about anything the way you want, based on how you ask the question. So, if you say, “Look, Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon, should the United States do nothing, or should it try to do what it can, even if it means military force, to stop Iran from getting a new weapon?” Yeah, we don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But if you say, “Israel has launched a war against Iran, do you think the United States should involve itself militarily in a new foreign war in the Middle East? Overwhelmingly, people say no, and polls are showing both. 

I don't care what the polling data is, if you ask somebody, “Do you want Iran to have nuclear weapons? Yes, or no?” I do not believe that Americans are waking up saying in the morning, “Wow, I couldn't sleep last night because I'm really worried about the prospect that Iran is going to get nuclear weapons.” 

By every account, they don't even have the missile capability to send one to the United States. Even if they could, why would they? North Korea doesn’t. Everyone understands that it's going to be immediate mutual suicide. I just don't think that's what people care about in their lives and polls constantly should have shown that. I don't think people elected Donald Trump to go to war with Iran or to restart the bombing campaign against the Houthis. And that's all they're hearing about now. That's what the Trump administration is focused on, which is not what the American people are focused on. I know this from polling data; I cover politics and we've all seen over time what Americans care about and what they don't care about and when they feel like their interests are ignored and when their interests are not. 

I want to just answer this with a story about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Not really a story so much as kind of my thoughts on Marjorie Taylor Greene. So, I want to be very honest and say that I really like Marjorie Taylor Greene, I have always liked Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think she's a good person. I think that she's sincere and earnest about the things she says and believes. Obviously, Marjorie Taylor Greene has said things over the last many years that I don't agree with, that you can describe as whatever, outside of the realm of what reality is. I think most politicians do. I think Donald Trump running around talking about how Iran's about to get a nuclear weapon and use it or whatever, that's way outside the realm of reality, to say nothing of what was said about the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis. But the reason I like Marjorie Taylor Greene is that she is what a lot of people wanted and were so fond of, so attracted to Trump. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene was never a politician. She didn't run for office, she wasn't like on the city council and then in the state legislature in Georgia and then worked her way up to the Georgia state Senate and was being groomed by the Republican Party to one day run for Congress, like kind of a career politician. That was not Marjorie Taylor Greene. She has a business, the business is prosperous, she's not incredibly rich, but probably upper middle class; she lives on a good upscale Georgia suburb. And she became very politically active with the MAGA movement and America First. It resonated with her just as a citizen and then she got politically involved and probably had some connections and money that helped. 

However, she wasn't part of a political dynasty, nor was her father the governor or anything. She really just did the kind of classic “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” type of political trajectory, where a citizen wakes up and says, I'm starting to get angry and concerned by what my government is doing. I think it's totally on the wrong track, the things they're saying make no sense, and I don't think they're representing our interests. 

She got very inspired by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and took it seriously and she suddenly became a member of Congress. And, yeah, because she's somebody who was not a trained politician, she often was not on script. She's charismatic and she says things that get people riled up and that bring a lot of media attention. That's why there's so much attention on Jasmine Crockett as well, not because she is some important figure in the House Democratic caucus, but because she says that gets people angry and cable news loves that and builds those people with a big platform. That's what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I don't think Marjorie Taylor Greene was ever doing or saying things on purpose to make people angry. I think she was doing and saying things that she really believed in that if you go to her district, I guarantee you, people like her, people who live near her, people who lived in her district, which is why they voted for her and keep re-electing her, despite how much the media hates her and says she's so evil and bad. 

I've talked to her before. I found her to be exactly the same when talking personally to her and when I listened to her in public. I've had her on the show before, and one of the things that really I found so interesting and eye-opening about Marjorie Taylor Green is that she's been reluctant to criticize Donald Trump too much previously. 

I remember I had her in the show. She was one of those people very much against the Ukraine war, making all those good arguments that I agree with about how we have women who can't get baby formula and our communities are falling apart. Why are we sending billions to finance a war that has nothing to do with us? I remember I asked her, like, does that apply to Israel, that rationale? It seems like it should, does it? And she wasn't enough confidence to say like, yeah, also Israel. That's a very sensitive topic, she knows that. But sometimes you get to Washington, and you have to find your way, you've got to understand how things work, especially if you're not a career politician. 

I remember when I started journalism, there were a lot of things I didn't understand. I hadn't done it full-time, I thought I knew about things, but once I really started looking, I started learning things and realizing how much I didn't know. And so, it took me a while to kind of feel like, okay, I have a good, secure sense of where things are. And I think that's where she is.

 When Donald Trump announced this new bombing campaign in Yemen, she was very outspoken against it and the way she made the argument really struck me. She said, “You know what, I've been a Congresswoman now for six years, or whatever it is, representing my district, but I've lived in my district forever. Nobody in my District even knows what a Houthi is. Nobody talks about Houthis, nobody has met Houthis, nobody is threatened by Houthis, nobody fears Houthis and nobody understands why we are spending all this money to bomb the Houthis. What does this have to do with us?” 

I thought about it. I was like, that's the benefit of having people who are not professional politicians. One of the things that makes Kamala Harris such a terrible candidate is that she worked her way up that ladder from her mid-20s. She's basically been a politician her whole life. She got elected to the San Francisco District Attorney, very ambitious. You can go find national interviews with her because she was doing things like imprisoning parents for truancy if their kids didn't go to school. “Good Morning, America” and those types of shows loved her. She parlayed that into a run for Attorney General of California, won that, worked her way up to the California Senate, and then became Vice President. And she never had a moment where she was off script, where she was saying things that people in Washington would be like, “What? What is that?” She clung to those scripts like her life depended on it. She was petrified of saying anything that official Washington would find odd or strange to disapprove of. And as a result, she was totally vacant. She never spoke naturally, she never spoken like a human being because that's all she knows is she's been clicked into the political system and she speaks about the things that her donors care about, that other politicians care about, that the media she consumes talks about and she has no ability to say what Marjorie Taylor Greene said, no courage to say it, even if she understood it. 

You can take that too far, before 9/11, and nobody in America, for the most part, understood what al-Qaeda was, thought much about al-Qaeda, didn't mean the government should not do anything about al-Qaeda. Of course, sometimes the government has to work on things that are real threats or problems that most people don't know about or think about or understand, but I think there's a basic wisdom to the idea of asking, especially when we're going to war, why are we bombing and killing these people on Yemen? What do they have to do with us? And at the time, they were not attacking American ships, we've gone through that timeline before, and the only reason they had been previously was because they knew we were arming and funding Israel's destruction of Gaza, so even that was because we were financing and fighting a war for a foreign country, and the way Marjorie Taylor Green said it was like, “a Houthi, well, who knows even, in my district, what a Houthi is? I'm not going to cheerlead a war against the Houthis that have nothing to do with the lives of the people who sent me to Washington.” 

And then, when it came to this war in Iran, she lost all fear or concern about recognizing the relationship between the United States and Israel, and in whose benefit that relationship is, and who's really pushing and shaping the decisions of the United States Congress and the executive branch when it comes to war. 

I think she has enough confidence now, she's seen enough, she’s learned enough, she's read enough, and she understands enough. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not dumb. I'm sure Democrats will say she is. She's not dumb, she is smart. She just doesn't speak like Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden because she's not from that. She doesn't emerge from that; she's a citizen. 

That was the idea, by the way, of the Congress, we weren't going to have a professional class of politicians, we're going to have people who represented their constituents, get sent to Congress for a few years and then go back to their lives and do what they were doing previously. And that's the kind of person she still is. She's very much still a resident of her Georgia district, much more so than a creature of Washington and so, she can think about things and say them in a way most Americans are still thinking and saying them. 

And when it came time for the war in Iran, too, she was like, “I am just sick” of having all of our money and all of her service members be put in harm's way for these wars that have nothing to do with our country. “Ukraine is not our country and Ukraine's wars are not our wars. Israel is not out country and Israel's wars are not out wars.” And I think she's able to speak so plainly about these things and insist that we focus on the things that her constituents and people in America really care about because she's not subservient to or taking orders from a political party or a kind of system. 

There are other people like her in Congress, too. I'm not suggesting she's the only one. I'm just saying she's been very noticeable over the last three, four months, because, especially when it comes to foreign policy, that's where politicians typically step most delicately and she's not stepping delicately at all. To me, she's become a voice of great clarity and confidence, and I think she's earnest about everything she's saying. I'm talking about these things the way most people talk about them. 

I've told stories before, and I hate to romanticize them. I'm not going to even tell the stories because I've told them too many times. Probably you've already heard them. But if you go to the United States and you get anonymous and you just go to some, like, again, it sounds so cliche, but like a diner, where you talk to drivers of Ubers or taxis or whatever, it is enlightening. You hear things that are actual wisdom, just common-sense wisdom, that no people who work on politics and are paid to work in politics in D.C. and New York ever say that is that chasm, it's a huge chasm.

Now, all of official Washington is worried about a war with Iran that I do not believe most people in the United States view as a threat or something that ought to be subsuming their lives. I don't think they want Donald Trump, whom they elected to benefit their lives as working-class people, to be focused on yet another new war in the Middle East. 

I think that's why he's hesitating too, that he has a sense for that. A good sense for that. He's a good politician in that way. It's like instinctive and I think the more Trump goes in those directions that are basically the Bush, Obama, Biden direction, the more people are going to start to see him as like every other politician in that attachment that people had to him, similar to the attachment they had to Obama, who people also viewed as a transformative figure of change but quickly became a just a mouthpiece for the establishment of the perpetuation of the status quo in Washington. They lost that inspirational connection to him. I think that's going to happen to Trump as well if he continues down this path. 

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All right, next question. @Commissar69 asks:

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It is amazing to me that you go study the Constitution, you go to law school, not even law school, our civics class, and the design of the Constitution, in some cases, is kind of ambiguous. They constructed that on purpose, that was part of how they obtained the votes they needed to ratify it: leaving some things purposely left ambiguous that would be interpreted in the future. So, you could tell people whose votes you needed, it could mean this: you tell other people you needed who thought differently, it could mean that. 

So, some of it is ambiguous, but some of it is not. It's not ambiguous because of the language, it's not ambiguous because of what the Federalist Papers say, it's not ambiguous because of the debates that were had. 

One of the things that was not ambiguous is that if the United States is going to go to war, it can do so only if Congress declares war. Only Congress has the power to declare war. The rationale for this is very clear: it was assumed, based on experience at the time, that if we go to a war, people are going to be drafted and it's the ordinary citizen who's going to go and die in these wars and the only way the United States should go to war is if the people consent, through their representatives in the House and the Senate. And I can read you so much from the Federalist Papers talking about this. 

The president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. By the way, the armed forces were not intended to be a standing army. The founders really feared standing armies, meaning like armed agents of the federal government, like the ATF or the FBI. They're basically like armed permanent agents or armies, but also the army itself. That's why they talked about well-regulated militias. You compile an army when you want to go fight a war, but you don't have a permanent standing army. They thought that was dangerous. 

So, when they said the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, what that meant is Congress approves a war and we go to war, and the person responsible for executing that war – because you cannot have Congress managing the war, you need a leader, a military leader, and we wanted civilian rule, it's not a top general – it is an elected president, he becomes the commander-in-chief of the armed forces that makes the decision about how that war will be fought. 

For a lot of reasons, over the last decades, we've completely forgotten about, ignored, the congressional power to declare war. I believe the last war we declared was the Korean War.

Now, the idea there is if Congress really was serious about this, they could have cut off funds for the war, but mostly it's been a desire by Congress not to have to take the hard vote of voting yes or no on a war. I mean, it destroyed political careers. Hillary Clinton lost because she was forced to vote on the Iraq War and voted yes. It got tied to John Kerry when he tried to run against Bush in 2004, against the Iraq War, when he had voted yes on it 18 months earlier. Joe Biden voted for it as well. It definitely was a huge reason why Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama in 2008 and even why Hillary Clinton was weaker than she could have been when running against Bernie Sanders in 2016, because of that Iraq War vote. They don't want to vote on war. They're happy to leave it to the president. So, they purposely kind of gave up the power that the Constitution assigned to them. It's really an abdication of their responsibility. But politicians don't want to take hard votes. 

And now the view of the executive, I remember very well that Bush and, I mean, of course, if our country is attacked, it's like this sudden invasion, the way Iran had with Israel, suddenly attacking it out of nowhere, of course, the president has the responsibility to order the country defended without first going to Congress and waiting for a vote. That's the one exception. 

That didn't apply to the war in Iraq, but Bush-Cheney said we have the right to go invade Iraq even without congressional support. And now that's the view of the Trump administration: we don't need to go to Congress to start the war in Iran. Why? Why don't you? If you want to enter a war with Iran, that's not an emergency war. Iran is not attacking the United States. Why don't you need a vote in Congress? But most people in Congress don't want that responsibility. They'd rather let Trump take the blame for it if things go wrong. 

And so, we basically have a president who single-handedly runs foreign policy, runs the intelligence community. We barely have a functional Congress at all. 

I mean, I'll just give you one example that's kind of amazing. Most of you who watch this show for a while know that I was vehemently opposed to the ban of TikTok or the forced sale of it, talked about a lot of reasons about why it’s a major act of censorship to just ban a social media app that a third of Americans – a third – and a majority of young people are voluntarily choosing to use, just saying, “No, you can't use it. We don't like that one anymore; we don't like the content there.” 

It was originally justified because Chinese ownership and influence were nefarious. That wasn't enough to get the votes, what finally got the votes was the view that there was too much anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian speech being allowed on TikTok and that was what was turning the nation's youth against Israel. And that's the reason why Democrats finally joined, and the Biden administration advocated the banning of TikTok. 

I was vehemently opposed to that, but Congress did pass it. The House passed it, the Senate passed it with a bipartisan majority, an overwhelming bipartisan majority. Their argument was that it's vital to our national security to ban TikTok. Joe Biden signed it into law and it had a deadline in the law that it had to be banned or sold the day after the election. They didn't want TikTok being shut down during the election so that Biden would get blamed, so they cynically made it the day after, and then Trump had 90 days to extend it if he wanted one time. 

Trump extended it, that 90 days came and went; he extended it again, for another 90 days that came and went, he just extended it again. In other words, he's just refusing to implement the law that Congress passed. And nobody cares! Do you hear anyone in Congress saying, “President Trump, we passed this law because we said it was vital to national security, what right do you have to ignore the law?” 

We basically are a country now that has centralized so much power in the presidency that Congress barely exists, except as a sort of symbolic body of pretense of democracy. George Bush and the Democrats under Obama and Biden, and especially now against Trump, of course, the whole idea: each branch is going to want to grab more power for itself. In that fight, the Congress is trying to take this from the executive, the executive says “No, that's ours,” the court says, “No, that's ours,” Congress says, “No, that's ours,” and you get a balance of power. But when one of the branches, Congress, just says, “We're content not to fight for any of our power. You can have it all, we just want to get reelected, enjoy the perks of our office, travel around the world, get the title, be perpetually re-elected, have these nice offices in the Capitol building, go on TV, get special privileges and perks,” then you don't have balance of power anymore. You have the centralization of power in a president and an executive that the founders were really here to avoid. That has completely twisted and distorted what our political system is supposed to be. It by no means started with Trump. 

The Trump administration came in as one of its major plans to eliminate anything that could oppose it, including Congress. Trump uses threats against the Republicans and all sorts of other means. But he's just continuing a trend that started, I would say, that ideas were formed by the Dick Cheney in the 1980s, but really implemented with 9/11 as the pretext by Bush-Cheney. It's just all grown as powers do from there, and we have a model of the government that is very unlike what the founders envisioned. Of course, it affects all the discourses as well. 

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All right, @Readalot. That's a very good name. I hope it's accurate. 

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All right, so that's a critique, a pretty strongly expressed one. So, let me just clarify, because I do think it's good sometimes to just talk to, especially, our members, about how we think of the show, how we try to put the show together. 

When I say that we don't want to be captive of the news cycle, what I mean by that is that 24-hour cable networks are forced to talk about things every day. And even if nothing significant is happening, they'll make something trivial or insignificant the centerpiece of what they talk about so there'll be some offhand comment by Trump, or there'll be some rumor about somebody resigning or somebody being in trouble, or there will be some bickering in the Congress, or there'll be some law that might get passed, that they're speculating about, or some scandal. 

When I say we don't want to be caught at the news cycle, what I mean is, I don't want to come here every night and feel obligated to talk about things that I don't think are interesting or important just because every other media outlet, newspaper, podcast or other show is discussing them. 

In part, I don't want to talk about things I find trivial. That's what I mean by I don't want to be captive by the news cycle. But it also means sometimes there are important things that are going on that I don't feel competent to talk about or I don't have anything particularly interesting to say, I try to be very mindful that when I was writing a lot and I hit publish, and I hope to get back to writing a little more soon, we'll talk about that sometime in the near future, that when you press publish, you're making a claim to your readers that they need to rely on, that when you hit publish, you're saying to them, “Look, I'm promising you that I've written something that I think is worthwhile for you to take your time and read, that I have something to say that is unique or interesting or that sheds light on something important.” I was always very mindful of that. I would rather not write something on a given day than write something that was just I'm writing just to write or because everyone else is talking about it. 

And that also means that I try not to write about things I have no specialized knowledge of and that's why we don't cover economic policy or economic debates very often, almost at all. And if we do, we'll have a guest who's an expert. Every time I covered tariffs, I had a guest on to talk about it. So that's what I mean by not being captive to the news cycle.

Now, having said that, there are obvious topics, major topics, that I do cover, that I've covered for a long time, that I have a specialized knowledge in, a lot of expertise built up over the years, a lot of knowledge about, a lot of passion about, things like foreign policy, things like war, the intelligence community, civil liberties, free speech and when there's major debates like there were with the deportations of students who were here legally because of the speech that they made, or taking immigrants out based on allegations that they were in gangs without any due process, or when there is a new war or foreign policy, obviously I'm going to not just talk about it, I'm going to cover it in depth. 

And so, I don't necessarily want to talk about Israel every night, but the reality is it has been the center of our politics since October 7. We have fought a massive, dangerous war, one of the worst wars, and it's not really even a war, it's just sort of an attack on a population that the United States has paid for. We've supported Israel taking land from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq – bombing, not taking land from Syria and Lebanon, bombing them and bombing Iraq. And now we're on the verge of a major war with Iran. Of course, I'm going to talk about that a lot. I'm going to talk about it in the lead up to it, I'm not going to talk about it while the war is occurring, which is now, I'm talking about everything related to it, that's not being counted in the news cycle. That's right at the heart of what we do. 

And I think we talk about it and I hope we talk about it in a way that's not being talked about in many other places. They're getting a different kind of perspective on it, a different way to understand it, different types of information, different voices. And when war broke out in Ukraine and the Biden administration decided to be heavily involved in that, we did endless numbers of shows on Ukraine and Russia because that was a proxy war between the two largest nuclear powers on the planet. It had all kinds of things to do with the alignment of each party. We do a lot of political talk that way about what it means to be left and right. What is Democrat and Republican? How has that changed? Is that meaningful? 

So, when we talk about major events like the war in Ukraine, like the destruction of Gaza, like the imminent war in Iran, the ongoing war and our relationship to Israel, as we talked about with Tuck Carlson and Ted Cruz, the attacks on free speech on the Biden administration, the ones from the Trump administration, we don't just repeat over and over whatever the headline is. I think we try and delve deeply into it and talk about everything ancillary because it often sheds light on other parts of it that aren't directly related to it. That's what I mean by not being captive to the news. 

I don't feel obligated to follow the cable news framework of doing a movement, I don't think you have short intelligence span where you can only talk about a topic for four minutes and every four minutes we have to move or talk about something for two minutes, bring on a guest for five minutes, seven minutes maximum, and then move to another topic. We don’t do nine topics a night like a cable show does for an hour. We do one or two topics at the most. We want to dive deeply into them. We respect our audience enough to believe that the people here want to pay close attention, want detailed analysis and want to dive deep into things. And then, when we can and when we have something to do, we will do a show completely detached from the news cycle. 

Last week, we did a very deep dive into Palantir, what that company is, how it started, what its history has been, what it was built for, who runs it, what their ideology is, and what function they're now playing in the government. We do a lot of those. We've done deep dives into the anthrax and things like that, even though that had nothing to do with the topic. We spent a lot of time on COVID and related policies like that. So, I think our range is pretty broad, but yes, if there's a major war that Washington is heavily debating, getting more involved in, that's going to be something we're going to talk about, maybe not every night, but certainly close to it. The consequences of that make it impossible to ignore. 

And it's the sort of thing that, as I said, I think we naturally cover and it would be very odd if people came here, and I spent maybe one night a week, two nights a week, talking about the war with Iran and then just talking about a bunch of other stuff on the other three nights and didn't mention it, especially given how fast moving it is, how much of a debate there is, how much other topics that it implicates. 

We make our own decisions about what's important, what we think we have something unique to offer, provocative, interesting, informative to say, and just say it in a way that other places are not saying it, and we try and take our time to delve in, even though we know that maybe we would have more viewers, potentially, if we just constantly, can get members of Congress to come on the show every night, people want to come on the shows all the time but I want to do one or two topics that I find extremely interesting that give you a kind of an analytical perspective, a depth of information that other platforms don't allow you to. That's the reason I like this platform so much, and I think we try to use it for that end. So that's how we think about putting the show together. 

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All right, last question is a tennis question, which I'm always happy to take. It's from @Alan _Smithee, who I recognize as somebody who submits tennis questions, who says this:

 

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Okay. First of all, that is slander, that last part. I don't pick the slam owners after the event is played. No, I do pick them after, say, the first round. So, I don't like to pick somebody who then gets eliminated in the first run; I like to see how they're kind of playing. It's still not easy to pick the slam winners just after the first round, and I have done a great job on that. 

I did actually watch the Onyx Center match today. He played a player who's one of my favorite players, Alexander Bublik, who has an extremely exotic and idiosyncratic game. He's very funny as a person, but he's extremely talented and inventive, especially on grass, so I like seeing him toy with Center. I don't think it happens a lot that when you move from clay to grass, you lose your first match. Corey Gauff won the French Open, but she lost her first match on grass as well. It just takes some transition. I don't think it means that he's in trouble or he's going to have a bad Wimbledon or anything. 

But anyway, I'll probably pick the winners of Wimbledon when we get a little bit closer to the tournament, as you say sardonically, maybe once we start the tournament, right at the beginning, then you can go and take those to the bank. But if you do and you lose, do not blame me, don't leave me rude and abusive messages, because I do have a lot of knowledge about it. My predictions have been weirdly good for the last year, but that could stop at any time. So, although I'm telling you can rely on me, that doesn't mean that you actually should or can, especially when it comes to betting money that you can't afford to lose. 

All right. Those are all the questions we have for tonight.

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