Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Tucker Carlson—Suddenly Out at Fox—Eliminates the Most Dissident Voice on Cable. Plus: AOC Calls for Federal Ban on Tucker
Video Transcript
April 28, 2023
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Note: This is the full transcript of a recent episode of System Update, originally published on Monday, April 25, 2023. To watch the full video, exclusively on Rumble, click on the link below:


Tucker Carlson, the most popular and most-watched cable news host in the history of that medium is no longer at Fox News, effective immediately. In a terse and cryptic statement, Fox announced today that it and its highest-rated host have “agreed to part ways”, adding “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.” That was all they said. 

This glaringly stingy and ungenerous statement combined with the fact that Tucker was not even given an opportunity to say goodbye to his audience or explain his departure. His last program was on Friday night at its normal time, with no indication that this would be his last show – was obviously something Tucker was unaware of on Friday night – indicates that this is not exactly an amiable separation. Reporting is very sparse about the proximate cause of what happened and despite my efforts to my best efforts today, I too, have been able to find out very little about what the immediate spark was. But that doesn't mean I find this event shocking or even surprising. We’ll undoubtedly find out what led to this abrupt and almost certainly less than amicable separation. But that doesn't mean there is nothing of value to say, that there's no meaning to derive from this remarkable decision. That Tucker's program has thrived for so long at the key p.m. hour on Fox, having taken over for Bill O'Reilly when he, as the top-rated show was forced out, in 2017, is something of a fascinating aberration. Each year since he took over, Tucker has moved further and further away from longstanding Republican orthodoxy and that orthodoxy, as it was expressed in the Bush-Cheney era and before that, even in the Reagan era, is something that a large segment of American conservatism, as expressed by Tucker, has increasingly come to reject. Like the 2016 Trump campaign, which was run explicitly in opposition to long-standing establishment Republican pieties on militarism, foreign policy, and even economics, Carlson's program has increasingly been shaped by divergence from establishment Republican policies and dissent from the bipartisan neoliberal class that it has long ruled Washington and continues to do so with ample bipartisan support. More often than not, one heard radically different views from Tucker Show during the 8 p.m. hour and then the views of the far more reliable Republican partisan Sean Hannity during the 9 p.m. hour. It's almost impossible to conceive of any such different difference happening on MSNBC and CNN with radically different ideological perspectives from one hour to the next. The 10 p.m. hour on Fox, hosted by Laura Ingraham, was somewhere in the middle of those two though closer to Tucker's worldview than to Hannity's. The same is true, though perhaps a tad less so for the 7 p.m. hour hosted by Jesse Watters. So, all of that shows a very serious ideological flux within the Republican Party and in American conservatism all of this, and especially Tucker's abrupt departure, reflects a sharp and vibrant debate and ideological dissent within the GOP and American conservatism more generally, a debate and a vibrancy that is utterly absent from the Democratic Party and the liberal left media that serves it, which is almost always in lockstep with party leaders on every key issue.

And it is that vibrant ideological split that is the key context for understanding Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox then. And very relatedly, speaking of the lockstep and repressive climate that prevails in affordable politics and media and those Democratic Party circles that those factions serve, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York in what is certainly a coincidence, but yet a very revealing one nonetheless, went on to the new MSNBC program of Joe Biden's former White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, on Sunday, and explicitly urged the United States government and the Biden administration to ban Tucker Carlson from “being permitted to appear on television.” That despotic view, one that any mainstream political figure would have been far too ashamed to publicly advocate even a decade ago is now utterly standard – standard and acceptable – in the left wing of the Democratic Party that is always somehow finding new ways to become even more authoritarian and crypto tyrannical. We'll examine why AOC’s demands about censorship of Tucker’s show are so reflective of her running political faction and the reason why Tucker’s separation from Fox may be the best thing that could have happened to him in terms of his influence and impact, provided that he ends up joining the independent sector of media such as that represented by Rumble, which is the only sector of media now that is thriving, growing and most importantly, immune from the despotic censorship pressures of AOC and her left-liberal media allies. We'll examine all of that tonight. 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. It appears, 12 hours after the show first appears here, live, on Rumble. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, or any other major podcasting platform where you can listen to our show, rate and review it to help spread the show's visibility.

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


 

It's almost impossible to imagine a bigger story in cable news or even in American media generally than the announcement by Fox News this morning – that came very abruptly and without any explanation – that Tucker Carlson is no longer employed at Fox News and his highest-rated program, Tucker Carlson Tonight at 8 p.m. will no longer appear on that network. As I said, there will be certainly a lot of reporting that emerges over the next few days and we will try and do a lot of that that exposes exactly what the most proximate causes were, not just what led to the separation, but why it happened in this way. There was no announcement that Tucker's last show would be in several weeks. There was no explanation provided by Fox or by Tucker today about exactly what it is that happened. It's somewhat shrouded in mystery, exactly what the events were over the last few days that led to this unexpected decision and, clearly – given not just that it happened, but how it happened – it's almost certainly the case that it was not amiable. Amiable separations after five or six years at the network come with a lot of fanfare, a lot of positive things that they say about one another, and very good reasons why it's happening. And most important of all, an end date that gives the host an opportunity to speak one last time to his audience about the reasons he's leaving and what it might be that he would be doing in the future. Even Brian Stelter, after he was fired by CNN, despite having no audience or because he had no audience, was given that opportunity, that's generally customary. The fact that Tucker is just taken off the air abruptly with no opportunity to even speak one last time to his audience is a pretty strong sign that whatever happened, happened with some degree of acrimony and some degree of animus. And I'm a little bit constrained, to be perfectly transparent, in my ability to speculate on why that is. The Tucker Show is one on which I often appear, along with other Fox shows like Laura Ingraham and Jesse Waters, Howie Kurtz Media Show, on Sunday, and Tucker is a friend of mine. And so, I'm reluctant to do anything like speak for him or speculate based on things I know as part of those more personal conversations. As I said, the reporting in terms of finding out inside Fox, finding out what happened is certainly something I've been doing all day and will continue to do, and will report on what I learn as soon as I am able. No media reports today have tried to shine any light on what might have caused this separation, and Tucker has, at least as of this moment, not spoken out at all publicly in terms of what took place. So, until he does and until there's more reporting that's reliable, not reporting that comes from hostile news organizations like CNN or anonymous sources in The New York Times, we should assume that we don't yet know the precipitating events over the last few days, but there are certain things that are worth analyzing and meaning that we can derive from the fact this happened the way that it happened. 

I want to begin with the simple fact that Tucker Carlson's program was simply like any other program that appears on cable news and that, I would suggest, has ever appeared on cable news. It is a widespread perception among the few viewers that CNN has or the readers that The New York Times has, or people who follow the Democratic Party that Fox News is this monolith that the American right and the Republican Party is a monolith, that they all believe the same things about everything, that it's a cult of Donald Trump, that there's no criticism ever aired of Donald Trump, something that you have to be completely ignorant to believe. Tucker Carlson’s show by itself is living proof, a breathing testament to how much a vibrant and often sharp debate there is within Republican Party politics and the broader American conservative movement. And one of the reasons why people who are less liberals and followers of the Democratic Party and who only get their information from The New York Times and The Washington Post and CNN and NBC News, have no conception of these debates on the right is because there is none on the left, meaning the mainstream left, the mainstream, liberal left. There was just a report in Politico ten days ago on the career trajectory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom you may remember presented herself, branded herself when she ran in 2018, as a primary challenger to Joe Crowley, whom many suspected might be Nancy Pelosi's successor to lead the Democratic Party. She branded herself an insurgent of the Democratic Party, a critic of the Democratic Party as much as the Republican Party. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign as well, described itself as meeting a political revolution not against the Republican Party, but against the establishment wings of both parties, particularly the Democratic Party. And yet in 2020, when Bernie Sanders’s campaign was sabotaged by the Democratic establishment, just as it was in 2016, he didn't express real anger about that fact. He didn't urge his supporters to rise and protest to the Democratic establishment. He instead instructed them all that they should do what he was about to do, which was fall obediently and loyally into line behind Joe Biden and the Democrats. And that's exactly what Bernie Sanders proceeded to do – as a reward, he became the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. When is the last time you heard Bernie Sanders say anything that alienates or is contrary to the core agenda of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party? The same exact path was followed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to the point that Politico just this week, or last week, celebrated her, rewarded her, and patted her on the head. Because it announced that AOC is now a “team player,” that she's now playing the inside game while she started off as someone who pretended to be a dissident to Democratic Party politics and establishment orthodoxy and instead has become one of the most valuable instruments of the Democratic Party, someone who is completely loyal to the Biden administration, who almost never critiques Democratic leaders or Democratic Party orthodoxy. And so, the movement that formed around Bernie Sanders and AOC, the media outlets and the media figures who got rich by branding themselves as followers of Bernie and AOC, who pretended to be edgy, dissident outsiders to Democratic Party politics, have followed AOC and Bernie into captivity, into the Democratic Party, to the point where when Joe Biden wanted $40 billion more for the war in Ukraine back in May of last year, every single Democrat, from the more establishment conservative wings to the moderate wing, to the supposedly left wing of the Democratic Party led by Bernie Sanders and AOC, every single last one of them fell lockstep into line and unanimously voted yes in partnership with the establishment wing of the Democratic Part – people like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell – to vote yes in support of sending $100 billion of American funds – in that case, 40 billion – to fuel the war in Ukraine, to enrich the CIA, expand their authority and reach Raytheon in General Dynamics. There is no longer any internal debate within Democratic Party politics or the mainstream left-liberal faction, by which I mean the faction that follows Bernie and AOC and, at the end of the day, is nothing more than a Democratic Party loyalist. 

The exact opposite is true when it comes to American conservatism in the Republican Party, where there is vibrant and often extreme and hostile debate within the party and within American conservatism, not about ancillary issues, but about the most important issues of the day, starting with the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, which Joe Biden himself says is the event that has brought the planet closer to nuclear Armageddon than any moment since 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Republican establishment, led by Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, stood in line behind Joe Biden in lockstep with every Democrat and voted yes to support that war – send your money to Ukraine to fight over who governs various provinces in Eastern Ukraine. But the only no votes came from a pretty substantial and yet still minority populist wing of the Republican Party with five dozen or so House members led by Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and numerous other populists who don't support American imperialism or wars fought on behalf of countries in which the American people have no direct interest, along with 11 senators, including people more associated with the populist right like Josh Hawley, who voted no. 

So, you see this debate from one issue after the next. The question of whether Julian Assange should be pardoned for his truth-telling and confrontation with the American Security State, whether the NSA should be given greater spying powers, and whether the CIA is a benevolent institution whose authority should continuously increase along with its budget. From one issue after the next, the only debate we have in mainstream U.S. politics takes place within the Republican Party and on and on the right-wing conservative wing of the Republican Party. That debate doesn't exist in mainstream Democratic Party politics. You can find it in the marginalized left, the kind of people I often bring on my show, like Norman Finkelstein, who was on my show last week, or Nick Cruise and others from the Revolutionary Black Out Network whom I've had on my show, people who do not fall in line and urge their followers to go and vote Democrat no matter who it is, even in the bluest of states like Gavin Newsom. But other than them, and it's a very small and inconsequential faction, unfortunately, the mainstream liberal left of the mainstream Democratic Party is not only completely in lockstep and unified with one another ideologically, but with the government and with the corporate media which serves that part of the Democratic Party: CNN, MSNBC, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post. There are almost no differences ever. They're just over there unified, in unison, the kind of lockstep behavior that they falsely accuse the American right and conservativism in Fox News of being driven by. It’s pure projection. That's that part of American politics, the reason it's become so worthless. They're subservient. There's no critical thought and there's never any challenge to leaders. They're a movement of followers. 

And what did the Tucker Carlson program represent being at the key hour of Fox News that kicks off its prime time, at 8 p.m.? What has always been the anchor of Fox? As I said, Bill O'Reilly, the previous anchor of Fox News, the most highly-rated host who occupied that position. The fact that Tucker Carlson is now there is amazing and important because his show is about little else than dissent, not from the establishment Democrats, but from the establishment Republicans and their ideology of endless war, militarism and corporatism. He not only expresses an advocate but constantly airs the kind of dissent that left liberals in the United States falsely tell themselves they represent. There is no dissent, no dissident in the mainstream left, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, thanks to Bernie Sanders and AOC, and exist only in the populist right among the people who are shaped by the Trump campaign and it was anchored in the media by Tucker Carlson and his program at 8 p.m. And removing Tucker Carlson from the airwaves doesn't just mean that Fox is removing the most popular host in the history of cable news, though it does mean that they are removing from the air the only person on television, on mainstream television who would air dissent on a huge number of crucial issues. As I said, Laura Ingraham does it as well now. Jesse Waters does it sometimes. A couple of other people on Fox do it. But in terms of just relentlessly and intensely forming his worldview based on increasing levels of radical dissent from establishment orthodoxy, there is no one on television who was doing what Tucker Carlson was doing. It is almost impossible to believe that that didn't play a major factor in why he's gone. 

Fox News is led by the Murdoch family still, and they have made it very clear that they've become embarrassed by some of the things Fox has been doing, although ironically, that embarrassment typically is about things like Fox hosts insisting that there was fraud in the voting machines for which Fox News just paid close to $1 billion to Dominion in a defamation lawsuit. And yet, Tucker Carlson was never one of the people affirming that after the election, quite the contrary, he was one of the few with the willingness on television to sometimes alienate his own audience by telling them when they did not want to hear it, that people like Sidney Powell have never presented evidence just to substantiate her claims, and that until there's evidence presented, nobody should believe what she's saying. 

In almost every issue, one after the next, you found dissent on Tucker Show, oftentimes views that the liberal left traditionally had expressed, but no longer would that only this program would. So let me just show you a couple of examples and obviously, we have to begin with the war in Ukraine, because, from the very beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, back in 2022, Tucker was essentially the only person on television – and again, Laura Ingraham did it too, I don't mean to downplay her – but Tucker was really the one, night after night after night, front loading this question of why the American people should be willing to spend huge amounts of our resources on this foreign war in a country in which we have no vital interests, all while risking escalation, and as a result of that, he constantly got called a Russian agent. He was put on an official list of the Ukrainian government, along with people like myself, Tulsi Gabbard and Brazil's President, Lula da Silva, who, ironically, has become a world leader questioning this war over and over. The only one who really shares that view or airs that view in American media has become Tucker Carlson. So let's just look at one example of a countless number of examples in which Tucker started his show up by looking into the eyes of his audience, millions and millions of people, and asking the question that rarely gets asked when it comes time to support a new war and spend billions and billions of dollars on it, which is how the American people benefit from this war, other than the tiny little sliver of elites in the intelligence community and the arms manufacturing industry. 

 

(Video. Tucker Carlson Tonight. March 15, 2023)

 

Tucker Carlson: Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. Well, it looks like you're going to get a hot war with Russia and China. Whether you want one or not. Yesterday morning, an American Reaper drone went down over the Black Sea. We still do not know exactly what happened. We're not going to lie to you. We don't know and we don't expect to find out anytime soon, if ever. The Biden administration says it knows. It says the unmanned drone was harassed and damaged by two Russian fighter jets over international waters. So, we're going to have to take their word for it. Everybody else seems to be. Lindsey Graham didn't ask many penetrating questions. No, he moved immediately and seized the opportunity to demand that the Pentagon attack the Russian air force. Here he is. 

 

Lindsey Graham: Well, we should hold them accountable and say that if you ever get near another U.S. flying in international waters, your airplane would be shot down. What would Ronald Reagan do right now? He would start shooting Russian planes down if they were threatening our assets. 

 

Tucker Carlson: What would Ronald Reagan do? Oh, good question, Senator Graham. Ronald Reagan's two-term presidency was notable for the fact that he did not declare war on the Russian air force and therefore the United States did not go to war with Russia and millions of lives were saved as a result. It's not a small thing, but one in the Reagan win column there. 

 

Notice there he did not choose as the person he could attack or would attack a leading Democrat or leading Democratic senator, as he easily could have done given that what Lindsey Graham is saying about the war in Ukraine is something almost every member of the Democratic Congress from AOC and Nancy Pelosi to Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer have said from the start, he, instead, purposely chose a member of the Republican establishment because often, more often than not, the target of his critiques was the Republican establishment, were the Republican establishment leaders. 

When is the last time you have ever or whatever on MSNBC or CNN see a host so devoted to constantly attacking leading Democratic senators or leading members of the House of Representatives from the Democratic Party? Never. The only time you ever see a Democratic lawmaker criticized on those other networks is on the op-ed pages of The Washington Post – The New York Times, on the very rare occasion when someone like Joe Manchin or Kirsten Sinema has the audacity to oppose something Joe Biden wants and then they get attacked: for being disloyal to the Democratic Party. Tucker is not attacking Lindsey Graham for disloyalty to the Republican Party. Lindsey Graham is expressing the views of the Republican establishment of what most Republicans believe. To have an 8 p.m. show on Fox primarily devoted or at least overwhelmingly devoted to dissecting and critiquing and dissenting from the core views of the Republican establishment is something remarkable on television, especially given how partisan and polarized our media has become. Usually what you have are media outlets that are completely enthralled with and in captivity to the Democratic Party over here. And then in the past, you've had Fox News and certain people of the right-wing media, members of the right-wing media and throughout the Republican Party, and there are these little partisan soldiers and the media going off and defending their party leaders. Tucker Carlson never did that. Ever. He is somebody who was a menace to Republican establishment orthodoxy and Republican establishment leaders more than probably anybody else, more than anybody else. And that is remarkable. 

And it is not just him in isolation, but that is something that happened as a result of Donald Trump's campaign. This is something that was long-standing as a trend in Republican Party politics and conservative politics, going back to the far more successful than expected presidential campaigns of Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012 when he was doing things like going into the deepest parts of evangelical Iowa and South Carolina and ranting and raving against the Bush-Cheney neoconservative agenda and war in Iraq and asking those people: “How are you possibly helped by a war on the other side of the world that's designed to change the government of Iraq? It sends your children into combat and danger and risks their lives for a war that a tiny sliver of Americans benefits from.” 

Ron Paul did much better than expected because he was tapping into growing anger with the establishment, not the Democratic establishment, the bipartisan neo-liberal establishment in Washington. And it was Donald Trump who tapped into that more than anybody recognized it, he ran his campaign in 2016 against Bush and Cheney and even old Reaganomics orthodoxies, trying even to conceive of the possibility that a Democratic presidential candidacy could have any success. If it ran against, say, the orthodoxies and defining policies of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, or even criticize them in the mildest of ways they would be destroyed. Democrats demand lockstep partisan loyalty from their media figures and from their politicians. And what Trump first did, and then what Tucker's show expanded, is creating a space for people on the populist right to wage the war and to express their anger with the Republican establishment that Fox News had never previously given air to and that no media outlet allows in terms of the party to which they're loyal. 

Here's an example of him doing this on Ukraine. As I said, he did it from the start. When he did it, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi were every bit as much targets of his as Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham and all of the neocons who were in the Republican Party and now migrated to the Democratic Party precisely because there's no Ron Paul or Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump in the Democratic Party who stands up and questions U.S. militarism. He also would express critiques of corporatism and crony capitalism of the kind that you almost never hear in mainstream media, especially in the past, on conservative networks or conservative media. The idea that hedge fund conservatism, neoliberalism, international institutions are not just “occasionally bad,” but intrinsically undesirable and corrupt. I don't think you can hear that out of the mouth of any Democratic politician, or certainly from any corporate media that has alignment with the liberal after the Democratic Party. And listen to the sorts of things Tucker Carlson would say about corporatism and adherence to international capitalism, even going so far as to attack major financiers within conservative politics like Paul Singer and hedge fund politics, who were often big stockholders in Fox News itself. Watch this and think about whether this kind of view would ever previously have been aired not just on Fox, but any corporate media outlet. 

 

(Video. Tucker Carlson Tonight. Dec. 3, 2019)

Tucker Carlson: Instead, the model is ruthless economic efficiency. Buy distressed companies, outsource the jobs, liquidate the valuable assets, fire middle management and once the smoke is cleared, dump what remains to the highest bidder, often in Asia. It's happened around the country. It has made a small number of people phenomenally rich. One of them is a New York-based hedge fund manager called Paul Singer, who, according to Forbes, has amassed a personal fortune of more than $3 billion. 

 

How has Singer made that money? He made a lot of it by purchasing sovereign debt from financially distressed countries, countries that were in trouble, usually at a massive discount. Once a country's economy regains some stability, Singer would bombard its government with lawsuits and a massive public relations campaign originating here in Washington, sometimes, until he made his money back with interest. The practice is called vulture capitalism, feeding off the carcass of a dying nation. In some ways, it's not so different from what Singer and his firm, Elliott Management, have done in this country – and to this country. Over the past couple of decades, Elliott Management has been billions by buying large stakes in American companies, then firing workers, driving up short-term share prices and, in some cases, taking government bailouts. Insult to injury, Bloomberg News once described Singer as “the world's most feared investor” and that tells you a lot. No one's even pretending Paul Singer's tactics are good for anyone but Paul Singer and his fund. 

 

This was the title of the segment: “Hedge Funds are Destroying Rural America.” It was a 12-minute, very well-researched and well-documented but also passionate rant against what he called vulture capitalism. The people who are in the nation’s hedge funds and vulture capital funds have no allegiance to the individual American or rural America or working-class America but have allegiance only to destroying countries for their own personal gain. Not just foreign countries but dumping American jobs in those countries and ravaging American working-class neighborhoods throughout the country, similar to the way he would often document how BlackRock would buy up tons of real estate and drive prices up and make them unaffordable to working-class Americans. Just deep fundamental critiques of not capitalism itself, but the way in which American capitalism has become vulture capitalism and crony capitalism in a way that is the most destructive force in American life. 

Do you think the Murdoch family and Paul Ryan, who is on the board of Fox News, were happy to hear this sort of critique? Again, this is a critique shared by a lot of conservatives now, a lot of populist conservatives. Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign, when he was working with Steve Bannon, wanted to essentially come in and tax these people in order to generate income to secure Social Security and Medicare and build a wall. That was the plan – until he lost his power struggle with Jared Kushner and economic policy under the Trump government, under his administration, became more classically Republican. But this kind of critique has never been heard on Fox News before. Tucker Carlson, and is anathema to the kind of people who fund the Republican Party and who control Fox News. 

Here is one of the most amazing things that I think Tucker did in terms of showing his dissent. There are few people hated more in American elite culture than Julian Assange. In 2010 and 2011, when Assange got a vast archive of documents, he first worked with the New York Times and The Guardian and El País and other country news outlets around the world, and he exposed all kinds of crimes committed by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan around the world. He was despised by the U.S. Security State, the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security saw Assange's enemy number one until Edward Snowden came along in 2013 – and I worked with him and we started competing with them. There's been reporting about the attempts that they had to destroy us, to prosecute us, to assassinate people who were working on that case, and to do so to Julian Assange – it is impossible to overstate how much the U.S. elite culture in DC despises Assange. In both parties. Dianne Feinstein was writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal in 2010. She's on the Intelligence Committee, she's the biggest servant in the CIA saying to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act. And he still had occasionally some support among liberals on the left that still back then regarded the Security State as a menace and a malevolent force. But then, in 2016, when Julian Assange committed his real crime, which was publishing true documents incriminating Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party in the middle of the 2016 campaign, it forced the resignation of the top five members of the Democratic Party, including its chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and proved that the DNC cheated to make sure Hillary Clinton won that primary over Bernie Sanders and in general expose the deceit of Hillary Clinton, the secret things she was saying when speaking to Goldman Sachs for $750,000 that were the opposite of what she was saying in public, where she was pledging her loyalty to the Goldman Sachs vulture capitalists; to Tucker Carlson publicly critiques, but in public, she was pretending she was going to be on the side of the working class. The reporting WikiLeaks did was devastating to Hillary Clinton and that eliminated the rest of whatever residual support Julian Assange had among left-liberals. That's the reason why they all want him in prison, not because of those 2010 publications which he's being charged with, in fact, because in 2016 he did reporting detrimental to the Democratic Party. They blame him for helping Trump win. That's why they want to see him in prison imagine that, how repressive the Democratic Party is that before 2016, the Obama administration decided they weren't going to prosecute Julian Assange, Joe Biden was part of that administration, because back then it was only exposing the war crimes of the Security State. The only thing that changed between then and now is that in 2016, he reported on Hillary Clinton in an unflattering light. He did his job as a journalist. And now Joe Biden and the Biden administration are aggressively pursuing his imprisonment. On television, nobody was willing to go to bat for Julian Assange during the Trump years except for Tucker Carlson. He went on a virtual crusade urging the pardon of Julian Assange, and everyone knew he had the ear of Donald Trump. Trump watched his show religiously, and Tucker Carlson would put people on one after the next: Assange's family, celebrity supporters of Assange, myself, and other journalists look into the camera and we were able to directly appeal to Trump and argue for the pardon of Julian Assange. Here's just one example of Tucker Carlson being the only person in primetime television willing to go to bat and do an actual crusade to get Assange pardoned. 

 

(Video. Tucker Carlson Tonight. Sept. 27, 2021)

 

Tucker Carlson: Julian Assange has been in jail for an awfully long time. He's now in jail in the UK, was under house arrest in a foreign embassy in London. The U.S. has now accused Julian Assange of violating the Espionage Act. This has been going on for a long time. It's just dumb weird. It took us a very long time, years to ask the obvious question: What exactly did Julian Assange do wrong? Everyone, all good people hate Julian Assange. What was his crime exactly? Was he hacking into other people's computers? Was he stealing secrets from the U.S. government? No. Actually, he was publishing things other people sent him. He was a journalist. He was an editor. That's literally true. Can you throw editors in jail because they embarrass you? Probably shouldn't. Not a good precedent to set. Even if you don't like the person's politics, you should be against that. Why good people are against it? We spoke recently to Pamela Anderson; she was trying to get a pardon for Assange. Watch this. 

 

Pamela Anderson: He needs to do the right thing. This is one of those moments in history, in his lifetime, that he needs to make the right decision. And so, it's all up to President Trump. But he would really gain a huge following and a huge sigh of relief and gratefulness from so many people on the planet. 

 

Tucker Carlson: We spoke to Roger Waters of Pink Floyd about it. Tonight, we're going to speak to Julian Assange’s father and brother, John Shipton, is his father; Gabriel Shipton is his brother. We're happy to have them on the show tonight. John and Gabriel, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks, John. First to you. What – This is a sincere question. What did your son do wrong? Exactly? What is his specific crime? 

 

John Shipton: Well, no specific crime at all, Tucker. He has just offended some people in certain sections of Washington and consequently has faced 12 years now of persecution and harassment. 

 

This was a very long segment and he did many other ones. It is hard for me to overstate how radically divergent Tucker's position was, not his position, but his campaign, his crusade was on behalf of Julian Assange from Republican Party politics. If you go back to 2010 and 2011, 2012, you can find almost nobody in the Republican Party willing to say anything about Julian Assange other than he's a traitor, he deserves to be executed or he deserves to be put into prison for the rest of his life. That was the Republican view, the conservative view of Julian Assange almost across the board. And one of the things that also distinguishes Tucker, aside from so often diverging from Republican Party orthodoxy, like I've shown you several examples of him doing, is he was, I think, the only person or one of the only people willing to go on television often and admit that he was wrong in the past. I used to hold this view. I now hold this view. Here's the reason I changed, and this is why I now hold a view that is different from the view I used to hold. And like Donald Trump and a lot of Trump supporters, Tucker shot up close just how corrupt and deceitful and malevolent the CIA, the FBI, the NSA are. He changed his view of Edward Snowden, the reporting that I did back in 2013 when Tucker was somewhat hostile to it and now sees that it was important to show the American people that the NSA was spying en masse on millions of people. He said that often when I was on and he changed his view, like so many people who followed, who were supporters of Donald Trump, including Trump himself, on Julian Assange because he too saw the need for transparency of these agencies. And yet this was a view that was almost never expressed in Republican Party politics. And after 2016, you could not find major Democratic Party leaders or major Democratic Party media figures willing to stand up for Assange. Only in the last few weeks have a few members of the Squad and progressives finally signed a letter after being pressured by the ACLU and other free press freedom groups on Assange's behalf. But it was only Tucker for years on television willing to go to bat for Assange in this way. 

Beyond that, let me show you this clip, which I found incredibly interesting just to again illustrate how certain views the liberal left pretends that they hold, yet their leaders and media figures never defend, were ones you could only find in this show. I went on Tucker’s show in order to talk about a particularly repressive step the Biden administration had taken, in terms of trying to control the flow of information on the Internet. In order to do that, or before I got to that – before he asked me about that – earlier that day, protest movements had broken out in Havana against the Castro regime, and members of both political parties stood up and said, the United States needs to stand with these protesters. We need to support these protesters. We need to help them change the government of Cuba. It was not just conservative Democrats, but even members of the Squad who were saying this, along with every person on television practically. And without really even telling me that this is going to happen, Tucker decided to start the segment, which is supposed to be about Biden's repression, talking about how Republicans on the Hill were not focused on Joe Biden's repression, but for some reason decided that their focus instead should be on the government of Cuba and fixing the government of Cuba. And here's what he said about that. 

(Video. Tucker Carlson Tonight. July 21, 2021)

 

Tucker Carlson: […] Cuba, because even today, idiot Republicans on the Hill spent their whole day talking about the lack of freedom in Cuba. And it's not a free country. That's true. But increasingly, neither are we. And they don't seem to notice what's going on in the country. They're supposed to be running and they're spending all their time focused on this Caribbean nation. It is not central to our interest. I mean, doesn't the First Amendment say pretty clearly the government is not allowed to control the press? I thought that was the point of it here. The government seems to be controlling the press. 

 

Glenn Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, I thought the whole point of the Make America Great Again, America First foreign policy as articulated by Donald Trump and his allies in Congress was we shouldn't be fixing other countries. We should be focusing on our own country and making […] for Americans. And it's very easy to talk about censorship in Beijing or Havana but what about right in front of your nose, right down the street at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? 

 

This, to me, is a major contradiction within conservative politics. I've done shows on this before: a lot of people profess a belief in America First foreign policy articulated by Donald Trump, and people like Ron Paul before him, and others before him, and yet still there's a very neocon influence that prevails within Republican Party politics that still wants to go around the world fighting wars and fixing other countries – fixing other countries – changing other countries in a way that has no effect on the lives of American citizens, whether being sanctions in Venezuela, to facilitate regime change there, or arming or funding protesters in Cuba to get rid of the government that they don't like, or making sure that Zelenskyy continues to govern parts of Eastern Ukraine, even if the people in those provinces prefer to be ruled by Moscow. All these things are not in the interests of the American people, and even members of the Republican Party who still profess adherence to an America First foreign policy continue to want to support it. That is not aired anywhere except on this program – that Fox has canceled. A view in this particular case, why is the United States, why is it our business to fix Cuba and change the government that used to be a view that the left and the Democratic Party claimed to support, and yet none of them ever in this instance stood up and said this – not on MSNBC, not on CNN, not on the op-ed pages of any of those newspapers. Only on this program. 

The example from just last week I think is particularly amazing and it's so vivid because this is a case where the Biden Justice Department indicted four black radical leftists, not the kind of leftists that support the Democratic Party and AOC and Bernie Sanders and think they're being radical, not the kind of leftist like that Twitch streamer I talked about last week who got very rich going around saying “I'm literally a communist dude” and then tells his supporters to vote for Gavin Newsom in the extremely blue state of California because the only way he can stay in mainstream politics is by proving his ultimate loyalty to the Democratic Party. No. Real black leftists, real black leftists, the kind that hate the Biden administration, hate the Democratic Party, view them as imperialist, and particularly, hate the war in Ukraine. They just got indicted for being agents of the Russian government and not a single person in media, in mainstream media, not anyone in any of those media outlets I listed, not a single Democratic Party lawmaker, including AOC or Cori Bush or Jamaal Bowman or Ilhan Omar, or any of them, was willing to stand up in defense of the First Amendment rights of these radicals. Because these are real radicals. These are real dissidents. These are the kind Democratic Party wants nothing to do with, who they are embarrassed by and who oppose the war in Ukraine. And so, the only person willing to stand up for the right is the person whom people in the rest of the media and the liberal mainstream political faction will just insist over and over, as though it's just gospel – you don't even need to prove it – is a white supremacist, an irredeemable racist. That's the only person willing to stand up and defend these four black radical leftists because the reality is, Tucker Carlson's core view is that the government should be devoted to the interest of Americans, regardless of their race or regardless of their [ideology], that we should stop seeing people in those terms. And that's why he was the only one willing to have me on the show to talk about this case and talk about the dangers it presents. Let me just show you a little bit of that. You see there. The graphic is called Domestic Dissidents. That's how he saw them correctly. And it was in defense of the right to dissent that he was rising. 

 

(Video. Tucker Carlson Tonight. April 20, 2023)

 

Tucker Carlson: Okay, again, we're not defending that guy because we agree with all of his views. We probably don't. That is totally irrelevant. Whether you agree with what someone is saying has nothing to do with his right to say it. Americans are allowed to say what they think is true, period. If they take that right away, you are no longer a citizen, you are a slave. 

 

Glenn Greenwald is the host of System Update and joins us tonight. Glenn, thanks so much for coming on. I'm actually in some ways glad that they went after a group of people I probably don't agree with on a lot of things because it just makes it so much clearer. This is not partisan. This guy is saying something the regime doesn't like and they're trying to put him in jail. How is this happening in America? 

 

So, first of all, note the rhetoric. He correctly refers to the government not as Democrats, but as the regime. It is a UniParty regime, it is supported by the establishment wings of both parties there, financed by the same people. This is one of the only shows that recognize that and says so. And there you see the target. The label of this segment “Black Socialists Are Being Targeted for Speaking Out Against the Ukraine War.” The fact that only this show covered it and objected to it, while he's constantly accused of being a white supremacist, somebody who [hates] black people and views them as subhuman, he doesn't consider them as citizens – All absolutely total lies. The only evidence they ever presented is that he defends the “Great Replacement” theory, when in reality all he ever does, is recognize and point out that it's the Democratic Party and Democratic Party consultants who adopted the plan explicitly, who wrote books about this fact, that they support immigration because they regard immigration as a way to change the demographics of the country, to make sure that the Democrats will win elections forever. That's not even Tucker Carlson who came up with it. He points out that it's the Democratic strategy because they themselves say so. He's never advocated the “replacement theory” in the sense that only white Americans are real citizens. He has constantly rejected explicitly that view, and yet they lie constantly that he believes the exact view that he regularly rejects. Here he is being the only one to defend the core constitutional rights of American citizens, even when they're extreme, even when they're radical, even when they're real dissidents that no mainstream left-liberal would ever touch. This is the kind of thing that has now been eliminated from the airwaves in a way that I do not consider unrelated to the decision. 

Sometimes the ability of the media to just convince people of other lies amazes me. It's scary, even though they are definitely losing their stranglehold on the flow of information. Sometimes I hear how many people believe absolute lies because the media convinced them of that. Two weeks ago, Rumble announced that it had signed two of the most popular Gen Z African American commentators on rap culture and hip-hop culture and I had heard and seen, both before the fact and after the fact, that one of their reasons for being reluctant originally to sign with Rumble is because people were telling them that is a platform owned by Donald Trump and that exists to serve the Trump movement – an absolute and complete lie but it came from the media. Rumble is a free-speech, apolitical platform that allows anyone on here to say whatever they want. It's not devoted to disseminating an ideology, and yet, the media said that lie enough times that so many people believe it. 

So, the same is true of the view that Tucker Carlson privately was expressing doubt about claims of election fraud but publicly he went on Fox and affirmed those claims. In other words, he knowingly lied to his viewers. This is something that I guarantee you 90 or 95% of American liberals believe: that Tucker Carlson went on air after the election and affirmed the election fraud claims while privately admitting he thought they were false, something it would be a terrible thing to do. You'll have no integrity if you are willing to publicly tell your audience things that privately you admitted you didn't believe. The reality is the exact opposite. After the election, Tucker Carlson did the thing that I believe is the hardest thing for a journalist to do and yet is the thing that is most necessary for integrity, which is willing to tell your audience things you know, they don't want to hear, things that you know will make them angry, but tell it to them anyway because it's something you believe. Right after the 2020 election, Donald Trump was telling his followers that the voting machines were manipulated for fraud. And Tucker Carlson wanted to know whether it was true. He wasn't willing to affirm it just because he knows his audience wanted to hear it. So, he was trying to get Sidney Powell, the leading proponent of this view, to come on his show and present her evidence. He was open-minded. He kept saying, let me see the evidence. And she refused to come on his program and refused to present her evidence at any forum. And so, he went on the air and said the opposite of what 95% of American liberals believe. He told his audience that no evidence’s been presented for this and until there is, nobody should believe it. Listen to him do this on November 19, 2020. 

 

(Video. Tucker Carlson Tonight. Nov. 19, 2020)

 

Tucker Carlson: Sorry, but you never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests, polite requests, not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell was never given them any evidence either, or does she provide any. Today at the press conference, Powell did say that electronic voting is dangerous, and she's right. We're with her there. But she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another, not one. Why are we telling you this? We're telling you this because it's true. And in the end, that's all that matters. The truth. It's our only hope. It's our best defense. And it's how we're different from them. We care what's true, and we know you care, too. That's why we told you. Maybe Sidney Powell will come forward soon with details on exactly how this happened and precisely who did it. Maybe she will. We are certainly hopeful that she will. What happened with the vote counting this month and at the polling places in Detroit and the polling places in Philadelphia and so much else actually matters? It matters no matter who you voted for. It matters whether or not you think this election is already over. Until we know the answers to those questions conclusively and we can agree on them, this country will not be united. 

 

 

You tell me, when is the last time any host of CNN, any host of MSNBC, any person on NBC News or ABC News, or an op-ed writer in The New York Times and The Washington Post went on to their platforms and told their viewers exactly what they knew would most anger them as he did in that segment. It would have been so easy like other Fox hosts did, to imply or suggest or insinuate that he knew the voting machines were manipulated and that Trump was the rightful winner. He did the opposite. He said, I'm open to that possibility, but I want to see evidence for it and thus far, Sidney Powell refuses to present it. And his audience did get in angry at him. They got enraged by him. Fox lost viewers over it. They went to CNN and Newsmax, where they were affirming those things and told them what they wanted to hear. And he refused. Who else on television has done that, especially on these other networks that depict Fox as exactly what they are, which is a lockstep partisan outlet that airs no dissent? 

I want to just show you a couple of things that I think are really worth considering as we try to understand what happened at Fox. As I said at the top, the Fox statement was incredibly stingy and notably ungenerous. Here is the Fox statement today. It reads:

Fox News media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor. 

 

That's about as sparse of a praise as you can get when somebody has been the top-rated personality, the face of your network for five years. It's basically like saying good luck in your future and future endeavors. And then it adds:

 

Mr. Carlson's last program was Friday, April 21. Fox News Tonight will air live at 8 p.m. starting this evening as an interim show helmed by rotating Fox News personalities until a new host is named. 

 

So again, this is a very cold and acrimonious statement. To put it mildly. And while I cannot prove right now sitting here this moment that his constant criticisms of establishment Republican orthodoxy were the main reason why this separation happened, I do know for sure that the people running Fox believe in ideological precepts radically different than the one Tucker Carlson has spent the last year espousing, and he's been criticizing those with increasing virulence here. 

For example, for those who like to claim that Tucker was nothing more than a Trump lackey who never criticized Trump. You probably recall that the only two times, notably, that the rest of the media was willing to praise Donald Trump was when he bombed people. He bombed Syria and killed Russian troops because of Bashar al-Assad's use of what Trump said was chemical weapons and the media applauded him. That was when people on CNN said things like, “This is the time Trump first became president.” Brian Williams, Malcolm Nance actually practically wrote a poem about the beauty of American missiles. The other time was when Trump killed one of the top Iranian generals that could have really risked a war with Iran – and most people in both parties applauded Trump for doing that. Most Republicans did, most conservatives did. Tucker was one of the few people in conservative Republican circles who criticized Trump, and he said, “I don't see why it's worth provoking a war with Iran to kill this general. Neocons want that. The Pentagon wants that. But how is it in our interest to risk a war with Iran, a country with whom are not at war by killing this general?” 

You may not agree with that, but again, it demonstrates that Tucker Carlson was one of the few people on television willing to do something that requires integrity, which is criticizing the political leader that he knows most of his audience support. Even when it came to Trump, when he thought he was wrong, he was willing to say so. Here is another important point that I think there's the article from The Washington Post in which “He Bashes Sidney Powell For a Lack of Evidence. ‘She Never Sent Us Any Evidence.’” So, it wasn't just Tucker on his show, but he was causing this questioning of this fraud claim in the media to be disseminated. 

But here's a really important point. As I said earlier, Fox News is run by the Murdoch family. The Murdoch family has traditionally supported standard Republican politicians, the establishment wing of the Republican Party. They're billionaires. They generally prefer a kind of billionaire's economics. And one of the members of the board of directors – there are only seven more members of the board of directors of Fox News, I believe – is Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the House, who is, in my view, one of the leading embodiments of Republican establishment politics. It's always, let's cut taxes for the corporations, let's cut taxes for the rich, let's cut social programs for the working class. He's somebody who's always been on board with standard Bush-Cheney militarism. There's not a molecule of dissent or populism in Paul Ryan's politics. And he recently gave an interview very notably to the Never Trump website, The Bulwark. That's who he goes to account for his actions. On March 1, 2020. there you see a CNN article Paul Ryan grilled for remaining on Fox’s board of directors amid fraud revelations. Here's the article. 

 

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan was grilled last week over his decision to remain on the board of directors of Fox News’ parent company after damning court documents showed that the right-wing network knowingly peddled election lies to its audience. In the interview conducted by conservative commentator Charlie Sykes at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and posted Tuesday on The Bulwark podcast, […] (CNN. March 1, 2023).

 

 The Bulwark is the Never Trump site, funded by Pirro Media and founded by Bill Kristol. They're Never Trump establishment Republicans that, for Paul Ryan, want to justify himself. 

[…] Ryan was asked how he could associate himself with a company that is “pumping toxic sludge, racism, disinformation and attacks on democracy.” 

“Do you have any responsibility?” Sykes asked.


“I do. I have a responsibility to offer my opinion and perspective and I do that, but I don't go on TV and do it, right.” So, I offer my perspective, my opinion, often, Ryan replied. I'll just leave it at that (CNN. March 1, 2023). 

 

But then he went on, he was pressed on it and he basically said, “I don't like the direction of the conservative movement. I think Fox needs to fix this.” It was a very clear statement that Fox is allowing what Paul Ryan considers to be the bad parts of conservative ideology, namely the anti-establishment parts, the dissident parts, the populist parts, the parts aligned with Donald Trump's critique of the Republican Party to get a stranglehold in Fox News. And I absolutely regard that as a crucial clue into the thinking of Fox News leaders, as embodied by Paul Ryan, someone completely anathema to the standard Republican Party voter now. And the reason that Tucker Carlson, whose views could not be further away than Paul Ryan's but then American conservatism ended up separated in such an acrimonious way from Fox. 

The last point I want to make on this before I get to AOC’s role in her censorship calls, which are really important in understanding not just that event in and of itself, but the entire dynamic that we have to look at in terms of understanding. Tucker Separation from Fox. This is not the first time the highest-rated anchor on Fox got fired. As I said, Bill Riley was removed from Fox, but that was because of sexual harassment allegations and allegations of a hostile workforce that consumed former Fox chairman Roger Ailes as well. Ailes was Bill O'Reilly's primary protector. And Bill O'Reilly's separation from Fox was due almost entirely to those kinds of scandals. But people have forgotten that in 2011, Glenn Beck was raiding records on the 5 p.m. side on Fox News, which is not even close to primetime. He had sometimes doubled the numbers as Fox News primetime host had. He was creating an audience size and creating ratings unlike what had ever been seen in Fox News history or cable news history. And he got fired at the peak of his ratings. And that was because ratings don't protect you. If the views that you're expressing become too anathema to the executives and owners of Fox News, the people who run these corporations don't want their network affiliated with views they regard as radical no matter how popular they are. 

Here is a Reuters article from 2011: “Glenn Beck And Fox News And Daily TV Show.” 

 

Glenn Beck and cable channel Fox News are ending his daily TV show after falling ratings, a loss of advertisers and a month of controversy over inflammatory remarks by the conservative U.S. host. Beck's nightly show currently draws about 1.9 million viewers, dwarfing the ratings for other cable news shows in the time slot. But audiences are down 30% from a year ago. 

 

Some reports estimate about 300 companies have either pulled their ads or declined to run commercials on his show in the last 18 months after campaigns by black and Jewish groups. In January, several hundred rabbis called on Fox News to sanction Beck for repeated use of Nazi and Holocaust imagery and for airing attacks on World War Two survivor and financier George Soros. 

 

“Fox News is dumping Glenn Beck because he has been rejected by Jews, by Christians and people of conscience from across the spectrum,” Simon Greer, president of Jewish Funds for Justice, said on Wednesday. 

 

Beck, a favorite of the Tea Party political movement, has been one of the most popular voices on Fox News, culminating in a public rally in Washington last year attended by tens of thousands of Americans in a conservative show of strength. 

David Brock, a spokesman for Media Matters for America, which often criticizes Fox News, said in a statement “the only surprise is that it took Fox News months to reach this decision” after he lost the support of advertisers (Reuters. April 6, 2011).  

 

This is what I think is so important to note that when you work for a major corporation like Fox News, a major media corporation, even one that prides itself on separating itself from the standard left-liberal hegemony of CNN and NBC and The New York Times, you are very constrained in what you can say. You are controlled. You are limited in the kinds of views you can air to the point that even enormous record-setting ratings of the kind Glenn Beck had and the kind that Tucker Carlson has do not protect you. You can be free to some extent within these media corporations, but you're free only to the point that you're not. And that is why I think that we mostly believe that Tucker Carlson is going to make – and I have not talked to him about this – is that he's going to join some part of media where he can be truly independent, free even from the constraints of Fox. I, when I was at The Intercept, strongly believed I was completely free. I had a contract with them that barred them from editorially interfering in my work. Unless I requested it, I could post whatever I wanted directly to the internet. And obviously, I laughed when they violated that contractual right I had negotiated for and I had always honored, by preventing me from publishing my article on the Hunter Biden laptop and Joe Biden's candidacy right before the election, which caused me to quit. But once I quit and went to Substack, where I was truly independent, I realized that there were just certain kinds of subliminal, subtle limitations in my brain from attaching myself to a media outlet in a corporation like The Intercept. Just things that are about how other people you work with respond a couple of occasions when people come to you and say, “I don't think what you did reflects well on us. We'd like you to tone that down.” It just puts those constraints in your mind, even if you don't want to acknowledge they're there, even if you think you don't have to abide by them. And I didn't realize how liberating it was to leave until I left. And by leaving and by joining Substack and having total independence, not just theoretical independence, but genuine independence, not only was I able to speak more freely in a less constrained way, but my audience size doubled and then tripled and then quadrupled because we're at the point now where people trust only independent media. The most influential people in media are not the ones who work for and are the property of giant media corporations. Joe Rogan is 10,000 times more influential than any of the remaining hosts at CNN, MSNBC, or even Fox. None of the people at CNN or MSNBC have their own native following. If they left those corporations, they had very few people follow them. Chris Cuomo, as you might know, is on this thing called “News Nation” and he maybe gets 30,000 people a night to watch, as opposed to the 800,000 he was getting at CNN because he was a byproduct of CNN.  

In Tucker's case, Fox needed Tucker a lot more than Tucker needed Fox. Just like The Intercept needed me a lot more than I need The Intercept or NBC needed Megyn Kelly a lot more than Megyn Kelly needed NBC. Media corporations would die for Joe Rogan, but he doesn't need them. Once you become independent, your influence increases the trust people have in you and the faith they place in you significantly escalates. And so, while Tucker has lost his perch on Fox, I really believe that whatever else he does, especially if it's an independent media – on Rumble or in anywhere else that is truly independent – his influence will significantly increase, unlike the vast majority of people in media who have no loyal or independent audience and who rely on that corporate brand. Tucker does not. He's one of the few who doesn't. And the fact that Fox, via Glenn Beck, has now separated from Tucker Carlson, their two most watched hosts, not despite what they're saying, but because of it, it seems, is a very powerful reason why only independent media gives people the platform like Tucker, who are real dissidents, who want to speak freely and report freely and can be immune from corporate pressures and external pressures as well. So, I hope Tucker ends up in independent media, and I strongly believe that his voice will be even more consequential there than it was at Fox News, where he was so constrained. 


 

Now, just to underscore that point further and on its own, I think this is crucial to talk about to conclude the show, on Sunday, the day before Fox separated from Tucker Carlson – I'm not suggesting this was the reason at all, in fact, if I had to bet, I would believe it's a coincidence – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on to this show, the new MSNBC show of Jen Psaki who was beloved by Democrats, former White House press secretary for Joe Biden – and she, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at Jen Psaki’s prodding, called for the government, the Biden administration, to ban Tucker Carlson from being allowed on television, claiming that regulations and laws prevent him from being heard. Let's listen, first of all, to what this little tyrant had to say while she was on MSNBC on Sunday. 

 

(Video. AOC and J. Psaki on MSNBC. April 23, 2023)

 

Jen Psaki: This week, Fox News settled its defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million. A lot of money. It's now one of the largest media defamation settlements in history. Do you think in making this settlement, Dominion's lawyers made a mistake in not requiring Fox to acknowledge on air that it lied to its viewers? 

 

Rep. AOC: Well, this was a corporation suing another corporation for material damages. Their job is to go in and get the most money that they can. And I think that they did that. They are not lawyers for the American public and I think it would have been best for the country, would have been to demand that and to not settle until we got that. But that is not their role. And so, for us, I think this really raises much larger questions. Very often, I believe that we leave it to the courts to solve issues that politics is really supposed to solve, that are just leading as supposed to solve. We have very real issues with what is permissible on air and we saw that with January 6. And we saw that in the lead-up to January 6 and how we navigate questions not just of freedom of speech, but also accountability for incitement of violence. This is the line that we have to really explore through law as well. 

 

 

And so that is an amazing statement already, even though it's not the most offensive part. She was saying, I wish we could have gotten the full trial of the Dominion suit, but that's not Dominion's job to expose Fox and hold them accountable. We should be doing that. We, the politicians, should be using the power of the law and government to be holding Fox accountable and to make decisions about what is and is not permitted on the air. She wants the government to have that role in controlling Fox and deciding which Fox shows are not permissible. That's exactly what she just said. And if you think that that is a wrong interpretation or an exaggeration. Listen to what comes next. 

 

(Video. AOC and J. Psaki on MSNBC. April 23, 2023)

 

Jen Psaki: Media organizations or social media platforms should be accountable for the role, for being platforms, for incitement? 

Rep. AOC: I believe that when it comes to broadcast television, like Fox News, these are subject to federal law, federal regulation. 

 

All right. Let me just stop there because like so much of what she says, it is not just authoritarian, but incredibly stupid and ignorant. Broadcast television is not Fox News. There are laws that apply to broadcast television because networks have a finite amount of bandwidth that the U.S. government has always doled out and in exchange they were required to agree to certain conditions on what they can and can’t say. That is not the case for cable. So, the laws that govern broadcast news have never applied to cable, which is where Fox News happens to be. So, the entire legal framework she just invoked is stupid and ignorant. Well, let's listen to what she says beyond that. 

 

(Video. AOC and J. Psaki on MSNBC. April 23, 2023)

 

Rep. AOC: All for being platforms for incitement. I believe that when it comes to broadcast television, like Fox News, these are subject to to federal law, federal regulation in terms of what's allowed on air and what isn't. And when you look at what Tucker Carlson and some of these other folks on Fox do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence. Very clearly incitement of violence. And that is the line that I think we have to be willing to contend with. 

 

 

I mean, she just said it outright that the government has laws about what is and isn't permissible on television. Tucker Carlson and other folks on Fox have crossed that line and therefore, they should not be permitted on television. It's the government that has to step in and enforce these rules. 

What rules is she talking about? What is she even talking about? This is what I can gather under the Supreme Court doctrine that protects the First Amendment and then extremely broad way, the only exception that the Supreme Court has recognized that is not First Amendment speech of the kind she's describing is in the case of Brandenburg v. Ohio. That was a case where a leader of the Ku Klux Klan stood up in a speech and vowed on behalf of the Ku Klux Klan that violence might become justifiable if leaders continue to act against white people. He was prosecuted on the grounds that it was terrorist speech or supporting violence, and the Supreme Court in Brandenburg rejected that prosecution, overturned it, and said that you're even allowed to advocate violence under the First Amendment. That is protected speech. That, after all, is how our revolution started, by people saying that the British crown has become so repressive that violence is justifiable. You're allowed to say, that to advocate the abstract justifiability of violence. The only thing you can't do is the imminent incitement of violence. And by that, the court means you're on the street corner with a mob gathered and you tell the mob, Go burn down that house where you're basically instructing them imminently, within the next few minutes to go and burn down that house, to go and use violence. That's the only exception the Brandenburg court carved out and she's trying to say Tucker and other Fox hosts are within that where they're imminently inciting violence because she knows – someone told her – that's the phrase you have to invoke in order to justify censorship. 

When has Tucker Carlson ever imminently incited violence in his life? And the fact that she's sitting here calling on the government, the Biden administration, to ban adversary media, arguing that the only conservative network in the country should be banned by the government, makes her and the people who follow her as authoritarian and tyrannical and fascist, and whatever other clichéd words you want to use to describe that, as anyone in this country. If you are at the point where you're demanding that the government ban adversarial, opposition media, there is no faction more authoritarian than that, and no political figure is more authoritarian than her. And I just want to be clear that this is the extremely defining standard view of electoral politics in America. She has not said anything aberrational or unusual or out of the ordinary for electoral politics, which is why not a single left-liberal media figure, not a single one of her prominent followers, have stood up and objected because they agree with her. They support state corporate censorship. We just showed you this amazing video from the time that Matt Taibbi testified about the Twitter Files, which, as you recall, showed the collaboration between the U.S. Security State on the one hand, the CIA, Homeland Security and the CIA and the FBI colluding with Big Tech to censor the Internet. So, it's the classic fascist collusion of the union of State and corporate power to censor the Internet in alignment with the same goals. Many members of that committee on the Democratic side explicitly defended the corporate state censorship regime. Collin Allred, the Democrat from Texas, told Matt Taibbi that we should be grateful that the CIA and Homeland Security are working with Big Tech to censor the Internet because it's for good and they mean well. You can't get a more authoritarian mindset than that. And that's why when AOC goes on Jen Psaki’s show and looks at the only corner of the media where dissent is allowed – of the kind I showed you – and says the government should ban that media and nobody stands up to object, it's because this is now the prevailing ethos of the Democratic Party and of the mainstream left-liberal politics. They absolutely believe in censorship and censorship in unison with the corporate power of Big Tech. 

The biggest irony of all – it won't surprise you to learn that AOC is a gigantic hypocrite – is that her argument for why Tucker and other shows should be banned, namely that they imminently incite violence, is an absolute lie. He never has. The person who has actually praised and incited violence is AOC herself. In 2019, she was on a podcast and she talked about the inevitability of violence coming from marginalized groups if they don't get what they want. Listen to what she said. 

 

(Video. Rep. AOC on Hot 97)

 

Rep. AOC: […] that injustice is a threat to the safety of all people, because once you have a group that is marginalized and marginalized and marginalized, then you create a population. Once someone doesn't have access to clean water, they have no choice but to riot. 

 

So, you can watch Tucker Carlson show every day for five years and you will not find anything, even in the universe of inciting violence like what she just said, which is unless you adopt my policies that I believe in for quote-unquote, “marginalized groups,” it becomes rational and inevitable for them to go and riot. That is inciting violence, if anything is. I would not call for her to be censored for that because I'm not a despot or an authoritarian, and I don't think that falls within Brandenburg, but it's way closer to when it becomes justifiable to censor than anything in the media she wants the government to censor. 

 

Now, just to conclude, I just want to show you these two charts, which I think are two of the most important charts in politics, that shed great light on what just happened with Tucker. 

Here is a Pew Poll from July, I think, it's 2022. It asked two questions and the title is “Partisan Divisions have widened over the role of government and tech firms in restricting misinformation.” One of the questions is, do you want the U.S. government, the state, to take steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits freedom of information? Sixty-five percent (65%) of people who identify as Democrats or Democrat-leaning want the state to censor the Internet in the name of stopping disinformation – 65%, the overwhelming majority of Democrats. Is it any wonder why AOC feels comfortable calling on the government to censor Fox and Fox shows when she knows that the vast majority of her party and her political faction crave that? Seventy-six percent (76%) want tech companies to censor the Internet in their name. And the gap between Democrats and Republicans who want that is 40 to 50 points. 

And then, of course, here is this chart from earlier this year that finds that Democrats overwhelmingly have favorable opinions of the U.S. Security State, the FBI, the CIA, Department of Homeland Security. Only a minority of Republicans do. Majorities of Republicans harbor distrust for the FBI, the CIA and Homeland Security, whereas majorities of Democrats have favorable views of the FBI, the CIA, and Homeland Security. And this explains everything. 

Tucker is one of the few programs where you can hear vehement defenses of free speech and the First Amendment, vehement critiques of the U.S. Security State. That's why they want him censored if you're in the Democratic Party, and that's why the establishment Republicans who clearly are in charge of Fox News, were happy to separate from Tucker Carlson. He no longer was espousing the ideology. The Republican establishment wants the dissent he was expressing from Republican Party orthodoxy and bipartisan neo-liberal ideology to become too extreme. 

Again, I'm not claiming that that is the proximate or primary reason for the separation. There may be something that happened that we don't know about that we will find out about. But what I know for sure is that the show where the greatest dissent to bipartisan orthodoxy, including Republican Party establishment orthodoxy, was just taken off the air. And it happened one day after AOC called for the government to censor that very program. I don't think that's the reason. I don't think she has that much power – In the past, she called for Google and Apple to take Parler offline, and within 48 hours, Google and Apple obeyed. I think that there was a causal connection there. This is not the first time her censorship desires have been met. When Parler was the number one most downloaded app in the country, AOC demanded Google and Apple and then Amazon take it offline. And they did. So, I don't think there's a causal connection between her call for censorship and Fox's decision but it reveals the key dynamic, the metric, the prism through which all of this has to be understood, which is that the Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Republican Party are very much aligned. They have differences on cultural issues like trans issues and abortion and gun control but on issues of how power is dispersed, on militarism and corporatism, they are fully in lockstep. That's why AOC and Bernie joined every Democrat and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham and McConnell to vote for $40 billion for the war in Ukraine. The only dissent came from the right wing of the Republican Party, Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson – and maybe a couple of other shows still on Fox for now – because that is where real dissent lies. But it was Tucker, at the 8 p.m. hour with the biggest audience Fox has ever seen, continually bashing bipartisan liberal orthodoxy and the establishment ideology of the Republican Party – and whether that was the cause or not, his cancellation or his separation from Fox means that dissent is now out there. 

You will not find any of those things I showed you from vehement opposition to the war in Ukraine to crusading for Julian Assange, to constant denunciations of the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security, you will not find that anywhere else on cable news. And whether that is by design or not, we'll see who replaces Tucker. My bet is that somebody far more aligned with Sean Hannity and Paul Ryan than with Tucker Carlson or even Laura Ingraham. But we'll see. The fact is that cable news has lost its primary place for dissent. The good news is that cable is a dying medium, even Fox News with its better ratings. If you look at the overall percentage of the country that turns to cable news, it is minuscule. Joe Rogan's audience, the audience of other people in independent media is far surpassing that and will continue to. That is the part of the media that's thriving and I believe Tucker's voice will end up amplified and not diminished. But this tells us a great deal about the very severe limits of corporate media in general and Fox News in particular. 


So that concludes our show for this evening. On Tuesday and Thursday nights, as a reminder, we have our aftershow on Locals, where we take your questions or respond to your feedback and your ideas about what we should cover and guests we should interview. If you want to have access exclusively to that live interactive aftershow on Locals, all you have to do is join our community. The join button is right underneath the Rumble player and that will also give you access to the transcript of each show as well as my written journalism. 

For those of you who have been watching a reminder: we're available in podcast form 12 hours after we air live here on Rumble. We are available on Spotify and Apple and the other major podcasting platforms. All you have to do is follow that. For those of you watching, we really appreciate it. Our audience continues to grow, Rumble continues to grow, and we really appreciate it. We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble. 

Have a great evening, everybody. 

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For anyone attacking or questioning Glenn's professional integrity or the ongoing usefulness of his journalism, or flatly stating you are jumping off this ship--you're doing exactly the thing those who compromised Glenn want you to do. Presumably you joined this community because you finally found a journalist who reports in the public interest without fear. There are others, but none as good. Such is the burden of the best. You're free to condemn, obviously, or leave, obviously, but know that in doing so you are being manipulated into it by the very people in this world that so frustrated you in the first place to find Glenn.

Who gives a F how other consenting adults get off?

I enjoyed last night's show. My son (in his early 30's) was watching with me, and he observed that Michael Tracey is sort of a punk rock version of Glenn. He's always a bit disheveled, in contrast to Glenn (who always looks like he just came from a GQ photo shoot), and his delivery of the opening statements was just hilarious. I'm paraphrasing, but, "I'm Michael Tracey, & I'm your host tonight whether you like it or not. Glenn is. . . out & about. . . I know I'm supposed to tell you all to like and share, but, personally, I never do that. . . " Michael did a great job, kept us laughing throughout, and made a lot of salient points.

Glenn, pls stop letting hateful Zionists shaming & silencing you. You have a very important voice for your base. We need you. We don't care about smear publicly exposed videos about you even, if they really happened. That video was a private moment. You are much more valuable to us than the media exploitation of our mentor, who’s on point shots at the enemy tear down their low life tactics.

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System Update #462

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

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

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

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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Glenn Greenwald is away this week. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video. Jaime Harrisson, Symone Sander, MSNBC. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Trump Admin's War with Harvard, Fallout from Wednesday's DC Killing, and More; Plus: Lee Fang on Epstein's Dark Legacy in the USVI
System Update #460

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first one is from @ChristianaK, who says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Question #3 is from @teardrinker who says:

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

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

And so, here's this question:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Next question, @kkotwas asked:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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All right, the @farside asks:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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