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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Glenn Takes Your Questions on Tulsi's Russiagate Revelations, Columbia's $200M Settlement, and More
System Update #492

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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Once a week, we devote the show to a Q&A session. We take questions submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community and answer as many as we can. As is typically the case, the questions tonight are wide-ranging and very provocative on a diverse range of news stories. 

 Our “Mailbag” is not intended to be just a sort of yes or no, but instead to give my viewpoint, my analysis, my perspective, my commentary on whatever it is that interests you. A lot of times, it ends up being topics that we might have wanted to cover anyway, that we just haven't had a chance to yet. Other times, they are topics that, on our own, we may not have covered. It's usually that kind of perfect mix that always makes me excited to do. So, let's get right into them to make sure we cover as many as possible. 

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The first is from @ChristianaK, and the question is very straightforward: 

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There's actually a second question here and let me get to it now, because it was going to be part of what I was about to say. It’s from @kevin328:

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I actually think Tulsi Gabbard's revelations on their own are substantive, meritorious, important and deserve a lot of attention but I do think, at this point, anything that the Trump administration is doing is intended to feed their base that is still very confused, upset and angry, for the most part, by this increasingly bizarre posture that they've taken on the Epstein revelations, namely not to make any, led not by Pam Bondi, Kash Patel or Dan Bongino, but by Donald Trump. 

Anything that they're suddenly unveiling is presumptively an attempt to distract people from that anger, that confusion and that growing suspicion about what they did with Epstein. The problem for them is the suspicions that have emerged – that I don't even think were that present before – that Donald Trump fears that his name is in the files and therefore wants to make sure they're not released, and even if his name isn't in the file in any way particularly incriminating. 

I've always thought the Epstein case has important questions to answer and I still think the Epstein case has important questions to be answered, including the ones I've outlined at length, such as whether he worked with or for any foreign or domestic intelligence agencies, and what was the source of his massive wealth, and why were these mysterious billionaires embedded in the military-industrial complex so eager on just seemingly handing him over huge amounts of wealth in exchange for services that seem very amorphous at best. I think there are a lot of unanswered questions that are important to say nothing of whether there's evidence that very powerful and important people participated in the more sinister aspects of what it was that he was doing and whether any blackmail arose from that. Of course, Donald Trump's name is going to be in some of these files for so many reasons. He was a very good friend of Jeffrey Epstein at one point. They spent a lot of time together. It seems like most or all of that time took place before the conviction of Jeffrey Epstein in 2007, which has its own very odd set of questions around why he got such an incredibly lenient deal for crimes that most people are sent to prison for a very long time. 

There's actually an excellent discussion on all of this that if you haven't seen I want to recommend which is Darryl Cooper's discussion on Tucker Carlson's show about the Epstein case, Darryl spent huge amounts of time putting together the entire history of Jeffrey Epstein, where he came from, how he emerged on the scene, who his key contacts were, where his wealth came from, the questions that have arisen, the way in which they've been buried. Despite what people have tried to depict about Darryl Cooper, in large part because of his unconventional views on World War II, but more so his harsh criticism of Israel, that he's some deranged, unhinged fabulist, who doesn't understand history, he's actually one of the most scrupulous and meticulous commentators and analysts I've seen, by which I mean, he really does only very strongly-cling to facts and has no problem admitting, which he often does, that there are certain things he doesn't know, that there are holes in his understanding, holes in the information, and there's zero conspiratorial thinking or even speculative thinking in this discussion or very little. It's all just a chronicle of facts laid out in a way not just to understand the Epstein case, but the reason why it's captured so much attention about the behavior of our elite class. 

So, I do think Donald Trump's name appears in these files the way The Wall Street Journal has reported it did. Trump was explicitly asked outside the White House by a reporter, just like two weeks ago: Did Pam Bondi give you a briefing in May in which she indicated to you that the Epstein files contain your name?” And to that, he explicitly said “No.” And that's exactly what The Wall Street Journal is now reporting had happened. Most journalists know that that happened. There were leaks inside the Justice Department and the White House that this is what happened. And again, I would be shocked if Donald Trump's name did not appear at some point in the Epstein files in some capacity, because of his close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein; they were in the same West Palm Beach social circles, which is a very small set of very rich people who compose that society. The U.S. attorney who ended up being appointed, who oversaw Jeffrey Epstein's sweetheart deal, ended up being appointed by Donald Trump as Secretary of Labor. He has positive feelings for Ghislaine Maxwell in that notorious interview. He said, “I wish her well,” something that Donald Trump doesn't say about most criminals, let alone ones imprisoned on charges that they trafficked underage girls. 

But the climate that has been created – in large part by his closest followers, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino and his personal attorney, who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, at least for a little bit longer, and some of the leading and most influential MAGA influencers – is that if your name is even remotely associated with Jeffrey Epstein, your entire life and your integrity and your character are instantly cast into doubt. One of the first times I really noticed this was when The Wall Street Journal reported on a series of contacts between people that no one knew had known Jeffrey Epstein, one of whom was Noam Chomsky. And the reason that happened was because Jeffrey Epstein had a very specific and passionate interest in academic institutions in Boston, especially the two most prestigious, Harvard and MIT. He funded various research projects. He gave $125,000, for example, to Bill Ackman's wife in order for her to have some sort of research project. And he had two or three dinners with Noam Chomsky. And Chomsky was very contemptuous of the questions in the Wall Street Journal. I guess that's what happens when you're 92. You don't take any kind of smear campaign seriously. You don't really care. And he just said, “Yeah, I had dinners with Jeffrey Epstein. He was a very well-connected and wealthy person.” 

Now, oddly, Jeffrey Epstein was very close friends with the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who obviously knew Chomsky would have a great deal of animus towards, and Jeffrey Epstein was very connected to the Israeli government in all sorts of ways, including through his primary benefactor, the multi-billionaire Les Wexner, who handed over to Epstein billions of dollars, it seems, and assets. It is an odd person for Chomsky to know, but at the same time, if you're one of the most intellectually heralded professors and scholars in the Boston area at one of the most prestigious schools in the world, MIT, where Chomsky spent almost his entire life as a professor of linguistics, that is the kind of person that Jeffrey Epstein tried to target and befriend to make himself feel important, to make him feel intellectually relevant. And yet, you would have thought that that revelation by itself proved that Chomsky had gone to that island multiple times and had sex with underage girls and was a pedophile. So, there has been a lot of speculative guilt by association and hysteria that has surrounded this story, such that anyone whose name appears in those files is likely to have suspicion and doubt cast on them for the rest of their life, even if the connections were innocuous. 

I'm sure part of what Trump wants to avoid is any indication that his name appears in those files because of that climate that will spill over him, including by many of his own followers. Then there are likely things in there that might, one of the reasons why investigations are typically kept secret, including grand jury proceedings, is because there are a lot of unverified accusations, but if they're published, they may seem like they have credibility. That was part of what we had to deal with the NSA, with the Snowden documents. A lot of the archives contain documents where they wanted to spy on certain people and they would speculate that those people might have ties to terrorist groups, or al-Qaeda, or Islamic extremism, or engage in other kinds of crimes unrelated to terrorism, but they were never charged with that. There was no evidence for it. It was just speculation about why the NSA thought they should spy on these people and had we published those documents with their names, we would have destroyed their reputations forever, based on accusations that were completely unvetted and just appeared in these documents. 

Clearly, Trump panicked when he learned that his name was in there. Not only did he order no more disclosures, the investigation closed, but, out of nowhere, he began asserting that the Epstein files are all a fake, are all fabricated, or at least much of them are fabricated and claimed that they were the same kind of hoax that Obama, Hillary, Biden, Jim Comey and John Brennan manufactured for Russiagate and the Steele Dossier. All of a sudden, the Epstein files went from the most pressing and significant matter, the disclosure of which would be the key ingredient to deciphering the sinister globalist elite that runs the world, to a hoax, a bunch of fake documents that never should see the light of day.

 Obviously, the only reason why Trump would suddenly concoct that excuse was because he was fearful that it would harm his reputation or the reputation of people very close to him and whom he cares about. and so he said, “No, this should never see the light of day; this is just another Democratic Party hoax that you idiots are falling for.” And that behavior obviously fuels suspicions even more, as has the subsequent reporting from The Wall Street Journal about that birthday greeting that Trump sent to Epstein, which he denies, but The Wall Street Journal reported, and then the subsequent reporting that Pam Bondi briefed him that his name appears in these documents. 

So, anytime anyone thinks about the Epstein documents for even one second, that kind of loss of faith and trust in Trump is something that, once it breaks, is very difficult to put together again, and they are desperate. I mean, the day after the Epstein files, they said, “Hey, here's the Martin Luther King files.” It's like, I guess it's good to see the Martin Luther King files, kind of like the JFK files, in that these are documents that should have been released a long time ago.” There's zero reason for secrecy. It was one of the most consequential historical events of the last 70 years in the United States. We should be able to understand what our government knows about that event. But it wasn't like anybody was so eager, anyone thought that that was the key to deciphering much of anything. It was an important historical event. From all appearances, nothing particularly surprising, shocking, or informative about any of those documents that was clearly a way of saying, “Here's a new shiny toy that you can go look at and try to forget about Epstein. 

The revelation by Tulsi Gabbard, especially in the time frame in which it occurred, most definitely, unfortunately, because as I said, they're consequential, is being contaminated by this perception that anything that the government is now throwing at you as disclosures are designed to distract you from the big whale that they've been covering up that they themselves made into the most pressing matter – JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr. as well – but also the idea that they want to regain your trust by showing you that they're redirecting your attention somewhere else. So, yes, unfortunately, it does have the stench of that, but at the same time, let's talk about these documents because they are extremely revealing. 

I know Aaron Maté spent a good amount of time yesterday – he was one of the very, very few people who weren't a MAGA journalist or pundit, weren't a Trump supporter, who, from the very beginning, said, “This whole story seems journalistically dubious at best.” There were very few of us at the time doing that. Jimmy Dore was another person who did that. Matt Taibbi was another one. There were very, very few of us and we all got called fascists and Trump supporters and Russian agents for having questioned these sensationalistic conspiracy theories about the relationship between Donald Trump and Russia or the role Russia played in the 2016 election that never had evidence for them, that were all fueled by very familiar anonymous leaks from the CIA and the FBI and the rest of the national security state that hated Trump, to the papers to whom they always leak when they want to manipulate the public, which is The Washington Post and The New York Times, which then gave themselves Pulitzers for having done so. But of all those people, I think Aaron has the most granular, detailed knowledge of every document, of every form of testimony. It's something I haven't looked at in several years. We haven't spent a lot of time on Russiagate was basically debunked when Robert Mueller closed the investigation while arresting nobody on the core conspiracy that they criminally conspired with the Russians, saying they couldn't find any evidence for it. Of course, there's been no accountability; those very same people lied in 2020 when they said that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, exactly in the same way. No accountability for any of that. But I haven't spent that much time engrossed in Russian documents, like I used to do all the time when I was reporting on it. But Aaron has a very still-trap memory, especially for this particular story. So, I was very glad to let him come on and talk about it in my absence. That's one of the reasons why we asked him to guest-host last night. 

So, I know he did a lot in this, but I do want to say that what was so obvious from the very beginning was that this was a very coordinated, politicized theme that emerged out of nowhere in the middle of 2016, something that the Hillary Clinton campaign, out of desperation, invented out of whole cloth. I will never forget the day when it was sort of circulating in the air. You had people like David Korn trying to insert the Steele Dossier reporting before his disclosure. “Oh, there's a document out there that everyone in Washington knows about that contains shocking revelations of Trump and Russia.” And that was all part of the effort to try to lay the foundation for this. But the Hillary Clinton campaign released this ad with this very sinister baritone, this very dark music and these very grainy photos saying, “What are Donald Trump and the Kremlin doing in secret? What is this relationship that they have?” 

I was just so amazed because not only was there no evidence for it – zero, none – it never even made sense on its own terms. Why, if the Russians wanted to hack the Podesta and the DNC emails, would they have needed the assistance of the Trump campaign? How would the Trump campaign have helped in any way in that hacking? Why would they need to do that? Why would they collaborate with Trump's campaign that way? There was never really even any evidence that Putin actually wanted Trump to win that race. If anything, a lot of people assumed that Hillary was the overwhelming favorite to win, was almost certainly going to win it. No one wanted to get on her bad side, and no one thought Donald Trump could win. The idea that the Russians would go so heavy never made much sense, but even more so there was never any evidence for it that it came from Putin, that even if the Russians had been mucking around in the election, that it came from Putin, that was sort of a big master plan that had any effect on the election; there was never any evidence for this. 

The intelligence community went all in because they were petrified of Trump. They hated Trump. They saw, correctly, that Hillary Clinton would be a very safe guardian and continuation of the status quo, which is what they saw in Biden and Kamala Harris as well. Trump, for whatever else is true about him, is very unpredictable. Sometimes, he will go to bat for the military-industrial complex and the intelligence community more aggressively than anyone else, as he's done many times, but he's also unpredictable and they want predictability, continuity, stability. The Democrats represented that, and Trump didn't. That was why they were so eager to destroy him, both in the campaign and then, sabotaging his presidency once he was inaugurated, and that's exactly what they proceeded to do with this fake story that ended up getting completely debunked and everybody just walked away from it as though it never happened. 

What these documents reveal is what we assumed at the time, which was that the Obama administration, obviously, was desperate to help Hillary. It was the CIA under John Brennan, an extremely politicized, corrupt, and dishonest actor whom Obama first had as his national security advisor and then installed as CIA chief, that led the way in concocting evidence. They had James Clapper there, too, with a history of lying. Those are the people running the national security state. And they were open, partisan. Remember, these are the same people who ended up among the 51 intelligence officials in 2020 who lied with that letter, blaming the Russians for the Hunter Biden laptop and calling into question its authenticity right before the election because they were petrified it would help Trump win and Biden lose. Their politicized motives are beyond question. 

Same with James Comey at the FBI; his hatred for Donald Trump has become legend. These were the people who took the best assessment of the U.S. Intelligence community, the analysts and the spies who were saying there's very low confidence that Russia really did anything here. We're not sure that they were the ones who did the hacking. There's no evidence that Putin even has a preference, let alone that he's pursuing some master plan to implement that preference. 

Obama basically ordered Brennan and Clapper to go back and take another look, meaning to revise what their own intelligence professionals were telling them. Exactly what happened, by the way, with the Iraq war, when there were all sorts of analysts inside the CIA telling Dick Cheney and the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, that they did not believe that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD program. You may remember the very bizarre story in Pat Leahy's memoir, where he says he was jogging on the street with his wife or walking on the street with this wife and these two guys who he didn't recognize came up to them as joggers and kind of whispered in Pat Lahey's ear like, hey, take a look at file number 14 in the CIA briefing that you have in the Senate.

He went and looked at it. It was filled with documents raising serious doubts about the WMD claims. And then they did it again, a few days later, and they said, “Have you taken a look at file 6?” He went there and found even more convincing evidence. He did end up voting against it but never revealed to the public that those documents were there, let alone that any of that happened, because he was too much of a coward. But he did write about it in his books. 

So, there were parts of the intelligence community, the parts that were the actual professional analysts, who resisted the idea that they were weapons of obstruction. That's when they got George Tenet, the CIA director, to say, “Oh, it's a slam dunk.” They created their own intelligence teams who were ideologically driven, who would give them what they wanted. They had Colin Powell go to the U.N. and use his credibility, squander his credibility to represent that fake evidence, that fake intelligence. 

This is exactly what happened here: the intelligence professionals with no real stake in the game, career intelligence officials, were saying, “There's really not much here, not very much at all, that we could actually provide you to bolster these conclusions.” And they just went back and found whatever they wanted and concluded whatever they wanted and started leaking it to The Washington Post and The New York Times and it became something that was considered not just possible, but basically proven truth. 

The idea that Trump and Russia were in bed together, that Putin had blackmail leverage over Trump, became the leading narrative of the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency for the first 18 months through the Mueller investigation, drowning out all of our other politics in utter and complete fraud and hoax. We now see the actual details of what happened, which, for me, at the time, were extremely obvious, extremely visible, but the rest of the media – other than the few exceptions I named, there were a few others, some right-wing reporters were doing excellent work, Molly Hemingway and Chuck Ross doing real day-to-day reporting, a couple of others as well – but most of the media just didn't tolerate any kind of questioning of the Russiagate narrative. There was no place other than Fox News to go and question it or criticize it, not in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal, or The New York Times, or The Washington Post, not in any of the other cable shows, and anyone questioning the Russiagate narrative was expelled from left liberal precincts. It became some sort of heresy to even question it when the whole thing was a scam and a fraud from the start. 

I do not think there will be any accountability for this, in large part because, let's remember that that Supreme Court immunity case that liberals raised hell over and said was some kind of newly invented precedent to immunize Donald Trump to allow him to commit crimes in office, as I pointed out at the time, was neither new nor radical. But what it also did was immunize every other president besides Trump, past, present and future, from crimes they committed in office as well, as long as it's in the exercise of their Article II powers. That means Biden got immunized. It means George Bush got immunized. It means Barack Obama got immunized. It means whoever follows Trump got immunized. 

Whatever else is true, clearly, everything that Barack Obama is accused of having been doing was in the exercise of his Article II powers, namely, overseeing and directing the intelligence agency. Even if he did it corruptly, even if he did it criminally, the scope of the immunity from the Supreme Court was so broad that even manipulating intelligence is not subject to criminal prosecution because that would be a violation of the separation of powers by having the judiciary punish presidents for the exercise of their Article II powers. That's what the Supreme Court decision was. 

Theoretically, John Brennan or others in the intelligence community, James Clapper, people inside the Obama White House could theoretically be prosecuted, but the history of the expanded Article II powers that long predated this immunity decision that led to it, as I pointed out at the time, as they documented at great length, despite it being picked up as some brand new, radical new idea just to protect Trump, in fact, it was the logical conclusion of the expansion of executive power. The immunity provided to them makes it extremely unlikely that any of these people is going to be held criminally responsible. There are questions of Statute of Limitations, even if they could be held criminally liable, for example, for perjury, we're talking now about nine years ago, events from nine, eight, seven years ago, a lot of the Statute of Limitations have already elapsed. 

But at the very least, this should be considered a nail in the coffin, not just of the fact that this was a fraud perpetrated on the American people for a long time, using the abuses of the intelligence community to do so, but that it was very deliberate, it was very knowing, it was very conscious, by the people at the highest levels of our government. It's just yet another case where the most damaging and the most extreme abrasive hoaxes happen when the intelligence community, the White House and their media partners unite to disseminate lies to the American public day after day, week after week, month after month, that they constantly reinforce. 

And yeah, some of them are trying to draw this distinction between “having Russia hack the election” in terms of whether they hacked the voting systems and altered the results versus whether they hacked the election metaphorically by hacking the DNC and Podesta's emails and then changing the course of the election. But at the time, that distinction was never drawn. There was a reason they repeated over and over and over; there are montages people have made, of every major media outlet, of every major figure of politicians in the Democratic Party, over and over, obviously through a coordinated script, saying the Russians hacked our election. And the message got to the American people: 70% of Americans two years later in polling believed that Hillary Clinton was the rightful winner of the 2016 election, but that the Russians had hacked into our electoral system and changed the voting outcome. 

You may recall the very notorious incident at The Intercept: a person inside the government named Reality Winner leaked to The Intercept a document and The Intercept handled it extremely carelessly. They allowed people to believe that I was the one who did it and oversaw it and, in fact, I hated this story from the beginning. I didn't even believe it should be worked on because the document was so unreliable. But they mishandled it to such an extent because they were so eager to get it published, to show the media that, despite my constant skepticism, vocal, vehement, constant skepticism about Russiagate, that they were going to join the real part of the media, and impress The Washington Post, The New York Times, and NBC News, by showing that they were willing to do a major story, bolstering the Russiagate, fraud.  

The whole point of that document was a very speculative memo that had been written, suggesting that the Russians had succeeded in tests on how to tap into our electoral system to basically bolster the idea that the Russians succeeded in changing vote totals to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election. That was what the big, huge, important disclosure from Reality Winner was, that The Intercept fell lock, stock and barrel because they wanted to. 

But even on the question not the weather they hacked the election in terms of the electoral system and changing vote totals, but in the metaphoric way, they're now trying to mean that they intended it to be, namely, that the Russians played a key role in that election, that it was Vladimir Putin's determination to help Trump win, that they hacked the DNC and Podesta emails to help that Kremlin goal that there was very little to no evidence for that either, and the intelligence community was extremely reluctant and dubious to endorse it, basically were forced to, when Obama ordered them to go back and make sure that they had released something before his leaving that allowed the media to believe that this was the overwhelming consensus of the intelligence committee. 

That is a gigantic scandal. It's not surprising. Something I believed for a long time is exactly what happened. It seemed so obvious at the time. Probably, other than the Snowden story, maybe the big investigation we did here in Brazil in 2019 and 2020 that resulted in Lula being freed from prison, I can't recall any story, any reporting I did that generated more contempt and hatred and pushback because it was a religion to the mainstream media and the Democratic Party. And not just the partisans of the Democratic Party, but most of the liberal left part of the party, though they deny it now, bought into this Russiagate story as well. And I do think it's so refreshing anytime you get disclosures of classified documents that are concealing, not information that might harm the American public or the national security of the United States, that they're disclosed, but that will harm the reputation of people in charge because it shows corruption that they abused the secrecy powers to conceal. 

Unfortunately, there is this skepticism that it's being done to distract from Epstein and partially it probably is. And there's going to be very little coverage of this because the media outlets that would cover it, that should cover it, are the ones who are the leading perpetrators of it. How can they without admitting massive guilt? They're never going to do it, they still haven't done it to this day, despite being caught lying repeatedly that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a much more straightforward lie that they got caught disseminating over and over before the election. So, I don't expect this to do much. 

You can see the only people who are talking about this are the people who were skeptical of the Russiagate story from the start. A lot of vindication is definitely deserved. People should claim it. It's an important story to explain to the public. But the people who really deserve accountability for this probably aren't going to get any and that's one of the major problems of our system. And until about a month ago, that's what the MAGA movement was saying was so important about the Epstein files as well, that people engaged in wrongdoing will face no accountability because these documents have been hidden. It seems like these documents are going to remain hidden, even more so because of the new determination by President Trump, for whatever his reasons, to keep them hidden and even to disparage their reliability or authenticity, even if they did get released. 

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All right, Columbia University and the White House announced a major new deal with the Trump Administration to restore their funding. The Trump White House cut off all research funding for Columbia, threatened to punish it in all sorts of other ways based on alleged claims that they tolerate antisemitism, that they allow Jewish students to be harassed, all those claims that the Trump administration has been making gain greater control of the curriculum at colleges, speech codes at colleges, faculty hiring at colleges. Columbia capitulated as it was clear they were going to do and they made this big announcement today.

@samsonite about that deal asked this: 

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God, you must be very well-spoken, very polite if you have to apologize for “what the hell is going on here” and say, “pardon my language.” For a lot of people, that is actually very elevated language, so congratulations on that. 

And then, there's a related issue that I'll get to with this next question, but the Columbia deal basically doesn't make sense on its own, because the idea is it's a deal to restore financing of the U.S. government to Colombia, even though part of the deal is that Colombia has to pay $200 million to the Trump administration, kind of as a punishment or a fee, they're accepting that they'll lose $200 million for all that naughty and bad things that they did in allowing too much criticism of Israel, and allowing protests to get out of control in the view of the Trump administration – in general, just allowing too much antisemitic thoughts and ideas and expression to the point that Jewish students are being endangered. There are also lawsuits brought by Jewish students against Columbia that Columbia is now agreeing to pay millions of dollars in order to settle. 

So, congratulations to the very put-upon, marginalized and oppressed Jewish students at Columbia who are now going to get major payoffs for all the hardship and the harassment and the oppression and marginalization they had to endure from seeing protests that made them uncomfortable. 

You can believe that Columbia University allowed the protest to get out of hand if you want. We've gone over this many times before. The history of student protests in this country has been an iconic part of the college experience. The protest against the Vietnam War in the ‘60s were infinitely more disruptive and radical than the protests throughout 2023, mostly into 2024, at most campuses where the resistance was largely symbolic. The campus protests at almost every school, including Columbia, were filled with Jewish students themselves, despite all the speech about how these protests were dangerous and harassing for Jewish students; huge numbers of Jews composed these protests and these encampments. We interviewed several of them to the point that every Friday night, inside the Columbia encampments, supposedly the most antisemitic one, the most dangerous one, with a history at the school of antisemitism, there were Shabbat dinners for all the protesters where Muslim, Christian and Jewish students, as part of these protests, would all get together for Shabbat dinner. They celebrated Muslim holidays and Christian holidays together. 

So, there was a huge exaggeration, which there always is, of any threat anytime the government wants to seize power over our private institutions or academic institutions. There's also a lot of misconception about the funding that comes from the U.S. government to these universities. The government doesn’t fund universities and just say, here's $500 million for you to use how you want. They task these universities who can attract the greatest minds from all over the world to pay for research facilities and labs, to research cures and treatments, to research all sorts of technology, including military technology. That's where a lot of military technology comes from. It's not a charity. It's being done to keep the United States competitive. A lot of the research ends up being done in our elite universities and never before has this money come with attachments about what views can be heard on campus or what kinds of professors can teach certain things and how they have to be approved by the government. 

So, two of the things that Columbia University has done that jeopardize free speech rights and academic freedom, not for foreign students and not in ways that pertain to the right to protest, it has nothing to do with the protest, it has nothing do with foreign students, it's purely about the expression of ideas, the peaceful expression of ideas in a classroom, in a student newspaper or what can be taught in schools. Part of it is that the curriculum for certain departments, obviously beginning with the Middle East Studies Department, which is the one of greatest interest to the government because that's where Israel can be criticized and discussed, now has to be subject to the review of the federal government. And on top of that, and even worse, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia adopt what Harvard has already adopted under government pressure and other universities as well, which is a radically expanded hate speech code that outlaws and bans ideas that have always been permissible to express at our leading universities under the First Amendment and the basic notions of academic freedom, but that are not outlawed. 

You're not allowed, for example, to call Israel a racist endeavor, even though you're allowed to call the United States a racist endeavor, even though you're allowed call any other country a racist endeavor, just not Israel. You're not allowed to say that Jews played a role in killing Jesus, even though Christians have believed this for centuries: not allowed to say. It's not like you can say it and then other people get to debate it. That's now deemed antisemitic. You can't subject Israel to criticism that you can't prove you subject other countries equally to the exact same criticism. So, like if you criticize Israel for engaging in a genocide, but you haven't said the same thing about some faction in the Sudan that does the same things, you can be guilty of antisemitism. Even you may not talk about the Sudan because your government has no role in it, while your government funds and arms what's happening and what's being done in Gaza. 

Suddenly, you have this burden of proof when you criticize Israel to show that you criticize other countries in exactly the same way. You don't have that burden to prove for any other country. You can criticize China without having to prove that you criticized other countries in the same ways. The burden is only for Israel. You're not allowed to say that certain Jewish individuals seem to have more loyalty to Israel than they do to the United States, even though it's so clearly true. People like Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss and so many others, you are not allowed to say that anymore, not allowed to express that. If you do, you're now in violation of the expanded hate speech code. And the whole point of this is to severely chill what can be said to young people about Israel, what young people can say about Israel on college campuses, about risking punishment. 

I want you to think about that for a minute. How unbelievably severe that is, how seriously grave an assault on free speech that is, not in defense of marginalized American groups, which is bad enough, but in defense of a foreign country and its interests and those who are loyal to it. Remember, the Trump movement spent a decade viciously mocking the idea that marginalized groups, minority groups and college campuses were intended to feel safe by banning ideas that make them uncomfortable. Now, that's exactly what the Trump administration required Columbia to do in exchange for having its research funding restored – and Harvard as well. 

What's happening is everybody sees the same polling data that we've shown you, that huge numbers of people in the United States have dramatically revised toward the negative side, their views of Israel and the U.S. relationship to Israel. And there's panic over that among Israel and its loyalists in the United States, who are reacting to that by trying to squash and destroy any place that allows criticism of Israel. Remember, the reason why the TikTok ban passed was not because of the China issue, which never got enough votes or near enough. It only got enough votes after October 7, when enough Democrats got convinced that one of the reasons why so many young people had turned against Israel and were against the war in Gaza was because TikTok was allowing too much anti-Israel pro-Palestinian sentiment to be expressed and they wanted to either force TikTok to close because of that or to force it to be transferred to a corporation that would be much more aggressive about censoring material that the government wanted suppressed. 

Right now, there's this amazing thing happening where Paramount is involved in a major merger. That's the parent company of CBS News and other networks, as well, and the idea of the merger, basically, is that Larry Ellison's son – Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle who's worth $30, $35 billion – his son, the heir to the Ellison fortune and the Ellinson family are fanatical supporters of Israel, are buying CBS News, with “60 Minutes” being one of the examples and “60 Minutes” has been widely criticized for having broadcast a lot of reports that are very pro-Israel, but also some that were critical. And not only is he now taking control of CBS, but he's negotiating with Bari Weiss to buy her Israeli government state outlet, the Free Press, for something like $200 million. And not only will the Free Press then become part of CBS News, but she will have some sort of ombudsman role or even a correspondent role at “60 Minutes.” 

So, you see this change in public opinion about Israel, and then you see the response, which is attacking all of our major institutions, imposing censorship on them, and using billionaire wealth to buy up these media outlets, and then installing within them people who are going to ensure that the content is completely pro-Israel. I hear all the time, they ask, like, “Why do you talk about Israel so much? Why are you so obsessed with Israel?” Obsessed with Israel? These are the people who are passing laws and bills and doing things every single day on behalf of Israel. The people inside government, in the largest corporations, and now in our academic institutions. 

Of course, I'm going to report on it. I'm going to focus on it a lot more when our government is paying for what I think is the greatest atrocity in humanitarian crime of the 21st century, which is the genocide and mass starvation in Gaza. But beyond that, it has all kinds of repercussions here at home. And they never stop. And here's just one more example. 

This is from someone called @YourLastUberDriver trying to think of what the implications of that might be. But I guess it's inspiring in the sense that if you're afraid there's a disappearance of Uber drivers, this person who asked this question will be there toward the end. They're going to be your last Uber driver. And they seem very wise, very reliable, so perhaps that's good. 

@YourLastUberDriver says this: 

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Yes, there is bipartisan legislation designed to impose greater censorship powers over the internet, over Big Tech, which we all agreed, I thought, was a terrible thing. It has bipartisan support. It's led by Congressman Josh Gottheimer of New, who's a fanatical supporter of Israel, he's a Democrat from New Jersey, as well as Don Bacon, who is a Republican from Nebraska, who is also a fanatical Israel supporter. And it comes from the ADL, whose job is to censor American discourse on behalf of Israel. 

Here's Congressman Gottheimer and Congressman Don Bacon at a George Newt conference, heralding their censorship legislation to force Big Tech to censor what they regard as antisemitic. 

Video. Josh Gottheimer, Don Bacon, AD. July 24, 2025.

I want to just emphasize that last point. He's talking about his legislation and then he says what he's particularly proud of. Wow, that's something to be so proud of. You're introducing a censorship law for American citizens, and you have the approval and background of a group with a long, aggressive tradition of demanding that people be fired or censored if they become critical of Israel. Congratulations. 

The Republican Congressman Bacon is a member of Congress who receives massive funding from AIPAC, needless to say, people are offended by his views. He's a public figure and he gets criticized on Twitter, and he sees it. People are calling him a Zionist, someone who's too loyal to Israel. He doesn't like it. And now he wants to enact a bill drafted by the ADL to force Big Tech to censor what he considers antisemitism. We don't think there's anti-black racism all over Twitter. Go look at Ilhan Omar's tweets and things that people say to her in response, or Jasmine Crockett. Go look at what Pete Buttigieg gets. You don't think there are all sorts of very anti-gay animus directed at him. Every single person in public life, no matter who you are, deals with that. Most of us are adults. We understand that it's actually healthier to allow free speech. I mean, if we hear things we really dislike, that are really ugly, it's in our bloodstream as Americans to kind of believe that about free speech, that yes, you get insults and all sorts of vituperative comments about things about you and who you are. But most of us don't have the impulse to go and censor that. And it's especially important to allow the public to express criticisms of political figures, elected officials in Washington, who are doing something like financing and arming a war. You're allowed to speak aggressively toward them, even if they don't like it. He's not even Jewish. Josh Gottheimer is Jewish. Congressman Bacon is not even Jewish. He's like, “I'm getting so much antisemitism in my Twitter feed.” Who cares? Stop reading it if it really bothers you. But passing a bill to force Big Tech to censor the stuff that you think is unpleasant!

Why is antisemitic speech more disturbing to you than anti-Black speech or anti-Muslim speech or anti-LGBT speech or anti-immigrant speech, which is also all over the place? My view on all of it is the same, which is that it's not the role of the government nor Big Tech to censor any of it. But this is what's happening throughout the democratic world. It's particularly happening in the EU, Canada, and, worst of all, in Brazil. 

We have a First Amendment that makes it more difficult, and that's why they're trying to outsource it to Big Tech. This is exactly what I thought we were all so angry about: what the Biden administration did when they forced Big Tech to censor dissent on COVID, on the 2020 election and on Ukraine. And that's what I mean. I'm the one obsessed with Israel when you have everyday members of Congress like this standing up and introducing new bills on behalf of a foreign government that attack our free speech rights as Americans. Yeah, I'm going to talk about that a lot. 

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All right, here is @AntiWarism who says: 

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Yes, this was the idea of “cancel culture” and the objections to it. It wasn't about government attacks on free speech, which is a violation of the First Amendment. It was the ideal that if you express views that are disliked by mainstream thought, that now you get fired, you get canceled, and it happens not just to people in prominent positions, but also to people on lower-level positions. 

So, here's the example. Honestly, I hate this whole format that has become popular, this Jubilee format. I can't stand how Mehdi Hassan debates. He wrote a book saying, “I'm the greatest debater” and really all he does is just filibuster and talk over people. Maybe you get out four or five words until he starts speaking over you and he thinks that's somehow an effective way of debating. 

But here's the person who basically self-identified as a fascist when Mehdi accused him of being one; he then lost his job. I think it's like a 21-year-old kid, all these people at this place were quite young and here's what happened. 

Video. Mehdi Hassan, Connor Estelle, Jubilee. July 30, 2025.

Can I understand why an employer would want to disassociate themselves from that person, saying that in that manner? Yes, I can understand that.  But I also think that if we have this climate where people cannot say what they believe unless it's completely acceptable to power factions or mainstream forces, that even though we have a First Amendment that restricts what the government can do in theory, oftentimes, cultural repression and social ostracization are much more potent and effective tools for controlling ideas – in fact, George Orwell has wrote a preface to Animal Farm, where he basically said that although the Soviet Union has very overt forms of repression and censorship, if you criticize Stalin, the KGB shows up at your house and takes you away and sends you to a gulag, in Siberia or whatever, that actually the British form of censorship is much more effective. It's basically diluting people into thinking that they're free, but making sure they get fired, they're unemployable, they don't get heard in the media, if they express any opinions outside the very narrow range of accepted opinions. Ironically, his preface couldn't be published because it was too sensitive. It seemed like almost too pro-Russian at a time when the West was entering the Cold War. His preface was censored, but it's now available; you can go read it online. I think it's absolutely right. 

There were all these examples in the Black Lives Matter movement, or Me Too, when low-level workers got fired for any kind of questioning or deviation from the right language. They had a truck driver who supposedly made the okay sign at a traffic stop, which was interpreted as a white supremacist message, and he got fired. Media outlets were doxing people for comments they were leaving to get them fired. That climate is incredibly repressive, intimidating, but after October 7, huge numbers of people in media, Hollywood and politics and journalism were fired for expressing criticism of Israel and their destruction of Gaza in academia as well. And suddenly, all the concerns about cancel culture disappeared. 

So, if you're 21 years old and you basically say “I want Trump to be a king and an autocrat and that's because I'm a fascist, self-identifying as a fascist is going to fall rather shockingly on the ears of a lot of people in the United States. And if you're an employer who deals with the public and you're a private company, especially if you are in a certain community and deal with a certain group of people, it might be very harmful to your business interests to have somebody like that employed. So I understand why that could happen. 

Again, if this were an isolated case, I would say: when you live in a society, you do have to kind of think about how you express yourself and what effect it has on others; if you decide you don't, then you probably are going to suffer consequences. It’s just a lesson you learn in life, living in a society; you have to accommodate, to some extent, how you're perceived.

But I also think that it can be very dangerous if it becomes too much of an automatic reaction, which, in a lot of different ways, I think it became, and a lot of the right was very opposed to these sorts of things when it was conservatives who were largely the target of it, and then, after October 7, a lot of that changed. People started applauding much more draconian forms of cancel culture like Bill Ackman, spearheading and organizing a blacklist among the most powerful law firms, Wall Street banks and hedge funds to vow never to hire undergraduate kids, 18 to 22, who sign a letter condemning Israel for their use of indiscriminate violence in Gaza, trying to make sure they're unemployable and having mass firings of people who express similar views. I noticed the disappearance of the concerns over cancel culture when that happened. And so, if you're going to be concerned with cancel culture and you don't apply it equally, it's like anything, not really a principle. 

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All right, last question is from @KCM71, who says this:

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Let me say, I find this dynamic so fascinating that whenever the American left is faced with a nominee from the Democratic Party that they hate, they are Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or countless senators or whomever, they're told it's your obligation to support and vote for whoever your party nominates, whether you like them or not. But the minute there's a nominee of the Democratic Party that the Democratic Party nominates who the establishment hates and the left likes, that obligation disappears. 

I still believe, in 2016, had the DNC not cheated and Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination, Democratic Party elites absolutely would have done everything to prevent him from being president, even if it meant electing Trump because what party leaders typically fear the most is the loss of their prerogatives within their own party. They would rather lose and keep control of the party than win if it means this shifting to some new group or some new generation. 

We especially saw that when Jeremy Corbyn became the leader of the Labour Party and the vast majority of Blairites and people in the center and the center-right of that party, overwhelmingly and overtly sought to destroy him, not to get a new party leader in, but to ensure that he lost the election. They would rather have lost to Boris Johnson, had Boris Johnson become prime minister, which is what happened, than lose control of the Labour Party by winning under Jeremy Corbyn. 

This is why I don't think that the Democratic establishment and elites believe they can stop Zohran at this point, in part because the alternatives are just so weak. I mean, you have Andrew Cuomo completely plagued by all sorts of scandal, just old, not really having anything to do with New York City, clearly not even wanting to be mayor; you have Eric Adams who caught red-handed taking bribes from Turkey and was only let go because he did a deal with the Trump administration to allow ICE to operate in New York City and then Curtis Sliwa, who's not a serious candidate, but are going to divide the vote enough to ensure that Zohran will win – not 100% sure anything could happen, but I think they're kind of resigned to it. 

But they also are afraid, more so – you see this with Hakeem Jeffries: Zohran Mamdani won Hakeem Jeffries’ congressional district by 12 points and yet, Hakeem Jeffries, the head of the Democratic House caucus in New York, refuses to endorse Zohran Mamdani. Left-wing people to this day got angry that Bernie Sanders didn't endorse Hillary Clinton quickly enough. He went around the country campaigning for her, but they say he didn't do it enthusiastically enough. 

But look at the prerogatives they take for themselves and there's never a point at which the left says, God, these people hate us so much. Like, why are we giving them our support when they so blatantly subvert and sabotage our candidates. You would think they would just have some dignity and finally leave. Jeremy Corbyn finally left the Labour Party, but only this week. He and a much younger, leftist member of parliament whose parents or grandparents were Pakistani immigrants to the U.K. – but she was born in the U.K. as her parents were third generation now, U.K. citizens – the two of them are the co-leaders of this new party in protest of the Labour Party's support for Israel and other policies as well because they concluded that there's no way within the Labour Party to actually reform. They will sabotage you if you try. 

And this is something we saw with AOC, when AOC was running and won her primary, in 2018, against a very senior member of the Democratic leadership, Joe Crowley, who was really in line to become House Speaker once Nancy Pelosi left, she sounded all these radical notes. I interviewed her. I was amazed at how thoughtful she seemed to be about making sure that her primary criticisms are directed mostly at the Democratic Party, how she understood that her main job had to be to go in and change the Democratic Party and not the Republican Party, so that there were two actual parties with two different sets of views. She gets in and she understands that to play the game, to get ahead, to gain power, you have to compromise constantly, become a good Democrat. She's barely distinguishable from Nancy Pelosi at this point. Remember, AOC just voted last week to send $500 million in military aid to Israel while calling it a genocide. Even while four members of her own party, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee and Al Green, all voted for Marjorie Taylor Greene's amendment to block that money from going there. AOC voted to send $500 million to Israel. 

One of the things that got my attention about her in 2018 was when she said – this was at the time when the Palestinians were doing their peaceful march up to the border fence, and the Israelis started just sniping them to death – and AOC said, “It's time for the Democratic Party to stop supporting these grotesque human rights abuses by Israel.” And I thought, OK, that's interesting to me. And now, here she is just a few years later, sending $500 million to Israel while pretending to believe that Israel is engaged in a genocide. 

So, there is the very real question of whether somebody who's very politically ambitious, as Zohran Mamdani is, can possibly change anything with any party system that is designed to destroy any challenge to its leadership, to its core dogma, to its donor base. And you see him making some concessions already. And while I still hope he wins given the alternatives, I mean the part of the debate alone where they said, “What's your first foreign trip going to be? And they all said, “We're going to go to the Holy Land and we're going to go right to Israel and we going to take our first trip to Israel” and he said, “I'm going to stay at home and work on the affordability issues facing the people of our city.” That alone, that kind of politics – as mayor of an American city, my job is to focus on the American people and not go pay some homage to Israel or to some other foreign country or that he understands that affordability and economic populism is the key issue, not culture war stuff, which is what he ran on in his campaign – those are the kind of things, that populist messages, that I think we need more of, both on the left and the right. But if you ask me, do I think he's going to immediately start compromising? Then my answer is probably going to be yes, because he's going to have to work with the Democratic Party infrastructure to get anything done. 

I think I might have talked about this before, but I'll just tell this quick story. When my husband got elected to become an elected official and got into elected office, first as a city councilman in Rio de Janeiro, and then as a member of the Brazilian Congress, I saw this firsthand. He wanted to go and introduce packages and laws and projects to help the people of his community, the people who voted for him, and whom he felt an obligation to serve. The only reason why he was interested in politics was to try to change people's material lives for the better. And then you get there, and you hear like, “Oh, that seems like a good bill. We're not sure we can get it to the fore, though. But if you're willing to support this project of mine, it's kind of corrupt, like just about greasing the wheels, then, maybe, you'll be able to get your bill to the fore and we support you.” You're suddenly faced with this choice: do I now start compromising and becoming part of the system in the hope that I can actually get the things done that I want to get done or do I just stand on principle and say, no, I'm not going to play your game, even if it means I can never get my things to the floor? Maybe in 10 years you can use your charisma and ability to get a platform. 

When you first get there, you're faced with these huge obstacles where, if you want to do anything, you have to play the game. And then, at some point, you have to consider how much are you really compromising to serve your original goals, or how much are you now compromising because you want to get on the key committees, and what are the motives that you want to get on the keys committees, is it because that's a better path to power? It's a very, very difficult road to navigate. Even if you arrive with the best of intentions, you find yourself in this corrupt, sleazy system constructed to co-opt you and to basically get you to play the game that you were running to destroy and it's very hard once you're immersed in it to see what the real principles are and what the real compromises are that are going to actually undermine what you set out to be. I think the only way to do that is by avoiding the structures that are already so fundamentally rotted and so fundamentally corrupt that they're going to contaminate you the more you attach yourself to them. 

I think being part of the Democratic Party is going to guarantee that you end up on the AOC to Pelosi path. Remember, Nancy Pelosi, when she started a career from San Francisco, was considered way to the left in the Democratic Party and by the end, she had no ideology. She was just a manager, like a technocrat, supporting wars and Wall Street and finance, insider trading. That's the path that you end up on and that the system is guaranteed to lure you into. You have to be someone who just has a personality that's very combative, very willing to sacrifice your own ambition and self-interest in career pursuits to combat. 

And if you ask me if that's Zohran Mamdani, I don't know him well enough to say one way or the other for sure, but it doesn't seem like that's what he is to me. Kind of like what Obama pretended to be and then wasn't. Every 10 years the Democratic Party offers a new person like this: here's the exciting one, here's a new one, here's the one who's really going to be on your side. We know you hate our party, we know you hit our dogma, our leadership, but look, we found something really new and exciting for you and it keeps people, young people and people identified as the left, on that path to identifying with the Democratic Party. 

Oftentimes, the Democratic Party changes very little; usually, that's the case. Everybody likes to keep up hope. Nobody likes to be defeatist or nihilistic but wants to believe that there's something hopeful. I'm the same way. Why would I wake up and focus on these sorts of things every day unless I believe that there were prospects and hope for positive change? 

I've seen positive change. You look at history, you look at current politics. It can happen. Changes in public opinion can happen. You want to believe that if you didn't believe that you would go do something else, if you thought it was all futile. But the road of being lured in by outsiders to the Democratic Party who seek to get into the Democratic Party and assume power within it is one fraught with almost nothing but disappointment, defeat and betrayal, ultimately, a draining of any belief that that continues to be the correct path. And people want to believe that. So, they keep kind of being vulnerable to that sales pitch. 

Maybe Zohran will be different. It's possible. But I certainly won't be shocked sitting here six months from now or a year from now if someone comes and shows me or I see for myself all the evidence that he's basically morphing into AOC and then Nancy Pelosi, that will not shock me in the slightest. 

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Aaron Maté on More Russiagate Fallout, Protests in Ukraine and Israel's Strikes on Syria with Special Guests John Solomon, Marta Havryshko, and Joshua Landis
System Update #491

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

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I'm Aaron Maté, sitting in for Glenn Greenwald. 

Tonight, we'll be looking at three major stories: the latest in Russiagate and the latest as well in Ukraine and Syria. There's a through line to all three of these stories. That's the CIA. That is right. From Russiagate to Ukraine to Syria, a lot of the mess that we're still dealing with after so many years in all these major stories runs through the CIA. 

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Interview: John Solomon 

During Donald Trump's first term, the dominant story of his presidency was the allegation that he had secretly conspired with Russia as part of a massive Russian interference campaign to install him in office. A lot of this story was fueled by intelligence officials who fueled the Russiagate conspiracy theory with anonymous stories to the press. Well, now we all know, after multiple investigations, that a lot of it was a scam and we continue to learn more. The new Director of National Intelligence under Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, has been declassifying critical information on the Russiagate story and unveiling a brand-new batch of newly disclosed records. Tulsi Gabbard accused Barack Obama of being a part of a plot against Trump. 

Video. Tulsi Gabbard, White House July 23, 2025.

So, that's Tulsi Gabbard accusing Barack Obama and other officials in his administration of being part of a coup against Trump. 

I think the language is a little bit too strong. I also think that the administration has messed up some of the messaging here in putting out the Russiagate documents. They've conflated, for example, vote hacking and email hacking. Email hacking was the core allegation at the heart of Russiagate and if you listen to the messaging that Tulsi Gabbard has been putting out, she's conflating the two. 

So, there have been some mistakes in putting out this story, and it also comes out of time when there's a lot of anger at the Trump administration for reneging on their promise to bring disclosure to the story of Jeffrey Epstein, which Donald Trump is very much implicated in. However, that does not negate the fact that there are really important disclosures in these new Russiagate documents. 

I have a brand-new article at RealClear Investigations talking about what I think is the essential story here, which is that the core allegation at the heart of Russiagate, along with the conspiracy theory that Trump and Russia were in cahoots, which nobody believes anymore. But the other major story was that Russia waged a massive interference campaign, and the heart of that supposed interference campaign was that Russian stole emails from the Democratic Party and released them via WikiLeaks. 

Well, if you read the new documents, you will see that U.S. intelligence officials who lodged this Russian email hacking allegation buried the fact that there was dissent at the highest levels that Russia was responsible for the hack and release of these emails. The NSA and the FBI, two premier U.S. intelligence agencies, expressed low confidence in that Russian hacking allegation. That assessment from the FBI and the NSA, which was suppressed until now, until Tulsi Gabbard just released it. 

So even though the messaging has been screwed up, the disclosures are important, and transparency is paramount because whether you want to think this was a coup or not, this was an attempt to frame Trump and his campaign as Russian agents and accuse Russia of a massive interference campaign that was aimed at destroying American democracy. There have been many consequences to this Russiagate scandal, including fueling tensions with Russia, and I think helping to lead to the current crisis we're in inside Ukraine. 

To discuss all this and more, I am joined by one of the premier journalists on the Russiagate story. John Solomon is the founder of the website, Just the News, a veteran reporter who's previously worked for The Washington Post and Associated Press, and he's been on the Russiagate story since day one. 

Aaron Maté: John Solomon, thanks so much for joining us on System Update. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, great to be with you. Great to join you. 

 

Aaron Maté: You have covered Russiagate extensively, and we've just gotten a series of really important document releases declassified by the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. For people not following this story as closely as you and I have, what do you think is most important to know, and what revelations stand out to you? 

 

John Solomon: What we now know is that both our intelligence and our law enforcement communities were hijacked by political operatives in the 2016 election to take the normal process of how you would evaluate election interference, which goes on, by the way, in every election with multiple countries, and tried to turn it into a political weapon and to create the perception in the public that Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to defeat Hillary Clinton. 

That concept starts with Hillary Clinton herself. The intelligence committee intercepts a conversation indicating that Hillary personally approved a plan in mid-July to hang a fake Russian shingle on Donald Trump's campaign house, basically, play a dirty trick and make it look like Vladimir and Donald were together in the election. The President of the United States at the time, Barack Obama, was personally warned about this on or about July 25 by John Brennan. Then, five days later, the president does not stop the FBI when the FBI decides to open up on that allegation. Between July and November, there's a concerted effort to get an FBI investigation going, to get a FISA warrant going, to then leak the information to try to get voters to believe this false story that was an illusion of the Clinton campaign. 

Donald Trump still wins the election, not with Vladimir Putin's help, but with the help of the American people. In December, with Hillary Clinton chastened by her loss, the intelligence community, working with John Brennan, tries to create a plausible explanation that Hillary only lost because Vladimir Putin had hijacked the election for Donald Trump. And they do this over the objections of career CIA officials. They do this in violation of the Intelligence Committee's directive rules; they do it by relying on a document that, by December 2016, the Steele Dossier, we all know it now, had been fully discredited, yet is used to drive a conclusion that Vladimir Putin was trying specifically to help Donald Trump win. It's really dramatic how it happens. 

On December 8, 2016, after the election, the Intelligence Committee was going to come to Barack Obama and say, “Hey, we assess that Russia, like it always did, gotten meddled in the election a little bit, but it did not have a favorite candidate.” In fact, it so much didn't have a favored candidate that it dropped out of its active measures, its “dirty tricks,” its intelligence, in October, the very month, if you were going to try to influence the election, you would most be active, right? If you wanted Hillary or Donald Trump to win, October's the month when people are making up their minds: that's when you would do your most active things. Putin pulls out of the election in October. 

On December 8, they were going to tell Barack Obama that that briefing had been canceled. The next day, Barack Obama orders a new review, led only by John Brennan, James Comey, and the NSA director, and within a few short weeks, they flip-flop the conclusions and say, “Oh, we've now decided, magically, that Vladimir Putin was specifically trying to help Donald Trump.” The only way they can get there, by today's explosive revelations that Tulsi Gabbard gave us, is because they have to use the Steele Dossier, which by that time has been discredited over and over again. Bruce Ohr told them in August that it was not to be relied on. The CIA warned the FBI in September that Steele's network of sources had been infiltrated by Russian intelligence. He needed to be reevaluated. The FBI fires Christopher Steele after catching him leaking the existence of the investigation and his dossier in November, and by December, the FBI has completed a spreadsheet of every sentence of the Steele dossier and concluded they can't corroborate it, or they've debunked every sentence. And despite all that, they decide to use it over the rules of the Intelligence Committee to plant this dirty secret or to plant a lie on the American people that Vladimir Putin helped Donald Trump win the election. 

 

Aaron Maté: I'm personally skeptical that there even was any kind of serious Russian meddling operation at all. There were some Facebook ads, we know about that, and some memes, but in terms of the email hacking, I am even more skeptical now after seeing the newly declassified intelligence. But before I get into that with you, I want to go back to July, because it's really important what you discussed initially. 

So, in July, we learned years later, that the Obama administration got a warning that Russia was aware of a plot to falsely tie Trump to Russia and despite that, as you explained, the Obama administration still let the FBI go ahead with its collusion investigation. And what we also learned way later was that weeks before the FBI opened up its fake collusion investigation into Trump and Russia, Victoria Nuland, who was then a senior State Department official, authorized the FBI to go and collect the Steele dossier, which is the Clinton campaign-funded collection of conspiracy theories. But yet the FBI wants us to believe that it had nothing to do with their decision to open up Crossfire Hurricane, the Trump-Russia occlusion probe. But on the issue of this warning by Brennan, of the so-called Clinton plan intelligence… 

 

John Solomon: Let me stop here, just for one second, because you just said something pretty profound. It's really important to realize that after they're warned that Hillary Clinton's going to plant the dirty trick, the FBI's FISA warrant relies on the direct evidence of that dirty trick. The Steele dossier was a big part of the dirty trick that the Clinton campaign was planting, along with the fake Alpha Bank story. The FBI takes the very fruit of what they know to be a dirty trick because they were warned, and they use it to predicate the investigation. That's what makes it more than just bumbling and stumbling. That's why a lot of people like Kash Patel, who's now open to conspiracy case, believe it was criminal in nature. 

 

Aaron Maté: Absolutely. Okay, speaking of criminal, in early September, weeks after John Brennan shared this information that Russia is aware of a Clinton plot to falsely tie Trump to Russia. All of a sudden, John Brennan sends a criminal referral or an investigative referral to the FBI, to James Comey, to Peter Strzok, warning them about this Clinton plan intelligence, this Clinton plot to falsely tie Trump to Russia. And yet nothing happens, and in fact, years later, James Comey is asked about this in Congress, and he claims it doesn't ring any bells. 

What do you think is going on here? So, Brennan received his intelligence, he warns Obama about it, then in September, why does he all of a sudden send a referral to the FBI? Do you buy James Comey's claim that it doesn't ring any bells? He doesn't remember receiving that referral. 

 

John Solomon: On multiple instances over the last four or five years, including this week when Barack Obama said, “I don't know how they can say I was part of a conspiracy,” I kept thinking back to the figure on the old Hogan Heroes TV show, Sgt. Schultz, who always used to say, “I know nothing,” even though he knew everything that was going on in the camp. 

It's important to realize that these statements are not true, based on the emails, text messages and other evidence we have. Everybody was read into these different developments as they were happening. There's no chance that James Comey can't remember that he was warned that Hillary Clinton was going to hang a dirty shingle on Donald Trump's house called Russia collusion. You just would remember something that important. If it didn't get to him, it would be one of the greatest failures of the FBI. You'd tell your director things of this importance. 

Everybody claims a lack of knowledge, even though they're present for the moments when these happen. Let's take Barack Obama's denial this week, because it can be disassembled so quickly. Barack Obama is basically like, “This is a political weapon; I didn't do anything. I don't even know what they're talking about.” He's in the meeting with Brennan in July when he's told Hillary Clinton's going to do this. In December, he orders the re-review after the Intelligence Committee comes to a conclusion that's different. In January, just 15 days before Donald Trump was going to take office, he presided over the meeting in the White House with Joe Biden, where they were trying to figure out how they can keep the investigation of Mike Flynn open, the incoming national security advisor. 

That is so significant, because one day before, on January 4, the FBI had decided that Mike Flynn had not engaged in a single act of criminality and that he should be cleared in the investigation against him that was launched during the election, it should be shut down. And there is Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the FBI gang trying to figure out how we can keep this going. When they leave that meeting, there's an FBI agent so disturbed by what happened in that meeting. What he witnessed, he writes down, is our mission here to get the truth for the American people, or are we just trying to trip up Mike Flynn to lie so we can charge him with something? That's what a senior FBI official witnessed the President of the United States engaging in. Barack Obama, I can refresh your recollections pretty quickly. Stop lying to the American people. Own up to what you did. 

 

Aaron Maté: And then you have John Brennan, who testified under oath that the Steele Dossier played no part in the formation of that intelligence community assessment that Barack Obama ordered in December 2016, and that was released to the public in January 2017. John Brennan said to Congress that the Steele Dossier was in no way used for the intelligence community assessment that accused Russia of a sweeping operation to try to elect Trump. 

Now we know that that's false. We've seen the new report by HPSCI, the House Intelligence Committee, that's just been declassified by Tulsi Gabbard, which says that the Steele Dossier was explicitly referenced in the body of the ICA and that John Brennan himself personally argued in favor of including it over the objections of some senior CIA analysts. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, and by the way, Brennan gets very similar testimony to what you show, again, in 2023, which is in the Statute of Limitations right now. There are four bullets upon which the key conclusions of the ICA that was produced in December 2016 rest on one of those bullets, which is the bullet that helps back up the argument that Donald Trump was aided by Putin. Putin's goal was to help Donald Trump win. That bullet refers to Annex 1, which is the annex that we now know to be the Steele Dossier. So, it was used as an analytical product to come to the most contentious of the analytical conclusions, which is that contrary to what the government had been saying for months, now, we're going to say that Putin was trying to help Donald Trump and that rests on the Steele Dossier, which by December, as we've said, was completely debunked by the time. It was not a reliable intelligence product. It contradicts everything you just heard in that clip from John Brennan. 

 

Aaron Maté: Alright, so on the issue of Russian email hacking, which was the core Russiagate allegation – it's actually what triggered Russiagate when CrowdStrike, a firm working for Hillary Clinton's campaign, came out in June 2016 and accused Russia of hacking the DNC. We've learned since then that the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics, even though CrowdStrike redacted its own reports and refused to let the FBI examine the DNC's servers for itself. Just as the FBI relied on the Steele Dossier, I've always flagged this as a major investigative lapse because you're relying on Trump's political opponent for such a critical component of this investigation and now, we've gotten more information that I think bolsters skepticism of this Russian hacking allegation. 

So, even if Russia did hack into the DNC servers which is quite plausible and it seems as if the intelligence community had a basis to believe that the actual evidence that Russia took something from the server and gave it to WikiLeaks remains very thin and now you have, newly released by Tulsi Gabbard, in September 2016, an intelligence community assessment that says the FBI and the NSA had low confidence that Russia actually hacked the emails and gave them to other actors, including WikiLeaks, for publication. We only got that now, this low confidence. Somehow, the FBI, the NSA go from expressing low confidence to going along with the John Brennan-led judgment that actually it was Russia that hacked and leaked the DNC. 

And what happens? Well, the timeline is, after the election, as you mentioned, Barack Obama orders a brand-new assessment and at a December 9 meeting, they decide ‘we're going to make an attribution to Russia.’ Now, missing from that meeting are James Comey and Mike Rogers, the respective heads of the FBI and the NSA, who had at that point still been dissenting on this Russian email hacking claim. What I'm speculating here is that it was at that point that they were told to fall in line, and James Comey, having been blamed for Hillary Clinton losing because of his handling of the Clinton email server investigation, he goes along with it. That's what I'm speculating here. 

What do you think? And what do you make of this very assessment that there was low confidence here? 

 

John Solomon: So, listen, you've done such a great reporting, Aaron, you know, as well as anyone, how elaborate this dirty trick was. I believe that that probably will be what the evidence shows when we're done. This is the time now where we have the contemporaneous documents, but we haven't compelled people to go before a grand jury and find out the truth on this. And I think the next moment, the moment we'll know whether this is going to be a serious move towards accountability or just another great set of Fox News revelations that go away in a few months, is whether Pam Bondi follows the normal procedures for the Justice Department. 

As you laid out, and we've laid out for the last 20 minutes, this is a conspiracy case now. And by the way, Kash Patel opened a predicated conspiracy case in April, looking at the events of 2016 through 2024 as one ongoing conspiracy. Clear Hillary Clinton, hang the Russian shingle on Donald Trump, Hunter Biden's got a Ukraine problem, start Ukraine impeachment, Joe Biden's got to classified documents problem, let's raid Donald Trump's house and find classified documents problem for him. They're looking at that as one continuous conspiracy, which by the way, winds back the statutes. You can now start taking events in 2016 and make them part of the conspiracy. 

If in any other case, a conspiracy case is open, the usual step that the FBI and the Justice Department take is they create a federal strike force. If this was a drug kingpin for the cartels or a godfather for the mafia, the next step is, the FBI predicated a case, you now create a Federal Strike Task Force and you take your best prosecutors and your agents, you make them one team and they look at every overt act and try to tell you whether this rises to the level of a criminal conspiracy. If Pam Bondi does that in the next few days or weeks, then something serious is going on. If she doesn't, then all we have is a lot more detail, but still a very short lack of accountability for the people who are involved in this. 

 

Aaron Maté: One more question on the email hacking. You reported years ago that there were talks with Julian Assange between Assange and the FBI, the Trump administration, where Assange was talking about providing some technical evidence that would rule out the role of state actors, including Russia, in the hack and leak. It was James Comey, I believe, that killed those talks… 

 

John Solomon: That's right, according to, I think it was Adam Waldman, the lawyer for Julian Assange at the time. That's where we learned that information. Yeah, that's what happened. And we have text messages that were going on. You can see in real time, I think Mark Warner and Comey were the ones who seemed to put the kibosh on it. That needs to be looked back now, in light of these other events, because it could be another overt act, another act of cover-up, to try to keep the lid on the dirty trick that started with Hillary Clinton. That's where a strike force and a grand jury could be potentially very helpful because there are still missing pieces of this puzzle. For instance, why didn't the FBI grab the servers? In any other investigation, you wouldn't rely on someone's private vendor and say, trust us, by the way, a private vendor who worked for a client that had a vested interest in the case, Hillary Clinton's and the Democratic National Committee, that's who they're working for at the time, you would grab the servers yourself… 

 

Aaron Maté: As they're framing Trump as a Russian agent…

 

John Solomon: …just like when they got the five thumb drives with all of Hillary Clinton’s exfiltration, you would normally look at that, but they didn't. All of the basic requirements of the FBI DIAG, all of the basic requirements of the U.S. attorney's manual, all the basic requirements of the Intelligence Communities directive, which is the Bible for how you do assessments, all of them get abandoned during this hour and during this window. All of them take all of their training and they cast it aside in order to come up with this ruse. The answer to why they did that will probably determine whether this is criminal in nature or not. 

 

Aaron Maté: Yeah, what did Comey say when he was asked about this by Congress, he said, Well, CrowdStrike, which is working for the Clinton campaign, was a highly respected firm, so nothing to see here. I suppose he could have said the same thing about Christopher Steele, a highly respected agent whom the FBI was also relying on. So, the fact that you have the FBI relying on a Clinton campaign contractor for not just one but two of Russiagate's core allegations, collusion and email hacking, the fact that we're only still getting transparency about this now, eight years later, really is mind-boggling. So you've laid out the fact that we're looking at a conspiracy case here. What are you expecting to happen in the coming months? More document releases? Who do you think they're looking at when it comes to building a criminal case? 

 

John Solomon: Well, listen, you got to have the apparatus to do it. It's one thing for the FBI to open the case and gather the evidence that's currently available, but for the evidence that hasn't been produced and needs to be forcibly produced, you need grand jury power, you need grand jury’s subpoenas. Conspiracies are typically applied to drug cartels and mob cases and things like that. If this is treated like every other case, the next step is to create a strike force and then give that strike force the ability to use a grand jury, maybe you name a special counsel because Donald Trump is the alleged victim for some of this, he creates some independence. Whether they do that or not, if they don't create the strike force, they're not following the normal procedures that a Justice Department would use for a conspiracy case like this. So, the ball is in Pam Bondi's court. The question is, is she going to shoot the three-point shot or not? I don't know the answer to that yet, but I will tell you, the way the Justice Department normally would work, the strike force would be the very next part of the process that you would see unfold in the next week or two. 

 

Aaron Maté: This conspiracy theory that Trump and Russia were in cahoots was so dominant, so widespread and so mainstream. I mean, The New York Times and The Washington Post gave themselves publishers for advancing this conspiracy theory, that I'm not expecting very much accountability from them. But I am wondering if you have thoughts on, first of all, the way Tulsi Gabbard rolled this out, there is a criticism that she conflated in her messaging, vote hacking and email hacking. And I think that criticism actually is correct. I do think she conflated it. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, I think it's right. I agree with you. 

 

Aaron Maté: Yeah, it doesn't change the fact that she revealed important stuff, but the messaging I think has been off. And then you have the fact that Trump is dealing with this Jeffrey Epstein controversy, and there's anger even among some of the MAGA faithful that there have not been the disclosures that they were promised. I'm wondering, do you think that the fact that Trump has been hesitant to address the Jeffrey Epstein issue and told people to move on, that that might undermine the ability to get out and to convince people that this Russiagate stuff really is important? Because what critics will do here is say that Trump and Gabbard are just releasing this to deflect from the Jeffrey Epstein mess. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, yeah, listen, Donald Trump has been worried about Russia collusion since 2017. So, it's going to be hard to say he suddenly got interested because of Epstein, right? He has cried about this and rightly so for eight years and he's done everything in his power to get the American people the truth because he felt victimized and he felt the American people were victimized. He said that to me several times in interviews and he doesn't want another president ever to face what he faced. So I don't think you can say, “Boy, Donald Trump ramped this up because he to make the Epstein thing.” The Epstein crisis exists because of bad messaging. Pam Bondi was more interested in getting in front of the camera before getting her facts straight before she got in front of the cameras, and so she messed it up. 

I think, in some way, Tulsi Gabbard's rollout on Saturday and some of the messaging in the Friday, Saturday, Sunday time frame was a little messed up. But at the end of the day, they have released really significant evidence. And we, elitists inside the beltway, worry about all the messaging and stuff. The American people just want to know, were they defrauded? And I think in Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, President Trump and the others. We now have a body of evidence that could answer that question for history, could answer that question for the courts and it would be a crying shame if the normal processes of the Justice Department aren't followed in this next step. There are grounds for a criminal conspiracy case and a strike force to be named. Let's see if that happens. I think history will not judge the Epstein matter and this matter in Tulsi on the fumbles, they did make fumbles. I don't disagree with you, I totally agree with you. They'll judge them on, did they handle the evidence right and did we do the right thing? That judgment will come in the next few weeks. We'll know whether Pam Bondi and Tulsi Gabbard get us to the right place or not. Kash Patel has started the process. Let's see if it gets to the right place like every other person who's been accused of a crime would face in similar circumstances. Let's not treat it differently. If they treat it the same way as other criminal scales, I think the American people will be forgiving and remember this as a good period. 

 

Aaron Maté: John Solomon of Just the News, thank you so much for joining us. 

 

John Solomon: Aaron, great work. You are such a great reporter. I read you all the time and congratulations for the work you've done in this story. 

 

Aaron Maté: Well, likewise, you've been an essential voice understanding this whole Russiagate mess and I really appreciate you taking the time to share some of your insight with us. 

 

John Solomon: Anytime. Great honor to be on the show. 

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Interview:  Marta Havryshko

We’re turning now to Ukraine, a crisis that was very much fueled by the Russiagate controversy. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy is facing the biggest protests he's seen since Russia invaded more than three years ago. 

To discuss Zelenskyy's current turmoil, I spoke to Marta Havryshko. She is visiting assistant professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. 

 

Aaron Maté: So for people who want to know what's going on in Ukraine, you have these massive protests now outside Zelenskyy's presidential residence calling out him cracking down on an anti-corruption bureau. What should people know? What's going on in Ukraine? 

 

Marta Havryshko: So, yesterday, for the first time since the Russian aggression in February 2022, the mass protest took place in major Ukrainian cities. Yesterday, they were in Kiev, Dnipro, Lviv, and other cities. What were the demands of protesters? They started to go out to the streets and protest with the hope that Zelenskyy will put a veto on the law adopted yesterday by the Verkhovna Rada. Actually, people call it an anti-corruption law and according to this law, the main anti-corruption bodies in Ukraine, NABU and SAPO, are losing independence and they have become subjected almost entirely to the prosecutor general, which is the person appointed by Zelenskyy. So, what does it mean? The entire activities of those structures are now paralyzed and Zelenskyy can use it as a tool to reward his loyal politicians, and to punish this loyal. That's why many, first of all young people, many students, they go out to the streets, and they started to shout and demand to veto. 

And while they were protesting, they found out that Zelenskyy very quickly signed this document and it was the big outrage. And nowadays, even in more numbers of cities, we have similar demonstrations. People are so angry. Why? Because Zelenskyy is constantly talking that Ukraine is a part of the European family, that Ukraine will join NATO and the EU, and one of the preconditions of joining the EU is the building of an effective anti-corruption system. And what is going on? Zelenskyy is destroying the whole system. That's why many people believe that the EU can even put sanctions in Ukraine, could stop this move of Ukraine to the European nation. That's why they are so angry. And mostly those people are young people, they are students. 

Aaron Maté: And Zelenskyy says that he's just cracking down on what he calls Russian influence, that somehow this anti-corruption bureau was corrupted by Russia. What do you say to that? 

 

Marta Havryshko: Actually, many observers, many experts, many anti-corruption activists say it's bullshit. In other words, it's not true, because those charges are very suspicious. First of all, some of them were accused of connections with the previous president Yanukovych and because Yanukovych is  now not a important person in political life, not Ukraine, not Russia. Some of them were charged with some offenses connected to traffic offenses that happened several years ago, and some of them were accused with direct cooperation with Russian security service. So these charges are very serious. And we know that SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine, in the past days, they made approximately eight raids across offices and homes of NABU agents, without court warrants, which makes them suspicious, debatable, controversial and basically illegal. So, but many experts say that the main reason is because NABU that was created by Western powers, predominantly U.S., was financed by U.S., inspired by U.S., agents were trained by U.S. Basically, they say that in recent days, they wanted to open investigation against the closest allies of Zelenskyy, for example, Timur Mindych, who was and is his long-term business partner, the owner of  Kvartal 95, his entertainment company, together with Zelenskyy. Also recently one of the criminal investigation with very serious charges of great corruption was opened against one of the closest friends of Zelenskyy, Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Chernyshov. And we know that Minister Oleg Chernyshov left the country, and there were so many rumors about his desire to return; he was afraid that he will be put in prison. So Mindich went to him, presumably, and argued that you can go, because you will be free, you will be not put in jail, and basically it happened, despite this massive damage to Ukraine budget, which cost approximately one billion hryvnia, to Ukraine's budget, he wasn't dismissed, and he wasn't put in trial. He paid enormously big bail, approximately $3 million, which for Ukraine's settings is an enormous sum and he's enjoying his office. He's still in place. 

But Mindych never returned to Ukraine. Why? Because he was afraid that he would be the next Oleg Chernyshov. So, experts say that by cracking down on anti-corruption bodies, Zelenskyy wants to protect, basically, his friends, his closest friends. So, he's not caring about the anti-corruption system, about the European future of Ukraine, about the effectiveness of anti-corruption struggle in Ukraine, which is one of the biggest problems in Ukraine from the very beginning of its creation, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. According to some polls, it's even a bigger problem than Russian drone and missile attacks because corruption kills, and many protesters hold signs, “Corruption kills.” 

And another reason: some investigative journalists say that NABU was closely investigating the so-called army of drones. It was and it is still one of the biggest projects in this security service where millions of dollars – including Western aid and the taxes of Western people – are going, supported by the Ministry of Defense, supported by the general staff, supported by a crowdfunding platform, United 24, with these celebrities from around the world. So, this army of drones has a lot of speculations, and the great corruption is there, and who is involved in this? The closest people to Zelenskyy: Arakhamia, who is the leader of Zelenskyy’s party in the parliament, and Yermak, who recently became a celebrity, I would say, in Western press, because so many articles were written about him, about his power… 

 

Aaron Maté: Andriy Yermak, that's Zelenskyy's chief of staff, yeah. Yes. I mean, hearing you talk about just like the key role of U.S. funding and all this, U.S. influence, it speaks to one irony of this whole conflict, which is that, in the name of fighting supposed Russian influence, Ukraine's been consumed with U.S. influence. And Zelenskyy feels empowered to be doing these things because he wants to curry favor with the U.S. But let me ask you about the war here. 

There's an article in The Spectator, which is a British publication, that's been a huge cheerleader for the proxy war, but even they are now being forced to admit that the war is not going well for Zelenskyy and they quote a former senior official in Zelenskyy's administration who says this: “If the war continues soon there will be no Ukraine left to fight for” (The Spectator. July 20, 2025.)

 And this person goes on to say that Zelenskyy is “prolonging the war to hold on to power.” The Spectator also spoke to a Zelenskyy ally named Mariia Berlinska, who is head of a prominent Ukrainian volunteer movement, who said: “We are hanging over the abyss” and ‘Ukraine is an expendable pawn in an American game.” (The Spectator. July 20, 2025.)

How much discontent is there right now with Zelenskyy because of the war and because Ukraine continues to lose so many of its people in this horrible conflict? 

 

Marta Havryshko: Actually, this point is very common nowadays in Ukraine, it's very widespread. That's why there are so many draft dodgers, because people don't believe that they own their lives and they can make their own decisions because even when we take into consideration this mineral deal, we observe, and many members of the Ukrainian parliament, they were very open, that they didn't even read these documents, they were provided only this general paper, this general document, but two others were hidden from them. So they can't even learn the details and they just were “strongly advised” to vote for this. Some of them were threatened by Zelenskyy and his inner circle that they risk be stripped of Western/U.S. and we know that many of them have property in the Western countries, so they were really afraid of these sanctions, probably, by U.S. and they just voted for this mineral deal. 

The problem is that this mineral bill, in general is even against the Ukraine constitution because, according to the Ukrainian constitution, all minerals belong to the people, but nowadays, they are stripped even of those resources. So, many Ukrainians ask themselves, “What I'm dying for? Why should I go to the front line, to lie in these trenches, to be hunted by Russian drones, to gather remains of my comrades, to bury them, to visit their family members and to talk to their wives? Why should I suffer when I not even own those minerals? I have nothing. 

Ukraine nowadays is perceived as a colony of the West. Everything in Ukraine is influenced by the West. Every single decision: military decision, financial decision, political decision, who will be the prime minister, who will be the head of the SBU security service. From the Western media we’ll learn that Budanov attempted to dismiss 10 times, but because he has a protege in the U.S. and it is believed that he is very close to some U.S. military circles, Zelenskyy wasn't allowed to dismiss him. So, basically, Zelenskyy and his team are not independent decision-makers. That's why many people who are now protesting against this anti-corruption crackdown ask the EU, the World Bank, the White House to put pressure on Zelenskyy because they know that all leverage is there in the West. 

We learned from some investigative journalists that some people say that this decision is already being done, that Zelenskyy is not needed anymore. His popularity is going down. And after yesterday's decision, it reminded people of Yanukovych’s time so much because, during the Maidan protest in 2013-2014, Yanukovych was associated with the massive corruption, but also with this break of this European dream of Ukrainians, because he refused to sign this association with EU. And nowadays, many EU members, Ursula von der Leyen, G7, other bodies, Macron, EU, Marta Kos from EU, they express their deeply concerns about this law and many people are afraid that this will be another case when Ukraine will be prevented from entering EU and will be stopped by their own government, prevented by their politicians. That's why many people compare Zelenskyy to Yanukovych, and in the memory of many Maidan protesters, it's the biggest […], pro-Russian, bloody murder of peaceful protesters. That's why the climate is very hot nowadays in Ukraine, and we shouldn't underestimate this protest.

The main question, for me, nowadays, is: Will Zelenskyy get this other Maidan? And will he be the next Ukraine president who will be forced to leave the country and his post? 

 

Aaron Maté: And if he is forced to leave like what does this leave groups like Azov, the Azov Battalion, which is a paramilitary force with neo-Nazi ties, led by some really extremist people, they've endorsed his crackdown on this anti-corruption bureau. So if he's forced out of office, does that mean they take even more power? Would their power be reduced? Where would they stand in a post-Zelenskyy Ukraine? 

 

Marta Havryshko: I was very struck when I read statements from Bielanski, the leader of the movement. Several of his deputies and other members, not only from the Azov movement but close to the Azov movement, who are also far right like the leader of C14, Yevhen Karas, who is the extremist and far-right neo-Nazi and others, basically, those neo-Nazis who are in close alliance with Zelenskyy and heavily rely on his support, are very critical of NABU and basically support him, started to disseminate this talking point that, “Yes, there were Russian agents, assets, they are in NABU, that's why this decision was very good.” 

We should keep in mind that all these far-right in Ukraine, are proponents of the cult of a strong leader. And they really believe that one person in the state should hold the maximum power like Führer, like Mussolini and other strong leaders. That's why they supported him. And I believe – and for many NGO activists, for many human rights activists, they were surprised because many of them didn't follow their agenda. So they were very surprised, how can you? It's about the European future, it's about the democratic future of Ukraine. But those guys have nothing to do with these democratic views. They are proponents of this strong authoritarian state with a strong leader, that's why. And we observe how they enjoy the state support, support from the security service, support from military intelligence, support from oligarchs close to Zelenskyy, and they join everything. 

So, they want this war to prolong, to go on, and they support Zelenskyy. That's why I believe it could be a civil unrest if they will support this strong position of Zelenskyy. Those anti-corruption organs were created and inspired by the Biden administration mostly, by Democrats, and now Trump allegedly is not interested in fighting corruption, he's not interested all this internal politics, he just want to leave this Ukraine cause, everything, and to just concentrate on other problems, so he doesn't care about this, and Zelenskyy believes that he can get away with these actions. And Europe needs him because he's a proponent of war, he's the proponent of these radical decisions. That's why he believed that he can do whatever they want without any resistance. 

But I believe that this potential for violent resistance inside the Ukraine country – I'm talking about even civil war, yeah, civil unrest. – it is very possible because there are even more radical far-right who are not in alliance with the state. For example, this White Phoenix who is allegedly involved in the killing of this SBU Colonel Voronych and others, they are very radical, white supremacist, and they are against even the Azov movement because they believe that Azov nowadays is in conjunction with globalists and Zionists, all this conspiracy and so on and so forth. 

 

Aaron Maté: Which is why it underscores why it was not a wise decision to block the Minsk accords, block opportunities that were out there a while ago, to avoid all this bloodshed and to not empower the most extremist elements of society. 

Marta, final question for you. I recently signed an open letter in your defense that was put out because you faced a lot of threats yourself for speaking out as a Ukrainian, as a scholar of the Holocaust, against Zelenskyy's government, against the influence of the far right. Very briefly, because we only have a few minutes, talk about the threats that you faced and this open letter that a bunch of us have just signed in your defense. 

 

Marta Havryshko: Thank you, Aaron, for the support, and I invite everyone to visit my Twitter, for example, and you can sign this letter too, because the general idea of this letter that was drafted by scholars, journalists and human rights activists, is about basically free speech and academic freedom in Ukraine, because not only me, but many scholars in Ukraine face pressure. They face pressure to ally with the state agenda, to obey all these ethnic, national agenda and not criticize the rights of the far-right in Ukraine. And I started to receive those death threats more than one year ago when I criticized for the first time this Azov exhibition, the 3rd assault brigade exhibition about the Waffen-Nazis division, Galicia. During this exhibition they compared themselves to Nazi collaborators basically and I asked them: is it okay when Putin is using this denazification talking point to justify his aggression against Ukraine? What are you doing, guys? Why do you need those Nazi symbols to fight Russians? You have beautiful Ukrainian symbols. 

Then, I started to do more research and I understood that they have basically freehand in Ukraine and they are in cooperation with the state authorities and political elites. And they are so unhappy about my activity and about my research exposing all these problematic developments that they send me rape threats, death threats, they openly discuss in their channels how they will kill me. I'm cooperating with the Massachusetts State Police and FBI in this regard because they have connections with many far-right neo-Nazis group here in the U.S., Atom Weapon Division, Misanthropic Division, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and other, because they have a similar agenda. 

As you know, many American neo-Nazis nowadays are in the war in Ukraine, fighting for Ukraine. So, basically, they are trained, they are armored to the teeth by American weapon, by NATO weapon, and I was strongly advised to be conscious about those threats and to do whatever I can to protect myself and protect my child because the very important thing and most important for me is to save my child from that threat. That's why my friends supported me, and I encourage everyone to protect freedom of speech, even despite all those challenging developments and troubling times. So, free speech is a core stone of democracy, human rights and freedom. 

 

Aaron Maté: Marta Havryschko, you're a very, very brave person, and I'm very grateful, too, for joining us on System Update. Marta Havryshko is a visiting assistant professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Marta, thank you so much. 

 

Marta Havryshko: Thank you so much. 

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Interview: Joshua Landis

Aaron Maté: Turning now to another part of the world that's been turned upside down by a CIA proxy war: Syria. When Syrian President Bashar Assad was overthrown last year, the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, openly took credit for the regime change in Damascus. 

Video. Benjamin Netanyahu, X. December 8, 2024.

So that's Netanyahu last year, taking credit for Assad's ouster, and in Assad's place came a new government led by the former leader of al-Qaeda in Syria named Mohammed al-Golani, who since changed his name to Ahmed al-Shara. But now Netanyahu, who, after taking credit for installing this al-Qaeda offshoot, is bombing that new government as well. Just recently, Israel bombed Damascus after sectarian clashes broke out with a lot of Druze, members of the Druze minority in Syria, being killed and Netanyahu claimed he was acting on their behalf in their defense. So, what is going on in Syria? Why is sectarian killing still going on? And why is Netanyahu intervening after helping to install the new government that he is now bombing? 

Well, to discuss that, I spoke to Joshua Landis. He is the Sandra Mackey Chair and Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. 

 

Aaron Maté: Joshua Landis, thanks so much for joining me. 

 

Joshua Landis: Aaron, it's always a pleasure. 

 

Aaron Maté: So, what's going on here with Israel bombing a government that it took credit for installing? 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, Netanyahu did say that it was because he had destroyed Hezbollah in Lebanon, or larger, decimated it, that Syria and Assad fell because there was no support for him; they'd also bombed Iran and that clipped the normal support for the Assad army. But he very quickly decided that he did not like the new ruler of Syria, Ahmed al-Shara, because he had been head of al-Qaeda for many years, and he's very closely attached to Turkey. And Turkey, of course, had welcomed Hamas leaders in Istanbul and had spoken out against Israel. So, in a sense, Iran was out, but Netanyahu said that Turkey is our new big enemy, and is dangerous, if not more dangerous than Iran. 

 

Aaron Maté: The pretext for this, according to Israel, is that there were atrocities being committed against the Druze in Suwayda, which was happening. There were atrocities. So what happened there? And then why is Israel getting involved on their behalf, or purportedly on their behalf? 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, the Druze situation. Druze are 3% of Syria. They're a small minority, heterodox, Shia, like the Alawites or the Ismailis. They did not trust this government because the government had persecuted the Druzes in the past. Ahmed al-Shara had killed about 20. He apologized and made up for it, but their shrines were blown apart. ISIS had forced many to convert, and Shara had been a member of ISIS before he was just al-Qaeda. They didn't trust him. And the Druze freed themselves of Assad's rule a year ahead of the taking of Damascus. So, they had set up their own autonomous regime. When Shara formulated his new constitution several months ago, an interim constitution for five years, it gave all power to him. There is no democracy. The parliament is appointed by him, a third directly, two-thirds indirectly. He appoints all the judges in the Supreme Court. He is everything in that country and there is a Druze minister, who's resigned, but they don't have any power. They are things like transportation, or various things. So, the real central figures are all from this al-Qaeda organization and very close to Shara, whether it's the interior or defense or foreign ministry and so forth. 

So they didn't trust him. They said we want some kind of federal arrangement. The Kurds are saying the same thing. The Alawites are saying the same thing. They don't want to just put down their arms, because that's what he was asking. He said, “I'm the ruler, I'm going to have a monopoly on power. All the minorities should put down their guns and trust us.” And they said, “We don't trust you.” And so it became a classic standoff. And that's the important background to this assault by the state on the Druze Mountain. It's a mountainous region. It is in the south, near the Jordanian border and not too far from the Golan. But there is a big Arab city, Dara, that sits between the Jabal Druze and the Golan Heights, which makes it impractical for Israel to move its troops in and protect them directly. So it used bombing, and Israel stepped in to defend the Druze. 

Israel has, it's important to know that they have 150,000 Druze who've served loyal in the military and are an important lobbying group that's not to be sneezed at. I know many Israeli Druze and they were frantic to get Netanyahu to step in. Now, Netanyahu was much bigger fish to fry than just the Druze. He has got a strategic vision, which is Israel being the predominant power.  And we've got to say that Israel has established not only complete air power over Lebanon, but now over Syria, over Iraq, and today, Iran as well. It doesn't want a strong Damascus, a Damascus that's armed by Turkey, that has a real army, that spreads its power over the border. So, Netanyahu said it very early on, we're not going to allow Damascus to deploy its troops South of Damascus City, not going to allow Shara to deploy his troops. 

The first day that Assad fell, Israel bombed Syria 400 times, destroying its entire navy, every missile depot, any airplane that was still existent. It erased everything it could find of the old Syrian army so that Shara would not have anything. And it's continued to bomb various airfields that Turkey is trying to resurrect, because it's very worried that Turkey will send its planes down there, build up the military, and that they'll have Turkey on Israel's border. That's what Netanyahu says. They said they're not going to do it, over our dead body. Of course, America doesn't like that, but that's the situation with the Jabal-Druze and Israel's entrance into this war. 

 

Aaron Maté: So, Israel claims to be fighting the sectarian oppression, the sectarian atrocities backed by the government, but it seems to me actually that they want to foment sectarianism in Syria. I mean, they were supporting the insurgency that was sectarian. I was reminded of a quote from way back, in 2013, by an Israeli official named Alon Pinkas. He's the former Israeli Consul General in New York and he said this about Syria, back in 2014. He said: “This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don't want one to win – we'll settle for a tie. Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that's the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria.” (Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria. September 5, 2013.)

So what he was basically saying back then was, as long as Syria is divided, as all sides are fighting each other, then Israel is dominant. And my question to you is, do you think that is still basically Israel strategy? 

 

Joshua Landis: Israel wants a weak and divided Syria, one that cannot present any challenge to Israel whatsoever on the Golan or anywhere else. In that sense, sweeping in and being a defender, having this human rights position and having the Druze actually want the Israelis to come and defend them fits perfectly into this larger strategic vision of a broken Syria that can't get back on its feet. 

 

Aaron Maté: And I don't want to minimize the atrocities the Druze have suffered. So talk to us a bit about what you know happened. For example, there seems to be a documented massacre that occurred at a Druze hospital in Syria.

 

Joshua Landis: Yes. The National Hospital in Suwayda. It was taken over by regime forces; they shot doctors, nurses and patients. They threw people off the roof. They were jihadists who went in there to wreak vengeance on the Druze. We've got to say that this came on the heels, already in May, there had been a dustup between the Druze and the Central State, because the Druzes had refused to make these concessions to the Central States. So, Shara, who wants to spread his military control over the country, is looking for ways. What happened in May was that this tape came out, a recording of a Druze Sheik – theoretically, the Druze denied it, said it was fake – of the Sheik saying something bad about Muhammad, the Prophet and they said, this is unacceptable. Students began to attack Druze students in dormitories in Hama. There were demonstrations in the street and very quickly it escalated into a situation where the Druze were being attacked from one end of Syria to the other, and particularly in two towns, Jaramana and Sahnaya, on the outskirts of Damascus towards the Jabal Druze. Many jihadist types and irregulars poured in, as well as regime troops, in order to attack the Druze, and Israel came into their defense, which of course, caused many Syrians to say, these are traitors, they're siding with Israel, look what they're doing in Gaza, this is terrible, and we've got to kill these Druze. So that was the background, and it was festering. 

A local story happened just on July 13, in which Bedouin, who make up 3% of the city of Suwayda, the capital city in the Jabal Druze, kidnapped a Druze merchant. And then it was tit for tat. It exploded. Over 10 people were killed. But the regime Shara said, only the central police and our security soldiers can bring calm to the Jabal Druze, we're sending them in. And so they attacked. And many people felt that the Bedouin situation was really a pretext to allow the regime to try to impose its will over the Jabal Druze. And this turned into a major conflagration because the Jews resisted. Regime elements came into the city, took over this national hospital, killed everybody in it, dozens of people. We don't know how many, but you look at pictures of body bags and there are probably 50 or 60. 

The videos are really horrendous. I published one of the videos very early on and my X account was inundated with regime supporters saying, This is fake news. These are not real things. They've either been doctored or the Druze were killing themselves because [   ], one of their leaders there. They've tried to demonize him and said that he's evil and he's shooting all these Druze because they really want to be part, they give up their guns to the government. 

It was very hard to tell what the truth was in those first moments, but there are major narrative campaigns going on in social media to defend the government, to defend the Druze, this sort of thing. But a lot of Druze have been killed. We don't have a sense so far, but it's probably going to approach a thousand. Whole families have been mowed down in their houses and so forth. Now, a bunch of Bedouins got killed and the Druze were very brutal to the regime troops that they later captured. And there were executions on both sides. And I'm not saying that – but this is the way that the government has been treating minorities. 

 

Aaron Maté: Yes. Well, that's what I was going to ask you about. So this follows the documented sectarian killings against the Alawites. And the death toll there is unknown, but it's believed to be very, very high. And that was also by forces linked to the government. Talk about what happened there and what a recent Reuters investigation newly confirmed. 

 

Joshua Landis: Right. Well, about 2,000 Alawites were killed. The government is claiming that – it came out with a report just the other day and said it was about 1,465, just under 1.5. But it's probably closer to 2,000. The government has closed down a lot of its bureaus for registering deaths along the coast. I know that because my father-in-law, an Alawite, died recently, and the family is still unable to record his death because all the offices are saying come back later, we're closed on this, you can't register the deaths. So, there's a lot of sleights of hand going on here, but 2,000 Alawites were killed on the coast, roughly. And this started with an attack on regime soldiers by some Alawites, and about 16, 17 Alawite soldiers were killed in one incidence, and it spread to two other places. 

The Alawites claim this is because we're being terribly mistreated, and this little convoy of troops was coming to a village to drag people out, claiming that they are regime remainders, and that they were coming to drag them off for transitional justice. The trouble is transitional justice is dragging people off and shooting them. There haven't been court trials. It's unclear. Many innocent people have been killed, people have never served in the military, houses have been robbed. So, the Alawites were beginning to feel that this regime is just going to kick us to the curb and mistreat us. 

So, it's hard to tell. The regime said this is a big conspiracy with Iran to bring back the Assad regime. The Alawite said, No, this is completely false. This is a self-defense thing. But the point is, once it began, the regime called for a general mobilization. Tens of thousands of militia members and militias began to swoop down onto the coast in long, that evening, in long, big lines of trucks and everything else. And many of them put hate in their hearts. They had their jihadist principles of we're going to kill all the Alawites. who are unbelievers, calling them pigs, making them bark like dogs. And we got this outpouring of videos, of whole families being lined up and just shot against walls, being made to bark like dogs and being shot. So, some villages, over 200 people were killed and then just laying all over the village. So, it was very brutal. Five of my wife's cousins had their houses broken into. People asked them, “Are you Alawite?” And then they proceeded to steal everything in the house, their car keys. One of their sons, Haidar, who grew up with my son, was dragged to – he never served in the military. He was an only son. You don't have to serve in the military if you're only son, he's the breadwinner for the family because a father had died of a heart attack and the mother didn't work – and he was dragged out to the step and just shot summarily. And this happened in family after family, up and down the coast. And so, it just put terror into the whole minority, and they'd begun to flood out of the country. 

As a result, the statistics from the U.N. show that about 100,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon have returned to Syria since the fall of the regime, the Assad regime, mostly Sunnis. But 100,00 have fled into Lebanon since the fall of the regime, mostly minorities and mostly Alawites who are looking for safety. So, the shoe is on the other foot, and the regime is increasingly using force and a good dollop of terror in order to try to subjugate the minorities who've been recalcitrant. And they're a problem, but they don't feel that there's any protection for them. They don't have any buy-in, and they don't trust this ex-al-Qaeda guy, who has a very low regard for these minorities as unbelievers and so forth. The language that's used by officials is a very religious language and it really marks them out for persecution.

 

Aaron Maté: Well, so on that note, how did the government respond recently when there was a suicide bombing in Damascus at a church? 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, the Christian church. Well over 20 people were killed, a bunch were wounded. The priests and so forth said, “We didn't get a visit from the president”. So, the president did finally call them, the minister, the Christian minister, the woman minister, did immediately go there and in the subsequent days, some other ministers went. But this is after Christians began to complain that they felt like they weren't treated the same as other people and that the president didn't really want to address the issue properly. So, the Christians feel that the government is begrudgingly recognizing their pain but not doing it in a serious way. And so, all the minorities are feeling like they're being kicked to the curb. And it must be said that the minorities were spoiled by the French during the first half of the last century. They were overrepresented in the military. Bashar al-Assad and his father were Alawites, and they privileged minorities because they needed minority support. So, many Sunnis feel like the West has supported this, has put up with this, and they've been mistreated for a century, and that the minorities are always spoiled. Therefore, they're getting their comeuppance. 

 

Aaron Maté: Well, but the minorities were also protected from sectarian atrocities and that's why some of us just, I'm speaking for myself here, we're opposed to regime change on top of the fact that I don't think we have the right to flood a country with weapons and fuel and arms and all kinds of dominant insurgency. It's also a disaster for groups like the ones that are being attacked now. And I think we're seeing an ongoing reminder of that with all these atrocities. That chant that was attributed to some of the early protests, “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave,” the protests against Assad, I mean, that's proved to be prophetic. They are sending Alawites now to the graves. So, whether you want to call that previously Alawites being spoiled or just being maybe protected from sectarian murder. 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, you didn't have to go very far. When al-Qaeda takes over, even an ex-al-Qaeda guy who's trying to fly right, and he's surrounded by all these al-Qaeda guys, that's what's going to happen. We saw it in Iraq. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that minorities are going to get persecuted. And they are being persecuted, and they're being robbed, they're having their houses taken over. Yes, America was concerned about Iran. They wanted Iran out of Syria. They wanted Iran to stop funding Hezbollah. That was the primary concern of America: if having al-Qaeda take over, that was the price and, in a sense, that's what's happened. 

 

Aaron Maté: That's why Jake Sullivan said in that infamous email to Hillary Clinton, “Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.” 

Final question for you. All this is happening at an awkward time for the Trump administration, which is moving to lift sanctions on Syria, the sanctions that helped achieve regime change by basically crippling the country and preventing reconstruction. But just as Trump is asking for these sanctions to be lifted, we're still seeing all these sectarian atrocities. So, talk to us a bit about the debate that's playing out right now in Washington over whether or not to lift these sanctions, which, in my opinion, again, should never have been imposed in the first place. We don't have the right to destroy another economy to regime change their government. But I think they're sadistic and should be removed. But now there's a problem because of all these sectarian murders that keep happening. 

 

Joshua Landis: Right. The first article I wrote after the fall of Assad was about the time to lift the sanctions. Sanctions are a brutal force that hurt the most vulnerable, no doubt about it. But the United States, and understandably, Trump made his deal with the Saudis and the Turks when he was visiting Saudi Arabia, and he said, I'm going to lift all sanctions. He embraced, Shara. He said, yes, he's a tough guy and he's done tough things, but sometimes you need a tough leader to rule a country. He said, Make Syria great again. We're not going to be in the business of regime change anymore. He really slammed George Bush, the son, and said all that regime change stuff was a big waste of time and what have we gotten out of it? Nothing. Make America great again, let the Syrians be Syrians. 

That was translated then into policy by our ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria, Ambassador Barak, who said, “We're lifting everything. We're not demanding anything in exchange.” He did say we want to see Syria fight ISIS, get rid of all the Palestinian groups, join the Abraham Accords, get rid of chemical weapons, and there were a few other little items on there. But mostly, he didn't say anything about human rights. He didn't say anything about minorities. He didn't say anything about democracy because America's finished with democracy promotion in the Middle East. And in a sense, America threw out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, these are unreasonable expectations, but you want to give some guidance. And this might not have happened if the United States had been a little bit firmer, saying, You can't do this, you can't use force to just crush the minorities. There's got to be some kind of representation and you can work that out. They're beginning to say it. There's just a movement in Congress to lift the Caesar sanctions. There are tons of sanctions on Syria. The president can lift many of them because they're presidential sanctions. But the major package, the Caesar sanctions, was put on by Congress. And those are the ones that give secondary sanctions. So, if companies go in and help rebuild Syria, they can be sanctioned. Most Republicans voted against lifting those, even though all the Syrian opposition who are in favor of the Shara regime said, We've got to lift them, we're against Assad, now we're good. And Republicans have been loath to do that. I think that's because a lot of their minority constituents have been screaming bloody murder and saying, you've got to hold this regime to account. So, they haven't all been lifted. They've been changed to a certain degree. It's still unclear what they mean. But they aren't completely gone. 

 

Aaron Maté: It's such a mess and this is what happens when you try to regime change a country: you end up creating a monster that is really very hard to roll back. The sanctions regime and now the fact that it's ruled by an offshoot of al-Qaeda. I'll just say, on the issue of chemical weapons, as someone who's been skeptical of these chemical weapons allegations, especially after they destroyed their stockpile in 2013-2014 under a deal with the OPCW, the fact that they haven't been able to find a trace of Assad's supposed chemical weapons stockpile in the more than seven months since he was ousted, I find that very interesting. And to me, it bolsters the skepticism that I've had of those allegations, which were also bolstered by things like the OPCW whistleblowers and leaked documents. 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, let me add, on your point about regime change being really just a terrible thing to do, most of these countries in the Middle East were established after World War I at the Paris Peace Conference: Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, so forth. They're very young. Various groups of people who didn't necessarily want to live together were stuck together in these newly drawn nation-states and told to get along. It's been very difficult. Almost all of the Middle Eastern countries have had a dictatorship almost from the beginning because they don't get along and they're fighting over who's going to be on top and so forth. 

So, there's been a lot of coercion in order to keep people from fighting each other, when you're trying to do state building, that's going to create a common citizenship and a political community where people will trust each other enough to vote on a constitution and follow the laws. That's what's basically required for democracies. You've got to have some common game rules that everybody buys into. That isn't present in most Middle Eastern countries, which is why there remain either kings or dictators. And it's very difficult to keep people from breaking into civil war. 

So, when America goes into these new countries that are still trying to reshape their citizenry and kick over the state, which was weak to begin with, maybe a little bit muscle-bound with military dictatorship, but unable to tax their people, unable to really get people to buy in, it turns into civil war. And that's what happened in Iraq. That's what happened in Libya. That's what happened in Afghanistan. That's going to happen in Iran if we try to overturn the regime there. And it's certainly what happened to Syria. And you get very long and bloody civil wars with tons of ethnic cleansing. It's not a good thing. And people need to just put regime change out of their minds because Western regime change isn't going to produce democracy. It's going to produce civil war in societies that are trying to find a way to live together and build a common political community. 

 

Aaron Maté: Joshua Landis, Sandra Mackey Chair and Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Thanks so much for joining us. 

 

Joshua Landis: Always a pleasure, Aaron. Love your show.

 

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Semafor Editor Ben Smith on Epstein Saga; How do MAGA Supporters Really Feel About Trump's Foreign Policy? Eddington Movie Review: Reflections on 2020
System Update #490

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!

AD_4nXfT_BDy4ZmCv7YowmlpimI3uiq7dVGVrebs2HL5mg4ECkvfhs3Y9eBAUpJII2f7KX_c0cHmCe_nJBq8K854h7KfY2o0T-_oXaV3vkUdy7KoA6IgnNWbT7_2jA5tfHRgXGATMZsLGqoQcnMQKCpn6Fk?key=4MGSGk-P8UsiVP_KGEUadw

Michael Tracey: Good evening, everybody. I'm Michael Tracey, and Glenn is somewhere. So, this is where I triumphantly storm in and anger parts of the audience who would prefer not to have to see my face, which I have to say, on some level, I sympathize with. 

Tonight, an interesting show. We'll be joined by Ben Smith, who is the editor-in-chief of Semafor and a longtime political observer, journalist, editor. And we will probably, I think, provide you with a slightly counterintuitive for different perspective anyway, on the meaning of the whole Epstein saga that continues to engulf American politics and media, seemingly. 

We'll also bring in somebody who works on this very show, and who you often don't see on camera, she stays behind the cameras but today, we're going to pry her out because Meagan O'Rourke, who I often do interviews with, and she's a producer on the show, I'm sure should be a fan favorite anyway. We're going to do actually a review of a new movie. This is a little out of left field based on typical System Update content, but there's a new movie that I happened to see last night, partly at the adamant urging of Meagan, called Eddington. And I think it's an incredible movie and an incredible window into a lot that's going on politically and culturally. So we're going to a movie review tonight. 

And we are also going to show some footage that she and I collected, actually back on the Fourth of July, earlier this month, that has been available on Locals for you subscribers for several weeks. But what we wanted to do was go to like an area that is sort of ground zero for salt of the earth, Joe six-pack style supporters of Trump voters and ask them about his foreign policy record thus far, particularly the bombing of Iran, which may seem like eons ago at this point, but it was only last month, and the full ramifications have not really been settled. 

AD_4nXfT_BDy4ZmCv7YowmlpimI3uiq7dVGVrebs2HL5mg4ECkvfhs3Y9eBAUpJII2f7KX_c0cHmCe_nJBq8K854h7KfY2o0T-_oXaV3vkUdy7KoA6IgnNWbT7_2jA5tfHRgXGATMZsLGqoQcnMQKCpn6Fk?key=4MGSGk-P8UsiVP_KGEUadw

Michael Tracey and Meagan O'Rourke

Okay, so we're going to go a little bit off the beaten path tonight because I know my mind has been largely occupied by this movie that I saw last night. And if it was just a well-crafted drama, or if there were just some sterling acting performances that were put in, I'm not sure that I would necessarily have been compelled to discuss it on System Update. 

However, there's like an interesting synergy going on in the universe where we have this Epstein story that keeps embroiling the American political and media worlds with some new developments on that score even just this afternoon and we have the opening of this movie which really gets to the beating heart in a very unparalleled way for like a cinematic experience of what drives the contemporary kind of like internet addled American political psyche. 

It's called “Eddington.” I guess we'll try to steer away from spoilers. We'll play the trailer for those who are not familiar. 

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