Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
The Disinformation Fraud: How America's Most Powerful Institutions Joined Forces to Crush Speech & Silence Dissent, with Jacob Siegel
Video Transcript
May 09, 2023
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Good evening. It's Thursday, May 4. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

Tonight, we’ll devote the entire show to examining one of the most important and consequential hoaxes in our current politics, not just in the United States, but in the wider democratic world, namely, this sprawling, multi-headed, extremely well-funded scam that was created in the wake of the 2016 election that calls itself the anti-disinformation industry. We have devoted several shows and I've written several articles to investigate the genesis of this industry, who is funding it and the rotten ways in which it functions. In September 2021, the still somewhat heterodox Harper's produced one of the most comprehensive examinations of this fraudulent industry in an article by Joseph Bernstein, entitled “Bad News. Selling the Story of Disinformation” but the single most important and comprehensive investigation of this fraudulent and deeply menacing industry was published several weeks ago by the journal Tablet, entitled “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.” In it, the writer Jacob Siegel, devoted 13,000 extremely well-researched words to describe, in his words, “a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole-of-society” effort that aims to seize total control over the Internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.” (Tablet. March 28, 2023). 

We will examine this industry, dissect the key elements of Siegel's groundbreaking article, and then in our interview segment, speak with him about its most important components. 

It is really hard to overstate how consequential and how nefarious this disinformation industry is. It received woefully inadequate attention until the emergence of these articles. It is one of the greatest threats to a free Internet yet manufactured. It is rapidly spreading as a result of the backing of some of the world's most powerful governments and most influential neo-liberal billionaires. And without hyperbole or melodrama, its goal is nothing less than the end of the Internet as one of our last instruments for expressing and organizing meaningful dissent. 

Due to ongoing family commitments, we are unfortunately unable to do our aftershow on Locals tonight, which ordinarily takes place on Thursday. We will do our best to be back on both Tuesday and Thursday of next week. With that, to join our Locals community, simply click the join button and you'll have exclusive access to that. 

As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form, it appears 12 hours after the show is first broadcasted, live, here on Rumble. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and every other major podcasting platform to help spread the visibility of the show.

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

 

 


In 2016, the neoliberal order suffered two devastating and traumatic defeats, made even more traumatizing because establishment forces did everything possible to stop them, yet failed. First, was the decision by the British people to ratify Brexit and leave the European Union, despite an avalanche of nonstop propaganda about why doing so would be so destructive to their interests. That was followed months later by the obviously shocking election of Donald Trump, against the ultimate establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. Numerous other similar traumas against neoliberal stability in Italy and Scandinavia, in Brazil and elsewhere deeply alarmed Western power centers in ways that cannot be exaggerated. The conclusion they drew from these events was quite simple: allowing the Internet to be free, for ordinary citizens to continue to use it to speak, debate and organize freely was simply no longer tolerable. The consequences of a free Internet had proven, in 2016, to be too unpredictable, too decentralized, and too free to allow it to persist any longer. As a result, there was a very conscious, deliberate and multisector campaign to end what we had all known as a free Internet. 

To accomplish that, some pretext, some justification, was required even in Western Europe and certainly in the United States, we are all too inculcated with the value of free debate and free expression to simply accept a candid admission by Western states and their power centers that they intended to censor the Internet to eliminate dissent – the real motive of what they were doing. 

The pretext that they had long given for creeping censorship, namely the need to stop hate speech, was far too limited and narrow for the much more ambitious goals they adopted for stifling free debate in 2016. What was needed was a term that was at once extremely elastic to the point of being meaningless, yet sufficient to encompass any ideas they wanted to suppress, and the word they invented to justify this new censorship regime was disinformation. Though this tactic had a clear rationale, we must protect the Internet to protect you – or rather, we must censor the Internet to protect you – from the dangers of disinformation, the problems were obvious. What is disinformation? How is it determined? And most importantly of all, who decides what counts and does not count as disinformation? To resolve those problems a fake expertise was invented out of whole cloth. Seemingly overnight, we became inundated with “disinformation experts.” There is no academic institution in the United States that issues degrees in Disinformation. It is a completely false credential, a fake expertise, but it proliferated very quickly with prominent social media stars bestowing themselves with the title of disinformation expert and the newly materialized groups – always with deliberately benign-sounding names but shady, yet substantial funding – suddenly appearing to employ these disinformation experts and to insist that the process for determining what is and is not disinformation was not politicized or ideological, perish the thought, but rather apolitical, scientific and data driven. The bet that they made was that as long as this field could be presented as residing above politics, rather than where it actually resides which is deep within it, enough people would be deceived to accept superior authority, and presto, censorship would no longer be about suppressing political ideas or dissent. No, it was a deeply earnest and scientific endeavor to do nothing more or less benign than protect people, all of you, from damaging falsehoods. Who doesn't want to live in a world where falsehoods are identified and then eliminated? 

Dissecting this fraud of disinformation and the industry that now supports it is not an easy task. There are hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. Security State and other Western security agencies, from George Soros and Bill Gates, and Pierre Omidyar – not Boogeymen but the documented funders of these organizations and virtually every corporate media outlet, always seeking ways to maintain their decades-old but finally evaporating stranglehold on the flow of information. These media outlets are now endorsing this fraudulent industry, recognizing the value it presents to equate their narratives with proven truth, and then any critics of their narratives as purveyors of the dreaded disinformation. 

The reporting we have done over the last few years has delved deeper into this industry. The Harper's article, though, that I alluded to at the start, advanced this story by identifying the core fraudulent premises at the heart of the entire project. Let's take a quick look at some of the key points that Harper's article exposed. The title is “Bad News Selling the Story of Disinformation” and here are its key revelations from 2021. 

 

The Commission on Information Disorder is the latest (and most creepily named) addition to a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia and policy research: Big Disinfo. A kind of EPA for content. It seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of “toxicity” on social media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platform's clumsy, dishonest and half-hearted attempts to halt it. 

As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a higher model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in beliefs or behavior that are bad by, some standards. Otherwise, why care what people read and watch?  

The most comprehensive survey of the field to date, a 2018 scientific literature review titled “Social Media Political Polarization and Political Disinformation,” reveals some gobsmacking deficits. The authors fault disinformation research for failing to explain why opinions change; lacking solid data on the prevalence and reach of disinformation and declining to establish common definitions for the most important terms in the field, including disinformation, misinformation, online propaganda, hyperpartisan news, fake news, clickbait, rumors and conspiracy theories. (Harper’s Magazine. Sept. 2021).

 

Of course, they don't want to define those terms. It's precisely the lack of definition that bestows the terms and those who wield them with all the power. The article goes on:

 

The sense prevails that no two people who research disinformation are talking about quite the same thing. This will ring true to anyone who follows the current media discussion around online propaganda. “Misinformation” and “disinformation” are used casually and interchangeably to refer to an enormous range of content, ranging from well-worn scams to viral news aggregation; from foreign-intelligence operations to trolling; from opposition research to harassment. In their crudest use, the terms are simply jargon for “things I disagree with.” 

Attempts to define “disinformation” broadly enough as to rinse it of political perspective or ideology leave us in territory so abstract as to be absurd. As the literature review put it: “Disinformation” is intended to be a broad category describing the types of information that one could encounter online that could possibly lead to misperceptions about the actual state of the world. The term has always been political and belligerent. An even more vexing issue for the disinformation field, though, is the supposedly objective stance media researchers and journalists take toward the information ecosystem to which they themselves belong. Somewhat amazingly, this attempt has taken place alongside an agonizing and overdue questioning within the media of the harm done by unexamined professional standards of objectivity. 

Like journalism, scholarship, and all other forms of knowledge creation, disinformation research reflects the culture, aspirations, and assumptions of its creators. (Harper’s Magazine. Sept. 2021).

 

It is nothing scientific. It is deeply subjective. 

 

A quick scan of the institutions that publish most frequently and influentially about disinformation: Harvard University, The New York Times, Stanford University at MIT, NBC, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations etc. That the most prestigious liberal institutions of the pre-digital age are the most invested in fighting disinformation reveals a lot about what they stand to lose or hope to regain. 

Whatever the brilliance of the individual disinformation researchers and reporters, the nature of the project inevitably places them in a regrettably defensive position in the contemporary debate about media representation, objectivity, image-making, and public knowledge. However well-intentioned these professionals are, they don't have special access to the fabric of reality. 

This spring, in light of new reporting and a renewed, bipartisan political effort to investigate the origins of COVID-19, Facebook announced that it would no longer remove posts that claim that the coronavirus was man-made or manufactured. Many disinformation workers who spent months calling for social-media companies to ban such claims on the grounds that they were conspiracy theories have been awkwardly silent as scientists have begun to admit that an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab is an unlikely, but plausible, possibility. (Harper’s Magazine. Sept. 2021).

 

That was, again, 18 months ago. The possibility of a Wuhan lab has become much more probable. We know that the leading and most elite teams of scientists within the Department of Energy and the FBI both believe it's by far the most likely explanation for the COVID pandemic. But what that Harper's article showed was the core fraud of this industry, the conceit that there are somehow a group of people who have now elevated themselves to reside above political ideology and political agenda, who have somehow become trained, experts, in decreeing what is and is not information to the point where that should be censored off the Internet, when in reality, as the Harper's article so brilliantly demonstrated, there is nothing objective about it, is every bit as politicized and subjective and subject to manipulation as journalism and political debate. It is a fraudulent industry and a fraudulent expertise. 

What made The Tablet’s article so definitive in terms of the understanding it presented for this industry beyond the reporting I had done, beyond the Harper's article, is that it traced the history, the genesis of where this all came from, and how it was formed, and then where it took hold. We will in our interview segment in just a few minutes, speak with the author of this brilliant and vitally important article, Jacob Siegel, and he will explain a great deal about the work he did in tracing the roots of this industry but I just want to show you a few key segments from the article to set this context for the discussion that I'm about to have with him. Let’s take a look at the article:

 

In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day, he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy's name synonymous with the politics of the era. 

For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts and demagogues. Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and the American political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States. 

This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in DC, George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation a “whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.” (Tablet. March 28, 2023).

 

That is exactly what happened. The Democratic Party after 2016 decided that the reason they lost that election was because the Internet was too free and they implemented a plan that became their top priority. A whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response, to gain control of the Internet by concocting, manufacturing, in partnership with their Never Trump Republican allies, this fraudulent industry called the disinformation industry that would then be used to justify control of the Internet. The article goes on:

 

In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime's aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That's why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden's laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. 

Disinformation, now and for all time is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system. (Tablet. March 28, 2023). 

 

As I said at the start, the lack of definition, the lack of anything concrete was intended. That's what bestows it with its power. The article goes on: 

 

The false yet foundational claim that Russia hacked the 2016 election provided a justification – just like the claims about weapons of mass destruction that triggered the Iraq War – to plunge America into a wartime state of exception. With the normal rules of constitutional democracy suspended, a coterie of party operatives and security officials then installed a vast, largely invisible new architecture of social control on the back end of the Internet's biggest platforms. (Tablet. March 28, 2023).

 

That is exactly what happened. That is the censorship regime that we face. There has been a lot of great work and reporting done none better than this article by Jacob Siegel, who is our guest tonight. And I'm about to show you the interview we conducted with him that I think shines even further light on what this journal called Tablet aptly calls “the hoax of the century,” meaning this fraudulent, fake but deeply nefarious disinformation industry. Here's our interview. 


 

G. Greenwald: Jacob, first of all, congratulations on writing an article that, at least in some quarters, has received so much attention and praise, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about it. 

 

Jacob Siegel:  I'm glad to be here. 

 

G. Greenwald: Sure. So, there are a lot of odd things that have happened in the world of politics. Let's start with the fact that I not only am praising an article in Tablet magazine but encouraging everybody to read it on the grounds that it's one of the most important stories of the year. Something I think would have been unimaginable for me even seven or eight years ago. There's a lot of other weird things like that, including the fact that you're talking to me and that, you know, the favorite operative of liberals is Rick Wilson and they worship the Bush-Cheney spokeswoman, Nicolle Wallace, who comes on their TV every day at 5 o’clock, so where do you fit in into this kind of whirlwind? Just talk a little bit about your post-9/11 trajectory, how you ended up in Afghanistan and just more broadly, your kind of political journey as you see it. 

 

Jacob Siegel: Yeah, I would say I wound up in the military shortly after 9/11, not with any great political conviction necessarily, but with a strong patriotic sentiment, a sense that if the country was going to war, I should be involved in that, I shouldn't be exempt, somehow, that if other people are going, I should go as well. And, you know, I had volunteered at Ground Zero shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and I just felt like I should be a part of that. And I was deployed to Iraq in 2006, 2007. That was a difficult, then sobering, experience, to say the least. Whatever illusions I'd had about the war, which were probably already gone by then, certainly didn't survive 15 months in Iraq. Then in 2012, I was deployed to Afghanistan and that was quite a different experience. But it was one that allowed for more kind of contemplation and reflection on my part, in no small part because the conditions in Afghanistan where I was, in western Afghanistan, in 2012, as an army intelligence officer, were, you know, less chaotic, less violent than they had been in Iraq during the civil war and surge years in 2006, 2007. And so, there was more opportunity for me to take stock and to think about what was actually happening and to assess what seemed to be a just unbridgeable gap between the official declarations about the war and what I, or for that matter, anybody else, could have observed on the ground. 

I should just make clear that I was nothing special. I didn't have any high-level access to anything. I was a very average – an average battalion-level intelligence officer. So it wasn't that I had any special access, it was just that I had the opportunity to take stock and when I did that, I couldn't reconcile myself to why these enormous lies were being told about the war. It was obvious to me that they were being told, and I couldn't justify that. That being said, I didn't have any grand political awakening at the moment. There was just this sort of creeping disillusionment and reassessment, and I couldn't honestly tell you exactly where it led me or where it wound up. I've always thought of myself primarily as a writer and an observer more than as somebody with very strong political convictions. 

 

G. Greenwald: You know, it's interesting. I had kind of an eye-opening experience when I worked on both reporting, on WikiLeaks stories and, then, also working with Edward Snowden, whom himself joined the Army after 9/11 and wanted to go fight in the war in Iraq, believing that it was just a noble cause. He broke his legs in basic training, ended up in the CIA and the NSA, and then kind of discovered while he was doing that, that there was a gap between what the government had made people believe it was doing and what it was doing. But also, even as part of that reporting, I so often would hear from people who had been in the military or who worked inside the intelligence community, who were most open to the notion that a lot of these secrets needed to be unveiled, not because they were fans of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden even, but just because they were much more open to the fact that the government lies about the reality because they saw it up close and, say, very militaristic and uber patriotic pundits who say it's never justifiable to criticize what the U.S. government is doing. And in terms of this kind of political change I had referenced in the beginning, to me, it seems like one of the most significant parts of this change is that the people who are very skeptical of and concerned about the behavior of the intelligence community used to be found, I think, primarily on the left, and now they're more often found on the right. And that has kind of… I feel like I'm sort of sitting in the same place and things have swirled around me. 

A big part of your article talks about the role of the intelligence community in building a censorship regime. You even compare some of the things you saw in terms of intelligence activities in Afghanistan and what was being used against the Taliban or al-Qaida, or the entire country, about Afghanistan to what's being done domestically to American citizens on U.S. soil. Has your view of the intelligence community changed in the sense that it became much more skeptical, that you've become more concerned about what they're doing? Or do you think they've just gotten more menacing in terms of our rights – or some combination of both? 

 

Jacob Siegel:  More the former. My views have certainly changed. I do think that they've gotten more menacing. But to take Assange as an example, you know, my sense of Julian Assange's role in the political process in 2016, let's say, there was a more or less fair and open political contest between Democrats and Republicans, and Assange was a kind of interloper in that political process. And, you know, I might have said the same thing about some of the things you were doing at the time, Glenn, I might have seen them in the same way, because my sense was that already there were referees, there was an officiated contest, there was procedural constitutional democracy and to have people come in from the outside, whether it was Kim Dotcom or Assange, and try and influence the electorate by strategically exposing secrets, as it were, I saw that as a kind of untoward interference. 

What I realize now is that there was not a fairly officiated electoral process and that the people who were keeping the secrets were the Democratic National Committee, the intelligence agencies, and that Assange – and so far, as he was pushing to open up the secrets – was actually acting more in the spirit, let's say, of a truly fair democratic process. But that was a gradual realization for me. There were a number of things, one thing after another, you know, realizing that Adam Schiff was lying over and over again. I couldn't reconcile myself to that after a while. The Russian bounties story, I couldn't reconcile myself to that. I'd always maybe had some skepticism of the, you know, unaccountable power in the intelligence agencies. I was aware of some of that history but once I saw all these things together, you know, the accumulation changed my view. 

 

G. Greenwald:   One of the things that struck me in the article when I sat down to read it was you began a paragraph devoted to the scandals of Joseph McCarthy and the controversy surrounding what he did, namely, accusing all sorts of people of being covert agents of the Kremlin, claiming that he had secret lists of people whom he could prove to hide allegiances, American citizens, well, allegiances to the Russians. And I recall the very first time I heard the Russiagate narrative presented in May 2016, which was when the Clinton campaign released this very ominous ad with that kind of heavy music and that deep intonation – “What is Donald Trump doing with the Kremlin?” You know, I immediately assumed that everybody remotely affiliated with the left or with liberalism steeped in the evils of McCarthyism would be horrified by this resurrection of this narrative. It was almost verbatim what was used and what was said. And to this very day, anyone who now stands up and questions the proxy war in Ukraine or who dissented from Russiagate was accused of being a Russian agent. Some people on the right still look at that era favorably. I think Ann Coulter wrote a whole book trying to resurrect McCarthy's reputation, but leaving that aside, why did you begin with that example? What is it about that example and what parallels do you see in what's happening now? 

 

Jacob Siegel:  I mean, for exactly the reason you just pointed out, which is that for more than half a century, the Red Scare and McCarthyism was not just one historical episode among many for American liberals, which is, you know, the tradition and the milieu that I grew up in was that kind of Cold War American liberalism and its aftermath is something I'm very familiar with. And McCarthyism was, if not the central moral allegory, then certainly the central moral allegory of the last 50 years, let's say. And it was supposed to have revealed the true face of America and what the American political system was capable of. And all of that was supposed to be in the DNA of American liberalism. And to see all of that abandoned so quickly, to see it abandoned – abandonment is the wrong word – to see precisely the thing that American liberalism had supposedly been against – it had to find itself in opposition to – to see it so quickly and wholeheartedly embraced, seemed to me significant and to signal the kind of epochal change which is that something from the polls had reversed somehow. And north was south and south was north now. And also just the parallels were so striking with the two secret lists in narrative terms – McCarthy with his list, you know, the famous list that he brandished and then never actually produced, and then this Hamilton 68 secret list that they couldn't produce, they couldn't reveal to the public. And so, I found it – I couldn't open it any other way. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, even if people generally support the notion that there was more communist infiltration of the United States in the 1950s than was known or whatever, it's still seemingly a support for the core tenets of McCarthyism because all of that was based on things like secret list and destruction of reputation with no due process and all kinds of excessive abuses of power that we should all object to, no matter what the cause. 

One of the things I think was very important that you did in telling this story was you emphasized the way in which the kind of accelerant, the steroids for all of this stuff – the regime of censorship, the involvement of the security state in our politics – was the obviously shocking election of Donald Trump in 2016, which I think people have forgotten. Almost nobody was expecting and was a huge shock to the system and caused a lot of these previously unthinkable things to just explode in power. But as you note, a lot of these things were a long time in the making well before Trump and you specifically point to the proximity of the Obama White House and Obama himself on the one hand, and Silicon Valley on the other, and the use, for example, of propaganda and disinformation over the Internet by Hillary Clinton's State Department and her use of people who then went on to work for Google, all these kind of, you know, Internet geniuses who thought they had found a real home in the Obama administration. Talk a little bit about how some of these things had their roots not in Trump's election, but back in the things the Obama administration was doing. 

 

Jacob Siegel: Yeah. So if you look at the Obama administration in that era, the Internet freedom agenda, what you find is that many of the tools of disinformation and the disinformation apparatus had their debut during that period, either as offensive weapons to be used against official enemies of the United States, ISIS in particular, or they were debuted because it was the Hillary Clinton State Department, in particular, that was criticizing other countries for engaging in precisely the kinds of activities that Clinton would later lead others to crusade against disinformation. 

But to begin with, first, there was a very close alignment between the Obama administration and Google in particular. And because of the kind of spectacular nature of the Twitter Files and because of Facebook being such a great and easy target in a lot of ways – you know, Google has skated off in a lot of the analysis of this censorship industrial complex and that's unfortunate because Google really plays a leading role in this. And it begins not in the coercive counter-disinformation register. It begins in this kind of big data political engineering register that the Obama administration embraces wholeheartedly. Assange, we mentioned a moment ago, was writing about this quite early on, talking about Google serving as a kind of shadow State Department for the Obama administration. There was a record-setting personnel exchange between the White House and Google, with a record number of meetings being held between the two. [So, you] see this very close alignment between these powerful tech companies that are effectively private surveillance platforms and the Obama administration, which goes on to become the sort of backbone of this permanent ruling party of the United States. 

 

G. Greenwald: One of the things that strikes me so much in the TikTok debate – whether to ban TikTok or not – and the kind of other bills to give the government even greater powers to ban platforms when they decide there are similar threats, is that – for a long time – the critique of countries like China and Iran and Russia was that these governments were despotic precisely because they refused to allow American technology platforms such as Google and Facebook to enter their country, or at least operate without a lot of constraints. Their concern was that they would be used to disseminate disinformation, they would destabilize their countries by spreading propaganda, by undermining the health of their citizenry in their country, and they would be called despotic for wanting to ban Google and Facebook, or at least requiring them to submit to a whole bunch of censorship rules in order to operate on their soil. And now, we have the United States leaving aside the merits of the debate over whether to ban TikTok, essentially, saying the same thing, that we can't allow foreign platforms, foreign social media companies to be on our soil because they'll propagandize their citizenry, they'll spread disinformation. I draw that parallel because it seems like there's a similar parallel in terms of some of the things that Hillary Clinton's State Department was doing. I remember she would go around with these two little kids, Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, who were supposedly whizz-kids of Silicon Valley, and the work they were actually doing was designed to allow citizens of those countries to get around the censorship regime that had been imposed by countries like China and Iran and Russia by making the Internet open, by allowing them to use the Internet anonymously to get around with things like VPNs. 

Given all of that, how do you see the similarities between what we have been long condemning in these countries in terms of controlling the Internet, censoring the Internet on the grounds that those countries said they had to protect their citizens from disinformation and foreign propaganda, with what the U.S. government is doing now in terms of what American citizens can and can't hear. 

 

Jacob Siegel: Well, look, I, I guess I have a somewhat, I don't know, complicated – but my view is that governments have a right to – “right” is a wrong word – governments have the prerogative to regulate communications platforms as corporate entities, let's say […] 

 

G. Greenwald: The way they regulate the other, the way they regulate banks or oil companies or any other company. 

 

Jacob Siegel: Precisely – and, in this case, a company or a sector that has monopolistic power over very key resource information which impacts directly political sovereignty. So, you know, I have a basically civil libertarian view of not infringing on speech rights on those platforms but, in terms of the kind of the corporate structure of the platforms themselves, I think there's no reason. The original argument, the original Clinton State Department argument, actually goes back to Bill Clinton. It goes back to the mid-nineties, the first dot-com boom. That argument is that we need totally unrestricted global markets for Internet companies to spread democracy everywhere and unimpeded access to the globe. You know, I think that's the argument that doesn't actually hold up but not that I'm justifying speech restrictions. 

 

G. Greenwald: Well, what's the zero in on that? I remember after 9/11, the kind of slogan, the motto of the media, and the government, was “9/11 changed everything.” I'm not entirely sure that it actually did. I think it took a lot of things that were already existing and expanded it. I think it's actually more accurate to use that motto about the election of Donald Trump. That actually did change everything or certainly fundamentally transformed things, making a lot of things that were once unthinkable now a reality. 

And you identify the election of Trump and the decision by Democrats and the U.S. security state – and kind of the establishment, more broadly – that was playing with a bunch of different explanations. Originally, they were going to blame WikiLeaks. They wanted to blame the New York Times. They wanted to blame Jim Comey. Then, they kind of landed on blaming Russia, and Russiagate, in turn, ended up being the foundation for so much of what ended up happening that your piece talks about in terms of the dangers of Internet control. Describe why you think Russiagate and Trump’s selection were so fundamental. How is that used to do all of this?  

 

Jacob Siegel: Yeah, they blamed everybody but the Clinton camp. Right? 

 

G. Greenwald: The people who actually paid to win that election. 

 

Jacob Siegel: Paid to win that election, decided not to campaign in the upper Midwest. Yeah. Everybody but them.

So, what Russiagate did, I think, was it both served as this kind of coordinating mechanism that brought these various factions of the ruling party – ruling party might be a bit too strong – but various factions of the most powerful sectors of American society that might have had implicit interests in common but had not been explicitly coordinated prior to that, and it brought them together and it brought them together to oppose Donald Trump. And there was a kind of popular base to the opposition to Donald Trump, which is the resistance that portrayed him as a fascist and portrayed him as a Russian stooge and had that kind of moral dimension. And then there was the fact that Donald Trump was obviously a threat to various deep-seated business interests, defense sector interests – that he was threatening to pull out of NATO, that he was threatening to renegotiate trade terms with China – and so, were these various reasons for Trump's outward displays of, you know, at times, quite ugly nativism that really did inflame people. I don't think this was all purely cynical. I think it could only work as well as it did, in part, because Trump really did inspire a reaction from people that was outsized, that was unlike the reaction we had gotten from other politicians. And that that, together with the way in which he threatened these really core interests of the most powerful sectors of American society, put in place the conditions for coordination between those sectors that had not previously existed. So, there was no reason, for instance, to think that Wall Street and Silicon Valley and NGO staffers and The Washington Post newsroom were all going to be aligned – that they were going to be explicitly aligned, I should say – functionally, operationally aligned, and not simply have implicit affinities with one another. But it was intrinsic to the war against disinformation, intrinsic and essential through the counter disinformation and its notion of a “whole-of-society” effort that these various powerful sectors would be lashed to one another in a common cause, in a national mobilization, very much on the model of what happens in times of war. When there's a war, we drop these divisions between the public and the private sector and we adopt that kind of central planning for the war effort, right? It was quite similar to that. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, this is one of the things – just in terms of illustrating how radical I think your critique was or your history was – you do compare the pretext that was used for the War on Terror or the war in Iraq, kind of the central falsehood about weapons of mass destruction that justified the war in Iraq, some of the fears around al-Qaida that led to a lot of the excesses of the War on Terror to what's taking place now. And so, when you say that there were parts of Trump and his nativism that were genuinely ugly and that were genuinely kind of frightening, I think, to a lot of not just establishment interests, but a lot of people who genuinely were frightened by this kind of new ideology, you know, it's also the case that people were also genuinely frightened by al-Qaida and by 9/11. I lived in Manhattan on 9/11. I remember very well, very vividly, all the sensations of anger and rage and fear and concern because our country was attacked. And the lesson of 9/11 that I really thought we had learned – maybe it's just too rational, maybe there are a lot of people who didn't live through it – was that when you actually feel a valid fear of some threat, it's important that you don't let establishment institutions, the government, the media, whomever, exploit those fears to get you to acquiesce to things that you’ll later regret, either because they were worse than the fear itself or were in some other ways not related to the fear – that you kind of got manipulated into saying yes to the Patriot Act; yes to warrantless surveillance; yes to, you know, torture; yes to process-free detentions, all because we have this genuine fear of al-Qaida. 

And so, when it comes to even what you might describe as valid concerns about Trump, why do you think that that lesson – and it wasn't just for 9/11, but prior historical events as well – wasn't kind of in place enough? Why was everybody – not everybody, but so many people, so many institutions – so easily manipulated by fear of this singular individual to radically change their views on almost every major political question and really get to the point that Sam Harris said that everything – lying, censoring and even disinformation – is justified in the name of stopping Trump because he's such a singular threat. 

 

Jacob Siegel:  Just to put a finer point on what Sam Harris said – that it was okay and he would turn and look the other way if there were dead children in a basement if that's what was on Hunter Biden’s laptops because that's how significant the Trump threat was – look, I don't think that societies learn lessons. Individuals learn lessons. So, I understand where you're coming from but I think that's a kind of hopeful position that isn't borne out and that certainly that unaccountable bureaucracies don't learn the lessons. And they exist in no small part to not learn lessons. And the not learning of lessons becomes a core function and a kind of a primary drive of the bureaucracies to avoid at all costs the learning of lessons, lest those lessons point to the needlessness or the excesses of the bureaucracy itself. So, I've sort of given up on this on this hope that there are collective lessons to be learned in that way. There are only carefully guarded institutions that are transparent enough and locally controlled enough that people can actually have influence and impact over them and that can preserve lessons in that way. But to the question of why people responded to Trump in this sort of apocalyptic register – leave aside for a moment why, let's say, the defense establishment or why Wall Street responded to him that way because I think that's maybe easier to understand. They saw him as a threat […] 

 

G. Greenwald: A genuine threat, a rational, genuine threat to their interests. 

 

Jacob Siegel: That's right. Why did so many normal people respond to him that way? And I think tens of millions of normal people did. There are two answers. One is that he seemed to play on these very suppressed and things that people were very uncomfortable with, that they wanted to have overcome – that we had somehow moved beyond the kind of crassness and racism and nativism that Trump represented. Something like that. The best way I could put it is that he was an embarrassment. And there are few things worse in life than an embarrassment. It's like when you think about what you're really afraid of, it's not being kidnaped by al-Qaida and tortured to death. You're really afraid of being embarrassed at a party or something like that – and Trump was a kind of hideous, unavoidable embarrassment who also sort of pointed the embarrassment back at those people by saying to them, “Oh, your niceties are foolish, you're the fool.” And so that was really difficult. 

The other part of it, which became more significant over the years and really can't be discounted, is that the secrecy regime that we're talking about and that the intelligence bureaucracies propagated – and not just the intelligence bureaucracies, other federal bureaucracies also which use secrecy as a form of regulatory power, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out many years ago. That secrecy, that culture of secrecy and that culture of sort of selective information operations being used to manipulate the public drives people crazy. It is not compatible with reason and self-government. It makes people suspicious of their neighbors, suspicious of their own shadows. It makes them believe in monsters that don't exist. So, all of those things together, I think, produced this kind of singular, totally outsized reaction that Trump inspired. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, these tactics have been time-tested over many decades and have been very effectively deployed often in other countries, as you point out, and now are kind of being directed at our own population. And I think that's, for me at least, one of the most significant changes in what you're describing.

 There are a couple of other questions that I want to ask you about. One paragraph, in particular, was very striking to me, both in terms of how extreme the terminology that you used is as well as kind of how it goes to the core of the matter. You wrote:

 

To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps:  America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts and outgrowing our parochial attachment to the Bill of Rights. (Jacob Siegel. March 28, 2023). 

 

That’s some pretty extreme steps that you claim the establishment is undertaking to make America less free and less safe. What kind of concrete examples did you have in mind when you're pointing to things like silencing dissent and taking away the right of rabble-rousers or people a little too far outside establishment constraints to be able to speak or even exercise basic foundational rights in the Constitution? 

 

Jacob Siegel: I mean, there are just dozens of examples of not fringe publications, not fringe figures, but people like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who is saying that, you know, what democracy really needs is to censor free speech, saying that Elon Musk's called – I'm going to mess up the quote and it deserves to be read precisely because it's so insane – but basically Reich says something along the lines that Elon Musk promising to turn Twitter into a real free speech platform fulfills the dream of Pol Pot and Stalin and every other dictator. I quote from an essay in the New York Times Magazine by a Yale graduate and writer, named Emily Bazelon, all about how disinformation and the infodemic, which was another one of these pseudoscientific terms trotted out during the COVID pandemic to conflate and erase the boundaries between disease on the one hand and war and speech, and to just erase all of these essential boundaries but, Bazelon’s argument is that free speech is essentially the American version of free speech, it is obsolete and has become dangerous and is empowering radicals. And this is an argument that's made over and over and over again by people in publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic Magazine and by, you know, high-level Democratic Party officials. It becomes the conventional wisdom. So, you know, I appreciate you calling it extreme, and I understand why it sounds extreme in that context. I have to give great credit to my editor at Tablet for never asking me to pull a single punch on any of this. And, you know, I didn't write anything to be extreme. It's not in my nature to write […] 

 

G. Greenwald: You're generally pretty moderate in your right away and in your rhetoric, which is why I think this piece was striking. And to be clear, at the end of the day, what's extreme is not what you're saying, but what the people whose behavior you're describing are actually doing. There's no way to describe what they're doing without using extreme language because it really is so extreme when you have the establishment and the key institutions of authority, now explicitly, essentially arguing that we can no longer tolerate a free Internet or even free speech because the dangers of it outweigh the dangers of curbing it. That, by nature, is kind of extreme. 

Let me ask you just a little bit about that notion, though, about free speech and censorship in this prevailing mentality. I always find that it's obviously a lot easier for people to defend free speech when it comes to censorship of ideas with which they agree, or the silencing of people whom they vaguely regard as allies. Elon Musk ran into this when he was banging the table and saying he was going to usher in absolute free speech and when someone asked him what that meant, he said that means allowing all speech except that which is illegal under Supreme Court precedent and Brandenburg and all that, even though he recognizes he's not bound by that, that's for the government. He kind of said that's going to be my guiding principles. And then, months after he took over, he's banning people like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, not because they've said anything even arguably illegal, but because those ideas are really offensive to maybe him or to advertisers or to others. He specifically said he would ban Alex Jones because Alex Jones, his comments about Sandy Hook, really struck him personally as offensive because he had a baby who died. So, I'm wondering, where do you draw that line when you're defending free speech – when you're kind of ringing about the dangers of censorship – do you see cases like, say, Kanye West or Nick Fuentes being banned or Alex Jones being banned? There are a lot of examples of, say, Palestinian activists being banned, critics of Israel being banned. Are those issues that are concerning to you as well? Where do you draw those lines? 

 

[00:56:09] Jacob Siegel:  I mean, the kind of operative question to me is, is there a collusion between the state and the corporation involved in the banning? You know, I think that's a bright red line. So, what would I personally advise Elon Musk to do with Twitter? I would say allow for more sort of local community-based moderation. Seems to me an approach that might work rather than trying to have – I don't think this model of centralization, vertical centralization, is good, personally. But, you know, I start to get outside of my depth with some of this stuff and I can be persuaded to take different views. 

In general, I think the more speech, the better. I think that where there is a case for banning private platforms, it's best when it's done at the most local possible level and most dangerous when it's done in a kind of top-down manner, and especially when it's done at the whim of a single owner. You know, Elon Musk having a personal connection to Sandy Hook is compelling for Elon Musk, but it's a very bad precedent for policy at a company that controls the core political speech rights of tens of millions of voters. That being said if there is no direct connection with the government – and let's pretend for a second that that's possible, and I don't actually think that that is possible because I think whoever owns Twitter, whether it's somebody like Musk who's done something incredible by disclosing this stuff with the Twitter files or somebody else who's more willing to go along with the dictates of the FBI, let's say – whoever owns it, it still functions as a surveillance platform in some way, still collecting user data on the backend. And we don't know how these decisions are being made and they're still fundamentally opaque. But, you know, if you can say that there is no direct coordination with the government and then not try and parse that too closely for the moment, I think, you know, it's the platforms having some kind of speech guidelines is a reasonable and probably a necessary thing for them to do, to maintain the kind of communities or user bases that are going to allow them to grow. But, you know, this is something where I don’t get into policy prescription stuff. It's not my strong […] 

 

G. Greenwald: Right. The focus of the article is on the role the government is playing in imposing this regime. 

We're just getting out of time, so just going to pick a couple of questions that I absolutely have to ask you. One of which is you devoted an entire section of the article – you had 13 parts or chapters – to the case of how the media and Big Tech treated the question of Hunter Biden's laptop. It's amazing that liberals have been trained the minute you even mention the phrase Hunter Biden's laptop, they've automatically been conditioned to believe you're talking about something trivial. Why did you decide to devote an entire chapter to that episode and you emphasize the importance of it when doing so, what importance do you see in it? 

 

Jacob Siegel: What could possibly be less trivial than 49 senior U.S. intelligence officials and the FBI lying openly to the American public and pressuring these social media platforms to censor reporting, weeks before a presidential election, and censoring the second oldest newspaper in the United States? I mean, I can't think of a more direct, more brazen assault, not only on freedom of speech. We're talking about what people think voting is. What do they think their voting rights and their political sovereignty are? You know, if you're kept in the dark and spun around and then, released at the last second and presented with two false choices and allowed to pick one, that's not exactly self-government. And so, I look at the way in which people have been – sort of the liberals in particular – have been conditioned to sort of yawn and parrot the AOC line about how this is still a half-baked story or whatever, as a reflexive response that also demonstrates the power of this sort of memetic propagation of attitudes that in a sense is the flipside of censorship. So, if censorship exists to eliminate certain forms of information […] 

 

G. Greenwald: Disinformation. Disinformation. You mean if censorship exists to elaborate disinformation... 

 

Jacob Siegel:  Well, what they call disinformation. I call it information.

 

G. Greenwald: Okay. Okay. Yeah, Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which is what this case illustrates, right, is that the people who claim to be fighting against disinformation were the ones who spread it as they did in so many other cases. 

 

Jacob Siegel: But the flipside of that is that there's also a powerful way to create a kind of conformity of opinion on critical issues like the Biden laptop, for instance, where you have first, you know, the press all falls in line. Virtually the entire press establishment falls in line. It becomes verboten to talk about this. And how does this work? Again, through kind of embarrassment, you know, you're mocked. If you take this seriously, you're scorned by your peers and your colleagues. You're conditioned to treat this as if it's no big deal and anybody who says otherwise is a right-wing fanatic but I think that it's as big a deal as one can find. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I recently said on one of my shows that not only will likely talk about the Hunter Biden laptop story until the day I die, but I'll probably request there be something about it on my tombstone because it's not only so gargantuan but what infuriates me the most, aside from the fact that the people who constantly claim to be the warriors against disinformation are the ones who spread those lies, as they so often did in the COVID case and so many others, including examples you mentioned, is that, even though we now have the definitive proof from the media institutions, they tell us to trust that the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic all along and was never Russian disinformation. Not a single media outlet that spread that lie has gone back in the wake of this new evidence and confronted what they did or even explained it, let alone retracted it. And the same thing happened in the story that you mentioned in your article where Jeff Gerth, who was at the belly of the beast. In the main, you cannot get more mainstream media than him, he worked for 30 years at The New York Times and then went to ProPublica and he was writing in Columbia Journalism Review, the most mainstream journalism outlet, a media criticism. He wrote a four-part indictment of the media's lies and recklessness in Russiagate, and not a single target or object of his critique even bothered to acknowledge it, just like they did with the Hunter Biden story. 

And so, I want to ask you, in terms of the repercussions of your story, which is this opus about, you know, touching every major institution of American political life, is it the case, as I perceive now, the only people who have really talked about it and acknowledged it is people who were already concerned about it in the first place. And given this kind of ability that these media outlets have to silo off any information that's negative – they don't care that they got caught lying in the hundred batting cages because they know their audience doesn't care if they confront it or apologize for it, they probably want them not to. What hope is there to be able to reform these institutions, if you have any? 

 

Jacob Siegel:  I don't have too much hope to reform these institutions. I am afraid that I think some of them are probably too far gone. But maybe we just need new institutions. I think that this has become the overriding institutional imperative, precisely to never face up to the failures, and that creates this escalating cycle where, by refusing to face up to these failures, you then double down on the idea that it's everybody else's fault. So, you lock yourself into a fraudulent analytical framework because you won't acknowledge what you've done wrong. You blame other people, you declare them extremists or conspiracy theorists, which is itself an error and specious and fraudulent. So now, you've made another error, by refusing to confront your original error, you've not doubled down on another error. Meanwhile, trust in the media plummets as a result. How do you metabolize trust in the media? You say it's due to disinformation and domestic extremism, and so then you have to go get more disinformation and domestic extremism orders, and this sort of goes on in perpetuity. There are still great reporters and almost all are there. […]

 

G. Greenwald:  For sure. For sure.

 

Jacob Siegel:  Doing very good. Right? 

 

G. Greenwald: These are institutional critiques.

 

Jacob Siegel: But as institutions and, you know, maybe – I just don't know enough – maybe, in a longer cycle, I would be able to see how they would escape from this. It's difficult for me to see, frankly. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I agree completely. I think they're largely irredeemable. I think their business model kind of depends on this polarization, which is why, for me, the only solution is, as you said, kind of constructing new institutions. But that depends upon the ability to do so with the free Internet. And I think censorship has become not only a way of kind of shielding their disinformation but also preventing competitors from emerging, because anyone who wants to compete, not just compete with them in a business sense. We have lots of new media outlets that kind of click into the same narrative. But anyone that wants to present an alternative way of seeing the world is instantly labeled “sewers of disinformation” and then a kind of censorship regime is unleashed against it precisely to prevent that from merging. I think that's the thing that they fear most, knowing how widely they're hated. 

 

Jacob Siegel: And, you know, the great example of this is something you wrote about Glenn. It's what happened with Parler right after January 6. That's an incredible story because it shows the way that these interests converge. Parler emerges right after the Capitol riot. I forget the statistic you had in your piece, but it was […] 

 

G. Greenwald: The number one most downloaded app in the Apple Play Store and in Google Play Store more than Instagram, more than TikTok, they all migrated there when they saw Trump being censored from Big Tech. 

 

Jacob Siegel:  And shutting down this fast-growing new number one is both something that the established tech companies want, and it's something the intelligence agencies want, and it's something the Democratic Party wants, and it's something that the press wants because they have been yoked together into this kind of monolithic entity with a shared set of core existential interests. And, if you push hard enough on that, you'll see the divisions but it's incredible and difficult to pull apart once you recognize the independence of the press and the kind of imperatives of the security agencies are at this point very difficult to pull apart. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, absolutely. It's a merger of major parts of both the public and the private sector. Public and private power which, ironically, is one of the academic definitions of fascism, as they claim that they're fighting fascism. But you're absolutely right. It's a consortium of institutions aligned, at least to a very large extent. And I actually think, at the end of the day, what your article does better than anything is illustrating the way in which they are actually working in collaboration toward a common goal. So, I really want to thank you for that article. I think it was incredibly illuminating. I'm going to badger everybody and on every platform to go read it. It’s worthwhile. And I also appreciate your taking the time to talk to us tonight. Thanks so much. 

 

Jacob Siegel: It was great being here. Thank you for having me. Great. 

 

G. Greenwald: Have a nice evening. 


 

So that concludes our show for this evening. For those of you who have been watching on our Local's platform, every Tuesday and Thursday, we have our live aftershow where we take your questions and respond to your feedback. To be able to be a part of that, simply join our Locals community where you also have exclusive written journalism that we post there and all kinds of community features as well as exclusive access to the transcripts for every show that we post within 24 hours of each show appearing. 

For those of you who've been watching this show here on Rumble, we're very appreciative of that. We hope to see you back every night, Monday through Friday, at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble. 

 

Have a great evening, everybody.

 

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System Update #500

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_4nXeZ4O4xc3AC6Xv7frryn0gRH426dnSiiWL_fHVJUOiYl0GyRu76Tf_ErdSXxAbt8_5IV4kXzpFumx9nFzEAFwyvBJKuSESoXedKaeqEU0JbvwLnTrSW_CnKdpQw8zuiOEQ2N6y3215-SJqPKJrgyg?key=0DG7XNYuAKh3Go88NaPTAg

Welcome to episode 500 of System Update, which means that over the last two years, ever since we launched in December of 2022, 500 times I have sat my ass in this chair, and we have done a program for you. Today is number 500. 

System Update, of course, is our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

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Every Friday night, as we're doing tonight, we take questions solely from our Locals members. We try to answer as many as we can.

 You may have noticed as well that, inspired by Donald Trump, all art today in commemoration of 500 shows is in gold, not our typical green and black. No, everything is gold. We went all out for tonight. So, I really hope you enjoy it.

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The first of which is from @alan_smithee. And he asked this:

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One of the reasons why I didn't talk about it, despite obviously being extremely interested in all three of them and the subject matter that they cover, I obviously am a longtime friend of Tucker’s. I used to be on the show, I think more than anybody else, when he was on Fox News, and now, on his podcast, I'm on frequently, maybe the guest who's been on the most as well, not really sure. It's not a competition. I don't know why I have to keep saying I'm at the top of the charts, but just to indicate the frequency, and he's been on our show before. So, I definitely consider him a friend of mine. Candace, I have a good relationship; I would describe it as friendly. I've chatted with Nick over the years a little bit, certainly not near the same level of interaction. 

I had this issue with Matt Taibbi. I was recently on Briahna Joy Gray's show, but also, I might have even been on a different show, where people were trying to ask me about Matt Taibbi and some of the criticism of him. Yeah, we've gotten questions about Matt Taibbi here as well over the past few months about things like his refusal to comment on Israel and Gaza, his infrequent commentary on the First Amendment issues raised by deporting students who speak critically of Gaza, the imposition of hate speech codes on American campuses by the Trump administration to shield Israel from criticism. 

I'm very honest about the fact that when someone is your friend, when you consider someone as your friend, at least for me, I really don't feel comfortable publicly criticizing them. It's actually one of the reasons why I go out of my way not to be friends or have any social ties with the people I'm supposed to be covering in Washington – politicians, major journalists. I've always thought the fact that I don't live in New York or Washington to be one of the greatest benefits for my journalism because I'm not in the middle of their social scenes. I don’t owe any social niceties to them. I don't feel as though if I criticize them, it's going to affect my social life or put me in uncomfortable positions. I take the obligation of friendship seriously. If you're actually somebody's friend, it comes with loyalty, and part of that loyalty is that, if you have problems with what they do and say, you go to them privately. It would take a lot for me to publicly criticize or down someone I consider my friend.

 I'm just being honest about that. Maybe that's not even the right thing to do. I'm not praising myself. I'm telling you how I feel personally. But again, I think if you live in New York, if you live in Washington, and you're integrated into that political media world, that is one of the reasons why it's so incestuous, why they constantly cover for each other, why there's so much groupthink within it. 

They're always talking to each other, for each order. To be part of these social scenes on which they depend, you have to be welcome. Part of being welcome is that you don't stray too far from their dogma. And I've always aggressively kept a very distant arm's length from people in positions of power, from major media figures, so that I don't feel constrained about giving my honest views or critiques or analysis or reporting on them. 

Occasionally, you do become friends with people almost by accident, who then end up in positions of power. Tulsi Gabbard is a good example. I have no problem criticizing Tulsi Gabbard because, whatever good relations I've had with her before, she's now the director of National Intelligence, and I'm not going to pull punches when I have critiques of Tulsi and I am also going to praise her only because I feel the praise is warranted. 

So, sometimes you just have to accept the fact that somebody has risen to a particular position or entered a type of power position, and there's just no getting around the fact that your job requires honest critique. I don't feel like that's the case for any of the people involved here, Tucker, Candace, or Nick Fuentes. I don't feel like any of them is a government official. Obviously, they all do have a great deal of influence in very different ways. So, I don't want to side with any one of them, nor do I want to necessarily say that I think insults or criticisms that they've launched at each other are warranted, but it is an extremely important conversation, so I also don't want to avoid it entirely, because for one thing these are three people, and obviously people understand how influential Tucker and Candace are. They're arguably the two most prominent conservative journalists/pundits, influencers. Maybe you could put Charlie Kirk in there, maybe Ben Shapiro, but Tucker and Candace are both bigger. I mean, Tucker hosted the most-watched show in the history of cable news for five years at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox. He's been on TV for 25 years before that. And Candace is just a powerhouse. She's a force of nature. Whatever you think of her, whatever you think of the Macron stuff, whatever you're thinking for Israel stuff, whatever, I'm leaving that on the side, I'm just saying. 

The fact of the matter is that when Candace left The Daily Wire, which, of course, is founded and run by Ben Shapiro after she had a falling out with Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, the other co-founder, over her criticism of Israel, which at the time was very mild – she was basically saying, “I don't think we should be bombing and killing children.” – that was pretty much the extent of it which caused this massive upheaval. A lot of people wondered, well, what is she going to do? Just like people wondered what Tucker Carlson was going to do, and they both went on to become, in my view, far more influential. 

I'm not saying that Tucker's position in the mediocre system now is necessarily larger than it is at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox News, but being at the 8 o'clock hour on Fox News comes with a lot of constraints, as he found out when he got fired, despite being the highest rated host on all of cable news. And he's completely liberated of those constraints now, I mean, completely. Completely. He's financially set. Fox is still paying this gigantic contract. He also now has a very successful platform. I mean, he's not worried about saying or doing whatever he wants. I know he feels – he said this before, publicly, not just in our conversations – that there were a lot of things he did as part of his career that he deeply regrets. Just being part of the Washington Group. 

I think he was raised there. I mean, he wasn't raised physically in Washington, but he eventually went there. But his father was very integrated into the U.S. deep state, that we could call it, ties to the CIA, he ran the propaganda arm of the U.S. government, Voice of America, was very, very integrated into that world. He grew up with a lot of wealth and privileges as he will tell you, and so when he got to Washington and got on TV very early on, he really was just immersed in this subculture that led him to believe, or at least not even necessarily to believe but to say a lot of things that he didn't really fully believe, or maybe that you can get yourself to believe things that you don't really believe because you just feel like it's what everyone around you expects you to say. 

Unlike a lot of people who are guilty of the same thing, Tucker has probably more than anybody else been extremely candid about what he regrets, and not only what he regrets, I'm not just talking about support for the Iraq war, I'm talking about the whole support that he gave for George Bush, Dick Cheney, neoconservative ideology, and not just on foreign policy, but also on economic policy and I think it's often overlooked. Everyone sees his head in foreign policies. Even when he was at Fox, he was criticizing Trump for doing things like assassinating General Soleimani, saying, “This is not in our interest. This might be in the interest of neocons or Israel, but why would we risk a war with Iran when that's not in our interest?” He was saying things like that even on Fox. He probably was the single most influential figure who took a lot of MAGA people, a lot of people on the right, and turned them against the war in Ukraine every night. 

I was on his show dozens of times talking about that war to the point where when he got fired from Fox, a bunch of Republican lawmakers ran to Politico or Axios anonymously and celebrated his firing and saying, “Oh, now our lives are going to be much easier. We can now fund the war in Ukraine without as much public pushback.” And that trajectory was because not just that he regretted what he had previously advocated and acknowledged his wrongdoing, but he was and is really determined to kind of repent for it. And he feels like the way to repent for it is by never again allowing himself to be blind. 

He moved out of Washington, used to live in the middle of Georgetown, where Victoria Nuland lived, I think, down the street or the other street. I mean, that's where they all lived. Now, he lives in rural Maine. He also lives on an island in Florida. He purposely took himself to very isolated places that are completely detached from that world, for the same reason as I was just describing. Not only do you feel less constrained, but you see things more clearly. You don't wake up every day and immediately get surrounded by people who are just part of this blob of groupthink and so, you're able to analyze things from a distance. It’s sort of like if you go into a big city and you're on a street corner, the vision that you have of what the city looks like is radically different than if you fly over it because that distance from what you're looking at gives you a better perspective, or at least, maybe not even better, but different. And the same thing happens when you move out of Washington or New York, and you purposely stay away from it, you start to see things more clearly because you're not immersed in it. And I do find that extremely valuable. 

I find that trajectory very, very positive. It's one of the reasons why, probably more than anything else that I've ever done, what caused much of the left turn against me, not all, but much, was number one, my refusal to get on board with Russiagate, but number two, my association with Tucker. I saw early on that there was a real movement within parts of the populist right, which you're now seeing in lots of different ways, not just questioning Israel and foreign policy and war, but also corporatism and the idea of economic populism. And yes, there are lots of deviations from it, but I mean Tucker and a few others were what made me see how real that was and how much of an opportunity there was, and not just to keep yourself in prison in the Democratic Party. 

So, I do believe Tucker's trajectory is real. I do believe that he's sincere and genuine in what he's saying. You never know what's fully in a person's heart, not even your own heart. You can't know for certain. You can deceive yourself about your own motives, your own thoughts and even the people you're closest to, your friends. But I have enough confidence in how well I know him, not just professionally, but personally as well, the time we spent together, the time that we've talked, that I do believe that he's very authentic in what he's saying. I think his trajectory is continuing. I don't think he's stopped at the point where he's going to be. And I think it's been very positive on almost every level. 

So that’s Tucker over here; then let's kind of put Candace in a similar position. I don't know Candace as well, so I can't comment to that degree of confidence about who she is and why she's doing what she's doing, but, two years ago, Candace worked at The Daily Wire, four years ago, she was in Jerusalem with Charlie Kirk celebrating Trump's move of the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, a long-time pipe dream, what seemed like a pipe dream of the furthest, most radicalized Greater Israel fanatics and their supporters in the United States. And there was very little criticism coming from Candace about Israel. In fact, the opposite was true. 

In her case, she's a lot younger than Tucker, she's only been around for not all that long, and I know personally that when you start off doing this work and you're able to spend full time digging into things, if you're minimally a critical thinker, if you're minimally open-minded, your views are going to morph the more you learn, the more you dive into things, the more you experience things. That is healthy and normal. And I do believe that her views, which she most passionately expresses, to which she pays the most attention, are genuine, which isn't the same thing as saying I agree with them all and they're all positive. I'm just saying I believe she also believes the things she's saying. I don't think it's calculated. I don't think it's about grifting. If it were, she could have stayed at The Daily Wire. There are easier ways to make a popular path than doing what she does. 

She defends Harvey Weinstein. She took up that case. There was hardly a public clamoring for that, especially among the audience that she cultivated. Also, the Macron stuff, all the stuff with Israel – she's been excluded from a lot of mainstream corporate media circles to which she used to have complete access and in which she could have risen without limits, obviously She’s very talented, like Tucker, she is a communicator, and she chose a much harder path, and I think that was through genuine conviction. There are many differences between Tucker and Candace, but for that purpose, you can put them together. 

And then you have Nick Fuentes. And just for those of you who haven't seen it, I'm just going to give you this summary of what's happened in the past few months, not going back years. The short version of this is that Nick Fuentes is often very critical of people who seem like they're the closest to him politically. So, he spends a lot of time criticizing Charlie Kirk – I was going to say Ben Shapiro, but I don't think Ben Shapiro is remotely close to Nick Fuentes – but Charlie Kirk on the surface could be. He spent a lot of time criticizing Matt Walsh. And he has also hurled a lot of criticism and might even say insults toward Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. 

In response, Candace Owens invited him for the first time on her podcast. Although I do think they have far more views in common than differences, the podcast was a bit hostile. I would say it's, in part, because Candace had some acrimonious points to raise with him, but also because – and she played some of these clips, I mean, Nick Fuentes had very harshly attacked her and criticized her, calling her a bitch who doesn't know what she's doing, and if you're going to do that, the people who are your targets are not necessarily going to love you, and so this was really the triggering event. 

She invited him to her podcast. He got a huge audience – between Candace and Nick Fuentes, who has a gigantic following online, in some ways you could argue he's as influential these days as Candace and Tucker, and maybe headed for even surpassing them, which again, generationally is natural – but because that interview was acrimonious and brought out a lot of tensions and personal conflicts, it kind of spilled over online because Nick left that interview and started really condemning Candace, accusing her of sandbagging him in the interview and the like, and then they had a big fight online. 

And then, before you knew it, Tucker asked Candace to come to his podcast. So, you're now talking about Candace Owens on Tucker Carlson's podcast, obviously a gigantic interview. And both of them, I don't know if they planned it, but both of them talked about Nick Fuentes in an extremely derogatory way. I mean, Tucker did acknowledge that, which you cannot deny. It's kind of like you can hate Trump all you want, but there's no denying his charisma, his skill in communicating, and the fact that he's very funny. 

For a long time, it was like heresy to say that, but there's no denying that that's true. I have no trouble admitting that people I can't stand are smart. I think Dick Cheney is very smart. I actually think Liz Cheney is very smart, just to give two examples, a lot of other ones as well. You can acknowledge the skills and assets that people have who you dislike or even despise. It’s not inconsistent. So, Tucker did acknowledge, like, look, Nick Fuentes is spectacularly talented. He is like a very rare, generational talent in terms of his ability to go before the camera, attract attention and be charismatic. But he's not like a ranter and a raver. Nick Fuentes is very well read, very, very informed. There aren't a lot of people who know more about the topics Nick Fuentes covers than Nick Fuentes does. It's very impressive. And that combination of being very charismatic, an extremely adept communicator, just kind of a natural camera presence, and having really smart insights that are grounded not in sensationalism or blind ideology, but lots of reading and thinking and critical evaluation, it's very potent. That's the reason why he's becoming so popular that even people at the heights of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson can't really ignore it anymore. 

They talked about Nick Fuentes as though he were just sort of some loser, like Tucker was saying, like, “How did he become so influential? He was just this gay kid living in his mother's basement in Chicago.” And I don't think Tucker quite meant it that way, but that is how some of it came off. Both agreed that he was some sort of psyop to destroy the right, that he maybe was a Fed working for the CIA. 

That led Nick to do a series of shows, a couple of segments, where he just tore into Tucker and Candace, particularly Tucker, in a way that suggests that he was: “How can you possibly call me this, Psyop, or this operative, or this person who works for the CIA, when you spent your whole life inside these circles? Candace Owens was the one working for Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson was working for Rupert Murdoch, making millions; Nick Fuentes wasn't. 

Nick's basic point was, like, you’re all very late to this game, like criticizing Israel, talking about the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States. You've only started doing this last year, whereas I've been doing it for years. This is what I think is at the heart of the matter: there are people who have been talking about Israel in this way for a long time. Noam Chomsky did, Norman Finkelstein did. 

One of the most important events was in 2007 when two of the most prestigious political scientists and international relations scholars in the United States, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote a book called “The Israel Lobby.” First, it was an essay in the London Review of Books, and then it turned into this massive tome, this 700-page book. It’s footnoted to the hilt because they're scholars, and they wrote the book that way. At the time, nobody on the mainstream was willing to say that. It was pretty much confined to the left, where you were free to say it. 

So, at the time, I was more associated with the left, perceived as being on the left. So, I was saying all these things for many years, but it wasn't all that risky for me because of the political camp that people perceived that I was in. I've always had one foot in that left-wing camp back then and one foot in the kind of libertarian, more independent camp, but in both of those camps it was totally fine, totally even welcome to talk about why we do so much for Israel, the evils of Israel, how they control our politics, how we go to war for them, how much money we spend to support them. 

So, I wasn't taking any risks – I've taken risks in my career, but I don't consider that as one – but Nick Fuentes, when he started doing it, was 18 years old, and he had this very promising future inside conservative media. At 18, he'd already been spotted as a talent. He had small shows, but he was making connections with and networking with some of the people who were very influential inside corporate media. People now forget, because now there's a lot of space for talking this way about Israel, but at the time, there was basically none. 

Before Donald Trump, there was almost nobody on the right willing to talk this way about Israel. You had Pat Buchanan, who did it for a long time, going back to the ‘80s, and he was viciously smeared as an anti-Semite. You had Ron Paul, who did the same thing. And then you had Trump kind of come in and create this space, and Nick Fuentes started really looking into it. I'm going into this not because of the personalities, but because I think they raise very broader issues about how all of this has evolved, not just for them, but for the broader discourse. 

Fuentes started off in conservative politics. At first, he thought Israel was our greatest ally and we have to support them: all the standard Republican and conservative views that have dominated both Republican and Democratic Party politics for decades. But then, the more he started questioning it, the more he started becoming vocal about it. And the more he became vocal about it, the more he became shunned inside the conservative media world, in which he had a very bright future. And rather than shutting up, as he was told to do, knowing that that might be better for his career, he couldn't. He just doesn't have that personality type. And he just had to keep examining it and keep saying it, and to say that Nick Fuentes paid a price for that is an understatement. Nick Fuentes has been excluded and booted out of every conceivable precinct of conservative media, even ones that consider themselves radical, dissident and far-right ones. I was playing on the mainstream ones. 

He was physically banned from going to Charlie Kirk's “Turning Points USA” and lots of other conferences like that. He was fired from the media platforms he was starting to develop. He was shunned by the friends that he had made, younger people on the side of the conservative movement. Then, it escalated from there. He got banned from almost every social media platform, including X. Elon Musk eventually reinstated him once he bought X, where he now is, but the only platform where he could be was Telegram. Now, he's on Rumble because Rumble is a genuine free speech platform. He has a show on Rumble that he does, I think, every night or four nights a week, and has found a good-sized audience. But really, it was on Twitter that he got his most attention, and that's why they banned him from Twitter in the pre-Musk era. But it wasn't just that. 

He wasn't just silenced and banned throughout all social media; he was also debanked. He had bank accounts closed, because of his political views, by major banks in the United States. He would get rejected for banking applications. He was put on a No-Fly list, which is the first time I really spoke about Nick, when I raised serious concerns about No-Fly lists being used in this way. His career has been severely impeded, not from what people believe are his racist views about Black people or immigrants; tons of people have those views and are perfectly welcome and fine in right-wing circles. The sole cause of it was his opposition to Israel and his questioning of the power of the Jewish lobby to keep the United States subservient to Israel. It just wasn't said. It was just a taboo. It was one of the third rails of American political discourse that would get anybody fired or destroyed for talking about it. 

Now, a lot of people talk about it, and it's become almost mainstream, but back then, especially on the right, almost nobody did. He paid a huge price, personally, financially, for his career, for his reputation, for his friendships, for his ability to get bank accounts. The government even put him on a no-fly list. And then last year, let's not forget, a homicidal maniac came to his house to try to murder him; shot two of his neighbors and killed them, and showed up at his house with a very large automatic weapon. This person eventually ended up being killed by the police. Another woman showed up at his house, a crazy liberal woman whom he had to pepper-spray. So, he's paid a big price for this. 

I don't want to speak for him, but I definitely identify with this mindset. I've had it too, sometimes, which is that if you are the first person or one of the first people to kind of get out on that plank and you're taking the shots because of it and very few other people are willing to join you,  and then at some point, it becomes a little safer to do it – I'm not saying it's safe; Tucker has also paid a price for it. I mean, half his audience has turned on him. He's now widely attacked by conservatives as being an anti-Semite, a Qatari agent, and Candace as well. So, it's not cost-free at all and Tucker didn't have to do it. He could have just ignored it. So, he's paid for a place too. 

But there's a big difference between Tucker Carlson in his mid-50s with a gigantic multimillion-dollar-year contract with Fox News, coming from the family that he came from, versus Nick Fuentes as a 22-year-old enduring all of that, and he comes from no wealth, no privilege. I think the idea is Nick feels like he was out on that plank, taking all these arrows and punishments, and then, in part, I do think that he helped open the space on the right to start talking more about Israel in a more honest way. It is true that Tucker and Candace, for the most part, hadn't really ever talked about it until after October 7, when, as Nick says, it almost became inevitable. They could have both ignored it. They could've both just spouted a few light lip services to it, but both of them made it very central to their cause, which they didn't have to do. It was not in their interest to do as well. But they did do it. 

But I think he feels like, I'm the one who actually paid the price for this. I was the one who was doing this earlier. Then the two of you come and now start doing it when it's a little bit safer, and also you're more protected because of your platform and standing in wealth, and you want to basically throw me in the garbage and declare me off limits, like, be the gatekeeper that says, you can go up to this point where Tucker and Candace are, but you can't go to Nick Fuentes; he's way too hateful or radical or dangerous or whatever. He feels like they're very late to the game, that he was braver, that he paid a bigger price and then they came along at an easier time and decided that they were the outer limits of where you can go on these discussions about Israel and the like. I'm not saying that's what I think, I'm saying that's what he thinks. I identify with that view. 

I think he would be fine if they would get there and say Nick Fuentes is one of the first people doing this, let's welcome him on our show. But the fact that he's still excluded, to the fact that they called him gay, loser, basically, in his parents' basement, implied that he was working for the CIA or was an agent, probably of Qatar, to destroy the right. I think that's what made him start being resentful, and also, there is this class issue here, which is very real. It's not his fault; Tucker's mother left them when he was very young. Then his father married an heiress from the Swanson fortune. And although she wasn't his mother. It was his stepmother. Obviously, he was living with his father and his stepmother, and they had a very good relationship. She was very good to him. And he ended up having all these benefits from a very young age. First, great wealth and privilege, and then some amount of fame, and then more fame, and then more wealth. And that's more or less been his life. 

Candace, I'm not sure about where she came from, what her family situation was, but once she got very big, she became very wealthy, and then she went to work for The Daily Wire, had a very lucrative contract there, and now she's married to, I heard Nick saying he's British royalty. I don't know if he is, maybe he is. I don't know one way or the other, but I know he's extremely wealthy. And I think there's a class issue there, too, which is like, you two purport to be the kind of warriors for this group of which you're not a part, which has kind of disaffected working-class white people. And Nick's saying, “I actually came from there and now suddenly you two, from your great mountain of wealth and privilege and lifelong or at least in Candace's case, years long, financial power and privilege and status and wealth, whatever, are coming in and trying to talk about me like I'm some loser and yeah I'm a loser in the sense that lots of white people have become trampled on by the United States and that is supposed to be what right-wing populism cares about.” 

So, I thought it was very telling. I do think, if I’m totally honest, it's more personal than substantive. I think Nick feels a lot of resentment for how he's been treated. 

I think Candace and Tucker feel resentment that they put a lot on the line to go where they went and one of the people who has a big influential audience, especially among young conservatives, have kind of gone to war with them. So, I think there's a lot of personal animist and personal resentment driving this, but there's also something very substantive here as well, which is about how people who are a little bit further along on the extremist train sometimes get attacked by the people who are less so, where they want to draw a line and kind of cut off the plank and have you fall off, even though you are on the plank first. I think Nick feels like that's being done to him, and I also think that there is a real class conflict that is driving a lot of this which is very much a part of the conservative world. I mean, huge amounts of conservative influencers, conservative pundits, conservative operatives who claim that they're there to speak for the working-class, for disaffected white people in the United States, are hanging out with billionaires every day and being funded by billionaires and meeting with billionaires and getting invites to the White House and to every center of power. And a lot of compromises are required to do that. And Nick's not willing to make them, and a lot of them are, and that is a substantive issue as well. 

Tucker and Candace, I do think, and they don't get very many invites to those circles. Tucker more than Candace. Tucker because he's been around for so long. He's good friends with people in the Trump administration. He campaigned for Trump, Trump likes him, even though Trump repudiated him and insulted him because of his opposition to the war in Iran. But there are a lot of tension points inside the MAGA movement that are very real, even if some of them are personally driven. We're human beings, we all harbor jealousies and vindictive sentiments and resentments. It's a Herculean effort to try to exclude those as much as possible. We all have to try; some of us do better than others. But none of us is immune from that. So, I'm not suggesting that it's a huge character flaw. I'm just saying I do think that's part of it. But I also think, at least as big of a part, if not bigger, are some of these ideological and class issues who's sort of keeping one foot in decent society and who's willing to say fully what they think without it. And the last thing I'll say is, and this is sort of what I began by saying, which is you can like somebody or not, but it doesn't mean you should lie about their skills or their successes. 

Nick Fuentes, I had a big online following for a few years, but it was very much a kind of online following that was almost like a cult following. It was like a very idiosyncratic group of people. They called themselves the Gropers. They didn't have a lot of cachet or influence outside of their circles, in part because Nick Fuentes wasn't invited anywhere into those more mainstream circles, or even less mainstream far-right circles. He kind of built his entire world himself. 

There are tons of successful podcasters and influencers who really don't have an original thought. They know what they have to get up and say to validate their audience, to show their loyalty to a particular circle. They may even have some talent in terms of rhetoric and communication, some charisma, but they're not very critically minded. They don't do a lot of reading. I can't tell you how often I listen to some of the podcasters of the biggest audience, and you're just like: How are you so ignorant? How do you think about these things? Do you ever stop and breathe and reflect, or read anything? Like read anything substantive in or bound like a Wikipedia page? So, there's a lot of that. 

But go listen to Nick Fuentes, if you haven't. And if you have preconceptions about what he is, I'm not saying that he doesn't say things that are provocative and deliberately cross lines on purpose sometimes, when he doesn't need to, just to cross them. Though I do think it's often purposeful, it's not just about a teenage transgressive instinct. 

So, there are definitely things he said that are offensive. Genuinely so, and not offensive in that, oh my god, you've offended me. But things that I think he would even acknowledge, he often says he doesn't really mean it, he is prone to rhetorical excess, and it's part of the whole presence. But everything that he talks about, he is extremely knowledgeable about and well-versed in. 

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Next question is from @edonk77, who says this:

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All right, the quick Ted Kaczynski story just for anyone who doesn't know it: out of nowhere in the ‘90s, in the Clinton administration, bombs started being sent to mailboxes. They were pretty sophisticated bombs, and they injured and even killed people. It was taking place across the country, and the FBI, the Attorney General, who at the time was Janet Reno, had no idea who was doing it. 

The person who was doing it wrote a letter, believed by the New York Times and the Washington Post, saying, “I will stop if you publish my essay about my ideas and what's motivating me.” And obviously, the instinct of the government is to say, “We’re not going to give in to your terrorist tactics,” which in classic terrorism is kind of what it was: it was violence directed at civilians to induce political and social change.  But it got to the point where the Justice Department was so desperate, they didn't have a first clue about who was doing that. It was like really the perfect crime. They agreed.

So, the Washington Post, maybe the New York Times, too, published this essay by Ted Kaczynski. The reason the Justice Department was willing to do it, aside from the fact that they thought it would help identify who it was, was because they thought what he had written was kind of just such lunacy, madness, that nobody would really read it and even think it deserved attention. And also, they were obviously made it known that the person who wrote that was the person who was sending these violent acts, the terrorist bombs, killing civilians or injuring civilians. They just assumed the hatred for him would overwhelm any interest in what he had to say. 

On one of those bets, they actually turned out to be right, because publishing this essay caused, eventually, Ted Kaczynski's brother, to come forward and say, “I think this is my brother. His writing seems familiar. His ideas are familiar.” That's how they were able to eventually track Ted Kaczynski down. 

Ted Kaczynski was a prodigy, recognized by everybody, as being brilliant – graduated high school at the age of 15, went to Harvard, completed a degree in mathematics. He then went to a PhD program, I think at the University of Chicago, at a top school, and then ended up teaching at Berkeley. And he was on the path of being the youngest ever tenured professor. He was a genuinely brilliant person, not brilliant in the sense that David Frum or Ann Abelbaum gets called brilliant, but genuinely brilliant. 

But what they were very wrong about was the fact that nobody would have any interest in his essay, that nobody would connect to any of his ideas, and that the hatred for Ted Kaczynski, even if people were willing to be open-minded, would make people refuse to read a terrorist essay and take it seriously. At first, that was true, but over time, people started turning to it and saying, “You know what? This seems quite important. There are a lot of ideas here that are very, very relevant and seem prophetic and explain a lot of what previously had been inexplicable.” 

I can't do a good job paraphrasing or summarizing the essay. It's very complex. It's highly worth reading. You can find it free online. It ended up being published in a longer-form, book format. You can read the essay in its long form or the book. But the basic theme of it was that technology was destroying humanity and the ability for human beings to live happy and fulfilled lives. And he traced it back to the Industrial Revolution, but then, how technology has advanced more and more. Before the Industrial Revolution, people were living in small towns, in villages, in nature like they had always lived on farms, had churches, had communities. They were very closely connected to their neighbors, to their extended family and they were living as human beings had lived for thousands of years. We're political and social animals. We need a connection. Without connection, human beings are going to go crazy. 

Eventually, we got to the point Charles Dickens was talking about: the hideous realities of living in gigantic cities as factory workers, completely exploited, working extremely long days for little pay. It is breaking people physically, spiritually, psychologically and emotionally, and that is definitely one of the costs, as we've even gone further down this road. 

And I think it's what Ted Kaczynski predicted, which is that the more technologically we come, the less human, the less fulfilled our natural human needs are. What it means to be human will be consumed by technology and turned into even more exploited tools and objects that barely look at us as humans, arranging our lives so that everything that gives us pleasure and is necessary for happiness is taken away. 

And just quickly on this, there's a Netflix documentary, I've mentioned this before, called “Happiness,” which is a documentary designed to ask, what is human happiness? How do humans acquire happiness? What is necessary and what isn't? And what they found is that a lot of what data reflects is that in many societies where people are economically deprived and without a lot of technology, they're much happier than in much wealthier Western countries. 

This documentary makes a very good case using science, not just pop psychology, about why, oftentimes, technological expansion and wealth expansion undermine human happiness. Ted Kaczynski also warned that, as technology evolved further and further, our societies are less humane, less fulfilling and less connected. And clearly, all of that is true. That is exactly what has happened. I'm not saying we need to dismantle it, but he actually lived those words, he dropped out of the whole matrix basically, when he was, I think 24, left his job as a faculty member and just went into the woods, lived a self-sufficient life off the grid, read, wrote, and did not much else other than working on his writing and his development and thoughts. The more he did that, the more he became convinced that being in the middle of this matrix was uniquely devastating to the ability of humans to be free and happy. 

Of course, that started resonating in America and in Europe and throughout the Western world as people became less and less happy. All the things he was describing as to why, and the role technology plays in that, would obviously exacerbate all that. Remember, this was 1995. I mean, the internet was just starting, but it was nowhere near as dominant in our lives. 

Obviously, with the internet, we often talk to people on phones or on screens. We have our phones everywhere. So, a lot of the human connection and interactivity you once had just walking on the street is now taken away from you because everybody's staring at their phones. You go to restaurants, any restaurant anywhere in the Western world, and you have people who are related, people who are friends, who talk a little, and they both pull out their phones. And before you know it, they're both staring at their phones, and especially with COVID, which forcibly segregated everybody and kept everybody at home, where people even developed a greater dependence on the internet to do everything, including interacting with other humans, this isolation has become far worse and all of the predictable pathologies that come with it that he predicted are also worsening very rapidly, in a very dangerous way. 

I mean, to me, this is the West's greatest problem: spiritual decay that comes from lack of connection. Obviously, there are benefits to technology. We have cures to diseases that we would otherwise die from. The internet makes the world easier, gives you access to things, including reading and information that you otherwise, etc. etc. There are a lot of benefits. But for me, one of the things I think I've learned is that the only real law of the universe is balance, by which I mean for everything that you drive a benefit, there's an equal cost, at least, that offsets it and keeps it in balance. Whatever: fame, wealth, career, success, it all comes with a cost. I definitely think that's the case of technology, and Ted Kaczynski was one of the first people to lay out this case in the way he laid it out. So even though he was a terrorist, even though he killed people, a lot of people began to think, you know what? I think there's a lot of validity here. 

You might ask why he goes to the scene to kill people? He had an academic pedigree. He probably could have gotten this published. I don't really know. I haven't paid much attention lately to this whole episode, so I forgot what the rationale was for that. But in any event, maybe he was also a little imbalanced himself. That probably was true. But, sometimes, being mentally imbalanced or at least mentally alienated, in a way, is necessary to produce insights. Even going back to that last question we talked about, you remove yourself from a certain society or a sector of society, it gives you a much greater clarity of thought because you're no longer connected to it or in it, and you can see it much clearly. I'm sure that's what happens if you just remove yourself completely. 

One of the things the question asked about is left-wing politics. And the person who just asked this question, I'm on the political left, but a lot of his critiques of what left-wings politics is about and the flaws in it, I must admit have validity. And basically, what Ted Kaczynski's warning was, and this definitely proved prophetic, was that the idea would be to make this system of technology and the capitalism that emerged from it invulnerable, so nobody blamed it, nobody wants to undermine it, nobody wants to subvert it, no matter what it's doing to us we're all propagandized to revere it to believe it's all good to believe it's invulnerable, to believe that we benefit from it. And he said one of the ways that that's going to succeed is that people are going to be given kind of culture war fights or social justice causes, which are going to make them feel like they're doing something subversive or radical, when in reality nothing that they're doing is a threat remotely to any real power center.

 Compact Magazine, which is I think a really interesting magazine, it kind of explores the intersection between left and right populism had an article on June 16, 2023, which I really recommend. The headline of it was: “Ted Kaczynski Anti-Left Leftist.” 

Obviously, this vision he's presenting in some ways is left-wing. It's a denunciation of capitalism and its excesses, the Industrial Revolution, and technology, that has a left-wing ethos for sure, but he was also scornful of modern-day, leftist political expression. 

A week or two ago, Ryan Grim as on our show and we were talking about the kind of fraudulent branding of Bari Weiss and The Free Press. There was supposedly a heterodox and dissident when, in reality, it really grew from objecting to a lot of the excesses of the woke movement. And Ryan basically said, if you're talking about kids with blue hair or whatever color hair someone has, or if they're trans or not or whatever, you're not talking about anything that is about the real structure and dissemination of power. It's like catnip. They're happy to have you fight about racism, feminism, yeah, they love racism. They love feminism. Remember the CIA did that whole video, super woke video? They centered like a, what was she? She was, I think, a non-binary Latina who had neurodivergence. And she was just like, “I stand proud and tall and occupy space unapologetically” as a Latino non-binary immigrant, whatever. They're so happy to have that. “Hey, look at our Black generals. We're going to celebrate our Black military officials. We're the Pentagon. Hey, with the FBI, look at all our cool badass women agents or fighter pilots. Look, they're women now.” It's like, “Oh, wow, that's so awesome. We've done so much to change society.” It's that famous cartoon where a Muslim family in Yemen are looking up at the sky and kind of smiling and saying, “I hear the neck bomb is going to be sent, is going to be dropped by a woman pilot.” 

It's just like, here's Hillary Clinton. She's so radical and such a wild departure from everything before, because she's going to be the first female president when there's like nobody more representative of status quo politics than she. So, you vote for her. You feel like you're doing something really like a big blow against the power center and the patriarchy, because now there's a woman and you put her in office and she's going to be the best possible protector of status-quo prerogatives and power centers everywhere, because she presents this illusion that you've done something historic or subversive, when in reality you're just working as hard as you can to entrench the status quo that you think you're working against. 

Ted Kaczynski was incredibly prescient about that as well. There's a lot more to him than what I've gone over. There's a lot to the essay. I just can't do that justice in the time we have, even though I took another hour. 

I did want to give my thoughts on it, but I also highly encourage you to go find the essay, even just start with the essay and I think you'll be amazed if you just sit down and read it, forget about he's the Unabomber, all that. Just read it, and remember it was written in the early to mid-1990s, and so even if some of it seems more familiar now, at the time it was very prescient, but also the way he described it, the historical framework he employed to shed light on how it works, that it's not just some brand new thing, it's gone back, basically traced it back to the Industrial Revolution. There are not very many better ways to spend your time in terms of your brain and your critical thinking, then to go read that essay. 

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All right, here's a few questions on Gaza. 

First from @CatRika:

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@Lightwins2028:

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It actually is incredible that I come here and sit here every night and do this show more or less every night 500 times. I will accept that as well and agree that it is kind of incredible.

And then from @johnmccray:

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I will confess that what we've seen in Gaza over the last 20 months is not just some horrific tragedy or even war on the other side of the world; it is a genocide that involves some of the most twisted cruelty and sadism I have ever witnessed in my life –  obviously, I wasn't alive in World War II, which is why I say ‘in my lifetime.’ However, when you announce that you're blocking all food from entering an enclave that you fully surround and control – and yes, there's a small border with Egypt and Gaza, but the Israeli military is on the other side of that, controlling egress and ingress into it and out of it (besides, the Egyptian dictator is U.S. supported and always has been for decades because he's there to take marching orders from the U.S. regarding Israel).

When you take this concentrated open-air prison enclave, where people can't leave, can't come in, you ban the media from coming in, and you announce to the world you're putting a blockade on any food from entering it, and you knowingly starve them to death, you knowingly blockade food from entering on top of what they're already experiencing – endless bombing, people burning alive in their churches, in their tents, every hospital, every school, all of civilian life being destroyed… The doctors who are there don't have basic medicines. They don't have antibiotics, they don't have feeding formula for babies, they don't have painkillers or anesthesia for the children who come in with their limbs blown off – just the absolute, worst nightmares that human beings could possibly endure for a sustained period, and on top of that, you start starving them to death and then, instead of letting food distribution in from the actual organizations that are experienced in it and actually want to feed the people, you create some new entity that you control – American military contractors that are, for profit, doing the bidding of the IDF, purposely set up so that it barely gives out any food and then it's a death trap – so, you lure starving people in there and you murder them and massacre them regularly, daily… That is a new kind of evil. 

When you’re starving people to death and then saying, “Hey, here are some grains of flour, come here and get them,” and murdering them when they do, when you purposely set up the centers so they barely stay open for more than 15 minutes. People get noticed right before, and they have to trek miles, very dangerously, to get there. They're not allowed to stay there, waiting for the next time to open. They have to go back, and they're killed on the way there. So, they're faced with this Sophie's choice of either having to stay at home and watch their kids starve to death or knowing they risk their lives and their teenage son's lives to go there and try to get food, knowing that a lot of them are going to be murdered, that is a sick new kind of evil. 

And because of how ubiquitous cell phones are, we have to watch it, and we know it's been streamed live every day, throughout the world. We've all seen just the absolute most sickening, hideous human suffering imaginable, a level of sadism that's almost hard to fathom that people are capable of. And while some Israelis are protesting some more now about the end of this war, for the most part, the view of the Israelis has been, I don't care how many civilians we kill, I don't care how many babies are killed. The babies are terrorists. They'll grow up to be Hamas, so I don't care to kill them. 

These are evils that are difficult to endure, even if your work is journalism, even if you look at some of the most horrible things people are doing, you still have to report on them. Even for that, I mean, it's hard to fathom and express, and I know so many people, and I just thought about myself including in this, that you feel so impotent, so your rage is so purposeless, even though it's all-consuming, because the Trump administration doesn't care. It's filled with Israel fanatics, and it's going to support Israel until the very last Gazan is killed. Can you give them all the weapons, all the money, all the diplomatic cover? 

And then of course, the Israelis themselves are so deranged and fanatical that they don't care either. And short of having the world go in and militarily intervene against Israel or arming Hamas, which is not going to happen, there's not a lot you can do. There definitely has been serious measurable changes for the better in how Americans now look at Israel and look at the Israeli action in Gaza, how they look at American funding of Israel. That's not going away. That's a big, big problem for Israel. 

Once you open your eyes to that, you can't unsee it. And you have a lot of people, as we talked about in that first question, fueling it constantly. I hope I'm one of them. I certainly do what I can to do that. But that doesn't mean that any of that is going to stop this war. 

Even in Europe, and I really despise the Western European political elite and media class, they're utterly supportive of Israel. They are loyal to Israel, they arm Israel, fund them, not as much as the United States, but to a great degree. A lot of those historical reasons, guilt over World War II, which Israel expertly exploits – not that it's difficult to exploit the guilt and psychological fragility of Western Europeans, but they do a great job of it. 

So, you're starting to see things like Macron comes out and recognize a Palestinian state, not unimportant, but still a symbolic step. Keir Starmer, he's probably the most despicable politician from a character perspective, an utterly empty, vapid belief-free politician – he's despised in his own country, despised. – He didn't even go that far. He said, “We are going to recognize a Palestinian state unless Israel starts letting food in.” So, Palestinian statehood is not something they're entitled to. It's like a threat that you make to Israel that you're going to give them if the Israelis don't let food in. You see the Germans, who are always the worst for obvious psychological and historical reasons when it comes to standing up to Israel, sort of saying now, “We're going to cut off arms.” 

We'll see how long any of that lasts. The one group of people you do not want to put your faith and trust in to stand for a cause, to hold firm on beliefs, or convictions and values is Western European political elites. They're pathetic. Pathetic. Obviously, there are some exceptions, but as a class, they're nauseating and pathetic. 

I used to think the British elite class was the worst elite class on the planet. While I still think they are definitely in the running, I'm starting to actually think the Germans are more psychologically warped and sickening. I mean, the Germans were also fanatics about the war in Ukraine – fanatics. You put Germans in power, and they don't think about anything other than going to war with Russia. It's really a bizarre repetitive pattern. 

So, I don't want to pretend that there's some quick solution. I do give as much money as I can to them, you can find Palestinian aid and Gaza aid organizations. There's no shortage of verified GoFundMe accounts from people in Gaza telling their stories. And obviously you have to be a little careful not to give to fraudulent ones, but there are easy ways to verify those. Look for trustworthy people on Twitter who vouch for them, things like that. You can donate to that. Even like $50 at a time, whatever you're capable of, $10, $15. Everything is so high-priced in Gaza that sometimes even if they have food available, they can’t afford it. And I think it's also a good way of showing the people in Gaza that the world actually cares about their plight. 

Earlier today, I talked about how Marjorie Taylor Greene has become very outspoken about refusing to serve the agenda of AIPAC and that AIPAC is now on the march against her. They're going to do what they've done to all sorts of politicians which they are now doing to Thomas Massie as well: try to find some fraudulent, politician who lives in their district, who seems demographically appealing to that district, who has the same politics, except they're going to know that AIPAC paid for their political career, paid for the seat in Congress, and they're going to be supremely loyal. 

One of the worst examples – I mean, I can barely look at this person because of how pathetic and sad it is to watch him. They wanted to get Cori Bush out of Congress. If you're conservative and you dislike Cori Bush, AIPAC doesn't dislike her for any of the reasons that you dislike her. They only care about the fact that she's raised questions like, “Why are we sending so much money to Israel when my whole district is filled with people financially struggling, who don't have healthcare, don't have access to education, have no public safety?” Why are we giving all this money to Israel? Why is AIPAC forcing us to do that?” And they were so determined to take Cori Bush out because of her Israel questioning that they found some utterly craven Black politician, nice liberal, nice Democrat, of course. You have to get a liberal, you have to be a Democrat, and probably have to be a Black politician. His name is Wesley Bell, and they paid $15 million – 15,000 million –for one Democratic primary seat in Congress in St. Louis, to replace Cori Bush with somebody exactly like her, except that he's an AIPAC loyalist. And you can just see him on social media and in speeches, standing up for Israel. You know exactly why $15 million was his price tag, and he knows if he wants to keep that seat, he's going to need AIPAC doing the same. And they're going to try to do the same with Thomas Massie. They're going to try to do the same with Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

They're not always successful. They've tried it many times with Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, even, to a smaller extent, AOC. They made some inroads, but for the most part, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are too popular in their Democratic primaries and their Democratic constituencies for that to work. 

In 2022, Ilhan Omar almost lost the Democratic primary. I think she won by a few points. So, she's not invulnerable. They never quite spent the money on her that they spent on people like Cori Bush or Jamaal Bowman. But they have a long history of doing this. And they're clearly doing it to Thomas Massie. If you look at the three top billionaires donating to AIPAC to remove Thomas Massie, they're all Jewish billionaires who are extremely loyal to Israel. 

That's the whole point of this effort that Donald Trump supports. One thing you can do is just look at who AIPAC is trying to remove from Congress and just donate to whoever they want to take out of Congress as a way to thwart them because even if you're a conservative and you see them doing it to some left-wing member of Congress that you don't like, it's not like the person they're going to replace that person with is going to be any more appealing to you. There's no difference, except that that person is going to be bought and paid to be an AIPAC agent, who is going to be devoted to Israel and never question Israel. That's the only difference. 

AIPAC's not taking Cori Bush out of Congress or Jamaal Bowman because they're too left-wing. The only thing they care about is if the person is devoted to Israel. The same with Tom Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene. If they're going to take out members of Congress as punishment for not being loyal enough to Israel, donate to the people they're trying to remove on both sides. If you're on the left, you're not going to agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie, obviously. But the people who are going to come in their place are not going to agree with you politically anymore. The only difference will be that those people will be fanatical Israel supporters, like many in the Republican Party, instead of being among the few to question them. So, that is another way I think you could work. 

I know this is thankless work. There's no immediate gratification, but it does work. Public opinion changes. It really does. And especially with independent media with a free internet, with the deconcentrating of power over the discourse no longer in the hands of a few tiny number of gigantic media corporations controlled by people who are all the same basic political outlook, with the same interests, but now huge gigantic people with big audiences who influence a lot of people completely removed from those circles and that dogma. That is also a big reason for optimism. And if you see the polling change in a pretty substantial way as you do on the Israel question and the Gaza question, keep contributing to that. You don't have to have a gigantic platform. 

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Last question, this is from @coldhotdog:

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All right. The U.S. is sanctioning Brazil, Brazilian officials, and also imposing tariffs on them, not for the reason that Trump has been imposing tariffs on other countries, mainly because he thinks there's unfair trading practices causing a trade deficit. The opposite is true. The United States has a significant trade surplus with Brazil. There's not a trade deficit. So, the tariffs are more – and it was kind of explicit – used as punishment against Brazil for their violation of free speech, their violation to due process, their persecution of political opponents. And obviously, that is not the U.S.'s real goal. 

I wrote an article about this in Folha, where I do reporting, and I'm a columnist in Brazil. And it basically said, Okay, I hope no one takes seriously when the U.S. government says we're upset about the infringements on free speech or the erosions of democracy. It was like a month before Trump announced sanctions on Brazil and tariffs on Brazil, that he went to the Persian Gulf region and heaped praise on Mohammed bin Salman and the leaders of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, heralded them, hugged them, and not for the first time. While I think Brazil is very repressive and I think Moraes is an absolute tyrant, it's in a completely different universe than what happens in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. It's not even close. 

So, any country that's heaping praise on and embracing, hugging and propping up the governments of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Qatar, or the Egyptians, or the Jordanians, of the Bahrainis or whomever, the Philippines, Indonesia, obviously, is not a country that cares about repression inside other countries. Obviously.

The United States doesn't go around the world fighting wars or intervening in other countries because they care about repression. That's the pretext. They love dictators as long as dictators are pro-American. They only have a problem with dictatorial regimes if they defy America, like Cuba or Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, and then you hear “Oh my god, we're the United States, we go and fight for democracies. That is why we have to protect Ukraine.” Even though, arguably, Ukraine has become as repressive as Russia. So, whatever drives the United States, it's not a love for democracy, it is not a contempt for an erosion of liberty, it is not a defense of free speech, obviously, I hope there's no one in my audience who believes that. So, when Trump says, “Oh, we're punishing Brazil because it's become repressive, it’s attacked the free speech,” it's obviously not the reason. 

Then the question that our Locals member is raising, which is a good one.

I don't support the U.S. embargo of Cuba which is now 65 years old. The idea of that was that we're going to change the government of Cuba and free the Cuban people. Obviously, it has not done that. The only thing it's done is make life in Cuba utterly miserable for the population. Same with Venezuela. Same with the sanctions on Iran. So, I don't think that's the role of the United States to go try to change other governments, even if they're pretending, they're changing them out of concern about their oppression when obviously that's not the real reason. 

The reason is they want to replace it with a regime that's more compliant to the United States. And obviously I don't think Trump is intervening in Brazil with punishments and the like because he's concerned in the abstract about free speech. I mean, aside from all the dictatorial regimes we embrace, there's also the attacks on free speech in the United States, which we've gone over many times, including last night, that the Trump administration is spearheading, that the Biden administration before that spearheaded. 

So, the question then becomes, well, what is the real reason? And I want to say, while I view Alexandre de Moraes as a serious menace, as one of the most tyrannically minded people on the planet, even if he's not, say, as powerful or dictatorial as Mohammed bin Salman, just because Brazil is not that kind of society that permits that level of overt, absolute, autocratic tyranny, the way a lot of other countries do that we support prop up, I do think he's a genuine evil figure. Obviously, one of the reasons I talk about it is because I live here. My family is Brazilian. My kids are Brazilian. So, it's something I care about for that reason. And of course, I think the reason why Trump is doing it is because it's not actually a left-wing government in Brazil. Lula is the president. And he was a leftist in his earlier life. He was a labor leader, but he ran for president three times as a leftist, lost. And then finally, in 2002, he was sick of losing. And he wrote this famous letter called Letter to the Brazilian People, where he basically said, “I understand that if I want to be president, I have to moderate. I have to get along with financial centers. This is important for prosperity.” He basically promised not to be a fallaway left-wing dogma to be much more moderate. And then to prove it, he chose a billionaire banker as his vice president, to make clear to financial markets, banks, big corporations inside Brazil that he wasn't going to be a threat. 

They're not leftist at all. But I'm sure in Trump's mind, in the eyes of Marco Rubio, the people who are influencing Trump, he sees a little like basically a communist regime, like a left-wing regime, like from the Cold War, even though it's not remotely that. And I'm not suggesting they're conservative or right-wing. They're not. But they're not communists or even socialists. And part of what Trump's doing is he just looks at Lula and the Brazilian government as an enemy and is convinced, okay, they're our enemy. Let's punish them. If I had to find a justification – I'm not saying I support it, I'm not saying I justify it – but if I had to find a justification, I would say that the real only justification for any of this is the fact that Moraes and the Supreme Court have been now targeting not just America's social media companies. 

So, this is reaching into the United States threatening the free speech rights of American citizens or people legally residing in the United States, attacking and threatening and trying to bully American social media companies. And that is, I believe, an invasion of American sovereignty and an attack on the rights of American citizens. I do think the government, the U.S. government, is duty-bound to draw a very firm line and say, “No, you're not going to cross that line. And if you cross that, we're going to take action against you.” That's the only justification I can think of. 

So, I'm not defending the Magnitsky Act sanctions against Moraes, or even the punitive tariffs against Brazil. I've basically been arguing that if there's anyone who truly is tyrannical in his mindset, who's just absolutely, like, mentally unstable and just an authoritarian tyrant with no limits at all, who's been just vindictive and drunk on his power, it is Alexandre de Moraes. And I do think there's this one justification for the U.S. to cite, to justify taking retaliatory and retributive action against Brazil. 

Obviously, Trump likes Bolsonaro. He strongly identifies with any claims that a politician is being victimized by politicized lawfare because Trump believes as do I, that he himself was the victim of that and he sees when he looks at Bolsonaro a very similar thing happening to Bolsonaro, and I think he feels personally angry by that. So, I think there's some complex motives as well, but other than what I just articulated, I'm not defending the U.S.’s use of sanctions, the exploitation of the dollars in reserve currency to punish the economies of other countries because we don't like what they're doing internally. It's all obviously a fraud and a pretext to say, we're doing it because we care about free speech or due process or whatever. But I think there is a foundation to it, not a very strong one, but a foundation to it that I do think is legitimate. And you know what? I guess, just looking at it from a less principled perspective, I do think Alexandre de Moraes is a completely out-of-control monster. And everyone in Brazil is too scared to stand up to him or too supportive of the fact that he's imprisoning and exiling and silencing Bolsonaro supporters, that there is nobody in Brazil that's capable of stopping him or willing to do so. And the only thing that has really undermined and disrupted him is what Trump just did and now is threatening to do even more with even more invasive sanctions against his wife, against other officials in Brazil. And that is something they have to take very seriously and are taking very seriously. And it's the first time there's been real limits put on it. 

So, from a very kind of instrumentalized, results-based perspective, I confess that I'm happy about where that is leading, even if I do have genuine, really real concerns about the use of American arms and weaponry to do this.

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The Pro-Israel Meltdown Over Mahmoud Khalil's NYT Interview: When is Violence Inevitable?; Why is FIRE Suing Marco Rubio: With 1A Lawyer Conor Fitzpatrick
System Update #499

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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The case of Mahmoud Khalil made national headlines – even international headlines – because he was the very first student who was snatched either off the street or out of his apartment by ICE agents under the Trump administration's brand new policy of expelling Israel critics, who they deem supportive of Hamas, which is basically anyone who criticizes Israel whether they're PhD students on green cards or anything else. 

On June 20, a federal judge ordered Khalil, who is a green card holder, released from ICE detention facilities pending the deportation proceedings on the grounds that he had never been arrested, let alone convicted of anything, and presents no threat to anyone or to the public in general. That release has enabled Khalil to make rounds giving interviews to various outlets, and he gave one last week to the New York Times' columnist and podcast host, Ezra Klein. One excerpt of Khalil's interview went viral, largely due to Israel supporters, of course, who claimed he was apologizing for, if not actively supporting, Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel. We'll examine his comments to see if he did say that, but also to examine the important questions raised about who has the right to use violence and when, who is a terrorist or who is a freedom fighter, and whether anything Khalil said remotely poses a danger to the United States. 

Our guest was Conor Fitzpatrick, a lawyer from FIRE.org, the free speech group the ACLU once was: a group of lawyers and activists passionately devoted to defending free speech against any and all attacks on it, regardless of whether the censorship target is on the right, the left, or anything in between. FIRE announced this week that it was suing Marco Rubio and the U.S. State Department under the First Amendment, arguing that the government has the right to deport foreign nationals, but not to do so as punishment for their political expression. 

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Foto preta e branca de rosto de homem visto de pertoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

We have covered the case of Mahmoud Khalil many times on this show. He was the sort of test case, the canary in the coal mine, showing that the Trump administration intended not to deport all foreign students or most foreign students or just foreign students who expressed a political opinion and engaged in political activism. That's not the Trump Administration's policy at all. They don't even have a policy of deporting foreign students on U.S. soil for criticizing the United States. What they do have is a policy of deporting foreign students in the United States or at American universities who criticize Israel or protest against that foreign country. 

Mahmoud Khalil was detained in his apartment, where he lives with his American wife. She was eight months pregnant; their newborn infant was born. And she's an American citizen. His newborn infant is an American Citizen. And he's a green card on the path to American citizenship. 

Since then, there have been many other cases of students being snatched off the street by plainclothes ICE agents and unmarked cars, including a Tufts PhD student, Rumeysa Ozturk, who the Trump administration admits, did nothing other than co-author an op-ed in the Tuft's student newspaper, where she called on the administration, along with three other students who were co-authors, to implement the student Senate's decision that the administration should divest from Israel. That's all she did. Nothing against Jews, nothing in favor of Hamas, any of that. She just criticized Israel and urged divestment because the student senate had voted for it. It was essentially saying abide. She, too, was snatched off the street, put in ICE detention, and now has been released. And there have been many other cases since. 

In the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the federal court said you can continue the deportation proceeding, but there's no basis or justification for keeping him in a detention prison while all of this proceeds. If you win the deportation process, you can obviously deport him, but there's no reason why he should rot in jail rather than being at home with his wife and child while this process proceeds, because he's never done anything remotely to suggest that he's a threat to anybody. He was never arrested as part of the student protest or any other time in his life, never convicted of a crime, never the subject of a complaint with the police. 

And so, he's now out and he's giving interviews, as is his right. He's given several interviews. One of them was for The New York Times columnist and podcast host, Ezra Klein

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Should Obama Admin Officials Be Prosecuted for Russiagate Lies? Major Escalations in Trump/Brazil Conflict
System Update #498

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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The Russiagate fraud is receiving all sorts of new attention and scrutiny thanks to documents first declassified and then released by Trump's Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. As we reported at length last week, these documents were quite incriminating for various Obama officials, such as former CIA Director James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director Jim Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, as they reveal what was a deliberate attempt to weaponize intelligence findings for purely partisan and political ends in 2016, namely, to manipulate the American electorate into voting for their former Obama administration colleague Hillary Clinton as president, and more importantly, defeating Donald Trump, and then repeatedly lying about it to Congress and the American people. 

Yesterday, it was reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi is not only investigating, which is kind of meaningless, but what's not meaningless is that she's also apparently empaneling a grand jury to investigate whether there was prosecutable criminality at the highest levels of the Obama administration. We'll examine that obviously important question. 

Then, we’ll examine what's driving all his complex escalation of Trump’s decision for 50% tariffs on Brazilian products and what's at stake, and the potential consequences for all sides. 

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I believe it's been obvious, pretty much from the very beginning of the Russiagate hoax, the Russiagate fraud, which I'll remind you, again, was driven by the core conspiracy claim that the Trump campaign officials collaborated and colluded and conspired with the Kremlin to hack into the DNC email server as well as John Podesta's email and disseminate those emails to WikiLeaks and by the broader conspiracy theory that Trump was being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin with sexual material, compromising financial information, personal blackmail as well, and that therefore the Kremlin was basically, once Trump got elected running the country, was a completely unhinged and deranged conspiracy theory from the start for which there was no evidence. 

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