Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Week in Review: Kremlin Bombing “False Flag” Allegation, Fox/Tucker Fallout, & Dems Rig Election for Biden, w/ Michael Tracey
Video Transcript
May 12, 2023
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Good evening. It's May 5. 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 have a week-in-review show, one we regularly do on Friday night, where we examine several of the most important stories of the week to extract their overlooked significance. And we'll be joined by a frequent guest, the very and sometimes maddeningly independent journalist Michael Tracey, to help us do it. 

We'll begin with what was undoubtedly the most important event of the week, the explosion that took place over the Kremlin during the middle of the night, Moscow time, on Wednesday. Russian officials insist that the attack was an attempted assassination aimed at Russian President Vladimir Putin and that it was orchestrated by the United States and its proxy in Kyiv. The U.S., for its part, not only vehemently denies that accusation, but just as is true when the Russian German Nord Stream pipeline was blown up in March, has media outlets throughout the West strongly suggesting that – for some unknown reason – the culprit behind the attack on Russia was Russia. Apparently, according to our very responsible media, which combats disinformation, Russia first blew up its own critical natural gas infrastructure and now bombed itself. 

Then, despite early polling showing that almost 20% of Democratic voters prefer Robert Kennedy Jr. as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024, with another 8% supporting Marianne Williamson – in other words, almost one out of every three Democratic voters are making clear that they want to vote for a candidate other than Joe Biden – Democratic Party apparatchiks are emphasizing that there will be no debates, no fair process, basically no opportunity to have an election of any kind. Joe Biden is the nominee and that is the end of the story, whether Democrats like it or not. 

The Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, the leader of the country of which Julian Assange is and always has been a citizen, has expressed his most assertive frustration yet at the refusal of the Biden administration to cease its attempts to prosecute and extradite the groundbreaking journalist. “Enough is enough,” said the Prime Minister of Australia about the Biden persecution of the Australian citizen, Julian Assange. Will this matter? 

And finally, Fox News’s one-sided war on Tucker Carlson continues, as does the collapse of Fox News's primetime ratings. We'll examine whether this really spells the genuine demise of Fox's three-decade dominance of cable news primetime, or whether its loyal viewers will forgive the network for what it's doing to the most popular host in the history of cable news and return to the network. We’ll also look at what this reveals about ongoing ideological divisions within the Republican Party and the American right. 

As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form. The show post 12 hours after our live broadcast here on Rumble. You can follow us on all major podcasting platforms, including Spotify, Apple and others. Simply rate and review the show, which helps the visibility of the program.

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


 

As our government and media tell it, something very strange is happening in the war in Ukraine. For some very unclear reason, Russia continuously does the job of Ukraine and of the United States and NATO attacking itself, constantly destroying its most vital resources and bombing its most critical infrastructure. 

Back in March, as you likely remember, the pipeline that connects Russia to Germany – the most vital interest to the Russians, it is a permit for Russia to sell cheap natural gas to Western Europe through Germany – exploded and it was one of the most devastating environmental disasters in the history of humanity. For some reason, people who claim that climate catastrophes are the most existential threat we face cared very little about this episode or who did it. And almost immediately, Western officials dispatched Western media to announce that the most likely candidate for bombing the Russian pipeline was… the Kremlin. And for days, in fact, weeks, this claim that this was a false flag operation, that it was the Russians who actually blew up their own pipeline, persisted even as the United States had for months explicitly and openly threatened that it would do exactly that if the Russians invaded Ukraine. And even as the United States celebrated the explosion of the pipeline, Western media outlets, and American media outlets as well, continued to try and convince you that the Russians were the ones who did it. 

Now we're seeing exactly the same thing happen with this drone attack on the Kremlin. On Wednesday night, we showed you the video right on the day that it happened, where you could see the explosion right above the Kremlin. It's an obviously dangerous thing to detonate a bomb from a drone in the middle of Moscow where government buildings and government officials reside, including the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. That's exactly what happened. The Russians did what you would expect them to do – what I think all-natural, rational people would assume – which is accuse the country with whom they're at war, Ukraine, of having attacked the explicit direction of the paymasters of the war for Kyiv, which is the United States government. The U.S. government vehemently denied those allegations, and again, Western media outlets are insisting that the most likely suspect for having detonated a bomb in the skies above Moscow was Russia – not rogue elements, anti-Putin elements within Russia – but the Russian government itself attacked itself. 

Here are just a couple of examples here. First, from Fox News, we have it with Bill Hemmer, on May 4. Listen to what it is that they want you to believe. This is with General Jack Keane. 

 

(Video. Fox News. May 4, 2023)

 

Robert O'Brien: Well, it has the hallmarks of a Russian false flag operation. And keep in mind […] 

 

Let me just stop there for one second. That phrase triggers me. “Hallmarks of a Russian operation.” That was exactly the phrase that these same people, the people inside the U.S. intelligence community invoked when they tried, before the 2020 election, to convince you to ignore the revelations based on the Hunter Biden laptop because, according to the letter that 51 former intelligence officials signed – which we now know was initiated by former Obama CIA Director Mike Morrell – that had “the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.” They weren't even willing to say that it was Russian disinformation. They left it to the media to do that, and the media promptly did. But they used that exact phrase. It's a way of being able to assert things without having to present any evidence. It kind of looks like the kind of thing Russia would do. Russia often attacks itself. They constantly blow up their own infrastructure. This is a very Russian thing to do. This is how they try and phrase it. So, let's listen to this explanation. 

 

(Video. Fox News. May 4, 2023)

 

Robert O'Brien: Well, it has the hallmarks of a Russian false flag operation. And keep in mind, that's for a couple of reasons. One, the Russians just launched a massive drone attack on civilians in Ukraine, and they've been roundly criticized for it. 

 

So, another point worth noting here about this idea that these are the hallmarks of the Russian government is this attack was carried out by a drone, which is a hallmark, as I understand it, of another country, not Russia, trying to think of the country…. Oh, right. The United States – that during the Obama administration attacked eight different countries using drones, and since then, under the Trump administration, attacked several more and continues to attack at will using drones whenever it wants. I think, in fact, that if one sees a drone dropping a bomb in the middle of the night, in another country, one might say it is a hallmark of the behavior of a particular country. I would not, though, say that it's a hallmark of Russia, but instead, the country that uses drones to bomb other countries more than any other by far, which is the United States. 

 

(Video. Fox News. May 4, 2023)

 

Robert O'Brien: […] And I think this is maybe their way of trying to say, oh, no, the Ukrainians did this to us as well. Number two, it's inconsistent with the way Ukraine has fought the war so far. I mean, Ukraine could engage in guerilla activity in Moscow and other major Russian cities. It has not done so. It's had limited attacks on the Russian Federation, just limited to power stations on the border, which, again, they deny. So, this is inconsistent with how Ukraine has fought the war. And number three, if they're trying to make a splash and hit the Kremlin or assassinate Vladimir Putin, this – based on the photos that we're watching – it's a small drone with a small conventional charge and the Kremlin is a massive facility for those. You know, you've been there, Bill. It's a massive facility. Hitting it with a small drone with a limited conventional charge wasn't going to kill Vladimir Putin or do any real damage to the Kremlin. So, it's hard to believe that the Ukrainians would risk the backlash of that sort of attack. So, I would take this, as one time where I'll agree with Secretary Blinken, that you can take this with a grain of salt from the Russians. 

 

First of all, the suggestion that it's “somehow unusual” – there's an agreement between the Biden administration and these militaries from the Republican Party who often appear on Fox. It is a joke. They have complete agreement on most major foreign policy issues, including the war in Ukraine itself and the U.S. support for it. It's not oh, “this is the one time I'm going to go ahead and agree with Secretary Blinken.” But here they are in full agreement constantly on all these questions all the time. There is one hour on Fox where there was disagreement expressed at this war that was called The Tucker Carlson Show or Tucker Carlson Tonight, which no longer exists. There are still a couple of pockets here and there. A Jesse Morton show and Laura Ingraham Show. But by and large, Fox News during the day, the kind of people they put on are in full agreement with the Biden administration, just like the Republican Party establishment is in full agreement as well. But here they are just trying to look into the camera like it's the most normal thing in the world, like the most obvious explanation here, so obvious, is that Russia attacked itself. They're not saying that maybe we should investigate that possibility. Hold open. They're saying, obviously, that this is what it is. All signs point to Russia attacking itself. 

Here on CNN, the same thing is taking place with the former Obama CIA Director, Leon Panetta. It's not just the Republican and Democratic Party that come together and offer the same messaging we could show you 15, 20, 30 of these videos from Fox, MSNBC, CNN, from the news outlets in print in NPR, The Washington Post, The New York Times, all of which will just constantly bombard you with the same messaging over and over and over. They print whatever the U.S. security state feeds them. The language, when they tried to tell you that the Russians pulled up their own Pipeline back in March, was virtually identical and now, just with no evidence whatsoever, it just floods the airwaves and floods the pages of our mainstream media outlets with this notion that it was most likely the Russians who blew up this pipeline. 

I'm about to bring Michael Tracey on. Before we do, let me show you this video from Jake Tapper so you can hear what was said on CNN and how identical it was to what was said on Fox and almost every other network and former CIA. 

 

(Video. “The Lead”. CNN. May 4, 2023)

 

J. Tapper: Secretary Panetta, sources tell CNN that U.S. officials had no warning that an attack like this was coming and that the Ukrainians assure them privately they had nothing to do with it. What's your take? 

 

Secretary Panetta: I think this really does smell like a false flag operation on the part of the Russians. A diversion, if you will. And if somebody was really trying to make an effort at an assassination attempt, it was pretty far-fetched. I've been to the Kremlin. The Kremlin is a fortress, and Putin doesn't exactly take walks around the Kremlin. There's no Rose Garden at the Kremlin. So, this is clearly an allegation that is false. I don't think there's a lot of truth to it and, at most, it probably is one of these diversionary things that kind of marks the beginning of the spring offensives that we're going to see pretty soon. 



Do you see who is constantly on these networks telling you what to think about world events on the news? Former heads of the CIA, former generals, senior officials at the Pentagon. These are the people in the United States who have commandeered control of our major news outlets and who constantly are telling you what it is that you should think, how it is that you should understand world events, like the most natural thing in the world: “In order to understand what happened, let's bring on the former CIA director and he's going to tell you who really is behind this.” And with no evidence at all, they just use this phrase “false flag” that if you use in any other context to suggest that maybe the United States government is responsible for an attack, that they're blaming on others, you will be instantly relegated to the fringes of conspiracy, as a conspiracy theorist. You will have your career destroyed for even suggesting there may be such a thing as a false flag operation when carried out by the United States government. But look at how casually they assert that when it comes to Russia. 

I'm going to show you a couple of examples here before we bring on the increasingly agitated Michael Tracey, whom I see in my peripheral vision getting all irritated because he has so much more important things to say and he can't believe I'm talking so long while he has to wait here.

 For example, from Newsweek, in February 2023, they compiled an entire long list of all the times that our media accused Russia of “planning ‘false flag’ attacks on the eve of the Ukraine war anniversary.” 

From The New York Post, in November 2022, the headline “Russia planning false Flag Attacks on ally Belarus to drag it into war: Ukraine Intel.” So, Ukrainian Intelligence officials told The New York Post that Russia was going to attack Belarus, pretending Ukraine did it to drag them into the war and then it makes the media and they treat it as something serious. 

The Daily Beast in October 2022, “Russia’s ‘Dirty Bomb’ Warnings Slammed as ‘False Flag’.” An entire article says that Russia is preparing the world to attack itself with a radiological weapon that they will blame on Ukraine but, in reality, it will actually come from Russia. 

And then finally here, from the Associated Press, February 2022, “U.S. says new intel shows Russia plotting false flag attack.” 

So, it's just a constant barrage of allegations that Russia is preparing to attack itself, has attacked itself, destroying its own infrastructure but, of course, any kind of even implication or questioning or suggestion that the United States might do that will destroy your career and has destroyed many people's careers for having suggested that as well. 


 

 

All right. It's time to bring Michael Tracey on. I can see that he's not doing well over there, off-camera. 

 

G. Greenwald: Michael, thank you so much for joining us. It's always great to see you. 

 

Michael Tracey: Well, thank you so much, Glenn, for needling me while I was hamstrung from responding. That really helped me. 

 

G. Greenwald: That's the best part of having your own show. I mean, if I didn't do that, I'd be squandering the main value. So let me ask you. 

 

Michael Tracey: I'm envious of that. 

 

G. Greenwald: We just listened to CNN bring on senior national security officials who act like – it's just awesome – to raise it basically, like the most obvious explanation is Russia attacked itself just like they did with the pipeline. What do you make of this explosion that happened over the Kremlin on Wednesday night? 

 

Michael Tracey: Well, it wasn't even just the pipeline. I mean, there's been a litany of accusations thrust out into the information space, making this claim that Russia was imminently on the verge of carrying out some sort of “false flag” attack. Remember, there was an utter conviction on the part of people that Russia was shelling the nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia that its own forces were occupying. So, it was shelling a unit of its own military in order to, I don't know, kill them via radiation poisoning or something. And then, lo and behold, a couple of months later, the Times of London, for whatever reason – before that, I guess – they gave a fairly exhaustive firsthand account of how “No, there was no Russian kind of deception in that they decided to bomb themselves. It was a Ukraine offensive where there was a Ukraine combat mission to strike the nuclear plant.” But anyway, I had to respond to that or had to address Robert O'Brien. I hadn't heard that particular clip. Robert O'Brien, the former national security adviser to Donald Trump, is either lying or is so wildly misinformed that he should probably consider a career change, where he's not running around bandying about the title of former national security adviser. I should advise it like Tiddledy Winks or Hopscotch or something a little bit more within his wheelhouse because I just pulled up the New York Times from December of 2022, as I was listening to that, just to make sure I had this 100% right. Does Robert O'Brien not read The New York Times? You know, you kind of have to do it on occasion if you want to get some information that otherwise you may not be privy to, because they are the recipients of tons of these leaks and so forth. But this one wasn't even a leak. This was just The New York Times in a news article, which is – and this is rare for them – saying “Ukraine executed its most brazen attack into Russian territory in the nine-month war on Monday, targeting two military bases hundreds of miles inside the country with drones.” Robert O'Brien said, oh, yeah, they might do a few attacks here and there on the border, which, by the way, would also contravene the assurances that have been given by the Biden administration as to whether the U.S. was going to countenance attacks inside territorial Russia. But leaving that aside, it's just demonstrably false in the most straightforward possible ways that we have it on record and U.S. officials confirm this – that Ukraine has committed very long-range strikes in Russia. 

 

G. Greenwald: Not only that. Well, let me just interject there, just to give you a couple of other examples as well. Just a month ago, a leading pro-war nationalist journalist was killed, was murdered, when a bomb that was handed to him detonated in a cafe in St Petersburg, a completely civilian infrastructure, and blew up and killed him and injured 17 other people. The Ukrainians openly celebrated it. Several months earlier, there was a terrorist attack on a car carried out, with the target being a similar type of nationalist, pro-war, influential journalist inside Russia. His car was blown up. He was not in the car. His daughter was. The Ukrainians celebrated that as well. So, the idea that it's somehow out of character for the Ukrainians to try and carry out attacks on Russian soil as part of this war is, as you say, just an absolute brazen lie. And yet it was the linchpin of his argument on [CNN] about why we should believe that it's most likely Ukraine or the Russians who did this attack while Bill Hemmer sat there and just nodded mindlessly. 

 

Michael Tracey: And that attack on the daughter of Dugin, so Dugina was the daughter's name, 26 or 27, in her twenties, blown up, blown to bits in a car by a car-bomb assassination in the outskirts of Moscow. Initially, Ukraine government officials vociferously denied that they carried out that attack. One of them said that Ukraine is not a terrorist state, therefore, how could you possibly ever believe that we might have carried out this attack? A few weeks later, the New York Times receives a leak from anonymous sources, which you got to take with a grain of salt but this was an admission against interest, right? Because what the anonymous sources were desperately pleading with The New York Times to disseminate was effectively a warning that the United States had concluded or that the intelligence services had concluded that factions of the Ukraine state actually carried out that assassination car bombing, which its public representatives in Ukraine had denounced the idea that they could be accused of doing because it would mean that they were a terrorist state. And this goes on and on and on. Before the invasion was launched in February of last year, there was an amazing clip – I don't know if you remember this – Matt Leigh, the Associated Press journalist, was questioning, I think it was Ned Price. 

 

G. Greenwald: Ned Price. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. 

 

Michael Tracey: And Matt Leigh, I'm paraphrasing, said something like, “You know, you're making this extremely jarring allegation about Russia being on the verge of committing a false flag attack and you're not providing any evidence for it. So how are we as journalists supposed to process this information and report on it with any semblance of like epistemic scruples?” And Lee even characterized the claims at that point coming out of the Biden administration as verging on “Alex Jones territory” because it is true that by and large, before 2022, people who are serious journalists or pundits or think tankers or whatever wouldn't get caught dead uttering the phrase ‘false flag’ because it was […] 

 

G. Greenwald: It is a staple of Alex Jones’ program. I mean, it's also something that radicals on the left and the right who are very critical of U.S. foreign policy, frequently accuse the United States of doing in order to create a just cause for some sort of, you know, use of chemical weapons in Syria that might provoke the United States government or justify the United States government to bomb Assad even further, and then become their surfaced allegations that it's likely the United States that are behind it. And anyone who dares suggest that the United States government, the CIA, would ever do a false flag operation to advance its own interests is immediately and permanently discredited as a crazed conspiracy theorist, the mere utterance of that phrase, as you say, was the providence of Alex Jones, and people who were kind of extremists on the left and the right who get booted off every mainstream platform. And here these people are with the most, I mean, brazen and casual posture, asserting that this is so – even though Michael, we showed this last night, I don't know if you've seen this – the Ukrainians commissioned a stamp commemorating the attack with a Ukrainian soldier sticking his middle finger up at the Kremlin while it's on fire. You would think if the Ukrainians were really eager to avoid the perception that they were behind the attack on the Kremlin, they would not be issuing commemorative stamps celebrating this attack. But none of this gets included in the discourse. 

 

Michael Tracey: Here's what I think is the most critical point. That question that was posed by Matt Lee to Ned Price in February 2022, a few weeks before the invasion commenced – he was referring to claims that were then being pumped out into the media about some imminent Russian false flag. Those claims proved false. There was no Russian false flag, as was being alleged at the time by U.S. government officials and as was being then transmitted across the informational landscape, as though it were some sort of established fact or as though it had enough credibility to just be incredulously propagated. I'm not aware of a single instance in which U.S. government officials, think tankers, or people who feel like they have some sort of amateur intelligence and analysis expertise, that any single time that these allegations have been made since the beginning of last year, have they actually been borne out and has Russia committed the false flag attack that we're being told they are sure to be on the verge of coming out – just hasn't happened. For better or worse, probably worse if you're not fond of the war having started, but Putin didn't engineer some kind of phony pretext to launch the war. He laid out his rationale for why he felt the war was justified. And it wasn't as though some sort of, like staged atrocity needed to be, you know, confabulated or something. And this happens over and over and over. And one of the main sources of this constant peddling of false flag allegations is the Institute for the Study of War, which is the think tank in Washington, D.C., founded in 2007, specifically to furnish to the George W. Bush administration an intellectual underpinning for them carrying out the surge, meaning the escalation of the Iraq war in 2006-2007. 

 

G. Greenwald: [Let’s] explain that for a little bit. So, in 2006, there was a very growing sentiment against the war in Iraq because the promise was it would last weeks. That was Bill Kristol's promise. That was the promise of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and all those people at the time. And 2006 was, you know, three, three and a half full years of hardcore, heavy combat, and a serious insurgency that had trapped the United States inside Iraq, we were nowhere near close to achieving our goals. There were thousands of U.S. soldiers being killed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis being killed. And the Democrats successfully won the 2006 midterm election by promising to cut off funding for the Iraq war, which, of course, they promptly abandoned the minute that Nancy Pelosi ascended to the speakership. When the Democrats won that mid-term election. 

 

Michael Tracey: Glenn! Quickly parallel there to what the Republicans are doing under Kevin McCarthy. 

 

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. Kevin McCarthy, before the midterm, tried to send out signals to convince his base that he was going to impose some limits on Biden's funding of the war in Ukraine. And the minute the Republicans squeaked by and won that election and then Kevin McCarthy got enough votes just barely to become speaker, he basically turned around and said, “Of course, I didn't believe any of that. Of course, I've always been a hardcore supporter of the war in Ukraine, and I intend to fully fund Joe Biden's war and proxy war in Ukraine exactly the way Nancy Pelosi funded it in 2006.” Although Pelosi really was against the war – she voted against it from the start, arguing against it – but they wanted the war to continue because they wanted to be able to run against the war in 2008 because they knew it would help them win, which it did. That was a major reason why Obama was able to beat John McCain, which is almost more cynical and disgusting. But the argument that year before the Surge was the answer of the foreign policy establishment and the neoconservatives to say, “We know you hate this war, we know you're sick of it, we know you think that we can't win but we have this theory now, it's called The Surge, we're going to just send – I don't know how many it was – 70,000-80,000 more soldiers into Iraq. They're going to, you know, just kind of amplify the force to such an extent that we're going to destroy the insurgency and finally install the democratic regime in Iraq, that had long been promised, and the think tank that was created to create, as you say, the intellectual underpinning for that strategy. So, tell us about who this think tank is. They're still around and they're now fueling the war in Ukraine with the same kind of theoretical justification. So, tell us a little bit about that think tank and what they're doing. 

 

Michael Tracey: Right. And it's not that they're just still around, they're probably more prominent than ever. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, certainly. Yeah, 

 

Michael Tracey: Of course, David Petraeus was the general who was appointed by Bush to execute that so-called Surge in Iraq. And guess who sits on the board as we speak of the Institute for the Study of War? That's right! David Petraeus, along with Bill Kristol, along with Jack Keane, along with Joe Lieberman, I mean, some of the most […] 

 

G. Greenwald: Michael, just a word on David Petraeus as well. David Petraeus’s career ended because he took – I don't just mean classified documents, I don't mean top secret documents of the kind this Discord leaker leaked, like just ordinary top secret documents – I mean, like the genuinely most sensitive documents in the United States pantheon, top secret documents, and handed it to his mistress to allow her to write a hagiography of him and got caught doing it, got a slap on the wrist, didn't spend a single day in prison, and is now on all these boards and the faculty of Harvard making enormous sums of money. Even though the leaks and the breaches of classified information that he was responsible for were infinitely more serious than all of these people who go to prison for years at a time. You're provoking me with all this history. But I think it's important to remember this because is the case that, as you get older, you realize that what you think is common knowledge because you lived through it. Increasingly, every year that goes by, there are more and more people who don't know about it and didn't live through it. And therefore, it's really worth revisiting. But go ahead with this thing. 

 

Michael Tracey: Somebody who's like 24 years old today, who wouldn't have necessarily known that Petraeus had resigned from the CIA when he was director for these classified information breaches. If you're 23 today and you're 24 today, you would've been like, you know, 13 […]

 

G. Greenwald: Let alone all the stuff about the Iraq war, you know, which is now 20 years old.

 

Michael Tracey: Right. This is a slight tangent, but I'll make it brief. David Petraeus told me personally recently – and maybe I shouldn't divulge this, but I can't restrain myself because I was going to be saving it for something – that he is functioning as a conduit of the Biden administration, because he's a former official, to issue statements as a quasi-administration figure, because oftentimes those who are in government actively cannot be quite as fulsome in what they want to put out there in the public domain. And so, if you recall or if you don't recall this, you should go look it up, in October of last year, David Petraeus was on the ABC Sunday Show and made a shocking statement, which is that if, he warned, if Russia commits any kind of nuclear attack inside Ukraine, even if it doesn't intend, on any NATO member state, even if it's a small the smallest of tactical nuclear weapons, I'm saying that that wouldn't be a catastrophe, probably but this is what he was emphasizing. It doesn't matter the scale of the attack, what will happen straight away, according to Petraeus. And he was just saying this as fact, as though he was reciting a formal policy document. He was saying that the U.S. will launch a massive kinetic strike on the Russian naval fleet in the Black Sea, on all their force presences in Ukraine, and basically – eventually start World War III. That's what David Petraeus was saying had been relayed to Putin by U.S. government officials as to what the consequence would be in the event of some sort of incident in Ukraine. And so, David Petraeus, a decade before, got booted out of the CIA as a director because he was so careless with his possession of classified material, and yet, I'm pretty sure that whatever he was communicating in public probably had its genesis in some rather classified material. 

 

G. Greenwald: Right. Although probably dispatched to deliver this message. 

Now, this is what I need to know. I want to get to the think tank and just create the context for it, because that's where we were started and we kind of got off on multiple tangents. I would say the fall was 70% yours, 30% mine, maybe 80/20. But the think tank itself is so notable because like […] 

 

Michael Tracey: I’m going to poll your viewers and see if they agree with that. 

 

G. Greenwald: I got excited by the Surge and not by David Petraeus. I think one of the things that are so vital to realize is that all those people responsible for all of those horrific abuses and policy disasters that followed the 9/11 attack for years were the people who had abandoned themselves largely to the Republican Party. A lot of them were very cooperative with the Democrats. There were all kinds of Democrats, obviously, on board with the war in Iraq – Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, the most prominent Democrats, in fact, there were people who were supportive of all these classified programs that became so controversial, like Guantanamo and torture and NSA spying and the rest. But it was largely the Republican Party that was the primary vessel for carrying out these policies. They got completely discredited. The election of Obama was facilitated in large part based on a promise to uproot all of these promises of the War on Terror, none of which happened. But the people responsible, these neocons, these hard-core militaries did get sufficiently discredited to the point where they haven't won another election since. In 2016, Trump ran by running opposition to them, by condemning them, and that's what drove them back into the Democratic Party, which is where they now reside and where they continue, as you said, to exert more influence than ever. They just switched parties to the party that became more hospitable to them so that no matter who they vote for, they thought they were voting for Obama to get rid of these people. And yet, under Obama, the person who was running Ukraine was Victoria Nuland, who first worked for Hillary Clinton's State Department and then for John Kerry’s State Department, even though she was Cheney's senior adviser for the war in Iraq. So, what is the relationship of this think tank to the new Victoria Nuland and to the entire neocon world? 

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Looking forward to the transcript!

Here's a lovely, short video of a man playing music for animals, including horses, elephants, lemurs, and more. It turns out that even horses enjoy the Rolling Stones' song Wild Horses😁
https://substack.com/@sailingbeyondknowledge/note/c-108597224?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1ngpds

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Christopher Rufo: On Civil Liberties, the American Founding, Academic Freedom, and More
System Update #450

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

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

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Tonight: Regardless of what you think of him or really about any issue, there's no denying the profound influence that tonight's guest, Christopher Rufo, has had on conservative politics and state and federal policy more broadly, though he has often focused on educational debates and educational institutions – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, appointed him to a key position to transform that state's New School from an institution largely producing left-wing thought to one that is more aligned with conservative educational dogma and policy. He was also instrumental in publicizing the plagiarism of Harvard President Claudine Gay, which, along with issues regarding campus Israel protests and antisemitism, led to her firing after only six months in that position. He has become one of the most influential voices shaping the views of leading conservative politicians and media figures. 

Rufo appeared on our program once before: back in 2023, where we spent an hour exploring his core beliefs and goals, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not. The conversation was spirited but unfailingly civil, and I think, illuminating of some of the controversies surrounding his work. 

What promoted Rufo's appearance tonight were comments that I had made about him and other right-wing figures in an interview I gave about the Trump administration to Reason Magazine. Rufo saw those comments, noted them and objected to them on X. It led to a back and forth but it became rapidly apparent - at least to me - that social media was the absolute worst venue to try to sort through those issues we were discussing, some of which have a lot of complexity and nuance to them: things like the core values of the American Founding, the values and views that most influenced the founders and how all of those questions apply to our current political debates, especially over civil liberties and the freedom of academic institutions. 

So, I suggested that we remove the conversation to a platform more suitable for a constructive exchange and he quickly agreed to come on this program for us to do so. 

His official biography does not really capture Rufo's influence and accomplishments, but for those unfamiliar with it, he is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute. He is also a contributing editor of City Journal, where his writings explore a range of issues, including critical race theory, gender ideology, homelessness, addiction, crime, and the decline of American cities. He has been published in Fox and the New York Post and has been the subject of numerous corporate media profiles, the most recent of which is a lengthy interview he gave to the New York Times just last month. He's the author of the New York Times bestselling book, “America's Cultural Revolution,” and as a filmmaker, he has directed four documentaries for PBS, Netflix, and international television, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities. 

The issues we hope to discuss are, in my view, some of the most consequential for American politics and the West more broadly, and I'm very much looking forward to our exploration of our agreements and our disagreements on all of those questions. 


G. Greenwald: Chris, good evening, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on and agreeing to do this.

So, it's interesting, when I was thinking about how to do this, how to conduct our discussion, the issues that we discussed, even though it was just a few tweets, were so far reaching and kind of complex that I had so many things I wanted to talk to you about, so the hard part was figuring out what to kind of focus on. 

There was a series of tweets that you posted in response to that interview I had given in Reason, where I basically said, and it was part of a larger conversation, I was asked specifically about you, that I think you're very shrewd and influential and successful operative and journalist but, to me, it seems like you've gotten to the point where you care more about this kind of Machiavellian quest for power than you do about principles. 

And in response, you said this:

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NIH Ends Fauci's Brutal Dog Experiments; MTG and Massie Shut Down Law to Criminalize Israel Boycotts
System Update #449

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_4nXfOxGUsg7A_S3ddqbTf0xdGX7VXJr8EwP92b1AKf4pGAlS-rPMMzfUP43cO8VRoSDJmtnjafkjZkWLr6PIa5Uw8gm-Mk5Lf-NKu01__8JfL6RrzjdjMp0ZP7WIjgfVuB7hH0qMHePVkOb0VjUNIXME?key=b0Z6bGXfV7ehSQkOWJEvWQ

Former senior health official who lurked around Washington for 40 years, Anthony Fauci was, well before COVID, highly polarizing and, in many cases, widely disliked. When many of the truths of COVID and his behavior during that pandemic were revealed, he was jettisoned into an entirely new category of the hero/villain narrative that plagues so much of our politics. 

But one constant in his long career was that he was always a robust advocate for and a funder of – an ample funder of – some of the most grotesque, cruelest and pointless medical experimentations on animals in government labs paid for by the government, especially dogs. And when doing these experiments on dogs which have almost no medical value, they often chose on purpose for beagles as their breed of choice because as anyone who has spent any time with beagles will tell you, they have a particularly loving, docile and trustworthy instinct when they are with animals, which makes it very easy to deceive them. 

Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste, is our guest to talk about the major win animal advocacy groups led by the very bipartisan White Coat Lab group scored today. The National Institute of Health, now run by Jay Bhattacharya, under the direction of HHS Secretary RFK Jr., announced that they were eliminating the last government-funded lab experiments on beagles: that was the lab that conducted the so-called barbaric septic shock experiment, and I'll save you the description until later. 

Then, Reason's magazine Matthew Petti wrote an excellent article today, a really good piece of journalism that broke down and analyzed the statute in very clear detail and concluded that it "would arguably be the most draconian measure of this kind to date". He is our second guest tonight. 

Some laws are so extreme and shocking that you can't actually believe anyone in Congress actually proposed them, and for me, this is one. As is true for most of the pro-Israel measures in Washington, it had a long list of co-sponsors from both parties. 

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Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste Project, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that just got done heralding, explaining and it exposed and has held Dr. Fauci accountable for many things, including funding the Wuhan lab, as well as testing cruel, gratuitous, and pointless testing on dogs generally and beagles specifically. For more than two decades, Justin has led successful and award-winning grassroots and lobbying campaigns to end cruel taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs, cats, primates, and other animals. I've long been an admirer of that group and his work, and we're really delighted to have him join us tonight. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions: Iraq War Lies, Judge Rebukes Trump, Ilham Omar Curses Reporters & More
System Update #448

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

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

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As most of you know, Friday night is our Q&A show. We take questions submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community. This week, the questions cover a very wide range of issues including the bizarre story told by former Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont about how he was secretly accosted by shadowy members of the deep state while jogging in 2003, and they directed him to proof that the Bush administration was lying about the proposed war in Iraq. Leahy cast a meaningless vote against the war because of what he saw, but never let the public know about the proof he was shown. 

We also have questions about yesterday’s very significant ruling by another Trump-appointed federal judge who ruled against the Trump administration. This one concluded that the administration lacks the authority even to invoke the wartime Alien Enemies Act, which is what the administration has been using to justify removing people from the U.S. and sending them to an El Salvador prison without so much as a trial. 

Finally, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota uttered very naughty words to a journalist from the Daily Caller, who walked up to her on the street, began filming her, asking her adversarial questions – a perfectly legitimate journalistic activity. Upon seeing the video and Omar's reaction, many conservatives – including many who have spent a decade calling journalists The Enemy of the People and cheering right-wing politicians who have scored journalists often aggressively and with verbal abuse – have now decided that Omar had failed to show journalists the respect and deference that they deserve as journalists. 

We'll examine this and other questions as well, as much as we can, time permitting. 

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The first question comes from @thefarside:

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I totally agree with that point of view and I've seen this happen many times before when senators and Congress members access classified material and they're too scared to show it to the public, even though they could do so on the floor of the Senate or the House enjoying absolute complete immunity: they cannot be prosecuted, criminalized, or arrested for anything said on the floor of Congress. It's legislative immunity. They could just go and reveal it, but they almost never do. They leave it up to people like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, or other courageous whistleblowers to do it, even though they don't have immunity, while senators just conceal this information. 

So, here's what he wrote in his memoir, “The Road Taken” by Patrick Leahy. By the way, it's not a new memoir; it's from 2022, it was just a couple of years ago, but it just got resurfaced and started going viral on X. I think a lot of people didn't know about it. Who would sit down and read Patrick Leahy's book? I certainly didn't. 

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So, imagine you're just walking on the street with your wife. It's like an old couple walking in the street and out of nowhere, there are very fit joggers behind you. They are following you and they stop and say, “Hey, we hear you're bringing in briefings. How have those been going?” And you say, “Fine, but I can't talk about them.” They're like, “No, no worries. We don't want to talk about that. Just take a look at file 8. Have you seen that?”

He writes:

[…] It was obvious from the look on my face that I had not seen such a file. They suggested I should and that I might find it interesting. Quickly thereafter, I arranged to see File Eight, and it contradicted much of what I had heard from the Bush administration.

Days later, Marcelle and I were out walking again when the two joggers reappeared. After the opening greetings, they told me they understood I had seen File Eight and asked what did I think about it? It was the eeriest conversation I'd experienced in Washington. I felt like a senatorial version of Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat—only in broad daylight.

I went through the usual disclaimers that I could not talk about any file and if such a file was available and so on. They said of course they understood, but they wondered if I had also been shown File Twelve, using a code word. […]

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

 

They're like, “Hey, remember when we mentioned File Eight? We're glad you took a look at that. No, no, don't worry. We don't need to hear your opinion. We just want to know, you should look at file 12 too.” 

He says:

[…] Again, I think the look on my face gave them the answer. They apologized for interrupting our walk and jogged off.

The next day, I was back in the secure room in the Capitol to read File Twelve, and it again contradicted the statements that the administration, and especially Vice President Cheney, seemed to be relying on, and I told my staff and others that for a number of reasons I absolutely intended to vote against the war in Iraq.

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

According to Patrick Leahy, he had been directed by mysterious deep state operatives, obviously, to classified files that had not been shown by the people briefing Congress on the Iraq War, both of which, he says, proved that the government was lying to the American people. 

You would think, I would think, that somebody in that position would be like, “Hey, I need to alert the American people to the fact that there are documents inside the government's file that prove that what Dick Cheney and George Bush were saying about the war in Iraq are lies.” 

Again, he had legal immunity; he could have read the whole file on the Senate floor and nothing would have happened. Even if he didn't have immunity, I would think you would be duty-bound when the government is selling a war to the population, a very serious invasion on the other side of the world, not a few bombs being dropped, and you have proof that what the government is saying is lying, but that's not what Patrick Leahy did and he admitted that in his book, not even realizing there's anything wrong with it. 

There's a woman on X who I find to be genuinely one of the smartest and most interesting X accounts to follow. Her X name is @villagecrazylady, but her name is Mel. She is very upfront. She does a podcast, a self-identified MAGA woman from the South. Yet, she believes the MAGA principle, she is vehemently opposed to all kinds of intervention, she's opposed to funding the war in Ukraine, funding Israel's war in Gaza, going to war with Iran, bombing Yemen, all the things that we were promised that Trump would do in foreign policy, she actually believes in it and insists on it and complains when it doesn't happen as it should. And she's just very smart. She's just always plugged into what I think are the right things, thinking about things that are really interesting, and I actually learned a lot from following her. I'm going to have her on the show soon. She was the one who alerted me to this. I think she was probably the one who alerted a lot of people to this, she said: 

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 I think what's really notable, too, is imagine that you're those two guys who obviously are risking their career, probably risking their liberty to try to make sure that Patrick Leahy sees, not just circumstantial evidence, but proof that the Bush-Cheney administration is lying about the key arguments they're trying to sell to the public to justify the invasion of Iraq. They put themselves on the line, they put themselves at risk because they apparently thought it was important for the truth to be known and they get Leahy to go read both of those files, and he just does nothing, nothing, to tell the public. He's just like, “Yeah, I'm going to vote no.” He didn't even tell his fellow senators. He didn't say a word. 

How pathetic is that? How cowardly is that? You run for the Senate, you're a career politician, you're old, you're in your 23rd term or whatever. Who cares? But don't you have any sense of duty at all? 

I don't want to be naive. I get that these are scummy politicians, very conniving. The more they stay around Washington, probably the fewer principles they believe they can operate on, the more kind of just pragmatic and cunning or whatever they become. But you're talking here about the most serious war that the United States has fought since it left Vietnam and you have the evidence in your hands that the government is lying yet again, like they did with the Vietnam War and the Gulf of Tonkin, and you just sit and say nothing? 

But there's a counterexample. When Daniel Ellsberg discovered the Pentagon Papers in the late 1960s, a multi-volume, tens of thousands of pages compiled by the Pentagon, the Pentagon Papers concluded and members of the highest levels of the government also knew under Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon that there was no way the U.S. could win the war in Vietnam; at most, they could fight to a standstill. Yet they were constantly telling the public that was growing tired of this war, like, “Hey, we're losing all our young men who are being drafted, we're killing huge numbers of people, we're spending tons of money, there's social unrest. What is going on?” So, the Pentagon would say, “Oh, don't worry. We're close to winning. We're like six months away from winning. We're making immense progress.” In the Pentagon Papers, though, they were saying the exact opposite. They knew they could not win, so it's the same thing. 

Daniel Ellsberg had proof in his hands that the American government was lying to the people about the Vietnam War. Ellsberg had a very high position in the government. He had a PhD in nuclear policy from Harvard, zand he worked at the highest levels of the Rand Corporation, had some of the most sensitive documents inside the government and he did what Patrick Leahy wouldn't do.

He wasn't a senator; he didn't have any sort of parliamentary immunity, but he tried to get members of Congress to read it on the floor, as he couldn't, he went to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and they published parts of it. But then finally, he found Senator Mike Gravel, a Republican from Alaska, who was like, “No, you know what? I have parliamentary immunity, and this is what it's for. The public has a right to know that the American government is lying.” 

By the way, Daniel Ellsberg was charged with espionage, they tried to imprison him for life and the only reason his case was dismissed was because the Nixon administration was discovered to have burglarized the office of his psychoanalyst to try to find dirt on the private life of Daniel Ellsberg and the judge, because of that misconduct, dismissed the case, but had the judge not done so, Daniel Ellsberg probably would have been in prison for the rest of his life. He just died about 18 months ago at the age of 94. 

I had the honor of working with him when we created the Freedom of the Press Foundation together, he was unbelievably smart. One of the smartest people I've ever met. And even at like ‘91 or ‘92, he would attend these board meetings we had at the Freedom the Press foundation and just present the most complex arguments possible. 

So, he got Senator Gravel to read it from the floor of the Senate, and this is what that kind of bravery looks like. 

Video. Sen. Mike Gravel, US Senate Chamber. June 21, 1971.

So, that was the prelude to him then reading the Pentagon Papers into the record. You can be uncomfortable with, or even mock if you want, the very emotional display of Senator Gravel there. He was crying in the middle of that statement. But I would suggest that that is a far more admirable, noble and understandable reaction than what Senator Leahy did. 

I mean, every day, if you're a senator in the late 1960s, early 1970s, you're getting intelligence briefings about how unbelievably horrific the Vietnam War is: 58,000 Americans killed, two million Vietnamese, at least, killed. I mean, just the use of biological agents like Agent Orange, it was a brutal, savage, barbaric war, and the people who were in there, in the middle of the jungles and rivers of Vietnam, had no idea why they were fighting, why they were being killed on the other side of the world. 

So, if you're aware of information that the public can perhaps use to understand they're being lied to and hopefully stop the war, I think it's absolutely commendable to think about what's happening to human beings. I mean, that's a humanistic response. 

He didn't just cry about it, he actually tried to do something about it. Even though they have parliamentary immunity, reading top-secret Pentagon documents about a war in the middle of Washington, D.C., you would never know for certain that that's going to be honored. 

Here in Brazil, there's just a very similar parliamentary immunity privilege that people in Congress and the Senate enjoy. A couple of months ago, a member of Congress went to the microphone to speak at the tribunal where he heavily criticized the authoritarian chief judge of the Supreme Court, even though he's not technically the chief judge; he acts that way, Alexandre de Moraes. And then, shortly after, Alexandre de Moraes ordered the police to investigate him and to try to convict him for having spoken there. And their argument was, “Yeah, they have parliamentary immunity, but it's not absolute.” 

There's another case that I'm very familiar with, that I've had personal dealings with, that to this day sickens me and I just want to tell you about. 

For about two or three years before the Snowden reporting started, before Edward Snowden risked his liberty to come forward and show his fellow citizens the truth about how the government was spying on them with no limits and no warrants, and risking his life in prison to do it, two different senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, went around hinting that, “Oh, the NSA is doing some really bad stuff that if the American public knew about it, would be enraged by,” but they never said what it was. They could have done what Senator Gravel did and gone to the fore, but no, they just kept hinting. They would write emails, be in interviews, they would go write up ads saying, “Oh, if you only knew how they were interpreting the Patriot Act and what they were allowing the NSA to do, you would be enraged.” But they didn't have the courage to say it. 

And it was only once Snowden came forward and we started publishing reporting about what the NSA was doing based on his courageous act, did they start coming forward and say things. The headline of The Washington Post, July 28, 2013, is: “With NSA revelations, Sen. Ron Wyden’s vague privacy warnings finally become clear”. 

I mean, you know what? I reported on this topic for three years. It was a very important part of my career. I still pay very close attention to this violence debate but I could barely get through that. It was so ambiguous, so bereft of anything substantive that you could really understand what the government was doing, because he, too, was just a coward and then the minute we came out with that report, he's like, “I tried everything.” Yeah, everything except disclosing what you could have disclosed to let the American people know way before Edward Snowden came forward, so that he didn't have to spend his life in prison or Russia. 

People in the government, in the intelligence community, were trying to alert the public through Leahy that this proof existed, but he was too much of a coward to do anything about it. And so were Senators Wyden and Udall, whereas Senator Gravel wasn't. 

I just want to say the final thing: when Edward Snowden did their job for them and he comes forward, he doesn't dump it all on the internet, he is as careful as he can be, he gives it to journalists with very conservative instructions about only to use this very carefully, don't put anybody in danger, only use it to reveal to the public what they should know. And then he, of course, gets immediately indicted on multiple felony charges, including the Espionage Act, which would send him to prison for the rest of his life. 

They would ask Senator Wyden and Senator Udall, “Well, he revealed what you said should have been revealed. What do you think of him? Are you defending him? Do you think the prosecution would be dropped?” And they'd be like, “I'm not really going to talk about Snowden. I mean, he disclosed classified information. You can't have that.” – basically calling him a criminal for doing what he did only because they were too afraid to. 

These people are propellant. They'll let wars happen rather than step forward and confront any sort of risk or warrantless unconstitutional eavesdropping, as the courts ruled on American citizens with no warrants. And that's the kind of people that, unfortunately, with some exceptions, but very few, get to Washington and sit in both houses of Congress. 

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All right, here's the next question, from @Andante423: 

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It's a great question. Thank you. 

Just to give you the context, because it's so important, all of you, of course, remember when Trump just picked up, ICE picked up, 238 Venezuelans, and then, just in the middle of the night, shipped them out of the United States on a plane to an El Salvador prison. They filmed these people having been dehumanized, being humiliated, having their heads shaved, kneeling on the floor and it's almost certainly the case that at least some of them weren’t guilty of being gang members, but they're in this prison that's designed to be permanent. It runs on slave labor; it's one of the most abusive ones. 

But when this got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme court said by a 9-0 ruling – so that includes Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, Justice Kavanaugh, all the conservatives’ favorite judges – “Even if you want to use the Alien Enemies Act, you still have to give these people a due process. You have to give them a hearing, advance notice of their intent to be removed and then their opportunity to go into court and present evidence that they’re not a gang member.” 

So, they already said you have to give them a court hearing; in this court hearing, the judges should decide two things. Number one: Does Trump have the right to invoke the Alien Enemies Act? It's supposed to be a wartime statute. It's only for wartime. The only three times it was invoked previously were the War of 1812, World War I and World War II. 

Just to give you a feel for how extremist this power is, that's what FDR used to order all Japanese Americans interned in concentration camps because they were suspected of being loyal to Japan, which is generally considered one of the most shameful acts of the 20th century – but at least there was a real war going on. 

When the lawyers for the Venezuelan detainees sued in federal court to argue that this law was invalidly invoked and they weren't gang members, they got the best judge they could have gotten. They got a judge appointed by Donald Trump in his first term. So, he's a Trump-appointed judge and you can imagine how conservative judges Trump appoints from Texas are. 

Yet that's the judge who yesterday said that there's no legal foundation for adopting and invoking the Alien Enemies Act because we're not actually in war. 

The Trump administration had to concoct a theory and their argument was we're basically at war with these international drug gangs that are invading our country. They're like an invading army. 

Here's the ruling from this Trump-appointed judge issued yesterday. 

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There you see the caption. It is J.A.V., which is one of the Venezuelan detainees that they want to deport, versus Donald Trump. It's quite long, but it's not actually a long opinion. You can read it. The link is here.

It explains why, based on the statute, the president cannot invoke this law, because it's only for wartime and we're not at wartime. It's as simple as that. 

I've seen a lot of conservatives questioning why the courts get to decide this. In part, it's because that's been how the Supreme Court and the judicial power have been interpreted for more than 200 years, going back to Marbury v. Madison, and if you think about it, it has to be this way. 

The purpose of the Constitution is to limit the powers of the federal government, to limit the powers of the president and Congress. The government can't do this, it can't do that, it cannot do the other thing. So, if the president ignores the constitution, let's say Joe Biden orders that all Trump supporters be rounded up and imprisoned with no trial, obviously a violation of the constitution, if you can't go to the courts and seek relief and ask the courts to declare that unconstitutional, who does that then? Where do you go? Where do you get relief? The president just starts ordering his political enemies imprisoned with no trial, no due process. Of course, it's the courts who have to say this is unconstitutional, therefore, it can't be done. 

That's how our system works. And it's all balanced. It's not like the courts are the supreme branches that sometimes people try and claim. It's the president who appoints the judges who are on the courts. The Senate has to confirm them. If they start abusing their power, they can be impeached. And federal court judges have been impeached before, not often, but they can, and they have been. 

On top of that, the courts really have no way to execute their decisions. They don't have an army, they don't have guns, they don't have any way to force a president. The president or Congress respects the credibility of the courts, and that's why court decisions are abided by. But if you're going to have a constitution and a set of laws, you need to have somebody who interprets what those are and who decrees what they are. You can't ask the president to rule in his own case, like, “Hey, Mr. President, are you violating the law? Are you violating the Constitution?” 

Obviously, tons of conservatives, many times, under Clinton, under Obama, under Biden, ran into court and asked federal court judges to put a stop to what those administrations were doing. 

It is true that there are a lot more of those rulings coming under Trump. You could make the argument that it’s because he has so many new policies that have tested and pushed the limits of the law. But that's how our system works. It works that way under every president. I do think picking people up in our country and sending them for life in prison in a country they have nothing to do with and have never been to, from where they'll never get out, is an extremist power and we definitely need judicial review. 

As the Court said, the president, despite not being able to use the Alien Enemies Act, has all the legal authority in the world to deport people who are illegally in the country. There is another set of laws, the Immigration and Nationality Act and others. That's how President Obama deported millions of people. He didn't use the Alien Enemies Act; he used the set of laws that are normally used for that. That's what the court is saying: it doesn't mean you can't deport people in the country illegally, it's your obligation, your right and your duty to do that, you just can't use this wartime power to do so because we're not at war, as the statute describes it. 

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All right, this one is from @MarcJohnson125, who says: 

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All right, so just to set the stage for this, so you can see what happened, for those of you who haven't, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was walking on the street toward the Capitol, and it's very common for journalists to work there. That's one of the places you can ask members of Congress questions, even if they don't invite you into their office or agree to an interview. It's very often done. So, the reporter's not doing anything wrong here at all, I don’t think, but this is how Congresswoman Omar reacted: 

Video. Ilhan Omar, The Daily Caller. May 1, 2025.

Okay, it was a little bit of a snarky question. That's okay. Reporters can be snarky. They don't have to be super deferential, super respectful. He didn't assault her; he didn't do anything. But in return, yeah, she used a naughty word. It's a word you tell your nine-year-old kid not to use, but adults use that word. She wasn't aggressive about it. She wasn't violent, she didn't attack him, she didn't threaten him. He asked this question, she was bothered by it and she says, “I think you should fuck off.” And then he said, “Excuse me, what?” She didn't backtrack at all. 

And that was it, maybe not the best way to handle a journalist, I'll certainly accept that. Maybe a member of Congress should conduct themselves with more, whatever, decorum, if you want to say that. I mean, Trump campaigned throughout 2024 using every curse word he could think of in his rallies. So let's not invoke decorum unless the politicians you most admire are actually adhering to it as well. 

Here was Nancy Mace, who was questioned by a constituent, not a journalist even, but a constituent in her home district when she was at some sort of drugstore and here's what happened. 

Video. Nancy Mace, X. April 19, 2025.

All right, that seems unhinged to me, to be honest. He was very polite. He kept his distance. He wasn't the slightest bit aggressive. It's part of the duty of members of Congress and she's like very aggressive, right from the beginning, very hostile and out of nowhere, by the way, “I voted for gay marriage twice.” Why would you say that? I mean, yeah, he is pretty clearly gay but why would you bring that up? Why does that even enter your brain? And then by the end of it, she used the F-word for, I don't know, 10 times maybe, probably, and said other things as well. 

So, if you're going to be very upset by Ilhan Omar using an f-word with a journalist – we all know journalists deserve the greatest deference, the highest amount of respect – if that's the sort of thing that you really want to hold politicians to, like no naughty words, then you ought to be complaining about Trump, who curses more than any politician I've ever seen. And it doesn't bother me, by the way. Or what Nancy Mace did, which is, of all those things, like the most unhinged. 

Here's Charlie Kirk, yesterday, after he saw the video:

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Piers Morgan, the British subject who loves to spend his time commenting on American politics:

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Here's Libs of TikTok, always the beacon of perfect politeness and civility and respect for others. She says:

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That wasn't the question: whether they're going to. He said, “Should they?” Do you think that more should go? As I said, it was a snippy question, but who cares? 

These are the people – the Trump movement, the American right, Trump himself – who spent 10 years calling journalists the “enemy of the people,” which I don't disagree with and never bothered me. In fact, I can make an argument about why that's legitimate. But still, that's some very aggressive, hostile rhetoric to use about journalists. Republican politicians over the last 10 years have frequently scorned and insulted journalists. Trump insults every journalist who asks him a question. Everyone. And now they’re going to turn around and be like “A politician should not speak to a journalist in this manner. Journalists deserve the highest respect. She has no class.” 

How about Nancy Mace? Does she have class? Does Donald Trump have class? This is the kind of thing I really can't stand. I really can’t stand it. I just have some consistent standards, especially on these kinds of trivial issues, and to act like Ilhan Omar is some kind of heathen, some kind of threat to society! “She doesn't have gratitude toward America.” She's an American citizen. Yeah, she was born in another country and became an American citizen and the same is true of Elon Musk and Melania Trump and a lot of other people. She's still a full citizen like anybody else is.

To be honest, I thought what Ilhan Omar did was funny. I mean, I kind of thought that the whole thing with Nancy Mace was sort of funny. I think Trump is funny; like, loosen up. The rectum doesn't always have to be, like, so tightly closed when you're pretending to be offended by things. I think we want our politicians to be more human. This is how people speak. 

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All right, one last question. It’s from @Sambista. 

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So yeah, they're all doing great actually. All the ones you named and all the other dogs that you've gotten to know they're doing very well. I appreciate your asking. And yeah, I actually wish I could find a way to integrate the dogs into the show more, or something like wander around. Maybe Friday night is a good night to do it. We'll think about it. But yeah, appreciate your asking. 

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