Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
RFK Jr. and Vaccines: What Counts as a Disqualifying "Red Line”? Plus: Montana Becomes First State to Ban TikTok
Video Transcript
May 22, 2023
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Good evening. It's Thursday, May 18. 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: Robert F. Kennedy Jr is – along with Marianne Williamson –  mounting a primary challenge to the Democratic incumbent, President Joe Biden. Despite polls showing that without even launching a campaign, he already has close to 20% of Democratic voters supporting him, while Williamson has another 7% supporting her, Democratic officials and their media allies are attempting to wish this all way, just pretend that Biden has no primary challengers because the ones who are running against him are – for reasons nobody ever bothers to explain – too unserious and lacking in credibility for the Democratic Party to even deem them worthy of attention much less debate. 

An interview conducted yesterday with RFK Jr on the online show “Breaking Point”, hosted by two excellent journalists, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti attracted significant attention because of the exchange between Ball and RFK JR on the wall on his long-time well-studied skepticism about vaccines. Ball told RFK Jr that she not only disagreed with his views on vaccines – and pointed out correctly that a large number of Democratic voters share her opposition – but that she considered his vaccine skepticism to being a “red line”, meaning not just a source of disagreement for her, but something that she and many other Democratic voters would consider disqualifying in of itself without regard to any other views he might hold that she likes and agrees with and considers extremely important. 

I've long been interested in, and I've often written about, the idea that once a politician adopts a view that is so disagreeable that it renders them completely off limits from consideration for support they almost get put into this camp of being crazy or a conspiracy theorist or people just too unhinged to even consider supporting, no matter how much agreement one might have with them. I first observed this dynamic in the 2012 election, when Barack Obama was running for reelection, on numerous policies the progressive wing of his party claimed to find morally abhorrent while the Republican primary field included longtime Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the only major presidential candidate in history to advocate views on crucial issues, which progressives claimed to find of the utmost importance, such as Ron Paul's steadfast opposition to the drug war and policies of mass incarceration that accompanies it, as well as his career-long opposition to the abuses of the U.S. security state, all of which President Obama supported and even strengthened. And yet, when I repeatedly pointed this out, I was told by liberals and other Democrats that Ron Paul's opposition to abortion was a “red line” that rendered him completely off limits, no matter what other positions he held, no matter how noble his other views might be. But that never made sense to me and still does not. Why was Ron Paul's pro-life position a “red line” but Obama's support for the drug war or say his view that he had the right to assassinate American citizens using drones – all with no due process and extraordinary power, the embodiment of extremism and radicalism – why was that not a “red line”? How was that determined? It seems it is so often used as a pretext for justifying support for party leadership and especially the ideology of the establishment, often unwittingly. Given that the same argument has arisen in the context of RFK Jr's challenge to Biden to argue that RFK is off limits but Joe Biden, chief advocate of the war in Iraq, chief architect of the U.S. prison state, an ardent supporter of the drug war, that he, Joe Biden, is somehow not off limits, has not crossed any red lines. I think it's really worth exploring how certain politicians are declared disqualified and whose interests are served by this framework and specifically who gets called crazy in our political discourse and why. 

Then: Montana's Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, today signed a bill effectively barring Montana citizens from using the social media app TikTok, owned by a Chinese company. Even if those citizens in his state have voluntarily chosen that platform as their preferred means for expressing their political views and seeking cultural and social communities. 

I realize that there's so much anti-China sentiment in the U.S. right now, not only in parts of the American right but also the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, that virtually any measure, any new government power invoked or justified in the name of weakening or stopping China will be automatically supported from the start. But to me, the overarching lesson of the U.S. government's response to 9/11 in the form of the so-called War on Terror is that it is precisely in such moments when anger toward or fear of a perceived foreign threat is so high that sweeping new state powers are being demanded in its name – such as the right to ban social media apps – it's precisely that moment that we must be at our most vigilant – and our minds most skeptical and open – to the possibility that the new government power either does not really address the perceived threat in whose name it's being justified or the dangers of this new political power are greater, much greater than the threats posed by the foreign actor. It is in that spirit that we will examine the details of this new law banning TikTok in Montana, as well as the dangers it raises. Do we want government officials to have the power to ban social media apps they perceive to be “dangerous’? Do American adults, after hearing their asserted risks and dangers, have the right to decide for themselves which social media platforms they want to use for political expression and organizing?

 I hope that before you lend your support to laws like this and other state powers seized in the name of fighting China – or fighting Russia or fighting Iran or fighting Al Qaida – you at least remain open to the possibility that the threats are being exaggerated to enhance state power at home or that the proposed new powers do not really accomplish what their proponents claim they will. This is an extraordinary new power. Many politicians are demanding the right to ban entire apps and social media platforms from specific states and even from the whole country and, as a result, it deserves not reflexive or emotional approval, but rather serious attention, scrutiny and critical thought. And that's what we intend to apply to this law. 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form and to follow us, simply go to Spotify, Apple, or any other major podcasting platforms. The episodes are posted 12 hours after their first broadcast, live, exclusively here on Rumble.

 Ordinarily, tonight being Thursday night, we would have our Aftershow, on our Locals platform available only to subscribers but since we're still easing back into working after our hiatus due to a death in the family, we thought it best not to have our aftershow tonight, but we will be back Tuesday and Thursday of next week with our show after this one, at its regular time. 

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


 

Earlier this week, the Democratic primary challenger, Robert F. Kennedy Jr appeared on the online show “Breaking Point,” hosted by two very good journalists, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti. And I found this interview very illuminating for multiple reasons. It attracted a lot of attention, especially this segment that we will show you and break down in which Krystal Ball confronts RFK Jr about what she calls either his vaccine skepticism or his anti-vax sentiment. He does a good job of using the time she gave him to respond. And what I found very interesting about this interview was several things, including the fact that she told him she regards his views on vaccines to be not merely an issue with which she and many other Democratic voters strongly disagree. But for her, a “red line,” meaning that anyone who crosses into that territory specifically is one that she considers as essentially off-limits. It's a “red line.” Once you cross it, there's no coming back. And because this is a dynamic I have long noticed, starting with the 2012 presidential election, as I alluded to, between Barack Obama and Ron Paul, which I want to break down in terms of why that first attracted my attention, and the broader tactic, which I'm not saying Krystal invoked, but certainly is often invoked in the context of RFK, or Ron Paul, or people who are just a little bit outside of establishment thought of calling them crazy or declaring them too strange, too unhinged and too bizarre. It's a very common and potent tactic and I think it's one that you will find is only wielded by the establishment against critics of the establishment. In other words, establishment figures have all the space in the world to endorse the most deranged, the most unhinged, the craziest policies but as long as you're in alignment with establishment orthodoxy, you will never be declared crazy, no matter how crazy those ideas are. This is a tactic reserved only for those who question prevailing establishment orthodoxy and I think all of us are in a way vulnerable to it. It's a very potent and pervasive form of propaganda that requires our constant vigilance and if we let our guard down at all, we're all susceptible to being influenced by that – to think that person has taken a view that everyone just knows is wrong, everyone trustworthy and reliable and credible knows it's wrong, therefore, I just want to stay as far away from them as possible. I think analyzing how this tactic is wielded, and how it manifested here, is of the utmost importance. 

Now, just a few cards on the table before I show you the parts of the interview and dissect it and connect it to other events. I consider both Krystal and Saagar Enjeti to be good friends of mine. I've appeared on that show many times. I have a lot of respect for their work. This is a case where I'm going to express some disagreements with Krystal's views, but it's not because I think she is a poor journalist or somebody ill-motivated. Quite the contrary. I think the fact that she is someone who is often very rigorous and scrupulous in trying to guard against establishment propaganda, nonetheless, in this case, used a tactic that is usually a tool of the establishment. “Breaking Point” is a show that has succeeded because it is anti-establishment, it is what makes it particularly worthwhile. If this had been Anderson Cooper or Joe Scarborough or Chris Hayes or any of those kinds of people, it would have been unworthy of analysis because that's what you expect from them. So, I think the fact that it came from an anti-establishment venue makes it all the more illustrative. 

I also just want to note that we have been in contact with RFK Jr about appearing on the show. He's agreed to do so. We're just negotiating exactly the date on which he will appear. I hope to devote an entire show to him or most of our show to him, as we did with Marianne Williamson, as we did with Vivek Ramen Swami, like we intend to do with any of the presidential candidates who will come to our show. I'm definitely interested in talking to him, and we will be doing that very soon, although he's by far from a candidate that I support. He has all kinds of views with which I vehemently disagree, including his ardent support for most of the extremist expressions of Russiagate. So, he's clearly not my candidate. I'm nonetheless interested in this dynamic because of what it illustrates more broadly. It's a really perfect, vivid illustration of this tactic that I think deserves a lot of attention. It's often overlooked, and as I said, many of us ingest it almost reflexively. 

So, let's go ahead and take a look at the first segment of this interview where vaccines were discussed. It's about ten minutes long. We're going to show you just a couple of segments and I'll comment on the parts that I think merit comment as we go along and kind of explain the framework that I want to explore with it. 

 

(Video. “Breaking Point”. May 15, 2023)

 

Krystal Ball: […] about vaccines, is an area where you and I have significant differences. And just to level with you on this, like a lot of what you say I really respond to, I think you're a very genuine person. But across the board, whether you want to call it vaccine skepticism or anti-vax advocacy, which has been a central part of what you've been up to for the past number of years, for me personally, it's an issue and it's a real sort of “red line.” And I know I'm not alone in that, especially running in a Democratic primary. There are going to be other millions of people […]. 



Okay. So, there you heard what she said, that this is not just an issue with which she disagrees with him, but it's for her – and she surmises I think correctly – for a lot of other Democratic voters, a red line. 

I don't want to place huge amounts of meaning in that phrase where it comes to Krystal because she's speaking here live and without a script and I know as well as anybody how sometimes you don't express yourself in the most precise way, that you use phrases or words that you wouldn't use if you were sitting and contemplating exactly what you wanted to say. But the fact that she did say it and you could kind of see the progression of her thought where she told him, “For me, your view of vaccines is very wrong, in fact, it's a red line” I think was very telling. She wanted to make the point that this is not just an ordinary disagreement she has with him. This is something that for her, despite all the other things he says that she says resonates with him, places him in this kind of different off-limits category. I've never heard her say that about Joe Biden. I believe she supported Joe Biden in the 2020 election, most definitely not in the primary. She, I believe, was a Bernie Sanders supporter, that's for sure. She did not support him in the primary, but certainly in the general election that was her preferred candidate. I have not heard her say that the positions Joe Biden has taken are a red line for her where she would never support him in a way she seems to be saying here for RFK Jr when it comes to vaccines. So that's part of what attracted my attention. Let's listen to the rest. 

 

Krystal Ball: […] who, like me, have similar concerns. So, how do you win them over? What's your message to people who think like I do? 

 

JFK, Jr.: But just tell me where you think I got it wrong. 

 

Krystal Ball: Well, I think you get it wrong when you draw a correlation between the rise of things like autism and the introduction of vaccines when there isn't hard scientific evidence tying those things together.

 

JFK, Jr.: How do you know? Let me ask you this. How do you know there's a lot of hard scientific evidence? 

 

Krystal Ball: Well, because the one major study that purported to show that was retracted and the scientist who conducted it was, you know, had a […] 

 

JFK, Jr.: What you're doing [...] 

 

(voices overlap)

 

Krystal Ball: Basically, fraudulently created […] 

 

JFK, Jr.: No, no, no. 

 

Krystal Ball: Hold on. Hold on. I don't want to get in a debate with you about this because you've spent your life pulling out of this. I will tell you. Let me just tell you. 

 

JFK, Jr.: […] and hundreds and […] 

 

Krystal Ball: Let me just tell you, I've listened to hours of interviews with you with an open mind, and I'm not persuaded. Now, maybe I'm wrong. That's possible. I'll hold it out there. People can watch. I thought Megyn Kelly did a phenomenal interview with you that went through all these claims piece by piece by piece. I really encourage people to watch that whole exchange because we won't be able to do it justice here in the five minutes we have left. But there are going to be people like me who aren't persuaded and who see this as an issue. And the fact that it's been such a central part of your advocacy means I can't just sort of put it to the side and say, “I will just ignore this piece that's been really important to you and your life.” So, you're running in a Democratic primary. You have a lot of people who feel even more strongly than me who think that Dr. Fauci is a hero and all of these things. How are you going to persuade them? How are you going to reach them? And what is your message to them? 

 

JFK, Jr.: Well, first of all, I'm leading with, you know, my opinions about vaccines. What I said to people is to show me where I got it wrong. Show me where I got my science wrong. I've written books about as you know; I wrote a book about a link between Arizona autism that has, I think, 450 distilled scientific studies confirm and validate that […] 



All right. So, there's a lot going on there that I think is worthy of attention. So first of all, you can see that Krystal is explicitly acknowledging that she doesn't have the same level of information and knowledge, she hasn't devoted anywhere near the amount of time to this question as RFK, Jr. and for that reason, she's explicitly saying, I don't want to actually engage with you on the merits. She keeps trying to kind of switch the question to a political or punditry question of, well, look, right or wrong, there's a lot of Democratic voters out there who share my views, who think you're wrong on vaccines. How do you intend to persuade them? But he wants, rightly so, after having been accused of being wrong on vaccines, to hear from her, what the basis is for her view that he's wrong, He wants to engage the substantive debate – that's part of why he's running. And I think he goes on to say to her that he, after listening to her try and make the case, that she's parroting establishment outlets, that she's parroting what the health establishment and what health policy officials have just repeated over and over, to the point that I think even well-intentioned people like Krystal start absorbing it to be true. And this is what I think is such an important point. 

I think in order to have a public platform where you opine strongly on vital issues, like whether the benefits of vaccines have been oversold, whether their harms and risks have been minimized and concealed, I really think you have an obligation to have that opinion be steeped in some very in-depth knowledge. I've tried very hard in my journalistic career never to opine publicly unless I feel I have that kind of basis of information. That's one of the reasons why I've always can find myself to a few issues out of time. One of my concerns with doing a show like this nightly and I talked about this a lot with my team was ‘How am I going to do a show where I have to talk every night about nine or ten or 12 issues where my knowledge about it is superficial?’ And so, one of the things we decided was we're not going to talk about nine or 12 issues every day. I'm not going to be obligated to opine politically, opine publicly or journalistically, or assert claims when I have just an ordinary level of knowledge, no deeper or more developed than the ordinary person who has a full-time job that requires them to work on nonpolitical issues. And so, if you're going to come and tell Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to his face that he's not only wrong when it comes to vaccine skepticism, but it's so wrong that it's crossed over this red line, then I do think you have the obligation to be prepared to engage on the merits and to construct an argument. She does go on to say, “Look, I may be wrong on this, this is something that I am open to being persuaded on, but I've listened to you and I haven't been persuaded.” 

But she also says that she doesn't really have anywhere near the level of knowledge he has. He spent years working on this. Remember RFK, Jr. was for 20 years or so a very widely regarded environmental activist working on issues of harmful waste by corporations and toxic dumping. He's somebody who's a very serious person. He is not some extremist or marginalized figure who just emerged out of the blue and started, you know, for clicks or attention talking about vaccines. This is a very deeply developed view, which does not mean I agree with it. I don't have the knowledge to agree with it or not. But what I know is this: health officials in the United States and in the West were proven to be not just wrong, but dishonest, repeatedly, throughout the COVID vaccine. Starting with the very first week when Dr. Fauci received emphatic emails from some of the most well-regarded virologists and epidemiologists on the planet, telling him that they were very convinced that the novel coronavirus could not have emerged naturally or through species jumping, but almost certainly came from a lab in Wuhan that happened to be one that received funding from agencies supervised by Dr. Fauci. For obvious reasons, Dr. Fauci was highly motivated to destroy and crush any possibility that this pandemic came from risky research that he himself approved and funded and so, within a matter of a week, the entire establishment got on board with the view that he insisted they endorse – which was the notion that this came from another species and jumped species or evolved naturally was all but proven. While the possibility of a lab leak was debunked, we know that that was completely baseless at best to the point where for a year or so, Facebook and other social media companies barred anyone from questioning it. That's how powerful Dr. Fauci was, creating a false consensus. You couldn't even question what he was saying, let alone did you have people willing in public to say it was wrong. Only for the U.S. government itself to finally get to the point that they said they didn't know the origins of the coronavirus and that an investigation was needed, including considering the possibility of a lab leak. And now, as we know from the Wall Street Journal and other outlets, the most elite scientific units and teams in the Department of Energy and in the FBI believe that a lab leak from the Wuhan lab is not only plausible – something you weren't allowed to say as a result of Dr. Fauci – but is the most probable explanation for where the coronavirus came from. You certainly have other experts who dispute that but the debate is open. And yet Dr. Fauci, from the beginning, closed it. We also know that all kinds of claims about the Pfizer vaccine and other vaccines were false to the point of being just deceitful. There are famous clips of people they send to propagandize the public, Rachel Maddow and others, about Dr. Fauci himself saying that the vaccine prevents transmission, that, if you're vaccinated, you cannot contract or transmit the virus to others and then, two months later, we watched as millions of vaccinated people were contracting and transmitting the virus to other vaccinated people. Something that turned out to be a complete lie. And on and on and on and on. 

So, whether I'm persuaded or not by what RFK, Jr. has to say about vaccines, both, generally, and when it comes to the COVID vaccine, I know for sure we benefit from having these questions debated. That's the reason the DNC wants to pretend RFK, Jr. doesn't exist. They're petrified of him for reminding Americans not only of how much we were deceived on almost every aspect of the COVID pandemic, including the vaccines, but how much damage that it has done from all the policies that we enacted based on these false claims, from school closings that have destroyed the social and intellectual development of huge numbers of our nation’s youth and youth around the world, to skyrocketing rates of depression and suicide and alcohol and drug abuse, which came from the harms of isolation and shutdowns and so many other things. So, at the very least, I think that if you have a public platform, you have a responsibility to encourage and cheer for and want to foster debate on these most critical questions, especially when it comes from highly informed people who are challenging and dissenting from establishment orthodoxy, especially on debates where they have been proven over and over to lie and to be proven wrong. 

So, Krystal Ball has every right to insist that she disagrees with RFK’s skepticism on vaccines but I think if you're going to use your public platform to say that, as opposed to just believing that privately – which we all have to do, we all have to form opinions privately – but it's a big jump to say I'm going to use the privilege and the responsibility I have with my public platform to opine on issues that I really haven't done the work necessary to have a reliable opinion, then I think the only default position there is if you're going to comment on those issues without the sufficient knowledge, is to encourage skepticism, to say, I want to hear these debates. We need more transparency and more of a right to have these questions raised rather than telling somebody that they're not only wrong but so wrong that they've crossed a “red line” which is completely in alignment with what the DNC is trying to do, to say that both Marion Williams and RFK, Jr. don't even deserve to be heard, they don't even deserve to be considered primary opponents to Joe Biden. If you ask a DNC official, they'll say it's already done. Biden has no primary challenger; he's our nominee – without a single vote being cast, without any debate being held – precisely because their strategy is to encourage people to believe that RFK, Jr. is not just wrong, but so wrong that no matter how much else you might like him on other issues, such as his vehement opposition to the proxy war in Ukraine, that he shouldn't even be someone that you're willing to get near. He crossed a red line. This is the establishment tactic that I think Krystal Ball, in this case, and so many other people in so many other cases have, unwittingly and with good motives, propagated. It's almost subconscious. She believes this – I'm sure she's done the hours of work she said she did, but hours of work on a question this complex is nowhere near enough to opine that emphatically and to tell someone they're off limits, that they've crossed a red line. So, again, I don't think she did anything criminal or cataclysmic here. I think it's more illustrative of how this propaganda tactic functions, often implicitly. 

Let me show you another example. This was from when Bari Weiss went on Joe Rogan's program. This is from January 2019. There was no Democratic primary, but it was heating up. There was a Republican challenger, Bill Weld, and a couple of others, but they never got anywhere near 20% in the polls like RFK, Jr. did. But there was a vibrant Democratic Party primary with Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard, and Marianne Williamson who was among those challengers. Bari Weiss had a discussion with Joe Rogan about these Democratic candidates and specifically about Tulsi Gabbard, whom I believe, unbeknownst to Bari Weiss, is someone that Joe Rogan really admired and still admires. I want you to watch what happened, the way Bari Weiss asserted claims, only to have it be clear that she had no basis for making them. She had just heard it so often that she just implicitly started believing it was true because it came from establishment voices. Watch this: 

 

(1:31-2:39)

(Video. Joe Rogan Podcast. Jan. 21, 2019)

 

Bari Weiss: […] So we have Kamala, Kirsten Gillibrand […] 

 

Joe Rogan: Tulsi Gabbard. 

 

Bari Weiss: Oh…monstrous […] 

 

Joe Rogan: Monstrous?  

 

Bari Weiss: Ideas. Ideas.

 

Joe Rogan: Well, when she was […]

 

Joe Rogan inserted Tulsi Gabbard as Bari Weiss was listing the candidates. Listen to this again: 

 

Bari Weiss: […] So we have Kamala, Kirsten Gillibrand […] 

 

Joe Rogan: Tulsi Gabbard. 

 

Bari Weiss: Oh…monstrous […] 

 

Joe Rogan: Monstrous?  

 

Bari Weiss: Ideas. Ideas.

 

Joe Rogan: Well, when she was 22, she had […]

 

Bari Weiss: No, she's an Assad toadie. 

 

Joe Rogan: What does that mean “She is a toadie?” 

 

Bari Weiss: I think that I used that word correctly. Jamie, can you check […]

 

Joe Rogan: Like toeing the line? Is that what it means? 

 

Bari Weiss: (talking to Jamie) T, o, a, d, i, e. (To Rogan) I think it means […] 

 

Joe Rogan: (shows search results from a screen) Toadie. Definition of toadies:  “A person” […]

 

Bari Weiss: Sycophant.

 

Joe Rogan: […] “that flatters or defers to others for self-serving reasons.” 

 

Bari Weiss: A sycophant. 

 

Joe Rogan: So, she's an Assad sycophant. Is that what you're saying? 

 

 Bari Weiss: Yeah, that's... known about her.  

 

“Are you saying Tulsi Gabbard is a sycophant to Bashar al-Assad?” “Yeah, right. Of course. I'm saying that. That's known. That's known about her.” I can't imagine making an accusation of that gravity on a very public and widely watched platform without having a single example I’m able to cite to substantiate that accusation and all I can say is, “Yeah, this is known. Everyone knows this.” Listen to this: 

 

Joe Rogan: So, she's an Assad sycophant. [Is] that what you're saying? 

 

Bari Weiss: Yeah, that's... known about her.  

 

Joe Rogan: What did she say that qualifies her […]

 

Bari Weiss: I don't remember the details… 

 

Joe Rogan: You probably shouldn’t say that – before we say that about –  we should probably read it rather […]

 

Bari Weiss: Well, I have read it. 

 

Joe Rogan: […] Oh, yeah. Okay. Just so we know what she said. […] Look, I really enjoyed talking to her. I like her a lot. 



I find that remarkable. Again, I think Bari Weiss was well-intentioned there in the sense that she was saying something she believed to be true and had come to believe it because just enough people had said it, that in her brain a switch clicked and it just became gospel to her, something that you don't even need to bother anymore to debate. She was obviously extremely unprepared to debate that or even to raise a single thing Tulsi Gabbard had done that would justify accusing her of that. And I think it's very similar to what happened with Krystal Ball, though I think Krystal Ball was much more prepared to talk about RFK vaccine skepticism than Bari Wise was to talk about Tulsi Gabbard’s supposedly “toadie”-ness or serving someone for her own self-interest, dishonestly, to Bashar al Assad. But nonetheless, I think it's a very similar dynamic because as RFK, Jr. pointed out in the second half of the segment, we didn't show you – he said, I think what you're doing is parroting establishment voices. It was clear to me that was what she was doing. She definitely did some work, but nowhere near enough. 

As I mentioned, this is a dynamic that I've been talking about for many years. And the thing that really led me to first start talking about it was in 2011, 2012, when Barack Obama was seeking reelection to his second term in office. I was a very vehement critic of Obama in many areas, particularly in his embrace of the exact war on terror policies instituted by George Bush and Dick Cheney and civil liberties assault in the name of the War on Terror. Then, Obama spent all of 2008 vowing to uproot. And not only did Obama continue those, but he also aggressively expanded them in some very radical and extremist ways. The left purported to be just as appalled by that as I was. This was during the time when my audience became filled with a lot of left-wing supporters because I was vehemently criticizing President Obama, not from a conservative or right-wing perspective, but from the perspective of civil liberties and my critique of his continuation of George Bush and Dick Cheney's most invasive and radical policies in the War on Terror. 

That was something the left strongly believed in and there was a candidate running for president in 2012 who agreed with the left's critique about President Obama's civil liberties assault. His name was Ron Paul. And he not only agreed with the left on some pretty important issues like the War on Terror and civil liberties but also became a vehement opponent of the drug war, the idea that American adults should be put into prison if they choose to buy and consume narcotics the government has declared to be illegal, drugs that you're not allowed to use, even if, as an adult, you're completely informed of the risks and benefits and choose to use them. Not only are you prohibited, but you will go to jail for it. He argued that this led to mass incarceration, it was the main reason the U.S. imprisons more of its citizens than any other in the world by far  – there was a racial component to it. Things the left adored. Yet, even the mere suggestion that Ron Paul's candidacy should be looked at and not necessarily one should vote for him or support him if one doesn't want to, but at least appreciate and celebrate and support the parts of his candidacy that were genuinely unique in a way that the left has a long claim to crave. That was one of my earliest, most violent breaches with the American left – when I started trying to argue that what Ron Paul is doing is something that should inspire them and whatever you want to say about Ron Paul and the issues on which you disagree with him, that at least is true for President Obama and yet the fact that President Obama had a “D” after his name and was the incumbent president, had the establishment on his side, whereas Ron Paul was always somebody who was kind of marginalized, considered a little crazy, not because of any personal behavior, which has always been upstanding in terms of his personal integrity and his conduct in office, but because of his views. He was immediately declared to have crossed red lines the way Krystal Ball said of RFK Jr the way don't see the way Bari Weiss said of Tulsi Gabbard.

Here you can see just a very common article from 2011 in The Washington Post. There you see the headline: “Call him a nut”.  “Ron Paul: Call Him a Nut,” just like he's crazy. This is by their media critic, Erik Wemple. So, again, this is the same tactic. Ron Paul doesn't have views with which one disagrees. He's just crazy. Just call him a crazy person, an insane person, and be done with it. 

The article I wrote in December 2011, in Salon, which, as I said, will probably, maybe, after my support for the majority opinion in Citizens United on free speech grounds, is probably – which is 2010. This is probably, at the time, the most abrupt and aggressive breach I had with the American left. “Progressives and the Ron Paul Fallacies.” There you see in the sub-headline: “The benefits of his candidacy are widely ignored, as are the Democrats’ own evils.” 

So, it reminds me very much of the framework Krystal Ball had created. She is certainly not a supporter of Joe Biden but, at the end of the day, she will urge him to be elected. She will advocate for people to vote for him in a general election because, apparently, he hasn't crossed red lines, whereas RFK, Jr. has. This is the same issue for me when it came to President Obama and Ron Paul. So let me show you a couple of videos where Ron Paul said some things that were really extraordinary, that you would think the left would be supportive of and excited by. 

Let's take a look at this video here, which is him talking about the effort by President Obama to use the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. Listen to Ron Paul express his opposition to that policy:

 

(Video. May, 2011) 

 

Ron Paul: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Plans, rumors and war propaganda for attacking Syria and disposing Assad has been around for many months. This past week, however, it was reported that the Pentagon indeed was finalizing plans to do just that. In my opinion, all the evidence to justify this attack is bogus. It is no more credible than the pretext given for the 2003 invasion of Iraq or for the 2011 attack on Libya. The total waste of those wars should cause us to pause before this all-out effort at occupation and regime change is initiated against Syria. There are no national security concerns that require such a foolish escalation of violence in the Middle East. There should be no doubt that our security interests are best served by completely staying out of the internal strife now raging in Syria. 

 

Just to put this in the simplest terms, to this day, if you mention the name Ron Paul, not just the Democrats, but anyone who's inherent to the establishment would laugh at him, they'll treat him like a joke. He's crazy. He's just insane. As the Washington Post said, “just call him a nut.” And yet, Ron Paul, in 2002, was one of the most ardent opponents of the idea of invading Iraq. He made all kinds of predictions that proved prophetic and prescient.  At the same time, Joe Biden – who no Democrat will say is crazy or off limits or has crossed a red line – was one of the most vocal advocates of the war in Iraq and because he was a Democrat  – considered to have a lot of experience in foreign policy, he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee at the time – you could really make the case that Joe Biden's support for Iraq, the war in Iraq, like Hillary Clinton's and like John Kerry's, was arguably the most important. He was the most important senator that enabled that war to happen, who led half the Democratic Senate caucus to vote in favor of the war in Iraq. Let's listen to him. In 2002, while he was cross-examining in a very hostile way, Scott Ritter, at the time a weapons inspector who was against the war in Iraq and was saying he was in Iraq, he was on the ground in Iraq, he vehemently believed Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction – so Ron Paul turned out to be right. Joe Biden turned out to be radically and disastrously wrong and yet, for some reason, Joe Biden is considered sane and on the right side of the red line,  and Ron Paul is on the wrong side of it. 

Let's put this video of Joe Biden in the Senate in 2002. Actually, this is a Senate hearing about the first war in Iraq. There are lots of clips, of course, of Joe Biden vehemently arguing for the war in Iraq. This is a video from 1988, he’s talking to Scott Ritter, but he's advocating regime change – all the way back in 1988, so three years before 9/11 – and then four years before that war was actually approved of. Listen to what Joe Biden said. 

 

(Video. C-SPAN. 1998).

 

J. Biden: […] Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me begin by saying, I think, Major, you have provided and are providing a very, very, very valuable service to your country by coming forward as you have, because, quite frankly, I think what you've done is you forced us to come to our milk here, all of us in the United States Congress. I think you and I believe and many of us believe here, as long as Saddam's at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root, and branch the entirety of Saddam's program relative to weapons of mass destruction and you and I both know and all of us here really know. And it's the thing we have to face that the only way we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having the started alone – started alone – and it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking Saddam down. You know it and I know it. So, I think we should not kid ourselves here. There are stark, stark choices. 



So, it is amazing. Biden was not just an advocate of the war in Iraq in 2002 when it was opposed, after 9/11. He was a very emphatic advocate of it, of regime change in Iraq and the need to take down Saddam Hussein before 9/11 even happened, back in 1998. 

Why is Joe Biden considered sane and people like Ron Paul considered crazy and off-limits and insane when, on the most critical questions of our time, Joe Biden has been wrong over and over? 

Let's look at Joe Biden and his support for the war in Libya –  a war that, like the war in Syria, Obama waged to take out Bashar al-Assad – turned that country into a complete wreck of a country where anarchy of the worst kind thrived, where slave markets are turned, where ISIS returned, that created extreme amounts of instability, not just in that country, but a migrant crisis in Europe, one of the worst and most misguided interventions the United States has ever launched, Joe Biden – like the war in Iraq – was strongly in favor of that one as well. Let's go ahead and pull that up. 

 

(Video. CNN. 2011.)

 

J. Biden: Libya, Gadhafi, one way or another, is gone. Whether he's alive or dead, he's gone. The people of Libya have gotten rid of a dictator of 40 years whom I personally knew. This is one tough, not-so-nice guy. And guess what? They got a chance now. But what happened in this case? America spent $2 billion total and didn't lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has been in the past. 



So, I think this is somewhat of an elusive point. So, I just want to get at it in one more different way, which is the idea that the establishment in the United States uses a tactic of proclaiming you to be mentally unwell or somehow just completely radioactive simply by virtue of dissent to establishment orthodoxy. And even if it's establishment orthodoxy itself, that proves to be the crazy view, that proves to be the destructive view, that proves to be the deranged conspiratorial view, you will never be labeled crazy or off limits, or having crossed a red line, as long as you're in alignment with the establishment thought there is no limit to what you can do provided you remain on that side. This is a term and a tactic reserved only for those who dissent from it. That's why Joe Biden's never considered crazy or off limits for people like RFK, Jr. or Ron Paul. 

I think the most vivid example is this one: from 2016 until 2019 – and we covered this on our show on Tuesday night when we talked about the Durham Report and its conclusions about the FBI's interference in our election by essentially collaborating with the Clinton campaign to create this false space investigation to link Trump to Russia – in the context that we discussed the fact that for three full years in the United States, the main political story that drowned our politics, that covered the front page of newspapers on a virtually daily basis that was constantly on television was Russiagate. The Russiagate scandal. The two key component parts were: the first, that the Trump campaign had criminally colluded or collaborated with the Russians to hack into the DNC emails and John Podesta's email – something we know from the Volcker investigation that closed without accusing a single American of that crime said there was no evidence for it – and now the German investigation concluding that the FBI never even had a basis to open an investigation into that in 2016. We know that that part was fraudulent. But the other part that was at least equally prominent came from the Steele Dossier. The Steele Dossier. It was one of the most insane and unhinged conspiracy theories imaginable. It really was the case that establishment figures in the media and politics for three straight years continuously went on television and to their pages and the op-ed columns and even gave themselves Pulitzers for it and constantly ratified the view that the Kremlin had seized control of the levers of American power by virtue of sexual, financial and other forms of personal blackmail held over the head of Donald Trump, that essentially they could force him to do the bidding of the Kremlin, even if it came at the expense of the United States. A conspiracy theory that, if you tried to submit it as a script in Hollywood, it would be too much even for them. It's preposterous. It's a joke. When you talk about wild, crazy conspiracy theories, that is the living, breathing embodiment of it. And no matter how often it was disproven because Trump acted against the most vital Russian interest when he sent lethal arms to Ukraine after President Obama refused to do so – a direct threat to Russia's vital interests – when Trump spent years trying to sabotage the most important economic project that Moscow has, which is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline connecting it to Western Europe to allow it to sell cheap natural gas through Germany, no matter how many times Trump acted directly against Russian interests when he bombed Russian troops in Syria and threatened to bomb Russian troops even more and take out. Their main Russian ally, Bashar al-Assad, no matter how much he acted against Russian interests. This conspiracy theory continued. And yet, not a single person who propagated that crazy conspiracy theory would ever be called crazy or a conspiracy theorist or having crossed a red line because they were acting in servitude in captivity to establishment dogma and establishment interest. To this day, those of us who stood up and objected to that conspiracy theory being baseless are the ones called crazy and even called conspiracy theorists, because these terms really are just weapons and tools used to stigmatize anybody who challenges establishment thought. This is the point that I want to get at. 

Let me just show you one last example of this because it happened not only to Ron Paul but also to his son, Rand Paul, when he became elected as senator from Kentucky. The exact same things are said about Rand Paul that were said about Ron Paul.

Here you see, from the New Republic, in May 2011, a headline: “Rand Paul is Really Crazy.” Rand Paul is Really Crazy – all but echoing The Washington Post’s similar story about his father – “Just call Ron Paul a nut”.  

Conor Friedersdorf, who now writes at The Atlantic, wrote a really great article in Newsweek that examined the question of why Rand Paul could be deemed crazy. What was it about Rand Paul that allowed him to be called crazy by establishment figures in Washington media and politics who themselves endorse all sorts of objectively, inherently extremist and radical ideas? And the answer, of course, is because what “all crazy” really means in Washington is opposing establishment thought. 

Here is Conor Friedersdorf’s article in Newsweek, in May 2010. The headline Is “Rand Paul Crazier Than Anyone Else in DC?” Let's look at the text of the article. 

 

Rand Paul has plenty of beliefs that I regard as wacky, such as his naive, now withdrawn, assumption that markets would have obviated the need for certain provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Or his desire to return America to the gold standard. 

Of course, I feel world-weary exasperation upon hearing every national politician speak – have you ever gotten through the election season television commercials without rolling your eyes? – but the media seem to reflexively treat some ideas and some candidates less seriously than others for no legitimate, objective reason. 

Third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot was called a disparaging name so often that he tried to diffuse the situation with humor by dancing in public to Patsy Cline's rendition of the song “Crazy.” Rand Paul can't escape this treatment, even on Fox News, where an anchor called him a libertarian wacko. If returning to the gold standard is unthinkable, is it not just as extreme that President Obama claims an unchecked power to assassinate, without due process, any American living abroad, whom he designates as an enemy combatant? (Newsweek. May 24, 2010).

 

Just to remind you, the Obama administration adopted a theory that if an American citizen is abroad in a place that they deem lawless or out of the reach of American extradition, the United States government has the right – without charging that American citizen with a crime or giving them any due process – simply for the president to declare them an enemy combatant and then murder them by drones. And this wasn't just a theory that Obama asserted. It was a theory that he used in Yemen. For example, he sent drones to first kill the American-born, American citizen cleric al-Awlaki and then to kill his 16-year-old son in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki. And what kind of Friedersdorf is saying is, “if you think advocacy of the gold standard makes Rand Paul crazy, how is that any less crazy or crazier than a president of the United States claiming the power to assassinate without due process any American living abroad whom he designates as an enemy combatant? 

 

Or that Joe Lieberman wants to strip Americans of their citizenship not when they are convicted of terrorist activities, but upon their being accused and designated as enemy combatants? (Newsweek. May 24, 2010).

 

And he goes on a bunch of other examples. He then concludes that essentially people who get called crazy in Washington are always people who dissent vigorously enough from establishment orthodoxy. I think maybe the correction that we need is not to stop calling people crazy, but to make sure that we include establishment figures in that. Because over the last six years, in particular, the establishment has gone utterly berserk. Joe Biden, if you look at it from a progressive perspective, has supported every policy that ought to be across the “red line” – from the Iraq war to the war in Libya to the war in Syria to funding the proxy war in Ukraine, endlessly and without limits to being the architect of the prison industrial complex, to be a virulent supporter of the drug war – and yet no one will call Joe Biden crazy. No one would call Mitch McConnell crazy, even though he supports almost every one of those same policies. Because if you're part of the establishment, you're inherently serious, you're inherently sane. Even if you're wrong, you're inherently credible. This is a tactic that appeared in Krystal Ball’s interview of RFK, Jr.; that appeared in Bari Weiss's commentary on Tulsi Gabbard; that appeared in all of these articles demanding we call Ron Paul and Rand Paul insane; that is designed to render dissidence to establishment thought intrinsically crazy. And it's one that I think a lot of us can adopt because we're constantly bombarded with claims from venues we've been conditioned to regard as inherently credible. And it leads us to believe all sorts of things that we haven't really critically evaluated and, as a result, to implicitly or reflexively regard as crazy or weird or off limits or on the other side of a “red line,” people who are questioning policies that themselves are often quite crazy but are deemed to be sacrosanct by virtue of the fact that it's the establishment that supports them. And so, I thought this interview with RFK, Jr., the treatment of RFK, Jr. and his candidacy, and the permission given for the DNC to basically pretend he doesn't exist, all illustrate this tactic. It's been one that is evident for decades and I think when you put it all together, it's one that we really need to work to be consciously aware of. 

 

So right after this, we will be back. We will look at the new law in Montana that bans TikTok and hope to apply the same critical faculties I was just talking about to this new law and other measures being demanded in the name of stopping China. We'll be right back after this. 


 

We would like to say a very special thank you to Field of Greens! They have been a big sponsor to the show because of Field of Greens we here at System Update can stay an indepedent news program. Thank you Field of Greens! 


In the last segment, I talked about a lot of policies that were enacted in the name of the War on Terror and fighting al-Qaida that, by all objective measures, should be deemed not just radical and extremist, but really quite just crazy, just unhinged. One of the lessons I learned from those years of reporting, in fact, probably, the overarching lesson, is that one of the most dangerous ways that governments extract power from its citizenry is to convince that citizenry that they face such a monumental threat, such a grave fear, usually from foreign sources, from foreign actors, that they need to capitulate to government demands for increasingly greater powers, including from powers previously thought out of any conceivable possibility. That was the story of the Patriot Act. We've covered that history several times on this show. Within literally days after 9/11, while the rubble and the corpses beneath it had not yet been cleared from the streets of Manhattan, there was legislation designed to enable the United States government to spy not just on foreign nationals, but American citizens, in ways previously unthinkable to radically reduce the evidentiary burdens that government has to meet in order to spy, in order for the CIA and the FBI to share information about American citizens. At the time, even as proponents acknowledged it was an extremist and radical bill, a fundamental change to the American system of government, to the values that we've always embraced for the limitations required for the government to operate in a way that protects our basic rights. And yet the Patriot Act passed easily despite those realities overwhelmingly in both the House and the Senate. Anyone who even breathed a word of dissent against the Patriot Act was instantly accused of either not taking seriously the threat posed by al-Qaida and Islamic radicalism, or usually and worse, being on the side of al-Qaida, being pro-terrorist simply for questioning anything the government demanded in the name of al-Qaida. 

 

 

As I said, I was someone who lived in Manhattan and worked in Manhattan and was in Manhattan on 9/11. I remember how traumatizing that attack was. I remember it took me, I think, two weeks, and I went to a movie and I realized in the middle of the movie that for about 10 minutes I wasn't thinking about the attack – for the first time since it happened. It was genuinely a traumatizing attack. Very shortly after that, came the Anthrax attacks, which for a lot of Americans, I believe, escalated those risks even further. We're going to devote a show very soon, perhaps tomorrow night, or in the upcoming week, about the Anthrax attacks and the impact it had on American perceptions about threats that we face, but also the still very significant lingering questions about how that Anthrax attack was launched on American soil, who really launched it and for what ends. I genuinely believe, as do a lot of mainstream scientists and even mainstream news outlets – they don't talk about it anymore but they did at the time – that the FBI's version of events for how the Anthrax attack happened stretched credibility to a breaking point that we don't really know the full story, but it sheds a lot of light on things like how our government manipulates and weaponizes viruses and other biological weapons in our labs, in Chinese labs. So, we're going to devote an entire show to remembering that history. I think a lot of you are probably too young to remember it, to have lived through it, but the lesson that I got from all of that is that once the perception of fear or anger toward a foreign power is high enough, the population is basically conditioned to accept anything and everything the government demands in the name of combating that threat. 

Right now, the threat that Americans regard as the gravest and the most serious is no longer al-Qaida or ISIS; it's not the Russians – unless you work for MSNBC and the Washington Post op-ed page – It's not Iran. It's China. I think there is a consensus growing certainly within the establishment wings of both parties – and even the populist right in the Republican Party – that China is the single greatest threat that the United States faces. At some point, we're going to delve deeply into the question of whether that's an accurate perception but for the moment, I want you to just assume that it is. 

So, let's assume that whether you think of China as some kind of an enemy with which we need to go to war or some kind of a very serious, formidable competitor that will likely require decades of a new Cold War of funding the intelligence agencies, of spending more and more money on weapons and deploying fleets and military units in that part of the world and confront China in every conceivable way, even if you're right about that, it still is the case that we are all vulnerable to having that concern, that fear, that anger toward China exploited for the government to seize more powers by telling you that those powers are necessary to combat the threat from Beijing and that you need not worry about these new powers because the government is only here to help you and protect you and keep you safe from the Chinese Communist Party. This absolutely becomes an argument we're hearing more and more in Washington in ways that I think people are finally starting to realize can be very dangerous in itself. 

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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.  

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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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