Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Writing • Culture
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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February 07, 2025

FYI Glenn, Scott Adams hosts a daily show using Rumble Studio that appears simultaneously on Rumble, YouTube, Locals and possibly X. After a typical hour long show, he somehow disconnects all streams except his Locals subscribers. It takes no more than 30 seconds to make the changeover. To me, viewing the Rumble stream, the image loses focus, the audio stops and a Locals logo appears center screen while he continues the stream with subscribers only.

His show and studio offer nothing approaching the production values of System Update and he doesn't use a different studio for his Locals program so I don't know if he can be of any help.

I can say he holds you and your work in high regard and may be able to offer suggestions how you might achieve the melding of System Update with the Tuesday/Thursday Aftershow for your Locals subscribers.

Thanks for the work you do,
James

February 07, 2025
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February 07, 2025

🤣🤣🤣We are truly living in extraordinary times.🤣🤣🤣

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Glenn Reacts to Trump's Gaza Take Over
System Update Special

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!


Good evening, everybody. Welcome to a special episode of System Update. The reason we wanted to do this is because we talked last night on our show about how President Trump had proposed a rather remarkable, extraordinary, stunning plan, to put that mildly, for Gaza and for resolving the conflict between Israel and Gaza. At the time that we had gone on air, however, he had only revealed a partial aspect of this plan. He gave his press conference in the Oval Office, he then met with Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Oval Office as well, answered questions and basically said that his plan and his vision for Gaza was to remove everybody who lives there, the 1.8 million people – and we'll get to that number, which is very strange in just a moment – clean it all up, rebuild it into something beautiful, and then basically allow some of them back in. 

We talked about the reasons why that kind of population transfer, forcible population transfer – the people of Gaza have made extremely clear they have no intention of leaving; they don't trust the United States or Israel that just destroyed their society – to say you'll just leave for a couple of years and you'll be allowed back, obviously, they were expelled from what they consider their homeland, which is now Israel, in 1948, and never came back, through generations they've been waiting to do so. They're never going to leave voluntarily. But it was really only after that press briefing with Prime Minister Netanyahu that President Trump gave another press conference in which he revealed the most significant part of this plan. And he didn't just speak off the cuff. 

He was reading from a prepared statement, which meant that it was actually a policy that people in the White House had concocted and created, which was not for Israel to go in and govern Gaza, as many Israelis, including in Netanyahu’s government, wanted to do, but that the United States would go in and, as he put it, would own Gaza, would rebuild Gaza, would turn it into whatever he envisions, and having a bunch of beachfront casinos and hotels and golf courses and who knows what else. 

When he was asked, well, the people of Gaza are saying that they refuse to leave and the Arab countries in the region are saying they will absolutely never accept such a solution, he basically said: “Well, I think they will leave because they wouldn’t want to say there, and if they don't, they're going to have to.” Meaning we're going to go make them. He also very clearly alluded to the fact that the United States government is going to go there. We're going to clear out the rubble. We're going to disarm that ordnance that is there. We're going to get rid of the buildings that are precarious because Israel has destroyed it all with the United States and the Biden administration funding and arming it. So, obviously, if the Gazans aren't going to voluntarily leave – which they're not – then the question is going to become, well, who's going to make them? How are they going to leave? Who's going to force them to leave? And President Trump was making very clear that he would. He would do what's necessary to make them leave. 

So, the plan is essentially two weeks into the Trump administration not to focus on Ohio or Michigan or jobs and inflation, although, obviously, things are being done about that. But now somehow the United States government, the Trump administration, is going to assume responsibility for Gaza, wants to clear the entire population out of Gaza to ethnically cleanse Gaza of the Arabs and forcibly transfer the population of Gaza out of Gaza so that we can then go in, clean it all up and rebuild the society there because it used to be there but it has now been destroyed, over the past 15 months. 

That is quite a remarkable deviation from the America First foreign policy ideology President Trump has long advocated, which he ran in this campaign. It is certainly a deviation from the idea that we have to remove ourselves from entanglements in the Middle East. He specifically heaped scorn on the idea of regime change or nation-building, which is exactly what he was describing last night, and you already see a lot of Republicans, like Mike Johnson – who, for religious reasons, is a stark and stalwart supporter of not just Israel, but a greater Israel, as they call it, which is not just the internationally recognized borders of Israel, but having the West Bank and Gaza become part of Israel – as well as members of Congress like Nancy Mace, who is trying to prove that she is the most loyal Trump supporter, saying things like, we're ready for a Mar-a-Lago in Gaza. 

So, I want to analyze these events because of how obviously significant they are without capitulating to hysteria or melodrama but, at the same time, underscoring the seriousness not only of the plan itself – which, as we've seen with Trump, may not happen because he often offers plans that are part of a negotiating strategy – but even the discussion of this can have a lot of serious implications. The whole idea of the Trump negotiating strategy is when you say things you're going to do or threaten things when you're going to do out a negotiating strategy if you don't get what you want, then of course, you have to follow through and do that because if you don't, that negotiating strategy will never have any credibility anymore. If you say either you give us X, Y and Z, or we're going to do A, B and C, and you don't get X, Y and Z, and then you don't do A, B and C, no one's going to trust your negotiating strategy any longer because you've proven essentially that that's a bluff. 

Setting up this plan where we're saying that we would go do this, we would take over responsibility and ownership of Gaza and we would clean it all out, we would forcibly remove the people who are there, all of them, so we can rebuild it and make it nice for, as he calls it, “the people in the region” – just the plan itself is already causing reverberations in the Muslim world. So, let's talk about a few parts of this. 

First of all, the Trump negotiating strategy is something that we do have to start with because we have seen in the past that he says things all the time and then doesn't follow through on them precisely because they're only intended as negotiating leverage. He talked about imposing a 25% tariff on both Canada and Mexico – he didn't just talk about it but implemented it. People went ballistic and now it turns out that he ended up not doing it, in part because he got some concessions – you can question how many concessions he really got, whether those are actual concessions or not but that is clearly part of the Trump negotiating strategy: to say that he's going to do things. So, the fact that he's saying he wants to go into Gaza, clear it all out, rebuild it, forcibly remove the population, doesn’t, in fact, mean that's going to happen. So, I do want to concede that point. Nonetheless, the whole purpose when a politician floats an idea of this kind is to allow people to respond. 

If you think it's a terrible idea – and I think it's a terrible idea for the reasons I've laid out last night – but an even worse idea, now that I know the details of this plan. When I say a bad idea, I mean strategically, pragmatically, ethically, morally, legally to try and go into the Middle East and turn it all over, after all the failures we've had with our Middle East engagements, with our attempts at nation building. 

The whole point is when a politician says something like this, this is the time to speak up; not when they're already going to do it, but now so that the administration understands that there are a lot of people who are opposed to it. Seeing a lot of really disturbing things from Trump supporters along the lines of, “Look, if he says something, you just trust him to know best, he clearly has some kind of 10-dimensional chess plan going” – No, that's not the way democracy works. The president's not a father figure. You don't trust in him that he knows best. You make yourself heard, especially when what is being proposed is such a radical deviation from what was promised. 

The entire plan depends upon somebody going in and paying for the renovations and for the rejuvenation of Gaza. Even if he can get those people out and he's clearly thinking that the people who are supposed to do this are the very wealthy people in that region. He said, “Lord knows there's a ton of major money in the Middle East,” which there is because of oil, and it's in the hands primarily of the Gulf state tyrants, the dictators who are our allies because we have those dictators there to prevent the popular will from being expressed, those countries being Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain and Jordan and Qatar. That's where all that money that Trump is very enamored of is. He loves the Saudis. He loves the Emirates, Jordan. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has done a lot of deals in those regions because there's so much money there and Trump obviously thinks that it's their responsibility to come in and pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. 

The problem is that the entire Trump plan rests on the assumption that the people of Gaza don't care about that land, that it's sort of like if you live in Ohio or Wisconsin and you look around and you say, “You know what? It's too cold here, I'm getting older and I don't really like the conditions here any longer, it's not conducive to my quality of life, I'm just going to go to Florida and Arizona. They have great developments there. They have new golf courses and nice homes, and the government's going to move there. What's the difference? I don't care about Ohio or Wisconsin.” That's not the way people who are Palestinians think, nor is it the way that Israeli Jews think. 

The reason the conflict has been so intractable for 70 years now and a lot longer before that but really 70 years since the formation of the state of Israel is because the Israeli Jews have become convinced that they have a sacred religious right to the land and the Palestinians believe the same thing. This land is holy. And both Judaism and Islam – as well as Christianity. The Palestinians have endured so much. Years and years, decades of bombing campaigns and starvation efforts and blockades and occupations with the backing of the most powerful country on the planet and they've never left. They've never been driven out. 

This was a plan by Joe Biden as well. This is not something Donald Trump invented. Joe Biden tried to pressure the Egyptians into accepting, quote-unquote, “refugees” temporarily from Gaza to give them a safe corridor to leave Gaza and the Egyptians understood very well what that plan was really about, which was taking the land away from the Palestinians. And they knew that no one in Gaza was going to voluntarily leave their homes especially if the plan was not just to go there until the bombing ended but go there for two or five or seven years, which is what they're saying is the time frame to clear out the rubble and to detonate the unstable and structurally compromised buildings. 

Nobody in Gaza, virtually nobody, is going to give up that land to Donald Trump knowing that he has Miriam Adelson and Bill Ackman and Jared Kushner, people who are in bed with the Israelis – in the case of Miriam Adelson, she is an Israeli. It's basically turning over the land to Israel. If the Gazans were willing to do that, they would have done that a long time ago. They're never going to do that. The only way this plan would work is if somebody is willing to go in and wage a war against Hamas, against Gaza. We just watched the IDF for 15 months with zero terms of engagement, with zero limits, trying to destroy the population and drive them out – and it failed. They all marched back to their homes triumphantly the minute that cease-fire was in effect. 

If you think that it's going to be easy to go in and drive out 1.8 million people and if you're an American, is that a war that you're willing to send yourself or your children or your family members to go fight? Do you want to go fight a war in the Middle East for Israel again this time to secure their biggest dream of ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank of all Arabs so that Israel can then have the layman's realm at once or that Trump can turn it into some kind of Dubai 2.0? It's never going to happen. There's no possibility that that can happen and that's what Trump is proposing. 

Trump is saying that the only way this plan can work, obviously, is if the Gazans have someplace to go and the place he wants them to go is Egypt and Jordan. The problem is that the Egyptian and Jordanian governments are dictatorships that care a lot about their unstable population. We just saw an Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, get overthrown in 2011 by a very restive population which can obviously happen to General Sisi as well. King Abdullah, of Jordan, has a large population of Palestinians already in his country and the population is not going to tolerate watching, with their cooperation, the United States and Israel ethnically cleansing Gaza. So, they're saying “We're not going to take any “refugees”,” but Trump's point is we give Egypt a ton of money. We give Jordan a ton of money. Without that money that we give them, those regimes would collapse. We give them that money to keep the peace with Israel. I think he thinks he has the leverage to force the Egyptians and Jordanians to accept the Gazans but, again, even if they do, and they're adamant that they won't, how do you get the Gazans to voluntarily leave even if their society has been reduced to rubble? 

Then you have the issue of these other countries – Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Bahrain, and Qatar, and Jordan. Trump's vision for normalization and stability in the Middle East, the one that he pursued in his first term and wants to expand in his second is to facilitate normalization between all those countries and Israel, isolate Iran, eventually do a deal with Iran so they don't get nuclear weapons – he talked about that today – and then have a stable, peaceful Middle East. That's part of what his legacy is (in his mind that’s what he wants it to be). 

The problem is that the governments that I just named have been vehement and adamant, from the beginning, that they absolutely will not consider any attempt to normalize relations with Israel, which Donald Trump says is in the interests of the United States, unless the Palestinians first have a fair outcome to their own state, basically. And it's not because these dictators and tyrants love the Palestinians or care about the Palestinians. Maybe some do, but it's not that. It's that even tyrants have to worry about their own populations, no matter how repressive they are. We've seen some of the most repressive tyrants in history be overthrown when the population gets too angry and feels like they're being too disregarded. 

If the population of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or even Lebanon, watch these countries cooperate with the forced ethnic cleansing and population transfer of Gazans out of Gaza so that Israel and the United States could work together to own it and take it over or even handed over to the Saudis to run like Saudi Arabia as part of normalization, the population would never tolerate that. There would be a conflagration, an uprising throughout the Middle East, which is why even Trump's mere mention of a plan like this, even if he doesn't intend to follow through on it, can be so destabilizing and so dangerous. 

But the fact that we are now so quickly at the point where you see Republican lawmakers willing to endorse a plan that very easily could entail a new war in the Middle East, either fought by the United States, fought by Israel, fought by Arab allies of the United States and Israel, meaning we would pay for that, we would arm it again and Republicans are right on board, is extremely alarming to this whole notion that Republicans are also on board with the idea that we don't need any more foreign entanglements, we shouldn't be involved in nation building – as always there's a gigantic Israel exception. To so many right-wing conservative principles, including free speech as we've gone over many times. Obviously not for all conservatives or everyone on the right, but certainly for a disturbingly large number of people that we're seeing yet again play out here. Collective punishment, population transfers, ethnic cleansing, these are all horrific war crimes that are barred by basic morality, by ethics and, if you care about it, by international law and there's no question about what Trump is promising. 

The other bizarre aspect of what we're seeing is that for 15 months under the Biden administration, reporters questioned the State Department, questioned the White House and would say, we're providing arms, all the arms, and we're paying for the Israelis to engage in a war of indiscriminate destruction against Gaza. They're destroying everything. They're carpet-bombing it. They're flattening Gaza. And the U.S. government was saying, “No, they're not. They're being very, very discriminating. They're being very targeted. They're only bombing where Hamas is. This isn't carpet bombing. This isn't the complete destruction of Gaza. They're being humanitarian about it. This is the world's most moral army.” 

Now that the cease-fire is in effect – and Trump deserves a lot of credit for that cease-fire; he also deserves credit for seemingly pressuring Netanyahu to maintain it and to move to the second stage, which is part of Trump's overall plan – now we're hearing the U.S. government say the opposite: “Look, the reason we need to transfer the Gazans out of Gaza is because Israel has completely destroyed the entire society. It's apocalyptic, everything is rubble. There's no civilian infrastructure, there's no sewage, there's no water, there's disease. Nobody can live like this.”

This is what the world was saying for the 15 months that Joe Biden was overseeing this war when the State Department and the Biden administration were denying this is happening as well as the Israelis. Now, suddenly, the cease-fire is taking place and the Trump administration wants to justify the forcible transfer of all the people out of Gaza. Suddenly, now the truth is being acknowledged that Israel flattened all of Gaza and made it uninhabitable, which was always the plan: to drive those people out so that Israel could take over Gaza. 

Is any of this that Trump is talking about in the interest of the people who voted for him, of the American worker, of the American economy, of all the things that we were told were going to be the focus of Trump's presidency if he won? Of course not. This is serving Miriam Adelson and Bill Ackman and all the neocons who are celebrating because it's Israel's wet dream along with getting the United States to bomb Iran. This is Israel's wet dream: to have the United States remove all the Arabs and ethnically cleanse Gaza. The Israelis tried it and failed and, out of frustration, reduced all Gaza to rubble. 

The other thing that I want to note – and this is something that has happened several times now, so it's worth noting, it's not just a mistake off the cuff – pre-October 7, the population of Gaza was universally estimated to be 2.1, 2.2 or 2.3 million people. Definitely in excess of 2 million people. Every time Trump talks about the population of Gaza, he now talks about it as being 1.8 million. He says, “We need to move all of those people out of Gaza, all 1.8 million” and he said that figure several times. Clearly, that's the figure he was given. 

If I've got a difference there of 200,000, 300,000, or 400,000 people between the pre-war population of Gaza and the number that Donald Trump is giving of the number of Arabs who now live inside Gaza. Remember, these are Muslims and Christians. So, I think that deserves a lot of explanation as well. I have no doubt that the official death numbers that we've been given for Gaza are vastly lower than the reality. There are huge numbers of people buried under the rubble that have never been discovered. There are people who are missing. There are people who died as a result of this war because of food deprivations or medical deprivations, to say nothing of the people who were just blown up, shot and killed, who never were accounted for. So, you have this big discrepancy in terms of the numbers that were given for the pre-war Gazan population and the current population. 

But to me, the bigger question is: is the MAGA movement going to sacrifice every one of its values, every one of the agenda items it said it believed and every one of the changes to foreign policy it said it was going to implement at the altar of yet again serving Israel or making sure Israel can expand? Trump just said in the press conference that Israel is too small and a very small country when asked whether or not he would endorse its annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. This would be a policy strictly to serve Israel. 

On some level, it is also ironic because evangelicals in the United States have even greater devotion to Israel than many Jewish Zionists. Their religious belief is that Israel has to be united under the control of the Jews for the Messiah to return, not that it gets divided and Gaza is controlled by Jared Kushner and Miriam Adelson and a bunch of hedge funds that turn it into casinos. This is supposed to be the holy land that unites under the Jews and that's the precondition for the Messiah returning. And also that's what Israel wants too; Israel wants to control these lands. It wants it to be greater Israel not have Donald Trump and the United States own it, as Donald Trump put it. 

I just find it quite disturbing that parts of the Trump movement seem to be willing to go along with anything, no matter how contradictory it is to the ideology and the policies that they had been led to believe they were going to support. They deserve credit, we saw in the case of the H-1B visa, which we covered, that the Trump administration stood up and said, no, we're not about expanding H-1B visas. We don't want to replace American workers with foreigners; we want to do the opposite and there was a huge debate and conflict within the movement over that. This is exactly the same thing. I mean, Trump, since 2015, has been railing against the idiocy and dangers of involving ourselves in nation-building and engagements in the Middle East overseas. How disastrous that has been. And now he turns around and proposes something like this that not only has that dimension but also this massively criminal dimension, acts that would absolutely entail violence and the use of military force. 

There has been some walk back today of this by some Trump administration officials going to the press but if you look at the briefing by the White House press secretary, she was repeatedly asked, “Is Donald Trump proposing that military force be part of the plan if the Palestinians, as they've all said repeatedly, won't leave voluntarily and peacefully?” She said: “President Trump has not endorsed military force yet.” 

Again, I get that's the negotiating strategy of Trump: he keeps every option on the table because it gives him more leverage, etc. but it's hard to know what he's even negotiating for here because at the end of the day, even if he wants the Arab state dictators to go in and do this job and not have the United States do it, it's still going to require somebody to go in and forcibly remove the Gazans, which is central to Trump's plan and there's no way that can be done short of war. And that is absolutely something Trump is proposing. That would be horrific in countless ways, exactly what the United States does not need: another war to serve this foreign government in Tel Aviv and its interests. It would be a catastrophe of humanitarianism on an indescribable scale. 

So, I think this doesn't deserve hysteria. I don't think this deserves the kind of falling apart and unraveling that so often Trump statements do because they're not intended to necessarily predict what will happen but it absolutely deserves a lot of opposition so the Trump administration knows that nobody's going to tolerate more Middle East engagements, more wars, more nation-building – not even for the United States interest to be served, but for the state of Israel to be served and that is exactly what's happening here. 

All right. So, I wanted to respond quickly. I watched that press briefing today. I've seen this unfold today. I thought it deserved a lot of commentary and analysis and reaction and dissection because it's really Trump's first war, and he's been overtly threatening. I mean, he alluded to military force in Panama, but not a plan this explicit. I think it's very important to make clear as much as possible that Americans don't want this kind of war. They don't want to send their kids to these kinds of wars. They don't want to pay for these kinds of wars. We've done enough to serve the interest of Israel at the expense of the United States and something like this would be in an entirely different universe which makes it utterly unacceptable.

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Tulsi and RFK Jr. Approved by Key Senate Committees | Trump Meets Netanyahu: Wants to Cleanse Gaza | Pro-Palestinian Group Suspended at UMich
System Update #402

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!


Two of Donald Trump's most controversial nominees, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, each took a major step forward to being confirmed. 

 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington today to become, unsurprisingly, the first foreign leader received by President Trump since his inauguration and Trump again stated his support for moving all the Palestinians out of Gaza, a series of events that could and should and only can be described as ethnic cleansing. 

And then, the investigative reporter Dave Boucher, will be here to talk about yet another pro-Palestinian group, this one at the University of Michigan, which was suspended as a result of their activism in speech as the ongoing assault on free speech to protect Israel in the United States continues unabated. The Students Allied for Freedom And Equality, also known as SAFE, were suspended from all campus activities for two years. 


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We've been extensively covering the nomination by Donald Trump to two critical positions inside the cabinet, both of whom have a long history of being heterodox thinkers and anti-establishment officials and, as a result, have created more controversy than almost any other official. We've seen people like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik and John Ratcliffe at CIA get approved unanimously with all Democrats voting but because both Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump wants to make Director of National Intelligence, and RFK Jr., whom Trump wants to make Secretary of Health and Human Resources, have a history of contesting, challenging and denying a whole bunch of establishment orthodoxies, as well as condemning the corruption of the agencies that they would lead, those have created more controversy than almost any other up there – with Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth and, certainly, Matt Gaetz, the most controversial, who never made it to a confirmation hearing. 

Today, however, both of them had major successes, cleared major hurdles, and have substantially increased the likelihood that they will actually be confirmed by the full Senate. I don't want to say that it's 100%. It still does need to go to the Senate floor but here is the Senate Finance Committee voting today on the confirmation of RFK Jr. to become Health and Human Services Secretary. 

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Rubio's Shift: What is Trump's Foreign Policy? | Trump/Musk Attack CIA Fronts USAID & NED: With Mike Benz
System Update #401

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!


Ever since Donald Trump entered the White House to begin his second term, there has been – by design – a flurry of highly significant orders, policies and changes, most of which, for better or worse, were promised during the campaign. The rapidity of these changes has created the impression for some that there is no coherence behind them, that they are all just designed to appease Trump's base voters with symbolism or to impose frantic vengeance.

If one digs deeply enough, one can locate a coherent worldview, especially when it comes to Trump's foreign policy changes. When Trump began nominating a series of conventional establishment Republicans to key positions after the election, people like Marco Rubio at State and Elise Stefanik at the U.N. and others – many people demanded of us that we denounce these picks, given that they signaled that Trump's pledge for a new kind of foreign policy was clearly a fraud. In response, my answer was always the same: even though I didn't like some of those picks, I never thought that one could reliably read into every one of Trump's choices some sort of tarot card about what Trump would do given that I kept hearing from Trump's closest circle for a long time now that they were determined to ensure that all of Trump's picks this time around would follow rather than subvert his vision as laid out in the campaign. 

Marco Rubio just gave an interview to Megyn Kelly late last week that strongly suggests this is true, as Rubio sounded far less like the standard GOP warmonger he has been for years and a lot more like a committed America First advocate, with a series of surprising acknowledgments, highly unusual for someone occupying a high place in U.S. government officialdom. We’ll look at that, as well as the Trump administration's foreign policy actions thus far to determine which consistent and cohesive principles can be identified. 

Then: Our guest is Mike Benz, a former State Department official during the first Trump administration who has become one of the most outspoken and knowledgeable critics of the US Security State. In the last year, he has appeared on the shows of both Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson to do so. He has become a font of information about why USAID in particular is such a destructive, toxic and wasteful agency – as Democrats march to protect it - and he'll be here with us to talk about why that is.


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Donald Trump often railed against the toxic and evil influence of neocons, particularly in American foreign policy, throughout 2023 and 2024, as he attempted to return to the White House. He seemed convinced of it and had a lot of policy initiatives designed to undermine the promises of neoconservatism and, in the process, alienated a lot of them, beginning with things like his opposition to or at least skepticism about the U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, the U.S. making NATO a central part of our foreign policy, even though the original purpose which is to deter the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe, obviously no longer applies, and a whole variety of other pieties of the foreign policy establishment Donald Trump was waging a frontal assault on. 

Once Trump won the election and began choosing his national security cabinet, a lot of people immediately concluded that all of that must be a fraud because Trump was choosing people like Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Mike Huckabee to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel, like John Ratcliffe at the CIA, like Mike Waltz to be his National Security Advisor, who have a long history similar to Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley or even Liz Cheney in endorsing this sort of posture of endless war, of having the U.S. dominate the world in exactly the way that would please most neocons. 

Although, as I said, I wasn't thrilled with those picks, I wasn't the one elected, so my choices would be much different. I was very resistant to the idea that simply because Trump was choosing some, by no means all, but some politicians who have a long history of establishment dogma. Those are the ones who sped through confirmation in the Senate, of course, including with lots of Democratic support. It didn't mean that those people were going to be governing foreign policy in the Trump administration because it was clear that Donald Trump knew that he was the one who won this race and intended to impose his vision on the world and wanted loyalists around him who would carry out those visions. 

In contrast to the first term, when he had a lot of people there who were deliberately sabotaging his foreign policy, often applauded by the media, including members, by the way, of the U.S. military, which meant that the U.S. military was essentially seizing civilian control of foreign policy, seizing control from democratically elected officials and assigning it to themselves so that they would often counter or even ignore his foreign policy decisions and they would be celebrated by the press as the adult in the room. This was all something that I knew from hearing from many people inside the Trump circle, both on the show and otherwise, that they were most determined to avoid. And so, when they were picking the Marco Rubios and the Elise Stefaniks, I wasn't happy about it but I also knew that it wasn't proof that Trump was going to lead a conventional U.S. foreign policy because it was clear that they were picking people who, beyond any particular set of beliefs, was willing to be loyal to Donald Trump's worldview and his agenda, because that's what had just been ratified by the American people. 

Even The New York Times in the wake of Trump’s victory in November, and I'm not sure they meant this as a compliment or as a warning, but either way, they were the ones who were coming out and saying, look, these people were neocons for sure, but they've now made radical, visible and palpable changes to the way they talk about foreign policy. Here, The New York Times headline:

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