Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
BELLINGCAT—Who Funds the Favorite Outlet of NBC & the CIA? Plus: Media Pushes Pentagon Lies as Biden Drones More Innocents
Video Transcript
May 24, 2023
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Good evening. It's Friday, May 19. 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, controversy is once again swirling around the U.S. Government-funded site called “Bellingcat,” which, depending on your perspective, is either celebrated for its intrepid reporting and courageous investigations or is notorious for its relentless propaganda, always in servitude to the foreign policy agenda of the Western intelligence agencies and neoliberal global institutions which fund it. 

Mystery has long surrounded how this outfit, in a very short period, skyrocketed from an obscure rag team of failed journalists and dweebish, online neoliberals into a site that receives ample funding from the U.S. Government and the EU's most potent propaganda arms and has become genuinely revered and aggressively protected by the most pro-establishment media sectors, from NBC and CNN – with whom Bellingcat is officially partnered, even though those networks rarely, if ever, disclose that fact when defending Bellingcat – to numerous Western governments and politically active billionaires who are also counted among their most rabid supporters and ample funders. 

The latest controversy came this week when Elon Musk accurately described what Bellingcat does. “Bellingcat literally specializes in psychological operations,” Musk said. Immediately, the most devoted loyalist of U.S. foreign policy in media, politics and academia rose in indignation to Bellingcat’s defense, as they always do, all without even mentioning, let alone refuting, the rather crucial fact that a significant chunk of Bellingcat funding comes from exactly the agencies that specialize in that kind of PSYOP propaganda campaign, always in an alignment with the U.S. and EU foreign policy. 

One can barely imagine a fact more revealing than the situation we have here. The most beloved and popular “news site” among established media outlets and pro-establishment academics is one that just so happens to be funded by CIA adjacent government agencies, EU foreign policy units, and the same small handful of multi-billionaires – George Soros, Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar over and over and over – whose fingerprints are always at the center of virtually every campaign of propaganda, disinformation and censorship. To say that Bellingcat is a shady and sketchy operation is to woefully understate the case. We'll show you who funds them, what functions they serve, and why glorifying and protecting them has become so crucial to CIA-aligned operatives and the nation's largest media corporations. 

Then: Joe Biden's drone program once again exterminated the life of an innocent person, this time in Syria, where a Hellfire missile fired by an American drone killed a 56-year-old father of ten who has spent his life languishing in poverty working as a bricklayer. The U.S. government once again lied about their victims, boasting that they killed a senior al-Qaida leader and the U.S. corporate media once again mindlessly spread those lies, dutifully claiming that Biden took out a senior al-Qaida official, even though they had no idea whether that was true at all. It turns out it wasn't. The same deceitful reporting has been going on for years, ever since President Obama bureaucratically redefined the word ‘militant’ so that essentially anyone the U.S. government kills by drones or bombing is now by definition a terrorist. 

This all comes on the heels of media outlets destroying the life and reputation of a pregnant woman who's a nurse by taking a completely decontextualized video that appeared online and basically, as it turns out, stapled the racism label to her forehead. As we will show you, we yet again find that those who most vocally and self-righteously claim to combat disinformation are, in fact, those who spread disinformation most maliciously and casually, all while calling themselves journalists. 

As a reminder, System Update is now available in podcast form. You can follow us and hear us there in podcast version on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform to do so. Rate and review our show to help spread its visibility.

Welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. 


 

Whenever a tiny and obscure entity is jettisoned overnight into an international celebrity, it merits a great deal of critical scrutiny to find out who exactly is behind this new entity, who funds it, and what is it that they get in return for that funding. There are occasions when a Hollywood dream comes true when a young, scrappy group of rabidly intrepid and independent investigators stumbles into or finds some incredibly consequential story or series of stories and becomes celebrated for that reason – that does on occasion happen. And then there's Bellingcat – an entity that completely deviates from that script in every sense of the word. Bellingcat is indeed rabidly celebrated by almost every key establishment sector in politics, media and academia. Anyone who criticizes them or even subjects them to critical scrutiny as we're doing here will instantly become the target of all sorts of vitriol, all sorts of rabid anger, principally from employees of the largest media outlets in the West who have come to depend on Bellingcat and their reputation for independent journalism and courageous investigations for the mythology they like to propagate about what press freedom means in the United States, and more importantly, how their revelations prove the validity of U.S. foreign military adventures, U.S. and NATO wars, and all other kinds of foreign policy goals of the United States and EU, which it just so happens, turns out, to be among their biggest funders. 

Bellingcat, as I suggested at the beginning has been the subject of controversy for a long time now but they found a new controversy because earlier this week, the owner of Twitter and the CEO of Space X and Tesla, Elon Musk, was interviewed on CNBC and was asked about Bellingcat, and Elon Musk stated what is the truth, something that is demonstrable and dispositive. If you just look at the evidence as we're about to, we essentially said that Bellingcat exists for psychological operations, for spreading propaganda on behalf of Western centers of power. Let's watch this interview

 

(Video. CNBC. May 16, 2023)

 

CNBC: But when you link to somebody who is talking about the guy who killed children in a mall in Allen, Texas, you say something like it might be a bad psyops, not quite sure what you meant, but…

 

Elon Musk: In that particular case – not that the people were killed, but it was, I think incorrectly ascribed via white supremacist action. And the evidence for that was some obscure Russian website that no one's ever heard of, that had no followers, and the company that found this is Bellingcat, and you know what Bellingcat does, psyops.



That was Elon Musk's accurate description of what Bellingcat does. I'm not here to report on or analyze or comment upon the evolution of facts concerning that shooter and what ideology motivated him, simply because I have not devoted the time or attention necessary to opine with any degree of confidence on that question. The question I'm interested in instead is the broader claim about what Bellingcat does because they have become extremely influential in how narratives in Western discourse are formulated. The corporate media in the United States come to has come to rely on them to such an extent that they will just mindlessly repeat whatever Bellingcat claims is the case. And so interrogating what Bellingcat is and who funds them and why these state agencies and neoliberal billionaires fund Bellingcat is of vital importance precisely because of what Elon Musk said in this video – not about this specific instance of whether this shooter was motivated by Nazi ideology or not, but instead the broader assertion that Bellingcat exists for PSYOPS, for psychological operation campaigns, which is a Cold War term, that connotes an attempt to influence and manipulate public opinion by typically secretive operations with the inside government. His description is entirely correct. When he gave this interview and said this about Bellingcat, it created a huge amount of controversy because Bellingcat has become extremely important to all kinds of centers of power in the West. 

Let's pull up the documents here where we can take a look at exactly what happened. So here on the screen when controversy arose, you have Elon Musk essentially repeating what he said in that interview. He said

 

Didn’t the story come from @bellingcat, which literally specializes in psychological operations? I don’t want to hurt their feelings, but this is either the weirdest story ever or a very bad psyop! (@elonmusk. May 9, 2023)



Lots of people responded to Elon Musk by attacking him, insisting that his accusations about Bellingcat were unjust principally leading figures in the media. CNN’s Jake TAPPER responded to the controversy provoked by Musk’s comments by saying:

@bellingcat is a great journalistic organization. Conversely, Musk once linked to a deranged article about Paul Pelosi in the Santa Monica Observer, a nutjob website that claimed in 2016 that Hillary Clinton had died and had been replaced by a body double. (@jaketapper. May 16, 2023)



 It's true that Elon Musk's tweet in that instance was reckless. He deleted it. But the question that actually matters from which people like Jake Tapper are trying to distract is what is Bellingcat. It's Bellingcat, not Elon Musk, who has become a leading source of narrative influence by Western media outlets, including CNN. And so, every time there's a controversy surrounding Bellingcat, you have people inside CNN and NBC doing what Jake Tapper did here, which is rising to their defense and heaping praise on them as a “great journalistic organization.” 

The Yale history professor who has become a leading resistance advocate, uses his credentials as an Ivy League professor to essentially propagate Democratic Party talking points. He's a huge fan of U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. security state, and a fanatical supporter of the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. He made a lot of money writing books about how Donald Trump is the new Hitler, how he's the singular threat to everything sacred in our democracy. He's just like a resistance troll on Twitter who happens to be an Ivy League professor of history. And here's Timothy Snyder, unsurprisingly, as an ardent defender of the U.S. security state, and U.S. foreign policy, doing the same thing

 

Bellingcat is a treasure trove of hugely important investigative journalism. (@TimothyDSnyder. May 17, 2023) 

 

One NBC personality who has an 8 p.m. show on MSNBC, Chris Hayes, decided that he wanted to refute the accusations about Bellingcat. Chris had been using his Twitter account to defend Bellingcat. And then in order to refute the accusations about Bellingcat, who did Chris Hayes bring on in order to discuss this? Did he bring on a critic of Bellingcat? Did he bring on somebody who has done investigative reporting about the U.S. government and European security agencies that fund Bellingcat to ask the question why would the leading propaganda arms of the U.S. government and EU security state agencies be funding a great journalistic outlet that is intrepid investigation and independent reporting? That's not who they go and try and fund. They obviously try and fund outlets that promote their agenda, that promote their foreign policy. And that's why every time Bellingcat needs defenders, the people who stand up and defend them are the people who are the most loyal devotees of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Justice Department, to Homeland Security, the war in Ukraine and European security state agencies – because that's exactly who funds Bellingcat is. We're about to show you.

 So, you would think if you're going to do a TV segment where you intend to or purport to refute, what you understand about Bellingcat and the widespread criticisms about how they disseminate propaganda and don't do journalism at all, you would at least speak to a critic of Bellingcat or acknowledge the evidence about who funds them and how they function as a way to have a full and informed debate. But of course, that's not what people in corporate media ever do. There is no dissent on NBC News. You turn on NBC News or MSNBC or CNN and what you find is exactly the same thing all the time. Two people or three or four or five all violently nodding their heads in agreement with one another to the point that you worry they're actually going to get a neck sprain. That's what these outlets exist to do. They are a closed system of propaganda. And the way, you know that is they never have anybody on who disagrees with the view of the News Corporation. So, if I wanted to do a Bellingcat segment and I had a guest on, I would try and have that guest be someone from Bellingcat or somebody who defends Bellingcat. That's not what they do. 

So, Chris Hayes, a virulent defender of Bellingcat, decided to invite a Bellingcat operative to refute these claims and never once was the funding of Bellingcat mentioned or the criticisms of Bellingcat and the basis for those criticisms ever mentioned. Instead, they both joined together and scoffed at Bellingcat critics in a segment, a part of which we're about to show you. 

Just to clarify, these two are not related biologically. This Bellingcat operative is not the nephew or the son of Chris Hayes. I understand why people have asked that question, but I want to just clarify that to my knowledge, at least, they have no biological relationship despite their virtually identical appearance. But here's how this segment went. 

 

(Video. MSNBC. May 17, 2023)

 

Chris Hayes: So, I want you to respond to the world's richest man and the owner of Twitter basically saying this is a fabricated PSYOP that you invented. 

 

Bellingcat Research Director:  Yeah, well, I mean, obviously it's not. I mean, […] But I mean, you know, Musk is just getting garbage information because he's just entirely kind of flooded in this like far right, you know, info space. But, you know, people, you know, Glenn Greenwald and all these types who are kind of putting this kind of stuff out there. So, he's just getting, you know, garbage in, garbage out kind of. I was not processing. I don't think he actually understands this all this well. 

 

So, there was a lot of name-calling there. There was a lot of snickering, a lot of patronizing commentary. Do you know what there wasn't? Any substantive engagement with the criticisms, any of the reporting that we've done, because they cannot confront that. They don't want their audience to know about that. That's why they don't have a critique of Bellingcat or even mention the criticism themselves. I also will never stop finding it incredibly ironic that a TV host who never criticizes the U.S. security state except to beg them to do more on behalf of his party and an operative from a propaganda arm that is actually funded by the U.S. security state and its propaganda arms and EU security state agencies are calling me someone who has been a career-long critic of those security agencies, a far-right operative or a far-right voice. And of course, Chris Hayes lacks the courage. Chris Hayes has known me for 15 years. To point that out, that is a preposterous label. I don't care about these labels but the point is if this is how they try to discredit people that use these labels that they know are signifiers to their audience, once they put that label on someone, you can just tune them out forever. You don't have to engage with their reporting. You don't have to engage in the substance of anything that they say. So, it's just always bizarre to be called right-wing by people whose mission in life appears to serve the CIA, serve the U.S. in neo-wars, proxy wars, and spying by the FBI and censorship by homeland security. It's just a very odd dynamic that results in that but this is the kind of thing you see. What matters here is two things. One is that NBC and CNN feel so compelled, like on a kind of moral imperative mission to defend Bellingcat as a great journalistic outlet, even though they're funded by those agencies. Since when are great journalistic outlets funded by the U.S. government or by EU security state agencies? But the other part of it is they just don't even need to tell their audience what the criticism is. 

So, let's look at what the criticism is. Let's look at the facts. No snickering, no name calling, no casually, recklessly tossing around political labels to discredit. Let's just look at the facts of who exactly it is that has made Bellingcat able to function, who gives money to Bellingcat and who obviously supports the work they do. 

Here, from Bellingcat, its own website, is a section called “How to Support Bellingcat.” So, if you are inclined to transfer money out of your bank account to theirs, they provide the information for how that can be done. And you can see here that they say approximately “a third of Bellingcat’s budget is currently raised from workshops held throughout the year.” And then, they say “We would also like to express our gratitude to the following organizations for their support.” One of them is Civitas, the other the European Commission, which is a unit of the EU government; Wellspring philanthropic fund, and “several organizations who graciously support our work but prefer to remain anonymous.” 

Shouldn't we know who the funders are of this great journalistic outlet that is constantly being used by major media corporations to shape their narrative to the extent we do know who funds them, though, we know that it's the European Commission and then, keep in mind Wellspring Philanthropic Fund and Civitates because we're going to show you who they are. But the most important part of Bellingcat’s funding – both important in terms of how much they get from there and the portion of their budget that is accounted for but also important in terms of revealing their true function – is that they are funded by the U.S. and the EU governments. What media outlet could possibly maintain any credibility as a journalistic outlet when they're being funded by major governments on whom they're constantly reporting in a way that, just coincidentally, in almost every case happens to align with the foreign policy agenda of those governments that fund them? 

In their own financial report from 2021, they have a line item here: “Income from other nonprofit organizations.” There you see the National Endowment for Democracy, which in terms of the actual 2020 budget and the planned 2020 budget is the largest single donor, at least listed in these sections. 

We're going to show you what the National Endowment for Democracy is, but by its own description, it is funded entirely by the U.S. government. It answers to the Biden White House and to the Democratic Senate and now the Republican House. So, it is supervised and funded entirely by the U.S. government, and its mission, from the start, explicitly, was to do the work of the CIA – but to do it with transparency publicly because they were concerned that the CIA's reputation was getting contaminated by how secretly they operate and the idea was, let's create an agency that will claim is designed to spread democracy throughout the world. We all know what that means. Whenever the U.S. government wants to facilitate regime change in another part of the world, remove one government or replace it with the government they like better, they claim that they're doing so to spread democracy. That was the justification for invading Iraq. That was the justification for changing the government of Libya. That was the justification for a covert CIA war in Syria, all of which Bellingcat supported. That's the justification for the proxy war in Ukraine. And every time the U.S. government has facilitated regime change, even when the regime they're taking down was actually a democratically elected government, they call that spreading democracy. For decades during the Cold War – you can go back and see coups that the United States government engineered, taking down democratically elected governments as they did in Brazil in 1964, as they did in Chile, as they did in so many others – in El Salvador, Nicaragua, so many other countries throughout the world – it's always called the promotion of democracy. All U.S.-sponsored coups are called that. That's what this National Endowment for Democracy exists to do, is to fund opposition groups in countries that we want to change the government of. 

In 2014, when Victoria Nuland led the change of government in Ukraine, the coup in Ukraine, where the democratically elected president – whom the U.S. perceived was too close to Moscow but was democratically elected – was removed from power as a result of oppositional groups funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and other arms of the U.S. government, that was called the promotion of democracy. Even though it resulted in the democratically elected president being removed from power before his term expired, and the installation of a leader that the U.S. government picked because they knew that that would best serve their interest. In a recording we've all heard, where Victoria Nuland was speaking to the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and they were debating who should be the next leader and they picked the leader and that's who got installed. That's always what the promotion of democracy means, going back to the Cold War and still now, the U.S. does coups and calls it an advancement of democracy. That's what the National Endowment for Democracy exists to do. It's a U.S. government-funded agency designed to facilitate regime change throughout the world and call it “promotion of democracy.” That is Bellingcat, its biggest funder or one of its biggest funders, as demonstrated by their own financial disclosure documents. 

How can anybody possibly believe that the new National Endowment for Democracy is substantially funding some sort of independent journalistic outlet when the whole reason the National Endowment for Democracy exists is to do the CIA's work out in the open? That's their own description of what their function is and always has been. So, if you're going on television to do a segment about Bellingcat and purport to refute the criticisms of them, you might want to mention the rather significant fact that it is the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA adjacent arm, that provides them with a significant amount of their funding. You also might want to mention the equally significant fact that the EU also funds Bellingcat. 

Item line 17, in “income from governments,” the first line item is the European Union, and the next is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Please tell me what independent journalistic outlets are funded by the security organizations and the security state agencies of governments around the world. Only for those outlets to then go and report, coincidentally in a way that furthers the foreign policy agenda of those governments. Is there anything more revealing about the function of our corporate media and pro-establishment journal academics, like Timothy Snyder, than the fact that the journalistic outlet they herald and most revere is one funded by the U.S. security state? This shows you how integrated all of these centers of powerful institutions are. Every journalist should look immediately askance and with great skepticism at Bellingcat because of this funding. Unless you think the CIA's mission – or the National Endowment for Democracy’s mission – is to just find really good journalists who are there to follow the facts wherever they might lead, even if it undermines U.S. foreign policy goals, just because the CIA cares so much about making sure we have an informed citizenry. If you believe that about the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy and the European Union, maybe then you would actually believe that Bellingcat is actually a journalistic organization. But unless you believe that idiotic fairy tale that even an eighth grader would instantly find laughable, it would be very difficult to herald this entity as something journalistic, or, at the very least, when you talk about Bellingcat, to defend that, you should be mentioning these obviously relevant facts. 

Let's take a look now at a couple of other Bellingcat documents: “Funders and partnerships.” This, too, is from a Bellingcat publication right on their website. 

 

 

So, the European Union – on whom they're constantly reporting, on whose words they're constantly reporting, on whose foreign policy they constantly report – is a funder of Bellingcat. 

Let me ask you a question. If Bellingcat were frequently reporting facts that undermined, rather than advanced, the foreign policy interest of the EU and the CIA, do you think that these government agencies would be funding Bellingcat? Would they be funding media outlets that are adversarial to them? To ask the question is to answer it. In fact, asking the question is to reveal the utter fraud at the heart of Bellingcat. 

The independent media outlet Declassified UK offers a comprehensive report on what Bellingcat is. They talk about the fact that one of its leading funders is the National Endowment for Democracy, NED, which funds Bellingcat. The former CIA official they quote said that the National Endowment of Democracy is a “vehicle for U.S. government propaganda.” The National Endowment for Democracy, which is a big Bellingcat funder, is funded entirely by the U.S. Congress, or almost entirely, and it has repeatedly plowed millions of dollars into groups that call themselves media outlets.

 The New York Times reported, and we'll show you this article, in 1997, the National Endowment for Democracy was “created […] to do in the open what the CIA has surreptitiously done for decades.” This is the arm of the CIA that is explicitly acknowledged and always has been in Washington. It talks about how the media has been involved in undermining and removing governments that are too disobedient to Washington, including Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. It quotes former directors of the NED openly admitting that what essentially their goal is to do the same thing as the CIA does just out in the open. And it talks about the money that the National Endowment for Democracy gives to Bellingcat, which is something you will find just by looking at Bellingcat’s own documents. 

Back in 2010, the actually independent media outlet ProPublica published an article about the National Endowment for Democracy and noted the propagandistic role that it plays. And the National Endowment for Democracy sent a letter to ProPublica objecting to that characterization. In responding to that, the probe ProPublica, which is a widely, highly regarded media outlet, said that they stand behind that characterization. And this is part of what they said about why they called the National Endowment for Democracy a state propaganda arm:

 

In the FAQs on its side, NED acknowledges its ongoing relationship with lawmakers, saying that its “continued funding is dependent on the continued support of the White House and Congress.” Those who spearheaded the creation of it have long acknowledged it was part of an effort to move from covert to overt efforts to foster democracy. 

President Reagan said in 1983 that “this program will not be hidden in the shadows. It will stand proudly in the spotlight, and that's where it belongs.” Allan Weinstein, a former acting president of the National Endowment for Democracy and one of the authors of the study that led to its creation, told David Ignatius, who I often refer to as the Washington Post CIA spokesman David Ignatius, in a 1991 interview that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA. The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection.” (ProPublica. Nov 24, 2010).

 

 

 In other words, as I said, the U.S. government had a problem with the CIA because everything they were doing was in secret. Much of it was contaminated and they needed a way to redefine it to make it appear more noble. Therefore, they created an agency, the National Endowment for Democracy, whose only goal is to promote the CIA's agenda but to do so in a way that seems more open – amidst that agency that exists solely to promote the agenda of the CIA by their own explanation, their own self-description. There is major funding for Bellingcat. Why? Why would they be funding an independent journalistic entity? They don't. It's preposterous. They fund outlets, exactly as Elon Musk said, that are designed to disseminate PSYOPS – psychological operations – and propaganda campaigns and perception management on behalf of the U.S. security state. 

The New York Times about the National Endowment for Democracy, in 1997, says – and this is how the New York Times always talked about this entity:

 

Congress routinely appropriates tens of millions of dollars in covert and overt money to use in influencing domestic politics abroad. 

The National Endowment for Democracy, created 15 years ago to do in the open what the CIA has done surreptitiously for decades, spends $30 million a year to support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements, and the news media in dozens of countries, including China. (The New York Times. 1997).

 

They're not doing that because they want to help other countries be more democratic. They're doing that to influence those other countries and the domestic politics in them to make them more aligned with U.S. government foreign policy. It's absurd that I even have to explain this. 

And yet, Bellingcat, if you point out that the National Endowment for Democracy is an arm of the CIA and an arm of the U.S. government, has convinced its followers that this is nothing more than Russian propaganda. Every single fact that Democrats and corporate media employees like Chris Hayes dislike is instantly labeled Russian disinformation or far-right. Automatically. 

So, what has been true and stated openly by the NED and by the media for 20 years, 30 years is that the NED exists to promote the agenda of the CIA. If you say that now, you'll be accused of spreading Russian disinformation. That reminds me a lot of how for 10 years – the last 10 years – every major master of Western media has warned that the age of battalion is the most significant fighting force in Ukraine and unfortunately, and quite dangerously, they happen to be Nazis. They happen to embrace an overt neo-Nazi ideology. You can find articles in Time Magazine, in The Guardian, USA Today, and every major media outlet, including The New York Times, before the war in Ukraine, saying that the Azov battalion is an overt neo-Nazi organization but then, once the war in Ukraine happened and it came time to arm and fund that group, suddenly it became Russian propaganda overnight to point out what the media had been saying for years. In exactly the same way that in the CIA war under Obama to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria, it was just simply true that the U.S. was aligned with Al-Qaida and even ISIS was fighting on the same side as Al-Qaida and even ISIS. And yet, if you point that out, you get accused of being someone disseminating Russian disinformation, even though it is true. Syria was the number one foreign policy goal of the CIA over the last decade. Trump's opposition to that regime change operation, which he enunciated in 2015, was one of the major reasons the CIA was so devoted to destroying the Trump campaign – he was an explicit opponent of their number one foreign policy goal, which was to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. 

Bellingcat first became a known entity, and first came to the public spotlight, as a result of their “independent” investigations that constantly supported the CIA's accusations against the government of Bashar al-Assad – that they were using chemical weapons. In every instance, Bellingcat was on the side of the CIA. They'd done the same thing in Ukraine. That's what they exist to do. Exactly as Elon Musk said. That's why they're funded by these organizations. 

There is also a 2021 document from Bellingcat in which they show who their partners are. There you see one of the partners is the OCCRP, another one is the BBC, CNN, and NBC, among other partners as well. And it is, I think, quite extraordinary, just independent of everything else I've talked about that we just watched a CNN personality, Jake Tapper, rise in defense of Bellingcat on Twitter, herald them as a wonderful journalistic outlet. We watched part of the segment that NBC's Chris Hayes did where he invited a Bellingcat operative to sit in agreement with them about how great Bellingcat is. And to my knowledge, none of these networks ever disclose this partnership they have with Bellingcat while defending Bellingcat. I know for certain that in that entire segment Chris Hayes did, never once did he say, ‘Oh, by the way, you may want to know that my corporate employer, NBC, is an official partner of Bellingcat.’ There are CNN segments. I can't say that every CNN segment that talked about Bellingcat failed to disclose this, but the ones we found also have no disclosure of any kind, nor do CNN employees defending Bellingcat over social media. This is just something you may ignore – a kind of relevant fact when these news outlets are defending Bellingcat.

Here are some more connections of Bellingcat. Here are what they call “Bellingcat supporters.” And there you see the flag of the EU because it's absolutely true that the EU is a supporter of Bellingcat as is the National Endowment for Democracy, which again, according to its own description, exists to promote the agenda of the CIA. 

This is who's behind Bellingcat. This is why they skyrocketed to notoriety. This is why so many pro-establishment operatives and propagandists are so vested in defending them. Because this is what they exist to do. This is whose agenda they are devoted to promoting whatever they are. It is not journalistic. Here is one of their partners, the OCCRP. And I think what's really important here is that when you look at who funds Bellingcat directly by looking at their financial disclosures, as we just did, you will find that they get money directly from the National Endowment for Democracy and the EU. And people often say, well, those aren't very big amounts but the reality of what happens is that so much of this money is laundered by the U.S. government and the EU government giving money to Bellingcat sponsors, which then pass on that money to Bellingcat. If you look at Bellingcat’s financial statements, you will see direct government money from the EU and the U.S. but what you don't see is how much indirect money they get from the U.S. and the EU through their sponsors, such as the OCCRP. 

So, here's the OCCRP, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Here you see their financial statements for 2020. Their biggest donor by far, in fact, half or more than half of their budget came from the U.S. government, $5 million in 2020. And that's a budget, a total budget of $8 million. Actually, around 70% of their budget came from the U.S. government. So, they passed on money as well to Bellingcat. That's one of Bellingcat’s sponsors. This is how this works. It's the same web of money, the same people constantly funding these entities, the same billionaires – Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, George Soros – and the same governments laundering this money through all of these different networks that have benign-sounding names like the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project – who could be opposed to that? – when in reality what they exist to do is to promote the agenda of these governments by labeling government critics “Russian agents,” by constantly inventing propaganda to promote foreign policy agencies and by laundering all this money around. 

Let's look at another document from this OCCRP, which is a sponsor of Bellingcat. Here they have a page titled “Who Supports Our Work” – and what do we find here? More Western governments pouring their money into a Bellingcat partner, the Slovak Agency for International Development Cooperation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and the United Kingdom's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Do you think these entities here are funding independent organizations that are willing to be adversarial to their foreign policy agenda if the facts lead them there? Or do you think these governments are funding exactly those entities they know exist or propagandized on behalf of their agenda? 

On the second page of this entity's funding, we find, unsurprisingly, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and, again, the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as George Soros’ Open Societies Foundation. So, this OCCRP is funded by the U.S. State Department, by the U.S. security state, by numerous Western security intel agencies, as well as by George Soros. And this, too, is a sponsor of Bellingcat. It's just money laundered all over the place by the same sources for the same reasons. 

Here is another list of Bellingcat sponsors and it's not just that George Soros is a sponsor of Bellingcat indirectly, though, he is, he's also a direct sponsor. There you see the open societies foundations. Always. Whenever these outfits emerge, you find the fingerprints of George Soros. 

One of their partners is the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund. This is another sponsor or funder of Bellingcat. We showed you the financial disclosure where they list the Wellspring Philanthropic fund. What is that? According to Influence Watch – and we verified these facts independently:

 

The Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, formerly known as the Matan B’Seter Foundation, was created in 2001 as part of an elaborate and secretive network of grantmaking organizations funded by three hedge fund billionaires: Andrew Shechtel, David Gelbaum and C. Frederick Taylor. (Wellspring Philanthropic Fund)



So, there are all kinds of this kind of money floating around, too, that ends up in Bellingcat. 

One of the partners of Bellingcat is the Center for American Progress. The Center for American Progress is, of course, the biggest Democratic Party think tank, the biggest neoliberal think tank in Washington. It was founded and run for years by John Podesta, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton. It was then run by Neera Tanden, who is now replacing Susan Rice in the Biden White House as the chief domestic policy adviser. If you look at who funds the Center for American Progress, you see entities like Bloomberg; the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is Mark Zuckerberg and his wife; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and also Wellspring Philanthropic Fund. So, they're funding the largest Democratic Party think tank in Washington – as well as Bellingcat – because this money just floats around from all the same sources. 

The Center for American Progress funders, include Microsoft Corporation, of course; the Open Society Foundation; you have the Omidyar Network Fund. So, Pierre Omidyar, so money is there, as well as the Walton Family Corporation. Again, Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, George Soros, always their money is appearing wherever these things are funded. 

So, if you were going to do a segment like this inviting this little dweeby Bellingcat operative onto your show – who happens to be a doppelganger of the host for reasons that I guess are coincidental – and you want to put on this Elon Musk-fueling far-right conspiracy theories about Bellingcat and mentioned me as a far-right conspiracy theorist Elon Musk is relying upon – let me just ask you to compare this segment completely bereft of any subset of information, refusing to even acknowledge, let alone confront, all the facts I just showed you, to the way that we do reporting – which is to lay out all the facts for you so that you can make decisions about what you think about Bellingcat. I don't conceal the other side of the story. I showed you their defense. I showed you other defenses of them, but then I showed you the facts about who's behind Bellingcat and what those sponsors and funders exist to do. And when you actually do that, when you actually respect your audience enough to share with them both sides of the story and to walk them through the actual reporting that you've done, not using bizarre sources that just appeared in the last five years and that are funded by weird government agencies, but often using Bellingcat’s own documents and the documents of their funders to trace where the money goes to and why these outlets exist and what they fund outlets like Bellingcat for, the facts become extremely self-evident, very manifest. 

And so, there is a good reason why CNN and NBC are so eager to herald Bellingcat. There's a reason why U.S. security state propagandists like Professor Timothy Snyder become so indignant whenever anyone criticizes them. There's a reason that Western centers of power are so desperate to criticize any effort to bring transparency to Bellingcat. It's because they have become arguably the single most valuable and influential propaganda arm of the CIA, the U.S. security state and Western intelligence agencies on behalf of their foreign policy agenda. And to know that, you should not listen to me and my claims, or Elon Musk and his, or these two, and there's this Chris Hayes and this Bellingcat person – you should look at the facts. They won't show you those facts we just did. And I think that the picture that emerges is crystal clear and no longer even needs my commentary. 


 

So, speaking of propaganda and how Western intelligence agencies deceive the public systematically, there was a drone strike just recently in Syria that we were told was a great success. We were told that we should give great credit to President Biden because this drone strike in Syria took out a senior al-Qaida leader. Remember al-Qaida? We still hate al-Qaida. We're still told for some reason they're a danger to the United States, even though I don't remember the last attack carried out by al-Qaida on U.S. soil. It's been a while. But let's assume Al-Qaida is still this grave threat. We're all supposed to hate them. We're all supposed to applaud whenever we kill someone said to be al-Qaida, even though they just got replaced the next day. And nothing changes other than the need to replace those missiles we use to kill people. I still don't understand why we're even in Syria. There's no war in Syria that we're involved in, and yet we still have troops stationed in Syria. We're still bombing Syria. Of course, no congressional authorization. 

There was recently an attempt by Congressman Matt Gaetz with his sector of the Republican Party that in this one instance was joined by some of the progressives in the Democratic Party to de-authorize the use of troops in Syria – because I don't think anyone can ask the question why we're bombing there, why we're occupying Syria still. And it overwhelmingly failed because, as usual, the established wings of the Democratic and Republican Party united to keep those troops there. The way Joe Biden and the CIA and the Pentagon want to. As part of that weird, unexplained, unauthorized military campaign, we recently killed somebody. And we were told, as you can see here from Reuters on May 3, 2023, “U.S. Targets Senior al-Qaida leader in NW Syria.” 

So, this is the claim from the media all over the place that we took out a senior leader of al-Qaida and everybody was happy, it turns out, in credit to the Washington Post for noting it – although it was the Pentagon that came to them and told them because it was about to be exposed – as you see in their tweet: 

 

Breaking News, U.S. military officials are walking back claims that a strike in Syria killed a senior al-Qaida figure following claims by the dead man's family that he had no ties to terrorists but was tending to sheep when he was slain by the missile. 

U.S. officials walk back claim drone strike killed senior al-Qaida leader, the acknowledgment comes as a terrorism expert and the dead man's family have cast doubt on a Pentagon statement indicating the operation targeted a high-ranking militant in Syria. (@washingtonpost. May 18, 2023).

 

The article goes on to explain that this guy was a father of ten, that he has spent his whole life in poverty. They interviewed neighbors saying that he's always lived a very quiet life, that he was a bricklayer for a long time, and now he tends to sheep and he just had his life exterminated. And the U.S. government announced that it was a senior al-Qaida official, and the media mindlessly reported that. This has been going on for many years. This is a critical way that the U.S. government lies on behalf of military operations conducted by the United States. And it shows you how casually and willingly these new corporate media outlets are willing to lie, how casually and easily and eagerly they will write down whatever they're told to say by their sources in the U.S. security state. I'm sure you remember the horrific, genuinely horrific drone strike that President Biden ordered on our way out of Afghanistan that exterminated a family of ten people, all completely innocent, with no connections whatsoever to the al-Qaida crisis. At the time that we were told the exact opposite, that the drone strike actually killed a critical ISIS planner, one of the people who planned the suicide attack on the airport in Kabul days earlier that killed dozens of people, including U.S. soldiers. 

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@ggreenwald Glenn, could you do a segment on the escalations between India-Pakistan sometime soon? As someone who’s not an expert on the history I would appreciate your trusted perspective on it, possibly with guests laying out either side’s position on it.

Interesting discussion last night. I had not realized Harvard's historical funding situation, and I think we need to DOGE that. They have enough money to get by on their own now. The general consensus of those in the live chat seemed to be to cut the funding, and stop telling them what to do. Great discussion!
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Christopher Rufo: On Civil Liberties, the American Founding, Academic Freedom, and More
System Update #450

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

And in response, you said this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The first question comes from @thefarside:

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

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

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

He writes:

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

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

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

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

 

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

He says:

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

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

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It's a great question. Thank you. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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