Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
The Largely Forgotten—And Still-Highly Suspect—2001 Anthrax Attacks That Enabled the Iraq War & Shine Light COVID's Origins
Video Transcript
May 25, 2023
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Good evening. It's Monday, May 22. Welcome to a new episode – a special episode –- of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

Tonight, we devote the entire show to one of the most significant events in American history over the last 40 years that happens to also be one of the most forgotten, namely, the 2001 anthrax attacks. Just seven days after 9/11, while rubble from the World Trade Center still lay on the streets of New York City with thousands of corpses underneath it, news outlets began reporting that envelopes containing what was said at the time to be extremely sophisticated and highly weaponized strains of anthrax were dropped in the U.S. Postal Service and addressed to some of the nation's most prominent journalists, including NBC News anchor, Tom Brokaw, the newsrooms of ABC, NBC, CBS and the New York Post, as well as top political officials, including then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. 

Those anthrax spores ended up killing five people, including a photojournalist with The Sun and two postal workers and 17 others were infected, with 11 of them being seriously ill. One could very easily argue that the anthrax attacks were at least as important in ratcheting up fear levels in the United States as the 9/11 attack itself was. And one could even plausibly argue that they were more effective in generating widespread fear and panic. The fear enabled the U.S. government to do everything from enacting the Patriot Act and imposing a pervasive domestic surveillance state to invading Iraq and bombing nine different countries over the next 15 years. 

While the 9/11 attacks were aimed at key centers in symbols of American corporate, political and military power – two planes hit the World Trade Center in Manhattan, another crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, while the fourth plane either crashed or was shot down by Dick Cheney was reportedly headed for the U.S. Capitol – the anthrax attacks, though, were delivered by mail. As a result, it convinced Americans far away from the nation's most important cities, in the suburbs, in rural areas, in small towns, everywhere, that they, too, were severely endangered, that Bond-like terrorist villains could get at them with terrifying biological weapons that could materialize right in their front lawn, in their mailbox, long an American symbol of friendly neighborhoods and an implicit sense of safety. 

That such a dastardly plot was carried out just a week after the spectacularly frightening and traumatizing 9/11 attack created a perception that everything had become destabilized, that nothing was safe, that our enemies were simultaneously highly sophisticated and serious, yet had no limits of any kind, a completely new enemy, unlike anything we had seen before, even during the five-decade Cold War with the Soviet Union. Looking back, there is no question that this widespread fear and panic was deliberately fostered and opportunistically exploited. While the 2003 invasion of Iraq was largely justified based on the dangers revealed by the 9/11 attack, there was a very influential camp of neocons and militarists in the United States who were eager to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam for years prior to the September 11 attacks. They included Joe Biden; neocons led by Bill Kristol and David Frum, who would go on to write George W. Bush's post-9/11 speeches, John McCain and Dick Cheney. And many of them wasted little time encouraging Americans to blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks, inventing outright lies in the days and weeks after the 9/11 attack that they wandered through America's most influential news outlets that wasted no time in priming Americans to believe that their safety depended on overthrowing the Iraqi leader, long one of America's closest allies in the region, but who now was said to be both a close ally of al-Qaida and the likely perpetrator of these anthrax attacks. 

It took the FBI more than seven full years to claim, in 2008, that they had finally solved the case and found the perpetrator of the attacks. After first trying to pin the blame on an American bioweapons expert named Steven Hatfill, only to pay him almost $6 million in a lawsuit after admitting he had no role whatsoever, the FBI announced in 2008 they had finally found the perpetrator: an American microbiologist who worked at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, named Bruce Ivins. Unfortunately, said the FBI, Dr. Ivins had just committed suicide as they were just about to arrest him, meaning the FBI would never have to prove their allegations in a court of law against him, and would never have to have their case and the evidence on which it was based that they found the real attacker subjected to the rigors of cross-examination, judicial scrutiny, or public examination. Almost instantly, serious doubts emerged about the FBI's evidence and their claim to have found the real killer, both circumstantial and scientific. And those doubts emerged not from obscure or marginalized venues, but from the nation's most mainstream newspapers and scientific journals. When the FBI finally made its scientific evidence available to a body of independent scientific investigators, that body concluded – in 2011 – that the FBI’s scientific evidence was far weaker than the FBI had claimed and raised more questions than it answered. 

That a crime of this magnitude – one whose effects included radical changes in how the U.S. government operates, the powers they claim, and the wars and regime change operations they will end up launching and executing for the next 15 years –  that a crime of that magnitude is still unsolved by itself justifies its revisiting, especially given that each year there are more and more Americans who have either forgotten this incident or have never lived through it in the first place. 

But the relevance of this event and the need to revisit it extends far beyond what is of historical interest. That the FBI itself claims that the worst bioweapons attack in American history came from a U.S. Army lab perpetrated by a U.S. Army scientist sheds significant light on the type of research the U.S. government does into bioweapons and that shed significant light onto the ongoing competing claims regarding the origins of the COVID pandemic. 

I spent years reporting on this anthrax case, and as I did, I became more and more convinced that, from the very start, lies and deliberate deceit drove the narrative about it from the start. There's no question about that. And every year that went by, I believe that more and more, and now I believe it more than ever. We'll walk you through the key event, surely the most central evidence, and examine the vital questions all of this raises so that you can recall everything that happened as part of this now deliberately forgotten episode and draw your own conclusions from it. 

As a reminder System Update is available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple and every other major podcasting platform to hear us in podcasting version, which is posted 12 hours after our live broadcast here on Rumble. Simply follow us, rate us and review us. That helps us spread the visibility of the show.

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


 

The most important ingredient for state propaganda is historical ignorance. The observation is typically attributed to the philosopher George Santayana. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is based exactly on that recognition. The more history is forgotten, the easier it is to use the same exact methods of deception, falsehoods and propaganda to manipulate the public. One of the realizations you have as you get older is that every year the number of people who never live through the events that you lived through and that you remember vividly increases. And even for those who did live through those events, the confluence of our rushed lives, our need to focus on our work and family, the deliberate memory holding of those events and the memory erosion fostered by social media ensured that many simply have forgotten that which they learned and that which they lived through. And I can think of no major political event of the last 40 years for which this is more true than the anthrax attacks of 2001. There is no question that the so-called War on Terror launched by the United States after 9/11 is, along with the 2008 financial collapse, the most consequential political event in our lifetime. It radically transformed how the U.S. government functions and its relationship with the U.S. citizenry, enabling it to seize previously unthinkable powers of detention and surveillance that endured to this very day. It led to endless wars, occupations, bombing campaigns, drone warfare, a torture regime, mass domestic spying, due process, free imprisonment, and all sorts of atrocities all around the globe, and few events fueled and enabled this multiheaded War on Terror like the September 2001 anthrax attacks. And yet, few people remember much about it at all. That's because once it served its purpose it was rarely discussed, especially when the FBI claimed it had solved the case by heaping blame for it on a dead man who would never have to stand trial and thus would ensure that the FBI's evidence never received real scrutiny. That's why we decided to devote a special episode tonight to reviewing this long-forgotten yet indescribably important event. 

The facts of the anthrax attacks, as they were presented to us at the time, were quite simple. Starting on September 18, just seven days after the 9/11 attack, when obviously Americans were already in a state of fear and heightened concern when things seemed like they were unraveling in terms of our public security – a mass casualty attack by a foreign power on American soil that took down the World Trade Center, crashed a plane into the Pentagon and killed 3000 Americans. Just seven days after that, we were all still reeling from that, media outlets began reporting that what they claimed was a highly sophisticated and extremely weaponized version of anthrax had been dropped in the mail and sent to numerous news outlets and American politicians. And over the next six weeks, anthrax continued to appear. New letters continued to emerge, and they were accompanied by a very alarming statement that was clearly designed to link it to the 9/11 attack through which we had all just lived. 

 

Here you see one of the letters.  

 

This is the letter that was sent to the NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, along with the anthrax that we were told was highly sophisticated, that only extremely advanced parties, very few on the planet, would be capable of producing. It says:

 

This is next

Take penicillin now
Death to America
Death to Israel 

Allah is great 

 

So, the letter was clearly intended to suggest that this was an extension of the 9/11 attack carried out by the same people and that it was going to be not just a one-day cataclysmic event, but a series of new events. “This is next,” it said, as though this was just the next terror in a long line of what was to come. 

To remind you of how alarmist the reporting was around this anthrax attack – and justifiably so. It was supposedly this never-before-seen, extremely sophisticated version that was highly fatal and that could just be sent to you through your mailbox and all you had to do was open a letter and you would be killed when the spores dispersed. Let's show you just a few real-time network news reporting and cable news reports about this event, just to give you a sense of how this was talked about. 

 

(Video. Various cuts from NBC News.)

 

- Welcome back, everybody. It certainly has been a tough day and days for all of us at NBC News, because, of course, the press conference that announced yesterday that an NBC News staff member actually had been tested positive for anthrax. 

 

- The Florida man has contracted a very rare and potentially deadly form of anthrax […]

 

- […] a rare, inhaled form of anthrax. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson calls it an isolated case and says there was no threat of terrorism […] 

 

- In Boca Raton, Florida, today, a memorial service for Bob Stevens. He is almost certainly the first American to be killed in a deliberate anthrax attack […] 

 

- Now to the home front and those concerns over anthrax in Florida after one man died from the illness and his coworker was contaminated. The FBI has taken over the investigation. 

 

- America strikes back. Anthrax, another infection, this time at NBC News in Rockefeller Plaza. 

 

  • Good evening. Tonight, we find ourselves in the unusual and unhappy position of reporting on one of our beloved colleagues, a member of my personal staff who has contracted a cutaneous anthrax infection. That's an infection of the skin that is responding favorably to treatment and her full recovery is expected. 

 

- There were two letters that were suspicious that both arrived on the same day. One contained a white talcum powder-like substance. The other contained a brownish, granular, almost sandy-like substance. 

 

- In just two weeks’ time, we have had four confirmed cases of anthrax, all with media connections and a number of anthrax scares as well. 

 

  • ABC News in Nevada / New Jersey / Tonight, the U.S. House of Representatives is closing offices today until Tuesday to allow a complete sweep for traces of anthrax. And 29 staffers for Senator Tom Daschle's office have tested positive for exposure to anthrax. / The letter sent to NBC and The New York Post was the same. This is next. Take penicillin now. Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great. The letter sent to Senator Tom Daschle had similar wording. / You cannot stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great. All carried the date 9/11 at the top. All were sent from Trenton, New Jersey. / I don't have anthrax and / Good morning. President Bush tries reassuring the nation after anthrax is found at a facility that handles mail going to the White House. / President Bush is calling those people who are mailing these anthrax letters “evildoers” and he says any attempt to terrorize this nation is going to fail. 



So, you see how it unfolded over the course of six weeks. It began with one person, one case, and then, over the course of six weeks, more and more letters appeared so that by the end, President Bush was saying this was done by evildoers. It was called germ warfare. It was said to be the greatest, worst attack of bioweapons attacks ever carried out on American soil. You can imagine how much of a role this played in escalating the fear that Americans already felt as a result of the 9/11 attack. 

By the end of October, when these multiple attacks had already manifested, there was almost literally nothing the government could demand that the American public didn't immediately acquiesce to as long as these new powers were described as necessary to keep us all safe. That's how terrorized overnight the population become, not only because of the 9/11 attack, but also because of these anthrax attacks, and they had no idea who perpetrated them, they said. 

But very quickly, the media started claiming, as a result of sources high up inside the government, that they began to learn who they thought the most likely suspect was of these attacks. It turned out, according to these media reports, that the government had revealed that, through analysis of the anthrax strains, they discovered bentonite. 

Bentonite sounds like a very terrorizing and highly sophisticated substance, in reality, it's basically the clay that holds together kitty litter because the challenge with weaponizing anthrax is it's extremely light and is likely to disperse, therefore, to weaponize it, you have to find a way to clump it together so that it only disperses when it's touched or moved, such as when opening an envelope. And according to these reports, the use of bentonite in weaponized anthrax was done only by one person on the entire planet. It just so happened to be the hallmark, they said, of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who many of the same people claiming this had been wanting to go to war with and topple his government years before 9/11 and the anthrax attack became the perfect attack to pin on him by laundering anonymous claims to the media that he was to blame. It's hard to overstate how frequently this was done and with how much certainty. 

Probably the worst offender at first was ABC News. Repeatedly, the investigative reporter Brian Ross went on the network news show of probably the most trusted television anchor of the time, Peter Jennings, and continuously pin the blame on Iraq. Let's look at one example. 

 

(Video. ABC World News Tonight. Oct 26, 2001)

 

Peter Jennings: […] ABC News has been told that initial tests on anthrax sent to Senator Daschle have found a telltale chemical additive whose name means a lot to weapons experts. It is called bentonite, a substance that helps keep the tiny anthrax particles floating in the air by preventing them from sticking together. Other countries may be using it, too, but it is a trademark of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program.

“It does mean for me that Iraq becomes the prime suspect as the source for the anthrax used in these letters.” 



So here you have a major television network, and at the time, cable was nowhere near as influential as it became – it's not very influential now, but it was nowhere near its peak. The network news way is really where everything mattered, where everything happened. And arguably the most trusted show began laundering this claim over and over, “Iraq was the most likely suspect”, “this was a hallmark and a telltale sign of the Iraqi weapons program”, and the fact that this was done when Americans had very little defenses up, when we were in a state of great fear, desperately wanting to find out who was attacking our country in these very dastardly ways, obviously meant that claims of this sort were instantly accepted.

 After 9/11, David Letterman, who at the time was the highest rated late night comedy show, went on a hiatus because he thought it inappropriate to have a comedy show and be making jokes in the wake of the 9/11 attack and the anthrax attack. When he came back, one of his very first guests was Senator John McCain of Arizona. It had huge ratings because it was David Letterman coming back – it wasn't the very first show, but it was one of the first shows and, obviously, this is what Americans were interested in. John McCain was heralded as one of the most knowledgeable and important foreign policy experts. And let's show you what he said to David Letterman about the anthrax attacks. 

 

(Video. D. Letterman Show. Oct. 2001)

 

John McCain: The second phase is Iraq. There is some indication and I don't have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax, may I say, may have come in from come from Iraq. 

 

D. Letterman: Is that right? 

 

John McCain: Yes. 



So, there you see John McCain. He's not being definitive about it, but he's certainly saying that Iraq is the most likely or one of the leading culprits to continuously put into the ether that, when we think about the anthrax attacks, it's almost certainly Saddam Hussein who did it. And that's based on a very “technical, complex analysis” conducted at the highest levels of the U.S. government that revealed the telltale sign of Iraqi bioweapons and the use of anthrax, which is bentonite. That was the claim made over and over. In October, John McCain appeared with his then sidekick, the Democratic neocon senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman, who just nine months earlier had been the vice-presidential candidate running with Al Gore on the ticket that lost to George Bush and Dick Cheney in that extremely closely contested race. And here you see Joe Lieberman right at John McCain's side, agreeing with everything John McCain had to say. Joe Lieberman, like John McCain, were two of the people, along with Joe Biden, who had long advocated overthrowing Saddam Hussein way before the 9/11 attack. They went on “Meet the Press.” Obviously, lots of Americans were watching that program at the time. This is just six or five weeks after the 9/11 attack. And listen to what they said. 

 

McCain: Recently, in Rio, I believe, an envelope was received, which gives me the idea that perhaps this is an international organization and not one within the United States of America. 

 

Lieberman: I've got mixed reports, but I'll tell you what I've concluded. And this is consistent with every report I've been given. The stuff that is being sent out, most of it, including the stuff that went to Tom Daschle's office, is significantly refined anthrax. In other words, when we hear the stories that there's anthrax in labs all over this country, that's basically bacteria in a lab tube. Dr. Fauci [Dr. Anthony Fauci] can tell you more detail on that. 

To take it from that, to make it into the stuff that's being sent in envelopes, that requires a real effort and, frankly, more than a couple of guys in somebody's kitchen stirring things up. 

So, it says to me that there's either a significant amount of money behind this, or this is state-sponsored, or this is stuff that was stolen from the former Soviet program.

(The Washington Post. Oct. 21, 2001)



On October 14, 2001, there is a headline in The Guardian: “Iraq ‘Behind U.S. Anthrax Outbreaks,’” no caveating, no uncertainty, a bold statement quoting some unknown person that we should just blame Iraq. We should assume this is Saddam Hussein attacking the United States in memos in dastardly and ethically limitless ways. 

 

American investigators probing anthrax outbreaks in Florida and New York believe they have all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack – and have named Iraq as prime suspect as the source of the deadly spores. Their inquiries are adding to what U.S. hawks say is a growing mass of evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved, possibly indirectly, with the September 11th hijackers. (The Guardian. Oct.14, 2001)



So, you see, they weren't using the anthrax attacks only to claim Saddam did it. They were using it to claim Saddam was in an alliance with al-Qaida, which, of course, was necessary to convince Americans to go and invade Iraq. 

A poll at the time, six months after the invasion, in fact, showed that 70% of Americans – 70% – believed that Saddam Hussein had personally participated in the planning of the 9/11 attacks. You had Jeffrey Goldberg, who has since been promoted to one of the most important and prestigious positions in journalism, at the time he was a New Yorker correspondent writing articles claiming Saddam Hussein was in an alliance with al-Qaida. Jeffrey Goldberg, of course, is part of the neocon camp that long wanted to overthrow Iraq. Do you see how they were exploiting these events to advance an agenda they had long craved to execute? 

 

U.S. intelligence believes Iraq has the technology and supplies of anthrax suitable for terrorist use. ‘They aren't making this stuff in caves in Afghanistan,’ the CIA source said. ‘This is prima facie evidence of the involvement of a state intelligence agency. Maybe Iran has the capability, but it doesn't look likely politically. That leaves Iraq. (The Guardian. Oct.14, 2001)

 

 That is as definitive as it gets.

 As it turns out, this CIA source and all these sources laundered through The Guardian and other sources turned out to be right: there was a government involved, a very sophisticated government involved. And when you factor in this weaponized anthrax, just turns out it wasn't Iraq or Iran, but the United States.

On June 1, 2002, as we're building up to the question of whether we need to go and invade Iraq, there's an article in The Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch entitled “Does al-Qaeda Have Anthrax? Better Assume So.” 

 

The operatives and allies of al-Qaeda have something in mind for the United States of which there can be little doubt. Something nasty. Vice President Dick Cheney said in May it is “almost certain” that the terrorists will strike again. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that terrorists inevitably will get their hands on weapons of mass destruction and “they would not hesitate one minute to use them.” 

QUESTION What if they already did use them and are preparing to do so again? Were last year's anthrax attacks, which caused five fatalities, a preview?

 in November, the FBI issued a suspect profile identifying the likely anthrax attacker as a single adult male, probably an American with a scientific background, lab experience, poor social skills and a grudge. Some people – I was one of them – viewed this interpretation with skepticism. What would be the motive? Why the timing so close to September 11? 

A number of analysts, including David Tell a useful article in The Weekly Standard on April 29, have subsequently cast doubt on the disgruntled-scientist hypothesis, and an FBI spokesman said in May that the bureau, far from being “convinced” that the attacks were carried out by an American loner, had “not precluded any category of suspect, motive or theory.” If anything, hints that anthrax and al-Qaida may be linked have grown harder to dismiss. (The Atlantic. June 1, 2002)



All of this was significantly elevated from very influential media outlets like ABC News, Meet the Press, The Guardian, John McCain, Joe Lieberman into a presidential pronouncement when, at the start of 2002, George Bush in January of that year gave his State of the Union address that was notoriously written by the neocon David Frum, that was the speech that notoriously proclaimed that we were fighting an “axis of evil” that was composed of Iraq, Iran and North Korea because these neocons were not content with only getting to Iraq and overthrowing Iraq. They also wanted to overthrow the government of Iran in the name of 9/11 and anthrax. And here you see George Bush take this same claim and elevate it to a State of the Union address. 

 

(Video. G. Bush State of the Union. Jan 2, 2002)

 

President Bush: Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. 

 

So that was David Frum's work: circulating absolute lies designed to put into Americans’ minds that the state responsible for these anthrax attacks was Iraq and Saddam Hussein as part of the already well-underway effort just weeks after September 11. This was barely three months after September 11 to prime Americans to blame September 11 on a state that had no involvement of any kind either in the 9/11 attacks or in the anthrax attacks, which was Iraq. Do you see this barrage of lies – How it was laundered by the very media outlets that still claim that they're the only ones that can be trusted, manufactured by the very people who ended up constantly being promoted and elevated? David Frum is also at The Atlantic with Jeffrey Goldberg. Bill Kristol is one of the favorite guests of CNN and MSNBC, a hero of American liberalism. George Bush has been completely rehabilitated, as is Dick Cheney, thanks to the liberal worship of his daughter, Liz Cheney. And the CIA continues to be a highly trusted source for American media outlets who just leak to them anonymously, as they did over and over here, and are just constantly believed.

At the time, there were all kinds of reasons to believe that this was a lie. To begin with, It isn't just that bentonite is an extremely common substance – as I said, it's the thing that is used to produce cat litter. The idea that it's some specialized ingredient that only the sophisticated Iraqi scientists could possibly use to weaponize anthrax was a joke from the start. But the much more important point is that there was never any government analysis, as ABC News ended up admitting, that detected the presence of bentonite. A totally false story from the start. 

The sources that went to ABC News and told ABC News that bentonite was detected in government analysis completely lied. If you go to journalism school or read journalistic ethics books, one of the things you will read is that the only taboo in journalism is revealing who your sources are, if you promise them anonymity. You may remember during Russiagate that was supposed to be a sacred principle, so sacred, in fact, that American journalists are supposed to go to jail for not revealing their sources, even if they’re ordered by a court to reveal it. And American journalists have gone to prison before for defying court orders. That's how sacred this principle is during Russiagate. An obviously unwell blogger named Marcy Wheeler had promised anonymity to a source of hers, but she became convinced – because she's unwell – that this source was some sort of smoking gun, some critical part proving collusion between Trump and Russia in 2016, and, without even being asked to do so, let alone subpoenaed or ordered to turn over the identity of her secret source, she begged the Mueller team and the FBI to give her a few minutes. She fantasized that she was part of the Mueller team and that she had in her hands, the smoking gun proof of collusion, and she, on her own, voluntarily went to snitch on her own source to whom she had promised anonymity – the greatest taboo in all of journalism – and an American journalist applauded her. People like Margaret Sullivan, the then media reporter for The Washington Post, and CNN, wrote articles glorifying what this woman had done, this obviously unhinged woman. It turns out she snitched on her source. He wasn't even mentioned in the Mueller report. He was not involved in any of this. It was all a sick fantasy that she had concocted in her head. She wanted to be part of the Mueller team and so, they applauded her. They did. The American media applauded somebody who voluntarily, without being asked, let alone subpoenaed, turned over her own source. And to this day, she's like a favorite of the dead end or Russiagators. But usually, that has always been a very sacred ethical precept – you don't ever reveal the identity of your sources to whom you prove anonymity except in one case when it not only becomes permissible but required, ethically obligatory, to reveal the identity of your anonymous sources and that's when they deliberately lie to you, when they use you to disseminate to the public lies that they know are lies at the time. And there is no question that the three or four high-level sources that Brian Ross claimed went to him to tell him that government tests had detected bentonite, deliberately lied to him as a way of trying to get the American public to blame Saddam Hussein in Iraq for the anthrax attacks, because those are the very people in the government who were so eager long before 9/11 to invade Iraq. 

I spent two years badgering ABC and Brian Ross about this. How is it that you continue to protect the identity of these high-level government officials who on one of the most crucial issues of our time lied to ABC News and all these other sources? You had Joe Lieberman and John McCain and The Guardian and then finally George Bush through David Frum’s speechwriting disseminating the same lie that led to the Iraq war. How can you possibly protect the identity of these people? ABC finally, as a result of that badgering, admitted the stories were false, admitted there was never any government that revealed the presence of bentonite and they finally retracted them. But to this day, they refuse to reveal their own sources who lied to them. High-level government sources. That's the reason people in the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security know that they can lie to the media on purpose without any accountability because they do so while hiding behind this shield of anonymity. So even if you know they lied, the media will protect these liars, people who are deceiving the public on purpose through the use of their media platforms – even though it is journalistic Ethics 101 that you not only have the right, but the duty to expose sources who do that. They never do this because they don't want to lose their sources, even if they know that those sources are feeding them false information, they’re still at least somebody giving them stories. 

Beyond the fact that this whole thing was a lie from the start, the whole basis of blaming Iraq that all these people just did, the reality is everything we knew about the anthrax strain would have led us to believe that it was a government involved, but not Iraq or Iran or al-Qaida, but the United States government, because the report suggested that the strain that was sent was the Ames strain and the reality was that was a telltale sign of a government weaponizing anthrax. It was a telltale sign of the United States. The Ames strain was a strain the United States government at Army labs had developed. In 2011, Frontline on PBS did a documentary revisiting the anthrax attacks. They interviewed one of the nation's most prestigious microbiologists and he talked about what he realized in 2001 about the likely source of this anthrax. Listen to him and what he said. 

 

(Video. PBS Frontline. 2011) 

 

Off: When they looked at the FBI's spores, they were stunned. All of them came from a single strain of anthrax, the Ames strain. 

 

Speaker 2: We were surprised it was the Ames strain, and it was chilling at the same time. 

 

Speaker 3 Because it was so virulent. The Ames strain was the anthrax of choice for the U.S. Army's bioweapon vaccine program. 

 

Off: Once you heard it was the Ames strain, you began to think to yourself, Ah, this doesn't sound like a job from the outside, it sounds much more like an inside job. 

The home of the Ames strain was the Heart Suites back in Maryland at USAMRIID. 



So just think about what this means. The public was flooded with outright lies about these anthrax attacks based on not a mistake, not a good faith misinterpretation of data, but an outright fabrication, that bentonite was detected in these strains, something that never happened and that caused the top levels of government and the most influential mainstream outlets to disseminate a very devastating, destructive and toxic lie to the public linking Saddam Hussein to these anthrax attacks. And not only was it based on lies, not only was it completely false, but as the scientist just explained, there was every reason in the world to know in 2001 for those analyzing the strains of anthrax, that by far the most likely culprit, no, it's not just the United States government, but the specific microbiology lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, the U.S. Army lab, which eight years later the FBI ended up blaming and saying was, in fact, the source of these attacks to get to. 

The other part about this is that what this means, what he just said, what the FBI now claims is that the U.S. Army, the U.S. government, was developing extremely virulent, sophisticated strains of highly fatal anthrax. Why would it do that? We heard the United States government over the last three years during the COVID pandemic insist that it doesn't do any kind of research like that. When Victoria Nuland accidentally went to the U.S. Senate and admitted there were very dangerous and sophisticated Biolabs in Ukraine they were very worried would fall into Russian hands, which meant they couldn't just be old Soviet labs because the Russians would already have them. It would mean that they were very dangerous new kinds of biological strains in Ukraine. The response came when people like me noticed what she said was, “Oh, this is a crazy conspiracy theory. We don't do offensive biological weapons research. We're banned by conventions. We sign from doing it. That's something China does. That's something Iran does and Russia does – we don't do that”. And yet one of the things the anthrax episode revealed, and it's one of the reasons why they've worked so hard to make sure you don't know about it and have forgotten it is it was proof that there were very virulent fatal strains of anthrax being researched and developed and stored in U.S. Army labs. That's the version of events from the FBI itself. Now they justify it by saying, okay, fine, we do this research, but we don't do it because we intend to use it offensively against anybody. We do it just because we must manipulate these strains and make them more fatal so we can research defenses to them in case one of the bad countries breaks the convention and does it. But who knows what their intention was? 

What we know for sure is they're developing these kinds of bioweapons and making them more fatal and more dangerous – exactly what Anthony Fauci denied when it came time to discuss the origins of the COVID pandemic. He said we would never do gain-of-function research. We would never take dangerous agents and make them more fatal, even though we learned that's exactly the kind of research that was being done in the Wuhan lab with U.S. funding. But the anthrax attack sheds a lot of weight onto those questions, and it's one of the main reasons they've wanted you to forget that. 

Just to show you a couple of examples of how dangerous these guys ended up being about anthrax and the lies about where they came from. Let me just show you an article from Maureen Dowd, on September 26, 2001, where she talks about how panicky everyone she knew in Washington was as a result of these anthrax attacks. This is all about the anthrax attacks, not about 9/11, 

 

After all these finicky years of fighting everyday germs and inevitable mortality with fancy products, Americans are now confronted with the specter of terrorists in crop dusters and hazardous-waste trucks spreading really terrifying, deadly toxins like plague, smallpox, blister agents, nerve gas and botulism. Women I know in New York and Washington debate whether to order Israeli versus Marine Corps gas masks and half-our lightweight gas masks versus $400, eight-hour gas masks, baby gas masks and pet gas masks with the same meticulous attention they gave to ordering no foam-no-fat-no-whip lattes in more innocent days. They share information on which pharmacies still have Cipro, Zithromax and Doxycycline, all antibiotics that can be used for anthrax, the way they once traded tips on designer shoe bargains. They talk more now about real botulism than the trendy cosmetic derivative Botox. Judy Miller, a Times reporter who is one of the authors of the surprise new bestseller “Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War,” said she had been deluged with calls from people asking how they can protect themselves. “It's the ultimate freak out,” she said. (The New York Times. Sept. 26, 2001) 

 

So here you have a real-time article in 2001 about the intense level of mania and panic these anthrax attacks generated and you can only imagine the effects of linking those attacks to Saddam Hussein in Iraq based on absolute lies when, in fact, they came from the U.S. government itself – while you had people in the U.S. government very aggressively and effectively exploiting these anthrax attacks for their own ends, namely, to advance their long-stated goal of invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. 

Here is a similar article from The Washington Post’s longtime columnist, liberal columnist, Richard Cohen. He wrote a column in 2004 entitled “Our Forgotten Panic,” where he tries to justify why he supported the war in Iraq and he's trying to say: it's 2004, let's go back to 2001 and remember how scary everything was. And just to you to do that, he focused not on the 9/11 attacks, but on the anthrax attacks. This is what he said.

At the time, Stevens’s death and those that followed appeared somehow linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. That seemed to make sense because the first letters containing anthrax spores were mailed around that time and, maybe more to the point, the authorities at first said so. “There is a suspicion that this is connected to international terrorists,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt echoed him: “I don't think there's a way to prove that, but I think we all suspect that.” Iraq was among the suspects. It was thought to have a storehouse of biological weapons. 

I mention anthrax for the simple reason that no one does anymore. It's a curious silence since, along with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, it all but dominated the news. Some of us did not get mail deliveries and, when they resumed, we went into secure rooms where we donned latex gloves and face masks before opening letters. On a tip, I asked my doctor early on to prescribe Cipro for me, only to find out that, insider though I thought I was, nearly everyone had been asking for the same thing. People made anthrax-safe rooms and one woman I know of had a mask made for her small dog. 

My point is that we were panicked. Yet that panic never gets mentioned. Last month, The New Republic published a “special issue” in which a bevy of very good writers wondered whether they had been wrong to support the war in Iraq. Most of them admitted to having erred about this or that detail, or in failing to appreciate how badly George Bush will administer the war in the occupation. But none confessed to being seized by the Zeitgeist. I read the magazine cover to cover, and unless I somehow missed it, the word anthrax never appeared. Imagine! Not once! Not a single one of these writers admitted to panicking over anthrax. 

Well, I did. I'm not sure if panic is quite the right word, but it is close enough. Anthrax played a role in my decision to support the Bush administration's desire to take out Saddam Hussein. I linked him to anthrax, which I linked to September 11. I was not going to stand by and simply wait for another attack – more attacks. I was going to go to the source, Hussein, and get him before he could get us. As time went on, I became more and more questioning, but I had a hard time backing down from my initial whoop and holler for war. (Richard Cohen.The Washington Post. July 24, 2004)



Here you have one of the longest-term and most influential liberal columnists in any newspaper in the United States, The Washington Post, acknowledging that the reason he encouraged his liberal readers to support the war in Iraq was in part because of the panic – in large part because the panic – spread by these anthrax attacks. You see him talking about people with obsessive gas masks, just like Maureen Dowd was talking about, people petrified they were going to be killed in their own homes. And the perception that was deliberately cultivated, the false perception by the same people, the same institutions, the same media outlets that lied to us constantly now that this came from Iraq. 

As I mentioned, there was a huge faction in Washington that had long wanted to invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein way before 9/11 – years before 9/11. And while we often talk about neocons as the people who are the ones who wanted that, one of the people who wanted that is named Joe Biden. Here is a hearing in 1998. So, more than three years before the 9/11 attacks, where he is questioning Scott Ritter, who was a weapons inspector on the ground in Iraq. And Joe Biden talks about – in 1998 – how important he thinks it is to take out Saddam. 

 

 (Video. C-SPAN. 1998)

 

Chairman: The ranking minority member on the Committee on Foreign Relations in the opening statement he would like to make. 

 

J. Biden: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me begin by saying, I think Major, you provided 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've 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, the only way, we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having started alone – started alone – and it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking the son of – taking Saddam down. You know it and I know it. So, I think we should not kid ourselves here. There are stark, stark choices. 



There you have it. It was the official position in the Clinton administration before 9/11. The United States should invade Iraq and do everything possible to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Joe Biden was one of the most vocal advocates of that during the Clinton administration. We just showed you that 1988 video of him doing exactly that. And Biden, of course, became probably the key senator in 2000 to generate enough support in the United States Senate, as the Democratic head of the Foreign Relations Committee, where he became, along with Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, very vocal advocates for taking down Saddam. And the anthrax attacks were a major reason why they were able to convince so much of the public that that needed to be done. 

 The neoconservatives in Washington – Bill Kristol, David Frum and we'll show you the names on this list, which was called the PNAC. It was the leading neocon think tank or organization at the time – wrote a letter in January 1988 to President Clinton urging President Clinton to invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein. These were exactly the same people. Three years later, we're behind the lies blaming Iraq for the anthrax attacks. Here's the letter to Bill Clinton. 

 

Dear Mr. President, 

we are writing to you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the United States and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor. 

The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction in the near term. This means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy. We urge you to articulate this aim and to turn your administration's attention to implementing a strategy of removing Saddam's regime from power. (PNAC. Jan 26, 1998)

 

And there you see the leading neocons – including Elliott Abrams and William Bennett and John Bolton, and Robert Kagan, who is the husband of Victoria Nuland, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woosley, the former CIA director – the standard group in Washington that had been going around essentially badgering everybody about regime change in Iraq for many years before 9/11, and then became the leaders of this lie, blaming the anthrax attacks on the exact country that they wanted to invade. 

As I mentioned, I had begun reporting on this story a year before, at least, the FBI announced they had finally captured the real attacker, who they said was a bioweapons researcher at Fort Dietrich, Bruce Ivins, as we're about to show you. And the reason I began reporting on it was because when I went back and began looking at the anthrax attack and realized how aggressive the narrative was that they had the proof linking this to Saddam Hussein's government and how central ABC News in particular was to spread that lie. 

Honestly, as somebody who was basically starting my journalism career – this was 2007 – so a year or so after I began writing about politics, a year and a half, I was indignant about it. This was part of my awakening about how radically corrupted these institutions really are. I couldn't believe, I hadn't remembered. I really wasn't paying a lot of attention at the time to the details, the grand details of all of this. I was working as a lawyer; I wasn't a journalist. I couldn't believe how often and definitively ABC News spread this lie. And what I couldn't believe was that they weren't willing to tell us who in the government spread this lie and used ABC News to spread this lie. So, here's one of the first stories I ever wrote about it. It was entitled “The Unresolved Story of ABC News is False Saddam-Anthrax Reports” and the sub-headline was “In October 2001, ABC News broadcast highly inflammatory and false reports linking Saddam to the anthrax attacks. Who was behind those claims and why has ABC not retracted its stories?” And here you see the article:

ABC aggressively promoted it as its top story for days on end during that highly provocative period of time. That and these are all quotes:

  1. “the anthrax in the tainted letters sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite” 

  2. bentonite is a “troubling chemical additive that authorities considered their first significant clue yet” 

  3. “Only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons”

  4. bentonite is “a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program”; and 

  5. “The anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994 and the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope”.

 

At different times, Ross attributed these claims to three well-placed but separate sources and alternatively to “at least four well-placed sources.” All of these factual claims – each and every one of them, separately – were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so.

Ross claimed at the time, and there is no reason to doubt it, that these false reports – clearly designed to blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks in the eyes of Americans – were fed to him by “at least four well-placed sources.”

Who were the well-placed multiple sources feeding ABC News completely fictitious claims linking Saddam Hussein to the anthrax attacks, including false claims about the results the government has? What possible justification is there for concealing the identity of those who manipulated ABC to disseminate these fictitious claims? Peter Jennings, the highly trusted ABC News anchor, then added the end of the story. Remember, this is October 2001. 

This news about bentonite as the additive being a trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program is very significant, partly because there's been a lot of pressure on the Bush administration inside and out to go after Saddam Hussein. And some are going to be quick to pick up on this as a smoking gun. There's a battle about Iraq that's been raging in the administration. (G. Greenwald. April 9, 2007)

 

I just want you to take a step back and think about the fact that all this time when this anthrax attack was being used to frighten Americans and put them into a state of panic beyond what 9/11 could accomplish, and that the claim was being circulated at the highest levels of politics and media, that totally fictitious test had suggested strongly, if not proven, that Iraq was behind it, the country they wanted to invade four years before 9/11, all along – at least according to what the FBI now says – this anthrax actually came from a U.S. Army lab where it was developed, maintained and stored. It was sent by a U.S. Army bioweapons expert, a microbiologist who – unfortunately for everybody – the FBI was about to arrest, killed himself, alleviating the FBI of ever having to present those claims in court. Those are pretty striking events. And again, I'm not citing at any point any obscure media outlets, any conspiratorial media outlets – but I am citing conspiratorial media outlets, just not ones known for being that, I'm citing the most mainstream ones – again, the highest levels of establishment – government and politics – are behind all these lies. 

Here's something that has kind of gotten lost to history that I think is just worth noting. In 2008, Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist whom I quoted earlier as saying that anthrax played a vital role in the panic that led him to support the Iraq war, went to Slate as part of a symposium where a bunch of advocates in the media and government who were advocating for the Iraq war back in 2002 and 2003, went to confront what they got wrong. 

Here you see Richard Cohen’s article: “How did they get Iraq wrong?” The subtitle is “I thought we had a chance to stabilize an unstable region, and – I admit it – I wanted to strike back. And here's what Richard Cohen says about why he got Iraq wrong. 

 

Anthrax. Remember anthrax? It seems no one does anymore – at least it's never mentioned. 

The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I have been told soon after September 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it. (Slate. March 18, 2008)

 

Think about that. This is a long-time columnist in The Washington Post. He's been around the Washington establishment forever. He has all sorts of contacts in the highest levels of the U.S. government because they've used him to disseminate propaganda in The Washington Post for as long as anyone can remember. And according to him, he was told by a high-level government official, as a friendly tip, he should start carrying Cipro, the antidote to tainted anthrax, way before the anthrax attacks had happened, before anybody had even heard of Cipro. Who told them that and why did they tell him that? Specifically, not just a range of antibiotics, but the specific one most used for anthrax. 

It's kind of a note to history that Richard Cohen himself has said that no one has ever pressured him other than me that I know of to tell us who told them that and how they knew to tell him that. But someone had a strong suspicion in Washington at the highest levels of the U.S. government, according to Richard Cohen, that the anthrax attacks are coming now. 

For a while, of course, there was still in the air the question of who did this. It couldn't just be left unsolved forever. It killed five people. It severely injured 11 others. It was, as I said, something that was constantly reported. No attempt to make it forgotten could possibly make us content with the fact that we would never know who did it. The FBI had to give us some explanation for several years. They not only obsessively focused on but leaked to the media the fact that an army bioweapons expert, a physicist named Steven Hatfill, was the prime suspect they leaked to Nick Kristof, to others, The New York Times and his reputation was destroyed. Everywhere he went, people assumed he was the anthrax attacker. He sued the FBI and in 2008, they had to pay him close to $6 million and admit he had no role. So once that happened, once the prime suspect that they leaked to the media was removed, was exonerated, the question then became who actually did it. 

Here you see from The Los Angeles Times when Steven Hatfill was paid, “Anthrax as Suspect Receives Payout,” 

 

The former Army scientist who was the prime suspect in the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings, agreed Friday to take a $5.82 million from the government to settle his claim that the Justice Department and the FBI invaded his privacy and ruined his career. 

Dr. Steven Hatfill, 54, who was called “a person of interest” in the case by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2002, said that label and repeated leaks of investigative details to the media damaged his reputation. 

For months in the anxious atmosphere after September 11, Hatfill was subjected to 24-hour surveillance and was widely identified as the leading suspect in the nation's first bioterrorism attack. However, he was never arrested or charged and a federal judge presiding over his lawsuit recently said that there “is not a scintilla of evidence linking him to the mailings.” (Los Angeles Times. June 28, 2008)

 

So, the person they tried to feed us for years ended up totally exonerated, leaving the question of who did it. It was just about five weeks after that – that the U.S. government paid Steven Hatfill – that they came back and said, this time we really got the real perpetrator. But unfortunately, he killed himself.

Here from the L.A. Times, you see the headline “Apparent Suicide in Anthrax Case.” This is August 1, 2008, just five weeks after that last article we showed you about the government paying off Steven Hatfill for having erroneously accused him for years. 

Top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, The L.A. Times has learned. Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who, for the last 18 years worked at the government's elite biodefense research laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious that and the FBI investigation. 

Ivins, whose name had not been publicly disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals. Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins has helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator's office in Washington. Ivans died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague, who declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI. Federal investigators moved away from Hatfill – for years, the only publicly identified “person of interest “and ultimately concluded that Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert Mueller changed the leadership of the investigation in late 2006. (Los Angeles Times. Aug. 1, 2008)

 

That's another interesting fact. This investigation was led by Robert Mueller. He was, as you may remember, George Bush's FBI director after 9/11. He was the one who presided over the FBI when it falsely blamed Steven Hatfill and then took seven years – seven years – to claim to find the real killer, the real attacker. It would just so happen they say, worked right under their noses in the most sophisticated U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick where he was working with anthrax spores and was able to attack the country using them as a result. 

As I said, the FBI did not have to present its case in court because the person was dead. And so, the FBI explained how this happened, that it took seven years to find the perpetrator and explain their reasons for believing that he did it through a series of press conferences and leaks to the media. And right away – right away – there is extraordinary doubt. Again, not from people branded conspiracy theorists or from people who are accustomed to doubting the FBI, but from the most mainstream political and scientific sources in the United States. Serious doubt about the FBI's case. Circumstantially, the evidence made little sense, and scientifically there were gigantic holes in what the FBI was claiming. 

Here's an article I wrote in 2009 entitled “Remembering the Anthrax Attack” where I summarized how much doubt had been expressed by the types of institutions rarely willing to question the FBI's veracity.

 

Ideologically diverse sources have expressed serious doubts about the FBI's anthrax case. That leads a key congressman to demand an independent commission to investigate. One of the two Senate targets of the attacks, Senator Pat Leahy flatly stated at a Senate hearing last September that he does not believe the FBI's case against Ivins and emphatically does not believe that Ivins acted alone. Republican Senator Arlen Specter, at the same hearing, told the FBI they could never have obtained a conviction against Ivins in court based on their case – riddled as it is, with so much doubt – and he also demanded an independent evaluation of the FBI's evidence. Republican Senator Charles Grassley has been a long-time skeptic of the FBI's anthrax investigation and has expressed serious doubt about the case against Ivins. (See this interview I did with Senator Grassley last year.) The ultimate establishment organ, The Washington Post Editorial Page, issued numerous editorials expressing serious doubts about the FBI's case against Ivins and called for an independent investigation. The New York Times Editorial Page echoed those views. Even The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, citing the FBI's “So long and so many missteps,” argued that “independent parties need to review all the evidence, especially the scientific forensics,” and concluded, “that is an opportunity for Congress to conduct legitimate oversight.”

In the wake of the FBI's accusations against Ivins, the science journal Nature flatly declared in its editorial headline “Case not closed” – and demanded an independent investigation into the FBI's case. After the FBI publicly disclosed some of its evidence against Ivins, The New York Times reported “growing doubts from scientists about the strength of the government's case.” The Baltimore Sun detailed that “scientists and legal experts criticized the strength of the case and cast doubt on whether it could have succeeded.” Dr. Alan Pierson, director of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Control Program at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, representative of numerous experts in the field, expressed many of those same scientific doubts and demanded a full investigation. 

So, it took the FBI seven years and when they claim that they found the person, who happened to act alone, in this extremely politically valuable attack on U.S. soil and presented their evidence, about the person who just happened to kill himself, alleviating them and the need to take it to court, everyone said the same thing and I mean by everyone the institutions that normally revere the FBI and write down whatever they tell them to say.

From “Nature”, the prestigious scientific journal, comes the headline “Case not closed” and here's what it said. 

 

Was Bruce Ivins, a scientist-gone-wrong who single-handedly orchestrated the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States? Or was the 62-year-old anthrax-vaccine researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, an emotionally unstable innocent whose profile made him a convenient fall guy for the FBI? The jury is still out on those questions – or rather, it would be if one had ever a chance to hear the evidence. Ivins’s apparent suicide last month means there will not be a trial, which makes it all the more important that the government releases the evidence it planned to use to accuse him in full. Now. 

   On August 6, the FBI’s parent agency, the U.S.   Department of Justice released what it described as hundreds of pages of evidence against Ivins and declared it would close the case because it was satisfied it had its man. But Ivins's attorney, Paul Kemp, has described those documents as “heaps of innuendo and a staggering lack of real evidence.” He has a point. 

For example, many of the documents are just search warrants – a reminder that despite extensive searches of Ivins’s house and cars, the FBI failed to come up with any physical evidence directly implicating him in the attacks. Similarly, the bureau has no evidence to place Ivins at the post boxes in Princeton, New Jersey, from which the anthrax-laden letters were sent. 

The core of the case against Ivins, as released so far, is contained in just a couple of dozen pages of affidavits – only four paragraphs of which discuss what the FBI says is the smoking gun: the genetic analysis of the anthrax powder from the letters. The FBI says it found four distinctive genetic mutations in the anthrax used in the attacks. It tested for those mutations and isolates of the Ames anthrax strain from 16 domestic, government and university laboratories, alongside ones from labs in Canada, Sweden and the U.K. In all, more than 1,000 samples were collected, only eight of which had the four mutations, according to the affidavit. Each of these isolates, it says, was directly related to a strain batch named RMR-1029, which was created in 1997 and held in a flask at the U.S. Army research facility in Fort Detrick. The affidavits described Ivins as “the sole custodian of that batch.” Many other researchers had access to it. [Turns out over 100 people had access to that flask.] But the FBI claims to have eliminated all of them as suspects. The genetic analysis itself seems quite solid. The FBI has collaborated with some of the best outside scientists on anthrax, and on August 18 convened many of them to answer journalists’ questions about the science. 

The researchers on the panel explained that none of the analysis techniques used in this case knew just the application to anthrax forensics. Several peer-reviewed papers on forensic work have already been published and another dozen or so anticipated. Although this openness about the techniques is commendable, neither the conclusions drawn from the scientific analysis nor such crucial legal elements as the veracity of the provenance and handling of the samples have been tested in court. So far, one side of the story has been heard: that of the prosecution. (Nature. Aug. 20, 2008)



The New York Times on August 8 had an editorial that was entitled “Identifying the Anthrax Killer,” and it expressed very similar doubts. The New York Times not exactly renowned for questioning the U.S. security state. 

 

The FBI seems convinced that has finally solved the long-festering case of who mailed the anthrax letters that killed five people in 2001. Yet its description of the evidence pointing to a mentally disturbed Army bioweapons expert as the sole culprit leaves us uncertain about whether investigators have pulled off a brilliant coup after a bumbling start or prematurely declaring victory, despite a lack of hard, incontrovertible proof. Federal agents relied on sophisticated scientific tests and laborious investigative work to conclude that only Dr. Bruce Ivins, who killed himself last week, could have made and mailed the anthrax used in the letters. They say that recently developed tests enabled them to identify telltale genetic mutations […] (The New York Times. Aug. 7, 2008)

 

Does that phrase sound familiar? “Telltale genetic mutations” –that phrase was used to blame it on Iraq at the highest levels of media in government seven years before. Now, the FBI says they developed tests that enabled them to identify telltale genetic mutations in the anthrax and to show it came not from Iraq or al-Qaida, but from a “flask kept by Dr. Ivins at the Army laboratories at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.”

 

More than a hundred people might have had access to that deadly substance, but over a four-year period, investigators gradually eliminated suspects until only Dr. Ivans was left. None of the investigators’ major assertions, however, have been tested in cross-examination or evaluated by outside specialists. It is imperative that federal officials make public all of their data so independent experts can judge whether the mailed anthrax was indeed identical to Dr. Ivins’s supply and only that supply. 

It is also critical for officials to explain more fully how they eliminated the many other people with access to the material. There is no direct evidence of his guilt. No witness saw him pouring powdered anthrax into envelopes. No anthrax spores in his house or cars. No confession to a colleague or any suicide note. No physical evidence tying him to the site in Princeton, New Jersey, from which the letters are believed to have been mailed. 

Because Dr. Ivins killed himself before he could be indicted, there will be no opportunity for adversarial testing of the FBI's conclusions. The bureau, unfortunately, has a history of building circumstantial cases that seem compelling at first but ultimately fall apart. (The New York Times. Aug. 7, 2008)

 

In response to all of this pressure, the FBI voluntarily, meaning they pick and choose which scientific evidence to make available to an expert panel that had been convened – that was an FBI expert panel, one that they had actually approved of – and when this expert panel finally got to see the FBI has long touted scientific evidence, they concluded that it was nowhere near as compelling, let alone conclusive, as the FBI had spent years claiming. 

This is from 2011. From The New York Times. The headline “Expert Panel is Critical of FBI's Work in Investigating Anthrax Letters”. 

 

A review of the FBI's scientific work on the investigation of the anthrax letters of 2001 concludes that the bureau overstated the strength of genetic analysis linking the mailed anthrax to a supply kept by Bruce Ivins, the Army microbiologist, whom the investigators blamed for the attacks. The review, by a panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences, said the genetic analysis “did not definitively demonstrate” that the mailed anthrax spores were grown from a sample taken by Dr. Ivins lab at Fort Detrick. It does add, however, that the evidence is ‘consistent with and supports an association” between Dr. Ivins flask and the attack anthrax. 

The Academy's report faults the FBI as failing to take advantage of scientific methods developed between the mailings in 2001 and its conclusion after Dr. Ivins’s suicide in 2008 that he was the sole perpetrator… Dr. Ivan's guilt has been adamantly denied by many of his colleagues at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where he was seen as an eccentric but popular character. The Academy's report is likely to renew claims by the FBI's critics that the bureau merely took advantage of Dr. Ivins’s suicide to close the case. (The New York Times. Feb. 15, 2011)

 

The Washington Post reported as well on the criticism from this expert panel approved by the FBI. There you see the headline from February of 2011: “Anthrax report Casts Doubt on Scientific Evidence in FBI Case against Bruce Ivins.” 

 

For the FBI, the case of the anthrax killer is an investigation that never seems to end. Agents thought they had solved the puzzle last year when they pinned the 2001 attacks on a deceased Fort Detrick scientist. But yet another new wrinkle emerged Tuesday, with a panel of prominent scientists casting doubt on key FBI scientific evidence. A report from the National Research Council questioned the strength of genetic testing that the government said conclusively linked the anthrax-infected letters that killed five people to a flask of lethal bacteria belonging to Bruce Ivins. Tuesday's report questioned a critical piece of evidence: the link between the anthrax spores in a flask labeled RMR-1029 stored in Ivins lab at Fort Detrick and anthrax from the attacks. The Justice Department report concluded that Ivins collection of anthrax spores, which he had called his “ultimate creation” was the “parent material” for the anthrax used in the mailings. “The scientific link between the letter material and the flask number RMR 1029 is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ Investigative Summary,” said the $1.1 million report, which was commissioned by the FBI. The document did add that “Genetic evidence is consistent with and supports an association between the flask and the anthrax used in the attack.” The 190-page document by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences praised the FBI's energetic pursuit of emerging science. But it offered another possible explanation for the apparent link between the letters and the Ivins flask, namely, that some of the mutations identified in the letters could have arisen independently through a process known as parallel evolution. The report said this possibility “was not rigorously explored” by the FBI. 

 

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Briahna Joy Gray on Dems in Disarray, the "Big Beautiful Bill," Biden Cover-Up Receipts and More; Plus: Interview with Journalist Katie Halper
System Update #461

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

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Glenn Greenwald is away this week. 

I’m Briahna Joy Gray, the guest host for this episode. 

You might know me from my own podcast, “Bad Faith,” or from my previous hosting responsibilities over at The Hill’s “Rising,” less of a free speech platform than this one. 

Today, I'll be walking through the implosion of the Democratic Party, the pathetic hunt for a Joe Rogan of the left, the party's instinct for corporate self-preservation over real populist reform and the media cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline. 

Afterward, I'll be joined by independent left podcaster and co-host of “Useful Idiots” podcast, Katie Halper, to continue the conversation about how the DNC is continuing to try to rig elections in favor of incumbents, even as they repeatedly keep dying in office, and the likelihood that there might be more independent third-party runs in 2028, a la RFK Jr.'s 2024 attempt. Now, let's get right into it. 

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For a decade now, corporate Democrats have been warning that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the Republic. During Trump's first term, much of that handwriting seemed to be hyperbolic – Trump derangement syndrome, if you will. His big legislative accomplishment was in line with the policy priorities of your typical establishment Republican: a $1.7 trillion tax cut that went overwhelmingly to the rich.

There was some good stuff too: unlike Biden, he didn't start any new wars. While he continued to fund Israel's genocide in Gaza and crack down on free speech rights of Americans who protested the said genocide, Trump did accomplish the temporary cease-fire that AOC merely claimed Kamala was “working tirelessly” to achieve. 

But now that President Trump is finally following through on some of his less popular and less populist policy commitments, like the Medicaid cuts, included in his Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the House last week, or throwing markets into disarray with his erratic application of tariffs, which can be good policy.

Establishment Democrats seem almost happy to have something to justify their hatred of Trump. So, you see, the less populist Trump behaves, the more it disguises the Democrats' own failure to meet the needs of the people. Some Democrats are outright advising that the way they should respond to this alleged “existential crisis” is to simply do nothing: Just sit back and wait to benefit from the backlash. 

You don't have to take my word for it: Listen to a veteran DNC advisor, James Carville, describe the strategy: 

Video. James Carville, The View. February 18, 2025.

Fiddle while Rome burns, the expert says, then exploit the tragedy. 

But so far, the backlash isn't coming. A new Economist/YouGov poll, out yesterday, shows that while GOP favorability is low, at negative 11%, Democrats are doing even worse, at negative 21%; 41% of Americans still view Republicans favorably, while a mere 36% of Americans view Democrats favorably. 

These polls come as no surprise to those of us who consume independent media. I mean, just look around: Democrats are in the throes of a credibility crisis that arose out of Joe Biden's obvious unfitness to run for president. 

They're trying to distract from their complicity and the cover-up, but going all in on the idea that it was Biden himself, his family, and his closest advisors that hid his decline from the party and the public until it was too late, not the liberal media. But it's hard to call Biden's infirmary a “cover-up” when it was out in the public for all of us to see and comment on. The president was confusing Haifa and Rafah, mixing up the president of Egypt and the president of Mexico, and even dodged culpability in the classified documents case on the basis that he didn't have the mental competence to knowingly take the files. 

He even seemed to wander off at the G7 Conference a year ago, like a distracted child. 

Video. Joe Biden, The Economic Times. June 14, 2024.

His mental lapses were evident as far back as the 2020 primary, during which presidential candidates Julian Castro and Cory Booker had the temerity to call him out for not remembering what he had just said at the primary debate. This clip is from way back in 2019, when Dems still could have avoided the albatross of a historically old and declining candidate around their necks. What did they do instead? Disappear both Castro and Booker, once rising stars from the ranks of up-and-coming leadership. 

Video. Cory Booker, CNN. September 13, 2019.

You heard it there. The mainstream media accused anyone who noticed Biden's obvious decline of being motivated by Trump-like conservative politics. “Believe our Trump derangement syndrome, not your lying eyes,” they seem to say. 

Reuters reported the story about Biden wandering off at the G7 as “lacking context.” Meanwhile, his inability to finish sentences was “contextualized” as a mere stutter. 

Jake Tapper, one of the authors of the book “Original Sin,” which sheds light on the extent of Biden's mental infirmity, was himself one of the original apologists for Biden's cognitive decline. A few good mainstream pundits on MSNBC question the co-author on Tapper's own complicity. 

Video. Alex Thompson, MSNBC, May 26, 2025.

That was some good questioning. And I got to say, I don't think we need medical degrees to be able to accurately observe what was going on with Joe Biden. We didn't need this new book to know the truth either. Independent media, along with the voters, knew what was been going on for years. 

Biden's midterm rating was worse than any other elected president on record and, back in August 2023, polls show that 77% of Americans, including 69% of Democrats, thought Biden was too old to be president. But Democrats wouldn't listen. Or rather, they simply didn't care. 

Now, as part of the media's effort to whitewash its own complicity, the same media figures who were involved in the cover-up are claiming, well, they had to defend Biden's mental competency because no one else primaried him. They were stuck with him as a candidate. This, even as the party shut down the possibility of a primary from the jump. 

Contrast former DNC chair, Jamie Harrison, making that incredible claim that anyone could have primaried Biden if they wanted to, followed by Biden/Harris spokesperson turned MSNBC “journalist,” Symone Sanders, proclaiming that under no circumstances will there be a primary. 

Video. Jaime Harrisson, Symone Sander, MSNBC. 

“If folks wanted to primary Joe Biden, there was nobody to tell them that they couldn't?” Is he serious? The mendacity is frankly shocking. As Symone admitted, Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson did throw their hats in the ring, as said RFK Jr., and you can hear how much respect they got for doing so reflected in Symone's smite tone and her inability to pronounce Marianne's name. Then don't forget, RFK Jr. also ran as a Democrat before the party pushed about and it's no surprise why he left the Dems.

 The Democratic Party, its pundits and politicians, were simply all behind Joe Biden, no matter how ill-fated his electoral chances were from the get-go. And while they want to memory hole their role in setting Dems up to fail, I have the receipts. 

Take “Pod Save America,” one of the most popular liberal podcasts in the country. These former Obama speech writers turned media moguls finally admitted that Biden wasn't fit to lead after Biden's disastrous debate with Trump. But the hindsight is 2020. Listen to how hostile they were in conversation with moderate primary candidate, Democrat Dean Phillips, when he joined their show during the primary season that wasn't. 

Video. Phillips, Pod Save America. November 20, 2023.

Phillips and I do not share the same politics, but he was right. At a certain point, internal polls show that Biden could not win. According to “Original Sin,” the Jake Tapper book, Biden traded trails rather in every battleground state, and the race that tightened in states he won comfortably back in 2020. But the voters don't matter, the polls don't matter, not to Democrats. What matters to the Democratic Party elites is who they choose to top the ticket. 

As Bernie Sanders’s former national press secretary in 2020, I know this all too well. In two back-to-back election cycles, the Democratic Party ignored polls that showed Bernie was more electable than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden against Donald Trump. 

Now, this is not some Monday morning quarterbacking from a disgruntled leftist. Democratic Party insider Donna Brazile admitted the primary was rigged back in 2017.

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson admit as much in “Original Sin.”  They admit it! The election was rigged. But even with all of the faux mea culpas happening around Biden's lack of mental fitness, the Democrats STILL refuse to act any differently going forward, to learn a lesson from their past mistakes. Tapper and Thompson write that Bernie was perceived to be unable to attract Black voters, but Bernie was the only candidate in 2020 who matched Biden's popularity with that group, while also outstripping the field when it came to Latino voters

Bernie remains popular. Not only have he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez been turning out tens of thousands of voters across the country during their anti-oligarchy tour, including in deep red states. Bernie's recent appearance on the “Flagrant” podcast, with Andrew Schultz, had a whole room of popular podcast “Bros” clamoring for the exact “democratic socialism” establishment Dems insisted would turn off the public!

Everybody's saying it. Look, it seems obvious that left populism is the way for Democrats to push back against Trump's right populism, which unfortunately, is increasingly informed by the tech billionaires that fund his campaign rather than the working-class real populists who voted him into office. You've got to ask yourself, is pardoning reality TV stars convicted of tax fraud really improving your ability to support your family? 

What about growing the military budget (and the deficit) at the same time while cutting special education funding? 

What about shifting wealth from the bottom 60% of working-age households to the top income brackets? 

Look, no matter what your politics are, two parties that are competing for the support of working-class Americans instead of aligning with corrupt billionaires would be a good thing! But you can't convince someone of something they're paid not to understand. Which is why Democrats are, instead of embracing popular policies like Medicare for all or a tax on billionaires, are choosing to spend millions of dollars to figure out how to, get this, speak to American men. I really wish I were kidding here.

You really can't make this stuff up. Dems are obsessed with finding the Joe Rogan of the left, but they could not be barking up a wronger tree. 

Hilariously, they seem to be tapping one of their most insidious surrogates, Oliva Juliana, to “message better” on men while continuing to treat Sanders – the man who was literally endorsed by the actual Joe Rogan back in 2020 – as a pariah. 

Video. James Carville, The Daily Beast. May 2025.

To be clear, Carville hasn't won an election since Bill Clinton in the ‘90s, but I digress. 

The reason why Democrats’ mission to find their own Joe Rogan will fail is obvious: to be a credible interlocutor in the political space, you have to be willing to say the true thing when it's hard, even when it is critical of your party. Especially when it's critical of your party. The popular “Manosphere” podcaster, Andrew Schultz, gets it. 

Video. Andrew Schultz, Flagrant.  May 28, 2025.

Even on MSNBC, a guest of Ayman's show was also able to identify the core issue here. 

Video. Ayman Mohyeldin, MSNBC. May 24, 2025.

See, right there at the end is a great summary of the impossibility of what Democrats think they're going to achieve. “We need an authentic voice that's going to become popular organically, and we need to control them.” 

Good luck with that, Democrats. Good luck with that. 

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Briahna Joy Gray: Back with Katie Halper. You know her from the “Katie Halper” podcast and as co-host of “Useful Idiots” with Aaron Maté. Welcome to System Update. 

Katie Halper: Thanks, Brie. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Katie, it's a pleasure. I can't wait to pick your brain about some of the viral clips, especially from the sort of Manosphere podcast arena that have gone viral precisely because of how well Bernie Sanders himself and his ideas have translated into his sphere, that Democrats have insisted were so right-wing and so far gone, and they spent so many years vilifying but now seem to be trying to enter into those kinds of spaces. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: I think it's funny because, of course, Bri, not to be self-promoting, but they're searching for the – what is it? – left-wing Joe Rogan. What about Briahna Joy Gray and Katie Halper to take the mantle? 

It is ironic that the same people who were throwing Bernie under the bus, smearing him, attacking him, are now saying that he has some kind of messaging that's good for the democrats. There's always this obsession with messaging over content and program, but that's kind of another issue. 

I think people continue to smear Bernie Sanders but to the extent that they are praising him, they're praising him now because they know he's not going to run. So, I think they think it's safe for them to praise his ideas because they actually are either just paying lip service to it or they are afraid of Bernie's more progressive stances that challenge the status quo. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I think that really gets to the core of the issue that the Democratic Party for years has managed to try to frame themselves as somehow different than the establishment wing of the Republican Party, despite having, substantively, the same corporate donors by leaning and going all in on identity politics.

There's been a backlash against that. They're saying, okay, well, now we've got to find some other messaging prong when the whole reason why they went all in on identity politics and now we're going all in this idea that they just get the right man who's lift enough weights to say the right thing that they will also be able to compete, it's because they're allergic, their corporate base makes them allergic to actually advancing the kind of ideas that made Bernie popular in the first place acting like this guy was somehow a ball of charisma as much as I liked his sort of like a grumpy straightforward persona. He wasn't winning hearts and minds because he was a charm generator. It was because, as Joe Rogan himself said when he was endorsing Bernie Sanders back in 2020, he's a man who's been saying the same thing for the last 40 years, and he has credibility. He's trustworthy. And it's amazing to rewatch that endorsement now that the Democrats are in the middle of this incredible credibility crisis. 

I want to ask you specifically about this book, “Original Sin,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. I don't know if you had seen that clip before, that super cut that Ayman put together on MSNBC of Jake Tapper doing exactly what is sort of criticized in this book, although I will say this book stays away mostly from media criticism and focuses on the idea that it was Biden in his inner circle that knew the truth and were just lying to everybody else and everybody else was sort of deceived by them, including the liberal media. What do you make of that sort of framing there? Is Jake Tapper really innocent in all of this? 

Katie Halper: I mean, I joke that Jake Tapper was well-positioned to write a book about a cover-up because he participated in the cover-up. So, he does probably have some inside knowledge and real insight into it. But no, I mean, you alluded to this and the mashup that I'm in proves this. Jake Tapper was doing the exact kind of cover-up and running of interference that you and I have commented on the media doing for Joe Biden, for the DNC, for centrist Democrats, that we know that they do, they love to do. And so, it is rich seeing someone who participated in that cover-up profiting off of a book about a cover-up and he's hawking that product on his shows and on the various CNN shows that he appears on and all the appearances he's been doing. And I think at the end, once again, it's fine for people to have the eureka moments in hindsight. Somehow, it never happens in real time. And he keeps making these media appearances and talking about how he has a great humility, and his co-writer talks about the humility, which is, I guess, as close as to a mea culpa that we'll get, but that's not, I'm always so frustrated when people say humility like they always do these humble brags. I'm truly humbled by, insert whatever praise, so that's just a little pet peeve I have with that word. 

But, yeah, I think that Jake Tapper, like much of the media, keeps making the same mistakes. They're warmongers for every war. I mean, the cover-up, is disgusting but another disgusting thing is that he has spread so many lies about Palestinians and has run so much interference, much like he ran so much interference for the Biden campaign, he's running so much interference for IDF and he and Dana Bash have done such a disgusting job at vilifying Palestinians, Palestinian Americans like Rashida Tlaib, but all Palestinians, and taking every single rumor and fabricating a narrative and running with it and never correcting it. 

Tapper and Dana Bash pushed the mass rape Hamas narrative that has been totally debunked; they've never corrected it and, at the same time, they've ever once acknowledged the fact that there's video footage of Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian,  – what I would call hostage, what our media calls prisoner or detainee, but I think, to be consistent we should say hostage – and it's one thing to push a debunked narrative and never correct it, but at least acknowledge the fact that we do know of people who are raped by Israelis, but the fact they don't acknowledge that and that this is something that mainstream Israeli media covers shows that they really don't care about sexual violence. They don't about rape and they're happy to be doing PR for a genocidal state. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, I think it's a really…

Katie Halper: Sorry, we're talking about cover-ups, but they're related. 

Briahna Joy Gray: No, I think that's a really important point because there is something deeply ironic and dissonant about Jake Tapper in particular. I don't know that Alex Thompson and it could be similarly described as hypocritical, but Jake Tapper for sure, go doing the press rounds about a cover-up while still actively participating in a misinformation campaign, at least as significant as the lies about the Steele dossier or claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was misinformation. I mean, someone else had another super cut sort of juxtaposing what he's saying now about Hunter Biden with what he said back then about Hunter Biden and framing any and every criticism of Joe Biden or just observation from people who actually love Joe Biden, that doesn't seem to be up to his best, he's not the same Joe Biden who was vice president back in 2008/2012 cycles, as somehow being Trumpy as though supporting Donald Trump, even if that were your perspective, precludes you from seeing the truth with your own eyes. And Katie, this is what's so frustrating about Democrats, and frankly, my concern with some folks on the left who seem to be taking this sort of measured praise for the enthusiasm Bernie and AOC are capturing on these anti-oligarchy tours and predicting that there's going to be real change to the Democratic Party this time, how optimistic are you that we're likely to see the Democrats learning from the lessons of the past? And if not, why aren't you optimistic? 

Katie Halper: Right. Yeah, I mean, I think that, unfortunately, the Democrats would really rather lose to Trump than have someone like Bernie in power. But you're asking a slightly different question, right? You're kind of saying, well, what suggests that the Democrats will deliver anything, even with this good messaging that Bernie and AOC are bringing? And certainly, they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to Gaza, but, sure, on economic issues, Bernie, especially, is excellent. 

I think that the problem is, and you've spoken a lot about this, Bri, it's great to have fresh ideas, fresh policies, fresh but also consistent. I mean, as you alluded to earlier, Bernie's been saying the same thing for decades and that is something that I think has endears him justifiably to lots of people. But the question is, will the Democratic Party actually allow for any of these policies to take hold? [audio problems]

So, there's a lot of rotating villain phenomenon, right? 

So, I think that the Democrats really love to pretend that they can't get things done, that they'd love to get things done. But the truth is they just don't want to get them done. They don't want to see these things because they're as beholden to their donors as the Republicans are, they're just better on social issues often. And to the extent that they're better on social issues, they certainly are willing to sacrifice these social issues in the name of fundraising, which is why, for instance, neither Obama nor Biden codified Roe v. Wade. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up Roe v. Wade because I have more optimistic folks, left side of the aisle saying, “Oh, no, this didn't waste strategy, whatever you think of it, it's likely to work” because look at how well Joe Biden did in midterms.” And I think in retrospect, and I think some of us at the time reported that we suspected that there was not a red wave in 2022, it was not a signal that voters were actually secretly happy with Joe Biden. Polls at the time showed, as I said in my radar, that he had historically low favorability at that time. What people were coming out to vote for was not Joe Biden; it was for Roe v. Wade. It was to express their discontent with Roe being overturned and anti-abortion laws being put into effect in all the country. And a lot of red states like Kansas, bipartisan majorities came out to defend those kinds of formerly constitutional rights. 

I want to ask you, though, about this particular clip where Chuck Todd, even someone who is very much an establishment pundit, seems to think and maybe even seems to hope that there will, unlike 2024, when the Democrats completely shut down a primary, that there will not just be a primary, but that there'll be independent third-party style candidates, a la RFK Jr., running in that race. Let's take a look. 

Video. Chuck Todd, The Chuck Toddcast. May 27, 2025.

Briahna Joy Gray: I don't even know where to start with that, Katie. Why a military guy? Why this Bill McRaven person, who apparently is the former chancellor of the University of Texas system? And why the optimism that we're going to have someone operating outside of the two-party system, from this person who is very much an establishment pundit? 

Katie Halper: Right. And who really, I think, took part in a mocking of third-party candidates that so much of the corporate media took part in. I think that it's interesting you asked about why it has to be a military figure. And I think this speaks to how much the media and our political elites are so obsessed with optics and messaging and so inattentive to substance. So, it's not about what this person's going to offer. It's not about the changes that they're going to bring to people's lives in any qualitative or meaningful way. It's about whether they can tap into people's, I don't know, like, crushes on military figures or tap into our militaristic society. It does have a bizarre obsession, I think, with optics that, again, I think is because no one who is powerful, no political or media elites actually want to see real changes. So, they just want to have kind of like different presentations that get people excited, but nobody wants to see the actual changes happen. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yes. It’s a different kind of identity politics. It's the same thing as, like, yeah, like the Joe Rogan of the left thing. It's like they think that they can find a podcaster who lifts enough weights. I guess that's why we're just disqualified Katie. We're not, we don't lift heavy… 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I know. I do a lot of repetition of light weights, right? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Right. It's totally vibe-based. 

Now look, of course, there is a, like a substantive claim for having a veteran, but I think it also misses the mainstream pundits' missing how much we are in a sort of anti-interventionist/isolationist/anti-war moment in both parties. And that's exactly why someone like Trump, who definitely ran as an anti-interventionist and didn't start any new wars, at least in his first term, was so popular. So them saying a military guy, I mean, I think someone like Matthew Ho, who ran on the Green Party for a Senate in North Carolina some years back, could be exactly that kind of guy because he served and learned from his service exactly why we shouldn't be sending troops to fight pointless wars and ruining lives all because young kids see no other avenue to access things like healthcare and a quality education. That could be your guide, but we know Chuck Todd isn't going to throw his hat in behind a Green Party leftist, kind of Bernie-style candidate like Matthew Ho. 

Katie Halper: Right. I mean, I think you're right that it would be great to have a military figure who was anti-war. I mean those are extremely powerful voices and they have a lot of credibility and, of course, more importantly they're anti-war which is something that wins votes, but also is obviously good for the planet and good for all people on the planet, except for people who work in the arms industry and people who support genocide. 

But I think that it is interesting to see people again, the very same people, who, I mean, I think it was Chuck Todd who said Bernie Sanders would get “hammered and sickled,” he actually said that to him, see them act poetic about working outside of the duopoly. They acknowledge that the two-party system doesn't work, but what were they doing except for running interference for this two-party system? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, absolutely. And just as the final nail in the coffin, which is perhaps a metaphor, now that I said it out loud, that's in poor taste. If we pull up the graphic, a significant number of Democrats who have quite literally died in office, a margin that would have prevented the Democrats or enabled the Democrats to block the passage of Biden's big, beautiful budget bill in the House had they stayed alive. 

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Now, remember, DNC vice chair David Hogg got an enormous amount of pushback simply saying you wanted to start a pack that funded challengers to incumbents, observing accurately that younger members of the party like AOC and people who are outsiders like Bernie Sanders are the ones that have managed to capture whatever energy is left in the husk of the Democrat Party. And for that, Democrat elites have rallied the ranks to literally push him out of his position at the DNC and are frankly using sort of identity politics as a lever to get him out. Even as Democrats are unable to whip sufficient votes to block win priorities, precisely because their members are so old and enfeebled that they are quite literally dying in office. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I mean, of course, the final nail in the coffin was the perfect turn of phrase. But what better represents the narcissism and selfishness and moribund nature of the Democrats than the way that they are refusing to resign? Because, again, the Democrats are constantly fearmongering – and I want to be clear, I mean, Trump is something to be feared. I mean, he's not an anti-war candidate. He is terrible for many reasons.  The Democrats often criticize him for the things that aren't even that bad, which is another irony. But they say he's an existential threat, he's a fascist and yet if they're so worried about this, why don't they retire so that they have a better chance of having someone from the Democratic Party who can vote against his bill? I mean literally, his bill passed because Democrats refused to resign despite having been very sick or old. It reminds me also of the way that if Kamala Harris cared so much about defeating Trump, if this was the most important election ever, then why didn't she listen to the base, which was clamoring for her to depart from Biden on several issues and most notably on Gaza. We know now from someone who worked with her, it was because she didn't want to be rude, and it's not, it's gauche to depart from your president's policies when you're the running mate. 

We also know that Joe Biden said, I don't want any daylight between us, kid. And so, for Biden, his legacy, much like these Democrats who are dying in office, their legacies are more important than defeating Trump and Trumpism or helping the people that they claim to serve. For Kamala, I guess, ruffling feathers was more important– or not upsetting donors, or not being able to run around with Liz Cheney, or not incurring the wrath of AIPAC. So, it just belies the whole claim that this is something that is an existential threat. 

I think that I mean we are facing existential threats. We're facing existential threats that neither party is willing to deal with, especially when it comes to climate change. But it's very hard to convince people that you're taking this seriously as an existential threat when you don't do the minimal things needed to either win an election or prevent a Republican from taking your seat in the case of people who are not resigning. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it's really hard, frankly, to see in concurrent election cycles the voting population stand up and clearly, clearly be clamoring for a legitimate, sincere populism. I mean, the outrage around inflation, cost of living, housing prices, gas prices, food prices, education prices. These are the sectors that are driving inflation and which are causing life to be so precarious for so many Americans and it's nice now that Democrats are like acknowledging that economic precarity, economic anxiety is a real thing because for I don't know like eight years after the 2015-2016 cycle they acted if you said well yeah people voted for Trump because of economic anxiety they said that oh that's just racism that's just a synonym for racism we won't take that argument so now they're finally embracing it and trying to say we're going to do a Joe Rogan sort of a situation. But again, they're not backing any of those policies. You're still getting Democrats out here arguing against baseline things like raising the minimum wage, which hasn't been raised since Bush was in office. The longest period without a minimum wage raise since it was invented in like the 1930s.

And meanwhile, Americans are struggling. So this huge lane is opening up. Meanwhile, on the right side of the aisle, I think people who voted for Donald Trump in good faith hoping that he was going to follow the sort of banded wing of his party and do real economic populism are seeing that Bannon is engaged in a battle with the other wing of the party that frankly bought the election, the tech wing, the Elon Musk's, the Marc Andreessen's, the folks who are very openly saying, “We need to do AI, we need to put the public out of business, we're going to make all of these arguments that legitimize defunding the welfare state that so many Americans, including so many American in very low-income red states in the South and elsewhere, are relying upon to survive.”

And we can do that because we literally bought this election. And I'm afraid that that tech wing, the billionaire wing, who has no alignment and interest with the working-class in this country, most of whom are frankly not even American or relatively recent transplants are going to win out and it's going to be too late for a genuine populism to actually restore a democracy that reflects people's values. What do you think? 

Katie Halper: I think it's a justifiable fear. And I think what you're saying it really does ring true. Again, we've seen in the cases of the leadership of both parties, we have seen a real embrace of anti-populism, right? And one of the most frustrating things was to see people equate Bernie Sanders with Donald Trump because there's a big difference between actual populism and pseudo populism, just like there's a big difference between being anti-war and being pseudo-anti-war. And Trump is great at appealing to populist sentiments. But of course, he's not someone who cares about the working class, the middle class. He is someone who, in some ways, is more dangerous than traditional Republicans because he talks a good talk. He knows how to sound like he's a populist. He knows how to sound like he's against the status quo. But of course, in some ways, the most dangerous thing to have is someone who substantively is status quo, but performatively and stylistically is not. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it is interesting to see float things like, we’re going to do a tax on the rich, right? But then walk it back. And you can read that in a couple of different ways. You can say Donald Trump is just a bad faith actor. He never met in the first place, or you can write it as, well, he actually is the one who's got a good sense of what the wind is blowing and what the base wants. And maybe he would be happy to do a little bit. He's a billionaire himself.  I wouldn't take it too far that he was willing, would be willing to do too redistributive justice to return the hard working, increased productivity of the working-classes back into their pockets the way that it was 50 years ago or so before a bunch of laws redistributed it to the very top, including Trump's own 2017 tax cuts. I won't take it too far, but there's a way you could read it that says, well, maybe Trump did get a sense that you need bread and roses. You need to get the masses a little bit to keep them on your team and that the corporate interests within his own party won't even let him do the bare minimum. And so, it's not clear to me how much there is a real war between the Steve Bannon's who seem to be more genuinely committed to working-class politics, even if it's also mixed in with sort of a nativism and some other unsavory aspects that I personally don't agree with. And this is like the raw, open, we don't need workers anymore. We're going to do AI, we're going to feed you cricket slop and you're going to like it, we don't even need humanity, we're to be on the moon types. And like my concern, I don't know how to read it, but if I had to pick, I would much rather the Steve Bannon's – I can't believe I'm saying this, but I would rather the Steve Bannon’s wing of the Republican Party went out. The problem is the Steve Banning wing of the Republican Party didn't spend half a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. 

Katie Halper: Right. And I think he also doesn't appeal to certain segments, demographically speaking, who are very powerful. I mean, again, I think that it is kind of a funny thing to say, I hope that Steve Bannon wins. But of course, I do think that populists, you can work across the aisle with economic populists on certain issues, whereas there's nothing you can work with Elon Musk types about, right? They are scarier in many ways, and their policies are scarier, and there's very little overlap between the populist left and the populist right, to the extent that you can even have a populist right. But yeah, certainly I think that the Elon Musk wing is more frightening than the, I mean, they're both frightening, but yeah, I guess if. I mean, Bri, you're not someone who likes the lesser of two evils, but maybe that's the furthest I can say is that Steve Bannon is the lesser of two evils when it comes to the Bannon wing or the Elon Musk wing. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Amen to that. I can't disagree, Katie. I really appreciate your willingness to talk through some of this with me. This was cathartic for me because watching all of this happen in real time has been difficult. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it with you, talk about it here on Glenn's amazing platform, and to continue to follow the Democrats' self-destruction cycle and incredible cope over their complicity and the great Biden cover-up. Thank you, Katie.

Katie Halper: Thank you, Thanks, Bri. Thanks Glenn.

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Trump Admin's War with Harvard, Fallout from Wednesday's DC Killing, and More; Plus: Lee Fang on Epstein's Dark Legacy in the USVI
System Update #460

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: There was major news this week, and we always try to devote our Friday night show to covering as much of that as possible, both through our “Week in Review” segment as well as the Q&A session, where we take questions from our Locals members and get to as many of them as we can. As always, we have a wide range of very probing questions from our followers on Locals – I'd expect nothing less from my viewers – and we'll try to answer as many of those as we can. 

Before we do that, we talk to the friend of the show, the intrepid independent journalist, Lee Fang, about numerous issues this week, including a new article he published on his Substack which investigates how officials in the Virgin Islands, where Jeffrey Epstein's notoriously bought that island, have been fraudulently profiting from victim funds and the residue from his presence. 

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Our guest tonight to help us go over some news events of the week as well as some investigative reporting that he has published this week, is a good friend of the show the independent journalist I've worked with at The Intercept, who has been published in many places now. He has one of the best Substack pages in the country where he does his investigative journalism and commentaries, Lee Fang.  

G. Greenwald: Lee, it’s always great to see you. 

Lee Fang: Hey Glenn, great to see you. Thanks for having me. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, so I want to start with the murder of these two Israeli embassy officials in Washington. We did a whole show on it last night, but the fallout sort of continues. 

I don't think we need to go into the question of whether there was any moral justness to these murders. I don't think any moral framework that I at least I recognize as valid suggests that anything other than unjust and horrific but there are a lot of attempts to exploit these murders beyond just expressing grief for the victims or condemnation for the shooter, including, essentially, immediately attempting to suggest that anyone who criticizes Israel or its war in Gaza in some sort of harsh way, or over some imaginary arbitrary line, is responsible for the killing as much as the shooter is, if not more so, and therefore we need to do something about that because that's spawning antisemitism and endangerment for Jews. What's your reaction to all that? 

Lee Fang: Look, I'm concerned about the kind of creeping martyrdom politics that have been coming into our system really for the last few decades. We see it more and more escalating on both the far left and the far right, whether it's far left activists seizing upon every kind of video of a police killing to make broad assumptions about the American criminal justice system and to engage in riots and calls for abolishing police, whether the far right who grab hold of any kind of immigrant crime or immigrant murder to say that we need to deport all immigrants or engage in some kind of draconian crackdown on immigrants. 

Now, we see this kind of increasingly in our Israel-Palestine debate where partisans are seizing upon this heinous crime that happened just a few days ago and really weaponizing it to engage in some type of collective punishment for their political opposition to claim all people who support peace in Palestine, justice or equal rights in that region, are somehow guilty of violence, that this act of political violence reflects on every American who supports peace or a cease-fire in Gaza. I mean, it's a little bit absurd, but it's kind of a continuation of this cycle of saying we want collective punishment on our political enemies, we want to weaponize any kind of tragic death into a partisan football, or just or partisan cudgel, to beat our political opponents. 

G. Greenwald: I actually started noticing it for the first time, I think, back in like 2005, 2006, right when I created my blog, started writing about politics. At the time, there was this blogger who was very pro-War on Terror, like very much of the view that we are at war with Islam after 9/11. Ironically, he became a sort of liberal resistance. His name was Charles Johnson. He wrote a blog called The Little Green Footballs. And one of the things he would do every day when he was in like his War on Terror fanatical stage was he had a daily occurring segment or a weekly occurring segment and he would title it “Religion of Peace” and he just published some sort of random robbery or burglary or assault or rape or violent crime that some Muslim somewhere in the world engaged in and thought that because he was constantly doing it, it was somehow making this point about Muslims in general being a menace. 

Obviously, you can do that to any race. You could do that to black people, you could do that to white people, you could do that to Christians, you could do that with Muslims, you can do that to Jews. When I recently was condemning or objecting to Matt Walsh, who went on Tucker Carlson to say it's better to leave kids in foster care and orphanages than to allow them to be adopted by same sex couples, I remember all these people replying to me, would show me stories about gay men molesting children and for everyone that they could show me, I could show them 20+ uncles molesting nieces at the age of five or some father molesting his daughter. It's such a stupid obviously, fallacious way to try to demonize a certain group of people and, obviously, the minute something like last night happens, we're supposed to believe that anyone now who condemns the war in Gaza is somehow a homicidal maniac or wants to kill Jews or wants to be antisemitic even though you can find literally every day Israel supporters in the United States saying the most nauseating things about Gazans. 

I mean, you can find Israeli officials in the last week saying Gazan babies are enemies because they grow up to be terrorists; “There's no such thing as innocent Gazans,” one official said we should segregate all the women and babies and children in Gaza and put them on one side and then put all the men 13 and above, so “13-year-old men,” they were calling them, and put then on another side and just execute all the men. It's such sophistry to try to argue this way, and yet it's done so often. 

Lee Fang: All connects back to my previous point that these are emotional arguments. They're not logical, they're not rational, they're certainly not empirical. It's very emotionally arresting when you see one of these police shooting videos. Often, they're without context, but even if the cop was in the wrong and was doing something unjust, that doesn't reflect on the millions of police-civilian interactions and all the thousands of different police jurisdictions that have completely different rules in training people will make sweeping assumptions about American policing after one of these very emotional videos. The same for an immigrant killing an American. You can see why someone could say that's unjust. This person was not supposed to be there, they're guests in our home and they're out killing or raping individuals, therefore, all immigrants are criminals or dangerous. It's that type of argument, and it's just being driven into overdrive with social media, with the kind of incentives around war. 

You have very well-financed pro-Israel advocacy groups. It's not just AIPAC, the super PAC and lobbying group, but dozens of other pro-Israel advocacy groups spending tens of millions of dollars per year pushing the U.S. foreign policy in one direction. So, for them to have this very tragic event that they can weaponize and use against their political opponents, they continue this push so that the U.S. stands in lockstep support of the Israeli government. Of course, that's what they'll do, but this is kind of an escalation we've seen in society over many years. It's just this dynamic that is very tribal, that is crude. It kind of appeals to the most basic instinct among us, and it really should be rejected. 

There are some principled Israel supporters and conservatives who have spoken out against this attempt to weaponize these tragic events, but it's really disappointing seeing people from across the board taking this and just saying, “We should have more censorship. We should support crackdowns on students. We should restrict speech. We should really support ethnic cleansing in Gaza because of it.” It is absurd. 

G. Greenwald: What makes it so much worse is, let's say, over the past decade, but especially as this kind of left-wing cultural war reached its apex with the word zenith, depending on your perspective with things like Me Too and then the Black Lives Matter riots of the fall of 2019, or 2020. Just then, the kind of wave that produced, of all sorts of language controls, taking premises to these completely preposterous conclusions. Most conservatives, in fact, almost by definition, were vehemently opposed to these sorts of victimhood narratives, these group-based grievances, these attempts to curb speech in the name that it made people uncomfortable or incited violence against them. And most of them, not all, but most of them, have now done an exact 180. 

All day yesterday, you heard people saying things like “There's systemic racism against Jews,” “Your speeches inciting antisemitism and bigotry.” Who knew that Donald Trump would be elected, and, within the first four months, his main cause and the main cause of his movement would be to declare a racism epidemic all around the world and the need to control speech to prevent it and protect these minority groups? 

It sounds very familiar, but just from a different direction. One of the people who was most vehemently opposed to this sort of left-wing oppression is Steven Pinker who was a very well-known biologist at Harvard and also a very vocal supporter of Israel but a very vocal critic of this sort of left-wing repression that has appeared on campuses and elsewhere. He has an article in The New York Times today that I thought was super interesting because it's also in the context of this attack by the Trump administration on Harvard and he said: “[…] For what it’s worth, I have experienced no antisemitism in my two decades at Harvard, and nor have other prominent Jewish faculty members. […] (The New York Times, May 23, 2025.)

So, we're talking here about this epidemic. I was reading some people yesterday, who were Jewish people in media, Jake Sherman was one, there were others, saying, “It's incredibly terrifying to be a Jew in America.” Not only did I live in the United States for, I think, 37 years, as an American Jew, and I'm there all the time. I've never once experienced an antisemitic assault or comments or anything like that, nor has anyone I know, and yet you're hearing this kind of wildly exaggerated set of claims about how Jews are endangered. 

So, he says: “My own discomfort instead is captured in a Crimson essay by the Harvard senior Jacob Miller, who called the claim that one in four Jewish students feels “physically unsafe” on campus “an absurd statistic I struggle to take seriously as someone who publicly and proudly wears a kippah around campus each day.” […] (The New York Times May 23, 2025.)

So that's not just a Jewish person, that's someone who wears a Kippah around campus every day and he's saying it's preposterous that people are saying there's some epidemic of antisemitism at Harvard. 

I mean, what he's basically saying there is that everything I thought I was supporting, fighting against when it was coming from the left, these group-based narratives, this attempt to restrict speech, this is a wild exaggeration of the danger of certain minority groups in the United States is now being flooding our discourse, from Israel supporters, he's making the point that it just sounds extremely familiar to him, but from the other direction. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, I mean, everything he's describing is pretty much accurate. The tools of wokeness that these kinds of studies claim astronomical levels of bigotry in society, you look back at 2020, a lot of Asian American groups claimed that anti-Asian hate crimes were skyrocketing. 

G. Greenwald: What was the name of that group? Stop Asian Hate? 

Lee Fang: Stop Asian Hate, yes, which was a spin out of Chinese for Affirmative Action. But this group, if you look carefully in their kind of footnotes of how they were quantifying anti-Asian hate, they were taking tweets that were critical of the lab leak theory or floating the lab leak theory that the COVID-19 virus might have come from Wuhan, China, and other kind of China critical tweets as examples of anti-Asian American hate crimes. So, they were grouping actual forms of violence, where, a lot of times, you don't know the intent. Perhaps someone of one race attacked someone else of another race. Is that a hate crime? It's context-dependent, but they were taking a broad brush on those. Then, they were juicing the numbers by taking tweets of something that they claimed was hateful, but turned out to be just a true fact, or likely a true fact, that the virus escaped from a bioweapons lab in China. 

Now, for the antisemitism kind of crisis or hysteria that we're in today, you look at the ADL and other pro-Israel advocacy groups at these studies that show a 300%, 500%, 1,000% increase in antisemitism. You look at the footnotes, and it's the exact same dynamic. It's folks who are critical of Israel in a completely neutral way, saying they just disagree with Israel's policies. That's deemed now antisemitic: groups like Jewish Voices for Peace, a Jewish-led leftist group that is critical of Israel's policies, holding rallies around the country. Each of these rallies in the ADL's report is tagged as an antisemitism hate event. So, that's how they're quantifying this gigantic, skyrocketing antisemitism problem. 

This would be laughably absurd if it weren't being weaponized and used by our government to crack down on speech and to defund science and medical research at universities around the country, but that's exactly what's happening. The Trump administration is citing these statistics and similar statistics when they're going after Harvard University and other universities, when they are cutting federal funding and when attempting to impose speech codes like the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which redefines antisemitism to include some criticism of Israel, and it's part of this kind of an investigation of Harvard around civil rights violations.

I mean if you zoomed out and just looked at the evidence, any normal person would laugh it off; any kind of ordinary person looking at what's been assembled as supposed examples of antisemitism are, you know, either incredibly minor or absolutely manufactured. And yet, this is the crisis that we're living in today. I wouldn't defend Harvard University on almost any other grounds. This is a school that acts like a hedge fund, that's accumulated huge amounts, that has deplatformed speakers in the past, that is kind of a platform for privilege, for billionaire donors to at times donate and get their kids into the school, and has engaged in some racial discrimination in the past, although the recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action have kind of rolled that back. Yet this current Trump administration attack, demanding that the school create safe spaces for Jewish students, create speech codes, preventing students from criticizing or even discussing Israeli policies, even getting rid of some of their departments that study the Middle East or study Israel's history or Palestinian history, I mean, it just kind of shocks  that they're doing this with absolutely no evidence. 

G. Greenwald: I mean, the idea that Harvard is some place that's hostile to Jews is almost as funny as that time the ADL issued a statement saying it's time for Hollywood to include Jews in their pro-diversity policies because Jews have been excluded for long enough from Hollywood and you just can't believe it's even being said. 

By the way, the thing that you mentioned about COVID drove me very crazy at the time and to this very day when I think about it, it still drives me crazy, which was It was really the Lancet letter, the proximal causes, notorious Lancet Letter that decreed well before they had any idea if it was remotely true what they were saying, that we know for certain that COVID came from the zoonotic leap, from animal to human, and that any attempt to suggest that it came from a lab leak in Wuhan was essentially racist and like an attack on our Chinese colleagues or whatever. Then, it immediately became canon that anyone who even raised the possibility that it might've come from a lab leak was being racist against Chinese people. 

The New York Times COVID reporter who became the COVID reporter when the real COVID reporter got fired because he said some things that upset a bunch of very wealthy teenagers whose parents paid for them to go on a field trip to Peru or something with him and they were offended by what he said, and so he got fired. So, they put this woman in, and she said one day we're going to grapple with the fact that this lab leak theory is racist, but I guess today is not the day. 

One always drove me so crazy about this. Besides the fact that who cares what theory was racist about where COVID came from? Like, all that mattered was what the truth was? Who cares which theory was more racist? It was like, where did it actually come from? But the idea that it was somehow more racist to say that COVID came from a highly sophisticated research lab in Wuhan, funded and partnered with the United States than saying, “Oh, Chinese people have these disgusting, filthy, primitive eating habits where they consume these filthy bats in wet markets and therefore got the coronavirus because they were the ones who were just eating things they shouldn't,” like the far more racist theory was the one they were insisting on, to this day insist on. It just always drove me crazy. Of course, the overwhelming evidence now is that it did come from that lab leak funded by the United States. 

All right, let me ask you about this article you wrote in your Substack

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So, I think it's a little bit self-explanatory, but you go into some really disturbing and interesting detail about what these funds that were set up for Jeffrey Epstein's victims and how much opportunity there was for Virgin Islands officials to profit from their protection that they gave him. What is it that you've been finding? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, so the Jeffrey Epstein saga is still not solved. There are still many unanswered questions. In February, the Trump administration promised to release unredacted files. The FBI, when they raided Jeffrey Epstein’s homes in 2018, collected CD-ROMs, other recordings, binders, all these files that remain unreleased to this day. They're sitting in a warehouse, the FBI warehouse in Winchester, Virginia and still, nothing has really been released. 

The documents that were supposedly released by the Trump administration were all previously released disclosures. There's nothing new there. My story takes a look at the other side of this, where the national media has really not paid attention. Many of the most important disclosures about Jeffrey Epstein's political network, how he's paid off politicians, particularly politicians in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but also some politicians in the territorial U.S., were released very suddenly and briefly during a lawsuit in 2023 between J.P. Morgan and the Virgin Islands. 

This sudden disclosure was kind of accidental because the U.S. Virgin Islands was hoping to win some settlement money from these crimes, a form of accountability after his death. They really did not expect it, but J.P. Morgan hit back hard, and it countersued and alleged that the Islands' officials were far more complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's criminal operations. From those disclosures, we got hundreds of emails, depositions, and other documents showing how Jeffrey Epstein kind of methodically paid off local politicians, customs agents, various governors and law enforcement agents to receive exemptions from the sex offender list in the Virgin Islands to travel back and forth. As he was bringing young girls, aged between 12 and 15, to his island, customs agents saw that and looked the other way, they refused to check on their safety. There's really just a litany of red flags he was raising, and yet he was paying off politicians to allow him to run his criminal enterprise. 

This piece kind of looks at how the governor, Albert Bryan, closed that window of disclosure. He quickly settled the lawsuit, he fired the attorney general, leading the JP Morgan lawsuit, he later replaced the attorney with one of Epstein's own lawyers, who serves to this day in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He promised that this legal settlement money would be used to prevent another Epstein criminal enterprise by using it to counter human trafficking, sex abuse, and that type of thing. Instead, it's being used as a piggy bank. Legislators there don't know exactly how the money's being spent but for what we do know, it is going to backdate government wages, it's going to vendor payments, it's going to a series of earmarks refurbishing various buildings in the Virgin Islands. There's very little transparency on how this money is being used and it's an ultimate irony or perhaps an injustice that the governor, who now controls these funds, is almost a quarter billion dollars of money, was part and parcel to the Epstein enterprise. He was receiving regular donations and gifts from Epstein. He was the one responsible for giving Epstein special tax breaks and then later pushing for his exemption from the sex offender list. 

So, while we have this kind of national conversation about the Epstein saga, and it's mostly focused on these documents in Virginia that are held by the FBI, which deserve to be disclosed, there are still so many unanswered questions and a lack of accountability in the Virgin Islands. 

G. Greenwald: It's interesting, for the last four years during the Biden administration, the Epstein files, as they've been called, were a major topic on right-wing media, especially independent right-wing media. Two people in particular, who are very influential and popular in that realm, went around constantly talking about whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, the doubts about why we should think that, as well as just bashing the FBI every day for concealing the Epstein files. 

Those two people were Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, who are now the Assistant Director and the Director of the FBI. And they, I'm sure you saw them on Fox News earlier this week, and one of the questions they got was about the Epstein documents. The interviewer said, “Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself? And they both said, “Yes, Jeffrey Epstein absolutely killed himself. We saw the documents.” They were very uncomfortable, but they're saying we saw the documents that prove he killed himself. 

Well, all of you, including Donald Trump, ran on the platform of making the Epstein files public. Why haven't we seen these documents that convinced them of that? But more so, I think the biggest, most interesting question in the Epstein case is, and always has been, “Was Jeffrey Epstein working with or for foreign intelligence agencies?” And it's a binary question. Maybe there's more complexity to it. 

But why is it, do you think, that after four, almost five months, in office, not just the Trump administration, but the very people who kind of built their reputation, in part, on banging the table about the Epstein files, about crushing and bashing Christopher Wray and the FBI for not releasing them, are now in charge of the FBI, and these documents are still not released; not a single one, that wasn't previously public has been released. 

Lee Fang: Well, I was in your program last year to discuss our lengthy investigation about why every […] that influence operation in the U.S., that attempts to change our laws, change who gets elected to Congress, affect American policy – there is an effort to enforce the Foreign Agent Registration Act, so that they disclose their lobbying activities, except for Israel. There is very ample evidence that the Israeli government – and its evidence from Israel, from Israeli news outlets and from Israeli investigations – shows that show Israeli government is pouring millions and millions of dollars over the last 10 years into influence operations in the U.S. and there's been a conscious effort to avoid far registration. 

The Epstein saga kind of raises many two-tier justice questions: one is just generally broadly about the wealthy in society because they were working with Epstein, facilitating his crimes, potentially engaging in sex crimes with him. They are kind of protected from scrutiny. If this were any ordinary American, any lower-class American, they could expect severe penalties and a severe form of justice, but because these are the rich and powerful, they do not receive the same level of scrutiny. Then, for your question around the Israel issue, there is… 

G. Greenwald: To be clear, I didn't say Israel. I just wondered whether he was working for any foreign intelligence agency. 

Lee Fang: Well, many would say that there might be an Israel issue. Interestingly enough, within the J.P. Morgan litigation, the kind of discovery process in some of the exhibits that were filed in the Virgin Islands case, many of the emails between former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein and some of his associates were disclosed in that litigation in 2023. It was really just an incredible window into Epstein's network. Many other emails of VIP individuals who received help from Jeffrey Epstein, who gave him donations or asked him to “manage their money,” even though it wasn't clear what he was doing with the money, or were traveling to his island, or to his New York home, these were details that were ferreted out from the J.P. Morgan case. Perhaps, again, that's why they moved so quickly to settle it, to close that case. But yes, I think just generally, whether it's Israel or another country… 

G. Greenwald: Maybe it's like Sweden, or Nigeria, but we should know. 

Lee Fang: We don't know, it could be Finland. It's really any of those Nordic countries, but the fact that we don't have these answers and they're sitting on servers, not just with the FBI, right? 

In just this countersuit from J.P. Morgan, they were able to get a huge amount of discovery from Epstein's servers, from his estate, from his associates. He had a close network, Richard Kahn, [Darren] Indyke, […], these three or four individuals who helped arrange many of his financial affairs and helped with the facilitation of his operations in this one little litigation, we were able to see kind of peer into his world. If the government wanted to, if this was a priority for either the Biden administration or the Trump administration, they could make it happen because these emails we know exist. 

G. Greenwald: And I think it's worth noting, and this to me is one of the most persuasive pieces of evidence, that when Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2010 in South Florida when he was trafficking minors into his home in West Palm Beach to have sex with them and eventually got caught, the U.S. Attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, who eventually ended up in the Justice Department, is the one who presided over this extremely shockingly generous plea bargain he got where, I mean, his charges were sex trafficking minors. Everybody who does that goes to prison for a long, long time. And he basically got something like 12 months, six months in prison, a suspended sentence and like community service or whatever. And then he was done and he went back right to… 

Lee Fang: Yeah, he got to spend most of it at home, right? He didn't even spend much of the time. 

G. Greenwald: Right, he started at home. Exactly. Alex Acosta, years later, when asked, “Why would you give a sex trafficker of minors such an incredibly light sentence?” He said, “I was told that he was Intelligence and to leave him alone.” 

So, there's every reason to believe that he had some connection to foreign intelligence. There were a lot of people with whom he was a close associate, including Jelaine Maxwell, whose father, Robert Maxwell, was most definitely a Mossad member; Les Wexner, who is the multi-billionaire who made Jeffrey Epstein rich, who has all kinds of ties to Israel. A lot of people try to say, “Oh, it was probably Qatar.” They always try to say like, “Oh, the country that's really influencing our politics and buying our politics is Qatar.” That was something Bari Weiss just published. I have a feeling that if Jeffrey Epstein were working for Qatari intelligence, that was something we would know and have known very quickly. 

The fact that you have two very hawkish people on the Epstein question, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who have been running around for years demanding full disclosure, outraged that it's not coming, and now they're suddenly the ones running the FBI and yet there's still not a single document, not one, release that hadn't already been seen – they did that ridiculous, humiliating debate where they called those right-wing influencers like Libs of TikTok and others to the White House and they gave them binders that said, “Epstein files set - phase one” and they were all waving around that binder and it turned out every single document in that binder had been already publicly disclosed long ago – it does really start to make you wonder, doesn’t it? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, this reporting, these details have not been easy. Some of this is a source from just the Virgin Islands for my story, a source from the Virgin Islands’ legislature. I talked to lawmakers there, I looked at litigation files, some which had never been published, even though there were litigation files from 2023, but also, the Virgin Islands operate in kind of a weird space, to U.S. territory, but they do not have an online system for just routine campaign finance disclosures. I had to pay a University of Virgin Islands journalism student to go in person and request documents and then pay an exorbitant fee, just to make photocopies and then have those sent to me.

Reporting this out over the last few months on a story that really should have been public way earlier was not easy to do, but it's clear that for Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, they don't have to do all these kinds of extra steps that I engaged in. This is not a question of ability, this is the question of will. Do they have the political will? Do they have the kind of wherewithal to weather the criticism, the kind of pressure from elite groups, potentially foreign intelligence agencies, by disclosing this information that could be very harmful to the political and kind of intelligence elite? 

G. Greenwald: And the fact that you do that reporting that is often expensive is another good reason for people to join your Substack, aside from the quality of the reporting that they get if they do. 

All right, let me ask you this last question. You're somebody who began journalism, associated primarily with the left. You worked at left-wing think tanks, not necessarily hardcore leftist think tanks, but you wrote for The Nation. You worked for the Center for American Progress, and you had a pretty left-wing outlook on things. You began to kind of have a breach with the around issues like crime and race, things that you were previously talking about, but crime was a really big one that, the left was constantly opposed to, almost reflexively, to any efforts to take crime seriously, to have the police emboldened or empowered to arrest criminals. You were particularly incensed by things like “defund the police,” that movement that arose in the wake of the George Floyd killing. And that has been something that you've taken seriously for a very long and in part because of your personal experience growing up in a mixed-race, working-class environment where there were a lot of working-class residents constantly victimized by violent crime. 

Now you live in California and San Francisco, where there's a lot of crime, obviously, including from immigrants who enter the country illegally. So as somebody who has taken those issues seriously, like the need to really crack down more on crime and violent criminals, as well as, you know, the flow of immigrants across the border, how do you look at thus far the Trump administration's efforts to crack down on people who have entered the country, especially those who have engaged in some sort of violence? 

Lee Fang: I see kind of like a lot of the same examples you've highlighted on the show as draconian as probably unconstitutional, illegal, immoral. If you look at what the Trump administration has done in terms of sending Venezuelans to CECOT, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador, I think it's morally horrendous. The Washington Post recently reported that many of the individuals that were sent there were people who were cleared for asylum status, who had protested Maduro, and then fled here after doing so.

Which senator was the one who encouraged people to rise up against the Maduro government in Venezuela and said that if you came to this country, we would provide new asylum protections and TPS protections to protect you? That was Marco Rubio. He led that.

So, just the absurdity, the kind of partisan cruelty for him to turn around and take those same individuals and send them to this prison without any due process is disgusting. Broadly speaking, I look at the kind of confirmation hearings this week for the USCIS role that the immigration wing of the Department of Homeland Security, that kind of manages a lot of the visa programs, and they're saying a lot of things that I think make sense, talking about the role of foreign workers, of these kind of temporary visa programs that were initially created 20 years ago, 30 years ago, like the one H1-B program and then the OPT program to encourage just the most skilled, scarce workers that we don't have in this country. These programs have ballooned into a kind of internal job replacement program where corporations are bringing millions of workers in who will work for lower wages for tech-related software and IT jobs. 

The Trump administration, which initially, back in January, rejected attempts to reform programs, is now kind of changing its tune and is considering a reform of these programs. This is something that Bernie Sanders and many of the more traditional class-focused left have talked about for a very long time. I don't see any problem with that. The other kind of enforcement areas of just like how do you get folks who are in this country illegally out of this country and then how do you prioritize to make sure that you're doing it in a way that's just and fair, it's a mixed record, right? 

At the end of the day, the Trump administration, on a month-to-month basis, has deported less than the Biden administration, compared to last year. There are some different variables here. There are fewer border crossings this year than last. You can also compare this year between this year and the last few years of the Obama administration, which had way more deportations. Again, there's a different variable there. There's more police ICE collaboration back in the Obama years than this year. There's simply not as much collaboration between police agencies and ICE in 2025, so it's perhaps not possible. So, it's hard to compare. If you look at some of the extreme measures they've taken against speech, ongoing after legal students who are here to study and who have protested Israel, and focusing on them to deport them. That's clearly absurd. The CECOT prison is absurd. I think for the rest of their kind of agenda, it's a mix. There's some good and bad. And I think just in terms of a policy, a lot of it just hasn't come into effect yet. The deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, they've relied on these kinds of very theatrical and flamboyant expressions of police state strength. “We're going to throw them into prisons in El Salvador, we're going to send them to Libya, we're going to put them in South Sudan,” things like that. But the reality is that there have been no mass deportations as promised by the Trump campaign. They've spent huge amounts of time and energy and money instead of going after them almost right away, as you said, people in this country who are completely law-abiding, who are here with green cards or student visas, for the crime of protesting Israel or criticizing Israel. And so in lieu of getting what they were told for 10 years from Donald Trump they would get, which is mass deportations, they're instead getting this massive crackdown on speech under the guise of immigration policy aimed at protecting this foreign country, Israel, from criticism and people have really not noticed, given all these kinds of sideshows over the Alien Enemies Act and shipping them to El Salvador and the fact that the integration deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

All right, Lee, thank you so much. It was great to see you, as always. I'm sure we'll have you back on our show soon. I hope you have a good evening 

Lee Fang: Thanks, Glenn. Have a good weekend. 

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All right, Friday night is for our interaction with our Locals members, but also in front of our entire Rumble audience. The reason we do that, as I've said before, is I think interaction with your audience is of the most importance. I have always hated the model of journalism that's monolog inform, where some journalists just step on a mountain top and bequeath to people the truth. I think it's very important to hear critiques and questions and interact. And we do that throughout the week on Locals. So, let's get into them. We have a lot of good ones tonight. I want to try to get to as many as possible. 

The first one is from @ChristianaK, who says:

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I talked a little bit with Lee about this and he said something I completely agree with, which is, I never thought I would be defending Harvard in my life. Especially over the last, say, 10 years, Harvard really has become a place which is almost ground zero for censoring speech. It's often ideologically homogenous. It's become just this kind of closed circle, a very specific, idiosyncratic, academic-ish left-wing culture war homogeneity. There's a lot wrong with academia in general. 

All that said, I find academia to be extremely important. I think it's a vital part of society. If you go back to the Enlightenment, which I regard as the founding principles of Western civilization, at least in the modern era, in terms of our political values and the like, academics talk frequently about the need to have at least one place in society where everything is up for grabs in terms of what you can debate, what you could challenge. There are no taboos, there are no pieties. I think having an institution in society like that, where everything is studied, everything is questioned and everything is poked at, is vital. It helped me learn a lot. 

It really stimulated my interest intellectually that there were all sorts of things out there that had been about questioning these long-term pieties and you were free to express the things that you wanted to express. I think it is quite disappointing, quite harmful, quite tragic that in so many ways our universities have become these ideologically homogenized outposts of political activism at the expense of what should be this academic freedom.

 Nonetheless, it really is true that one of the things that has been most responsible for America's success, economically, technologically, politically, socially and militarily, has been research that takes place at our highest institutions. Everywhere in the world, people look at Harvard and talk about Harvard with great admiration and awe. Here in Brazil, if somebody went to study at Harvard, even for a year, and they come back and they say, “Oh, I studied at Harvard,” it imparts them with immense credibility, and that's how it's looked at around the world. I mean, Harvard is one of the symbols of American greatness. It's been a leading college for 450 years, same as Yale, Brown and Princeton, but Harvard, especially globally, is at the top. 

So, I think, if you're going to have a government that suddenly decides that it's going to wage a major war to try to destroy what have always been America's leading academic institutions, it’s kind of out of the blue, just start attacking it in every conceivable way, I think everybody should be very guarded about why that's happening. 

In general, leading academic institutions and the government have had extremely close partnerships. The reason the federal government gives money to places like Harvard and Yale, and all sorts of other schools, is not because the government is being benevolent. It's not because the government wants it to have a nice gender studies program. Sometimes it's to fortify financial aid so that not only rich people from rich families can go to the top schools, but mostly it's for paying for research projects that the United States government once undertook. It was federal-funded research programs at our universities that led to the invention of the internet in the United States and American dominance over the internet for all those years. It came right out of the federal funding of academic institutions, cures and medical treatments, scientific advances and technological advances that often were things the government wanted done for military use. 

When you have well-funded research programs, that's how you attract the greatest minds from all around the world and that only fortifies the institution. Without these research facilities, it basically just becomes like a liberal arts school for 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds, as opposed to institutions where the highest-level research and innovations take place. On top of that, it's the question of why these institutions are being attacked. 

In the case of Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Princeton and all the others that the Trump administration has targeted, there has been one argument that I think is a valid one, which is that there has been discrimination in the admissions process for a long time. It was considered affirmative action, where you would purposely go out of your way to divide all the applicants into groups of race, to ensure that there was a representative percentage from each group. Part of that was to correct historical injustices, other parts of it were to have a more diverse campus. I think there was a time when you could make that argument that was necessary and over time we've gotten to the point where we've decided that that's no longer necessary that it's actually a form of racism in its own way and courts have stepped in and begun to rule against those sorts of practices and they had to scale back greatly on them. 

So, I understand that objection, but the much bigger reason, as we know, is that these schools allowed protests against Israel to take place. For many years – you can go back to 2010, 2012, 2014 – all of these groups that are funded by Israel or Israeli loyal billionaires were obsessed with American college campuses because they knew that that's where the primary activism against Israel was based on this boycott, divestment and sanctions model that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa. Israel and its loyalists were petrified that that would work in American campuses. They knew a lot of the anti-Israel sentiment was being talked about and allowed on American campuses and they set out this whole anti-woke thing if you go and look at it, all these people who were obsessed with Israel, who led this anti-woke movement on college campuses, were doing it, in part, because they hated American colleges because it allowed too much Israel criticism. The Trump administration is saying that you have allowed too much antisemitism, meaning Israel criticism on your campus; they're actually forcing institutions to put their Middle East Studies program under receivership so the government can control what is taught in Middle East Studies programs. 

Who thought that the role of the U.S. government was to control the curricula of how adult academics who teach adult students can do their curriculum, can pick their course materials? But that's what the Trump administration is doing. And it's all because of Israel, to some extent, it's because they perceive it's kind of a left-wing institution, they want to attack it. But they've already denied funding these schools. 

Here from AP News on April 15: “Trump administration freezes $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard over campus activism (AP News. April 15, 2025.)

We know what that “campus activism” means: the Israel protests that you allowed. Harvard said, “Look, you've gone too far. We made a lot of concessions, but we're about to become a branch of the Trump administration if we go too far, we're going to sue instead.” And they sued, that's when the government went ballistic. 

Today, Homeland Security announced that they were canceling the student visas of all Harvard students, revoking them immediately, and would refuse to give student visas for any international students that want to go to Harvard in the future. So only 25% of Harvard has international students. It's a way that the United States spreads pro-American sentiment. People want to come to the United States, they want to study in the United States, they get integrated into American culture. It has great benefits for the U.S. As I said, people look at Harvard as this place that everyone around the world wants to go to, or Yale, or Princeton, or Columbia, Stanford, whatever. 

The idea that Harvard, of all places – its current president is Jewish, most of its past presidents, close to a majority, if not an overall majority over the last 30 years, have been Jewish. Larry Summers is one of the people who ran Harvard for the longest. Their biggest donors are overwhelmingly Jewish. Jews do very, very well at Harvard. The idea that it's some kind of cesspool of antisemitism is laughable. 

But as we know, any criticism of Israel is now deemed antisemitic and that's what's driving the Trump administration. So, now, you take these huge numbers of foreign students who have spent years pursuing PhD programs, a lot of them are going to graduate and stay in the United States and become extremely productive members American society, and even if they don't, even if go back to their countries, they're obviously going to have a connection to the United States, and now you take all these people who have put years and years into their studies, and out of nowhere, they're instantly told “Your visa is revoked and you can try to get into another school, we'll extend your visa then, but if you don't, Harvard doesn't have any more student visas. We're revoking them all, and we're banning Harvard from accepting any foreign students in the future”. 

This is basically on the verge of destroying Harvard, notwithstanding their $50 billion endowment. As Lee said, this $50 billion endowment almost makes them like a hedge fund. So, I don't have sympathy for Harvard, but it is true that denying them all federal money, destroying and forcing them to dismantle all research programs, and then disallowing any international students will absolutely cripple this institution that has for 500 years been the pinnacle of American greatness, a symbol of it, and a crucial tool in soft power. 

It's just yet another way that this government got into power and decided that one of its goals, if not its number one goal, was to punish anybody who was criticizing Israel. I think it's incredibly dangerous. What we've done is we basically turned the United States into a country where a requirement to enter, to study, or to work is that you love Israel and worship Israel, or that you at least agree that you were framed from ever criticizing it. We're just sacrificing so much of our national interest for this foreign country. 

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Question #2. It’s from @Kurt_Malone, who asked the following:

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This has been a controversy taking place among various journalists. I've certainly talked a lot before about how many of the people who have very lucratively branded themselves as free speech champions over the last several years, but who are really just Israel loyalists, who are doing this to attack college campuses and now have turned around.

Now you’re looking at this massive First Amendment attack in the name of stopping Israel criticism and they either barely care, barely mention it, occasionally mutter some mild opposition to say they have done it, they did or oftentimes, even support it.

Bari Weiss, yesterday, in response to the murder of the two Israeli embassy staffers, basically said anyone who's been attacking Israel or denouncing it in harsh ways, or its supporters, has blood on their hands. So, there are a lot of people who have built a large audience, mostly conservatives, right-wing people, or MAGA people, by championing free speech because over the past 10 years, conservative speech has been one of the main targets of censorship. And so, these people who are independent media outlets, who rely on subscription money from their viewers, it's a big problem in independent media. I've talked about it before. It's a problem in corporate media as well, that a lot of people don't want to say things that will ever alienate or offend their audience because they know if they do, there's a good chance that they'll lose subscribers, which is how they make their money. 

I've talked about it before, as an independent journalist, I also have that dynamic. After October 7, we lost a lot of subscribers who were pro-Israel and didn't want to hear my critiques of Israel and who still don't. We still lose subscribers over that. But over time, if you actually build yourself and your audience with a look to the long term as somebody who has integrity and you build an audience of people who know that you can't come and expect that you're going to always hear what you want to hear but you're always going to, at least, hear the honest perspective and an argument behind it, then you build an idea of people who respect your integrity and aren't here for validation,  which I would suggest is a much more valuable audience to have. 

So there have been some disputes. One of the people who has been most criticized for this is a friend of mine. So, I'm reluctant to speak specifically about him. You can go see these arguments. I will say, one of the reasons why I think it's so important to me that I have a great distance from the kind of social scene in Washington and New York and politics and media is because it is corrupting, it is difficult. If you end up immersed in a social circle and you end being friends with all these politicians who you're supposed to be adversarial to, or other journalists whom you're supposed to criticize because there is a sort of ethical, I think, valid principle, that if somebody is really your friend, I don't mean acquaintance, I don't mean somebody who you say hi to occasionally, but somebody who's really a friend is doing something you disagree with, to turn around and denounce them publicly. It's a real conflict in principles between, on the one hand, you want to hold people accountable and critique them when they deserve it, but on the other hand, like turning around and just publicly denouncing a friend is hard. 

So for the most part, that's why I avoid that social circle. I see it all the time. You see Jake Tapper in this book with all these journalists going around and talking about how they've known these Biden White House officials forever. And so, when they said there's nothing wrong with Biden, they didn't think they were being lied to; they believed them. They didn't want to criticize these people. That's what being friends can do to journalists or to, and I think it's a major reason why Washington is so corrupt, media and politics. They all live in the same neighborhoods and they all socialize with each other. They're all intermarried, the media and the political class. And so, they're anything but adversarial to each other, but I will say there's this idea that some of the people are saying, “Look, I don't want to comment on Israel and Palestine because I don't know enough about it, it's too complicated, it is just not an issue I want to talk about.” And then there's a resulting critique. No, the reason you don't want to talk about it is because you don’t want to defend Israel or the censorship being implemented in the United States in its name. After all, you would be obviously betraying everything you ever said you believed in. But you also don't want to denounce it because you have a lot of people who support Donald Trump or Israel in your audience and you're afraid of alienating them and losing money from saying what it is that you believe. 

So, let me just say, quickly, a few things about this because it is a growing controversy. One is that I actually am somebody who has always tried to, who strongly believes in the idea that there's nobody who can be an expert in everything. There's no person who has expert-level or specialized knowledge in every debate. 

It's always been so important to me never to report on, comment on, or analyze topics that I don't actually understand better than just the ordinary person who's not paying much attention. I've always only covered a handful of issues at one time that I believe I have some kind of specialized knowledge or expertise in, or some unique perspective that's informed, so that I can basically place a claim on the audience's time if I want to write about something or talk about something. I do agree that if there's something you don't understand well, if there is something that you haven't covered, it's best just not to talk about it. 

That said, once there's an issue that becomes so significant, maybe tariffs is an example, which is something that Trump's tariff policy was something I ordinarily would not talk about since I'm the last person who can give you a good microeconomic assessment of tariffs and the like. But I can talk about other aspects related to it. I can have people on my show that I've talked to, that I asked about, because some issues are just too big to ignore. And the war in Israel, especially if you're an American citizen whose government is paying for that war and arming that war, given that world organizations have called this a genocide, people have said this is the worst war in their lifetime that they've ever seen, even an Israeli former Prime Minister came out and said today that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, two million people being starved to death. Our government is paying for it, at the same time, there are major implications in the United States, on Americans and our basic constitutional rights. It's just not an issue that I think you can just say, “Yeah, I don't understand that. I think I'm going to avoid that.” I'm not saying you have to cover it every day, I'm saying you have super didactic opinions about it, but I think it's kind of an abdication of your responsibility if you have influence on a platform to just refuse to talk about the most significant issues that the entire world is discussing, especially when they directly affect the causes that you have claimed you're most invested in. 

Again, I think there are a lot of people in the sort of what had been called the international dark web, as they self-glorifyingly named themselves, who pretended to be free speech advocates, who have now abandoned that because the real loyalty was to Israel. And then some people just haven't really spoken much about it because audience capture is very real in independent media. It's not like you're either super noble and you don't care about it, or you're just integrity-free, greedy money, sucking pig. There are a lot of nuances, and there's a big spectrum between those two things. But I do think it's very important if you're going to have any credibility that you do everything possible to ensure that you never have a fear of your own audience and that you have this view that it's better to lose some audience and subscribers short-term or maybe even long-term that you won't replace, especially if you're somebody who's built a big platform and making a very good living doing this, than it is to just have the goal to build the biggest audience possible by avoiding ever telling them anything that might make them at all upset.

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 Question #3 is from @teardrinker who says:

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So, just for those of you who didn't see it, there's this big controversy in Brazil, actually a major epidemic in Brazil. Brazil, under this very unpopular president, in 2017, legalized gambling basically overnight. As a result, all these apps popped up to allow people to put their money into these accounts and then start betting on sporting events or all sorts of things online, playing casino games. Huge numbers of people, millions of people, Brazil's a country with a huge economic inequality, have become addicted to gambling, to these apps on their phones. The minute they get government assistance that is supposed to feed their family, or their paycheck, they transfer the whole thing into their gambling account. They've been told that it's a way to get rich, to escape poverty. And you have people massively in debt, losing everything, destroying their families over this gambling addiction. 

A major reason why is that you have these Instagram influencers who have tens of millions of followers who show people their super glamorous, luxurious lifestyle. These betting companies are paying these influencers to tell their young audience, their poor audience, “Oh, you should go bet. Use this betting app. You can make so much money.” And they show videos of the influencers betting and making money that are often fake. And not only do these influencers get millions of dollars to lead their poor and young audience into betting but they get percentages of whatever losses their audience has, which is profit for the betting app. And we showed you a part of an investigation that the Brazilian Senate is doing on this. 

And so, here's this question:

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Okay, it's so interesting because I have always taken a very libertarian approach to all of these issues. My general philosophy is that if you are an adult, you have the absolute right to consent to whatever behavior you want to engage in, as long as it's not directly harming somebody else. And by that, I mean like punching somebody or attacking somebody violently. I don't mean like blowing your money on some stupid, ill-advised shopping spree and then harming your family because now they can't pay their bills. I mean, direct harm. 

I believe that about pretty much everything. What drugs people take, what alcohol they consume, whether they gamble, whether what kind of sex they engage in with other adults consensually, my view of that has always been very strongly this libertarian view that adults should be able to make whatever choices they want that involve consent, and it's nobody's business to stop them. You can have public campaigns about the dangers of alcoholism or drug addiction. I'm all for that, so you give people information, but I don't believe in intervening, and I think they are responsible for the choices that they make. 

I have begun to rethink and retreat from that absolute libertarian view of people's choices a bit. I'll explain why. We're really entering a dystopian society, and we've had this for a long time, a dystopian world, where there are parts of the world that are extremely affluent and that most of the world is incomprehensibly poor. And you have things now, like for example, we talked about this before, we'll probably do some reporting on it because I want to learn more about it, but you have these affluent Europeans, I'm sure Americans as well, who need a kidney transplant and there's nobody who's compatible, who will give them a kidney. So they're traveling to countries in West Africa that people are barely at a subsistence level. And they're paying them $20,000, $30,000 and $40,000 to donate a kidney. I mean, is that something that we really should say is nobody's business? You have two adults in a transaction, one selling their organ to the other so that they can feed their children. Or is there something like incredibly exploitative about that to the point where it's very hard to say that that's actually consensual? 

I've been thinking the same thing about surrogacy arrangements. You have very wealthy couples. Most of them, by the way, are not gay couples; most of them are straight couples, contrary to belief, overwhelmingly straight couples, although the number of gay couples doing it as well has increased. And they want a baby. They can't produce a baby for whatever reason. Gay couples can't procreate. A lot of straight couples can’t either. Sometimes they don't want to, the woman doesn't want to carry a baby. 

So, they find a woman who needs $30,000, $50,000, whatever, $100,000 to carry their baby with an agreement that the minute that baby is born, the biological mother just hands over the baby, has no rights to it. Probably, if you asked me 10, 15 years ago, I would have said, “Yeah, that's their own choice. Who is the state, or anyone, to intervene in that transaction?” 

I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of women who do that are not very, very harmed psychologically. And again, as people get richer and the rich-poor gap increases, these kinds of transactions are going to become more and more complex. What about couples in the West who can't procreate and want to adopt but don't want to go through the adoption process? And so, they go to Africa, or they go to Asia, to extremely poor countries, and they pay some family. They say, “Hey, I see you have a healthy three-month-old infant, or a six-month infant, or a two-year-old, we want one of those. If we pay you $100,000, can we take your kid?” I mean, that's the same thing, right? That's very consensual, it's transactional, but is anyone going to say they have no qualms about that? 

I think sometimes Americans have problems understanding what poverty around the world is if you haven't lived in a country where it exists. What's considered poor in the United States, I mean, now it's become a little more severe, but what is considered poverty in the United States is nothing like what is considered poverty in most places in the world. There may be people who don't have access to clean water, don't have access to healthcare, don't have access to anything. And the internet is everywhere, and people are influenced. That's why they're called influencers. 

That's the same with gambling. So, I'm not saying that people who end up gambling and losing everything and destroying their lives and the lives of their family have no responsibility. Of course, they have some. Nobody forced them to do it. I've stopped thinking that all these things have this kind of pure, beautiful, consensual character to them because I have trouble seeing that as purely consensual. And again, I'm not saying it should be banned. I'm not even saying necessarily that I think it's the role of the state to stop it, but it doesn't make it so that it's perfectly fine either. Yeah, this is something I've been reconsidering. I think there's a lot of pressure for exploitation. 

As for this word “gaslighting,” I just, in general, hate new words that pop up and become part of the ethos. And especially gaslight was used mostly by a kind of MeToo movement. It was part of that MeToo lexicon where I think the excesses of Me Too have been well-documented. I oppose them from the beginning. I hate mob justice. I hate the idea that accusations should be treated as true with no evidence. I don't trust any human being, man, woman, anybody, with that level of power to say, “Oh, your accusations, they have to be inherently believed.” And that's where gaslighting came, a very, kind of vague accusation that people began making against their husbands or their boyfriends to claim that their relationship was, quote-unquote, “toxic.” I understand what it means. 

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Next question, @kkotwas asked:

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 It's funny, I was going to ask Lee a very similar question. I think that there has been a drastic, visible, palpable, documentable, severe turn in public opinion both in the United States and globally toward Israel. Israelis are talking about how they're becoming a “pariah state.” The level of dehumanization and cruelty and suffering and killing that Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians for 17 months, as we've all watched it live every day and that they're saying they're going to continue to perpetrate basically until these people are in concentration camps, driven out of their land – and imagine the level of violence that's going to cause. They are announcing that they are entering Gaza. They're going to take to it all, they're going to bomb whatever's left, they're going to force Palestinians to leave, the ones who don't are going to be in concentration camps, a little walled-off, fenced-off areas that they get to stay in, surrounded by the IDF. These are concentration camps. 

It has turned the world against Israel in ways never previously seen since the creation of Israel in 1948. And they know that, polling data shows it. You see countries that have been among the most vocal Israeli supporters and allies for a variety of political reasons, like Canada, the U.K. and France, jointly issuing a statement, vehemently condemning Israel, not merely a mouth condemnation. Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant have been officially indicted by the International Criminal Court as war criminals. They have to avoid certain countries. IDF soldiers are afraid to go to various countries. There are projects to make sure they get arrested or chased out of the country, which happened in Brazil. We actually interviewed the head of one of the groups that tracks IDF soldiers who participated in crimes in Gaza, because all these countries are signatories to various conventions that forced them to arrest people on their soil who have committed war crimes. One almost got arrested in Brazil, he got snuck out at the last second. 

And then Israeli tourists as well are being met with all sorts of hostility and I think that's why there have been these desperate attempts to censor Israel criticism, to criminalize it, to attack these universities over it, to arrest and deport people for criticizing or protesting Israel; these are acts of desperation. 

And yeah, I don't think that the murder of two Israeli staffers, as terrible as it obviously is, and the scope of what's happening in Gaza that's been happening for the last 18 months, that will continue to happen unless it's stopped for the next year or so, or however long, I think it's going to be a speed bump. 

Israel supporters are hoping they can turn it into something much greater, but I don't think it's going to succeed, given how Israelis are still not just destroying all of Gaza and the people in Gaza, but saying some of the most Nazi-like horrific things, including Israeli officials that think we should separate the women and the children and then take all men 13 years over and exterminate them. They're all them saying Gazan babies are enemies, there are no innocent Gazan babies, they grew up to be terrorists. Really sick, sick stuff. They don't think the world is good. I want to say tolerate, but I don't think there's any stopping Israel in the sense that they're an apocalyptic cult, and it would take some political will on the part of the West and the United States, almost like a humanitarian intervention, to really stop it. 

But I think Israel is going to pay a huge price for a long, long time; they have all kinds of internal dissent. Netanyahu is consolidating all sorts of undemocratic power. They were in a civil war before October 7 over the Supreme Court, whether orthodox Israelis have to serve in the military, and they have a lot of internal tension. People are fleeing the country. So no, I do not think these two murders of last night are going to radically change the trajectory of how Israel is perceived. 

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All right, the @farside asks:

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I've been saying this from the beginning. Every time there’s a Supreme Court ruling against the invocation of the AEA, where they're required to give the new process. Now, a Trump-appointed judge and an appellate court have said Trump's not even allowed to invoke the AEA: it's only for wartime. And then you have a bunch of Trump supporters saying, “But what do you mean? We voted for mass deportation. Are we supposed to give trials to 20 million people?” 

I've always turned to emphasize, I think it's now finally being understood, not just for me, but others, that the problem is that you have a deportation system instead of laws. It's very easy. You just deport. You show they're not in the country illegally, you send them back to their home country. The problem is that Trump didn't want to use that. He wanted to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. Something that has only been invoked three times before, during wartime, the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, because it gives Trump immense power, far more power than he has otherwise. 

So, automatically, the president's powers increase in times of war, the deference that courts give a president when there's a wartime emergency automatically increases. So, by declaring war, Trump's already consolidated more power. And then, the Alien Enemies Act gives him almost unfettered power to do anything to people he declares to be an alien enemy. He can just put them in camps. 

Remember, he sent them to Guantanamo and that's the policy that FDR invoked to put Japanese Americans in camps. You don't have to send them back to their home country. That way, you can just send them to El Salvador, a country they've never been to and have nothing to do with, and put them into prison. And you can send them to Libya. You can send them to South Sudan, which the Trump administration is now talking about doing and in the process of doing. The Trump Administration came in wanting to ensure, and I think understandably in a way, because Trump’s first term was basically characterized by constant subversion of the president's authority. Trump was boxed in all the time, he was sabotaged, and they were determined to not allow that to happen by this big bureaucracy, by the deep state, by the administrative state. And so, they came in determined to have a plan to allow Trump to do whatever he wanted with no constraints. The Alien Enemies Act was part of that.

The problem is that it is a very severe law, only intended for wartime. And even then, as the Supreme Court said, 9-0, when it said they're all entitled to habeas hearings before being removed under the AEA, even people suspected of being Nazi sympathizers, Nazi operatives inside the United States were given a hearing before they were detained or deported. All these legal controversies around deportation are not about deportation itself; they're about the AEA, which Trump invoked, because of the extraordinary powers that it gives him. 

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All right, I think this is the last question. It's from @65wakai:

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Yeah, that's a very complex question to answer in a short period. It all depends on how long people have been there. I mean, there's obviously an indigenous population in the United States that American settlers and colonialists went to war with, massacred, and now they have rights recognized by the United States, including their own sovereignty inside reservations. There are indigenous people in Brazil who came way before Portuguese colonization. Primarily in the Amazon, there are tribes that are still undisturbed, unconnected to the world. It's a little hard to say that they don't have rights to Brazil, where they've been for who knows how long. Same with Africa. 

If you're talking about Israel and Palestine, I think the problem there is that it's not really a claim that, “Oh, my people have a right to this land.” It's really that “God gave my people this land,” it's not, “Oh, we've been here for a long time, therefore, we should have it,” it's that “God said this is ours.” 

I do not think that theological claims about what God wants and who God wants to be in certain places are a valid claim for that land. We have a geopolitical system of solving diplomatic conflicts, which the world recognizes, and the Israelis are lucky, because for a long time, it didn't look like this. Would Israel, with certain borders, the 1967 borders, with the West Bank and Gaza belonging to the Palestinians and most Israelis who now want to steal the West Bank in Gaza and act against all international law and take it for only Jews, are doing so because they believe that God has bestowed them that. And I think that's a much different question. It's one of the things that bothers me about Zionism as an ideology: it inherently depends upon a Jewish supremacy that, at least within Israel, Jews will always be supreme and I don't think that it's an ideology that leads to anything good.

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Israeli Embassy Staffers Killed in DC: Reactions and Implications; DHS Terminates Student Visas for Harvard
System Update #459

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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There's a lot to talk about because a cold-blooded murder happened last night on the streets of Washington, D.C., as a gunman apparently targeted people associated with an event held at the Capital Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was hosting a reception for young diplomats. The two victims, a couple in their mid-20s, soon to be engaged, were both staffers at the Israeli embassy in Washington. The shooter left behind a manifesto stating he was doing it, killing people, to protest Israel's ongoing destruction of Gaza, and he yelled pro-Palestinian slogans, including “Free Palestine,” once he was arrested. 

It goes without saying, or at least it should, that randomly targeting people you don't know for murder is morally unjust in all cases, regardless of the justness of the cause in whose name you're doing it. But the reaction to this violence predictably lurched very quickly. We'll look at all the ramifications and the attempts to use these killings for various agendas. 

Then, the Department of Homeland Security announced today that it was immediately revoking all international student visas for Harvard, forcing all students to try to find another school or face deportation from the United States. All of this comes as the Irish rap band Kneecaps has been formally charged with terrorism crimes by the U.K. government – terrorism crimes – for featuring a sign at one of their shows in support of Gaza and against Israel, as well as using images of Hezbollah in their show. As global public opinion grows against Israel, threatening to make it, in the words of an Israeli official, a "pariah state", the censorship campaign and the efforts to suppress Israel's criticisms become more severe and more desperate every day. 

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What happened last night in Washington, D.C., by all appearances, and we should definitely wait for more investigations and for facts to unfold because often things aren't what they appear to be in the first day or week, but by all appearance it seems as though somebody very committed to the cause of protesting the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza decided that, even though the world is starting to realize what's going on, even though the U.S. government itself understands that the population is turning against it, that there's simply nothing that will be done to stop the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel – based on some very twisted moral reasoning, that he thought it was justified and helpful – to randomly gun down too young Americans with ties to Israel although he presumably didn't even know they had ties to Israel at the time that he did it. 

It was a couple that was going to be engaged when they went to Israel next week, She was Jewish, grew up in a Jewish family, had very strong ties to Isreal, had often gone there but when she would go there, she would work on with the groups that try to bridge gaps between Israelis and Palestinians to kind of create dialog between the two, to try to encourage peaceful coexistence. 

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