Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
US Continues Dangerous Escalations in Ukraine, Sprinting Toward Catastrophe. Plus: Saagar Enjeti on Ukraine, Anthrax/COVID, GOP Race, Tucker Carlson, & More
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May 26, 2023
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 Good evening. It's Tuesday, May 23. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

Tonight, more major escalations in the U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine as Ukrainian forces step up their incursions over the border and attacks inside of Russia. While all of this occurs, the Biden administration continues its bizarre, unstable and dangerous pattern. It first insists that it will not send a particular weapon or military system to Ukraine because doing so would be far too risky for escalating the war and dragging the U.S. further into that conflict – including risking direct military confrontation between the U.S., the country with the world's second-largest nuclear stockpile, and Russia the country with its largest – only for Biden to then turn around months later and announce that he will, in fact, send exactly that same weapons system they emphatically said they could not supply to Ukraine due to the serious dangers. They first did this with Patriot missile batteries, which Biden said at the start of the war he would never send to Ukraine, only to announce, suddenly, in December of last year, that it would send them. The same thing happened with Abrams tanks. Biden spent all of 2022 adamantly rejecting Ukraine's pleas for them only to reverse himself this year, by announcing the U.S. would send 31 tanks, just to start. And it just happened again, this time with F-16 fighter jets, which easily have the capacity to fly deep into Russia and bomb Russian targets. Biden was particularly emphatic that sending some of the U.S.'s most potent and complex fighter jets would create far too large of a risk of a major escalation, including their use to bomb Russia. Yet, last week, Biden once again reversed himself, telling President Zelenskyy those jets were coming and that the U.S. would begin training Ukrainian pilots on how to use them. 

This is the living, breathing embodiment of creeping out-of-control escalation. What is declared unthinkably dangerous and risky one month becomes official government war policy the next. On this path, it seems far more likely than not now the U.S. will find itself in some sort of direct military confrontation with Russia. How would the U.S. react if a neighboring country was repeatedly striking American soil using missiles, tanks and fighter jets supplied by China, Russia, or Iran? 

As has been the case since the start of this war, the question continues to be what U.S. interests or benefits possibly justify trifling with these increasingly dangerous risks, especially given Washington's position for two decades under both parties that Ukraine was never and never would be a vital interest to the United States. We'll evaluate the question once again in the context of these latest war escalations.  

Then, for our interview segment, we'll speak with one of the most impressive success stories in independent media, Saagar Enjeti, host of the wildly popular “Breaking Points” program, which successfully broke away from the corporate media outlet where it was born under a different name, The Hill, to find an even larger audience and greater influence as a fully independent program. 

We'll talk to Saagar, who got his start in journalism working with Tucker Carlson, in The Daily Caller, about Ukraine and the increasingly significant role of the U.S. in that war, the state of the GOP primary, and whether Ron DeSantis represents an ongoing breakaway from the GOP establishment or an attempt by that establishment to regain control of the party. We'll discuss the program we did here last night on the various mysteries of the 2001 anthrax attacks and the light it shines on the current attempt to determine dispositively the origins of the COVID pandemic. And we'll talk about the nature of independent media, including the recent decision by Tucker Carlson once he was fired by Fox to put his show, at least for now, onto Twitter.

This being Tuesday, as soon as we're done with our one-hour show, live, here on Rumble, we will move to Locals for our interactive aftershow to take your questions and comment on your feedback, something we do every Tuesday and Thursday night. To obtain access to that aftershow where we respond to your feedback and I address criticism, simply sign up as a member of our Locals community. The red join button is right below the video player here. System Update is also available in podcast form. You can follow us on every major podcasting platform, including Spotify and Apple, 12 hours after our shows are broadcast live, here on Rumble.

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


 

There is a lot to say about the war in Ukraine, particularly what has now indisputably become the U.S. proxy war with Russia using Ukraine as the sacrifice or as the platform. Observing that the U.S. was intending to use Ukraine as a proxy war with Russia was once taboo to say, anyone who said it was immediately – needless to say – branded a Russian agent, or a pro-Russian propagandist, and yet now nobody disputes that characterization. How can you? It is like every hallmark of a classic proxy war and there are some really serious escalations taking place right now as we speak, escalating numbers and types of Ukrainian attacks into Russian territory using American weapons systems, including weapons systems the Biden administration repeatedly vowed not to send, only to send them. While there are greater incursions by the Ukrainian or Ukrainian allied forces into Russia, striking Russian targets and killing Russian people with American weapons, the Biden administration reversed its most emphatic decree that it would never send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, given their capacity to strike deep into Russian territory. By having Joe Biden announce to President Zelenskyy that the F-16s are on their way and that the U.S. will begin training Ukrainian pilots on how to use them, I think the most striking part of this war – and we will talk about a lot of this with Saagar Enjeti when he comes on in just a little bit – is that there has been no campaign of propaganda and disinformation that even compares to the one surrounding the war in Ukraine, at least since the war in Iraq. 

We spent last night devoting our entire show to just a prong of propaganda that led to that war in Iraq. The effort to falsely and thoroughly link the Iraqi government to the anthrax attacks, which the FBI seven years later said came actually not from the Iraqi government, but from the American government, from a U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick, where, as it turns out, according to the FBI, the U.S. government was working with highly sophisticated, deadly strains of anthrax, something it had long claimed it never does, and something it still continues to claim it does not do. 

This propaganda is hard to overstate. There was just outright lie after outright lie after outright lie emanating from leading political figures and U.S. media outlets from the very start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine a year and two months ago. To underscore that, I want to show you an interview that was recently given by Jeffrey Sachs, whose establishment resume is way too long for me to recite. Basically, he became a very well-known and well-regarded economics professor at Harvard in the 1980s, where he became renowned for helping countries avoid or solve hyperinflation. He became very close to a lot of governments, including in Bolivia and Poland and then in Russia. He's been at the center of some of the most important historical events of the last 40 years. He often was hosted on the most establishment television programs. He still manages to appear on “Morning Joe”, despite the fact that he has become a real heretic when it comes to U.S. foreign policy and even the COVID pandemic, where he originally was asked to lead a COVID task force because of his views that the U.S. government mostly had it right, only to then begin questioning a lot of the core pieties. And here he is talking about the role the U.S. media has played in disseminating a level of propaganda that is at least as severe and glaring and flagrant as the propaganda that led us into Iraq. He's specifically talking about the role The Washington Post has played in that, in the context of the obvious lies that our government and our media have spread in order to avoid having Americans realize the obvious that when the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up, one of the worst environmental disasters in all of human history, an act of industrial terrorism – it was a pipeline that connects Russia to Germany to allow Russia to sell cheap natural gas to the Europeans, something that the United States has long wanted to terminate because it will then force the Europeans to buy natural gas in the United States – when it was blown up, it was so obvious it was done, at least, with the consent of, if not led by the American military. And yet, not only was that instantly denied by the corporate media, but they also actually tried convincing people of something so preposterous that nobody should be able to say with a straight face, namely that it was Russia that blew up its own pipeline – a kind of false flag claim, a conspiracy theory that when it comes to that of the United State is completely impermissible to entertain, and yet it's constantly asserted when it comes to Russia. The same thing was said when a drone attack took place over the Kremlin at the time that President Putin was inside the Kremlin and released what appeared to be a bomb near the Kremlin and we heard, “Oh, that was just Russia launching a false flag operation against itself. They attacked itself just like they blew up its own pipeline.” 

Here's Jeffrey Sachs, again, somebody whose life has been immersed in establishment sectors, at Harvard, with economics and macroeconomics, somebody who has been given access to mainstream media outlets. We're going to have him on our show very shortly. He has an extremely interesting history. Lots of misperceptions about his ideological directory, which I'll cover. But listen to what he says about the role of mainstream media outlets in this war in Ukraine. 

I should say he's talking here to Bob Wright, who is a critic of the war in Ukraine and has a show in his Bloggingheads.tv – it's been about 15 years. It was one of the early pioneers of blogging. You're able to have people on in a split-screen format to debate each other. Listen to what Jeffrey Sachs says.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1660327241467801603

(Video. Bloggingheads.tv. May 21, 2023)

 

Jeffrey Sachs: I tell you when Nord Stream was blown up, I had a chat with a long-time friend, actually a classmate of mine from Harvard from decades ago, who was a senior reporter in one of the most important newspapers. I said, you know what? I think the U.S. did it. And he said, Of course, the U.S. did it. Who else? And I said, Humm… maybe your paper could mention something like that. It just today said the Russians did it. He said, come on, Jeff. Come on. I said, Are you kidding? Could we have a serious discussion of this? And he said to me, You know, the editors are not so interested in that. And I said – this is a friend from decades – I said, You know, when I was young, I turned to your newspaper because of Watergate, because of the Pentagon Papers, and I loved it. And he said to me, ‘That paper is so dead and gone, Jeff, you have to understand that.’ And I cannot imagine, you know, this is a really talented guy. A lead columnist, a lead journalist, I should say, and he's telling me the paper that I loved is dead and gone. If you ask me why, I really cannot figure it out why a paper doesn't want to eat the government over the head when it tells ridiculous stories like Nord Stream was blown up by six people on a boat like they tried for one day. Okay, Come on. This is... This was put up by serious media? Because it was almost a joke from the intelligence agency. Why these media are so in line with official narratives? I don't fully understand. I know all the theories – money, advertising, power and many other things – but the truth is it's dreadful compared to what it was 40 years ago. Dreadful. And it's gotten a lot worse. 

 

I think that is the key point when it comes to understanding the role of these media outlets, as he said, why are they so in line with official narratives? People often debate what is the ideology of the media. I've talked about this before. For decades, conservatives like Rush Limbaugh would insist that the media was biased in the sense that they were liberals, they were Democrats. I think that tells a part of the story when it comes to things like the culture war, for example. They're clearly biased in favor of American liberalism. These are people who went to East Coast colleges. They're no longer people who come from working-class backgrounds, primarily, it's not a working-class profession any longer at the national level. So, these are cosmopolitan people who go get educated on the East Coast. The national media live in New York; they live in Washington, so, they have the cultural views and biases of their environment. But when it comes to foreign policy, it's not really so much being biased in favor or against the Democratic Party or American liberalism. After all, it was The New York Times, and as we've shown you, Jeffrey Goldberg at The New Yorker, and so many other leading liberal institutions – foreign policy writers at liberal outlets – that took the lead role in selling the Iraq war to the American people. Their primary overarching fidelity is not to a particular political party or ideology, at least when it comes to foreign policy, that is, instead, they are completely in servitude to the U.S. security state and to the foreign policy community. That is what foreign policy and war exist for them to do: to propagate whatever these institutions tell them to say. That's where Russiagate came from. That is where so many of the frauds that we have suffocated under, including all the lies from COVID came from. This is what they exist to do, as he said, to reflect the ideology and the propaganda of establishment institutions. 

From the very beginning, there has been, as you probably recall, a series of lies told about the war in Ukraine. I would have to devote an entire show to listing them but we have a series of tweets that you may recall from the then-congressman, nominally Adam Kinzinger, who is now a CNN commentator, who from the start of the war just begun outright lying, spreading complete campaigns of disinformation. And in a way, we chose this example, because of how ridiculous it is, but in another way, because of how blatant the lie was, it was a reference to the “Ghost of Kyiv,” some supposedly heroic Ukrainian fighter jet pilot who had managed courageously to shoot down a huge number of Russian planes all by himself and he got turned into this hero called the “Ghost of Kyiv.” 

Here you see Adam Kinzinger's tweet in February 2020 right at the start of the war where he falls for an Internet scam. This is a picture of somebody who is constantly used for all sorts of Internet fake, Sam Hide, and Adam Kinzinger fell for it like the idiot that he is. 

 

The #ghostofkyiv has a name and he has absolutely OWNED the Russian air force. Godspeed and more kills, Samuyil! (@Adam Kinzinger. Feb. 25, 2022)

 

Samuyil Hyde is the Ukrainian version of the name for Sam Hide, who is constantly used by all right sites and other scam sites in a kind of frivolous way to create fakes that this moron fell for. But here he is, spreading it even more seriously. 

On the same day:

 

To the #ghostofkyiv, we raise a glass. Here is to even more! (@Adam Kinzinger. Feb. 25, 2022)

 

There have been fact-checks since then that there is no such thing as the ghost of Kyiv. There were similar lies told about the Russian battlefield being told to go fuck yourself by a group of very heroic Ukrainians who fought to the death on an island when in reality they were safely captured. The whole thing was a complete fairy tale. He'd spread that as well. And what amazes me is that this person – whom we know, deliberately told lies, just spread campaigns of disinformation while a member of the U.S. Congress to support a war, just like was done at the start of the Iraq war and for years after – after being exposed for spreading lies and propaganda on purpose, got hired by CNN, where he now works as a commentator. The network that incessantly tells you that they're there to combat disinformation, that you have to trust them to decree truth and falsity because you and independent media cannot be trusted to do it. 

This is not the first known liar they've hired. They got hired James Clapper, President Obama's senior national security official, after he got caught lying to Congress, three months before we began the Snowden reporting, by telling the U.S. Senate, falsely, that the NSA does not collect data on millions of Americans when in fact, three months later, we showed that the NSA is doing exactly that. So, there was another proven liar inside the government that CNN hired. 

Probably the most prolific chronic liar of the Trump era when it comes to media is a woman named Natasha Bertrand, who was a hardcore Russiagate or who promoted every single fraud that became part of Russiagate from Trump and the Alfa Bank to Russian bounties in Afghanistan to the Steele dossier. And every time she lied, she got promoted. She went from Business Insider to MSNBC. Then she ended up at The Atlantic, where Jeffrey Goldberg, who's now the editor-in-chief after telling his eyes that led to the Iraq war, got promoted. Then she ended up at Politico, where she was the first to break the CIA lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. She, too, got promoted or hired to CNN after getting caught lying. These people are not getting hired by CNN, despite the fact that they're liars. They're getting hired precisely because they're liars. It's a requirement for the job. That’s what these media outlets exist to do, as Jeffrey Sachs just said. They're there to say whatever is necessary to be in alignment with and promote the agenda of the establishment, the U.S. security state, even if it means outright lying, like trying to convince you of the absurdity, the face of absurdity, that Russia blew up its own pipeline.

Let's take a look at what I referenced earlier as the overarching question here, which is why is it that the United States is willing to risk and trifle with these incredibly grave dangers with the world's largest nuclear stockpile? We're getting closer and closer to direct military confrontation. You now have Ukrainian soldiers with highly offensive weapons, highly sophisticated weapons enabled by the United States, supplied by the United States, going into Russia and bombing and killing Russians inside Russia. And they're now going to have F-16s sent in, delivered by the Biden administration, after a series of bizarre reversals that shows how unhinged this war policy is. And what is particularly bizarre about this and I want to talk to Saagar about this when he comes on, because I genuinely think it's mystifying in a way, is that, for at least a decade, in Washington, bipartisan Washington, the view of the bipartisan class in Washington and the foreign policy community was that there is no vital interest for the United States in Ukraine. This doctrine of vital interest is crucial. It says where are we willing to go to war? For what are we willing to go to war? Which countries are vital enough to our interests to risk justifying military confrontation? And there's nothing in Ukraine that has ever been considered a vital interest to the United States, to the point where, in April 2016, that very same Jeffrey Goldberg, who rose to become the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic after getting caught telling multiple lies while at The New Yorker, he was one of President Obama's favorite journalists, this neocon. Obama sat down with him to discuss what Jeffrey Goldberg titled “The Obama Doctrine - The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America's role in the world.” And one of the things Jeffrey Goldberg badgered him about was Obama's refusal to do more for Ukraine, to arm Ukraine, to punish the Russians for taking Crimea. And Jeffrey Goldberg kept saying, why didn't you do more to protect Ukraine? Why didn't you do more to arm Ukraine, to use Ukraine to hurt Russia? And here's what Obama said: 

Obama's theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest, but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there. 

“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” Obama said. 

I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic. “It's realistic”, he said. “But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there's always going to be some ambiguity.” He then offered up a critique he had heard directed against him, in order to knock it down. 

I think that the best argument you can make on the side of those who are critics of my foreign policy is that the president doesn't exploit ambiguity enough. He doesn't maybe react in ways that might cause people to think, Wow, this guy might be a little crazy.” 

There is no evidence in modern American foreign policy that Obama that that's how people respond. People respond based on what their imperatives are, and if it's really important to somebody, and it's not that important to us, they know that, and we know that,” he said. There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we should consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. (Jeffrey Goldberg. May 2, 2022)

 

And Obama describes it that way because it's facially absurd that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Obama said they should speak up and be very clear about it. He wanted them to say that. These militarists in the Republican Party, like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, who were attacking him for not doing more to confront Russia, he said stand up and say, if you believe it, that we should risk war with Russia over Ukraine. 

 

The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision-making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years. (Jeffrey Goldberg. May 2, 2022)



 In other words, it's so absurd that we would go to war or risk war with Russia over who rules eastern Ukraine, that Obama was daring his critics to stand up and say it because, of course, they didn't want to say they were willing to risk war with Russia over Ukraine. And yet that's exactly what U.S. policy has become. We are risking war with Russia, undoubtedly, indisputably over nothing more than the question of who rules various provinces in eastern Ukraine. The reason Obama didn't go to war with Russia or didn't really take strong action against Russia when it annexed Crimea was because he knew that the people of Crimea wanted to be under Russian rule, wanted to be under Moscow rule, just like the people of Kosovo wanted independence from Serbia. And the precedent we set was that the people of this province want independence enough, they should have it. That's why Kosovo is now an independent country. And it's indisputably true that Crimea and the people in it consider themselves far more Russian than Ukrainian. It's long been true as well for the people of eastern Ukraine. And so why would we possibly continue to trifle with war with a nuclear-armed power over any of this? 

It wasn't just Barack Obama who thought this. There was a president after him, named Donald Trump, who thought the same thing. In fact, when Trump saw the Republican Party's platform when it came to Ukraine, it seemed like it was written by neocons – John McCain, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and that crowd – basically saying, We will always arm Ukraine. We will stand by Ukraine. Trump thought that was insane. Just like Trump thought it was insane that the U.S. is trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria and risk confrontation there through the CIA. Trump's position was why would we try to change the government of Syria? We should cooperate with Russia and Syria to kill ISIS and al-Qaida. Why would we want to change the government of Syria? He thought the same thing about Ukraine. He expresses it in Trumpian ways but it was the same position Obama had, which was risking war with Russia or harming the United States to protect Ukraine from Russia is insanity. And so, he had the GOP platform changed and, amazingly – and this is when I really began realizing how insane the establishment become when it came to Russiagate – they used the change in that platform, which just reflected Trump's view of pragmatism in media to avoid words that weren't a direct threat to the United States, to claim that this was proof somehow that Trump was in the Kremlin's pocket. That he took the same position Obama did, which is there's nothing in Ukraine worth going to war with Russia over. 

From The Washington Post:

 

“Trump Campaign Guts GOP’s Anti-Russia Stance on Ukraine” 

 

The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won't call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington. (The Washington Post. July 18, 2016)

 

Oh, perish the thought! “Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington” have been so correct about everything you would never want to contradict them. This was a major prong of Russiagate. The fact that Trump basically adopted Obama's view against the GOP establishment, against the Democratic establishment that said Ukraine is not a vital interest to the United States. We should not risk anything, much less war with Russia to care about what happens there. What changed in Washington that we have now gone from we will never send Patriot missile batteries, we will never send Abrams tanks, we will never send F-16s to, one after the next, sending all of those? 

Back in March 2022, at the start of the war, the establishment figure, Niall Ferguson wrote an article in Bloomberg that expressed the view that at the time was considered evil, which is basically that the United States only has one goal in Ukraine, which is not to protect the Ukrainian people. The inspiring script, the moralistic narrative, the fairy tale we were fed just like we were told we were going to Iraq to deliver democracy to the Iraqi people, we were going to war in Libya to bring democracy to the Libyans, we were going to try and take out Bashar al-Assad with the CIA secret war because we wanted to help the Syrian people – we're not in Ukraine to help the Ukrainian people. Niall Ferguson said after talking to both British and American senior foreign policy officials that the real reason we're in Ukraine was the opposite. It was to sacrifice Ukraine, to destroy Ukraine, in order to bleed Russia. The country suffering the most from this war, really, the only country is Ukraine. Their entire country is being destroyed. Their people are dying in huge numbers. Their buildings are all being blown to bits, at least in the parts where this war is. And the people who are benefiting most are the elites in the West. They have a new war for their arms manufacturers, pundits get to feel Churchillian and purposeful and strong writing in favor of this war from a safe distance. But this is what Niall Ferguson said at the very beginning: the real goal was to sacrifice Ukraine and Ukrainians and not protect them. 

 

 

 

“American officials are divided on how much the lessons from Cold War proxy wars like the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan can be applied to the ongoing war in Ukraine.” David Sanger reported for the New York Times on Saturday. According to Sanger, who cannot have written this piece without high-level sources, the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential path to de-escalation. CIA officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted Ukrainian military units, according to American officials. Reading this carefully, I conclude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going. The administration will continue to supply the Ukrainians with anti-aircraft Stingers, anti-tank Javelins and explosive Switchblade drones. It will keep trying to persuade other NATO governments to supply heavier defensive weaponry. (The latest U.S. proposal is for Turkey to provide Ukraine with the sophisticated S-400 anti-aircraft system, which Ankara purchased from Moscow just a few years ago. I expect it to go the way of the scuttled plan for Polish MiG fighters.) 

Washington will revert to the Afghanistan-after-1979 playbook of supplying an insurgency only if the Ukrainian government loses the conventional war. I have evidence from other sources to corroborate this. “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime.” Until then, all the time Putin stays, Russia will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the UK's number one option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language.

 It helps explain, among other things, the lack of diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal. (March 22, 2022)

 

And that indeed is exactly what ended up happening. The reality is the only identifiable U.S. interest was achieved in the first month of the war, which was when the U.S. coerced Germany, and then Europe, to cut off the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and to start buying natural gas from the United States. Everything else after that has been trying to do to Ukraine what the United States did to Syria: leave it in ruins by bleeding out the war just long enough, in order to weaken Russia. That is what everything is about, why we're sending $100 billion in weapons, they're depleting our own stockpiles and most dangerously of all, increasingly risking all sorts of new escalations. 

We have for you the articles that show how Biden would one month declare he refuses to send the weapons system I mentioned and then months later send the rest. As I told you, the last week brought the worst reversal of all, the most severe and by no means necessarily the last one. We're right now giving them fighter jets, F-16 fighter jets. And of course, the Ukrainians are supposedly promising not to use it to strike deep into Russia. They've repeatedly violated those promises in other ways, using American weapons to strike Russian targets inside Russia. And there are few greater escalatory dangers than that. 

As always, the question becomes who is benefiting from this war? It is definitely not you, as American infrastructure crumbles, but the CIA is benefiting, arms manufacturers in the West are definitely benefiting and it's hard to tell who else beyond that. But what is for sure true is that the core doctrine of Washington, a bipartisan foreign policy in Washington, has radically changed, seemingly overnight when it comes to the question of Ukraine. And the only real explanation I can find is that the Democratic Party fed for so long an anti-Russian animus as a result of Russiagate, they really became convinced that what they regard as the greatest, the most cataclysmic event in recent U.S. history – the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the defeat of Hillary Clinton – was due to interference by Moscow. And this is payback for that. We seem to be willing to risk blowing ourselves up over the question of who rules provinces in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbas, where the people of that region have always clearly had greater loyalty to Moscow than to Kyiv. And whatever the motive is, ultimately – and ultimately, it was very hard to tell the motive in Iraq: people had different motives for why we invaded that country and occupied it for over a decade – you can see what escalation is unfolding right before your eyes. Never with congressional debate, let alone debate of the American people. In fact, before the midterms, Kevin McCarthy, trying to win the speakership position in the midterm, signals that he would impose limits on the flow of money from the United States to Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe. As soon as he won and the Republicans won that election and he got to be the speaker, all of that stopped, and he's now aligned with the biggest hawks and warmongers in the Republican Party saying, “I've always been on the side of Biden when it comes to the war in Ukraine, and I always will be. We stand with Ukraine until the very end.”


So, we have a great guest for you. There he is, Saagar Enjeti. 

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

And in response, you said this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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AD_4nXc_Yo8Z6iDXaF7iic4CpePaVf7WorA4k4PnGQf-KFz6rZx_D63EeI-qWYw9vMSLVYFmsC59ghot91KUV9BOGxAhX2N-4lQ6lhxqAzMqJvY7TlF2ymQm2wwiPOg1nphRSejLGOunmYjO-H9xesUN?key=b0Z6bGXfV7ehSQkOWJEvWQ

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The first question comes from @thefarside:

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

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

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

He writes:

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

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

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

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

 

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

He says:

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

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

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It's a great question. Thank you. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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