Dems’ New Star—Manhattan Billionaire Heir Dan Goldman—Fiercely Defends Security State. Plus: ...

Glenn Greenwald

Politics • Culture • Writing

Dems’ New Star—Manhattan Billionaire Heir Dan Goldman—Fiercely Defends Security State. Plus: Jeffrey Sachs’ Break w/ the Establishment on Ukraine, COVID, & More

Video Transcript

Glenn Greenwald

May 30, 2023

Watch the full episode here:

Good evening. It's Wednesday, May 24. 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, you can tell a lot about a political party by the elected officials its followers most venerate. Since 2018, one of the Democrats’ most popular stars, if not the most popular, has been Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of gentrified Queens and parts of the Bronx, whose unique talents in creating viral social media content for Twitter and TikTok, such as her AOC-in-white, Oscar-worthy performance as a paid activist staring at a parking lot at the border, is beyond dispute – even if her influence over actual policy and lawmaking is close to zero. You never see Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema going viral on Instagram with endless discussions of their various traumas. You only see them wielding their power to determine what the outcome of laws will be, something you never see AOC doing. That's because they seem to like being lawmakers while AOC really enjoys life as a cultural celebrity and influencer. And it shows.

But whatever else you think of her, AOC’s special brand of identity politics, her passion for calling every Republican a white supremacist or a fascist and her completely harmless theater kid gesturing at the most banal and comfortable form of gentrified socialism did capture the zeitgeist of post-George Floyd, Trump-obsessed, left-liberal, online sentiment. AOC – whose star began to fade when of her gaudy appearance at the Met Gala, surrounded by masked servants who prepared her hair, nails and feet while she and her unmasked boyfriend blatantly enjoyed their pampering. A bridge too far. A mask-dropping moment that could never be unseen, even by her most devoted loyalist. – AOC now has a competitor: the billionaire heir of the Levi Strauss fortune, Daniel Goldman – who, through a combination of his family's friendship with the Sulzberger family, which won him an endorsement from the NYT that matters only in Manhattan, where, lucky for him, he was running, and a huge spending advantage caused by his own unearned wealth and the fortunes of his dad's friends – was elected in 2022 to represent New York's 10th Congressional district, which covers wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods and the most gentrified parts of Brooklyn. AOC has the most gentrified parts of Queens, while Daniel Goldman has Brooklyn.

Goldman's videos, as posted by the Vox Video Dunce Aaron Rupar, are now going routinely viral, which is the opposite of surprising. One can barely imagine a more perfect avatar of what the Democratic Party now represents than a billionaire heir who, even at the age of 47, has lived on his family's wealth and never worked outside of government, who reveres the FBI and views criticism of the U.S. security state as immoral or a sign of ‘bad character,’ who promised to put his assets in blind trust if he was elected to Congress and inveighed against members, like Nancy Pelosi, profiting off stock trades only to now continuously enrich himself through stock trades and the very industries on which he most focuses. There's really no better way to understand the modern-day Democratic Party than by taking a relatively fast – but still, I'm sorry to say – painfully deep look at Dan Goldman, his charmed life and his rotten ideology. So that's what we're going to do.

Then, for our interview segment, I'll talk to someone whose work I've increasingly admired and whose voice I believe is now one of the most impressive and important in U.S. political discourse, Jeffrey Sachs, who has spent his life compiling a mountain of impressive establishment credentials and working at the belly of the beast of establishment power, only to become a full-scale, increasingly vocal and, one might say, radical critic of establishment dogma and narratives, from Ukraine and Russia to COVID and well beyond. We're excited to welcome him to his debut appearance on System Update.

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and every other major podcasting platform. You can help the show's visibility by following, rating and reviewing this show, which helps our visibility.

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

One of the things I've learned in the just few months that I've been hosting a nightly show about journalism and politics is sometimes you have to be grateful for the people who make your job easier. And that's definitely how I feel. That's one of the many feelings I have toward the newly elected representative for Manhattan and its Lower Manhattan districts which are among the wealthiest in the country, as one with the most gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Daniel Goldman.

It is almost impossible for me to equate or match in words and analysis what he reveals about the Democratic Party just by himself and looking at how Democrats are reacting to him. He has become one of the most popular social media stars in Democratic Party politics. Just today, the longtime neocon Jenn Rubin, the blogger at The Washington Post – whose enthusiasm for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign was so extreme that it reached restraining order levels. It became really creepy how enamored she was of Mitt Romney. She hasn't changed a single view since her obsession with Mitt Romney, in 2012, but she now recognizes correctly that the Democratic Party is the most hospitable vehicle for her neoconservative ideology. And just today, she heralded Dan Goldman as the single best freshman member of Congress after seeing a video – that we're going to show you – that he posted just yesterday, of a speech he gave in Congress, where essentially he condemned Republicans for daring to criticize the FBI and claim the only reason anybody would dare criticize the FBI is because they themselves are criminals and afraid of the FBI catching criminals. The same thing I heard when we were doing the Snowden reporting and revealing the mass spying system implemented in secret by the NSA. When I heard constantly that the only people who would be worried about NSA spying are criminals and terrorists and pedophiles because, after all, no good citizen has anything to hide and wouldn't care if the government was reading their emails and knowing everything about what they were doing in their lives. A very similar sentiment that a decade later is found at the heart of the Democratic Party.

I think it's worth quickly examining Dan Goldman's trajectory and, most of all, his ideology, to understand why he's resonating so passionately with the Democratic Party's core base. He had a very common life for someone who is born into a billionaire family with generational wealth. His great-grandfather was the founder of the Levi Strauss chain. His grandfather was the one who turned it into a billionaire entity. So, his father, just like him, was born as an heir, somebody who never had to work a day in his life and yet who had the life of somebody drowning in all kinds of extreme wealth.

He, of course, went to the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, which is where the top Washington elite can afford $60,000 a year for the second grade – more than most people in the working class make in a year of doing actual labor – that's where he went to school. He then followed that up by going to Yale, then by going to Stanford Law School and then becoming a federal prosecutor. So, he never has actually worked in the private sector a day in his life. He has not rejected the wealth that was handed to him but instead has lived a very lavish lifestyle as a result of being an heir. And I want to say you can't control where you're born. You can't control if you're born to people who have committed crimes, you can't control whether you're born in extreme poverty, you can't control whether you're born to a family that lavishes you with billionaire wealth that you never actually had to earn, making you an heir to a fortune that you had nothing to do with creating. That's why in the West we don't hold a parent or grandparent sins against the child. That's a moral precept to which I definitely subscribe. So, it's not as though Dan Goldman has done anything wrong by being born as a billionaire heir to a fortune that was the result of someone else's work. But what you do with that life and with the paths that lay before you is highly relevant to the character that someone has. You can either work very hard to shed the insulated privilege that shapes who you are – the fact that you're constantly being told that you're the smartest and the best person, constantly surrounded by sycophants who praise you because the only people with whom you ever deal are people who work for you or for your family, people who want favors from your family, people at these private schools who are trained to treat these children like members of royalty – you can work hard to shed all of that, to avoid it, to become a humble person who has values of decency, compassion and empathy, or you can become – and I've seen this many times as somebody who was born with no financial privilege at all, but someone who ended up working my way into elite sectors, I've seen all kinds of people who grew up like Dan Goldman, maybe not as wealthy as he, but close, and more often than not, those people end up with serious entitlement syndromes as smug assholes with a superiority complex who look down at everybody else who has less than they do, even though those people actually have to work for everything they got, because he's convinced that he has more by virtue of his own merit, even though he did nothing to obtain it. And it reeks out of every pore in his body for every single video and every time he opens his mouth (we’re going to show you a few of those) but far worse and more revealing to me is the ideology he represents, what he’s brought to Congress, and it's the reason why he's become, more than anything, so popular.

So the fact that one of the most popular, if not the biggest rising stars in the Democratic Party is a billionaire heir to a fortune, who has spent his whole life ensconced in the most extreme forms of East Coast insularity and privilege, who looks down his nose, as we're about to show you, at working-class people, who don't have the same ideology as he, and most important of all, who is eager to weaponize the U.S. security state, to criminalize his opponents, and to create a precept that it is inherently and more unpatriotic and immoral to criticize the FBI and the U.S. security state, makes him the perfect vehicle, the perfect symbol, for the defining values of the Democratic Party. That's why he's worth taking a look at.

Beyond that biography, the way in which he ended up in Congress itself reveals so much about the prevailing ideology in Democratic Party politics and the values that party now represents. As I said, he was somebody who never had served even in elective office before getting elected to Congress. He served as a federal prosecutor and he really came to public view because he was selected by the House Intelligence Committee to be one of the lead prosecutors in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump. This impeachment trial, even more absurd than the second one, which centered around Trump's supposedly withholding of weapons to Ukraine, as though it's a moral obligation of a president of the United States to lavish Ukraine with our weapons because he wanted the Ukrainian investigators to determine whether or not Joe Biden and his son had committed crimes and using Joe Biden's influence as a vice president, as many newspaper reporting and, now, many investigations suggest he may have done, to determine whether or not there was actual corruption.

So, he became this kind of resistance star and it led to an MSNBC contract. But even then, running for Congress in the highly competitive sector of New York politics is a very difficult thing to do. He ran against several people who had worked their way up the political ladder by running for local office at City Council and then the State Assembly and State Senate. There was a range of ideological choices from people – from kind of the AOC left to the more centrist wings of the party. He was running against a black gay incumbent, Mondaire Jones, who had been elected in 2018, beating a significant field of primary challengers and had to run in a new district. Every district redistricted a different district than the one to which he got elected (because Sean Maloney, the head of the Democratic Campaign Committee, was desperate to get reelected and he decided he was going to run for Mondaire Jones’s seat forcing the black new congressman into this district).

So Dan Goldman had a ton of competition. So how did he win? How did this person who had no elected office and his background had never even tried to run at the age of 47, had never done anything besides work as a federal prosecutor, won? The first way is that his dad and his granddad were very good friends of the Sulzberger family who, lucky for him, happens to own and control The New York Times. And while a New York Times endorsement now means basically nothing – you may recall, in the 2020 election, in the Democratic primary, they jointly endorsed Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren because they were just insistent that a woman be the nominee, but they just couldn't decide between these two brilliant women and, after that endorsement, both of them collapsed even further. Neither of them ever made a serious bid.

The New York Times endorsement at this point is a joke, except among Manhattan voters in rich, wealthy, affluent Manhattan districts, which is by a great coincidence for him the exact voters whom he needed to win the election. So here you see “The Times endorses Dan Goldberg for New York District 10.” In August 2022, in a newspaper owned by his close friends and his family's close friends, the Sulzbergers, also Manhattan billionaires, it reads:

Mr. Goldman, a former federal prosecutor, has lived in Lower Manhattan for 16 years […]

Oh, I bet he has. That's where Soho is. That's where the wealthiest and cheekiest districts are, where people buy lofts and penthouse apartments for $7 and $8 million. They're trying to turn this into some kind of like he's the neighborhood kid.

[he] has lived in Lower Manhattan for 16 years. His uncommon experience, […]

I'd say it's uncommon. Not many people grow up as billionaire heirs.

[…] particularly his knowledge of congressional oversight and the rule of law could prove especially valuable in Congress in coming years. “I have been on the front lines leading the fight in Congress against Donald Trump and the Republican Party and trying to protect and defend our democracy and our institutions and our rule of law,” he said in an interview with the editorial board. […]

They quote that up top as though that's kind of like unique compelling insight when it's nothing but the most banal expression of liberal sentiment.

Although he lives in the district, much of which is affluent, […]

So, he's perfect for the Democratic Party, as is that district.

Mr. Goldman would need to use his first term to convince the large numbers of low-income and middle-class Americans he would represent that he understands the issues facing these constituents, especially the need for more affordable housing and better public transportation. (The New York Times. Aug 13, 2022)

Oh, I'm totally sure that Dan Goldberg understands the issues facing those middle-class and working-class constituents. I'm sure he spent his whole life thinking about affordable housing and public housing and better public transportation – if he has ever once been on the subway.

But that was The New York Times attempting to convince Manhattan voters, because the Sulzbergers were close friends of the Goldbergs, that this is whom they should vote for. And they obediently, as they so often do, followed the New York Times’ advice and elected him. But another major reason he was selected is that he had unlimited amounts of funds to pour into his campaign and for a low voter turnout Democratic primary in New York, millions of dollars make all the difference.

Here from Bloomberg on July 2022 is a story on just how vast his wealth is and the advantage that it would likely play and provide. The headline is “Levi Strauss Heir Would Join Congress’s Richest With New York Win.” The “Levi Strauss Heir” that’s exactly what he is.

Dan Goldman Congress, who served as lead Democratic counsel in former President Donald Trump's first impeachment, would be among the richest members of Congress if he’s successful in his bid to represent a newly redrawn district in New York City. It's no secret that Goldman, 46, an heir to the Levi Strauss & Company fortune, is rich. But financial disclosure forms shared by his campaign with Bloomberg show the extent of his wealth. He has a net worth of between $64 million and $253 million from over 1,700 assets, which would likely place him among the top 20 wealthiest members of Congress if he were to be elected in November.
Goldman's assets include a broad range of stocks and holdings in a wide variety of industry sectors, including oil and gas, large pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, big tech military contractors and major commercial banks. In the last federal campaign filing, Goldman said he raised $1.2 million for his congressional race, for which he has yet to spend any of his own personal fortune, although he hasn't ruled out doing so, if necessary. (Bloomberg. July 30, 2022)

Well, just a few weeks later, Politico, on August 11, reports he decided it was necessary. There you see the headline, “Money To Burn: Goldman Pumping Millions Into Television, in NY-10 Contest. That includes hits during the nightly news, late-night talk shows and daytime soaps, Federal Communications Commission records show.”

Dan Goldman, the Levi Strauss & Company heir who has gained national television exposure as counsel to House Democrats during their first impeachment trial of President Trump is raking in campaign cash and pumping an unusual amount into TV advertising in the race for New York City's open 10th Congressional District.
Goldman, a former federal prosecutor and one of several frontrunners in the race, has dropped $2.8 million on broadcast and cable spots since announcing his run on June 1, according to data from Ad Impact released Tuesday. That includes hits during the nightly news, late-night talk shows and daytime soaps, Federal Communications Commission records show.
He’s spent more than three times rival candidate Rep. Mondaire Jones, the only other competitor on the airwaves, and far beyond typical House primaries in New York City. The outsize spending on a tool more often employed by city and statewide candidates shows just how much money has flowed into Goldman's war chest – in part from his own pocket.
In particular, Goldman was able to tap into a network of family and friends connected to the Levi Strauss and Co. fortune – to which he is an heir – to raise more than $200,000. And over the weekend, his campaign filed paperwork with the FEC showing that Goldman gave his own campaign $1 million. Should he win, Goldman would be one of the richest members of Congress. (Politico. Aug. 11, 2022)

As I said, he's become a social media star here, you see.

Here was a Politico article that was, I believe, from 2022 as well, and I just like this headline, which was “Denim Dynasty Cash Among NY-10 contributions flowing from outside the district. The familial money flowing to Dan Goldman is part of a larger current of money from outside the newly drawn 10th Congressional District, public records show.”

It talks about how all of this money is flowing because of his family's link to all kinds of other family fortunes.

As I said, his social media profile on Twitter has close to half a million followers. When he began running, he had a few thousand, maybe 20,000-30,000, something like that, so, he has skyrocketed into social media fame. And the reason is that his ideological positions and the way he expresses himself are so connected to the “Id” of the modern-day Democratic Party. And I just want to show you a few of them, because it doesn't just shed light on Goldman – It sheds light on the Democratic Party itself. All of these videos were promoted by the Supreme Partisan videographer Aaron Rupar, who used to work for Vox and now is on his own; and they really embody not just Dan Goldman's ethos, but the ethos of the Democratic Party. He couldn't pick a more perfect avatar of Democratic Party politics than a billionaire heir who hates working-class people and reveres the U.S. security state. That's pretty much the fullness of his agenda.

So as you probably recall, we reported it several times when it happened and after Matt Taibbi, along with Michael Shellenberger, appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to be questioned by members of that committee about the Twitter File's reporting, which showed that the U.S. security state, the FBI, the CIA and Homeland Security had been exercising extraordinary amounts of influence over Twitter's decisions about what views and what people can and cannot be heard online. In other words, the U.S. security state is directly involved in censoring our domestic political discourse. And every Democrat on that committee, literally every Democrat, not only defended and heralded the importance and virtue of them doing so, but attacked Taibbi personally for the crime of revealing what they wanted to be kept secret because they were in support of it. And one of the people who were most scornful against the journalist, well, insulting journalists used to be a grave press freedom crisis back in 2017, 2018, 2019. now Democrats are giddy with ecstasy and arousal when they watch Dan Goldman do it. Let's watch what he did to Matt Taibbi about the Twitter Files.

(Video. March 9, 2023)

Dan Goldman: Twitter. Twitter. And even with Twitter, you cannot find actual evidence of any direct government censorship, of any lawful speech. And when I say lawful, I mean non-criminal speech, because plenty […]
Chairman: I'll give you one. The gentleman's time has expired. I'd ask unanimous consent to enter into the record the following email from Clarke Humphrey, Executive Office of the Presidency, White House Office, January 23, 2021. That's the Biden administration. 4:39 a.m. “Hey, folks,” this goes to Twitter. “Hey, folks. They use the term Mr. Goldman just used “wanting to flag the below tweet and then wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed a.s.a.p.” Boom, that is […]
Dan Goldman: You read the below tweet.
Chairman: “And then if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre, that would be great.” This is a tweet on the very issue […]

They're going to argue about what this tweet is, and whether or not it should have been censored. So, Dan Goldman went from saying there's never an instance in which the Biden administration or the U.S. security state tried to influence Twitter to remove lawful speech. He then went on to acknowledge because Jim Jordan forced him to, that in fact, that does happen and then went on to justify it. The examples, Jim Jordan first, those were ones where Hunter Biden's laptop was used to reveal things about Hunter Biden's personal life, and then others were more generalized about all kinds of censorship that Twitter did at the behest of the FBI, which was the heart and soul of the Twitter Files. And Democrats cheered it and explicitly praised it.

At a recent immigration hearing, a journalist whom I know whose work I followed for quite a while now, Julio Rosas, who comes from a humble working-class family and who has really done just standard, classic, on-the-ground, courageous reporting at protests that have been dangerous and specifically reporting on the border, appeared before the committee on which Dan Goldman sits to testify. And Dan Goldman spoke about him like he was dirt on the ground, someone whose credentials were so pitiful that he could barely even utter it in his mouth. It really reveals so much about his character but also about the Democratic Party's class-based view of the world. Listen to what he did and how he treated this journalist.

(Video. May 16, 2023)

Dan Goldman: […] gas light us up here as if Antifa, which Mr. Rosas apparently the expert now in organized terrorist activity, has overruled the FBI director who says – there's a headline – says “Antifa is an ideology, not an organization.” No, no, no. Let's not listen to the FBI director. Let's listen to – Sorry. What's your title? Senior Writer at Townhall who is going to tell us that the FBI director is wrong. And I would like to introduce[…]

No suggesting that the FBI director is wrong. What kind of person would do that, would dispute a claim from the FBI? This is disgusting. And especially when it comes from some writer. What's it called? Town Hall didn't even go to Sidwell Friends. Never stepped foot on Yale's campus. Didn't go to Stanford Law. Never worked in the federal prosecutor's office. Didn't come from a billionaire family. Just some loser whose name he could barely remember and whose credentials make him sick to even reference. And the biggest crime of all was the fact that he would dare, based on his years of reporting on Antifa protests on the ground, to characterize it differently than the way the FBI director does – no criticizing the FBI.

If you think that is in any way an overstatement, listen to what Dan Goldman said yesterday in which he ranted, and raved against the audacity of the Republican Party in arguing that the FBI is what it has always been and what the Democratic Party and the liberal left sector of it have always maintained it was, until about six years ago, which is a fundamentally corrupt organization.

Now, Dan Goldberg believes that saying that about the FBI reflects bad moral character. Listen to this rousing defense of the FBI that went viral all over Twitter as liberals cheered.

(Video. May 23, 2023)

Dan Goldman: So why are my colleagues trying to undermine the FBI? Why are they asking to defund the FBI?

Oh, no. Undermining the FBI. How can anyone want to undermine the FBI? Every year, since I've been writing about politics, we've gotten reports from the Inspector General's office of the FBI, the Inspector General's office of the Justice Department. Independent investigations like the Horowitz Report, like the one John Durham just submitted, a 306-page report detailing at great length the severe abuses that the FBI commits of their power for political ends. They still work in what was called the J. Edgar Hoover Building. That is the name of their headquarters. J. Edgar Hoover, whom they couldn't dislodge from the FBI for 60 years because he famously kept dossiers on every major political figure in Washington, and everyone was petrified of him. The FBI under Hoover that encouraged Martin Luther King to commit suicide upon threat of revealing the evidence the FBI illegally obtained through surveillance of Martin Luther King's adulterous relationships. That's the FBI that Dan Goldman is here to say nobody should dare ever undermine.

(Video. May 23, 2023)

Dan Goldman: It is not because the FBI is not doing its job. It's because the FBI is doing its job. And the problem they have is that the FBI is doing its job in investigating their dear leader, Donald Trump. And if you can undermine the investigator, if you can undermine independent journalists doing investigative reporting, then you can undermine our entire system of democracy. That is the authoritarian playbook 101. You attack the democratic institutions. You attack the independent, objective individuals who provide checks and balances in a democracy. And then, rather than follow the law and the rules, you can violate the law and the rules because there's no one with any credibility who can hold you in check. So, do you want to know the reason why the FBI is going down in its credibility? It's because it's being attacked by people on the other side of the aisle. And that has to stop. […]

If you've listened to any Democratic Party senator, over the last 60 years, like Frank Church – who led the investigation into the U.S. security state in the 1970s and uncovered systemic abuses that shocked America – you may have thought the FBI was actually a menace to democratic values. That's what John Durham just concluded. They launched an investigation in the middle of the 2016 election with no evidentiary basis of any kind into Trump's fictitious collusion with the Russians to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 election. They've repeatedly got caught abusing their spying powers for all kinds of improper ends. An FBI lawyer pled guilty in a federal court to lying to the FISA court to get search warrants to spy on Carter Page when he was just out of representing or working with the Trump campaign. And here's Dan Goldman to tell you the FBI is critical for safeguarding our democratic values and if we criticize them, if we erode their credibility, that is how our democracy is threatened, not from them abusing all their powers and spying on Americans for improper ends, but by people having the audacity to criticize the FBI because of their abuse of political power.

If you look at polling and we've shown this many times – and I'm about to bring Jeffrey Sachs on, I'm excited to do that. So, we're going to talk to him about all of these things – but I just want to show you this as the last graph.

Here is a Pew Survey from March 2023. So often people say to me – or Matt Taibbi or others – what happened to you guys? We used to love you. You've really changed. This shows what has actually changed. Overwhelming majorities of Democratic voters, overwhelming majorities now view the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security favorably, while majorities of Republicans, or pluralities, view them skeptically and critically. And so, when Dan Goldman gives this rousing homage to the greatness, integrity, and importance of the FBI, he is speaking on behalf of Democratic Party voters. And that is why it resonates. That has become the core ideology of the Democratic Party that the U.S. security state is here to protect our democracy, to protect the United States through its great integrity and honor and commitment to democracy, and that anyone who criticizes it is unpatriotic, probably a Russian agent or somebody who is a criminal. Why else would you criticize the FBI unless it was because you wanted to hide your own crimes?

And right at the same time, this Pew poll in August 2021 shows an overwhelming majority of Democrats favor the Internet being censored, not only by tech companies, by big tech but also by the state. They want the U.S. government to take steps to restrict information on the grounds that the U.S. government sees that it's false, even if it limits freedom of information – 65% of Democrats want that – It has skyrocketed since 2018. And 76% of Democrats want big tech to do what they want: a unified state and corporate power to censor the Internet – and the U.S. security state is the North Star of Democratic Party politics, which is why they're in an alliance with almost every major neocon that now correctly perceives that the Democratic Party is the best vehicle for advancing the neoconservative agenda.

In the last week, Dan Goldman has made almost $10 million in stock trades after promising to put his assets in a blind trust and saying that no member of Congress should ever trade stocks. This is who has become the rising star, the most popular new member of Congress among the online liberal left and the Democratic Party. And it's hard to imagine a better avatar, a clearer representative for what this party has become.

I have been wanting to speak to our next guest for quite a while as I have become increasingly interested in his trajectory and admiring his multiple criticisms of establishment dogma, all amazingly, while managing to always keep at least one foot in establishment venues. Not an easy feat for someone intent on exposing its deceits and even subverting its agenda. But that's what Jeffrey Sachs has managed to do.

Back in 2012, I was working on a book about long-time MIT professor and fierce establishment critic, Noam Chomsky, and I ended up not finishing it, in part because this person named Edward Snowden disrupted my life, and the materials he provided me ended up consuming my journalistic life for the next three years. But one of the critiques I had developed about Chomsky, in the context of my overall admiration for his work and the way it influenced me, was what I regarded as his failure, in my view, to do more to avoid being marginalized. Chomsky insisted marginalization was an inevitable outcome for any establishment dissident and that establishments, by their nature, are designed to exclude and silence or, if necessary, destroy effective establishment critics. But I developed the view that while nothing ever justifies compromising one's core integrity in exchange for access, there are small compromises one can make to ensure access to and influence in establishment venues, whether it's gestures as trivial as what clothes one wears, or developing and maintaining a relationship with TV producers to ensure you can be heard or learning the way to speak in the way demanded by the constraining format of television – all things that are necessary to prevent your full-scale disappearance. And that, if one really believes in the value of what one is saying, trying to find ways to ensure access and platforms is really an obligation. And that is what has attracted me most to support Sachs' work. All while he is vehemently condemning not just U.S. policy in Ukraine, but the narratives that support it; suggesting the possibility not only that COVID came from a lab leak, but a lab leak at a U.S. facility; supporting Trump's opposition to the CIA's top priority (regime change war in Syria) – views as threatening to establishment dogma and interests as it gets – he has simultaneously managed to maintain access to some of the most influential political and media precincts. That doesn't happen without adept and determined strategizing.

To say that Sachs has an establishment pedigree and has long been welcomed in the highest levels of establishment circles is to understate the case. He's long been a Harvard professor of economics, has been a senior advisor to the UN Secretary-General, an economic adviser to governments around the world, and someone who personally witnessed some of the most historic events of post-Soviet Russia. Twice named on the Times list of the world’s 100 most influential people and now a professor of economics at Columbia, at the start of the COVID pandemic, he was appointed by the then prestigious medical journal Lancet to serve as chair of its task force. So, Sachs is clearly somebody who has been in positions of establishment power for a long time. He rose very quickly to become a full professor at Harvard by the time he was 29 and then received international attention by helping Bolivia navigate its way out of hyperinflation and convince the international financial community to cancel a large part of its debt that led countries like Poland and others in Eastern Europe to similarly seek his service and then finally, both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, in post-Soviet Russia, asked him to come and help them manage their post-communist economy.

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Would love to hear others' reaction to it.
Well worth a read.
And congrats on 500 shows. Friday's broadcast was as great as I've come to expect from these audience Q and A shows. Fantastic and insightful questions as usual. It's amazing how often I get an answer to something I want to ask about, because Glenn answers another viewer who has asked it.
So I guess I should say congrats to my fellow viewers as well.
Cheers 👍

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm

Teardrinker@Teardrinker

10 hours ago

@ggreenwald
Glenn, can you bring Diana Panchenko on your show?
She's a Ukrainian journalist who has done some of the most honest coverage on free speech crackdowns in Ukraine, as well as the war with Russia.
YouTube just cancelled her channel, even though she has over 2 million followers, without any warning or explanation as to why.
Those of us who are fans of hers would love to hear from her about it.

Kurl Malone@Kurl_Malone

23 hours ago

System update,

I just listened to a segment regarding Michael Tracey on Richard Groves' GrandTheftWorld podcast (highly recommended to you and your audience) accusing Whitney Webb of plagiarism and making up information.

I doubt you will disassociate from Mr Tracey anytime soon, so I would like to suggest (in descending order of likelihood least to most) methods for putting this minor controversy to bed.

1 replace michael with whitney asap
2read the book and make notes where she made mistakes
3 have chatgpt read the books and regurgitate any issues the ai finds
4 invite Whitney and Michael on SU to debate
5 invite Whitney on alone for an interview

The Michael Tracey stink on the show has bothered me for a long time, please address it?

Kurl

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

August 05, 2025

Stephen Miller's False Denials About Trump's Campus "Hate Speech" Codes; Sohrab Ahmari on the MAGA Splits Over Antitrust, Foreign Wars, and More

System Update #495

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 as a podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast platform.

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!

One of President Trump's most powerful advisers, Stephen Miller, last night claimed that I had posted what he called "patently false" statements about the Trump administration’s policy. Specifically, earlier in the day, I had pointed out – and documented, as I've done many times – that the Trump administration has implemented a radically expanded "hate speech" code that outlawed a wide range of opinions about Israel and Jewish individuals and, even worse, that they have been pressuring American universities to adopt this expanded "hate speech" code on campuses to restrict the free speech rights, not of foreign students, but of American professors, American administrators and American students. It's a direct attack on the free speech rights of Americans on college campuses.

I also pointed out – as I have covered here many times – that the Trump administration has also adopted a policy of deporting law-abiding citizens, not for criticizing the United States, but for criticizing Israel. All of my claims here are demonstrably and indisputably true. Yet after I pointed them out yesterday, and various MAGA influencers began responding to them and promoting them, White House officials began contacting them to convince them that my claims weren't true. When that didn't work because I was able to provide the evidence, the White House late last night dispatched one of its most popular officials – Stephen Miller – to label my claims “patently false."

The policies in question, adopted by the Trump administration, especially these attacks on free speech on American college campuses through hate speech codes, are of great importance, precisely, since they do attack the free speech rights of Americans at our universities, and the actual truth of what the Trump administration should be demonstrated. So that's exactly what we're going to do tonight.

Then: The emergence of Donald Trump and his MAGA ideology in the Republican Party led to the opening of all sorts of new ideas and policies previously anathema in that party. All of that, in turn, led to vibrant debates and competing views within the Trump coalition, as well as to all new voices and perspectives. One of the most interesting thinkers to emerge from that clash is our guest tonight: he's Sohrab Ahmari, one of the founders of Compact Magazine and now the U.S. editor for the online journal UnHerd. We’ll talk about all of that, as well as other MAGA divisions becoming increasingly more visible on economic populism generally, war and foreign policy, and much more.

Sometimes, government policy is carried out with very flamboyant and melodramatic announcements that everyone can listen to and understand, but more often it's carried out through a series of documents, very lengthy documents, sometimes legal documents, that have a great deal of complexity to them.

Oftentimes, when that happens, the government, if it has a policy or is pursuing things that are unpopular, especially among its own voters, can just try to confuse things by claiming that people's descriptions of what they're doing are untrue and false and trying to just confuse people with a bunch of irrelevances or false claims. A lot of people don't know what to make of it. They just throw up their hands because most people don't have the time to sort through all that. Especially if you're a supporter of a political movement and you hear that they're pursuing a policy that you just think is so anathema to their ideology that you don't want to believe that they're doing, you're happy to hear from the government when they say, “Oh, that's a lie. Don't listen to the persons or the people saying that. That's not actually what we're doing.”

Yet when that happens, I think it's very incumbent upon everybody who wants to know what their government is doing to actually understand the truth. And that is what happened last night.

I've been reporting for several months now on the Trump administration's systematic efforts to force American universities to adopt expanded hate speech codes. Remember, for so long, conservatives hated hate speech codes on college campuses. They condemned it as censorship. They said it's designed to suppress ideas.

Oftentimes, those hate speech codes were justified on the grounds that it's necessary to protect minority groups or that those ideas are hateful and incite violence. And all of this, we were told by most conservatives that I know, I think, in probably a consensus close to unanimity, we were told that this is just repressive behavior, that faculty and students on campus should have the freedom to express whatever views they want. If they're controversial, if they are offensive, if they are just disliked by others, the solution is not to ban those ideas or punish those people, but to allow open debate to flourish and people to hear those ideas.

That is a critique I vehemently agree with. And I've long sided with conservatives on this censorship debate as it has formed over the last, say, six, seven, eight years when it comes to online discourse, when it comes to campus discourse, free speech is something that is not just a constitutional guarantee and according to the Declaration of Independence, a right guaranteed by God, but it is also central to the American ethos of how we think debate should unfold. We don't trust the central authority to dictate what ideas are prohibited and which ones aren't. Instead, we believe in the free flow of ideas and the ability of adults to listen and make up their own minds.

That's the opposite of what the Trump administration has now been doing. What they said they believed in, Donald Trump, in his inauguration and other times, was that he wanted to restore free speech. Early on in the administration, JD Vance went to Europe and chided them for having long lists of prohibited ideas for which their citizens are punished if they express those views. And the reality is that's exactly what the Trump administration has been doing.

I want to make clear I'm not talking here about the controversies over deporting foreign students for criticizing Israel. That's a separate issue, which is part of this discussion, but that's totally ancillary and secondary. I've covered that many times. That is not what I'm discussing.

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Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

August 04, 2025

What are CBS News' Billionaire Heirs Doing with Bari Weiss? With Ryan Grim on the Funding Behind It: Europe Capitulates to Trump Again

System Update #494

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.

Our guest is the independent journalist Ryan Grim, the founder of DropSite News and a co-host of Breaking Points, about a new investigative article he published with Murtaza Hussain about who exactly guides Bari Weiss's media outlet, The Free Press, which seems to be now set to be at the center of one of America's oldest, most prestigious, and most influential news outlets.

A lot of different measures have been undertaken over the past 18 months – really a lot longer than that, but they've intensified over the last, say, 20 months since October 7 – as not just Americans, but the world, increasingly watched some of the most horrifying images we've ever seen live-streamed to us on a daily basis, sometimes on an hourly basis, of children getting blown up, of entire families being extinguished and being wiped out of essentially all of Gaza and civilian life there being destroyed systematically while Israeli officials openly admit that their goal is to do exactly that, to cleanse Gaza of the people who live there, to either force them to leave, kill them, or concentrate them in tiny little camps, what has also long been known as concentration camps.

The evidence of this has become so compelling that many Western politicians who have never been willing to utter a word of criticism about Israel are now feeling required to stand up on a soapbox and speak of Israel in terms as critical and condemning as I'm sure they never imagined they would. The same is true for many media outlets and for organizations. Just in the last week alone, both France and then today, the U.K., sort of recognized the Palestinian state, something they had always refused to do, except in connection with an agreement of which Israel was a part.

Even Donald Trump came out within the last three days and, in direct defiance of Benjamin Netanyahu's proclamation that there's no starvation policy that Israel has imposed on Gaza and, according to Netanyahu, no starvation at all. Donald Trump said there's absolutely starvation in Gaza. You see it in the children; you see it in people. These are things that you cannot fake.

The public opinion in the United States has rapidly spiraled out of control against Israel as the world turns against that country, and particularly what it's doing in Gaza. Huge amounts of sympathy for that country emerged in the wake of October 7. Almost every country expressed support for it and was on its side, but what they have done, using October 7 as a pretext, to achieve what were in reality long-term goals of many people inside the Israeli government, similar to how many American neocons used the 9/11 attacks to achieve all kinds of pre-existing goals, 9/11 and 9/11 became the pretext for it, including the invasion of Iraq, but a whole variety of other measures as well.

Large numbers of people have turned against Israel in the United States, which funds the Israeli military, which funds Israeli wars, which gives $4 billion to that country automatically every year under a 10-year deal signed by President Obama on the way out, much of which is required to be used to buy weapons from American arms dealers – it's basically a gift certificate offered by the American people to Israel to go on a shopping spree in the military industrial complex. But not all of it is required for that. And then every time Israel has a new war or wants to go fight somebody else, the United States not only transfers billions more to them.

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. government transferred, in addition to that $4 billion a year, another $17 billion to pay for what Israel has been doing in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon. But the U.S. also spends massive amounts of money just deploying our military assets to protect Israel, to fight with Israel, to intercept missiles that are shot at Israel by countries that they're bombing. Therefore, a lot of people who did not grow up based on indoctrination about their obligation to subsidize the Israeli state; people who, after the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis, the disruptions of COVID and the lives that accompanied each of those, began losing trust and faith in American institutions but also began losing their own economic security.

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Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

August 04, 2025

Israel-Made Famine Crisis Finally Recognized

System Update #493

Tonight, we will cover the rapidly growing body of indisputable evidence that mass famine, mass starvation, is sweeping through Gaza in a way we haven't really quite seen in many decades, given how deliberate and planned it is by the Israeli government.

By evidence I don't just mean the testimony of people in Gaza, or Gaza journalist or World Health organizations, but many Western physicians who are in Gaza, who are coming back from Gaza and reporting on the horrors that they're seeing, as well as official statements from Israeli government officials about exactly what they are carrying out, and what their intentions are with regard to the blockade that they continue to impose to prevent food from getting to Gaza.

We're seeing babies, young kids and even now adults starving to death, again, as the result of a deliberate starvation policy that, again, is part of a war that the United States is paying for, that the United States under two successive presidents has been arming and continues to support diplomatically.

One of the ways that you know that the horrors are immense is that many Western politicians, even Western governments, are now, suddenly, after 18 to 20 months of steadfastly supporting everything Israel is doing, starting to try to distance themselves with all sorts of statements and expressions of concern and even occasionally trying to pretend that they're doing something concrete. They know that what is taking place in Gaza is of historic proportions in terms of atrocity and war crimes and they do not want that associated with them, they don't want that on their conscience or especially on their legacy and so they're attempting to pretend all along is that this were something that they had opposed from the very first moment the Israeli destruction of Gaza began.

Ever since the start of the destruction of Gaza by the Israeli government following the October 7 attack, there have been all kinds of concerns that one of the things the Israeli government would do is impose mass starvation and famine on the population of 2.2 million people of Gaza. At least that was the population when all this began; half of that population, 1.1 million, are children, under the age of 18.

This has been something we've seen evidence of, and in part, people were concerned about it because the Israeli government immediately announced that that was their intention. We've now gotten to the point after a full-scale Israeli blockade – and by blockade, I don't mean that Israel is failing to feed the people of Gaza, I mean that the people, groups and organizations that are trying to bring food into Gaza are physically impeded from doing so by the IDF as a result of official Israeli policy.

There was a complete and full blockade for three months; at the same time, they imposed policies such as destroying any fields or plants where food could grow. They are now killing or at least arresting anybody who tries to just go a little bit out – remember, Gaza has a beach and a sea – to try to fish for food. That is also prohibited. It clearly is a policy designed to starve the population to death, which is why even Israeli experts in genocide who long resisted applying the word genocide to what Israel is doing in Gaza have now relented and said it's the only word that applies.

The number of groups, governments and people who previously supported what Israel was doing or at least refused to acknowledge the full extent of the atrocities, have now, in their view, no choice but to do so. The evidence is starting to become so overwhelming that only the hardcore Israel loyalists are left to try to deny it or blame somebody else for it.

ABC News today brings this headline: “More than 100 aid groups warn of 'mass starvation' in Gaza amid Israel's war with Hamas. Their statement warned of "record rates of acute malnutrition." They are the World Health Organization and groups from all over the planet that have immense credibility in having worked with conflicts many times before.

A leading Israeli newspaper, the daily Haaretz, which has been more critical of the Netanyahu government than most, but which at the same time was supportive for months of what Israel was doing in Gaza following October 7, had its lead editorial yesterday under this headline: “Israel Is Starving Gaza.” The language they used was so clear, straightforward and direct that it's unimaginable to think of any large corporate Western media outlet saying anything similar.

Last Monday, we interviewed a leading scholar of famine, who has studied famines around the world for his entire life and not only did he describe how what's taking place in Gaza is unprecedented, at least since World War II, because of how minutely planned it is and because they're unlike famine, say, in Ethiopia, or Sudan or Yemen. There are all sorts of organizations with immense expertise and resources that are just a couple of miles away from where children are starving to death, have huge amounts of food and other aids that they want to bring to the people of Gaza and yet are blocked from doing so by the IDF.

Although I suppose it's encouraging, or at least better than the alternative, that even Western governments and the longstanding Israel supporters who are American politicians are now issuing statements about how disturbed they are by the mass famine in Gaza, how Israel needs to immediately cease this inhumane activity, none of this is surprising. None of it is new. Israel made very clear from the very beginning what exactly their intentions were, and people just decided that they were too scared to stand up and object at the time.

Oftentimes, you hear that it's only far-right extremist ministers in Netanyahu's government who say things like this, like Ben Gvir, Smotrich, or people like that. In reality, the Israeli defense minister was one of the moderate people comparatively at the start of the war, to the point where Netanyahu ended up ousting him and he was the one who ordered a "complete siege" on the Gaza Strip, saying Israeli authorities would cut electricity and block the entry of food, water and electricity.

In April of this year, just three months ago, another Israeli minister, Smotrich, said at a conference:

Proudly boasting of the actions that the Israeli military, the Israeli government intended to take and then took. In his words, to ensure that not even a grain a wheat entered, a place where 2.2 million people, or 2 million people, or 1.9 million people are clinging to survival in between dodging shelling from tanks and bombs and having everything from schools and U.N. refugees and refugees in even their own tents being blown up. From CNN, in May:

Just as a reminder, it was in February, after Trump was inaugurated, that Israel explicitly announced to the world that it was blockading all food from entering Gaza. They didn't hide it. It wasn't in dispute. It wasn't in doubt. It was an official Israeli policy to starve the entire population, which is collective punishment as a way of forcing Hamas to negotiate or to surrender. This is exactly sort of the thing that, after World War II, we decided would be intolerable, that people who did it would be guilty of war crimes and treated as such, the way that the Nazis who did things similarly, like starve entire cities, starve entire ghettos of Jews, were treated as war criminals and held responsible and actually executed.

So, none of this is new for all the people who are now just seeing the babies who are emaciated in skin and bones and dying of malnutrition and increasingly older children and adults as well, to suddenly come out and say, “Oh my God, I can't believe this. What have we been supporting? This has to stop.”

This is all months in the making, and, as hunger experts and famine groups will tell you, once it gets to this stage, where people are actually dying now of famine in large numbers, it becomes irreversible. Irreversible physically because even if you get the food in, their bodies aren't equipped to process it. They need much more extensive medical care than that. Of course, in children, it impedes brain growth for life and physical vitality for life, to say nothing of the mass death from starvation, which we're now starting to see.

That's why all these attempts to distance themselves that we're seeing from Western governments and Western politicians are utterly nauseating. They're the ones who enabled it, they're the ones who have been paying for it, they're the ones who have been arming it, they're the ones who've been cheering for it, despite Israeli vows to starve to death the people of Gaza.

We've been hearing for a year and a half about stories of doctors in Gaza having to perform major surgeries, amputations on children, without so much as any painkillers, let alone anesthesia. Horror stories of the worst kind imaginable. But what we're now seeing is a body of evidence so conclusive and so indisputable from so many different sources that it has essentially become impossible for denialists of these atrocities to maintain their denialism any longer.

Here is Nick Maynard. He's a British physician who was on the mainstream program “Good Morning Britain,” just like “Good Morning America” in the United States. And he got back from Gaza. He's a surgeon. And here's what he described in his own words.

Video. Nick Maynard, “Good Morning Britain.” July 25, 2025.

He just gets done saying exactly what he's been seeing that every day, for fun almost, IDF soldiers pick which part of the body they're going to snipe young children, teenagers, young teenagers with, oh, today their heads, tomorrow their chests. How about their kneecaps? How about their testicles? And they come in in clutches with all the same injury. We've been hearing stories of IDF soldiers purposely targeting young boys who come in with bullets in their brains. We've been hearing about this for quite a long time now. He's in Gaza. He saw exactly what he's describing.

Here he is again, talking about something in one way, not quite as brutal, but in another way, almost more horrific in terms of the intentionality that it shows in terms of what the Israeli government and the IDF are actually up to in terms of their objectives in Gaza.

Video. NICK MAYNARD, GOOD MORNING BRITAIN. July 25, 2025.

If you are deliberately preventing the entrance in Gaza of baby formula, knowing that there is severe malnutrition among the women giving birth to these babies and not when Hamas operatives are trying to bring them in, but from Western doctors who work with organizations known around the world for treating people with injuries in war zones, if that isn't evidence of genocidal intent, someone needs to tell me what is.

Here's Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat from Minnesota, with a very steadfast pro-Israel record in the Senate for the entire time she's been there. Yesterday, she decided to stand up on the Senate floor to talk about how deeply worried and concerned and upset she is by the stories about nutrition coming out of Gaza and the role that the Israelis are playing in blockading food to starve the people in Gaza to death. She's so moved by it. She had to stand up and make her voice heard. Here's what she said.

Video. AMY KLOBUCHAR, C-SPAN. July 24, 2025.

I've heard enough of that performance. Very well delivered. The voice cracking was a nice touch. But as you'll see, as you will notice, there's no advocacy of any concrete call. You would think this is just some country doing this, that the United States has nothing to do with.

The United States pays for the Israeli military. It pays for their wars. It pays for the munitions they use to carry all of this out and has for decades. Amy Klobuchar is a steadfast supporter of that, as are pretty much all of her colleagues in the Senate from both parties.

Here is a photograph of 14 senators, seven from the Republican Party and seven from the Democratic Party, the perfect balance to illustrate how bipartisan the reverence and support for Israel is in Washington. There you see Amy Klobuchar. She's right here smiling. And here's Benjamin Netanyahu. Here's Chuck Schumer, here's Ted Cruz, here's Adam Schiff. Just all the kinds of people we're constantly told can never get along with anything. There they all are gathered. You see Netanyahu sort of posing there in front of everybody as some kind of warrior strut.

Benjamin Netanyahu is an indicted war criminal required to be arrested by any signatory to the International Criminal Court, just like Vladimir Putin is. Just the week before, the IDF soldiers and settlers in the West Bank murdered yet another American citizen, this one 20 years old, who was born in the United States, lived in the U.S., and was visiting relatives in the West Bank. And not only did settlers at the back of the IDF storm their house and beat him to death, but they also then blocked ambulances from getting to the scene to pick him up and bring him to get medical care, and the American citizen died, killed by Israelis. None of these people had anything to say about this, because their loyalty is more to Israel than to even their own fellow citizens.

So, it's nice that Amy Klobuchar wants to engage in public displays of emotion about how deeply moved she is, except she was just standing right next to the leader of the government responsible. Again, this is not anything new. He is indicted exactly for these kinds of crimes, for deliberate starvation, among many other things.

I should also point out that Amy Klobuchar's statement about the hostages is preposterous. The Netanyahu government has said many times, very explicitly, that even if Hamas turned over every hostage today, they've said this for months, that they would not stop their war. Their war aim is not to get the hostage back. That's the pretext. Even the hostages' own families know that and have said that, which is why they have deprioritized getting the hostages back because that's not their role. Their goal is to expel all Arabs and Palestinians from all of Gaza, as another minister in the Israeli government said yesterday, and make sure that all of Gaza is exclusively Jewish. They want to cleanse all of Gaza of every Arab and Muslim who lives there, every Palestinian, including Christian Palestinians and Palestinian Catholics, and make it part of the Israeli state where only Israeli Jews are permitted to live. That's the goal of the war. It doesn't have anything to do with the hostages. That's a pretext.

There's an Israeli scholar who is one of the leading scholars on Holocaust studies and the study of genocide, named Omer Bartov and he served in the IDF. He's an Israeli and he now teaches at Brown University, where he teaches Holocaust studies and the study of Genocide. And for quite a long time, until very recently, he rejected the idea that the word genocide applies to what Israel is doing in Gaza. Even when other human rights groups and other experts in genocide were saying, “The word absolutely applies,” he was insisting it did not. He then wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last week where he said, “I'm an expert in genocide. I know it when I see it,” and laid out a very long case with documentation and evidence. Again, this is an Israeli citizen who fought in the IDF, who dedicated his life to Holocaust studies as a steadfast supporter of Israel, writing in The New York Times op-ed, “I long resisted the conclusion, but there's no other word that can be used to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza besides genocide.” He laid out a long case using his historical understanding, his scholarly analysis of what genocide means and how it's been applied in the past and why it applies today. He then went on Piers Morgan and elaborated on his view and here's part of what he said.

Video. Omer Bartov, Piers Morgan Uncensored. July 24, 2025.

And that's been true for a very long time. The war aim of this war has always been to destroy civilian life in all of Gaza, whether by killing the people there or making life so impossible that it forces them to try to find some way out. That's the goal. It has nothing to do with the hostages or dismantling Hamas or anything else. It's to steal the land that the fanatics in the Israeli government believe God promised to them, without regard to what the rest of the world believes or thinks about international borders or anything else. And they don't regard the people in Gaza as human. That's the reality. Israel, as a country, obviously has lots of exceptions, but the prevailing ethos in Israel is that these are not human beings. These are less than human beings, which is why there's very little opposition – some have grown, but it’s still an absolute minority in Israel who are objecting to any of this.

In response to this Israeli scholar of the Holocaust and genocide, not just pronouncing that what Israel is doing is a genocide, but laying out a very extensive case, for whatever reason, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, you might recall, is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, not the Secretary of State, compelled to go onto Twitter and to say this in response to somebody who denied this claim:

So, have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – who is not Jewish, of course, he's part of a Catholic family – accusing Israeli Jews of spreading blood libel against Jews, because they invoke their field of expertise and the decades long study that they've done of genocide to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza as the manifestation of genocidal intent, is a blood libel against Jews.

Blood libel is now a term that has the same effective definition operationally as antisemitism, which just means criticizing Israel. I have, though, been really amazed. I've noticed this for quite some time now, the way in which non-Jewish supporters of Israel – you can call them Christian Zionists, or Zionists in general – I don't think RFK Jr.'s reverence for Israel comes from any kind of evangelical Christianity, just think it comes from political expediency.

He was on my show once, talking about it, where he gave this big, long speech about how we have to immediately stop financing the war in Ukraine because we can't afford it any longer. All of that, all of which was true. All of which I agreed with. And then I asked him, Does that same thing apply to Israel? And he immediately rejected it, started saying how Israel is a crucial ally, blah, blah, although, at the end, he did say, you know what, maybe you're right, maybe it is time to stop funding Israel and let them stand on their own two feet. But then the Democrats decided to attack RFK Jr. as antisemitic, and he ran into the arms of the most extremist Israel supporters like Rabbi Shmuley. Ever since, he has been as extreme a supporter of Israel as it gets to the point that he now accuses Israeli professors of Holocaust studies of spreading blood libels against Jews.

One of the most repugnant things I've seen is this new attempt, this new PR attempt, to shift from, “Oh, no, there's no problem in Gaza with food. There's no famine in Gaza. They have plenty of food.” And then for a while, it became, to the extent people don't have food, “It's Hamas's fault, they're stealing the food.” And then the question is, where are they getting it from to steal it? No food can be allowed in. They destroyed the ability to grow food and crops. They shoot and kill, or at best arrest, people who try to fish off the coast. So, that denialism didn't work any longer, and now the shift in rhetoric has become, “Oh, it's the U.N.'s fault. There's all this aid sitting there that they refuse to distribute.”

The last time the U.N. tried to take food into Gaza, when they finally got the authorization of the Israeli military to allow trucks to come in, was July 20, which is four days ago. And what happened was, even though they had the authorization of the IDF to come, as soon as they entered with trucks of food, desperate Gaza civilians whose families are dying of hunger, ran over to the trucks. And when they did, the Israeli military, the IDF, started gunning them down, started massacring them. And obviously, when you're shooting that many bullets at people by U.N. trucks, you are also endangering the lives of the drivers of those trucks and the aid workers who are on those trucks.

Cindy McCain, who tries to be very, very diplomatic, because that's her job, when talking about the role Israel is playing, she's the head of the World Food Program, but it's also her job to get food to the people of Gaza. And she comes from a family that is as pro-Israel as it gets. Her husband was John McCain. Even more fanatically pro-Israel is her daughter, Megan McCain, who accuses everybody of antisemitism daily, basically, if you don't support everything Israel is doing, that's the family she comes from. That's the political tradition out of which she emerged. And so, she's often very careful and cautious in her words. And she wants to be able to get food to the people of Gaza as well. That's her job. And yet, for Cindy McCain, this was quite an extreme language. She went on CNN the following day to describe the massacre aimed at the people getting the food from the U.N., and also the U.N. aid workers themselves, imposed by the Israeli government.

Here's what she said.

Video. CINDY MCCAIN, CNN. July 21, 2025.

The last time the U.N. tried to deliver aid and food into Gaza, they were massacred by the Israeli military and now, the IDF and the Gaza Health Foundation, guided by scumbags who used to work for the Obama administration, who are paid to advise them on PR strategies, have told them to stop denying that there's hunger and famine in Gaza, and instead blame the U.N., a group that has been desperately trying to get food to the people of Gaza for more than a year.

The Prime Minister of Australia came out yesterday with a statement, very melodramatic, about how upset he is and how disturbed he is; 29 countries issued a letter that we read to you late last week. This is all just symbolic. This is a way of, as that book cover says, pretending that they were against this all along.

Only the West and particularly the United States has the power to stop the Israelis from what they're doing and instead, the American government, like they did in the Biden administration, now under the Trump administration, is doing the opposite, expressing more and more support for what Israel is doing.

We're just witnessing in real time the kind of war crimes and atrocities that 20, 50, 100 years from now, people are going to be reading their history books, looking back and wondering how this could possibly have happened. And we're seeing it unfold, right in front of our faces, and we all do bear a significant amount of responsibility for it.

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