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
May 30, 2023
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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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6 hours ago

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

Interesting discussion last night. I had not realized Harvard's historical funding situation, and I think we need to DOGE that. They have enough money to get by on their own now. The general consensus of those in the live chat seemed to be to cut the funding, and stop telling them what to do. Great discussion!
Looking forward to the transcript!

Here's a lovely, short video of a man playing music for animals, including horses, elephants, lemurs, and more. It turns out that even horses enjoy the Rolling Stones' song Wild Horses😁
https://substack.com/@sailingbeyondknowledge/note/c-108597224?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1ngpds

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Christopher Rufo: On Civil Liberties, the American Founding, Academic Freedom, and More
System Update #450

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

And in response, you said this:

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AD_4nXcOEpKRM--8xTmtxxxpZIh6D5VTD6vza9AEN0mSz-ZC9ShfneizvxtBhXHrQ8X6x-7qhfaL7yzw2XCNpPYBbKC3KEPQuYCHJ_2CoMxfO_t8jxXoFY2nn-Z8NJr657FdP60B_amh1mqk8MczwlgXaQ?key=pQIu-Amz3rzPmGu1T6DqxQ

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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!

AD_4nXfOxGUsg7A_S3ddqbTf0xdGX7VXJr8EwP92b1AKf4pGAlS-rPMMzfUP43cO8VRoSDJmtnjafkjZkWLr6PIa5Uw8gm-Mk5Lf-NKu01__8JfL6RrzjdjMp0ZP7WIjgfVuB7hH0qMHePVkOb0VjUNIXME?key=b0Z6bGXfV7ehSQkOWJEvWQ

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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