Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Week-in-Review: Americans Reject Biden—Show Huge Support for RFK Jr/Anyone-Else, World Revolts Against US Hegemony, Feinstein Shielded by Clinton/Pelosi—Why?
Video Transcript
May 30, 2023
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Good evening. It’s Friday, May 26. Welcome to 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, the Democratic Party's strategy to protect Joe Biden from a primary challenge is rapidly crumbling. That strategy is as simple as it is delusional. They have been simply pretending that Biden has no primary challengers, that there is no voting process to be had, and, thus, no debates are required. There's one rather significant problem with that fairy tale. Polls continue to show Biden to be one of the weakest first-term presidents in modern American history, not just with the electorate generally, but within his own party. Yet another new poll released today shows that 20% of Democratic voters, one out of every five, are supporting the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. That's more support than many polls show Ron DeSantis is having in the Republican Party. Meanwhile, Marianne Williamson continues to be polling at close to 10%. If these numbers continue, not even the Democratic Party's most loyal media servants will be able to keep pretending that Biden is already the nominee because he just happens to have no real primary challengers. 

Democrats know what saved Biden in 2020, mainly a COVID pandemic, that let him rest most of the time in his basement at home and confined himself to MSNBC daytime appearances where adoring hosts like Nicolle Wallace treated him like an addled, but lovable grandpa but that won't work this year. Exposing Biden to the rigors of a fall campaign, especially one that includes even a mild primary fight, would be devastating, especially for Biden's physical and mental health. But these poll numbers will make that fairy tale unsustainable. 

Then, a remarkable foreign policy address was delivered this week by one of Washington's most mainstream and hawkish foreign policy figures, Fiona Hill, known as a Russia specialist and an anti-Russian hawk, who is one of those Victoria Nuland-type figures, who always runs foreign policy no matter which party wins the White House, and became a close ally of John Bolton during the Trump years. She is now a Brookings Institution scholar. Her recent speech this week warning that most of the world outside of Europe is in full revolt against U.S. hegemony and that Ukraine's war cause is being severely addled by guilt by association with the United States and NATO, in one sense, simply states what is visibly obvious to anyone not completely propagandized – namely, propaganda about the U.S. foreign policy apparatus or its noble values is really intended for domestic consumption only. There are absurd claims believed only by Western corporate media outlets, but in the rest of the world claims that the United States foreign policy community fuels wars to save and protect people and to spread democracy provokes intense laughing fits. And that's been true for quite a while. But the fact that the U.S. is clearly now weakened, seriously weakened, vis a vis the rest of the world by endless wars that have saddled the country with massive debt, as well as the related and growing sense among the American public that these endless wars benefit everyone except the American people has enabled other countries to defy and subvert U.S. dictates like never before, at least not since the fall of the Soviet Union. 

That this warning so explicitly and accurately stated, comes not from an anti-establishment critic of the U.S., but from someone deep within the bowels of the foreign policy establishment, makes a speech really significant beyond words. We will report on the key points she made. 

Finally, while Joe Biden knows where he is some of the time, the 89-year-old Democratic senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, almost never knows where she is. She was recently away for months from the capital due to health problems and, when she returned, she was asked by a reporter about her absence and she had no idea what he was talking about, insisting she never went anywhere. Despite this, leading Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, are adamant that she not resign. Apparently, her right to cling to power to the end of her sixth term in the Senate, even if she doesn't even know her own name, outweighs what they regard as the needs of the 40 million people of her state, the people she's supposed to be representing. If there's a clearer and more vivid expression of the real priorities of America's ruling class than this, I can't think of what it might be. But the real motive for their attempt to keep Feinstein in office is even more cynical. They are petrified that Feinstein's resignation would force California's governor, Gavin Newsom, to appoint in his place the black liberal Democrat who has already announced that she's running for Feinstein’s seat, Congresswoman Barbara Lee. Gavin Newsom has promised in advance to name a black woman to that seat if Feinstein resigns and Lee is responsible for one of the bravest acts of any members of Congress in the last 30 years – something infinitely more valuable than anything supreme authoritarian Adam Schiff, the most compulsive liar in the House, has ever done. Nonetheless, Pelosi, Hillary, and most other establishment-Democrat radical leaders want that seat held open for this white Russiagate fanatic. We'll take a look at what all these maneuverings by Democratic elites reveal. 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, or any other major podcasting platform. If you follow us there, please rate and review our show, which helps spread the visibility of the program.

 

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


 

Few things have proven to be more crippling to a Democratic Party presidential incumbent than a serious primary challenge, especially when that primary challenge comes from the heralded Kennedy family. Back in 1968, the success of Robert F. Kennedy's primary challenge, based on his opposition to Lyndon Johnson's war in Vietnam, forced Lyndon Johnson to announce that he wouldn't even seek the nomination for the Democratic primary because his defeat became almost inevitable. In 1980, Edward Kennedy, the senator from Massachusetts, challenged the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter, and though he ended up losing, Carter ended up severely debilitated by that very contested primary challenge, and though he won, he ended up getting destroyed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. Now, Joe Biden has two primary challengers who are now, both, apparently, according to Democratic voters, reasonably credible: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of California Senator Robert Kennedy, who forced Lyndon Johnson out of the 1968 race, as well as the author Marianne Williamson, already familiar to Democratic voters because she previously ran for president in 2020. 

When I say the strategy of the Democratic Party in the face of this primary challenge is simply to pretend that it's not happening, to just insist that Joe Biden has no primary challengers, even though he does, and therefore no debate will ever be sponsored by the Democratic National Committee, I really mean that. I'm not exaggerating. Here is current MSNBC host and former Joe Biden and Kamala Harris White House aide, Symone Sanders, who was asked by Joe Scarborough what the Democratic Party and the DNC intend to do about these primary challenges. You can listen in her own words to the extreme arrogance and hubris of what she said, the contempt that they have for the Democratic Party voter. Listen to what she told them. 

 

(Video. “Morning Joe”. May 6, 2023)

 

Joe Scarborough: Bobby Kennedy, Jr. doing well, he's at 19%. Hasn't really gotten that much out there. I mean it's – and I'm starting to hear more and more talk about him – are we going to actually have a challenge here? 

 

Symone Sanders: I'm trying not to laugh, Jeff. There's not going to be […]

 

Joe Scarborough: Can I just can I stop you for a second? Do you know how many people said the same thing about Donald Trump in 2015? The same exact […]

 

[voices overlap]

 

Symone Sanders: Yes, because there was going to be a Republican primary. But I really think that the mealy-mouthed Democrats, as I like to call them, and some of my progressive friends who would like to live in a fantasy land, they need to come back to reality. And the reality is this: the sitting president of the United States of America is a Democrat, a Democrat that would like to run for reelection, so much so that he has declared a reelection campaign. In that case, the Democratic National Committee will not facilitate a primary process. There will be no debate stage for Bobby Kennedy, Marianne Williamson, or anyone else. 

 

Joe Scarborough: So, we're going to have another Bobby Kennedy and an empty chair in the debate, right? 

 

Symone Sanders: There will be no debating […]

 

Joe Scarborough: No debate. 

 

Symone Sanders: The Democratic National Committee administers the debates and they're not going to set up a primary process for debate for someone to challenge the head of the Democratic Party. 



There are two amazing ironies of that. The first is she accused her progressive friends, whomever she meant, or these “mealy-mouthed Democrats” of living in a fantasy world. Right afterward, she just got done announcing, after hearing that 20% of Democratic voters support not Joe Biden to be the party's nominee, but Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – and another 8% support Marianne Williamson. So that's almost one out of every three Democratic voters who are announcing their support for a different candidate other than Joe Biden. She said there will be no primary race. There will be no debate. She's pretending they don't exist. Who's living in the fantasy world? But the other irony is these are the people who constantly tell you that they are the guardians of democracy. They want to preserve democratic values but the contempt they have for the democratic process, for their own voters, they don't even bother to hide anymore. She just said, “I don't care how many people prefer Robert Kennedy, Jr. or Marianne Williamson or any other candidate, Joe Biden will be the nominee.” Or, in other words, it's not the Democratic Party voters who determine the nominee. It's people like her. And it's already decided: it's Joe Biden. There's no need to have an election. He's the nominee regardless of what Democratic Party voters want. How self-hating do you have to be to listen to party leaders say that right to your face and continue to support this party that makes clear that they don't care in any way what it is that you think or want?

 There's a new poll today from CNN that is even worse for Joe Biden. It is not only another poll that has Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., this time at 20%, not 19 – Marianne Williamson at 8%. The results continue to show substantial support for candidates other than Joe Biden within the Democratic Party. It's also a devastating poll for Joe Biden. Among other things, it has about a 35% favorability rating, the lowest for any American president in the first term since Dwight Eisenhower, 70 years ago. In one way, this poll was so devastating for Joe Biden, that even CNN was forced to admit it. 

Here is Jake Tapper telling his audience what you know they do not want to hear to the extent that there is such a thing as a CNN audience anymore. But the few who are still there definitely don't want to hear this message and yet he had no choice, given the clarity of this data, to deliver it. 

 

(Video. CNN. May 25, 2023)

 

Jake Tapper: It's horrible news. Horrible for Joe Biden. In our new CNN poll, while the president leads his Democratic competitors by a huge margin, two-thirds of all of the American people surveyed, 66% of the public say that a Biden victory would either be a setback or a disaster for the United States. 

 

Tapper suggests that Joe Biden's lead is huge. It's actually not in the context of primary challenges to a sitting president. Donald Trump had primary challengers in 2020, people like former Massachusetts Governor, Bill Weld, and former South Carolina governor, who resigned in disgrace and then ended up running for the House seat that he held, Mark Sanford, and losing in the primary. It was a joke of a candidate and they never got anywhere near 20%, even though supposedly a significant portion of the party was so Trump, so anathema. And as I said, there are a lot of polls that show Ron DeSantis at a lower number of support than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has – at 16% and 18%. I saw a South Carolina poll today where Trump was above 50% and DeSantis was at 15%. And yet everybody acknowledges, and I think they should, that there's a real Republican primary, the outcome of which we won't know until the voting is counted. But if you think that about the Republican Party, you have to think that about the Democratic Party, given that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is polling higher in some polls, at least than Ron DeSantis, but has roughly the same level of support. And everyone regards Ron DeSantis as at least a credible primary challenger. Nobody would say Donald Trump is not a primary challenger. This is a fairy tale, a mythology that they have invented. 

Here's CNN talking about its own poll. It has this hilariously optimistic headline:  “Biden has a lead over Democratic Party challengers but faces heavy headwinds overall.”

Just a third of Americans say that Biden winning in 2024 would be a step forward or a triumph for the country. At the same time, the survey finds a decline in favorable views of Biden over the past six months from 42% in December to 35% now. And results from the same poll released earlier this week showed Biden's approval rating for handling the presidency at 40%, among the lowest for any first-term president since Dwight Eisenhower at this point in their term. Within his own party, 60% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters said they back Biden for the top of next year's Democratic ticket, 20% favor activist and lawyer Robert f Kennedy, Jr., and 8% back author Marianne Williamson. Another 8% said they would support an unnamed “someone else.” (CNN. May 25, 2023)

 

One of the things I find extremely interesting about the challenge from RFK Jr., in particular – and I said this to Marianne Williamson when I had her on this show, and I'm going to have RFK Jr. on within the next week or two. We're finalizing the dates. Looking forward to that discussion – is that the way in which that last primary challenge against the Democratic incumbent proved to be successful it wasn't just RFK who drove Lyndon Johnson out of the race, but also Eugene McCarthy because there was a war going on that the Democratic Party president supported and they exploited anti-war sentiment to mount a challenge against him. Marianne Williamson has no differences or criticisms at all of Biden's proxy war policy in Ukraine. She supports it, in fact, vehemently. But RFK Jr. is a vehement and vocal opponent of that war policy. He finds the war in Ukraine to be recklessly disastrous and recklessly dangerous in a way that produces no benefits for the American people and all kinds of harm. But it's not just in that very important issue where he presents a stark choice and therefore a crucial debate where Biden would be forced to defend this war policy, even though Biden himself said it has brought the war closer to nuclear Armageddon than in any point since 1962, his own policy has done that, but also the widespread lies and errors and damage done. In the name of COVID, which Biden has vehemently supported. So let Biden go before the Democratic Party electorate and justify school closures that have caused retardation in the intellectual and emotional and cognitive development of millions of American children or the fact that lies were told about the efficacy of cloth masks and what the vaccine would do and how it works. That's why the Democrats are petrified of a debate because they actually have a real contrast. 

Now, let me say, on a show a few days ago when I was just sort of talking about RFK Jr.’s candidacy in passing, I mentioned that there are certain things that I disagree with him on, including what I called his vehement support for Russiagate. His campaign got in contact with me and said they thought that was wildly overstated, even a little inaccurate, or maybe entirely inaccurate in their view. And we checked more than I did before. I said that it was kind of an off-the-cuff comment I made. And I have to say that at the very least my formulation was excessive. I don't think it's fair to call him a vehement supporter of Russiagate. You can find a couple of tweets that can be interpreted as supportive and a couple of skeptical tweets. And I'm going to refrain from characterizing that any further until I have RFK Jr. on the show where he can talk himself about what his position was and what it is now when it comes to Russiagate. But clearly, the Democrats are petrified of the debate that he brings. This is a serious person. He was an environmental lawyer for 20 years, widely regarded among left-liberals for doing an important job. He knows what he's talking about. We showed you that interview he did with Krystal Ball on “Breaking Point,” where she tried to tell him he was wrong on vaccines but was ill-prepared to tell him why and admitted he had done far more work than she had in researching it. He wrote an entire book on it that became a New York Times bestseller filled with references to hundreds of studies and thousands of footnotes. Imagine Joe Biden having to engage in that debate. 

So, of course, they're going to do everything possible to keep Biden hidden like they did in 2020. But as poll numbers like this continue to grow and he becomes a weaker and weaker and weaker candidate, barely able to speak a coherent sentence, oftentimes, clearly not having any idea what he's saying, the ability to sustain this fairy tale is going to crumble even more now. 

Let me show you a speech that Biden gave at the G-7 just last week that was, despite him reading from a script, cringeworthy and difficult to watch. Uncomfortable. Because what he was saying, the words that were coming out of his mouth were incoherent. So, imagine him trying to do that in the debate. Whatever medication they gave him in 2020 that got him to those debates seems not to be working any longer. Listen to him try to read from his script. 

 

(Video. G7 Summit. May 22, 2023)

 

President Biden: And there's a lot of other, for example, the idea that we're in terms of taxes that they refuse to, for example, I was able to balance the budget and pass everything from the global warming bill – anyway. I was able to cut by $1.7 billion in the first two years the deficit that we were accumulating. And because I was able to say to it that the 55 corporations in America that made $4,400 billion or $40 billion, $400 billion that they pay zero in tax zero. Zero.

 

That was a 42-second clip. He mentioned no fewer than seven issues, none of which had anything to do with the prior one. He threw out numbers that made no sense, that were clearly wrong. He had no idea what those numbers meant. He continuously interrupted himself with like, whatever, and moved on. He couldn't complete a sentence, even though this was scripted. You see him reading the speech looking down. He had a script in front of him. He couldn't even read from it. His cognitive decline is something that was alerted to, warned about, and trumpeted not by Trump supporters or Bernie Sanders supporters in 2018 when he was gearing up to run, but by Democratic insiders on “Morning Joe,” who were petrified he was going to get the nomination due to name recognition only to be able to be exposed to somebody whose brain is melting. That was five years ago. This is going to be another year and a half, another year before he starts running. How are they going to present, then prop him up to make him even acceptable to watch, let alone people willing to vote for him again? And if he has to go through the rigors of a Democratic primary where he gets exposed even more, where he gets weakened even more, where his energy is devoted to that, where he gets exposed like this over and over, it is very hard to see how he ends up as even a viable candidate, let alone one that Democrats are going to have confidence in. But Democratic voters themselves see it. It's very possible the more they learn about RFK Jr. and his position on vaccines, that support will disappear. But Democratic voters clearly are petrified of supporting and nominating Joe Biden and are very uncomfortable watching him and extremely unfavorable about how he is governing this country – let alone independents and Republicans – to the point where even CNN is calling polling data disastrous. 


 

I want to move on to a separate issue, which I have to say I consider to be significantly more important than those polling data – and we're probably going to do a show on this next week. It was only today we saw the speech, so we wanted to give it coverage but we want to delve into it a lot further because it really deserves all kinds of attention. 

What has become extremely obvious since the beginning of this war in Ukraine and especially the United States’ sponsorship of Ukraine as a proxy in this war against Russia, is that outside of Europe, virtually the entire world is no longer feeling compelled to support the United States and submit to its dictates. They have from the start abstained from U.N. resolutions that have been designed to put the world against Russia, to isolate Russia, including major countries like China and India and the top democratic countries in the world, the biggest democracies in the world. Sometimes ten out of the first 20 democracies have just abstained on these U.N. resolutions. And these countries are now openly exploiting the weakness of the United States because we are always devoting ourselves and our resources to these endless wars, pouring billions and hundreds of billions of dollars into these wars. We just got out of Afghanistan after 20 years and six months later found a new war. And the arms industry thrives and our country is saddled with more and more debt, people are suffering more and more at home because the priorities of our country are clearly imperialism and militarism – And it's not just the rest of the world that sees it, but increasingly people here at home. And the rest of the world sees an opportunity to finally get out of the hegemonic rule of the United States, which has dominated the world since the late 1980s with the fall of the Soviet Union. 

We've repeatedly shown you videos of world leaders who are confronted by Western media outlets about supposed war crimes they're committing or supposed repression in their countries, and they scoff at it and they tell these reporters, Who are you to judge us? You invaded Iraq, a country that never attacked you, and destroyed a country of 26 million people; you tried to do a dirty war in Syria to remove that government; you changed the government of Libya and left it filled with ISIS and anarchy and slave markets; you bombed eight or nine different countries just under Obama alone – and now you're coming to lecture us about the rules-based international order? This is propaganda that I promise you only works on U.S. corporate media outlets, in Western corporate media outlets and in the UK and Western European capitals. But the rest of the world, which is now increasingly empowered and emboldened in the wake of U.S. weakness is increasingly not only mocking the U.S. but organizing quickly to subvert the U.S. led world order. 

And it's not just people like me now saying this. Fiona Hill, who is somebody who comes from the deepest bowels of the U.S. foreign policy community, like I said, she's practically a Victoria Nuland figure, she just gets passed around from one foreign policy job to the next no matter who wins. Unlike Victoria Nuland, who was at least out of government, when Donald Trump was elected, she managed to control and run Russia policy, often against the stated wishes of the president, and she did so by aligning herself and partnering with John Bolton, probably the most deranged warmonger in recent American history. So, for her to go and give a speech warning that the rest of the world now sees the United States as a joke, as a cauldron of hypocrisy, as a country that no longer intimidates anybody and that they have a rationale for thinking this, is truly remarkable. The speech she gave – we're going to show you some of the segments – is just not something foreign policy elites like her say, but in this case, she did, because of how compelling she obviously sees it. It was a very impressive speech because she so perfectly captured the world view of what we like to call ‘the rest of the world’, meaning not the United States or our European allies. Sometimes we call the United States and our European allies and Australia, the international community, and everything else is ‘the rest of the world’ and an arrogant formulation, she warned, needs to be modified because people understand that and no longer accept it. 

So, before we show you the keywords of her speech, let me just show you a video of the South African leader who's the leader of The African National Congress, Fikile Mbalula, who was confronted by a BBC reporter about the fact that he and his country continues to trade with Russia. Just watch this confrontation. 

 

(Video. BBC. “Hardtalk” May 24, 2023)

 

Stephen Sackur: Africa is a treaty member of the International Criminal Court. If Putin comes here in August as planned, your government will be obliged to arrest him. As head of the ANC, do you believe your government should and indeed will arrest him? 

 

Fikile Mbalula: According to the ANC, we would want President Putin to be here even tomorrow to come to our country. 

 

Stephen Sackur: You would? You would welcome Vladimir Putin here right now, a man who is being investigated for war crimes by the International Court?

 

Fikile Mbalula: Of course, we would welcome him to come here as part and parcel of BRICS. But we know that we are constrained by the ICC in terms of doing that. Putin is a head of state. Do you think that a head of state can just be arrested anywhere? How many crimes has your country committed in Iraq? How many crimes have everyone else who is so vocal up today committed in Iraq and Afghanistan? Have you arrested them?  

 

Stephen Sackur: You know, the impact […] 

 

Fikile Mbalula: […] A lot of noise about putting a state working for peace between Ukraine and Russia. And you failed to resolve the war. Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Tony Blair went to Iraq and claimed {there were} weapons of mass destruction. Did you see anybody standing against that in the United Kingdom and Britain? More than – millions of people have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there are no weapons of mass destruction. We know what the war is about between Russia and Ukraine. 

 

Stephen Sackur: Mr. Secretary General […]

 

Fikile Mbalula: We want peace. That's what is important so that the world can thrive and organs and institutions of the world that institute world peace must not be conspicuous by their silence […] 

 

Stephen Sackur: We don't have much time left, which is why I want to bring it back to domestic South African politics before we end. 



They never have much time whenever they get put in a corner like that. And whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not, this is exactly how not powerless countries, but powerful countries around the world now think. And it's not just they think this way. They feel emboldened by U.S. weakness to say it. Just to give their middle finger at what used to be the kinds of hypocritical actions that they knew were hypocritical but had to swallow, but no longer have to swallow the BRICS alliance by itself. An alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. One that countries like Saudi Arabia are now seeking to join and is all about creating a new pole of power that will liberate much of the world – you're talking about 30% - 40% of the world's population or more – from having to live under a sanctions regime of the United States, where the United States tells the world with whom they can and cannot trade because they control the dollar as the reserve currency, and they can punish countries for trading with whatever countries the United States decides not to like. Nobody in the world is having this anymore. And again, you may not like that. You may think we want a world where the U.S. doesn't pay attention to its people at home but instead rules the world through superior force. But that world is no longer possible. Because people like the general secretary of the African National Congress understand that the moral lectures are bullshit and that they now have the power to say so. And what is so unusual is that someone like Fiona Hill stood up and explained this at this conference of Western foreign policy elites this week, where she urged the West to stop living in this fantasy world that is still 1997 or 2006, to understand that the world has changed and it's in large part change because of the war in Ukraine. Because while the U.S. was pouring all of its resources into fueling this war, China marched into the Middle East  – China, that doesn't get itself involved in endless wars, that uses its resources to build infrastructure at home and invest in countries abroad, marched into the Middle East, traditionally where the United States rules, and forged a peace deal between the two primary enemies in that region, the Iranians and Saudi Arabia, right under the nose of the United States. While we're focused on this insane and pointless war over who rules Eastern Ukraine. And you go in to talk to these African countries and they will say, when the United States comes, we get a lecture. When China comes, we get a new hospital. That's the reality of the world, whether you like it or not. And that's what Fiona Hill is trying to get people to realize. 

So, let's listen to just a few of the key excerpts. I really encourage you to read this entire speech. It's not that long, but let's take a look at what she had to say

 

In its pursuit of the war, Russia has cleverly exploited deep-seated international resistance, and in some cases open challenges, to continued American leadership of global institutions. It is not just Russia that seeks to push the United States to the sidelines in Europe and China, that wants to minimize and contain U.S. military and economic presence in Asia so both can secure their respective spheres of influence. Other countries that have traditionally been considered “middle powers” or “swing states” – the so-called “Rest” of the world seek to cut the United States down to a different size in their neighborhoods and exert more influence in global affairs. They want to decide, not be told what's in their interest. In short, in 2023, we hear a resounding no to U.S. domination and see a marked appetite for a world without a hegemon. 

Since 1991, the U.S. has seemingly stood alone as the global superpower. But today, after a fraught two-decade period shaped by American-led military interventions and direct engagement in regional wars, the Ukraine war highlights the decline of the United States itself. This decline is relative economically and militarily, but serious in terms of U.S. moral authority. 

Unfortunately, just as Osama bin Laden intended, the U.S.’s own reactions and actions have eroded its position since the devastating terrorist attacks of 9/11. “America fatigue” and disillusionment with its role as the global hegemon is widespread. 

This includes, in the United States itself – a fact that is frequently on display in Congress, in news outlets and in think tank debates. For some, the U.S. is a flawed international actor with its own domestic problems to attend to. For others, the U.S. is a new form of imperial state that ignores the concerns of others and throws its military weight around. 

Ukraine is essentially being punished by guilt through association for having direct U.S. support in its efforts to defend itself and liberate its territory. Indeed, in some international and American domestic forums, discussions about Ukraine quickly degenerated into arguments about U.S. past behavior. 

Russia's actions are addressed in a perfunctory fashion. “Russia is doing only what the U.S. does,” is the retort… Yes, Russia overturned the fundamental post-1945 principle of the prohibition against war and the use of force enshrined in Article 2 of the UN Charter. But the U.S. already damaged that principle when it invaded Iraq 20 years ago. 

“Whataboutism” is not just a feature of Russian rhetoric. The U.S. invasion of Iraq universally undercut U.S. credibility and continues to do so for many critics of the United States, Iraq was the most recent in a series of American sins stretching back to Vietnam and the precursor of current events. Even though a tiny handful of states have sided with Russia in successive UN resolutions in the General Assembly, significant abstentions, including by China and India, signal displeasure with the United States. 

As a result, the vital twin task of restoring the prohibition against war and the use of force as the critical cornerstone of the United Nations and the international system, and of defending Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, get lost in a morass of skepticism and suspicions about the United States. In the so-called “Global South” and what I am loosely referring to as the “Rest” of the world, there is no sense of the U.S. as a virtuous state. Perceptions of American hubris and hypocrisy are widespread. Trust in the international system(s) that the U.S. helped invent and has presided over since World War II is long gone. 

Elites and populations in many of these countries believe that the system was imposed on them at a time of weakness when they were only just securing their independence. Even if elites and populations have generally benefited from pax Americana, they believe the United States and its bloc of countries in the collective West have benefited far more. For them, this war is about protecting the West’s benefits and hegemony, not defending Ukraine. 

Non-Western elites share the same belief as some Western analysts that Russia was provoked or pushed into war by the United States and NATO expansion. They resent the power of the U.S. dollar and Washington’s frequent punitive use of financial sanctions. They were not consulted by the U.S. on this round of sanctions against Russia. They see Western sanctions constraining their energy and food supplies and pushing up prices. They blame Russia's Black Sea blockade and deliberate disruption of global grain exports on the United States – not the actual perpetrator, Vladimir Putin. They point out that no one pushed to sanction the United States when it invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, even though they were opposed to the U.S. intervention, so why should they step up now and sanction Russia?

Countries in the Global South’s resistance to the U.S. and European appeals for solidarity on Ukraine are an open rebellion. This is a mutiny against what they see as the collective West dominating the international discourse and foisting its problems on everyone else while brushing aside their priorities on climate change compensation, economic development, and debt relief. 

The Rest feel constantly marginalized in world affairs. Why in fact are they labeled (as I am reflecting here in this speech) the “Global South,” having previously been called the Third World or the Developing World? Why are they even the rest of the world? They are the world. They are the world representing, 6.5 billion people. Our terminology reeks of colonialism. 

The Cold War era non-aligned movement has reemerged if it ever went away. At present, this is less a cohesive movement than a desire for distance to be left out of the European mess around Ukraine. But it is also a very clear negative reaction to the American propensity for defining the global order and forcing countries to take sides. As one Indian interlocutor recently exclaimed about Ukraine, “This is your conflict! We have other pressing matters… our own issues… We are in our own lands, on our own sides. Where are you when things go wrong for us?” (Lennart Meri Lecture by Fiona Hill, 2023)




As I said, this is something you've heard on my show before, this is something you might hear from Jeffrey Sachs that we had on Wednesday night. It's a longtime critique of Noam Chomsky of the U.S. hegemonic role in the world and a warning that it will eventually backfire. It's something Donald Trump and a lot of the America First foreign policy advocates have been arguing as well. Their going around the world trying to change regimes and impose our will on others is a huge waste of our resources when we have so many problems at home and will simply create resentment in the rest of the world – anti-American sentiment – and drive people into the arms of China that, notice, does not do that. That is not to defend the Chinese, it is to point out that they do not invade other countries and occupy them for 20 years because they see how wasteful and counterproductive it is. 

 

The fact that you hear it from all the other sources is one thing, the fact that you're hearing it from her is something completely different. Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the Center of the United States and Europe and the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings – it does not get more establishment that. In November 2022, Hill was appointed chancellor of Durham University, U.K., a high-profile ceremonial and ambassadorial role. Hill is also currently a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. She served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian Affairs on the U.S. National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, and as a national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council from 2006 to 2009. In October, November 2019, Hill testified before Congress in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. She is the author of “There Is Nothing For You Here,” and co-author of this other book on Putin. She basically is the living, breathing embodiment of foreign policy elites. And this is the message she is delivering, one which is amazing even needs to be delivered, given how often the rest of the world and its leaders make this clear. 

I want to show you a video of just how far gone U.S. leaders are, how deranged and unhinged they are when it comes to this war in Ukraine, and how they are talking themselves into greater and greater involvement all while this change is around them. Here is the long-time Democratic congressman from Manhattan, Jerry Nadler, who represents an American gerontocracy. We have a president who barely knows where he is. We have a U.S. senator from California who doesn't know her own name. Everyone seems to be in their late seventies and eighties. Joe Biden's going to run for a second term at 82 to finish his term, theoretically when he's 86. 

Here's Jerry Nadler, who's been around forever. Listen to him when he was asked about the dangers of sending F-16 fighter jets, as Biden just now reversed himself and said he would do, given the Ukrainian propensity to want to strike deep into Russia, watch him talk so cavalierly about the most dangerous war since at least Iraq and the event that has brought us closer to nuclear in any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Joe Biden himself. 

 

(Video. May 24, 2023)

 

Interviewer:  And what do you think about his previous comments, though, that it was too escalatory to do?

 

Jerry Nadler: I think that he was wrong. I think, you know, every different weapon system is too escalatory and then we eventually gave it to them. And they're fighting not only for their lives, but they’re also fighting for democracy, the fighting for the world order against, you know, just invasion of another country, all three borders by force, which is inadmissible since 1945. And we should give them whatever they need. 

Interviewer: And are you concerned that they will enter into Russian territory, as there have been recent reports of Belgorod, the border city? 

 

Jerry Nadler: I'm not concerned. I wouldn't care if they did. 

 

Interviewer: You wouldn't care if they entered Russia? No, really? 

 

Jerry Nadler: Turn of events is fair play. I don't think they're going to do it on any large scale. But why should Russia feel that they can invade somebody else and have total safety at home? 

 

Interviewer: Well, but that would cross the line to a U.S.-sanctioned invasion of Russia. 

 

Jerry Nadler: But we don't have to sanction it. 

 

Interviewer: Well, you would be providing the weapons that conducted it is what I'm saying

 

Jerry Nadler: If you're not providing it for that purpose, I said I personally wouldn't mind. 

 

Interviewer: You personally wouldn't mind, but you know, you are a representative of the government. 

 

Jerry Nadler: So, I'm part of the government, part of the executive branch, but I think we should give them whatever they need. 

 

Interviewer: Okay. And, you know, if an F-16 was to be used on Russia, you wouldn't come out and say, that's too much, it's too far. 

 

Jerry Nadler: No, I don't think that's going to happen in any event, no. They're going to use F-16s for air defense, basically […] 

 

Interviewer: But there are these reports right now that American weapons are being used in Belgorod, which is, you know, a Russian territory. It's already happening.

 

Jerry Nadler: They're not going to use major weapons. I mean, things like F-16s they need for air defense over Ukraine so they can provide air cover for their counterattack and things like that. They're not going to waste that in Russia. 

 

Do you want U.S. F16s being used to bomb Moscow by Ukraine? Are you ready for that kind of direct military confrontation? He said, Why should the Russians get to invade another country and be safe at home? What would have happened if while the U.S. was invading Iraq, China or Russia gave F-16 fighter jets to Saddam Hussein in the name of protecting his country, and he used those to do bombing runs and bomb U.S. barracks in the Middle East or even the U.S. homeland. Do you think this would be our attitude? But you can be this cavalier about nuclear war when you're at the end of your life. It's a major reason why it's so dangerous to be ruled by 90-year-olds and 80-year-olds. Let's remember that about a year ago, Jerry Nadler was giving a press conference in Capitol Hill. It was recently, within the last year or so. He was standing next to Nancy Pelosi and he pooped in his pants. At a press conference. And you kind of tried waddling away very carefully, because if you walk too quickly when that happens, you can imagine the mess you would make. This is a metaphor for the kind of people who are ruling us – our ruling class. This is what the rest of the world sees. It's a major reason they understand that they have an opportunity to subvert and undermine us. Does this seem scary to you? Let's watch this

 

That is disgusting. I mean. That is the government. There's like an 82-year-old  woman here and some guy who doesn't have control over his gastrointestinal system. And, you know, this was from 2020, so, now we're three years later. He's like, “Yeah, have the American F16s bomb the world's largest nuclear power.” And they are working to elect a president whose brain is melting and they now want him to be the president for four more years until he's 86. This is our ruling class. And it's the reason why American power is collapsing around it, to the point where even someone like Fiona Hill sees it and understands it and finds it so dire that she needs to break through or urge elites to break through the propaganda in which they're subsumed and start to realize the truth that is so glaring. 

Speaking of people whose brains are melting and who are part of America's meritocracy, I want to talk about Dianne Feinstein. Dianne Feinstein is now 89 years old. She is currently in her sixth term representing the state of California in the United States Senate. She, by all accounts, no longer has a functioning brain. She doesn't know where she is, she doesn't know her name, she has no idea what she's voting on: everything is done by her staff. She was just absent for three months, which meant the Democrats were unable to pass or get approved any of Joe Biden's judicial nominees, angering the Democrats when a lot of Democrats want her to resign because she was incapable of carrying out the work because her brain doesn't function anymore. It's sad, but it's true. And she shouldn’t be a United States senator. A reporter confronted her about where she was when she was gone and she denied being gone, not because she was lying, but because she didn't remember having been away, even though she was gone for three months, about two days until this exchange.

Here you see The Hill’s article: Feinstein: “I hadn’t been gone. I've been working.” 

A Feinstein spokesperson declined to immediately comment on the reports. Feinstein was hospitalized and stayed away from the Capitol for weeks because of complications from shingles. Her absence led four House Democrats, including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), to call for her resignation as Democrats struggled to move a judicial nomination through the Senate. Critics have argued that she can no longer serve on the air because most popular state effectively, given her health. 

Feinstein and her office have pushed back at some suggestions, and the pressure to resign has not come from Democratic colleagues in the Senate and the Senate, key allies in the House, the White House or Congress, or California Governor Gavin Newsom. The exchange with the reporters, however, is likely to raise more scrutiny about Feinstein's acuity and her ability to effectively serve her state. (The Hill. May 16, 2023)

 

We have the video of this exchange where Feinstein is being wheeled around in a wheelchair and you can judge for yourself. 

 

(Video. May 16, 2023)

 

Benjamin Orestes: What has the response from your colleagues been like?  […] the well-wishes? What have you heard? 

 

Dianne Feinstein: What have I heard about what about? 

 

Benjamin Orestes: Your return. How have they felt about your return? 

 

Dianne Feinstein: I haven't been gone. You should follow... I haven't been gone. I've been working. 

 

Benjamin Orestes: You've been working from home, is what you're saying? 

 

Dianne Feinstein: No, I've been here. I've been voting. So please, either know or don't. 

 

Benjamin Orestes: What do you say to Californians like Ro Khanna who say you should resign? 



She was gone for three months. That was the day she came back. She was waving like some kind of prop-up character from the film “Weekend with Bernie’s.” 

While a lot of Democratic voters are understandably angry that they can't get any judges approved because Dianne Feinstein, despite her not realizing it, is not actually in the Senate working, she's been absent for three months on the Judiciary Committee, meaning the Democrats have no majority and are calling for her resignation. As that article suggests, the top level of the Democratic Party, the actual ruling elite, who, as we showed you in the past, doesn't care at all what their voters want – which is why they're saying you're not going to have a primary no matter how many of you want to vote for a different candidate: have fun, he's still going to be the nominee – also are saying we don't want Dianne Feinstein to resign. And the reason they'll say is that it's sexist to demand that, the same way they did when Democrats wanted Ginsburg to resign under President Obama, in fear that there'd be a Republican president who would appoint a replacement, which is exactly what happened in a lot of Democratic parlances, came out and said that's misogynistic to demand that she resign. A woman has the right to her own body and can resign when she wants. But Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi have a much different motive. 

So here is an article that sheds light on what their motive is and, as it turns out, it is Nancy Pelosi's daughter who is currently taking care of Dianne Feinstein as her primary caregiver, at the same time that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton both explicitly and publicly said Feinstein should not resign despite her not knowing her own name. Here is the May 18 article from Politico, the title of which is “Feinstein's primary caregiver: Pelosi's daughter. A quiet, caretaking arrangement has raised questions about whether Nancy Pelosi has the ailing senator's personal interest at heart.

 

When senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, walked into the Capitol last week, ending a monthslong medical absence, she was accompanied by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a small entourage of aides – and a close personal confidant with a storied political pedigree. Nancy Corinne Prowda blended into the swarm around the legendary California Democrat. (Politico. May 18, 2023)

 

What makes her legendary, by the way, just the fact that she's like 90 and has been around forever? 

The San Francisco Chronicle made note of her presence but left it unreported amid the spectacle, the larger role that Prowda, the eldest child of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has come to play in Feinstein's life as the 89-year-old has dealt with the absence of her disease, the departure of trusted staffers, a nasty case of shingles and spiraling concerns about her fitness for office. 

By all accounts, the arrangement is rooted in a long and friendly relationship between Feinstein and the Pelosis – twin pillars of San Francisco politics. But among some of those who are aware, it has also raised uncomfortable questions about whether Nancy Pelosi's political interests are in conflict with Feinstein's personal interest. The intrigue surrounds the future of Feinstein's seat. Pelosi has endorsed Rep. Adam Schiff, her longtime protégé and former hand-picked House Intelligence Committee chair, to succeed Feinstein after her sixth and final term ends next year. Schiff is a household name in California and already raised a $15 million campaign cash advantage over his nearest competitor. But if Feinstein were to bow to pressure and retire early, Schiff's advantage could disappear. Governor Gavin Newsom has pledged to appoint a black woman to serve out her term, and one of Schiff's declared opponents, Rep. Barbara Lee, would fit the bill. 

“If DiFi, resigns right now, there is an enormous probability that by Barbara Lee gets appointed – thus it makes it harder for Schiff,” one Pelosi family confidant told Playbook, adding that the relationship between Pelosi, her daughter and the senator is “being kept under wraps and very, very closely held.” (Politico, May 18, 2023)

 

Also, in Politico (Feb.2, 2023), “Pelosi Endorses Adam Schiff in California Senate race –if Feinstein doesn't run.” She said he would be the one who needs to be filling that seat, not that black woman, Barbara Lee. 

Ordinarily, if you think about it, a state like California that has no black representation, they have a white man as their governor, this is how Democratic Party politics works. Another man who is Latino and a white woman, Dianne Feinstein, would at some point have to account for the fact that in such a large, important democratic state, they have no black representation. That's why Barbara Lee is running along with Rep. Katie Porter. And you have Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein working very hard to prevent this long-term black congresswoman from ascending to the Senate because they want this white man to do so instead, Adam Schiff. 

Ordinarily, that would be called racist, without question. Fortunately for Democratic Party leaders like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, the rules clearly state that Democratic Party leaders are exempt from racism accusations, so lucky for them. But what makes it particularly amazing is that Barbara Lee actually has done something significant in the House, unlike Adam Schiff on September 14, 2001, as I've written about several times. So, we've had about three days after the 9/11 attack when there was enormous pressure to acquiesce to everything the U.S. government wanted. She stood up on the House floor and was the lone vote the only vote in the House or the Senate, to vote against authorizing military force in Afghanistan. And for that, she was mauled, as you might imagine, as any dissident in the wake of 9/11 was. She was called a terrorist lover. She had tons of violent threats pouring into her office. She had to walk around with armed guards for months. It was a very brave thing to do. And whether you were for the war in Afghanistan at the time or against it – and lots of people believe it was morally justified because of the claim that the Taliban was harboring Osama bin Laden, even though the Taliban said they would turn over Osama bin Laden if the U.S. presented proof that he was actually responsible for the 9/11 attack – not in an unreasonable demand. When a country is saying we demand you turn over someone safely in your country, legally in your country, and you say, well, show us evidence that he's guilty and we will. The Bush administration said we're not showing you anything. You give him to us or we're going to bomb you and go to war against you. And Barbara Lee stood up and said, not that the U.S. has no moral right to do it but if we did it, it would end up being a morass. We would end up with no war aims and with yet another war that we were trapped in for years without any end. Whatever you think of the wisdom of going to war, there is no question that Barbara Lee stood up and gave warnings that were very prescient, that proved absolutely true. Time has vindicated what she said, and she was the only one with the courage to do it. 

Let me show you this video. It was a two-minute speech that she gave or even less on the House floor. And again, this is September 14, 2021, when almost nobody was willing to oppose what the U.S. government was demanding. Listen to what she said

 

(Video. Sept. 14, 2001)

 

Chairman: Gentlewoman from California is recognized for a minute and a half. 

 

Rep. Barbara Lee:  […]  Mr. Speaker, members, I rise today really with a very heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and the loved ones who were killed and injured this week. Only the most foolish and the most calloused would not understand the grief that has really gripped our people and millions across the world. This unspeakable act in the United States has really forced me, however, to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God, for direction. September 11 changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. This is a very complex and complicated matter. Now, this resolution will pass, although we all know that the president can wage a war even without it. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, let's step back for a moment. Let's just pause just for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control. Now, I have agonized over this vote, but I came to grips with it today and I came to grips with opposing this resolution during the very painful, yet very beautiful memorial service, as a member of the clergy so eloquently said, as we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore. Thank you. And I yield the balance of my time. 



Again, there's no denying the courage of what she did there. And for those of you who didn't live through it, it was an incredibly repressive time. Everything that happened in the weeks after the passage of the Patriot Act – the war in Afghanistan; the installation of a domestic, illegal, unconstitutional spying regime and so much else – ended up being incredibly damaging to the United States. We just showed you Fiona Hill's speech about how the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan devastated Iraq and America's moral standing in the world. If anybody had known it would take 20 years to occupy that country, to lose thousands of American lives and then to walk out with the disaster that we left, only for the Taliban to waltz right back in – do you think anybody would have voted yes on that war? She was very prescient and very courageous in her warning. This is who they're trying to keep out of the Senate in favor of Adam Schiff, who has done nothing but blatantly lie to the American people, and has pushed false claims after false claims. He swore on cameras over and over that he has personally seen smoking gun evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russians, only for, as the public now knows, that to be a complete lie. So, the first thing the ruling class, the Democratic Party, is trying to do is to keep a woman in power who is completely incapacitated, just like they're trying to do with Joe Biden because they don't care at all about whether the government acts on your behalf. How much more obvious can that be? But the reason they want to keep her in power, other than the fact that their only loyalty is to their own class, the ruling class, is because they want to keep that one out of power to place Adam Schiff in it. And you can just imagine what would be said in any other context about this being done. 

But that is the Democratic Party, a group of extremely old and addled leaders, people who poop in their own pants while they casually trifle with the risk of nuclear war. And you go around calling everybody else racist for behavior far less egregious than this while exempting themselves from those accusations. We’ll definitely continue to follow the attempt to keep Dianne Feinstein in that seat and especially the nefarious motives for why this is being done. 


 

So that concludes our show for this evening and this week. As a reminder, we are available in podcast form on Apple, Spotify and every other major platform. These shows post 12 hours after they first air, live, here on Rumble. To follow us, simply follow us on those platforms and review the show, which helps spread visibility. We also have a Locals community that you can join that helps support the journalism we do here and entitles you to exclusive access to the aftershow, we do on Tuesday and Thursday that are interactive. We take your comments and address your critiques and your suggestions for what we should cover and whom we should interview to join the Locals community, simply click the join button in the Rumble. That, as I said, promotes our journalism and it gives you access to the written transcripts that we post each show every day, and the written journalism. We are starting to expand once again as I have more energy and time to do so. 

For those who have been watching and making the show a success, we are very appreciative. Have a great weekend. We hope to see you back on Monday at 7 p.m. and every night after that, Monday through Friday, exclusively here on Rumble. 

Have a great night and a great weekend.

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If you were trying to introduce a novice to this history, which book would you choose for them, taking into account accuracy, readability, and persuasiveness? (From the few peeks I've taken, I'm leaning toward Stefania Maurizi's "Secret Power," although Mate's & Melzer's books also look excellent.)

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Prof. John Mearsheimer on U.S.-Israel War with Iran, Gaza, Trump's Foreign Policy, and More
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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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The understandable focus on that war in Iran has also served to obscure other perhaps equally significant events, including the still-worsening Israeli destruction of Gaza, the economic and political fallout from this war, the one we just had in Iran, the prospect of future regional conflict there, the ongoing war in Ukraine – remember that? – that's still going on, and also, what we learned from all of these events about Trump's foreign policy. 

Given the importance, but also the complexities, of those developments, we are thrilled to have one of the most knowledgeable and clear-thinking voices anywhere in our political discourse. He is Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer.

 Professor Mearsheimer doesn't need any introduction, especially for our viewers, who have seen him on this show many times over the past several years and is one of our most popular and certainly one of our most enlightening guests. He's the author of the genuinely groundbreaking 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” as well as the highly influential 2014 article in the Journal of Foreign Affairs entitled: "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault.” 

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Why Did Zohran Win in NYC? Plus: Gaza Pulitzer Prize Winner Mosab Abu Toha on the Latest Atrocities
System Update #476

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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Zohran Mamdani, who had been a relatively obscure member of the New York state assembly, scored one of the largest political upsets in New York city politics last night – arguably one of largest upsets in American politics – when he won the Democratic Party nomination for Mayor of New York City against multiple candidates led by Andrew Cuomo. 

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In fact, many on the right appear to think that Zohran, who's a leftist Muslim from Uganda, is some sort of unholy love child of Osama bin Laden and Josef Stalin. Establishment Democrats believe, as they did for Bernie's campaign in 2016 and the AOC's win in 2018, in her emergence as a leader of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, that their future as a party will be destroyed by having a young candidate energize huge amounts of young voters, including young male voters with an anti-establishment and economic populist agenda of the range of views that are absolutely hated by their big donors, who demand they adhere to corporatism, the kind of corporatist that most Americans on both sides of the aisle have come to hate. 

First, we will talk to Mosab Abu Toha, who is a Palestinian writer, poet and scholar from Gaza. He lived in Gaza with his family on October 7, after which the massive Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip began. His daughter is an American citizen, which enabled him and his wife to flee to Egypt with their daughter in December, but along the way, he was detained and disappeared by the IDF and was released only under significant international pressure. 

He wrote a series of essays for The New Yorker on the suffering and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, the awarding of which, needless to say, generated outrage and protest. The war in Iran has really served to obscure and hide the still-worsening crimes in Gaza over the last couple of weeks. We think it's very important to talk with someone as informed as he is about the latest Israeli atrocities and what has been happening in Gaza. 

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The Interview: Mosab Abu Toha

As we just noted, Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian writer, he's a poet, a scholar, and has worked hard on various libraries in Gaza as well. He was in Gaza when Israel began its massive assault after the October 7 attack, and he was able to flee with his wife and young daughter, who is an American citizen, though just barely. He was there for about two months when he was about to flee. He is now a Pulitzer Prize winner as a result of a series of essays he wrote last year in The New Yorker that chronicle and powerfully express the extreme human suffering of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and we are delighted to have him with us tonight to understand what has been happening there. 

G. Greenwald: Mosab, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Of course, it is my great pleasure. Thank you so much, Glenn, for having me. 

G. Greenwald: I wish we were meeting under better circumstances, I wish we had something less depressing and horrific to talk about, but the world is what it is. So, I just want to get a little bit of understanding from you since one of the things that you do is convey thoughts and emotions in words as a poet, as a writer, obviously, a now widely recognized one. 

As somebody who's lived in Gaza, it's not new to you to be bombed by the Israelis. Israel has been bombing Gaza, killing civilians over many, many years, but I think it was very obvious for a variety of reasons, not just October 7, but the composition of the current Israeli government, the obvious support the world was going to give them, that this is going to be far worse and quickly it turned out to be. So, you went to Gaza for about two months before you were able to get out. What were those two months like for you and your family? 

Mosab Abu Toha: First of all, it is important to note that I was born in a refugee camp. My parents were born themselves in refugee camps. My grandparents on both sides were expelled from Yaffa in 1948. So, I lived in Gaza all my life and I was a witness and a survivor of so many Israeli assaults. I was wounded in one of the airstrikes in 2008-2009. I survived by chance and I still have the wounds in my body: in my neck, in my forehead, in my cheeks and on my shoulder. So, surviving the genocide in Gaza was not the first time I survived the Israeli aggression. In fact, I was in the United States between 2022-2023. I returned to Gaza in 2023 after I finished my MFA from Syracuse University and I then traveled to the United States again for a literary festival, Palestine Writes, held at UPenn in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. And I returned to Gaza 10 days before October 7 and I resumed my work as a teacher in Gaza. 

G. Greenwald: Can I just interrupt you there, because that literary festival that you're referring to shortly before October 7, as I recall, there was a gigantic movement, this was before October 7, to have that canceled simply because people like you and other Palestinians were participating and speaking critically of Israel. Can you just talk a little bit about that? Then I want to get back to what the experience was in Gaza. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah. I would like to say, Glenn, that the criticism that I or other people are critical of Israel is not true. We are not critical of Israel. All we are doing is exposing the crimes that Israel has been committing, whether it's in the Gaza Strip or in the West Bank. So, I don't care if it was a different country, if it were a different people, I would still do the same thing, because this is happening to me and to my people, to my parents, to my children, and also to my grandchildren. So, it is not that people in Palestine or Palestinians or even pro-Palestinian people who care about human rights, it's not that they are critical of Israel or whatever you call it. It's that people are talking and advocating on behalf of the people who have been living under occupation for 77 years and this is perceived as a crime when you talk about crimes that are committed by a state that has been created in 1948 and that's been funded by, unfortunately, Western countries and also the United States until today, even as they are committing an ongoing genocide. 

So, it is shameful that some of the participants in the festival were canceled or not permitted to be on campus at the University of Pennsylvania in September 2023. But here we are, in 2025, Palestinian people, Palestinian writers and Palestinian journalists have been the main target of the Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian activists and pro-Palestinian activists have been canceled from so many places, even artists, even singers. They were canceled from big events because of what they say about the Palestinian people and their right to exist and to exist with dignity. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, we covered so many censorship-based reactions to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, but I just thought it was important to remember that that's been happening in the United States well before October 7, and in fact, just a week or two before, at one of our great universities, the University of Pennsylvania, where apparently just the mere presence of Palestinian voices in the view of a lot of people justify trying to get the entire event canceled and ended up getting some of the people banned. 

All right, so you went back to Gaza after that event and shortly thereafter, the October 7 attack happened, then followed by this massive Israeli air assault on Gaza, unlike, I think, anything that has happened in Gaza for a long time, despite how terrible and fatal so many of the other ones were. Just in your own words, what was that like, just to be constantly surrounded by death, by the risk of death, by the fear that you would go to bed and not wake up? How did you navigate that? 

Mosab Abu Toha: So, it is important, Glenn, to note that Palestinians in Gaza have been massacred by the Israeli forces, the Israeli army, without – I mean, I was 31 years old when I left Gaza for the last time, I've never, before October 7, in my life, seen an Israeli soldier. Israel was bombing us from the sky, Israel was firing at us from gunboats and warships in the sea, in our sea, just seven or eight nautical miles off our shore. They were shooting at us, they were killing us, they were dropping bombs on us without us seeing. I've never seen an Israeli, not even one Israeli soldier, never seen any Israeli soldier or Israeli civilian, in my life. So, we have been killed, we have been abducted, we have been injured, our houses have been destroyed on top of our families, without us seeing who these people are, who have been killing us without us seeing. 

I mean, they see us from a screen. They see us as dots, black and white dots moving on the ground or maybe structures on the ground. Lately, they have been filming us through their drones, people who are trying to get aid. There are so many videos of people who try to go back to their homes to collect food and then there is footage of an Israeli drone missile hitting them and killing them. 

So, I lived in Gaza all my life and I've never seen an Israeli soldier. I was wounded and I don't know whether that soldier knew or whether that Israeli pilot who dropped the bomb in 2009 knew that they killed seven people in that airstrike and they wounded a 16-year-old child who became a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. 

So, when Israel attacked Gaza, it was not only a military attack. Israel did not only drop bombs, they did not fire bullets at people, unarmed people, but they also shut off electricity, shut off water, shut off food trucks. They control everything, right? So, it's not like Israel just attacked Gaza militarily. No, they blocked everything, even as we are talking, people do not have, not only enough food, because we always talk about the lack of food, the lack of water, the lack of shelter, but there is a lack of medicine. 

One of the relatives of my brother-in-law who was wounded in a strike that killed his brother 20 days ago, and I wrote about him in my last piece in the New Yorker, he was at the hospital, at al-Shifa hospital, and the shrapnel covered his body, and his arms and his body was wrapped in gauze, and he complained to the doctors that he has some pain in his body. And do you know what they gave him? They gave him something like Tylenol, something that you take when you have a headache. There's no medicine in Gaza. And even though there is no healthy food – the kind of food that is entering Gaza is canned food: canned beans, canned peas, sugar and frying oil. There is no fresh food, not only for people to grow normally, but even for those, the dozens of thousands of Palestinians who were injured. There is no healthy food. Fresh food like vegetables, fruit and meat, for them to heal. 

So, people in Gaza are dying several, times and if you allow me I mean because now as we are talking, today in Gaza, it's 2:20 a.m., it's Thursday today, June 26, as we are talking, just in the past hour, Israel bombed a tent in Khan Yunis, killing five people. And before that, yesterday, they killed 101 people all over the Gaza Strip. Of these people, there was a whole family, the Al-Dahdouh family. I wrote their names on my social media, I mean, we don't get to know the names of these people who are killed. The father is named Salah al-Dahdouh, his wife is Salwa al-Dahdouh, their children are Ahmad, son, Abdallah, son, Mostafa, son, and Alaa, his daughter. The brother of the father was killed, and then there was a nephew. So, the Israel attack on Gaza is not by killing them, but even by bombing the internet, bombing the electricity, not allowing people even to report. So, there is difficulty in reporting, not only by not allowing journalists, international journalists, to go to Gaza, but they are also bombing every means that Palestinians can use to report on their miseries and their suffering and their demise. 

So, that's why it is very important to talk about what's happening in Gaza and also in Palestine every day. Israel is killing people in Gaza and Palestine every day. That's why every day we have to speak, to talk, about Palestine. 

G. Greenwald: There's a lot, obviously, we could talk about; we cover a lot of the atrocities pretty much on a daily basis, or close to it, on this show. I do want to get, to that as well, just some of the more recent things that have been happening that, as I said, have been even more covered up than usual, not just by the lack of media in Gaza, international media, and the lack internet, but also by so much attention paid to what was happening in Iran.

I had John Mearsheimer on my show yesterday and we were both talking about how is it that the world can watch what's going on in Gaza, even to the extent that we get to see it, how is it the West, that's paying for it, that's enabling it, can watch what's happening? It's just no one seems to mind, nobody seems to care, nobody seems to be bothered by it, it just kind of goes on, no one is even close to stopping it. 

We just saw Trump order Netanyahu to turn the planes around from Iran, which obviously Biden could have done, Trump could have done at any time, and they just won't. I'm trying to figure out, like, how can this be? 

I think one of the ways that that happens is the language of dehumanization. So, I think a lot of Americans have this perception of what Gaza is, what Palestine is, radically different than the reality. I was interested in the work that you've done in creating libraries in Gaza. You're obviously very well-spoken. You just won a Pulitzer Prize for your writing in English. I've had Gazans on my show before who are very similarly highly educated, well-spoken. 

There is a whole network – there were at least – of Gazan universities and advanced centers of learning that are all now destroyed. Gaza had one of the highest literacy rates in the world before October 7. Some of the best doctors, respected all around the world as specialists in their field. Can you talk about what Gazan society and Gazan culture are like and how it has been just so completely destroyed in the last 20 months? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Sure, yeah, I mean, before I answer your question, I would like to highlight the fact that, for two years now, not a single student in Gaza has gone to school. The schools have become shelters, as we are talking. Just half an hour, at the same time that Israel bombed a tent in Khan Yunis, Israel bombed a classroom on the third floor of a school called Amr Ibn al-Aas in Sheikh Radwan, in Gaza City, and two or three people were reported to be killed. 

So, two years, no schools. So anyone who was five years old when Israel attacked Gaza on October 7 hasn't gone to school for two years. So, if my children were to be there at the moment, my five-year-old would have missed his first and second grades. For two years, students have missed their high school diploma tests. So, people in Gaza are missing not only their lives, but even those who survive are missing a lot in their own lives. 

The Gaza Strip lies on the beach of the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza is rich in its plants and trees. One of the best places in Gaza is a city or town called Beit Lahia and it's very, very famous for the strawberry farms. My father-in-law is a strawberry farmer and they also used to plant corn, onion, watermelon, oranges, and they used to even, I mean, when it is allowed, to export some of the strawberries to the West Bank. But I think Gaza is very beautiful, even though it has been under occupation since 1948 and it's been under siege since 2007. 

Israel controls how much food gets into Gaza, how many hours of electricity is available in Gaza, how much medicine is allowed to enter Gaza, what kind of equipment, medical equipment get into Gaza, how many books get into because when I was trying to build the Edward Said Public Library, two branches in 2017 and 2019 – and unfortunately Israel destroyed the two libraries just like they destroyed all the universities in Gaza – Israel was in control of the entry of these books into Gaza. Sometimes the books would be delayed by months. It usually takes eight weeks for any books or packages to enter Gaza. So, Israel was controlling every single aspect of our lives in Gaza, despite that, we managed to make Gaza as beautiful as we could. 

This campaign of destroying Gaza is nonstop. Israel has been blowing up the houses in Bethlehem: 70%, this is an old statistic, 70% of Gaza has been either destroyed or damaged by not only Israeli airstrikes, while people are sleeping, but even the houses that people had to live in because Israel announced them to be a combat zone. Israel has been systematically blowing these houses up, and there are so many videos of Israeli soldiers documenting the blowing up of neighborhoods and of schools, of their bulldozers destroying a hospital in north Gaza just next to the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahia. 

Israel has systematically been destroying everything in Gaza. So, the question is not about when there will be a cease-fire in Gaza, although the cease-fire is just the beginning of a bigger change in Palestine. The question is, even after the cease-fire, Israel is trying to make it impossible for people to live again. So, let's say there is a cease-fire today. There are no schools in Gaza; 70% of the population in Gaza do not have homes, they are living in tents. Even though they are living in tents, including some of my family members, these tents get bombed. 

Just a few days ago, Glenn, my neighbor was killed in an airstrike when Israel hit a group of people walking next to it. She was inside her tent. These tents are pulled up on the street. So, she was killed while she was inside her tent. Her mother is still critically wounded, and all her brothers were wounded. So, Israel continues to destroy, to decimate as much of Gaza as possible, and there is a systematic destruction of the refugee camps in Gaza. Something that I wrote about in one of my pieces in The New Yorker is that Israel is not only destroying Gaza, the cities, the villages and the towns, but they are also destroying refugee camps. 

The refugee camps after 1948 were groups of tents here and there. Their refugee status continued for years and years, then people started to build rooms from concrete, and, over the years, they started to build multistory buildings. So, the refugee camp changed into a small city. 

So, Israel currently destroyed most, I mean, much of the Jabalia refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in Gaza. So, these are people, now, who lived in the refugee camp or people who were born in refugee camps like me and now are living in tents on the street, and maybe sheltering in a school, in a hospital, these people now are dreaming of returning to the refugee camps. So, this is the fault of the world. 

This is the fault of the word because they left the Palestinian people to live in refugee camps, they left them without protection and they not only left them without protection, they continue to support, to fund Israel's genocide, like the United States cut its funding for UNRWA, which has been responsible for the delivery of aid and for the education of so many people, including me. So, this world is not working properly, really. It's very strange for us to be watching this, even 20 months after the start of the genocide and for me to watch it from here, from the United States. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, it's got to be almost impossible.

I know I don't need to tell you, but for people who are watching, I mean, the control of Gaza by the Israelis – including it probably intensified since they removed troops, which they had there in 2005 – the control that continued was so great that the Israelis had phrases like really macabre, horrific, dark phrases like mowing the lawn, which meant let's just go in and kill some Palestinians or let's put the Palestinians on a diet when they would cut back the amount of food that they allowed in into Gaza. This has been the mentality going on for a long time. 

I want to just to ask you something: we talk a lot about the number of people in Gaza who have been slaughtered since October 7, the Israelis are now open about the fact that they want to make Gaza uninhabitable to force people to leave, to kill them until they leave, to destroy civilization until they leave. It's at least a policy of ethnic cleansing. One thing that I think about a lot, though, is, for the people who do survive, who are able to survive the genocide, survive this ethnic cleansing, this onslaught, I have to think about, how is it possible that they'd have a future? 

I live in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, which is a city, especially in poorer areas, that has a very high level of violence, drug gangs and the like, very high murder rates and I know some people who grew up there and they talk about, one time when I was seven years old, I saw a dead body on the ground twice, when I was in my teenage years, I saw a gun shootout, and they talk about how psychologically scarring that is for life, like to be exposed to those kinds of horrors even once or twice while you're growing up. And here you have this massive civilian population in Gaza, 50% of them are children, and the last two years, their lives have been nothing but bombing and destruction and murder and fear of death. Just psychologically, how do you think that the people who are there who do survive will be able to overcome that and, at some point, return to a normal semblance of life? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Well, this is a very hard question to answer. It's very obvious that the population that's been trying to survive – I mean, I don't like to say that people live in Gaza. No, people are trying to survive in Gaza because there is a difference between living in Gaza and trying to survive a genocide. 

So, these people, for 20 months, at least, haven't lived a single day without suffering, without looking for food, looking for medicine, looking for water. I mean, Glenn, I was in Gaza for the first two months. I remember walking in the street looking for water to fill a bucket of water for my children and for my wife, to wash the dishes, maybe to have a shower in the school, because there are no services in the school shelters, by the way. 

I remember walking in the city and seeing five-year-old children standing in line to fill a bucket of water for their families, or children maybe 10 years old. I saw some of my students standing in line to get a pack of bread and that was in October and November 2023, that was before Israel tightened its genocide. So, these children, five or seven years old, are no longer children. These children are not practicing childhood. 

This is a very dangerous reality and it should also be a signal that there would be a very dangerous future for these children. So, 50% of the population in Gaza is children. So, the question is for the Americans, for the Europeans who have been funding Israel's genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza and also in the West Bank: what do they expect of these Palestinians once this genocide comes on in? So, what kind of people is the world expecting to see in the future? That's a question that I don't have an answer to, but I'm sure that these people, Palestinian people who have been surviving the genocide in Gaza, will no longer be normal. 

I'm not a scientist, I am not a psychologist, but I think people in the world, especially officials, politicians and decision-makers, should think seriously about this. What kind of people are we going to see after the genocide comes to an end? What kind of people are going to be those who have been living under occupation? I don't have an answer to that, but if you think about it, I think there are many answers. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. A couple more questions: there's this old phrase, it's often attributed to Stalin, I'm not really sure. I don't think anyone is sure if he's really the one who said it. It’s this idea that when one person dies, it is a tragedy, when 1000 people die, it's a statistic. We often talk about, oh, 50,000 people are dead or 100,000 people dead in Gaza, and so often, as you said, the names of the people aren't very well known. We don't talk about them; we don't humanize them. 

One of the people who was killed after October 7 is a friend of yours, Refaat Alareer, who was a very well-known and accomplished poet. He has a book, “If I Must Die,” a poem that was turned into a book after he died, which became a bestseller in the United States and the West, and it's really remarkable. I got a copy, I read it and I really encourage people to do so. 

He was killed in an airstrike in December, so just a couple of months after October 7, and he was killed in his house, along with his sister and several of her children. Then, I guess, I don't know, what is it, five months later, his eldest daughter and her grandson were separately killed in airstrikes on their home as well. It just kind of gives you a sense for the number of families being wiped out. 

He was English speaking, he participated in the American Discourse, and one of the things that happened – I think people have really overlooked this, I want to make sure it's not forgotten and I want to get your views on this: after October 7, as we know, there were all these lies that were told about what was done in Israel, that children were killed in ovens, which obviously invokes the Holocaust by design; that babies were cut out of the wombs of their mothers, none of which ended up being true. Refaat, on Twitter, responding to these kinds of insane lies that were being told, mocked them. 

We have the tweet on October 29 where he said, “With or without baking powder?”, obviously mocking the idea that they were killed in ovens, which turned out to be a complete lie: 

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And Bari Weiss, who obviously has a big platform, immediately seized on that and put a target on his back: 

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An obvious distortion of what he said. The claim that Bari Weiss made that babies were killed in an oven was a complete and total lie disseminated by the Israeli government. And then he went the next day and said:

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Then, about a month later, he was dead at a targeted bombing of his home. Lots of human rights groups believe it was deliberate. Can you reflect on him and his work, but also how you see that killing and Bari Weiss's role in at least spreading these lies, if not helping to target him? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Of course. First of all, Refaat was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Gaza, where I studied, where I did my bachelor's degree. He was someone like a mentor. He was one of the founders of “We Are Not Numbers,” which is a group that is dedicated to mentoring emerging writers in Gaza, in the West Bank and also the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. So, Refaat introduced me to that project in 2014-2015, so, in fact, Refaat was killed in his sister's house in Gaza City. His sister, Asmaa, lived in Gaza City, and he also lived in Gaza City, but he evacuated his house, so Refaat, by the time he entered his sister's house, he was bombed in that apartment. He was killed along with his sister Asmaa and four nephews, along with one of Refaat’s brothers. 

Refaat was known for his satire. Of course, he and me and other Palestinians would never believe that any Palestinian, whether it's Hamas or other people, would burn babies, put people in ovens, or behead babies, I don't know what, I mean, even an evil person wouldn't do that. So, of course, he thought that this was a lie, this is a joke or something, and there is no evidence that that happened.

G. Greenwald: And it was proven to be a lie. He was absolutely right. It did not happen. It was a complete fabrication. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you go back, if you go to Refaat’s social media accounts before October 7, you would see a lot of jokes. So that was one of his jokes, and it was used against him. It's like one of the posts when I say, when I commented about an Israeli hostage, Emily Demary, and I said, how on Earth is this soldier a hostage while other Palestinians, like me, who were abducted from checkpoints, from hospitals, from school shelters, are called prisoners or detainees. 

G. Greenwald: Right, they're putting them in danger without any charges, and they're convicted of nothing, and those are prisoners, and yet people who are active IDF soldiers found in tanks, found in combat, who are taken as prisoners of war, those are all hostages. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah, so that was one of my questions. And then that was used against me, until after I won the Pulitzer. Oh, he is denying his status as a hostage; this is an anti-Semite. She called me a Holocaust denier. So, it's really irritating and it's ridiculous even to call someone like me a Holocaust denier, someone who has never talked about the Holocaust. In fact, I have some of the books that are about the holocaust that I relate to, that I feel very outraged when I read about the experiences of the Jewish people at the hands of Europeans, not Palestinians. 

So, Refaat's tweet, and I remember that post when Bari Weiss posted that, just to get a lot of hate, more hate for Refaat. Refaat was a Palestinian poet, essayist, a fiction writer, an editor of a book called “Gaza Writes Back,” which he published in 2014, an anthology of short stories by some of his students at the University of Gaza and other students from other universities. 

It's been devastating that Refaat was killed in his sister's house and then, a few months later, his daughter Shayma was killed with her baby, whom Refaat himself didn't see because his daughter was still pregnant. So, Shayma was killed with her baby, Abd al-Rahman, and with her husband, an engineer called Mohammed Siyam. And, by the way, Glenn, there is something that people don't know, which is that that poem, If I Must Die, which is the title of that book you referred to, in fact that poem was written in 2011 and that poem was dedicated to his daughter Shayma.

G. Greenwald: The one who died in that airstrike with her infant son. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Exactly. So the poem Refaat re-shared the poem after October 7. So that's how people came to know the poem. So, just imagine, in that poem, he's telling his daughter, if I must die, you should live, to tell my stories, to sell my things, to make a kite, that's the meaning of the poem; if I must die let it bring hope, let it be a tale. And we, truth tellers, writers, poets, journalists, we should write the tale of those whose voices were taken away from them by killing them and their families. So that was his message to his daughter, who unfortunately was killed in an air strike. 

So in that poem, to me, it's very clear that the I and the you were killed. That's why the you must become a collective you, that every one of us, the free people of the world who care about the human beings, especially those who have been living under occupation and siege and apartheid for decades, not for months, not four years, for decades, we should be the voices of these people, especially because we know what's happening or what has been happening. 

G. Greenwald: Yes. Mosab, I know you have time constraints. It was such a pleasure speaking with you. I think your voice is uniquely valuable and important to be heard by as many people as possible. So, we're definitely going to be harassing you to come back on the show. I had a lot more to talk about, but I want to respect your time as well, but super appreciative for you to come on. It's great speaking with you. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. 

G. Greenwald: All right, have a good evening. 

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So, I want to talk about the extraordinary victory – and it was truly extraordinary – last night, in the Democratic Party primary, of Zohran Mamdani, who has really vanquished a political dynasty, the Cuomos. 

However, I just want to note, though, in relation to that last segment, that shortly before we went on air, Donald Trump, I guess, just learned for the first time that Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing extremely serious corruption charges and is on trial for those corruption charges. These are not things like an accounting scheme to cover-up payments to a porn star or anything else like Donald Trump was accused of. This is hardcore, real corruption. It would have probably gotten him out of office a long time ago, had it not been for the various wars that he started. Lots of people believe that's one of the reasons why he needed these wars: to stay in office. 

Right before we were going on air, President Trump put out a quite lengthy and passionate, spirited statement on Truth Social in which he essentially said, “I know that Benjamin Netanyahu is now being called to return to his trial on Monday. This is an outrage.” I read it several times and I'm summarizing it very accurately. He said these trials should be canceled and/or Prime Minister Netanyahu should be completely pardoned. Then he went on to say that he and Bibi Netanyahu just secured a very tough, important victory against what he called Israel's longtime enemy, not the United States’ long-term enemy, but Israel's long-time enemy, Iran. 

He's essentially saying we just together fought a war against Israel's enemy, which is, of course, exactly what that war was and the reason why it was fought. Then he went on through this long, lengthy expression of outrage over the fact that Bibi Netanyahu is facing criminal charges. At the end, he said, the United States just saved Israel, and the United States will also now save Bibi Netanyahu. 

So, Trump himself is describing this war as one against Israel's longtime enemy and that the United States just saved Israel. There are a lot of people who get extremely outraged when you observe that it seems like this is another war for Israel being fought, not for the United States' interest, but for Israel, against Israel's enemy, not the United States’ enemy. Yet, President Trump, apparently, sees it that way as well, based on what he's saying, and instead of focusing on the people that he promised to protect and work for, namely the forgotten American worker, remember he's right now back to trying to interfere in the Israeli court system and the Israeli domestic politics by demanding that his very close friend, Bibi Netanyahu, be pardoned because he fought a good war. I don't really understand the relationship between those two things, but that is what President Trump said. 

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Zohran Mamdani's victory last night is extraordinary for a lot of reasons. Back in February, so I'm not talking about a year ago, I'm talking about four months ago. All the polling showed Andrew Cuomo with his gigantic lead. Obviously, he has massive name recognition, part of a beloved political dynasty. I mean, Mario Cuomo, for those who didn't live through that time in the eighties, was probably the most beloved Democrat in a long time. But then he had these two sons, Andrew and Chris, and Chris ended up parlaying that last name and those connections into being a journalist and his other brother, Andrew, was basically groomed to be the president of the United States from a very young age. He went around with his father everywhere, just the absolute classic nepo baby. And then he got all sorts of positions in Democratic Party politics because of his dad. At a very young age, he was made a cabinet secretary in the Clinton administration. In the early 1990s, he married a Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo. 

The entire thing was being shaped, from the very beginning, to groom Andrew Cuomo as part of this political dynasty based on the nepotistic benefits he got from being Mario Cuomo's son, not just to be governor of New York, but to be the president of the United States. That was absolutely where Cuomo is headed. It was supposedly remembered that liberals turned him into the hero of the COVID crisis saying only he was acting with the level of aggression necessary and all of that came completely crashing down because he had a litany of women who credibly accused him of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and this was a couple of years after Democrats made the Me Too movement. His brother also ended up getting fired from CNN because he was plotting with his brother about how to discredit these female accusers while he was still on CNN. And then it turned out that his greatness on COVID, which was his greatest strength that was going to jettison him to the presidency, ended up being one of his worst disgraces because he kept a bunch of old people locked in nursing homes and a lot of them ended up dying as a result. 

We covered all that before, but suffice to say, nonetheless, four years later, he comes back with much less ambition, already the governor of New York with three terms. He resigned in the middle of his third term, having been groomed to be president. 

Now they kind of convinced him, look, you're 67, the only thing there is for you to do is to run for mayor. He clearly thought it was beneath him, wasn't particularly excited, thought his victory was inevitable, and it looked like it was. Who's going to beat a Cuomo in Democratic Party politics? And not just because they're Cuomo, but he has all the billionaire money behind him. 

 

In February, when I really started paying attention to Zohran's campaign, because I could kind of tell it had the big potential to really take off, I could just tally at a lot of political talent, that he was forming a campaign that can really connect. You don't know for sure, but I noted at the time that it seemed very interesting to me that what he was doing was very different. You can see he had a lot of political talent. It reminded me of AOC, where, say what you want about her now, and I have mostly negative things to say about her, there's no denying that she has a kind of charisma and a political talent as well. 

But anyway, still, I mean, even though I was interested in and could see the potential, I never imagined that he would actually win. I just thought, oh, this is going to be a political star, he's probably going to end up attracting a good number of left-wing voters. But never imagined he would defeat the Cuomo dynasty and all the billionaire money behind it. 

As Zohran started increasing in the polls and then clearly became the main threat to Cuomo, huge amounts of billionaire money, largely afraid, in part about Zohran's democratic socialist policy, kind of a type of democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders and AOC. I know people want to call it communism, which just isn't. But obviously, people on Wall Street hated it, which definitely means things like increasing taxes on the rich, redistributing resources to the working class and poor people. It is that philosophy that people on Wall Street hate, that big billionaires hate. Also, he's a very outspoken critic of Israel, which in New York, with a very large Jewish population, a very large pro-Israel faction that's very powerful, is typically not something you can be. I mean, even the Democrats who won, like Ed Koch and Bill de Blasio, have been typically pro-Israel. That's just a red line for any politician who has ambitions in New York. 

He has said things like he supports a boycott and divestment sanction; he's talked about globalizing the intifada. Interestingly, unlike people who, when they run for office, have their past quotes dug up and are confronted with them and they repudiate them immediately, like Kamala Harris reputed everything she said she believed when running for president in the Democratic primary in 2019 and they brought it all to her when she was running in the general election. 

Mamdani did not do any of that. He was asked, “Do you still support the globalizing intifada instead of running away from it?” And he said, “Yeah, I do, but I think it's often distorted. It doesn't mean anything more than a struggle, a resistance, not blowing people up.” He supports boycotting Israel; he didn't repudiate that. He was asked whether, given Benjamin Netanyahu's indictment and the warrants for his arrest issued by the ICC, he would have him arrested if he came to New York, and he said he would. So, obviously, a lot of billionaires like Bill Ackman, whose primary loyalty is to Israel, were desperate to make sure Mamdani didn't win. 

I promise you, Bill Ackman does not care about zoning laws or the efficiency of services in New York. He has about 10 estates all over the world. To the extent he lives in New York, he lives in a $30 million duplex apartment very high above Manhattan, he chauffeured around in cars and the like. That's not his interest. His interest was in stopping somebody who was critical of Israel, and he put huge amounts of money, as did other billionaires, into packs for Andrew Cuomo that largely just attacked Zohran Mamdani as an anti-Semite, all the rest. And none of it worked, even though usually those things are guaranteed to work in any major democratic race. 

It's very difficult when I watch Democrats trying to convince Americans that Donald Trump was a Hitler-like figure, it's like a vicious dictator who was going to put people in camps. One of the reasons why it was so hard to do that, why it was so obviously destined to fail, was because Trump doesn't read that way. Americans watched him for four years in the presidency and they, even the ones who didn't like him, didn't see him as Hitler. And so, this attempt to try to turn Zohran Mamdani into a raging anti-Semite, I mean, we showed you a few of these tweets throughout the week, just absolutely insane ones from people saying his election would be an existential threat to New York Jews. What is he going to do, like round them up from synagogues and put them in concentration camps, is that what Zohran Mamdani is going to do? 

The reason it doesn't work is that you just listen to the guy for three minutes and you see that he is not anything resembling that. He has a lot of policies, especially culture war ones, with which I'm uncomfortable. His economic policies are ones that obviously a lot of people are going to have problems with, but the idea that he's like Osama bin Laden, or Joseph Stalin, that just doesn't work. If you just listen to who he is, how he speaks, what he says – there has to be some alignment with the smears with the person in order for it to work. 

A lot of liberals have this monolithic view that everybody on the right has the same exact views of everything, there are no divisions, and of course you pay attention to right-wing politics, there are major ideological rifts and divisions and debates. We saw it with the Iran war and many other issues already, H-1B visas, all sorts of things. But a lot of people on the right see the Democratic Party as this monolith as well. They think like Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi are the same, like, AOC or Bernie or Zohran, and it's completely untrue. 

New York City doesn't elect socialists. When they elect Democrats, they elect very established – Ed Koch was a very centrist member of Congress for a long time, very pro-Israel, always at war with the left-wing of the Democratic Party, kind of the classic New York city mayor, very outspoken, loud, kind of charismatic in his own sort of way. And even Bill de Blasio, who was considered more progressive, had very close relations with the large New York City developers, even though Wall Street didn't like Bill de Blasio. 

So, it's hard to overstate what a sea change this is. Even if you think New York City is a cesspool of baffling, it's not. I mean, it is in little places, but a citywide election, that's not who wins in New York. 

Here, just to give you a sense of the funding gap. I'm doing this because I want to underscore to you how improbable this victory is, what a reflection of it it is of a remarkable sea change in how American voters are thinking about politics or thinking about elections, what they respond to, what they don't respond to, not just on the left, but on the right, not in Democratic Party or the Republican Party, but across the spectrum. 

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You have three types of funding: campaign funding directly, matching public funds and then aligned super PACs. Andrew Cuomo had at least $35 million, $35.6 million. In second place, was Zohran with 9.1, almost entirely small donors. So, look at this gap, talking about a gap of $25 million – $25 billion for a city-wide race. And that's why people are describing it as such a major upset.

Now, just so you don't think I'm like hopping on some train once it left the station, pretending that I knew all along, I've watched Zohran for quite a while now, but I'm going to show you the reasons why. Back in February, when he was at less than 1% of the polls, I just wanted to draw people's attention to him, even though nobody was paying attention then, because I could see the kind of campaign he was running. I, for the first time, understood what his political talent was. It's just like a native inborn thing that you either have or you don't. He has it. He's a very effective political speaker, but he just kind of has an energy that people find attractive and appealing. And to be clear, I hate the fact that if you analyze somebody's political appeal in a positive way, people are like, “Oh, you're a cheerleader for him. You must love him.” I went through this with Donald Trump for so many years, I would say liberals don't understand Trump's appeal. He's funny, he is charismatic and exciting and he vessels and channels anti-establishment hatred, which is the driving force of American politics and American political life, and you should understand that about him. 

I can admit that the people I can't stand most, Dick Cheney, are very smart. I can acknowledge that attribute of theirs without liking them. So, what I'm saying here is it's important to understand why's Zohran had this political appeal. It doesn't mean you like him or hate him. It's a completely separate question. 

So back in February, I wrote this:

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So, it was clear to me something was happening there. I'm not suggesting I knew he was going to win. I just knew that there was a lot of potential there, people should pay more attention to him. And so the question is, okay, why did this happen? 

So, I want to show you a video that was probably the first thing that really attracted my attention to him and why I thought he was just a very different kind of Democrat. 

 This is at a time when Joy Reid and MSNBC were telling everybody that Trump won simply because white voters are too racist and misogynist to vote for a black woman, which is a very self-certifying, pleasant narrative to tell yourself. But here's what Zohran did. He went specifically to the neighborhoods in New York City that had the biggest swing from Democratic voters to Trump. They weren't the Upper West Side or the East Side. They were poor neighborhoods, working-class neighborhoods, racially diverse neighborhoods, or even predominantly Black or Latino neighborhoods, immigrant neighborhoods. All he did was go around and ask them why they voted for Trump and the things that they told him clearly shaped what he decided to do when forming his own campaign and the issues that he wanted to emphasize. In other words, he went to speak to the people of New York and asked why they were dissatisfied and then formed a campaign to speak to what their dissatisfactions and desires were. Imagine doing that. He didn't go to consultants or political strategists or whatever; he really just went and talked to voters. 

Listen to what happened. Listen to how he did it, too. 

Video. Zohran Mamdani, X. November 15, 2024.

That's a very good sampling of why a lot of people voted for Trump. The Democrats want to send all our money to wars in Ukraine and Israel, we can't afford things, they only care about the wealthy. 

The things that they care about are obvious, the things that they encounter every day in their lives, the bus fares and the cost of rent and the like. And that's what his entire campaign was structured around. 

A lot of people found tweets of his from 2020 when he was in his mid to late twenties, running for New York assembly right during Black Lives Matter. Tons of left-wing culture war, nonsense, lots of extreme positions. He was positioning himself for a very left-wing seat in the state assembly, stuff like defund the police over and over, queer liberation requires defund of the police. Things that, obviously, if you're running in a citywide election, you're not going to run on. And he didn't. He ran a very economic populist campaign, despite being called a communist or a socialist or whatever. 

I want to show you this clip that I also found incredibly interesting. So, this is one that he did in January, when again, people really weren't paying attention to him and he posted a video with a tweet, and the tweet said: “Chicken over rice now costs $10 or more. It's time to make halal eight bucks again.”

Video. Zohran Mamdani, X. January 13, 2025.

 If you live in New York City, one of the things you see everywhere is street vendors. Lots of people buy food from street vendors, like snacks, pretzels, or all kinds of ethnically diverse food that you can eat from. If you don't have time to sit in a restaurant, you grab something from one of these street vendors and, especially in the more working-class neighborhoods, it's where people eat and people are complaining that the price of that food is increasing. If you're Andrew Cuomo, you don't eat at these; you have no idea about any of this. If you're Bill Ackman, obviously you don’t have any clue. You think that voters are going to vote on the fact that Iran is not pro-Israel enough, voters in New York City, that's what they wake up and care about? Just like the Democrats thought voters were going to wake up and care about Trump having praised a fascist, or fascist or Hitler, or whatever, so removed from their lives, or Ukraine. 

This is what populism is. I saw people today, a lot of conservatives, saying when I called it economic populism, “Oh, socialism is an economic populist.” No, when you appeal to people's life, when you tell them the rich and corporations are running roughshod over you, are preventing you from having a survivable or affordable life, and that's what became his keyword is affordability which obviously a lot of New Yorkers are being driven out of New York City, they can't afford it anymore, things are too expensive. 

So, look at what he did in this video. You tell me if this is like some sort of Stalinist communist, at least in terms of how he ran his campaign. He wanted to understand why chicken over rice, something that people eat every day in New York City, especially in more working-class neighborhoods, and why that food has increased. So he did his analysis, and concluded that the solution was to change a few things.

The laws that he's promoting here, the four laws are number one, better access to business licensing, repeal criminal liability for street vendors, services for vendors, and reform the sitting rules. It's almost like libertarian, like “Oh, there's too much bureaucracy, too many too many rigorous permit requirements, they have to pay someone else as a permit owner $20,000 a year, which obviously affects food prices. 

I mean, on top of the very kind of regular person appeal of that, talking about things that people care about a lot, things that are affecting their lives, talking about solutions to them in a very non-ideological way. There's also a lot of humor in there, a lot of kind of flair, something you want to watch. It's not like a lecture, it's not like an angry rant. You look at this and it's not hard to see why he won. 

Now, let me show you the counterattack, the way they thought the Andrew Cuomos of the world thought they were going to sabotage him. It's an amazing thing.

 This is the New York mayoral debate. There were, I think, seven candidates, eight candidates on the stage, and it was hosted by the local NBC News affiliate. And just listen to this question that they thought was important for people wanting to be New York City mayor to answer and how they all answered, except for Zohran. 

Video. New York Mayoral Debate, NBC News. June 4, 2025.

So, do you see how excited Andrew Cuomo got? He really did base a huge part of his campaign on his loyalty to Israel, his love of Israel, his long-time support for Israel, his father's support for Israel, his family's support for Israel. And you heard those voters who voted for Trump when asked why. Did any of them say, “Oh, I think Democrats are insufficiently pro-Israel?” No, no one said that. These people aren't waking up and thinking, I want to make sure my mayor is going to go to Israel as the very first foreign visit. 

It was supposed to be controversial that he said, “Look, I'm the New York City mayor. That's what I'm running for. Not the Secretary of State. I'm not thinking about foreign trips. I'm actually wanting to represent the people of New York City. I'm going to stay here at home and talk to the people I'm supposed to be working for. Why would I plan my overseas trips and make sure Israel is for?” 

“Oh, a lot of them said Israel. One of them, said, “Oh, the Holy Land, Israel.” So that was supposed to be the kind of thing that they thought was going to sabotage him. They have these old ideas on their heads about what you can and can't do. That's why Trump won, too. He broke all of those rules that people thought were still valid and he proved they weren't. 

Now, just a couple of things here. If you want to win in the Democratic primary in New York City, you can't just rely on left-wing voters. Like DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, AOC-Bernie types, that can give you a certain momentum, a certain energy, but you're not going to win a city-wide race just with those kinds of voters. You have to attract a lot of normie, liberal Democrats. That's who lives in New York City. 

 They're not people who hate Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. These are not them. There are some in places like Brooklyn and Queens, but the majority of Democrats in New York City and most liberal American cities are very normal Democrats. They love the democratic establishment; they love Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer represents New York and has forever. That's who they like. That's what you need to attract: those voters. 

 

They've become convinced that the Democrats has this kind of aged stagnant, listless, slow, uninteresting leadership base. And it's true. It's basically an aristocracy. Obviously, the debacle with Biden underscored that more than anything. They were being told they had to get behind someone who was suffering from dementia. And so, they want this kind of new energy, this exciting energy. That's a big part of it. 

It was kind of a referendum on what Democrats want their party to be. They don't want to be voting for a 67-year-old person of politics for 40 years, who has billionaire money behind him as part of the democratic establishment, who was in the Clinton cabinet, have Bill Clinton kind of come in from wherever he is and be like, yeah, I'm endorsing Andrew Cuomo. That's not appealing to these Democrats anymore. They know that they can't keep going down that road. 

So that's part of it. But I really think a big part of is that the primary division, not just American politics, but politics throughout the democratic world, certainly something we've talked a lot about before, is the difference between someone perceived to be part of the establishment and someone who seems to be an outsider, who hates the establishment. There are a lot of people in the United States, millions, who voted twice for President Obama in 2008, 2012, and then voted for Donald Trump in 2016. That's a reason why Trump won. And people who continue to cling to this archaic, obsolete way of understanding American politics, whether it's about left v. right, conservative v. socialist, whatever, they can't process that. 

In 2016, there were a lot of people who were saying to reporters, my two favorite candidates are Trump and Bernie Sanders. And again, same thing, if you think everything's a right v. left, you'd be like, what are these people? They're crazy? That makes no sense. But when you see that things are about hatred for the establishment, a desire to reject establishment candidates and vote for outsiders who seem anti-establishment, you understand why Obama won against, first, Hillary Clinton, and then, John McCain. 

Zohran Mamdani is obviously an outsider candidate, very unknown, very young, doesn't speak like those other candidates, certainly doesn't speak like Andrew Cuomo, doesn't have billionaire backing, is highly critical on a fundamental level of the political establishment. That's a major reason why he won as well. 

I really believe that one of the things that was like Trump's superpower was, as I said, that he didn't care that the things he was saying were supposedly disqualifying. He wouldn't retract them. I remember in 2015 when he had a pretty sizable lead, people were shocked by it. But they thought, “Oh, it's just early. This is the kind of candidate Republicans flirt with but won't actually vote for. They're going to snap it to line at the end and vote for Jeb Bush.”  

In 2015, he gave an interview that's now notorious where he said, when asked about John McCain, who never liked Trump, and he was asked about his heroism and Trump said, “I don't know that he's so heroic. He crashed a plane and got captured. I prefer soldiers and heroes who don't get captured. I think that's what makes you a winner.” I remember the outpouring of articles over the next few days from all the, like, deans of political reporting or whatever, saying, “OK, that's the end of Trump's campaign. You can't criticize John McCain.” And of course, they went to him, “Do you apologize?” “No, I don't apologize. I meant every word I said.” 

And there were so many things like that. Mocking the New York Times reporter who has cerebral palsy, I believe it was some sort of degenerative disease. Over and over, and his refusal to renounce his own statements, actions, and beliefs made him seem more genuine. Even if people don't like the things he has said, the fact that he's saying, “No, that's what I believe,” is a big political asset. 

The fact Zohran, who has a long history of passionate activism in opposition to Israeli aggression, Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Israeli assaults on Gaza, when he would say things like “Globalize Intifada”, which he did, and he was confronted about that a month before the election, and he's like, “No, I'm not going to withdraw that. People distort what that means. They try to make it seem like it means you believe in terrorists, like killing people with car bombs. It's just a word, intifada, an Arabic word for struggle or resistance, including peaceful struggle and resistance for equal rights for the Palestinians.” 

A lot of people may not like that term, a lot of people don't like that term, but I think the fact that he was not running away from it, not apologizing for it, ran a pretty unique campaign as I'm trying to show you, is also a major reason that he won. I just think, again, populism is nothing more than there's a system over here of powerful people, politically powerful, financially powerful people, they do not have your interest in mind, they don't care about you, they're exploiting you, they're abusing you for their own aggrandizement, their own wealth, their own power and I want to fight them on your behalf. That's what economic populism is. 

Go look at what Josh Hawley does, threatening to vote against Trump's bill because it cuts Medicaid, knowing that a lot of Trump voters, the working-class voters, rely on Medicaid. Something really interesting about Josh Hawley, every week he holds like hearings, and he summons executives of all kinds of industries, the airline industry, the meat industry, bankers, and he just pounds them about hidden fees or, the like. Josh Hawley has said the future of the Republican Party is a multiracial working-class coalition, which requires economic populism. Josh Hawley stood with Bernie to stop the COVID bill from being passed and they were going to give out billions and billions of dollars to big business and he demanded that there be direct payments to all Americans, and they got the bill, they tried to stop bill, and they got $600 direct payment to Americans, that's economic populism. And then it went to Trump and Trump said, $600 is enough, I'm vetoing it, I want $2,000 payments, promising to represent the forgotten person. 

That's what economic populism: not serving Wall Street, not serving bankers, not serving real estate developers, not endorsing establishment dogma, not tying yourself to old, decaying people who've just been around for decades, who interest and excite nobody any longer. That's the goal of American politics. I don't think it matters at all to people if it comes from the right or the left. And the lots of things about Zohran, Marjorie Taylor Greene today posted the Statue of Liberty in a burqa, Ari Fleischer said, “New York Jews, you need to evacuate,” as some kind of nation, as I said before, like Joseph Stalin and Osama bin Laden – you look at him, do you think, is that at all what he reads as, what he codes as, is it what seems a convincing attack on him? 

And so, I think there are a lot of lessons here, not just for the Democratic Party, though, certainly not for what American voters respond to and what they don't. And in this case, the lessons are so powerful, so penetrating, that it drove the unlikeliest of people to crush one of the most powerful political dynasties in America, the Cuomos, backed by every institutional advantage you could want, and very poised to – I'm not saying it's certain, but highly likely to become what a lot of people have long said is the second most important position in American politics – as mayor of New York City. New York City, obviously, is the center of American finance, American wealth, massive tourism, a gigantic city, and so that is an important position. That's not a joke. The fact that a 33-year-old Muslim self-identified democratic socialist was able to win despite that history of statements, I think it's very important to derive a lot of lessons from that. And I think anyone interested in understanding politics, let alone winning elections, would be studying him in a very non-judgmental way. It doesn't matter if you hate him, it doesn't matter if you love him. The lessons ought to be the same. 

 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on War with Iran, Executive Power, the Trump Presidency, and More
System Update #473

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 you probably know, Friday night is when we try to have our Q&A session. The questions are submitted only by our Locals members. We try to do it every Friday night, but when news events are developing, major news events that we have to discuss – and preparations for a huge war, a huge, dangerous, destructive war, are the kind of thing that we're going to cover and often everything is very fast-moving so, oftentimes, we end up having to cover something on Friday and not being able to do the Q&A we wanted. 

The list of questions is always eclectic. We try to choose a variety of topics, people who haven't asked questions and who have, people who are critical and people who aren't, we always look for good-faith, critical comments and we have a couple of those tonight. So, let me just dive into this. You don't need all the prefacing and the explanations. Most of you are probably very familiar with this arrangement and it's not particularly complicated; it doesn't require a lot of explanation. It's just a Q&A. 

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The first question comes from @wineverett:

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All right. I could not agree more with all of that. I think a major reason for Donald Trump's victories and, by victory I mean starting in 2016 when he was never even remotely considered a candidate or politician and he's gunned down the field of all those professional, highly funded Republican politicians starting with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, all through them, got the nomination and then crushed the Clinton political machine, obviously filled with nothing but political animals, long-term professional career politicians, is precisely for this reason. People understand that both political parties speak a language, live in a world, spend money on things, talk about things, vote on things completely detached from their concerns and their lives and that's why they've lost faith and trust in most institutes of authority because they perceive correctly that people in power who are there to essentially represent them care about everything other than what they care about. It's so incredibly obvious from how these people speak to what they say, and Donald Trump was the first to come along and sort of break all those rules that people have come to hate about how they speak, how they talk, what they talk about, the things you're allowed to say and he was basically a weapon to smash that glass, to smash the system that they were so eager to smash. 

Obviously, Donald Trump is now a politician. There's no denying that. It doesn't mean it's bad, it doesn't mean it’s good, he's been president for four years, spent four more years running for president and is now president again. So, the last 10 years of our political lives have been dominated by the political figure of Donald Trump. It's clearly the Trump era of politics. He's not really an outsider force anymore. He can't be president twice, having run a third time and almost won, just constantly running for president for 10 years, and be a political outsider anymore. 

He's still an outsider in a lot of different ways, compartmentally and the like, but it's not as appealing, I think, as it once was and especially now that we're watching in the first five months of this first term, that was consumed by things like tariffs which was a major promise of the Trump campaign, no doubt but I think people ended up feeling like economically they had been beaten upon and crushed for so long, including by the Biden years, that there was, even Trump admitted, short-term pain, the stock market became unstable, it went down, people's investments and retirements funds became less valuable, small businesses struggled. So, that was already kind of a feeling that, wow, we have Trump again, who promised to help us in the working-class, but instead, we seem to be suffering with this tariff policy that we're being told will have long-term benefits, but for the moment, we don't seem to have them. 

And now, political discourse is being dominated by a potential war with Iran that I just don't think most people have spent the last two years caring about. I used to always say about Russia when Democrats are spending all that time on the evils of Putin and the threats posed by Russia, it's just so obvious there's a huge gap between what Democrats spend all their time talking and warning about and what Americans wake up thinking about. I just know that Americans are not waking up worried about Vladimir Putin and the threat posed by Russia. That's not something they're scared about. They were during the Cold War, when nuclear war was very possible, people were taught to go to shelters, which was very much part of the culture, and there was an existential war between communism and capitalism. There was a lot at stake. But people don't worry about Russia anymore. They don't consider Vladimir Putin one of the leading threats to their well-being, unless you are an MSNBC viewer. And so, there was this gigantic gap between what Democrats were talking about and what people care about. I think that's the reason they ended up losing. 

But now you look at what Republicans have talked about. What has Trump done aside from tariffs? He's gotten in and he resumed a bombing campaign in Yemen against Houthis and unleashed the Israelis again to continue their destruction of Gaza, which the United States is paying for. Started deporting, not people in the United States illegally or who have committed crimes, but people who were guilty of the crime of protesting Israel or speaking out against Israel. I think that's what people were worried about: people in the country legally, PhD students, Fulbright scholars, biologists, chemists, with nothing but a record of achievement, being booted out with a new precedent because they spoke out against Israel. I mean, people were definitely worried about illegal immigration, especially people who are dangerous to their children or their communities. You think they're worried about Harvard and Yale biologists who wrote up ads about Israel? So, a lot of that as well. 

And now we have this war with Iran, which, if you ask, you can get polling answers or polling data about anything the way you want, based on how you ask the question. So, if you say, “Look, Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon, should the United States do nothing, or should it try to do what it can, even if it means military force, to stop Iran from getting a new weapon?” Yeah, we don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But if you say, “Israel has launched a war against Iran, do you think the United States should involve itself militarily in a new foreign war in the Middle East? Overwhelmingly, people say no, and polls are showing both. 

I don't care what the polling data is, if you ask somebody, “Do you want Iran to have nuclear weapons? Yes, or no?” I do not believe that Americans are waking up saying in the morning, “Wow, I couldn't sleep last night because I'm really worried about the prospect that Iran is going to get nuclear weapons.” 

By every account, they don't even have the missile capability to send one to the United States. Even if they could, why would they? North Korea doesn’t. Everyone understands that it's going to be immediate mutual suicide. I just don't think that's what people care about in their lives and polls constantly should have shown that. I don't think people elected Donald Trump to go to war with Iran or to restart the bombing campaign against the Houthis. And that's all they're hearing about now. That's what the Trump administration is focused on, which is not what the American people are focused on. I know this from polling data; I cover politics and we've all seen over time what Americans care about and what they don't care about and when they feel like their interests are ignored and when their interests are not. 

I want to just answer this with a story about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Not really a story so much as kind of my thoughts on Marjorie Taylor Greene. So, I want to be very honest and say that I really like Marjorie Taylor Greene, I have always liked Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think she's a good person. I think that she's sincere and earnest about the things she says and believes. Obviously, Marjorie Taylor Greene has said things over the last many years that I don't agree with, that you can describe as whatever, outside of the realm of what reality is. I think most politicians do. I think Donald Trump running around talking about how Iran's about to get a nuclear weapon and use it or whatever, that's way outside the realm of reality, to say nothing of what was said about the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis. But the reason I like Marjorie Taylor Greene is that she is what a lot of people wanted and were so fond of, so attracted to Trump. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene was never a politician. She didn't run for office, she wasn't like on the city council and then in the state legislature in Georgia and then worked her way up to the Georgia state Senate and was being groomed by the Republican Party to one day run for Congress, like kind of a career politician. That was not Marjorie Taylor Greene. She has a business, the business is prosperous, she's not incredibly rich, but probably upper middle class; she lives on a good upscale Georgia suburb. And she became very politically active with the MAGA movement and America First. It resonated with her just as a citizen and then she got politically involved and probably had some connections and money that helped. 

However, she wasn't part of a political dynasty, nor was her father the governor or anything. She really just did the kind of classic “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” type of political trajectory, where a citizen wakes up and says, I'm starting to get angry and concerned by what my government is doing. I think it's totally on the wrong track, the things they're saying make no sense, and I don't think they're representing our interests. 

She got very inspired by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and took it seriously and she suddenly became a member of Congress. And, yeah, because she's somebody who was not a trained politician, she often was not on script. She's charismatic and she says things that get people riled up and that bring a lot of media attention. That's why there's so much attention on Jasmine Crockett as well, not because she is some important figure in the House Democratic caucus, but because she says that gets people angry and cable news loves that and builds those people with a big platform. That's what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I don't think Marjorie Taylor Greene was ever doing or saying things on purpose to make people angry. I think she was doing and saying things that she really believed in that if you go to her district, I guarantee you, people like her, people who live near her, people who lived in her district, which is why they voted for her and keep re-electing her, despite how much the media hates her and says she's so evil and bad. 

I've talked to her before. I found her to be exactly the same when talking personally to her and when I listened to her in public. I've had her on the show before, and one of the things that really I found so interesting and eye-opening about Marjorie Taylor Green is that she's been reluctant to criticize Donald Trump too much previously. 

I remember I had her in the show. She was one of those people very much against the Ukraine war, making all those good arguments that I agree with about how we have women who can't get baby formula and our communities are falling apart. Why are we sending billions to finance a war that has nothing to do with us? I remember I asked her, like, does that apply to Israel, that rationale? It seems like it should, does it? And she wasn't enough confidence to say like, yeah, also Israel. That's a very sensitive topic, she knows that. But sometimes you get to Washington, and you have to find your way, you've got to understand how things work, especially if you're not a career politician. 

I remember when I started journalism, there were a lot of things I didn't understand. I hadn't done it full-time, I thought I knew about things, but once I really started looking, I started learning things and realizing how much I didn't know. And so, it took me a while to kind of feel like, okay, I have a good, secure sense of where things are. And I think that's where she is.

 When Donald Trump announced this new bombing campaign in Yemen, she was very outspoken against it and the way she made the argument really struck me. She said, “You know what, I've been a Congresswoman now for six years, or whatever it is, representing my district, but I've lived in my district forever. Nobody in my District even knows what a Houthi is. Nobody talks about Houthis, nobody has met Houthis, nobody is threatened by Houthis, nobody fears Houthis and nobody understands why we are spending all this money to bomb the Houthis. What does this have to do with us?” 

I thought about it. I was like, that's the benefit of having people who are not professional politicians. One of the things that makes Kamala Harris such a terrible candidate is that she worked her way up that ladder from her mid-20s. She's basically been a politician her whole life. She got elected to the San Francisco District Attorney, very ambitious. You can go find national interviews with her because she was doing things like imprisoning parents for truancy if their kids didn't go to school. “Good Morning, America” and those types of shows loved her. She parlayed that into a run for Attorney General of California, won that, worked her way up to the California Senate, and then became Vice President. And she never had a moment where she was off script, where she was saying things that people in Washington would be like, “What? What is that?” She clung to those scripts like her life depended on it. She was petrified of saying anything that official Washington would find odd or strange to disapprove of. And as a result, she was totally vacant. She never spoke naturally, she never spoken like a human being because that's all she knows is she's been clicked into the political system and she speaks about the things that her donors care about, that other politicians care about, that the media she consumes talks about and she has no ability to say what Marjorie Taylor Greene said, no courage to say it, even if she understood it. 

You can take that too far, before 9/11, and nobody in America, for the most part, understood what al-Qaeda was, thought much about al-Qaeda, didn't mean the government should not do anything about al-Qaeda. Of course, sometimes the government has to work on things that are real threats or problems that most people don't know about or think about or understand, but I think there's a basic wisdom to the idea of asking, especially when we're going to war, why are we bombing and killing these people on Yemen? What do they have to do with us? And at the time, they were not attacking American ships, we've gone through that timeline before, and the only reason they had been previously was because they knew we were arming and funding Israel's destruction of Gaza, so even that was because we were financing and fighting a war for a foreign country, and the way Marjorie Taylor Green said it was like, “a Houthi, well, who knows even, in my district, what a Houthi is? I'm not going to cheerlead a war against the Houthis that have nothing to do with the lives of the people who sent me to Washington.” 

And then, when it came to this war in Iran, she lost all fear or concern about recognizing the relationship between the United States and Israel, and in whose benefit that relationship is, and who's really pushing and shaping the decisions of the United States Congress and the executive branch when it comes to war. 

I think she has enough confidence now, she's seen enough, she’s learned enough, she's read enough, and she understands enough. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not dumb. I'm sure Democrats will say she is. She's not dumb, she is smart. She just doesn't speak like Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden because she's not from that. She doesn't emerge from that; she's a citizen. 

That was the idea, by the way, of the Congress, we weren't going to have a professional class of politicians, we're going to have people who represented their constituents, get sent to Congress for a few years and then go back to their lives and do what they were doing previously. And that's the kind of person she still is. She's very much still a resident of her Georgia district, much more so than a creature of Washington and so, she can think about things and say them in a way most Americans are still thinking and saying them. 

And when it came time for the war in Iran, too, she was like, “I am just sick” of having all of our money and all of her service members be put in harm's way for these wars that have nothing to do with our country. “Ukraine is not our country and Ukraine's wars are not our wars. Israel is not out country and Israel's wars are not out wars.” And I think she's able to speak so plainly about these things and insist that we focus on the things that her constituents and people in America really care about because she's not subservient to or taking orders from a political party or a kind of system. 

There are other people like her in Congress, too. I'm not suggesting she's the only one. I'm just saying she's been very noticeable over the last three, four months, because, especially when it comes to foreign policy, that's where politicians typically step most delicately and she's not stepping delicately at all. To me, she's become a voice of great clarity and confidence, and I think she's earnest about everything she's saying. I'm talking about these things the way most people talk about them. 

I've told stories before, and I hate to romanticize them. I'm not going to even tell the stories because I've told them too many times. Probably you've already heard them. But if you go to the United States and you get anonymous and you just go to some, like, again, it sounds so cliche, but like a diner, where you talk to drivers of Ubers or taxis or whatever, it is enlightening. You hear things that are actual wisdom, just common-sense wisdom, that no people who work on politics and are paid to work in politics in D.C. and New York ever say that is that chasm, it's a huge chasm.

Now, all of official Washington is worried about a war with Iran that I do not believe most people in the United States view as a threat or something that ought to be subsuming their lives. I don't think they want Donald Trump, whom they elected to benefit their lives as working-class people, to be focused on yet another new war in the Middle East. 

I think that's why he's hesitating too, that he has a sense for that. A good sense for that. He's a good politician in that way. It's like instinctive and I think the more Trump goes in those directions that are basically the Bush, Obama, Biden direction, the more people are going to start to see him as like every other politician in that attachment that people had to him, similar to the attachment they had to Obama, who people also viewed as a transformative figure of change but quickly became a just a mouthpiece for the establishment of the perpetuation of the status quo in Washington. They lost that inspirational connection to him. I think that's going to happen to Trump as well if he continues down this path. 

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All right, next question. @Commissar69 asks:

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It is amazing to me that you go study the Constitution, you go to law school, not even law school, our civics class, and the design of the Constitution, in some cases, is kind of ambiguous. They constructed that on purpose, that was part of how they obtained the votes they needed to ratify it: leaving some things purposely left ambiguous that would be interpreted in the future. So, you could tell people whose votes you needed, it could mean this: you tell other people you needed who thought differently, it could mean that. 

So, some of it is ambiguous, but some of it is not. It's not ambiguous because of the language, it's not ambiguous because of what the Federalist Papers say, it's not ambiguous because of the debates that were had. 

One of the things that was not ambiguous is that if the United States is going to go to war, it can do so only if Congress declares war. Only Congress has the power to declare war. The rationale for this is very clear: it was assumed, based on experience at the time, that if we go to a war, people are going to be drafted and it's the ordinary citizen who's going to go and die in these wars and the only way the United States should go to war is if the people consent, through their representatives in the House and the Senate. And I can read you so much from the Federalist Papers talking about this. 

The president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. By the way, the armed forces were not intended to be a standing army. The founders really feared standing armies, meaning like armed agents of the federal government, like the ATF or the FBI. They're basically like armed permanent agents or armies, but also the army itself. That's why they talked about well-regulated militias. You compile an army when you want to go fight a war, but you don't have a permanent standing army. They thought that was dangerous. 

So, when they said the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, what that meant is Congress approves a war and we go to war, and the person responsible for executing that war – because you cannot have Congress managing the war, you need a leader, a military leader, and we wanted civilian rule, it's not a top general – it is an elected president, he becomes the commander-in-chief of the armed forces that makes the decision about how that war will be fought. 

For a lot of reasons, over the last decades, we've completely forgotten about, ignored, the congressional power to declare war. I believe the last war we declared was the Korean War.

Now, the idea there is if Congress really was serious about this, they could have cut off funds for the war, but mostly it's been a desire by Congress not to have to take the hard vote of voting yes or no on a war. I mean, it destroyed political careers. Hillary Clinton lost because she was forced to vote on the Iraq War and voted yes. It got tied to John Kerry when he tried to run against Bush in 2004, against the Iraq War, when he had voted yes on it 18 months earlier. Joe Biden voted for it as well. It definitely was a huge reason why Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama in 2008 and even why Hillary Clinton was weaker than she could have been when running against Bernie Sanders in 2016, because of that Iraq War vote. They don't want to vote on war. They're happy to leave it to the president. So, they purposely kind of gave up the power that the Constitution assigned to them. It's really an abdication of their responsibility. But politicians don't want to take hard votes. 

And now the view of the executive, I remember very well that Bush and, I mean, of course, if our country is attacked, it's like this sudden invasion, the way Iran had with Israel, suddenly attacking it out of nowhere, of course, the president has the responsibility to order the country defended without first going to Congress and waiting for a vote. That's the one exception. 

That didn't apply to the war in Iraq, but Bush-Cheney said we have the right to go invade Iraq even without congressional support. And now that's the view of the Trump administration: we don't need to go to Congress to start the war in Iran. Why? Why don't you? If you want to enter a war with Iran, that's not an emergency war. Iran is not attacking the United States. Why don't you need a vote in Congress? But most people in Congress don't want that responsibility. They'd rather let Trump take the blame for it if things go wrong. 

And so, we basically have a president who single-handedly runs foreign policy, runs the intelligence community. We barely have a functional Congress at all. 

I mean, I'll just give you one example that's kind of amazing. Most of you who watch this show for a while know that I was vehemently opposed to the ban of TikTok or the forced sale of it, talked about a lot of reasons about why it’s a major act of censorship to just ban a social media app that a third of Americans – a third – and a majority of young people are voluntarily choosing to use, just saying, “No, you can't use it. We don't like that one anymore; we don't like the content there.” 

It was originally justified because Chinese ownership and influence were nefarious. That wasn't enough to get the votes, what finally got the votes was the view that there was too much anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian speech being allowed on TikTok and that was what was turning the nation's youth against Israel. And that's the reason why Democrats finally joined, and the Biden administration advocated the banning of TikTok. 

I was vehemently opposed to that, but Congress did pass it. The House passed it, the Senate passed it with a bipartisan majority, an overwhelming bipartisan majority. Their argument was that it's vital to our national security to ban TikTok. Joe Biden signed it into law and it had a deadline in the law that it had to be banned or sold the day after the election. They didn't want TikTok being shut down during the election so that Biden would get blamed, so they cynically made it the day after, and then Trump had 90 days to extend it if he wanted one time. 

Trump extended it, that 90 days came and went; he extended it again, for another 90 days that came and went, he just extended it again. In other words, he's just refusing to implement the law that Congress passed. And nobody cares! Do you hear anyone in Congress saying, “President Trump, we passed this law because we said it was vital to national security, what right do you have to ignore the law?” 

We basically are a country now that has centralized so much power in the presidency that Congress barely exists, except as a sort of symbolic body of pretense of democracy. George Bush and the Democrats under Obama and Biden, and especially now against Trump, of course, the whole idea: each branch is going to want to grab more power for itself. In that fight, the Congress is trying to take this from the executive, the executive says “No, that's ours,” the court says, “No, that's ours,” Congress says, “No, that's ours,” and you get a balance of power. But when one of the branches, Congress, just says, “We're content not to fight for any of our power. You can have it all, we just want to get reelected, enjoy the perks of our office, travel around the world, get the title, be perpetually re-elected, have these nice offices in the Capitol building, go on TV, get special privileges and perks,” then you don't have balance of power anymore. You have the centralization of power in a president and an executive that the founders were really here to avoid. That has completely twisted and distorted what our political system is supposed to be. It by no means started with Trump. 

The Trump administration came in as one of its major plans to eliminate anything that could oppose it, including Congress. Trump uses threats against the Republicans and all sorts of other means. But he's just continuing a trend that started, I would say, that ideas were formed by the Dick Cheney in the 1980s, but really implemented with 9/11 as the pretext by Bush-Cheney. It's just all grown as powers do from there, and we have a model of the government that is very unlike what the founders envisioned. Of course, it affects all the discourses as well. 

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All right, @Readalot. That's a very good name. I hope it's accurate. 

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All right, so that's a critique, a pretty strongly expressed one. So, let me just clarify, because I do think it's good sometimes to just talk to, especially, our members, about how we think of the show, how we try to put the show together. 

When I say that we don't want to be captive of the news cycle, what I mean by that is that 24-hour cable networks are forced to talk about things every day. And even if nothing significant is happening, they'll make something trivial or insignificant the centerpiece of what they talk about so there'll be some offhand comment by Trump, or there'll be some rumor about somebody resigning or somebody being in trouble, or there will be some bickering in the Congress, or there'll be some law that might get passed, that they're speculating about, or some scandal. 

When I say we don't want to be caught at the news cycle, what I mean is, I don't want to come here every night and feel obligated to talk about things that I don't think are interesting or important just because every other media outlet, newspaper, podcast or other show is discussing them. 

In part, I don't want to talk about things I find trivial. That's what I mean by I don't want to be captive by the news cycle. But it also means sometimes there are important things that are going on that I don't feel competent to talk about or I don't have anything particularly interesting to say, I try to be very mindful that when I was writing a lot and I hit publish, and I hope to get back to writing a little more soon, we'll talk about that sometime in the near future, that when you press publish, you're making a claim to your readers that they need to rely on, that when you hit publish, you're saying to them, “Look, I'm promising you that I've written something that I think is worthwhile for you to take your time and read, that I have something to say that is unique or interesting or that sheds light on something important.” I was always very mindful of that. I would rather not write something on a given day than write something that was just I'm writing just to write or because everyone else is talking about it. 

And that also means that I try not to write about things I have no specialized knowledge of and that's why we don't cover economic policy or economic debates very often, almost at all. And if we do, we'll have a guest who's an expert. Every time I covered tariffs, I had a guest on to talk about it. So that's what I mean by not being captive to the news cycle.

Now, having said that, there are obvious topics, major topics, that I do cover, that I've covered for a long time, that I have a specialized knowledge in, a lot of expertise built up over the years, a lot of knowledge about, a lot of passion about, things like foreign policy, things like war, the intelligence community, civil liberties, free speech and when there's major debates like there were with the deportations of students who were here legally because of the speech that they made, or taking immigrants out based on allegations that they were in gangs without any due process, or when there is a new war or foreign policy, obviously I'm going to not just talk about it, I'm going to cover it in depth. 

And so, I don't necessarily want to talk about Israel every night, but the reality is it has been the center of our politics since October 7. We have fought a massive, dangerous war, one of the worst wars, and it's not really even a war, it's just sort of an attack on a population that the United States has paid for. We've supported Israel taking land from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq – bombing, not taking land from Syria and Lebanon, bombing them and bombing Iraq. And now we're on the verge of a major war with Iran. Of course, I'm going to talk about that a lot. I'm going to talk about it in the lead up to it, I'm not going to talk about it while the war is occurring, which is now, I'm talking about everything related to it, that's not being counted in the news cycle. That's right at the heart of what we do. 

And I think we talk about it and I hope we talk about it in a way that's not being talked about in many other places. They're getting a different kind of perspective on it, a different way to understand it, different types of information, different voices. And when war broke out in Ukraine and the Biden administration decided to be heavily involved in that, we did endless numbers of shows on Ukraine and Russia because that was a proxy war between the two largest nuclear powers on the planet. It had all kinds of things to do with the alignment of each party. We do a lot of political talk that way about what it means to be left and right. What is Democrat and Republican? How has that changed? Is that meaningful? 

So, when we talk about major events like the war in Ukraine, like the destruction of Gaza, like the imminent war in Iran, the ongoing war and our relationship to Israel, as we talked about with Tuck Carlson and Ted Cruz, the attacks on free speech on the Biden administration, the ones from the Trump administration, we don't just repeat over and over whatever the headline is. I think we try and delve deeply into it and talk about everything ancillary because it often sheds light on other parts of it that aren't directly related to it. That's what I mean by not being captive to the news. 

I don't feel obligated to follow the cable news framework of doing a movement, I don't think you have short intelligence span where you can only talk about a topic for four minutes and every four minutes we have to move or talk about something for two minutes, bring on a guest for five minutes, seven minutes maximum, and then move to another topic. We don’t do nine topics a night like a cable show does for an hour. We do one or two topics at the most. We want to dive deeply into them. We respect our audience enough to believe that the people here want to pay close attention, want detailed analysis and want to dive deep into things. And then, when we can and when we have something to do, we will do a show completely detached from the news cycle. 

Last week, we did a very deep dive into Palantir, what that company is, how it started, what its history has been, what it was built for, who runs it, what their ideology is, and what function they're now playing in the government. We do a lot of those. We've done deep dives into the anthrax and things like that, even though that had nothing to do with the topic. We spent a lot of time on COVID and related policies like that. So, I think our range is pretty broad, but yes, if there's a major war that Washington is heavily debating, getting more involved in, that's going to be something we're going to talk about, maybe not every night, but certainly close to it. The consequences of that make it impossible to ignore. 

And it's the sort of thing that, as I said, I think we naturally cover and it would be very odd if people came here, and I spent maybe one night a week, two nights a week, talking about the war with Iran and then just talking about a bunch of other stuff on the other three nights and didn't mention it, especially given how fast moving it is, how much of a debate there is, how much other topics that it implicates. 

We make our own decisions about what's important, what we think we have something unique to offer, provocative, interesting, informative to say, and just say it in a way that other places are not saying it, and we try and take our time to delve in, even though we know that maybe we would have more viewers, potentially, if we just constantly, can get members of Congress to come on the show every night, people want to come on the shows all the time but I want to do one or two topics that I find extremely interesting that give you a kind of an analytical perspective, a depth of information that other platforms don't allow you to. That's the reason I like this platform so much, and I think we try to use it for that end. So that's how we think about putting the show together. 

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All right, last question is a tennis question, which I'm always happy to take. It's from @Alan _Smithee, who I recognize as somebody who submits tennis questions, who says this:

 

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Okay. First of all, that is slander, that last part. I don't pick the slam owners after the event is played. No, I do pick them after, say, the first round. So, I don't like to pick somebody who then gets eliminated in the first run; I like to see how they're kind of playing. It's still not easy to pick the slam winners just after the first round, and I have done a great job on that. 

I did actually watch the Onyx Center match today. He played a player who's one of my favorite players, Alexander Bublik, who has an extremely exotic and idiosyncratic game. He's very funny as a person, but he's extremely talented and inventive, especially on grass, so I like seeing him toy with Center. I don't think it happens a lot that when you move from clay to grass, you lose your first match. Corey Gauff won the French Open, but she lost her first match on grass as well. It just takes some transition. I don't think it means that he's in trouble or he's going to have a bad Wimbledon or anything. 

But anyway, I'll probably pick the winners of Wimbledon when we get a little bit closer to the tournament, as you say sardonically, maybe once we start the tournament, right at the beginning, then you can go and take those to the bank. But if you do and you lose, do not blame me, don't leave me rude and abusive messages, because I do have a lot of knowledge about it. My predictions have been weirdly good for the last year, but that could stop at any time. So, although I'm telling you can rely on me, that doesn't mean that you actually should or can, especially when it comes to betting money that you can't afford to lose. 

All right. Those are all the questions we have for tonight.

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