Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Absurd Media Struggles to Discern Who Is Worst: Trump, DeSantis, Putin, or Literal Hitler. Plus: Obscene Double Standards for Russian/Belarusian Athletes on Ukraine War
Video Transcript
May 31, 2023
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Good evening. It's Monday, May 29. Happy Memorial Day and welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.

Tonight:  Was Hitler really so bad after all? That seems to be the question being continuously posed, at least implicitly, sometimes explicitly, by the U.S. corporate media. Ever since Trump's presidential campaign began to be viable in early 2016, equating Trump to Hitler has become increasingly common, even obligatory, despite the small fact that Trump has never actually done nor advocated any of the things that have made us understand Hitler to be a singularly evil historical actor. Things like attempting to exterminate entire races of people until eliminating any forms of even minimal dissent to launching an aggressive war of conquest that led to the Second World War; the deaths of tens of millions of people, indiscriminate air bombing of civilians in large metropolitan areas, and little things that are Hitler's signature as acts and ultimately the use of the first nuclear weapons in Japan. Those are little things that are Hitler's signature acts that Trump never stated or implied that he favored, let alone actually did, during four years in power. Nonetheless, that Trump is “literally Hitler” became a very common theme in the most mainstream sectors of liberal corporate media, far more than I actually even recalled as I realized on the compared material for this evening's program.

The tactical problem for the media in branding Trump a white supremacist and then a fascist and even the new Hitler was obvious at the time. The latest Republican presidential candidate always must be described as worse than the prior one, the worst in history – hence the rehabilitation of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, in order to declare Trump an unprecedented evil. As Jeff Zeleny put it today, regarding a clip from an MSNBC show that convened a panel to announce that DeSantis is even more dangerous than Trump, i.e., the new Hitler,  “Think about many of what is shown like entertainment instead of education. The sequel has to be scarier than the original. Why else would people watch?” 

But once you've branded someone “the new Hitler” where do you go from there when it's time to say that they are even worse now than before, or that their successor is worse? The media is giving us its answer. These new people are literally worse than Hitler. Or the converse must also be true: Hitler is better, more moral, and less evil than the 2024 version of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and anyone else liberal media employees seek to demonize, including Vladimir Putin. They can't help themselves, and as a result, they are doing something that Jewish groups formed after the Holocaust have always regarded as uniquely dangerous – they are trivializing the threat of Hitler and of Nazis by elevating him and them from a singular evil into just another ordinary bad guy, someone who actually deserves credit sometimes for not going as far as Trump, DeSantis, Putin, or whomever they need to villainize. 

Some of this is just the deranged mentality of failing TV and newspaper outlets desperate for ratings and clicks. If you're just in an ordinary political battle, that's not very interesting; if you're fighting to protect the country from “New Hitler,” that's exciting. But it also captures a vital truth about the liberal intelligentsia in the United States: they do not believe they are engaged in their ordinary political battle, but rather in a world-historic, unprecedented fight against a singular worse-than-evil Hitler. And for that reason, they have come to believe – often explicitly stated – that anything and everything they do in the name of advancing their cause is justified by the indisputably noble and morally paramount nature of their battle. And that mentality is another defining characteristic of Adolf Hitler. 

Then there is a brand new standard being created for Russian and Belarusian professional athletes, namely that they are morally responsible for the acts of their own governments to the point that they should be banned from competing in athletic competitions or are required to issue statements denouncing their own government as a condition for earning their livelihood or – as is now happening right this minute at the French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament held in Paris – they can play but not have their nationality mentioned or their national flag displayed. The International Soccer League, FIFA, banned Russia from global competition and continue to ban them to this day. To call this a double standard is to be unfair to double standards. American and British athletes have traveled the world for decades, including when their governments were engaged in some of the most egregious and destructive wars of aggression from the invasion of Iraq to bombing multiple countries under President Obama and were never banned from any athletic competition nor told they bore responsibility for those acts or were required to denounce them. That China is currently engaged in genocide against the Uyghurs or that the Saudi regime was responsible for the brutal murder of a journalist is the gospel in the West. Yet Chinese and Saudi athletes are free to play and play under their own flag with no similar obligations imposed. It's particularly bizarre to simultaneously assert, on the one hand, that Russia and Belarus are totalitarian regimes or that any dissidents are instantly murdered or imprisoned, and then on the other, tell individual athletes from those countries that they somehow bear responsibility for their government's actions as though they live in a democracy or have the responsibility to denounce it, even while they and their family continue to live in that country. There's a lot more than about tennis or athletes or professional sport. It's about how the Western press manufactures propaganda in seemingly innocuous ways. It's about how so many propagandistic precepts are absorbed, even by those of us seeking to be critically minded, because it's made to be pervasive in the culture and in the ether. And it raises very profound questions about how we see ourselves and our own obligations to abide by the moral obligations we so joyously and self-righteously and endlessly seek to impose on others. 

 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and all other major podcasting platforms. Simply follow us there, and you can also rate and review the show, which really does help our program's visibility. We are climbing the charts and have been on both Spotify and Apple, getting near the top, and the higher we go, the more that this show will be heard and seen by more people. 

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


 

For decades since really the end of World War II, one of the central missions of Jewish groups and other groups dedicated to memorializing the Holocaust and ensuring that it never repeated was to avoid what they called a trivialization of both Adolf Hitler and Nazism, on the one hand, and anti-Semitism on the other. And yet, over the last several decades, we've seen this trivialization happening. Often while all those groups cheered, in all sorts of ways, anti-Semitism has often become a tool that is attached to the foreheads of anybody who expresses ideas that the liberal elite sectors in media and politics disagree with, including by and only criticism of Israel making that term that used to be and should be a very serious accusation, become less and less credible, the more casually and manipulatively – and cynically – it's tossed about. 

But the same is true for Nazism and Adolf Hitler. We had been taught since childhood that Adolf Hitler was not just another bad dictator, not just another immoral leader who initiated a war of aggression, that he was a singular evil, that he was somebody who had reached a new level of villainy, somebody whom we were supposed to regard as existing essentially in a category unto himself. And it wasn't hard to see why, given the historical consensus – one of the central products projects of Adolf Hitler was not only to launch an international war of conquest but to exterminate an entire race of people from the planet. And yet it has been truly stunning to watch that long-standing convention be aggressively eroded in the name of first, stopping Donald Trump, and now, stopping essentially anybody who comes into the radar screen and becomes a target of the liberal media discourse. That Trump is essentially or not even essentially, but literally, the new incarnation of Adolf Hitler, as bad as Hitler, essentially the same as Hitler, became a theme so pervasive in liberal media that it is almost impossible to overstate. As I said, I had actually forgotten how commonplace this assertion became once it became clear that Trump stood a real chance to become president. And then, after he was elected, to say that Trump was Hitler, Trump is Hitler, Trump is Hitler, over and over and over again, was something that became so commonplace – I think that's the reason I had forgotten how common it was – that we became inured to hearing it because it was everywhere. Even though, as I said, kind of seems important that Trump never actually engaged in or even advocated all of the defining evils of Adolf Hitler. And yet Democrats and liberals and establishment Republicans devoted to destroying Trump and his movement didn't care about any of that. They were more than happy to playfully use Adolf Hitler like it was their little toy – similar to the way that liberal discourse now uses terms like white supremacy or white supremacist and fascist to be applied to anybody who questions any part of liberal dogma. Even the most piecemeal or mainstream questioning of liberal orthodoxy results in those maximalist claims. If you question whether or not a seven-year-old should be taught in public schools that perhaps they're non-binary or question whether or not trans women can fairly compete in professional sports or any other dissent from liberal dogma, suddenly you are essentially somebody who advocates genocide, you are a fascist. These terms have become utterly stripped of all their meaning. And it's particularly dangerous to do that to Nazism and Adolf Hitler, not because it was intended to be shielded as a historical analog. The value of things like the Nuremberg trials and memorializing what happened during World War II was precisely that we ought to learn the lessons of history and be aware of similar dangers. That's not what's happening. It's become a plaything in liberal discourse. And the problem for them is that now that they want to essentially say that Trump is even worse than he was in 2016, or that Ron DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump – once you start with the premise that Trump was literally Hitler in 2016, where does that take you? It necessarily must mean if Trump is worse than he was before, when he was Hitler, or that Ron DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump, who is Hitler? That those figures are more dangerous than Hitler? Or to put it another way, Hitler was better than they were. There were things about Hitler that either were commendable, that isn’t true for Trump and Ron DeSantis, or that there are certain kinds of moral evils that Hitler refrained from doing and Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump actually do. We heard this explicitly at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where some of the most influential public voices in U.S. foreign policy began arguing, to the point they had to apologize, that, well, at least Adolf Hitler never did things like extinguish ethnic speaking Germans the way Putin is seeking to do to with ethnic speaking Russians. Once you put yourself into this mindset – that you are really battling the new Hitler or worse than Hitler – it not only means you become rhetorically deranged, but I think it's an extraordinarily dangerous mentality to convince yourself that you are fighting a world-historic battle against a singular, unique and unprecedented evil because what that means is that anything and everything you do – censoring dissenting voices, disseminating disinformation campaigns, hiding the truth – journalistically, all becomes justified in the name of stopping this unprecedented evil. And that's why I think this is worth discussing. Not so much because of the rhetorical embarrassment that they placed themselves in, though that is worth looking at, but because of the underlying mentality that both causes it and that it then creates. 

So let me just show you a few of the examples that, as I say, made me realize as we put the show together, that this comparison was actually much more common than I realized – maybe I realized it at the time, but that I recall it being.

 From Reuters, on September 6, 2018, the headline “Michael Moore Compares Trump to Hitler in a New Documentary.” 

 

Filmmaker Michael Moore compares U.S. President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler in his provocative new documentary, “Fahrenheit 11/9” that got its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday to a sold-out audience.

The documentary examines the forces Moore believes contributed to Trump’s election victory in November 2016, drawing parallels with the rise of Hitler in 1930s Germany. (Reuters. Sept. 6, 2026). 

 

This was two years into the Trump presidency when he did this, which is even more excusable than doing it during the campaign when you're not actually certain what Trump is going to do with power. This is two years into the Trump presidency. There were no concentration camps set up. There were no efforts to exterminate entire races of people. Trump was the first American president in decades – I know so many people hate to hear it but it's nonetheless true – not to involve the United States in a new war, not to start a new war. He inherited some but he didn’t start new wars. Starting new wars, aggressive wars is kind of fundamental to Hitler being Hitler. In fact, the Nuremberg trials called aggressive war, the kingpin crime, the crime that enabled all of the other subsequent crimes that made Adolf Hitler a war criminal in the eyes of that tribunal. Donald Trump had none of that and yet Michael Moore still compared him to Adolf Hitler two years into his presidency with very little controversy, as I recall. 

But Michael Moore was by far not the only person to do that. Here in The Washington Post, in September 2016, so just a couple of months before the 2016 election, there you see the title “New York Times ‘Hitler’ Book Review sure reads like a thinly veiled Trump comparison.

In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, the longtime book reviewer for The New York Times, reviewed a new book about Adolf Hitler titled “Hitler: Ascent 1889- 1939.” To many observers, though, it read like a bit more than a book review. It read like a comparison between Hitler and Donald Trump. 

It's true that the review didn't name Trump or even allude to the 2016 U.S. presidential race, but it came across to more than a few readers as an intentional point-by-point comparison of Hitler's rise and Trump's. And it's not hard to see why. From the headline – In ‘Hitler’, an Ascent from Dunderheads to Demagogue – to the conclusion 1,300 words later, nearly everything Kakutani says about Volker Ullrich’s book reflects long-standing warnings by some about how Trump shouldn't be dismissed as some sideshow, and that history shows where this can lead. (The Washington Post. Sept. 28, 2023)

 

So that's The Washington Post and The New York Times. In case you think it's only confined to marginalized clowns like Michael Moore, here from The Huffington Post, after a campaign rally where Donald Trump asked his audience to take a pledge to support him. It seems like a pretty innocuous act to me. It's very common in a political rally to urge supporters to pledge loyalty to the cause and to do everything possible to elect the leader. This is a common language unless you put a Nazi prism on it, as of course, they did. There's the headline, “This Donald Trump rally looks like a scene from Nazi Germany.” So here the comparison, of course, is not only Donald Trump being Hitler, but Trump supporters being Nazis. 

 

It is getting way too scary.

Donald Trump’s ascent to the top of the Republican presidential candidate heap has been increasingly likened to the rise of Adolf Hitler, as both men have used racist rhetoric and blamed select groups of minorities for many of the country's problems. (The Huffington Post. March 5, 2016).

 

 Is that all it takes to be Adolf Hitler these days? Using what the Huffington Post believes is racist rhetoric and blaming select groups of minorities for many of the country's problems? That is something that every politician has been doing for time immemorial – including in the United States, including in both political parties. And now suddenly that became sufficient to justify equating Donald Trump to – at least to the 20th century’s singular evil, according to a consensus of historians.

Here from ABC News, in December 2015: “Donald Trump shrugs off Hitler comparisons” is the headline there. “He prefers to cite FDR in defending his plan to bar Muslims from the United States.” As you may recall, Trump during the 2016 campaign said that there should be a ban from certain Muslim countries – not on Muslims, from certain Muslim countries – entering the United States “until we can figure out what's going on,” in his words. That became mischaracterized as a ban on all Muslims, which it never was, and then, that got used to say that this was something akin to the Holocaust. 

Donald Trump's plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States has prompted a comparison to Adolf Hitler. But that hasn't given the GOP presidential frontrunner any pause. 

 

Asked whether “increasingly being compared to Hitler” is cause for concern, Trump told ABC News George Stephanopoulos today that he instead finds comfort in what he sees as his proposal’s similarity to the work of a previous U.S. president. 

“No, because what I'm doing is no different from FDR,” Trump said during a phone interview this morning” – presumably referring to FDR, his mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II with no due process. Something that was done, not in terms of an immigration policy to govern who can and cannot come into the States from certain countries, but instead rounding up huge numbers of people inside the United States based solely on their ethnicity, American citizens, and putting them into camps during World War II. That to me seems a lot more Hitler-like than anything Donald Trump ever imagined doing now. 

Let me just show you a couple of videos so you can get a sense of just how pervasive this really was and often how unhinged there really was. 

So here is a CNN segment from July 2021. So, again, now we're into the Biden administration. You've had Trump in office for four years, no concentration camps, no wars of aggression, none of the things that we've just gone over as kind of important, being in Hitler's category. And yet, listen to what not even – I forget his name, but I don't really need to know his name. If someone in the control room knows, you can tell me and I'll say it. But it doesn't really matter. He's just some interchangeable CNN host whom nobody watches. Listen to what he said

 

(Video. CNN. July 21, 2021)

 

Pannel: In all its derangement, terror and horror.

 

Pannel: And just one more quote so people know exactly what Carl and Dan are talking about here. General Milley on The Big Lie and what Trump was saying about the election, the lies he says this is a Reichstag moment, Milley told aides, the Gospel of the Führer. The Reichstag moment refers to Adolf Hitler using the burning of the German parliament, basically, to seize all power in Germany, suspend habeas corpus, and suspend civil rights. A coup more or less. 

 

What is he even talking about? When did Trump propose suspending habeas corpus or banning all rights? And what does the Reichstag fire have to do with a three-hour riot on January 6? But this is the kind of unhinged rhetoric we get. 

I just want to add, it's possible that this reporter misstated Trump's proposed 2016 ban. The policy itself ended up banning immigrants from, I believe it was six or eight Muslim-majority countries. But maybe I'm just remembering maybe he did actually want to ban all Muslims. We're going to check on that. But even so, again, there's a gigantic universal difference between immigration policies designed to ban immigration from certain countries –we have that right now where certain countries have priority and other countries are subjected to more rigorous scrutiny – and the Holocaust. But we'll check on that just for the sake of accuracy.

Here is a video from Bill Maher where he just outright says that he thinks Trump is like Hitler. You can listen to him do that. 

 

(Video. CBSN. March 2016)

 

Bill Maher: So, I had one of Hitler's speeches translated into English, and I think this tells us a lot about where Donald Trump is getting his ideas. Look at this Hitler speech and we've translated it for you. 

(video in German) It's mangle. Thank you. We're going to make Germany great again so that I can tell you, believe me. 

 

Supporters: So, when people ask why you support Donald Trump, you just tell them. 

 

Supporters: He's going to take our economy from here to here. All right. 

 

Supporters: He's not some cautious politician. He says what I'm thinking. 

 

Supporters: I don't know what it is. I just like the guy. 

 

Supporters: A message from racists for Donald Trump. 



So again, you can see here that it wasn't just that they were comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler – this was from March 2016, but also, continuously – Trump supporters to Nazis and white supremacists and members of the Ku Klux Klan. You saw all Trump supporters depicted there were white, notwithstanding the fact – the rather inconvenient fact – that Trump has done better with nonwhite voters than any Republican candidate in a long time. He won Texas in 2020 almost entirely because of a huge surge of support among Latino voters who apparently don't see Trump's immigration policies the same way as a lot of immigrant groups who report purport to speak on behalf of all Latinos. These are no East Coast college graduates who majored in liberal-arts-style majors and who now purport to speak on behalf of Latino working-class people who continue to vote in larger and larger numbers for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. 

So just to clarify, the 2016 position of Donald Trump was originally in that statement he issued to ban all Muslims from the United States. The policy he then was implementing was to ban immigrants from seven specific Muslim-majority countries. 

So, there you have it. That was just a partial sampling of how often this rhetoric was invoked of comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. 

 

Now, here we have the problem. The Washington Post, on May 24, so just a few days ago, has an article that is headlined: “The Deepening Radicalization of Donald J. Trump. Watch How the former president's positions and rhetoric have grown more confrontational and extreme as he seeks a second term.” So, if Donald Trump, in 2016, was Adolf Hitler, and Donald Trump is now worse and more radical and more extreme than he was back in 2016, that must necessarily mean he's now evolved to be worse than Hitler or that Hitler is better than Donald Trump. So, Hitler's kind of rising on the chart through history, rising in the rankings, by virtue of this attempt to constantly assert that all sorts of people, as we're going to show you, are worse than Hitler. It's an extremely dangerous rhetorical device, an extremely dangerous historical framework to constantly impose. And obviously, four years now, in 2028, when there are other Republican candidates, or maybe it'll be Ron DeSantis, they're going to have to keep going and going and going because that's what they always do, to get to the point where we're going to hear that half the Republican Party or half the country is worse than Hitler. That again, conversely, Hitler is up here in terms of moral weight and ethical constraints and Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, Vladimir Putin and tons of other people who are on the target list of the liberal media are down here. 

The Washington Post article to support that claim reads,  

 

On this and a host of subjects, from sexual assault to foreign and domestic policy, Trump's positions have become even more extreme, his tone more confrontational, his accounts less tethered to our reality, According to a Washington Post review of Trump’s speeches and interviews of former aides. When he was at times ambiguous or equivocal, he's now brazenly defiant. (The Washington Post. May 24, 2023)

 

In addition to claiming that Trump is worse than before when he was equated to Adolf Hitler, we also have the increasingly common theme that Ron DeSantis is even worse than, and, specifically, more dangerous than Donald Trump. In other words, Ron DeSantis is worse than and more dangerous than Adolf Hitler. It's necessarily the logical implication of this assertion. And again, you see it all over the media.

Here from The Huffington Post, just from last week: “No one is more dangerous for the White House than Ron DeSantis – including Donald Trump.” 

 

Imagine Trump but with a stalwart dedication toward legislation that moves the country in a direction that should terrify most reasonable human beings. Enter Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. (Huffpost, May 17, 2023)

 

Which legislation that Ron DeSantis has advocated or has overseen the implementation of is comparable to Nazism or what Adolf Hitler did and that should terrify citizens everywhere. I understand that people disagree with some of Ron DeSantis’s legislation. That's reasonable. There are culture war debates that the country is split on and he's on one side and of course, other people would be on the other. That's commonplace. That's true of Democratic Party candidates as well. But to say that he's more dangerous and he's terrifying. What is the basis for that? The NAACP issued an advisory warning for nonwhite people in Florida. That's how much they're trifling with these concepts. I'm not even going to make an argument for why that's preposterous. Huge numbers of black voters and Latino voters voted for Ron DeSantis, twice, for governor. And yet the ICP again, a group of East Coast elites who have very little in common with the black working class or other nonwhite members of the working class, who purport to speak on their behalf, nonetheless, are issuing statements that bear no resemblance to reality and in the process of doing so, are completely, really harming themselves. They're watering down and rendering laughable concepts that actually ought to be taken seriously. 

Here from MSNBC, April 2022, and again, they read from the same script. The headline is “Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a far more dangerous politician than Donald Trump. Like Trump, DeSantis in his time in office would be marked by attempts to pit Americans against one another. But unlike Trump, DeSantis has the proven ability to follow through.” 

Pit Americans against one another? Hillary Clinton, in 2016, said that a large chunk of Trump supporters, namely 25%, 30%, or 35% of the country, were “irredeemably deplorable” – irredeemably deplorable. It is the official position of the Democratic Party that anyone who doesn't vote for them is racist and fascist and white supremacist. Joe Biden famously or notoriously told the host of “The Breakfast Club,” Charlamagne, that if he had any questions at all about whether he wanted to vote for Joe Biden, that meant ‘that Charlamagne isn't even black’. Pitting the country against one another – if that's enough to make you a terrifying Hitler figure – which politicians don't do that?

 So, from this MSNBC article:

 

Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida, a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, and quite possibly the most dangerous figure in American politics. The most dangerous figure in American politics. While it's hard to imagine any politician wrestling that title away from Donald Trump [and yes, it should be hard to imagine any politician wrestling that title away from Donald Trump], DeSantis brings something to the table that Trump lacks – his ability to translate political vindictiveness, cruelty and demagoguery into policy results. 

 

It isn't only Ron DeSantis and Trump's current iteration in 2024 that are said to be worse than the Hitlerian version of Trump in 2016. As I indicated, that also became a tactic used by lots of liberal elites to try to claim that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was like anything we've seen, including during World War II – was somehow vastly more dangerous than the Nazi march through Western Europe. And in order to do that, they actually started explicitly praising Adolf Hitler, which is where all of this leads. 

Here is Michael McFaul, the former Obama ambassador to Russia for the United States under President Obama, who's now become one of the most deranged and hawkish pro-war voices when it comes to Ukraine. He was on Rachel Maddow Show and listen to what he said as he tried to claim that Putin is worse than Hitler and in doing so, actually went out of his way to praise Hitler for having some constraints that Putin lacks. 

 

(Video. MSNBC. March 12, 2022)

 

Michael McFaul: One of the Russian journalists said, you know, there's one difference between Hitler when he was coming in and Putin. Hitler didn't kill ethnic Germans. He didn't kill German-speaking people. That's a very I think people need to remember that when we're talking about cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol and Kyiv, there are large populations there. You know, up to a third and sometimes as much to a half that are Russian speakers and are ethnic Russians. And yet Putin doesn't seem to care about that. He slaughters the very people. He said he’s come to liberate. 



First of all, it wasn't even true. Of course, there were German-speaking or I think Germans who died as a result of Hitler's advance through Czechoslovakia and through Poland and through other parts of Western Europe but even if it were true, what moral relevance does that have? And how do you not have an instinctive aversion to going out of your way to praise Hitler or to suggest that Hitler somehow had ethical constraints that Vladimir Putin lacks? Again, whatever you think of the invasion of Ukraine, it's far more comparable to the U.S. invasion of Iraq than it is to anything that made Hitler Hitler during World War II. And in fact, I would say – and I've made this argument before – that there's a big, big difference between sending your troops into a neighboring country over the border, that is the most sensitive part of your border, that the West has been very actively engaged in running and manipulating and putting weapons into and flooding with lethal arms, than packing up your entire military and going to the other part of the world all the way across the other part of the world to invade and occupy and destroy a country that has never once threatened to attack you, let alone have the ability to do so.

 I've said from the very beginning that I believe Russia's war and invasion of Ukraine are not legally or morally justified. And I had Norman Finkelstein on the show who yelled at me for that, saying the logical conclusion of observing that there were provocative acts by the West going all the way up to the Russian border with all sorts of interference on the part of the U.S. and NATO necessarily justifies the invasion, and anyone like me, or Aaron Martel, or others who's afraid to say that, and who still maintains that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is unjustifiable, as either being a coward or morally consistent. That's what Norman Finkelstein told me. I think you heard that argument, but I do actually believe that the Russian invasion was unjustified. I don't think the conditions were met ethically or legally to justify a military invasion of a sovereign country like this. But it is far more like what the Americans did – and the British and the Australians did – in Iraq, than it is to anything that you have Hitler did. And yet you have these voices so casually going out of their way to downplay Hitler's evil in order to take whomever they want to villainize and make them worse than Hitler. It is a deranged discourse. It's a historical discourse. And it's a very dangerous discourse because these are the people who really do believe that they are in power now to do anything and everything because of the nature of the enemy that they're fighting. That is the Sam Harris video that went viral that we've shown you many times. The reason it went viral is that Sam Harris annunciated what their actual mentality is when justifying the lies that were told and the censorship that was invoked around the Hunter Biden laptop and the stories and reporting that came from that right before the election, which was the evil we’re fighting is so much worse – It's a different level. It's Hitlerian. Not saying Sam Harris said that, but that's what he said conceptually, that the evil is so much worse than anything else that we could ever do to stop it, that anything we can do to stop it is morally justified and even obligatory. That is the mentality, the driving mentality, of the coalition that has emerged, the union of Power Centers that has emerged, in the name of stopping Trump – the U.S. security state, the Democratic Party, Wall Street and Silicon Valley that back the Democratic Party against Trump and his movement or anything that is perceived to be that like they just perceive Ron DeSantis for the moment. Being the corporate media, that is the access that it has assembled, and their driving impetus is that the nature of the evil they are fighting means they're justified to do anything and everything. And I think that, as I said, is a defining attribute of Adolf Hitler and it's what makes that coalition so remarkably dangerous. 


 

We're going to move on to a separate topic that may seem a little bit uncharacteristic for this show since it involves professional sports and activities and events taking place within it. To say that the show doesn’t typically report on or cover professional sports, I think is quite an understatement. I am, however, a tennis fan. I've talked about this before. I was actually going to do a documentary on someone who is one of my childhood heroes Martina Navratilova, the Czechoslovakia tennis player who escaped Czechoslovakia when she was 18, to defect to the United States – because, you know, she didn't want to live under communism – and became an outspoken dissident in all sorts of ways. It didn't end up working out. But tennis is something that has been an interest of mine since I was young. I still follow it, and that's what has kind of animated my interest in this. But it goes so far beyond tennis, so far beyond professional sports, it really provides a window into the ways in which we're propagandized, often without realizing it – because it seems trivial. “Oh, it's just about sports.” And yet it enters our brain and plays a major role by design, in shaping how we understand the world. But it also has a lot to do with the question of how we see ourselves in the world and whether we believe we're obliged to adhere to the moral tenets and the moral obligations we seek to impose on others. 

The immediate news event that raises this topic is there is currently a tennis tournament being held in Paris, called Roland Garros, or the French Open. It is one of the four grand slam tennis tournaments held every year. The Grand Slams are the most important tennis tournaments in terms of financial reward, in terms of points and rankings. The world media descends upon the four grand slams. The other is the Australian Open, at the beginning of the year; then, Wimbledon and then the U.S. Open, in September in New York. So, it's Melbourne, Australia; Paris; London and New York. So, it's designed to bring a lot of attention to the world. 

Tennis is actually the fourth most popular sport in the world. There are hundreds of millions of people who follow it, and the rule that most tournaments have adopted, including the French Open currently being played, is that Russian and Belarusian tennis players are permitted to participate in the tournament, but they are considered to be neutral players. And that really doesn't have much pragmatic effect except an absurd one, which is when they are announced their country cannot be identified in any way, nor can their flag be displayed next to the name the way it is typical for tennis tournaments because one of the appeals of professional tennis is that it has always been a global sport, an international sport. It has become increasingly globalized, increasingly international, no longer based just in Western Europe and the United States. IN Asia, it has skyrocketed in popularity; Latin America has always been a continent that has produced a lot of good tennis players, but Asia is where it's growing the most – even in Africa and the Middle East, there's a lot of growth as well. And so, part of the appeal are the different players and the cultures they're from. And it creates a lot of conflict and drama in different ways of playing tennis. And it's always been one of the things most interesting about tennis, about this new rule, is that Russian and Belarusian players are prohibited from being identified in any way as representing their countries, even though every single other country and the players that play for it are permitted to be so identified. 

 

 

So, let's just take a look at one of the ways in which this is manifested. Here is a small portion of the draw from the first round of Roland Garros. It is from the men's draw. And here you see, because some of the best players in the world are from Russia, both men and women, that has always been the case, Russia has always been a very strong country when it comes to tennis – at least over the last 30 years. So, one of the Russian players is the world’s number two player. There you see him. His name is Daniil Medvedev. He won the U.S. Open in 2022. But – notice is – while his flag is missing – so here you see a player from Brazil with whom he's playing – there's the Brazilian flag. Here's an American player, Francis Chaffee, who also has an American flag. And then here's another Russian player, and you'll see that his flag is missing. So, this seems like a kind of absurd, petty and trivial way to punish them. The same is true on their scoreboard. Their flag is not permitted to be shown. 

One of the interesting parts about that is that they are the only countries who suffered this ban because, apparently, the war in Ukraine is the only crime taking place in the world that is sufficient to justify this sort of stigma. 

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

Interesting discussion last night. I had not realized Harvard's historical funding situation, and I think we need to DOGE that. They have enough money to get by on their own now. The general consensus of those in the live chat seemed to be to cut the funding, and stop telling them what to do. Great discussion!
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Christopher Rufo: On Civil Liberties, the American Founding, Academic Freedom, and More
System Update #450

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

And in response, you said this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The first question comes from @thefarside:

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

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

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

He writes:

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

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

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

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

 

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

He says:

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

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

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AD_4nXco5EeJOMpGfm0iJLTGIpawiHuFLRc_S_OLs5QNl7kBxJjO9bIpI7xGfhP16gqODI5Zk7CJgOPKkBtwQvRZcYfM_EzqXBUyAleR1JPhDq5CWil_tb7nlk7_DOvCqixu4pct0Qnlq1xQjUnpbNI7D7Q?key=MrBQyTUNLJMvWrwHZK6IMQrI

It's a great question. Thank you. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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