Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Writing • Culture
Drone Strikes on Moscow Signal Dangerous New Phase of Ukraine War. Plus: One of Russia’s Most Notorious Spies—a Whale—Resurfaces
Video Transcript
June 01, 2023
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Good evening. It's Tuesday, May 30. 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, we spend a lot of time on this program discussing the war in Ukraine because – how could we not? It is easily the most dangerous war for the U.S., the West, and the world, in decades. The Iraq war, which had nuclear power only on one side of the conflict, posed nowhere near the dangers that this war poses. One of the primary participants in the war, President Joe Biden, the chief proxy sponsor of Ukraine, himself, said in an unscripted moment back in October that this war has brought the planet closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, 61 years ago. And then we just all moved on like that never happened. 

This war is the single most important political story of the year, and nothing is close to that title. How could it not be that? This is a proxy war between the nation with the largest nuclear power on one side, Russia, and the nation with the second largest nuclear stockpile on the other, the United States. There's this new conception that nuclear war is not really possible, that will only happen if a suicidal psychopath had full control over their use. But that is a delusion, a fairy tale, a belief that can arise only from the crudest and most extreme form of historical ignorance. 

The U.S. and USSR came very, very close less than an hour away, from nuclear war on at least two occasions during the Cold War, caused not by psychotic behavior, but by rational behavior triggered by miscommunication and misperceptions. That same hair-trigger, archaic Cold War systems are still in place. Washington and Moscow continue to have thousands of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles pointed at each other’s large and midsize cities that are designed to be launched upon any belief that the other side is preparing to do so. The option of first using nuclear weapons, namely using them without even believing that the other side intends to use them, merely as a justified, offensive, or defensive tactic in the face of a threat perceived to be existential, is very much still on the table for war planners in both capitals. Indeed, during the 2017 general election in the UK, the Labor Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was lambasted by everyone for his statement that he would never consider the use of nuclear weapons as part of his nuclear national security strategy.

 The reason I continue to cover this war so much is not because I wish to repeat myself. It's because the war is not stagnant. It is changing constantly. And the way it is changing – more so now than ever – is that it is now ushering, in a very rapid and very dangerous escalation, including, again, just last night. 

What is declared unthinkable one month becomes explicit policy the next: the classic framework for how wars rapidly escalate out of control in history. Biden has repeatedly declared various weapons systems off-limits to send to Ukraine because of their escalatory dangers – meaning their potential to expand the war beyond its current theater focused on southern and especially eastern Ukraine – only for him to repeatedly change his mind and reverse himself, with the latest reversal coming in his announcement that he will now support sending F-16 fighter jets – we will now send them to Ukraine as they aggressively expand their military operations inside Russia.

 Very early this morning, on Tuesday, eight kamikaze drones were flown into residential buildings in Moscow, an act The New York Times characterized as “a potent sign that the war is increasingly reaching the heart of Russia,” adding “Ukraine has increasingly been reaching far into Russia-held territory.” Western commentators and governments barely even bothered to pretend today to be concerned that their weapons, our weapons, American weapons, were used by Kyiv to purposely target civilian targets in Russia's capital. 

Russia has, of course, attacked targets in Kyiv and other cities, civilian targets have been hit by Russia and Ukrainian civilians have been killed. That is true of every war, including the ones the U.S. and its allies fight, but the question now is how many dangers are you willing to put yourself in for this war? When it comes to U.S. involvement what is the limiting principle? If we give F-16s, why not give them the green light to use them to bomb targets inside Russia if we haven't already, to bomb the Kremlin with our F-16s, why not give them tactical nuclear weapons? What's the argument against that? Are we willing to risk a Third World War over the question of who governs the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, filled with Russian-speaking ethnic Russians, or Crimea, about which that is even more true? The answer, even though it is not explicit, increasingly seems to be yes, in a word, that we barely bother to debate because there is unanimity in the Democratic Party in support of Joe Biden's war policy and the GOP establishment is completely aligned with Biden. And when that kind of bipartisan, Uniparty consensus emerges, debate ends and we simply proceed along without even talking about it. 

Then, as our second story, we all know that the Kremlin agents are working everywhere, working on every corner, on every social media platform, and under every bed. We know that Russia – despite being, at best, a regional power with an economy smaller than Italy and Canada – that spends 1/16 of what the U.S. spends on our military, controls almost every major world event somehow and is responsible for most of America's social and political ills. But what you may not know is that they have developed one of the most nefarious and terrifying weapons yet: they have recruited and trained a deceptively adorable white beluga whale to serve as a Kremlin spy. We will tell you the full story of this Marine menace who, after years in hiding, has reportedly resurfaced this week to terrorize a Norwegian fishing boat. 

As we do every Tuesday and Thursday, as soon as we're done with our one-hour live show here on Rumble, we will move to Locals for an interactive aftershow to take your questions and comment on your feedback. To obtain access to our aftershow, which is for subscribers only, simply sign up as a member of our Locals community. The red Join button is right below the video player here on the Rumble page. We also provide daily transcripts, full transcripts for each program, as well as exclusive access to some of our journalism. 

As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form. We are available on Spotify, Apple and all other major podcasting platforms. The show posts the podcast version 12 hours after we first broadcast here, live, on Rumble. Simply follow us on those platforms as well as please rate and review our programs: that helps us spread the visibility of System Update.

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


 

Certain words when they become so overused, begin to lose their meaning. They're just like noises that no longer evoke any real sentiment or any real feeling. They just become pure abstractions. And I think that's the case for the word ‘escalation’ when it comes to war. You can warn about how wars have the risk of escalating and the dangers that come from that escalatory spiral but I think, more often than not, we tend to dismiss that as an abstraction. It just doesn't evoke very many strong sentiments any longer and I think that's because the United States for so long has felt completely safe and immune from the risks of a world war. It's been 70 years since the conclusion of the last World War. It used to be commonplace that American students and American children were trained how to hide in bomb shelters. The specter of nuclear war very much was on the forefront of people's consciousness throughout all of the Cold War. And now we seem to be at the moment where people just tacitly, blissfully, assume that nuclear war is not really a possibility. It's something that you can kind of mention or talk about, but everyone knows that will never happen. There's very little fear over what is increasingly looking like a very direct proxy war between the two largest nuclear nations on the planet. It is, though, the warnings about nuclear war or the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists putting their doomsday clock to the closest time to midnight ever, which signifies global extermination, just doesn't seem to make any difference. We barely even debate or discuss this war. It's a war that Joe Biden himself said has brought the planet closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any point since 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And yet, given how central the U.S. government is to this war – over $100 billion already authorized for it after just over a year and increasingly sophisticated weapons being supplied to Ukraine, that are then used not only against Russian soldiers inside Ukraine but increasingly inside Russia itself – it seems like we're in this blissful form of ignorance, fortified by the fact that there is absolutely many within the Democratic Party in Washington in support of this war, as well as the fact that the Republican establishment, as usual, is in full alignment with the Biden administration when it comes to the U.S. war policy. So, everybody from Chuck Schumer to Tom Cotton and everybody from AOC to most of the Republican House caucus, clearly including Kevin McCarthy and Michael McFaul, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, and on and on and on are in complete agreement. There's just no dissent. Ilhan Omar thinks the same way as – pick your Republican senator – Marsha Blackburn. And when that kind of bipartisan consensus happens, debate stops, even though there's a lot to debate. 

This war is constantly escalating right before our eyes, and that's the reason we keep discussing it. And we'll continue to. The last 24 hours may have brought the most dangerous escalation yet. By escalation, what I mean by that is the ability of a war to start wildly and rapidly expanding, physically expanding beyond its original theater, but expanding rhetorically as well in terms of the willingness of countries to just devote themselves endlessly to not just trying to solve the conflict, but to win the conflict and vanquish one's enemies, as well as to what the war aims are that just constantly spiral out of control. That is absolutely, whatever your views are and whatever your assignment of blame is, is how to understand this war. 

So, what happened last night is that eight kamikaze drones were obviously sent by Ukraine – people aren't even bothering with the pretense this time to say it was a false flag that Russia bombed itself – attacked not military installations, not any battalion of troops, but residential buildings in Russia's capital and Moscow. So just try and imagine how that would look to the United States if, say, Mexico using Chinese-provided drones or Chinese-provided weapons, attack residential buildings in Arlington, Virginia, or in the nation’s capital, or in Manhattan. That is how Russia is currently looking at the world today. 

So here from The New York Times, the headline is “What we know about the drone attack on Moscow. Russia's defense ministry said that at least eight drones had targeted Moscow and the surrounding region.” 

 

Explosions were reported in Moscow early on Tuesday morning with Russia's defense ministry saying that at least eight drones had targeted the capital city and the surrounding region. All of the drones were intercepted, the ministry said in a statement, saying that electronic jamming measures forced some to deviate from intended targets and that others had been shot down outside the city limits by air defenses. It did not specify what the targets may have been. 

American officials have in the past voiced concern that Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil could provoke Mr. Putin without having a direct effect on the battlefield – one reason that Washington has withheld from Ukraine weapons that could be used to strike deep into Russia. 

The reality of the war in Ukraine has largely been perceived as distant for much of the Russian public but the attacks unmask Moscow could change that and possibly even threaten overall support for Mr. Putin's handling of what the Kremlin has called “the special military operation.” (The New York Times. May 30, 2023)

 

It seems to be a very bizarre formulation by The New York Times for a couple of reasons. One is implicit within that account – it seems to be a justification for targeting residential buildings, for targeting civilians on purpose, which, when it's convenient, we are told is a war crime. The implicit narrative in the New York Times article – and we're going to show you one from The Washington Post that's even more egregious because a big part of the story is not just what Ukraine did, but how the West, and the United States in particular, are reacting – because there lies the real danger of what our mentality has become collectively. But the idea that it is now permissible to target civilians in order to make civilians more invested in the war's outcome, so they don't see it as an abstraction, is a justifying rationale for war crimes. Targeting civilian infrastructure and civilians on purpose for strategic gain is a violation of the laws of war, to the extent anyone cares about that – but there is implicit justification in there.

The other point that I find amazing is the notion that if you start bombing Russian civilians enough, they will turn against the war. When does that ever happen? Every government in the world knows that the best way to unify the population behind the government is to convince them that they are under attack and being threatened by a foreign enemy, by a foreign power. George Bush's 2000 election was one of the most disputed and contested elections in American history. For all the talk about election denialism and the threat posed in challenging the credibility of our elections, Democrats overwhelmingly believed that that election was stolen and that Al Gore was the rightful winner. The Supreme Court stole the election from the Democrats on behalf of George W. Bush, and for the first year of George Bush's presidency, of the first nine months, he was completely polarizing as a president. And then came September 11 and 90% of Americans approved the way George Bush was doing his job – 90% of Americans unified behind their leader the minute there was a foreign attack. That's what happens in every instance where a country is attacked. If you want to find a way to unify the Russians behind Vladimir Putin, keep bombing and targeting apartment buildings filled with civilians in Moscow on purpose. 

We have some videos that will give you a sense of what this attack looks like, from Sky News.

Watch.

 

 Ukraine clearly has the intention – because they've repeatedly done it – to not just attack Russian troops on their soil, to expel them, but to attack Russia itself inside Russian territory. This is not the first time by far that this has happened. There were units allied with the Ukrainian army, including reportedly certain actual overt Nazis who are enemies of the Putin government, who just recently engaged in cross-border attacks inside Moscow. There have been terrorist attacks by the Ukrainians, including blowing up a cafe in St. Petersburg to kill a Russian nationalist journalist and not only killed him but injured 19 people attending the speech. A car bomb that was targeting a Russian nationalist pro-war blogger who ended up instead murdering his daughter. So, it's not like this is the first time, but this is now eight kamikaze drones inside Moscow attacking residential buildings. That is an escalation of a war, if ever there was one. 

I want to show you what The Washington Post said about this war, not in an editorial, not in an op-ed, but in what they purport to be their news report, because embedded within this reporting is something extraordinary and, I would submit, very alarming: conceptions about how to understand this war. So, there you see the Washington Post article from today that reports on these drone attacks: “Drones hit Moscow, shocking Russian capital after new missile on Kyiv.” 

 

A drone attack hit Moscow on Tuesday morning, damaging two residential buildings – the first strike on a civilian area of the Russian capital since President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago. It was almost certainly a prelude to a major escalation in hostilities. (The Washington Post. May 30, 2023)

 

This is a newspaper that has been behind this war from the beginning – they're behind every single major or minor American war of the last two decades, at least, every single war from Iraq and Syria to Libya, to Afghanistan, to the bombing missions throughout the Middle East. Now, the war in Ukraine has been supported by The Washington Post. And even The Washington Post is saying “This event yesterday is almost certainly a prelude to a major escalation in hostilities,” a major escalation in a war involving multiple nuclear powers. 

How is this not the story that all of us should be focused on today? 

 

The drone attack, which was confirmed by Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, occurred just hours after yet another barrage of Russian airstrikes on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, which killed at least one person and injured more than a dozen. In Moscow, there were no reports of serious injuries. 

While Ukraine denied involvement in the drone attack on Moscow, the dueling strikes on the capital cities appeared to mark a threshold moment as residents of Russia's capital experienced direct consequences of their nation's hostilities for the first time. (The Washington Post. May 30, 2023)



I want to read this again because it's a lot of words put together that seem on their own to be the kind of technical journalistic words newspapers typically use when they're describing some kind of national security policy but the actual meaning really bears some scrutiny. They say that the “dueling strikes” marked “a threshold moment as residents of Russia's capital experienced direct consequences of their nation's hostilities for the first time.” Is that how we now talk about attacks on civilians – deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure like apartment buildings? Oh, they're just carrying the consequences of what their nation is doing. That's how Osama bin Laden talked about 9/11. “Oh, we're going to make sure that Americans, for the first time feel the direct consequences for their nation's hostility for the first time.” That was his justification for the 9/11 attacks. Well, it's about time Americans don't just get to attack, but have to feel the consequences that they bring to other countries. That's the justification being offered by The Washington Post for targeting civilian buildings in Russia based apparently on the view that not the Russian government, but the Russian people need to suffer, be injured, or even be killed. And as we emphasized on our program last night when we were talking about the disparate treatment of Russian and Belarusian athletes who are somehow told they're responsible for their government's actions, it makes even less sense in this case, because we're also constantly told that Russia is a tyranny, a totalitarian society where no citizen has any input at all into what their government does, and any dissidents of any kind result in imprisonment or death. Anyone who criticizes Vladimir Putin gets sent to the Gulag. And yet, apparently, we're now supposed to believe that these same Russian people who are oppressed, we're told, by the Putin government, need to start feeling some bombs because somehow they bear responsibility for this war and need to be motivated to stop Putin, even though he's a totalitarian dictator who kills all of his critics. 

This is how propaganda works. It's an insidious weaving throughout everything that we're constantly told about how just to implicitly understand the world and the moral frameworks that we are supposed to apply to others and ourselves. 

 

Reports that some 200 artillery shells hit Russian towns in the Belgorod region near the Ukrainian border Tuesday, offered further evidence that Kyiv wants to bring the war to Russian territory before initiating its long-expected counter-offensive, which will inevitably necessitate further destruction in Ukraine. (The Washington Post. May 30, 2023) 

 

So let me stop there as well for a minute. We've been told forever that a counter-offensive is coming. And maybe it will. But the reality is the primary victim of the war right now is Ukraine. It's Ukrainian buildings and Ukraine that's been destroyed, Ukrainian infrastructure that's being destroyed, Ukrainian lives that are being taken in gigantic numbers. And the idea that they want this war is a nice narrative, but it's belied by the fact, as we've shown you before, that President Zelenskyy has been repeatedly forced not only to do things like close oppositional media outlets, ban political parties who are his opponents and banning churches – something he was doing even before the war started – but he severely increased the penalties for desertion because Ukrainian men, many of them, actually don't want to fight in this war. They do not think this war is worth dying for over the question of who controls Donbas or whether they get Crimea back. Ultimately awards merit is determined by whether people are willing to fight and die in it. Huge numbers of Americans volunteered to fight in World War II. Zelensky is using a conscript army. These are people forced to fight. And their country is being destroyed because, at the beginning of the war, it was clear. as many reported that the United States’ goal in this war was never to save Ukraine or protect Ukrainians, it was to destroy Ukraine and sacrifice Ukrainians for its broader geopolitical goal of beating the Russians as much as possible. That is what this war is really about. That is why there's never been even any discussion, let alone efforts toward finding a diplomatic solution to this war in Washington – because Washington does not want this war to end. It wants it to continue. It's a gold mine for the arms industry, for the intelligence community, and for the goal of destroying Russia, which again, I believe is predominantly motivated by a perception in Washington that it was Russia that was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. That's the real reason for this increasingly vitriolic anti-Russian hatred that is driving U.S. policy much more than any geopolitical objectives. 

 

Mykailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, said Moscow residents deserved whatever came at them. (The Washington Post. May 30, 2023)

 

This is one of Zelenskyy's primary advisors justifying the targeting of civilian infrastructures on the grounds that “Moscow residents deserved whatever came at them.” 

 

I'm going to say some paradoxical things and you can then analyze them: first, undoubtedly, gradually, Moscow is starting to sink into the fog of war… with a very desired sensation, Podolyak said Tuesday morning during “Breakfast Show” a Ukrainian Russian-language YouTube program. “Of course, we want those people who wanted to start this big European war to feel what it is like to live in this state of danger.” 

“And, of course, all those terrible men who sat in the parliament and threatened everyone,” Podolyak added, “they are going to gradually receive all of that back.” (The Washington Post. May 30, 2023)



Note that Ukraine did not bomb the parliament or the Kremlin this time the way they did several months ago when they sent a drone over Moscow that exploded right above the Kremlin. They targeted apartment buildings. How is it that on the one hand, Russia is a totalitarian, despotic society that imprisons every citizen who dissents from the government's actions and where Russian citizens have no ability to influence at all the government that we're told is despotic, and yet on the other, the Ukrainian government can say – using our weapons – that Russian civilians deserve whatever is coming to them because somehow they're responsible for this war. Is that now our position that the proxy nations that we use as pawns in war can deliberately target civilian infrastructure and kill as many civilians as possible and then explicitly justify doing that because they deserve to get what's coming to them? 

Again, that is the rationale of Osama bin Laden for why 9/11 happened. When Osama bin Laden was asked to justify that, then he said “Americans bear responsibility for their government's aggression in the world because they are the ones who elected that government. It was actually true in that case, that the Americans elected the government that initiated the war in Iraq or that starved hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children with sanctions or put troops on Saudi soil. But still, it didn't justify targeting civilians. It never is justified, let alone when we're told that civilians have no political rights of any kind. The article goes on. 

 

Putin said that Ukraine was trying to “intimidate” Russia and Russian citizens and that the attack aimed to provoke “a mirror response” from Moscow. 

“This, of course, is a clear sign of terrorist activity,” Putin said during a visit to a cultural center. (The Washington Post. May 30, 2023)

 

Regardless of what you think about this war, about who's to blame for this war, if you want to assign 1,000% of the blame to Vladimir Putin, is it true that deliberately targeting civilians to terrify those civilians into changing their government's policy is the very definition of terrorism? It's the definition I've always understood terrorism had, to the extent that it's actually a term with a clear fixed meaning, as opposed to just a propaganda term. Targeting civilians with violence on purpose to terrorize them into changing their behaviors and their views, that is terrorism. And that is what the Ukrainian government explicitly is saying was their goal here, was their purpose, was their aim. 

I mentioned Osama bin Laden and what he said about 9/11 on several occasions because it is exactly what we hear increasingly not just from Ukrainians, but from the West, about who bears responsibility for the invasion of Ukraine, that it's not just the Russian government, but Russian civilians as well. We showed you last night in the context of professional sports how that rationale is being invoked and I emphasized that even though that's just sports, it can seem trivial, the underlying propagandistic framework that is being pushed on us constantly, that we're being asked to ratify, is an extremely dangerous one because you first banned Russian and Belarusian athletes on the grounds that they somehow bear responsibility – 25-year-old athletes.

 If that's true that civilians are responsible, then it does become justifiable morally to target them and kill them on purpose because you've just gotten done implementing a framework that holds them morally responsible, ethically responsible, and responsible in every other way, for the war that you claim is the greatest act of evil since Hitler, if not even worse than Hitler. That's what makes this rationale so nefarious: that it's coming not only from Ukraine but from their sponsors in the West.

 Let's look at what Osama bin Laden said in September 2007 in a transcript of a speech that he gave from a video where he was talking about 9/11 and the War on Terror and U.S. aggression:

 

After it became clear to you that it was an unjust and unnecessary war, you made one of your greatest mistakes [He's talking here to the American people] in that you neither brought to account nor punished those who waged this war, not even the most violent of its murderers, Donald Rumsfeld. And even more incredible than that is that Bush picked him as secretary of defense in his first term, after picking Dick Cheney as his vice president, Powell, as secretary of state, and Richard Armitage as Powell's deputy, despite their horrific, bloody history of murdering humans. So that was a clear signal that his administration – the administration of generals – didn't have as its main concern the serving of humanity, but rather, was interested in bringing about new massacres. 

Yet, in spite of that, you permitted Bush to complete his first term, and stranger still, chose him for a second term, which gave him a clear mandate from you [American civilians] – with your full knowledge and consent – to continue to murder our people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then you claim to be innocent! This innocence of yours is like my innocence of the blood of your sons on the 11th – were I to claim such a thing. But it is impossible for me to humor any of you in the arrogance and indifference you show for the lives of humans outside America, or for me to humor your leaders and their lying, as the entire world knows, they have the lion's share of that. 

These morals aren't our morals. What I want to emphasize here is that not taking past war criminals to account led to them to keep repeating that crime of killing humanity without right and waging this unjust war in Mesopotamia, and as a result, here are the oppressed ones today continuing to take their right from you.  (Public Intelligence. Sept. 7, 2007, Video with Transcript).

 

So that was Osama bin Laden's argument for why American civilians were legitimate targets on September 11. And it sounds a lot to me like what Ukraine is saying about Russian civilians now and what the West has been saying since the start of this war in the way that they are talking about, not the Russian government, but the Russian civilians. And from that, it is not a big leap, in fact, it is the inevitable outcome, that Russian civilians should be targeted, which is exactly what happened within the last 24 hours – and now, with increasingly sophisticated, aggressive weaponry in their hands, provided to them by the United States with a mentality that you just got done hearing: that Russian civilians deserve what's coming to them. What do you think these weapons are going to be used for? 

If you can just put yourself into the position of seeing the world through Russian eyes – and again, think all you want about the fact that Russia is to blame for invading Ukraine, that they can end the war at any moment by going home. That's not the way the Russians see this war: it's the way the West sees this war. It's not the way Russians see this war, it's not the way most countries see this war. As we demonstrated to you when we reported on Fiona Hill's remarkable speech, an anti-Russia anti-China hawk who has been deep in the bowels of the U.S. foreign policy establishment forever, standing up and telling the Western foreign policy elites that “the rest” of the world – which now is not the rest of the world, but is actually a huge portion of the world, assembling greater and greater power and coming together in a more potent confederation than ever – does not see the war in Ukraine the way the United States and the West see the war in Ukraine. They see the war in Ukraine as yet another attempt – rightly or wrongly, it's how they see it – by the United States, by the West, to assert their dominion and hegemonic control everywhere, including all the way up to the Russian border. And while they don't necessarily support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they certainly believe that the U.S. and the West provoked it. And that's Fiona Hill talking, not me. And there are tons of evidence to demonstrate that that's how major governments around the world see this war. 

But leaving aside the question of who's to blame or who's responsible, do you think that Russia, this country with this enormous history, filled with proud nationalists and the largest nuclear stockpile on the planet, is going to sit by while Ukraine takes weapons provided by the West and kills their civilians inside Moscow by bombing them from the air? Does anyone think that Putin is going to allow that to happen without reacting very, very aggressively? 

The theory of escalated wars,  of war getting out of control, of how World Wars start, is they always have a very limited beginning – that there is a border dispute between two countries, other allies side with each, and suddenly, there are all kinds of tension escalating. All these other new grievances are aired and the anger and hatred and hostility that war breeds in humans – we need hatred to be pulsating through our veins to support wars because when we engage in war, we do the most unthinkable things to one another – that hatred just constantly increases and bubbles over. That's how atrocities become possible. 

We are now already at the point where the Ukrainians are explicitly justifying attacks on Russian civilians, deep inside Russia, into Moscow, its capital; at the same time that the United States is now providing Ukraine F-16 fighter jets and at the same time that there's almost no communication at all between Moscow and Washington, one of the rotted results of Russiagate that essentially criminalized conversations between American diplomats on the one hand and Russian diplomats on the other. Michael Flynn almost went to jail because he reached out to the Russian ambassador shortly after becoming the national security adviser. 

Again, this is not the first time there have been strikes inside Russia, and each time that it happens, we are told some kind of just laughable propaganda about what happened. Here, from The Washington Post earlier this month – and you may recall that Ukraine exploded a drone bomb over the Kremlin near where Vladimir Putin was and The Washington Post headline was “Ukraine Denies Kremlin's Claim of Drone Assassination Attempt on Putin” and gave credence to this preposterous notion, even more, preposterous than the insulting claim that Russia blew up its own pipeline:

 Russia on Wednesday accused Ukraine of staging a drone attack intended to kill President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, an incendiary allegation that was forcefully denied by Ukrainian officials, some of whom warned it could be a pretext for Russia to escalate its war. (The Washington Post. May 3, 2023)



In the first paragraph, The Washington Post gave credence to this false flag theory that Russia bombed itself. 

 

Russia said that it thwarted the attack and that Putin was not in the building at the time. Among the mysteries surrounding Wednesday's alleged attack was how two drones could have successfully reached one of the most protected buildings of Moscow's fortified city center. While some analysts said the incident might have been a false flag attack staged by Russia, others suggested it could be a performance gesture, by Ukraine, striking at a preeminent symbol of Russian state power. (The Washington Post. May 3, 2023)

 

Don't forget that incident just weeks ago when the Russians perceived that Zelenskyy and Ukrainians tried to murder the Russian president via drone over Moscow. Again, think about what would the United States do if all of this was happening, not in Moscow, but in Washington – especially if those weapons were supplied by and the war was enabled by Russia, Iran or China, or some combination of all of those countries, which is what's happening in Ukraine that's enabled solely by the United States principally, and the rest of Western Europe and NATO. 

 

 

Just to give you a sense of how utterly deranged the mentality has become among American journalists, war analysts and the like, all these people who just make a living constantly supporting U.S. foreign policy whenever it comes to militarism and war, I want to show you this tweet or series of tweets from Tiger Rogoway. I forgot the publication he works at. We will get that for you. He used to be part of the Gizmodo Media Group and he's worked for other media outlets as well. So, he's a journalist. But listen to how he thinks and how he's speaking. And very little opposition arose from this tweet until I pointed it out. It's him today discussing the drone attacks on Moscow last night. 

Every day this war goes on, Ukraine's kinetic reach expands in magnitude and frequency. Taking the word to Moscow IS the goal. Little drones will turn into way more drones of increasing complexity, then into cruise missiles, then ballistic missiles… (@Aviation_Intel.  May 30, 2023)

 

They have relatively advanced indigenous ballistic missile tech. If you don't think they aren’t doing everything they can to get what they set aside a few years ago operational, we are living in different universes and they are likely getting help. (@Aviation_Intel.  May 30, 2023)

 

Obviously, meaning help from the United States. And he cites an article entitled “Does Ukraine have a stash of domestically developed ballistic missiles?” Once a day he is celebrating an intended abuse to strike deep into Russia. He then goes on. 

 

So much is focused on what NATO will give them, especially in standoff weaponry, but it's 15 months into this thing. What crash programs are likely maturing? Hence the flocks of drones that will be raining on Moscow. 

Bad, bad news for Russia. (@Aviation_Intel.  May 30, 2023)

 

Is that just bad news for Russia? Or is that bad news for the world if we are now going to start having constant drone attacks on civilian infrastructure in Russia, in Moscow, followed by cruise missiles, followed by ballistic missiles? He works at this media outlet called The Drive, which is a New York outlet. I’d never heard of it before that published this article about whether Ukraine has a stash of ballistic missiles. He also has a vertical called the War Zone. He's obviously one of these people Adam Smith warned us about back in 1776. People who stay far away from the battlefield but who cheer wars from a distance. Sometimes they go there and do kind of we're reporting in the war zone, but they don't fight in the wars. But you can see the excitement. They get a sense of purpose and strength. We're talking about cruise missiles and ballistic missiles raining down on Russia. If you want to have a nuclear war, this is the way to do it. And as always, the question I will continue to pose for as long as this war goes on is: what interest does the United States have in continuing this war? What interest does the United States have in fighting with this level of risk and danger over who gets to govern the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine – bereft of any vital interests for the United States – or who governs Crimea – a region where even the harshest anti-Russian hawks will acknowledge is filled with people who far more identify as Russian than they do as Ukrainians and who would far more rather be governed by Moscow or be independent than be governed by President Zelenskyy in Kyiv. 

Ever since the United States fostered regime change in Ukraine, which we know happened – we heard Victoria Nuland talking about it secretly on a tape – there are large numbers of people in these provinces who feel like they live in a country that is not theirs. They see Russia with far more affinity to their ethnic identity, to their historical identity than Ukraine. And one possible way out of this war is to hold a referendum and see what the people of Eastern Ukraine want; to see what people in Crimea want, a fair election supervised by the U.N.; to see if they want to be part of Russia, if they want to be independent, if they want to remain under the thumb of Kyiv. I think the West knows what the outcome of that referendum will be. 

And whatever else is true, again, whatever your position, I think the most striking thing here is how little effort there is on the part of Washington or London or Paris or Berlin to even pretend they're seeking a diplomatic solution to this war. Where are the diplomats? Where are the efforts to foster an outcome to finally end this war before it escalates out of control? There are paths to a diplomatic resolution. I just named one. We have the example of Kosovo, which is in the news – we're going to cover that later this week – which is now engaged in some hostilities with Serbia, over what is technically, at least in the eyes of the West, the territory of Kosovo even though many countries don't recognize Kosovo as a country. But the reason there are Kosovo and Serbia to talk about is that the United States and the EU sided with the ethnic separatists in Kosovo that no longer wanted to be part of Serbia. They didn't want to be ruled by Belgrade because they're Albanians, ethnic Albanians, and they wanted their independence and the U.S. supported that independence by arguing that the people of Kosovo deserved autonomy over who they're governed by. And at the time, Vladimir Putin warned that that would be a very dangerous precedent to set because post-World War II Europe is filled with regions and provinces that have been shoved into countries with which they don't identify – including those two breakaway provinces in Georgia that were subject to that 2008 war between Russia and Georgia where the people of South Ossetia and other provinces in Georgia, that are Russian speaking and identify as Russians, did not want to be under the thumb of a country with which they felt no affinity and preferred to be under the governance of Russia. Same with Crimea, same with people in Donbas and other parts of eastern Ukraine. 

So, the Kosovo model is one way out of this, which is to have a free and fair election to oust the people in those provinces and in those regions what they want. Do they want independence? Do they want to be part of Russia? Do they want to be part of Kyiv? And allow them to have their own say in the outcome of that. There is no attempt on the part of the West, you will notice, to try and foster that diplomatic resolution or any other, because the only people in whose interest this war is our Western elites and the Western security state and everybody else, principally the people of Ukraine but also the people of the United States who, are transferring enormous amounts of resources – poured into that war through Raytheon, through the CIA – to this country that has long been considered the most corrupt in all of Europe, only to now face what Joe Biden himself, the sponsor of this war, calls the most dangerous moment since 1962 for the survival of the species. 

So, there is no effort to end this war diplomatically, nor is there any intention to hold that kind of referendum because the West knows what the people in those regions want and don't care about what they want at all. This war is not about protecting Ukraine or protecting Ukrainians. It never was. It's about pretty much everything else, and each day that this war escalates, the dangers intensify. 



We all know that Russia has been responsible, the puppet master, for pretty much every single problem that the West has had over the last ten years. It's not because the Western elites are corrupted. It's not because neo-liberal global institutions are malicious and are willing to squeeze entire populations just to enrich themselves and empower themselves a little further. No, perish the thought. It's because Vladimir Putin, despite all his problems domestically, despite having an economy that is smaller than that of Canada or Italy, despite spending 1/16 of what the United States spends on the military, is somehow able, from across the other side of the world, to puppet master every last event inside the United States, inside of the United Kingdom, and even other Western European countries. And we all know how many Kremlin agents there are, how many Russian spies are, essentially, everybody who challenges or dissents from U.S. foreign policy in any way. 

So just a reminder of all the things the Russians somehow managed to do. The New York Times, through Charlie Savage, in July or June 2020, announced that Russia had placed bounties on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan, we were told they had convinced the Taliban that they would pay them if they killed American troops. 

Just beyond anything else, as a reminder, remember the outrage that Russia would dare try and involve itself in an American war by encouraging our enemies to kill American troops? This is something just ghastly that no country would ever do. Only for two years later us to drown Russia's bordering country, Ukraine, with every conceivable weapon we can think of in order for them to go and kill as many Russian troops and increasingly Russian civilians as they can. 

But anyway, that's what Russia was doing. They were controlling Afghanistan. Of course, that story turned out to be false like most of these stories. The Daily Beast in 2021, “U.S. Intel walks back claim Russians put bounties on American troops.” Then we had the Havana Syndrome: somehow there was this new mind-controlled device using 24th-century technology that nobody had ever heard of before, much less began to understand, that enabled them, the Russians, to go around the world injuring the brains of American diplomats, not just in Havana, but all over Europe, using invisible sonic weapons that nobody can't even possibly explain. And we were told over and over again that Russia was behind that as well – that they were damaging the brains of State Department officials. Turns out it was all basically hysteria. It was a psychosomatic illness created by a bunch of hysterics. Imagine that those are the kinds of people working inside the State Department, people who are just completely hysterical and create imaginary illnesses. I wonder where they came from. But as you see here in Rolling Stone, the “Noises were likely crickets, not super weapons, State Department report says.” But we were told that Russia was behind that as well. 

From the Washington Post, in 2020, turns out that America's racial strife is not due to 250 years that involve slavery and Jim Crow laws and segregation or American activist groups that need racial strife. It turns out that racism is because of Russian bots. They're responsible for racial strife in the United States, too. They're sending disinformation campaigns targeting African Americans. They're behind that as well. 

Also, Brexit. Remember Brexit? When the British people went and decided they no longer wanted to be part of the EU, they didn't want to be ruled by Eurocrats in Brussels, they actually want a local role to be able to influence their own self-governance by removing themselves from the EU. That was not the decision of the British people. That too was due to Russia! Russia also engineered Brexit, says the New York Times: “‘No one’ protected British democracy from Russia, UK report concludes.” They blamed Brexit on the Russians.

And of course, 2016: the Democrats lost the presidential election not because they ran one of the most unlikable people on the planet, one of the most historically unpopular politicians in modern American political history. Not because they didn't go to Wisconsin. Not because they had no program to offer anybody other than the elites that financed Hillary Clinton's campaign. Not because they relied on Lena Dunham and a bunch of Hollywood celebrities to tell people in the United States that they should vote for Hillary. None of that. It was because Moscow dictated the outcome of our election. And I could go through the entire list of all the people who we know are Russian agents – because of the fact that they criticized the U.S. government.

Here from the New York Times is a reminder. “Hillary Clinton left no doubt on Thursday that she believes Russia contributed to her defeat by interfering in the election, condemning what she called Moscow's “weaponization of information.” 

So those are all the things and many, many more that Russia has masterminded through its incredible sophistication and power. It turns out they have a new weapon. It's actually a new one. It's the emergence of an old one in 2019. The Guardian, in April, warned us of a frightening new weapon – a Russian spy. The headline: “Whale with harness, could be Russian weapon,” said Norwegian experts.

 

Fishermen in Norway raised alarm after a white beluga whale sporting unusual strapping began harnessing their boats. Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian Navy as part of a program to use underwater mammals as a special ops force. Fishermen in waters near the small Norwegian fishing village of Inga, reported last week that a white beluga whale wearing a strange harness had begun to harass their fishing boats. (The Guardian. May 29, 2019) 

 

Kind of like the way Russian bots do on Twitter. 

 

The strange behavior of the whale, which was actively seeking out the vessels and trying to pull straps and rope from the sides of the boats[…] (The Guardian. May 29, 2019) 



Apparently, I knew that there was the claim that the Russians had used these whales to spy on Kremlin spies, but apparently, they trained them to attack Norwegian fishing boats. 

The strange behavior of the whale, which was actively seeking out the vessels and trying to pull strobe straps and ropes from the side of the boats, as well as the fact that it was wearing a tight harness, which seemed to be a camera or weapon, raised suspicions among Marine experts that the animal had been given military-grade training by neighboring Russia. inside the harness, which has now been removed from the whale, were the words “Equipment of St Petersburg.” (The Guardian. May 29, 2019) 

 

Because, of course, everybody knows that when you deploy covert agents into the field, or convert whales into the ocean, you, of course, have to describe where they came from, and who they belong to. Everybody knows that. I mean, yes, spying is a pretty nasty business, but there are rules. And one of the rules is if you're going to use whales, you have to say where they came from. So, there was a harness that said “Equipment from St Petersburg.” And apparently, that's how they knew. 

Maybe that's a false flag. Could be. Except, unfortunately, you're never allowed to suggest that the West was responsible for a false flag, mislabeling the perpetrator of the attack. Only Russia does that. Russia explodes its own industrial hardware and infrastructure, even though its future economic growth depends on it – like they blew up their own pipeline. Russia bombs itself as it did when it exploded a drone over the Kremlin where Vladimir Putin was sleeping. They think it's Russia that killed its own pro-Russian nationalist blogger in that cafe and blew up that car. But we know in this case that this whale is definitely a Kremlin agent because it says right in the harness “Equipment of Saint Petersburg.” 

 

“If this whale comes from Russia, and there is great reason to believe it, then it is not Russian scientists, but rather the Navy that has done this,” said Martin Biuw of the Institute of Marine Research in Norway. 

Audun Rikardsen, professor at the Department of Arctic and Marine Biology at the Arctic University of Norway told NRK: “We know that in Russia they have domestic whales in captivity and also that some of these have been apparently released. Then they often seek out boats.” (The Guardian. May 29, 2019) 



 So, I guess the claim here is that whales are generally gentle and humanitarian mammals that ordinarily are very peaceful when they see boats but the Russians have trained them to identify Western boats, boats that are controlled by Westerners or by Western navies, and to attack these boats on behalf of the Kremlin, very, very alarming. Once you start weaponizing marine life this way.

 

He said he had contacted Russian researchers who said the harnessed whale had nothing to do with them. “They tell me that most likely is the Russian navy in Murmansk,” said Rikardsen. 

In 1980s Soviet Russia, a program saw dolphins recruited for military training, their razor-sharp vision, stealth, and good memory, making them effective underwater tools for detecting weapons. 

This mammal program closed in the 1990s. However, a 2017 report by TV Zvezda, a station owned by the Defense Ministry revealed that the Russian Navy has again been training beluga whales, seals and bottlenose dolphins for military purposes in polar waters. 

In the past three years, President Vladimir Putin has re-opened three former Soviet military bases along its vast Arctic coastline. The recent research and training were done by Murmansk Sea Biology Research Institute in northern Russia on behalf of the Navy to see if beluga whales could be used to, “guard entrances to naval bases” in Antarctic regions, “assist deepwater divers and, if necessary, kill any strangers who enter their territory. (The Guardian. May 29, 2019) 



I don't doubt, in fact, I affirmatively believe that many countries probably do train dolphins to try and engage in certain behavior that could be beneficial to their government. But the idea that this is some kind of nefarious, scary army of Wales, that the Kremlin's have been trained to be spies and to attack Norwegian boats is lunacy. Lunacy. Especially given what they're claiming is the evidence for it that they had a harness that said basically, “Hello, I'm a Russian spy.” And the tone that's used to suggest that this is supposed to frighten us. That this is something that only very evil, insidious countries would do. Like this sonic weapon that came from the 24th century. That instead turned out just to be the psychosomatic neuroses of people who just got out of Swarthmore and joined the State Department and convinced themselves that their brains were being melted by Russian sonic weapons because they'd been watching Rachel Maddow too much, when in fact all along it was crickets they were hearing, and they had invented this mental health disease and then given themselves it sounds like a lot like that. 

As it turns out, this scary Russian Kremlin not just apparently a spy but also an attacker had disappeared, in 2019, only to resurface in the last two days, the last 48 hours. So here from The Guardian, we find he has returned: “Suspected Russia-trained spy whale, reappears off Sweden's coast.” Where is this whale been for the last four years? 

 

A beluga whale that turned up in Norway wearing a harness in 2019, prompting speculation it was a spy trained by the Russian Navy has reappeared off Sweden's coast. First discovered in Norway's far northern region of Finnmark, the whale spent more than three years slowly moving down the top half of the Norwegian coastline before suddenly speeding up in recent months to cover the second half and move on to Sweden. (The Guardian. May 29, 2023)

 

So, the Marine mission for which he had been trained, apparently involved a four-year timeline where he would kind of chill out in the Arctic waters – excuse the pun, I promise it wasn't intended. For four years. And then in 2023, maybe to the date that the program would suddenly speed up and start attacking Swedes.

 

The harness had a mount suited for an action camera and the words “Equipment St. Petersburg” printed on the plastic clasps. 

Directorate officials said Hvaldimir – I guess that's the name of the whale. Oh, it's a pun on Vladimir and then the word for the whale, in Norwegian. Very clever. – Hvaldimir may have escaped an enclosure and may have been trained by the Russian navy as he appeared to be accustomed to humans. 

Moscow never issued any official reaction to Norwegian speculation that he could be a “Russian spy.” (The Guardian. May 29, 2023)

 

 They probably couldn't stop laughing.

 So here from 2019 is another one: it’s an AP report that has even a picture of him. He looks quite adorable. “Beluga whale with Russian harness raises alarm in Norway.” 

 

A beluga whale found with a tight harness that appeared to be Russian-made has raised the alarm of our region officials and speculation that the animal may have come from a Russian military facility. (AP News. April 29, 2019)

 

Just more of the same. 

We do have a video of this nefarious Kremlin spy. And like I said, I want to warn you, I think it's important for you to watch this video to be on guard because he's incredibly cute. He's very playful. He clearly likes humans or at least pretends to like humans. I think part of the danger is that he orders people into this sense of safety by tracking them into his web. He's like a honeypot. You know, Russians use honeypots, like very beautiful women to entice politicians like Eric Swalwell and the person who turned out to be a Chinese spy who developed a very good relationship. That's been a Cold War tactic for a long time. But instead of using women to lure men into getting their secrets, they use adorable animals. People love animals. A lot of people use the love of animals as a way of getting greater connection in our hearts in modern life. And they found this incredibly adorable whale. But he's a spy for the Kremlin. Who not only warns your secrets but attacks you if you're Norwegian or Swedish. 

So, let's look at him. I think it's important to keep you out in the waters and you see him. to identify him and remain very cautious in what you tell him and in your interactions with him. 

I should say this is from NBC News just to ensure, I assure you that this is all coming from the most mainstream outlets. There you see the caption: Marine experts think this whale may be a Russian-trained spy. Let's watch him

 

Do you see how malicious the Russians are? They play on our best instincts and they weaponize the cuteness of beluga whales for military purposes. I don't know if you notice in that propaganda I read you, one paragraph, said, “The reason we know he's a Russian spy is because he's unusually aggressive and hostile.” He attacks only Norwegian boats, fishing boats out of the blue with no provocation. And then we also heard that the reason we know he's a spy is because he's so accustomed to being around humans. Did you see any hostility there at all? I saw nothing but very polite behavior. But again, that's the point. That's the way they keep this a secret. 

 

Now, let me show you one other report, which I believe is from CBS News because I think you cannot be on guard enough. Here is the report. It's entitled Russian Spy Whale. And it's from 2019 when he first appeared. 

 

(Video. CBS News. 2019)

 

The city of Hammerfest, Norway. You may have to get into a boat to see the town's most iconic resident, Hvaldimir, the Beluga. The gentle giant is not from Norway. The townspeople believe he once worked as a Russian spy whale and then fled. […]

 

So apparently he's like a dissident. It turns out he was trained as a Russian spy. I think he developed some kind of misgivings about the nature of the work that he was doing. And he escaped bravely. And he sought asylum in Norway, off the coast of Norway. So, I mean, I guess according to this version, at least he's heroic, though he did reappear in 2023. Maybe the Russians captured him again, debriefed him, retrained him, and then gave him a new Marine mission, kind of reoriented him, indoctrinated him out of his dissidence, and now he's back under Russian control. But this is what they thought in 2019 about him. 

 

I always say it sounds like something that a comic book artist ran out of ideas or something in the fifties and created this. 

He was trained to do military spy work. You can send a whale a lot further and a lot longer and a lot deeper than you can a human, first of all. 

And second of all, that whale can go undetected. Hvaldimir had cameras strapped to him. He boldly left his old life behind, showing up on the coast alone and in need of help. 

 

He Oh, my God. I mean, okay, let me say again, this is CBS News, and they've turned him into like a victim of Russian repression by a heroic victim. Somebody who really did not appreciate being forced to work for the Russian government. Or maybe at some point he kind of like had an epiphany, kind of like Edward Snowden. He was a very young man, who joined the U.S. military believing the war in Iraq was just. He broke both of his legs in basic training. Then he went to work for the CIA and the NSA until he had an epiphany and began realizing that the mythology that he had been fed about the U.S. government, and the role that it played in the world was false. And therefore, he wanted to act against it. This seems to be the case for this whale, at some point, we don't know why he had kind of like an epiphany, like a sort of awakening about the true nature of the Russian government, and decided he no longer wanted to work for them. And he made a breakaway to the coast of Norway where he anticipated correctly, it turns out, that he would be well received. 

This is 2019, so I want to point out that this may be all a cover, a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the West to make us think that he had an awakening and was no longer willing to do the work of the Russian government when in reality was his way of luring us in. That was part of his training to think that he was actually on our side and to trust him. And now it turns out he resurfaced, is swimming faster than ever and attacking the Swedes. So, it's a very complex story, that's for sure. 

So, here's the rest of this report for 2019. 

 

Started pulling at fishermen’s boats and buoys and equipment and getting their attention. One of the fishermen in Norway really realized something's wrong with this picture. There's a man wearing a harness. He got in the water himself and was able to undo the harness and take all the mirrors out of the harness, which I think is really important, an important thing to have happened for Hvaldimir because I don't think he probably could have lived his whole life and not too comfortably.  

 

Can you believe this? I mean, you know, obviously there are lots of ways to mock this. I have refrained from doing so because of the gravity of the story. But if I wanted to, I could. I think the point here, though, is all of this is based on this whole story that emerged in 2019 about this Kremlin spy who's a whale and then, like, escaped as kind of like fleeing a repressive regime, quickly making it to the West, where he could be free and asked for help, and the Norwegians gave it to him. But now it turns out he really might have been a spy. Or maybe he went back and got What is any of this based on? It's like this woman just telling a story with music in the background designed to pull in your heartstrings, to make you think this whale is, like, benevolent, heroic. Except now he's being depicted once again as nefarious. This is the never-ending, incessant bullshit. But these corporate media outlets and under the guise of news, this is news, that Washington Post article that I read you before about how Russian civilians are finally getting what they deserve and this is going to make them rise up. That was also presented as news. This is what we are constantly bombarded with. There's not even pretense to have an evidentiary basis for it. It's almost like the more egregious they can be, the more flagrant they can be, and how they propagandize us, the better it is because it shows their power. 

If they can make you affirm things that you know are false or they don't even have to pretend to care whether or not you believe them, they just shove narrative constructions down your throat without the slightest regard for whether it even makes the most basic sense, that's real power. That's essentially saying to you we don't fear you at all. We don't even have enough respect for you to bother caring about whether or not you're convinced. And that is really the posture of the U.S. government and the corporate media outlets that serve that. And I think it's no wonder that it's one of the most optimistic and encouraging facts that we have that faith and trust in these media outlets have completely collapsed because, eventually, people see through this stuff. People know when they're being scorned and treated with contempt. 

And while you can mark this and talk about the absurdity of it, it does in fact, have very dangerous outcomes. We’re now at war with a country that the Democratic Party decided to blame for what for them was the most traumatic event in recent political history, which is the loss of Hillary Clinton and the election of Donald Trump. They fed their followers with the most severe form of anti-Russian animus. They basically made it a crime to even talk to Russians. And now we're in the middle of this incredibly dangerous, rapidly escalating war that has no geostrategic aim other than its continuation for its own sake. There are no efforts to resolve it diplomatically and instead, all we ever get is this constant narrative that we should hate Russia and Russians in lieu of any rationale for why these resources should continuously be expended and why these rights should be incurred in pursuit of this war. 

These institutions cannot collapse fast enough. They cannot collapse fast enough. There is no way to describe how fundamentally and irretrievably corrupted they are. And that's why I always say, and I will continue to say that: however much you hate the corporate media and the U.S. security state, it is nowhere near enough the willingness that they have to drag you into lies and then create dangers all around those lies is essentially limitless. 


 

That concludes our show for this evening. Because it is Tuesday night, we will now move to our Locals platform for our live, interactive show where we take your questions, comment on your critiques and feedback, hear your suggestions for the kinds of stories we should cover and whom we should interview, and just generally have a conversation with our audience, which I always find to be a very important form of journalistic accountability. 

To have access to that live aftershow, simply join our Locals community by clicking the join button here, on the video player. That also helps support the journalism we do here. 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast forms: you can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcast platform. You can also rate and review the show – that helps spread its visibility.

 

 Thank you so much for watching. We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. EST, exclusively here on Rumble. 

Have a great evening, everybody.

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FYI Glenn, Scott Adams hosts a daily show using Rumble Studio that appears simultaneously on Rumble, YouTube, Locals and possibly X. After a typical hour long show, he somehow disconnects all streams except his Locals subscribers. It takes no more than 30 seconds to make the changeover. To me, viewing the Rumble stream, the image loses focus, the audio stops and a Locals logo appears center screen while he continues the stream with subscribers only.

His show and studio offer nothing approaching the production values of System Update and he doesn't use a different studio for his Locals program so I don't know if he can be of any help.

I can say he holds you and your work in high regard and may be able to offer suggestions how you might achieve the melding of System Update with the Tuesday/Thursday Aftershow for your Locals subscribers.

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February 07, 2025
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Glenn Reacts to Trump's Gaza Take Over
System Update Special

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.

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Good evening, everybody. Welcome to a special episode of System Update. The reason we wanted to do this is because we talked last night on our show about how President Trump had proposed a rather remarkable, extraordinary, stunning plan, to put that mildly, for Gaza and for resolving the conflict between Israel and Gaza. At the time that we had gone on air, however, he had only revealed a partial aspect of this plan. He gave his press conference in the Oval Office, he then met with Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Oval Office as well, answered questions and basically said that his plan and his vision for Gaza was to remove everybody who lives there, the 1.8 million people – and we'll get to that number, which is very strange in just a moment – clean it all up, rebuild it into something beautiful, and then basically allow some of them back in. 

We talked about the reasons why that kind of population transfer, forcible population transfer – the people of Gaza have made extremely clear they have no intention of leaving; they don't trust the United States or Israel that just destroyed their society – to say you'll just leave for a couple of years and you'll be allowed back, obviously, they were expelled from what they consider their homeland, which is now Israel, in 1948, and never came back, through generations they've been waiting to do so. They're never going to leave voluntarily. But it was really only after that press briefing with Prime Minister Netanyahu that President Trump gave another press conference in which he revealed the most significant part of this plan. And he didn't just speak off the cuff. 

He was reading from a prepared statement, which meant that it was actually a policy that people in the White House had concocted and created, which was not for Israel to go in and govern Gaza, as many Israelis, including in Netanyahu’s government, wanted to do, but that the United States would go in and, as he put it, would own Gaza, would rebuild Gaza, would turn it into whatever he envisions, and having a bunch of beachfront casinos and hotels and golf courses and who knows what else. 

When he was asked, well, the people of Gaza are saying that they refuse to leave and the Arab countries in the region are saying they will absolutely never accept such a solution, he basically said: “Well, I think they will leave because they wouldn’t want to say there, and if they don't, they're going to have to.” Meaning we're going to go make them. He also very clearly alluded to the fact that the United States government is going to go there. We're going to clear out the rubble. We're going to disarm that ordnance that is there. We're going to get rid of the buildings that are precarious because Israel has destroyed it all with the United States and the Biden administration funding and arming it. So, obviously, if the Gazans aren't going to voluntarily leave – which they're not – then the question is going to become, well, who's going to make them? How are they going to leave? Who's going to force them to leave? And President Trump was making very clear that he would. He would do what's necessary to make them leave. 

So, the plan is essentially two weeks into the Trump administration not to focus on Ohio or Michigan or jobs and inflation, although, obviously, things are being done about that. But now somehow the United States government, the Trump administration, is going to assume responsibility for Gaza, wants to clear the entire population out of Gaza to ethnically cleanse Gaza of the Arabs and forcibly transfer the population of Gaza out of Gaza so that we can then go in, clean it all up and rebuild the society there because it used to be there but it has now been destroyed, over the past 15 months. 

That is quite a remarkable deviation from the America First foreign policy ideology President Trump has long advocated, which he ran in this campaign. It is certainly a deviation from the idea that we have to remove ourselves from entanglements in the Middle East. He specifically heaped scorn on the idea of regime change or nation-building, which is exactly what he was describing last night, and you already see a lot of Republicans, like Mike Johnson – who, for religious reasons, is a stark and stalwart supporter of not just Israel, but a greater Israel, as they call it, which is not just the internationally recognized borders of Israel, but having the West Bank and Gaza become part of Israel – as well as members of Congress like Nancy Mace, who is trying to prove that she is the most loyal Trump supporter, saying things like, we're ready for a Mar-a-Lago in Gaza. 

So, I want to analyze these events because of how obviously significant they are without capitulating to hysteria or melodrama but, at the same time, underscoring the seriousness not only of the plan itself – which, as we've seen with Trump, may not happen because he often offers plans that are part of a negotiating strategy – but even the discussion of this can have a lot of serious implications. The whole idea of the Trump negotiating strategy is when you say things you're going to do or threaten things when you're going to do out a negotiating strategy if you don't get what you want, then of course, you have to follow through and do that because if you don't, that negotiating strategy will never have any credibility anymore. If you say either you give us X, Y and Z, or we're going to do A, B and C, and you don't get X, Y and Z, and then you don't do A, B and C, no one's going to trust your negotiating strategy any longer because you've proven essentially that that's a bluff. 

Setting up this plan where we're saying that we would go do this, we would take over responsibility and ownership of Gaza and we would clean it all out, we would forcibly remove the people who are there, all of them, so we can rebuild it and make it nice for, as he calls it, “the people in the region” – just the plan itself is already causing reverberations in the Muslim world. So, let's talk about a few parts of this. 

First of all, the Trump negotiating strategy is something that we do have to start with because we have seen in the past that he says things all the time and then doesn't follow through on them precisely because they're only intended as negotiating leverage. He talked about imposing a 25% tariff on both Canada and Mexico – he didn't just talk about it but implemented it. People went ballistic and now it turns out that he ended up not doing it, in part because he got some concessions – you can question how many concessions he really got, whether those are actual concessions or not but that is clearly part of the Trump negotiating strategy: to say that he's going to do things. So, the fact that he's saying he wants to go into Gaza, clear it all out, rebuild it, forcibly remove the population, doesn’t, in fact, mean that's going to happen. So, I do want to concede that point. Nonetheless, the whole purpose when a politician floats an idea of this kind is to allow people to respond. 

If you think it's a terrible idea – and I think it's a terrible idea for the reasons I've laid out last night – but an even worse idea, now that I know the details of this plan. When I say a bad idea, I mean strategically, pragmatically, ethically, morally, legally to try and go into the Middle East and turn it all over, after all the failures we've had with our Middle East engagements, with our attempts at nation building. 

The whole point is when a politician says something like this, this is the time to speak up; not when they're already going to do it, but now so that the administration understands that there are a lot of people who are opposed to it. Seeing a lot of really disturbing things from Trump supporters along the lines of, “Look, if he says something, you just trust him to know best, he clearly has some kind of 10-dimensional chess plan going” – No, that's not the way democracy works. The president's not a father figure. You don't trust in him that he knows best. You make yourself heard, especially when what is being proposed is such a radical deviation from what was promised. 

The entire plan depends upon somebody going in and paying for the renovations and for the rejuvenation of Gaza. Even if he can get those people out and he's clearly thinking that the people who are supposed to do this are the very wealthy people in that region. He said, “Lord knows there's a ton of major money in the Middle East,” which there is because of oil, and it's in the hands primarily of the Gulf state tyrants, the dictators who are our allies because we have those dictators there to prevent the popular will from being expressed, those countries being Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain and Jordan and Qatar. That's where all that money that Trump is very enamored of is. He loves the Saudis. He loves the Emirates, Jordan. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has done a lot of deals in those regions because there's so much money there and Trump obviously thinks that it's their responsibility to come in and pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. 

The problem is that the entire Trump plan rests on the assumption that the people of Gaza don't care about that land, that it's sort of like if you live in Ohio or Wisconsin and you look around and you say, “You know what? It's too cold here, I'm getting older and I don't really like the conditions here any longer, it's not conducive to my quality of life, I'm just going to go to Florida and Arizona. They have great developments there. They have new golf courses and nice homes, and the government's going to move there. What's the difference? I don't care about Ohio or Wisconsin.” That's not the way people who are Palestinians think, nor is it the way that Israeli Jews think. 

The reason the conflict has been so intractable for 70 years now and a lot longer before that but really 70 years since the formation of the state of Israel is because the Israeli Jews have become convinced that they have a sacred religious right to the land and the Palestinians believe the same thing. This land is holy. And both Judaism and Islam – as well as Christianity. The Palestinians have endured so much. Years and years, decades of bombing campaigns and starvation efforts and blockades and occupations with the backing of the most powerful country on the planet and they've never left. They've never been driven out. 

This was a plan by Joe Biden as well. This is not something Donald Trump invented. Joe Biden tried to pressure the Egyptians into accepting, quote-unquote, “refugees” temporarily from Gaza to give them a safe corridor to leave Gaza and the Egyptians understood very well what that plan was really about, which was taking the land away from the Palestinians. And they knew that no one in Gaza was going to voluntarily leave their homes especially if the plan was not just to go there until the bombing ended but go there for two or five or seven years, which is what they're saying is the time frame to clear out the rubble and to detonate the unstable and structurally compromised buildings. 

Nobody in Gaza, virtually nobody, is going to give up that land to Donald Trump knowing that he has Miriam Adelson and Bill Ackman and Jared Kushner, people who are in bed with the Israelis – in the case of Miriam Adelson, she is an Israeli. It's basically turning over the land to Israel. If the Gazans were willing to do that, they would have done that a long time ago. They're never going to do that. The only way this plan would work is if somebody is willing to go in and wage a war against Hamas, against Gaza. We just watched the IDF for 15 months with zero terms of engagement, with zero limits, trying to destroy the population and drive them out – and it failed. They all marched back to their homes triumphantly the minute that cease-fire was in effect. 

If you think that it's going to be easy to go in and drive out 1.8 million people and if you're an American, is that a war that you're willing to send yourself or your children or your family members to go fight? Do you want to go fight a war in the Middle East for Israel again this time to secure their biggest dream of ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank of all Arabs so that Israel can then have the layman's realm at once or that Trump can turn it into some kind of Dubai 2.0? It's never going to happen. There's no possibility that that can happen and that's what Trump is proposing. 

Trump is saying that the only way this plan can work, obviously, is if the Gazans have someplace to go and the place he wants them to go is Egypt and Jordan. The problem is that the Egyptian and Jordanian governments are dictatorships that care a lot about their unstable population. We just saw an Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, get overthrown in 2011 by a very restive population which can obviously happen to General Sisi as well. King Abdullah, of Jordan, has a large population of Palestinians already in his country and the population is not going to tolerate watching, with their cooperation, the United States and Israel ethnically cleansing Gaza. So, they're saying “We're not going to take any “refugees”,” but Trump's point is we give Egypt a ton of money. We give Jordan a ton of money. Without that money that we give them, those regimes would collapse. We give them that money to keep the peace with Israel. I think he thinks he has the leverage to force the Egyptians and Jordanians to accept the Gazans but, again, even if they do, and they're adamant that they won't, how do you get the Gazans to voluntarily leave even if their society has been reduced to rubble? 

Then you have the issue of these other countries – Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Bahrain, and Qatar, and Jordan. Trump's vision for normalization and stability in the Middle East, the one that he pursued in his first term and wants to expand in his second is to facilitate normalization between all those countries and Israel, isolate Iran, eventually do a deal with Iran so they don't get nuclear weapons – he talked about that today – and then have a stable, peaceful Middle East. That's part of what his legacy is (in his mind that’s what he wants it to be). 

The problem is that the governments that I just named have been vehement and adamant, from the beginning, that they absolutely will not consider any attempt to normalize relations with Israel, which Donald Trump says is in the interests of the United States, unless the Palestinians first have a fair outcome to their own state, basically. And it's not because these dictators and tyrants love the Palestinians or care about the Palestinians. Maybe some do, but it's not that. It's that even tyrants have to worry about their own populations, no matter how repressive they are. We've seen some of the most repressive tyrants in history be overthrown when the population gets too angry and feels like they're being too disregarded. 

If the population of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or even Lebanon, watch these countries cooperate with the forced ethnic cleansing and population transfer of Gazans out of Gaza so that Israel and the United States could work together to own it and take it over or even handed over to the Saudis to run like Saudi Arabia as part of normalization, the population would never tolerate that. There would be a conflagration, an uprising throughout the Middle East, which is why even Trump's mere mention of a plan like this, even if he doesn't intend to follow through on it, can be so destabilizing and so dangerous. 

But the fact that we are now so quickly at the point where you see Republican lawmakers willing to endorse a plan that very easily could entail a new war in the Middle East, either fought by the United States, fought by Israel, fought by Arab allies of the United States and Israel, meaning we would pay for that, we would arm it again and Republicans are right on board, is extremely alarming to this whole notion that Republicans are also on board with the idea that we don't need any more foreign entanglements, we shouldn't be involved in nation building – as always there's a gigantic Israel exception. To so many right-wing conservative principles, including free speech as we've gone over many times. Obviously not for all conservatives or everyone on the right, but certainly for a disturbingly large number of people that we're seeing yet again play out here. Collective punishment, population transfers, ethnic cleansing, these are all horrific war crimes that are barred by basic morality, by ethics and, if you care about it, by international law and there's no question about what Trump is promising. 

The other bizarre aspect of what we're seeing is that for 15 months under the Biden administration, reporters questioned the State Department, questioned the White House and would say, we're providing arms, all the arms, and we're paying for the Israelis to engage in a war of indiscriminate destruction against Gaza. They're destroying everything. They're carpet-bombing it. They're flattening Gaza. And the U.S. government was saying, “No, they're not. They're being very, very discriminating. They're being very targeted. They're only bombing where Hamas is. This isn't carpet bombing. This isn't the complete destruction of Gaza. They're being humanitarian about it. This is the world's most moral army.” 

Now that the cease-fire is in effect – and Trump deserves a lot of credit for that cease-fire; he also deserves credit for seemingly pressuring Netanyahu to maintain it and to move to the second stage, which is part of Trump's overall plan – now we're hearing the U.S. government say the opposite: “Look, the reason we need to transfer the Gazans out of Gaza is because Israel has completely destroyed the entire society. It's apocalyptic, everything is rubble. There's no civilian infrastructure, there's no sewage, there's no water, there's disease. Nobody can live like this.”

This is what the world was saying for the 15 months that Joe Biden was overseeing this war when the State Department and the Biden administration were denying this is happening as well as the Israelis. Now, suddenly, the cease-fire is taking place and the Trump administration wants to justify the forcible transfer of all the people out of Gaza. Suddenly, now the truth is being acknowledged that Israel flattened all of Gaza and made it uninhabitable, which was always the plan: to drive those people out so that Israel could take over Gaza. 

Is any of this that Trump is talking about in the interest of the people who voted for him, of the American worker, of the American economy, of all the things that we were told were going to be the focus of Trump's presidency if he won? Of course not. This is serving Miriam Adelson and Bill Ackman and all the neocons who are celebrating because it's Israel's wet dream along with getting the United States to bomb Iran. This is Israel's wet dream: to have the United States remove all the Arabs and ethnically cleanse Gaza. The Israelis tried it and failed and, out of frustration, reduced all Gaza to rubble. 

The other thing that I want to note – and this is something that has happened several times now, so it's worth noting, it's not just a mistake off the cuff – pre-October 7, the population of Gaza was universally estimated to be 2.1, 2.2 or 2.3 million people. Definitely in excess of 2 million people. Every time Trump talks about the population of Gaza, he now talks about it as being 1.8 million. He says, “We need to move all of those people out of Gaza, all 1.8 million” and he said that figure several times. Clearly, that's the figure he was given. 

If I've got a difference there of 200,000, 300,000, or 400,000 people between the pre-war population of Gaza and the number that Donald Trump is giving of the number of Arabs who now live inside Gaza. Remember, these are Muslims and Christians. So, I think that deserves a lot of explanation as well. I have no doubt that the official death numbers that we've been given for Gaza are vastly lower than the reality. There are huge numbers of people buried under the rubble that have never been discovered. There are people who are missing. There are people who died as a result of this war because of food deprivations or medical deprivations, to say nothing of the people who were just blown up, shot and killed, who never were accounted for. So, you have this big discrepancy in terms of the numbers that were given for the pre-war Gazan population and the current population. 

But to me, the bigger question is: is the MAGA movement going to sacrifice every one of its values, every one of the agenda items it said it believed and every one of the changes to foreign policy it said it was going to implement at the altar of yet again serving Israel or making sure Israel can expand? Trump just said in the press conference that Israel is too small and a very small country when asked whether or not he would endorse its annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. This would be a policy strictly to serve Israel. 

On some level, it is also ironic because evangelicals in the United States have even greater devotion to Israel than many Jewish Zionists. Their religious belief is that Israel has to be united under the control of the Jews for the Messiah to return, not that it gets divided and Gaza is controlled by Jared Kushner and Miriam Adelson and a bunch of hedge funds that turn it into casinos. This is supposed to be the holy land that unites under the Jews and that's the precondition for the Messiah returning. And also that's what Israel wants too; Israel wants to control these lands. It wants it to be greater Israel not have Donald Trump and the United States own it, as Donald Trump put it. 

I just find it quite disturbing that parts of the Trump movement seem to be willing to go along with anything, no matter how contradictory it is to the ideology and the policies that they had been led to believe they were going to support. They deserve credit, we saw in the case of the H-1B visa, which we covered, that the Trump administration stood up and said, no, we're not about expanding H-1B visas. We don't want to replace American workers with foreigners; we want to do the opposite and there was a huge debate and conflict within the movement over that. This is exactly the same thing. I mean, Trump, since 2015, has been railing against the idiocy and dangers of involving ourselves in nation-building and engagements in the Middle East overseas. How disastrous that has been. And now he turns around and proposes something like this that not only has that dimension but also this massively criminal dimension, acts that would absolutely entail violence and the use of military force. 

There has been some walk back today of this by some Trump administration officials going to the press but if you look at the briefing by the White House press secretary, she was repeatedly asked, “Is Donald Trump proposing that military force be part of the plan if the Palestinians, as they've all said repeatedly, won't leave voluntarily and peacefully?” She said: “President Trump has not endorsed military force yet.” 

Again, I get that's the negotiating strategy of Trump: he keeps every option on the table because it gives him more leverage, etc. but it's hard to know what he's even negotiating for here because at the end of the day, even if he wants the Arab state dictators to go in and do this job and not have the United States do it, it's still going to require somebody to go in and forcibly remove the Gazans, which is central to Trump's plan and there's no way that can be done short of war. And that is absolutely something Trump is proposing. That would be horrific in countless ways, exactly what the United States does not need: another war to serve this foreign government in Tel Aviv and its interests. It would be a catastrophe of humanitarianism on an indescribable scale. 

So, I think this doesn't deserve hysteria. I don't think this deserves the kind of falling apart and unraveling that so often Trump statements do because they're not intended to necessarily predict what will happen but it absolutely deserves a lot of opposition so the Trump administration knows that nobody's going to tolerate more Middle East engagements, more wars, more nation-building – not even for the United States interest to be served, but for the state of Israel to be served and that is exactly what's happening here. 

All right. So, I wanted to respond quickly. I watched that press briefing today. I've seen this unfold today. I thought it deserved a lot of commentary and analysis and reaction and dissection because it's really Trump's first war, and he's been overtly threatening. I mean, he alluded to military force in Panama, but not a plan this explicit. I think it's very important to make clear as much as possible that Americans don't want this kind of war. They don't want to send their kids to these kinds of wars. They don't want to pay for these kinds of wars. We've done enough to serve the interest of Israel at the expense of the United States and something like this would be in an entirely different universe which makes it utterly unacceptable.

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Tulsi and RFK Jr. Approved by Key Senate Committees | Trump Meets Netanyahu: Wants to Cleanse Gaza | Pro-Palestinian Group Suspended at UMich
System Update #402

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!


Two of Donald Trump's most controversial nominees, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, each took a major step forward to being confirmed. 

 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington today to become, unsurprisingly, the first foreign leader received by President Trump since his inauguration and Trump again stated his support for moving all the Palestinians out of Gaza, a series of events that could and should and only can be described as ethnic cleansing. 

And then, the investigative reporter Dave Boucher, will be here to talk about yet another pro-Palestinian group, this one at the University of Michigan, which was suspended as a result of their activism in speech as the ongoing assault on free speech to protect Israel in the United States continues unabated. The Students Allied for Freedom And Equality, also known as SAFE, were suspended from all campus activities for two years. 


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We've been extensively covering the nomination by Donald Trump to two critical positions inside the cabinet, both of whom have a long history of being heterodox thinkers and anti-establishment officials and, as a result, have created more controversy than almost any other official. We've seen people like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik and John Ratcliffe at CIA get approved unanimously with all Democrats voting but because both Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump wants to make Director of National Intelligence, and RFK Jr., whom Trump wants to make Secretary of Health and Human Resources, have a history of contesting, challenging and denying a whole bunch of establishment orthodoxies, as well as condemning the corruption of the agencies that they would lead, those have created more controversy than almost any other up there – with Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth and, certainly, Matt Gaetz, the most controversial, who never made it to a confirmation hearing. 

Today, however, both of them had major successes, cleared major hurdles, and have substantially increased the likelihood that they will actually be confirmed by the full Senate. I don't want to say that it's 100%. It still does need to go to the Senate floor but here is the Senate Finance Committee voting today on the confirmation of RFK Jr. to become Health and Human Services Secretary. 

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Rubio's Shift: What is Trump's Foreign Policy? | Trump/Musk Attack CIA Fronts USAID & NED: With Mike Benz
System Update #401

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!


Ever since Donald Trump entered the White House to begin his second term, there has been – by design – a flurry of highly significant orders, policies and changes, most of which, for better or worse, were promised during the campaign. The rapidity of these changes has created the impression for some that there is no coherence behind them, that they are all just designed to appease Trump's base voters with symbolism or to impose frantic vengeance.

If one digs deeply enough, one can locate a coherent worldview, especially when it comes to Trump's foreign policy changes. When Trump began nominating a series of conventional establishment Republicans to key positions after the election, people like Marco Rubio at State and Elise Stefanik at the U.N. and others – many people demanded of us that we denounce these picks, given that they signaled that Trump's pledge for a new kind of foreign policy was clearly a fraud. In response, my answer was always the same: even though I didn't like some of those picks, I never thought that one could reliably read into every one of Trump's choices some sort of tarot card about what Trump would do given that I kept hearing from Trump's closest circle for a long time now that they were determined to ensure that all of Trump's picks this time around would follow rather than subvert his vision as laid out in the campaign. 

Marco Rubio just gave an interview to Megyn Kelly late last week that strongly suggests this is true, as Rubio sounded far less like the standard GOP warmonger he has been for years and a lot more like a committed America First advocate, with a series of surprising acknowledgments, highly unusual for someone occupying a high place in U.S. government officialdom. We’ll look at that, as well as the Trump administration's foreign policy actions thus far to determine which consistent and cohesive principles can be identified. 

Then: Our guest is Mike Benz, a former State Department official during the first Trump administration who has become one of the most outspoken and knowledgeable critics of the US Security State. In the last year, he has appeared on the shows of both Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson to do so. He has become a font of information about why USAID in particular is such a destructive, toxic and wasteful agency – as Democrats march to protect it - and he'll be here with us to talk about why that is.


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Donald Trump often railed against the toxic and evil influence of neocons, particularly in American foreign policy, throughout 2023 and 2024, as he attempted to return to the White House. He seemed convinced of it and had a lot of policy initiatives designed to undermine the promises of neoconservatism and, in the process, alienated a lot of them, beginning with things like his opposition to or at least skepticism about the U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, the U.S. making NATO a central part of our foreign policy, even though the original purpose which is to deter the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe, obviously no longer applies, and a whole variety of other pieties of the foreign policy establishment Donald Trump was waging a frontal assault on. 

Once Trump won the election and began choosing his national security cabinet, a lot of people immediately concluded that all of that must be a fraud because Trump was choosing people like Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Mike Huckabee to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel, like John Ratcliffe at the CIA, like Mike Waltz to be his National Security Advisor, who have a long history similar to Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley or even Liz Cheney in endorsing this sort of posture of endless war, of having the U.S. dominate the world in exactly the way that would please most neocons. 

Although, as I said, I wasn't thrilled with those picks, I wasn't the one elected, so my choices would be much different. I was very resistant to the idea that simply because Trump was choosing some, by no means all, but some politicians who have a long history of establishment dogma. Those are the ones who sped through confirmation in the Senate, of course, including with lots of Democratic support. It didn't mean that those people were going to be governing foreign policy in the Trump administration because it was clear that Donald Trump knew that he was the one who won this race and intended to impose his vision on the world and wanted loyalists around him who would carry out those visions. 

In contrast to the first term, when he had a lot of people there who were deliberately sabotaging his foreign policy, often applauded by the media, including members, by the way, of the U.S. military, which meant that the U.S. military was essentially seizing civilian control of foreign policy, seizing control from democratically elected officials and assigning it to themselves so that they would often counter or even ignore his foreign policy decisions and they would be celebrated by the press as the adult in the room. This was all something that I knew from hearing from many people inside the Trump circle, both on the show and otherwise, that they were most determined to avoid. And so, when they were picking the Marco Rubios and the Elise Stefaniks, I wasn't happy about it but I also knew that it wasn't proof that Trump was going to lead a conventional U.S. foreign policy because it was clear that they were picking people who, beyond any particular set of beliefs, was willing to be loyal to Donald Trump's worldview and his agenda, because that's what had just been ratified by the American people. 

Even The New York Times in the wake of Trump’s victory in November, and I'm not sure they meant this as a compliment or as a warning, but either way, they were the ones who were coming out and saying, look, these people were neocons for sure, but they've now made radical, visible and palpable changes to the way they talk about foreign policy. Here, The New York Times headline:

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