Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Overnight, the Western Press Radically Rewrote the Truth About Ukraine to Serve Biden's Endless War Policies
Video Transcript
June 06, 2023
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First, we are very excited to announce documents from the U.S. security state that prove that the US government completely in the dark and with no democratic debate, indeed, unbeknownst to even high-level members of Congress, converted the Internet into a pervasive system of indiscriminate mass surveillance aimed at the American people. 

That first article is one I published in The Guardian on June 6, 2013, and it revealed a secret order of the FISA court that required all American phone companies to turn over to the NSA detailed telephone records on all American citizens, a deeply invasive spying program that enabled the US government to know of every call we made to whom and from whom, how long we spoke, and the time of day or night, exactly the kind of mass surveillance that millions of Americans which President Obama's senior national security official, James Clapper, just months earlier, had falsely denied to the Senate that the NSA was doing. And that kicked off that article, months, in fact, years, of reporting from this top secret archive. 

To commemorate the ten year anniversary. I will speak tomorrow night to the two people whose work, courage and integrity were the most crucial to do this reporting. Our source, the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden, whom the Obama administration purposely trapped in Russia when he was transiting in order to discredit him and thus the reporting as a Kremlin agent, And Laura Poitras, who had been placed on a U.S. government watch list for her 2004 Oscar-nominated film about the war in Iraq, and whose film about the work we did with Snowden in Hong Kong, Citizenfour, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2015. 

The three of us, Snowden, Laura Poitras and I will revisit tomorrow night the choices we made, the climate of threats and intimidation that instantly arose when began reporting the role of the corporate press in defending the NSA in the U.S. government and the entire impact of that reporting. Ten years later, the U.S. surveillance state continues to expand; yet now, with far more weapons in the hands of individuals to combat that surveillance state. I'm really excited to share our discussion with you tomorrow night on this program, live, at 7 p.m., exclusively on Rumble.

 For tonight, a New York Times article today admits what has long been obvious, yet has been hidden behind a taboo, namely, that the Ukrainian military, which the U.S. government is now funding and to which the U.S. is providing huge stockpiles of advanced heavy weaponry is awash in Nazi battalions, Nazi flags and imagery, and Nazi ideology. 

We'll show you how in real time the U.S. corporate press completely rewrote history and the facts about Ukraine in order to align with the U.S. security state's agenda, overnight, simply denying facts they had been reporting and affirming for a full decade before Russia invaded, and how big tech radically rewrote its own censorship policies to ensure that speech, which affirmed U.S. government narratives thrived while speech that dissented from U.S. government policy was censored. Whatever your views on Joe Biden's war policies in Ukraine, his commitment, which is supported by the establishment of both parties to fuel this increasingly unstable and dangerous proxy war, whatever your views on that are, there are few things more dangerous than having the corporate media create false and propagandistic worlds that have no purpose other than to shield government words from dissent and critical scrutiny. 

Yet, as we will break down tonight and demonstrate, this is exactly what the U.S. corporate press, and the Western press more broadly, has been doing, in full cooperation with the security state agencies of Western governments. For as bad and oppressive as the media propaganda was surrounding the Iraq war – and it was bad – I would submit that the media propaganda to maintain support for the proxy war in Ukraine has been far more extreme, repressive, dishonest and shielded from any meaningful dissent. 

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


There are really few things more dangerous than having the corporate media create propagandistic worlds in which one minute a fact that is affirmed, overnight becomes a fact that gets denied. To have decade-long narratives about a country like Ukraine get completely rewritten, revised and whitewashed with a specific and clear goal of having their reporting align with the security state of the United States and its war policies – and yet that is exactly what the US media has done. There is a new article in the New York Times today that very begrudgingly acknowledges a core truth about the situation in Ukraine, one that the Western press had spent a decade warning about. But then, overnight, as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine and the United States government, other Western governments sided with Ukraine in that proxy war, just disappeared from public view. In fact, what had been long affirmed by the Western press for a decade became banned to prohibit, to express on the grounds that it was Russian propaganda or evidence somehow that you were aligned with or loyal to the Kremlin, if you simply acknowledged it, a tactic that has become increasingly common and that is, in fact, the go-to tactic of the Western press to stigmatize dissent and to propagandize the public, to label all dissent, disloyalty, or proof of allegiance to the Kremlin, almost to the point of caricature. And yet, allegations of disloyalty to your own country, your own tribe, are inherently potent. And it has really been effective in keeping this flow of information about this war in Iraq, which, remember, even Joe Biden himself says has brought the world closer to nuclear Armageddon than any time, since 1962, to keep the flow of information about that war completely closed off from dissent. 

Now, let's look at what the New York Times acknowledged today, the fact they acknowledged it is significant, the way in which they acknowledged it and tried to frame it though is incredibly revealing in how propagandistic the Western press is when it comes to this war. The headline reads “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History.” The subheadline reads “Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.” So they are admitting that there are all sorts of Nazi emblems spread throughout the Ukrainian military, we have all seen them. They aren’t just posted from random trolls but even Ukraine’s government and NATO and Western media outlets have repeatedly got caught posting glorifying the photos of Ukrainian military battalions and soldiers, only to be embarassed when they learned afterward that the image that they were spreading and glorifying contained classic Nazi symbols. And I don’t mean MAGA hats. I mean the real deal Nazi flags, imagery, and symbols from battalions who are explicitly loyal to neo-Nazi idealogy. For a decade, the Western press has warned that the dominant faction, the best faction fighting force in Ukraine are the Azov and allied groups that have explicitly adopted the neo-Nazi idealogy. Now, maybe you are someone who doesn’t care about that. Maybe, you are someone that is happy to see neo-Nazi groups in Europe armed again. Maybe you think this time that will work out well unlike the last time Nazi idealogy took root in Europe and began to be flooded heavy weaponry. Regardless of your views on Ukraine and the war, we should want our media telling the truth, not rewriting history to suit government war policies and that’s exactly what this propaganda has been about. Let’s take a look at the article. 

 

Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench, and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.

 In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups. The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

Let me just stop there. Let's look at this phrase. Let’s savor it. The Ukrainian military has a “complicated relationship” with Nazi imagery! Do you think that if it came to any other group on this planet, especially when the New York Times was seeking to vilify instead of glorify, they would describe that group's relationship with Nazi imagery as “complicated”? We generally don't regard an embrace of Nazi symbols and Nazi flags and Nazi mottos and Nazi slogans and Nazi ideologies as “complicated”. In fact, it's one of the simplest things when it comes to a moral framework and a geostrategic one. We ought to avoid arming militias and battalions related to Nazi imagery. But in this case, the New York Times needs to justify it, needs to mitigate it and so now it becomes “complicated.” You're going to see this kind of moral relativity throughout the entire article. 

Again, if someone in the West wears a MAGA hat, that becomes instant proof they’re Nazi. They have to be destroyed. They're not entitled to free speech. They're not entitled to due process. You can imprison them for months with no trial, and it's all justified because they're Nazis. But then when Western institutions meet actual Nazis, like the real deal kind, the kind that admired Nazi Germany and view classic Nazi collaborators as heroes and inspirations, neo-liberal institutions in the United States want to arm and fund them and turn them into heroes. So, here we see the “complicated relationship” that Ukraine's military has with Nazi imagery, 

 

[…] a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II. That relationship has become especially delicate because President Vladimir Putin of Russia has falsely declared Ukraine to be a Nazi state, a claim he has used to justify his illegal invasion. […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

The fact that Russia asserts a particular thing to be true does not make it immoral to acknowledge its truth if it's actually true. If what the Russian government is saying is factually correct, the fact that your view aligns with the Russian government does not make you a Russian propagandist or Kremlin agent. It just means that you're both acknowledging the same fact and the claim that Putin made when originally announcing his invasion – namely that there is a significant faction in the Ukrainian military and in Ukraine composed of Nazis, and that therefore part of that military operation is designed not to fight the Ukrainian state – is one that has been made over and over and over again by almost every major Western media outlet before this war, including, as we will show you, The New York Times. And yet, now, what The New York Times is essentially saying is the only reason it's a problem for Ukrainian militias and battalions to be enamored of Nazi ideology is not because it's inherently problematic that they're Nazis, but because it fortifies Russian propaganda – it makes Putin's claim seem valid. Do you know why? Because in this particular case, it happens to be. And the only thing you need to do to see that is to look at what the Western press has been saying for 10 years before the invasion when they changed their story overnight because that fact became too inconvenient to admit any longer. The Times goes on:

 

The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

Try that. Try that! Go out on the street, if you're a conservative in the United States, proudly wearing Nazi symbols and Nazi ideology, and when your photo is taken and The New York Times publishes it, and every liberal journalist in this country demands that you get fired from your job and excluded from the financial system, try this excuse that The New York Times is accepting from Ukrainians wearing Nazi symbols: “Oh, I don't interpret the swastika or the black sun or these other Nazi symbols as Nazism. I just interpret that as American sovereignty and American pride.” Let me know if that works out or if The New York Times is sympathetic to that claim when it comes from conservatives in the United States or in the West as opposed to the Ukrainian battalion Joe Biden is dead set on arming into for all of eternity, it seems. 

The article goes on:

 

In the short term that threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin's propaganda and giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be “de-Nazified” – a position that ignores the fact that Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023) 

 

Let me stop again here. What The Times is trying to tell you, is that you don't have to worry about the fact that huge numbers of Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainian people and Ukrainian battalions are openly embracing Nazi ideology because the president of Ukraine is Jewish. 

Now, what I want you to do is the next time somebody says that the United States has a problem with systemic racism or that the United States is a country founded on white supremacy – claims that are extremely common, in fact, gospel in liberal discourse – I want you to say in response: “Well, of course, that cannot be true, because after all, the president of the United States, from 2008 to 2016, Barack Obama, is black. Therefore, it cannot be true that the United States is founded on an ideology of white supremacy or that that ideology continues to be the predominant ideology in the United States.” Or you can point out that not only is President Obama, who was elected and then reelected, black but also the current vice president, Kamala Harris, as well. And therefore, that is a negation of the claim that the United States is a racist country. It seems to work here from The New York Times when it comes to Ukraine – I don't think that you would be very successful in arguing that when it came to similar claims about the United States. 

The article goes on. 

 

More broadly, Ukraine's ambivalence about these symbols and sometimes even its acceptance of them risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate. […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

 Okay, so The New York Times is acknowledging that Ukraine is ambivalent about Nazi symbols, and sometimes even accepting of them seems like a pretty big deal to admit, given that’s the country that we are turning into one of the most well-armed countries on the planet. What is the concern the New York Times has about the fact? Is it that Nazis are being armed and that might lead to very dangerous outcomes in the future? No, the concern is this “risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.”

 

“What worries me, in the Ukrainian context, is that people in Ukraine who are either in leadership positions, either they don't or they're not willing to acknowledge and understand how these symbols are viewed outside of Ukraine,” said Michael Colborne, a researcher at the investigative group Bellingcat who studies the international far right. (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)



 Are you surprised that the first expert – the apolitical, neutral expert – cited by The New York Times in this article happens to be somebody from Bellingcat who, in a report that we broadcasted two weeks ago – that has been watched by almost 2 million people – was one that we documented is funded and shaped by the security state agencies of the West, the very governments that are behind the war in Ukraine? And here he is trying to say the only problem with it is not that these ideologies are pretty dangerous –  Nazism, that is – but that they have bad P.R. in the West. And it's really important to maintain good PR in the West so that the West continues to fund and arm Ukraine. 

In other words, the problem isn't that the Ukrainians are Nazis. The problem is they're being too candid about it. 

 

“I think Ukrainians need increasingly to realize that these images undermine support for the country.” (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)



 Shouldn't they undermine support for the country? Shouldn't the fact that the leading fighting forces in Ukraine are filled with Nazis and people who have allegiance to Nazi ideology? Again, when I say Nazi ideology, you have to be very careful because, in Western discourse, that phrase has been so overused – That Trump is a Nazi, that Trump is the new Hitler, that the Trump movement is fascist, that they're based on white supremacy has been asserted over and over that those words have lost their meaning. You call someone a Nazi now and it pretty much means that someone is a conservative or dissents from establishment orthodoxy, whether from the right or the left. But it does actually have meaning. There are real Nazis. There is such a thing as Nazi ideology, and these are the real adherence to it. And the only problem, according to The New York Times and their partners at Bellingcat, is that it creates bad PR for Ukraine. It's important to keep good PR from Ukraine so we can keep weaponizing them and funding them. 

 

So far, the imagery has not eroded international support for the war […] 

 

Why not? Why hasn't this imagery of what The New York Times describes as a regular or frequent invocation of Nazi ideology and Nazi symbols by the Ukrainian military, why hasn't that eroded international support for the war? I should also point out the international support for the word the United the New York Times basically means the United States, Great Britain and several Western European allies. Not very much beyond that. 

 

So far, the imagery has not eroded international support for the war. It has, however, left diplomats, Western journalists, and advocacy groups in a difficult position: calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda. Saying nothing allows it to spread. (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

Okay. You would think by “difficult position” what the New York Times means is that these diplomats, Western journalists and advocacy groups are advocating that neo-Nazi groups be funded and that's the difficult position. That's not what they mean. That's not the difficult position. What is the difficult position that they're in? “Calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda, saying nothing allows it to spread.” In other words, it might be helpful to Russia to point out the truth. The truth – which is what journalists above all else are supposed to reveal so that you can decide what policies you support – because that might help Russia, Journalists are in a difficult position about whether or not they should admit these facts. 

This is the part that is most mind-blowing. Even Jewish groups and anti-hate organizations that have traditionally called out hateful symbols have stayed largely silent. Privately, some leaders have worried about being seen as embracing Russian propaganda talking points. 

The ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, used to be very open about the fact that they regarded the Azov Battalion as an extraordinarily menacing neo-Nazi group. They said it over and over. And now suddenly, because pointing that out might undermine the agenda of the U.S. security state, groups that ostensibly exist to defend the Jewish people from antisemitism, but which in fact are really about advancing the interests of the Democratic Party, will no longer denounce actual neo-Nazi groups or raise concerns about arming them because to do so would undermine Joe Biden's policy. 

In case you think this is just some isolated cases of Twitter trolls on Ukraine, on Twitter or elsewhere, The New York Times says: 

 

In April, Ukraine's Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring the skull and crossbones, known as the Totenkopf or Death's head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

 The Ukrainian Defense Ministry posted a photo, glorifying soldiers wearing the exact symbols that Nazi units wore while they committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II. 

 

The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small number 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death In June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.” (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

 So, you see, all the ingredients for what normally gets people destroyed are all present now. The Nazi ideology and Nazi symbols are so pervasive in the Ukrainian military – the military that the United States government, with your money, is funding and weaponizing and arming – that they don't seem to be able to find photos of soldiers that don't have them. 

I mentioned the ADL, which according to The New York Times, the Times didn’t name them but it is among the Jewish groups that are reluctant now to denounce for fear that it will undermine U.S. foreign policy, but in 2019, September 2019, the ADL had no trouble acknowledging what was widely acknowledged throughout the West. 

 

This Ukrainian extremist group, called the Azov Battalion, has ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Our latest report on international white supremacy details how they try to connect with like-minded extremists from the U.S.: adl.org/resources/repo. (@adl Sept. 23, 2019)

 

 And then, there you see Mike Levine, whose own tweet says:

 

The FBI has arrested a member of the U.S. Army, who allegedly discussed plans to bomb a major U.S. news network, discussed traveling to Ukraine to fight with violent far-right groups, and allegedly distribute info online on how to build bombs. He also allegedly mentioned @BetoORourke. (@MLevineReports)

 

This is just 2019. This is not 20 years ago. It was four years ago. This is three years, two and a half years before the Russian invasion, where this fact about the Azov battalion, that they are a neo-Nazi group and the dominant fighting force in the Ukrainian military went from widely acknowledged fact to taboo unmentionable truth because Vladimir Putin also happened to be saying it. 

I can spend all night showing Western media accounts that have stated over and over that it's a huge danger in Ukraine, that the leading fighters, the most sophisticated and experienced fighters are Nazis. 

It doesn't mean that all Ukrainians or most Ukrainians are Nazis. That's not what any of this means. It's very similar to what happened in Syria, where the Syrian revolution began with a lot of regular Syrians fighting against the government of Bashar Assad but when the fighting really broke out and erupted into very serious combat and a proxy war, as usually happens, the regular citizens could not participate in that level of combat and it was absolutely true that the leading fighting forces, fighting against Assad, were assisting al-Qaida on whose side the United States ended up fighting. ISIS and al-Qaida wanted to remove Bashar Assad and so did the United States. So, it doesn't mean Syrians, including opponents of Assad, are adherents of al-Qaida or ISIS. But it means that if you want to flood Syria with weaponry in the name of removing Assad, a lot of those arms are going to end up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaida. Remember al-Qaida, the group that justified a 20-year War on Terror that we then ended up arming in Syria? The government reports say that many of our weapons ended up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaida in Syria. 

So, who do you think are the leading fighters in Ukraine? Do you think they're just ordinary Ukrainians who are conscripts in an army that sometimes has to continuously increase the punishments for deserting because they don't actually want to fight because they know they're being used as cannon fodder in this war? Or do you think it's the highly trained neo-Nazi militias that the West has been warning about for a decade because those are the leading fighters? 

Here's The Guardian in 2014. And there you see the article “Azov Fighters Are Ukraine's Greatest Weapon and Maybe Its Greatest Threat.” 

There was no sense that, “Oh, it's just a few isolated cases of some Nazis.” This was the leading fighting force and still is in Ukraine. “The battalion’s far-right volunteers’ desire to “bring the fight to Kyiv” is a danger to post-conflict stability.” They don't like the Kyiv government. They don't like democracy. Because they're Nazis. Their plan is to first fight the Russians and get the Russians out of their country and then turn against the democratic rule and the government that originally was installed by Victoria Nuland in the United States in 2014 – and they hate Zelenskyy and the Kyiv government as well. 

Here's what the Guardian article said. 

 

But there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine's most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists, they also pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government and perhaps even the state when the conflict in the east is over. The Azov causes particular concern due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members. (The Guardian. Sept. 10, 2014)

 

As I mentioned before, The New York Times – which today claims you can't call these Azov battalions Nazis, because that will fuel the propaganda of Vladimir Putin –  who says the same thing and had no problem saying it over and over because it was the truth prior to the war. This is what I mean when I say the Western media has completely revised and rewritten history right in front of your eyes because the truth impeded the Biden administration's war policies and NATO's war policies. And again, even if you support the Biden administration and NATO's war policy in Ukraine, you don't want the media serving as propagandists to deceive the public by concealing relevant facts or disseminating false claims because they're acting as agents of the security state. But that is the role of the corporate media in the United States. And that's why I think this is so critical to focus on. 

Here is just one of many articles of The New York Times talking about the dominant factions in the Ukrainian military from 2015. It's about Islamic battalions, including Chechens, who are helping Ukraine in the war with the rebels and that created conflict because neo-Nazi battalions tend to dislike Islamic fighters. Here's what the New York Times said:

 

Apart from an enemy, these groups do not have much in common with Ukrainians – or, for that matter, with Ukraine's Western allies, including the United States. Right sector, for example, formed during last year's street protest in Kyiv from a half-dozen fringe Ukrainian national groups like White Hammer” and the Trident of Stepan Bandera. Another, the Azov group, is openly neo-Nazi […] (The New York Times. July 7, 2015)

 

Let me say that again – this is The New York Times, which today told you that only Putin propagandists say this:  

 

Another, the Azov group is openly neo-Nazi using the “Wolf's Hook” symbol associated with the SS. 

To try to bolster the abilities of the Ukrainian regular forces and reduce Kyiv's reliance on these quasilegal paramilitaries, the United States Army is training the Ukrainian national guard. The Americans are specifically prohibited from giving instructions to members of the Azov group. (The New York Times. July 7, 2015)

 

 That's how widely known and proven it was that the Azov were Nazis – that the U.S. government, which does not have a problem historically with supporting Nazi factions when it suits their agenda. In fact, after World War II, a lot of those top Nazis were embraced by the CIA, even by NASA. A lot of the NASA scientists came from the Nazi space program because the U.S. was perfectly comfortable working with neo-Nazi or proto-Nazi groups in its fight in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. But even within that framework, in 2015, the Azov Battalion was a bridge too far for the U.S. government and the U.S. military, which was explicitly prohibited from training the Azov Battalion and other comrade aligned groups, even though they were trying to train the Ukrainian army to fight against the Russians. 

So that was the New York Times talking about it up in 2015. Listen to how that changed in 2022 when it no longer was convenient to admit that. Here's the headline “Why Vladimir Putin Invokes Nazis to Justify His Invasion of Ukraine.” 

Remember, this is the same paper that itself was warning, in 2015, that the Ukrainian military was filled with Nazi battalions like Azov. And now they're saying only Vladimir Putin thinks that. Why would he invoke Nazis to justify his invasion of Ukraine? Here's what the Times said after the war began: “The language of Russia's invasion has been dominated by the word “Nazi” – a puzzling assertion about a country whose leader is Jewish.” That's the subheadline. We're back to that same argument about Obama and Kamala Harris. How can Ukraine possibly have a Nazi problem when the president is Jewish? 

 

With Ukrainian nationalist groups now playing an important role in defending their country from the Russian invasion, Western supporters of Ukraine have struggled for the right tone.

 Facebook last week said it was making an exception to its anti-extremism policies to allow praise for Ukraine's far-right Azov Battalion military unit, “strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard. (The New York Times. March 17, 2022)

 

 We're going to get to what Facebook did in just a second: they completely rewrote their censorship policies. Before February 2022, it was prohibited on Facebook to praise Azov Battalion. Based on the. Facebook’s censorship policy prohibits praising Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion. Facebook made an exception once the war began, as we're about to show you. But the amazing thing is noting how in The New York Times parlance, what had long been Nazi and neo-Nazi groups the Azov Battalion has now morphed into far-right or even Ukrainian nationalist groups. They just completely change their parlance. So, what they had been previously stating for a decade – along with The Guardian, Time magazine and the BBC as we're about to show you – overnight got transformed into a different vernacular. 

Here, let me just show you a report from the BBC, in 2012. I'm going to show you just a few samples of what the BBC was saying about the Azov Battalion. Signal a tone, a sense of the tenor with which this group was spoken about, the group that the West is now arming before it was necessary to deny it. 

 

(Video. BBC. 2012)

 

OFF: The whole bar was a shrine to Far-Right extremism. They had Celtic crosses, swastikas and white power symbols. There was also an unhealthy obsession with Nazi Germany. 

But it was harder to pin down exactly what Faddin believes in. 

 

Faddin: No, we’re not Nazis. No, no, neo-Nazis, no.

 

BBC: But you support some aspects. 

 

Faddin: Some aspects, Yes. Some positive aspects, of course, because Germany would not be German right now without Adolph Hitler. 

 

BBC: Faddin is a recruiter for a group called Patriot of Ukraine. This is a Patriot video, but they claim to be rounding up illegal immigrants, that they want to deport.

 

Faddin: One race, one nation, one fatherland. We must prepare for... Sometimes we think it's a civil war. Of course, nobody wants to have some war or otherwise somebody dies. Some may not, you know. But we must be prepared for everything. 

 

BBC: Do you recruit from the stands? Do you try and find new members? 

 

Faddin: Oh, yeah. Yeah. 

 

BBC: I could see why football terraces could be fertile recruiting grounds for the Patriots. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, right-wing politics and hooliganism have gone hand in hand. At this match, I spotted two fans with Patriot logos on their t-shirts and it wasn't long before the fascist-style salutes began. It was a gesture I would see at every Ukrainian game I went to. 



I mean, what more do you want? He said, “At every single Ukrainian game I went to I saw people doing this.” Not wearing Trump signs or Trump t-shirts, but giving Nazi salutes, decorating themselves with swastikas, and talking about the positive aspects of Hitler in Nazi Germany. And again, maybe that doesn't bother you. That's your right to say ‘I don't mind that.’ ‘I'm happy that the United States armed those groups.’ But it's the role of the media to at least acknowledge the truth and tell you about it. And they used to do so until doing so became incompatible with the agenda of the United States government. 

You may say that's 2012. The New York Times article is from 2015. The Guardian Article is from 2014. This has been going on all the way right up until the start of the war in Ukraine. 

Here is a Time magazine, a mini-documentary on the Azov Battalion that essentially over and over called them neo-Nazis, white supremacists, 2021. They posted it on Twitter, it viralized. Everybody loved it. “Oh, my God, these are real Nazis dominating the Ukrainian military. This seems like a huge problem.” This was, you know, less than a year before Russia invaded Ukraine and then this became a prohibited fact to point out. Anyone pointing out this what Time magazine – that most mainstream outlets was saying in 2021 – became a Russian propagandist overnight. 

That title is “The Azov Up Battalion – Inside Ukraine's White Supremacist Militia.” It's 8 minute-long. It's more and more of the same. Again, you're talking about TIME Magazine here. It does not get more mainstream than TIME Magazine. 

We referred to the fact earlier that big tech completely always aligns its sensitive policies with the U.S. security state. Always, and not just the U.S. security state, but the U.S. establishment in general. It was prohibited from the start of the COVID pandemic until more than a year later to question whether or not the COVID pandemic, in fact, came from the way Dr. Fauci and that Lancet letter claimed, which was through natural species jumping at Chinese wet markets. You are not allowed to say that you believe the evidence demonstrated that it was more likely to have come from the Wuhan lab through U.S.-funded research in the lab – it was barred. You would get either your post removed or you would get banned entirely from Facebook and other social media platforms. And it was only once the Biden administration – even the Biden administration – acknowledged uncertainty over that claim – because, as we know, its leading most elite team of scientists in the Department of Energy now believe it's more likely, not just possible, more likely that COVID came from a lab leak in the Wuhan lab, a view that was barred by social media because the U.S. government wanted it barred. 

I hope you can see the extent to which you live in a censorship regime. I know we don't think about ourselves that way. I know we think censorship might happen here, there. We live in a culture of censorship. You can find dissent if you look hard enough for it on the Internet. But from most mainstream platforms where most Americans get the flow of their information, it is tightly controlled what you can and cannot say and so often what is banned on the grounds that it's disinformation is, in fact, the truth. The question is not whether it's true. The question is: does it advance or impede the interest of the agenda of U.S. power centers? Big tech censors in alignment with it. 

So, when the war in Ukraine started, Facebook policy, as I said before, was that you are not permitted to praise the Azov Battalion because it was deemed a Nazi group, and on Facebook, praise for Nazis is prohibited. But that created a problem for Facebook and the U.S. security state, because, as soon as the war in Ukraine began, the Azov Battalion became heroes. They were the group we were arming. How could Facebook possibly ban praising the Azov Battalion when they were so central to us? You would need a war policy in Ukraine. And so, overnight, Facebook changed its censorship policy to create an exception to its ban on praising Nazis to allow praise for the Azov Battalion.

From The Intercept – and it's got widely reported, in February 2022, so, near the start of the war – “Facebook Allows Praise of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian Battalion If It Fights Russian Invasion.” Here's the sub-headline: “The reversal raises questions about Facebook's blacklist-based content moderation, which critics say lacks nuance and context.” 

 

Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the country's Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy […] (The Intercept. Feb. 24, 2022)

 

I just want you to internalize that for a second. Facebook has something called the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy. And this is a list of individuals and organizations that Facebook deems too dangerous to allow you to praise. On that list appeared the Azov Battalion. But then they changed their policy. 

 

The policy shift, made this week, is pegged to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and preceding military escalations. The Azov Battalion, which functions as an armed wing of the broader Ukrainian white nationalist Azov movement, began as a volunteer anti-Russian militia before formally joining the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014; the regiment is known for its hardcore right-wing, ultra-nationalism […] (The Intercept. Feb. 24, 2022)

 

That's a long way to work around Nazism. But then to its credit, Sam Biddle, The Intercept reporter, adds, 

 […] and the neo-Nazi ideology pervasive among its members.

 

Though it has in recent years, downplayed its neo-Nazi sympathies, the group's affinities are not subtle: Azov soldiers march and train wearing uniforms bearing icons of the Third Reich; its leadership has been reportedly courted American alt-right and neo-Nazi elements; and in 2010, the battalion's first commander and a former Ukrainian parliamentarian, Andriy Biletsky, stated that Ukraine's national purpose was to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade against Semite-led Untermenschen [Sub-humans]. 

With Russian forces reportedly moving rapidly against targets throughout Ukraine, Facebook's blunt, list-based approach to moderation puts the company in a bind: What happens when a group you've deemed too dangerous to freely discuss is defending its country against a full-scale assault? (The Intercept. Feb. 24, 2022)

 

In other words, this Intercept article suggests sometimes Nazis are good. Nazis are good when they're fighting against the U.S. enemy. This has been long-standing U.S. policy. We used to arm and fund Nazi groups and Nazi battalions and Nazi governments throughout the Cold War who would engage in all sorts of war crimes and massacres against their own people, neighboring countries – and the U.S. to be funding and arming them. This is just an extension of that mindset. 

That wasn't the only censorship change – change to its censorship policy Facebook made to accommodate the Biden administration toward policies. From Reuters, the next month, in March 2022, “Facebook Allows War Posts Urging Violence Against Russian Invaders.” Facebook long has a policy like most big tech social media platforms that prohibits advocacy of violence against particular individuals. You're not allowed to advocate violence on most big tech platforms but Facebook also changed that policy to make it permissible to advocate violence against Russian individuals, not against Ukrainians or any other country, just Russians. 

 

Meta Platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, in a temporary change to its hate speech policy. (Reuters. March 11, 2022)

 

Do you see how malleable these terms are when wielded by them? Who is a Nazi? Who's a white supremacist? What is hate speech? They just literally rewrite the definitions whenever it suits them right in front of you and then expect you to trust the reliability of these concepts, even as they manipulate them so flagrantly to advance whatever their agenda is. 

 

The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death of Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, according to internal emails to its content moderators. “As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules, like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders’; we still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. (Reuters. March 11, 2022)

 

Do you see the extreme control being exercised over what you are and are not allowed to say, that billions of people get their information from? This is why, as we've reported before, whenever there's legislation pending that is designed to break up the monopoly monopolistic powers of big tech, the first people to rise in defense of their monopolistic powers, to argue against that legislation are leading members of the U.S. security state, are former operatives of the U.S. security state, because they know one of their greatest weapons is the concentration of information on these big tech platforms. And as long as they get to exercise control over what is and is not permitted to be said on big tech platforms, which they absolutely control. That was the point of the Twitter Files. They then have the power to propagandize billions of people on the planet. 

This whole idea about banning TikTok, which I know a lot of you support – every time we discuss that, there's a portion of our audience that supports it – because you've been convinced that TikTok is engaging in unique and unprecedented spying on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party that no other big tech platform does. What that really is about is trying to pressure TikTok to censor on behalf of the U.S. security state just like Facebook and Google and Twitter used to. Facebook and Google still do. That's all it is about. It's about leverage, saying, if you do not censor in accordance with our goals, our foreign policy aims, the way Facebook and Google do that, then we will ban you. And increasingly, that's exactly what TikTok is doing. Their CEO has basically said ‘We will turn over content moderation to you.’ He doesn't care. The capitalists who control TikTok, they're profit-motivated about which political opinions are banned and permitted. They want to stay in the United States and they're willing to allow the U.S. security state to dictate their content moderation policies the way Facebook and Google do. That is what makes big tech censorship so dangerous as they can create entire worlds of false information, they can rewrite definitions and have them bind what billions of people on the planet believe. 

Here from Reuters is an article about the Azov Battalion, in May 2022. And I just want you to listen to how Reuters speaks of the Azov Battalion, which, as we showed you, Reuters and many other outlets spent a decade calling Nazis but now that they speak about them: “Ukraine's Azov commander says civilians heavily wounded, evacuated from Mariupol plant.” 

 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Mariupol’s last defenders – regular soldiers, as well as members of the National Guard, to which the Azov Regiment belongs – are national heroes, and that he hopes they can be exchanged for Russian prisoners. Moscow calls the Azov regiment Nazis […] (Reuters. May 20, 2022)

 

 Do you see what they've done? They took a fact – that the Azov Battalion are Nazis – and now it's only Moscow that calls them that. 

 

The unit, formed in 2014 as a militia to fight Russian-backed separatists, denies being fascist, and Ukraine says it has been reformed from its radical nationalist origins. (Reuters. May 20, 2022)

 

When was it reformed? This is May 2022. I showed you the late 2021 Time Magazine mini-documentary calling the Azov Battalion Nazis over and over. 

Here's Reuters itself, which now says only Vladimir Putin and the Russians called the Azov Battalion Nazis in 2015. The title there was “Ultra-nationalist Ukrainian Battalion Gears Up For More Fighting.” And here's what Reuters said:

 

The 1,000-strong ultra-nationalist militia has a reputation as a fierce pro-government fighting force in the almost year-old conflict with the Russian-backed rebels in east Ukraine and is disdainful of peace efforts. But the radical views of the commanders of a group affiliated to Ukraine's National Guard, which works alongside the army, and the use of symbols echoing Nazi emblems, have caused alarm in the West and Russia and could return to haunt Kyiv’s pro-Western leadership even when fighting eventually ends. (Reuters. March 25, 2015)



That's Reuters calling them Nazis and now turns around and says only Moscow calls them Nazis. And in fact, Reuters publish articles calling the Azov Battalion heroes. Heroes of Ukrainian nationalism. 

Now, just to show you how pervasive the propaganda is, in April of 2022, one of Poland's most renowned journalists, quit his newspaper because he wanted to call the Azov Battalion neo-Nazis. The way that paper and every other paper in the West has always called the Azov Battalion. But he was told he wasn't allowed to: he had to refer to them instead as merely far right, something much more innocuous. Here's what the article says

 

One of Poland's most prominent journalists, Konstanty Gebert, said he is quitting what many regard as the country's newspaper of record after it demanded that he describe Ukraine's controversial Azov Battalion as “far-right” instead of “neo-Nazi.” Gebert, who is Jewish, announced his resignation Thursday in his weekly column, “The Weather Forecast,” which has penned for many years and published in Gazeta Wyborcza, a left-leaning publication. (Jewish Telegraphic Agency. April 15, 2022)



In case you think that this is some kind of new topic for me that I'm suddenly raising, I just want to show you an article I wrote – in 2015 – after James Clapper explicitly urged President Obama to send arms to Ukraine. And the article I wrote was, “Who would that actually empower?” And the sub-headline was “Demonized as Putin propaganda, claims about the fascist and even neo-Nazi thugs leading the fight for the Kyiv government are actually true”. And I documented that at length. All of the Western media reports and the government reports that demonstrated this is not Kremlin propaganda, that in fact the Azov Battalion and other leading battalions in Ukraine embraced a Nazi ideology. That was back in 2015 when I was reporting that. 

I mentioned earlier Bellingcat. They've weighed in on this topic. They are now vehement supporters of Biden's war policy in Ukraine and vehement supporters of the proxy war in Ukraine. But, in 2019, they were one of the many outlets warning about the neo-Nazi groups dominating Ukraine's military.

Defend the white race: American extremists being co-opted by Ukraine's far-right” – that was the title of the Bellingcat article in 2019. And it read:

 

Newly uncovered evidence going back to 2015 suggests that the Ukrainian white nationalists Azov movement has been systematically co-opting American right-wing extremists to advance the former's own international agenda. In audio statements uncovered by Bellingcat, this agenda was summarized by the International Secretary of the political wing of Azov, the National Corps, as a “world conservative revolution aimed to “defend the white race.” These new findings are separate from the recently reported ties between Azov and the American violent neo-Nazi group, the Rise Above Movement, and members of the American alt-right.  

Bellingcat has confirmed that in January 2016, Azov, via its online podcast, was in contact with the late Andrew Oneschuck, an eminent member of the violent American neo-Nazi organization Atomwaffen Division. On the Azov podcast, Oneschuck discussed issues facing Americans that wanted to join Azov and expressed interest in learning methods of attracting youth to nationalism in America. He was encouraged to try to join Azov. (Bellingcat. Feb. 15, 2019)

 

If you say this today you get called a Russian propagandist. They just rewrote history overnight. 

Here's an article that's incredibly interesting, from Max Rose, who was a veteran of the Iraq war, became a Democratic member of Congress for one term from Staten Island, and he co-published it with Ali Soufan, who was a FBI agent who was central to several FBI War on Terror operations. The title of it was “We Once Fought Jihadis, Now We Battle White Supremacists. The truth about so-called domestic terrorism? There is nothing domestic about it.” The article was essentially designed to say that the American right is linked to neo-Nazi groups all throughout the world, including the Azov Battalion. This is an op-ed for The New York Times in 2019 by a Democratic member of Congress and Jewish American, Max Rose, writing with a Muslim former FBI agent. And this is what they said:

 

As a former soldier and FBI agent, we both risked our lives to fight al-Qaida. But the enemy we currently face is not a jihadist threat – It's white supremacists. In the United States and overseas. One American group, The Base, peppered a recruitment video with footage of our faces, intercut with shots of masked men machine-gunning a spray-painted star of David. The Scandinavia-based Nordic Resistance Movement called us out by name, referring to us in a recent statement as “the Jew Max Rose” and “ Arab FBI agent. Ali Soufan.” Defenders of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, which the FBI calls a paramilitary unit “notorious for its association with neo-Nazi ideology,” accuse us of being part of a Kremlin campaign to “demonize” the group. 

The Australian, who, in March last year, murdered 51 worshipers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, claimed in his manifesto that he had traveled to Ukraine; during the attacks he wore a symbol used by the Azov Battalion. The FBI director recently warned that American extremists, too, are traveling overseas for paramilitary training. Almost twice as many foreign fighters have traveled to join the civil war in Ukraine than to Afghanistan in the 80’s – a conflict which birthed al-Qaida. The government is aware of the threat. In 2018, the Trump administration warned of violent foreign neo-Nazi groups forging ties with organizations in the United States. (The New York Times. Feb. 11, 2020)

 

This is, again, a 2020 New York Times op-ed that essentially is designed to say that Azov is at the center of a neo-Nazi organization. 

Again, maybe this doesn't bother you, but it is shocking to watch how what was once, very recently, asserted from every sector and every corner as a grave warning has now become disappeared from our discourse and rendered taboo.  

I’ll show you an amazing interview that was conducted by the German journalist, Tilo Jung, who interviewed the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, and the interview was conducted in German, but it has English subtitles, and Tilo Jung interrogates this Ukrainian ambassador about the way in which Stepan Bandera, who is a national hero in Ukraine – many times, if you see interviews on CNN with Ukrainian officials, they will have a picture of Stepan Bandera on the wall of their office. He's a national hero, like George Washington, to Ukrainians. Stepan Bandera was an aggressive collaborator with the Nazis. He helped round up Ukrainian Jews and send them to concentration camps. And the Ukrainian ambassador was questioned about the fact that Ukrainians in large numbers revere a well-known Nazi collaborator who participated in war crimes with the German Nazis. And watch this interview and what he said

(Video. July 2,   )

 

Tilo Jung: There have been several massacres of Poles in Eastern Ukraine, carried out by Bandera troops. 

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: Yes, but there were the same massacres of Ukrainians by Poles. Also, tens  of thousands of Ukrainians… 

 

Tilo Jung: But that doesn’t make it better.

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: Tens of thousands of Ukrainians… There was a war and Poland is now trying to politicize this story.

 

Tilo Jung: Is Israel wrong? Is Israel wrong that Bandera and his troops were involved in the killing of 800.000 jews? Do they make up a story?

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: I don’t know what they are making up but we’re talking about Bandera.

 

 I just want you to stop and think about this. What he's saying here is Israel has repeatedly complained about the Ukrainian reverence for Stepan Bandera. Because the Israelis say that he is a well-known Nazi collaborator, who participated in Nazi war crimes. It was very disturbing to the Israelis that the Ukrainians worshiped and revered him as a national hero and not a collaborator. When asked about this, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany said Israel is lying. “They're making that up.” “I don't know why they're lying and making that up.” 

Can anyone else in this world get away with saying that about Israel? That the Israeli government's objections to the admiration of an individual on the grounds that he is not a war criminal, it is just a fabrication and a lie, and they have no idea why the Israeli government is lying. Tell me who else can survive saying something like this? This Ukrainian ambassador to Germany after saying this caused some controversy but I want to show you what happened to him as a result of saying this. Listen to the rest:

 

Tilo Jung: The whole world recognizes that Bandera was involved in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Except for Ukraine.

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: There is no evidence that Bandera troops killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. There is zero evidence. This narrative is being pushed by the Russians until today and that is being supported by Germany as well as Poland and Israel…

 

So, he's saying –  I'm interrupting here because, for those listening by podcast, we have the English subtitles on the screen – but he's essentially saying this idea that Stepan Bandera is a Nazi collaborator is a lie being spread by Germany, Poland and Israel. They've made that up. And so now the host says, “Are you saying the Jewish community has invented this lie about Stepan Bandera?” And watch what he says. 

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: I don’t know where they take this data from but I am willing to talk objectively with the Israeli community, at least if they don’t repeat what has been told for decades.

 

Tilo Jung: There were leaflets spread when the Germans entered Lviv. They said: “People. What you have to know: Moscovites, Poles, Hungarians and Jews are your enemies! Destroy them! This is what you have to know. Your leader, Stepan Bandera. 

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: What kind of leaflets?

 

Tilo Jung: When the Germans invaded. They were given to the population who was under different (Soviet) rule at that time. They aligned with the Germans. This is a FACT. I wonder… I mean, I understand…

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: I will not tell you today that I disassociate myself from this. That’s it.

 

Tilo Jung: That’s your decision…

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: Yes, this is my decision. This is my decision and you can’t understand that but…

 

Tilo Jung: I can’t understand how can someone call a mass murderer of Jews and Poles a hero.

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: Bandera wasn’t a mass murderer of Jews and Poles. He wasn’t a mass murderer.

 

 I mean, there's just nobody else who could get away with saying any of that, let alone all of that, the way that he did. 

Unsurprisingly, after that interview, that interview made a lot of people upset. Among the people that it upset are some people whose voices tend to be, in any other context, pretty powerful. 

Here is Poland: Stepan Bandera collaborated with the Nazis in exterminating a large number of Poles. They did not appreciate the Ukrainian government through their ambassador to Germany explicitly defending Stepan Bandera and claiming that these were lies and fabrications because Poland was one of his victims. So, despite the fact that Poland has been a steadfast supporter of Ukraine in this war, the Poles in July 2022 objected. There you see an article from the outlet “Notes from Poland”, NFP: “Poland Intervenes After Ukrainian Ambassador Denies Wartime Massacre of Poles And Jews.” 

 

Poland's foreign ministry has intervened after Ukraine's ambassador to Germany denied that Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera was responsible for the mass murder of ethnic Poles and Jews, and also sought to justify his collaboration with Nazi Germany. 

Melnyk's comments quickly drew condemnation. In a widely shared post, pianist Igor Levit – who was born to a Jewish family in Russia but has lived in Germany since childhood – called the remarks a “shameful denial of history.” Last night, Poland's current foreign minister designate, Zbigniew Rau, announced that he had spoken with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmitro Kuleba, about Melnyk's false statements. (NFP. July 1, 2022)

 

It wasn't just Poland that objected. It was also the government of Israel, as you might expect. The Ukrainian ambassador accused the Israeli government of lying and making up claims about the Ukrainian national hero, Stepan Bandera, and when Israel objected on the grounds that the Ukrainian ambassador was praising a Nazi collaborator, Ukraine told Israel “Stay out of our business, you have no right to comment on who we make our national heroes.”

 Tell me what other countries can get away with that. Telling Israel to stay out of our business is none of your business whether we honor and treat as a national hero – a Nazi collaborator. But the Ukrainians can get away with anything including his openly revering Nazi collaborators, the history and current Nazis today. From the Times of Israel: “Ukraine tells Israel to stay out of the debate about honoring Nazi collaborators. Ukraine's ambassador to Israel says honoring of Stepan Bandera is an internal issue, calls Israeli envoy's comments against it “counterproductive.” “

 

Ukraine's ambassador to Israel has told Jerusalem to butt out of the debate about the honoring of Nazi collaborators. (The Times of Israel. Jan. 11, 2020)

 

As I said, it's important to know what happened to this Ukrainian ambassador. After this controversial interview condemned by Germany, Poland and Israel was his career destroyed the way almost anybody else's would for saying something like that? It was not. 

Here is Deutsche World, in November 2022, reporting on his plum new job in promotion. There's a headline: “Kyiv's Ex-Envoy To Berlin Takes Deputy Foreign Minister Post. Ukraine has appointed its foreign ambassador, its former ambassador to Germany, Andrijj Melnyk, to a new post as deputy foreign minister. His outspoken brand of diplomacy has made waves in recent months in Berlin and beyond. 

 

A senior Ukrainian official announced Friday that former ambassador to Germany Andrij Melnyk, would become Ukraine's deputy foreign minister. (DW. Nov. 19, 2022)

 

Tell me what other country in the world can have an official explicitly praised Nazi collaborator tell Poland, Germany and especially Israel to butt out of its affairs; that if they want to have a national hero, be a Nazi collaborator, that's their business, and then, not only not get destroyed, but get promoted to the position of deputy foreign minister of Ukraine. 

One of the Ukrainian activists, journalists, whatever you want to call him, who was turned into an overnight celebrity in the West, Ilya Ponomarenko – he now has 1.3 million followers, he's followed by every Western liberal who adores him and worships him. He has explicitly praised the Azov Battalion, back when Western media outlets were saying over and over they were a neo-Nazi battalion, proclaiming himself to be a member of that group, a brother in arms. And you have Western liberals, American liberals who think that everyone who votes against Joe Biden is a Nazi and deserves no constitutional rights in the United States, worshiping this guy, even though you see postings like:

 

Brothers in Arms.

It was a fine day in August 2017 when Azov guys consecrated me an artillery guy. (2019)

 

All kinds of tweets from him explicitly praising Azov even back when the Western media were saying they were neo-Nazis. 

Just to show you how kind of common it was for this claim to be made, here is the now deceased and formerly beloved liberal Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, who in 2016, as part of the defense appropriations bill, stood up and insisted that no U.S. funds ever, not even a penny, find their way to the Azov Battalion because they're Nazis. Let’s hear what he said. It wasn't even controversial at the time. 

 

Rep. John Conyers: […] That I propose this evening limited arms training and other assistance to the neo-Nazi Ukrainian militia, the Azov Battalion. Foreign Policy Magazine has characterized the 1000-men Azov Battalion as “openly neo-Nazi” and “fascists.” Numerous other news organizations, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Associated Press, have corroborated the dominance of white supremacy and anti-Semitic views within the group. Yet Ukraine's interior minister recently announced the Azov Battalion will be among the units to receive training and arms from Western allies, including the United States. Azov’s founder Andriy Biletsky organized the group the social nationalist in 2008. Azov men used neo-Nazi symbolism on their banner. These groups run counter to American values, and once the fighting ends, they pose a significant threat to the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people. And as we've seen many times, most notably within the major Mujahideen in Afghanistan, these groups will not lay down their arms once the conflict is over, they will turn their arms against their own people in order to reinforce their hateful views. I urge support of our amendment and make it a U.S. law that we will not equip this dangerous neo-Nazi militia. 



Okay. John Conyers, he was elderly. I think he passed away a short time after, maybe, I don't remember exactly, but it was not very long. You could tell he was addled there reading from his statement, but everything in that statement was true. It was totally conventional wisdom in Washington, every word that he said about the Azov Battalion, about the need for the United States to avoid letting any arms fall into their hands. The example he cited historically was exactly the right one, which is the United States flooded Afghanistan, the Mujahideen, with advanced weaponry to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. And then once that fighting was done, once they were done fighting the Soviet Union, the Mujahideen became al-Qaida, and they were stocked full of very sophisticated Western weapons that the United States and NATO had furnished them with. And that is the point. 

Again, even if you support Joe Biden's commitment to an endless proxy war in Ukraine, surely there are serious implications from funding this group and groups like it that are all over Ukraine. That was the point of the New York Times article today – that it was not an isolated case here and there, but a pervasive problem, which is what I showed you has always been true, according to the Western media, that these are the leading groups, the pervasive groups in Ukraine, not marginalized or fringe ones. And as John Conyers said there, as we saw with the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, you could openly espouse this ideology in Ukraine – and unlike in the United States or the West, where you are instantly destroyed for doing so, instantly destroyed, in fact, for not even getting near any of that, in Ukraine, you thrive. You get appointed to the position of deputy foreign minister after you tell a German journalist that the Israelis are lying and fabricating when they're objecting to the reference of a Nazi collaborator, and, in fact, either way, it's none of Israel's business. It's a matter of internal Ukraine's internal affairs, whom they want to worship. 

It is true Ukraine can revere whomever they want. I don't really think it makes much difference to us, except for the fact the United States and the West are pouring increasingly sophisticated weapons into that country, including F-16 fighter jets, tanks, and all kinds of missiles. What's going to happen to those weapons? Where are they going to go, and into which usage are they going to be put? We're probably going to hear five years from now or 10 years from now, that we need to go to war against Nazi groups in Ukraine because of the fear that they will spread their ideology to other white nationalist groups in Europe, and other places. That's how it works. We constantly fuel our own wars by arming the entire world and then claiming that those groups are now dangerous and we have to go to war against them. 

We talk too often about how Ukraine is the most corrupt government, so, pouring $100 billion or more, as the Biden administration has done into that country means that money is going to disappear into Swiss bank accounts and offshore bank accounts, the way the Pandora papers and other reporting has revealed that Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian oligarchs who support him have already been beneficiaries of. But what about the weapons? Where are these weapons going to go? 

Here from CNN, in April 2022, near the start of the war, with an admission: “What happens to weapons sent to Ukraine? The U.S. doesn't really know.” 

 

The U.S. has few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weaponry that is sent across the border into Ukraine, sources tell CNN, a blind spot that's due in large part to the lack of U.S. boots on the ground in the country – and the easy portability of many of the smaller systems now pouring across the border. 

It's a conscious risk the Biden administration is willing to take. 

In the short term, the U.S. sees the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to be vital to the Ukrainians’ ability to hold off Moscow's invasion. 

A senior defense official said Tuesday that it is “certainly the largest recent supply to a partner country in a conflict.” But the risk, both current U.S. officials and defense analysts say, is that in the long term, some of those weapons may wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the U.S. did not intend to arm.  “We have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero,” said one source briefed on U.S. intelligence. “It drops into a big black hole and you have almost no sense of it all after a short period of time.” (CNN. April 19, 2022)

 

I understand that this Russian invasion of Ukraine has elevated excitement and passion levels in the West to a great extent and it is absolutely true that there is enormous support for the Biden administration's war policies in both political parties. The Democratic Party is unanimously in support – unanimously–  and the Republican establishment is overwhelmingly in support as well. The only dissent you here in DC is from the populist wing in the Republican Party, 70 votes, 59 in the House, all of it in the Senate. The last time there was a vote on whether to continue to fund and arm Ukraine, you have several Republican candidates like Donald Trump and Vivek Ramazani who are opposed to this ongoing funding; you have Robert Kennedy Jr. at the Democratic Party who are also opposed, but overwhelmingly, as they always are, Washington, the establishment wings, are fully in support of this war. That's fine if you're somebody who supports that policy, you can make those arguments. But what I think we should all be able to agree on is that we do not want the Western press, the Western corporate press, with the ability and the willingness to just completely overnight do a 180 on the claims that they say are true and to take claims that are clearly true and that they have spent a decade endorsing, and the minute it impedes U.S. foreign policy to affirm it, turn it into Russian propaganda and anyone who affirms it a Russian propagandist, while at the same time, big tech rewrites to self-ownership policies to ensure that there is no ability to dissent. No matter what, you have to be deeply uncomfortable. You should be deeply uncomfortable with the way in which this flow of information is being so aggressively and rigidly managed in exactly the way that we're told happens only in our oppressive regimes. And when you break down how the media treats these claims in real-time, their willingness to completely reverse on a dime the minute it suits some institution of power or the other, the way they've done it on every crucial issue from Russiagate to COVID to the war in Ukraine. The more we see that, while the U.S. government is claiming we're fighting for democracy abroad, what we have at home is far, far from it. 


That concludes our show for this evening. As a reminder, we will have a special episode tomorrow night at 7 p.m. to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the start of the Snowden reporting, which began with a June 6, 2013, article in The Guardian about how the NSA was collecting huge amounts of surveillance data on every American. Exactly what James Clapper, three months before the reporting began, falsely denied to the Senate. My guess for that will be the source for the courageous stories that enabled that reporting. Edward Snowden, my journalistic colleague Laura Poitras, who won an Academy Award for her documentary Citizenfour, documents the work we did together in Hong Kong to kick out that reporting. If you haven't seen that documentary, I highly, highly recommend it. I'm very excited for tomorrow night's show where we're going to delve into what that reporting entailed, the choices that we made, and the implications of it. 

As a reminder as well. System Update is available in podcast form. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and every other major podcasting platform. Every Tuesday and Thursday night, we have an aftershow that is designed to be interactive with our audience, which is available exclusively to our subscribers on the local platform, which is part of Rumble to join our community, which entitles you to have access to that show, to written journalism, to transcripts of the show and much more. It also helps the journalism that we do here. Just click the join button and you can become a member of our Locals community. 

For now, thank you so much for watching. We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively on Rumble. 

Have a great evening, everybody.

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Briahna Joy Gray on Dems in Disarray, the "Big Beautiful Bill," Biden Cover-Up Receipts and More; Plus: Interview with Journalist Katie Halper
System Update #461

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Glenn Greenwald is away this week. 

I’m Briahna Joy Gray, the guest host for this episode. 

You might know me from my own podcast, “Bad Faith,” or from my previous hosting responsibilities over at The Hill’s “Rising,” less of a free speech platform than this one. 

Today, I'll be walking through the implosion of the Democratic Party, the pathetic hunt for a Joe Rogan of the left, the party's instinct for corporate self-preservation over real populist reform and the media cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline. 

Afterward, I'll be joined by independent left podcaster and co-host of “Useful Idiots” podcast, Katie Halper, to continue the conversation about how the DNC is continuing to try to rig elections in favor of incumbents, even as they repeatedly keep dying in office, and the likelihood that there might be more independent third-party runs in 2028, a la RFK Jr.'s 2024 attempt. Now, let's get right into it. 

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For a decade now, corporate Democrats have been warning that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the Republic. During Trump's first term, much of that handwriting seemed to be hyperbolic – Trump derangement syndrome, if you will. His big legislative accomplishment was in line with the policy priorities of your typical establishment Republican: a $1.7 trillion tax cut that went overwhelmingly to the rich.

There was some good stuff too: unlike Biden, he didn't start any new wars. While he continued to fund Israel's genocide in Gaza and crack down on free speech rights of Americans who protested the said genocide, Trump did accomplish the temporary cease-fire that AOC merely claimed Kamala was “working tirelessly” to achieve. 

But now that President Trump is finally following through on some of his less popular and less populist policy commitments, like the Medicaid cuts, included in his Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the House last week, or throwing markets into disarray with his erratic application of tariffs, which can be good policy.

Establishment Democrats seem almost happy to have something to justify their hatred of Trump. So, you see, the less populist Trump behaves, the more it disguises the Democrats' own failure to meet the needs of the people. Some Democrats are outright advising that the way they should respond to this alleged “existential crisis” is to simply do nothing: Just sit back and wait to benefit from the backlash. 

You don't have to take my word for it: Listen to a veteran DNC advisor, James Carville, describe the strategy: 

Video. James Carville, The View. February 18, 2025.

Fiddle while Rome burns, the expert says, then exploit the tragedy. 

But so far, the backlash isn't coming. A new Economist/YouGov poll, out yesterday, shows that while GOP favorability is low, at negative 11%, Democrats are doing even worse, at negative 21%; 41% of Americans still view Republicans favorably, while a mere 36% of Americans view Democrats favorably. 

These polls come as no surprise to those of us who consume independent media. I mean, just look around: Democrats are in the throes of a credibility crisis that arose out of Joe Biden's obvious unfitness to run for president. 

They're trying to distract from their complicity and the cover-up, but going all in on the idea that it was Biden himself, his family, and his closest advisors that hid his decline from the party and the public until it was too late, not the liberal media. But it's hard to call Biden's infirmary a “cover-up” when it was out in the public for all of us to see and comment on. The president was confusing Haifa and Rafah, mixing up the president of Egypt and the president of Mexico, and even dodged culpability in the classified documents case on the basis that he didn't have the mental competence to knowingly take the files. 

He even seemed to wander off at the G7 Conference a year ago, like a distracted child. 

Video. Joe Biden, The Economic Times. June 14, 2024.

His mental lapses were evident as far back as the 2020 primary, during which presidential candidates Julian Castro and Cory Booker had the temerity to call him out for not remembering what he had just said at the primary debate. This clip is from way back in 2019, when Dems still could have avoided the albatross of a historically old and declining candidate around their necks. What did they do instead? Disappear both Castro and Booker, once rising stars from the ranks of up-and-coming leadership. 

Video. Cory Booker, CNN. September 13, 2019.

You heard it there. The mainstream media accused anyone who noticed Biden's obvious decline of being motivated by Trump-like conservative politics. “Believe our Trump derangement syndrome, not your lying eyes,” they seem to say. 

Reuters reported the story about Biden wandering off at the G7 as “lacking context.” Meanwhile, his inability to finish sentences was “contextualized” as a mere stutter. 

Jake Tapper, one of the authors of the book “Original Sin,” which sheds light on the extent of Biden's mental infirmity, was himself one of the original apologists for Biden's cognitive decline. A few good mainstream pundits on MSNBC question the co-author on Tapper's own complicity. 

Video. Alex Thompson, MSNBC, May 26, 2025.

That was some good questioning. And I got to say, I don't think we need medical degrees to be able to accurately observe what was going on with Joe Biden. We didn't need this new book to know the truth either. Independent media, along with the voters, knew what was been going on for years. 

Biden's midterm rating was worse than any other elected president on record and, back in August 2023, polls show that 77% of Americans, including 69% of Democrats, thought Biden was too old to be president. But Democrats wouldn't listen. Or rather, they simply didn't care. 

Now, as part of the media's effort to whitewash its own complicity, the same media figures who were involved in the cover-up are claiming, well, they had to defend Biden's mental competency because no one else primaried him. They were stuck with him as a candidate. This, even as the party shut down the possibility of a primary from the jump. 

Contrast former DNC chair, Jamie Harrison, making that incredible claim that anyone could have primaried Biden if they wanted to, followed by Biden/Harris spokesperson turned MSNBC “journalist,” Symone Sanders, proclaiming that under no circumstances will there be a primary. 

Video. Jaime Harrisson, Symone Sander, MSNBC. 

“If folks wanted to primary Joe Biden, there was nobody to tell them that they couldn't?” Is he serious? The mendacity is frankly shocking. As Symone admitted, Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson did throw their hats in the ring, as said RFK Jr., and you can hear how much respect they got for doing so reflected in Symone's smite tone and her inability to pronounce Marianne's name. Then don't forget, RFK Jr. also ran as a Democrat before the party pushed about and it's no surprise why he left the Dems.

 The Democratic Party, its pundits and politicians, were simply all behind Joe Biden, no matter how ill-fated his electoral chances were from the get-go. And while they want to memory hole their role in setting Dems up to fail, I have the receipts. 

Take “Pod Save America,” one of the most popular liberal podcasts in the country. These former Obama speech writers turned media moguls finally admitted that Biden wasn't fit to lead after Biden's disastrous debate with Trump. But the hindsight is 2020. Listen to how hostile they were in conversation with moderate primary candidate, Democrat Dean Phillips, when he joined their show during the primary season that wasn't. 

Video. Phillips, Pod Save America. November 20, 2023.

Phillips and I do not share the same politics, but he was right. At a certain point, internal polls show that Biden could not win. According to “Original Sin,” the Jake Tapper book, Biden traded trails rather in every battleground state, and the race that tightened in states he won comfortably back in 2020. But the voters don't matter, the polls don't matter, not to Democrats. What matters to the Democratic Party elites is who they choose to top the ticket. 

As Bernie Sanders’s former national press secretary in 2020, I know this all too well. In two back-to-back election cycles, the Democratic Party ignored polls that showed Bernie was more electable than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden against Donald Trump. 

Now, this is not some Monday morning quarterbacking from a disgruntled leftist. Democratic Party insider Donna Brazile admitted the primary was rigged back in 2017.

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson admit as much in “Original Sin.”  They admit it! The election was rigged. But even with all of the faux mea culpas happening around Biden's lack of mental fitness, the Democrats STILL refuse to act any differently going forward, to learn a lesson from their past mistakes. Tapper and Thompson write that Bernie was perceived to be unable to attract Black voters, but Bernie was the only candidate in 2020 who matched Biden's popularity with that group, while also outstripping the field when it came to Latino voters

Bernie remains popular. Not only have he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez been turning out tens of thousands of voters across the country during their anti-oligarchy tour, including in deep red states. Bernie's recent appearance on the “Flagrant” podcast, with Andrew Schultz, had a whole room of popular podcast “Bros” clamoring for the exact “democratic socialism” establishment Dems insisted would turn off the public!

Everybody's saying it. Look, it seems obvious that left populism is the way for Democrats to push back against Trump's right populism, which unfortunately, is increasingly informed by the tech billionaires that fund his campaign rather than the working-class real populists who voted him into office. You've got to ask yourself, is pardoning reality TV stars convicted of tax fraud really improving your ability to support your family? 

What about growing the military budget (and the deficit) at the same time while cutting special education funding? 

What about shifting wealth from the bottom 60% of working-age households to the top income brackets? 

Look, no matter what your politics are, two parties that are competing for the support of working-class Americans instead of aligning with corrupt billionaires would be a good thing! But you can't convince someone of something they're paid not to understand. Which is why Democrats are, instead of embracing popular policies like Medicare for all or a tax on billionaires, are choosing to spend millions of dollars to figure out how to, get this, speak to American men. I really wish I were kidding here.

You really can't make this stuff up. Dems are obsessed with finding the Joe Rogan of the left, but they could not be barking up a wronger tree. 

Hilariously, they seem to be tapping one of their most insidious surrogates, Oliva Juliana, to “message better” on men while continuing to treat Sanders – the man who was literally endorsed by the actual Joe Rogan back in 2020 – as a pariah. 

Video. James Carville, The Daily Beast. May 2025.

To be clear, Carville hasn't won an election since Bill Clinton in the ‘90s, but I digress. 

The reason why Democrats’ mission to find their own Joe Rogan will fail is obvious: to be a credible interlocutor in the political space, you have to be willing to say the true thing when it's hard, even when it is critical of your party. Especially when it's critical of your party. The popular “Manosphere” podcaster, Andrew Schultz, gets it. 

Video. Andrew Schultz, Flagrant.  May 28, 2025.

Even on MSNBC, a guest of Ayman's show was also able to identify the core issue here. 

Video. Ayman Mohyeldin, MSNBC. May 24, 2025.

See, right there at the end is a great summary of the impossibility of what Democrats think they're going to achieve. “We need an authentic voice that's going to become popular organically, and we need to control them.” 

Good luck with that, Democrats. Good luck with that. 

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Briahna Joy Gray: Back with Katie Halper. You know her from the “Katie Halper” podcast and as co-host of “Useful Idiots” with Aaron Maté. Welcome to System Update. 

Katie Halper: Thanks, Brie. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Katie, it's a pleasure. I can't wait to pick your brain about some of the viral clips, especially from the sort of Manosphere podcast arena that have gone viral precisely because of how well Bernie Sanders himself and his ideas have translated into his sphere, that Democrats have insisted were so right-wing and so far gone, and they spent so many years vilifying but now seem to be trying to enter into those kinds of spaces. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: I think it's funny because, of course, Bri, not to be self-promoting, but they're searching for the – what is it? – left-wing Joe Rogan. What about Briahna Joy Gray and Katie Halper to take the mantle? 

It is ironic that the same people who were throwing Bernie under the bus, smearing him, attacking him, are now saying that he has some kind of messaging that's good for the democrats. There's always this obsession with messaging over content and program, but that's kind of another issue. 

I think people continue to smear Bernie Sanders but to the extent that they are praising him, they're praising him now because they know he's not going to run. So, I think they think it's safe for them to praise his ideas because they actually are either just paying lip service to it or they are afraid of Bernie's more progressive stances that challenge the status quo. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I think that really gets to the core of the issue that the Democratic Party for years has managed to try to frame themselves as somehow different than the establishment wing of the Republican Party, despite having, substantively, the same corporate donors by leaning and going all in on identity politics.

There's been a backlash against that. They're saying, okay, well, now we've got to find some other messaging prong when the whole reason why they went all in on identity politics and now we're going all in this idea that they just get the right man who's lift enough weights to say the right thing that they will also be able to compete, it's because they're allergic, their corporate base makes them allergic to actually advancing the kind of ideas that made Bernie popular in the first place acting like this guy was somehow a ball of charisma as much as I liked his sort of like a grumpy straightforward persona. He wasn't winning hearts and minds because he was a charm generator. It was because, as Joe Rogan himself said when he was endorsing Bernie Sanders back in 2020, he's a man who's been saying the same thing for the last 40 years, and he has credibility. He's trustworthy. And it's amazing to rewatch that endorsement now that the Democrats are in the middle of this incredible credibility crisis. 

I want to ask you specifically about this book, “Original Sin,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. I don't know if you had seen that clip before, that super cut that Ayman put together on MSNBC of Jake Tapper doing exactly what is sort of criticized in this book, although I will say this book stays away mostly from media criticism and focuses on the idea that it was Biden in his inner circle that knew the truth and were just lying to everybody else and everybody else was sort of deceived by them, including the liberal media. What do you make of that sort of framing there? Is Jake Tapper really innocent in all of this? 

Katie Halper: I mean, I joke that Jake Tapper was well-positioned to write a book about a cover-up because he participated in the cover-up. So, he does probably have some inside knowledge and real insight into it. But no, I mean, you alluded to this and the mashup that I'm in proves this. Jake Tapper was doing the exact kind of cover-up and running of interference that you and I have commented on the media doing for Joe Biden, for the DNC, for centrist Democrats, that we know that they do, they love to do. And so, it is rich seeing someone who participated in that cover-up profiting off of a book about a cover-up and he's hawking that product on his shows and on the various CNN shows that he appears on and all the appearances he's been doing. And I think at the end, once again, it's fine for people to have the eureka moments in hindsight. Somehow, it never happens in real time. And he keeps making these media appearances and talking about how he has a great humility, and his co-writer talks about the humility, which is, I guess, as close as to a mea culpa that we'll get, but that's not, I'm always so frustrated when people say humility like they always do these humble brags. I'm truly humbled by, insert whatever praise, so that's just a little pet peeve I have with that word. 

But, yeah, I think that Jake Tapper, like much of the media, keeps making the same mistakes. They're warmongers for every war. I mean, the cover-up, is disgusting but another disgusting thing is that he has spread so many lies about Palestinians and has run so much interference, much like he ran so much interference for the Biden campaign, he's running so much interference for IDF and he and Dana Bash have done such a disgusting job at vilifying Palestinians, Palestinian Americans like Rashida Tlaib, but all Palestinians, and taking every single rumor and fabricating a narrative and running with it and never correcting it. 

Tapper and Dana Bash pushed the mass rape Hamas narrative that has been totally debunked; they've never corrected it and, at the same time, they've ever once acknowledged the fact that there's video footage of Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian,  – what I would call hostage, what our media calls prisoner or detainee, but I think, to be consistent we should say hostage – and it's one thing to push a debunked narrative and never correct it, but at least acknowledge the fact that we do know of people who are raped by Israelis, but the fact they don't acknowledge that and that this is something that mainstream Israeli media covers shows that they really don't care about sexual violence. They don't about rape and they're happy to be doing PR for a genocidal state. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, I think it's a really…

Katie Halper: Sorry, we're talking about cover-ups, but they're related. 

Briahna Joy Gray: No, I think that's a really important point because there is something deeply ironic and dissonant about Jake Tapper in particular. I don't know that Alex Thompson and it could be similarly described as hypocritical, but Jake Tapper for sure, go doing the press rounds about a cover-up while still actively participating in a misinformation campaign, at least as significant as the lies about the Steele dossier or claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was misinformation. I mean, someone else had another super cut sort of juxtaposing what he's saying now about Hunter Biden with what he said back then about Hunter Biden and framing any and every criticism of Joe Biden or just observation from people who actually love Joe Biden, that doesn't seem to be up to his best, he's not the same Joe Biden who was vice president back in 2008/2012 cycles, as somehow being Trumpy as though supporting Donald Trump, even if that were your perspective, precludes you from seeing the truth with your own eyes. And Katie, this is what's so frustrating about Democrats, and frankly, my concern with some folks on the left who seem to be taking this sort of measured praise for the enthusiasm Bernie and AOC are capturing on these anti-oligarchy tours and predicting that there's going to be real change to the Democratic Party this time, how optimistic are you that we're likely to see the Democrats learning from the lessons of the past? And if not, why aren't you optimistic? 

Katie Halper: Right. Yeah, I mean, I think that, unfortunately, the Democrats would really rather lose to Trump than have someone like Bernie in power. But you're asking a slightly different question, right? You're kind of saying, well, what suggests that the Democrats will deliver anything, even with this good messaging that Bernie and AOC are bringing? And certainly, they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to Gaza, but, sure, on economic issues, Bernie, especially, is excellent. 

I think that the problem is, and you've spoken a lot about this, Bri, it's great to have fresh ideas, fresh policies, fresh but also consistent. I mean, as you alluded to earlier, Bernie's been saying the same thing for decades and that is something that I think has endears him justifiably to lots of people. But the question is, will the Democratic Party actually allow for any of these policies to take hold? [audio problems]

So, there's a lot of rotating villain phenomenon, right? 

So, I think that the Democrats really love to pretend that they can't get things done, that they'd love to get things done. But the truth is they just don't want to get them done. They don't want to see these things because they're as beholden to their donors as the Republicans are, they're just better on social issues often. And to the extent that they're better on social issues, they certainly are willing to sacrifice these social issues in the name of fundraising, which is why, for instance, neither Obama nor Biden codified Roe v. Wade. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up Roe v. Wade because I have more optimistic folks, left side of the aisle saying, “Oh, no, this didn't waste strategy, whatever you think of it, it's likely to work” because look at how well Joe Biden did in midterms.” And I think in retrospect, and I think some of us at the time reported that we suspected that there was not a red wave in 2022, it was not a signal that voters were actually secretly happy with Joe Biden. Polls at the time showed, as I said in my radar, that he had historically low favorability at that time. What people were coming out to vote for was not Joe Biden; it was for Roe v. Wade. It was to express their discontent with Roe being overturned and anti-abortion laws being put into effect in all the country. And a lot of red states like Kansas, bipartisan majorities came out to defend those kinds of formerly constitutional rights. 

I want to ask you, though, about this particular clip where Chuck Todd, even someone who is very much an establishment pundit, seems to think and maybe even seems to hope that there will, unlike 2024, when the Democrats completely shut down a primary, that there will not just be a primary, but that there'll be independent third-party style candidates, a la RFK Jr., running in that race. Let's take a look. 

Video. Chuck Todd, The Chuck Toddcast. May 27, 2025.

Briahna Joy Gray: I don't even know where to start with that, Katie. Why a military guy? Why this Bill McRaven person, who apparently is the former chancellor of the University of Texas system? And why the optimism that we're going to have someone operating outside of the two-party system, from this person who is very much an establishment pundit? 

Katie Halper: Right. And who really, I think, took part in a mocking of third-party candidates that so much of the corporate media took part in. I think that it's interesting you asked about why it has to be a military figure. And I think this speaks to how much the media and our political elites are so obsessed with optics and messaging and so inattentive to substance. So, it's not about what this person's going to offer. It's not about the changes that they're going to bring to people's lives in any qualitative or meaningful way. It's about whether they can tap into people's, I don't know, like, crushes on military figures or tap into our militaristic society. It does have a bizarre obsession, I think, with optics that, again, I think is because no one who is powerful, no political or media elites actually want to see real changes. So, they just want to have kind of like different presentations that get people excited, but nobody wants to see the actual changes happen. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yes. It’s a different kind of identity politics. It's the same thing as, like, yeah, like the Joe Rogan of the left thing. It's like they think that they can find a podcaster who lifts enough weights. I guess that's why we're just disqualified Katie. We're not, we don't lift heavy… 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I know. I do a lot of repetition of light weights, right? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Right. It's totally vibe-based. 

Now look, of course, there is a, like a substantive claim for having a veteran, but I think it also misses the mainstream pundits' missing how much we are in a sort of anti-interventionist/isolationist/anti-war moment in both parties. And that's exactly why someone like Trump, who definitely ran as an anti-interventionist and didn't start any new wars, at least in his first term, was so popular. So them saying a military guy, I mean, I think someone like Matthew Ho, who ran on the Green Party for a Senate in North Carolina some years back, could be exactly that kind of guy because he served and learned from his service exactly why we shouldn't be sending troops to fight pointless wars and ruining lives all because young kids see no other avenue to access things like healthcare and a quality education. That could be your guide, but we know Chuck Todd isn't going to throw his hat in behind a Green Party leftist, kind of Bernie-style candidate like Matthew Ho. 

Katie Halper: Right. I mean, I think you're right that it would be great to have a military figure who was anti-war. I mean those are extremely powerful voices and they have a lot of credibility and, of course, more importantly they're anti-war which is something that wins votes, but also is obviously good for the planet and good for all people on the planet, except for people who work in the arms industry and people who support genocide. 

But I think that it is interesting to see people again, the very same people, who, I mean, I think it was Chuck Todd who said Bernie Sanders would get “hammered and sickled,” he actually said that to him, see them act poetic about working outside of the duopoly. They acknowledge that the two-party system doesn't work, but what were they doing except for running interference for this two-party system? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, absolutely. And just as the final nail in the coffin, which is perhaps a metaphor, now that I said it out loud, that's in poor taste. If we pull up the graphic, a significant number of Democrats who have quite literally died in office, a margin that would have prevented the Democrats or enabled the Democrats to block the passage of Biden's big, beautiful budget bill in the House had they stayed alive. 

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Now, remember, DNC vice chair David Hogg got an enormous amount of pushback simply saying you wanted to start a pack that funded challengers to incumbents, observing accurately that younger members of the party like AOC and people who are outsiders like Bernie Sanders are the ones that have managed to capture whatever energy is left in the husk of the Democrat Party. And for that, Democrat elites have rallied the ranks to literally push him out of his position at the DNC and are frankly using sort of identity politics as a lever to get him out. Even as Democrats are unable to whip sufficient votes to block win priorities, precisely because their members are so old and enfeebled that they are quite literally dying in office. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I mean, of course, the final nail in the coffin was the perfect turn of phrase. But what better represents the narcissism and selfishness and moribund nature of the Democrats than the way that they are refusing to resign? Because, again, the Democrats are constantly fearmongering – and I want to be clear, I mean, Trump is something to be feared. I mean, he's not an anti-war candidate. He is terrible for many reasons.  The Democrats often criticize him for the things that aren't even that bad, which is another irony. But they say he's an existential threat, he's a fascist and yet if they're so worried about this, why don't they retire so that they have a better chance of having someone from the Democratic Party who can vote against his bill? I mean literally, his bill passed because Democrats refused to resign despite having been very sick or old. It reminds me also of the way that if Kamala Harris cared so much about defeating Trump, if this was the most important election ever, then why didn't she listen to the base, which was clamoring for her to depart from Biden on several issues and most notably on Gaza. We know now from someone who worked with her, it was because she didn't want to be rude, and it's not, it's gauche to depart from your president's policies when you're the running mate. 

We also know that Joe Biden said, I don't want any daylight between us, kid. And so, for Biden, his legacy, much like these Democrats who are dying in office, their legacies are more important than defeating Trump and Trumpism or helping the people that they claim to serve. For Kamala, I guess, ruffling feathers was more important– or not upsetting donors, or not being able to run around with Liz Cheney, or not incurring the wrath of AIPAC. So, it just belies the whole claim that this is something that is an existential threat. 

I think that I mean we are facing existential threats. We're facing existential threats that neither party is willing to deal with, especially when it comes to climate change. But it's very hard to convince people that you're taking this seriously as an existential threat when you don't do the minimal things needed to either win an election or prevent a Republican from taking your seat in the case of people who are not resigning. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it's really hard, frankly, to see in concurrent election cycles the voting population stand up and clearly, clearly be clamoring for a legitimate, sincere populism. I mean, the outrage around inflation, cost of living, housing prices, gas prices, food prices, education prices. These are the sectors that are driving inflation and which are causing life to be so precarious for so many Americans and it's nice now that Democrats are like acknowledging that economic precarity, economic anxiety is a real thing because for I don't know like eight years after the 2015-2016 cycle they acted if you said well yeah people voted for Trump because of economic anxiety they said that oh that's just racism that's just a synonym for racism we won't take that argument so now they're finally embracing it and trying to say we're going to do a Joe Rogan sort of a situation. But again, they're not backing any of those policies. You're still getting Democrats out here arguing against baseline things like raising the minimum wage, which hasn't been raised since Bush was in office. The longest period without a minimum wage raise since it was invented in like the 1930s.

And meanwhile, Americans are struggling. So this huge lane is opening up. Meanwhile, on the right side of the aisle, I think people who voted for Donald Trump in good faith hoping that he was going to follow the sort of banded wing of his party and do real economic populism are seeing that Bannon is engaged in a battle with the other wing of the party that frankly bought the election, the tech wing, the Elon Musk's, the Marc Andreessen's, the folks who are very openly saying, “We need to do AI, we need to put the public out of business, we're going to make all of these arguments that legitimize defunding the welfare state that so many Americans, including so many American in very low-income red states in the South and elsewhere, are relying upon to survive.”

And we can do that because we literally bought this election. And I'm afraid that that tech wing, the billionaire wing, who has no alignment and interest with the working-class in this country, most of whom are frankly not even American or relatively recent transplants are going to win out and it's going to be too late for a genuine populism to actually restore a democracy that reflects people's values. What do you think? 

Katie Halper: I think it's a justifiable fear. And I think what you're saying it really does ring true. Again, we've seen in the cases of the leadership of both parties, we have seen a real embrace of anti-populism, right? And one of the most frustrating things was to see people equate Bernie Sanders with Donald Trump because there's a big difference between actual populism and pseudo populism, just like there's a big difference between being anti-war and being pseudo-anti-war. And Trump is great at appealing to populist sentiments. But of course, he's not someone who cares about the working class, the middle class. He is someone who, in some ways, is more dangerous than traditional Republicans because he talks a good talk. He knows how to sound like he's a populist. He knows how to sound like he's against the status quo. But of course, in some ways, the most dangerous thing to have is someone who substantively is status quo, but performatively and stylistically is not. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it is interesting to see float things like, we’re going to do a tax on the rich, right? But then walk it back. And you can read that in a couple of different ways. You can say Donald Trump is just a bad faith actor. He never met in the first place, or you can write it as, well, he actually is the one who's got a good sense of what the wind is blowing and what the base wants. And maybe he would be happy to do a little bit. He's a billionaire himself.  I wouldn't take it too far that he was willing, would be willing to do too redistributive justice to return the hard working, increased productivity of the working-classes back into their pockets the way that it was 50 years ago or so before a bunch of laws redistributed it to the very top, including Trump's own 2017 tax cuts. I won't take it too far, but there's a way you could read it that says, well, maybe Trump did get a sense that you need bread and roses. You need to get the masses a little bit to keep them on your team and that the corporate interests within his own party won't even let him do the bare minimum. And so, it's not clear to me how much there is a real war between the Steve Bannon's who seem to be more genuinely committed to working-class politics, even if it's also mixed in with sort of a nativism and some other unsavory aspects that I personally don't agree with. And this is like the raw, open, we don't need workers anymore. We're going to do AI, we're going to feed you cricket slop and you're going to like it, we don't even need humanity, we're to be on the moon types. And like my concern, I don't know how to read it, but if I had to pick, I would much rather the Steve Bannon's – I can't believe I'm saying this, but I would rather the Steve Bannon’s wing of the Republican Party went out. The problem is the Steve Banning wing of the Republican Party didn't spend half a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. 

Katie Halper: Right. And I think he also doesn't appeal to certain segments, demographically speaking, who are very powerful. I mean, again, I think that it is kind of a funny thing to say, I hope that Steve Bannon wins. But of course, I do think that populists, you can work across the aisle with economic populists on certain issues, whereas there's nothing you can work with Elon Musk types about, right? They are scarier in many ways, and their policies are scarier, and there's very little overlap between the populist left and the populist right, to the extent that you can even have a populist right. But yeah, certainly I think that the Elon Musk wing is more frightening than the, I mean, they're both frightening, but yeah, I guess if. I mean, Bri, you're not someone who likes the lesser of two evils, but maybe that's the furthest I can say is that Steve Bannon is the lesser of two evils when it comes to the Bannon wing or the Elon Musk wing. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Amen to that. I can't disagree, Katie. I really appreciate your willingness to talk through some of this with me. This was cathartic for me because watching all of this happen in real time has been difficult. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it with you, talk about it here on Glenn's amazing platform, and to continue to follow the Democrats' self-destruction cycle and incredible cope over their complicity and the great Biden cover-up. Thank you, Katie.

Katie Halper: Thank you, Thanks, Bri. Thanks Glenn.

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Trump Admin's War with Harvard, Fallout from Wednesday's DC Killing, and More; Plus: Lee Fang on Epstein's Dark Legacy in the USVI
System Update #460

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

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

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Tonight: There was major news this week, and we always try to devote our Friday night show to covering as much of that as possible, both through our “Week in Review” segment as well as the Q&A session, where we take questions from our Locals members and get to as many of them as we can. As always, we have a wide range of very probing questions from our followers on Locals – I'd expect nothing less from my viewers – and we'll try to answer as many of those as we can. 

Before we do that, we talk to the friend of the show, the intrepid independent journalist, Lee Fang, about numerous issues this week, including a new article he published on his Substack which investigates how officials in the Virgin Islands, where Jeffrey Epstein's notoriously bought that island, have been fraudulently profiting from victim funds and the residue from his presence. 

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Our guest tonight to help us go over some news events of the week as well as some investigative reporting that he has published this week, is a good friend of the show the independent journalist I've worked with at The Intercept, who has been published in many places now. He has one of the best Substack pages in the country where he does his investigative journalism and commentaries, Lee Fang.  

G. Greenwald: Lee, it’s always great to see you. 

Lee Fang: Hey Glenn, great to see you. Thanks for having me. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, so I want to start with the murder of these two Israeli embassy officials in Washington. We did a whole show on it last night, but the fallout sort of continues. 

I don't think we need to go into the question of whether there was any moral justness to these murders. I don't think any moral framework that I at least I recognize as valid suggests that anything other than unjust and horrific but there are a lot of attempts to exploit these murders beyond just expressing grief for the victims or condemnation for the shooter, including, essentially, immediately attempting to suggest that anyone who criticizes Israel or its war in Gaza in some sort of harsh way, or over some imaginary arbitrary line, is responsible for the killing as much as the shooter is, if not more so, and therefore we need to do something about that because that's spawning antisemitism and endangerment for Jews. What's your reaction to all that? 

Lee Fang: Look, I'm concerned about the kind of creeping martyrdom politics that have been coming into our system really for the last few decades. We see it more and more escalating on both the far left and the far right, whether it's far left activists seizing upon every kind of video of a police killing to make broad assumptions about the American criminal justice system and to engage in riots and calls for abolishing police, whether the far right who grab hold of any kind of immigrant crime or immigrant murder to say that we need to deport all immigrants or engage in some kind of draconian crackdown on immigrants. 

Now, we see this kind of increasingly in our Israel-Palestine debate where partisans are seizing upon this heinous crime that happened just a few days ago and really weaponizing it to engage in some type of collective punishment for their political opposition to claim all people who support peace in Palestine, justice or equal rights in that region, are somehow guilty of violence, that this act of political violence reflects on every American who supports peace or a cease-fire in Gaza. I mean, it's a little bit absurd, but it's kind of a continuation of this cycle of saying we want collective punishment on our political enemies, we want to weaponize any kind of tragic death into a partisan football, or just or partisan cudgel, to beat our political opponents. 

G. Greenwald: I actually started noticing it for the first time, I think, back in like 2005, 2006, right when I created my blog, started writing about politics. At the time, there was this blogger who was very pro-War on Terror, like very much of the view that we are at war with Islam after 9/11. Ironically, he became a sort of liberal resistance. His name was Charles Johnson. He wrote a blog called The Little Green Footballs. And one of the things he would do every day when he was in like his War on Terror fanatical stage was he had a daily occurring segment or a weekly occurring segment and he would title it “Religion of Peace” and he just published some sort of random robbery or burglary or assault or rape or violent crime that some Muslim somewhere in the world engaged in and thought that because he was constantly doing it, it was somehow making this point about Muslims in general being a menace. 

Obviously, you can do that to any race. You could do that to black people, you could do that to white people, you could do that to Christians, you could do that with Muslims, you can do that to Jews. When I recently was condemning or objecting to Matt Walsh, who went on Tucker Carlson to say it's better to leave kids in foster care and orphanages than to allow them to be adopted by same sex couples, I remember all these people replying to me, would show me stories about gay men molesting children and for everyone that they could show me, I could show them 20+ uncles molesting nieces at the age of five or some father molesting his daughter. It's such a stupid obviously, fallacious way to try to demonize a certain group of people and, obviously, the minute something like last night happens, we're supposed to believe that anyone now who condemns the war in Gaza is somehow a homicidal maniac or wants to kill Jews or wants to be antisemitic even though you can find literally every day Israel supporters in the United States saying the most nauseating things about Gazans. 

I mean, you can find Israeli officials in the last week saying Gazan babies are enemies because they grow up to be terrorists; “There's no such thing as innocent Gazans,” one official said we should segregate all the women and babies and children in Gaza and put them on one side and then put all the men 13 and above, so “13-year-old men,” they were calling them, and put then on another side and just execute all the men. It's such sophistry to try to argue this way, and yet it's done so often. 

Lee Fang: All connects back to my previous point that these are emotional arguments. They're not logical, they're not rational, they're certainly not empirical. It's very emotionally arresting when you see one of these police shooting videos. Often, they're without context, but even if the cop was in the wrong and was doing something unjust, that doesn't reflect on the millions of police-civilian interactions and all the thousands of different police jurisdictions that have completely different rules in training people will make sweeping assumptions about American policing after one of these very emotional videos. The same for an immigrant killing an American. You can see why someone could say that's unjust. This person was not supposed to be there, they're guests in our home and they're out killing or raping individuals, therefore, all immigrants are criminals or dangerous. It's that type of argument, and it's just being driven into overdrive with social media, with the kind of incentives around war. 

You have very well-financed pro-Israel advocacy groups. It's not just AIPAC, the super PAC and lobbying group, but dozens of other pro-Israel advocacy groups spending tens of millions of dollars per year pushing the U.S. foreign policy in one direction. So, for them to have this very tragic event that they can weaponize and use against their political opponents, they continue this push so that the U.S. stands in lockstep support of the Israeli government. Of course, that's what they'll do, but this is kind of an escalation we've seen in society over many years. It's just this dynamic that is very tribal, that is crude. It kind of appeals to the most basic instinct among us, and it really should be rejected. 

There are some principled Israel supporters and conservatives who have spoken out against this attempt to weaponize these tragic events, but it's really disappointing seeing people from across the board taking this and just saying, “We should have more censorship. We should support crackdowns on students. We should restrict speech. We should really support ethnic cleansing in Gaza because of it.” It is absurd. 

G. Greenwald: What makes it so much worse is, let's say, over the past decade, but especially as this kind of left-wing cultural war reached its apex with the word zenith, depending on your perspective with things like Me Too and then the Black Lives Matter riots of the fall of 2019, or 2020. Just then, the kind of wave that produced, of all sorts of language controls, taking premises to these completely preposterous conclusions. Most conservatives, in fact, almost by definition, were vehemently opposed to these sorts of victimhood narratives, these group-based grievances, these attempts to curb speech in the name that it made people uncomfortable or incited violence against them. And most of them, not all, but most of them, have now done an exact 180. 

All day yesterday, you heard people saying things like “There's systemic racism against Jews,” “Your speeches inciting antisemitism and bigotry.” Who knew that Donald Trump would be elected, and, within the first four months, his main cause and the main cause of his movement would be to declare a racism epidemic all around the world and the need to control speech to prevent it and protect these minority groups? 

It sounds very familiar, but just from a different direction. One of the people who was most vehemently opposed to this sort of left-wing oppression is Steven Pinker who was a very well-known biologist at Harvard and also a very vocal supporter of Israel but a very vocal critic of this sort of left-wing repression that has appeared on campuses and elsewhere. He has an article in The New York Times today that I thought was super interesting because it's also in the context of this attack by the Trump administration on Harvard and he said: “[…] For what it’s worth, I have experienced no antisemitism in my two decades at Harvard, and nor have other prominent Jewish faculty members. […] (The New York Times, May 23, 2025.)

So, we're talking here about this epidemic. I was reading some people yesterday, who were Jewish people in media, Jake Sherman was one, there were others, saying, “It's incredibly terrifying to be a Jew in America.” Not only did I live in the United States for, I think, 37 years, as an American Jew, and I'm there all the time. I've never once experienced an antisemitic assault or comments or anything like that, nor has anyone I know, and yet you're hearing this kind of wildly exaggerated set of claims about how Jews are endangered. 

So, he says: “My own discomfort instead is captured in a Crimson essay by the Harvard senior Jacob Miller, who called the claim that one in four Jewish students feels “physically unsafe” on campus “an absurd statistic I struggle to take seriously as someone who publicly and proudly wears a kippah around campus each day.” […] (The New York Times May 23, 2025.)

So that's not just a Jewish person, that's someone who wears a Kippah around campus every day and he's saying it's preposterous that people are saying there's some epidemic of antisemitism at Harvard. 

I mean, what he's basically saying there is that everything I thought I was supporting, fighting against when it was coming from the left, these group-based narratives, this attempt to restrict speech, this is a wild exaggeration of the danger of certain minority groups in the United States is now being flooding our discourse, from Israel supporters, he's making the point that it just sounds extremely familiar to him, but from the other direction. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, I mean, everything he's describing is pretty much accurate. The tools of wokeness that these kinds of studies claim astronomical levels of bigotry in society, you look back at 2020, a lot of Asian American groups claimed that anti-Asian hate crimes were skyrocketing. 

G. Greenwald: What was the name of that group? Stop Asian Hate? 

Lee Fang: Stop Asian Hate, yes, which was a spin out of Chinese for Affirmative Action. But this group, if you look carefully in their kind of footnotes of how they were quantifying anti-Asian hate, they were taking tweets that were critical of the lab leak theory or floating the lab leak theory that the COVID-19 virus might have come from Wuhan, China, and other kind of China critical tweets as examples of anti-Asian American hate crimes. So, they were grouping actual forms of violence, where, a lot of times, you don't know the intent. Perhaps someone of one race attacked someone else of another race. Is that a hate crime? It's context-dependent, but they were taking a broad brush on those. Then, they were juicing the numbers by taking tweets of something that they claimed was hateful, but turned out to be just a true fact, or likely a true fact, that the virus escaped from a bioweapons lab in China. 

Now, for the antisemitism kind of crisis or hysteria that we're in today, you look at the ADL and other pro-Israel advocacy groups at these studies that show a 300%, 500%, 1,000% increase in antisemitism. You look at the footnotes, and it's the exact same dynamic. It's folks who are critical of Israel in a completely neutral way, saying they just disagree with Israel's policies. That's deemed now antisemitic: groups like Jewish Voices for Peace, a Jewish-led leftist group that is critical of Israel's policies, holding rallies around the country. Each of these rallies in the ADL's report is tagged as an antisemitism hate event. So, that's how they're quantifying this gigantic, skyrocketing antisemitism problem. 

This would be laughably absurd if it weren't being weaponized and used by our government to crack down on speech and to defund science and medical research at universities around the country, but that's exactly what's happening. The Trump administration is citing these statistics and similar statistics when they're going after Harvard University and other universities, when they are cutting federal funding and when attempting to impose speech codes like the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which redefines antisemitism to include some criticism of Israel, and it's part of this kind of an investigation of Harvard around civil rights violations.

I mean if you zoomed out and just looked at the evidence, any normal person would laugh it off; any kind of ordinary person looking at what's been assembled as supposed examples of antisemitism are, you know, either incredibly minor or absolutely manufactured. And yet, this is the crisis that we're living in today. I wouldn't defend Harvard University on almost any other grounds. This is a school that acts like a hedge fund, that's accumulated huge amounts, that has deplatformed speakers in the past, that is kind of a platform for privilege, for billionaire donors to at times donate and get their kids into the school, and has engaged in some racial discrimination in the past, although the recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action have kind of rolled that back. Yet this current Trump administration attack, demanding that the school create safe spaces for Jewish students, create speech codes, preventing students from criticizing or even discussing Israeli policies, even getting rid of some of their departments that study the Middle East or study Israel's history or Palestinian history, I mean, it just kind of shocks  that they're doing this with absolutely no evidence. 

G. Greenwald: I mean, the idea that Harvard is some place that's hostile to Jews is almost as funny as that time the ADL issued a statement saying it's time for Hollywood to include Jews in their pro-diversity policies because Jews have been excluded for long enough from Hollywood and you just can't believe it's even being said. 

By the way, the thing that you mentioned about COVID drove me very crazy at the time and to this very day when I think about it, it still drives me crazy, which was It was really the Lancet letter, the proximal causes, notorious Lancet Letter that decreed well before they had any idea if it was remotely true what they were saying, that we know for certain that COVID came from the zoonotic leap, from animal to human, and that any attempt to suggest that it came from a lab leak in Wuhan was essentially racist and like an attack on our Chinese colleagues or whatever. Then, it immediately became canon that anyone who even raised the possibility that it might've come from a lab leak was being racist against Chinese people. 

The New York Times COVID reporter who became the COVID reporter when the real COVID reporter got fired because he said some things that upset a bunch of very wealthy teenagers whose parents paid for them to go on a field trip to Peru or something with him and they were offended by what he said, and so he got fired. So, they put this woman in, and she said one day we're going to grapple with the fact that this lab leak theory is racist, but I guess today is not the day. 

One always drove me so crazy about this. Besides the fact that who cares what theory was racist about where COVID came from? Like, all that mattered was what the truth was? Who cares which theory was more racist? It was like, where did it actually come from? But the idea that it was somehow more racist to say that COVID came from a highly sophisticated research lab in Wuhan, funded and partnered with the United States than saying, “Oh, Chinese people have these disgusting, filthy, primitive eating habits where they consume these filthy bats in wet markets and therefore got the coronavirus because they were the ones who were just eating things they shouldn't,” like the far more racist theory was the one they were insisting on, to this day insist on. It just always drove me crazy. Of course, the overwhelming evidence now is that it did come from that lab leak funded by the United States. 

All right, let me ask you about this article you wrote in your Substack

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So, I think it's a little bit self-explanatory, but you go into some really disturbing and interesting detail about what these funds that were set up for Jeffrey Epstein's victims and how much opportunity there was for Virgin Islands officials to profit from their protection that they gave him. What is it that you've been finding? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, so the Jeffrey Epstein saga is still not solved. There are still many unanswered questions. In February, the Trump administration promised to release unredacted files. The FBI, when they raided Jeffrey Epstein’s homes in 2018, collected CD-ROMs, other recordings, binders, all these files that remain unreleased to this day. They're sitting in a warehouse, the FBI warehouse in Winchester, Virginia and still, nothing has really been released. 

The documents that were supposedly released by the Trump administration were all previously released disclosures. There's nothing new there. My story takes a look at the other side of this, where the national media has really not paid attention. Many of the most important disclosures about Jeffrey Epstein's political network, how he's paid off politicians, particularly politicians in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but also some politicians in the territorial U.S., were released very suddenly and briefly during a lawsuit in 2023 between J.P. Morgan and the Virgin Islands. 

This sudden disclosure was kind of accidental because the U.S. Virgin Islands was hoping to win some settlement money from these crimes, a form of accountability after his death. They really did not expect it, but J.P. Morgan hit back hard, and it countersued and alleged that the Islands' officials were far more complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's criminal operations. From those disclosures, we got hundreds of emails, depositions, and other documents showing how Jeffrey Epstein kind of methodically paid off local politicians, customs agents, various governors and law enforcement agents to receive exemptions from the sex offender list in the Virgin Islands to travel back and forth. As he was bringing young girls, aged between 12 and 15, to his island, customs agents saw that and looked the other way, they refused to check on their safety. There's really just a litany of red flags he was raising, and yet he was paying off politicians to allow him to run his criminal enterprise. 

This piece kind of looks at how the governor, Albert Bryan, closed that window of disclosure. He quickly settled the lawsuit, he fired the attorney general, leading the JP Morgan lawsuit, he later replaced the attorney with one of Epstein's own lawyers, who serves to this day in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He promised that this legal settlement money would be used to prevent another Epstein criminal enterprise by using it to counter human trafficking, sex abuse, and that type of thing. Instead, it's being used as a piggy bank. Legislators there don't know exactly how the money's being spent but for what we do know, it is going to backdate government wages, it's going to vendor payments, it's going to a series of earmarks refurbishing various buildings in the Virgin Islands. There's very little transparency on how this money is being used and it's an ultimate irony or perhaps an injustice that the governor, who now controls these funds, is almost a quarter billion dollars of money, was part and parcel to the Epstein enterprise. He was receiving regular donations and gifts from Epstein. He was the one responsible for giving Epstein special tax breaks and then later pushing for his exemption from the sex offender list. 

So, while we have this kind of national conversation about the Epstein saga, and it's mostly focused on these documents in Virginia that are held by the FBI, which deserve to be disclosed, there are still so many unanswered questions and a lack of accountability in the Virgin Islands. 

G. Greenwald: It's interesting, for the last four years during the Biden administration, the Epstein files, as they've been called, were a major topic on right-wing media, especially independent right-wing media. Two people in particular, who are very influential and popular in that realm, went around constantly talking about whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, the doubts about why we should think that, as well as just bashing the FBI every day for concealing the Epstein files. 

Those two people were Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, who are now the Assistant Director and the Director of the FBI. And they, I'm sure you saw them on Fox News earlier this week, and one of the questions they got was about the Epstein documents. The interviewer said, “Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself? And they both said, “Yes, Jeffrey Epstein absolutely killed himself. We saw the documents.” They were very uncomfortable, but they're saying we saw the documents that prove he killed himself. 

Well, all of you, including Donald Trump, ran on the platform of making the Epstein files public. Why haven't we seen these documents that convinced them of that? But more so, I think the biggest, most interesting question in the Epstein case is, and always has been, “Was Jeffrey Epstein working with or for foreign intelligence agencies?” And it's a binary question. Maybe there's more complexity to it. 

But why is it, do you think, that after four, almost five months, in office, not just the Trump administration, but the very people who kind of built their reputation, in part, on banging the table about the Epstein files, about crushing and bashing Christopher Wray and the FBI for not releasing them, are now in charge of the FBI, and these documents are still not released; not a single one, that wasn't previously public has been released. 

Lee Fang: Well, I was in your program last year to discuss our lengthy investigation about why every […] that influence operation in the U.S., that attempts to change our laws, change who gets elected to Congress, affect American policy – there is an effort to enforce the Foreign Agent Registration Act, so that they disclose their lobbying activities, except for Israel. There is very ample evidence that the Israeli government – and its evidence from Israel, from Israeli news outlets and from Israeli investigations – shows that show Israeli government is pouring millions and millions of dollars over the last 10 years into influence operations in the U.S. and there's been a conscious effort to avoid far registration. 

The Epstein saga kind of raises many two-tier justice questions: one is just generally broadly about the wealthy in society because they were working with Epstein, facilitating his crimes, potentially engaging in sex crimes with him. They are kind of protected from scrutiny. If this were any ordinary American, any lower-class American, they could expect severe penalties and a severe form of justice, but because these are the rich and powerful, they do not receive the same level of scrutiny. Then, for your question around the Israel issue, there is… 

G. Greenwald: To be clear, I didn't say Israel. I just wondered whether he was working for any foreign intelligence agency. 

Lee Fang: Well, many would say that there might be an Israel issue. Interestingly enough, within the J.P. Morgan litigation, the kind of discovery process in some of the exhibits that were filed in the Virgin Islands case, many of the emails between former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein and some of his associates were disclosed in that litigation in 2023. It was really just an incredible window into Epstein's network. Many other emails of VIP individuals who received help from Jeffrey Epstein, who gave him donations or asked him to “manage their money,” even though it wasn't clear what he was doing with the money, or were traveling to his island, or to his New York home, these were details that were ferreted out from the J.P. Morgan case. Perhaps, again, that's why they moved so quickly to settle it, to close that case. But yes, I think just generally, whether it's Israel or another country… 

G. Greenwald: Maybe it's like Sweden, or Nigeria, but we should know. 

Lee Fang: We don't know, it could be Finland. It's really any of those Nordic countries, but the fact that we don't have these answers and they're sitting on servers, not just with the FBI, right? 

In just this countersuit from J.P. Morgan, they were able to get a huge amount of discovery from Epstein's servers, from his estate, from his associates. He had a close network, Richard Kahn, [Darren] Indyke, […], these three or four individuals who helped arrange many of his financial affairs and helped with the facilitation of his operations in this one little litigation, we were able to see kind of peer into his world. If the government wanted to, if this was a priority for either the Biden administration or the Trump administration, they could make it happen because these emails we know exist. 

G. Greenwald: And I think it's worth noting, and this to me is one of the most persuasive pieces of evidence, that when Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2010 in South Florida when he was trafficking minors into his home in West Palm Beach to have sex with them and eventually got caught, the U.S. Attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, who eventually ended up in the Justice Department, is the one who presided over this extremely shockingly generous plea bargain he got where, I mean, his charges were sex trafficking minors. Everybody who does that goes to prison for a long, long time. And he basically got something like 12 months, six months in prison, a suspended sentence and like community service or whatever. And then he was done and he went back right to… 

Lee Fang: Yeah, he got to spend most of it at home, right? He didn't even spend much of the time. 

G. Greenwald: Right, he started at home. Exactly. Alex Acosta, years later, when asked, “Why would you give a sex trafficker of minors such an incredibly light sentence?” He said, “I was told that he was Intelligence and to leave him alone.” 

So, there's every reason to believe that he had some connection to foreign intelligence. There were a lot of people with whom he was a close associate, including Jelaine Maxwell, whose father, Robert Maxwell, was most definitely a Mossad member; Les Wexner, who is the multi-billionaire who made Jeffrey Epstein rich, who has all kinds of ties to Israel. A lot of people try to say, “Oh, it was probably Qatar.” They always try to say like, “Oh, the country that's really influencing our politics and buying our politics is Qatar.” That was something Bari Weiss just published. I have a feeling that if Jeffrey Epstein were working for Qatari intelligence, that was something we would know and have known very quickly. 

The fact that you have two very hawkish people on the Epstein question, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who have been running around for years demanding full disclosure, outraged that it's not coming, and now they're suddenly the ones running the FBI and yet there's still not a single document, not one, release that hadn't already been seen – they did that ridiculous, humiliating debate where they called those right-wing influencers like Libs of TikTok and others to the White House and they gave them binders that said, “Epstein files set - phase one” and they were all waving around that binder and it turned out every single document in that binder had been already publicly disclosed long ago – it does really start to make you wonder, doesn’t it? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, this reporting, these details have not been easy. Some of this is a source from just the Virgin Islands for my story, a source from the Virgin Islands’ legislature. I talked to lawmakers there, I looked at litigation files, some which had never been published, even though there were litigation files from 2023, but also, the Virgin Islands operate in kind of a weird space, to U.S. territory, but they do not have an online system for just routine campaign finance disclosures. I had to pay a University of Virgin Islands journalism student to go in person and request documents and then pay an exorbitant fee, just to make photocopies and then have those sent to me.

Reporting this out over the last few months on a story that really should have been public way earlier was not easy to do, but it's clear that for Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, they don't have to do all these kinds of extra steps that I engaged in. This is not a question of ability, this is the question of will. Do they have the political will? Do they have the kind of wherewithal to weather the criticism, the kind of pressure from elite groups, potentially foreign intelligence agencies, by disclosing this information that could be very harmful to the political and kind of intelligence elite? 

G. Greenwald: And the fact that you do that reporting that is often expensive is another good reason for people to join your Substack, aside from the quality of the reporting that they get if they do. 

All right, let me ask you this last question. You're somebody who began journalism, associated primarily with the left. You worked at left-wing think tanks, not necessarily hardcore leftist think tanks, but you wrote for The Nation. You worked for the Center for American Progress, and you had a pretty left-wing outlook on things. You began to kind of have a breach with the around issues like crime and race, things that you were previously talking about, but crime was a really big one that, the left was constantly opposed to, almost reflexively, to any efforts to take crime seriously, to have the police emboldened or empowered to arrest criminals. You were particularly incensed by things like “defund the police,” that movement that arose in the wake of the George Floyd killing. And that has been something that you've taken seriously for a very long and in part because of your personal experience growing up in a mixed-race, working-class environment where there were a lot of working-class residents constantly victimized by violent crime. 

Now you live in California and San Francisco, where there's a lot of crime, obviously, including from immigrants who enter the country illegally. So as somebody who has taken those issues seriously, like the need to really crack down more on crime and violent criminals, as well as, you know, the flow of immigrants across the border, how do you look at thus far the Trump administration's efforts to crack down on people who have entered the country, especially those who have engaged in some sort of violence? 

Lee Fang: I see kind of like a lot of the same examples you've highlighted on the show as draconian as probably unconstitutional, illegal, immoral. If you look at what the Trump administration has done in terms of sending Venezuelans to CECOT, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador, I think it's morally horrendous. The Washington Post recently reported that many of the individuals that were sent there were people who were cleared for asylum status, who had protested Maduro, and then fled here after doing so.

Which senator was the one who encouraged people to rise up against the Maduro government in Venezuela and said that if you came to this country, we would provide new asylum protections and TPS protections to protect you? That was Marco Rubio. He led that.

So, just the absurdity, the kind of partisan cruelty for him to turn around and take those same individuals and send them to this prison without any due process is disgusting. Broadly speaking, I look at the kind of confirmation hearings this week for the USCIS role that the immigration wing of the Department of Homeland Security, that kind of manages a lot of the visa programs, and they're saying a lot of things that I think make sense, talking about the role of foreign workers, of these kind of temporary visa programs that were initially created 20 years ago, 30 years ago, like the one H1-B program and then the OPT program to encourage just the most skilled, scarce workers that we don't have in this country. These programs have ballooned into a kind of internal job replacement program where corporations are bringing millions of workers in who will work for lower wages for tech-related software and IT jobs. 

The Trump administration, which initially, back in January, rejected attempts to reform programs, is now kind of changing its tune and is considering a reform of these programs. This is something that Bernie Sanders and many of the more traditional class-focused left have talked about for a very long time. I don't see any problem with that. The other kind of enforcement areas of just like how do you get folks who are in this country illegally out of this country and then how do you prioritize to make sure that you're doing it in a way that's just and fair, it's a mixed record, right? 

At the end of the day, the Trump administration, on a month-to-month basis, has deported less than the Biden administration, compared to last year. There are some different variables here. There are fewer border crossings this year than last. You can also compare this year between this year and the last few years of the Obama administration, which had way more deportations. Again, there's a different variable there. There's more police ICE collaboration back in the Obama years than this year. There's simply not as much collaboration between police agencies and ICE in 2025, so it's perhaps not possible. So, it's hard to compare. If you look at some of the extreme measures they've taken against speech, ongoing after legal students who are here to study and who have protested Israel, and focusing on them to deport them. That's clearly absurd. The CECOT prison is absurd. I think for the rest of their kind of agenda, it's a mix. There's some good and bad. And I think just in terms of a policy, a lot of it just hasn't come into effect yet. The deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, they've relied on these kinds of very theatrical and flamboyant expressions of police state strength. “We're going to throw them into prisons in El Salvador, we're going to send them to Libya, we're going to put them in South Sudan,” things like that. But the reality is that there have been no mass deportations as promised by the Trump campaign. They've spent huge amounts of time and energy and money instead of going after them almost right away, as you said, people in this country who are completely law-abiding, who are here with green cards or student visas, for the crime of protesting Israel or criticizing Israel. And so in lieu of getting what they were told for 10 years from Donald Trump they would get, which is mass deportations, they're instead getting this massive crackdown on speech under the guise of immigration policy aimed at protecting this foreign country, Israel, from criticism and people have really not noticed, given all these kinds of sideshows over the Alien Enemies Act and shipping them to El Salvador and the fact that the integration deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

All right, Lee, thank you so much. It was great to see you, as always. I'm sure we'll have you back on our show soon. I hope you have a good evening 

Lee Fang: Thanks, Glenn. Have a good weekend. 

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All right, Friday night is for our interaction with our Locals members, but also in front of our entire Rumble audience. The reason we do that, as I've said before, is I think interaction with your audience is of the most importance. I have always hated the model of journalism that's monolog inform, where some journalists just step on a mountain top and bequeath to people the truth. I think it's very important to hear critiques and questions and interact. And we do that throughout the week on Locals. So, let's get into them. We have a lot of good ones tonight. I want to try to get to as many as possible. 

The first one is from @ChristianaK, who says:

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I talked a little bit with Lee about this and he said something I completely agree with, which is, I never thought I would be defending Harvard in my life. Especially over the last, say, 10 years, Harvard really has become a place which is almost ground zero for censoring speech. It's often ideologically homogenous. It's become just this kind of closed circle, a very specific, idiosyncratic, academic-ish left-wing culture war homogeneity. There's a lot wrong with academia in general. 

All that said, I find academia to be extremely important. I think it's a vital part of society. If you go back to the Enlightenment, which I regard as the founding principles of Western civilization, at least in the modern era, in terms of our political values and the like, academics talk frequently about the need to have at least one place in society where everything is up for grabs in terms of what you can debate, what you could challenge. There are no taboos, there are no pieties. I think having an institution in society like that, where everything is studied, everything is questioned and everything is poked at, is vital. It helped me learn a lot. 

It really stimulated my interest intellectually that there were all sorts of things out there that had been about questioning these long-term pieties and you were free to express the things that you wanted to express. I think it is quite disappointing, quite harmful, quite tragic that in so many ways our universities have become these ideologically homogenized outposts of political activism at the expense of what should be this academic freedom.

 Nonetheless, it really is true that one of the things that has been most responsible for America's success, economically, technologically, politically, socially and militarily, has been research that takes place at our highest institutions. Everywhere in the world, people look at Harvard and talk about Harvard with great admiration and awe. Here in Brazil, if somebody went to study at Harvard, even for a year, and they come back and they say, “Oh, I studied at Harvard,” it imparts them with immense credibility, and that's how it's looked at around the world. I mean, Harvard is one of the symbols of American greatness. It's been a leading college for 450 years, same as Yale, Brown and Princeton, but Harvard, especially globally, is at the top. 

So, I think, if you're going to have a government that suddenly decides that it's going to wage a major war to try to destroy what have always been America's leading academic institutions, it’s kind of out of the blue, just start attacking it in every conceivable way, I think everybody should be very guarded about why that's happening. 

In general, leading academic institutions and the government have had extremely close partnerships. The reason the federal government gives money to places like Harvard and Yale, and all sorts of other schools, is not because the government is being benevolent. It's not because the government wants it to have a nice gender studies program. Sometimes it's to fortify financial aid so that not only rich people from rich families can go to the top schools, but mostly it's for paying for research projects that the United States government once undertook. It was federal-funded research programs at our universities that led to the invention of the internet in the United States and American dominance over the internet for all those years. It came right out of the federal funding of academic institutions, cures and medical treatments, scientific advances and technological advances that often were things the government wanted done for military use. 

When you have well-funded research programs, that's how you attract the greatest minds from all around the world and that only fortifies the institution. Without these research facilities, it basically just becomes like a liberal arts school for 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds, as opposed to institutions where the highest-level research and innovations take place. On top of that, it's the question of why these institutions are being attacked. 

In the case of Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Princeton and all the others that the Trump administration has targeted, there has been one argument that I think is a valid one, which is that there has been discrimination in the admissions process for a long time. It was considered affirmative action, where you would purposely go out of your way to divide all the applicants into groups of race, to ensure that there was a representative percentage from each group. Part of that was to correct historical injustices, other parts of it were to have a more diverse campus. I think there was a time when you could make that argument that was necessary and over time we've gotten to the point where we've decided that that's no longer necessary that it's actually a form of racism in its own way and courts have stepped in and begun to rule against those sorts of practices and they had to scale back greatly on them. 

So, I understand that objection, but the much bigger reason, as we know, is that these schools allowed protests against Israel to take place. For many years – you can go back to 2010, 2012, 2014 – all of these groups that are funded by Israel or Israeli loyal billionaires were obsessed with American college campuses because they knew that that's where the primary activism against Israel was based on this boycott, divestment and sanctions model that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa. Israel and its loyalists were petrified that that would work in American campuses. They knew a lot of the anti-Israel sentiment was being talked about and allowed on American campuses and they set out this whole anti-woke thing if you go and look at it, all these people who were obsessed with Israel, who led this anti-woke movement on college campuses, were doing it, in part, because they hated American colleges because it allowed too much Israel criticism. The Trump administration is saying that you have allowed too much antisemitism, meaning Israel criticism on your campus; they're actually forcing institutions to put their Middle East Studies program under receivership so the government can control what is taught in Middle East Studies programs. 

Who thought that the role of the U.S. government was to control the curricula of how adult academics who teach adult students can do their curriculum, can pick their course materials? But that's what the Trump administration is doing. And it's all because of Israel, to some extent, it's because they perceive it's kind of a left-wing institution, they want to attack it. But they've already denied funding these schools. 

Here from AP News on April 15: “Trump administration freezes $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard over campus activism (AP News. April 15, 2025.)

We know what that “campus activism” means: the Israel protests that you allowed. Harvard said, “Look, you've gone too far. We made a lot of concessions, but we're about to become a branch of the Trump administration if we go too far, we're going to sue instead.” And they sued, that's when the government went ballistic. 

Today, Homeland Security announced that they were canceling the student visas of all Harvard students, revoking them immediately, and would refuse to give student visas for any international students that want to go to Harvard in the future. So only 25% of Harvard has international students. It's a way that the United States spreads pro-American sentiment. People want to come to the United States, they want to study in the United States, they get integrated into American culture. It has great benefits for the U.S. As I said, people look at Harvard as this place that everyone around the world wants to go to, or Yale, or Princeton, or Columbia, Stanford, whatever. 

The idea that Harvard, of all places – its current president is Jewish, most of its past presidents, close to a majority, if not an overall majority over the last 30 years, have been Jewish. Larry Summers is one of the people who ran Harvard for the longest. Their biggest donors are overwhelmingly Jewish. Jews do very, very well at Harvard. The idea that it's some kind of cesspool of antisemitism is laughable. 

But as we know, any criticism of Israel is now deemed antisemitic and that's what's driving the Trump administration. So, now, you take these huge numbers of foreign students who have spent years pursuing PhD programs, a lot of them are going to graduate and stay in the United States and become extremely productive members American society, and even if they don't, even if go back to their countries, they're obviously going to have a connection to the United States, and now you take all these people who have put years and years into their studies, and out of nowhere, they're instantly told “Your visa is revoked and you can try to get into another school, we'll extend your visa then, but if you don't, Harvard doesn't have any more student visas. We're revoking them all, and we're banning Harvard from accepting any foreign students in the future”. 

This is basically on the verge of destroying Harvard, notwithstanding their $50 billion endowment. As Lee said, this $50 billion endowment almost makes them like a hedge fund. So, I don't have sympathy for Harvard, but it is true that denying them all federal money, destroying and forcing them to dismantle all research programs, and then disallowing any international students will absolutely cripple this institution that has for 500 years been the pinnacle of American greatness, a symbol of it, and a crucial tool in soft power. 

It's just yet another way that this government got into power and decided that one of its goals, if not its number one goal, was to punish anybody who was criticizing Israel. I think it's incredibly dangerous. What we've done is we basically turned the United States into a country where a requirement to enter, to study, or to work is that you love Israel and worship Israel, or that you at least agree that you were framed from ever criticizing it. We're just sacrificing so much of our national interest for this foreign country. 

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Question #2. It’s from @Kurt_Malone, who asked the following:

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This has been a controversy taking place among various journalists. I've certainly talked a lot before about how many of the people who have very lucratively branded themselves as free speech champions over the last several years, but who are really just Israel loyalists, who are doing this to attack college campuses and now have turned around.

Now you’re looking at this massive First Amendment attack in the name of stopping Israel criticism and they either barely care, barely mention it, occasionally mutter some mild opposition to say they have done it, they did or oftentimes, even support it.

Bari Weiss, yesterday, in response to the murder of the two Israeli embassy staffers, basically said anyone who's been attacking Israel or denouncing it in harsh ways, or its supporters, has blood on their hands. So, there are a lot of people who have built a large audience, mostly conservatives, right-wing people, or MAGA people, by championing free speech because over the past 10 years, conservative speech has been one of the main targets of censorship. And so, these people who are independent media outlets, who rely on subscription money from their viewers, it's a big problem in independent media. I've talked about it before. It's a problem in corporate media as well, that a lot of people don't want to say things that will ever alienate or offend their audience because they know if they do, there's a good chance that they'll lose subscribers, which is how they make their money. 

I've talked about it before, as an independent journalist, I also have that dynamic. After October 7, we lost a lot of subscribers who were pro-Israel and didn't want to hear my critiques of Israel and who still don't. We still lose subscribers over that. But over time, if you actually build yourself and your audience with a look to the long term as somebody who has integrity and you build an audience of people who know that you can't come and expect that you're going to always hear what you want to hear but you're always going to, at least, hear the honest perspective and an argument behind it, then you build an idea of people who respect your integrity and aren't here for validation,  which I would suggest is a much more valuable audience to have. 

So there have been some disputes. One of the people who has been most criticized for this is a friend of mine. So, I'm reluctant to speak specifically about him. You can go see these arguments. I will say, one of the reasons why I think it's so important to me that I have a great distance from the kind of social scene in Washington and New York and politics and media is because it is corrupting, it is difficult. If you end up immersed in a social circle and you end being friends with all these politicians who you're supposed to be adversarial to, or other journalists whom you're supposed to criticize because there is a sort of ethical, I think, valid principle, that if somebody is really your friend, I don't mean acquaintance, I don't mean somebody who you say hi to occasionally, but somebody who's really a friend is doing something you disagree with, to turn around and denounce them publicly. It's a real conflict in principles between, on the one hand, you want to hold people accountable and critique them when they deserve it, but on the other hand, like turning around and just publicly denouncing a friend is hard. 

So for the most part, that's why I avoid that social circle. I see it all the time. You see Jake Tapper in this book with all these journalists going around and talking about how they've known these Biden White House officials forever. And so, when they said there's nothing wrong with Biden, they didn't think they were being lied to; they believed them. They didn't want to criticize these people. That's what being friends can do to journalists or to, and I think it's a major reason why Washington is so corrupt, media and politics. They all live in the same neighborhoods and they all socialize with each other. They're all intermarried, the media and the political class. And so, they're anything but adversarial to each other, but I will say there's this idea that some of the people are saying, “Look, I don't want to comment on Israel and Palestine because I don't know enough about it, it's too complicated, it is just not an issue I want to talk about.” And then there's a resulting critique. No, the reason you don't want to talk about it is because you don’t want to defend Israel or the censorship being implemented in the United States in its name. After all, you would be obviously betraying everything you ever said you believed in. But you also don't want to denounce it because you have a lot of people who support Donald Trump or Israel in your audience and you're afraid of alienating them and losing money from saying what it is that you believe. 

So, let me just say, quickly, a few things about this because it is a growing controversy. One is that I actually am somebody who has always tried to, who strongly believes in the idea that there's nobody who can be an expert in everything. There's no person who has expert-level or specialized knowledge in every debate. 

It's always been so important to me never to report on, comment on, or analyze topics that I don't actually understand better than just the ordinary person who's not paying much attention. I've always only covered a handful of issues at one time that I believe I have some kind of specialized knowledge or expertise in, or some unique perspective that's informed, so that I can basically place a claim on the audience's time if I want to write about something or talk about something. I do agree that if there's something you don't understand well, if there is something that you haven't covered, it's best just not to talk about it. 

That said, once there's an issue that becomes so significant, maybe tariffs is an example, which is something that Trump's tariff policy was something I ordinarily would not talk about since I'm the last person who can give you a good microeconomic assessment of tariffs and the like. But I can talk about other aspects related to it. I can have people on my show that I've talked to, that I asked about, because some issues are just too big to ignore. And the war in Israel, especially if you're an American citizen whose government is paying for that war and arming that war, given that world organizations have called this a genocide, people have said this is the worst war in their lifetime that they've ever seen, even an Israeli former Prime Minister came out and said today that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, two million people being starved to death. Our government is paying for it, at the same time, there are major implications in the United States, on Americans and our basic constitutional rights. It's just not an issue that I think you can just say, “Yeah, I don't understand that. I think I'm going to avoid that.” I'm not saying you have to cover it every day, I'm saying you have super didactic opinions about it, but I think it's kind of an abdication of your responsibility if you have influence on a platform to just refuse to talk about the most significant issues that the entire world is discussing, especially when they directly affect the causes that you have claimed you're most invested in. 

Again, I think there are a lot of people in the sort of what had been called the international dark web, as they self-glorifyingly named themselves, who pretended to be free speech advocates, who have now abandoned that because the real loyalty was to Israel. And then some people just haven't really spoken much about it because audience capture is very real in independent media. It's not like you're either super noble and you don't care about it, or you're just integrity-free, greedy money, sucking pig. There are a lot of nuances, and there's a big spectrum between those two things. But I do think it's very important if you're going to have any credibility that you do everything possible to ensure that you never have a fear of your own audience and that you have this view that it's better to lose some audience and subscribers short-term or maybe even long-term that you won't replace, especially if you're somebody who's built a big platform and making a very good living doing this, than it is to just have the goal to build the biggest audience possible by avoiding ever telling them anything that might make them at all upset.

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 Question #3 is from @teardrinker who says:

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So, just for those of you who didn't see it, there's this big controversy in Brazil, actually a major epidemic in Brazil. Brazil, under this very unpopular president, in 2017, legalized gambling basically overnight. As a result, all these apps popped up to allow people to put their money into these accounts and then start betting on sporting events or all sorts of things online, playing casino games. Huge numbers of people, millions of people, Brazil's a country with a huge economic inequality, have become addicted to gambling, to these apps on their phones. The minute they get government assistance that is supposed to feed their family, or their paycheck, they transfer the whole thing into their gambling account. They've been told that it's a way to get rich, to escape poverty. And you have people massively in debt, losing everything, destroying their families over this gambling addiction. 

A major reason why is that you have these Instagram influencers who have tens of millions of followers who show people their super glamorous, luxurious lifestyle. These betting companies are paying these influencers to tell their young audience, their poor audience, “Oh, you should go bet. Use this betting app. You can make so much money.” And they show videos of the influencers betting and making money that are often fake. And not only do these influencers get millions of dollars to lead their poor and young audience into betting but they get percentages of whatever losses their audience has, which is profit for the betting app. And we showed you a part of an investigation that the Brazilian Senate is doing on this. 

And so, here's this question:

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Okay, it's so interesting because I have always taken a very libertarian approach to all of these issues. My general philosophy is that if you are an adult, you have the absolute right to consent to whatever behavior you want to engage in, as long as it's not directly harming somebody else. And by that, I mean like punching somebody or attacking somebody violently. I don't mean like blowing your money on some stupid, ill-advised shopping spree and then harming your family because now they can't pay their bills. I mean, direct harm. 

I believe that about pretty much everything. What drugs people take, what alcohol they consume, whether they gamble, whether what kind of sex they engage in with other adults consensually, my view of that has always been very strongly this libertarian view that adults should be able to make whatever choices they want that involve consent, and it's nobody's business to stop them. You can have public campaigns about the dangers of alcoholism or drug addiction. I'm all for that, so you give people information, but I don't believe in intervening, and I think they are responsible for the choices that they make. 

I have begun to rethink and retreat from that absolute libertarian view of people's choices a bit. I'll explain why. We're really entering a dystopian society, and we've had this for a long time, a dystopian world, where there are parts of the world that are extremely affluent and that most of the world is incomprehensibly poor. And you have things now, like for example, we talked about this before, we'll probably do some reporting on it because I want to learn more about it, but you have these affluent Europeans, I'm sure Americans as well, who need a kidney transplant and there's nobody who's compatible, who will give them a kidney. So they're traveling to countries in West Africa that people are barely at a subsistence level. And they're paying them $20,000, $30,000 and $40,000 to donate a kidney. I mean, is that something that we really should say is nobody's business? You have two adults in a transaction, one selling their organ to the other so that they can feed their children. Or is there something like incredibly exploitative about that to the point where it's very hard to say that that's actually consensual? 

I've been thinking the same thing about surrogacy arrangements. You have very wealthy couples. Most of them, by the way, are not gay couples; most of them are straight couples, contrary to belief, overwhelmingly straight couples, although the number of gay couples doing it as well has increased. And they want a baby. They can't produce a baby for whatever reason. Gay couples can't procreate. A lot of straight couples can’t either. Sometimes they don't want to, the woman doesn't want to carry a baby. 

So, they find a woman who needs $30,000, $50,000, whatever, $100,000 to carry their baby with an agreement that the minute that baby is born, the biological mother just hands over the baby, has no rights to it. Probably, if you asked me 10, 15 years ago, I would have said, “Yeah, that's their own choice. Who is the state, or anyone, to intervene in that transaction?” 

I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of women who do that are not very, very harmed psychologically. And again, as people get richer and the rich-poor gap increases, these kinds of transactions are going to become more and more complex. What about couples in the West who can't procreate and want to adopt but don't want to go through the adoption process? And so, they go to Africa, or they go to Asia, to extremely poor countries, and they pay some family. They say, “Hey, I see you have a healthy three-month-old infant, or a six-month infant, or a two-year-old, we want one of those. If we pay you $100,000, can we take your kid?” I mean, that's the same thing, right? That's very consensual, it's transactional, but is anyone going to say they have no qualms about that? 

I think sometimes Americans have problems understanding what poverty around the world is if you haven't lived in a country where it exists. What's considered poor in the United States, I mean, now it's become a little more severe, but what is considered poverty in the United States is nothing like what is considered poverty in most places in the world. There may be people who don't have access to clean water, don't have access to healthcare, don't have access to anything. And the internet is everywhere, and people are influenced. That's why they're called influencers. 

That's the same with gambling. So, I'm not saying that people who end up gambling and losing everything and destroying their lives and the lives of their family have no responsibility. Of course, they have some. Nobody forced them to do it. I've stopped thinking that all these things have this kind of pure, beautiful, consensual character to them because I have trouble seeing that as purely consensual. And again, I'm not saying it should be banned. I'm not even saying necessarily that I think it's the role of the state to stop it, but it doesn't make it so that it's perfectly fine either. Yeah, this is something I've been reconsidering. I think there's a lot of pressure for exploitation. 

As for this word “gaslighting,” I just, in general, hate new words that pop up and become part of the ethos. And especially gaslight was used mostly by a kind of MeToo movement. It was part of that MeToo lexicon where I think the excesses of Me Too have been well-documented. I oppose them from the beginning. I hate mob justice. I hate the idea that accusations should be treated as true with no evidence. I don't trust any human being, man, woman, anybody, with that level of power to say, “Oh, your accusations, they have to be inherently believed.” And that's where gaslighting came, a very, kind of vague accusation that people began making against their husbands or their boyfriends to claim that their relationship was, quote-unquote, “toxic.” I understand what it means. 

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Next question, @kkotwas asked:

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 It's funny, I was going to ask Lee a very similar question. I think that there has been a drastic, visible, palpable, documentable, severe turn in public opinion both in the United States and globally toward Israel. Israelis are talking about how they're becoming a “pariah state.” The level of dehumanization and cruelty and suffering and killing that Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians for 17 months, as we've all watched it live every day and that they're saying they're going to continue to perpetrate basically until these people are in concentration camps, driven out of their land – and imagine the level of violence that's going to cause. They are announcing that they are entering Gaza. They're going to take to it all, they're going to bomb whatever's left, they're going to force Palestinians to leave, the ones who don't are going to be in concentration camps, a little walled-off, fenced-off areas that they get to stay in, surrounded by the IDF. These are concentration camps. 

It has turned the world against Israel in ways never previously seen since the creation of Israel in 1948. And they know that, polling data shows it. You see countries that have been among the most vocal Israeli supporters and allies for a variety of political reasons, like Canada, the U.K. and France, jointly issuing a statement, vehemently condemning Israel, not merely a mouth condemnation. Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant have been officially indicted by the International Criminal Court as war criminals. They have to avoid certain countries. IDF soldiers are afraid to go to various countries. There are projects to make sure they get arrested or chased out of the country, which happened in Brazil. We actually interviewed the head of one of the groups that tracks IDF soldiers who participated in crimes in Gaza, because all these countries are signatories to various conventions that forced them to arrest people on their soil who have committed war crimes. One almost got arrested in Brazil, he got snuck out at the last second. 

And then Israeli tourists as well are being met with all sorts of hostility and I think that's why there have been these desperate attempts to censor Israel criticism, to criminalize it, to attack these universities over it, to arrest and deport people for criticizing or protesting Israel; these are acts of desperation. 

And yeah, I don't think that the murder of two Israeli staffers, as terrible as it obviously is, and the scope of what's happening in Gaza that's been happening for the last 18 months, that will continue to happen unless it's stopped for the next year or so, or however long, I think it's going to be a speed bump. 

Israel supporters are hoping they can turn it into something much greater, but I don't think it's going to succeed, given how Israelis are still not just destroying all of Gaza and the people in Gaza, but saying some of the most Nazi-like horrific things, including Israeli officials that think we should separate the women and the children and then take all men 13 years over and exterminate them. They're all them saying Gazan babies are enemies, there are no innocent Gazan babies, they grew up to be terrorists. Really sick, sick stuff. They don't think the world is good. I want to say tolerate, but I don't think there's any stopping Israel in the sense that they're an apocalyptic cult, and it would take some political will on the part of the West and the United States, almost like a humanitarian intervention, to really stop it. 

But I think Israel is going to pay a huge price for a long, long time; they have all kinds of internal dissent. Netanyahu is consolidating all sorts of undemocratic power. They were in a civil war before October 7 over the Supreme Court, whether orthodox Israelis have to serve in the military, and they have a lot of internal tension. People are fleeing the country. So no, I do not think these two murders of last night are going to radically change the trajectory of how Israel is perceived. 

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All right, the @farside asks:

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I've been saying this from the beginning. Every time there’s a Supreme Court ruling against the invocation of the AEA, where they're required to give the new process. Now, a Trump-appointed judge and an appellate court have said Trump's not even allowed to invoke the AEA: it's only for wartime. And then you have a bunch of Trump supporters saying, “But what do you mean? We voted for mass deportation. Are we supposed to give trials to 20 million people?” 

I've always turned to emphasize, I think it's now finally being understood, not just for me, but others, that the problem is that you have a deportation system instead of laws. It's very easy. You just deport. You show they're not in the country illegally, you send them back to their home country. The problem is that Trump didn't want to use that. He wanted to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. Something that has only been invoked three times before, during wartime, the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, because it gives Trump immense power, far more power than he has otherwise. 

So, automatically, the president's powers increase in times of war, the deference that courts give a president when there's a wartime emergency automatically increases. So, by declaring war, Trump's already consolidated more power. And then, the Alien Enemies Act gives him almost unfettered power to do anything to people he declares to be an alien enemy. He can just put them in camps. 

Remember, he sent them to Guantanamo and that's the policy that FDR invoked to put Japanese Americans in camps. You don't have to send them back to their home country. That way, you can just send them to El Salvador, a country they've never been to and have nothing to do with, and put them into prison. And you can send them to Libya. You can send them to South Sudan, which the Trump administration is now talking about doing and in the process of doing. The Trump Administration came in wanting to ensure, and I think understandably in a way, because Trump’s first term was basically characterized by constant subversion of the president's authority. Trump was boxed in all the time, he was sabotaged, and they were determined to not allow that to happen by this big bureaucracy, by the deep state, by the administrative state. And so, they came in determined to have a plan to allow Trump to do whatever he wanted with no constraints. The Alien Enemies Act was part of that.

The problem is that it is a very severe law, only intended for wartime. And even then, as the Supreme Court said, 9-0, when it said they're all entitled to habeas hearings before being removed under the AEA, even people suspected of being Nazi sympathizers, Nazi operatives inside the United States were given a hearing before they were detained or deported. All these legal controversies around deportation are not about deportation itself; they're about the AEA, which Trump invoked, because of the extraordinary powers that it gives him. 

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All right, I think this is the last question. It's from @65wakai:

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Yeah, that's a very complex question to answer in a short period. It all depends on how long people have been there. I mean, there's obviously an indigenous population in the United States that American settlers and colonialists went to war with, massacred, and now they have rights recognized by the United States, including their own sovereignty inside reservations. There are indigenous people in Brazil who came way before Portuguese colonization. Primarily in the Amazon, there are tribes that are still undisturbed, unconnected to the world. It's a little hard to say that they don't have rights to Brazil, where they've been for who knows how long. Same with Africa. 

If you're talking about Israel and Palestine, I think the problem there is that it's not really a claim that, “Oh, my people have a right to this land.” It's really that “God gave my people this land,” it's not, “Oh, we've been here for a long time, therefore, we should have it,” it's that “God said this is ours.” 

I do not think that theological claims about what God wants and who God wants to be in certain places are a valid claim for that land. We have a geopolitical system of solving diplomatic conflicts, which the world recognizes, and the Israelis are lucky, because for a long time, it didn't look like this. Would Israel, with certain borders, the 1967 borders, with the West Bank and Gaza belonging to the Palestinians and most Israelis who now want to steal the West Bank in Gaza and act against all international law and take it for only Jews, are doing so because they believe that God has bestowed them that. And I think that's a much different question. It's one of the things that bothers me about Zionism as an ideology: it inherently depends upon a Jewish supremacy that, at least within Israel, Jews will always be supreme and I don't think that it's an ideology that leads to anything good.

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Israeli Embassy Staffers Killed in DC: Reactions and Implications; DHS Terminates Student Visas for Harvard
System Update #459

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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There's a lot to talk about because a cold-blooded murder happened last night on the streets of Washington, D.C., as a gunman apparently targeted people associated with an event held at the Capital Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was hosting a reception for young diplomats. The two victims, a couple in their mid-20s, soon to be engaged, were both staffers at the Israeli embassy in Washington. The shooter left behind a manifesto stating he was doing it, killing people, to protest Israel's ongoing destruction of Gaza, and he yelled pro-Palestinian slogans, including “Free Palestine,” once he was arrested. 

It goes without saying, or at least it should, that randomly targeting people you don't know for murder is morally unjust in all cases, regardless of the justness of the cause in whose name you're doing it. But the reaction to this violence predictably lurched very quickly. We'll look at all the ramifications and the attempts to use these killings for various agendas. 

Then, the Department of Homeland Security announced today that it was immediately revoking all international student visas for Harvard, forcing all students to try to find another school or face deportation from the United States. All of this comes as the Irish rap band Kneecaps has been formally charged with terrorism crimes by the U.K. government – terrorism crimes – for featuring a sign at one of their shows in support of Gaza and against Israel, as well as using images of Hezbollah in their show. As global public opinion grows against Israel, threatening to make it, in the words of an Israeli official, a "pariah state", the censorship campaign and the efforts to suppress Israel's criticisms become more severe and more desperate every day. 

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What happened last night in Washington, D.C., by all appearances, and we should definitely wait for more investigations and for facts to unfold because often things aren't what they appear to be in the first day or week, but by all appearance it seems as though somebody very committed to the cause of protesting the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza decided that, even though the world is starting to realize what's going on, even though the U.S. government itself understands that the population is turning against it, that there's simply nothing that will be done to stop the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel – based on some very twisted moral reasoning, that he thought it was justified and helpful – to randomly gun down too young Americans with ties to Israel although he presumably didn't even know they had ties to Israel at the time that he did it. 

It was a couple that was going to be engaged when they went to Israel next week, She was Jewish, grew up in a Jewish family, had very strong ties to Isreal, had often gone there but when she would go there, she would work on with the groups that try to bridge gaps between Israelis and Palestinians to kind of create dialog between the two, to try to encourage peaceful coexistence. 

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