Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Writing • Culture
The Pro-Israel Right's "Israel Exception" – From Free Speech to "America First" – is Finally Dragged Into the Light
Tucker Carlson's new scathing denunciation of Ben Shapiro and allies on Israel reveals long-hidden rifts.
January 07, 2024
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(From l. to r): Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro

The Trump-era American Right has carried within it largely hidden but quite massive internal conflicts that have finally exploded into public view. It was long past time for these unsustainable – and glaringly self-negating – doctrinal inconsistencies to be fully aired and confronted. 

Exactly that is finally happening in the wake of the Biden administration's steadfast, unlimited financing and arming of Israel's war in Gaza, including Biden's request for an additional $14 billion for Israel's war, on top of the billions Israel automatically gets each year from the U.S. While Biden officials periodically leak statements of "concern" about the number of civilians Israel is killing in Gaza, largely to assuage their increasingly angry voting base, they have steadfastly refused to even consider the use of American leverage and aid to put any limits on Israeli actions. 

Biden, as top Israeli officials acknowledge, has spent his entire career as one of Israel's most devoted and steadfast supporters. His reverent speeches defending Israel over the decades make Bill Kristol sound restrained by comparison. Over many decades, Biden is the largest recipient of donations from the pro-Israel lobby, and for good reason. Few have been as steadfastly supportive of that foreign country. And ever since the October 7 attack on Israel, Biden has gone to extreme lengths to protect and support Israel, even bypassing the requirement of Congressional approval to secretly send Israel all the weapons it requests and is now using to obliterate civilian life in Gaza.

Even a Monday article in The New York Times designed to depict Biden officials as deeply pained over Israel's destruction of Gaza acknowledges that "no one inside [the White House] is really pressing for a dramatic policy shift like suspending weapons supplies to Israel — if for no other reason than they understand the president is not willing to do so."

The vast majority of Congressional Republicans support Biden's policy of arming and funding Israel, just as the vast majority of them supported Biden's policy of arming and funding Ukraine's war. But from the start of the war in Ukraine, there was a non-trivial sector of Republicans -- composed largely of the more populist and anti-intervention wing -- who opposed Biden's war policy and voted NO on American funding of Ukraine's war.

While only a handful of Congressional Republicans have applied the same rationale to Biden's financing of Israel's war, numerous influential conservative voices are now denouncing that war policy -- and the broader U.S. financing and arming of Israel generally -- by invoking the same non-interventionist and "America First" principles that led them to oppose similar American funding of Ukraine's war. 

Haaretz, Oct. 20, 2023

And many influential conservatives are now particularly scathing of the ongoing attempt to erode free speech rights in the U.S., and to impose various speech restrictions on American campuses and elsewhere, in the name of protecting Israel from criticisms and activism opposed to its actions. That is because the central principles embraced by the populist Right in the Trump era are squarely and irreconcilably at odds with the very consequential policies demanded by the Biden administration and their pro-Israel Republican allies.

This long overdue debate has been provoked by the refusal of many influential American conservative figures – former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Daily Wire host Candace Owens, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), and numerous MAGA influencers – to accept or endorse a long-standing, gigantic exception to key conservative principles that one may accurately call "the Israel Exception." For years, "the Israel Exception" has signified the demand of pro-Israel conservatives to abandon multiple ostensible defining political values in order to protect and finance Israel, and to impose repressive censorship and cancellations rules at home designed to punish or silence critics of this foreign country.


 

Long-standing lurking contradictions on Israel

In the abstract, none of this is actually new. It has been going on for years prior to October 7. I have written and spoken over many years about this Israel Exception in American right-wing politics. In December, 2022, we presented a SYSTEM UPDATE episode entitled "How Many Different Countries Should the US Now Be Fixing, Changing, and Interfering In?" Exploring the anti-intervention ethos and anti-war rhetoric that has become dominant in the Trump-era conservative movement, that show was designed to press the question – in light of pervasive right-wing animus to them – of how many different countries or entities the U.S. should view as an enemy worth fighting a war against. 

In January of last year, we produced a separate episode entitled "The Right's Identity Politics: Exploiting Anti-Semitism to Suppress Debate and Defame Political Opponents." That program examined the long bipartisan history of suppressing speech in the U.S. in the name of protecting Israel.

At the same time that many on the Right profess that the U.S. must stop fighting and financing so many foreign wars and that neoconservatism is a toxic worldview, the list of entrenched foreign enemies maintained by many conservatives is as long as, and is often similar to, those of classic warmongers and neocons such as Bill Kristol, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Nikki Haley, Sen. Marco Rubio (S-FL), and Liz Cheney. That Enemies List features, at the very least, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Qatar, Hamas, Hezbollah, Muslims in general and all enemies of Israel in particular. And, of course, establishment Republicans also regard Russia as an enemy in the same way that establishment Democrats do, which is why the U.S. has spent more than $100 billion to fuel a proxy war against it in Ukraine, with Washington poised to send $60 billion more to Kiev.

That is a long list of powerful enemies and a long list of potential wars. For many conservatives, anti-war and anti-intervention slogans seem appealing in the abstract. Yet the eagerness to view so many other countries and groups of people not merely as competitors of the U.S. but as threats and enemies to the U.S. ensures that each one of Washington's new proposed wars -- or proposed new proxy wars for the U.S. to fund -- will instinctively trigger ample right-wing support despite the rhetorical embrace of anti-intervention principles.  

One of the defining historic attributes of the Trump presidency -- one the corporate media almost never acknowledges -- is that Trump was the first American President in decades not to involve the U.S. in a new war. He bombed and killed many people as part of the war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq that he inherited from the Obama administration, a war he vowed in 2016 to aggressively escalate and win. And he most definitely employed some of the nation's worst neocons and war hawks, including John Bolton, Nikki Haley and, most destructively of all, Mike Pompeo, whom he put in charge of the CIA and then the State Department. And his administration often ended up implementing policies that misaligned with his peace-with-Russia rhetoric, such as sending lethal arms to Ukraine after Obama (defying intense bipartisan pressure) largely refused to do so.  

But the fact remains that Trump ran in 2016 on a vow to subvert and uproot decades-old bipartisan warmongering and interventionist foreign policy, including his distaste for NATO, the financing of other countries' wars, and both proxy wars and regime-change wars. Trump's 2016 attack on bipartisan DC foreign policy orthodoxy -- combined with Hillary Clinton's well-earned status as one of Washington's most stalwart champions of those wars and other forms of aggression and foreign interference -- was one major reason that the smarter neocons and the U.S. Security State recognized early on that Trump was such a grave threat to their agenda (indeed, many neocons -- including Victoria Nuland's husband, Robert Kagan, were maneuvering to support Hillary even before Trump emerged as a candidate). That is a major reason why, even before Trump was inaugurated, they did everything possible to sabotage him and have never stopped.

Early in 2016, Trump's anti-intervention and "America First" instincts led him to denounce what had become the American obsession with prioritizing Israel and mindlessly giving it everything it wants. In an MSNBC-hosted town hall in February of that year, Trump vowed to be what he called a "neutral guy" when it came to the Israel/Palestinian conflict, emphasizing the urgency for American national security of forging a two-state peace deal, something he said would be impossible to do if the U.S. continues to be perceived as being too much on Israel's side. 

CNN, February 19, 2016
CNN, Feb. 19, 2016

Trump's pledge of "neutrality" regarding Israel predictably created a major firestorm. Unquestioning support for Israel has long been a virtual religion in bipartisan Washington. Trump was attacked from every corner: Israel-obsessed neocons, Republican war hawks, and establishment Democrats.

Seeing the political danger from this issue -- Hillary strongly implied he was anti-Semitic and insufficiently loyal to Israel -- Trump quickly snapped into line during the 2016 campaign, giving one of the most pro-Israel speeches to AIPAC. Then, as President, Trump anointed his fanatical pro-Israel son-in-law Jared Kushner to run his Middle East policy, whereby Trump (with the support of senior Democrats including Chuck Schumer) ordered the U.S. Embassy moved to Jeruslam, once an idea confined to the radical pro-Israel fringes. But that 2016 episode exposed an obvious, politically uncomfortable tension between the America First foreign policy principles Trump was championing, and the bipartisan policy of prioritizing Israel's needs.

Trump did not, of course, invent these anti-interventionist sentiments within the American Right. But he gave voice to them, and became the most charismatic and effective political figure in decades to advocate them. Figures like Texas Congressman Ron Paul and, before him, senior Nixon, Ford and Reagan official Pat Buchanan, both attracted ample support as anti-establishment GOP presidential candidates by urging a more anti-interventionist foreign policy, principles which each of them explicitly argued cannot coherently accommodate a special exception for U.S. devotion to the Israeli government. 

(Both of them, needless to say, were branded as anti-Semites). In the recent past, the most significant presidential attempts to impose limits on U.S. support for Israel came from Republican, not Democratic, presidents. In the early 1980s, President Reagan directly threatened Israel with a cessation of American aid if it did not stop various bombing and invasion operations against its neighbors in Syria and Lebanon, acts that Reagan regarded as not only reckless but as creating danger for American troops in the region.

Lou Cannon's 2014 book on Reagan recounts how the American President called then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin -- formerly a leader of the Israeli terrorist group Irgun -- and told him that the Israeli bombing of Lebanon was a "holocaust" that must end. Begin, scared of losing American aid, immediately complied.

When a U.S. Marine base in Lebanon was attacked by suicide bombers in 1983, killing 241 American servicemembers, Reagan refused to join in on attacks against Iran and others, and instead withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon, reasoning that American involvement there -- originally designed in part to assist Israel -- was contrary to American interests.

The last significant defiance of America's Israel supporters came under the Bush 41 administration. In 1991 and 1992, President George H.W. Bush -- alongside his realist advisors James Baker (who was Reagan's Chief of Staff and Treasury Secretary) and Brent Scowcroft -- provoked a serious political controversy by threatening Israel that the U.S. would cut off $10 billion in American loan guarantees if Israel did not halt settlement expansions in the West Bank.

Bush, Baker and Scowcroft -- needless to say -- were widely vilified by the Nikki Haleys and Ben Shapiros of that time as being "anti-Semitic." And, exactly as happens now, those fanatical pro-Israel smear artists were joined in that vilification ritual by leading Democrats. Leading the attempts to smear Baker in particular as an anti-Jewish bigot was the always-opportunistic Bill Clinton. Clinton was preparing to run for president against Bush in 1992, and Clinton knew – as Richard Nixon pointed out very explicitly in a post-presidential interview – that America's Israel supporters do not tolerate any limits on American aid to Israel, no matter how much such limits are in America's interests. 

The Washington Post, Feb. 25, 1992 (l.); April 2, 1992 (r.)

The Bush 41 administration argument was clear: namely, Israel is harming American national security by sabotaging a two-state solution with settlement expansions, which the U.S. had long opposed and still does. Why, Bush officials asked, should the U.S. should fund a foreign country as it engages in policies that directly engagers Americans: namely, subjecting American troops and other regional interests to attack due to anger over U.S-enabled denial of Palestinian statehood?

The reputational attacks on these Bush officials arguing this were severe. And Bush 41 was therefore the last American president to attempt to impose any real limits on U.S. funding and protection of Israel (Obama's last-minute abstention on a UN Security Council resolution to declare Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal was more symbolic than substantive). This very acrimonious 1991 exchange between then-Secretary of State Baker and one of the most pro-Israel House members, the Florida Democrat Rep. Larry Smith, should seem very familiar to anyone paying attention now. The dynamic has never changed. Just look at the unique passion and emotion that this foreign country invokes among its American supporters:

The Israelis are very well-aware that American presidents are politically barred from placing any limits on their actions, even when the U.S. is funding Israel's various wars and its military. In 2001, Netanyahu was caught on video mocking the notion that American leaders could impede Israel's attacks on Palestinians, boasting of the ease with which he could marshall American public support in Israel's favor, against any presidential attempts to stand up to Israel.

Just this week, several of Israel's most extremist ministers explicitly said that Israel's goal in its current war was to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. After the Biden White House announced that it opposes such an objective, Israel's Minister of Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, mocked the U.S.'s attempt to impose limits on his country, saying: "we are not another star on the American flag."

This notion that Israel is not the 51st American state is one that is used by many Americans to oppose U.S. financing of Israel (just as it was used to oppose U.S. financing of Ukraine's war). Minister Ben-Gvir's decree would be a more convincing proclamation of Israeli sovereignty if not for the fact that this same Israeli government aggressively pressures the U.S. to pay of its miliary and for its wars. But this mentality -- the U.S. will pay for our wars and then has no right to object that our actions harm American interests -- underscores how bizarre it is that many (not all, but many) of the same people who parade under the banner of "America First" not only accept these Israeli commands but also eagerly pay for them. 


 

Right-wing contradictions on Israel finally erupt

Despite the successful smearing of Bush 41 officials as anti-Jewish bigots, these glaring conflicts between stated right-wing ideological beliefs and America's unlimited and unconditional support for Israel have never disappeared. And that is why they have exploded within right-wing circles over the past twelve weeks.  

What forced these contradictions into the light was the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and especially the subsequent decision by the Biden Administration and bipartisan Washington to immediately treat Israel's war in Gaza the same way it has been treating Ukraine's war with Russia: namely, by paying for Israel's war, arming it, and alienating much of the world whose support the U.S. needs in its commercial competition with China: massive costs Washington eagerly incurred all in order to "stand with Israel."

When Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) was elected Speaker of the House in October, he followed long-standing tradition by ascending to the House podium in order to unveil to Americans the the top priorities that his Speakership would pursue. After first decreeing that "the greatest threat to our national security is our nation's debt," he then announced that the very first bill the new Speaker intended to bring to the floor was not one to address the many problems of American citizens or to address that national debt. Instead, he said beaming with pride, the first bill would be one "in support of our dear friend Israel." 

As a result of all of this, numerous influential conservatives have begun quite vocally objecting to this Israel Exception championed by many Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits. It provoked Daily Wire hosts Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro to trade acrimonious criticisms of each other in public. Congressman Massie appeared on our show last month to reveal the large spending now being done by AIPAC to recruit a Kentucky GOP primary challenger against him in order to remove him from Congress for opposing Biden's insistence that the U.S. fund Israel's war.

Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy also told us that he opposes Biden's request for $14 billion in additional funds to pay for Israel's war, and separately warned conservatives in a Wall Street Journal op-ed to stop embracing censorship and cancel culture against Israel's critics in the U.S. Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential media figure among American conservatives, has repeatedly noted, and objected to, many of these glaring contradictions on Israel. 

But a particularly inflammatory interview given last Friday by Carlson to "Breaking Points" host Saagar Enjeti has now really ignited the intra-right debate. Among other things, the former Fox News host railed against the intense, singular and highly emotional fixation on this foreign country by Ben Shapiro and his fanatically pro-Israel allies. Carlson also condemned the complete abandonment of large parts of the American right's claimed belief in free speech since October 7 in favor of the suppression of Israel criticisms and the punishment of Israel critics in almost every sector of American life, including on college campuses. 

Carlson's argument did not rest, as some pro-Israel extremists tried to imply, on the mere fact that Shapiro sometimes focuses on and speaks about Israel. Instead, Carlson's grievance is that Shapiro and many others demand that Americans bear the costs of Israel's military and its wars, even though millions of Israelis live better than millions of Americans. Here is Carlson in his own words:

Those comments – needless to say – instantly and very predictably provoked accusations of "bigotry" and anti-Semitism against Carlson from pro-Israel activists and various assorted neocons. The Patron Saint of Anti-Semitism Accusations, the ADL, has long demanded Carlson's firing from Fox News by accusing him of bigotry. And the ADL has long attempted to impose restrictions on campus speech in the name of various liberal causes but also in the name of protecting Israel. As has happened often since October 7, many conservatives now find themselves in alignment with the pro-censorship ADL.

A long-time complaint of conservatives against the American liberal-left is that they resort to bigotry accusations against their opponents in order to destroy reputations and stifle debates. That has always been an ironic grievance given that many pro-Israel conservatives, as their first tactic, hurl racism and biogtry accusations against their opponents more casually and aggressively than any purple-haired Social Justice Warrior at Oberlin that they claim to loathe.

Just as everyone knows they will be branded by liberals as a racist or Nazi for opposing, say, permissive immigration policies or affirmative action, everyone knows they will be branded by pro-Israel conservatives and various neocons as a bigot, Nazi and anti-Semite for criticizing the actions of the Israeli government or questioning U.S. financing of their wars. These two factions have far more in common, at least on a tactic level, than either likes to admit.  

Bigotry accusations -- specifically anti-Semitism -- are and always have been the central tactic of America's most devoted Israel supporters. And there are few areas where this has worked more effectively than deterring, or sometimes even barring, American citizens from questioning why the burden falls on them to pay for Israel's wars and its military, and why the U.S. constantly sacrifices so much for this one single foreign country.


 

Imposing censorship and other speech restrictions in the U.S. to protect Israel

Beyond those foreign policy tensions lurking within the American Right, we have also often reported on the numerous censorship campaigns aimed at Israel critics in the West. These Israel-protecting censorship campaigns in the U.S. are, amazingly, often supported by some of the same right-wing or at least "anti-woke" figures who branded their lucrative media image around a supposed passion for free speech and free debate. 

Indeed, the causes of political censorship and restrictions on campus speech have had no better moment than the last ten weeks in the U.S. Suffice to say, when it comes to domestic conceptions of free speech, language policing, victimhood narratives, "cancel culture" crusades, and mass firing of critics, October 7 has become the George Floyd moment of the pro-Israel wing of American conservatives. 

The censorship and cancellation of Israel critics in the U.S. began almost immediately after October 7 and has shown no signs of relenting. Governor DeSantis actually ordered the banning of a pro-Palestinian student group from the University of Florida system: a move that the free speech group FIRE, long credible with conservatives, denounced as a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, since the crime of "material support for terrorism" requires more than mere speech. Major college administrators followed in DeSantis' path, with Columbia University, Rutgers and others simply banning or suspending a group of Jewish students who are pro-Palestinian, along with the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine.

In this week's interview with Enjeti, both he and Carlson once again expressed indignation at how readily and eagerly parts of the American Right are to sacrifice free speech for Americans, and impose classic censorship and cancellations tactics, in the name of punishing and silencing Israel's critics:

 

To illustrate how valuable Western censorship advocates see Israel as being for their cause: the EU just initiated its first ever formal investigation under its new online censorship law, the Digital Services Act, against Elon Musk's X. The primary charge is that X failed to censor enough anti-Israel or "pro-Hamas" content.

Some on the Right have tried to justify this speech suppression by falsely depicting it as some sort of new tactic designed to finally force the pro-censorship left to live under their own censorship rules. But that ignores the fact that — long before October 7 – Israel critics have been among the most frequent targets of American censorship and "cancellation" campaigns.

For years, I have reported on speech-abridging laws -- that came largely from red states, along with Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo -- which banned American citizens from supporting a boycott of Israel as a condition to receiving contracts with the state. That law is such a full-frontal assault on the First Amendment's free speech guarantee that federal courts quickly and emphatically struck them down. To illustrate how twisted these laws are: an American citizen is free to boycott any other nation on the planet, or even to boycott other American states. The sole entity protected is Israel (indeed, Gov. Cuomo himself ordered a boycott of North Carolina and Indiana as punishment for trans/bathroom bills they enacted, while then barring anyone from boycotting this one foreign country).

As just one illustrative example of the extreme contradictions for free speech rights which this Israel devotion creates: Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) -- within one twenty-four-hour period in 2021 -- condemned the Biden administration for supporting censorship of political speech, but then turned around and demanded that Ben & Jerry's ice cream be banned from sale in Oklahoma due to its decision to no longer allow its product to be sold in the occupied West Bank. Censorship of American speech is apparently horrific to Sen. Landford, and to so many of his fellow conservatives, unless it is designed to protect Israel.

Pro-Israel censorship in the U.S. has been raging for years. On October 6 of this year – just one day before the Hamas attack in Israel – I tweeted this in response to a report that Israel supporters were angry at the University of Pennsylvania's President, the now-ousted Liz Magill, over her refusal to cancel a literary event featuring Palestinian writers: 

The Israel-protecting censorship craze – both before October 7 and especially after – has not been disguised. In September -- before the Hamas attack -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed Elon Musk that Musk's professed belief in free speech absolutism must, when it comes to Israel, be "balanced" with the need to stop "hate speech": the most common left-liberal justification for censorship. In other words, the Israeli leader was demanding that the speech rights of American citizens be narrowed to shield this foreign country that he leads.

In 2019, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis championed and then signed into law a bill to heighten punishments for so-called "hate crimes." The entire concept of "hate crimes" was one long opposed in principle by many conservatives. who argue that committing violence is already a crime, and enhanced punishments necessarily for "hatred" require the monitoring by the state of speech and belief, i.e., they punish "thought crimes."

DeSantis emphasized that the primary goal of this new state law was to target anti-Semitism. But he did not sign the bill in Tallahassee: Florida's capital. instead, he signed the law governing the rights of American citizens in Israel, after a meeting with Netanyahu. Representing the dominant political dynamic, the ADL "applauded" Gov. DeSantis for both the bill and where he chose to sign it.

Since October 7, there has been no single individual more adored and cheered among pro-Israel Americans than Bill Ackman. Much of the pro-Israel Right cheered as the liberal American billionaire and hedge fund manager encouraged "no-hire" blacklists of American college students who criticized or blamed Israel for the conflict (not who praised Hamas). Pro-Israel groups then paid for trucks to drive around their campuses with their names and faces on them, while speakers blared accusations of bigotry. In November, we interviewed two Harvard undergraduate students who explained what was done to them for the crime of signing a statement blaming Israel for the larger conflict with the Palestinians: treatment far worse and more harassing than the vast majority of American Jewish Ivy League students have allegedly been "endangered" for their support of Israel.

Ordinarily Ackman, a mega-donor to Democratic Party candidates, would be the embodiment of everything the American Right claims to hate: a financier who enriched himself by betting on the collapse of the U.S. economy and hollowing out American companies, and who advocated COVID maximalism including shutting down the economy for a full month while enormously profiting from the failure of the U.S. economy.

Yet just as criticism of Israel overrides all virtues in the eyes of America's pro-Israel extremists, support for Israel cleanses all sins: that is what it means to say that Israel is the overarching priority for so many. And thus has Ackman received adulation from many conservatives as he leads the effort to cleanse American universities of Israel criticisms or pro-Palestinian activism.

Ackman's most significant coup so far was leading the effort to force the ouster of Penn's President Liz Magill and Harvard's President Claudine Gay; he now is working to remove MIT President's Sally Kornbluth. As we documented on Tuesday's show, what each of them has in common is not plagiarism or any other ethical transgression; the crime is that they defended excessively broad conceptions of free speech by correctly insisting that one must assess the "context" to know if speech critical of Israel crosses over into "advocacy of genocide." 

In October, several Western European countries banned pro-Palestinian marches while still permitting pro-Israel marches: in other words, they outlawed protests against EU government policy toward Israel while allowing protests that supported government policy. As just one example illustrating the instant abandonment of professed principles in the name of Israel, Dave Rubin – who has become a very wealthy man by self-branding as a defender of free discourse and the right of dissent – did not just cheer this censorship of anti-war and pro-Palestinian protests, but heralded such censorship as the possible salvation of the West:

Websites and social media pages popular among pro-Israel conservatives hunted down the names of previously obscure American critics of Israel, and worked tirelessly – and often successfully – to pressure their employers into firing them. After Republican Congress members spent years denouncing the "politicization of the FBI" and "weaponization of the Security State," pro-Israel members of Congress such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) demanded that the DOJ "investigate" American student groups critical of Israel, labelling them "pro-Hamas" to justify these domestic witch hunts.

Pro-Israel conservatives have, again and again, embraced the defining pro-censorship theories of the American liberal-left to justify their silencing of Israel critics. One Republican member of Congress, Nick LaLota (R-NY) – a lawyer! – said last week, in order to justify the banning of harsh Israel criticism, that the First Amendment does not protect "hate speech," something he was forced to delete after he was told that this is the opposite of what the Constitution provides.

From the start, this has been the tactic of pro-censorship conservatives, and it is a mirror image of the prinicpal theories of pro-censorship liberals. They first take the pro-Palestinian views they wish to banish or punish, then define them as "racism" or "hate speech." Or they insist that long-standing political slogans – such as "Free Palestine" or "intifada" or "from the river to the sea" – have a secret meaning: kill all Jews everywhere. This is identical to the way liberals insist that right-wing speech on immigration, or affirmative action, or trans issues should be banned because such speech carries a secret, implicit message: commit genocide against Latinos, or black Americans, or trans people.

One can endlessly debate whether these phrases are actually designed to incite violence against Israelis or even Jews. Or one can point out that the defining document of Netanyahu's Israeli Likud Party contains the same phrase – "from the river to the sea" – to define what they mean by Greater Israel, even though nobody argues that Likud politicians should be silenced on this ground.  

Those debates can and should be permitted. And that is the point. In America, people are entitled to free speech, to express their political views and opinions without limits: even about Israel. There is no Israel Exception to the First Amendment. Even if pro-Palestinian activists were calling for the elimination of Israel not through legal or political means – as they insist – but rather through the use of violence, that is still clearly protected free speech. 

That advocacy of violence is protected speech in the U.S., and that there is no constitutional exception for Israel, should be too obivous to require discussion. Lindsey Graham cannot be prosecuted for urging that Iran be wiped off the map, nor can that view be banned at American universities. Nikki Haley cannot be prosecuted for screeching "finish them!" at Netanyahu as Israel makes Gaza uninhabitable in order to ethnically cleanse that land of Arabs, a policy many Israeli officials explicitly advocate, nor can that view be banned at American colleges. American supporters of Israel cannot be prosecuted for demanding that Gaza be "flattened" or "turned into a parking lot" or for chanting "kill them all" about Arabs. And pro-Palestinian advocates, which often includes Jewish students, cannot be prosecuted or have their views banned from American colleges because some fanatical Israel supporters decide that their criticisms of or hostility toward some foreign country goes too far or seems driven by hatred.

These principles are ironclad and sacrosanct. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment even protects advocacy of violence. And beyond state power, the American Right has spent years denouncing attempts to condition employment or campus speech rights on adherence to political orthodoxy, denouncing such attempts as "cancel culture."

Yet in the wake of October 7, many American media and political figures have lost their jobs for the crime of signing pro-Palestinian petitions or even, in one case, re-tweeting an Onion article mocking indifference to the suffering of Palestinian civilians. We devoted an entire show last month to examining what those Americans who lost their jobs after October 7 actually said and did; contrary to those justifying their "cancellation," none defended Hamas' attack on October 7. Instead, they simply criticized Israel and/or urged more protection of Palestinian civilians through measures such as a cease-fire.

This proclivity to hurl accusations of bigotry in lieu of substantive debate is the primary means of attempting to vilify Israel critics. Yet it is exactly this tactic, when used by the American liberal-left, that has been the primary grievance of the "anti-woke" sector of media, as illustrated by this emphatically argued 2019 essay by Bari Weiss in the neocon journal Commentary which, in its title, urged: "Say No to the Woke Revolution!" 

Throughout her manifesto, Weiss lamented that the left has given up on the virtues of debate and rational discourse, replacing it with a relentless stream of bigotry accusations, intolerance for opposing views, the primacy of identity as a measure of worth, and equating words and slogans with actual violence in order to justify banning them. She wrote:

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming….

 

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.

 

In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good.

 

In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.

While all of that perfectly describes the worst of the liberal-left's post-George-Floyd behavior, it describes with equal vigor and accuracy the conduct of America's most fanatical Israel supporters in the wake of October 7 (and before).

Anti-woke conservatives – who spent years mocking claims of college students that they felt unsafe: oh, do you poor fragile snowflakes need a therapy dog and a security blanket because you feel threatened by views you have to hear? – finally found a minority group whose members they insist are so unsafe they need a wide array of special protections, including censorship, to shield them from trauma. Many Israeli and Jewish American professors who work at East Coast elite colleges repeatedly insisted that the narrative of Jewish victimhood on college campuses was being wildly exaggerated and melodramatized with the same goal as left-wing activists have when they do the same for other minority groups: to justify suppression of dissent. 

But no matter: that roving bands of violent Muslims hordes and their Jewish leftist allies are roaming American college campuses chanting "gas the Jews" or "murder all Jews" became, despite being a total fabrication, unchallengeable Gospel. Republican and Democratic members of Congress joined together – as they always do when the topic is Israel – to parade Jewish Ivy League students before Congress to amplify and treat with the greatest sensitivity their tales of how unsafe they feel: not because anyone attacked them physically, but because they are forced to see pro-Palestinian student protests and hear political chants denouncing Israel's war in Gaza and its occupation of the West Bank.

But that, too, is nothing new. In 2014, after the University of Illinois offered a tenured position to Professor Steve Salatia, Jewish student groups and major donors demanded that offer be withdrawn after they found tweets in which Salatia had harshly condemned Israel's 2014 bombing of Gaza. As The New York Times reported: "Noah Feingold, a member of a pro-Israel student group, told The Forward" that their demands were justified on this ground: "It’s about feeling safe on campus." The university ended up paying Salatia close to $1 million to settle a lawsuit, but at least they successfully purged the college of Israel critics and prevented students from feeling "unsafe." 

When it comes to Israel: words are indeed violence, provided the words cross some arbitrary line of what is deemed permissible criticisms. As free speech advocates have been telling the left for years, actual violence is already illegal. The only way to justify the criminalization or suppression of ideas is to deceitfully equate those ideas with violence. And few things are more dangerous than conflating political ideas, slogans and chants with actual violence. 

While many on the pro-Israel right have also been adept at doling out this inspiring lecture on the need for free expression, many have been struggling to live under it, if they even try at all. And while many of them insist that they loathe the tactic of hurling racism and bigotry accusations to destroy the reputation of their opponents and shut down the possibility of debate and dissent, few are more practiced and skilled purveyors of this tactic than the pro-Israel sector of the American right.


 

Massive costs of Israel's full-scale dependency on U.S. largesse

That Israel is treated by the U.S. not as a foreign country but as effectively the 51st American state is nothing new. Israel, for decades, has received more American foreign aid than any other country by far. One of the last acts of President Obama before leaving office in 2016, with Vice President Biden in tow, was to agree to a record-breaking ten-year deal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that, in the words of The New York Times, "provided an average of $3.8 billion a year over the next decade to Israel," which was "already the largest recipient of American aid." But for both Israel and its legion of vociferous U.S. supporters, even that is not enough. 

When it comes to most American supporters of Israel, nothing is enough. Whenever Israel decides to bomb Gaza, as it has done countless times in the last twenty years, the U.S. supports those wars and pays billions more for them, too. When Israel bombs its neighbors, then the U.S. Government, as it did under President Obama and is again doing now, furnishes those bombs in real-time from its own stockpiles. As a result, images of American-furnished weapons landing in Gaza pervade the region, fueling not only anti-Israel anger but also anti-American hatred. And one of Biden’s first acts after his October 18 pilgrimage to Tel Aviv was to request an additional $14 billion in American taxpayer money

A handful of prominent Israel supporters have urged that American aid to Israel end, on the ground that the aid restrains Israel from acting even more aggressively against its regional enemies. But the reality is that Israeli officials bargain hard to get this aid, and any American president who refused would be destroyed. And, as Biden is now showing, the billions given to Israel every year are virtually never used as leverage by the U.S. to demand anything.

Efforts to compare American aid to Israel with other countries are laughable. A November analysis by Axios revealed that "the U.S. is by far the biggest supplier of military aid to Israel, contributing around $130 billion since its founding." While much of that is now required to be used to buy weapons from U.S. arms dealers, "Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign military financing, which has represented around 15% of the country's defense budget in recent years." U.S. aid to the Palestinians, by contrast, totaled $150 million in 2022: or 25 times less than what Israel receives at a minimum each year.

All of this happens while many Israelis enjoy a higher standard of living, and greater health and educational benefits, than millions of Americans. Israel touts a universal health care system, along with highly subsidized and far cheaper college for Israelis than American citizens have. The life expectancy of an Israeli is at least five years higher than that of the average American.

Beyond using American resources to pay for Israel's war, the Biden administration has used the American veto power at the U.N. to completely isolate itself from almost the entire world. As news outlets around the world -- and in Israel  -- document the staggering and unique destruction of civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza, including Israel's deliberate use of starvation as a weapon, most of the world has turned against the Israeli war. 

Biden has ignored not only overwhelming world opinion but also domestic opinion. A majority of Americans in all groups from the start has favored a cease-fire.

Despite all that, the U.S., in vote after vote at both the Security Council and the General Assembly, has increasingly stood against the entire world in order to protect Israel. The U.S. is now down to a vanishingly small number of largely irrelevant countries as its allies – really just a handful of tiny island nations – in defense of Israel's war. 

At one of the last votes on this conflict, a December 19 resolution to affirm the right of the Palestinians to self-determination, only four countries on the planet voted NO: Israel, the U.S., and two Pacific islands called Micronesia (population 113,000) and Nauru (population: 12,000). Only ten other countries abstained: the largest of them being Paraguay and South Sudan. That means that all 172 other countries, from the U.S.'s largest allies in Europe and Asia to South America and Africa, stood opposed to the U.S. and Israel.

Some right-wing discourse has bizarrely instructed Americans to believe that anything that happens "at the U.N." is irrelevant and likely corrupt. But "the U.N." is not some mystical leftist entity or a Soros-funded NGO. It is nothing more or less than the collective policy views of the world's governments. So when the U.S. stands against the world to support Israel, it is not standing "against the U.N." but rather against every country on earth, including almost all of its allies. 

This isolation carries real and tangible costs to U.S. interests. As hard-core anti-China and anti-Russia hawk Fiona Hill, a former Trump White House official, warned in a speech to European foreign policy elites last June – in a speech we extensively covered at the time – nothing is strengthening China more than the US's alienation of many of the planet's governments and populations, which now see the U.S. as singularly responsible for so many destructive wars, coups and dictatorships around the world.

The specific dangers to the physical security of American citizens from the U.S.'s singular support for Israel's wars are obvious, in large part because it is the U.S. Government itself warning of them. Ever since Biden's trip to visit Netanyahu and his promise of unlimited financial support, the Biden State Department has warned American citizens on multiple occasions that they face heightened dangers of anti-American violence and terrorism anywhere they go in the world.

All of that is consistent with the repeated warnings over many years from top U.S. military officials that one of the primary causes of anti-American hatred in the region – and thus a key driver of the risks of anti-American terrorism at home – is the accurate perception that it is the U.S. that single-handedly enables Israeli aggression and wars against its Muslim neighbors (each time a military official issues this warning, as Gen. David Petraeus did among others, the ADL denounces them). Back in 2010, the chief of Israel's Mossad warned that Israel was becoming a "burden" to the U.S. Just one month before the October 7 attack, another former Mossad chief warned that Israel was now an "apartheid" state and was thus isolating itself from the world. 

So for so many reasons, and on so many levels, it is impossible to reconcile claims of putting "America First" with the Biden administration's multi-pronged and very aggressive support for Israel and its wars. This is true for the same reason that so many self-identified "America First" or MAGA adherents – including many I interviewed over the last two years – emphatically explained why they opposed Biden's similar decision to fund and arm Ukraine in its war against Russia. 

MAGA guest after MAGA guest, including several in Congress, told me when opposing the U.S. role in Ukraine that the U.S. has too many problems at home and is already drowning in too much debt to fund Ukraine's wars, adding that Ukraine "is not the 51st American state." Yet every time I asked whether this same rationale applies to Israel, they hemmed and hawed and stumbled to insist that Israel was somehow different, in part because they see Israel as being of singular importance and/or because they know that a refusal to support Israel means political or reputational death.  

If one is comparing which country is an actual "ally," then one could make a far stronger case for Ukraine (which for years has done everything it is told by Washington) than one could for Israel (which continues to engage in the exact conduct the U.S. warns is harming American security). But there is no coherent explanation under Trump-era conservative politics for why Americans should be forced to fund the wars of either.

The explanation for these inconsistencies is self-evident to any honest person, no matter how potent the taboo constructed around it. For so many Americans, Israel is most definitely not just a foreign country. For deeply held religious and cultural convictions with which they have often been indoctrinated from birth – whether it be some strains of evangelical Christianity, or Zionism among American Jews, or just a generalized animosity toward Muslims that causes some to see Arabs as a sub-humanized horde – Israel resides on a special, elevated and unique pedestal that requires the U.S. to devote enormous resources of its own citizens to funding and protecting it.

But whatever that mentality is, it has nothing to do with American nationalism let alone an "America First'' framework for governing political choices. And that is why it was only a question of time before these lurking, glaring internal conflicts in American conservatism finally erupted.

 

 

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South Korean Economist Ha-Joon Chang on the Economic World Order, Trump's Tariffs, China & More
System Update #410

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We focus a lot on this show on international relations and foreign policy from the perspective of what often shapes them – things like wars and militarism, conflicts and perception of external threats – but at least as important is the world economic order: which countries are rich, which ones are poor, which ones are developing and aren't and how that system is maintained as well as the truth about rising economic powers like China and its potential to undermine American dominance and the dollar as the reserve currency. 

Ha-Joon Chang is a leading economist known for his sharp critiques of international economic institutions and their defense of neoliberalism. No matter how often it fails, as well as for his advocacy for economic pluralism, he has become quite a growing sensation online with his lectures. 

He's a professor at the SOAS University of London and a former Cambridge lecturer. He's probably best known for his 2002 book, “Kicking Away the Ladder,” which examines how wealthy nations traditionally have blocked economic progress in developing countries. His recent book, “Edible Economics,” from 2022, uses food to explain economic ideas. 

In addition to these topics, we sat down with him last night and he helped us understand the likely implication of Donald Trump's proposed tariffs and protectionism as a basis for his economic policy, as well as the reason basic economic literacy is so important in democracy and how often it is deliberately made inaccessible through things like jargon and excessive statistics and a reliance on all sorts of terms that are designed to keep people away. He has made it a life work to elevate economic literacy. I found the conversation with him very interesting. I think you will as well. 

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The Interview: Ha-Joon Chang

G. Greenwald: Professor Chang, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk. One of the reasons we were so interested in having you is we have a lot of conversations now about geopolitics and international relations. So often it focuses on things people can easily understand, things as wars and various types of conflicts. A huge part of geopolitics in the international order is the scheme of wealth – that various countries have or don't have – and has always been. 

A lot of your work has become quite popular. I think “Kicking Away the Ladder,” the 2002 book, is among your best known and, for me, that provides one of the best explanations to understand why some countries are rich and why some are poor and kind of how there's a system to ensure that stays the same. Can you talk about that for people who haven't read that book or are familiar with your work? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yes, the book was published in 2002, so it's quite a bit old now. But there I was pointing out that this was the high noon of neoliberalism when rich countries were lecturing developing countries “Oh, don't use that stupid things like protectionism, don't use that state-owned enterprises that don't have a government meddle with business.” But then I tried to show that these are actually exactly the policies that the rich countries themselves use in order to get where they are today. Telling the developing countries not to use these policies is like someone using a ladder to climb to the top and kicking the ladder away so that other people cannot follow. 

The most famous and most robust argument for using protectionism is known as the infant industry argument. That argument says the government of a developing nation needs to protect and nurture its young industries until they grow up and compete in the global market. Exactly in the same way that we protect and nurture our children until they grow up and can compete in the adult labor market. Of course, in poor countries, a lot of children work from the age of five or six, but you know, this means that they cannot get educated, they cannot acquire high skills and so on. So, if you can do it, it pays to send these kids to school rather than sending them to work. 

Very interestingly, this logic of infant industry protection was invented by an American and not just any American. He was called Alexander Hamilton, the very first Treasury Secretary of the United States of America. He invented the term “infant industry protection.” Initially, a lot of Americans were not convinced by this, especially people like Thomas Jefferson who said this guy is insane. We can export our cotton and tobacco, of course – I never mentioned the slaves – and import manufactured goods that are cheaper and better – even considering the considerable transportation costs – than what these Yankees can produce. So why should we subsidize these inefficient Yankee manufacturers? 

So, it was initially rejected, but over time the Americans figured out that actually this was what they needed and yeah, from about the 1830s until the Second World War, most of the time over that 120-year period, the United States was the most protectionist country in the world. So, I was revealing this history. It wasn't just the U.S. I mean, Hamilton got his ideas from British practices, Germans later developed Hamilton's theory and used protectionism quite heavily in the late 19th century. The Swedes and later the French and the Japanese and more recently Koreans and Taiwanese and so on. 

So, I was basically pointing out this hypocrisy in which these countries are actually telling developing countries not to use the exact same policies that they used in order to climb to the top. It wasn't just protectionism. It wasn't just tariffs, there were a lot of other policies like the use of state-owned enterprises, strict regulations on foreign investments and other things. So yeah, I mean, that caused a bit of a wave in the international policy debate because developing countries could tell the rich countries, “Look, why are you telling us not to use these policies when these are exactly the policies that you guys used in order to get where you are today?” 

G. Greenwald: You know, it's interesting when you kind of take those principles that you just described, these historical and economic principles, and apply them to specifics, I think sometimes people can see them better in a kind of more modern sense. And one of the things I find so interesting is that you have now a lot of billionaires who became that wealthy because they developed companies in the wake of the internet that became public companies, became very large and successful, who are now essentially insisting that the only way for innovation to happen is to have massive cuts in government spending, even though the internet itself was the byproduct of massive government investment, some of whom will acknowledge that. So, is that the kind of dynamic that you're describing where there's kind of this propaganda that government spending impedes economic growth, whereas so often it's what spurs it? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, I mean, it's in a way the most obvious in the United States. You know, it wasn't just the internet, but the computer itself, microchips. I mean, these are all financed by the U.S. government, especially the U.S. military: the internet, the GPS system, what makes our modern information economy possible, these were all invented with government money. And there's a reason why Silicon Valley is where it is because this is where a lot of U.S. defense research, specially built around the jet propulsion laboratory, was conducted. And yeah, this is like, once again, people rewriting history in the most convenient way. I mean, they lived on government support in the beginning, and then now that they are bigger and don't need the government as much, although they still need government, the U.S. government is still pouring huge amounts of money into military research, which spills into the civilian industries. I mean, it gives a huge protection in the form of the patent system and copyright system, without which these companies wouldn't have the monopoly they have. So, actually, they still need the government, but of course, they only want protection and not the obligations. So, now they say the government is bad. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, in fact, most of those companies, not only exploited the technology developed by the government, but continue to rely on massive government contracts, particularly with the military, but with the intelligence, you know, you have Palantir and all these adjacent companies that are on this kind of austerity kick. Everyone needs to lose their benefits, every government agency needs to be cut, except for our massive contracts with the CIA and the Pentagon that are worth many, many billions of dollars. 

The enforcement scheme – you were describing earlier, how rich countries sort of dictate this economic dogma to poor countries, that they know themselves the rich countries aren't what produces growth. The mechanisms by which they do that have been these kinds of international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. Oftentimes the message is, well, we've fostered this dependency, you're relying on a bunch of our loans and bailouts and, as a condition, we kind of demand that you just cut all services for your citizens and investments in your society. We want to see massive austerity and no more government spending. 

Is that done, do you think, with the intention to maintain these countries in a sort of dependence state, or is it just a misguided but well-intentioned way of trying to help these countries grow? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, it's a mixture of things, you know, because there is a lot of misguided goodwill. There are people who truly believe that the United States and other rich countries are developed on the basis of free trade and free market; there are economists who believe that government is bad and so on. So yeah, some of it is misguided goodwill. But you have to ask the question, if it's so misguided and has produced terrible results – because the World Bank and IMF programs have basically wiped out economic growth, increased inequalities, and created all sorts of problems in almost all the developing countries where they were involved – then, at that point, you will have to ask: okay, I mean, misguided goodwill or not, if these programs are not working, why do they keep repeating the same thing again and again and again? I mean, maybe you could say that these people are mad. As Einstein said, the definition of madness is repeating the same thing again and again and expecting different results. But it's not madness that they are doing this. They are allowed to repeat these policies that are not working only because they are basically backed by the rich countries, which benefit from this kind of thing. 

G. Greenwald: One of the more interesting disputes that arose in the last decade, it was about a decade ago now, maybe a little more. I don't focus primarily on economic policy or macroeconomics or anything, but I follow the story quite closely when the Greek economy was sort of on the verge of collapse. The Greeks elected a fairly populist, aggressive government that tried to stand up to primarily France and Germany insisting that the Greeks impose a sort of rigid austerity like we were just talking about. The Greeks tried to be very confrontational and resisted and didn't really work out well for Greece in the end. Are there ways that underdeveloped countries that are put into these positions have to defy these institutions or are they pretty much captive to what they're told to do? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Well, yeah, Greece was really crushed by the European Commission, basically France and Germany. I mean, people say that in that episode the IMF was telling the Germans and the French that they were going too far but what happened there was this mistaken belief that the way to revive the economy is to cut government debt, which means cutting spending. The trouble is that when you cut spending, the economy shrinks and the tax revenue falls and, as a result, even while the spending was cut brutally, public debt, as a proportion of GDP, was still rising because GDP itself was shrinking very rapidly. And there was a huge unemployment –especially youth unemployment reached over 40%. So, it was a total disaster.

But there are instances where the countries defied these international institutions [audio failed] …the Asian financial crisis and yeah, instead of signing these austerity agreements with the IMF, Malaysia suspended capital outflow for like a year. And yeah, there was a huge uproar. You know, they said, “Oh, when this ban is lifted, you know, 70, 80 billion dollars will flow out of the country.” But what happened was that because of this ban, because the money couldn't flow out, they stayed and then started doing something, so the economy got revived. When the government lifted the ban one year later, only six or seven billion dollars flowed out, which is a kind of normal amount. 

So, you know, there are these instances. And also, you know, look at the successful economies in East Asia: Japan first and then Korea, Taiwan, now China. I mean, these countries never really followed the advice of the World Bank and the IMF. (laughs) So, the proof is that they're steering you right into your face but apparently, you know, the people refuse to understand it. Was it the Canadian American economist John Kenneth Galbraith who said that if someone's salary depends on not understanding something, you can never make that person understand anything? It might have been often unclear but, basically, these institutions, these governments, they are refusing to accept this reality because it means that they have done wrong, it means that they have to do something that benefits them less. 

G. Greenwald: That is interesting, this emergence of this kind of new economic power based in Asia, obviously led by China. As you might know, our program is based in Brazil. Brazil had for a long time been kind of under the thumb of the United States. It's in what the United States considers its backyard, which is all of South America. But then Brazil became a founding member of the BRICS alliance and the Brazilian president Lula da Silva has said several times now that he wakes up every day dreaming of de-dollarization. Is the emergence of things like BRICS or the attempt to move away from the dollar as the dominant reserve currency potential paths to undermining this system that you're describing? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yes. Of course, if you zoom out, the history of Capitalism has been a history of domination and resistance and military invasion and colonization, gunboat diplomacy that led to unequal treaties. And so, it's been a constant struggle between different countries and societies that are located in different parts of the global economic hierarchy. 

So, yeah, I mean, in the '60s and '70s, with decolonization, a lot of developing countries that wanted to be kind of independent of the U.S. and European domination, they wanted to be allowed to change their positions in the global economic hierarchy and, yeah, they called for the new international economic order, they organized a non-aligned movement. Unfortunately, all of this was crushed in the '80s and '90s with the third world debt crisis starting with the Mexican [  ] of 1982 and, yeah, especially countries in Latin America and Africa basically kind of being forced to implement these World Bank-IMF policies, which basically created decades of stagnation and social unrest. 

Now, with the recovery from that phase and with the rise of China, with the kind of revival of some of the developing economies in the 21st century, these countries have started demanding a different arrangement. So, there's BRICS, also G20, which was created when rich countries were in big trouble, after the 2008 financial crisis. There has been the creation of new developing country-focused financial institutions, very often led by China, the Asian Infrastructure Bank and the New Development Bank. Yeah, so things are quite different. 

In the '80s and '90s, if you didn't agree with the World Bank, you didn't get money because there was only one bank in town, and it was called the World Bank. Now, there are different banks. Now, there are different countries with slightly different views about development, like, say, South Korea giving foreign aid and China is rising, Brazil is becoming quite assertive and South Africa, in its own way, is trying. So yeah, I mean I think this is a time of great global geopolitical shift. 

But when it comes to dollar dominance, I'm afraid that it's going to be a while before it can be changed because once you become the dominant currency, it gives you so much kind of extra power even without you trying. So, it's very difficult to change that. It has been changed only once with the rise of the U.S., you know, Britain had to see the position of the home of the dominant currency. But even that took decades. And this time around, even with the creation of the euro and the rise of China and so on, it will still take some time before the currency domination can be changed. But in other respects, the World Bank is now almost irrelevant, the IMF is kind of less domineering, [  ] credits changed its practices a little bit, not massively. So yes, I think the world is in a very interesting place. Unfortunately, it means that it can be a very dangerous place because now the Americans and Europeans are desperate to stop China's rise and they are doing a lot of things that could create quite a lot of collateral damage for weaker countries in the process.

G. Greenwald: Your work has become quite popular in various sectors online, as I'm sure you know and one of the viral clips that I saw circulating several times was one where you were talking about how modern-day economic thinking and language are sort of comparable to Catholic theology in the Middle Ages. 

And the thing that I thought of when I heard that was the very first U.S. presidential election that I really paid close attention to – it was in my young adulthood – was the 1992 presidential election where you had the Democrat Bill Clinton and the Republican George H. W. Bush who were in full agreement on the virtues and the sanctity of free trade. And then this was the time of NAFTA and the like. And then you had this third-party candidate who was kind of treated as a crazy person, Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire, who was saying NAFTA will gut out industrial jobs and factories and good paying middle-class lives for Americans. And then, you know, 20 years later, everyone agrees that the major problem is that we have massive deindustrialization, all these towns are shuttered, the middle class has kind of withered. Very prescient. 

At the time I didn't know who was right, but it seems very clear that the NAFTA opponents were. And yet any attempt still, even after all of that, to question the tenets of free trade and the necessity of having full-scale free trade drives people insane like it's some kind of an outrage.

Is that the sort of thing you were talking about with this “Middle Age theology”? And can you kind of expand on what more you mean by that? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, well, yeah, Ross Perot's giant sucking sound from the South. Yeah, no, no, absolutely. 

Well, it's not just in relation to free trade that economics has become the modern equivalent of Catholic theology in Medieval Europe. I mean, it is basically now a doctrine that justifies the existing social economic order. So, it's basically telling us the world is what it is because it has to be. However, unjust, irrational, or wasteful, you think that it might be the “science of economics” is saying – or in the old days, “the words of God,” especially as interpreted by the Vatican – it is something that you have to accept. 

So that now, you know, I mean, of course, that, you know, in the capitalist economy, economic considerations have always been dominant, but especially in the neoliberal age, when, you know, economic considerations are the ultimate and very often the only logic that you have to accept. I mean, economics has become basically the language of power. 

Of course, when I say economics, I must qualify that. There are different types of economics, you know, not all economists believe in the free market; not all economists think nothing else matters other than the market. But, you know, economics as it is practiced today is like that. Therefore, it has become a very important kind of obstacle to changing the world because it says that this is the best of all possible worlds and that anyone who tries to challenge it is either misguided or has a hidden agenda to enrich himself, empower himself, but really don't care about the rest of the world. 

So, yeah, I'm afraid that it's become like that and to extend the analogy a bit further, you know, economics as it is practiced has become basically impenetrable to ordinary citizens because it uses a huge amount of jargon, lots of mathematics, you know, lots of statistics. And yeah, I mean, ordinary people find it difficult to understand. So, it's become the Latin of the Middle Ages. I mean, it's the language of the ruling class. And if you don't know Latin, you are not even allowed to debate anything and the Vatican made sure that no one other than the priesthood and sons of some very rich people understand the Bible, by preventing the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. So, later during the Reformation, it became a big deal that the Bible was translated into English, German, French, and so on. Because now it meant that a lot of people could read it. So, yes, I'm afraid that this analogy is not as frivolous as it might seem. 

G. Greenwald: Well, it's interesting, though, because although that's clearly accurate in terms of how economic theory and economic thinking has gone, especially in the West and in these institutions we've been describing, probably even globally, you now have a new American president who ran on a campaign very hostile toward free trade and very favorable to protectionism and tariffs and explained it in a way that enough people could understand it. They voted for him, believing that tariffs would protect American industry, would enable its reemergence, the return of jobs and you have these establishment economic outlets like The Wall Street Journal and those types – the neoliberals and sort of, you know, classic conservative economic dogmatists – who are horrified and outraged by what is coming out of the Trump White House with regard to protectionism and free trade and tariffs. What do you make of his administration's approach to these questions? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, well, first of all, most of his tariffs are used to get concessions on other things than straightforward economic things, so, the use of the threat of tariffs to Canada and Mexico to kind of intensify their border controls. But insofar as it is used for economic purposes, I think it's very poorly conceived and will backfire most immediately, it is going to increase inflation. Especially if you impose a tariff on Chinese imports, which account for a big proportion of U.S. consumer products, then it will have an immediate inflationary effect. 

I mean, this is why initially he talked about a 100% tariff on Chinese goods, but now it's only 10% because even he and his people know that could spark inflation. But, you know, in the long run, this importation of cheap, good-quality consumer products from China has been one of the most important factors in the modern neoliberal American political economy, because wages have been suppressed for the last 50 years. The U.S. median wage fell from the mid-70s till the mid-90s, and then it started rising again but it recovered to the ‘70s level only a few years ago. And in that story, of course, another important role was played by the ballooning of credit cards and other consumer debts, but the availability of these cheap Chinese goods was very important. 

Now, if you impose a tariff on Chinese goods, you'll have to pay your workers more. How are you going to cope with that? So, it actually could undermine the whole neoliberal economic system. 

Now, he says that this will rebuild the U.S. industry, but I'm afraid it's not going to happen like that, because protection, as in the infant {industry} protection story, protection only creates this space in which improvement can happen and in order for that to happen, companies need to invest, they need to do research and development to innovate, they need to recreate the skill base of the American workforce and so on. And there's no plan to do it through deliberate industrial policies. 

So, he's basically leaving it to American corporations to do it, but then these corporations are actually not interested in rebuilding the economy because the U.S. now has – yeah, this really started in the '80s, but that really came into full being in the 21st century – the U.S. now has a parasitic financial system, which is not interested in long-term investment. 

In the last 25 years, the American stock market sucked out money from corporations rather than putting money in, which is supposed to be their job. Now these companies, in order to satisfy these short-term-oriented shareholders, have to do huge stock buybacks, sometimes borrowing money to do stock buybacks, because they want to do stock buybacks that are bigger than their profits, giving away huge dividends. So, in the last 25 years, 90% to 95% of U.S. corporate profit has been given back to these shareholders. 

So, these companies are like leaky buckets. You create more water by temporarily protecting your economy from foreign competition. These companies get more resources because of that because now they don't have competition, they can charge higher prices and so on. But this money is going to leak out of these corporations. I mean, look at the way that Boeing has been destroyed, all because of this parasitic financial system. 

So, I'm afraid that it's not going to work. It's not to go back to the infant industry analogy, although in the current U.S. case, it's not an infant, it's the revival of an old person. I mean, it's not enough to go to school, the kid has to study. You have to provide incentives and punishment to the kid so that he puts adequate hours and concentration to study. I mean, what Trump is doing now is sending the kid to school, but letting the kid decide what he wants to do. So, when he goes to school, he will skip classes and not concentrate. So yeah, I mean, good luck with the revival of the U.S. industry. I'm afraid I don't see it happening. 

G. Greenwald: I just have a couple more questions. I want to talk about what you just said and what you talked about before in this comparison to Catholic dogma and theology and the like, which is that if you had a set of pieties or orthodoxies in a particular field that was producing positive outcomes, you could almost understand why there weren't a lot of people questioning it or challenging it because it's working. 

Here in economics, especially international finance, you have not just the destruction of jobs and the middle class throughout the West in the United States, but also the 2008 financial crisis, what you were just alluding to, in a lot of ways, that wrecked the economic security and future of a couple of generations of people and countries all over the world. And you would think it would prompt a reexamination of a lot of these unchallenged premises and yet one of the things you describe is this kind of oligopolistic system of economics to prevent these principles from being challenged, I suppose, because they actually have worked well for a certain group of people who have an interest in perpetuating them. But how does that work, this oligopolistic system to preserve these pieties and make sure there's no challenge to them? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, so the most shocking is how poorly the neoliberal system has performed. I mean, of course, it benefited hugely a tiny group of people at the top. But, you know, compared to the days of the so-called “mixed economy,” the period between the 1950s and '70s, when there was a lot more government regulation, you know, the U.S. was 92% in those days – and there was a lot of strong state involvement in economic development, industrialization, all over the world, not just in developing countries, in the U.S., in Europe. Compared to those days of the so-called mixed economy, neoliberalism has not only produced higher inequality and more social problems, which even many of the advocates of neoliberalism admitted might happen, but it has produced much less growth. In the earlier period, the world economy was growing at about 2.8%. In the last 40 years of neoliberalism, it has been growing at half the rate – 1.4%, 1.5%, both in per capita terms per year. So, if it cannot even produce growth, why do we have this? That's the biggest mystery. 

Of course, those who benefit from it have all the interest in the world to defend it. So, you know, basically, the kind of politicians who support their agenda is more blatant in the U.S. because there's a lot of money flowing around in the U.S. politics legally. In other countries, it's a bit less, but those who have money have a huge influence on government policy, they control the media and they make sure that people are kind of indoctrinated into believing that this is the best of all possible worlds by making sure that the right kind of economists are given the Nobel Prize, the right kind of economists are given faculty positions in top universities, the right kind of economists that write in the financial press and pontificate on what is a good economic policy. And, yeah, above all, they have basically found a trick in diverting people's attention away from economics by creating all kinds of single-issue debates on gun control and abortion and the culture war and wokeism. 

So, yes, I'm afraid that this is why I have been on a personal mission in the last couple of decades to propagate mass economic literacy because in the kind of society we are living in, without everyone knowing at least some economics, democracy is meaningless. It becomes like voting in a talent show. Oh, I like the look of that guy. I mean, he has a beautiful voice or whatever. I mean, that is not about the substance, because those who have power and money do not want people to think about the substance. 

G. Greenwald: Well, with my last question, I'd love to have you back on, because it's been super enlightening, which I expected it to be, but I want to ask you about China. I remember in the 1980s in the United States, or into the 1990s, the overwhelming economic discourse was about fearmongering about Japan and its rising economic power: they're buying all of our buildings, they're taking over our industries, there's no stopping them. Apparently, there was some stopping them, because none of these scenarios that were depicted really happened. 

But now we're hearing the same thing, the same kind of rhetoric, about China – that they're rapidly growing, so fast that they're going to have parity with the United States in terms of purchasing power, they're going to be this unstoppable economic force. There's a lot of talk about them having to be our implacable enemy and at least a Cold War-type competitor or adversary. What do you think from a Western perspective and an American perspective is the right way to understand what one might call the threats or challenges posed by a rising China? 

Ha-Joon Chang: I must declare at the beginning that I'm not a fan of any country. I'm a citizen of South Korea. Korea has been bullied by everyone around us for the last few thousand years, Chinese, Japanese, the Mongols, the Manchus, the Huns, and later Russians and Americans. So, whatever I say about Japan, China, and so on, it's not because I'm particularly fond of or hate that particular country. I hate all the countries equally if you want me to put it that way. (laughter)

The rise of Japan was halted partly because Japan got bullied into opening the financial market and accepting a huge revaluation of the currency in the 1985 Plaza Accord. Once that happened, there was a huge financial bubble, it burst, the Japanese didn't manage the aftermath very well and then the economy went into a permanent kind of depression, and it was seen off in that way. And that happened, well, maybe mainly, if not even partly, because Japan was dependent on the U.S., on the military. When they lost the Pacific War, they were forced to sign this constitution which prevented it from having a sizable army and then the U.S. military is stationed in Japan. 

So, in that sense, even though it was rising economically, [Japan’s] political position was subordinate to that of the U.S. China doesn't have that problem. And actually, from China's point of view, the U.S. is the aggressor because basically China is surrounded by U.S. navy and army bases, almost all across this South border, except the one they did with Russia. You have the U.S. army stationed in South Korea, as well as the air forces; the South China Sea is kind of covered with U.S. Navy presence and you name it. 

So, China is not going to play that game that Japan had to play. So, it's not going to accept financial liberalization, which is the easiest way to undermine the rising economy because China does not have the kind of financial power, and I'm not just talking about money, but the financial institutions and the skills that people who work in the financial industry has and so on, that you can mobilize to fight the American financial power. Whereas you can and it is fighting the American power in terms of production and international trade and so on. 

My prediction is that China will not play that game, which means a big problem for the U.S. because first of all, it's not as if this is, as some people argue, the second Cold War. In the real Cold War, there was no real economic relationship between the Soviet bloc and the U.S. bloc. This time, China and the U.S., these economies are deeply intertwined. China is the biggest trading partner with the U.S. after the EU and the NAFTA countries. I mean, it owns 13% of the U.S. Treasury bills. As I mentioned earlier, the role as a source of affordable, good-quality consumer goods is very, very critical to the American political economy. 

So, the U.S. cannot push it around in the way that it could with Japan. More importantly, what the U.S. has been doing in the last several years – and this is not just Trump, I mean, even from the days of Obama, but more clearly, Biden – it has been actually pushing China into catching up faster. With all these restrictions on the high-grade microchips and key technologies, China – they say this is the model of invention – China has come up with these ways of doing the same things with less resources and lower technologies. 

So, when Biden made the Dutch companies and German companies export lithographic machines that make the circuit board for semiconductors, Americans thought, well, now this will make it impossible for the Chinese to have the latest microchips but, lo and behold, within a couple of years, it found a way to make the latest seven-nanometer chips without using the latest machines from the Dutch and the Germans. I mean, lately, this Chinese AI company DeepSeek has kind of created an economic earthquake by creating an AI with a fraction of the cost that American companies are using. 

So, I mean, if the U.S. really wanted to push back China, it should have started 20 years ago. Now it's too close. Putting more pressure on China will – not necessarily, but most likely – bring forward a day when it catches up with the United States and the rest of the world. This is why the U.S. and the EU are panicking and breaking all the rules of the WTO and other international institutions that they were so insistent on upholding because now they are desperate to [ ] China. But without a coherent industrial strategy and without reforming the leaky parasitic financial system, I'm afraid that they are not going to be able to do that. 

G. Greenwald: All right, Professor Chang, it's always good to have one's economic literacy raised and in the spirit of doing that we will show everybody who's watching where they can follow your work. We really appreciate you're taking the time to talk to us. We'd love to have you back on as well. Thank you so much.

Ha-Joon Chang: Thank you.

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Rumble & Truth Social Sue Brazil’s Chief Censor Moraes in US Court; DC Establishment Melts Down Over Trump's Ukraine Policy
System Update #409

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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There were two main segments on this episode:

First, we discussed the lawsuit filed by Donald Trump’s media company – which owns his social media site Truth Social – jointly with this platform, Rumble, against Brazil’s notorious chief censor, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. 

We were the ones who broke this story on the front page of Brazil’s largest newspaper this morning – Folha de São Paulo – and we’ll explain the story’s significance and its implications for a free internet. 

Tthen: President Trump significantly escalated his rhetoric against the West’s long-time darling – Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy – after Zelenskyy made critical comments about Trump, which in turn followed Trump's endorsement of the need for elections in Ukraine. After all, if you're fighting a war in defense of democracy, that country you're defending probably should have elections. Instead, Trump slammed Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian” who “talked the U.S. into spending $350 billion for a war that couldn’t be won,”. He also accused Zelenskyy of presiding over missing money in Kiev and suffering from deep disapproval among his own people, labeling him, “a dictator without elections.” All of that was in the context of Trump's arguing that the war must end – not only for the sake of the United States but also for the Ukrainian people. 

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We have reported many times on the increasingly repressive censorship regime imposed by not just the Brazilian government, but more so by a single judge on the Brazilian court. It’s something we've covered for lots of different reasons, including the fact that your free speech rights, if you're in the United States, are absolutely affected and threatened whenever censorship regimes are imposed and accepted in parts of the democratic world. They become the new bar that other countries can then hurdle over. We've seen that many times. There have been extreme examples of this in Brazil, including the banning of X, forcing them to comply with and obey every censorship order issued by a single judge. And it's just so extreme. 

Now, as you probably know, Rumble had operated in Brazil for a long time and began receiving this tsunami of censorship orders demanding that they close the accounts or block accounts of a whole long list of people, one after the next, always in secret court orders with no due process, no trial, no notice to the other person being censored. Rumble began complying but then got to the point where they said, “We created our site to be a site that defends free speech. We're not going to sit here and unjustly censor” and so Rumble decided that they would not be available in Brazil rather than comply with unjust censorship orders. 

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Germany's Repressive Speech Crackdown Intensifies | U.S. & Russia Meet in Saudi Arabia and Open Cooperation | Plus: An Amazing Hate Crime in Florida is Buried
System Update #408

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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First: The German-based journalist, James Jackson, has been covering free speech attacks in Germany extensively and he will be here with us tonight to explain all of them. 

Then: Several top national security officials of the Trump administration – including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump envoy, Steve Witkoff – met today in Saudi Arabia with senior Russian officials including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. It was the first real dialogue between high-level officials of both countries – by the way, the world’s two largest nuclear superpowers – that took place in many years and there is every reason to celebrate even, indeed, – to breathe a sigh of relief – over the fact these two countries are now agreeing to maintain open dialog and work together, cooperatively, not only to end the devastating war in Ukraine but on numerous issues of common interest beyond Ukraine as well. 

Plus: there was a bizarre and extraordinary hate crime that took place in Miami over the weekend that you likely heard very little about. A Jewish American man who identifies as an ardent Zionist shot and tried to kill two people solely because he thought they were Palestinian. The two men he shot were actually Israeli. 

For their part, the two victims also mistook the ethnic background of their shooter: they announced on social media that he was Arab and that he tried to kill them just for being Israelis and then added on their social media accounts, “Death to Arabs.” 

There's a lot to say about this incident, especially the reaction to it or, more accurately, the very subdued lack of reaction.

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The interview: James Jackson

The issue on which our show has mostly focused over the last year or so has been the relentless assault on free speech after October 7. It resulted in all sorts of executive orders in the U.S., purporting to ban criticism of Israel or activism against it, the shutting of pro-Palestinian groups on campuses and even the shutting of TikTok as one very prominent senator admitted over the weekend: the true impetus for shutting down TikTok in the United States was that it was perceived to permit too many criticisms of Israel. 

Meanwhile, throughout Europe, the targeting of Israel critics and pro-Palestinian activists, particularly people engaged in activism against the Israeli war in Gaza, has been even more severe. While it's taken place throughout Europe, undoubtedly the country where it has been most extreme is Germany, which has furnished immense amounts of arms to Israel that it used to bomb and destroy Gaza and therefore has a very intent motive to prevent anyone from claiming that those are war crimes or genocide because it would make Germany complicit – a strain Vice-President JD Vance did not mention when criticizing Europe for the attacks on free speech at the Munich Security Conference, last week. 

James Jackson is an independent journalist and broadcaster from the United Kingdom who is based in Berlin. He hosts Mad in Germany, a current affairs podcast. He has previously covered news, business and culture in Germany and Central and Eastern Europe for publications like the BBC, Sunday Times, and Time Magazine. He has really become one of my top two or three go-to sources for understanding events in Germany, particularly these assaults on free speech. We are delighted to welcome him to his debut appearance on System Update. 

 

G. Greenwald: James, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us. I know it's late there. 

James Jackson: Hi Glenn. Thanks so much for having me on here. You know, long-time reader and follower of yours. So, really great that you've picked up the free speech cause in Germany particularly because it's not something that has got very much attention until, of course, the vice president of the United States and “60 Minutes” as well brought it to the world's attention. But it's been something I've been trying to get the message out on for a while. So, I'm happy that it's gone global, but as you said, the most egregious attack on free speech JD Vance did not mention and that is the assault in Israel. I think we understand why, you know, politics plays a very important role in this. 

G. Greenwald: Right, sometimes politicians do constructive or positive acts or take constructive and positive steps even if it's always not for the best motives. And who knows, you know, JD Vance is politically constrained. I've never heard him defend or demand censorship of pro-Palestinian activism but in any event, he certainly did end up generating a lot more attention to this issue. 

I want to just step back from current events taking place in Germany which we'll get to in a minute including what happened today at this film festival. I think one of the very first articles I ever wrote when I became a journalist or a blogger back in 2005, 2006, was precisely about the fact that there is a vastly different tradition in Western Europe when it comes to perceptions of free speech than there is in the United States. One of the few unifying views in the United States was, at least until recently, the idea that even the most horrendous political views are permitted to be expressed. The state can't punish you for them. And I remember what prompted my article was a conviction in Austria of the British historian David Irving for having engaged in revisionism and denial of the Holocaust. He was criminally convicted and sentenced to a prison term. I essentially wrote that these things are unimaginable in the United States but they're common in Europe and in Germany in particular. After World War II, you could even say, for understandable reasons, there emerged these restrictions on speech particularly when it came to denying the reality of the Holocaust, its magnitude, trying to revise what happened, as well as praise for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party and the Nazi ideology. And so, you started off with this kind of exception to free speech justified by these extreme events of World War II and they've obviously, as we're seeing now, have expanded aggressively as censorship usually does. That's its trajectory. It starts off justified by some extreme event that people can get on board with and then before you know it, it's a power that is being used all over the place. 

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