Watch the full episode here:
Good evening. It's Tuesday, January 9. Tonight: one of the most significant rifts in conservative politics has been emerging over the last three months, ever since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the Biden administration's immediate request for another $14 billion for having to have the United States finance Israel's new war in Gaza. But that rift turned into a major explosion last week, when one of the most influential figures in conservative media, Tucker Carlson, launched some extremely vitriolic critiques against Ben Shapiro and, more broadly, the pro-American sector of the American right.
Carlson had previously expressed the substance of his critiques over the last several months, including in an interview on this program in December. His two principal points have been: 1) It is a direct and glaring violation of the so-called America First ideology to demand that American taxpayers fund the Israeli military and fund Israel's wars, especially considering that millions of Israelis have higher standards of living than millions of American citizens do, and 2) much of the American right, ever since October 7, has completely abandoned its claimed belief in free speech in order not just to defend, but to demand a wide array of attacks on the free speech rights of Americans who are critical of Israel, in other words, demanding the erosion of the rights of American citizens to shield this foreign country from critique.
Other influential right-wing figures beyond Carlson have recently voiced similar critiques about the Biden administration's unflinching support for Israel, including some who did so on our program. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky, for example, explained how he is now the target of a very aggressive effort by AIPAC, the American Israel Political Action Committee, to recruit and fund a primary challenger against him to punish him for opposing Biden's $14 billion request for Israel; GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who also told us he opposes that request, as well as recent conservative efforts to silence and demand the firing of various Israel critics, and the Daily Wire host Candace Owens, who exchanged incredibly vitriolic insults with her Daily Wire colleague Ben Shapiro over the latter's fanatical support for Israel. And there have been many other examples as well.
But what rendered Carlson's most recent comments, speaking to “Breaking Points” host, Saagar Enjeti, a new frontier in this rift is that Carlson waded directly into a claim that, despite being clearly true for many Israel supporters, is also one of the most rigidly enforced taboos in American discourse. The former Fox host strongly implied, if not outright stated, that what motivates Shapiro's obsessive fixation on Israel and his relentless demands that the United States—American citizens—fund and support that country, is not his view that such policies are best for the United States, but rather his view that such policies are best for Israel, the country to which, according to Carlson, Shapiro maintains his highest allegiance.
For these comments. Carlson—needless to say—was instantly condemned as being a bigot and a racist, not, this time, by Media Matters or Brooklyn-based digital media outlets, but by some of the Republican Party's staunchest supporters of Israel. This event did receive some attention, but not nearly as much as it deserved, given the multipronged significance of this long overdue debate on U.S. policy toward Israel within right-wing politics, especially given the new political orthodoxies of the Trump-era conservative movement.
Over the weekend, I published a rather lengthy article on our Locals platform regarding the implications of these disputes that have surfaced within conservative politics as a result of Carlson's accusations against Shapiro and his most fanatical pro-Israel allies. These issues have, of course, been a major topic of our reporting and commentary on this program since October 7, but the ability to gather it all together in one place, take a few steps back and reflect on it, and then express it in written journalism was both cathartic and, I hope, for my readers, illuminating.
As I've been saying for some time, I've been wanting to return to my regular written journalism, which has always been the anchor of the work I do. The idea in coming here was to do this show nightly on the Rumble platform, and then publish our journalism on the Locals platform, but doing that has been difficult for me over the last year, both because of the time constraints of producing this nightly show at a quality level we feel comfortable with presenting, as well as the personal struggles our family has faced over the last 18 months.
So, I resolved that, in 2024, I would finally start writing more. And perhaps the excitement of rediscovering that passion for my writing—as well as my very passionate views about this topic— caused an outpouring of a lot of energy. The primary challenge over the last week in working on this article was how to reduce it to a manageable length. With the help of our great editorial team here, I was able to do that, and I really hope that those of you who haven't read it yet will. But I nonetheless wanted to take a few minutes to highlight some of what I regard as the most important and overlooked aspects of how we arrived at where we are, where the United States, virtually alone in the world, has no space to criticize Israel, how no issue unites the establishment wings of both parties in Washington more than mindless and unlimited support for this foreign government, even when, as now, it requires the United States to incur very substantial costs. Costs that we incur both as a nation and as a citizenry. Most of all, I want to continue to do what I can to encourage some sort of reckoning with the principles of conservative politics that most of its leaders and adherents profess, and the necessary abandonment of those principles to justify everything that is happening in the United States when it comes to the topic of Israel and its war in Gaza.
Right before this show began, just minutes before, it was breaking news about an announcement by Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis that perfectly illustrates and relates to the point we wanted to cover on tonight's show, where DeSantis announced how, in his own words, he is implementing a program that makes it easier specifically for Jewish students in the United States, to transfer to Florida state schools and to receive a variety of benefits as a result of that transfer. Not the first time that Governor DeSantis has advocated group-based rights of the kind that he typically says he opposes when it comes to other groups. So, we're going to cover that just-breaking story as well.
Then: over the last 24 hours, almost a dozen journalists, pundits and commentators were banned from Twitter, from X, with no explanation of any kind. Their accounts just simply disappeared. The only thing they had in common: they had been outspoken critics of the Israeli war in Gaza, and scathing critics of the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman.
Today, after a lot of uproar about this, Elon Musk, to his credit, responded to critics of these bans, including myself, with a vow to investigate what happened and then all of those accounts were quickly reinstated. But this episode, along with our recent experience at TikTok that we told you about where our show account was banned without warning or explanation in December, only then to be quietly reinstated after public protests after several weeks, illustrates how Kafkaesque Big Tech decision-making over our discourse has become.
The issue is not merely the repressive nature of having the boundaries of our political debates severely limited by often unseen corporate executives or automated systems—that's obviously a concern of ours, one we've covered a lot—but it's also the complete lack of due process and appeal available for those whose ability to participate in public discourse is zapped out of existence overnight, often in the most arbitrary ways. We'll examine these events today at X and the one at TikTok, as well as the ongoing banning on TikTok of the popular YouTube commentator Jimmy Dore, also with that explanation, to illustrate this highly consequential problem with Big Tech censorship on our political speech.
And then finally: a really harrowing and almost fatal episode involving a Boeing 737 at Alaska Airlines has shined considerable light on this corporate giant on whose board—let us remember—Nikki Haley so lucrative sat after leaving the Trump administration. Many of Boeing's troubles are the byproduct of the standard and most definitely bipartisan revolving door politics of the D.C. swamp. Industry executives are appointed to the government positions overseeing that industry, get very permissive and then leave government and are highly rewarded when they return for services rendered. But much of it is the byproduct of the kind of mega-mergers that have increasingly destroyed competition for the American consumer, most often appearing within Big Tech but also in other industries as well. We will speak to one of the country's most informed and interesting antitrust analysts, a friend of the show, Matt Stoller, who has written a book on this and works for a leading think tank about all of these events, as well as some of the latest antitrust proceedings that may finally pose serious dangers to both Google and Microsoft to understand these sometimes obscure yet highly impactful proceedings.
I was involved in a debate on January 6th, which was Saturday night that I originally had planned to attend in person in Austin, Texas, and for logistical reasons, the second was unable to. So I participated remotely by video. And on the side of the debate, which was about January 6th, was my align with myself, Alex Jones and the former Trump speechwriter and Duke University professor of political science Darren Beattie. And on the other side was the, YouTuber Destiny, as well as the 2000 Stein twins. And I have to say, I didn't know what to expect from them, the 2009 twins, but they actually performed at a higher level of substance than I had anticipated. I thought actually they did the best job on their side of the debate, but the debate got quite contentious at various points. It was a very long three hour debate, so we prepared the highlights of the debate. The 20 or 25 most important minutes of the exchanges, we thought were most interesting, that we published as a separate video on our platform, which we hope you will take a look at.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
