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Good evening. It's Monday, January 15.
Tonight: the first actual votes in the 2024 presidential race will be officially counted as Iowa holds Republican caucuses all around that state. That means that the all-out establishment war to prevent Donald Trump from being reelected president of the United States officially begins tonight. For now, the principal establishment weapon against him is the campaign of Nikki Haley, who more and more Democrats are now openly, enthusiastically, out of desperation, supporting, not because she would be the weakest opponent for Joe Biden—that, at least would be strategic—but rather on the ground, the very earnest one, that she is so clearly the superior candidate in the Republican race, that for the good of the country—as liberals and their neocon allies see it—Americans are duty bound to vote for her.
The war to destroy Trump extends far beyond Nikki Haley and includes four separate criminal proceedings to try to render him a felon and imprison him, and more than a dozen legal processes to ban him from appearing on the ballot altogether and then dispensing entirely with the need to persuade Americans not to vote for him. But for tonight, the establishment hope is that it has breathed enough life and enough cash into Nikki Haley's campaign that she will leave Iowa and head to New Hampshire as the clear and sole Republican alternative to the orange Hitler.
One of the best decisions we ever made as a program was reading weather reports last week that warned that one of the most severe blizzards and cold spells ever would descend upon Iowa. And thereafter, we called up the intrepid independent journalist Michael Tracey and asked him to travel to Iowa to cover that caucus for us. Michael joined us on Friday night from Des Moines and is still suffering intensely under an ongoing cold spell, beyond that entertaining spectacle of watching him suffer that way and hearing about it, he'll also join us tonight to tell us the latest on what he's seen and heard over the past few days, going around to different rallies and what it presages for tonight.
Then, we take a look back at the fascinating and very revealing career of a Republican congressman, forgotten to history. First elected in 1960 to represent a moderate district in Illinois, he became one of the earliest opponents of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, warning that it would lead to exactly what it led to, which was an endless war without a clear exit. As a result, he authored the “War Powers Resolution,” the bill that curbs the ability of the president to deploy the U.S. military to fight wars without congressional approval, a law that really was mandated by the Constitution and was systematically ignored and was much discussed last week, after Joe Biden ordered the bombing of Yemen without so much as a congressional notification, let alone a debate or a vote.
What makes this congressman, Paul Findley, particularly interesting and notable is not just how he spent his career, but also how it was destroyed. Findley not only opposed U.S. intervention in general before doing so was mainstream but was a very specific and increasingly vehement opponent of U.S. funding of Israel and the U.S. support for its various wars. For that crime, he was accused by a PAC, the Anti-Defamation League and other vehement defenders of Israel in the United States, as being—you'll never guess—anti-Semitic. He was targeted by the pro-Israel lobby in defeat because of it.
In 1982, after he had served in Congress for 22 years, a PAC recruited and then funded a young Democrat who, unlike Findley, was highly supportive of Israel and believed that the U.S. should finance that foreign country. His name was Dick Durbin and he went on to become one of the Democratic Party's most senior, most powerful American senators and one of the most reliable supporters of U.S. funding of Israel. The case of Paul Findley was one of the first, but by no means the last, that sent a clear signal to American lawmakers that they either unquestioningly support Israel and vote for U.S. funding of it or face likely destruction of their career. It's a fascinating case because of the War Powers Act authorship as well as this aspect of his career, so, we're going to look back at that.
And then finally: the Metropolitan Police of London issued a chilling statement on Saturday, one that could only be found by definition in an authoritarian country: it announced the commencement of a criminal investigation due to a speech, a political speech, that someone gave at a very peaceful anti-war protest in London on Saturday. That speech, like the protest itself, was aimed at denouncing the now 100-day-old Israeli destruction of Gaza.
Many claim that this speech was intended to express support for the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, and to urge future attacks like it. The speech did not do that, as I'll show you, the person who delivered the speech vehemently denied that that was his intent or that he believed that but even if it had been, free speech clearly entails the right to defend violence. That's why people can freely urge that Iran be bombed off the map, or that Yemen be attacked by U.S. aircraft, or that Gaza be flattened and turned into a parking lot by Israel—all things we've heard said by prominent people in the West over the last several months, and obviously they didn't get criminally investigated or arrested because no matter how repellent that view might be, it's encompassed by and protected by the free speech guaranteed that all free countries have. Yet, because the target of criticism here was Israel, not Iran, Yemen, or Gaza, many people demanded—including prominent members of the British Parliament—that the police arrest the speaker. Yet again, we see a severe and rapid erosion of core free speech rights in the West, all to protect this foreign country, no matter what your view is of this war or Israel, that should be deeply disturbing.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
