Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Briahna Joy Gray on her Firing from The Hill and Free Speech Double Standards; Leighton Woodhouse on his Reporting About Dr. Fauci’s Dog Experiments | SYSTEM UPDATE 279
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June 10, 2024
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Good evening. It's Friday, June 7. 

Tonight: There's no doubt that in the United States, certain forms of right-wing speech have been targeted with various forms of censorship over the last decade: in academia, in media and online. But it is equally true that in the United States, one of the primary and most frequent targets of viewpoint-based firings, censorship and other forms of sanction, has been, and still is, critics of the state of Israel. One could spend all night documenting how many Americans have been fired or censored for criticizing this one foreign country, and still not be close to comprehensively documenting all of them. 

Since October 7, this long, potent censorship framework has exploded. There are dozens of cases, at least, if not hundreds, of media figures, political officials and academics who have been fired for saying the wrong thing about Israel. As we have repeatedly reported, laws have been enacted in the United States since October 7 to expand the legal definition of antisemitism to include a wide range of commonly expressed oppositional views of Israel. Fanatical pro-Israel governors have issued executive orders purporting to ban antisemitism, though no other form of bigotry in their state, and there have been countless attempts to punish students who sign on to or otherwise express opposition to Israel in a way that is deemed excessive, including efforts by many billionaires and corporations to blackball them from employment. 

The long list of Americans being fired for expressing views about Israel deemed over the line, or even bigoted, now has a new member. She is Briahna Joy Gray, my former colleague at The Intercept, who was also the press secretary for the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign and, until yesterday, the very popular host of the morning news show produced by The Hill entitled Rising. After Briahna became a major target of indignation and even hatred on the part of pro-Israel activists over the last several weeks, The Hill yesterday sent her a summary email, firing her with no explanation and no warning. We will speak to her about what exactly happened and then examine its broader implications.

Then: When Doctor Anthony Fauci appeared before Congress last week, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene asked Fauci about gruesome and morally repugnant experiments that had been conducted on dogs, specifically on beagles, a breed chosen specifically because of their particularly trusting and humane loving nature. Democratic partisans and others in the media immediately mocked her for spreading a deranged right-wing conspiracy theory, in part because news outlets for years, particularly The Washington Post, had gone to great lengths to cover for Fauci and depict this connection as a right-wing lie. But it is far from a lie. 

Earlier today, the independent journalist Leighton Woodhouse, with whom I have done extensive reporting over the years on the causes of mistreatment of animals, including these exact kinds of dog experiments back in 2017, published a very detailed and amply documented report on our Locals site this morning that laid out all the facts that Fauci, the National Institute of Health, and The Washington Post have united for years to conceal. These facts make the connection between the U.S. government, on the one hand, and dog experiments on the other, of this type manifest. 

Roughly at the same time that we published Leighton's article this morning, The Washington Post fact checker, notorious for being extremely partisan in favor of Democrats, published its own fact-check of Congresswoman Green's accusations and Fauci's denial. The Post's fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, began with this confession at the beginning of his article, "When we first saw Greene hold up the photo, we figured this would be easy to debunk — another in a string of misleading attacks against Fauci, who became the public face of the government’s response to the pandemic."

He ultimately concluded that the facts that he was able to find- which are well known and which Leighton cited as well - cast grave doubt on the dialog of both Fauci and the NIH. We will speak to Leyton Woodhouse about what he discovered and reported on our site today. 

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

 


 

One of the topics on which I have long focused is the question of all kinds of censorship, not only the kind that ultimately leads to the state enacting laws to punish people or to restrict their views but also the kinds of informal censorship when institutions that aren't part of the government, academia, business or media, start firing people because of their political views. Expressing unpopular political views is a fundamental part of being in academia, it's certainly a fundamental part of doing journalism and being part of the media. If people start getting fired regularly for expressing certain views, then it means that we live in a society where our discourse is very closed. And although I often focused over the last several years on the problem of right-wing speech being targeted, I have also spent a lot of time, essentially reporting on the fact that, in many cases, the firing of Israel critics is one of the most frequent forms of censorship in the United States. It has been the case for years that one of the easiest ways to get censored or fired in an American newsroom, in an American company, or at an American academic institution, is to criticize Israel in a way that is deemed excessive or deemed to be bigoted in some way. This has been severely worsened since October 7. There have been numerous Americans in the United States fired because of the fact that they criticized Israel. 

Just to remind you of a couple of examples – we reported on most of these as they happened: 

From NBC News, on October 26, 2023.

 

 The Board of Biomedical and Life Sciences Journal fired him after he posted the following on October 13: “The onion speaks with more moral courage and insight and moral clarity than the leaders of almost every academic institution put together. I wish there was a @The Onion University” while he quoted a post from that satirical website with this headline: “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.” (NBC News. October 26, 2023)

 

The same day, the journal released a statement from its board of directors saying Eisen, who was Jewish, had, “been given clear feedback from the board that his approach to leadership, communication and social media has at times been detrimental to the cohesion of the community.” 

 

On October 26, The New York Times reported:

 

David Velasco was removed after the magazine’s publishers said there was a flawed editorial process behind the publication of a letter that supported Palestinian liberation.

 

Thousands of artists, academics and cultural workers, including Velasco, signed the Oct. 19 open letter, which supported Palestinian liberation and criticized the silence of cultural institutions about the Israeli bombing of residents in Gaza.

 

The letter initially omitted mention of Hamas’s surprise Oct. 7 attack, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis, information that was added after criticism from subscribers and advertisers. A preface was also added to say that the letter “reflects the views of the undersigned individual parties and was not composed, directed or initiated by Artforum or its staff.”

 

The magazine’s publishers, Danielle McConnell and Kate Koza, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a post on the magazine’s website Thursday evening, they criticized the decision as “not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process.” The letter “was widely misinterpreted as a statement from the magazine about highly sensitive and complex geopolitical circumstances,” they said in the post, which made no mention of Velasco’s termination. (The New York Times, October 26, 2023).

 

So, here are two examples after October 7, where people and media were fired simply for expressing their support for the Palestinian cause and or their criticism of the Israeli war in Gaza. It's so notable that you can say anything you want about the American government and its leaders. You can go on and say the American government is radically corrupted, they're fascists, they're warmongers, they're communists. You can say anything you want about Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and you'll be fine. What you can't do is express that kind of criticism about this one foreign country; that often guarantees that you will suffer punishment and that has long been true.

From The Guardian, in June 2007. 


Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry, now has less than a year remaining on his contract with the political sciences department of DePaul University in Chicago. He lost his bid for a lifelong post after a four to three vote of the promotions and tenure board.

 

Mr. Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, has responded to the decision to, in effect, sack him from his job at DePaul by condemning the vote as an act of political aggression. "I met the standards of tenure DePaul required, but it wasn't enough to overcome the political opposition to my speaking out on the Israel-Palestine conflict." (The Guardian, June 12, 2007)

 

In 2014, The New York Times reported on a different firing in academia of an Israel critic:

 


The trustees of the University of Illinois voted on Thursday to block the appointment of Steven Salaita, a Palestinian-American professor who had been offered a tenured position last year, following a campaign by pro-Israel students, faculty members and donors who contended that his Twitter comments on the bombardment of Gaza this summer were anti-Semitic.

 

“Hate speech is never acceptable for those applying for a tenured position; incitement to violence is never acceptable,” Josh Cooper, a college senior who collected 1,300 signatures on a petition against the appointment, told the trustees before the vote. The student, a former intern for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, added that “there must be a relationship between free speech and civility.”

 

Several of the comments that supporters of Israel took exception to referred to parallels Mr. Salaita has drawn in his work between the experiences of Native Americans and Palestinians. (The New York Times, September 12, 2014)

 

I've been following right-wing discourse for many years on the issue of cancel culture and you can see that it has been the pro-Israel right, often overlapping with the right, but not always, who have been using these safe space arguments, using words like “hate speech” and claiming that people are inciting violence because of their political views. For years, way before conservatives started talking about cancel culture and the like, the targets of censorship were often critics of the state of Israel. 

Interestingly, Briahna Joy Gray was not even the first person fired by The Hill for criticizing Israel. In October 2022, Jacobin, the left-wing magazine, reported on the case of Katie Halper, who herself is a Jewish journalist. She had also been working for Rising, the same program Briahna was fired from yesterday. 

 

 

Are you allowed in the United States to call Israel an apartheid state? We've shown you many times before that in September 2023, a month before the October 7 attack, the former head of the Mossad, appointed to that position by Benjamin Netanyahu, said that Israel had become an apartheid state because they were about to be the minority rulers of a majority of Arabs. 

 

From NBC News was an article on CNN firing Marc Lamont Hill, their long-time commentator, after his speech on Israel drew outrage. 

He essentially gave a speech in which he said that we think it's important that Palestinians be free from the river to the sea, and for that, yet another journalist, Marc Lamont Hill, an American journalist, was fired from his job for criticizing Israel in a way that people found offensive. 

 

 

I've been writing about this for so many years. In 2010, a longtime producer for CNN who covered the Mideast region for them, Octavia Nasr, was fired by CNN. It was a summary dismissal by CNN of a 20-year employee who had nothing but positive reviews. And the reason she got fired was because she expressed solidarity or positive sentiments for a mullah in Lebanon who had been linked to Hezbollah. And this is somebody that you're not allowed to praise because he's deemed to be anti-Israel. So she was instantly fired from her job in journalism after 20 years. This is a pattern that goes back many, many years. And Briahna is only the latest example of someone who was fired from her job for criticizing Israel in a way that was deemed excessive. 

We are about to talk to Briahna. For those of you who don't know, she is a lawyer and also a longtime journalist. She was my former colleague at The Intercept, where we worked together for about a year and a half. And then she left to become the press secretary of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign. After that, over the last several years, she has become the very popular host of the morning news show Rising, which is a show produced by the longtime Washington media outlet called The Hill. And it was yesterday when Briahna received word out of nowhere, with no explanation, that she was being fired at the same time, that she'd become a major source of indignation,  contempt and hatred on the part of the pro-Israel faction in the United States. I'm always delighted to speak with Briahna, and tonight is no exception. 


The Interview: Briahna Joy Gray


G. Greenwald: Briahna, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. 

 

Briahna Joy Gray: Thank you for having me, Glenn, and thank you, I have to say, for being just so consistent on this particular issue, especially, when so many others have demonstrated that there is a free speech exception, that is very much Israel shaped. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I appreciate that. You know, one of the things I've always tried to argue when I've been defending people on the right who are fired or censored or otherwise punished for their views, is that it doesn't matter whether you like that person or whether you like their views. What matters is the principle that you want to affirm. Do you want to live in a society in which people are required to recite certain ideological orthodoxies in order to be heard in the media, to keep their job in journalism? Or do you want to live in a society where there's actually free speech, where people are permitted to involve themselves in debates, even with views that are unpopular and not lose their job over it, especially in journalism, academia, the places where, most of all, we need this kind of free discourse. So, let's talk about your situation. I just went through this long history that I know you know, of all the people in the United States who have been fired over many years, and particularly since October 7, for criticizing the State of Israel in some way or supporting the Palestinian cause. You know those risks to your career and yet you have become, since October 7, one of the most visible and vocal critics of the state of Israel, of its war in Gaza, of the Palestinian cause. Why was that a risk that you were willing to take? And I should say, I think the risk is even higher for people like yourself who aren't Jewish. People who are Jewish can get fired like Norman Finkelstein but have a little bit more protection. But, you were particularly vulnerable, I think, in part for that reason. Why was this cause something that you were willing to risk your job over? 

 

Briahna Joy Gray: Well, for one, I always saw my choice to work at Rising in the first place as driven by my desire to use a large corporate media platform to articulate left politics, which are largely excluded from any kind of mainstream discourse. For me, primarily, frankly, exclusively, it was about my ability to use the platform to advance a kind of politics that I feel passionately about. And the money is just, you know, an ancillary benefit on the side. And especially after Katie was fired from the Hill, my feeling was that it was my obligation, frankly, to test the premise that the CEO, Bob Cusack, had put out there at the time, which is that Katie's firing was not ideological, that they had some other sort of issue with the radar that she had written that was ostensibly the cause of her firing. These radars are our video essays that we deliver directly to the camera. But they had told her that her radar was somehow not up to the standard, that it had been written in a way that was not consistent with The Hill's editorial direction. And that's why she was let go, not because of the content of the radar. So what I said was, I'm going to go full bore on this issue in particular, obviously not knowing at the time that October 7 was going to make it the issue in domestic and international politics, but it was really important to me to not pull any punches, in part because I did not want to validate in any way the Hill's reasoning that they did not already fire a contributor for ideological reasons. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, I obviously empathize the minute you're a journalist and someone is telling you that you can't say certain things or can't report certain things, that is no longer a job that any person with any dignity should maintain. That's what I said when I quit my own media, The Intercept. And I wish that there were a lot more people who thought that way. All right, let's talk about the firing itself. You were notified of your termination by an email that was sent by the Hill yesterday. 

 

 

And just to add insult to injury, they didn't even bother to spell your name correctly. And they essentially just said, effective immediately, you are fired. It didn't contain any reasons for it. It's just a very kind of deliberate, summary dismissal. Have you received any word from them either since the firing or before that they had a problem with things that you were saying about Israel? 

 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yes and no. So I have not had any communication with anybody from the Hill about the firing. The producer, Joanne Levine, has not returned any of my phone calls. I immediately reached out after I received this letter, in part because it wasn't clear to me from the texts whether the 30 days referenced in the letter meant that they expected me to finish out the month, or whether or not, Wednesday was my last day in office, and I texted her several times saying, look, I don't need to have a conversation with you, can you just clarify that one point so I can start talking about this publicly? You know what I mean? So no, to date, I've heard from nobody except for Robbie, who has been on vacation and who is frustrated by all of this as well. 

 

G. Greenwald:  And to be clear, Robbie, it's Robbie Soave, who's your co-host and with whom you have a lot of disagreements, including in Israel. 

 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yes, very publicly on the show. That's the whole point of the show. But behind the scenes, off camera, he's very supportive of what we're trying to do on the show, of the project of the show itself, and is very protective of it and was very frustrated and disappointed in the actions that The Hill took. But I want to add some more context. I have been under a great deal of pressure for months and months now to tone down my Israel coverage at Rising. It started really in earnest about six months ago or so when there was a radical shift in the staff at The Hill where every single person who worked there was either fired or pushed out. The work environment was so difficult that they chose to leave. And as new staff replaced – and particularly new producers, who exerted much more editorial control over the content than had ever been exerted before – they particularly put a lot of scrutiny on coverage of Israel and started to refer to our coverage as an Israel block. We do about 8 to 12 blocks, or segments, a day. And they started to refer to this idea of an Israel block where we could only do one segment on Israel. And as you can imagine, Glenn, given the plethora of stories that come out on a daily basis, some of them were domestic political issues, some of them are straight news reporting about whatever bombing campaign most recently happened in, let's say, Rafah; some of them are about the choice to have Netanyahu come to speak to Congress; you might have a story about what happened on a college campus protest and on and on. You could easily do 12 segments on Israel every day. And they were segments that were very popular with Rising's audience. I've been on the other side of that, right? But on Israel, it was a double header of a lot of clicks earns money for the company, and is also something that's very newsy and something that ideologically I personally cared a lot about. And yet, unlike other subjects that were very newsy, let's say when we talked about a lot of COVID coverage or talked about some culture issues with trans issues and the like, there was never the same resistance to covering it as much as the audience wanted as there was when it came to Israel. 

G. Greenwald: I think there are two important things to note here. Number one is that this is not a foreign war. This is an American war. The United States government is paying for this war. It's arming the Israelis. And I think, most importantly of all, it has completely isolated itself on the world stage. So often, their votes at the U.N. were the only two No votes in the world, the United States and Israel, and the rest of the world either is voting yes, to criticize Israel, to stop Israel, or there's a couple dozen countries in the middle that are abstaining. And so, as an American, of course, this is the war you're going to talk about, not even because it's a war. It's like the war in Ukraine, it's also an American war as well. 

The other thing I think is so important in what you said – and I actually wanted to ask you about this – is it would be one thing if you had your own show and you were just there spouting what the company considered, let's call it, anti-Israel propaganda and nobody was rebutting it or checking it. For anyone who has seen this show, you had right next to you there your co-host, Robbie Soave, who I know well. But on this topic, he pretty much has been defending Israel vociferously and you and he have had some very strident arguments, often almost the kind that you wouldn't expect two coworkers to have, because that's how open these disagreements and disputes were. Can you talk a little bit more, though, about the idea? Obviously, The Hill could point to the fact that your commentary on Israel was harming their ratings, their views, or their profit. That would be one thing. Talk a little bit more about what those data shows. 

 

Briahna Joy Gray:  Yeah, not at all. In fact, the numbers on The Hill have been down significantly, again, since this whole staff turnover earlier this year, in part because it almost feels, frankly, like they've been trying to sabotage the show for a long time. For example, that edict came down earlier this year that we weren't allowed to respond to clips. And as you know, Glenn, so much of doing an Internet show is responding to viral clips. I mean, that's so much of what the coverage is. But there was this decision to disallow us from doing that. That caused a real steep decline in the kinds of segments we could do. And I've been outright told that certain kinds of guests couldn't come on, for example. I was told that Norm Finkelstein – you brought him up earlier, the foremost scholar on Gaza in the entire country, if not the world – was banned because they said he was a “Holocaust denier.” This is someone whose parents survived the Holocaust, themselves. 

So, this is the kind of pressure that we've been under. And as much as you see me, you know, arguing with Robby on air, that is our job. In many ways, that has been more tense behind the scenes because of the editorial control that they have been trying to wrest over me. I think Robby, frankly, he will speak for himself at some point, I'm sure, but he's been under a lot of pressure to push back against me in ways that maybe are even artificial to his own belief structure because the show desire for people at the company desire there to be balance, even if this is not necessarily an issue where there are both sides. And I think that's ultimately what led to the interview, which is being held up as the pretext for my firing. […] 

 

G. Greenwald: Let me interrupt you there because that’s what I wanted to ask you about. Just to give a little context of this, I've definitely been noticing that you have been ascending as a target by pro-Israel fanatics. I mean, they've really been going after you. You did this debate recently where it was very contentious, and the supposed neutral host constantly engaged in attacking you in very vicious ways, calling you a DEI Barbie, and then pathetically, cowardly denying that he was referring in any way to your race.

 

Briahna Joy Gray:  Yeah, exactly. (laughs) I‘ll have T-shirts made.

 

G. Greenwald: You should change your Twitter name to that. But clearly, the fact that you are out there, that you do have this kind of platform in corporate media where you've been using it to be so vocal in your criticism of Israel has really made you the public enemy number one. But as you say, that really escalated when this very short snippet of an interview that you conducted with, I believe she's a sister of a hostage in Gaza, is that correct? She's the sister of a hostage. At the very end of the interview, so there was no context to it, but they tried to claim that you were essentially mocking and rolling your eyes at a rape victim. We must show this video that caused so much disturbance. 





G. Greenwald: Briahna, I honestly never knew that there were so many people on the right who embrace this phrase “believe women,” but ever since October 7, they've been kind of chanting and marching around with their fist in the air, chanting this like they’re Gloria Steinem or something. Before October 7, the idea was, “No, we don't believe women; we want to see evidence and you can question the evidence.” I guess that is yet another view that changed. But what happened there? Were you mocking and rolling your eyes at Israeli rape victims? Explain what it is that you were doing. 

 

Briahna Joy Gray: Of course not. I am hesitant to give The Hill more clicks at this point, but I do encourage people to go and listen to the whole interview because of a couple of things. One is that this is not someone that The Hill reached out to. They weren't looking for a guest who was a family member of a hostage or who gave the perspective of what those family members are going through. This person offered themselves up and very specifically when making the request said that they wanted to talk to me. When our producer Joanne forwarded the request to me, immediately a red flag went up because it seemed to me that this was someone who had a personal vendetta, an agenda against me, and I was cautioning Joanne against having yet another person on that wanted to litigate what they found distasteful about my own personal political views in the context of a show where I, as a host, really don't have the opportunity to go back and forth. I have to moderate a show and be gracious to the person who has come there. But when they sort of opened the door to personal attacks and upset the balance in a way that I don't think is really appropriate for the show. I was in a position where I was under a great deal of pressure once again, to have balance in the coverage that was happening on the show, despite the fact that my Radars were the most – one of the only, well, performing segments that were happening on The Hill at the time because of the decline in viewership, as I was alluding to before. So, throughout this interview, she first said it was, I think, very fine. I think her perspective is valuable and necessary. We were talking about her sister and how hard it is for her to be separated from her. It was, you know, a compelling story. But then she started to interject political claims into the narrative. She made an Islamophobic comment, suggesting that there was going to be terrorism in Dearborn, Michigan because I suppose it's the largest Arab American community. She, talked about the now discredited mass rape hoax on October 7, suggesting that, if the organization that perpetuated many of those claims was credible and that if I only had listened to survivors, I would understand what had happened on October 7, and that her sister could be under similar threats of violence. Certainly, it could be the case that her sister could be under threats of sexual violence but she forced me, frankly, to push back against discredited false claims about events that did not happen on October 7. And as I did that, she seemed to grow increasingly agitated. She would pivot between saying that she didn't want to talk about politics and I said, “Okay, well, tell me about your sister, we'd love to hear about your sister.” And then she would interject politics back into it. When I tried to ask her how she felt as the family of a hostage victim, about how Benjamin Netanyahu has been handling the return of the hostages - he has been protested as you well know, in Israel, for not prioritizing the return of the hostages - she again pivoted away. So, she's not a politician, doesn't know about politics, but then, of course, toward the end, increasingly tried to make it personal about me. I pushed back the little bit that you saw there at the end, and frankly, that eye-roll and exasperation are more about the, sorry, stupidity of my producer choosing to have this guest on, who, very predictably, was going to make it into a personal attack about me than about that woman herself. And I would point out that, today, again, another Israeli guest or I think she was actually an Iranian Zionist guest, have made the same thing when they've come on and then clipped the episodes afterward to launch very personal media attacks against me with a swarm of bots that we now know from reporting over the past week it's coming directly from the Israeli government. 

 

G. Greenwald: You know, it's always been bizarre to me since October 7 that the excuse for destroying all of Gaza, for obliterating it, for blowing it all up and for starving it is they're doing it for the hostages. Because if I were a family member of a hostage in Gaza, and many family members of hostages in Gaza have said this repeatedly, the last thing I'd want is for my own government to be bombing the crap indiscriminately out of the place where my family member was, and to starve them. You had hostages who were released as part of that exchange early on, and many of them came out and said, my biggest fear was Israeli bombs. They talked about how there was often a shortage of food, not because Hamas was starving them, but they even said Hamas was sharing with them and eating the exact portions that they were eating. And so, to even make her representative as if she's speaking for all hostages’ family members is itself a distortion. But I think the important thing I want to delve into a little bit more is the great taboo here – has always been – questioning things that were said in the weeks after October 7 about what happened on October 7. Even though we know for sure it's probably true that so many of the things that were said, particularly the worst things, turned out to be absolute lies. They said that Hamas had beheaded babies. They said that they put them in ovens, that they cut them out of the wombs. As it turns out, it's documented that a grand total of one Israeli baby was killed on October 7. These were all grotesque lies. They had Joe Biden say he saw photos of beheaded babies, even though that never happened. And, then, of course, the big article that purported to step up and say we're about to tell the truth and verify this mass rape claim was a New York Times article that even within The Times, because of so much journalistic sketchiness, the need to retract certain things, people saying they were quoted in certain ways that they didn't believe, it turned into a huge scandal. And The New York Times, when they went to submit Pulitzer nominations, notably excluded that article. So, there are all kinds of questions about the nature of these claims. Can you talk a little bit about some of the uncertainties or some of the things that have been disproven about that kind of claim? 

 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because even covering that story on The Hill has been particularly difficult, even within the context of the broader Gaza siege. And one particular instance I remember wanting to cover, I don't remember whose reporting it was, whether it was the Grayzone or some other outlet, but one of the exposés that had basically revealed the inconsistencies in The New York Times reporting, and really blew the lid off of the mass rape hoax as it's come to be known. And when I proposed it as a blog, our producer again, Joanne Levine, said, I don't know about this. Why don't you do it as a Radar? It sounds like a Radar. Basically, she was trying to turn what was a news story into a personal opinion story to put distance between it and the show. And, again, I was not required to do Radar as part of my deal here, I was going to go from three days to four days, about a year ago, and no longer be required to do these radars, which are pretty time-consuming. I started doing Radars again after October 7 with great frequency, because it was really the only way I could get coverage of Gaza-related stories Into the lineup. So that was one instance where particularly there was a clear discomfort around even covering the mass rape hoax story. Of course, when I did cover it, I did turn it into a radar. It was again one of the best-performing blogs that we had. But yeah, I want to give an enormous amount of credit to The Grayzone and the Squirrel Twitter account and all of the people who have been scrutinizing blatantly from The New York Times’s record, the inconsistent claims about what was alleged to have happened on October 7. And I believe today, The London Times finally – one of the more mainstream outlets – that is now going back into the Pramila Patten U.N. report that was held up as corroborating evidence of sexual assault on October 7, when it did exactly the opposite. She said she looked through hundreds and thousands of images and video hours of the cameras that Hamas was wearing and the like and did not see any evidence of rape in any of that imagery. And yet we still have Sheryl Sandberg and the like performatively on camera saying that they're looking at evidence of rape that we know was not actually uncovered by the U.N. and, in fact, in the interview with the sister of the Hamas hostage on The Hill, she says that she also saw this video, saw this video that the U.N. says after examining all of the video and documentary evidence that it did not demonstrate, despite seeing a lot of horrible things, no doubt did not see any evidence of sexual assault on October 7. 

 

G. Greenwald: You know, I think that's the key point. There were obviously terrible atrocities on October 7, as people now say, as always happens and more. I mean, there were clearly civilians who were murdered in horrible and gruesome ways, in ways that were often intentional. But the truth also matters, like to question these maximalist claims doesn't mean you're denying the things that happened on October 7 inside Israel that were very worthy of condemnation. You know, every time we have a certain one of these events, there's always lies told about it. I mean, back when the Bush administration wanted to go to war with Iraq over Kuwait, they made up claims about how Saddam Hussein was pulling babies out of incubators. The Vietnam War started with lies. The other Iraq War started with lies. I remember when the Obama administration killed Osama bin Laden, they immediately released a whole string of lies to emotionally manipulate people to support it, claiming that he was shooting at them, that he had held up his wife as a shield in front of him to show what a coward he was. None of this turned out to be true. So, the idea that we're willing to immediately accept everything that's claimed in one of these events, let alone agree that we can't question it, is amazing to me. 

In the little bit of time left with you, let me just ask you: this whole idea that you risk your job if you criticize this foreign country, even though you're an American citizen living in your own country, and that you're free to say anything you want, no matter how vicious or nasty, about American leaders and American government officials but you have to be very careful and walk a very cautious line when criticizing the officials of this one foreign country. How did that feel to you having just lost your job because of it? 

 

Briahna Joy Gray: I mean, look, it's a no-no. I know that I was playing with fire, but to me, there's no point in being at an outlet like The Hill unless you're willing to use it to say things that you're not allowed to say. And I know that I was testing their boundaries. As I've explained, it's been a head-to-head fight almost every single day, for the past six months, to get the coverage you've seen on the screen. But to me, it was worth it. And it's worth it to expose how intolerant outlets like this are. Remember, The Hill really gets a lot of traction out of this idea but it's not really corporate media, it's an online show. It was innovated by Krystal and Saagr., who had this amazing format of left and right and who are outside of the two-party dynamic, neither identifying as Democrats or Republicans, willing to challenge the political establishment, to be very critical of it from both sides, kind of outsider wings. And they cover a lot of issues that are about speech suppression. We covered the Twitter Files extensively. We cover COVID misinformation. We covered all of those things extensively and the show brands itself as being different from other sorts of corporate media. We don't censor. We cover people who are censored. We have Matt Taibbi on, we have you on. And so, I do think that that alone is what kept me around so long, even as I was causing so much trouble internally. They were worried about the brand hit that they were going to take, especially after what happened to Katie Halper. So yeah, I mean, I obviously regret it insofar as I think it's important to have a left perspective on relatively mainstream platforms. That is why I was there. I think it's important, and that is a loss in and of itself. But I also think this is an important teaching moment, an important kind of reckoning moment about how powerful – and this is not a trope or stereotyping – I'm talking about a news story that was reported this past week about an Israeli branch of government that has a social media campaign to influence you U.S. lawmakers. This is what we're talking about here. The incredible influence of not just AIPAC as a lobby, but Israel as an institution in dictating America's media agenda and political agenda. And it should not be missed, by the way, that in both […]  happened about a week ago over the debate that I did at the Dissidents Conference in New York, that debate happened a month ago. That clip surfaced and circulated about a week ago by people like Ritchie Torres, who was one of the Congress members that the reporting about the Israeli influence campaign specifically says was involved. And he also was involved in surfacing and disseminating the eye-roll clip, which is purportedly the reason why I've been fired, though, of course, that's not what The Hill has said. I really do think it was a pretext, given my long-standing commitment to covering truthfully what has been going on on the ground in Gaza. 

 

G. Greenwald: It's just one of those bizarre yet very revealing facts of American life that Congressman Ritchie Torres, who represents the single poorest district in the United States, has decided to make a defense of this foreign country on the other side of the world, who have millions of citizens who have a better standard of living than the people in his district, the number one cause. Obviously, he understands the converse of what happened to you, namely, that if you become a fanatical Israel supporter as he has become, it is very good for your political future. 

Before I let you go, let me just ask you, you obviously identify as a leftist. You are, at the same time, a harsh critic of the Democratic Party. There's a lot of speculation that Biden's ongoing support for Israel, which we know will last through Election Day and beyond, might endanger his reelection because there are a lot of young people, a lot of people, a lot of left-wing voters whose support he needs in key swing states like Michigan and others… How serious of a threat do you think that is? Do you think the left will snap into line like they usually do and vote for the Democrats? Or do you think that this poses a serious threat to the support that he needs? 

 

Briahna Joy Gray: I do not think they will snap in line. There's obviously a contingent of folks who to date are still saying, yes, I'm very disappointed in him, but we've got to vote blue no matter who. But what has been really remarkable to see for me is that even people who were very critical of Biden, but who also said he's better than the alternative, have now changed their tune, who have changed their mind because, for them, a genocide or what the ICJ has at least described as plausibly a genocide is their red line. And, you know, I'm leaning to my friends, Kristal and Kyle, who I have the utmost respect for. We had a public debate on their podcast, I think last at the end of last summer, about whether or not the left should vote for Biden. I felt very strongly that they should not. This was before October 7, but they felt and they made a reasonable argument along these lines that I respect but disagree with: that because of certain labor gains, the improvement to the NLRB, those being building blocks for a bigger left movement, that it was worthwhile to vote for him. Now, post October 7 and post the eight months now of ethnic cleansing that we've seen in Gaza, they do not feel that way. And I admire that shift, and I very strongly agree with that. I'm so glad that we're all on the same page, but to me, it speaks volumes, that very intelligent people made a reason to argue and said at one point, yes, even knowing all of the critiques more than most folks, and because who criticizes Biden more than people like Kristal and Kyle, very, very few, that they still felt like there was a kind of political argument to voting for him then, but not now. And if they have had that shift being as informed and knowledgeable as they are, I think that's indicative of how over it so, so many other players are. You cannot see the actual headless infants, the record number of amputee children, the blatant disregard for cemeteries – 16 cemeteries being dug up by the IDF. What is the claim there that Hamas is under the dead? Are there tunnels under the cemetery? It's so flagrant that to the extent that anybody thinks that Biden should win because we got a quote-unquote “defeat fascism” or “defeat Trump” or whatever the argument has to be, then it's incumbent on Biden to change his position to earn those votes back, because I think very few kind of moral thinking, feeling, seeing people can look up at the Democratic argument that Biden is better than the alternative and really have a clear picture of that being true, and he's the one that's funding and facilitating the genocide that we've been watching for the last eight months. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, it's very strange to hear people say, “I think Joe Biden is guilty of being complicit in genocide and it's extremely important we do everything possible to keep him in power.” I mean, I don't see how any minimally moral person could possibly join those two statements together. Before I let you go, what is it that you are doing now? Where can people find you and support your work? 

 

Briahna Joy Gray:  Well, I have always been living my life like my podcast. Bad Faith is my primary job and I will continue to do that. So, you can get free episodes of Bad Faith every Thursday and you can subscribe at patreon.com/badfaithpodcast to get an additional premium episode on Mondays, you can follow Bad Faith on Bad Faith YouTube. You can follow me at @briebriejoy on Twitter, and I will be posting about new upcoming projects as well. So, please do follow me and stay tuned because I have been wanting, frankly, to have more space in my schedule to get back to some writing projects, and I anticipate starting those soon. 

 

G. Greenwald: Briahna, it's always great to see you. I have the utmost admiration and respect for what you do. I'm actually kind of glad in a way that your firing is so obvious that it was because of your views about Israel because it really manifests the actual culture in the United States when it comes to free speech and free discourse. And I appreciate your coming on. We'll talk soon. 

 

Briahna Joy Gray:  Thank you so much, Glenn, I appreciate it. 

 


The Interview #2: Leighton Woodhouse



Leighton Woodhouse is a longtime freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker based at the moment in Oakland, California. He has done extensive reporting at many publications, including documentary video reporting at The Intercept, both by himself and many times with me as well. It is impossible to place Leighton ideologically, which is what makes his reporting highly reliable. He currently does much of it on his Substack page at leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/. 

Earlier today on our Locals platform, we published a new original reporting from him about an ongoing controversy. 

 

I really think that Leighton is one of the great independent journalists in our country, and I am glad that he published with us, and it is great to welcome his debut appearance on System Update. 

 

G. Greenwald: So, let's start with the controversy that you published your article about, which was initiated when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene held up a picture of a hideous dog experiment that involved extreme suffering and torture of dogs for utterly unnecessary reasons and suggested that somehow Dr. Fauci was connected to those experiments, and he kind of expressed anger and indignation about this suggestion. We have this video of her asking this question. Let's go ahead and quickly show that. 

 

(Video. Marjorie Taylor Greene. June 3, 2024)

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Fauci, you were quoted on CBS Face the Nation saying it's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science because I represent science. Do you represent science, Mr. Fauci? 

 

Dr. Anthony Fauci: I am a scientist who uses the scientific method to gain information. 

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Yes. You said you represent science. Do you represent science, Mr. Fauci? Well, yes or no?  

 

Dr. Anthony Fauci: No, that's not a yes or no. 

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Yes. It's a yes or no. 

 

Dr. Anthony Fauci: I don't think it is.  

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Okay. Well, we'll take that as a you don't know what you represent. But, as director of the NIH, you did sign off on these so-called scientific experiments. And as a dog lover, I want to tell you, this is disgusting and evil. What you signed off on and these experiments that happened to beagles paid for by the American taxpayer. And I want you to know, Americans don't pay their taxes for animals to be tortured like this. So, the type of science that you are representing, Mr. Fauci, is abhorrent, and it needs to stop. 

 

G. Greenwald: All right. So that was Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Now, you and I wrote an article in 2017 together, and I believe we produced a video showing how hideous some of these experiments are. They particularly choose beagles because of their extra-trusting nature. We talked about how some of these experiments involved breeding dogs into the world solely to experiment on them, and then kill them afterward, so they have a life of nothing but torture and experimentation. That article was mostly about experiments in the corporate world and in the academic world. Before we get to the specifics of Dr. Fauci and his connection to these programs, talk a little bit about what these experiments entail, including the ones that Congresswoman Greene was referencing. 

 

Leighton Woodhouse: Yeah. So, this is an incredibly dreary topic that you and I have covered before. There are about 60,000 beagles that are tested in a year. By the way, I should say that we're talking about beagles right now, but millions of animals are tested on a year, most of them mice, which don't even get reported to the government. So, we actually have no idea how many animals are tortured in these labs in a year. But these beagles are often kept as you mentioned before, they are a docile, non-aggressive, eager-to-please breed of dog, which makes them perfect for laboratory technicians to be able to draw blood samples, inject them, do whatever they want to with them in experiments, which can include things like force feeding them laundry detergent, injecting them with bacteria with deadly viruses, etc. Sometimes the experiment was actually with dogs from shelters, but usually, they're raised in these factory farms for laboratory dogs, in which they're held in stacked cages, with wire floors. They're just sitting in their own poop and pee all day. I think the legal regulations are that the cage needs to be just a few inches bigger than their body, and if they make it twice that size, then they never have to take them out to exercise. So, often they are twice that size and the only exercise that these dogs have is spinning in circles in their cages, never touching the earth, never seeing daylight. And then they're shipped out to some laboratory to perform heinous experiments on them. 

 

G. Greenwald: So, the experiment in particular that was referenced in that exchange, and the one that has become the topic of controversy, talk about what that experimentation entails. 

 

Leighton Woodhouse: So, in 2019, in Tunisia, there was an experiment that was performed on a number of beagles in which they had their heads placed into mesh bags that were filled with starved sand flies, which carried a parasite, which in turn carried a disease with which the researchers were trying to infect the beagles. So, this experiment took place. There are pictures of it. A paper was published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases that was the academic journal it was published. In that article, the researchers acknowledged funding from NIAID. NIAID is the institute within NIH, which is led by Anthony Fauci. So, they acknowledged the funding from NIAID. This is in 2019. Fast forward a couple of years to 2021. This is an old experiment by now, but the White Coat Waste Project, which is a group that advocates against taxpayer funding of heinous experiments like this on animals, discovered the paper, publicized it, wrote a blog post about it, and, then, a couple of months after that, there was a letter circulated by a bipartisan group of Congress members expressing their disapproval of taxpayer money being used for this kind of heinous research. So, these two things together sort of spark a backlash online. There was a #ArrestFauci trending on Twitter. According to NIAID, they were inundated with so many phone calls that for two weeks, Fauci's assistant just stopped answering the phone. This is a real publicity crisis for them. We know that this is a political crisis for them because White Coat Waste was able to get ahold of their emails through a FOIA request. And in those emails, we have Anthony Fauci, telling his colleagues we are being bombarded by protesters and asking them to look into this experiment.  

 

G. Greenwald: I want to emphasize and draw out one part of what you said. So, the entire reason that this became a controversy is that there was an official and final publication that was published that the White Coat Waste project discovered, where it explicitly said that this specific dog experiment, the one where they put their heads in mesh bags and they're infected on purpose with this pathogen through all these sort of – what are they called? The things that are […] 

 

Leighton Woodhouse: Sand flies.

 

G. Greenwald: Sand flies. It said specifically, though, that it was funded, at least in part or in whole, by the agency that Dr. Fauci ran. So that seemed like pretty definitive proof. What happened then after that that made this a controversy at all? 

 

Leighton Woodhouse: So, it surfaced and it became a problem for NIAID. And what happened after that was basically, an orchestrated cover-up. So Fauci sends out this email saying, “We got to do something about this because we're being bombarded by protests.” What we know from these email threads is that within two hours, NIAID receives an email from Abhay Satoskar, who's the principal investigator on the Tunisian project. He's a microbiologist at Ohio State University. He sends NIAID an email. Following up on a phone call, he says this is following up on a phone call. So presumably NIAID had called him shortly before he sent the email. And in the email, he said this was all a big mistake. NIAID didn't actually fund our experiment. This was just like a paperwork error or something. I should be clear that we have a copy of the application to NIAID that was approved and which specifically details precisely the experiments that were carried out in Tunisia. Nevertheless, he says there was a mistake. And then within ten minutes of sending that email, he emails the editor of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, asking for a correction. The editor of PLOS Neglected Tropical Disease, as a close colleague of his. She is an expert on the exact same subject as he is, which is this disease called leishmaniasis. In fact, she's an expert on infecting beagles with leishmaniasis via sand flies. Her own research has been publicized by the White Coat Waste Project. She is co-published with Abhay Satoskar, with the principal investigator on the Tunisian project. And to add to all that, she works for NIAID, so her boss is ultimately Anthony Fauci. This is just rife with conflicts of interest. She acknowledges one of them with her colleagues. She says “I could have a possible conflict of interest since I work for NIAID,” regardless of this, these conflicts of interest, the question goes forward. It's published in the journal, and then NIAID has what it needs to be able to go to credulous reporters and say, this was just an accident, and this whole thing is just a big right-wing conspiracy theory. So, among those reporters, the foremost among them is Dana Milbank, columnist for The Washington Post, who takes their excuse, their alibi, and writes this column just dripping with sarcasm, making fun of the idea that Anthony Fauci is going to kill your puppy and calling it all a right-wing conspiracy. So, he publishes that column and then after that, and this is just what I found really interesting because you just see the way that the media ecosystem lines up, just one after the other of these fact-checkers like PolitiFact, Snopes, etc. just start regurgitating the same line. Shortly after that, The Washington Post released a big investigative story, in which they sort of unearth the right-wing conspiracy that had created this crisis at NIAID, where at a time when NIAID was busy trying to vaccinate children and they were distracted by all these angry phone calls and kind of goes through the anatomy of this online right-wing conspiracy. 

So, that's basically the end of the story, but they published the story, and, then, for years after that, like between then and now, it's been sort of consigned to the dustbin of right-wing conspiracy theories. Ironically, Marjorie Taylor Greene brought it up this week at this hearing, which inspired Glenn Kessler from, again, The Washington Post. Their fact-checker to his credit, wrote a very good, thorough, essentially debunking of the idea that this is a right-wing conspiracy theory that he didn't acknowledge in the piece that his own paper was the one that had propagated this myth. But he did very responsibly go through the facts and say, it looks like this was bungled by NIH and that their sources were shaky, etc., etc. And so that's what we're seeing now. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, it's amazing because when we got your article that you wrote completely separately, we decided we were going to publish it, first thing on Monday morning and, then, basically at the same time, The Washington Post fact-checker publishes a story that goes over many of the same facts that you did.

 

There you see it, from 2021. And, you know, the whole thing, as you say, is completely sarcastic, like, Anthony Fauci is trying to kill my dog, you know, and mocks the entire thing. 

 

I think one of the most important things that happened here is that, as you said, there was this article that was out for a long time saying that it was funded by the agency Dr. Fauci runs and then when this kind of minion of Dr. Fauci, someone who really does work ultimately for him, calls this journal and asks for a correction, they immediately corrected it, even though the editor herself essentially works for Dr. Fauci. And this was the correction that then they sent, as you said, to every gullible news media outlet that immediately published this claim that, oh, the whole thing was false all along. 

Was there ever any investigation of this denial before either this magazine published it or anybody else then took that denial or that correction and then used it to suggest that this was false? 

 

Leighton Woodhouse: Certainly, not from Dana Milbank, because we have his email to the principal investigator basically just saying, look, I want you to confirm that what I heard from NIAID, which is that this is all a big mistake. I believe that's probably the sum total of the investigation. 

 

G. Greenwald: Was there any investigation by the Journal that issued the corrections? Do you have this person who works with Fauci calling and saying, you need to issue this correction? And then, they issued this correction by the editor, who also worked for Fauci. Was there any attempt by that magazine to verify whether what they had published originally, which is that this was in fact funded by the U.S. government, was true or not, or did they just publish this correction based on the single phone call? 

 

Leighton Woodhouse: No, there's no evidence that there was any investigation. From what we've seen, the request was made. The request was granted. It was basically just rubber-stamped. 

 

G. Greenwald: Okay. So, now, internally, this is one of the things that your article today extensively covers and I think is so important. It shows, based on these emails that were obtained through FOIA with Dr. Fauci and those who worked with him. To me, it's almost very similar to what happened with the Lancet letter where, behind the scenes, Fauci was hearing one thing, and, then, they were desperate to try to organize a letter that said, oh, no, we know for sure that it's naturally occurring, even though, of course, they had no idea that that was true, that all kinds of indications from top epidemiologists that it may have been more likely that it came from a lab, and then they engineered this PR campaign to manipulate the public, and that the media then mindlessly carried forward Dr. Fauci's methods that any attempt to question the origins of the COVID pandemic and the virus in any way, by suggesting it wasn't naturally occurring, was a right-wing conspiracy, a right-wing lie, some kind of, you know, people were banned from the Internet for suggesting it. The emails that you reported on show a great deal about how, internally, Dr. Fauci and those who work with him can manipulate the media and orchestrate these kinds of PR campaigns to make the media say things that they don't have any idea whether or not they're in fact true. So, what is it that's reflected in these emails internally with Fauci about The Washington Post's Dana Milbank, or just in general about what the media was doing? 

 

Leighton Woodhouse: I mean, it's almost too strong to call it manipulation because the reporters are so eager and enthusiastic to go along with it. So, like in the emails from The Washington Post reporter Beth Rinehart to the principal investigator of the Tunisia Project, she says right at the beginning of the email, “We're reporting on this massive disinformation campaign against Anthony Fauci.” So, she had already reached her verdict. To your point about the COVID-19 origins stuff, I've reported on that as well with Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag. It is very uncanny the way in which there’s similarity here, because, you know, the “Proximal Origins” paper that was written by those scientists to disprove the lab leak hypothesis was essentially seeded by Fauci and NIH. So, in the sort of the backchannel they're asking for this paper to be written, the paper is written, on message with what they want it to be and then what is published. Then Fauci can pick it up and wave in front of the cameras and say, this “Proximal Origin” paper shows that it definitely came from animal spillover. So, it's exactly the same play. It's such a crude strategy that I… it's hard to even call it like a psyop because it's just so... yeah, easy to debunk. And it was very easy for me to debunk at the time. But to me, the most shocking thing about, or maybe not the most shocking but the most illuminating thing about it is the degree to which these reporters were just tripping over themselves to get this excuse from NIAID, to use it to exonerate them from the accusation. 

 

G. Greenwald: To me, one of the biggest takeaways, if not the biggest, is, you know, you have these emails that you report and I really hope people read your article. It's not very long, but it's very concise. It goes over these key emails. You know, they were basically celebrating, saying things like, “Oh, Dana Milbank is a great help. Like, kind of like he's their little tool. And the whole idea of journalism is that you're supposed to report adversarially on those in power. That's the whole idea of it. If you're just carrying messages of the government, no one needs you. You're just a propagandist, you should go work for the government. They have their own spokespeople. Nobody needs the media to replicate that message. But in the era of Trump, it just is so true. And we see it so clearly in the story that whoever is perceived as antagonistic to Trump automatically becomes a hero among American liberals who the media then seeks to serve. We've seen it over and over with Robert Mueller and now with Jack Smith and with Michael Avenatti, and on and on and on and on. 

Talk a little bit about how they were talking about the media. What kind of view do they have of the media inside the vouches operation? 

 

Leighton Woodhouse: So, Dana Milbank actually went back to them. Again, this is how enthusiastic these reporters are about doing the bidding of their favorite political leaders. He went back to them and said, I'm thinking about doing a follow-up story about the imperviousness to the facts of this conspiracy theory, something to that effect, and asked, do you have any more? There was something that kind of came through in these emails, which is that the reporters keep asking for more evidence that this money wasn't used on this experiment. And it's almost like they are not really buying the line, or they don't think that their readers will, and they're looking for something stronger to be able to hang their hat on, which is not forthcoming from NIH. But he goes back again to the trough and says, do you have any more evidence? I'm going to write another story. And to the response to that from the NIH staffer or the NIH staffers, can we get a response for Dana? He's being very helpful here. So, it's like the collusion between them. It's almost organic. It's like there isn't a need for a backroom conspiracy. The relationship is already established and the media is coming together  in order to deflect from these accusations that are out there and turn it into a right-wing conspiracy theory. That's the role not yet understood. The reporters understand it. It's just automatic. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, it's a political operation, pure and simple, which is fine for government officials, although not necessarily for health policy officials. But it's definitely not fine for journalists, so-called. All right. Last question, Nathan. On the question of dog experimentation, I think a lot of people obviously a ton of Americans have dogs. There's a lot of empathy for dogs. We saw that in the response to Kristi Noem's biography, where she bizarrely boasted of having pumped bullets into her puppy's skull, and it didn't go over well with almost anybody. Nonetheless, when I think about some people who think about animal experimentation, their view is, yes, there's a lot of suffering, even torture, that takes place as part of these experiments. But they're necessary to develop vaccines or cures for diseases for humans. And at the end of the day, humans are supreme, say many people and it's not nice that we have to use dogs and other animals to do this research, but it's worth it if it's saving human lives. Are these experiments necessary to save human lives? 

 

Leighton Woodhouse: No. One thing that is important to understand is that NIH funds basic science research. So that means that it's stuff that there's not an immediate goal to like, ‘if we discover this, then we can find this vaccine.’ I mean, some of the projects are towards the end of eventually learning more about this disease so that we can develop a vaccine. But it's not like if you had a test where if we go through this trial we'll be able to develop this cure. That stuff is paid for by pharmaceutical corporations. That's the applicable side. So, you don't need the government to fund that stuff. The government is there to fund basic research but there is no immediate commercial applicability. So, these things are like tests of, you know, how long does a dog have to run on a treadmill with a collapsed artery before it expires and dies? They're just curious to find that out. And so, NIH will fund it. And then what I've learned from reporting on this at length is that this becomes sort of a treadmill because what happens is the scientists who are engaged in basic research know that they can get funding from NIH for a particular experiment. So, next year they need to keep their lab open. They need to keep their research assistants paid. They have responsible fiscal responsibilities. If they just tweak the experiments a little bit, you know, use a different breed of dog or slightly different arteries severed or something like that, just to tweak the experiment, then they can get the funding all over again. So, it becomes this never-ending cycle, because it's not justified by any actual need in the world. It's just justified by the needs of the institutions that are conducting these experiments. 

 

G. Greenwald: All right. Great job on this reporting. People can find the reporting on our Locals page. It's available for everybody. They can find your leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/work-from-home. I have worked many times on the causes of the mistreatment of animals, what's happening in factory farms, and what's happening in experiments. And I don't think there are many people out there any more knowledgeable than he is on this issue, and many others as well. So, Leighton, thanks so much for that article. It was great. It was great talking to you as well. I hope to see you soon. 

 

Leighton Woodhouse: Thank you. Thank you so much. 

 

 All right. All right. All right. 

So that concludes our show for this evening. 

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Many of you have been asking about the impact of Trump's tariffs, and Glenn addressed how we are covering the issue during our mail bag segment yesterday. As always, we are grateful for your thought-provoking questions! Thank you, and keep the questions coming!

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In Case You Missed It: Glenn Breaks Down Trump's DOJ Speech on Fox News
00:04:52
In Case You Missed It: Glenn Discusses Mahmoud Khalil on Fox News
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Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted
TOMORROW: Locals Mailbag with Glenn Greenwald—We Need Your Questions!

Please submit your questions for our weekly mailbag. We're going to try to answer a couple more this week, seeing as we weren't able to host a Q&A last Friday.

Hi System Update,

I just stopped by to tell you that Michael Tracey is not just an annoying tabloid hack, but a real blow to the credibility of the work you do.

Please consider a spin off show for Michael? Get him a payday and let his work stand for itself.

Love the show,
Kurl

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Trump's DC Takeover: Is it Legal? Israel Kills More Journalists, Including Anas al-Sharif; Glenn Reacts to Pete Buttigieg and JD Vance on Israel
System Update #501

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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I am again on the road, specifically in New York City, in a hotel room, as I will be participating in a debate tomorrow night, hosted by the Soho Forum and Reason Magazine, regarding the constitutionality of President Trump's various deportation policies and other related questions. 

I have a lot I want to talk about, beginning with the decision and announcement by President Trump to basically, at least the moment, federalize the Police Department of Washington, D.C., as well as activate the National Guard to patrol the streets of Washington in response to what President Trump says is a serious out of control, crime epidemic. We'll look at both the legality and constitutionality of that decision and some of its implications. 

Also, again, every time we say that we don't think that there's any way for Israel to go any lower, for them to engage in any more horrific atrocities, they somehow do seem to find a way. Last night, they slaughtered five Al Jazeera journalists, including, arguably, the Al Jazeera journalist who has become the eyes and ears of Gaza for most of the time in all of the West; Anas al-Sharif was killed alongside four other journalists. This is now the 278th journalist that the Israelis have slaughtered in Gaza. Israel admits that it was a targeted killing, that they killed him on purpose and the Israeli claim, needless to say, I don't even need to tell you it's so predictable, is that, “Oh, he was Hamas,” and so therefore they were justified in killing him. 

Earlier today, another equally influential and prominent journalist had his house targeted with an Israeli bomb. It didn't kill the journalist, but it killed 10 members of his family. And then when rescue workers came to try to salvage those who were among the survivors, they bombed again, what's called a double tap, and they killed even more people. We have a horrific video of that. It really has gotten to the point where the contempt, the repulsion and condemnation that all decent people around the world have are insufficient for the magnitude of the atrocities. 

Of course, the U.S. government and both parties continue to support it. We'll have a clip from JD Vance for an interview that he gave on Fox News earlier today where he was asked about what he thinks of the Israeli plan to occupy all of Gaza, which, needless to say, has already resulted and will continue to result in even more killing of innocent people at a far more indiscriminate rate. We also have a response from Pete Buttigieg, who was once the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and somehow parlayed that into a position as Secretary of Transportation under Joe Biden. He was asked about Israel on the Pod Save America podcast and gave the sort of technocratic, meaningless, mealy-mouthed, noncommittal, frightened response that has caused even Democratic Party partisans, let alone everybody else, to absolutely despise Democrats, not even for ideology, just because of their complete cowardice as for ever take a position or say anything whatsoever. He's a McKinsey consultant and that's exactly how he talks about everything: completely dead-eyed, passion-free, afraid to take any position on anything. 

There’s a lot to talk about. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on Tucker/Candace v. Nick Fuentes, the Unabomber Manifesto, Independent Media, and More
System Update #500

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!

AD_4nXeZ4O4xc3AC6Xv7frryn0gRH426dnSiiWL_fHVJUOiYl0GyRu76Tf_ErdSXxAbt8_5IV4kXzpFumx9nFzEAFwyvBJKuSESoXedKaeqEU0JbvwLnTrSW_CnKdpQw8zuiOEQ2N6y3215-SJqPKJrgyg?key=0DG7XNYuAKh3Go88NaPTAg

Welcome to episode 500 of System Update, which means that over the last two years, ever since we launched in December of 2022, 500 times I have sat my ass in this chair, and we have done a program for you. Today is number 500. 

System Update, of course, is our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

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Every Friday night, as we're doing tonight, we take questions solely from our Locals members. We try to answer as many as we can.

 You may have noticed as well that, inspired by Donald Trump, all art today in commemoration of 500 shows is in gold, not our typical green and black. No, everything is gold. We went all out for tonight. So, I really hope you enjoy it.

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The first of which is from @alan_smithee. And he asked this:

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One of the reasons why I didn't talk about it, despite obviously being extremely interested in all three of them and the subject matter that they cover, I obviously am a longtime friend of Tucker’s. I used to be on the show, I think more than anybody else, when he was on Fox News, and now, on his podcast, I'm on frequently, maybe the guest who's been on the most as well, not really sure. It's not a competition. I don't know why I have to keep saying I'm at the top of the charts, but just to indicate the frequency, and he's been on our show before. So, I definitely consider him a friend of mine. Candace, I have a good relationship; I would describe it as friendly. I've chatted with Nick over the years a little bit, certainly not near the same level of interaction. 

I had this issue with Matt Taibbi. I was recently on Briahna Joy Gray's show, but also, I might have even been on a different show, where people were trying to ask me about Matt Taibbi and some of the criticism of him. Yeah, we've gotten questions about Matt Taibbi here as well over the past few months about things like his refusal to comment on Israel and Gaza, his infrequent commentary on the First Amendment issues raised by deporting students who speak critically of Gaza, the imposition of hate speech codes on American campuses by the Trump administration to shield Israel from criticism. 

I'm very honest about the fact that when someone is your friend, when you consider someone as your friend, at least for me, I really don't feel comfortable publicly criticizing them. It's actually one of the reasons why I go out of my way not to be friends or have any social ties with the people I'm supposed to be covering in Washington – politicians, major journalists. I've always thought the fact that I don't live in New York or Washington to be one of the greatest benefits for my journalism because I'm not in the middle of their social scenes. I don’t owe any social niceties to them. I don't feel as though if I criticize them, it's going to affect my social life or put me in uncomfortable positions. I take the obligation of friendship seriously. If you're actually somebody's friend, it comes with loyalty, and part of that loyalty is that, if you have problems with what they do and say, you go to them privately. It would take a lot for me to publicly criticize or down someone I consider my friend.

 I'm just being honest about that. Maybe that's not even the right thing to do. I'm not praising myself. I'm telling you how I feel personally. But again, I think if you live in New York, if you live in Washington, and you're integrated into that political media world, that is one of the reasons why it's so incestuous, why they constantly cover for each other, why there's so much groupthink within it. 

They're always talking to each other, for each order. To be part of these social scenes on which they depend, you have to be welcome. Part of being welcome is that you don't stray too far from their dogma. And I've always aggressively kept a very distant arm's length from people in positions of power, from major media figures, so that I don't feel constrained about giving my honest views or critiques or analysis or reporting on them. 

Occasionally, you do become friends with people almost by accident, who then end up in positions of power. Tulsi Gabbard is a good example. I have no problem criticizing Tulsi Gabbard because, whatever good relations I've had with her before, she's now the director of National Intelligence, and I'm not going to pull punches when I have critiques of Tulsi and I am also going to praise her only because I feel the praise is warranted. 

So, sometimes you just have to accept the fact that somebody has risen to a particular position or entered a type of power position, and there's just no getting around the fact that your job requires honest critique. I don't feel like that's the case for any of the people involved here, Tucker, Candace, or Nick Fuentes. I don't feel like any of them is a government official. Obviously, they all do have a great deal of influence in very different ways. So, I don't want to side with any one of them, nor do I want to necessarily say that I think insults or criticisms that they've launched at each other are warranted, but it is an extremely important conversation, so I also don't want to avoid it entirely, because for one thing these are three people, and obviously people understand how influential Tucker and Candace are. They're arguably the two most prominent conservative journalists/pundits, influencers. Maybe you could put Charlie Kirk in there, maybe Ben Shapiro, but Tucker and Candace are both bigger. I mean, Tucker hosted the most-watched show in the history of cable news for five years at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox. He's been on TV for 25 years before that. And Candace is just a powerhouse. She's a force of nature. Whatever you think of her, whatever you think of the Macron stuff, whatever you're thinking for Israel stuff, whatever, I'm leaving that on the side, I'm just saying. 

The fact of the matter is that when Candace left The Daily Wire, which, of course, is founded and run by Ben Shapiro after she had a falling out with Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, the other co-founder, over her criticism of Israel, which at the time was very mild – she was basically saying, “I don't think we should be bombing and killing children.” – that was pretty much the extent of it which caused this massive upheaval. A lot of people wondered, well, what is she going to do? Just like people wondered what Tucker Carlson was going to do, and they both went on to become, in my view, far more influential. 

I'm not saying that Tucker's position in the mediocre system now is necessarily larger than it is at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox News, but being at the 8 o'clock hour on Fox News comes with a lot of constraints, as he found out when he got fired, despite being the highest rated host on all of cable news. And he's completely liberated of those constraints now, I mean, completely. Completely. He's financially set. Fox is still paying this gigantic contract. He also now has a very successful platform. I mean, he's not worried about saying or doing whatever he wants. I know he feels – he said this before, publicly, not just in our conversations – that there were a lot of things he did as part of his career that he deeply regrets. Just being part of the Washington Group. 

I think he was raised there. I mean, he wasn't raised physically in Washington, but he eventually went there. But his father was very integrated into the U.S. deep state, that we could call it, ties to the CIA, he ran the propaganda arm of the U.S. government, Voice of America, was very, very integrated into that world. He grew up with a lot of wealth and privileges as he will tell you, and so when he got to Washington and got on TV very early on, he really was just immersed in this subculture that led him to believe, or at least not even necessarily to believe but to say a lot of things that he didn't really fully believe, or maybe that you can get yourself to believe things that you don't really believe because you just feel like it's what everyone around you expects you to say. 

Unlike a lot of people who are guilty of the same thing, Tucker has probably more than anybody else been extremely candid about what he regrets, and not only what he regrets, I'm not just talking about support for the Iraq war, I'm talking about the whole support that he gave for George Bush, Dick Cheney, neoconservative ideology, and not just on foreign policy, but also on economic policy and I think it's often overlooked. Everyone sees his head in foreign policies. Even when he was at Fox, he was criticizing Trump for doing things like assassinating General Soleimani, saying, “This is not in our interest. This might be in the interest of neocons or Israel, but why would we risk a war with Iran when that's not in our interest?” He was saying things like that even on Fox. He probably was the single most influential figure who took a lot of MAGA people, a lot of people on the right, and turned them against the war in Ukraine every night. 

I was on his show dozens of times talking about that war to the point where when he got fired from Fox, a bunch of Republican lawmakers ran to Politico or Axios anonymously and celebrated his firing and saying, “Oh, now our lives are going to be much easier. We can now fund the war in Ukraine without as much public pushback.” And that trajectory was because not just that he regretted what he had previously advocated and acknowledged his wrongdoing, but he was and is really determined to kind of repent for it. And he feels like the way to repent for it is by never again allowing himself to be blind. 

He moved out of Washington, used to live in the middle of Georgetown, where Victoria Nuland lived, I think, down the street or the other street. I mean, that's where they all lived. Now, he lives in rural Maine. He also lives on an island in Florida. He purposely took himself to very isolated places that are completely detached from that world, for the same reason as I was just describing. Not only do you feel less constrained, but you see things more clearly. You don't wake up every day and immediately get surrounded by people who are just part of this blob of groupthink and so, you're able to analyze things from a distance. It’s sort of like if you go into a big city and you're on a street corner, the vision that you have of what the city looks like is radically different than if you fly over it because that distance from what you're looking at gives you a better perspective, or at least, maybe not even better, but different. And the same thing happens when you move out of Washington or New York, and you purposely stay away from it, you start to see things more clearly because you're not immersed in it. And I do find that extremely valuable. 

I find that trajectory very, very positive. It's one of the reasons why, probably more than anything else that I've ever done, what caused much of the left turn against me, not all, but much, was number one, my refusal to get on board with Russiagate, but number two, my association with Tucker. I saw early on that there was a real movement within parts of the populist right, which you're now seeing in lots of different ways, not just questioning Israel and foreign policy and war, but also corporatism and the idea of economic populism. And yes, there are lots of deviations from it, but I mean Tucker and a few others were what made me see how real that was and how much of an opportunity there was, and not just to keep yourself in prison in the Democratic Party. 

So, I do believe Tucker's trajectory is real. I do believe that he's sincere and genuine in what he's saying. You never know what's fully in a person's heart, not even your own heart. You can't know for certain. You can deceive yourself about your own motives, your own thoughts and even the people you're closest to, your friends. But I have enough confidence in how well I know him, not just professionally, but personally as well, the time we spent together, the time that we've talked, that I do believe that he's very authentic in what he's saying. I think his trajectory is continuing. I don't think he's stopped at the point where he's going to be. And I think it's been very positive on almost every level. 

So that’s Tucker over here; then let's kind of put Candace in a similar position. I don't know Candace as well, so I can't comment to that degree of confidence about who she is and why she's doing what she's doing, but, two years ago, Candace worked at The Daily Wire, four years ago, she was in Jerusalem with Charlie Kirk celebrating Trump's move of the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, a long-time pipe dream, what seemed like a pipe dream of the furthest, most radicalized Greater Israel fanatics and their supporters in the United States. And there was very little criticism coming from Candace about Israel. In fact, the opposite was true. 

In her case, she's a lot younger than Tucker, she's only been around for not all that long, and I know personally that when you start off doing this work and you're able to spend full time digging into things, if you're minimally a critical thinker, if you're minimally open-minded, your views are going to morph the more you learn, the more you dive into things, the more you experience things. That is healthy and normal. And I do believe that her views, which she most passionately expresses, to which she pays the most attention, are genuine, which isn't the same thing as saying I agree with them all and they're all positive. I'm just saying I believe she also believes the things she's saying. I don't think it's calculated. I don't think it's about grifting. If it were, she could have stayed at The Daily Wire. There are easier ways to make a popular path than doing what she does. 

She defends Harvey Weinstein. She took up that case. There was hardly a public clamoring for that, especially among the audience that she cultivated. Also, the Macron stuff, all the stuff with Israel – she's been excluded from a lot of mainstream corporate media circles to which she used to have complete access and in which she could have risen without limits, obviously She’s very talented, like Tucker, she is a communicator, and she chose a much harder path, and I think that was through genuine conviction. There are many differences between Tucker and Candace, but for that purpose, you can put them together. 

And then you have Nick Fuentes. And just for those of you who haven't seen it, I'm just going to give you this summary of what's happened in the past few months, not going back years. The short version of this is that Nick Fuentes is often very critical of people who seem like they're the closest to him politically. So, he spends a lot of time criticizing Charlie Kirk – I was going to say Ben Shapiro, but I don't think Ben Shapiro is remotely close to Nick Fuentes – but Charlie Kirk on the surface could be. He spent a lot of time criticizing Matt Walsh. And he has also hurled a lot of criticism and might even say insults toward Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. 

In response, Candace Owens invited him for the first time on her podcast. Although I do think they have far more views in common than differences, the podcast was a bit hostile. I would say it's, in part, because Candace had some acrimonious points to raise with him, but also because – and she played some of these clips, I mean, Nick Fuentes had very harshly attacked her and criticized her, calling her a bitch who doesn't know what she's doing, and if you're going to do that, the people who are your targets are not necessarily going to love you, and so this was really the triggering event. 

She invited him to her podcast. He got a huge audience – between Candace and Nick Fuentes, who has a gigantic following online, in some ways you could argue he's as influential these days as Candace and Tucker, and maybe headed for even surpassing them, which again, generationally is natural – but because that interview was acrimonious and brought out a lot of tensions and personal conflicts, it kind of spilled over online because Nick left that interview and started really condemning Candace, accusing her of sandbagging him in the interview and the like, and then they had a big fight online. 

And then, before you knew it, Tucker asked Candace to come to his podcast. So, you're now talking about Candace Owens on Tucker Carlson's podcast, obviously a gigantic interview. And both of them, I don't know if they planned it, but both of them talked about Nick Fuentes in an extremely derogatory way. I mean, Tucker did acknowledge that, which you cannot deny. It's kind of like you can hate Trump all you want, but there's no denying his charisma, his skill in communicating, and the fact that he's very funny. 

For a long time, it was like heresy to say that, but there's no denying that that's true. I have no trouble admitting that people I can't stand are smart. I think Dick Cheney is very smart. I actually think Liz Cheney is very smart, just to give two examples, a lot of other ones as well. You can acknowledge the skills and assets that people have who you dislike or even despise. It’s not inconsistent. So, Tucker did acknowledge, like, look, Nick Fuentes is spectacularly talented. He is like a very rare, generational talent in terms of his ability to go before the camera, attract attention and be charismatic. But he's not like a ranter and a raver. Nick Fuentes is very well read, very, very informed. There aren't a lot of people who know more about the topics Nick Fuentes covers than Nick Fuentes does. It's very impressive. And that combination of being very charismatic, an extremely adept communicator, just kind of a natural camera presence, and having really smart insights that are grounded not in sensationalism or blind ideology, but lots of reading and thinking and critical evaluation, it's very potent. That's the reason why he's becoming so popular that even people at the heights of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson can't really ignore it anymore. 

They talked about Nick Fuentes as though he were just sort of some loser, like Tucker was saying, like, “How did he become so influential? He was just this gay kid living in his mother's basement in Chicago.” And I don't think Tucker quite meant it that way, but that is how some of it came off. Both agreed that he was some sort of psyop to destroy the right, that he maybe was a Fed working for the CIA. 

That led Nick to do a series of shows, a couple of segments, where he just tore into Tucker and Candace, particularly Tucker, in a way that suggests that he was: “How can you possibly call me this, Psyop, or this operative, or this person who works for the CIA, when you spent your whole life inside these circles? Candace Owens was the one working for Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson was working for Rupert Murdoch, making millions; Nick Fuentes wasn't. 

Nick's basic point was, like, you’re all very late to this game, like criticizing Israel, talking about the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States. You've only started doing this last year, whereas I've been doing it for years. This is what I think is at the heart of the matter: there are people who have been talking about Israel in this way for a long time. Noam Chomsky did, Norman Finkelstein did. 

One of the most important events was in 2007 when two of the most prestigious political scientists and international relations scholars in the United States, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote a book called “The Israel Lobby.” First, it was an essay in the London Review of Books, and then it turned into this massive tome, this 700-page book. It’s footnoted to the hilt because they're scholars, and they wrote the book that way. At the time, nobody on the mainstream was willing to say that. It was pretty much confined to the left, where you were free to say it. 

So, at the time, I was more associated with the left, perceived as being on the left. So, I was saying all these things for many years, but it wasn't all that risky for me because of the political camp that people perceived that I was in. I've always had one foot in that left-wing camp back then and one foot in the kind of libertarian, more independent camp, but in both of those camps it was totally fine, totally even welcome to talk about why we do so much for Israel, the evils of Israel, how they control our politics, how we go to war for them, how much money we spend to support them. 

So, I wasn't taking any risks – I've taken risks in my career, but I don't consider that as one – but Nick Fuentes, when he started doing it, was 18 years old, and he had this very promising future inside conservative media. At 18, he'd already been spotted as a talent. He had small shows, but he was making connections with and networking with some of the people who were very influential inside corporate media. People now forget, because now there's a lot of space for talking this way about Israel, but at the time, there was basically none. 

Before Donald Trump, there was almost nobody on the right willing to talk this way about Israel. You had Pat Buchanan, who did it for a long time, going back to the ‘80s, and he was viciously smeared as an anti-Semite. You had Ron Paul, who did the same thing. And then you had Trump kind of come in and create this space, and Nick Fuentes started really looking into it. I'm going into this not because of the personalities, but because I think they raise very broader issues about how all of this has evolved, not just for them, but for the broader discourse. 

Fuentes started off in conservative politics. At first, he thought Israel was our greatest ally and we have to support them: all the standard Republican and conservative views that have dominated both Republican and Democratic Party politics for decades. But then, the more he started questioning it, the more he started becoming vocal about it. And the more he became vocal about it, the more he became shunned inside the conservative media world, in which he had a very bright future. And rather than shutting up, as he was told to do, knowing that that might be better for his career, he couldn't. He just doesn't have that personality type. And he just had to keep examining it and keep saying it, and to say that Nick Fuentes paid a price for that is an understatement. Nick Fuentes has been excluded and booted out of every conceivable precinct of conservative media, even ones that consider themselves radical, dissident and far-right ones. I was playing on the mainstream ones. 

He was physically banned from going to Charlie Kirk's “Turning Points USA” and lots of other conferences like that. He was fired from the media platforms he was starting to develop. He was shunned by the friends that he had made, younger people on the side of the conservative movement. Then, it escalated from there. He got banned from almost every social media platform, including X. Elon Musk eventually reinstated him once he bought X, where he now is, but the only platform where he could be was Telegram. Now, he's on Rumble because Rumble is a genuine free speech platform. He has a show on Rumble that he does, I think, every night or four nights a week, and has found a good-sized audience. But really, it was on Twitter that he got his most attention, and that's why they banned him from Twitter in the pre-Musk era. But it wasn't just that. 

He wasn't just silenced and banned throughout all social media; he was also debanked. He had bank accounts closed, because of his political views, by major banks in the United States. He would get rejected for banking applications. He was put on a No-Fly list, which is the first time I really spoke about Nick, when I raised serious concerns about No-Fly lists being used in this way. His career has been severely impeded, not from what people believe are his racist views about Black people or immigrants; tons of people have those views and are perfectly welcome and fine in right-wing circles. The sole cause of it was his opposition to Israel and his questioning of the power of the Jewish lobby to keep the United States subservient to Israel. It just wasn't said. It was just a taboo. It was one of the third rails of American political discourse that would get anybody fired or destroyed for talking about it. 

Now, a lot of people talk about it, and it's become almost mainstream, but back then, especially on the right, almost nobody did. He paid a huge price, personally, financially, for his career, for his reputation, for his friendships, for his ability to get bank accounts. The government even put him on a no-fly list. And then last year, let's not forget, a homicidal maniac came to his house to try to murder him; shot two of his neighbors and killed them, and showed up at his house with a very large automatic weapon. This person eventually ended up being killed by the police. Another woman showed up at his house, a crazy liberal woman whom he had to pepper-spray. So, he's paid a big price for this. 

I don't want to speak for him, but I definitely identify with this mindset. I've had it too, sometimes, which is that if you are the first person or one of the first people to kind of get out on that plank and you're taking the shots because of it and very few other people are willing to join you,  and then at some point, it becomes a little safer to do it – I'm not saying it's safe; Tucker has also paid a price for it. I mean, half his audience has turned on him. He's now widely attacked by conservatives as being an anti-Semite, a Qatari agent, and Candace as well. So, it's not cost-free at all and Tucker didn't have to do it. He could have just ignored it. So, he's paid for a place too. 

But there's a big difference between Tucker Carlson in his mid-50s with a gigantic multimillion-dollar-year contract with Fox News, coming from the family that he came from, versus Nick Fuentes as a 22-year-old enduring all of that, and he comes from no wealth, no privilege. I think the idea is Nick feels like he was out on that plank, taking all these arrows and punishments, and then, in part, I do think that he helped open the space on the right to start talking more about Israel in a more honest way. It is true that Tucker and Candace, for the most part, hadn't really ever talked about it until after October 7, when, as Nick says, it almost became inevitable. They could have both ignored it. They could've both just spouted a few light lip services to it, but both of them made it very central to their cause, which they didn't have to do. It was not in their interest to do as well. But they did do it. 

But I think he feels like, I'm the one who actually paid the price for this. I was the one who was doing this earlier. Then the two of you come and now start doing it when it's a little bit safer, and also you're more protected because of your platform and standing in wealth, and you want to basically throw me in the garbage and declare me off limits, like, be the gatekeeper that says, you can go up to this point where Tucker and Candace are, but you can't go to Nick Fuentes; he's way too hateful or radical or dangerous or whatever. He feels like they're very late to the game, that he was braver, that he paid a bigger price and then they came along at an easier time and decided that they were the outer limits of where you can go on these discussions about Israel and the like. I'm not saying that's what I think, I'm saying that's what he thinks. I identify with that view. 

I think he would be fine if they would get there and say Nick Fuentes is one of the first people doing this, let's welcome him on our show. But the fact that he's still excluded, to the fact that they called him gay, loser, basically, in his parents' basement, implied that he was working for the CIA or was an agent, probably of Qatar, to destroy the right. I think that's what made him start being resentful, and also, there is this class issue here, which is very real. It's not his fault; Tucker's mother left them when he was very young. Then his father married an heiress from the Swanson fortune. And although she wasn't his mother. It was his stepmother. Obviously, he was living with his father and his stepmother, and they had a very good relationship. She was very good to him. And he ended up having all these benefits from a very young age. First, great wealth and privilege, and then some amount of fame, and then more fame, and then more wealth. And that's more or less been his life. 

Candace, I'm not sure about where she came from, what her family situation was, but once she got very big, she became very wealthy, and then she went to work for The Daily Wire, had a very lucrative contract there, and now she's married to, I heard Nick saying he's British royalty. I don't know if he is, maybe he is. I don't know one way or the other, but I know he's extremely wealthy. And I think there's a class issue there, too, which is like, you two purport to be the kind of warriors for this group of which you're not a part, which has kind of disaffected working-class white people. And Nick's saying, “I actually came from there and now suddenly you two, from your great mountain of wealth and privilege and lifelong or at least in Candace's case, years long, financial power and privilege and status and wealth, whatever, are coming in and trying to talk about me like I'm some loser and yeah I'm a loser in the sense that lots of white people have become trampled on by the United States and that is supposed to be what right-wing populism cares about.” 

So, I thought it was very telling. I do think, if I’m totally honest, it's more personal than substantive. I think Nick feels a lot of resentment for how he's been treated. 

I think Candace and Tucker feel resentment that they put a lot on the line to go where they went and one of the people who has a big influential audience, especially among young conservatives, have kind of gone to war with them. So, I think there's a lot of personal animist and personal resentment driving this, but there's also something very substantive here as well, which is about how people who are a little bit further along on the extremist train sometimes get attacked by the people who are less so, where they want to draw a line and kind of cut off the plank and have you fall off, even though you are on the plank first. I think Nick feels like that's being done to him, and I also think that there is a real class conflict that is driving a lot of this which is very much a part of the conservative world. I mean, huge amounts of conservative influencers, conservative pundits, conservative operatives who claim that they're there to speak for the working-class, for disaffected white people in the United States, are hanging out with billionaires every day and being funded by billionaires and meeting with billionaires and getting invites to the White House and to every center of power. And a lot of compromises are required to do that. And Nick's not willing to make them, and a lot of them are, and that is a substantive issue as well. 

Tucker and Candace, I do think, and they don't get very many invites to those circles. Tucker more than Candace. Tucker because he's been around for so long. He's good friends with people in the Trump administration. He campaigned for Trump, Trump likes him, even though Trump repudiated him and insulted him because of his opposition to the war in Iran. But there are a lot of tension points inside the MAGA movement that are very real, even if some of them are personally driven. We're human beings, we all harbor jealousies and vindictive sentiments and resentments. It's a Herculean effort to try to exclude those as much as possible. We all have to try; some of us do better than others. But none of us is immune from that. So, I'm not suggesting that it's a huge character flaw. I'm just saying I do think that's part of it. But I also think, at least as big of a part, if not bigger, are some of these ideological and class issues who's sort of keeping one foot in decent society and who's willing to say fully what they think without it. And the last thing I'll say is, and this is sort of what I began by saying, which is you can like somebody or not, but it doesn't mean you should lie about their skills or their successes. 

Nick Fuentes, I had a big online following for a few years, but it was very much a kind of online following that was almost like a cult following. It was like a very idiosyncratic group of people. They called themselves the Gropers. They didn't have a lot of cachet or influence outside of their circles, in part because Nick Fuentes wasn't invited anywhere into those more mainstream circles, or even less mainstream far-right circles. He kind of built his entire world himself. 

There are tons of successful podcasters and influencers who really don't have an original thought. They know what they have to get up and say to validate their audience, to show their loyalty to a particular circle. They may even have some talent in terms of rhetoric and communication, some charisma, but they're not very critically minded. They don't do a lot of reading. I can't tell you how often I listen to some of the podcasters of the biggest audience, and you're just like: How are you so ignorant? How do you think about these things? Do you ever stop and breathe and reflect, or read anything? Like read anything substantive in or bound like a Wikipedia page? So, there's a lot of that. 

But go listen to Nick Fuentes, if you haven't. And if you have preconceptions about what he is, I'm not saying that he doesn't say things that are provocative and deliberately cross lines on purpose sometimes, when he doesn't need to, just to cross them. Though I do think it's often purposeful, it's not just about a teenage transgressive instinct. 

So, there are definitely things he said that are offensive. Genuinely so, and not offensive in that, oh my god, you've offended me. But things that I think he would even acknowledge, he often says he doesn't really mean it, he is prone to rhetorical excess, and it's part of the whole presence. But everything that he talks about, he is extremely knowledgeable about and well-versed in. 

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Next question is from @edonk77, who says this:

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All right, the quick Ted Kaczynski story just for anyone who doesn't know it: out of nowhere in the ‘90s, in the Clinton administration, bombs started being sent to mailboxes. They were pretty sophisticated bombs, and they injured and even killed people. It was taking place across the country, and the FBI, the Attorney General, who at the time was Janet Reno, had no idea who was doing it. 

The person who was doing it wrote a letter, believed by the New York Times and the Washington Post, saying, “I will stop if you publish my essay about my ideas and what's motivating me.” And obviously, the instinct of the government is to say, “We’re not going to give in to your terrorist tactics,” which in classic terrorism is kind of what it was: it was violence directed at civilians to induce political and social change.  But it got to the point where the Justice Department was so desperate, they didn't have a first clue about who was doing that. It was like really the perfect crime. They agreed.

So, the Washington Post, maybe the New York Times, too, published this essay by Ted Kaczynski. The reason the Justice Department was willing to do it, aside from the fact that they thought it would help identify who it was, was because they thought what he had written was kind of just such lunacy, madness, that nobody would really read it and even think it deserved attention. And also, they were obviously made it known that the person who wrote that was the person who was sending these violent acts, the terrorist bombs, killing civilians or injuring civilians. They just assumed the hatred for him would overwhelm any interest in what he had to say. 

On one of those bets, they actually turned out to be right, because publishing this essay caused, eventually, Ted Kaczynski's brother, to come forward and say, “I think this is my brother. His writing seems familiar. His ideas are familiar.” That's how they were able to eventually track Ted Kaczynski down. 

Ted Kaczynski was a prodigy, recognized by everybody, as being brilliant – graduated high school at the age of 15, went to Harvard, completed a degree in mathematics. He then went to a PhD program, I think at the University of Chicago, at a top school, and then ended up teaching at Berkeley. And he was on the path of being the youngest ever tenured professor. He was a genuinely brilliant person, not brilliant in the sense that David Frum or Ann Abelbaum gets called brilliant, but genuinely brilliant. 

But what they were very wrong about was the fact that nobody would have any interest in his essay, that nobody would connect to any of his ideas, and that the hatred for Ted Kaczynski, even if people were willing to be open-minded, would make people refuse to read a terrorist essay and take it seriously. At first, that was true, but over time, people started turning to it and saying, “You know what? This seems quite important. There are a lot of ideas here that are very, very relevant and seem prophetic and explain a lot of what previously had been inexplicable.” 

I can't do a good job paraphrasing or summarizing the essay. It's very complex. It's highly worth reading. You can find it free online. It ended up being published in a longer-form, book format. You can read the essay in its long form or the book. But the basic theme of it was that technology was destroying humanity and the ability for human beings to live happy and fulfilled lives. And he traced it back to the Industrial Revolution, but then, how technology has advanced more and more. Before the Industrial Revolution, people were living in small towns, in villages, in nature like they had always lived on farms, had churches, had communities. They were very closely connected to their neighbors, to their extended family and they were living as human beings had lived for thousands of years. We're political and social animals. We need a connection. Without connection, human beings are going to go crazy. 

Eventually, we got to the point Charles Dickens was talking about: the hideous realities of living in gigantic cities as factory workers, completely exploited, working extremely long days for little pay. It is breaking people physically, spiritually, psychologically and emotionally, and that is definitely one of the costs, as we've even gone further down this road. 

And I think it's what Ted Kaczynski predicted, which is that the more technologically we come, the less human, the less fulfilled our natural human needs are. What it means to be human will be consumed by technology and turned into even more exploited tools and objects that barely look at us as humans, arranging our lives so that everything that gives us pleasure and is necessary for happiness is taken away. 

And just quickly on this, there's a Netflix documentary, I've mentioned this before, called “Happiness,” which is a documentary designed to ask, what is human happiness? How do humans acquire happiness? What is necessary and what isn't? And what they found is that a lot of what data reflects is that in many societies where people are economically deprived and without a lot of technology, they're much happier than in much wealthier Western countries. 

This documentary makes a very good case using science, not just pop psychology, about why, oftentimes, technological expansion and wealth expansion undermine human happiness. Ted Kaczynski also warned that, as technology evolved further and further, our societies are less humane, less fulfilling and less connected. And clearly, all of that is true. That is exactly what has happened. I'm not saying we need to dismantle it, but he actually lived those words, he dropped out of the whole matrix basically, when he was, I think 24, left his job as a faculty member and just went into the woods, lived a self-sufficient life off the grid, read, wrote, and did not much else other than working on his writing and his development and thoughts. The more he did that, the more he became convinced that being in the middle of this matrix was uniquely devastating to the ability of humans to be free and happy. 

Of course, that started resonating in America and in Europe and throughout the Western world as people became less and less happy. All the things he was describing as to why, and the role technology plays in that, would obviously exacerbate all that. Remember, this was 1995. I mean, the internet was just starting, but it was nowhere near as dominant in our lives. 

Obviously, with the internet, we often talk to people on phones or on screens. We have our phones everywhere. So, a lot of the human connection and interactivity you once had just walking on the street is now taken away from you because everybody's staring at their phones. You go to restaurants, any restaurant anywhere in the Western world, and you have people who are related, people who are friends, who talk a little, and they both pull out their phones. And before you know it, they're both staring at their phones, and especially with COVID, which forcibly segregated everybody and kept everybody at home, where people even developed a greater dependence on the internet to do everything, including interacting with other humans, this isolation has become far worse and all of the predictable pathologies that come with it that he predicted are also worsening very rapidly, in a very dangerous way. 

I mean, to me, this is the West's greatest problem: spiritual decay that comes from lack of connection. Obviously, there are benefits to technology. We have cures to diseases that we would otherwise die from. The internet makes the world easier, gives you access to things, including reading and information that you otherwise, etc. etc. There are a lot of benefits. But for me, one of the things I think I've learned is that the only real law of the universe is balance, by which I mean for everything that you drive a benefit, there's an equal cost, at least, that offsets it and keeps it in balance. Whatever: fame, wealth, career, success, it all comes with a cost. I definitely think that's the case of technology, and Ted Kaczynski was one of the first people to lay out this case in the way he laid it out. So even though he was a terrorist, even though he killed people, a lot of people began to think, you know what? I think there's a lot of validity here. 

You might ask why he goes to the scene to kill people? He had an academic pedigree. He probably could have gotten this published. I don't really know. I haven't paid much attention lately to this whole episode, so I forgot what the rationale was for that. But in any event, maybe he was also a little imbalanced himself. That probably was true. But, sometimes, being mentally imbalanced or at least mentally alienated, in a way, is necessary to produce insights. Even going back to that last question we talked about, you remove yourself from a certain society or a sector of society, it gives you a much greater clarity of thought because you're no longer connected to it or in it, and you can see it much clearly. I'm sure that's what happens if you just remove yourself completely. 

One of the things the question asked about is left-wing politics. And the person who just asked this question, I'm on the political left, but a lot of his critiques of what left-wings politics is about and the flaws in it, I must admit have validity. And basically, what Ted Kaczynski's warning was, and this definitely proved prophetic, was that the idea would be to make this system of technology and the capitalism that emerged from it invulnerable, so nobody blamed it, nobody wants to undermine it, nobody wants to subvert it, no matter what it's doing to us we're all propagandized to revere it to believe it's all good to believe it's invulnerable, to believe that we benefit from it. And he said one of the ways that that's going to succeed is that people are going to be given kind of culture war fights or social justice causes, which are going to make them feel like they're doing something subversive or radical, when in reality nothing that they're doing is a threat remotely to any real power center.

 Compact Magazine, which is I think a really interesting magazine, it kind of explores the intersection between left and right populism had an article on June 16, 2023, which I really recommend. The headline of it was: “Ted Kaczynski Anti-Left Leftist.” 

Obviously, this vision he's presenting in some ways is left-wing. It's a denunciation of capitalism and its excesses, the Industrial Revolution, and technology, that has a left-wing ethos for sure, but he was also scornful of modern-day, leftist political expression. 

A week or two ago, Ryan Grim as on our show and we were talking about the kind of fraudulent branding of Bari Weiss and The Free Press. There was supposedly a heterodox and dissident when, in reality, it really grew from objecting to a lot of the excesses of the woke movement. And Ryan basically said, if you're talking about kids with blue hair or whatever color hair someone has, or if they're trans or not or whatever, you're not talking about anything that is about the real structure and dissemination of power. It's like catnip. They're happy to have you fight about racism, feminism, yeah, they love racism. They love feminism. Remember the CIA did that whole video, super woke video? They centered like a, what was she? She was, I think, a non-binary Latina who had neurodivergence. And she was just like, “I stand proud and tall and occupy space unapologetically” as a Latino non-binary immigrant, whatever. They're so happy to have that. “Hey, look at our Black generals. We're going to celebrate our Black military officials. We're the Pentagon. Hey, with the FBI, look at all our cool badass women agents or fighter pilots. Look, they're women now.” It's like, “Oh, wow, that's so awesome. We've done so much to change society.” It's that famous cartoon where a Muslim family in Yemen are looking up at the sky and kind of smiling and saying, “I hear the neck bomb is going to be sent, is going to be dropped by a woman pilot.” 

It's just like, here's Hillary Clinton. She's so radical and such a wild departure from everything before, because she's going to be the first female president when there's like nobody more representative of status quo politics than she. So, you vote for her. You feel like you're doing something really like a big blow against the power center and the patriarchy, because now there's a woman and you put her in office and she's going to be the best possible protector of status-quo prerogatives and power centers everywhere, because she presents this illusion that you've done something historic or subversive, when in reality you're just working as hard as you can to entrench the status quo that you think you're working against. 

Ted Kaczynski was incredibly prescient about that as well. There's a lot more to him than what I've gone over. There's a lot to the essay. I just can't do that justice in the time we have, even though I took another hour. 

I did want to give my thoughts on it, but I also highly encourage you to go find the essay, even just start with the essay and I think you'll be amazed if you just sit down and read it, forget about he's the Unabomber, all that. Just read it, and remember it was written in the early to mid-1990s, and so even if some of it seems more familiar now, at the time it was very prescient, but also the way he described it, the historical framework he employed to shed light on how it works, that it's not just some brand new thing, it's gone back, basically traced it back to the Industrial Revolution. There are not very many better ways to spend your time in terms of your brain and your critical thinking, then to go read that essay. 

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All right, here's a few questions on Gaza. 

First from @CatRika:

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@Lightwins2028:

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It actually is incredible that I come here and sit here every night and do this show more or less every night 500 times. I will accept that as well and agree that it is kind of incredible.

And then from @johnmccray:

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I will confess that what we've seen in Gaza over the last 20 months is not just some horrific tragedy or even war on the other side of the world; it is a genocide that involves some of the most twisted cruelty and sadism I have ever witnessed in my life –  obviously, I wasn't alive in World War II, which is why I say ‘in my lifetime.’ However, when you announce that you're blocking all food from entering an enclave that you fully surround and control – and yes, there's a small border with Egypt and Gaza, but the Israeli military is on the other side of that, controlling egress and ingress into it and out of it (besides, the Egyptian dictator is U.S. supported and always has been for decades because he's there to take marching orders from the U.S. regarding Israel).

When you take this concentrated open-air prison enclave, where people can't leave, can't come in, you ban the media from coming in, and you announce to the world you're putting a blockade on any food from entering it, and you knowingly starve them to death, you knowingly blockade food from entering on top of what they're already experiencing – endless bombing, people burning alive in their churches, in their tents, every hospital, every school, all of civilian life being destroyed… The doctors who are there don't have basic medicines. They don't have antibiotics, they don't have feeding formula for babies, they don't have painkillers or anesthesia for the children who come in with their limbs blown off – just the absolute, worst nightmares that human beings could possibly endure for a sustained period, and on top of that, you start starving them to death and then, instead of letting food distribution in from the actual organizations that are experienced in it and actually want to feed the people, you create some new entity that you control – American military contractors that are, for profit, doing the bidding of the IDF, purposely set up so that it barely gives out any food and then it's a death trap – so, you lure starving people in there and you murder them and massacre them regularly, daily… That is a new kind of evil. 

When you’re starving people to death and then saying, “Hey, here are some grains of flour, come here and get them,” and murdering them when they do, when you purposely set up the centers so they barely stay open for more than 15 minutes. People get noticed right before, and they have to trek miles, very dangerously, to get there. They're not allowed to stay there, waiting for the next time to open. They have to go back, and they're killed on the way there. So, they're faced with this Sophie's choice of either having to stay at home and watch their kids starve to death or knowing they risk their lives and their teenage son's lives to go there and try to get food, knowing that a lot of them are going to be murdered, that is a sick new kind of evil. 

And because of how ubiquitous cell phones are, we have to watch it, and we know it's been streamed live every day, throughout the world. We've all seen just the absolute most sickening, hideous human suffering imaginable, a level of sadism that's almost hard to fathom that people are capable of. And while some Israelis are protesting some more now about the end of this war, for the most part, the view of the Israelis has been, I don't care how many civilians we kill, I don't care how many babies are killed. The babies are terrorists. They'll grow up to be Hamas, so I don't care to kill them. 

These are evils that are difficult to endure, even if your work is journalism, even if you look at some of the most horrible things people are doing, you still have to report on them. Even for that, I mean, it's hard to fathom and express, and I know so many people, and I just thought about myself including in this, that you feel so impotent, so your rage is so purposeless, even though it's all-consuming, because the Trump administration doesn't care. It's filled with Israel fanatics, and it's going to support Israel until the very last Gazan is killed. Can you give them all the weapons, all the money, all the diplomatic cover? 

And then of course, the Israelis themselves are so deranged and fanatical that they don't care either. And short of having the world go in and militarily intervene against Israel or arming Hamas, which is not going to happen, there's not a lot you can do. There definitely has been serious measurable changes for the better in how Americans now look at Israel and look at the Israeli action in Gaza, how they look at American funding of Israel. That's not going away. That's a big, big problem for Israel. 

Once you open your eyes to that, you can't unsee it. And you have a lot of people, as we talked about in that first question, fueling it constantly. I hope I'm one of them. I certainly do what I can to do that. But that doesn't mean that any of that is going to stop this war. 

Even in Europe, and I really despise the Western European political elite and media class, they're utterly supportive of Israel. They are loyal to Israel, they arm Israel, fund them, not as much as the United States, but to a great degree. A lot of those historical reasons, guilt over World War II, which Israel expertly exploits – not that it's difficult to exploit the guilt and psychological fragility of Western Europeans, but they do a great job of it. 

So, you're starting to see things like Macron comes out and recognize a Palestinian state, not unimportant, but still a symbolic step. Keir Starmer, he's probably the most despicable politician from a character perspective, an utterly empty, vapid belief-free politician – he's despised in his own country, despised. – He didn't even go that far. He said, “We are going to recognize a Palestinian state unless Israel starts letting food in.” So, Palestinian statehood is not something they're entitled to. It's like a threat that you make to Israel that you're going to give them if the Israelis don't let food in. You see the Germans, who are always the worst for obvious psychological and historical reasons when it comes to standing up to Israel, sort of saying now, “We're going to cut off arms.” 

We'll see how long any of that lasts. The one group of people you do not want to put your faith and trust in to stand for a cause, to hold firm on beliefs, or convictions and values is Western European political elites. They're pathetic. Pathetic. Obviously, there are some exceptions, but as a class, they're nauseating and pathetic. 

I used to think the British elite class was the worst elite class on the planet. While I still think they are definitely in the running, I'm starting to actually think the Germans are more psychologically warped and sickening. I mean, the Germans were also fanatics about the war in Ukraine – fanatics. You put Germans in power, and they don't think about anything other than going to war with Russia. It's really a bizarre repetitive pattern. 

So, I don't want to pretend that there's some quick solution. I do give as much money as I can to them, you can find Palestinian aid and Gaza aid organizations. There's no shortage of verified GoFundMe accounts from people in Gaza telling their stories. And obviously you have to be a little careful not to give to fraudulent ones, but there are easy ways to verify those. Look for trustworthy people on Twitter who vouch for them, things like that. You can donate to that. Even like $50 at a time, whatever you're capable of, $10, $15. Everything is so high-priced in Gaza that sometimes even if they have food available, they can’t afford it. And I think it's also a good way of showing the people in Gaza that the world actually cares about their plight. 

Earlier today, I talked about how Marjorie Taylor Greene has become very outspoken about refusing to serve the agenda of AIPAC and that AIPAC is now on the march against her. They're going to do what they've done to all sorts of politicians which they are now doing to Thomas Massie as well: try to find some fraudulent, politician who lives in their district, who seems demographically appealing to that district, who has the same politics, except they're going to know that AIPAC paid for their political career, paid for the seat in Congress, and they're going to be supremely loyal. 

One of the worst examples – I mean, I can barely look at this person because of how pathetic and sad it is to watch him. They wanted to get Cori Bush out of Congress. If you're conservative and you dislike Cori Bush, AIPAC doesn't dislike her for any of the reasons that you dislike her. They only care about the fact that she's raised questions like, “Why are we sending so much money to Israel when my whole district is filled with people financially struggling, who don't have healthcare, don't have access to education, have no public safety?” Why are we giving all this money to Israel? Why is AIPAC forcing us to do that?” And they were so determined to take Cori Bush out because of her Israel questioning that they found some utterly craven Black politician, nice liberal, nice Democrat, of course. You have to get a liberal, you have to be a Democrat, and probably have to be a Black politician. His name is Wesley Bell, and they paid $15 million – 15,000 million –for one Democratic primary seat in Congress in St. Louis, to replace Cori Bush with somebody exactly like her, except that he's an AIPAC loyalist. And you can just see him on social media and in speeches, standing up for Israel. You know exactly why $15 million was his price tag, and he knows if he wants to keep that seat, he's going to need AIPAC doing the same. And they're going to try to do the same with Thomas Massie. They're going to try to do the same with Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

They're not always successful. They've tried it many times with Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, even, to a smaller extent, AOC. They made some inroads, but for the most part, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are too popular in their Democratic primaries and their Democratic constituencies for that to work. 

In 2022, Ilhan Omar almost lost the Democratic primary. I think she won by a few points. So, she's not invulnerable. They never quite spent the money on her that they spent on people like Cori Bush or Jamaal Bowman. But they have a long history of doing this. And they're clearly doing it to Thomas Massie. If you look at the three top billionaires donating to AIPAC to remove Thomas Massie, they're all Jewish billionaires who are extremely loyal to Israel. 

That's the whole point of this effort that Donald Trump supports. One thing you can do is just look at who AIPAC is trying to remove from Congress and just donate to whoever they want to take out of Congress as a way to thwart them because even if you're a conservative and you see them doing it to some left-wing member of Congress that you don't like, it's not like the person they're going to replace that person with is going to be any more appealing to you. There's no difference, except that that person is going to be bought and paid to be an AIPAC agent, who is going to be devoted to Israel and never question Israel. That's the only difference. 

AIPAC's not taking Cori Bush out of Congress or Jamaal Bowman because they're too left-wing. The only thing they care about is if the person is devoted to Israel. The same with Tom Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene. If they're going to take out members of Congress as punishment for not being loyal enough to Israel, donate to the people they're trying to remove on both sides. If you're on the left, you're not going to agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie, obviously. But the people who are going to come in their place are not going to agree with you politically anymore. The only difference will be that those people will be fanatical Israel supporters, like many in the Republican Party, instead of being among the few to question them. So, that is another way I think you could work. 

I know this is thankless work. There's no immediate gratification, but it does work. Public opinion changes. It really does. And especially with independent media with a free internet, with the deconcentrating of power over the discourse no longer in the hands of a few tiny number of gigantic media corporations controlled by people who are all the same basic political outlook, with the same interests, but now huge gigantic people with big audiences who influence a lot of people completely removed from those circles and that dogma. That is also a big reason for optimism. And if you see the polling change in a pretty substantial way as you do on the Israel question and the Gaza question, keep contributing to that. You don't have to have a gigantic platform. 

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Last question, this is from @coldhotdog:

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All right. The U.S. is sanctioning Brazil, Brazilian officials, and also imposing tariffs on them, not for the reason that Trump has been imposing tariffs on other countries, mainly because he thinks there's unfair trading practices causing a trade deficit. The opposite is true. The United States has a significant trade surplus with Brazil. There's not a trade deficit. So, the tariffs are more – and it was kind of explicit – used as punishment against Brazil for their violation of free speech, their violation to due process, their persecution of political opponents. And obviously, that is not the U.S.'s real goal. 

I wrote an article about this in Folha, where I do reporting, and I'm a columnist in Brazil. And it basically said, Okay, I hope no one takes seriously when the U.S. government says we're upset about the infringements on free speech or the erosions of democracy. It was like a month before Trump announced sanctions on Brazil and tariffs on Brazil, that he went to the Persian Gulf region and heaped praise on Mohammed bin Salman and the leaders of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, heralded them, hugged them, and not for the first time. While I think Brazil is very repressive and I think Moraes is an absolute tyrant, it's in a completely different universe than what happens in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. It's not even close. 

So, any country that's heaping praise on and embracing, hugging and propping up the governments of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Qatar, or the Egyptians, or the Jordanians, of the Bahrainis or whomever, the Philippines, Indonesia, obviously, is not a country that cares about repression inside other countries. Obviously.

The United States doesn't go around the world fighting wars or intervening in other countries because they care about repression. That's the pretext. They love dictators as long as dictators are pro-American. They only have a problem with dictatorial regimes if they defy America, like Cuba or Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, and then you hear “Oh my god, we're the United States, we go and fight for democracies. That is why we have to protect Ukraine.” Even though, arguably, Ukraine has become as repressive as Russia. So, whatever drives the United States, it's not a love for democracy, it is not a contempt for an erosion of liberty, it is not a defense of free speech, obviously, I hope there's no one in my audience who believes that. So, when Trump says, “Oh, we're punishing Brazil because it's become repressive, it’s attacked the free speech,” it's obviously not the reason. 

Then the question that our Locals member is raising, which is a good one.

I don't support the U.S. embargo of Cuba which is now 65 years old. The idea of that was that we're going to change the government of Cuba and free the Cuban people. Obviously, it has not done that. The only thing it's done is make life in Cuba utterly miserable for the population. Same with Venezuela. Same with the sanctions on Iran. So, I don't think that's the role of the United States to go try to change other governments, even if they're pretending, they're changing them out of concern about their oppression when obviously that's not the real reason. 

The reason is they want to replace it with a regime that's more compliant to the United States. And obviously I don't think Trump is intervening in Brazil with punishments and the like because he's concerned in the abstract about free speech. I mean, aside from all the dictatorial regimes we embrace, there's also the attacks on free speech in the United States, which we've gone over many times, including last night, that the Trump administration is spearheading, that the Biden administration before that spearheaded. 

So, the question then becomes, well, what is the real reason? And I want to say, while I view Alexandre de Moraes as a serious menace, as one of the most tyrannically minded people on the planet, even if he's not, say, as powerful or dictatorial as Mohammed bin Salman, just because Brazil is not that kind of society that permits that level of overt, absolute, autocratic tyranny, the way a lot of other countries do that we support prop up, I do think he's a genuine evil figure. Obviously, one of the reasons I talk about it is because I live here. My family is Brazilian. My kids are Brazilian. So, it's something I care about for that reason. And of course, I think the reason why Trump is doing it is because it's not actually a left-wing government in Brazil. Lula is the president. And he was a leftist in his earlier life. He was a labor leader, but he ran for president three times as a leftist, lost. And then finally, in 2002, he was sick of losing. And he wrote this famous letter called Letter to the Brazilian People, where he basically said, “I understand that if I want to be president, I have to moderate. I have to get along with financial centers. This is important for prosperity.” He basically promised not to be a fallaway left-wing dogma to be much more moderate. And then to prove it, he chose a billionaire banker as his vice president, to make clear to financial markets, banks, big corporations inside Brazil that he wasn't going to be a threat. 

They're not leftist at all. But I'm sure in Trump's mind, in the eyes of Marco Rubio, the people who are influencing Trump, he sees a little like basically a communist regime, like a left-wing regime, like from the Cold War, even though it's not remotely that. And I'm not suggesting they're conservative or right-wing. They're not. But they're not communists or even socialists. And part of what Trump's doing is he just looks at Lula and the Brazilian government as an enemy and is convinced, okay, they're our enemy. Let's punish them. If I had to find a justification – I'm not saying I support it, I'm not saying I justify it – but if I had to find a justification, I would say that the real only justification for any of this is the fact that Moraes and the Supreme Court have been now targeting not just America's social media companies. 

So, this is reaching into the United States threatening the free speech rights of American citizens or people legally residing in the United States, attacking and threatening and trying to bully American social media companies. And that is, I believe, an invasion of American sovereignty and an attack on the rights of American citizens. I do think the government, the U.S. government, is duty-bound to draw a very firm line and say, “No, you're not going to cross that line. And if you cross that, we're going to take action against you.” That's the only justification I can think of. 

So, I'm not defending the Magnitsky Act sanctions against Moraes, or even the punitive tariffs against Brazil. I've basically been arguing that if there's anyone who truly is tyrannical in his mindset, who's just absolutely, like, mentally unstable and just an authoritarian tyrant with no limits at all, who's been just vindictive and drunk on his power, it is Alexandre de Moraes. And I do think there's this one justification for the U.S. to cite, to justify taking retaliatory and retributive action against Brazil. 

Obviously, Trump likes Bolsonaro. He strongly identifies with any claims that a politician is being victimized by politicized lawfare because Trump believes as do I, that he himself was the victim of that and he sees when he looks at Bolsonaro a very similar thing happening to Bolsonaro, and I think he feels personally angry by that. So, I think there's some complex motives as well, but other than what I just articulated, I'm not defending the U.S.’s use of sanctions, the exploitation of the dollars in reserve currency to punish the economies of other countries because we don't like what they're doing internally. It's all obviously a fraud and a pretext to say, we're doing it because we care about free speech or due process or whatever. But I think there is a foundation to it, not a very strong one, but a foundation to it that I do think is legitimate. And you know what? I guess, just looking at it from a less principled perspective, I do think Alexandre de Moraes is a completely out-of-control monster. And everyone in Brazil is too scared to stand up to him or too supportive of the fact that he's imprisoning and exiling and silencing Bolsonaro supporters, that there is nobody in Brazil that's capable of stopping him or willing to do so. And the only thing that has really undermined and disrupted him is what Trump just did and now is threatening to do even more with even more invasive sanctions against his wife, against other officials in Brazil. And that is something they have to take very seriously and are taking very seriously. And it's the first time there's been real limits put on it. 

So, from a very kind of instrumentalized, results-based perspective, I confess that I'm happy about where that is leading, even if I do have genuine, really real concerns about the use of American arms and weaponry to do this.

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The Pro-Israel Meltdown Over Mahmoud Khalil's NYT Interview: When is Violence Inevitable?; Why is FIRE Suing Marco Rubio: With 1A Lawyer Conor Fitzpatrick
System Update #499

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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The case of Mahmoud Khalil made national headlines – even international headlines – because he was the very first student who was snatched either off the street or out of his apartment by ICE agents under the Trump administration's brand new policy of expelling Israel critics, who they deem supportive of Hamas, which is basically anyone who criticizes Israel whether they're PhD students on green cards or anything else. 

On June 20, a federal judge ordered Khalil, who is a green card holder, released from ICE detention facilities pending the deportation proceedings on the grounds that he had never been arrested, let alone convicted of anything, and presents no threat to anyone or to the public in general. That release has enabled Khalil to make rounds giving interviews to various outlets, and he gave one last week to the New York Times' columnist and podcast host, Ezra Klein. One excerpt of Khalil's interview went viral, largely due to Israel supporters, of course, who claimed he was apologizing for, if not actively supporting, Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel. We'll examine his comments to see if he did say that, but also to examine the important questions raised about who has the right to use violence and when, who is a terrorist or who is a freedom fighter, and whether anything Khalil said remotely poses a danger to the United States. 

Our guest was Conor Fitzpatrick, a lawyer from FIRE.org, the free speech group the ACLU once was: a group of lawyers and activists passionately devoted to defending free speech against any and all attacks on it, regardless of whether the censorship target is on the right, the left, or anything in between. FIRE announced this week that it was suing Marco Rubio and the U.S. State Department under the First Amendment, arguing that the government has the right to deport foreign nationals, but not to do so as punishment for their political expression. 

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Foto preta e branca de rosto de homem visto de pertoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

We have covered the case of Mahmoud Khalil many times on this show. He was the sort of test case, the canary in the coal mine, showing that the Trump administration intended not to deport all foreign students or most foreign students or just foreign students who expressed a political opinion and engaged in political activism. That's not the Trump Administration's policy at all. They don't even have a policy of deporting foreign students on U.S. soil for criticizing the United States. What they do have is a policy of deporting foreign students in the United States or at American universities who criticize Israel or protest against that foreign country. 

Mahmoud Khalil was detained in his apartment, where he lives with his American wife. She was eight months pregnant; their newborn infant was born. And she's an American citizen. His newborn infant is an American Citizen. And he's a green card on the path to American citizenship. 

Since then, there have been many other cases of students being snatched off the street by plainclothes ICE agents and unmarked cars, including a Tufts PhD student, Rumeysa Ozturk, who the Trump administration admits, did nothing other than co-author an op-ed in the Tuft's student newspaper, where she called on the administration, along with three other students who were co-authors, to implement the student Senate's decision that the administration should divest from Israel. That's all she did. Nothing against Jews, nothing in favor of Hamas, any of that. She just criticized Israel and urged divestment because the student senate had voted for it. It was essentially saying abide. She, too, was snatched off the street, put in ICE detention, and now has been released. And there have been many other cases since. 

In the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the federal court said you can continue the deportation proceeding, but there's no basis or justification for keeping him in a detention prison while all of this proceeds. If you win the deportation process, you can obviously deport him, but there's no reason why he should rot in jail rather than being at home with his wife and child while this process proceeds, because he's never done anything remotely to suggest that he's a threat to anybody. He was never arrested as part of the student protest or any other time in his life, never convicted of a crime, never the subject of a complaint with the police. 

And so, he's now out and he's giving interviews, as is his right. He's given several interviews. One of them was for The New York Times columnist and podcast host, Ezra Klein

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