Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
White "Dudes" and Women Rally for Harris; "Weird" J.D. Vance Attacks; Interviews with Political Analyst Bill Scher & Radio Host John Ziegler
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August 01, 2024
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Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the Internet. It is Tuesday, July 30. 

Glenn is once again away on vacation. So, sorry to break it to you, but you're stuck with me again. I'm Michael Tracey, inspired by Kamala Harris’s campaign, our show tonight will be limited exclusively to white dudes, so we'll discuss this sudden peculiar embrace by the Democratic Party of white identity politics. 

Then: journalist, media critic, and fellow white dude John Ziegler and I will confront our shared whiteness in relation to the new Kamala juggernaut. 

And finally, Bill Scher, editor at the Washington Monthly and yet another white dude will analyze with me how he stopped worrying and learned to love our new Kamala overlord. 

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


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So, the Democratic Party has taken an interesting turn. First, they seem to have collectively decided that Donald Trump is no longer a fascist: he's just weird. So, for months and years and what seems like decades, what's been slightly shorter than that thankfully, the Democrats have been histrionically shrieking that Donald Trump is this existential threat to democracy; he's undermining our democratic order irreparably and irreversibly; he wants to overturn everything great and sacred about American and liberal internationalist values, and we need to all come together as a popular front to thwart his next rise to power. And Democrats seem to have taken an entirely different course these past couple of days, and they've decided that it turns out most people don't actually believe that Trump is this existential threat to democracy. So, you could have plenty of criticisms of Trump – we've shared some on the show–, you could do critical reporting on Trump – as I've done for now, eight, nine years, whatever the hell long it's been – without endlessly lurching into this just tedious refrain that Trump is going to destroy our democratic order, which never made a whole lot of sense.  Democrats appear to have decided that, at the 11th hour, they're just going to start calling Trump weird and not explain how they made that logical transition. 

And they're bolstered in this, apparently, by J.D. Vance having said some quote-unquote weird stuff over the past couple of years. So, we'll talk with our guests about that weird shift on Democrats' part. 

What I want to get to now is an even more shocking turn of events in terms of how the Democrats are handling their current electoral argument. They've decided to embrace white identity politics. Fascinating. 

Take a look at this beautiful trucker hat

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This was developed and created by a group of Democratic operatives and strategists and they convened last night a Zoom call of lots of white dudes. So, they're having racially exclusivist gatherings, I suppose, where they're emphasizing the racial identity and gender identity of the participants. And I should note, in fairness, they did clarify at the outset of this Zoom call that everybody was technically welcome, but it was branded first for white dudes. It was for white dudes to demonstrate their racial solidarity with Kamala Harris. So, they were showing how important it was to be allies of the newly presumptive Democratic presidential nominee with their racial identity. And you can purchase that hat. Take a look at it again. Gaze at it with wonder and joy.

That is available to you for the low price of $35, I'm told, plus $7.05 shipping. So, for approximately $42 that could be yours. And you'll have an in-kind contribution to the Harris campaign. And if you're a white dude like myself, then you'll, I guess, be repurposing your whiteness toward a positive, progressive end, at least in terms of how the organizers put it. 

So, let's hear a little bit from the intro, from this magnificent Zoom call that I actually sat and watched. So, the things I do for you people. Glenn, whenever the heck he gets back, really should elevate my compensation drastically. Because what I did this afternoon was I sat through like 3.5 hours of White Dudes for Kamala Zoom call and collated all the funniest bits so you don't have to watch it all yourself. So, for that alone, man, I should be getting his entire salary, frankly. So, let's have a look at what this white dude had to say vis-a-vis the intro of this Zoom call. [Short clip version]

 

Video. White Dudes for Harris, July 29, 2024

 

Ross Morales Rocketto: And I'll start by really addressing the elephant in the room, which is a lot of people feel and felt uncomfortable about the call, and I think that's understandably so. You know, throughout American history, when white men have organized, it was often with pointy hats on. And so I think that discomfort, I think the skepticism is understandable. The reason that we are doing this is because, we've just, you know, the left has been ceding white men to the MAGA for way, way too long. You know. […]

 

So, that's the organizer of this White Dudes for Harris call, preempting whatever discomfort some might understandably have. He acknowledges the impetus for this call being shared racial and gender identity, which, at least in terms of whites, the Democrats used to be pretty aggressively skeptical of and you might even say hostile to in recent years. But they're diving into it headfirst, apparently, now, because it can be marshaled toward the self-absolving and heavily virtuous end of electing our first half Asian. And you have to go through every historic first that Kamala would represent. You can't just say, woman, it's half Asian and half Black and also woman and also first person from Berkeley, California, and almost also first San Francisco district attorney and also the first vice president to be theoretically elected president, who was picked basically as an emotional blackmail tactic by an incumbent, or by a presidential nominee in 2020, Joe Biden, who had was basically pressured into selecting a Black woman after the George Floyd uproar Emerged that year. There was some political necessity for him to demonstrate his own solidarity in that election cycle, I guess, racially or something, and pick a Black woman, and Kamala ended up rising to the top of the pack after her surrogates and supporters kind of basically kneecapped her other rivals for the VP slot. But that's neither here nor there. Let's look at what's the white dude in chief himself, Jeff Bridges, had to say. This is funny. 

 

Video. Jeff Bridges. White Dudes for Harris. July 29, 2024

 

Jeff Bridges: Kamala is just so certainly our girl. You know, I can see her being pressed. I'm so excited a woman president, man. How exciting, you know, and her championing of women's rights. But for that. 

 

 Okay, so, Jeff Bridges, I guess is just really excited about a woman president. So, would he have been excited about Nikki Haley? Perhaps. How about, I don't know, Sarah Palin? Marjorie Taylor Greene? Lauren Boebert, who we interviewed at the Republican convention recently? I mean, so much of what was discussed on this call as this rallying cry around Kamala was just pure recitation of her identity traits, which was thematically in keeping with the organizational reason for this call, purportedly, which is that these are all white dudes, and they have to stand together as white dudes and show that they will very dutifully line up behind Kamala, despite having divergent racial characteristics, and that's supposed to be very heartwarming for us all in this pluralistic democracy that we're so fortunate to live in. 

Let's go to Governor Roy Cooper, of North Carolina, yet another white dude. As I mentioned, this is a whites-only space tonight. This is a safe space for white dudes. If you're not a white dude watching, you might not even want to turn off the broadcast because maybe you'll feel uncomfortable. And frankly, you're not even welcome as far as I'm concerned, because I'm going with the vibes that have been sent forth by the Democratic Party. 

Don't turn off the broadcast! That would be bad for Rumble and our advertisers. I'm just kidding. But you get my point, right? This is all about, apparently, racial solidarity. So, we're trying to model that, we're emulating what the Democrats are doing. It's all in service of racial justice. 

 

So, here is Governor Roy Cooper, Democrat of North Carolina, we're told, just took himself out of the running for a potential VP pick for Kamala as of yesterday. But he nevertheless made time to appear on this White Dudes for Kamala Zoom call. 

 

Video. Gov. Roy Cooper (D - NC). White Dudes for Harris. July 29, 2024

 

Gov. Roy Cooper: I'm going to get right to it, guys. Real men respect women. Their decisions. Their careers. And it's pretty clear that Donald Trump and JD Vance don't. 

 

So I guess all real men out there, and I consider myself a very real man – look, you just see me radiating with masculinity, I feel like I'm going to overdose on masculinity, my muscles are just going to burst out at the seams of my shirt here and, actually, probably seductive for many of you watching – but what Roy Cooper's point is, I gather, is that real men know when it's time for them to defer to women. And the number one woman to be deferred to now is Kamala Harris. 

Notice they're marshaling this woman argument, which it seemed like it was played out with Hillary Clinton but, I guess, you know, never say never with the Democrats, it's back baby. They're saying that, you know, real men would understand that what they ought to do, what they have a moral obligation to do, is defer to the divine rights or the obviousness of Kamala Harris ascending to the presidency, again, as we've gone over many times on this show, without having won a single vote, acquired a singular delegate through a single popular vote outcome in a single state or territory in two presidential primary cycles. But that's all being swept to the side and, according to Roy Cooper, real men understand that it's our duty to defer to Kamala. 

 

Next, we have Mitch Landrieu. He's the former mayor of New Orleans. He's also a Biden campaign operative. And here's his take. 

 

Video. Mitch Landrieu. White Dudes for Harris. July 29, 2024

 

Mitch Landrieu: We need to stand in this moment. Kamala is carrying on her shoulders 248 years of pain, of agony, of hope, of frustration. And no matter how high she jumps, no matter how many degrees she has, no matter how good her grades are, she's never good enough because they're always moving the line. And I think in that idea, she holds the heart of so many people who have been left out. 

 

So, there's Mitch Landrieu. Yes, a white dude, as indicated by his participation in this call, taking it upon himself to assert that Kamala Harris as a personage, as a figure that hasn't been elected to any office in terms of this current election cycle, yes, she's the elected vice president, but nothing beyond that in terms of having acquired delegates or votes in the nomination cycle. But even if she had, it's very bizarre for Landrieu to ascribe to Kamala this, like, world-historic importance as like a racial forgiveness vessel or racial absolution vessel, where Landrieu is suggesting that she carries centuries of racial injustice on her shoulders. Really? According to who? I mean, did she carry that on her shoulders when she was locking up plenty of young Black men in California as a district attorney and then as attorney general? I'm not sure. I'm not even sure what entitles Mitch Landrieu to posit all these extravagant racial narratives onto the personhood of Kamala Harris. It's all very strange. You could easily imagine this being taken much differently if similar narratives were being concocted by Republicans where they're trying to appropriate the racial suffering of, I guess, Blacks and say that they stand for this, you know, historic remedy to the centuries-long plight of Black Americans and you can break that glass ceiling, I guess, by voting for their preferred nominee. 

 

So, here's an even funnier one. I hope you all enjoy this. I hope you go to bed tonight and you just replay this over and over again in your head because I know I will be doing so. This is from Josh Gad. I have to confess, I wasn't exactly familiar with him prior to subjecting myself to this White Dudes for Kamala Zoom call. But now I'm a huge fan of his work, so I'll be studying his filmography very closely. I have his IMDb page loaded up and ready to go. Let's hear from Josh. 

 

Video. Josh Gad. White Dudes for Harris. July 29, 2024

 

Josh Gad: I'm. I'm a white dude. That much you can probably tell by now, but I also happen to be a father of two girls. I have a ten-year-old and a 13-year-old, and I'm not sure if you guys can recall that feeling you had on the night of Tuesday, November 8, 2016. I stood over my kid's bed and I wept. I wept because I felt like I let them down. I wept because they had the chance, and we had the chance to have a female president for the first time in our lives and in the history of this nation. 

 

Isn't that wonderful? I need my tissues, where are my Kleenex and my other supplies to dab my eyes just because I'm so moved by his performance there? It really is something. I mean, what is there really to add? I like what he says.” As you can see, I'm a white dude. That much should be clear.” I think I'm going to introduce myself in every social situation from now on by saying the same thing. So, I'm just going to burst into a room and say, “I should be clear, I'm a white dude, but” then I'll make my point. I'll offer whatever greetings I was planning on offering, but I want to preface everything by announcing that I am, in fact, a white dude, again, inspired by the Democratic Party's recent turn toward white identity politics and what makes this so just unbelievably ironic? 

In 2020, you might recall, during the summer of George Floyd, you had a bevy of bestselling books, Atlantic magazine articles and viral tweet threads where white people were being instructed to, for the first time, develop a sense of racial identity that maybe they had been oblivious to or had neglected in the United States, where they have a stature of privilege. This was the theory, but they needed to cultivate a sense of white racial identity in order to recognize the racial grievances of their fellow Black Americans, or POC Americans, and to understand that they had to listen to them, value them, and allow them to take the lead in all kinds of endeavors and step back. You know, white people were being instructed “to know their role and shut their mouths,” to quote Dwayne The Rock Johnson, one of my idols. 

What was clear at the time was that what a lot of these white liberals were doing, in a fit of racial hysteria, was echoing what much of the white reactionary right like truly extreme online racialist right had been obsessed with for a very long time and were desperate to get some kind of mainstream acceptability, for which is to also cultivate white racial identity, but for their preferred ends, which is some kind of white nationalism, perhaps overblown term, but to foster a political movement around this sense of collective white identity, to preserve whites' interests or even whites' racial purity. 

So, the irony was that the white liberals who thought that they were cultivating this white identity politics to elevate Blacks or something, or to forge this new racial utopia or progressive utopia, they were giving a huge favor to the genuine reactionary, racialist right-wing types who wanted to foster this sense of identity politics for entirely different reasons. And that's continuing now because what are the white dudes for Kamala doing? Well, yeah, I mean, they are further entrenching this idea that white dudes have these distinct interests or there are distinct racial groups and there's like maybe any other racial group or ethnic group that organizes amongst themselves. I'm not even endorsing or opposing the logic of that. I'm just noting for the record that the function, it seems to me, of this new embraced by the Democratic Party and the Harris campaign of white identity politics in service of its own ends, just kind of underscores the creation of this new category of political, racial organizing. 

That can have some potentially worrisome downstream effects or it's at least something not to just be mindlessly cheered, I wouldn't think, especially if you, at least at one point pretended to be into, like, a colorblind society, like, I don't know, Barack Obama kind of was. He was into that rhetoric in the ancient days of 2008 or 2010, which I guess is an entirely different epoch in our collective history here. 

 

Let's go to Scott Galloway, who I'm told is some kind of internet celebrity. I don't understand the appeal, I have to say, every time I see him on some program, he just looks entirely dour, you know, he's, like, lecturing in this really morose way. Apparently, he inspires a lot of people to listen to it like marketing podcasts or something, but, hey, different strokes for different folks, right? And I'm certainly a different folk myself. So, I'm not one to judge. He graced the White Dudes for Kamala Zoom call with his presence as an internet celebrity. That's how he was introduced actually. And here's what he said. This is amazing. 

 

Video. Scott Galloway. White Dudes for Harris. July 29, 2024

 

Scott Galloway: Thanks very much. My name is Scott Galloway. I teach at NYU. I consider myself a man and I think my job is to provide and protect and the way that manifests in this age is to ensure that Vice President Harris is in the White House. 

 

So, Professor Scott says how he manifests his masculinity at the moment is to elect Kamala Harris. Again, so selfless. You could tell why he's such a popular internet celebrity, that he's willing to put it out there for anyone to see, that he is of the belief that what his commitment to true, pure and righteous masculinity entails in this moment, in this trying moment when the soul of America is once again at stake in the most important election of our lifetimes – which is the case for every election, we're told, right? I mean, 2016, 2020 and even go back. I mean, I would love to resurrect the ghost of Bob Dole, or at least go through the archives from the 1996 election, because I'm sure there are some schmucks who said that the election of 1996 between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton was the most important of all time. They say it every election cycle. And it's always a bit of a ruse because. It's all about just inflaming Partisan sentiment to get people rushing out to the polls, marching dutifully to the polls to pull the lever, checking the box or mailing the postcard or what have you to keep in power the two major parties, and then they can just usher in their respective professional classes who get empowered as a result of the voter going and voting in the Republican and Democratic Party, and then look forward to next election cycle also being the most important of all time. 

So, in light of that, I'm very thankful for Scott Galloway instructing us, or lecturing us because he's such a brilliant NYU professor and he really has the academic expertise to inform us what it means to be a man in this moment is to ensure that Kamala Harris is in the White House. Isn't that inspiring? 

 

Next, let's go to Eric Swalwell. Always a fun guy to hear from. 

 

Video. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D - CA). White Dudes for Harris. July 29, 2024

 

Eric Swalwell: And you know who's tough? It's Kamala Harris. And so, she's tough. She's real. She's ready. She's smart. And something that we're all starting to really see that I really like is that she's fun, and she's a person who can be serious without taking herself too seriously. But what I was hoping to impart onto everyone tonight, in my experience of like telling the story of why Kamala and not the past president, is a few things. And so, I wanted to just give you kind of three things that we all can do. And something that I've found helpful in my messaging is these three things. And if there's anything that us white dudes like to do it's to have a good hot take. 

 

I couldn't agree more, Eric. Congressman. If there's anything that we, white dudes, love to do more than rattling off hot takes. I don't know what it is. I know I associate my whiteness and my white dudeness intrinsically with the art of the hot take. Like the Art of the Deal, written by another infamous famous, depending on your point of view: white dude Donald J. Trump. We, white dudes and our hot takes, you know, it's just, something we're born with. I'm once again very inspired by Eric Swalwell, marshaling his inborn propensity to muster hot takes in service of what is now all our righteous and collective duty, which is to elect Kamala Harris, apparently. 

 

One more of this stuff, but this one also tickles me. This is another actor who I have to familiarize myself with because I'm just so moved by his thespian skill. 

 

Video. Rory O’Malley. White Dudes for Harris. July 29, 2024

 

Rory O’Malley: For having me. What's up, my white dudes? Ross, it was my honor to do anything for this call. I want to thank you and everyone who's been a part of it, and all of you who are on the call and will have donated that crazy amount of money. I'm in shock that this is happening. I'm here because I'm a dude. I'm clearly very white. I'm representing the pasty white contingency of the delegation, and I'm voting for Vice President Harris because she is the candidate who stands for justice, freedom and the future. She's the embodiment of the backbone of the progressive movement. She's a woman. More specifically, she's a Black woman and Black women have been showing up to elect progressive white dudes for generations. And it's time we show up for […] 

 

Okay, so there is, there's Rory fellow of White Dudes for Harris, one of the organizers, saying “It's time we, white progressives, show up for Black women.” Have you heard, like, one statement of a policy stance associated with Kamala Harris over the course of any of these declarations? I heard very little in sitting through that 3.5-hour session. It's all about how white progressives – I have to say, many of them seem like gay men – which is fine, not that there's anything wrong with that – who feel like they have some extra identity-based obligation to defer to Black women and show how supportive they are of Black women and how they're going to leave everything out on the field for Black women. Because Black women, as Rory said, are the backbone of the Democratic Party. And it's time for white dudes to show their appreciation electorally and get to work and sacrifice for others for once. Just like Black women have always sacrificed for white dudes. So, it seems like it's more like a racial karma ritual for a lot of these people than it is about governance or policy or anything that would really substantively relate to Kamala Harris's conduct in the office of the presidency, the most powerful position in world history. I mean, forget foreign policy, forget national security. They don't give a crap about that, as far as I could tell. It's all about, like, this racial trade-off, mystical kind of conception of how American politics works. That's what they're most fixated on by far. And as a white dude, I know I'm here for it. 

And just to end this tantalizing monologue, let's hear from our gender compatriots. I'm gonna make one exception. Okay? This was a white dude-only session tonight inspired by the Democratic Party, but I couldn't resist. White women also held their own Zoom and it was also a joyous occasion. I want to share this with you because I feel like this will really ring in your heart for some time. So, let's hear this. 

 

Video. Arielle Fodor. White Women for Kamala. July 29, 2024

 

Organizer: Arielle Fodor, affectionately known as Mrs. Frazzle to her combined audience of over 1.5 million followers, is here to help gently parent us through this election. 

 

Arielle Fodor: Thank you. Hi everybody. I am so honored to speak today. I am like shaking to just be among such incredible company. We are here because as if you were here earlier you've heard, Bipoc women have tapped us in as white women to step up, listen, and get involved this election season. This is a really important time, and we all need to use our voices and influence for the greater good. No matter who you are, you are all influencers in some way. So tonight, I'm going to share some do's and don'ts for getting involved in politics online and navigating the toxicity that comes with it and spoiler alert; as much as the toxicity […] 

 

Okay, I'm pausing because, honestly, I think I would blow my brains out if I listened to that full clip. So, I apologize to our production team but I really cannot bear to listen to that full thing. But you get the idea. She says she’s shaking because she's so honored by being in the presence of all these illustrious people who are on the call. I'm shaking to listen to that, but for much different reasons. I do appreciate, though, that she says we're all influencers. She's a TikTok influencer. She is a teacher, I guess, and she makes cute little videos about her classroom experiences. But now she's a political mogul, I guess, or something, and she wants to give us all tips on how we can best share the message of Kamala in these tumultuous and turbulent political times. And I know when I'm listening to that, I really do feel like I'm in a third-grade classroom. And I guess that's what a lot of people in the Democratic Party like now. They want to feel like they're being educated in a third-grade context, because that's about the level of sophistication with which they're approaching this stuff, which is why identity politics, I mean, if this is up your alley, then I don't know. You guys are on a different wavelength than me. I find that really repulsive. But now let's move on.


Interview: John Ziegler

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 All right, so I want to welcome John Zeigler. He's a long-time media critic, I think it's fair to say. Also, I would call him a journalist. I'm not sure if you would appreciate that designation or not – sometimes journalist is not the most flattering title. I'm even inclined to reject it myself – and also a long-time radio host, he's a podcaster, and so forth. So, let's go to John Ziegler. 

 

M. Tracey: John, how are you? 

 

John Ziegler: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. 

 

M. Tracey: So, John, I recall hearing of you first back in the day when you were a staunch defender for Sarah Palin, the vice presidential nominee in 2008 with John McCain. So, in light of that, I do want to get your take on something to do with J.D. Vance, obviously, the recently named vice presidential nominee for Donald Trump. And let's go to this clip. This is JB Pritzker. He's the governor of Illinois. He was on ABC's “This Week”, this past Sunday. I want to get your response to it. 

 

Video. JB Pritzker. ABC This Week. July 28, 2024

 

JB Pritzker: […] They're just weird. The differences between these two candidates, I mean, on the other side, they're just weird. I mean, they really are. The things that they stand for. Donald Trump, of course, is afraid of windmills. And, you know, he talks about, all kinds of crazy. You know, his running mate, as you probably have heard, is, you know, getting known for his obsession with couches and somebody who is hiding his views on a woman's right to choose, and then just broadly, the attack on people […] 

 

M. Tracey: So, John, as best I can tell, when JB Pritzker is invoking JD Vance, having some weird fixation with couches, what he's referring to is a fabricated internet meme that people just outright made up, that then got turned into a new story about J.D. Vance, like, having sex with a couch. I'm sorry I'm even having to say it here, but that was the genesis of what Pritzker is alluding to and you know notice, Martha Raddatz, who I think was the anchor of ABC News’s “This Week” on the Sunday show this past weekend, she doesn't catch it. She just lets J.B. Pritzker make this allusion to some literally made-up claim about JD Vance to underscore this newfound Democratic talking point, that J.D. Vance is weird. And I'm sure he is weird in certain respects. In fact, I'm pretty certain that he is weird in certain respects, but, you know, so am I; so are most Democrats. John, I'm sorry to say you might be weird in certain respects as well. A lot of us are weird, but to just let fly that fabricated claim about Vance and having some sexual liaison with a couch, I don't know. This seems like it could raise your hackles a bit, given your experience in 2008 with Palin or am I drawing too loose of a connection there? 

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One of President Trump's most powerful advisers, Stephen Miller, last night claimed that I had posted what he called "patently false" statements about the Trump administration’s policy. Specifically, earlier in the day, I had pointed out – and documented, as I've done many times – that the Trump administration has implemented a radically expanded "hate speech" code that outlawed a wide range of opinions about Israel and Jewish individuals and, even worse, that they have been pressuring American universities to adopt this expanded "hate speech" code on campuses to restrict the free speech rights, not of foreign students, but of American professors, American administrators and American students. It's a direct attack on the free speech rights of Americans on college campuses. 

I also pointed out – as I have covered here many times – that the Trump administration has also adopted a policy of deporting law-abiding citizens, not for criticizing the United States, but for criticizing Israel. All of my claims here are demonstrably and indisputably true. Yet after I pointed them out yesterday, and various MAGA influencers began responding to them and promoting them, White House officials began contacting them to convince them that my claims weren't true. When that didn't work because I was able to provide the evidence, the White House late last night dispatched one of its most popular officials – Stephen Miller – to label my claims “patently false." 

The policies in question, adopted by the Trump administration, especially these attacks on free speech on American college campuses through hate speech codes, are of great importance, precisely, since they do attack the free speech rights of Americans at our universities, and the actual truth of what the Trump administration should be demonstrated. So that's exactly what we're going to do tonight. 

Then: The emergence of Donald Trump and his MAGA ideology in the Republican Party led to the opening of all sorts of new ideas and policies previously anathema in that party. All of that, in turn, led to vibrant debates and competing views within the Trump coalition, as well as to all new voices and perspectives. One of the most interesting thinkers to emerge from that clash is our guest tonight: he's Sohrab Ahmari, one of the founders of Compact Magazine and now the U.S. editor for the online journal UnHerd. We’ll talk about all of that, as well as other MAGA divisions becoming increasingly more visible on economic populism generally, war and foreign policy, and much more. 

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Sometimes, government policy is carried out with very flamboyant and melodramatic announcements that everyone can listen to and understand, but more often it's carried out through a series of documents, very lengthy documents, sometimes legal documents, that have a great deal of complexity to them. 

Oftentimes, when that happens, the government, if it has a policy or is pursuing things that are unpopular, especially among its own voters, can just try to confuse things by claiming that people's descriptions of what they're doing are untrue and false and trying to just confuse people with a bunch of irrelevances or false claims. A lot of people don't know what to make of it. They just throw up their hands because most people don't have the time to sort through all that. Especially if you're a supporter of a political movement and you hear that they're pursuing a policy that you just think is so anathema to their ideology that you don't want to believe that they're doing, you're happy to hear from the government when they say, “Oh, that's a lie. Don't listen to the persons or the people saying that. That's not actually what we're doing.”

Yet when that happens, I think it's very incumbent upon everybody who wants to know what their government is doing to actually understand the truth. And that is what happened last night. 

I've been reporting for several months now on the Trump administration's systematic efforts to force American universities to adopt expanded hate speech codes. Remember, for so long, conservatives hated hate speech codes on college campuses. They condemned it as censorship. They said it's designed to suppress ideas. 

Oftentimes, those hate speech codes were justified on the grounds that it's necessary to protect minority groups or that those ideas are hateful and incite violence. And all of this, we were told by most conservatives that I know, I think, in probably a consensus close to unanimity, we were told that this is just repressive behavior, that faculty and students on campus should have the freedom to express whatever views they want. If they're controversial, if they are offensive, if they are just disliked by others, the solution is not to ban those ideas or punish those people, but to allow open debate to flourish and people to hear those ideas. 

That is a critique I vehemently agree with. And I've long sided with conservatives on this censorship debate as it has formed over the last, say, six, seven, eight years when it comes to online discourse, when it comes to campus discourse, free speech is something that is not just a constitutional guarantee and according to the Declaration of Independence, a right guaranteed by God, but it is also central to the American ethos of how we think debate should unfold. We don't trust the central authority to dictate what ideas are prohibited and which ones aren't. Instead, we believe in the free flow of ideas and the ability of adults to listen and make up their own minds. 

That's the opposite of what the Trump administration has now been doing. What they said they believed in, Donald Trump, in his inauguration and other times, was that he wanted to restore free speech. Early on in the administration, JD Vance went to Europe and chided them for having long lists of prohibited ideas for which their citizens are punished if they express those views. And the reality is that's exactly what the Trump administration has been doing. 

I want to make clear I'm not talking here about the controversies over deporting foreign students for criticizing Israel. That's a separate issue, which is part of this discussion, but that's totally ancillary and secondary. I've covered that many times. That is not what I'm discussing. 

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What are CBS News' Billionaire Heirs Doing with Bari Weiss? With Ryan Grim on the Funding Behind It: Europe Capitulates to Trump Again
System Update #494

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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Our guest is the independent journalist Ryan Grim, the founder of DropSite News and a co-host of Breaking Points, about a new investigative article he published with Murtaza Hussain about who exactly guides Bari Weiss's media outlet, The Free Press, which seems to be now set to be at the center of one of America's oldest, most prestigious, and most influential news outlets. 

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A lot of different measures have been undertaken over the past 18 months – really a lot longer than that, but they've intensified over the last, say, 20 months since October 7 – as not just Americans, but the world, increasingly watched some of the most horrifying images we've ever seen live-streamed to us on a daily basis, sometimes on an hourly basis, of children getting blown up, of entire families being extinguished and being wiped out of essentially all of Gaza and civilian life there being destroyed systematically while Israeli officials openly admit that their goal is to do exactly that, to cleanse Gaza of the people who live there, to either force them to leave, kill them, or concentrate them in tiny little camps, what has also long been known as concentration camps. 

The evidence of this has become so compelling that many Western politicians who have never been willing to utter a word of criticism about Israel are now feeling required to stand up on a soapbox and speak of Israel in terms as critical and condemning as I'm sure they never imagined they would. The same is true for many media outlets and for organizations. Just in the last week alone, both France and then today, the U.K., sort of recognized the Palestinian state, something they had always refused to do, except in connection with an agreement of which Israel was a part. 

Even Donald Trump came out within the last three days and, in direct defiance of Benjamin Netanyahu's proclamation that there's no starvation policy that Israel has imposed on Gaza and, according to Netanyahu, no starvation at all. Donald Trump said there's absolutely starvation in Gaza. You see it in the children; you see it in people. These are things that you cannot fake. 

The public opinion in the United States has rapidly spiraled out of control against Israel as the world turns against that country, and particularly what it's doing in Gaza. Huge amounts of sympathy for that country emerged in the wake of October 7. Almost every country expressed support for it and was on its side, but what they have done, using October 7 as a pretext, to achieve what were in reality long-term goals of many people inside the Israeli government, similar to how many American neocons used the 9/11 attacks to achieve all kinds of pre-existing goals, 9/11 and 9/11 became the pretext for it, including the invasion of Iraq, but a whole variety of other measures as well.

 Large numbers of people have turned against Israel in the United States, which funds the Israeli military, which funds Israeli wars, which gives $4 billion to that country automatically every year under a 10-year deal signed by President Obama on the way out, much of which is required to be used to buy weapons from American arms dealers – it's basically a gift certificate offered by the American people to Israel to go on a shopping spree in the military industrial complex. But not all of it is required for that. And then every time Israel has a new war or wants to go fight somebody else, the United States not only transfers billions more to them. 

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. government transferred, in addition to that $4 billion a year, another $17 billion to pay for what Israel has been doing in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon. But the U.S. also spends massive amounts of money just deploying our military assets to protect Israel, to fight with Israel, to intercept missiles that are shot at Israel by countries that they're bombing. Therefore, a lot of people who did not grow up based on indoctrination about their obligation to subsidize the Israeli state; people who, after the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis, the disruptions of COVID and the lives that accompanied each of those, began losing trust and faith in American institutions but also began losing their own economic security. 

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Israel-Made Famine Crisis Finally Recognized
System Update #493

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

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

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Tonight, we will cover the rapidly growing body of indisputable evidence that mass famine, mass starvation, is sweeping through Gaza in a way we haven't really quite seen in many decades, given how deliberate and planned it is by the Israeli government. 

By evidence I don't just mean the testimony of people in Gaza, or Gaza journalist or World Health organizations, but many Western physicians who are in Gaza, who are coming back from Gaza and reporting on the horrors that they're seeing, as well as official statements from Israeli government officials about exactly what they are carrying out, and what their intentions are with regard to the blockade that they continue to impose to prevent food from getting to Gaza. 

We're seeing babies, young kids and even now adults starving to death, again, as the result of a deliberate starvation policy that, again, is part of a war that the United States is paying for, that the United States under two successive presidents has been arming and continues to support diplomatically. 

One of the ways that you know that the horrors are immense is that many Western politicians, even Western governments, are now, suddenly, after 18 to 20 months of steadfastly supporting everything Israel is doing, starting to try to distance themselves with all sorts of statements and expressions of concern and even occasionally trying to pretend that they're doing something concrete. They know that what is taking place in Gaza is of historic proportions in terms of atrocity and war crimes and they do not want that associated with them, they don't want that on their conscience or especially on their legacy and so they're attempting to pretend all along is that this were something that they had opposed from the very first moment the Israeli destruction of Gaza began.

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Ever since the start of the destruction of Gaza by the Israeli government following the October 7 attack, there have been all kinds of concerns that one of the things the Israeli government would do is impose mass starvation and famine on the population of 2.2 million people of Gaza. At least that was the population when all this began; half of that population, 1.1 million, are children, under the age of 18. 

This has been something we've seen evidence of, and in part, people were concerned about it because the Israeli government immediately announced that that was their intention. We've now gotten to the point after a full-scale Israeli blockade – and by blockade, I don't mean that Israel is failing to feed the people of Gaza, I mean that the people, groups and organizations that are trying to bring food into Gaza are physically impeded from doing so by the IDF as a result of official Israeli policy. 

There was a complete and full blockade for three months; at the same time, they imposed policies such as destroying any fields or plants where food could grow. They are now killing or at least arresting anybody who tries to just go a little bit out – remember, Gaza has a beach and a sea – to try to fish for food. That is also prohibited. It clearly is a policy designed to starve the population to death, which is why even Israeli experts in genocide who long resisted applying the word genocide to what Israel is doing in Gaza have now relented and said it's the only word that applies. 

The number of groups, governments and people who previously supported what Israel was doing or at least refused to acknowledge the full extent of the atrocities, have now, in their view, no choice but to do so. The evidence is starting to become so overwhelming that only the hardcore Israel loyalists are left to try to deny it or blame somebody else for it.

 ABC News today brings this headline: “More than 100 aid groups warn of 'mass starvation' in Gaza amid Israel's war with Hamas. Their statement warned of "record rates of acute malnutrition." They are the World Health Organization and groups from all over the planet that have immense credibility in having worked with conflicts many times before. 

A leading Israeli newspaper, the daily Haaretz, which has been more critical of the Netanyahu government than most, but which at the same time was supportive for months of what Israel was doing in Gaza following October 7,  had its lead editorial yesterday under this headline: “Israel Is Starving Gaza.” The language they used was so clear, straightforward and direct that it's unimaginable to think of any large corporate Western media outlet saying anything similar.

Last Monday, we interviewed a leading scholar of famine, who has studied famines around the world for his entire life and not only did he describe how what's taking place in Gaza is unprecedented, at least since World War II, because of how minutely planned it is and because they're unlike famine, say, in Ethiopia, or Sudan or Yemen. There are all sorts of organizations with immense expertise and resources that are just a couple of miles away from where children are starving to death, have huge amounts of food and other aids that they want to bring to the people of Gaza and yet are blocked from doing so by the IDF. 

Although I suppose it's encouraging, or at least better than the alternative, that even Western governments and the longstanding Israel supporters who are American politicians are now issuing statements about how disturbed they are by the mass famine in Gaza, how Israel needs to immediately cease this inhumane activity, none of this is surprising. None of it is new. Israel made very clear from the very beginning what exactly their intentions were, and people just decided that they were too scared to stand up and object at the time. 

Oftentimes, you hear that it's only far-right extremist ministers in Netanyahu's government who say things like this, like Ben Gvir, Smotrich, or people like that. In reality, the Israeli defense minister was one of the moderate people comparatively at the start of the war, to the point where Netanyahu ended up ousting him and he was the one who ordered a "complete siege" on the Gaza Strip, saying Israeli authorities would cut electricity and block the entry of food, water and electricity. 

In April of this year, just three months ago, another Israeli minister, Smotrich, said at a conference:

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 Proudly boasting of the actions that the Israeli military, the Israeli government intended to take and then took. In his words, to ensure that not even a grain a wheat entered, a place where 2.2 million people, or 2 million people, or 1.9 million people are clinging to survival in between dodging shelling from tanks and bombs and having everything from schools and U.N. refugees and refugees in even their own tents being blown up. From CNN, in May:

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Just as a reminder, it was in February, after Trump was inaugurated, that Israel explicitly announced to the world that it was blockading all food from entering Gaza. They didn't hide it. It wasn't in dispute. It wasn't in doubt. It was an official Israeli policy to starve the entire population, which is collective punishment as a way of forcing Hamas to negotiate or to surrender. This is exactly sort of the thing that, after World War II, we decided would be intolerable, that people who did it would be guilty of war crimes and treated as such, the way that the Nazis who did things similarly, like starve entire cities, starve entire ghettos of Jews, were treated as war criminals and held responsible and actually executed. 

So, none of this is new for all the people who are now just seeing the babies who are emaciated in skin and bones and dying of malnutrition and increasingly older children and adults as well, to suddenly come out and say, “Oh my God, I can't believe this. What have we been supporting? This has to stop.” 

This is all months in the making, and, as hunger experts and famine groups will tell you, once it gets to this stage, where people are actually dying now of famine in large numbers, it becomes irreversible. Irreversible physically because even if you get the food in, their bodies aren't equipped to process it. They need much more extensive medical care than that. Of course, in children, it impedes brain growth for life and physical vitality for life, to say nothing of the mass death from starvation, which we're now starting to see. 

That's why all these attempts to distance themselves that we're seeing from Western governments and Western politicians are utterly nauseating. They're the ones who enabled it, they're the ones who have been paying for it, they're the ones who have been arming it, they're the ones who've been cheering for it, despite Israeli vows to starve to death the people of Gaza. 

We've been hearing for a year and a half about stories of doctors in Gaza having to perform major surgeries, amputations on children, without so much as any painkillers, let alone anesthesia. Horror stories of the worst kind imaginable. But what we're now seeing is a body of evidence so conclusive and so indisputable from so many different sources that it has essentially become impossible for denialists of these atrocities to maintain their denialism any longer. 

Here is Nick Maynard. He's a British physician who was on the mainstream program “Good Morning Britain,” just like “Good Morning America” in the United States. And he got back from Gaza. He's a surgeon. And here's what he described in his own words. 

Video. Nick Maynard, “Good Morning Britain.” July 25, 2025.

He just gets done saying exactly what he's been seeing that every day, for fun almost, IDF soldiers pick which part of the body they're going to snipe young children, teenagers, young teenagers with, oh, today their heads, tomorrow their chests. How about their kneecaps? How about their testicles? And they come in in clutches with all the same injury. We've been hearing stories of IDF soldiers purposely targeting young boys who come in with bullets in their brains. We've been hearing about this for quite a long time now. He's in Gaza. He saw exactly what he's describing. 

Here he is again, talking about something in one way, not quite as brutal, but in another way, almost more horrific in terms of the intentionality that it shows in terms of what the Israeli government and the IDF are actually up to in terms of their objectives in Gaza. 

Video. NICK MAYNARD, GOOD MORNING BRITAIN. July 25, 2025.

If you are deliberately preventing the entrance in Gaza of baby formula, knowing that there is severe malnutrition among the women giving birth to these babies and not when Hamas operatives are trying to bring them in, but from Western doctors who work with organizations known around the world for treating people with injuries in war zones, if that isn't evidence of genocidal intent, someone needs to tell me what is. 

Here's Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat from Minnesota, with a very steadfast pro-Israel record in the Senate for the entire time she's been there. Yesterday, she decided to stand up on the Senate floor to talk about how deeply worried and concerned and upset she is by the stories about nutrition coming out of Gaza and the role that the Israelis are playing in blockading food to starve the people in Gaza to death. She's so moved by it. She had to stand up and make her voice heard. Here's what she said. 

Video. AMY KLOBUCHAR, C-SPAN. July 24, 2025.

I've heard enough of that performance. Very well delivered. The voice cracking was a nice touch. But as you'll see, as you will notice, there's no advocacy of any concrete call. You would think this is just some country doing this, that the United States has nothing to do with. 

The United States pays for the Israeli military. It pays for their wars. It pays for the munitions they use to carry all of this out and has for decades. Amy Klobuchar is a steadfast supporter of that, as are pretty much all of her colleagues in the Senate from both parties. 

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Here is a photograph of 14 senators, seven from the Republican Party and seven from the Democratic Party, the perfect balance to illustrate how bipartisan the reverence and support for Israel is in Washington. There you see Amy Klobuchar. She's right here smiling. And here's Benjamin Netanyahu. Here's Chuck Schumer, here's Ted Cruz, here's Adam Schiff. Just all the kinds of people we're constantly told can never get along with anything. There they all are gathered. You see Netanyahu sort of posing there in front of everybody as some kind of warrior strut. 

Benjamin Netanyahu is an indicted war criminal required to be arrested by any signatory to the International Criminal Court, just like Vladimir Putin is. Just the week before, the IDF soldiers and settlers in the West Bank murdered yet another American citizen, this one 20 years old, who was born in the United States, lived in the U.S., and was visiting relatives in the West Bank. And not only did settlers at the back of the IDF storm their house and beat him to death, but they also then blocked ambulances from getting to the scene to pick him up and bring him to get medical care, and the American citizen died, killed by Israelis. None of these people had anything to say about this, because their loyalty is more to Israel than to even their own fellow citizens.

 So, it's nice that Amy Klobuchar wants to engage in public displays of emotion about how deeply moved she is, except she was just standing right next to the leader of the government responsible. Again, this is not anything new. He is indicted exactly for these kinds of crimes, for deliberate starvation, among many other things. 

I should also point out that Amy Klobuchar's statement about the hostages is preposterous. The Netanyahu government has said many times, very explicitly, that even if Hamas turned over every hostage today, they've said this for months, that they would not stop their war. Their war aim is not to get the hostage back. That's the pretext. Even the hostages' own families know that and have said that, which is why they have deprioritized getting the hostages back because that's not their role. Their goal is to expel all Arabs and Palestinians from all of Gaza, as another minister in the Israeli government said yesterday, and make sure that all of Gaza is exclusively Jewish. They want to cleanse all of Gaza of every Arab and Muslim who lives there, every Palestinian, including Christian Palestinians and Palestinian Catholics, and make it part of the Israeli state where only Israeli Jews are permitted to live. That's the goal of the war. It doesn't have anything to do with the hostages. That's a pretext. 

There's an Israeli scholar who is one of the leading scholars on Holocaust studies and the study of genocide, named Omer Bartov and he served in the IDF. He's an Israeli and he now teaches at Brown University, where he teaches Holocaust studies and the study of Genocide. And for quite a long time, until very recently, he rejected the idea that the word genocide applies to what Israel is doing in Gaza. Even when other human rights groups and other experts in genocide were saying, “The word absolutely applies,” he was insisting it did not. He then wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last week where he said, “I'm an expert in genocide. I know it when I see it,” and laid out a very long case with documentation and evidence. Again, this is an Israeli citizen who fought in the IDF, who dedicated his life to Holocaust studies as a steadfast supporter of Israel, writing in The New York Times op-ed, “I long resisted the conclusion, but there's no other word that can be used to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza besides genocide.” He laid out a long case using his historical understanding, his scholarly analysis of what genocide means and how it's been applied in the past and why it applies today. He then went on Piers Morgan and elaborated on his view and here's part of what he said. 

Video. Omer Bartov, Piers Morgan Uncensored. July 24, 2025.

And that's been true for a very long time. The war aim of this war has always been to destroy civilian life in all of Gaza, whether by killing the people there or making life so impossible that it forces them to try to find some way out. That's the goal. It has nothing to do with the hostages or dismantling Hamas or anything else. It's to steal the land that the fanatics in the Israeli government believe God promised to them, without regard to what the rest of the world believes or thinks about international borders or anything else. And they don't regard the people in Gaza as human. That's the reality. Israel, as a country, obviously has lots of exceptions, but the prevailing ethos in Israel is that these are not human beings. These are less than human beings, which is why there's very little opposition – some have grown, but it’s still an absolute minority in Israel who are objecting to any of this. 

In response to this Israeli scholar of the Holocaust and genocide, not just pronouncing that what Israel is doing is a genocide, but laying out a very extensive case, for whatever reason, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, you might recall, is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, not the Secretary of State, compelled to go onto Twitter and to say this in response to somebody who denied this claim:

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So, have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – who is not Jewish, of course, he's part of a Catholic family – accusing Israeli Jews of spreading blood libel against Jews, because they invoke their field of expertise and the decades long study that they've done of genocide to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza as the manifestation of genocidal intent, is a blood libel against Jews.  

Blood libel is now a term that has the same effective definition operationally as antisemitism, which just means criticizing Israel. I have, though, been really amazed. I've noticed this for quite some time now, the way in which non-Jewish supporters of Israel – you can call them Christian Zionists, or Zionists in general – I don't think RFK Jr.'s reverence for Israel comes from any kind of evangelical Christianity, just think it comes from political expediency. 

He was on my show once, talking about it, where he gave this big, long speech about how we have to immediately stop financing the war in Ukraine because we can't afford it any longer. All of that, all of which was true. All of which I agreed with. And then I asked him, Does that same thing apply to Israel? And he immediately rejected it, started saying how Israel is a crucial ally, blah, blah, although, at the end, he did say, you know what, maybe you're right, maybe it is time to stop funding Israel and let them stand on their own two feet. But then the Democrats decided to attack RFK Jr. as antisemitic, and he ran into the arms of the most extremist Israel supporters like Rabbi Shmuley. Ever since, he has been as extreme a supporter of Israel as it gets to the point that he now accuses Israeli professors of Holocaust studies of spreading blood libels against Jews. 

One of the most repugnant things I've seen is this new attempt, this new PR attempt, to shift from, “Oh, no, there's no problem in Gaza with food. There's no famine in Gaza. They have plenty of food.” And then for a while, it became, to the extent people don't have food, “It's Hamas's fault, they're stealing the food.” And then the question is, where are they getting it from to steal it? No food can be allowed in. They destroyed the ability to grow food and crops. They shoot and kill, or at best arrest, people who try to fish off the coast. So, that denialism didn't work any longer, and now the shift in rhetoric has become, “Oh, it's the U.N.'s fault. There's all this aid sitting there that they refuse to distribute.” 

The last time the U.N. tried to take food into Gaza, when they finally got the authorization of the Israeli military to allow trucks to come in, was July 20, which is four days ago. And what happened was, even though they had the authorization of the IDF to come, as soon as they entered with trucks of food, desperate Gaza civilians whose families are dying of hunger, ran over to the trucks. And when they did, the Israeli military, the IDF, started gunning them down, started massacring them. And obviously, when you're shooting that many bullets at people by U.N. trucks, you are also endangering the lives of the drivers of those trucks and the aid workers who are on those trucks. 

Cindy McCain, who tries to be very, very diplomatic, because that's her job, when talking about the role Israel is playing, she's the head of the World Food Program, but it's also her job to get food to the people of Gaza. And she comes from a family that is as pro-Israel as it gets. Her husband was John McCain. Even more fanatically pro-Israel is her daughter, Megan McCain, who accuses everybody of antisemitism daily, basically, if you don't support everything Israel is doing, that's the family she comes from. That's the political tradition out of which she emerged. And so, she's often very careful and cautious in her words. And she wants to be able to get food to the people of Gaza as well. That's her job. And yet, for Cindy McCain, this was quite an extreme language. She went on CNN the following day to describe the massacre aimed at the people getting the food from the U.N., and also the U.N. aid workers themselves, imposed by the Israeli government. 

Here's what she said. 

Video. CINDY MCCAIN, CNN. July 21, 2025.

The last time the U.N. tried to deliver aid and food into Gaza, they were massacred by the Israeli military and now, the IDF and the Gaza Health Foundation, guided by scumbags who used to work for the Obama administration, who are paid to advise them on PR strategies, have told them to stop denying that there's hunger and famine in Gaza, and instead blame the U.N., a group that has been desperately trying to get food to the people of Gaza for more than a year. 

The Prime Minister of Australia came out yesterday with a statement, very melodramatic, about how upset he is and how disturbed he is; 29 countries issued a letter that we read to you late last week. This is all just symbolic. This is a way of, as that book cover says, pretending that they were against this all along. 

Only the West and particularly the United States has the power to stop the Israelis from what they're doing and instead, the American government, like they did in the Biden administration, now under the Trump administration, is doing the opposite, expressing more and more support for what Israel is doing. 

We're just witnessing in real time the kind of war crimes and atrocities that 20, 50, 100 years from now, people are going to be reading their history books, looking back and wondering how this could possibly have happened. And we're seeing it unfold, right in front of our faces, and we all do bear a significant amount of responsibility for it. 

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