Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Dems' Attacks on the Green Party, Israel/Gaza's Effect on 2024, and More with VP Candidate Butch Ware
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September 20, 2024
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It's Thursday, September 19. 

Tonight: Over the past couple of months, Democrats and their leading surrogates have been dispatched to attack Jill Stein and the Green Party in ways quite vicious and systematic, in ways that I've never seen before. They ordinarily love to dump on the Green Party after they lose an election or to blame the Greens for their loss as if they own those voters by divine mandate and were stolen from them, and more so they like to do that after the election to avoid taking any responsibility in any way for their own losses. But it's very rare – I would say almost unprecedented – that they give the Green Party this amount of attention and oxygen by attacking them so vocally and continuously before the election. That, however, is exactly what Democrats have been doing over the last couple of months. They sent out their self-identified left-wing spokesman for the party, people such as AOC and Keith Ellison to lead the charge against the Greens. And it's very evident that their internal polling, as well as public polling that we've seen, must be showing very alarming data about how many Arab and Muslim voters and even young voters and African American voters intend to vote for the Greens in key swing states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, because absent that alarming data, they would not be so vocally giving oxygen to the party. 

All of these unhinged attacks – AOC, called the Green Party a, quote, “predatory party” – have only fueled that party even more, giving them far more attention. One of the most beneficial results of all of this has been the elevation in terms of platform invisibility of Stein's vice presidential running mate, the newcomer to politics, at least as a candidate, Butch Ware. He's a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania and someone who has come from a childhood of immense poverty, instability and deprivation, and yet where he's made quite an impact in a very short period of time due to his eloquent and clearly genuinely felt defense of his political and social values. 

Last week, both Jill Stein and Butch Ware appeared on The Breakfast Club, the highly popular political show among African Americans and others and had this very telling exchange with one of the hosts, Angela Rye, as she sought to join the Democratic Party and leading the charge in attacking that duo. 

 

Video. Butch Ware. September 13, 2024.

 

Prof. Butch Ware: I am personally offended by the way that blackness is being weaponized in this electoral cycle in order to justify white supremacist genocide in Gaza. 

 

Charlamagne Tha God: Expand, please.

 

Prof. Butch Ware: Malcolm said of Zionism – of the Zionist state, the Israeli state – he said that this is a white Jewish population, an Ashkenazi population being given power by white imperialists to remove brown Arabs from their land, he said, so, therefore, Zionism is white supremacy. In 1979, in “Open Letter to the Born Again”, James Baldwin said the same thing. He said the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews. It was created for the salvation of Western interests. When you go through Kwame Ture, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur, these are all people who cited the Palestinian resistance movement, – not even to bring in Africans, not to mention Nelson Mandela, not to mention Thomas Sankara – who talked about Zionism as being the face of imperialism in the Middle East. Right? This is what the black radical tradition taught me. And the black radical tradition taught me that if we weaponize our blackness in favor of white supremacy, then we become apostates from blackness itself because blackness is not a race. It is an oppositional ideology to white supremacy. I'm a historian of Africa by training. Never before in human history had people speaking hundreds of different languages made themselves into one. People developed a common culture so that you and I can relate to one another. You and I can relate to one another on the basis of a shared culture. And we got our Latin and Caribbean brothers and sisters, you know, especially Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. But also, you know, more broadly, right? They share in that culture. That is a miracle. It's never happened before in human history. Because what happened is that an oppositional identity to white supremacy came into being, and that is us. And when I see that identity now being weaponized to justify the most heinous genocide in our time, like Harriet Tubman is rolling over in her grave right now. Sojourner Truth is rolling over in her grave right now. Bell Hooks is rolling over in her grave right now. Who did I miss? Do you know what I'm saying? The idea that we would weaponize something as sacred as black womanhood and then utilize this to justify blowing up Palestinian kids […] 

 

The more I watch Ware the more impressed I become and if he continues to try to build the infrastructure and the groundwork for a real third-party movement in this country, as he insists he intends to do, I have no doubt that his visibility and impact will only grow as it deserves to.

In a discussion we recorded yesterday – simply because I'm traveling tonight and cannot do the show live; even though you're looking at me, I'm not actually here, I'm traveling – but we sat down with him yesterday and we had a very wide-ranging conversation that covered his personal and political trajectory, his view of the two-party system, his answers to some of the most powerful and good faith critiques of the Green Party, what he has been learning from his ongoing conversations with Muslim, Arab, Latino, and Black voters and working-class white voters in key swing states, as well as his view on the various ways in which the U.S. is now engaged in two wars, at least, both in the Middle East and in Ukraine. Whatever your perspective is on his views and ideology, there is no doubt that he brings a new type of energy, passion, and advocacy to our national conversation. He's clearly a charismatic and compelling figure, and I think you will see that, as I did, in the 45-minute conversation that we had with him. 

For now, here is the interview that we conducted with the vice presidential running mate of Jill Stein on the Green Party ticket, Dr. Butch Ware. 


Interview with Butch Ware (VP candidate for Green Party) 

G. Greenwald: Dr. Ware, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on our program and talk with us. We're glad to have you. 

 

Butch Ware: Great to be with you, Glenn. 

 

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. So, you have certainly had over the past several months a significant increase in visibility, definitely doing a lot of the rounds in the media, making people very aware. You've created a lot of positive impact on social media. So, I think people have a good understanding of sort of the summary background of who you are, where you've studied and what you've done but politically and ideologically speaking, could you talk about your trajectory from when you got into politics, what led you to the Green Party and how you became a candidate on its national ticket? 

 

Butch Ware: Yeah. Not sure I am in politics. I would definitely qualify myself as a public servant before I would qualify myself as a politician. And I think when reclassified as a public servant, then it's really been 20-plus years. I'm doing similar work, activist work, academic work, organizing work and bringing communities together. I'm trying to leverage the kind of public visibility as well as the kind of community backing to bring about social change. And I think that that was probably what put me on the radar with the campaign. I did an Instagram live with Dr. Jill Stein just to learn more about her candidacy, to learn more about the Green Party platform and after I did that, literally within 24 hours, the Green Party reached out to me about the possibility of running as the VP candidate. So I went through a lengthy vetting process, made a lot of phone calls, and reached out to mentors, people in the Palestinian community, the black community, and the Muslim community more broadly. And I also realized that, like, I actually have very deep roots with the Green Party that I hadn't thought about, you know, sort of actualizing. My closest friend growing up, Sean Young, was actually the son of the longest-serving and first-ever elected Green Party official in the state of Minnesota, on the south side of Minneapolis, Annie Young, who was like a backup mother to my single mom, basically is the one that taught me everything I know about public service and, you know, kind of being engaged in political life in the public. So, in a lot of ways, it made a ton of sense. And then, when I found out that Dr. Jill Stein had been mentored by Annie Young in her early days in the Green Party, I realized that, while some people might not have seen this coming, this particular move makes a lot of sense at a lot of levels. 

 

G. Greenwald: There's, of course, a long history that I think is deliberately whitewashed to make people think this never happened of third-party candidates, of independent candidates, having a very major role in our politics, going back to the century before during the Woodrow Wilson administration. Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate, was such a threat that they had to imprison him. Obviously, you go through the '60s and ‘70s, you're talking about things like the black power movement and radicals like Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey and the Socialists, the Weather Underground that grew up around the Vietnam War. I think in the last several decades, though, they've really kind of clamped down on this notion that, no, there's just a two-party system. Unless you're a billionaire, you can't really have any meaningful impact as someone outside of the two-party system. And a lot of people I know who now support the Green Party, who want an alternative to both parties, where people who originally, when they got into politics, had critiques of the Democratic Party, but at the end of the day, they felt like voting for them was the best way to advance their values, however unsatisfactory it was. And I'm wondering if that's the case for you. Was there a time ever in your kind of political consciousness when you saw the political world and social activism where you felt like the Democratic Party was a viable vehicle for you to do work in? 

 

Butch Ware: Never. Not for a single day in my entire life. And the reason is that Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was, you know, sort of a mentor at a distance, temporally and spatially. I was born in 1973, Malcolm passed away before I came along, but the autobiography of Malcolm X led to my conversion to Islam and was the beginning of political consciousness for me, at age 15. And Malcolm warned about the Liberal. He described the Liberal as a fox, it bears its teeth and you think that it is smiling at you, but you are on the menu, whereas the conservative as a wolf, it bears its teeth and you know that it's there to eat. So, I've never in my entire adult life trusted either liberals or conservatives. And the two-party system that we – well, we don't have a two-party system – but the two parties that have come to dominate the American political system are dominated by liberals and conservatives. So, I've never thrown my lot in with the Democratic Party at any level. I voted for the Democrats in the first election that I ever voted – for Bill Clinton. I voted for Clinton the first time around, I was 18 years old, and I voted for Obama, in 2008. And I think that those are the only two times that I've actually voted in a presidential election. I'd have to go back and check on that. I think I voted in primaries at other points in time. My mom was somewhat engaged in Democratic Party politics in the city of Minneapolis, but because of Annie, we mostly stayed around Green and third-party movements. To return to your broader question that Bill Clinton election was the beginning of the end of viable options for third parties for a generation and the reason is Clinton sold out on campaign finance reform. My own understanding was that at that point in time, the Democratic Party was interested in campaign finance reform because all the corporate money was behind the Republican Party and this was something people now forget that Bill Clinton ran on. I was actually very much motivated by this because I thought that the influence of money in politics was going to make it impossible for people like Annie Young and others to do well and be successful. And what the Democrats found out is that if they went corporate, too, they could raise as much money or more than the Republicans could raise and we saw essentially for the past 30-plus years, the Clinton political machine dominate the Democratic Party and go further and further towards corporate selling out, to the point that they're now fundamentally indistinguishable. There is an ideological difference between, quote-unquote, “liberals” and quote-unquote, “conservatives” but there is no functional difference between Team Blue and Team Red when it comes to their beholdenness to AIPAC, to the war machine, to the 1%, to corporate dollars. And I made a social media post before I ever joined the campaign that said whether you vote Team Blue or Team Red, militarized fascism wins. Because what we're essentially seeing in the struggle between Democrats and Republicans is a struggle for factional control over the corporate machine of the 1%. Their patronage networks overlap fundamentally with AIPAC and the war machine. And there is just kind of a fight at the margin between certain kinds of identity groups on one side and Christian nationalists on the other but, ultimately, they serve the same corporate masters. And you are now seeing this with Team Blue as they recruit, you know, people that were well to the right of Ronald Reagan and, without blinking an eye, the Democratic Party embraces war criminals like Dick Cheney because, fundamentally, Team Blue and Team Red of the same team, I call them purple fascists. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, it was really interesting when Liz Cheney talked about not only her endorsement of Kamala but also her father's. She made very clear it's not just because of animosity toward Trump or his comportment. She said very clearly I'm more comfortable with the Foreign Policy ideology of the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden than I am with the Trump-led Republican Party and no one was even confused by that. For me, that made complete sense. If I were Dick Cheney and my views had been what they had been his whole life, I feel very comfortable in the Democratic Party as it's currently constituted as well. 

Let me ask you, just on a personal note, it kind of attracted my attention that you said, “Look, I'm not a politician. Don't call me that.” The reality is if you're running for any office where you're trying to get votes for yourself, by definition you sort of are, even if you don't think of yourself primarily as that, which I understand. I'm wondering, though, in the past, the Democrats attacked the Greens only when they lost and needed somebody to blame for their failures. They couldn't of course, (Ware laughs) So, after the elections are over, they’re going to reap scorn on Ralph Nader, in 2000 and then Jill Stein in 2016, to blame them. This time, I think it's the first time we're seeing this, there's a great deal of venom and attacks in a very coordinated way coming from some of the most prominent surrogates of the Democratic Party, AOC, Keith Ellison, coordinated DNC attacks, not just on both of you, but sort of on your person and your integrity. I mean, AOC called your party “predatory.” I'm wondering, I assume you knew you were going to open yourself up to attacks, but I'm wondering whether you understood or expected that it was going to be at the level of vitriol and kind of personal destruction that you're now seeing. 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
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The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

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There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

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.  

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We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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