And… we’re back!

As we begin this new week, we understand that some of you were not able to tune in to some of last week’s episodes, and so we’re back with another Weekly Update, here to give you all the links to all of Glenn’s best moments from Monday to Friday. A lot happened in the news. Let’s start updating!

First, a bit about Locals:

Some of you were wondering why we decided to show our Thursday after show on Friday, and the answer’s pretty simple: From time to time, we want to show the rest of our viewers what perks are offered to our loyal subscribers! If you’re here from that episode, welcome; if you’re here from before, don’t even think about leaving. Glenn is watching.

Second, a reminder for those who might not have caught our first two (new) Weekly Updates:

Let’s be real: we cover a lot of ground in a given week. When we started, the shows were supposed to be 60 minutes long. Now, they're running closer to 90 or even longer.

We also understand that you’re all very busy — and so are we. Some of you live in California and can’t see the full show before you get away from work, while others are in the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, and myriad other places. Maybe we air too late for you, or maybe we’re on a little earlier than you’d like. That’s fine!

Introducing our revamped Weekly Roundup, within which you’ll find some of our key clips and moments. That being said, we always encourage our loyal viewers and listeners to watch our full show on Rumble or listen to it on all of your favorite podcasting platforms 12 hours after airing.

Daily Updates

MONDAY: The Democratic Blame Game & Trump’s Cabinet

In this episode, we talked about…

1. Democrats refusing to accept even a modicum of political responsibility;

2. Trump banning Pompeo and Haley from his future administration;

TUESDAY: Glenn Suffers from the Plague

WEDNESDAY: Biden Welcomes ‘Hitler,’ While System Update Talks to an Israeli-Detained American Journalist

In this episode, we discussed…

 3. Biden welcoming Hitler (Trump) back to the Reichstag (White House);

4. Analyzing Trump’s latest appointments;

5. Jeremy Loffredo and his harrowing imprisonment in the West Bank by Israeli forces;

THURSDAY: Biden Promises All the Pennies to Ukraine as Tulsi Gets Smeared

In this episode, we talked about…

 6. Biden pledging to give our wallets, and any remaining pocket change, to the Ukrainian war effort;

7. How Tulsi Gabbard is being slandered (again) as a Russian-Syrian toady;

8. Why Blinken’s letter to Israel proves farcical;

FRIDAY: Glenn Talks to the Locals Community Post-Election

In this episode, we answered…

 10. All of your invaluable questions. Keep asking them, and watch his answers here!

Third, live question submissions:

Stay tuned — and tune in LIVE! This week, we’re debuting a feature that allows you, should you choose, to send videos or audio messages to the team for our Locals after show. 

Fourth, publication recommendations:

It dawned on our team that some of our ‘favorite’ publications are worth sharing, not because they are better than those not mentioned or because we even like them. Rather, we’re of the mindset that you should know how we prep for the show — and what certain publications mean to our process. Here are five or, we guess, six that are worth paying attention to, either for their journalistic or comedic value.

The New York Times

This one’s obvious: pure comedic value. We have to read the Gray Lady for so many things. Chief among them are little nuggets like this that come as the paper’s heralded minds attempt to debunk the healthful musings of RFK Jr. and his new M.A.H.A. cadre:

The Washington Post

Really, outlets like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal fall under a similar umbrella. But the Washington Post’s Bezos-related blowup a couple of weeks before the election was truly a sight to behold. Comedy gold, again.

At the same time, these three papers do claim to represent the establishment. And it’s worth paying attention — vigilantly — to the alleged center of this country’s news and opinion distribution.

Politico and Punchbowl 

It’s likely that you’ve heard of Politico, but some of that publication’s founders and editors left a few years back to found Punchbowl in their ever-feverish endeavor to stay hip and relevant. If you want gossip from and about Capitol Hill, these are the places we frequently go.

Current Affairs

Shoutout to Nathan Robinson, who we just recently interviewed. They think out of the box over there. We appreciate that. 

Haaretz

Other Israeli outlets (really, most of them) report on developments in the Middle East, particularly as they relate to Israel, are more forthcoming about the crimes committed by the government since and before October 7, 2023. Here’s just one recent example from the aforementioned publication that is deserving of some praise, in contrast to the mainstream American consensus that Israel has not done anything to deliberately stymie aid to Gaza:

That’s it for this edition of the Weekly Update! 

We’ll see you next week…

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because the Weekly Update happened.”

— Dr. Seuss, if he read the Weekly Update

Watch the full episode HERE

Podcast: Apple - Spotify 

Rumble App: Apple - Google

Good evening. It's Wednesday, November 13.

Tonight: The principal liberal and media theme of the 2024 campaign was that Donald Trump does not merely have a bad ideology, and is not merely a bad person, but he is a fascist threat to American democracy: a literal Hitler figure who intends to impose violence and permanent dictatorship on our nation. How odd, then, to see the American Hitler invited today to the White House, where he met with the sitting President Joe Biden, who warmly shook his hand, expressed fondness for him, and vowed to provide him all the assistance he wants in facilitating his path back to power. 

If Democrats actually believed anything they had been saying about Trump and the singular threat he poses, all of this should seem bizarre and should never happen. But it did, precisely because few in the media or politics actually believed the fears they were trying to gin up about what a Trump re-election would entail. Obviously: you don't invite and embrace Hitler to the White House.

Then: Donald Trump announced a spate of appointees for key positions in his cabinet since we evaluated his initial choices last week. Today alone, he chose Marco Rubio to be his Secretary of State, Tulsi Gabbard to be his Director of National Intelligence, and – in perhaps the most surprising choice of all – announced Matt Gaetz as his pick for Attorney General. Yesterday – in another major surprise – he announced combat veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be his Secretary of Defense, and Mike Huckabee to be his Ambassador to Israel: obviously, Israel is the first country to which he appointed an ambassador because, in American politics, Israel comes first.

Understandably, people seek to read into every choice certainty about what Trump's new administration will do and be. But did anyone watch Trump's first administration? The reason so many people left with such bitterness and rage – from John Bolton to John Kelley and countless others – is because Trump so often rejected their advice and refused to follow their preferred policies. Whether Trump will rely on Marco Rubio, JD Vance, or Matt Gaetz – or just Trump himself or whoever he is listening to – is very difficult to ascertain, let alone with certainty.  

There is clearly a lot in common with Trump's national security choices in particular. They are almost all fanatically, almost religiously loyal to the Israeli state, far more than many Israeli citizens are. And at one point or another, all of them, or most of them express views that one could easily describe as classic establishment Bush-Cheney foreign policy views or even outright neoconservatism. 

There is clearly a lot in common with Trump's national security choices – they are all fanatically, almost religiously, loyal to the Israeli state – far more than many Israelis themselves are – and, at one point or another, expressed views that one could easily describe as classic establishment, Bush-Cheney foreign policy views and even outright neoconservatism. Marco Rubio is probably the pick that most vividly exemplifies that, and there are many others.

Perhaps it is true, as many are arguing, that these appointments signify that Trump will be just a standard adherent to the DC foreign policy blob, and will pursue policies of confrontation, militarism, and war in his new administration. I understand why that conclusion is tempting – I certainly am far from a fan of all these choices, to put that mildly – though I am a fan of several – but I think the picture is far more nuanced and ambiguous and uncertain about who will wield power in this administration and how. And so, we want to devote the bulk of our show to digging into these choices and what they likely do, and do not, signify.

Finally: Jeremy Loffredo is an outstanding independent journalist whose work we have featured on our show previously. Loffredo is an American citizen whose reporting has been primarily done with Grayzone. He has spent the last year focused on critically scrutinizing the Israeli destruction of Gaza and the role of the U.S. and extremist ideologies in that. Agree or not with each one of his views, that is the work of a journalist.

Yet last month, Loffredo was arrested at a West Bank checkpoint by IDF soldiers, blindfolded, and put into solitary confinement. His crime? Reporting on the damage done in Israel by Iranian cruise missiles after Israeli officials falsely claimed that none of those missiles landed and did damage. Despite the fact that Loffredo's reporting was cited and divulged by Israeli outlets, his arrest was clearly punitive retaliation for the critical reporting he's done of Israeli occupation and war. We'll talk to him about what he endured and what it means about Israel's attitude toward journalists and whether “the region's only democracy” still deserves that term.

Watch the full episode HERE

Podcast: Apple - Spotify 

Rumble App: Apple - Google

Good evening. It's Monday, November 11. 

Tonight: It has been 5 full days since Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 election and, as such, the President-elect of the United States. To say that Democratic Party officials and corporate media personalities have not handled this news very well is to dramatically understate the case. At least since the Sept. 11 attacks, I have rarely seen such a frantic and unhinged reaction to any event as we're seeing toward this election result, and the spasms are, I'm afraid, nowhere near the end, but merely in their incipient stages.

To begin with, Democrats and their media allies need to explain to their faithful partisan hordes how this happened – why would people as honorable and decent and noble and patriotic as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz possibly lose a national election to a ticket led by a convicted felon and twice-impeached monster and insurrectionist who is literally the new Hitler, along with his Vice President whom they proclaimed to be, depending on the week, weird, fascistic, and a Silicon Valley puppet. There are two rules Democrats and the media must follow in offering an explanation – first, to identify who the villains are who caused this traumatic event, and secondly, to ensure that the villains are anyone other than the Democratic party, its leaders, its establishment ideology, and its media and secondly, they have to ensure that the villains are anyone other than the Democratic Party, its leaders, its establishment ideology, and its media. The one thing they all agree on is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Democratic Party. The same thing happened after 2016. People who voted for Trump are racists and misogynists, some argued. They are deceived and confused by a steady stream of disinformation fed to them by right-wing oligarchical media barons who somehow control the independent podcasts and shows that have become far more influential than CNN or the New York Times. Or it's Joe Biden's fault for not dropping out soon enough. It's just a problem of messaging – people never were told why the Democratic Party deserved their gratitude. Or it was all the left's fault for their excesses on culture war issues such as trans rights. 

Anything to avoid having to confront and grapple with the real rot at the heart of the Democratic Party: its corporatism and militarism which produces major benefits for a small clique of American liberal elites, while leaving everyone else ignored and abused. I've often said that the two most accountability-free professions on the planet are politics and punditry. No matter how much they fail, they never acknowledge their failures, find someone else to pin the blame on, and just merrily continue in their positions of now-rapidly diminishing influence and power. That is exactly what we're seeing right now, an attempt to shift the blame onto anybody other than the actual culprits, which are themselves. 

Then: There are many things one could say about the first Trump presidential term. That it was driven by rigid ideological coherence is not one of them. For all sorts of reasons – constant contrived scandals from the U.S. Security State disseminated by the corporate media, Trump's lack of familiarity with how the Swamp really worked, the conflicting factions he allowed deep into his government – it was hard to discern a clear political worldview from these first four years. Official Trump policies often conflicted with the President's rhetoric; his orders were often thwarted or ignored by unseen bureaucrats; Trump seemed unsure of himself when it came to particularly complex policy decisions.

Trump himself has acknowledged many of these problems and is explicitly vowing to avoid their repetition. But there are, of course, all sorts of ideological factions vying to influence him: none more dangerous than the neocons and warmongers who sometimes populated his first time and are eager to drive him into the very wars he insists he wants to avoid.

Those tensions were evident over the last several weeks as Trump's CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, arguably the worst person and the first Trump administration was included in Trump's inner camp on some of his last campaign stops, clearly attempting to worm his way into a position of influence. But Trump, responding to the concerns of the anti-interventionist wing of his Republican base, preemptively announced that he would bar both Mike Pompeo and, for good measure, Nikki Haley, from any position in his administration and wish them the best of luck in the future. That announcement, combined with Trump's prior selection of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate earlier this year, created hope that Trump would freeze out that standard DC warmongers and interventionists from tape shaping his top national security start. Donald Trump Jr. this week vowed that freezing such people out was his top priority and by all reports, Donald Trump Jr. is wielding more influence in the Trump camp than ever before. 

Today, however, Trump announced that he was appointing New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Nikki Haley clone, to Haley's old position as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.. He also just announced moments before we went on the air that Congressman Mike Waltz, Republican of Florida and former Green Beret, somebody who has been quite hawkish in the war in Ukraine – he actually opposed Trump's attempt to withdraw from Afghanistan, is quite hawkish on China, though he is a NATO skeptic – will be his national security advisor.

None of these individual appointments standing alone will definitively signal what differences, if any, the second Trump administration will have from the first. But we do have some revealing clues thus far that at least are worth examining, especially because there is clearly an ongoing fight among those closest to Trump to shape how these differences might emerge. But it's definitely worth looking at since we have enough data points at this point to try and map out how we think that will evolve.