Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
DC Attacks Trump's Most Disruptive Picks; Biden Authorizes Massive Escalation With Russia; Joe & Mika Meet With "Hitler"
System Update #367 - Video Transcript
November 25, 2024
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Good evening, everybody, this is Glenn Greenwald with a brand new episode of System Update, on the road. 

Tonight, first of all, a major war is underway against several of Donald Trump's nominees for his cabinet and other positions in his administration. Quite notably, the war is being waged only on the group of nominees who are there to disrupt and fundamentally overhaul the agencies they're appointed to lead. There is almost no disagreement or dispute about the most pro-establishment, sort of status-quo-perpetuating appointees, people like Marco Rubio for secretary of state, or Elise Stefanik for ambassador to the U.N., or John Ratcliffe to head the CIA. Washington, including Democrats and the media, are thrilled with those appointments. Those are the kinds of appointments that Kamala Harris would have made and that Liz Cheney could have made, they will likely play a different role in the administration than the ones they really intend to ensure don't end up with approval – people like Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz because they're there to fulfill Donald Trump's central promise of draining the swamp and fundamentally uprooting how this permanent power faction works in Washington, obviously, the permanent power faction is most afraid of that and they're therefore going to devote all their energy to stopping those appointees in a way which I think is very revealing. 

Then, Joe Biden, or whoever acts in the name of Joe Biden, has announced an extremely dangerous and serious escalation in the war in Ukraine with Russia, and he's doing it on his way out of his presidency, essentially doing something that the administration itself has long refused to do because it's so dangerous and escalatory and making it very difficult for Donald Trump to come in and negotiate a peace deal, but also make it very difficult to avoid the kind of escalation that through sheer luck we've avoided thus far, namely, Biden has authorized Ukraine to use missiles which the United States has provided them to strike deep into Russian territory. 

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has long said that the red line for him, what he will consider the entrance of NATO and the United States as belligerents in this war is if they authorize the use of those kinds of missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory, in large part because the Ukrainians don't have the capabilities to do it on their own, it would actually take the direct involvement of the United States or other NATO countries to help guide those missiles and to launch them. Taking these risks is an extremely dangerous and risky thing to do, especially while Biden is on his way out and when he obviously has no idea what's going on, people are doing this in his name and doing it now when the war is in everybody's eyes finally is something that is futile is remarkably reckless, to put that mildly. 

And then finally, it's almost hard to watch Democrats realize that none of their leaders were serious when they were claiming that they viewed Donald Trump as the new Hitler, that they viewed him as some white supremacist dictator who was going to end American democracy. They got that realization first when Joe Biden, with a huge grin, warmly welcomed the new Hitler to the White House and promised his full assistance in anything that Hitler needed in order to return back to power. Two of the people in media who led the way in insisting that Trump was a Hitler figure – that he was going to be a dictator, that he was going to kill women, that he's a white supremacist – were Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who first, in 2015, wrote on Trump's coattails, put him on the show all the time, including by phone, were overtly supporters of Donald Trump and then, only once Trump got the nomination and Joe Scarborough didn't get chosen as his vice president, which he was lobbying to do, turned against him. They spent the last seven years calling him Hitler, calling him a fascist and now that he's elected and they're desperate to stay proximate to power, they're desperate to find a new way to get people to watch their show, they made a degrading pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, where they humiliated themselves in front of Trump, and pled him to talk to them again, to come on their show again. Obviously, a lot of people who used to believe them, for some incredibly stupid reason, are now realizing that they're just opportunists, craven grifters who never meant a word of what they said and still don't mean it. It's really reflective of this broader realization that with Trump back in power virtually none of our power centers meant anything that they were saying to try unsuccessfully to convince the American public not to vote for Trump again because of how endangered they would be. 

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

DC Establishment Freakout

What's going on in Washington? I think the most significant and also most revealing events center around a lot of the nominations that Donald Trump has chosen and it's really interesting because he's chosen two different, almost antithetical classes of appointees. One type is the very pro-establishment kind of expected ordinary, normalized appointees that people expect to fill these cabinet positions, people who come from the Senate and are respected there, people who believe in bipartisan orthodoxy and have never in their careers threatened it. That would be people like Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Elise Stefanik as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, replacing the position that Nikki Haley held in the first Trump presidency, as well as others like John Ratcliffe, who will head the CIA. You'll notice you’ll hear almost no negative commentary about any of them, even from Democrats. In fact, Democrats hold those appointees up like Elise Stefanik and Marco Rubio to say no, these are the kinds of people we need, these kinds of people who, we disagree with, but they're fundamentally part of our system. They won't threaten radically any sort of dogma or any institutional authority and these are the kinds of people we want. 

Had Trump only confined himself to those sorts of people, I think there'd be a lot of concern, a lot of valid grievances about Trump's central promise for the last eight years of draining the swamp, of radically uprooting the bipartisan corruption that drives the permanent power faction in Washington. A lot of people should be able to rightly say: “Well, how is it possible that you're going to achieve that? Are you serious about that? If these are the kinds of people you are appointing…” That would have been the reaction, I think, of a lot of Trump supporters: “Wait a minute. You're promising to uproot the swamp and drain the swamp, and yet you're choosing representatives of the swamp, of the way it does business, of its ideology to the point that Democrats are very happy with your choices!”

 But he isn't doing that. He started by doing that – those were his first initial appointees that he unveiled, the first two being Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik and everybody was fine with those – but now they have a series of appointees who are the exact opposite of what I just described, the kinds of people who are not expected to occupy these positions, who have radically critiqued the way institutional authority and power in Washington have been corrupted, people who are there not to continue or preserve the governing dogma of these agencies, but to radically transform them in the way that Donald Trump vowed would happen. And those people include Tulsi Gabbard, as the head national, director of national intelligence, overseeing all the Intel agencies, people like Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, Pete Hegseth to be the defense secretary and, of course, RFK Jr. to oversee the health agencies as the director of Health and Human Services. 

It's really odd and interesting how these people are being attacked because it reeks of a kind of desperation. You know, the establishment is shocked and horrified that these kinds of individuals, ones who have been radical critics of establishment D.C. are now going to be ascending to some of the most influential and cherished positions in Washington. They don't really have much of a basis to attack them but in their desperation to attack lies a great deal of the important truth about how Washington functions on a bipartisan basis. I thought for a long time that the thing that made the most upset was Matt Gaetz and I still think that's probably true, but I'm starting to think that a close second is the choice of Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence, precisely because Tulsi has been one of those people who, back in 2014 and 2016, when she was on the left wing of the Democratic Party supporting Bernie Sanders from an anti-establishment perspective and then slowly transforming, realizing that the Republican Party provides a much better vehicle for challenging establishment dogma, she's always been somebody that they viewed as very threatening as someone they could not control. What gives her so much credibility in attacking the intelligence agencies and the military-industrial complex is precisely the fact that as a young woman, she was deceived and misled into going to Iraq to fight for what she thought was her country's national security, only to learn that she had been lied to and that the war was just a regime-change war to try to rebuild Iraqi society by changing the country and imposing leaders and new governments that we wanted. She realized how futile and wasteful of human life and resources that was and as a result, as you can imagine, having gone to war as she did, based on false pretenses, of course, she is and should be a radical critic of the agencies that did that and did so much after that, like trying to remove Bashar Assad and destroying Syria as they fought alongside ISIS and al-Qaeda, or trying to change the government of Libya. These are not wars in the national interest, they are wars to feed the military-industrial complex. And so, she is a particularly hated figure because of the importance of this position and they don't really have much they can attack her on other than screaming “Russian agent.” We've gone over the many people who have done that, but it's really intensified and I think a way that is worth looking at. 

So earlier today, The New York Times had this article on her: How Tulsi Gabbard Became a Favorite of Russia’s State Media

Let me just say when you see career professionals at the Justice Department crying, literally crying, at the prospect that Matt Gaetz might be the attorney general, when you see the people who have run and built our massive health industry inside the government express indignation and horror at RFK Jr.'s probable ascent to lead that agency, when you see longtime defense contractors and defense officials who have worked their way through the Pentagon bureaucracy be horrified that someone like Pete Hegseth could be appointed to run that sprawling, almost trillion-dollar-a-year part of the government and when you see people horrified, “national security officials,” quote-unquote, horrified that Tulsi Gabbard could lead those agencies, that is the greatest endorsement any of these appointees could possibly have. That's the reason that they're there. They're not there to continue the way things have been done. All of those agencies have been deeply corrupted. People realize how rotted the health care professionals who are health policy officials were during COVID-19, what Dr. Fauci and his horde of collaborators insisted and decreed, so many things were not just true, but such that questioning them made you a “disinformation agent” who should be banned and silenced off the Internet – many people were – only for people to realize that so much of what they said was either false or aggressively harmful, forcing young kids to get a vaccine that was experimental that likely could have caused some injuries, that never lived up to the promise that it would stop the pandemic. Obviously, tons of people who are vaccinated continue to contract COVID-19 and pass it along, none of that was true and obviously the origins of it. 

That's true of the Justice Department, which has been extremely politicized to the point where it has intensively and incessantly tried to imprison not just Donald Trump, but so many of his closest associates based on a scandal that came from the intelligence agencies that was completely fabricated, namely that Donald Trump was collaborating with Vladimir Putin and was also a Russian agent. This is now the claim they're making about Tulsi Gabbard, even though there has never been an iota of evidence, Tulsi Gabbard takes orders from the Kremlin and she's paid by them. If you go onto any show in corporate media, or you go to an op-ed page of any national newspaper and you write down what they're all saying, in writing, which is that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset, as The New York Times is doing today, you will never be questioned about what your basis is, what the evidence there is for that. The only reason they're able to say that about Tulsi Gabbard is because when the war in Ukraine broke out, she correctly said that this war would be completely disastrous, the Russians were always going to win, Ukraine could never win, the choice was not between expelling Russia from Ukraine, that was never going to happen, the choice is between years of bloody fatal conflict that would ultimately end up with Russia getting what it wanted anyway at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and the destruction of Ukraine. That was one option. The other option was a diplomatic resolution based on the understanding that Putin had legitimate concerns about what was taking place on the other side of his border concerning U.S. and NATO interference in it. John Mearsheimer said the same thing many times on our show. So did many others, including me, and everyone who said it got put on official lists issued by Ukrainian intelligence as being Russian agents. So, for disagreeing with Joe Biden's war policy and the war policy of bipartisan D.C. in a way that proved to be completely correct, she's being accused of being a Russian asset. It's exactly like the 2002/2003 tactic for accusing anybody who was against the war in Iraq of being a sympathizer of Saddam Hussein or being in league with Saddam Hussein. It's that idiotic. And then there was the meeting that she had with Bashar Assad, something Nancy Pelosi did as well, something a lot of people have done because you're supposed to talk to foreign leaders and adversaries when your government wants to go to war with them. That's part of the congressional responsibility, to go there and understand what's happening, trying to avert a war. Simply because she went and met with Assad, went to Syria to find out what was happening for herself, a country very close to where she fought as a member of the military, which she still is, those two policy positions A) proved completely correct, the government did not succeed in taking Assad out of power, we destroyed that country, we did fight along ISIS and al-Qaeda, many of the weapons we sent there ended up in the hands of the groups that we were told for 20 years we have to fight against. We were on their side in that war. And certainly, what she said about Ukraine or the fact that she was in dissent and correct is what causes all of this brouhaha that she's some sort of foreign agent. 

Earlier today on CNN, there was a panel discussion about why Tulsi Gabbard is this great evil and the opposition to her was led by Coleman Hughes – and I don't really understand when he became an expert on foreign policy. He became known for speaking, I think, quite insightfully about things like race and class and the intersection of them. I have been on his show before, he's been on mine. Suddenly, though, he's now a great expert on the Middle East, he's a vehement supporter of Israel as much as Bari Weiss or Sam Harris or people like that are. Here he is on CNN, maligning Tulsi Gabbard, who knows 10 million times more about foreign policy in her toenail than Coleman Hughes has in his entire arsenal of knowledge but here he is expressing why she's such a terrible choice to lead DNI. 

Host: I don't understand how, I mean, well, let me take that back. I do understand, if your number one concern is having someone who doubles down on what you already believe is wrong with the intelligence community, Tulsi Gabbard might be a perfect choice. But if you have been president, as Trump has, and you understand the seriousness of what comes through on that presidential daily brief, this is a confounding decision. 

 

Coleman Hughes: It's very confounding. I mean, look, call me crazy, but I think the director of national intelligence should be a person who A) trusts the U.S. intelligence and B) likes the U.S. Intelligence. And what do we know about Tulsi Gabbard? We know that when Assad gassed civilians in 2017 and our intelligence agencies determined that and Trump decided to strike those facilities, Gabbard doubted that. She doubted the findings of our intelligence facilities... 

 

Host: Actually […] to go visit Assad. 

 

Coleman Hughes: Yeah and she went to visit Assad and we know that she defends Julian Assange, who released classified information that imperiled the people we were working with – in Afghanistan and the Taliban went out there and were able to kill them one by one. And so, you know... This is exactly the opposite of the person you want leading… 

He's saying that the only kinds of people you want to lead, the intelligence agencies are people who A) trust what they tell you and B) like how they operate. How can any sentient human being who knows anything about the last 25 years of American history – and even if you want to go back much further, it's the same thing, but just going back to the last 25 years since the war in Iraq and the run-up to it going all the way through things like Syria and Libya and Russiagate and the Hunter Biden laptop and all the different ways that these intelligence agencies have interfered in our politics improperly and based on lies, it's not disqualifying to just trust the intelligence agencies or to dislike how they operate and want to change it. What is disqualifying is to trust the intelligence agencies. How mindless must somebody be to say, Yeah, I really trust the CIA, I think their pronouncements are all correct. All her audacity to question anything that the CIA was saying about the war in Syria, which the CIA was leading one of those dirty wars that they love to fight at $1 billion a year, that Obama unleashed them to fight, to remove Bashar Assad from power and replace someone else they wanted. Oh no questioning the intelligence agencies, Tulsi Gabbard questioned what they said, doubted some of their pronouncements, and now she's somehow ineligible to lead them because she doesn't have blind, mindless faith in them. This is conventional wisdom in Washington. Coleman doesn't know anything about the topics about which he's opining, including what he said about Wikileaks. The idea that Wikileaks is supposed to be considered some sort of nefarious group that nobody can defend when they've done more than anybody to bring transparency to our government, including the lies they told us about the wars in which Tulsi Gabbard fought, the corruption of our allies and all the lies that we've been told as the public about what our government was doing. The idea that defending Julian Assange for bringing transparency is somehow disqualifying – I'm sure he would say the same thing about Edward Snowden, who Tulsi Gabbard also supports – it's just mind-blowingly dumb. We showed you this because it's so reflective of how Washington thinks. I mean, Coleman Hughes, what he does when he doesn't know what he's talking about is he just picks up on conventional wisdom in the world in which he resides with Bari Weiss and that kind of people and just repeats what that world thinks without giving an inch of knowledge. 

It's nonetheless worth seeing this because that is the opposition to Tulsi Gabbard. She's not a fan of the CIA, she's not a fan of the NSA. She doesn't think the intelligence agencies like Homeland Security have been doing a good job and have been honest with the American people. This is what Donald Trump ran on. He didn't run on appointing the kind of people that Coleman Hughes thinks should be appointed, people who think the intelligence communities are so trustworthy and who love what they're doing. He ran on a campaign promise to uproot them, to fundamentally drain their swamp and to rebuild them into more ethical and trustworthy institutions and Tulsi Gabbard represents that. The only people scared of her are the people who should be scared, the people who want to keep those institutions in place despite all the lies they've told and the corruption they've imposed precisely because they're the ones who benefit most from it. They don't want anyone questioning, let alone changing how Washington works. 

Here is arguably the most loyal spokesman of the CIA over many, many years, David Ignatius, a columnist for The Washington Post known for his extreme proximity to the CIA. He went on “Morning Joe” this morning. We're going to get to Joe Scarborough in a minute, but you'll notice here already that Joe Scarborough is arguing against Tulsi Gabbard by pretending that he has Trump's best interest in mind. “This is bad for Trump,” he is saying. That's the posture that he's now in: “I love Donald Trump, I want the best for him, I hope you're listening, Donald. I'm not attacking Tulsi because she's doing what you want. No, I'm talking about how she's going to make life more difficult for you and you shouldn't want that.” And then, here's David Ignatius, obviously speaking for the CIA against Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination. 

David Ignatius: She's just echoed the words of Vladimir Putin and Russia. So, there are a lot of people that are concerned that Donald Trump and his administration will not get the Intel they need because you can speak to this very well, there're just going to be other countries that are not going to share information and sensitive Intel with Tulsi Gabbard. And so, as I said last week repeatedly, a pick like Tulsi Gabbard or a pick like Matt Gaetz for AG, that's not just bad for the Republican Party, that's not just bad for America, it's bad for Donald Trump because it makes him less effective. I understand he wants to find loyalists that will go in and overturn the rocks, you know, and see what's underneath in all of these different bureaucracies. I think most Americans would say, okay, that's good, but not political retribution and not these selections that will end up hurting him and make him less effective and make the United States less effective. So, Joe, as you know well, the military, the intelligence agencies are full of thousands of people who want to serve their country. That's why they're doing it. And they want to be professional in how they do their jobs, they want to be respected. And I get nervous when I see a nominee who's been making headlines for four years, as Hegseth has, by attacking military leadership. I just worry that that's going to produce chaos and the opposite of what the country wants. There are going to be so many issues coming up where Donald Trump's going to make decisions that really matter for America and the world, what he does on Ukraine, whether he rewards Vladimir Putin's aggression, whether he leaves the Ukrainians in terrible danger is a crucial issue. We need to cover that. We need to know a lot about the decisions he's making. Same thing with finding peace finally in these Middle East wars, same thing with Iran and where our policy toward Iran is going. In all these areas it's important that we do our work as journalists when we see mistakes being made or choices being made, and we hear from allies around the world, these policies are hurting us. We need to get that information to the American public and the White House, for that matter, as readers, because that's part of how this... 

Okay, the only tiny people first of all who are going to be impeded in their, quote-unquote, “journalistic” endeavors if Tulsi Gabbard runs the intelligence community are people like David Ignatius whose whole career is based on befriending and cuddling up to the leaders of those agencies and serving their agenda. He is a believer in these institutions because his whole career is based on them. And what he's really saying is why would Tulsi Gabbard, running the intelligence agency prevent journalists from bringing transparency? She wants to bring transparency, as Joe Scarborough said, she wants to overturn the rocks and see what's underneath them. He's not saying that most journalists would be impeded in any way from doing their jobs. He's saying he would be – because his friends are finally going to be removed from leading these agencies. He's not going to get the scoops and the leaks that he's been getting his whole career where they say we want the American people to believe this, so go write this and then he dutifully does it. 

But the broader issue here is that these people are so disingenuous to the point that it's nauseating, maybe disingenuous isn't even a strong enough word. Remember, these are people who have been saying for years, for at least eight years, that Donald Trump is a Russian agent. They've been saying that our allies won't provide intelligence to the United States government, not because of Tulsi Gabbard, but because of Donald Trump, they don't trust Donald Trump. He's going to pass a law in Russia and he's going to sell it to the Saudis. Donald Trump, as the president-elect, about to be president, has access to all classified information whenever he wants. He runs the executive branch. You can't keep secrets from Donald Trump. There was actual reporting in his first term that generals and Intel agencies did keep things from him and they were celebrated for it, but in theory, they're not supposed to. But if you already believe Donald Trump is a Russian agent, as all these people do – though they're not saying it now because they're trying to appease Trump and they want him to listen to them, so, they're pretending they're doing it for his own good – If you believe that Trump is a Russian agent, that all these people close to Trump are Russian agents, then why would Tulsi Gabbard change anything? Trump could pass a law to the Kremlin if he wanted, he has access to everything. This is desperation speaking, the stench of desperation. He said a lot of people inside the intelligence agencies are very alarmed by Tulsi Gabbard. If the director of national intelligence chosen by Donald Trump did not make those people alarmed – David Ignatius and the people he serves – you would know it would be a terrible choice, similar to the way there are very few people harmed by the selection of Marco Rubio. 

This is, I think, the key point. If Kamala Harris had won, she would have chosen, like Barack Obama or Joe Biden did, people who are just very standard, welcome and friendly to accommodating Washington's institutional power and D.C. dogma. That's why the people who love D.C. dogma like Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol and the rest of the neocons were behind Kamala Harris. They knew what was so obvious when she said all the people she would appoint would just come from these agencies and institutions and be there to perpetuate them and continue their dogma. If the American people wanted that, they could have chosen Kamala Harris, and that's what people would have been entitled to. She lost the election, she didn't win the election. Americans instead voted for somebody who made it very clear over and over for years that he believes these institutions are politicized, dangerous, corrupted and destructive. And he has the absolute right to fulfill his promise. In fact, the duty to fulfill his promise to appoint people who are radical critics of these agencies and who scared the daylights out of the people inside these institutions and their slaves and servants and defenders like Joe Scarborough and David Ignatius. 

We also have then Pete Hegseth, who is Trump's nomination to be the defense secretary, which arguably is the most important appointment a president can make because they have close to $1 trillion budget. So, I just want you to realize how many financial interests and stakes there are in the Defense Department that that “wheel of justice” greased with tens and hundreds of billions of dollars going out the door into the pockets of Raytheon, General Dynamics and Boeing. Lloyd Austin, the current defense secretary, was not just approved overwhelmingly, but they actually rewrote the law for him, they gave him a waiver. You're not supposed to have a recent member of active duty military run the Pentagon. It’s supposed to be a civilian-run Pentagon. There is a rule that says if you've been an active duty military member for the last five years, you can't get appointed to run the Defense Department unless you get a waiver. Trump selected General Mattis to run the Pentagon and he needed a waiver because he had just been on active duty and when Congress gave Trump the waiver, they wanted General Mattis there because they felt like he would impede Trump, he would defend the military and the bipartisan war policy and he would keep all the deep pockets that fund them, the lobbyists who fund them, very happy, which is exactly what he did. They did a waiver and they said, we're never doing a waiver again, it's very important that we keep civilian control of the Pentagon, but then, as soon as Biden chose Lloyd Austin, the Congress did exactly what they promised they would never do again, which is they gave him a waiver. Why? Because he was coming from the board of Raytheon. He was part of the military-industrial complex. Of course, Lloyd Austin was going to continue all the splurging and spending and dogma that runs the Pentagon. And so, everybody was very happy.

Now, you have Pete Hegseth, who I have to say I have a lot of serious disagreements with him, based on policy. Probably the thing I find most disturbing about Pete Hegseth is that there were members of the military who recklessly and deliberately murdered Iraqi civilians or Iraqi detainees, just shot old women in the head and shot children in the head – really just out of some sort of psychosis – and there were others who just stabbed detainees to death for no reason. And they got court-martialed, they were found guilty by the military, which is a very hard thing to do in war a soldier to be found guilty. Pete Hegseth was a long-time defender of these people. He campaigned for their pardon. He convinced Trump to pardon these war criminals. He was also a big defender of almost every War on Terror policy that turned out to be a disaster. But he's morphed and changed over time like a lot of these picks have, and so I'm not saying that I'm comfortable with this ideology, but no one minds that ideology, if anything, that's what makes it more likely that he's going to get confirmed, but what they really hate about Pete Hegseth is that he has been a harsh critic of the dogma that runs the Pentagon, a lot of the woke policies that have shaped the Pentagon, he believes that women shouldn't be in combat, but he also believes that the Pentagon has been extremely corrupt in how it spent its trillion dollars. They can't pass an audit. They just failed their sixth audit in a row. So much money goes out the door. $800 for hammers, all those things that aren't apocryphal but are real and there's probably nothing people in the Senate and the House care more about than making sure that money keeps flowing to these gigantic arms dealers who fund their campaigns, whose lobbyists run their offices. Pete Hegseth is a threat to that because he's not emerging from the Pentagon bureaucracy and just like with Tulsi Gabbard, the objection to beat Hegseth has nothing to do with this actual abuse but instead, out of nowhere, appeared this allegation very similar to when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court, that he actually raped a woman, in 2017. It's all over the media now. 

Here, it’s New York Magazine from today: What We Know About the Sexual-Assault Allegation Against Pete Hegseth

 … in the days since his nomination, it’s emerged that the conservative TV host was accused of sexual assault many years prior. Though Trump appears to be standing by his nomination, the news added another bump to Hegseth’s already rocky path to confirmation.

The incident allegedly took place during the 2017 California Federation of Republican Women conference in Monterey, where Hegseth was in attendance. Per the Washington Post, the transition team received a four-page memo detailing an alleged assault by Hegseth of a 30-year-old female staffer for a conservative organization at the hotel, written by a friend of the victim in question. 

A report was completed days later on October 12. No charges were filed, and the woman’s statement has not been made public. (New York Magazine. November 18, 2024.)

I was on Megyn Kelly's show earlier today for about an hour and a half where we discussed this case at length. Megan, of course, is an outspoken defender of women who are victimized by sexual harassment and sexual assault. She was very famous when she was on Fox News, as are other female journalists. So, she's not somebody who just rushes to defend men and dismiss the allegations and yet she went through both as a lawyer and a journalist and as an expert in this field a lot of the reasons to have serious doubt about what we know so far about these allegations. My view, my bottom line view, is the same one that applies to Matt Gaetz’s situation which is that if a government body or if a police officer investigates an allegation of criminal conduct and they decide there's no evidence to even charge the person, let alone obtain a conviction, which is what happened in Pete Hegseth’s case, the woman who disappeared from her husband and kids who were staying at the hotel was on video, walking very affectionately with Pete Hegseth back to his room. She woke up, she couldn't remember anything, and she claims she was raped, the next morning, to her husband, as the reason she disappeared. They went to the hospital, they did a rape test, a rape kit, but the police found nothing to justify, even after further investigating what happened, and so they closed the case and no charges were brought. She then sued for money and he did pay her money, but if you're a public figure, especially at the height of the MeToo movement, which is when this case was brought, a lot of people pay off accusers even if they've done nothing wrong, because they know that the mere allegation, even if false, will permanently destroy their reputation, their careers. He would have almost certainly been fired by Fox and never have any opportunity again. So, the fact that he paid her ensuring that the allegation did not come public doesn't in any way, to me, signify guilt. And it's just, again, every time at the most opportune moment, these allegations emerge and appear. This is a serious crime that he's being accused of, which is rape, and the fact that the police investigated in real time and found no evidence to justify the criminal charging – and the same thing happened with Matt Gaetz, the Biden just department spent a year and a half or two years beating about Matt Gaetz, over and over, destroying his reputation and then ultimately finding that they don't have evidence sufficient to charge him and indict him, let alone convict him. I'm not saying you can't make judgments about people if they're not charged criminally, but it's pretty significant that they weren't, and, clearly, the reason why these kinds of accusations are being launched against these people's character and past is not that people care about these allegations, they're being exploited against the very people who are most frightening to the D.C. establishment. 

If you think I'm overstating that, last week, we showed you a video interview of Elizabeth Warren saying that Tulsi Gabbard was the most dangerous nominee, in contrast to Marco Rubio, who, she said, “I don't agree with him on anything, but he's a very serious person. He's qualified, he has the credentials.” They just want the kinds of people who they feel are unthreatening. 

Here's Democratic Senator Mark Warner, of Virginia, talking today, for example, about Marco Rubio's nomination on MSNBC. 

Host: Joining us now, Virginia Senator Mark Warner, chair of the Intelligence Committee. You've worked so closely with Marco Rubio. He's been the vice chair but really much a partner of yours. How do you assess him as the choice for secretary of state? 

Mark Warner: Well, first of all, I don't get to make Trump administration’s personnel decisions. And, you know, the president-elect has still not put forward anybody's name. But if Marco is put forward as secretary of state, I think it'll be a strong choice. He and I don't agree on a lot of things, but we always found a way to work together. And I think most importantly, he knows and understands... 

Not just Republicans, but the Democratic establishment and the media establishment, for the obvious reason that they believe that Marco Rubio is one of them. 

Here is Ana Navarro on “The View” and she particularly likes Senator Rubio because he has long advocated U.S. intervention and interference in Central American and South American countries to change governments. She hails from there, from Central America and she has long advocated when she was working with the Bushes intervention to change the governments of Latin America. Her father was a high-level Nicaraguan leader whom the Americans worked very closely with and this is what her ideology is. It's not really right or left, it's just interventionism when it's not about American defense, but about changing foreign governments, the kind of war Tulsi Gabbard hates and is opposed to and Trump is, too. Here's Ana Navarro, who hates every iota of Trump praising his choice for secretary of state on The View. 

Ana Navarro:  You know, I've known Marco Rubio for a very long time here, and I grew up in Republican politics in Miami together. Haven't spoken to him in several years. He's changed a lot, he probably thinks I have, too. But I will say this: Marco is qualified. He's been on Foreign Relations in the Senate for many years. I'm happy because he knows Latin America, which for me is a region that's often forgotten. He speaks Spanish, he knows who these leaders are, he knows what the issues are. I think he's going to come in hot on places like Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, which I care about enormously. I'm surprised by the appointment because he and I agree on foreign policy, and I think he's considered a foreign policy hawk and kind of like a neocon, which is looked down upon by the MAGA folks. I'm also surprised because of all of this, you know, stuff that's happened between them before, and Trump is putting such an emphasis on loyalty. I'm surprised because this will give Governor DeSantis the chance to make a Senate appointment and Governor DeSantis is not one of Donald Trump's favorite people. I'm surprised by Marco because Donald Trump had such turnover in his cabinet, in 2016, that I think going giving up your Senate seat where you're your boss to go work for Donald Trump… 

Marco Rubio's record in Washington has been a war hawk, an interventionist, as she says, very aligned with neoconservative ideology. You'll notice there, she says neocons are disliked in Trump’s world and other worlds, but they're not in the Democratic Party, which is why Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol support the Democratic Party. 

If Trump's appointees were only people like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik – by the way, there's no difference at all in foreign policy views between Elise Stefanik on the one hand and the person she would be replacing at the U.N., Nikki Haley. There's not any difference in foreign policy between Elise Stefanik and Liz Cheney, as Ana Navarro correctly points out, these are basically neocons whose whole careers have been that. If all of Trump's appointees were that I'd be very alarmed about Trump's intention to fulfill the things he's been promising to do. The reason I'm in a wait-and-see mode is because so many of the people he chose as well are people who have a completely contrary worldview and ultimately that resolution will be determined by Donald Trump. We saw that in 2016, as she said, he fired a lot of his advisers. He made them walk away bitter because he wouldn't do what they said. We'll see what kind of ideology and worldview emerge. 

Obviously, RFK Jr. is deeply threatening and the reason why is so interesting RFK Jr.'s principal focus is not on banning vaccines. In fact, as he will tell you, what most offends him is vaccine mandates forcing people against their will to inject into their bodies experimental vaccines, where there's been very little research, which is true for the COVID-19 vaccine. I talked earlier to Megan Kelly show how, as a parent of young boys prepubescent or just postpubescent I wanted to weigh the risks and benefits for them of getting the vaccine because I knew that as healthy children they were. The risk of COVID-19 was extremely low for them. And so, the idea of injecting into their body some sort of vaccine that wasn't very well tested, that drug companies who controlled these regulatory agencies were making billions and billions and billions of dollars was something I wasn't sure I wanted to do. What was so infuriating was that that choice was taken away from me as a parent. My kids had to get the vaccine because there were vaccine mandates. They couldn't go to school, they couldn't go into buildings, they couldn't go on airplanes and they couldn't do anything unless they had the vaccine card because vaccines became mandatory. Even though these kids have almost no risk of COVID and, as we know, the vaccine didn't prevent them from contracting it and passing it on either. So, that was a lie. 

What RFK Jr. really is focused on is the fact that all of these institutions, the FDA, the NIH, the huge apparatus, the bureaucracy that runs health care policy have been captured by the major industries they're supposed to be regulating – by Big Food, by Big Agriculture, by Big Pharma and by the insurance companies. The irony of this is that this has long been a left-wing view that these gigantic industries that only care about profit are playing to make Americans sick if it means increasing their profits have captured the government and you need somebody who's opposed to these industries, who believes these industries need to be stopped and changed and radically transformed, so they can't keep putting into our food supply extremely damaging substances and then when we get sick from them, allowing Big Pharma to step in and sell us the medication directly, through ads that tell us we have to take to cure our sickness – also very little oversight of that because they, too, have captured these regulatory agencies – and then, when it's time to get sick, we have to turn to these insurance companies that are worst of all. And there is no control of any of this. They control the government, not the other way around. 

That is RFK Jr.’s principal worldview. It has long been a left-wing worldview. That's why RFK Jr. was a beloved liberal for so long, he was an environmental lawyer fighting to prevent corporate pollution and dumping in our water supply and our rivers. That's why Obama actively considered appointing him as the head of the EPA during the Obama administration. But like so many people, he hasn't changed. The politics around him have changed. Democrats and even liberals no longer believe in opposing power centers in Washington, including corporate power centers and that's why he's such a threat. 

Here, today is Obama's Health and Human Services secretary, the former Democratic governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius, who, needless to say, finds RFK Jr.'s nomination very alarming. She went on MSNBC to explain why. 

Kathleen Sebelius: Well, I just listened to Congressman Ivey, and I think that we're talking about magnitudes of danger beyond erroneously making legal decisions. This is life or death. The HHS affects people from birth to their grave and is intimately connected with every state in the country. So, this could be very dangerous. I think it's totally disqualifying for anyone who seeks to lead the major health agency in this country and one of the leaders in the world to just unequivocally say there is no safe and effective vaccine. That in and of itself, from the bully pulpit of HHS, could end up killing people, could end up harming children. My grandson is too young to get a lot of vaccinations yet and having him exposed to unvaccinated people with polio and measles is a terrifying thought. Having eradicated those diseases as a major... 

Lawrence O'Donnell did a similar segment accusing RFK Jr. of having directly killed people by encouraging them not to take the COVID-19 vaccine, as a result, they died of it. 

Do you know how harmful and destructive and fatal so many of these COVID policies ended up being? Things like closing schools for more than a year, locking people into their homes, lockdowns, curfews and shutdowns of everything, isolating people even further from society more than they already were causing massive mental health problems that led to suicides and an increase in alcoholism and drug addiction, stunting the emotional and intellectual development of school-aged children by not allowing them to go to school for more than a year, even though they were never at risk, stunting and impeding the brain development of very young children because people had masks on and their brains didn't learn how to read and adapt to other people's faces, a crucial part of early childhood development, just to say nothing of the fact that there is an increase in myocarditis and other health problems, not a huge risk, but an increased risk that nobody was allowed to talk about, from the vaccine. These are the people who have been killing people, allowing all kinds of poisons into our food supply, turning the population obese and highly overweight at a much more radically escalating level and it's getting worse and worse, especially among children. The health care in the United States, the health status of people's health in the United States is disastrous for mental health and physical health because people like Kathleen Sebelius have overseen and just been part of and then profit off of a system, they did everything to protect one in which these corporate industries, the ones the sectors that I just listed, are free to do whatever they want, including getting experimental drugs approved at breakneck speed because nobody cares to stop them. 

RFK Jr. is not going to make polio vaccines optional. He's going to be constrained to what he can do and when he said there's no such thing as a safe, effective vaccine, he’s explained 100 times, what he meant by that is that we don't have enough research into these vaccines. People like Joe Scarborough, ten years ago, would have RFK Jr. on their show and Joe Scarborough claimed that his oldest son has a mild form of autism, Asperger's, and he believes that it's possible that it was caused by vaccines. Of course, people say there's no evidence that vaccines cause autism and maybe there isn't and our case counterpoint is that's because no research is being done into that question because it's been prohibited and rendered taboo. You're not even allowed to raise the question. 

So just like Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, they're petrified of RFK Jr., they believe he's going to go in and put an end to the game they've been playing at people's expense and their benefit for decades now and that's all the more reason that these appointees should be approved. You can almost see the best appointees by the ones who scare Washington power mavens in media, politics and finance the most and you can kind of see the worst appointees by the people who get called qualified and serious by the bipartisan political class and so, you see a lot about how Washington works in their reaction to all these different appointees. 

Biden Authorizes Weapons to Ukraine

From the very beginning of the war in Ukraine with Russia, back in February of 2022, almost three full years now, we've been saying essentially the same thing and have had very informed guests on bolstering it as well, which is that this war is going to lead to nothing positive. Even if you believe it was a moral duty to support Ukraine or help Ukrainians fight off Putin, it was never possible, there is no way a country of the size of Russia could lose in a ground war to a country the size of Ukraine. It was just never going to happen. The Russians have a superior military as well, superior military technology, more know-how in how to fight wars due to decades and even centuries that the Russians have fought all kinds of wars, it's been a rich part of their history.

The choice never was Oh, the Ukrainians are going to expel the Russian troops from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, where after a referendum, in which nobody doubted the vast majority of Crimeans identify as Russian and prefer to be under the governance of Moscow and Kiev voted to be part of Russia. Either way the Russians took Crimea because they viewed it as an existential to their national defense in the wake of the U.S.-supporting coup in Ukraine that removed the democratically elected leader a year before his constitutional term expired and replaced him, as we know, with Victoria Nuland’s lead with a government that the U.S. picked to serve their interests right on the other side of the Russian border. 

So, there was no possibility the Russians were going to give up Crimea to NATO and let them have access to the Black Sea and be right in that geostrategically crucial part, near Russia, a peninsula filled with people who identify as Russians, nor were they going to allow NATO to fill up all of Ukraine to come right up to the east of Ukraine, right on the western border of Russia. They were just not going to allow that to happen. They were going to do everything to fight it. So, the choices never were either the Ukrainians save their noble democracy and drive the Russian invaders out, or let Ukraine just be annexed by Putin. Those were never the choices because Ukraine was never going to win. The choices were between having a diplomatic resolution that the Russians and the Ukrainians came very close to achieving in February 2022 or having a years-long war that killed hundreds of thousands of people needlessly only for Russians to occupy a chunk of Ukraine at the end and leave Ukraine as a rump state with a generation of men murdered or killed and the whole country in shambles, which is exactly what has happened.

 The reason that diplomatic solution did not happen was just because people like Boris Johnson, the then prime minister of the United Kingdom and neocons like Victoria Nuland in the U.S. told the Ukrainians and obviously the Ukrainians have to listen because they depend on the largesse of the West that it could not sign this peace deal – we want you to go to war with Russia, we'll give you everything we need, you need to make sure that you can win – and that's when Zelenskyy got convinced that he didn't have to do a deal with Russia. And here we are, almost three years later, and what made this war not just destructive, but so dangerous is that Russia is the country with the largest nuclear stockpile on the planet and we're playing this game right in their neighborhood on the other side of the border, the most sensitive part of their border, which was used twice in the 20th century to invade Russia, in two world wars, and killed tens of millions of its citizens. 

We had Sahra Wagenknecht in the show, the great and rising German politician, who used to be part of the left and started her own party in large part out of opposition to their culture war agenda and immigration, but also in large part out of the militarism of the left-wing of the German political wing and the Green Party in particular. She talked about something I had not really thought about but as a German, you would think about it, which is how alarming and traumatic it is for the Russians to once again see German tanks riding eastward into Ukraine toward the Russian border. Obviously, for obvious reasons, that is extremely alarming and traumatic for anybody steeped in the most basic parts of Russian history and yet that's exactly what we have been doing. This war has risked escalation of a very dangerous kind for a long time but Putin has been constrained, thankfully. And now, Joe Biden after his party loses the election, in part because Trump said, we have to finish this war in Ukraine and get it resolved, in part because people are sick of endless wars, as a lame duck, as somebody whose party was just vehemently rejected by the American public, makes a decision, or again, when I say Joe Biden, I mean who was ever acting in his name makes a decision to radically escalate this war on his way out in a way that even the United States previously admitted would be too dangerous to do because it would mean direct U.S.-NATO's involvement in the war would become direct belligerence against Russia, which is by not just giving the Ukrainian long-range missiles attack us, but authorizing their use deep into Russian territory. And it isn't just authorizing Ukrainians to do it. The Ukrainians cannot operate these missiles on their own. They need the satellite and guidance systems of the U.S. or other NATO countries and that means every missile launched, the United States or the Western European militaries will be directly involved, and as Putin has said, as a result, the first missile that plants in our territory will be regarded as a direct war with the United States not only will treat it as such. 

And here's the game that Biden is playing, from today in The New York Times: Biden Allows Ukraine to Strike Russia With Long-Range U.S. Missiles; With two months left in office, the president for the first time authorized the Ukrainian military to use the system known as ATACMS to help defend its forces in the Kursk region of Russia.

The weapons are likely to be initially employed against Russian and North Korean troops in defense of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region of western Russia, the officials said.

Mr. Biden’s decision is a major change in U.S. policy. The choice has divided his advisers, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.

The officials said that while the Ukrainians were likely to use the missiles first against Russian and North Korean troops that threaten Ukrainian forces in Kursk, Mr. Biden could authorize them to use the weapons elsewhere.

Some U.S. officials said they feared that Ukraine’s use of the missiles across the border could prompt President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to retaliate with force against the United States and its coalition partners.

But other U.S. officials said they thought those fears were overblown. The New York Times. November 18, 2024)

 

We don't know what Putin's going to do. Putin isn't suicidal, he's not stupid, as he's proven repeatedly. He's not going to pursue a direct military attack on the United States and NATO unless he considers it absolutely necessary. He understands the risk of that very well, especially with a new president, Donald Trump, coming into power in just two months, who has promised repeatedly in one unnamed campaign pledge to end the war, not escalating it. Still, this decision by Biden is so reckless, it's so politically unethical – on your way out as an 81-year-old man who doesn't really care that much about the future, just say screw it, let the Ukrainians bomb deep inside Russia in a way that we or our European allies have to help them do it, knowing that Putin has said that this is a direct attack on Russia.  Remember, this is all being done to help the Ukrainian forces that have invaded Russia and occupied an increasingly smaller part of their land, and what is going on here is that it is now inevitable that NATO and the U.S. will be humiliated. From the start, they defined victory in a way that could never be accomplished, namely, driving all Russian troops out of every inch of Ukrainian soil. There is zero chance that that will happen. Nobody believes that will happen. Everyone knows that won't happen. NATO and Biden said we will fight until the end to ensure victory against Russia. We will not let Russia win. Russia has won the war. 

This is all about trying to save face and get a better deal from the Russians who inevitably are going to occupy part of Ukraine, but it's really about this – I really believe it's about this, which is Trump has vowed and promised to do what should be done, something Tulsi Gabbard favors, a lot of Republicans favor, which is not escalating, that we're further not funding it further, not arming it further, but instead negotiating a deal with Russia, which of course will involve Russian control over Ukrainian land. They paid a huge price to get that, they're not giving that up. When that happens, there's going to be an effort on the part of the media and the Democratic Party to say “Look, Trump gave away Ukraine, parts of Ukraine to his friend Vladimir Putin,” when in reality, we're on that road anyway. European capitals, American officials, even Ukrainian officials understand that this war has to end. It's far too destructive and there is no chance of achieving victory. But they're going to get to fabricate this narrative that it was Trump who gave away parts of Ukraine when in reality it was the Biden administration and NATO officials who wanted this war, who could have averted it early on with a buffer zone and a promise of neutrality. Instead, they purposely averted a diplomatic solution, causing this war to kill hundreds of thousands of young men both in Russia and Ukraine and now ensure that the Russians are never going to give up territory that they paid such a steep price in order to get. It's not going to be Trump's fault; it's going to be the fault of Biden. 

Here's The Economist offering a very important piece of analysis earlier today about this decision by Biden: Ukraine can, at last, use its American missiles inside Russia

What they're essentially saying is this was something that Biden and his advisers were adamant against doing from the beginning of the war. There was pressure from the Europeans – Keir Starmer, the prime minister of Great Britain, flew to Washington to try to badger Biden into allowing and authorizing the involvement of NATO with this and Biden was steadfast that that wouldn't happen. The reason why the U.S. wouldn't do it is because of how serious the risk of escalation is from doing this. 

Here's what The Economist recalled. 

The third was the risk of escalation. Ukraine has frequently used its own drones and missiles to strike inside Russia—one attack at Toropets in September took out three to four months’ worth of ammunition—but ATACMS strikes typically require American assistance with intelligence and targeting. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has said that the use of Western missiles in Russia would constitute “direct involvement” in the war. The Economist. November 18, 2024.

Of course, it would be “direct involvement in the war.” 

Here was Putin, back in September 2024, as reported by Bloomberg, talking about how Russia would view any decision of this kind. 

Vladimir Putin: With modern, long-range precision systems of Western manufacture, the Ukrainian is not capable of striking. It cannot do this. If this decision is made, it will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States and European countries in the war in Ukraine. This is their direct participation and this, of course, significantly changes the very essence, the very nature of the conflict. This will mean that NATO countries, the United States and European countries are fighting against Russia and if this is so, bear in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created for u

You can argue with that if the United States sends its military officials, its soldiers and its Intel intelligence officials to work directly with Ukraine on the launch of American-made, American-sent, American-sold missiles into Russia because Ukraine can't do it on its own, of course, the United States would now be a direct belligerent in attacking Russia. Why risk that? Why risk that kind of retaliation, that risk of nuclear war from an 81-year-old man who doesn't know where he is? His party has just been soundly rejected and who's on his way out of the presidency in a lame-duck decision like that – the consequence of that danger is insane. 

Back in September, The New York Times published an op-ed with the title “Ukraine is Running Out of Optimists

It essentially talked about how even the hardest core boosters of the war are now admitting that this war has destroyed them, that they have no chance of winning, they want this war to end, all it is doing is killing them and destroying their country and they know, they have accepted, that they cannot beat Russia, and that eventually, the Russians will control, as they do now, a good chunk of Ukraine. They're controlling about 24% of the country and every day Russia expands a mile, a half mile, two miles further westward into Ukraine, headed toward Kiev. Obviously, the Ukrainians want to stop that. They want to stop the Russians where they are, not allow them to get more territory, get the security guarantees that they need and stop the killing and dying of their citizens. Even in Ukraine, they realize this. And Joe Biden, instead, is saying, let's just keep pouring fuel on the fire. 

This is a big reason the Democratic Party lost. It’s because of the perception that the United States does not want to spend its money on everything other than the welfare of American citizens. You go and look at all of these exit discussions and exit polls: people have anger about the perception we're spending a lot of money to give benefits to people who enter the country illegally, that citizens don't have, but they're also very angry about the hundreds of billions of dollars going out the door to help Ukraine, to help Israel. And when people can't afford groceries or basic health care for their kids, of course, that's going to make them angry and it also is just a series of endless swerves. And Americans don't wake up and care about who's going to rule various provinces in eastern Ukraine. Why is the United States involved in that war again? Tulsi Gabbard questions that question the same thing about Syria and for that reason, that reason only, she's being maligned as a Russian agent. We need more people to question this kind of war consensus. It's destructive, it burns our resources and it's a very, very dangerous thing to do. One of the worst things I've seen is watching someone in Joe Biden's name authorize this extreme escalation that even the Biden administration for years was unwilling to take precisely because they knew how dangerous it was. 

Morning Joe Warms up to Hitler

All right, so just as a quick last segment, it's not really worth spending a lot of time on Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, but it is worth talking about how they're behaving as a window into understanding what the media now is. 

So, as you undoubtedly know, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were Trump's biggest boosters in 2015. They loved Trump, they went down to Mar-a-Lago constantly, they talked about him and their friendship with him. They did everything to boost him. Then, right when Trump was ready to run in the general election and there were a lot of reports Joe Scarborough wanted to be his vice president, Trump obviously didn't pick him and picked Mike Pence instead. They turned on a dime. 

Part of that was because MSNBC had become such a vehemently anti-Trump network that the only people watching were people who hated Trump and believed he was Hitler and a Russian agent and no show could survive on that network unless they were as vehemently opposed to Trump as the rest of the network. But it was also because there was a personal interest there that they felt pushed away and the thing that Joe Scarborough needs more than anything is to feel like he's important, that he's listened to by people in power, that's why he worshiped Trump and served him in 2015 and 2016. Then, when Joe Biden won, he became the biggest cheerleader of Joe Biden, insisting that anyone who questioned Biden's cognitive abilities was lying, that he personally was with Biden many times and that he could run laps around any of the Republicans questioning his cognitive abilities, including Kevin McCarthy and people like that, that he was sharper than ever. He was constantly calling Trump a threat to democracy and just defending the White House line to the point where Joe Biden, it was well known, his favorite show on TV was “Morning Joe,” because he would tune in every day and see Joe Scarborough defending him and heralding him and every one of his positions. That's what Scarborough likes. Joe Biden listens to our show. And now that Biden is on the way out, the Democrats are ejected and the new power is Donald Trump, listen to what Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who spent the last seven years calling Trump Hitler a white supremacist, a Nazi, someone who wants to kill women, listen to what they humiliated themselves by doing: 

Mika Brzezinski: Over the past week, Joe and I have heard from so many people, from political leaders to regular citizens, deeply dismayed by several of President-elect Trump's cabinet selections. And they are scared. Last Thursday, we expressed our own concerns on this broadcast and even said we would appreciate the opportunity to speak with the president-elect himself. On Friday, we were given the opportunity to do just that. Joe and I went to Mar-a-Lago to meet personally with President-elect Trump. It was the first time we have seen him in seven years. 

Joe Scarborough: Now, we talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation and threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets. We talked about that a good bit. And it's going to come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show or has watched it over the past year or over the past decade that we didn't see eye to eye on a lot of issues. And we told him so. 

Mika Brzezinski: What we did agree on was to restart communications. My father often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed. That's a task shared by reporters and commentators alike. We have not spoken to President Trump since March 2020, other than a personal call Joe made to Trump on the morning after the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania. In this meeting, President Trump was cheerful. He was upbeat. He seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues. And for those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, why wouldn't we? Five years of political warfare has deeply divided Washington and the country. We have been as clear as we know how in expressing our deep concerns about President Trump's actions and words in the coarsening of public debate. But for nearly 80 million Americans, election denialism, public trials and January 6 were not as important as the issues that moved them to send Donald Trump back to the White House with their vote. Joe and I realize it's time to do something different. And that starts with not only talking about...

Joe and Mika, allowing Donald Trump to call into their show again, something that no news show ever does for a politician but that those two did all the time in 2015 because of how much Trump saved their jobs and brought them ratings. 

Let me just note a couple of things. First of all – I mean, there's so much to say about that but I'm going to try to restrain myself. 

First of all, note how Mika says “Trump was upbeat and cheerful.” I'm sure he was. He loves nothing more than when he forces people to make a pilgrimage to him and bend their knees because they need him for something, especially the people who have bashed him the most. And now they have to plead for an audience with him and he grants it. But they have to fly to him and they're not even there for an interview. They don't get an interview out of it. They're just allowed an audience with him to meet with him because they're so desperate to recreate a relationship with Trump in order, again, to feel like they're proximate to power – the worst desire for someone who purports to be a journalist in any way wanting, craving to be close to power instead of adversarial to it. But also because Donald Trump is the only thing that can bring them an audience. There's no more MSNBC audience as we're about to show you, they need Trump, he obviously doesn't need them at all. 

The other thing I just want to say to you is, as you might know, Mika Brzezinski’s father was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was an actual diplomat and a national security expert, much sought out through the ‘70s and the Carter administration into the ‘80s and ‘90s. She compared them, that dumb duo, that pundit duo, to her father as though they're just doing what her father did, like going around the world trying to facilitate peace, but they're like “My father often said, you have to talk to people you don't like.” We're here to solve the divisiveness in the nation. That's why they went to Mar-a-Lago because they're there as peacemakers on behalf of the country like her father flew around the world meeting with adversary countries to negotiate peace deals. I just think about the self-importance, to be able to try to pretend that that's the reason that you went there, as opposed to crawling on your hands and knees because you're desperate for Trump to talk about your show, to watch your show, to come on your show, because they have nobody else on. 

Earlier today, as I said, I went to The Megyn Kelly Show. We also spent a good amount of time on this. We had a hard time controlling ourselves, we tried to move on to other topics, but it was just so much material to mock – but also to derive meaning from. Before I went on, we were talking about putting together a montage of all the things that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were saying about Trump before he won. She was saying, “For those of you who asked, why would I go there, I would ask you, why wouldn't we?” The reason you wouldn't is because you claimed he was Adolf Hitler, that he was deliberately going to kill women, and he was going to put his critics like you into concentration camps. Maybe they really believe that and they're trying to avoid the concentration camp by currying favor with him, which would be even more pathetic. 

Here's just a little taste of what those two have been saying about Trump for the last several years. This was put together by The Megyn Kelly Show. Click on the link below.

Video. Morning Joe, The Megyn Kelly. November 18, 2024 - montage of various “Morning Joe” clips from Meagyn Kelly’s show

How vapid and vacant and sociopathic and bereft of any genuine belief somebody has to be to perform like that for a liberal audience, calling Donald Trump repeatedly Adolf Hitler, Nazi, fascist, white supremacist, looking to murder and imprison his critics, over and over and over again because, you know, that's what brings the liberal audience. And then the minute that person wins the election, you realize nobody has listened to you, nobody takes seriously a thing you say, you were telling them “You can't vote for him, you're going to destroy the country” and they just tuned you out and did it anyway. And you realize your own irrelevance and now you're desperate to A) find a way back to what you think is relevant, and B) to find a way to get your audience back and so, you fly down to the kingdom of Adolf Hitler and you meet with him privately and you tell him how important it is to you to reestablish a relationship. 

These people don't believe anything they've been saying. Kamala Harris’ closing argument was “Trump is a fascist” and then Joe Biden when he wins warmly welcomes Hitler to the Oval Office, and says, we're here to do anything that you need to facilitate a smooth transition back to power, Mr. Hitler. Democrats, the Liberal audience, the herd who did believe this, have to watch this and they realize now none of them ever believed it, those who were leading them to believe it. When Biden invited Trump to the White House – we thought Trump was Hitler why are you inviting him to the White House? But these two are willing to humiliate themselves more than any media personalities I've ever seen. 

For policy views of Megyn Kelly that you dislike, I dislike them as well, but to her credit, I go on her show all the time and we actually had a debate one of the last times I was on about our differences about foreign policy, about 9/11 – it was when TikTok banned the 9/11 letter – and whether Muslims hated the United States because they hate our freedom and our religion, or whether it's because they hate our foreign policy. So, you can go watch that, we have our differences, and that's fine, but one thing I will say about Megyn Kelly, she will interview any politician, including one she loves. She loved Ron DeSantis, she loves him. Go and watch the interview that Megan Kelly did with Ron DeSantis when Ron DeSantis was running for president, even though Megan obviously not just like him, I would say that that was her favorite candidate. She asked DeSantis probably the hardest questions that he had been asked throughout the presidential cycle because, as she says, at the heart of this relationship is an adversarial one, especially when you're a working journalist. 

Joe and Mika were worshipful of Trump when it served their interests, they became haters of his of the most virulent kind and now they're back to crawling around in his office begging for some attention. One of the reasons this is happening is because it is hard to overstate the extent to which liberals have tuned out of politics, especially the networks that they were watching, telling them that Trump was going to prison any moment, that Trump was on the verge of being prosecuted, that Trump was a traitor, that everybody knew that, that Kamala was going to win, that women were going to rise up. Then after the election, like, none of what they believed was true and not only that, but it seems like these people have zero influence because nothing that they were saying resonated with the broader country. They're in this tiny little bubble. They realize that. They feel helpless, they feel misled, and they are in droves abandoning politics in general, but especially these people who they feel misled by in particular. MSNBC's audience has all but disappeared. I want to show you the numbers, just to emphasize how true that is. Let's look at this. 

 

These are the primetime numbers for Fox News, CNN and MSNBC and this shows the number of people who watch these primetime programs on these major networks who are in the key demographic, which is 18 to 54. Advertisers don't care about people 54 or 55 and older because they feel they're set in their ways, they aren't really reachable as consumers, the only people they consider influenceable are people who are 18 to 54. That's the only monetizable audience. You could have 10 trillion senior citizens watching your show, advertisers don't care about them. They don't want them, they won't pay for them. They only pay for this key demographic of people under 55. 

Let me show you the number of people watching MSNBC shows in prime time. So here in yellow, you see it. You have Ari Melber, at 6:00, he has an audience of 66,000 people. 66,000. Joy Reid 76,000. Chris Hayes 77,000. Alex Wagner 53,000. The Last Word 53,000. Stephanie Ruhle 62,000. CNN it was a little bit better, but barely and then, as usual, Fox News has five times that amount. 

Do you know how few people? When you are on cable, you're in every home, you're in every airport, you're in every doctor's office, you just flip through the channel and everybody can see you, you have a major corporate conglomerate promoting you aggressively and continuously. Do you know how pathetic it is? What a disaster it is to reach 53,000 people who are under the age of 55, not even 100,000 people. They can't even get to 80 000 in prime time. 

Here are their weekend numbers, which are even more shocking. 

They have a 4 p.m. show, look at to how many people they got: 13,000 people watched that show. Dan Bongino has hundreds of thousands of people watching him live on Rumble without any of that corporate backing, without having to pay zillions of dollars for our on-air talent and staff. Al Sharpton show: 33,000 people. Jonathan Capehart: 27,000 people. Ari Melber: 26,000. Stephanie Ruhle: 23,000. I mean, their audience really has disappeared. CNN has on primetime nights, its lowest audience since they began, practically, back in 2000. 

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski make a lot of money and that money and their importance depends on keeping an audience. They know the liberal audiences have checked out, feel misled, feel dispirited, feel impotent and their only chance to gain back relevance and get back an audience is to have Trump come back on their show. I don't think it's gonna work. No MSNBC liberals want to see Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski being friends with Donald Trump and no conservatives are ever going to trust Joe Scarborough, or Mika Brzezinski, no matter how many times they bring Trump on, so I think they painted themselves into a corner. But just have some dignity, just a minimal amount of dignity.

At least people like Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O'Donnell and like Kaitlan Collins and all these people, they believe the deranged stuff they're spewing. They really believe Trump is a Russian agent. They made Rachel Maddow really believe she was going to go to a concentration camp or prison. AOC really believes that. It's deranged, it's hysterical, it's unhinged beyond belief, but at least there's some authenticity to it, which I respect more than these two who are just such craven, vacant opportunists who will say and do anything just to advance themselves a little further and to enhance their relevance a little bit more, calling someone Hitler for six straight years a racist, a white supremacist, a dictator, someone who is going to kill women and then admit that you crawl on the floor and beg for an audience with him and got one to try to encourage him to talk to you again. And now you already see Joe Scarborough as we showed you, framing the things he's saying, including opposing Tulsi Gabbard as though he cares about Trump. He wants what's best for Trump. He believes Trump's now watching their show, trusting what Joe Scarborough is saying, things like, “I'm not criticizing Donald Trump for this appointment, he has the right to appoint whom he wants, it's just bad for Trump that Tulsi Gabbard at the head of these intelligence agencies”. It's just a form of self-degradation unlike any I've seen before, but the reality is that these people finally not just these two, but that all of the corporate media is having to grapple with the fact that nothing they say resonated. This whole time they've been talking to a tiny little liberal bubble of like-minded people who live in these tiny enclaves with like-minded people. 

So many of them are on an exodus from Twitter because they want to go to some other social media site where only they exist. They're actually retreating even more into this bubble because no one believes them, no one trusts them. Polls have shown that for so long and they didn't want to believe it, now, they have to and they're in kind of a panic. At least some of them are just saying we're going to go further into this bubble, these two are trying to get back into Trump's good graces in a way that Trump must be laughing his ass off as he watches, and I'm sure he's going to make them do all sorts of even more humiliating things before he gives them what they so desperately need, which is him going back on to the show and it's just very indicative and illustrative of the broader media, of the broader liberal discourse. They just can't justify that in themselves anymore, that anything that they're doing is true or relevant or has any impact whatsoever. And it's kind of cathartic and delightful to see. 

So that concludes our show for this evening.

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Prof. John Mearsheimer on U.S.-Israel War with Iran, Gaza, Trump's Foreign Policy, and More
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The past ten days were filled with extremely weighty and consequential events in foreign policy, obviously beginning, of course, with Israel's attack on Iran and then Donald Trump's decision to bomb that country's nuclear facilities. Though that was ended relatively quickly – at least it seems so, and one certainly hopes – the fallout is likely to be vast and will unfold over the next many months. 

The understandable focus on that war in Iran has also served to obscure other perhaps equally significant events, including the still-worsening Israeli destruction of Gaza, the economic and political fallout from this war, the one we just had in Iran, the prospect of future regional conflict there, the ongoing war in Ukraine – remember that? – that's still going on, and also, what we learned from all of these events about Trump's foreign policy. 

Given the importance, but also the complexities, of those developments, we are thrilled to have one of the most knowledgeable and clear-thinking voices anywhere in our political discourse. He is Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer.

 Professor Mearsheimer doesn't need any introduction, especially for our viewers, who have seen him on this show many times over the past several years and is one of our most popular and certainly one of our most enlightening guests. He's the author of the genuinely groundbreaking 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” as well as the highly influential 2014 article in the Journal of Foreign Affairs entitled: "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault.” 

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Why Did Zohran Win in NYC? Plus: Gaza Pulitzer Prize Winner Mosab Abu Toha on the Latest Atrocities
System Update #476

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Zohran Mamdani, who had been a relatively obscure member of the New York state assembly, scored one of the largest political upsets in New York city politics last night – arguably one of largest upsets in American politics – when he won the Democratic Party nomination for Mayor of New York City against multiple candidates led by Andrew Cuomo. 

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In fact, many on the right appear to think that Zohran, who's a leftist Muslim from Uganda, is some sort of unholy love child of Osama bin Laden and Josef Stalin. Establishment Democrats believe, as they did for Bernie's campaign in 2016 and the AOC's win in 2018, in her emergence as a leader of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, that their future as a party will be destroyed by having a young candidate energize huge amounts of young voters, including young male voters with an anti-establishment and economic populist agenda of the range of views that are absolutely hated by their big donors, who demand they adhere to corporatism, the kind of corporatist that most Americans on both sides of the aisle have come to hate. 

First, we will talk to Mosab Abu Toha, who is a Palestinian writer, poet and scholar from Gaza. He lived in Gaza with his family on October 7, after which the massive Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip began. His daughter is an American citizen, which enabled him and his wife to flee to Egypt with their daughter in December, but along the way, he was detained and disappeared by the IDF and was released only under significant international pressure. 

He wrote a series of essays for The New Yorker on the suffering and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, the awarding of which, needless to say, generated outrage and protest. The war in Iran has really served to obscure and hide the still-worsening crimes in Gaza over the last couple of weeks. We think it's very important to talk with someone as informed as he is about the latest Israeli atrocities and what has been happening in Gaza. 

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The Interview: Mosab Abu Toha

As we just noted, Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian writer, he's a poet, a scholar, and has worked hard on various libraries in Gaza as well. He was in Gaza when Israel began its massive assault after the October 7 attack, and he was able to flee with his wife and young daughter, who is an American citizen, though just barely. He was there for about two months when he was about to flee. He is now a Pulitzer Prize winner as a result of a series of essays he wrote last year in The New Yorker that chronicle and powerfully express the extreme human suffering of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and we are delighted to have him with us tonight to understand what has been happening there. 

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

Mosab Abu Toha: Of course, it is my great pleasure. Thank you so much, Glenn, for having me. 

G. Greenwald: I wish we were meeting under better circumstances, I wish we had something less depressing and horrific to talk about, but the world is what it is. So, I just want to get a little bit of understanding from you since one of the things that you do is convey thoughts and emotions in words as a poet, as a writer, obviously, a now widely recognized one. 

As somebody who's lived in Gaza, it's not new to you to be bombed by the Israelis. Israel has been bombing Gaza, killing civilians over many, many years, but I think it was very obvious for a variety of reasons, not just October 7, but the composition of the current Israeli government, the obvious support the world was going to give them, that this is going to be far worse and quickly it turned out to be. So, you went to Gaza for about two months before you were able to get out. What were those two months like for you and your family? 

Mosab Abu Toha: First of all, it is important to note that I was born in a refugee camp. My parents were born themselves in refugee camps. My grandparents on both sides were expelled from Yaffa in 1948. So, I lived in Gaza all my life and I was a witness and a survivor of so many Israeli assaults. I was wounded in one of the airstrikes in 2008-2009. I survived by chance and I still have the wounds in my body: in my neck, in my forehead, in my cheeks and on my shoulder. So, surviving the genocide in Gaza was not the first time I survived the Israeli aggression. In fact, I was in the United States between 2022-2023. I returned to Gaza in 2023 after I finished my MFA from Syracuse University and I then traveled to the United States again for a literary festival, Palestine Writes, held at UPenn in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. And I returned to Gaza 10 days before October 7 and I resumed my work as a teacher in Gaza. 

G. Greenwald: Can I just interrupt you there, because that literary festival that you're referring to shortly before October 7, as I recall, there was a gigantic movement, this was before October 7, to have that canceled simply because people like you and other Palestinians were participating and speaking critically of Israel. Can you just talk a little bit about that? Then I want to get back to what the experience was in Gaza. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah. I would like to say, Glenn, that the criticism that I or other people are critical of Israel is not true. We are not critical of Israel. All we are doing is exposing the crimes that Israel has been committing, whether it's in the Gaza Strip or in the West Bank. So, I don't care if it was a different country, if it were a different people, I would still do the same thing, because this is happening to me and to my people, to my parents, to my children, and also to my grandchildren. So, it is not that people in Palestine or Palestinians or even pro-Palestinian people who care about human rights, it's not that they are critical of Israel or whatever you call it. It's that people are talking and advocating on behalf of the people who have been living under occupation for 77 years and this is perceived as a crime when you talk about crimes that are committed by a state that has been created in 1948 and that's been funded by, unfortunately, Western countries and also the United States until today, even as they are committing an ongoing genocide. 

So, it is shameful that some of the participants in the festival were canceled or not permitted to be on campus at the University of Pennsylvania in September 2023. But here we are, in 2025, Palestinian people, Palestinian writers and Palestinian journalists have been the main target of the Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian activists and pro-Palestinian activists have been canceled from so many places, even artists, even singers. They were canceled from big events because of what they say about the Palestinian people and their right to exist and to exist with dignity. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, we covered so many censorship-based reactions to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, but I just thought it was important to remember that that's been happening in the United States well before October 7, and in fact, just a week or two before, at one of our great universities, the University of Pennsylvania, where apparently just the mere presence of Palestinian voices in the view of a lot of people justify trying to get the entire event canceled and ended up getting some of the people banned. 

All right, so you went back to Gaza after that event and shortly thereafter, the October 7 attack happened, then followed by this massive Israeli air assault on Gaza, unlike, I think, anything that has happened in Gaza for a long time, despite how terrible and fatal so many of the other ones were. Just in your own words, what was that like, just to be constantly surrounded by death, by the risk of death, by the fear that you would go to bed and not wake up? How did you navigate that? 

Mosab Abu Toha: So, it is important, Glenn, to note that Palestinians in Gaza have been massacred by the Israeli forces, the Israeli army, without – I mean, I was 31 years old when I left Gaza for the last time, I've never, before October 7, in my life, seen an Israeli soldier. Israel was bombing us from the sky, Israel was firing at us from gunboats and warships in the sea, in our sea, just seven or eight nautical miles off our shore. They were shooting at us, they were killing us, they were dropping bombs on us without us seeing. I've never seen an Israeli, not even one Israeli soldier, never seen any Israeli soldier or Israeli civilian, in my life. So, we have been killed, we have been abducted, we have been injured, our houses have been destroyed on top of our families, without us seeing who these people are, who have been killing us without us seeing. 

I mean, they see us from a screen. They see us as dots, black and white dots moving on the ground or maybe structures on the ground. Lately, they have been filming us through their drones, people who are trying to get aid. There are so many videos of people who try to go back to their homes to collect food and then there is footage of an Israeli drone missile hitting them and killing them. 

So, I lived in Gaza all my life and I've never seen an Israeli soldier. I was wounded and I don't know whether that soldier knew or whether that Israeli pilot who dropped the bomb in 2009 knew that they killed seven people in that airstrike and they wounded a 16-year-old child who became a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. 

So, when Israel attacked Gaza, it was not only a military attack. Israel did not only drop bombs, they did not fire bullets at people, unarmed people, but they also shut off electricity, shut off water, shut off food trucks. They control everything, right? So, it's not like Israel just attacked Gaza militarily. No, they blocked everything, even as we are talking, people do not have, not only enough food, because we always talk about the lack of food, the lack of water, the lack of shelter, but there is a lack of medicine. 

One of the relatives of my brother-in-law who was wounded in a strike that killed his brother 20 days ago, and I wrote about him in my last piece in the New Yorker, he was at the hospital, at al-Shifa hospital, and the shrapnel covered his body, and his arms and his body was wrapped in gauze, and he complained to the doctors that he has some pain in his body. And do you know what they gave him? They gave him something like Tylenol, something that you take when you have a headache. There's no medicine in Gaza. And even though there is no healthy food – the kind of food that is entering Gaza is canned food: canned beans, canned peas, sugar and frying oil. There is no fresh food, not only for people to grow normally, but even for those, the dozens of thousands of Palestinians who were injured. There is no healthy food. Fresh food like vegetables, fruit and meat, for them to heal. 

So, people in Gaza are dying several, times and if you allow me I mean because now as we are talking, today in Gaza, it's 2:20 a.m., it's Thursday today, June 26, as we are talking, just in the past hour, Israel bombed a tent in Khan Yunis, killing five people. And before that, yesterday, they killed 101 people all over the Gaza Strip. Of these people, there was a whole family, the Al-Dahdouh family. I wrote their names on my social media, I mean, we don't get to know the names of these people who are killed. The father is named Salah al-Dahdouh, his wife is Salwa al-Dahdouh, their children are Ahmad, son, Abdallah, son, Mostafa, son, and Alaa, his daughter. The brother of the father was killed, and then there was a nephew. So, the Israel attack on Gaza is not by killing them, but even by bombing the internet, bombing the electricity, not allowing people even to report. So, there is difficulty in reporting, not only by not allowing journalists, international journalists, to go to Gaza, but they are also bombing every means that Palestinians can use to report on their miseries and their suffering and their demise. 

So, that's why it is very important to talk about what's happening in Gaza and also in Palestine every day. Israel is killing people in Gaza and Palestine every day. That's why every day we have to speak, to talk, about Palestine. 

G. Greenwald: There's a lot, obviously, we could talk about; we cover a lot of the atrocities pretty much on a daily basis, or close to it, on this show. I do want to get, to that as well, just some of the more recent things that have been happening that, as I said, have been even more covered up than usual, not just by the lack of media in Gaza, international media, and the lack internet, but also by so much attention paid to what was happening in Iran.

I had John Mearsheimer on my show yesterday and we were both talking about how is it that the world can watch what's going on in Gaza, even to the extent that we get to see it, how is it the West, that's paying for it, that's enabling it, can watch what's happening? It's just no one seems to mind, nobody seems to care, nobody seems to be bothered by it, it just kind of goes on, no one is even close to stopping it. 

We just saw Trump order Netanyahu to turn the planes around from Iran, which obviously Biden could have done, Trump could have done at any time, and they just won't. I'm trying to figure out, like, how can this be? 

I think one of the ways that that happens is the language of dehumanization. So, I think a lot of Americans have this perception of what Gaza is, what Palestine is, radically different than the reality. I was interested in the work that you've done in creating libraries in Gaza. You're obviously very well-spoken. You just won a Pulitzer Prize for your writing in English. I've had Gazans on my show before who are very similarly highly educated, well-spoken. 

There is a whole network – there were at least – of Gazan universities and advanced centers of learning that are all now destroyed. Gaza had one of the highest literacy rates in the world before October 7. Some of the best doctors, respected all around the world as specialists in their field. Can you talk about what Gazan society and Gazan culture are like and how it has been just so completely destroyed in the last 20 months? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Sure, yeah, I mean, before I answer your question, I would like to highlight the fact that, for two years now, not a single student in Gaza has gone to school. The schools have become shelters, as we are talking. Just half an hour, at the same time that Israel bombed a tent in Khan Yunis, Israel bombed a classroom on the third floor of a school called Amr Ibn al-Aas in Sheikh Radwan, in Gaza City, and two or three people were reported to be killed. 

So, two years, no schools. So anyone who was five years old when Israel attacked Gaza on October 7 hasn't gone to school for two years. So, if my children were to be there at the moment, my five-year-old would have missed his first and second grades. For two years, students have missed their high school diploma tests. So, people in Gaza are missing not only their lives, but even those who survive are missing a lot in their own lives. 

The Gaza Strip lies on the beach of the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza is rich in its plants and trees. One of the best places in Gaza is a city or town called Beit Lahia and it's very, very famous for the strawberry farms. My father-in-law is a strawberry farmer and they also used to plant corn, onion, watermelon, oranges, and they used to even, I mean, when it is allowed, to export some of the strawberries to the West Bank. But I think Gaza is very beautiful, even though it has been under occupation since 1948 and it's been under siege since 2007. 

Israel controls how much food gets into Gaza, how many hours of electricity is available in Gaza, how much medicine is allowed to enter Gaza, what kind of equipment, medical equipment get into Gaza, how many books get into because when I was trying to build the Edward Said Public Library, two branches in 2017 and 2019 – and unfortunately Israel destroyed the two libraries just like they destroyed all the universities in Gaza – Israel was in control of the entry of these books into Gaza. Sometimes the books would be delayed by months. It usually takes eight weeks for any books or packages to enter Gaza. So, Israel was controlling every single aspect of our lives in Gaza, despite that, we managed to make Gaza as beautiful as we could. 

This campaign of destroying Gaza is nonstop. Israel has been blowing up the houses in Bethlehem: 70%, this is an old statistic, 70% of Gaza has been either destroyed or damaged by not only Israeli airstrikes, while people are sleeping, but even the houses that people had to live in because Israel announced them to be a combat zone. Israel has been systematically blowing these houses up, and there are so many videos of Israeli soldiers documenting the blowing up of neighborhoods and of schools, of their bulldozers destroying a hospital in north Gaza just next to the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahia. 

Israel has systematically been destroying everything in Gaza. So, the question is not about when there will be a cease-fire in Gaza, although the cease-fire is just the beginning of a bigger change in Palestine. The question is, even after the cease-fire, Israel is trying to make it impossible for people to live again. So, let's say there is a cease-fire today. There are no schools in Gaza; 70% of the population in Gaza do not have homes, they are living in tents. Even though they are living in tents, including some of my family members, these tents get bombed. 

Just a few days ago, Glenn, my neighbor was killed in an airstrike when Israel hit a group of people walking next to it. She was inside her tent. These tents are pulled up on the street. So, she was killed while she was inside her tent. Her mother is still critically wounded, and all her brothers were wounded. So, Israel continues to destroy, to decimate as much of Gaza as possible, and there is a systematic destruction of the refugee camps in Gaza. Something that I wrote about in one of my pieces in The New Yorker is that Israel is not only destroying Gaza, the cities, the villages and the towns, but they are also destroying refugee camps. 

The refugee camps after 1948 were groups of tents here and there. Their refugee status continued for years and years, then people started to build rooms from concrete, and, over the years, they started to build multistory buildings. So, the refugee camp changed into a small city. 

So, Israel currently destroyed most, I mean, much of the Jabalia refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in Gaza. So, these are people, now, who lived in the refugee camp or people who were born in refugee camps like me and now are living in tents on the street, and maybe sheltering in a school, in a hospital, these people now are dreaming of returning to the refugee camps. So, this is the fault of the world. 

This is the fault of the word because they left the Palestinian people to live in refugee camps, they left them without protection and they not only left them without protection, they continue to support, to fund Israel's genocide, like the United States cut its funding for UNRWA, which has been responsible for the delivery of aid and for the education of so many people, including me. So, this world is not working properly, really. It's very strange for us to be watching this, even 20 months after the start of the genocide and for me to watch it from here, from the United States. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, it's got to be almost impossible.

I know I don't need to tell you, but for people who are watching, I mean, the control of Gaza by the Israelis – including it probably intensified since they removed troops, which they had there in 2005 – the control that continued was so great that the Israelis had phrases like really macabre, horrific, dark phrases like mowing the lawn, which meant let's just go in and kill some Palestinians or let's put the Palestinians on a diet when they would cut back the amount of food that they allowed in into Gaza. This has been the mentality going on for a long time. 

I want to just to ask you something: we talk a lot about the number of people in Gaza who have been slaughtered since October 7, the Israelis are now open about the fact that they want to make Gaza uninhabitable to force people to leave, to kill them until they leave, to destroy civilization until they leave. It's at least a policy of ethnic cleansing. One thing that I think about a lot, though, is, for the people who do survive, who are able to survive the genocide, survive this ethnic cleansing, this onslaught, I have to think about, how is it possible that they'd have a future? 

I live in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, which is a city, especially in poorer areas, that has a very high level of violence, drug gangs and the like, very high murder rates and I know some people who grew up there and they talk about, one time when I was seven years old, I saw a dead body on the ground twice, when I was in my teenage years, I saw a gun shootout, and they talk about how psychologically scarring that is for life, like to be exposed to those kinds of horrors even once or twice while you're growing up. And here you have this massive civilian population in Gaza, 50% of them are children, and the last two years, their lives have been nothing but bombing and destruction and murder and fear of death. Just psychologically, how do you think that the people who are there who do survive will be able to overcome that and, at some point, return to a normal semblance of life? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Well, this is a very hard question to answer. It's very obvious that the population that's been trying to survive – I mean, I don't like to say that people live in Gaza. No, people are trying to survive in Gaza because there is a difference between living in Gaza and trying to survive a genocide. 

So, these people, for 20 months, at least, haven't lived a single day without suffering, without looking for food, looking for medicine, looking for water. I mean, Glenn, I was in Gaza for the first two months. I remember walking in the street looking for water to fill a bucket of water for my children and for my wife, to wash the dishes, maybe to have a shower in the school, because there are no services in the school shelters, by the way. 

I remember walking in the city and seeing five-year-old children standing in line to fill a bucket of water for their families, or children maybe 10 years old. I saw some of my students standing in line to get a pack of bread and that was in October and November 2023, that was before Israel tightened its genocide. So, these children, five or seven years old, are no longer children. These children are not practicing childhood. 

This is a very dangerous reality and it should also be a signal that there would be a very dangerous future for these children. So, 50% of the population in Gaza is children. So, the question is for the Americans, for the Europeans who have been funding Israel's genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza and also in the West Bank: what do they expect of these Palestinians once this genocide comes on in? So, what kind of people is the world expecting to see in the future? That's a question that I don't have an answer to, but I'm sure that these people, Palestinian people who have been surviving the genocide in Gaza, will no longer be normal. 

I'm not a scientist, I am not a psychologist, but I think people in the world, especially officials, politicians and decision-makers, should think seriously about this. What kind of people are we going to see after the genocide comes to an end? What kind of people are going to be those who have been living under occupation? I don't have an answer to that, but if you think about it, I think there are many answers. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. A couple more questions: there's this old phrase, it's often attributed to Stalin, I'm not really sure. I don't think anyone is sure if he's really the one who said it. It’s this idea that when one person dies, it is a tragedy, when 1000 people die, it's a statistic. We often talk about, oh, 50,000 people are dead or 100,000 people dead in Gaza, and so often, as you said, the names of the people aren't very well known. We don't talk about them; we don't humanize them. 

One of the people who was killed after October 7 is a friend of yours, Refaat Alareer, who was a very well-known and accomplished poet. He has a book, “If I Must Die,” a poem that was turned into a book after he died, which became a bestseller in the United States and the West, and it's really remarkable. I got a copy, I read it and I really encourage people to do so. 

He was killed in an airstrike in December, so just a couple of months after October 7, and he was killed in his house, along with his sister and several of her children. Then, I guess, I don't know, what is it, five months later, his eldest daughter and her grandson were separately killed in airstrikes on their home as well. It just kind of gives you a sense for the number of families being wiped out. 

He was English speaking, he participated in the American Discourse, and one of the things that happened – I think people have really overlooked this, I want to make sure it's not forgotten and I want to get your views on this: after October 7, as we know, there were all these lies that were told about what was done in Israel, that children were killed in ovens, which obviously invokes the Holocaust by design; that babies were cut out of the wombs of their mothers, none of which ended up being true. Refaat, on Twitter, responding to these kinds of insane lies that were being told, mocked them. 

We have the tweet on October 29 where he said, “With or without baking powder?”, obviously mocking the idea that they were killed in ovens, which turned out to be a complete lie: 

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And Bari Weiss, who obviously has a big platform, immediately seized on that and put a target on his back: 

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An obvious distortion of what he said. The claim that Bari Weiss made that babies were killed in an oven was a complete and total lie disseminated by the Israeli government. And then he went the next day and said:

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Then, about a month later, he was dead at a targeted bombing of his home. Lots of human rights groups believe it was deliberate. Can you reflect on him and his work, but also how you see that killing and Bari Weiss's role in at least spreading these lies, if not helping to target him? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Of course. First of all, Refaat was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Gaza, where I studied, where I did my bachelor's degree. He was someone like a mentor. He was one of the founders of “We Are Not Numbers,” which is a group that is dedicated to mentoring emerging writers in Gaza, in the West Bank and also the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. So, Refaat introduced me to that project in 2014-2015, so, in fact, Refaat was killed in his sister's house in Gaza City. His sister, Asmaa, lived in Gaza City, and he also lived in Gaza City, but he evacuated his house, so Refaat, by the time he entered his sister's house, he was bombed in that apartment. He was killed along with his sister Asmaa and four nephews, along with one of Refaat’s brothers. 

Refaat was known for his satire. Of course, he and me and other Palestinians would never believe that any Palestinian, whether it's Hamas or other people, would burn babies, put people in ovens, or behead babies, I don't know what, I mean, even an evil person wouldn't do that. So, of course, he thought that this was a lie, this is a joke or something, and there is no evidence that that happened.

G. Greenwald: And it was proven to be a lie. He was absolutely right. It did not happen. It was a complete fabrication. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you go back, if you go to Refaat’s social media accounts before October 7, you would see a lot of jokes. So that was one of his jokes, and it was used against him. It's like one of the posts when I say, when I commented about an Israeli hostage, Emily Demary, and I said, how on Earth is this soldier a hostage while other Palestinians, like me, who were abducted from checkpoints, from hospitals, from school shelters, are called prisoners or detainees. 

G. Greenwald: Right, they're putting them in danger without any charges, and they're convicted of nothing, and those are prisoners, and yet people who are active IDF soldiers found in tanks, found in combat, who are taken as prisoners of war, those are all hostages. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah, so that was one of my questions. And then that was used against me, until after I won the Pulitzer. Oh, he is denying his status as a hostage; this is an anti-Semite. She called me a Holocaust denier. So, it's really irritating and it's ridiculous even to call someone like me a Holocaust denier, someone who has never talked about the Holocaust. In fact, I have some of the books that are about the holocaust that I relate to, that I feel very outraged when I read about the experiences of the Jewish people at the hands of Europeans, not Palestinians. 

So, Refaat's tweet, and I remember that post when Bari Weiss posted that, just to get a lot of hate, more hate for Refaat. Refaat was a Palestinian poet, essayist, a fiction writer, an editor of a book called “Gaza Writes Back,” which he published in 2014, an anthology of short stories by some of his students at the University of Gaza and other students from other universities. 

It's been devastating that Refaat was killed in his sister's house and then, a few months later, his daughter Shayma was killed with her baby, whom Refaat himself didn't see because his daughter was still pregnant. So, Shayma was killed with her baby, Abd al-Rahman, and with her husband, an engineer called Mohammed Siyam. And, by the way, Glenn, there is something that people don't know, which is that that poem, If I Must Die, which is the title of that book you referred to, in fact that poem was written in 2011 and that poem was dedicated to his daughter Shayma.

G. Greenwald: The one who died in that airstrike with her infant son. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Exactly. So the poem Refaat re-shared the poem after October 7. So that's how people came to know the poem. So, just imagine, in that poem, he's telling his daughter, if I must die, you should live, to tell my stories, to sell my things, to make a kite, that's the meaning of the poem; if I must die let it bring hope, let it be a tale. And we, truth tellers, writers, poets, journalists, we should write the tale of those whose voices were taken away from them by killing them and their families. So that was his message to his daughter, who unfortunately was killed in an air strike. 

So in that poem, to me, it's very clear that the I and the you were killed. That's why the you must become a collective you, that every one of us, the free people of the world who care about the human beings, especially those who have been living under occupation and siege and apartheid for decades, not for months, not four years, for decades, we should be the voices of these people, especially because we know what's happening or what has been happening. 

G. Greenwald: Yes. Mosab, I know you have time constraints. It was such a pleasure speaking with you. I think your voice is uniquely valuable and important to be heard by as many people as possible. So, we're definitely going to be harassing you to come back on the show. I had a lot more to talk about, but I want to respect your time as well, but super appreciative for you to come on. It's great speaking with you. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. 

G. Greenwald: All right, have a good evening. 

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So, I want to talk about the extraordinary victory – and it was truly extraordinary – last night, in the Democratic Party primary, of Zohran Mamdani, who has really vanquished a political dynasty, the Cuomos. 

However, I just want to note, though, in relation to that last segment, that shortly before we went on air, Donald Trump, I guess, just learned for the first time that Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing extremely serious corruption charges and is on trial for those corruption charges. These are not things like an accounting scheme to cover-up payments to a porn star or anything else like Donald Trump was accused of. This is hardcore, real corruption. It would have probably gotten him out of office a long time ago, had it not been for the various wars that he started. Lots of people believe that's one of the reasons why he needed these wars: to stay in office. 

Right before we were going on air, President Trump put out a quite lengthy and passionate, spirited statement on Truth Social in which he essentially said, “I know that Benjamin Netanyahu is now being called to return to his trial on Monday. This is an outrage.” I read it several times and I'm summarizing it very accurately. He said these trials should be canceled and/or Prime Minister Netanyahu should be completely pardoned. Then he went on to say that he and Bibi Netanyahu just secured a very tough, important victory against what he called Israel's longtime enemy, not the United States’ long-term enemy, but Israel's long-time enemy, Iran. 

He's essentially saying we just together fought a war against Israel's enemy, which is, of course, exactly what that war was and the reason why it was fought. Then he went on through this long, lengthy expression of outrage over the fact that Bibi Netanyahu is facing criminal charges. At the end, he said, the United States just saved Israel, and the United States will also now save Bibi Netanyahu. 

So, Trump himself is describing this war as one against Israel's longtime enemy and that the United States just saved Israel. There are a lot of people who get extremely outraged when you observe that it seems like this is another war for Israel being fought, not for the United States' interest, but for Israel, against Israel's enemy, not the United States’ enemy. Yet, President Trump, apparently, sees it that way as well, based on what he's saying, and instead of focusing on the people that he promised to protect and work for, namely the forgotten American worker, remember he's right now back to trying to interfere in the Israeli court system and the Israeli domestic politics by demanding that his very close friend, Bibi Netanyahu, be pardoned because he fought a good war. I don't really understand the relationship between those two things, but that is what President Trump said. 

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Zohran Mamdani's victory last night is extraordinary for a lot of reasons. Back in February, so I'm not talking about a year ago, I'm talking about four months ago. All the polling showed Andrew Cuomo with his gigantic lead. Obviously, he has massive name recognition, part of a beloved political dynasty. I mean, Mario Cuomo, for those who didn't live through that time in the eighties, was probably the most beloved Democrat in a long time. But then he had these two sons, Andrew and Chris, and Chris ended up parlaying that last name and those connections into being a journalist and his other brother, Andrew, was basically groomed to be the president of the United States from a very young age. He went around with his father everywhere, just the absolute classic nepo baby. And then he got all sorts of positions in Democratic Party politics because of his dad. At a very young age, he was made a cabinet secretary in the Clinton administration. In the early 1990s, he married a Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo. 

The entire thing was being shaped, from the very beginning, to groom Andrew Cuomo as part of this political dynasty based on the nepotistic benefits he got from being Mario Cuomo's son, not just to be governor of New York, but to be the president of the United States. That was absolutely where Cuomo is headed. It was supposedly remembered that liberals turned him into the hero of the COVID crisis saying only he was acting with the level of aggression necessary and all of that came completely crashing down because he had a litany of women who credibly accused him of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and this was a couple of years after Democrats made the Me Too movement. His brother also ended up getting fired from CNN because he was plotting with his brother about how to discredit these female accusers while he was still on CNN. And then it turned out that his greatness on COVID, which was his greatest strength that was going to jettison him to the presidency, ended up being one of his worst disgraces because he kept a bunch of old people locked in nursing homes and a lot of them ended up dying as a result. 

We covered all that before, but suffice to say, nonetheless, four years later, he comes back with much less ambition, already the governor of New York with three terms. He resigned in the middle of his third term, having been groomed to be president. 

Now they kind of convinced him, look, you're 67, the only thing there is for you to do is to run for mayor. He clearly thought it was beneath him, wasn't particularly excited, thought his victory was inevitable, and it looked like it was. Who's going to beat a Cuomo in Democratic Party politics? And not just because they're Cuomo, but he has all the billionaire money behind him. 

 

In February, when I really started paying attention to Zohran's campaign, because I could kind of tell it had the big potential to really take off, I could just tally at a lot of political talent, that he was forming a campaign that can really connect. You don't know for sure, but I noted at the time that it seemed very interesting to me that what he was doing was very different. You can see he had a lot of political talent. It reminded me of AOC, where, say what you want about her now, and I have mostly negative things to say about her, there's no denying that she has a kind of charisma and a political talent as well. 

But anyway, still, I mean, even though I was interested in and could see the potential, I never imagined that he would actually win. I just thought, oh, this is going to be a political star, he's probably going to end up attracting a good number of left-wing voters. But never imagined he would defeat the Cuomo dynasty and all the billionaire money behind it. 

As Zohran started increasing in the polls and then clearly became the main threat to Cuomo, huge amounts of billionaire money, largely afraid, in part about Zohran's democratic socialist policy, kind of a type of democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders and AOC. I know people want to call it communism, which just isn't. But obviously, people on Wall Street hated it, which definitely means things like increasing taxes on the rich, redistributing resources to the working class and poor people. It is that philosophy that people on Wall Street hate, that big billionaires hate. Also, he's a very outspoken critic of Israel, which in New York, with a very large Jewish population, a very large pro-Israel faction that's very powerful, is typically not something you can be. I mean, even the Democrats who won, like Ed Koch and Bill de Blasio, have been typically pro-Israel. That's just a red line for any politician who has ambitions in New York. 

He has said things like he supports a boycott and divestment sanction; he's talked about globalizing the intifada. Interestingly, unlike people who, when they run for office, have their past quotes dug up and are confronted with them and they repudiate them immediately, like Kamala Harris reputed everything she said she believed when running for president in the Democratic primary in 2019 and they brought it all to her when she was running in the general election. 

Mamdani did not do any of that. He was asked, “Do you still support the globalizing intifada instead of running away from it?” And he said, “Yeah, I do, but I think it's often distorted. It doesn't mean anything more than a struggle, a resistance, not blowing people up.” He supports boycotting Israel; he didn't repudiate that. He was asked whether, given Benjamin Netanyahu's indictment and the warrants for his arrest issued by the ICC, he would have him arrested if he came to New York, and he said he would. So, obviously, a lot of billionaires like Bill Ackman, whose primary loyalty is to Israel, were desperate to make sure Mamdani didn't win. 

I promise you, Bill Ackman does not care about zoning laws or the efficiency of services in New York. He has about 10 estates all over the world. To the extent he lives in New York, he lives in a $30 million duplex apartment very high above Manhattan, he chauffeured around in cars and the like. That's not his interest. His interest was in stopping somebody who was critical of Israel, and he put huge amounts of money, as did other billionaires, into packs for Andrew Cuomo that largely just attacked Zohran Mamdani as an anti-Semite, all the rest. And none of it worked, even though usually those things are guaranteed to work in any major democratic race. 

It's very difficult when I watch Democrats trying to convince Americans that Donald Trump was a Hitler-like figure, it's like a vicious dictator who was going to put people in camps. One of the reasons why it was so hard to do that, why it was so obviously destined to fail, was because Trump doesn't read that way. Americans watched him for four years in the presidency and they, even the ones who didn't like him, didn't see him as Hitler. And so, this attempt to try to turn Zohran Mamdani into a raging anti-Semite, I mean, we showed you a few of these tweets throughout the week, just absolutely insane ones from people saying his election would be an existential threat to New York Jews. What is he going to do, like round them up from synagogues and put them in concentration camps, is that what Zohran Mamdani is going to do? 

The reason it doesn't work is that you just listen to the guy for three minutes and you see that he is not anything resembling that. He has a lot of policies, especially culture war ones, with which I'm uncomfortable. His economic policies are ones that obviously a lot of people are going to have problems with, but the idea that he's like Osama bin Laden, or Joseph Stalin, that just doesn't work. If you just listen to who he is, how he speaks, what he says – there has to be some alignment with the smears with the person in order for it to work. 

A lot of liberals have this monolithic view that everybody on the right has the same exact views of everything, there are no divisions, and of course you pay attention to right-wing politics, there are major ideological rifts and divisions and debates. We saw it with the Iran war and many other issues already, H-1B visas, all sorts of things. But a lot of people on the right see the Democratic Party as this monolith as well. They think like Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi are the same, like, AOC or Bernie or Zohran, and it's completely untrue. 

New York City doesn't elect socialists. When they elect Democrats, they elect very established – Ed Koch was a very centrist member of Congress for a long time, very pro-Israel, always at war with the left-wing of the Democratic Party, kind of the classic New York city mayor, very outspoken, loud, kind of charismatic in his own sort of way. And even Bill de Blasio, who was considered more progressive, had very close relations with the large New York City developers, even though Wall Street didn't like Bill de Blasio. 

So, it's hard to overstate what a sea change this is. Even if you think New York City is a cesspool of baffling, it's not. I mean, it is in little places, but a citywide election, that's not who wins in New York. 

Here, just to give you a sense of the funding gap. I'm doing this because I want to underscore to you how improbable this victory is, what a reflection of it it is of a remarkable sea change in how American voters are thinking about politics or thinking about elections, what they respond to, what they don't respond to, not just on the left, but on the right, not in Democratic Party or the Republican Party, but across the spectrum. 

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You have three types of funding: campaign funding directly, matching public funds and then aligned super PACs. Andrew Cuomo had at least $35 million, $35.6 million. In second place, was Zohran with 9.1, almost entirely small donors. So, look at this gap, talking about a gap of $25 million – $25 billion for a city-wide race. And that's why people are describing it as such a major upset.

Now, just so you don't think I'm like hopping on some train once it left the station, pretending that I knew all along, I've watched Zohran for quite a while now, but I'm going to show you the reasons why. Back in February, when he was at less than 1% of the polls, I just wanted to draw people's attention to him, even though nobody was paying attention then, because I could see the kind of campaign he was running. I, for the first time, understood what his political talent was. It's just like a native inborn thing that you either have or you don't. He has it. He's a very effective political speaker, but he just kind of has an energy that people find attractive and appealing. And to be clear, I hate the fact that if you analyze somebody's political appeal in a positive way, people are like, “Oh, you're a cheerleader for him. You must love him.” I went through this with Donald Trump for so many years, I would say liberals don't understand Trump's appeal. He's funny, he is charismatic and exciting and he vessels and channels anti-establishment hatred, which is the driving force of American politics and American political life, and you should understand that about him. 

I can admit that the people I can't stand most, Dick Cheney, are very smart. I can acknowledge that attribute of theirs without liking them. So, what I'm saying here is it's important to understand why's Zohran had this political appeal. It doesn't mean you like him or hate him. It's a completely separate question. 

So back in February, I wrote this:

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So, it was clear to me something was happening there. I'm not suggesting I knew he was going to win. I just knew that there was a lot of potential there, people should pay more attention to him. And so the question is, okay, why did this happen? 

So, I want to show you a video that was probably the first thing that really attracted my attention to him and why I thought he was just a very different kind of Democrat. 

 This is at a time when Joy Reid and MSNBC were telling everybody that Trump won simply because white voters are too racist and misogynist to vote for a black woman, which is a very self-certifying, pleasant narrative to tell yourself. But here's what Zohran did. He went specifically to the neighborhoods in New York City that had the biggest swing from Democratic voters to Trump. They weren't the Upper West Side or the East Side. They were poor neighborhoods, working-class neighborhoods, racially diverse neighborhoods, or even predominantly Black or Latino neighborhoods, immigrant neighborhoods. All he did was go around and ask them why they voted for Trump and the things that they told him clearly shaped what he decided to do when forming his own campaign and the issues that he wanted to emphasize. In other words, he went to speak to the people of New York and asked why they were dissatisfied and then formed a campaign to speak to what their dissatisfactions and desires were. Imagine doing that. He didn't go to consultants or political strategists or whatever; he really just went and talked to voters. 

Listen to what happened. Listen to how he did it, too. 

Video. Zohran Mamdani, X. November 15, 2024.

That's a very good sampling of why a lot of people voted for Trump. The Democrats want to send all our money to wars in Ukraine and Israel, we can't afford things, they only care about the wealthy. 

The things that they care about are obvious, the things that they encounter every day in their lives, the bus fares and the cost of rent and the like. And that's what his entire campaign was structured around. 

A lot of people found tweets of his from 2020 when he was in his mid to late twenties, running for New York assembly right during Black Lives Matter. Tons of left-wing culture war, nonsense, lots of extreme positions. He was positioning himself for a very left-wing seat in the state assembly, stuff like defund the police over and over, queer liberation requires defund of the police. Things that, obviously, if you're running in a citywide election, you're not going to run on. And he didn't. He ran a very economic populist campaign, despite being called a communist or a socialist or whatever. 

I want to show you this clip that I also found incredibly interesting. So, this is one that he did in January, when again, people really weren't paying attention to him and he posted a video with a tweet, and the tweet said: “Chicken over rice now costs $10 or more. It's time to make halal eight bucks again.”

Video. Zohran Mamdani, X. January 13, 2025.

 If you live in New York City, one of the things you see everywhere is street vendors. Lots of people buy food from street vendors, like snacks, pretzels, or all kinds of ethnically diverse food that you can eat from. If you don't have time to sit in a restaurant, you grab something from one of these street vendors and, especially in the more working-class neighborhoods, it's where people eat and people are complaining that the price of that food is increasing. If you're Andrew Cuomo, you don't eat at these; you have no idea about any of this. If you're Bill Ackman, obviously you don’t have any clue. You think that voters are going to vote on the fact that Iran is not pro-Israel enough, voters in New York City, that's what they wake up and care about? Just like the Democrats thought voters were going to wake up and care about Trump having praised a fascist, or fascist or Hitler, or whatever, so removed from their lives, or Ukraine. 

This is what populism is. I saw people today, a lot of conservatives, saying when I called it economic populism, “Oh, socialism is an economic populist.” No, when you appeal to people's life, when you tell them the rich and corporations are running roughshod over you, are preventing you from having a survivable or affordable life, and that's what became his keyword is affordability which obviously a lot of New Yorkers are being driven out of New York City, they can't afford it anymore, things are too expensive. 

So, look at what he did in this video. You tell me if this is like some sort of Stalinist communist, at least in terms of how he ran his campaign. He wanted to understand why chicken over rice, something that people eat every day in New York City, especially in more working-class neighborhoods, and why that food has increased. So he did his analysis, and concluded that the solution was to change a few things.

The laws that he's promoting here, the four laws are number one, better access to business licensing, repeal criminal liability for street vendors, services for vendors, and reform the sitting rules. It's almost like libertarian, like “Oh, there's too much bureaucracy, too many too many rigorous permit requirements, they have to pay someone else as a permit owner $20,000 a year, which obviously affects food prices. 

I mean, on top of the very kind of regular person appeal of that, talking about things that people care about a lot, things that are affecting their lives, talking about solutions to them in a very non-ideological way. There's also a lot of humor in there, a lot of kind of flair, something you want to watch. It's not like a lecture, it's not like an angry rant. You look at this and it's not hard to see why he won. 

Now, let me show you the counterattack, the way they thought the Andrew Cuomos of the world thought they were going to sabotage him. It's an amazing thing.

 This is the New York mayoral debate. There were, I think, seven candidates, eight candidates on the stage, and it was hosted by the local NBC News affiliate. And just listen to this question that they thought was important for people wanting to be New York City mayor to answer and how they all answered, except for Zohran. 

Video. New York Mayoral Debate, NBC News. June 4, 2025.

So, do you see how excited Andrew Cuomo got? He really did base a huge part of his campaign on his loyalty to Israel, his love of Israel, his long-time support for Israel, his father's support for Israel, his family's support for Israel. And you heard those voters who voted for Trump when asked why. Did any of them say, “Oh, I think Democrats are insufficiently pro-Israel?” No, no one said that. These people aren't waking up and thinking, I want to make sure my mayor is going to go to Israel as the very first foreign visit. 

It was supposed to be controversial that he said, “Look, I'm the New York City mayor. That's what I'm running for. Not the Secretary of State. I'm not thinking about foreign trips. I'm actually wanting to represent the people of New York City. I'm going to stay here at home and talk to the people I'm supposed to be working for. Why would I plan my overseas trips and make sure Israel is for?” 

“Oh, a lot of them said Israel. One of them, said, “Oh, the Holy Land, Israel.” So that was supposed to be the kind of thing that they thought was going to sabotage him. They have these old ideas on their heads about what you can and can't do. That's why Trump won, too. He broke all of those rules that people thought were still valid and he proved they weren't. 

Now, just a couple of things here. If you want to win in the Democratic primary in New York City, you can't just rely on left-wing voters. Like DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, AOC-Bernie types, that can give you a certain momentum, a certain energy, but you're not going to win a city-wide race just with those kinds of voters. You have to attract a lot of normie, liberal Democrats. That's who lives in New York City. 

 They're not people who hate Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. These are not them. There are some in places like Brooklyn and Queens, but the majority of Democrats in New York City and most liberal American cities are very normal Democrats. They love the democratic establishment; they love Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer represents New York and has forever. That's who they like. That's what you need to attract: those voters. 

 

They've become convinced that the Democrats has this kind of aged stagnant, listless, slow, uninteresting leadership base. And it's true. It's basically an aristocracy. Obviously, the debacle with Biden underscored that more than anything. They were being told they had to get behind someone who was suffering from dementia. And so, they want this kind of new energy, this exciting energy. That's a big part of it. 

It was kind of a referendum on what Democrats want their party to be. They don't want to be voting for a 67-year-old person of politics for 40 years, who has billionaire money behind him as part of the democratic establishment, who was in the Clinton cabinet, have Bill Clinton kind of come in from wherever he is and be like, yeah, I'm endorsing Andrew Cuomo. That's not appealing to these Democrats anymore. They know that they can't keep going down that road. 

So that's part of it. But I really think a big part of is that the primary division, not just American politics, but politics throughout the democratic world, certainly something we've talked a lot about before, is the difference between someone perceived to be part of the establishment and someone who seems to be an outsider, who hates the establishment. There are a lot of people in the United States, millions, who voted twice for President Obama in 2008, 2012, and then voted for Donald Trump in 2016. That's a reason why Trump won. And people who continue to cling to this archaic, obsolete way of understanding American politics, whether it's about left v. right, conservative v. socialist, whatever, they can't process that. 

In 2016, there were a lot of people who were saying to reporters, my two favorite candidates are Trump and Bernie Sanders. And again, same thing, if you think everything's a right v. left, you'd be like, what are these people? They're crazy? That makes no sense. But when you see that things are about hatred for the establishment, a desire to reject establishment candidates and vote for outsiders who seem anti-establishment, you understand why Obama won against, first, Hillary Clinton, and then, John McCain. 

Zohran Mamdani is obviously an outsider candidate, very unknown, very young, doesn't speak like those other candidates, certainly doesn't speak like Andrew Cuomo, doesn't have billionaire backing, is highly critical on a fundamental level of the political establishment. That's a major reason why he won as well. 

I really believe that one of the things that was like Trump's superpower was, as I said, that he didn't care that the things he was saying were supposedly disqualifying. He wouldn't retract them. I remember in 2015 when he had a pretty sizable lead, people were shocked by it. But they thought, “Oh, it's just early. This is the kind of candidate Republicans flirt with but won't actually vote for. They're going to snap it to line at the end and vote for Jeb Bush.”  

In 2015, he gave an interview that's now notorious where he said, when asked about John McCain, who never liked Trump, and he was asked about his heroism and Trump said, “I don't know that he's so heroic. He crashed a plane and got captured. I prefer soldiers and heroes who don't get captured. I think that's what makes you a winner.” I remember the outpouring of articles over the next few days from all the, like, deans of political reporting or whatever, saying, “OK, that's the end of Trump's campaign. You can't criticize John McCain.” And of course, they went to him, “Do you apologize?” “No, I don't apologize. I meant every word I said.” 

And there were so many things like that. Mocking the New York Times reporter who has cerebral palsy, I believe it was some sort of degenerative disease. Over and over, and his refusal to renounce his own statements, actions, and beliefs made him seem more genuine. Even if people don't like the things he has said, the fact that he's saying, “No, that's what I believe,” is a big political asset. 

The fact Zohran, who has a long history of passionate activism in opposition to Israeli aggression, Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Israeli assaults on Gaza, when he would say things like “Globalize Intifada”, which he did, and he was confronted about that a month before the election, and he's like, “No, I'm not going to withdraw that. People distort what that means. They try to make it seem like it means you believe in terrorists, like killing people with car bombs. It's just a word, intifada, an Arabic word for struggle or resistance, including peaceful struggle and resistance for equal rights for the Palestinians.” 

A lot of people may not like that term, a lot of people don't like that term, but I think the fact that he was not running away from it, not apologizing for it, ran a pretty unique campaign as I'm trying to show you, is also a major reason that he won. I just think, again, populism is nothing more than there's a system over here of powerful people, politically powerful, financially powerful people, they do not have your interest in mind, they don't care about you, they're exploiting you, they're abusing you for their own aggrandizement, their own wealth, their own power and I want to fight them on your behalf. That's what economic populism is. 

Go look at what Josh Hawley does, threatening to vote against Trump's bill because it cuts Medicaid, knowing that a lot of Trump voters, the working-class voters, rely on Medicaid. Something really interesting about Josh Hawley, every week he holds like hearings, and he summons executives of all kinds of industries, the airline industry, the meat industry, bankers, and he just pounds them about hidden fees or, the like. Josh Hawley has said the future of the Republican Party is a multiracial working-class coalition, which requires economic populism. Josh Hawley stood with Bernie to stop the COVID bill from being passed and they were going to give out billions and billions of dollars to big business and he demanded that there be direct payments to all Americans, and they got the bill, they tried to stop bill, and they got $600 direct payment to Americans, that's economic populism. And then it went to Trump and Trump said, $600 is enough, I'm vetoing it, I want $2,000 payments, promising to represent the forgotten person. 

That's what economic populism: not serving Wall Street, not serving bankers, not serving real estate developers, not endorsing establishment dogma, not tying yourself to old, decaying people who've just been around for decades, who interest and excite nobody any longer. That's the goal of American politics. I don't think it matters at all to people if it comes from the right or the left. And the lots of things about Zohran, Marjorie Taylor Greene today posted the Statue of Liberty in a burqa, Ari Fleischer said, “New York Jews, you need to evacuate,” as some kind of nation, as I said before, like Joseph Stalin and Osama bin Laden – you look at him, do you think, is that at all what he reads as, what he codes as, is it what seems a convincing attack on him? 

And so, I think there are a lot of lessons here, not just for the Democratic Party, though, certainly not for what American voters respond to and what they don't. And in this case, the lessons are so powerful, so penetrating, that it drove the unlikeliest of people to crush one of the most powerful political dynasties in America, the Cuomos, backed by every institutional advantage you could want, and very poised to – I'm not saying it's certain, but highly likely to become what a lot of people have long said is the second most important position in American politics – as mayor of New York City. New York City, obviously, is the center of American finance, American wealth, massive tourism, a gigantic city, and so that is an important position. That's not a joke. The fact that a 33-year-old Muslim self-identified democratic socialist was able to win despite that history of statements, I think it's very important to derive a lot of lessons from that. And I think anyone interested in understanding politics, let alone winning elections, would be studying him in a very non-judgmental way. It doesn't matter if you hate him, it doesn't matter if you love him. The lessons ought to be the same. 

 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on War with Iran, Executive Power, the Trump Presidency, and More
System Update #473

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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As you probably know, Friday night is when we try to have our Q&A session. The questions are submitted only by our Locals members. We try to do it every Friday night, but when news events are developing, major news events that we have to discuss – and preparations for a huge war, a huge, dangerous, destructive war, are the kind of thing that we're going to cover and often everything is very fast-moving so, oftentimes, we end up having to cover something on Friday and not being able to do the Q&A we wanted. 

The list of questions is always eclectic. We try to choose a variety of topics, people who haven't asked questions and who have, people who are critical and people who aren't, we always look for good-faith, critical comments and we have a couple of those tonight. So, let me just dive into this. You don't need all the prefacing and the explanations. Most of you are probably very familiar with this arrangement and it's not particularly complicated; it doesn't require a lot of explanation. It's just a Q&A. 

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The first question comes from @wineverett:

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All right. I could not agree more with all of that. I think a major reason for Donald Trump's victories and, by victory I mean starting in 2016 when he was never even remotely considered a candidate or politician and he's gunned down the field of all those professional, highly funded Republican politicians starting with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, all through them, got the nomination and then crushed the Clinton political machine, obviously filled with nothing but political animals, long-term professional career politicians, is precisely for this reason. People understand that both political parties speak a language, live in a world, spend money on things, talk about things, vote on things completely detached from their concerns and their lives and that's why they've lost faith and trust in most institutes of authority because they perceive correctly that people in power who are there to essentially represent them care about everything other than what they care about. It's so incredibly obvious from how these people speak to what they say, and Donald Trump was the first to come along and sort of break all those rules that people have come to hate about how they speak, how they talk, what they talk about, the things you're allowed to say and he was basically a weapon to smash that glass, to smash the system that they were so eager to smash. 

Obviously, Donald Trump is now a politician. There's no denying that. It doesn't mean it's bad, it doesn't mean it’s good, he's been president for four years, spent four more years running for president and is now president again. So, the last 10 years of our political lives have been dominated by the political figure of Donald Trump. It's clearly the Trump era of politics. He's not really an outsider force anymore. He can't be president twice, having run a third time and almost won, just constantly running for president for 10 years, and be a political outsider anymore. 

He's still an outsider in a lot of different ways, compartmentally and the like, but it's not as appealing, I think, as it once was and especially now that we're watching in the first five months of this first term, that was consumed by things like tariffs which was a major promise of the Trump campaign, no doubt but I think people ended up feeling like economically they had been beaten upon and crushed for so long, including by the Biden years, that there was, even Trump admitted, short-term pain, the stock market became unstable, it went down, people's investments and retirements funds became less valuable, small businesses struggled. So, that was already kind of a feeling that, wow, we have Trump again, who promised to help us in the working-class, but instead, we seem to be suffering with this tariff policy that we're being told will have long-term benefits, but for the moment, we don't seem to have them. 

And now, political discourse is being dominated by a potential war with Iran that I just don't think most people have spent the last two years caring about. I used to always say about Russia when Democrats are spending all that time on the evils of Putin and the threats posed by Russia, it's just so obvious there's a huge gap between what Democrats spend all their time talking and warning about and what Americans wake up thinking about. I just know that Americans are not waking up worried about Vladimir Putin and the threat posed by Russia. That's not something they're scared about. They were during the Cold War, when nuclear war was very possible, people were taught to go to shelters, which was very much part of the culture, and there was an existential war between communism and capitalism. There was a lot at stake. But people don't worry about Russia anymore. They don't consider Vladimir Putin one of the leading threats to their well-being, unless you are an MSNBC viewer. And so, there was this gigantic gap between what Democrats were talking about and what people care about. I think that's the reason they ended up losing. 

But now you look at what Republicans have talked about. What has Trump done aside from tariffs? He's gotten in and he resumed a bombing campaign in Yemen against Houthis and unleashed the Israelis again to continue their destruction of Gaza, which the United States is paying for. Started deporting, not people in the United States illegally or who have committed crimes, but people who were guilty of the crime of protesting Israel or speaking out against Israel. I think that's what people were worried about: people in the country legally, PhD students, Fulbright scholars, biologists, chemists, with nothing but a record of achievement, being booted out with a new precedent because they spoke out against Israel. I mean, people were definitely worried about illegal immigration, especially people who are dangerous to their children or their communities. You think they're worried about Harvard and Yale biologists who wrote up ads about Israel? So, a lot of that as well. 

And now we have this war with Iran, which, if you ask, you can get polling answers or polling data about anything the way you want, based on how you ask the question. So, if you say, “Look, Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon, should the United States do nothing, or should it try to do what it can, even if it means military force, to stop Iran from getting a new weapon?” Yeah, we don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But if you say, “Israel has launched a war against Iran, do you think the United States should involve itself militarily in a new foreign war in the Middle East? Overwhelmingly, people say no, and polls are showing both. 

I don't care what the polling data is, if you ask somebody, “Do you want Iran to have nuclear weapons? Yes, or no?” I do not believe that Americans are waking up saying in the morning, “Wow, I couldn't sleep last night because I'm really worried about the prospect that Iran is going to get nuclear weapons.” 

By every account, they don't even have the missile capability to send one to the United States. Even if they could, why would they? North Korea doesn’t. Everyone understands that it's going to be immediate mutual suicide. I just don't think that's what people care about in their lives and polls constantly should have shown that. I don't think people elected Donald Trump to go to war with Iran or to restart the bombing campaign against the Houthis. And that's all they're hearing about now. That's what the Trump administration is focused on, which is not what the American people are focused on. I know this from polling data; I cover politics and we've all seen over time what Americans care about and what they don't care about and when they feel like their interests are ignored and when their interests are not. 

I want to just answer this with a story about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Not really a story so much as kind of my thoughts on Marjorie Taylor Greene. So, I want to be very honest and say that I really like Marjorie Taylor Greene, I have always liked Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think she's a good person. I think that she's sincere and earnest about the things she says and believes. Obviously, Marjorie Taylor Greene has said things over the last many years that I don't agree with, that you can describe as whatever, outside of the realm of what reality is. I think most politicians do. I think Donald Trump running around talking about how Iran's about to get a nuclear weapon and use it or whatever, that's way outside the realm of reality, to say nothing of what was said about the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis. But the reason I like Marjorie Taylor Greene is that she is what a lot of people wanted and were so fond of, so attracted to Trump. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene was never a politician. She didn't run for office, she wasn't like on the city council and then in the state legislature in Georgia and then worked her way up to the Georgia state Senate and was being groomed by the Republican Party to one day run for Congress, like kind of a career politician. That was not Marjorie Taylor Greene. She has a business, the business is prosperous, she's not incredibly rich, but probably upper middle class; she lives on a good upscale Georgia suburb. And she became very politically active with the MAGA movement and America First. It resonated with her just as a citizen and then she got politically involved and probably had some connections and money that helped. 

However, she wasn't part of a political dynasty, nor was her father the governor or anything. She really just did the kind of classic “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” type of political trajectory, where a citizen wakes up and says, I'm starting to get angry and concerned by what my government is doing. I think it's totally on the wrong track, the things they're saying make no sense, and I don't think they're representing our interests. 

She got very inspired by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and took it seriously and she suddenly became a member of Congress. And, yeah, because she's somebody who was not a trained politician, she often was not on script. She's charismatic and she says things that get people riled up and that bring a lot of media attention. That's why there's so much attention on Jasmine Crockett as well, not because she is some important figure in the House Democratic caucus, but because she says that gets people angry and cable news loves that and builds those people with a big platform. That's what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I don't think Marjorie Taylor Greene was ever doing or saying things on purpose to make people angry. I think she was doing and saying things that she really believed in that if you go to her district, I guarantee you, people like her, people who live near her, people who lived in her district, which is why they voted for her and keep re-electing her, despite how much the media hates her and says she's so evil and bad. 

I've talked to her before. I found her to be exactly the same when talking personally to her and when I listened to her in public. I've had her on the show before, and one of the things that really I found so interesting and eye-opening about Marjorie Taylor Green is that she's been reluctant to criticize Donald Trump too much previously. 

I remember I had her in the show. She was one of those people very much against the Ukraine war, making all those good arguments that I agree with about how we have women who can't get baby formula and our communities are falling apart. Why are we sending billions to finance a war that has nothing to do with us? I remember I asked her, like, does that apply to Israel, that rationale? It seems like it should, does it? And she wasn't enough confidence to say like, yeah, also Israel. That's a very sensitive topic, she knows that. But sometimes you get to Washington, and you have to find your way, you've got to understand how things work, especially if you're not a career politician. 

I remember when I started journalism, there were a lot of things I didn't understand. I hadn't done it full-time, I thought I knew about things, but once I really started looking, I started learning things and realizing how much I didn't know. And so, it took me a while to kind of feel like, okay, I have a good, secure sense of where things are. And I think that's where she is.

 When Donald Trump announced this new bombing campaign in Yemen, she was very outspoken against it and the way she made the argument really struck me. She said, “You know what, I've been a Congresswoman now for six years, or whatever it is, representing my district, but I've lived in my district forever. Nobody in my District even knows what a Houthi is. Nobody talks about Houthis, nobody has met Houthis, nobody is threatened by Houthis, nobody fears Houthis and nobody understands why we are spending all this money to bomb the Houthis. What does this have to do with us?” 

I thought about it. I was like, that's the benefit of having people who are not professional politicians. One of the things that makes Kamala Harris such a terrible candidate is that she worked her way up that ladder from her mid-20s. She's basically been a politician her whole life. She got elected to the San Francisco District Attorney, very ambitious. You can go find national interviews with her because she was doing things like imprisoning parents for truancy if their kids didn't go to school. “Good Morning, America” and those types of shows loved her. She parlayed that into a run for Attorney General of California, won that, worked her way up to the California Senate, and then became Vice President. And she never had a moment where she was off script, where she was saying things that people in Washington would be like, “What? What is that?” She clung to those scripts like her life depended on it. She was petrified of saying anything that official Washington would find odd or strange to disapprove of. And as a result, she was totally vacant. She never spoke naturally, she never spoken like a human being because that's all she knows is she's been clicked into the political system and she speaks about the things that her donors care about, that other politicians care about, that the media she consumes talks about and she has no ability to say what Marjorie Taylor Greene said, no courage to say it, even if she understood it. 

You can take that too far, before 9/11, and nobody in America, for the most part, understood what al-Qaeda was, thought much about al-Qaeda, didn't mean the government should not do anything about al-Qaeda. Of course, sometimes the government has to work on things that are real threats or problems that most people don't know about or think about or understand, but I think there's a basic wisdom to the idea of asking, especially when we're going to war, why are we bombing and killing these people on Yemen? What do they have to do with us? And at the time, they were not attacking American ships, we've gone through that timeline before, and the only reason they had been previously was because they knew we were arming and funding Israel's destruction of Gaza, so even that was because we were financing and fighting a war for a foreign country, and the way Marjorie Taylor Green said it was like, “a Houthi, well, who knows even, in my district, what a Houthi is? I'm not going to cheerlead a war against the Houthis that have nothing to do with the lives of the people who sent me to Washington.” 

And then, when it came to this war in Iran, she lost all fear or concern about recognizing the relationship between the United States and Israel, and in whose benefit that relationship is, and who's really pushing and shaping the decisions of the United States Congress and the executive branch when it comes to war. 

I think she has enough confidence now, she's seen enough, she’s learned enough, she's read enough, and she understands enough. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not dumb. I'm sure Democrats will say she is. She's not dumb, she is smart. She just doesn't speak like Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden because she's not from that. She doesn't emerge from that; she's a citizen. 

That was the idea, by the way, of the Congress, we weren't going to have a professional class of politicians, we're going to have people who represented their constituents, get sent to Congress for a few years and then go back to their lives and do what they were doing previously. And that's the kind of person she still is. She's very much still a resident of her Georgia district, much more so than a creature of Washington and so, she can think about things and say them in a way most Americans are still thinking and saying them. 

And when it came time for the war in Iran, too, she was like, “I am just sick” of having all of our money and all of her service members be put in harm's way for these wars that have nothing to do with our country. “Ukraine is not our country and Ukraine's wars are not our wars. Israel is not out country and Israel's wars are not out wars.” And I think she's able to speak so plainly about these things and insist that we focus on the things that her constituents and people in America really care about because she's not subservient to or taking orders from a political party or a kind of system. 

There are other people like her in Congress, too. I'm not suggesting she's the only one. I'm just saying she's been very noticeable over the last three, four months, because, especially when it comes to foreign policy, that's where politicians typically step most delicately and she's not stepping delicately at all. To me, she's become a voice of great clarity and confidence, and I think she's earnest about everything she's saying. I'm talking about these things the way most people talk about them. 

I've told stories before, and I hate to romanticize them. I'm not going to even tell the stories because I've told them too many times. Probably you've already heard them. But if you go to the United States and you get anonymous and you just go to some, like, again, it sounds so cliche, but like a diner, where you talk to drivers of Ubers or taxis or whatever, it is enlightening. You hear things that are actual wisdom, just common-sense wisdom, that no people who work on politics and are paid to work in politics in D.C. and New York ever say that is that chasm, it's a huge chasm.

Now, all of official Washington is worried about a war with Iran that I do not believe most people in the United States view as a threat or something that ought to be subsuming their lives. I don't think they want Donald Trump, whom they elected to benefit their lives as working-class people, to be focused on yet another new war in the Middle East. 

I think that's why he's hesitating too, that he has a sense for that. A good sense for that. He's a good politician in that way. It's like instinctive and I think the more Trump goes in those directions that are basically the Bush, Obama, Biden direction, the more people are going to start to see him as like every other politician in that attachment that people had to him, similar to the attachment they had to Obama, who people also viewed as a transformative figure of change but quickly became a just a mouthpiece for the establishment of the perpetuation of the status quo in Washington. They lost that inspirational connection to him. I think that's going to happen to Trump as well if he continues down this path. 

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All right, next question. @Commissar69 asks:

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It is amazing to me that you go study the Constitution, you go to law school, not even law school, our civics class, and the design of the Constitution, in some cases, is kind of ambiguous. They constructed that on purpose, that was part of how they obtained the votes they needed to ratify it: leaving some things purposely left ambiguous that would be interpreted in the future. So, you could tell people whose votes you needed, it could mean this: you tell other people you needed who thought differently, it could mean that. 

So, some of it is ambiguous, but some of it is not. It's not ambiguous because of the language, it's not ambiguous because of what the Federalist Papers say, it's not ambiguous because of the debates that were had. 

One of the things that was not ambiguous is that if the United States is going to go to war, it can do so only if Congress declares war. Only Congress has the power to declare war. The rationale for this is very clear: it was assumed, based on experience at the time, that if we go to a war, people are going to be drafted and it's the ordinary citizen who's going to go and die in these wars and the only way the United States should go to war is if the people consent, through their representatives in the House and the Senate. And I can read you so much from the Federalist Papers talking about this. 

The president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. By the way, the armed forces were not intended to be a standing army. The founders really feared standing armies, meaning like armed agents of the federal government, like the ATF or the FBI. They're basically like armed permanent agents or armies, but also the army itself. That's why they talked about well-regulated militias. You compile an army when you want to go fight a war, but you don't have a permanent standing army. They thought that was dangerous. 

So, when they said the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, what that meant is Congress approves a war and we go to war, and the person responsible for executing that war – because you cannot have Congress managing the war, you need a leader, a military leader, and we wanted civilian rule, it's not a top general – it is an elected president, he becomes the commander-in-chief of the armed forces that makes the decision about how that war will be fought. 

For a lot of reasons, over the last decades, we've completely forgotten about, ignored, the congressional power to declare war. I believe the last war we declared was the Korean War.

Now, the idea there is if Congress really was serious about this, they could have cut off funds for the war, but mostly it's been a desire by Congress not to have to take the hard vote of voting yes or no on a war. I mean, it destroyed political careers. Hillary Clinton lost because she was forced to vote on the Iraq War and voted yes. It got tied to John Kerry when he tried to run against Bush in 2004, against the Iraq War, when he had voted yes on it 18 months earlier. Joe Biden voted for it as well. It definitely was a huge reason why Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama in 2008 and even why Hillary Clinton was weaker than she could have been when running against Bernie Sanders in 2016, because of that Iraq War vote. They don't want to vote on war. They're happy to leave it to the president. So, they purposely kind of gave up the power that the Constitution assigned to them. It's really an abdication of their responsibility. But politicians don't want to take hard votes. 

And now the view of the executive, I remember very well that Bush and, I mean, of course, if our country is attacked, it's like this sudden invasion, the way Iran had with Israel, suddenly attacking it out of nowhere, of course, the president has the responsibility to order the country defended without first going to Congress and waiting for a vote. That's the one exception. 

That didn't apply to the war in Iraq, but Bush-Cheney said we have the right to go invade Iraq even without congressional support. And now that's the view of the Trump administration: we don't need to go to Congress to start the war in Iran. Why? Why don't you? If you want to enter a war with Iran, that's not an emergency war. Iran is not attacking the United States. Why don't you need a vote in Congress? But most people in Congress don't want that responsibility. They'd rather let Trump take the blame for it if things go wrong. 

And so, we basically have a president who single-handedly runs foreign policy, runs the intelligence community. We barely have a functional Congress at all. 

I mean, I'll just give you one example that's kind of amazing. Most of you who watch this show for a while know that I was vehemently opposed to the ban of TikTok or the forced sale of it, talked about a lot of reasons about why it’s a major act of censorship to just ban a social media app that a third of Americans – a third – and a majority of young people are voluntarily choosing to use, just saying, “No, you can't use it. We don't like that one anymore; we don't like the content there.” 

It was originally justified because Chinese ownership and influence were nefarious. That wasn't enough to get the votes, what finally got the votes was the view that there was too much anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian speech being allowed on TikTok and that was what was turning the nation's youth against Israel. And that's the reason why Democrats finally joined, and the Biden administration advocated the banning of TikTok. 

I was vehemently opposed to that, but Congress did pass it. The House passed it, the Senate passed it with a bipartisan majority, an overwhelming bipartisan majority. Their argument was that it's vital to our national security to ban TikTok. Joe Biden signed it into law and it had a deadline in the law that it had to be banned or sold the day after the election. They didn't want TikTok being shut down during the election so that Biden would get blamed, so they cynically made it the day after, and then Trump had 90 days to extend it if he wanted one time. 

Trump extended it, that 90 days came and went; he extended it again, for another 90 days that came and went, he just extended it again. In other words, he's just refusing to implement the law that Congress passed. And nobody cares! Do you hear anyone in Congress saying, “President Trump, we passed this law because we said it was vital to national security, what right do you have to ignore the law?” 

We basically are a country now that has centralized so much power in the presidency that Congress barely exists, except as a sort of symbolic body of pretense of democracy. George Bush and the Democrats under Obama and Biden, and especially now against Trump, of course, the whole idea: each branch is going to want to grab more power for itself. In that fight, the Congress is trying to take this from the executive, the executive says “No, that's ours,” the court says, “No, that's ours,” Congress says, “No, that's ours,” and you get a balance of power. But when one of the branches, Congress, just says, “We're content not to fight for any of our power. You can have it all, we just want to get reelected, enjoy the perks of our office, travel around the world, get the title, be perpetually re-elected, have these nice offices in the Capitol building, go on TV, get special privileges and perks,” then you don't have balance of power anymore. You have the centralization of power in a president and an executive that the founders were really here to avoid. That has completely twisted and distorted what our political system is supposed to be. It by no means started with Trump. 

The Trump administration came in as one of its major plans to eliminate anything that could oppose it, including Congress. Trump uses threats against the Republicans and all sorts of other means. But he's just continuing a trend that started, I would say, that ideas were formed by the Dick Cheney in the 1980s, but really implemented with 9/11 as the pretext by Bush-Cheney. It's just all grown as powers do from there, and we have a model of the government that is very unlike what the founders envisioned. Of course, it affects all the discourses as well. 

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All right, @Readalot. That's a very good name. I hope it's accurate. 

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All right, so that's a critique, a pretty strongly expressed one. So, let me just clarify, because I do think it's good sometimes to just talk to, especially, our members, about how we think of the show, how we try to put the show together. 

When I say that we don't want to be captive of the news cycle, what I mean by that is that 24-hour cable networks are forced to talk about things every day. And even if nothing significant is happening, they'll make something trivial or insignificant the centerpiece of what they talk about so there'll be some offhand comment by Trump, or there'll be some rumor about somebody resigning or somebody being in trouble, or there will be some bickering in the Congress, or there'll be some law that might get passed, that they're speculating about, or some scandal. 

When I say we don't want to be caught at the news cycle, what I mean is, I don't want to come here every night and feel obligated to talk about things that I don't think are interesting or important just because every other media outlet, newspaper, podcast or other show is discussing them. 

In part, I don't want to talk about things I find trivial. That's what I mean by I don't want to be captive by the news cycle. But it also means sometimes there are important things that are going on that I don't feel competent to talk about or I don't have anything particularly interesting to say, I try to be very mindful that when I was writing a lot and I hit publish, and I hope to get back to writing a little more soon, we'll talk about that sometime in the near future, that when you press publish, you're making a claim to your readers that they need to rely on, that when you hit publish, you're saying to them, “Look, I'm promising you that I've written something that I think is worthwhile for you to take your time and read, that I have something to say that is unique or interesting or that sheds light on something important.” I was always very mindful of that. I would rather not write something on a given day than write something that was just I'm writing just to write or because everyone else is talking about it. 

And that also means that I try not to write about things I have no specialized knowledge of and that's why we don't cover economic policy or economic debates very often, almost at all. And if we do, we'll have a guest who's an expert. Every time I covered tariffs, I had a guest on to talk about it. So that's what I mean by not being captive to the news cycle.

Now, having said that, there are obvious topics, major topics, that I do cover, that I've covered for a long time, that I have a specialized knowledge in, a lot of expertise built up over the years, a lot of knowledge about, a lot of passion about, things like foreign policy, things like war, the intelligence community, civil liberties, free speech and when there's major debates like there were with the deportations of students who were here legally because of the speech that they made, or taking immigrants out based on allegations that they were in gangs without any due process, or when there is a new war or foreign policy, obviously I'm going to not just talk about it, I'm going to cover it in depth. 

And so, I don't necessarily want to talk about Israel every night, but the reality is it has been the center of our politics since October 7. We have fought a massive, dangerous war, one of the worst wars, and it's not really even a war, it's just sort of an attack on a population that the United States has paid for. We've supported Israel taking land from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq – bombing, not taking land from Syria and Lebanon, bombing them and bombing Iraq. And now we're on the verge of a major war with Iran. Of course, I'm going to talk about that a lot. I'm going to talk about it in the lead up to it, I'm not going to talk about it while the war is occurring, which is now, I'm talking about everything related to it, that's not being counted in the news cycle. That's right at the heart of what we do. 

And I think we talk about it and I hope we talk about it in a way that's not being talked about in many other places. They're getting a different kind of perspective on it, a different way to understand it, different types of information, different voices. And when war broke out in Ukraine and the Biden administration decided to be heavily involved in that, we did endless numbers of shows on Ukraine and Russia because that was a proxy war between the two largest nuclear powers on the planet. It had all kinds of things to do with the alignment of each party. We do a lot of political talk that way about what it means to be left and right. What is Democrat and Republican? How has that changed? Is that meaningful? 

So, when we talk about major events like the war in Ukraine, like the destruction of Gaza, like the imminent war in Iran, the ongoing war and our relationship to Israel, as we talked about with Tuck Carlson and Ted Cruz, the attacks on free speech on the Biden administration, the ones from the Trump administration, we don't just repeat over and over whatever the headline is. I think we try and delve deeply into it and talk about everything ancillary because it often sheds light on other parts of it that aren't directly related to it. That's what I mean by not being captive to the news. 

I don't feel obligated to follow the cable news framework of doing a movement, I don't think you have short intelligence span where you can only talk about a topic for four minutes and every four minutes we have to move or talk about something for two minutes, bring on a guest for five minutes, seven minutes maximum, and then move to another topic. We don’t do nine topics a night like a cable show does for an hour. We do one or two topics at the most. We want to dive deeply into them. We respect our audience enough to believe that the people here want to pay close attention, want detailed analysis and want to dive deep into things. And then, when we can and when we have something to do, we will do a show completely detached from the news cycle. 

Last week, we did a very deep dive into Palantir, what that company is, how it started, what its history has been, what it was built for, who runs it, what their ideology is, and what function they're now playing in the government. We do a lot of those. We've done deep dives into the anthrax and things like that, even though that had nothing to do with the topic. We spent a lot of time on COVID and related policies like that. So, I think our range is pretty broad, but yes, if there's a major war that Washington is heavily debating, getting more involved in, that's going to be something we're going to talk about, maybe not every night, but certainly close to it. The consequences of that make it impossible to ignore. 

And it's the sort of thing that, as I said, I think we naturally cover and it would be very odd if people came here, and I spent maybe one night a week, two nights a week, talking about the war with Iran and then just talking about a bunch of other stuff on the other three nights and didn't mention it, especially given how fast moving it is, how much of a debate there is, how much other topics that it implicates. 

We make our own decisions about what's important, what we think we have something unique to offer, provocative, interesting, informative to say, and just say it in a way that other places are not saying it, and we try and take our time to delve in, even though we know that maybe we would have more viewers, potentially, if we just constantly, can get members of Congress to come on the show every night, people want to come on the shows all the time but I want to do one or two topics that I find extremely interesting that give you a kind of an analytical perspective, a depth of information that other platforms don't allow you to. That's the reason I like this platform so much, and I think we try to use it for that end. So that's how we think about putting the show together. 

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All right, last question is a tennis question, which I'm always happy to take. It's from @Alan _Smithee, who I recognize as somebody who submits tennis questions, who says this:

 

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Okay. First of all, that is slander, that last part. I don't pick the slam owners after the event is played. No, I do pick them after, say, the first round. So, I don't like to pick somebody who then gets eliminated in the first run; I like to see how they're kind of playing. It's still not easy to pick the slam winners just after the first round, and I have done a great job on that. 

I did actually watch the Onyx Center match today. He played a player who's one of my favorite players, Alexander Bublik, who has an extremely exotic and idiosyncratic game. He's very funny as a person, but he's extremely talented and inventive, especially on grass, so I like seeing him toy with Center. I don't think it happens a lot that when you move from clay to grass, you lose your first match. Corey Gauff won the French Open, but she lost her first match on grass as well. It just takes some transition. I don't think it means that he's in trouble or he's going to have a bad Wimbledon or anything. 

But anyway, I'll probably pick the winners of Wimbledon when we get a little bit closer to the tournament, as you say sardonically, maybe once we start the tournament, right at the beginning, then you can go and take those to the bank. But if you do and you lose, do not blame me, don't leave me rude and abusive messages, because I do have a lot of knowledge about it. My predictions have been weirdly good for the last year, but that could stop at any time. So, although I'm telling you can rely on me, that doesn't mean that you actually should or can, especially when it comes to betting money that you can't afford to lose. 

All right. Those are all the questions we have for tonight.

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