We are thrilled to have a good friend of the show, somebody who has become one of the most independent, informed and incisive political analysts to emerge in a long time.

He is a podcast host, he's a comedian and he is a political analyst as well – And I think I would actually put that first. Certainly, that's what he's here to be and we are delighted to welcome him

G. Greenwald: Dave Smith, it’s great to see you. How are you?

Dave Smith: What's up, Glenn? Thanks so much for having me back on. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, of course. Of course. 

Dave Smith: And thank you for those kind words. That's very, very kind. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I really mean it. And for those who don't know Dave, it's probably very few people but you should definitely follow his work. I do. And it's always enlightening. All right. 

So, a lot is going on, I don't think we chose you for that reason but it's good that the schedule is aligned, that we have a lot to talk about, including things that I know you're very interested in. So let's begin with these warrants that were issued, these arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court, that essentially require all signatory countries that include almost all of Western Europe, for example, all of Latin America, South America, other countries spread throughout the world to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant if they try to enter those countries, charging them with war crimes under the Geneva Conventions for what they've been doing in Gaza. The world was shocked to hear the response of the Israeli government, Netanyahu specifically, which was to call everyone involved in these prosecutions bigoted and antisemitic. No one imagined that that would be the response. So, I guess I want to begin there: is this prosecution arguably antisemitic? 

Dave Smith: It's funny because you say, I'm a comedian and I'm here to be a political analyst, but it only makes sense in this world because Netanyahu's response video was like something out of a Saturday Night Live sketch or something, in the darkest way, but it's almost like – it almost be like if there was like a comedy sketch where a black guy is just beating someone up and they go “Hey, stop beating him up” and he goes, “It's because I'm Black” or something like that. It's so ridiculous to jump to that conclusion.

Here is our exclusive interview with journalist Jeremy Loffredo, who just faced imprisonment by Israeli forces for the crime of doing journalism in Israel, where he has done critical reporting over the last year. Loffredo is an American citizen and he has a lot to tell us about violence against the press, censorship, and his experience.

Watch the video or read the transcript below for the full interview.
Subscribe to our community on Locals.

Jeremy Loffredo is an investigative journalist based in New York City. His work has taken him to Russia, France, Israel and Palestine, where he's covered issues such as economic unrest, state-sponsored violence and war. His work is regularly published in outlets like the Grayzone and ZNetwork. He faced imprisonment in Israel for the crime of doing basic reporting and journalism in Israel, a country where he has done critical reporting, and great reporting over the last year. And there's a lot we want to speak to him tonight about all of this. 

Jeremy did some pretty intrepid and brave and important reporting. He went to the West Bank, he met up with settlers who are among the most extremist activists in Israel. They were organizing civilian blockades of aid trucks into Gaza whenever they see a truck carrying flour, food, or water, they physically blocked the truck and refused to move, and they're supported and backed by the Israeli military. That's one of the reasons aid cannot get into Israel: Israeli settlers, activists and civilians are physically blocking it and the Israeli military helps them. 

Jeremy embedded with them and interviewed them about what their beliefs are and why it is that they're trying to keep food out of Gaza, why they believe that mass starvation is something that the Gazans deserve.

You can watch his 18-minute documentary – which I hope you will watch in its entirety  - and the reporting that angered Israeli authorities below: 

'Kill them all': inside the Israeli blockade on Gaza aid:

On the ground investigating Iran's strikes on Israel:

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.