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Our guest was Jefferson Morley, who testified today in front of Congress about the significance of the newly released JFK documents, along with others who have long followed the JFK investigation, including director Oliver Stone. We'll have Morley here to talk about his testimony today. 

We'll then break down what the guardians and saviors of Democracy are doing in banishing their most popular opponents from running as opposed to trying to defeat them democratically. Marine Le Pen, Bolsonaro and Calin Georgescu are some of the examples.

The Interview: Jeff Morley

Jefferson Morley is a best-selling author and a veteran Washington journalist known for his investigative books which expose the covert history of American power. His most recent book is “Scorpion's Dance: the President, the Spymaster, and Watergate,” which explores the secret relationship between CIA director Richard Helms and President Richard Nixon. He is, as well, a leading authority, I believe one of the top two or three journalistic authorities on the JFK assassination. He has spent decades prying loose the CIA's deepest secrets and challenging the official narrative. 

He testified earlier today at Congress about what these newly declassified documents from the Trump administration add to our understanding not just of the assassination but the clear cover-up that took place as part of the investigation, as well as the potential CIA role in all of this. We're delighted he took the time to join us. 

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

Jefferson Morley: Thanks for having me, Glenn. I'm very glad to be here. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I'm glad to have you. I recommended the interview that you recently did on Breaking Points, about 30 minutes with Saagar Enjeti and Ryan Grim. I found it one of the most illuminating interviews in recent times, especially on these documents. But I want to explore some other things beyond what's in that interview as well.

You testified earlier today before the House Task Force on Declassification, which is chaired by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, the Republican of Florida. I know that you and everybody else interested in not just the JFK assassination, but the role that the CIA has played in our politics and our history, were very interested in these documents and more broadly interested in getting to the bottom of this case, whether we ever learned the truth. What was your sense, having testified before the committee, about whether that interest and excitement is shared by most members of Congress? 

Jefferson Morley: Let me talk about chairwoman Luna first because I've gotten to know her over the last couple of weeks when she launched this House Task Force on Declassification and I've been very impressed with her attitude. She's a can-do person. When I said, I said we needed to get these documents from the CIA, she said, “Give me a memo and I'll call Ratcliffe's office today.” So, she's very proactive. I think her leadership has been very strong. We had some partisan politics in the hearing today, which I think was unfortunate because it's not really a partisan issue. I mean, I'm a pretty liberal guy. That's why I wanted to be on your show, you know? And so, I'm hopeful that the task force is going to do serious work. The most encouraging sign is she says we're going to have another hearing on JFK. We're hoping to get some more firsthand witnesses to explicate the new history of JFK's assassination. 

G. Greenwald: So, I want to spend most of my time with you on the substance of these documents and the investigation, but just before I get to that, just along those same lines, I don't want to make it a partisan issue either, but there is a palpable shift in how our political spectrum thinks about the U.S. Security State, the CIA, the nefarious role they've often played. As you said, you're a liberal Democrat and it used to be foundational to American liberal and left-wing politics to distrust and view the CIA and the Security State as quite sinister, as needing reform. It was more typical that conservatives would defend them though. These are patriotic organizations, we need them, we love them. They have to operate in the dark and there's been so much change I mean it was Donald Trump who finally declassified these documents as he promised to do; it’s Chairwoman Luna, a very right-wing member of Congress who's leading the way, as you say, very proactively. 

I just want to show you a clip from today that involves Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of the Democratic Texas, who has become in a lot of ways one of the leading faces of the Democratic Party, the American liberalism, and here's what she had to say about the JFK documents and the hearing itself and the possibility of the CIA involvement. 

Video. Jasmine Crockett, C-SPAN3 Pronto. April 1, 2025.

There is more of that, but she's essentially saying, “Look, these new documents vindicated the CIA, it had no role to play in any of this. Anyone who suggests otherwise is a conspiracy theorist.” And in any event, it doesn't really even matter. There's no reason for us to know we should focus on a Signal gate or whatever. As somebody who's been aligned with the Democratic Party for a long time, do you think that's become a more common sentiment? 

Jefferson Morley: Absolutely. And it's really unfortunate, I mean, to bring up something totally unrelated about what's going on, with the current controversy. The JFK files are something that there is broad support for across the political spectrum, and there's no need to drag partisan politics into this issue. It's just not an issue. Representative Luna did a good job of leading this, in kind of reflexive – you know, Jasmine Crockett hadn't even read the documents. She didn't even listen to what I said about the false testimony of three top CIA officials, and like, facts don't register anymore, which is a problem universally. But it's especially a problem when we're actually making progress on the JFK story. President Trump's order was a breakthrough, and it's one of the few things I agree with him about, a very positive measure. We obtained, on March 18, a lot of important information and we're getting more as we proceed. 

Remember Glenn, they released 80,000 pages of documents on March 19. I might have seen a thousand pages of those. I've talked to researchers who've seen a few thousand more, but we're just at the beginning of this process of really getting our hands and our minds around these new records. And so, that's the positive thing. Luna's talking about having another hearing. I think that's a good idea to bring more JFK witnesses and educate people about what really happened. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean I thought it was bizarre, the day that it was released, everybody ran to their social media accounts or their programs to tell everybody what these documents show. We focused only on one document which was the unredacted Schlesinger memo and only to the extent that it revealed things about the CIA in general, not necessarily their role, if any, in the JFK assassination. And I want to get to that memo in a second because I do think it's of profound importance. But before I do, I think some of this is generational. I mean, I didn't live through the JFK assassination, I wasn't born yet. Obviously, Congresswoman Crockett wasn't. She was born, I believe, in the 1980s or even 1990s. So, I understand why some people might say, “Oh, this is kind of old and ancient history that we don't need to go excavating through.” What is your answer to that? Why do you think it matters so much to kind of continue with the investigation? 

Jefferson Morley: Let me explain. My readership at the JFK Facts newsletter is very diverse from MAGA, Christian nationalists on the right, libertarians, anti-imperialists and liberals on the left and we don't have a big culture war on the site. People want to talk about this. People want a real debate. And the idea that people are coming reflexively to the defense of the CIA without even acknowledging or incorporating these records… We're going to talk about the Schlesinger memo in a second. Why should people care? What we're missing right now in American politics is what President Kennedy talked about in 1963. He's talked about how we need a strategy for peace, not peace in our time, peace for all times, not a Pax Americana enforced with America as the world's policeman, but peace for everybody. And that's the vision really that died in Dallas. So, when people say, “Why does it matter now?” You don't hear that voice anymore in American politics, not from Democrats and not from Republicans, and that's what's missing, and that's why it's important to understand what died when President Kennedy died. 

We've lost something very real and I would say, the most aggressive factions in the American security establishment after President Kennedy's assassination, because there was no real accountability, there was no real investigation, that faction has had impunity ever since and that's led to a much more militarized, aggressive interventionist foreign policy, which Kennedy was trying to steer the country away from. That's what's important about the Kennedy assassination. We lost something when we lost President Kennedy. 

G. Greenwald: So, let me dive into these details now and let's start with the Schlesinger memo. For viewers who might have seen it, I think when it was released, I believe two weeks ago, we delved very deeply into what this memo is and what the newly released material demonstrates. 

For those who don't know him, Arthur Schlesinger was a very respected historian, especially among the kind of Kennedy circle, and after the Bay of Pigs debacle and the firing of Alan Dulles, who was sort of the father of the CIA, JFK was very interested in getting a hold of the CIA and asked Arthur Schlesinger to write this memo, and he wrote this long memo detailing all of the abuses and dangers of having this kind of runaway, unaccountable secret agency off on its own, making foreign policy, engineering coups away from the State Department, and also offered a lot of plans for how to rein it in – pretty serious and severe plans. 

So, I want to hear what your thoughts are on the newly released portion of that, but before you get to that, do we have evidence that the CIA was aware of the conversations taking place in the JFK White House about the need to rein in the CIA? 

Jefferson Morley: Absolutely, Dick Helms, Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, said in his memoir that this period after the Bay of Pigs was a stormy… 

G. Greenwald: Sorry. Wasn’t he the director of the CIA, not in the '60s, but later on with Nixon? 

Jefferson Morley: He was deputy director right at the time of the Bay of Pigs and later became director. At the kind of Kennedy’s assassination, he was deputy director and Helms said in his memoir “This was a stormy interregnum for the agency” where they understood that their continued existence was in the balance. Ultimately, Kennedy decided not to do the reorganization – it was just too big a left, I think, for him in terms of politics – but the Schlesinger memo shows that he was talking about it very seriously, and the key thing there was what Schlesinger called the encroachment of the CIA on the president's foreign policymaking authority – and you've talked about the Schlesing memo. You recall some of those details: 47% of State Department officers at the time of Kennedy's assassination were in fact CIA officers. So, the CIA is taking over the political reporting function of the State Department, and of course, that limited the president's ability to make foreign policy. That's what Kennedy was concerned about and that's the problem Schlesinger was trying to solve. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, in that memo, he, I think quite famously and quite pointedly and importantly, called it “a state within a state,” which is kind of ironic since now the term deep state has become this source of liberal mockery as though it's some bizarre, unhinged conspiracy theory. And you knew you had Dwight Eisenhower coming out of the '50s, serving two terms as president, warning about the military-industrial complex on his way out and then you have Arthur Schlesinger calling it a state within a state when writing to JFK about it. So, this memo has been out for a while, I think for a few years or even longer, but what we have now thanks to President Trump's declassification order is the full unredacted memo. So, are there things that we have learned that are important in the unredacted parts that we didn't previously know? 

Jefferson Morley: Yeah, I mean, there was a whole page that was redacted. So, like the statistic that I just quoted to you, 47% of State Department officers were actually CIA officers, which was redacted by the CIA for the past 60 years. The fact that the CIA had 128 people in the Paris embassy, was redacted. And when you look at it, that's not national security information, no American would be threatened or harmed by that information. 

It's only the reputation of the CIA and so what you see in these redactions -- these redactions are justified in the name of national security, right? You need to protect us from our enemies. Our enemies aren't fooled the only people that were fooled were the American people and that's why we need this full declassification because we're the only ones that are in the dark about the way the CIA is operating. 

G. Greenwald: About your argument that the reason the CIA or other parts of the government perceive JFK to be threatening, perhaps threatening enough to want to kill him, is that he was talking about this radical transformation of our foreign policy, of finding a way to get out of endless wars and become a nation of peace. There are people very knowledgeable who are also on the left, one of them is Noam Chomsky, who has said over the years that he finds that unpersuasive because – and I guess this is a very Chomsky way of looking at things – although there was a little bit of resistance here and there on the part of JFK and his administration to the military-industrial complex, the intelligence community – obviously they had an argument after the Bay of Pigs, they fired, as I said earlier, Alan Dulles – that essentially JFK was a militarist and was a Cold Warrior. He was the one who oversaw what Chomsky calls the invasion of South Vietnam by the United States and if you were a militarist or a Cold Warrior, you'd have no reason to look at JFK and find him bothersome. What do you think about that? 

Jefferson Morley: I mean none of Kennedy’s enemies on the right ever said that at the time. They said that he was a weakling if not a traitor. The idea that Kennedy was a Cuba hawk or a Vietnam hawk – no Cuba hawk or Vietnam hawk in 1963 ever said that. The problem with Chomsky’s argument is he hasn't really familiarized himself with the debates. 

CIA Director Richard Helms was trying to pressure Kennedy into a more aggressive Cuba policy and four days before the assassination, Richard Helms brought a machine gun into the Oval Office as a way of convincing President Kennedy to take a more aggressive stance. And when you read Kennedy's account of it, it's hard not to believe that he understood that he was being threatened. I mean, think about that. The CIA director or deputy CIA director is demonstrating to the president your security perimeter is not secure, right? That was four days before President Kennedy was killed. So, the idea that there weren't profound conflicts at the top of the U.S. government, I mean, I know Noam Chomsky is a smart guy, but he needs to pay attention to the historical record. There were profound conflicts between Kennedy and the national security establishment in the fall of 1963. Nobody who pays attention, especially to the new records, thinks that wasn't the case. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, and obviously Chomsky is not here to defend himself, but he's obviously talked many times about this so people interested can go to YouTube and find that. I think he has a propensity against what he calls conspiracy theories and just kind of dismissing them out of hand and nobody's perfect. 

Yeah, but let me ask you this. This is one of the things I learned from your work. I remember growing up in the '70s and '80s and my understanding of the JFK assassination was that Lee Harvey Oswald was just sort of this weird loner who had like a couple of appearances here and there in some public and political sectors, but that by and large he was kind of a nobody, sort of like what they're depicting the person who did the first assassination attempt against President Trump in Pennsylvania, like just a guy, a weirdo, not really connected. And it was only really through following your work and the work of a couple of other people that I actually learned things like, no, the CIA had a lot of interest in Oswald prior to – I thought nobody knew of him before this all happened and in fact, the CIA had a big, long, large surveillance file on him. What interest did the CIA have in Oswald prior to Oswald's alleged role in the JFK assassination? 

Jefferson Morley: They were interested, first of all, in recruiting him as a possible source or contact behind the Iron Curtain. And that was one of the key documents that emerged on March 18, a document where Angleton talked exactly about who he targeted for that type of recruiting. The second thing that they were interested in was his pro-Cuba activities. That was something that the CIA denied at the time. They pretended they didn't know anything about this. When you talk about a big surveillance file – this is what I showed to Representative Luna today – they had 198 pages on him on November 15 when President Kennedy was getting ready to go to Dallas. 

So, Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone nut in the eyes of the CIA. He was a known quantity who top CIA officials, top counterintelligence officials, knew everything about him, as President Kennedy was preparing to go to Dallas. Of course, there are suspicions, and people say, “Oh, well, that's incompetence” or “They didn't know,” or “Oswald didn't present a threat.” Wait a second, part of the reason you have a counterintelligence staff is to protect you against assassinations, and that clearly didn't happen. Angleton failed to do his job. But nobody knew anything about this. The CIA imposed a cover story, the lone gunman, and Angleton, instead of losing his job, he kept it for another decade. 

G. Greenwald: Well, I know you have to go in just a few minutes, so I want to just respect your time. I just have a couple more questions briefly. 

This is one of the things that I think that you grow up and you're kind of bombarded to believe the established narrative about everything. I mean, that's why it's the established narrative because they have control of the institutions that shape your thinking and the more you kind of look into these things, the more basis you have for skepticism, including the fact that Alan Dulles, who led the CIA, gave birth to the CIA, directed the CIA, was controlling almost everything in there until Kennedy fired him and then Kennedy fired him and he was put onto the Warren Commission where naturally as being Alan Dulles, he had immense weight on conducting the official investigation. I've always said it's kind of like putting Ben Shapiro in charge of an investigation to find out who's at fault in Gaza. You know what kind of outcome you're going to get if you put Alan Dulles on the Warren Commission. You're putting, like, a chief suspect on there. What are the best reasons we have to distrust both the process and the conclusions of the Warren Commission? 

Jefferson Morley: I mean the fact that Allen Dulles was on it, the fact that the Warren Commission was deceived about the surveillance of Oswald – they had no idea that the CIA had 198 pages of material on Oswald. The Warren Commission was told that they had only minimal information about Oswald so the Warren Commission was fed a false story about Oswald. Glenn, I'm going to have to go soon. 

G. Greenwald: Okay, I know, all right, I have one more question, but I'm going to let you go. One more question. Okay, well, I'll just ask you briefly. James Angleton, who was this senior CIA official, has been central to your work. You said today in your testimony that he was one of three senior CIA officials to have lied to the Warren Commission about the investigation, that that was sort of a tipping point for you. What did Angleton lie about, and how did he deceive the commission? 

Jefferson Morley: Well, actually what we learned last month was that Angleton lied to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, in 1978. He never had to testify to the Warren Commission. In 1978, he testified, and he was asked, “Was Oswald ever the subject of a CIA project?” and the answer was “Yes.” Angleton had personally put Oswald under mail surveillance. They were intercepting his letters to his mother from the Soviet Union. He was under mail surveillance from 1959 to 1962. When Angleton was asked by the HSCA, “Was Oswald ever part of a CIA project?” he said “No,” and what we know now is that that was a lie and that he was lying under oath about what he knew about Oswald before the assassination. So, that was the tipping point for me, because until March 18, we never knew that. 

G. Greenwald: All right, Jeff, thank you for your great work. We're going to definitely have you back on as you work your way through these documents. Really appreciate the time. I know you're busy tonight after your testimony, so we're going to let you go, but thanks once again. 

Jefferson Morley: Thanks a million for having me, Glenn. 

G. Greenwald: All right, talk to you soon. 

One of the ironies, I think, in Western politics, or throughout the democratic world over the last, let's say, decade or so, has been, that there is a group of people, a very powerful faction, you could say the kind of establishment faction that's composed of both the center-left and the center-right in most Western democracies that have engaged in all sorts of highly classically anti-democratic measures in the name of saving democracy. 

The reality of politics in the democratic world over the last decade has been that of a variety of factors. In the U.S. you can go back to the War on Terror and the lies of the Iraq War, but more recently the 2008 financial crisis, whose repercussions are expressing themselves to this very day, jeopardizing people's financial security, the policies of free trade and deindustrialization. 

And then all the deceit and crackdowns around COVID have turned huge portions of the population into vehement anti-establishment warriors. These people hate these establishments. They hate whoever they perceive as defenders of the status quo. It started to express itself in 2016 with things like the British people voting to leave the EU out of hatred and contempt for EU bureaucrats in Brussels, and then obviously followed a few months later by what was, for most people, the shocking victory of Donald Trump over the ultimate establishment maven, Hillary Clinton. And ever since then, it's been one after the next. 

Historically, when establishments feel threatened by some new event or some shift in political sentiment, their tendency, being the establishment, is not to assuage it, not to persuade it but to crush it. The establishment today, unlike, say, 400 or 500 years ago are not monarchs in name, they're not churches in name, with some sort of absolute say the way the Catholic Church had over a lot of countries. They have to pretend to be Democrats, people who believe in democracy, that's how they pitch themselves and so they have been just openly doing things like censoring their political opponents, creating an industry designed to decree truth and falsity that nobody can deviate from with this disinformation industry. 

More disturbingly, and I think more desperately, showing how desperate they really are because, in so many countries, the establishment is in deep trouble, typically because of an emerging right-wing populist movement, occasionally because of left-wing populism as well, both of which manifest as anti-establishment movements. Their solution has just been to basically bar democracy, limit democracy, prevent the most popular opponents of the establishment, typically right-wing populists, from even running on the ballot, just saying you're banished from the election – the thing we're told is what Putin does when he has fraudulent elections because his opponents can't run. These are just theatrical elections that are very stage-managed.

 That's exactly what has been happening throughout the democratic world in multiple different countries over at least the last decade. A lot of people are noting that even more now because of what happened in France. 

Here from The New York Times yesterday:

Marine Le Pen Barred From French Presidential Run After Embezzlement Ruling

The verdict effectively barred the current front-runner in the 2027 presidential election […] (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)

[…] from participating in it, an extraordinary step but one the presiding judge said was necessary because nobody is entitled to “immunity in violation of the rule of law.”

Jordan Bardella, Ms. Le Pen’s protégé and a likely presidential candidate in her absence, said on social media, “Not only has Marine Le Pen been unjustly convicted; French democracy has been executed.”

The verdict infuriated Ms. Le Pen, an anti-immigrant, nationalist politician who has already mounted three failed presidential bids. (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)

Notice I have not uttered a syllable about what I think of Marine Le Pen or her politics or anything like that because it's completely irrelevant. 

If you actually believe in democracy as the premier way to select our leaders, which I do, it should be disturbing if it has actually become a weapon to exploit the judicial system or use lawfare to defeat your political opponents, not at the ballot box, not by giving the people in the country the choice to vote for, but by prohibiting them from becoming on the ballot. If it were just one case, then you'd have to spend a lot of time debating Marine Le Pen's case. 

We're going to have somebody on this week who has been following Marine Le Pen's case closely and understands the intricacies of French law in a way that I don't, so I'm not sitting here propounding on the validity or otherwise of her conviction, just the fact that it has now become part of an obvious trend where politicians like her, especially when they become too popular, are being banned. 

[…]

In the United States, of course even if you're convicted of a crime, then it doesn't mean that you can't run. The socialist leader, Eugene Debs, ran for president as a third-party candidate, during the Wilson administration, from prison. Had the Democrats succeeded in convicting and imprisoning Trump before the election as they were desperately trying to do, that would not have resulted in his being banned from the ballot. He could have run even as a convicted felon. In fact, they did convict him of a felony charge or multiple repetitive felony charges in New York and he still was permitted to run and the American people decided. We know he was convicted, we don't trust that conviction, we think it's politically motivated and in any event, we want him to be our president. That's what democracy means. 

The Democrats tried other ways to get him banned from the ballot, as we'll get to, and they almost succeeded. That was clearly their goal. But in the United States, at least, it's left to the people to decide and that's what a lot of French politicians across the political spectrum are saying. 

Here is the most recent polling data on the French presidential election from the International Market Research Group, on March 31:

INTENTIONS TO VOTE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Two years before the next presidential election, a [I.F.O.P.] poll for the Journal du Dimanche reveals the voting intentions of the French for the next presidential election. In the most favorable scenario, the National Rally candidate would collect 37% of voting intentions, nearly 14 points more than her score in the first round in 2022.

Edouard Philippe appears to be the best-placed candidate to qualify for the second round against Marine Le Pen. His score ranges between 20 and 25%, depending on the different configurations tested. (International Market Research Group. March 31, 2025.)

So, she's not just leading in the polls, she's leading the polls by far. Not enough to avoid a runoff, she's made the runoff twice now and lost to Macron. But the question is not, “Is Marine Le Pen going to be in the second round?” She for sure will be. The question is: who can get just enough to make it with her? And unlike in the past, in France, where that party was considered toxic and off limits, where everybody would unite to prevent it from gaining any power, that's not really the case anymore. I mean, you did see that in the subsequent parliamentary elections in France that Macron called after Marine Le Pen's party won the EU parliamentary elections, and he called new elections for the parliament. So, the parliament called new elections and the left-wing coalition came in first, Macron's party came in second, and Le Pen’s party came third, but it was very closely disputed. 

So, there's the possibility that there could be a coalition to defeat her. We're likely never to find out because the French establishment is too afraid to let her run for the ballot for fear that she might win. As I said, if that were an isolated case, we could just sort of say, “Well, is Marine Le Pen guilty?” That's the French law, but it's by far not an isolated case. It has become a common scenario. 

Here the BBC, on March 26, is reporting on the case of Brazil and the ex-Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing populist who actually shocked the country, shocked Brazil when he won the presidency in 2018 over the Workers’ Party of Lula da Silva, which had dominated Brazilian politics, had occupied the presidency from 2002 when Lula first won until 2016 when his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached and her vice president took over. But he didn't even bother running again. He was widely hated. So, in 2018, that was the first election that the Workers' Party didn't win since 2002, 16 years earlier. They dominated Brazilian politics. 

Ironically, in 2018, Lula was intending to run again and he was leading in polls early on and he ended up being imprisoned, convicted and imprisoned on corruption charges and so he was not allowed to run on the ballot and that opened the path for Bolsonaro. What actually happened there was the center-right has always wanted to dominate Brazilian politics, they're the party of the Brazilian media, the big media conglomerates, kind of like a Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell type party, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney-like, classic center-right figures, even right-wing figures, but who are very pro-establishment and hate the way those figures hate Donald Trump. The center-right in Brazil despises Bolsonaro, but they thought that impeaching Dilma and then imprisoning Lula, would be an easy path to victory because they were always the party second to Lula, kind of like Marine Le Pen and Macron. They just couldn't ever beat the Workers' Party. 

So, they thought once they got rid of Lula and impeached Dilma, they had a clear path to power instead. Nobody wanted them, nobody ever liked them. So, once they got rid of Lula, instead of winning, they got Bolsonaro, who they hated more than Lula. Bolsonaro won by a sizable margin against the Workers' Party in 2018 in the runoff. And then in 2022, everyone knew that there was only one person who could beat Bolsonaro, and that was Lula, who was in prison. So, the Supreme Court of Brazil invalidated his conviction. After upholding it many times, they actually used the excuse of the reporting that I did with my colleagues there that showed prosecutors and judges had cheated. But that was just their pretext. They wouldn't have let him out, no matter what we reported, had they not wanted to. They only allowed him out because they knew that only he had a chance to beat Bolsonaro. But even with everything that happened to Bolsonaro, the entire establishment against him, COVID, ruining the Brazilian economy, shutting down the economy, all of those scandals about vaccines and masks and lockdowns and countless corruption charges, and running against what had been the most popular politician in Brazil, Lula da Silva, that election was extremely close, decided by about one point. 

All night Bolsonaro was leading, kind of at the last minute, Lula overtook him, but it was an extremely close election. Now Lula's popularity is plummeting, his presidency has unraveled, he's about to be 80 years old. Bolsonaro's not young himself. He's about four or three years younger. But the country is not happy at all with Lula, and people are very afraid of his chances to be re-elected. There's a high likelihood he's going to lose, especially if he runs against Jair Bolsonaro. Fortunately for the Brazilian establishment, Bolsonaro can't run because two years ago, he was declared ineligible, and now they're about to convict him before the Supreme Court on charges that he engineered a coup or tried to engineer a coup, which probably sounds familiar to the American ear since that was a charge against Trump as well. 

[…]

Now, let me just be clear there. He is now criminally charged with planning and plotting a violent coup once Lula won, that would reinstall Bolsonaro. 

We haven't had the trial yet. All we have are media leaks and now the police report under the control of Lula's government and Moraes. I don't find the evidence particularly persuasive, but that will be decided as it should be in a trial. Unfortunately, he's unlikely to get a fair trial, but that isn't why he's banned from running. He was already banned from running, completely independent of these allegations of a violent coup. And that's due to the fact that before the election happened in 2022, and then after he lost, he alleged that there was voting machine fraud. And for that and that alone, the Supreme Court decided he's now ineligible to run that that was an abuse of power, an attack on democracy. 

And I should also say that during that 2022 campaign, when Biden was president in Brazil, that 2022 to campaign, Biden dispatched the CIA, he dispatched Jake Sullivan, his national security advisor and other top officials to go to Brazil and interfere in that election by essentially saying that Bolsonaro's claims of voting fraud are completely invalid, threatening Brazil with punishments or consequences, warning Bolsonaro not to raise the issue of election fraud. At the same time, USAID was funding the censorship groups, the disinformation groups that were systematically censoring Bolsonaro supporters in countless ways that we've reported on many times before. 

So, his banning from the ballot, similar to the way Marine Le Pen was banned happened not because of these criminal allegations of a coup, but because of those allegations that he made of voting machine fraud. 

Here from the Brazilian outlet UOL on March 29, the headline is:

It's a 15-point lead that Bolsonaro has among the people of Brazil who should decide who they want as their president. 

Here from CNN Brazil, yes, Brazil has a CNN, is contaminated and infected with CNN, the Brazilian version, a separate poll shows this:

So even Bolsonaro's wife, who's never been elected to public office, was the first lady of the country, has a 9-point lead over Lula. But obviously, they'd much rather run against her than run against Jair Bolsonaro, who has already proven that he can become, can win a national election.

Here's why the establishment is so scared of him. They threw everything at him during his first term. And remember, I'm not commenting on my views of Bolsonaro. As I said, I did the reporting that ended up being the pretext for the Supreme Court to allow Lula out of prison to invalidate his convictions. And when I did, Bolsonaro threatened me several times, explicitly, with prison. I ended up criminally indicted for that reporting, although the Supreme Court had a press freedom ruling that required the dismissal of those charges.

 I've had a lot of acrimonious history with Bolsonaro, but just like Marine Le Pen, that has nothing to do with any of this. Again, I actually believe in democracy. I think the president should be determined by who wins. 

So, like in France, the Bolsonaro problem is solved. Who cares if he's leading in the polls? Who cares if a majority of Brazilians want him as president? Nope, banned from the ballot in the name of saving democracy. 

Obviously, everybody remembers that Trump faced four felony indictments in four different jurisdictions, two state and two federal, and that was the Democratic strategy, to imprison Trump before the election. They never were able to do that, but they tried. But beyond that, they also just wanted him banned from the ballot independently of criminal convictions by claiming that the constitutional provision banning people who led an insurrection from running for high office should apply to ban Trump, even though he had never been convicted of insurrection, actually never even charged with it. Congress hadn't declared him ineligible, but the Democrats got a four to three majority on the Colorado Supreme Court for democratic judges to say that Trump is ineligible to run again. 

And then in Romania, I think we might even have actually the most flagrant and glaring case because there, they actually had an election. The first round was won by a previously obscure right-wing populist, with the EU and the U.S. The Romanians invalidated the election: let's just have another election. They saw that that candidate was likely to win again, they were, like, “This time we're going to ban him so he can't win.” 

Here from Politico EU in November 2025, this is December 2024, I think:

Georgescu won with 22.94 percent of the vote. He was followed by liberal reformist candidate Elena Lasconi on 19.18 percent in second place, after she edged ahead of center-left Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu on 19.15 percent — a difference of just over 2,700 votes.

An early exit poll suggested that Ciolacu and Lasconi were set to qualify for the presidential runoff but Georgescu surged into the lead as vote counting continued Sunday night, heralding a result that is set to upend Romanian politics. (Politico EU. November 24, 2024.)

So, they have this populist right-wing candidate, hostile to the EU, opposed to the war in Ukraine, not wanting to adopt the European view that Europe is at war with Russia and candidates like that have won throughout the EU. Even in Slovakia, which had long been an ardent opponent of Russia because of the history of the Cold War, Robert Fico, a former prime minister, ran on a platform, in late 2023, of stopping aid to Ukraine, and he won. He was then almost killed in an assassination attempt, but he's still running the country. He miraculously survived that. So here's another right-wing populist in Europe, hostile to the EU, opposed to the war in Ukraine, that the establishment hates, who shocked the establishment because they had two candidates they were happy with when he came in first in the first round of voting. 

As a result, because they didn't get the outcome they wanted, here's what happened from Politico EU, December 6, 2024:

Now, look at what they did there. They basically concocted their own Russiagate. They said, “Yes, this candidate that we hate won the election fair and square, came in first. But there were some ads on TikTok that helped him that we think came from Russia. So, our election is invalid, the Russians interfered.” Just like they tried to do in 2016, like, “Hey, we found some Facebook pages and some Twitter bots that seem like they came from Russia” and that makes Trump an illegitimate president. That's the theory that they used. 

Leaving aside the fact that the so-called interference by Russia – quite small in the context of millions of people going to vote – does anyone believe that the U.S. and the EU don't interfere at least as much in these elections to ensure the outcome that they want? You think it's only Russia interfering in the Romanian election and not the EU and the U.S. despite how strategically important Romania is to them, despite the fact that the EU and the U.S. took the position that the election should be nullified, that that candidate should be banned. EU and the U.S. have their fingerprints all over these countries, manipulating and funding opposition groups and demanding certain outcomes. 

And then Russia puts some TikTok videos, supposedly, in support of the candidate they want to win and the whole election has to get validated. “We didn't get the candidate that we wanted. In the name of democracy, we have to cancel that election because the candidate we hate won.” 

[…]

The view of the guardians of democracy, the safeguards of democracy, the people fighting anti-democratic forces is that you can have all the elections you want, just keep voting as long as the candidates most likely to win that they fear and hate most are barred from the ballot so that you cannot vote for them. That's what the democratic world now means, that’s what democracy in Europe, the United States and parts of South America, that's what it means. 

And that is to say nothing of the censorship regime that they impose to accomplish it. EU officials are also very upfront about the fact that they need this censorship regime, under these laws, they passed the Digital Services Act, in the EU, the Online Safety Act, in the U.K. and various laws in Canada and Brazil. They claim they need those because with elections imminent, they have to prevent the spread of disinformation, meaning they have to censor views that they are most afraid of, that they think will help sink them in the election. 

These center-left, center-right, neoliberal establishment orders are justifiably hated by their populations – hated, despised. Even when, on a rare occasion, one of them wins, it's a total fluke, like what happened in the U.K. where the Labor Party under Sir Keir Starmer won. They won with a small percentage of the vote, 34%. It was largely a backlash against the corrupt leadership of the Conservative Party, of the Tories under Boris Johnson and people like that. And they were never popular, this center-left party. As soon as they win, Kier Starmer is hated across Britain. 

So even when they win, it's only a very kind of fluke election. In general, they're so despised, even in the U.K. where they won they're despised, but usually they're so despised now, they know they're despised and in a free and fair election, they cannot win. They cannot win with free speech permitted. And they're cracking down on all of the defining core ingredients of what democracy means and telling you in the most Orwellian way possible that they're doing it because they're the ones who have to save democracy, by which they mean they have to stay in power at all costs. 

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Just since last Friday night, 72 hours ago, several of America's most accomplished academic institutions – including Harvard, Columbia, and NYU – saw increasingly aggressive attempts to punish, fire and silence, not students, but academics and professors, for the crime of opposing Israel: all as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly celebrates his control over the discourse on American campuses. 

We are – according to the Trump administration itself – only at the beginning, nowhere near the end, of the systemic assault on free thought in American academia: the place free thought is supposed to thrive most robustly. What's most amazing of all is that this free speech attack is not being waged in defense of Americans or American values, but instead in defense of a foreign country often cheered most by those who call themselves part of the America First movement, a staggering irony among many. 

Deportations of students who denounced or protested the Israeli war in Gaza continue to gather steam. Another student at the University of Minnesota, in the country legally, was really disappeared by ICE agents yesterday. I use that verb, disappeared, quite deliberately – nobody knows where she is, including the university. Another student, earlier this last week, at Tufts, is now detained and imprisoned by ICE in Louisiana because she wrote an op-ed in her school paper advocating for university divestment of Israel until the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank ends. An op-ed. 

The U.S. government is not grabbing these names out of a hat. They are being fed to them by two extremely sketchy and shadowy groups with deep ties to the Israeli State – the Canary Project and Betar. We'll tell you what we know about these groups and how they select people to go on their McCarthyite blacklist that is now allowing a foreign country to dictate the limits of free speech in the United States, including in academic institutions. 

I try hard to avoid hyperbole in my journalism, my reporting, my analysis, or my commentary. I think it just is very discrediting. It's also a kind of softball just to leap to the most dramatic rhetoric possible the minute you want to make a point about something. Therefore, I say this with all due deliberation, with all consideration, I really do believe the United States is currently engaged in confronting one of the worst free speech crises we've confronted in many years. And I say that as somebody who is extremely vocal and relentless in denouncing the Biden administration's various ways to censor political speech from coercing Big Tech platforms to remove dissent, to imposing all kinds of orthodoxies, to endorsing and financing a disinformation industry deciding to censure. What we're having now is a full-frontal attack on the core rights of free speech, free discourse and academic freedom. That is an incredibly important American value: academic freedom. 

Our country was built on the principles of the Enlightenment. One of the things that Enlightenment thinkers most stood for was the idea that in society generally, but especially in academic institutions, you'd need to have full freedom to question and prod at, and dissect, and deny, and call into question the most cherished orthodoxies. It was crucial to have at least one place in society that was not just tolerant of but encouraging of the most sacred and valued priorities to be questioned and denied. That's what academia is for. That's what academic freedom is about. And all of that is being very rapidly subverted by a Trump administration that came in promising to end censorship and restore the values of free speech in the United States. 

They're doing so for the very obvious reason that they want to prevent American academia and American college campuses, but people in general, from feeling free to criticize the state of Israel or question the U.S. financing of Israel and the relationship with Israel, where we give them billions of dollars and arm them. They want to create a climate where people are afraid of what the consequences will be if they speak negatively or critically about Israel and it's already having major repercussions. 

Sometimes the Trump administration and officials are directly punishing people or demanding censorship. Other times the threat that they have hovering over them is causing self-censorship, which often is one of the most pernicious forms of censorship – people and institutions start anticipating what the punishment might be if they exercise free speech so they voluntarily renounce it to keep the government pleased and happy and at bay. 

Here is the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Trump's former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who just yesterday appeared in public to openly boast about it and celebrate the fact that the Trump administration is supposedly waging a war against bigotry on campuses – just like the liberal left said they were doing – and is curbing speech in the name of stopping hate speech and racism, just like the liberal left was doing. But at least the American liberal left was doing so in the name of protecting people in the country, protecting Americans, protecting America, that was their ostensible goal. This now is a censorship regime really being engineered by a foreign government and its loyalists inside the United States. And they're more than happy to tell you that: 

Video. Benjamin Netanyahu, David Friedman, GPO. March 30, 2025.

So, remember the conservative critique of the censorship regime that came from on college campuses? Liberals would constantly depict whatever speech they disliked as inciting violence against minorities, being racist, transphobic, xenophobic, whatever, and then would say, “No, this isn't speech. This is violence, this is incitement, this is bigotry” and not only would they do that, but a lot of the censorship, including banning President Trump from Facebook and Twitter while he was still in office, were based on the argument that, “No, this isn't speech that he is uttering and spreading, it's incitement to insurrection.” And there's a big difference, they said, between speech and hate speech, or free speech and bigotry, or free speech and incitement. These are all the arguments now being marshaled, not by our leaders, but by a leader of a foreign country who's proudly patting us on the head for engaging in the kind of censorship that he loves and telling other countries they better do the same. Why does this little country that we finance, and it depends on the American taxpayer, have any say in what people can say at college campuses and how we can protest? 

It's so ironic because a lot of conservatives or Trump supporters justify the deportation of students from college campuses by saying, “Well, they're just foreigners, they're guests in our country. Foreigners have no right to comment on our policies, to denounce anything, to protest against anything.” It’s a strange principle, the idea that you lure foreign students to your universities because that's how you get a lot of brain drain into your country – which both Elon Musk and Trump said was necessary when they defended H-1B visas increasing – and then tell them you can stay for eight years and get degrees, you just have to keep your mouth shut about anything political.

 But here you have Benjamin Netanyahu. Not only did he say this, but last week he mocked, denounced and attacked the American judiciary and the American legal system because he's facing a corruption case and wants Americans to think that the persecution of Donald Trump was similar to his persecution, but then also the president of El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, went on to Twitter and just mocked a court order that came from our judiciary saying, “Whoopsie ” – mocked our court system, mocked our legal system. and a lot of people keep saying foreigners have no right to comment on our politics. “We're all, oh, thank you. Thank you, Prime Minister Netanyahu. Thank you, President Bukele, for standing up to the American judiciary.” 

There are all those Israelis applauding. The Trump administration is going to go to war against not anti-Black racism, not misogyny, not transphobia, not xenophobia, not Islamophobia. Who cares about any of those types of bigotries? We're going to let those reign free, because any attempt to stop those on campus, that's censorship, that's woke ideology. David Friedman tells everybody the government is going to do a lot to fight bigotry in the United States – is that the government's role now? – including putting people in prison for saying anything antisemitic – not even antisemitic, but antisemitic in their view. They think that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic. 

These people think that antisemitism doesn't mean denying the Holocaust or talking about the inherent degeneracy of Jews like classic antisemitism, they've expanded radically the definition of that term. In fact, the Trump administration is imposing on various administrations and colleges the requirement that they expand what antisemitism means to include a whole range of common credits of Israel. We showed you that many times. The House actually passed a law to implement and formalize that expanded definition of antisemitism, which actually is implemented in the EU, because they have a lot of hate speech codes that JD Vance went to Europe and said this is antithetical to our values – but that censor in the name of hate speech is exactly what the Trump administration is doing. 

Here's what the Trump administration did to Columbia University, from CNN on March 7:

We went over the letter that came from the Trump administration to Columbia. It’s not just that they demanded, not foreign students, but American students who protested Israel and the Israeli war in Gaza and the Biden administration's policy of financing that war. They demanded that American students, including American Jewish students, be severely punished, suspended and/or expelled. That was one of the Trump administration's demands of Columbia, and they have now started to expel citizens of the United States who participated in those protests. 

On top of that, the Trump administration also demanded that the Columbia Middle East Studies program, which has been for decades a target of Israel's strongest loyalists in the United States – Bari Weiss got her start at Columbia, the anti-cancel culture queen, as a 19 and 20-year old agitating for all sorts of Arab professors or Israel critics to be fired. That was her starting point. Then, at some point, she rebranded herself as a free-speech warrior but never gave up those ideas. 

Now, the Middle East studies program that the Bari Weisses of the world have long aided, has to be put under receivership, meaning someone from outside the department, no longer the chair of the department, controls what their curriculum is, obviously to make sure that it's pro-Israel. Our academic institutions and every professor who works there and everything that is taught must be aligned with the view of the Israeli government and supporters. 

On top of that, they're demanding as well that this expanded hate speech definition of antisemitism, the IHRA definition that we've gone over many times before. You're not allowed to say the Jews killed Jesus, you're not allowed to accuse certain Jewish people of having primary loyalty to Israel, even if you think it's true. A whole long list of things. You can't apply “double standards” to Israel meaning you can't criticize them in a certain way unless you make sure you're criticizing every other country the same. You're not allowed to call Israel a racist endeavor, even though you can say that about every other country freely, including the United States. It is actually, an assault to outlaw Israel critics and protests against Israel, including peaceful ones. 

I'm telling you, right now, so far, the deportations have been confined to people who are green card holders. You're married to an American citizen, your wife is eight months pregnant, your American wife, she's about to give birth, and you get deported because you participated in a protest against Israel, even though you're a permanent resident here. But I'll tell you what is next. I promise you, what is next is that they're going to take American citizens who are naturalized American citizens, like Elon Musk or Melania Trump, people not born in the United States but who came to the United States and became naturalized, they're going to strip them of their citizenship and, because they're no longer citizens, they can be immediately deported, and they're going to deport them for the crime of criticizing Israel. 

As I said, it's already affecting the free speech rights of Americans when you're imposing constraints on academic freedom at colleges. You're obviously affecting not just foreign students if you don't care about that, but also everyone on the campus, including American students, including Jewish students, sacred Jewish students who you want so badly to defend and protect and keep safe. You want to hold them close and hug them. You're also causing an erosion of the free speech rights of substantial minorities of Jewish students and Jews in general, who opposed the Israeli War in Gaza. 

Since October 7, four different Ivy League American presidents have been forced out of their jobs all over the same issue, Israel, and allowing bigotry on campus to thrive – antisemitism. Two of them at Columbia, one at Harvard and one at the University of Pennsylvania. The latest Columbia president was just forced out on Friday, even though she agreed to all the Trump administration's terms. Someone claimed, The Free Press claimed, Bari Weiss's pro-Israel thing claimed, that she had said privately, “Yes, I'm agreeing to these, but I'm going to slow them off. We're not going to just rush and do this.” 

The Trump administration and Israel supporters went ballistic and forced the second university president of Columbia out in a year and replaced her with somebody who actually has appeared on the stage of AIPAC to vow bipartisan loyalty to Israel to talk about the need to keep bipartisan support and financing of Israel. She's a Jewish woman who has appeared at AIPAC, and still, there's already a move to get rid of her, too, because she's insufficiently pro-Israel. You can be a Jewish woman who goes to AIPAC, gets up on the stage, and talks about the importance of keeping bipartisan support for Israel, and still be insufficiently pro-Isreal to the point where the government won't allow you to assume the presidency of Columbia. 

Here from The Wall Street Journal, on Friday:

In America, the government isn't supposed to dictate the curriculum, the administration, the teaching, or what can be done at our lead colleges. That's supposed to be left up to academics and professors. That is what academic freedom means: the ability to teach and to express yourself how you want, free of government coercion and control. This would be like if the Biden administration came to universities and said, “We're going to take away all your funding unless you fire every last conservative. You still have a few conservatives on the campus, they oppose affirmative action, they oppose DEI. We think that's racist. You have to get rid of them.”  Or who says that there are only two genders and that's transphobic and incites violence against trans people, you have to get rid of them. Do you think conservatives would be supporting that and saying, “Oh yeah, that's the role of the government, that is totally fine”? Of course not, they would be screaming that Joe Biden was a tyrant, they should be doing the same now that Trump is doing, which is just in defense of a different group. 

Is this going on a crusade to purge bigotry from American campuses, using a combination of government coercion and control and expanded hate speech codes, what conservatives wanted? Because I had always understood that conservatives were deeply offended by those sorts of things and the reason I thought that was because they'd been screaming that for as long as I can remember. 

One of the weird things, really weird things, is that there are a lot of members of the Republican Party in Congress who are not Jewish but who are more fanatical about Israel than almost every Jewish member of Congress. They love to speak for all Jewish people, they've irrigated to themselves the right to speak for Jewish people. 

Here is Congressman Mike Lawler, of New York, who is not Jewish, despite how much he loves to purport to speak to Jewish people everywhere, kind of the white savior hero who comes down and protects all Jews. So grateful to him, so, so grateful. Kind of like a Robin D'Angelo type, but for Jews. And the new president of Columbia, the third one, is Claire Shipman, who, as I said, is a Jewish woman who has actually been at AIPAC. She's married to Obama's former press secretary, Jay Carney, who's served for the last decade as the spokesperson for Amazon. These are not actually far-left radicals. These are like corporatist types. Claire Shipman is very much pro-Israel. 

But here is Mike Lawler on Friday saying she has to go because she's not Jewish enough. He quotes the tweet of the New York Post. 

She's the third president. She barely is in office like six seconds and he's saying, “You're offensive to all Jewish people. Step down.” Who is Michael Lawler to speak for all Jewish students? Huge numbers of Jewish students participated in those protests, we had them on our show. In fact, so many Jewish students were participating in the protest that they had a Shabbat dinner every Friday night inside the protest encampment. 

Here is Claire Shipman, the new president, who Michael Lawler and many others think is insufficiently pro-Israel to lead Columbia. Here she was on the stage at AIPAC with the Democratic Senator Chris Coons, a virulent supporter of Israel, obviously very bipartisan, and they talked about the need to maintain bipartisan support for AIPAC. 

Here's just a little snippet. 

Video. Claire Shipman, Chris Coons, AIPAC. March 6, 2018.

This is Columbia Spectator, on March 30

She was married to Jay Carney, who served as the White House press secretary under former president Barack Obama. It's a little background on her. This is not some far-left pro-Hamas radical or whatever they're trying to imply she is to force out the third Columbia president in the last seven months over this one foreign country. 

Here is Minouche Shafik, who was testifying before the House and listening to what he had to say about Columbia's administration. 

Video. Minouche Shafik, C-SPAN. April 17, 2024.

I am somebody who has spent eight years, denouncing what I regarded as baseless or excessive attacks on Donald Trump, attempts to malign him and fabrications of scandal. I don't just go around or flexibly criticize the Trump administration. But when I see, as somebody who really does believe in the Constitution, who really does believe in the value of free speech and academic freedom and free discourse and free protest and due process speaking of other issues as well, I'm not going to sit by and watch college campuses have their free speech rights destroyed in service of a foreign government and not say anything. 

The same thing is now spreading to Harvard. This is from today, March 31.

The Trump administration is not threatening to withdraw federal funding for all universities, just the ones that they think are allowing too much anti-Israel speech. 

Let me just read you this quote pretending this is coming from the Biden administration.

This administration [the Biden administration] has proven that we will take swift action to hold institutions accountable if they allow racism against black people, transphobia, or xenophobia to fester. 

[…] [a senior official at the General Services Administration] added. “We will not hesitate to act if Harvard fails to do so.”

Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, was not immediately available for comment. […] (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)

I should add that Harvard's current president is Jewish – and I think it's like six out of the last seven, have been Jewish. Many of their major donors are Jewish, their faculty is filled with people who are Jewish, who hold all kinds of views about Israel, some vehemently pro-Israel like Alan Dershowitz was all those decades he was at Harvard, some critical of Israel mildly but still supportive of Israel, some vocally – it's a diversity of opinion which is what we're supposed to have. 

But he has previously emphasized the importance of federal money to the university’s operation.

[…] “We could not carry out our mission the way we do now without substantial federal research support, nor could we provide the benefits to the nation that we do now without that support,” Dr. Garber said in a December interview with The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper. (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)

Again, this is not studying undergraduate programs. This is funding the most sophisticated medical centers and hospitals and scientific research into cures. This is why we have these kinds of government funding. 

Marc Andreessen, who was one of the people credited correctly with developing the modern internet, in the late 1990s – credited with developing the browser Netscape that was then sold to Microsoft – has now become a very vocal Trump supporter. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has people placed all around the Trump administration. He spent time at Mar-a-Lago, a lot of time, in the transition. He's a Trump supporter.

He gave an interview to the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, on January 17, just a few days before the administration was to take office, the Trump Administration. The title was: “How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms” - Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism. (The New York Times. January 17, 2025.)

But one of the things Marc Andreessen pointed out in this interview was that the reason the United States developed the internet, the reason the United States became a leader of the internet, the reason Silicon Valley exists and that drove so much American wealth is because the U.S. government-funded so many academic research institutions to do research into the internet, into browsing, into all of that. That's why we fund American academic institutions because it produces innovation that benefits the entire country. The U.S. government is not forced to fund research institutes at universities but it would cripple innovation in the United States if you did that. 

But that's not even what's happening here. The Trump administration is not defunding American academic institutions. They're using that funding as leverage to force them to be less permissive about criticism of Israel on their campus. And they're all complying because as the President of Harvard said, we wouldn't be the leading academic institute that we were if we lost federal funding. It's not the classroom that makes us the leading Institute. It is that we can attract the leaders of each field, knowing that they'll have the opportunity to engage in research that leads to cures and to innovations, that then benefit the entire country. The Trump administration is not defunding universities. They're just using it as leverage to suppress speech they dislike. 

Here from the Jewish News Syndicate on March 31, 2025, this happened on Friday night as well:

Head of Harvard’s Middle East studies center told to step down by end of year

Rabbi David Wolpe, a former member of Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group, said that the change in leadership was “good news.” (Jewish News Syndicate. March 31, 2025.)

Just like they're changing the control of Columbia's Middle East study program, they're doing the same at Harvard now, so that people like Rabbi David Wolpe can step in, just like Benjamin Netanyahu was celebrating and like David Friedman was threatening, to outlaw criticism of Israel. They've always been very concerned that American academic institutions were the epicenter of protests against Israel. And this is not the first time, by the way, that disruptive protests have happened across American college campuses. It was one of the things that helped stop the Vietnam War. Protests were often violent and disruptive at colleges across the United States in the '60s against the Vietnam War in favor of the civil rights movement, far more so than these protests were. 

One of the things that scares Israel and its supporters so much is that the epicenter of activism against the apartheid regime in South Africa that helped to bring it down was a protest movement throughout American campuses demanding that their schools divest from South Africa to bring down the apartheid regime. And that's why Israel wants to make it illegal. In many places in Europe, they've done so and have started to do so in the United States, too, to advocate a boycott of Israel.

 So, Israel looks at the United States and they're like, where do we need to go to stop this growing sentiment against our country? Oh, well, TikTok. They allow a lot of Israel criticism. We need to ban that. The EDL said ban that, and that's what caused enough votes from the Democratic Party to finally ban TikTok – not in fear of China, but a fear that after October 7, TikTok was allowing too much pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel speech. So, they got rid of TikTok, or at least, at some point, they're going to force a sale or ban it. And then college campuses are the other place, and that's what their target is. It's a foreign country targeting the civil liberties, free speech rights and academic freedom of our country, which have long been crucial to our country's prosperity. 

If all that wasn't enough, here at NYU, as reported by the Canadian outlet CTV News on March 30, the headline: “Climate of Fear’: Montreal Doctor Says NYU Cancelled Her Presentation”

Dr. Joanne Liu, the former international president of Doctors Without Borders said the abrupt cancellation speaks to the “climate of fear” universities in the U.S. are now living under in which they preemptively “self-censor” themselves to avoid retaliation. (CTV News. March 30, 2025.)

Doctors Without Borders is an organization that goes around to the most deprived and repressed places, usually in war zones, and they have volunteer doctors from around the world who go and work on the people who are facing starvation or need surgery because of bombs. It's like one of the most noble things you could do, become a doctor and then join Doctors Without Borders. 

She was going to change her speech to appease NYU and, particularly, the Trump administration. She wasn't going to criticize the cuts to USAID quite harshly. She would tone down her rhetoric about how many people were killed in Gaza. I don't know if she was going to dilute the numbers to please the government. But even after she offered to edit the slides in her speech, she said the university apologized and said they had to cancel.

We have covered the individual cases of students who are legally in the United States who in secret, the State Department and Marco Rubio revoked their green card or their visa, meaning they weren't given notice to come and contest it or prove they didn't do anything wrong – they were just canceled summarily – and they instantly become illegal in the country and then they send ICE agents to accost them in their apartments or on the street, detain them and grab them, put them in a detention facility, and then ship them to Louisiana. Even though they have no connection with Louisiana: the government's hoping that Louisiana has more conservative judges who will defer to the Trump administration and deport people even if it's for their free speech rights. 

The government is not collecting its own lists. They're relying on pro-Israel activist groups. Two in particular. 

So, here's The New York Times on what happened. There you see the headline:

Federal Government Detains International Student at Tufts

The university was told that the student’s visa had been terminated, its president said in a late-night email to students and faculty members.

The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, had a valid student visa as a doctoral student at Tufts, according to a statement from her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai. Ms. Ozturk, who is Muslim, was heading out to break her Ramadan fast with friends Tuesday night when she was detained by agents from the Department of Homeland Security near her apartment in Somerville, Mass., Ms. Khanbabai said.

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her,” the lawyer said. “No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of.”

A statement attributed to a senior spokesman for Homeland Security claimed on Wednesday that Ms. Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of” Hamas considered “grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.” (The New York Times. March 26, 2025.)

Now, I think it's important to note here that just like you'll be called antisemitic if you criticize Israel too much, you'll also be called pro-terrorist or pro-Hamas if you oppose the Israeli war in Gaza, or question American funding and financing of Israel, or why the American taxpayer has to pay for Israel's wars. You'll immediately be called pro-terrorist or pro-Hamas. And this is a tactic from the war on terror that Bush and Cheney used all the time. If you said, hey, you're imprisoning people in Guantánamo and elsewhere indefinitely with no due process, and a lot of the people you're accusing have turned out to be innocent, shouldn't you give them a hearing? They would say, “You are pro-terrorist. Why are you defending terrorists?” 

I get called pro-Hamas every day, even though I've never uttered a single peep of praise or support for Hamas, just like I haven’t for Putin. I'm called pro-Putin all the time. It's the tactic. I was called pro-terrorist when I was opposing the War on Terror and the civil liberties abuses. 

When they say pro-Hamas, they don't mean someone praises Hamas or justifies Hamas, all you have to do is criticize Israel, and that's enough to be called pro-Hamas. 

Here is the Washington Post, and this video circulated everywhere, showing how chilling this detention was. Remember, this is a person legally inside the United States who just gets accosted. Notice how her phone is taken while she's using it, which will enable Homeland Security then to look in her phone and find out who she's talking to, find out everything about her with no warrants. Watch what happens. 

Video. The Washington Post, Tufts University. March 27, 2025.

You see an unmarked car that pulls up and just plainclothes officers, not even identified, get out. You wouldn't have any idea they were plain close. Ironically, they're wearing masks, even though the Trump administration is demanding that protesters get banned from wearing masks, and now they're costing her. She has her phone, and they just grab her. She has no idea who these people are. They could be anybody. She's a Ph.D. student. They grabbed her phone, forcibly grabbed her phone, and then they surrounded her and they detained her. She says, “Can I just speak to the cops?” And they say, “We are the police.” She had no idea that she was being detained by the police because they were in plain clothes, they have unmarked cars, Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in the student paper criticizing university leaders for their stance on the war in Gaza. That's her crime. 

I mean, this looks like the most dystopian, repressive country you can think of, where you write an op-ed, you're a law-abiding citizen, you're a PhD student, you've never been charged with a crime in your life, and then a bunch of Homeland Security agents descend upon you, grab your phone, and then grab you, and put you in a prison, and ship you to Louisiana, a state you've never been to, have no connection with because they don't like an op-ed that you wrote? Not even the government doesn't even bother to claim that she did anything other than write the op-ed. 

Here is the Assistant Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin, on March 26:

First of all, she has never, in her life, there's zero evidence, uttered a peep of support for Hamas. We don't even know that she participated in any protests. All we know is that she wrote an op-ed that is the only basis for her detention that anybody has cited, and there's nothing remotely in this op-bed that could be construed as supporting Hamas.

Notice this slimy rhetoric that Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. That is an absolute lie. Hamas is an organization devoted to one cause and purpose only, which is defending Gaza and Palestinians from what they perceive as aggression by Israel. They've never engaged in terrorism in the United States or targeted American citizens. This is one of the things that the Israeli supporters try to say about why the United States should go fight Israel's wars, that, oh, one of the remaining hostages, one of the only living remaining hostage, he was American, is still in Hamas custody. 

Do you know why he ended up in Hamas custody, this American citizen? Because he left the United States to go to Israel, and he joined a foreign army, the IDF, and he was in uniform, in a tank, when Hamas took him. Usually, we'd call that a prisoner of war. He's an active-duty soldier. But the idea that if you're an American citizen and you go join some foreign army and as part of your fighting in that army, you get captured, now the United States has a responsibility to wage war to rescue you. 

Obviously, if they join the American military and that happens, of course, the United States has a responsibility, but not when you go fight in a foreign army. They're using this, they're exploiting this to say, “Oh look, they are targeting Americans too.” They had a bunch of Thai citizens there. Do you think they're targeting Thailand? These are people who are in Israel. 

Here's Marco Rubio when being asked about what the justification is for having deported this Turkish PhD student: 

Video. Marco Rubio, C-SPAN. March 27, 2025.

She didn't do any of that. This is a completely deceitful statement designed to mask what they're actually doing. They promised mass deportations of people in the country illegally. They're not giving that to you. Joe Biden deported more people in these two months of last year than Donald Trump did. Obama deported way more. The immigration group's called Obama the Deporter-in-Chief because of how many people he deported. 

They have closed the border almost entirely. It's down 94%. Sometimes the deportation count comes from deporting people when they're detained at the border. But there's nothing even remotely like mass deportations taking place of people in the United States illegally. Their priority is not even people in the United States illegally. Their priority is people who are in the United States who committed the ultimate crime of criticizing Israel and they're lying to justify it. 

Everybody knows she didn't vandalize anything. No one suggests that she did anything illegal, anything aggressive, anything violent. The only reason she ended up on these lists of pro-Israel groups that are dictating to the U.S. government who can and cannot stay in the United States is because she wrote this op-ed. 

I want to show you that op-ed in a second, just to let you decide if you think it's anything radical, let alone remotely pro-Hamas or glorifying terrorism, other than unless you think that criticizing Israel or opposing Israel is inherently pro-terrorist, which is what a lot of people think. They just don't usually admit it. 

Rubio’s claims are all false claims. False claims. Some of the leading protesters at Columbia who occupied Hamilton Hall were American Jewish students who are now expelled because the Trump administration required it. So, congratulations on protecting American Jews by getting them expelled from college for protesting. Fantastic. Jews all over are very grateful.

 Their priority is to protect Israel from criticism and activism and none of the people who have been removed, certainly not the ones who have become controversial, did anything remotely like vandalize building. This is all Marco Rubio's fabrications. 

Here is the criminal op-ed that this student wrote, along with three other students, at Tufts. And the headline is:

Try again, President Kumar: Renewing calls for Tufts to adopt March 4 TCU Senate resolutions (The Tufts Daily. March 26, 2025.)

On March 4, the Tufts Community Union Senate passed 3 out of 4 resolutions demanding that the University acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, apologize for University President Sunil Kumar’s statements, disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel. These resolutions were the product of meaningful debate by the Senate and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law.

Unfortunately, the University’s response to the Senate resolutions has been wholly inadequate and dismissive of the Senate, the collective voice of the student body. … Although graduate students were not allowed by the University into the Senate meeting, which lasted for almost eight hours, our presence on campus and financial entanglement with the University via tuition payments and the graduate work that we do on grants and research makes us direct stakeholders in the University’s stance.

We reject any attempt by the University or the Office of the President to summarily dismiss the role of the Senate and mischaracterize its resolution as divisive. … We, as graduate students, affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people and reject the University’s mischaracterization of the Senate’s efforts.

We urge President Kumar and the Tufts administration to meaningfully engage with and actualize the resolutions passed by the Senate. (The Tufts Daily. March 26, 2025.)

Is that like terrorist greed? Is that something that should result in your deportation, that you express views as a graduate student in a Tufts newspaper? A community in which you've been invited to participate, not just to study and keep your mouth shut. There's no free country in the world where that's the rule for entering the country. 

Again, the government, Marco Rubio, is not finding these people. Homeland Security is not finding them, ICE is not finding them. ICE isn't even looking for them, they're here legally. They only become illegal when Marco Rubio secretly revokes their green card or their visa because they criticize Israel. So, how do they know where to find these people? 

There are two incredibly shady pro-Israel groups connected to Israel. Typically, their funding is completely anonymous. There's been reporting on where they get funding. Who they are even is anonymous. One of them is the Canary Mission, and they have been around now for a decade. If a student expresses in a classroom criticism of Israel, they take the student's name and put them on a website that has been highly funded so that it's the first Google result. If you enter that student's name when they go apply for work, it'll be, here's a list of all the anti-Semites on American campuses, while they're doxing students and professors and putting their name on the internet, these cowards will not say or identify themselves, who's behind this Canary mission. They have been quite boastful of the fact that their list is the one Homeland Security and the State Department is using to determine who gets removed from the country. 

In other words, pro-Israel fanatics are dictating to the U.S. government who can and cannot stay in this country based on whether they love Israel or not, that is the literal truth of what is happening. I just don't understand how anybody who claimed to believe in free speech or the values of free discourse or academic freedom cannot be anything but enraged by this. Here's the Canary mission on March 27, boasting of their work to have her deported.

They’re claiming credit. And then here is what they have to say about her. There you see:

This is the kind of thing they do. They put the person's picture, their name, and they pay a lot of money to promote the website to make sure that it becomes the first Google search. So obviously, it's a blacklist, like a McCarthyite list, and they label someone a terrorist and pro-Hamas simply because they oppose Israel. 

So, on their dossier that they say is what caused her deportation, they're admitting the primary offense or primary transgression is publishing that op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that they disliked because it was critical of Israel. And now the government is obeying these pro-Israel groups on who to deport, not based on crimes they committed or property they destroyed or people they harassed or attacked, but based on their ideas about one foreign country, published in a very professional, very moderately stated op-ed. 

Here's another one of the groups that is taking credit for it as well: Betar Worldwide. It is a radical pro-Israel group, considered radical even in Israel. And they too took credit:

That's where the government's getting these names from, from these very sketchy Israel-connected groups of people they want out of the country for criticizing Israel. 

Here's Tammy Bruce, the Department of State spokesperson being asked about all of this and here's what she said. 

Video. Tammy Bruce, US Department of State. March 31, 2025.

So, these groups are out there taking credit. These groups, by the way, only have one cause, one mission: devotion to Israel. The United States and Americans are not part of the agenda, just this foreign country of Israel. And they're boasting about the fact that they're the ones who are telling Homeland Security and the State Department who to deport. When asked about it, the State Department won't deny that, they won't even confirm. They won't say how they're getting these names. Tammy Bruce refused to say whether Betar and the Canary Mission, as we know they are because they say so, are giving these lists to the U.S. government – Betar basically gave a thumbs up to her, said “Good job,” a little pat on the head again from an Israeli group so many people in Washington crave and will do anything for. 

Here is the Jewish newspaper Forward, on March 10, doing a little profile:

Jewish groups targeted Columbia grad Mahmoud Khalil — then ICE arrested him

Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus called to #DeportMahmoudKhalil days before immigration agents detained him

Ross Glick, a pro-Israel activist who previously shared a list of campus protesters with federal immigration authorities, said that he was in Washington, D.C., for meetings with members of Congress during the Barnard library demonstration and discussed Khalil with aides to Sens. Ted Cruz and John Fetterman who promised to “escalate” the issue. He said that some members of Columbia’s board had also reported Khalil to officials.

Glick, the activist who discussed the Khalil case with Senate staffers, was until recently connected to a far-right Jewish group called Betar, which began compiling a list last fall of international students involved in the protests and shared the database with the Trump administration. (Forward. March 10, 2025.)

Here is one of the things that Betar sayd in their Twitter account, on February 20, 2025. You see there is a tweet from Laila Al-Arian, who's been on our show before and they comment:

You can blame Hamas, which I'm sure some of you do but any decent person by definition would lament the loss of this huge number of babies who didn't reach their first birthday and had their lives extinguished in this war. Not Betar who dictates to the U.S. government who can and cannot stay, they said on top of this list: “It's not enough, not enough. We demand blood in Gaza.” They looked at this endless list, these degenerates, these morally burdened creeps – you have to be a complete moral degenerate to look at a list of infants killed in a war, a long, long list, and say “It's not enough, we want more, we want more blood in Gaza.” That's who's in charge of deciding who loves Israel enough or not to stay in the United States. 

 These are the very noble people who are determining our immigration policy, not for illegal immigrants, for legal immigrants, whose crime is criticizing the foreign country that, for whatever reason, has an immense amount of influence in our own. Even though we pay for their wars and subsidize their society, it probably should be the other way around, we have a lot of influence on their country, but that's not how it works. 

And then the New York Attorney General issued this statement on March 13 of this year:

Re: Betar US — a/k/a Betar Zionist Organization

Dear Ali Abunimah,

I am writing in response to your correspondence to the Attorney General's Charities Bureau concerning Betar US - Betar Zionist Organization.

… [We] have contacted Betar US — Betar Zionist Organization Inc. to notify them of the requirement to register with the Charities Bureau. (Office of the Attorney General, NY. March 13, 2025.)

Everything about them is just very sketchy. They will not say where their funding comes from, they will not say who they are, while they drag everybody else's name into the spotlight and now have control over the U.S. government's deportation policies. 

[…]

 That's where we're headed. I know that there are a lot of people who are fine with it because they prioritize and revere Israel. And it's very, very difficult to get yourself to care about free speech when the views that you most hate are being targeted as opposed to the views that you agree with or feel an affinity with. But if you don't step up and defend free speech when it's those views that you most hate that are being silenced and punished and constrained and targeted, you don't actually believe in free speech at all. 

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!

I've always thought that the ability or the obligation of a journalist to interact with their readers or their viewers is one of the most positive developments of internet-based journalism. It used to be that journalists would just speak from the hill and pass down their articles as though they were scrolls handed down from God to Moses and nobody could ever respond. 

The internet has enabled a much different means of interacting with your readers where you get questions, challenges, critiques and all sorts of things like that. So, we're happy that we've chosen Friday nights to institute this Q&A where we get questions from our Locals members. We have an excellent sampling today, as we typically do. 

The first question is from Kevin Kotwas and he wrote this:

I think one of the problems in talking about DOGE is that, on the one hand, there has not been a lot of transparency in terms of what they've been doing. They've tried to provide some transparency, but some of the information ended up unreliable or inaccurate which is I guess to be expected when a brand new government agency starts doing work that has never really been done before then, on the other hand, you have enormous amounts of hysteria and histrionics about what they are doing as well and that has not been balanced by DOGE explaining or defending itself. 

Last night Elon Musk and key members of the DOGE team went on to Fox News. About eight of them spent 30 to 35 minutes being questioned by Fox anchor Bret Baier about exactly what their work is. I think it's worth watching for those of you who haven't seen it. It gives a different impression in terms of, at least, their mindset, their methods and their objectives than have been presented by the media. But I still think it is a brand-new project that deserves a lot of scrutiny and not just blind applause because people have Elon Musk or the Trump administration and want to cheer for whatever they're doing. 

I do think there's also a critique that you can want to cut excess spending and excess bureaucracy, which the U.S. government undoubtedly has, but at the same time, if you do it recklessly, you can produce a lot of negative outcomes. I think Elon felt like he's had success doing that with Twitter, and he did. He went in and cut something like 80% of the workforce. I remember very well that a bunch of tech experts and media people were saying, “Oh, Twitter's just gonna stop working. Within two months, it's gonna be unstable, and then it's just going to stop working,” and it works as well as it ever has, there's really no operational disruption to it, and I'm sure he's done that in other companies before. 

As for the broader critique that the question raises, let's call it the ideology of Silicon Valley, which I do think is aptly described as being transhumanist, having really kind of a quasi-religious view. There was just an interview with Bill Gates where he was asked whether he thinks that humans are going to become obsolete in terms of the work that humanity does and the work the planet needs. He basically said, “Yeah, I think most of this work that we need done and do now will be done by a combination of AI and also robots” and humans were almost talked about by him as though they were extraneous, kind of unnecessary almost, besides the point, just beings that will lay around and, I don't know, consume things and maybe have leisure time, but be liberated from work because we're not really competent to do work as well as the technology that Silicon Valley has been developing. 

And then when Mark Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan – I had a two-hour root canal and I listened to the entire thing and I'm not sure which was worse – Mark Zuckerberg’s view was very much that not necessarily that human beings are going to be eliminated, but that we're gonna start merging with the technology that they're developing. Instead of having a phone that we hold in our hand, we will have vision goggles implanted in our eyes, eventually, there'll be ways of technologically drilling into our brain to connect this kind of technology so that our brains just automatically have it. You don't need a device anymore. He talked about experiments they're already doing for medical purposes to cure paralysis or to try and obviously achieve noble goals that involve understanding the brain – how to manipulate the brain, how to use technology to merge it into the brain – so that neurological functions can be enhanced. 

Those kinds of things are promising, but you can very quickly see the dystopian vision that might lead to – and I do think there has been this kind of techno-feudal or transhumanist as the question I think aptly described it, an ideology that has become pervasive in Silicon Valley. 

I just don't know if I would attribute all that to DOGE. I'm not sure it's DOGE that is responsible for that or even after two months of being guided by that kind of vision. I think they're more about just kind of tearing out parts of the government which has been a long-time dream of the American right. 

Ronald Reagan talked about things like closing the Department of Education massively and he just could never get it done. Whatever else you want to say about the Trump administration they did come in with very clear plans, very clear ideas of how they wanted to do the things they went and said about doing. 

So, this is always the case anytime you have a revolution, and I'm using this term loosely, you can hate the government and believe the government is deeply corrupt and therefore support revolutionary sentiments, and just uprooting a corrupt government or a repressive government is in and of itself worthwhile because without a revolution you know it will continue indefinitely. But there's always the risk that the revolution replaces the horrific status quo with something worse. That's always a danger. And that kind of creates a human inertia: let me just stick with what I know. And I do think that part of the sentiment that makes people fear Trump is that he is, and they perceive him as being, a radical deviation from how things are being done. Even people dissatisfied with the status quo are afraid of change. I think human beings instinctively and in general are afraid of change. We always prefer bad things that we're familiar with to the unknown, which promises to be better or worse but just the fact that it's unknown makes us fear it more. And this is always how I've seen Donald Trump – and several questions are coming about Trump and what he's done and how it aligns or doesn't align with my expectations – but I've cited this quote from Seymour Hersh many times before that says that Trump basically acts as a “circuit breaker.” 

 So, if you look at the way Washington works, controlled by massive corporations, by corporatist interests, by the military-industrial complex, by the intelligence community, by the posture of endless war, it already has hollowed out the country, put our country in trillions of dollars’ worth of debt, has made the United States be perceived with great hostility in most places around the world, made us rely on constant military force and wars and bombing campaigns as a way to advance our national interest, has been overwhelmingly oriented toward serving the interest of large corporate interest at the expense of pretty much everybody else in the country. I mean, this is part of the MAGA critique. 

So, if you believe that – and I do – and if you believe that that status quo has been extremely destructive and corrupt, as I do, to say nothing of all these relationships with global institutions and the like, and the destruction of the credibility of most of our institutions, from science to media to politics, and essentially everything in between. It's hard to say, “Oh, I oppose something that will go and just kind of smash it all to pieces,” even if I don't know what's gonna be rebuilt in its place, and it's possible that what's rebuilt in its plate might actually make those bad attributes worse. But breaking things at least creates an opportunity. There's opportunity in chaos, there's opportunity in change. And so, the floor might be lower, but the ceiling is much, much higher. 

I'm not willing to say yet that DOGE, specifically, or the Trump movement in general, is accelerating our path to techno-feudalism or transhumanism. I think that's a path we've been on because of how influential Silicon Valley has become but I also will say that one of the things I do think has gotten overlooked because MAGA and Trump have so hyped this idea that they're opposed to the military-industrial complex, the intelligence community, is we kind of have a changing of the guard of the military-industrial complex, so, maybe like Boeing is out, and Raytheon is out, and Lockheed Martin is out – although I haven't seen much of that but maybe they're coming out – but then you have just these newer versions, like Palantir which is inextricably linked to the intelligence community and has become a critical, essential part of the Trump administration. They are the leaders in things like mass surveillance and launching wars, just go listen to Alex Karp and go read an article he's written or an interview where he conducted, or go watch one, and you'll see what that agenda is and people like him are extremely embedded into the Trump administration and I do think that's a serious danger. 

I just think that after two months of hitting the panic button or drawing very widespread wide-ranging conclusions, I think is premature, despite the fact that I think those dangers are real but I think the potential is real as well. 

All right; the next question is from the Mill Man who asked:

I think it's a very interesting point and I would say that question describes the approach that I have been trying to take, in my own journalism, and kind of the areas that I have focused on are kind of common ground between populist left and populist right, anti-establishment left and anti-establishment right, which includes not only opposition to the U.S. financing and arming the Israeli destruction of Gaza, but also the U.S. financing and fueling the war in Ukraine and just the general militaristic war, endless war posture that the United States is on that I think does know Americans any good, except for a tiny sliver of elites who run these industries that profit so much at everybody else's expense. 

I do think that had these protests been more generalized against the U.S. war machine and heightened Ukraine as an example as well, it may have attracted a broader base of support. But let me just say a couple of things about that because I'm not entirely sure in this case if that's true. I understand it in theory, I think it has potential but I think it's so important not to underestimate the enormous hold that Israel has on large swaths of our political spectrum. Not just our political spectrum, but American conservatism and even large parts of MAGA. 

In fact, it is often the case, I really do believe, that a lot of these sentiments in defense of Israel are even stronger than the sentiments in defense of the United States. If you go back and read “The Israel Lobby” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, from 2007, it details a lot of that, but I think one of the things that has happened is – I'll just explain in Brazil. 

Brazil used to be an overwhelmingly Catholic country, the largest Catholic country in the world, and it still is very Catholic, at least in the sense of who identifies as a Catholic, but Catholics tend not to be particularly devout or driven by religion, it's just kind of a religion of Brazil like Christianity is the religion of the United States. Some people are very devout, but by and large, it would be a secular society with kind of Christian-informed values or Catholic-informed values. 

But over the last three or four decades, there's been the emergence of a very passionate and intense evangelical movement. There have always been evangelicals around, but it's only quite recently that evangelicals have been convinced that one of their highest religious duties is to politically support Israel and support everything it does and want to fund it with great enthusiasm. So, if you go to a protest or a march or demonstration organized by the Brazilian right, you'll see at least as many Israel flags as you will Brazilian flags because Israel plays such a defining central role in how right-wing evangelical politics are expressed. 

There's this – just as a side note – it’s an interesting anecdote where this drug gang that kind of rules the favelas, they constantly fight for expansion and the head of this gang is devoutly evangelical, demands that everybody in communities that he runs be evangelical. He united a bunch of the communities that he gained power over, and he called it the Complex of Israel. All over the place, there are stars of David and Israeli flags, they use the uniforms of the IDF. That is how central Israel has become in the evangelical mindset. 

And so, if you look at a major part of the U.S. Congress, obviously, you have American Jews who are inculcated from birth to revere Israel and then you have national security hawks who just see Israel as an important instrument or extension of American power. But you also have huge parts of the MAGA movement that are composed of evangelicals who will tell you outright they don't want to give money to any other country in the world, they don't want to defend any other countries in the world except for Israel and that's because God has mandated that they defend Israel. Some of them believe that Israel has to be unified under the control of the Jews for the Messiah to return at which time he will consign all Jews because they don't accept the divinity of Jesus to eternal damnation but Jews are happy to accept that support because they don't actually believe that will happen. But others just have a more generalized view of the book of Exodus and some of the chapters of what we call the Old Testament, that God promised Israel to the Jews and said that whoever defends and supports and blesses the Jewish people in Israel will themselves be blessed. 

So, we're in a genuine religious conviction, on the part of evangelicals, or a deeply embedded, extremely indoctrinated identification with Israel among American Jews, then it isn't so easy to just say, “Oh yeah, they're going to start being okay with these protests against the Israeli destruction of Gaza as long as we just throw Ukraine in as well.” I mean, I see the emotion, I see emotion in people when you talk about this issue. It's unlike almost any other. For a lot of people, this is the red line, the single greatest issue. And not a small number of people. A large number of people. 

Obviously there are a lot of Jews who are highly critical of Israel, they participated and led the protests. Obviously, this show hosted by myself is highly critical of Israel, and I was taught all the same things about Israel that other American Jews were, from birth, and there are evangelicals who don't mix their religion with their politics, but I'm saying in general, it is such a dominant issue. 

You can pretty much, in these factions, take any position at all, and they'll be fine with it. You can disagree with them about almost anything, you disagree with them about this, and they will write you off because this, this foreign country, is the highest and most sacred duty. 

And it's so ironic that there are so many people who identify as America First for whom this is true. Obviously, huge parts of MAGA and America First don't see Israel this way, but many, many of them do. 

The other problem is that there are a lot of people on the left, broadly speaking – by the left I kind of mean the left-wing of the Democratic Party; I don't mean like the hardcore leftists who would never support the Democratic party. I mean like mainstream people who are called left, like the Bernie Sanders, AOC, even a little inward toward the mainstream who get called the left. They unanimously almost overwhelmingly support Ukraine and support the NATO war in Ukraine and want the United States to continue to fund it. 

So, if you were to introduce a Ukraine element into these protests, it would alienate a huge number of people who don't support that at all. These should combine. I absolutely agree that opposing the U.S. financing, and funding, and arming, and diplomatic protection of Israel should lead you to the conclusion that the U.S. should stop doing the same thing concerning Ukraine. Obviously, people would say, “They're totally different, Israel is the aggressor, and Ukraine is a victim of aggression, so we should defend the victims of aggression, which is Ukraine.” People have different views on that as well, but it's just a difficult group of views to mix because it would alienate so many people one way or the other, and I'm not sure if the focus was on Israel or room was a major part, it would become tolerable for all those people for whom Israel plays such a vital role. 

And then I guess the last thing I would say about this is that I don't think you compare the war in Ukraine to the war in Gaza. They're not even remotely comparable in terms of civilians killed, in terms of the destruction that it's ushering in, in terms of the humanitarian crimes and the atrocities and the war criminality. 

I think that what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, especially with the resumption now of this bombing campaign when there was barely anything left to bomb, just the absolute indiscriminate slaughter and killing, the complete destruction of civilian life in Gaza, blowing up every hospital, every university – and I know all the argument is Hamas was there, etc. – but I think that what we're witnessing in Gaza is by far the worst atrocity, certainly, of the century. I could make a case in my lifetime. 

There's been a lot of massacres and slaughters in the last several decades but I would certainly say that about this century because there are just zero constraints of any kind that are observed. Zero regard for human life among Palestinians, zero. And it's been so sustained, the Gazans are basically helpless, they don't have an army, they don't have NATO behind them, they don't have aircraft being shipped to them, they have very primitive weapons that make them able sort of to fight a guerrilla campaign, but not to guard against it. It's basically a sitting duck population, a helpless population. 

So, I understand why people felt a particular need to go out and protest that, especially because our government is who is paying for it, who is arming it, who is diplomatically shielding it. 

So, it's a complicated question, but I do wish that people would be more open to the idea that there really is huge common ground among left-wing populists and right-wing populists and the problem is that people on the right, including right-wing populists, are taught to hate anything on the left and left-wing populists are taught to hate everything on the right. That was why my attempt to examine and foster this common ground on issues like trade and war and intelligence community and military-industrial complex and corporatism alienated so many people on the left. The idea that there could be anybody on the right who has views that they could connect to or that they can work with is so anathema to how people have been indoctrinated to think, they just stay over here in their separate corners. And so yes, I wish there was a lot more thinking along these lines, but unfortunately, we're pretty far away from that. 

All right, next question, Bently 2:

All that is way too sweeping, I think, with respect to being able to just say yes or no to. I understand the sentiment. I guess I would acknowledge that some of the methods and tactics that the Trump administration has resorted to almost immediately have surprised me, just in terms of how extreme they are, like deporting green card holders who are married to American citizens or PhD students because they wrote an op-ed against Israel, creating this framework that anybody should be afraid of criticizing Israel because the U.S. government is showing that they will punish you. And it's not just foreign citizens either, by the way. It's also Americans as well. The Trump administration, when they submitted their demands to Columbia, demanded as a condition to even talking about receiving the funding that was frozen, they required Columbia to severely suspend or expel everybody who participated anyway in the protest against the Israeli war in Gaza. And as a result, Americans – American-born Americans – have been expelled because the government demanded it.

 The government has also demanded the implementation of a radically expanded definition of antisemitism that puts you in violation of campus rules when you criticize Israel in any way prohibited by this radical definition promulgated by Israel and adopted by the EU. So, it's not just foreign students who are being deported, it's also American institutions, American academia, American students who are being punished by this attempt to outlaw and criminalize and intimidate people out of criticizing Israel. 

So, that is one thing that I did not expect them to do but at the same time, you can look at other things that they're doing that are shocking to me, like invoking the Alien Enemies Act to try to proclaim that the U.S. is at war with a small violent group of thugs and gang members from Venezuela. We're at war like we were in World War I or World War II, or the War of 1812. You can now invoke wartime powers enacted in the late 18th century that have barely been enacted throughout American history and even when it was, the people who they wanted to deport got hearings to be able to demonstrate that they weren't Nazi sympathizers, weren't actual threats to the national security. 

The Trump administration is not just deporting people with no hearing of any kind. They're not deporting them at all. Deporting means sending them back to their home. They're “deporting” by throwing them into a uniquely repressive, abusive prison in El Salvador, paying for them to be in prison and being kept there indefinitely to the point where El Salvador is saying they may stay here for life all without a shred of due process, some process to make sure that we're not imprisoning for life people who are totally innocent. 

I do think I will acknowledge that the speed of this stuff and the aggression with which it's carried out did surprise me, I probably would have said I don't think the Trump administration would do that at all, or certainly not as quickly as they've done. At the same time, Trump said repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would do this. You can watch speeches where he says, “I'm going to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and mass deport people, and we're going to go after foreign students and revoke their visas who participated in a protest against Israel. 

So, I think these things are anti-democratic, I think they're a violation of the Bill of Rights. I expect or at least hope, and I would say expect, at least in some cases, that our federal courts, including the Supreme Court, will rule that some of these things are a violation of the Constitution. 

What I have a problem with is this binary assessment that Trump is a severe threat to democracy because you can look at the Biden administration and I do think many things that they did, including their systemic campaign to have the CIA, Homeland Security and the NIH bully, pressure and coerce Big Tech to ban dissent from their pronouncements on things like COVID in Ukraine, was as unconstitutional and as severe of a threat to our Bill of Rights as anything the Trump administration is doing. I don't think you can say one is worse than the next. 

So, we're two months into the administration, two months, just a little over, and I don't think I've been coy about the serious alarm that I have about many of the things the Trump administration has been doing – re-initiating the war in Gaza, restarting and then escalating the bombing campaign in Yemen using rules of engagement that assign almost zero value to civilian life in Yemen, to say nothing of these deportations, these attacks on American institutions. I think the attempt to force law firms to restructure their pro-bono program to promise hundreds of millions of dollars of free work in defense of the Trump administration, demanding that they do pro-bono work on antisemitism specifically, like a DEI program – just today, earlier today, Skadden, Arps, one of the biggest, most powerful firms on the planet that wasn't even targeted yet with an executive order by Trump but preemptively reached an agreement with the White House that was chilling and creepy, where they're promising not to do certain kinds of pro-bono work, promising to do other types in a way that aligns with Trump's political agenda, forcing major law firms to submit to and promise to work for free for Trump's political vision. 

I do think a lot of these things are creepy and threatening and anti-democratic. But I also did shows before the election, several, on how many people on the right, many in the Trump circle who proclaim to believe in free speech actually have a gigantic Israel exception. I did an entire show on what the likely influence of Miriam Adelson's $100 million of the Trump campaign would be. I highlighted how Trump officials and people around him were vowing to deport students for the crime of criticizing Israel and protesting Israel. 

So, it's not like my vision of Trump pre-election was this kind of anti-war pacifist, fully devoted defender of free speech and civil liberties. There are obvious dangers to Trump. I just think that the rhetoric of depicting Biden, or George W. Bush, or Obama as these kinds of beacons of nobility and devotees of American democracy in contrast to Trump, who's just this anti-democratic monster, unlike thing we've ever seen before, I think that is what has been wildly overblown. And I still think that. Despite the fact that I'm certainly willing to admit that presidents stand up all the time or candidates stand up all the times and vow to do things on the campaign trail and then don't do them, as I said, I'm willing to admit that it has surprised me, not just the velocity, but the intensity, the extremism, the aggression with which they're carrying out what I regard as obvious assaults on the Bill of Rights. 

The way in which Trump supporters are willing to basically say or do anything to justify anything that the administration does, I mean, it took them eight weeks, it took MAGA eight weeks to go from what they had been saying for years. “No more Middle East wars, F* the military-industrial complex, no more endless wars, keep that money here at home for our own citizens” and then Trump restarts Biden's bombing campaign of Yemen, even though in 2024, Trump said he opposed Biden's bombings of Yemen. And that was when the Houthis were actually attacking U.S. ships. They're not attacking U.S. ships now. Trump greenlit the massive escalation and bombing of them, killing lots of civilians and suddenly MAGA's like, “Yeah, take them down.” 

Like to do such about-face of the things that you say you believe in! Have some integrity and have some duty as a citizen. Even if you support your leader still, even if you love him, even if you want him to be straightened, stand up and say when you think he's doing something against what you said your values are. 

Same with the censorship thing. I can't tell you how many times a day I hear Trump's supporters saying only American citizens have rights under the Constitution. No matter how much you show them that the Supreme Court has said for 150 years or more that everybody under U.S. government control, including even illegal aliens, but certainly people illegally in the United States, have the protections of the Bill of Rights. They'll never stop saying it because they need to say it to defend what Trump is doing, going from, “We love free speech, free speech is the most important thing” to “Yeah, get these Israel critics out of our country, punish the colleges and universities that allow too much Israel criticism, punish American citizens who are students if they protest against Israel.” 

You just turn on a dime and they're like, yeah censorship, that kind of censorship that's really good. It goes back to what I was saying before about the primacy of Israel, but also the willingness not of all Trump supporters or not of all MAGA supporters and not even all Democrats to justify everything their party and their president is doing, but this is typically how our politics works. 

We're very tribal by nature, we develop tribalistically, we think tribalistically, but part of the challenge of being a human being with some degree of critical thought and intellectual independence and integrity is doing your best to avoid succumbing to tribalism and reason for yourself and think for yourself about what your government is doing. 

All right. The next question is from Milagro who says:

This goes back to a couple of the other questions about Trump. Let's remember that it was Joe Biden who for 15 months, Biden and Harris administration that unconditionally supported everything Israel did. Occasionally, they gave a few nods to the fact that maybe they should be a little more careful with civilian casualties when they blew up aid workers, they would say like, “Yeah, we think they need to be more careful.” But we funded the entire war, Joe Biden flew to Tel Aviv and met with Netanyahu on October 10 and said, “The United States will stand behind you and whatever you think you need to do; we'll fund you, we promised our unabashed and unlimited commitment” and that's exactly how Biden and Harris proceeded to do and they would often say, “We're working tirelessly on a cease-fire”, but never got one. 

There was one early on for about, I think, six weeks, not even that, where there was some exchange of hostages and people held in Israeli dungeons with no due process and then it resumed and that was always the case. But they never got near a cease-fire and then Trump came in with Steve Witkoff, who very aggressively demanded that the Israelis stop and there was a cease-fire that the Palestinians celebrated. So, that's the sort of thing that I do think Trump still has in him. 

The problem is that on almost every issue the Trump administration is filled with people with very differing views and very differing ideologies on how to confront China or Ukraine, on domestic policy but there are almost no people in the Trump administration, certainly not anybody who is high level, that he listens to, that he cares about, who is not an ardent Israel loyalist, not one. 

I think this is such an important point to realize too: let's remember that Donald Trump wasn't only running for president, he was running to stay out of prison for life. Had Donald Trump lost the election in 2024, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Democrats would have put him in prison. They had four different felony cases against him, one of which they already got a guilty verdict in Manhattan and three others that would have allowed them to convict him under espionage. 

They wanted to put Donald Trump in prison for a very long time, certainly for life and Trump was desperate to win. He was willing to do what he had to win, so when Miriam Adelson comes to him and says, “Yeah, I'll give you all the money you need as long as you promise A, B, C, D, and E for Israel,” Trump's going to say, “Okay.”

These pro-Israel fanatics, by the way, originally aligned with Ron DeSantis, who is a far more true believer in Israel than Trump is. Go look at all the loudest AIPAC voices and the Israel loyalists, and you'll see that almost without exception, they supported Ron DeSantis and his candidacy, and it was only once it became apparent that Ron DeSantis had no political charisma, that there was no way he could beat Trump, couldn't even get close, did they all migrate to Trump to try to influence his royal court.

That was when huge numbers of those people started to get close to Trump, and then had Miriam Adelson and other people too, not just her, but long-time Israel supporters, given tens of millions of dollars as well. Trump is captive to them and he's going to do what they want. Remember as well that Trump's daughter, his favorite child by all accounts, Ivanka Trump herself is Jewish. She converted because she's married to Jared Kushner, who's an Orthodox Jew, whose family has given massive amounts of money to Israel, not just to Israel but to the most extremist parts, to projects to expand settlements in the West Bank. 

So, he's surrounded by this view everywhere he turns and so the idea that he's going to resist it I think is very difficult to imagine but, again, the Democrats are also completely captive to the Israel lobby and Israel as well. I think you saw in Trump with that cease-fire, the capacity to deviate but I'm not sure how much Americans so far care about what's being done in Gaza. 

I do think it's interesting that you're seeing a massive change in public opinion in the United States, especially among young people, but not only, migrating away from supporting Israel. If the Trump administration persists in telling people they can't criticize Israel, that they have to pay for Israel's wars, constantly talking about Israel, not only do I think that could be a political problem for Trump and the Republicans, but I actually think that it could risk seriously increasing antisemitism. 

At some point, as I've talked about before, people are going to say, “Wait a minute, why are we not allowed to talk about this country? Why are people being deported who are law-abiding, productive members of society, PhDs, Fulbright scholars, physicians and specialists in kidney transplants, why are we deporting those kinds of people because they criticize not our own country, but this foreign country? Why are we sending billions and billions and billions all the time to Israel?” I think there is a danger of that. 

Yesterday in the Senate, a lawyer named Kenneth Stern, who has worked his whole life in Jewish organizations, like the American Jewish Congress and wrote books on combating antisemitism, he believes that antisemitism is being exploited to prevent people from criticizing Israel. He was making that point in Josh Hawley, who does not have a history of being a Jewish scholar of antisemitism, to put it mildly, he started screaming over him, saying he didn't care about Jews, he doesn't want to protect Jews on campus. This is the guy who has worked his whole life in Jewish organizations who's being screamed at by Josh Hawley for saying, “Wait a minute, I don't think we should be censoring protests” – and his argument was “That is what increases antisemitism.” It feeds into what had been longstanding antisemitic tropes as we call them, that Jews have secret control over countries, and they dictate to these countries what they should do. And the more you feed into that, the more antisemitism you're going to increase, he said. 

I certainly agree with that also and I think people who are going way overboard with trying to shield Israel by attacking the free speech rights and civil liberties rights of the United States, by insisting the United States keep giving more and more to Israel, are playing a very dangerous game and risking the exact results that they claim they're so petrified of, which is the spread of antisemitism. 

Stephen Sanford asked:

That's always been a hard question to answer in the United States because the reality of our elections is that the people who really control elections are large donors, billionaires, oligarchs and bulk parties. There's a new book out about what happened in 2024 inside the Democratic Party with Biden and Harris and it describes what finally forced Joe Biden out were the donors. They demanded it. They said, “We're not gonna fund your campaign, we're not going to give you the hundreds of billions of dollars you need to run a campaign because we don't think you have any chance to win.” Biden tried to convince them. “You may be right, but I can promise you, my dropping out is gonna result in Kamala Harris becoming the nominee, whether we anoint her or whether we pretend to have a mini-convention, and she has less chance than I do.” But the donors insisted. That's who got Biden out. Not the people rising up or whatever. 

But protest movements do work. They have toppled governments all around the world, they have changed the course of American history, obviously during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement and the like. It's just that protesting can be difficult. You need the time, most people work and support their families and want to be with their families and barely have enough time to breathe, let alone participate in political protests. That's why it's typically an activity mostly for the young, for youth. That's why college campuses have been, iconically, a venue of protest, but I think that, ultimately, that's the only thing that really lets the voice of the people be heard, is when the government starts fearing the population, rather than having the population fear the government. 

All right, the last question comes from Doc Fab, who says:

All right, let me just say here, just because that was very, very filled with praise, that I didn’t choose these questions. I rely on my colleagues to do so, in part because I wanna make sure that I'm not just picking up the things that I want to talk about, but things that maybe push me out of my comfort zone. So, if there's a question that's heaping a lot of praise on me, it's not because I chose it, it's because someone here thought that it raises some important issues. 

I do glance at the questions just to make sure that it's worth speaking about, but I don't really read them. I want the first time that I'm really concentrating on them to be live on camera so that my answer is more natural and less planned. I think that's the point of a Q&A, as opposed to a show where you're sort of committed to an idea ahead of time about what you want to say.

But this is probably the type of comment that I appreciate the most because I want to just be honest for a second about independent media. I'm a big fan of independent media; I think independent media has become an important alternative to and check against corporate media. It’s provided people with emancipation, not to be captive to corporate media, to get their information from other sources. It's why I came to Rumble because Rumble, I believe, is one of the very, very, very few companies that has a genuine commitment to free speech, not just branding themselves as such. 

The problem with independent media is that you don't have funding sources by definition. You don't work for a gigantic media corporation like CNN or ABC News or Fox. Typically, you don't have big corporate advertisers – Aetna or Boeing or any major company, Pfizer – advertising on our show or anywhere on Rumble. 

And so, people who want to be able to be independent journalists and make a living out of it have to rely upon the support of their viewers. By far the easiest way to do that, the way that's most likely to succeed, and not just succeed, but potentially make you quite wealthy, is if you plant your flag in a party, or a political movement, or an ideology, and your viewers know that that's their ideology, that's their party, that's their movement, and they're gonna come to rally around the flag, whatever that flag is, and you're never gonna tell them anything that upsets them or alienates them, you're never going to criticize that flag and the movement that the flag represents. 

There is a lot of independent media like that. I mean, it's by far the easiest thing to do. You say I'm on the left, I am a Democrat, I’m a Never Trump conservative, I am a MAGA person and then just everything you say and do is aligned with whatever you need to align yourself with to advance and defend and justify whatever that particular faction is doing. And it is tempting. You look around and you see how many people are succeeding in a very lucrative way by doing that. 

I mean, I guess it's tempting to some people. It just isn't for me because I think what's so important is I didn't enter journalism because that was my career goal. I didn’t enter it with any career ideas at all. I entered it because I wanted to say things that weren't being said, I wanted them to be heard. As I recounted, I never wanted to attach myself to a party, I never wanted to attach to myself and be imprisoned by an ideology, I most definitely didn't want to have to remain loyal to a particular politician or a set of politicians – that sounds so dreary and awful and anti-intellectual and just drained of all of its integrity. I'd have no passion for doing that whatsoever. 

And so, I know that by criticizing Democrats, but then also criticizing conservatives in the Trump movement and never just feeding people all the time what they want to hear, that does cost you viewers and supporters; it costs you followers on social media, it costs everything. 

But I think one of the things that is important to me is that, and I'm quite grateful for and aware of, is that I am at a point in my career, where I have enough of a platform that I've built up over many years, that I don't really have to worry about losing a part of my audience in a way that would make it no longer feasible for me to do this work. I'd much rather lose 10% to 15% of our audience – as we did almost immediately after October 7 – in order to be able to pursue the truth as I see it to present facts that I think need to be presented, to critique people who I think are not telling the truth and feel good about the work. But I realize that not everybody has that luxury. 

Some people can't lose that and continue to do the work, so I'm not necessarily judging them. I'm just saying what I feel like I have is a platform that enables me to avoid being captive to those kinds of pressures, that kind of audience capture, or the need to just validate everybody's thoughts, and sometimes I think, like, if I don't do it, who's going to do that? 

I mean, there are obviously very big podcasts that don't have an allegiance to a political faction, Joe Rogan being the most obvious example, but Joe Rogan didn't really start as a political podcast, and he's not really even now a political podcaster. Most of what he does is not about politics. Politics is secondary to what he does. And he's gained enough credibility with his audience so that he can more or less free range on what he thinks. I think he has become more loyal to and more supportive of Trump and the MAGA movement than he had previously been supportive of any one particular factor but still, he's very capable of heterodoxy. But he's the exception because it's not a political podcast. 

This is a show about journalism and politics. That's obviously what I do, pretty much exclusively. I don't do a lot of cultural commentary. And so, the easiest way to do that is to just plant your flag and then validate people's views. But when I hear a comment like that: hey, my son is over here and I'm over here and we have a very difficult time bridging the gap but your show enables us to do that because we can count on you to kind of be reliable and telling us the things that you really think and it's a window into having a more rational conversation than otherwise we might, in terms of being super polarized – that's the kind of compliment of my work that I feel very grateful for and appreciative of and that I really value because it'd be much easier – much, much easier – in my life and in every other way to just feed a group of people exactly what they want to hear. It's not hard to do that, that's very easy. You can just put yourself on autopilot and do it. 

One of the things that I'm particularly appreciative of in life is that the work I've always done has been work that I am passionate about. And if I were to do that, I wouldn't be passionate about it, I wouldn’t feel like I had any integrity in it. I'm not perfect in it, I'm sure there are sometimes subconsciously when I avoid something or say something because of that incentive. We're all human, we all have these incentives. But again, it's sort of like the tribalism I was talking about before. It's something that I think you have to work as hard as you can to avoid

All right. Those were an excellent set of questions. If you want to submit your questions, you can do so by joining our Locals community, which is the community on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.