Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
EXTRA: Lee Fang and Michael Tracey On Europe’s Emergency Defense Summit, the Future of Independent Media, Speech Crackdowns and More
Special Episode
March 15, 2025
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The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

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Michael Tracey and Lee Fang swap guest hosting tales, discuss free speech crackdowns against Israel’s critics and speculate about the possible outcomes for ending the Ukraine war. This conversation was recorded on Friday, March 7.

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Lee Fang: My next guest really requires no introduction. He’s a friend of the show, European correspondent for System Update. Really, I’m taking his job. He should be here filling in. You've been replaced, Michael. How are you doing? 

Michael Tracey: I think I might need to orchestrate another coup to reclaim my rightful role as the semi-regular System Update guest host, but I'm sure you've been doing a fantastic job in my absence, Lee. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, it's been fun. I like the community actually, some of the feedback's been good. What's been your experience doing this? I know you've done it maybe a few times in the past. How has that been for you? 

Michael Tracey: Yeah, well, one time I did it for like two weeks straight when I went to Brazil and guest-hosted from the studio. And then I've done it kind of intermittently, remotely. And then, most recently, last week, I did two shows from the Rumble studio or bureau in Washington D.C., where we aired some of the CPAC interviews that I did, I kind of narrate them. 

I don't know, I mean, I guess I find it tolerable. I mean, if people like to watch me extemporaneously speak, then that's good. But I have to admit, I'm not the biggest fan of just sitting and absorbing monologues.

Lee Fang: Yeah.

Michael Tracey: But I guess that's how people process information now. So, you have to kind of cultivate it as a skill. Otherwise, you're going to be deemed irrelevant in our bold, brave new media landscape. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, Glenn's very good at it. He's transformed his trial attorney skills…

Michael Tracey: Yes. 

Lee Fang: He's like, he's given a deposition or something and he's just nailing you with like arguments when he's doing it. But then I don't even know how many people really like the Glenn style. I like the Glenn style, but I think most human beings, most consumers of media, want the TikTokerification of media. They want the like 15 second clips that are like interspersed with emotionally evocative bullshit. That's what everything's boiling down to. I'm writing these 3,000-word investigations and I'm looking at the click-through rates and people are opening my emails and closing them immediately because there are too many words. 

Michael Tracey: That's the, you know what? I don't even, I try not to even look at those data. Maybe I should, because it would behoove me to know how much of my stuff is getting read or just clicked out of immediately, I almost find it's a bit like a cognitive distortion influence, to even be mindful of those figures, because I don't want it to, like, subconsciously influence me. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, but you want people to listen to what you have to say, right? It's important. I mean the format, that's it just the way it is, I’m sure that there are other journalists who write for print and they're nostalgic for print. I've always been online. So, the transition isn't as radical for me, but I don't welcome this movement towards all-video, all-audio. So, it's kind of hard. 

Michael Tracey: Well, I don’t either because I appreciate your commentaries, your occasional commentaries on this. One reason I think that I do, at least, partially lament whatever transition we're in is because there are just so many people who could like to be broadly construed as in the media of some kind, but they never do any journalism at all. Like I'm not saying I'm the most intrepid journalist in the face of the earth, I've done the most bombshell investigative stories, but at least I try to do some original reporting and have some original thoughts. 

I just feel like if everybody is always just pontificating online and they can be like just lumped into this ever evolving category of media that kind of dilutes like, I think what the real purpose of the media is or like one of the most benefit the most beneficial purpose of the media which is to shine light on stuff that's otherwise not going to be covered. And if it's just punditry, again, I'm not going to claim that I don't engage in punditry… 

Lee Fang: Yeah.

Michael Tracey: But it's just an overload and it's too much. It gets conflated and it like breaks everybody down, I guess, I don't know. 

Lee Fang: I pointed this out on Twitter. I saw from some of the people who got the Jeffrey Epstein… 

Michael Tracey: Yes, that was a great example. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, I've never even heard of half of those people, and I looked them up and they all have over a million followers. It's like, what? And it's like this whole flimflam, these were documents that were already released I think over 10 years ago, including some of the flight log stuff that Gawker reported, a gazillion years ago. 

Michael Tracey: That was like 2015, I think. But these people are influencers. Look, so not everybody has to be a journalist. I understand that there are different walks of life that one can pursue. But, like every now and then, it is actually useful to have somebody with a journalistic impulse to be examining government documents that are just being spoon fed to them. Clearly, this whole Epstein document release thing was engineered so, frankly, a bunch of dopey people who are just going to be awestruck if they were given this so-called access by the Trump administration, just kind of credulously regurgitate whatever it is they're fed. And I get it. 

Sometimes, like the more mainstream media, oftentimes the more mainstream media does go way overboard in kind of dwelling on petty things to nitpick Trump on. So, I get that there’s been, there needs to be some correction, but this seems like an over-correction where now you could just delegate core functions of the media to essentially just partisan influencers who don't even pretend to be engaged in any critical scrutiny of what it is they're being provided with. And that's why it blew up in their faces. It was like... 

Lee Fang: Yeah, and that's to the credit of the broad audience. I think everyone's kind of disgusted by this, even people who are loyal followers of these influencers. But it just kind of gets me back to something I was talking to a friend about the other day. I've been critical, I write about money and politics. It's one of the main beats I do. But one thing I'm critical of is these corporate PACs, the kind of big money, lobbyist fundraisers that most of the folks in Congress rely on. It's kind of obviously a quid pro quo. You at least get some favor by engaging this type of thing with the industries that donate. But as we've seen the gravitation away from that to small dollar donations, now you have this huge incentive for members of Congress to become influencers, to go and do dances on the Capitol Hill steps or engage in conspiracy theories or do these theatrical outbursts in committee hearings that don't make any sense. I've seen them happen live where it's so obviously scripted. It's not something that is an organic outburst of anger towards Trump or Biden, depending on which member of Congress you're talking about. And it's all just geared to get these small dollar donations. It's like, well – I don't want the Goldman Sachs, Northrop Grumman PAC-dominated world, but I don't want this either. Be careful what you wish for.  

Michael Tracey: Yeah, like the workhorse legislators are probably not going to be the ones who are getting the small dollar donations because they're not entertainers. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, exactly. 

Michael Tracey: And I'm not even trying to glamorize the workhorse legislator necessarily, because it all depends on to what end they're legislating toward. But let's say like, theoretically, there was something productive that you want to see get accomplished legislatively. The people who are going to be in the weeds of those issues generally are not the ones who have been primed to kind of fashion their public profile around this endless race to the bottom for small dollar donations. And I mean, I'm sort of like you, I was optimistic when this small dollar model seemed to be at least gradually supplanting the older model, which was much more reliant on donor insider access, but, as we see, it's never really black or white and there are some pretty significant pitfalls.

And you see this incentive structure replicated in the media itself. Like it's almost like the politicians and the so-called media are operating within the same structure here. 

Lee Fang: Yeah. 

Michael Tracey: So, like somebody goes on Joe Rogan, I'm not trying to even bad mouth Joe Rogan, I've been a long-time listener, but, like, somebody goes on and he says, by the way, pizza gate actually was never debunked. And I'll give you just this like scattershot list of facts that seem to maybe add up to some indication that there's something… 

Lee Fang: Yeah, I just watched it. Yeah.

Michael Tracey: Don’t you remember that pizza gate. I don't even want to even litigate pizza gate, but it's just like that kind of – that's the kind of – I guess – “intrepid journalism” that gets rewarded in this ecosystem. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, it's bottom of the barrel. It's kind of like the Alex Jones’ dynamic where we don't have to get deep into Alex Jones but… 

Michael Tracey: Let's go. Let's get deep into Alex Jones. 

Lee Fang: Well, it's like he takes a real issue, a very serious issue, exaggerates, adds on other issues that are not well-founded or completely fabricated, and then brings attention to it. And then this issue that is often something that's kind of on the sidelines, that's a little bit more of a niche subterranean topic, and then he by being so bombastic, he delegitimizes discussion of the very real issue – I'll give you one: the famous clip of him saying they're putting chemicals in the water, they're turning the frogs gay...

Michael Tracey: Turning the frogs gay? I knew exactly where you were going. 

Lee Fang: I've written about Syngenta. The herbicide company has put so much of their herbicide into crops and it's water-soluble. If you drink water in Iowa or Illinois, you're drinking atrazine, their herbicide, in a very interesting kind of dynamic where there's a professor at Berkeley who discovered that if you give frogs a relatively small amount of atrazine, it changes their sex. It completely changes their hormones. They basically trans the frogs. I mean, this whole story around transgenes is incredible because they hired private detectives, they hired people to harass this professor at Berkeley. It became a whole kind of, one of those corporate intimidation campaigns where they suppressed his science. They did everything they could to try to delegitimize the research he was doing and to intimidate him. And this is something that is not well known. This is a problem around a lot of pesticides that are very common in everyday American agriculture, that are affecting the biological environment, animals, insects, and possibly humans. But then how do people act? Do people know the real story? Do they know the Alex Jones version that is mostly bullshit. 

Michael Tracey: I would even broaden it out a bit, like Alex Jones in his earlier days of influencer kind of popularized this notion of globalism as being something bad, right? And there are legitimate critiques of "globalist institutions,” like the Economic Forum or different international financial organizations. There's obviously overabundance of material to rational critique there, but when it gets layered on to just kind of this baseline, almost like quasi-theological conspiracism, it kind of limits the amount of rational critique you can do on the subject that actually does call out for it. And so, if there's always like a layer of like dot connecting that has to come into every discussion of every legitimate issue. So, it's turned now in certain sectors, the term globalism into like an insult, with maybe it ought to be, but I feel like people should have like a more rational understanding of why they're objecting to these globalists… 

Lee Fang: No, I think that's exactly right. I mean, same dynamic could be applied to deep state. I mean, this was not a partisan concept…

Michael Tracey: I've stopped using that term. 

Lee Fang: This is an unelected bureaucracy that's very heavily in the intelligence, national security space that basically operates independently of whoever is in power. 

Michael Tracey: Here's a great example. Here's a great example. 

Lee Fang: Yeah. 

Michael Tracey: So, I stopped using the term deep state earnestly, like in 2017, the minute Sean Handy started using it. Because the minute he started using it, you knew that it just became a Republican that it was just like a rep talking point, there was obviously a legitimately existing permanent bureaucracy or national security state apparatus that had arrogated unto itself levels of autonomy that are probably inconsistent with what the founders would have envisioned, right? Or what people who just want a minimum democratic response would advocate. So that's a huge issue. I mean, that was definitely a totally legitimate issue. But now it's gotten to the point where DOGE, you'll see DOGE proponents supporting moves like totally crippling the Consumer Protection Financial Board by saying, “Oh, we're getting rid of the deep state. So, they're like, this is the deep state.”

Lee Fang: Yeah.

Michael Tracey: It's always, it's ever shifting what they can classify as the deep state. Like some National Park Service.

Lee Fang: Air traffic controllers. 

Michael Tracey: Yeah. Those are the things. So, it's gone so far beyond the bounds of what would have been, at one point, a rational critique. And I don't know about you, but I haven't seen much sign yet that they've shuffled out a lot of personnel, obviously, from the security state agencies. But are they reducing the power of the security state agencies? Maybe there's some stuff that I missed, and it could be coming. They've only been in power for like six weeks. But that would be the real sign that the power or influence of the so-called deep state is actually being genuinely curbed…

Lee Fang: Right.

Michael Tracey: Not just firing a bunch of people who work in national parks.

Lee Fang: And we don't want FBI agents or people with incredible reach inside the intelligence agency. Intelligence agencies swapped out for other partisans with their own kind of extremely narrow agenda. 

Michael Tracey: Like, Dan Bongino, why am I supposed to be thrilled that Dan Bongino, who's a hardcore Republican partisan, which he's entitled to be, I'm not even begrudging that, there's a big market out there for that, apparently. Is this the alternative to the so-called deep state that we're all supposed to be clamoring for? I'm not sure. 

Lee Fang: Yeah. No, I think this, I mean, this is an issue that is TBD. Like so far, we haven't seen it. Maybe there's going to be, I mean, this is one of the things I'm holding out some optimism for, but. Yeah. I mean, I will… 

Michael Tracey: People get mad at me up on these kinds of subjects, I pledge to strive to keep an open mind. But it's hard to keep an open mind when, for example, today, the administration announces they're carrying forth Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s big free speech initiative, which is to crack down on so-called antisemitic speech by using the coercive power of the state to compel basically the prohibition of certain forms of political speech that RFK Jr. and Linda McMahon deem unacceptable pursuant to an executive order that was issued by Trump, which actually drew on an executive order from his first term, in 2019, that mandated that the federal government agencies start employing the so-called IHRA definition of antisemitism, which is the most expansive possible definition of antisemitism. And so, if you can be accused of “applying double standards to Israel,” that means you're antisemitic. 

And now under this current framework, you could be subject to legal penalties. And they just canceled like 700 million or something or $300 million of federal contracts or grants to Columbia University on the basis of antisemitism, which obviously as Glenn covered earlier this week, the government is not permitted to condition expenditures that otherwise would have been making on the political speech of the recipient. Like that's basic first amendment case law. So, on the one hand, I do think a lot of what JD Vance said when he went to the Munich Security Conference and castigated European countries for their own free speech infringements. A lot of that was substantively correct. It's true, as you know that Romania just kind of like randomly abrogated an entire presidential election through judicial edict because they claimed that there was some interference over TikTok. So that was true, but then what standing now does JD Vance have when he goes around pontificating about free speech, sometimes validly, if it's being totally disregarded domestically in the United States. That's why in my life, I struggle to keep an open mind. 

Lee Fang: This area is sensitive, because even though it's a winning, I don't know if it's a winning, but it's a very potent area for criticism for Democrats. They could be raising this. No one talked about this during his confirmation hearings. No one really raised these issues, even though now it's very clear that because HHS oversees billions of dollars in grants to universities. He actually has these kind of levers to pull with research institutes and really basically any major university in the country, because they're so reliant on federal research dollars. But Democrats won't touch it for, I guess, political reasons. And same in Europe. I mean, this is a great way for any kind of Eurocrat to poke back at JD Vance or the Trump administration saying, you have no free speech on Israel issues, except that maybe there's the worst in Germany and most of these other countries. They don't actually have free speech either. So, there's no kind of platform for them to stand and… 

Michael Tracey: It was so funny, when I was at CPAC and people might have seen this if they've been following the channel, but I interviewed a member of the European Parliament with the AfD, the Alternative for Germany, the so-called far-right party, I don't even know what that descriptor means anymore, but they're widely labeled that and then came in second in the German federal election. And I asked, this came up, Vance's hectoring or lecture or scolding of the European countries. She was inclined to agree with it. But then I brought up, what about Germany's attitude toward pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel protests, which have been ruthlessly prescribed, much more wantonly in Germany than I think would even be possible in the United States, as much as some people would like to. 

She had this whole rationale, Christine Anderson was her name, people can look up the interview. She had this whole rationale for why that actually was not protected speech. It wasn't even like a coherent rationale. It was just like they don't even evince that they've made any attempt to try to reconcile their broader critique of like the liberal bureaucrats genuinely oftentimes infringing upon speech of conservatives with this giant exception that they've all decided on for speech critical of Israel. 

I mean, Trump came into office in the second term, like one of the first executive orders he signed to much fanfare was basically something to the effect of free speech is back. The government shall not infringe on free speech. And then, like within a couple of weeks, we have this intergovernmental initiative spearheaded by Bobby Jr. – let's not even dwell on him because – I mean, I get people wanna always be like belabor the vaccine issue. To me, it seems like there's a disproportionate emphasis on that with respect to him as evidence now by his first big initiative being an intergovernmental campaign to liken antisemitism with racism. It's almost like he's copying and pasting one of those corporate mea culpa things from 2020. Target and MasterCard and all these companies had to... 

Lee Fang: Yeah. There's a template for how to do this now. 

Michael Tracey: Yeah, yeah, they had to apologize for racism. Now, like, we're randomly getting this new variant of it in 2025, but antisemitism is the big new disease or pestilence, as RFK said, that everybody now has to take accountability for. And that means, I guess, withholding grants to universities that don't comply with the speech restrictions that RFK would like to see imposed. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, I think there's part of the general conservative mindset here. I would be open to critiques of this. There's such a hatred for universities that universities, you look at the donations, all the professors and administrators give to Democrats, they're all registered Democrats. We've seen like 10 years of conservatives being shut down. I think there's just a nihilism here. 

If you want to compare it to something, it's like you get these leftists in a room a few years ago and they kind of get each other so excited because of their hatred for police, because of certain viral videos or other, like, books that inspired them, that you started asking them, it's like, well, wait, what are we gonna do about public safety or what happens when there's a crime? 

It didn't matter. It wouldn't matter if you had to destroy the institution. And there's an obsession with destroying universities and higher education to the point where principles don't matter. I think a lot of conservatives do genuinely care about free speech. But then you kind of dangle the keys of, “Hey, what we could destroy universities over this kind of fabricated or at least exaggerated antisemitism issue.” They get so excited, they kind of lunge for it. 

Michael Tracey: This goes back decades, though, right? I mean, Richard Nixon campaigned against the pointy-headed academics from the rivalry towers. 

Lee Fang: They’ve been primed for generations on this…

Michael Tracey: Yeah, I mean, I saw the first time I saw JD Vance speak was in 2021 at a so-called National Conservatism Conference. He just could have copied and pasted Richard Nixon speeches from the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, just in terms of his attacks on academia and the corrupting influence on the youth, etc. And trying to pit middle America against the elites, which has recurring resonance in American political life. So, I'm not arguing it's an ineffective tactic. It's not a new phenomenon, for sure. And so yeah, I mean, I do think there is a nihilism. They just would like to burn down the left-wing universities. 

Unfortunately, one of the patterns in speech infringements is that obviously undesirable targets are used as the introduction to start restricting speech more broadly. 

I think the case with Alex Jones, like when Alex Jones was purged from social media in 2018, that was like the canary in the coal mine for an expansion of the so-called content moderation policies that ended up being de facto government censorship, because the government was incentivizing or pressuring the social media companies to take these sensorial actions, whether it was because social media companies were endangering public health with COVID allegedly or abetting foreign interference in elections and so forth. But Alex Jones, that was like an example where people think he's kind of kooky. So maybe sure, he's somebody who we can justifiably throw off the platforms… 

Lee Fang: One area that a lot of the Trump kind of intellectual, the brain trust, the folks that were at the America First Policies Institute and some of the think tanks that kind of incubated a lot of the personnel and the ideas for the administration, they basically set out to abolish the wing of the Department of Homeland Security that was involved, known as CISA, that was involved in the pandemic censorship, the 2020 election censorship that they claim is the reason they lost that election. A lot of the kind of interference coordinated with the FBI that led to content moderation that they claimed was partisan motivated and some of it definitely was, but here's I think this is where it's all going to boomerang. So far, they have not shut down this wing of the Department of Homeland Security and God only knows how this could be used, this could be weaponized to suppress speech critical of Israel. I mean they could use the exact same kind of government bureaucracy, the same mechanics that they have spent the last four years criticizing. And they could really apply it, again, on these kinds of Israel issues. I don't think it's going to stop at private universities. I mean, I think this is going to expand very rapidly. 

Michael Tracey: And the Trump executive order that he issued really 10 days or so into the presidency, is not at all limited to college campuses. It applies to all Americans in terms of his ordering the attorney general to double down on investigating antisemitism, again, as defined by the IHRA definition. So, even if you have no affiliation at all with universities. You are potentially implicated by that. And there was also talk about how this might be limited to just like foreign students on a student visa or something…

Lee Fang: On a student visa or something. 

Michael Tracey: Right. But it goes way beyond that as well, because obviously, everybody, people impacted by this Columbia decision are not solely foreign students. But even the text of the executive order did not at all circumscribe it to just apply to students. So are foreign students. So, you can't even justify it on like, oh, he's cracking down on immigration violations or whatever. 

Yeah, I mean, the CISA thing is interesting. I mean, I'm almost positive that that stems from – I forget Chris Krebs. He was the CISA administrator in the 2020 election. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, that's right. 

Michael Tracey: And his statement that the 2020 election was the most secure election in American history was constantly cited by the media to argue that, like Trump's own claims were being refuted by his own administration. 

Lee Fang: Right. 

Michael Tracey: So, I think it's as simple as they're going to get rid of the guy who got rid of the agency that caused him that disturbance, right? I don't know how principle that is. Like even today, I don't know if you saw it, but there was an executive order, maybe it was yesterday, he's issuing executive orders to go after individual law firms now. 

Lee Fang: Speaking of fruitful broad-based policies before you have to go. I want to ask you about why you're in Europe. You attended this European Council summit. Could you just explain what you're doing there? What you saw and what are the kind of reverberations from these last weeks? Zelenskyy's press conference kind of catastrophe like, has that changed the mindset? I mean I saw one thing that I also want to ask you about is just this news report from The Wall Street Journal that the Germans are even now open to developing nuclear weapons and kind of taking their defense budget and giving it new rules, so they can go past their old deficit constraints. So, it seems like even with the drama between Zelenskyy and some other European leaders and Trump, they're actually engaging in a lot of the goals of having NATO in Europe be more self-sufficient as Trump has intended. 

Michael Tracey: Yeah. So, I'm in Brussels, Belgium, which is where the European Union, European Parliament, European Council, all these interlocking European institutions that a lot of people who are in them don't even really seem to know what they do are. Like there's a European Council president who's one guy but then there's also Ursula von der Leyen who is the – I forget even what her title now is like I can't even keep them straight – but it's just a very confusing series of institutions like in this supranational structure. 

And so, yeah, there was an emergency summit that was convened yesterday, where they would be basically declaring collectively to rearm more expeditiously than they had declared in previous instances when they've done variations of this. But I do have to say, it does seem like they are taking tangible steps to facilitate this mobilization now. 

For one thing, you mentioned Germany. Germany has tended to be much more scrupulously fiscally conservative, like resistant to acquiring debt and so forth. But now, they are in favor of an EU-wide instrument being adopted so that debt can be used to finance these increases in defense spending. So, that was a big historic break for Germany. A lot of the Eurocrat hawks have been demanding this of Germany for a while, like accusing them of hypocrisy for like rhetorically suggesting that Europe needs to enter a new historical phase in its rearmament, but then not changing its fiscal policy to enable that, but so now they apparently are doing that. 

And so, yeah, I mean, to the extent that the European states can facilitate anything amongst themselves in a cogent way. They seem committed to this. And I have to question this like unflinching consensus behind how it's like just an obviously great thing for Europe to rapidly rearm… 

Lee Fang: Militarize, yeah. 

Michael Tracey: Yeah, rapidly remilitarize. Like, remember when people were cheering because Germany may be sending tanks to attack Russia or something. People overuse historical analogies, but there might be some historical sort of omens to at least be mindful of. And the whole reason that the European Union and the European Council – the European Union is like a parliament, the European Council used to be just an informal body where the EU heads of state or heads of government would congregate and deliberate and issue statements, now it's more of a formalized deliberative process that's supposed to be binding on the member states but isn't always in practice. 

But anyway, a reason why a lot of these institutions came about was to kind of institutionalize the demilitarization of Europe after decades of endless conflict. That's why they've had to do some things that are outside of their nature, especially over the past three years, because the EU is not set up as even really contemplating. The EU was not originally contemplated to have any jurisdiction over collective military affairs, really. So, they've had to invent that stuff on the fly. The European peace facility is like the EU instrument that's now very ironically named, that was invoked in 2022 to start providing EU-specific military provisions to Ukraine. So, they're ramping that stuff up. And I just don't fully understand why. 

Trump is also obviously encouraging this. I mean, one of his big grievances is that the U.S. gets ripped off. We gave, according to him, $350 billion to Ukraine, which I don't think is quite right. I mean, I don't know how he's tabulating that exactly. And Europe only gave $100 million, so they better equalize. That's the term he's used. Well, can we stop and have someone explain why we should want Europe to equalize? 

One of the big problems with having militaries of a large size, as Madeleine Albright once said in the ‘90s, “if we have this big, beautiful military, what's the point of having it if not to use it?” Like that changes the incentives in how states act. So, do we want like a radicalized Poland like that and now they have to take up the mantle to oppose like the legacy of Soviet aggression because they're still all crazed about having admittedly been under pretty unpleasant Russian control for decades? I just don't think people have thought through the implications of this should it come to fuller fruition, which seems to be at least preliminarily in progress. 

Another issue is that they had what they declared to be a background briefing, which I didn't agree to, so I don't know why I would be on the hook for that. Like I just walked into a room and said, okay, as you all know, this is a background briefing. But I guess for decorum sake, I won't name the guy but it was an advisor to Macron. And obviously, Macron's been trying to lead the charge in fulfilling his Charles de Gaulle fantasies of an autonomous Europe led by France. 

Macron has given a big defense speech this week about the need for, again, Europe to rearm even more quickly. The issue of an American backstop came up for a potential negotiated settlement in Ukraine, whereby if there was a cessation of hostilities, what Ukraine and the European countries, most of them anyway, other than Hungary, seem to want is for there to be a European military force deployed to Ukraine, mainly British and French. And so, this advisor was asked, again, “on background” what about the American backstop to that, to provide a security guarantee? And for all the fanfare around Trump's rhetorical unkindness to Zelenskyy and Ukraine, the Europeans, as this guy explained, are operating under the assumption that it's been conveyed to them that yes, the U.S. will be providing some kind of backstop in the event that these European troops are deployed to Ukraine. 

So, now, do we want a situation where we have multiple layers of a “security guarantee” cling to what seems like, if it's achievable at all, would be a fairly fragile cease-fire scenario in Ukraine and potentially have the U.S. on the hook to back up some of these more audacious European countries that are saying they're going to put troops on the ground. 

I think there's a lot that's pretty ominous here that I just don't understand why it's not more widely discussed. But then, again, I often have that response to things that go on in the world. 

Lee Fang: Well, there's this mainstream discourse, and it's not just like, okay, in The Economist or the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. It's literally every major newspaper. It's virtually every think tank in Washington, every single house defense committee or budget committee or any of that congressional leadership, everyone basically just not in the same bombastic way, not in the same kind of severing ties potentially with NATO or ending kind the post-Cold War consensus but the actual meat of what the substance of the echo chamber is that NATO countries need to spend more. They need to hit that 5% GDP defense spending number that was their obligation, but I guess it's not in the treaty. 

Michael Tracey: It used to be two, it used to be two, then it went up to three, and then Trump blew everybody out of their seats a few weeks ago and upped it to five, which would be extraordinary. 

Lee Fang: And no one's going close to that. I guess Poland has had the quickest increases. I wonder because you talk about like an American military backstop, it's like, look, if French or British troops are being killed by Russians, there's already a nuclear backstop. I mean, we're talking about a NATO alliance that's already backed up with weapons that kill us all. What does this actually mean? 

I was just talking to Leighton earlier in the program, the pivot to Asia, there's this huge talk about new long-range bombers, new submarines, new cutting-edge naval vessels to keep pace with China but if there's a kinetic war between the U.S. and China, would we only be using conventional weapons, it will never reach the nuclear weapons standpoint? That part just doesn't make sense to me. I wonder if there are other factors at play. It's like you look at how Russia had the fastest growing economy in Europe last year. It has not truly suffered in the way that was expected from these sanctions because they've kind of engaged. 

Michael Tracey: Because it's a war economy.

Lee Fang: Yes. 

Michael Tracey: It's like why the United States was through faster than World War II. 

Lee Fang: I think if you're one of these economic planners in France or Germany, especially Germany, which has had a sagging manufacturing base over the last two years, there's a broad appeal in rejuvenating the economy through defense spending. This is not actually about Ukrainian defense or creating this European army that can replace the Americans because at the end of the day, the only true threat is potentially Russia. And if it does come to all-out war with Russia, I don't think this is going to be solved with more German tanks. It'll be something much more cataclysmic than that. So, I just feel like the pandering, the discussion, the rhetoric, doesn't actually peel back to what does this actually mean? 

Michael Tracey: I sometimes fall short on this in terms of getting too engrossed in the Trump rhetoric because sometimes you just have to, like, marvel at it and like wonder about what the implications are. But if the results of his bluster toward Ukraine and his bluster, to some degree, toward the European countries is that they are in fact going to accelerate their military spending, then what is achieved is like whatever this consensus view had already been, right? 

I mean, this is a genuine consensus view. Republicans may have a different view on Ukraine at this point than Democrats, like in the Congress or whatever, but in terms of wanting the European member states to spend more on the military, there's no disagreement at all. Everybody just thinks that is total garbage… 

Lee Fang: Complete uniparty. 

Michael Tracey: And if that's what Trump is achieving, then maybe the rhetoric isn't quite as significant as that. I'm also kind of bewildered that there's not more cognizance of the apparent conditions that could potentially be placed on Russia pursuant to some negotiated settlement and whether those are even achievable. Like Lavrov, the foreign minister and others have said repeatedly that this notion of a European quote-unquote “peacekeeping force” deployed to Ukraine is a total non-starter because obviously those would be NATO troops and even if they're not there under an explicit NATO mission, NATO missions can always broaden, it's not like it's a hard and fast legal kind of technicality around like what constitutes a NATO mission and what doesn't.

 In the Libyan war in 2011, there was initially a NATO mandate, and if memory serves, they decided to eventually rescind the NATO mandate once they got to the regime change phase of the operation, or there was some technicality that I'm not recalling exactly as to whether that was constituted a full-fledged whole of NATO mission. I don't think it did. I think it was just three member states, primarily the U.S., U.K., and France that were collaborating with one another using NATO operational kind of capacities, but we're not embroiling the entire NATO block. 

So, I mean, there's a lot of ambiguity around what does it even mean to be a NATO mission. But the fact is, if there was a British and French troop presence there with some kind of “backstop” from the United States, that's functionally a NATO presence, right? So how is that gonna be reconcilable? And Trump endorsed this concept. I mean, that's why the blow up with Zelenskyy was so odd. He had the perfect runway to have a meeting where they would consecrate this so-called minerals deal. Macron and then Starmer, who were both there, who were both leading the charge on this European peacekeeping deployment – quote-unquote “peacekeeping.” 

I think Trump even called it “a so-called peacekeeping mission,” which kind of raises some questions about the veracity of that mission title. And then, Zelenskyy was about to confirm that the U.S. was going to just basically acquire Ukraine as a quasi-colony or something. I mean, people should read the text, I don't know if you did, of that so-called Minerals Agreement. It goes well beyond rare earth minerals. 

Lee Fang: Oh, it’s just you know, I haven't. I should check that out. 

Michael Tracey: It’s basically the U.S. acquiring at least half of all earnings from Ukrainian extractable natural resources. So, hydrocarbons, oil, rare earth minerals. And then on top of that, the U.S. acquires ownership of Ukrainian physical infrastructure, like refineries and ports. So, this is basically the U.S. I don't know, maybe colonization is not the right word. I'm open to whatever the people think the correct terminology is. 

It is essentially like the U.S. seizing vast swaths of Ukrainian state resources. And Trump had characterized this, and also Rubio and others were characterizing this as an effective security guarantee to Ukraine, because, according to Trump, this would mean that U.S. personnel of some kind would be on the ground in Ukraine. 

If memory serves, Russia invaded Ukraine because they perceived Ukraine being turned into an American/Western outpost for anti-Russian hostility. So, is this like fortification of a U.S./NATO presence in Ukraine consistent with like the redress of the Russian grievances? I don't know. 

So, in terms of like what the negotiations will look like, I think people are taking it a little bit too for granted that these conditions would be acceptable to the Russian side, notwithstanding the fact that I think is significant that they've resumed diplomatic contacts, but they haven't even addressed the essence of the conflict yet, as far as I know. 

Lee Fang: I mean, from what you're saying, it sounds a lot like Trump is attempting to give the Russians no security guarantee for Ukraine, while in effect doing everything he can to provide a security guarantee, whether that's a backstop for European forces or so many European or American personnel and business ties in the region, that it becomes effectively, a quasi-American state that if it is attacked, we'd have to respond. 

Michael Tracey: And another question is: it's also kind of just taken for granted that Russia would desire an immediate cease-fire or a freeze along the current lines. In 2022, Putin declared that four oblasts are eternal parts of the Russian Federation and Russia still does not control the entirety of those oblasts. So, would he be willing to freeze and basically concede that Russia does not control the territories that were declared to be eternal parts of the Russian Federation? 

Again, I'm just not – is it possible that they could make a concession on that? 

Lee Fang: Well, there's going to have to be some swapping of territory if it happens today, because there's still Ukrainian forces in Kursk, although they're having some severe losses right now. I mean, there's going to be some swapping, and you could imagine that would be part of the switch. 

Michael Tracey: Well, apparently that was the logic behind the Kursk incursion, although – that's another good example: Russia now seems to finally have neutered the Kursk incursion, they cut off the supply lines or so. There was like a turning point in Russia trying to counteract the Kursk incursion. They're still generally making incremental gains in the main front line in places like Donetsk. 

It's like, what incentive do they have now to just agree to a full…? Their economy is not collapsing. It doesn't seem like there's a crisis that they have to resolve at the moment. 

So, are they just going to capitulate to Trump? I mean, I don't know if you saw it today, but he did threaten – he announced he's going to be threatening additional sanctions on Russia. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, it seems like it's pretty clear only to negotiate because that's really the only olive branch, that's the only incentive for Russians to come to the table because if we just have the status quo, they're eventually going to win this as a military conflict. But if there's the kind of incentive to lift sanctions, I mean, that would probably be good for the global economy, good for Europe's economy and has a downwind effect on the U.S. given oil prices. 

Michael Tracey: It would be ironic though, because there's a school of thought in Russia where they actually welcome – this is like the Dugin kind of philosophy, right? Glenn interviewed him recently, and I've spoken to him as well. (I don't think he's quite as brilliant as maybe Glenn does, but anyway.) 

There's this whole theory now that it's a good thing that these sanctions have been levied against Russia because now Russia can purify itself. It can free itself of all of these external influences that are always looking to subjugate Russia. So, it's good that it's cut off from the world financial system. It's like an occasion, some kind of cultural regeneration, within Russia, also forcing them to revitalize domestic industry. You know, there’s China. So, like why would they just give up on all that? Yeah, there's actually, after all this fanfare over the past three years about how it was actually a good thing. 

Lee Fang: The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article, I think from last year, about a kind of small train of thought in Iran that's similar, because in response to all of these sanctions, there's now a domestic refrigerator and microwave manufacturing industry that just didn't exist before, because they have no other way to obtain these kind of basic appliances, and some of these small, burgeoning domestic Iranian industries want to keep the sanctions, because it's actually to their benefit for jobs and for local commerce. 

This conversation is pretty long, but I enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for taking the time. 

Michael Tracey: You said we might go for 10, 15 minutes. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, I think this was about 10, maybe 11 minutes. Oh, but yeah, thanks for joining Michael. Good to see you. 

Michael Tracey: All right, yes, signing off from the Belgium Bureau. 

Lee Fang: All right, take care. 

 

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TOMORROW: Locals Mailbag with Glenn Greenwald—We Need Your Questions!

Please submit your questions for our weekly mailbag. We're going to try to answer a couple more this week, seeing as we weren't able to host a Q&A last Friday.

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I just stopped by to tell you that Michael Tracey is not just an annoying tabloid hack, but a real blow to the credibility of the work you do.

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Trump's DC Takeover: Is it Legal? Israel Kills More Journalists, Including Anas al-Sharif; Glenn Reacts to Pete Buttigieg and JD Vance on Israel
System Update #501

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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I am again on the road, specifically in New York City, in a hotel room, as I will be participating in a debate tomorrow night, hosted by the Soho Forum and Reason Magazine, regarding the constitutionality of President Trump's various deportation policies and other related questions. 

I have a lot I want to talk about, beginning with the decision and announcement by President Trump to basically, at least the moment, federalize the Police Department of Washington, D.C., as well as activate the National Guard to patrol the streets of Washington in response to what President Trump says is a serious out of control, crime epidemic. We'll look at both the legality and constitutionality of that decision and some of its implications. 

Also, again, every time we say that we don't think that there's any way for Israel to go any lower, for them to engage in any more horrific atrocities, they somehow do seem to find a way. Last night, they slaughtered five Al Jazeera journalists, including, arguably, the Al Jazeera journalist who has become the eyes and ears of Gaza for most of the time in all of the West; Anas al-Sharif was killed alongside four other journalists. This is now the 278th journalist that the Israelis have slaughtered in Gaza. Israel admits that it was a targeted killing, that they killed him on purpose and the Israeli claim, needless to say, I don't even need to tell you it's so predictable, is that, “Oh, he was Hamas,” and so therefore they were justified in killing him. 

Earlier today, another equally influential and prominent journalist had his house targeted with an Israeli bomb. It didn't kill the journalist, but it killed 10 members of his family. And then when rescue workers came to try to salvage those who were among the survivors, they bombed again, what's called a double tap, and they killed even more people. We have a horrific video of that. It really has gotten to the point where the contempt, the repulsion and condemnation that all decent people around the world have are insufficient for the magnitude of the atrocities. 

Of course, the U.S. government and both parties continue to support it. We'll have a clip from JD Vance for an interview that he gave on Fox News earlier today where he was asked about what he thinks of the Israeli plan to occupy all of Gaza, which, needless to say, has already resulted and will continue to result in even more killing of innocent people at a far more indiscriminate rate. We also have a response from Pete Buttigieg, who was once the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and somehow parlayed that into a position as Secretary of Transportation under Joe Biden. He was asked about Israel on the Pod Save America podcast and gave the sort of technocratic, meaningless, mealy-mouthed, noncommittal, frightened response that has caused even Democratic Party partisans, let alone everybody else, to absolutely despise Democrats, not even for ideology, just because of their complete cowardice as for ever take a position or say anything whatsoever. He's a McKinsey consultant and that's exactly how he talks about everything: completely dead-eyed, passion-free, afraid to take any position on anything. 

There’s a lot to talk about. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on Tucker/Candace v. Nick Fuentes, the Unabomber Manifesto, Independent Media, and More
System Update #500

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Welcome to episode 500 of System Update, which means that over the last two years, ever since we launched in December of 2022, 500 times I have sat my ass in this chair, and we have done a program for you. Today is number 500. 

System Update, of course, is our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

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Every Friday night, as we're doing tonight, we take questions solely from our Locals members. We try to answer as many as we can.

 You may have noticed as well that, inspired by Donald Trump, all art today in commemoration of 500 shows is in gold, not our typical green and black. No, everything is gold. We went all out for tonight. So, I really hope you enjoy it.

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The first of which is from @alan_smithee. And he asked this:

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One of the reasons why I didn't talk about it, despite obviously being extremely interested in all three of them and the subject matter that they cover, I obviously am a longtime friend of Tucker’s. I used to be on the show, I think more than anybody else, when he was on Fox News, and now, on his podcast, I'm on frequently, maybe the guest who's been on the most as well, not really sure. It's not a competition. I don't know why I have to keep saying I'm at the top of the charts, but just to indicate the frequency, and he's been on our show before. So, I definitely consider him a friend of mine. Candace, I have a good relationship; I would describe it as friendly. I've chatted with Nick over the years a little bit, certainly not near the same level of interaction. 

I had this issue with Matt Taibbi. I was recently on Briahna Joy Gray's show, but also, I might have even been on a different show, where people were trying to ask me about Matt Taibbi and some of the criticism of him. Yeah, we've gotten questions about Matt Taibbi here as well over the past few months about things like his refusal to comment on Israel and Gaza, his infrequent commentary on the First Amendment issues raised by deporting students who speak critically of Gaza, the imposition of hate speech codes on American campuses by the Trump administration to shield Israel from criticism. 

I'm very honest about the fact that when someone is your friend, when you consider someone as your friend, at least for me, I really don't feel comfortable publicly criticizing them. It's actually one of the reasons why I go out of my way not to be friends or have any social ties with the people I'm supposed to be covering in Washington – politicians, major journalists. I've always thought the fact that I don't live in New York or Washington to be one of the greatest benefits for my journalism because I'm not in the middle of their social scenes. I don’t owe any social niceties to them. I don't feel as though if I criticize them, it's going to affect my social life or put me in uncomfortable positions. I take the obligation of friendship seriously. If you're actually somebody's friend, it comes with loyalty, and part of that loyalty is that, if you have problems with what they do and say, you go to them privately. It would take a lot for me to publicly criticize or down someone I consider my friend.

 I'm just being honest about that. Maybe that's not even the right thing to do. I'm not praising myself. I'm telling you how I feel personally. But again, I think if you live in New York, if you live in Washington, and you're integrated into that political media world, that is one of the reasons why it's so incestuous, why they constantly cover for each other, why there's so much groupthink within it. 

They're always talking to each other, for each order. To be part of these social scenes on which they depend, you have to be welcome. Part of being welcome is that you don't stray too far from their dogma. And I've always aggressively kept a very distant arm's length from people in positions of power, from major media figures, so that I don't feel constrained about giving my honest views or critiques or analysis or reporting on them. 

Occasionally, you do become friends with people almost by accident, who then end up in positions of power. Tulsi Gabbard is a good example. I have no problem criticizing Tulsi Gabbard because, whatever good relations I've had with her before, she's now the director of National Intelligence, and I'm not going to pull punches when I have critiques of Tulsi and I am also going to praise her only because I feel the praise is warranted. 

So, sometimes you just have to accept the fact that somebody has risen to a particular position or entered a type of power position, and there's just no getting around the fact that your job requires honest critique. I don't feel like that's the case for any of the people involved here, Tucker, Candace, or Nick Fuentes. I don't feel like any of them is a government official. Obviously, they all do have a great deal of influence in very different ways. So, I don't want to side with any one of them, nor do I want to necessarily say that I think insults or criticisms that they've launched at each other are warranted, but it is an extremely important conversation, so I also don't want to avoid it entirely, because for one thing these are three people, and obviously people understand how influential Tucker and Candace are. They're arguably the two most prominent conservative journalists/pundits, influencers. Maybe you could put Charlie Kirk in there, maybe Ben Shapiro, but Tucker and Candace are both bigger. I mean, Tucker hosted the most-watched show in the history of cable news for five years at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox. He's been on TV for 25 years before that. And Candace is just a powerhouse. She's a force of nature. Whatever you think of her, whatever you think of the Macron stuff, whatever you're thinking for Israel stuff, whatever, I'm leaving that on the side, I'm just saying. 

The fact of the matter is that when Candace left The Daily Wire, which, of course, is founded and run by Ben Shapiro after she had a falling out with Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, the other co-founder, over her criticism of Israel, which at the time was very mild – she was basically saying, “I don't think we should be bombing and killing children.” – that was pretty much the extent of it which caused this massive upheaval. A lot of people wondered, well, what is she going to do? Just like people wondered what Tucker Carlson was going to do, and they both went on to become, in my view, far more influential. 

I'm not saying that Tucker's position in the mediocre system now is necessarily larger than it is at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox News, but being at the 8 o'clock hour on Fox News comes with a lot of constraints, as he found out when he got fired, despite being the highest rated host on all of cable news. And he's completely liberated of those constraints now, I mean, completely. Completely. He's financially set. Fox is still paying this gigantic contract. He also now has a very successful platform. I mean, he's not worried about saying or doing whatever he wants. I know he feels – he said this before, publicly, not just in our conversations – that there were a lot of things he did as part of his career that he deeply regrets. Just being part of the Washington Group. 

I think he was raised there. I mean, he wasn't raised physically in Washington, but he eventually went there. But his father was very integrated into the U.S. deep state, that we could call it, ties to the CIA, he ran the propaganda arm of the U.S. government, Voice of America, was very, very integrated into that world. He grew up with a lot of wealth and privileges as he will tell you, and so when he got to Washington and got on TV very early on, he really was just immersed in this subculture that led him to believe, or at least not even necessarily to believe but to say a lot of things that he didn't really fully believe, or maybe that you can get yourself to believe things that you don't really believe because you just feel like it's what everyone around you expects you to say. 

Unlike a lot of people who are guilty of the same thing, Tucker has probably more than anybody else been extremely candid about what he regrets, and not only what he regrets, I'm not just talking about support for the Iraq war, I'm talking about the whole support that he gave for George Bush, Dick Cheney, neoconservative ideology, and not just on foreign policy, but also on economic policy and I think it's often overlooked. Everyone sees his head in foreign policies. Even when he was at Fox, he was criticizing Trump for doing things like assassinating General Soleimani, saying, “This is not in our interest. This might be in the interest of neocons or Israel, but why would we risk a war with Iran when that's not in our interest?” He was saying things like that even on Fox. He probably was the single most influential figure who took a lot of MAGA people, a lot of people on the right, and turned them against the war in Ukraine every night. 

I was on his show dozens of times talking about that war to the point where when he got fired from Fox, a bunch of Republican lawmakers ran to Politico or Axios anonymously and celebrated his firing and saying, “Oh, now our lives are going to be much easier. We can now fund the war in Ukraine without as much public pushback.” And that trajectory was because not just that he regretted what he had previously advocated and acknowledged his wrongdoing, but he was and is really determined to kind of repent for it. And he feels like the way to repent for it is by never again allowing himself to be blind. 

He moved out of Washington, used to live in the middle of Georgetown, where Victoria Nuland lived, I think, down the street or the other street. I mean, that's where they all lived. Now, he lives in rural Maine. He also lives on an island in Florida. He purposely took himself to very isolated places that are completely detached from that world, for the same reason as I was just describing. Not only do you feel less constrained, but you see things more clearly. You don't wake up every day and immediately get surrounded by people who are just part of this blob of groupthink and so, you're able to analyze things from a distance. It’s sort of like if you go into a big city and you're on a street corner, the vision that you have of what the city looks like is radically different than if you fly over it because that distance from what you're looking at gives you a better perspective, or at least, maybe not even better, but different. And the same thing happens when you move out of Washington or New York, and you purposely stay away from it, you start to see things more clearly because you're not immersed in it. And I do find that extremely valuable. 

I find that trajectory very, very positive. It's one of the reasons why, probably more than anything else that I've ever done, what caused much of the left turn against me, not all, but much, was number one, my refusal to get on board with Russiagate, but number two, my association with Tucker. I saw early on that there was a real movement within parts of the populist right, which you're now seeing in lots of different ways, not just questioning Israel and foreign policy and war, but also corporatism and the idea of economic populism. And yes, there are lots of deviations from it, but I mean Tucker and a few others were what made me see how real that was and how much of an opportunity there was, and not just to keep yourself in prison in the Democratic Party. 

So, I do believe Tucker's trajectory is real. I do believe that he's sincere and genuine in what he's saying. You never know what's fully in a person's heart, not even your own heart. You can't know for certain. You can deceive yourself about your own motives, your own thoughts and even the people you're closest to, your friends. But I have enough confidence in how well I know him, not just professionally, but personally as well, the time we spent together, the time that we've talked, that I do believe that he's very authentic in what he's saying. I think his trajectory is continuing. I don't think he's stopped at the point where he's going to be. And I think it's been very positive on almost every level. 

So that’s Tucker over here; then let's kind of put Candace in a similar position. I don't know Candace as well, so I can't comment to that degree of confidence about who she is and why she's doing what she's doing, but, two years ago, Candace worked at The Daily Wire, four years ago, she was in Jerusalem with Charlie Kirk celebrating Trump's move of the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, a long-time pipe dream, what seemed like a pipe dream of the furthest, most radicalized Greater Israel fanatics and their supporters in the United States. And there was very little criticism coming from Candace about Israel. In fact, the opposite was true. 

In her case, she's a lot younger than Tucker, she's only been around for not all that long, and I know personally that when you start off doing this work and you're able to spend full time digging into things, if you're minimally a critical thinker, if you're minimally open-minded, your views are going to morph the more you learn, the more you dive into things, the more you experience things. That is healthy and normal. And I do believe that her views, which she most passionately expresses, to which she pays the most attention, are genuine, which isn't the same thing as saying I agree with them all and they're all positive. I'm just saying I believe she also believes the things she's saying. I don't think it's calculated. I don't think it's about grifting. If it were, she could have stayed at The Daily Wire. There are easier ways to make a popular path than doing what she does. 

She defends Harvey Weinstein. She took up that case. There was hardly a public clamoring for that, especially among the audience that she cultivated. Also, the Macron stuff, all the stuff with Israel – she's been excluded from a lot of mainstream corporate media circles to which she used to have complete access and in which she could have risen without limits, obviously She’s very talented, like Tucker, she is a communicator, and she chose a much harder path, and I think that was through genuine conviction. There are many differences between Tucker and Candace, but for that purpose, you can put them together. 

And then you have Nick Fuentes. And just for those of you who haven't seen it, I'm just going to give you this summary of what's happened in the past few months, not going back years. The short version of this is that Nick Fuentes is often very critical of people who seem like they're the closest to him politically. So, he spends a lot of time criticizing Charlie Kirk – I was going to say Ben Shapiro, but I don't think Ben Shapiro is remotely close to Nick Fuentes – but Charlie Kirk on the surface could be. He spent a lot of time criticizing Matt Walsh. And he has also hurled a lot of criticism and might even say insults toward Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. 

In response, Candace Owens invited him for the first time on her podcast. Although I do think they have far more views in common than differences, the podcast was a bit hostile. I would say it's, in part, because Candace had some acrimonious points to raise with him, but also because – and she played some of these clips, I mean, Nick Fuentes had very harshly attacked her and criticized her, calling her a bitch who doesn't know what she's doing, and if you're going to do that, the people who are your targets are not necessarily going to love you, and so this was really the triggering event. 

She invited him to her podcast. He got a huge audience – between Candace and Nick Fuentes, who has a gigantic following online, in some ways you could argue he's as influential these days as Candace and Tucker, and maybe headed for even surpassing them, which again, generationally is natural – but because that interview was acrimonious and brought out a lot of tensions and personal conflicts, it kind of spilled over online because Nick left that interview and started really condemning Candace, accusing her of sandbagging him in the interview and the like, and then they had a big fight online. 

And then, before you knew it, Tucker asked Candace to come to his podcast. So, you're now talking about Candace Owens on Tucker Carlson's podcast, obviously a gigantic interview. And both of them, I don't know if they planned it, but both of them talked about Nick Fuentes in an extremely derogatory way. I mean, Tucker did acknowledge that, which you cannot deny. It's kind of like you can hate Trump all you want, but there's no denying his charisma, his skill in communicating, and the fact that he's very funny. 

For a long time, it was like heresy to say that, but there's no denying that that's true. I have no trouble admitting that people I can't stand are smart. I think Dick Cheney is very smart. I actually think Liz Cheney is very smart, just to give two examples, a lot of other ones as well. You can acknowledge the skills and assets that people have who you dislike or even despise. It’s not inconsistent. So, Tucker did acknowledge, like, look, Nick Fuentes is spectacularly talented. He is like a very rare, generational talent in terms of his ability to go before the camera, attract attention and be charismatic. But he's not like a ranter and a raver. Nick Fuentes is very well read, very, very informed. There aren't a lot of people who know more about the topics Nick Fuentes covers than Nick Fuentes does. It's very impressive. And that combination of being very charismatic, an extremely adept communicator, just kind of a natural camera presence, and having really smart insights that are grounded not in sensationalism or blind ideology, but lots of reading and thinking and critical evaluation, it's very potent. That's the reason why he's becoming so popular that even people at the heights of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson can't really ignore it anymore. 

They talked about Nick Fuentes as though he were just sort of some loser, like Tucker was saying, like, “How did he become so influential? He was just this gay kid living in his mother's basement in Chicago.” And I don't think Tucker quite meant it that way, but that is how some of it came off. Both agreed that he was some sort of psyop to destroy the right, that he maybe was a Fed working for the CIA. 

That led Nick to do a series of shows, a couple of segments, where he just tore into Tucker and Candace, particularly Tucker, in a way that suggests that he was: “How can you possibly call me this, Psyop, or this operative, or this person who works for the CIA, when you spent your whole life inside these circles? Candace Owens was the one working for Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson was working for Rupert Murdoch, making millions; Nick Fuentes wasn't. 

Nick's basic point was, like, you’re all very late to this game, like criticizing Israel, talking about the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States. You've only started doing this last year, whereas I've been doing it for years. This is what I think is at the heart of the matter: there are people who have been talking about Israel in this way for a long time. Noam Chomsky did, Norman Finkelstein did. 

One of the most important events was in 2007 when two of the most prestigious political scientists and international relations scholars in the United States, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote a book called “The Israel Lobby.” First, it was an essay in the London Review of Books, and then it turned into this massive tome, this 700-page book. It’s footnoted to the hilt because they're scholars, and they wrote the book that way. At the time, nobody on the mainstream was willing to say that. It was pretty much confined to the left, where you were free to say it. 

So, at the time, I was more associated with the left, perceived as being on the left. So, I was saying all these things for many years, but it wasn't all that risky for me because of the political camp that people perceived that I was in. I've always had one foot in that left-wing camp back then and one foot in the kind of libertarian, more independent camp, but in both of those camps it was totally fine, totally even welcome to talk about why we do so much for Israel, the evils of Israel, how they control our politics, how we go to war for them, how much money we spend to support them. 

So, I wasn't taking any risks – I've taken risks in my career, but I don't consider that as one – but Nick Fuentes, when he started doing it, was 18 years old, and he had this very promising future inside conservative media. At 18, he'd already been spotted as a talent. He had small shows, but he was making connections with and networking with some of the people who were very influential inside corporate media. People now forget, because now there's a lot of space for talking this way about Israel, but at the time, there was basically none. 

Before Donald Trump, there was almost nobody on the right willing to talk this way about Israel. You had Pat Buchanan, who did it for a long time, going back to the ‘80s, and he was viciously smeared as an anti-Semite. You had Ron Paul, who did the same thing. And then you had Trump kind of come in and create this space, and Nick Fuentes started really looking into it. I'm going into this not because of the personalities, but because I think they raise very broader issues about how all of this has evolved, not just for them, but for the broader discourse. 

Fuentes started off in conservative politics. At first, he thought Israel was our greatest ally and we have to support them: all the standard Republican and conservative views that have dominated both Republican and Democratic Party politics for decades. But then, the more he started questioning it, the more he started becoming vocal about it. And the more he became vocal about it, the more he became shunned inside the conservative media world, in which he had a very bright future. And rather than shutting up, as he was told to do, knowing that that might be better for his career, he couldn't. He just doesn't have that personality type. And he just had to keep examining it and keep saying it, and to say that Nick Fuentes paid a price for that is an understatement. Nick Fuentes has been excluded and booted out of every conceivable precinct of conservative media, even ones that consider themselves radical, dissident and far-right ones. I was playing on the mainstream ones. 

He was physically banned from going to Charlie Kirk's “Turning Points USA” and lots of other conferences like that. He was fired from the media platforms he was starting to develop. He was shunned by the friends that he had made, younger people on the side of the conservative movement. Then, it escalated from there. He got banned from almost every social media platform, including X. Elon Musk eventually reinstated him once he bought X, where he now is, but the only platform where he could be was Telegram. Now, he's on Rumble because Rumble is a genuine free speech platform. He has a show on Rumble that he does, I think, every night or four nights a week, and has found a good-sized audience. But really, it was on Twitter that he got his most attention, and that's why they banned him from Twitter in the pre-Musk era. But it wasn't just that. 

He wasn't just silenced and banned throughout all social media; he was also debanked. He had bank accounts closed, because of his political views, by major banks in the United States. He would get rejected for banking applications. He was put on a No-Fly list, which is the first time I really spoke about Nick, when I raised serious concerns about No-Fly lists being used in this way. His career has been severely impeded, not from what people believe are his racist views about Black people or immigrants; tons of people have those views and are perfectly welcome and fine in right-wing circles. The sole cause of it was his opposition to Israel and his questioning of the power of the Jewish lobby to keep the United States subservient to Israel. It just wasn't said. It was just a taboo. It was one of the third rails of American political discourse that would get anybody fired or destroyed for talking about it. 

Now, a lot of people talk about it, and it's become almost mainstream, but back then, especially on the right, almost nobody did. He paid a huge price, personally, financially, for his career, for his reputation, for his friendships, for his ability to get bank accounts. The government even put him on a no-fly list. And then last year, let's not forget, a homicidal maniac came to his house to try to murder him; shot two of his neighbors and killed them, and showed up at his house with a very large automatic weapon. This person eventually ended up being killed by the police. Another woman showed up at his house, a crazy liberal woman whom he had to pepper-spray. So, he's paid a big price for this. 

I don't want to speak for him, but I definitely identify with this mindset. I've had it too, sometimes, which is that if you are the first person or one of the first people to kind of get out on that plank and you're taking the shots because of it and very few other people are willing to join you,  and then at some point, it becomes a little safer to do it – I'm not saying it's safe; Tucker has also paid a price for it. I mean, half his audience has turned on him. He's now widely attacked by conservatives as being an anti-Semite, a Qatari agent, and Candace as well. So, it's not cost-free at all and Tucker didn't have to do it. He could have just ignored it. So, he's paid for a place too. 

But there's a big difference between Tucker Carlson in his mid-50s with a gigantic multimillion-dollar-year contract with Fox News, coming from the family that he came from, versus Nick Fuentes as a 22-year-old enduring all of that, and he comes from no wealth, no privilege. I think the idea is Nick feels like he was out on that plank, taking all these arrows and punishments, and then, in part, I do think that he helped open the space on the right to start talking more about Israel in a more honest way. It is true that Tucker and Candace, for the most part, hadn't really ever talked about it until after October 7, when, as Nick says, it almost became inevitable. They could have both ignored it. They could've both just spouted a few light lip services to it, but both of them made it very central to their cause, which they didn't have to do. It was not in their interest to do as well. But they did do it. 

But I think he feels like, I'm the one who actually paid the price for this. I was the one who was doing this earlier. Then the two of you come and now start doing it when it's a little bit safer, and also you're more protected because of your platform and standing in wealth, and you want to basically throw me in the garbage and declare me off limits, like, be the gatekeeper that says, you can go up to this point where Tucker and Candace are, but you can't go to Nick Fuentes; he's way too hateful or radical or dangerous or whatever. He feels like they're very late to the game, that he was braver, that he paid a bigger price and then they came along at an easier time and decided that they were the outer limits of where you can go on these discussions about Israel and the like. I'm not saying that's what I think, I'm saying that's what he thinks. I identify with that view. 

I think he would be fine if they would get there and say Nick Fuentes is one of the first people doing this, let's welcome him on our show. But the fact that he's still excluded, to the fact that they called him gay, loser, basically, in his parents' basement, implied that he was working for the CIA or was an agent, probably of Qatar, to destroy the right. I think that's what made him start being resentful, and also, there is this class issue here, which is very real. It's not his fault; Tucker's mother left them when he was very young. Then his father married an heiress from the Swanson fortune. And although she wasn't his mother. It was his stepmother. Obviously, he was living with his father and his stepmother, and they had a very good relationship. She was very good to him. And he ended up having all these benefits from a very young age. First, great wealth and privilege, and then some amount of fame, and then more fame, and then more wealth. And that's more or less been his life. 

Candace, I'm not sure about where she came from, what her family situation was, but once she got very big, she became very wealthy, and then she went to work for The Daily Wire, had a very lucrative contract there, and now she's married to, I heard Nick saying he's British royalty. I don't know if he is, maybe he is. I don't know one way or the other, but I know he's extremely wealthy. And I think there's a class issue there, too, which is like, you two purport to be the kind of warriors for this group of which you're not a part, which has kind of disaffected working-class white people. And Nick's saying, “I actually came from there and now suddenly you two, from your great mountain of wealth and privilege and lifelong or at least in Candace's case, years long, financial power and privilege and status and wealth, whatever, are coming in and trying to talk about me like I'm some loser and yeah I'm a loser in the sense that lots of white people have become trampled on by the United States and that is supposed to be what right-wing populism cares about.” 

So, I thought it was very telling. I do think, if I’m totally honest, it's more personal than substantive. I think Nick feels a lot of resentment for how he's been treated. 

I think Candace and Tucker feel resentment that they put a lot on the line to go where they went and one of the people who has a big influential audience, especially among young conservatives, have kind of gone to war with them. So, I think there's a lot of personal animist and personal resentment driving this, but there's also something very substantive here as well, which is about how people who are a little bit further along on the extremist train sometimes get attacked by the people who are less so, where they want to draw a line and kind of cut off the plank and have you fall off, even though you are on the plank first. I think Nick feels like that's being done to him, and I also think that there is a real class conflict that is driving a lot of this which is very much a part of the conservative world. I mean, huge amounts of conservative influencers, conservative pundits, conservative operatives who claim that they're there to speak for the working-class, for disaffected white people in the United States, are hanging out with billionaires every day and being funded by billionaires and meeting with billionaires and getting invites to the White House and to every center of power. And a lot of compromises are required to do that. And Nick's not willing to make them, and a lot of them are, and that is a substantive issue as well. 

Tucker and Candace, I do think, and they don't get very many invites to those circles. Tucker more than Candace. Tucker because he's been around for so long. He's good friends with people in the Trump administration. He campaigned for Trump, Trump likes him, even though Trump repudiated him and insulted him because of his opposition to the war in Iran. But there are a lot of tension points inside the MAGA movement that are very real, even if some of them are personally driven. We're human beings, we all harbor jealousies and vindictive sentiments and resentments. It's a Herculean effort to try to exclude those as much as possible. We all have to try; some of us do better than others. But none of us is immune from that. So, I'm not suggesting that it's a huge character flaw. I'm just saying I do think that's part of it. But I also think, at least as big of a part, if not bigger, are some of these ideological and class issues who's sort of keeping one foot in decent society and who's willing to say fully what they think without it. And the last thing I'll say is, and this is sort of what I began by saying, which is you can like somebody or not, but it doesn't mean you should lie about their skills or their successes. 

Nick Fuentes, I had a big online following for a few years, but it was very much a kind of online following that was almost like a cult following. It was like a very idiosyncratic group of people. They called themselves the Gropers. They didn't have a lot of cachet or influence outside of their circles, in part because Nick Fuentes wasn't invited anywhere into those more mainstream circles, or even less mainstream far-right circles. He kind of built his entire world himself. 

There are tons of successful podcasters and influencers who really don't have an original thought. They know what they have to get up and say to validate their audience, to show their loyalty to a particular circle. They may even have some talent in terms of rhetoric and communication, some charisma, but they're not very critically minded. They don't do a lot of reading. I can't tell you how often I listen to some of the podcasters of the biggest audience, and you're just like: How are you so ignorant? How do you think about these things? Do you ever stop and breathe and reflect, or read anything? Like read anything substantive in or bound like a Wikipedia page? So, there's a lot of that. 

But go listen to Nick Fuentes, if you haven't. And if you have preconceptions about what he is, I'm not saying that he doesn't say things that are provocative and deliberately cross lines on purpose sometimes, when he doesn't need to, just to cross them. Though I do think it's often purposeful, it's not just about a teenage transgressive instinct. 

So, there are definitely things he said that are offensive. Genuinely so, and not offensive in that, oh my god, you've offended me. But things that I think he would even acknowledge, he often says he doesn't really mean it, he is prone to rhetorical excess, and it's part of the whole presence. But everything that he talks about, he is extremely knowledgeable about and well-versed in. 

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Next question is from @edonk77, who says this:

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All right, the quick Ted Kaczynski story just for anyone who doesn't know it: out of nowhere in the ‘90s, in the Clinton administration, bombs started being sent to mailboxes. They were pretty sophisticated bombs, and they injured and even killed people. It was taking place across the country, and the FBI, the Attorney General, who at the time was Janet Reno, had no idea who was doing it. 

The person who was doing it wrote a letter, believed by the New York Times and the Washington Post, saying, “I will stop if you publish my essay about my ideas and what's motivating me.” And obviously, the instinct of the government is to say, “We’re not going to give in to your terrorist tactics,” which in classic terrorism is kind of what it was: it was violence directed at civilians to induce political and social change.  But it got to the point where the Justice Department was so desperate, they didn't have a first clue about who was doing that. It was like really the perfect crime. They agreed.

So, the Washington Post, maybe the New York Times, too, published this essay by Ted Kaczynski. The reason the Justice Department was willing to do it, aside from the fact that they thought it would help identify who it was, was because they thought what he had written was kind of just such lunacy, madness, that nobody would really read it and even think it deserved attention. And also, they were obviously made it known that the person who wrote that was the person who was sending these violent acts, the terrorist bombs, killing civilians or injuring civilians. They just assumed the hatred for him would overwhelm any interest in what he had to say. 

On one of those bets, they actually turned out to be right, because publishing this essay caused, eventually, Ted Kaczynski's brother, to come forward and say, “I think this is my brother. His writing seems familiar. His ideas are familiar.” That's how they were able to eventually track Ted Kaczynski down. 

Ted Kaczynski was a prodigy, recognized by everybody, as being brilliant – graduated high school at the age of 15, went to Harvard, completed a degree in mathematics. He then went to a PhD program, I think at the University of Chicago, at a top school, and then ended up teaching at Berkeley. And he was on the path of being the youngest ever tenured professor. He was a genuinely brilliant person, not brilliant in the sense that David Frum or Ann Abelbaum gets called brilliant, but genuinely brilliant. 

But what they were very wrong about was the fact that nobody would have any interest in his essay, that nobody would connect to any of his ideas, and that the hatred for Ted Kaczynski, even if people were willing to be open-minded, would make people refuse to read a terrorist essay and take it seriously. At first, that was true, but over time, people started turning to it and saying, “You know what? This seems quite important. There are a lot of ideas here that are very, very relevant and seem prophetic and explain a lot of what previously had been inexplicable.” 

I can't do a good job paraphrasing or summarizing the essay. It's very complex. It's highly worth reading. You can find it free online. It ended up being published in a longer-form, book format. You can read the essay in its long form or the book. But the basic theme of it was that technology was destroying humanity and the ability for human beings to live happy and fulfilled lives. And he traced it back to the Industrial Revolution, but then, how technology has advanced more and more. Before the Industrial Revolution, people were living in small towns, in villages, in nature like they had always lived on farms, had churches, had communities. They were very closely connected to their neighbors, to their extended family and they were living as human beings had lived for thousands of years. We're political and social animals. We need a connection. Without connection, human beings are going to go crazy. 

Eventually, we got to the point Charles Dickens was talking about: the hideous realities of living in gigantic cities as factory workers, completely exploited, working extremely long days for little pay. It is breaking people physically, spiritually, psychologically and emotionally, and that is definitely one of the costs, as we've even gone further down this road. 

And I think it's what Ted Kaczynski predicted, which is that the more technologically we come, the less human, the less fulfilled our natural human needs are. What it means to be human will be consumed by technology and turned into even more exploited tools and objects that barely look at us as humans, arranging our lives so that everything that gives us pleasure and is necessary for happiness is taken away. 

And just quickly on this, there's a Netflix documentary, I've mentioned this before, called “Happiness,” which is a documentary designed to ask, what is human happiness? How do humans acquire happiness? What is necessary and what isn't? And what they found is that a lot of what data reflects is that in many societies where people are economically deprived and without a lot of technology, they're much happier than in much wealthier Western countries. 

This documentary makes a very good case using science, not just pop psychology, about why, oftentimes, technological expansion and wealth expansion undermine human happiness. Ted Kaczynski also warned that, as technology evolved further and further, our societies are less humane, less fulfilling and less connected. And clearly, all of that is true. That is exactly what has happened. I'm not saying we need to dismantle it, but he actually lived those words, he dropped out of the whole matrix basically, when he was, I think 24, left his job as a faculty member and just went into the woods, lived a self-sufficient life off the grid, read, wrote, and did not much else other than working on his writing and his development and thoughts. The more he did that, the more he became convinced that being in the middle of this matrix was uniquely devastating to the ability of humans to be free and happy. 

Of course, that started resonating in America and in Europe and throughout the Western world as people became less and less happy. All the things he was describing as to why, and the role technology plays in that, would obviously exacerbate all that. Remember, this was 1995. I mean, the internet was just starting, but it was nowhere near as dominant in our lives. 

Obviously, with the internet, we often talk to people on phones or on screens. We have our phones everywhere. So, a lot of the human connection and interactivity you once had just walking on the street is now taken away from you because everybody's staring at their phones. You go to restaurants, any restaurant anywhere in the Western world, and you have people who are related, people who are friends, who talk a little, and they both pull out their phones. And before you know it, they're both staring at their phones, and especially with COVID, which forcibly segregated everybody and kept everybody at home, where people even developed a greater dependence on the internet to do everything, including interacting with other humans, this isolation has become far worse and all of the predictable pathologies that come with it that he predicted are also worsening very rapidly, in a very dangerous way. 

I mean, to me, this is the West's greatest problem: spiritual decay that comes from lack of connection. Obviously, there are benefits to technology. We have cures to diseases that we would otherwise die from. The internet makes the world easier, gives you access to things, including reading and information that you otherwise, etc. etc. There are a lot of benefits. But for me, one of the things I think I've learned is that the only real law of the universe is balance, by which I mean for everything that you drive a benefit, there's an equal cost, at least, that offsets it and keeps it in balance. Whatever: fame, wealth, career, success, it all comes with a cost. I definitely think that's the case of technology, and Ted Kaczynski was one of the first people to lay out this case in the way he laid it out. So even though he was a terrorist, even though he killed people, a lot of people began to think, you know what? I think there's a lot of validity here. 

You might ask why he goes to the scene to kill people? He had an academic pedigree. He probably could have gotten this published. I don't really know. I haven't paid much attention lately to this whole episode, so I forgot what the rationale was for that. But in any event, maybe he was also a little imbalanced himself. That probably was true. But, sometimes, being mentally imbalanced or at least mentally alienated, in a way, is necessary to produce insights. Even going back to that last question we talked about, you remove yourself from a certain society or a sector of society, it gives you a much greater clarity of thought because you're no longer connected to it or in it, and you can see it much clearly. I'm sure that's what happens if you just remove yourself completely. 

One of the things the question asked about is left-wing politics. And the person who just asked this question, I'm on the political left, but a lot of his critiques of what left-wings politics is about and the flaws in it, I must admit have validity. And basically, what Ted Kaczynski's warning was, and this definitely proved prophetic, was that the idea would be to make this system of technology and the capitalism that emerged from it invulnerable, so nobody blamed it, nobody wants to undermine it, nobody wants to subvert it, no matter what it's doing to us we're all propagandized to revere it to believe it's all good to believe it's invulnerable, to believe that we benefit from it. And he said one of the ways that that's going to succeed is that people are going to be given kind of culture war fights or social justice causes, which are going to make them feel like they're doing something subversive or radical, when in reality nothing that they're doing is a threat remotely to any real power center.

 Compact Magazine, which is I think a really interesting magazine, it kind of explores the intersection between left and right populism had an article on June 16, 2023, which I really recommend. The headline of it was: “Ted Kaczynski Anti-Left Leftist.” 

Obviously, this vision he's presenting in some ways is left-wing. It's a denunciation of capitalism and its excesses, the Industrial Revolution, and technology, that has a left-wing ethos for sure, but he was also scornful of modern-day, leftist political expression. 

A week or two ago, Ryan Grim as on our show and we were talking about the kind of fraudulent branding of Bari Weiss and The Free Press. There was supposedly a heterodox and dissident when, in reality, it really grew from objecting to a lot of the excesses of the woke movement. And Ryan basically said, if you're talking about kids with blue hair or whatever color hair someone has, or if they're trans or not or whatever, you're not talking about anything that is about the real structure and dissemination of power. It's like catnip. They're happy to have you fight about racism, feminism, yeah, they love racism. They love feminism. Remember the CIA did that whole video, super woke video? They centered like a, what was she? She was, I think, a non-binary Latina who had neurodivergence. And she was just like, “I stand proud and tall and occupy space unapologetically” as a Latino non-binary immigrant, whatever. They're so happy to have that. “Hey, look at our Black generals. We're going to celebrate our Black military officials. We're the Pentagon. Hey, with the FBI, look at all our cool badass women agents or fighter pilots. Look, they're women now.” It's like, “Oh, wow, that's so awesome. We've done so much to change society.” It's that famous cartoon where a Muslim family in Yemen are looking up at the sky and kind of smiling and saying, “I hear the neck bomb is going to be sent, is going to be dropped by a woman pilot.” 

It's just like, here's Hillary Clinton. She's so radical and such a wild departure from everything before, because she's going to be the first female president when there's like nobody more representative of status quo politics than she. So, you vote for her. You feel like you're doing something really like a big blow against the power center and the patriarchy, because now there's a woman and you put her in office and she's going to be the best possible protector of status-quo prerogatives and power centers everywhere, because she presents this illusion that you've done something historic or subversive, when in reality you're just working as hard as you can to entrench the status quo that you think you're working against. 

Ted Kaczynski was incredibly prescient about that as well. There's a lot more to him than what I've gone over. There's a lot to the essay. I just can't do that justice in the time we have, even though I took another hour. 

I did want to give my thoughts on it, but I also highly encourage you to go find the essay, even just start with the essay and I think you'll be amazed if you just sit down and read it, forget about he's the Unabomber, all that. Just read it, and remember it was written in the early to mid-1990s, and so even if some of it seems more familiar now, at the time it was very prescient, but also the way he described it, the historical framework he employed to shed light on how it works, that it's not just some brand new thing, it's gone back, basically traced it back to the Industrial Revolution. There are not very many better ways to spend your time in terms of your brain and your critical thinking, then to go read that essay. 

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All right, here's a few questions on Gaza. 

First from @CatRika:

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@Lightwins2028:

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It actually is incredible that I come here and sit here every night and do this show more or less every night 500 times. I will accept that as well and agree that it is kind of incredible.

And then from @johnmccray:

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I will confess that what we've seen in Gaza over the last 20 months is not just some horrific tragedy or even war on the other side of the world; it is a genocide that involves some of the most twisted cruelty and sadism I have ever witnessed in my life –  obviously, I wasn't alive in World War II, which is why I say ‘in my lifetime.’ However, when you announce that you're blocking all food from entering an enclave that you fully surround and control – and yes, there's a small border with Egypt and Gaza, but the Israeli military is on the other side of that, controlling egress and ingress into it and out of it (besides, the Egyptian dictator is U.S. supported and always has been for decades because he's there to take marching orders from the U.S. regarding Israel).

When you take this concentrated open-air prison enclave, where people can't leave, can't come in, you ban the media from coming in, and you announce to the world you're putting a blockade on any food from entering it, and you knowingly starve them to death, you knowingly blockade food from entering on top of what they're already experiencing – endless bombing, people burning alive in their churches, in their tents, every hospital, every school, all of civilian life being destroyed… The doctors who are there don't have basic medicines. They don't have antibiotics, they don't have feeding formula for babies, they don't have painkillers or anesthesia for the children who come in with their limbs blown off – just the absolute, worst nightmares that human beings could possibly endure for a sustained period, and on top of that, you start starving them to death and then, instead of letting food distribution in from the actual organizations that are experienced in it and actually want to feed the people, you create some new entity that you control – American military contractors that are, for profit, doing the bidding of the IDF, purposely set up so that it barely gives out any food and then it's a death trap – so, you lure starving people in there and you murder them and massacre them regularly, daily… That is a new kind of evil. 

When you’re starving people to death and then saying, “Hey, here are some grains of flour, come here and get them,” and murdering them when they do, when you purposely set up the centers so they barely stay open for more than 15 minutes. People get noticed right before, and they have to trek miles, very dangerously, to get there. They're not allowed to stay there, waiting for the next time to open. They have to go back, and they're killed on the way there. So, they're faced with this Sophie's choice of either having to stay at home and watch their kids starve to death or knowing they risk their lives and their teenage son's lives to go there and try to get food, knowing that a lot of them are going to be murdered, that is a sick new kind of evil. 

And because of how ubiquitous cell phones are, we have to watch it, and we know it's been streamed live every day, throughout the world. We've all seen just the absolute most sickening, hideous human suffering imaginable, a level of sadism that's almost hard to fathom that people are capable of. And while some Israelis are protesting some more now about the end of this war, for the most part, the view of the Israelis has been, I don't care how many civilians we kill, I don't care how many babies are killed. The babies are terrorists. They'll grow up to be Hamas, so I don't care to kill them. 

These are evils that are difficult to endure, even if your work is journalism, even if you look at some of the most horrible things people are doing, you still have to report on them. Even for that, I mean, it's hard to fathom and express, and I know so many people, and I just thought about myself including in this, that you feel so impotent, so your rage is so purposeless, even though it's all-consuming, because the Trump administration doesn't care. It's filled with Israel fanatics, and it's going to support Israel until the very last Gazan is killed. Can you give them all the weapons, all the money, all the diplomatic cover? 

And then of course, the Israelis themselves are so deranged and fanatical that they don't care either. And short of having the world go in and militarily intervene against Israel or arming Hamas, which is not going to happen, there's not a lot you can do. There definitely has been serious measurable changes for the better in how Americans now look at Israel and look at the Israeli action in Gaza, how they look at American funding of Israel. That's not going away. That's a big, big problem for Israel. 

Once you open your eyes to that, you can't unsee it. And you have a lot of people, as we talked about in that first question, fueling it constantly. I hope I'm one of them. I certainly do what I can to do that. But that doesn't mean that any of that is going to stop this war. 

Even in Europe, and I really despise the Western European political elite and media class, they're utterly supportive of Israel. They are loyal to Israel, they arm Israel, fund them, not as much as the United States, but to a great degree. A lot of those historical reasons, guilt over World War II, which Israel expertly exploits – not that it's difficult to exploit the guilt and psychological fragility of Western Europeans, but they do a great job of it. 

So, you're starting to see things like Macron comes out and recognize a Palestinian state, not unimportant, but still a symbolic step. Keir Starmer, he's probably the most despicable politician from a character perspective, an utterly empty, vapid belief-free politician – he's despised in his own country, despised. – He didn't even go that far. He said, “We are going to recognize a Palestinian state unless Israel starts letting food in.” So, Palestinian statehood is not something they're entitled to. It's like a threat that you make to Israel that you're going to give them if the Israelis don't let food in. You see the Germans, who are always the worst for obvious psychological and historical reasons when it comes to standing up to Israel, sort of saying now, “We're going to cut off arms.” 

We'll see how long any of that lasts. The one group of people you do not want to put your faith and trust in to stand for a cause, to hold firm on beliefs, or convictions and values is Western European political elites. They're pathetic. Pathetic. Obviously, there are some exceptions, but as a class, they're nauseating and pathetic. 

I used to think the British elite class was the worst elite class on the planet. While I still think they are definitely in the running, I'm starting to actually think the Germans are more psychologically warped and sickening. I mean, the Germans were also fanatics about the war in Ukraine – fanatics. You put Germans in power, and they don't think about anything other than going to war with Russia. It's really a bizarre repetitive pattern. 

So, I don't want to pretend that there's some quick solution. I do give as much money as I can to them, you can find Palestinian aid and Gaza aid organizations. There's no shortage of verified GoFundMe accounts from people in Gaza telling their stories. And obviously you have to be a little careful not to give to fraudulent ones, but there are easy ways to verify those. Look for trustworthy people on Twitter who vouch for them, things like that. You can donate to that. Even like $50 at a time, whatever you're capable of, $10, $15. Everything is so high-priced in Gaza that sometimes even if they have food available, they can’t afford it. And I think it's also a good way of showing the people in Gaza that the world actually cares about their plight. 

Earlier today, I talked about how Marjorie Taylor Greene has become very outspoken about refusing to serve the agenda of AIPAC and that AIPAC is now on the march against her. They're going to do what they've done to all sorts of politicians which they are now doing to Thomas Massie as well: try to find some fraudulent, politician who lives in their district, who seems demographically appealing to that district, who has the same politics, except they're going to know that AIPAC paid for their political career, paid for the seat in Congress, and they're going to be supremely loyal. 

One of the worst examples – I mean, I can barely look at this person because of how pathetic and sad it is to watch him. They wanted to get Cori Bush out of Congress. If you're conservative and you dislike Cori Bush, AIPAC doesn't dislike her for any of the reasons that you dislike her. They only care about the fact that she's raised questions like, “Why are we sending so much money to Israel when my whole district is filled with people financially struggling, who don't have healthcare, don't have access to education, have no public safety?” Why are we giving all this money to Israel? Why is AIPAC forcing us to do that?” And they were so determined to take Cori Bush out because of her Israel questioning that they found some utterly craven Black politician, nice liberal, nice Democrat, of course. You have to get a liberal, you have to be a Democrat, and probably have to be a Black politician. His name is Wesley Bell, and they paid $15 million – 15,000 million –for one Democratic primary seat in Congress in St. Louis, to replace Cori Bush with somebody exactly like her, except that he's an AIPAC loyalist. And you can just see him on social media and in speeches, standing up for Israel. You know exactly why $15 million was his price tag, and he knows if he wants to keep that seat, he's going to need AIPAC doing the same. And they're going to try to do the same with Thomas Massie. They're going to try to do the same with Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

They're not always successful. They've tried it many times with Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, even, to a smaller extent, AOC. They made some inroads, but for the most part, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are too popular in their Democratic primaries and their Democratic constituencies for that to work. 

In 2022, Ilhan Omar almost lost the Democratic primary. I think she won by a few points. So, she's not invulnerable. They never quite spent the money on her that they spent on people like Cori Bush or Jamaal Bowman. But they have a long history of doing this. And they're clearly doing it to Thomas Massie. If you look at the three top billionaires donating to AIPAC to remove Thomas Massie, they're all Jewish billionaires who are extremely loyal to Israel. 

That's the whole point of this effort that Donald Trump supports. One thing you can do is just look at who AIPAC is trying to remove from Congress and just donate to whoever they want to take out of Congress as a way to thwart them because even if you're a conservative and you see them doing it to some left-wing member of Congress that you don't like, it's not like the person they're going to replace that person with is going to be any more appealing to you. There's no difference, except that that person is going to be bought and paid to be an AIPAC agent, who is going to be devoted to Israel and never question Israel. That's the only difference. 

AIPAC's not taking Cori Bush out of Congress or Jamaal Bowman because they're too left-wing. The only thing they care about is if the person is devoted to Israel. The same with Tom Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene. If they're going to take out members of Congress as punishment for not being loyal enough to Israel, donate to the people they're trying to remove on both sides. If you're on the left, you're not going to agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie, obviously. But the people who are going to come in their place are not going to agree with you politically anymore. The only difference will be that those people will be fanatical Israel supporters, like many in the Republican Party, instead of being among the few to question them. So, that is another way I think you could work. 

I know this is thankless work. There's no immediate gratification, but it does work. Public opinion changes. It really does. And especially with independent media with a free internet, with the deconcentrating of power over the discourse no longer in the hands of a few tiny number of gigantic media corporations controlled by people who are all the same basic political outlook, with the same interests, but now huge gigantic people with big audiences who influence a lot of people completely removed from those circles and that dogma. That is also a big reason for optimism. And if you see the polling change in a pretty substantial way as you do on the Israel question and the Gaza question, keep contributing to that. You don't have to have a gigantic platform. 

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Last question, this is from @coldhotdog:

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All right. The U.S. is sanctioning Brazil, Brazilian officials, and also imposing tariffs on them, not for the reason that Trump has been imposing tariffs on other countries, mainly because he thinks there's unfair trading practices causing a trade deficit. The opposite is true. The United States has a significant trade surplus with Brazil. There's not a trade deficit. So, the tariffs are more – and it was kind of explicit – used as punishment against Brazil for their violation of free speech, their violation to due process, their persecution of political opponents. And obviously, that is not the U.S.'s real goal. 

I wrote an article about this in Folha, where I do reporting, and I'm a columnist in Brazil. And it basically said, Okay, I hope no one takes seriously when the U.S. government says we're upset about the infringements on free speech or the erosions of democracy. It was like a month before Trump announced sanctions on Brazil and tariffs on Brazil, that he went to the Persian Gulf region and heaped praise on Mohammed bin Salman and the leaders of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, heralded them, hugged them, and not for the first time. While I think Brazil is very repressive and I think Moraes is an absolute tyrant, it's in a completely different universe than what happens in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. It's not even close. 

So, any country that's heaping praise on and embracing, hugging and propping up the governments of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Qatar, or the Egyptians, or the Jordanians, of the Bahrainis or whomever, the Philippines, Indonesia, obviously, is not a country that cares about repression inside other countries. Obviously.

The United States doesn't go around the world fighting wars or intervening in other countries because they care about repression. That's the pretext. They love dictators as long as dictators are pro-American. They only have a problem with dictatorial regimes if they defy America, like Cuba or Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, and then you hear “Oh my god, we're the United States, we go and fight for democracies. That is why we have to protect Ukraine.” Even though, arguably, Ukraine has become as repressive as Russia. So, whatever drives the United States, it's not a love for democracy, it is not a contempt for an erosion of liberty, it is not a defense of free speech, obviously, I hope there's no one in my audience who believes that. So, when Trump says, “Oh, we're punishing Brazil because it's become repressive, it’s attacked the free speech,” it's obviously not the reason. 

Then the question that our Locals member is raising, which is a good one.

I don't support the U.S. embargo of Cuba which is now 65 years old. The idea of that was that we're going to change the government of Cuba and free the Cuban people. Obviously, it has not done that. The only thing it's done is make life in Cuba utterly miserable for the population. Same with Venezuela. Same with the sanctions on Iran. So, I don't think that's the role of the United States to go try to change other governments, even if they're pretending, they're changing them out of concern about their oppression when obviously that's not the real reason. 

The reason is they want to replace it with a regime that's more compliant to the United States. And obviously I don't think Trump is intervening in Brazil with punishments and the like because he's concerned in the abstract about free speech. I mean, aside from all the dictatorial regimes we embrace, there's also the attacks on free speech in the United States, which we've gone over many times, including last night, that the Trump administration is spearheading, that the Biden administration before that spearheaded. 

So, the question then becomes, well, what is the real reason? And I want to say, while I view Alexandre de Moraes as a serious menace, as one of the most tyrannically minded people on the planet, even if he's not, say, as powerful or dictatorial as Mohammed bin Salman, just because Brazil is not that kind of society that permits that level of overt, absolute, autocratic tyranny, the way a lot of other countries do that we support prop up, I do think he's a genuine evil figure. Obviously, one of the reasons I talk about it is because I live here. My family is Brazilian. My kids are Brazilian. So, it's something I care about for that reason. And of course, I think the reason why Trump is doing it is because it's not actually a left-wing government in Brazil. Lula is the president. And he was a leftist in his earlier life. He was a labor leader, but he ran for president three times as a leftist, lost. And then finally, in 2002, he was sick of losing. And he wrote this famous letter called Letter to the Brazilian People, where he basically said, “I understand that if I want to be president, I have to moderate. I have to get along with financial centers. This is important for prosperity.” He basically promised not to be a fallaway left-wing dogma to be much more moderate. And then to prove it, he chose a billionaire banker as his vice president, to make clear to financial markets, banks, big corporations inside Brazil that he wasn't going to be a threat. 

They're not leftist at all. But I'm sure in Trump's mind, in the eyes of Marco Rubio, the people who are influencing Trump, he sees a little like basically a communist regime, like a left-wing regime, like from the Cold War, even though it's not remotely that. And I'm not suggesting they're conservative or right-wing. They're not. But they're not communists or even socialists. And part of what Trump's doing is he just looks at Lula and the Brazilian government as an enemy and is convinced, okay, they're our enemy. Let's punish them. If I had to find a justification – I'm not saying I support it, I'm not saying I justify it – but if I had to find a justification, I would say that the real only justification for any of this is the fact that Moraes and the Supreme Court have been now targeting not just America's social media companies. 

So, this is reaching into the United States threatening the free speech rights of American citizens or people legally residing in the United States, attacking and threatening and trying to bully American social media companies. And that is, I believe, an invasion of American sovereignty and an attack on the rights of American citizens. I do think the government, the U.S. government, is duty-bound to draw a very firm line and say, “No, you're not going to cross that line. And if you cross that, we're going to take action against you.” That's the only justification I can think of. 

So, I'm not defending the Magnitsky Act sanctions against Moraes, or even the punitive tariffs against Brazil. I've basically been arguing that if there's anyone who truly is tyrannical in his mindset, who's just absolutely, like, mentally unstable and just an authoritarian tyrant with no limits at all, who's been just vindictive and drunk on his power, it is Alexandre de Moraes. And I do think there's this one justification for the U.S. to cite, to justify taking retaliatory and retributive action against Brazil. 

Obviously, Trump likes Bolsonaro. He strongly identifies with any claims that a politician is being victimized by politicized lawfare because Trump believes as do I, that he himself was the victim of that and he sees when he looks at Bolsonaro a very similar thing happening to Bolsonaro, and I think he feels personally angry by that. So, I think there's some complex motives as well, but other than what I just articulated, I'm not defending the U.S.’s use of sanctions, the exploitation of the dollars in reserve currency to punish the economies of other countries because we don't like what they're doing internally. It's all obviously a fraud and a pretext to say, we're doing it because we care about free speech or due process or whatever. But I think there is a foundation to it, not a very strong one, but a foundation to it that I do think is legitimate. And you know what? I guess, just looking at it from a less principled perspective, I do think Alexandre de Moraes is a completely out-of-control monster. And everyone in Brazil is too scared to stand up to him or too supportive of the fact that he's imprisoning and exiling and silencing Bolsonaro supporters, that there is nobody in Brazil that's capable of stopping him or willing to do so. And the only thing that has really undermined and disrupted him is what Trump just did and now is threatening to do even more with even more invasive sanctions against his wife, against other officials in Brazil. And that is something they have to take very seriously and are taking very seriously. And it's the first time there's been real limits put on it. 

So, from a very kind of instrumentalized, results-based perspective, I confess that I'm happy about where that is leading, even if I do have genuine, really real concerns about the use of American arms and weaponry to do this.

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The Pro-Israel Meltdown Over Mahmoud Khalil's NYT Interview: When is Violence Inevitable?; Why is FIRE Suing Marco Rubio: With 1A Lawyer Conor Fitzpatrick
System Update #499

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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The case of Mahmoud Khalil made national headlines – even international headlines – because he was the very first student who was snatched either off the street or out of his apartment by ICE agents under the Trump administration's brand new policy of expelling Israel critics, who they deem supportive of Hamas, which is basically anyone who criticizes Israel whether they're PhD students on green cards or anything else. 

On June 20, a federal judge ordered Khalil, who is a green card holder, released from ICE detention facilities pending the deportation proceedings on the grounds that he had never been arrested, let alone convicted of anything, and presents no threat to anyone or to the public in general. That release has enabled Khalil to make rounds giving interviews to various outlets, and he gave one last week to the New York Times' columnist and podcast host, Ezra Klein. One excerpt of Khalil's interview went viral, largely due to Israel supporters, of course, who claimed he was apologizing for, if not actively supporting, Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel. We'll examine his comments to see if he did say that, but also to examine the important questions raised about who has the right to use violence and when, who is a terrorist or who is a freedom fighter, and whether anything Khalil said remotely poses a danger to the United States. 

Our guest was Conor Fitzpatrick, a lawyer from FIRE.org, the free speech group the ACLU once was: a group of lawyers and activists passionately devoted to defending free speech against any and all attacks on it, regardless of whether the censorship target is on the right, the left, or anything in between. FIRE announced this week that it was suing Marco Rubio and the U.S. State Department under the First Amendment, arguing that the government has the right to deport foreign nationals, but not to do so as punishment for their political expression. 

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Foto preta e branca de rosto de homem visto de pertoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

We have covered the case of Mahmoud Khalil many times on this show. He was the sort of test case, the canary in the coal mine, showing that the Trump administration intended not to deport all foreign students or most foreign students or just foreign students who expressed a political opinion and engaged in political activism. That's not the Trump Administration's policy at all. They don't even have a policy of deporting foreign students on U.S. soil for criticizing the United States. What they do have is a policy of deporting foreign students in the United States or at American universities who criticize Israel or protest against that foreign country. 

Mahmoud Khalil was detained in his apartment, where he lives with his American wife. She was eight months pregnant; their newborn infant was born. And she's an American citizen. His newborn infant is an American Citizen. And he's a green card on the path to American citizenship. 

Since then, there have been many other cases of students being snatched off the street by plainclothes ICE agents and unmarked cars, including a Tufts PhD student, Rumeysa Ozturk, who the Trump administration admits, did nothing other than co-author an op-ed in the Tuft's student newspaper, where she called on the administration, along with three other students who were co-authors, to implement the student Senate's decision that the administration should divest from Israel. That's all she did. Nothing against Jews, nothing in favor of Hamas, any of that. She just criticized Israel and urged divestment because the student senate had voted for it. It was essentially saying abide. She, too, was snatched off the street, put in ICE detention, and now has been released. And there have been many other cases since. 

In the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the federal court said you can continue the deportation proceeding, but there's no basis or justification for keeping him in a detention prison while all of this proceeds. If you win the deportation process, you can obviously deport him, but there's no reason why he should rot in jail rather than being at home with his wife and child while this process proceeds, because he's never done anything remotely to suggest that he's a threat to anybody. He was never arrested as part of the student protest or any other time in his life, never convicted of a crime, never the subject of a complaint with the police. 

And so, he's now out and he's giving interviews, as is his right. He's given several interviews. One of them was for The New York Times columnist and podcast host, Ezra Klein

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