Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Is Any Due Process Needed to Send Immigrants to Lifelong Prison in El Salvador? Trump Continues the Long-Standing Bipartisan Policy of Bombing Yemen
System Update #424
March 19, 2025
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Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of mass deportations of those who entered the United States illegally. They just sent 236 people to El Salvador – none of whom is from that country or has anything to do with that country – and they sent them to one of the world's worst and most repressive prisons. And all of this was done without any due process. A federal court already ordered that nobody be deported to El Salvador without a hearing, even ordering that any planes in the air on their way to El Salvador come back but the Trump Justice Department argued that the judge lacked any authority to issue such an order and thus ignored it. 

The United States government, President Trump, in his second term, just ordered a significant bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, which his National Security Advisor says will be a “sustained bombing campaign.” All of this was done without any Congressional approval, let alone any declaration of war. 

As the friend of the show, Michael Tracey, put it, when this new bombing campaign in Yemen was announced, “You will seldom lose money betting on bipartisan continuity in U.S. foreign policy.” 

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Some of you know the reason why I went into journalism and started writing about politics was principally in reaction to what I had perceived to be the grave assault on civil liberties and basic constitutional rights, carried out by the Bush-Cheney administration, in the name of the War on Terror. 

There were many components to what I thought were the attacks on free speech but one of the most significant, one of the most egregious, was that the president, very broadly, under Article II, claimed the right to exercise virtually unlimited power that no court and no one in Congress could limit what he did in his prosecution of the War on Terror. He could ignore congressional statutes as the Bush administration did when it came to spying on Americans and not even courts could issue orders that constrained him in any way. 

Essentially, the president has the full, untrammeled right to carry out whatever he decides is necessary and one of the specific steps that the Bush-Cheney administration did in fact carry out, beyond spying on Americans with no warrants, that I found very alarming was creating a prison camp off of what they thought was American soil in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in Guantánamo, part of Cuba, to create a prison where people were thrown into basically black holes simply because they were accused by the president or the administration of being terrorists – but never actually needing to prove the truth of those accusations. 

These people were imprisoned oftentimes for years based solely on the say-so of the administration. They had no opportunity to have lawyers, they had no opportunity to know what the accusations against them were and they had no opportunity to contest the charges and accusations that were lodged against them. 

When people like me would stand up and say, “How do you just throw people to a black hole for eternity without at least giving them an opportunity to show that they did nothing wrong or to contest the accusations that you're making against them?”, the Bush administration's argument was, “Oh, don't worry, don't worry. All the people we're putting in Guantánamo are terrorists, trust us. We've labeled them terrorists, and they're not just terrorists, but these are the worst of the worst terrorists”, in order to convince everybody not to care about what happened to them, to even be happy about the fact that they were being imprisoned for life with no due process of any kind. 

And it was only in 2008 when the Supreme Court said, under the Constitution, everybody under the power of the U.S. government has the right to habeas corpus, which is a right guaranteed by the Constitution, basically, to go into a court and say that you're being wrongfully detained. 

And once that happened, it turned out, and even the U.S. government admitted, that not a few people, but many of the people that were detained in Guantánamo, were actually guilty of nothing. They were innocent, we're unjustly accused and never had anything to do with any terrorist organizations. Sometimes people in their community would tattle on them because they had some grudge, and the U.S. military would then pick them up based on these gossipy accusations. Many times, it was a mistaken identity. And again, that's not just me saying that, that is the U.S. government admitting it, and that's why there had been a thousand people in Guantánamo, and now, 25 years later, there's fewer than 40, because the U.S. government ended up releasing them all, obviously because they believed they were not a threat and admitted that many of them were never a threat, which is always what will happen if you put power in the hands of any human to censor people, to punish people, to imprison people, they're often going to get it wrong. 

 And so, had the Supreme Court not ruled that Guantánamo detainees had the right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court and see the evidence against them, many of these innocent people would have been held for far more years than they were actually already held in Guantánamo. Some people were held there for 10 or 15 years of their lives and the U.S. government now acknowledges never had any involvement in a terrorist organization. 

 If you go to law school and study the Constitution, if you read the Bill of Rights, due process is central to everything. The idea that the government cannot punish people without giving them an opportunity for some process to know what the accusations are against them and to disprove them or contest them – and the Supreme Court said that even for non-citizens in Guantánamo because the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo was essentially under U.S. sovereignty and that anybody under U.S. sovereignty has the right to invoke the Bill of Rights, which is a document that restricts what the U.S. government can do to anybody. 

This is what we went over in the case of Mahmoud Khalil and the general effort to deport green card holders or visa holders from the United States based on their speech. They have the right to invoke the right of free protest, even though they're not U.S. citizens, which is 150 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence. But it's also true of people who aren't visa holders at all, who don't have any visas, who don't have any green cards, such as Guantánamo detainees. 

President Trump indeed campaigned on a promise to initiate a program of mass deportations against people who enter the United States illegally, who cross the border with no approval of the U.S. government, who have no visa, who have no green card, no legal right to be in the United States. Usually, what deportation means is that you take the person who's in your country illegally and you just send them back to the country of origin, whatever country of which they're a citizen. In that case, the stakes aren't that high. I mean, it is for some people who have been in the United States for a long time, but in general, the reason the public ratified that is that people believe that if you enter the United States illegally, the U.S. government has the right to send you back to your country. You don't go back to prison, you just go back to your country. 

What the Trump administration is now doing is much, much different than the way deportation is carried out. 

Here, from CNN, on February 4, 2025:

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The president of El Salvador has become a kind of darling of the international populist right. There's a lot of admiration for how he eliminated violent crime by just rounding up thousands and thousands and thousands of people and putting them into some of the most repressive prisons – again, rounding them up without much due process. There are obviously a lot of people in those prisons who are violent gang members who deserve to be locked up but some people don't deserve to be locked up, which is what happens when you put people in prison without due process. 

These prisons are designed to keep people forever. They are about the worst place you could want to be, anywhere in the world. There's a maximum-security prison in El Salvador that has been built for gang members who they call terrorists. That's about the worst place you can want to be. But the El Salvadoran president has been currying favor with the Trump administration and said, “If you need a place to send illegal immigrants when you're deporting them, we don't even care if they have anything to do with El Salvador, if they've ever been to El Salvador, if they're citizens of El Salvador, just send them back to us, we will put them into these very repressive prisons and just keep them there” and that's what the United States government under the Trump administration is now doing, not deporting these people in the normal course of deportation. They're not going back to their country of origin, even though in the case of say Venezuelans: the Venezuelan government has made it very clear they will take back all their deported illegal immigrants. They've been taking them back. We're not sending El Salvadorans back to El Salvador, we're sending Venezuelans to El Salvador or any other nationality that the U.S. government decides should be there. 

In other words, we're throwing them into a black hole for life without any charges against them, without any due process. We're knowingly imprisoning people for life with no due process.

 Everything that has been said about Trump in terms of his being a threat to democracy, an autocrat, an authoritarian and someone who intends to ignore the law and replace it with his will, has been predicated on the notion that Trump will abide by no limits. I watched Trump during the first term, repeatedly, when courts invalidated his actions as unconstitutional, observe those court orders. I watched as conservatives constantly ran into federal courts to invalidate Joe Biden's actions.; conservatives went into federal court for rulings that his pressure on social media companies to censor dissent was unconstitutional and that his cancelation of loan guarantees was unconstitutional. There was actually an instance where Democrats called on him to ignore a court order. Biden effectively did that by proceeding with loan cancelations, even after the courts said that doing so needed an act of Congress and that Biden didn't have the right to just do that through a regulatory order or executive order. 

But in general, Trump has abided by judicial orders, and he was asked last month whether there was any chance that he would ignore a court order, or violate court orders, and he said, “Absolutely not. I don't violate court orders. If the court orders something, then that becomes the law, and you appeal it. That's the solution, not to violate it.” And he was very clear on that. 

Now, the way in which the White House is trying to justify these deportations to El Salvador and simultaneously argue that people being sent there to be in prison for life have no right to any hearing, no right to any due process, neither in the United States nor in El Salvador, is because they have invoked, and here you can see the White House order from today: “Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua” (The White House. March 15, 2025.)

In other words, they're saying, just like in World War II, just like in other declared wars, that we've declared war on these Venezuelan drug gangs and once the president is waging a war – and the argument is we've been invaded – then essentially the courts and the Congress have no right, no role to play whatsoever in anything the president decides to do. Similar to the Bush-Cheney argument that in the War on Terror, neither courts nor Congress could limit anything that they did. 

This was the old law that was used during World War II by FDR to provide for the internment of Japanese Americans. There you see the executive order from February 1942:

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It's very difficult to argue that no matter what your view of the problem of illegal immigration is – and I think it's a huge problem; I've talked about the reasons before – it used to be a left-wing cause. When I started doing journalism it was a Bush-Cheney and the Chamber of Commerce’s goal to create amnesty for people in the country, to open up the borders more because large corporations whom Bush and Cheney served wanted a massive labor pool, not just of Americans who they have to pay a high wage to but of people who come into the country illegally who they can pay much less.

It was corporations and the party that served corporations, the Republican Party, that wanted massive migration in the United States and it was the left – people like Bernie Sanders, union leaders and African American groups – that opposed this kind of immigration because the people who would be harmed would be the American worker. It would drive down wages and take away jobs from Americans, primarily Black people and Latinos. 

I'm not contesting, I don't think many people at this point are contesting, that the flow of millions of people into the United States with no controls poses massive societal problems. However, there is no circumstance under which that can be described as a war in the way our prior wars declared by Congress have been. And that's one of the reasons why the judge stepped in.

Here from Politico, earlier today. 

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U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday ordered the Trump administration to immediately halt efforts to remove those Venezuelan migrants until he has more time to consider whether Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act was illegal.

The lawsuit, brought on behalf of five named Venezuelan immigrants, was provisionally turned into a class action — meaning it serves as a block on the deportation of all non-citizens in U.S. custody who are subject to Trump’s proclamation invoking the rarely-used law.

Two aircraft believed to be carrying Venezuelan deportees took off from an airport in Harlingen, Texas, during a break in a video hearing Boasberg conducted Saturday for the lawsuit filed by immigrant-rights advocates. According to flight tracking databases, one plane was bound for San Salvador, El Salvador, and the other for Comayagua, Honduras, and they were in the air nearing their destinations as Boasberg issued his order.

Boasberg said there are serious legal questions about Trump’s rationale for invoking the 1798 law — used only three times in American history — by labeling the criminal gang Tren de Aragua the equivalent of a foreign government. (Politico. March 15, 2025.)

 Anything that the president does that is significant and consequential, certainly, things that he does that are readily used in history are subject to the question of whether the Constitution permits the president to do that. That's why, even though it's not in the Constitution, judges review the constitutionality of the other branches' acts.

The Supreme Court, 200 years ago, said that the only way a constitution makes sense, the only way a document makes sense if you impose limits on the president or the Congress is you have somebody that adjudicates the question of whether the president or the Congress have exceeded their limits in the Constitution. If courts don't have the power to do that, if nobody has the power to do that, then the Constitution is worthless. This is why in Marbury vs. Madison, the Supreme Court, early in the 19th century, in the 1800s, said that the Supreme Court necessarily has that power to say what the law is, otherwise, there's no point in having the law. 

There are many checks on the courts. The only people who ever get to the court, the federal court, are people appointed by the president and then confirmed by the Senate. So, you already have those checks. But then, also, Congress can impeach judges for abusing their power and for acting corruptly – another check on the judiciary. It's not as though there are no checks on the judiciary. 

Congress has a lot of different ways to rearrange the judiciary, to punish the judiciary but, if you don't have a judiciary that determines whether or not the government is violating an individual's constitutional right, those constitutional rights are illusory, they're meaningless. 

Yet, it does seem, in this case, that the Trump administration decided to ignore the court order and they're basically admitting now that they did, although they're justifying why they were allowed to. 

Here, from Axios on Sunday:

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The Trump administration says it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling didn't apply, two senior officials tell Axios.

The White House welcomes that fight. "This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we're going to win," a senior White House official told Axios. (Axios. March 16, 2025.)

It is possible they will win. It's possible the Supreme Court will hold that this is a constitutionally valid invocation of this war power, of this Alien Enemies Act, as applied to this case. It's, I think, quite possible that they won't win. And that's the reason the court ordered an injunction against deportations: precisely to have time to determine whether this power Donald Trump is claiming is being exercised constitutionally and legally. 

No matter how much of a supporter you are of Donald Trump, no matter how much you support the policy that he is enacting – and as I said, this isn't just about the deportation of people in the country illegally, If it were just about deportations, sending people back to their country of origin, the controversy would be far less intense – the issue is that these people who are being sent to El Salvador are being sent there purposefully because the El Salvadorian government has said that they will be immediately put into a maximum-security prison where effectively they will never leave for life. 

Just like in Guantánamo, you shouldn't trust the U.S. government when it says, “Oh, don't worry, we've decided these people are members of a violent drug gang,” because undoubtedly they're going to make mistakes, and they're going to accuse people falsely of being part of that drug gang, and they're going to spend life in prison, in some of the worst conditions, because they were never given even a small opportunity to contest or to prove that the accusations are false or to force the government to prove that they're true. 

 As is true of most things that Trump is doing, he didn't hide the fact that he intended to do this. I say most things that Trump is doing because bombing Yemen was something for which he criticized Joe Biden and now he's doing that but Trump is very open about his plan to invoke this old law that has barely been used three times in American history when we were clearly at war. That's to his credit, but that doesn't mean that the courts are powerless and play no role in determining whether the invocation of that law is actually permissible under the law itself and under the Constitution. That's the way our democracy has worked basically from the beginning as presidents engage in action, Congress passes laws and the courts determine whether those actions are constitutional and legal. It doesn't make the Judiciary supreme because there are a lot of checks on the judiciary still. 

The reason it was a 5-4 decision is not because four of the judges ruled that Guantánamo detainees have no constitutional rights because they're non-citizens. That was not their ruling. All nine of the justices agreed that the detainee status of non-citizens does not preclude their right to invoke constitutional rights. The argument of the Bush administration was, we know there are 125 years of Supreme Court precedent that says that the Bill of Rights applies to everybody within our jurisdiction, but this is Guantánamo Bay. We purposely built the prison outside of the United States to avoid this. The United States is not the sovereign power of Cuba. Cuba is the sovereign power of Cuba. So, our conduct in Cuba is not subject to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the orders of the court. And that was what the court decided on and split on five to four. 

Here, from the CBC, March 2009:

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And that was very much the climate after 9/11: who cares about legal niceties, who cares about constitutional limits? Just pick them all up and kill them all without the slightest regard for whether or not we really know that they're innocent or members of a terrorist organization. 

We were assured by the Bush government over and over and over that the only people in Guantánamo were terrorists, they had done all the necessary vetting to determine that. They weren't just terrorists, but they were “the worst of the worst.” It turns out that so much of that was untrue and the U.S. government has been admitting that over and over ever since. 

Here, from NBC News, in October 2016:

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Mohamedou Ould Slahi was sent back to his native Mauritania after 14 years of captivity, during which he was never charged with a crime.

Slahi, 45, was an engineer for technology companies; he was put in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 under suspicion of being a recruiter for al Qaeda. He'd expressed loyalty to the group in the early 1990s, but his lawyers say that was when he fought with anti-Communist mujahideen in Afghanistan. (NBC News. October 17, 2016.)

“Guantánamo Diary” was a best-selling book about his time in Guantánamo, made into a film where Jodie Foster played his lawyer. We interviewed Mohamedou back in 2021. I had met him in Amsterdam where he is now living, but that is a case where the U.S. government acknowledged that he had no ties to al-Qaeda and released him for that reason and that has been happening over and over for the last 25 years. 

One of the things that has been making me somewhat sick, going back to the first Trump administration, is that the precise people who did what I'm describing in the Bush-Cheney administration – who pioneered this radical Article II theory of executive power that the president is unlimited and can't be constrained by a court or Congress, as part of the War on Terror, that he has the right to put people in prison with no due process – have now morphed into Never Trump people and are constantly criticizing Trump and even depicting him as some unique evil for doing exactly what they did, advocated and implemented less than 20 years ago. 

Here's Bill Kristol on X:

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His fellow Bush-Cheney neocon, David Frum, said much the same:

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Again, these are the people, David Frum and Bill Kristol and all of these Bush-Cheney operatives who are now heroes of liberal punditry, who invented these theories they're now claiming are the hallmarks of autocracy. 

I wrote an article when I first started my blog, An Ideology of Lawlessness, which described how these theories of Article II executive power had been invented out of whole cloth to say that presidents had the power to do whatever they wanted and nobody, not courts or congress, could scrutinize it, or limit it in any way. The presidents had the right to ignore congressional statutes. So, if Congress passes a law saying, you're not allowed to eavesdrop on American citizens without getting a warrant first from the FISA court, Bush and Cheney violated that. They spied on Americans without getting those warrants. Afterward, their argument was, well, we had the right to. We were prosecuting the War on Terror and Congress has no power to limit anything we can do. And the same with the courts. 

 I found that theory incredibly authoritarian and alarming back then. I do not think the founders envisioned a country where a president in any circumstance could act with whatever powers he wants in violation of people's constitutional rights and neither the courts nor the Congress could stop him, including in war, where it is true, the president's powers are at their apex. 

The question here, of course, is if the United States is really at war in the sense that we've always understood that – Venezuelan drug gangs are criminal gangs, they're not a government, they're not a country. We're not at war with Venezuelan drug gangs or at least that's certainly a significant question for the courts to decide before Trump starts rounding people up and throwing them into holes in El Salvador. 

It's not just Never Trump-Bush-Cheney operatives who are condemning what they've done. There are a lot of Democrats and liberals acting as if violating a court order is the one red line that a president can't cross without destroying the entire constitutional order. Even though, as I said, President Biden arguably did that – I think he did do that when he ignored the court order on student loan cancelations – there are prominent Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who were urging Biden to ignore and violate the court order on the ground that it had no legitimacy, not to appeal it, but to just ignore it.

Video. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, CNN. April 8, 2023

That's exactly the argument of the Trump administration now and was the Bush administration back then too: if we deem any act or any check from any other branch to be illegitimate, including courts, we’re just going to ignore them. We shouldn't agree to be bound by court rulings that we consider illegitimate. 

That's exactly what the Trump administration is arguing in court right now. In part, they're saying because it wasn't a written order, it was an oral order and having studied law, having practiced law, I can tell you that nobody ever thought that orders of the court were invalid until they were put in writing. Many judges issue orders orally and they're considered to be orders, but the bigger argument of the Trump administration is the same one AOC marshaled there, which is, that we'll obey court orders when the courts are acting within their legitimate power and since we don't think courts have the right to order us to turn planes around, then we ignore that, we're happy to and we think we were right too. 

Remember when the constitutional convention was held and Benjamin Franklin came out, a woman on the street, in Philadelphia, asked him, “What is it that you created there? He said: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

They understood that despite the fact that central to their whole design was checks and balances never allowing one branch to get too powerful, never allowing one branch to operate without checks, they were counting on every branch always trying to increase their power at the expense of the other. And in this internal conflict, there would be a balance. 

Congress, however, has abdicated its role because they are controlled by Republicans and even without that, they're basically unwilling to exercise their power when it comes to things like their power to declare war. The president constantly involves the U.S. in military conflict without congressional authorization. Congress does nothing about it and, in many ways, the Supreme Court defers a great deal to executive power.

 I do think that ignoring court orders is a red line that shouldn't be crossed. I thought that when Biden did it and when liberals were calling for it and I certainly think that's true now and I also think that we can allow human power to be exercised even in a significant way as long as there's some check and limit on it. Even when it comes to people who enter the country illegally, we should not be sending people to prison for life without any chance whatsoever for them to contest the accusations against them, for them to be able to demonstrate that what they're being accused of is an error because it is certainly going to be the case that a lot of these are errors. 

Since it's not just deportation, but now you're talking about imprisonment for life in El Salvador, a country they have no connection to, the need for due process is even greater. I understand that people want illegal immigrants out of the United States, but they are still human beings and we should not empower the U.S. government to be able to imprison people for life without having some sort of hearing in court to determine whether or not that power is being exercised justly. 

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At this point, it's basically virtually a tradition, like a rite of presidential passage, that every new administration starts bombing Yemen, the Houthis in Yemen. There was bombing by the Bush administration in a limited way as part of the War on Terror in Yemen. President Obama escalated it significantly. He escalated the bombing of alleged terror targets through drones and often attacked the Houthis in Yemen, but he also worked with Saudi Arabia, which waged a full all-out war against the Houthis in Yemen. They regarded them as an arm or an extension of Iranian power, a proxy of Iran, and therefore Saudi Arabia in their competition with Iran, viewed the Houthis controlling Yemen as their enemy. 

The Obama administration worked with the Saudis, provided them with all kinds of weapons, provided them with intelligence about where to strike and the Saudis waged a barbaric war against the Houthis in Yemen creating what all human rights groups recognize was the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet. 

Yemen is the poorest country in the world and the war that Saudi Arabia with the help of the Obama administration brought to Yemen made all of those humanitarian challenges much, much worse, including mass starvation throughout Yemen. 

During the first Trump presidency, there was a bombing of the Houthis in Yemen and then when President Biden got into office, he said he was going to work with Saudi Arabia to stop the war in Yemen, but, after October 7, when the Houthis began attacking ships in protest of the Israeli destruction of Gaza, Biden ordered continuous bombing. 

There were months where there was bombing essentially every day throughout 2024 just constant never-ending bombing. Biden ended up dropping a thousand bombs on Yemen in 2024 alone. European allies dropped a large number as well in conjunction with the United States. So, the United States has been bombing Yemen, bombing the Houthis, for a long, long time. 

The Houthis are probably stronger than they've ever been, the capabilities that they've developed, including the ability to shoot long-range missiles into Israel, which they've done several times, and the success they've had in attacking and seizing ships. Their strength is higher than ever despite all of that bombing, all of that constant warfare that the United States has been waging in various forums in Yemen, going back to the Bush administration.

And this is something that President Trump criticized Joe Biden for doing during the campaign. He said, why is the United States bombing Yemen? That's not the way that you handle things. And yet, not even two months into office, Trump has restarted and seemingly escalated one of the several different wars we have in the Middle East. 

Here, from The New York Times, on March 15:

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We have seen from Trump that he uses threats of war against other countries to achieve the objective of avoiding war. His theory is that the country has to fear that the United States will attack them or bomb them to get them meaningfully at the negotiating table to make concessions. 

But when it comes to Iran, a country that Israel has been pushing the United States to attack and bomb for 15 years – you can go back 15 years and hear Netanyahu warning that Iran was on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon, that it's the United States's responsibility to go in and attack it. The Israelis did in fact bomb Iran after Iranians sent ballistic missiles into Israel, which was in turn a response to the Israeli bombing of Iran's consulate in Damascus and other acts as well. So, there has been a kind of dangerous conflict, militarily, between Israel and Iran. Israel considers Iran to be its most significant threat and enemy and they've been wanting the United States to go fight that war for them or with them. 

Netanyahu urged the United States to invade Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussein, who he also considered to be one of the worst enemies of Israel. He did the same in the Obama administration, urging the United States to launch a dirty war against Bashar Assad and when it finally succeeded later last year, Netanyahu stood up and took credit for it. 

So, there are a lot of wars that have benefited Israel and the Netanyahu government the Israelis have wanted the United States to go and fight for them or with them. And Iran has always been the kind of North Star, the ultimate prize in getting the United States to go and wage war on. 

Although I do believe that Trump's real goal is to get a nuclear deal with Iran that we had with Iran, but Trump judged it to be a poor deal and therefore withdrew from it. When you're bombing very aggressively the Houthis with whom Iran has a relationship and at the same time threatening Iran that you're going to bomb them if they don't stop working with the Houthis, which they're never going to do, you're flirting with a real war that could blow up the entire Middle East. 

After a campaign that Donald Trump ran, twice now, three times really, pledging to keep the United States out of Middle East wars and specifically condemning Biden for bombing Yemen, here's what Trump posted on True Social yesterday: 

Today, I have ordered the United States Military to launch decisive and powerful Military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen. They have waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American, and other, ships, aircraft, and drones.

To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE! […]

Similar language to what he used when he was threatening Gaza and Hamas.

To Iran: Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY! Do NOT threaten the American People, their President, who has received one of the largest mandates in Presidential History, or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!

(Donald Trump, Truth Social. March 15, 2025.) 

The Pentagon released footage of some of the U.S. strikes on Yemen. You can see some of them here. 

Video. US Strikes, Yemen. March 15, 2025.

That's a pretty heavy and destructive bomb. The Yemenis claim that at least 32 civilians were killed in these strikes. The Houthis have made that claim and there are hospitals and the like that have supported that. 

Here is Donald Trump, in June 2023.

Video. Donald Trump, Newsmax. June 24, 2023.

So, “I will be your peacemaker in less than two months in office.” 

Ever since there's been a cease-fire, those attacks on American ships have stopped and the Houthis began attacking Israeli-flagged ships, not American ones, and said they would continue to do so, in protest of the Israeli blockade of all food, electricity and other humanitarian aid entering Gaza. They said, “We're going to continue to attack until Israel lets the humanitarian aid into Gaza until the cease-fire deal that they agreed to would be honored.” 

It would have been much easier for Trump to get the Israelis to simply allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Instead, we decided to bomb the Houthis to shield the right of Israel to block the humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. We're back into fighting Middle East wars in defense really of Israel, given the current posture of what the Houthis have been doing and are saying. 

One of the ways that I often defended Trump's foreign policy of the first term was to point out that it was accurate that Trump was the first president in decades to have not involved the United States in a new war. He inherited some wars from Obama including bombing campaigns against ISIS in Iraq and Syria which he escalated as he promised to do but he didn't involve the United States in any new wars. Trump himself, in 2024, praised himself for that. 

 

I know there are so many Trump supporters justifying Trump's bombing of the Houthis in Yemen, even though Trump himself criticized Biden for doing exactly the same thing. I'd argue Biden had more justification because, at the time, the Houthis were actually attacking American ships. And now they've said they're limiting their attacks to Israeli ships meaning that this bombing campaign is seemingly yet again in protection of Israel and not the United States. 

But to threaten Iran! In what conceivable way is threatening a war with Iran or worse, engaging in one, consistent in any meaningful sense with the America First ideology, with everything Trump has said about avoiding wars? 

There is a real question, and I know this has been taboo for a long time, about the extent of influence and control that the Israelis or those loyal to Israel exercise in the United States. There's a video, we're going to do a deep dive on the Adelsons. We did one before the election about Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the billionaire couple. She's an Israeli American citizen and he's an American citizen who have given more to the Republican Party – they have sometimes given it to other candidates, but they're the most important billionaire donors of the Republican party, and there's a video of them where they admit that their number one goal is not the United States but is Israel. In fact, Sheldon Adelson served in the military very briefly in the late 1950s and he said: I served in the military, but unfortunately it was the military of the United States and not the IDF. I wish it were the IDF. My wife had the honor and privilege of serving in the IDF. And our goal is to be good Zionist citizens. 

You see the attacks within the very beginning days of the Trump administration on the students who are protesting against Israel when the Trump administration is filled with people who regard protesting Israel as one of the worst, most offensive things you can do, claiming that these are immigration violations just coincidentally against people who protested the Israeli war in Gaza. There's an American Jewish student today who was expelled by Columbia for participating in these protests. You have this attack on anti-Israel protesters in the United States going on, you have bombing of a country that, or a group of people in Yemen who are only attacking Israeli ships because they're cutting off and blockading humanitarian aid into Gaza. And now the United States is threatening to go to war with Iran, Israel's worst enemy, a war that Israel has always wanted the United States to go to. 

It’s extra ironic because this is a movement and a president that called itself “America First.” But during the campaign, Trump spoke with Miriam Adelson there to a group of Republican Israel supporters and said, “Yes, we're going to make America great again, but we're also going to make Israel great again.” He talked about how the Adelsons were the most frequent visitors in his first term, that he would constantly give them everything they asked for Israel. He'd even give them more than they asked for sometimes, he boasted. 

If Trump ends up involving the United States in a real war in the Middle East, after everything he described, after everything he promised, after everything he said about his worldview and objectives and ideology, that really could destroy the Trump presidency single-handedly. Middle East wars can do that. And despite all this bombing, the Houthis are stronger than ever. They've learned how to have a very light presence, they can disperse their weapons, and disperse their forces easily to avoid airstrikes, they've learned how to do that after 10 years of constant warfare from the United States and from Saudi Arabia, from Israel as well. 

And there's no objective. What is the objective? We've tried to destroy the Houthis for 10 years and they're able to impede international shipping lanes in the Red Sea and to shoot long-range missiles into Israel. They seem stronger than ever. We're just going to keep dropping bombs, it's like the United States has some sort of obligation to always be at war with someone to always be bombing someone. 

I hope Donald Trump will understand that a reason for his appeal was that he promised to end these kinds of wars, to end this posture of constant bombing. If Americans understand that the reason we're doing this is not so much for the United States, but more so for Israel, I think the damage to the Trump administration will be even greater still. One thing I'm sure of is that whether there's the intention to go to war with Iran or not, these kinds of threats, historically, have been very dangerous because they often lead to war, even when that's not actually the intent. 

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@ggreenwald Glenn, could you do a segment on the escalations between India-Pakistan sometime soon? As someone who’s not an expert on the history I would appreciate your trusted perspective on it, possibly with guests laying out either side’s position on it.

Interesting discussion last night. I had not realized Harvard's historical funding situation, and I think we need to DOGE that. They have enough money to get by on their own now. The general consensus of those in the live chat seemed to be to cut the funding, and stop telling them what to do. Great discussion!
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Here's a lovely, short video of a man playing music for animals, including horses, elephants, lemurs, and more. It turns out that even horses enjoy the Rolling Stones' song Wild Horses😁
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Christopher Rufo: On Civil Liberties, the American Founding, Academic Freedom, and More
System Update #450

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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Tonight: Regardless of what you think of him or really about any issue, there's no denying the profound influence that tonight's guest, Christopher Rufo, has had on conservative politics and state and federal policy more broadly, though he has often focused on educational debates and educational institutions – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, appointed him to a key position to transform that state's New School from an institution largely producing left-wing thought to one that is more aligned with conservative educational dogma and policy. He was also instrumental in publicizing the plagiarism of Harvard President Claudine Gay, which, along with issues regarding campus Israel protests and antisemitism, led to her firing after only six months in that position. He has become one of the most influential voices shaping the views of leading conservative politicians and media figures. 

Rufo appeared on our program once before: back in 2023, where we spent an hour exploring his core beliefs and goals, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not. The conversation was spirited but unfailingly civil, and I think, illuminating of some of the controversies surrounding his work. 

What promoted Rufo's appearance tonight were comments that I had made about him and other right-wing figures in an interview I gave about the Trump administration to Reason Magazine. Rufo saw those comments, noted them and objected to them on X. It led to a back and forth but it became rapidly apparent - at least to me - that social media was the absolute worst venue to try to sort through those issues we were discussing, some of which have a lot of complexity and nuance to them: things like the core values of the American Founding, the values and views that most influenced the founders and how all of those questions apply to our current political debates, especially over civil liberties and the freedom of academic institutions. 

So, I suggested that we remove the conversation to a platform more suitable for a constructive exchange and he quickly agreed to come on this program for us to do so. 

His official biography does not really capture Rufo's influence and accomplishments, but for those unfamiliar with it, he is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute. He is also a contributing editor of City Journal, where his writings explore a range of issues, including critical race theory, gender ideology, homelessness, addiction, crime, and the decline of American cities. He has been published in Fox and the New York Post and has been the subject of numerous corporate media profiles, the most recent of which is a lengthy interview he gave to the New York Times just last month. He's the author of the New York Times bestselling book, “America's Cultural Revolution,” and as a filmmaker, he has directed four documentaries for PBS, Netflix, and international television, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities. 

The issues we hope to discuss are, in my view, some of the most consequential for American politics and the West more broadly, and I'm very much looking forward to our exploration of our agreements and our disagreements on all of those questions. 


G. Greenwald: Chris, good evening, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on and agreeing to do this.

So, it's interesting, when I was thinking about how to do this, how to conduct our discussion, the issues that we discussed, even though it was just a few tweets, were so far reaching and kind of complex that I had so many things I wanted to talk to you about, so the hard part was figuring out what to kind of focus on. 

There was a series of tweets that you posted in response to that interview I had given in Reason, where I basically said, and it was part of a larger conversation, I was asked specifically about you, that I think you're very shrewd and influential and successful operative and journalist but, to me, it seems like you've gotten to the point where you care more about this kind of Machiavellian quest for power than you do about principles. 

And in response, you said this:

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NIH Ends Fauci's Brutal Dog Experiments; MTG and Massie Shut Down Law to Criminalize Israel Boycotts
System Update #449

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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Former senior health official who lurked around Washington for 40 years, Anthony Fauci was, well before COVID, highly polarizing and, in many cases, widely disliked. When many of the truths of COVID and his behavior during that pandemic were revealed, he was jettisoned into an entirely new category of the hero/villain narrative that plagues so much of our politics. 

But one constant in his long career was that he was always a robust advocate for and a funder of – an ample funder of – some of the most grotesque, cruelest and pointless medical experimentations on animals in government labs paid for by the government, especially dogs. And when doing these experiments on dogs which have almost no medical value, they often chose on purpose for beagles as their breed of choice because as anyone who has spent any time with beagles will tell you, they have a particularly loving, docile and trustworthy instinct when they are with animals, which makes it very easy to deceive them. 

Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste, is our guest to talk about the major win animal advocacy groups led by the very bipartisan White Coat Lab group scored today. The National Institute of Health, now run by Jay Bhattacharya, under the direction of HHS Secretary RFK Jr., announced that they were eliminating the last government-funded lab experiments on beagles: that was the lab that conducted the so-called barbaric septic shock experiment, and I'll save you the description until later. 

Then, Reason's magazine Matthew Petti wrote an excellent article today, a really good piece of journalism that broke down and analyzed the statute in very clear detail and concluded that it "would arguably be the most draconian measure of this kind to date". He is our second guest tonight. 

Some laws are so extreme and shocking that you can't actually believe anyone in Congress actually proposed them, and for me, this is one. As is true for most of the pro-Israel measures in Washington, it had a long list of co-sponsors from both parties. 

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Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste Project, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that just got done heralding, explaining and it exposed and has held Dr. Fauci accountable for many things, including funding the Wuhan lab, as well as testing cruel, gratuitous, and pointless testing on dogs generally and beagles specifically. For more than two decades, Justin has led successful and award-winning grassroots and lobbying campaigns to end cruel taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs, cats, primates, and other animals. I've long been an admirer of that group and his work, and we're really delighted to have him join us tonight. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions: Iraq War Lies, Judge Rebukes Trump, Ilham Omar Curses Reporters & More
System Update #448

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

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

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As most of you know, Friday night is our Q&A show. We take questions submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community. This week, the questions cover a very wide range of issues including the bizarre story told by former Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont about how he was secretly accosted by shadowy members of the deep state while jogging in 2003, and they directed him to proof that the Bush administration was lying about the proposed war in Iraq. Leahy cast a meaningless vote against the war because of what he saw, but never let the public know about the proof he was shown. 

We also have questions about yesterday’s very significant ruling by another Trump-appointed federal judge who ruled against the Trump administration. This one concluded that the administration lacks the authority even to invoke the wartime Alien Enemies Act, which is what the administration has been using to justify removing people from the U.S. and sending them to an El Salvador prison without so much as a trial. 

Finally, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota uttered very naughty words to a journalist from the Daily Caller, who walked up to her on the street, began filming her, asking her adversarial questions – a perfectly legitimate journalistic activity. Upon seeing the video and Omar's reaction, many conservatives – including many who have spent a decade calling journalists The Enemy of the People and cheering right-wing politicians who have scored journalists often aggressively and with verbal abuse – have now decided that Omar had failed to show journalists the respect and deference that they deserve as journalists. 

We'll examine this and other questions as well, as much as we can, time permitting. 

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The first question comes from @thefarside:

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I totally agree with that point of view and I've seen this happen many times before when senators and Congress members access classified material and they're too scared to show it to the public, even though they could do so on the floor of the Senate or the House enjoying absolute complete immunity: they cannot be prosecuted, criminalized, or arrested for anything said on the floor of Congress. It's legislative immunity. They could just go and reveal it, but they almost never do. They leave it up to people like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, or other courageous whistleblowers to do it, even though they don't have immunity, while senators just conceal this information. 

So, here's what he wrote in his memoir, “The Road Taken” by Patrick Leahy. By the way, it's not a new memoir; it's from 2022, it was just a couple of years ago, but it just got resurfaced and started going viral on X. I think a lot of people didn't know about it. Who would sit down and read Patrick Leahy's book? I certainly didn't. 

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So, imagine you're just walking on the street with your wife. It's like an old couple walking in the street and out of nowhere, there are very fit joggers behind you. They are following you and they stop and say, “Hey, we hear you're bringing in briefings. How have those been going?” And you say, “Fine, but I can't talk about them.” They're like, “No, no worries. We don't want to talk about that. Just take a look at file 8. Have you seen that?”

He writes:

[…] It was obvious from the look on my face that I had not seen such a file. They suggested I should and that I might find it interesting. Quickly thereafter, I arranged to see File Eight, and it contradicted much of what I had heard from the Bush administration.

Days later, Marcelle and I were out walking again when the two joggers reappeared. After the opening greetings, they told me they understood I had seen File Eight and asked what did I think about it? It was the eeriest conversation I'd experienced in Washington. I felt like a senatorial version of Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat—only in broad daylight.

I went through the usual disclaimers that I could not talk about any file and if such a file was available and so on. They said of course they understood, but they wondered if I had also been shown File Twelve, using a code word. […]

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

 

They're like, “Hey, remember when we mentioned File Eight? We're glad you took a look at that. No, no, don't worry. We don't need to hear your opinion. We just want to know, you should look at file 12 too.” 

He says:

[…] Again, I think the look on my face gave them the answer. They apologized for interrupting our walk and jogged off.

The next day, I was back in the secure room in the Capitol to read File Twelve, and it again contradicted the statements that the administration, and especially Vice President Cheney, seemed to be relying on, and I told my staff and others that for a number of reasons I absolutely intended to vote against the war in Iraq.

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

According to Patrick Leahy, he had been directed by mysterious deep state operatives, obviously, to classified files that had not been shown by the people briefing Congress on the Iraq War, both of which, he says, proved that the government was lying to the American people. 

You would think, I would think, that somebody in that position would be like, “Hey, I need to alert the American people to the fact that there are documents inside the government's file that prove that what Dick Cheney and George Bush were saying about the war in Iraq are lies.” 

Again, he had legal immunity; he could have read the whole file on the Senate floor and nothing would have happened. Even if he didn't have immunity, I would think you would be duty-bound when the government is selling a war to the population, a very serious invasion on the other side of the world, not a few bombs being dropped, and you have proof that what the government is saying is lying, but that's not what Patrick Leahy did and he admitted that in his book, not even realizing there's anything wrong with it. 

There's a woman on X who I find to be genuinely one of the smartest and most interesting X accounts to follow. Her X name is @villagecrazylady, but her name is Mel. She is very upfront. She does a podcast, a self-identified MAGA woman from the South. Yet, she believes the MAGA principle, she is vehemently opposed to all kinds of intervention, she's opposed to funding the war in Ukraine, funding Israel's war in Gaza, going to war with Iran, bombing Yemen, all the things that we were promised that Trump would do in foreign policy, she actually believes in it and insists on it and complains when it doesn't happen as it should. And she's just very smart. She's just always plugged into what I think are the right things, thinking about things that are really interesting, and I actually learned a lot from following her. I'm going to have her on the show soon. She was the one who alerted me to this. I think she was probably the one who alerted a lot of people to this, she said: 

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AD_4nXeJda1FgfBphHUuW3uElR4oIVQlWVoaGMHWMhYK3UMOMc7qnMU1R3FpJugjBsT-tt-94Sv14JU4oUv4_zujYgYETP-302CT4kX-jHpU4CIBTI0f87dvEbbMmjjFBUUr71ErGLpV1DxsC6WHiFSBZZw?key=MrBQyTUNLJMvWrwHZK6IMQrI

 I think what's really notable, too, is imagine that you're those two guys who obviously are risking their career, probably risking their liberty to try to make sure that Patrick Leahy sees, not just circumstantial evidence, but proof that the Bush-Cheney administration is lying about the key arguments they're trying to sell to the public to justify the invasion of Iraq. They put themselves on the line, they put themselves at risk because they apparently thought it was important for the truth to be known and they get Leahy to go read both of those files, and he just does nothing, nothing, to tell the public. He's just like, “Yeah, I'm going to vote no.” He didn't even tell his fellow senators. He didn't say a word. 

How pathetic is that? How cowardly is that? You run for the Senate, you're a career politician, you're old, you're in your 23rd term or whatever. Who cares? But don't you have any sense of duty at all? 

I don't want to be naive. I get that these are scummy politicians, very conniving. The more they stay around Washington, probably the fewer principles they believe they can operate on, the more kind of just pragmatic and cunning or whatever they become. But you're talking here about the most serious war that the United States has fought since it left Vietnam and you have the evidence in your hands that the government is lying yet again, like they did with the Vietnam War and the Gulf of Tonkin, and you just sit and say nothing? 

But there's a counterexample. When Daniel Ellsberg discovered the Pentagon Papers in the late 1960s, a multi-volume, tens of thousands of pages compiled by the Pentagon, the Pentagon Papers concluded and members of the highest levels of the government also knew under Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon that there was no way the U.S. could win the war in Vietnam; at most, they could fight to a standstill. Yet they were constantly telling the public that was growing tired of this war, like, “Hey, we're losing all our young men who are being drafted, we're killing huge numbers of people, we're spending tons of money, there's social unrest. What is going on?” So, the Pentagon would say, “Oh, don't worry. We're close to winning. We're like six months away from winning. We're making immense progress.” In the Pentagon Papers, though, they were saying the exact opposite. They knew they could not win, so it's the same thing. 

Daniel Ellsberg had proof in his hands that the American government was lying to the people about the Vietnam War. Ellsberg had a very high position in the government. He had a PhD in nuclear policy from Harvard, zand he worked at the highest levels of the Rand Corporation, had some of the most sensitive documents inside the government and he did what Patrick Leahy wouldn't do.

He wasn't a senator; he didn't have any sort of parliamentary immunity, but he tried to get members of Congress to read it on the floor, as he couldn't, he went to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and they published parts of it. But then finally, he found Senator Mike Gravel, a Republican from Alaska, who was like, “No, you know what? I have parliamentary immunity, and this is what it's for. The public has a right to know that the American government is lying.” 

By the way, Daniel Ellsberg was charged with espionage, they tried to imprison him for life and the only reason his case was dismissed was because the Nixon administration was discovered to have burglarized the office of his psychoanalyst to try to find dirt on the private life of Daniel Ellsberg and the judge, because of that misconduct, dismissed the case, but had the judge not done so, Daniel Ellsberg probably would have been in prison for the rest of his life. He just died about 18 months ago at the age of 94. 

I had the honor of working with him when we created the Freedom of the Press Foundation together, he was unbelievably smart. One of the smartest people I've ever met. And even at like ‘91 or ‘92, he would attend these board meetings we had at the Freedom the Press foundation and just present the most complex arguments possible. 

So, he got Senator Gravel to read it from the floor of the Senate, and this is what that kind of bravery looks like. 

Video. Sen. Mike Gravel, US Senate Chamber. June 21, 1971.

So, that was the prelude to him then reading the Pentagon Papers into the record. You can be uncomfortable with, or even mock if you want, the very emotional display of Senator Gravel there. He was crying in the middle of that statement. But I would suggest that that is a far more admirable, noble and understandable reaction than what Senator Leahy did. 

I mean, every day, if you're a senator in the late 1960s, early 1970s, you're getting intelligence briefings about how unbelievably horrific the Vietnam War is: 58,000 Americans killed, two million Vietnamese, at least, killed. I mean, just the use of biological agents like Agent Orange, it was a brutal, savage, barbaric war, and the people who were in there, in the middle of the jungles and rivers of Vietnam, had no idea why they were fighting, why they were being killed on the other side of the world. 

So, if you're aware of information that the public can perhaps use to understand they're being lied to and hopefully stop the war, I think it's absolutely commendable to think about what's happening to human beings. I mean, that's a humanistic response. 

He didn't just cry about it, he actually tried to do something about it. Even though they have parliamentary immunity, reading top-secret Pentagon documents about a war in the middle of Washington, D.C., you would never know for certain that that's going to be honored. 

Here in Brazil, there's just a very similar parliamentary immunity privilege that people in Congress and the Senate enjoy. A couple of months ago, a member of Congress went to the microphone to speak at the tribunal where he heavily criticized the authoritarian chief judge of the Supreme Court, even though he's not technically the chief judge; he acts that way, Alexandre de Moraes. And then, shortly after, Alexandre de Moraes ordered the police to investigate him and to try to convict him for having spoken there. And their argument was, “Yeah, they have parliamentary immunity, but it's not absolute.” 

There's another case that I'm very familiar with, that I've had personal dealings with, that to this day sickens me and I just want to tell you about. 

For about two or three years before the Snowden reporting started, before Edward Snowden risked his liberty to come forward and show his fellow citizens the truth about how the government was spying on them with no limits and no warrants, and risking his life in prison to do it, two different senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, went around hinting that, “Oh, the NSA is doing some really bad stuff that if the American public knew about it, would be enraged by,” but they never said what it was. They could have done what Senator Gravel did and gone to the fore, but no, they just kept hinting. They would write emails, be in interviews, they would go write up ads saying, “Oh, if you only knew how they were interpreting the Patriot Act and what they were allowing the NSA to do, you would be enraged.” But they didn't have the courage to say it. 

And it was only once Snowden came forward and we started publishing reporting about what the NSA was doing based on his courageous act, did they start coming forward and say things. The headline of The Washington Post, July 28, 2013, is: “With NSA revelations, Sen. Ron Wyden’s vague privacy warnings finally become clear”. 

I mean, you know what? I reported on this topic for three years. It was a very important part of my career. I still pay very close attention to this violence debate but I could barely get through that. It was so ambiguous, so bereft of anything substantive that you could really understand what the government was doing, because he, too, was just a coward and then the minute we came out with that report, he's like, “I tried everything.” Yeah, everything except disclosing what you could have disclosed to let the American people know way before Edward Snowden came forward, so that he didn't have to spend his life in prison or Russia. 

People in the government, in the intelligence community, were trying to alert the public through Leahy that this proof existed, but he was too much of a coward to do anything about it. And so were Senators Wyden and Udall, whereas Senator Gravel wasn't. 

I just want to say the final thing: when Edward Snowden did their job for them and he comes forward, he doesn't dump it all on the internet, he is as careful as he can be, he gives it to journalists with very conservative instructions about only to use this very carefully, don't put anybody in danger, only use it to reveal to the public what they should know. And then he, of course, gets immediately indicted on multiple felony charges, including the Espionage Act, which would send him to prison for the rest of his life. 

They would ask Senator Wyden and Senator Udall, “Well, he revealed what you said should have been revealed. What do you think of him? Are you defending him? Do you think the prosecution would be dropped?” And they'd be like, “I'm not really going to talk about Snowden. I mean, he disclosed classified information. You can't have that.” – basically calling him a criminal for doing what he did only because they were too afraid to. 

These people are propellant. They'll let wars happen rather than step forward and confront any sort of risk or warrantless unconstitutional eavesdropping, as the courts ruled on American citizens with no warrants. And that's the kind of people that, unfortunately, with some exceptions, but very few, get to Washington and sit in both houses of Congress. 

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All right, here's the next question, from @Andante423: 

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It's a great question. Thank you. 

Just to give you the context, because it's so important, all of you, of course, remember when Trump just picked up, ICE picked up, 238 Venezuelans, and then, just in the middle of the night, shipped them out of the United States on a plane to an El Salvador prison. They filmed these people having been dehumanized, being humiliated, having their heads shaved, kneeling on the floor and it's almost certainly the case that at least some of them weren’t guilty of being gang members, but they're in this prison that's designed to be permanent. It runs on slave labor; it's one of the most abusive ones. 

But when this got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme court said by a 9-0 ruling – so that includes Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, Justice Kavanaugh, all the conservatives’ favorite judges – “Even if you want to use the Alien Enemies Act, you still have to give these people a due process. You have to give them a hearing, advance notice of their intent to be removed and then their opportunity to go into court and present evidence that they’re not a gang member.” 

So, they already said you have to give them a court hearing; in this court hearing, the judges should decide two things. Number one: Does Trump have the right to invoke the Alien Enemies Act? It's supposed to be a wartime statute. It's only for wartime. The only three times it was invoked previously were the War of 1812, World War I and World War II. 

Just to give you a feel for how extremist this power is, that's what FDR used to order all Japanese Americans interned in concentration camps because they were suspected of being loyal to Japan, which is generally considered one of the most shameful acts of the 20th century – but at least there was a real war going on. 

When the lawyers for the Venezuelan detainees sued in federal court to argue that this law was invalidly invoked and they weren't gang members, they got the best judge they could have gotten. They got a judge appointed by Donald Trump in his first term. So, he's a Trump-appointed judge and you can imagine how conservative judges Trump appoints from Texas are. 

Yet that's the judge who yesterday said that there's no legal foundation for adopting and invoking the Alien Enemies Act because we're not actually in war. 

The Trump administration had to concoct a theory and their argument was we're basically at war with these international drug gangs that are invading our country. They're like an invading army. 

Here's the ruling from this Trump-appointed judge issued yesterday. 

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There you see the caption. It is J.A.V., which is one of the Venezuelan detainees that they want to deport, versus Donald Trump. It's quite long, but it's not actually a long opinion. You can read it. The link is here.

It explains why, based on the statute, the president cannot invoke this law, because it's only for wartime and we're not at wartime. It's as simple as that. 

I've seen a lot of conservatives questioning why the courts get to decide this. In part, it's because that's been how the Supreme Court and the judicial power have been interpreted for more than 200 years, going back to Marbury v. Madison, and if you think about it, it has to be this way. 

The purpose of the Constitution is to limit the powers of the federal government, to limit the powers of the president and Congress. The government can't do this, it can't do that, it cannot do the other thing. So, if the president ignores the constitution, let's say Joe Biden orders that all Trump supporters be rounded up and imprisoned with no trial, obviously a violation of the constitution, if you can't go to the courts and seek relief and ask the courts to declare that unconstitutional, who does that then? Where do you go? Where do you get relief? The president just starts ordering his political enemies imprisoned with no trial, no due process. Of course, it's the courts who have to say this is unconstitutional, therefore, it can't be done. 

That's how our system works. And it's all balanced. It's not like the courts are the supreme branches that sometimes people try and claim. It's the president who appoints the judges who are on the courts. The Senate has to confirm them. If they start abusing their power, they can be impeached. And federal court judges have been impeached before, not often, but they can, and they have been. 

On top of that, the courts really have no way to execute their decisions. They don't have an army, they don't have guns, they don't have any way to force a president. The president or Congress respects the credibility of the courts, and that's why court decisions are abided by. But if you're going to have a constitution and a set of laws, you need to have somebody who interprets what those are and who decrees what they are. You can't ask the president to rule in his own case, like, “Hey, Mr. President, are you violating the law? Are you violating the Constitution?” 

Obviously, tons of conservatives, many times, under Clinton, under Obama, under Biden, ran into court and asked federal court judges to put a stop to what those administrations were doing. 

It is true that there are a lot more of those rulings coming under Trump. You could make the argument that it’s because he has so many new policies that have tested and pushed the limits of the law. But that's how our system works. It works that way under every president. I do think picking people up in our country and sending them for life in prison in a country they have nothing to do with and have never been to, from where they'll never get out, is an extremist power and we definitely need judicial review. 

As the Court said, the president, despite not being able to use the Alien Enemies Act, has all the legal authority in the world to deport people who are illegally in the country. There is another set of laws, the Immigration and Nationality Act and others. That's how President Obama deported millions of people. He didn't use the Alien Enemies Act; he used the set of laws that are normally used for that. That's what the court is saying: it doesn't mean you can't deport people in the country illegally, it's your obligation, your right and your duty to do that, you just can't use this wartime power to do so because we're not at war, as the statute describes it. 

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All right, this one is from @MarcJohnson125, who says: 

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All right, so just to set the stage for this, so you can see what happened, for those of you who haven't, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was walking on the street toward the Capitol, and it's very common for journalists to work there. That's one of the places you can ask members of Congress questions, even if they don't invite you into their office or agree to an interview. It's very often done. So, the reporter's not doing anything wrong here at all, I don’t think, but this is how Congresswoman Omar reacted: 

Video. Ilhan Omar, The Daily Caller. May 1, 2025.

Okay, it was a little bit of a snarky question. That's okay. Reporters can be snarky. They don't have to be super deferential, super respectful. He didn't assault her; he didn't do anything. But in return, yeah, she used a naughty word. It's a word you tell your nine-year-old kid not to use, but adults use that word. She wasn't aggressive about it. She wasn't violent, she didn't attack him, she didn't threaten him. He asked this question, she was bothered by it and she says, “I think you should fuck off.” And then he said, “Excuse me, what?” She didn't backtrack at all. 

And that was it, maybe not the best way to handle a journalist, I'll certainly accept that. Maybe a member of Congress should conduct themselves with more, whatever, decorum, if you want to say that. I mean, Trump campaigned throughout 2024 using every curse word he could think of in his rallies. So let's not invoke decorum unless the politicians you most admire are actually adhering to it as well. 

Here was Nancy Mace, who was questioned by a constituent, not a journalist even, but a constituent in her home district when she was at some sort of drugstore and here's what happened. 

Video. Nancy Mace, X. April 19, 2025.

All right, that seems unhinged to me, to be honest. He was very polite. He kept his distance. He wasn't the slightest bit aggressive. It's part of the duty of members of Congress and she's like very aggressive, right from the beginning, very hostile and out of nowhere, by the way, “I voted for gay marriage twice.” Why would you say that? I mean, yeah, he is pretty clearly gay but why would you bring that up? Why does that even enter your brain? And then by the end of it, she used the F-word for, I don't know, 10 times maybe, probably, and said other things as well. 

So, if you're going to be very upset by Ilhan Omar using an f-word with a journalist – we all know journalists deserve the greatest deference, the highest amount of respect – if that's the sort of thing that you really want to hold politicians to, like no naughty words, then you ought to be complaining about Trump, who curses more than any politician I've ever seen. And it doesn't bother me, by the way. Or what Nancy Mace did, which is, of all those things, like the most unhinged. 

Here's Charlie Kirk, yesterday, after he saw the video:

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Piers Morgan, the British subject who loves to spend his time commenting on American politics:

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Here's Libs of TikTok, always the beacon of perfect politeness and civility and respect for others. She says:

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That wasn't the question: whether they're going to. He said, “Should they?” Do you think that more should go? As I said, it was a snippy question, but who cares? 

These are the people – the Trump movement, the American right, Trump himself – who spent 10 years calling journalists the “enemy of the people,” which I don't disagree with and never bothered me. In fact, I can make an argument about why that's legitimate. But still, that's some very aggressive, hostile rhetoric to use about journalists. Republican politicians over the last 10 years have frequently scorned and insulted journalists. Trump insults every journalist who asks him a question. Everyone. And now they’re going to turn around and be like “A politician should not speak to a journalist in this manner. Journalists deserve the highest respect. She has no class.” 

How about Nancy Mace? Does she have class? Does Donald Trump have class? This is the kind of thing I really can't stand. I really can’t stand it. I just have some consistent standards, especially on these kinds of trivial issues, and to act like Ilhan Omar is some kind of heathen, some kind of threat to society! “She doesn't have gratitude toward America.” She's an American citizen. Yeah, she was born in another country and became an American citizen and the same is true of Elon Musk and Melania Trump and a lot of other people. She's still a full citizen like anybody else is.

To be honest, I thought what Ilhan Omar did was funny. I mean, I kind of thought that the whole thing with Nancy Mace was sort of funny. I think Trump is funny; like, loosen up. The rectum doesn't always have to be, like, so tightly closed when you're pretending to be offended by things. I think we want our politicians to be more human. This is how people speak. 

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All right, one last question. It’s from @Sambista. 

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So yeah, they're all doing great actually. All the ones you named and all the other dogs that you've gotten to know they're doing very well. I appreciate your asking. And yeah, I actually wish I could find a way to integrate the dogs into the show more, or something like wander around. Maybe Friday night is a good night to do it. We'll think about it. But yeah, appreciate your asking. 

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