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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Hi glenn!
I'm so very very confused about what is going on rn in regards to Garcia and el Salvador. Did the USC decide 9-0 for him to be returned or that demanding trump return him was beyond the ability of a district court to demand? Does facilitate his return merely mean allow him to come through the border? Was he ordered to be deported in 2019? Does the order of holding get canceled if trump declares m16 a terrorist organization? Is a US president a coequal with the US SC or is one more powerful than the other?
Too much contradictory information for me! What is true? What isnt??

Glenn, as always I appreciate all of your diligent work and your attempt to reach the truth. Unfortunately when it comes to Harvard nobly resisting becoming a tool of the federal government, I find this humorous. The first thing you would have to do to make this in any way reasonable is to demonstrate that they are currently not beholding to other donors and that the money these donors give does not influence their curriculum, the people they hire in either the bureaucratic or the educational departments in the university. If you cannot prove if, or if such an investigation shows that they are influenced by other big money, then all Harvard is doing is choosing one controlling interest over another. And the students receive a slanted education, which of course they perceive as truth. Whether they believe so or not, they have little choice. Rebellion and resistance can easily masquerade as freedom of thought when they are, in fact, a form of conformism to another special interest. ...

April 16, 2025

Dear Glenn.

First of all, and most importantly, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your wonderful courage and your profound intellectual honesty. I love Tucker and I enjoy Jimmy Dore and the GreyZone; but, you are the only one for whom I make an effort to watch every single show. And, your shows are uniformly magnificent. Such a joy to get my news from such a trusted source.

Among the many issues that you’ve addressed with a lovely integrity is the genocide of the Palestinian population at the hands of the Israelis. And, Trump’s sociopathic approach to the topic has been quite disturbing.

Since the moment Trump came down the “golden escalator,” I’ve liked the guy. And, since I met him a year later in a small gathering and realized that “he’s not the guy he plays on TV” (I SWEAR Bill Maher stole my line), I’ve been completely in his camp and - for better or worse - have been dumped by some formerly very dear friends because of it. So, it’s sad to come to the ...

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Week in Review: Trump's Tariffs, Ukraine Negotiations, Possibility of War with Iran, and More with Glenn Greenwald, Lee Fang, & Michael Tracey
System Update #438

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 a program that covers only two or at the most three issues per night – because we prefer in-depth coverage to sort of cable-style quick five-minute hits of each different news event possible – sometimes, especially these days, it is difficult to keep up with all the news, given how fast and furious things are always happening with this new administration. 

As a result, we're going to try to devote one show per week or so to a sort of “Week in Review,” where we're able to cover more topics than we normally would cover on a typical program by inviting friends of the show on to talk with us about those. 

To help us do that tonight, we are joined by the independent Journalist Lee Fang and the always delightful and agreeable Michael Tracey. 

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Lee Fang is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He covers political and corporate wrongdoing on Substack at leefang.com. He previously wrote and reported for The Intercept where he was my colleague for many years; he has also written at The Nation and reported for Vice. He is an intrepid investigative journalist, always breaking lots of stories, working by himself or with an independent team. We are always happy to welcome him to the show. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions: On Banning Candidates in the Democratic World, Expanding Executive Power, and Trump's Tariffs
System Update #437

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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For various reasons, we had our Q&A show on this show rather than Friday night. The questions that we received cover a wide range of topics, and the ones tonight have all sorts of interesting questions from the escalating use of lawfare in this so-called democratic world to ban anti-establishment candidates from the ballot to some of the ongoing fallout from Trump's tariffs policies, including a bunch of themes related to corporate media.

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Before I get to the questions though, I want to give you some breaking news that happened a few minutes before we came live on the air. I just spent the last 10 to 15 minutes reading about it so I don't have a very in-depth knowledge of it. You may have heard the U.S. government sent to El Salvador a person who was living in the United States, who's married to an American citizen, has a daughter they're raising together, has lived here for years in the U.S., has no charges against him, no problems whatsoever. As a result, there was a hold put on any attempt to remove him or deport him by a deportation court. Yet, he was picked up within the last month and sent to that mega horrific prison in El Salvador, even though there was a court order barring his removal, pending hearings. Even the U.S. government admitted that they sent him there accidentally. That's what they said. “Oops, it was an accident.” 

Now, what do you do if the government admits and mistakenly consigns somebody to one of the worst prisons on the planet, in El Salvador, indefinitely, with no way out, incommunicado: their families can't speak to them, their lawyers can't speak to, they're in El Salvador. 

A federal district court judge about a week ago ordered the U.S. government to do everything possible to get him back, to tell their – let's face it – puppet state in El Salvador, President Bukele, that they want him back. 

Remember, the U.S. government pays for each one of these prisoners to be there. So, it's not like we have no influence there. The whole strategy of Bukele is to do what the United States tells him to do. The Trump White House and Trump supporters were indignant about this order: who are you to tell the president to go get him from El Salvador? The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said, “Well, tell the court to call Salvador.” That was her attitude. 

The injunction then went up on appeal to an appellate court composed of one Reagan appointee and two appointees of Democratic presidents, one Obama and one Clinton, if I'm not mistaken, who, more or less unanimously – they had some differences about the rationale – upheld that injunction and said it's unconscionable to send somebody who you haven't demonstrated any guilt for and when there's a court order barring his removal, to send him to El Salvador for life in prison and then just wash your hands of it. 

The problem is the government doesn't want to go get him because that would be an admission that they sent someone there mistakenly, which they've already admitted in their briefs. That would raise the question, well, how can you send people to a prison in El Salvador without giving them a chance to prove that they're not guilty of the crimes you're accusing them of being gang members and those sorts of things? 

Last night, we reported in detail on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a separate case where five Venezuelans obtained an injunction before they were sent to El Salvador, a country they've never been to, to be put in prison, arguing that they should have the right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court before they're removed and argue that they were wrongfully detained and are wrongfully accused and all nine justices of the Supreme Court – all nine – said that you cannot remove people under the Alien Enemies Act until you first give them a habeas corpus here and they had a disagreement by a 5-4 vote about that proceeding had to be brought where the person is detained.” 

They're detained mostly in Texas or Arizona and already those Venezuelan detainees who had this injunction against them immediately went to court in Texas. Yesterday, a Trump-appointed judge issued an injunction saying the government has to prove that they have evidence that they're guilty of the things they're accusing them, which is gang membership. 

You can still deport people and send them back to their country of origin just by proving they're illegal but if you want to send them to a prison in El Salvador, and if you want to remove them under the Alien Enemies Act, which requires proving that they're an alien enemy: every time it's been invoked – the War of 1812, World War I, World War II – even those accused of being Nazi sympathizers got hearings first. And that's what the U.S. Supreme Court said. Right after that, a Trump-appointed judge in the original court, the district court, issued a ruling saying, “You cannot remove these people as well.” 

We keep hearing about all these left-wing judges. We talked about this before. These are not left-wing judges. A lot of times they're Reagan or Bush judges but in a couple of cases now they've been Trump-appointed judges. 

In fact, yesterday, a different Trump-appointed judge ruled in favor of the Associated Press. As you might recall, the White House issued marching orders to the American media, saying, “You cannot call this the Gulf of Mexico anymore, you have to call it the Gulf of America.” 

I’m not sure when the government thought it obtained the power to dictate to media outlets and journalists what they can say and how they can describe things. When the Associated Press continued to call out the Gulf of Mexico, the Trump White House cut off all access to press pools, briefing rooms, and the like. 

A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled in favor of AP, saying, obviously not everybody's entitled to access to the White House but once you have it, you cannot be punished with removal because of the things you say, because the things that you're saying don't align with the government's orders of what you should say. 

Just before we came on air, the Supreme Court issued another ruling – it was an unsigned ruling, which typically means that it was the opinion of the court unanimously – which involved the case of this one individual who was sent to El Salvador in the way that the administration admitted was sent mistakenly. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to dissolve that injunction saying, “Courts can't rule on how to conduct ourselves diplomatically” and the court said, “No, we are maintaining this injunction” by a 9-0 vote – apparently, there was no dissent.

So, you can't mandate or force the Trump administration to get the prisoner back but they said the government does have to prove they did everything reasonable to facilitate his return and that's the Supreme Court, the last word that has said that the Trump administration has to try and get him back because he should never have been sent there by the Trump administration's admission. 

Congress is completely impotent. They're afraid of Trump, especially the Republicans. As long as he stays very popular within the Republican Party, very few Republicans are willing to defy him. 

Congress in general, well before Trump, has neutered itself. We talked about that last night with David Sirota. They've given up the role that they're supposed to have constitutionally in setting tariff policy. They've especially abdicated their responsibility to authorize wars. The president goes to war all the time like we are now in Yemen without any hint of congressional approval. Obama did the same thing. Biden did the same thing. 

We don't really have an operating congressional branch in any real sense. |As I said, no branch is supposed to be unlimited in its power, it's supposed to have a balance of power that's supposed to be co-equal branches. 

If the president starts violating the law, implementing due process-free procedures of punishment and punishing the press, it's the role of the courts to say, “This violates the Constitution.” This Supreme Court has now twice done that with Trump, and Trump-appointed judges are doing it as well. 

Whatever your views are on all these different assertions of power, you want there to be some check on presidential power, and you don't want any one branch of government getting too powerful. There are all sorts of checks on the judiciary. The only people who can be on the judiciary are ones that the president nominates, even ones the president nominates said they have to go through a confirmation hearing in the Senate – every single judge – and then for wrongdoing, they can be impeached. 

So, they have many different checks and balances on everyone in the branches and you don't want the power to get too concentrated in any one branch, especially the president. As David Sirota said last night, the founders feared most an elected king; they just fought a revolutionary war to free themselves of a monarch. The last thing they wanted to do was to recreate one, but that's what you would have if the president said, “Oh, once I win an election, I'm totally free to do whatever I want. Ignore the Constitution. It doesn't matter. No one can do anything to stop me.” That is not something any American citizen should want. 

 So that's just an update. I'll read the case more carefully but, from what I can gather, that is the essence of the ruling. It's not a complete defeat for Trump because it does recognize the president has the right to conduct diplomacy and they don't want to interfere in that but the order is the government has to do everything reasonable to facilitate their return and then demonstrate to the court the efforts they made so the court can then determine whether they actually tried to do that.

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All right, so let's get to our Mailbag. These are questions that have been submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community. The first one is from @John_Mann. 

AD_4nXcdRzr6sZ9KQq3FHxTXYeAVEqeMpChh786AVQXcqgjXiqJtr6YhmTYfhOScFrEEFWtOe4YyJHpW3_rQgE-hF98iqyAj_D3vt545whwTcGWMk7q8L17MXlubkN60Ij37-Lu7eRd3T4eRNVJ1dvmGskg?key=raEjNIDONd4zGJ8N9tomIcvGI do think it's important when critiquing any institution, including the corporate media, not to romanticize the past. 

It has always been the case, especially throughout the Cold War, that the corporate media would basically serve as a mouthpiece for the CIA, for the Security State. Every time the CIA overthrew a government The New York Times and Time Magazine would herald it as a revolution by the people. 

Conversely, whenever a new pro-United States leader was installed, no matter how tyrannical, they would call it an advancement of democracy. And you can just go back and look at that. I recently did that with the CIA-engineered coup in Brazil to see how The New York Times covered that and it was essentially, “Oh, this was a revolution against a corrupt communist regime.” 

In fact, it was an elected center-left government, and the tyrannical regime was the installment of the right-wing military junta. The worst offender was probably Time Magazine. Henry Luce was the publisher and owner of Time Magazine, he was extremely close to the U.S. government, and a hardcore Cold Warrior. 

Several countries actually enacted laws banning foreign-owned media from being freely circulating in the country as a result of the influence of Time Magazine and how they were just propagandizing the entire world. 

So, there was always this kind of union between the government on the one hand and the corporate media on the other. They worked hand-in-hand. But you did have occasions when that didn't happen, very well-known occasions: when Edward R. Murrow angered his bosses at CBS by vigorously and repeatedly denouncing McCarthyism in the 1950s; Walter Cronkite, in the 1960s, turned against the Vietnam War and editorialized on air – he was the most trusted news person there was saying, “The government's not winning, the U.S. is not winning, the U.S. isn't going to win.” 

Shortly thereafter, we had Watergate, you have the Pentagon Papers that enraged the U.S. government that was done by The New York Times and the Washington Post. So, you definitely had a kind of adversarial relationship at some points. 

But well before Donald Trump, when I first started writing about politics, and I'll talk about this in a second, I didn't intend to start writing about the media. I wasn't trying to be a media critic; I wasn't looking at the world that way. Only over time did I realize that with the War on Terror, the war in Iraq, the problem with the media was they were completely subservient to the National Security State, not to Democrats, not to Republicans, to the National Security State. 

Nonetheless, despite all of that, despite those fundamental problems I used to rail against the corporate media, I would debate them, I'd criticize them, I'd dissect their propaganda when I was writing, every day, in the 2000s and 2010s. I think it has gotten much worse for one reason and one reason only, and that was the emergence of Donald Trump. 

Once Donald Trump emerged, even though I don't think he was more radical than, say, George Bush and Dick Cheney, even from a kind of coastal, liberal perspective. Comportmentally, he was just so offensive to establishment elites, to liberal elites, that the media absolutely despised him, especially once he won and they went completely insane. They really did start including that their journalistic mission no longer mattered, that far more important was the higher mission of defeating Donald Trump, and they just started lying openly. 

We've been through all those lies, the Russiagate, that people forget now, really did drown the country politically for almost three years, only for it to be debunked. They spread the Hunter Biden laptop lie right before the election, which came from the CIA that it was “Russian disinformation.” All the COVID lies, everything Anthony Fauci said was not to be questioned and anyone who questioned it was a conspiracy theorist and on and on, and on. 

And that was really when you see this massive collapse in trust and faith in the media if you look at the graphs. I mean, it has been going down over time and you can even see prior to the advent of the internet, people turning to alternative sources. Talk Radio became very big among conservatives. Millions and millions and millions of people listen to Rush Limbaugh and he fed them every day with arguments about why you can't trust the corporate media. 

But in 2016, it fell off a cliff. That's because most of the media ended up just openly cheering for one of the two parties and that's something they really hadn't done before. 

The media was always liberal in the sense that these people lived in New York or Washington, they were probably more liberal on social issues, but when it came to war, remember, The New York Times and The New Yorker, with Jeffrey Goldberg, did more to sell the war in Iraq than any conservative outlet ever did. Conservatives were already behind the war on Iraq, behind the War on Terror, because it was a Republican administration. They're the ones who made it palatable for liberals to support it, telling liberals, “No, these things are real. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He's in an alliance with al-Qaeda.” 

That central bias was never right v. left or Democrat v. Republican; it really became Democrat v. Republican in 2016 and until the 2024 election. They were just openly and almost explicitly of the view that their journalistic views no longer matter, their journalistic principles no longer matter because of the much higher mission they were serving now – very kind of self-glorifying view of themselves like “No, we're on the front lines of this world-historic battle, this preserve American democracy and keep fascism out of the country.” 

That's what they told themselves. It feels much better than saying, “Oh, yeah, our job is just to report facts, without fear or favor to anybody.” It's kind of boring. They became heroes in liberal America. I mean, all these journalists, they wrote bestselling books, because they were anti-Trump, kind of the Jim Acosta effect. Just like the most mediocre people. Rachel Maddow became like a superstar in liberal America and in mainstream entertainment and all of that. All those people who abandoned their journalistic mission for the much more overtly partisan one. 

And when they did that, the problem was it wasn't like they were just reporting in a way that would help the Democratic Party. That was their mission, that was their goal. And that was what their mindset became. Remember, heading in the 2020 election, I worked for The Intercept, which was created explicitly to avoid attachment to a particular party or an ideology. We were supposed to just be adversarial to the government and that was the first time editors ever tried to stop me from publishing something. It was right before the election. I wanted to write about the revelations of the Hunter Biden laptop, what it showed about Joe Biden's and the Biden family's pursuit of profits in Ukraine and China, and they just said, “No, you cannot do that.”

 I don't think corporate media ever recovered and don't think they ever will recover. I think that trust and faith are gone. The fact that there are so many alternatives now means that people aren't captive of them any longer and you can see their audience disappearing. I mean, the only people who watch cable news are people over 60 or 65. It's true, especially on MSNBC and CNN. If they have like 700,000 viewers in total for a prime-time show, maybe 10%, 70,000 people under the age of 54, 70,000. Do you know how small that is for a massive media corporation in everybody's home because they're on the cable networks? You just see that medium dying and I think they did it to themselves. 

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All right, next question. @Bowds asks:

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I just did a show with two other leftists. One is the European editor of Jacobin, who's based in Europe, and the other is Yanis Varoufakis, who was the former finance minister of Greece and a very smart, I think, figure on the left. And it was about how so many right-wing populists are being banned the minute they start getting too popular, focused on Marine Le Pen’s banning. 

 I was really relieved to hear both of them, both on principle and on pragmatism, warn how dangerous and wrong that was to steal the core right in a democracy, which is to vote and choose your own leaders by banning people who are opposed to the establishment the minute they start doing too well. 

I've learned more about the Le Pen case, both of them have much nuts-and-bolts knowledge of it. I mean, the Marine Le Pen case is such a joke. I mean, it was called “Embezzlement” in the United States. That's what she was charged with and convicted of, which makes it sound like she stole money for herself. That's usually what embezzlement means. That's not what it was at all, it wasn't even close to that. 

Basically, everyone who's a member of the EU Parliament gets a lot of money a month for staff, something like 30,000 euros a month for staff and you can hire people even though they don't really do anything. One of the things Marine Le Pen’s party did was they took a lot of that budget for the parliamentarians they had in the EU, and they used it essentially to hire people, not so much to help with the work of the EU, but more to supplement or bolster salaries of the people who work for her party. 

And what both of them said, and this is the impression I got too, is that it is possible that that happened. Although it's a very gray area and the question becomes like, “Did they do more work on the EU or were they really working more internally on the party?” But there's no self-enrichment. Marine Le Pen didn't steal any money. The idea was she had the people who were getting these salaries work more on the party in France than on the EU work. 

How do you determine who does more of what? But what they all said was that essentially every party does this. Something like 25% of members of the EU Parliament have been found doing things very much like this, and they're not prosecuted criminally. They're required to pay a fine or pay the money back. So, at best, it was a very selective prosecution. They found Marine Le Pen doing something that is commonly done. 

And I think in general, any time you have a candidate who's leading the polls, either probably will win or highly likely to win as in the case of Marine Le Pen, she was certainly a real threat, especially without Macron being able to run and they suddenly get prosecuted on a very iffy crime. 

I'm not talking about murder, rape, kidnapping, racketeering. It's like misuse of funds where nobody gets enriched, kind of like Donald Trump's prosecution in Manhattan for these supposed mischaracterizations of the payments to Stormy Daniels through Michael Cohen, a bookkeeping kind of transgression that would be at best treated like a misdemeanor and rarely prosecuted. 

Whenever you start having that, you immediately, instinctively should wonder, is this person being prosecuted because they're afraid they're going to win an election and don't want to let the people of the country whom polls show close to a majority or even a majority want to elect, to keep them from actually running. And if this were a nice lady case where Marine Le Pen was the only example, maybe you could sit there all night and debate the intricacies of French law and how much other people do it and whatever, but it's so clearly part of the pattern. 

Here in Brazil, Lula's popularity is declining significantly and a lot of polls show Bolsonaro would win if he was able to run in 2026 against Lula, some polls show a tie within the margin of error. But, again, clearly, Bolsonaro would have a chance to win. Clearly, tens of millions of people in Brazil want him to be the president. But they're denied the choice because, in 2023, an electoral court said Bolsonaro is ineligible to run for the next eight years because he cast out on the integrity of the voting process. And they said, “Oh, it's an abuse of power to have done that. You can't run again.” 

And then, obviously, in Romania, we have Calin Georgescu who won the Romanian election and he's the more anti-EU, anti-NATO, pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine war, at least, candidate. The EU hates him, the U.S. hates him and they just invalidated the election. They said, this election doesn't count because Russia used ads on TikTok to help this candidacy, as if the U.S. and the EU weren't massively interfering in all these elections to get the candidate they want elected. 

But it's like, yeah, this election doesn't count. The candidate we don't like won, so it doesn't count. Then as polls showed, for the new election, he was again leading in the polls by an even higher amount because there was a perception in Romania that they were banning him to prevent him from winning, they went back, and said, “You can't run, Russia helped you, you're now ineligible.” There was another populist right figure in his party or an ally who was then also banned. 

This is becoming a trend. The Democrats' principal strategy in the 2024 election was to try to charge Trump with as many crimes as possible, not only convict him of those crimes but even try to put him in prison before 2024. 

It's so obviously a tactic that's being used by people who are claiming that they and they alone are the guardians of democracy. I mean, they're doing the same exact thing with censorship. And I believe that the story is that in 2016, the British people shocked Western liberals by having the U.K. leave the EU, do you know how significant that is? To have the U.K. leave the EU as a result of a referendum of the British people? Just because of perceptions that Brussels hates them, is not caring about their lives, how they don't want to be ruled by these distant bureaucrats and eurocrats in Brussels, and then, three months later, four months later, Donald Trump beats the symbol of establishment, power and dogma, Hillary Clinton. 

And that was when Western liberals decided that they could no longer trust people to be free. They can't trust them to have free speech because if they talk to each other freely and circulate ideas, they can't control what people think and therefore how they vote. That was when this whole disinformation industry arose. 

The whole purpose of the Enlightenment was “No, we were endowed with the capacity for reason.” We can all do that ourselves using free speech, as long as we can debate each other and exchange ideas, we can then make our own choice about what's true and false. That was the whole point of the Enlightenment, on which the American founding, among other things, was based. 

So, they're waging war at the Enlightenment on core Western values, core democratic values, not just of censorship, but now banning people they are fearful to win and they're doing it in the name of saving democracy, kind of like we have to burn down this village to save it. We have to eliminate democracy to save democracy. 

And I think all this is going to happen, kind of, as I was saying last night when we were looking at those polls showing a significant decline in support for Israel in the United States and how the reaction is more censorship to prevent people from spreading anti-Israel arguments that I think it's just going to create a backlash, just like the liberal censorship regime did on issues like race and gender ideology, created resentment and a backlash. I think that's going to happen with Israel, I think it's going to happen here as well. I think people are going to start looking around and figure it out and realize, hey, wait a minute, all these candidates that are leading in the polls that the establishment hates, they're all getting banned. 

It's not that difficult to realize how improbable it is that all of these right-wing populist anti-establishment candidates, right as they're on the verge of winning, just happen to commit crimes in the nick of time to justify banning them from the ballot, whereas all the establishment's favorite candidates are all super clean and law-abiding and driven by nobility and integrity, and they're just abiding by the law. I mean, who believes that? It's always like this. The people who stand up and say, “We are the guardians of democracy” are the ones who censor and ban people from the ballot. 

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All right, next question from @TuckertheDog. I don't know what that means but I'm always happy to take questions from canines. 

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It is not unheard of for journalists to have off-the-record meetings with American political leaders and even foreign leaders. Obviously, why would a foreign leader want to meet in secret with a journalist? Or why would a foreign leader want to be secret with influencers? Because they want to impart to them propaganda about why they should be more aligned with that country's agenda or that leader's way of thinking. 

The people they met with are already very pro-Israel, certainly Dave Rubin. I mean there's a picture that Dave Rubin posted of himself and Netanyahu and it almost looks like he's in the middle of some sort of sexual ecstasy that's like a sustained one, I mean he's standing next to Benjamin Netanyahu who basically is his leader. 

So, I don't know what possible impact that could have. Dave Rubin was already somebody who put Israel at the center of his world. I don't know how he could do that even more. Tim Poole, I don't want to make sweeping statements about his views on Israel. I know he's very pro-Israel, but I just don't know enough to make definitive statements. But it's not that it's that unheard of and my understanding is like Dave Rubin posted a picture of it. I think Tim Pool talked about it. I think that happened after it was disclosed, but they met under a set of rules that journalists use where you can't report on anyone who is at the meeting, you can't report on anything that was discussed, but you can disclose the fact of the meeting and just maybe general impressions. 

So, it was rules of secrecy. They weren't allowed to quote Netanyahu; they weren't allowed to talk about what he said. And I do think this points to a problem in independent media. I think one of the problems that we were just talking about with corporate media is that they became too partisan, too ideological, too willing to act subserviently to a particular faction. The U.S. Security State, the Democratic Party, whatever. 

And I think there's definitely that same problem in independent media. I've talked before about how the easiest way to have financial success and rating success in this new independent media environment is to plant your flag in one faction and say, “This is who I am, this is where I am, this is who I defend, this is the ideology I believe in; I'm never going to deviate from it.” 

You attract all the people who believe in that ideology or who are loyal to that party or to that faction, and they want to hear their views validated all the time. And you can build a very big audience of people who just want to keep informational closure and always have their views validated, never challenged, let alone rejected: a lot of people are making a lot of money in independent media doing that. 

I absolutely believe that the emergence of independent media is a net good just for the reason that it increases the number of alternatives people have. Some people have tried independent media but have not succumbed to that kind of group thing or audience capture, Joe Rogan probably being the best example. 

Joe Rogan does not sit there and just praise the Democratic, the Republican Parties. He's always that kind of a mixture of views. He obviously became the most popular program in the country. 

It's a little different because Joe Rogan's program is not primarily political. Sometimes it's political. But it is cultural. He considers himself a comedian, he has a lot of comedians on, actors, celebrities, and a lot of political content – just kind of along the way there's political content, so, but I'm not playing that political show; it's difficult to be successful as a political show unless you do that. And once you do, in a lot of ways, you become no different than the corporate media. 

They have a lot of proximity to power. If you're suddenly now – because you cheered on MAGA, you cheered on Trump every day – now you're getting invited to the White House, you're being let in on secret meetings, the Trump White House is calling you, giving you little tidbits, to what extent is that really independent media? 

I've always believed it's important to keep people in power at a distance, at an arm's length. The minute you start befriending them, the minute you start talking to them too much, the minute you start succumbing to the temptations of being led into their world – you have people with power, they can open doors, like, oh, I get to go to the White House, I get to have a meeting with a foreign leader, not just a foreign leader but like the Prime Minister of Israel – of course, that's going to compromise your independence. Or maybe not. Of course, maybe you can resist that and fight against that, but it's certainly going to have a big effect. 

That's why I've always hated anything that reeks of journalists and political power merging socially or in any other way, like that White House Correspondence Dinner. I absolutely despise it. It makes me sick to my stomach. They all dress up as if they're at the Oscars and they get to meet like B-list celebrities and chatter at the White House with all these and with the president. It's just so corrupting. It creates just like this culture of Versailles like you're either in the royal court or you're not. 

On some level, the issue of audience capture can actually be more problematic in independent media. It didn't use to be such a problem in corporate media years ago, in the decades I was describing earlier, because when there was only ABC, NBC, and CBS, they were the only games in town – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, your local newspaper. But it was a place everybody felt more or less trusting of in terms of getting the news from because they were not overtly partisan. As I said, they had other biases, but it wasn't so overtly partisan. 

Now, there is absolute audience capture among corporate media. The vast majority of The New York Times subscribers – the vast, vast majority – are liberals. They hate Trump. Same with The Washington Post: they had mass cancelations of subscriptions when Jeff Bezos barred them from endorsing Kamala Harris. Obviously, the cable outlets all have their audiences, and you actually saw that with Fox, which I personally do believe is the most independent of the three cable networks for reasons I can explain, but not really relevant now, but when Trump was telling everybody the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud, that Biden's victory was fraudulent, byproduct of voter fraud, many, maybe even most people on Fox were not on board with that. Some of them actually were opposed to it. Tucker Carlson went on the air and ranted and raved about the dishonesty of Sidney Powell, how she keeps making these grandiose claims and she has all this proof, but then every time he invites her on to show, she won't come on, she never shows this proof. And you saw this migration of a good number of people, a good number of conservatives, away from Fox to Newsmax, and, as a result, Fox started getting more receptive to the fraud narrative. 

That is a kind of audience capture that I think is new for corporate media because they are now all in silos. You know who the audience is of each one of these outlets. But I think with independent media – because shows and independent journalists rely on their viewers not just for ratings, not just to show up, but also for financial support – most independent media shows, most independent journalists can't make a living unless they have their readers and viewers supporting them financially, monthly subscriptions or donations or whatever. That's what independent media rely on mostly. 

Then many of them become afraid to say anything that might alienate them. I mean, I've been through this many times in my career where you take a position that you know is going to alienate a lot of your audience and you can watch them go away, the subscriptions drop and fall. But I would way rather have fewer viewers and make less money and know that I'm not in prison to say things I don't really believe to keep my audience happy. 

I've never had a viewership or a readership that expected me to do that or wanted me to do that and I think it's really commendable for people who consume news to stay with somebody even when they're saying things that are so against your views as long as you think they're doing their best to be honest, you can be challenged by it. I think it's boring to listen to somebody who agrees with me all the time. I really do. I don't like it. I don't find it compelling or engaging. There's too much agreement. It's like we're already on the same wavelength. 

So, I do think independent media is an absolute positive. I've been a big defender of it. I still am. I think free speech on the internet is the most important thing. But I also think there are some important vulnerabilities independent media has, some of which are shared by corporate media and some of them are more inherent to independent media that I think are worth being aware of. 

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The next question is from @aobraun1: 

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I think the most interesting thing about Trump and tariffs, and a lot of people have said this before, is that – and I'm sure you've all seen this – you can go back to the 1980s, Trump was famous when he was young because he was entering the Manhattan real estate market, building big buildings, he was good looking, he always attracted attention, always had a certain charisma, his dating habits attracted all kinds of tabloid attention. He had his first wife, Ivanka. I remember one of us when I lived in New York with whom he had his first four children. And he ended up having a marital affair with Marla Maples. And the media went insane. Like The New York Post, those tabloids every day. 

He was extremely famous for those kinds of things, for his real estate success. He ended up leaving Ivanka Trump and then marrying Marla Maples, whatever, and then he had a third marriage and lots of other things in between and the tabloids loved this. They ate it up. 

You can see an interview with him in the 1980s where he was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, kind of at the height of her popularity on her extremely popular show and she asked him, like, “Would you ever run for president?” and he said, “Ah, probably not.” But he was passionate about one topic in particular and that was the idea that Japan back then, it was not China but Japan, in the ‘80s, that people feared was taking over technologically and economically – they were buying a bunch of land in the United States – that Japan and other countries were taking advantage of the United States in ways that were disgusting, he said, for American leaders to permit, meaning trade deficits, unfair trade practices – it has been a view of Trump's forever. He’s been talking about tariffs and protectionism for a long time. 

So, in terms of the brain trust, it's not like other issues where I think Trump gets influenced to do things. I think this is something that Trump really was devoted to doing, especially this time around. You can see this time he wants to leave his mark. He doesn't care as much about public opinion, about media anger – and this is what I heard too from Trump's circle throughout 2024: they got outflanked in the first turn, they had all kinds of people there to sabotage them, weaseled and embedded into a circle. They didn't really know how Washington worked. Trump was an outsider. He was constantly undercut and sabotaged by generals and by the whole deep state. 

And they are determined to make sure that does not happen again. That was, they worked on that for a long time, at least a full year, and they got in and they were very serious about it. They had a real plan for it. So, this time, most of what's happening is because Trump wants it to happen. Tariffs are probably the leading example. But of course, he's not an economist, he's not a specialist in tariffs, but Trump has a lot of confidence in his own decision-making ability. 

My guess is that the main architect of these tariffs is Peter Navarro, just because he's a fanatical supporter of tariffs. Maybe he talked to his treasury secretary. Maybe he talked to some billionaires whom he trusts. What I know for sure is that when these terrorists were instituted the way they were, people were kind of shocked, including people close to him, and they were harming these billionaires quite a bit. I mean, you could watch Tesla stock imploding. 

When Tim Waltz made fun of Tesla when it was at a very low level, like six weeks ago, two months ago, it was 225, it then went up to 280, 290, and it was back to 210, 215, like losing 20% of its value. Elon Musk is the primary shareholder of Tesla, so that eats in greatly to his net worth, but everyone in the market, people on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, who love Trump, who thought he was going to do everything that they wanted him to do, that he would serve their interests without any kind of hesitation. 

So, I know for a fact, that there was a lot of reporting on this, I've heard this as well, Elon was going to Trump all the time, trying to talk him out of these tariffs, other people were as well, and Trump wouldn't move because he believed in it. And the only thing that got Trump to move, as he himself said, was that people freaked out, they panicked, and they were panic selling. What really alarmed them was not so much the stock market, because the stock market has had many times when it's gone down that way, and it bounced back, they knew the stock market was going to go down, they were willing to endure that. 

What really alarmed them was what happened in the bond market because that reverberated the entire economy very quickly. Imagine that if things didn't get better and Trump kept those tariffs in place through 2025 heading into 2026, by the best estimates, whatever benefit you get from protectionism is going to take some time to show up. Just think about layoffs, the economy slowing down, prices going up, people's 401k being eaten up. 

As I said last night, I have people in my life who don't care much about politics, but they have 401ks and they care quite a lot about the 401k because that's the retirement security and when it starts going like this, it's not just billionaires, it's ordinary people really feeling fear and anger about what's happening. 

Then that reverberates in Republicans and Congress as well, because they serve and are funded by banking interests in Wall Street, but also because a lot of them are true believers in free trade. That's the classic Republican position. But then also they have to run for re-election every two years and 2026 is already looking to be a scary year for Republicans. General midterm elections after an election are terrible for the party in control. The opposition is much more motivated. 

You've already seen in some of these elections for state Senate and House, these kinds of off-year elections, these special elections, and the couple for Congress where Democrats cut into the margins that Trump created very significantly. They were even afraid of Elise Stefanik's seat; if she went to the U.N. and there was an open seat, they were so afraid that they might lose it, even in a Trump 20-plus district, that they withdrew her nomination for U.N. ambassador because that's how much energy there is among Democrats and a lack of interest and energy among Republicans. When Trump's on the ballot, a lot of moderate people don't come out and I'm sure they're petrified about that. So, he was getting it from all directions. 

We'll see what happens. It's very uncharacteristic of Trump to back out, and that is what he did. I don't care what anyone says. They said from the start, these tariffs are staying in place, we don't take care; if the stock market gets angry, you're going to have to grit and bear it, have some short-term pain. We need to radically overhaul our economy. It's not working, which I agree with. 

Free trade globalism has been great for billionaires. It's created massive income inequality and sent the middle class and the working class on this sharp, steep decline of downward mobility. But suspending the tariffs kind of contradicts that message, like, we're going to radically overhaul the system and put in protectionism. Even if they get deals with these countries, if the tariffs don't return, then you haven't really overhauled anything. You've gotten some better deals. But you haven't overhauled the global economy or the American economy. 

But imagine putting those tariffs back in place, what it would do to the stock market, what it would do to the bond market, what it would do to people's perceptions. I don't know if they can put it back. I mean, presidents, no matter how powerful they are, definitely are limited by a lot of other powerful factions. 

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Last point, just not really a question, but speaking of independent media like on Joe Rogan's show, today, I don't know if it was recorded today, but it was released today, they had kind of a debate between Dave Smith on the one hand, who's a libertarian, anti-interventionist, anti-war Israel critic, and Douglas Murray, the British, whatever he is, who's fanatically in favor of Israel and wars, he loves wars, he thinks they're all great. 

There's this phrase I once heard or I once read. It might be something that a lot of people have said. I'm certainly not the first one to say it, but it's really true. I realized as soon as I read it, how true it was. I realized that when I was younger, I kind of absorbed this, that Americans automatically add 20 IQ points to any British person who speaks with a posh British accent, they all think, “Oh, they're so brilliant, so eloquent.” and that they subtract 20 IQ points for anybody who speaks with an American Southern accent. It is so true. 

The relevance of Douglas Murray seems obvious to me, but he went on Joe Rogan's Show today with Dave Smith, Joe Rogan doesn't usually have these kinds of debates. It got very heated. Rogan was clearly more on Dave Smith's side than Douglas Murray's side.

 Usually, Joe Rogan's audience is pretty favorable to the show. Basically, the entire Joe Rogan audience, which, again, is not left-wing, to put it mildly, was completely contemptuous of Douglas Murray. They could not spew enough disgust and contempt for him intellectually, politically and personally. 

I don't think I've ever seen Joe Rogan’s comment section be that universally disgusted and contemptuous of anybody since Matt Yglesias – I mean, I like mean internet comments as much as anybody else, but like, I almost felt uncomfortable reading the comment section when Matt Yglesias went on just because it was so mean, so incessantly mean, so personal. I mean they hated Matt Yglesias. It was when he had that book out about how America should have a billion people in it and they hated the book, they hated the argument, they hated him, they hated how he looked. I mean everything about him. But it came close with Douglas Murray. And I think it's so interesting because Douglas Murray usually won't go anywhere where he's challenged in any meaningful way. 

In fact, after October 7, we asked Douglas Murray to come on our shows several times. At first, he was responding, pretending he would, talking about scheduling, and then he just ghosted us and disappeared and won't come on. He doesn't want to be challenged; he wants to sit back in some chair like he's in a British salon. He loves to hear himself speak, he thinks he's so eloquent and he knows Americans are like, “Oh my god, this is so brilliant,” but he will never be challenged and he was challenged today a lot by David Smith and Joe Rogan. And he just fell apart. Fell apart.

It's really worth watching. It's entertaining. I encourage you to read the comment section as well. But it's not just that it was a good internet fight. They talked about a lot of foreign policy issues. Douglas Murray came on and just became a full-on Karen for the first 15 minutes, like whining and complaining to Joe Rogan about how he's talking to people he shouldn't be talking to, people who aren't worthy of being heard, including Dave Smith. That didn't go well. 

So, I recommend that. It's good when somebody like Douglas Murray, a hardcore Israel fanatic, a complete warmonger, someone who wants to send people to war all the time, but never goes, is actually challenged, not in like an eight-minute cable hit where you really can't get at the person, but it was two and a half hours and it's unrelenting.

I loved it when I was on, but by the third hour I was like, is this ending? It's tiring to focus that much, and when you're getting battered by Dave Smith and more importantly for Douglas Murray by Joe Rogan that way, you can definitely see him falling apart very quickly. So, I really recommend that! 

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As Tariffs Dominate News, Trump and Netanyahu Make Increasingly Militaristic Threats; Plus: Mixed Supreme Court Ruling on Deportation Powers
System Update #435

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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Trump once again hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House – the second time in two months.  Hopefully, this will be a monthly occurrence when Netanyahu comes to Washington and visits his workers every month or so. 

The visit was billed as an attempt by Israel to convince Trump to lift the 17% tariff imposed on that country but, as the visit unfolded, it was clear they were talking at least as much about war in the Middle East, specifically, the prospect of bombing Iran – an American war against Iran, the ultimate dream of Israel and its many supporters in the United States. Many statements were made of great significance – to put it mildly – and we will break those all down for you. 

Then, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a partial victory – and, despite the headlines, it was only a partial victory – as they lifted by a 5-4 vote, the nationwide injunction on these deportations imposed by federal district court Judge Boesberg and the court then required any judicial challenges to the deportation to be brought not as a class action. 

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There are many important world leaders of major countries with whom Donald Trump has not yet met, which is to be expected. He's only been in office not even 90 days. But there's a world leader with whom he has now met twice, hosting that leader at the White House two times in two months. You'll be shocked to learn that the leader who has now visited the White House most is none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Netanyahu went to the White House on April 8 and had a tour, including the part of the White House where Trump has a whole wall of just photos of himself with the Israeli leader. They were both admiring and looking at that. Trump seemed very proud of how many times he met Netanyahu: he talked fondly of Netanyahu in front of the media, including how often he has met with him, how well he knows him – praised him essentially for everything. 

One of the things that was so odd about this meeting, especially the love fest that manifested again between the two leaders, was that the day before, Israel shot and killed a 14-year-old American boy in the West Bank, a foreign government shot and killed that American citizen, 14 years old, in the West Bank, shot dead by Israeli soldiers and rather than the U.S. government saying, "Hey, why did you kill our citizen?” or “We were kind of upset that you shot an American boy,” it was not mentioned in any part of their public communications. 

Here from CNN yesterday:

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We have seen so many times when the IDF or the Israeli government makes a claim to justify their killing of innocent people about what these people were doing to warrant their murder and so often when there's a video that emerges, it turns out the IDF is lying. It happened in 2023, with an American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera shot in the West Bank. Israel originally said that they didn't kill her, it was Palestinians who shot and accidentally killed her, and then there was an investigation, there were videos and there was an autopsy that proved that the bullets came right from an IDF weapon. They ultimately admitted it. 

They eventually even ended up apologizing but that was only because a video was released proving it, as happened last week as well with the killing of medics as we'll show you so. It so often happens, of course, if the Israelis kill even a 14-year-old American boy they'll say, “Oh those are terrorists.” 

I just want to remind you of one thing so often this gets lost: the West Bank is not part of Israel; it has internationally recognized borders when Israel was created and then, even when Israel took more territory in 1967, there are internationally recognized borders. Israel does not own the West Bank. The West Bank does not belong to Israel. 

The Israeli military is brutally, violently occupying the West Bank and has been for decades ruling the lives of the Palestinians who live there in horrific ways that a lot of South African leaders say are even worse than in South African apartheid. There are roads in the West Bank available only for Jews but not for Arabs or Palestinians, they constantly have to wait in line for hours and go through humiliating checkpoints where they're constantly beaten and forced to just engage in humiliating rituals. 

There's also a huge number of settlements, just buildings that Israeli citizens have built, “settlers,” because they want to take that land. They expel Palestinians from their homes and say this is now our home, they have built so much there that it makes a two-state solution impossible because there are so many settlers in the West Bank, even though it doesn't belong to Israel. Some of the Israeli settlers have fanatical religious views; they believe God promised them that land. Others just don't care; they want Israel to expand and are now backed by the IDF, so, they go and pillage villages, they kill Palestinians in the West Bank, and the IDF often stands there, if not aiding them now, given how the government has changed. 

The entire world considers Israeli settlements and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank illegal. So, when you're hearing, “Oh, these boys were throwing rocks,” they're throwing rocks at their military occupiers, who are in tanks: tanks paid for by the United States – some of the most fortified tanks on the planet. 

I just want to ask you, if you’re an American and a foreign military invaded and occupied the United States, would you throw rocks at the military occupier? Would that be terrorism if you did? There's actually a 1984 film about what would happen if the Russian army, then the Soviet army, called Red Don, invaded the United States. Essentially, it glorifies all the American civilians who bravely stood up to their occupiers and killed them, used violence against them and threw rocks at them. But of course, if a foreign military is occupying your land for decades and the whole world considers it illegal, it's not theirs. If you're going to a map, the West Bank is not part of Israel. And yet their military is ruling the lives of those people – who would not think that's justified throwing rocks at the Israeli tanks? What people being occupied wouldn't do that? But in any event, even if they were throwing rocks at tanks, does that justify murdering a 14-year-old American, Palestinian American boy who was in the West Bank? The Israeli defense, the IDF thinks so. They released a video of them killing this American and shooting two other Americans, that they think justifies it. 

Video. Israel Defense Forces, X. April 7, 2025.

It's about a five-second video where you can see a couple of rocks being thrown. And then they came and just kind of shot them all, all three, two wounded, one dead. We talk about 14-and 15-year-old kids here. 

If any other country shot American teenagers, the U.S. government would be very angry but when Israel kills an American citizen, we're on the side of Israel. That's America First. 

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