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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All right, next question, Bently 2:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Sanford asked:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

As a result of Mike Waltz’s refusal to admit error and move on, we have been drowned in a series of utterly ridiculous claims from the administration, as well as from Goldberg and other Trump enemies that deserve scrutiny simply because this is one of the most important jobs of a journalist: to sort through claims coming from government and corporate media to discern what is true and what is not. 

Then, in the second segment: EU leaders seem to delight in embracing all sorts of tough guy, warmongering rhetoric about how they intend to become a major military power without the U.S. We'll show you the sad and darkly hilarious reality of Europe and the Grand-Canyon-wide gap between their swaggering rhetoric and their impotent reality. 

And then finally: Today, that 3-judge Appellate Court issued its ruling and by a 2-1 decision, ordered that the injunction on these deportations to El Salvador remain in place. Even the dissenting judge acknowledged that before you can deport even an illegal alien to El Salvador, they are required to have due process. We'll tell you all about it. 

If I'm completely honest – and why wouldn't I be? – I wish I didn't have to talk about this whole Signal-Atlantic-Yemen-war chat scandal. I actually don't think it's particularly significant in and of itself. I think what happened here is very obvious. The Trump administration, particularly Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth – particularly Mike Waltz – was negligent, careless and reckless. I think all of those terms apply when using an unreliable app to talk about extremely sensitive war plans or a bombing campaign that they were about to initiate before its initiation. Mike Waltz accidentally went to include somebody who worked for the government in that group, and by accident chose a reporter, a highly unscrupulous and aggressively anti-Trump reporter named Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic. He accidentally chose his number; his contact was saved in his phone and he put him into the group. 

Had Mike Waltz just admitted that had he just said, “Look, […] when I created this group, I thought I was choosing somebody in the Trump administration, instead, I accidentally put Jeffrey Goldberg in the group. It was definitely a mistake. It was a bad mistake. I'm sorry I committed it. I'll be more careful in the future. No harm was done. The operation was a success.” – had he just said the obvious truth, then there'd be nothing else to talk about in this story. 

Unfortunately, that's not what Mike Waltz did, therefore, the Trump administration in defending him had to issue a series of statements that are blatantly, almost insultingly, untrue, and a lot of the journalists, including Jeffrey Goldberg, have been making false claims as well. 

The whole thing is a tsunami of false claims we do feel compelled now to sort through. When the government issues highly implausible or questionable statements, it's the job of a journalist to question those, to scrutinize those and to point out what we know and what is true. 

There's also in the chats that have now been released, including new chats that were released by The Atlantic today, insights into what exactly this bombing campaign in Yemen is entailing, the strategies being used to bomb, who to kill, how many civilians can be killed, and that is at least worth examining probably more so. 

Just to remind anybody who has not heard of this story – who's fortunate enough not to have heard of it – it all started yesterday when Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic – again, I think one of the most unscrupulous operatives in all of D.C. media – published this article after the Trump bombing campaign in Yemen resumed. 

He revealed and showed screenshots of the chat in which he had been included by Mike Waltz, in an extremely sensitive conversation that, for some reason, took place over the commercial app Signal that everybody uses for free. Even though the government spends billions of dollars developing highly secure encrypted communication for national security discussions, they decided to use Signal – and they accidentally put Jeffrey Goldberg into their planning about how they were going to bomb Yemen, which is obviously a secret: what aircraft they were going to use to bomb Yemen, what time the bombing was going to start, and that's what Jeffrey Goldberg revealed. 

This is clearly classified information, highly sensitive, secret information – the government planning a bombing campaign. It's actually illegal to provide that information to someone who's not authorized to receive classified information, which is Jeffrey Goldberg, and yet they did. They did it by accident, presumably, and they should have just said that. 

Instead of that, the Trump administration, once Waltz came out and denied that he ever talked to Jeffrey Goldberg, began denying that there was anything sensitive about debating and then planning when to start a bombing campaign in Yemen. 

I just want you to think for a second about what would have happened had Jeffrey Goldberg published the entire chat with all of these operational details, before the U.S. going and bombed Yemen. Do you really believe that a single person in the Trump administration would have said, “Oh, that's no big deal that Jeffrey Goldberg published these detailed war plans about when we were going to send our service members in harm's way, what aircraft they would use, what time they would start bombing”? 

They would probably charge Jeffrey Goldberg under the Espionage Act and arrest him immediately. At the very least, they would have described this as an incredibly reckless, disloyal, unpatriotic, treasonous thing to do by a reporter because, of course, this information is sensitive. It was only once they realized that Jeffrey Goldberg had it because they gave him access to it that they started to insult your intelligence by trying to tell you there's nothing at all sensitive or classified about any of this information. 

Here's Pete Hegseth speaking on Fox News about all this. 

Video. Pete Hegseth, Hawaii, Fox News. March 24, 2025.

“Nobody was texting war plans,” he said and this has been the line from the Trump administration: “No, there was nothing in there that's sensitive. No big deal that we shared it with the journalists.” 

In fact, I agree with everything Pete Hegseth said about Jeffrey Goldberg. I think he's one of the most fraudulent, if not the most fraudulent operatives in the media. In addition to all the sins Pete Hegseth mentioned, as we've shown you before, it was Jeffrey Goldberg single-handedly, who invented the lie that Saddam Hussein had a close alliance with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to convince Americans of what they needed to be convinced of to support the war in Iraq, which was that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the planning of the 9/11 attack and that's why we had to go in and take him out. Without that lie that Jeffrey Goldberg spread all over the New Yorker and NPR and all the shows that he was asked to come on, he was showered with journalism awards. Without that lie, it would have been much more difficult to convince the Americans to support the war on Iraq. 

Needless to say, none of this has affected Jeffrey Goldberg's standing in corporate media because, as I've said before, it's not just tolerated, it is required if you want to advance in corporate media, that you lie on behalf of the U.S. Security State. Nobody does that as eerily or as casually as Jeffrey Goldberg. 

Given that I agree with everything Pete Hegseth has said about him, that provokes the question Why is it that Jeffrey Goldberg was included in this very small, 16, 17-people, top national security officials? Why was he included in his group and therefore made aware of the war planning? 

It's true that not all of the details of the bombing operation in Yemen were included but a lot of it was. 

Here is The Atlantic, which actually was almost forced to reveal more text because Jeffrey Goldberg had said there were details about the operation. The Trump administration vehemently denied it, as you just heard Pete Hegseth do, as others have done, and because the Trump administration said there was nothing classified in there, Jeffrey Goldberg had no excuse to withhold it. Once you call the reporter a liar and claim that what he's claiming is in there really isn't and that there's nothing classified about it, you have no excuse not to publish it. You're basically duty-bound to do so. And he did, under this headline:

At 11:44 a.m. Eastern time, Hegseth posted in the chat, in all caps, “TEAM UPDATE:”

The text beneath this began,

 “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.” Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East. 

The Hegseth text continues:

“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”

“1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”

The Hegseth text then continued:

“1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”

“1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”

“1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”

“MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)”

“We are currently clean on OPSEC”—that is, operational security. (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.)

I'm sorry, but nobody in good faith, nobody trying to be minimally honest, nobody who is anything other than a complete partisan hack would claim that there was nothing sensitive, nothing classified in what Pete Hegseth posted to the Signal group that included Jeffrey Goldberg. I'm talking about detailed times of an operation that has not yet begun. The targets of the operation, the aircraft they intend to use and the sequence of events that the attack plan entails. The U.S. government classifies everything, pretty much. 

I've talked before about how I read through the Snowden archive for two years plus: hundreds of thousands, if not more, top secret and classified documents. They classify everything, including the most banal, ridiculous and routine documents. Here's how you request a vacation and here's how you get a parking credential, top secret or classified. 

The idea, the very idea that detailed war plans to secretly bomb a country is not information that ought to be closely held, that it's fine to share it with whoever is just an insult to your intelligence and it is a byproduct of the fact that Mike Waltz decided he won't tell the truth and couldn't tell the truth for reasons we'll get into. So, the administration lined up behind him to defend him and in doing so had to issue some claims that didn't even pass the lab test. 

 I'm not pretending, and I won't pretend that I'm sitting here worried about whether the government effectively or efficiently protects its secrets. That is not my job. I'm a journalist. If anything, my job is to unearth those secrets, not help the government better hide them. I wouldn't even be talking about this if not for the fact that it's ongoing because the truth just wasn't admitted. Instead, we're getting an avalanche of preposterous claims not just from the government, but from Jeffrey Goldberg as well. 

Here is a tweet from Karoline Levitt, the White House Press Secretary, and she essentially followed up with the same sort of denials that Pete Hegseth had that's clearly part of the strategy. She says:

Come on! And they're trying to claim that Jeffrey Goldberg one day said there were war plans and then in The Atlantic was treated as “attack plans.” There's no difference between those. It's just not true that “No ‘war plans’ were discussed” in the Signal chat.” 

How is this information not classified? 

3. The White House Counsel’s Office has provided guidance on several different platforms for President Trump’s top officials to communicate as safely and efficiently as possible.

As the National Security Council stated, the White House is looking into how Goldberg’s number was inadvertently added to the thread. 

Thanks to the strong and decisive leadership of President Trump, and everyone in the group, the Houthi strikes were successful and effective. Terrorists were killed and that’s what matters most to President Trump. (Karoline Leavitt, X. March 25, 2025.)

Trump administration officials for the last two months have been issuing very flamboyant and aggressive statements about the evils of leaking classified information, saying they’ll have zero tolerance and they'll punish anybody who is responsible for it. Suddenly, because of Mike Waltz's careless mistake at best, they shared secret war plans, secret attack and bombing plans with one of the most hostile anti-Trump media operatives on the planet and now they resort to, “Oh, We don't care that much about leaking classified information, we just care that the operation was a success.” It was successful because Jeffrey Goldberg opted not to publish what he had learned before the bombing campaign. But they had no way of guaranteeing that when they let him into that group. 

Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, were testifying before Congress yesterday and both of them took similar positions. 

Video. Martin Heinrich, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe. March 25, 2025.

Did you hear that? I mean, whatever you think of the Yemen bombing campaign, however much you love President Trump, here's the CIA director testifying before the Senate. It's not even an effective lie because of course these chats were going to come out. He was asked: Was there anything about timing or weapons packages transmitted in this chat? Obviously, John Ratcliffe, the CIA Director, read the chat. It's right on his phone before going to testify. He knew what was in there and yet he still said, “Not to my knowledge”? I just read you exactly that, the weapons packages that were going to be used and the timing of the attacks in detail. 

What is the justification for lying about that? Why would you even do that? That's what I mean: this began as a very trivial matter and it became something more significant because of the refusal to tell the truth and just dig in, in defense of Mike Waltz. 

Maybe there is some kind of a semantic game to try to justify those answers, but they are misleading at best. They should have just said, ‘Yes, as we were talking about the operation, we did talk about timing. It was a mistake to include a journalist and period. End of the story. It was a mistake, it was careless, we have to take steps to make sure it won’t happen again.’ 

Mike Waltz went on Laura Ingraham last night, and I just want to give you this sense of how preposterous this has now become, and how insulting so many of these explanations are. 

Laura Ingraham, to her credit, wanted to know how Jeffrey Goldberg's phone number ended up saved in Mike Waltz's phone and why that happened. 

Now, I don't know how many of you have used Signal before, but when you open the Signal app, the only people with whom you can start communicating are people who are saved on your phone. You can't just type a random number in. And then, if you create a new Signal group that permits you to speak with multiple Signal users at once, you have to add people to your group and the only options that you have are people whose contacts are saved in your phone. 

I understand why Mike Waltz doesn't want to admit that he had Jeffrey Goldberg's number saved in his phone because Jeffrey Goldberg is one of the most dishonest and one of most vehemently anti-Trump media people in all of Washington and Trump, Mike Waltz's boss, harbors a severe hatred for Jeffrey Goldberg. As you saw with Pete Hegseth, Trump has said some more things. They hate Jeffrey Goldberg. So, instead of just admitting that this is what happened, he was too scared to admit that he had Jeffrey Goldberg's phone number saved in his phone. 

To Laura Ingraham's credit – and I'm not surprised at all that she did it, she's done it many times before – she quite persistently and adversely questioned Mike Waltz on this very question, I want you to listen to the utter babbling, the preposterous defense, the attempts to justify how this could have happened that came out of Mike Waltz's mouth. 

Remember: this is the national security advisor, the person closest to the president on matters of national security, somebody responsible for possessing, analyzing and safeguarding the most sensitive secrets that our government possesses. 

Here's his attempt to explain how he had Jeffrey Goldberg's number on his phone. 

Video. Mike Waltz, Laura Ingraham, Fox News. March 25, 2025.

Oh, we have to convene all of the greatest technological minds and scientists, the computer experts and security experts from all around the world to investigate how possibly could be the case that Jeffrey Goldberg's contact information and phone number were stored in Mike Waltz's phone, sufficiently to allow Mike Waltz's to put him into the Signal group. And when Laura Ingraham still said, like, okay, given that's the case, Jeffrey Goldberg's phone number and contact information ended up in your phone and it was identified as Jeffrey Goldberg. The graphic in the Signal chat said “JG,” which is Jeffrey Goldberg's initials. And he said, “Oh yeah, yeah, what happens is, like, when this happens, the number gets sucked in. It gets sucked. It's totally what happens like the iPhone, like, oh, yeah. So many times. There are these people who I don't want to talk to, who I'm not supposed to talk to, but my iPhone just sucks in their contact information and their name, and I'm like, oh my God, how did they get in my contacts? How did that happen? How do I have their phone number and their name in my, oh, yeah, the phone sucked it in.” Sucked it from where?” 

It's laughable, it's ridiculous, it's insulting that they would continue this preposterous charade. 

Here's another image that The Atlantic released today. Jeffrey Goldberg in his original story said that he got an invitation and was added to the chat group by Mike Waltz. Once you hit ‘accept,’ you become part of the group and  Signal messages to the entire group.

So, here you see, this is the “Houthi PC small group” and it says:  Michael Waltz added you to the group. 

This is Jeffrey Goldberg's phone. There were only 19 members. It was intended to be a small group talking about the Houthi operation. And there is the first message where Mike Waltz says:

Team-establishing a principles group for coordination on Houthis, particularly over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting. (March 11, 2025.)

I heard a lot of Trump supporters trying to pin the blame on his assistant or his staffer, Alex Wong. Mike Waltz is willing to say anything to defend himself, you just saw that, but he's not willing to falsely blame Alex Wong. Why anyway, if you're the National Security Advisor, would you be handing out your phone, your personal telephone to staffers and they have access to it? That's not something a national security adviser should be doing. If that were the explanation, that might even be worse, more reckless. But that's not what happened. It says right here: “Mike Waltz added Jeffrey Goldberg to the group” and, again, the only way you could do that is if you have Jeffrey Goldberg's number saved in your phone. 

Mike Waltz has been insisting from the beginning, “I don't know Jeffrey Goldberg, I've never met him, I've ever talked to him.” Here is a photo from October 2021 that people dug up. It's from the French philosopher and warmonger, Bernard-Henri Lévy. On October 29, 2021, he tweeted:

I don't know, maybe you stood next to somebody on a stage before, and even though you work in the same area – Jeffrey Goldberg is a National Security Reporter, Mike Waltz is a member of Congress, who works in national security and is very well known in D.C, he has been around forever. There you see the two of them and up close. Maybe actually just didn't talk to him. He never remembered this. It's a total coincidence that the person whose contact and number are saved in your phone is somebody that you were about three inches from in a small group meeting on a stage. But the other side of it is it important to realize who Jeffrey Goldberg is. 

The New York Post published a headline saying “Trump team accidentally added lefty editor to secret text group planning Yemen raids. OPERATION OVERSHARE” (New York Post. March 25, 2025.)

The idea that Jeffrey Goldberg is a “lefty” is so funny. Jeffrey Goldberg is an American who left college to join a foreign military – you'll never guess which country, never! Take one guess. Yeah, exactly: he went and joined the IDF. He worked as a prison guard in an Israeli IDF prison that detained Palestinians with no due process during the first Intifada. It's notorious for being abusive. He talked about abuses that he saw and helped cover up, he wrote a book about his experience. So, he joined the IDF and then he became one of the loudest advocates of War in Iraq, He was at the New Yorker in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002. 

Video. Jeffrey Goldberg, C-SPAN. October 22, 2002.

That would mean that Saddam Hussein probably played a role in 9/11 but unfortunately, it was a complete lie. 

There was a time, for those of you who don't remember or were too young to have lived through it, that they were constantly leaking, that Muhammad Adda, one of the lead hijackers for the 9/11 attack, met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague – very similar to what Russiagate was. They just make up lies based on whatever the needs are. 

Remember they had all kinds of claims from the Steele dossier about close Trump associates going and meeting with the Russians in Prague. Same kind of modus operandi, same kind of lie. 

In any reasonably healthy society, this would have destroyed Jeffrey Goldberg's career. That he lied the country into a devastating war that took the lives of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands, if not more, Iraqis. That even Tony Blair, an advocate of this war, says is what gave rise to ISIS because of the instability in the vacuum that we created. This was a major destruction of American credibility, of American lives, of American treasure. 

Americans wanted to support wars against the people who did 9/11. This was a year after 9/11. That's what they wanted. Jeffrey Goldberg happily stepped forward and provided that false link, was showered with a journalism award for this incredible investigation and it didn't impede his career at all. It helped his career. 

So, it's not a surprise that Jeffrey Goldberg, himself, on the other side of the story is also lying. He went on The Bulwark, the Never Trump website, which is where he belongs, and spoke to lifelong GOP operative turned Democratic cheerleader Tim Miller. Yesterday, Tim Miller was pressuring him: “You need to release this and show that it's actually in there.” Jeff Goldberg was very reluctant to do so. Listen to him explaining why he didn't think he could or should. 

Video. Jeffrey Goldberg, Tim Miller, The Bulwark. March 25, 2025.

That is a complete lie. The person who works for John Ratcliffe and manages his team is not an undercover agent. An undercover agent is someone deployed in a field, say, Lebanon or Syria, pretending to be a store clerk or a weapons dealer, who, in reality, is someone who works for the CIA. And if you identify them as a CIA agent, you blow their cover and that puts them in danger. It would be incredibly irresponsible for John Ratcliffe to have put the name of a CIA undercover operative in this chat. Even among 17 people doing that is reckless; that's the thing you guard the most. Jeffrey Goldberg, however, to try to justify why this is so grave and why he cannot release any more information, just fabricated on the spot that there was a CIA undercover operative who was named in the chat. 

The Atlantic itself admits that that's not true:

A CIA spokesperson asked us to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe's chief of staff, which Ratcliffe had shared in the Signal chain, because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified. Ratcliffe had testified earlier yesterday that the officer is not undercover and said it was "completely appropriate" to share their name in the Signal conversation. We will continue to withhold the name of the officer. Otherwise, the messages are unredacted. (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.)

Now, about the war itself. We had gone over some of these excerpts on Monday, and when talking about whether they should bomb Yemen, JD Vance was the only person in the chat who raised objections to it. He called it, “a mistake.” He said, “Look, if this is what your decision is, I won't object publicly” but he noted that there was very little American interest in the Suez Canal. Maybe 3% of the trade in the Suez Canal is American, whereas 30% to 40%, he says, is European, if anything, this matters to Europe and Egypt, but not to the U.S. Obviously, it benefits Israel as well as Tom Cotton said, because the Houthis have been bombing Israel and threatening to seize their ships and so, JD Vance said, “We're supposed to be America First foreign policy. Why are we going to bombing campaigns and wars again to salvage the interest of other people?” 

But he wasn't the only one who said that. The other person who talked about some hesitation was the former congressional candidate, the Green Beret, whose wife was killed working for the CIA in Syria in the battle with ISIS, Joe Kent, whom Tulsi Gabbard has now chosen as her chief of staff or her deputy. He said: “There is nothing time-sensitive driving the timeline. We’ll have the exact same options in a month. […] (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.) So, there was an added voice of caution or at least pushback and hesitation on this Yemen bombing plan and that was Tulsi Gabbard's Chief of Staff, Joe Kent. 

There was a segment of these chats that were about the bombing campaign itself that happened not before the bombing campaign, but as the first strikes happened. And it started with Mike Waltz saying, 

At 1:48 p.m., Waltz sent the following text, containing real-time intelligence about conditions at an attack site, apparently in Sanaa: “VP. Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID. Pete, Kurilla, the IC, amazing job.” 

Waltz was referring here to Hegseth; General Michael E. Kurilla, the commander of Central Command; and the intelligence community, or IC. […] (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.)

But JD Vance didn't understand the message from Waltz. It was just written in a very incoherent way. So, JD Vance said, “What?” and then Mike Waltz responded this way:

At 2 p.m., Waltz [wrote]: “Typing too fast. The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”

Vance responded a minute later: “Excellent.” 

Thirty-five minutes after that, Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wrote, “A good start,” which Waltz followed with a text containing a fist emoji, an American flag emoji, and a fire emoji. (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.)

I just want to highlight this, that this is what the Yemin bombing campaign entailed to start. They identified someone that they claimed was a top-missile person for the Houthis. They didn't kill him in his car, they didn't kill him on a battlefield. They waited for him to enter a residential building filled with civilians, including his girlfriend and the way they killed him was by collapsing the entire building. 

On that first day, there were many claims of civilian deaths – unsurprisingly, given that these were the rules of engagement. 

Is that something that you think is a legitimate military strategy to find somebody that is in your view a legitimate target and just blow up whatever building they're in regardless of how many civilians you kill? If during the Iraq War, the Iraqis had identified where a military commander lived, and he lived in some 47-floor high-rise apartment in Chicago, would the Iraqis have had the right to just blow up the entire building and say “Well, there was one guy in there who was a legitimate target”? 

You blow up an apartment and you kill 37 American civilians along with one member of the military but, of course, when we do it, it's not terrorism. Somehow it becomes legitimate. But if that's what this bombing campaign is, collapsing residential buildings to take out some mid-level missile person – or their top missile person even – who will just get replaced very easily as happened throughout the entire War on Terror – “Hey, we got Number 3 of al-Qaeda again because they just kept getting replenished.” That's how the War on Terror went on and on – this is the kind of endless war posture that Trump said he wanted to avoid. 

Not only is Trump doing exactly what Joe Biden did, bombing Yemen, and what Barack Obama did as well, when he worked with the Saudis for a full-on war with Houthi, just endless war in the Middle East, but he's loosened the rules of engagement so that the military is free to blow up entire residential apartment buildings as long as one person that they want to kill is in there, not caring in the slightest about how many civilians or children or whoever happens to be, unfortunately, have the misfortune of being in that apartment building when it's “collapsed”. 

So, a lot is going on in this story, most of it is quite ugly and unnecessary, eroding our credibility for absolutely no reason. The most significant part by far is the fact that we now have another war in the Middle East that is not going to stop. 

Just to remind you, the Houthis were attacking U.S. ships when Biden was bombing them and when Trump said that the bombing campaign was unnecessary. Once there was a cease-fire in Gaza that Trump and his envoy were able to facilitate, the Houthis stopped attacking ships. They only restarted attacking ships once in their view and everyone in the international community agrees that this happened once the Israelis started blocking the humanitarian aid that the cease-fire called for – food, medicine, water – into Gaza. They said because Israel is not abiding by the cease-fire agreement, we're only going to attack Israel-flagged or Israel-owned ships. 

So, they're not even attacking American ships anymore, just Israel's and that is what prompted Trump after saying last year that he opposed restarting Biden's war and escalating it and clearly killing a ton of civilians as usual. 

Then, at some point, we'll be attacked and everybody will walk around saying, “Oh my god what did we do? Why did they hate us?” And I think that has to be the focus once this question of how Jeffrey Goldberg got into the chat is resolved and we can move on from that. This is what our focus ought to be. 

One of the most bizarre things to watch over the last several years ever since the Russian invasion, in February 2022, in Ukraine, is watching Europeans, European officials in Brussels and bureaucrats start acting like they're refighting World War II or fighting World War III against Russia. You have German leaders talking about sending tanks for the third time in the last 100 years eastward toward Russia, which they ultimately did. You have German leaders in outdoor rallies saying, “We must defeat Russia, we must take them down.” You have all these tiny little countries and their tiny little prime ministers turn out like with a million people in the entire country acting like they're Winston Churchill. 

Ever since the pronouncements by Donald Trump – about his intentions to say, “We're not going to keep paying for your defense, Europe. Why would we pay for your defense? You offer this very ample welfare state to your people and they love it and that's understandable. They get a lot of benefits, but why are our workers paying for your defense? You're not impoverished. You're perfectly capable of doing it yourself.” – they've gone completely insane, acting like, “OK, now we're going to become this military superpower we were always meant to be, without the United States.” 

The problem is Europe is a joke militarily. They're an absolute joke. France and the U.K. have a small nuclear arsenal, so that makes them serious on that level, but in terms of conventional military fighting, they're laughable. In fact, in that Signal chat group that we just went over, because JD Vance was saying, Mike Waltz said:

[From Mike Waltz] Whether we pull the plug or not today European navies do not have the capability to defend against the types of sophisticated, antiship, cruise missiles, and drones the Houthis are now using. So whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes. Per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans. (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.)

So, according to Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, Europe doesn't even have the military capability to fight the Houthis. Their navy is insufficient. The Houthis have more sophisticated weaponry and more fighting capability than the Europeans, who nonetheless have been walking around beating their chest, “We're Europe, we're going to build our own military, we are going to fight Russia, we're going to defeat them, consign them to the ash heap of history, we don't need the United States.” 

All of that rhetoric is about three weeks old and already Europe is confronting the reality that they're Europe and that none of that tough talk is possible. Even The New York Times is mocking them now: 

Most of the European countries are struggling greatly with their economy. Their populations hate them. There's massive anti-establishment sentiment throughout Western Europe and even in Central Europe. It's the reason why people in the U.K. voted to leave the EU with Brexit because they didn't want to be governed by these kinds of people in Brussels. It's a reason why right-wing populist parties that countries never thought would succeed – in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and many more places – are gaining in popularity because they're channeling this anti-establishment sentiment. And none of these Europeans want to give up the massive state benefits that they get, which is a crucial part of being European: one-month vacation and tons of time off for paternity and maternity leave, retiring early, working four days, not working a 40-hour workweek. These are all things essential to the Europeans and they’re not going to give that up to build a massive military and go into massive debt for it, especially when a lot of these countries like France are already in enormous amounts of debt. 

Yet, here is Ursula von der Leyen, a warmonger and a German who nobody elected to become the president of the EU other than the members of the European Parliament, on March 4, talking tough about her rearmament plan. 

Video. Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission. March 4, 2025.

She said Europe is ready to rearm and build its defense. They're not. One of the ironies of all of this is that the most strident warmongers in Europe are women politicians who are on the center-left, the center of European politics. The reason I say it's ironic is that the most belligerent, aggressive, and warmongering party of Europe when it comes to Ukraine and Russia, Israel and a variety of other potential wars, is the German Green Party, whose figurehead is Annalena Baerbock, who is the foreign minister of Germany. 

The German Greens ran on a platform that elevated her and the Greens to the parliament. They ran on the platform with what they called a feminist foreign policy. They said, “Our party is dominated by women, we're going to have female officials in the most important offices, and because women are more inclined to resolve disputes through diplomacy and conciliation and not with war and aggression, a feminist foreign policy is less antagonistic, less belligerent.” That's the campaign they ran on. 

I personally find this kind of essentializing – men are more aggressive and inclined to war; women are more conciliatory – to be extremely reductive. And obviously you can use that same reasoning, not to elevate women, but to demean them: “Oh, women are more emotional, men are more rational, women don't belong in possession of power, etc.” That's the same exact kind of thinking. But for whatever reason, the most unhinged voices who practically think they're at war with Russia and are ready to build up this military are women politicians in Europe, on the center and center-left. 

One of them, Kaja Kallas, the former prime minister of the crucial state of Estonia, all one million people who live there, has become so deranged that she's even starting to genuinely disturb a lot of European officials, including many who are for the war in Ukraine, but are very alarmed by the way she's speaking. 

Here's Politico EU today:

Imagine the Prime Minister of Estonia saying, “We're now the leaders of the free world, not the United States. 

Most countries don’t want to inflame things with the United States,” said a sixth diplomat. “Saying the free world needs a new leader just isn’t what most leaders wanted to put out there.” (Politico EU. March 26, 2025.) 

Just to give you the kind of rhetoric this person uses, this Kaja Kallas person, here she is at the annual conference at the European Defense Agency in January, addressing the fact that there are EU members like Hungary that don't support this foreign policy, that don’t want to confront Russia, that want to try to put an end diplomatically to the war in Ukraine. And here's the kind of language she used against them: 

Video. Kaja Kallas, EU Council. March 6, 2025.

Believing that Ukraine can win the war, meaning, expelling all Russian troops from every inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, requires madness at this point. But what does she care? She's from a tiny little country that will contribute nothing. She's demanding that workers in Italy, Spain, France and Germany pay for the glories of this war that she wants. I get why Estonians don't like Russians. I understand the history of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, but she has to face reality and she wants to be this glamorous, strong, Churchillian war leader, but the EU doesn't have anywhere near the capability to back up those words. 

Here is Kaja Kallas in May of last year at a different conference. 

Video. Kaja Kallas, Lennart Meri Conference. May 18, 2024.

She's talking about regime change in Russia, changing the government of Russia and then breaking Russia up into a bunch of little different pieces. That's the foreign minister of the EU engaging in utterly deranged, fairytale thinking. 

Here is the prime minister of Finland, Mette Frederiksen. And here's how she's speaking. 

Video. Mette Frederiksen, DR News. March 5, 2025.

The reason these people live in a fantasy world is because they've had the United States financing, arming and fighting their wars for them for so many decades. So, they've gotten to simultaneously talk tough as though they're fighting wars because they contribute some troops, while at the same time not having to spend any of their people's money on it and giving them a welfare state that you could afford to give if you're not spending massive amounts in the military the way the United States has been doing. 

But now, they're having to face the reality that the United States is not going to continue to pay the military-industrial complex to defend Europe and fight its wars for it. Why should the United States do so? And so, they still want to talk this tough talk, but the reality is they don't have the political will nor the resources nor anything resembling a serious military to back it up. I mean, as I said, Michael Waltz said in that Signal group from a couple of days ago, “They can't even fight the Houthis. They don't have the military sophistication or the navies to battle Yemen.”

 And we're seeing now that there's just zero willingness to back up any of this rhetoric. It was like when the British Prime Minister wanted to be all Churchillian, the British are obsessed with being Churchill, Sir Keir Starmer, and he said, “We're going to go and send our troops to Ukraine to keep the peace there and prevent Russia from advancing.” And then the next day, he had to come out and admit, “Actually, we can't do anything without U.S. air cover. So, we're just saying that if the U.S. is willing to go to war in Ukraine against Russia, then we will, but we can't do it without the U.S.” And that's the reality of what and who Europe is, including the U.K. 

I just want to show you one bizarre article that came out today that gives you a sense of just how far gone the Europeans are in terms of the unreality in which they're living. It's from the Financial Times: 

EU calls for households to stockpile 72 hours of food amid war risks

 “New realities require a new level of preparedness in Europe,” said commission president Ursula von der Leyen. “Our citizens, our member states and our businesses need the right tools to act both to prevent crises and to react swiftly when a disaster hits.” (Financial Times. March 26, 2025.)

So, even as every country around her tells this unelected person that they can't fund this massive military rearmament that she envisions – they won't go into greater debt for it; their populations won't tolerate it – she's basically now telling European citizens, you're in a war. You have to stock up and make sure you have 72 hours' worth of food because she envisions that Europe is at war with Russia. 

This is how they think and while I'm very critical of things the Trump administration has done in the first two months of the presidency, one of which we're about to get to, others of which involve censorship, the resumption of the war in Ukraine, the continuation of the destruction of Gaza, Trump is making progress in facilitating a peace deal with Russia and Ukraine. And on some level, you can make the argument that in terms of world security and given the utter insanity of how the Europeans are thinking and speaking, there may be nothing more important than putting an end to this war diplomatically, which Trump ran on a promise of doing, the American people want, and Trump has now made significant strives in achieving. 

We reported previously last week on the controversy surrounding the fact that the Trump administration during the campaign promised to mass deport people in the United States illegally. Deportation typically means, in fact always means, picking people up who are in your country illegally and sending them back to their country of origin. They get a very quick hearing in a, basically quasi-court, a deportation court inside the Justice Department, and as long as the government can show they don't have the legal papers to be in the United States, and the person can't show they have the illegal documents, the deportation is approved, and they get sent back to their home country. 

The Trump administration is doing some of that, not nearly at the level promised, but they're doing some of it. However, they're doing something much, much different, which is that they're picking people up, primarily Venezuelans, up until now, and they're not sending them back to Venezuela. They're sending them to a third country that these people have nothing to do with, that they're not citizens of, that in most if not all cases, they've never visited, which is El Salvador. 

The United States government is paying the government of El Salvador not to accept them, but to incarcerate them in one of the most horrific prisons that exist in the world, to film them being humiliated and dehumanized, all based on the accusation that the Trump administration refuses to prove that these people are members of a violent gang, Tren de Aragua, based on invocation of war powers that has only been used three times previously, in actual wars, the war of 1812, World War I, World War II, but even then, the people who were ordered under the Alien Enemies Act to be deported got a hearing. 

The Trump administration is sending these people, including people who have obviously compelling cases that they're not part of this gang, that they've been mistaken for gang members, just like the U.S. told us during Guantánamo, the War on Terror, that only the worst of the worst was there and it turned out many of the people there had nothing to do with terrorism. They were innocent, they were a part of a mistaken identity, any number of reasons why. That's what happens when you don't give people due process, you imprison people unjustly. 

A federal district court judge ordered this to stop and no detainees to be delivered to El Salvador without first getting a hearing. The Trump administration rushed to move them there, brought 237 of them there, refused to turn the plane around and a lot of Trump supporters have been complaining, “Oh, this is just a single federal judge. Who is he to order the president to stop some policy based on his belief that it's unconstitutional or illegal?” – even though as we showed you on Monday night that's how our system works. 

Conservatives have often got injunctions from single district court judges to stop Biden policy, to stop Obama policy, to stop Clinton policy. But the DOJ appealed that injunction. So, it's not before just a single district judge now. It's before the U.S. Court of Appeals, which is the highest appellate court in the country, which is right below the Supreme Court in terms of prestige. They held an oral argument on Monday, and we played a lot of that for you or some of it in which we showed you how antagonistic, how adversarial, how aggressive the judges on the panel were being toward the Trump Justice Department's arguments about why they have the legal authority to do this, making it quite clear that it's extremely likely that the appellate court would uphold that injunction, so that now it's not just a single federal court judge, it's the most prestigious appellant court in the country, right below the Supreme Court, that's doing so. 

The three judges were an Obama appointee, a George H.W. Bush appointee and a Trump appointee and the decision that they issued today was a 2-1 decision that upheld this injunction that the federal district court issued for the Trump administration not to deport anyone else back to El Salvador, at least not without hearings. 

Even the judge in dissent, the Trump judge, emphasizes that every single illegal alien, people inside the United States illegally that the Trump administration proposes to send to a prison in a foreign country, has a right to a habeas corpus hearing, to an opportunity to prove that he's being unjustly accused. The only reason he dissented was he said that the case should have been brought where they were detained and not in Washington. But on the substance of whether they have a due process rate, the dissenting judge agreed that it was essentially 3-0 on that question. 

You can see the ruling here. 

[…]

What's interesting is the Trump-appointed judge, Judge Walker, did dissent but as I said, he dissented mostly on the grounds of where the case was brought. He said it shouldn't have been brought in Washington, but in Texas, you have to bring it where the people are detained, not where the government officials are. In his dissent, he said this:

[WALKER DISSENT]

The two sides of this case agree on very little. But what is

at this point uncontested is that “individuals identified as alien

enemies . . . may challenge that status in a habeas petition.” (US Court of Appeals. March 26, 2025.)

If the Trump administration wants to do mass deportation – they convinced Americans to vote for that and polls show people favor that – if they were deporting people back to their home country, none of this would be an issue. But when you change that to something far more radical, sending people, based on interpretations of their tattoos or the flimsiest evidence that you haven't even presented to a court, and you accuse people of being violent criminals and send them to a prison designed to be one of the worst and most destructive and humiliating and dehumanizing prisons in the entire world – the El Salvadorian government has said they may never leave, they may be here for life – not just basic human rights, but our Constitution, our laws, our precedents, as all three judges agreed, including the Trump-appointed judge, require that they be given an opportunity to contest the charges against them – this should not even be controversial. 

It has become such because if you sufficiently dehumanize people, and this is what we saw in the world War on Terror, if the government just labels them terrorists without proving it, even if it's wrong, enough people will say, “Oh, these people are animals; they're not even humans, they deserve no rights; kill them, torture them, kidnap them, put them in prison for life. They don't need a trial.” That is always what the founders feared most: that the government would raise the fear level sufficiently so that people would give away their own liberties. 

Remember, Benjamin Franklin and this is not apocryphal, this is documented, when he left the constitutional convention, he was asked by a woman, “What is it that you did in there?” And he said, “We created a republic if you can keep it”, knowing that the biggest danger to the Bill of Rights would be that citizens, the population, would be manipulated or fearmongered into giving up those rights. And that's what typically happens. We see this all the time, and that's why it's happening now. 

Now, the appellate court, it's not just one judge, it's a three-judge appellant court, has ruled that doing this without a hearing, or even invoking the law to justify it, is likely to fail on the merits, and therefore these deportations are still enjoined, not by one judge, but by a three-judge panel. 

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First, Trump national security officials planned the granular details of the U.S. bombing campaign of Yemen, not on official classified channels, but rather on the popular messaging app Signal. Before they began planning that bombing attack on that platform, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, for some reason, added to their group one of the journalists most responsible for the most frauds of the last 20 years, as well as some of the most baseless attacks on Donald Trump himself, the editor in chief of the Atlantic and former IDF prison guard, Jeffrey Goldberg. We'll look at what we know from these chats to gain insight into the foreign policy ideology and mindset dominating Trump's thus far quite militaristic foreign policy. 

Then: In the oral argument held this afternoon, the appellate judges in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, generally considered the highest appeals court right below the Supreme Court, were openly hostile – aggressively hostile at times – to most, if not all of the Trump's lawyers' reasons as to why no due process is required before shipping  Venezuelans and other foreign nationals to a notorious prison in El Salvador, to spend the rest of their lives in prison. We'll report on that hearing and the broader legal and Constitutional issues arrayed by this increasingly acrimonious fight over the Constitution and due process. 

Finally: over the past 24 hours, they somehow outdid themselves and reached new lows. First, Israel targeted and then slaughtered two young Palestinian journalists who have been among the most effective in showing the world the realities of Gaza over the last 15 months – reporting they continued to do quite bravely despite an endless stream of death threats from the IDF, meaning they would be killed if they continued to speak out. Then, perhaps even more shockingly, the producer of the documentary on Israel and Palestine that just won an Oscar at last month's Academy Award ceremony was attacked and almost fatally lynched by Israeli settlers, not in Gaza but in the West Bank, settlements that the entire world considers to be illegally occupying that land and as the ambulance sped to a hospital to try and save this Oscar-winning filmmaker, the IDF dragged him from the ambulance and then arrested him – they did not arrest the settlers who beat him nearly to death but the Oscar-winning filmmaker who had just been near-fatally beaten. 

There are simply no limits or standards of law and morality the Israeli government recognizes at this point and if you're an American citizen, you are absolutely responsible for everything that is being done because it's being done with your money, your resources, your arms and weapons and your diplomatic protection without which Israel cannot carry out these atrocities. 

A major reason I found myself interested in and even seeing potential in the Trump movement as it has evolved over the last eight years is that they had adopted and begun to advocate a foreign policy that they were describing as both anti-war and anti-intervention, including critiques that the United States has involved itself in far too many wars, especially in the Middle East, including ones where our direct interest and security were not really at state. 

Donald Trump prided himself on the fact that he did not involve the U.S. in any new wars in his first term and said he was determined to continue that and it was in his second term that he wanted to be remembered by history as a peacemaker, not somebody who started wars, but as someone who ended them. He talked often about ending the war in Ukraine and Russia. He patted himself on the back quite a bit for the cease-fire deal in Gaza that he engineered before he was inaugurated. 

Yet, over the past two months, we have seen a very bellicose, very militaristic, and at times war-creating foreign policy. They're definitely trying to stop the war in Ukraine and Russia. I just believe they deserve a lot of credit for that – I've given them a lot of credit for it – but, at the same time, they not only stood by and gave the green light, but encouraged Israel to restart the destruction of Gaza, even though there's very little left in Gaza to destroy. 

In other words, they unraveled their own cease-fire deal that they themselves negotiated and facilitated by demanding that Hamas and the Gazans abandon it and release all hostages immediately instead of following the schedule set out in that cease-fire. 

Even the most pro-Israel voices in the U.S. and Israel have acknowledged that Netanyahu told his right-wing cabinet members from the beginning, don't worry about this cease-fire, we're only going to do the first stage and once we get some hostages back, we're going to resume the war and to get rid of the Gazans out of Gaza entirely. And that's exactly what he set out to do and is now doing. 

And then of course you have the Trump administration's new war – you really could call it a new war because it had stopped finally under Biden, once he was on his way out during the transition which was the bombing campaign that Biden carried out throughout all of 2024, constantly dropping weapons and bombs on the Houthis in Yemen. Trump criticized Joe Biden for it, often doing so every day, saying there's no need to drop bombs on Yemen. Yet, early this month, the Trump administration announced very proudly, very publicly, that they were not only bombing Yemen but doing so in a very aggressive way, in a sustained campaign. And that's what they're doing. 

They're carrying out massive bombing campaigns all throughout Yemen, killing many civilians and targeting Houthis and the like. Exactly the policy that Biden carried out for the same reasons, with the same exact rationale. Although as we've gone over before, and we've read you the accounts, at least Biden had the excuse when he was doing it – when Trump was criticizing him – that the Houthis were attacking American ships in the Red Sea and elsewhere. 

Once there was a cease-fire deal and Israel was no longer bombing Gaza, the Houthis stopped their attacks: they said they would and they did. Only once the Israelis blockaded humanitarian aid from entering Gaza as the agreement called for, did they say, “We're going to attack Israeli ships,” Israel-flagged ships only until they allow the humanitarian aid into Gaza as required by that agreement.” So, they weren't even attacking American ships at the time this bombing campaign was initiated. I agreed with Trump's criticism of Biden, but at least Biden had an argument, whereas Trump doesn't. 

Earlier today, Jeffrey Goldberg, the longtime editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, which has been one of the most anti-Trump magazines in the country, ground zero during the Russiagate hysteria, who, during the 2020 election, claimed anonymously that Trump had disparaged the soldiers who died fighting as losers and suckers, then, in this election, he was the one who kept quoting General Milley and General Kelly claiming that Trump had said he admired Hitler and was a fascist – so, he’s not one of the most unscrupulous operatives in D.C. over the last 20 to 25 years but also one of the most vociferously anti-Trump ones – Goldberg wrote an article earlier today in The Atlantic, which by the way, is owned by the billionaire heiress Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, who inherited his billions and became a major donor to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris:

This is shocking. It's not just one of a standard classified conversation – all conversations in Washington are “classified” – this is as sensitive as it gets. They are talking here about a surprise attack on a country that the United States was not bombing, and they were talking about the most precise detailed operational aspects of this bombing campaign: where they were going to bomb, exactly what time they were going to start bombing, which military weapons they were going to use to bomb. 

Obviously, anybody who gets this information and leaks it could sabotage the attack or put service members who are carrying it out in obvious danger. If the Houthis knew exactly where planes were coming from and what targets they were going to use, they could do all sorts of things to sabotage it. To put Jeffrey Goldberg into a top-secret meeting, even though he has no top-secret security clearance – seemingly by mistake, but who knows? – that is incompetence on a security breach of the most extreme kind you can imagine. 

But that's something for other people to worry about, I'm not particularly concerned with national security breaches like that. I think way too much is classified. Although even I, generally on the far end of absolutism when it comes to state and government transparency recognize and I've always said that, of course, some things ought to be secret, some things ought to be hidden. Well, one of those is troop movements. 

This would be like if you planned D-Day and accidentally included Nazi sympathizing or communist sympathizing or anti-American journalists in your planning meeting and they learned the details in advance of the invasion of Normandy. I mean it's on that level of breach. 

But I'll let others worry about that, what I'm more interested in is the debate that ensued, the conversation about the bombing attack and who said what, to get a glimpse into the mindset of Trump's national security team. 

So, here's what Goldberg wrote:

[…] At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the Suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)

On the one hand, this is not a very vehement objection, he wasn't pounding the table and saying, “This is wrong and we cannot do this.” You have to remember that JD Vance has a potentially purely empty and symbolic role in the Trump administration. He's the vice president. He really has no official duties. Whatever duties he gets, whatever influence he has, is solely because Trump gives it to him. Therefore, he's always being quite careful not to seem like he's a radical dissident to the Trump agenda. 

Nonetheless, he and he alone did stand up and say, “I think this is a mistake” because there are no real U.S. interests involved here. We have a tiny amount of shipping that goes to the Suez. It's the Europeans who have enormous amounts and why are we out there demanding that Europe take responsibility for its own defense and that we not bear the brunt of it anymore? Here we are about to do exactly that in a way that the public won't understand. 

I guess you might consider it a coincidence – I don't – that the position of the Houthis under Trump has been not that we're going to attack American ships, but that we are only going to attack Israeli ships. To me, this is much more a bombing campaign designed to protect Israel than to protect the Europeans. No one's going to say that and no one is going to admit that, but that's the truth. And yet it was J.D. Vance, despite the extremely insignificant, almost trivial, connection to U.S. interests, who stood up and said, this is wrong, this was a mistake. 

[…] The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)

So, he was essentially saying, “This is wrong, I'm against it, but at least let's wait a month so we can figure out what we're really doing here. Why the urgency? Why the immediacy?”

[HEGSETH MESSAGE]

[…] At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)

In other words, they have no way to explain to the American people why bombing the Houthis is in their interest, why bombing Yemen is in their interest, so, Hegseth is saying, let's just simplify it and just avoid the real reasons and just say Biden failed even though Biden actually bombed Yemen continuously throughout 2024. 

This is always the Republican narrative: the Democrats are weak. They say Democrats and Biden were weak on Israel even though the United States under Biden paid for Israel's entire war, funded and armed that war, diplomatically protected Israel every day of the U.N. – and it was Obama who signed a deal on his way out of office with Netanyahu to give the Israelis $38 billion in military aid over 10 years. 

But of course, the Fox News Republican narrative always has to be, “Oh, the Democrats hate Israel,” etc. Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Democrat, has a book out warning of the antisemitism crisis that has engulfed America and said, “My job is to make sure the left stays pro-Israel.” The idea that Democrats are weak on Israel or the Middle East or whatever is laughable. It's a joke. But Hegseth is saying that's how we have to sell it to the public: Biden failed and let's scare them over the connection to Iran. 

[…] The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease-fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)

Very ironic that Pete Hegseth is promising a 100% OPSEC operational security on this plan when they're all doing this planning in front of an anti-Trump journalist that they have no idea has been invited by the National Security Advisor into this group unwittingly or otherwise. 

Goldberg goes on:

[YEMEN BOMBINGS]

It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. Eastern time. So, I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city. (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)

Nobody is denying that the chat is authentic. When the State Department spokesperson was asked why this happened, she simply said, “We’re not commenting on it.” 

At Donald Trump's press appearance, which, to his credit, he does essentially every day in the Roosevelt Room, a reporter in a very weird, timid way asked Trump about this story and Trump denied all knowledge of it. Here's what he said. 

Video. Donald Trump, C-SPAN2. March 24, 2025.

The Atlantic article came out and everybody in Washington in the political circles was talking about it. I don't doubt actually that Trump hasn't heard about it, sometimes he doesn't follow the news cycle all that closely. But later after this, the White House put out a statement through Karoline Levitt, the White House press secretary, saying President Trump has full and complete confidence in his National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, even though Mike Waltz added a journalist, a hostile journalist, to their planning for a new war – and that's illegal by the way, to transmit classified information to someone not authorized to receive it, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, others in the Trump administration have said they will have zero tolerance for leaks of classified information. 

They're lucky that Jeffrey Goldberg is obviously in favor of the bombing of Yemen because it helps Israel, whose foreign military he joined and served as a prison guard in an Israeli detention camp for Palestinians and he's been an advocate of the Iraq war, did more than anybody to spread the lie that Saddam Hussein was involved in al-Qaeda in order to justify that war. So, obviously it was safe in that sense because Jeffrey Goldberg was going to be a supporter of it. He has a very similar worldview to Mike Waltz. Both of them are standard GOP militarists and neocons. But still, a gigantic mistake at best, a huge national security breach, and had it been done with the wrong person, it could easily have put the lives of American troops in harm's way. 

And why were they using Signal? The government pays for extremely sophisticated classified networks to talk about these sorts of things. I consider Signal relatively safe among commercial apps. It's probably the safest. It's the one I use when I'm having conversations that I don't want to be easily invaded, but it's far from invulnerable. 

[…]

Here's the issue I have: aside from the fact that there's, no denying, a gigantic gap between what MAGA said they wanted Trump to do when he won. Then, Trump got into office and, less than two months later, he's bombing Yemen. Are there very many MAGA advocates, MAGA influencers and Republican conservative pundits who are denouncing this? There are some, but not many and this is the same exact thing with the free speech issue. 

Conservatives have probably been most contemptuous over the last decade of the attempt to limit free speech on campus in the name of protecting the sensibilities and creating safe spaces for various minority groups. Trump gets into office and one of his primary focuses is to eliminate antisemitism on college campuses to force Columbia to adopt a broader definition of antisemitism, such that various criticisms of Israel are outlawed in the name of making Jewish students feel safe.  I am not talking here about deporting protesters; I'm talking about forcing speech codes on Columbia and in other schools as well. You don't hear very many MAGA advocates and pundits and employers and the like object to that either, even though, they've been waiving the free speech banner incessantly for the last decade, especially when it comes to college campuses. And this is something I've seen in my journalism career every single time there's a change in party control in the White House, every single time. 

When people are out of power, they embrace values and beliefs, and they appeal to constitutional principles and whatever they use to condemn the opposite party when they're in power. Then, the minute their party gets into power, they forget about every single value they pretended to believe in, even if the president of their party is carrying on the same policies that they so vehemently denounced when carried out by the prior party. 

The first time I ever saw that was the first time there was a party change in the White House while I was a journalist – I started in 2005, condemning the War on Terror, writing every day about the due process violations of the War and Terror, the spying and privacy violations of American citizens, rendition and torture and imprisoning people with no trial – and I built up a gigantic Democrat Party and liberal audience, along with a libertarian one, but the minute the Republicans are out of the office and Barack Obama takes office in 2009, and continues to carry on many, in fact, most of the same War on Terror policies that I had spent years viciously denouncing, huge numbers of Democrats in my audience were like, “Wait a minute, I didn't really believe these things. I was just using them to attack George Bush. I don't want to hear these criticisms of Barack Obama,” and I lost a good part of my audience – and kept a good part as well, but you see it every single time there's a change of party control. They either start overlooking the things that they say they find so objectionable or start twisting themselves into pretzels to justify it because now their side is doing it. 

Trump undid his cease-fire and caused a new war in Gaza, even though there's barely anything left to destroy there – but we're paying for and arming. He restarted a Biden bombing campaign in Yemen, two different wars in the Middle East while Israel bombed Syria and Lebanon and accused part of those countries – basically have a giant Middle East war led by the United States and Israel – exactly the kind of wars that Trump for a decade has been promising to end and you barely hear protests from his followers, the people who said they believe in the MAGA vision, the MAGA mentality that he laid out, his criticism of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy, the constant permanent war from the deep state – the war machine and the military-industrial complex, all that's gone, gone from the MAGA lips in order to cheer for what Trump is doing. 

I understand the temptation involved in that, I understand that if you are happy that your president is doing a lot of what you hoped he would do, you're very reluctant to criticize him. There's also a big economic factor in independent media, which is if you did build an audience based on Trump supporters, and then you turn around and start criticizing him sometimes you're going to alienate a lot of your audience, and a lot of people are afraid to do that. They get imprisoned by the audience they've created because they purposely have set out to create a partisan pro-Trump or pro-Biden or pro-Cuomo, whatever, audience, and they're there to hear praise of those people, not criticism of them. 

But if you don't want to be a fraud if you want to have any credibility in what you claim, someday there's going to be a Democratic president, you stand up again and start screaming that you're anti-war and don't want foreign wars and don' like censorship. No one's gonna take you seriously. Why would they? They just watched you do everything that you could possibly do to justify the very things you claim to denounce – and I'm not saying all MAGA supporters are doing that, I know some who aren't, I respect the ones who aren't, but there's a lot of them and the fact that we're two months into the Trump administration and the only person in the group who said, “Wait a minute, why are we bombing Yemen?” – like, what does that have to do with America First and American interests? – was JD Vance, someone who has no real authority. And because of that, they ran roughshod over him and ignored him and by the end, he was saying, “Okay, I'm on board. I won't express any disagreements publicly and I'm praying for the success of our mission.” And that gives you a real sense of the very traditionally militaristic foreign policy that a lot of these long-time establishment Republicans who Trump built his cabinet with have, and it shows that they are really getting their way. 

It shouldn't surprise anybody that the Trump administration is deporting people who are in the country illegally and they're doing so in an aggressive manner. After all, if you had to pick one issue, one promise, that was Trump's signature issue ever since he emerged on the political scene, it would be deporting illegal aliens. That was the very first thing he talked about when he descended that escalator in Trump Tower and gave the speech that propelled him to the start of the polls. He has a democratic mandate for it, he was twice elected on that promise. Polls show that they want that. 

The reality is, though, despite all these showy controversies, these flamboyant distractions, there are no mass deportations taking place. The rate of deportations under Trump is similar to, even a little bit less than, it was under Biden for this time period. Part of the reason is that Trump has succeeded in virtually shutting the border, so there aren't a lot of people entering the country illegally over the border and that counted for a lot of the deportations Biden has done, but the numbers are nowhere near what anyone can consider mass deportation in the scope of how many illegal aliens there are in the United States. Maybe that number will increase, but it's not now. There doesn't seem to be a lot of urgency to that. 

What we're getting instead are these side shows, almost an exploitation of the promise to engage in mass deportations. The first one was going to Colombia and targeting for deportation, not people who were in the United States illegally, but people who are in the United States very legally, with student visas, with work visas, even with green cards, which are considered permanent resident status. And they started deporting those people for the crime of protesting, you'll never guess which country, the one that half of the things we talk about as a nation end up focusing on, which is Israel. 

So, there's been a lot of deportation controversy surrounding deporting people in the U.S. legally, which has nothing to do with Trump's mass deportation promise and then you have a controversy that has been created, not because Trump deported illegal aliens because the deportation of illegal aliens is always meant, not just in the United States, but essentially every country in the democratic world, taking people inside the country illegally and sending them back to their country of origin, meaning where they're a citizen. So, if you deport Guatemalans, they get deported back to Guatemala, if you deport illegal aliens who are Chinese, you deport them back to China, etc. That's how deportation works, that deportation means. 

As we know, and we reported this last week at length, that's not what the Trump administration is doing. Over the weekend, last weekend, they took 237 Venezuelans, who are not citizens of El Salvador, who have never been citizens of El Salvador, probably in every case, certainly most of them have never been to El Salvador or have nothing to do with El Salvador, and they didn't deport them just to go back to their countries; they purposely deported them to a third-party country that they have nothing to do with and paid the El Salvadoran government to put them into one of the world's worst, most notorious, and abusive prisons, from where the El Salvadoran president, essentially the dictator of El Salvador, said they very well may never leave. That's what that prison is for, it's intended to completely strip people of their humanity and ignore human rights or principles concerning prisons. 

The argument of the Trump administration as to why they sent them to prison was because they were all members of a violent Venezuelan drug gang, Tren de Aragua. The problem with that claim is that they were accusing people of severe criminality without any kind of evidentiary hearing where they were going to present the evidence demonstrating this accusation was true and giving the accused the opportunity to contest it. 

So, the Trump administration comes in and says, “Oh, look, he has a tattoo that is associated with this gang” and the person accused can say, “No, actually, this is a tattoo of my favorite soccer team, Real Madrid,” that is worldwide known and the ICE agents misinterpreted it, which is exactly what happened, at least in one case. 

So, the problem here is not the Trump Administration deporting illegal aliens, the problem is the Trump Administration sending people to life in prison with zero due process, zero opportunity for them to contest the accusations against them. As a result, all we’re left to do is to piece together whatever evidence emerges in the media, or from their families, or from the lawyers, and say, wait a minute, there's at least serious doubt about this person, and this person and this person and this person. It seems very unlikely that they're actually in Tren del Agua. Unfortunately, the government didn't have to prove anything, and they didn't have a chance to disprove it. They were just swept onto a plane and thrown into that prison where now no U.S. court can even order them released because the El Salvadoran government can obviously ignore U.S. court orders. 

The Trump administration's response to all of this was once a judge, a federal district court judge, who as a reminder is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, ordered an injunction against this program – in fact, ordered those detainees not to be taken to El Salvador – they took them to El Salvador anyway. And the judge as a result extended his injunction on this program saying, “You cannot deport people to life in prison without some kind of a hearing, without some opportunity for them to go to court and argue that they're being wrongfully accused.” 

There's been a major Trump White House media war and a MAGA social media war on the particular judge who ruled this way, calling him a far-left judge, even though he has so many hearings, some of which have been in favor of decisions which are far from left, some of which have been against the Mueller investigation, some of which had been in favor of Trump. But the way our legal system works is that if you want to sue the government, you can't go right to the Supreme Court, you can't go to an appellate court. You have to go to a federal district court judge. That's where essentially, with very few exceptions, every legal case originates. Federal district court judges absolutely have the power to enjoin the federal government from doing something – in fact, conservatives constantly went into federal court under the Clinton administration, under the Obama administration and under the Biden administration to ask a district court judge to issue and often succeeded in getting a district court judges to issue an injunction blocking what the Biden administration wanted to do, not just for that district, but nationwide. 

This idea that federal district court judges have no power or authority to enjoin the federal government from violating the law or the Constitution, nobody has ever thought this before. This is always how our court system has worked at least since Marbury v. Madison, which resolved the question of who interprets the Constitution – the courts did and ever since that has been how our legal system has worked and both sides have fully taken advantage of that by getting the other party's president's policies invalidated or declared unconstitutional. And yet, there's outrage over this injunction. 

From AP:

President Donald Trump on Monday questioned the impartiality of the federal judge who blocked his plans to deport Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, leveling his criticism only hours before his administration will ask an appeals court to lift the judge’s order.

Just after midnight, Trump posted a social media message calling for Chief Judge James Boasberg to be disbarred. Trump reposted an article about Boasberg’s attendance at a legal conference that purportedly featured “anti-Trump speakers.”

The judge, meanwhile, refused Monday to throw out his original order before an appeals court hearing for the case. Boasberg ruled that the immigrants facing deportation must get an opportunity to challenge their designations as alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang. He said there is “a strong public interest in preventing the mistaken deportation of people based on categories they have no right to challenge.” (AP News. March 24, 2025.)

That's all he's saying is before you can put someone in prison based on the government say-so that these people are members of this violent gang that you've declared a terrorist organization, they have to have an opportunity to disprove that accusation. 

That decision was appealed by the Trump Justice Department, to the D.C. Court of Appeals. We have 13 different appellate courts in the United States. The D.C. Court Of Appeals is for D.C. It typically rules on federal government action. It's considered the most prestigious court of all the Court of Appeals courts right below the Supreme Court. One of the three judges who sat on the panel, one of them was a Trump appointee, Justin Walker. 

 I’ve attended a lot of oral arguments; I've participated in a lot of oral arguments as a lawyer and I've covered a lot of oral arguments as a journalist. Honestly, I’m serious here, I don't recall an oral argument where the judges on the panel were so blatantly and glaringly opposed to everything the government lawyers were saying. 

Oftentimes, they'll try tough questions for each side and a lot of times you walk away not really knowing how they're going to rule. Sometimes you walk away knowing how they’re going to rule because they were somewhat more assertive with one side than the other. In this hearing, they just badgered the DOJ lawyer, rejecting aggressively everything that he was saying. Then, when the immigrant's lawyers from the ACLU and elsewhere stood up to speak, they basically kept saying, “We already agree with you, you don't really need to keep saying this.” 

Here is just one of the exchanges, courtesy of C-SPAN, which broadcast the hearing, that's where I listened to it, of this Trump appointee, Justin Walker, as he essentially sides with the Venezuelans about the right to due process. And by the way, this is one of the lawyers for the Venezuelan immigrants who are describing why due process is so urgent here. Then you'll hear the judge interject

Video. Hon. Justin Walker, C-SPAN. March 24, 2025.

This is the crux of the case. Their only argument is look, we don't dispute the government's right to deport people in the country illegally, we don't even dispute their right to imprison people if they're part of a criminal gang or an organization designated as a terrorist organization. What we're arguing is that the people accused before they get thrown away into a foreign country and disappear forever in one of the worst prison systems in the world, for life, or indefinitely, have to have the right before they're put there to appeal to a court and say, “We want a hearing to demonstrate that the accusation against us is false.” And the judge on the panel, who's a Trump appointee, interjected and said, “I don't know why you keep talking about this because there's no dispute from this bench that every single person that they propose to deport to El Salvador has the right to an Article III hearing before they're deported where the evidence has to be considered.” 

Just by the way, last week, my friends Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball, the co-host of “Breaking Points,” had a quite vociferous debate, twice in fact, about this issue with Krystal arguing against these deportations to El Salvador and Saagar arguing in favor. I listened to both, I went and talked to Saagar, and explained to him my reasons why I thought he was wrong.

To his immense credit, he asked me to come on the show, where I could basically yell at him and tell him why he's wrong and he actually during the conversation we had, even before, was starting to say, “You know what, maybe I'm being convinced, I'm understanding these arguments better now,” he kind of said. I am very emotional about illegal immigration like a lot of people are and I just want the problem solved but it is true we can't violate the Constitution or basically process the right to do it and to his great credit, he invited me on, to the playful title that Breaking Point put up was Glenn Greenwald's schools Saagar on deportation. 

A lot of people thought that that was the staff passive-aggressively rebelling against Saagar. In fact, he was the one who wrote it, knowing that that would bring a lot of traffic to the segment, but we did hash it out. Ryan Graham was there as well for about 25 minutes and kind of at the end, Saagar said, “You know what, I feel like I'm probably wrong on this issue. I'm starting to understand why this can't be that you can just throw people into an El Salvadorean prison with no opportunity for them to say that I've been wrongly accused of being part of a drug gang.” Otherwise, the president could just pick up anybody. 

Anyway, I recommend the “Breaking Points” debate I did earlier today because a lot of these issues are really hashed out.

[…]

I see a lot of Trump supporters arguing that district court judges should not have the power to make decisions that bind the entire federal government, the president, the executive branch; nobody elected them, etc., etc. As I said earlier, the Trump supporters, the conservative movement, frequently went into federal court under every democratic administration for decades, including Joe Biden's, and asked a single federal judge in a single federal district to enjoin, to stop Biden’s policy, not for just one district, but for the entire country and they often succeeded in getting it. No conservative back then ever said, “Oh, federal district court judges don't have the right to stop U.S. government policy” because, again, if you want to sue the U.S. government and get an injunction, stop them from doing something you believe is illegal or unconstitutional, you have to go to a federal district court. That's the only one that can rule in the first instance. If the government thinks that the injunction is wrong, the solution is not to ignore it but to appeal. That's how the rule of law functions. 

There's this other narrative that the judges who are ruling against the Trump administration are all left-wing judges. They're all leftists carrying out a political agenda and a political war against Trump. So, this is the On Data and Democracy, which compiled data that reveals:

Measured Resistance: Data Reveals Cross-Ideological Judicial Opposition to Trump Administration

The cross-ideological judicial pushback challenging Trump’s narrative. (On Data and Democracy. March 20, 2025.)

They have both liberal and conservative judges ruling against Trump, two of the four judges targeted for impeachment are actually right of center. You will see a lot of these people for Trump here, conservatives for Trump, who have been ruling against him and you'll see Judge Boasberg, who again is being called a far-leftist, even though his judicial history doesn't remotely suggest anything like that, other judges as well, who are more to the conservative side. The percentage ruling against Trump by judicial ideology. So, this is by no means a far-left attack on the Trump administration. This is something that the judiciary is reacting to. 

Remember, the Trump administration, the Trump movement, and this is part of what I liked about it, vowed that they were going to go in and completely break the way things are being done. So, it is, I think, expected that judges are going to be giving more scrutiny to brand new ways of doing things. 

[…]

Here is David Sacks, who I know very well and have a lot of respect for. He's been a very knowledgeable, important and influential opponent of the war in Ukraine, among other things. I think he's really been influenced by a lot of the voices that we have on our show, Professor Mearsheimer and that kind of realist school that is opposed to intervention. But he is now part of the Trump administration. He's Trump's czar for crypto and artificial intelligence. And he said this on X earlier today:

I just told you Trump celebrating a federal district court judge doing exactly that, invalidating an executive branch action, but remember the case that we talked about a lot where the Biden administration was coercing and pressuring Big Tech to censor dissent on a whole range of issues, including COVID? And the Biden Administration lost in the federal court, district court level. Conservative attorneys general for Missouri and Louisiana went and by the administration and asked the federal district court judge to enjoin that program, preventing the government from doing what they were doing with coercing Big Tech. The same David Sacks who just said the government would collapse if federal district court judges can override executive policy, the country would fall apart, was celebrating this because, like myself, he found the censorship regime to be so offensive to the Constitution and American values. 

Here's what he posted on X in July 2023:

Conservatives constantly got federal support judges to enjoin democratic administrations. 

I understand there are more such injunctions now, but that's because there are more Trump executive orders now. And Trump is not a status quo president. He's a status-quo-breaking president in a lot of ways. But if you want to complain, complain about the number. The principle cannot be challenged, which is that a federal district court judge has the right to issue nationwide injunctions, stopping a presidential policy. They always have had that power, both sides have used that power and celebrated it repeatedly. And now suddenly they want to create a new principle that federal district court judges should not have this power because it's Donald Trump now in office and they don't want to see him constrained in any way. That is anything but a principled or a constitutional-based argument. 

Watch this segment here.

We could spend literally everyday documenting and announcing new Israeli atrocities in Gaza. There are all kinds of reporters who have covered wars for 30 years and aid organizations that have done so as well, who have said they have never seen destruction and indiscriminate killing of the kind that Israel has been doing in Gaza, you know all the statistics about the tens of thousands of children killed, 92% of all buildings destroyed or rendered completely compromised. It's essentially just turning Gaza into a parking lot, which a lot of Israelis at the beginning said and I was told, “Oh, don't listen to them. They're fringe voices, they're nothing but fringe voices.” That's exactly what the Israeli government planned to do, while at the same time they were cutting off food, water, electricity and medicine. So that things like amputations or surgeries without anesthesia on children became necessary because of those blockades, as well as malnutrition and mass starvation. 

Earlier today, the Israeli military targeted and then killed two young journalists in separate attacks in Gaza. Here from ANTIWAR.COM:

Israeli Military Kills Two More Journalists in Separate Attacks in Gaza

Israeli strikes killed Hossam Shabat, a reporter for Al Jazeera, and Mohammad Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today TV (ANTIWAR.COM. March 24, 2025.)

We've had a young Palestinian journalist on our program who is a correspondent for Drop Site News, the outlet founded by my former colleagues and my friends Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill that has been doing excellent coverage on the war in Gaza. He's Abubaker Abed, who you probably remember. He's 22, speaks fluent English and wanted to go into journalism before this whole thing started because he wanted to report on his favorite sport, which is soccer, only to have watched many, if not most members of the Palestinian soccer team killed over the last year and a half or so. And three days ago, or two days ago, he disappeared from the internet. People got very worried. It turns out he was suffering from severe malnutrition. 

There's no death worse than when your body starts shutting down because of hunger, starving to death is the most painful death there is. I was so impressed by him, he knows the danger of what he's doing. He continues to do it anyway. 

But another journalist, a young journalist, who's 24 Hossam Shabat is somebody I've been following very closely over the last 15 months to get the news about what's happening in Gaza. There are no foreign journalists allowed in. So, we have to rely on Gaza and Palestinian journalists where we have no idea what's taking place in Gaza, except what the IDF would tell us, which is the opposite of reliable. 

Hossam Shabat, the 24-year-old journalist who's been reporting every day on the destruction in Gaza was driving the car today, the IDF targeted his car, dropped a bomb on it or a drone pulled up the car and killed him instantly. And he was also a colleague of Drop Site. He had written messages at Drop Site, and he knew his life was in danger. Everyone in Gaza is in danger. It's a country of 2 million people and at least 60,000 have died, at least – every organization that says that's an undercount. So, about 3%, 4%, or 5% of the population extinguished with no end in sight. 

Being a journalist, in particular, has been extra dangerous because Israel targets journalists because they are dangerous to Israel: they show the world what the Israelis are doing. And so, Hossam had prepared a message, I don't know exactly when, but that he had asked his colleagues and his family to post if he was killed. And because he was killed, they now posted it. Here's what it says:

Western journalists love to herald themselves as brave and heroic. Jim Acosta wrote that notorious book where he depicted himself as some sort of martyr constantly in danger because telling the truth in the air about Trump was so dangerous and the only thing that ever happened to him in his entire career was Trump said a few insulting side remarks about him. 

This is actual courage: you're 24 years old, you have a stream of death threats from the IDF saying if you continue to do this reporting, we're going to kill you, you've seen hundreds of journalists in Gaza be targeted with death, and yet you continue do the work knowing that it's so likely that you're going to be targeted with death that you actually prepare a statement ahead of time knowing that it is likely to be released in the event that you are killed. 

I don't even need to tell you what Israel's defense is: “These are all terrorists and Hamas operatives.” As we see with everything in Columbia, if you protest the Israeli war in Gaza, if you denounce it, if you're an effective critic of Israel, automatically you're a terrorist and you're pro-Hamas. That's what those terms mean. 

Here was the IDF October 23, 2024, just about five months ago: “Documents Expose 6 Al Jazeera Journalists as Terrorists in the Hamas and Islamic Jihad Terror Organizations” (Israel Defense Forces. October 23, 2024.)

And one of the people they listed was Hossam Shabat. There you see the six journalist and he is in the lower left-hand corner. 

There have been very few Western journalistic outlets objecting to any of this, even though in every other instance they would, you may remember that a Wall Street Journal reporter was detained in Russia for about nine months and they never stopped talking about it, and I don't blame them for that. That’s their duty, especially the Wall Street Journal’s, and he was released. Tuck Carlson went to interview Putin and spent the last 10 minutes of the interview badgering Putin to release him. 

Journalists do that. They stand up for other journalists. Very few though have stood up for the Gazan journalists who have been targeted and killed by Israel for obvious reasons. People are very afraid to criticize Israel in the United States. The Committee to Protect Journalists, though, has done so somewhat and here is what they released today:

Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war

As of March 24, 2025, CPJ’s preliminary investigations showed at least 173 journalists and media workers were among the more than tens of thousands killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992. (Committee to Protect Journalists. March 24, 2025.)

So, more journalists killed in this conflict since 1992 – since they've been counting. 

Tammy Bruce is the spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, replacing Matthew Miller, though sounding awful like him, especially when it comes to Israel, and we have the video where she was asked today about the killing of these two journalists. Essentially, every time Israel does something horrific – kills aid workers, foreign aid workers, people with the U.N. and this is going back to the Biden administration as well – the State Department will say, “Oh yeah, we really regretted it. It's absolutely terrible. It's so tragic. Yes, it's being done with our money and our weapons.” But even though Israel is the one who keeps killing these people, it's all the fault somehow of Hamas. Here's what she said today: 

Video. Tammy Bruce, US Department of State. March 24, 2025.

I think one of the most repulsive things that I hear when I see the U.S. government under Biden and now Trump, justifying every single thing Israel does by appealing to this “never again” slogan, is that they seem to think that ‘never again’ means, or that the war crimes conventions created after World War II mean and cover only Jews; that from now on you can't touch a hair on the head of a Jew because Never Again means that will never happen and war crimes were created only to protect Jews from what happened in the Holocaust. 

If you go back and look at the Nuremberg trials where they punished and killed Nazi war criminals, all the prosecutors in the United States and from other allied countries, the judges all said, “What we're doing here will only matter, will only be just if the principles we're creating apply to every single country in the future, including the ones who are part of the prosecution.” 

This did not mean that any violence against Jews suddenly invoked the horrors of the Holocaust. Other people can impose war criminality and mass slaughter, not just people who do so to Jews, and actually a Jewish state can do that as well. 

The idea that, “Oh, everything was so nice and wonderful and peaceful in this region until Hamas attacked on October 7,” killing 800 civilians and the rest of IDF soldiers and armed agents of the state, if that's the thing that you focus, that one-day killing of 800 civilians versus the 60,000 who have died in Gaza at least, the targeting of journalists, the slaughter of children, the destruction of all of the infrastructure, that you only go back to that one-day because everything was so peaceful when Hamas attacked when in reality Israel had bombed Gaza repeatedly throughout 2023, before October 7, just like they did in 2022, and 2021, and 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2014  on a remarkable level, – not what competes with this, but the Israelis have been bombing the crap out of the Palestinians for decades, blockading them, keeping them tracked in Gaza brutally occupying the West Bank. Believing that this war started on October 7 is like propaganda, like the war in Ukraine began in February 2022 when the Russians invaded, and nothing ever happened of any kind of hostility before that. 

But to stand there and “Hey, you just killed two young journalists by targeting them.” Isn't that a war crime? Say, “All I care about is October 7” and that whatever Israel does, they can go and slaughter as many babies as they want, we're gonna blame Hamas and we're gonna keep paying for Israel's war, we're going to keep arming them to do all of this.

I don't know what happened to America First, by the way. You would think America First would mean like, hey, we're not going to give billions and billions and billions of dollars to Israel, we’ll instead spend it at home on our own citizens. Remember all of that? And they're cutting aid to every foreign country they can find except for Israel. It sounds like anything but America First to me. 

Besides what they did in Gaza with these two young journalists, in the West Bank, where there has been an amount of violence and destruction – burning people's homes down, expelling them from their land – while the whole world recognizes the West Bank not as Israel, but as belonging to the Palestinians, but obviously Israel doesn't care about international law because it has the largest, richest, and most powerful country and history in the United States fully in captive to it, fully paying for it, fully arming it, fully protecting it, why would they have to worry? 

They have been open about the fact that they're looking not just to expel Palestinians from Gaza, but also from the West Bank. They want that land for themselves. They already occupy larger and larger parts of Syria and Lebanon. It's just a layman's realm that they are seeking. 

In the West Bank, as you probably know, there was a film that was produced by an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian living in the West Bank that was designed to document the apartheid treatment of the West Bank by illustrating the vastly different rights that this Israeli Jew has versus this Palestinian in the west bank. 

It was a documentary, “The Other Land,” that won the Oscar just a couple of months ago for Best Documentary. It hasn't found American distribution because theaters are afraid to show it when a theater in Miami Beach said that they were going to show it, the mayor tried to cancel the lease of the theater as punishment for showing this film even though it won an Oscar because it reflects poorly on Israel. Israel hates this film. Obviously, the Israeli who produced it has done something very courageous, but so has the Palestinian producer, knowing how Israel would react. 

One of the producers of this film today – who actually won the award itself because when a documentary wins the Academy Award, the producers of the films are the ones who actually get the Oscar, so he's the one who got the Oscar – was attacked brutally and practically lynched by Israeli settlers who have just occupied land that doesn't belong to them and they keep occupying it with the encouragement and protection of the Israeli government and the Israeli military and he was essentially very close to being killed. I think his life is still at risk. 

So, the idea that this Palestinian who just won an Oscar for a film critical of Israel ended up getting attacked by Israeli settlers and then, in the ambulance, the IDF dragged him out and arrested him and he disappeared is the level where we're at with Israel. 

I just want to make one last point, which is that RFK Jr., who I had on my show when he was a candidate running for the Democratic primary, and whose health agenda I was largely supportive of, got into office, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. I was a strong advocate for his confirmation, and he had an agenda called “Make America Healthy Again.” There was a long list of important and impressive but difficult achievements he hoped to accomplish, things like combating chronic disease among Americans and child obesity, waging war on the regulatory capture by Big Pharma and Big Ag, forcing the removal of dangerous additives in the American food supply that don't exist anywhere else, re-examining and subjecting to much greater scrutiny certain medications that have been approved by a process that was sketchy because of how the pharmaceutical company, Big Pharma. 

Here's what RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, posted earlier this month:

Such an Orwellian post because of the way the Trump administration is dealing with what they call antisemitism on college campuses, trying to eliminate bigotry, as though that can be done just like Democrats tried to eliminate racism, and are doing so by forcing universities to implement much more rigid speech codes, much more expanded definitions of antisemitism that outlaw a whole variety of common critiques of Israel.

For RFK Jr. to define that as an advancement of free speech and battling censorship on college campuses when it actually is censorship on college campuses was unbelievably ironic. But the fact that the first, one of the first public announcements he made as Secretary of Health and Human Services had nothing to do with the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda that I just described, spoke volumes. 

And then he went back to X earlier today to make an announcement, again, not about childhood obesity or chronic disease or Big Ag or Big Pharma, or anything. This is what he said instead:

One of the things Columbia was forced to agree to was to adopt a radically expanded definition of antisemitism, the kind that they already have adopted in the EU that prevents you from saying Israel is a racist endeavor. You can say that about the United States, China, Peru or any other country in the world, just not about Israel. You're not allowed to observe that certain American Jews like, say, Ben Shapiro or Bari Weiss, just to pick two random examples, seem to have greater loyalty to Israel than the United States. That's one of the things that's now barred as antisemitism to say. You're not allowed to criticize Israel in a way that suggests you're applying a double standard to it, meaning you criticize Israel, but don't hold other countries to that same, that too is antisemitism. 

You're not allowed to compare what the Israeli government is doing to the crimes of the Nazis, even though the whole purpose of the Nuremberg trials was to use that as a historical precedent to blow the whistle and to alert people to similar crimes. That is not allowed. 

You can say that about the United States, you can say the United States are acting like Nazis, you can say the Russians are, you can say the Ukrainians are, or you can say the British are. Pick whatever country you want and say that about them. Feel free. Have a party calling it racist, comparing it to not just not this one country – that you are not allowed to do because now the Trump administration is demanding the application of more rigid speech codes to protect a particular minority and to eliminate bigotry after mocking the left and Democrats and liberals for doing exactly that for every other single minority group for a full decade. 

It just shows you the obsession of the U.S. government with this single foreign country. I mean, it's one thing for Marco Rubio to do it, or Elise Stefanik to do it, or National Security officials to do it. It's still kind of weird that they're so obsessed with Israel, but at least they're talking about their actual jobs. RFK is the Health and Human Services Secretary; he excited so many people based on an agenda having to do with American health. However, twice now, the very few public pronouncements he's made, it's both been about antisemitism on college campuses, the need to curb it, and the October 7 holocaust. 

At some point, I mean, it's already happening, but at some point, Americans are going to really start asking, why does Israel play such a vital central role? Why is the U.S. government constantly talking about it? Why is it sending billions of dollars a year to that foreign country? Why are they making special rules just for this one group of people and just of those foreign countries? 

If you're worried about antisemitism, this is what's going to fuel it. Telling people that they're now outlawed from criticizing Israel, telling them that they are not allowed to talk about Israel, that every criticism they raise is antisemitic, telling them they have to send billions and billions of dollars a year to Israel, even after the Trump administration and the MAGA movement was all about let's stop giving our money to foreign countries and keep it here and spend it on our own country's welfare, at some point that's going to be realized. 

It already is. The approval rating for Israel is at its lowest point ever in the history of Gallup polling and we showed you that two weeks ago. Watching even these kinds of ancillary cabinet members in the Trump administration, with nothing to do with foreign policy, continuously make pronouncements to serve Israel and show how concerned they are about it, is just further fueling the fire that's going to lead to people, rightfully so, asking why this foreign country has such a grave hold on our politics on a bipartisan basis and why it is that even every day you turn the internet, you see them blowing up children, blowing up journalists, blowing up buildings, destroying all of society, occupying multiple countries, bombing multiple countries all with American weapons and American money. Why it is that the United States is so blindly devoted to this foreign country and why do American politicians seem to have a much greater willingness to criticize our own government than this foreign government on the other side of the world?