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.
