Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
The Truth & Lies About the Atlantic's Signal Controversy; EU Already Failing to Back Up its Militaristic Rhetoric; Appeals Court Rules Against Trump DOJ in El Salvador Case
SYSTEM UPDATE #429
April 01, 2025

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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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. 

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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. 

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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:

 

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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.)

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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. 

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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: 

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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:

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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. 

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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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System Update #462

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Tonight, a look at two global crises where the U.S. is deeply involved. From Ukraine to Gaza, are we any closer to peace? For insight on the Ukraine-Russia question, we'll be joined by authors and scholars Jonathan Haslam and Nicolai Petro, and to discuss the latest in Israel-Palestine, we'll hear from Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani. 

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Briahna Joy Gray on Dems in Disarray, the "Big Beautiful Bill," Biden Cover-Up Receipts and More; Plus: Interview with Journalist Katie Halper
System Update #461

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Glenn Greenwald is away this week. 

I’m Briahna Joy Gray, the guest host for this episode. 

You might know me from my own podcast, “Bad Faith,” or from my previous hosting responsibilities over at The Hill’s “Rising,” less of a free speech platform than this one. 

Today, I'll be walking through the implosion of the Democratic Party, the pathetic hunt for a Joe Rogan of the left, the party's instinct for corporate self-preservation over real populist reform and the media cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline. 

Afterward, I'll be joined by independent left podcaster and co-host of “Useful Idiots” podcast, Katie Halper, to continue the conversation about how the DNC is continuing to try to rig elections in favor of incumbents, even as they repeatedly keep dying in office, and the likelihood that there might be more independent third-party runs in 2028, a la RFK Jr.'s 2024 attempt. Now, let's get right into it. 

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For a decade now, corporate Democrats have been warning that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the Republic. During Trump's first term, much of that handwriting seemed to be hyperbolic – Trump derangement syndrome, if you will. His big legislative accomplishment was in line with the policy priorities of your typical establishment Republican: a $1.7 trillion tax cut that went overwhelmingly to the rich.

There was some good stuff too: unlike Biden, he didn't start any new wars. While he continued to fund Israel's genocide in Gaza and crack down on free speech rights of Americans who protested the said genocide, Trump did accomplish the temporary cease-fire that AOC merely claimed Kamala was “working tirelessly” to achieve. 

But now that President Trump is finally following through on some of his less popular and less populist policy commitments, like the Medicaid cuts, included in his Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the House last week, or throwing markets into disarray with his erratic application of tariffs, which can be good policy.

Establishment Democrats seem almost happy to have something to justify their hatred of Trump. So, you see, the less populist Trump behaves, the more it disguises the Democrats' own failure to meet the needs of the people. Some Democrats are outright advising that the way they should respond to this alleged “existential crisis” is to simply do nothing: Just sit back and wait to benefit from the backlash. 

You don't have to take my word for it: Listen to a veteran DNC advisor, James Carville, describe the strategy: 

Video. James Carville, The View. February 18, 2025.

Fiddle while Rome burns, the expert says, then exploit the tragedy. 

But so far, the backlash isn't coming. A new Economist/YouGov poll, out yesterday, shows that while GOP favorability is low, at negative 11%, Democrats are doing even worse, at negative 21%; 41% of Americans still view Republicans favorably, while a mere 36% of Americans view Democrats favorably. 

These polls come as no surprise to those of us who consume independent media. I mean, just look around: Democrats are in the throes of a credibility crisis that arose out of Joe Biden's obvious unfitness to run for president. 

They're trying to distract from their complicity and the cover-up, but going all in on the idea that it was Biden himself, his family, and his closest advisors that hid his decline from the party and the public until it was too late, not the liberal media. But it's hard to call Biden's infirmary a “cover-up” when it was out in the public for all of us to see and comment on. The president was confusing Haifa and Rafah, mixing up the president of Egypt and the president of Mexico, and even dodged culpability in the classified documents case on the basis that he didn't have the mental competence to knowingly take the files. 

He even seemed to wander off at the G7 Conference a year ago, like a distracted child. 

Video. Joe Biden, The Economic Times. June 14, 2024.

His mental lapses were evident as far back as the 2020 primary, during which presidential candidates Julian Castro and Cory Booker had the temerity to call him out for not remembering what he had just said at the primary debate. This clip is from way back in 2019, when Dems still could have avoided the albatross of a historically old and declining candidate around their necks. What did they do instead? Disappear both Castro and Booker, once rising stars from the ranks of up-and-coming leadership. 

Video. Cory Booker, CNN. September 13, 2019.

You heard it there. The mainstream media accused anyone who noticed Biden's obvious decline of being motivated by Trump-like conservative politics. “Believe our Trump derangement syndrome, not your lying eyes,” they seem to say. 

Reuters reported the story about Biden wandering off at the G7 as “lacking context.” Meanwhile, his inability to finish sentences was “contextualized” as a mere stutter. 

Jake Tapper, one of the authors of the book “Original Sin,” which sheds light on the extent of Biden's mental infirmity, was himself one of the original apologists for Biden's cognitive decline. A few good mainstream pundits on MSNBC question the co-author on Tapper's own complicity. 

Video. Alex Thompson, MSNBC, May 26, 2025.

That was some good questioning. And I got to say, I don't think we need medical degrees to be able to accurately observe what was going on with Joe Biden. We didn't need this new book to know the truth either. Independent media, along with the voters, knew what was been going on for years. 

Biden's midterm rating was worse than any other elected president on record and, back in August 2023, polls show that 77% of Americans, including 69% of Democrats, thought Biden was too old to be president. But Democrats wouldn't listen. Or rather, they simply didn't care. 

Now, as part of the media's effort to whitewash its own complicity, the same media figures who were involved in the cover-up are claiming, well, they had to defend Biden's mental competency because no one else primaried him. They were stuck with him as a candidate. This, even as the party shut down the possibility of a primary from the jump. 

Contrast former DNC chair, Jamie Harrison, making that incredible claim that anyone could have primaried Biden if they wanted to, followed by Biden/Harris spokesperson turned MSNBC “journalist,” Symone Sanders, proclaiming that under no circumstances will there be a primary. 

Video. Jaime Harrisson, Symone Sander, MSNBC. 

“If folks wanted to primary Joe Biden, there was nobody to tell them that they couldn't?” Is he serious? The mendacity is frankly shocking. As Symone admitted, Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson did throw their hats in the ring, as said RFK Jr., and you can hear how much respect they got for doing so reflected in Symone's smite tone and her inability to pronounce Marianne's name. Then don't forget, RFK Jr. also ran as a Democrat before the party pushed about and it's no surprise why he left the Dems.

 The Democratic Party, its pundits and politicians, were simply all behind Joe Biden, no matter how ill-fated his electoral chances were from the get-go. And while they want to memory hole their role in setting Dems up to fail, I have the receipts. 

Take “Pod Save America,” one of the most popular liberal podcasts in the country. These former Obama speech writers turned media moguls finally admitted that Biden wasn't fit to lead after Biden's disastrous debate with Trump. But the hindsight is 2020. Listen to how hostile they were in conversation with moderate primary candidate, Democrat Dean Phillips, when he joined their show during the primary season that wasn't. 

Video. Phillips, Pod Save America. November 20, 2023.

Phillips and I do not share the same politics, but he was right. At a certain point, internal polls show that Biden could not win. According to “Original Sin,” the Jake Tapper book, Biden traded trails rather in every battleground state, and the race that tightened in states he won comfortably back in 2020. But the voters don't matter, the polls don't matter, not to Democrats. What matters to the Democratic Party elites is who they choose to top the ticket. 

As Bernie Sanders’s former national press secretary in 2020, I know this all too well. In two back-to-back election cycles, the Democratic Party ignored polls that showed Bernie was more electable than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden against Donald Trump. 

Now, this is not some Monday morning quarterbacking from a disgruntled leftist. Democratic Party insider Donna Brazile admitted the primary was rigged back in 2017.

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson admit as much in “Original Sin.”  They admit it! The election was rigged. But even with all of the faux mea culpas happening around Biden's lack of mental fitness, the Democrats STILL refuse to act any differently going forward, to learn a lesson from their past mistakes. Tapper and Thompson write that Bernie was perceived to be unable to attract Black voters, but Bernie was the only candidate in 2020 who matched Biden's popularity with that group, while also outstripping the field when it came to Latino voters

Bernie remains popular. Not only have he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez been turning out tens of thousands of voters across the country during their anti-oligarchy tour, including in deep red states. Bernie's recent appearance on the “Flagrant” podcast, with Andrew Schultz, had a whole room of popular podcast “Bros” clamoring for the exact “democratic socialism” establishment Dems insisted would turn off the public!

Everybody's saying it. Look, it seems obvious that left populism is the way for Democrats to push back against Trump's right populism, which unfortunately, is increasingly informed by the tech billionaires that fund his campaign rather than the working-class real populists who voted him into office. You've got to ask yourself, is pardoning reality TV stars convicted of tax fraud really improving your ability to support your family? 

What about growing the military budget (and the deficit) at the same time while cutting special education funding? 

What about shifting wealth from the bottom 60% of working-age households to the top income brackets? 

Look, no matter what your politics are, two parties that are competing for the support of working-class Americans instead of aligning with corrupt billionaires would be a good thing! But you can't convince someone of something they're paid not to understand. Which is why Democrats are, instead of embracing popular policies like Medicare for all or a tax on billionaires, are choosing to spend millions of dollars to figure out how to, get this, speak to American men. I really wish I were kidding here.

You really can't make this stuff up. Dems are obsessed with finding the Joe Rogan of the left, but they could not be barking up a wronger tree. 

Hilariously, they seem to be tapping one of their most insidious surrogates, Oliva Juliana, to “message better” on men while continuing to treat Sanders – the man who was literally endorsed by the actual Joe Rogan back in 2020 – as a pariah. 

Video. James Carville, The Daily Beast. May 2025.

To be clear, Carville hasn't won an election since Bill Clinton in the ‘90s, but I digress. 

The reason why Democrats’ mission to find their own Joe Rogan will fail is obvious: to be a credible interlocutor in the political space, you have to be willing to say the true thing when it's hard, even when it is critical of your party. Especially when it's critical of your party. The popular “Manosphere” podcaster, Andrew Schultz, gets it. 

Video. Andrew Schultz, Flagrant.  May 28, 2025.

Even on MSNBC, a guest of Ayman's show was also able to identify the core issue here. 

Video. Ayman Mohyeldin, MSNBC. May 24, 2025.

See, right there at the end is a great summary of the impossibility of what Democrats think they're going to achieve. “We need an authentic voice that's going to become popular organically, and we need to control them.” 

Good luck with that, Democrats. Good luck with that. 

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Briahna Joy Gray: Back with Katie Halper. You know her from the “Katie Halper” podcast and as co-host of “Useful Idiots” with Aaron Maté. Welcome to System Update. 

Katie Halper: Thanks, Brie. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Katie, it's a pleasure. I can't wait to pick your brain about some of the viral clips, especially from the sort of Manosphere podcast arena that have gone viral precisely because of how well Bernie Sanders himself and his ideas have translated into his sphere, that Democrats have insisted were so right-wing and so far gone, and they spent so many years vilifying but now seem to be trying to enter into those kinds of spaces. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: I think it's funny because, of course, Bri, not to be self-promoting, but they're searching for the – what is it? – left-wing Joe Rogan. What about Briahna Joy Gray and Katie Halper to take the mantle? 

It is ironic that the same people who were throwing Bernie under the bus, smearing him, attacking him, are now saying that he has some kind of messaging that's good for the democrats. There's always this obsession with messaging over content and program, but that's kind of another issue. 

I think people continue to smear Bernie Sanders but to the extent that they are praising him, they're praising him now because they know he's not going to run. So, I think they think it's safe for them to praise his ideas because they actually are either just paying lip service to it or they are afraid of Bernie's more progressive stances that challenge the status quo. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I think that really gets to the core of the issue that the Democratic Party for years has managed to try to frame themselves as somehow different than the establishment wing of the Republican Party, despite having, substantively, the same corporate donors by leaning and going all in on identity politics.

There's been a backlash against that. They're saying, okay, well, now we've got to find some other messaging prong when the whole reason why they went all in on identity politics and now we're going all in this idea that they just get the right man who's lift enough weights to say the right thing that they will also be able to compete, it's because they're allergic, their corporate base makes them allergic to actually advancing the kind of ideas that made Bernie popular in the first place acting like this guy was somehow a ball of charisma as much as I liked his sort of like a grumpy straightforward persona. He wasn't winning hearts and minds because he was a charm generator. It was because, as Joe Rogan himself said when he was endorsing Bernie Sanders back in 2020, he's a man who's been saying the same thing for the last 40 years, and he has credibility. He's trustworthy. And it's amazing to rewatch that endorsement now that the Democrats are in the middle of this incredible credibility crisis. 

I want to ask you specifically about this book, “Original Sin,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. I don't know if you had seen that clip before, that super cut that Ayman put together on MSNBC of Jake Tapper doing exactly what is sort of criticized in this book, although I will say this book stays away mostly from media criticism and focuses on the idea that it was Biden in his inner circle that knew the truth and were just lying to everybody else and everybody else was sort of deceived by them, including the liberal media. What do you make of that sort of framing there? Is Jake Tapper really innocent in all of this? 

Katie Halper: I mean, I joke that Jake Tapper was well-positioned to write a book about a cover-up because he participated in the cover-up. So, he does probably have some inside knowledge and real insight into it. But no, I mean, you alluded to this and the mashup that I'm in proves this. Jake Tapper was doing the exact kind of cover-up and running of interference that you and I have commented on the media doing for Joe Biden, for the DNC, for centrist Democrats, that we know that they do, they love to do. And so, it is rich seeing someone who participated in that cover-up profiting off of a book about a cover-up and he's hawking that product on his shows and on the various CNN shows that he appears on and all the appearances he's been doing. And I think at the end, once again, it's fine for people to have the eureka moments in hindsight. Somehow, it never happens in real time. And he keeps making these media appearances and talking about how he has a great humility, and his co-writer talks about the humility, which is, I guess, as close as to a mea culpa that we'll get, but that's not, I'm always so frustrated when people say humility like they always do these humble brags. I'm truly humbled by, insert whatever praise, so that's just a little pet peeve I have with that word. 

But, yeah, I think that Jake Tapper, like much of the media, keeps making the same mistakes. They're warmongers for every war. I mean, the cover-up, is disgusting but another disgusting thing is that he has spread so many lies about Palestinians and has run so much interference, much like he ran so much interference for the Biden campaign, he's running so much interference for IDF and he and Dana Bash have done such a disgusting job at vilifying Palestinians, Palestinian Americans like Rashida Tlaib, but all Palestinians, and taking every single rumor and fabricating a narrative and running with it and never correcting it. 

Tapper and Dana Bash pushed the mass rape Hamas narrative that has been totally debunked; they've never corrected it and, at the same time, they've ever once acknowledged the fact that there's video footage of Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian,  – what I would call hostage, what our media calls prisoner or detainee, but I think, to be consistent we should say hostage – and it's one thing to push a debunked narrative and never correct it, but at least acknowledge the fact that we do know of people who are raped by Israelis, but the fact they don't acknowledge that and that this is something that mainstream Israeli media covers shows that they really don't care about sexual violence. They don't about rape and they're happy to be doing PR for a genocidal state. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, I think it's a really…

Katie Halper: Sorry, we're talking about cover-ups, but they're related. 

Briahna Joy Gray: No, I think that's a really important point because there is something deeply ironic and dissonant about Jake Tapper in particular. I don't know that Alex Thompson and it could be similarly described as hypocritical, but Jake Tapper for sure, go doing the press rounds about a cover-up while still actively participating in a misinformation campaign, at least as significant as the lies about the Steele dossier or claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was misinformation. I mean, someone else had another super cut sort of juxtaposing what he's saying now about Hunter Biden with what he said back then about Hunter Biden and framing any and every criticism of Joe Biden or just observation from people who actually love Joe Biden, that doesn't seem to be up to his best, he's not the same Joe Biden who was vice president back in 2008/2012 cycles, as somehow being Trumpy as though supporting Donald Trump, even if that were your perspective, precludes you from seeing the truth with your own eyes. And Katie, this is what's so frustrating about Democrats, and frankly, my concern with some folks on the left who seem to be taking this sort of measured praise for the enthusiasm Bernie and AOC are capturing on these anti-oligarchy tours and predicting that there's going to be real change to the Democratic Party this time, how optimistic are you that we're likely to see the Democrats learning from the lessons of the past? And if not, why aren't you optimistic? 

Katie Halper: Right. Yeah, I mean, I think that, unfortunately, the Democrats would really rather lose to Trump than have someone like Bernie in power. But you're asking a slightly different question, right? You're kind of saying, well, what suggests that the Democrats will deliver anything, even with this good messaging that Bernie and AOC are bringing? And certainly, they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to Gaza, but, sure, on economic issues, Bernie, especially, is excellent. 

I think that the problem is, and you've spoken a lot about this, Bri, it's great to have fresh ideas, fresh policies, fresh but also consistent. I mean, as you alluded to earlier, Bernie's been saying the same thing for decades and that is something that I think has endears him justifiably to lots of people. But the question is, will the Democratic Party actually allow for any of these policies to take hold? [audio problems]

So, there's a lot of rotating villain phenomenon, right? 

So, I think that the Democrats really love to pretend that they can't get things done, that they'd love to get things done. But the truth is they just don't want to get them done. They don't want to see these things because they're as beholden to their donors as the Republicans are, they're just better on social issues often. And to the extent that they're better on social issues, they certainly are willing to sacrifice these social issues in the name of fundraising, which is why, for instance, neither Obama nor Biden codified Roe v. Wade. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up Roe v. Wade because I have more optimistic folks, left side of the aisle saying, “Oh, no, this didn't waste strategy, whatever you think of it, it's likely to work” because look at how well Joe Biden did in midterms.” And I think in retrospect, and I think some of us at the time reported that we suspected that there was not a red wave in 2022, it was not a signal that voters were actually secretly happy with Joe Biden. Polls at the time showed, as I said in my radar, that he had historically low favorability at that time. What people were coming out to vote for was not Joe Biden; it was for Roe v. Wade. It was to express their discontent with Roe being overturned and anti-abortion laws being put into effect in all the country. And a lot of red states like Kansas, bipartisan majorities came out to defend those kinds of formerly constitutional rights. 

I want to ask you, though, about this particular clip where Chuck Todd, even someone who is very much an establishment pundit, seems to think and maybe even seems to hope that there will, unlike 2024, when the Democrats completely shut down a primary, that there will not just be a primary, but that there'll be independent third-party style candidates, a la RFK Jr., running in that race. Let's take a look. 

Video. Chuck Todd, The Chuck Toddcast. May 27, 2025.

Briahna Joy Gray: I don't even know where to start with that, Katie. Why a military guy? Why this Bill McRaven person, who apparently is the former chancellor of the University of Texas system? And why the optimism that we're going to have someone operating outside of the two-party system, from this person who is very much an establishment pundit? 

Katie Halper: Right. And who really, I think, took part in a mocking of third-party candidates that so much of the corporate media took part in. I think that it's interesting you asked about why it has to be a military figure. And I think this speaks to how much the media and our political elites are so obsessed with optics and messaging and so inattentive to substance. So, it's not about what this person's going to offer. It's not about the changes that they're going to bring to people's lives in any qualitative or meaningful way. It's about whether they can tap into people's, I don't know, like, crushes on military figures or tap into our militaristic society. It does have a bizarre obsession, I think, with optics that, again, I think is because no one who is powerful, no political or media elites actually want to see real changes. So, they just want to have kind of like different presentations that get people excited, but nobody wants to see the actual changes happen. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yes. It’s a different kind of identity politics. It's the same thing as, like, yeah, like the Joe Rogan of the left thing. It's like they think that they can find a podcaster who lifts enough weights. I guess that's why we're just disqualified Katie. We're not, we don't lift heavy… 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I know. I do a lot of repetition of light weights, right? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Right. It's totally vibe-based. 

Now look, of course, there is a, like a substantive claim for having a veteran, but I think it also misses the mainstream pundits' missing how much we are in a sort of anti-interventionist/isolationist/anti-war moment in both parties. And that's exactly why someone like Trump, who definitely ran as an anti-interventionist and didn't start any new wars, at least in his first term, was so popular. So them saying a military guy, I mean, I think someone like Matthew Ho, who ran on the Green Party for a Senate in North Carolina some years back, could be exactly that kind of guy because he served and learned from his service exactly why we shouldn't be sending troops to fight pointless wars and ruining lives all because young kids see no other avenue to access things like healthcare and a quality education. That could be your guide, but we know Chuck Todd isn't going to throw his hat in behind a Green Party leftist, kind of Bernie-style candidate like Matthew Ho. 

Katie Halper: Right. I mean, I think you're right that it would be great to have a military figure who was anti-war. I mean those are extremely powerful voices and they have a lot of credibility and, of course, more importantly they're anti-war which is something that wins votes, but also is obviously good for the planet and good for all people on the planet, except for people who work in the arms industry and people who support genocide. 

But I think that it is interesting to see people again, the very same people, who, I mean, I think it was Chuck Todd who said Bernie Sanders would get “hammered and sickled,” he actually said that to him, see them act poetic about working outside of the duopoly. They acknowledge that the two-party system doesn't work, but what were they doing except for running interference for this two-party system? 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, absolutely. And just as the final nail in the coffin, which is perhaps a metaphor, now that I said it out loud, that's in poor taste. If we pull up the graphic, a significant number of Democrats who have quite literally died in office, a margin that would have prevented the Democrats or enabled the Democrats to block the passage of Biden's big, beautiful budget bill in the House had they stayed alive. 

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Now, remember, DNC vice chair David Hogg got an enormous amount of pushback simply saying you wanted to start a pack that funded challengers to incumbents, observing accurately that younger members of the party like AOC and people who are outsiders like Bernie Sanders are the ones that have managed to capture whatever energy is left in the husk of the Democrat Party. And for that, Democrat elites have rallied the ranks to literally push him out of his position at the DNC and are frankly using sort of identity politics as a lever to get him out. Even as Democrats are unable to whip sufficient votes to block win priorities, precisely because their members are so old and enfeebled that they are quite literally dying in office. What do you make of it? 

Katie Halper: Yeah, I mean, of course, the final nail in the coffin was the perfect turn of phrase. But what better represents the narcissism and selfishness and moribund nature of the Democrats than the way that they are refusing to resign? Because, again, the Democrats are constantly fearmongering – and I want to be clear, I mean, Trump is something to be feared. I mean, he's not an anti-war candidate. He is terrible for many reasons.  The Democrats often criticize him for the things that aren't even that bad, which is another irony. But they say he's an existential threat, he's a fascist and yet if they're so worried about this, why don't they retire so that they have a better chance of having someone from the Democratic Party who can vote against his bill? I mean literally, his bill passed because Democrats refused to resign despite having been very sick or old. It reminds me also of the way that if Kamala Harris cared so much about defeating Trump, if this was the most important election ever, then why didn't she listen to the base, which was clamoring for her to depart from Biden on several issues and most notably on Gaza. We know now from someone who worked with her, it was because she didn't want to be rude, and it's not, it's gauche to depart from your president's policies when you're the running mate. 

We also know that Joe Biden said, I don't want any daylight between us, kid. And so, for Biden, his legacy, much like these Democrats who are dying in office, their legacies are more important than defeating Trump and Trumpism or helping the people that they claim to serve. For Kamala, I guess, ruffling feathers was more important– or not upsetting donors, or not being able to run around with Liz Cheney, or not incurring the wrath of AIPAC. So, it just belies the whole claim that this is something that is an existential threat. 

I think that I mean we are facing existential threats. We're facing existential threats that neither party is willing to deal with, especially when it comes to climate change. But it's very hard to convince people that you're taking this seriously as an existential threat when you don't do the minimal things needed to either win an election or prevent a Republican from taking your seat in the case of people who are not resigning. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it's really hard, frankly, to see in concurrent election cycles the voting population stand up and clearly, clearly be clamoring for a legitimate, sincere populism. I mean, the outrage around inflation, cost of living, housing prices, gas prices, food prices, education prices. These are the sectors that are driving inflation and which are causing life to be so precarious for so many Americans and it's nice now that Democrats are like acknowledging that economic precarity, economic anxiety is a real thing because for I don't know like eight years after the 2015-2016 cycle they acted if you said well yeah people voted for Trump because of economic anxiety they said that oh that's just racism that's just a synonym for racism we won't take that argument so now they're finally embracing it and trying to say we're going to do a Joe Rogan sort of a situation. But again, they're not backing any of those policies. You're still getting Democrats out here arguing against baseline things like raising the minimum wage, which hasn't been raised since Bush was in office. The longest period without a minimum wage raise since it was invented in like the 1930s.

And meanwhile, Americans are struggling. So this huge lane is opening up. Meanwhile, on the right side of the aisle, I think people who voted for Donald Trump in good faith hoping that he was going to follow the sort of banded wing of his party and do real economic populism are seeing that Bannon is engaged in a battle with the other wing of the party that frankly bought the election, the tech wing, the Elon Musk's, the Marc Andreessen's, the folks who are very openly saying, “We need to do AI, we need to put the public out of business, we're going to make all of these arguments that legitimize defunding the welfare state that so many Americans, including so many American in very low-income red states in the South and elsewhere, are relying upon to survive.”

And we can do that because we literally bought this election. And I'm afraid that that tech wing, the billionaire wing, who has no alignment and interest with the working-class in this country, most of whom are frankly not even American or relatively recent transplants are going to win out and it's going to be too late for a genuine populism to actually restore a democracy that reflects people's values. What do you think? 

Katie Halper: I think it's a justifiable fear. And I think what you're saying it really does ring true. Again, we've seen in the cases of the leadership of both parties, we have seen a real embrace of anti-populism, right? And one of the most frustrating things was to see people equate Bernie Sanders with Donald Trump because there's a big difference between actual populism and pseudo populism, just like there's a big difference between being anti-war and being pseudo-anti-war. And Trump is great at appealing to populist sentiments. But of course, he's not someone who cares about the working class, the middle class. He is someone who, in some ways, is more dangerous than traditional Republicans because he talks a good talk. He knows how to sound like he's a populist. He knows how to sound like he's against the status quo. But of course, in some ways, the most dangerous thing to have is someone who substantively is status quo, but performatively and stylistically is not. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Yeah, it is interesting to see float things like, we’re going to do a tax on the rich, right? But then walk it back. And you can read that in a couple of different ways. You can say Donald Trump is just a bad faith actor. He never met in the first place, or you can write it as, well, he actually is the one who's got a good sense of what the wind is blowing and what the base wants. And maybe he would be happy to do a little bit. He's a billionaire himself.  I wouldn't take it too far that he was willing, would be willing to do too redistributive justice to return the hard working, increased productivity of the working-classes back into their pockets the way that it was 50 years ago or so before a bunch of laws redistributed it to the very top, including Trump's own 2017 tax cuts. I won't take it too far, but there's a way you could read it that says, well, maybe Trump did get a sense that you need bread and roses. You need to get the masses a little bit to keep them on your team and that the corporate interests within his own party won't even let him do the bare minimum. And so, it's not clear to me how much there is a real war between the Steve Bannon's who seem to be more genuinely committed to working-class politics, even if it's also mixed in with sort of a nativism and some other unsavory aspects that I personally don't agree with. And this is like the raw, open, we don't need workers anymore. We're going to do AI, we're going to feed you cricket slop and you're going to like it, we don't even need humanity, we're to be on the moon types. And like my concern, I don't know how to read it, but if I had to pick, I would much rather the Steve Bannon's – I can't believe I'm saying this, but I would rather the Steve Bannon’s wing of the Republican Party went out. The problem is the Steve Banning wing of the Republican Party didn't spend half a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. 

Katie Halper: Right. And I think he also doesn't appeal to certain segments, demographically speaking, who are very powerful. I mean, again, I think that it is kind of a funny thing to say, I hope that Steve Bannon wins. But of course, I do think that populists, you can work across the aisle with economic populists on certain issues, whereas there's nothing you can work with Elon Musk types about, right? They are scarier in many ways, and their policies are scarier, and there's very little overlap between the populist left and the populist right, to the extent that you can even have a populist right. But yeah, certainly I think that the Elon Musk wing is more frightening than the, I mean, they're both frightening, but yeah, I guess if. I mean, Bri, you're not someone who likes the lesser of two evils, but maybe that's the furthest I can say is that Steve Bannon is the lesser of two evils when it comes to the Bannon wing or the Elon Musk wing. 

Briahna Joy Gray: Amen to that. I can't disagree, Katie. I really appreciate your willingness to talk through some of this with me. This was cathartic for me because watching all of this happen in real time has been difficult. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it with you, talk about it here on Glenn's amazing platform, and to continue to follow the Democrats' self-destruction cycle and incredible cope over their complicity and the great Biden cover-up. Thank you, Katie.

Katie Halper: Thank you, Thanks, Bri. Thanks Glenn.

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Tonight: There was major news this week, and we always try to devote our Friday night show to covering as much of that as possible, both through our “Week in Review” segment as well as the Q&A session, where we take questions from our Locals members and get to as many of them as we can. As always, we have a wide range of very probing questions from our followers on Locals – I'd expect nothing less from my viewers – and we'll try to answer as many of those as we can. 

Before we do that, we talk to the friend of the show, the intrepid independent journalist, Lee Fang, about numerous issues this week, including a new article he published on his Substack which investigates how officials in the Virgin Islands, where Jeffrey Epstein's notoriously bought that island, have been fraudulently profiting from victim funds and the residue from his presence. 

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Our guest tonight to help us go over some news events of the week as well as some investigative reporting that he has published this week, is a good friend of the show the independent journalist I've worked with at The Intercept, who has been published in many places now. He has one of the best Substack pages in the country where he does his investigative journalism and commentaries, Lee Fang.  

G. Greenwald: Lee, it’s always great to see you. 

Lee Fang: Hey Glenn, great to see you. Thanks for having me. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, so I want to start with the murder of these two Israeli embassy officials in Washington. We did a whole show on it last night, but the fallout sort of continues. 

I don't think we need to go into the question of whether there was any moral justness to these murders. I don't think any moral framework that I at least I recognize as valid suggests that anything other than unjust and horrific but there are a lot of attempts to exploit these murders beyond just expressing grief for the victims or condemnation for the shooter, including, essentially, immediately attempting to suggest that anyone who criticizes Israel or its war in Gaza in some sort of harsh way, or over some imaginary arbitrary line, is responsible for the killing as much as the shooter is, if not more so, and therefore we need to do something about that because that's spawning antisemitism and endangerment for Jews. What's your reaction to all that? 

Lee Fang: Look, I'm concerned about the kind of creeping martyrdom politics that have been coming into our system really for the last few decades. We see it more and more escalating on both the far left and the far right, whether it's far left activists seizing upon every kind of video of a police killing to make broad assumptions about the American criminal justice system and to engage in riots and calls for abolishing police, whether the far right who grab hold of any kind of immigrant crime or immigrant murder to say that we need to deport all immigrants or engage in some kind of draconian crackdown on immigrants. 

Now, we see this kind of increasingly in our Israel-Palestine debate where partisans are seizing upon this heinous crime that happened just a few days ago and really weaponizing it to engage in some type of collective punishment for their political opposition to claim all people who support peace in Palestine, justice or equal rights in that region, are somehow guilty of violence, that this act of political violence reflects on every American who supports peace or a cease-fire in Gaza. I mean, it's a little bit absurd, but it's kind of a continuation of this cycle of saying we want collective punishment on our political enemies, we want to weaponize any kind of tragic death into a partisan football, or just or partisan cudgel, to beat our political opponents. 

G. Greenwald: I actually started noticing it for the first time, I think, back in like 2005, 2006, right when I created my blog, started writing about politics. At the time, there was this blogger who was very pro-War on Terror, like very much of the view that we are at war with Islam after 9/11. Ironically, he became a sort of liberal resistance. His name was Charles Johnson. He wrote a blog called The Little Green Footballs. And one of the things he would do every day when he was in like his War on Terror fanatical stage was he had a daily occurring segment or a weekly occurring segment and he would title it “Religion of Peace” and he just published some sort of random robbery or burglary or assault or rape or violent crime that some Muslim somewhere in the world engaged in and thought that because he was constantly doing it, it was somehow making this point about Muslims in general being a menace. 

Obviously, you can do that to any race. You could do that to black people, you could do that to white people, you could do that to Christians, you could do that with Muslims, you can do that to Jews. When I recently was condemning or objecting to Matt Walsh, who went on Tucker Carlson to say it's better to leave kids in foster care and orphanages than to allow them to be adopted by same sex couples, I remember all these people replying to me, would show me stories about gay men molesting children and for everyone that they could show me, I could show them 20+ uncles molesting nieces at the age of five or some father molesting his daughter. It's such a stupid obviously, fallacious way to try to demonize a certain group of people and, obviously, the minute something like last night happens, we're supposed to believe that anyone now who condemns the war in Gaza is somehow a homicidal maniac or wants to kill Jews or wants to be antisemitic even though you can find literally every day Israel supporters in the United States saying the most nauseating things about Gazans. 

I mean, you can find Israeli officials in the last week saying Gazan babies are enemies because they grow up to be terrorists; “There's no such thing as innocent Gazans,” one official said we should segregate all the women and babies and children in Gaza and put them on one side and then put all the men 13 and above, so “13-year-old men,” they were calling them, and put then on another side and just execute all the men. It's such sophistry to try to argue this way, and yet it's done so often. 

Lee Fang: All connects back to my previous point that these are emotional arguments. They're not logical, they're not rational, they're certainly not empirical. It's very emotionally arresting when you see one of these police shooting videos. Often, they're without context, but even if the cop was in the wrong and was doing something unjust, that doesn't reflect on the millions of police-civilian interactions and all the thousands of different police jurisdictions that have completely different rules in training people will make sweeping assumptions about American policing after one of these very emotional videos. The same for an immigrant killing an American. You can see why someone could say that's unjust. This person was not supposed to be there, they're guests in our home and they're out killing or raping individuals, therefore, all immigrants are criminals or dangerous. It's that type of argument, and it's just being driven into overdrive with social media, with the kind of incentives around war. 

You have very well-financed pro-Israel advocacy groups. It's not just AIPAC, the super PAC and lobbying group, but dozens of other pro-Israel advocacy groups spending tens of millions of dollars per year pushing the U.S. foreign policy in one direction. So, for them to have this very tragic event that they can weaponize and use against their political opponents, they continue this push so that the U.S. stands in lockstep support of the Israeli government. Of course, that's what they'll do, but this is kind of an escalation we've seen in society over many years. It's just this dynamic that is very tribal, that is crude. It kind of appeals to the most basic instinct among us, and it really should be rejected. 

There are some principled Israel supporters and conservatives who have spoken out against this attempt to weaponize these tragic events, but it's really disappointing seeing people from across the board taking this and just saying, “We should have more censorship. We should support crackdowns on students. We should restrict speech. We should really support ethnic cleansing in Gaza because of it.” It is absurd. 

G. Greenwald: What makes it so much worse is, let's say, over the past decade, but especially as this kind of left-wing cultural war reached its apex with the word zenith, depending on your perspective with things like Me Too and then the Black Lives Matter riots of the fall of 2019, or 2020. Just then, the kind of wave that produced, of all sorts of language controls, taking premises to these completely preposterous conclusions. Most conservatives, in fact, almost by definition, were vehemently opposed to these sorts of victimhood narratives, these group-based grievances, these attempts to curb speech in the name that it made people uncomfortable or incited violence against them. And most of them, not all, but most of them, have now done an exact 180. 

All day yesterday, you heard people saying things like “There's systemic racism against Jews,” “Your speeches inciting antisemitism and bigotry.” Who knew that Donald Trump would be elected, and, within the first four months, his main cause and the main cause of his movement would be to declare a racism epidemic all around the world and the need to control speech to prevent it and protect these minority groups? 

It sounds very familiar, but just from a different direction. One of the people who was most vehemently opposed to this sort of left-wing oppression is Steven Pinker who was a very well-known biologist at Harvard and also a very vocal supporter of Israel but a very vocal critic of this sort of left-wing repression that has appeared on campuses and elsewhere. He has an article in The New York Times today that I thought was super interesting because it's also in the context of this attack by the Trump administration on Harvard and he said: “[…] For what it’s worth, I have experienced no antisemitism in my two decades at Harvard, and nor have other prominent Jewish faculty members. […] (The New York Times, May 23, 2025.)

So, we're talking here about this epidemic. I was reading some people yesterday, who were Jewish people in media, Jake Sherman was one, there were others, saying, “It's incredibly terrifying to be a Jew in America.” Not only did I live in the United States for, I think, 37 years, as an American Jew, and I'm there all the time. I've never once experienced an antisemitic assault or comments or anything like that, nor has anyone I know, and yet you're hearing this kind of wildly exaggerated set of claims about how Jews are endangered. 

So, he says: “My own discomfort instead is captured in a Crimson essay by the Harvard senior Jacob Miller, who called the claim that one in four Jewish students feels “physically unsafe” on campus “an absurd statistic I struggle to take seriously as someone who publicly and proudly wears a kippah around campus each day.” […] (The New York Times May 23, 2025.)

So that's not just a Jewish person, that's someone who wears a Kippah around campus every day and he's saying it's preposterous that people are saying there's some epidemic of antisemitism at Harvard. 

I mean, what he's basically saying there is that everything I thought I was supporting, fighting against when it was coming from the left, these group-based narratives, this attempt to restrict speech, this is a wild exaggeration of the danger of certain minority groups in the United States is now being flooding our discourse, from Israel supporters, he's making the point that it just sounds extremely familiar to him, but from the other direction. 

Lee Fang: Yeah, I mean, everything he's describing is pretty much accurate. The tools of wokeness that these kinds of studies claim astronomical levels of bigotry in society, you look back at 2020, a lot of Asian American groups claimed that anti-Asian hate crimes were skyrocketing. 

G. Greenwald: What was the name of that group? Stop Asian Hate? 

Lee Fang: Stop Asian Hate, yes, which was a spin out of Chinese for Affirmative Action. But this group, if you look carefully in their kind of footnotes of how they were quantifying anti-Asian hate, they were taking tweets that were critical of the lab leak theory or floating the lab leak theory that the COVID-19 virus might have come from Wuhan, China, and other kind of China critical tweets as examples of anti-Asian American hate crimes. So, they were grouping actual forms of violence, where, a lot of times, you don't know the intent. Perhaps someone of one race attacked someone else of another race. Is that a hate crime? It's context-dependent, but they were taking a broad brush on those. Then, they were juicing the numbers by taking tweets of something that they claimed was hateful, but turned out to be just a true fact, or likely a true fact, that the virus escaped from a bioweapons lab in China. 

Now, for the antisemitism kind of crisis or hysteria that we're in today, you look at the ADL and other pro-Israel advocacy groups at these studies that show a 300%, 500%, 1,000% increase in antisemitism. You look at the footnotes, and it's the exact same dynamic. It's folks who are critical of Israel in a completely neutral way, saying they just disagree with Israel's policies. That's deemed now antisemitic: groups like Jewish Voices for Peace, a Jewish-led leftist group that is critical of Israel's policies, holding rallies around the country. Each of these rallies in the ADL's report is tagged as an antisemitism hate event. So, that's how they're quantifying this gigantic, skyrocketing antisemitism problem. 

This would be laughably absurd if it weren't being weaponized and used by our government to crack down on speech and to defund science and medical research at universities around the country, but that's exactly what's happening. The Trump administration is citing these statistics and similar statistics when they're going after Harvard University and other universities, when they are cutting federal funding and when attempting to impose speech codes like the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which redefines antisemitism to include some criticism of Israel, and it's part of this kind of an investigation of Harvard around civil rights violations.

I mean if you zoomed out and just looked at the evidence, any normal person would laugh it off; any kind of ordinary person looking at what's been assembled as supposed examples of antisemitism are, you know, either incredibly minor or absolutely manufactured. And yet, this is the crisis that we're living in today. I wouldn't defend Harvard University on almost any other grounds. This is a school that acts like a hedge fund, that's accumulated huge amounts, that has deplatformed speakers in the past, that is kind of a platform for privilege, for billionaire donors to at times donate and get their kids into the school, and has engaged in some racial discrimination in the past, although the recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action have kind of rolled that back. Yet this current Trump administration attack, demanding that the school create safe spaces for Jewish students, create speech codes, preventing students from criticizing or even discussing Israeli policies, even getting rid of some of their departments that study the Middle East or study Israel's history or Palestinian history, I mean, it just kind of shocks  that they're doing this with absolutely no evidence. 

G. Greenwald: I mean, the idea that Harvard is some place that's hostile to Jews is almost as funny as that time the ADL issued a statement saying it's time for Hollywood to include Jews in their pro-diversity policies because Jews have been excluded for long enough from Hollywood and you just can't believe it's even being said. 

By the way, the thing that you mentioned about COVID drove me very crazy at the time and to this very day when I think about it, it still drives me crazy, which was It was really the Lancet letter, the proximal causes, notorious Lancet Letter that decreed well before they had any idea if it was remotely true what they were saying, that we know for certain that COVID came from the zoonotic leap, from animal to human, and that any attempt to suggest that it came from a lab leak in Wuhan was essentially racist and like an attack on our Chinese colleagues or whatever. Then, it immediately became canon that anyone who even raised the possibility that it might've come from a lab leak was being racist against Chinese people. 

The New York Times COVID reporter who became the COVID reporter when the real COVID reporter got fired because he said some things that upset a bunch of very wealthy teenagers whose parents paid for them to go on a field trip to Peru or something with him and they were offended by what he said, and so he got fired. So, they put this woman in, and she said one day we're going to grapple with the fact that this lab leak theory is racist, but I guess today is not the day. 

One always drove me so crazy about this. Besides the fact that who cares what theory was racist about where COVID came from? Like, all that mattered was what the truth was? Who cares which theory was more racist? It was like, where did it actually come from? But the idea that it was somehow more racist to say that COVID came from a highly sophisticated research lab in Wuhan, funded and partnered with the United States than saying, “Oh, Chinese people have these disgusting, filthy, primitive eating habits where they consume these filthy bats in wet markets and therefore got the coronavirus because they were the ones who were just eating things they shouldn't,” like the far more racist theory was the one they were insisting on, to this day insist on. It just always drove me crazy. Of course, the overwhelming evidence now is that it did come from that lab leak funded by the United States. 

All right, let me ask you about this article you wrote in your Substack

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So, I think it's a little bit self-explanatory, but you go into some really disturbing and interesting detail about what these funds that were set up for Jeffrey Epstein's victims and how much opportunity there was for Virgin Islands officials to profit from their protection that they gave him. What is it that you've been finding? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, so the Jeffrey Epstein saga is still not solved. There are still many unanswered questions. In February, the Trump administration promised to release unredacted files. The FBI, when they raided Jeffrey Epstein’s homes in 2018, collected CD-ROMs, other recordings, binders, all these files that remain unreleased to this day. They're sitting in a warehouse, the FBI warehouse in Winchester, Virginia and still, nothing has really been released. 

The documents that were supposedly released by the Trump administration were all previously released disclosures. There's nothing new there. My story takes a look at the other side of this, where the national media has really not paid attention. Many of the most important disclosures about Jeffrey Epstein's political network, how he's paid off politicians, particularly politicians in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but also some politicians in the territorial U.S., were released very suddenly and briefly during a lawsuit in 2023 between J.P. Morgan and the Virgin Islands. 

This sudden disclosure was kind of accidental because the U.S. Virgin Islands was hoping to win some settlement money from these crimes, a form of accountability after his death. They really did not expect it, but J.P. Morgan hit back hard, and it countersued and alleged that the Islands' officials were far more complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's criminal operations. From those disclosures, we got hundreds of emails, depositions, and other documents showing how Jeffrey Epstein kind of methodically paid off local politicians, customs agents, various governors and law enforcement agents to receive exemptions from the sex offender list in the Virgin Islands to travel back and forth. As he was bringing young girls, aged between 12 and 15, to his island, customs agents saw that and looked the other way, they refused to check on their safety. There's really just a litany of red flags he was raising, and yet he was paying off politicians to allow him to run his criminal enterprise. 

This piece kind of looks at how the governor, Albert Bryan, closed that window of disclosure. He quickly settled the lawsuit, he fired the attorney general, leading the JP Morgan lawsuit, he later replaced the attorney with one of Epstein's own lawyers, who serves to this day in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He promised that this legal settlement money would be used to prevent another Epstein criminal enterprise by using it to counter human trafficking, sex abuse, and that type of thing. Instead, it's being used as a piggy bank. Legislators there don't know exactly how the money's being spent but for what we do know, it is going to backdate government wages, it's going to vendor payments, it's going to a series of earmarks refurbishing various buildings in the Virgin Islands. There's very little transparency on how this money is being used and it's an ultimate irony or perhaps an injustice that the governor, who now controls these funds, is almost a quarter billion dollars of money, was part and parcel to the Epstein enterprise. He was receiving regular donations and gifts from Epstein. He was the one responsible for giving Epstein special tax breaks and then later pushing for his exemption from the sex offender list. 

So, while we have this kind of national conversation about the Epstein saga, and it's mostly focused on these documents in Virginia that are held by the FBI, which deserve to be disclosed, there are still so many unanswered questions and a lack of accountability in the Virgin Islands. 

G. Greenwald: It's interesting, for the last four years during the Biden administration, the Epstein files, as they've been called, were a major topic on right-wing media, especially independent right-wing media. Two people in particular, who are very influential and popular in that realm, went around constantly talking about whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, the doubts about why we should think that, as well as just bashing the FBI every day for concealing the Epstein files. 

Those two people were Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, who are now the Assistant Director and the Director of the FBI. And they, I'm sure you saw them on Fox News earlier this week, and one of the questions they got was about the Epstein documents. The interviewer said, “Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself? And they both said, “Yes, Jeffrey Epstein absolutely killed himself. We saw the documents.” They were very uncomfortable, but they're saying we saw the documents that prove he killed himself. 

Well, all of you, including Donald Trump, ran on the platform of making the Epstein files public. Why haven't we seen these documents that convinced them of that? But more so, I think the biggest, most interesting question in the Epstein case is, and always has been, “Was Jeffrey Epstein working with or for foreign intelligence agencies?” And it's a binary question. Maybe there's more complexity to it. 

But why is it, do you think, that after four, almost five months, in office, not just the Trump administration, but the very people who kind of built their reputation, in part, on banging the table about the Epstein files, about crushing and bashing Christopher Wray and the FBI for not releasing them, are now in charge of the FBI, and these documents are still not released; not a single one, that wasn't previously public has been released. 

Lee Fang: Well, I was in your program last year to discuss our lengthy investigation about why every […] that influence operation in the U.S., that attempts to change our laws, change who gets elected to Congress, affect American policy – there is an effort to enforce the Foreign Agent Registration Act, so that they disclose their lobbying activities, except for Israel. There is very ample evidence that the Israeli government – and its evidence from Israel, from Israeli news outlets and from Israeli investigations – shows that show Israeli government is pouring millions and millions of dollars over the last 10 years into influence operations in the U.S. and there's been a conscious effort to avoid far registration. 

The Epstein saga kind of raises many two-tier justice questions: one is just generally broadly about the wealthy in society because they were working with Epstein, facilitating his crimes, potentially engaging in sex crimes with him. They are kind of protected from scrutiny. If this were any ordinary American, any lower-class American, they could expect severe penalties and a severe form of justice, but because these are the rich and powerful, they do not receive the same level of scrutiny. Then, for your question around the Israel issue, there is… 

G. Greenwald: To be clear, I didn't say Israel. I just wondered whether he was working for any foreign intelligence agency. 

Lee Fang: Well, many would say that there might be an Israel issue. Interestingly enough, within the J.P. Morgan litigation, the kind of discovery process in some of the exhibits that were filed in the Virgin Islands case, many of the emails between former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein and some of his associates were disclosed in that litigation in 2023. It was really just an incredible window into Epstein's network. Many other emails of VIP individuals who received help from Jeffrey Epstein, who gave him donations or asked him to “manage their money,” even though it wasn't clear what he was doing with the money, or were traveling to his island, or to his New York home, these were details that were ferreted out from the J.P. Morgan case. Perhaps, again, that's why they moved so quickly to settle it, to close that case. But yes, I think just generally, whether it's Israel or another country… 

G. Greenwald: Maybe it's like Sweden, or Nigeria, but we should know. 

Lee Fang: We don't know, it could be Finland. It's really any of those Nordic countries, but the fact that we don't have these answers and they're sitting on servers, not just with the FBI, right? 

In just this countersuit from J.P. Morgan, they were able to get a huge amount of discovery from Epstein's servers, from his estate, from his associates. He had a close network, Richard Kahn, [Darren] Indyke, […], these three or four individuals who helped arrange many of his financial affairs and helped with the facilitation of his operations in this one little litigation, we were able to see kind of peer into his world. If the government wanted to, if this was a priority for either the Biden administration or the Trump administration, they could make it happen because these emails we know exist. 

G. Greenwald: And I think it's worth noting, and this to me is one of the most persuasive pieces of evidence, that when Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2010 in South Florida when he was trafficking minors into his home in West Palm Beach to have sex with them and eventually got caught, the U.S. Attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, who eventually ended up in the Justice Department, is the one who presided over this extremely shockingly generous plea bargain he got where, I mean, his charges were sex trafficking minors. Everybody who does that goes to prison for a long, long time. And he basically got something like 12 months, six months in prison, a suspended sentence and like community service or whatever. And then he was done and he went back right to… 

Lee Fang: Yeah, he got to spend most of it at home, right? He didn't even spend much of the time. 

G. Greenwald: Right, he started at home. Exactly. Alex Acosta, years later, when asked, “Why would you give a sex trafficker of minors such an incredibly light sentence?” He said, “I was told that he was Intelligence and to leave him alone.” 

So, there's every reason to believe that he had some connection to foreign intelligence. There were a lot of people with whom he was a close associate, including Jelaine Maxwell, whose father, Robert Maxwell, was most definitely a Mossad member; Les Wexner, who is the multi-billionaire who made Jeffrey Epstein rich, who has all kinds of ties to Israel. A lot of people try to say, “Oh, it was probably Qatar.” They always try to say like, “Oh, the country that's really influencing our politics and buying our politics is Qatar.” That was something Bari Weiss just published. I have a feeling that if Jeffrey Epstein were working for Qatari intelligence, that was something we would know and have known very quickly. 

The fact that you have two very hawkish people on the Epstein question, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who have been running around for years demanding full disclosure, outraged that it's not coming, and now they're suddenly the ones running the FBI and yet there's still not a single document, not one, release that hadn't already been seen – they did that ridiculous, humiliating debate where they called those right-wing influencers like Libs of TikTok and others to the White House and they gave them binders that said, “Epstein files set - phase one” and they were all waving around that binder and it turned out every single document in that binder had been already publicly disclosed long ago – it does really start to make you wonder, doesn’t it? 

Lee Fang: Yeah, this reporting, these details have not been easy. Some of this is a source from just the Virgin Islands for my story, a source from the Virgin Islands’ legislature. I talked to lawmakers there, I looked at litigation files, some which had never been published, even though there were litigation files from 2023, but also, the Virgin Islands operate in kind of a weird space, to U.S. territory, but they do not have an online system for just routine campaign finance disclosures. I had to pay a University of Virgin Islands journalism student to go in person and request documents and then pay an exorbitant fee, just to make photocopies and then have those sent to me.

Reporting this out over the last few months on a story that really should have been public way earlier was not easy to do, but it's clear that for Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, they don't have to do all these kinds of extra steps that I engaged in. This is not a question of ability, this is the question of will. Do they have the political will? Do they have the kind of wherewithal to weather the criticism, the kind of pressure from elite groups, potentially foreign intelligence agencies, by disclosing this information that could be very harmful to the political and kind of intelligence elite? 

G. Greenwald: And the fact that you do that reporting that is often expensive is another good reason for people to join your Substack, aside from the quality of the reporting that they get if they do. 

All right, let me ask you this last question. You're somebody who began journalism, associated primarily with the left. You worked at left-wing think tanks, not necessarily hardcore leftist think tanks, but you wrote for The Nation. You worked for the Center for American Progress, and you had a pretty left-wing outlook on things. You began to kind of have a breach with the around issues like crime and race, things that you were previously talking about, but crime was a really big one that, the left was constantly opposed to, almost reflexively, to any efforts to take crime seriously, to have the police emboldened or empowered to arrest criminals. You were particularly incensed by things like “defund the police,” that movement that arose in the wake of the George Floyd killing. And that has been something that you've taken seriously for a very long and in part because of your personal experience growing up in a mixed-race, working-class environment where there were a lot of working-class residents constantly victimized by violent crime. 

Now you live in California and San Francisco, where there's a lot of crime, obviously, including from immigrants who enter the country illegally. So as somebody who has taken those issues seriously, like the need to really crack down more on crime and violent criminals, as well as, you know, the flow of immigrants across the border, how do you look at thus far the Trump administration's efforts to crack down on people who have entered the country, especially those who have engaged in some sort of violence? 

Lee Fang: I see kind of like a lot of the same examples you've highlighted on the show as draconian as probably unconstitutional, illegal, immoral. If you look at what the Trump administration has done in terms of sending Venezuelans to CECOT, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador, I think it's morally horrendous. The Washington Post recently reported that many of the individuals that were sent there were people who were cleared for asylum status, who had protested Maduro, and then fled here after doing so.

Which senator was the one who encouraged people to rise up against the Maduro government in Venezuela and said that if you came to this country, we would provide new asylum protections and TPS protections to protect you? That was Marco Rubio. He led that.

So, just the absurdity, the kind of partisan cruelty for him to turn around and take those same individuals and send them to this prison without any due process is disgusting. Broadly speaking, I look at the kind of confirmation hearings this week for the USCIS role that the immigration wing of the Department of Homeland Security, that kind of manages a lot of the visa programs, and they're saying a lot of things that I think make sense, talking about the role of foreign workers, of these kind of temporary visa programs that were initially created 20 years ago, 30 years ago, like the one H1-B program and then the OPT program to encourage just the most skilled, scarce workers that we don't have in this country. These programs have ballooned into a kind of internal job replacement program where corporations are bringing millions of workers in who will work for lower wages for tech-related software and IT jobs. 

The Trump administration, which initially, back in January, rejected attempts to reform programs, is now kind of changing its tune and is considering a reform of these programs. This is something that Bernie Sanders and many of the more traditional class-focused left have talked about for a very long time. I don't see any problem with that. The other kind of enforcement areas of just like how do you get folks who are in this country illegally out of this country and then how do you prioritize to make sure that you're doing it in a way that's just and fair, it's a mixed record, right? 

At the end of the day, the Trump administration, on a month-to-month basis, has deported less than the Biden administration, compared to last year. There are some different variables here. There are fewer border crossings this year than last. You can also compare this year between this year and the last few years of the Obama administration, which had way more deportations. Again, there's a different variable there. There's more police ICE collaboration back in the Obama years than this year. There's simply not as much collaboration between police agencies and ICE in 2025, so it's perhaps not possible. So, it's hard to compare. If you look at some of the extreme measures they've taken against speech, ongoing after legal students who are here to study and who have protested Israel, and focusing on them to deport them. That's clearly absurd. The CECOT prison is absurd. I think for the rest of their kind of agenda, it's a mix. There's some good and bad. And I think just in terms of a policy, a lot of it just hasn't come into effect yet. The deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, they've relied on these kinds of very theatrical and flamboyant expressions of police state strength. “We're going to throw them into prisons in El Salvador, we're going to send them to Libya, we're going to put them in South Sudan,” things like that. But the reality is that there have been no mass deportations as promised by the Trump campaign. They've spent huge amounts of time and energy and money instead of going after them almost right away, as you said, people in this country who are completely law-abiding, who are here with green cards or student visas, for the crime of protesting Israel or criticizing Israel. And so in lieu of getting what they were told for 10 years from Donald Trump they would get, which is mass deportations, they're instead getting this massive crackdown on speech under the guise of immigration policy aimed at protecting this foreign country, Israel, from criticism and people have really not noticed, given all these kinds of sideshows over the Alien Enemies Act and shipping them to El Salvador and the fact that the integration deportation numbers are actually quite low. 

All right, Lee, thank you so much. It was great to see you, as always. I'm sure we'll have you back on our show soon. I hope you have a good evening 

Lee Fang: Thanks, Glenn. Have a good weekend. 

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All right, Friday night is for our interaction with our Locals members, but also in front of our entire Rumble audience. The reason we do that, as I've said before, is I think interaction with your audience is of the most importance. I have always hated the model of journalism that's monolog inform, where some journalists just step on a mountain top and bequeath to people the truth. I think it's very important to hear critiques and questions and interact. And we do that throughout the week on Locals. So, let's get into them. We have a lot of good ones tonight. I want to try to get to as many as possible. 

The first one is from @ChristianaK, who says:

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I talked a little bit with Lee about this and he said something I completely agree with, which is, I never thought I would be defending Harvard in my life. Especially over the last, say, 10 years, Harvard really has become a place which is almost ground zero for censoring speech. It's often ideologically homogenous. It's become just this kind of closed circle, a very specific, idiosyncratic, academic-ish left-wing culture war homogeneity. There's a lot wrong with academia in general. 

All that said, I find academia to be extremely important. I think it's a vital part of society. If you go back to the Enlightenment, which I regard as the founding principles of Western civilization, at least in the modern era, in terms of our political values and the like, academics talk frequently about the need to have at least one place in society where everything is up for grabs in terms of what you can debate, what you could challenge. There are no taboos, there are no pieties. I think having an institution in society like that, where everything is studied, everything is questioned and everything is poked at, is vital. It helped me learn a lot. 

It really stimulated my interest intellectually that there were all sorts of things out there that had been about questioning these long-term pieties and you were free to express the things that you wanted to express. I think it is quite disappointing, quite harmful, quite tragic that in so many ways our universities have become these ideologically homogenized outposts of political activism at the expense of what should be this academic freedom.

 Nonetheless, it really is true that one of the things that has been most responsible for America's success, economically, technologically, politically, socially and militarily, has been research that takes place at our highest institutions. Everywhere in the world, people look at Harvard and talk about Harvard with great admiration and awe. Here in Brazil, if somebody went to study at Harvard, even for a year, and they come back and they say, “Oh, I studied at Harvard,” it imparts them with immense credibility, and that's how it's looked at around the world. I mean, Harvard is one of the symbols of American greatness. It's been a leading college for 450 years, same as Yale, Brown and Princeton, but Harvard, especially globally, is at the top. 

So, I think, if you're going to have a government that suddenly decides that it's going to wage a major war to try to destroy what have always been America's leading academic institutions, it’s kind of out of the blue, just start attacking it in every conceivable way, I think everybody should be very guarded about why that's happening. 

In general, leading academic institutions and the government have had extremely close partnerships. The reason the federal government gives money to places like Harvard and Yale, and all sorts of other schools, is not because the government is being benevolent. It's not because the government wants it to have a nice gender studies program. Sometimes it's to fortify financial aid so that not only rich people from rich families can go to the top schools, but mostly it's for paying for research projects that the United States government once undertook. It was federal-funded research programs at our universities that led to the invention of the internet in the United States and American dominance over the internet for all those years. It came right out of the federal funding of academic institutions, cures and medical treatments, scientific advances and technological advances that often were things the government wanted done for military use. 

When you have well-funded research programs, that's how you attract the greatest minds from all around the world and that only fortifies the institution. Without these research facilities, it basically just becomes like a liberal arts school for 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds, as opposed to institutions where the highest-level research and innovations take place. On top of that, it's the question of why these institutions are being attacked. 

In the case of Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Princeton and all the others that the Trump administration has targeted, there has been one argument that I think is a valid one, which is that there has been discrimination in the admissions process for a long time. It was considered affirmative action, where you would purposely go out of your way to divide all the applicants into groups of race, to ensure that there was a representative percentage from each group. Part of that was to correct historical injustices, other parts of it were to have a more diverse campus. I think there was a time when you could make that argument that was necessary and over time we've gotten to the point where we've decided that that's no longer necessary that it's actually a form of racism in its own way and courts have stepped in and begun to rule against those sorts of practices and they had to scale back greatly on them. 

So, I understand that objection, but the much bigger reason, as we know, is that these schools allowed protests against Israel to take place. For many years – you can go back to 2010, 2012, 2014 – all of these groups that are funded by Israel or Israeli loyal billionaires were obsessed with American college campuses because they knew that that's where the primary activism against Israel was based on this boycott, divestment and sanctions model that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa. Israel and its loyalists were petrified that that would work in American campuses. They knew a lot of the anti-Israel sentiment was being talked about and allowed on American campuses and they set out this whole anti-woke thing if you go and look at it, all these people who were obsessed with Israel, who led this anti-woke movement on college campuses, were doing it, in part, because they hated American colleges because it allowed too much Israel criticism. The Trump administration is saying that you have allowed too much antisemitism, meaning Israel criticism on your campus; they're actually forcing institutions to put their Middle East Studies program under receivership so the government can control what is taught in Middle East Studies programs. 

Who thought that the role of the U.S. government was to control the curricula of how adult academics who teach adult students can do their curriculum, can pick their course materials? But that's what the Trump administration is doing. And it's all because of Israel, to some extent, it's because they perceive it's kind of a left-wing institution, they want to attack it. But they've already denied funding these schools. 

Here from AP News on April 15: “Trump administration freezes $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard over campus activism (AP News. April 15, 2025.)

We know what that “campus activism” means: the Israel protests that you allowed. Harvard said, “Look, you've gone too far. We made a lot of concessions, but we're about to become a branch of the Trump administration if we go too far, we're going to sue instead.” And they sued, that's when the government went ballistic. 

Today, Homeland Security announced that they were canceling the student visas of all Harvard students, revoking them immediately, and would refuse to give student visas for any international students that want to go to Harvard in the future. So only 25% of Harvard has international students. It's a way that the United States spreads pro-American sentiment. People want to come to the United States, they want to study in the United States, they get integrated into American culture. It has great benefits for the U.S. As I said, people look at Harvard as this place that everyone around the world wants to go to, or Yale, or Princeton, or Columbia, Stanford, whatever. 

The idea that Harvard, of all places – its current president is Jewish, most of its past presidents, close to a majority, if not an overall majority over the last 30 years, have been Jewish. Larry Summers is one of the people who ran Harvard for the longest. Their biggest donors are overwhelmingly Jewish. Jews do very, very well at Harvard. The idea that it's some kind of cesspool of antisemitism is laughable. 

But as we know, any criticism of Israel is now deemed antisemitic and that's what's driving the Trump administration. So, now, you take these huge numbers of foreign students who have spent years pursuing PhD programs, a lot of them are going to graduate and stay in the United States and become extremely productive members American society, and even if they don't, even if go back to their countries, they're obviously going to have a connection to the United States, and now you take all these people who have put years and years into their studies, and out of nowhere, they're instantly told “Your visa is revoked and you can try to get into another school, we'll extend your visa then, but if you don't, Harvard doesn't have any more student visas. We're revoking them all, and we're banning Harvard from accepting any foreign students in the future”. 

This is basically on the verge of destroying Harvard, notwithstanding their $50 billion endowment. As Lee said, this $50 billion endowment almost makes them like a hedge fund. So, I don't have sympathy for Harvard, but it is true that denying them all federal money, destroying and forcing them to dismantle all research programs, and then disallowing any international students will absolutely cripple this institution that has for 500 years been the pinnacle of American greatness, a symbol of it, and a crucial tool in soft power. 

It's just yet another way that this government got into power and decided that one of its goals, if not its number one goal, was to punish anybody who was criticizing Israel. I think it's incredibly dangerous. What we've done is we basically turned the United States into a country where a requirement to enter, to study, or to work is that you love Israel and worship Israel, or that you at least agree that you were framed from ever criticizing it. We're just sacrificing so much of our national interest for this foreign country. 

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Question #2. It’s from @Kurt_Malone, who asked the following:

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This has been a controversy taking place among various journalists. I've certainly talked a lot before about how many of the people who have very lucratively branded themselves as free speech champions over the last several years, but who are really just Israel loyalists, who are doing this to attack college campuses and now have turned around.

Now you’re looking at this massive First Amendment attack in the name of stopping Israel criticism and they either barely care, barely mention it, occasionally mutter some mild opposition to say they have done it, they did or oftentimes, even support it.

Bari Weiss, yesterday, in response to the murder of the two Israeli embassy staffers, basically said anyone who's been attacking Israel or denouncing it in harsh ways, or its supporters, has blood on their hands. So, there are a lot of people who have built a large audience, mostly conservatives, right-wing people, or MAGA people, by championing free speech because over the past 10 years, conservative speech has been one of the main targets of censorship. And so, these people who are independent media outlets, who rely on subscription money from their viewers, it's a big problem in independent media. I've talked about it before. It's a problem in corporate media as well, that a lot of people don't want to say things that will ever alienate or offend their audience because they know if they do, there's a good chance that they'll lose subscribers, which is how they make their money. 

I've talked about it before, as an independent journalist, I also have that dynamic. After October 7, we lost a lot of subscribers who were pro-Israel and didn't want to hear my critiques of Israel and who still don't. We still lose subscribers over that. But over time, if you actually build yourself and your audience with a look to the long term as somebody who has integrity and you build an audience of people who know that you can't come and expect that you're going to always hear what you want to hear but you're always going to, at least, hear the honest perspective and an argument behind it, then you build an idea of people who respect your integrity and aren't here for validation,  which I would suggest is a much more valuable audience to have. 

So there have been some disputes. One of the people who has been most criticized for this is a friend of mine. So, I'm reluctant to speak specifically about him. You can go see these arguments. I will say, one of the reasons why I think it's so important to me that I have a great distance from the kind of social scene in Washington and New York and politics and media is because it is corrupting, it is difficult. If you end up immersed in a social circle and you end being friends with all these politicians who you're supposed to be adversarial to, or other journalists whom you're supposed to criticize because there is a sort of ethical, I think, valid principle, that if somebody is really your friend, I don't mean acquaintance, I don't mean somebody who you say hi to occasionally, but somebody who's really a friend is doing something you disagree with, to turn around and denounce them publicly. It's a real conflict in principles between, on the one hand, you want to hold people accountable and critique them when they deserve it, but on the other hand, like turning around and just publicly denouncing a friend is hard. 

So for the most part, that's why I avoid that social circle. I see it all the time. You see Jake Tapper in this book with all these journalists going around and talking about how they've known these Biden White House officials forever. And so, when they said there's nothing wrong with Biden, they didn't think they were being lied to; they believed them. They didn't want to criticize these people. That's what being friends can do to journalists or to, and I think it's a major reason why Washington is so corrupt, media and politics. They all live in the same neighborhoods and they all socialize with each other. They're all intermarried, the media and the political class. And so, they're anything but adversarial to each other, but I will say there's this idea that some of the people are saying, “Look, I don't want to comment on Israel and Palestine because I don't know enough about it, it's too complicated, it is just not an issue I want to talk about.” And then there's a resulting critique. No, the reason you don't want to talk about it is because you don’t want to defend Israel or the censorship being implemented in the United States in its name. After all, you would be obviously betraying everything you ever said you believed in. But you also don't want to denounce it because you have a lot of people who support Donald Trump or Israel in your audience and you're afraid of alienating them and losing money from saying what it is that you believe. 

So, let me just say, quickly, a few things about this because it is a growing controversy. One is that I actually am somebody who has always tried to, who strongly believes in the idea that there's nobody who can be an expert in everything. There's no person who has expert-level or specialized knowledge in every debate. 

It's always been so important to me never to report on, comment on, or analyze topics that I don't actually understand better than just the ordinary person who's not paying much attention. I've always only covered a handful of issues at one time that I believe I have some kind of specialized knowledge or expertise in, or some unique perspective that's informed, so that I can basically place a claim on the audience's time if I want to write about something or talk about something. I do agree that if there's something you don't understand well, if there is something that you haven't covered, it's best just not to talk about it. 

That said, once there's an issue that becomes so significant, maybe tariffs is an example, which is something that Trump's tariff policy was something I ordinarily would not talk about since I'm the last person who can give you a good microeconomic assessment of tariffs and the like. But I can talk about other aspects related to it. I can have people on my show that I've talked to, that I asked about, because some issues are just too big to ignore. And the war in Israel, especially if you're an American citizen whose government is paying for that war and arming that war, given that world organizations have called this a genocide, people have said this is the worst war in their lifetime that they've ever seen, even an Israeli former Prime Minister came out and said today that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, two million people being starved to death. Our government is paying for it, at the same time, there are major implications in the United States, on Americans and our basic constitutional rights. It's just not an issue that I think you can just say, “Yeah, I don't understand that. I think I'm going to avoid that.” I'm not saying you have to cover it every day, I'm saying you have super didactic opinions about it, but I think it's kind of an abdication of your responsibility if you have influence on a platform to just refuse to talk about the most significant issues that the entire world is discussing, especially when they directly affect the causes that you have claimed you're most invested in. 

Again, I think there are a lot of people in the sort of what had been called the international dark web, as they self-glorifyingly named themselves, who pretended to be free speech advocates, who have now abandoned that because the real loyalty was to Israel. And then some people just haven't really spoken much about it because audience capture is very real in independent media. It's not like you're either super noble and you don't care about it, or you're just integrity-free, greedy money, sucking pig. There are a lot of nuances, and there's a big spectrum between those two things. But I do think it's very important if you're going to have any credibility that you do everything possible to ensure that you never have a fear of your own audience and that you have this view that it's better to lose some audience and subscribers short-term or maybe even long-term that you won't replace, especially if you're somebody who's built a big platform and making a very good living doing this, than it is to just have the goal to build the biggest audience possible by avoiding ever telling them anything that might make them at all upset.

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 Question #3 is from @teardrinker who says:

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So, just for those of you who didn't see it, there's this big controversy in Brazil, actually a major epidemic in Brazil. Brazil, under this very unpopular president, in 2017, legalized gambling basically overnight. As a result, all these apps popped up to allow people to put their money into these accounts and then start betting on sporting events or all sorts of things online, playing casino games. Huge numbers of people, millions of people, Brazil's a country with a huge economic inequality, have become addicted to gambling, to these apps on their phones. The minute they get government assistance that is supposed to feed their family, or their paycheck, they transfer the whole thing into their gambling account. They've been told that it's a way to get rich, to escape poverty. And you have people massively in debt, losing everything, destroying their families over this gambling addiction. 

A major reason why is that you have these Instagram influencers who have tens of millions of followers who show people their super glamorous, luxurious lifestyle. These betting companies are paying these influencers to tell their young audience, their poor audience, “Oh, you should go bet. Use this betting app. You can make so much money.” And they show videos of the influencers betting and making money that are often fake. And not only do these influencers get millions of dollars to lead their poor and young audience into betting but they get percentages of whatever losses their audience has, which is profit for the betting app. And we showed you a part of an investigation that the Brazilian Senate is doing on this. 

And so, here's this question:

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Okay, it's so interesting because I have always taken a very libertarian approach to all of these issues. My general philosophy is that if you are an adult, you have the absolute right to consent to whatever behavior you want to engage in, as long as it's not directly harming somebody else. And by that, I mean like punching somebody or attacking somebody violently. I don't mean like blowing your money on some stupid, ill-advised shopping spree and then harming your family because now they can't pay their bills. I mean, direct harm. 

I believe that about pretty much everything. What drugs people take, what alcohol they consume, whether they gamble, whether what kind of sex they engage in with other adults consensually, my view of that has always been very strongly this libertarian view that adults should be able to make whatever choices they want that involve consent, and it's nobody's business to stop them. You can have public campaigns about the dangers of alcoholism or drug addiction. I'm all for that, so you give people information, but I don't believe in intervening, and I think they are responsible for the choices that they make. 

I have begun to rethink and retreat from that absolute libertarian view of people's choices a bit. I'll explain why. We're really entering a dystopian society, and we've had this for a long time, a dystopian world, where there are parts of the world that are extremely affluent and that most of the world is incomprehensibly poor. And you have things now, like for example, we talked about this before, we'll probably do some reporting on it because I want to learn more about it, but you have these affluent Europeans, I'm sure Americans as well, who need a kidney transplant and there's nobody who's compatible, who will give them a kidney. So they're traveling to countries in West Africa that people are barely at a subsistence level. And they're paying them $20,000, $30,000 and $40,000 to donate a kidney. I mean, is that something that we really should say is nobody's business? You have two adults in a transaction, one selling their organ to the other so that they can feed their children. Or is there something like incredibly exploitative about that to the point where it's very hard to say that that's actually consensual? 

I've been thinking the same thing about surrogacy arrangements. You have very wealthy couples. Most of them, by the way, are not gay couples; most of them are straight couples, contrary to belief, overwhelmingly straight couples, although the number of gay couples doing it as well has increased. And they want a baby. They can't produce a baby for whatever reason. Gay couples can't procreate. A lot of straight couples can’t either. Sometimes they don't want to, the woman doesn't want to carry a baby. 

So, they find a woman who needs $30,000, $50,000, whatever, $100,000 to carry their baby with an agreement that the minute that baby is born, the biological mother just hands over the baby, has no rights to it. Probably, if you asked me 10, 15 years ago, I would have said, “Yeah, that's their own choice. Who is the state, or anyone, to intervene in that transaction?” 

I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of women who do that are not very, very harmed psychologically. And again, as people get richer and the rich-poor gap increases, these kinds of transactions are going to become more and more complex. What about couples in the West who can't procreate and want to adopt but don't want to go through the adoption process? And so, they go to Africa, or they go to Asia, to extremely poor countries, and they pay some family. They say, “Hey, I see you have a healthy three-month-old infant, or a six-month infant, or a two-year-old, we want one of those. If we pay you $100,000, can we take your kid?” I mean, that's the same thing, right? That's very consensual, it's transactional, but is anyone going to say they have no qualms about that? 

I think sometimes Americans have problems understanding what poverty around the world is if you haven't lived in a country where it exists. What's considered poor in the United States, I mean, now it's become a little more severe, but what is considered poverty in the United States is nothing like what is considered poverty in most places in the world. There may be people who don't have access to clean water, don't have access to healthcare, don't have access to anything. And the internet is everywhere, and people are influenced. That's why they're called influencers. 

That's the same with gambling. So, I'm not saying that people who end up gambling and losing everything and destroying their lives and the lives of their family have no responsibility. Of course, they have some. Nobody forced them to do it. I've stopped thinking that all these things have this kind of pure, beautiful, consensual character to them because I have trouble seeing that as purely consensual. And again, I'm not saying it should be banned. I'm not even saying necessarily that I think it's the role of the state to stop it, but it doesn't make it so that it's perfectly fine either. Yeah, this is something I've been reconsidering. I think there's a lot of pressure for exploitation. 

As for this word “gaslighting,” I just, in general, hate new words that pop up and become part of the ethos. And especially gaslight was used mostly by a kind of MeToo movement. It was part of that MeToo lexicon where I think the excesses of Me Too have been well-documented. I oppose them from the beginning. I hate mob justice. I hate the idea that accusations should be treated as true with no evidence. I don't trust any human being, man, woman, anybody, with that level of power to say, “Oh, your accusations, they have to be inherently believed.” And that's where gaslighting came, a very, kind of vague accusation that people began making against their husbands or their boyfriends to claim that their relationship was, quote-unquote, “toxic.” I understand what it means. 

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Next question, @kkotwas asked:

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 It's funny, I was going to ask Lee a very similar question. I think that there has been a drastic, visible, palpable, documentable, severe turn in public opinion both in the United States and globally toward Israel. Israelis are talking about how they're becoming a “pariah state.” The level of dehumanization and cruelty and suffering and killing that Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians for 17 months, as we've all watched it live every day and that they're saying they're going to continue to perpetrate basically until these people are in concentration camps, driven out of their land – and imagine the level of violence that's going to cause. They are announcing that they are entering Gaza. They're going to take to it all, they're going to bomb whatever's left, they're going to force Palestinians to leave, the ones who don't are going to be in concentration camps, a little walled-off, fenced-off areas that they get to stay in, surrounded by the IDF. These are concentration camps. 

It has turned the world against Israel in ways never previously seen since the creation of Israel in 1948. And they know that, polling data shows it. You see countries that have been among the most vocal Israeli supporters and allies for a variety of political reasons, like Canada, the U.K. and France, jointly issuing a statement, vehemently condemning Israel, not merely a mouth condemnation. Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant have been officially indicted by the International Criminal Court as war criminals. They have to avoid certain countries. IDF soldiers are afraid to go to various countries. There are projects to make sure they get arrested or chased out of the country, which happened in Brazil. We actually interviewed the head of one of the groups that tracks IDF soldiers who participated in crimes in Gaza, because all these countries are signatories to various conventions that forced them to arrest people on their soil who have committed war crimes. One almost got arrested in Brazil, he got snuck out at the last second. 

And then Israeli tourists as well are being met with all sorts of hostility and I think that's why there have been these desperate attempts to censor Israel criticism, to criminalize it, to attack these universities over it, to arrest and deport people for criticizing or protesting Israel; these are acts of desperation. 

And yeah, I don't think that the murder of two Israeli staffers, as terrible as it obviously is, and the scope of what's happening in Gaza that's been happening for the last 18 months, that will continue to happen unless it's stopped for the next year or so, or however long, I think it's going to be a speed bump. 

Israel supporters are hoping they can turn it into something much greater, but I don't think it's going to succeed, given how Israelis are still not just destroying all of Gaza and the people in Gaza, but saying some of the most Nazi-like horrific things, including Israeli officials that think we should separate the women and the children and then take all men 13 years over and exterminate them. They're all them saying Gazan babies are enemies, there are no innocent Gazan babies, they grew up to be terrorists. Really sick, sick stuff. They don't think the world is good. I want to say tolerate, but I don't think there's any stopping Israel in the sense that they're an apocalyptic cult, and it would take some political will on the part of the West and the United States, almost like a humanitarian intervention, to really stop it. 

But I think Israel is going to pay a huge price for a long, long time; they have all kinds of internal dissent. Netanyahu is consolidating all sorts of undemocratic power. They were in a civil war before October 7 over the Supreme Court, whether orthodox Israelis have to serve in the military, and they have a lot of internal tension. People are fleeing the country. So no, I do not think these two murders of last night are going to radically change the trajectory of how Israel is perceived. 

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All right, the @farside asks:

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I've been saying this from the beginning. Every time there’s a Supreme Court ruling against the invocation of the AEA, where they're required to give the new process. Now, a Trump-appointed judge and an appellate court have said Trump's not even allowed to invoke the AEA: it's only for wartime. And then you have a bunch of Trump supporters saying, “But what do you mean? We voted for mass deportation. Are we supposed to give trials to 20 million people?” 

I've always turned to emphasize, I think it's now finally being understood, not just for me, but others, that the problem is that you have a deportation system instead of laws. It's very easy. You just deport. You show they're not in the country illegally, you send them back to their home country. The problem is that Trump didn't want to use that. He wanted to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. Something that has only been invoked three times before, during wartime, the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, because it gives Trump immense power, far more power than he has otherwise. 

So, automatically, the president's powers increase in times of war, the deference that courts give a president when there's a wartime emergency automatically increases. So, by declaring war, Trump's already consolidated more power. And then, the Alien Enemies Act gives him almost unfettered power to do anything to people he declares to be an alien enemy. He can just put them in camps. 

Remember, he sent them to Guantanamo and that's the policy that FDR invoked to put Japanese Americans in camps. You don't have to send them back to their home country. That way, you can just send them to El Salvador, a country they've never been to and have nothing to do with, and put them into prison. And you can send them to Libya. You can send them to South Sudan, which the Trump administration is now talking about doing and in the process of doing. The Trump Administration came in wanting to ensure, and I think understandably in a way, because Trump’s first term was basically characterized by constant subversion of the president's authority. Trump was boxed in all the time, he was sabotaged, and they were determined to not allow that to happen by this big bureaucracy, by the deep state, by the administrative state. And so, they came in determined to have a plan to allow Trump to do whatever he wanted with no constraints. The Alien Enemies Act was part of that.

The problem is that it is a very severe law, only intended for wartime. And even then, as the Supreme Court said, 9-0, when it said they're all entitled to habeas hearings before being removed under the AEA, even people suspected of being Nazi sympathizers, Nazi operatives inside the United States were given a hearing before they were detained or deported. All these legal controversies around deportation are not about deportation itself; they're about the AEA, which Trump invoked, because of the extraordinary powers that it gives him. 

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All right, I think this is the last question. It's from @65wakai:

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Yeah, that's a very complex question to answer in a short period. It all depends on how long people have been there. I mean, there's obviously an indigenous population in the United States that American settlers and colonialists went to war with, massacred, and now they have rights recognized by the United States, including their own sovereignty inside reservations. There are indigenous people in Brazil who came way before Portuguese colonization. Primarily in the Amazon, there are tribes that are still undisturbed, unconnected to the world. It's a little hard to say that they don't have rights to Brazil, where they've been for who knows how long. Same with Africa. 

If you're talking about Israel and Palestine, I think the problem there is that it's not really a claim that, “Oh, my people have a right to this land.” It's really that “God gave my people this land,” it's not, “Oh, we've been here for a long time, therefore, we should have it,” it's that “God said this is ours.” 

I do not think that theological claims about what God wants and who God wants to be in certain places are a valid claim for that land. We have a geopolitical system of solving diplomatic conflicts, which the world recognizes, and the Israelis are lucky, because for a long time, it didn't look like this. Would Israel, with certain borders, the 1967 borders, with the West Bank and Gaza belonging to the Palestinians and most Israelis who now want to steal the West Bank in Gaza and act against all international law and take it for only Jews, are doing so because they believe that God has bestowed them that. And I think that's a much different question. It's one of the things that bothers me about Zionism as an ideology: it inherently depends upon a Jewish supremacy that, at least within Israel, Jews will always be supreme and I don't think that it's an ideology that leads to anything good.

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