Major Escalation in Attempts to Purge U.S. Universities of Israel Critics; Who are the Israel Groups...

Major Escalation in Attempts to Purge U.S. Universities of Israel Critics; Who are the Israel Groups Providing Lists to the U.S. Government to Deport & Punish?

System Update #431

Glenn Greenwald

April 02, 2025

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Just since last Friday night, 72 hours ago, several of America's most accomplished academic institutions – including Harvard, Columbia, and NYU – saw increasingly aggressive attempts to punish, fire and silence, not students, but academics and professors, for the crime of opposing Israel: all as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly celebrates his control over the discourse on American campuses.

We are – according to the Trump administration itself – only at the beginning, nowhere near the end, of the systemic assault on free thought in American academia: the place free thought is supposed to thrive most robustly. What's most amazing of all is that this free speech attack is not being waged in defense of Americans or American values, but instead in defense of a foreign country often cheered most by those who call themselves part of the America First movement, a staggering irony among many.

Deportations of students who denounced or protested the Israeli war in Gaza continue to gather steam. Another student at the University of Minnesota, in the country legally, was really disappeared by ICE agents yesterday. I use that verb, disappeared, quite deliberately – nobody knows where she is, including the university. Another student, earlier this last week, at Tufts, is now detained and imprisoned by ICE in Louisiana because she wrote an op-ed in her school paper advocating for university divestment of Israel until the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank ends. An op-ed.

The U.S. government is not grabbing these names out of a hat. They are being fed to them by two extremely sketchy and shadowy groups with deep ties to the Israeli State – the Canary Project and Betar. We'll tell you what we know about these groups and how they select people to go on their McCarthyite blacklist that is now allowing a foreign country to dictate the limits of free speech in the United States, including in academic institutions.

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I try hard to avoid hyperbole in my journalism, my reporting, my analysis, or my commentary. I think it just is very discrediting. It's also a kind of softball just to leap to the most dramatic rhetoric possible the minute you want to make a point about something. Therefore, I say this with all due deliberation, with all consideration, I really do believe the United States is currently engaged in confronting one of the worst free speech crises we've confronted in many years. And I say that as somebody who is extremely vocal and relentless in denouncing the Biden administration's various ways to censor political speech from coercing Big Tech platforms to remove dissent, to imposing all kinds of orthodoxies, to endorsing and financing a disinformation industry deciding to censure. What we're having now is a full-frontal attack on the core rights of free speech, free discourse and academic freedom. That is an incredibly important American value: academic freedom.

Our country was built on the principles of the Enlightenment. One of the things that Enlightenment thinkers most stood for was the idea that in society generally, but especially in academic institutions, you'd need to have full freedom to question and prod at, and dissect, and deny, and call into question the most cherished orthodoxies. It was crucial to have at least one place in society that was not just tolerant of but encouraging of the most sacred and valued priorities to be questioned and denied. That's what academia is for. That's what academic freedom is about. And all of that is being very rapidly subverted by a Trump administration that came in promising to end censorship and restore the values of free speech in the United States.

They're doing so for the very obvious reason that they want to prevent American academia and American college campuses, but people in general, from feeling free to criticize the state of Israel or question the U.S. financing of Israel and the relationship with Israel, where we give them billions of dollars and arm them. They want to create a climate where people are afraid of what the consequences will be if they speak negatively or critically about Israel and it's already having major repercussions.

Sometimes the Trump administration and officials are directly punishing people or demanding censorship. Other times the threat that they have hovering over them is causing self-censorship, which often is one of the most pernicious forms of censorship – people and institutions start anticipating what the punishment might be if they exercise free speech so they voluntarily renounce it to keep the government pleased and happy and at bay.

Here is the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Trump's former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who just yesterday appeared in public to openly boast about it and celebrate the fact that the Trump administration is supposedly waging a war against bigotry on campuses – just like the liberal left said they were doing – and is curbing speech in the name of stopping hate speech and racism, just like the liberal left was doing. But at least the American liberal left was doing so in the name of protecting people in the country, protecting Americans, protecting America, that was their ostensible goal. This now is a censorship regime really being engineered by a foreign government and its loyalists inside the United States. And they're more than happy to tell you that:

Video. Benjamin Netanyahu, David Friedman, GPO. March 30, 2025.

So, remember the conservative critique of the censorship regime that came from on college campuses? Liberals would constantly depict whatever speech they disliked as inciting violence against minorities, being racist, transphobic, xenophobic, whatever, and then would say, “No, this isn't speech. This is violence, this is incitement, this is bigotry” and not only would they do that, but a lot of the censorship, including banning President Trump from Facebook and Twitter while he was still in office, were based on the argument that, “No, this isn't speech that he is uttering and spreading, it's incitement to insurrection.” And there's a big difference, they said, between speech and hate speech, or free speech and bigotry, or free speech and incitement. These are all the arguments now being marshaled, not by our leaders, but by a leader of a foreign country who's proudly patting us on the head for engaging in the kind of censorship that he loves and telling other countries they better do the same. Why does this little country that we finance, and it depends on the American taxpayer, have any say in what people can say at college campuses and how we can protest?

It's so ironic because a lot of conservatives or Trump supporters justify the deportation of students from college campuses by saying, “Well, they're just foreigners, they're guests in our country. Foreigners have no right to comment on our policies, to denounce anything, to protest against anything.” It’s a strange principle, the idea that you lure foreign students to your universities because that's how you get a lot of brain drain into your country – which both Elon Musk and Trump said was necessary when they defended H-1B visas increasing – and then tell them you can stay for eight years and get degrees, you just have to keep your mouth shut about anything political.

But here you have Benjamin Netanyahu. Not only did he say this, but last week he mocked, denounced and attacked the American judiciary and the American legal system because he's facing a corruption case and wants Americans to think that the persecution of Donald Trump was similar to his persecution, but then also the president of El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, went on to Twitter and just mocked a court order that came from our judiciary saying, “Whoopsie ” – mocked our court system, mocked our legal system. and a lot of people keep saying foreigners have no right to comment on our politics. “We're all, oh, thank you. Thank you, Prime Minister Netanyahu. Thank you, President Bukele, for standing up to the American judiciary.”

There are all those Israelis applauding. The Trump administration is going to go to war against not anti-Black racism, not misogyny, not transphobia, not xenophobia, not Islamophobia. Who cares about any of those types of bigotries? We're going to let those reign free, because any attempt to stop those on campus, that's censorship, that's woke ideology. David Friedman tells everybody the government is going to do a lot to fight bigotry in the United States – is that the government's role now? – including putting people in prison for saying anything antisemitic – not even antisemitic, but antisemitic in their view. They think that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

These people think that antisemitism doesn't mean denying the Holocaust or talking about the inherent degeneracy of Jews like classic antisemitism, they've expanded radically the definition of that term. In fact, the Trump administration is imposing on various administrations and colleges the requirement that they expand what antisemitism means to include a whole range of common credits of Israel. We showed you that many times. The House actually passed a law to implement and formalize that expanded definition of antisemitism, which actually is implemented in the EU, because they have a lot of hate speech codes that JD Vance went to Europe and said this is antithetical to our values – but that censor in the name of hate speech is exactly what the Trump administration is doing.

Here's what the Trump administration did to Columbia University, from CNN on March 7:

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We went over the letter that came from the Trump administration to Columbia. It’s not just that they demanded, not foreign students, but American students who protested Israel and the Israeli war in Gaza and the Biden administration's policy of financing that war. They demanded that American students, including American Jewish students, be severely punished, suspended and/or expelled. That was one of the Trump administration's demands of Columbia, and they have now started to expel citizens of the United States who participated in those protests.

On top of that, the Trump administration also demanded that the Columbia Middle East Studies program, which has been for decades a target of Israel's strongest loyalists in the United States – Bari Weiss got her start at Columbia, the anti-cancel culture queen, as a 19 and 20-year old agitating for all sorts of Arab professors or Israel critics to be fired. That was her starting point. Then, at some point, she rebranded herself as a free-speech warrior but never gave up those ideas.

Now, the Middle East studies program that the Bari Weisses of the world have long aided, has to be put under receivership, meaning someone from outside the department, no longer the chair of the department, controls what their curriculum is, obviously to make sure that it's pro-Israel. Our academic institutions and every professor who works there and everything that is taught must be aligned with the view of the Israeli government and supporters.

On top of that, they're demanding as well that this expanded hate speech definition of antisemitism, the IHRA definition that we've gone over many times before. You're not allowed to say the Jews killed Jesus, you're not allowed to accuse certain Jewish people of having primary loyalty to Israel, even if you think it's true. A whole long list of things. You can't apply “double standards” to Israel meaning you can't criticize them in a certain way unless you make sure you're criticizing every other country the same. You're not allowed to call Israel a racist endeavor, even though you can say that about every other country freely, including the United States. It is actually, an assault to outlaw Israel critics and protests against Israel, including peaceful ones.

I'm telling you, right now, so far, the deportations have been confined to people who are green card holders. You're married to an American citizen, your wife is eight months pregnant, your American wife, she's about to give birth, and you get deported because you participated in a protest against Israel, even though you're a permanent resident here. But I'll tell you what is next. I promise you, what is next is that they're going to take American citizens who are naturalized American citizens, like Elon Musk or Melania Trump, people not born in the United States but who came to the United States and became naturalized, they're going to strip them of their citizenship and, because they're no longer citizens, they can be immediately deported, and they're going to deport them for the crime of criticizing Israel.

As I said, it's already affecting the free speech rights of Americans when you're imposing constraints on academic freedom at colleges. You're obviously affecting not just foreign students if you don't care about that, but also everyone on the campus, including American students, including Jewish students, sacred Jewish students who you want so badly to defend and protect and keep safe. You want to hold them close and hug them. You're also causing an erosion of the free speech rights of substantial minorities of Jewish students and Jews in general, who opposed the Israeli War in Gaza.

Since October 7, four different Ivy League American presidents have been forced out of their jobs all over the same issue, Israel, and allowing bigotry on campus to thrive – antisemitism. Two of them at Columbia, one at Harvard and one at the University of Pennsylvania. The latest Columbia president was just forced out on Friday, even though she agreed to all the Trump administration's terms. Someone claimed, The Free Press claimed, Bari Weiss's pro-Israel thing claimed, that she had said privately, “Yes, I'm agreeing to these, but I'm going to slow them off. We're not going to just rush and do this.”

The Trump administration and Israel supporters went ballistic and forced the second university president of Columbia out in a year and replaced her with somebody who actually has appeared on the stage of AIPAC to vow bipartisan loyalty to Israel to talk about the need to keep bipartisan support and financing of Israel. She's a Jewish woman who has appeared at AIPAC, and still, there's already a move to get rid of her, too, because she's insufficiently pro-Israel. You can be a Jewish woman who goes to AIPAC, gets up on the stage, and talks about the importance of keeping bipartisan support for Israel, and still be insufficiently pro-Isreal to the point where the government won't allow you to assume the presidency of Columbia.

Here from The Wall Street Journal, on Friday:

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In America, the government isn't supposed to dictate the curriculum, the administration, the teaching, or what can be done at our lead colleges. That's supposed to be left up to academics and professors. That is what academic freedom means: the ability to teach and to express yourself how you want, free of government coercion and control. This would be like if the Biden administration came to universities and said, “We're going to take away all your funding unless you fire every last conservative. You still have a few conservatives on the campus, they oppose affirmative action, they oppose DEI. We think that's racist. You have to get rid of them.” Or who says that there are only two genders and that's transphobic and incites violence against trans people, you have to get rid of them. Do you think conservatives would be supporting that and saying, “Oh yeah, that's the role of the government, that is totally fine”? Of course not, they would be screaming that Joe Biden was a tyrant, they should be doing the same now that Trump is doing, which is just in defense of a different group.

Is this going on a crusade to purge bigotry from American campuses, using a combination of government coercion and control and expanded hate speech codes, what conservatives wanted? Because I had always understood that conservatives were deeply offended by those sorts of things and the reason I thought that was because they'd been screaming that for as long as I can remember.

One of the weird things, really weird things, is that there are a lot of members of the Republican Party in Congress who are not Jewish but who are more fanatical about Israel than almost every Jewish member of Congress. They love to speak for all Jewish people, they've irrigated to themselves the right to speak for Jewish people.

Here is Congressman Mike Lawler, of New York, who is not Jewish, despite how much he loves to purport to speak to Jewish people everywhere, kind of the white savior hero who comes down and protects all Jews. So grateful to him, so, so grateful. Kind of like a Robin D'Angelo type, but for Jews. And the new president of Columbia, the third one, is Claire Shipman, who, as I said, is a Jewish woman who has actually been at AIPAC. She's married to Obama's former press secretary, Jay Carney, who's served for the last decade as the spokesperson for Amazon. These are not actually far-left radicals. These are like corporatist types. Claire Shipman is very much pro-Israel.

But here is Mike Lawler on Friday saying she has to go because she's not Jewish enough. He quotes the tweet of the New York Post.

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She's the third president. She barely is in office like six seconds and he's saying, “You're offensive to all Jewish people. Step down.” Who is Michael Lawler to speak for all Jewish students? Huge numbers of Jewish students participated in those protests, we had them on our show. In fact, so many Jewish students were participating in the protest that they had a Shabbat dinner every Friday night inside the protest encampment.

Here is Claire Shipman, the new president, who Michael Lawler and many others think is insufficiently pro-Israel to lead Columbia. Here she was on the stage at AIPAC with the Democratic Senator Chris Coons, a virulent supporter of Israel, obviously very bipartisan, and they talked about the need to maintain bipartisan support for AIPAC.

Here's just a little snippet.

Video. Claire Shipman, Chris Coons, AIPAC. March 6, 2018.

This is Columbia Spectator, on March 30

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She was married to Jay Carney, who served as the White House press secretary under former president Barack Obama. It's a little background on her. This is not some far-left pro-Hamas radical or whatever they're trying to imply she is to force out the third Columbia president in the last seven months over this one foreign country.

Here is Minouche Shafik, who was testifying before the House and listening to what he had to say about Columbia's administration.

Video. Minouche Shafik, C-SPAN. April 17, 2024.

I am somebody who has spent eight years, denouncing what I regarded as baseless or excessive attacks on Donald Trump, attempts to malign him and fabrications of scandal. I don't just go around or flexibly criticize the Trump administration. But when I see, as somebody who really does believe in the Constitution, who really does believe in the value of free speech and academic freedom and free discourse and free protest and due process speaking of other issues as well, I'm not going to sit by and watch college campuses have their free speech rights destroyed in service of a foreign government and not say anything.

The same thing is now spreading to Harvard. This is from today, March 31.

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The Trump administration is not threatening to withdraw federal funding for all universities, just the ones that they think are allowing too much anti-Israel speech.

Let me just read you this quote pretending this is coming from the Biden administration.

This administration [the Biden administration] has proven that we will take swift action to hold institutions accountable if they allow racism against black people, transphobia, or xenophobia to fester.

[…] [a senior official at the General Services Administration] added. “We will not hesitate to act if Harvard fails to do so.”

Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, was not immediately available for comment. […] (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)

I should add that Harvard's current president is Jewish – and I think it's like six out of the last seven, have been Jewish. Many of their major donors are Jewish, their faculty is filled with people who are Jewish, who hold all kinds of views about Israel, some vehemently pro-Israel like Alan Dershowitz was all those decades he was at Harvard, some critical of Israel mildly but still supportive of Israel, some vocally – it's a diversity of opinion which is what we're supposed to have.

But he has previously emphasized the importance of federal money to the university’s operation.

[…] “We could not carry out our mission the way we do now without substantial federal research support, nor could we provide the benefits to the nation that we do now without that support,” Dr. Garber said in a December interview with The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper. (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)

Again, this is not studying undergraduate programs. This is funding the most sophisticated medical centers and hospitals and scientific research into cures. This is why we have these kinds of government funding.

Marc Andreessen, who was one of the people credited correctly with developing the modern internet, in the late 1990s – credited with developing the browser Netscape that was then sold to Microsoft – has now become a very vocal Trump supporter. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has people placed all around the Trump administration. He spent time at Mar-a-Lago, a lot of time, in the transition. He's a Trump supporter.

He gave an interview to the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, on January 17, just a few days before the administration was to take office, the Trump Administration. The title was: “How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms” - Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism. (The New York Times. January 17, 2025.)

But one of the things Marc Andreessen pointed out in this interview was that the reason the United States developed the internet, the reason the United States became a leader of the internet, the reason Silicon Valley exists and that drove so much American wealth is because the U.S. government-funded so many academic research institutions to do research into the internet, into browsing, into all of that. That's why we fund American academic institutions because it produces innovation that benefits the entire country. The U.S. government is not forced to fund research institutes at universities but it would cripple innovation in the United States if you did that.

But that's not even what's happening here. The Trump administration is not defunding American academic institutions. They're using that funding as leverage to force them to be less permissive about criticism of Israel on their campus. And they're all complying because as the President of Harvard said, we wouldn't be the leading academic institute that we were if we lost federal funding. It's not the classroom that makes us the leading Institute. It is that we can attract the leaders of each field, knowing that they'll have the opportunity to engage in research that leads to cures and to innovations, that then benefit the entire country. The Trump administration is not defunding universities. They're just using it as leverage to suppress speech they dislike.

Here from the Jewish News Syndicate on March 31, 2025, this happened on Friday night as well:

Head of Harvard’s Middle East studies center told to step down by end of year

Rabbi David Wolpe, a former member of Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group, said that the change in leadership was “good news.” (Jewish News Syndicate. March 31, 2025.)

Just like they're changing the control of Columbia's Middle East study program, they're doing the same at Harvard now, so that people like Rabbi David Wolpe can step in, just like Benjamin Netanyahu was celebrating and like David Friedman was threatening, to outlaw criticism of Israel. They've always been very concerned that American academic institutions were the epicenter of protests against Israel. And this is not the first time, by the way, that disruptive protests have happened across American college campuses. It was one of the things that helped stop the Vietnam War. Protests were often violent and disruptive at colleges across the United States in the '60s against the Vietnam War in favor of the civil rights movement, far more so than these protests were.

One of the things that scares Israel and its supporters so much is that the epicenter of activism against the apartheid regime in South Africa that helped to bring it down was a protest movement throughout American campuses demanding that their schools divest from South Africa to bring down the apartheid regime. And that's why Israel wants to make it illegal. In many places in Europe, they've done so and have started to do so in the United States, too, to advocate a boycott of Israel.

So, Israel looks at the United States and they're like, where do we need to go to stop this growing sentiment against our country? Oh, well, TikTok. They allow a lot of Israel criticism. We need to ban that. The EDL said ban that, and that's what caused enough votes from the Democratic Party to finally ban TikTok – not in fear of China, but a fear that after October 7, TikTok was allowing too much pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel speech. So, they got rid of TikTok, or at least, at some point, they're going to force a sale or ban it. And then college campuses are the other place, and that's what their target is. It's a foreign country targeting the civil liberties, free speech rights and academic freedom of our country, which have long been crucial to our country's prosperity.

If all that wasn't enough, here at NYU, as reported by the Canadian outlet CTV News on March 30, the headline: “Climate of Fear’: Montreal Doctor Says NYU Cancelled Her Presentation”

Dr. Joanne Liu, the former international president of Doctors Without Borders said the abrupt cancellation speaks to the “climate of fear” universities in the U.S. are now living under in which they preemptively “self-censor” themselves to avoid retaliation. (CTV News. March 30, 2025.)

Doctors Without Borders is an organization that goes around to the most deprived and repressed places, usually in war zones, and they have volunteer doctors from around the world who go and work on the people who are facing starvation or need surgery because of bombs. It's like one of the most noble things you could do, become a doctor and then join Doctors Without Borders.

She was going to change her speech to appease NYU and, particularly, the Trump administration. She wasn't going to criticize the cuts to USAID quite harshly. She would tone down her rhetoric about how many people were killed in Gaza. I don't know if she was going to dilute the numbers to please the government. But even after she offered to edit the slides in her speech, she said the university apologized and said they had to cancel.

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We have covered the individual cases of students who are legally in the United States who in secret, the State Department and Marco Rubio revoked their green card or their visa, meaning they weren't given notice to come and contest it or prove they didn't do anything wrong – they were just canceled summarily – and they instantly become illegal in the country and then they send ICE agents to accost them in their apartments or on the street, detain them and grab them, put them in a detention facility, and then ship them to Louisiana. Even though they have no connection with Louisiana: the government's hoping that Louisiana has more conservative judges who will defer to the Trump administration and deport people even if it's for their free speech rights.

The government is not collecting its own lists. They're relying on pro-Israel activist groups. Two in particular.

So, here's The New York Times on what happened. There you see the headline:

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Federal Government Detains International Student at Tufts

The university was told that the student’s visa had been terminated, its president said in a late-night email to students and faculty members.

The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, had a valid student visa as a doctoral student at Tufts, according to a statement from her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai. Ms. Ozturk, who is Muslim, was heading out to break her Ramadan fast with friends Tuesday night when she was detained by agents from the Department of Homeland Security near her apartment in Somerville, Mass., Ms. Khanbabai said.

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her,” the lawyer said. “No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of.”

A statement attributed to a senior spokesman for Homeland Security claimed on Wednesday that Ms. Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of” Hamas considered “grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.” (The New York Times. March 26, 2025.)

Now, I think it's important to note here that just like you'll be called antisemitic if you criticize Israel too much, you'll also be called pro-terrorist or pro-Hamas if you oppose the Israeli war in Gaza, or question American funding and financing of Israel, or why the American taxpayer has to pay for Israel's wars. You'll immediately be called pro-terrorist or pro-Hamas. And this is a tactic from the war on terror that Bush and Cheney used all the time. If you said, hey, you're imprisoning people in Guantánamo and elsewhere indefinitely with no due process, and a lot of the people you're accusing have turned out to be innocent, shouldn't you give them a hearing? They would say, “You are pro-terrorist. Why are you defending terrorists?”

I get called pro-Hamas every day, even though I've never uttered a single peep of praise or support for Hamas, just like I haven’t for Putin. I'm called pro-Putin all the time. It's the tactic. I was called pro-terrorist when I was opposing the War on Terror and the civil liberties abuses.

When they say pro-Hamas, they don't mean someone praises Hamas or justifies Hamas, all you have to do is criticize Israel, and that's enough to be called pro-Hamas.

Here is the Washington Post, and this video circulated everywhere, showing how chilling this detention was. Remember, this is a person legally inside the United States who just gets accosted. Notice how her phone is taken while she's using it, which will enable Homeland Security then to look in her phone and find out who she's talking to, find out everything about her with no warrants. Watch what happens.

Video. The Washington Post, Tufts University. March 27, 2025.

You see an unmarked car that pulls up and just plainclothes officers, not even identified, get out. You wouldn't have any idea they were plain close. Ironically, they're wearing masks, even though the Trump administration is demanding that protesters get banned from wearing masks, and now they're costing her. She has her phone, and they just grab her. She has no idea who these people are. They could be anybody. She's a Ph.D. student. They grabbed her phone, forcibly grabbed her phone, and then they surrounded her and they detained her. She says, “Can I just speak to the cops?” And they say, “We are the police.” She had no idea that she was being detained by the police because they were in plain clothes, they have unmarked cars, Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in the student paper criticizing university leaders for their stance on the war in Gaza. That's her crime.

I mean, this looks like the most dystopian, repressive country you can think of, where you write an op-ed, you're a law-abiding citizen, you're a PhD student, you've never been charged with a crime in your life, and then a bunch of Homeland Security agents descend upon you, grab your phone, and then grab you, and put you in a prison, and ship you to Louisiana, a state you've never been to, have no connection with because they don't like an op-ed that you wrote? Not even the government doesn't even bother to claim that she did anything other than write the op-ed.

Here is the Assistant Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin, on March 26:

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First of all, she has never, in her life, there's zero evidence, uttered a peep of support for Hamas. We don't even know that she participated in any protests. All we know is that she wrote an op-ed that is the only basis for her detention that anybody has cited, and there's nothing remotely in this op-bed that could be construed as supporting Hamas.

Notice this slimy rhetoric that Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. That is an absolute lie. Hamas is an organization devoted to one cause and purpose only, which is defending Gaza and Palestinians from what they perceive as aggression by Israel. They've never engaged in terrorism in the United States or targeted American citizens. This is one of the things that the Israeli supporters try to say about why the United States should go fight Israel's wars, that, oh, one of the remaining hostages, one of the only living remaining hostage, he was American, is still in Hamas custody.

Do you know why he ended up in Hamas custody, this American citizen? Because he left the United States to go to Israel, and he joined a foreign army, the IDF, and he was in uniform, in a tank, when Hamas took him. Usually, we'd call that a prisoner of war. He's an active-duty soldier. But the idea that if you're an American citizen and you go join some foreign army and as part of your fighting in that army, you get captured, now the United States has a responsibility to wage war to rescue you.

Obviously, if they join the American military and that happens, of course, the United States has a responsibility, but not when you go fight in a foreign army. They're using this, they're exploiting this to say, “Oh look, they are targeting Americans too.” They had a bunch of Thai citizens there. Do you think they're targeting Thailand? These are people who are in Israel.

Here's Marco Rubio when being asked about what the justification is for having deported this Turkish PhD student:

Video. Marco Rubio, C-SPAN. March 27, 2025.

She didn't do any of that. This is a completely deceitful statement designed to mask what they're actually doing. They promised mass deportations of people in the country illegally. They're not giving that to you. Joe Biden deported more people in these two months of last year than Donald Trump did. Obama deported way more. The immigration group's called Obama the Deporter-in-Chief because of how many people he deported.

They have closed the border almost entirely. It's down 94%. Sometimes the deportation count comes from deporting people when they're detained at the border. But there's nothing even remotely like mass deportations taking place of people in the United States illegally. Their priority is not even people in the United States illegally. Their priority is people who are in the United States who committed the ultimate crime of criticizing Israel and they're lying to justify it.

Everybody knows she didn't vandalize anything. No one suggests that she did anything illegal, anything aggressive, anything violent. The only reason she ended up on these lists of pro-Israel groups that are dictating to the U.S. government who can and cannot stay in the United States is because she wrote this op-ed.

I want to show you that op-ed in a second, just to let you decide if you think it's anything radical, let alone remotely pro-Hamas or glorifying terrorism, other than unless you think that criticizing Israel or opposing Israel is inherently pro-terrorist, which is what a lot of people think. They just don't usually admit it.

Rubio’s claims are all false claims. False claims. Some of the leading protesters at Columbia who occupied Hamilton Hall were American Jewish students who are now expelled because the Trump administration required it. So, congratulations on protecting American Jews by getting them expelled from college for protesting. Fantastic. Jews all over are very grateful.

Their priority is to protect Israel from criticism and activism and none of the people who have been removed, certainly not the ones who have become controversial, did anything remotely like vandalize building. This is all Marco Rubio's fabrications.

Here is the criminal op-ed that this student wrote, along with three other students, at Tufts. And the headline is:

Try again, President Kumar: Renewing calls for Tufts to adopt March 4 TCU Senate resolutions (The Tufts Daily. March 26, 2025.)

On March 4, the Tufts Community Union Senate passed 3 out of 4 resolutions demanding that the University acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, apologize for University President Sunil Kumar’s statements, disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel. These resolutions were the product of meaningful debate by the Senate and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law.

Unfortunately, the University’s response to the Senate resolutions has been wholly inadequate and dismissive of the Senate, the collective voice of the student body. … Although graduate students were not allowed by the University into the Senate meeting, which lasted for almost eight hours, our presence on campus and financial entanglement with the University via tuition payments and the graduate work that we do on grants and research makes us direct stakeholders in the University’s stance.

We reject any attempt by the University or the Office of the President to summarily dismiss the role of the Senate and mischaracterize its resolution as divisive. … We, as graduate students, affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people and reject the University’s mischaracterization of the Senate’s efforts.

We urge President Kumar and the Tufts administration to meaningfully engage with and actualize the resolutions passed by the Senate. (The Tufts Daily. March 26, 2025.)

Is that like terrorist greed? Is that something that should result in your deportation, that you express views as a graduate student in a Tufts newspaper? A community in which you've been invited to participate, not just to study and keep your mouth shut. There's no free country in the world where that's the rule for entering the country.

Again, the government, Marco Rubio, is not finding these people. Homeland Security is not finding them, ICE is not finding them. ICE isn't even looking for them, they're here legally. They only become illegal when Marco Rubio secretly revokes their green card or their visa because they criticize Israel. So, how do they know where to find these people?

There are two incredibly shady pro-Israel groups connected to Israel. Typically, their funding is completely anonymous. There's been reporting on where they get funding. Who they are even is anonymous. One of them is the Canary Mission, and they have been around now for a decade. If a student expresses in a classroom criticism of Israel, they take the student's name and put them on a website that has been highly funded so that it's the first Google result. If you enter that student's name when they go apply for work, it'll be, here's a list of all the anti-Semites on American campuses, while they're doxing students and professors and putting their name on the internet, these cowards will not say or identify themselves, who's behind this Canary mission. They have been quite boastful of the fact that their list is the one Homeland Security and the State Department is using to determine who gets removed from the country.

In other words, pro-Israel fanatics are dictating to the U.S. government who can and cannot stay in this country based on whether they love Israel or not, that is the literal truth of what is happening. I just don't understand how anybody who claimed to believe in free speech or the values of free discourse or academic freedom cannot be anything but enraged by this. Here's the Canary mission on March 27, boasting of their work to have her deported.

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They’re claiming credit. And then here is what they have to say about her. There you see:

AD_4nXdoWETtIWglQs8EWCgNXIFX9NKZK3fUPLGjMYpGfqVDMHLsNknAvEjyXgbIId8IafaqZ2_5vL0bPFandT7lNb9KuMUynnJl_EBQqTs9B18jwMjtlXHeKPnky0P6giP9AmzSrMbqDgg4YpPBR8fYd8Y?key=3zmm5dzhJSoKNbzQmVPvCqcV

AD_4nXftV3CEK3AyvpigCLWU00vTiXXaFqzPVJXCpfuzQDLixeq7kf-4-G4lmojrx5OkrM--NuAjkQ_989jGbbvxEpvTwfLKG03TdRe4F3Z_Ty6CLCRv_G4GrjDNMTA6b3HDvJcamS0ZWVEQaJbAMmRA8Gg?key=3zmm5dzhJSoKNbzQmVPvCqcV

This is the kind of thing they do. They put the person's picture, their name, and they pay a lot of money to promote the website to make sure that it becomes the first Google search. So obviously, it's a blacklist, like a McCarthyite list, and they label someone a terrorist and pro-Hamas simply because they oppose Israel.

So, on their dossier that they say is what caused her deportation, they're admitting the primary offense or primary transgression is publishing that op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that they disliked because it was critical of Israel. And now the government is obeying these pro-Israel groups on who to deport, not based on crimes they committed or property they destroyed or people they harassed or attacked, but based on their ideas about one foreign country, published in a very professional, very moderately stated op-ed.

Here's another one of the groups that is taking credit for it as well: Betar Worldwide. It is a radical pro-Israel group, considered radical even in Israel. And they too took credit:

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That's where the government's getting these names from, from these very sketchy Israel-connected groups of people they want out of the country for criticizing Israel.

Here's Tammy Bruce, the Department of State spokesperson being asked about all of this and here's what she said.

Video. Tammy Bruce, US Department of State. March 31, 2025.

So, these groups are out there taking credit. These groups, by the way, only have one cause, one mission: devotion to Israel. The United States and Americans are not part of the agenda, just this foreign country of Israel. And they're boasting about the fact that they're the ones who are telling Homeland Security and the State Department who to deport. When asked about it, the State Department won't deny that, they won't even confirm. They won't say how they're getting these names. Tammy Bruce refused to say whether Betar and the Canary Mission, as we know they are because they say so, are giving these lists to the U.S. government – Betar basically gave a thumbs up to her, said “Good job,” a little pat on the head again from an Israeli group so many people in Washington crave and will do anything for.

Here is the Jewish newspaper Forward, on March 10, doing a little profile:

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Jewish groups targeted Columbia grad Mahmoud Khalil — then ICE arrested him

Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus called to #DeportMahmoudKhalil days before immigration agents detained him

Ross Glick, a pro-Israel activist who previously shared a list of campus protesters with federal immigration authorities, said that he was in Washington, D.C., for meetings with members of Congress during the Barnard library demonstration and discussed Khalil with aides to Sens. Ted Cruz and John Fetterman who promised to “escalate” the issue. He said that some members of Columbia’s board had also reported Khalil to officials.

Glick, the activist who discussed the Khalil case with Senate staffers, was until recently connected to a far-right Jewish group called Betar, which began compiling a list last fall of international students involved in the protests and shared the database with the Trump administration. (Forward. March 10, 2025.)

Here is one of the things that Betar sayd in their Twitter account, on February 20, 2025. You see there is a tweet from Laila Al-Arian, who's been on our show before and they comment:

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You can blame Hamas, which I'm sure some of you do but any decent person by definition would lament the loss of this huge number of babies who didn't reach their first birthday and had their lives extinguished in this war. Not Betar who dictates to the U.S. government who can and cannot stay, they said on top of this list: “It's not enough, not enough. We demand blood in Gaza.” They looked at this endless list, these degenerates, these morally burdened creeps – you have to be a complete moral degenerate to look at a list of infants killed in a war, a long, long list, and say “It's not enough, we want more, we want more blood in Gaza.” That's who's in charge of deciding who loves Israel enough or not to stay in the United States.

These are the very noble people who are determining our immigration policy, not for illegal immigrants, for legal immigrants, whose crime is criticizing the foreign country that, for whatever reason, has an immense amount of influence in our own. Even though we pay for their wars and subsidize their society, it probably should be the other way around, we have a lot of influence on their country, but that's not how it works.

And then the New York Attorney General issued this statement on March 13 of this year:

AD_4nXfzqpEvB8QZF38a2pNWgJ21lZzKab6_4UjIsNJ408Ji5WJYiDYQJhNQbzCvuy3gDH9PPb3ZyD-i0-0CiFPgfwgiqbf0t3qgfGyQZvIxLuTOF3ah3PDiy34VEJsJix76TW0IEntFYA_prTr36XyJK7Y?key=3zmm5dzhJSoKNbzQmVPvCqcV

Re: Betar US — a/k/a Betar Zionist Organization

Dear Ali Abunimah,

I am writing in response to your correspondence to the Attorney General's Charities Bureau concerning Betar US - Betar Zionist Organization.

… [We] have contacted Betar US — Betar Zionist Organization Inc. to notify them of the requirement to register with the Charities Bureau. (Office of the Attorney General, NY. March 13, 2025.)

Everything about them is just very sketchy. They will not say where their funding comes from, they will not say who they are, while they drag everybody else's name into the spotlight and now have control over the U.S. government's deportation policies.

[…]

That's where we're headed. I know that there are a lot of people who are fine with it because they prioritize and revere Israel. And it's very, very difficult to get yourself to care about free speech when the views that you most hate are being targeted as opposed to the views that you agree with or feel an affinity with. But if you don't step up and defend free speech when it's those views that you most hate that are being silenced and punished and constrained and targeted, you don't actually believe in free speech at all.

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23 hours ago

Glenn Takes Your Questions on Tucker/Candace v. Nick Fuentes, the Unabomber Manifesto, Independent Media, and More

System Update #500

Welcome to episode 500 of System Update, which means that over the last two years, ever since we launched in December of 2022, 500 times I have sat my ass in this chair, and we have done a program for you. Today is number 500.

System Update, of course, is our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.

Every Friday night, as we're doing tonight, we take questions solely from our Locals members. We try to answer as many as we can.

You may have noticed as well that, inspired by Donald Trump, all art today in commemoration of 500 shows is in gold, not our typical green and black. No, everything is gold. We went all out for tonight. So, I really hope you enjoy it.

The first of which is from @alan_smithee. And he asked this:

One of the reasons why I didn't talk about it, despite obviously being extremely interested in all three of them and the subject matter that they cover, I obviously am a longtime friend of Tucker’s. I used to be on the show, I think more than anybody else, when he was on Fox News, and now, on his podcast, I'm on frequently, maybe the guest who's been on the most as well, not really sure. It's not a competition. I don't know why I have to keep saying I'm at the top of the charts, but just to indicate the frequency, and he's been on our show before. So, I definitely consider him a friend of mine. Candace, I have a good relationship; I would describe it as friendly. I've chatted with Nick over the years a little bit, certainly not near the same level of interaction.

I had this issue with Matt Taibbi. I was recently on Briahna Joy Gray's show, but also, I might have even been on a different show, where people were trying to ask me about Matt Taibbi and some of the criticism of him. Yeah, we've gotten questions about Matt Taibbi here as well over the past few months about things like his refusal to comment on Israel and Gaza, his infrequent commentary on the First Amendment issues raised by deporting students who speak critically of Gaza, the imposition of hate speech codes on American campuses by the Trump administration to shield Israel from criticism.

I'm very honest about the fact that when someone is your friend, when you consider someone as your friend, at least for me, I really don't feel comfortable publicly criticizing them. It's actually one of the reasons why I go out of my way not to be friends or have any social ties with the people I'm supposed to be covering in Washington – politicians, major journalists. I've always thought the fact that I don't live in New York or Washington to be one of the greatest benefits for my journalism because I'm not in the middle of their social scenes. I don’t owe any social niceties to them. I don't feel as though if I criticize them, it's going to affect my social life or put me in uncomfortable positions. I take the obligation of friendship seriously. If you're actually somebody's friend, it comes with loyalty, and part of that loyalty is that, if you have problems with what they do and say, you go to them privately. It would take a lot for me to publicly criticize or down someone I consider my friend.

I'm just being honest about that. Maybe that's not even the right thing to do. I'm not praising myself. I'm telling you how I feel personally. But again, I think if you live in New York, if you live in Washington, and you're integrated into that political media world, that is one of the reasons why it's so incestuous, why they constantly cover for each other, why there's so much groupthink within it.

They're always talking to each other, for each order. To be part of these social scenes on which they depend, you have to be welcome. Part of being welcome is that you don't stray too far from their dogma. And I've always aggressively kept a very distant arm's length from people in positions of power, from major media figures, so that I don't feel constrained about giving my honest views or critiques or analysis or reporting on them.

Occasionally, you do become friends with people almost by accident, who then end up in positions of power. Tulsi Gabbard is a good example. I have no problem criticizing Tulsi Gabbard because, whatever good relations I've had with her before, she's now the director of National Intelligence, and I'm not going to pull punches when I have critiques of Tulsi and I am also going to praise her only because I feel the praise is warranted.

So, sometimes you just have to accept the fact that somebody has risen to a particular position or entered a type of power position, and there's just no getting around the fact that your job requires honest critique. I don't feel like that's the case for any of the people involved here, Tucker, Candace, or Nick Fuentes. I don't feel like any of them is a government official. Obviously, they all do have a great deal of influence in very different ways. So, I don't want to side with any one of them, nor do I want to necessarily say that I think insults or criticisms that they've launched at each other are warranted, but it is an extremely important conversation, so I also don't want to avoid it entirely, because for one thing these are three people, and obviously people understand how influential Tucker and Candace are. They're arguably the two most prominent conservative journalists/pundits, influencers. Maybe you could put Charlie Kirk in there, maybe Ben Shapiro, but Tucker and Candace are both bigger. I mean, Tucker hosted the most-watched show in the history of cable news for five years at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox. He's been on TV for 25 years before that. And Candace is just a powerhouse. She's a force of nature. Whatever you think of her, whatever you think of the Macron stuff, whatever you're thinking for Israel stuff, whatever, I'm leaving that on the side, I'm just saying.

The fact of the matter is that when Candace left The Daily Wire, which, of course, is founded and run by Ben Shapiro after she had a falling out with Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, the other co-founder, over her criticism of Israel, which at the time was very mild – she was basically saying, “I don't think we should be bombing and killing children.” – that was pretty much the extent of it which caused this massive upheaval. A lot of people wondered, well, what is she going to do? Just like people wondered what Tucker Carlson was going to do, and they both went on to become, in my view, far more influential.

I'm not saying that Tucker's position in the mediocre system now is necessarily larger than it is at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox News, but being at the 8 o'clock hour on Fox News comes with a lot of constraints, as he found out when he got fired, despite being the highest rated host on all of cable news. And he's completely liberated of those constraints now, I mean, completely. Completely. He's financially set. Fox is still paying this gigantic contract. He also now has a very successful platform. I mean, he's not worried about saying or doing whatever he wants. I know he feels – he said this before, publicly, not just in our conversations – that there were a lot of things he did as part of his career that he deeply regrets. Just being part of the Washington Group.

I think he was raised there. I mean, he wasn't raised physically in Washington, but he eventually went there. But his father was very integrated into the U.S. deep state, that we could call it, ties to the CIA, he ran the propaganda arm of the U.S. government, Voice of America, was very, very integrated into that world. He grew up with a lot of wealth and privileges as he will tell you, and so when he got to Washington and got on TV very early on, he really was just immersed in this subculture that led him to believe, or at least not even necessarily to believe but to say a lot of things that he didn't really fully believe, or maybe that you can get yourself to believe things that you don't really believe because you just feel like it's what everyone around you expects you to say.

Unlike a lot of people who are guilty of the same thing, Tucker has probably more than anybody else been extremely candid about what he regrets, and not only what he regrets, I'm not just talking about support for the Iraq war, I'm talking about the whole support that he gave for George Bush, Dick Cheney, neoconservative ideology, and not just on foreign policy, but also on economic policy and I think it's often overlooked. Everyone sees his head in foreign policies. Even when he was at Fox, he was criticizing Trump for doing things like assassinating General Soleimani, saying, “This is not in our interest. This might be in the interest of neocons or Israel, but why would we risk a war with Iran when that's not in our interest?” He was saying things like that even on Fox. He probably was the single most influential figure who took a lot of MAGA people, a lot of people on the right, and turned them against the war in Ukraine every night.

I was on his show dozens of times talking about that war to the point where when he got fired from Fox, a bunch of Republican lawmakers ran to Politico or Axios anonymously and celebrated his firing and saying, “Oh, now our lives are going to be much easier. We can now fund the war in Ukraine without as much public pushback.” And that trajectory was because not just that he regretted what he had previously advocated and acknowledged his wrongdoing, but he was and is really determined to kind of repent for it. And he feels like the way to repent for it is by never again allowing himself to be blind.

He moved out of Washington, used to live in the middle of Georgetown, where Victoria Nuland lived, I think, down the street or the other street. I mean, that's where they all lived. Now, he lives in rural Maine. He also lives on an island in Florida. He purposely took himself to very isolated places that are completely detached from that world, for the same reason as I was just describing. Not only do you feel less constrained, but you see things more clearly. You don't wake up every day and immediately get surrounded by people who are just part of this blob of groupthink and so, you're able to analyze things from a distance. It’s sort of like if you go into a big city and you're on a street corner, the vision that you have of what the city looks like is radically different than if you fly over it because that distance from what you're looking at gives you a better perspective, or at least, maybe not even better, but different. And the same thing happens when you move out of Washington or New York, and you purposely stay away from it, you start to see things more clearly because you're not immersed in it. And I do find that extremely valuable.

I find that trajectory very, very positive. It's one of the reasons why, probably more than anything else that I've ever done, what caused much of the left turn against me, not all, but much, was number one, my refusal to get on board with Russiagate, but number two, my association with Tucker. I saw early on that there was a real movement within parts of the populist right, which you're now seeing in lots of different ways, not just questioning Israel and foreign policy and war, but also corporatism and the idea of economic populism. And yes, there are lots of deviations from it, but I mean Tucker and a few others were what made me see how real that was and how much of an opportunity there was, and not just to keep yourself in prison in the Democratic Party.

So, I do believe Tucker's trajectory is real. I do believe that he's sincere and genuine in what he's saying. You never know what's fully in a person's heart, not even your own heart. You can't know for certain. You can deceive yourself about your own motives, your own thoughts and even the people you're closest to, your friends. But I have enough confidence in how well I know him, not just professionally, but personally as well, the time we spent together, the time that we've talked, that I do believe that he's very authentic in what he's saying. I think his trajectory is continuing. I don't think he's stopped at the point where he's going to be. And I think it's been very positive on almost every level.

So that’s Tucker over here; then let's kind of put Candace in a similar position. I don't know Candace as well, so I can't comment to that degree of confidence about who she is and why she's doing what she's doing, but, two years ago, Candace worked at The Daily Wire, four years ago, she was in Jerusalem with Charlie Kirk celebrating Trump's move of the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, a long-time pipe dream, what seemed like a pipe dream of the furthest, most radicalized Greater Israel fanatics and their supporters in the United States. And there was very little criticism coming from Candace about Israel. In fact, the opposite was true.

In her case, she's a lot younger than Tucker, she's only been around for not all that long, and I know personally that when you start off doing this work and you're able to spend full time digging into things, if you're minimally a critical thinker, if you're minimally open-minded, your views are going to morph the more you learn, the more you dive into things, the more you experience things. That is healthy and normal. And I do believe that her views, which she most passionately expresses, to which she pays the most attention, are genuine, which isn't the same thing as saying I agree with them all and they're all positive. I'm just saying I believe she also believes the things she's saying. I don't think it's calculated. I don't think it's about grifting. If it were, she could have stayed at The Daily Wire. There are easier ways to make a popular path than doing what she does.

She defends Harvey Weinstein. She took up that case. There was hardly a public clamoring for that, especially among the audience that she cultivated. Also, the Macron stuff, all the stuff with Israel – she's been excluded from a lot of mainstream corporate media circles to which she used to have complete access and in which she could have risen without limits, obviously She’s very talented, like Tucker, she is a communicator, and she chose a much harder path, and I think that was through genuine conviction. There are many differences between Tucker and Candace, but for that purpose, you can put them together.

And then you have Nick Fuentes. And just for those of you who haven't seen it, I'm just going to give you this summary of what's happened in the past few months, not going back years. The short version of this is that Nick Fuentes is often very critical of people who seem like they're the closest to him politically. So, he spends a lot of time criticizing Charlie Kirk – I was going to say Ben Shapiro, but I don't think Ben Shapiro is remotely close to Nick Fuentes – but Charlie Kirk on the surface could be. He spent a lot of time criticizing Matt Walsh. And he has also hurled a lot of criticism and might even say insults toward Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson.

In response, Candace Owens invited him for the first time on her podcast. Although I do think they have far more views in common than differences, the podcast was a bit hostile. I would say it's, in part, because Candace had some acrimonious points to raise with him, but also because – and she played some of these clips, I mean, Nick Fuentes had very harshly attacked her and criticized her, calling her a bitch who doesn't know what she's doing, and if you're going to do that, the people who are your targets are not necessarily going to love you, and so this was really the triggering event.

She invited him to her podcast. He got a huge audience – between Candace and Nick Fuentes, who has a gigantic following online, in some ways you could argue he's as influential these days as Candace and Tucker, and maybe headed for even surpassing them, which again, generationally is natural – but because that interview was acrimonious and brought out a lot of tensions and personal conflicts, it kind of spilled over online because Nick left that interview and started really condemning Candace, accusing her of sandbagging him in the interview and the like, and then they had a big fight online.

And then, before you knew it, Tucker asked Candace to come to his podcast. So, you're now talking about Candace Owens on Tucker Carlson's podcast, obviously a gigantic interview. And both of them, I don't know if they planned it, but both of them talked about Nick Fuentes in an extremely derogatory way. I mean, Tucker did acknowledge that, which you cannot deny. It's kind of like you can hate Trump all you want, but there's no denying his charisma, his skill in communicating, and the fact that he's very funny.

For a long time, it was like heresy to say that, but there's no denying that that's true. I have no trouble admitting that people I can't stand are smart. I think Dick Cheney is very smart. I actually think Liz Cheney is very smart, just to give two examples, a lot of other ones as well. You can acknowledge the skills and assets that people have who you dislike or even despise. It’s not inconsistent. So, Tucker did acknowledge, like, look, Nick Fuentes is spectacularly talented. He is like a very rare, generational talent in terms of his ability to go before the camera, attract attention and be charismatic. But he's not like a ranter and a raver. Nick Fuentes is very well read, very, very informed. There aren't a lot of people who know more about the topics Nick Fuentes covers than Nick Fuentes does. It's very impressive. And that combination of being very charismatic, an extremely adept communicator, just kind of a natural camera presence, and having really smart insights that are grounded not in sensationalism or blind ideology, but lots of reading and thinking and critical evaluation, it's very potent. That's the reason why he's becoming so popular that even people at the heights of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson can't really ignore it anymore.

They talked about Nick Fuentes as though he were just sort of some loser, like Tucker was saying, like, “How did he become so influential? He was just this gay kid living in his mother's basement in Chicago.” And I don't think Tucker quite meant it that way, but that is how some of it came off. Both agreed that he was some sort of psyop to destroy the right, that he maybe was a Fed working for the CIA.

That led Nick to do a series of shows, a couple of segments, where he just tore into Tucker and Candace, particularly Tucker, in a way that suggests that he was: “How can you possibly call me this, Psyop, or this operative, or this person who works for the CIA, when you spent your whole life inside these circles? Candace Owens was the one working for Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson was working for Rupert Murdoch, making millions; Nick Fuentes wasn't.

Nick's basic point was, like, you’re all very late to this game, like criticizing Israel, talking about the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States. You've only started doing this last year, whereas I've been doing it for years. This is what I think is at the heart of the matter: there are people who have been talking about Israel in this way for a long time. Noam Chomsky did, Norman Finkelstein did.

One of the most important events was in 2007 when two of the most prestigious political scientists and international relations scholars in the United States, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote a book called “The Israel Lobby.” First, it was an essay in the London Review of Books, and then it turned into this massive tome, this 700-page book. It’s footnoted to the hilt because they're scholars, and they wrote the book that way. At the time, nobody on the mainstream was willing to say that. It was pretty much confined to the left, where you were free to say it.

So, at the time, I was more associated with the left, perceived as being on the left. So, I was saying all these things for many years, but it wasn't all that risky for me because of the political camp that people perceived that I was in. I've always had one foot in that left-wing camp back then and one foot in the kind of libertarian, more independent camp, but in both of those camps it was totally fine, totally even welcome to talk about why we do so much for Israel, the evils of Israel, how they control our politics, how we go to war for them, how much money we spend to support them.

So, I wasn't taking any risks – I've taken risks in my career, but I don't consider that as one – but Nick Fuentes, when he started doing it, was 18 years old, and he had this very promising future inside conservative media. At 18, he'd already been spotted as a talent. He had small shows, but he was making connections with and networking with some of the people who were very influential inside corporate media. People now forget, because now there's a lot of space for talking this way about Israel, but at the time, there was basically none.

Before Donald Trump, there was almost nobody on the right willing to talk this way about Israel. You had Pat Buchanan, who did it for a long time, going back to the ‘80s, and he was viciously smeared as an anti-Semite. You had Ron Paul, who did the same thing. And then you had Trump kind of come in and create this space, and Nick Fuentes started really looking into it. I'm going into this not because of the personalities, but because I think they raise very broader issues about how all of this has evolved, not just for them, but for the broader discourse.

Fuentes started off in conservative politics. At first, he thought Israel was our greatest ally and we have to support them: all the standard Republican and conservative views that have dominated both Republican and Democratic Party politics for decades. But then, the more he started questioning it, the more he started becoming vocal about it. And the more he became vocal about it, the more he became shunned inside the conservative media world, in which he had a very bright future. And rather than shutting up, as he was told to do, knowing that that might be better for his career, he couldn't. He just doesn't have that personality type. And he just had to keep examining it and keep saying it, and to say that Nick Fuentes paid a price for that is an understatement. Nick Fuentes has been excluded and booted out of every conceivable precinct of conservative media, even ones that consider themselves radical, dissident and far-right ones. I was playing on the mainstream ones.

He was physically banned from going to Charlie Kirk's “Turning Points USA” and lots of other conferences like that. He was fired from the media platforms he was starting to develop. He was shunned by the friends that he had made, younger people on the side of the conservative movement. Then, it escalated from there. He got banned from almost every social media platform, including X. Elon Musk eventually reinstated him once he bought X, where he now is, but the only platform where he could be was Telegram. Now, he's on Rumble because Rumble is a genuine free speech platform. He has a show on Rumble that he does, I think, every night or four nights a week, and has found a good-sized audience. But really, it was on Twitter that he got his most attention, and that's why they banned him from Twitter in the pre-Musk era. But it wasn't just that.

He wasn't just silenced and banned throughout all social media; he was also debanked. He had bank accounts closed, because of his political views, by major banks in the United States. He would get rejected for banking applications. He was put on a No-Fly list, which is the first time I really spoke about Nick, when I raised serious concerns about No-Fly lists being used in this way. His career has been severely impeded, not from what people believe are his racist views about Black people or immigrants; tons of people have those views and are perfectly welcome and fine in right-wing circles. The sole cause of it was his opposition to Israel and his questioning of the power of the Jewish lobby to keep the United States subservient to Israel. It just wasn't said. It was just a taboo. It was one of the third rails of American political discourse that would get anybody fired or destroyed for talking about it.

Now, a lot of people talk about it, and it's become almost mainstream, but back then, especially on the right, almost nobody did. He paid a huge price, personally, financially, for his career, for his reputation, for his friendships, for his ability to get bank accounts. The government even put him on a no-fly list. And then last year, let's not forget, a homicidal maniac came to his house to try to murder him; shot two of his neighbors and killed them, and showed up at his house with a very large automatic weapon. This person eventually ended up being killed by the police. Another woman showed up at his house, a crazy liberal woman whom he had to pepper-spray. So, he's paid a big price for this.

I don't want to speak for him, but I definitely identify with this mindset. I've had it too, sometimes, which is that if you are the first person or one of the first people to kind of get out on that plank and you're taking the shots because of it and very few other people are willing to join you, and then at some point, it becomes a little safer to do it – I'm not saying it's safe; Tucker has also paid a price for it. I mean, half his audience has turned on him. He's now widely attacked by conservatives as being an anti-Semite, a Qatari agent, and Candace as well. So, it's not cost-free at all and Tucker didn't have to do it. He could have just ignored it. So, he's paid for a place too.

But there's a big difference between Tucker Carlson in his mid-50s with a gigantic multimillion-dollar-year contract with Fox News, coming from the family that he came from, versus Nick Fuentes as a 22-year-old enduring all of that, and he comes from no wealth, no privilege. I think the idea is Nick feels like he was out on that plank, taking all these arrows and punishments, and then, in part, I do think that he helped open the space on the right to start talking more about Israel in a more honest way. It is true that Tucker and Candace, for the most part, hadn't really ever talked about it until after October 7, when, as Nick says, it almost became inevitable. They could have both ignored it. They could've both just spouted a few light lip services to it, but both of them made it very central to their cause, which they didn't have to do. It was not in their interest to do as well. But they did do it.

But I think he feels like, I'm the one who actually paid the price for this. I was the one who was doing this earlier. Then the two of you come and now start doing it when it's a little bit safer, and also you're more protected because of your platform and standing in wealth, and you want to basically throw me in the garbage and declare me off limits, like, be the gatekeeper that says, you can go up to this point where Tucker and Candace are, but you can't go to Nick Fuentes; he's way too hateful or radical or dangerous or whatever. He feels like they're very late to the game, that he was braver, that he paid a bigger price and then they came along at an easier time and decided that they were the outer limits of where you can go on these discussions about Israel and the like. I'm not saying that's what I think, I'm saying that's what he thinks. I identify with that view.

I think he would be fine if they would get there and say Nick Fuentes is one of the first people doing this, let's welcome him on our show. But the fact that he's still excluded, to the fact that they called him gay, loser, basically, in his parents' basement, implied that he was working for the CIA or was an agent, probably of Qatar, to destroy the right. I think that's what made him start being resentful, and also, there is this class issue here, which is very real. It's not his fault; Tucker's mother left them when he was very young. Then his father married an heiress from the Swanson fortune. And although she wasn't his mother. It was his stepmother. Obviously, he was living with his father and his stepmother, and they had a very good relationship. She was very good to him. And he ended up having all these benefits from a very young age. First, great wealth and privilege, and then some amount of fame, and then more fame, and then more wealth. And that's more or less been his life.

Candace, I'm not sure about where she came from, what her family situation was, but once she got very big, she became very wealthy, and then she went to work for The Daily Wire, had a very lucrative contract there, and now she's married to, I heard Nick saying he's British royalty. I don't know if he is, maybe he is. I don't know one way or the other, but I know he's extremely wealthy. And I think there's a class issue there, too, which is like, you two purport to be the kind of warriors for this group of which you're not a part, which has kind of disaffected working-class white people. And Nick's saying, “I actually came from there and now suddenly you two, from your great mountain of wealth and privilege and lifelong or at least in Candace's case, years long, financial power and privilege and status and wealth, whatever, are coming in and trying to talk about me like I'm some loser and yeah I'm a loser in the sense that lots of white people have become trampled on by the United States and that is supposed to be what right-wing populism cares about.”

So, I thought it was very telling. I do think, if I’m totally honest, it's more personal than substantive. I think Nick feels a lot of resentment for how he's been treated.

I think Candace and Tucker feel resentment that they put a lot on the line to go where they went and one of the people who has a big influential audience, especially among young conservatives, have kind of gone to war with them. So, I think there's a lot of personal animist and personal resentment driving this, but there's also something very substantive here as well, which is about how people who are a little bit further along on the extremist train sometimes get attacked by the people who are less so, where they want to draw a line and kind of cut off the plank and have you fall off, even though you are on the plank first. I think Nick feels like that's being done to him, and I also think that there is a real class conflict that is driving a lot of this which is very much a part of the conservative world. I mean, huge amounts of conservative influencers, conservative pundits, conservative operatives who claim that they're there to speak for the working-class, for disaffected white people in the United States, are hanging out with billionaires every day and being funded by billionaires and meeting with billionaires and getting invites to the White House and to every center of power. And a lot of compromises are required to do that. And Nick's not willing to make them, and a lot of them are, and that is a substantive issue as well.

Tucker and Candace, I do think, and they don't get very many invites to those circles. Tucker more than Candace. Tucker because he's been around for so long. He's good friends with people in the Trump administration. He campaigned for Trump, Trump likes him, even though Trump repudiated him and insulted him because of his opposition to the war in Iran. But there are a lot of tension points inside the MAGA movement that are very real, even if some of them are personally driven. We're human beings, we all harbor jealousies and vindictive sentiments and resentments. It's a Herculean effort to try to exclude those as much as possible. We all have to try; some of us do better than others. But none of us is immune from that. So, I'm not suggesting that it's a huge character flaw. I'm just saying I do think that's part of it. But I also think, at least as big of a part, if not bigger, are some of these ideological and class issues who's sort of keeping one foot in decent society and who's willing to say fully what they think without it. And the last thing I'll say is, and this is sort of what I began by saying, which is you can like somebody or not, but it doesn't mean you should lie about their skills or their successes.

Nick Fuentes, I had a big online following for a few years, but it was very much a kind of online following that was almost like a cult following. It was like a very idiosyncratic group of people. They called themselves the Gropers. They didn't have a lot of cachet or influence outside of their circles, in part because Nick Fuentes wasn't invited anywhere into those more mainstream circles, or even less mainstream far-right circles. He kind of built his entire world himself.

There are tons of successful podcasters and influencers who really don't have an original thought. They know what they have to get up and say to validate their audience, to show their loyalty to a particular circle. They may even have some talent in terms of rhetoric and communication, some charisma, but they're not very critically minded. They don't do a lot of reading. I can't tell you how often I listen to some of the podcasters of the biggest audience, and you're just like: How are you so ignorant? How do you think about these things? Do you ever stop and breathe and reflect, or read anything? Like read anything substantive in or bound like a Wikipedia page? So, there's a lot of that.

But go listen to Nick Fuentes, if you haven't. And if you have preconceptions about what he is, I'm not saying that he doesn't say things that are provocative and deliberately cross lines on purpose sometimes, when he doesn't need to, just to cross them. Though I do think it's often purposeful, it's not just about a teenage transgressive instinct.

So, there are definitely things he said that are offensive. Genuinely so, and not offensive in that, oh my god, you've offended me. But things that I think he would even acknowledge, he often says he doesn't really mean it, he is prone to rhetorical excess, and it's part of the whole presence. But everything that he talks about, he is extremely knowledgeable about and well-versed in.

Next question is from @edonk77, who says this:

All right, the quick Ted Kaczynski story just for anyone who doesn't know it: out of nowhere in the ‘90s, in the Clinton administration, bombs started being sent to mailboxes. They were pretty sophisticated bombs, and they injured and even killed people. It was taking place across the country, and the FBI, the Attorney General, who at the time was Janet Reno, had no idea who was doing it.

The person who was doing it wrote a letter, believed by the New York Times and the Washington Post, saying, “I will stop if you publish my essay about my ideas and what's motivating me.” And obviously, the instinct of the government is to say, “We’re not going to give in to your terrorist tactics,” which in classic terrorism is kind of what it was: it was violence directed at civilians to induce political and social change. But it got to the point where the Justice Department was so desperate, they didn't have a first clue about who was doing that. It was like really the perfect crime. They agreed.

So, the Washington Post, maybe the New York Times, too, published this essay by Ted Kaczynski. The reason the Justice Department was willing to do it, aside from the fact that they thought it would help identify who it was, was because they thought what he had written was kind of just such lunacy, madness, that nobody would really read it and even think it deserved attention. And also, they were obviously made it known that the person who wrote that was the person who was sending these violent acts, the terrorist bombs, killing civilians or injuring civilians. They just assumed the hatred for him would overwhelm any interest in what he had to say.

On one of those bets, they actually turned out to be right, because publishing this essay caused, eventually, Ted Kaczynski's brother, to come forward and say, “I think this is my brother. His writing seems familiar. His ideas are familiar.” That's how they were able to eventually track Ted Kaczynski down.

Ted Kaczynski was a prodigy, recognized by everybody, as being brilliant – graduated high school at the age of 15, went to Harvard, completed a degree in mathematics. He then went to a PhD program, I think at the University of Chicago, at a top school, and then ended up teaching at Berkeley. And he was on the path of being the youngest ever tenured professor. He was a genuinely brilliant person, not brilliant in the sense that David Frum or Ann Abelbaum gets called brilliant, but genuinely brilliant.

But what they were very wrong about was the fact that nobody would have any interest in his essay, that nobody would connect to any of his ideas, and that the hatred for Ted Kaczynski, even if people were willing to be open-minded, would make people refuse to read a terrorist essay and take it seriously. At first, that was true, but over time, people started turning to it and saying, “You know what? This seems quite important. There are a lot of ideas here that are very, very relevant and seem prophetic and explain a lot of what previously had been inexplicable.”

I can't do a good job paraphrasing or summarizing the essay. It's very complex. It's highly worth reading. You can find it free online. It ended up being published in a longer-form, book format. You can read the essay in its long form or the book. But the basic theme of it was that technology was destroying humanity and the ability for human beings to live happy and fulfilled lives. And he traced it back to the Industrial Revolution, but then, how technology has advanced more and more. Before the Industrial Revolution, people were living in small towns, in villages, in nature like they had always lived on farms, had churches, had communities. They were very closely connected to their neighbors, to their extended family and they were living as human beings had lived for thousands of years. We're political and social animals. We need a connection. Without connection, human beings are going to go crazy.

Eventually, we got to the point Charles Dickens was talking about: the hideous realities of living in gigantic cities as factory workers, completely exploited, working extremely long days for little pay. It is breaking people physically, spiritually, psychologically and emotionally, and that is definitely one of the costs, as we've even gone further down this road.

And I think it's what Ted Kaczynski predicted, which is that the more technologically we come, the less human, the less fulfilled our natural human needs are. What it means to be human will be consumed by technology and turned into even more exploited tools and objects that barely look at us as humans, arranging our lives so that everything that gives us pleasure and is necessary for happiness is taken away.

And just quickly on this, there's a Netflix documentary, I've mentioned this before, called “Happiness,” which is a documentary designed to ask, what is human happiness? How do humans acquire happiness? What is necessary and what isn't? And what they found is that a lot of what data reflects is that in many societies where people are economically deprived and without a lot of technology, they're much happier than in much wealthier Western countries.

This documentary makes a very good case using science, not just pop psychology, about why, oftentimes, technological expansion and wealth expansion undermine human happiness. Ted Kaczynski also warned that, as technology evolved further and further, our societies are less humane, less fulfilling and less connected. And clearly, all of that is true. That is exactly what has happened. I'm not saying we need to dismantle it, but he actually lived those words, he dropped out of the whole matrix basically, when he was, I think 24, left his job as a faculty member and just went into the woods, lived a self-sufficient life off the grid, read, wrote, and did not much else other than working on his writing and his development and thoughts. The more he did that, the more he became convinced that being in the middle of this matrix was uniquely devastating to the ability of humans to be free and happy.

Of course, that started resonating in America and in Europe and throughout the Western world as people became less and less happy. All the things he was describing as to why, and the role technology plays in that, would obviously exacerbate all that. Remember, this was 1995. I mean, the internet was just starting, but it was nowhere near as dominant in our lives.

Obviously, with the internet, we often talk to people on phones or on screens. We have our phones everywhere. So, a lot of the human connection and interactivity you once had just walking on the street is now taken away from you because everybody's staring at their phones. You go to restaurants, any restaurant anywhere in the Western world, and you have people who are related, people who are friends, who talk a little, and they both pull out their phones. And before you know it, they're both staring at their phones, and especially with COVID, which forcibly segregated everybody and kept everybody at home, where people even developed a greater dependence on the internet to do everything, including interacting with other humans, this isolation has become far worse and all of the predictable pathologies that come with it that he predicted are also worsening very rapidly, in a very dangerous way.

I mean, to me, this is the West's greatest problem: spiritual decay that comes from lack of connection. Obviously, there are benefits to technology. We have cures to diseases that we would otherwise die from. The internet makes the world easier, gives you access to things, including reading and information that you otherwise, etc. etc. There are a lot of benefits. But for me, one of the things I think I've learned is that the only real law of the universe is balance, by which I mean for everything that you drive a benefit, there's an equal cost, at least, that offsets it and keeps it in balance. Whatever: fame, wealth, career, success, it all comes with a cost. I definitely think that's the case of technology, and Ted Kaczynski was one of the first people to lay out this case in the way he laid it out. So even though he was a terrorist, even though he killed people, a lot of people began to think, you know what? I think there's a lot of validity here.

You might ask why he goes to the scene to kill people? He had an academic pedigree. He probably could have gotten this published. I don't really know. I haven't paid much attention lately to this whole episode, so I forgot what the rationale was for that. But in any event, maybe he was also a little imbalanced himself. That probably was true. But, sometimes, being mentally imbalanced or at least mentally alienated, in a way, is necessary to produce insights. Even going back to that last question we talked about, you remove yourself from a certain society or a sector of society, it gives you a much greater clarity of thought because you're no longer connected to it or in it, and you can see it much clearly. I'm sure that's what happens if you just remove yourself completely.

One of the things the question asked about is left-wing politics. And the person who just asked this question, I'm on the political left, but a lot of his critiques of what left-wings politics is about and the flaws in it, I must admit have validity. And basically, what Ted Kaczynski's warning was, and this definitely proved prophetic, was that the idea would be to make this system of technology and the capitalism that emerged from it invulnerable, so nobody blamed it, nobody wants to undermine it, nobody wants to subvert it, no matter what it's doing to us we're all propagandized to revere it to believe it's all good to believe it's invulnerable, to believe that we benefit from it. And he said one of the ways that that's going to succeed is that people are going to be given kind of culture war fights or social justice causes, which are going to make them feel like they're doing something subversive or radical, when in reality nothing that they're doing is a threat remotely to any real power center.

Compact Magazine, which is I think a really interesting magazine, it kind of explores the intersection between left and right populism had an article on June 16, 2023, which I really recommend. The headline of it was: “Ted Kaczynski Anti-Left Leftist.”

Obviously, this vision he's presenting in some ways is left-wing. It's a denunciation of capitalism and its excesses, the Industrial Revolution, and technology, that has a left-wing ethos for sure, but he was also scornful of modern-day, leftist political expression.

A week or two ago, Ryan Grim as on our show and we were talking about the kind of fraudulent branding of Bari Weiss and The Free Press. There was supposedly a heterodox and dissident when, in reality, it really grew from objecting to a lot of the excesses of the woke movement. And Ryan basically said, if you're talking about kids with blue hair or whatever color hair someone has, or if they're trans or not or whatever, you're not talking about anything that is about the real structure and dissemination of power. It's like catnip. They're happy to have you fight about racism, feminism, yeah, they love racism. They love feminism. Remember the CIA did that whole video, super woke video? They centered like a, what was she? She was, I think, a non-binary Latina who had neurodivergence. And she was just like, “I stand proud and tall and occupy space unapologetically” as a Latino non-binary immigrant, whatever. They're so happy to have that. “Hey, look at our Black generals. We're going to celebrate our Black military officials. We're the Pentagon. Hey, with the FBI, look at all our cool badass women agents or fighter pilots. Look, they're women now.” It's like, “Oh, wow, that's so awesome. We've done so much to change society.” It's that famous cartoon where a Muslim family in Yemen are looking up at the sky and kind of smiling and saying, “I hear the neck bomb is going to be sent, is going to be dropped by a woman pilot.”

It's just like, here's Hillary Clinton. She's so radical and such a wild departure from everything before, because she's going to be the first female president when there's like nobody more representative of status quo politics than she. So, you vote for her. You feel like you're doing something really like a big blow against the power center and the patriarchy, because now there's a woman and you put her in office and she's going to be the best possible protector of status-quo prerogatives and power centers everywhere, because she presents this illusion that you've done something historic or subversive, when in reality you're just working as hard as you can to entrench the status quo that you think you're working against.

Ted Kaczynski was incredibly prescient about that as well. There's a lot more to him than what I've gone over. There's a lot to the essay. I just can't do that justice in the time we have, even though I took another hour.

I did want to give my thoughts on it, but I also highly encourage you to go find the essay, even just start with the essay and I think you'll be amazed if you just sit down and read it, forget about he's the Unabomber, all that. Just read it, and remember it was written in the early to mid-1990s, and so even if some of it seems more familiar now, at the time it was very prescient, but also the way he described it, the historical framework he employed to shed light on how it works, that it's not just some brand new thing, it's gone back, basically traced it back to the Industrial Revolution. There are not very many better ways to spend your time in terms of your brain and your critical thinking, then to go read that essay.

All right, here's a few questions on Gaza.

First from @CatRika:

@Lightwins2028:

It actually is incredible that I come here and sit here every night and do this show more or less every night 500 times. I will accept that as well and agree that it is kind of incredible.

And then from @johnmccray:

I will confess that what we've seen in Gaza over the last 20 months is not just some horrific tragedy or even war on the other side of the world; it is a genocide that involves some of the most twisted cruelty and sadism I have ever witnessed in my life – obviously, I wasn't alive in World War II, which is why I say ‘in my lifetime.’ However, when you announce that you're blocking all food from entering an enclave that you fully surround and control – and yes, there's a small border with Egypt and Gaza, but the Israeli military is on the other side of that, controlling egress and ingress into it and out of it (besides, the Egyptian dictator is U.S. supported and always has been for decades because he's there to take marching orders from the U.S. regarding Israel).

When you take this concentrated open-air prison enclave, where people can't leave, can't come in, you ban the media from coming in, and you announce to the world you're putting a blockade on any food from entering it, and you knowingly starve them to death, you knowingly blockade food from entering on top of what they're already experiencing – endless bombing, people burning alive in their churches, in their tents, every hospital, every school, all of civilian life being destroyed… The doctors who are there don't have basic medicines. They don't have antibiotics, they don't have feeding formula for babies, they don't have painkillers or anesthesia for the children who come in with their limbs blown off – just the absolute, worst nightmares that human beings could possibly endure for a sustained period, and on top of that, you start starving them to death and then, instead of letting food distribution in from the actual organizations that are experienced in it and actually want to feed the people, you create some new entity that you control – American military contractors that are, for profit, doing the bidding of the IDF, purposely set up so that it barely gives out any food and then it's a death trap – so, you lure starving people in there and you murder them and massacre them regularly, daily… That is a new kind of evil.

When you’re starving people to death and then saying, “Hey, here are some grains of flour, come here and get them,” and murdering them when they do, when you purposely set up the centers so they barely stay open for more than 15 minutes. People get noticed right before, and they have to trek miles, very dangerously, to get there. They're not allowed to stay there, waiting for the next time to open. They have to go back, and they're killed on the way there. So, they're faced with this Sophie's choice of either having to stay at home and watch their kids starve to death or knowing they risk their lives and their teenage son's lives to go there and try to get food, knowing that a lot of them are going to be murdered, that is a sick new kind of evil.

And because of how ubiquitous cell phones are, we have to watch it, and we know it's been streamed live every day, throughout the world. We've all seen just the absolute most sickening, hideous human suffering imaginable, a level of sadism that's almost hard to fathom that people are capable of. And while some Israelis are protesting some more now about the end of this war, for the most part, the view of the Israelis has been, I don't care how many civilians we kill, I don't care how many babies are killed. The babies are terrorists. They'll grow up to be Hamas, so I don't care to kill them.

These are evils that are difficult to endure, even if your work is journalism, even if you look at some of the most horrible things people are doing, you still have to report on them. Even for that, I mean, it's hard to fathom and express, and I know so many people, and I just thought about myself including in this, that you feel so impotent, so your rage is so purposeless, even though it's all-consuming, because the Trump administration doesn't care. It's filled with Israel fanatics, and it's going to support Israel until the very last Gazan is killed. Can you give them all the weapons, all the money, all the diplomatic cover?

And then of course, the Israelis themselves are so deranged and fanatical that they don't care either. And short of having the world go in and militarily intervene against Israel or arming Hamas, which is not going to happen, there's not a lot you can do. There definitely has been serious measurable changes for the better in how Americans now look at Israel and look at the Israeli action in Gaza, how they look at American funding of Israel. That's not going away. That's a big, big problem for Israel.

Once you open your eyes to that, you can't unsee it. And you have a lot of people, as we talked about in that first question, fueling it constantly. I hope I'm one of them. I certainly do what I can to do that. But that doesn't mean that any of that is going to stop this war.

Even in Europe, and I really despise the Western European political elite and media class, they're utterly supportive of Israel. They are loyal to Israel, they arm Israel, fund them, not as much as the United States, but to a great degree. A lot of those historical reasons, guilt over World War II, which Israel expertly exploits – not that it's difficult to exploit the guilt and psychological fragility of Western Europeans, but they do a great job of it.

So, you're starting to see things like Macron comes out and recognize a Palestinian state, not unimportant, but still a symbolic step. Keir Starmer, he's probably the most despicable politician from a character perspective, an utterly empty, vapid belief-free politician – he's despised in his own country, despised. – He didn't even go that far. He said, “We are going to recognize a Palestinian state unless Israel starts letting food in.” So, Palestinian statehood is not something they're entitled to. It's like a threat that you make to Israel that you're going to give them if the Israelis don't let food in. You see the Germans, who are always the worst for obvious psychological and historical reasons when it comes to standing up to Israel, sort of saying now, “We're going to cut off arms.”

We'll see how long any of that lasts. The one group of people you do not want to put your faith and trust in to stand for a cause, to hold firm on beliefs, or convictions and values is Western European political elites. They're pathetic. Pathetic. Obviously, there are some exceptions, but as a class, they're nauseating and pathetic.

I used to think the British elite class was the worst elite class on the planet. While I still think they are definitely in the running, I'm starting to actually think the Germans are more psychologically warped and sickening. I mean, the Germans were also fanatics about the war in Ukraine – fanatics. You put Germans in power, and they don't think about anything other than going to war with Russia. It's really a bizarre repetitive pattern.

So, I don't want to pretend that there's some quick solution. I do give as much money as I can to them, you can find Palestinian aid and Gaza aid organizations. There's no shortage of verified GoFundMe accounts from people in Gaza telling their stories. And obviously you have to be a little careful not to give to fraudulent ones, but there are easy ways to verify those. Look for trustworthy people on Twitter who vouch for them, things like that. You can donate to that. Even like $50 at a time, whatever you're capable of, $10, $15. Everything is so high-priced in Gaza that sometimes even if they have food available, they can’t afford it. And I think it's also a good way of showing the people in Gaza that the world actually cares about their plight.

Earlier today, I talked about how Marjorie Taylor Greene has become very outspoken about refusing to serve the agenda of AIPAC and that AIPAC is now on the march against her. They're going to do what they've done to all sorts of politicians which they are now doing to Thomas Massie as well: try to find some fraudulent, politician who lives in their district, who seems demographically appealing to that district, who has the same politics, except they're going to know that AIPAC paid for their political career, paid for the seat in Congress, and they're going to be supremely loyal.

One of the worst examples – I mean, I can barely look at this person because of how pathetic and sad it is to watch him. They wanted to get Cori Bush out of Congress. If you're conservative and you dislike Cori Bush, AIPAC doesn't dislike her for any of the reasons that you dislike her. They only care about the fact that she's raised questions like, “Why are we sending so much money to Israel when my whole district is filled with people financially struggling, who don't have healthcare, don't have access to education, have no public safety?” Why are we giving all this money to Israel? Why is AIPAC forcing us to do that?” And they were so determined to take Cori Bush out because of her Israel questioning that they found some utterly craven Black politician, nice liberal, nice Democrat, of course. You have to get a liberal, you have to be a Democrat, and probably have to be a Black politician. His name is Wesley Bell, and they paid $15 million – 15,000 million –for one Democratic primary seat in Congress in St. Louis, to replace Cori Bush with somebody exactly like her, except that he's an AIPAC loyalist. And you can just see him on social media and in speeches, standing up for Israel. You know exactly why $15 million was his price tag, and he knows if he wants to keep that seat, he's going to need AIPAC doing the same. And they're going to try to do the same with Thomas Massie. They're going to try to do the same with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

They're not always successful. They've tried it many times with Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, even, to a smaller extent, AOC. They made some inroads, but for the most part, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are too popular in their Democratic primaries and their Democratic constituencies for that to work.

In 2022, Ilhan Omar almost lost the Democratic primary. I think she won by a few points. So, she's not invulnerable. They never quite spent the money on her that they spent on people like Cori Bush or Jamaal Bowman. But they have a long history of doing this. And they're clearly doing it to Thomas Massie. If you look at the three top billionaires donating to AIPAC to remove Thomas Massie, they're all Jewish billionaires who are extremely loyal to Israel.

That's the whole point of this effort that Donald Trump supports. One thing you can do is just look at who AIPAC is trying to remove from Congress and just donate to whoever they want to take out of Congress as a way to thwart them because even if you're a conservative and you see them doing it to some left-wing member of Congress that you don't like, it's not like the person they're going to replace that person with is going to be any more appealing to you. There's no difference, except that that person is going to be bought and paid to be an AIPAC agent, who is going to be devoted to Israel and never question Israel. That's the only difference.

AIPAC's not taking Cori Bush out of Congress or Jamaal Bowman because they're too left-wing. The only thing they care about is if the person is devoted to Israel. The same with Tom Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene. If they're going to take out members of Congress as punishment for not being loyal enough to Israel, donate to the people they're trying to remove on both sides. If you're on the left, you're not going to agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie, obviously. But the people who are going to come in their place are not going to agree with you politically anymore. The only difference will be that those people will be fanatical Israel supporters, like many in the Republican Party, instead of being among the few to question them. So, that is another way I think you could work.

I know this is thankless work. There's no immediate gratification, but it does work. Public opinion changes. It really does. And especially with independent media with a free internet, with the deconcentrating of power over the discourse no longer in the hands of a few tiny number of gigantic media corporations controlled by people who are all the same basic political outlook, with the same interests, but now huge gigantic people with big audiences who influence a lot of people completely removed from those circles and that dogma. That is also a big reason for optimism. And if you see the polling change in a pretty substantial way as you do on the Israel question and the Gaza question, keep contributing to that. You don't have to have a gigantic platform.

Last question, this is from @coldhotdog:

All right. The U.S. is sanctioning Brazil, Brazilian officials, and also imposing tariffs on them, not for the reason that Trump has been imposing tariffs on other countries, mainly because he thinks there's unfair trading practices causing a trade deficit. The opposite is true. The United States has a significant trade surplus with Brazil. There's not a trade deficit. So, the tariffs are more – and it was kind of explicit – used as punishment against Brazil for their violation of free speech, their violation to due process, their persecution of political opponents. And obviously, that is not the U.S.'s real goal.

I wrote an article about this in Folha, where I do reporting, and I'm a columnist in Brazil. And it basically said, Okay, I hope no one takes seriously when the U.S. government says we're upset about the infringements on free speech or the erosions of democracy. It was like a month before Trump announced sanctions on Brazil and tariffs on Brazil, that he went to the Persian Gulf region and heaped praise on Mohammed bin Salman and the leaders of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, heralded them, hugged them, and not for the first time. While I think Brazil is very repressive and I think Moraes is an absolute tyrant, it's in a completely different universe than what happens in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. It's not even close.

So, any country that's heaping praise on and embracing, hugging and propping up the governments of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Qatar, or the Egyptians, or the Jordanians, of the Bahrainis or whomever, the Philippines, Indonesia, obviously, is not a country that cares about repression inside other countries. Obviously.

The United States doesn't go around the world fighting wars or intervening in other countries because they care about repression. That's the pretext. They love dictators as long as dictators are pro-American. They only have a problem with dictatorial regimes if they defy America, like Cuba or Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, and then you hear “Oh my god, we're the United States, we go and fight for democracies. That is why we have to protect Ukraine.” Even though, arguably, Ukraine has become as repressive as Russia. So, whatever drives the United States, it's not a love for democracy, it is not a contempt for an erosion of liberty, it is not a defense of free speech, obviously, I hope there's no one in my audience who believes that. So, when Trump says, “Oh, we're punishing Brazil because it's become repressive, it’s attacked the free speech,” it's obviously not the reason.

Then the question that our Locals member is raising, which is a good one.

I don't support the U.S. embargo of Cuba which is now 65 years old. The idea of that was that we're going to change the government of Cuba and free the Cuban people. Obviously, it has not done that. The only thing it's done is make life in Cuba utterly miserable for the population. Same with Venezuela. Same with the sanctions on Iran. So, I don't think that's the role of the United States to go try to change other governments, even if they're pretending, they're changing them out of concern about their oppression when obviously that's not the real reason.

The reason is they want to replace it with a regime that's more compliant to the United States. And obviously I don't think Trump is intervening in Brazil with punishments and the like because he's concerned in the abstract about free speech. I mean, aside from all the dictatorial regimes we embrace, there's also the attacks on free speech in the United States, which we've gone over many times, including last night, that the Trump administration is spearheading, that the Biden administration before that spearheaded.

So, the question then becomes, well, what is the real reason? And I want to say, while I view Alexandre de Moraes as a serious menace, as one of the most tyrannically minded people on the planet, even if he's not, say, as powerful or dictatorial as Mohammed bin Salman, just because Brazil is not that kind of society that permits that level of overt, absolute, autocratic tyranny, the way a lot of other countries do that we support prop up, I do think he's a genuine evil figure. Obviously, one of the reasons I talk about it is because I live here. My family is Brazilian. My kids are Brazilian. So, it's something I care about for that reason. And of course, I think the reason why Trump is doing it is because it's not actually a left-wing government in Brazil. Lula is the president. And he was a leftist in his earlier life. He was a labor leader, but he ran for president three times as a leftist, lost. And then finally, in 2002, he was sick of losing. And he wrote this famous letter called Letter to the Brazilian People, where he basically said, “I understand that if I want to be president, I have to moderate. I have to get along with financial centers. This is important for prosperity.” He basically promised not to be a fallaway left-wing dogma to be much more moderate. And then to prove it, he chose a billionaire banker as his vice president, to make clear to financial markets, banks, big corporations inside Brazil that he wasn't going to be a threat.

They're not leftist at all. But I'm sure in Trump's mind, in the eyes of Marco Rubio, the people who are influencing Trump, he sees a little like basically a communist regime, like a left-wing regime, like from the Cold War, even though it's not remotely that. And I'm not suggesting they're conservative or right-wing. They're not. But they're not communists or even socialists. And part of what Trump's doing is he just looks at Lula and the Brazilian government as an enemy and is convinced, okay, they're our enemy. Let's punish them. If I had to find a justification – I'm not saying I support it, I'm not saying I justify it – but if I had to find a justification, I would say that the real only justification for any of this is the fact that Moraes and the Supreme Court have been now targeting not just America's social media companies.

So, this is reaching into the United States threatening the free speech rights of American citizens or people legally residing in the United States, attacking and threatening and trying to bully American social media companies. And that is, I believe, an invasion of American sovereignty and an attack on the rights of American citizens. I do think the government, the U.S. government, is duty-bound to draw a very firm line and say, “No, you're not going to cross that line. And if you cross that, we're going to take action against you.” That's the only justification I can think of.

So, I'm not defending the Magnitsky Act sanctions against Moraes, or even the punitive tariffs against Brazil. I've basically been arguing that if there's anyone who truly is tyrannical in his mindset, who's just absolutely, like, mentally unstable and just an authoritarian tyrant with no limits at all, who's been just vindictive and drunk on his power, it is Alexandre de Moraes. And I do think there's this one justification for the U.S. to cite, to justify taking retaliatory and retributive action against Brazil.

Obviously, Trump likes Bolsonaro. He strongly identifies with any claims that a politician is being victimized by politicized lawfare because Trump believes as do I, that he himself was the victim of that and he sees when he looks at Bolsonaro a very similar thing happening to Bolsonaro, and I think he feels personally angry by that. So, I think there's some complex motives as well, but other than what I just articulated, I'm not defending the U.S.’s use of sanctions, the exploitation of the dollars in reserve currency to punish the economies of other countries because we don't like what they're doing internally. It's all obviously a fraud and a pretext to say, we're doing it because we care about free speech or due process or whatever. But I think there is a foundation to it, not a very strong one, but a foundation to it that I do think is legitimate. And you know what? I guess, just looking at it from a less principled perspective, I do think Alexandre de Moraes is a completely out-of-control monster. And everyone in Brazil is too scared to stand up to him or too supportive of the fact that he's imprisoning and exiling and silencing Bolsonaro supporters, that there is nobody in Brazil that's capable of stopping him or willing to do so. And the only thing that has really undermined and disrupted him is what Trump just did and now is threatening to do even more with even more invasive sanctions against his wife, against other officials in Brazil. And that is something they have to take very seriously and are taking very seriously. And it's the first time there's been real limits put on it.

So, from a very kind of instrumentalized, results-based perspective, I confess that I'm happy about where that is leading, even if I do have genuine, really real concerns about the use of American arms and weaponry to do this.

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