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Whatever else one might want to say about the first two-and-a-half months of the Trump administration, there's no denying that there is no such thing as a slow news day. Virtually every day brings some major new event, often multiple ones, in the realms of foreign policy, wars, economic policy, free speech, constitutional and civil liberties issues. Even for a show like ours that is on every night — or everynightish — it is impossible to cover everything that deserves coverage. 

With that difficulty in mind, we are thrilled to have one of the most knowledgeable and clear-thinking voices anywhere in our political discourse. He is a professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer. 

Friday, however, is Mailbag Day and we have answered some of your questions. Keep sending them.

The Interview: John Mearsheimer

Professor Mearsheimer doesn't need an introduction – especially for viewers of our show, who have seen him on many times over the past several years and is always one of our most popular, and I would say, enlightening guests as well. We have a whole range of topics to cover this evening, including the ongoing Israeli destruction of Gaza, the decision by President Trump to restart President Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen, the broader threats of Middle East war, what is going on in the war in Ukraine, remember that as well as the terror policies that President Trump has announced and what it might mean specifically geopolitically for the U.S.-China relations. 

Professor Mearsheimer is also the author of the groundbreaking book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” as well as the highly influential 2014 article in the Journal of Foreign Affairs entitled "The Crisis in Ukraine is the fault of the West.". 

G. Greenwald: Professor Mearsheimer, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It's always great to see you. 

John Mearsheimer: Great to be here, Glenn. 

G. Greenwald: I actually thought about this morning and this afternoon, starting by talking to you about the free speech crisis and the assaults on academic freedom taking place in American academia. I want to get to that with you, of course, but I realized afterward, that it's almost impossible not to begin with the ongoing atrocities in Gaza because of the horror of it. The fact that the United States is directly responsible for it, I think really requires that it be the first topic that we talk about. 

So, I guess my question to you is, and we've talked about it before, what do you think the Israeli motives might be in essentially destroying all of Gaza, destroying civilian life in all of Gaza? To me, it seems like there's no doubt any longer what their intentions are. They're saying it. There's really one possibility. I'm just interested in your view of what that is. 

John Mearsheimer: Yeah, I think there is only one possible goal here, given what they're doing, and that is to ethically cleanse Gaza. And what they are trying to do is make Gaza unlivable, and their story will force the Palestinians to leave. But other than that, I can't see what possible motive they would have for continuing this offensive. 

G. Greenwald: I've seen the sentiment around a lot. I heard it from people I like and trust and am colleagues with and friends. And I certainly feel the same way. It's like, at some point, you just almost feel like you're out of words, out of horror and disgust and rage to express the more you see. And I do think it's gotten worse in terms of the resumption. You could probably compare it to the early couple of months when there was this indiscriminate bombing and huge numbers of people killed. We're kind of back to that, but on some level, even worse when you add in the purposeful blockading of any food getting in, the use of mass starvation as a form of collective punishment and driving people out, forcing them to side between starving to death or leaving and giving that land of theirs to the Israelis. How do you compare what we're seeing in Gaza to other atrocities and war crimes that we've seen over the last several decades? 

John Mearsheimer: Well, I think this is a genocide, and I would put it in the same category as what happened in Rwanda, what happened in Cambodia, and what happened in World War II with the Nazi Holocaust. I mean, the basic goal here is to kill a huge number of people in the Palestinian population, and that, I think, easily qualifies as genocide. In fact, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both done lengthy reports that lay out the case for genocide, and I find those cases compelling. So, I think this is a lot like those other cases. 

G. Greenwald: Even people who might be uneasy, or even critical of what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, nonetheless, have a very visceral, almost primal opposition to applying the word genocide to what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. They may say things like, oh, look, if their goal were to just wipe them all out and eradicate them, they have the weaponry to do so and they have not done that yet. And I guess some people at the same time say, “Does it matter if this is called a genocide?” I know you've used that word before; you just used it again. What is your understanding of exactly what genocide is? How do we recognize that and why does it apply? I guess why is it important to use that term for this case? 

John Mearsheimer: Well, there's a clear-cut definition in international law, which was by and large established as a result of the Nazi genocide in World War II. It involves, focusing on killing a large portion of a particular population. That population could be based on ethnicity or religion or what have you but the point is that what you're aiming to do is kill a huge chunk of a particular population. Now, that can happen rapidly, it can happen slowly, but does that really matter? If you were to kill three million people in a particular group over five years, would that be any different than killing those people over five months? I think the answer is no. And I think you therefore really can't compare genocides with one another. In the same way, you can't compare apartheid in one system with apartheid in another system. 

Over the years, many Israelis have argued to me that Israel is not an apartheid state because it's different than South Africa. But the point is comparing Israel to South Africa doesn't deal with the question of whether or not Israel is an apartheid state. You have a general definition of what an apartheid state is, and then you have to ask yourself the question, does South Africa and does Israel fit into that category of apartheid? And the same thing is true with genocide. There's no question that there are fundamental differences – and I would note fundamental similarities between the Nazi Holocaust and what's going on in Gaza. But the fact is that there are also fundamental differences but if you look at the definition of genocide you can categorize what's happening in Gaza as a genocide. As I said, if you look at what Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have done on this count, they lay out that this is genocide. 

G. Greenwald: What would so ironic, I guess you can use a sort of lighter word than is merited, about what is happening is that so much of the international law and the conventions that emerge, including the Geneva Conventions, the new Geneva Conventions that emerged after World War II were specifically designed to prevent things like the Holocaust from happening again. 

One of the prohibitions that the world agreed to was a prohibition on collective punishment. The Nazis would go to France and if there was somebody in the resistance in a certain town, they would say, “Turn them all over, we're going to kill 20,000 of the people in the town without respect to whether they actually did anything.” It's collective punishment, “We are going to punish this town if it produces somebody who was working against us or has in some way taken up arms against us.” 

There's a war crime prohibition on collective punishment among others, using food as a weapon of war, mass starvation and the like, all the things the Israelis are doing. I kind of get the sense – and maybe this is actually a pervasive propagandistic success – that when people talk about saying the Nuremberg trials or war crimes or even the phrase “Never again,” they seem to think that what it means is these are principles to protect Jews and only Jews and not the rest of humanity, and therefore, you cannot have a genocide perpetrated by Jews, only against them, or you can't have collective punishment and war crimes perpetrated by Jews, only against them. Do you think that is a kind of common ethos in the West? 

John Mearsheimer: I think deep down inside most Jews do believe that, that the word genocide cannot be applied to anyone other than the Nazis and what happened between 1941 and 1945. 

But Glenn, let me say a word about collective punishment and use my discussion of that term, to distinguish between how I think the genocide against the Jews evolved and how this genocide in Gaza evolved. I don't think collective punishment… 

G. Greenwald: Just to be clear, when I was talking about collective punishment, I wasn't necessarily using it as how the Holocaust evolved, although there was a lot of collective punishment there. But even, like I said, in places like Nazi-occupied France, against the French Resistance and the like, it was used there. But I'm definitely interested. I just wanted to be clearer about what I was saying, but definitely, I'd like to hear what you have to say with this distinction. 

John Mearsheimer: Okay, but I think with regard to the Nazi holocaust, from the get-go, the aim of collective punishment was not at play. The aim was to annihilate all of European Jewry, or at least that portion of European Jewry that the Nazis could capture. So, it wasn't collective punishment at all. 

I think the way the genocide in Gaza has evolved is different. I think after October 7, the Israelis concluded that if they really punished the civilian population in Gaza, that would cause that population to leave. So, I don't think the initial goal was to murder huge numbers of Palestinians. It was definitely to inflict massive punishment on the Palestinian population and to make the place unlivable. 

But what happened is that the Palestinians didn't leave. The Israelis therefore had to constantly up the ante, which is another way of saying they had to consistently up the bombing campaign and the end result is that over time, I believe it morphed into genocide. As I said at the time, I didn't think in the fall of 2023 that it was a genocide, but by late 2023, given that the Israelis had been unable to drive the Palestinians out and were continuing to punish the population, and were increasingly frustrated, and therefore increasingly ramping up the punishment, it morphed into a genocide. And of course, it's just gotten worse and worse over time. 

One would have thought that once the cease-fire was in place, this was the day before President Trump was inaugurated, January 19 of this year, we had put an end to the genocide. We would then just have to deal with the suffering in Gaza and hopefully ameliorate that to the point where fewer people would die than we thought would happen if the genocide continued. 

But then, Trump began to talk about what his view was of Gaza and he basically gave the Israelis the green light to start the campaign of genocide all over again. That, of course, is what's happened, and the Trump administration has said hardly anything about what the Israelis are doing. The media and leading politicians in the West have said hardly anything. 

So, the Israelis, they're pretty much free to do anything they want to the Palestinians and hardly anyone except for a handful of people like you and I will stand up and say that this is fundamentally wrong and has to stop. 

G. Greenwald: We talked several times during 2024 about what you thought might be the likely impact of Trump's election on these wars in the Middle East and I think there was a sense that we know for sure what will happen if Joe Biden wins or Kamala Harris wins, which is a continuation of the status quo. They made no efforts to, for a cease-fire, occasionally made some noises about concerns for humanitarian ends, but really never used their leverage in any real way to back that up. 

But the issue of Trump was always – well, you really don't know what you're going to get, I mean, he talks a lot about how he prides himself on being the first American president not to involve the U.S. in a new war. He obviously was the one who facilitated that cease-fire and seemed to take a lot of pride in it. Yet, now he's in office and he restarts Joe Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen, which I want to talk about, which you could count as a new war or an escalated war. And then, clearly, he gave the green light to the Israelis, not just to unravel his cease-fire, but to go all in on whatever they wanted to do. 

What do you make of the expectations that you had of the Trump administration throughout 2024 versus the reality that we're now seeing? 

John Mearsheimer: I thought there was some chance that he would try to shut down the war. This is before he came into office. I thought that in large part because he made much of the fact that he intended to be the president for peace, that he was not a warmonger, and that he was going to shut the war in Europe, shut down the war in the Middle East. And then, of course, he forced Netanyahu to accept the cease-fire, which was initiated the day before Trump was inaugurated, January 20 of this year. And that gave one hope because the cease-fire had three stages. But the second stage looked like it would really put an end to the conflict, that the Israelis would leave Gaza, and you'd have a cease-fire that would last for a long time. 

But of course, the Israelis refused to go to the second stage of the cease-fire, the Trump administration put no pressure on the Israelis, and indeed, the Trump administration blamed Hamas for the fact that you had not gone into the second stage, and that of course was not true. But anyway, Trump has disappointed us, and he's no different than genocide Joe was. 

G. Greenwald: I think that, and again, we saw this several times in the first term starting in 2017, obviously, Trump's not a pacifist, I mean, he escalated bombing campaigns, which he inherited from Obama in the way he said he would against ISIS and Syria and Iraq, etc. But you really didn't see this kind of militarism expressed. 

Now he's back in, he's utterly unconstrained, at least in his mind – I was just reading today, in fact, some Republicans in the White House saying basically in response to all this uproar about the collapsing stock market or the declining stock market that he just doesn't care. He doesn't care about negative reactions from the public, doesn't care about negative reactions in the media, he feels like he got a mandate, he's going to do what he wants and that's what he's setting out to do. 

And so, I guess, on one level, he seems to be in charge. It seems like he is determined to make sure that his will is carried out a lot more so than in the first term, where I think there was a lot of sabotage, kind of undermining, around him. This time he seems to really have had a plan, or people with him did, to make sure that everything that happens is because he wants it to happen. 

So, what do you think accounts for that change? Why did he get into office right away and start bombing Yemen and giving the Israelis the green light to go wild, even wilder than they were before, and now threatening Iran with some sort of annihilation if they don't give the kind of deal that he wants on nuclear weapons? 

John Mearsheimer: Let me answer that, Glenn, by making a general point about Trump and then specifically answering your question. I think that in his first term, he was not a radical president. I think that he pursued one radical policy, and that was that he drastically altered our policy toward China. He abandoned engagement with China and he pursued containment. That was the one, I think, radical shift and policy, both foreign and domestic, that took place in his first term. 

As many people have said and Trump himself has acknowledged, the deep state basically boxed him in, much the way it boxed Obama in. When he came into office this time, I think because he had had four years to really think about it and think about how to deal with this issue, he came in with the thought in mind that he was going to get his way. And I think you see this, by the way, in the people that he has relied on to execute his policies. 

Elon Musk, for example, and Steve Witkoff. I think Musk is the key person, the key right-hand person for Trump on domestic policy and Witkoff is the right-hand person on foreign policy. Neither one of these individuals is part of the deep state, neither one of these individuals is part of the Washington establishment. They're outsiders, they're Trump's buddies, they're the kind of people he can trust. He doesn't trust Marco Rubio and people of that sort. 

So, what he did was he brought in his own team and he set out to pursue a radical policy, both at the foreign level, foreign policy level, and at the domestic level. And if you just laundry list a lot of the policies, it becomes manifestly clear that that's the case. First of all, with regard to tariffs; second, with regard to the whole notion of conquering territory, like Greenland, the Panama Canal; third, with regard to transatlantic relations; fourth, with regard to relations with Russia. 

Then, if you switch down to the domestic level, his approach towards dealing with the judiciary, his approach toward dealing with a deep state, his approach toward dealing with immigration, and his interest in wrecking universities. These are truly radical policies across the board. You didn't see this the first time around but this time he's unleashed the dogs and he has lieutenants, again, Witkoff and Musk, who are working with him in this regard. 

So, at a very general level, I would say you do not want to underestimate what a transformational president he intends to be and, given that he's just in the beginning of a four-year term, one can only wonder what this is all going to look like four years from now. So that's my general point. 

My specific point is I don't understand what he's doing in the Middle East. I understand what he's doing with regard to Ukraine. I understand what he's doing with regard to the genocide. I don't understand what's he doing with regard to the Houthis and I don’t understand what he is doing regarding Iran, because these are all losing policies. 

He would have been much smarter to force Netanyahu to stick to the cease-fire which would have been no fight with the Houthis, and he would have been much smarter to work out a deal with the Iranians. But getting involved in a shooting match with the Iranians and with the Houthis at the same time you're supporting a genocide, does not make sense to me. 

G. Greenwald: Well, I suppose one might say that for it to make sense, one might go and read your 2007 book called “The Israel Lobby” because I do think, at least for me, my big concern throughout the 2024 campaign and then the election, was and I had a very similar idea toward that they knew that as you did, which is I thought the ceiling for Trump could be higher, but the kind of floor could be lower whereas I just thought was going to be a disastrous continuation of how things were. 

My concern was that one of his biggest donors was Miriam Adelson. He said openly in the campaign, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were the people who came most to the White House, other than the people who worked there. They were there the most. And every time they were there, they would ask for things for Israel, and I would always give them to them and he kind of joked and said, that they would come back two weeks later and asked for more. And I would say, “Come on guys, give me like a few weeks of breathing room.” He boasted that he gave them the Golan Heights which was more than they even asked for. He said during the campaign, “We're going to make Israel great again, and we're going to make America great again”. He also, as diverse as the cabinet is in many respects, the one litmus test that everybody had to pass to be appointed to any significant position was kind of indisputable, unbreakable support for Israel. I'm just wondering, what do you think, this is coming from him himself or it comes from influences around him? 

John Mearsheimer: Well, I think obviously the influences around him matter. You and I both know how powerful the lobby is, so there's no question that he's getting pressure there. I don't think Trump cares very much about the future of Israel. I think Trump is an America-First president. 

I personally think what's going on here, I can't prove this, but my sense is that Trump is pursuing a radical agenda as I described, and there are a lot of very controversial issues at play on that agenda. And it does not make sense, given that agenda, for him to pick a fight with the lobby over Israel. It's just much easier to let the Israelis do what they want, make the lobby happy, don't get any flak from people in the lobby, and if anything, create a situation where the lobby supports you, and it doesn't get in the way of pursuing your radical agenda. So, I think that by and large, that explains what Trump is doing. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, and it was interesting the dynamic in the Republican primary, the hardcore people in the Israeli lobby, the sort of neocons who never trusted Trump, who didn't think he was reliable, they were almost entirely aligned behind Ron DeSantis. I mean, you can go back and just look at who those people are and you'll see that they really thought Ron DeSantis does care about Israel a lot more than Trump does. 

Then, it was only once it became apparent that DeSantis had no chance of winning, that they kind of started their way into Trump's world to make sure that he was on their side with those things and I guess that is the calculation – maybe this is a little naive but, you know, everyone sees what we're seeing, everyone sees the same videos we're seeing, everyone understands exactly what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, it's not just the United States has been paying for an army that war, there's also a lot of countries in Europe doing the same, providing logistical support as well in the case of the U.K. throughout the EU, lots of countries have given money and military aid to Israel. 

Is there any prospect at all that whatever you might call the international community outside of the United States, could ever look at this and through some kind of desire not to have this on their legacy and conscience that they just sat through this and kind of gave tacit approval to it or said nothing, might finally say enough is enough? 

John Mearsheimer: Well, I don't think you're going to see that in the West. If you look at the situation in Europe, it's every bit as depressing as the situation here in the United States. I mean, everybody talks about Western values, and we often get up on our moral high horse and talk about how wonderful we are in the West compared to everybody else, if anything, this support of the genocide across the West shows that that claim is a bankrupt one. 

I think there's much more criticism of Israel outside of the West, but that really doesn't resonate in any meaningful way. I think the one country that has gone to the greatest lengths to try and rein Israel in is South Africa and South Africa has paid a price for that. The United States has been giving South Africa, especially since Trump came to office all sorts of problems because the lobby and Israel have been putting pressure on Trump to make it clear to South Africa that it made a fundamental mistake pushing the case of genocide in Gaza in the International Court of Justice. 

I think other countries look at what's happened to South Africa and it has a deterrent effect. They just say to themselves, “Do I really want to get out front on this issue and criticize Israel?” And here we're talking about countries outside the West because as I said, countries inside the West are a hopeless cause. 

So, you have this situation where the only people who are today helping the Palestinians in Gaza are the Houthis. The only reason the Houthis are attacking shipping in the Red Sea is because the Israelis started the genocide up again. So, if there is anybody who deserves credit for helping the Palestinians in Gaza, it's the Houthis. 

G. Greenwald: And look what they're getting as well, a massive bombing campaign aimed at them precisely for that reason. 

Let me just say, on that question of South Africa, I meant to say this earlier when you were talking about the differences with South African apartheid, but the similarities as well. 

I took my kids to South Africa last year, we spent a couple of weeks there, we met with some officials. There are a lot of amazing museums and with all this, like, residual signage and mementos of apartheid, and you go and you look at it and you immediately recognize a lot of similarities between how apartheid was carried out in South Africa, and how it's being carried out in the West Bank – and by the way, there are a lot of senior Israeli officials who have long said it's apartheid, including the former head of the Mossad, just a month before October 7, and lots of other Israeli officials too. 

It's interesting because South Africa, even going back to Mandela and Bishop Tutu, were among the most local supporters of the Palestinians and critics of Israel because they identify so much with that cause. And of course, that is the reason why they've taken the lead in filing these war crimes charges against Israel. 

Let me ask you about the Houthis. Did you want to say something about that? 

John Mearsheimer: Yeah.

G. Greenwald: Good.

John Mearsheimer: I just want to say that it's very important to understand that a number of South African Jews who were involved in the anti-apartheid movement before apartheid collapsed have said that the apartheid system in Israel is worse than the apartheid system in South Africa was. Second – and this is a very important point – it's important to emphasize that Jews in the West, and this includes the United States, of course, have been incredibly vocal in their opposition to the genocide. And that's true in Europe as well. So, it's important that we don't come away from this discussion thinking that it's Jews who are supporting the genocide because many Jews are opposed to the genocide and, of course, the point I'm making here is if you go back to South Africa, many Jews were opposed to apartheid in South Africa. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, if you look at police arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters in Germany or protesters against the Israeli destruction of Gaza, so often they're German Jews. And you see the police coming and arresting German Jews because they protest against Israel, dragging them away, all in the name of fighting antisemitism or protecting the Jews, it's incredibly perverse. 

Let me ask you about when we get to the academia discussion, we're going to talk about that a little more and I obviously always emphasize how many Jewish students participated in these protests, because that's deliberately obscured. Let me ask about Yemen and the bombing campaign there, the United States has been bombing Yemen pretty much for 20 years now without stopping. The Obama administration worked for the Saudis for an all-out war against the Houthis and then Trump, in his first term, bombed the Houthis, Biden bombed them all throughout 2024. 

They seemed to be very resilient. It's amazing how you can watch a political movement like Trump supporters say, “No more wars in the Middle East,” and the minute he posted a video today of about 20 people in Yemen standing around a huge bomb went off and they were all killed. And there were all these Trump supporters saying, “Yeah, get the terrorists, get the terrorists.” It is amazing how you get people to sign onto a war instantly just by saying we're killing the terrorists. 

What do you think are the dangers and geopolitical implications of what the Trump administration says is going to be a sustained ongoing bombing campaign? 

John Mearsheimer; It's very important to emphasize, Glenn, that there was a big piece in The New York Times today that said that individuals from the Pentagon have been briefing Congress that the policy against the Houthis has not been succeeding, and we have been eating up huge amounts of ammunition, and this is undermining our position in East Asia where we're determined to contain the Chinese. So, Trump can say that we're on the verge of winning a decisive victory against the Houthis. He can say in public and he'll convince his supporters of that, I'm sure. But the fact is, that's not what's happening, and that's what people in the Pentagon are telling people in Congress behind closed doors. So, we in the past were unable to defeat the Houthis. We are unable to defeat them now. Trump can bomb them from now to kingdom come and the end result is going to be the same. The Houthis are going to remain standing. 

G. Greenwald: Before we get to some of the domestic issues, I want to ask you about what you alluded to just a minute ago, which is the transatlantic relationship, NATO, the way in which the Trump officials are being quite open about their contempt for the Europeans. And even when we got a glimpse of what they were saying in private with that Signal Chat, JD Vance in particular, but a lot of other people as well, were just spewing overt contempt of the Europeans. Trump has obviously harbored that for quite a long time, not just because he perceives – I think justly – that they don't pay their share, the United States fights their wars and protects them while they have a healthy welfare state, but also because the people in the European capitals tend to look down on Trump, look down on the people around him, and I think that's part of it. 

Do you think the last couple of months have ushered in a lasting, permanent and fundamental transformation of the relationship between the U.S. and Europe? 

John Mearsheimer: Yes. I think that Trump is determined to significantly reduce the American commitment to NATO or the American commitment to Europe. I don't think he's going to eliminate it completely, but he wants to greatly reduce our presence in Europe and he wants the Europeans to take care of their own security or be principally responsible for taking care of their own security, and he wants the Europeans to deal with the Ukraine problem. 

There are a variety of reasons for this, one of which he wants to pivot to Asia, as do most people in the national security establishment because they understand China is a bigger threat than Russia is. In fact, Russia is not much of a threat at all. When you marry that strategic logic with the fact that Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, have contempt for the Europeans and then you marry that with the tariffs that we've now put on the Europeans, it's hard to see how the NATO alliance is going to be anything more than a hollow shell four years from now. 

G. Greenwald: But do you think that is a valid premise, namely that NATO was important when it was necessary to contain the Soviet Union, to protect Western Europe against incursions by Moscow – obviously, the Soviet Union has not been around for several decades now and, therefore, the rationale for NATO and especially the need for the United States to pay far more than the Europeans do for their defense, the moment has come to stop this kind of handout to the Europeans and force them to defend themselves? I mean, do you find that convincing or valid? 

John Mearsheimer: Yes. The fact is, Glenn, I was in favor of pulling it out of NATO and pulling out of Europe after the Cold War ended, and certainly after the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. The purpose of the NATO alliance was to contain the Soviet Union. I thought that made eminently good sense during the Cold War, I fully supported it, but once the Soviet Union went away, what was the purpose of staying in Europe? 

I would have brought the forces home and I would've concentrated on what Barack Obama called nation-building at home. I think that was much more important. I think presidents have the principal responsibility to the American people, and the idea that American leadership involves us policing the entire world, having forces in every nook and cranny of the planet, and trying to run everybody's politics, I think is a prescription for disaster. So, I would have gotten out of here. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, it is ironic, too, that the National Security establishment has been saying we need to pivot away from the Middle East to Europe that goes all the way back to Obama and even before. That was Obama's foreign policy, we needed to get out of the Middle East and so we could focus on Asia. And obviously, the more wars you finance in the Middle East, and the more wars you start in the Middle East, the more that goal is going to get impeded and it was true for Obama as well. 

John Mearsheimer: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I don't know if I already said this to you, Glenn, but if you look at the piece in The New York Times today that talks about the bombing campaign against the Houthis and how much ammunition we're expending against the Houthis, the point was made in the article that it is hindering our efforts in the Pacific. It's hindering our efforts to deal with China. And this just tells you that from an American point of view, if you think that containing China is important – and the Biden administration and now the Trump administration both believe that is the case – then what you want to do is you want to reduce your footprint in the Middle East.  You want to greatly reduce your footprint in Ukraine so that you can pivot fully to Asia. But, in fact, what's happened is we've gotten deeper and deeper into the Middle East. 

Go back to our earlier conversation about starting a war with the Houthis and thinking about starting a war with Iran and backing the Israelis, that's not getting out and diminishing our footprint in that region. In fact, if anything, it's just the opposite. In Europe, I mean, Trump does want to get out, but he's not been very successful so far, and there's not a lot of evidence he's going to be successful anytime soon. And all of this is making it more difficult to deal with the Chinese. 

G. Greenwald: You mentioned earlier, this kind of massive attack by the Trump administration on colleges and universities. You obviously care a great deal about academia, you have worked in academia pretty much your entire adult life. It's something that I know you value. You've spent a lot of time here before talking about your ardent belief in free speech and how the attacks on protests are eroding it on campus.

However, now, we have something in a different universe than what we saw in 2024: not only these deportations of law-abiding, legal immigrants in the United States for the crime of criticizing or protesting Israel, but also, demands now that colleges and universities adopt this radically expansive definition of hate speech and antisemitism to include all sorts of criticism of Israel, including now outlawing something you said earlier, which was comparing and contrasting Israeli actions with the acts of the Nazis. 

That is something that wherever this expanded definition of antisemitism is adopted, what essentially could get you expelled if you're a student, potentially fired if you are an academic. 

But then on top of that, you have this whole climate where speakers are being disinvited if they're going to talk about Gaza; you have Middle East studies programs at Columbia being put under receivership at the demands of the Trump administration. At Harvard, you have the Middle East Studies Director and Associate Director forced out because they're not pro-Israel enough. 

What do you make of all of this in terms of the future of free speech and academic freedom in American academia? 

John Mearsheimer: It's a disaster. There's just no question about it. Not only is free speech being attacked here, but I think that the Trump administration is bent on badly damaging universities. It's bent on wrecking them. When you come into a university from the outside, the way the administration is doing, and you dictate how that university is run in all sorts of ways that are completely antithetical to the way our great universities have been run for a long, long time, you are threatening the existence of some of the most important institutions, not only in the United States but on the planet. 

I have a number of friends who are not Americans, who come from foreign countries, who can't believe what we're doing because they think that American universities are the most wonderful institutions in the world. This is not to say that our universities don't have problems. They do have problems, and those problems need to be addressed. But nevertheless, to bring a wrecking ball in and take places like Harvard and Columbia and Princeton and Penn and now they've added Brown to the list and take the wrecking ball to them, in my mind is really just crazy. Why would anybody do this? But again, as I said to you before Glenn, you do not want to underestimate how radical Trump is. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, well, I mean, just to make the argument that I hear often from Trump supporters and defenders of all of this, which is, yeah, universities used to be an epicenter of innovation and research, and produce cures; they created the internet – Mark Andreessen, a prominent Trump supporter who obviously was instrumental in the creation of the internet with Netscape told The New York Times that it was basically Al Gore, despite all the mockery he got, who really did lead the way in getting funding for key institutions to do the research that ultimately led to browsers and to the Internet. That's been the history of American academia. 

The argument now is look, now they're just hotbeds of left-wing ideology, and gender studies, and sociology and beyond that, they can do whatever they want, but not if they're getting federal funding. If they get federal funding, they have to align themselves with the ideology of the federal government or they don't have to get federal funding and they can't do what they want. What do you make of those? 

John Mearsheimer: Look, I think there's no question that the political center of gravity in universities is too far to the left and needs to be pushed back towards the center. It's not as dire a situation by any means as critics on the right make out. But I would come at this whole issue from a different perspective. I wouldn't focus simply on the inventions that come out of universities. I would focus on the phenomenon of critical thinking. 

What universities do is they teach young people to think critically. Most young people have not figured out by the time they graduate from High School how to think critically, how to read a book and pick it apart and figure out what the author's argument is and how to counter that argument. What universities are really good at is teaching young people, whether you're in the hard sciences, the humanities, or in the social sciences, to think critically. 

And free speech, of course, is inextricably bound up with critical thinking. You want people to be free to ask any questions that pop into their minds, you want them to be free to make arguments that disagree with the arguments that you, the professor, are making, this is what the enterprise is all about. It's what makes it such a wonderful enterprise. It's why people from all around the world are so interested in coming to our universities. 

And what the Trump administration is doing, and of course, the Israel lobby is playing a key role here, is undermining this process by undermining critical thinking, by making it impossible to state your views on particular issues for fear that you'll be thrown in jail, or you'll be dismissed from the position that you're in. So, this is really a huge mistake on the part of the Trump administration, and it is a huge mistake on the part of the Israel lobby. They should absolutely not be doing this. It is not in the interest of Israel supporters to pursue these kinds of policies on university and college campuses. 

G. Greenwald: I still remember the excitement I felt when I got to college and started exploring things and getting exposed to ideas I had never known existed. Not only that, but being encouraged, not just allowed, but encouraged to question every piety, every orthodoxy, I got into a lot of debates with professors who had been studying these issues for a long time, and they encouraged you to challenge them, and you have these exchanges of ideas. And what amazed me about it is that you have all these people who talk about preserving our nation and its kind of founding values and you go back to the Enlightenment, which is essentially what gave birth to the American founding, the Enlightenment ideals and values. 

There was all this kind of, not just discussion about the supreme importance of free speech and free discourse but also a place where all taboos and all pieties get picked in question, which was, is academia. And this has been central to the American founding and the American way of life for centuries. And it's amazing to me to watch people who say that they are devoted to preserving American life and American values be so supportive of this full-frontal attack on this all for the benefit of a foreign country. 

John Mearsheimer: I agree with you. Just to come in from another perspective, Glenn, the fact is that we live in a remarkably complicated world and it's hard to figure out what's going on. As you pointed out at the top of the show, it's harder to keep up with the news because there's a new issue every day on a new subject. And so, we collectively are having lots of trouble just trying to make sense of the world that we operate in. 

What I think we do at universities is we teach critical thinking, which is what allows students who then become adults, young adults and older adults, we teach them to think critically about the world. We teach them how to try to make sense of the world so that they can navigate the world and make them better citizens. And I think this is just a very important function that we serve, and I think it, again, just is foolish in the extreme for the Trump administration and the Israel lobby to take the wrecking ball to that enterprise. 

G. Greenwald: Obviously, what's on everybody's mind are these quite aggressive tariffs that Trump has imposed. But the two countries with the greatest economic power, who are now close to a full-scale trade war, are the United States and China. We saw some of this in the first Trump term, a kind of you could call it a trade war or retaliatory tariffs, but nowhere near to this extent. 

What do you think are the implications, not necessarily economically, if you don't want to talk about that, but more geopolitically in terms of the U.S.-China relationship? 

John Mearsheimer: I don't know what the economic implications are, to be honest. I'm not an economist… 

G. Greenwald: Right, that's why I brought that out. 

John Mearsheimer: Yeah. I really don't what to make of it. I think geopolitically, it will exacerbate tensions with China. I think we have a security competition here, and we have a competition that involves sophisticated or cutting-edge technologies. So, there's this military competition that's been set in play and this sophisticated technology competition that has been set in play. 

And then you add to that the tariff war, the trade war, and it's just going to make relations worse. I think with regard to the Europeans; it's going to make our relations with the Europeans worse. There's no question about that. And I think from Trump's point of view, that's not a bad thing, because it will help him to work out a divorce with the Europeans, which I think he's interested in facilitating. But I don't think these tariffs are going to improve or help relations with the Europeans in any way. 

I think the most interesting question from my point of view, and here we're talking about the geopolitical dimension, is what effect these tariffs have on the countries in East Asia that we would like to be on our side against China. If you look at the tariffs on Vietnam, for example, one would think that Vietnam is a country that the United States would want to rule away from China and have good relations with but I think the tariffs are up around the 45% level with Vietnam. 

There are all sorts of other countries, of course, in Asia, like the South Koreans, the Japanese, and the Taiwanese, who are going to field these tariffs as well. I worry that relations with our East Asian allies will be negatively affected by the tariffs. 

G. Greenwald: Our last question: I think every time you've been on in the last three years, the war in Ukraine has taken up, certainly, a good part of our discussion, if not the bulk of it. Now it's kind of reduced to a footnote at the very end. I almost thought about letting you leave without asking you, but I would feel bad if we didn't talk about Ukraine at all, because it is, despite people not paying attention to it, an ongoing major war still.

President Trump has seemed to have taken some meaningful steps to try to forge a kind of framework for a deal that could wind down that war, but so far there's not really much evidence that it's happening. I think he made some progress but, obviously, the war is still ongoing. The Russians just had a new conscription order to, I think, call up another 130,000 or 140,000 new troops. Where do you think things are with Ukraine and the possibility of Trump being able to facilitate an end to it? 

John Mearsheimer: Doesn't look good. I mean, it may be the case that there's movement behind closed doors, and we just don't know about it. But out in public, it does not look hopeful. The real problem here is that the Trump administration desperately wants a comprehensive cease-fire. We want to stop the shooting right now and then we tell the Russians what we will do once we get the cease-fire: we will begin negotiations on the final peace settlement. 

The Russians have exactly the opposite view. Their view is, “We don't want to cease-fire now because we're in the driver's seat on the battlefield and indeed we expect to win big victories in the spring and in the summer and further improve our situation on the battlefield. So, a cease-fire now makes no sense to us. What we want is we want negotiations on what the final settlement looks like and once you, the Americans, sign on to what the final settlement looks like.” That's another way of saying, “Once you the Americans agree to our principle demands, Moscow's principle demands, we will then agree to a cease-fire.” 

So, you have two fundamentally different approaches to how to move forward. And the question you have to ask yourself is, who's going to win in this tug of war? And the answer is the Russians are going to win because they're in the driver's seat. They're simply not going to agree to a comprehensive cease-fire and they're going to continue militarily fighting on the battlefield and they are going to continue marching forward. 

I believe, Glenn, that at some point the Ukrainians and the Europeans, who are a huge obstacle to getting any kind of a peace agreement, at this point will come to their senses and realize that prolonging this war makes no sense from Ukraine's point of view, because they're just going to lose more territory and more Ukrainians are going to die. Hopefully, then Trump will be able to move in and get some sort of negotiations going where we can finally put an end to this war, either through a final peace agreement or by causing a frozen conflict. 

G. Greenwald: Alright Professor Mearsheimer, it was great to see you I appreciate talking to you and it's always good to be able to cover so many topics like we did tonight, and I hope to see you again and shortly. 

John Mearsheimer: Likewise, and thank you for having me on, Glenn. I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. Have a great evening. 

All right, every Friday night, we have a Q&A session where we take questions exclusively from our Locals members. We weren't sure if we were going to be able to get to it tonight. I usually like to talk to Professor Mearsheimer for as long as possible. We'll get to as many as we can. 

The first one is from @iculus333, and he writes: 

Yeah, so I'm not sure I identified as a Democrat or a liberal like in the early 2000s. I talked about before how I used to pay a lot of attention to politics in the '80s when I was going to college and then into the '90s going to law school. And then once I got into law school, I started working at a big law firm, a big Wall Street firm, for a couple of years and started my own firm. And I was really focused on my work and my law firm trying to build a practice of constitutional law. And I really kind of stayed out of partisan politics, especially in the nineties. It was a very small issue stuff with the Clinton administration dominated by things like the Lewinsky scandal and school uniforms. I mean, there was a war, of course, in Yugoslavia bombing Serbia, advocating for the independence of Kosovo, which we're now saying is outrageous when the Russians want to do that. 

So, I mean, there were some things going on, I don’t mean to completely diminish it, but it was the fall of the Soviet Union, the peace dividend, etc. There was a lot of focus on domestic issues. Really didn't care much about partisan politics. And it was really only after 9/11 that I started getting very interested, primarily because of this radical change in the climate where I thought there was an attack on dissent, institutions had been capitulating but more so it was this idea that we were imprisoning people without any due process in Guantánamo, but also American citizens – there was a U.S. citizen named Jose Padilla who is arrested at the Chicago International Airport when he arrived in January 2002, they accused him of being the dirty bomber and didn't charge him with any crime. They just arrested him: no charges, no access to lawyers, no access to the outside world for the next three and a half years until the case made it to the Supreme Court. They were worried the Supreme Court was going to say he's an American citizen you have to give him charges in a trial and they kind of then brought charges finally and argued to the Supreme Court that that question was moot. 

All those civil liberties and obviously NSA spying on American citizens were the motivations that I had to start writing and paying a lot more attention to politics and doing journalism and I never considered those values left or right. I really didn't. I really didn’t. 

Obviously, I was criticizing sharply the Bush & Cheney administration and the neocons that surrounded them. And so, because that was the first thing I did in my journalism career, that's the way people got to know me, they assumed I must be a liberal or a Democrat or whatever since I was constantly condemning the Bush and Cheney administration. But I never perceived values like due process or the rights of citizens and the Fourth Amendment to be particularly left-wing or Democratic Party values. 

I was often criticized by the Democrats because people don't remember that the Democrats endorsed most of what Bush and Cheney were doing. Half of the Democratic Senate caucus voted to invade Iraq. Nancy Pelosi was, at the time, the ranking member on the Intelligence Committee in the House of Representatives and she was briefed on all this stuff, on torture in Guantánamo, on warrantless NSA spying, and she endorsed it all. 

And then, once President Obama got in and began applying the same exact policies and even expanding a lot of the ones that he had vowed to uproot, I continued those criticisms that people think lost the sense of Democrat or Republican. I would say I was raised as a Democrat. My political influences were my grandparents. They were just very standard kind of pro-FDR, post-depression, Jewish Americans who identified with the Democratic Party, with American liberalism. I remember my earliest memory was them cheering for George McGovern against Richard Nixon. 

So, it was kind of the ethos that I absorbed. Like the big debates in the ‘80s were often around social issues and identified more with the democratic view on those, like the idea that people should be free to do what they want. But all that has changed, it constantly changes. I think particularly once Trump emerged, so much of partisan politics or left v. right, radically changed how they manifest. So, I just don't think it's remotely helpful. I honestly never think about what is the position that I should take if I want to be on the left, what is the position I want to take when I'm if I want to be on the right.” 

When I did a lot of investigative reporting in Brazil in 2019 and 2020 that dominated the headlines about the corruption probe that led to the former president Lula da Silva being arrested and our reporting led to him being released from jail, obviously the Brazilian left loved me and assumed I was a leftist, the Brazilian right hated me and assume I was a leftist, and I kept saying this is not my cause here. My cause is journalism and having an uncorrupted and unpoliticized legal process, especially when you're talking about putting people in jail. 

And nobody believed me when I was saying, it has nothing to do with left-wing ideology for me. The right hated me because they thought I was on the left and the left loved me because they thought it was one of them too. And now I've done a lot of reporting that Bolsonaro supporters like a lot and the left is enraged by it. So, it always shifts, especially if you don't look at things through that metric and I really try not to. I'm not saying I'm perfect, I'm as subjective as anybody else is, where all the byproducts are experiences and beliefs. But I honestly don't look at politics that way. 

That's why, from the beginning, I've always had a readership that couldn't be defined ideologically as left v. right. I always had libertarians, a lot of kind of partisan Democrats, people on the left and it changed over the years. I have a lot of Trump supporters now as well, but it's a very diverse audience. It always has been. That's the way I want it. 

When I released my first book in 2006 about the Bush-Cheney attack on civil liberties called “How Would a Patriot Act?” the first place that I spoke about my book was the ACLU and the second place was the Cato Institute. And even though I was perceived as a liberal then, the first magazine that ever hired me to write an article to pay me was the American Conservative founded by Pat Buchanan, paleoconservatives who very much were in accord with me when it came to the Bush-Cheney powers, they were claiming and contempt for neocons and the like. So, it has always had this kind of mixed political spirit, and I still think that's the way I see things. 

Especially now, with Trump and these radical realignments and transformations, I think trying to figure out what is left or what is right or what is Republican and what is Democrat in terms of the belief system that defines them is really unhelpful like it just obfuscates things more than it eliminates. 

All right, next question, from @adoe: 

That’s some ironic mockery. But anyway, and it ends with thank you, I'll assume it's intended in the nicest way possible. I think this is the important thing to think about. I know instinctively, intuitively, you would think, "Oh, it's the American Constitution. That's for citizens. It's the Bill of Rights. It's only for citizens." 

Just imagine what it would mean if non-citizens had no constitutional rights. It would have meant that during the Biden administration, Joe Biden could have ordered, let's say, Jordan Peterson, who's not an American citizen but is in the U.S. legally, he could have just said, “I want him in prison for life because he's been criticizing my policies. I think he's too disruptive. He's disrupting and destabilizing America. I don't want to give him a trial, I don' want to charge him with anything, I don't want to have to convince a court that he's done anything wrong. Just throw him into prison. Or let's send him to El Salvador. Let them put him in prison and we'll pay El Salvador to do it.”

Would anybody have trouble understanding why that's tyrannical? Why that's completely contrary to the letter in the spirit of the Constitution? It's a lot harder to think about that if you're demonizing somebody. Oh, this is an Islamic radical who loves Hamas as a terrorist. And then people are like, “Yeah, throw them into prison, get them out of here. I don't really care.” A lot of time, most of the time, that's a lie. That's not true of any of those students being deported. 

But the bigger issue is the Bill of Rights is conceived of not as a Christmas tree of presents and rights and benefits that are assigned only to a certain select group of people called American citizens. The Bill of Rights is a constraint on what the U.S. government can do to anyone under its power, including people who are in the country on a legal visa or green card, or even people in the U.S. illegally. 

That's why the government can't just order the execution of say a green card holder because he criticizes the government. It's why they can't order the life in prison of someone whose only crime was crossing the border illegally and especially not without a trial. And it's not hard to understand why that's important to make sure the government can't. Even in 2008, Guantánamo detainees who were effectively in prison for life indefinitely with no charges, no trial, nothing, they weren't even allowed to go into a court hearing to argue that they had been wrongfully detained. It got up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said that the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, applies to anyone, non-citizen or citizen under the control on sovereign territory of the United States. 

And all nine justices of the Supreme Court agreed with the principle that non-citizens have constitutional rights. The only thing at question in that case was whether Guantánamo counted as a sovereign American territory because the Americans had taken over Guantánamo. The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 decision said, “Guantánamo is also American land.”

It was never a dispute that noncitizens have the protection of the Bill of Rights.  So that's one way of looking at it. Just imagine what would be possible if they didn't. But the reason, textually and constitutionally, courts have said this for 150 years. The first case I'm aware of, and I think there are ones before this, is in the 1880s, just so you don't think this is some invention of a, like, the war in court or some left-wing judges or whatever. It was back in the1880s. A Chinese national who was working inside the United States was suspected in California of having committed a crime and they basically just arrested him and put him in prison with almost no due process rights that citizens would get. He appealed his conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, I think we've read this case to you before, that the right of due process applies to everyone in the United States, not just citizens. 

The reason is, if you look at the wording that the founders purposely chose, or even the framers of the 14th Amendment purposely chose, it does not say that the government shall not have the right to deprive citizens of property or rights or life without the due process of law. It says all persons. The 14th Amendment says all persons in the United States shall be guaranteed the right of equal protection of law and due process. And it's not like they didn't understand the word citizen because there are a few constitutional provisions that apply only to citizens including the right to vote.

 They know how to say citizens if that's what they meant. They didn't. They purposely said persons. It's a universal protection for anyone under the control of the United States. You see it actually if you go read the 14th Amendment or the 5th Amendment. And if you just think about what would be the consequences, the very perverse consequences of allowing the U.S. government to do anything to non-citizens, including people here legally. You could have a green card holder who's married to an American citizen and has three American kids and is here for 30 years and the government could just come to your house one day and say, “We don't like what you say, so we're putting you in prison for the rest of your life with no trial.” If you believe the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to non-citizens, you have no objections to that, you have no constitutional objections to them. But of course, that would be unconstitutional for the textual and prudential reasons I just said. You just can read the Constitution, you can read these cases, and it'll become very clear why. 

All right, next question, we'll make it the last one Brian R. Duffy @brdduffy who says: 

And he says:

I understand it's a leverage tool for negotiations as well. Most of the coverage I have seen is pessimistic about the chances of it working. Is there a guest that Glenn could have on that we could trust to shed some light on the subject? (Brian R. Duffy @brduffy. April 4, 2025.)

Now, obviously, this is something we've been thinking about and have been discussing because the terror policies that President Trump unveiled are indescribably consequential, causing consequences all throughout the world, not just economically, but geopolitically, and they're affecting every country in transformative ways. 

One of the things I hope you listened to when I asked Professor Mearsheimer about tariffs, I specifically said, “Look, I'm not really asking you to describe what you think the economic outcome will be. Will it bring back the manufacturing base? Is it just a negotiating ploy? Will it drive up inflation or unemployment? Is it a tax?” 

And the reason I didn't ask him that is because I know that he's not an economist. He didn't study economics. He's not an expert on tariffs or economic policy. And so, I just wanted to give him that out, to say, “Look, I'm not asking you to comment on the tariffs themselves, just how they affect the relationship between the U.S. and China” and I expected and I really appreciated the fact that he said, “Look, I can't talk about the economics of tariffs because I'm not an expert in this. I really don't know.” 

And so one of the things that I've always tried hard to do since the beginning of my journalism career, since I had that blog back in 2005 and 2006, even when I was writing every day, you can go back and see, I don't write about topics where I don't feel like I have any specialized knowledge, or expertise, or particularly valuable insight. I just don't. I don't know much about economic theory. I don’t have the credibility or the competence in my view to sit here and opine on what the outcome of tariffs would be. I could if I wanted to. I've been reading all the things that you've been reading, I've been listening to all the people debate tariffs, not just now, but back in the first Trump administration – that was something he was advocating back then and did to some extent nowhere near the extent to now. 

But I really talk about economic policy because I feel like I have a decent understanding of it, the kind of understanding that you get if you read and listen to the news or to experts. I talk to people whose views I respect on this issue. But I would be a fraud, I feel, if I sat here and said, “OK, I'm going to explain to you now the implications economically of tariffs.” I don't know. And I just don't want to talk about it. 

Now, the one thing I do know about that I think is interesting and that I can talk about is the political evolution of this issue, by which I mean specifically that for as long as I've been watching the American left, they have hated free trade. Hated it. One of the biggest criticism on the left of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and one of the things that people hate about the Clintons is NAFTA and those other free trade agreements that ended up, I think in the view of a lot of people, certainly a lot people on the left, hollowing out the manufacturing base, deindustrializing the middle of the country, causing massive unemployment and the shuttering of factories, the downward mobility of the middle class and the shipping of jobs overseas. 

I remember watching the 1992 presidential debate, where Ross Perot said, “Do you hear that sucking sound? That's the sound of jobs being sucked out of the United States, immediately heading to Mexico.” And he proved to be totally prescient on this. 

There's a really interesting video that we'll put in the show notes next week – I actually promoted it on X when I watched it: Pat Buchanan wrote his 2011 book, I think it's called Suicide of a Superpower – he went on a C-SPAN show that was hosted by Ralph Nader. So, you had Ralph Nader well on the left, in fact, so on the left that he ran to the Democratic Party's left in 2000. A lot of people think he cost Al Gore the election. I don't. But so, you have Ralph Nader on the left here, you have Pat Buchanan obviously on the right, the populist right, and they both completely agreed on the evils of free trade. 

In fact, both of them were at the 1999 very famous, notorious protest outside the World Trade Organization in Seattle that turned violent, because a lot of kind of Antifa types – I mean, there was no Antifa in that, but same kind of strain – but there were huge numbers of people there, from the left and the right, who didn't engage in violence, but were there to protest world trade, global trade, free trade. 

And I think the idea that free trade and globalism are evils socially, economically and politically, is as close to what consensus on the American left, maybe in the Western left, as I think you can get. So, I have to say it's a little odd now to watch finally a politician who promised this during the election – it's not like he unveiled this out of nowhere: he promised he was going to do this during this election. Most of what Trump's doing is stuff he talked about in the election, not trying to get Greenland or the Panama Canal, not bombing Yemen, but a lot of the most controversial stuff, including invoking the L.A. and enemies act to have full discretion to deport not just illegal people here illegally, but also legally all the stuff you talked about in the campaign trail, the terrorists was one of them, and people voted for them. They were convinced that that would help. 

So, it's very odd for me to see people on the left just, I'm not saying they have to support exactly how Trump is doing the tariffs, they do seem a bit haphazard to me, again, I'm not going to opine on that, but it seems odd for people on the left to reflexively say, “Oh my God, these tariffs are terrible” and to even cite the fact that Wall Street is angry about them, that the stock market is declining because of it, as though that's some terrible thing. Now the left is afraid of alienating Wall Street. 

I thought the whole point was that we're tired of policies that only benefit a tiny sliver of the country. This concentrated corporate power that is globalist in nature, Wall Street barons, tycoons, and the like. So, because it's Trump, now, a lot of people are saying, “Wait a minute, we don't want tariffs. We want to keep the regime of global trade, of free trade.” Really? That's not what I've ever heard previously. And then there are a lot of people, I think the smarter, more thoughtful people, who don't have this reflexive reaction to Trump saying, “Tariffs can actually do important and beneficial things. We need them, we have to start undermining the regime of free trade, it's just not this way that he's doing it is not the correct way,” which seems to me to be a middle ground. It's kind of like immigration, where opposition to open borders when I started writing about politics was a very left-wing position. Bernie Sanders in 2016 when he ran was asked about open borders and he was horrified. Bernie Sanders said, “Open borders? That's what you favor? That's a Koch brothers’ proposal.” 

And back then it was George Bush and Dick Cheney and the Chamber of Commerce and John McCain, people who were very corporatist in their interests and orientations who wanted immigration reform, wanted to open up the borders much more because that's beneficial to large American corporations. If you flood the labor market with cheap labor, you drive down the cost of doing business, you increase the bottom line, you gut out the unions and the protections that American labor has. That's exactly what happened and that's why the left was opposed to it. Cesar Chavez, the Mexican American union leader, hated immigration. 

There's an article in 2011 by Jameel Bowie in the American Prospect, who's now like the supposed left-wing columnist for The New York Times, he's really just a partisan Democrat, but he wrote an article when he was at the American Prospect, I think it was in 2010, warning Democrats not to be too aggressive about or permissive about immigration because, he said, the people who will lose their jobs and suffer the most are Black and Latino Americans. Those are the ones who lose their job first, who will have to compete with undocumented immigrants. 

Opposing immigration was really a left-wing view. The establishment Republican Part –, you have those populists, but the Establishment Republican Party wanted open borders. So now you just have this complete mix now. It's in a lot of ways the same with tariffs. I'm just amazed at how many people are so horrified that Wall Street doesn't like Trump's plan, that they're throwing a tantrum that I guess they want to preserve now the system of free trade. 

So again, I'm not commenting on the merits of the tariffs and how they're done because I can't, I just see that political aspect to it. We talked about having somebody on this week. 

The problem is that if I just have an economist on, who's vehemently opposed to, or vocally in support of Trump's tariff regime, I really won't be able to push back on it the way I need to. And they'll just be here to state one opinion. I won't really have the chops, especially if they're experts in tariffs and trade, to be able to push back. We talked about maybe having two people on who have some different views that I can kind of mediate so you can hear the clash of ideas, which I think is probably the best way to do it but it is true that, in general, I've often not covered very important topics, simply, if I think I lack the expertise or the competence to do so. 

I cannot be an expert in everything. I think one of the downfalls, in fact, of American journalism and American punditry is that people feel compelled to just pontificate on everything, including things they know virtually nothing about. And that's something I really try to avoid. I was glad that Professor Mearsheimer obviously abstained as well from talking about a topic on which he wasn't an expert either.

All right, so we did have some more excellent questions that I wanted to get to, but we're short of time to do that. We'll try to get to some questions next week. And continue to submit your questions, if you're members of our Locals community, we really enjoy doing these Friday night Q&As. 

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

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The CEO of Substack, Chris Best, will be here tonight to discuss what this free speech protection program is, what prompted it, and other developments at Substack as well, which formed to be a platform that preserves free speech on the internet, very similar to Rumble. 

Then, we have a potpourri – a smorgasbord – of various events we want to cover quickly tonight: the behavior of the Democrats at the Congressional hearing held yesterday on the censorship regime featuring the testimony of Matt Taibbi, as well as the would-be Homeland Security disinformation Nina Yankovitch – remember her? We also want to talk about the behavior of both parties at yesterday's hearing on the newly released JFK files and the possible role of the CIA hearing that featured the Director of the film “JFK,” Oliver Stone, as well as the long-time JFK investigator Jefferson Morley, whom we interviewed on our show last night. We also want to cover the newly elected Israel-focused member of Congress, the Republican from Florida who is taking Mike Waltz's seat, Randy Fine, and, time permitting, several other issues. 

The Interview: Chris Best

When I resigned from The Intercept, the media outlet that I co-founded, I immediately went to Substack, a platform I didn't know very much about and had an extremely positive experience there the entire time I was there in large part because they were very committed to giving their writers total freedom and protecting freedom of speech. You didn't have to worry about saying something that the platform would dislike or that would ban you. They were an NRA platform devoted to free speech. 

Chris Best is a co-founder and CEO of Substack. He has fought, as has Substack, to defend free speech rights while connecting users with creators, ideas and communities they care about most. It was founded in 2017. Substack is building a new economic engine for culture by putting publishers in charge and enabling subscribers to support the work they deeply value. 

Before Substack, Chris was the co-founder and CTO of the mobile messenger app Kit, from 2009 to 2017. He helped scale Kit and built a platform used by over 300 million users. It is always a pleasure to welcome him to our show. 

G. Greenwald: Chris, good evening. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. 

Chris Best: Thank you for having me.

G. Greenwald: All right. So, let's get right into this because Substack has teamed up with FIRE.ORG, which I sort of consider to be the new ACLU, what the ACLU was before they kind of prioritized partisan agendas above their original values.  

FIRE has been speaking out quite vocally, even though they had developed a mostly conservative audience because they had been defending conservative speech on campus about a lot of these new censorship attacks coming from the new administration. 

You joined with FIRE and the idea was to protect writers in America, especially ones who are somehow being targeted or punished for their dissent on foreign policy, Israel, or any other topics. 

It’s not all that usual for a company that is a for-profit company, which is true of Substack, to take such a vocal position on controversial issues. What is it that prompted you to do so? 

Chris Best: Substack doesn't take positions broadly on political issues; we don't take a position, for example, on immigration policy or foreign policy. But we do see freedom of speech and freedom of the press as centrally important to our business and our mission. And so, this felt really important. 

G. Greenwald: I get that, and free speech, in my view, has been kind of central to your identity and your mission from the beginning and I've never really seen it in conflict with your business model, although it certainly can be. If you take any kind of position, even one just vaguely in support of free speech that certainly can. But the statement refers to new sorts of attacks on the right of free thought, the right to free expression. I'm just kind of wondering, was there a tipping point or a triggering point for you over the last couple of months where you decided Substack needed to do something? 

Chris Best: I think the event that put this in kind of like the Substack Bailiwick was the Öztürk editorial and deportation. The fact that somebody is being, as far as we know, targeted for the contents of an editorial that they have co-published, to us, that's a very clear free speech issue and so, even though it's not, that felt like a very clear line in the sand. 

We've had this Substack Defender program for years that helps defend free speech from legal threats. It's helped dozens of cases. We wanted to make sure that we were stepping in and helping wherever we could on this issue and we're delighted to partner with FIRE, which is just a fantastic organization. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. For those who don't know – and viewers of the show know because we covered that story in depth, what you're referring to is a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts, who was in the United States very legally working in her on her PhD program. She was recently snatched up by plainclothes officers on the street. She was obviously very frightened. She didn't even know these were agents of the state. They arrived in masks. They grabbed her phone that she was using so they could have access to her phone and then shipped her to a deportation facility in Louisiana. The only thing the government alleges, or the only things groups that monitor people like this allege is this op-ed. There's no claim that she even participated in the protest, let alone harassed anybody, blocked anyone's entrance, or vandalized a building. It's apparently solely about the op-ed. 

Now, you just mentioned you were happy to join with FIRE. I'm just wondering how that came about and why FIRE? 

Chris Best: There aren't that many consistent defenders of freedom of the press. Freedom of speech is something that I think has a lot of fair-weather friends. It's something that we've tried to be consistent about over the years and I've been very impressed by FIRE as well. You mentioned in the intro that they were sort of known for defending right-wing people against threats of censorship, but they also do that across the political spectrum. I think they're just very value-aligned on this issue. And I know Greg Lukianoff. I think they're fantastic and we're just happy to partner with them. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, just to underscore that, I mean, I know some of the people who founded and run FIRE, including Greg, who you just mentioned, who actually are quite vocal supporters of Israel, very vocal support of Israel just in their personal views and yet they've spent a lot of time defending pro-Palestinian speech on campus because their mission is to defend free speech, regardless of what they think. 

Chris, I was thinking about this earlier today and kind of is very ironic because when I first came to Substack, it was late 2020, so it was a little bit more than four years now, it wasn't very well known, but it was starting to be better known before I got there, and certainly over the next year. But the criticism of it at the time was that because it allowed free speech, it was basically some sort of right-wing or even hospitable to fascism kind of outlet when in reality you weren't promoting right-wing speech, you were just offering a platform for people who had been censored, and you had a ton of writers who weren't even remotely on the right. 

Now here we are, four years later, and what you're essentially saying is you want to make sure that people who are writing at Substack have the right to criticize foreign policy, including U.S. foreign policy toward Israel or to the Middle East or anything else and kind of protect them from some of these programs we've seen from the Trump administration. 

My guess is, or there's certainly a possibility, that if you start protecting people who have that perspective, you kind of now get the opposing accusation, “Oh, you're protecting left-wing radicals” or even that you're “antisemitic” which, if you haven't gotten yet, I'm sure you're likely to, given this program. What is the mission of Substack in terms of dealing with any type of those accusations? 

Chris Best: I think the biggest thing is to have principles, know what you stand for and why, stay calm and make sure that you're sort of consistently trying to live up to the principle. And you're absolutely right that I think free speech is a mechanism that protects writers and thinkers from power. And so, at any given time, people will look at freedom of speech as a partisan issue or as a one-sided issue, but over a long enough time horizon, we've just seen this. We've had people come to Substack in recent years who had been former critics of us, who used to say, “Substack is this evil right or left-wing place because it platforms this thing.” They wind up finding themselves censored when the worm turns, and they come to appreciate the wisdom of a consistent stance in favor of freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. I think that we've been doing that for long enough, that the evidence says we're not doing it for one side. It's a consistent policy and I really believe in it. I think it's the best thing for the platform; I think it's the best thing for the country. 

G. Greenwald: One of the things that has impressed me being here at Rumble is that they have a very kind of vigorous commitment to this same principle. It's a place for anyone to come, anyone to be heard, it's not their place to sit in judgment of which opinions are sufficiently right or wrong to be allowed to be hurt. At times this has in fact jeopardized their commercial benefits. They're as a result of that position, their refusal to censor, they're not allowed in certain countries including Brazil. I was just in France about a month ago, tried to access my own show and got that message that says “Rumble's not available in France” because they wouldn't remove RT and other Russian outlets that the French government demanded they remove. And I guess their position is sort of twofold. One is that in the long term we think free speech will help our commercial interests, but number two, even if they don't, even if they do undermine them somewhat, we're not willing to profit by violating our own beliefs in free speech and censoring on behalf of power centers. Which of those two, or if it's any of those, do you see Substack's position as being? 

Chris Best: I do think it's both. We've designed the company to be aligned with this mission. Writers on Substack, creators on Substack, are independent. They own their work, they own connection to their audience, so they can leave at any time. If we turned around one day and said, “Ha ha ha, we've sold out for some short-term profit, we're going to start censoring,” we would lose all of our business. 

I think that I’ve tried, we've tried, to build a company that puts us on the side of writers and thinkers who have the right to say what they think and readers and viewers who have a right to choose what to subscribe to and what to hear. I don't think that there is a conflict, but it is both a commercial and a moral proposition for us. 

G. Greenwald: And do you get pressure from investors or from people interested in the more financial side of Substack that if push comes to shove, they don't want you to choose this kind of mission of free speech if it is going to undermine the financial profitability of the company? 

Chris Best: If anything, the opposite. We have wonderful investors. We have wonderful employees, too. I think we've been at this long enough that people know what we're about. They understand the theory of what we are doing. People would not sign up to work at or invest in Substack if they didn't see these things as valuable. And so, we're quite fortunate that we're pretty aligned. 

G. Greenwald: So, let's talk about the program itself. When I was there, you started introducing programs that would kind of support the writers, including some really important support mechanisms, such as if a writer gets sued by some subject that they're writing about, to help them be able to have legal counsel that defends them, which is incredibly important, especially if you're an independent journalist. If you don't have that, you could be deterred from writing about wealthy people or powerful people because of the threat that you could be sued, you begin offering another kind of support services for research and the like, and it's become not just this neutral platform, but a place that is designed to support the writers that you attract, which is one of the reasons I think you're attracting so many. So, what is this new program that you just unveiled specifically intended to do?  

Chris Best: It is spiritually similar to the Defender Program that you're talking about, the genesis of that was we noticed that if you're an independent journalist, you're writing something about a local businessman or politician that is true or is like valid journalism and they send you this legal threat to shut you down. It's basically like censorship by lawfare. And so, we just felt like the platform had an interest in helping defend against those kinds of activities. If it was costless to do that, if people could just be rolled over at no cost, it was going to have this massive chilling effect on everybody on Substack, on the internet as a whole. And we feel the same about these actions. It cannot be the case that people can be snatched up in America for writing an op-ed. We have to help with that where we can, we have to provide what resources we can to support, we're partnering with FIRE, and we're providing money in legal defense. Whatever we can do to help push back against specifically the threats to free speech, we want to do. 

G. Greenwald: question, because I found this funny too. When I was at Substack, and the kind of awareness of Substack was growing pretty significantly, it was attracting a much larger audience, many writers who had a big platform previously, it wasn't just the accusation wasn't, just, “Oh, there's some sort of proto-fascist site, because they're allowing a bunch of right-wing people who should be banned or whatever.” That was at the height of the kind of left-liberal censorship regime as opposed to the one we're getting now. But the other attack on it that I remember quite well came from corporate journalists because they're afraid of anything that might be a competitor to the hegemony or monopoly on a discourse that corporate journalism has and certainly, Substack, attracting so many readers, became a threat. 

I remember very well that the consensus was that Substack could ruin journalism. It was allowing all these people to write and to do journalism “without any kind of editorial fact-checking structure” and it was just for people to kind of sound off and it was something that would erode journalism. 

Now, just yesterday, I think, The New York Times had an article on Substack, about how many refugees from corporate media, who four years ago would never have been caught dead associating with Substack are now not just going to Substack but finding success on Substack after they were basically expelled from their company for one reason or another. 

It kind of details not just that they're there, but that they are finding a lot of success. What do you think changed in kind of the ecosystem over the last few years that had corporate media personalities, contemptuous of Substack, kind of scorning it to now kind of “if you can't beat them, you join them” mentality, going to Substack? 

Chris Best: I do think part of it is just that there is a lot of pressure on those business models. That's been a tough business for a bunch of reasons. But I think the big thing is, I think a lot of people, you said before, people were worried that if you give people freedom, it's going to make the thing bad. It's going to turn into something that you don't want, something that can't make a good product. And I think the reverse is true. When you set the incentives up correctly, when you give people editorial freedom, when you give them the right to their own platform, the right to set their own standards in their community, when you get them a viable business model for doing the work they believe in, ultimately it works, ultimately you can make good things, and that is attracting more and more people, and I guess more sides of the political spectrum are seeing the value of freedom of speech owning your audience. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. As you said, people kind of like the idea of a control discourse until it kind of starts coming for them …

Chris Best: Until they’re the ones being controlled. 

G. Greenwald: Exactly, then they find the virtues of free speed. 

I know some of them are doing quite well. Are you pleased with the growth of Substack? Has it been kind of a continual growing as a result of these new issues in the media? 

Chris Best: We're thrilled: more than five-million-page descriptions. The Substack app is growing very quickly. You should get the app, get the Rumble app too. Get the Substack App as well. It's going great and it's been a steady growth over the years at this point and we think it's working. People are hungry to take back their minds, to have something different and we're delighted that more and more people are choosing Substack. 

G. Greenwald: All right, Chris, it was great to see you. Congratulations on this initiative, which I obviously do not just support, but think is incredibly important. Keep up the great work. 

Chris Best: Thank you. Thanks for everything. 

There's a lot of different things going on, and we wanted to try to just sort of, instead of delving in very, very deeply into each of them, kind of just give you a sense of some of them because the news cycle has been extremely filled. It's been a very fast news cycle, I don't think there's been a slow news day since Trump's inauguration. 

We tend to do stories more in-depth here. Maybe two, a maximum of three a night, our challenge is which ones we're going to leave out because there are always so many things to cover. 

Obviously, the big news of today is this new scheme of tariffs that Trump introduced that has become quite controversial. I'm not an expert at all on tariffs. If we're going to talk about it, we would have someone on to talk about it. But I wanted to show you just a few quick things that we would mean to talk about that I think are interesting kind of in a faster pace order. 

Yesterday, there was a hearing on the JFK documents and we covered that by having Jefferson Morley, who was a witness at that hearing, on our show. He talked about the hearing itself and the discovery of CIA-related documents in the JFK files. But there was also, in a different committee, a hearing to investigate the censorship industrial complex, the program by the Biden administration to censor dissent by coercing Big Tech companies, by threatening Big Tech companies, in terms of what they can allow and what they cannot allow, controlling them to remove dissent on COVID, Ukraine, a whole variety of other issues. 

One of the witnesses who was testifying was our friend, the journalist Matt Taibbi, and he did that, of course, because of his work on the Twitter Files, which was one of the main sources of information to show how the government was pressuring social media companies and Big Tech, so that's why he was there. 

The Democrats invited to sit next to him that utterly crazy woman who they wanted to put in charge of the ‘disinformation’, as part of Homeland Security, Nina Yankovitch. And even in our society that loves censorship and that is in love with this idea of experts identifying disinformation for you – because they know more than you do about what is true and what is false and they're going to protect you from false things – she was such a caricature of kind of a liberal censor that she was just a bridge too far even for our political culture when Biden was president. So, they had to kind of scrap that, and she's been very angry about that ever since. 

I just want to show you how scummy people in Congress can be. So, Matt Taibbi was there as a journalist, and if you know Matt, he has a very mild-mannered demeanor. He's very polite, very soft-spoken. If you engage him in debate, he's not really a combative personality. Sometimes when I watch Matt in these circumstances, my aggression kicks in. I just say, Matt, say this, push him, but that's not how Matt is. I've never seen him be disrespectful to anybody. 

So, of course, if you're going to denounce the censorship regime of Joe Biden, you're going to have Democrats who are going to be angry at you, even though it's, again, something that had been so fundamental to left-liberal politics for decades, the idea of free speech, and now it's not at all. 

So Matt Taibbi was there. He got invited. He went to testify in Washington, left his family, left his kids to go do it and here's the ranking member of that committee, her name is Sydney Kamlager-Dove – she's a member of Congress, a Democratic member of Congress – and here is what she did in response to Matt's testimony. 

Video. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, C-SPAN. April 1, 2025.

Do you see how scummy that is? Almost 30 years ago, in Moscow according to newspapers – and these were old newspaper articles – Matt Taibbi terrorized women. 

This all came from a work of fiction that Matt Taibbi's partner, Mark Ames, wrote. In exile, they had an extremely satirical newspaper. They were quite young; Matt, kind of in particular, got known for a sort of raucous style of writing. I remember reading him when I was in law school or even as a lawyer in the New York server, the New Press. He had a column there. It was very satiric, it was very ironic, but this book, in particular, was fiction. It was a work of fiction. And a lot of articles that came out right when Matt Taibbi had a new book out were designed to depict him as some sort of misogynist, like a victim of the Me Too movement, or a predator of the Me Yoo movement. 

And then once these newspaper articles ran, several of them ended up retracting the article, because the thing that was missing from Matt Taibbi's reign of terror against women in Moscow was a single woman who identified herself as his victim. No one ever complained about Matt Taibbi in any way. No woman to this day has ever said, “Oh, Matt Taibbi harassed me, he treated me inappropriately.” Yet, this scumbag of a congresswoman is exploiting the Me Too movement. 

Let me just say too, that right now, in New York City, the leading candidate to become mayor of New York is the Democrat Andrew Cuomo who had to resign from his gubernatorial position several years ago because he was engulfed in a multiple-woman scandal and alleging sexual harassment or inappropriate sexual behavior. He was forced out of office and the entire Democratic establishment is now going to align behind Andrew Cuomo because they don't actually care at all. Those were actually victims, alleged victims there, rising and saying, “Yes, he treated me improperly.” 

They don't care about that at all! Every four years, the Democratic convention hosts Bill Clinton, who's been not just credibly accused of sexual assault, but even of rape and feminist groups throughout the '90s, defended Bill Clinton, defended Bill Clinton, against all of these women accusers. Hillary Clinton demeaned their character and attacked the victims. James Carville said, “Oh yeah if you drag a dollar through a trailer park, you never know what kind of trash you're going to find.” Joe Biden himself had all kinds of accusations about inappropriate behavior with women. Do you think these people care in the slightest? 

They so cynically and cheaply exploit this issue, the Me Too issue, sexual harassment, womanizing, feminism. They don't believe in it at all. What relevance did it even have? Matt's there to talk as a journalist about an investigation that he did and she's like, “Hey, by the way, 30 years ago, some newspaper said that he was harassing women.” He never got sued, he was never charged and there's no victim, newspapers retracted it when they understood that it was actually based on a work of fiction, primarily written by his partner Mark Ames, who also has never been accused of any of that, by any woman. But they'll just whip it out because they just want to demean and malign anybody who criticized Biden's censorship regime. 

It is the left-liberal establishment in the West that has largely imposed a censorship regime. It came from 2016 with the dual traumas for Western liberalism of the British people voting to leave the EU in contempt of the Brussels bureaucrats that rule their lives followed three or four months later by the shock of Trump's victory over the ultimate establishment maven, Hillary Clinton. After that, they decided, all of them, that they could not afford free speech. They could not permit free speech anymore on the internet because when you do so, you can't control how people vote. 

And they concocted a whole new industry called the disinformation industry, a whole expertise they fabricated out of whole cloth, disinformation experts, that really does not exist. None of these people pretended to believe in free speech, none of the people had any concern about it. She began by saying, “Why are we even talking about these things? The only things that we should be talking about are the economic suffering of ordinary Americans,” which is so ironic because the reason people hate the Democratic Party is that they've never been interested in that, not in the last decade. 

They've been talking about Russiagate and Putin and Trump loving Hitler, just anything that they could fabricate and concoct that had nothing to do with the lives of ordinary Americans. Who are they going to fool now by pretending, “Oh, we shouldn't be even talking about an attack on people's fundamental free speech rights because it's just really irrelevant?” But that is the Democratic Party, just pure and simple. 

Even when they try to change their brand and feign concern with the working class or whatever, it's just so unconvincing. Everybody knows that's not at all what their interests are. Consultants have told them they need to start making people believe that's what they care about, but that's what they care about in the slightest. And so, to distract attention from Taibbi's reporting and from the other reporting about the censorship regime that they presided over for so long, first, you're going to say, “Hey, 30 years ago, he harassed women, even though it's a lie.” And then say, by the way, who cares? We should only focus on Signal Gate – or whatever. 

Here is part of the hearing as former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean is questioning Matt Taibbi as well as another witness about the censorship industrial complex. 

Video. Matt Taibbi, Thomas Kean, C-SPAN. April 1, 2025.

All that is absolutely true. Now, there is some hypocrisy, obviously, on the Republican side as well, because there is, as we've been covering, a systematic assault on the rights of people in the United States, citizens, green card holders, people who are here legally on student visas for criticizing Israel. We've covered that at length. That's a whole different type of censorship regime that is at least as menacing as the one they're talking about here. But just for reporting on this, Matt Taibbi is so hated by the Democratic Party, which used to pretend to have free speech as one of its core values, that they're willing to try to demean his character even with no foundation. 

All right. At the other hearing, the JFK hearing, we showed a little bit of this clip last night while we were interviewing Jefferson Morley. Jeff Morley identifies himself as a liberal Democrat, someone sort of on the progressive side of the Democratic Party. And he always has been. He's not a conservative anyway. And yet it's very notable that the people who have the most interest in his reporting, especially when it comes to the role that the CIA played in that assassination and covering it up, tend to be right-wing media. 

A lot of right-wing media wants to understand whether the CIA had a role to play in the Kennedy assassination, and by and large, Democrats could not be more uninterested, even though the target of that assassination was a Democratic president, from the most elevated Democratic royal family, which is the Kennedys. 

You would think they would have the biggest interest, especially because back then, they were the ones who regarded the CIA as sinister, but no more. There's no iota of concern about the CIA barely in left-liberal politics and Democratic Party politics. And that's why Jasmine Crockett had this to say when she attended the hearing where Oliver Stone and Jeff Morley, people have spent decades in-depth studying this issue, investigating this issue. An issue that Jasmine Crockett knows almost nothing about. And here's what she had to say. 

Video. Jasmine Crockett, C-SPAN3. April 1, 2025.

Can you believe how much dumbness and/or dishonesty is required to say that? Do you think Jasmine Crockett has read the 80,000 pages of newly unclassified and released documentation in order to be able to conclude, having studied this very carefully in her congressional office, that the documents now exonerate the CIA of any involvement? That is so stupid. 

Obviously, some staff member prepared for her – she's reading it. But then she goes on to say, after declaring the CIA innocent – because the Democrats love the CIA because they recognize, quite validly, that has been their political ally; that's where Russiagate came from; that's what the Hunter Biden’s laptop came from – so they don't want to, in any way, they're not interested in demeaning the reputation of the CIA by finding out if they actually killed the American president. 

That's what she finds funny: why would we as Congress want to investigate who killed an American president, whether the CIA, which has grown enormously since the early 1960s as a result of the Vietnam War, the dirty wars in the 1980s in Central America, and most of all, the endless wars after the War and Terror and many other things in between? Why would we be concerned at all if they actually murdered an elected American president because they were concerned about his foreign policy or just concerned that he was going to constrain them or weaken that agency? Why would you be concerned about the CIA, the new proof top-level officials of the CIA lied to investigators and covered up all sorts of relevant information, including the fact that the CIA had been surveilling and monitoring and in contact with Lee Harvey Oswald for many, many years?

Nobody really knew that, as Jeff Morley explained, until the documents were released. She's like “Who cares? So funny that people are interested in this.” And also, the CIA was exonerated. These documents, the 80,000 that “I, Jasmine Crockett, have read very studiously and carefully prove that they were innocent, it exonerates them, so what are we even doing here?” 

Here was another member of Congress, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democratic member of congress who decided that he was going to exploit this hearing in order to try to force Jeff Morley who was only there to talk about these documents and the JFK assassination and the CIA's involvement, talk about anything but that. 

Video. Raja Krishnamoorthi, Jefferson Morley. April 1, 2025.v

You can see how angry he is. This is an investigative journalist who has devoted a substantial part of his life to documenting the cover-up by the Warren Commission that had a massive influence of Alan Dulles, the longtime CIA director who JFK fired. They put him on the Warren Commission. The documents are now finally being released in their full form, their unredacted form, which sheds considerable light on this information. He's very excited by this, this is what he does. He comes there and they're trying to get him to talk about what JFK would say about various Trump policies, – I mean, the idiocy of it. You can see just how resentful he is about it. 

He even said, “Look I'm not here to make this a partisan issue.” He told us last night, on his Substack, where he writes about the JFK investigation he said he has equal numbers of people across the political spectrum, people who are right-wing and concerned about what they call the deep state people on the left, who have always been anti-imperialist and anti-security state, and everyone in between. But these people in Congress have no interest in anything substantial. All they want to do is ignore everything and speak about Trump and his evils. 

Now speaking about Donald Trump and evils, there is this remarkable and darkly hilarious and blatantly pathetic trend that's going on every four years, for as long as I can remember, you have all these elites, celebrities and the like, you say, “Oh, if George Bush wins, if John McCain wins, if Mitt Romney wins, I'm leaving the United States.” They never do. 

Finally, in the second victory of Donald Trump, there were actually a few people who did leave the United States. Ellen DeGeneres moved to London. Rosie O'Donnell went to Ireland. So, at least they're carrying through on this, but these are celebrities who aren't even worth mocking. What is worth looking at is the fact that you have these self-identified experts, these honored, heralded experts, in the highest levels of American academia, who are also now fleeing America, they say, because it's not safe for them to stay any longer. 

One of them is Yale Professor Jason Stanley, who really just became a laughingstock the more he exposed himself on X. I mean, they have these lofty titles at Yale, the chair, the funded, named chair that they hold, everything's designed to elevate their stature and their prestige and their intellectual elevation. And then they go on to X and they just realize what complete morons these people are just like politically banal in every way, totally on board with Russiagate. 

His fellow Yale Professor, Jeffrey Timothy Snyder, became pretty much like the academic hero of American liberals because he was extremely enthusiastic about Russiagate, he's an absolute fanatic about funding the war in Ukraine, he thinks Trump is in bed with Putin and he wrote this book on tyranny that liberals think is the guidebook for how you avoid the authoritarianism and tyranny of Donald Trump. 

Then his wife, who is also a senior professor at Yale and all three of them are together fleeing the United States to Canada. And they're saying they're fleeing. It's not like they just got a job at another university. They did get a job in a Canadian university but they're thinking, we're leaving because we don't feel safe. These very protected, lofty, extremely wealthy, celebrated academics don't feel safe. 

Obviously, there are people whose civil liberties are a threat. We've been covering them a lot. It's not wealthy, shielded, coddled, highly credentialed Yale professors. And if you're going to make a career out of saying, “Oh, I'm a fascism expert, I'm going to teach you how to fight Trump's authoritarianism,” you should be the last person running away and fleeing. You've told people to stay and fight. That's how you got rich. You wrote books saying the key is to disobey, defy them, stay and fight. And now not even two months into the administration, you're admittedly fleeing, and of course, they get it glamorous right up in Vanity Fair. 

Now, Timothy Snyder's book on tyranny has become a massive bestseller. He's made millions of dollars on this book. It came out in April 2017. It was obviously about Trump. “I am the academic expert, the historian, and the expert on tyranny. And here I am to tell you that Trump is a tyrant. Authoritarianism is coming and here's how you have to resist it.” 

In fairness, a lot of people are suggesting that it's really his wife who's demanding that they flee and he's just going with her. But it's this trio. Jason says, “Oh, yeah, they're my best friends, those two. We're all fleeing together.” After you read a book telling other people, to stand your ground and fight; don't give in ahead of time because that's what teaches them that they can go further, here he is fleeing the country, not fighting anything. 

No one's even targeted him. No one is even interested in him. Like, if the FBI starts snooping around and hears they're about to re-arrest it, okay, flee the country, but no one's even remotely suggesting that's going to happen. And they're the first ones out. 

Like I said, I do think there are people whose civil liberties are in danger, whose liberty is in danger. But it's not them.

All right, a couple of other items. 

Last night in two different Florida congressional districts, there were special elections for the House of Representatives, in part because one was an open seat because Mike Waltz left his Florida district to become Donald Trump's National Security Advisor. He had previously been a Republican member of the House. And the other was the seat abandoned by Matt Gaetz when he became Trump's nominee for Attorney General. Although he didn't get confirmed, he withdrew his nomination, likely because he wouldn't get the support of Republican senators. That seat is now open as well. 

So, there were two special elections and both of these elections should have been automatic for the Republicans because one of them, the one that is Matt Gaetz's seat, is a plus-30 Republican district, meaning Trump won that district in 2024 by 30 points. Overwhelmingly red district. The other, Mike Waltz is even more overwhelmingly red, plus-36. 

Yet, for a variety of reasons, Democrats tend to come out more in low-turnout elections. It's generally the party out of power that's more motivated in midterms, which is why it's typical for the party out of power to do very well in the midterms because they're more motivated because of their loss. But in both districts, the Republicans won by something like 15 or 16 points, a significant decrease, obviously, from 30 and 36. And then, in Wisconsin, where Elon Musk poured a huge amount of money because he wanted to change the majority, which is a liberal 4-3 majority in the Wisconsin Supreme Court to a 4-4 conservative majority. So, he backed the conservative candidate there with tens of millions of dollars. He went to Wisconsin, tried to insert himself into the race, and said that all of Western civilization depended on it. The Democrats won by something like 13 points, even though Trump just won Wisconsin a few months ago in the 2024 election, but by a very small margin. Still, it was a big Democratic turnout. The Democratic judge won easily. 

Now, they're going to be able to redistrict in favor of Democrats. Probably Democrats will gain a seat or two in Wisconsin for the 2026 midterms. So, there was a lot at stake. George Soros put some money in and JB Pritzker, the billionaire Democratic governor of Illinois, but Elon Musk put by far the most. 

One of the members of Congress, the congressional candidate who won in Mike Waltz's seat, but with a much smaller margin than Mike Waltz did, or Trump did, is named Randy Fine. Randy Fine will easily become the most embarrassing, pathetic, fanatical supporter of Israel. He doesn't even hide that, for him, Israel is the number one issue. Trump backed him because he obviously wants the Republicans to win. He so ironically called him America First, even though he's nothing of the sort.Here's some of what Randy Fine has said over the last year or so on October 10, 2024, about Gaza:

June 4, 2021. This is before October 7, obviously. Somebody put a picture of a baby that was killed by an Israeli tank. And the Twitter user said:

His comment:

Here is a picture of Randy Fine in his office, just getting elected, he was a member of the State Senate. 

By the way, Ron DeSantis hates Randy Fine. He said that he has an extremely alienating and repellent personality, that the reason he won by a much smaller margin wasn't because of some pro anti-Trump or pro-Democrat swing, it's because he's such a horrific candidate. So, here he is in his office with his gigantic Israeli flag. He goes to Israel constantly. Michael Tracey interviewed him for our show. We actually had him on our show for an interview with Michael Tracey on one of his roving trips and he talked about how he thinks Israel, doing everything that Israel wants, is also good for America. But here you see him, maybe there's an American flag somewhere in the distance. You see the Israeli flag, a little bit of the Florida flag, a big Yarmouk there. a big Hanukkah menorah there, but no American flag, at least not front and center. 

So that's the new member of Congress. He said, at least as horrific things, and that's just sociopathic. You can support the war in Israel, and obviously I'd make clear what I think of that, but there are people I know who support the war in Israel while also actually lamenting the loss of innocent Palestinian life. He's said before, “There’s nothing Palestinian, let the blood flow.” So that is a new member of Congress. 

To be completely honest, I think he's going to actually be a very valuable instrument for those who oppose Israel. He's so grotesque on all levels. As Ron DeSantis said, he's so alienating and unappealing, he's so flagrant about his first loyalty – usually, more subtle people are more effective communicators. He's everything but that. And I think people are going to make him the face of the pro-Israel movement for good reason. And that'll help bring transparency to what this movement is. 

A couple more quick items that I think are relevant. 

The Republican senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, is somebody who pretends to support President Trump quite a bit, when in reality, he actually despises the MAGA foreign policy on which Trump ran – not necessarily the one he's pursuing, restarting the bombing campaign of Biden in Yemen and escalating it, restarting the Biden fueled war in Gaza for Israel, threatening Iran with war. But Tom Cotton hates what the MAGA foreign policy is, as opposed to what Trump's so far doing. 

And although I certainly give Trump credit for trying, we'll see if it works to end the war in Ukraine – nobody's really tried before – but as far as the Middle East is concerned, you're not really seeing this peacemaker Trump pledge, quite the contrary. 

Here's Tom Cotton at a hearing yesterday. The subject was what to do about Iran whether to go to war with Iran, whether to bomb Iran, which Trump is threatening to do. Here's what Tom Cotton had to say about that. 

Video. Tom Cotton, C-SPAN. April 1, 2025.

By the way, for those listening to the show, when Tom Cotton snidely said, “Oh, there's this hysteria that if we bomb Iran, it's going to be another forever war or another endless war, he put that in scare quotes to mock the fact that the United States has been on a posture and a footing of endless war and forever wars, which is true. And here's what we heard in Iraq, by the way. Oh, don't worry. It's going to be an invasion. It's going to be over very quickly. 

Bill Kristol said it would be over in eight weeks, but American troops were still there 10 years later. None of what we were promised happened and it turned into an endless war, as Tom Cotton calls it, a forever war, as did the one in Afghanistan. 

So, when these people start mocking “hysteria” meaning people's concerns we are getting into another Middle East war against Israel, that's when you know that things are about to happen. Clearly, Tom Cotton, at least, and many others think that it is very likely. 

We'll see how that turns out. I'm not convinced that Trump's going to go to war with Iran. I do think he threatens war a lot to get what he wants, but if he doesn't get what we want – he told Hamas while the cease-fire was still in place, the one that he facilitated and took credit for, rightly so, he said, “If you don't release all the hostages immediately, as opposed to following the agreement that we negotiated with you, hell is going to rain down upon you” and that's exactly what the Israelis are doing now. 

There was an article from the Wall Street Journal today about how Miriam Adelson and Ben Shapiro were the ones who arranged for Trump to meet with the family members of the hostages and other hostages who were released. And they told him all these stories and enraged him and he was like, “We need to get those hostages out immediately.” And when Hamas said, “No, we're going to stick to the agreement,” that's when Trump greenlit Israel going back in and bombing far more indiscriminately still. 

Earlier this week, there's a lot of evidence that they just summarily executed 15 aid workers, ambulance drivers, including some who were bound with their hands and feet, so helpless detainees. They shot them and threw them into a pit and then covered the pit. And those bodies were found because they had disappeared. 

These are the kind of things that are happening now, obviously with Trump's consent. So, when Trump's threatening Iran, you cannot be so certain that it's only to have negotiating leverage to get a good deal for their nuclear program. We had a deal in place, of course, that Trump withdrew from and invalidated. He said it wasn't a very good deal. Of course, Trump's saying, “I prefer to have a deal, but if we don't have one, we're going to bomb Iran.” And you have to take it seriously, given what just happened in Gaza, given what's now happening in Yemen. Trump's perfectly willing to start a new Middle East war and certainly Tom Cotton thinks so and is very excited about that. 

All right, last point: there is a New York mayoral race that is happening and obviously the current incumbent Democratic Mayor, Eric Adams, is all but dead politically. In the federal court yesterday, the strategy of the Trump DOJ was to say to Eric Adams, “If you cooperate with us on deporting people in the country illegally by letting us come into New York and deport these people, we'll agree to dismiss the criminal case against you brought by the Justice Department for bribery and all kinds of money inappropriately and secretly accepted from Turkey and others” that he was indicted for. And Trump DOJ said, “If you play ball with us, we'll just drop this case. But we're not going to drop it completely, meaning with prejudice – that means we drop it and it can never be brought again.” They said, “We will drop it without prejudice, meaning we can bring it back at any time so it's like kind of a leverage that's hanging over your head. So, if you don't do what we want, you know that we can bring the case back.” 

And what the federal court did instead just yesterday was they said, “No, you cannot have it both ways.” The DOJ said it wants to dismiss this lawsuit or reject their request to do it without prejudice, meaning they could bring it back at any time. He dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning the Justice Department can never indict Adams on these issues again. But still, politically, people are very unhappy with him, not just because of the indictment, but well before that, because of the perceived mismanagement of the city and widespread corruption. 

Andrew Cuomo stepped into the breach, and he obviously is the one with the biggest name recognition. As I said before, Democrats don't care at all about sexual harassment scandals or Me Too stuff. That's just a way to demonize their enemies or to wield power. But he's ahead in the polls.

The mayoral race is just kind of getting started and there is what I find to be an interesting candidate, Zohran Mamdani. He was now in the New York Assembly, as an elected member of the New York Assembly. He's a Democrat and he comes from the more left-wing of the Democratic Party. He’s been supported by DSA, the Democratic Socialist America, but the campaign he's running is really devoid of ideology. It's very, very focused on the cost of living. 

And he's gotten so much money that he's asking for nobody to send more money. He's already reached the maximum for matching funds. There is a lot of grassroots support for him. He's very charismatic, and I think he's a very good politician. His campaign is designed to talk to people, the majority of working-class New Yorkers about the cost-of-living problems in their lives and the way to fix that. He's trying to offer very practical solutions, avoid the mistakes of Democrats, of culture war focus and all that. He's actually rising in the polls, nowhere near Andrew Cuomo yet, but there's still a lot of time left. 

He's enough of a threat that the New York Post decided to run a smear campaign on the cover of the New York Post against him and here is the title: 

So, there you see it. It says “anti-Israel lefty.” So, the first thing they can think to say about him is that he's anti-Israel and it talks about how he's a Muslim, he's 33 years old. The first question becomes, why is this even relevant to deciding the New York mayoral race? Like, is it a requirement to take any office in the United States, including the municipal office, that you love and support Israel? Is this a requirement of American patriotism, American citizenship, or being in good standing in the United States? Do you have to fully support the wars and policies of this foreign country on the other side of the world?

 I saw someone today saying, “Well, yeah, of course it's relevant to New York because there are a million Jews in New York” and I just found that very odd because that implies that Jewish Americans vote in presidential elections not based on what's best for America, but based on what's best for Israel, which is a long-standing antisemitic trope that Jews aren't really loyal, they have dual loyalty, they vote based on what’s good for Israel. 

Obviously, Andrew Cuomo is a fanatical supporter of Israel. […] And so, they'd be very happy with Andrew Cuomo, and that's why they're attacking Mandani. But I just found it so interesting that the thing they have on him is that he's, “anti-Isreal” as though that is an important qualification for this job, which, let's face it, it actually is, in terms of how a lot of voters vote. 

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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. 

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:

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:

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. 

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

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.