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

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

Our guest was Jefferson Morley, who testified today in front of Congress about the significance of the newly released JFK documents, along with others who have long followed the JFK investigation, including director Oliver Stone. We'll have Morley here to talk about his testimony today. 

We'll then break down what the guardians and saviors of Democracy are doing in banishing their most popular opponents from running as opposed to trying to defeat them democratically. Marine Le Pen, Bolsonaro and Calin Georgescu are some of the examples.

The Interview: Jeff Morley

Jefferson Morley is a best-selling author and a veteran Washington journalist known for his investigative books which expose the covert history of American power. His most recent book is “Scorpion's Dance: the President, the Spymaster, and Watergate,” which explores the secret relationship between CIA director Richard Helms and President Richard Nixon. He is, as well, a leading authority, I believe one of the top two or three journalistic authorities on the JFK assassination. He has spent decades prying loose the CIA's deepest secrets and challenging the official narrative. 

He testified earlier today at Congress about what these newly declassified documents from the Trump administration add to our understanding not just of the assassination but the clear cover-up that took place as part of the investigation, as well as the potential CIA role in all of this. We're delighted he took the time to join us. 

G. Greenwald: Jeff, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us. 

Jefferson Morley: Thanks for having me, Glenn. I'm very glad to be here. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I'm glad to have you. I recommended the interview that you recently did on Breaking Points, about 30 minutes with Saagar Enjeti and Ryan Grim. I found it one of the most illuminating interviews in recent times, especially on these documents. But I want to explore some other things beyond what's in that interview as well.

You testified earlier today before the House Task Force on Declassification, which is chaired by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, the Republican of Florida. I know that you and everybody else interested in not just the JFK assassination, but the role that the CIA has played in our politics and our history, were very interested in these documents and more broadly interested in getting to the bottom of this case, whether we ever learned the truth. What was your sense, having testified before the committee, about whether that interest and excitement is shared by most members of Congress? 

Jefferson Morley: Let me talk about chairwoman Luna first because I've gotten to know her over the last couple of weeks when she launched this House Task Force on Declassification and I've been very impressed with her attitude. She's a can-do person. When I said, I said we needed to get these documents from the CIA, she said, “Give me a memo and I'll call Ratcliffe's office today.” So, she's very proactive. I think her leadership has been very strong. We had some partisan politics in the hearing today, which I think was unfortunate because it's not really a partisan issue. I mean, I'm a pretty liberal guy. That's why I wanted to be on your show, you know? And so, I'm hopeful that the task force is going to do serious work. The most encouraging sign is she says we're going to have another hearing on JFK. We're hoping to get some more firsthand witnesses to explicate the new history of JFK's assassination. 

G. Greenwald: So, I want to spend most of my time with you on the substance of these documents and the investigation, but just before I get to that, just along those same lines, I don't want to make it a partisan issue either, but there is a palpable shift in how our political spectrum thinks about the U.S. Security State, the CIA, the nefarious role they've often played. As you said, you're a liberal Democrat and it used to be foundational to American liberal and left-wing politics to distrust and view the CIA and the Security State as quite sinister, as needing reform. It was more typical that conservatives would defend them though. These are patriotic organizations, we need them, we love them. They have to operate in the dark and there's been so much change I mean it was Donald Trump who finally declassified these documents as he promised to do; it’s Chairwoman Luna, a very right-wing member of Congress who's leading the way, as you say, very proactively. 

I just want to show you a clip from today that involves Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of the Democratic Texas, who has become in a lot of ways one of the leading faces of the Democratic Party, the American liberalism, and here's what she had to say about the JFK documents and the hearing itself and the possibility of the CIA involvement. 

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

There is more of that, but she's essentially saying, “Look, these new documents vindicated the CIA, it had no role to play in any of this. Anyone who suggests otherwise is a conspiracy theorist.” And in any event, it doesn't really even matter. There's no reason for us to know we should focus on a Signal gate or whatever. As somebody who's been aligned with the Democratic Party for a long time, do you think that's become a more common sentiment? 

Jefferson Morley: Absolutely. And it's really unfortunate, I mean, to bring up something totally unrelated about what's going on, with the current controversy. The JFK files are something that there is broad support for across the political spectrum, and there's no need to drag partisan politics into this issue. It's just not an issue. Representative Luna did a good job of leading this, in kind of reflexive – you know, Jasmine Crockett hadn't even read the documents. She didn't even listen to what I said about the false testimony of three top CIA officials, and like, facts don't register anymore, which is a problem universally. But it's especially a problem when we're actually making progress on the JFK story. President Trump's order was a breakthrough, and it's one of the few things I agree with him about, a very positive measure. We obtained, on March 18, a lot of important information and we're getting more as we proceed. 

Remember Glenn, they released 80,000 pages of documents on March 19. I might have seen a thousand pages of those. I've talked to researchers who've seen a few thousand more, but we're just at the beginning of this process of really getting our hands and our minds around these new records. And so, that's the positive thing. Luna's talking about having another hearing. I think that's a good idea to bring more JFK witnesses and educate people about what really happened. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean I thought it was bizarre, the day that it was released, everybody ran to their social media accounts or their programs to tell everybody what these documents show. We focused only on one document which was the unredacted Schlesinger memo and only to the extent that it revealed things about the CIA in general, not necessarily their role, if any, in the JFK assassination. And I want to get to that memo in a second because I do think it's of profound importance. But before I do, I think some of this is generational. I mean, I didn't live through the JFK assassination, I wasn't born yet. Obviously, Congresswoman Crockett wasn't. She was born, I believe, in the 1980s or even 1990s. So, I understand why some people might say, “Oh, this is kind of old and ancient history that we don't need to go excavating through.” What is your answer to that? Why do you think it matters so much to kind of continue with the investigation? 

Jefferson Morley: Let me explain. My readership at the JFK Facts newsletter is very diverse from MAGA, Christian nationalists on the right, libertarians, anti-imperialists and liberals on the left and we don't have a big culture war on the site. People want to talk about this. People want a real debate. And the idea that people are coming reflexively to the defense of the CIA without even acknowledging or incorporating these records… We're going to talk about the Schlesinger memo in a second. Why should people care? What we're missing right now in American politics is what President Kennedy talked about in 1963. He's talked about how we need a strategy for peace, not peace in our time, peace for all times, not a Pax Americana enforced with America as the world's policeman, but peace for everybody. And that's the vision really that died in Dallas. So, when people say, “Why does it matter now?” You don't hear that voice anymore in American politics, not from Democrats and not from Republicans, and that's what's missing, and that's why it's important to understand what died when President Kennedy died. 

We've lost something very real and I would say, the most aggressive factions in the American security establishment after President Kennedy's assassination, because there was no real accountability, there was no real investigation, that faction has had impunity ever since and that's led to a much more militarized, aggressive interventionist foreign policy, which Kennedy was trying to steer the country away from. That's what's important about the Kennedy assassination. We lost something when we lost President Kennedy. 

G. Greenwald: So, let me dive into these details now and let's start with the Schlesinger memo. For viewers who might have seen it, I think when it was released, I believe two weeks ago, we delved very deeply into what this memo is and what the newly released material demonstrates. 

For those who don't know him, Arthur Schlesinger was a very respected historian, especially among the kind of Kennedy circle, and after the Bay of Pigs debacle and the firing of Alan Dulles, who was sort of the father of the CIA, JFK was very interested in getting a hold of the CIA and asked Arthur Schlesinger to write this memo, and he wrote this long memo detailing all of the abuses and dangers of having this kind of runaway, unaccountable secret agency off on its own, making foreign policy, engineering coups away from the State Department, and also offered a lot of plans for how to rein it in – pretty serious and severe plans. 

So, I want to hear what your thoughts are on the newly released portion of that, but before you get to that, do we have evidence that the CIA was aware of the conversations taking place in the JFK White House about the need to rein in the CIA? 

Jefferson Morley: Absolutely, Dick Helms, Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, said in his memoir that this period after the Bay of Pigs was a stormy… 

G. Greenwald: Sorry. Wasn’t he the director of the CIA, not in the '60s, but later on with Nixon? 

Jefferson Morley: He was deputy director right at the time of the Bay of Pigs and later became director. At the kind of Kennedy’s assassination, he was deputy director and Helms said in his memoir “This was a stormy interregnum for the agency” where they understood that their continued existence was in the balance. Ultimately, Kennedy decided not to do the reorganization – it was just too big a left, I think, for him in terms of politics – but the Schlesinger memo shows that he was talking about it very seriously, and the key thing there was what Schlesinger called the encroachment of the CIA on the president's foreign policymaking authority – and you've talked about the Schlesing memo. You recall some of those details: 47% of State Department officers at the time of Kennedy's assassination were in fact CIA officers. So, the CIA is taking over the political reporting function of the State Department, and of course, that limited the president's ability to make foreign policy. That's what Kennedy was concerned about and that's the problem Schlesinger was trying to solve. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, in that memo, he, I think quite famously and quite pointedly and importantly, called it “a state within a state,” which is kind of ironic since now the term deep state has become this source of liberal mockery as though it's some bizarre, unhinged conspiracy theory. And you knew you had Dwight Eisenhower coming out of the '50s, serving two terms as president, warning about the military-industrial complex on his way out and then you have Arthur Schlesinger calling it a state within a state when writing to JFK about it. So, this memo has been out for a while, I think for a few years or even longer, but what we have now thanks to President Trump's declassification order is the full unredacted memo. So, are there things that we have learned that are important in the unredacted parts that we didn't previously know? 

Jefferson Morley: Yeah, I mean, there was a whole page that was redacted. So, like the statistic that I just quoted to you, 47% of State Department officers were actually CIA officers, which was redacted by the CIA for the past 60 years. The fact that the CIA had 128 people in the Paris embassy, was redacted. And when you look at it, that's not national security information, no American would be threatened or harmed by that information. 

It's only the reputation of the CIA and so what you see in these redactions -- these redactions are justified in the name of national security, right? You need to protect us from our enemies. Our enemies aren't fooled the only people that were fooled were the American people and that's why we need this full declassification because we're the only ones that are in the dark about the way the CIA is operating. 

G. Greenwald: About your argument that the reason the CIA or other parts of the government perceive JFK to be threatening, perhaps threatening enough to want to kill him, is that he was talking about this radical transformation of our foreign policy, of finding a way to get out of endless wars and become a nation of peace. There are people very knowledgeable who are also on the left, one of them is Noam Chomsky, who has said over the years that he finds that unpersuasive because – and I guess this is a very Chomsky way of looking at things – although there was a little bit of resistance here and there on the part of JFK and his administration to the military-industrial complex, the intelligence community – obviously they had an argument after the Bay of Pigs, they fired, as I said earlier, Alan Dulles – that essentially JFK was a militarist and was a Cold Warrior. He was the one who oversaw what Chomsky calls the invasion of South Vietnam by the United States and if you were a militarist or a Cold Warrior, you'd have no reason to look at JFK and find him bothersome. What do you think about that? 

Jefferson Morley: I mean none of Kennedy’s enemies on the right ever said that at the time. They said that he was a weakling if not a traitor. The idea that Kennedy was a Cuba hawk or a Vietnam hawk – no Cuba hawk or Vietnam hawk in 1963 ever said that. The problem with Chomsky’s argument is he hasn't really familiarized himself with the debates. 

CIA Director Richard Helms was trying to pressure Kennedy into a more aggressive Cuba policy and four days before the assassination, Richard Helms brought a machine gun into the Oval Office as a way of convincing President Kennedy to take a more aggressive stance. And when you read Kennedy's account of it, it's hard not to believe that he understood that he was being threatened. I mean, think about that. The CIA director or deputy CIA director is demonstrating to the president your security perimeter is not secure, right? That was four days before President Kennedy was killed. So, the idea that there weren't profound conflicts at the top of the U.S. government, I mean, I know Noam Chomsky is a smart guy, but he needs to pay attention to the historical record. There were profound conflicts between Kennedy and the national security establishment in the fall of 1963. Nobody who pays attention, especially to the new records, thinks that wasn't the case. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, and obviously Chomsky is not here to defend himself, but he's obviously talked many times about this so people interested can go to YouTube and find that. I think he has a propensity against what he calls conspiracy theories and just kind of dismissing them out of hand and nobody's perfect. 

Yeah, but let me ask you this. This is one of the things I learned from your work. I remember growing up in the '70s and '80s and my understanding of the JFK assassination was that Lee Harvey Oswald was just sort of this weird loner who had like a couple of appearances here and there in some public and political sectors, but that by and large he was kind of a nobody, sort of like what they're depicting the person who did the first assassination attempt against President Trump in Pennsylvania, like just a guy, a weirdo, not really connected. And it was only really through following your work and the work of a couple of other people that I actually learned things like, no, the CIA had a lot of interest in Oswald prior to – I thought nobody knew of him before this all happened and in fact, the CIA had a big, long, large surveillance file on him. What interest did the CIA have in Oswald prior to Oswald's alleged role in the JFK assassination? 

Jefferson Morley: They were interested, first of all, in recruiting him as a possible source or contact behind the Iron Curtain. And that was one of the key documents that emerged on March 18, a document where Angleton talked exactly about who he targeted for that type of recruiting. The second thing that they were interested in was his pro-Cuba activities. That was something that the CIA denied at the time. They pretended they didn't know anything about this. When you talk about a big surveillance file – this is what I showed to Representative Luna today – they had 198 pages on him on November 15 when President Kennedy was getting ready to go to Dallas. 

So, Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone nut in the eyes of the CIA. He was a known quantity who top CIA officials, top counterintelligence officials, knew everything about him, as President Kennedy was preparing to go to Dallas. Of course, there are suspicions, and people say, “Oh, well, that's incompetence” or “They didn't know,” or “Oswald didn't present a threat.” Wait a second, part of the reason you have a counterintelligence staff is to protect you against assassinations, and that clearly didn't happen. Angleton failed to do his job. But nobody knew anything about this. The CIA imposed a cover story, the lone gunman, and Angleton, instead of losing his job, he kept it for another decade. 

G. Greenwald: Well, I know you have to go in just a few minutes, so I want to just respect your time. I just have a couple more questions briefly. 

This is one of the things that I think that you grow up and you're kind of bombarded to believe the established narrative about everything. I mean, that's why it's the established narrative because they have control of the institutions that shape your thinking and the more you kind of look into these things, the more basis you have for skepticism, including the fact that Alan Dulles, who led the CIA, gave birth to the CIA, directed the CIA, was controlling almost everything in there until Kennedy fired him and then Kennedy fired him and he was put onto the Warren Commission where naturally as being Alan Dulles, he had immense weight on conducting the official investigation. I've always said it's kind of like putting Ben Shapiro in charge of an investigation to find out who's at fault in Gaza. You know what kind of outcome you're going to get if you put Alan Dulles on the Warren Commission. You're putting, like, a chief suspect on there. What are the best reasons we have to distrust both the process and the conclusions of the Warren Commission? 

Jefferson Morley: I mean the fact that Allen Dulles was on it, the fact that the Warren Commission was deceived about the surveillance of Oswald – they had no idea that the CIA had 198 pages of material on Oswald. The Warren Commission was told that they had only minimal information about Oswald so the Warren Commission was fed a false story about Oswald. Glenn, I'm going to have to go soon. 

G. Greenwald: Okay, I know, all right, I have one more question, but I'm going to let you go. One more question. Okay, well, I'll just ask you briefly. James Angleton, who was this senior CIA official, has been central to your work. You said today in your testimony that he was one of three senior CIA officials to have lied to the Warren Commission about the investigation, that that was sort of a tipping point for you. What did Angleton lie about, and how did he deceive the commission? 

Jefferson Morley: Well, actually what we learned last month was that Angleton lied to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, in 1978. He never had to testify to the Warren Commission. In 1978, he testified, and he was asked, “Was Oswald ever the subject of a CIA project?” and the answer was “Yes.” Angleton had personally put Oswald under mail surveillance. They were intercepting his letters to his mother from the Soviet Union. He was under mail surveillance from 1959 to 1962. When Angleton was asked by the HSCA, “Was Oswald ever part of a CIA project?” he said “No,” and what we know now is that that was a lie and that he was lying under oath about what he knew about Oswald before the assassination. So, that was the tipping point for me, because until March 18, we never knew that. 

G. Greenwald: All right, Jeff, thank you for your great work. We're going to definitely have you back on as you work your way through these documents. Really appreciate the time. I know you're busy tonight after your testimony, so we're going to let you go, but thanks once again. 

Jefferson Morley: Thanks a million for having me, Glenn. 

G. Greenwald: All right, talk to you soon. 

One of the ironies, I think, in Western politics, or throughout the democratic world over the last, let's say, decade or so, has been, that there is a group of people, a very powerful faction, you could say the kind of establishment faction that's composed of both the center-left and the center-right in most Western democracies that have engaged in all sorts of highly classically anti-democratic measures in the name of saving democracy. 

The reality of politics in the democratic world over the last decade has been that of a variety of factors. In the U.S. you can go back to the War on Terror and the lies of the Iraq War, but more recently the 2008 financial crisis, whose repercussions are expressing themselves to this very day, jeopardizing people's financial security, the policies of free trade and deindustrialization. 

And then all the deceit and crackdowns around COVID have turned huge portions of the population into vehement anti-establishment warriors. These people hate these establishments. They hate whoever they perceive as defenders of the status quo. It started to express itself in 2016 with things like the British people voting to leave the EU out of hatred and contempt for EU bureaucrats in Brussels, and then obviously followed a few months later by what was, for most people, the shocking victory of Donald Trump over the ultimate establishment maven, Hillary Clinton. And ever since then, it's been one after the next. 

Historically, when establishments feel threatened by some new event or some shift in political sentiment, their tendency, being the establishment, is not to assuage it, not to persuade it but to crush it. The establishment today, unlike, say, 400 or 500 years ago are not monarchs in name, they're not churches in name, with some sort of absolute say the way the Catholic Church had over a lot of countries. They have to pretend to be Democrats, people who believe in democracy, that's how they pitch themselves and so they have been just openly doing things like censoring their political opponents, creating an industry designed to decree truth and falsity that nobody can deviate from with this disinformation industry. 

More disturbingly, and I think more desperately, showing how desperate they really are because, in so many countries, the establishment is in deep trouble, typically because of an emerging right-wing populist movement, occasionally because of left-wing populism as well, both of which manifest as anti-establishment movements. Their solution has just been to basically bar democracy, limit democracy, prevent the most popular opponents of the establishment, typically right-wing populists, from even running on the ballot, just saying you're banished from the election – the thing we're told is what Putin does when he has fraudulent elections because his opponents can't run. These are just theatrical elections that are very stage-managed.

 That's exactly what has been happening throughout the democratic world in multiple different countries over at least the last decade. A lot of people are noting that even more now because of what happened in France. 

Here from The New York Times yesterday:

Marine Le Pen Barred From French Presidential Run After Embezzlement Ruling

The verdict effectively barred the current front-runner in the 2027 presidential election […] (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)

[…] from participating in it, an extraordinary step but one the presiding judge said was necessary because nobody is entitled to “immunity in violation of the rule of law.”

Jordan Bardella, Ms. Le Pen’s protégé and a likely presidential candidate in her absence, said on social media, “Not only has Marine Le Pen been unjustly convicted; French democracy has been executed.”

The verdict infuriated Ms. Le Pen, an anti-immigrant, nationalist politician who has already mounted three failed presidential bids. (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)

Notice I have not uttered a syllable about what I think of Marine Le Pen or her politics or anything like that because it's completely irrelevant. 

If you actually believe in democracy as the premier way to select our leaders, which I do, it should be disturbing if it has actually become a weapon to exploit the judicial system or use lawfare to defeat your political opponents, not at the ballot box, not by giving the people in the country the choice to vote for, but by prohibiting them from becoming on the ballot. If it were just one case, then you'd have to spend a lot of time debating Marine Le Pen's case. 

We're going to have somebody on this week who has been following Marine Le Pen's case closely and understands the intricacies of French law in a way that I don't, so I'm not sitting here propounding on the validity or otherwise of her conviction, just the fact that it has now become part of an obvious trend where politicians like her, especially when they become too popular, are being banned. 

[…]

In the United States, of course even if you're convicted of a crime, then it doesn't mean that you can't run. The socialist leader, Eugene Debs, ran for president as a third-party candidate, during the Wilson administration, from prison. Had the Democrats succeeded in convicting and imprisoning Trump before the election as they were desperately trying to do, that would not have resulted in his being banned from the ballot. He could have run even as a convicted felon. In fact, they did convict him of a felony charge or multiple repetitive felony charges in New York and he still was permitted to run and the American people decided. We know he was convicted, we don't trust that conviction, we think it's politically motivated and in any event, we want him to be our president. That's what democracy means. 

The Democrats tried other ways to get him banned from the ballot, as we'll get to, and they almost succeeded. That was clearly their goal. But in the United States, at least, it's left to the people to decide and that's what a lot of French politicians across the political spectrum are saying. 

Here is the most recent polling data on the French presidential election from the International Market Research Group, on March 31:

INTENTIONS TO VOTE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Two years before the next presidential election, a [I.F.O.P.] poll for the Journal du Dimanche reveals the voting intentions of the French for the next presidential election. In the most favorable scenario, the National Rally candidate would collect 37% of voting intentions, nearly 14 points more than her score in the first round in 2022.

Edouard Philippe appears to be the best-placed candidate to qualify for the second round against Marine Le Pen. His score ranges between 20 and 25%, depending on the different configurations tested. (International Market Research Group. March 31, 2025.)

So, she's not just leading in the polls, she's leading the polls by far. Not enough to avoid a runoff, she's made the runoff twice now and lost to Macron. But the question is not, “Is Marine Le Pen going to be in the second round?” She for sure will be. The question is: who can get just enough to make it with her? And unlike in the past, in France, where that party was considered toxic and off limits, where everybody would unite to prevent it from gaining any power, that's not really the case anymore. I mean, you did see that in the subsequent parliamentary elections in France that Macron called after Marine Le Pen's party won the EU parliamentary elections, and he called new elections for the parliament. So, the parliament called new elections and the left-wing coalition came in first, Macron's party came in second, and Le Pen’s party came third, but it was very closely disputed. 

So, there's the possibility that there could be a coalition to defeat her. We're likely never to find out because the French establishment is too afraid to let her run for the ballot for fear that she might win. As I said, if that were an isolated case, we could just sort of say, “Well, is Marine Le Pen guilty?” That's the French law, but it's by far not an isolated case. It has become a common scenario. 

Here the BBC, on March 26, is reporting on the case of Brazil and the ex-Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing populist who actually shocked the country, shocked Brazil when he won the presidency in 2018 over the Workers’ Party of Lula da Silva, which had dominated Brazilian politics, had occupied the presidency from 2002 when Lula first won until 2016 when his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached and her vice president took over. But he didn't even bother running again. He was widely hated. So, in 2018, that was the first election that the Workers' Party didn't win since 2002, 16 years earlier. They dominated Brazilian politics. 

Ironically, in 2018, Lula was intending to run again and he was leading in polls early on and he ended up being imprisoned, convicted and imprisoned on corruption charges and so he was not allowed to run on the ballot and that opened the path for Bolsonaro. What actually happened there was the center-right has always wanted to dominate Brazilian politics, they're the party of the Brazilian media, the big media conglomerates, kind of like a Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell type party, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney-like, classic center-right figures, even right-wing figures, but who are very pro-establishment and hate the way those figures hate Donald Trump. The center-right in Brazil despises Bolsonaro, but they thought that impeaching Dilma and then imprisoning Lula, would be an easy path to victory because they were always the party second to Lula, kind of like Marine Le Pen and Macron. They just couldn't ever beat the Workers' Party. 

So, they thought once they got rid of Lula and impeached Dilma, they had a clear path to power instead. Nobody wanted them, nobody ever liked them. So, once they got rid of Lula, instead of winning, they got Bolsonaro, who they hated more than Lula. Bolsonaro won by a sizable margin against the Workers' Party in 2018 in the runoff. And then in 2022, everyone knew that there was only one person who could beat Bolsonaro, and that was Lula, who was in prison. So, the Supreme Court of Brazil invalidated his conviction. After upholding it many times, they actually used the excuse of the reporting that I did with my colleagues there that showed prosecutors and judges had cheated. But that was just their pretext. They wouldn't have let him out, no matter what we reported, had they not wanted to. They only allowed him out because they knew that only he had a chance to beat Bolsonaro. But even with everything that happened to Bolsonaro, the entire establishment against him, COVID, ruining the Brazilian economy, shutting down the economy, all of those scandals about vaccines and masks and lockdowns and countless corruption charges, and running against what had been the most popular politician in Brazil, Lula da Silva, that election was extremely close, decided by about one point. 

All night Bolsonaro was leading, kind of at the last minute, Lula overtook him, but it was an extremely close election. Now Lula's popularity is plummeting, his presidency has unraveled, he's about to be 80 years old. Bolsonaro's not young himself. He's about four or three years younger. But the country is not happy at all with Lula, and people are very afraid of his chances to be re-elected. There's a high likelihood he's going to lose, especially if he runs against Jair Bolsonaro. Fortunately for the Brazilian establishment, Bolsonaro can't run because two years ago, he was declared ineligible, and now they're about to convict him before the Supreme Court on charges that he engineered a coup or tried to engineer a coup, which probably sounds familiar to the American ear since that was a charge against Trump as well. 

[…]

Now, let me just be clear there. He is now criminally charged with planning and plotting a violent coup once Lula won, that would reinstall Bolsonaro. 

We haven't had the trial yet. All we have are media leaks and now the police report under the control of Lula's government and Moraes. I don't find the evidence particularly persuasive, but that will be decided as it should be in a trial. Unfortunately, he's unlikely to get a fair trial, but that isn't why he's banned from running. He was already banned from running, completely independent of these allegations of a violent coup. And that's due to the fact that before the election happened in 2022, and then after he lost, he alleged that there was voting machine fraud. And for that and that alone, the Supreme Court decided he's now ineligible to run that that was an abuse of power, an attack on democracy. 

And I should also say that during that 2022 campaign, when Biden was president in Brazil, that 2022 to campaign, Biden dispatched the CIA, he dispatched Jake Sullivan, his national security advisor and other top officials to go to Brazil and interfere in that election by essentially saying that Bolsonaro's claims of voting fraud are completely invalid, threatening Brazil with punishments or consequences, warning Bolsonaro not to raise the issue of election fraud. At the same time, USAID was funding the censorship groups, the disinformation groups that were systematically censoring Bolsonaro supporters in countless ways that we've reported on many times before. 

So, his banning from the ballot, similar to the way Marine Le Pen was banned happened not because of these criminal allegations of a coup, but because of those allegations that he made of voting machine fraud. 

Here from the Brazilian outlet UOL on March 29, the headline is:

It's a 15-point lead that Bolsonaro has among the people of Brazil who should decide who they want as their president. 

Here from CNN Brazil, yes, Brazil has a CNN, is contaminated and infected with CNN, the Brazilian version, a separate poll shows this:

So even Bolsonaro's wife, who's never been elected to public office, was the first lady of the country, has a 9-point lead over Lula. But obviously, they'd much rather run against her than run against Jair Bolsonaro, who has already proven that he can become, can win a national election.

Here's why the establishment is so scared of him. They threw everything at him during his first term. And remember, I'm not commenting on my views of Bolsonaro. As I said, I did the reporting that ended up being the pretext for the Supreme Court to allow Lula out of prison to invalidate his convictions. And when I did, Bolsonaro threatened me several times, explicitly, with prison. I ended up criminally indicted for that reporting, although the Supreme Court had a press freedom ruling that required the dismissal of those charges.

 I've had a lot of acrimonious history with Bolsonaro, but just like Marine Le Pen, that has nothing to do with any of this. Again, I actually believe in democracy. I think the president should be determined by who wins. 

So, like in France, the Bolsonaro problem is solved. Who cares if he's leading in the polls? Who cares if a majority of Brazilians want him as president? Nope, banned from the ballot in the name of saving democracy. 

Obviously, everybody remembers that Trump faced four felony indictments in four different jurisdictions, two state and two federal, and that was the Democratic strategy, to imprison Trump before the election. They never were able to do that, but they tried. But beyond that, they also just wanted him banned from the ballot independently of criminal convictions by claiming that the constitutional provision banning people who led an insurrection from running for high office should apply to ban Trump, even though he had never been convicted of insurrection, actually never even charged with it. Congress hadn't declared him ineligible, but the Democrats got a four to three majority on the Colorado Supreme Court for democratic judges to say that Trump is ineligible to run again. 

And then in Romania, I think we might even have actually the most flagrant and glaring case because there, they actually had an election. The first round was won by a previously obscure right-wing populist, with the EU and the U.S. The Romanians invalidated the election: let's just have another election. They saw that that candidate was likely to win again, they were, like, “This time we're going to ban him so he can't win.” 

Here from Politico EU in November 2025, this is December 2024, I think:

Georgescu won with 22.94 percent of the vote. He was followed by liberal reformist candidate Elena Lasconi on 19.18 percent in second place, after she edged ahead of center-left Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu on 19.15 percent — a difference of just over 2,700 votes.

An early exit poll suggested that Ciolacu and Lasconi were set to qualify for the presidential runoff but Georgescu surged into the lead as vote counting continued Sunday night, heralding a result that is set to upend Romanian politics. (Politico EU. November 24, 2024.)

So, they have this populist right-wing candidate, hostile to the EU, opposed to the war in Ukraine, not wanting to adopt the European view that Europe is at war with Russia and candidates like that have won throughout the EU. Even in Slovakia, which had long been an ardent opponent of Russia because of the history of the Cold War, Robert Fico, a former prime minister, ran on a platform, in late 2023, of stopping aid to Ukraine, and he won. He was then almost killed in an assassination attempt, but he's still running the country. He miraculously survived that. So here's another right-wing populist in Europe, hostile to the EU, opposed to the war in Ukraine, that the establishment hates, who shocked the establishment because they had two candidates they were happy with when he came in first in the first round of voting. 

As a result, because they didn't get the outcome they wanted, here's what happened from Politico EU, December 6, 2024:

Now, look at what they did there. They basically concocted their own Russiagate. They said, “Yes, this candidate that we hate won the election fair and square, came in first. But there were some ads on TikTok that helped him that we think came from Russia. So, our election is invalid, the Russians interfered.” Just like they tried to do in 2016, like, “Hey, we found some Facebook pages and some Twitter bots that seem like they came from Russia” and that makes Trump an illegitimate president. That's the theory that they used. 

Leaving aside the fact that the so-called interference by Russia – quite small in the context of millions of people going to vote – does anyone believe that the U.S. and the EU don't interfere at least as much in these elections to ensure the outcome that they want? You think it's only Russia interfering in the Romanian election and not the EU and the U.S. despite how strategically important Romania is to them, despite the fact that the EU and the U.S. took the position that the election should be nullified, that that candidate should be banned. EU and the U.S. have their fingerprints all over these countries, manipulating and funding opposition groups and demanding certain outcomes. 

And then Russia puts some TikTok videos, supposedly, in support of the candidate they want to win and the whole election has to get validated. “We didn't get the candidate that we wanted. In the name of democracy, we have to cancel that election because the candidate we hate won.” 

[…]

The view of the guardians of democracy, the safeguards of democracy, the people fighting anti-democratic forces is that you can have all the elections you want, just keep voting as long as the candidates most likely to win that they fear and hate most are barred from the ballot so that you cannot vote for them. That's what the democratic world now means, that’s what democracy in Europe, the United States and parts of South America, that's what it means. 

And that is to say nothing of the censorship regime that they impose to accomplish it. EU officials are also very upfront about the fact that they need this censorship regime, under these laws, they passed the Digital Services Act, in the EU, the Online Safety Act, in the U.K. and various laws in Canada and Brazil. They claim they need those because with elections imminent, they have to prevent the spread of disinformation, meaning they have to censor views that they are most afraid of, that they think will help sink them in the election. 

These center-left, center-right, neoliberal establishment orders are justifiably hated by their populations – hated, despised. Even when, on a rare occasion, one of them wins, it's a total fluke, like what happened in the U.K. where the Labor Party under Sir Keir Starmer won. They won with a small percentage of the vote, 34%. It was largely a backlash against the corrupt leadership of the Conservative Party, of the Tories under Boris Johnson and people like that. And they were never popular, this center-left party. As soon as they win, Kier Starmer is hated across Britain. 

So even when they win, it's only a very kind of fluke election. In general, they're so despised, even in the U.K. where they won they're despised, but usually they're so despised now, they know they're despised and in a free and fair election, they cannot win. They cannot win with free speech permitted. And they're cracking down on all of the defining core ingredients of what democracy means and telling you in the most Orwellian way possible that they're doing it because they're the ones who have to save democracy, by which they mean they have to stay in power at all costs. 

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

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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.