Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Glenn Takes Your Questions: On Banning Candidates in the Democratic World, Expanding Executive Power, and Trump's Tariffs
System Update #437
April 13, 2025
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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!

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For various reasons, we had our Q&A show on this show rather than Friday night. The questions that we received cover a wide range of topics, and the ones tonight have all sorts of interesting questions from the escalating use of lawfare in this so-called democratic world to ban anti-establishment candidates from the ballot to some of the ongoing fallout from Trump's tariffs policies, including a bunch of themes related to corporate media.

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Before I get to the questions though, I want to give you some breaking news that happened a few minutes before we came live on the air. I just spent the last 10 to 15 minutes reading about it so I don't have a very in-depth knowledge of it. You may have heard the U.S. government sent to El Salvador a person who was living in the United States, who's married to an American citizen, has a daughter they're raising together, has lived here for years in the U.S., has no charges against him, no problems whatsoever. As a result, there was a hold put on any attempt to remove him or deport him by a deportation court. Yet, he was picked up within the last month and sent to that mega horrific prison in El Salvador, even though there was a court order barring his removal, pending hearings. Even the U.S. government admitted that they sent him there accidentally. That's what they said. “Oops, it was an accident.” 

Now, what do you do if the government admits and mistakenly consigns somebody to one of the worst prisons on the planet, in El Salvador, indefinitely, with no way out, incommunicado: their families can't speak to them, their lawyers can't speak to, they're in El Salvador. 

A federal district court judge about a week ago ordered the U.S. government to do everything possible to get him back, to tell their – let's face it – puppet state in El Salvador, President Bukele, that they want him back. 

Remember, the U.S. government pays for each one of these prisoners to be there. So, it's not like we have no influence there. The whole strategy of Bukele is to do what the United States tells him to do. The Trump White House and Trump supporters were indignant about this order: who are you to tell the president to go get him from El Salvador? The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said, “Well, tell the court to call Salvador.” That was her attitude. 

The injunction then went up on appeal to an appellate court composed of one Reagan appointee and two appointees of Democratic presidents, one Obama and one Clinton, if I'm not mistaken, who, more or less unanimously – they had some differences about the rationale – upheld that injunction and said it's unconscionable to send somebody who you haven't demonstrated any guilt for and when there's a court order barring his removal, to send him to El Salvador for life in prison and then just wash your hands of it. 

The problem is the government doesn't want to go get him because that would be an admission that they sent someone there mistakenly, which they've already admitted in their briefs. That would raise the question, well, how can you send people to a prison in El Salvador without giving them a chance to prove that they're not guilty of the crimes you're accusing them of being gang members and those sorts of things? 

Last night, we reported in detail on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a separate case where five Venezuelans obtained an injunction before they were sent to El Salvador, a country they've never been to, to be put in prison, arguing that they should have the right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court before they're removed and argue that they were wrongfully detained and are wrongfully accused and all nine justices of the Supreme Court – all nine – said that you cannot remove people under the Alien Enemies Act until you first give them a habeas corpus here and they had a disagreement by a 5-4 vote about that proceeding had to be brought where the person is detained.” 

They're detained mostly in Texas or Arizona and already those Venezuelan detainees who had this injunction against them immediately went to court in Texas. Yesterday, a Trump-appointed judge issued an injunction saying the government has to prove that they have evidence that they're guilty of the things they're accusing them, which is gang membership. 

You can still deport people and send them back to their country of origin just by proving they're illegal but if you want to send them to a prison in El Salvador, and if you want to remove them under the Alien Enemies Act, which requires proving that they're an alien enemy: every time it's been invoked – the War of 1812, World War I, World War II – even those accused of being Nazi sympathizers got hearings first. And that's what the U.S. Supreme Court said. Right after that, a Trump-appointed judge in the original court, the district court, issued a ruling saying, “You cannot remove these people as well.” 

We keep hearing about all these left-wing judges. We talked about this before. These are not left-wing judges. A lot of times they're Reagan or Bush judges but in a couple of cases now they've been Trump-appointed judges. 

In fact, yesterday, a different Trump-appointed judge ruled in favor of the Associated Press. As you might recall, the White House issued marching orders to the American media, saying, “You cannot call this the Gulf of Mexico anymore, you have to call it the Gulf of America.” 

I’m not sure when the government thought it obtained the power to dictate to media outlets and journalists what they can say and how they can describe things. When the Associated Press continued to call out the Gulf of Mexico, the Trump White House cut off all access to press pools, briefing rooms, and the like. 

A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled in favor of AP, saying, obviously not everybody's entitled to access to the White House but once you have it, you cannot be punished with removal because of the things you say, because the things that you're saying don't align with the government's orders of what you should say. 

Just before we came on air, the Supreme Court issued another ruling – it was an unsigned ruling, which typically means that it was the opinion of the court unanimously – which involved the case of this one individual who was sent to El Salvador in the way that the administration admitted was sent mistakenly. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to dissolve that injunction saying, “Courts can't rule on how to conduct ourselves diplomatically” and the court said, “No, we are maintaining this injunction” by a 9-0 vote – apparently, there was no dissent.

So, you can't mandate or force the Trump administration to get the prisoner back but they said the government does have to prove they did everything reasonable to facilitate his return and that's the Supreme Court, the last word that has said that the Trump administration has to try and get him back because he should never have been sent there by the Trump administration's admission. 

Congress is completely impotent. They're afraid of Trump, especially the Republicans. As long as he stays very popular within the Republican Party, very few Republicans are willing to defy him. 

Congress in general, well before Trump, has neutered itself. We talked about that last night with David Sirota. They've given up the role that they're supposed to have constitutionally in setting tariff policy. They've especially abdicated their responsibility to authorize wars. The president goes to war all the time like we are now in Yemen without any hint of congressional approval. Obama did the same thing. Biden did the same thing. 

We don't really have an operating congressional branch in any real sense. |As I said, no branch is supposed to be unlimited in its power, it's supposed to have a balance of power that's supposed to be co-equal branches. 

If the president starts violating the law, implementing due process-free procedures of punishment and punishing the press, it's the role of the courts to say, “This violates the Constitution.” This Supreme Court has now twice done that with Trump, and Trump-appointed judges are doing it as well. 

Whatever your views are on all these different assertions of power, you want there to be some check on presidential power, and you don't want any one branch of government getting too powerful. There are all sorts of checks on the judiciary. The only people who can be on the judiciary are ones that the president nominates, even ones the president nominates said they have to go through a confirmation hearing in the Senate – every single judge – and then for wrongdoing, they can be impeached. 

So, they have many different checks and balances on everyone in the branches and you don't want the power to get too concentrated in any one branch, especially the president. As David Sirota said last night, the founders feared most an elected king; they just fought a revolutionary war to free themselves of a monarch. The last thing they wanted to do was to recreate one, but that's what you would have if the president said, “Oh, once I win an election, I'm totally free to do whatever I want. Ignore the Constitution. It doesn't matter. No one can do anything to stop me.” That is not something any American citizen should want. 

 So that's just an update. I'll read the case more carefully but, from what I can gather, that is the essence of the ruling. It's not a complete defeat for Trump because it does recognize the president has the right to conduct diplomacy and they don't want to interfere in that but the order is the government has to do everything reasonable to facilitate their return and then demonstrate to the court the efforts they made so the court can then determine whether they actually tried to do that.

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All right, so let's get to our Mailbag. These are questions that have been submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community. The first one is from @John_Mann. 

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It has always been the case, especially throughout the Cold War, that the corporate media would basically serve as a mouthpiece for the CIA, for the Security State. Every time the CIA overthrew a government The New York Times and Time Magazine would herald it as a revolution by the people. 

Conversely, whenever a new pro-United States leader was installed, no matter how tyrannical, they would call it an advancement of democracy. And you can just go back and look at that. I recently did that with the CIA-engineered coup in Brazil to see how The New York Times covered that and it was essentially, “Oh, this was a revolution against a corrupt communist regime.” 

In fact, it was an elected center-left government, and the tyrannical regime was the installment of the right-wing military junta. The worst offender was probably Time Magazine. Henry Luce was the publisher and owner of Time Magazine, he was extremely close to the U.S. government, and a hardcore Cold Warrior. 

Several countries actually enacted laws banning foreign-owned media from being freely circulating in the country as a result of the influence of Time Magazine and how they were just propagandizing the entire world. 

So, there was always this kind of union between the government on the one hand and the corporate media on the other. They worked hand-in-hand. But you did have occasions when that didn't happen, very well-known occasions: when Edward R. Murrow angered his bosses at CBS by vigorously and repeatedly denouncing McCarthyism in the 1950s; Walter Cronkite, in the 1960s, turned against the Vietnam War and editorialized on air – he was the most trusted news person there was saying, “The government's not winning, the U.S. is not winning, the U.S. isn't going to win.” 

Shortly thereafter, we had Watergate, you have the Pentagon Papers that enraged the U.S. government that was done by The New York Times and the Washington Post. So, you definitely had a kind of adversarial relationship at some points. 

But well before Donald Trump, when I first started writing about politics, and I'll talk about this in a second, I didn't intend to start writing about the media. I wasn't trying to be a media critic; I wasn't looking at the world that way. Only over time did I realize that with the War on Terror, the war in Iraq, the problem with the media was they were completely subservient to the National Security State, not to Democrats, not to Republicans, to the National Security State. 

Nonetheless, despite all of that, despite those fundamental problems I used to rail against the corporate media, I would debate them, I'd criticize them, I'd dissect their propaganda when I was writing, every day, in the 2000s and 2010s. I think it has gotten much worse for one reason and one reason only, and that was the emergence of Donald Trump. 

Once Donald Trump emerged, even though I don't think he was more radical than, say, George Bush and Dick Cheney, even from a kind of coastal, liberal perspective. Comportmentally, he was just so offensive to establishment elites, to liberal elites, that the media absolutely despised him, especially once he won and they went completely insane. They really did start including that their journalistic mission no longer mattered, that far more important was the higher mission of defeating Donald Trump, and they just started lying openly. 

We've been through all those lies, the Russiagate, that people forget now, really did drown the country politically for almost three years, only for it to be debunked. They spread the Hunter Biden laptop lie right before the election, which came from the CIA that it was “Russian disinformation.” All the COVID lies, everything Anthony Fauci said was not to be questioned and anyone who questioned it was a conspiracy theorist and on and on, and on. 

And that was really when you see this massive collapse in trust and faith in the media if you look at the graphs. I mean, it has been going down over time and you can even see prior to the advent of the internet, people turning to alternative sources. Talk Radio became very big among conservatives. Millions and millions and millions of people listen to Rush Limbaugh and he fed them every day with arguments about why you can't trust the corporate media. 

But in 2016, it fell off a cliff. That's because most of the media ended up just openly cheering for one of the two parties and that's something they really hadn't done before. 

The media was always liberal in the sense that these people lived in New York or Washington, they were probably more liberal on social issues, but when it came to war, remember, The New York Times and The New Yorker, with Jeffrey Goldberg, did more to sell the war in Iraq than any conservative outlet ever did. Conservatives were already behind the war on Iraq, behind the War on Terror, because it was a Republican administration. They're the ones who made it palatable for liberals to support it, telling liberals, “No, these things are real. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He's in an alliance with al-Qaeda.” 

That central bias was never right v. left or Democrat v. Republican; it really became Democrat v. Republican in 2016 and until the 2024 election. They were just openly and almost explicitly of the view that their journalistic views no longer matter, their journalistic principles no longer matter because of the much higher mission they were serving now – very kind of self-glorifying view of themselves like “No, we're on the front lines of this world-historic battle, this preserve American democracy and keep fascism out of the country.” 

That's what they told themselves. It feels much better than saying, “Oh, yeah, our job is just to report facts, without fear or favor to anybody.” It's kind of boring. They became heroes in liberal America. I mean, all these journalists, they wrote bestselling books, because they were anti-Trump, kind of the Jim Acosta effect. Just like the most mediocre people. Rachel Maddow became like a superstar in liberal America and in mainstream entertainment and all of that. All those people who abandoned their journalistic mission for the much more overtly partisan one. 

And when they did that, the problem was it wasn't like they were just reporting in a way that would help the Democratic Party. That was their mission, that was their goal. And that was what their mindset became. Remember, heading in the 2020 election, I worked for The Intercept, which was created explicitly to avoid attachment to a particular party or an ideology. We were supposed to just be adversarial to the government and that was the first time editors ever tried to stop me from publishing something. It was right before the election. I wanted to write about the revelations of the Hunter Biden laptop, what it showed about Joe Biden's and the Biden family's pursuit of profits in Ukraine and China, and they just said, “No, you cannot do that.”

 I don't think corporate media ever recovered and don't think they ever will recover. I think that trust and faith are gone. The fact that there are so many alternatives now means that people aren't captive of them any longer and you can see their audience disappearing. I mean, the only people who watch cable news are people over 60 or 65. It's true, especially on MSNBC and CNN. If they have like 700,000 viewers in total for a prime-time show, maybe 10%, 70,000 people under the age of 54, 70,000. Do you know how small that is for a massive media corporation in everybody's home because they're on the cable networks? You just see that medium dying and I think they did it to themselves. 

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All right, next question. @Bowds asks:

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I just did a show with two other leftists. One is the European editor of Jacobin, who's based in Europe, and the other is Yanis Varoufakis, who was the former finance minister of Greece and a very smart, I think, figure on the left. And it was about how so many right-wing populists are being banned the minute they start getting too popular, focused on Marine Le Pen’s banning. 

 I was really relieved to hear both of them, both on principle and on pragmatism, warn how dangerous and wrong that was to steal the core right in a democracy, which is to vote and choose your own leaders by banning people who are opposed to the establishment the minute they start doing too well. 

I've learned more about the Le Pen case, both of them have much nuts-and-bolts knowledge of it. I mean, the Marine Le Pen case is such a joke. I mean, it was called “Embezzlement” in the United States. That's what she was charged with and convicted of, which makes it sound like she stole money for herself. That's usually what embezzlement means. That's not what it was at all, it wasn't even close to that. 

Basically, everyone who's a member of the EU Parliament gets a lot of money a month for staff, something like 30,000 euros a month for staff and you can hire people even though they don't really do anything. One of the things Marine Le Pen’s party did was they took a lot of that budget for the parliamentarians they had in the EU, and they used it essentially to hire people, not so much to help with the work of the EU, but more to supplement or bolster salaries of the people who work for her party. 

And what both of them said, and this is the impression I got too, is that it is possible that that happened. Although it's a very gray area and the question becomes like, “Did they do more work on the EU or were they really working more internally on the party?” But there's no self-enrichment. Marine Le Pen didn't steal any money. The idea was she had the people who were getting these salaries work more on the party in France than on the EU work. 

How do you determine who does more of what? But what they all said was that essentially every party does this. Something like 25% of members of the EU Parliament have been found doing things very much like this, and they're not prosecuted criminally. They're required to pay a fine or pay the money back. So, at best, it was a very selective prosecution. They found Marine Le Pen doing something that is commonly done. 

And I think in general, any time you have a candidate who's leading the polls, either probably will win or highly likely to win as in the case of Marine Le Pen, she was certainly a real threat, especially without Macron being able to run and they suddenly get prosecuted on a very iffy crime. 

I'm not talking about murder, rape, kidnapping, racketeering. It's like misuse of funds where nobody gets enriched, kind of like Donald Trump's prosecution in Manhattan for these supposed mischaracterizations of the payments to Stormy Daniels through Michael Cohen, a bookkeeping kind of transgression that would be at best treated like a misdemeanor and rarely prosecuted. 

Whenever you start having that, you immediately, instinctively should wonder, is this person being prosecuted because they're afraid they're going to win an election and don't want to let the people of the country whom polls show close to a majority or even a majority want to elect, to keep them from actually running. And if this were a nice lady case where Marine Le Pen was the only example, maybe you could sit there all night and debate the intricacies of French law and how much other people do it and whatever, but it's so clearly part of the pattern. 

Here in Brazil, Lula's popularity is declining significantly and a lot of polls show Bolsonaro would win if he was able to run in 2026 against Lula, some polls show a tie within the margin of error. But, again, clearly, Bolsonaro would have a chance to win. Clearly, tens of millions of people in Brazil want him to be the president. But they're denied the choice because, in 2023, an electoral court said Bolsonaro is ineligible to run for the next eight years because he cast out on the integrity of the voting process. And they said, “Oh, it's an abuse of power to have done that. You can't run again.” 

And then, obviously, in Romania, we have Calin Georgescu who won the Romanian election and he's the more anti-EU, anti-NATO, pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine war, at least, candidate. The EU hates him, the U.S. hates him and they just invalidated the election. They said, this election doesn't count because Russia used ads on TikTok to help this candidacy, as if the U.S. and the EU weren't massively interfering in all these elections to get the candidate they want elected. 

But it's like, yeah, this election doesn't count. The candidate we don't like won, so it doesn't count. Then as polls showed, for the new election, he was again leading in the polls by an even higher amount because there was a perception in Romania that they were banning him to prevent him from winning, they went back, and said, “You can't run, Russia helped you, you're now ineligible.” There was another populist right figure in his party or an ally who was then also banned. 

This is becoming a trend. The Democrats' principal strategy in the 2024 election was to try to charge Trump with as many crimes as possible, not only convict him of those crimes but even try to put him in prison before 2024. 

It's so obviously a tactic that's being used by people who are claiming that they and they alone are the guardians of democracy. I mean, they're doing the same exact thing with censorship. And I believe that the story is that in 2016, the British people shocked Western liberals by having the U.K. leave the EU, do you know how significant that is? To have the U.K. leave the EU as a result of a referendum of the British people? Just because of perceptions that Brussels hates them, is not caring about their lives, how they don't want to be ruled by these distant bureaucrats and eurocrats in Brussels, and then, three months later, four months later, Donald Trump beats the symbol of establishment, power and dogma, Hillary Clinton. 

And that was when Western liberals decided that they could no longer trust people to be free. They can't trust them to have free speech because if they talk to each other freely and circulate ideas, they can't control what people think and therefore how they vote. That was when this whole disinformation industry arose. 

The whole purpose of the Enlightenment was “No, we were endowed with the capacity for reason.” We can all do that ourselves using free speech, as long as we can debate each other and exchange ideas, we can then make our own choice about what's true and false. That was the whole point of the Enlightenment, on which the American founding, among other things, was based. 

So, they're waging war at the Enlightenment on core Western values, core democratic values, not just of censorship, but now banning people they are fearful to win and they're doing it in the name of saving democracy, kind of like we have to burn down this village to save it. We have to eliminate democracy to save democracy. 

And I think all this is going to happen, kind of, as I was saying last night when we were looking at those polls showing a significant decline in support for Israel in the United States and how the reaction is more censorship to prevent people from spreading anti-Israel arguments that I think it's just going to create a backlash, just like the liberal censorship regime did on issues like race and gender ideology, created resentment and a backlash. I think that's going to happen with Israel, I think it's going to happen here as well. I think people are going to start looking around and figure it out and realize, hey, wait a minute, all these candidates that are leading in the polls that the establishment hates, they're all getting banned. 

It's not that difficult to realize how improbable it is that all of these right-wing populist anti-establishment candidates, right as they're on the verge of winning, just happen to commit crimes in the nick of time to justify banning them from the ballot, whereas all the establishment's favorite candidates are all super clean and law-abiding and driven by nobility and integrity, and they're just abiding by the law. I mean, who believes that? It's always like this. The people who stand up and say, “We are the guardians of democracy” are the ones who censor and ban people from the ballot. 

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All right, next question from @TuckertheDog. I don't know what that means but I'm always happy to take questions from canines. 

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It is not unheard of for journalists to have off-the-record meetings with American political leaders and even foreign leaders. Obviously, why would a foreign leader want to meet in secret with a journalist? Or why would a foreign leader want to be secret with influencers? Because they want to impart to them propaganda about why they should be more aligned with that country's agenda or that leader's way of thinking. 

The people they met with are already very pro-Israel, certainly Dave Rubin. I mean there's a picture that Dave Rubin posted of himself and Netanyahu and it almost looks like he's in the middle of some sort of sexual ecstasy that's like a sustained one, I mean he's standing next to Benjamin Netanyahu who basically is his leader. 

So, I don't know what possible impact that could have. Dave Rubin was already somebody who put Israel at the center of his world. I don't know how he could do that even more. Tim Poole, I don't want to make sweeping statements about his views on Israel. I know he's very pro-Israel, but I just don't know enough to make definitive statements. But it's not that it's that unheard of and my understanding is like Dave Rubin posted a picture of it. I think Tim Pool talked about it. I think that happened after it was disclosed, but they met under a set of rules that journalists use where you can't report on anyone who is at the meeting, you can't report on anything that was discussed, but you can disclose the fact of the meeting and just maybe general impressions. 

So, it was rules of secrecy. They weren't allowed to quote Netanyahu; they weren't allowed to talk about what he said. And I do think this points to a problem in independent media. I think one of the problems that we were just talking about with corporate media is that they became too partisan, too ideological, too willing to act subserviently to a particular faction. The U.S. Security State, the Democratic Party, whatever. 

And I think there's definitely that same problem in independent media. I've talked before about how the easiest way to have financial success and rating success in this new independent media environment is to plant your flag in one faction and say, “This is who I am, this is where I am, this is who I defend, this is the ideology I believe in; I'm never going to deviate from it.” 

You attract all the people who believe in that ideology or who are loyal to that party or to that faction, and they want to hear their views validated all the time. And you can build a very big audience of people who just want to keep informational closure and always have their views validated, never challenged, let alone rejected: a lot of people are making a lot of money in independent media doing that. 

I absolutely believe that the emergence of independent media is a net good just for the reason that it increases the number of alternatives people have. Some people have tried independent media but have not succumbed to that kind of group thing or audience capture, Joe Rogan probably being the best example. 

Joe Rogan does not sit there and just praise the Democratic, the Republican Parties. He's always that kind of a mixture of views. He obviously became the most popular program in the country. 

It's a little different because Joe Rogan's program is not primarily political. Sometimes it's political. But it is cultural. He considers himself a comedian, he has a lot of comedians on, actors, celebrities, and a lot of political content – just kind of along the way there's political content, so, but I'm not playing that political show; it's difficult to be successful as a political show unless you do that. And once you do, in a lot of ways, you become no different than the corporate media. 

They have a lot of proximity to power. If you're suddenly now – because you cheered on MAGA, you cheered on Trump every day – now you're getting invited to the White House, you're being let in on secret meetings, the Trump White House is calling you, giving you little tidbits, to what extent is that really independent media? 

I've always believed it's important to keep people in power at a distance, at an arm's length. The minute you start befriending them, the minute you start talking to them too much, the minute you start succumbing to the temptations of being led into their world – you have people with power, they can open doors, like, oh, I get to go to the White House, I get to have a meeting with a foreign leader, not just a foreign leader but like the Prime Minister of Israel – of course, that's going to compromise your independence. Or maybe not. Of course, maybe you can resist that and fight against that, but it's certainly going to have a big effect. 

That's why I've always hated anything that reeks of journalists and political power merging socially or in any other way, like that White House Correspondence Dinner. I absolutely despise it. It makes me sick to my stomach. They all dress up as if they're at the Oscars and they get to meet like B-list celebrities and chatter at the White House with all these and with the president. It's just so corrupting. It creates just like this culture of Versailles like you're either in the royal court or you're not. 

On some level, the issue of audience capture can actually be more problematic in independent media. It didn't use to be such a problem in corporate media years ago, in the decades I was describing earlier, because when there was only ABC, NBC, and CBS, they were the only games in town – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, your local newspaper. But it was a place everybody felt more or less trusting of in terms of getting the news from because they were not overtly partisan. As I said, they had other biases, but it wasn't so overtly partisan. 

Now, there is absolute audience capture among corporate media. The vast majority of The New York Times subscribers – the vast, vast majority – are liberals. They hate Trump. Same with The Washington Post: they had mass cancelations of subscriptions when Jeff Bezos barred them from endorsing Kamala Harris. Obviously, the cable outlets all have their audiences, and you actually saw that with Fox, which I personally do believe is the most independent of the three cable networks for reasons I can explain, but not really relevant now, but when Trump was telling everybody the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud, that Biden's victory was fraudulent, byproduct of voter fraud, many, maybe even most people on Fox were not on board with that. Some of them actually were opposed to it. Tucker Carlson went on the air and ranted and raved about the dishonesty of Sidney Powell, how she keeps making these grandiose claims and she has all this proof, but then every time he invites her on to show, she won't come on, she never shows this proof. And you saw this migration of a good number of people, a good number of conservatives, away from Fox to Newsmax, and, as a result, Fox started getting more receptive to the fraud narrative. 

That is a kind of audience capture that I think is new for corporate media because they are now all in silos. You know who the audience is of each one of these outlets. But I think with independent media – because shows and independent journalists rely on their viewers not just for ratings, not just to show up, but also for financial support – most independent media shows, most independent journalists can't make a living unless they have their readers and viewers supporting them financially, monthly subscriptions or donations or whatever. That's what independent media rely on mostly. 

Then many of them become afraid to say anything that might alienate them. I mean, I've been through this many times in my career where you take a position that you know is going to alienate a lot of your audience and you can watch them go away, the subscriptions drop and fall. But I would way rather have fewer viewers and make less money and know that I'm not in prison to say things I don't really believe to keep my audience happy. 

I've never had a viewership or a readership that expected me to do that or wanted me to do that and I think it's really commendable for people who consume news to stay with somebody even when they're saying things that are so against your views as long as you think they're doing their best to be honest, you can be challenged by it. I think it's boring to listen to somebody who agrees with me all the time. I really do. I don't like it. I don't find it compelling or engaging. There's too much agreement. It's like we're already on the same wavelength. 

So, I do think independent media is an absolute positive. I've been a big defender of it. I still am. I think free speech on the internet is the most important thing. But I also think there are some important vulnerabilities independent media has, some of which are shared by corporate media and some of them are more inherent to independent media that I think are worth being aware of. 

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The next question is from @aobraun1: 

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I think the most interesting thing about Trump and tariffs, and a lot of people have said this before, is that – and I'm sure you've all seen this – you can go back to the 1980s, Trump was famous when he was young because he was entering the Manhattan real estate market, building big buildings, he was good looking, he always attracted attention, always had a certain charisma, his dating habits attracted all kinds of tabloid attention. He had his first wife, Ivanka. I remember one of us when I lived in New York with whom he had his first four children. And he ended up having a marital affair with Marla Maples. And the media went insane. Like The New York Post, those tabloids every day. 

He was extremely famous for those kinds of things, for his real estate success. He ended up leaving Ivanka Trump and then marrying Marla Maples, whatever, and then he had a third marriage and lots of other things in between and the tabloids loved this. They ate it up. 

You can see an interview with him in the 1980s where he was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, kind of at the height of her popularity on her extremely popular show and she asked him, like, “Would you ever run for president?” and he said, “Ah, probably not.” But he was passionate about one topic in particular and that was the idea that Japan back then, it was not China but Japan, in the ‘80s, that people feared was taking over technologically and economically – they were buying a bunch of land in the United States – that Japan and other countries were taking advantage of the United States in ways that were disgusting, he said, for American leaders to permit, meaning trade deficits, unfair trade practices – it has been a view of Trump's forever. He’s been talking about tariffs and protectionism for a long time. 

So, in terms of the brain trust, it's not like other issues where I think Trump gets influenced to do things. I think this is something that Trump really was devoted to doing, especially this time around. You can see this time he wants to leave his mark. He doesn't care as much about public opinion, about media anger – and this is what I heard too from Trump's circle throughout 2024: they got outflanked in the first turn, they had all kinds of people there to sabotage them, weaseled and embedded into a circle. They didn't really know how Washington worked. Trump was an outsider. He was constantly undercut and sabotaged by generals and by the whole deep state. 

And they are determined to make sure that does not happen again. That was, they worked on that for a long time, at least a full year, and they got in and they were very serious about it. They had a real plan for it. So, this time, most of what's happening is because Trump wants it to happen. Tariffs are probably the leading example. But of course, he's not an economist, he's not a specialist in tariffs, but Trump has a lot of confidence in his own decision-making ability. 

My guess is that the main architect of these tariffs is Peter Navarro, just because he's a fanatical supporter of tariffs. Maybe he talked to his treasury secretary. Maybe he talked to some billionaires whom he trusts. What I know for sure is that when these terrorists were instituted the way they were, people were kind of shocked, including people close to him, and they were harming these billionaires quite a bit. I mean, you could watch Tesla stock imploding. 

When Tim Waltz made fun of Tesla when it was at a very low level, like six weeks ago, two months ago, it was 225, it then went up to 280, 290, and it was back to 210, 215, like losing 20% of its value. Elon Musk is the primary shareholder of Tesla, so that eats in greatly to his net worth, but everyone in the market, people on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, who love Trump, who thought he was going to do everything that they wanted him to do, that he would serve their interests without any kind of hesitation. 

So, I know for a fact, that there was a lot of reporting on this, I've heard this as well, Elon was going to Trump all the time, trying to talk him out of these tariffs, other people were as well, and Trump wouldn't move because he believed in it. And the only thing that got Trump to move, as he himself said, was that people freaked out, they panicked, and they were panic selling. What really alarmed them was not so much the stock market, because the stock market has had many times when it's gone down that way, and it bounced back, they knew the stock market was going to go down, they were willing to endure that. 

What really alarmed them was what happened in the bond market because that reverberated the entire economy very quickly. Imagine that if things didn't get better and Trump kept those tariffs in place through 2025 heading into 2026, by the best estimates, whatever benefit you get from protectionism is going to take some time to show up. Just think about layoffs, the economy slowing down, prices going up, people's 401k being eaten up. 

As I said last night, I have people in my life who don't care much about politics, but they have 401ks and they care quite a lot about the 401k because that's the retirement security and when it starts going like this, it's not just billionaires, it's ordinary people really feeling fear and anger about what's happening. 

Then that reverberates in Republicans and Congress as well, because they serve and are funded by banking interests in Wall Street, but also because a lot of them are true believers in free trade. That's the classic Republican position. But then also they have to run for re-election every two years and 2026 is already looking to be a scary year for Republicans. General midterm elections after an election are terrible for the party in control. The opposition is much more motivated. 

You've already seen in some of these elections for state Senate and House, these kinds of off-year elections, these special elections, and the couple for Congress where Democrats cut into the margins that Trump created very significantly. They were even afraid of Elise Stefanik's seat; if she went to the U.N. and there was an open seat, they were so afraid that they might lose it, even in a Trump 20-plus district, that they withdrew her nomination for U.N. ambassador because that's how much energy there is among Democrats and a lack of interest and energy among Republicans. When Trump's on the ballot, a lot of moderate people don't come out and I'm sure they're petrified about that. So, he was getting it from all directions. 

We'll see what happens. It's very uncharacteristic of Trump to back out, and that is what he did. I don't care what anyone says. They said from the start, these tariffs are staying in place, we don't take care; if the stock market gets angry, you're going to have to grit and bear it, have some short-term pain. We need to radically overhaul our economy. It's not working, which I agree with. 

Free trade globalism has been great for billionaires. It's created massive income inequality and sent the middle class and the working class on this sharp, steep decline of downward mobility. But suspending the tariffs kind of contradicts that message, like, we're going to radically overhaul the system and put in protectionism. Even if they get deals with these countries, if the tariffs don't return, then you haven't really overhauled anything. You've gotten some better deals. But you haven't overhauled the global economy or the American economy. 

But imagine putting those tariffs back in place, what it would do to the stock market, what it would do to the bond market, what it would do to people's perceptions. I don't know if they can put it back. I mean, presidents, no matter how powerful they are, definitely are limited by a lot of other powerful factions. 

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Last point, just not really a question, but speaking of independent media like on Joe Rogan's show, today, I don't know if it was recorded today, but it was released today, they had kind of a debate between Dave Smith on the one hand, who's a libertarian, anti-interventionist, anti-war Israel critic, and Douglas Murray, the British, whatever he is, who's fanatically in favor of Israel and wars, he loves wars, he thinks they're all great. 

There's this phrase I once heard or I once read. It might be something that a lot of people have said. I'm certainly not the first one to say it, but it's really true. I realized as soon as I read it, how true it was. I realized that when I was younger, I kind of absorbed this, that Americans automatically add 20 IQ points to any British person who speaks with a posh British accent, they all think, “Oh, they're so brilliant, so eloquent.” and that they subtract 20 IQ points for anybody who speaks with an American Southern accent. It is so true. 

The relevance of Douglas Murray seems obvious to me, but he went on Joe Rogan's Show today with Dave Smith, Joe Rogan doesn't usually have these kinds of debates. It got very heated. Rogan was clearly more on Dave Smith's side than Douglas Murray's side.

 Usually, Joe Rogan's audience is pretty favorable to the show. Basically, the entire Joe Rogan audience, which, again, is not left-wing, to put it mildly, was completely contemptuous of Douglas Murray. They could not spew enough disgust and contempt for him intellectually, politically and personally. 

I don't think I've ever seen Joe Rogan’s comment section be that universally disgusted and contemptuous of anybody since Matt Yglesias – I mean, I like mean internet comments as much as anybody else, but like, I almost felt uncomfortable reading the comment section when Matt Yglesias went on just because it was so mean, so incessantly mean, so personal. I mean they hated Matt Yglesias. It was when he had that book out about how America should have a billion people in it and they hated the book, they hated the argument, they hated him, they hated how he looked. I mean everything about him. But it came close with Douglas Murray. And I think it's so interesting because Douglas Murray usually won't go anywhere where he's challenged in any meaningful way. 

In fact, after October 7, we asked Douglas Murray to come on our shows several times. At first, he was responding, pretending he would, talking about scheduling, and then he just ghosted us and disappeared and won't come on. He doesn't want to be challenged; he wants to sit back in some chair like he's in a British salon. He loves to hear himself speak, he thinks he's so eloquent and he knows Americans are like, “Oh my god, this is so brilliant,” but he will never be challenged and he was challenged today a lot by David Smith and Joe Rogan. And he just fell apart. Fell apart.

It's really worth watching. It's entertaining. I encourage you to read the comment section as well. But it's not just that it was a good internet fight. They talked about a lot of foreign policy issues. Douglas Murray came on and just became a full-on Karen for the first 15 minutes, like whining and complaining to Joe Rogan about how he's talking to people he shouldn't be talking to, people who aren't worthy of being heard, including Dave Smith. That didn't go well. 

So, I recommend that. It's good when somebody like Douglas Murray, a hardcore Israel fanatic, a complete warmonger, someone who wants to send people to war all the time, but never goes, is actually challenged, not in like an eight-minute cable hit where you really can't get at the person, but it was two and a half hours and it's unrelenting.

I loved it when I was on, but by the third hour I was like, is this ending? It's tiring to focus that much, and when you're getting battered by Dave Smith and more importantly for Douglas Murray by Joe Rogan that way, you can definitely see him falling apart very quickly. So, I really recommend that! 

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Many of you have been asking about the impact of Trump's tariffs, and Glenn addressed how we are covering the issue during our mail bag segment yesterday. As always, we are grateful for your thought-provoking questions! Thank you, and keep the questions coming!

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Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

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@ggreenwald Glenn, could you do a segment on the escalations between India-Pakistan sometime soon? As someone who’s not an expert on the history I would appreciate your trusted perspective on it, possibly with guests laying out either side’s position on it.

Interesting discussion last night. I had not realized Harvard's historical funding situation, and I think we need to DOGE that. They have enough money to get by on their own now. The general consensus of those in the live chat seemed to be to cut the funding, and stop telling them what to do. Great discussion!
Looking forward to the transcript!

Here's a lovely, short video of a man playing music for animals, including horses, elephants, lemurs, and more. It turns out that even horses enjoy the Rolling Stones' song Wild Horses😁
https://substack.com/@sailingbeyondknowledge/note/c-108597224?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1ngpds

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Christopher Rufo: On Civil Liberties, the American Founding, Academic Freedom, and More
System Update #450

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!

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Tonight: Regardless of what you think of him or really about any issue, there's no denying the profound influence that tonight's guest, Christopher Rufo, has had on conservative politics and state and federal policy more broadly, though he has often focused on educational debates and educational institutions – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, appointed him to a key position to transform that state's New School from an institution largely producing left-wing thought to one that is more aligned with conservative educational dogma and policy. He was also instrumental in publicizing the plagiarism of Harvard President Claudine Gay, which, along with issues regarding campus Israel protests and antisemitism, led to her firing after only six months in that position. He has become one of the most influential voices shaping the views of leading conservative politicians and media figures. 

Rufo appeared on our program once before: back in 2023, where we spent an hour exploring his core beliefs and goals, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not. The conversation was spirited but unfailingly civil, and I think, illuminating of some of the controversies surrounding his work. 

What promoted Rufo's appearance tonight were comments that I had made about him and other right-wing figures in an interview I gave about the Trump administration to Reason Magazine. Rufo saw those comments, noted them and objected to them on X. It led to a back and forth but it became rapidly apparent - at least to me - that social media was the absolute worst venue to try to sort through those issues we were discussing, some of which have a lot of complexity and nuance to them: things like the core values of the American Founding, the values and views that most influenced the founders and how all of those questions apply to our current political debates, especially over civil liberties and the freedom of academic institutions. 

So, I suggested that we remove the conversation to a platform more suitable for a constructive exchange and he quickly agreed to come on this program for us to do so. 

His official biography does not really capture Rufo's influence and accomplishments, but for those unfamiliar with it, he is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute. He is also a contributing editor of City Journal, where his writings explore a range of issues, including critical race theory, gender ideology, homelessness, addiction, crime, and the decline of American cities. He has been published in Fox and the New York Post and has been the subject of numerous corporate media profiles, the most recent of which is a lengthy interview he gave to the New York Times just last month. He's the author of the New York Times bestselling book, “America's Cultural Revolution,” and as a filmmaker, he has directed four documentaries for PBS, Netflix, and international television, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities. 

The issues we hope to discuss are, in my view, some of the most consequential for American politics and the West more broadly, and I'm very much looking forward to our exploration of our agreements and our disagreements on all of those questions. 


G. Greenwald: Chris, good evening, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on and agreeing to do this.

So, it's interesting, when I was thinking about how to do this, how to conduct our discussion, the issues that we discussed, even though it was just a few tweets, were so far reaching and kind of complex that I had so many things I wanted to talk to you about, so the hard part was figuring out what to kind of focus on. 

There was a series of tweets that you posted in response to that interview I had given in Reason, where I basically said, and it was part of a larger conversation, I was asked specifically about you, that I think you're very shrewd and influential and successful operative and journalist but, to me, it seems like you've gotten to the point where you care more about this kind of Machiavellian quest for power than you do about principles. 

And in response, you said this:

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NIH Ends Fauci's Brutal Dog Experiments; MTG and Massie Shut Down Law to Criminalize Israel Boycotts
System Update #449

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!

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Former senior health official who lurked around Washington for 40 years, Anthony Fauci was, well before COVID, highly polarizing and, in many cases, widely disliked. When many of the truths of COVID and his behavior during that pandemic were revealed, he was jettisoned into an entirely new category of the hero/villain narrative that plagues so much of our politics. 

But one constant in his long career was that he was always a robust advocate for and a funder of – an ample funder of – some of the most grotesque, cruelest and pointless medical experimentations on animals in government labs paid for by the government, especially dogs. And when doing these experiments on dogs which have almost no medical value, they often chose on purpose for beagles as their breed of choice because as anyone who has spent any time with beagles will tell you, they have a particularly loving, docile and trustworthy instinct when they are with animals, which makes it very easy to deceive them. 

Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste, is our guest to talk about the major win animal advocacy groups led by the very bipartisan White Coat Lab group scored today. The National Institute of Health, now run by Jay Bhattacharya, under the direction of HHS Secretary RFK Jr., announced that they were eliminating the last government-funded lab experiments on beagles: that was the lab that conducted the so-called barbaric septic shock experiment, and I'll save you the description until later. 

Then, Reason's magazine Matthew Petti wrote an excellent article today, a really good piece of journalism that broke down and analyzed the statute in very clear detail and concluded that it "would arguably be the most draconian measure of this kind to date". He is our second guest tonight. 

Some laws are so extreme and shocking that you can't actually believe anyone in Congress actually proposed them, and for me, this is one. As is true for most of the pro-Israel measures in Washington, it had a long list of co-sponsors from both parties. 

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Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste Project, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that just got done heralding, explaining and it exposed and has held Dr. Fauci accountable for many things, including funding the Wuhan lab, as well as testing cruel, gratuitous, and pointless testing on dogs generally and beagles specifically. For more than two decades, Justin has led successful and award-winning grassroots and lobbying campaigns to end cruel taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs, cats, primates, and other animals. I've long been an admirer of that group and his work, and we're really delighted to have him join us tonight. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions: Iraq War Lies, Judge Rebukes Trump, Ilham Omar Curses Reporters & More
System Update #448

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!

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As most of you know, Friday night is our Q&A show. We take questions submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community. This week, the questions cover a very wide range of issues including the bizarre story told by former Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont about how he was secretly accosted by shadowy members of the deep state while jogging in 2003, and they directed him to proof that the Bush administration was lying about the proposed war in Iraq. Leahy cast a meaningless vote against the war because of what he saw, but never let the public know about the proof he was shown. 

We also have questions about yesterday’s very significant ruling by another Trump-appointed federal judge who ruled against the Trump administration. This one concluded that the administration lacks the authority even to invoke the wartime Alien Enemies Act, which is what the administration has been using to justify removing people from the U.S. and sending them to an El Salvador prison without so much as a trial. 

Finally, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota uttered very naughty words to a journalist from the Daily Caller, who walked up to her on the street, began filming her, asking her adversarial questions – a perfectly legitimate journalistic activity. Upon seeing the video and Omar's reaction, many conservatives – including many who have spent a decade calling journalists The Enemy of the People and cheering right-wing politicians who have scored journalists often aggressively and with verbal abuse – have now decided that Omar had failed to show journalists the respect and deference that they deserve as journalists. 

We'll examine this and other questions as well, as much as we can, time permitting. 

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The first question comes from @thefarside:

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I totally agree with that point of view and I've seen this happen many times before when senators and Congress members access classified material and they're too scared to show it to the public, even though they could do so on the floor of the Senate or the House enjoying absolute complete immunity: they cannot be prosecuted, criminalized, or arrested for anything said on the floor of Congress. It's legislative immunity. They could just go and reveal it, but they almost never do. They leave it up to people like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, or other courageous whistleblowers to do it, even though they don't have immunity, while senators just conceal this information. 

So, here's what he wrote in his memoir, “The Road Taken” by Patrick Leahy. By the way, it's not a new memoir; it's from 2022, it was just a couple of years ago, but it just got resurfaced and started going viral on X. I think a lot of people didn't know about it. Who would sit down and read Patrick Leahy's book? I certainly didn't. 

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So, imagine you're just walking on the street with your wife. It's like an old couple walking in the street and out of nowhere, there are very fit joggers behind you. They are following you and they stop and say, “Hey, we hear you're bringing in briefings. How have those been going?” And you say, “Fine, but I can't talk about them.” They're like, “No, no worries. We don't want to talk about that. Just take a look at file 8. Have you seen that?”

He writes:

[…] It was obvious from the look on my face that I had not seen such a file. They suggested I should and that I might find it interesting. Quickly thereafter, I arranged to see File Eight, and it contradicted much of what I had heard from the Bush administration.

Days later, Marcelle and I were out walking again when the two joggers reappeared. After the opening greetings, they told me they understood I had seen File Eight and asked what did I think about it? It was the eeriest conversation I'd experienced in Washington. I felt like a senatorial version of Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat—only in broad daylight.

I went through the usual disclaimers that I could not talk about any file and if such a file was available and so on. They said of course they understood, but they wondered if I had also been shown File Twelve, using a code word. […]

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

 

They're like, “Hey, remember when we mentioned File Eight? We're glad you took a look at that. No, no, don't worry. We don't need to hear your opinion. We just want to know, you should look at file 12 too.” 

He says:

[…] Again, I think the look on my face gave them the answer. They apologized for interrupting our walk and jogged off.

The next day, I was back in the secure room in the Capitol to read File Twelve, and it again contradicted the statements that the administration, and especially Vice President Cheney, seemed to be relying on, and I told my staff and others that for a number of reasons I absolutely intended to vote against the war in Iraq.

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

According to Patrick Leahy, he had been directed by mysterious deep state operatives, obviously, to classified files that had not been shown by the people briefing Congress on the Iraq War, both of which, he says, proved that the government was lying to the American people. 

You would think, I would think, that somebody in that position would be like, “Hey, I need to alert the American people to the fact that there are documents inside the government's file that prove that what Dick Cheney and George Bush were saying about the war in Iraq are lies.” 

Again, he had legal immunity; he could have read the whole file on the Senate floor and nothing would have happened. Even if he didn't have immunity, I would think you would be duty-bound when the government is selling a war to the population, a very serious invasion on the other side of the world, not a few bombs being dropped, and you have proof that what the government is saying is lying, but that's not what Patrick Leahy did and he admitted that in his book, not even realizing there's anything wrong with it. 

There's a woman on X who I find to be genuinely one of the smartest and most interesting X accounts to follow. Her X name is @villagecrazylady, but her name is Mel. She is very upfront. She does a podcast, a self-identified MAGA woman from the South. Yet, she believes the MAGA principle, she is vehemently opposed to all kinds of intervention, she's opposed to funding the war in Ukraine, funding Israel's war in Gaza, going to war with Iran, bombing Yemen, all the things that we were promised that Trump would do in foreign policy, she actually believes in it and insists on it and complains when it doesn't happen as it should. And she's just very smart. She's just always plugged into what I think are the right things, thinking about things that are really interesting, and I actually learned a lot from following her. I'm going to have her on the show soon. She was the one who alerted me to this. I think she was probably the one who alerted a lot of people to this, she said: 

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 I think what's really notable, too, is imagine that you're those two guys who obviously are risking their career, probably risking their liberty to try to make sure that Patrick Leahy sees, not just circumstantial evidence, but proof that the Bush-Cheney administration is lying about the key arguments they're trying to sell to the public to justify the invasion of Iraq. They put themselves on the line, they put themselves at risk because they apparently thought it was important for the truth to be known and they get Leahy to go read both of those files, and he just does nothing, nothing, to tell the public. He's just like, “Yeah, I'm going to vote no.” He didn't even tell his fellow senators. He didn't say a word. 

How pathetic is that? How cowardly is that? You run for the Senate, you're a career politician, you're old, you're in your 23rd term or whatever. Who cares? But don't you have any sense of duty at all? 

I don't want to be naive. I get that these are scummy politicians, very conniving. The more they stay around Washington, probably the fewer principles they believe they can operate on, the more kind of just pragmatic and cunning or whatever they become. But you're talking here about the most serious war that the United States has fought since it left Vietnam and you have the evidence in your hands that the government is lying yet again, like they did with the Vietnam War and the Gulf of Tonkin, and you just sit and say nothing? 

But there's a counterexample. When Daniel Ellsberg discovered the Pentagon Papers in the late 1960s, a multi-volume, tens of thousands of pages compiled by the Pentagon, the Pentagon Papers concluded and members of the highest levels of the government also knew under Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon that there was no way the U.S. could win the war in Vietnam; at most, they could fight to a standstill. Yet they were constantly telling the public that was growing tired of this war, like, “Hey, we're losing all our young men who are being drafted, we're killing huge numbers of people, we're spending tons of money, there's social unrest. What is going on?” So, the Pentagon would say, “Oh, don't worry. We're close to winning. We're like six months away from winning. We're making immense progress.” In the Pentagon Papers, though, they were saying the exact opposite. They knew they could not win, so it's the same thing. 

Daniel Ellsberg had proof in his hands that the American government was lying to the people about the Vietnam War. Ellsberg had a very high position in the government. He had a PhD in nuclear policy from Harvard, zand he worked at the highest levels of the Rand Corporation, had some of the most sensitive documents inside the government and he did what Patrick Leahy wouldn't do.

He wasn't a senator; he didn't have any sort of parliamentary immunity, but he tried to get members of Congress to read it on the floor, as he couldn't, he went to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and they published parts of it. But then finally, he found Senator Mike Gravel, a Republican from Alaska, who was like, “No, you know what? I have parliamentary immunity, and this is what it's for. The public has a right to know that the American government is lying.” 

By the way, Daniel Ellsberg was charged with espionage, they tried to imprison him for life and the only reason his case was dismissed was because the Nixon administration was discovered to have burglarized the office of his psychoanalyst to try to find dirt on the private life of Daniel Ellsberg and the judge, because of that misconduct, dismissed the case, but had the judge not done so, Daniel Ellsberg probably would have been in prison for the rest of his life. He just died about 18 months ago at the age of 94. 

I had the honor of working with him when we created the Freedom of the Press Foundation together, he was unbelievably smart. One of the smartest people I've ever met. And even at like ‘91 or ‘92, he would attend these board meetings we had at the Freedom the Press foundation and just present the most complex arguments possible. 

So, he got Senator Gravel to read it from the floor of the Senate, and this is what that kind of bravery looks like. 

Video. Sen. Mike Gravel, US Senate Chamber. June 21, 1971.

So, that was the prelude to him then reading the Pentagon Papers into the record. You can be uncomfortable with, or even mock if you want, the very emotional display of Senator Gravel there. He was crying in the middle of that statement. But I would suggest that that is a far more admirable, noble and understandable reaction than what Senator Leahy did. 

I mean, every day, if you're a senator in the late 1960s, early 1970s, you're getting intelligence briefings about how unbelievably horrific the Vietnam War is: 58,000 Americans killed, two million Vietnamese, at least, killed. I mean, just the use of biological agents like Agent Orange, it was a brutal, savage, barbaric war, and the people who were in there, in the middle of the jungles and rivers of Vietnam, had no idea why they were fighting, why they were being killed on the other side of the world. 

So, if you're aware of information that the public can perhaps use to understand they're being lied to and hopefully stop the war, I think it's absolutely commendable to think about what's happening to human beings. I mean, that's a humanistic response. 

He didn't just cry about it, he actually tried to do something about it. Even though they have parliamentary immunity, reading top-secret Pentagon documents about a war in the middle of Washington, D.C., you would never know for certain that that's going to be honored. 

Here in Brazil, there's just a very similar parliamentary immunity privilege that people in Congress and the Senate enjoy. A couple of months ago, a member of Congress went to the microphone to speak at the tribunal where he heavily criticized the authoritarian chief judge of the Supreme Court, even though he's not technically the chief judge; he acts that way, Alexandre de Moraes. And then, shortly after, Alexandre de Moraes ordered the police to investigate him and to try to convict him for having spoken there. And their argument was, “Yeah, they have parliamentary immunity, but it's not absolute.” 

There's another case that I'm very familiar with, that I've had personal dealings with, that to this day sickens me and I just want to tell you about. 

For about two or three years before the Snowden reporting started, before Edward Snowden risked his liberty to come forward and show his fellow citizens the truth about how the government was spying on them with no limits and no warrants, and risking his life in prison to do it, two different senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, went around hinting that, “Oh, the NSA is doing some really bad stuff that if the American public knew about it, would be enraged by,” but they never said what it was. They could have done what Senator Gravel did and gone to the fore, but no, they just kept hinting. They would write emails, be in interviews, they would go write up ads saying, “Oh, if you only knew how they were interpreting the Patriot Act and what they were allowing the NSA to do, you would be enraged.” But they didn't have the courage to say it. 

And it was only once Snowden came forward and we started publishing reporting about what the NSA was doing based on his courageous act, did they start coming forward and say things. The headline of The Washington Post, July 28, 2013, is: “With NSA revelations, Sen. Ron Wyden’s vague privacy warnings finally become clear”. 

I mean, you know what? I reported on this topic for three years. It was a very important part of my career. I still pay very close attention to this violence debate but I could barely get through that. It was so ambiguous, so bereft of anything substantive that you could really understand what the government was doing, because he, too, was just a coward and then the minute we came out with that report, he's like, “I tried everything.” Yeah, everything except disclosing what you could have disclosed to let the American people know way before Edward Snowden came forward, so that he didn't have to spend his life in prison or Russia. 

People in the government, in the intelligence community, were trying to alert the public through Leahy that this proof existed, but he was too much of a coward to do anything about it. And so were Senators Wyden and Udall, whereas Senator Gravel wasn't. 

I just want to say the final thing: when Edward Snowden did their job for them and he comes forward, he doesn't dump it all on the internet, he is as careful as he can be, he gives it to journalists with very conservative instructions about only to use this very carefully, don't put anybody in danger, only use it to reveal to the public what they should know. And then he, of course, gets immediately indicted on multiple felony charges, including the Espionage Act, which would send him to prison for the rest of his life. 

They would ask Senator Wyden and Senator Udall, “Well, he revealed what you said should have been revealed. What do you think of him? Are you defending him? Do you think the prosecution would be dropped?” And they'd be like, “I'm not really going to talk about Snowden. I mean, he disclosed classified information. You can't have that.” – basically calling him a criminal for doing what he did only because they were too afraid to. 

These people are propellant. They'll let wars happen rather than step forward and confront any sort of risk or warrantless unconstitutional eavesdropping, as the courts ruled on American citizens with no warrants. And that's the kind of people that, unfortunately, with some exceptions, but very few, get to Washington and sit in both houses of Congress. 

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All right, here's the next question, from @Andante423: 

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It's a great question. Thank you. 

Just to give you the context, because it's so important, all of you, of course, remember when Trump just picked up, ICE picked up, 238 Venezuelans, and then, just in the middle of the night, shipped them out of the United States on a plane to an El Salvador prison. They filmed these people having been dehumanized, being humiliated, having their heads shaved, kneeling on the floor and it's almost certainly the case that at least some of them weren’t guilty of being gang members, but they're in this prison that's designed to be permanent. It runs on slave labor; it's one of the most abusive ones. 

But when this got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme court said by a 9-0 ruling – so that includes Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, Justice Kavanaugh, all the conservatives’ favorite judges – “Even if you want to use the Alien Enemies Act, you still have to give these people a due process. You have to give them a hearing, advance notice of their intent to be removed and then their opportunity to go into court and present evidence that they’re not a gang member.” 

So, they already said you have to give them a court hearing; in this court hearing, the judges should decide two things. Number one: Does Trump have the right to invoke the Alien Enemies Act? It's supposed to be a wartime statute. It's only for wartime. The only three times it was invoked previously were the War of 1812, World War I and World War II. 

Just to give you a feel for how extremist this power is, that's what FDR used to order all Japanese Americans interned in concentration camps because they were suspected of being loyal to Japan, which is generally considered one of the most shameful acts of the 20th century – but at least there was a real war going on. 

When the lawyers for the Venezuelan detainees sued in federal court to argue that this law was invalidly invoked and they weren't gang members, they got the best judge they could have gotten. They got a judge appointed by Donald Trump in his first term. So, he's a Trump-appointed judge and you can imagine how conservative judges Trump appoints from Texas are. 

Yet that's the judge who yesterday said that there's no legal foundation for adopting and invoking the Alien Enemies Act because we're not actually in war. 

The Trump administration had to concoct a theory and their argument was we're basically at war with these international drug gangs that are invading our country. They're like an invading army. 

Here's the ruling from this Trump-appointed judge issued yesterday. 

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There you see the caption. It is J.A.V., which is one of the Venezuelan detainees that they want to deport, versus Donald Trump. It's quite long, but it's not actually a long opinion. You can read it. The link is here.

It explains why, based on the statute, the president cannot invoke this law, because it's only for wartime and we're not at wartime. It's as simple as that. 

I've seen a lot of conservatives questioning why the courts get to decide this. In part, it's because that's been how the Supreme Court and the judicial power have been interpreted for more than 200 years, going back to Marbury v. Madison, and if you think about it, it has to be this way. 

The purpose of the Constitution is to limit the powers of the federal government, to limit the powers of the president and Congress. The government can't do this, it can't do that, it cannot do the other thing. So, if the president ignores the constitution, let's say Joe Biden orders that all Trump supporters be rounded up and imprisoned with no trial, obviously a violation of the constitution, if you can't go to the courts and seek relief and ask the courts to declare that unconstitutional, who does that then? Where do you go? Where do you get relief? The president just starts ordering his political enemies imprisoned with no trial, no due process. Of course, it's the courts who have to say this is unconstitutional, therefore, it can't be done. 

That's how our system works. And it's all balanced. It's not like the courts are the supreme branches that sometimes people try and claim. It's the president who appoints the judges who are on the courts. The Senate has to confirm them. If they start abusing their power, they can be impeached. And federal court judges have been impeached before, not often, but they can, and they have been. 

On top of that, the courts really have no way to execute their decisions. They don't have an army, they don't have guns, they don't have any way to force a president. The president or Congress respects the credibility of the courts, and that's why court decisions are abided by. But if you're going to have a constitution and a set of laws, you need to have somebody who interprets what those are and who decrees what they are. You can't ask the president to rule in his own case, like, “Hey, Mr. President, are you violating the law? Are you violating the Constitution?” 

Obviously, tons of conservatives, many times, under Clinton, under Obama, under Biden, ran into court and asked federal court judges to put a stop to what those administrations were doing. 

It is true that there are a lot more of those rulings coming under Trump. You could make the argument that it’s because he has so many new policies that have tested and pushed the limits of the law. But that's how our system works. It works that way under every president. I do think picking people up in our country and sending them for life in prison in a country they have nothing to do with and have never been to, from where they'll never get out, is an extremist power and we definitely need judicial review. 

As the Court said, the president, despite not being able to use the Alien Enemies Act, has all the legal authority in the world to deport people who are illegally in the country. There is another set of laws, the Immigration and Nationality Act and others. That's how President Obama deported millions of people. He didn't use the Alien Enemies Act; he used the set of laws that are normally used for that. That's what the court is saying: it doesn't mean you can't deport people in the country illegally, it's your obligation, your right and your duty to do that, you just can't use this wartime power to do so because we're not at war, as the statute describes it. 

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All right, this one is from @MarcJohnson125, who says: 

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All right, so just to set the stage for this, so you can see what happened, for those of you who haven't, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was walking on the street toward the Capitol, and it's very common for journalists to work there. That's one of the places you can ask members of Congress questions, even if they don't invite you into their office or agree to an interview. It's very often done. So, the reporter's not doing anything wrong here at all, I don’t think, but this is how Congresswoman Omar reacted: 

Video. Ilhan Omar, The Daily Caller. May 1, 2025.

Okay, it was a little bit of a snarky question. That's okay. Reporters can be snarky. They don't have to be super deferential, super respectful. He didn't assault her; he didn't do anything. But in return, yeah, she used a naughty word. It's a word you tell your nine-year-old kid not to use, but adults use that word. She wasn't aggressive about it. She wasn't violent, she didn't attack him, she didn't threaten him. He asked this question, she was bothered by it and she says, “I think you should fuck off.” And then he said, “Excuse me, what?” She didn't backtrack at all. 

And that was it, maybe not the best way to handle a journalist, I'll certainly accept that. Maybe a member of Congress should conduct themselves with more, whatever, decorum, if you want to say that. I mean, Trump campaigned throughout 2024 using every curse word he could think of in his rallies. So let's not invoke decorum unless the politicians you most admire are actually adhering to it as well. 

Here was Nancy Mace, who was questioned by a constituent, not a journalist even, but a constituent in her home district when she was at some sort of drugstore and here's what happened. 

Video. Nancy Mace, X. April 19, 2025.

All right, that seems unhinged to me, to be honest. He was very polite. He kept his distance. He wasn't the slightest bit aggressive. It's part of the duty of members of Congress and she's like very aggressive, right from the beginning, very hostile and out of nowhere, by the way, “I voted for gay marriage twice.” Why would you say that? I mean, yeah, he is pretty clearly gay but why would you bring that up? Why does that even enter your brain? And then by the end of it, she used the F-word for, I don't know, 10 times maybe, probably, and said other things as well. 

So, if you're going to be very upset by Ilhan Omar using an f-word with a journalist – we all know journalists deserve the greatest deference, the highest amount of respect – if that's the sort of thing that you really want to hold politicians to, like no naughty words, then you ought to be complaining about Trump, who curses more than any politician I've ever seen. And it doesn't bother me, by the way. Or what Nancy Mace did, which is, of all those things, like the most unhinged. 

Here's Charlie Kirk, yesterday, after he saw the video:

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Piers Morgan, the British subject who loves to spend his time commenting on American politics:

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Here's Libs of TikTok, always the beacon of perfect politeness and civility and respect for others. She says:

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That wasn't the question: whether they're going to. He said, “Should they?” Do you think that more should go? As I said, it was a snippy question, but who cares? 

These are the people – the Trump movement, the American right, Trump himself – who spent 10 years calling journalists the “enemy of the people,” which I don't disagree with and never bothered me. In fact, I can make an argument about why that's legitimate. But still, that's some very aggressive, hostile rhetoric to use about journalists. Republican politicians over the last 10 years have frequently scorned and insulted journalists. Trump insults every journalist who asks him a question. Everyone. And now they’re going to turn around and be like “A politician should not speak to a journalist in this manner. Journalists deserve the highest respect. She has no class.” 

How about Nancy Mace? Does she have class? Does Donald Trump have class? This is the kind of thing I really can't stand. I really can’t stand it. I just have some consistent standards, especially on these kinds of trivial issues, and to act like Ilhan Omar is some kind of heathen, some kind of threat to society! “She doesn't have gratitude toward America.” She's an American citizen. Yeah, she was born in another country and became an American citizen and the same is true of Elon Musk and Melania Trump and a lot of other people. She's still a full citizen like anybody else is.

To be honest, I thought what Ilhan Omar did was funny. I mean, I kind of thought that the whole thing with Nancy Mace was sort of funny. I think Trump is funny; like, loosen up. The rectum doesn't always have to be, like, so tightly closed when you're pretending to be offended by things. I think we want our politicians to be more human. This is how people speak. 

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All right, one last question. It’s from @Sambista. 

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So yeah, they're all doing great actually. All the ones you named and all the other dogs that you've gotten to know they're doing very well. I appreciate your asking. And yeah, I actually wish I could find a way to integrate the dogs into the show more, or something like wander around. Maybe Friday night is a good night to do it. We'll think about it. But yeah, appreciate your asking. 

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