The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.
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I know that a lot of you, on the very rare occasions when we have to miss a show on the scheduled time, start thinking that I'm being lazy, I'm just lounging around doing nothing, and sometimes that's the case, but very rarely. Most of the time, it's because I'm very busy with other commitments or other things that I am doing related to my work. Just to illustrate to you how true that is, how actually extremely busy I am, how diligent and hardworking, even when you think that I'm being slothful, I just want to briefly comment on several of the interviews that I did just in the last day and a half.
For those of you who might be interested, I spent two hours on the Megyn Kelly Show on Wednesday. It might've even been yesterday, these are all blending together now. We talked about a wide range of issues, the chaos at “60 Minutes” and then, I'm not really sure why, it led to a quite lengthy discussion of Michelle Obama's podcast and Michelle Obama herself, the grievances of that all-female astronaut crew that went on a little ride for 11 minutes on Jeff Bezos' rocket and then got back angry that they weren't being called astronauts. We talked a lot about that. We even talked about Meghan Markle's show, like I said, outside of the realm of topics I would certainly cover here, on this show, but talking to Megyn always is very substantive regardless of what you're talking about and I enjoyed it. You can watch it here.
Then, I had a 90-minute discussion with Reason Magazine for their “Just Asking Questions” show, where we actually covered many of the topics that I do spend a lot of time talking about here, particularly civil liberties. That's a libertarian magazine. They're very focused on free speech, due process and the like. We covered a lot of ground there over the course of 90 minutes that might be of interest to you as well. This one is here.
Also, yesterday I did a 35-40 minute interview with Emily Jashinsky, who's a co-host of “Breaking Points” but also has her own program on the UnHerd Magazine channel called “Undercurrents,” where we talked about the attacks on free speech with regard to students criticizing Israel, the comparisons between some of the rationale that the left liberal censorship regime invoked and on which it depended versus the one that people on the right are now using. And I think Emily's also always an excellent questioner, so I really recommend the interview. It’s here.
I also spoke this morning for about 30 minutes with Professor Glenn Diesen, who is one of the most knowledgeable experts on Russia and Ukraine. I usually go on a show to talk about that, though this time I went on instead to talk about free speech issues, some of the civil liberties concerns being raised by these new policies of the Trump administration and how it compares to prior ones. Here.
So, if you miss me during the weekend – I know some of you really do, I know that some of you struggle a lot with that – there are all sorts of things for you to consume and fill your time with.
All right, so that was my self-justification for what a hard-working journalist I am, even when I seem like I've just disappeared, but now I want to get into our Friday night episode for two of our semi-regular segments.
The first is a “Week in Review,” where we try to cover and go in depth into various news events or debates that we did not have the opportunity to cover in depth previously and the second is our “Mailbag,” a Q&A with our audience, where we take questions that were posted throughout the week from our Locals members – our show's supporters.
The topic I wanted to begin with just so happens to be one of the most common questions we got from Locals members this week. @ChristianaK asked this:
Now, this is one of the biggest topics, news topics of the day, certainly consuming a lot of news and commentaries. It's also generating a lot of hysteria and a lot of inaccurate commentary as well, so I actually did want to address this.
Just to give you the bare bones facts, for those of you who haven't heard it, Judge Dugan is a local judge in the County of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. She's a judge in the state court system in Milwaukee, not a very high-ranking judge, in fact, what I believe is one of the lowest levels of the judicial system. She was elected and she's somebody who has spent a long time working with low-income people, which I regard as noble, but also causes generally associated with the left, including immigrants.
She was arrested by the FBI today at her home and, obviously, that created a lot of shock because this was the FBI going and arresting a sitting judge in Wisconsin who clearly is a political opponent or someone with ideological views that differ from the administration. The arrest was originally announced by FBI Director Kash Patel, and a lot of people became instantly alarmed for reasons I guess are understandable, saying, “Wow, this is a huge escalation where the Trump administration is now arresting judges.” The implication was, especially from a lot of Democrats – I don't mean like Democratic random commentators, I mean from major Democratic Party leaders in D.C. and a lot of media personalities who are Democratic – they were essentially trying to claim that this was some huge red line that had just been crossed because this was an instance of the Trump administration now weaponizing the FBI to arrest judges for issuing orders they dislike.
If it were that, if this were the FBI, say, going to one of the judges that have been ruling against the Trump Administration, issuing rulings that certain Trump administration policies are unconstitutional or issuing injunctions, and the FBI went to their chambers or their home to arrest them as punishment for or in response to a judicial ruling that they issued in the course of their judicial work, I would be as alarmist as the English language permits. I would actually consider that to be a major escalation of the civil liberties threats that, as you I think know, I believe are genuine over the past three months that we're seeing. But that's not what happened today.
This is not a case where this judge issued an adverse ruling, and for that reason, the FBI went and arrested the judge, as a lot of people were attempting to imply.
I just want to note, it's not that uncommon for judges to be arrested. Judges commit crimes all the time. The FBI catches judges taking bribes, or embezzling money, or engaging in judicial corruption, or, on the state level, election corruption. There are all sorts of judges who have been arrested, who have been prosecuted, who have been sentenced to prison, who are sitting in prison now. Judges are not any more above the law than anybody else. So, the mere fact that the FBI arrested a judge doesn't make this a political scandal or a cause for alarm.
Obviously, if a judge breaks into somebody's house and steals, if they rape somebody, if they're caught engaging in pedophilia, if they murder, if they engage in tax evasion, if they've taken your bribe, etc., etc., they ought to be arrested and are arrested. It's really not an out-of-the-ordinary event. Not saying judges get arrested every day, but it's not that it happens once every century either.
So, the question then becomes, what was the reason for the arrest? What was the basis for the arrest? Pam Bondi, the attorney general, who supervises as attorney general the FBI, went to Fox News today, and this is the explanation she gave about the series of events that led the FBI to arrest Judge Dugan in Milwaukee.
Video. Pam Bondi, Fox News. April 25, 2025.
Now, let me just issue an important caution, which is that Pam Bondi is a prosecutor. She's the attorney general of the United States, the highest-ranking prosecutor in the country. The FBI is a law enforcement agency. In our country, one of the responsibilities of citizenship is that we don't just assume that the version of events offered by the FBI or the police or the prosecutor is actually the full story, the accurate story, the correct story. So, there's no chance I'm going to sit here and say, “Oh, this judge committed a crime.” I want to hear from the judge, I want to hear from her lawyer, I want to see the evidence being examined and tested with witnesses in a court. Only then, at least, would I be willing to opine on whether there was really a crime committed here.
What is the case is that the FBI's theory or the DOJ's theory about why this judge got arrested was that she committed what is in fact a crime, whether you think it should be or not, which is that if the government is looking for somebody to arrest them or detain them and you do something actively to obstruct law enforcement from being able to find them, if you help the person escape, if you hide them, if you lie to law enforcement about where they are so that they don't find them, that's a crime in every state in the country and federal courts.
There is a context here, an important context, which is that we have this very odd situation in the United States where you have, on the one hand, the federal government that is charged with enforcing immigration laws and this is not just under Trump. I mean, in fact, immigrant rights groups called Obama the deporter-in-chief. Obama deported millions of people who entered the country illegally, millions. That's done through Homeland Security, through ICE, and other agencies charged with enforcing immigration laws by finding, detaining and then deporting people who are in the country illegally; that's a legitimate function of the federal government.
On the other hand, Milwaukee is an example of a city that has declared itself to be a sanctuary city. For example, let's say there's a person who's in the country illegally and the person is raped, or let's say that there's murder on the street and one of the witnesses is a person in the country illegally, or let's say there's an older person in the county illegally, been here for a while, has a heart attack, shows up at an emergency room in a public hospital and in the course of getting their papers and the like the hospital discovers they're in the country illegally. The argument is that we don't want people in our city who are in the country illegally to be hiding. That's a policy decision that cities and states, through their elected officials, have made. However, you see the tension this creates.
You have the government searching for and wanting to detain and deport, especially now, people in the country illegally, but a lot of these people are in these so-called sanctuary cities. The police in those cities will not cooperate with ICE. They will not help the Federal Government find illegal aliens.
But the question becomes, what happens if a city or a state official doesn't just passively refuse to help the federal government but actively seeks to obstruct what they're trying to do? The city officials aren't just engaged in passive non-cooperation, they are instead engaged in actively impeding or obstructing what the federal government under the law is attempting to do and one of the things Trump's immigration czar, Tom Holman, has said from the start is “If we find city or state officials actively impeding or obstructing or harboring or hiding people in the country illegally that we're trying to detain and arrest, we will prosecute them because that is a crime.”
Let me just take it out of the immigration context for a second, just to illustrate the point. Let's say there's somebody who robs a bank and you know they robbed a bank. You didn't help them rob the bank, you didn’t even know they were going to rob the bank beforehand, but now you know they robbed the bank and that the police are after them. They're fugitives from justice. If you tell the person to come hide in your basement, or you give them money and a car to be able to flee, you are committing the crime of helping a fugitive flee justice, impeding or obstructing justice.
These are just ordinary crimes. I've confronted this many times before. In fact, when we went to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden to do the reporting, we were always very concerned about what was going to happen to him after he had to leave Hong Kong. Like, where was he going to go? We tried to talk to him about that. He said, “I don't care about that, I'm not the issue, work on the journalism, and I'll take care of that myself.”
But we felt like we had a responsibility to him. I was working at The Guardian at the time; I called The Guardian. Their lawyers came to Hong Kong, we were talking about how we could help him and the U.S. government and the British government made very clear that if we took steps of tried to hide Snowden to help him get out of Hong Kong to help him get to safety they would regard our behavior as criminal because now we're aiding and vetting a fugitive from justice.
This is not a radical theory of criminality that the Trump administration today invented to arrest this judge. So, if this judge knew that ICE agents had come to the courthouse because the person they wanted to detain was in court as a criminal defendant accused of domestic assault and battery, which was the charge against him, and then the judge, upon learning that ICE agents were out in the hallway, adjourned the proceeding to whisper to the defendant and his lawyer to come to her secret chambers where there's an exit they should take, if that's really what she did, and, again, I'm not assuming that she did that, but if that's what she really did, this does start to seem to me like more of an ordinary criminal offense than it does some political abuse of power designed to take retaliation against judges.
If you did what that judge did, you would also get arrested. People have been arrested before for harboring or helping escape, not just criminals in general, but people in the country illegally as well. It's considered a crime. Just because she's a judge doesn't make what she did any less criminal, just like judges are arrested all the time for common crimes like bribery and all the other things I've said.
So, when I heard that Kash Patel, as FBI director, went onto Twitter and said, “We just arrested this state judge,” I was obviously alarmed. The FBI arresting a judge in an immigration case seems like it has the potential for the abuse of power, but then, once you hear the allegations, and there are affidavits and other things, you understand that at least if the set of facts alleged by the FBI is accurate, then this is far from the sort of political scandal that a lot of Democrats were trying to make it out to be.
This is the problem that I have had with Democrats for a long time. One of the biggest gifts that they give to Trump is that they seem incapable of ever criticizing him without using maximalist language. Everything is a threat to democracy, everything is fascism, everything is Nazi-like or Hitler-like, or some sort of drastic deviation from the norm, even when that's not true.
That creates the boy-who-cries-wolf syndrome. I do think there are things the Trump administration is doing that are serious threats to basic civil liberties. We've talked about them a lot on this show. But the reason I feel competent to talk about them is because I am not somebody who has or will ever just instantly react to everything the Trump Administration does with this deranged kind of chicken running around with its head cut off rhetoric that a lot of Democrats instantly use and, again, the problem is that if you call everything he does fascist or a threat to democracy, on the times he really does do those things, people will tune out that rhetoric. It's similar to overusing the racism accusation or the antisemitism accusation. If you just start throwing that around almost reflexively, people are going to tune it out so that when it really merits that term, it will have lost its impact. Same with a lot of this rhetoric. So, here is, so many Democrats sounded exactly the same today.
So, we'll see how this plays out. I understand that it can be an intimidating message to judges in immigration cases. They probably want that message to be sent because there's another judge in Arizona who just got arrested earlier this week because he was harboring someone illegally in his house, who the government claims is a member of Tren de Aragua. So, we'll see how this case plays out, but either way, it does not warrant this hair-on-fire melodramatic language that a lot of people, quite counterproductively, are giving it.
All right, let me talk about a few more stories before we get to the Q&A. There's this Irish band called Kneecap, which appeared at Coachella 2025, I think like four days ago, over maybe the last weekend, and a huge controversy was created.
The reason is not that this band attacked Jewish people in the audience, nor that they encouraged people to attack Jewish people in the audience, nor incited attacks on Jewish people who were in the audience. What they did instead, in a very common way, especially for a rock band, but even for just musicians or anyone who is a political activist, was that they criticized a foreign country, one that's at war and they used this image to do so.
You would have thought that they had committed some kind of grave and moral transgression because a lot of people describe what they did as that. Obviously, if this had said like “Fuck China, free the Uyghurs;” “Fuck Russia, free Ukraine;” Fuck Iran, free women in Iran,” or pretty much anything like “Fuck Paraguay,” who knows why, maybe they just don't like Paraguay; or Denmark because they think that Denmark should give Greenland over to Trump; if they had said this about any other country, literally, even “Fuck the U.S.,” it wouldn't have even registered as a controversy.
I mean, that's what rock bands do. Rock bands express political ideas all the time, including transgressive ideas. I mean, Woodstock, probably the most famous rock concert of all time, was gathered for the world's most famous musicians to come and condemn the United States government for the Vietnam War. This is what music, musicians and artists have done forever. It's not unusual in any way.
But in this environment where criticizing Israel is considered some unique and singular crime, where people are losing their green cards and student visas for doing it; where the Trump administration is forcing colleges and universities to adopt expanded hate speech codes that would make expressions like this punishable and prohibited on campus; where, we just showed you earlier this week, that the National Institute of Health instituted new guidelines saying that if you are getting grants from the NIH, doing cancer research or Alzheimer's research or research into treatments or cures for any diseases but you support a boycott of Israel, you'll be ineligible for NIH grants even though you're permitted to boycott any other country on the planet, boycott other American states, you just can't boycott Israel; in this climate where there's an obvious attempt to basically try to criminalize expressions of animosity toward Israel – which I'd like to remind you again is a foreign country inside the United States, a foreign country for an Irish band as well, they have no loyalty to that country - it's considered almost criminal, like, shocking, morally.
Ironically, the framework being used is itself somewhat antisemitic. They're conflating the Israeli government with Jews, as if you say, “Fuck Israel,” what you're really saying is “fuck all Jews.” Even though, as you know, huge numbers of Jewish Israelis inside Israel are vehemently opposed to that war, opposed to the Netanyahu government, Jewish students from around the world and Jewish people of all kinds have been protesting Israel. But that's the trick that they do.
Just like liberals used to try to say, if you oppose open borders immigration, if you question Black Lives Matter, if you believe there are two genders, what you're really saying is, “I hate black people, I hate trans people,” they find those unspoken messages embedded in the opinion they actually want to punish by depicting them in a much more malignant and hateful light than they're actually expressed and then justifying their banning or punishment based on that wild interpretation. That's exactly what's being done here. “Fuck Israel” really means, in our discourse, kill all Jews. I don't know how that happened. Well, I do know how it happened, but I don't know when that became convincing.
Something very similar happened at Cornell University. There was a singer scheduled to perform, Kehlani, who was going to appear at what is called Slope Day in Cornell.
We have someone on our staff who's a Cornell graduate. I'm sure he'd be happy to go on and on about what this is. It doesn't really matter for the moment what it is. Though I can see him moving to the microphone, trying to tell me. I actually don't want to know for the moment. He can tell me afterwards. But it's a sort of tradition, a yearly event held at Cornell, very, very important to people at Cornell. And they had a singer that they had invited to come, but it turns out she had previously expressed opposition to Israel, which, as we know, is the supreme crime, causing all sorts of upset. The administration of Cornell sent a message to all Cornellians – that's what they call each other, people who are at Cornell, the students and faculty, or whatever, they're Cornellians – so, they wrote an email note to all Cornellians saying:
I don't know who this is, I'm not pretending, but if this musician had written songs, if she had had all these songs, heralding Israel, saying kill Hamas, get the hostages back, level Gaza, no cancelation would have happened. And it's, again, so ironic that all the people who have spent the last decade complaining about cancel culture, about disinviting and deplatforming speakers because of their controversial political views on college campuses, not all of them, but many of them are not just cheering this, but they're the ones who are behind this. This is happening almost every day now.
Donald Trump gave an extensive interview to Time magazine. I have to say, despite the many criticisms I've had of the Trump administration, I've been very supportive of his attempt, for example, to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine and one of the things you have to give Trump credit for is that I can't remember a president who was even remotely as available to journalists, to the media, to the public, to answer questions. He basically does it every day. And he just has open court, they can ask anything, and he answers as honestly as he can. He obviously likes that. He thinks it's important. That's transparency, that's accountability, genuine credit to Trump for doing that.
Here he is with Time Magazine. They asked him about the Abrego Garcia case, the El Salvadoran citizen, who's in the United States, married to an American woman, raising their American child together, and there was a court order barring his deportation, pending further proceedings to hear his asylum claim, to see if he's earned the right to stay in the U.S., and ICE went and picked him up anyway and included him in the group that they shipped back to El Salvador and then the U.S. government, the Trump administration admitted it was a mistake. The case went to the Supreme Court and by a 9-0 ruling unanimously, so including all the favorite right-wing judges, in addition to the centrist and the liberal wing of the court, all of them, nine together, said his removal was “illegal” and that the Trump administration is required to do what it can to “facilitate his release.” We showed you this decision. We went over it in detail. If you're a viewer of our show, you know what it actually says.
But what happened was, and we showed you this as well, when Trump was meeting with President Bukele, members of the press asked him about that ruling and said, you're openly defying it; you're saying you're not going to do anything to try and get him back even though the Supreme Court said 9-0 that you have to. How do you justify that? And Trump, and I believe this is totally true, he doesn't read Supreme Court decisions, he relies on his lawyers and his aides to tell him what the court is doing. He said to Stephen Miller, his top advisor on immigration: “Stephen, what happened in this decision?” And Stephen Miller lied directly to his face.
While, if you want to be super semantic about it, it is true the Supreme Court said, “Look, we can't force the Trump administration to get him back” because let's imagine the Trump administration has to invade El Salvador or sanction the El Salvadoran government to get him back. We can't force Trump to alter his foreign policy or to start a war. So, we can say, what we're ordering is to do everything possible to facilitate his return.” And so, Stephen Miller lied and said, “Oh, the court, by 9-0, ruled totally in our favor. So, we don't have to do anything.” So, Time Magazine asked him about that, and the journalist said, “Let me quote from the ruling.”
I do think this is the case where the Trump administration is openly and deliberately defying an order from the Supreme Court. I believe that Trump believes it doesn't say what it says because Stephen Miller lied to him. We all watched him do that and we went over all the reasons why, but that does give you insight into Trump's thinking.
They asked him about Ukraine and about Netanyahu, if he would drag Trump into a war with Iran and you will see Trump saying like, “Look, I believe we're going to get a done a deal done with Iran.”
And the question is what happens if the U.S. and Iran reach a deal that is satisfactory to the U.S. but not to Israel? Is Trump going to really tell Israel, We don't care that you don't like this deal, we're doing it anyway? It was basically what Obama told Netanyahu about the Iran deal, along with Russia and Europe. Or is Trump really willing to defy Netanyahu? Or if the Israelis say, “We don't like this deal,” will Trump say, “OK, if this isn't satisfactory to you and we can't get a deal that you're happy with, I guess it's time to go bomb Iran.”
That's definitely something we'll look for. But I do believe Trump's preference, based on not just things he's saying, but things I've heard from a lot of people inside the administration, is very much that he strongly prefers a deal that does by no mean guarantee though that a deal will happen and that we'll be able to avert a war.
Now, the Mailbag. Several of you asked questions about the stories I just ended up covering, including the very first story in the Weekend in Review about the arrest of this judge in Wisconsin. But we still have other questions that we want to get to as many of them as we can in the time that we have allotted.
Here is a question from @antiwarism who asked the following:
Yeah! A lot of interesting points that I think are worth examining. First of all, this whole thing with the Bernie and the AOC rallies, they really are attracting a sizable crowd in almost every place they go – 20,000-30,000 people, sometimes more – in not even our largest cities, sometimes in red states and the like. And clearly, they're tapping into something.
But at the end of the day, what are AOC and Bernie's real message, what is their real agenda? Are they really attracting huge numbers of people to some new way of doing politics? No, they are not.
They're attracting Democratic Party loyalists and Democratic Party voters who want to feel like they have some outlet for fighting Trump. And Bernie and AOC always lead people into the Democratic Party, it's what they do. Now Bernie has been making more noise lately about creating some kind of an independent party, I'll believe that when I see it. But I don't want to say I find what they're doing irrelevant or trivial because it's not, if you're attracting that many people, you're exciting a good number of people, but toward what end?
I think toward the end of gathering Democrats, you really have nobody else but Bernie and AOC doing this sort of thing to let them kind of gather and feel like they're engaged in this protest movement, this rallying against the Trump administration, there's nothing else to it. To the extent they have a critique of the Democratic Party, the critique is that the Democrats aren't fighting hard enough against Trump. It's not an ideological critique, it's not anything. It's just – that's all it is.
So, I'm not sure that necessarily indicates that a bigger or equal in size anti-war movement joining different people from different factions is possible. But I do agree that if anything warrants that, it's opposition to a war in Iran. So let me say a little bit about why I don't think that's happening yet and why, unfortunately, I'm a little skeptical about whether it would.
Let's look at what just happened with this war in Yemen: One of the things that we've seen from the Trump administration is that most of what the Trump Administration has been doing are things they promised to do during the campaign, including deporting foreign students who participated in protests against Israel, including invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport people they regard as alien enemies on U.S. soil with no due process.
You can point to a Trump speech or multiple Trump speeches and interviews where he promised to do all of the things he's doing. One of the exceptions, though, is bombing the Houthis in Yemen. In fact, during 2024, Joe Biden was bombing the Houthis continuously. If you go look and just use Google and look at how many bombing raids Biden ordered throughout 2024 and on what dates, there are most months where they were bombing every day. when Biden was bombing the Houthis, the argument for doing so was, “Well, they're attacking our ships, and we need to stop that.” And at the time, they actually were attacking American ships.
And Trump was asked about the bombing of the Houthis in mid-2024 by Tim Poole, and we showed you this video before, and Trump criticized Biden for bombing the Houthis. He didn't say, “Oh, the bombing isn’t intense enough. He should either really bomb or not bomb at all.” He said, “Why would we bomb the Houthis? There's no reason to bomb the Houthis. You just use diplomacy, and you pick up the phone and you get that solved.”
So, not only didn't Trump ever say he was going to bomb the Houthis in the campaign, he actually criticized Biden for having done so. And that was at least at a time when the Houthis really were attacking American ships because they perceived, obviously correctly, that it was the United States funding the Israeli destruction of Gaza, which is what they were protesting, and so they regarded America as a legitimate target.
Once the cease-fire was imposed or agreed to, the day before Trump was inaugurated, that Trump deserves credit, along with Steve Witkoff, for having facilitated, the Houthis said, “Okay, there's a cease-fire. We're not going to attack any ships anymore.” And they stopped.
They only resumed attacking ships once the Israelis started violating the terms of the cease-fire by refusing to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza as required by the cease-fire. And when they said they were going to resume attacking ships, they said, “We're only going to attack Israeli ships.” Not even American ships. So, now they're only attacking Israeli ships, as opposed to 2024, and Trump said out of nowhere, “Oh, we're going to start bombing the crap out of the Houthis” and Trump has been bombing the crap out to the Houthis.
It's not just the daily bombing like Biden was doing. They're using much heavier weaponry. They're bombing more intensively; they're bombings with fewer constraints about civilian deaths.
I watched the MAGA movement saying we need to stop the Middle East wars. And they heard Trump criticize Biden for having bombed the Houthis. Yet, when Trump said, “We're going to start bombing the Houthis,” and now that he's bombing the Houthis, how much resistance or opposition from MAGA have you heard? I've heard very little.
In fact, I remember one of the most sickening things I've seen in a while, which is Trump posted a video of about 60 Yemenis standing in a circle, and he claimed, “Oh, these are people who gathered to plot attacks on American ships,” which made no sense for so many reasons, like, why would they be standing outdoors doing that when they know there are American drones hovering overhead, bombing them all the time? There was zero evidence that that's what it was. And then the footage showed an American bomb, a very heavy American bomb, probably like 1,000 pounds, maybe 2,000 pounds, drop there, just incinerating all of them. You see the aftermath: there's no one there anymore. They're gone. All 60 people extinguished, wiped out.
And I saw huge numbers of MAGA people saying, “Yeah, we got the terrorists. Yeah,” like it was Dick Cheney in 2002, 2003. And that started alarming me. I said, wait, if Trump does Middle East wars after one of the primary views of MAGA was that we're fighting too many Middle East wars, is there really going to be no opposition? Are they just going to get on board with the ever-Middle East wars Trump says we need to fight, including against Iran? Am I going to now start hearing, “Yeah, it's the Mullahs, they hate America, they hate Israel, these are the dangerous ones. We we got to do a regime change. We got to bomb their nuclear facilities.” It started making me wonder.
What has given me more hope is that it isn't just Tucker Carlson, though he's an important voice, but Charlie Kirk, who probably, in terms of influence within MAGA, is at least on Tucker's level now, came out and said something very similar, which is, “Look, the war drums are beating very loudly in Washington. This is very real. There's a good chance that we are actually going to go to war with Iran.” And if Trump does that, that will kill the MAGA movement. This is exactly the kind of war that has destroyed our country and we can't allow any more of.
So, my hope is that this kind of transideological, cross-factional section of the political spectrum that you identified will actually come together in some way, even if it's not a kind of overt union, that still people will be raising their voices very loudly in opposition. I think one of the reasons why it's not happening yet is because they're not really prepping the United States population for a war with Iran. In fact, as I said, you have Trump saying, “No, I want a deal with Iran, I don't want to bomb Iran, I don't want to go to war with Iran,” “I want to do a deal with Iran” and “I think we can do a deal with Iran.” They've had these initial meetings and Trump was very positive about saying we made some great progress.
For people to really get worked up over this, I think they need to feel like they're getting signals from the government that a war, if not imminent, is at least much more possible than the government is suggesting now. Even though we have plenty of signs that the war is very plausible. But I think people have to feel the urgency a little bit more.
I think there are a lot of MAGA supporters who feel like they have to stay consolidated behind Trump for the moment. There are a lot who like what he's doing in deportations, especially in immigration and in other areas as well and they feel like it's not the time to really go to war with anything Trump does. I've seen a lot of them sort of stay quiet on things that I know they don't like Trump doing.
The war with Iran will be the real test. I mean, bombing the Houthis, it stays invisible, there's not a lot of media coverage of it. A lot of people think, “Ah, the Houthis, it's like the poorest country in the region. They're probably all terrorists anyway.” Just drop some bombs as long as you're not sending American troops there or whatever. Who really cares? That's what I think the attitude is, whereas a war with Iran, even a bombing raid against Iran would be far more consequential. But until I see a real rising up, of the kind of core MAGA faction against something Trump does, I'm going to have doubts about whether they're really going to do it.
It was really interesting to me, I remember in that transition period, when Vivek Ramaswamy really agitated a lot of people when he came out and talked about the problems of American culture, we value leisure too much and we don't value hard work and nerds, all of that. And then that led to Elon Musk coming out and demanding more H-1B visas to bring in skilled workers from China and from India, from wherever, to work for Silicon Valley and other tech companies. And a lot of people in MAGA said, “What? What do you mean? You want to bring in foreign workers to do jobs in the United States?” I mean, the whole idea is we're supposed to do these jobs.
And the message of the Vivek explicitly and Elon implicitly was, “No, Americans aren't smart enough or skilled enough or trained enough to do these jobs, we need to bring them in from China and India and other places where their education is better.” And that created this kind of huge war, where a lot of people in MAGA wanted to go to war with Elon Musk and Vivek over this issue, like H-1Bs, “No, you're not going to bring in foreign workers. The whole point is we want fewer foreigners in our country and more Americans doing jobs.”
Then Trump came in at a certain point, and even though he had previously said, we need fewer H-1B visas, we have to give these Americans these jobs, he had said that in his prior campaigns, he came in and sided with Elon and said, “No, H-1B visas are important for our country, important for companies.” And that pretty much put an end to the MAGA uprising. Like, daddy came in and said this is how it's going to be. And they all said, okay. And you haven't heard from that again. And that did disturb me because that is fundamental to the MAGA agenda, not bringing in more foreign workers to work for American companies but having those be available for American jobs.
As soon as Trump sided with Elon, they kind of said, okay, I guess that settles it for now. It was during the transition; the Trump administration hadn't even begun. So, I was willing to say, maybe they just don't want to go to war with the Trump administration before it even starts. That kind of makes sense. But I'm still in wait-and-see mode on whether the MAGA movement is really willing to vocally object to what Trump does, even something as significant as a war with Iran, and I'm not entirely convinced yet that, I'm sure some of them will, but whether masses of them do, I am not yet convinced, but I hope I'm wrong about that.
The next question is from @Kurl_Malone, who says:
I definitely followed all of this with a great deal of interest and what I found so notable about it is that the people you named, Douglas Murray, Sam Harris, Konstantin Kisin, are all people who have basically created careers and thrive within independent media and one of the kind of defining ethos of independent media, a flag I've raised myself before, is that the scope of the voices that corporate media believes is worthy of being heard is extremely narrow, even when they're giving you some “experts” they're not just randomly finding experts on a topic and then seeing what they have to say. They're choosing them based on the agenda and the narrative they want to promote.
I don't know many people who have more in-depth expertise on international relations than Professor John Mearsheimer. When's the last time you saw him quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, or on NBC or CBS analyzing world events? He doesn't have the right narrative. It's not a question of credentials.
Part of the idea of why we need independent media is precisely because corporate media selects a tiny range of voices and a tiny range of views that can be heard and they have a very stifled sense of what expertise is. The idea of independent media was like, hey, no, ordinary citizens deserve to be heard too, a lot of times they have an understanding of things or a view of things which is more informed and more valuable than the so-called “experts.”
I really try hard not to fall into romanticization of working-class people or people who haven't gone to elite schools, because every group of people has their flaws and their bad characteristics and when you start to idealize the working class as this group with wisdom and superior empathy or knowledge or whatever, it's always a little bit manipulative in its own right, it's kind of the mirror image of romanticizing elite Ivy League professors.
I did a debate in New York 10 days ago, maybe, about misinformation, disinformation, internet censorship, all of that and it was a debate between myself and two other people. One is a woman who's on the faculty of George Washington University and does research into disinformation. So, like a disinformation expert, though, to her credit, she doesn't like that term, but that's essentially what she was there to be. And then a University of Virginia professor, who's a professor of Media Studies, who is regarded as a great expert in studying media and disinformation or whatever. |It was about a two-hour debate, and I was obviously more adversarial to both of them, though I liked her very much. I was more impressed with the nuances of her view. With all these credentials, PhD in this and whatever, and on the faculty of a very good university, the University of Virginia, every view that he had was like this extremely banal, cliched, predictable, inch-deep, liberal, MSNBC view of politics, kind of prettified with the language of scholarship.
But everything he was saying was just so reflexive and the idea that there's even another way to look at things besides how he looks at it was offensive to him. He could not conceive of that. He really believed that his political worldview was so correct that it ought to be deemed the truth and anything that deviates from it is by definition disinformation. Even in topics that he's not an expert in, like COVID, where he was saying, anyone who disputes Dr. Fauci, people like Jay Bhattacharya, don't really have expertise in science, they're just crackpots, no matter what their credentials are.
So, there are a lot of people who are so-called “experts” who just get so immersed in a certain subculture where they just get validated all the time in their political views that they become far more blind as a result of their expertise than they are open-minded.
I think one of the most important things that independent media does is it allows people to build their own credibility and I absolutely think you can become an expert in a particular field without necessarily having degrees from top universities.
I'm not somebody who disbelieves in expertise. If I want to understand how a plane works, I'm likely to seek out a pilot or an aeronautical engineer rather than just some random person on the internet. If I have an issue with some organ of mine, like my heart, or something my kids do, I'm going to go to a cardiologist, not going to just do a Google search for somebody who claims to understand the heart. So, it's not that I disbelieve expertise, but especially when it comes to political debate, I think confining yourself to that is extremely stultifying.
And that has been what independent media has ultimately been fueled by, this idea that we can listen to a lot of people and ultimately decide, like, who's the most informed? Who really is thinking most independently, most critically, most skeptically? Sometimes it's people who don't necessarily have credentials. That has been what independent media has been about: finding new voices, different voices, people with different perspectives than what the “expert” class is offering.
And the king of independent media for years has been Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan has built many of these people's careers, many of their careers, by going on multiple times, by having him endorse their work. I was on Rogan's show once, but he very, very often talked about my work and recommends it but I’m not somebody whose career or platform has in any way been built on or depended on Joe Rogan, but a lot of these people have. So, typically you hear almost no criticism of Joe Rogan in the realm of independent media because of the power that he possesses because of his gigantic audience.
Suddenly, lo and behold, over the past couple of months, you're now hearing not just criticism of Joe Rogan, but very assertive, vocal, accusatory critiques of him from many of these people who have thrived in independent media and often been on Rogan's show many times. And the only thing that has really changed about the Rogan show is that over the past year or so he has been putting on more and more people who are vocal critics of Israel.
And that's when Douglas Murray went on to Joe Rogan's show with Dave Smith, he clearly went on with the intention not to debate Dave Smith but to scold Joe Rogan for having too many Israel critics on and not enough Israel supporters. And I was like, what? I remember so well, basically from October 7 onward that most of the people Joe Rogan had on talking about Israel were vehemently pro-Israel. He had Ben Shapiro on. He had Coleman Hughes on several times, a fanatical supporter of Israel, who works for the Free Press. I mean, just one after the next. I was even going to make a list, but it was too long. Somebody recently put together a video, I just saw it today, where Douglas Murray says, “You don't have any people on who have the other view on Israel,” and he just did this huge montage of the huge numbers of people who are fanatically pro-Israel that have been on Joe Rogan's show.
But that's the norm in the view of Israel supporters like Sam Harris and Douglas Murray and Konstantin Kisin. It’s yeah, of course you put Israel supporters on because those are the people who have the right view and who are all throughout the media. It's basically almost a requirement to be a supporter of Israel to get into the media. But the problem is that Joe Rogan has been putting on a lot of people who are not just opponents of Israel, but pretty aggressive ones. He's had on Ian Carroll; Darryl Cooper, who writes under MartyrMade; Dave Smith, several times. And that is really starting to worry a lot of very pro-Israel people, that it's not just once in a while now that Joe Rogan is putting on critics of Israel but doing so with more and more frequency, despite how often he also still has on heavy support of Israel.
But that is not permitted. Israel supporters look for any source of Israel criticism, and they target that. That's why college campuses are being targeted; that's why TikTok got targeted. We talked before about how the original claim about TikTok was it was dangerous because of China, but that wasn't enough to get votes. Only once people became convinced that there was too much criticism of Israel on TikTok, did that get banned. And now they're after The Joe Rogan's Show and they're using this idea of expertise. Like, hey, you're putting on these people like Dave Smith and Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper and other Israel critics who aren't experts. They don't know anything. You should only have experts on.
Somehow, Douglas Murray considers himself an expert, even though the only degree he has is an undergraduate degree in English. So, if you were judging expertise through normal credentials, you might invite Douglas Murray on to analyze the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer, but not much else, just like if you're going to do a show on English literature. He also got into a tank, and the IDF took him around for about eight seconds to a few places in Gaza that they wanted to show him like, hey, look, here's a tunnel, here's this, here's that. And he thinks he's an expert because of that, because he went on a propaganda trip.
And so, now, suddenly, you see these people on independent media desperate to tell Rogan why they can't have Israel critics on, and they're invoking the same kind of gatekeeping's conception of expertise that corporate media for so long has embraced to exclude voices, which they think ought to be excluded.
Everyone can see what's going on here. Everyone understands what's motivating this. I think that a lot of Israel supporters are getting increasingly desperate as Israel critics find more and more of a platform, as more places are giving voice to Israel criticism. There are more parts of the political spectrum open to that. Polls show that support for Israel is declining. It's kind of like lashing out, like, “Oh my god, you can't put him on. He's not an expert.” When, of course, it's not about expertise, like how is Sam Harris or Douglas Murray or Konstantin Kisin an expert in Israel any more than, say, Dave Smith is? They're not. They just are deemed to have the right level of knowledge because they're supporters of Israel and that's essential. If you're an expert in the Middle East, by definition, according to them, you're going to be an Israel supporter.
So, I do think it's very revealing but also very expected. Whenever some new venue or new faction is the outsider force, it's easy to wave these rebel flags like, yeah, we're the dissidents, we're disruptors. But then the minute they start to become the gatekeepers of opinion and information, they start replicating the tactics of the establishment they set out to subvert, because they're now engaged in ruling-class or establishment behavior. And it's very interesting to watch Rogan become the target of that by people who he's valued and has helped build a career.
We'll see whether or not he's influenced by it and to the extent which he is. It's a very powerful critique they're bringing and it's not people who Rogan doesn't like or hates, but who he knows and respects. They're all unified now, trying to pressure him to either stop putting on so many Israel critics or make sure that they always have an Israel supporter right by their side when he does, and we'll see how that works.
All right, last question: @ScottishBear92 asked the following:
Yeah, it's interesting. I used to talk a lot more than I do now at colleges, journalism schools. But I would get this question a lot. And basically, what I would always tell people is that you have to begin, if you're going to take a riskier career path, which is what journalism is, there's safer career paths. You can go to law school and become a lawyer, medical school and be a doctor, or accounting school, become an accountant. You're going to have a much easier path of security, guaranteed income, and the like. In journalism, the ceilings are higher, but the floors are lower too. I mean it in a lot of ways. It's a collapsing profession in some ways, but in other ways, it's a thriving and growing one, depending on what you want to do.
And the question becomes: Do you have a passion? An actual passion, like, do you just like talking about political and social issues, or is there something you're very passionate about? And if you are passionate about that, you have to know what that passion is and then do everything to make certain that it becomes your driving force at all times.
I think that's advice for anybody who's entering some kind of line of work that they're doing, not because it's the most stable or the safest, but because they believe that it's something they really want to do.
When I went to law school, I had so many ideals, so many passion-based ambitions. I went to NYU Law School, it's regarded as one of the top law schools, but also kind of a more permissive law school, it's not necessarily intended to be a feeder into corporate law. And so, a lot of people end up there with all this passion. And I watch as they go through law school and corporate law firms start luring them with big paychecks and all sorts of other access, that passion starts to get extinguished, to fade out. It becomes kind of this relic of young adulthood, and now it's time to be a real grown-up, where you care about your paycheck, stability, building a family and whatever. These educational institutions, same with journalism schools for sure, are designed to extinguish that passion.
So, unless you want to take the safest path, like I'm going to go to Columbia Journalism School – and even then, that's not as safe, but at least it's safer, you can do that as a career choice as any other career choice, doing this to become known or make money or have different career paths.
But if you actually feel passionate about something, I really believe that on the internet, in independent media, people who are passionate, who have a real voice, a real conviction, a real genuine commitment to a set of ideals, and then the ability to pursue them, to articulate them, a willingness to really work on them and offer something unique that other people aren't already offering within media, I still believe there are massive paths for fulfillment and success and growth. It's a lot less secure of a path than it used to be because you used to have a very clear path laid out. You'd go to top journals in school, you would start at a newspaper, you would cover zoning, board meetings, then city council meetings, and then work your way up to the state, and then become a national reporter. That's pretty much gone, or certainly, radically reduced.
The future is in independent journalism, but that requires a lot of self-sufficiency. A commitment to really trying to find a unique voice that is needed, that offers some value and, to me, that in turn requires not just having passion, but being committed to keeping that passion protected and preserved and nurtured. Even if along the way you have to make a few concessions. Again, I'm going to take this job, not because it's really going to fuel my passion, but because it going to get me to a place where I can then do that. I think it's very important to keep contact with and not ever let anyone suffocate or extinguish that passion, which ultimately is what drives unique work.
Ok, let's do one more. Last question, actually, from @antiwarism again.
I like all animals, almost equally. That's why I'm vegan. And that's why I'm disgusted by the cruelty and immorality and disease-ridden filth of factory farms. The problem is if you have 25 dogs as we do, you can't really have a lot of cats around you, but I always had cats before I started having dogs. We have cats at our shelter. Sometimes they rescue cats and bring them to the shelter. So, you can pretty much replace cats with any animal and ask me if I like them and the answer will almost certain yes. Life itself, human life, animal life, and just animals in general, I find to be some of the most majestic and worthwhile and fulfilling things on the planet. So, it's very hard for me to think of an animal that I don't like, even one that you might think people wouldn't generally like.
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