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It is very well-documented on this show and elsewhere that critics of Israel are not only smeared and maligned but are often officially punished by the U.S. government and other Western nations. Few people have endured more such attacks than our guest tonight: the Italian specialist in human rights law and the U.N. Rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese. 

And for doing her job and doing it well, Albanese has now not only been widely branded an anti-Semite, of course, but is also being punished by multiple Western governments as well as Israel in all sorts of ways. Those reprisals against her, again, for the crime of documenting Israeli crimes in Gaza and the West Bank – her job – severely escalated this week when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the imposition of American sanctions against her personally, against her finances, her travel and other abilities in her life. His announcement, not coincidentally, came just days after the U.N. publicized her report about the role of American Big Tech companies – including Google, Amazon and Palantir – in working with the IDF and profiting off of the destruction of Gaza. She'll join us tonight to talk about her work and the ongoing attacks against her. 

Then: as you likely know, every Friday night we try to reserve all of our shows or a significant part of our shows for a Q&A session with the members of our Locals. As usual, we have a wide range of questions, and we’ll answer some of them.

The Interview: Francesca Albanese

Our guest tonight, the U.N. Rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, in a lot of ways, is a tribute to the remarkable courage and relentless investigative work and the refusal to back down when documenting Israeli war crimes in Palestine by the Israelis. 

Of course, people always accuse her and the U.N. generally of obsessing on Israel. It's not true. There are U.N. Rapporteurs for human rights abuses in countless other countries. I just named some of them: North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, Colombia, Burundi, Iran, and many others as well. The idea that the U.N. focuses only on Israel or that it somehow obsesses on Israel is laughable. 

Francesca Albanese’s job, in particular, is to document as a rapporteur, which is a legal position where international human rights lawyers volunteer their time pro bono to work on matters documenting human rights abuses in various areas for the U.N. Her role is to do so documenting the abuses by the Israeli government, paid for and armed by the U.S. and other Western governments and that's the work she's been doing.

She has also been involved throughout her life in all kinds of other human rights abuses throughout the world that have nothing to do with Israel. She's traveling this week in Bosnia, where she's commemorating the massacres against Bosnian Muslims during the 1990s. She has been involved in refugee crises and migrant abuses, or abuses in Afghanistan. This is just part of her work, but it's the part of her work that, unlike all the other things she's done, which have provoked retaliation, because in the U.S. and the West, it's increasingly viewed as not just amoral but criminal to criticize Israel. 

You need no further proof than the announcement this week by the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio – the U.S. Secretary of State, not the Secretary of State for Israel – announcing punishments on her, and this is what he said on July 10. He posted on X: 

Notice what Secretary Rubio did not accuse her of lying or publishing fabrications, or manipulating evidence, or spreading disinformation. The anger is over the accuracy of her work and it's not a coincidence that, the day before Secretary Rubio announced those sanctions, the Washington Post documented a report that the U.N. issues that was authored and overseen by Francesca Albanese, that was specifically designed to demonstrate how major Big Tech companies, including Google, along with Palantir, Amazon and others, are providing weapons, and by weapons I mean tech weapons, surveillance weapons, military weapons to Israel and to the IDF to profit off of the destruction, the ethnic cleansing in Gaza. In many ways, U.S. Big Tech companies are more powerful than the U.S. government. They're central to the U.S. military-industrial complex. They all have massive contracts with the U.S. intelligence agency. 

But knowing exactly that, she decided that it was important to document the role of industrial forces in what is happening in the IDF. And for that, she got the announcement as – you'll never guess – antisemitic, by the co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, who is a Russian Jewish immigrant to the United States, a U.S. citizen, co-founded Google, a multibillionaire, one of the world's 10 richest people. 

The Washington Post got hold of internal dialogue from internal chats from Google, where he made it clear to Google employees that they should never even be discussed because the U.N. itself is transparently antisemitic. The headline was: “Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Calls U.N. ‘Transparently Antisemitic’ After Report on Tech Firms and Gaza.” His argument was that the use of “genocide,” not to talk about what was done to Jews 80 years ago, but to talk about what's being done by Israel today, is inherently antisemitic. 

Genocide is a term you can apply to every country on the planet except Israel, according to the multi-multibillionaire co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin. That shows you, again, there was nothing in the report that he said was false. They're not angry that she published false information designed to malign the reputation of Google. They're angry that you published true information about Google's role in the IDF. 

For all the conservative claims about how much they hate Big Tech, they are completely in bed with Big Tech and the U.S. military-industrial complex and the intelligence community are completely in bed with Big Tech. We've documented that many times before. We did a whole show on the role of Palantir. 

And for as much retaliation as you will suffer if you criticize Israel, documenting the role of America's largest tech companies and its partnership with the IDF and its profiteering off of the destruction of Gaza, is a red line that apparently Marco Rubio decided merits sanctions. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. 

I'm sure there have been calls for her sanctioning or other punishment – of course, calling her an anti-Semite, the way everyone who criticizes Israel is called an anti-Semite, everybody knows that formula by now – but the American government sanctioning her because of criticism of Israel – and obviously she's documenting as well the vital role the U.S. and Europeans are playing in arming and financing that war. All things again, that's her job to do. Nobody can test the veracity of it. They're now going to block her finances, prevent her from using credit cards and bank accounts, whatever they can do with these sanctions. 

One of the impressive things about Francesca Albanese, many things, is that she doesn't speak from a place of ideology. She doesn't speak from a place of political bias. She's an international human rights lawyer and an academic who is best known for her role as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the situation on human rights in Palestine, but she was only appointed to that position in 2022. She has done lots of other work throughout her life. She's a scholar at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of International Migration. She has been in the news recently because of Gaza and the proposals against her, but as I said, she's done human rights advocacy and work concerning migrants, concerning Bosnian Muslims or Afghanistan, concerning a whole variety of other issues as well, and she's never suffered a reprisal before until her work starting in 2022 focused on the attack by the IDF against the people of Gaza, which even Israeli genocide experts who have stood up and defended her say is a genocide. 

So the fact that she's done this work, knowing the attack she was going to get, the fact that's she's unbothered by these attacks, that she continues to be one of the most informed, eloquent and courageous spokespersons objecting to what I do think is the atrocity of our time, which is the Israeli destruction of Gaza, makes her, in my view, extremely admirable and worthy of respect, but also somebody very worth listening to. There are few people who know more about the situation than she. It's our pleasure to welcome her to the show this evening. 

G. Greenwald: Ms. Albanese, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. We are very interested in your case. I want to begin with a common criticism that I hear frequently of people like yourself, who focus a lot on the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing taking place there, the genocide, which is, “Oh, you seem very obsessed with Israel; you don't really seem to care much about other human rights violations.” 

I know one of the things you're doing now is traveling; we had a little bit of a hard time scheduling. Where are you traveling today and for what purpose? 

Francesca Albanese: I just arrived in Sarajevo from Srebrenica. I've been invited to speak after Slovenia, after London, after Madrid, to speak to the people here about what's going on in the occupied Palestinian territory, particularly in Gaza. I was honored to accept the invitation in this context, where the genocide survivors are hosting a space to talk about all genocides. 

Today I went to Srebrenica to pay tribute to the survivors and the victims. It was very heavy and there is so much that I'm still processing this, but something that really touched me was the nerve of some Western officials who, on the one hand, said, “Oh, we have always been with you and we will be with you forever.” No, no, there was no NATO when the Bosnian people were slaughtered, especially those in Srebrenica. 

The people in Srebrenica were not even forced out of Srebrenica, because there was a safe area under U.N. supervision and the U.N. itself didn't protect the people. So, 30 years later, these people have the nerve to come and deliver messages from afar. The population is still so devastated, [inaudible] and say, well, I will not let you rewrite it. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, it's important in and of itself to talk about that massacre in Bosnia, but also to underscore how universalized your human rights focus has been. It's not like you just focus on Israel and Palestine, other than the job that you have. But let me ask you about the specific job that you have, because I think a lot of people don't understand the function generally of U.N. Rapporteurs, but also the specific function that you serve as the U.N. Rapporteur for Palestine, for the occupiers of Palestine. So, can you talk about what it is that your job at the U.N. as an official is intended to be, both generally and specifically, in your case? 

Francesca Albanese: United Nations special rapporteurs are experts of the United Nations, appointed by the Human Rights Council to serve for a term of three or six years, in my case, documenting and supporting given human rights situations. It can be thematic issues like reporting on the state of the right to food, the prevention of torture, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. There are also a number of mandates that have a country focus, for example, Iran, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the occupied Palestinian territories. So, my responsibility as per the resolution that created this mandate is to document, report and investigate reported violations of international law committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory. 

Is it an obsession to focus on Israel? Not really, because when the mandate was created, the Palestinian authorities, or whatever people think that the Palestinians have, were not even in existence. And so Israel was and still remains the occupying power ruling through a brutal regime of oppression and apartheid over the Palestinians and this is why this mandate is still in function. I would be the happiest to be the last special Rapporteur in the occupied Palestinian territories and see the end of the forever occupation, apartheid, and justice for the genocide that is still ongoing.  

G. Greenwald: One of the reasons why you're even more in the news this week than you often are is because the U.S. State Department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that there were going to be a whole variety of sanctions directed at you for your criticisms essentially of Israel, which is your job at the U.N., and I want to get into a lot of the other reprisals that you face, but I want to just focus on this for the moment because it's new. 

It struck me, and I'm wondering whether it also struck you as important, that the last thing you did as rapporteur before being sanctioned was the publication of this report detailing the role that key U.S. tech companies such as Google and Amazon and others play in providing the IDF with technology, with intelligence, with all kinds of instruments and weapons that they use in their destruction of Gaza. Can you talk a little bit about what this report was and whether you think that it was the proximate cause or the last straw before sanctions were imposed on you? 

Francesca Albanese: Yes, my last report is the outcome of an investigation that started about eight months ago and has led me to collect information through various sources, submissions, investigative journalists, forensic experts, economists, civil society scholars, lawyers; about 1,000 entities that operate in the occupied Palestinian territory as private sector, which includes a broad range of entities, from arms manufacturers, tech companies, construction machinery-related companies, like producing anything from bulldozers, or anything to build the infrastructure from water grids to roads and rails, until banks, pension funds, supply chain companies, and universities. 

I've realized by looking at this puzzle and organizing all the elements, that Israel has maintained what had already been called by many economists and scholars an economy of the occupation. I have realized that each sector and various companies for sectors, advancing the displacement and replacement of the Palestinians. For example, to take control of their land and emptying it of Palestinians, Israel has used weapons, bulldozers and other machines, it has used surveillance technology to segregate the Palestinians and make sure that their life would grow increasingly constrained to the benefit of the expansion of the colonies, in which, meanwhile, there would be the realization of the second pillar of the Israeli economy, the replacement of the Palestinians through the construction on their land of colonies, water grid, electricity grid and rails, roads, and then the installation of companies to produce and sell goods from dates to wines to beauty products from the Dead Sea, etc. Then, there would be a network to sell these products. 

But all of these would not have been possible without the enablers – banks, pension funds, and other providers of financial resources, and universities and other institutions, charities – lending legitimacy to Israel. Israel's economy is inseparable from that of the occupation. 

So, my report says, first and foremost, we need to stop this fiction of there is a good Israel within the Green Line and a bad Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory because when everything is so ingrained, all the more now that there are proceedings against Israel for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and in the last 20 months, and this is the last point [inaudible] the facts without bothering the legal framework, is that while the Israeli economy was nosediving in many respects in free fall and Israelis were losing jobs and livelihoods, the Israeli stock exchange kept on rising, amassing $220 billion, which means an increase of +170%. How is it possible? It’s because there have been companies that have profited from the escalation of violence and the genocidal violence in Gaza.

For example, the companies in particular, arms manufacturers. Israel has sophisticated, perfected, even changed and made its weapons more lethal, which have been provided through these companies directly or through member states like the United States, Germany, and others. But also Israel wouldn't have been able to do that without the banks that, at the moment of great crisis, increased deficit and fall of the credit rating, like credit trust, in that case, it's been the banks and other financial institutions intervening to supply Israel with all the resources it needed. And meanwhile, all the other companies, which should have disengaged decades ago, have continued to stay engaged and provide tools that have allowed not just Israel to continue the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank, but that have contributed to the extrajudicial killings and other genocidal acts, including the pulverization of Gaza. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, and I should note that it has often been the case that these kinds of sustained occupations and massacres have often used the nation's industries as a tool for doing so. Obviously, Nazi Germany relied on it to a great extent, but many others as well. 

But I guess one of the things I'm trying to get at is that, in the United States government's mind, these companies, Apple, Google, Amazon, Palantir and others, are kind of the crowning jewel of American power. They're very integrated into the U.S. military, the U.S. intelligence community. They provide a lot of money to a lot of politicians in Washington. And you have been the target of extreme criticism from the Trump administration, even before that, from the Biden administration. And it seems like these sanctions came right as your report was issued implicating these companies in this ethnic cleansing and genocide, and I'm wondering if you think that was what provoked these sanctions. 

Francesca Albanese: Look, first, let me tell for the benefit of your audience, that by no means would I like people to think that this is an exhaustive list. My report contains reference to 48 entities, 60, if we could see, there are also the parents, subsidiaries, franchisees and licensees, but this is not the list, this is just a set of cases which are illustrative of an overall criminal endeavor. All these companies have been put on notice. I gave them time to check the facts that were contested. I have prepared a tailored legal analysis for each company telling them all the violations they were taking part of by the very fact, according to international law, of engaging in a situation which is as unlawful as the one that Israel maintains in the occupied Palestinian territory – that the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to dismantle, totally and unconditionally, dismantle the settlements, withdraw the troops and stop exploiting Palestinian natural resources, stop practicing racial discrimination and apartheid. This is the decision of the ICJ. 

In the face of this, in the face of criminal proceedings, in the face of proceedings for genocide, companies, entities that have stayed engaged have at least contributed not just to the violation of the self-determination of the Palestinian people and the perpetual occupation that Israel maintains on their land, but also other ancillary violations by being directly linked, contributing to, and even in certain cases, causing the human rights violations. 

Some of these violations, like extracting from the quarries in the West Bank as a German Heidelberg company has done, can amount to pillage. So, I've put everyone on notice from Booking.com, Google, Amazon, Palantir, Elbit. They could have responded. Some of them have: a small number, 18. The others have completely ignored my facts, all of my facts and legal analysis. 

The thing is that, you see, Glenn, my report has not been challenged substantively. It has given rise to a hurricane of aggravated violence against me, which is not new. I'm not new to this constant smear, defamation and reputational damage from the United States, which is unacceptable because I'm just a legal expert serving pro bono the United Nations. The U.S., as a member of the United Nations, should respect my work, should engage with my work, instead of engaging in senseless attacks. But all the more it's clear what is happening here. I've touched a nerve, a nerve that resonates with the Palestinians, that alerts consumers, that may ignite litigation, civil suits, and other criminal proceedings against these companies. 

Besides this, people understand that there is a direct link between the laboratory that Palestine has become at the end of decades of experimentation of all sorts of military, surveillance and other techniques by Israel that then have been marketed handsomely for, again, for decades and sold to all dictatorships first and foremost and many states as we speak. But also, people make a link between the profits that companies like Amazon or Airbnb make, including in the context of a genocide, and the profits that these companies make in our own system in Europe and elsewhere. So, these companies have become rights holders without corresponding obligation; it is the usual operating outside the law for those who detain power, where multinationals today hold more power than states and therefore more power than us. 

I understand why, Glenn, universities have cracked down so harshly on students, because the students have been the ones exposing their complicity with the military industry, their complicities with Israeli apartheid. The university realized, like the Technical University of Munich, that probably losing this partnership will cause its bankruptcy. So it was better to go harsh on the students. And this is what has led probably the United States administration to conclude that I'm a threat to a global economy because I'm provoking an awakening that has not been there before, through the tragedy of the Palestinians. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, so often the worst attacks on someone come not when they lie, but when they tell the truth, the truth that people want most to hide and I think that's happened repeatedly in our case. And I do think it's worth noting that there are very few people who have been the target of just a more systemic, organized, official smear campaign over the last almost two years now than you have been. I don't mean comments online, I mean very coordinated attacks from multiple governments led by Israel, led by the United States and now you have these sanctions. I don't know if you're under legal constraints in terms of what you can say about them, but can you talk to whatever extent you can about the effects that these sanctions are likely to have on you, your life, your finances, your travel, anything else? 

Francesca Albanese: Glenn, honestly, it's not even about legal restraints, is that, believe it or not, I've had very brief conversations both with my family and my legal advisors, because I've been busy traveling across Slovenia and now Bosnia. I need to pause and look at this. I need to let it sink in, because my reflex as a lawyer is the 1946 Convention on Private Privileges and Immunities prohibits the United States from doing what it's doing and would make total sense for me to start advocating so, a member state, any member state take the United States before the International Court of Justice because enough with this mafia-style, intimidation techniques. This is unsustainable, not just for me, but for the system. We need to protect the multilateral arena. We will miss human rights very much when we don't have them anymore. 

However, I've not done it again, probably because I'm really coming to terms with this, which is huge, but also, I don't want to distract anyone from member states to civil society from our priority, which is to stop the genocide in Gaza. 

I mean, yesterday, yes, I woke up to the news of the sanctions. I mean, I had heard about that and then I read the night before and then I needed to get some time to realize what it was. But then I had my cup of tea, I had my shower, I spoke with my kids and went on with my life. Well, again, dozens and dozens of Palestinians were killed yesterday alone. And this is every day in Gaza. People are being starved. I'm so exhausted to see the bodies of dying kids, starving kids in the arms of their moms. It's something that we cannot tolerate, we cannot, and I don't know what kind of monstrosity has infected all of us.

Right now, Glenn, what member states should be doing, especially those in the Mediterranean area, should send their navies with doctors, nurses, and real humanitarian aid, food, baby formula, medicines, everything that is needed for the Palestinians to overcome the current difficulty. It's a tragedy. And that thing that people call the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a death trap. And I do see the criminality in it. It looks like a joint criminal enterprise. And this must stop. So this is my priority. And no, I'm not even thinking of the sanctions and impact that they will have on me. This is the state I am in right now. 

G. Greenwald: I think a lot of people share your horror and almost the inability to express it in words at this point, anymore, not just what's happening there, but the way in which the world is not just standing by, but much of the Western world is funding and arming and enabling it. 

I just have a last question out of respect for your time, I know you have limited time because you're traveling. I do think it's so important that you mention that your background is in human rights law. That's when everything is steeped in. You're not talking out of ideology or politics, let alone antisemitism or anything else that you're accused of. And you used two words to describe Israel and what's happening, which is apartheid and genocide. And you're by far not the only person to use those words. High level Israeli officials have called what the Israeli treatment of Palestinians are as apartheid. Huge numbers of Israeli genocide experts have used genocide as the word. But, as somebody with the legal background and the international law background that you have, how do you understand those two terms briefly, and why do you think they apply to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians – apartheid and genocide? 

Francesca Albanese: Look, Palestine for me has been such a learning environment also to connect the dots and break the walls or the silos that contain the legal knowledge. You know that in our field, you have specialized human rights lawyers or international humanitarian law experts or genocide experts. Well, Palestine allows you in real time to understand it all.

Taking the land and the resources from people, forcibly displace them, this is the essence of settler colonialism. Israel has used as other settler colonial endeavors, think of South Africa, but also think of Algeria, think of other places where colonialism has been accompanied by the transfer of civilians from the metropolis from another place by apartheid. Apartheid is an institutionalized system of racial segregation entailing inhumane acts and we cannot claim that we have had a system in the history of settler colonialism that was not apartheid. South Africa has given us the term apartheid, but apartheid is everywhere. There is a legal dualism that then reflects in policy and practices in a given country, place, state among citizens, distinguishing them and separating them according to racial lines. And Israel does it. It does it inside Israel, because Palestinians have Israeli citizenship, but they have less rights, but it does so, especially in the occupied Palestinian territory. Israeli settlers have been under Israeli civil law and Palestinians are under Israeli military rule, military orders, draconian military orders written by soldiers, enforced by soldiers and reviewed in military courts, including for children. By soldiers. 

Genocide, I've realized throughout history, genocide is the intentional destruction of a group as such in its essence and can take place through acts of killing, but not exclusively. There are genocides that have been committed exclusively through creating the conditions of life calculated to destroy and also the separation of children, but also another act of genocide is the severe bodily and mental harm. And I would like to see who today can keep on claiming, I mean, anyone with a grain of decency, that what happens is not a genocide. 

However, settler colonialism carries inside the dormant gene of genocide in its legal sense, which is a very restrictive sense, because genocide as it has been conceived also includes cultural elements which are not protected under the definition of the crime. And look, eventually from Srebrenica and from Sarajevo, I can tell you it takes time. There will be one day where everyone, as an illustrious Palestinian writer has said, everyone will have been against it. Tonight, it's very heavy to carry this responsibility together with many others, like Amnesty International, the Palestinians, first and foremost, Israeli scholars who have denounced the genocide. It's very hard to carry this responsibility of chroniclers of the genocide, who are also trying to stop it with all their might and here we are, facing sanctions because of this. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, well, I had the opportunity to tell you privately, personally, I'm going to tell you again that I think the work you're doing is incredibly courageous. It merits immense amounts of respect and admiration. I know you're not doing it for that reason, but the fact that you're facing so many reprisals and attacks, I think, is a testament to the efficacy of your work, and I don't even need to say I hope you keep going because I know that you will. And we will certainly continue to follow anything that's being done to you, but also the work that you're doing and we hope to talk to you again. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today. 

Francesca Albanese: Thank you, Glenn. May I add something? I would not be me if I didn't do that. It's true that these sanctions hit hard, but I would also spend one second to reflect on and to thank all those who have stood against this, have spoken against this, from special procedures inside the U.N., U.N. officials and the European Union and so many others, so many scholars, organizations, this is incredible. And so, it seems that while, yes, there are chosen victims of constant attacks and defamation, there is also a society that through this constant victimization, which is first and foremost of the Palestinians, not myself, but are waking up and I hope that this awakening will soon allow us to stand together and united against the monstrosity of our time. Thank you very much for having me and the respect and admiration is absolutely mutual Glenn. Thank you. 

G. Greenwald: Thank you, really appreciate it. 

We are always excited to do the Q&A session where we get questions from our Locals members that we do our best to answer in depth and as many as we can on our Friday night Q&A show. As usual, there's a wide range of questions that have been asked, always quite probing, starting with @Estimarpet who asked:

We did a whole show on Trump's condemnation of Brazil for its attacks on free speech, which we have repeatedly documented, as well as what he regards as this persecution of the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who faces multiple criminal charges and had already been declared ineligible to run in 2026 and 2030. There is a criminal charge against him for planning or conspiring to implement a coup to prevent Lula from returning to power after he won the 2022 election. It was a coup plan that was never actually done, but they claim that he participated in conspiring and plotting that and it's before the Supreme Court, a five-judge panel on the Supreme Court. 

Bolsonaro’s conviction is basically inevitable, given who the judges are, including Alexandre de Moraes, who's made it his personal mission in life to destroy the Bolsonaro movement through censorship and imprisonment, as well as Lula's personal attorney, who defended Lula when he was facing corruption charges, who then Lula put on the Supreme Court, and also Lula’s Justice Minister who was very loyal to Lula and Lula also put him on the Supreme Court. So, there are three judges right there who it's almost impossible to imagine that they would ever exonerate Bolsonaro and he's likely to face prison time. As a result of his conviction, Lula himself, of course was in prison for one year and eight months for an 11-year corruption conviction that he received that was nullified to allow him to run in 2022, with the reporting we did about the corruption of the anti-corruption probe as the pretext, but it was really because the Supreme Court wanted him released, knowing that he was the only person who could beat Bolsonaro when he ran for a re-election. And Lula did win that election by a tiny margin. 

Trump first issued a statement condemning Brazil for its persecution of Bolsonaro, for its attacks on free speech, and Lula, was hosting the BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which seems to be what really caught Trump's attention on Brazil: he hates BRICS. He regards it as what it is, which is an anti-American competitor. I don't mean anti-American in a malicious sense. I just mean they're there to form an alternative alliance to American hegemony. He said it's anti-American, that it needs to be attacked and any country associated with it will be subject to sanctions. 

Lula then basically came out and said, “This is beneath the dignity of any world leader to threaten countries on social media; it really doesn't deserve a reply.” But he basically waved the flag of sovereignty, saying, “Trump needs to realize the world has changed. We don't want an emperor. We don't have emperors anymore.” And then in response, Trump the next day announced 50% tariff on Brazil, higher than on any country thus far, which he justified based on both an appeal to individual rights and Bolsonaro's political rights, but also a claim that Brazil has been practicing unfair trade practices, even though the U.S. has a multibillion-dollar surplus with Brazil. The U.S. doesn't have a trade deficit with Brazil, but a multibillion-dollar surplus, but Trump has to invoke that rationale as well to justify the tariffs.

Lula immediately, and I think predictably, seized on this announcement in order to wave the banner of sovereignty, to say the only people who should decide Brazil's internal affairs are Brazilians. “We're a sovereign country. We're not going to be threatened or dictated to by some other country.” 

There's some lingering resentment about the role the United States has played in Brazil as the massive superpower in the region. Brazil is the second-largest country in the hemisphere. Brazil has always been very important. In 1964, the CIA perceived that the elected government of Brazil was leaning a little bit too far to the left and this was the Cold War, when any left-wing policies were viewed as aligning with Moscow and communists. The Kennedy administration warned the elected Brazilian president that things like rent control or land distribution were unacceptable to Washington. When he continued, based on sovereignty arguments, to pursue those policies on which he ran, during the Johnson administration, the CIA worked with right-wing generals in Brazil to engineer a military coup that overthrew the elected government and imposed a military dictatorship that governed Brazil with an iron fist for the next 21 years. So, anything about U.S. interference in Brazil still resonates with huge numbers of people.

The U.S. is a crucial commercial trading partner with Brazil. The U.S. does sell a lot to Brazil, but Brazil sells a huge amount to the U.S., second only to China in the amount of their exports. They have commodities like coffee, they have equipment for aviation, they have a lot of oil, and other things that the U.S. can't produce and has been buying it in very large amounts, and obviously, 50% tariffs are going to make it much more difficult to sell in the U.S. market. You can just buy those same products from some other country that's not subject to 50% tariffs. 

There's a lot of concern inside Brazil that this is going to impose economic suffering on Brazilians, which it likely will. And there is a big part of the media that hates Bolsonaro. Lula and the government want to blame this on Bolsonaro and they have a reasonable foundation to blame Bolsonaro for this, which is that Bolsonaro's allies, including Jair Bolsonaro's son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who's a member of Congress, an elected member of Congress, a few months ago announced a leave of absence from the Brazilian Congress and he's in the United States, where he's been working with members of Congress and the executive branch. What they really wanted were sanctions imposed on the notorious member of the Supreme Court, Alexandre de Moraes, who has been overseeing the censorship scheme. The argument is they're censoring not just Brazilian companies but American companies. Rumble is not allowed in Brazil because of its refusal to accept censorship orders. X was banned from Brazil for more than a month. When X didn't have assets in Brazil to pay the fines, Moraes just ordered that money be seized from Starlink’s accounts to pay for X fines on the grounds that they're both associated with Elon Musk, even though they're different corporations. So, there have been a lot of abuses. 

Moraes is also now overseeing the trial. He's overseeing investigation and then the trial of Bolsonaro and many Bolsonaro officials and associates as well. He wants to imprison them. So the Bolsonaro family was hoping to get personal sanctions imposed on Moraes and others on the Supreme Court and in the government, and all these sanctions were approved by all the relevant agencies, including the State Department, by Marco Rubio. Instead, Trump, at the last minute, decided he wanted to have a more flamboyant gesture, something he thought was even more punishing than sanctions, which was a 50% tariff on Brazil. 

Sanctions are targeted against very specific officials and can really make their life difficult – I mean, as we discussed with Francesca Albanese, the sanctions on her can affect their use of credit cards, their bank accounts and their ability to transfer assets. It's all based on the dollars, the reserve currency. It's one of the reasons why BRICS and a lot of other countries are working hard to overthrow the dollar as the reserve currency, because of the massive power it gives the United States to do things like sanctioning people they dislike, who defy it, countries they dislike and defy it. But that would have hurt only the officials. No one would have really cared. They would have still waived the sovereignty banner, but since most people aren't affected by it, it wouldn't have had much political weight. 

The group was not really asking for tariffs. That's what Trump decided to do. And Bolsonaro and associates can't really object or criticize Trump since that was Trump's intervention nominally on behalf of Bolsonaro. I really think Trump was more motivated by a desire to punish Brazil for BRICS, but he did it under the banner of defending Bolsonaro's political rights and persecution, defending free speech in Brazil that has been largely directed at Bolsonaro. 

So, there was no way for Bolsonaro's movement to object to what Trump did. They couldn't denounce Trump. He's one of their most important allies. But it's not really what they wanted, precisely because there's now a good argument to make that, because of Bolsonaro's activism, asking Trump to punish Brazil on his behalf, whatever economic suffering accrues in Brazil now will be the fault of Bolsonaro and his movement. And you have the massive media organizations like Globo and other massive organizations. They've always been dominant in Brazil. They were allies of the dictatorship for a long time, wherever power is. They've become less powerful because of the internet, which is why there's so much focus on Brazil censoring the internet. Globo itself is a big supporter of that. But still, they wield a lot of influence and they've been just nonstop bombarding the airwaves about Trump's attack on Brazil, his invasion of their sovereignty, how Brazilians have to unify under the Brazilian flag in the name of Brazilian sovereignty. 

It's a human instinct to defend one’s tribe. It's the same if a country gets attacked by an external force, no matter how much they hate the government, people are going to unify in the name of their tribe, in the name of their country. We saw that in Iran, where a lot of people who had been vehement opponents of the Iranian government suddenly lined up behind it against Israel because Israel was bombarding their country. We saw it after 9/11 when 50% of the country hated George W. Bush, thought he stole the 2000 election and after 9/11, his approval rating skyrocketed to 90%. When a country is attacked by an external power, nothing unifies the people behind the government more and Lula has become quite unpopular, his government is quite unpopular. He's now in his third term, not consecutive, but third term, running for a fourth term. He'll be 80 next year when he runs for reelection. So, asking the people to make him president until he's 84 years old. He's definitely a very vulnerable incumbent. And they believe, and I think most politicians would believe, that this can be employed against not just Trump, but his allies, the Bolsonaro movement, who they're going to claim engineered this in order to convince people that they should unite behind Lula, who's defending Brazilian sovereignty, the right of Brazil to determine its own affairs. 

What the Brazilian government seems to be banging on, and its allies in the media, of which there are many, is that well, no, in this case, it won't be Lula who will be blamed for the economic suffering that results from these terrorists, but they'll be able to successfully blame it on Bolsonaro and his movement for having induced it, asked Trump for it, etc. I’m not convinced of that at all. I mean, I get that that's the overwhelming media narrative now, and might be for the next couple of weeks, but economic deprivation over the next, say, 14 months until the 2026 election, 15 months, is going to be much more diffuse than that. It's not going to have this proximity to the story. And there's already a pretty widespread unpopularity toward Lula for a whole bunch of reasons, including economic suffering. And I guess it remains to be seen what political effects this will have. 

I do think there are a lot of other things worth asking here about why the United States and Trump. Why is it their place to dictate to other countries what kind of human rights or freedom of expression protections they're supposed to have? Can't help but notice that Trump loves a lot of countries far more dictatorial than the Brazilian government, no matter how authoritarian you think Brazil has become, and I think it has become quite authoritarian. It's kind of difficult to watch Trump herald the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, and then suddenly be like, “Oh, we're punishing Brazil because we're so offended by their lawfare and their attacks on free speech.” When you're in bed with and love some of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet, which has been U.S. foreign policy forever, there’s a lot of stuff like that, to say nothing of Trump's own free speech attacks on people who criticize Israel and the like. 

But as far as the political question is concerned, I'm sure there's going to be a rallying around the flag effect. There is already, I think you can see that, at least at the elite level, kind of among the middle class. But that's a lot different than saying that 15 months from now people are massively out of jobs or paying higher prices, suffering inflation, that they're still going to remember to somehow blame Bolsonaro for that, who hasn't been in power for four years, might even be in prison by then, as opposed to blaming Lula's government. I think they're being a little too clever. 

I certainly know very smart people here in Brazil who believe it's going to help the Lula government, not just now, but for the long term. I guess we'll see. With these kinds of things, the political effects of things, I think it's always very difficult to predict with precision. You have to understand how people think, what information they're consuming. I think we've seen in a lot of democracies, certainly including the U.S., that elite opinion no longer dictates the opinion of the masses. And I think similar dynamics are at play in Brazil. 

All right., next question is @ButchieOD: 

I know there are people who think this is not a very important story. Maybe I think it's a more important story because as I think most of you know, I follow tennis very closely. I always have. I play a lot of tennis. It's sort of a sport that I value, that I respect. But I also think even if that's not the case, we don't care about tennis, which is fine, a lot of people don't, it's still an interesting story about how the billionaire mind works and how billionaire power is exerted. 

So, the gist of the story is this: Bill Ackman is a multibillionaire, vulture, finance person who does things like talks down American stocks and then short sells them. He's made billions of dollars not by producing anything of value just by manipulating numbers like Wall Street does oftentimes harming the country. This is where his wealth comes from. He's not Jeff Bezos, who at least produced Amazon and for all the criticism of him, he actually produced something that people use. That's not Bill Ackman. 

Bill Ackman is not only a multibillionaire, but he’s also become particularly more prominent in the last couple of years because he's a fanatical supporter of Israel. He led the campaign to make lists of students at colleges, I'm talking about undergraduates, 18 to 22-year-olds who signed petitions or letters condemning Israel for its war on Gaza. He organized a blacklist of major finance firms and venture capital firms and Wall Street banks and major law firms to agree that they would refuse to hire anyone who is on these lists, trying to make them jobless, basically, for the crime of criticizing a foreign country for which he has great affection, to put it generously, toward which he has supreme loyalty, to put more accurately. And he actually is a tennis fan. He plays a lot of tennis as well. He follows tennis. He actually pours money into professional tennis and he goes to a lot of tournaments. It's just one of the things he likes to do as a billionaire. But he went far beyond that. 

This week, there was an actual professional tournament. It wasn't a ProAm where amateurs come and get to play with pros the way they have in golf sometimes. It was an actual ATP tournament where professional tennis players go. To make matters worse, it's held at the Tennis Hall of Fame. It's supposed to be like sacred ground. The Hall of Fame is there to kind of preserve the most sacred moments in tennis, to honor the people who have achieved the most by admitting them into the Hall of Fame. They have one tournament every year, that's a professional ATP-level tournament, but right before that, in Houston, Rhode Island, in Newport, they have an APT Challenger event, which is kind of like the minor league, sort of like analogous to Triple A in baseball, where it's the kind of up-and-coming players. They're not among the 100 best, but they're kind of in the top 200 or 300. Extremely good. I mean, if you're the 200th best tennis player on the planet, you're extremely good. It's what you do for your work. But a lot of these are younger players, they come from poor countries, they have trouble sustaining themselves economically, and these kinds of tournaments are what they play in to earn some money, but also to make their way up the rankings. It's a serious professional tennis tournament, with a lot at stake for a lot of people. 

Somehow, Bill Ackman wormed his way into having the tournament accept his entry to play as though he were a professional tennis player. It was doubles. He was playing with a doubles partner. And this doubles partner used to be a big tennis star, Jack Sock. He hasn't actually played. He retired from tennis. He now plays pickleball. He's very good. He's a great doubles player. He's won Grand Slam titles in doubles. I'm sure he was paid. He didn't just show up out of benevolence and nobody knows what exactly the arrangement was that induced this tournament to degrade itself by allowing Bill Ackman at the age of 59 to play. But they did, and it was a professional doubles match.  

And Bill Ackman's like a decent player. He is somebody who plays at a tennis club. I'm sure he's taken lessons from some of the best pros. When you have unlimited money, I'm sure that's what he's done. But he's not impressive at all in his tennis abilities. To say nothing of the fact that he's 59 years old. These are all 23-year-olds, 26-year-olds, like the most precisely trained athletes on the planet. And there was Ackman on a court taking somebody else's position and his level of play was so abysmal, so pathetic, I mean, just like, taking balls that are so easy to return and just smacking them into the net or well out of the court, many, many feet out of court, constantly double faulting, couldn't even get a serve in, that for whatever reasons, and I think it's interesting to ask why, the three other players on the quarter who are professionals started to like baby him. They were kind of just hitting the softest balls possible directly to him to try to help him avoid embarrassment, to stroke his ego. I don't know what their motives were, I don't know why they didn't just say, if he wants to play, let him play and we'll smash balls at his face the way they would do to anybody else. So the whole thing ended up being a complete joke. I mean, it just made a complete mockery, a farce out of a professional tennis match. 

Again, if you don't care about tennis, maybe that doesn't bother you. Everybody who cares about tennis was disgusted by this, was horrified by it. It would kind of be like if the triple-A team of the Seattle Mariners, which is the minor league team right below the major leagues – where people who are about to get into the major league are trying to show their skills to get into the major leagues of baseball, people who have spent their whole lives playing baseball, learning baseball, training baseball, they get to that professional level – it'd be like if the Seattle Mariners announced, “Oh, we're going to have one of our starting pitchers be Bill Gates at the age of 63 because he loves baseball.” Never played professionally, just kind of likes to throw the ball around and they just put Bill Gates on the mound in the middle of a real sanctioned Major League Baseball game, just because he's a billionaire and greased whatever wheels he greased and then he just kind of got up there, pawed it up there, couldn't throw the ball to the catcher, like made everything a joke. 

Obviously, the fact that Bill Ackman is a billionaire makes it all the more tawdry, because obviously, there's a lot to do with his vast wealth and the power that comes with it that he exploited to put himself into that position. Just imagine that narcissism, and the need for ego gratification, that you have to have to subject yourself to that. So here's some video of Bill Ackman, I guess. You could call it playing. He's the one dressed in all white. So you can recognize him in just like a series of, not just errors, everybody makes errors when they play tennis, even Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic or Serena Williams, but just like the kind of errors that no pro would ever make, just not even one of them, let alone all of them. 

Video. Bill Ackman. 

You see, the players were laughing in his face. Having watched a good part of this match, I can tell you this was not cherry-picked; this was very illustrative and it was shocking to watch. As I said, everyone in tennis, former players, current players, tennis writers, tennis journalists, column after column, were expressing sickness, disgust and rage. 

Leaving the tennis part aside, we talked about this on the last show, actually, when somebody asked about Peter Thiel's interview with Ross Douthat, where Peter Thiel basically said, when asked if he believes in the continuation or survival of humanity, he had a great deal of difficulty answering yes, and kind of resorted to this deranged transhumanistic vision, at most, that he was willing to say, yes, I think humanity should survive, but in radically altered form. And we talked then about the mentality of billionaires, and I've never had anything to do with billionaires until maybe, I don't know, a decade ago, a little bit more. My first real experience was when I founded The Intercept with Pierre Omidyar, the multibillionaire founder of eBay, who ended up buying PayPal. Honestly, Pierre Omidyar, as billionaires go, is as good as it gets: he kind of withdrew from Silicon Valley, moved his family away from Silicon Valley to an isolated place in Hawaii just so his kids would grow up more normally. He did have like a few years where he was a little bit in the spotlight because he was funding media outlets like The Intercept and other groups, but he's kind of retreated since. He tries to be as humble as possible, but I noticed from the beginning, we knew we purposely formed The Intercept with people who were as anti-authoritarian as possible who were as undeferential to prestige and position as power, and just automatically he would walk in the room – and just like kind of the power and wealth that he has; it's not just wealth, it's wealth that is larger than what small nations have and the amount of power that comes with that – I just watched people naturally become almost sycophantic around him and he was always the center of attention. And of course, he comes with a big team of yes-men and sycophants who are just constantly flattering and bolstering everybody that he has. Like I said, he's as good as it gets. He tries to create a more normal, natural environment, but it's impossible. When you have that level of wealth, multiple 747 jets that you and your family constantly fly on, just buying whatever you want and influencing nations because of your wealth, it does distort the human mind. And if you listen to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel and, to some extent, Elon Musk, they talk about themselves as kind of like the Übermensch, to use a Nietzschean term, like this kind of species of humans that have evolved beyond normal humanity, almost to like a TD type figure. 

That's how they see themselves, that's how other people see them, and so every idea that enters their head, every thought that emanates from their mouth, is constantly subject to reinforcement and flattery, and they believe in their own genius, they believe in their power to do essentially everything. Even though, so many of them, as I've described before – I've gotten to know many more than Pierre – are mediocre or, like, at best, they have an Idiot Savant skill, some coding thing that they were able to create, something and they created it at the right time or might even get like managers of a business. But none of that remotely means they have wisdom or insight about philosophy, science, or political issues, the way they attribute to themselves. They believe they're kind of just all floating – Übermensch, is the best way I can describe it. 

To put yourself in such an embarrassing position where you become the focus of attention in the most negative way possible, where at the age of almost 60, who never even got close to a level of professional tennis, you decide that you're going to insinuate yourself into a professional match, take someone else's position that, like I said, that could have had that position to earn money and rankings, and just believe that you deserve to be on that court, that you belong on that court, the hubris of it – I don't know if you ever noticed, but every time Bill Ackman posts a tweet, it can't be just a tweet. It's like a proclamation, like a dissertation, extremely edited and has the language of a decree. That's the byproduct of self-importance that comes from being a billionaire. He really believes that every utterance, every desire, has to be immediately honored. It's kind of like people who get massive fame and wealth at a very young age, child stars and the like, or heirs to fortunes. Almost always, it is extremely corrupting of mental health, of the ability to understand and relate to the world, to think of yourself in some kind of like remotely humble way. 

Watching Bill Ackman just try to glorify himself as a professional tennis player, have this fantasy and use my wealth to make it a reality in front of everybody... He did have to write a tweet where he kind of swallowed a lot of the criticism. Heather Crowe was very humble and said, "Oh, I'm so much better a player than this usually, but I just couldn't. I was too nervous. My arm didn't work. I couldn't breathe. I was suffused with anxiety and neurosis." It is a real professional tournament. They should have said no. I mean, they want to build tennis as a real sport. It's the fourth-largest sport in the world. And again, it would be like Bill Gates stumbling onto the field and being like, yeah, I want to be the quarterback for a quarter in an NFL game. It's like, the NFL would never allow that. No one would, I mean, it would be the most pathetic thing to watch. That's what this was. And again, even if you don't care about tennis, I think billionaire wealth and the billionaire mindset are really worth understanding. And this gives a pretty vibrant look inside that very, very toxic swamp. 

Speaking of toxic swamps, we have a question from @QuillDagg. He's not the toxic swamp! It's a question about Sam Harris. And it reads this:

All right, so some of you may remember this, some may not know, but when I was at The Guardian, and this was April 2013, it was like three months before the Snowden reporting began, I wrote an article on Sam Harris because this is when the new atheist movement was kind of at its peak. 

I didn't pay a lot of attention to it. Atheism is not anything that's ever bothered me. I used to identify as an atheist when I was young. I only don't know now, because I believe in not some organized religious concept of a god, like a Christian god, or a Muslim god, or a Jewish god, whatever, but just in forces larger than ourselves that play a role in how the universe unfolds. But it became a very popular, especially online, but even offline, a popular movement which had a huge following. 

They called themselves the “Four Horsemen,” the four leaders of this movement: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. There's a gigantic following, and in Sam Harris's case, it wasn't just an expression of religious conviction or atheistic advocacy. He commandeered it for blatantly political ends. Sam Harris is Jewish, and he, you'd think, as an atheist, would have contempt for religions equally. And he very conspicuously had contempt for one religion, in particular, you’ll never guess which one: Islam. He also had harsh criticism for Christianity, like Christopher Hitchens did and Richard Dawkins did, and he had very, very, very, conspicuously few criticisms of Judaism. 

But also, it just so happened that all of his political views perfectly aligned with the kind of views someone would have if they were devoted to Israel. Namely, he was a big supporter of the War on Terror. He used to write articles like the Huffington Post, like “Are there good justifications for torture?” clearly intending to remove the taboo for torture, but since he never came out and said I'm pro-torture, just saying here's all the reasons why torture might be justified, if you said “Oh, he wrote a pro-torture article,” he says: “How dare you distort what I said?” 

But everything about U.S. foreign policy from a neocon perspective, Sam Harris was commandeering his supposed new atheism to fuel, and he did it from this position, like, I'm a liberal. My new atheism comes from my liberalism. I hate Islam because it doesn't respect women's rights and gay rights, etc., etc. And it commandeered a lot of liberals into this political agenda; the atheism was kind of like the candy offered at the playground. But the politics were what happened once you lure the kid into the car. And so many liberals thought they were being taught this like very rational, anti-tribalist philosophy, when in fact, at least from Sam Harris' perspective, nothing could have been more tribalistic. 

And he had a podcast about why I don't criticize Israel. But hey, wow, what a coincidence. Here you have a state explicitly constructed around religious identity, the Jewish state, or ethnic tribes that are adjacent to religious identity, Judaism, like the living embodiment of what you're supposed to be against, if you take anything that you're saying seriously. And he'd always talk about the IDF as the most moral army in the world, he talked about why he doesn't criticize Israel and he would somehow try to reconcile his support for Israel. Again, an ethno-religious state based on the supremacy of one particular sectarian faction, Jews, with his posturing as someone who's so rising above it, just a vessel of objectivity, no allegiance to tribe or religious identity or identity politics. He hates all that and yet, noticeably not only would refrain from criticizing Judaism and Israel, even if it was bashing particularly Islam, but Christianity as well, but every other view that he had about bombing, about enemies, it all aligned with what you would expect a standard neocon to believe in and to disseminate and defend. 

Writing this article, I kind of dissected what were the obvious inconsistencies in the new ideas movement as expressed at least by Sam Harris and for suggesting that what he was saying was his worldview was not his worldview, it was a facade in disguise to mask what the real worldview was, that was actually the exact opposite of what he claiming he was, Sam Harris went on a jihad against me that lasted years. Actually, to this day, when my name comes up, he'll just explode and I'm the worst person ever to exist in media. I mean, he pretty much has that with every single person who disagrees with him. He once went on Ezra Klein's podcast, the most anodyne, restrained person in media, practically, tries very hard never to engage in vituperative exchanges or harsh criticism, unlike myself, and he came out of that accusing Ezra, kind of criticizing him in bad faith, distorting all his words. 

And this went on for years with him, just because of that one article. And obviously, I repeatedly defended my views of Sam Harris. But at some point, I just decided he really wasn't worth it any longer. I said what I had to say. He just continued to go on so many shows. You can find him talking about me for years and years and years for that. 

So, Sam Harris has lost a lot of his following. But not all of it. He mostly became this sort of obsessively anti-Trump and obsessively pro-establishment, which didn't surprise me in the least. He was contemptuous of anybody questioning any of the orthodoxies around COVID. He despises Trump. He turned against all the Silicon Valley friends that he used to have, including Elon, as well as people like Joe Rogan, because they were questioning establishment dogma or not seeing Trump as Hitler the way he saw them. 

He had one very notorious clip in 2020, after it became obvious that the media had lied by saying the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, and he basically said, “I consider Trump so blatantly evil and so inferior morally and ethically to Democrats that the most important thing is to stop him. And if that means that somebody lied to do it, I really am not bothered by it. I think it's justifiable. The means justify the end of destroying Trump.” Of course, he denies that's what he said. Everybody can listen to the video. It's exactly what he said. 

As a result, he's lost a big part of his following because even though he claimed to be a liberal, a lot of them were right-wing, a lot of them were just mostly motivated by his contempt for Islam. At one point, he was on Bill Maher with Ben Affleck, who attacked him, quite eloquently actually. But Sam said something like Islam is the mother of all bad ideas. He's supposed to be an atheist, supposed to have contempt for all religions, but no, Islam, for by a huge coincidence, happened to be the one that Sam Harris hated most. A lot of people who were anti-Muslim more than they were anything else found him very appealing. 

Coincidentally, he comes from an extremely wealthy family. His mother was the creator, showrunner and screenwriter of multiple successful shows, including The Golden Girls and Soap – and by the way, Soap is actually a very risqué, but, I thought, very good show in the late 1970s, early 1980s, way ahead of its time. But it's discovered Bill Kristol. Anyway, he comes from a very wealthy, prominent family as well. He kind of has that mindset and the last thing I'll say before showing you this video, which kind of is him finally confessing who he really is, in a way that was just so satisfied to watch him do, is that somehow he's also like, in the intervals, where he's not like screaming at everybody and expressing grievances toward everybody and accusing everybody of being a bad faith attacker of him and spewing contempt for everybody and being filled with resentment and grievance, he somehow also presents himself as a meditation guru. 

He does these videos where he teaches people how to breathe and relax and expel tension and stay in the present. I'm a big believer in meditation and yoga, I believe it, but I've never honestly heard anything less relaxing in my life than Sam Harris' voice. Like even when he's telling you “close your eyes,” “release all tension,” “focus on your breathing,” his voice still sounds so filled with hatred and resentment and anger and grievance that I can't imagine anyone relaxing in any way by listening to Sam Harris' voice. I mean, I don't know. I'd rather listen to Laura Loomer talking about Israel and Palestine to relax than listen to Sam Harris telling me how to breathe. But anyway, there are a lot of people who listen to his meditation videos as well. 

So here's a YouTube show called JewishUncensored, which appears on YouTube. It's hosted by an Orthodox Jew who's an extreme supporter of Israel as well. And he basically says, “Hey, guys, I want to show you Sam Harris talking about Israel and Zionism, because it's remarkable to hear him saying what he says here. Listen to this. 

Video. Sam Harris, JewishUncensored, YouTube. July 6, 2025.

Out of bullshit, you could not say that before October 7, he was not a Zionist. He never once expressed opposition to Zionism and, in fact, he realizes that that claim was totally baseless. And he goes on to describe what he actually said and thought about Israel and Zionism before October 7. Remember, he just said, “I think one of the biggest plagues of the world is sectarianism.” Israel is nothing but, whether you love it or not, a sectarian state. It's called the Jewish state. That's what Zionism is. It guarantees the supremacy of Jews within the state. You cannot reconcile love of Israel and support for Zionism, on the one hand, with your view that sectarianism is the greatest evil on the other. They're completely antithetical. He's basically saying, I believe sectarianism is the great evil, except I have exceptions for my principles, that's called Israel and Zionism. Shockingly, that just so happens to be my own group for which I've made an exception, but it's totally coincidental. I'm extremely objective. I rise above tribalism's pure coincidence. 

He's now trying to suggest, oh, I was an anti-Zionist before October 7, October 7 showed me the virgin. He was always a Zionist. And he even says it right there. He just claims, back then, “I was kind of reluctant.” Like, I hesitated. I realized that it was a complete contradiction of everything I pretended to believe in. But I nonetheless defended it, but with reluctance. 

“The seeming contradiction,” it's just for you idiots out there, for you intellectual mediocre, it may seem like it's a contradiction on the one hand to go around accusing everybody of destroying humanity because of sectarian allegiances, and then at the same time defending a state of Israel based on a philosophy, a new philosophy called Zionism, that's nothing other than a country formed based on sectarian identity and sectarian allegiance. And sectarian superiority. It may seem like there's a contradiction there, to you idiots, even though I think more deeply, so I understand why it's not a contradiction. And then he goes on for this. 

For a long time, in conservative discourse, even more in centrist discourse, there grew a lot of frustration and ultimately contempt for victimhood narratives. Black people saying, “We've been uniquely victimized, so we deserve these special protections,” Latinos saying, “We're uniquely victimize, we have to migrate, we deserve the special protections,” women saying they've been uniquely victimized throughout the ages and they deserve special protections, gay people, trans people, Muslims, all of whom have a version of history based in some truth that they faced extreme amounts of discrimination, oppression and other forms of bigotry and therefore merit special protection. 

We seem to have arrived at this consensus, especially after the excesses of Me Too and the Black Lives Matter movement, that we've gone way too far in that direction. A lot of these historic bigotries and repression aren't nearly as strong as they've been. They've made a lot of progress from them. There's still lingering effects of them, but we've made allot of progress and maybe the best way to move forward isn't to keep reinforcing them by dividing everybody up into groups and treating them differently based on their race or gender, sexual identity, or religion, or instead, just say, you know what, we're all actually the same, and we're going to work to make sure the treatment of everybody is the same but not endlessly treat people differently by emphasizing their divisions based on these demographic characteristics. That was certainly a unifying view of the right, without doubt. 

And yet, so many people claim that Sam Harris is one of them. Or like, you know what? There's one group and only one group that has a meritorious claim to that self-victimhood defense and that just so happens to be Jews, which a lot of people, creating that exception, happen to be, coincidentally. Like, hey, you know what? I can't stand victimhood narratives for any other group. It's totally whiny and snowflake behavior, all fabricated. It’s time to buckle up and stop being so frightened and demanding safety with your little blanket and your therapy dogs. But my group, that's the real one that's discriminating against. 

So that's what you heard the host of the show say. It's like, yes, Sam Harris is finally realizing, everybody hates us. That guy hates us, that guy hates us, antisemitism is everywhere and we, alone, are entitled to form sectarian allegiance based on our sectarian religious identity. Nobody else is, but we are. And Sam Harris is Jewish, he was raised Jewish, and he wants you to believe it's a coincidence that he's finally at the point in middle age where he's willing to admit every principle that I've said that I have, every principle in which I've built my career, every principle that supposedly defined my brand, that made me rich, that created a huge following ring, I want you to know I subordinate all of these principles, I have a huge exception to all of them called Israel and Zionism. 

I'll tell you one of the things I hate most about Sam Harris, the reason why I believe he deserves a particular level of disgust. I can have a certain baseline respect for people who have whatever views they have, even if I find them repellent, who are honest about those views, who don't hide them, who don't pretend that they have an agenda that's different from their actual agenda, whose expressed values and beliefs are actually their values and beliefs, and they're willing to stand up and defend it. Sam Harris is one of the most blatant, brazen frauds ever to present himself as a public intellectual. 

I mean, as I said 12 years ago, I wrote that article based on exposing this entire sham that what Sam Harris claimed his driving force was had nothing to do with his actual agenda or his set of beliefs. And it was the fact that he would deny that – and not just deny it, but accuse anybody who saw it, of being a liar, a bad faith fabulist, someone deliberately distorting his so-clear words because what he feared the most was having people understand what his real agenda was. He's just a standard Jewish neocon who loves Israel and forms his worldview based on that, which is fine.  There are a lot of people in every group who do that. There are people who are Black, who form their worldview based on their membership as a Black person, who see the world through the historical victimhood of Black people or women who do that, or gay people who do, or Muslim people, that's fine, that is in every group. But it was his constant, endless insistence that there's no tribalism to him, there's no sectarianism to him, he hates those things, he rises above it, he's just an objective atheist that lured so many people into his little web. Then, once they got there, they were fed something completely different than what had been promised. And here he is finally admitting it. 

I really think that the person that you should be most wary of is not a person with one particular ideology or the other. Obviously, there are a lot of people who are honest about their views and I find those views repellent but the person I find meriting the most amount of legitimate contempt, disrespect, and discredit are those who are too cowardly to admit what they really think or too conniving and manipulative to admit it. And Sam Harris is the vintage case of somebody who's all of those things. And to watch him just so casually admit that everything he's been saying for his whole life is a huge fraud because he has a gigantic exception to all of it, based on special prerogatives and rights that extend to his group, but to no other, as discussing as it is, it is kind of cathartic as well to have forever Sam Harris's agenda laid bare for all of the world to see in his own words. 

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!

There are times when we cannot cover everything that is going on that we think deserves attention, and one of the ways we try to rectify that is to bring on guests who we believe are highly informed, engaging and provocative. We have two guests tonight for you who are most certainly all of those things. 

The first is Liam Cunningham, who is the long-time working Irish actor likely best known for his central role as Davod Seaworth in the HBO hit series, Game of Thrones; but for our purposes he is also a very passionate political activist and analyst who has spent decades involved in political activism, in the last two years focused like many people, on the Israeli destruction of Gaza. 

Right after that, we’ll talk to the very independent, heterodox and cantankerous journalist – which I mean in the most flattering way – Zaid Jilani. He was my colleague for years at the Intercept until he left for all the right reasons. We're going to talk about a wide range of topics with him, including the fallout from the DOJ's announcement that it's closing the Epstein investigation with no further disclosures, the state of the race for New York City mayor, where Zohran Mamdani's primary win has sent a lot of people, especially the city's richest, into full meltdown mode. 

The Interview: Liam Cunningham 

Liam Cunningham is an award-winning Irish actor, as I said, best known for his role in HBO's series Game of Thrones. Various outlets, including The Irish Times, have called him one of Ireland's greatest actors. He's been a political activist for decades, but recently he helped to organize and became a spokesperson for the "Freedom Flotilla,” in which Greta Thunberg and other colleagues were arrested and deported by the Israeli government for attempting to deliver aid to the people of Gaza when the IDF was blockading it. I've followed his work for some time, especially his political work and we are delighted to have him for his debut appearance. Hope it's not the last on the show. 

G. Greenwald: Liam, it's great to see you. I know it's so late in Dublin. I really appreciate your staying up to talk with us. 

Liam Cunningham: No, that's fine. It's way past my bedtime, but an absolute yes. For you, sir, anything. 

G. Greenwald: I appreciate that. All right. So, let's begin with what I just mentioned, which is the role that you played in kind of helping to organize and becoming a very well-known spokesperson for the boat that was intended to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza as a way of circumventing the IDF's blockade of food, water, medicine and the like.

I think a lot of people didn't realize at the time what an actually dangerous and courageous mission it was. I remember in 2011, a very similar flotilla attempted essentially the same thing to deliver food to the people of Gaza when there was a blockade there and the IDF actually attacked that ship and killed 10 people on board. You had Nobel Prize winners, holocaust survivors and the IDF just didn't care. They violently attacked it. What was the impetus for your involvement in this particular action, even knowing how dangerous and provocative it might be?

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!

 Much of the MAGA world was in turmoil, confusion and anger yesterday –understandably so – after the Trump DOJ announced it was closing the Epstein files and its investigation with no further disclosures of any kind. After all this happened, some attempt was made to try and pin the blame or isolate the blame for all of this on Attorney General Pam Bondi. Yet, Donald Trump himself, today, when asked about all of this, went much further than anyone else when meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House again: President Trump actually mocked and angrily dismissed any concerns over the Epstein matter and how it was handled. 

On our second segment, one of the uniting views of Trump supporters over the last four years has been opposition to the Biden administration's policy of arming, funding, and fueling Ukraine in its war against Russia. Yesterday, however, at the same meeting with Netanyahu, Trump announced that he would continue the Biden policy that he had spent so many years criticizing by now providing defensive arms at least to Ukraine, and he did so based on the longstanding neocon/liberal view that Putin is completely untrustworthy and therefore Russia must be thought because of Putin. That's what Trump himself said. 

Then, we’ll comment on Trump’s lengthy tweet attacking Brazil for its ongoing prosecution of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, during the BRICS Summit being held in Rio de Janeiro. This was something we were going to cover last night and didn't have time to, but we will tonight. Brazil's President Lula da Silva quickly responded, very defiantly, by basically telling Trump to mind his own business. 

Last night, we covered quite extensively the decision by the Trump Justice Department, not even six months into the administration, to completely shut down and close and stop all investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, as well as announcing that there will be no further disclosures of any documents of any kind, that whatever they've released so far, which has basically been nothing – not basically, has been nothing – is all you're going to get. 

This is a blatant betrayal of multiple promises made by key Trump officials over the last four years, before they were in the White House, but was also a complete 180 in terms of what key Trump influencers and pundits had been saying, including several pundits who are now running the FBI, such as Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, as well as the Justice Department, including Pam Bondi. 

We even showed you an interview that Alina Habba, the Trump attorney who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, appointed by Donald Trump, did with Pierce Morgan while she was in the government, just in February, where she claimed they have a whole bunch of very incriminating lists with shocking names. She said there's video and there are all kinds of documents that are shocking, in her words, and she said they're going to be released over time because we've gone long enough where people who do these sorts of things, including are involved in the Epstein scandal, have no accountability. She said that is ending with the Trump administration. There's going to be accountability. 

Yesterday, the Trump Justice Department said, “No, there's nothing here. We looked. There's no such thing as a client list.” We know we've been promising and that JD Vance repeatedly said, “Where's the client list?” Donald Trump Jr. said, “Anyone hiding the client lists is a scumbag.” Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi accused Biden officials of basically covering up predatory pedophilia by refusing to release the Jeffrey Epstein client list. Now, they're saying there's no client list, that thing we've been talking about and accusing Biden officials of hiding and promising to disclose, that doesn't exist.