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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As we try to do every Friday night, news permitting, we will devote the entire show tonight to a Q&A session, taking questions submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community and answering as many of them as we can. As is typically the case for my audience – and I say this with no small amount of pride – the questions tonight, as usual, are wide-ranging, thoughtful, informed, and provocative on a very diverse range of issues.
The first question is from @MaltGirl5 and she says this:
I think anyone who's watching my show, followed my reporting or commentary over the years, understands that I am not one to call things racist or bigoted or all those other synonyms very casually or even very easily. If anything, maybe there's more reluctance than I should have to do so sometimes, but in this case, it's hard not to.
I don't know if racism is the right word; I think it's more about anti-Muslim bigotry, meaning not just animosity toward Muslims, but extremely irrational animosity. The things that are getting said about Zohran that just so plainly don't apply to him, as I was talking the other night about how Democrats tried for 10 years to depict Trump as this white nationalist, fascist, Hitler-like figure, and it just never worked because Trump didn't read that way to people, he didn't code that way to the people, even people who have a lot of reservations or even opposition to things he says and does just don't feel threatened that way.
And that is true, notwithstanding what I believe. There have been a lot of authoritarian measures that have been implemented this year that are cutting against key constitutional liberties; we've talked about those a lot, specifically, free speech, free press and due process. There's still a massive gap between that and being a white supremacist, fascist and Hitler-type figure, which is what they tried to depict him as, especially as they got desperate in the last weeks of his campaign, in 2024. It just didn't work because people could look with their own eyes and what they were seeing wasn't Hitler.
I think this is very similar to what's going on with Zohran. They want to turn him into this Osama bin Laden figure. But you just look at Zohran, you see how he lives his life, you see how he speaks, what he says, you see his wife, you see his background and just there's nothing in that background that suggests any of this has any basis in reality. So, it's very mean-spirited. I think a lot of people enjoy this kind of mob, sort of hatefulness. It feels good.
Obviously, there are a lot of real reasons, ideological reasons and political reasons, why a lot of people are very uncomfortable with Zohran Mamdani. He absolutely is of the left and has left-wing economic views for sure. And if that's an ideology that you reject, that you are opposed to, I have zero problem with any kind of vehement opposition. That's what politics is about. But the stuff we're about to show you has nothing to do with any of that. It's so clearly designed to trigger the worst impulses in people.
Again, if it had some basis in reality, if he had been a member of ISIS or al-Qaeda, then I could understand that, although the president of Syria was that until about seven seconds ago, and the West loves him as president of Syria. There are reports that he's about to normalize relations with Israel, Israel was free to fly over Syrian skies when it was attacking Iran. So, even if he had been some sort of ISIS or al-Qaeda supporter in the past, that wouldn't even be disqualifying in our politics, but Zohran was never anything remotely like that.
Here's a congressman. I'm not even sure I've heard of him before, to be honest and obviously, I do this for a living. So, sometimes these members of Congress are so obscure, they are desperate for attention. His name is Andy Ogles. He's a Republican congressman from Tennessee and this is what he went on to X yesterday and said after Mamdani won overwhelmingly the New York City Democratic primary to be mayor:
Like, what does that mean “little Mohammed?” What is that in time designed to evoke?
This went mega viral, as did all the other stuff that he started posting along this vein once he realized that it was getting him attention for once. He's now writing on this, creating cartoons about it, retweeting every article that talks about it.
Here's the letter that he wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday:
Okay, let me just stop there for a second and say the following. First of all, Mamdani tried to be a rapper and produced songs when he was in his early twenties. He's still quite young, he's 33, so we're talking about a decade ago, when he was like 22, 23. Are we really supposed to go back in time and see what somebody said in their early twenties, what they sung, what music they were creating, what they were saying in those songs, to now deport them after they just won a major election, where huge numbers of people in New York City want him to be their mayor?
The Holy Land Foundation was one of the most controversial prosecutions of the entire War on Terror. I reported on it frequently at the time. I regarded it as a completely horrific and unjust miscarriage of justice that was done in a hysteria, after 9/11.
The Holy Land Foundation was a group of imams living in Texas who raised funds for Palestinians because of the suffering they were enduring and still are. They would send it to Gaza, they would send to the West Bank and the U.S. government invented a claim that some of the money they were sending ended up in the hands of Gaza and ended up in the hands of Hamas, which is the government of Gaza. So, if you send money to a hospital in Gaza, or to a first aid station, you send some money to some fund that helps distribute food, at some point, you're going to come into contact with Hamas and that's the government of Gaza. It doesn't remotely suggest that in any way you support Hamas, you support terrorism, etc.
That's what all this trial did but in the hysteria of post 9/11 America, they were able to extract convictions against people who, I mean, if you want, you can go back and read my reporting or other reporting, but I'm here to say that I believe the Holy Land Foundation prosecutions were a miscarriage of justice, the people in prison under them were wrongfully prosecuted, wrongfully convicted, wrongly imprisoned. Am I not allowed to say that as an American? Is that somehow a crime now to believe that people who were convicted of a crime were wrongly convicted? It's kind of foundational to our entire society.
Do you think one might raise First Amendment concerns that you want to deport the person who was just elected to represent the Democratic Party by an overwhelming majority of voters in New York City because of what he rapped when he was 22, 23 years old, you'd think that might raise First Amendment issues?
Zohran Mamdani has lived in the United States since he was seven years old. He came to the United States when he was 7 years old; that means he has lived in the United States for almost the vast majority of his life, all of his adult life. He's never once been arrested, let alone charged or convicted of a crime. What he's done is run on a political platform and won to seat to the New York City legislature and then, as a Democratic nominee, for mayor, based on a political ideology that a lot of conservatives, like this one, dislike. That's it.
I mean, if he's organizing for Hamas or raising money and sending it to terrorist groups or engaging in terrorism, why would that not have been known? Why would it be that, right when he wins a major election, suddenly, we're supposed to investigate this, even though it's based on nothing? Also, I keep hearing from conservatives that if Democrats keep electing people like him or AOC or whoever, that strain of Democrat, they're going to destroy their party, they're going to prevent the Democratic Party from winning forever. Well, it doesn't seem like a lot of people who say that really believe that. Why would you want to deport Zohran Mamdani if you think that the Democrats electing him will destroy the Democratic Party forever? This is not the behavior of people who think that Zohran Mamdani is going to explode the Republican Party and lead to a hundred years of glorious Republican reign and rule. This seems like the behavior of people who are very afraid of what he just did, which is to energize huge numbers of people that don't typically vote. The same thing that President Obama was uniquely able to do, the same thing that President Trump has been uniquely able to do.
Here's Libs of TikTok:
Like the original tweet from Congressman Ogles, this went mega viral, 10,000 people at least, maybe more, retweeting it; 25,000 or so liking it as of whenever I last looked. Just to give you a sense, there are not some isolated statements. This is resonating with a lot of people.
Here's Congressman Ogles going back onto X to get another hit of that dopamine that he got for being noticed for the first time and he has this little cartoon that my guess is his office made, or someone made, of him with his hand up saying “Deport” and then there's a man looking like some angry terrorist which he doesn't ever look like.
And notably they want to deport him back to Uganda, they emphasize.
I want to just make a couple of observations here. First of all, I have been hearing from conservatives for many years now, expressing what I regard as a very valid grievance when I've expressed myself about the evils of lawfare against political opponents, but also about this anti-democratic trend that we’ve seen in so many countries, including the United States, that when you can't beat a politician whose views you dislike, you try to prevent him from appearing on the ballot at all. That was the Democrats' main strategy in 2024 to get President Trump convicted – they even got a Colorado Supreme Court by a four-to-three ruling to throw him off the ballot, prevent him from running on the grounds that he's an insurrectionist, even though he wasn't charged with that, let alone convicted of it. They did everything possible to put him in prison, to make him ineligible to run. It's been done in Brazil, they did it in Romania just recently, and then, of course, in France, a very frivolous criminal conviction of Marine Le Pen is now rendering her ineligible to run.
I've done shows with that theme about how anti-democratic that is, doing all this in the name of democracy, while what you're really doing is whenever somebody who's your political opponent gets too popular, you want to find a way to get them banned or imprisoned. That's exactly what this is. Oh yeah, Andy Ogles just woke up, he sees that Zohran Mamdani is inspiring huge numbers of young men, which the Democratic Party has had problems with, it is not common for left-wing candidates, for Democratic candidates to inspire people, young people, to give a new face to the Democratic Party. Suddenly, he woke up and decided that Zohran had to be deported, that he's a criminal, that he is a terrorist and huge numbers of conservatives are cheering along with that, not to mention that it's the same conservative movement.
Again, I joined in with this with years of grievance about attacks on the First Amendment, free speech and censorship. Donald Trump gets into office, one of the first things he does is go on a hunt for people who criticize Israel or protest against Israel, even though they're in the country legally with green cards and student visas, to deport them. They never committed any crimes, they haven't been arrested and they haven't been charged.
Anyone who is comfortable with any of this, anybody who is supportive of this, just please, please, don't ever, ever again come with this grievance about how repressive globalists in the world ban people from ballots when they get too popular so the voters don't have a choice, or grievances about censorship and attacks on free speech, just don't do that. If you want to support this, find other ways to do that but the hypocrisy, the deceit of what many on the right – not all people, many don't like this, but many do – but many on the right who have spent years waving the flag of democracy and free speech are now suddenly supporting this, oh yeah, let's deport this guy who just had a major victory and his exciting voters, not just in New York, but across the country, let's just deport him by fabricating a claim that he's been organizing with terrorists, something that nobody ever minimally even whispered or suggested before. He's a person who's lived in the United States for 25 years, not even arrested or charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one, and now suddenly he needs to be deported? I mean, is there anyone who wants to pretend they don't know what's going on here?
Next question, @stevenpw asks this:
Let's, first of all, just make clear what it is that the court decided. There's some reference to court decisions and there are a lot of different decisions on the question of immigration. Some have gone in one direction, some have gone on the other, and reconciling them would take a lot of time, but it's not necessary for this narrow question that you referenced, which is the idea of telling federal court judges that they don't have the power to issue injunctions that go beyond the case before them, that are nationwide injunction. So let me just explain what they're saying here.
So, let's say you are a lawyer, you represent six people who are in the country illegally, and the Trump administration wants to deport them, not back to their home country, but to El Salvador for a prison, or to South Sudan, which is now where they're sending people in the country illegally. They're just picking the most war-torn, dangerous, poor places, and they're saying, “We're not going to send you back to your country, we're going to send you to the South Sudan or Libya.” You rush into court, and you have these three levels of the federal judiciary: the Supreme Court, the appellate courts and then underneath that are individual federal district courts.
You have to start in the federal court except in the rarest circumstances, but any lawsuit has to go to an individual federal court judge first and only if you lose, you go to the appeals court and then to the Supreme Court, if they accept it. The judge says it's unconstitutional to take these six individual plaintiffs who are in the country illegally and who the government wants to deport to South Sudan, it's unconstitutional to deport them to some third country. It's unconstitutional to do so without due process. So those six people are now subject to an injunction. The court says the government is hereby barred from sending the six people who brought this lawsuit to this third country the U.S. government wants to send them to. That would be uncontroversial. I mean, it might be controversial on the merits, but nobody would doubt the federal court has the power to do that. Even if the decision is wrong, that's something to fix on appeal.
What federal court judges have been doing, and they've done it long before Trump, but they've done it far more regularly and frequently in the last five months than they have in the last, I don't know, 60 years combined – it's become very, very accelerated – is when they issue these injunctions, they're not just saying it's unconstitutional and therefore you're prohibited from deporting these six people who brought this lawsuit to me. I'm ruling in their favor, and you can't deport these six to the South Sudan without a more extensive due process requirement because under the Constitution they have constitutional rights.
We've been over many times why people who are non-citizens, including people in the country illegally still have rights under the Constitution that the Supreme Court has recognized for a hundred years. It's not radical, it’s not new, it’s not left-wing. It’s just how the Constitution works. You don't have to like it, but it's just what the Supreme Court has regularly ruled. But what they're doing instead of saying you're enjoined from removing these six people is they're saying the government, as a whole, not just in this case, but every case, is enjoined from deporting anybody to the South Sudan or to El Salvador without these kinds of hearings necessary.
In other words, they're not just issuing an injunction for the people before them in court, they're issuing an injunction for the entire nation, for every citizen, every person who's not a citizen, every person in the United States illegally, they're reporting to describe rulings and orders that are binding on the government for everyone they might want to deport.
As I've said before, this has never been uncommon. During the Biden years, for example, Joe Biden wanted to forgive student loan debt. When Nancy Pelosi was asked why he hasn't done it, she always said, “Well, it needs an act of Congress.” But then Biden finally needed a way to satisfy his base. It was a promise that he had made. So he just unilaterally, through executive order, canceled student loan. Conservative groups went into a federal court representing various plaintiffs and asked for not just respect for those plaintiffs, but for the entire student loan program to be declared illegal and for its implementation to be enjoined and they won in a federal district court, the judge issued a nationwide injunction.
That has happened in every administration. It was never particularly that controversial because it happened with a lot of restraint, rarely, but because of the frequency with which federal district judges have been doing it since Trump was elected back in January, you can argue about why, by their own admission, the Trump administration's own admission, they're testing a lot of previously untested, relatively radical powers in a lot of different areas, but there certainly are political motives, I'm sure, too. You have a whole bunch of federal court judges just enjoining these policies nationwide.
It's been a main grievance of the Trump Administration and as you likely know, the position of the Trump administration is that birthright citizenship violates the Constitution. There's nothing in the Constitution that says that if you are born in the United States, you automatically become a citizen. Most legal scholars, constitutional scholars, disagree. That's the merits of the case. In the context of the Trump administration wanting to deport people who were born in the United States, and the Trump administration is making the argument they’re not citizens, even though they were born here.
So, the question is, does birthright citizenship actually exist in the Constitution? The federal district court judge rejected the Trump administration's argument, said “No, birthright citizenship is absolutely guaranteed by the Constitution” and enjoined not just those plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit who were going to get deported, but the government as a whole, from deporting anybody who has citizenship based on the fact that they were born in the United States. That case was then appealed, to the appellate court, by the government. The appellant court affirmed the district court's ruling, said birthright citizenship is absolutely in the Constitution and therefore affirmed it and said, “No, you cannot deport anybody born in the United States.
The Trump administration then appealed to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court issued a ruling today in that case. It did not decide the merits of birthright citizenship; it did not make a ruling on whether birthright citizenship is based on the Constitution or not. They are going to decide that at some point, presumably later. The only question they decided is the following: do federal courts have the power to issue not just injunctions, enjoining government conduct as it applies to the people who brought the case, the ones who are before them, but for an entire nation? And with an important caveat that I'll get to at the end just because it's kind of a detail for the most part, maybe an important one, maybe not, but what the Supreme Court said by a six to three ruling, and it broke down exactly along conservative and liberal lines, and the court ruled that the district court judges do not – again, with a caveat – do not have the power to issue nationwide universal injunctions. They only have the power to enjoin government action as it pertains to the people in front them and it was a pretty scathing dissent and even more scathing ruling issued by that was written by Amy Coney Barrett.
I think a lot of people have trouble understanding what the power of federal courts are in the Constitution. One of the things that I love most about the Constitution is that a lot of it was written to deliberately be a little bit ambiguous to avoid being very unambiguous or specific or dogmatic about certain crucial questions, in part because they needed to be able to attract enough votes to ratify the Constitution and there were people who had lots of disagreements about what the role of the court should be, what the role of the president should be, what the role of the Congress should be. But also, the whole idea of the Constitution is checks and balances and the whole point of checks and balances is the three branches are always going to be fighting for power. The president will want more power, the Congress will want power, the courts will want more power. And through that struggle, no one branch will get too powerful.
Everyone is checked by every other branch. You can't be a federal judge without the president nominating you and then having the Senate approve you. And even once you're approved, you can be impeached by the Congress, by the Senate. So, every branch has checks from every other branch and through this constant struggle for more and more power, there will be a balance of power, which is what they were obsessed with, preventing a king, essentially from reemerging, since they just fought a bloody war to emancipate themselves from that kind of rule.
One of the concerns about Congress is that they have just washed their hands of their power. President Trump decides, “OK, I'm going to get involved in this new war with Israel, I'm going to go bomb Iran.” Even though the Constitution says it's Congress that has the power to declare war, and you can read the Federalist Papers saying the gravest decision a country can make is to go to war, and we should not be able to go war unless the people, through the representatives in Congress, approve of it, since they're going to be the ones bearing the burden of that war, fighting it, paying for it, Congress doesn't want to vote on wars because those are hard votes.
That's really dangerous, because if Congress isn't fighting for its power, and it typically isn't, that's what creates this imbalance. I just want to explain, I think people understand the power of the Congress and the power of the presidency, the executive in Article I, Congress, Article II, the Executive, Article III is where the judicial power is outlined and a lot of these things are intended to be obscure and a lot of them are complex, especially since they required 200 years of judicial interpretation to create these precedents that govern today. And people go to law school and study Article III for a year, a year and a half, in order to fully understand it. So it's understandable that people don't have a clear sense of it. So, I just wanted to walk you through the basics, because I think it's so crucial to everything that's being debated now about these injunctions and what the Supreme Court decided today.
The key phrase for understanding the judicial power in the United States as defined and formed by Article III is what's called the case or controversy cause of the court, which is Section 2, Article III, which defines to what extent the judicial power extends. And before I show you this language, I just want to give you a kind of overview: Courts cannot and do not go around just opining on various questions, like whether some law is passed by Congress, signed into law by the president. People say, I think it's unconstitutional, and then the court just comes along and says, “Oh, you know what? Let me resolve this. I'll be the one to decide if it's constitutional or not.” Just like courts don't go around without being asked to judge whether people who are charged with crimes are guilty, they have to have the case brought to them by the prosecutor. A person has to be charged, brought to court, and you have two sides that are in dispute, the prosecution and the defendant, the person charged – same with civil cases that person cheats me out of a million dollars in a business deal. The court just doesn't issue an opinion. I have to go to the court, sue the person, create a controversy, a case or controversy, and then bring it to the court.
The court's power is to resolve the case in front of the case or controversy. That's what the case of controversy clause of Article III, Section 2 means. Courts don't get to just go around opining and resolving things because they think it's important or saying laws are unconstitutional. If you believe a law is unconstitutional and you want a court to decide, that's not enough. You can't just go into a court and say, “Hey, Congress has passed this law and I don't like it. I think it’s unconstitutional, I'd like you to decide.” Courts can't do that. You have to prove that you have standing to raise it, that you're being specifically and directly harmed by this law to let you sue the government, because otherwise you're just asking the court to opine in the abstract and that's not what they do. Their judicial power is limited to cases and controversies before them. They don't opine on precedent, they don't create precedent on their own, they don't make legal rulings. All they're supposed to do is rule on the case before them; they have to have a fully formed case. One side sues someone, one side charges someone criminally, and then the other side comes in and now you have a case or controversy. That's what courts are for. When someone sues somebody else, when you sue the government, or when you charge someone with a crime. That's the only time judicial power is activated: when someone brings a case before them.
And the controversy that's taking place here is that when a federal district court judge issues a ruling that extends beyond the people before them, as I said, six people about to be deported run into court and sue the government saying, “Hey, what the government's trying to do to me is unconstitutional.” The court absolutely has the power to decide for those six people whether their rights are being violated and to issue an injunction if necessary to protect them that applies to those six People. What courts have been doing over the 20th century and especially since Trump was reelected is basically saying, my order doesn't just apply to the people before me, it applies to the entire country. It applies just to restrain the government everywhere it wants to go, way out of my district, way out of my state, way out of my circuit. And that's what has become controversial because then you put a federal district court judge, a single judge at the lowest level, in charge of basically imposing his ruling or her ruling on the entire country.
There are instances, and this is the caveat I mentioned, where the only way you can give relief to the people in front of you is by issuing a nationwide injunction. So, you have a class of people, hundreds or thousands, who are affected by a government policy. They all join together to sue, which happens as long as they have enough common interest; you can sue as a class, and the only way to give them relief is you can't just say, oh, it applies to 3,000 people. You have to give them relief for the entire country. There are other examples like that.
And so, the Supreme Court today said that all federal district court judges can do is issue rulings necessary to give relief to the people before them. It may be that there are times when a nationwide injunction is necessary to give relief to the plaintiffs, but in general, as it was true in this case, when you have six people in the country illegally suing not to be deported, six citizens who are here because of birthright citizenship, you don't need a nationwide injunction to give them complete relief, you just rule that the government can't deport those six people but the next 12 people who are going to be deported have to sue separately, in another district or another judge. They're confining the power of federal discourse judges to what the Article III, Section 2 definition of case or controversy had in mind.
I'm not fully convinced of the majority ruling, just because I read most of it, but not all of it. It was only issued this morning and we're taping this show early today. So, and I haven't read all of the dissenting opinion, though I've read a lot of both to have a very good idea. So, I don't want to just hear and like say, “Oh yeah, this is right.”
I think, constitutionally, the language I showed you of case and controversy limits the judge's power and just kind of the equities of how our government is supposed to work due to, and that's what Coney Barrett said today, it does not matter really all these arguments about why it's good or bad Ketanji Brown Jackson is raising. You don't even need to indulge them because what she's saying is just contrary to 250 years of judicial precedent about the power of the judiciary, plus the Constitution itself.
And one of the reasons why I think Amy Coney Barrett is arguably the best judge on the court, even though conservatives get angry with her sometimes, because she doesn't vote the party line, it's precisely because she doesn’t vote the party line, she follows legal principles. She's very studious about it; she takes it very seriously. It was so ironic because when Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett, the liberals went ballistic and said, “She's a religious fanatic, she's just going to automatically vote in favor of Donald Trump.” They even claimed there was a quid pro quo that he nominated her in exchange for her promise to invalidate the results of the 2020 election if he lost, and of course, he did lose that election, and Amy Coney Barrett, nor anyone on the Supreme Court, even remotely intervened to try to reverse the certified results of that election.
Obviously, none of them apologized to her, but I think six years, seven years later, we have a very clear understanding with her. She joins with the conservatives when she believes it, like she did on overturning Roe v. Wade, and in this case, as well, a very crucial case of the Trump administration, but she's not just a party line judge. She really does look at constitutional principles and really doesn't care about the political or partisan outcome that everyone pretends that they want from a judge, sort of like everyone pretends that that's what they want from a journalist: just do your profession, follow your principles, follow the mores of the work without regard any favor to one side or another. Oftentimes, when people do that, they get attacked by both sides for not being loyal to either, but that's what I think makes her such a good judge.
All right. @Jcart1965 asked the following:
It's kind of a substantive question there about Trump's foreign policy, but also a political one about the efficacy of it. I'm not sure I agree on political grounds. Sometimes, when you feed all your factions that you need just enough to keep them from revolting, even if they're not all totally in love with you, but still think they've gotten some things from you, that can be a politically beneficial strategy. I think that's well said, and I think it's pretty accurate too.
He was pressured by neocons and war hawks and obviously donors – he has many big donors who are highly loyal to Israel – to join the Israeli war against Iran, to bomb their nuclear facilities, and he went and did that, that obviously made anti-interventionists in his party angry and feel betrayed and it obviously made neocons very happy. But then, he also ended the war 12 days after it started, didn't, at least for now, caused regime change, didn't assassinate the Ayatollah Khamenei, didn't allow Israel or the United States to just carpet bomb all government institutions that could have just collapsed the government and created chaos like what was done in Syria.
So, a lot of anti-interventionists were able to say, “Okay, I don't like the fact that we joined this war, but at least we didn't get dragged into an endless conflict.” At the same time, it made the neocons, the warmongers and the Israel loyalists kind of upset. Like Mark Levin thought he got everything he wanted. Now he's like, “This is outrageous. Why aren't we finishing the job?” So nobody's really happy, but nobody's completely betrayed either. I don't know, politically, that might be a good strategy.
I don't usually think in those terms, but that would be my analysis. It seems like his supporters are just happy that's all over and now get to move on to other things, where they're more united, like immigration, or the Supreme Court ruling today, things like that, or mocking Zohran Mamdani as some sort of al-Qaeda agent. But on the merits, this is, let's just remember how many wars Israel has started, and yes, when you bomb another country, it's an act of war. It absolutely means you're at war with the country.
I know in the United States, we bomb so many countries that for us, a war has to be something way more like – no one thinks we're at a war in 18 different countries at once just because we go around bombing whoever we want, but those are acts of war. There's no other country on the planet that would say, “Yeah, let' go bomb that country, but let's not have a war with them”. If you're bombing a country, you're at war with them. Even if it lasts a week, it's still a war. You're sending military fighter jets or bombers over a country to blow things up inside that country without their consent; that's a war.
The Israelis over the last year and a half, with American support, American approval, American financing, American arms and American diplomatic protection, both under Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have bombed Gaza, they bombed the West Bank, they bombed Lebanon, they bombed Syria, they bomb Yemen, and now they bombed Iran. That's six countries in the region. I'm sure they bombed Iraq, too, pretty sure. But I'll bleed them out. Six regions, four different sovereign countries. They took land in both Lebanon and Syria as part of it. So, they conquered land as part of that. And the U.S. is along for the ride the whole way, involved in all these new Middle East wars. President Trump restarted the bombing campaign of Joe Biden in Yemen. He escalated it, but again there he started it, they envisioned it, they wanted it to go on for nine months to a year and President Trump saw how expensive it was, how much it was depleting our missiles, how it wasn't actually weakening the Houthis, as a lot of people said before him wouldn't happen, and he ended it after a month.
So, on the one hand, you're angry that, if you have an anti-interventionist view like I do, you're angry that he bombed Yemen, but kind of happy that he realized, apparently, that it was at least a bad policy, if not a mistake, and ended after 30 days. Obviously, I think bombing Iran for Israel is a horrific mistake and even though this phase of the war only lasted 12 days, I absolutely don't believe the conflict is over. I believe the Americans and Israelis and lots of other people are doing all sorts of things to destabilize the Iranian government, backing dissident factions to arm them, to fund them, operating all kinds of operatives within Iran. Israel's already speaking about how they reserve the right to bomb Iran any time if they see they're trying to build ballistic missiles and it's not even about nuclear weapons.
Israel has violated every cease-fire. There's a cease-fire in Lebanon. Israel just bombs it whenever it wants. When there was a cease-fire in Gaza, Israel frequently attacked Gaza. So, there's a cease-fire between the Israelis and Iranians. Anyone who thinks that's going to hold that the Israelis don't want it to, I think, is being very naive.
There has been a lot of instability and tension with still the possibility for greater escalation that would drag the United States that didn't exist before, three weeks ago, when President Trump started a new war in the Middle East despite all his promises not to, but then you have the other side that he stopped it quickly, clearly didn't want to get dragged into a war.
So I think, politically, that is what he's doing. I also believe he understands that getting dragged into an endless conflict in the Middle East will destroy his presidency, but, also, he remembers he's gone around saying for a decade “That is incredibly stupid, that's incredibly counterproductive, we have to put America first” and understands that's not anything consistent with what he has been saying.
So, I think there's a big part in the back of his mind that is very hesitant to get the U.S. involved in a protracted war and that's better than not having that hesitation. It’s what I guess I would say.
All right, @Katesam327:
I don't think that. We did a show last night where Michael Tracey went to the NATO Meeting and interviewed multiple leaders. I saw some of the clips of that interview. I didn't see the full show, so I don't associate or disassociate myself with Michael Tracey.
I don't think I talked about the NATO summit, but on the question of Iran, just let me say first of all that I did a debate released on Wednesday with Konstantin Kisin and his partner, Francis, his co-host on the Triggernometry podcast that's quite popular. It's on YouTube, it's about an hour long and this was the question debated: Was President Trump right to bomb the nuclear facility? Should we consider Iran a threat? So, I don't necessarily want to give a long-detailed answer. I've talked many times about this before as well. We showed a video clip as well, on Monday night, of Noam Chomsky being asked this exact question: “How can you minimize so much the danger of Iran when they chant death to America, death to Israel? What about if they get a nuclear weapon?” We showed you his answer that I definitely associate myself with.
Let me just say a couple of things. First of all, when people chant death to America, death to Israel that's a chant. It's an expression of anger and, of course, Iran has anger toward the United States because we overthrew their democratic left government in 1953 and imposed on them a brutal savage dictator, the Shah of Iran, who was an Israeli and U.S. puppet, served Israel and the U.S.'s interests, and cracked down on religious freedom, all sorts of dissent and it didn't end until 1979. That's 25 years later.
And you can say, “Oh, that's a long time ago.” That's not a long time ago. A big portion of the population lived through that, lived through the Shah, lived under the Shah, understood it was the United States imposing a dictatorship on their country. A lot of anti-American sentiment comes from there. And then you obviously, even people who didn't live through it, studied that, understand that history. In Brazil, they did the same thing in 1964, so a decade later, they imposed a military junta on the country that was repressive and savage. Same thing, not quite as brutal as the Shah, but brutal enough. They toppled Brazilian democracy and propped up a dictator who ran the country the way the United States wanted. It basically lasted 24 years, depending on how you count. Obviously, a lot of people in Brazil remember that, live through it and have a lot of negativity toward the United States because of it. Who wouldn't?
So, it's one thing to chant. It's another thing to have the capability or the willingness. What does that mean, “Death to America, death to Israel?” Iran didn't start that war. Israel started the war with the United States. It's not Iran that has bombed six different places, four different sovereign countries in the region in the last two years. That's Israel and the United States that have done that. Iran hasn't started a war in like two hundred years, that's what Professor Mearsheimer was saying. The United States has started many – many – and so has Israel in that time.
Israel, which is a major nuclear state, has had nuclear weapons for several decades, has a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons has second-strike capability – to say nothing of the United States, which after Russia is the second largest nuclear power in the world, but probably with a more sophisticated second-strike capability – that means that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, which again, even the U.S. intelligence community said no evidence that they were (I've gone over all these things so I don't want to repeat the in-depth point) but I think the bigger issue is, even if they got nuclear weapons – and in general, I think it's better to have fewer countries with nuclear weapons than more in general as a principle – I'm way more worried about Israel's nuclear weapons than I am about Iran's, because Israel actually has them. Israel has proven that it acts with no limits.
Israel is operating through a fanaticism that's partly religious and partly nationalistic and I could see Israel using nuclear weapons before I could see Iran using nuclear weapons. If you believe Iran is going to use nuclear weapons against Israel and the United States, you believe then that the leaders of Iran are willing to commit instant suicide, not just for themselves, not for only the 92 million people who live in their country – if Ted Cruz is watching, it's 92 million people – but for the extermination of Iran as an entity, as a place, as nation. I don't see anything that Iranian leaders have ever done that suggests they're suicidal in that manner. That's why nuclear weapon proliferation has not resulted in a nuclear war.
I do not believe that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, they would use it to commit suicide and destroy their entire country. They have just proven it over and over. They entered a deal where they gave up nuclear weapons voluntarily in 2015. They had inspectors all over the place, they allowed surveillance, monitoring and cameras all on site to prove to the world they didn't want nuclear weapons. They weren't going to get nuclear weapons; they wanted to be reintegrated into the international community, to have sanctions lifted. How can you say that the Iranians are some fanatical, unhinged, insane country hellbent on not just getting nuclear weapons but using them, even though it means their complete destruction, when they just proved this decade that they would enter into an agreement, they were ready to again? It wasn't Iran that withdrew from that deal. It was the United States under Donald Trump. And nobody thinks the Iranians were violating that deal. Trump just promised to do it in 2016 as a campaign promise to attract pro-Israel voters and money and he won, and he felt the need to make good on that plan. His argument, from the beginning, was not that Iran is violating it and enriching to try to get nukes; the argument was that the deal is somehow not good enough, and he wanted to get a better deal. But Iran proved they'll enter into a deal.
Even if they got nuclear weapons, what makes anyone think that they would attack Israel in the United States, knowing it would mean their instant annihilation? I know where the propaganda is: “Oh, this is an apocalyptic end-time religion.” Nothing they've done remotely substantiates that, including what they just did in this war, to say nothing of the last two years, when they offered a very, very restrained response to Israel after Israel blew up their consulate, they launched symbolic retaliation that they knew would be intercepted. And whenever I used to say that, people would say, “Oh, you think they did less than they really could do? That's all they could do.” And they just proved, no, they can do a lot more. President Trump himself said Israel got battered, hit very hard.
There was military censorship in Iran and Israel. Journalists explained that they were not allowed to show any damage done to military or government installations, even though it was extensive. The only things that journalists were allowed to show were damage when a civilian building got hit, to create the false impression that Iran was targeting civilian structures and that no defense bases, no intelligence bases, no government buildings in Israel got hit very hard, as President Trump said.
Iran always had the capability to inflict more damage than they did last year in that retaliation. They just proved it, and I believe they could have inflicted a lot more, too, but they were pragmatic and careful, restrained and rational, as they always are, not to spiral up the escalatory ladder, precisely because they're not suicidal. And even though I say, in general, I think it's better for fewer countries to have nuclear weapons than more because of how destructive and reckless and dangerous those are, not just to a particular group of people, but to humanity, I am receptive to the argument I've heard Professor Mearsheimer make, that perhaps Iran having a nuclear weapon would actually create more stability in the region, because right now Israel just goes around doing whatever it wants, taking whatever land it wants, bombing whoever it wants, killing whoever it wants, because their nuclear weapons make them the bully of the neighborhood.
If there was a balance of power, a kind of forced respect, the way we saw with India and Pakistan, given that both of them have nuclear weapons. Everyone's very careful with North Korea and China and the United States and Russia. If there were that kind of fear on the part of the Israelis rather than this belief that we can just fight whoever they want, there's a good likelihood, a very good argument to make that there'd actually be fewer wars, less conflict, and more stability in that region.
