Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Warmongering Neocons Smitten with Biden, Havana Syndrome Conspiracy Theory Crumbles
March 05, 2023
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Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Wednesday March 1, 2023. Watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to the podcast on Spotify

One of the most fanatical neocons in American media, The New York Times Bret Stephens converted his column today into a homage to the greatness of Joe Biden – his moral courage and clarity, his strength of character, his steadfast support for what is right when it comes to the war in Ukraine. Stephens favorably compared Biden not only to French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz – he said Biden was far better than even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Stephens’s hatred for Donald Trump, shared by most neocons, is too well-known for him to have even bothered to argue that Biden is superior to Trump. For neocons, everyone is superior to Trump. And most amazingly of all, Bret Stephens in The New York Times essentially endorsed Joe Biden's reelection in 2024, directing him on how to ensure that he wins the second term, which this neocon extremist believes this country desperately needs. 

If it were just an example of a single neocon kind of losing his mind temporarily and writing a baseline to the greatness of Joe Biden, it would be worth noting more for entertainment purposes but this is something far more significant. All of this illustrates one of the most important yet under-discussed political transformations of the last decade, namely, the full-scale union between the country's most fanatical neocons on the one hand and the Democratic Party on the other. And while many liberals like to tell themselves the pleasing fairy tale that this happened only due to their common contempt for Trump, the reality is exactly the opposite. The migration of neocons back to the Democratic Party was well underway long before anyone even imagined such a thing as President Donald Trump. And more importantly, this alliance is based not on shared hatred for any one individual, but on the perception of the neocons, the very well-grounded and accurate perception, that the Democratic Party is now far more hospitable to core neocon values of endless war and sacrificing the lives and well-being of ordinary Americans for an agenda that serves foreign nationals and a sliver, of American elites and nobody else. We will examine in depth this ever-deepening alliance and what it means for American politics. 

Plus, the corporate media suffers yet another humiliating debacle, this time by having their melodramatic script about what they called the Havana Syndrome blow up in their faces in the most humiliating possible way. We would love, I promise, to be able to have just one episode where we don't have to cover the systemic rot at the heart of the U.S. corporate media, but their constant embarrassments, errors, and deceit make that very difficult for us to accomplish. 

As a reminder, System Update episodes are now available on every leading podcast platform, including Apple and Spotify the day after they air, live, here on Rumble. Simply follow System Update, if you like, while listening to episodes in podcast form. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. 


Monologue

 

One of the surest ways to know that your country's political discourse is irretrievably broken is when the most important news events, the ones that matter most, are the least discussed. Such is the case for the radical political transformation that I regard as the single most important in the last decade: the re-migration of neoconservatives back to the Democratic Party, where they began decades ago, and the resulting full-scale enduring alliance between the most fanatical neocons and Democrats, the unholy alliance that I would argue, has become the single most dominant political faction in the United States. 

Like many commonly used political terms, neocon lacks a very precise and universally accepted definition. But – as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about the long failed attempt by the Supreme Court to define obscenity, “I know it when I see it” – we are able to use that standard to recognize many neocons. And while we will, in just a few minutes, spend some time defining neoconservatives and reviewing their lowly and destructive trajectory in American public life, one of the people who is indisputably a neocon using the Justice Stewart standard, someone who exudes its core values and tactics from every pore of his body, is New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. 

Prior to being hired by The New York Times, in 2017, as a columnist, Stephens has spent almost two decades as a foreign policy columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and for a few years as editor-in-chief of the Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post. His writings throughout all those years were of along classic neoconservative ideology: he was an ardent supporter of the invasion of Iraq; he was a very vocal cheerleader for the most extreme abuses and civil liberties assaults carried out under the banner of the War on Terror – someone whose only criticisms of Bush-Cheney militarism was that it failed to go far enough by failing to carry out regime change operations in Syria and Iran, for instance; and he has always been driven by a virtually binding, absolute allegiance to the government of Israel – that translates not only as an endless demand for always greater U.S. financial and military aid to Israel but also as a reflexive defense of virtually everything that that foreign nation does. 

Among American liberals, it has become one of their favorite pastimes to explode with indignation every time the Times publishes a new column by Bret Stephens, complaining that the paper is giving him a platform, something they regard as proof of the New York Times tolerance for or even the support of far-right-wing fascism and white supremacy or whatever their favorite insult of the week is. Every time there's a Bret Stephens column, liberals react that way. 

When the Times announced its hiring of Stephens in 2017, the rage-driven reaction of liberals surprised even me. While accustomed as I have become to the liberal belief that newspapers should only hire journalists whose views perfectly adhere to liberal pieties. Watching that orgy of outrage over his hiring, I actually wrote an article that very week, the week of Stephens’s hiring, trying to warn liberals that the far more significant hiring that week by the Times was not Bret Stephens, but his Wall Street Journal colleague and protégé, Bari Weiss, whose hiring was announced just two days after his. But few had heard of Bari Weiss at the time and they were far too fixated with collective rage over Stephens and his hiring to hear anything else. 

Here, for example, is an Intercept headline accompanying an article by reporter Zaid Jilani that reflected the typical liberal anger over Stephens’ hiring “New York Times Promises Truth and Diversity, Then Hires Climate-Denying Anti-Arab White Guy”. The subheadline: “Readers have flocked to the New York Times after it reasserted its principles in the Trump era. Then it hired the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens”. 

The left-wing media watchdog group, FAIR, published an article during that week headlined “Three Reasons Bret Stephens Should Not Be a New York Times Columnist”. Their  reasons: 1) he's a climate denier; 2) he advocates crimes against humanity, meaning the War on Terror abuses such as torture and the due process for the imprisonments of the Bush-Cheney era, and – no left-liberal article would be complete without it – 3) he's a racist, citing a long line of derogatory statements that Stephens had written over the years about Arabs and their culture as a means of defending Israel, such as, “The Arab world's problems are a problem of their mind or, to be more specific, the “disease” of their mind”. 

As so often happens, the liberal script when it came to the rage over Bret Stephens’s hiring, was nearly identical. Here, for example, is the headline from Vox that reads “The New York Times Should Not Have Hired Climate Change Bullshitter Bret Stephens' '. 

Here, from The Huffington Post: “The New York Times Publisher Writes To Those Who Ditched Subscriptions Over Bret Stephens” – because liberals were canceling what the Huffington Post said was a mass exodus, but really just a few hundred or a couple of thousand ditched subscriptions, in protest. 

To be very clear, I am the opposite of a Bret Stephens fan. I agree with a lot of the criticisms I just referenced. I regard neoconservatism of the kind that Bret Stephens advocates as the most toxic and destructive ideological force in America. It's the ideology of Bill Kristol and David Frum and Dick and Liz Cheney, a bloodthirsty and sociopathic mentality that seeks to keep the U.S. in a posture of endless wars, one after the next, for the benefit of everyone and everything except the lives of ordinary American citizens. That they are just fanatical about ensuring that it is other families and almost never their own that have to fight in those wars and die in those wars that they cheer, makes them even more morally repellent to me than ever. And this disgust for neocons has been central to my worldview since I began writing about politics in 2005, largely motivated by contempt for the war-mongering and regime change fixations and civil liberties assaults that this small but very influential faction of neocons had architected for America and deceived ordinary Americans through propaganda into believing that it was in their interest to support it. 

So, my contempt for neocons began very early on and endures to this very day. For decades this intense disgust of neocons was shared by virtually everyone who identified as a Democrat, a liberal or a leftist, or something similar, as reflected by the rage when Bret Stephens was hired by the New York Times. My contempt for neocons and their ideology has never wavered. But now the opposite is true for most liberal pundits and liberal elites who now regard neocons not only as tolerable but deeply admirable, even heroic. Liz Cheney was named one of America's heroes for 2022 by Mother Jones. That the leftwing magazine named after a socialist activist famous for civil disobedience in pursuit of far left-wing causes. Their hero is now Dick Cheney’s daughter, the Wicked Neocon Witch of the West.

The factor that caused liberals and so many leftists to so radically change their views of neocons from unbridled hatred to respect, affection and admiration is the same fact that dictates all of their views, namely whether someone likes or hates Donald Trump. And since neocons viewed Donald Trump almost immediately as a grave threat to their agenda, they converted themselves into Trump's sworn enemy, devoting themselves with a single-minded fixation to doing everything possible to sabotaging, maligning and destroying Trump. That obviously wasn't true of all neocons. People like John Bolton ended up being hired by the Trump administration and working within it, although he eventually got fired, it was certainly true of most. 

And that was all it took for Liberals to immediately abandon their long standing view of neocons as monstrous war criminals with an insatiable thirst for wars that are totally unrelated to the welfare of the American people and almost overnight view them as the opposite, as valued allies and wise thought leaders. That's why David Frum, George W. Bush's speechwriter, who penned so many of Bush's most harmful lies, doesn't write for National Review or Fox News. He writes for The Atlantic. It's why Bill Kristol's social media exploded due almost entirely to new liberal followers and why he regularly has the red carpet rolled out for him as though he's some honored, wise statesman by MSNBC. It's why Liz Cheney lost her GOP primary by a humiliating and record setting 35 points while liberal columnists write pieces to her greatness and moral character. 

While it is the neocons’ hatred for Trump that made liberals revere neocons, that is not why neocons have migrated back to the original petri dish from which they first emerged. What explains that is that neocons tend to be much more shrewd and clever than the liberals whom they have deceived into reversing them. They understood well before Trump's emergence on the scene that the Republican Party was becoming increasingly hostile to their unlimited militarism and their thirst for wars. Wars come at the expense of ordinary working-class Americans who pay for those wars and die in them, that receive no benefits from them. Starting in the second term of the Obama administration, neocons could see through things like the success that Ron Paul had with an anti-interventionist message deep in the primaries of Iowa and South Carolina, and who believed that Hillary Clinton would likely succeed Obama and could barely contain their excitement over the prospect of a Hillary Clinton administration. Neocons, before Trump, began signaling their intention to abandon the Republican Party, which had served as their host body for the entire War on Terror and reinfect the Democratic Party, which they had decided to make their home for the near future at least. 

Despite this union, many liberals who have been trained to love those neocons still do harbor animus toward Bret Stevens. And that's partly due to his heresies on culture war issues, other kinds of religion, liberal religious beliefs, a church that touches his opposition to some planks of gender ideology, and his long-standing skepticism of climate change – though neocons, if nothing else, always know where their bread is buttered, and Bret Stephens recently announced after taking a trip to Greenland that he's now largely on board with the liberal view of climate change, acknowledging that it really is the crisis that liberals have long been insisting it is. So, there are very few reasons left for liberals to hate Bret Stephens other than his occasional opposition to the most extremist planks of gender ideology. At this point, their dislike of Stephens is basically just reflexive, a kind of learned behavior they never unlearned. But all of that is highly likely to change. Stephens may very well now lose his status as one of the very few neocons liberals have not yet ineffectually passionately embraced as a result of his decision today to write what is not so much a political column in the New York Times as it is a homage, a passion to the moral courage and general greatness of Joe Biden. 

To those paying little attention to U.S. politics over the last decade, or for those who have little capacity for thinking critically, it may seem surprising, shocking even, that a lifelong neocon would not only revere Joe Biden as our modern-day Winston Churchill, but basically endorse his reelection as president in 2024, something not even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has yet willing to do when asked. Writing under the headline “On Ukraine, Biden Outshines Macron, Scholz – and DeSantis,” Stephens gushed about Biden with such adolescent fanboy fervor that it would even embarrass Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert or the Washington Post team of fact-checkers. 

We offer you just a few of the most illustrative paragraphs of the reverence Bret Stephens penned today for Joe Biden. He began by condemning French President Macron and German chancellor Scholz for the crime of trying to find a diplomatic resolution to the war in Ukraine, which Stephens finds so glorious and exciting. About those diplomatic efforts, Stephens writes, “These are preposterous suggestions.” And then he unleashes his love and respect and homage to Joe Biden:

 

That's the point. Those who now argue that President Zelenskyy of Ukraine needs to be “realist” or “pragmatic” – that is, that he should stop short of pursuing a complete Russian withdrawal from all occupied Ukrainian territories – are proposing a solution they would never countenance for their own countries under ordinary circumstances, let alone during a struggle for national survival. That's why, as the war in Ukraine entered the second year, I feel grateful for Joe Biden. Fault him all you want on many issues, particularly his gradualist approach to arming Ukraine, but on the most consequential question of our time, he has the big thing right (The New York Times. Feb. 28, 2023). 

 

In other words, the one criticism Bret Stephens recognizes as valid of Joe Biden is that he has not armed the Ukrainians enough – not quickly enough or aggressively enough. But, he says, he got what, in Bret Stephens’s mind, is the most consequential question of our time, whether Russia or Ukraine will rule various provinces in Eastern Ukraine or whether they will be independent. That's a real privilege talking. Being a New York Times columnist and believing that the most important issue is who rules various provinces in Eastern Ukraine. For Bret Stephens, the fact that Joe Biden has gotten this right more than any other world leader means that he deserves a second term. He goes on:

 

As for prudence, musing openly about the need for eventual negotiation harms Ukraine's solidarity and morale, both key factors for survival and success. An overwhelming majority of Ukrainians want to retake all the territories seized by Russia, including Crimea. That political fact should weigh in the mind of Biden's foreign policy team. Public support for Ukraine is eroding, particularly among Republicans and conservatives who know better, including Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who are shamefully hedging their bets. President Biden likes to say that the United States will support Ukraine for as long as it takes, but that promise can expire on January 20, 2025, if he doesn't win a second term, he owes it to his own legacy, not to hazard what is potentially the most historic accomplishment of his presidency on next year's race. (The New York Times. Feb. 28, 2023). 

 

There's a lot packed in there, into those claims, beginning with the fact that he says a majority of Ukrainians, an overwhelming majority, want not only to have the war end but instead want to expel Russia from all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. The idea that NATO is going to support Ukraine for it to successfully expel every last Russian troop, including from the areas of Eastern Ukraine where overwhelmingly people identify far more with Moscow than with Kyiv, where far more would rather either be independent or under the rule of Putin than under the rule of Zelenskyy is utter madness. But even more unhinged is the idea that Russia would just stand by and allow Ukraine and NATO to take back Crimea. And Bret Stephens’ assertion – and that's all it is, is an assertion – that the vast majority of people support Biden's vision, that they want to fight until the very end, until every last bit of territory is recovered, including in Crimea, you'll note, has no citation. He doesn't say the poll. He doesn't link to a study. That's just something that he wants to believe. It's a nice fairy tale to believe. And so, he just asserted it. All Ukrainians are behind me and Joe Biden: they want to fight this war until the very end. 

It's very hard in a war zone to take accurate polls. It's very hard in a country under martial law, which is what Ukraine is, to get people to speak openly. Even before the war began, when Russia invaded Ukraine, President Zelenskyy had already proven himself very willing to engage in anti-democratic and authoritarian tactics, not in 2022, but in 2021. He had shut down three opposition television stations. He had begun attacking opposition parties and even questioning whether or not they had a right to exist. But one of the pieces of evidence that we can use in assessing whether or not Bret Stephens’s assertion has any remote validity to it, namely, that the vast majority of Ukrainians want to fight this war until the very end, or whether that's something only Bret Stephens wants because he gets to say that while he and his family are far removed from the battlefield, is the fact that President Zelenskyy is not using a volunteer army. He's not using a huge group of Ukrainian men who step forward to say, we want to fight the Russian army until the very end, even if it means risking our own lives to do so. The exact opposite is true. Over the last several months, there has been increasingly compelling evidence of the fact that more and more and more Ukrainian men are unwilling to fight this war. They're unwilling to die in this war. That's why Zelenskyy has to rely on a draft army and a conscription army the way the United States had to do when it wanted to fight a war in Vietnam, that most Americans had a great deal of difficulty understanding what relevance it had to their lives, who ruled the southern part of Vietnam, whether it was going to be right-wing U.S. allies or communist or anyone else. You didn't have Americans lining up around the block to volunteer to fight in Vietnam the way you had Americans lining up to fight after 9/11 when they realized that, in fact, their own country had been attacked, because people are willing to fight for a cause they believe in, in the end, to die for a cause they believe in. But if they don't think the war is worth it, that's when conscription is needed. And not only has Zelenskyy had to rely on conscription, on the draft, on forcing people who don't want to fight to actually fight, it's become increasingly difficult to prevent people from deserting, to prevent people from exploiting the grave corruption that has always governed Ukraine by paying people to get them out of Ukraine. 

Here, for example, is one of the most recent articles on the problems Zelenskyy is facing, from The Economist, on February 26 – so, just a few days ago – and, remember, this is in the context of a New York Times columnist today asserting that vast, vast majority of Ukrainians not only want to fight to get Russia out of the parts they invaded, but to fight to get them out of all parts, including Crimea, which would be a years’ long war, that Russia would do everything in its power to prevent. Why is it that The New York Times columnist is able to make an assertion so dubious without any evidence presented when in fact the evidence strongly suggests that what he said was false? 

Here, for example, The Economist’s headline reads “Ukraine Finds Stepping Up Mobilization is Not so Easy. Military recruiters are accused of rough tactics as they try to boost the headcount”. 

Here's an anecdote that illustrates how aggressive and even violent Zelensky's kind of forces have to be to get people willing to go fight against the Russians on the front line: 

Ruslan Kubay was surprised to receive a draft notice in late January. Registered as seriously disabled since childhood – Mr. Kubay is missing both hands – he falls under a list of automatic exemptions from service. Even more surprising, however, was the reaction of officials at the local registration office in Drohobich, near Lyiv. Far from admitting their error, they doubled down and declared him fit for service. Someone who didn't want to fight and someone who had no hands, Mr. Kubay’s case was an extreme, but far from an isolated incident. 

 

Ukraine has visibly stepped up mobilization activities in the first two months of this year. For unclear reasons, officials in western Ukraine have been the most aggressive, but the trend is clear across the country. There have been reports of draft notices issued and sometimes violently enforced at military funerals, checkpoints in Kharkyiv, shopping centers in Kyiv and on street corners In Odessa. Popular ski resorts lie deserted despite the first proper snows in the winter – footage of military officials snooping around at the slopes were enough to keep the crowds away. In every town and city across the country, social media channels share information about where recruitment officers might be lurking. Previously, only members of Ukraine's draft commission were allowed to issue notices and only at home addresses. Now a wider group of officials can issue the two-part document, and there is no geographical limitation. Another difference is who is being called up. In the first wave most of the recruits were voluntary; queues outside draft offices where a frequent sight. Now officials are recruiting from a much less enthusiastic crowd. 

 

In a country like Ukraine, there are inevitably less-than-legal ways to escape the call-up too. “It's a dialectic of nature”, said Colonel Kevlyuk, who worked in the general staff until 2021. “Whenever there is demand, you'll always find someone to supply it”. Some arrange fictitious marriages with mothers of three or four or more children. Others get corrupt military doctors to issue a medical exemption. For a few thousand dollars, one can pay to be smuggled across the border. 

Government officials say excesses are being addressed as they come to light. But with the Army set on achieving a military breakthrough before the summer, recruitment of less-motivated Ukrainians [by “less motivated”, they mean people who don't want to fight] will surely be stepped up and scandals will probably continue. 

 

The armed forces may respond to legal challenges by improving their bureaucracy, but there are other ways to deal with them too. Informed sources say that at least two lawyers disputing draft orders have abruptly been called up themselves. As the Army well knows, mobilized lawyers are automatically barred from practicing (The Economist. Feb 26, 2023). 

 

Again, this is not the first time we have heard that Ukraine and Zelenskyy are having a great deal of difficulty in getting their own citizens to fight in a war that people like Bret Stephens keep telling us is of the utmost importance – a very easy thing to say when it's not you or your family who have to go and fight in that war. 

Back in early February, we had another Politico article entitled “Ukraine Army Discipline Crackdown Sparks Fear and Fury on the Front. Critics say new legislation that punishes deserters and rule-breakers more harshly contravenes human rights and demotivates military personnel”. The article states:

 

President Zelenskyy refused to veto a new law that strengthens punishments for wayward military personnel on Thursday, rejecting a petition signed by over 25,000 Ukrainians who argue it's too harsh. “The key to the combat capability of military units and ultimately of Ukraine's victory is compliance with military discipline”, Zelensky said in his written response to the petition. Ukrainian soldiers have stunned the world with their resilience and battlefield successes withstanding a year-long onslaught from Russian troops.

 

But among Kyiv's forces, made up largely of fresh recruits lacking previous military experience or training, some are struggling to cope. There are those who have rebelled against commanders’ orders, gotten drunk, or misbehaved; others, running low on ammunition and morale, have fled for their lives, abandoning their positions.

 

Seeking to bring his forces into line, Zelenskyy in January signed into force a punitive law that introduces harsher punishments for deserters and wayward soldiers and strips them of their right to appeal (Politico. Feb 5, 2023). 

 

For me, this is classic neocon behavior. They feel so powerful and purposeful and compensate for their feelings of lifelong internal weakness, typically as men, by getting to write columns that glorify war and all of the courage that's required, the way in which we all get to be Winston Churchill, not by actually going to the frontlines and fighting, but by publishing columns condemning people whose backbone isn't quite as solid as people like Bret Stevens. 

But that's what neocons have always done. That's what they're notorious for, is they love to send other people's families to war. They love to demand that other people risk their lives in wars while they can find themselves writing articles with pretty language that elevates the cause and, most importantly of all, elevates themselves. And so, Bret Stephens can sit in the New York Times office and claim that a war over who controls the Eastern provinces of Ukraine is the single most consequential question of our time; that Joe Biden deserves reelection for getting this utmost question so correct when the people who actually have to go and fight in that war are seeking increasingly desperate ways to avoid doing so. But that is what neocons have been doing for the last 20 years. Almost none of them or their family members, their children, their siblings, or their relatives volunteered to fight in the wars that they were such fervent supporters of. 

To me, that is a classic attribute of neoconservatism, and few people illustrate that and embody it more than Bret Stephens. So, not only is his claim false, apparently, that the vast majority of Ukrainians are eager to fight to the very end, even to take back Crimea from Russia, but it reflects such a grotesque moral failing that year after year, decade after decade, someone like him uses nothing more than his pen and the safety of his life as a journalist to send people – millions, thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands after the next – to wars, that they go die. And so that he gets to feel strong and purposeful. 

But note that this is what the Democratic Party, in his view, has welcomed. He realizes that if you look at where resistance to the war in Ukraine is growing, where there's anger over the fact that we're sacrificing the lives of our own citizens, not yet by sending them into the war zone, but by sacrificing their economic future – when people in East Palestine cannot get anyone to pay attention to their crisis when people are without healthcare coverage and the ability to send their kids to college or treat Fentanyl addiction, that we're sending hundreds of billions of dollars to this foreign war that not even the people of that country seem willing to fight in so that the neocons of the world can feel good about themselves. And they recognize that there's growing opposition to that mentality over the years in the Republican Party and that is why they've decided, quite wisely, that if you want support for endless warfare, you have to basically go to the Democratic Party. The vote back in May, just three months into the war over whether to send $40 billion to Ukraine, reflected that reality, reflected the correct perception by neocons that the Democratic Party is the place to go if you believe what they believe. 

Every single member of the Democratic Caucus and the House and the Senate voted yes. Not a single one had the courage to vote no, whereas at least seven or eight dozen Republican members of the House and Senate voted no. And there's clearly now growing reluctance, growing resistance among Republicans who now control the House in order to place strong limits on how much more aid we're willing to give to fuel this proxy war. Whereas I don't see any evidence of any resistance, let alone significant resistance on the part of the Democratic Party. And when you go down the list of neoconservative priorities, one after the next, you find exactly the same thing - the desire to change the regime of Bashar Assad, to bomb Libya and remove Muammar Gadhafi all found great support within the Democratic Party. There are a lot of Republicans who supported it, too, but at least there was a lot of opposition in the Republican Party because – going all the way back to Ron Paul, and the success he had, and then this new MAGA movement that emphasizes the need to avoid unnecessary wars – the fact that Trump boasts, as he should, of being the first president in decades not to involve the U.S. in a new war shows how hostile the Republican Party, long the host for neocons, has now become to neocons. And that is the reason that neocons are aligning with the Democratic Party. 

As I said, this is not a new development. This became very obvious from the early moments of the Trump presidency. Back in July of 2017, just six months into the Trump presidency, there was a creation of a new foreign policy group that was designed to essentially promote hawkish policies toward Russia and beyond. And the people who formed this group and the people who were financing it were essentially the who's who of the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party and neocons led by people like Bill Kristol. They were in a complete alliance. And that's why in July 2017, I wrote an article about this new group. It turned out this group was the group that sponsored and created the Hamilton 68 database that purported to be able to identify which themes were being pushed by Russian accounts on the Internet, a device that the Twitter Files just proved was completely fraudulent. But the evidence for me was very clear early on that what we were seeing was this brand new alliance between the Democratic Party and neocons that had to do with things far beyond their shared dislike of Trump. 

The headline under which I wrote was, “With New D.C. Policy Group Dems Continue To Rehabilitate And Unify With Bush-Era Neocons”. And the reason that was so amazing to me was that when I began writing about politics, there was nobody more hated by Democrats, leftists, or liberals. Then these Bush-era neocons. And so, to watch them form groups with these very same people and to cheer them and to buy their books and to applaud them on social media and to formalize this union was amazing to me as somebody who, again, had never watered down my contempt for neocons the way seemingly every Democratic liberal has. The subheadline here is “This union is far more than a marriage of convenience to stop Trump; it reflects a broad-based agreement on U.S. hawkishness toward Russia and beyond”. The name of the group was the Alliance for Securing Democracy. And here you can see the first paragraph of my article where I draw the conclusion that I was seeing,

One of the most under-discussed yet consequential changes in the American political landscape is the reunion between the Democratic Party and the country's most extreme and discredited neocons. While the rise of Donald Trump, whom the neocons loathe, has accelerated this realignment, it began long before the ascension of Trump and is driven by far more common beliefs than contempt for the current president. 

You know, I was constantly being asked by liberals and leftists of this time “What happened to you?”,  constantly being accused of having changed my core views. And I was being asked that and accused of that while I was watching those very same people obviously enter into an enduring and ideologically based alliance with the neocons, who they had long claimed were the most malicious force in American life. So, for sure they were right that someone had changed but it would seem clear to me that it wasn't me since my view of neocons had remained steady and unchanged. 

It was a very hard thing for liberals to start to justify and explain how is it the people that you most hated are people that you're now embracing and their excuse, the only one they could really offer, was “Look, we're not in agreement with neocons. We don't have any more in common with them than we ever did before. It's just an alliance of pragmatism. It's just an alliance of convenience. So, it's very temporary and that will disappear the minute Trump is gone”. 

The reason I knew that was a lie – and you can see that it ends up being a lie now that it is as strong as ever even without Trump anywhere near Washington – is that the movement toward creating this alliance between neocons and Democrats began well before Trump was even on anyone's mind as a major political actor. 

Here, for example, is an article in the New York Times, in 2014 – so, a year before Trump even announced his candidacy. The headline of it is “The Next Act Of Neocons”. It's by Jacob Heilbrunn, who's one of the most attentive and scholarly students of neocon behavior. And you can see here on the screen two figures: on the left is Hillary Clinton and on the right is Robert Kagan. Robert Kagan is a classic neoconservative. His entire family, the Kagan's, are all neocons, very influential neocons. And Robert Kagan also so happens to be married to Victoria Nuland, another neocon who is also highly influential and who ended up working both in Hillary Clinton's State Department as well as in John Kerry’s State Department, after serving as Dick Cheney's primary advisor on the War on Terror. 

Here is what the article is describing: 

After nearly a decade in the political wilderness, the neoconservative movement is back, using the turmoil in Iraq and Ukraine to claim that it is President Obama, not the movement's interventionist foreign policy that dominated early George W. Bush-era Washington, that bears responsibility for the current round of global crises. Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver's seat of America's foreign policy. Other neocons have followed Mr. Kagan's careful centrism and respect for Mrs. Clinton. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in The New Republic this year that “It is clear that in administration councils she was a principled voice for a strong stand on controversial issues, whether supporting the Afghan surge or the intervention in Libya. And the thing is these neocons have a point. Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels. likened Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy (The New York Times. July 5, 2014). 

 

In other words, Hillary Clinton is and long has been a full-fledged supporter of virtually every key plank of neoconservative ideology. 

So, the article concludes, “It's easy to imagine Mrs. Clinton's making room for the neocons in her administration. No one can charge her with being weak on national security with the likes of Robert Kagan on board”. 

This is exactly what happened. There were all sorts of policies that the Obama administration supported what neocons also supported, including things like allowing the CIA to try and unseat Bashar Assad in a regime change operation, the bombing of Libya in order to remove Muammar Gadhafi and all sorts of other aggressive actions that Obama took in terms of bombing multiple Middle Eastern countries with drones. But one of the most aggressive critics of Obama for failing to do enough inside the administration was Hillary Clinton. And she was particularly scathing when it came to criticizing Obama for failing to confront Russia aggressively enough in Syria and in Ukraine. And the neocons saw that Hillary Clinton and her allies were not just hospitable to their agenda, but in many ways had become the most vocal and effective and devoted, and passionate advocates of the neoconservative worldview. That is when neocons began realizing that their future lay not with the Republican Party with it, but with the Democratic Party. And, again, while the emergence of Trump may have accelerated that – surely it did – it was a much broader and more fundamental shift in the dynamics of what these parties were that led neocons to believe, correctly, that they ought to align most with the Democratic Party. 

Just to give you an idea of how these neocons had been discussed by liberal media outlets, including people like Robert Kagan, who was on board with Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, here's an article in The Guardian, from April 2008, so, during the Bush years, entitled “A neocon by any other name.” It's basically an article explaining that Robert Kagan, though trying to deny that that neocon title belongs to him, is in fact a classic neocon. The article says, 

 

Robert Kagan, author, essayist, former diplomat, pre-eminent thinker of what is called ‘neoconservatism’ – and now foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential nominee John McCain – would like it to be known that there are many things that he is not.  A hate figure for large sections of the left, Kagan has been blamed for many things, prominent among them being one of the intellectual authors and cheerleaders for the U.S.-led war in Iraq. So, when it comes to Kagan, the gloves are off. He has been denigrated for being a writer on Middle Eastern issues who knows no Arabic; an expert on military affairs who has not served in the military. Others have been stronger still, accusing him of ‘spewing out one falsehood after another’ about the progress of the war in Iraq.

 

But these days, Kagan is to be found in Brussels in the house provided by the U.S. State Department to his wife, Victoria Nuland, America's permanent representative to NATO, a pretty place with cherry trees blossoming in the extensive garden. It was these years that would shape Kagan's political thinking, which he would define in a seminal essay, written with William Kristol and published in the influential journal Foreign Affairs, in 1996, calling for a neo-Reaganite foreign policy. Writing in the middle of the Clinton presidency, they argued that U.S. conservatives were adrift. 

 

“Today's lukewarm consensus about America's reduced role in a post-Cold War world," they wrote, “is wrong." Conservatives should not accede to it; it is bad for the country and, incidentally, bad for conservatism. Conservatives will not be able to govern America over the long term if they fail to offer a more elevated vision of America's international role. What role would that be? Their answer was this: “Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the” evil empire” the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America's security, supporting its friends, advancing its interest, and standing up for its principles around the world (The Guardian.  April 27, 2008). 

 

That's a really important reminder of how far back this history goes. Remember, as we've shown you before when George Bush ran against Al Gore in 2000. His critique of the Clinton foreign policy was not that it wasn't hawkish enough, but that it was too hawkish, that the U.S. was involved in too many wars, including in places like the Balkans, and that, in the words of George Bush, “a more humble foreign policy was needed’. Obviously, 9/11 changed that radically But this was already a fight going on in Republican Party politics. And people like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan and his wife, Victoria Nuland, were already deeply concerned back then that Republicans were abandoning this posture of endless war. And we're starting to see in the likes of Madeleine Albright and Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton that, in many ways, Democrats were more hospitable to the neocon agenda. This has been an alliance long in the making. It now clearly culminated in what is very sturdy, and I would suggest a very enduring alliance. And it is based on something very real, which is that if you want to find anti war or anti-interventionist sentiment in Washington among elected officials, you need to go to the right-wing, populist wing of the Republican Party. But if you want to find a party that is a guaranteed vehicle for neoconservative aggression, that place is the Democratic Party. That's the reason why neocons are so closely aligned with Democrats now. It's the reason why people like Bret Stephens write in The New York Times that Joe Biden is one of the greatest moral leaders of our time and that a second term for Joe Biden is so urgent – something unthinkable a decade ago, or even a little longer, has become our reality: that neocons are not just part of the Democratic Party coalition, but when it comes to foreign policy, are its most influential thought leaders. 

These are the implications of today's New York Times op-ed. The reason why I wanted to spend so much time on it is that it sheds light on that history. We do want to turn to another story, which, as I mentioned at the top, is something we almost have to do because it's yet another instance of a very embarrassing media debacle. We just devoted the show last night to the way in which they essentially proclaimed that the lab leak theory of how COVID began was something that was “debunked” to the point where only crazy conspiracy theorists advocate for it. And it got to the point where people who believe in the lab leak theory were banned from even advocating that online only for it to turn out that at least major parts of the U.S. government, their most elite scientific teams believe. Although nobody knows for sure, in their view that the lab leak theory is not just viable, the more likely explanation for how COVID began. 

We have today another similar media debacle where the corporate media spent three years hyping this thing that they called the Havana Syndrome, which began with diplomats in Cuba claiming that their brains were being targeted and harmed by some kind of new sonic weapon that nobody had ever heard of. The media ultimately claimed that it was almost certainly Russia that was behind it in the attempt to pent up American anger and hostility toward Russia only for the parts of the government that actually want to gin up hostility toward Russia, admitting what we've seen evidence of for quite a long time now, which is that the whole thing, all along, was essentially a scam. 

Here we have from The Washington Post a new article today headlined, “Havana Syndrome Not Caused By Energy Weapon Or Foreign Adversary. Intelligence Review Finds”. The Post explains, 

 

The mysterious ailment known as a “Havana Syndrome” did not result from the actions of a foreign adversary, according to an intelligence report that shatters a long-disputed theory that hundreds of U.S. personnel were targeted and sickened by a clandestine enemy, wielding energy waves as a weapon. The new intelligence assessment caps a years-long effort by the CIA and several other U.S. intelligence agencies to explain why career diplomats, intelligence officials and others serving in U.S. missions around the world experience what they describe as strange and painful acoustic sensations. The effects of this mysterious trauma shortened careers racked up large medical bills and in some cases caused severe physical and emotional suffering.

 

Seven intelligence agencies participated in the review of approximately 1000 cases of “anomalous health incidents”, the term the government uses to describe a constellation of physical symptoms, including ringing in the ears, followed by pressure in the head and nausea, headaches and acute discomfort. Five of those agencies determined it was “very unlikely” that a foreign adversary was responsible for the symptoms, either as a result of purposeful actions – such as a directed energy weapon – or as the byproduct of some other activity, including electronic surveillance that unintentionally could have made people sick, the officials said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the findings of the assessment, which had not yet been made public (The Washington Post. March 1, 2023). 

 

Like everybody knows, who watches my show or has followed my journalism, I'm somebody who strongly believes that skepticism is warranted when the U.S. intelligence community makes claims. And this is a case where the Washington Post is reporting the findings of the intelligence community that essentially none of this happened. So, the question could be reasonably posed to me: Why am I willing to place faith in this conclusion of an intelligence community assessment given my long-standing skepticism toward reports by the intelligence community?

I have several answers to that I think is dispositive of the question. First of all, we have to distinguish, as every rational field of discipline does, between assertions that somebody makes that advance or promote their interests versus assertions that they make that undermine their own interests. So, for example, if the CIA makes a claim about an enemy of the CIA – Russia interfered in our elections; Russia was controlling Vladimir Putin; It was Russia that sabotaged its own pipeline – you should have a huge amount of skepticism because that's a case where the intelligence community is making assertions that advance its foreign policy agenda, its interests. 

But when the intelligence community makes statements that undermine their interests, when they admit that there's no evidence for a long-standing theory that accuses a U.S. enemy of some dastardly deed as they're doing here, then it's entitled to a lot more faith and confidence, because this is a case where the intelligence community is making claims contrary to their interests. And as I said, this is a concept that should be self-evident, logically. If someone says something that undermines their interest, that seems more trustworthy than someone making a claim that promotes their interest. But it's also recognized in the law, for example, most of you are likely familiar with the concept of hearsay, which is when a witness or somebody makes a claim outside of the courtroom and is unavailable to testify themselves about whether they said it. Someone is prohibited – under the rules of hearsay – from getting up on the stand and saying, so-and-so said this outside of the courtroom because it's so easy for a party to a lawsuit to make up claims that advance their own interest by claiming that somebody said something when the witness isn't there to say whether or not they actually said it. 

There's an exception, though, for when hearsay is actually admissible. There are several exceptions, but one of them is called a declaration against interest. I won’t delve deeply into the technicalities of what this means but, essentially, it's what I just said, that the law regards a statement by a witness as being more credible if that statement undermines the interest of the person saying it, then if it advances the interest of the person saying it. It's just a very common logical principle that we should be more skeptical of self-interested statements and more believing in ones that undermine our self-interest. 

But the evidence that all of this is fake has been available for years and comes from many more sources than just the U.S. intelligence community. I've been reporting on this story for years now and it's been very clear that there's no evidence for it. 

Here, in October 2021, for example, we did an in-depth video, I believe it was something like 90 Minutes, and the title of it was “The Latest CIA/Media Fraud: Claiming Cricket Mating Sounds Are A Russian Sonic Microwave Attack”. And this was in the wake of a study that had captured some of the noises that these diplomats claim they were hearing that they believe constituted the sonic attack. And they were able to prove that the noises that they were hearing were identical to the mating sounds that crickets make which are commonly found in the Caribbean, in places like Cuba.

In this video, we examined all kinds of evidence, including what became a publicly available, non-classified study that essentially said the reason that so many diplomats began reporting the same symptoms is that they were all hearing the media reports that this danger existed and that the media, by spreading this story, essentially created a form of mass psychosis, kind of a psychosomatic complex where people began believing that they were suffering from this disease, even though it didn't really exist, because the more people who claimed it, the more paranoia they experienced.

The report about the crickets is from the Colorado Spring Harbor Laboratory (Jan 4, 2019). The title of it is a “Recording of sonic attacks on U.S. diplomats in Cuba spectrally matches the echoing call of a Caribbean cricket”.

While the temporal pulse structure in the recording is unlike any natural insect source, when the cricket call is played on a loudspeaker and recorded indoors, the interaction of reflected sound pulse yields a sound virtually indistinguishable from the AP sample. 

 

The AP, Associated Press, had collected a sample of what these people were claiming they heard, and when they compared it to the cricket sound, it became indistinguishable.

 

This provides strong evidence that an echoing cricket call, rather than a sonic attack or other technological device is responsible for the sound and the released recording. Although the causes of the health problems reported by the embassy personnel are beyond the scope of this paper, our finding highlights the need for more rigorous research into the source of these ailments, including the potential psychogenic effects as well as possible physiological explanations unrelated to sonic attacks.

 So, in other words, what they were basically saying was – they were doing it very delicately because there were diplomats who were actually claiming that they were hearing these sounds. They wanted to take it seriously, and they were basically saying that the sounds are exactly the same as the crickets. That almost certainly came from the crickets. 

But let's remember as well just how implausible this whole story was from the start. The U.S. government had within its vast, sophisticated range of knowledge from employing some of the most sophisticated scientists on the planet, but they had no concept of what kind of technology would enable a country like Russia to go around the world with a little portable weapon, a sonic weapon, that would enable it to target the brains of American diplomats and disable and debilitate and cripple these brains. This is like a technology from the 25th century. It would have required a leap of centuries in technological advance on the part of the Russians to be able to do this in a way that the American government not only was unable to detect with their scientists but also with all of the surveillance instruments, they had no concept of how this possibly could have happened. 

 

Here now is a report from a group that was compiled by the U.S. government that was called JASON. It ended up being declassified. It's entitled “Acoustic Signals and Physiological Effects on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba” and they too essentially concluded the same thing: 

No plausible single source of energy (neither radio/microwaves nor sonic) can produce both the recorded audio/video signals and the reported medical effects [In other words, there's no technology that could do this]. We believe the recorded sounds are mechanical or biological in origin rather than electric. The most likely source is the Indies’ short-tailed cricket. 

The most likely source is a cricket. They have a picture of the cricket. And they go on to say, 

 

The call of the animal matches, in nuanced details, the spectral properties of the recordings from Cuba once room echoes are taken into account. 

 

A possible explanation for the reported symptoms is psychogenic illness, in part because the science is weak to declare any causal links from RF or acoustic weapons to brain injury without prior baseline measurements and a control group of similar background. 

 

It is also worth noting that psychogenic effects on vestibular function are common and the symptoms can be chronic. Although the JAMA paper dismisses such a “dizziness” theory, JASON believes psychogenic effects may serve to explain important components of the reported symptoms. 

Psychogenic effects is very polite - an euphemism for basically saying that these people imagined what it was that they were experiencing as a result of social influences, such as what we're about to show you.

It's hard to overstate how all of this is in the hands of the most fanatical disinformation agents in the country who are not QAnon, members who are not on Fortune, who are not operating within pro-Trump Facebook groups, but who work instead very tragically at the largest media corporations in the world, in their hands, watch what they did with this story that never had any evidence to it. 

Here is the first story. It was from NBC News and it was in 2019. And you're about to hear Andrea Mitchell and other top NBC News luminaries not only give greater credence to this story but place the blame in the lap of a nuclear-armed country. 

 

(Video 01:14:10) 

MSNBC: The mystery who or what caused American officials living in these Havana homes and several hotels to suffer headaches, dizziness and some serious brain injuries similar to a concussion? Last year, Cuban investigators told us they would never allow their territory to be used that way. But now Russia is the leading suspect, NBC News has learned, according to three U.S. officials and two others briefed on the investigation. Evidence they say, backed up by highly secret communications intercepts collected during a lengthy and ongoing investigation involving the FBI, CIA and other agencies. U.S. officials also tell NBC News investigators now believe the Americans were deliberately targeted. 

 

Juan Zarate, Senior National Security Analyst: This is not an accident. And those who think this is some sort of rogue operation I think are operating in a fantasy world. 

 

MSNBC: The State Department says it is still investigating. 

 

State Department Spokesperson: We have not assigned any blame and we continue to look into this. 

 

MSNBC: Why would Russia target American officials? [The] leading theory to disrupt President Obama's opening to the Cuban leader Raul Castro? No comment tonight from the Cubans or the Russians.  



I mean, it's – I almost want to play that for you again, because every single sentence is not just false, but incredibly dangerous and inflammatory and sensationalistic. And it's offered with almost no questioning or doubt at all. They acknowledge the CIA and the FBI are telling them this. They do what they always do, which is they take what they're told by individuals inside these agencies who are trying to gin up anger toward Russia. And the subtext always is that Russia is our enemy and President Trump is doing nothing about it because he's the victim of blackmail and can't, he's beholden to Putin. And they – for two straight minutes – just repeated over and over that it was basically proven that the Russians had developed an extremely advanced sonic weapon and were using it to target American diplomats and debilitate their brains. 

I've seen that many times and every time I watch it, it's just amazing, in part because these are the same people who will tell you every day and who really believe that the greatest threat to American democracy and all the values we hold dear in the West is disinformation. And these are the people who go and sit on panels where they talk about disinformation and how evil that is and how we can recognize it and how we can fight it. These are the people who want to censor the Internet and then aim to protect you from disinformation, even though some of these people are just so dumb that they'll believe anything the government tells them with no critical thought of any kind, while others are just malicious. They're purposely disseminating disinformation because it advances their political agenda to do so. 

I could show you clips like this all day, not just from NBC, but from CNN and many other places. But I'm just going to show you one more. Watch how the tone of this clip was manufactured, the kind of urgency of it and the certainty that they invoke, this authoritative tone. Anybody watching this who doesn't deeply distrust these people already would automatically assume it's true, given how authoritative they are in speaking and how little questioning or doubt they include in the report. Let's watch that. 

 

(Video 01:17:57] 

NBC News: Exclusive new reporting this morning from NBC News. Intelligence agencies investigating attacks on U.S. diplomats in Cuba and China now strongly suspect that Russia is to blame. 26 government workers in Havana had mysterious brain injuries starting in late 2016. And then this year, one U.S. worker in China was diagnosed with similar symptoms. Joining me now with more on this with NBC News intelligence and national security reporter Ken Dilanian. 

And so, this has been a mystery. The CIA, the FBI, other intelligence agencies have all been working to try to figure out what exactly happened here. Why do they suspect Russia now and what's the evidence that they have? 

 

K. Dilanian, intelligence and national security reporter: Well, it's still partially a mystery, Chris, but they have more and more evidence, they say. Three U.S. officials tell us, pointing to Russia, including communications intercepts that suggest that the Russian intelligence agency was involved now. And really, there were only three suspects from the beginning here, Russia, China and the Cubans. The Russian and Chinese intelligence services operate in force in Cuba. And it's still believed that it's possible that some element of the Cuban intelligence services cooperated with this. The other interesting thing we're reporting here is that one of the technologies used to injure these American spies and diplomats was some kind of microwave weapon that is so sophisticated, the Americans don't even fully understand it. And they've been testing some kinds of aspects of this technology. 

 

NBC News: So, kind of reverse engineering, is that what they're trying to do? 

 

K. Dilanian: Absolutely, Because, you know, the U.S. military has worked on microwave technology and tried to deploy it as weapons over the years. Apparently, the Russians have as well. And it can make people think they're hearing sounds. That's why initially this was thought to be a sonic attack of some sort, Chris.

 

NBC News: What do we know about the people? Were individuals targeted? Was it just a group that was targeted? And do we have any idea about a motive why these people – 

 

K. Dilanian: And then, again, these are only theories. But what our sources are telling us is that this was an intentional attack because initially people thought it could be a byproduct of some spying technology gone awry. But it's now believed that this was meant to hurt these spies and diplomats, some of whom have suffered serious brain injuries. And if this is confirmed that it was Russia, Chris, it would be a game changer because the sort of unwritten rules of the spying game are you don't go after the other person's spies and diplomats. You don't try to hurt them. You. I'm out of the country. But you don't. 

 

NBC News: So where are they in this investigation? I mean, are they close? Do they feel like they're at a place where they will have a definitive answer? 

 

K. Dilanian: They do believe that eventually they will be able to go down the track of possibly even indicting people. But they are far from that right now. They're not even willing to say within the U.S. government that they are 100% sure it was Russia. 

 

I mean, where do you start? None of that ever happened. They spent two and a half minutes talking about something that did not exist. And not just that, but they were explaining in great detail the evidence that proved that Russia did it, even though the “it” was made up and fabricated. 

And they're so dumb too. Did you see when she said, “So it's like kind of like reverse engineering, the microwave oven”? And he's like, “yeah, I mean, essentially that”. As I said, I really wish that there were times when we could just not have to talk about these people and not have to dissect the propaganda that they spew. But it's impossible because of how often they do it and because of how destructive it is when they do. NBC News is one of the most influential media outlets on the planet, even though nobody watches MSNBC primetime shows, NBC News itself has all sorts of gigantic ways of influencing not just American discourse, but discourse globally. And so the fact that they are spew – you could just watch them in real-time with the most serious and earnest faces spewing outright lies about things that don't even exist. 

You know, you run out of words at some point to just describe the contempt that they deserve. But to me, what it always comes down to is the same thing, which is if they had gone on the air yesterday and said, Hey, do you remember when we spent the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic mocking the people who were wondering whether this came from a lab leak, who thought that perhaps it's more than a coincidence that the exact lab where these kinds of viruses are studied and manipulated happens to be the exact place in the world where the virus began and maybe there's a connection… And we told you that the only people who were suggesting that were people who were insane conspiracy theorists because that had already been debunked and disproven and that scientists knew for sure that this had come from a zoonotic cause by leaping species. Do you remember when we told you that night after night after night and ruined the reputations – or tried to – of the people who were suggesting the lab leak might be viable only for us to now learn that even the most elite scientific units inside the United States government, at least some of them, not only believe that that lab leak theory we mocked and told you had been disproven is, in fact, not just viable but the most likely explanation. Well, we want to tell you we're really sorry for having misled you, so fundamentally misled you in the world. Here's what happened. Here's why we did that. Here are the steps we're going to take to ensure it doesn't happen again. We're, of course, retracting everything we said, and we apologize profoundly for having done so. And here's the accountability that is being brought to those most responsible. 

Or if they were, then the next day, go on the air and say, hey, do you remember when we were telling you for three years that Russia was way over every conceivable ethical line when it comes to international relations because they had developed a 25th-century sonic weapon that was beyond anyone's comprehension and they were using it to go around the world, destroying the brains of our diplomats? And then we learned today that even the aid agencies that we told you were the ones confirming this for us now have concluded and admitted that all along it was false, that everything we spent day after day after day after day telling you is a complete fairy tale and was total fiction. And we would like once again to apologize because this is now the 430th time in the last two years that we did exactly this. And here are the steps we're going to take. 

It's the fact that, of course, they don't do any of that. That is what causes the deepest form of my contempt because what that shows is not that they're so embarrassed about their failures that they want to pretend that it didn't happen, something they get away with because they live in a completely closed and insular system where the only people they care about and to whom and for whom they speak are liberals who want them to lie this way. It's not just that. It's something much more nefarious. It's that this kind of lying is their job. They're actually doing their job successfully and effectively by doing all of this. So that they know that's their job. So why would anyone ever apologize for having done their job well? Why would you implement steps to change the way that you're doing something when in fact you're doing exactly what it is that you're paid to do? This is another way of saying that the real agents of disinformation, the real people whose job it is to use the resources of the richest and most powerful corporations, are not the people that they claim are the disinformation agents. It's these people right here. And so, the fact that polling shows that the public holds these people in contempt and doesn't trust them and has come increasingly to see them as malicious influences in the world is something that I cheer that's urgent, that they're seen for what they are. And that's why I say that more of that is necessary. So, the reason we spend time dissecting these stories is in part because, as I said last night, it's a very important form of journalism to debunk journalistic deceit and journalistic propaganda. But another major reason is that it is healthy and important to identify the malicious actors in your society and to assemble in contempt for them and in opposition to them. And I think that is one of the most important functions independent media serves, is that independent media and only independent media have the ability to do that. And that's the reason why they are so intent on maligning and discrediting any of us who have large audiences in independent media, and if that fails, ultimately trying to use the power of the state and big corporations to have people in independent media censored because they know that their ability to get away with what they're doing depends upon their ability to either discredit dissent or – if that doesn't work as it's not working – to stamp it out altogether. And that is the war over information that is currently underway. 

And the thing that gives me the most optimism is the ability that independent media has, as evidenced by the success of our show after just two months, to have a very large audience that grows each week and each month and other shows in independent media as well. There clearly is a shift in power and influence out of the hands of these large media corporations and into the hands of the people who want to debunk propaganda rather than fortify it. And that's the reason why I decided to do this show, notwithstanding the fact that it's not easy to produce a show every single night, live, at a quality that I feel is necessary to do. It's because I believe this work is really necessary as the only real way to undermine people like this and to get the public to really regard them with the contempt that they so richly deserve and have really earned through their behavior. 

 

So that concludes our show for this evening. Thank you, as always. To those of you who watch, as we remind you, every Tuesday and Thursday, we have our aftershow live on Locals where we take your questions and feedback from our audience and comment on what it is that you have to say in reaction to our show. We take your ideas as well about topics to cover and guest interviews. And the fact that our journalism is now appearing there exclusively is all the more reason for you to join. It also helps the show, the more members that we have. So, the join button is right underneath the video on this page. It's in red, and if you click that, you'll be able to join our community. It helps strengthen the reporting that we're doing. It allows you to be a part of all the other things we're doing as well. 

Thanks, as always, to everybody who has watched. I hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night. 7 p.m. EST, live, exclusively here on Rumble.

 

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

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

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 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. 

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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. 

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System Update #482

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

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

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One of the most significant scandals among MAGA pundits and operatives within pro-Trump discourse generally over the last four years has been the one involving Jeffrey Epstein. 

Now, in less than five months, the DOJ announced today, the one under Pam Bondi, that they are closing the investigation, given the certainty that they say they have that Epstein had no client list. There's no such thing as an Epstein client list, he never tried to blackmail anyone and no powerful people were involved whatsoever with his sexual abuse of minors. They also say that he undoubtedly killed himself: there's no question about that. 

All of this is such a blatant betrayal of what was promised all of these years, such that all but the most blindly loyal Trump followers – like the real cult numbers, a lot of them almost certainly paid to be that – are reacting with understandable confusion and anger over what happened today and over the last several months. We'll delve into all of this and what this means. 

Then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced today that the group that al-Golani once led, long known as al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, is no longer officially a designated terrorist group. This is al-Qaeda. We'll explore what all of this shows about the utterly vacant and manipulated propaganda terms, terrorist and terrorism. 

As a note, we did not have enough time, so we’ll talk about President Trump’s tweet attacking Brazil and its government, on the day of the BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro, some other time soon.

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Earlier today, the Justice Department issued a statement, essentially announcing that they no longer consider any of the questions surrounding what had long been the Epstein scandal to be worthwhile investigation; that essentially all of these questions have been answered, that there's really nothing to look into. 

You can read the Justice Department's statement here.

They're saying this client list that most Trump supporters, I would say, have been accusing the U.S. government, of hiding to protect all the powerful people on this list, now, that they're in power – people like Pam Bondi, Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, now they're in charge – they're saying, no, actually there is no client list at all. There's at least no incriminating client list, whatever that means. 

I don't know if there is a client list or not, but according to them, there's no incriminating client list. I don't know how you can have a client list that's not incriminating: to be a client of Jeffrey Epstein seems inherently incriminating. They seem to have said what the White House briefing said today when asked about this, because as we'll show you, Pam Bondi went on Fox News and was asked, “Are you going to release the client list?” And she said, “It's sitting on my desk for review.” 

Trump had strongly suggested he would order it released. Now they're saying, “You know what? There is no client list.” 

So, all these claims that Jeffrey Epstein had recordings of prominent individuals who he invited to his island, who had sex with minors, evidently, there's no incriminating material of any kind that would implicate any powerful person. Just not there, they checked. They checked the storage closets, they looked under the beds, just couldn't find anything. All the stuff they had been claiming was there for years, screaming and pounding the table on podcasts, making a lot of money over it, too, accusing Biden officials of hiding this all for corrupt ends, just not there. They looked, couldn't find it. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Ukraine War, Peter Thiel and Transhumanism, Trump’s Middle East Policies, the New Budget Bill, and More
System Update #481

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

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

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I don't know if you heard, but there's some breaking news, and that is that tomorrow is July 4, which in the United States is a major holiday. The Fourth of July is the day that we celebrate our independence from the tyranny of the British Crown. Tomorrow we will be taking the holiday off in large part because the appetite for watching political content or political news apps and some big political story on July 4 is quite reduced and so everyone can use a three-day weekend. 

What we usually do on Friday night is the Q&A session, something very important to us and something that we try to do at least once a week because it's one of the main benefits that we believe not only give to our Locals members but also receive from them. 

It's always kind of a hodgepodge, but it always ends up as one of our most interesting shows, we think, throughout the week, one of the shows that produces the best reaction. Since we're not doing a show on Friday, we're going to do it tonight instead. We have some excellent questions. There's one really confrontational question – I was going to say a bitchy question, but I want to be a little more professional in that – let's say confrontational questioning, critical. We're going to try to deal with that one as well. 

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So one of the things that shows throughout the week is that I happen to speak a lot. I analyze things, I dissect things, I read evidence, I show you videos, I talk to guests, I ask them questions. And what we try to do on our Q&A is to be respectful with the question and give an in-depth answer. 

I'd rather answer four or five by giving in-depth answers that I hope are thought-provoking than just speeding through them. I'd rather do a substantive response to four or five than a quick, superficial one to nine or 10. So let's go do that. 

The first one is from @If TruthBeTold and this is what they asked: 

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Well, let's begin with the fact that there is a reasonably effective instrument for preventing foreign interests and foreign lobbies from exerting influence in our country in a way that's stealthy or covert; that’s the FARA registration, which requires foreign agents acting on behalf of other countries to register as such so that everybody knows if they're slinking around Congress, whispering in politicians' ears, asking for legislation on behalf of a foreign government because they've disclosed it. 

And so if you work for the Iranian government, they're paying you to influence members of the legislator, if you do that for Qatar, if you do it for Russia, if you do it for Saudi Arabia – and the premise of the question correct, huge numbers of foreign interests lobby in the United States, you're required to declare that publicly on a FARA registration form and you can go see those, they're publicly available, and you can see who's lobbying on behalf of foreign governments for pay. 

One of the problems is that, for some reason – and you can fill in the blanks here – AIPAC has become exempt from that requirement. AIPAC is a lobbying group that reports to the Israeli government, meets all the time with the Israeli government, and gets funding from Israeli sources. Ted Cruz tried to deny that AIPAC is operating on behalf of a foreign government. Tucker Carlson asked him, “Well, has there ever been a single position that AIPAC has taken that deviates from the Netanyahu government?” and Ted Cruz said, “Sure, they do it all the time.” And Tucker Carlson said, “Oh, that's great. Why don't you name one?” And of course, Ted Cruz couldn't because it never happens, because AIPAC is an arm of the Israeli government trying to exert influence in the United States. 

And yet, for some reason, for a lot of reasons, in contrast to all the other examples I just named, when you have to fill out a foreign agent registration form, people who work for AIPAC or on behalf of the Israel lobby don't. Their claim is, “Oh, we're not lobbying for Israel. We're lobbying for the United States. We just believe that if the United States does everything that Israel wants, that's good for the United States. We're an American group. We're patriotic. We're America first. We just think that America benefits when it does everything that the Israeli government tells it to do.” 

John F. Kennedy strongly advocated and started to demand that the predecessor group to AIPAC register as an agent of a foreign government. He couldn't understand why it didn't have to, alone among all the other groups. And it never ended up happening because JFK's presidency ended when he was killed. 

Again, I'm not drawing any kind of causal link there. I'm not even trying to imply it. I'm just giving you the chronology as to why that never came back. And since then, nobody has ever talked about that. So, that's one thing. The other is that AIPAC is uniquely well-financed in terms of being a lobby operating on behalf of foreign governments. It hides that in a lot of ways, but I'll just give you an example. In the last Congress, there were two members in particular who AIPAC identified as being too critical of Israel. They were both Black members of Congress who represented primarily Black, poor districts, and the rhetoric started to become, which is threatening to AIPAC, ‘Wait, why are we sending billions and billions and billions of dollars to Israel when Israelis enjoy things like better access to health care and more subsidies for college than our own citizens do, when millions of Israelis have better standards of living than millions of people in the United States, including in my district? Why are we sending the money there instead of keeping it at home and improving our lives? 

Two of the people they identified as highly vulnerable were Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. I've certainly had criticisms of both of them, particularly Jamaal Bowman, but also Cori Bush – but that's not why AIPAC was interested in moving them from Congress. They poured $15 million – $15 million into a single house district in a Democratic primary – they found this Black politician in St. Louis to challenge Cori Bush, who promised to be an AIPAC puppet, and he has kept his promise. Wesley Bell is his name. He should put AIPAC in the middle of his name because it's much more descriptive of what he is now. And they just removed Cori Bush from Congress and put in this person who is basically the same as Cori Bush, except he loves and worships and devotes himself to Israel, never criticizes it. 

They did the same with Jamaal Bowman. They got George Latimer, who's white, but he was a county executive known in the district, and they poured $15 million into that. I don't know of any other interest group on behalf of a foreign government that has not just the ability, but the brazenness, the willingness, to be so open about destroying people’s careers in Congress that they're not sufficiently loyal to a foreign government. 

So the question is, well, what's the solution? Are you more willing to consider the problem of money in politics? I've never doubted the problems of big money in politics. I've always recognized that there are massive problems with huge amounts of money in politics. The founders did as well. They were capitalists. Obviously, they weren't opposed to financial inequality. They were often very rich themselves, property owners and the like, but they also warned that massive inequality in the financial realm can easily spill over into something they did want to avoid, which is inequality in the political realm or the legal realm. And clearly that's happening. 

The problem is, how do you restrict the expenditure of money for political purposes without running afoul of the First Amendment? Let me just give you an example of what this kind of law would entail. This was at the heart of Citizens United, which was the five-to-four Supreme Court decision in 2010 that invalidated certain amounts of financial campaign finance restrictions on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. 

Let's say you're a group that wants to improve conditions for the homeless, and you want to bring attention to the problems of the homeless and solutions you really believe in as a citizen; you're just like trying to pursue a political cause that you believe in. You get together a bunch of money from your friends from other groups, you save your money and use that money to publish films, ads and documentaries about which politicians are helping the homeless and which ones are harming them. Then, you also may hire somebody who has influence in Congress, who can get you into doors to talk to members of Congress, to try to persuade them to enact legislation that will help the homeless. If you have laws that say that you can't lobby, you can’t spend money on political advocacy. It's not just going to mean that Israel and Raytheon can't go into Congress or that Facebook and Palantir can't; It's going to mean that nobody can. And that clearly is a restriction on your ability to, not your ability but your right under the Constitution to petition your government for redress, to speak freely about grievances you have against your government. 

I've always thought the better solution than trying to restrict First Amendment rights by eliminating money from politics is to equalize it through public campaign financing. So, if your opponent raises $10 million through billionaire spending or very rich people, the government will match your funds and give you $10 billion. 

We do have matching funds in certain places. We also have a better tradition and culture of small-dollar donors that compete with big-money donors. I mean Bernie Sanders' campaign drowned in money in 2016 because of small donors. AOC has insane amounts of money that largely come from small donors over the internet. Donald Trump had a ton of small donors, in addition to very big ones. Zohran Mamdani, actually, got so much money at the start of the campaign from grassroots donors that he actually asked them not to give anymore because, under the matching fund system of the city, where you can raise money up to a certain level and then they match it, he reached the maximum. He didn't need any more money because he wanted to get the matching funds. 

That has been encouraging; the internet and various fundraising networks enable small donor contributions to a huge amount, making people competitive, who aren't relying on big money. But once you start trying to regulate how people can spend their money for political causes, remember Citizens United grew out of an advocacy group, they were conservative, they produced a documentary, publishing, highlighting and documenting what they believed were the crimes and corruptions of the Clintons before the 2008 election. So, they made a film about one of the most powerful politicians on Earth and it contained information they wanted the general public to see before voting, potentially making her president. And that was, they were told, a violation of campaign finance laws because they were a nonprofit, and under the campaign finance laws in question, corporations, including nonprofits or unions, were banned from spending money 60 days before an election. 

That's why groups like the ACLU and labor unions sided with Citizens United and argued that this campaign finance law, which the court, by a 5-4 decision, overturned, is in fact unconstitutional. People forget the ACLU and labor unions that also would have been restricted, were also part of the urging of the majority decision, even though it's considered a conservative decision. 

I think there are much better ways to equalize the playing field when it comes to lobbying: make AIPAC and all of its operatives and the entire Israel lobby required to register under FARA, just like everybody else does. If they don't, they go to prison, just like anybody else does who doesn't file the FARA forms deliberately or intends to deceive. And then, also, find ways to make the playing field even without telling people, citizens, that they can't spend their money that they earn and that they make on political advocacy, on campaigns to convince the public of certain things against various other candidates. I think there are many better ways to do it than that. 

 

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All right, @TearDrinker asked the following. And this is somebody, I'm quite sure, that if you start crying, he gets so happy, he'll drink your tears. He looks for that. That's who asked this question. So, I think we do have a lot of very noble and benevolent people in our audience but we also have some very dark people in the audience and I think @TearDrinker is one of those. Nonetheless, the question is very good. We all have dark sides, good sides and bad sides. We're very complex. So is our audience. And here's his very good question: 

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I had several people on my show from the start who were vehement opponents of U.S. financing, NATO financing of the war in Ukraine. Jeffrey Sachs was one, John Mearsheimer was another and Stephen Walt was another. We had several people, we had members of Congress, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, part of the MAGA movement, Rand Paul as well, RFK Jr., when he was running for president. We had a lot of people but Professor Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs and Stephen Walt in particular were overwhelmingly prescient in predicting what would happen, even though at the time you weren't allowed to say this because if you said this, if you said reality, you would get accused of being a Russian propagandist or pro-Kremlin or all the things they use to smear people who are questioning the prevailing propaganda. Just like we saw in this last war, if you questioned U.S. bombing of Iran or the Israeli attack on Iran, you were accused of pro-Mullahs, loving the Ayatollahs, same thing every time. 

One of the things that they were saying is like, “Look, it doesn't matter how many weapons you give to Ukraine, it does matter how much money you hand to Kiev.” Even if it didn't get all sucked up in the massive corruption that has long governed Ukraine – which of course it will, but let's assume it didn’t, let's just say it was a very honest, well-accounted for country driven by integrity and principle and all the money was used for exactly what it was earmarked for – even if that happened and even if the Ukrainian people were incredibly courageous and they were at the beginning but even so… 

You know, there's a dog behavior that I've seen so many times. If you go to a dog park and two dogs are going to fight and they're on neutral ground, no one owns the dog park, the stronger dog is likely to win. But if you took those same dogs and the weaker dog in the dog park was at home and the stronger one in the park went to the house of the weaker dog, the weaker dog would suddenly become very strong. And typically, I'm not saying in all cases, obviously a Poodle and a Rottweiler, it's going to be the same result, but I'm saying when it's even remotely close, when you're defending your home – and this is definitely true in the canine world, they fight much more passionately, much more aggressively, much more confidently. And I think that's the same for human beings. 

And so the Ukrainians were very feisty, very punching above their weight at the beginning but even so, and all these people on my show said it, and I got convinced, that it was true from the very start, even if everything went right for the Ukrainians, even if you give them everything they want, the simple fact that Russia is so much bigger and that this is going to be a ground war of attrition between two neighboring countries, meant that inevitably Russia was going to win. It might take a year, it might take two years, it might take five years. The only possibility is that the Ukrainian population of young men, and as they expanded the draft, it became middle-aged, young to middle-aged men, were going to be obliterated, were going to disappear and obviously were huge numbers of young Russian men, but they have so many more that they can just keep replenishing them and losing that amount without having any real effect on Russia, which is like a gigantic country. And that's what's happened between the people who were killed in Ukraine, the people who fled and deserted, and there are a lot of them. There's basically a generation of Ukrainian men missing, which in turn means women aren't dating and aren't marrying. It just destroys the whole society.

The last time we really heard any promises that there was going to be a change was in 2023. There was going to be this great counterattack during the summer, like David Petraeus and Max Boot and all the people who promised the same thing was going to happen in Iraq with the surge were they telling us, “No, this counterattack is going to change everything.” It didn't change anything. Russia has maintained the 22%, 23%, 24% of Ukraine that they occupied, and they've been expanding more and more. There's no way to stop that unless you send in NATO troops or U.S. troops to have a direct war with Russia, which would by definition be World War III. 

The EU, has these – I'm going to say they're primarily women and I say that because a lot of left-wing parties in Europe ran explicitly on the idea that they were going to put women in foreign policy positions because women are less likely to be militaristic, warmongering, seeking conflict, they're much more likely to rely on diplomacy to resolve disputes because it's more in the woman nature. This was the feminist argument, a very essentialist and reductive view of how women and men resolve conflicts. 

But instead, you look at these warmongers, and you're up there like Ursula von der Leyen, who's the president of the EU. Nobody elected her. She's a maniac, a sociopath. The foreign affairs minister is the former prime minister of Estonia. It's like a million people. She's now like the foreign minister; she goes around demanding more and more war. And then the Green Party in Germany is the worst. They ran on this feminist foreign policy explicitly. And they have Annalena Baerbock as the Foreign Minister: she sounds like something out of 1939, talking about the glories of war. 

And even with all that, the Europeans are going to send in troops, the Americans are going to send in troops and so the more we prolong this war, the more we destroy Ukraine, the country, and the more we sacrifice the lives of Ukrainians. And that has been the neocon argument. It's like, you don't have to worry. Americans aren't dying. It's the Ukrainians who are dying. Remember, they're not fighting voluntarily. They're conscripted. A lot of them are fleeing, a lot of them are deserting. They just don't have the people to fight. 

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been announcements that the U.S. is going to slow down or stop certain weapons transfers that had previously been allocated under the Biden administration. One of the people who is announcing this, who's deciding this, is Elbridge Colby. You remember that Elbridge Colby was one that the neocons tried so hard to stop his confirmation to the high levels of the Pentagon because his view has long been that we have no interest in a lot of the wars we fight, including in Ukraine, including in the Middle East, we ought to be focusing on China and the Pacific. And neocon groups that obviously want the United States focused on fighting in the Middle East, funding Ukraine, were desperate to keep him out. 

There are a few others. Some of those non-interventionists who made the high levels of the Pentagon, like Dan Caldwell, who ended up getting fired because they fabricated leaks against him that were completely fake. We'll do a show on that one time. But there are still several of them. And so Elbridge Colby, when he announced this policy, like, Look, we were going to ship all these munitions and missiles to Ukraine, but now we can't. The reason we can, and we have gone over this before, is because U.S. stockpiles are dangerously low. We don't have these missiles and munitions to give, at least not consistently with making sure that we have enough in the case we want to fight another war. And the reasons are obvious. We've been sending missiles and munitions and drones and everything else we have to Ukraine and to Israel to fuel their wars. 

Israel has multiple wars, not just in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Syria. It has bombed the Houthis many times and attacked Iran. The United States has been arming and funding and just sending huge amounts of weaponry to Ukraine. And also remember, President Trump re-instituted and escalated President Biden's campaign of bombing the Houthis. And the idea was we're going to obliterate the Houthis. After a month, President Trump got the report and saw how much money we were spending, how many weapons we were using, how much money it was costing, and nothing was really getting done. We were killing a bunch of civilians and not really degrading the Houthis at all. And they told him, “Oh, sir, we just need nine more months.” But he ended it because he saw he was being deceived again. And we're very low on military stockpile, even though we spend three times more than any other country on the planet and more than the next 15 countries combined. 

This was one of the reasons why, although we've been told that Israel and the United States together achieved this massive, glorious war victory, Netanyahu and Trump are war heroes, when Trump called on Netanyahu to be immediately pardoned or have his corruption trial stopped, it was like, “Look, he just, with me, won a historic war.” It's very important for Trump and Israel to insist to people that they won this great war, this historic war, in 12 days. 

The reality is that the Israelis really couldn't fight that war for much longer. You saw with fewer and fewer missiles shot by Iran, not even most sophisticated yet, that more and more of a landing. We don't know the full extent of the damage in Israel because journalists will tell you they were absolutely and aggressively censored by the military from showing any hits on government or military buildings. The only things they were allowed to show were the occasional hits by the Iranians on a civilian building here, a residential building there, to create the false impression that they were targeting and only hitting civilian buildings, but a lot of Israel suffered a lot of damage. President Trump said that himself, that Israel took a huge pounding. They didn't have air defenses any longer. They were running out and the United States couldn't continue to supply them. We were running out of our own missiles that we use to shoot down Iranian missiles. Israel and the United States didn't end to that war at least as much as Iran did because we were so low on our stock files because we're fighting so many wars or funding so many wars. And so the argument of the Pentagon and Elbridge Colby is, “Look, we just don't have these weapons to keep giving to Ukraine. We need them for ourselves. If we keep giving them to Ukraine, we're not going to have any on our own and our priority should be our military and our protection and not Ukraine's.” 

If this were really a difference between Ukraine winning the war, if we give them the weapons as defined by NATO, which was always a pipe dream. However, the definition was expelling every Russian troop from every inch of Ukraine, including Crimea, which the Russians would never ever allow to happen. If it were a difference between Ukraine winning or Ukraine just getting rolled over, then I would say, okay, maybe there's a debate to be had. But the reality is we've been feeding them weapons into the fourth year now. It's four whole years, coming up on four years, three and a half years of not just the United States sending billions and billions of dollars, but also Europe, and Ukraine hasn't been saved. Ukraine has been destroyed. Ukrainians haven't been freed. They've been slaughtered in mass numbers. And that's all that's going to happen if we keep sending weapons there. 

Of course, the Europeans are relying on this fearmongering that Putin is not going to stop with Ukraine. He wants to eat up all of Ukraine. He's demonstrated many times that he's willing to do a peace deal that secures a buffer zone in eastern Ukraine that protects the ethnic Russians who speak Russian and feel they've been aggressively discriminated against by the Kiev government. The people of Crimea and various provinces in the east feel closer to Moscow than they do to Kiev. They identify as Russians and not Ukrainians. So, as long as Russia feels that, A, they can protect those people, and B, create a buffer zone between NATO and the West on the one hand and Russia on the other so it can't go right up to their border, they've always said they're willing to reach a deal. 

And remember, Ukraine and Russia they almost reached a deal at the very beginning of the war that didn't call for the complete sacrifice of Ukrainian sovereignty, but only those kinds of buffer zones or semi-autonomous regions to letting them vote, and that was the deal that Victoria Nuland and Boris Johnson swept in and told Ukraine they can't keep and they wanted this war to be a prolonged war to destroy Russia. So this fearmongering that Putin's going to eat up all of Ukraine and he's going to move to Poland and then he's like Hitler, he's going to sweep through Eastern Europe and then Central Europe, back to Austria and Germany and then is going to go to Paris again, this is idiotic. 

The Russians have had a hard time defeating Ukraine, albeit with, obviously, Ukraine's being aggressively backed by NATO. But even if they weren't, they were willing to do a deal that just provides Russian security. But wars always are raw and fearmongering, and so they've convinced a lot of people if we don't back the Ukrainians, Russia is going to just roll over and take over, annex Ukraine and rebuild the Soviet Union under this kind of view of Greater Russia that Putin supposedly has in mind, the way Israel is actually doing, creating Greater Israel. There's so much evidence that contradicts that, so little evidence that supports it, but at the end of the day, where are these people going to come from who are going to fight on the front lines in Ukraine? There aren't many left. We can drown that country with billions of dollars in weapons and the war is still going to end up the way it's going to end up. You may not like it, it may be sad to you, you may wish it were a different way, but that is just the reality. 

There have been experts saying it very bravely, I mean, Jeffrey Sachs used to go on “Morning Joe” all the time, until he started saying this, and he hasn't been on again. People get booted out of mainstream platforms, they get called all sorts of names, Russian agents, Kremlin propaganda, etc., but who cares? Those people were the ones who were absolutely right, which is why we kept putting them on our show. They were by far the most convincing people. And that is the nature of the war in Ukraine and the U.S. role in it. Even if we wanted to keep supplying the weapons, we simply don't have them because we've been fueling and arming far too many wars: our own, Israel's and Ukraine's. That's what happens. 

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I think this is the third question, and it comes from @BookWench. And this person, I believe, is a wench, self-described, I'm not being insulting, they're a wench. And they really like books. And if you're going to be a wench, I think it’s better to be a well-read wench than some ignorant one. It's a good friend of the show, often asks some really great questions. And here's the one submitted by this wench tonight. 

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She’s talking about our show last night. If you haven't seen it, that's a great summary of it. But we talked about the integration of Big Tech companies like Meta, OpenAI and Palantir increasingly into the media, while at the same time, Trump and big media corporations are reaching all sorts of nefarious agreements about what their coverage should and shouldn't be.

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I'll give you a parallel example to make this point, rather than just addressing this one directly. Oftentimes people focus on what words apply, like what inflammatory words apply, what shocking or extreme political jargon applies, and even if that jargon is important, even if it has fixed meaning, even if deserves to be applied, traditionally, I've tried to avoid arguments over words or labels because so many people feel so strongly about them that even if they might be open to your argument on the substance and the merits, the minute you use that word, a lot of people just shut off. 

That was why it took me a few months to call what Israel was doing in Gaza a genocide, not because I doubted that the term applied but just because there are a lot of people open to hearing the facts about what Israel is doing in Gaza and seeing how horrific and criminal and atrocious it is, but the minute you use the word genocide, they just kind of instantly turn away from it. I often make the assessment, I'd rather have the channel open for communication than use a word that I know that's just going to close that channel. 

A lot of times, though, it does become necessary to use that term, I don't just mean genocide, but a term that can't have that effect because it's indispensable to understanding the situation. And that's how I came to see the word genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing, even more so. You can't really talk about Gaza without talking about that intent. It's not my guess about that; it's based on the statements that the Israelis have made about their war objectives and then their actions that align with it. But in general, I like to avoid those kinds of words. 

Fascism is definitely one of them. I promise fascism is similar to my problem with genocide and there are a lot of other words like this. There are a lot of words that get thrown around that even if they have a clear and fixed meaning, the people throwing them around aren't very capable of defining in a very concrete, specific way what the words mean. Fascism, to me, has almost become colloquial for just, like, Hitler-like or authoritarian or using aggressive racist themes combined with abuse of government power but the word and concept Fascism is a lot more complex than that, and it involves a lot more prongs than that. 

People study fascism for years in universities. There are graduate programs where you study fascism. It's a philosophy, it's an ideology that was developed in a very specific historical context. It ended up shaping the Italian government in the 1930s under Mussolini and then, of course, the Germans; you could argue Franco in Spain also was an expression of it. But I just feel like throwing the word fascism around at Trump or the Republicans, or especially, of all, it means a kind of aggressive authoritarianism. It just doesn't serve any purpose because I think the Biden administration was extremely authoritarian in lots of different ways. I think most administrations of the last 25 years have been. Very few people spent more time vocally, vehemently condemning Bush-Cheney than I did. I wrote books about it, including arguments that they ought to be prosecuted for things they did, spying on Americans without warrants, torturing people and kidnapping them off the streets of Europe. But I don't think I ever called them fascists. Not because someone had studied or done that, would have been offended or argued that it didn't apply, but just because I don't think it helps the conversation any. 

I think one of the worst things the Biden administration did is essentially commandeered the power of Big Tech to control political discourse in the United States, dictating to Big Tech what they ought to suppress and what they are to permit. In doing so, they absolutely warped and suppressed crucial debates about COVID, about Ukraine, about even election integrity that ought to have been aired. One of the things that bothered me about it so much was that you had the government on the one hand and corporate power on the other in the form of Big Tech and the Biden administration was basically annexing the power of Big Tech and corporate power to control free speech. 

I often pointed out that, ironically, the Democrats love to call Donald Trump a fascist, uniting state and corporate power, eliminating the separation between them, where they each have different objectives, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, but uniting them as one entity working toward exactly the same goal. That was what Hitler did. There was no arms industry that wasn't under the control of the government. There was no private sector not under the control of the government, all working toward a common theme and a common unity. 

That is what's happening here as well as these major corporations like OpenAI, Palantir and Facebook more and more directly and expansively integrate into the military, into the intelligence community, into the government. But there are other factors, other prongs of fascism as well, and people debate it. And so if I were to say that, oh, this is fascism, the Trump government is fascist or the Biden administration is fascist, it might be satisfying to people who want to hear that and who believe that. But for a lot of people, they would just turn that off as Fox junk in the case of Biden or MSNBC junk in the case of Trump, and oftentimes that is what it is, just junk. It's people spewing it without having any idea what those terms mean, just to get maximum emotional catharsis or provoke emotional reactions. 

I would much rather do what we did last night, which is spend 45 or 50 minutes, maybe an hour, however much we spent, showing people exactly what's happening, showing this integration between corporate and state power for surveillance purposes, for military purposes, for intelligence gathering. Talk about the dangers of it in a way that I hope people are open-minded, because we're showing them the evidence. The minute you start using terms that they're kind of inherently going to repel or just recoil from, I feel like I can call it fascism and congratulate myself, but I don't feel like it does much good. I feel like actually does the reverse. If these terms were very clearly agreed to specific meanings that everyone understood, I wouldn't have a problem with using them when they applied, but since they don't at all, I think these words are obfuscated. 

But I did point out last night, and I will say again, that integrating corporate and state power is a hallmark of fascism and whether all the other hallmarks of fascism are present, it's extremely dangerous for the reasons we delved into extensively last night if you want to understand more how we think about that and what we said you can, if you haven't already, check out last night's show

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All right, next question @KKtowas, who says this:

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I don't want to be too cavalier about paraphrasing this. The question did do a good job of describing it. I'd rather show the actual words. If you haven't heard it, it's really worth watching. I definitely understand why it provoked this question. 

So, let me focus on the part that I do actually feel comfortable paraphrasing, which is Ross Douthat did ask Peter Thiel, “Do you favor the continuation of the human race? Is this something that you actually think is a good thing?” 

Elon Musk has been asked this before. Part of what Elon Musk wants to do is make sure humanity is multiplanetary, starting with life on Mars. A lot of people think, ‘Oh, you must think that's because humanity on Earth is doomed; otherwise, why is it so important to you to make humanity multiplanetary?’ There are other reasons why you might, but that's a suspicion, and not just to make it multiplanetary because the Earth is doomed, but also to transform what it means to be human. 

This kind of philosophy has been popular among these more extreme Silicon Valley types of Transhumanism, something that transcends humanity or fundamentally transforms it. Typically, I think merging humanity with technology or with a machine for a superior being, it's definitely how a lot of them think of artificial intelligence. I, one time, got a root canal, which I hate as much as anybody – I think I hate it more, but probably everyone hates it equally – but one of the only good things about it is that it lasts for two hours. I have the time to sit and listen to podcasts that ordinarily I wouldn't have time to listen to, or the inclination, just because I have to have my brain distracted. I can't, even if my mouth is totally numb and I don't feel it. I don't like hearing what the dentist is doing. I don't want to think about what tools he's using and why. There's almost no job I'd rather have least than being a dentist and just constantly being in someone's mouth every day looking at their teeth. But whatever. So, I try to distract myself and one of the ways I did so is I listening to Mark Zuckerberg's appearance on Joe Rogan. He was talking at length about his vision that soon we're going to take all these devices, virtual reality devices and AI devices, and they're no longer going to be exterior instruments that we wear, like Googles on our head or phones or earpieces or things in our phone. It's going to be part of our anatomy. He was talking about drilling into brains in order to have this technology part of the human brain, and at first he said the first use is going to medical, somebody has a neurological injury or some other serious neurological problem, this machine will help them with that functionality. But critically, he was talking as well about an ultimate merger between technology and human beings, which in one way may not change the nature of human beings in the beginning. It's just kind of another instrument. You can imagine this earpiece. Say you wear an earpiece of the kind people commonly use now to listen to things on a computer, connected by Bluetooth to their phones. Does it really change humanity if, instead of just having this come in and out, it's just now implanted in our ears? Does it change humanity? Well, when you start talking about the brain and changing how our brains think and produce thought, or having AI be the future of what a human being should be, but in a spiritual form, that's clearly transhumanistic. That's transforming what a human being fundamentally is. 

There are all kinds of questions that come with that. If you believe in a soul, does this have a soul? And the way Mark Zuckerberg was so cavalier in talking about it, I found very creepy. 

Let me just say one thing. I think the question referenced that Peter Thiel stuttered when he answered and kind of had big pauses. Peter Thiel always does that. The reason is – and he's talked about this before, he's autistic – and that means you don't have the same capacity for social interaction. 

One of the things he said that I found super interesting was what he thinks the benefit of being autistic, not severely autistic, where you aren't verbal, can't interact with people at all, but somewhere on the spectrum of where he places himself. When you don't have autism and you're very clued into social cues – and we are social and political animals, we do interact as groups, we are not solitary beings – that if you're so aware of social cues and you're constantly receiving what social cues are, in a way it's making you more conformist, kind of morphing you into society, you understand what society expects of you, you understand what the society thinks, you understand what you're supposed to say in most situations. And he was saying that that can really make you conformist. It can kind of just make you part of this blob. Whereas he sees his autism as almost a gift because feeling detached, excluded, or isolated from majoritarian societal sentiments, ethos and mores forces you to see things differently, to look at things differently. And then that, of course, is the kind of thing that can lead to innovation and invention. Steve Jobs was not autistic, but he actually has said in interviews, people don't talk about this, but it's so true, that had he not taken LSD and had experience with other hallucinogens, he never would have invented the iPad or various Apple products, that it was that kind of transcendent thought that enabled him to have this vision that he otherwise wouldn't have had. On some level, mind-altering drugs can be analogized to autism and so, yes, Peter Thiel stutters; he stumbles. Oftentimes, it seems like he's sweating or having difficulty answering the question, but in reality, it's autism and the way he speaks. But it does affect how people perceive him. 

Let me show you this clip that the question asked, because I think it's really worth hearing him in his own words. 

Video. Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel, TikTok.

Let me say a couple of things about this. People who think about changes in the future are often looked at as strange and weird because generally, the future is something we can't really imagine. 

I remember when I was young, I'm still young, but I remember when I was younger, when I was a child, and I used to go visit my grandparents. My grandfather was born in 1904. My grandmother was born in 1910. I spent a lot of time over there when I was younger and I constantly thought about how bizarre it was that they were born into a world that didn't have airplanes, didn't have radio, didn't have television, didn't really have phones and then during their lifetime, like all this technology that previously had been considered unthinkable – how is something going to fly in the air over the Earth? How are people going to talk to each other using weird connective machines? Or television that started off black and white and then became color, or film that started silent and then became with audio. All these things were unthinkable at the beginning and I kept thinking how strange to be born into a world where this unthinkable technology didn't exist, and then suddenly it arrives, and it just changes your world. All those technologies, obviously, had a major effect on the world. Then I had my own experience. I was born in 1967. I was 24, 25 when the internet started really being something that I used in my life, and, obviously, that's a major transformative innovation. If you had thought about the internet before it happened, it would seem inconceivable; people who describe the future in ways that seem inconceivable always come off as very strange and weird. So, I think we ought to acknowledge that. 

But I want to say two things on the other side, as kind of big caveats. One is the idea of a billionaire; until you really interact with billionaires, it's hard to explain what they're like, and I've had pretty close interactions with many of them. Obviously, I founded a media company with one of them, Pierre Omidyar, who I think is worth like $12 billion or whatever. A lot of other people in Silicon Valley whom – I've gotten to know some – ‘being rich’ doesn't describe that, like the amount of wealth that you have, like when you're a billionaire, you don't think of yourself as just rich, you start thinking about what you can do to change the world, change the government, change countries, change culture. It's so much power; it's so much money. 

With power and money comes, in almost every case, being surrounded by sycophants: people constantly flattering you, saying yes to everything that you think, say and want, because power means you can do so many things for people that benefit their lives and if they know that you have that, they're going to want to flatter you so that there's a chance you're going to give those things to them. Obviously, it makes people in that situation so detached from reality and so enamored of themselves just because all their influences tell them that they are brilliant, and that they're a genius and that they see things people don't see. 

Sometimes, that may be true, there are probably billionaires, I guess I know a couple, who I would consider extremely smart, but the majority of them, including ones I've worked with, I can tell you, I'm not going to say they're dumb. They're mediocre. Sometimes they have like an idiot savant skill that turned into a company that just exploded at the right time. Everyone's success has partly some luck. You have to be in the right place at the right time and a lot of these people who walk around thinking they're brilliant and have the power with their billions of dollars to bring those visions to fruition and to convince people that they should, are not even remotely close to as smart as they think. 

So, when they start getting these visions and everyone around them tells them how brilliant they are and everything about their lives is reinforcing their own brilliance, I do think that can be a very twisted and dangerous dynamic. Then there is this very specific billionaire culture, especially the ones that came out of Silicon Valley, that believes that they are the kind of people society ought to progress and evolve and transform into, and that the society just doesn't facilitate that. The society punishes success; it impedes a transformative kind of Übermensch, to use a Nietzschean expression. And they have ideas like they want to just start new societies, they want to buy a country, or buy so much land that it can become its own country and they just create a society from scratch where they're the overlords and they create rules. Obviously it then extends to like, maybe we shouldn't even do it on Earth, let's start our own society on Mars or wherever and it becomes this very utopian and dystopian vision driven by a tiny number of people who have no real pushback or tension between the things that come out of their mouths into their from their brains into their mouths and then try they can try and make reality and have the power to make reality. But a lot of that is, I think very alarming; we ought to be very, very, very skeptical of that, even in the cases where it might be promising. 

A lot of this just depends on what you think. If you're a complete nihilist and atheist, and you just believe everything is just kind of a nihilistic evolution, no purpose, no spirit, no soul, we just keep evolving over millions of years, and human beings are just where we are now, it’s just one stop along the way, and our next destination is something totally different, it probably wouldn't bother you. But if you have a kind of idea of something essentialist about being human that turning us into beings that exist in an AI vat and eliminating us, every part of us, except our intellect, may not be an advancement, that may be a destruction of humanity while maintaining the facade of it, this is the kind of stuff that I think requires a great deal of introspection, a great deal of thought, a great debate involving the whole society. 

But because billionaires have this ability to just push things along with no constraints, AI is just exploding really with no safeguards. I mean, there are some superficial safeguards, like if you use ChatGPT or the commercial ones, they don't let you do certain things that could easily be done, but you can imagine how it's actually being developed. And the people who don't want those safeguards to exist are using AI without those safeguards. None of this is being understood. None of it is being analyzed or studied. 

I'm not an alarmist at all about technology, even including AI. But I think it's more this kind of narcissism and this self-adoration that naturally develops in billionaires that gives them far too much confidence in their own ability to push humanity into directions that they think it should go and really don't need much debate to do it because their brains are sufficiently advanced to make those decisions and see those things on their own and the proof is that they became billionaires. That's how the reasoning works. That, I think, is the most dangerous dynamic rather than the specific things. 

And yeah, when Peter Thiel starts saying, “I'm not sure humanity should continue, okay, I'll say yes, just because you obviously think it's extremely creepy if I don't, but I'm going to add that maybe we should exist in some other form,” I hope people are disturbed by that. I'm not saying necessarily opposed to it, but I hope they're disturbed by it, in a way that they kind of demand some time and reflection in order to consider. 


 

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