Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Fox Launches Massive Character Assassination Campaign Against Tucker Plus: Drone Hits Kremlin Renewing Fears of Escalation
Video Transcript
May 09, 2023
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Good evening. It's Wednesday, May 3rd. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. eastern. Exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.

 Tonight, it was shocking enough when Fox News, with no warning whatsoever, unceremoniously announced last Monday that its top-rated host, Tucker Carlson, would no longer appear on the network, despite the fact that Carlson had cultivated millions of fans over the six years he hosted the 8 p.m. show and despite the fact that Carlson led them to six consecutive years of ratings win, Fox made no effort to explain to his loyal viewers why the show's last day was to be the Friday night show before the announcement was made, just no effort at all to accommodate or express the slightest interest in the anger and confusion of their loyal audience. But Fox's strange behavior has now become contemptible. While Tucker released a two-minute video last week that contained not a single word of criticism for Fox or his colleagues or any of its executives, Fox has been launching a vicious, one-sided, and seemingly still escalating war, with the apparent goal of permanently destroying Tucker Carlson's character and reputation. 

Just today, The New York Times published an article that purported to describe the thought process of Fox's board of directors, which includes, among others, former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and it also contained a leaked text that was designed, obviously, to make Tucker look like a racist – a narrative that the Fox leakers aggressively cultivated, using The New York Times as their partners, as one of the reasons why they decided to fire him. What is Fox's goal in this one-sided war of character destruction, and why are they seemingly indifferent, even eager to permanently alienate Carlson's most loyal viewers, especially as they watch their prime time ratings decline rapidly since Carlson's unexplained departure, especially among younger viewers? We’ll examine this strange and increasingly disturbing episode. 

Then, a drone attack last night appears to have targeted the Kremlin, where video footage captured explosions near the government buildings in Moscow, including the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin was unhurt in the attack, but Russia is unsurprisingly vowing aggressive and escalatory retaliation against Ukraine, whom they naturally blame for the attack. While Kyiv denies any involvement, Ukrainian elements, including their postal service, were seen officially celebrating the attack. And as is true for the U.S. and NATO regarding the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline, Ukraine is obviously going to be the most likely suspect in the eyes of the Russians. All of this once again raises the question, why is the United States so eager, so willing to incur the vastly increasing risks of this extremely dangerous war? For what interests and for whose? 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. We are available on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms. We post the episodes 12 hours after they are first broadcast here, live, on Rumble. You can follow us there. Find us,  rate us, and review us, that helps the visibility of the show.

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


 

One of the most unexplained, bizarre and unexpected developments in cable news took place last week when Fox, in a very cursory statement, unceremoniously announced that the Tucker Carlson program, which was not only the highest-rated program currently on Fox but the highest-rated program in the history of cable news – the history of the medium – as of Friday night before, would no longer appear on the program. It was terminated. Fox was done with Tucker Carlson and his program. They added insult to injury by issuing the most stinting and ungenerous statement possible, the stingiest words imaginable, essentially saying we thank Tucker for his service to our network and wish him luck in his future endeavors. No attempt at all to explain to the millions of people that Fox has spent tons of money cultivating over the years to watch Tucker’s show. Why it is that their favorite host, the person whom they most trust, has just simply disappeared from the Fox airwaves? No respect for the viewers, nothing but contempt for them – actually, just announced in a short note that he was gone and then asked Brian Kilmeade, the host of “Fox & Friends”, who was in a very difficult position, to guest-host the show Monday evening. And they gave him about 12 seconds at the start of the show for him to say, essentially, “You probably heard Fox and Tucker have parted ways and Tucker's a friend of mine and always will be. And now on to the news.” 

So, the entire episode has been shrouded in mystery because Fox has said nothing about why this has happened and Tucker issued a two-minute video in which he essentially vowed that he will continue to always tell the truth. He said that if you do tell the truth, you pay a price, you will end up suffering, which is absolutely true. But there wasn't a single hint of criticism of any Fox executive or Fox News itself in that video. Almost immediately following that video, Fox began leaking to the media that it had compiled a dossier on Tucker that it was prepared to unleash a nuclear war arsenal against him if Tucker goes nuclear on Fox. And that makes sense. 

When I left The Intercept, I not only announced I was leaving, but I condemned them in very vehement terms because I felt an obligation to my readers not just to announce in a cursory note that I was leaving but, given the media outlet was founded on my name and I had been defending it since 2013, I felt an obligation to explain what I thought had gone so wrong inside that institution that I felt compelled to leave. And as a result, The Intercept then turned around and attacked me and my character and made allegations against me, which I completely expected and thought was fair – if I was going to attack them, I thought it was totally expected that they would attack me back. And they did. And I never minded and I thought that was fine. But in this case, Tucker left or was fired and didn't utter a word of criticism. He didn't tell his audience not to watch Fox. He didn't tell his audience or anybody else that this was Fox selling out or trying to appease liberal public opinion. He just issued a two-minute video after three days of silence, basically saying, I'm not going anywhere, I'll let you know what it is that I'm doing. That was it. And ever since, there has been an avalanche of leaks clearly coming from the highest levels of Fox News that are not designed to shed light on why Fox fired Tucker. They're designed to destroy Tucker Carlson's character and reputation forever by branding him a white supremacist, a racist, a misogynist, and a liar. And to do so, they are partnering with the very liberal media outlets that have been most bent on Fox's destruction for years, starting with The New York Times. 

So, let's look today at this incredibly new escalation, this significant escalation, and Fox's attack on the person who until about two weeks ago, by all appearances, has been somebody beloved by the Murdoch family, because he made them so much money and because Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's son who runs Fox, believed that Tucker was a very respectable face for the network. I have tried doing a lot of reporting on finding out the real reason why Fox fired Tucker. I obviously know a lot of people at Fox. I know Tucker well. He's become a friend of mine over the years. I know other people at Fox who are at Fox, who have been at Fox. Nobody knows the real reason. People can speculate, there are little clues here and there but the real story of why Fox decided to fire its top-rated host and risk what has happened and what everyone knew happened, which is a radical decline in their ratings and prime time – maybe they'll recover, maybe they won't – is a story that no one seems to know. And it is amazing to watch this war now being waged on Tucker's character by the people for whom he has loyally worked for the last six years. So, let's look at what they did today. 

Here is The New York Times article. The headline is “Carlson's Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: It's Not How White Men Fight.”  You can tell from the headline that The New York Times is reporting not to have gotten a hold of attacks that makes Tucker look bad, although they did. That could have come from anywhere. That could have come from a lower-level Fox person. It could have come from someone inside Dominion's law firm or Fox's law firm or – who knows – when there's litigation of this kind between Dominion and Fox and emails are flying around, anyone can get access to emails and link them. It's impossible to say for sure who did it. What is so amazing about this New York Times article is it is purporting to describe insight into how the Fox board of directors viewed this text and the thought process that led them to fire Tucker, which could have only come from the board of directors itself. No one else will have the ability to convince The New York Times to publish claims about what the Fox board of directors is thinking other than people on the board of directors of Fox or at the highest levels of Fox News – Fox Management Suzanne Scott or Lachlan Murdoch himself, or someone on the board. That is where this story came from. That is what is so amazing about it. It is confirmation that Fox is on this warpath against him. There is the subheading “The discovery of the text message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Tucker Carlson's firing.” It's a story by three different New York Times reporters – Jeremy Peters, Michael Schmidt, and Jim Rutenberg. Let's take a look at what it says. 

A text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of its billion-dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views about violence and race. 

The discovery of the message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson's firing. The text alarmed the Fox board […] (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

 

How would they know that that text alarmed the Fox board unless someone on the Fox board told The New York Times? This is what alarmed us. 

 

The text alarmed the Fox board, which saw the message a day before Fox was set to defend itself against Dominion before a jury. The board grew concerned that the message could become public at trial when Mr. Carlson was on the stand, creating a sensational and damaging moment that would raise broader questions about the company […] (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).



Let me just stop here and explain why this makes no sense to me. So first of all, it is far from clear why a private text that we're about to show you that Tucker Carlson wrote, that was intended to be private, where he actually talks about him watching a video of three white Trump supporters ganging up on an Antifa protester and beating him to a pulp and the feelings that he had watching that, including the fact that he was at first biting himself, rooting for the Antifa person to have the crap kicked out of him. And then he realizes that's not how he wants to go through life, feeling that that's not a humanitarian sensation, that even this Antifa person, despite hating his politics and maybe even him, has a family, has a mother, has a father, has siblings who all of whom would be in deep mourning and grief if he were actually killed. And he said to himself by succumbing to these temptations, I will be as bad as him. He also said in there that ganging up on people this way is a dishonorable thing to do. It's not how white people fight. That's what made the text so inflammatory. Why would this text possibly be admissible in a lawsuit that Dominion brought against Fox claiming defamation regarding Fox allegations by some host or the airing of some claims that Dominion voting machines were used to defraud the election? It's extremely unlikely that this text would be admissible. The idea that they fear that this text would emerge as part of the trial is extremely unbelievable to me. But even if it were the case that they feared that this email might emerge during the trial, they settled the lawsuit with Dominion. There was no trial and they fired him after that. So, when they fired him, there was no concern that this would emerge as part of the trial. This version makes no sense. Maybe they feared this would come out in some other way but, ironically, it came out because someone at Fox clearly gave it to The New York Times. And why would you do that? Again, you can only get that if the board went to the New York Times and said, “Let us tell you why we decided to fire Tucker because we discovered he's an unreconstructed racist. We didn't know that before. We only learned it in the past couple of weeks. When we learned it, we decided to fire him.” That's what Fox is saying to the public about Tucker Carlson through The New York Times. 

 

The day after the discovery, the board told Fox executives it was bringing in an outside law firm to conduct an investigation into Mr. Carlson's conduct. The text message added to a growing number of internal issues involving Mr. Carlson that led the company's leadership to conclude he was more of a problem than an asset and had to go, according to several people with knowledge of the decision […] (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

 

Again, those are people inside Fox at high levels of Fox News. This leak would not be happening without the authorization of Lachlan Murdoch and Suzanne Scott and the highest levels of Fox. Why – If you're going to leak this – do you go to the New York Times to do it? 

 

In other messages, [Tucker] had referred to women – including a senior Fox executive – in crude and misogynistic terms. The message about the fight also played a role in the company's decision to settle with Dominion for $787.5 million, the highest known payout in a defamation case. 

The text message came to the attention of Fox's board of directors and even some senior executives only last month, on the Sunday before the trial was set to begin, according to two people with knowledge of Fox's internal deliberations. At the time, Fox negotiators were entering discussions about an out-of-court settlement ahead of the swearing-in of what was shaping up to be a diverse jury. 

The next day, the board told Fox's leadership about its plan to have the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz to investigate Mr. Carlson. That disclosure set up the possibility that there could be a continuing investigation into what was behind Mr. Carlson's messages at the same time as a trial, and as he was serving as its top host in prime time. 

Fox has not commented about Mr. Carlson's ouster last week beyond an initial statement announcing that they agreed to “part ways” and thanking “him for his service.” It did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday on the contents of Mr. Carlson's redacted message. (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

 

Look at this lie. This is the game they play. “Fox has not commented about Mr. Carlson's ouster last week beyond that initial statement.” Everything I just read you was Fox commenting, just doing it, in the slimiest way possible, anonymously, into the New York Times but, of course, everything that I just read to you came from Fox. It's borderline lying to say that ‘Fox hasn't commented on this’, ‘Fox wouldn't comment when asked’ when they know that all of this came from Fox. 

 

It remains unclear how the text escaped more notice earlier, given that the Fox legal team was aware of it and other offensive text written by Mr. Carlson. Fox's lawyers had produced attacks as part of the discovery process and were involved in the redactions. Mr. Carlson had even been asked about it during a deposition, according to several people who have read the unredacted transcripts of his deposition. (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

 

So, the whole timeline doesn't make sense either. This text was produced as part of the litigation many, many, many months ago. The way that documents get produced in litigation is that the principles – people like Tucker Carlson, or anyone involved in the lawsuit who are required to turn over information, go through their emails, and turn them over to Fox's lawyers; Fox's lawyers go through them, read through them carefully, decide which are privileged, which ones are it, and which ones need to be turned over and then turn them over – so, of course, Fox News's lawyers have seen this. And if it's true that it was going to be used by Dominion and, again, according to the New York Times article, Dominion's lawyers asked Tucker about it in his deposition many months ago, it strains credulity beyond all breaking points that Fox only learned about this within the last ten days, and that was the reason for his firing. It makes absolutely no sense – beyond the fact that how long now have people like The New York Times and liberal media outlets been accusing every Fox News personality of being a racist and a white supremacist, going back to Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck or Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. Everyone who works at Fox is instantly and inherently referred to as a white supremacist. Now, suddenly, they're so worried about that. I believe we have the text itself, which we need to show you. It's pretty much what I described, but I nonetheless want to go over and read it to you. It's the text that just became public today. It's the reason Fox is saying – or a major reason Fox is saying – why they fired Tucker Carlson. It seems like Fox not only talked to The New York Times, but also The Washington Post. They have an article as well. There you see the headlines. “Tucker Carlson's Text on How “White Men Fight” Alarmed Fox Board Members. The lawsuit, a countermove against John Paul Mac Isaac escalates the legal battle.” And here again, you see: 

 

But in the most startling passage, Carlson asserted flatly that” jumping a guy like that is obvious is dishonorable. It's not how white men fight. 

After seeing the message, the board alerted Fox executives that it planned to retain a law firm to investigate Carlson's behavior, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. (The Washington Post. May 2, 2023).

 

People inside Fox – of the highest levels – also spoke to The Washington Post to give them the same story about how this email or how this text played a crucial role in the decision-making process. Now, listen to the other reason The Washington Post says Fox fired Tucker. 

The Washington Post reported last week that network co-founder Rupert Murdoch had also grown concerned about Carlson's increasingly far-right commentary, including his disparagement of U.S. support for Ukraine, and that executives had noted that his harsh critiques of Fox management and his private communications, including some sexist and vulgar language aimed at a female executive. (The Washington Post. May 2, 2023).

 

Is opposing U.S. proxy wars fought through the CIA and Raytheon now a “far-right” position? And if it is true that part of the reason Rupert Murdoch wanted Tucker Carlson off the air was that he was one of the only people in media with a show vocally opposing the war in Ukraine – Laura Ingraham has put guests on and questioned it and so did Jesse Watters, but nowhere near, with the level of vitriol and devotion that Tucker has. It's been a crusade of his, from the start, to keep the U.S. out of this war. So first of all, when did it become right-wing to oppose U.S. proxy wars? There are left-wing leaders all over the world, like here in Brazil, Lula da Silva, and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, who also oppose what the U.S. is doing in Ukraine, and many others. How is that a far-right position? And beyond that, even if it were, since when does Rupert Murdoch care about having his media outlets air far-right views? That's what they do. That's what they're for – from the New York Post to the Daily Mail to every other right-wing tabloid. 

I do believe – and there was a report from the new start-up Semafor that I believe we showed you, or maybe we didn’t, so I'll tell you about it. It's a new start-up by Ben Smith, who is the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed and used to work at Politico, then he became the media columnist for The New York Times. He now has a startup journalistic outlet called Semafor, it has people like Dave Weigel, who was The Washington Post’s political reporter, and many other experienced reporters. And several days ago, they reported that, shortly before Fox and the Murdochs fired Tucker, they had a call with President Zelenskyy that included Zelenskyy's concerns or anger about Tucker's views on the war in Ukraine and Semafor strongly implied that there was a causal connection between the Murdochs calling Zelenskyy on the one hand and the decision to fire Tucker on the other. They didn't really have the reporting to prove that connection or to assert it explicitly but they clearly implied it. And here's The Washington Post strongly suggesting the same: part of why Rupert Murdoch wanted Tucker off the air was because of his opposition to the U.S. role in Ukraine. 

So, even if you're somebody who's in doubt about the role of the U.S. in the war in Ukraine or even if you're somebody who supports the U.S. role, isn’t this extremely disturbing? There was one person in all of the media, corporate media, who was a vocal, continuous, devoted critic of the Biden administration's war policy. That person is now off the air. That show no longer exists and, according to reporting from The Washington Post and Semafor, especially The Washington Post, at least in part, his opposition to Biden's war policies in Ukraine is part of why he got fired. Is it not incredibly concerning that we cannot, in our corporate media, accommodate dissent to U.S. foreign policy, especially when it comes to a war that Joe Biden himself has said has brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962? 

Many of you probably don't remember this, but in 2002 and 2003, when there was a very repressive atmosphere for dissent over the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq, there was only one person on all of cable news who had a show who was vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq. The Fox hosts were in favor. People on CNN were in favor. There was one person, on MSNBC, who was as adamantly opposed to the invasion of Iraq in 2002, as Tucker Carlson has been to the U.S. role in Ukraine. His name was Phil Donahue, the longtime daytime talk show host who was known as kind of a left-liberal. He was given his own MSNBC show. It was the beginning of MSNBC's growth. He didn't have a very big audience, but it was bigger than everybody else's on MSNBC, it was the highest-rated MSNBC host, and he was fired in the middle of 2002, or early 2003. And a memo surfaced very shortly after saying the reason he got fired was because MSNBC did not want to be associated with his opposition to the war. It was too inflammatory at the time, and I remember very well I was reading blogs at this point, getting ready to start writing myself, this was a cause of extreme outrage among American progressives and liberals, and the left, that we can't have one host of one TV show who's opposed to this war. We need a 24-hour drumbeat in favor of the invasion of Iraq. No debate or dissent can be permitted? That is the same as what happened here. Where are those voices angrily objecting? Even if you hate Tucker Carlson and everything else he stands for that. What Fox really seems to have done, at least in part, is remove Tucker Carlson from the air because of his heterodox view that conflicts with the majority of Republican establishment lawmakers who support Joe Biden's war policy, including Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, the two Republican leaders of the House and Senate. At least in part, that seems to have been the motive for Rupert Murdoch removing Tucker from the air. That is incredibly disturbing for anyone who values dissent and free media. 

Let me put Tucker's text on the air. I'm going to read the whole thing to you. I think if we're going to talk about it, we should see it. So, this is from January 7, 2021. Here's the text printed by The New York Times. There's no text before it. There's no indication to whom he's speaking or to what he's responding. It says, 

 

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It's not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn't good for me. I'm becoming something I don't want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I'm sure I'd hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn't gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don't care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is? (Tucker Carlson. Jan 7, 2021).

 

Overall, this is a very kind of thoughtful, contemplative, humanistic pondering on his part. That's the sort of thing we want people to do. We have these human impulses – part of it is our instinct, part of it is our primitive I.D. – and we expect people to evaluate what's taking place inside of our brains and decide whether or not those are positive impulses and to restrain them and we decide that they're not as he did. Obviously, the problematic part of this post is when he says that ganging up three against one or four against one is not how white people fight. Presumably, it's how other racial groups fight – Latinos, Black people or Muslims, or whoever – but it's not how white people fight. 

If you ask me, looking at this text in isolation, what I think of that sentence, I will tell you without the slightest hesitation that I find it problematic in the extreme. One of the reasons I've always defended Tucker – and one of the reasons I will still always defend Tucker – is that I do believe that his prism is free of racial analysis. He judges people by individuals and not by their race. And obviously, this is inconsistent with that. He's making a statement about how white people fight versus how black people and Latinos fight. So, do I like this comment? I do not like this comment. What I will, though, say is that I believe that you can go through everybody's private text – these are private texts – where people are speaking freely to friends or colleagues in a rushed way, not being the slightest bit careful, and you can find problematic things in what everybody has said in private, at some point, if you go through enough of their texts for enough time – and even worse when you decontextualized a passage. So, you have no idea what the tenor of this conversation was, whether there was humor involved, what he was responding to whom, what the subtext was – it's very difficult to evaluate on its own. Evaluating on its own makes it problematic. There is no doubt about it. That's why Fox gave it to The New York Times because they knew how this would make Tucker look. But to take the facts that Tucker provided to Fox's lawyers, assuming that they were his lawyers, too, and to now start leaking them selectively as part of a war to destroy Tucker Carlson is despicable. I assume Tucker will answer this and explain what he meant in due course – I have no doubt that he will – but to start leaking things like this, torn out of their context, without any opportunity for him to explain himself – because he's constrained in all sorts of ways as he negotiates how he's leaving – I find it reprehensible what Fox is doing to Tucker. 

The consequences of all of this are predictable, and I want to show them to you. Tucker was not just the most-watched host on cable news, but the highest-rated host among even young Democrats who watch cable. He had a much younger and more diverse audience than almost anyone in cable – and the largest audience. The cable news audience itself is very old, its audience. If you look at, for example, MSNBC or CNN's ratings, their overall audiences might be 800,000 or 900,000 for a show on MSNBC, and 400,000 - 500,000 for CNN. But if you look at the only people who matter in cable news economics, which is what's called the demo, people who are between 25 and 54 are the ones who are most desired by advertisers because they're the ones who are consumers. Maybe 10% of the overall audience is under 55. So, Anderson Cooper will have 500,000-600,000 people watching, but he'll have 80,000 people under the age of 55. Chris Hayes will have an audience of a million people, but barely 100,000 of them – 10% – will be under 55. They're all old. Cable news is dying as a medium. Tucker was one of the few, the only one really keeping it afloat with his extremely large and loyal audience that was far younger and more diverse than almost any other show on cable in history. And yet here is the ratings for Friday night, April 28. 

Friday night is always a little bit aberrational because people watch less, but it's comparative. So here you see someone on Twitter analyzing the ratings that came out that Friday night. So, four or five days after Tucker’s show is off the air and he says:

 

Holy Christ, young people have abandoned Fox News in prime time with Hannity now below 100,000 in the demo. And Tucker's all-time slot losing more than 70% of its young audience. Catastrophic.(@a_newsman May 1, 2023).

 

And he's absolutely right. So here you look at the cable ratings for people who are 25 to 54, which is the demographic that matters the most. The number one show is “The Five”, which is on at 5 p.m. That is not a prime time. A show that had 240,000 people under the age of 54. The next show is “Gutfeld!”. It's on at 11 p.m. That is also not prime time. He had 154,000 people watching under the age of 54. That was followed by a “Special Report with Brett Bayer”, also not a prime time show, at 6 p.m., 150,000. “America's Newsroom” with Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer. He's been on Fox forever. He used to be on CNN. That's a 9 a.m. show. That's also not a prime time show. Then, “America Reports” with Smith and Roberts at 2 p.m. Do you see? There are no prime time shows in the top five or six outnumbered at noon. “The Faulkner Focus” at 11 a.m., “Fox and Friends” at 8 a.m., “America's Newsroom” with Perino and Hemmer at 10 a.m. MSNBC is a 4:00 p.m. show with Nicolle Wallace beating every Fox prime-time show in the demo since Tucker left. Then there's Neil Cavuto, “Fox and Friend,” and only at number 13 you finally get to Jesse Watters, at 7 p.m. He had 116,000 people under the age of 54 watching. Then you have to go down to... it was a disaster for Fox! America Reports with Smith and Roberts. That's Tucker's old slot. It comes in at number 16 with 111,000 people, barely ahead of “Erin Burnett.” And then afternoon MSNBC shows including Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, “Morning Joe” and only then, it’s number 26, you get Sean Hannity who has under 100,000 people watching, under the age of 54, and the “Laura Ingraham Show”, at 28, at 10 p.m., also at 91,000.  

Again, Fox has slightly recovered from these ratings in the last week, but it is hard to overstate what a huge collapse this is for the demo. Almost always Tucker would be number one, followed by Hannity, “The Five”, “Gutfeld!”, Laura Ingraham, all occupying the top four or five. It seems like a huge portion of Fox's young audience departed when they realized the Tucker show was no longer on the air. So, what is the strategy here? Attacking the person whom these people obviously trust so much that they won't watch Fox without him, perhaps they want to destroy his reputation so that he can't ever again host a show that will compete with Fox? Perhaps it's that they want to win back his audience by making Tucker so radioactive that no one wants to have anything to do with him anymore. They'll pry away his loyal fans from him by convincing everyone he's an unreconstructed racist and a misogynist that, even to Fox, it's a bridge too far. Maybe they want to destroy his credibility so that if he does criticize Fox, the criticisms will be less significant. Whatever it is, they are out to destroy his reputation. And there's only so long Tucker is going to sit by silently and allow them to do that. They seem to be provoking on purpose some kind of a response, which I presume will be forthcoming, but this is despicable behavior by Fox. It just is. To have someone who works for you for six years with great success, who was a loyal employee by every report and the minute he’s out the door because you fired him under very bizarre circumstances, you not only try to destroy his reputation, but you go to The New York Times to do it.  

Somebody has also been leaking to Media Matters videos of Tucker that they think are embarrassing. I'll just show you a couple of these. These may not even be high-level Fox people doing it, but you can see a couple of these that Media Matters got a hold of and is now reveling in. Here's one. 

 

Tucker Carlson (on the phone): Nobody is going to watch it on Fox Nation. Nobody watches Fox Nation because the site sucks. I’d really like to just dump the whole thing on YouTube. […] Anyway, that’s just my view. I’m just frustrated with…it’s hard to use that site. I don’t know why they are not fixing it. It’s driving me insane. They are making like lifetime movies but they don’t work on the infrastructure of the site? Like WHAT? It’s crazy and it’s driving me crazy. We’re doing all this extra work and no one can find it? It’s unbelievable, actually. I don’t know who runs that site […] (Video. Leaked audios of T. Carlson. Media Matters. May 3, 2023)

 

Well, I hope Media Matters has cleared a space on the shelf for the Pulitzer they're going to win for obtaining this incriminating footage. 

There's another one of somebody inside Fox. Obviously, this one is a tape from Fox News when he's in front of the camera when the show isn’t on but the cameras are rolling – leaking to Media Matters of all people, not The New York Times and The Washington Post, this time to Media Matters. 

Inappropriate Tucker Comments (BTS) - Media Matters

So, I have to say, I mean, I am incredibly disturbed by this. I think this is really despicable behavior. There are people who host Fox shows whom I respect. I've been on a lot of those shows many times. I've been on Laura Ingraham many times, I've been on Jesse Watters not quite as many, but a lot. I've been on Howie Kurtz’s Sunday show quite a bit. Several others as well. I've never been on Sean Hannity’s show. He invited me on a couple of times, maybe five years ago, but never again. That's not a show that really aligns with what I do. I don't want to revel in Fox's demise. I don't want to hope for them to fail. I think they serve an important function of airing at least some dissent within the corporate media to what is otherwise a lockstep neoliberal consensus on economic policy, foreign policy, the culture war, and everything else. But I don't know whether I would accept an invitation to go on Fox right now, given their corporate behavior concerning the person who has done more to build up Fox and I think has performed a more important function in media than almost anybody else on television if not anybody else on television over the last six years. The space that he's created for dissent, for a different kind of way of looking at politics, for critiquing the GOP establishment from within and the Democratic establishment, in showing how they're a uniparty, for reporting on the abuses of the U.S. security state in a way that has almost never been done before in corporate television – to take this person who has built a huge audience of people who previously were not open to those ideas, an opening to them, and not just trying to justify why they fired him, but trying to destroy him permanently, forever using all the standard tropes that the liberal media typically uses against Fox and everybody else that they dislike is the behavior I find unforgivable. Unforgivable. And whether that means I'll go on Fox at some point or not, I don't know. But this has left a disgusting taste in my mouth. I think they ought to stop this immediately, and I think they're going to jeopardize their audience that is going to watch them do this. They're going to keep the 75 and 80 and 85-year-old hardcore Republicans who have been watching Fox for 30 years and always will. They're going to have that. I just showed you how small that audience can be. But I don't think they're going to be able to recover the audience that Tucker brought in when people see what it is that they do to those who are most loyal to them.

 

 

We'll see what Tucker does. I have high hopes that his next step will fortify the part of the media I think is most important, the part where I am currently, the independent part, the part where there are no corporate constraints, where there is no Rupert Murdoch to pull the plug if you get too critical of Joe Biden's war policy. I hope – I have very high hopes – that Tucker will come to a place like this – if not this place. But I do believe that Fox needed Tucker more than Tucker needed Fox and that whatever he does, he will thrive. But he will forever have this cloud hanging over his head. And I don't think this is anywhere near the end of what they intend to unleash on him. And I can't think of a justifiable reason for doing this. Not even one that is remotely within the realm of what is ethically justifiable. It is despicable what Fox has done to Tucker and the people with whom they've chosen to do it. And I guess that's all I have to say about that, other than I hope to see Tucker back on the air. I hope to see him defending himself from these attacks, explaining things like that text. And I expect we'll be hearing from him shortly because it's unsustainable to sit by while you get pummeled by your old employer through The New York Times and every other media outlet that has long hated you and remain silent. They've kind of forced his hand into not only responding, but I think responding in kind. And we'll see where that leads. My guess is the audience will end up siding with Tucker and not with Fox. That's certainly where my loyalties would lie.


 

So, we're going to move now to a second story, which is the latest developments in the increasingly dangerous war in Ukraine.

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

Interesting discussion last night. I had not realized Harvard's historical funding situation, and I think we need to DOGE that. They have enough money to get by on their own now. The general consensus of those in the live chat seemed to be to cut the funding, and stop telling them what to do. Great discussion!
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Christopher Rufo: On Civil Liberties, the American Founding, Academic Freedom, and More
System Update #450

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

And in response, you said this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The first question comes from @thefarside:

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

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

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

He writes:

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

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

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

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

 

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

He says:

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

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

(The Road Taken, Patrick Leahy. 2022.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AD_4nXco5EeJOMpGfm0iJLTGIpawiHuFLRc_S_OLs5QNl7kBxJjO9bIpI7xGfhP16gqODI5Zk7CJgOPKkBtwQvRZcYfM_EzqXBUyAleR1JPhDq5CWil_tb7nlk7_DOvCqixu4pct0Qnlq1xQjUnpbNI7D7Q?key=MrBQyTUNLJMvWrwHZK6IMQrI

It's a great question. Thank you. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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