Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
The Disinformation Fraud: How America's Most Powerful Institutions Joined Forces to Crush Speech & Silence Dissent, with Jacob Siegel
Video Transcript
May 09, 2023
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Good evening. It's Thursday, May 4. 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, we’ll devote the entire show to examining one of the most important and consequential hoaxes in our current politics, not just in the United States, but in the wider democratic world, namely, this sprawling, multi-headed, extremely well-funded scam that was created in the wake of the 2016 election that calls itself the anti-disinformation industry. We have devoted several shows and I've written several articles to investigate the genesis of this industry, who is funding it and the rotten ways in which it functions. In September 2021, the still somewhat heterodox Harper's produced one of the most comprehensive examinations of this fraudulent industry in an article by Joseph Bernstein, entitled “Bad News. Selling the Story of Disinformation” but the single most important and comprehensive investigation of this fraudulent and deeply menacing industry was published several weeks ago by the journal Tablet, entitled “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.” In it, the writer Jacob Siegel, devoted 13,000 extremely well-researched words to describe, in his words, “a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole-of-society” effort that aims to seize total control over the Internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.” (Tablet. March 28, 2023). 

We will examine this industry, dissect the key elements of Siegel's groundbreaking article, and then in our interview segment, speak with him about its most important components. 

It is really hard to overstate how consequential and how nefarious this disinformation industry is. It received woefully inadequate attention until the emergence of these articles. It is one of the greatest threats to a free Internet yet manufactured. It is rapidly spreading as a result of the backing of some of the world's most powerful governments and most influential neo-liberal billionaires. And without hyperbole or melodrama, its goal is nothing less than the end of the Internet as one of our last instruments for expressing and organizing meaningful dissent. 

Due to ongoing family commitments, we are unfortunately unable to do our aftershow on Locals tonight, which ordinarily takes place on Thursday. We will do our best to be back on both Tuesday and Thursday of next week. With that, to join our Locals community, simply click the join button and you'll have exclusive access to that. 

As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form, it appears 12 hours after the show is first broadcasted, live, here on Rumble. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and every other major podcasting platform to help spread the visibility of the show.

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

 

 


In 2016, the neoliberal order suffered two devastating and traumatic defeats, made even more traumatizing because establishment forces did everything possible to stop them, yet failed. First, was the decision by the British people to ratify Brexit and leave the European Union, despite an avalanche of nonstop propaganda about why doing so would be so destructive to their interests. That was followed months later by the obviously shocking election of Donald Trump, against the ultimate establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. Numerous other similar traumas against neoliberal stability in Italy and Scandinavia, in Brazil and elsewhere deeply alarmed Western power centers in ways that cannot be exaggerated. The conclusion they drew from these events was quite simple: allowing the Internet to be free, for ordinary citizens to continue to use it to speak, debate and organize freely was simply no longer tolerable. The consequences of a free Internet had proven, in 2016, to be too unpredictable, too decentralized, and too free to allow it to persist any longer. As a result, there was a very conscious, deliberate and multisector campaign to end what we had all known as a free Internet. 

To accomplish that, some pretext, some justification, was required even in Western Europe and certainly in the United States, we are all too inculcated with the value of free debate and free expression to simply accept a candid admission by Western states and their power centers that they intended to censor the Internet to eliminate dissent – the real motive of what they were doing. 

The pretext that they had long given for creeping censorship, namely the need to stop hate speech, was far too limited and narrow for the much more ambitious goals they adopted for stifling free debate in 2016. What was needed was a term that was at once extremely elastic to the point of being meaningless, yet sufficient to encompass any ideas they wanted to suppress, and the word they invented to justify this new censorship regime was disinformation. Though this tactic had a clear rationale, we must protect the Internet to protect you – or rather, we must censor the Internet to protect you – from the dangers of disinformation, the problems were obvious. What is disinformation? How is it determined? And most importantly of all, who decides what counts and does not count as disinformation? To resolve those problems a fake expertise was invented out of whole cloth. Seemingly overnight, we became inundated with “disinformation experts.” There is no academic institution in the United States that issues degrees in Disinformation. It is a completely false credential, a fake expertise, but it proliferated very quickly with prominent social media stars bestowing themselves with the title of disinformation expert and the newly materialized groups – always with deliberately benign-sounding names but shady, yet substantial funding – suddenly appearing to employ these disinformation experts and to insist that the process for determining what is and is not disinformation was not politicized or ideological, perish the thought, but rather apolitical, scientific and data driven. The bet that they made was that as long as this field could be presented as residing above politics, rather than where it actually resides which is deep within it, enough people would be deceived to accept superior authority, and presto, censorship would no longer be about suppressing political ideas or dissent. No, it was a deeply earnest and scientific endeavor to do nothing more or less benign than protect people, all of you, from damaging falsehoods. Who doesn't want to live in a world where falsehoods are identified and then eliminated? 

Dissecting this fraud of disinformation and the industry that now supports it is not an easy task. There are hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. Security State and other Western security agencies, from George Soros and Bill Gates, and Pierre Omidyar – not Boogeymen but the documented funders of these organizations and virtually every corporate media outlet, always seeking ways to maintain their decades-old but finally evaporating stranglehold on the flow of information. These media outlets are now endorsing this fraudulent industry, recognizing the value it presents to equate their narratives with proven truth, and then any critics of their narratives as purveyors of the dreaded disinformation. 

The reporting we have done over the last few years has delved deeper into this industry. The Harper's article, though, that I alluded to at the start, advanced this story by identifying the core fraudulent premises at the heart of the entire project. Let's take a quick look at some of the key points that Harper's article exposed. The title is “Bad News Selling the Story of Disinformation” and here are its key revelations from 2021. 

 

The Commission on Information Disorder is the latest (and most creepily named) addition to a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia and policy research: Big Disinfo. A kind of EPA for content. It seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of “toxicity” on social media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platform's clumsy, dishonest and half-hearted attempts to halt it. 

As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a higher model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in beliefs or behavior that are bad by, some standards. Otherwise, why care what people read and watch?  

The most comprehensive survey of the field to date, a 2018 scientific literature review titled “Social Media Political Polarization and Political Disinformation,” reveals some gobsmacking deficits. The authors fault disinformation research for failing to explain why opinions change; lacking solid data on the prevalence and reach of disinformation and declining to establish common definitions for the most important terms in the field, including disinformation, misinformation, online propaganda, hyperpartisan news, fake news, clickbait, rumors and conspiracy theories. (Harper’s Magazine. Sept. 2021).

 

Of course, they don't want to define those terms. It's precisely the lack of definition that bestows the terms and those who wield them with all the power. The article goes on:

 

The sense prevails that no two people who research disinformation are talking about quite the same thing. This will ring true to anyone who follows the current media discussion around online propaganda. “Misinformation” and “disinformation” are used casually and interchangeably to refer to an enormous range of content, ranging from well-worn scams to viral news aggregation; from foreign-intelligence operations to trolling; from opposition research to harassment. In their crudest use, the terms are simply jargon for “things I disagree with.” 

Attempts to define “disinformation” broadly enough as to rinse it of political perspective or ideology leave us in territory so abstract as to be absurd. As the literature review put it: “Disinformation” is intended to be a broad category describing the types of information that one could encounter online that could possibly lead to misperceptions about the actual state of the world. The term has always been political and belligerent. An even more vexing issue for the disinformation field, though, is the supposedly objective stance media researchers and journalists take toward the information ecosystem to which they themselves belong. Somewhat amazingly, this attempt has taken place alongside an agonizing and overdue questioning within the media of the harm done by unexamined professional standards of objectivity. 

Like journalism, scholarship, and all other forms of knowledge creation, disinformation research reflects the culture, aspirations, and assumptions of its creators. (Harper’s Magazine. Sept. 2021).

 

It is nothing scientific. It is deeply subjective. 

 

A quick scan of the institutions that publish most frequently and influentially about disinformation: Harvard University, The New York Times, Stanford University at MIT, NBC, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations etc. That the most prestigious liberal institutions of the pre-digital age are the most invested in fighting disinformation reveals a lot about what they stand to lose or hope to regain. 

Whatever the brilliance of the individual disinformation researchers and reporters, the nature of the project inevitably places them in a regrettably defensive position in the contemporary debate about media representation, objectivity, image-making, and public knowledge. However well-intentioned these professionals are, they don't have special access to the fabric of reality. 

This spring, in light of new reporting and a renewed, bipartisan political effort to investigate the origins of COVID-19, Facebook announced that it would no longer remove posts that claim that the coronavirus was man-made or manufactured. Many disinformation workers who spent months calling for social-media companies to ban such claims on the grounds that they were conspiracy theories have been awkwardly silent as scientists have begun to admit that an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab is an unlikely, but plausible, possibility. (Harper’s Magazine. Sept. 2021).

 

That was, again, 18 months ago. The possibility of a Wuhan lab has become much more probable. We know that the leading and most elite teams of scientists within the Department of Energy and the FBI both believe it's by far the most likely explanation for the COVID pandemic. But what that Harper's article showed was the core fraud of this industry, the conceit that there are somehow a group of people who have now elevated themselves to reside above political ideology and political agenda, who have somehow become trained, experts, in decreeing what is and is not information to the point where that should be censored off the Internet, when in reality, as the Harper's article so brilliantly demonstrated, there is nothing objective about it, is every bit as politicized and subjective and subject to manipulation as journalism and political debate. It is a fraudulent industry and a fraudulent expertise. 

What made The Tablet’s article so definitive in terms of the understanding it presented for this industry beyond the reporting I had done, beyond the Harper's article, is that it traced the history, the genesis of where this all came from, and how it was formed, and then where it took hold. We will in our interview segment in just a few minutes, speak with the author of this brilliant and vitally important article, Jacob Siegel, and he will explain a great deal about the work he did in tracing the roots of this industry but I just want to show you a few key segments from the article to set this context for the discussion that I'm about to have with him. Let’s take a look at the article:

 

In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day, he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy's name synonymous with the politics of the era. 

For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts and demagogues. Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and the American political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States. 

This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in DC, George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation a “whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.” (Tablet. March 28, 2023).

 

That is exactly what happened. The Democratic Party after 2016 decided that the reason they lost that election was because the Internet was too free and they implemented a plan that became their top priority. A whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response, to gain control of the Internet by concocting, manufacturing, in partnership with their Never Trump Republican allies, this fraudulent industry called the disinformation industry that would then be used to justify control of the Internet. The article goes on:

 

In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime's aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That's why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden's laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. 

Disinformation, now and for all time is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system. (Tablet. March 28, 2023). 

 

As I said at the start, the lack of definition, the lack of anything concrete was intended. That's what bestows it with its power. The article goes on: 

 

The false yet foundational claim that Russia hacked the 2016 election provided a justification – just like the claims about weapons of mass destruction that triggered the Iraq War – to plunge America into a wartime state of exception. With the normal rules of constitutional democracy suspended, a coterie of party operatives and security officials then installed a vast, largely invisible new architecture of social control on the back end of the Internet's biggest platforms. (Tablet. March 28, 2023).

 

That is exactly what happened. That is the censorship regime that we face. There has been a lot of great work and reporting done none better than this article by Jacob Siegel, who is our guest tonight. And I'm about to show you the interview we conducted with him that I think shines even further light on what this journal called Tablet aptly calls “the hoax of the century,” meaning this fraudulent, fake but deeply nefarious disinformation industry. Here's our interview. 


 

G. Greenwald: Jacob, first of all, congratulations on writing an article that, at least in some quarters, has received so much attention and praise, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about it. 

 

Jacob Siegel:  I'm glad to be here. 

 

G. Greenwald: Sure. So, there are a lot of odd things that have happened in the world of politics. Let's start with the fact that I not only am praising an article in Tablet magazine but encouraging everybody to read it on the grounds that it's one of the most important stories of the year. Something I think would have been unimaginable for me even seven or eight years ago. There's a lot of other weird things like that, including the fact that you're talking to me and that, you know, the favorite operative of liberals is Rick Wilson and they worship the Bush-Cheney spokeswoman, Nicolle Wallace, who comes on their TV every day at 5 o’clock, so where do you fit in into this kind of whirlwind? Just talk a little bit about your post-9/11 trajectory, how you ended up in Afghanistan and just more broadly, your kind of political journey as you see it. 

 

Jacob Siegel: Yeah, I would say I wound up in the military shortly after 9/11, not with any great political conviction necessarily, but with a strong patriotic sentiment, a sense that if the country was going to war, I should be involved in that, I shouldn't be exempt, somehow, that if other people are going, I should go as well. And, you know, I had volunteered at Ground Zero shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and I just felt like I should be a part of that. And I was deployed to Iraq in 2006, 2007. That was a difficult, then sobering, experience, to say the least. Whatever illusions I'd had about the war, which were probably already gone by then, certainly didn't survive 15 months in Iraq. Then in 2012, I was deployed to Afghanistan and that was quite a different experience. But it was one that allowed for more kind of contemplation and reflection on my part, in no small part because the conditions in Afghanistan where I was, in western Afghanistan, in 2012, as an army intelligence officer, were, you know, less chaotic, less violent than they had been in Iraq during the civil war and surge years in 2006, 2007. And so, there was more opportunity for me to take stock and to think about what was actually happening and to assess what seemed to be a just unbridgeable gap between the official declarations about the war and what I, or for that matter, anybody else, could have observed on the ground. 

I should just make clear that I was nothing special. I didn't have any high-level access to anything. I was a very average – an average battalion-level intelligence officer. So it wasn't that I had any special access, it was just that I had the opportunity to take stock and when I did that, I couldn't reconcile myself to why these enormous lies were being told about the war. It was obvious to me that they were being told, and I couldn't justify that. That being said, I didn't have any grand political awakening at the moment. There was just this sort of creeping disillusionment and reassessment, and I couldn't honestly tell you exactly where it led me or where it wound up. I've always thought of myself primarily as a writer and an observer more than as somebody with very strong political convictions. 

 

G. Greenwald: You know, it's interesting. I had kind of an eye-opening experience when I worked on both reporting, on WikiLeaks stories and, then, also working with Edward Snowden, whom himself joined the Army after 9/11 and wanted to go fight in the war in Iraq, believing that it was just a noble cause. He broke his legs in basic training, ended up in the CIA and the NSA, and then kind of discovered while he was doing that, that there was a gap between what the government had made people believe it was doing and what it was doing. But also, even as part of that reporting, I so often would hear from people who had been in the military or who worked inside the intelligence community, who were most open to the notion that a lot of these secrets needed to be unveiled, not because they were fans of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden even, but just because they were much more open to the fact that the government lies about the reality because they saw it up close and, say, very militaristic and uber patriotic pundits who say it's never justifiable to criticize what the U.S. government is doing. And in terms of this kind of political change I had referenced in the beginning, to me, it seems like one of the most significant parts of this change is that the people who are very skeptical of and concerned about the behavior of the intelligence community used to be found, I think, primarily on the left, and now they're more often found on the right. And that has kind of… I feel like I'm sort of sitting in the same place and things have swirled around me. 

A big part of your article talks about the role of the intelligence community in building a censorship regime. You even compare some of the things you saw in terms of intelligence activities in Afghanistan and what was being used against the Taliban or al-Qaida, or the entire country, about Afghanistan to what's being done domestically to American citizens on U.S. soil. Has your view of the intelligence community changed in the sense that it became much more skeptical, that you've become more concerned about what they're doing? Or do you think they've just gotten more menacing in terms of our rights – or some combination of both? 

 

Jacob Siegel:  More the former. My views have certainly changed. I do think that they've gotten more menacing. But to take Assange as an example, you know, my sense of Julian Assange's role in the political process in 2016, let's say, there was a more or less fair and open political contest between Democrats and Republicans, and Assange was a kind of interloper in that political process. And, you know, I might have said the same thing about some of the things you were doing at the time, Glenn, I might have seen them in the same way, because my sense was that already there were referees, there was an officiated contest, there was procedural constitutional democracy and to have people come in from the outside, whether it was Kim Dotcom or Assange, and try and influence the electorate by strategically exposing secrets, as it were, I saw that as a kind of untoward interference. 

What I realize now is that there was not a fairly officiated electoral process and that the people who were keeping the secrets were the Democratic National Committee, the intelligence agencies, and that Assange – and so far, as he was pushing to open up the secrets – was actually acting more in the spirit, let's say, of a truly fair democratic process. But that was a gradual realization for me. There were a number of things, one thing after another, you know, realizing that Adam Schiff was lying over and over again. I couldn't reconcile myself to that after a while. The Russian bounties story, I couldn't reconcile myself to that. I'd always maybe had some skepticism of the, you know, unaccountable power in the intelligence agencies. I was aware of some of that history but once I saw all these things together, you know, the accumulation changed my view. 

 

G. Greenwald:   One of the things that struck me in the article when I sat down to read it was you began a paragraph devoted to the scandals of Joseph McCarthy and the controversy surrounding what he did, namely, accusing all sorts of people of being covert agents of the Kremlin, claiming that he had secret lists of people whom he could prove to hide allegiances, American citizens, well, allegiances to the Russians. And I recall the very first time I heard the Russiagate narrative presented in May 2016, which was when the Clinton campaign released this very ominous ad with that kind of heavy music and that deep intonation – “What is Donald Trump doing with the Kremlin?” You know, I immediately assumed that everybody remotely affiliated with the left or with liberalism steeped in the evils of McCarthyism would be horrified by this resurrection of this narrative. It was almost verbatim what was used and what was said. And to this very day, anyone who now stands up and questions the proxy war in Ukraine or who dissented from Russiagate was accused of being a Russian agent. Some people on the right still look at that era favorably. I think Ann Coulter wrote a whole book trying to resurrect McCarthy's reputation, but leaving that aside, why did you begin with that example? What is it about that example and what parallels do you see in what's happening now? 

 

Jacob Siegel:  I mean, for exactly the reason you just pointed out, which is that for more than half a century, the Red Scare and McCarthyism was not just one historical episode among many for American liberals, which is, you know, the tradition and the milieu that I grew up in was that kind of Cold War American liberalism and its aftermath is something I'm very familiar with. And McCarthyism was, if not the central moral allegory, then certainly the central moral allegory of the last 50 years, let's say. And it was supposed to have revealed the true face of America and what the American political system was capable of. And all of that was supposed to be in the DNA of American liberalism. And to see all of that abandoned so quickly, to see it abandoned – abandonment is the wrong word – to see precisely the thing that American liberalism had supposedly been against – it had to find itself in opposition to – to see it so quickly and wholeheartedly embraced, seemed to me significant and to signal the kind of epochal change which is that something from the polls had reversed somehow. And north was south and south was north now. And also just the parallels were so striking with the two secret lists in narrative terms – McCarthy with his list, you know, the famous list that he brandished and then never actually produced, and then this Hamilton 68 secret list that they couldn't produce, they couldn't reveal to the public. And so, I found it – I couldn't open it any other way. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, even if people generally support the notion that there was more communist infiltration of the United States in the 1950s than was known or whatever, it's still seemingly a support for the core tenets of McCarthyism because all of that was based on things like secret list and destruction of reputation with no due process and all kinds of excessive abuses of power that we should all object to, no matter what the cause. 

One of the things I think was very important that you did in telling this story was you emphasized the way in which the kind of accelerant, the steroids for all of this stuff – the regime of censorship, the involvement of the security state in our politics – was the obviously shocking election of Donald Trump in 2016, which I think people have forgotten. Almost nobody was expecting and was a huge shock to the system and caused a lot of these previously unthinkable things to just explode in power. But as you note, a lot of these things were a long time in the making well before Trump and you specifically point to the proximity of the Obama White House and Obama himself on the one hand, and Silicon Valley on the other, and the use, for example, of propaganda and disinformation over the Internet by Hillary Clinton's State Department and her use of people who then went on to work for Google, all these kind of, you know, Internet geniuses who thought they had found a real home in the Obama administration. Talk a little bit about how some of these things had their roots not in Trump's election, but back in the things the Obama administration was doing. 

 

Jacob Siegel: Yeah. So if you look at the Obama administration in that era, the Internet freedom agenda, what you find is that many of the tools of disinformation and the disinformation apparatus had their debut during that period, either as offensive weapons to be used against official enemies of the United States, ISIS in particular, or they were debuted because it was the Hillary Clinton State Department, in particular, that was criticizing other countries for engaging in precisely the kinds of activities that Clinton would later lead others to crusade against disinformation. 

But to begin with, first, there was a very close alignment between the Obama administration and Google in particular. And because of the kind of spectacular nature of the Twitter Files and because of Facebook being such a great and easy target in a lot of ways – you know, Google has skated off in a lot of the analysis of this censorship industrial complex and that's unfortunate because Google really plays a leading role in this. And it begins not in the coercive counter-disinformation register. It begins in this kind of big data political engineering register that the Obama administration embraces wholeheartedly. Assange, we mentioned a moment ago, was writing about this quite early on, talking about Google serving as a kind of shadow State Department for the Obama administration. There was a record-setting personnel exchange between the White House and Google, with a record number of meetings being held between the two. [So, you] see this very close alignment between these powerful tech companies that are effectively private surveillance platforms and the Obama administration, which goes on to become the sort of backbone of this permanent ruling party of the United States. 

 

G. Greenwald: One of the things that strikes me so much in the TikTok debate – whether to ban TikTok or not – and the kind of other bills to give the government even greater powers to ban platforms when they decide there are similar threats, is that – for a long time – the critique of countries like China and Iran and Russia was that these governments were despotic precisely because they refused to allow American technology platforms such as Google and Facebook to enter their country, or at least operate without a lot of constraints. Their concern was that they would be used to disseminate disinformation, they would destabilize their countries by spreading propaganda, by undermining the health of their citizenry in their country, and they would be called despotic for wanting to ban Google and Facebook, or at least requiring them to submit to a whole bunch of censorship rules in order to operate on their soil. And now, we have the United States leaving aside the merits of the debate over whether to ban TikTok, essentially, saying the same thing, that we can't allow foreign platforms, foreign social media companies to be on our soil because they'll propagandize their citizenry, they'll spread disinformation. I draw that parallel because it seems like there's a similar parallel in terms of some of the things that Hillary Clinton's State Department was doing. I remember she would go around with these two little kids, Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, who were supposedly whizz-kids of Silicon Valley, and the work they were actually doing was designed to allow citizens of those countries to get around the censorship regime that had been imposed by countries like China and Iran and Russia by making the Internet open, by allowing them to use the Internet anonymously to get around with things like VPNs. 

Given all of that, how do you see the similarities between what we have been long condemning in these countries in terms of controlling the Internet, censoring the Internet on the grounds that those countries said they had to protect their citizens from disinformation and foreign propaganda, with what the U.S. government is doing now in terms of what American citizens can and can't hear. 

 

Jacob Siegel: Well, look, I, I guess I have a somewhat, I don't know, complicated – but my view is that governments have a right to – “right” is a wrong word – governments have the prerogative to regulate communications platforms as corporate entities, let's say […] 

 

G. Greenwald: The way they regulate the other, the way they regulate banks or oil companies or any other company. 

 

Jacob Siegel: Precisely – and, in this case, a company or a sector that has monopolistic power over very key resource information which impacts directly political sovereignty. So, you know, I have a basically civil libertarian view of not infringing on speech rights on those platforms but, in terms of the kind of the corporate structure of the platforms themselves, I think there's no reason. The original argument, the original Clinton State Department argument, actually goes back to Bill Clinton. It goes back to the mid-nineties, the first dot-com boom. That argument is that we need totally unrestricted global markets for Internet companies to spread democracy everywhere and unimpeded access to the globe. You know, I think that's the argument that doesn't actually hold up but not that I'm justifying speech restrictions. 

 

G. Greenwald: Well, what's the zero in on that? I remember after 9/11, the kind of slogan, the motto of the media, and the government, was “9/11 changed everything.” I'm not entirely sure that it actually did. I think it took a lot of things that were already existing and expanded it. I think it's actually more accurate to use that motto about the election of Donald Trump. That actually did change everything or certainly fundamentally transformed things, making a lot of things that were once unthinkable now a reality. 

And you identify the election of Trump and the decision by Democrats and the U.S. security state – and kind of the establishment, more broadly – that was playing with a bunch of different explanations. Originally, they were going to blame WikiLeaks. They wanted to blame the New York Times. They wanted to blame Jim Comey. Then, they kind of landed on blaming Russia, and Russiagate, in turn, ended up being the foundation for so much of what ended up happening that your piece talks about in terms of the dangers of Internet control. Describe why you think Russiagate and Trump’s selection were so fundamental. How is that used to do all of this?  

 

Jacob Siegel: Yeah, they blamed everybody but the Clinton camp. Right? 

 

G. Greenwald: The people who actually paid to win that election. 

 

Jacob Siegel: Paid to win that election, decided not to campaign in the upper Midwest. Yeah. Everybody but them.

So, what Russiagate did, I think, was it both served as this kind of coordinating mechanism that brought these various factions of the ruling party – ruling party might be a bit too strong – but various factions of the most powerful sectors of American society that might have had implicit interests in common but had not been explicitly coordinated prior to that, and it brought them together and it brought them together to oppose Donald Trump. And there was a kind of popular base to the opposition to Donald Trump, which is the resistance that portrayed him as a fascist and portrayed him as a Russian stooge and had that kind of moral dimension. And then there was the fact that Donald Trump was obviously a threat to various deep-seated business interests, defense sector interests – that he was threatening to pull out of NATO, that he was threatening to renegotiate trade terms with China – and so, were these various reasons for Trump's outward displays of, you know, at times, quite ugly nativism that really did inflame people. I don't think this was all purely cynical. I think it could only work as well as it did, in part, because Trump really did inspire a reaction from people that was outsized, that was unlike the reaction we had gotten from other politicians. And that that, together with the way in which he threatened these really core interests of the most powerful sectors of American society, put in place the conditions for coordination between those sectors that had not previously existed. So, there was no reason, for instance, to think that Wall Street and Silicon Valley and NGO staffers and The Washington Post newsroom were all going to be aligned – that they were going to be explicitly aligned, I should say – functionally, operationally aligned, and not simply have implicit affinities with one another. But it was intrinsic to the war against disinformation, intrinsic and essential through the counter disinformation and its notion of a “whole-of-society” effort that these various powerful sectors would be lashed to one another in a common cause, in a national mobilization, very much on the model of what happens in times of war. When there's a war, we drop these divisions between the public and the private sector and we adopt that kind of central planning for the war effort, right? It was quite similar to that. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, this is one of the things – just in terms of illustrating how radical I think your critique was or your history was – you do compare the pretext that was used for the War on Terror or the war in Iraq, kind of the central falsehood about weapons of mass destruction that justified the war in Iraq, some of the fears around al-Qaida that led to a lot of the excesses of the War on Terror to what's taking place now. And so, when you say that there were parts of Trump and his nativism that were genuinely ugly and that were genuinely kind of frightening, I think, to a lot of not just establishment interests, but a lot of people who genuinely were frightened by this kind of new ideology, you know, it's also the case that people were also genuinely frightened by al-Qaida and by 9/11. I lived in Manhattan on 9/11. I remember very well, very vividly, all the sensations of anger and rage and fear and concern because our country was attacked. And the lesson of 9/11 that I really thought we had learned – maybe it's just too rational, maybe there are a lot of people who didn't live through it – was that when you actually feel a valid fear of some threat, it's important that you don't let establishment institutions, the government, the media, whomever, exploit those fears to get you to acquiesce to things that you’ll later regret, either because they were worse than the fear itself or were in some other ways not related to the fear – that you kind of got manipulated into saying yes to the Patriot Act; yes to warrantless surveillance; yes to, you know, torture; yes to process-free detentions, all because we have this genuine fear of al-Qaida. 

And so, when it comes to even what you might describe as valid concerns about Trump, why do you think that that lesson – and it wasn't just for 9/11, but prior historical events as well – wasn't kind of in place enough? Why was everybody – not everybody, but so many people, so many institutions – so easily manipulated by fear of this singular individual to radically change their views on almost every major political question and really get to the point that Sam Harris said that everything – lying, censoring and even disinformation – is justified in the name of stopping Trump because he's such a singular threat. 

 

Jacob Siegel:  Just to put a finer point on what Sam Harris said – that it was okay and he would turn and look the other way if there were dead children in a basement if that's what was on Hunter Biden’s laptops because that's how significant the Trump threat was – look, I don't think that societies learn lessons. Individuals learn lessons. So, I understand where you're coming from but I think that's a kind of hopeful position that isn't borne out and that certainly that unaccountable bureaucracies don't learn the lessons. And they exist in no small part to not learn lessons. And the not learning of lessons becomes a core function and a kind of a primary drive of the bureaucracies to avoid at all costs the learning of lessons, lest those lessons point to the needlessness or the excesses of the bureaucracy itself. So, I've sort of given up on this on this hope that there are collective lessons to be learned in that way. There are only carefully guarded institutions that are transparent enough and locally controlled enough that people can actually have influence and impact over them and that can preserve lessons in that way. But to the question of why people responded to Trump in this sort of apocalyptic register – leave aside for a moment why, let's say, the defense establishment or why Wall Street responded to him that way because I think that's maybe easier to understand. They saw him as a threat […] 

 

G. Greenwald: A genuine threat, a rational, genuine threat to their interests. 

 

Jacob Siegel: That's right. Why did so many normal people respond to him that way? And I think tens of millions of normal people did. There are two answers. One is that he seemed to play on these very suppressed and things that people were very uncomfortable with, that they wanted to have overcome – that we had somehow moved beyond the kind of crassness and racism and nativism that Trump represented. Something like that. The best way I could put it is that he was an embarrassment. And there are few things worse in life than an embarrassment. It's like when you think about what you're really afraid of, it's not being kidnaped by al-Qaida and tortured to death. You're really afraid of being embarrassed at a party or something like that – and Trump was a kind of hideous, unavoidable embarrassment who also sort of pointed the embarrassment back at those people by saying to them, “Oh, your niceties are foolish, you're the fool.” And so that was really difficult. 

The other part of it, which became more significant over the years and really can't be discounted, is that the secrecy regime that we're talking about and that the intelligence bureaucracies propagated – and not just the intelligence bureaucracies, other federal bureaucracies also which use secrecy as a form of regulatory power, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out many years ago. That secrecy, that culture of secrecy and that culture of sort of selective information operations being used to manipulate the public drives people crazy. It is not compatible with reason and self-government. It makes people suspicious of their neighbors, suspicious of their own shadows. It makes them believe in monsters that don't exist. So, all of those things together, I think, produced this kind of singular, totally outsized reaction that Trump inspired. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, these tactics have been time-tested over many decades and have been very effectively deployed often in other countries, as you point out, and now are kind of being directed at our own population. And I think that's, for me at least, one of the most significant changes in what you're describing.

 There are a couple of other questions that I want to ask you about. One paragraph, in particular, was very striking to me, both in terms of how extreme the terminology that you used is as well as kind of how it goes to the core of the matter. You wrote:

 

To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps:  America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts and outgrowing our parochial attachment to the Bill of Rights. (Jacob Siegel. March 28, 2023). 

 

That’s some pretty extreme steps that you claim the establishment is undertaking to make America less free and less safe. What kind of concrete examples did you have in mind when you're pointing to things like silencing dissent and taking away the right of rabble-rousers or people a little too far outside establishment constraints to be able to speak or even exercise basic foundational rights in the Constitution? 

 

Jacob Siegel: I mean, there are just dozens of examples of not fringe publications, not fringe figures, but people like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who is saying that, you know, what democracy really needs is to censor free speech, saying that Elon Musk's called – I'm going to mess up the quote and it deserves to be read precisely because it's so insane – but basically Reich says something along the lines that Elon Musk promising to turn Twitter into a real free speech platform fulfills the dream of Pol Pot and Stalin and every other dictator. I quote from an essay in the New York Times Magazine by a Yale graduate and writer, named Emily Bazelon, all about how disinformation and the infodemic, which was another one of these pseudoscientific terms trotted out during the COVID pandemic to conflate and erase the boundaries between disease on the one hand and war and speech, and to just erase all of these essential boundaries but, Bazelon’s argument is that free speech is essentially the American version of free speech, it is obsolete and has become dangerous and is empowering radicals. And this is an argument that's made over and over and over again by people in publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic Magazine and by, you know, high-level Democratic Party officials. It becomes the conventional wisdom. So, you know, I appreciate you calling it extreme, and I understand why it sounds extreme in that context. I have to give great credit to my editor at Tablet for never asking me to pull a single punch on any of this. And, you know, I didn't write anything to be extreme. It's not in my nature to write […] 

 

G. Greenwald: You're generally pretty moderate in your right away and in your rhetoric, which is why I think this piece was striking. And to be clear, at the end of the day, what's extreme is not what you're saying, but what the people whose behavior you're describing are actually doing. There's no way to describe what they're doing without using extreme language because it really is so extreme when you have the establishment and the key institutions of authority, now explicitly, essentially arguing that we can no longer tolerate a free Internet or even free speech because the dangers of it outweigh the dangers of curbing it. That, by nature, is kind of extreme. 

Let me ask you just a little bit about that notion, though, about free speech and censorship in this prevailing mentality. I always find that it's obviously a lot easier for people to defend free speech when it comes to censorship of ideas with which they agree, or the silencing of people whom they vaguely regard as allies. Elon Musk ran into this when he was banging the table and saying he was going to usher in absolute free speech and when someone asked him what that meant, he said that means allowing all speech except that which is illegal under Supreme Court precedent and Brandenburg and all that, even though he recognizes he's not bound by that, that's for the government. He kind of said that's going to be my guiding principles. And then, months after he took over, he's banning people like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, not because they've said anything even arguably illegal, but because those ideas are really offensive to maybe him or to advertisers or to others. He specifically said he would ban Alex Jones because Alex Jones, his comments about Sandy Hook, really struck him personally as offensive because he had a baby who died. So, I'm wondering, where do you draw that line when you're defending free speech – when you're kind of ringing about the dangers of censorship – do you see cases like, say, Kanye West or Nick Fuentes being banned or Alex Jones being banned? There are a lot of examples of, say, Palestinian activists being banned, critics of Israel being banned. Are those issues that are concerning to you as well? Where do you draw those lines? 

 

[00:56:09] Jacob Siegel:  I mean, the kind of operative question to me is, is there a collusion between the state and the corporation involved in the banning? You know, I think that's a bright red line. So, what would I personally advise Elon Musk to do with Twitter? I would say allow for more sort of local community-based moderation. Seems to me an approach that might work rather than trying to have – I don't think this model of centralization, vertical centralization, is good, personally. But, you know, I start to get outside of my depth with some of this stuff and I can be persuaded to take different views. 

In general, I think the more speech, the better. I think that where there is a case for banning private platforms, it's best when it's done at the most local possible level and most dangerous when it's done in a kind of top-down manner, and especially when it's done at the whim of a single owner. You know, Elon Musk having a personal connection to Sandy Hook is compelling for Elon Musk, but it's a very bad precedent for policy at a company that controls the core political speech rights of tens of millions of voters. That being said if there is no direct connection with the government – and let's pretend for a second that that's possible, and I don't actually think that that is possible because I think whoever owns Twitter, whether it's somebody like Musk who's done something incredible by disclosing this stuff with the Twitter files or somebody else who's more willing to go along with the dictates of the FBI, let's say – whoever owns it, it still functions as a surveillance platform in some way, still collecting user data on the backend. And we don't know how these decisions are being made and they're still fundamentally opaque. But, you know, if you can say that there is no direct coordination with the government and then not try and parse that too closely for the moment, I think, you know, it's the platforms having some kind of speech guidelines is a reasonable and probably a necessary thing for them to do, to maintain the kind of communities or user bases that are going to allow them to grow. But, you know, this is something where I don’t get into policy prescription stuff. It's not my strong […] 

 

G. Greenwald: Right. The focus of the article is on the role the government is playing in imposing this regime. 

We're just getting out of time, so just going to pick a couple of questions that I absolutely have to ask you. One of which is you devoted an entire section of the article – you had 13 parts or chapters – to the case of how the media and Big Tech treated the question of Hunter Biden's laptop. It's amazing that liberals have been trained the minute you even mention the phrase Hunter Biden's laptop, they've automatically been conditioned to believe you're talking about something trivial. Why did you decide to devote an entire chapter to that episode and you emphasize the importance of it when doing so, what importance do you see in it? 

 

Jacob Siegel: What could possibly be less trivial than 49 senior U.S. intelligence officials and the FBI lying openly to the American public and pressuring these social media platforms to censor reporting, weeks before a presidential election, and censoring the second oldest newspaper in the United States? I mean, I can't think of a more direct, more brazen assault, not only on freedom of speech. We're talking about what people think voting is. What do they think their voting rights and their political sovereignty are? You know, if you're kept in the dark and spun around and then, released at the last second and presented with two false choices and allowed to pick one, that's not exactly self-government. And so, I look at the way in which people have been – sort of the liberals in particular – have been conditioned to sort of yawn and parrot the AOC line about how this is still a half-baked story or whatever, as a reflexive response that also demonstrates the power of this sort of memetic propagation of attitudes that in a sense is the flipside of censorship. So, if censorship exists to eliminate certain forms of information […] 

 

G. Greenwald: Disinformation. Disinformation. You mean if censorship exists to elaborate disinformation... 

 

Jacob Siegel:  Well, what they call disinformation. I call it information.

 

G. Greenwald: Okay. Okay. Yeah, Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which is what this case illustrates, right, is that the people who claim to be fighting against disinformation were the ones who spread it as they did in so many other cases. 

 

Jacob Siegel: But the flipside of that is that there's also a powerful way to create a kind of conformity of opinion on critical issues like the Biden laptop, for instance, where you have first, you know, the press all falls in line. Virtually the entire press establishment falls in line. It becomes verboten to talk about this. And how does this work? Again, through kind of embarrassment, you know, you're mocked. If you take this seriously, you're scorned by your peers and your colleagues. You're conditioned to treat this as if it's no big deal and anybody who says otherwise is a right-wing fanatic but I think that it's as big a deal as one can find. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I recently said on one of my shows that not only will likely talk about the Hunter Biden laptop story until the day I die, but I'll probably request there be something about it on my tombstone because it's not only so gargantuan but what infuriates me the most, aside from the fact that the people who constantly claim to be the warriors against disinformation are the ones who spread those lies, as they so often did in the COVID case and so many others, including examples you mentioned, is that, even though we now have the definitive proof from the media institutions, they tell us to trust that the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic all along and was never Russian disinformation. Not a single media outlet that spread that lie has gone back in the wake of this new evidence and confronted what they did or even explained it, let alone retracted it. And the same thing happened in the story that you mentioned in your article where Jeff Gerth, who was at the belly of the beast. In the main, you cannot get more mainstream media than him, he worked for 30 years at The New York Times and then went to ProPublica and he was writing in Columbia Journalism Review, the most mainstream journalism outlet, a media criticism. He wrote a four-part indictment of the media's lies and recklessness in Russiagate, and not a single target or object of his critique even bothered to acknowledge it, just like they did with the Hunter Biden story. 

And so, I want to ask you, in terms of the repercussions of your story, which is this opus about, you know, touching every major institution of American political life, is it the case, as I perceive now, the only people who have really talked about it and acknowledged it is people who were already concerned about it in the first place. And given this kind of ability that these media outlets have to silo off any information that's negative – they don't care that they got caught lying in the hundred batting cages because they know their audience doesn't care if they confront it or apologize for it, they probably want them not to. What hope is there to be able to reform these institutions, if you have any? 

 

Jacob Siegel:  I don't have too much hope to reform these institutions. I am afraid that I think some of them are probably too far gone. But maybe we just need new institutions. I think that this has become the overriding institutional imperative, precisely to never face up to the failures, and that creates this escalating cycle where, by refusing to face up to these failures, you then double down on the idea that it's everybody else's fault. So, you lock yourself into a fraudulent analytical framework because you won't acknowledge what you've done wrong. You blame other people, you declare them extremists or conspiracy theorists, which is itself an error and specious and fraudulent. So now, you've made another error, by refusing to confront your original error, you've not doubled down on another error. Meanwhile, trust in the media plummets as a result. How do you metabolize trust in the media? You say it's due to disinformation and domestic extremism, and so then you have to go get more disinformation and domestic extremism orders, and this sort of goes on in perpetuity. There are still great reporters and almost all are there. […]

 

G. Greenwald:  For sure. For sure.

 

Jacob Siegel:  Doing very good. Right? 

 

G. Greenwald: These are institutional critiques.

 

Jacob Siegel: But as institutions and, you know, maybe – I just don't know enough – maybe, in a longer cycle, I would be able to see how they would escape from this. It's difficult for me to see, frankly. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I agree completely. I think they're largely irredeemable. I think their business model kind of depends on this polarization, which is why, for me, the only solution is, as you said, kind of constructing new institutions. But that depends upon the ability to do so with the free Internet. And I think censorship has become not only a way of kind of shielding their disinformation but also preventing competitors from emerging, because anyone who wants to compete, not just compete with them in a business sense. We have lots of new media outlets that kind of click into the same narrative. But anyone that wants to present an alternative way of seeing the world is instantly labeled “sewers of disinformation” and then a kind of censorship regime is unleashed against it precisely to prevent that from merging. I think that's the thing that they fear most, knowing how widely they're hated. 

 

Jacob Siegel: And, you know, the great example of this is something you wrote about Glenn. It's what happened with Parler right after January 6. That's an incredible story because it shows the way that these interests converge. Parler emerges right after the Capitol riot. I forget the statistic you had in your piece, but it was […] 

 

G. Greenwald: The number one most downloaded app in the Apple Play Store and in Google Play Store more than Instagram, more than TikTok, they all migrated there when they saw Trump being censored from Big Tech. 

 

Jacob Siegel:  And shutting down this fast-growing new number one is both something that the established tech companies want, and it's something the intelligence agencies want, and it's something the Democratic Party wants, and it's something that the press wants because they have been yoked together into this kind of monolithic entity with a shared set of core existential interests. And, if you push hard enough on that, you'll see the divisions but it's incredible and difficult to pull apart once you recognize the independence of the press and the kind of imperatives of the security agencies are at this point very difficult to pull apart. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, absolutely. It's a merger of major parts of both the public and the private sector. Public and private power which, ironically, is one of the academic definitions of fascism, as they claim that they're fighting fascism. But you're absolutely right. It's a consortium of institutions aligned, at least to a very large extent. And I actually think, at the end of the day, what your article does better than anything is illustrating the way in which they are actually working in collaboration toward a common goal. So, I really want to thank you for that article. I think it was incredibly illuminating. I'm going to badger everybody and on every platform to go read it. It’s worthwhile. And I also appreciate your taking the time to talk to us tonight. Thanks so much. 

 

Jacob Siegel: It was great being here. Thank you for having me. Great. 

 

G. Greenwald: Have a nice evening. 


 

So that concludes our show for this evening. For those of you who have been watching on our Local's platform, every Tuesday and Thursday, we have our live aftershow where we take your questions and respond to your feedback. To be able to be a part of that, simply join our Locals community where you also have exclusive written journalism that we post there and all kinds of community features as well as exclusive access to the transcripts for every show that we post within 24 hours of each show appearing. 

For those of you who've been watching this show here on Rumble, we're very appreciative of that. We hope to see you back every night, Monday through Friday, at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble. 

 

Have a great evening, everybody.

 

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Hi glenn!
I'm so very very confused about what is going on rn in regards to Garcia and el Salvador. Did the USC decide 9-0 for him to be returned or that demanding trump return him was beyond the ability of a district court to demand? Does facilitate his return merely mean allow him to come through the border? Was he ordered to be deported in 2019? Does the order of holding get canceled if trump declares m16 a terrorist organization? Is a US president a coequal with the US SC or is one more powerful than the other?
Too much contradictory information for me! What is true? What isnt??

Glenn, as always I appreciate all of your diligent work and your attempt to reach the truth. Unfortunately when it comes to Harvard nobly resisting becoming a tool of the federal government, I find this humorous. The first thing you would have to do to make this in any way reasonable is to demonstrate that they are currently not beholding to other donors and that the money these donors give does not influence their curriculum, the people they hire in either the bureaucratic or the educational departments in the university. If you cannot prove if, or if such an investigation shows that they are influenced by other big money, then all Harvard is doing is choosing one controlling interest over another. And the students receive a slanted education, which of course they perceive as truth. Whether they believe so or not, they have little choice. Rebellion and resistance can easily masquerade as freedom of thought when they are, in fact, a form of conformism to another special interest. ...

April 16, 2025

Dear Glenn.

First of all, and most importantly, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your wonderful courage and your profound intellectual honesty. I love Tucker and I enjoy Jimmy Dore and the GreyZone; but, you are the only one for whom I make an effort to watch every single show. And, your shows are uniformly magnificent. Such a joy to get my news from such a trusted source.

Among the many issues that you’ve addressed with a lovely integrity is the genocide of the Palestinian population at the hands of the Israelis. And, Trump’s sociopathic approach to the topic has been quite disturbing.

Since the moment Trump came down the “golden escalator,” I’ve liked the guy. And, since I met him a year later in a small gathering and realized that “he’s not the guy he plays on TV” (I SWEAR Bill Maher stole my line), I’ve been completely in his camp and - for better or worse - have been dumped by some formerly very dear friends because of it. So, it’s sad to come to the ...

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As a program that covers only two or at the most three issues per night – because we prefer in-depth coverage to sort of cable-style quick five-minute hits of each different news event possible – sometimes, especially these days, it is difficult to keep up with all the news, given how fast and furious things are always happening with this new administration. 

As a result, we're going to try to devote one show per week or so to a sort of “Week in Review,” where we're able to cover more topics than we normally would cover on a typical program by inviting friends of the show on to talk with us about those. 

To help us do that tonight, we are joined by the independent Journalist Lee Fang and the always delightful and agreeable Michael Tracey. 

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Lee Fang is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He covers political and corporate wrongdoing on Substack at leefang.com. He previously wrote and reported for The Intercept where he was my colleague for many years; he has also written at The Nation and reported for Vice. He is an intrepid investigative journalist, always breaking lots of stories, working by himself or with an independent team. We are always happy to welcome him to the show. 

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System Update #437

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Before I get to the questions though, I want to give you some breaking news that happened a few minutes before we came live on the air. I just spent the last 10 to 15 minutes reading about it so I don't have a very in-depth knowledge of it. You may have heard the U.S. government sent to El Salvador a person who was living in the United States, who's married to an American citizen, has a daughter they're raising together, has lived here for years in the U.S., has no charges against him, no problems whatsoever. As a result, there was a hold put on any attempt to remove him or deport him by a deportation court. Yet, he was picked up within the last month and sent to that mega horrific prison in El Salvador, even though there was a court order barring his removal, pending hearings. Even the U.S. government admitted that they sent him there accidentally. That's what they said. “Oops, it was an accident.” 

Now, what do you do if the government admits and mistakenly consigns somebody to one of the worst prisons on the planet, in El Salvador, indefinitely, with no way out, incommunicado: their families can't speak to them, their lawyers can't speak to, they're in El Salvador. 

A federal district court judge about a week ago ordered the U.S. government to do everything possible to get him back, to tell their – let's face it – puppet state in El Salvador, President Bukele, that they want him back. 

Remember, the U.S. government pays for each one of these prisoners to be there. So, it's not like we have no influence there. The whole strategy of Bukele is to do what the United States tells him to do. The Trump White House and Trump supporters were indignant about this order: who are you to tell the president to go get him from El Salvador? The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said, “Well, tell the court to call Salvador.” That was her attitude. 

The injunction then went up on appeal to an appellate court composed of one Reagan appointee and two appointees of Democratic presidents, one Obama and one Clinton, if I'm not mistaken, who, more or less unanimously – they had some differences about the rationale – upheld that injunction and said it's unconscionable to send somebody who you haven't demonstrated any guilt for and when there's a court order barring his removal, to send him to El Salvador for life in prison and then just wash your hands of it. 

The problem is the government doesn't want to go get him because that would be an admission that they sent someone there mistakenly, which they've already admitted in their briefs. That would raise the question, well, how can you send people to a prison in El Salvador without giving them a chance to prove that they're not guilty of the crimes you're accusing them of being gang members and those sorts of things? 

Last night, we reported in detail on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a separate case where five Venezuelans obtained an injunction before they were sent to El Salvador, a country they've never been to, to be put in prison, arguing that they should have the right of habeas corpus, the right to go into court before they're removed and argue that they were wrongfully detained and are wrongfully accused and all nine justices of the Supreme Court – all nine – said that you cannot remove people under the Alien Enemies Act until you first give them a habeas corpus here and they had a disagreement by a 5-4 vote about that proceeding had to be brought where the person is detained.” 

They're detained mostly in Texas or Arizona and already those Venezuelan detainees who had this injunction against them immediately went to court in Texas. Yesterday, a Trump-appointed judge issued an injunction saying the government has to prove that they have evidence that they're guilty of the things they're accusing them, which is gang membership. 

You can still deport people and send them back to their country of origin just by proving they're illegal but if you want to send them to a prison in El Salvador, and if you want to remove them under the Alien Enemies Act, which requires proving that they're an alien enemy: every time it's been invoked – the War of 1812, World War I, World War II – even those accused of being Nazi sympathizers got hearings first. And that's what the U.S. Supreme Court said. Right after that, a Trump-appointed judge in the original court, the district court, issued a ruling saying, “You cannot remove these people as well.” 

We keep hearing about all these left-wing judges. We talked about this before. These are not left-wing judges. A lot of times they're Reagan or Bush judges but in a couple of cases now they've been Trump-appointed judges. 

In fact, yesterday, a different Trump-appointed judge ruled in favor of the Associated Press. As you might recall, the White House issued marching orders to the American media, saying, “You cannot call this the Gulf of Mexico anymore, you have to call it the Gulf of America.” 

I’m not sure when the government thought it obtained the power to dictate to media outlets and journalists what they can say and how they can describe things. When the Associated Press continued to call out the Gulf of Mexico, the Trump White House cut off all access to press pools, briefing rooms, and the like. 

A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled in favor of AP, saying, obviously not everybody's entitled to access to the White House but once you have it, you cannot be punished with removal because of the things you say, because the things that you're saying don't align with the government's orders of what you should say. 

Just before we came on air, the Supreme Court issued another ruling – it was an unsigned ruling, which typically means that it was the opinion of the court unanimously – which involved the case of this one individual who was sent to El Salvador in the way that the administration admitted was sent mistakenly. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to dissolve that injunction saying, “Courts can't rule on how to conduct ourselves diplomatically” and the court said, “No, we are maintaining this injunction” by a 9-0 vote – apparently, there was no dissent.

So, you can't mandate or force the Trump administration to get the prisoner back but they said the government does have to prove they did everything reasonable to facilitate his return and that's the Supreme Court, the last word that has said that the Trump administration has to try and get him back because he should never have been sent there by the Trump administration's admission. 

Congress is completely impotent. They're afraid of Trump, especially the Republicans. As long as he stays very popular within the Republican Party, very few Republicans are willing to defy him. 

Congress in general, well before Trump, has neutered itself. We talked about that last night with David Sirota. They've given up the role that they're supposed to have constitutionally in setting tariff policy. They've especially abdicated their responsibility to authorize wars. The president goes to war all the time like we are now in Yemen without any hint of congressional approval. Obama did the same thing. Biden did the same thing. 

We don't really have an operating congressional branch in any real sense. |As I said, no branch is supposed to be unlimited in its power, it's supposed to have a balance of power that's supposed to be co-equal branches. 

If the president starts violating the law, implementing due process-free procedures of punishment and punishing the press, it's the role of the courts to say, “This violates the Constitution.” This Supreme Court has now twice done that with Trump, and Trump-appointed judges are doing it as well. 

Whatever your views are on all these different assertions of power, you want there to be some check on presidential power, and you don't want any one branch of government getting too powerful. There are all sorts of checks on the judiciary. The only people who can be on the judiciary are ones that the president nominates, even ones the president nominates said they have to go through a confirmation hearing in the Senate – every single judge – and then for wrongdoing, they can be impeached. 

So, they have many different checks and balances on everyone in the branches and you don't want the power to get too concentrated in any one branch, especially the president. As David Sirota said last night, the founders feared most an elected king; they just fought a revolutionary war to free themselves of a monarch. The last thing they wanted to do was to recreate one, but that's what you would have if the president said, “Oh, once I win an election, I'm totally free to do whatever I want. Ignore the Constitution. It doesn't matter. No one can do anything to stop me.” That is not something any American citizen should want. 

 So that's just an update. I'll read the case more carefully but, from what I can gather, that is the essence of the ruling. It's not a complete defeat for Trump because it does recognize the president has the right to conduct diplomacy and they don't want to interfere in that but the order is the government has to do everything reasonable to facilitate their return and then demonstrate to the court the efforts they made so the court can then determine whether they actually tried to do that.

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All right, so let's get to our Mailbag. These are questions that have been submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community. The first one is from @John_Mann. 

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It has always been the case, especially throughout the Cold War, that the corporate media would basically serve as a mouthpiece for the CIA, for the Security State. Every time the CIA overthrew a government The New York Times and Time Magazine would herald it as a revolution by the people. 

Conversely, whenever a new pro-United States leader was installed, no matter how tyrannical, they would call it an advancement of democracy. And you can just go back and look at that. I recently did that with the CIA-engineered coup in Brazil to see how The New York Times covered that and it was essentially, “Oh, this was a revolution against a corrupt communist regime.” 

In fact, it was an elected center-left government, and the tyrannical regime was the installment of the right-wing military junta. The worst offender was probably Time Magazine. Henry Luce was the publisher and owner of Time Magazine, he was extremely close to the U.S. government, and a hardcore Cold Warrior. 

Several countries actually enacted laws banning foreign-owned media from being freely circulating in the country as a result of the influence of Time Magazine and how they were just propagandizing the entire world. 

So, there was always this kind of union between the government on the one hand and the corporate media on the other. They worked hand-in-hand. But you did have occasions when that didn't happen, very well-known occasions: when Edward R. Murrow angered his bosses at CBS by vigorously and repeatedly denouncing McCarthyism in the 1950s; Walter Cronkite, in the 1960s, turned against the Vietnam War and editorialized on air – he was the most trusted news person there was saying, “The government's not winning, the U.S. is not winning, the U.S. isn't going to win.” 

Shortly thereafter, we had Watergate, you have the Pentagon Papers that enraged the U.S. government that was done by The New York Times and the Washington Post. So, you definitely had a kind of adversarial relationship at some points. 

But well before Donald Trump, when I first started writing about politics, and I'll talk about this in a second, I didn't intend to start writing about the media. I wasn't trying to be a media critic; I wasn't looking at the world that way. Only over time did I realize that with the War on Terror, the war in Iraq, the problem with the media was they were completely subservient to the National Security State, not to Democrats, not to Republicans, to the National Security State. 

Nonetheless, despite all of that, despite those fundamental problems I used to rail against the corporate media, I would debate them, I'd criticize them, I'd dissect their propaganda when I was writing, every day, in the 2000s and 2010s. I think it has gotten much worse for one reason and one reason only, and that was the emergence of Donald Trump. 

Once Donald Trump emerged, even though I don't think he was more radical than, say, George Bush and Dick Cheney, even from a kind of coastal, liberal perspective. Comportmentally, he was just so offensive to establishment elites, to liberal elites, that the media absolutely despised him, especially once he won and they went completely insane. They really did start including that their journalistic mission no longer mattered, that far more important was the higher mission of defeating Donald Trump, and they just started lying openly. 

We've been through all those lies, the Russiagate, that people forget now, really did drown the country politically for almost three years, only for it to be debunked. They spread the Hunter Biden laptop lie right before the election, which came from the CIA that it was “Russian disinformation.” All the COVID lies, everything Anthony Fauci said was not to be questioned and anyone who questioned it was a conspiracy theorist and on and on, and on. 

And that was really when you see this massive collapse in trust and faith in the media if you look at the graphs. I mean, it has been going down over time and you can even see prior to the advent of the internet, people turning to alternative sources. Talk Radio became very big among conservatives. Millions and millions and millions of people listen to Rush Limbaugh and he fed them every day with arguments about why you can't trust the corporate media. 

But in 2016, it fell off a cliff. That's because most of the media ended up just openly cheering for one of the two parties and that's something they really hadn't done before. 

The media was always liberal in the sense that these people lived in New York or Washington, they were probably more liberal on social issues, but when it came to war, remember, The New York Times and The New Yorker, with Jeffrey Goldberg, did more to sell the war in Iraq than any conservative outlet ever did. Conservatives were already behind the war on Iraq, behind the War on Terror, because it was a Republican administration. They're the ones who made it palatable for liberals to support it, telling liberals, “No, these things are real. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He's in an alliance with al-Qaeda.” 

That central bias was never right v. left or Democrat v. Republican; it really became Democrat v. Republican in 2016 and until the 2024 election. They were just openly and almost explicitly of the view that their journalistic views no longer matter, their journalistic principles no longer matter because of the much higher mission they were serving now – very kind of self-glorifying view of themselves like “No, we're on the front lines of this world-historic battle, this preserve American democracy and keep fascism out of the country.” 

That's what they told themselves. It feels much better than saying, “Oh, yeah, our job is just to report facts, without fear or favor to anybody.” It's kind of boring. They became heroes in liberal America. I mean, all these journalists, they wrote bestselling books, because they were anti-Trump, kind of the Jim Acosta effect. Just like the most mediocre people. Rachel Maddow became like a superstar in liberal America and in mainstream entertainment and all of that. All those people who abandoned their journalistic mission for the much more overtly partisan one. 

And when they did that, the problem was it wasn't like they were just reporting in a way that would help the Democratic Party. That was their mission, that was their goal. And that was what their mindset became. Remember, heading in the 2020 election, I worked for The Intercept, which was created explicitly to avoid attachment to a particular party or an ideology. We were supposed to just be adversarial to the government and that was the first time editors ever tried to stop me from publishing something. It was right before the election. I wanted to write about the revelations of the Hunter Biden laptop, what it showed about Joe Biden's and the Biden family's pursuit of profits in Ukraine and China, and they just said, “No, you cannot do that.”

 I don't think corporate media ever recovered and don't think they ever will recover. I think that trust and faith are gone. The fact that there are so many alternatives now means that people aren't captive of them any longer and you can see their audience disappearing. I mean, the only people who watch cable news are people over 60 or 65. It's true, especially on MSNBC and CNN. If they have like 700,000 viewers in total for a prime-time show, maybe 10%, 70,000 people under the age of 54, 70,000. Do you know how small that is for a massive media corporation in everybody's home because they're on the cable networks? You just see that medium dying and I think they did it to themselves. 

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All right, next question. @Bowds asks:

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I just did a show with two other leftists. One is the European editor of Jacobin, who's based in Europe, and the other is Yanis Varoufakis, who was the former finance minister of Greece and a very smart, I think, figure on the left. And it was about how so many right-wing populists are being banned the minute they start getting too popular, focused on Marine Le Pen’s banning. 

 I was really relieved to hear both of them, both on principle and on pragmatism, warn how dangerous and wrong that was to steal the core right in a democracy, which is to vote and choose your own leaders by banning people who are opposed to the establishment the minute they start doing too well. 

I've learned more about the Le Pen case, both of them have much nuts-and-bolts knowledge of it. I mean, the Marine Le Pen case is such a joke. I mean, it was called “Embezzlement” in the United States. That's what she was charged with and convicted of, which makes it sound like she stole money for herself. That's usually what embezzlement means. That's not what it was at all, it wasn't even close to that. 

Basically, everyone who's a member of the EU Parliament gets a lot of money a month for staff, something like 30,000 euros a month for staff and you can hire people even though they don't really do anything. One of the things Marine Le Pen’s party did was they took a lot of that budget for the parliamentarians they had in the EU, and they used it essentially to hire people, not so much to help with the work of the EU, but more to supplement or bolster salaries of the people who work for her party. 

And what both of them said, and this is the impression I got too, is that it is possible that that happened. Although it's a very gray area and the question becomes like, “Did they do more work on the EU or were they really working more internally on the party?” But there's no self-enrichment. Marine Le Pen didn't steal any money. The idea was she had the people who were getting these salaries work more on the party in France than on the EU work. 

How do you determine who does more of what? But what they all said was that essentially every party does this. Something like 25% of members of the EU Parliament have been found doing things very much like this, and they're not prosecuted criminally. They're required to pay a fine or pay the money back. So, at best, it was a very selective prosecution. They found Marine Le Pen doing something that is commonly done. 

And I think in general, any time you have a candidate who's leading the polls, either probably will win or highly likely to win as in the case of Marine Le Pen, she was certainly a real threat, especially without Macron being able to run and they suddenly get prosecuted on a very iffy crime. 

I'm not talking about murder, rape, kidnapping, racketeering. It's like misuse of funds where nobody gets enriched, kind of like Donald Trump's prosecution in Manhattan for these supposed mischaracterizations of the payments to Stormy Daniels through Michael Cohen, a bookkeeping kind of transgression that would be at best treated like a misdemeanor and rarely prosecuted. 

Whenever you start having that, you immediately, instinctively should wonder, is this person being prosecuted because they're afraid they're going to win an election and don't want to let the people of the country whom polls show close to a majority or even a majority want to elect, to keep them from actually running. And if this were a nice lady case where Marine Le Pen was the only example, maybe you could sit there all night and debate the intricacies of French law and how much other people do it and whatever, but it's so clearly part of the pattern. 

Here in Brazil, Lula's popularity is declining significantly and a lot of polls show Bolsonaro would win if he was able to run in 2026 against Lula, some polls show a tie within the margin of error. But, again, clearly, Bolsonaro would have a chance to win. Clearly, tens of millions of people in Brazil want him to be the president. But they're denied the choice because, in 2023, an electoral court said Bolsonaro is ineligible to run for the next eight years because he cast out on the integrity of the voting process. And they said, “Oh, it's an abuse of power to have done that. You can't run again.” 

And then, obviously, in Romania, we have Calin Georgescu who won the Romanian election and he's the more anti-EU, anti-NATO, pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine war, at least, candidate. The EU hates him, the U.S. hates him and they just invalidated the election. They said, this election doesn't count because Russia used ads on TikTok to help this candidacy, as if the U.S. and the EU weren't massively interfering in all these elections to get the candidate they want elected. 

But it's like, yeah, this election doesn't count. The candidate we don't like won, so it doesn't count. Then as polls showed, for the new election, he was again leading in the polls by an even higher amount because there was a perception in Romania that they were banning him to prevent him from winning, they went back, and said, “You can't run, Russia helped you, you're now ineligible.” There was another populist right figure in his party or an ally who was then also banned. 

This is becoming a trend. The Democrats' principal strategy in the 2024 election was to try to charge Trump with as many crimes as possible, not only convict him of those crimes but even try to put him in prison before 2024. 

It's so obviously a tactic that's being used by people who are claiming that they and they alone are the guardians of democracy. I mean, they're doing the same exact thing with censorship. And I believe that the story is that in 2016, the British people shocked Western liberals by having the U.K. leave the EU, do you know how significant that is? To have the U.K. leave the EU as a result of a referendum of the British people? Just because of perceptions that Brussels hates them, is not caring about their lives, how they don't want to be ruled by these distant bureaucrats and eurocrats in Brussels, and then, three months later, four months later, Donald Trump beats the symbol of establishment, power and dogma, Hillary Clinton. 

And that was when Western liberals decided that they could no longer trust people to be free. They can't trust them to have free speech because if they talk to each other freely and circulate ideas, they can't control what people think and therefore how they vote. That was when this whole disinformation industry arose. 

The whole purpose of the Enlightenment was “No, we were endowed with the capacity for reason.” We can all do that ourselves using free speech, as long as we can debate each other and exchange ideas, we can then make our own choice about what's true and false. That was the whole point of the Enlightenment, on which the American founding, among other things, was based. 

So, they're waging war at the Enlightenment on core Western values, core democratic values, not just of censorship, but now banning people they are fearful to win and they're doing it in the name of saving democracy, kind of like we have to burn down this village to save it. We have to eliminate democracy to save democracy. 

And I think all this is going to happen, kind of, as I was saying last night when we were looking at those polls showing a significant decline in support for Israel in the United States and how the reaction is more censorship to prevent people from spreading anti-Israel arguments that I think it's just going to create a backlash, just like the liberal censorship regime did on issues like race and gender ideology, created resentment and a backlash. I think that's going to happen with Israel, I think it's going to happen here as well. I think people are going to start looking around and figure it out and realize, hey, wait a minute, all these candidates that are leading in the polls that the establishment hates, they're all getting banned. 

It's not that difficult to realize how improbable it is that all of these right-wing populist anti-establishment candidates, right as they're on the verge of winning, just happen to commit crimes in the nick of time to justify banning them from the ballot, whereas all the establishment's favorite candidates are all super clean and law-abiding and driven by nobility and integrity, and they're just abiding by the law. I mean, who believes that? It's always like this. The people who stand up and say, “We are the guardians of democracy” are the ones who censor and ban people from the ballot. 

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All right, next question from @TuckertheDog. I don't know what that means but I'm always happy to take questions from canines. 

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It is not unheard of for journalists to have off-the-record meetings with American political leaders and even foreign leaders. Obviously, why would a foreign leader want to meet in secret with a journalist? Or why would a foreign leader want to be secret with influencers? Because they want to impart to them propaganda about why they should be more aligned with that country's agenda or that leader's way of thinking. 

The people they met with are already very pro-Israel, certainly Dave Rubin. I mean there's a picture that Dave Rubin posted of himself and Netanyahu and it almost looks like he's in the middle of some sort of sexual ecstasy that's like a sustained one, I mean he's standing next to Benjamin Netanyahu who basically is his leader. 

So, I don't know what possible impact that could have. Dave Rubin was already somebody who put Israel at the center of his world. I don't know how he could do that even more. Tim Poole, I don't want to make sweeping statements about his views on Israel. I know he's very pro-Israel, but I just don't know enough to make definitive statements. But it's not that it's that unheard of and my understanding is like Dave Rubin posted a picture of it. I think Tim Pool talked about it. I think that happened after it was disclosed, but they met under a set of rules that journalists use where you can't report on anyone who is at the meeting, you can't report on anything that was discussed, but you can disclose the fact of the meeting and just maybe general impressions. 

So, it was rules of secrecy. They weren't allowed to quote Netanyahu; they weren't allowed to talk about what he said. And I do think this points to a problem in independent media. I think one of the problems that we were just talking about with corporate media is that they became too partisan, too ideological, too willing to act subserviently to a particular faction. The U.S. Security State, the Democratic Party, whatever. 

And I think there's definitely that same problem in independent media. I've talked before about how the easiest way to have financial success and rating success in this new independent media environment is to plant your flag in one faction and say, “This is who I am, this is where I am, this is who I defend, this is the ideology I believe in; I'm never going to deviate from it.” 

You attract all the people who believe in that ideology or who are loyal to that party or to that faction, and they want to hear their views validated all the time. And you can build a very big audience of people who just want to keep informational closure and always have their views validated, never challenged, let alone rejected: a lot of people are making a lot of money in independent media doing that. 

I absolutely believe that the emergence of independent media is a net good just for the reason that it increases the number of alternatives people have. Some people have tried independent media but have not succumbed to that kind of group thing or audience capture, Joe Rogan probably being the best example. 

Joe Rogan does not sit there and just praise the Democratic, the Republican Parties. He's always that kind of a mixture of views. He obviously became the most popular program in the country. 

It's a little different because Joe Rogan's program is not primarily political. Sometimes it's political. But it is cultural. He considers himself a comedian, he has a lot of comedians on, actors, celebrities, and a lot of political content – just kind of along the way there's political content, so, but I'm not playing that political show; it's difficult to be successful as a political show unless you do that. And once you do, in a lot of ways, you become no different than the corporate media. 

They have a lot of proximity to power. If you're suddenly now – because you cheered on MAGA, you cheered on Trump every day – now you're getting invited to the White House, you're being let in on secret meetings, the Trump White House is calling you, giving you little tidbits, to what extent is that really independent media? 

I've always believed it's important to keep people in power at a distance, at an arm's length. The minute you start befriending them, the minute you start talking to them too much, the minute you start succumbing to the temptations of being led into their world – you have people with power, they can open doors, like, oh, I get to go to the White House, I get to have a meeting with a foreign leader, not just a foreign leader but like the Prime Minister of Israel – of course, that's going to compromise your independence. Or maybe not. Of course, maybe you can resist that and fight against that, but it's certainly going to have a big effect. 

That's why I've always hated anything that reeks of journalists and political power merging socially or in any other way, like that White House Correspondence Dinner. I absolutely despise it. It makes me sick to my stomach. They all dress up as if they're at the Oscars and they get to meet like B-list celebrities and chatter at the White House with all these and with the president. It's just so corrupting. It creates just like this culture of Versailles like you're either in the royal court or you're not. 

On some level, the issue of audience capture can actually be more problematic in independent media. It didn't use to be such a problem in corporate media years ago, in the decades I was describing earlier, because when there was only ABC, NBC, and CBS, they were the only games in town – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, your local newspaper. But it was a place everybody felt more or less trusting of in terms of getting the news from because they were not overtly partisan. As I said, they had other biases, but it wasn't so overtly partisan. 

Now, there is absolute audience capture among corporate media. The vast majority of The New York Times subscribers – the vast, vast majority – are liberals. They hate Trump. Same with The Washington Post: they had mass cancelations of subscriptions when Jeff Bezos barred them from endorsing Kamala Harris. Obviously, the cable outlets all have their audiences, and you actually saw that with Fox, which I personally do believe is the most independent of the three cable networks for reasons I can explain, but not really relevant now, but when Trump was telling everybody the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud, that Biden's victory was fraudulent, byproduct of voter fraud, many, maybe even most people on Fox were not on board with that. Some of them actually were opposed to it. Tucker Carlson went on the air and ranted and raved about the dishonesty of Sidney Powell, how she keeps making these grandiose claims and she has all this proof, but then every time he invites her on to show, she won't come on, she never shows this proof. And you saw this migration of a good number of people, a good number of conservatives, away from Fox to Newsmax, and, as a result, Fox started getting more receptive to the fraud narrative. 

That is a kind of audience capture that I think is new for corporate media because they are now all in silos. You know who the audience is of each one of these outlets. But I think with independent media – because shows and independent journalists rely on their viewers not just for ratings, not just to show up, but also for financial support – most independent media shows, most independent journalists can't make a living unless they have their readers and viewers supporting them financially, monthly subscriptions or donations or whatever. That's what independent media rely on mostly. 

Then many of them become afraid to say anything that might alienate them. I mean, I've been through this many times in my career where you take a position that you know is going to alienate a lot of your audience and you can watch them go away, the subscriptions drop and fall. But I would way rather have fewer viewers and make less money and know that I'm not in prison to say things I don't really believe to keep my audience happy. 

I've never had a viewership or a readership that expected me to do that or wanted me to do that and I think it's really commendable for people who consume news to stay with somebody even when they're saying things that are so against your views as long as you think they're doing their best to be honest, you can be challenged by it. I think it's boring to listen to somebody who agrees with me all the time. I really do. I don't like it. I don't find it compelling or engaging. There's too much agreement. It's like we're already on the same wavelength. 

So, I do think independent media is an absolute positive. I've been a big defender of it. I still am. I think free speech on the internet is the most important thing. But I also think there are some important vulnerabilities independent media has, some of which are shared by corporate media and some of them are more inherent to independent media that I think are worth being aware of. 

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The next question is from @aobraun1: 

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I think the most interesting thing about Trump and tariffs, and a lot of people have said this before, is that – and I'm sure you've all seen this – you can go back to the 1980s, Trump was famous when he was young because he was entering the Manhattan real estate market, building big buildings, he was good looking, he always attracted attention, always had a certain charisma, his dating habits attracted all kinds of tabloid attention. He had his first wife, Ivanka. I remember one of us when I lived in New York with whom he had his first four children. And he ended up having a marital affair with Marla Maples. And the media went insane. Like The New York Post, those tabloids every day. 

He was extremely famous for those kinds of things, for his real estate success. He ended up leaving Ivanka Trump and then marrying Marla Maples, whatever, and then he had a third marriage and lots of other things in between and the tabloids loved this. They ate it up. 

You can see an interview with him in the 1980s where he was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, kind of at the height of her popularity on her extremely popular show and she asked him, like, “Would you ever run for president?” and he said, “Ah, probably not.” But he was passionate about one topic in particular and that was the idea that Japan back then, it was not China but Japan, in the ‘80s, that people feared was taking over technologically and economically – they were buying a bunch of land in the United States – that Japan and other countries were taking advantage of the United States in ways that were disgusting, he said, for American leaders to permit, meaning trade deficits, unfair trade practices – it has been a view of Trump's forever. He’s been talking about tariffs and protectionism for a long time. 

So, in terms of the brain trust, it's not like other issues where I think Trump gets influenced to do things. I think this is something that Trump really was devoted to doing, especially this time around. You can see this time he wants to leave his mark. He doesn't care as much about public opinion, about media anger – and this is what I heard too from Trump's circle throughout 2024: they got outflanked in the first turn, they had all kinds of people there to sabotage them, weaseled and embedded into a circle. They didn't really know how Washington worked. Trump was an outsider. He was constantly undercut and sabotaged by generals and by the whole deep state. 

And they are determined to make sure that does not happen again. That was, they worked on that for a long time, at least a full year, and they got in and they were very serious about it. They had a real plan for it. So, this time, most of what's happening is because Trump wants it to happen. Tariffs are probably the leading example. But of course, he's not an economist, he's not a specialist in tariffs, but Trump has a lot of confidence in his own decision-making ability. 

My guess is that the main architect of these tariffs is Peter Navarro, just because he's a fanatical supporter of tariffs. Maybe he talked to his treasury secretary. Maybe he talked to some billionaires whom he trusts. What I know for sure is that when these terrorists were instituted the way they were, people were kind of shocked, including people close to him, and they were harming these billionaires quite a bit. I mean, you could watch Tesla stock imploding. 

When Tim Waltz made fun of Tesla when it was at a very low level, like six weeks ago, two months ago, it was 225, it then went up to 280, 290, and it was back to 210, 215, like losing 20% of its value. Elon Musk is the primary shareholder of Tesla, so that eats in greatly to his net worth, but everyone in the market, people on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, who love Trump, who thought he was going to do everything that they wanted him to do, that he would serve their interests without any kind of hesitation. 

So, I know for a fact, that there was a lot of reporting on this, I've heard this as well, Elon was going to Trump all the time, trying to talk him out of these tariffs, other people were as well, and Trump wouldn't move because he believed in it. And the only thing that got Trump to move, as he himself said, was that people freaked out, they panicked, and they were panic selling. What really alarmed them was not so much the stock market, because the stock market has had many times when it's gone down that way, and it bounced back, they knew the stock market was going to go down, they were willing to endure that. 

What really alarmed them was what happened in the bond market because that reverberated the entire economy very quickly. Imagine that if things didn't get better and Trump kept those tariffs in place through 2025 heading into 2026, by the best estimates, whatever benefit you get from protectionism is going to take some time to show up. Just think about layoffs, the economy slowing down, prices going up, people's 401k being eaten up. 

As I said last night, I have people in my life who don't care much about politics, but they have 401ks and they care quite a lot about the 401k because that's the retirement security and when it starts going like this, it's not just billionaires, it's ordinary people really feeling fear and anger about what's happening. 

Then that reverberates in Republicans and Congress as well, because they serve and are funded by banking interests in Wall Street, but also because a lot of them are true believers in free trade. That's the classic Republican position. But then also they have to run for re-election every two years and 2026 is already looking to be a scary year for Republicans. General midterm elections after an election are terrible for the party in control. The opposition is much more motivated. 

You've already seen in some of these elections for state Senate and House, these kinds of off-year elections, these special elections, and the couple for Congress where Democrats cut into the margins that Trump created very significantly. They were even afraid of Elise Stefanik's seat; if she went to the U.N. and there was an open seat, they were so afraid that they might lose it, even in a Trump 20-plus district, that they withdrew her nomination for U.N. ambassador because that's how much energy there is among Democrats and a lack of interest and energy among Republicans. When Trump's on the ballot, a lot of moderate people don't come out and I'm sure they're petrified about that. So, he was getting it from all directions. 

We'll see what happens. It's very uncharacteristic of Trump to back out, and that is what he did. I don't care what anyone says. They said from the start, these tariffs are staying in place, we don't take care; if the stock market gets angry, you're going to have to grit and bear it, have some short-term pain. We need to radically overhaul our economy. It's not working, which I agree with. 

Free trade globalism has been great for billionaires. It's created massive income inequality and sent the middle class and the working class on this sharp, steep decline of downward mobility. But suspending the tariffs kind of contradicts that message, like, we're going to radically overhaul the system and put in protectionism. Even if they get deals with these countries, if the tariffs don't return, then you haven't really overhauled anything. You've gotten some better deals. But you haven't overhauled the global economy or the American economy. 

But imagine putting those tariffs back in place, what it would do to the stock market, what it would do to the bond market, what it would do to people's perceptions. I don't know if they can put it back. I mean, presidents, no matter how powerful they are, definitely are limited by a lot of other powerful factions. 

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Last point, just not really a question, but speaking of independent media like on Joe Rogan's show, today, I don't know if it was recorded today, but it was released today, they had kind of a debate between Dave Smith on the one hand, who's a libertarian, anti-interventionist, anti-war Israel critic, and Douglas Murray, the British, whatever he is, who's fanatically in favor of Israel and wars, he loves wars, he thinks they're all great. 

There's this phrase I once heard or I once read. It might be something that a lot of people have said. I'm certainly not the first one to say it, but it's really true. I realized as soon as I read it, how true it was. I realized that when I was younger, I kind of absorbed this, that Americans automatically add 20 IQ points to any British person who speaks with a posh British accent, they all think, “Oh, they're so brilliant, so eloquent.” and that they subtract 20 IQ points for anybody who speaks with an American Southern accent. It is so true. 

The relevance of Douglas Murray seems obvious to me, but he went on Joe Rogan's Show today with Dave Smith, Joe Rogan doesn't usually have these kinds of debates. It got very heated. Rogan was clearly more on Dave Smith's side than Douglas Murray's side.

 Usually, Joe Rogan's audience is pretty favorable to the show. Basically, the entire Joe Rogan audience, which, again, is not left-wing, to put it mildly, was completely contemptuous of Douglas Murray. They could not spew enough disgust and contempt for him intellectually, politically and personally. 

I don't think I've ever seen Joe Rogan’s comment section be that universally disgusted and contemptuous of anybody since Matt Yglesias – I mean, I like mean internet comments as much as anybody else, but like, I almost felt uncomfortable reading the comment section when Matt Yglesias went on just because it was so mean, so incessantly mean, so personal. I mean they hated Matt Yglesias. It was when he had that book out about how America should have a billion people in it and they hated the book, they hated the argument, they hated him, they hated how he looked. I mean everything about him. But it came close with Douglas Murray. And I think it's so interesting because Douglas Murray usually won't go anywhere where he's challenged in any meaningful way. 

In fact, after October 7, we asked Douglas Murray to come on our shows several times. At first, he was responding, pretending he would, talking about scheduling, and then he just ghosted us and disappeared and won't come on. He doesn't want to be challenged; he wants to sit back in some chair like he's in a British salon. He loves to hear himself speak, he thinks he's so eloquent and he knows Americans are like, “Oh my god, this is so brilliant,” but he will never be challenged and he was challenged today a lot by David Smith and Joe Rogan. And he just fell apart. Fell apart.

It's really worth watching. It's entertaining. I encourage you to read the comment section as well. But it's not just that it was a good internet fight. They talked about a lot of foreign policy issues. Douglas Murray came on and just became a full-on Karen for the first 15 minutes, like whining and complaining to Joe Rogan about how he's talking to people he shouldn't be talking to, people who aren't worthy of being heard, including Dave Smith. That didn't go well. 

So, I recommend that. It's good when somebody like Douglas Murray, a hardcore Israel fanatic, a complete warmonger, someone who wants to send people to war all the time, but never goes, is actually challenged, not in like an eight-minute cable hit where you really can't get at the person, but it was two and a half hours and it's unrelenting.

I loved it when I was on, but by the third hour I was like, is this ending? It's tiring to focus that much, and when you're getting battered by Dave Smith and more importantly for Douglas Murray by Joe Rogan that way, you can definitely see him falling apart very quickly. So, I really recommend that! 

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As Tariffs Dominate News, Trump and Netanyahu Make Increasingly Militaristic Threats; Plus: Mixed Supreme Court Ruling on Deportation Powers
System Update #435

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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Trump once again hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House – the second time in two months.  Hopefully, this will be a monthly occurrence when Netanyahu comes to Washington and visits his workers every month or so. 

The visit was billed as an attempt by Israel to convince Trump to lift the 17% tariff imposed on that country but, as the visit unfolded, it was clear they were talking at least as much about war in the Middle East, specifically, the prospect of bombing Iran – an American war against Iran, the ultimate dream of Israel and its many supporters in the United States. Many statements were made of great significance – to put it mildly – and we will break those all down for you. 

Then, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a partial victory – and, despite the headlines, it was only a partial victory – as they lifted by a 5-4 vote, the nationwide injunction on these deportations imposed by federal district court Judge Boesberg and the court then required any judicial challenges to the deportation to be brought not as a class action. 

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There are many important world leaders of major countries with whom Donald Trump has not yet met, which is to be expected. He's only been in office not even 90 days. But there's a world leader with whom he has now met twice, hosting that leader at the White House two times in two months. You'll be shocked to learn that the leader who has now visited the White House most is none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Netanyahu went to the White House on April 8 and had a tour, including the part of the White House where Trump has a whole wall of just photos of himself with the Israeli leader. They were both admiring and looking at that. Trump seemed very proud of how many times he met Netanyahu: he talked fondly of Netanyahu in front of the media, including how often he has met with him, how well he knows him – praised him essentially for everything. 

One of the things that was so odd about this meeting, especially the love fest that manifested again between the two leaders, was that the day before, Israel shot and killed a 14-year-old American boy in the West Bank, a foreign government shot and killed that American citizen, 14 years old, in the West Bank, shot dead by Israeli soldiers and rather than the U.S. government saying, "Hey, why did you kill our citizen?” or “We were kind of upset that you shot an American boy,” it was not mentioned in any part of their public communications. 

Here from CNN yesterday:

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We have seen so many times when the IDF or the Israeli government makes a claim to justify their killing of innocent people about what these people were doing to warrant their murder and so often when there's a video that emerges, it turns out the IDF is lying. It happened in 2023, with an American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera shot in the West Bank. Israel originally said that they didn't kill her, it was Palestinians who shot and accidentally killed her, and then there was an investigation, there were videos and there was an autopsy that proved that the bullets came right from an IDF weapon. They ultimately admitted it. 

They eventually even ended up apologizing but that was only because a video was released proving it, as happened last week as well with the killing of medics as we'll show you so. It so often happens, of course, if the Israelis kill even a 14-year-old American boy they'll say, “Oh those are terrorists.” 

I just want to remind you of one thing so often this gets lost: the West Bank is not part of Israel; it has internationally recognized borders when Israel was created and then, even when Israel took more territory in 1967, there are internationally recognized borders. Israel does not own the West Bank. The West Bank does not belong to Israel. 

The Israeli military is brutally, violently occupying the West Bank and has been for decades ruling the lives of the Palestinians who live there in horrific ways that a lot of South African leaders say are even worse than in South African apartheid. There are roads in the West Bank available only for Jews but not for Arabs or Palestinians, they constantly have to wait in line for hours and go through humiliating checkpoints where they're constantly beaten and forced to just engage in humiliating rituals. 

There's also a huge number of settlements, just buildings that Israeli citizens have built, “settlers,” because they want to take that land. They expel Palestinians from their homes and say this is now our home, they have built so much there that it makes a two-state solution impossible because there are so many settlers in the West Bank, even though it doesn't belong to Israel. Some of the Israeli settlers have fanatical religious views; they believe God promised them that land. Others just don't care; they want Israel to expand and are now backed by the IDF, so, they go and pillage villages, they kill Palestinians in the West Bank, and the IDF often stands there, if not aiding them now, given how the government has changed. 

The entire world considers Israeli settlements and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank illegal. So, when you're hearing, “Oh, these boys were throwing rocks,” they're throwing rocks at their military occupiers, who are in tanks: tanks paid for by the United States – some of the most fortified tanks on the planet. 

I just want to ask you, if you’re an American and a foreign military invaded and occupied the United States, would you throw rocks at the military occupier? Would that be terrorism if you did? There's actually a 1984 film about what would happen if the Russian army, then the Soviet army, called Red Don, invaded the United States. Essentially, it glorifies all the American civilians who bravely stood up to their occupiers and killed them, used violence against them and threw rocks at them. But of course, if a foreign military is occupying your land for decades and the whole world considers it illegal, it's not theirs. If you're going to a map, the West Bank is not part of Israel. And yet their military is ruling the lives of those people – who would not think that's justified throwing rocks at the Israeli tanks? What people being occupied wouldn't do that? But in any event, even if they were throwing rocks at tanks, does that justify murdering a 14-year-old American, Palestinian American boy who was in the West Bank? The Israeli defense, the IDF thinks so. They released a video of them killing this American and shooting two other Americans, that they think justifies it. 

Video. Israel Defense Forces, X. April 7, 2025.

It's about a five-second video where you can see a couple of rocks being thrown. And then they came and just kind of shot them all, all three, two wounded, one dead. We talk about 14-and 15-year-old kids here. 

If any other country shot American teenagers, the U.S. government would be very angry but when Israel kills an American citizen, we're on the side of Israel. That's America First. 

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