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Whatever else one might want to say about the first two-and-a-half months of the Trump administration, there's no denying that there is no such thing as a slow news day. Virtually every day brings some major new event, often multiple ones, in the realms of foreign policy, wars, economic policy, free speech, constitutional and civil liberties issues. Even for a show like ours that is on every night — or everynightish — it is impossible to cover everything that deserves coverage. 

With that difficulty in mind, we are thrilled to have one of the most knowledgeable and clear-thinking voices anywhere in our political discourse. He is a professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer. 

Friday, however, is Mailbag Day and we have answered some of your questions. Keep sending them.

The Interview: John Mearsheimer

Professor Mearsheimer doesn't need an introduction – especially for viewers of our show, who have seen him on many times over the past several years and is always one of our most popular, and I would say, enlightening guests as well. We have a whole range of topics to cover this evening, including the ongoing Israeli destruction of Gaza, the decision by President Trump to restart President Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen, the broader threats of Middle East war, what is going on in the war in Ukraine, remember that as well as the terror policies that President Trump has announced and what it might mean specifically geopolitically for the U.S.-China relations. 

Professor Mearsheimer is also the author of the groundbreaking book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” as well as the highly influential 2014 article in the Journal of Foreign Affairs entitled "The Crisis in Ukraine is the fault of the West.". 

G. Greenwald: Professor Mearsheimer, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It's always great to see you. 

John Mearsheimer: Great to be here, Glenn. 

G. Greenwald: I actually thought about this morning and this afternoon, starting by talking to you about the free speech crisis and the assaults on academic freedom taking place in American academia. I want to get to that with you, of course, but I realized afterward, that it's almost impossible not to begin with the ongoing atrocities in Gaza because of the horror of it. The fact that the United States is directly responsible for it, I think really requires that it be the first topic that we talk about. 

So, I guess my question to you is, and we've talked about it before, what do you think the Israeli motives might be in essentially destroying all of Gaza, destroying civilian life in all of Gaza? To me, it seems like there's no doubt any longer what their intentions are. They're saying it. There's really one possibility. I'm just interested in your view of what that is. 

John Mearsheimer: Yeah, I think there is only one possible goal here, given what they're doing, and that is to ethically cleanse Gaza. And what they are trying to do is make Gaza unlivable, and their story will force the Palestinians to leave. But other than that, I can't see what possible motive they would have for continuing this offensive. 

G. Greenwald: I've seen the sentiment around a lot. I heard it from people I like and trust and am colleagues with and friends. And I certainly feel the same way. It's like, at some point, you just almost feel like you're out of words, out of horror and disgust and rage to express the more you see. And I do think it's gotten worse in terms of the resumption. You could probably compare it to the early couple of months when there was this indiscriminate bombing and huge numbers of people killed. We're kind of back to that, but on some level, even worse when you add in the purposeful blockading of any food getting in, the use of mass starvation as a form of collective punishment and driving people out, forcing them to side between starving to death or leaving and giving that land of theirs to the Israelis. How do you compare what we're seeing in Gaza to other atrocities and war crimes that we've seen over the last several decades? 

John Mearsheimer: Well, I think this is a genocide, and I would put it in the same category as what happened in Rwanda, what happened in Cambodia, and what happened in World War II with the Nazi Holocaust. I mean, the basic goal here is to kill a huge number of people in the Palestinian population, and that, I think, easily qualifies as genocide. In fact, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both done lengthy reports that lay out the case for genocide, and I find those cases compelling. So, I think this is a lot like those other cases. 

G. Greenwald: Even people who might be uneasy, or even critical of what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, nonetheless, have a very visceral, almost primal opposition to applying the word genocide to what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. They may say things like, oh, look, if their goal were to just wipe them all out and eradicate them, they have the weaponry to do so and they have not done that yet. And I guess some people at the same time say, “Does it matter if this is called a genocide?” I know you've used that word before; you just used it again. What is your understanding of exactly what genocide is? How do we recognize that and why does it apply? I guess why is it important to use that term for this case? 

John Mearsheimer: Well, there's a clear-cut definition in international law, which was by and large established as a result of the Nazi genocide in World War II. It involves, focusing on killing a large portion of a particular population. That population could be based on ethnicity or religion or what have you but the point is that what you're aiming to do is kill a huge chunk of a particular population. Now, that can happen rapidly, it can happen slowly, but does that really matter? If you were to kill three million people in a particular group over five years, would that be any different than killing those people over five months? I think the answer is no. And I think you therefore really can't compare genocides with one another. In the same way, you can't compare apartheid in one system with apartheid in another system. 

Over the years, many Israelis have argued to me that Israel is not an apartheid state because it's different than South Africa. But the point is comparing Israel to South Africa doesn't deal with the question of whether or not Israel is an apartheid state. You have a general definition of what an apartheid state is, and then you have to ask yourself the question, does South Africa and does Israel fit into that category of apartheid? And the same thing is true with genocide. There's no question that there are fundamental differences – and I would note fundamental similarities between the Nazi Holocaust and what's going on in Gaza. But the fact is that there are also fundamental differences but if you look at the definition of genocide you can categorize what's happening in Gaza as a genocide. As I said, if you look at what Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have done on this count, they lay out that this is genocide. 

G. Greenwald: What would so ironic, I guess you can use a sort of lighter word than is merited, about what is happening is that so much of the international law and the conventions that emerge, including the Geneva Conventions, the new Geneva Conventions that emerged after World War II were specifically designed to prevent things like the Holocaust from happening again. 

One of the prohibitions that the world agreed to was a prohibition on collective punishment. The Nazis would go to France and if there was somebody in the resistance in a certain town, they would say, “Turn them all over, we're going to kill 20,000 of the people in the town without respect to whether they actually did anything.” It's collective punishment, “We are going to punish this town if it produces somebody who was working against us or has in some way taken up arms against us.” 

There's a war crime prohibition on collective punishment among others, using food as a weapon of war, mass starvation and the like, all the things the Israelis are doing. I kind of get the sense – and maybe this is actually a pervasive propagandistic success – that when people talk about saying the Nuremberg trials or war crimes or even the phrase “Never again,” they seem to think that what it means is these are principles to protect Jews and only Jews and not the rest of humanity, and therefore, you cannot have a genocide perpetrated by Jews, only against them, or you can't have collective punishment and war crimes perpetrated by Jews, only against them. Do you think that is a kind of common ethos in the West? 

John Mearsheimer: I think deep down inside most Jews do believe that, that the word genocide cannot be applied to anyone other than the Nazis and what happened between 1941 and 1945. 

But Glenn, let me say a word about collective punishment and use my discussion of that term, to distinguish between how I think the genocide against the Jews evolved and how this genocide in Gaza evolved. I don't think collective punishment… 

G. Greenwald: Just to be clear, when I was talking about collective punishment, I wasn't necessarily using it as how the Holocaust evolved, although there was a lot of collective punishment there. But even, like I said, in places like Nazi-occupied France, against the French Resistance and the like, it was used there. But I'm definitely interested. I just wanted to be clearer about what I was saying, but definitely, I'd like to hear what you have to say with this distinction. 

John Mearsheimer: Okay, but I think with regard to the Nazi holocaust, from the get-go, the aim of collective punishment was not at play. The aim was to annihilate all of European Jewry, or at least that portion of European Jewry that the Nazis could capture. So, it wasn't collective punishment at all. 

I think the way the genocide in Gaza has evolved is different. I think after October 7, the Israelis concluded that if they really punished the civilian population in Gaza, that would cause that population to leave. So, I don't think the initial goal was to murder huge numbers of Palestinians. It was definitely to inflict massive punishment on the Palestinian population and to make the place unlivable. 

But what happened is that the Palestinians didn't leave. The Israelis therefore had to constantly up the ante, which is another way of saying they had to consistently up the bombing campaign and the end result is that over time, I believe it morphed into genocide. As I said at the time, I didn't think in the fall of 2023 that it was a genocide, but by late 2023, given that the Israelis had been unable to drive the Palestinians out and were continuing to punish the population, and were increasingly frustrated, and therefore increasingly ramping up the punishment, it morphed into a genocide. And of course, it's just gotten worse and worse over time. 

One would have thought that once the cease-fire was in place, this was the day before President Trump was inaugurated, January 19 of this year, we had put an end to the genocide. We would then just have to deal with the suffering in Gaza and hopefully ameliorate that to the point where fewer people would die than we thought would happen if the genocide continued. 

But then, Trump began to talk about what his view was of Gaza and he basically gave the Israelis the green light to start the campaign of genocide all over again. That, of course, is what's happened, and the Trump administration has said hardly anything about what the Israelis are doing. The media and leading politicians in the West have said hardly anything. 

So, the Israelis, they're pretty much free to do anything they want to the Palestinians and hardly anyone except for a handful of people like you and I will stand up and say that this is fundamentally wrong and has to stop. 

G. Greenwald: We talked several times during 2024 about what you thought might be the likely impact of Trump's election on these wars in the Middle East and I think there was a sense that we know for sure what will happen if Joe Biden wins or Kamala Harris wins, which is a continuation of the status quo. They made no efforts to, for a cease-fire, occasionally made some noises about concerns for humanitarian ends, but really never used their leverage in any real way to back that up. 

But the issue of Trump was always – well, you really don't know what you're going to get, I mean, he talks a lot about how he prides himself on being the first American president not to involve the U.S. in a new war. He obviously was the one who facilitated that cease-fire and seemed to take a lot of pride in it. Yet, now he's in office and he restarts Joe Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen, which I want to talk about, which you could count as a new war or an escalated war. And then, clearly, he gave the green light to the Israelis, not just to unravel his cease-fire, but to go all in on whatever they wanted to do. 

What do you make of the expectations that you had of the Trump administration throughout 2024 versus the reality that we're now seeing? 

John Mearsheimer: I thought there was some chance that he would try to shut down the war. This is before he came into office. I thought that in large part because he made much of the fact that he intended to be the president for peace, that he was not a warmonger, and that he was going to shut the war in Europe, shut down the war in the Middle East. And then, of course, he forced Netanyahu to accept the cease-fire, which was initiated the day before Trump was inaugurated, January 20 of this year. And that gave one hope because the cease-fire had three stages. But the second stage looked like it would really put an end to the conflict, that the Israelis would leave Gaza, and you'd have a cease-fire that would last for a long time. 

But of course, the Israelis refused to go to the second stage of the cease-fire, the Trump administration put no pressure on the Israelis, and indeed, the Trump administration blamed Hamas for the fact that you had not gone into the second stage, and that of course was not true. But anyway, Trump has disappointed us, and he's no different than genocide Joe was. 

G. Greenwald: I think that, and again, we saw this several times in the first term starting in 2017, obviously, Trump's not a pacifist, I mean, he escalated bombing campaigns, which he inherited from Obama in the way he said he would against ISIS and Syria and Iraq, etc. But you really didn't see this kind of militarism expressed. 

Now he's back in, he's utterly unconstrained, at least in his mind – I was just reading today, in fact, some Republicans in the White House saying basically in response to all this uproar about the collapsing stock market or the declining stock market that he just doesn't care. He doesn't care about negative reactions from the public, doesn't care about negative reactions in the media, he feels like he got a mandate, he's going to do what he wants and that's what he's setting out to do. 

And so, I guess, on one level, he seems to be in charge. It seems like he is determined to make sure that his will is carried out a lot more so than in the first term, where I think there was a lot of sabotage, kind of undermining, around him. This time he seems to really have had a plan, or people with him did, to make sure that everything that happens is because he wants it to happen. 

So, what do you think accounts for that change? Why did he get into office right away and start bombing Yemen and giving the Israelis the green light to go wild, even wilder than they were before, and now threatening Iran with some sort of annihilation if they don't give the kind of deal that he wants on nuclear weapons? 

John Mearsheimer: Let me answer that, Glenn, by making a general point about Trump and then specifically answering your question. I think that in his first term, he was not a radical president. I think that he pursued one radical policy, and that was that he drastically altered our policy toward China. He abandoned engagement with China and he pursued containment. That was the one, I think, radical shift and policy, both foreign and domestic, that took place in his first term. 

As many people have said and Trump himself has acknowledged, the deep state basically boxed him in, much the way it boxed Obama in. When he came into office this time, I think because he had had four years to really think about it and think about how to deal with this issue, he came in with the thought in mind that he was going to get his way. And I think you see this, by the way, in the people that he has relied on to execute his policies. 

Elon Musk, for example, and Steve Witkoff. I think Musk is the key person, the key right-hand person for Trump on domestic policy and Witkoff is the right-hand person on foreign policy. Neither one of these individuals is part of the deep state, neither one of these individuals is part of the Washington establishment. They're outsiders, they're Trump's buddies, they're the kind of people he can trust. He doesn't trust Marco Rubio and people of that sort. 

So, what he did was he brought in his own team and he set out to pursue a radical policy, both at the foreign level, foreign policy level, and at the domestic level. And if you just laundry list a lot of the policies, it becomes manifestly clear that that's the case. First of all, with regard to tariffs; second, with regard to the whole notion of conquering territory, like Greenland, the Panama Canal; third, with regard to transatlantic relations; fourth, with regard to relations with Russia. 

Then, if you switch down to the domestic level, his approach towards dealing with the judiciary, his approach toward dealing with a deep state, his approach toward dealing with immigration, and his interest in wrecking universities. These are truly radical policies across the board. You didn't see this the first time around but this time he's unleashed the dogs and he has lieutenants, again, Witkoff and Musk, who are working with him in this regard. 

So, at a very general level, I would say you do not want to underestimate what a transformational president he intends to be and, given that he's just in the beginning of a four-year term, one can only wonder what this is all going to look like four years from now. So that's my general point. 

My specific point is I don't understand what he's doing in the Middle East. I understand what he's doing with regard to Ukraine. I understand what he's doing with regard to the genocide. I don't understand what's he doing with regard to the Houthis and I don’t understand what he is doing regarding Iran, because these are all losing policies. 

He would have been much smarter to force Netanyahu to stick to the cease-fire which would have been no fight with the Houthis, and he would have been much smarter to work out a deal with the Iranians. But getting involved in a shooting match with the Iranians and with the Houthis at the same time you're supporting a genocide, does not make sense to me. 

G. Greenwald: Well, I suppose one might say that for it to make sense, one might go and read your 2007 book called “The Israel Lobby” because I do think, at least for me, my big concern throughout the 2024 campaign and then the election, was and I had a very similar idea toward that they knew that as you did, which is I thought the ceiling for Trump could be higher, but the kind of floor could be lower whereas I just thought was going to be a disastrous continuation of how things were. 

My concern was that one of his biggest donors was Miriam Adelson. He said openly in the campaign, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were the people who came most to the White House, other than the people who worked there. They were there the most. And every time they were there, they would ask for things for Israel, and I would always give them to them and he kind of joked and said, that they would come back two weeks later and asked for more. And I would say, “Come on guys, give me like a few weeks of breathing room.” He boasted that he gave them the Golan Heights which was more than they even asked for. He said during the campaign, “We're going to make Israel great again, and we're going to make America great again”. He also, as diverse as the cabinet is in many respects, the one litmus test that everybody had to pass to be appointed to any significant position was kind of indisputable, unbreakable support for Israel. I'm just wondering, what do you think, this is coming from him himself or it comes from influences around him? 

John Mearsheimer: Well, I think obviously the influences around him matter. You and I both know how powerful the lobby is, so there's no question that he's getting pressure there. I don't think Trump cares very much about the future of Israel. I think Trump is an America-First president. 

I personally think what's going on here, I can't prove this, but my sense is that Trump is pursuing a radical agenda as I described, and there are a lot of very controversial issues at play on that agenda. And it does not make sense, given that agenda, for him to pick a fight with the lobby over Israel. It's just much easier to let the Israelis do what they want, make the lobby happy, don't get any flak from people in the lobby, and if anything, create a situation where the lobby supports you, and it doesn't get in the way of pursuing your radical agenda. So, I think that by and large, that explains what Trump is doing. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, and it was interesting the dynamic in the Republican primary, the hardcore people in the Israeli lobby, the sort of neocons who never trusted Trump, who didn't think he was reliable, they were almost entirely aligned behind Ron DeSantis. I mean, you can go back and just look at who those people are and you'll see that they really thought Ron DeSantis does care about Israel a lot more than Trump does. 

Then, it was only once it became apparent that DeSantis had no chance of winning, that they kind of started their way into Trump's world to make sure that he was on their side with those things and I guess that is the calculation – maybe this is a little naive but, you know, everyone sees what we're seeing, everyone sees the same videos we're seeing, everyone understands exactly what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, it's not just the United States has been paying for an army that war, there's also a lot of countries in Europe doing the same, providing logistical support as well in the case of the U.K. throughout the EU, lots of countries have given money and military aid to Israel. 

Is there any prospect at all that whatever you might call the international community outside of the United States, could ever look at this and through some kind of desire not to have this on their legacy and conscience that they just sat through this and kind of gave tacit approval to it or said nothing, might finally say enough is enough? 

John Mearsheimer: Well, I don't think you're going to see that in the West. If you look at the situation in Europe, it's every bit as depressing as the situation here in the United States. I mean, everybody talks about Western values, and we often get up on our moral high horse and talk about how wonderful we are in the West compared to everybody else, if anything, this support of the genocide across the West shows that that claim is a bankrupt one. 

I think there's much more criticism of Israel outside of the West, but that really doesn't resonate in any meaningful way. I think the one country that has gone to the greatest lengths to try and rein Israel in is South Africa and South Africa has paid a price for that. The United States has been giving South Africa, especially since Trump came to office all sorts of problems because the lobby and Israel have been putting pressure on Trump to make it clear to South Africa that it made a fundamental mistake pushing the case of genocide in Gaza in the International Court of Justice. 

I think other countries look at what's happened to South Africa and it has a deterrent effect. They just say to themselves, “Do I really want to get out front on this issue and criticize Israel?” And here we're talking about countries outside the West because as I said, countries inside the West are a hopeless cause. 

So, you have this situation where the only people who are today helping the Palestinians in Gaza are the Houthis. The only reason the Houthis are attacking shipping in the Red Sea is because the Israelis started the genocide up again. So, if there is anybody who deserves credit for helping the Palestinians in Gaza, it's the Houthis. 

G. Greenwald: And look what they're getting as well, a massive bombing campaign aimed at them precisely for that reason. 

Let me just say, on that question of South Africa, I meant to say this earlier when you were talking about the differences with South African apartheid, but the similarities as well. 

I took my kids to South Africa last year, we spent a couple of weeks there, we met with some officials. There are a lot of amazing museums and with all this, like, residual signage and mementos of apartheid, and you go and you look at it and you immediately recognize a lot of similarities between how apartheid was carried out in South Africa, and how it's being carried out in the West Bank – and by the way, there are a lot of senior Israeli officials who have long said it's apartheid, including the former head of the Mossad, just a month before October 7, and lots of other Israeli officials too. 

It's interesting because South Africa, even going back to Mandela and Bishop Tutu, were among the most local supporters of the Palestinians and critics of Israel because they identify so much with that cause. And of course, that is the reason why they've taken the lead in filing these war crimes charges against Israel. 

Let me ask you about the Houthis. Did you want to say something about that? 

John Mearsheimer: Yeah.

G. Greenwald: Good.

John Mearsheimer: I just want to say that it's very important to understand that a number of South African Jews who were involved in the anti-apartheid movement before apartheid collapsed have said that the apartheid system in Israel is worse than the apartheid system in South Africa was. Second – and this is a very important point – it's important to emphasize that Jews in the West, and this includes the United States, of course, have been incredibly vocal in their opposition to the genocide. And that's true in Europe as well. So, it's important that we don't come away from this discussion thinking that it's Jews who are supporting the genocide because many Jews are opposed to the genocide and, of course, the point I'm making here is if you go back to South Africa, many Jews were opposed to apartheid in South Africa. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, if you look at police arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters in Germany or protesters against the Israeli destruction of Gaza, so often they're German Jews. And you see the police coming and arresting German Jews because they protest against Israel, dragging them away, all in the name of fighting antisemitism or protecting the Jews, it's incredibly perverse. 

Let me ask you about when we get to the academia discussion, we're going to talk about that a little more and I obviously always emphasize how many Jewish students participated in these protests, because that's deliberately obscured. Let me ask about Yemen and the bombing campaign there, the United States has been bombing Yemen pretty much for 20 years now without stopping. The Obama administration worked for the Saudis for an all-out war against the Houthis and then Trump, in his first term, bombed the Houthis, Biden bombed them all throughout 2024. 

They seemed to be very resilient. It's amazing how you can watch a political movement like Trump supporters say, “No more wars in the Middle East,” and the minute he posted a video today of about 20 people in Yemen standing around a huge bomb went off and they were all killed. And there were all these Trump supporters saying, “Yeah, get the terrorists, get the terrorists.” It is amazing how you get people to sign onto a war instantly just by saying we're killing the terrorists. 

What do you think are the dangers and geopolitical implications of what the Trump administration says is going to be a sustained ongoing bombing campaign? 

John Mearsheimer; It's very important to emphasize, Glenn, that there was a big piece in The New York Times today that said that individuals from the Pentagon have been briefing Congress that the policy against the Houthis has not been succeeding, and we have been eating up huge amounts of ammunition, and this is undermining our position in East Asia where we're determined to contain the Chinese. So, Trump can say that we're on the verge of winning a decisive victory against the Houthis. He can say in public and he'll convince his supporters of that, I'm sure. But the fact is, that's not what's happening, and that's what people in the Pentagon are telling people in Congress behind closed doors. So, we in the past were unable to defeat the Houthis. We are unable to defeat them now. Trump can bomb them from now to kingdom come and the end result is going to be the same. The Houthis are going to remain standing. 

G. Greenwald: Before we get to some of the domestic issues, I want to ask you about what you alluded to just a minute ago, which is the transatlantic relationship, NATO, the way in which the Trump officials are being quite open about their contempt for the Europeans. And even when we got a glimpse of what they were saying in private with that Signal Chat, JD Vance in particular, but a lot of other people as well, were just spewing overt contempt of the Europeans. Trump has obviously harbored that for quite a long time, not just because he perceives – I think justly – that they don't pay their share, the United States fights their wars and protects them while they have a healthy welfare state, but also because the people in the European capitals tend to look down on Trump, look down on the people around him, and I think that's part of it. 

Do you think the last couple of months have ushered in a lasting, permanent and fundamental transformation of the relationship between the U.S. and Europe? 

John Mearsheimer: Yes. I think that Trump is determined to significantly reduce the American commitment to NATO or the American commitment to Europe. I don't think he's going to eliminate it completely, but he wants to greatly reduce our presence in Europe and he wants the Europeans to take care of their own security or be principally responsible for taking care of their own security, and he wants the Europeans to deal with the Ukraine problem. 

There are a variety of reasons for this, one of which he wants to pivot to Asia, as do most people in the national security establishment because they understand China is a bigger threat than Russia is. In fact, Russia is not much of a threat at all. When you marry that strategic logic with the fact that Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, have contempt for the Europeans and then you marry that with the tariffs that we've now put on the Europeans, it's hard to see how the NATO alliance is going to be anything more than a hollow shell four years from now. 

G. Greenwald: But do you think that is a valid premise, namely that NATO was important when it was necessary to contain the Soviet Union, to protect Western Europe against incursions by Moscow – obviously, the Soviet Union has not been around for several decades now and, therefore, the rationale for NATO and especially the need for the United States to pay far more than the Europeans do for their defense, the moment has come to stop this kind of handout to the Europeans and force them to defend themselves? I mean, do you find that convincing or valid? 

John Mearsheimer: Yes. The fact is, Glenn, I was in favor of pulling it out of NATO and pulling out of Europe after the Cold War ended, and certainly after the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. The purpose of the NATO alliance was to contain the Soviet Union. I thought that made eminently good sense during the Cold War, I fully supported it, but once the Soviet Union went away, what was the purpose of staying in Europe? 

I would have brought the forces home and I would've concentrated on what Barack Obama called nation-building at home. I think that was much more important. I think presidents have the principal responsibility to the American people, and the idea that American leadership involves us policing the entire world, having forces in every nook and cranny of the planet, and trying to run everybody's politics, I think is a prescription for disaster. So, I would have gotten out of here. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, it is ironic, too, that the National Security establishment has been saying we need to pivot away from the Middle East to Europe that goes all the way back to Obama and even before. That was Obama's foreign policy, we needed to get out of the Middle East and so we could focus on Asia. And obviously, the more wars you finance in the Middle East, and the more wars you start in the Middle East, the more that goal is going to get impeded and it was true for Obama as well. 

John Mearsheimer: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I don't know if I already said this to you, Glenn, but if you look at the piece in The New York Times today that talks about the bombing campaign against the Houthis and how much ammunition we're expending against the Houthis, the point was made in the article that it is hindering our efforts in the Pacific. It's hindering our efforts to deal with China. And this just tells you that from an American point of view, if you think that containing China is important – and the Biden administration and now the Trump administration both believe that is the case – then what you want to do is you want to reduce your footprint in the Middle East.  You want to greatly reduce your footprint in Ukraine so that you can pivot fully to Asia. But, in fact, what's happened is we've gotten deeper and deeper into the Middle East. 

Go back to our earlier conversation about starting a war with the Houthis and thinking about starting a war with Iran and backing the Israelis, that's not getting out and diminishing our footprint in that region. In fact, if anything, it's just the opposite. In Europe, I mean, Trump does want to get out, but he's not been very successful so far, and there's not a lot of evidence he's going to be successful anytime soon. And all of this is making it more difficult to deal with the Chinese. 

G. Greenwald: You mentioned earlier, this kind of massive attack by the Trump administration on colleges and universities. You obviously care a great deal about academia, you have worked in academia pretty much your entire adult life. It's something that I know you value. You've spent a lot of time here before talking about your ardent belief in free speech and how the attacks on protests are eroding it on campus.

However, now, we have something in a different universe than what we saw in 2024: not only these deportations of law-abiding, legal immigrants in the United States for the crime of criticizing or protesting Israel, but also, demands now that colleges and universities adopt this radically expansive definition of hate speech and antisemitism to include all sorts of criticism of Israel, including now outlawing something you said earlier, which was comparing and contrasting Israeli actions with the acts of the Nazis. 

That is something that wherever this expanded definition of antisemitism is adopted, what essentially could get you expelled if you're a student, potentially fired if you are an academic. 

But then on top of that, you have this whole climate where speakers are being disinvited if they're going to talk about Gaza; you have Middle East studies programs at Columbia being put under receivership at the demands of the Trump administration. At Harvard, you have the Middle East Studies Director and Associate Director forced out because they're not pro-Israel enough. 

What do you make of all of this in terms of the future of free speech and academic freedom in American academia? 

John Mearsheimer: It's a disaster. There's just no question about it. Not only is free speech being attacked here, but I think that the Trump administration is bent on badly damaging universities. It's bent on wrecking them. When you come into a university from the outside, the way the administration is doing, and you dictate how that university is run in all sorts of ways that are completely antithetical to the way our great universities have been run for a long, long time, you are threatening the existence of some of the most important institutions, not only in the United States but on the planet. 

I have a number of friends who are not Americans, who come from foreign countries, who can't believe what we're doing because they think that American universities are the most wonderful institutions in the world. This is not to say that our universities don't have problems. They do have problems, and those problems need to be addressed. But nevertheless, to bring a wrecking ball in and take places like Harvard and Columbia and Princeton and Penn and now they've added Brown to the list and take the wrecking ball to them, in my mind is really just crazy. Why would anybody do this? But again, as I said to you before Glenn, you do not want to underestimate how radical Trump is. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, well, I mean, just to make the argument that I hear often from Trump supporters and defenders of all of this, which is, yeah, universities used to be an epicenter of innovation and research, and produce cures; they created the internet – Mark Andreessen, a prominent Trump supporter who obviously was instrumental in the creation of the internet with Netscape told The New York Times that it was basically Al Gore, despite all the mockery he got, who really did lead the way in getting funding for key institutions to do the research that ultimately led to browsers and to the Internet. That's been the history of American academia. 

The argument now is look, now they're just hotbeds of left-wing ideology, and gender studies, and sociology and beyond that, they can do whatever they want, but not if they're getting federal funding. If they get federal funding, they have to align themselves with the ideology of the federal government or they don't have to get federal funding and they can't do what they want. What do you make of those? 

John Mearsheimer: Look, I think there's no question that the political center of gravity in universities is too far to the left and needs to be pushed back towards the center. It's not as dire a situation by any means as critics on the right make out. But I would come at this whole issue from a different perspective. I wouldn't focus simply on the inventions that come out of universities. I would focus on the phenomenon of critical thinking. 

What universities do is they teach young people to think critically. Most young people have not figured out by the time they graduate from High School how to think critically, how to read a book and pick it apart and figure out what the author's argument is and how to counter that argument. What universities are really good at is teaching young people, whether you're in the hard sciences, the humanities, or in the social sciences, to think critically. 

And free speech, of course, is inextricably bound up with critical thinking. You want people to be free to ask any questions that pop into their minds, you want them to be free to make arguments that disagree with the arguments that you, the professor, are making, this is what the enterprise is all about. It's what makes it such a wonderful enterprise. It's why people from all around the world are so interested in coming to our universities. 

And what the Trump administration is doing, and of course, the Israel lobby is playing a key role here, is undermining this process by undermining critical thinking, by making it impossible to state your views on particular issues for fear that you'll be thrown in jail, or you'll be dismissed from the position that you're in. So, this is really a huge mistake on the part of the Trump administration, and it is a huge mistake on the part of the Israel lobby. They should absolutely not be doing this. It is not in the interest of Israel supporters to pursue these kinds of policies on university and college campuses. 

G. Greenwald: I still remember the excitement I felt when I got to college and started exploring things and getting exposed to ideas I had never known existed. Not only that, but being encouraged, not just allowed, but encouraged to question every piety, every orthodoxy, I got into a lot of debates with professors who had been studying these issues for a long time, and they encouraged you to challenge them, and you have these exchanges of ideas. And what amazed me about it is that you have all these people who talk about preserving our nation and its kind of founding values and you go back to the Enlightenment, which is essentially what gave birth to the American founding, the Enlightenment ideals and values. 

There was all this kind of, not just discussion about the supreme importance of free speech and free discourse but also a place where all taboos and all pieties get picked in question, which was, is academia. And this has been central to the American founding and the American way of life for centuries. And it's amazing to me to watch people who say that they are devoted to preserving American life and American values be so supportive of this full-frontal attack on this all for the benefit of a foreign country. 

John Mearsheimer: I agree with you. Just to come in from another perspective, Glenn, the fact is that we live in a remarkably complicated world and it's hard to figure out what's going on. As you pointed out at the top of the show, it's harder to keep up with the news because there's a new issue every day on a new subject. And so, we collectively are having lots of trouble just trying to make sense of the world that we operate in. 

What I think we do at universities is we teach critical thinking, which is what allows students who then become adults, young adults and older adults, we teach them to think critically about the world. We teach them how to try to make sense of the world so that they can navigate the world and make them better citizens. And I think this is just a very important function that we serve, and I think it, again, just is foolish in the extreme for the Trump administration and the Israel lobby to take the wrecking ball to that enterprise. 

G. Greenwald: Obviously, what's on everybody's mind are these quite aggressive tariffs that Trump has imposed. But the two countries with the greatest economic power, who are now close to a full-scale trade war, are the United States and China. We saw some of this in the first Trump term, a kind of you could call it a trade war or retaliatory tariffs, but nowhere near to this extent. 

What do you think are the implications, not necessarily economically, if you don't want to talk about that, but more geopolitically in terms of the U.S.-China relationship? 

John Mearsheimer: I don't know what the economic implications are, to be honest. I'm not an economist… 

G. Greenwald: Right, that's why I brought that out. 

John Mearsheimer: Yeah. I really don't what to make of it. I think geopolitically, it will exacerbate tensions with China. I think we have a security competition here, and we have a competition that involves sophisticated or cutting-edge technologies. So, there's this military competition that's been set in play and this sophisticated technology competition that has been set in play. 

And then you add to that the tariff war, the trade war, and it's just going to make relations worse. I think with regard to the Europeans; it's going to make our relations with the Europeans worse. There's no question about that. And I think from Trump's point of view, that's not a bad thing, because it will help him to work out a divorce with the Europeans, which I think he's interested in facilitating. But I don't think these tariffs are going to improve or help relations with the Europeans in any way. 

I think the most interesting question from my point of view, and here we're talking about the geopolitical dimension, is what effect these tariffs have on the countries in East Asia that we would like to be on our side against China. If you look at the tariffs on Vietnam, for example, one would think that Vietnam is a country that the United States would want to rule away from China and have good relations with but I think the tariffs are up around the 45% level with Vietnam. 

There are all sorts of other countries, of course, in Asia, like the South Koreans, the Japanese, and the Taiwanese, who are going to field these tariffs as well. I worry that relations with our East Asian allies will be negatively affected by the tariffs. 

G. Greenwald: Our last question: I think every time you've been on in the last three years, the war in Ukraine has taken up, certainly, a good part of our discussion, if not the bulk of it. Now it's kind of reduced to a footnote at the very end. I almost thought about letting you leave without asking you, but I would feel bad if we didn't talk about Ukraine at all, because it is, despite people not paying attention to it, an ongoing major war still.

President Trump has seemed to have taken some meaningful steps to try to forge a kind of framework for a deal that could wind down that war, but so far there's not really much evidence that it's happening. I think he made some progress but, obviously, the war is still ongoing. The Russians just had a new conscription order to, I think, call up another 130,000 or 140,000 new troops. Where do you think things are with Ukraine and the possibility of Trump being able to facilitate an end to it? 

John Mearsheimer: Doesn't look good. I mean, it may be the case that there's movement behind closed doors, and we just don't know about it. But out in public, it does not look hopeful. The real problem here is that the Trump administration desperately wants a comprehensive cease-fire. We want to stop the shooting right now and then we tell the Russians what we will do once we get the cease-fire: we will begin negotiations on the final peace settlement. 

The Russians have exactly the opposite view. Their view is, “We don't want to cease-fire now because we're in the driver's seat on the battlefield and indeed we expect to win big victories in the spring and in the summer and further improve our situation on the battlefield. So, a cease-fire now makes no sense to us. What we want is we want negotiations on what the final settlement looks like and once you, the Americans, sign on to what the final settlement looks like.” That's another way of saying, “Once you the Americans agree to our principle demands, Moscow's principle demands, we will then agree to a cease-fire.” 

So, you have two fundamentally different approaches to how to move forward. And the question you have to ask yourself is, who's going to win in this tug of war? And the answer is the Russians are going to win because they're in the driver's seat. They're simply not going to agree to a comprehensive cease-fire and they're going to continue militarily fighting on the battlefield and they are going to continue marching forward. 

I believe, Glenn, that at some point the Ukrainians and the Europeans, who are a huge obstacle to getting any kind of a peace agreement, at this point will come to their senses and realize that prolonging this war makes no sense from Ukraine's point of view, because they're just going to lose more territory and more Ukrainians are going to die. Hopefully, then Trump will be able to move in and get some sort of negotiations going where we can finally put an end to this war, either through a final peace agreement or by causing a frozen conflict. 

G. Greenwald: Alright Professor Mearsheimer, it was great to see you I appreciate talking to you and it's always good to be able to cover so many topics like we did tonight, and I hope to see you again and shortly. 

John Mearsheimer: Likewise, and thank you for having me on, Glenn. I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. Have a great evening. 

All right, every Friday night, we have a Q&A session where we take questions exclusively from our Locals members. We weren't sure if we were going to be able to get to it tonight. I usually like to talk to Professor Mearsheimer for as long as possible. We'll get to as many as we can. 

The first one is from @iculus333, and he writes: 

Yeah, so I'm not sure I identified as a Democrat or a liberal like in the early 2000s. I talked about before how I used to pay a lot of attention to politics in the '80s when I was going to college and then into the '90s going to law school. And then once I got into law school, I started working at a big law firm, a big Wall Street firm, for a couple of years and started my own firm. And I was really focused on my work and my law firm trying to build a practice of constitutional law. And I really kind of stayed out of partisan politics, especially in the nineties. It was a very small issue stuff with the Clinton administration dominated by things like the Lewinsky scandal and school uniforms. I mean, there was a war, of course, in Yugoslavia bombing Serbia, advocating for the independence of Kosovo, which we're now saying is outrageous when the Russians want to do that. 

So, I mean, there were some things going on, I don’t mean to completely diminish it, but it was the fall of the Soviet Union, the peace dividend, etc. There was a lot of focus on domestic issues. Really didn't care much about partisan politics. And it was really only after 9/11 that I started getting very interested, primarily because of this radical change in the climate where I thought there was an attack on dissent, institutions had been capitulating but more so it was this idea that we were imprisoning people without any due process in Guantánamo, but also American citizens – there was a U.S. citizen named Jose Padilla who is arrested at the Chicago International Airport when he arrived in January 2002, they accused him of being the dirty bomber and didn't charge him with any crime. They just arrested him: no charges, no access to lawyers, no access to the outside world for the next three and a half years until the case made it to the Supreme Court. They were worried the Supreme Court was going to say he's an American citizen you have to give him charges in a trial and they kind of then brought charges finally and argued to the Supreme Court that that question was moot. 

All those civil liberties and obviously NSA spying on American citizens were the motivations that I had to start writing and paying a lot more attention to politics and doing journalism and I never considered those values left or right. I really didn't. I really didn’t. 

Obviously, I was criticizing sharply the Bush & Cheney administration and the neocons that surrounded them. And so, because that was the first thing I did in my journalism career, that's the way people got to know me, they assumed I must be a liberal or a Democrat or whatever since I was constantly condemning the Bush and Cheney administration. But I never perceived values like due process or the rights of citizens and the Fourth Amendment to be particularly left-wing or Democratic Party values. 

I was often criticized by the Democrats because people don't remember that the Democrats endorsed most of what Bush and Cheney were doing. Half of the Democratic Senate caucus voted to invade Iraq. Nancy Pelosi was, at the time, the ranking member on the Intelligence Committee in the House of Representatives and she was briefed on all this stuff, on torture in Guantánamo, on warrantless NSA spying, and she endorsed it all. 

And then, once President Obama got in and began applying the same exact policies and even expanding a lot of the ones that he had vowed to uproot, I continued those criticisms that people think lost the sense of Democrat or Republican. I would say I was raised as a Democrat. My political influences were my grandparents. They were just very standard kind of pro-FDR, post-depression, Jewish Americans who identified with the Democratic Party, with American liberalism. I remember my earliest memory was them cheering for George McGovern against Richard Nixon. 

So, it was kind of the ethos that I absorbed. Like the big debates in the ‘80s were often around social issues and identified more with the democratic view on those, like the idea that people should be free to do what they want. But all that has changed, it constantly changes. I think particularly once Trump emerged, so much of partisan politics or left v. right, radically changed how they manifest. So, I just don't think it's remotely helpful. I honestly never think about what is the position that I should take if I want to be on the left, what is the position I want to take when I'm if I want to be on the right.” 

When I did a lot of investigative reporting in Brazil in 2019 and 2020 that dominated the headlines about the corruption probe that led to the former president Lula da Silva being arrested and our reporting led to him being released from jail, obviously the Brazilian left loved me and assumed I was a leftist, the Brazilian right hated me and assume I was a leftist, and I kept saying this is not my cause here. My cause is journalism and having an uncorrupted and unpoliticized legal process, especially when you're talking about putting people in jail. 

And nobody believed me when I was saying, it has nothing to do with left-wing ideology for me. The right hated me because they thought I was on the left and the left loved me because they thought it was one of them too. And now I've done a lot of reporting that Bolsonaro supporters like a lot and the left is enraged by it. So, it always shifts, especially if you don't look at things through that metric and I really try not to. I'm not saying I'm perfect, I'm as subjective as anybody else is, where all the byproducts are experiences and beliefs. But I honestly don't look at politics that way. 

That's why, from the beginning, I've always had a readership that couldn't be defined ideologically as left v. right. I always had libertarians, a lot of kind of partisan Democrats, people on the left and it changed over the years. I have a lot of Trump supporters now as well, but it's a very diverse audience. It always has been. That's the way I want it. 

When I released my first book in 2006 about the Bush-Cheney attack on civil liberties called “How Would a Patriot Act?” the first place that I spoke about my book was the ACLU and the second place was the Cato Institute. And even though I was perceived as a liberal then, the first magazine that ever hired me to write an article to pay me was the American Conservative founded by Pat Buchanan, paleoconservatives who very much were in accord with me when it came to the Bush-Cheney powers, they were claiming and contempt for neocons and the like. So, it has always had this kind of mixed political spirit, and I still think that's the way I see things. 

Especially now, with Trump and these radical realignments and transformations, I think trying to figure out what is left or what is right or what is Republican and what is Democrat in terms of the belief system that defines them is really unhelpful like it just obfuscates things more than it eliminates. 

All right, next question, from @adoe: 

That’s some ironic mockery. But anyway, and it ends with thank you, I'll assume it's intended in the nicest way possible. I think this is the important thing to think about. I know instinctively, intuitively, you would think, "Oh, it's the American Constitution. That's for citizens. It's the Bill of Rights. It's only for citizens." 

Just imagine what it would mean if non-citizens had no constitutional rights. It would have meant that during the Biden administration, Joe Biden could have ordered, let's say, Jordan Peterson, who's not an American citizen but is in the U.S. legally, he could have just said, “I want him in prison for life because he's been criticizing my policies. I think he's too disruptive. He's disrupting and destabilizing America. I don't want to give him a trial, I don' want to charge him with anything, I don't want to have to convince a court that he's done anything wrong. Just throw him into prison. Or let's send him to El Salvador. Let them put him in prison and we'll pay El Salvador to do it.”

Would anybody have trouble understanding why that's tyrannical? Why that's completely contrary to the letter in the spirit of the Constitution? It's a lot harder to think about that if you're demonizing somebody. Oh, this is an Islamic radical who loves Hamas as a terrorist. And then people are like, “Yeah, throw them into prison, get them out of here. I don't really care.” A lot of time, most of the time, that's a lie. That's not true of any of those students being deported. 

But the bigger issue is the Bill of Rights is conceived of not as a Christmas tree of presents and rights and benefits that are assigned only to a certain select group of people called American citizens. The Bill of Rights is a constraint on what the U.S. government can do to anyone under its power, including people who are in the country on a legal visa or green card, or even people in the U.S. illegally. 

That's why the government can't just order the execution of say a green card holder because he criticizes the government. It's why they can't order the life in prison of someone whose only crime was crossing the border illegally and especially not without a trial. And it's not hard to understand why that's important to make sure the government can't. Even in 2008, Guantánamo detainees who were effectively in prison for life indefinitely with no charges, no trial, nothing, they weren't even allowed to go into a court hearing to argue that they had been wrongfully detained. It got up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said that the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, applies to anyone, non-citizen or citizen under the control on sovereign territory of the United States. 

And all nine justices of the Supreme Court agreed with the principle that non-citizens have constitutional rights. The only thing at question in that case was whether Guantánamo counted as a sovereign American territory because the Americans had taken over Guantánamo. The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 decision said, “Guantánamo is also American land.”

It was never a dispute that noncitizens have the protection of the Bill of Rights.  So that's one way of looking at it. Just imagine what would be possible if they didn't. But the reason, textually and constitutionally, courts have said this for 150 years. The first case I'm aware of, and I think there are ones before this, is in the 1880s, just so you don't think this is some invention of a, like, the war in court or some left-wing judges or whatever. It was back in the1880s. A Chinese national who was working inside the United States was suspected in California of having committed a crime and they basically just arrested him and put him in prison with almost no due process rights that citizens would get. He appealed his conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, I think we've read this case to you before, that the right of due process applies to everyone in the United States, not just citizens. 

The reason is, if you look at the wording that the founders purposely chose, or even the framers of the 14th Amendment purposely chose, it does not say that the government shall not have the right to deprive citizens of property or rights or life without the due process of law. It says all persons. The 14th Amendment says all persons in the United States shall be guaranteed the right of equal protection of law and due process. And it's not like they didn't understand the word citizen because there are a few constitutional provisions that apply only to citizens including the right to vote.

 They know how to say citizens if that's what they meant. They didn't. They purposely said persons. It's a universal protection for anyone under the control of the United States. You see it actually if you go read the 14th Amendment or the 5th Amendment. And if you just think about what would be the consequences, the very perverse consequences of allowing the U.S. government to do anything to non-citizens, including people here legally. You could have a green card holder who's married to an American citizen and has three American kids and is here for 30 years and the government could just come to your house one day and say, “We don't like what you say, so we're putting you in prison for the rest of your life with no trial.” If you believe the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to non-citizens, you have no objections to that, you have no constitutional objections to them. But of course, that would be unconstitutional for the textual and prudential reasons I just said. You just can read the Constitution, you can read these cases, and it'll become very clear why. 

All right, next question, we'll make it the last one Brian R. Duffy @brdduffy who says: 

And he says:

I understand it's a leverage tool for negotiations as well. Most of the coverage I have seen is pessimistic about the chances of it working. Is there a guest that Glenn could have on that we could trust to shed some light on the subject? (Brian R. Duffy @brduffy. April 4, 2025.)

Now, obviously, this is something we've been thinking about and have been discussing because the terror policies that President Trump unveiled are indescribably consequential, causing consequences all throughout the world, not just economically, but geopolitically, and they're affecting every country in transformative ways. 

One of the things I hope you listened to when I asked Professor Mearsheimer about tariffs, I specifically said, “Look, I'm not really asking you to describe what you think the economic outcome will be. Will it bring back the manufacturing base? Is it just a negotiating ploy? Will it drive up inflation or unemployment? Is it a tax?” 

And the reason I didn't ask him that is because I know that he's not an economist. He didn't study economics. He's not an expert on tariffs or economic policy. And so, I just wanted to give him that out, to say, “Look, I'm not asking you to comment on the tariffs themselves, just how they affect the relationship between the U.S. and China” and I expected and I really appreciated the fact that he said, “Look, I can't talk about the economics of tariffs because I'm not an expert in this. I really don't know.” 

And so one of the things that I've always tried hard to do since the beginning of my journalism career, since I had that blog back in 2005 and 2006, even when I was writing every day, you can go back and see, I don't write about topics where I don't feel like I have any specialized knowledge, or expertise, or particularly valuable insight. I just don't. I don't know much about economic theory. I don’t have the credibility or the competence in my view to sit here and opine on what the outcome of tariffs would be. I could if I wanted to. I've been reading all the things that you've been reading, I've been listening to all the people debate tariffs, not just now, but back in the first Trump administration – that was something he was advocating back then and did to some extent nowhere near the extent to now. 

But I really talk about economic policy because I feel like I have a decent understanding of it, the kind of understanding that you get if you read and listen to the news or to experts. I talk to people whose views I respect on this issue. But I would be a fraud, I feel, if I sat here and said, “OK, I'm going to explain to you now the implications economically of tariffs.” I don't know. And I just don't want to talk about it. 

Now, the one thing I do know about that I think is interesting and that I can talk about is the political evolution of this issue, by which I mean specifically that for as long as I've been watching the American left, they have hated free trade. Hated it. One of the biggest criticism on the left of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and one of the things that people hate about the Clintons is NAFTA and those other free trade agreements that ended up, I think in the view of a lot of people, certainly a lot people on the left, hollowing out the manufacturing base, deindustrializing the middle of the country, causing massive unemployment and the shuttering of factories, the downward mobility of the middle class and the shipping of jobs overseas. 

I remember watching the 1992 presidential debate, where Ross Perot said, “Do you hear that sucking sound? That's the sound of jobs being sucked out of the United States, immediately heading to Mexico.” And he proved to be totally prescient on this. 

There's a really interesting video that we'll put in the show notes next week – I actually promoted it on X when I watched it: Pat Buchanan wrote his 2011 book, I think it's called Suicide of a Superpower – he went on a C-SPAN show that was hosted by Ralph Nader. So, you had Ralph Nader well on the left, in fact, so on the left that he ran to the Democratic Party's left in 2000. A lot of people think he cost Al Gore the election. I don't. But so, you have Ralph Nader on the left here, you have Pat Buchanan obviously on the right, the populist right, and they both completely agreed on the evils of free trade. 

In fact, both of them were at the 1999 very famous, notorious protest outside the World Trade Organization in Seattle that turned violent, because a lot of kind of Antifa types – I mean, there was no Antifa in that, but same kind of strain – but there were huge numbers of people there, from the left and the right, who didn't engage in violence, but were there to protest world trade, global trade, free trade. 

And I think the idea that free trade and globalism are evils socially, economically and politically, is as close to what consensus on the American left, maybe in the Western left, as I think you can get. So, I have to say it's a little odd now to watch finally a politician who promised this during the election – it's not like he unveiled this out of nowhere: he promised he was going to do this during this election. Most of what Trump's doing is stuff he talked about in the election, not trying to get Greenland or the Panama Canal, not bombing Yemen, but a lot of the most controversial stuff, including invoking the L.A. and enemies act to have full discretion to deport not just illegal people here illegally, but also legally all the stuff you talked about in the campaign trail, the terrorists was one of them, and people voted for them. They were convinced that that would help. 

So, it's very odd for me to see people on the left just, I'm not saying they have to support exactly how Trump is doing the tariffs, they do seem a bit haphazard to me, again, I'm not going to opine on that, but it seems odd for people on the left to reflexively say, “Oh my God, these tariffs are terrible” and to even cite the fact that Wall Street is angry about them, that the stock market is declining because of it, as though that's some terrible thing. Now the left is afraid of alienating Wall Street. 

I thought the whole point was that we're tired of policies that only benefit a tiny sliver of the country. This concentrated corporate power that is globalist in nature, Wall Street barons, tycoons, and the like. So, because it's Trump, now, a lot of people are saying, “Wait a minute, we don't want tariffs. We want to keep the regime of global trade, of free trade.” Really? That's not what I've ever heard previously. And then there are a lot of people, I think the smarter, more thoughtful people, who don't have this reflexive reaction to Trump saying, “Tariffs can actually do important and beneficial things. We need them, we have to start undermining the regime of free trade, it's just not this way that he's doing it is not the correct way,” which seems to me to be a middle ground. It's kind of like immigration, where opposition to open borders when I started writing about politics was a very left-wing position. Bernie Sanders in 2016 when he ran was asked about open borders and he was horrified. Bernie Sanders said, “Open borders? That's what you favor? That's a Koch brothers’ proposal.” 

And back then it was George Bush and Dick Cheney and the Chamber of Commerce and John McCain, people who were very corporatist in their interests and orientations who wanted immigration reform, wanted to open up the borders much more because that's beneficial to large American corporations. If you flood the labor market with cheap labor, you drive down the cost of doing business, you increase the bottom line, you gut out the unions and the protections that American labor has. That's exactly what happened and that's why the left was opposed to it. Cesar Chavez, the Mexican American union leader, hated immigration. 

There's an article in 2011 by Jameel Bowie in the American Prospect, who's now like the supposed left-wing columnist for The New York Times, he's really just a partisan Democrat, but he wrote an article when he was at the American Prospect, I think it was in 2010, warning Democrats not to be too aggressive about or permissive about immigration because, he said, the people who will lose their jobs and suffer the most are Black and Latino Americans. Those are the ones who lose their job first, who will have to compete with undocumented immigrants. 

Opposing immigration was really a left-wing view. The establishment Republican Part –, you have those populists, but the Establishment Republican Party wanted open borders. So now you just have this complete mix now. It's in a lot of ways the same with tariffs. I'm just amazed at how many people are so horrified that Wall Street doesn't like Trump's plan, that they're throwing a tantrum that I guess they want to preserve now the system of free trade. 

So again, I'm not commenting on the merits of the tariffs and how they're done because I can't, I just see that political aspect to it. We talked about having somebody on this week. 

The problem is that if I just have an economist on, who's vehemently opposed to, or vocally in support of Trump's tariff regime, I really won't be able to push back on it the way I need to. And they'll just be here to state one opinion. I won't really have the chops, especially if they're experts in tariffs and trade, to be able to push back. We talked about maybe having two people on who have some different views that I can kind of mediate so you can hear the clash of ideas, which I think is probably the best way to do it but it is true that, in general, I've often not covered very important topics, simply, if I think I lack the expertise or the competence to do so. 

I cannot be an expert in everything. I think one of the downfalls, in fact, of American journalism and American punditry is that people feel compelled to just pontificate on everything, including things they know virtually nothing about. And that's something I really try to avoid. I was glad that Professor Mearsheimer obviously abstained as well from talking about a topic on which he wasn't an expert either.

All right, so we did have some more excellent questions that I wanted to get to, but we're short of time to do that. We'll try to get to some questions next week. And continue to submit your questions, if you're members of our Locals community, we really enjoy doing these Friday night Q&As. 

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

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The CEO of Substack, Chris Best, will be here tonight to discuss what this free speech protection program is, what prompted it, and other developments at Substack as well, which formed to be a platform that preserves free speech on the internet, very similar to Rumble. 

Then, we have a potpourri – a smorgasbord – of various events we want to cover quickly tonight: the behavior of the Democrats at the Congressional hearing held yesterday on the censorship regime featuring the testimony of Matt Taibbi, as well as the would-be Homeland Security disinformation Nina Yankovitch – remember her? We also want to talk about the behavior of both parties at yesterday's hearing on the newly released JFK files and the possible role of the CIA hearing that featured the Director of the film “JFK,” Oliver Stone, as well as the long-time JFK investigator Jefferson Morley, whom we interviewed on our show last night. We also want to cover the newly elected Israel-focused member of Congress, the Republican from Florida who is taking Mike Waltz's seat, Randy Fine, and, time permitting, several other issues. 

The Interview: Chris Best

When I resigned from The Intercept, the media outlet that I co-founded, I immediately went to Substack, a platform I didn't know very much about and had an extremely positive experience there the entire time I was there in large part because they were very committed to giving their writers total freedom and protecting freedom of speech. You didn't have to worry about saying something that the platform would dislike or that would ban you. They were an NRA platform devoted to free speech. 

Chris Best is a co-founder and CEO of Substack. He has fought, as has Substack, to defend free speech rights while connecting users with creators, ideas and communities they care about most. It was founded in 2017. Substack is building a new economic engine for culture by putting publishers in charge and enabling subscribers to support the work they deeply value. 

Before Substack, Chris was the co-founder and CTO of the mobile messenger app Kit, from 2009 to 2017. He helped scale Kit and built a platform used by over 300 million users. It is always a pleasure to welcome him to our show. 

G. Greenwald: Chris, good evening. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. 

Chris Best: Thank you for having me.

G. Greenwald: All right. So, let's get right into this because Substack has teamed up with FIRE.ORG, which I sort of consider to be the new ACLU, what the ACLU was before they kind of prioritized partisan agendas above their original values.  

FIRE has been speaking out quite vocally, even though they had developed a mostly conservative audience because they had been defending conservative speech on campus about a lot of these new censorship attacks coming from the new administration. 

You joined with FIRE and the idea was to protect writers in America, especially ones who are somehow being targeted or punished for their dissent on foreign policy, Israel, or any other topics. 

It’s not all that usual for a company that is a for-profit company, which is true of Substack, to take such a vocal position on controversial issues. What is it that prompted you to do so? 

Chris Best: Substack doesn't take positions broadly on political issues; we don't take a position, for example, on immigration policy or foreign policy. But we do see freedom of speech and freedom of the press as centrally important to our business and our mission. And so, this felt really important. 

G. Greenwald: I get that, and free speech, in my view, has been kind of central to your identity and your mission from the beginning and I've never really seen it in conflict with your business model, although it certainly can be. If you take any kind of position, even one just vaguely in support of free speech that certainly can. But the statement refers to new sorts of attacks on the right of free thought, the right to free expression. I'm just kind of wondering, was there a tipping point or a triggering point for you over the last couple of months where you decided Substack needed to do something? 

Chris Best: I think the event that put this in kind of like the Substack Bailiwick was the Öztürk editorial and deportation. The fact that somebody is being, as far as we know, targeted for the contents of an editorial that they have co-published, to us, that's a very clear free speech issue and so, even though it's not, that felt like a very clear line in the sand. 

We've had this Substack Defender program for years that helps defend free speech from legal threats. It's helped dozens of cases. We wanted to make sure that we were stepping in and helping wherever we could on this issue and we're delighted to partner with FIRE, which is just a fantastic organization. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. For those who don't know – and viewers of the show know because we covered that story in depth, what you're referring to is a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts, who was in the United States very legally working in her on her PhD program. She was recently snatched up by plainclothes officers on the street. She was obviously very frightened. She didn't even know these were agents of the state. They arrived in masks. They grabbed her phone that she was using so they could have access to her phone and then shipped her to a deportation facility in Louisiana. The only thing the government alleges, or the only things groups that monitor people like this allege is this op-ed. There's no claim that she even participated in the protest, let alone harassed anybody, blocked anyone's entrance, or vandalized a building. It's apparently solely about the op-ed. 

Now, you just mentioned you were happy to join with FIRE. I'm just wondering how that came about and why FIRE? 

Chris Best: There aren't that many consistent defenders of freedom of the press. Freedom of speech is something that I think has a lot of fair-weather friends. It's something that we've tried to be consistent about over the years and I've been very impressed by FIRE as well. You mentioned in the intro that they were sort of known for defending right-wing people against threats of censorship, but they also do that across the political spectrum. I think they're just very value-aligned on this issue. And I know Greg Lukianoff. I think they're fantastic and we're just happy to partner with them. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, just to underscore that, I mean, I know some of the people who founded and run FIRE, including Greg, who you just mentioned, who actually are quite vocal supporters of Israel, very vocal support of Israel just in their personal views and yet they've spent a lot of time defending pro-Palestinian speech on campus because their mission is to defend free speech, regardless of what they think. 

Chris, I was thinking about this earlier today and kind of is very ironic because when I first came to Substack, it was late 2020, so it was a little bit more than four years now, it wasn't very well known, but it was starting to be better known before I got there, and certainly over the next year. But the criticism of it at the time was that because it allowed free speech, it was basically some sort of right-wing or even hospitable to fascism kind of outlet when in reality you weren't promoting right-wing speech, you were just offering a platform for people who had been censored, and you had a ton of writers who weren't even remotely on the right. 

Now here we are, four years later, and what you're essentially saying is you want to make sure that people who are writing at Substack have the right to criticize foreign policy, including U.S. foreign policy toward Israel or to the Middle East or anything else and kind of protect them from some of these programs we've seen from the Trump administration. 

My guess is, or there's certainly a possibility, that if you start protecting people who have that perspective, you kind of now get the opposing accusation, “Oh, you're protecting left-wing radicals” or even that you're “antisemitic” which, if you haven't gotten yet, I'm sure you're likely to, given this program. What is the mission of Substack in terms of dealing with any type of those accusations? 

Chris Best: I think the biggest thing is to have principles, know what you stand for and why, stay calm and make sure that you're sort of consistently trying to live up to the principle. And you're absolutely right that I think free speech is a mechanism that protects writers and thinkers from power. And so, at any given time, people will look at freedom of speech as a partisan issue or as a one-sided issue, but over a long enough time horizon, we've just seen this. We've had people come to Substack in recent years who had been former critics of us, who used to say, “Substack is this evil right or left-wing place because it platforms this thing.” They wind up finding themselves censored when the worm turns, and they come to appreciate the wisdom of a consistent stance in favor of freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. I think that we've been doing that for long enough, that the evidence says we're not doing it for one side. It's a consistent policy and I really believe in it. I think it's the best thing for the platform; I think it's the best thing for the country. 

G. Greenwald: One of the things that has impressed me being here at Rumble is that they have a very kind of vigorous commitment to this same principle. It's a place for anyone to come, anyone to be heard, it's not their place to sit in judgment of which opinions are sufficiently right or wrong to be allowed to be hurt. At times this has in fact jeopardized their commercial benefits. They're as a result of that position, their refusal to censor, they're not allowed in certain countries including Brazil. I was just in France about a month ago, tried to access my own show and got that message that says “Rumble's not available in France” because they wouldn't remove RT and other Russian outlets that the French government demanded they remove. And I guess their position is sort of twofold. One is that in the long term we think free speech will help our commercial interests, but number two, even if they don't, even if they do undermine them somewhat, we're not willing to profit by violating our own beliefs in free speech and censoring on behalf of power centers. Which of those two, or if it's any of those, do you see Substack's position as being? 

Chris Best: I do think it's both. We've designed the company to be aligned with this mission. Writers on Substack, creators on Substack, are independent. They own their work, they own connection to their audience, so they can leave at any time. If we turned around one day and said, “Ha ha ha, we've sold out for some short-term profit, we're going to start censoring,” we would lose all of our business. 

I think that I’ve tried, we've tried, to build a company that puts us on the side of writers and thinkers who have the right to say what they think and readers and viewers who have a right to choose what to subscribe to and what to hear. I don't think that there is a conflict, but it is both a commercial and a moral proposition for us. 

G. Greenwald: And do you get pressure from investors or from people interested in the more financial side of Substack that if push comes to shove, they don't want you to choose this kind of mission of free speech if it is going to undermine the financial profitability of the company? 

Chris Best: If anything, the opposite. We have wonderful investors. We have wonderful employees, too. I think we've been at this long enough that people know what we're about. They understand the theory of what we are doing. People would not sign up to work at or invest in Substack if they didn't see these things as valuable. And so, we're quite fortunate that we're pretty aligned. 

G. Greenwald: So, let's talk about the program itself. When I was there, you started introducing programs that would kind of support the writers, including some really important support mechanisms, such as if a writer gets sued by some subject that they're writing about, to help them be able to have legal counsel that defends them, which is incredibly important, especially if you're an independent journalist. If you don't have that, you could be deterred from writing about wealthy people or powerful people because of the threat that you could be sued, you begin offering another kind of support services for research and the like, and it's become not just this neutral platform, but a place that is designed to support the writers that you attract, which is one of the reasons I think you're attracting so many. So, what is this new program that you just unveiled specifically intended to do?  

Chris Best: It is spiritually similar to the Defender Program that you're talking about, the genesis of that was we noticed that if you're an independent journalist, you're writing something about a local businessman or politician that is true or is like valid journalism and they send you this legal threat to shut you down. It's basically like censorship by lawfare. And so, we just felt like the platform had an interest in helping defend against those kinds of activities. If it was costless to do that, if people could just be rolled over at no cost, it was going to have this massive chilling effect on everybody on Substack, on the internet as a whole. And we feel the same about these actions. It cannot be the case that people can be snatched up in America for writing an op-ed. We have to help with that where we can, we have to provide what resources we can to support, we're partnering with FIRE, and we're providing money in legal defense. Whatever we can do to help push back against specifically the threats to free speech, we want to do. 

G. Greenwald: question, because I found this funny too. When I was at Substack, and the kind of awareness of Substack was growing pretty significantly, it was attracting a much larger audience, many writers who had a big platform previously, it wasn't just the accusation wasn't, just, “Oh, there's some sort of proto-fascist site, because they're allowing a bunch of right-wing people who should be banned or whatever.” That was at the height of the kind of left-liberal censorship regime as opposed to the one we're getting now. But the other attack on it that I remember quite well came from corporate journalists because they're afraid of anything that might be a competitor to the hegemony or monopoly on a discourse that corporate journalism has and certainly, Substack, attracting so many readers, became a threat. 

I remember very well that the consensus was that Substack could ruin journalism. It was allowing all these people to write and to do journalism “without any kind of editorial fact-checking structure” and it was just for people to kind of sound off and it was something that would erode journalism. 

Now, just yesterday, I think, The New York Times had an article on Substack, about how many refugees from corporate media, who four years ago would never have been caught dead associating with Substack are now not just going to Substack but finding success on Substack after they were basically expelled from their company for one reason or another. 

It kind of details not just that they're there, but that they are finding a lot of success. What do you think changed in kind of the ecosystem over the last few years that had corporate media personalities, contemptuous of Substack, kind of scorning it to now kind of “if you can't beat them, you join them” mentality, going to Substack? 

Chris Best: I do think part of it is just that there is a lot of pressure on those business models. That's been a tough business for a bunch of reasons. But I think the big thing is, I think a lot of people, you said before, people were worried that if you give people freedom, it's going to make the thing bad. It's going to turn into something that you don't want, something that can't make a good product. And I think the reverse is true. When you set the incentives up correctly, when you give people editorial freedom, when you give them the right to their own platform, the right to set their own standards in their community, when you get them a viable business model for doing the work they believe in, ultimately it works, ultimately you can make good things, and that is attracting more and more people, and I guess more sides of the political spectrum are seeing the value of freedom of speech owning your audience. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. As you said, people kind of like the idea of a control discourse until it kind of starts coming for them …

Chris Best: Until they’re the ones being controlled. 

G. Greenwald: Exactly, then they find the virtues of free speed. 

I know some of them are doing quite well. Are you pleased with the growth of Substack? Has it been kind of a continual growing as a result of these new issues in the media? 

Chris Best: We're thrilled: more than five-million-page descriptions. The Substack app is growing very quickly. You should get the app, get the Rumble app too. Get the Substack App as well. It's going great and it's been a steady growth over the years at this point and we think it's working. People are hungry to take back their minds, to have something different and we're delighted that more and more people are choosing Substack. 

G. Greenwald: All right, Chris, it was great to see you. Congratulations on this initiative, which I obviously do not just support, but think is incredibly important. Keep up the great work. 

Chris Best: Thank you. Thanks for everything. 

There's a lot of different things going on, and we wanted to try to just sort of, instead of delving in very, very deeply into each of them, kind of just give you a sense of some of them because the news cycle has been extremely filled. It's been a very fast news cycle, I don't think there's been a slow news day since Trump's inauguration. 

We tend to do stories more in-depth here. Maybe two, a maximum of three a night, our challenge is which ones we're going to leave out because there are always so many things to cover. 

Obviously, the big news of today is this new scheme of tariffs that Trump introduced that has become quite controversial. I'm not an expert at all on tariffs. If we're going to talk about it, we would have someone on to talk about it. But I wanted to show you just a few quick things that we would mean to talk about that I think are interesting kind of in a faster pace order. 

Yesterday, there was a hearing on the JFK documents and we covered that by having Jefferson Morley, who was a witness at that hearing, on our show. He talked about the hearing itself and the discovery of CIA-related documents in the JFK files. But there was also, in a different committee, a hearing to investigate the censorship industrial complex, the program by the Biden administration to censor dissent by coercing Big Tech companies, by threatening Big Tech companies, in terms of what they can allow and what they cannot allow, controlling them to remove dissent on COVID, Ukraine, a whole variety of other issues. 

One of the witnesses who was testifying was our friend, the journalist Matt Taibbi, and he did that, of course, because of his work on the Twitter Files, which was one of the main sources of information to show how the government was pressuring social media companies and Big Tech, so that's why he was there. 

The Democrats invited to sit next to him that utterly crazy woman who they wanted to put in charge of the ‘disinformation’, as part of Homeland Security, Nina Yankovitch. And even in our society that loves censorship and that is in love with this idea of experts identifying disinformation for you – because they know more than you do about what is true and what is false and they're going to protect you from false things – she was such a caricature of kind of a liberal censor that she was just a bridge too far even for our political culture when Biden was president. So, they had to kind of scrap that, and she's been very angry about that ever since. 

I just want to show you how scummy people in Congress can be. So, Matt Taibbi was there as a journalist, and if you know Matt, he has a very mild-mannered demeanor. He's very polite, very soft-spoken. If you engage him in debate, he's not really a combative personality. Sometimes when I watch Matt in these circumstances, my aggression kicks in. I just say, Matt, say this, push him, but that's not how Matt is. I've never seen him be disrespectful to anybody. 

So, of course, if you're going to denounce the censorship regime of Joe Biden, you're going to have Democrats who are going to be angry at you, even though it's, again, something that had been so fundamental to left-liberal politics for decades, the idea of free speech, and now it's not at all. 

So Matt Taibbi was there. He got invited. He went to testify in Washington, left his family, left his kids to go do it and here's the ranking member of that committee, her name is Sydney Kamlager-Dove – she's a member of Congress, a Democratic member of Congress – and here is what she did in response to Matt's testimony. 

Video. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, C-SPAN. April 1, 2025.

Do you see how scummy that is? Almost 30 years ago, in Moscow according to newspapers – and these were old newspaper articles – Matt Taibbi terrorized women. 

This all came from a work of fiction that Matt Taibbi's partner, Mark Ames, wrote. In exile, they had an extremely satirical newspaper. They were quite young; Matt, kind of in particular, got known for a sort of raucous style of writing. I remember reading him when I was in law school or even as a lawyer in the New York server, the New Press. He had a column there. It was very satiric, it was very ironic, but this book, in particular, was fiction. It was a work of fiction. And a lot of articles that came out right when Matt Taibbi had a new book out were designed to depict him as some sort of misogynist, like a victim of the Me Too movement, or a predator of the Me Yoo movement. 

And then once these newspaper articles ran, several of them ended up retracting the article, because the thing that was missing from Matt Taibbi's reign of terror against women in Moscow was a single woman who identified herself as his victim. No one ever complained about Matt Taibbi in any way. No woman to this day has ever said, “Oh, Matt Taibbi harassed me, he treated me inappropriately.” Yet, this scumbag of a congresswoman is exploiting the Me Too movement. 

Let me just say too, that right now, in New York City, the leading candidate to become mayor of New York is the Democrat Andrew Cuomo who had to resign from his gubernatorial position several years ago because he was engulfed in a multiple-woman scandal and alleging sexual harassment or inappropriate sexual behavior. He was forced out of office and the entire Democratic establishment is now going to align behind Andrew Cuomo because they don't actually care at all. Those were actually victims, alleged victims there, rising and saying, “Yes, he treated me improperly.” 

They don't care about that at all! Every four years, the Democratic convention hosts Bill Clinton, who's been not just credibly accused of sexual assault, but even of rape and feminist groups throughout the '90s, defended Bill Clinton, defended Bill Clinton, against all of these women accusers. Hillary Clinton demeaned their character and attacked the victims. James Carville said, “Oh yeah if you drag a dollar through a trailer park, you never know what kind of trash you're going to find.” Joe Biden himself had all kinds of accusations about inappropriate behavior with women. Do you think these people care in the slightest? 

They so cynically and cheaply exploit this issue, the Me Too issue, sexual harassment, womanizing, feminism. They don't believe in it at all. What relevance did it even have? Matt's there to talk as a journalist about an investigation that he did and she's like, “Hey, by the way, 30 years ago, some newspaper said that he was harassing women.” He never got sued, he was never charged and there's no victim, newspapers retracted it when they understood that it was actually based on a work of fiction, primarily written by his partner Mark Ames, who also has never been accused of any of that, by any woman. But they'll just whip it out because they just want to demean and malign anybody who criticized Biden's censorship regime. 

It is the left-liberal establishment in the West that has largely imposed a censorship regime. It came from 2016 with the dual traumas for Western liberalism of the British people voting to leave the EU in contempt of the Brussels bureaucrats that rule their lives followed three or four months later by the shock of Trump's victory over the ultimate establishment maven, Hillary Clinton. After that, they decided, all of them, that they could not afford free speech. They could not permit free speech anymore on the internet because when you do so, you can't control how people vote. 

And they concocted a whole new industry called the disinformation industry, a whole expertise they fabricated out of whole cloth, disinformation experts, that really does not exist. None of these people pretended to believe in free speech, none of the people had any concern about it. She began by saying, “Why are we even talking about these things? The only things that we should be talking about are the economic suffering of ordinary Americans,” which is so ironic because the reason people hate the Democratic Party is that they've never been interested in that, not in the last decade. 

They've been talking about Russiagate and Putin and Trump loving Hitler, just anything that they could fabricate and concoct that had nothing to do with the lives of ordinary Americans. Who are they going to fool now by pretending, “Oh, we shouldn't be even talking about an attack on people's fundamental free speech rights because it's just really irrelevant?” But that is the Democratic Party, just pure and simple. 

Even when they try to change their brand and feign concern with the working class or whatever, it's just so unconvincing. Everybody knows that's not at all what their interests are. Consultants have told them they need to start making people believe that's what they care about, but that's what they care about in the slightest. And so, to distract attention from Taibbi's reporting and from the other reporting about the censorship regime that they presided over for so long, first, you're going to say, “Hey, 30 years ago, he harassed women, even though it's a lie.” And then say, by the way, who cares? We should only focus on Signal Gate – or whatever. 

Here is part of the hearing as former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean is questioning Matt Taibbi as well as another witness about the censorship industrial complex. 

Video. Matt Taibbi, Thomas Kean, C-SPAN. April 1, 2025.

All that is absolutely true. Now, there is some hypocrisy, obviously, on the Republican side as well, because there is, as we've been covering, a systematic assault on the rights of people in the United States, citizens, green card holders, people who are here legally on student visas for criticizing Israel. We've covered that at length. That's a whole different type of censorship regime that is at least as menacing as the one they're talking about here. But just for reporting on this, Matt Taibbi is so hated by the Democratic Party, which used to pretend to have free speech as one of its core values, that they're willing to try to demean his character even with no foundation. 

All right. At the other hearing, the JFK hearing, we showed a little bit of this clip last night while we were interviewing Jefferson Morley. Jeff Morley identifies himself as a liberal Democrat, someone sort of on the progressive side of the Democratic Party. And he always has been. He's not a conservative anyway. And yet it's very notable that the people who have the most interest in his reporting, especially when it comes to the role that the CIA played in that assassination and covering it up, tend to be right-wing media. 

A lot of right-wing media wants to understand whether the CIA had a role to play in the Kennedy assassination, and by and large, Democrats could not be more uninterested, even though the target of that assassination was a Democratic president, from the most elevated Democratic royal family, which is the Kennedys. 

You would think they would have the biggest interest, especially because back then, they were the ones who regarded the CIA as sinister, but no more. There's no iota of concern about the CIA barely in left-liberal politics and Democratic Party politics. And that's why Jasmine Crockett had this to say when she attended the hearing where Oliver Stone and Jeff Morley, people have spent decades in-depth studying this issue, investigating this issue. An issue that Jasmine Crockett knows almost nothing about. And here's what she had to say. 

Video. Jasmine Crockett, C-SPAN3. April 1, 2025.

Can you believe how much dumbness and/or dishonesty is required to say that? Do you think Jasmine Crockett has read the 80,000 pages of newly unclassified and released documentation in order to be able to conclude, having studied this very carefully in her congressional office, that the documents now exonerate the CIA of any involvement? That is so stupid. 

Obviously, some staff member prepared for her – she's reading it. But then she goes on to say, after declaring the CIA innocent – because the Democrats love the CIA because they recognize, quite validly, that has been their political ally; that's where Russiagate came from; that's what the Hunter Biden’s laptop came from – so they don't want to, in any way, they're not interested in demeaning the reputation of the CIA by finding out if they actually killed the American president. 

That's what she finds funny: why would we as Congress want to investigate who killed an American president, whether the CIA, which has grown enormously since the early 1960s as a result of the Vietnam War, the dirty wars in the 1980s in Central America, and most of all, the endless wars after the War and Terror and many other things in between? Why would we be concerned at all if they actually murdered an elected American president because they were concerned about his foreign policy or just concerned that he was going to constrain them or weaken that agency? Why would you be concerned about the CIA, the new proof top-level officials of the CIA lied to investigators and covered up all sorts of relevant information, including the fact that the CIA had been surveilling and monitoring and in contact with Lee Harvey Oswald for many, many years?

Nobody really knew that, as Jeff Morley explained, until the documents were released. She's like “Who cares? So funny that people are interested in this.” And also, the CIA was exonerated. These documents, the 80,000 that “I, Jasmine Crockett, have read very studiously and carefully prove that they were innocent, it exonerates them, so what are we even doing here?” 

Here was another member of Congress, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democratic member of congress who decided that he was going to exploit this hearing in order to try to force Jeff Morley who was only there to talk about these documents and the JFK assassination and the CIA's involvement, talk about anything but that. 

Video. Raja Krishnamoorthi, Jefferson Morley. April 1, 2025.v

You can see how angry he is. This is an investigative journalist who has devoted a substantial part of his life to documenting the cover-up by the Warren Commission that had a massive influence of Alan Dulles, the longtime CIA director who JFK fired. They put him on the Warren Commission. The documents are now finally being released in their full form, their unredacted form, which sheds considerable light on this information. He's very excited by this, this is what he does. He comes there and they're trying to get him to talk about what JFK would say about various Trump policies, – I mean, the idiocy of it. You can see just how resentful he is about it. 

He even said, “Look I'm not here to make this a partisan issue.” He told us last night, on his Substack, where he writes about the JFK investigation he said he has equal numbers of people across the political spectrum, people who are right-wing and concerned about what they call the deep state people on the left, who have always been anti-imperialist and anti-security state, and everyone in between. But these people in Congress have no interest in anything substantial. All they want to do is ignore everything and speak about Trump and his evils. 

Now speaking about Donald Trump and evils, there is this remarkable and darkly hilarious and blatantly pathetic trend that's going on every four years, for as long as I can remember, you have all these elites, celebrities and the like, you say, “Oh, if George Bush wins, if John McCain wins, if Mitt Romney wins, I'm leaving the United States.” They never do. 

Finally, in the second victory of Donald Trump, there were actually a few people who did leave the United States. Ellen DeGeneres moved to London. Rosie O'Donnell went to Ireland. So, at least they're carrying through on this, but these are celebrities who aren't even worth mocking. What is worth looking at is the fact that you have these self-identified experts, these honored, heralded experts, in the highest levels of American academia, who are also now fleeing America, they say, because it's not safe for them to stay any longer. 

One of them is Yale Professor Jason Stanley, who really just became a laughingstock the more he exposed himself on X. I mean, they have these lofty titles at Yale, the chair, the funded, named chair that they hold, everything's designed to elevate their stature and their prestige and their intellectual elevation. And then they go on to X and they just realize what complete morons these people are just like politically banal in every way, totally on board with Russiagate. 

His fellow Yale Professor, Jeffrey Timothy Snyder, became pretty much like the academic hero of American liberals because he was extremely enthusiastic about Russiagate, he's an absolute fanatic about funding the war in Ukraine, he thinks Trump is in bed with Putin and he wrote this book on tyranny that liberals think is the guidebook for how you avoid the authoritarianism and tyranny of Donald Trump. 

Then his wife, who is also a senior professor at Yale and all three of them are together fleeing the United States to Canada. And they're saying they're fleeing. It's not like they just got a job at another university. They did get a job in a Canadian university but they're thinking, we're leaving because we don't feel safe. These very protected, lofty, extremely wealthy, celebrated academics don't feel safe. 

Obviously, there are people whose civil liberties are a threat. We've been covering them a lot. It's not wealthy, shielded, coddled, highly credentialed Yale professors. And if you're going to make a career out of saying, “Oh, I'm a fascism expert, I'm going to teach you how to fight Trump's authoritarianism,” you should be the last person running away and fleeing. You've told people to stay and fight. That's how you got rich. You wrote books saying the key is to disobey, defy them, stay and fight. And now not even two months into the administration, you're admittedly fleeing, and of course, they get it glamorous right up in Vanity Fair. 

Now, Timothy Snyder's book on tyranny has become a massive bestseller. He's made millions of dollars on this book. It came out in April 2017. It was obviously about Trump. “I am the academic expert, the historian, and the expert on tyranny. And here I am to tell you that Trump is a tyrant. Authoritarianism is coming and here's how you have to resist it.” 

In fairness, a lot of people are suggesting that it's really his wife who's demanding that they flee and he's just going with her. But it's this trio. Jason says, “Oh, yeah, they're my best friends, those two. We're all fleeing together.” After you read a book telling other people, to stand your ground and fight; don't give in ahead of time because that's what teaches them that they can go further, here he is fleeing the country, not fighting anything. 

No one's even targeted him. No one is even interested in him. Like, if the FBI starts snooping around and hears they're about to re-arrest it, okay, flee the country, but no one's even remotely suggesting that's going to happen. And they're the first ones out. 

Like I said, I do think there are people whose civil liberties are in danger, whose liberty is in danger. But it's not them.

All right, a couple of other items. 

Last night in two different Florida congressional districts, there were special elections for the House of Representatives, in part because one was an open seat because Mike Waltz left his Florida district to become Donald Trump's National Security Advisor. He had previously been a Republican member of the House. And the other was the seat abandoned by Matt Gaetz when he became Trump's nominee for Attorney General. Although he didn't get confirmed, he withdrew his nomination, likely because he wouldn't get the support of Republican senators. That seat is now open as well. 

So, there were two special elections and both of these elections should have been automatic for the Republicans because one of them, the one that is Matt Gaetz's seat, is a plus-30 Republican district, meaning Trump won that district in 2024 by 30 points. Overwhelmingly red district. The other, Mike Waltz is even more overwhelmingly red, plus-36. 

Yet, for a variety of reasons, Democrats tend to come out more in low-turnout elections. It's generally the party out of power that's more motivated in midterms, which is why it's typical for the party out of power to do very well in the midterms because they're more motivated because of their loss. But in both districts, the Republicans won by something like 15 or 16 points, a significant decrease, obviously, from 30 and 36. And then, in Wisconsin, where Elon Musk poured a huge amount of money because he wanted to change the majority, which is a liberal 4-3 majority in the Wisconsin Supreme Court to a 4-4 conservative majority. So, he backed the conservative candidate there with tens of millions of dollars. He went to Wisconsin, tried to insert himself into the race, and said that all of Western civilization depended on it. The Democrats won by something like 13 points, even though Trump just won Wisconsin a few months ago in the 2024 election, but by a very small margin. Still, it was a big Democratic turnout. The Democratic judge won easily. 

Now, they're going to be able to redistrict in favor of Democrats. Probably Democrats will gain a seat or two in Wisconsin for the 2026 midterms. So, there was a lot at stake. George Soros put some money in and JB Pritzker, the billionaire Democratic governor of Illinois, but Elon Musk put by far the most. 

One of the members of Congress, the congressional candidate who won in Mike Waltz's seat, but with a much smaller margin than Mike Waltz did, or Trump did, is named Randy Fine. Randy Fine will easily become the most embarrassing, pathetic, fanatical supporter of Israel. He doesn't even hide that, for him, Israel is the number one issue. Trump backed him because he obviously wants the Republicans to win. He so ironically called him America First, even though he's nothing of the sort.Here's some of what Randy Fine has said over the last year or so on October 10, 2024, about Gaza:

June 4, 2021. This is before October 7, obviously. Somebody put a picture of a baby that was killed by an Israeli tank. And the Twitter user said:

His comment:

Here is a picture of Randy Fine in his office, just getting elected, he was a member of the State Senate. 

By the way, Ron DeSantis hates Randy Fine. He said that he has an extremely alienating and repellent personality, that the reason he won by a much smaller margin wasn't because of some pro anti-Trump or pro-Democrat swing, it's because he's such a horrific candidate. So, here he is in his office with his gigantic Israeli flag. He goes to Israel constantly. Michael Tracey interviewed him for our show. We actually had him on our show for an interview with Michael Tracey on one of his roving trips and he talked about how he thinks Israel, doing everything that Israel wants, is also good for America. But here you see him, maybe there's an American flag somewhere in the distance. You see the Israeli flag, a little bit of the Florida flag, a big Yarmouk there. a big Hanukkah menorah there, but no American flag, at least not front and center. 

So that's the new member of Congress. He said, at least as horrific things, and that's just sociopathic. You can support the war in Israel, and obviously I'd make clear what I think of that, but there are people I know who support the war in Israel while also actually lamenting the loss of innocent Palestinian life. He's said before, “There’s nothing Palestinian, let the blood flow.” So that is a new member of Congress. 

To be completely honest, I think he's going to actually be a very valuable instrument for those who oppose Israel. He's so grotesque on all levels. As Ron DeSantis said, he's so alienating and unappealing, he's so flagrant about his first loyalty – usually, more subtle people are more effective communicators. He's everything but that. And I think people are going to make him the face of the pro-Israel movement for good reason. And that'll help bring transparency to what this movement is. 

A couple more quick items that I think are relevant. 

The Republican senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, is somebody who pretends to support President Trump quite a bit, when in reality, he actually despises the MAGA foreign policy on which Trump ran – not necessarily the one he's pursuing, restarting the bombing campaign of Biden in Yemen and escalating it, restarting the Biden fueled war in Gaza for Israel, threatening Iran with war. But Tom Cotton hates what the MAGA foreign policy is, as opposed to what Trump's so far doing. 

And although I certainly give Trump credit for trying, we'll see if it works to end the war in Ukraine – nobody's really tried before – but as far as the Middle East is concerned, you're not really seeing this peacemaker Trump pledge, quite the contrary. 

Here's Tom Cotton at a hearing yesterday. The subject was what to do about Iran whether to go to war with Iran, whether to bomb Iran, which Trump is threatening to do. Here's what Tom Cotton had to say about that. 

Video. Tom Cotton, C-SPAN. April 1, 2025.

By the way, for those listening to the show, when Tom Cotton snidely said, “Oh, there's this hysteria that if we bomb Iran, it's going to be another forever war or another endless war, he put that in scare quotes to mock the fact that the United States has been on a posture and a footing of endless war and forever wars, which is true. And here's what we heard in Iraq, by the way. Oh, don't worry. It's going to be an invasion. It's going to be over very quickly. 

Bill Kristol said it would be over in eight weeks, but American troops were still there 10 years later. None of what we were promised happened and it turned into an endless war, as Tom Cotton calls it, a forever war, as did the one in Afghanistan. 

So, when these people start mocking “hysteria” meaning people's concerns we are getting into another Middle East war against Israel, that's when you know that things are about to happen. Clearly, Tom Cotton, at least, and many others think that it is very likely. 

We'll see how that turns out. I'm not convinced that Trump's going to go to war with Iran. I do think he threatens war a lot to get what he wants, but if he doesn't get what we want – he told Hamas while the cease-fire was still in place, the one that he facilitated and took credit for, rightly so, he said, “If you don't release all the hostages immediately, as opposed to following the agreement that we negotiated with you, hell is going to rain down upon you” and that's exactly what the Israelis are doing now. 

There was an article from the Wall Street Journal today about how Miriam Adelson and Ben Shapiro were the ones who arranged for Trump to meet with the family members of the hostages and other hostages who were released. And they told him all these stories and enraged him and he was like, “We need to get those hostages out immediately.” And when Hamas said, “No, we're going to stick to the agreement,” that's when Trump greenlit Israel going back in and bombing far more indiscriminately still. 

Earlier this week, there's a lot of evidence that they just summarily executed 15 aid workers, ambulance drivers, including some who were bound with their hands and feet, so helpless detainees. They shot them and threw them into a pit and then covered the pit. And those bodies were found because they had disappeared. 

These are the kind of things that are happening now, obviously with Trump's consent. So, when Trump's threatening Iran, you cannot be so certain that it's only to have negotiating leverage to get a good deal for their nuclear program. We had a deal in place, of course, that Trump withdrew from and invalidated. He said it wasn't a very good deal. Of course, Trump's saying, “I prefer to have a deal, but if we don't have one, we're going to bomb Iran.” And you have to take it seriously, given what just happened in Gaza, given what's now happening in Yemen. Trump's perfectly willing to start a new Middle East war and certainly Tom Cotton thinks so and is very excited about that. 

All right, last point: there is a New York mayoral race that is happening and obviously the current incumbent Democratic Mayor, Eric Adams, is all but dead politically. In the federal court yesterday, the strategy of the Trump DOJ was to say to Eric Adams, “If you cooperate with us on deporting people in the country illegally by letting us come into New York and deport these people, we'll agree to dismiss the criminal case against you brought by the Justice Department for bribery and all kinds of money inappropriately and secretly accepted from Turkey and others” that he was indicted for. And Trump DOJ said, “If you play ball with us, we'll just drop this case. But we're not going to drop it completely, meaning with prejudice – that means we drop it and it can never be brought again.” They said, “We will drop it without prejudice, meaning we can bring it back at any time so it's like kind of a leverage that's hanging over your head. So, if you don't do what we want, you know that we can bring the case back.” 

And what the federal court did instead just yesterday was they said, “No, you cannot have it both ways.” The DOJ said it wants to dismiss this lawsuit or reject their request to do it without prejudice, meaning they could bring it back at any time. He dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning the Justice Department can never indict Adams on these issues again. But still, politically, people are very unhappy with him, not just because of the indictment, but well before that, because of the perceived mismanagement of the city and widespread corruption. 

Andrew Cuomo stepped into the breach, and he obviously is the one with the biggest name recognition. As I said before, Democrats don't care at all about sexual harassment scandals or Me Too stuff. That's just a way to demonize their enemies or to wield power. But he's ahead in the polls.

The mayoral race is just kind of getting started and there is what I find to be an interesting candidate, Zohran Mamdani. He was now in the New York Assembly, as an elected member of the New York Assembly. He's a Democrat and he comes from the more left-wing of the Democratic Party. He’s been supported by DSA, the Democratic Socialist America, but the campaign he's running is really devoid of ideology. It's very, very focused on the cost of living. 

And he's gotten so much money that he's asking for nobody to send more money. He's already reached the maximum for matching funds. There is a lot of grassroots support for him. He's very charismatic, and I think he's a very good politician. His campaign is designed to talk to people, the majority of working-class New Yorkers about the cost-of-living problems in their lives and the way to fix that. He's trying to offer very practical solutions, avoid the mistakes of Democrats, of culture war focus and all that. He's actually rising in the polls, nowhere near Andrew Cuomo yet, but there's still a lot of time left. 

He's enough of a threat that the New York Post decided to run a smear campaign on the cover of the New York Post against him and here is the title: 

So, there you see it. It says “anti-Israel lefty.” So, the first thing they can think to say about him is that he's anti-Israel and it talks about how he's a Muslim, he's 33 years old. The first question becomes, why is this even relevant to deciding the New York mayoral race? Like, is it a requirement to take any office in the United States, including the municipal office, that you love and support Israel? Is this a requirement of American patriotism, American citizenship, or being in good standing in the United States? Do you have to fully support the wars and policies of this foreign country on the other side of the world?

 I saw someone today saying, “Well, yeah, of course it's relevant to New York because there are a million Jews in New York” and I just found that very odd because that implies that Jewish Americans vote in presidential elections not based on what's best for America, but based on what's best for Israel, which is a long-standing antisemitic trope that Jews aren't really loyal, they have dual loyalty, they vote based on what’s good for Israel. 

Obviously, Andrew Cuomo is a fanatical supporter of Israel. […] And so, they'd be very happy with Andrew Cuomo, and that's why they're attacking Mandani. But I just found it so interesting that the thing they have on him is that he's, “anti-Isreal” as though that is an important qualification for this job, which, let's face it, it actually is, in terms of how a lot of voters vote. 

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!

Our guest was Jefferson Morley, who testified today in front of Congress about the significance of the newly released JFK documents, along with others who have long followed the JFK investigation, including director Oliver Stone. We'll have Morley here to talk about his testimony today. 

We'll then break down what the guardians and saviors of Democracy are doing in banishing their most popular opponents from running as opposed to trying to defeat them democratically. Marine Le Pen, Bolsonaro and Calin Georgescu are some of the examples.

The Interview: Jeff Morley

Jefferson Morley is a best-selling author and a veteran Washington journalist known for his investigative books which expose the covert history of American power. His most recent book is “Scorpion's Dance: the President, the Spymaster, and Watergate,” which explores the secret relationship between CIA director Richard Helms and President Richard Nixon. He is, as well, a leading authority, I believe one of the top two or three journalistic authorities on the JFK assassination. He has spent decades prying loose the CIA's deepest secrets and challenging the official narrative. 

He testified earlier today at Congress about what these newly declassified documents from the Trump administration add to our understanding not just of the assassination but the clear cover-up that took place as part of the investigation, as well as the potential CIA role in all of this. We're delighted he took the time to join us. 

G. Greenwald: Jeff, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us. 

Jefferson Morley: Thanks for having me, Glenn. I'm very glad to be here. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I'm glad to have you. I recommended the interview that you recently did on Breaking Points, about 30 minutes with Saagar Enjeti and Ryan Grim. I found it one of the most illuminating interviews in recent times, especially on these documents. But I want to explore some other things beyond what's in that interview as well.

You testified earlier today before the House Task Force on Declassification, which is chaired by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, the Republican of Florida. I know that you and everybody else interested in not just the JFK assassination, but the role that the CIA has played in our politics and our history, were very interested in these documents and more broadly interested in getting to the bottom of this case, whether we ever learned the truth. What was your sense, having testified before the committee, about whether that interest and excitement is shared by most members of Congress? 

Jefferson Morley: Let me talk about chairwoman Luna first because I've gotten to know her over the last couple of weeks when she launched this House Task Force on Declassification and I've been very impressed with her attitude. She's a can-do person. When I said, I said we needed to get these documents from the CIA, she said, “Give me a memo and I'll call Ratcliffe's office today.” So, she's very proactive. I think her leadership has been very strong. We had some partisan politics in the hearing today, which I think was unfortunate because it's not really a partisan issue. I mean, I'm a pretty liberal guy. That's why I wanted to be on your show, you know? And so, I'm hopeful that the task force is going to do serious work. The most encouraging sign is she says we're going to have another hearing on JFK. We're hoping to get some more firsthand witnesses to explicate the new history of JFK's assassination. 

G. Greenwald: So, I want to spend most of my time with you on the substance of these documents and the investigation, but just before I get to that, just along those same lines, I don't want to make it a partisan issue either, but there is a palpable shift in how our political spectrum thinks about the U.S. Security State, the CIA, the nefarious role they've often played. As you said, you're a liberal Democrat and it used to be foundational to American liberal and left-wing politics to distrust and view the CIA and the Security State as quite sinister, as needing reform. It was more typical that conservatives would defend them though. These are patriotic organizations, we need them, we love them. They have to operate in the dark and there's been so much change I mean it was Donald Trump who finally declassified these documents as he promised to do; it’s Chairwoman Luna, a very right-wing member of Congress who's leading the way, as you say, very proactively. 

I just want to show you a clip from today that involves Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of the Democratic Texas, who has become in a lot of ways one of the leading faces of the Democratic Party, the American liberalism, and here's what she had to say about the JFK documents and the hearing itself and the possibility of the CIA involvement. 

Video. Jasmine Crockett, C-SPAN3 Pronto. April 1, 2025.

There is more of that, but she's essentially saying, “Look, these new documents vindicated the CIA, it had no role to play in any of this. Anyone who suggests otherwise is a conspiracy theorist.” And in any event, it doesn't really even matter. There's no reason for us to know we should focus on a Signal gate or whatever. As somebody who's been aligned with the Democratic Party for a long time, do you think that's become a more common sentiment? 

Jefferson Morley: Absolutely. And it's really unfortunate, I mean, to bring up something totally unrelated about what's going on, with the current controversy. The JFK files are something that there is broad support for across the political spectrum, and there's no need to drag partisan politics into this issue. It's just not an issue. Representative Luna did a good job of leading this, in kind of reflexive – you know, Jasmine Crockett hadn't even read the documents. She didn't even listen to what I said about the false testimony of three top CIA officials, and like, facts don't register anymore, which is a problem universally. But it's especially a problem when we're actually making progress on the JFK story. President Trump's order was a breakthrough, and it's one of the few things I agree with him about, a very positive measure. We obtained, on March 18, a lot of important information and we're getting more as we proceed. 

Remember Glenn, they released 80,000 pages of documents on March 19. I might have seen a thousand pages of those. I've talked to researchers who've seen a few thousand more, but we're just at the beginning of this process of really getting our hands and our minds around these new records. And so, that's the positive thing. Luna's talking about having another hearing. I think that's a good idea to bring more JFK witnesses and educate people about what really happened. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean I thought it was bizarre, the day that it was released, everybody ran to their social media accounts or their programs to tell everybody what these documents show. We focused only on one document which was the unredacted Schlesinger memo and only to the extent that it revealed things about the CIA in general, not necessarily their role, if any, in the JFK assassination. And I want to get to that memo in a second because I do think it's of profound importance. But before I do, I think some of this is generational. I mean, I didn't live through the JFK assassination, I wasn't born yet. Obviously, Congresswoman Crockett wasn't. She was born, I believe, in the 1980s or even 1990s. So, I understand why some people might say, “Oh, this is kind of old and ancient history that we don't need to go excavating through.” What is your answer to that? Why do you think it matters so much to kind of continue with the investigation? 

Jefferson Morley: Let me explain. My readership at the JFK Facts newsletter is very diverse from MAGA, Christian nationalists on the right, libertarians, anti-imperialists and liberals on the left and we don't have a big culture war on the site. People want to talk about this. People want a real debate. And the idea that people are coming reflexively to the defense of the CIA without even acknowledging or incorporating these records… We're going to talk about the Schlesinger memo in a second. Why should people care? What we're missing right now in American politics is what President Kennedy talked about in 1963. He's talked about how we need a strategy for peace, not peace in our time, peace for all times, not a Pax Americana enforced with America as the world's policeman, but peace for everybody. And that's the vision really that died in Dallas. So, when people say, “Why does it matter now?” You don't hear that voice anymore in American politics, not from Democrats and not from Republicans, and that's what's missing, and that's why it's important to understand what died when President Kennedy died. 

We've lost something very real and I would say, the most aggressive factions in the American security establishment after President Kennedy's assassination, because there was no real accountability, there was no real investigation, that faction has had impunity ever since and that's led to a much more militarized, aggressive interventionist foreign policy, which Kennedy was trying to steer the country away from. That's what's important about the Kennedy assassination. We lost something when we lost President Kennedy. 

G. Greenwald: So, let me dive into these details now and let's start with the Schlesinger memo. For viewers who might have seen it, I think when it was released, I believe two weeks ago, we delved very deeply into what this memo is and what the newly released material demonstrates. 

For those who don't know him, Arthur Schlesinger was a very respected historian, especially among the kind of Kennedy circle, and after the Bay of Pigs debacle and the firing of Alan Dulles, who was sort of the father of the CIA, JFK was very interested in getting a hold of the CIA and asked Arthur Schlesinger to write this memo, and he wrote this long memo detailing all of the abuses and dangers of having this kind of runaway, unaccountable secret agency off on its own, making foreign policy, engineering coups away from the State Department, and also offered a lot of plans for how to rein it in – pretty serious and severe plans. 

So, I want to hear what your thoughts are on the newly released portion of that, but before you get to that, do we have evidence that the CIA was aware of the conversations taking place in the JFK White House about the need to rein in the CIA? 

Jefferson Morley: Absolutely, Dick Helms, Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, said in his memoir that this period after the Bay of Pigs was a stormy… 

G. Greenwald: Sorry. Wasn’t he the director of the CIA, not in the '60s, but later on with Nixon? 

Jefferson Morley: He was deputy director right at the time of the Bay of Pigs and later became director. At the kind of Kennedy’s assassination, he was deputy director and Helms said in his memoir “This was a stormy interregnum for the agency” where they understood that their continued existence was in the balance. Ultimately, Kennedy decided not to do the reorganization – it was just too big a left, I think, for him in terms of politics – but the Schlesinger memo shows that he was talking about it very seriously, and the key thing there was what Schlesinger called the encroachment of the CIA on the president's foreign policymaking authority – and you've talked about the Schlesing memo. You recall some of those details: 47% of State Department officers at the time of Kennedy's assassination were in fact CIA officers. So, the CIA is taking over the political reporting function of the State Department, and of course, that limited the president's ability to make foreign policy. That's what Kennedy was concerned about and that's the problem Schlesinger was trying to solve. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, in that memo, he, I think quite famously and quite pointedly and importantly, called it “a state within a state,” which is kind of ironic since now the term deep state has become this source of liberal mockery as though it's some bizarre, unhinged conspiracy theory. And you knew you had Dwight Eisenhower coming out of the '50s, serving two terms as president, warning about the military-industrial complex on his way out and then you have Arthur Schlesinger calling it a state within a state when writing to JFK about it. So, this memo has been out for a while, I think for a few years or even longer, but what we have now thanks to President Trump's declassification order is the full unredacted memo. So, are there things that we have learned that are important in the unredacted parts that we didn't previously know? 

Jefferson Morley: Yeah, I mean, there was a whole page that was redacted. So, like the statistic that I just quoted to you, 47% of State Department officers were actually CIA officers, which was redacted by the CIA for the past 60 years. The fact that the CIA had 128 people in the Paris embassy, was redacted. And when you look at it, that's not national security information, no American would be threatened or harmed by that information. 

It's only the reputation of the CIA and so what you see in these redactions -- these redactions are justified in the name of national security, right? You need to protect us from our enemies. Our enemies aren't fooled the only people that were fooled were the American people and that's why we need this full declassification because we're the only ones that are in the dark about the way the CIA is operating. 

G. Greenwald: About your argument that the reason the CIA or other parts of the government perceive JFK to be threatening, perhaps threatening enough to want to kill him, is that he was talking about this radical transformation of our foreign policy, of finding a way to get out of endless wars and become a nation of peace. There are people very knowledgeable who are also on the left, one of them is Noam Chomsky, who has said over the years that he finds that unpersuasive because – and I guess this is a very Chomsky way of looking at things – although there was a little bit of resistance here and there on the part of JFK and his administration to the military-industrial complex, the intelligence community – obviously they had an argument after the Bay of Pigs, they fired, as I said earlier, Alan Dulles – that essentially JFK was a militarist and was a Cold Warrior. He was the one who oversaw what Chomsky calls the invasion of South Vietnam by the United States and if you were a militarist or a Cold Warrior, you'd have no reason to look at JFK and find him bothersome. What do you think about that? 

Jefferson Morley: I mean none of Kennedy’s enemies on the right ever said that at the time. They said that he was a weakling if not a traitor. The idea that Kennedy was a Cuba hawk or a Vietnam hawk – no Cuba hawk or Vietnam hawk in 1963 ever said that. The problem with Chomsky’s argument is he hasn't really familiarized himself with the debates. 

CIA Director Richard Helms was trying to pressure Kennedy into a more aggressive Cuba policy and four days before the assassination, Richard Helms brought a machine gun into the Oval Office as a way of convincing President Kennedy to take a more aggressive stance. And when you read Kennedy's account of it, it's hard not to believe that he understood that he was being threatened. I mean, think about that. The CIA director or deputy CIA director is demonstrating to the president your security perimeter is not secure, right? That was four days before President Kennedy was killed. So, the idea that there weren't profound conflicts at the top of the U.S. government, I mean, I know Noam Chomsky is a smart guy, but he needs to pay attention to the historical record. There were profound conflicts between Kennedy and the national security establishment in the fall of 1963. Nobody who pays attention, especially to the new records, thinks that wasn't the case. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, and obviously Chomsky is not here to defend himself, but he's obviously talked many times about this so people interested can go to YouTube and find that. I think he has a propensity against what he calls conspiracy theories and just kind of dismissing them out of hand and nobody's perfect. 

Yeah, but let me ask you this. This is one of the things I learned from your work. I remember growing up in the '70s and '80s and my understanding of the JFK assassination was that Lee Harvey Oswald was just sort of this weird loner who had like a couple of appearances here and there in some public and political sectors, but that by and large he was kind of a nobody, sort of like what they're depicting the person who did the first assassination attempt against President Trump in Pennsylvania, like just a guy, a weirdo, not really connected. And it was only really through following your work and the work of a couple of other people that I actually learned things like, no, the CIA had a lot of interest in Oswald prior to – I thought nobody knew of him before this all happened and in fact, the CIA had a big, long, large surveillance file on him. What interest did the CIA have in Oswald prior to Oswald's alleged role in the JFK assassination? 

Jefferson Morley: They were interested, first of all, in recruiting him as a possible source or contact behind the Iron Curtain. And that was one of the key documents that emerged on March 18, a document where Angleton talked exactly about who he targeted for that type of recruiting. The second thing that they were interested in was his pro-Cuba activities. That was something that the CIA denied at the time. They pretended they didn't know anything about this. When you talk about a big surveillance file – this is what I showed to Representative Luna today – they had 198 pages on him on November 15 when President Kennedy was getting ready to go to Dallas. 

So, Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone nut in the eyes of the CIA. He was a known quantity who top CIA officials, top counterintelligence officials, knew everything about him, as President Kennedy was preparing to go to Dallas. Of course, there are suspicions, and people say, “Oh, well, that's incompetence” or “They didn't know,” or “Oswald didn't present a threat.” Wait a second, part of the reason you have a counterintelligence staff is to protect you against assassinations, and that clearly didn't happen. Angleton failed to do his job. But nobody knew anything about this. The CIA imposed a cover story, the lone gunman, and Angleton, instead of losing his job, he kept it for another decade. 

G. Greenwald: Well, I know you have to go in just a few minutes, so I want to just respect your time. I just have a couple more questions briefly. 

This is one of the things that I think that you grow up and you're kind of bombarded to believe the established narrative about everything. I mean, that's why it's the established narrative because they have control of the institutions that shape your thinking and the more you kind of look into these things, the more basis you have for skepticism, including the fact that Alan Dulles, who led the CIA, gave birth to the CIA, directed the CIA, was controlling almost everything in there until Kennedy fired him and then Kennedy fired him and he was put onto the Warren Commission where naturally as being Alan Dulles, he had immense weight on conducting the official investigation. I've always said it's kind of like putting Ben Shapiro in charge of an investigation to find out who's at fault in Gaza. You know what kind of outcome you're going to get if you put Alan Dulles on the Warren Commission. You're putting, like, a chief suspect on there. What are the best reasons we have to distrust both the process and the conclusions of the Warren Commission? 

Jefferson Morley: I mean the fact that Allen Dulles was on it, the fact that the Warren Commission was deceived about the surveillance of Oswald – they had no idea that the CIA had 198 pages of material on Oswald. The Warren Commission was told that they had only minimal information about Oswald so the Warren Commission was fed a false story about Oswald. Glenn, I'm going to have to go soon. 

G. Greenwald: Okay, I know, all right, I have one more question, but I'm going to let you go. One more question. Okay, well, I'll just ask you briefly. James Angleton, who was this senior CIA official, has been central to your work. You said today in your testimony that he was one of three senior CIA officials to have lied to the Warren Commission about the investigation, that that was sort of a tipping point for you. What did Angleton lie about, and how did he deceive the commission? 

Jefferson Morley: Well, actually what we learned last month was that Angleton lied to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, in 1978. He never had to testify to the Warren Commission. In 1978, he testified, and he was asked, “Was Oswald ever the subject of a CIA project?” and the answer was “Yes.” Angleton had personally put Oswald under mail surveillance. They were intercepting his letters to his mother from the Soviet Union. He was under mail surveillance from 1959 to 1962. When Angleton was asked by the HSCA, “Was Oswald ever part of a CIA project?” he said “No,” and what we know now is that that was a lie and that he was lying under oath about what he knew about Oswald before the assassination. So, that was the tipping point for me, because until March 18, we never knew that. 

G. Greenwald: All right, Jeff, thank you for your great work. We're going to definitely have you back on as you work your way through these documents. Really appreciate the time. I know you're busy tonight after your testimony, so we're going to let you go, but thanks once again. 

Jefferson Morley: Thanks a million for having me, Glenn. 

G. Greenwald: All right, talk to you soon. 

One of the ironies, I think, in Western politics, or throughout the democratic world over the last, let's say, decade or so, has been, that there is a group of people, a very powerful faction, you could say the kind of establishment faction that's composed of both the center-left and the center-right in most Western democracies that have engaged in all sorts of highly classically anti-democratic measures in the name of saving democracy. 

The reality of politics in the democratic world over the last decade has been that of a variety of factors. In the U.S. you can go back to the War on Terror and the lies of the Iraq War, but more recently the 2008 financial crisis, whose repercussions are expressing themselves to this very day, jeopardizing people's financial security, the policies of free trade and deindustrialization. 

And then all the deceit and crackdowns around COVID have turned huge portions of the population into vehement anti-establishment warriors. These people hate these establishments. They hate whoever they perceive as defenders of the status quo. It started to express itself in 2016 with things like the British people voting to leave the EU out of hatred and contempt for EU bureaucrats in Brussels, and then obviously followed a few months later by what was, for most people, the shocking victory of Donald Trump over the ultimate establishment maven, Hillary Clinton. And ever since then, it's been one after the next. 

Historically, when establishments feel threatened by some new event or some shift in political sentiment, their tendency, being the establishment, is not to assuage it, not to persuade it but to crush it. The establishment today, unlike, say, 400 or 500 years ago are not monarchs in name, they're not churches in name, with some sort of absolute say the way the Catholic Church had over a lot of countries. They have to pretend to be Democrats, people who believe in democracy, that's how they pitch themselves and so they have been just openly doing things like censoring their political opponents, creating an industry designed to decree truth and falsity that nobody can deviate from with this disinformation industry. 

More disturbingly, and I think more desperately, showing how desperate they really are because, in so many countries, the establishment is in deep trouble, typically because of an emerging right-wing populist movement, occasionally because of left-wing populism as well, both of which manifest as anti-establishment movements. Their solution has just been to basically bar democracy, limit democracy, prevent the most popular opponents of the establishment, typically right-wing populists, from even running on the ballot, just saying you're banished from the election – the thing we're told is what Putin does when he has fraudulent elections because his opponents can't run. These are just theatrical elections that are very stage-managed.

 That's exactly what has been happening throughout the democratic world in multiple different countries over at least the last decade. A lot of people are noting that even more now because of what happened in France. 

Here from The New York Times yesterday:

Marine Le Pen Barred From French Presidential Run After Embezzlement Ruling

The verdict effectively barred the current front-runner in the 2027 presidential election […] (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)

[…] from participating in it, an extraordinary step but one the presiding judge said was necessary because nobody is entitled to “immunity in violation of the rule of law.”

Jordan Bardella, Ms. Le Pen’s protégé and a likely presidential candidate in her absence, said on social media, “Not only has Marine Le Pen been unjustly convicted; French democracy has been executed.”

The verdict infuriated Ms. Le Pen, an anti-immigrant, nationalist politician who has already mounted three failed presidential bids. (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)

Notice I have not uttered a syllable about what I think of Marine Le Pen or her politics or anything like that because it's completely irrelevant. 

If you actually believe in democracy as the premier way to select our leaders, which I do, it should be disturbing if it has actually become a weapon to exploit the judicial system or use lawfare to defeat your political opponents, not at the ballot box, not by giving the people in the country the choice to vote for, but by prohibiting them from becoming on the ballot. If it were just one case, then you'd have to spend a lot of time debating Marine Le Pen's case. 

We're going to have somebody on this week who has been following Marine Le Pen's case closely and understands the intricacies of French law in a way that I don't, so I'm not sitting here propounding on the validity or otherwise of her conviction, just the fact that it has now become part of an obvious trend where politicians like her, especially when they become too popular, are being banned. 

[…]

In the United States, of course even if you're convicted of a crime, then it doesn't mean that you can't run. The socialist leader, Eugene Debs, ran for president as a third-party candidate, during the Wilson administration, from prison. Had the Democrats succeeded in convicting and imprisoning Trump before the election as they were desperately trying to do, that would not have resulted in his being banned from the ballot. He could have run even as a convicted felon. In fact, they did convict him of a felony charge or multiple repetitive felony charges in New York and he still was permitted to run and the American people decided. We know he was convicted, we don't trust that conviction, we think it's politically motivated and in any event, we want him to be our president. That's what democracy means. 

The Democrats tried other ways to get him banned from the ballot, as we'll get to, and they almost succeeded. That was clearly their goal. But in the United States, at least, it's left to the people to decide and that's what a lot of French politicians across the political spectrum are saying. 

Here is the most recent polling data on the French presidential election from the International Market Research Group, on March 31:

INTENTIONS TO VOTE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Two years before the next presidential election, a [I.F.O.P.] poll for the Journal du Dimanche reveals the voting intentions of the French for the next presidential election. In the most favorable scenario, the National Rally candidate would collect 37% of voting intentions, nearly 14 points more than her score in the first round in 2022.

Edouard Philippe appears to be the best-placed candidate to qualify for the second round against Marine Le Pen. His score ranges between 20 and 25%, depending on the different configurations tested. (International Market Research Group. March 31, 2025.)

So, she's not just leading in the polls, she's leading the polls by far. Not enough to avoid a runoff, she's made the runoff twice now and lost to Macron. But the question is not, “Is Marine Le Pen going to be in the second round?” She for sure will be. The question is: who can get just enough to make it with her? And unlike in the past, in France, where that party was considered toxic and off limits, where everybody would unite to prevent it from gaining any power, that's not really the case anymore. I mean, you did see that in the subsequent parliamentary elections in France that Macron called after Marine Le Pen's party won the EU parliamentary elections, and he called new elections for the parliament. So, the parliament called new elections and the left-wing coalition came in first, Macron's party came in second, and Le Pen’s party came third, but it was very closely disputed. 

So, there's the possibility that there could be a coalition to defeat her. We're likely never to find out because the French establishment is too afraid to let her run for the ballot for fear that she might win. As I said, if that were an isolated case, we could just sort of say, “Well, is Marine Le Pen guilty?” That's the French law, but it's by far not an isolated case. It has become a common scenario. 

Here the BBC, on March 26, is reporting on the case of Brazil and the ex-Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing populist who actually shocked the country, shocked Brazil when he won the presidency in 2018 over the Workers’ Party of Lula da Silva, which had dominated Brazilian politics, had occupied the presidency from 2002 when Lula first won until 2016 when his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached and her vice president took over. But he didn't even bother running again. He was widely hated. So, in 2018, that was the first election that the Workers' Party didn't win since 2002, 16 years earlier. They dominated Brazilian politics. 

Ironically, in 2018, Lula was intending to run again and he was leading in polls early on and he ended up being imprisoned, convicted and imprisoned on corruption charges and so he was not allowed to run on the ballot and that opened the path for Bolsonaro. What actually happened there was the center-right has always wanted to dominate Brazilian politics, they're the party of the Brazilian media, the big media conglomerates, kind of like a Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell type party, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney-like, classic center-right figures, even right-wing figures, but who are very pro-establishment and hate the way those figures hate Donald Trump. The center-right in Brazil despises Bolsonaro, but they thought that impeaching Dilma and then imprisoning Lula, would be an easy path to victory because they were always the party second to Lula, kind of like Marine Le Pen and Macron. They just couldn't ever beat the Workers' Party. 

So, they thought once they got rid of Lula and impeached Dilma, they had a clear path to power instead. Nobody wanted them, nobody ever liked them. So, once they got rid of Lula, instead of winning, they got Bolsonaro, who they hated more than Lula. Bolsonaro won by a sizable margin against the Workers' Party in 2018 in the runoff. And then in 2022, everyone knew that there was only one person who could beat Bolsonaro, and that was Lula, who was in prison. So, the Supreme Court of Brazil invalidated his conviction. After upholding it many times, they actually used the excuse of the reporting that I did with my colleagues there that showed prosecutors and judges had cheated. But that was just their pretext. They wouldn't have let him out, no matter what we reported, had they not wanted to. They only allowed him out because they knew that only he had a chance to beat Bolsonaro. But even with everything that happened to Bolsonaro, the entire establishment against him, COVID, ruining the Brazilian economy, shutting down the economy, all of those scandals about vaccines and masks and lockdowns and countless corruption charges, and running against what had been the most popular politician in Brazil, Lula da Silva, that election was extremely close, decided by about one point. 

All night Bolsonaro was leading, kind of at the last minute, Lula overtook him, but it was an extremely close election. Now Lula's popularity is plummeting, his presidency has unraveled, he's about to be 80 years old. Bolsonaro's not young himself. He's about four or three years younger. But the country is not happy at all with Lula, and people are very afraid of his chances to be re-elected. There's a high likelihood he's going to lose, especially if he runs against Jair Bolsonaro. Fortunately for the Brazilian establishment, Bolsonaro can't run because two years ago, he was declared ineligible, and now they're about to convict him before the Supreme Court on charges that he engineered a coup or tried to engineer a coup, which probably sounds familiar to the American ear since that was a charge against Trump as well. 

[…]

Now, let me just be clear there. He is now criminally charged with planning and plotting a violent coup once Lula won, that would reinstall Bolsonaro. 

We haven't had the trial yet. All we have are media leaks and now the police report under the control of Lula's government and Moraes. I don't find the evidence particularly persuasive, but that will be decided as it should be in a trial. Unfortunately, he's unlikely to get a fair trial, but that isn't why he's banned from running. He was already banned from running, completely independent of these allegations of a violent coup. And that's due to the fact that before the election happened in 2022, and then after he lost, he alleged that there was voting machine fraud. And for that and that alone, the Supreme Court decided he's now ineligible to run that that was an abuse of power, an attack on democracy. 

And I should also say that during that 2022 campaign, when Biden was president in Brazil, that 2022 to campaign, Biden dispatched the CIA, he dispatched Jake Sullivan, his national security advisor and other top officials to go to Brazil and interfere in that election by essentially saying that Bolsonaro's claims of voting fraud are completely invalid, threatening Brazil with punishments or consequences, warning Bolsonaro not to raise the issue of election fraud. At the same time, USAID was funding the censorship groups, the disinformation groups that were systematically censoring Bolsonaro supporters in countless ways that we've reported on many times before. 

So, his banning from the ballot, similar to the way Marine Le Pen was banned happened not because of these criminal allegations of a coup, but because of those allegations that he made of voting machine fraud. 

Here from the Brazilian outlet UOL on March 29, the headline is:

It's a 15-point lead that Bolsonaro has among the people of Brazil who should decide who they want as their president. 

Here from CNN Brazil, yes, Brazil has a CNN, is contaminated and infected with CNN, the Brazilian version, a separate poll shows this:

So even Bolsonaro's wife, who's never been elected to public office, was the first lady of the country, has a 9-point lead over Lula. But obviously, they'd much rather run against her than run against Jair Bolsonaro, who has already proven that he can become, can win a national election.

Here's why the establishment is so scared of him. They threw everything at him during his first term. And remember, I'm not commenting on my views of Bolsonaro. As I said, I did the reporting that ended up being the pretext for the Supreme Court to allow Lula out of prison to invalidate his convictions. And when I did, Bolsonaro threatened me several times, explicitly, with prison. I ended up criminally indicted for that reporting, although the Supreme Court had a press freedom ruling that required the dismissal of those charges.

 I've had a lot of acrimonious history with Bolsonaro, but just like Marine Le Pen, that has nothing to do with any of this. Again, I actually believe in democracy. I think the president should be determined by who wins. 

So, like in France, the Bolsonaro problem is solved. Who cares if he's leading in the polls? Who cares if a majority of Brazilians want him as president? Nope, banned from the ballot in the name of saving democracy. 

Obviously, everybody remembers that Trump faced four felony indictments in four different jurisdictions, two state and two federal, and that was the Democratic strategy, to imprison Trump before the election. They never were able to do that, but they tried. But beyond that, they also just wanted him banned from the ballot independently of criminal convictions by claiming that the constitutional provision banning people who led an insurrection from running for high office should apply to ban Trump, even though he had never been convicted of insurrection, actually never even charged with it. Congress hadn't declared him ineligible, but the Democrats got a four to three majority on the Colorado Supreme Court for democratic judges to say that Trump is ineligible to run again. 

And then in Romania, I think we might even have actually the most flagrant and glaring case because there, they actually had an election. The first round was won by a previously obscure right-wing populist, with the EU and the U.S. The Romanians invalidated the election: let's just have another election. They saw that that candidate was likely to win again, they were, like, “This time we're going to ban him so he can't win.” 

Here from Politico EU in November 2025, this is December 2024, I think:

Georgescu won with 22.94 percent of the vote. He was followed by liberal reformist candidate Elena Lasconi on 19.18 percent in second place, after she edged ahead of center-left Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu on 19.15 percent — a difference of just over 2,700 votes.

An early exit poll suggested that Ciolacu and Lasconi were set to qualify for the presidential runoff but Georgescu surged into the lead as vote counting continued Sunday night, heralding a result that is set to upend Romanian politics. (Politico EU. November 24, 2024.)

So, they have this populist right-wing candidate, hostile to the EU, opposed to the war in Ukraine, not wanting to adopt the European view that Europe is at war with Russia and candidates like that have won throughout the EU. Even in Slovakia, which had long been an ardent opponent of Russia because of the history of the Cold War, Robert Fico, a former prime minister, ran on a platform, in late 2023, of stopping aid to Ukraine, and he won. He was then almost killed in an assassination attempt, but he's still running the country. He miraculously survived that. So here's another right-wing populist in Europe, hostile to the EU, opposed to the war in Ukraine, that the establishment hates, who shocked the establishment because they had two candidates they were happy with when he came in first in the first round of voting. 

As a result, because they didn't get the outcome they wanted, here's what happened from Politico EU, December 6, 2024:

Now, look at what they did there. They basically concocted their own Russiagate. They said, “Yes, this candidate that we hate won the election fair and square, came in first. But there were some ads on TikTok that helped him that we think came from Russia. So, our election is invalid, the Russians interfered.” Just like they tried to do in 2016, like, “Hey, we found some Facebook pages and some Twitter bots that seem like they came from Russia” and that makes Trump an illegitimate president. That's the theory that they used. 

Leaving aside the fact that the so-called interference by Russia – quite small in the context of millions of people going to vote – does anyone believe that the U.S. and the EU don't interfere at least as much in these elections to ensure the outcome that they want? You think it's only Russia interfering in the Romanian election and not the EU and the U.S. despite how strategically important Romania is to them, despite the fact that the EU and the U.S. took the position that the election should be nullified, that that candidate should be banned. EU and the U.S. have their fingerprints all over these countries, manipulating and funding opposition groups and demanding certain outcomes. 

And then Russia puts some TikTok videos, supposedly, in support of the candidate they want to win and the whole election has to get validated. “We didn't get the candidate that we wanted. In the name of democracy, we have to cancel that election because the candidate we hate won.” 

[…]

The view of the guardians of democracy, the safeguards of democracy, the people fighting anti-democratic forces is that you can have all the elections you want, just keep voting as long as the candidates most likely to win that they fear and hate most are barred from the ballot so that you cannot vote for them. That's what the democratic world now means, that’s what democracy in Europe, the United States and parts of South America, that's what it means. 

And that is to say nothing of the censorship regime that they impose to accomplish it. EU officials are also very upfront about the fact that they need this censorship regime, under these laws, they passed the Digital Services Act, in the EU, the Online Safety Act, in the U.K. and various laws in Canada and Brazil. They claim they need those because with elections imminent, they have to prevent the spread of disinformation, meaning they have to censor views that they are most afraid of, that they think will help sink them in the election. 

These center-left, center-right, neoliberal establishment orders are justifiably hated by their populations – hated, despised. Even when, on a rare occasion, one of them wins, it's a total fluke, like what happened in the U.K. where the Labor Party under Sir Keir Starmer won. They won with a small percentage of the vote, 34%. It was largely a backlash against the corrupt leadership of the Conservative Party, of the Tories under Boris Johnson and people like that. And they were never popular, this center-left party. As soon as they win, Kier Starmer is hated across Britain. 

So even when they win, it's only a very kind of fluke election. In general, they're so despised, even in the U.K. where they won they're despised, but usually they're so despised now, they know they're despised and in a free and fair election, they cannot win. They cannot win with free speech permitted. And they're cracking down on all of the defining core ingredients of what democracy means and telling you in the most Orwellian way possible that they're doing it because they're the ones who have to save democracy, by which they mean they have to stay in power at all costs.