Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Writing • Culture
The Pro-Israel Right's "Israel Exception" – From Free Speech to "America First" – is Finally Dragged Into the Light
Tucker Carlson's new scathing denunciation of Ben Shapiro and allies on Israel reveals long-hidden rifts.
January 07, 2024
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(From l. to r): Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro

The Trump-era American Right has carried within it largely hidden but quite massive internal conflicts that have finally exploded into public view. It was long past time for these unsustainable – and glaringly self-negating – doctrinal inconsistencies to be fully aired and confronted. 

Exactly that is finally happening in the wake of the Biden administration's steadfast, unlimited financing and arming of Israel's war in Gaza, including Biden's request for an additional $14 billion for Israel's war, on top of the billions Israel automatically gets each year from the U.S. While Biden officials periodically leak statements of "concern" about the number of civilians Israel is killing in Gaza, largely to assuage their increasingly angry voting base, they have steadfastly refused to even consider the use of American leverage and aid to put any limits on Israeli actions. 

Biden, as top Israeli officials acknowledge, has spent his entire career as one of Israel's most devoted and steadfast supporters. His reverent speeches defending Israel over the decades make Bill Kristol sound restrained by comparison. Over many decades, Biden is the largest recipient of donations from the pro-Israel lobby, and for good reason. Few have been as steadfastly supportive of that foreign country. And ever since the October 7 attack on Israel, Biden has gone to extreme lengths to protect and support Israel, even bypassing the requirement of Congressional approval to secretly send Israel all the weapons it requests and is now using to obliterate civilian life in Gaza.

Even a Monday article in The New York Times designed to depict Biden officials as deeply pained over Israel's destruction of Gaza acknowledges that "no one inside [the White House] is really pressing for a dramatic policy shift like suspending weapons supplies to Israel — if for no other reason than they understand the president is not willing to do so."

The vast majority of Congressional Republicans support Biden's policy of arming and funding Israel, just as the vast majority of them supported Biden's policy of arming and funding Ukraine's war. But from the start of the war in Ukraine, there was a non-trivial sector of Republicans -- composed largely of the more populist and anti-intervention wing -- who opposed Biden's war policy and voted NO on American funding of Ukraine's war.

While only a handful of Congressional Republicans have applied the same rationale to Biden's financing of Israel's war, numerous influential conservative voices are now denouncing that war policy -- and the broader U.S. financing and arming of Israel generally -- by invoking the same non-interventionist and "America First" principles that led them to oppose similar American funding of Ukraine's war. 

Haaretz, Oct. 20, 2023

And many influential conservatives are now particularly scathing of the ongoing attempt to erode free speech rights in the U.S., and to impose various speech restrictions on American campuses and elsewhere, in the name of protecting Israel from criticisms and activism opposed to its actions. That is because the central principles embraced by the populist Right in the Trump era are squarely and irreconcilably at odds with the very consequential policies demanded by the Biden administration and their pro-Israel Republican allies.

This long overdue debate has been provoked by the refusal of many influential American conservative figures – former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Daily Wire host Candace Owens, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), and numerous MAGA influencers – to accept or endorse a long-standing, gigantic exception to key conservative principles that one may accurately call "the Israel Exception." For years, "the Israel Exception" has signified the demand of pro-Israel conservatives to abandon multiple ostensible defining political values in order to protect and finance Israel, and to impose repressive censorship and cancellations rules at home designed to punish or silence critics of this foreign country.


 

Long-standing lurking contradictions on Israel

In the abstract, none of this is actually new. It has been going on for years prior to October 7. I have written and spoken over many years about this Israel Exception in American right-wing politics. In December, 2022, we presented a SYSTEM UPDATE episode entitled "How Many Different Countries Should the US Now Be Fixing, Changing, and Interfering In?" Exploring the anti-intervention ethos and anti-war rhetoric that has become dominant in the Trump-era conservative movement, that show was designed to press the question – in light of pervasive right-wing animus to them – of how many different countries or entities the U.S. should view as an enemy worth fighting a war against. 

In January of last year, we produced a separate episode entitled "The Right's Identity Politics: Exploiting Anti-Semitism to Suppress Debate and Defame Political Opponents." That program examined the long bipartisan history of suppressing speech in the U.S. in the name of protecting Israel.

At the same time that many on the Right profess that the U.S. must stop fighting and financing so many foreign wars and that neoconservatism is a toxic worldview, the list of entrenched foreign enemies maintained by many conservatives is as long as, and is often similar to, those of classic warmongers and neocons such as Bill Kristol, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Nikki Haley, Sen. Marco Rubio (S-FL), and Liz Cheney. That Enemies List features, at the very least, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Qatar, Hamas, Hezbollah, Muslims in general and all enemies of Israel in particular. And, of course, establishment Republicans also regard Russia as an enemy in the same way that establishment Democrats do, which is why the U.S. has spent more than $100 billion to fuel a proxy war against it in Ukraine, with Washington poised to send $60 billion more to Kiev.

That is a long list of powerful enemies and a long list of potential wars. For many conservatives, anti-war and anti-intervention slogans seem appealing in the abstract. Yet the eagerness to view so many other countries and groups of people not merely as competitors of the U.S. but as threats and enemies to the U.S. ensures that each one of Washington's new proposed wars -- or proposed new proxy wars for the U.S. to fund -- will instinctively trigger ample right-wing support despite the rhetorical embrace of anti-intervention principles.  

One of the defining historic attributes of the Trump presidency -- one the corporate media almost never acknowledges -- is that Trump was the first American President in decades not to involve the U.S. in a new war. He bombed and killed many people as part of the war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq that he inherited from the Obama administration, a war he vowed in 2016 to aggressively escalate and win. And he most definitely employed some of the nation's worst neocons and war hawks, including John Bolton, Nikki Haley and, most destructively of all, Mike Pompeo, whom he put in charge of the CIA and then the State Department. And his administration often ended up implementing policies that misaligned with his peace-with-Russia rhetoric, such as sending lethal arms to Ukraine after Obama (defying intense bipartisan pressure) largely refused to do so.  

But the fact remains that Trump ran in 2016 on a vow to subvert and uproot decades-old bipartisan warmongering and interventionist foreign policy, including his distaste for NATO, the financing of other countries' wars, and both proxy wars and regime-change wars. Trump's 2016 attack on bipartisan DC foreign policy orthodoxy -- combined with Hillary Clinton's well-earned status as one of Washington's most stalwart champions of those wars and other forms of aggression and foreign interference -- was one major reason that the smarter neocons and the U.S. Security State recognized early on that Trump was such a grave threat to their agenda (indeed, many neocons -- including Victoria Nuland's husband, Robert Kagan, were maneuvering to support Hillary even before Trump emerged as a candidate). That is a major reason why, even before Trump was inaugurated, they did everything possible to sabotage him and have never stopped.

Early in 2016, Trump's anti-intervention and "America First" instincts led him to denounce what had become the American obsession with prioritizing Israel and mindlessly giving it everything it wants. In an MSNBC-hosted town hall in February of that year, Trump vowed to be what he called a "neutral guy" when it came to the Israel/Palestinian conflict, emphasizing the urgency for American national security of forging a two-state peace deal, something he said would be impossible to do if the U.S. continues to be perceived as being too much on Israel's side. 

CNN, February 19, 2016
CNN, Feb. 19, 2016

Trump's pledge of "neutrality" regarding Israel predictably created a major firestorm. Unquestioning support for Israel has long been a virtual religion in bipartisan Washington. Trump was attacked from every corner: Israel-obsessed neocons, Republican war hawks, and establishment Democrats.

Seeing the political danger from this issue -- Hillary strongly implied he was anti-Semitic and insufficiently loyal to Israel -- Trump quickly snapped into line during the 2016 campaign, giving one of the most pro-Israel speeches to AIPAC. Then, as President, Trump anointed his fanatical pro-Israel son-in-law Jared Kushner to run his Middle East policy, whereby Trump (with the support of senior Democrats including Chuck Schumer) ordered the U.S. Embassy moved to Jeruslam, once an idea confined to the radical pro-Israel fringes. But that 2016 episode exposed an obvious, politically uncomfortable tension between the America First foreign policy principles Trump was championing, and the bipartisan policy of prioritizing Israel's needs.

Trump did not, of course, invent these anti-interventionist sentiments within the American Right. But he gave voice to them, and became the most charismatic and effective political figure in decades to advocate them. Figures like Texas Congressman Ron Paul and, before him, senior Nixon, Ford and Reagan official Pat Buchanan, both attracted ample support as anti-establishment GOP presidential candidates by urging a more anti-interventionist foreign policy, principles which each of them explicitly argued cannot coherently accommodate a special exception for U.S. devotion to the Israeli government. 

(Both of them, needless to say, were branded as anti-Semites). In the recent past, the most significant presidential attempts to impose limits on U.S. support for Israel came from Republican, not Democratic, presidents. In the early 1980s, President Reagan directly threatened Israel with a cessation of American aid if it did not stop various bombing and invasion operations against its neighbors in Syria and Lebanon, acts that Reagan regarded as not only reckless but as creating danger for American troops in the region.

Lou Cannon's 2014 book on Reagan recounts how the American President called then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin -- formerly a leader of the Israeli terrorist group Irgun -- and told him that the Israeli bombing of Lebanon was a "holocaust" that must end. Begin, scared of losing American aid, immediately complied.

When a U.S. Marine base in Lebanon was attacked by suicide bombers in 1983, killing 241 American servicemembers, Reagan refused to join in on attacks against Iran and others, and instead withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon, reasoning that American involvement there -- originally designed in part to assist Israel -- was contrary to American interests.

The last significant defiance of America's Israel supporters came under the Bush 41 administration. In 1991 and 1992, President George H.W. Bush -- alongside his realist advisors James Baker (who was Reagan's Chief of Staff and Treasury Secretary) and Brent Scowcroft -- provoked a serious political controversy by threatening Israel that the U.S. would cut off $10 billion in American loan guarantees if Israel did not halt settlement expansions in the West Bank.

Bush, Baker and Scowcroft -- needless to say -- were widely vilified by the Nikki Haleys and Ben Shapiros of that time as being "anti-Semitic." And, exactly as happens now, those fanatical pro-Israel smear artists were joined in that vilification ritual by leading Democrats. Leading the attempts to smear Baker in particular as an anti-Jewish bigot was the always-opportunistic Bill Clinton. Clinton was preparing to run for president against Bush in 1992, and Clinton knew – as Richard Nixon pointed out very explicitly in a post-presidential interview – that America's Israel supporters do not tolerate any limits on American aid to Israel, no matter how much such limits are in America's interests. 

The Washington Post, Feb. 25, 1992 (l.); April 2, 1992 (r.)

The Bush 41 administration argument was clear: namely, Israel is harming American national security by sabotaging a two-state solution with settlement expansions, which the U.S. had long opposed and still does. Why, Bush officials asked, should the U.S. should fund a foreign country as it engages in policies that directly engagers Americans: namely, subjecting American troops and other regional interests to attack due to anger over U.S-enabled denial of Palestinian statehood?

The reputational attacks on these Bush officials arguing this were severe. And Bush 41 was therefore the last American president to attempt to impose any real limits on U.S. funding and protection of Israel (Obama's last-minute abstention on a UN Security Council resolution to declare Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal was more symbolic than substantive). This very acrimonious 1991 exchange between then-Secretary of State Baker and one of the most pro-Israel House members, the Florida Democrat Rep. Larry Smith, should seem very familiar to anyone paying attention now. The dynamic has never changed. Just look at the unique passion and emotion that this foreign country invokes among its American supporters:

The Israelis are very well-aware that American presidents are politically barred from placing any limits on their actions, even when the U.S. is funding Israel's various wars and its military. In 2001, Netanyahu was caught on video mocking the notion that American leaders could impede Israel's attacks on Palestinians, boasting of the ease with which he could marshall American public support in Israel's favor, against any presidential attempts to stand up to Israel.

Just this week, several of Israel's most extremist ministers explicitly said that Israel's goal in its current war was to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. After the Biden White House announced that it opposes such an objective, Israel's Minister of Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, mocked the U.S.'s attempt to impose limits on his country, saying: "we are not another star on the American flag."

This notion that Israel is not the 51st American state is one that is used by many Americans to oppose U.S. financing of Israel (just as it was used to oppose U.S. financing of Ukraine's war). Minister Ben-Gvir's decree would be a more convincing proclamation of Israeli sovereignty if not for the fact that this same Israeli government aggressively pressures the U.S. to pay of its miliary and for its wars. But this mentality -- the U.S. will pay for our wars and then has no right to object that our actions harm American interests -- underscores how bizarre it is that many (not all, but many) of the same people who parade under the banner of "America First" not only accept these Israeli commands but also eagerly pay for them. 


 

Right-wing contradictions on Israel finally erupt

Despite the successful smearing of Bush 41 officials as anti-Jewish bigots, these glaring conflicts between stated right-wing ideological beliefs and America's unlimited and unconditional support for Israel have never disappeared. And that is why they have exploded within right-wing circles over the past twelve weeks.  

What forced these contradictions into the light was the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and especially the subsequent decision by the Biden Administration and bipartisan Washington to immediately treat Israel's war in Gaza the same way it has been treating Ukraine's war with Russia: namely, by paying for Israel's war, arming it, and alienating much of the world whose support the U.S. needs in its commercial competition with China: massive costs Washington eagerly incurred all in order to "stand with Israel."

When Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) was elected Speaker of the House in October, he followed long-standing tradition by ascending to the House podium in order to unveil to Americans the the top priorities that his Speakership would pursue. After first decreeing that "the greatest threat to our national security is our nation's debt," he then announced that the very first bill the new Speaker intended to bring to the floor was not one to address the many problems of American citizens or to address that national debt. Instead, he said beaming with pride, the first bill would be one "in support of our dear friend Israel." 

As a result of all of this, numerous influential conservatives have begun quite vocally objecting to this Israel Exception championed by many Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits. It provoked Daily Wire hosts Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro to trade acrimonious criticisms of each other in public. Congressman Massie appeared on our show last month to reveal the large spending now being done by AIPAC to recruit a Kentucky GOP primary challenger against him in order to remove him from Congress for opposing Biden's insistence that the U.S. fund Israel's war.

Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy also told us that he opposes Biden's request for $14 billion in additional funds to pay for Israel's war, and separately warned conservatives in a Wall Street Journal op-ed to stop embracing censorship and cancel culture against Israel's critics in the U.S. Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential media figure among American conservatives, has repeatedly noted, and objected to, many of these glaring contradictions on Israel. 

But a particularly inflammatory interview given last Friday by Carlson to "Breaking Points" host Saagar Enjeti has now really ignited the intra-right debate. Among other things, the former Fox News host railed against the intense, singular and highly emotional fixation on this foreign country by Ben Shapiro and his fanatically pro-Israel allies. Carlson also condemned the complete abandonment of large parts of the American right's claimed belief in free speech since October 7 in favor of the suppression of Israel criticisms and the punishment of Israel critics in almost every sector of American life, including on college campuses. 

Carlson's argument did not rest, as some pro-Israel extremists tried to imply, on the mere fact that Shapiro sometimes focuses on and speaks about Israel. Instead, Carlson's grievance is that Shapiro and many others demand that Americans bear the costs of Israel's military and its wars, even though millions of Israelis live better than millions of Americans. Here is Carlson in his own words:

Those comments – needless to say – instantly and very predictably provoked accusations of "bigotry" and anti-Semitism against Carlson from pro-Israel activists and various assorted neocons. The Patron Saint of Anti-Semitism Accusations, the ADL, has long demanded Carlson's firing from Fox News by accusing him of bigotry. And the ADL has long attempted to impose restrictions on campus speech in the name of various liberal causes but also in the name of protecting Israel. As has happened often since October 7, many conservatives now find themselves in alignment with the pro-censorship ADL.

A long-time complaint of conservatives against the American liberal-left is that they resort to bigotry accusations against their opponents in order to destroy reputations and stifle debates. That has always been an ironic grievance given that many pro-Israel conservatives, as their first tactic, hurl racism and biogtry accusations against their opponents more casually and aggressively than any purple-haired Social Justice Warrior at Oberlin that they claim to loathe.

Just as everyone knows they will be branded by liberals as a racist or Nazi for opposing, say, permissive immigration policies or affirmative action, everyone knows they will be branded by pro-Israel conservatives and various neocons as a bigot, Nazi and anti-Semite for criticizing the actions of the Israeli government or questioning U.S. financing of their wars. These two factions have far more in common, at least on a tactic level, than either likes to admit.  

Bigotry accusations -- specifically anti-Semitism -- are and always have been the central tactic of America's most devoted Israel supporters. And there are few areas where this has worked more effectively than deterring, or sometimes even barring, American citizens from questioning why the burden falls on them to pay for Israel's wars and its military, and why the U.S. constantly sacrifices so much for this one single foreign country.


 

Imposing censorship and other speech restrictions in the U.S. to protect Israel

Beyond those foreign policy tensions lurking within the American Right, we have also often reported on the numerous censorship campaigns aimed at Israel critics in the West. These Israel-protecting censorship campaigns in the U.S. are, amazingly, often supported by some of the same right-wing or at least "anti-woke" figures who branded their lucrative media image around a supposed passion for free speech and free debate. 

Indeed, the causes of political censorship and restrictions on campus speech have had no better moment than the last ten weeks in the U.S. Suffice to say, when it comes to domestic conceptions of free speech, language policing, victimhood narratives, "cancel culture" crusades, and mass firing of critics, October 7 has become the George Floyd moment of the pro-Israel wing of American conservatives. 

The censorship and cancellation of Israel critics in the U.S. began almost immediately after October 7 and has shown no signs of relenting. Governor DeSantis actually ordered the banning of a pro-Palestinian student group from the University of Florida system: a move that the free speech group FIRE, long credible with conservatives, denounced as a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, since the crime of "material support for terrorism" requires more than mere speech. Major college administrators followed in DeSantis' path, with Columbia University, Rutgers and others simply banning or suspending a group of Jewish students who are pro-Palestinian, along with the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine.

In this week's interview with Enjeti, both he and Carlson once again expressed indignation at how readily and eagerly parts of the American Right are to sacrifice free speech for Americans, and impose classic censorship and cancellations tactics, in the name of punishing and silencing Israel's critics:

 

To illustrate how valuable Western censorship advocates see Israel as being for their cause: the EU just initiated its first ever formal investigation under its new online censorship law, the Digital Services Act, against Elon Musk's X. The primary charge is that X failed to censor enough anti-Israel or "pro-Hamas" content.

Some on the Right have tried to justify this speech suppression by falsely depicting it as some sort of new tactic designed to finally force the pro-censorship left to live under their own censorship rules. But that ignores the fact that — long before October 7 – Israel critics have been among the most frequent targets of American censorship and "cancellation" campaigns.

For years, I have reported on speech-abridging laws -- that came largely from red states, along with Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo -- which banned American citizens from supporting a boycott of Israel as a condition to receiving contracts with the state. That law is such a full-frontal assault on the First Amendment's free speech guarantee that federal courts quickly and emphatically struck them down. To illustrate how twisted these laws are: an American citizen is free to boycott any other nation on the planet, or even to boycott other American states. The sole entity protected is Israel (indeed, Gov. Cuomo himself ordered a boycott of North Carolina and Indiana as punishment for trans/bathroom bills they enacted, while then barring anyone from boycotting this one foreign country).

As just one illustrative example of the extreme contradictions for free speech rights which this Israel devotion creates: Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) -- within one twenty-four-hour period in 2021 -- condemned the Biden administration for supporting censorship of political speech, but then turned around and demanded that Ben & Jerry's ice cream be banned from sale in Oklahoma due to its decision to no longer allow its product to be sold in the occupied West Bank. Censorship of American speech is apparently horrific to Sen. Landford, and to so many of his fellow conservatives, unless it is designed to protect Israel.

Pro-Israel censorship in the U.S. has been raging for years. On October 6 of this year – just one day before the Hamas attack in Israel – I tweeted this in response to a report that Israel supporters were angry at the University of Pennsylvania's President, the now-ousted Liz Magill, over her refusal to cancel a literary event featuring Palestinian writers: 

The Israel-protecting censorship craze – both before October 7 and especially after – has not been disguised. In September -- before the Hamas attack -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed Elon Musk that Musk's professed belief in free speech absolutism must, when it comes to Israel, be "balanced" with the need to stop "hate speech": the most common left-liberal justification for censorship. In other words, the Israeli leader was demanding that the speech rights of American citizens be narrowed to shield this foreign country that he leads.

In 2019, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis championed and then signed into law a bill to heighten punishments for so-called "hate crimes." The entire concept of "hate crimes" was one long opposed in principle by many conservatives. who argue that committing violence is already a crime, and enhanced punishments necessarily for "hatred" require the monitoring by the state of speech and belief, i.e., they punish "thought crimes."

DeSantis emphasized that the primary goal of this new state law was to target anti-Semitism. But he did not sign the bill in Tallahassee: Florida's capital. instead, he signed the law governing the rights of American citizens in Israel, after a meeting with Netanyahu. Representing the dominant political dynamic, the ADL "applauded" Gov. DeSantis for both the bill and where he chose to sign it.

Since October 7, there has been no single individual more adored and cheered among pro-Israel Americans than Bill Ackman. Much of the pro-Israel Right cheered as the liberal American billionaire and hedge fund manager encouraged "no-hire" blacklists of American college students who criticized or blamed Israel for the conflict (not who praised Hamas). Pro-Israel groups then paid for trucks to drive around their campuses with their names and faces on them, while speakers blared accusations of bigotry. In November, we interviewed two Harvard undergraduate students who explained what was done to them for the crime of signing a statement blaming Israel for the larger conflict with the Palestinians: treatment far worse and more harassing than the vast majority of American Jewish Ivy League students have allegedly been "endangered" for their support of Israel.

Ordinarily Ackman, a mega-donor to Democratic Party candidates, would be the embodiment of everything the American Right claims to hate: a financier who enriched himself by betting on the collapse of the U.S. economy and hollowing out American companies, and who advocated COVID maximalism including shutting down the economy for a full month while enormously profiting from the failure of the U.S. economy.

Yet just as criticism of Israel overrides all virtues in the eyes of America's pro-Israel extremists, support for Israel cleanses all sins: that is what it means to say that Israel is the overarching priority for so many. And thus has Ackman received adulation from many conservatives as he leads the effort to cleanse American universities of Israel criticisms or pro-Palestinian activism.

Ackman's most significant coup so far was leading the effort to force the ouster of Penn's President Liz Magill and Harvard's President Claudine Gay; he now is working to remove MIT President's Sally Kornbluth. As we documented on Tuesday's show, what each of them has in common is not plagiarism or any other ethical transgression; the crime is that they defended excessively broad conceptions of free speech by correctly insisting that one must assess the "context" to know if speech critical of Israel crosses over into "advocacy of genocide." 

In October, several Western European countries banned pro-Palestinian marches while still permitting pro-Israel marches: in other words, they outlawed protests against EU government policy toward Israel while allowing protests that supported government policy. As just one example illustrating the instant abandonment of professed principles in the name of Israel, Dave Rubin – who has become a very wealthy man by self-branding as a defender of free discourse and the right of dissent – did not just cheer this censorship of anti-war and pro-Palestinian protests, but heralded such censorship as the possible salvation of the West:

Websites and social media pages popular among pro-Israel conservatives hunted down the names of previously obscure American critics of Israel, and worked tirelessly – and often successfully – to pressure their employers into firing them. After Republican Congress members spent years denouncing the "politicization of the FBI" and "weaponization of the Security State," pro-Israel members of Congress such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) demanded that the DOJ "investigate" American student groups critical of Israel, labelling them "pro-Hamas" to justify these domestic witch hunts.

Pro-Israel conservatives have, again and again, embraced the defining pro-censorship theories of the American liberal-left to justify their silencing of Israel critics. One Republican member of Congress, Nick LaLota (R-NY) – a lawyer! – said last week, in order to justify the banning of harsh Israel criticism, that the First Amendment does not protect "hate speech," something he was forced to delete after he was told that this is the opposite of what the Constitution provides.

From the start, this has been the tactic of pro-censorship conservatives, and it is a mirror image of the prinicpal theories of pro-censorship liberals. They first take the pro-Palestinian views they wish to banish or punish, then define them as "racism" or "hate speech." Or they insist that long-standing political slogans – such as "Free Palestine" or "intifada" or "from the river to the sea" – have a secret meaning: kill all Jews everywhere. This is identical to the way liberals insist that right-wing speech on immigration, or affirmative action, or trans issues should be banned because such speech carries a secret, implicit message: commit genocide against Latinos, or black Americans, or trans people.

One can endlessly debate whether these phrases are actually designed to incite violence against Israelis or even Jews. Or one can point out that the defining document of Netanyahu's Israeli Likud Party contains the same phrase – "from the river to the sea" – to define what they mean by Greater Israel, even though nobody argues that Likud politicians should be silenced on this ground.  

Those debates can and should be permitted. And that is the point. In America, people are entitled to free speech, to express their political views and opinions without limits: even about Israel. There is no Israel Exception to the First Amendment. Even if pro-Palestinian activists were calling for the elimination of Israel not through legal or political means – as they insist – but rather through the use of violence, that is still clearly protected free speech. 

That advocacy of violence is protected speech in the U.S., and that there is no constitutional exception for Israel, should be too obivous to require discussion. Lindsey Graham cannot be prosecuted for urging that Iran be wiped off the map, nor can that view be banned at American universities. Nikki Haley cannot be prosecuted for screeching "finish them!" at Netanyahu as Israel makes Gaza uninhabitable in order to ethnically cleanse that land of Arabs, a policy many Israeli officials explicitly advocate, nor can that view be banned at American colleges. American supporters of Israel cannot be prosecuted for demanding that Gaza be "flattened" or "turned into a parking lot" or for chanting "kill them all" about Arabs. And pro-Palestinian advocates, which often includes Jewish students, cannot be prosecuted or have their views banned from American colleges because some fanatical Israel supporters decide that their criticisms of or hostility toward some foreign country goes too far or seems driven by hatred.

These principles are ironclad and sacrosanct. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment even protects advocacy of violence. And beyond state power, the American Right has spent years denouncing attempts to condition employment or campus speech rights on adherence to political orthodoxy, denouncing such attempts as "cancel culture."

Yet in the wake of October 7, many American media and political figures have lost their jobs for the crime of signing pro-Palestinian petitions or even, in one case, re-tweeting an Onion article mocking indifference to the suffering of Palestinian civilians. We devoted an entire show last month to examining what those Americans who lost their jobs after October 7 actually said and did; contrary to those justifying their "cancellation," none defended Hamas' attack on October 7. Instead, they simply criticized Israel and/or urged more protection of Palestinian civilians through measures such as a cease-fire.

This proclivity to hurl accusations of bigotry in lieu of substantive debate is the primary means of attempting to vilify Israel critics. Yet it is exactly this tactic, when used by the American liberal-left, that has been the primary grievance of the "anti-woke" sector of media, as illustrated by this emphatically argued 2019 essay by Bari Weiss in the neocon journal Commentary which, in its title, urged: "Say No to the Woke Revolution!" 

Throughout her manifesto, Weiss lamented that the left has given up on the virtues of debate and rational discourse, replacing it with a relentless stream of bigotry accusations, intolerance for opposing views, the primacy of identity as a measure of worth, and equating words and slogans with actual violence in order to justify banning them. She wrote:

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming….

 

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.

 

In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good.

 

In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.

While all of that perfectly describes the worst of the liberal-left's post-George-Floyd behavior, it describes with equal vigor and accuracy the conduct of America's most fanatical Israel supporters in the wake of October 7 (and before).

Anti-woke conservatives – who spent years mocking claims of college students that they felt unsafe: oh, do you poor fragile snowflakes need a therapy dog and a security blanket because you feel threatened by views you have to hear? – finally found a minority group whose members they insist are so unsafe they need a wide array of special protections, including censorship, to shield them from trauma. Many Israeli and Jewish American professors who work at East Coast elite colleges repeatedly insisted that the narrative of Jewish victimhood on college campuses was being wildly exaggerated and melodramatized with the same goal as left-wing activists have when they do the same for other minority groups: to justify suppression of dissent. 

But no matter: that roving bands of violent Muslims hordes and their Jewish leftist allies are roaming American college campuses chanting "gas the Jews" or "murder all Jews" became, despite being a total fabrication, unchallengeable Gospel. Republican and Democratic members of Congress joined together – as they always do when the topic is Israel – to parade Jewish Ivy League students before Congress to amplify and treat with the greatest sensitivity their tales of how unsafe they feel: not because anyone attacked them physically, but because they are forced to see pro-Palestinian student protests and hear political chants denouncing Israel's war in Gaza and its occupation of the West Bank.

But that, too, is nothing new. In 2014, after the University of Illinois offered a tenured position to Professor Steve Salatia, Jewish student groups and major donors demanded that offer be withdrawn after they found tweets in which Salatia had harshly condemned Israel's 2014 bombing of Gaza. As The New York Times reported: "Noah Feingold, a member of a pro-Israel student group, told The Forward" that their demands were justified on this ground: "It’s about feeling safe on campus." The university ended up paying Salatia close to $1 million to settle a lawsuit, but at least they successfully purged the college of Israel critics and prevented students from feeling "unsafe." 

When it comes to Israel: words are indeed violence, provided the words cross some arbitrary line of what is deemed permissible criticisms. As free speech advocates have been telling the left for years, actual violence is already illegal. The only way to justify the criminalization or suppression of ideas is to deceitfully equate those ideas with violence. And few things are more dangerous than conflating political ideas, slogans and chants with actual violence. 

While many on the pro-Israel right have also been adept at doling out this inspiring lecture on the need for free expression, many have been struggling to live under it, if they even try at all. And while many of them insist that they loathe the tactic of hurling racism and bigotry accusations to destroy the reputation of their opponents and shut down the possibility of debate and dissent, few are more practiced and skilled purveyors of this tactic than the pro-Israel sector of the American right.


 

Massive costs of Israel's full-scale dependency on U.S. largesse

That Israel is treated by the U.S. not as a foreign country but as effectively the 51st American state is nothing new. Israel, for decades, has received more American foreign aid than any other country by far. One of the last acts of President Obama before leaving office in 2016, with Vice President Biden in tow, was to agree to a record-breaking ten-year deal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that, in the words of The New York Times, "provided an average of $3.8 billion a year over the next decade to Israel," which was "already the largest recipient of American aid." But for both Israel and its legion of vociferous U.S. supporters, even that is not enough. 

When it comes to most American supporters of Israel, nothing is enough. Whenever Israel decides to bomb Gaza, as it has done countless times in the last twenty years, the U.S. supports those wars and pays billions more for them, too. When Israel bombs its neighbors, then the U.S. Government, as it did under President Obama and is again doing now, furnishes those bombs in real-time from its own stockpiles. As a result, images of American-furnished weapons landing in Gaza pervade the region, fueling not only anti-Israel anger but also anti-American hatred. And one of Biden’s first acts after his October 18 pilgrimage to Tel Aviv was to request an additional $14 billion in American taxpayer money

A handful of prominent Israel supporters have urged that American aid to Israel end, on the ground that the aid restrains Israel from acting even more aggressively against its regional enemies. But the reality is that Israeli officials bargain hard to get this aid, and any American president who refused would be destroyed. And, as Biden is now showing, the billions given to Israel every year are virtually never used as leverage by the U.S. to demand anything.

Efforts to compare American aid to Israel with other countries are laughable. A November analysis by Axios revealed that "the U.S. is by far the biggest supplier of military aid to Israel, contributing around $130 billion since its founding." While much of that is now required to be used to buy weapons from U.S. arms dealers, "Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign military financing, which has represented around 15% of the country's defense budget in recent years." U.S. aid to the Palestinians, by contrast, totaled $150 million in 2022: or 25 times less than what Israel receives at a minimum each year.

All of this happens while many Israelis enjoy a higher standard of living, and greater health and educational benefits, than millions of Americans. Israel touts a universal health care system, along with highly subsidized and far cheaper college for Israelis than American citizens have. The life expectancy of an Israeli is at least five years higher than that of the average American.

Beyond using American resources to pay for Israel's war, the Biden administration has used the American veto power at the U.N. to completely isolate itself from almost the entire world. As news outlets around the world -- and in Israel  -- document the staggering and unique destruction of civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza, including Israel's deliberate use of starvation as a weapon, most of the world has turned against the Israeli war. 

Biden has ignored not only overwhelming world opinion but also domestic opinion. A majority of Americans in all groups from the start has favored a cease-fire.

Despite all that, the U.S., in vote after vote at both the Security Council and the General Assembly, has increasingly stood against the entire world in order to protect Israel. The U.S. is now down to a vanishingly small number of largely irrelevant countries as its allies – really just a handful of tiny island nations – in defense of Israel's war. 

At one of the last votes on this conflict, a December 19 resolution to affirm the right of the Palestinians to self-determination, only four countries on the planet voted NO: Israel, the U.S., and two Pacific islands called Micronesia (population 113,000) and Nauru (population: 12,000). Only ten other countries abstained: the largest of them being Paraguay and South Sudan. That means that all 172 other countries, from the U.S.'s largest allies in Europe and Asia to South America and Africa, stood opposed to the U.S. and Israel.

Some right-wing discourse has bizarrely instructed Americans to believe that anything that happens "at the U.N." is irrelevant and likely corrupt. But "the U.N." is not some mystical leftist entity or a Soros-funded NGO. It is nothing more or less than the collective policy views of the world's governments. So when the U.S. stands against the world to support Israel, it is not standing "against the U.N." but rather against every country on earth, including almost all of its allies. 

This isolation carries real and tangible costs to U.S. interests. As hard-core anti-China and anti-Russia hawk Fiona Hill, a former Trump White House official, warned in a speech to European foreign policy elites last June – in a speech we extensively covered at the time – nothing is strengthening China more than the US's alienation of many of the planet's governments and populations, which now see the U.S. as singularly responsible for so many destructive wars, coups and dictatorships around the world.

The specific dangers to the physical security of American citizens from the U.S.'s singular support for Israel's wars are obvious, in large part because it is the U.S. Government itself warning of them. Ever since Biden's trip to visit Netanyahu and his promise of unlimited financial support, the Biden State Department has warned American citizens on multiple occasions that they face heightened dangers of anti-American violence and terrorism anywhere they go in the world.

All of that is consistent with the repeated warnings over many years from top U.S. military officials that one of the primary causes of anti-American hatred in the region – and thus a key driver of the risks of anti-American terrorism at home – is the accurate perception that it is the U.S. that single-handedly enables Israeli aggression and wars against its Muslim neighbors (each time a military official issues this warning, as Gen. David Petraeus did among others, the ADL denounces them). Back in 2010, the chief of Israel's Mossad warned that Israel was becoming a "burden" to the U.S. Just one month before the October 7 attack, another former Mossad chief warned that Israel was now an "apartheid" state and was thus isolating itself from the world. 

So for so many reasons, and on so many levels, it is impossible to reconcile claims of putting "America First" with the Biden administration's multi-pronged and very aggressive support for Israel and its wars. This is true for the same reason that so many self-identified "America First" or MAGA adherents – including many I interviewed over the last two years – emphatically explained why they opposed Biden's similar decision to fund and arm Ukraine in its war against Russia. 

MAGA guest after MAGA guest, including several in Congress, told me when opposing the U.S. role in Ukraine that the U.S. has too many problems at home and is already drowning in too much debt to fund Ukraine's wars, adding that Ukraine "is not the 51st American state." Yet every time I asked whether this same rationale applies to Israel, they hemmed and hawed and stumbled to insist that Israel was somehow different, in part because they see Israel as being of singular importance and/or because they know that a refusal to support Israel means political or reputational death.  

If one is comparing which country is an actual "ally," then one could make a far stronger case for Ukraine (which for years has done everything it is told by Washington) than one could for Israel (which continues to engage in the exact conduct the U.S. warns is harming American security). But there is no coherent explanation under Trump-era conservative politics for why Americans should be forced to fund the wars of either.

The explanation for these inconsistencies is self-evident to any honest person, no matter how potent the taboo constructed around it. For so many Americans, Israel is most definitely not just a foreign country. For deeply held religious and cultural convictions with which they have often been indoctrinated from birth – whether it be some strains of evangelical Christianity, or Zionism among American Jews, or just a generalized animosity toward Muslims that causes some to see Arabs as a sub-humanized horde – Israel resides on a special, elevated and unique pedestal that requires the U.S. to devote enormous resources of its own citizens to funding and protecting it.

But whatever that mentality is, it has nothing to do with American nationalism let alone an "America First'' framework for governing political choices. And that is why it was only a question of time before these lurking, glaring internal conflicts in American conservatism finally erupted.

 

 

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I wouldn't blame you for hesitating to get into this, but in trying to understand US elites' fanatical allegiance to Israel, I keep bumping up against the question: could it be because the Mossad has compelling dirt on them?

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U.S. Journalist Arrested, Charged In Israel; Kamala's Highly Curated Univision "Town Hall"
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It's October 10, 2024. 

Tonight. Jeremy Loffredo is an independent American journalist who as of yesterday is in an Israeli prison charged with violating Israel's censorship law and, quote, “aiding and abetting the enemy.” All of that is based on nothing more than Loffredo’s reporting that debunked Israeli claims that Iran's ballistic missiles did no damage. He was able to debunk that by showing the air bases that were actually harmed by those missiles and the extent of that damage. And for that reporting, the so-called, quote, “only democracy in the Middle East” arrested him, an American journalist, for the crime of doing reporting. 

Ordinarily, when American journalists are arrested by a foreign country for the journalism they do, it creates a major scandal in the United States where U.S. corporate media outlets make it their primary crusade to denounce the arrest, defend freedom of the press and secure their release. Such was the case, for instance, when Russia arrested and then imprisoned Wall Street Journal's Evan Gershkovich, about which the U.S. media raised so much indignation and pressure that Russia finally agreed to his release. 

Such indignation, however, you may notice, is very selective. Virtually no media organization in the corporate media even covered it, let alone denounced, the death of the American journalist, Gonzalo Lira, after the Zelenskyy regime brutally imprisoned him for the crime of criticizing Ukraine's war effort and it is virtually impossible to imagine any concern by the U.S. media over Israel's arrest of Jeremy Loffredo. For so many Americans, their love of certain foreign countries, whether it be Ukraine or Israel, actually overrides any concerns for their own fellow citizens. 

Indeed, Israel has killed multiple Americans over the last year or so, including an American journalist whom, an investigation found, was shot in the head purposely by an Israeli sniper. So many Americans who love to proclaim themselves to be super-patriots and to put America first did not raise a peep of protest when Israel killed that American journalist because they assume that everything Israel does is justified even when it comes to imprisoning or killing American citizens. Tonight, the independent journalist Dan Cohen, who has been covering Loffredo’s case will be with us and we will speak to him tonight about all of the details. 

Jeremy Loffredo has previously been a guest on our show as well when we featured his courageous journalism in documenting, among other things, how Israeli settlers were blocking food and humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Clearly, Loffredo's journalism that was critical of the Israelis is undoubtedly a factor, if not the primary factor, in why he is now sitting in an Israeli prison cell facing very serious charges without the U.S. State Department or any other organ of the Biden administration uttering a peep of concern or protest about it. 

And then finally: Kamala Harris continues her somewhat disastrous media tour by appearing today at a “town hall” organized by the Latino Network Univision, held in Las Vegas. Earlier today, I was on the “Megan Kelly Show,” which just incidentally, happens to be one of the most watched television programs or political programs in all of the United States, not just as a podcast, but even on cable news. It's a show that has grown remarkably. I spent two hours on that show and one of the things we talked a lot about was Kamala's campaign. Our intrepid reporter, Michael Tracey, was there in Las Vegas for the proceedings and he will be with us tonight, briefly, I promise, to share with us some of the contrived aspects and the lowlights of that event that one had to be present to see. 

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

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Kamala Can't State Differences From Biden; X Back In Brazil; Report Emerges About U.S. Role In Destroying Nord Stream
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It's Wednesday, October 9th.

Tonight: Ever since Kamala Harris was imposed on the Democratic Party and then the American public without a single vote being cast for her – other than the only votes that actually matter, namely, Obama-led Democratic elites acting in secret – her campaign has been most notable for its deliberate and continuous avoidance of taking a single substantive position on pretty much anything other than abortion, which she favors, and LGBT, whom she deeply loves – a fantastic ally. Other than that, there's really no substance at all. For more than a month, her website was completely devoid of any Issues page, and, finally, when one was added, it was more clichéd than a Stephen Colbert monologue about Donald Trump.

It's therefore unsurprising that Kamala – as she finally decided to submit to a media tour, albeit in the most friendly and adoring venues possible – continues to be unable to articulate a single substantive view that she maintains about virtually any policy issue. In fact, over several successive programs on which she appeared over the weekend, she was repeatedly asked by the most sympathetic interviewers possible the same completely predictable question: what would you have done differently or what would you do differently than Joe Biden, the barely sentient and highly unpopular incumbent under whose administration she serves? After all, her whole campaign is based on turning the page and changing. So, the obvious question is: What do you mean change from Joe Biden? In what way? 

Despite the utter simplicity and complete predictability of this most basic question, she simply could not provide any coherent answer yet again displaying the complete emptiness that characterizes her political trajectory and her presidential campaign and that has squandered much of the goodwill that she compiled when she emerged as an alternative to two eighty-year-old men whom the public has long been saying was a choice they disliked. 

Like her campaign, Kamala is a completely empty vessel of ideas, full of ambition and careers to be sure, but who has zero core or stable views, which became even more visible than ever over this weekend, which was intended to give the public some greater sense of who she is but ended up doing the opposite. 

Then: five weeks ago, a single Brazilian Supreme Court justice notorious around the world for being an authoritarian censor, decreed that you Elon Musk’s X shall be banned from Brazil due primarily to the platform's refusal to continue to comply with a mountain of censorship orders that routinely emanate from that court and which contain no justifying explanation about why these accounts have to be banned, let alone any due process for anyone to understand or contest it. At the time, Musk declared that he would rather lose access to a market even as large and lucrative as Brazil if the only price for admission there was unjustly carrying out illegal censorship orders. X Brazil has had its ban for five weeks now. And the only people who could access it were ones willing to risk using a VPN, since the judge also said that using a VPN is basically illegal and would subject you to a $ 9,000-a-day fine for every day you've used it, which is higher than the median Brazilian income. The problem for Musk became that the longer access inaccessibility to the Brazilian market went on, the more harm for the company piled up. X had massive fines imposed on it, millions and millions of dollars. The censorship judge froze the assets of a completely separate company, Space X, and took its money out of the Space X Bank to pay for X's fines, X lost huge ad revenue it desperately needed, given how much it's in debt to its various creditors, and millions of X users in Brazil migrated to competitors such as Blue Sky and Threads. The longer the ban went on, the more likely that migration was to be permanent. 

So, two weeks ago, X began stating to these Brazilian courts that it would reverse itself and comply with all demands in Brazil, not just from now on, but retrospectively as well. To prove that it meant it, it started banning all of the accounts this judge had censored, including the accounts on X of all elected officials. It paid all the fines imposed on X, millions of dollars and a jump through every other hoop that had been set up for it, in part to humiliate X as a condition for getting back to Brazil. All of this was done last week. X had complied with every demand by the Brazilian courts on purpose and created some excuse as to why X couldn't come back online last week, namely that they paid their fines to the round judicial account and waited until this week, in fact, today, to restore X. One might suggest that the delay was due to the fact that there was a huge midterm election held last Sunday in all of Brazil and X was unavailable for it as a result of that delay. 

Some are depicting X's return to Brazil as some sort of ringing victory for free speech that must triumphed over the authoritarian centers in Brazil, and that it was Brazil that capitulated but the exact opposite is actually true. Brazil forced X into complete submission and therefore this is one more victory for the growing state censorship regime and the consequences of that victory in Brazil, just like the one in France when they arrested Pavel Durov of Telegram, are already spreading. We're going to show you all about that ban. 

When the Nord Stream II pipeline, connecting Russia and Germany, was exploded under the ocean in late 2022, in the middle of the Russia-Ukraine War, that was not only one of the worst incidents of industrial terrorism in history, but it was also one of the worst environmental disasters in decades, as massive amounts of gas leaked out from the destroyed pipeline at the bottom of the sea into the ocean for months at a time. 

Parts of the U.S. government and its media allies, in the face of the obvious question of who did that, hilariously tried to suggest that it was Russia, which for some reason decided to blow up its own pipeline, a pipeline that it built and that is central to its plans for economic growth by selling cheap natural gas to Western Europe. Yet, a new report out of Northern Europe this week bolsters what Seymour Hersh and others had reported for a long time and which was, in any event, quite self-evident, namely that the United States, not Russia, the United States and its key allies in Ukraine, played the significant role, if not the leading role, in this act of industrial sabotage. And we'll tell you about this new evidence and remind you of just how extreme the propaganda was that they actually tried to convince people that it was Russia that blew up its own pipeline. 

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

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Flashback: Glenn Retraces the 30-Year Domestic War on Civil Liberties that Launched Gore Vidal’s Political Transformation
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If somebody asks me which issue I most focus on and which issue this program was designed to bring the most attention to, I will certainly say it is the abuses of the U.S. Security State in general, but in particular, how these U.S. Security State agencies have been weaponized, particularly in the Trump years, to target increasingly domestic dissent. Seemingly every week brings a new story about the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, trying to censor the Internet, monitoring and surveilling the political opponents of the Biden administration and of the neoliberal order that runs the United States and, in general, looking for ways to criminalize, suppress, outlaw and punish all forms of political dissent. 

To highlight how true that is, I want to show you a couple of stories just from the last couple of days that illustrate what a great crisis this has really become to then put this into its historical context and to really try to understand the roots of where this came from. 

Earlier this week, the news site Newsweek, on October 5, published an exclusive investigation by a reporter named William Arkin, who has spent his entire life within established media organizations – in 2011 he published one of the most important investigative series on the U.S. Security State entitled “Top Secret America,” which he co-authored with the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dana Priest, and it was really that article that in a lot of ways spurred my interest in the NSA, and that led to the Snowden reporting. It talked about how there was this sprawling secret part of the government that was completely unaccountable and that was so big that no one could understand. Bill Arkin is the author of this new investigation in Newsweek entitled AD_4nXdPa5gsMF18kVx1LUSJlJQ0hrjulA18FSoD3jDqDnv3Go2OeRlLCWccWTQcwYANwfxofa36zb67Oi9H8avBhgPQpIrIZ9fbEtfc_l-Xz6iGLiKHrH7gkwiEfVbR06HIEuTukXn1Br1dckWMV8RIoa61d7PCSjsuW4eTLvPflg?key=gpNbDv5kW0f2RJu3YjrUXA

In other words, this is not Fox News claiming the FBI is being weaponized against Trump supporters, nor is it a right-wing site. This is a journalist who has been an investigative reporter inside most mainstream organizations his entire life and is now reporting this. And what he wrote is the following: 

 

The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers.

 

"The FBI is in an almost impossible position," says a current FBI official, who requested anonymity to discuss highly sensitive internal matters. The official said that the FBI is intent on stopping domestic terrorism and any repeat of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the Bureau must also preserve the Constitutional right of all Americans to campaign, speak freely and protest the government. By focusing on former president Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters, the official said, the Bureau runs the risk of provoking the very anti-government activists that the terrorism agencies hope to counter.

 

What the FBI Data Shows

From the president down, the Biden administration has presented Trump and MAGA as an existential threat to American democracy and talked up the risk of domestic terrorism and violence associated with the 2024 election campaign.

 

"Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country," President Biden tweeted last September, the first time that he explicitly singled out the former president. "MAGA Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections but elections being held now and into the future," Biden said. (Newsweek. October 5, 2023)

 

There are so many reasons that should disturb everybody. That is not the role of the FBI to decide which political ideologies are sufficiently threatening, that American citizens who are not found to have engaged in any violence or engaged in illegality should be tracked and monitored, but we, of course, know that this is exactly what the U.S. Security State is being used for. The neoliberal order really does believe, the kind of bipartisan establishment wings of both parties, that anyone who is a critic of the establishment and any kind of an effective way is somebody who is a threat, somebody who is a danger, not just a threat or a danger, but the primary threat, the primary danger. They see domestic dissidents and what they call domestic extremists as the greatest threat to the American homeland and national security – not ISIS, not al-Qaida, not foreign terrorist groups, not Russia – and that is where the bulk of their powers and their budget are being directed: inward, internally, domestically, for domestic dissent. 

No viewers of this program think that's hyperbole. We've reported on the Fifth Circuit decision just a month ago that the Biden administration is responsible for one of the grievous assaults of the First Amendment in decades, if not in the history of the judiciary, by constantly pressuring social media companies, using the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA and the CDC to censor political speech the Biden administration thinks is dangerous and it dislikes. That's, of course, something we report on frequently, but to really understand their real mindset, I think it's really worth looking at a clip of an interview given to CNN's Christiane Amanpour this week by Hillary Clinton, who in a lot of ways has become the “id” of American liberalism. She's the person who says the things liberals really believe in and that they really think, but they know better than to admit publicly that they believe. But she's so bitter about the 2016 election and her defeat there still – in fact, more bitter than ever – that she has no internal filter and she just says what liberals really think about their political enemies. That's, of course, where her notorious phrase basket of deplorables came from, looking down her nose at Trump supporters and saying how they're just irredeemably bad people. That, of course, is what liberals think about their political opponents. 

Here she is on CNN, saying that she thinks the Trump movement is a cult that needs to be deprogrammed. What here what she said. 

 

Video. Hillary Clinton, CNN Interview. October 5, 2023

 

Hillary Clinton: […] Very strong partisans in both parties in the past. And we had very bitter battles over all kinds of things, gun control and climate change and the economy and taxes. But there wasn't this little tail of extremism waving, you know, wagging the dog of the Republican Party as it is today. And sadly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure. He's only in it for himself. He's now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him? You know, because at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen. 

 

And did you see there? Christiane Amanpour kind of chuckled, thinking she was deliberately using hyperbole, but she didn't laugh at all. She meant that. She thinks there should be a formal reeducation, a formal deprogramming of Trump supporters. That is increasingly how establishment liberals see people who support Donald Trump or support his set of beliefs: not as citizens exercising their rights to free thought and free speech and free political organization, but as criminals, as people who are sick and need to be monitored, surveilled, deprogrammed and reeducated. And this is what they all think. She is the only one in her bitterness willing to say it now. 

As I said, the War on Terror over the last 20 years created the impression that the CIA, Homeland Security and the NSA were primarily focused on domestic and foreign threats and not domestic ones. And so, it seems like that's this new pathology that these U.S. Security State agencies are so focused instead on domestic politics. But that really isn't true. The first report that we did that initiated the Snowden reporting was one that proved the NSA was collecting massive dossiers on American citizens, including all of their phone records, collecting with whom people were speaking and for how long, where they were when they were speaking. And they were doing it in mass by the millions, not people who were suspected of any wrongdoing, just monitoring the entire population domestically. But a major part of the War on Terror, even though it was constantly talked about as a war against foreign threats, was focused domestically. That's obviously what the Patriot Act was, which ended up getting used in far more domestic cases and domestic investigations than it did in cases involving foreign terror threats. But the entire edifice of the War on Terror ended up, once it eroded, being directed inward. Many of the techniques and weapons that were developed and intended to be deployed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan were instead imported into the United States. As a result, our law enforcement agencies here at home now resemble paramilitary forces of the kind you deploy to war zones, much more so than domestic police forces. 

Here's The Atlantic in 2011, reporting on just one of the many programs that militarized the U.S. Security State here at home. It was entitled “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police.” 

AD_4nXcnshXwEqflxkO3AYNkxl4h35HUeCaLRaczCadr9GtticMxrnKRRn5nWpjb1-ILvDCv8oj1L-xiSU-otmmCJlIZyJGJcMJljFmaa_Zvr9wP28Y8AMzYcdiGUFayWJVtG_Vv3HSBVeFRKx5Dq8qD0RxvH4DtdlpWYetBm5QV6Q?key=gpNbDv5kW0f2RJu3YjrUXA

 

Over the past ten years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more like soldiers. Here's why we should be alarmed.

 

Ever since September 14, 2001, when President Bush declared war on terrorism, there has been a crucial, yet often unrecognized, shift in United States policy. Before 9/11, law enforcement possessed the primary responsibility for combating terrorism in the United States. Today, the military is at the tip of the anti-terrorism spear. This shift appears to be permanent: in 2006, the White House's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism confidently announced that the United States had "broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain."

 

In an effort to remedy their relative inadequacy in dealing with terrorism on U.S. soil, police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculcate a "soldier's mentality" among their ranks. Though the reasons for this increasing militarization of American police forces seem obvious, the dangerous side effects are somewhat less apparent.

 

Undoubtedly, American police departments have substantially increased their use of military-grade equipment and weaponry to perform their counterterrorism duties, adopting everything from body armor to, in some cases, attack helicopters.  The logic behind this is understandable. If superior, military-grade equipment helps the police catch more criminals and avert, or at least reduce, the threat of a domestic terror attack, then we ought to deem it an instance of positive sharing of technology — right? Not necessarily. Indeed, experts in the legal community have raised serious concerns that allowing civilian law enforcement to use military technology runs the risk of blurring the distinction between soldiers and peace officers. (The Atlantic. November 7, 2011)

 

The establishment knows as much as you do. That anti-establishment sentiment is at an all-time high. It's been growing for years. People don't trust the establishment institutions of 39 states. They don't like them. They feel hostile toward them. They feel attacked by them. And the remedy that has been adopted for that is to militarize the U.S. Security State, to turn it into a weapon against the American people – to intimidate the population domestically to know that if you try to exercise your rights of dissent if you try to protest or organize, you're going to be surveilled. You're going to be monitored. You're going to be criminalized and prosecuted. And if it comes down to it and you present enough of a threat, you will be crushed. That is what the abuse of the U.S. Security State is about, controlling every aspect of domestic politics in exactly the way it was never supposed to. 

What is happening now is a mirror image of what happened in the 1990s under the Clinton administration when the left and American liberals started putting all their faith and trust in the FBI and these other law enforcement agencies, because they were told the real threat America faced, is not foreign, but one from domestic extremists or anti-government extremism from people who were opposed to the political establishment and the federal government. Even before the domestic terrorist attack in Oklahoma City in 1995, the Clinton administration was exploiting this threat to demand all kinds of authoritarian powers and once that terrorist attack happened in Oklahoma City, then they were off to the races. Every week, the major media outlets in the United States were hyping this threat and insisting that we needed to invest more powers in the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA to stay safe. This is where this mentality comes from that these U.S. security agencies should be directed inward at domestic dissent. So, you cannot understand today's crisis without understanding this decade and every year that goes by, more and more people don't know about these events because they become more and more distant historical events. It's really worth, even for those of you who remember it, revisiting it and using the political transformation of Gore Vidal to use it, which I find incredibly fascinating but also relevant today. 

So, one of the very first events that spawned this anti-government rage was the raid I referenced earlier at Ruby Ridge in Idaho, where the Weaver family had an ideology of white separatism, of anti-government ideology that happens to be illegal in the United States.

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 You may not like it, you may not support it, but you're allowed to move to Idaho to get off the grid and to decide that you want to live a life of separation from society because you don't think society is healthy any longer. That is your absolute right to do. But the U.S. government didn't think so. They harassed the family. They tried to prosecute them. They tried to serve warrants on them. It finally led to an 11-day siege by the FBI, ATM and other agents at their ranch in Idaho where federal agents just killed several members of the Weaver family.

 

The New York Times article tells us that:

 

Randy Weaver, a white supremacist whose defiance of the law made him a hero to hate groups in the West, surrendered to the authorities today, ending an 11-day siege at his mountaintop cabin in the woods of north Idaho.

 

The standoff, which began with two days of gunfire that killed Mr. Weaver's 13-year-old son, Samuel, his wife, Vicki, and a deputy United States marshal, William F. Degan, ended early this afternoon without a shot being fired.

 

The 44-year-old fugitive had vowed to die rather than turn himself over to the small army of Federal agents, National Guard troops and police officers who had surrounded his cabin atop steep cliffs in the Selkirk Mountains. Supporters of Mr. Weaver, who taunted and cursed the authorities for the last week, have accused them of overkill. A fugitive for 19 months, Mr. Weaver was wanted on Federal gun charges. (The New York Times. September 1, 1992)

 

So, of course, The New York Times was trying to justify that. It turned out Randy Weaver sued the government and started other people who were injured there. They won multimillion-dollar settlements. The investigation by the FBI concluded that the FBI used reckless force and was essentially harassing a citizen for purely ideological ends and ended up shooting and killing members of his family unjustly. But that was the mentality that had taken hold of the U.S. Security State, that they were there not to fight foreign terrorist organizations – at the time, al-Qaida was very active and they would end up attacking the World Trade Center that decade – but they were focused, as they are now, primarily on domestic dissent. 

That anti-government rage escalated severely with the hideous government assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Here is the New York Times version of it on April 20, 1993: “Apparent Mass Suicide Ends a 51-Day Standoff in Texas.”

 

DEATH IN WACO: The Overview -- SCORES DIE AS CULT COMPOUND IS SET AFIRE AFTER F.B.I. SENDS IN TANKS WITH TEAR GAS; Apparent Mass Suicide Ends A 51-Day Standoff in Texas

 

Hours after Federal agents began battering holes in the walls of the Branch Davidian compound and spraying tear gas inside, David Koresh and more than 80 followers -- including at least 17 children -- apparently perished today when flames engulfed the sprawling wooden complex on the Texas prairie.

 

Officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said they believed that Mr. Koresh, a self-described messiah who prophesied to his followers that they would meet their end in an apocalyptic confrontation with the law, gave the order to burn the compound down in the 51st day of a standoff with Federal agents.

 

F.B.I. officials said smashing the walls and filling the building with tear gas was intended to increase pressure on the cult members, who had resisted all previous demands for surrender. But the officials insisted that the tear gas was not flammable and that the fire was set by cult members who poured fuel around the perimeter of the compound and lit matches. 'They All Willingly Followed'

 

F.B.I. officials said they believed that 95 people were inside the compound when the fire began, including 17 children under the age of 10, and that it only knew of the 9 survivors, 4 of whom were at hospitals this evening and 5 of whom were taken to the local jail. (The New York Times. April 20, 1993)

 

Investigations of the incident at Waco under Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, created a much different picture than The New York Times depicted, namely that it was almost definitely the case that the FBI agents who had seized that compound or seized it shot canisters that caused this fire and incinerated the people inside and killed them. And I'm going to show you Gore Vidal's attacks on the FBI in just a minute and let him express the critiques in its most eloquent form. Critiques that got him expelled from left-liberal circles which he had spent his entire life inhabiting for the crime of questioning the U.S. Security State and its abuse of its power against American dissidents. But the propaganda was that David Koresh was a threat to those children, that he was molesting them and I guess the government decided it would be better to burn them alive and kill them, which is what the government did than allow that to continue. 

Here is a news report from a local affiliate at the time reporting on what happened in Waco. 

 

Video. Waco News Report. 1993

 

Host: The flames may be out, but a firestorm of controversy rages on after the assault on the Branch Davidian compound. Officials are starting to look for answers after doomsday in Waco. This morning, investigators began sifting through the embers of the Waco compound, searching for the bodies of more than 80 cult members believed killed in the fire. In Washington, President Clinton says he gives his full support to the decisions made by the attorney general and the FBI to end the siege but the family members of those killed in Waco have bitter words for those they say must bear the responsibility for needless deaths under the blistering Texas sun. Investigators comb the smoldering remains of the Branch Davidian compound. More than 80 people are believed to have died in yesterday's fiery conclusion to the 51-day siege, 24 of them children. Today, the FBI said it's not responsible for the deaths. 

 

Jeff Jammar, Special Agent: Those children are dead because David Koresh had been killed. There's no question about that. He had those fires started. He had 51 days to release those children. He chose those children to die. We didn't have anything to do with their deaths. 

 

Host: The FBI said cult members didn't panic as tanks began to ram the compound. Yet calmly, apparently under orders from Koresh, began to gather in an underground bunker and donned gas masks. Federal agents tried to help the few people they could see, including a man clinging to the roof. 

 

Jeff Jammar, Special Agent: And he finally fell off the roof and exposed himself to danger. […] He was on fire and saved him. Another woman came out. They appear to be disoriented. She went back into the compound. They got out and went to get her. So there was constant communication with everybody to try to get them to come out. 

 

Host: Only nine people were rescued from the flames as to why the FBI lost its patience after weeks of waiting. Law enforcement officials revealed today that they had electronic listening devices inside the compound. Their eavesdropping led them to believe Koresh was becoming more violent and that intervention was necessary. 

 

So, again, you don't have to like these groups. These were two groups that decided to isolate, to live by themselves. The government couldn't tolerate that and used a lot of violence. Of course, you had The New York Times and most media outlets propagandizing in defense of the FBI, in defense of the government for what they're getting at. Investigations revealed – as so often happens – that that was propagandistic lies. 

One of the outcomes of Ruby Ridge, and especially Waco, was that a former member of the U.S. military concluded that the U.S. government was waging war on Americans and that what he had learned in the military taught him that it was justified to wage a war back, planted a bomb at the Oklahoma City federal courthouse and killed 157 people, including a couple of dozen children, Timothy McVeigh, and the minute that happened, the Clinton administration seized on that attack to insist that the gravest threat that the United States faced was one of anti-government right-wing sentiment and began demanding a huge series of powers just like the Bush administration did after 9/11 that would have vested the administration in the U.S. government with previously unthinkable powers of surveillance, detention and monitoring, all in the name of this huge threat that they built up after Oklahoma City. 

But even before, here you see the New York Times article that is really right to the point: “Clinton seeks broad Powers in Battle against terrorism; Oklahomans mourn their loss.” 

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They didn't even wait until the bodies were clear from the courthouse before the Clinton administration began demanding powers and the government engaged in a nonstop propaganda campaign about the dangers posed by domestic extremism. 

Here you see the cover of Time Magazine back when Time Magazine mattered, in 1995. 

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They had really turned opposition to the government into a crime, saying that these people who feared the federal government, who opposed the federal government, even after seeing what they did in Ruby Ridge and Waco were terrorists. These were people who were not permitted to be free. 

The New York Times, of course, led the way here. You see their week in review in 1995, “Men at War. Inside the World of the Paranoid.” 

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We may never know what part of the shadows of rage and conspiracy Timothy J. McVeigh emerged from. The man charged with the worst act of terrorism in the nation's history is said to consider himself a political prisoner, telling authorities no more than his name and date of birth.

 

But anyone who has leafed through the literature of self-styled patriot groups, sampled the worst of anti-government postings on the computer Internet or looked at hate tracts will find that there is an old root of paranoia that runs deep in the national cellar and has sprouted rage and conspiracy for generations.

 

One current branch leads to the right-wing militias and a world view that Mr. McVeigh was apparently exposed to, and may well have shared, in the months before the Oklahoma City blast.

 

Even as a Republican ascendancy has shifted political discourse rightward, the militias accept almost as an article of faith that the Government has betrayed the people, that its leaders are corrupt and that the Constitution has been subverted. Ross Perot has said some of the same things. But militia members and other right-wing extremists then go into another dimension, transforming frustration and alienation into a black-and-white world in which the forces of one-world government are at the nation's doorstep and the Federal Government and the F.B.I. together are bitter enemies of true patriots. It is a world of hate and fear, with a shared belief in the same sinister global forces binding disparate groups and individuals who have fallen under its sway. (The New York Times. April 30, 1995)

 

Do you see how none of this is new? How? Back then they were also attempting to say that anybody who fears the FBI, who thinks the worst of the federal government, is an extremist who ought to be stopped by the federal government. They immediately exploited the acts of this one person in Oklahoma City to claim that this entire movement of people who dislike the federal government and distrust the federal government, the FBI, and who saw Ruby Ridge and Waco as examples of government attempts to crush dissent were somehow not free people exercising their constitutional rights but were criminals. Bill Clinton as his top priority, repeatedly exploited Oklahoma City and all of this anti-government sentiment to demand what he called anti-terrorism powers exactly like the Bush administration did after 9/11. 

Here from The New York Times in May, just a month or so after Oklahoma City:

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The President expressed particular concern over opposition to three of his recommendations, which would expand wiretapping authority, ease the ban on military involvement in law enforcement and require that materials that can be used to make explosives be tagged with particles to make them easier to trace.

 

But, backed by a bipartisan group concerned about infringing on the civil liberties of domestic political groups, the Republican plan does not go as far as the President wants in expanding wiretapping authority.

 

Mr. Clinton's public approval ratings have risen significantly since the bombing on April 19, and the White House is eager to keep the initiative on an issue that makes the President appear tough. Mr. Clinton particularly cited his proposal to allow investigators to conduct wiretaps on suspected terrorists who move from telephone to telephone, or roving taps, without obtaining a new court order each time. "I don't care whether a terrorist is trying to knowingly evade the police. I care that he or she may be trying to plan another Oklahoma City bombing." (The New York Times. May 28, 1995)

 

They've been after these powers for decades, and they use anything and make everything in anything they can to scare people into giving it to them. Even before Oklahoma City, the year before, the Clinton administration was demanding something called a “Clipper chip” That would have, before the Internet could even breathe, given the federal government almost ubiquitous control over it. 

Also from The New York Times, in June 1994, a year before the Oklahoma City bombing or so:

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The Clipper chip has prompted what might be considered the first holy war of the information highway. 

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