Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
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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Another day, another revelation of Israeli war crimes.

"However, S. testified that aside from one person found with a knife and a single encounter with armed fighters, the scores of others killed — an average of one per day in his battalion’s combat zone — were unarmed. According to him, the drone strikes were carried out with the intent to kill, despite the majority of victims being located at such a distance from the soldiers that they could not have posed any threat.

“'It was clear that they were trying to return to their homes — there’s no question,' he explained. 'None of them were armed, and nothing was ever found near their bodies. We never fired warning shots. Not at any point.'”
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Trump Mocks Concerns About Epstein; Trump Continues Biden's Policy of Arming Ukraine; Trump and Lula Exchange Barbs Over Brazil
System Update #483

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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 Much of the MAGA world was in turmoil, confusion and anger yesterday –understandably so – after the Trump DOJ announced it was closing the Epstein files and its investigation with no further disclosures of any kind. After all this happened, some attempt was made to try and pin the blame or isolate the blame for all of this on Attorney General Pam Bondi. Yet, Donald Trump himself, today, when asked about all of this, went much further than anyone else when meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House again: President Trump actually mocked and angrily dismissed any concerns over the Epstein matter and how it was handled. 

On our second segment, one of the uniting views of Trump supporters over the last four years has been opposition to the Biden administration's policy of arming, funding, and fueling Ukraine in its war against Russia. Yesterday, however, at the same meeting with Netanyahu, Trump announced that he would continue the Biden policy that he had spent so many years criticizing by now providing defensive arms at least to Ukraine, and he did so based on the longstanding neocon/liberal view that Putin is completely untrustworthy and therefore Russia must be thought because of Putin. That's what Trump himself said. 

Then, we’ll comment on Trump’s lengthy tweet attacking Brazil for its ongoing prosecution of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, during the BRICS Summit being held in Rio de Janeiro. This was something we were going to cover last night and didn't have time to, but we will tonight. Brazil's President Lula da Silva quickly responded, very defiantly, by basically telling Trump to mind his own business. 

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Last night, we covered quite extensively the decision by the Trump Justice Department, not even six months into the administration, to completely shut down and close and stop all investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, as well as announcing that there will be no further disclosures of any documents of any kind, that whatever they've released so far, which has basically been nothing – not basically, has been nothing – is all you're going to get. 

This is a blatant betrayal of multiple promises made by key Trump officials over the last four years, before they were in the White House, but was also a complete 180 in terms of what key Trump influencers and pundits had been saying, including several pundits who are now running the FBI, such as Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, as well as the Justice Department, including Pam Bondi. 

We even showed you an interview that Alina Habba, the Trump attorney who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, appointed by Donald Trump, did with Pierce Morgan while she was in the government, just in February, where she claimed they have a whole bunch of very incriminating lists with shocking names. She said there's video and there are all kinds of documents that are shocking, in her words, and she said they're going to be released over time because we've gone long enough where people who do these sorts of things, including are involved in the Epstein scandal, have no accountability. She said that is ending with the Trump administration. There's going to be accountability. 

Yesterday, the Trump Justice Department said, “No, there's nothing here. We looked. There's no such thing as a client list.” We know we've been promising and that JD Vance repeatedly said, “Where's the client list?” Donald Trump Jr. said, “Anyone hiding the client lists is a scumbag.” Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi accused Biden officials of basically covering up predatory pedophilia by refusing to release the Jeffrey Epstein client list. Now, they're saying there's no client list, that thing we've been talking about and accusing Biden officials of hiding and promising to disclose, that doesn't exist. 

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Trump DOJ: There's Nothing to the Epstein Story; State Dept: Syria's Al-Qaeda are No Longer "Terrorists"
System Update #482

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the Justice Department's statement here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video. Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel, TikTok.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 

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