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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haaretz, Oct. 20, 2023

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

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


 

Long-standing lurking contradictions on Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 

Right-wing contradictions on Israel finally erupt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Why The CNN Syria Rescue Deserves Skepticism
System Update #379, Part 2/3

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CNN's foreign correspondent, Clarissa Ward, produced and broadcast an extremely strange and very melodramatic video of her and her CNN crew magically discovering a previously undetected prisoner in Syria lying motionless under a blanket. Ward had previously admitted in her book that she stopped being a journalist when it came to Syria and was enraged that the U.S. had not done more to help remove Assad from power. Many people have raised questions about this bizarre video – whether it was staged by CNN and/or its Syrian handlers – and while we certainly don't purport to know the answer, what we do now is that extreme skepticism of such propaganda is very warranted given how often the U.S. Government and its media have blatantly lied, essentially always, when it comes to wars and coups that are important to Washington.

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Strange Stories

A very moving, emotional and deeply melodramatic segment was aired this week on CNN when the foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward, who has gone to Syria in the wake of the ouster of long-time Syrian President Bashar Assad, purported to have entered one of the notorious Syrian prisons and discovered to her great shock that there was a single prisoner who was there under a blanket, who had not been discovered in the emptying of all the other prisoners. It gave her the opportunity to comfort him, hug him and show how oppressed these heroes are.

One of the interesting things about the emptying of these prisons and the liberation of prisoners is no one seems to be questioning whether any of these people deserve to be in prison. It is certainly true there are a lot of political prisoners. The Assad regime tortured people. When we wanted to torture people in interrogations, as part of the War on Terror, the U.S. sent people that we kidnapped from Europe to Egypt and Syria, both Mubarak and Assad were our allies at the time. There is a lot of torture, there's a lot of political persecution under Assad but there are other people who were in prison because they committed violent crimes or egregious crimes. There seems to be an assumption, though, that every person in a Syrian prison is an unjustly persecuted person there simply because of their dissent. Into that, we embrace them all, we free them all and they're all evidence of Assad's tyranny. 

So, here is what CNN claims is what happened in real-time, as they discovered along with you. 

Video. CNN.

There's one guy alone in a cell. He was very dramatic to give a suspense. He wasn't just sitting there; he was under a blanket perfectly in a way that you couldn't even tell if there was a human being there. So, we're all waiting with bated breath to see what would happen when the blanket is removed, and it turns out there's a very seemingly clean and well-cared-for person under a blanket. He puts his hands up and they've discovered a prisoner, one of the very few who have not been released and CNN did it! CNN is about to rescue him with their Syrian handlers and here's what happens. 

Video. CNN.

I just need to show you some of the acting that was done here, that I didn't catch the first time I watched it but, as you saw, Clarissa Ward of CNN was in the room. She was speaking English to him. “I'm a civilian.” I'm not sure why she was speaking English then, but that’s what she was doing. And then when he gets up, she goes behind the door. She leaves the cell for just a moment. She needs a moment to compose herself. She puts her hand on her heart. There you see her hands on her chest. Oh My God. She's, she's so emotional about what they just discovered. A guy in a prison under a blanket. 

A lot of people had a lot of questions about this. No idea, at all, why he was there. Obviously, the Syrian handlers are people who are rebels, who want to show the world how vicious and brutal the Assad regime is or was. And so, I'm certainly not suggesting that CNN staged this. I don't know if the Syrian handlers did, but a lot of people did close-ups of the hands of this prisoner, he had very well-manicured, very clean hands. There was no one else in the prison with him. The other prison cells we've seen were overcrowded. Huge numbers of people came out when the doors were open. There doesn't seem to be any human waste in the prison. So, a lot of people were thinking this might have been staged as propaganda so that CNN could not just interview a prisoner, but actually participate in the rescue of a Syrian prisoner or someone in an Assad dungeon. 

The reason I found it so notable that Clarissa Ward, in particular, is participating in this story is because she had previously admitted that she was basically somebody who gave up on any pretense of journalistic neutrality or journalistic distance when it comes to Syria. She admitted that she was, in fact, a hardened advocate of the U.S. policy to remove Bashar Assad from power. In fact, she was sending deranged voicemails and emails to Obama White House officials because they didn't do more to remove Bashar Assad in 2021. She did a podcast entitled Intelligence Matters, which is hosted by the former acting director of the CIA under President Obama, Michael Morell, one of the people who accused Trump of being a Russian asset in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton and, needless to say, was one of the people who signed the letter, the notorious letter of 51 intelligence officials claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop had all the markings of Russian disinformation. She was on his podcast. She's a journalist on the podcast, chatting, very friendly with the former head of the CIA, because that's, of course, the loyalties that she has. And she was asked about Syria, and this is what she said. 

Author and war correspondent Clarissa Ward on reporting from conflict zones - "Intelligence Matters"

I will cop to the fact that I think I crossed the line in Syria. I became so emotionally involved and I was crushed by the U.S. response and the U.S. policy… I felt that there wasn't really a strong U.S. policy, that we had said 'Assad must go' and then we had done nothing to make him go. We had said chemical weapons were a red line and then that red line was crossed and there wasn't really anything in terms of real repercussions.

And I wrote Ben Rhodes an email to his official White House account. And I said, 'Dear Ben, I hope you're sleeping soundly as Aleppo burns. At least we have the Russians to sort it out. Best wishes, Clarissa.' (CBS News. June 2, 2021)

So, I don't think I ever need to prove but this is somebody who is a longtime activist for U.S. policy removing Bashar Assad and for putting in whoever these rebels are, because she herself admitted that “I crossed the line.” She's sending these, like, angry, enraged emails to Obama officials, sarcastic and embittered. It's not a journalist, it’s fine if people go around wanting to advocate for Obama doing more to remove Assad beyond giving the CIA $1 billion a year as he was doing, to fight along alongside ISIS and al-Qaeda. But to be a journalist covering Syria and at the same time berating the government for not unleashing the CIA even more to do regime change in a country? Obviously, that's crossing the line journalistically. But also, it's a good reason why we ought to be skeptical when then she starts putting out this kind of propaganda that is highly questionable. 

Here she is previously in what became controversial in October of 2023, showed herself on CNN avoiding what she said was rocket fire. Here's what happened:

Video. CNN. October 9, 2023.

She was on the ground out of breath, in Israel, on October 9, 2023, talking about these primitive crude rockets that Hamas was sending when Israel was sending 2,000-pound bombs and one thousand-pound bombs to destroy Gaza. She was there to convey the drama of being in Israel and the dangers of that. 

I'm just offering these facts about what we know. As I said, I'm not here to assert that CNN staged that very melodramatic and convenient prison rescue. If I had to bet, I'd say it's likelier that the Syrian handlers for rebels did it for CNN. But they don't even know that it could be just this huge coincidence that CNN stumbled into some forgotten prisoner, and he grabbed her by the arm, even though she's speaking English to him and he has perfectly manicured nails and he's holding onto her arm and she's saying, “Get water, get water.” She gives him the water, and he just drinks it out of great thirst. That could be a very excellent stroke of luck for CNN and for Clarissa Ward, who is a strong advocate, as she said, of this policy to remove Assad. But I think that it's very worth remembering – and I want to be as emphatic as I can be about how I phrase this because every single time there's a major geopolitical event that the United States cares about, extreme, deliberate, blatant material lies come spewing forth both before and afterward to influence public opinion and the way that Washington wants it to be, they disseminate those lies themselves or through their media. It happens all the time.

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Trump’s Latest Interviews Reveal A More Focused Vision
System Update #379, Part 1/3

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Since his election victory, Donald Trump has given two major, lengthy interviews about his intentions for his second term in the presidency and one can't help but notice that the version of Trump that we are seeing is a much different one, at least in some key respects, than the one we saw during the campaign. 

Trump's constrained demeanor and the content of what he is saying are all quite striking. It is a very calm, sober, focused and one might even say thoughtful Trump that we are seeing. And what he is saying aligns in many cases with how he is saying it: it's a more cogent and consistent Trump, one who has a clearly defined worldview on many issues accompanied by an obvious desire to be less polarizing and alarming to those who did not vote for him, one might even say a more moderated and serious Trump. That doesn't mean he's compromising on every or even most issue – though he is on some – only that he's avoiding gratuitous flailing. We'll look at this ethos but more so at the substance of what he is saying as perhaps a window into what the second term will be.

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A More Moderate Side

One of the many reasons why I think that the media campaign and the Democratic Party campaign to make people afraid of Donald Trump’s character, to depict him as Adolf Hitler, to claim that he's a white supremacist seeking to impose a Nazi dictatorship on the United States, failed – and there were many – but one of the reasons it definitely failed was because it's easy to do that to somebody that the public doesn't know where fearmongering has space to grow. However, for someone who is known to the American public – and he was very well known to the public before 2016 when he first ran and, after, basically dominated our political lives over the last eight years, being president for four years. Americans already know Donald Trump so well that they really don't need the media to try to fill in the gap for them. They have their own perceptions of who he is, how he conducts himself, of how he acts in power. So, the media just was unable to scare people who weren't already scared of Trump based on what they had seen. That's why I have to say Donald Trump as a character has been pretty consistent. I don't think he's been aligned at all with the caricature that has been manufactured for him by the media outlets most hostile to him. He has been fairly consistent in his behavior, his character and how he responds to certain events – and I say that as somebody who lived in New York City for a long time, beginning in the early 1990s, when Trump was a larger-than-life figure, all the way back then, and people had a good understanding of who he was then, he was very much in the media. 

That's why I think these two major post-election interviews that he did, one with “Meet the Press” and Kristen Welker, the host of that program about two weeks ago, two weekends ago, and then today, a new one that was published with Time Magazine after it named him Person of the Year and put him on the cover, obviously much to his delight. It's actually quite striking because there are some palpable changes in the way he speaks and the tone he's using to speak in what I think is the remarkable cogency of how he's articulating his views. There's no rambling, there's not a lot of stopping and starting. He's being more articulate than usual and I think that's one of his failures as a politician. He has a great amount of charisma, he's hilarious to most people who are willing to see it, he draws a lot of attention to himself and he understands instinctively how to communicate with people, but I don't think he's a great order at all. A lot of times in debates or interviews, you kind of almost have to know what he's trying to say to really understand it because he just doesn't fully articulate. I think a lot of that has changed. 

It is possible, I think one might even say likely, that the two attempts to take his life, particularly the first one that came about a centimeter away from blowing his head off would have to change even the most fixed-in-own-ways person. By all accounts, people close to Trump speaking off the record, or on the record, say they noticed visible changes in Trump in what he values and how he speaks after those incidents. No matter how cynical you are, in general, about Donald Trump, I think it'd be very hard to reject that out of hand. In fact, it would be much more surprising to me, if someone didn't change after two incidents like that, particularly the first one. But it's also the case that, if you look at these interviews, it just seems a different Donald Trump. It's the same Donald Trump in a lot of ways. I'm not saying there's a radical transformation or departure from what he's always been, but it seems like it's a much more content Donald Trump, a much more secure Donald Trump. Someone who no longer is desperate to win the election because, remember, winning the election was really his only way out of staying out of prison. Not only did he win this time, but there's no one questioning his win, no one claiming it's illegitimate, and no one claiming it's because of Putin. It was a pretty sweeping victory. We knew he was going to win almost by eleven o’clock at night, certainly confirmed by one in the morning, which is pretty early for American politics. It was a pretty sweeping vindication of who he insists he's been and what he's been. 

I think this is appearing in interviews and one of the things substantively that is appearing as well is that he is clearly attempting to be less provocative. He's not only avoiding making statements that may play into the worst smears about him or his character, but he's going out of his way to try to be reassuring in a way that I find convincing because it does seem to me more consistent with his worldview than what one might do during a campaign. That's true of all politicians. 

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So, let's look at Time Magazine, released today, and there you see him on the cover. The article reads:

For 97 years, the editors of TIME have been picking the Person of the Year: the individual who, for better or for worse, did the most to shape the world and the headlines over the past 12 months. In many years, that choice is a difficult one. In 2024, it was not. (TIME. December 12, 2024)

It's hard to argue with that. I don't really care who Time chooses, I'm more interested in the interview. But given what they said, I think it's very, very difficult to argue there was anybody who shaped political culture or political life, not just in the United States, but through the democratic world more than Donald Trump did over this past year. The fact that he came back from being impeached twice, from being indicted four times and then he rolled to victory in the GOP nomination against a lot of credible opponents – well-funded, credible opponents. He brought a lot of other people to his side. Clearly, he's reshaped political life in the United States in ways that no one else can compare and even, therefore, globally agree that the U.S. is still the largest, most powerful country in the world. 

The magazine published a transcript with Trump, a pretty lengthy, detailed transcript and I want to give you a sense of what I mean when I said all the things I said about how Trump appears to me. As you know, during the campaign, an ad that the Trump campaign ran and ran and ran and ran over and over and over that was quite effective, was one that focused not so much on the issue of transgender people. It was really more focused on something Kamala Harris had said in 2019 when responding to a questionnaire by the ACLU and running for office, where she said in response to the ACLU question that she does support having U.S. government funding the sex reassignment surgery and another treatment, even to people who are in prison or who are illegally detained. I don't really think the reason why that ad works so well, showing Kamala Harris saying that and concluding with that famous phrase, therefore, “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you.” I don't even think the reason it resonated so much is because people think much about that issue, whether the government should pay for sex reassignment surgeries or treatments for prisoners and illegal detainees. I think that became a proxy for trying to say, look at how out of touch the Democrats are with your lives, that's the reason that you're suffering under their government, they don't care about you at all. They have these lofty radical issues and factions that they please, but they don't think about things that you're going through and that's what the commercial is about – not let's go stop the evil of transgenderism but more you need people in Washington who care about you and your lives. And so, I thought it was so interesting what Trump said when he was asked about this issue in general, but also the specific issue of whether the first ever member of Congress who is transgender, Sarah McBride, who was elected from the state of Delaware in the Democratic Party, should be able to use the women's bathroom. That has become a controversy in Washington among some people, and they asked him about that as well. I think his answer was surprising, at least to me. It's what I would expect him to say, I guess what was surprising was that he's just willing to say it, even if it means alienating a lot of people who are on his side, especially on this issue. So here was the exchange:

Can I shift to the transgender issue? Obviously, sort of a major issue during the campaign. In 2016, you said that transgender people could use whatever bathroom they chose. Do you still feel that way?

I don’t want to get into the bathroom issue. Because it's a very small number of people we're talking about, and it's ripped apart our country, so they'll have to settle whatever the law finally agrees.

But on that note, there’s a big fight on this in Congress now. The incoming trans member from Delaware, Sarah McBride, says we should all be focused on more important issues. Do you agree?

I do agree with that. On that – absolutely. As I was saying, it's a small number of people. (TIME December 12, 2024)

So, what he's saying is: look, this issue of transgender people using the bathroom is not an issue we should be focused on. 

As I said, I know there are a lot of conservatives, a lot of Trump supporters who disagree with that, who think that is an issue on which we should be focused. There are a lot of people who are focused on that issue, which is what I think is so notable about the fact that Trump didn't choose to demagogue this issue, he didn't choose to exploit the polarization in genders. In fact, he said, yeah, I agree with the newly elected trans member of Congress when she says we shouldn’t be focused on the question of which bathroom people use, but instead on far more important issues facing the country. 

Here is Donald Trump in 2016. I think it's really worth remembering that when Trump announced he was running, he was extremely emphatic on the issue of immigration but Trump has never been a hard-core conservative on any social issues to put that mildly, and it's pretty easy to understand why. He's been a Manhattan billionaire for his entire adult life, he was a star in Hollywood on his own show. Obviously, he's coming into contact with gay people all the time, constantly, in Manhattan, in Hollywood. He himself is on his third marriage. Those three women to whom he was married, were not the only women with whom he has had sex. He doesn't live a life focused on this, he never cared about social issues before and he's giving checks to the Democratic Party. What motivated him was immigration, trade and economics. That clearly was what gave him the most passion but obviously, during a campaign, you have to focus on the things that will get your votes. I always knew that Trump's heart is not in social issues. And you saw him quite calculatedly in this election afraid of what the abortion issue could do to his campaign and backing off a lot of hard-core pro-life stances that were once the requirement of the Republican Party, including saying he doesn't believe in a national abortion ban. 

Here is Trump in 2016, addressing kind of briefly when asked the question of trans people in bathrooms: 

Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. April 21, 2016.

That's something we talked about last week. That it is true that, for a long time, the trans issue was never anything that anybody bothered with. It only became a source of controversy when it got pushed into areas that were predictably designed to provoke a lot of conflicts, one involving trans women in sports, biological males who transition to women in women's sports, and especially the question of administering treatment to children, to preadolescence to stop their puberty or give them hormones, cross-sex hormones, as we talked about that last week. I think Trump is very representative of most people: this is not the issue that's driving me. Live and let live. This is not something that he newly unveiled. It's something he's been saying for a long time. 

During the campaign, Trump did talk about trans issues and I remember seeing the first time he did it. He basically said in a kind of ironic way: “Wow, you mention the trans issue, people go wild, I don't know why people care about this so much, but they do. Every time I mentioned it in my rally, they go insane.” So, being a politician wanting to win, he definitely did raise it and talk about it. But even when he saw the benefit, it was bringing it to him politically he never quite understood why this was something so important to other people, since it wasn't to him. Here's one example, at a rally in June of 2023:

 Video. Donald Trump. Newsmax. June 10, 2023.

He was basically mocking the audience that gave him a standing ovation. He said, yeah, “I talk about tax cuts and the economy, well, yeah, okay, I care about that a little. But if you mention trans…” I mean, the audience there in North Carolina where he was speaking, gave him a standing ovation, a prolonged applause. So Trump is obviously subtly, at least being confounded by, if not criticizing the audience for prioritizing this issue to such an extent because he does not. There you see in this article today where they basically ask him about whether he agrees that this is not the issue that we should be focused on. He said, yeah, this is in fact a tiny number of people. And he even went on to say, look, I mean, what the majority wants matters, but so do minority rights. And I want to make sure we're treating everybody justly and fairly not only was there no hostility to trans people, but there was also compassion and empathy towards them of the kind you saw in that clip going all the way back to 2016 – and I think that is who Trump consistently is. 

Another thing that I found very interesting in this article is that there's a lot of confusion among some people on what exactly Trump wants in Ukraine. In part because so many people whom he's chosen for very key positions in the foreign policy part of his administration are people who have been critical of Joe Biden for not having done more, not having done more and sooner, including allowing American long-range missiles to be used to bomb Russia, which is what Joe Biden just about three weeks ago announced he would do. And so the reporter asked him the following:

 … the question people want to know is, Would you abandon Ukraine?

And I had a meeting recently with a group of people from the government, where they come in and brief me, and I'm not speaking out of turn, the numbers of dead soldiers that have been killed in the last month are numbers that are staggering, both Russians and Ukrainians, and the amounts are fairly equal. You know, I know they like to say they weren't, but they're fairly equal, but the numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place are staggering. It's crazy what's taking place. It's crazy. I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia. Why are we doing that? We're just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done. (TIME. December 12, 2024)

I know there are people in both parties who disagree with Trump on this saying “I don't want to escalate this war,” “It's crazy to allow the Ukrainians to use American missiles and probably personnel to shoot deep inside Russia, bomb deep inside Russia. Why are we doing that?” He's speaking kind of from the heart in terms of what he really thinks. I've made this point actually once before, a couple of months ago when I was on Fox, I think it was with Laura Ingraham. She had played a clip of Trump talking about the war in Ukraine and he was basically saying what he said there, which was like “this war has ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings, young people. What is the point of this, the sense of all this bloodshed?” And I remarked that it's very rare to hear a politician talking about war in that way. That is the only way, or at least the primary way to talk about war. That is war. It's spilling blood, it's ending people's lives, it's extinguishing their existence – young people who don't even want to be in the war, and don't know why they're there. It doesn't mean war is always unjustified. It means that one of the reasons why it should be an absolute last resort, only done when absolutely necessary, which is not the case for this war is because, as he often puts it, so many people are bleeding and dying and losing their lives and it's tragic. Most people in Washington in both parties talk about it as a geostrategic issue. “We can't let Russia expand.” They almost never talk about the human cost of war, in part because it doesn't really come to American soil. We haven't had a war where people are drafted since Vietnam. And so most people in the United States see war as kind of a game, as an abstract issue. It's not fought on our soil, and it's not fought with most of their families. But when Trump talks about it, he talks about it always in this very humanistic way, which is why I also do believe that, at least to some extent, there's authenticity to his desire to avoid war. Along with, as I talked about before, what is an obvious fear of nuclear weapons, which he talks about a lot. 

One of the reasons why this was so interesting – that he so adamantly said he opposes the use of long-range missiles in Ukraine – is that a lot of people who are going to be in his cabinet and who are supporters of his have said the exact opposite. Just a couple of weeks ago, General Keith Kellogg was on Fox News, and here's what he had to say on that same exact issue. 

Video. Keith Kellogg. Fox News. November 27, 2024.

That's Trump’s former national security adviser and that is the representative view of the establishment wing of the Republican Party, people like Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik and others whom he's chosen, whose criticism of the Biden policy toward Ukraine is not that we've gotten too involved, that we've fueled that war, that we've risked escalation too much, but that we haven't done it enough. And so, for Trump to just come out and say “This is crazy, to send that kind of missiles there,” I think is indicative of why I say we need to wait to see what the Trump administration is and not judge based on the people he's choosing because it seems a very engaged Trump, a very determined Trump to make sure that this time his policies are the ones who end up shaping his administration and not people who are supposed to work for him. 

TIME Magazine also asked Trump about the war in Israel and Gaza and here's what Trump had to say about that. 

You mentioned the Palestinian people. In your first term, your administration put forward the most comprehensive plan for a two-state solution in a long time. Do you still support that plan?

I support a plan of peace, and it can take different forms.

Do you still support a two-state solution?

I support whatever solution we can do to get peace. There are other ideas other than two states, but I support whatever, whatever is necessary to get not just peace, but a lasting peace.

The real question at the heart of this, sir, is, do you want to get a two-state deal done, outlined in your Peace to Prosperity deal that you put forward, or are you willing to let Israel annex the West Bank?

So what I want is a deal where there's going to be peace and where the killing stops.

Would you tell Israel—that Bibi tried last time and you stopped him. Would you do it again this time? 

We’ll see what happens. Yeah, I did. I stopped him.

Do you trust Netanyahu?

I don’t trust anybody. 

 (TIME. December 12, 2024)

That is not the answer that most of the people who are working for Trump, whom he's chosen, would give. None of them is saying, in fact, oh yeah, we want peace. They're saying we want to unleash the Israelis even further and we'll see what happens in the administration. That's the area where I am least optimistic and hopeful, given the people who funded Trump's campaign and who he surrounded himself with. But I do think Trump prides himself on ending wars. And there again you're seeing his view that the priority has to be ending wars. He has no reason at this point, unlike two months ago, to say things he doesn't believe because he's never going to face the electorate again. 

When Trump was on “Meet the Press,” one of the issues he was asked about was whether he would allow RFK Jr. to ban childhood vaccines, or to otherwise codify the idea that vaccines cause autism and here's what Trump said about that. 

Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. December 8, 2024.

So, here he's saying, look, I'm not asserting that childhood vaccines cause autism, but I do want to know why autism has skyrocketed. She keeps saying scientists say it's because we identify it better as if he's just supposed to swallow that and say, well, there's no longer any need to research, like, do all scientists think that? Is it possible scientists are wrong like they were in so many instances with COVID? And this is a very, again, reasonable, non-dogmatic way of looking at it. I want to study these causes. I want to work with drug companies. If somebody wants to ban all toddler vaccines like the polio one, that's going to be pretty difficult for them to get me to do. So, again, you're seeing this kind of image of Trump that if you were to believe what you've been hearing about him for the last year, you would not recognize this person. 

Here's one particularly good example. I think this not only surprised a lot of his supporters but even angered them. He was asked about whether he would really intend to deport every single person illegally in the country, all 11 million, including the so-called Dreamers, the people who came here very, very young, who have studied here, who went to school here, who have integrated into the society. She asked him, would you even deport them? And here's what he said about that. 

Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. December 8, 2024.

So again, here's the person we were supposed to believe hates all Brown people, wants them all extinguished and wants them gone and sent to concentration camps and here he's asked about dreamers – and again, I know this made a lot of supporters of Donald Trump angry, who don't think anyone in the country, including Dreamers, should be able to stay – and he said, “Yeah, I want them to stay. Of course they have to stay. We need to get something worked out.” He even criticized Joe Biden and the Democrats, for not having done it when they had full power. 

I have to say this again: all of this is very cogent. Do you see how easy it is to understand, to listen to him, to follow the logical train of thought that he is asking us to travel with him on? It's a very relaxed Trump. It's not that hyper-combative defense of Trump. And again, I think that comes from the security of having just won an election that nobody can challenge the legitimacy of. Remember when he ran in 2016, it was instantly delegitimized as the byproduct of Russian interference. No one could do that this time, and so he's just extremely secure when he's talking to anybody and that makes him, I think, a more effective communicator and a more effective speaker. I know I'm being pretty positive and I'm praising a lot of aspects of what I see of Trump and this is just what I'm seeing and I'm showing you the reasons. 

One of the superpowers of Trump has always been that he is extremely funny and so often the things he said that were funny and clearly intended as jokes, the media just could not comprehend or intend it humorously. A lot of times they purposely distorted it, other times they simply were confused. I think the time that I really became radicalized when it came to media lying about not just Russiagate but Trump in 2016 was that time he stood at a press conference and was asked about Russia – they were obsessed with Russia and Russian hacking into the DNC – and he said, “I don't know about that, but Russia, if you're listening, maybe you can find Hillary Clinton's deleted emails, the ones that she had deleted.” Trump was obviously making a joke. Hey, you want to know about Russian hacking? Maybe the Russians can find Hillary Clinton's emails! And they decided to pretend that Trump was standing up in front of the world and earnestly placing a request to the Kremlin about what they should go hack. And they took that as proof that he obviously was in collusion with Putin in the Kremlin since he was specifically requesting that they go hack in a way that was politically advantageous for him. The stupidity of this was so self-evident. If Trump was in collusion with the Kremlin, why would he stand in front of cameras and submit his hacking requests to them? It was such an obvious joke and they decided to take it seriously and it made them look like idiots – like deranged, hysterical idiots. 

Trump is still funny. And I want to show you this one clip just to underscore that while he does seem to be sort of more sober and serious communicator, it's also the case that he has retained that, especially that kind of bitter, sardonic humor that comes from certain kinds of resentments. Here's what he said when he talked about the first debate he did with Joe Biden. 

Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. December 8, 2024.

So, he says, yeah, I mean, it's one thing to debate one person, just Joe Biden. That's pretty easy, he said, but to debate three people, actually that's pretty easy too, to be honest. 

Again, I think that I don't have any reason to believe this is a contrived Trump. What is most striking to me is the engagement and focus and confidence he shows now, because I think that's what was missing more than anything in the first term. I don't think he was that focused, he was not engaged, he was more focused on the vendettas he had, with Russiagate and the like, and he just allowed all these other people to do policy in a way that contradicted not only what he ran on, but what I think is his worldview. 

I am still skeptical of whether that will change in the second term, despite how many people close to Trump insist it will, that he's aware of that, that they're aware that that's the priority. But this Trump, someone very clearly focused on policy, speaking about it in an informed way, feeling strongly about it, but not so strongly that it becomes just this inflexible obsession, but still not compromising on the core worldview. That's a Trump that I think has the best chance to correct that fundamental problem that happened in his first administration when he simply didn't know enough or cared enough, wasn't competent enough and was more focused on criticisms of himself. This Trump, I think, has the best chance of actually being a Trump that can align his actual worldview and ideology, regardless of whether it appeared in the campaign, with what administration policy actually is. It remains to be seen, but this is what we have to go on. And I think it's very interesting how he appeared in both interviews. 

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The Weekly Update
From December 9th to December 13th

It’s Monday, People! Have You No Reason?

As we begin our final week before the end-of-year holiday(s), we understand that some of you were not able to tune in to all of last week’s episodes, and so we’re back with another Weekly Update to give you every link to all of Glenn’s best moments from Monday to Friday. This week, he made a massive (literally larger-than-life) appearance in New York. Let’s start updating!

Daily Updates

MONDAY: Rise, Fall, and All You Need to Know About Syria

In this episode, we discussed…

  1. How the West talks about repression in Syria;

  2. Whether Mohammad al-Jolani is a terrorist or noble rebel;

  3. U.S. actions in Syria with Aaron Maté;

TUESDAY: Scott Horton Debates Niall Ferguson on Ukraine

In this episode, we showed…

  1. Our partnered feature of Scott Horton’s debate with historian Niall Ferguson;

WEDNESDAY: A Little Bit of Reason

Glenn appeared virtually for a debate on presidential immunity in New York — and he crushed it! Here were the results from the event’s official page, with Glenn taking the negative (“No”) on the following resolution: 

Resolution:

Presidential immunity for official acts is a key factor in the proper functioning of the U.S. government's executive branch.

AD_4nXfKEWXemlr8t-RRA01T6i3ZfhOAzmx3OAsMoeAuGVk9xs8JcI-PMbAZSyEH-vP5eKnzfR0PR0UW_mik-4RiKZPhk3XhGbck36FMFJ1VYdcUNmFn3LyF4vkN_MA34QcZx3aeZO03Gw?key=sAb1SlIwCeiRRHTUAGxRy4gS

THURSDAY: Trump’s Interviews, CNN in Syria, and Luigi Mangione

In this episode, we talked about…

  1. How Trump has seemingly changed in more recent interviews;

  2. Why CNN’s Syrian rescue deserves a degree of skepticism;

  3. If anyone actually opposes all types of Luigi-style vigilantism;

FRIDAY: Iran, Rumble, and the Story of Pulo

In this episode, we examined…

  1. D.C. drumming up more unfounded fears about Iran;

  2. The New York Times attacking Rumble, while declining to mention this show;

  3. System Pupdate: Pulo’s Story

About those live question submissions:

Stay tuned — and tune in LIVE! In the near future, we’re debuting a feature that allows you, should you choose, to send videos or call in live to the team for our Locals after-show. 

That’s it for this edition of the Weekly Update! 

We’ll see you next week…

“Though this Weekly Update is done, the best is yet to come.”

— Frank Sinatra, in spirit.

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