Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Steve Bannon's Contempt Charges Reveal Historic Double Standard; Interview with RFK Jr.'s Running Mate Nicole Shanahan on the 2024 Election and More
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June 08, 2024
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Good evening. It's Thursday, June 6. 

Tonight: Steve Bannon, one of President Trump's top White House advisers in the first part of his presidency and currently one of his closest and most important allies, was ordered to surrender to a federal prison on July 1, three weeks from now. Bannon had been out on bail pending an appeal of his 2022 conviction on charges of refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena that ordered him to testify about the events of January 6; he had a variety of legal arguments as to why he was not required to do that. Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison by a court that rejected those defenses and was allowed to be out on bail pending appeal. The appellate court rejected his appeal, and now the judge has ordered him to surrender to prison, even though he has more appeals left. 

In addition to President Trump himself, who was just convicted of 34 felonies on obviously dubious and – no pun intended – trumped-up charges – Bannon is not the first top Trump aide to be jailed for alleged violations of a congressional subpoena. In March of this year, President Trump's trade advisor, Peter Navarro, reported to a federal prison to serve a four-month sentence on similar charges. And, of course, a large group of key Trump White House officials and other allies, including General Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and many others have also been convicted and imprisoned, or at least accused and convicted of crimes, all of which is unprecedented in all of American history. 

Indeed, Congress often issued subpoenas to Washington officials that are simply ignored or violated, in one way or the other, where these officials concoct excuses as to why they don't have to appear, that this conflict between the executive branch on the one hand and Congress on the other, is a central part of our system. It's been happening for decades if not centuries, and almost never do those events result in anything close to what has been done to Peter Navarro and now to Steve Bannon. We'll go through the relevant history to illustrate how, yet again, the Biden DOJ and Democratic prosecutors are so transparently weaponizing the legal system and judicial system against their political enemies for partisan ends. 

In general – as I learned firsthand when I started writing about politics in the second term of the Bush administration, and then into the Obama administration where there was a lot of talk at the time about the potential that Obama would prosecute Bush officials and CIA officials for committing crimes like torture, kidnapping and illegal domestic spying – the consensus in Washington politics and media – believe me, has long been for decades – that only banana republics prosecute their political enemies and prosecute their prior administration. I never agreed with that consensus. Indeed, I wrote countless articles against it and even a 2011 book arguing against it and titled “With Liberty and Justice for Some,” but these prosecutions of Trump and his allies do not represent an abandonment of that rotted Washington rule. If it did, I would be cheering for it. Like so many other things, it represents merely a temporary suspension of this Washington rule for one and only one political official named Donald Trump. 

Then: We will speak to Nicole Shanahan, now officially the vice presidential running mate of RFK, Jr. If polls hold up at all, that independent ticket will be one of the most successful independent presidential candidates in decades. Bobby Kennedy’s choice for a running mate baffled a lot of people. While Shanahan is reasonably well known in Silicon Valley – in part for accumulating a net worth estimated at $1 billion, largely, but not entirely, as a result of her marriage to one of the world's richest billionaires, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and in part due to her own accomplishments, an initiatives – very few American citizens had ever heard of Shanahan and know very little about her, in large part because she never held elected office of any kind. 

That does not mean that she has been uninterested in politics. She has indeed donated a large amount of money, primarily, if not exclusively, to Democratic Party candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg and the 2020 campaign of Joe Biden, as well as more left-wing candidates and causes. That, of course, raises a lot of questions about her current political views (which can reasonably change for a lot of people), her past political trajectory, and the role of big money in our politics. We'll talk to her about that, as well as her views on current U.S.-financed wars in Ukraine and Israel, the issue of online censorship, whistleblowers, and much more. 

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


 

After I first began writing about politics, in late 2005, within the next couple of years, one of the issues I talked about most often, was how there was a two-tiered justice system in the United States, where financial leaders, and especially political elites, are largely immunized from the rule of law. Oftentimes, this was taking place in the controversy over many obvious illegal programs that the Bush and Cheney administration had adopted in the name of the War on Terror, torturing detainees, kidnaping those people off the streets of Europe and sending them with no due process to Syria or Egypt to be tortured, or spying on American citizens without the warrants required by law. These were all crimes. And when Barack Obama ran in 2008, he was often asked whether he believed that those crimes should be prosecuted. He always gave the same answer, which is “Absolutely. Nobody's above the law and one of the first things I'm going to do when I win is direct my attorney general to investigate whether crimes were committed there and whether or not there should be prosecutions.” And yet, the minute he got into office, the media started haranguing him, that you don't go and prosecute your political adversaries in the United States, you don't go and prosecute prior administrations. This is only done in banana republics, not in the United States. 

My argument always was: well, what if they actually did commit crimes? What if the prior administration actually committed crimes? What if your political adversaries committed crimes? Are they supposed to be exempt from the same rule of law that applies to all other citizens? If this were a case where the consensus that has long existed in Washington by the media and politicians – that you don't go and prosecute your political adversaries or the prior administration – if that were being really lifted permanently because journalism and politics realized that were wrong, I'd be the first to applaud. That's not what's happening here.

Another issue that I've long talked about is how journalism is corrupt when it does nothing more than, say, “The Republicans say this, the Democrats say this, and it's not up for us to decide. We're just going to report what officials say in the U.S. government. We're not going to tell you if it's true or false.” And so, when the media started after Trump saying, “oh, we're going to start calling him a liar all the time,” I would also be cheering if it really meant an abandonment of that kind of lazy journalism, that kind of corrupting journalism where you don't investigate what powerful people claim, you just report it and mimic it and then leave it at that. But again, this practice is only for Trump. You will never hear of them saying those kinds of things about Joe Biden or Democratic Party officials or anyone else. So, this isn't a form of progress or evolution in how we understand things. This is obviously the political persecution and the judicial and legal persecution of Trump and his closest allies, not in the name of equal justice for all, but solely in the name of weaponizing the judicial system against a political movement that they regard with great fear that they will do anything to stop, including abusing the legal system.

From The Wall Street Journal earlier today on the Steve Bannon case:

 

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A federal judge Thursday ordered Steve Bannon to surrender by July 1 to serve a four-month prison sentence for defying the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack and former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

In a unanimous decision last month, a three-judge appeals court panel rejected Bannon’s arguments that his conviction wasn’t valid because he was following his lawyer’s advice when he refused to comply with a House subpoena demanding documents and testimony. The panel said Bannon’s advice-of-counsel defense wasn’t valid in contempt-of-Congress cases and would impede the legislature’s investigative authority.

Bannon was the first of two former Trump White House officials to face prosecution for defying the House panel. A year after Bannon’s conviction, former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro was found guilty of defying the committee and later sentenced to four months in prison. Both cases stemmed from House referrals recommending that the Justice Department bring prosecutions. (The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2024)

 

Someone who hasn't looked at these issues for very long might say, well, if Congress issues a subpoena, you're legally required to obey it. If you don't obey it, or you don't give the documents that they asked for and the testimony that they demand, truthfully, you will be held in contempt of Congress, and that is a crime. The problem is that there is a long history of the executive branch refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas on the grounds that they have the power as the executive branch - which is supposed to be separate from the legislative power - that they have, rights as the executive branch not to turn over information or appear to testify when a co-equal branch, which is Congress, demands their appearance. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro are by far not the first people who were in the executive branch to give a middle finger to Congress when they've issued a subpoena and yet you'd be hard-pressed to find another case where people explicitly were held in contempt of congressional subpoenas, but who were referred to the Justice Department and/or then prosecuted by the Justice Department for it. 

Here, this is a case where the Biden Justice Department took a referral from a Democratic-run committee, the January 6 committee that was created under Nancy Pelosi's speakership, a committee where for the first time in the history of our country, the House speaker rejected the members that the minority, the Republicans, wanted to put on that committee, the first time in history that a House speaker refused to impanel the members of Congress indicated as members of that committee by the House minority leader and instead, as a result, no Republicans agreed to serve on that committee in protest, except for two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who obviously are far more aligned with the Democratic Party when it comes to January 6. So, in effect, it was a full partisan panel and so the Democrats in Congress referred these contempt citations to the Biden Justice Department, which in turn decided to prosecute – something almost unprecedented in our history. 

Let me give you a few similar cases to understand what a complete deviation this is from how things have typically been done in Washington. Here, from CNN, in February 2008, during the Bush administration. 


U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey Friday said he will not ask a federal grand jury to investigate whether two top Bush administration officials should be prosecuted for contempt of Congress.

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Thursday asked Mukasey to look into whether White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers committed contempt of Congress in the investigation of the 2006 firings of several U.S. attorneys.

Earlier this month, the House voted to find Bolten and Miers in contempt of Congress and pursue charges against them.

The White House argues that forcing the aides to testify would violate the Constitution's separation of powers. (CNN, February 29, 2008)

 

And that has been the longstanding view in Washington, that if Congress orders a private citizen to appear for a legitimate investigation, there are all kinds of limits on what Congress is permitted to investigate. And I think it's extremely questionable whether or not they had the authority to investigate private citizens for January 6, because in general, the only two types of investigations that Congress is permitted to initiate are one, to exercise oversight over the executive branch, and number two, to hold hearings to decide what legislation they want to pass. So, if they're, for example, thinking about legislation related to a certain industry, you call the people in that industry, you call the activists against that industry, and you hear from all the sides, and then you decide what kind of legislation is appropriate. That's one example of when Congress can convene investigative hearings. The other is solely to investigate executive branch officials, it's never to investigate private citizens. And yet, that's exactly what the January 6 committee here did. Those precedents saying that Congress can investigate private citizens for their political views came out of the McCarthy hearings when the Supreme Court – twice – in the 1950s, told Congress that they were vastly exceeding the scope of their investigative powers by trying to investigate and harass people for their political views. And that's exactly what the January 6 Committee did. But even leaving all that partisanship and all that precedent aside, there have been so many other cases where Congress declared a certain executive official to be in contempt of Congress, and it never went to the point where Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro's cases have gone.

 

Here from CBS News, in June 2012, another example:

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One day after the House voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to provide documents relating to the Fast and Furious gunwalking program […] 

 

The White House says Eric Holder, the Obama attorney general, won't be prosecuted for contempt. Many of you may not even remember what that was, but it was a scandal involving the Justice Department whether they were permitting all kinds of serious weapons to come in through the Mexican border through illegal immigration. And the Congress was investigating that Eric Holder refused to turn over documents the House held him in contempt.

White House spokesperson Jay Carney said the criminal prosecution of the contempt charges will not move forward. He said the president's assertion of executive privilege over the related documents makes the matter moot.

In a letter sent to the House Speaker John Boehner, Deputy Attorney General James Cole confirmed that Justice would not move forward with contempt prosecution. (CBS News, June 29, 2012)

 

I'll take you all the way back to 1983, during the first term of the Reagan administration, where you can see just how long standing this  tradition is that has not resulted in these kinds of prosecutions. From The New York Times, March 1983. 



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There you see the headline, the attorney general that was Ronald Reagan's attorney general, William French Smith, defends action by the Justice Department in the contempt case.

 

Under sharp questioning today by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William French Smith repeatedly maintained that there was no way to prevent conflicts between the executive and legislative branches like the battle over access to Environmental Protection Agency documents.

 

So Congress was trying to get documents to investigate what the Reagan administration was doing with the Environmental Protection Agency, and EPA officials and others refused to hand them over, claiming that that was the executive prerogative to formulate policy, and Congress had no right to intrude. When William Smith went before Congress and they grilled him on why he wasn't prosecuting them and why the Justice Department was, he said,

 

There is ''built-in conflict'' and tension between the branches, Mr. Smith asserted, adding, ''As long as we have this system of government, I don't see how we can avoid the kind of problem we've had here.''

 

…several committee members, expressing dissatisfaction with Mr. Smith's responses, demanded a guarantee that the House would not be ignored the next time it cited an official in the executive branch for contempt and sought to have the case prosecuted.

 

The dispute involves the Justice Department's action in the contempt case against the head of the environmental agency, Anne McGill Burford, who was cited for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents. 

 

These are all causing very ancient memories to return from an old political scandal. But this really was the same conflict between the EPA and Congress. The EPA director, Anne Burford, was highly controversial. She was extremely conservative and put in charge of the EPA, was a very pro-industry anti-environmentalist. The House wanted to investigate her and she refused to turn over documents and the Reagan Justice Department refused to prosecute her for it.

 

Representative Peter W. Rodino Jr., the New Jersey Democrat who is chairman of the committee, told Mr. Smith that by law, the United States Attorney had a ''mandatory'' duty to present the contempt case to a grand jury. But he suggested that the department seemed to believe it was free to make its own decision on whether to prosecute. (The New York Times, March 16, 1983)

 

So, just look at how many cases involving Republican and Democratic administrations, where members of the executive branch or people close to the president, refused to turn over information demanded by subpoena to congressional committees who were trying to investigate the executive branch. Typically, because of this notion that the two branches are co-equal, one is not in charge of the other, Nancy Pelosi can't pick up the phone and order Donald Trump to appear before Congress or order his White House chief of staff to appear before Congress. That would make the Congress supreme and not a co-equal branch. And that's why those two branches of government are constantly fighting with one another over when they have to turn over documents. It's an inherent and natural part of our system that has often been resolved politically, but rarely with prosecutions, even when, as in the case of Eric Holder and other instances, Congress declared that official in contempt of Congress, and referred the contempt charges to the Justice Department. 

There's just no denying that these are long-standing precedents in Washington, for better or for worse. Again, I'm against a lot of them, I'd be the first one to party if they were really undone but that's not what's happening here. This is a one-time-only suspension of these long-standing rules, not an abandonment of them, in the name of criminalizing the Trump movement and doing everything to sabotage Donald Trump's attempt to return to office. 

As I suggested at the start, this ethos in Washington was a major part of my journalism for the first ten years. It was a topic on which I focused incessantly, and that was because I had started writing about the War on Terror, and I began to see that a lot of what was being done by the Bush and Cheney administration and the neocons who ran the relevant agencies was not just misguided or dangerous or destructive but was illegal, criminal. That definitely included the way the Bush administration was spying on American citizens without the warrants required by law, something that Congress retroactively legalized in 2008 and that became the FISA  law that now gets renewed all the time and that just got recently renewed to allow spying on American citizens with no warrants but, at the time, it was illegal and criminal. The same is true for torturing detainees, which had always been a crime in the United States, kidnapping with no due process and other similar ones as well. And so every time I was arguing that these were crimes and that they should be prosecuted, what I always heard from longtime journalists and media and the consensus in Washington was that, well, it doesn't really matter if those acts are illegal or not, because here in Washington, we don't prosecute top-level political officials for the acts they've undertaken as part of their executive branch duties. That only happens in Banana Republics. That's called criminalizing policy differences or criminalizing legal disputes between the two branches and you just don't do that, otherwise, you can have a never-ending cycle of retribution where one party is putting the other in prison the minute it gets hold of the levers of the Justice Department. 

One of the first debates I ever had with a classic member of the corporate media was when NBC News’s Chuck Todd, went on the air and basically scoffed at the idea – and this is in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration – that there should be any investigations at all, criminal investigations, of Bush officials or what Bush officials did in the past, CIA officials did, or the NSA did, because this is a distraction, he said. It doesn't really matter. It's not the stuff that Obama should be doing. He should be caring about appearing as a centrist, those sorts of things. In Washington, we just simply don't prosecute prior administrations, and I can't tell you how many columns like that were written, how many TV pundits went on cable news and said that it was the overwhelming consensus. I can't think of anyone in corporate media who believed that President Obama should investigate or prosecute prior acts in the Bush administration. In fact, so intense was the media pressure on Obama, that despite promising repeatedly in the 2008 campaign that he would give it to his attorney general with the instructions to look into it, to criminally investigate it, and to prosecute if there were reasonable grounds for believing crimes were committed, saying, I'm not going to be involved, this is a legal question, nobody's above the law, I'll ask my attorney general to look at it. Two months into office, Obama announced that he was not going to allow any prosecutions of anyone in the prior administration, including in the CIA, for any of these crimes. Pronouncing “It's more important that we look forward than backward,” which never made any sense on its own terms, because all criminal prosecutions, by definition, require looking backward. By definition, their acts were undertaken in the past. When it comes to the prior administration, we're going to adopt the view that we don't look backward, we only look forward for the good of the country or whatever, then it is a complete immunity or exemption for politicians from being prosecuted by the law in the same way that ordinary American citizens are prosecuted. And I was indignant about this. I wrote article after article. I wrote, as I said, the 2011 book arguing against this mindset. 

In 2009, I had a big enough platform that I really couldn't be ignored any longer by people in the corporate media, and so I wrote an article about Chuck Todd's comments and heavily criticized him, and he said, hey, I wish you had talked to me before. And I said, well, I don't think I have the obligation. I'm just criticizing your public remarks. But I'd love to engage you on this. And why don't you come on and we'll do a podcast, and I can ask you questions and you can ask me questions and we'll debate this issue. 

 

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And here you see The Huffington Post, in August 2009, reporting on that debate. I'm just going to give you one passage from this discussion that I had with him to illustrate to you how adamant these people were that we cannot have prosecutions of our political adversaries or our past administrations. 

 

GG: Let me ask you about that, then. If a president can find, as a president always will be able to find, some low-level functionary in the Justice Department -- a John Yoo -- to write a memo authorizing whatever it is the president wants to do, and to say that it's legal, then you think the president ought to be immune from prosecution whenever he breaks the law, as long as he has a permission slip from the Justice Department? I mean, that's the argument that's being made. Don't you think that's extremely dangerous?

 

CT: That could be dangerous, but let me tell you this: Is it healthy for our reputation around the world - and this I think is that we have TO do what other countries do more often than not, so-called democracies that struggle with their democracy, and sit there and always PUT the previous administration on trial - you don't think that we start having retributions on this going forward?

 

Look, I am no way excusing torture. I'm not excusing torture, and I bristle at the attack when it comes on this specific issue. But I think the political reality in this, and, I understand where you're coming from, you're just saying, just because something's politically tough doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. That's, I don't disagree with you from 30,000 feet. And that is an idealistic view of this thing. Then you have the realistic view of how this town works, and what would happen, and is it good for our reputation around the world if we're essentially putting on trial the previous administration? We would look at another country doing that, and say, geez, boy, this is — (The Huffington Post, August 17, 2009)

 

And the reason I was so interested in having this conversation with Chuck Todd is not because he was some aberrational voice in the U.S. media. Just look at this ethos here: “the hardcore reality,” “if you know how Washington works” as you go around prosecuting your political opponents, people in the other party, people from the prior administration,” this is what they had been saying for decades – for decades. It's how they excuse the pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford, even though the evidence was overwhelming that you could have convicted Richard Nixon of crimes the way you did with many of his top aides, all of whom got pardoned. During the Reagan administration, there was an Iran-Contra scandal that involved highly likely criminality on the part of Reagan officials who wanted to fund the Contras in a civil war in Nicaragua, even though Congress had passed a law saying any funding of the Contras in Nicaragua is illegal and hereby banned. The executive branch ignored that law, but they couldn't get funds from Congress. So, what they did was they sold highly sophisticated missiles and other weapons to Iran, got the cash at the White House in secret accounts, and then sent that money secretly to fund the Contras, even though Congress had said, you can't. A lot of the top officials in the Reagan administration were at risk of being prosecuted, including George Bush, the then-vice president. And the minute George Bush got elected, the first thing he did was issue a pardon of Caspar Weinberger and every other Reagan administration official, and most people in the media applauded that and said, “Yeah, we can't be distracted by these kinds of prosecutions.” 

We can't be prosecuting people in Washington. It's too much of a distraction. It makes us seem like a banana republic. This has been the argument for so long. And if I really believed that this was finally being lifted, and the idea was, look, we're going to prosecute people, no matter how powerful they are in Washington, any time they break the law, I would be the happiest person. I'd be the first one to stand up and cheer. But it's so obvious that's not what's happening. There's no remorse or regret about how this was done previously. The minute Trump is out of the scene, they're going to return right again to this rule. It's a one-time exception only, as so many things are, for abusing and weaponizing the justice system against one person and one person only, and that is Donald Trump. 

 




Nicole Shanahan is in many respects a classic American success story. She grew up in poverty, worked her way through college and Law School, including by working in various, hourly jobs like a maid and a paralegal, and is now a 38-year-old highly respected lawyer in Silicon Valley. She's also one of the richest women in the world, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion that is largely, though not entirely, a result of her marriage to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. But most notable, she is now the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. If polls are even remotely correct, they will likely be the most significant independent presidential candidacy in many years. 

Many things made Shanahan's choice as vice presidential candidate somewhat notable, including the fact that she had never held political office previously. But that is also true of the man who leads the ticket, RFK, Jr. and was also true of someone named Donald Trump before his 2016 victory. Whatever else is true, she's an extremely interesting person with a very rich and I would say vintage American life. And she also has a robust political trajectory, and we are delighted to welcome her tonight to System Update. 


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

 

Nicole Shanahan: Thanks for having me, Glenn. And just a quick correction: my mom was a maid. But my first job was busing tables, and I just wanted to. 

 

G. Greenwald: I apologize for that, but that story is true, that you did grow up without any advantages, essentially in poverty, had to work your way through college and Law School and built up what you became, which I think everybody can and should respect. Let me start by asking you about just a couple of, I think, crucial issues, including the two wars that our country is currently financing, arming and supporting. The first one is in Ukraine. When I had RFK, Jr. on my show several months ago, we spent a lot of time talking about his view on that war. And since then, the war has gotten even worse, from the perspective of the Ukrainians. I think it's a consensus that the Ukrainian military is in deep trouble, that the Russians are advancing, and that the idea that they could ever expel Russian troops from all of Ukraine is a pipe dream that will never happen. Do you support the ongoing financing by the U.S. government of the war in Ukraine? And if not, what do you think should be done to try and bring about a resolution? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: Well, first of all, this war should have never happened. The United States should have never egged it on as it has. The U.S. has been involved in Ukrainian affairs for decades now. We've been involved in their elections and have been pushing certain kinds of candidates that have been anti-Russia and against normalization of trade and other relationships with Russia. And so the moment that we're in right now, watching Ukrainian lives lost at incredible rates, young men getting dragged into duty who have no interest in fighting and risking their lives, you have the will of the people wanting peace with Russia in this moment. I was devastated when the foreign aid bill went out. Sending an additional, I believe it was $70 billion, to finance this war. At this moment, I think that it is imperative for the United States to understand what is going on. The United States has intentionally aggravated a situation and has continued to escalate it. It is looking at deploying troops. It has allowed the Ukrainian military to use U.S., military supplies. I mean, every day there's a new escalation. That is taking us to a point of a World War III scale risk for our people. And we need to think about what our job is right now. And our job is to take care of this country and not escalate foreign wars. 

 

G. Greenwald: Concerning that last argument that our job as a country, or the government's duty – it seems so basic, but for whatever reason, it has to be debated because so often it's not done – the U.S. government's primary duty is, as you said, to take care of our citizens here at home. Our citizens are suffering. Communities are being ravaged by all kinds of pathologies. People are in economic difficulty. And so, as you say, why should we be sending $60 billion to Ukraine to fuel a highly futile war? I want to know whether you apply that same line of thinking to the billions and billions of dollars that we're sending to Israel to finance and arm its war against Gaza, one that has resulted in more civilian casualties by a long distance than the one in Ukraine. 

 

Nicole Shanahan: I think that the U.S. sending funds to Israel to support the Iron Dome makes a lot of sense. I've supported that in the past. I think, historically, it's been a great way to show support for the state of Israel. I believe October 7 was one of the worst terrorist attacks I've witnessed in my lifetime and might be the worst terrorist attack I will witness in my lifetime. And I do think a response was warranted. I think that when I think about Israel participating in wars of the past and the role that the United States played, you know, I often think of leadership like Golda Meir, who ended the Yom Kippur War, in about a month, and she was fighting on multiple fronts, against multiple armies. And what I see right now happening on the ground in Gaza is devastating. I think there are arguments to be made that we've long past the point of a cease-fire. I think there are lots of arguments to be made that Israel should be showing more restraint. You know, Bobby and I, this is one of the areas that we have the most heated debate. And I think that there's an argument that the United States should have delivered the last aid package to Israel with greater affirmation as to how that money would be spent. We're in a moment right now that I really don't think we should have been in. And you have to go back historically to really look at the United States' involvement in the Middle East. There's a direct line between our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and Hamas. Israel thinks that - and many others do as well - that a two-state system is not possible in a world in which Hamas is running Gaza. And I tend to agree with that. But is it possible or likely that the Israeli military is going to be successful in destroying Hamas in totality, at this moment? I don't think so. And I think that was actually clear as early as February. And so I think that at this moment, the United States really needs to take responsibility for what it's done to arrive at this moment. And I do think that there needs to be greater coordination, greater levels of sophistication in how we're operating ourselves in the Middle East at this moment. 

 

G. Greenwald: So when you began, you started talking about funding the Iron Dome, which is a purely defensive system that prevents Israel from being attacked with rockets and other types of missiles, but we're not just funding that. We're, of course, funding all their offensive weapons. Most of the bombs being dropped on civilians in Gaza have been made in the USA and the whole world knows that. I guess what I'm wondering is if the advocates of U.S. financing of the war in Ukraine will say: “we're not helping Ukraine conquer territory and we're not helping Ukraine invade other countries either. It's basically like an iron dome. We're just giving them money to defend their country against aggression and invasion by the Russians.” What is the difference between Ukraine on the one hand and Israel on the other, in your view, when it comes to the question of whether we should be financing their wars? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: I think the primary difference is what is being asked for in these conflicts. So, if you look at Russia's history with Ukraine, what is being asked for is the normalization of the trade relationship between Ukrainian leadership and Russia. And tons of historical records show that Russia has been attempting to create a trade route and access point to the Black Sea. And there's a reasonableness there that I think that most people can objectively say this war could have been avoided. I think when you look at what's been going on in Israel and Gaza and you talk to Israelis, they've been fired at, by Hamas, for so many years, and you talk to the average Israeli who's in their 40s, and they've been now drafted into so many different wars. And October 7 is very different - and I'm just speaking morally. October 7 had a very different effect on the consciousness of humanity and I think that certainly, most people would agree that a response was necessary based on the October 7 attack. There was reprehensible behavior. But I think where the majority of people are in their consciousness at this moment as well is very much wishing for greater restraint from Israel, which has an incredibly sophisticated army compared to Hamas. And I think that given the complexity of the region - and, again, the U.S. has contributed a lot to exacerbating this complexity - there are fundamental differences between these two wars. But that being said, neither one needs to continue, as it has been currently, and there are paths to de-escalation available that this administration is fully and capable of executing right now. 

 

G. Greenwald: Let me just switch gears a little bit, when your selection as vice presidential candidate was announced, there was a lot of discourse suggesting or claiming that one of the reasons, if not the main reason for your selection was that you have a great ability to self-finance an independent campaign. I'm somebody who has long said that the way in which the two parties have constructed this kind of duopoly means that the only way you can succeed as an independent candidate is if you have something like a billionaire on the ticket who can fund the campaign. Nonetheless, I just want to understand, was that part of the conversation as part of the selection process, whether or not you were willing to donate money? How much money do you intend to donate to this campaign?

 

Nicole Shanahan: I can't give you an exact dollar amount. We're in June right now. June, historically for independent candidates, has been very challenging. That's usually when the other two parties really ramp up their PR and media spend and most of that media spend typically goes towards taking out the independent candidate first and then, you know, their opposing party candidate. And I am of the belief that this is an election unlike any other. We have a standing president running for reelection who is clearly showing signs of rapid decline. We have another president who has just recently been convicted of a felony. And we've got now an independent candidate who was the only outspoken public figure during a pandemic that was calling out the origins of a virus and calling out government officials and it’s clear that he was entirely correct. So, my involvement and I feel like my responsibility right now, being on this ticket is to first and foremost make sure he's on every single ballot. And I will contribute as much as it takes to make that a reality. 

 

G. Greenwald: I totally respect that and I understand that argument. And like I said, I'm somebody who in the past has said if you want to be an independent candidate, if you want to challenge the two parties, you know, unfortunately, the only way to do that is if you have somebody in the one or the other slots who basically is a billionaire and can self-finance the campaign to compete with the two parties because that's how they've constructed the system. I'm just wondering, though, when people look at your selection and our political system in general, which you have no role in creating, but the idea that very wealthy people obviously have a much bigger say than ordinary Americans in exerting power in Washington and how laws are passed. You've been a big donor for political candidates for quite some time, do you regard the role of big money in politics as a major problem for democracy, and if so, what kind of reforms would you support? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: I think it's a huge problem. I think Citizens United turned this country into a kleptocracy overnight. And I believe that individual donors should certainly have limits and that independents should be free to run without having to spend this kind of money. The ballot requirements that we've seen are arbitrary and ludicrous. Each state is different. Their requirements are crushing. We have an enormous legal team just to deal with that piece. The thing that has made me really excited is that I recently met with somebody at an organization called American Promise and they are going state by state to try to pass a constitutional amendment that would set contribution limits for both individuals and corporations. Twenty-two states have endorsed it, and it seems to be something that Americans want, by a large margin of the population. The grand majority of Americans want there to be limits, and I am one of them. 

 

G. Greenwald: You referenced earlier the recent conviction in the Manhattan courtroom of former president Donald Trump. Today, before speaking to you, I was talking about the order compelling Steve Bannon, the president's former top White House official, to surrender to federal prison on July 1 for contempt of Congress charges, a charge for which people are very rarely imprisoned. Do you see the prosecution of Trump on these specific charges, the one about the accounting irregularities for hush fund payments, and the other prosecutions of so many people around the Trump orbit as a vindication of the rule of law? Or do you think it's an example of Democrats and others in the establishment weaponizing the justice system to attack their political enemies? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: There's been evidence from both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party using the judicial system and the Department of Justice against political opponents. We have become so divided and polarized in this country that there is no branch of government that hasn't somehow been corrupted by these party lines. I think that they've both been guilty. You can point at many areas where Republicans have done similar things and Democrats have done similar. I mean, no greater example is what happened to President Trump. But the case itself, if you are just objectively looking at how the case was conducted, is a hush money trial that didn't have the correct jury instructions in the hands of the jury. And there were just so many things about it that make you really question the objectivity of the Justice Department at this moment. The Justice Department has always been the last resort. It's been that last layer of defense in protecting our civil liberties in this country, normalcy in this country, objectivity, and the rule of law. To have it be toyed with in this way, to have it be manipulated and distorted, I think is the number one thing. It's kind of the last straw for many people in this country; they feel that we've slipped into an autocratic environment where the rule of law is really no longer the rule of law but the rule of the parties. It's incredibly concerning on so many levels. And I think it has a ripple effect as well. 

 

G. Greenwald: So, I referenced earlier the history that you've had as a big dollar donor in politics, from what I can tell, maybe I'm wrong, but the overwhelming majority of your big dollar donations, if not all of them, have gone to Democratic Party candidates, including both kinds of mainstream centrist types like Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg, his presidential campaign, but also […]

 

Nicole Shanahan: And Marianne Williamson. In 2020.

 

G. Greenwald: I was about to say Marianne Williamson. You supported her, as well as some of the reform-minded prosecutors, including in San Francisco, which is a criminal justice reform cause often associated with the left - although Donald Trump was the first president to sign a criminal justice reform in a long time. Nonetheless, you were donating to classic Democrats. You were a registered member of the Democratic Party until this year when you were going to run as an independent. You alluded earlier to President Biden's obvious rapid decline in cognitive function and ability. But is that all that concerns you about Biden and the Democrats, or is there anything else or other things that have caused you to change your mind about the Democratic Party? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: To be completely honest with you, Biden's health is secondary to – and secondary by a long margin – the enormous corruption I've seen in the party. So, in 2020, I didn't support Biden. I supported Hillary but not with enthusiasm. But it was in 2020 that I realized that the Democratic primary had been completely broken. I knew that Bernie was likely to win the primary in 2016. In fact, I think he won. That was the first real big crack in the DNC that I saw. In 2020, it was truly, very obvious that there was no more Democratic primary. No one could run a fair shot at beating the central democratic dynastic line. And it was very clear that Biden was the only one who was going to get a shot at getting on the ticket. My experience, I mean, this would take hours and hours to unpack, but I've had such excruciatingly disappointing experiences with the leadership of the Democrats. I've heard things said to me and I've seen things done that are incredibly contradictory. They're really pathetic in terms of what the party cares about and prioritizes. There's been almost no interest in addressing the root causes of many of this country's biggest issues, including chronic disease and including budget adjustments that need to be made. They throw around money. They want to win at all costs. Once they win, they're not focused on the American people. They are focused on these auxiliary functions of government. And it's very clear that they have built up this enormous kleptocracy in our agencies. There was no way for me to be able to continue, to take any of it seriously. I couldn't support it anymore. And, you know, you said I've previously supported many progressive DAs. I've also recalled DAs as well that didn't do their jobs. The first I DA supported was actually a former police chief. And he did a pretty good job in San Francisco […]

 

G. Greenwald: That was George Gascón, right? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: George Gascón. Yes. A very much liked police officer. He ran on bringing balance to the system and communication and partnership between the DA's office and the police department. But he also wanted to create trust and make sure that there was no bias that could be called into question, and he wanted to make sure that the police department had a lot of integrity and trust. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I did think the donation to Marianne Williamson was interesting, in part because her major critique is aimed at least as much at the Democratic Party, as the Republican Party. She often sounds like more of an independent candidate criticizing both parties. A lot of times when people who become very disappointed in the Democratic Party come to see them as pathetic as you said – I empathize a lot with that trajectory – a lot of those people still in the back of their mind, believe that at the end of the day, Democrats are still a little bit better than the Republicans. In this case, I guess, especially under Donald Trump. Is that a view that you share - that if there were no independent candidate, if there were only Democrats or Republicans, that people should vote for the Democratic Party? Are you not prepared to say that one is better than the other at this point? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: I think that there is a clear uniparty and nothing made that more obvious than the way Congress came together in this last session. There is no way that I could swing over and support Donald Trump. I know too much about his record. He had a Raytheon lobbyist running the secretary of defense. He had his loyalists, which represented all kinds of corporate interests, fill his cabinet. He hasn't blinked twice about the fact that he was responsible for Operation Warp Speed had enabled Fauci very blindly to go ahead and conduct the pandemic response. He intentionally pulled the investigation on Pfizer. He's done so many things that, you know, that are just as pitiful as the Democratic Party has done. You know, I like Liberty Republicans. I think that if there's some future where the two-party system returns to any sense of sanity, I could see myself becoming a Liberty Republican alongside individuals like, you know, I think Thomas Massie has done great things for this country. I think that Ron Paul's done incredible things for this country. I think Rand Paul has been really fighting the good fight for this country. And then I also see some good progressives, you know, I think Dean Phillips, has done some very good and interesting things as well. So there are still signs that the two parties can be salvaged. I don't know that we will get there, though, if we just keep doing these huge swings. And, you know, my theory right now is that Trump is peaking, in large part, due to the help of the Democrats and the general understanding in America that the judicial system has been corrupted to support Democrats in this election by prosecuting Trump. But that backfired on them. He's raised over $100 million since the conviction. 

 

G. Greenwald: I just have a couple of more questions in the little bit of time that we have left. I want to respect your time. So, I have a lot of questions for you to come back on, but, for now, I want to ask you about this: since 2016, when there was this sort of trauma to the system of the establishment, Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton, but also Brexit, there's been this kind of systematic attempt to gain control over the kind of information and speech that is permitted to flow on the Internet. There have been governments around the world, including our own government and our intelligence agencies, who have created excuses to either censor the Internet directly or to coerce Big Tech platforms to do it for them. Usually, the justifications are things like, well, we have to combat disinformation as if the government can decree truth and falsity, or we have to combat hate speech or things that are some kind of a threat to our national security. Where do you fall in that debate? Do you believe that there are any reasons that the government or Big Tech should be censoring political speech or on the Internet, other than in obvious cases where crimes are being committed, like fraud or things like that, but when it comes to political speech, do you support the censorship or suppression of any of those views? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: I mean, you can't love this country and also support the censorship. I love this country very deeply. I love this country because of the Constitution. I, in part, went to Law School because of the fact that I believe so deeply in the power of the Constitution to protect individual liberties. And I believe these basic liberties, such as freedom of speech, are what make this country, the country that it is, a country of hope, a country of honor, a country of innovation, a country of living out one's dream. The censorship that has occurred since 2016, especially with the use of AI to censor speech automatically, and these large language models, which are programmed specifically to demarcate categories of speech that will be automatically banned, has been one of the reasons why – I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley right now – I have decided to rebel against Silicon Valley. Part of me joining Bobby Kennedy's ticket is this rebellion. Bobby Kennedy has been censored more than any political candidate in my lifetime that I'm aware of. And I have joined this ticket in part because I am an insider. I know how this happened. I saw it happen. I know why it's happened, and I know exactly how to unwind it. And if given the opportunity, I will on my first opportunity, go into these agencies and take out and disable all of these AI censors. I will also understand the exact points of, you know, government capture of the corporations and the Big Tech platforms. They have, you know, it's not just use or coerce. It's a combination of coercion and knowing and willful partnership. And I've seen it. 

 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. That is interesting that you kind of come from it with that perspective. And so much of the censorship is done by AI. 

All right. Last question. When I had Bobby Kennedy on my show, he said that one of the things he would support almost immediately was pardoning both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, both of whom have essentially been turned into dissidents for the crime of exposing the crimes of the secret part of our government, the U.S. Security State. Do you agree with that position? And more importantly, how do you see the dangers posed by that part of our government that has no democratic accountability, that works in complete secrecy, that's independent of any party change that we might vote for the CIA, the NSA? How do you see that part of the government? 

 

Nicole Shanahan: Ron Paul said in his libertarian convention speech that there was a coup when JFK was assassinated. And I don't think there's any candidate in history that is going to be able to unravel the shadow government more than Bobby Kennedy, Jr. can and will do. I am fully supportive of the need for that. I think that it is critical to reclaim this nation as a free and stable republic. Assange is a hero. And I think that what he has done through this broader cypherpunk movement is to protect the Internet, which is where most Americans, and especially young Americans, are living out their lives today. It is a forum of engagement, exchanging information, building companies and building coalitions. And if the Internet is not a free place, for people to be able to expose and have conversations about what is going on with their governments, then we've lost the most dominant speech we have, which is, you know, the speech that we have over digital platforms. So, I believe Assange is 100% a hero and it is so necessary. Trump had a chance to do it and he didn't. And I don't understand why he didn’t, because, to me, one of the most obvious and easy decisions he could have made was to pardon Assange. Snowden is a whistleblower. We are a country that has historically protected overseas whistleblowers. Why do we prosecute our own? It's incredibly hypocritical. 

 

G. Greenwald: Well, Miss Shanahan, you gave us a lot of your time. I found the conversation very interesting. We'd love to have you back on, at some point in the future. And I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us tonight. 

 

Nicole Shanahan: Thanks for having me. It was nice to meet you as well. 

 

G. Greenwald: You too. Have a good evening. 

 

So that concludes our show for this evening. 

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LAWFARE "BLOWBACK"

After a very public plea on social media by President Trump (see post below), the Israeli judiciary announces that Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial (due to begin the following day) is to be delayed. These corruption proceedings began eight years ago and they now face yet another delay.

Donald Trump's social media post is suffused with references to "lawfare", supposed lawfare against Benjamin Netanyahu. This is plainly untrue as there is copious evidence against Netanyahu (see "The Bibi Files" documentary, free-to-watch online [1]).

But here we see the consequences of political elites playing the "lawfare" card, a card that was played sparingly up until the last 10 years or so. Morgan Tsvangirai [2] suffered severe lawfare at the hands of Robert Mugabe in 2007. The West recoiled in horror.

Now this tactic has migrated into Western politics...

• In Brazil against both Lula Da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro
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Dear Glenn - I am under heavy attack in my own home and there's no help after a million pleas for help. Trump knows what is happening to me and he's not stopping it.

My ex-girlfriend from grad school in Italy was Croatian, went to her president, who went to Trump at the Three Seas Summit in Poland in front of all the cameras to ask for help for her.

He helped her but he won't help me. He only does favors for powerful people, not the people. I need a president to ask my own president for his help. I am being murdered right now. Please hold authority to account.

https://full-take-times.surge.sh

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@ggreenwald
I really needed to share this.
I recently travelled through Russia. Backpacking, as I usually do. Anyone who has seen "New Mokva", would realize this is not some backwards commie country. It made me think of Glenn's interview with Dugin, and brought up a question in my mind. Why would any of us in the west want to interfere with this country? It's amazing and beautiful just the way it is. It's perfect because we are imperfectly perfect as people. We get to decide for ourselves what we want and what we don't want.
Why would any of us want to change what anyone is about on the other side of the earth from us? I really don't get it.
It's the reason why I have such a problem with Glenn's coverage of Israel. I really feel like he hates the country, and looks at it only through the eyes of his own life and experiences. Rather than seeing them as their own society, and their own country.
It's our differences that make us beautiful. Imagine the entire world was made in the wests' ...

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Why Did Zohran Win in NYC? Plus: Gaza Pulitzer Prize Winner Mosab Abu Toha on the Latest Atrocities
System Update #476

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Zohran Mamdani, who had been a relatively obscure member of the New York state assembly, scored one of the largest political upsets in New York city politics last night – arguably one of largest upsets in American politics – when he won the Democratic Party nomination for Mayor of New York City against multiple candidates led by Andrew Cuomo. 

Many on the political right, including people who had never heard of him until about six days ago, and even more so in the establishment Democratic Party politics, are absolutely horrified and even terrified by Zohran's win. They're acting as though it's some sort of invasion by al-Qaeda and ISIS combined with Mao's China. 

In fact, many on the right appear to think that Zohran, who's a leftist Muslim from Uganda, is some sort of unholy love child of Osama bin Laden and Josef Stalin. Establishment Democrats believe, as they did for Bernie's campaign in 2016 and the AOC's win in 2018, in her emergence as a leader of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, that their future as a party will be destroyed by having a young candidate energize huge amounts of young voters, including young male voters with an anti-establishment and economic populist agenda of the range of views that are absolutely hated by their big donors, who demand they adhere to corporatism, the kind of corporatist that most Americans on both sides of the aisle have come to hate. 

First, we will talk to Mosab Abu Toha, who is a Palestinian writer, poet and scholar from Gaza. He lived in Gaza with his family on October 7, after which the massive Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip began. His daughter is an American citizen, which enabled him and his wife to flee to Egypt with their daughter in December, but along the way, he was detained and disappeared by the IDF and was released only under significant international pressure. 

He wrote a series of essays for The New Yorker on the suffering and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, the awarding of which, needless to say, generated outrage and protest. The war in Iran has really served to obscure and hide the still-worsening crimes in Gaza over the last couple of weeks. We think it's very important to talk with someone as informed as he is about the latest Israeli atrocities and what has been happening in Gaza. 

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The Interview: Mosab Abu Toha

As we just noted, Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian writer, he's a poet, a scholar, and has worked hard on various libraries in Gaza as well. He was in Gaza when Israel began its massive assault after the October 7 attack, and he was able to flee with his wife and young daughter, who is an American citizen, though just barely. He was there for about two months when he was about to flee. He is now a Pulitzer Prize winner as a result of a series of essays he wrote last year in The New Yorker that chronicle and powerfully express the extreme human suffering of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and we are delighted to have him with us tonight to understand what has been happening there. 

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

Mosab Abu Toha: Of course, it is my great pleasure. Thank you so much, Glenn, for having me. 

G. Greenwald: I wish we were meeting under better circumstances, I wish we had something less depressing and horrific to talk about, but the world is what it is. So, I just want to get a little bit of understanding from you since one of the things that you do is convey thoughts and emotions in words as a poet, as a writer, obviously, a now widely recognized one. 

As somebody who's lived in Gaza, it's not new to you to be bombed by the Israelis. Israel has been bombing Gaza, killing civilians over many, many years, but I think it was very obvious for a variety of reasons, not just October 7, but the composition of the current Israeli government, the obvious support the world was going to give them, that this is going to be far worse and quickly it turned out to be. So, you went to Gaza for about two months before you were able to get out. What were those two months like for you and your family? 

Mosab Abu Toha: First of all, it is important to note that I was born in a refugee camp. My parents were born themselves in refugee camps. My grandparents on both sides were expelled from Yaffa in 1948. So, I lived in Gaza all my life and I was a witness and a survivor of so many Israeli assaults. I was wounded in one of the airstrikes in 2008-2009. I survived by chance and I still have the wounds in my body: in my neck, in my forehead, in my cheeks and on my shoulder. So, surviving the genocide in Gaza was not the first time I survived the Israeli aggression. In fact, I was in the United States between 2022-2023. I returned to Gaza in 2023 after I finished my MFA from Syracuse University and I then traveled to the United States again for a literary festival, Palestine Writes, held at UPenn in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. And I returned to Gaza 10 days before October 7 and I resumed my work as a teacher in Gaza. 

G. Greenwald: Can I just interrupt you there, because that literary festival that you're referring to shortly before October 7, as I recall, there was a gigantic movement, this was before October 7, to have that canceled simply because people like you and other Palestinians were participating and speaking critically of Israel. Can you just talk a little bit about that? Then I want to get back to what the experience was in Gaza. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah. I would like to say, Glenn, that the criticism that I or other people are critical of Israel is not true. We are not critical of Israel. All we are doing is exposing the crimes that Israel has been committing, whether it's in the Gaza Strip or in the West Bank. So, I don't care if it was a different country, if it were a different people, I would still do the same thing, because this is happening to me and to my people, to my parents, to my children, and also to my grandchildren. So, it is not that people in Palestine or Palestinians or even pro-Palestinian people who care about human rights, it's not that they are critical of Israel or whatever you call it. It's that people are talking and advocating on behalf of the people who have been living under occupation for 77 years and this is perceived as a crime when you talk about crimes that are committed by a state that has been created in 1948 and that's been funded by, unfortunately, Western countries and also the United States until today, even as they are committing an ongoing genocide. 

So, it is shameful that some of the participants in the festival were canceled or not permitted to be on campus at the University of Pennsylvania in September 2023. But here we are, in 2025, Palestinian people, Palestinian writers and Palestinian journalists have been the main target of the Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian activists and pro-Palestinian activists have been canceled from so many places, even artists, even singers. They were canceled from big events because of what they say about the Palestinian people and their right to exist and to exist with dignity. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, we covered so many censorship-based reactions to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, but I just thought it was important to remember that that's been happening in the United States well before October 7, and in fact, just a week or two before, at one of our great universities, the University of Pennsylvania, where apparently just the mere presence of Palestinian voices in the view of a lot of people justify trying to get the entire event canceled and ended up getting some of the people banned. 

All right, so you went back to Gaza after that event and shortly thereafter, the October 7 attack happened, then followed by this massive Israeli air assault on Gaza, unlike, I think, anything that has happened in Gaza for a long time, despite how terrible and fatal so many of the other ones were. Just in your own words, what was that like, just to be constantly surrounded by death, by the risk of death, by the fear that you would go to bed and not wake up? How did you navigate that? 

Mosab Abu Toha: So, it is important, Glenn, to note that Palestinians in Gaza have been massacred by the Israeli forces, the Israeli army, without – I mean, I was 31 years old when I left Gaza for the last time, I've never, before October 7, in my life, seen an Israeli soldier. Israel was bombing us from the sky, Israel was firing at us from gunboats and warships in the sea, in our sea, just seven or eight nautical miles off our shore. They were shooting at us, they were killing us, they were dropping bombs on us without us seeing. I've never seen an Israeli, not even one Israeli soldier, never seen any Israeli soldier or Israeli civilian, in my life. So, we have been killed, we have been abducted, we have been injured, our houses have been destroyed on top of our families, without us seeing who these people are, who have been killing us without us seeing. 

I mean, they see us from a screen. They see us as dots, black and white dots moving on the ground or maybe structures on the ground. Lately, they have been filming us through their drones, people who are trying to get aid. There are so many videos of people who try to go back to their homes to collect food and then there is footage of an Israeli drone missile hitting them and killing them. 

So, I lived in Gaza all my life and I've never seen an Israeli soldier. I was wounded and I don't know whether that soldier knew or whether that Israeli pilot who dropped the bomb in 2009 knew that they killed seven people in that airstrike and they wounded a 16-year-old child who became a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. 

So, when Israel attacked Gaza, it was not only a military attack. Israel did not only drop bombs, they did not fire bullets at people, unarmed people, but they also shut off electricity, shut off water, shut off food trucks. They control everything, right? So, it's not like Israel just attacked Gaza militarily. No, they blocked everything, even as we are talking, people do not have, not only enough food, because we always talk about the lack of food, the lack of water, the lack of shelter, but there is a lack of medicine. 

One of the relatives of my brother-in-law who was wounded in a strike that killed his brother 20 days ago, and I wrote about him in my last piece in the New Yorker, he was at the hospital, at al-Shifa hospital, and the shrapnel covered his body, and his arms and his body was wrapped in gauze, and he complained to the doctors that he has some pain in his body. And do you know what they gave him? They gave him something like Tylenol, something that you take when you have a headache. There's no medicine in Gaza. And even though there is no healthy food – the kind of food that is entering Gaza is canned food: canned beans, canned peas, sugar and frying oil. There is no fresh food, not only for people to grow normally, but even for those, the dozens of thousands of Palestinians who were injured. There is no healthy food. Fresh food like vegetables, fruit and meat, for them to heal. 

So, people in Gaza are dying several, times and if you allow me I mean because now as we are talking, today in Gaza, it's 2:20 a.m., it's Thursday today, June 26, as we are talking, just in the past hour, Israel bombed a tent in Khan Yunis, killing five people. And before that, yesterday, they killed 101 people all over the Gaza Strip. Of these people, there was a whole family, the Al-Dahdouh family. I wrote their names on my social media, I mean, we don't get to know the names of these people who are killed. The father is named Salah al-Dahdouh, his wife is Salwa al-Dahdouh, their children are Ahmad, son, Abdallah, son, Mostafa, son, and Alaa, his daughter. The brother of the father was killed, and then there was a nephew. So, the Israel attack on Gaza is not by killing them, but even by bombing the internet, bombing the electricity, not allowing people even to report. So, there is difficulty in reporting, not only by not allowing journalists, international journalists, to go to Gaza, but they are also bombing every means that Palestinians can use to report on their miseries and their suffering and their demise. 

So, that's why it is very important to talk about what's happening in Gaza and also in Palestine every day. Israel is killing people in Gaza and Palestine every day. That's why every day we have to speak, to talk, about Palestine. 

G. Greenwald: There's a lot, obviously, we could talk about; we cover a lot of the atrocities pretty much on a daily basis, or close to it, on this show. I do want to get, to that as well, just some of the more recent things that have been happening that, as I said, have been even more covered up than usual, not just by the lack of media in Gaza, international media, and the lack internet, but also by so much attention paid to what was happening in Iran.

I had John Mearsheimer on my show yesterday and we were both talking about how is it that the world can watch what's going on in Gaza, even to the extent that we get to see it, how is it the West, that's paying for it, that's enabling it, can watch what's happening? It's just no one seems to mind, nobody seems to care, nobody seems to be bothered by it, it just kind of goes on, no one is even close to stopping it. 

We just saw Trump order Netanyahu to turn the planes around from Iran, which obviously Biden could have done, Trump could have done at any time, and they just won't. I'm trying to figure out, like, how can this be? 

I think one of the ways that that happens is the language of dehumanization. So, I think a lot of Americans have this perception of what Gaza is, what Palestine is, radically different than the reality. I was interested in the work that you've done in creating libraries in Gaza. You're obviously very well-spoken. You just won a Pulitzer Prize for your writing in English. I've had Gazans on my show before who are very similarly highly educated, well-spoken. 

There is a whole network – there were at least – of Gazan universities and advanced centers of learning that are all now destroyed. Gaza had one of the highest literacy rates in the world before October 7. Some of the best doctors, respected all around the world as specialists in their field. Can you talk about what Gazan society and Gazan culture are like and how it has been just so completely destroyed in the last 20 months? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Sure, yeah, I mean, before I answer your question, I would like to highlight the fact that, for two years now, not a single student in Gaza has gone to school. The schools have become shelters, as we are talking. Just half an hour, at the same time that Israel bombed a tent in Khan Yunis, Israel bombed a classroom on the third floor of a school called Amr Ibn al-Aas in Sheikh Radwan, in Gaza City, and two or three people were reported to be killed. 

So, two years, no schools. So anyone who was five years old when Israel attacked Gaza on October 7 hasn't gone to school for two years. So, if my children were to be there at the moment, my five-year-old would have missed his first and second grades. For two years, students have missed their high school diploma tests. So, people in Gaza are missing not only their lives, but even those who survive are missing a lot in their own lives. 

The Gaza Strip lies on the beach of the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza is rich in its plants and trees. One of the best places in Gaza is a city or town called Beit Lahia and it's very, very famous for the strawberry farms. My father-in-law is a strawberry farmer and they also used to plant corn, onion, watermelon, oranges, and they used to even, I mean, when it is allowed, to export some of the strawberries to the West Bank. But I think Gaza is very beautiful, even though it has been under occupation since 1948 and it's been under siege since 2007. 

Israel controls how much food gets into Gaza, how many hours of electricity is available in Gaza, how much medicine is allowed to enter Gaza, what kind of equipment, medical equipment get into Gaza, how many books get into because when I was trying to build the Edward Said Public Library, two branches in 2017 and 2019 – and unfortunately Israel destroyed the two libraries just like they destroyed all the universities in Gaza – Israel was in control of the entry of these books into Gaza. Sometimes the books would be delayed by months. It usually takes eight weeks for any books or packages to enter Gaza. So, Israel was controlling every single aspect of our lives in Gaza, despite that, we managed to make Gaza as beautiful as we could. 

This campaign of destroying Gaza is nonstop. Israel has been blowing up the houses in Bethlehem: 70%, this is an old statistic, 70% of Gaza has been either destroyed or damaged by not only Israeli airstrikes, while people are sleeping, but even the houses that people had to live in because Israel announced them to be a combat zone. Israel has been systematically blowing these houses up, and there are so many videos of Israeli soldiers documenting the blowing up of neighborhoods and of schools, of their bulldozers destroying a hospital in north Gaza just next to the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahia. 

Israel has systematically been destroying everything in Gaza. So, the question is not about when there will be a cease-fire in Gaza, although the cease-fire is just the beginning of a bigger change in Palestine. The question is, even after the cease-fire, Israel is trying to make it impossible for people to live again. So, let's say there is a cease-fire today. There are no schools in Gaza; 70% of the population in Gaza do not have homes, they are living in tents. Even though they are living in tents, including some of my family members, these tents get bombed. 

Just a few days ago, Glenn, my neighbor was killed in an airstrike when Israel hit a group of people walking next to it. She was inside her tent. These tents are pulled up on the street. So, she was killed while she was inside her tent. Her mother is still critically wounded, and all her brothers were wounded. So, Israel continues to destroy, to decimate as much of Gaza as possible, and there is a systematic destruction of the refugee camps in Gaza. Something that I wrote about in one of my pieces in The New Yorker is that Israel is not only destroying Gaza, the cities, the villages and the towns, but they are also destroying refugee camps. 

The refugee camps after 1948 were groups of tents here and there. Their refugee status continued for years and years, then people started to build rooms from concrete, and, over the years, they started to build multistory buildings. So, the refugee camp changed into a small city. 

So, Israel currently destroyed most, I mean, much of the Jabalia refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in Gaza. So, these are people, now, who lived in the refugee camp or people who were born in refugee camps like me and now are living in tents on the street, and maybe sheltering in a school, in a hospital, these people now are dreaming of returning to the refugee camps. So, this is the fault of the world. 

This is the fault of the word because they left the Palestinian people to live in refugee camps, they left them without protection and they not only left them without protection, they continue to support, to fund Israel's genocide, like the United States cut its funding for UNRWA, which has been responsible for the delivery of aid and for the education of so many people, including me. So, this world is not working properly, really. It's very strange for us to be watching this, even 20 months after the start of the genocide and for me to watch it from here, from the United States. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, it's got to be almost impossible.

I know I don't need to tell you, but for people who are watching, I mean, the control of Gaza by the Israelis – including it probably intensified since they removed troops, which they had there in 2005 – the control that continued was so great that the Israelis had phrases like really macabre, horrific, dark phrases like mowing the lawn, which meant let's just go in and kill some Palestinians or let's put the Palestinians on a diet when they would cut back the amount of food that they allowed in into Gaza. This has been the mentality going on for a long time. 

I want to just to ask you something: we talk a lot about the number of people in Gaza who have been slaughtered since October 7, the Israelis are now open about the fact that they want to make Gaza uninhabitable to force people to leave, to kill them until they leave, to destroy civilization until they leave. It's at least a policy of ethnic cleansing. One thing that I think about a lot, though, is, for the people who do survive, who are able to survive the genocide, survive this ethnic cleansing, this onslaught, I have to think about, how is it possible that they'd have a future? 

I live in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, which is a city, especially in poorer areas, that has a very high level of violence, drug gangs and the like, very high murder rates and I know some people who grew up there and they talk about, one time when I was seven years old, I saw a dead body on the ground twice, when I was in my teenage years, I saw a gun shootout, and they talk about how psychologically scarring that is for life, like to be exposed to those kinds of horrors even once or twice while you're growing up. And here you have this massive civilian population in Gaza, 50% of them are children, and the last two years, their lives have been nothing but bombing and destruction and murder and fear of death. Just psychologically, how do you think that the people who are there who do survive will be able to overcome that and, at some point, return to a normal semblance of life? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Well, this is a very hard question to answer. It's very obvious that the population that's been trying to survive – I mean, I don't like to say that people live in Gaza. No, people are trying to survive in Gaza because there is a difference between living in Gaza and trying to survive a genocide. 

So, these people, for 20 months, at least, haven't lived a single day without suffering, without looking for food, looking for medicine, looking for water. I mean, Glenn, I was in Gaza for the first two months. I remember walking in the street looking for water to fill a bucket of water for my children and for my wife, to wash the dishes, maybe to have a shower in the school, because there are no services in the school shelters, by the way. 

I remember walking in the city and seeing five-year-old children standing in line to fill a bucket of water for their families, or children maybe 10 years old. I saw some of my students standing in line to get a pack of bread and that was in October and November 2023, that was before Israel tightened its genocide. So, these children, five or seven years old, are no longer children. These children are not practicing childhood. 

This is a very dangerous reality and it should also be a signal that there would be a very dangerous future for these children. So, 50% of the population in Gaza is children. So, the question is for the Americans, for the Europeans who have been funding Israel's genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza and also in the West Bank: what do they expect of these Palestinians once this genocide comes on in? So, what kind of people is the world expecting to see in the future? That's a question that I don't have an answer to, but I'm sure that these people, Palestinian people who have been surviving the genocide in Gaza, will no longer be normal. 

I'm not a scientist, I am not a psychologist, but I think people in the world, especially officials, politicians and decision-makers, should think seriously about this. What kind of people are we going to see after the genocide comes to an end? What kind of people are going to be those who have been living under occupation? I don't have an answer to that, but if you think about it, I think there are many answers. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. A couple more questions: there's this old phrase, it's often attributed to Stalin, I'm not really sure. I don't think anyone is sure if he's really the one who said it. It’s this idea that when one person dies, it is a tragedy, when 1000 people die, it's a statistic. We often talk about, oh, 50,000 people are dead or 100,000 people dead in Gaza, and so often, as you said, the names of the people aren't very well known. We don't talk about them; we don't humanize them. 

One of the people who was killed after October 7 is a friend of yours, Refaat Alareer, who was a very well-known and accomplished poet. He has a book, “If I Must Die,” a poem that was turned into a book after he died, which became a bestseller in the United States and the West, and it's really remarkable. I got a copy, I read it and I really encourage people to do so. 

He was killed in an airstrike in December, so just a couple of months after October 7, and he was killed in his house, along with his sister and several of her children. Then, I guess, I don't know, what is it, five months later, his eldest daughter and her grandson were separately killed in airstrikes on their home as well. It just kind of gives you a sense for the number of families being wiped out. 

He was English speaking, he participated in the American Discourse, and one of the things that happened – I think people have really overlooked this, I want to make sure it's not forgotten and I want to get your views on this: after October 7, as we know, there were all these lies that were told about what was done in Israel, that children were killed in ovens, which obviously invokes the Holocaust by design; that babies were cut out of the wombs of their mothers, none of which ended up being true. Refaat, on Twitter, responding to these kinds of insane lies that were being told, mocked them. 

We have the tweet on October 29 where he said, “With or without baking powder?”, obviously mocking the idea that they were killed in ovens, which turned out to be a complete lie: 

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And Bari Weiss, who obviously has a big platform, immediately seized on that and put a target on his back: 

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An obvious distortion of what he said. The claim that Bari Weiss made that babies were killed in an oven was a complete and total lie disseminated by the Israeli government. And then he went the next day and said:

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Then, about a month later, he was dead at a targeted bombing of his home. Lots of human rights groups believe it was deliberate. Can you reflect on him and his work, but also how you see that killing and Bari Weiss's role in at least spreading these lies, if not helping to target him? 

Mosab Abu Toha: Of course. First of all, Refaat was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Gaza, where I studied, where I did my bachelor's degree. He was someone like a mentor. He was one of the founders of “We Are Not Numbers,” which is a group that is dedicated to mentoring emerging writers in Gaza, in the West Bank and also the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. So, Refaat introduced me to that project in 2014-2015, so, in fact, Refaat was killed in his sister's house in Gaza City. His sister, Asmaa, lived in Gaza City, and he also lived in Gaza City, but he evacuated his house, so Refaat, by the time he entered his sister's house, he was bombed in that apartment. He was killed along with his sister Asmaa and four nephews, along with one of Refaat’s brothers. 

Refaat was known for his satire. Of course, he and me and other Palestinians would never believe that any Palestinian, whether it's Hamas or other people, would burn babies, put people in ovens, or behead babies, I don't know what, I mean, even an evil person wouldn't do that. So, of course, he thought that this was a lie, this is a joke or something, and there is no evidence that that happened.

G. Greenwald: And it was proven to be a lie. He was absolutely right. It did not happen. It was a complete fabrication. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you go back, if you go to Refaat’s social media accounts before October 7, you would see a lot of jokes. So that was one of his jokes, and it was used against him. It's like one of the posts when I say, when I commented about an Israeli hostage, Emily Demary, and I said, how on Earth is this soldier a hostage while other Palestinians, like me, who were abducted from checkpoints, from hospitals, from school shelters, are called prisoners or detainees. 

G. Greenwald: Right, they're putting them in danger without any charges, and they're convicted of nothing, and those are prisoners, and yet people who are active IDF soldiers found in tanks, found in combat, who are taken as prisoners of war, those are all hostages. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Yeah, so that was one of my questions. And then that was used against me, until after I won the Pulitzer. Oh, he is denying his status as a hostage; this is an anti-Semite. She called me a Holocaust denier. So, it's really irritating and it's ridiculous even to call someone like me a Holocaust denier, someone who has never talked about the Holocaust. In fact, I have some of the books that are about the holocaust that I relate to, that I feel very outraged when I read about the experiences of the Jewish people at the hands of Europeans, not Palestinians. 

So, Refaat's tweet, and I remember that post when Bari Weiss posted that, just to get a lot of hate, more hate for Refaat. Refaat was a Palestinian poet, essayist, a fiction writer, an editor of a book called “Gaza Writes Back,” which he published in 2014, an anthology of short stories by some of his students at the University of Gaza and other students from other universities. 

It's been devastating that Refaat was killed in his sister's house and then, a few months later, his daughter Shayma was killed with her baby, whom Refaat himself didn't see because his daughter was still pregnant. So, Shayma was killed with her baby, Abd al-Rahman, and with her husband, an engineer called Mohammed Siyam. And, by the way, Glenn, there is something that people don't know, which is that that poem, If I Must Die, which is the title of that book you referred to, in fact that poem was written in 2011 and that poem was dedicated to his daughter Shayma.

G. Greenwald: The one who died in that airstrike with her infant son. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Exactly. So the poem Refaat re-shared the poem after October 7. So that's how people came to know the poem. So, just imagine, in that poem, he's telling his daughter, if I must die, you should live, to tell my stories, to sell my things, to make a kite, that's the meaning of the poem; if I must die let it bring hope, let it be a tale. And we, truth tellers, writers, poets, journalists, we should write the tale of those whose voices were taken away from them by killing them and their families. So that was his message to his daughter, who unfortunately was killed in an air strike. 

So in that poem, to me, it's very clear that the I and the you were killed. That's why the you must become a collective you, that every one of us, the free people of the world who care about the human beings, especially those who have been living under occupation and siege and apartheid for decades, not for months, not four years, for decades, we should be the voices of these people, especially because we know what's happening or what has been happening. 

G. Greenwald: Yes. Mosab, I know you have time constraints. It was such a pleasure speaking with you. I think your voice is uniquely valuable and important to be heard by as many people as possible. So, we're definitely going to be harassing you to come back on the show. I had a lot more to talk about, but I want to respect your time as well, but super appreciative for you to come on. It's great speaking with you. 

Mosab Abu Toha: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. 

G. Greenwald: All right, have a good evening. 

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So, I want to talk about the extraordinary victory – and it was truly extraordinary – last night, in the Democratic Party primary, of Zohran Mamdani, who has really vanquished a political dynasty, the Cuomos. 

However, I just want to note, though, in relation to that last segment, that shortly before we went on air, Donald Trump, I guess, just learned for the first time that Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing extremely serious corruption charges and is on trial for those corruption charges. These are not things like an accounting scheme to cover-up payments to a porn star or anything else like Donald Trump was accused of. This is hardcore, real corruption. It would have probably gotten him out of office a long time ago, had it not been for the various wars that he started. Lots of people believe that's one of the reasons why he needed these wars: to stay in office. 

Right before we were going on air, President Trump put out a quite lengthy and passionate, spirited statement on Truth Social in which he essentially said, “I know that Benjamin Netanyahu is now being called to return to his trial on Monday. This is an outrage.” I read it several times and I'm summarizing it very accurately. He said these trials should be canceled and/or Prime Minister Netanyahu should be completely pardoned. Then he went on to say that he and Bibi Netanyahu just secured a very tough, important victory against what he called Israel's longtime enemy, not the United States’ long-term enemy, but Israel's long-time enemy, Iran. 

He's essentially saying we just together fought a war against Israel's enemy, which is, of course, exactly what that war was and the reason why it was fought. Then he went on through this long, lengthy expression of outrage over the fact that Bibi Netanyahu is facing criminal charges. At the end, he said, the United States just saved Israel, and the United States will also now save Bibi Netanyahu. 

So, Trump himself is describing this war as one against Israel's longtime enemy and that the United States just saved Israel. There are a lot of people who get extremely outraged when you observe that it seems like this is another war for Israel being fought, not for the United States' interest, but for Israel, against Israel's enemy, not the United States’ enemy. Yet, President Trump, apparently, sees it that way as well, based on what he's saying, and instead of focusing on the people that he promised to protect and work for, namely the forgotten American worker, remember he's right now back to trying to interfere in the Israeli court system and the Israeli domestic politics by demanding that his very close friend, Bibi Netanyahu, be pardoned because he fought a good war. I don't really understand the relationship between those two things, but that is what President Trump said. 

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Zohran Mamdani's victory last night is extraordinary for a lot of reasons. Back in February, so I'm not talking about a year ago, I'm talking about four months ago. All the polling showed Andrew Cuomo with his gigantic lead. Obviously, he has massive name recognition, part of a beloved political dynasty. I mean, Mario Cuomo, for those who didn't live through that time in the eighties, was probably the most beloved Democrat in a long time. But then he had these two sons, Andrew and Chris, and Chris ended up parlaying that last name and those connections into being a journalist and his other brother, Andrew, was basically groomed to be the president of the United States from a very young age. He went around with his father everywhere, just the absolute classic nepo baby. And then he got all sorts of positions in Democratic Party politics because of his dad. At a very young age, he was made a cabinet secretary in the Clinton administration. In the early 1990s, he married a Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo. 

The entire thing was being shaped, from the very beginning, to groom Andrew Cuomo as part of this political dynasty based on the nepotistic benefits he got from being Mario Cuomo's son, not just to be governor of New York, but to be the president of the United States. That was absolutely where Cuomo is headed. It was supposedly remembered that liberals turned him into the hero of the COVID crisis saying only he was acting with the level of aggression necessary and all of that came completely crashing down because he had a litany of women who credibly accused him of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and this was a couple of years after Democrats made the Me Too movement. His brother also ended up getting fired from CNN because he was plotting with his brother about how to discredit these female accusers while he was still on CNN. And then it turned out that his greatness on COVID, which was his greatest strength that was going to jettison him to the presidency, ended up being one of his worst disgraces because he kept a bunch of old people locked in nursing homes and a lot of them ended up dying as a result. 

We covered all that before, but suffice to say, nonetheless, four years later, he comes back with much less ambition, already the governor of New York with three terms. He resigned in the middle of his third term, having been groomed to be president. 

Now they kind of convinced him, look, you're 67, the only thing there is for you to do is to run for mayor. He clearly thought it was beneath him, wasn't particularly excited, thought his victory was inevitable, and it looked like it was. Who's going to beat a Cuomo in Democratic Party politics? And not just because they're Cuomo, but he has all the billionaire money behind him. 

 

In February, when I really started paying attention to Zohran's campaign, because I could kind of tell it had the big potential to really take off, I could just tally at a lot of political talent, that he was forming a campaign that can really connect. You don't know for sure, but I noted at the time that it seemed very interesting to me that what he was doing was very different. You can see he had a lot of political talent. It reminded me of AOC, where, say what you want about her now, and I have mostly negative things to say about her, there's no denying that she has a kind of charisma and a political talent as well. 

But anyway, still, I mean, even though I was interested in and could see the potential, I never imagined that he would actually win. I just thought, oh, this is going to be a political star, he's probably going to end up attracting a good number of left-wing voters. But never imagined he would defeat the Cuomo dynasty and all the billionaire money behind it. 

As Zohran started increasing in the polls and then clearly became the main threat to Cuomo, huge amounts of billionaire money, largely afraid, in part about Zohran's democratic socialist policy, kind of a type of democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders and AOC. I know people want to call it communism, which just isn't. But obviously, people on Wall Street hated it, which definitely means things like increasing taxes on the rich, redistributing resources to the working class and poor people. It is that philosophy that people on Wall Street hate, that big billionaires hate. Also, he's a very outspoken critic of Israel, which in New York, with a very large Jewish population, a very large pro-Israel faction that's very powerful, is typically not something you can be. I mean, even the Democrats who won, like Ed Koch and Bill de Blasio, have been typically pro-Israel. That's just a red line for any politician who has ambitions in New York. 

He has said things like he supports a boycott and divestment sanction; he's talked about globalizing the intifada. Interestingly, unlike people who, when they run for office, have their past quotes dug up and are confronted with them and they repudiate them immediately, like Kamala Harris reputed everything she said she believed when running for president in the Democratic primary in 2019 and they brought it all to her when she was running in the general election. 

Mamdani did not do any of that. He was asked, “Do you still support the globalizing intifada instead of running away from it?” And he said, “Yeah, I do, but I think it's often distorted. It doesn't mean anything more than a struggle, a resistance, not blowing people up.” He supports boycotting Israel; he didn't repudiate that. He was asked whether, given Benjamin Netanyahu's indictment and the warrants for his arrest issued by the ICC, he would have him arrested if he came to New York, and he said he would. So, obviously, a lot of billionaires like Bill Ackman, whose primary loyalty is to Israel, were desperate to make sure Mamdani didn't win. 

I promise you, Bill Ackman does not care about zoning laws or the efficiency of services in New York. He has about 10 estates all over the world. To the extent he lives in New York, he lives in a $30 million duplex apartment very high above Manhattan, he chauffeured around in cars and the like. That's not his interest. His interest was in stopping somebody who was critical of Israel, and he put huge amounts of money, as did other billionaires, into packs for Andrew Cuomo that largely just attacked Zohran Mamdani as an anti-Semite, all the rest. And none of it worked, even though usually those things are guaranteed to work in any major democratic race. 

It's very difficult when I watch Democrats trying to convince Americans that Donald Trump was a Hitler-like figure, it's like a vicious dictator who was going to put people in camps. One of the reasons why it was so hard to do that, why it was so obviously destined to fail, was because Trump doesn't read that way. Americans watched him for four years in the presidency and they, even the ones who didn't like him, didn't see him as Hitler. And so, this attempt to try to turn Zohran Mamdani into a raging anti-Semite, I mean, we showed you a few of these tweets throughout the week, just absolutely insane ones from people saying his election would be an existential threat to New York Jews. What is he going to do, like round them up from synagogues and put them in concentration camps, is that what Zohran Mamdani is going to do? 

The reason it doesn't work is that you just listen to the guy for three minutes and you see that he is not anything resembling that. He has a lot of policies, especially culture war ones, with which I'm uncomfortable. His economic policies are ones that obviously a lot of people are going to have problems with, but the idea that he's like Osama bin Laden, or Joseph Stalin, that just doesn't work. If you just listen to who he is, how he speaks, what he says – there has to be some alignment with the smears with the person in order for it to work. 

A lot of liberals have this monolithic view that everybody on the right has the same exact views of everything, there are no divisions, and of course you pay attention to right-wing politics, there are major ideological rifts and divisions and debates. We saw it with the Iran war and many other issues already, H-1B visas, all sorts of things. But a lot of people on the right see the Democratic Party as this monolith as well. They think like Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi are the same, like, AOC or Bernie or Zohran, and it's completely untrue. 

New York City doesn't elect socialists. When they elect Democrats, they elect very established – Ed Koch was a very centrist member of Congress for a long time, very pro-Israel, always at war with the left-wing of the Democratic Party, kind of the classic New York city mayor, very outspoken, loud, kind of charismatic in his own sort of way. And even Bill de Blasio, who was considered more progressive, had very close relations with the large New York City developers, even though Wall Street didn't like Bill de Blasio. 

So, it's hard to overstate what a sea change this is. Even if you think New York City is a cesspool of baffling, it's not. I mean, it is in little places, but a citywide election, that's not who wins in New York. 

Here, just to give you a sense of the funding gap. I'm doing this because I want to underscore to you how improbable this victory is, what a reflection of it it is of a remarkable sea change in how American voters are thinking about politics or thinking about elections, what they respond to, what they don't respond to, not just on the left, but on the right, not in Democratic Party or the Republican Party, but across the spectrum. 

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You have three types of funding: campaign funding directly, matching public funds and then aligned super PACs. Andrew Cuomo had at least $35 million, $35.6 million. In second place, was Zohran with 9.1, almost entirely small donors. So, look at this gap, talking about a gap of $25 million – $25 billion for a city-wide race. And that's why people are describing it as such a major upset.

Now, just so you don't think I'm like hopping on some train once it left the station, pretending that I knew all along, I've watched Zohran for quite a while now, but I'm going to show you the reasons why. Back in February, when he was at less than 1% of the polls, I just wanted to draw people's attention to him, even though nobody was paying attention then, because I could see the kind of campaign he was running. I, for the first time, understood what his political talent was. It's just like a native inborn thing that you either have or you don't. He has it. He's a very effective political speaker, but he just kind of has an energy that people find attractive and appealing. And to be clear, I hate the fact that if you analyze somebody's political appeal in a positive way, people are like, “Oh, you're a cheerleader for him. You must love him.” I went through this with Donald Trump for so many years, I would say liberals don't understand Trump's appeal. He's funny, he is charismatic and exciting and he vessels and channels anti-establishment hatred, which is the driving force of American politics and American political life, and you should understand that about him. 

I can admit that the people I can't stand most, Dick Cheney, are very smart. I can acknowledge that attribute of theirs without liking them. So, what I'm saying here is it's important to understand why's Zohran had this political appeal. It doesn't mean you like him or hate him. It's a completely separate question. 

So back in February, I wrote this:

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So, it was clear to me something was happening there. I'm not suggesting I knew he was going to win. I just knew that there was a lot of potential there, people should pay more attention to him. And so the question is, okay, why did this happen? 

So, I want to show you a video that was probably the first thing that really attracted my attention to him and why I thought he was just a very different kind of Democrat. 

 This is at a time when Joy Reid and MSNBC were telling everybody that Trump won simply because white voters are too racist and misogynist to vote for a black woman, which is a very self-certifying, pleasant narrative to tell yourself. But here's what Zohran did. He went specifically to the neighborhoods in New York City that had the biggest swing from Democratic voters to Trump. They weren't the Upper West Side or the East Side. They were poor neighborhoods, working-class neighborhoods, racially diverse neighborhoods, or even predominantly Black or Latino neighborhoods, immigrant neighborhoods. All he did was go around and ask them why they voted for Trump and the things that they told him clearly shaped what he decided to do when forming his own campaign and the issues that he wanted to emphasize. In other words, he went to speak to the people of New York and asked why they were dissatisfied and then formed a campaign to speak to what their dissatisfactions and desires were. Imagine doing that. He didn't go to consultants or political strategists or whatever; he really just went and talked to voters. 

Listen to what happened. Listen to how he did it, too. 

Video. Zohran Mamdani, X. November 15, 2024.

That's a very good sampling of why a lot of people voted for Trump. The Democrats want to send all our money to wars in Ukraine and Israel, we can't afford things, they only care about the wealthy. 

The things that they care about are obvious, the things that they encounter every day in their lives, the bus fares and the cost of rent and the like. And that's what his entire campaign was structured around. 

A lot of people found tweets of his from 2020 when he was in his mid to late twenties, running for New York assembly right during Black Lives Matter. Tons of left-wing culture war, nonsense, lots of extreme positions. He was positioning himself for a very left-wing seat in the state assembly, stuff like defund the police over and over, queer liberation requires defund of the police. Things that, obviously, if you're running in a citywide election, you're not going to run on. And he didn't. He ran a very economic populist campaign, despite being called a communist or a socialist or whatever. 

I want to show you this clip that I also found incredibly interesting. So, this is one that he did in January, when again, people really weren't paying attention to him and he posted a video with a tweet, and the tweet said: “Chicken over rice now costs $10 or more. It's time to make halal eight bucks again.”

Video. Zohran Mamdani, X. January 13, 2025.

 If you live in New York City, one of the things you see everywhere is street vendors. Lots of people buy food from street vendors, like snacks, pretzels, or all kinds of ethnically diverse food that you can eat from. If you don't have time to sit in a restaurant, you grab something from one of these street vendors and, especially in the more working-class neighborhoods, it's where people eat and people are complaining that the price of that food is increasing. If you're Andrew Cuomo, you don't eat at these; you have no idea about any of this. If you're Bill Ackman, obviously you don’t have any clue. You think that voters are going to vote on the fact that Iran is not pro-Israel enough, voters in New York City, that's what they wake up and care about? Just like the Democrats thought voters were going to wake up and care about Trump having praised a fascist, or fascist or Hitler, or whatever, so removed from their lives, or Ukraine. 

This is what populism is. I saw people today, a lot of conservatives, saying when I called it economic populism, “Oh, socialism is an economic populist.” No, when you appeal to people's life, when you tell them the rich and corporations are running roughshod over you, are preventing you from having a survivable or affordable life, and that's what became his keyword is affordability which obviously a lot of New Yorkers are being driven out of New York City, they can't afford it anymore, things are too expensive. 

So, look at what he did in this video. You tell me if this is like some sort of Stalinist communist, at least in terms of how he ran his campaign. He wanted to understand why chicken over rice, something that people eat every day in New York City, especially in more working-class neighborhoods, and why that food has increased. So he did his analysis, and concluded that the solution was to change a few things.

The laws that he's promoting here, the four laws are number one, better access to business licensing, repeal criminal liability for street vendors, services for vendors, and reform the sitting rules. It's almost like libertarian, like “Oh, there's too much bureaucracy, too many too many rigorous permit requirements, they have to pay someone else as a permit owner $20,000 a year, which obviously affects food prices. 

I mean, on top of the very kind of regular person appeal of that, talking about things that people care about a lot, things that are affecting their lives, talking about solutions to them in a very non-ideological way. There's also a lot of humor in there, a lot of kind of flair, something you want to watch. It's not like a lecture, it's not like an angry rant. You look at this and it's not hard to see why he won. 

Now, let me show you the counterattack, the way they thought the Andrew Cuomos of the world thought they were going to sabotage him. It's an amazing thing.

 This is the New York mayoral debate. There were, I think, seven candidates, eight candidates on the stage, and it was hosted by the local NBC News affiliate. And just listen to this question that they thought was important for people wanting to be New York City mayor to answer and how they all answered, except for Zohran. 

Video. New York Mayoral Debate, NBC News. June 4, 2025.

So, do you see how excited Andrew Cuomo got? He really did base a huge part of his campaign on his loyalty to Israel, his love of Israel, his long-time support for Israel, his father's support for Israel, his family's support for Israel. And you heard those voters who voted for Trump when asked why. Did any of them say, “Oh, I think Democrats are insufficiently pro-Israel?” No, no one said that. These people aren't waking up and thinking, I want to make sure my mayor is going to go to Israel as the very first foreign visit. 

It was supposed to be controversial that he said, “Look, I'm the New York City mayor. That's what I'm running for. Not the Secretary of State. I'm not thinking about foreign trips. I'm actually wanting to represent the people of New York City. I'm going to stay here at home and talk to the people I'm supposed to be working for. Why would I plan my overseas trips and make sure Israel is for?” 

“Oh, a lot of them said Israel. One of them, said, “Oh, the Holy Land, Israel.” So that was supposed to be the kind of thing that they thought was going to sabotage him. They have these old ideas on their heads about what you can and can't do. That's why Trump won, too. He broke all of those rules that people thought were still valid and he proved they weren't. 

Now, just a couple of things here. If you want to win in the Democratic primary in New York City, you can't just rely on left-wing voters. Like DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, AOC-Bernie types, that can give you a certain momentum, a certain energy, but you're not going to win a city-wide race just with those kinds of voters. You have to attract a lot of normie, liberal Democrats. That's who lives in New York City. 

 They're not people who hate Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. These are not them. There are some in places like Brooklyn and Queens, but the majority of Democrats in New York City and most liberal American cities are very normal Democrats. They love the democratic establishment; they love Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer represents New York and has forever. That's who they like. That's what you need to attract: those voters. 

 

They've become convinced that the Democrats has this kind of aged stagnant, listless, slow, uninteresting leadership base. And it's true. It's basically an aristocracy. Obviously, the debacle with Biden underscored that more than anything. They were being told they had to get behind someone who was suffering from dementia. And so, they want this kind of new energy, this exciting energy. That's a big part of it. 

It was kind of a referendum on what Democrats want their party to be. They don't want to be voting for a 67-year-old person of politics for 40 years, who has billionaire money behind him as part of the democratic establishment, who was in the Clinton cabinet, have Bill Clinton kind of come in from wherever he is and be like, yeah, I'm endorsing Andrew Cuomo. That's not appealing to these Democrats anymore. They know that they can't keep going down that road. 

So that's part of it. But I really think a big part of is that the primary division, not just American politics, but politics throughout the democratic world, certainly something we've talked a lot about before, is the difference between someone perceived to be part of the establishment and someone who seems to be an outsider, who hates the establishment. There are a lot of people in the United States, millions, who voted twice for President Obama in 2008, 2012, and then voted for Donald Trump in 2016. That's a reason why Trump won. And people who continue

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on War with Iran, Executive Power, the Trump Presidency, and More
System Update #473

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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As you probably know, Friday night is when we try to have our Q&A session. The questions are submitted only by our Locals members. We try to do it every Friday night, but when news events are developing, major news events that we have to discuss – and preparations for a huge war, a huge, dangerous, destructive war, are the kind of thing that we're going to cover and often everything is very fast-moving so, oftentimes, we end up having to cover something on Friday and not being able to do the Q&A we wanted. 

The list of questions is always eclectic. We try to choose a variety of topics, people who haven't asked questions and who have, people who are critical and people who aren't, we always look for good-faith, critical comments and we have a couple of those tonight. So, let me just dive into this. You don't need all the prefacing and the explanations. Most of you are probably very familiar with this arrangement and it's not particularly complicated; it doesn't require a lot of explanation. It's just a Q&A. 

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The first question comes from @wineverett:

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All right. I could not agree more with all of that. I think a major reason for Donald Trump's victories and, by victory I mean starting in 2016 when he was never even remotely considered a candidate or politician and he's gunned down the field of all those professional, highly funded Republican politicians starting with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, all through them, got the nomination and then crushed the Clinton political machine, obviously filled with nothing but political animals, long-term professional career politicians, is precisely for this reason. People understand that both political parties speak a language, live in a world, spend money on things, talk about things, vote on things completely detached from their concerns and their lives and that's why they've lost faith and trust in most institutes of authority because they perceive correctly that people in power who are there to essentially represent them care about everything other than what they care about. It's so incredibly obvious from how these people speak to what they say, and Donald Trump was the first to come along and sort of break all those rules that people have come to hate about how they speak, how they talk, what they talk about, the things you're allowed to say and he was basically a weapon to smash that glass, to smash the system that they were so eager to smash. 

Obviously, Donald Trump is now a politician. There's no denying that. It doesn't mean it's bad, it doesn't mean it’s good, he's been president for four years, spent four more years running for president and is now president again. So, the last 10 years of our political lives have been dominated by the political figure of Donald Trump. It's clearly the Trump era of politics. He's not really an outsider force anymore. He can't be president twice, having run a third time and almost won, just constantly running for president for 10 years, and be a political outsider anymore. 

He's still an outsider in a lot of different ways, compartmentally and the like, but it's not as appealing, I think, as it once was and especially now that we're watching in the first five months of this first term, that was consumed by things like tariffs which was a major promise of the Trump campaign, no doubt but I think people ended up feeling like economically they had been beaten upon and crushed for so long, including by the Biden years, that there was, even Trump admitted, short-term pain, the stock market became unstable, it went down, people's investments and retirements funds became less valuable, small businesses struggled. So, that was already kind of a feeling that, wow, we have Trump again, who promised to help us in the working-class, but instead, we seem to be suffering with this tariff policy that we're being told will have long-term benefits, but for the moment, we don't seem to have them. 

And now, political discourse is being dominated by a potential war with Iran that I just don't think most people have spent the last two years caring about. I used to always say about Russia when Democrats are spending all that time on the evils of Putin and the threats posed by Russia, it's just so obvious there's a huge gap between what Democrats spend all their time talking and warning about and what Americans wake up thinking about. I just know that Americans are not waking up worried about Vladimir Putin and the threat posed by Russia. That's not something they're scared about. They were during the Cold War, when nuclear war was very possible, people were taught to go to shelters, which was very much part of the culture, and there was an existential war between communism and capitalism. There was a lot at stake. But people don't worry about Russia anymore. They don't consider Vladimir Putin one of the leading threats to their well-being, unless you are an MSNBC viewer. And so, there was this gigantic gap between what Democrats were talking about and what people care about. I think that's the reason they ended up losing. 

But now you look at what Republicans have talked about. What has Trump done aside from tariffs? He's gotten in and he resumed a bombing campaign in Yemen against Houthis and unleashed the Israelis again to continue their destruction of Gaza, which the United States is paying for. Started deporting, not people in the United States illegally or who have committed crimes, but people who were guilty of the crime of protesting Israel or speaking out against Israel. I think that's what people were worried about: people in the country legally, PhD students, Fulbright scholars, biologists, chemists, with nothing but a record of achievement, being booted out with a new precedent because they spoke out against Israel. I mean, people were definitely worried about illegal immigration, especially people who are dangerous to their children or their communities. You think they're worried about Harvard and Yale biologists who wrote up ads about Israel? So, a lot of that as well. 

And now we have this war with Iran, which, if you ask, you can get polling answers or polling data about anything the way you want, based on how you ask the question. So, if you say, “Look, Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon, should the United States do nothing, or should it try to do what it can, even if it means military force, to stop Iran from getting a new weapon?” Yeah, we don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But if you say, “Israel has launched a war against Iran, do you think the United States should involve itself militarily in a new foreign war in the Middle East? Overwhelmingly, people say no, and polls are showing both. 

I don't care what the polling data is, if you ask somebody, “Do you want Iran to have nuclear weapons? Yes, or no?” I do not believe that Americans are waking up saying in the morning, “Wow, I couldn't sleep last night because I'm really worried about the prospect that Iran is going to get nuclear weapons.” 

By every account, they don't even have the missile capability to send one to the United States. Even if they could, why would they? North Korea doesn’t. Everyone understands that it's going to be immediate mutual suicide. I just don't think that's what people care about in their lives and polls constantly should have shown that. I don't think people elected Donald Trump to go to war with Iran or to restart the bombing campaign against the Houthis. And that's all they're hearing about now. That's what the Trump administration is focused on, which is not what the American people are focused on. I know this from polling data; I cover politics and we've all seen over time what Americans care about and what they don't care about and when they feel like their interests are ignored and when their interests are not. 

I want to just answer this with a story about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Not really a story so much as kind of my thoughts on Marjorie Taylor Greene. So, I want to be very honest and say that I really like Marjorie Taylor Greene, I have always liked Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think she's a good person. I think that she's sincere and earnest about the things she says and believes. Obviously, Marjorie Taylor Greene has said things over the last many years that I don't agree with, that you can describe as whatever, outside of the realm of what reality is. I think most politicians do. I think Donald Trump running around talking about how Iran's about to get a nuclear weapon and use it or whatever, that's way outside the realm of reality, to say nothing of what was said about the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis. But the reason I like Marjorie Taylor Greene is that she is what a lot of people wanted and were so fond of, so attracted to Trump. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene was never a politician. She didn't run for office, she wasn't like on the city council and then in the state legislature in Georgia and then worked her way up to the Georgia state Senate and was being groomed by the Republican Party to one day run for Congress, like kind of a career politician. That was not Marjorie Taylor Greene. She has a business, the business is prosperous, she's not incredibly rich, but probably upper middle class; she lives on a good upscale Georgia suburb. And she became very politically active with the MAGA movement and America First. It resonated with her just as a citizen and then she got politically involved and probably had some connections and money that helped. 

However, she wasn't part of a political dynasty, nor was her father the governor or anything. She really just did the kind of classic “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” type of political trajectory, where a citizen wakes up and says, I'm starting to get angry and concerned by what my government is doing. I think it's totally on the wrong track, the things they're saying make no sense, and I don't think they're representing our interests. 

She got very inspired by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and took it seriously and she suddenly became a member of Congress. And, yeah, because she's somebody who was not a trained politician, she often was not on script. She's charismatic and she says things that get people riled up and that bring a lot of media attention. That's why there's so much attention on Jasmine Crockett as well, not because she is some important figure in the House Democratic caucus, but because she says that gets people angry and cable news loves that and builds those people with a big platform. That's what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I don't think Marjorie Taylor Greene was ever doing or saying things on purpose to make people angry. I think she was doing and saying things that she really believed in that if you go to her district, I guarantee you, people like her, people who live near her, people who lived in her district, which is why they voted for her and keep re-electing her, despite how much the media hates her and says she's so evil and bad. 

I've talked to her before. I found her to be exactly the same when talking personally to her and when I listened to her in public. I've had her on the show before, and one of the things that really I found so interesting and eye-opening about Marjorie Taylor Green is that she's been reluctant to criticize Donald Trump too much previously. 

I remember I had her in the show. She was one of those people very much against the Ukraine war, making all those good arguments that I agree with about how we have women who can't get baby formula and our communities are falling apart. Why are we sending billions to finance a war that has nothing to do with us? I remember I asked her, like, does that apply to Israel, that rationale? It seems like it should, does it? And she wasn't enough confidence to say like, yeah, also Israel. That's a very sensitive topic, she knows that. But sometimes you get to Washington, and you have to find your way, you've got to understand how things work, especially if you're not a career politician. 

I remember when I started journalism, there were a lot of things I didn't understand. I hadn't done it full-time, I thought I knew about things, but once I really started looking, I started learning things and realizing how much I didn't know. And so, it took me a while to kind of feel like, okay, I have a good, secure sense of where things are. And I think that's where she is.

 When Donald Trump announced this new bombing campaign in Yemen, she was very outspoken against it and the way she made the argument really struck me. She said, “You know what, I've been a Congresswoman now for six years, or whatever it is, representing my district, but I've lived in my district forever. Nobody in my District even knows what a Houthi is. Nobody talks about Houthis, nobody has met Houthis, nobody is threatened by Houthis, nobody fears Houthis and nobody understands why we are spending all this money to bomb the Houthis. What does this have to do with us?” 

I thought about it. I was like, that's the benefit of having people who are not professional politicians. One of the things that makes Kamala Harris such a terrible candidate is that she worked her way up that ladder from her mid-20s. She's basically been a politician her whole life. She got elected to the San Francisco District Attorney, very ambitious. You can go find national interviews with her because she was doing things like imprisoning parents for truancy if their kids didn't go to school. “Good Morning, America” and those types of shows loved her. She parlayed that into a run for Attorney General of California, won that, worked her way up to the California Senate, and then became Vice President. And she never had a moment where she was off script, where she was saying things that people in Washington would be like, “What? What is that?” She clung to those scripts like her life depended on it. She was petrified of saying anything that official Washington would find odd or strange to disapprove of. And as a result, she was totally vacant. She never spoke naturally, she never spoken like a human being because that's all she knows is she's been clicked into the political system and she speaks about the things that her donors care about, that other politicians care about, that the media she consumes talks about and she has no ability to say what Marjorie Taylor Greene said, no courage to say it, even if she understood it. 

You can take that too far, before 9/11, and nobody in America, for the most part, understood what al-Qaeda was, thought much about al-Qaeda, didn't mean the government should not do anything about al-Qaeda. Of course, sometimes the government has to work on things that are real threats or problems that most people don't know about or think about or understand, but I think there's a basic wisdom to the idea of asking, especially when we're going to war, why are we bombing and killing these people on Yemen? What do they have to do with us? And at the time, they were not attacking American ships, we've gone through that timeline before, and the only reason they had been previously was because they knew we were arming and funding Israel's destruction of Gaza, so even that was because we were financing and fighting a war for a foreign country, and the way Marjorie Taylor Green said it was like, “a Houthi, well, who knows even, in my district, what a Houthi is? I'm not going to cheerlead a war against the Houthis that have nothing to do with the lives of the people who sent me to Washington.” 

And then, when it came to this war in Iran, she lost all fear or concern about recognizing the relationship between the United States and Israel, and in whose benefit that relationship is, and who's really pushing and shaping the decisions of the United States Congress and the executive branch when it comes to war. 

I think she has enough confidence now, she's seen enough, she’s learned enough, she's read enough, and she understands enough. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not dumb. I'm sure Democrats will say she is. She's not dumb, she is smart. She just doesn't speak like Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden because she's not from that. She doesn't emerge from that; she's a citizen. 

That was the idea, by the way, of the Congress, we weren't going to have a professional class of politicians, we're going to have people who represented their constituents, get sent to Congress for a few years and then go back to their lives and do what they were doing previously. And that's the kind of person she still is. She's very much still a resident of her Georgia district, much more so than a creature of Washington and so, she can think about things and say them in a way most Americans are still thinking and saying them. 

And when it came time for the war in Iran, too, she was like, “I am just sick” of having all of our money and all of her service members be put in harm's way for these wars that have nothing to do with our country. “Ukraine is not our country and Ukraine's wars are not our wars. Israel is not out country and Israel's wars are not out wars.” And I think she's able to speak so plainly about these things and insist that we focus on the things that her constituents and people in America really care about because she's not subservient to or taking orders from a political party or a kind of system. 

There are other people like her in Congress, too. I'm not suggesting she's the only one. I'm just saying she's been very noticeable over the last three, four months, because, especially when it comes to foreign policy, that's where politicians typically step most delicately and she's not stepping delicately at all. To me, she's become a voice of great clarity and confidence, and I think she's earnest about everything she's saying. I'm talking about these things the way most people talk about them. 

I've told stories before, and I hate to romanticize them. I'm not going to even tell the stories because I've told them too many times. Probably you've already heard them. But if you go to the United States and you get anonymous and you just go to some, like, again, it sounds so cliche, but like a diner, where you talk to drivers of Ubers or taxis or whatever, it is enlightening. You hear things that are actual wisdom, just common-sense wisdom, that no people who work on politics and are paid to work in politics in D.C. and New York ever say that is that chasm, it's a huge chasm.

Now, all of official Washington is worried about a war with Iran that I do not believe most people in the United States view as a threat or something that ought to be subsuming their lives. I don't think they want Donald Trump, whom they elected to benefit their lives as working-class people, to be focused on yet another new war in the Middle East. 

I think that's why he's hesitating too, that he has a sense for that. A good sense for that. He's a good politician in that way. It's like instinctive and I think the more Trump goes in those directions that are basically the Bush, Obama, Biden direction, the more people are going to start to see him as like every other politician in that attachment that people had to him, similar to the attachment they had to Obama, who people also viewed as a transformative figure of change but quickly became a just a mouthpiece for the establishment of the perpetuation of the status quo in Washington. They lost that inspirational connection to him. I think that's going to happen to Trump as well if he continues down this path. 

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All right, next question. @Commissar69 asks:

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It is amazing to me that you go study the Constitution, you go to law school, not even law school, our civics class, and the design of the Constitution, in some cases, is kind of ambiguous. They constructed that on purpose, that was part of how they obtained the votes they needed to ratify it: leaving some things purposely left ambiguous that would be interpreted in the future. So, you could tell people whose votes you needed, it could mean this: you tell other people you needed who thought differently, it could mean that. 

So, some of it is ambiguous, but some of it is not. It's not ambiguous because of the language, it's not ambiguous because of what the Federalist Papers say, it's not ambiguous because of the debates that were had. 

One of the things that was not ambiguous is that if the United States is going to go to war, it can do so only if Congress declares war. Only Congress has the power to declare war. The rationale for this is very clear: it was assumed, based on experience at the time, that if we go to a war, people are going to be drafted and it's the ordinary citizen who's going to go and die in these wars and the only way the United States should go to war is if the people consent, through their representatives in the House and the Senate. And I can read you so much from the Federalist Papers talking about this. 

The president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. By the way, the armed forces were not intended to be a standing army. The founders really feared standing armies, meaning like armed agents of the federal government, like the ATF or the FBI. They're basically like armed permanent agents or armies, but also the army itself. That's why they talked about well-regulated militias. You compile an army when you want to go fight a war, but you don't have a permanent standing army. They thought that was dangerous. 

So, when they said the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, what that meant is Congress approves a war and we go to war, and the person responsible for executing that war – because you cannot have Congress managing the war, you need a leader, a military leader, and we wanted civilian rule, it's not a top general – it is an elected president, he becomes the commander-in-chief of the armed forces that makes the decision about how that war will be fought. 

For a lot of reasons, over the last decades, we've completely forgotten about, ignored, the congressional power to declare war. I believe the last war we declared was the Korean War.

Now, the idea there is if Congress really was serious about this, they could have cut off funds for the war, but mostly it's been a desire by Congress not to have to take the hard vote of voting yes or no on a war. I mean, it destroyed political careers. Hillary Clinton lost because she was forced to vote on the Iraq War and voted yes. It got tied to John Kerry when he tried to run against Bush in 2004, against the Iraq War, when he had voted yes on it 18 months earlier. Joe Biden voted for it as well. It definitely was a huge reason why Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama in 2008 and even why Hillary Clinton was weaker than she could have been when running against Bernie Sanders in 2016, because of that Iraq War vote. They don't want to vote on war. They're happy to leave it to the president. So, they purposely kind of gave up the power that the Constitution assigned to them. It's really an abdication of their responsibility. But politicians don't want to take hard votes. 

And now the view of the executive, I remember very well that Bush and, I mean, of course, if our country is attacked, it's like this sudden invasion, the way Iran had with Israel, suddenly attacking it out of nowhere, of course, the president has the responsibility to order the country defended without first going to Congress and waiting for a vote. That's the one exception. 

That didn't apply to the war in Iraq, but Bush-Cheney said we have the right to go invade Iraq even without congressional support. And now that's the view of the Trump administration: we don't need to go to Congress to start the war in Iran. Why? Why don't you? If you want to enter a war with Iran, that's not an emergency war. Iran is not attacking the United States. Why don't you need a vote in Congress? But most people in Congress don't want that responsibility. They'd rather let Trump take the blame for it if things go wrong. 

And so, we basically have a president who single-handedly runs foreign policy, runs the intelligence community. We barely have a functional Congress at all. 

I mean, I'll just give you one example that's kind of amazing. Most of you who watch this show for a while know that I was vehemently opposed to the ban of TikTok or the forced sale of it, talked about a lot of reasons about why it’s a major act of censorship to just ban a social media app that a third of Americans – a third – and a majority of young people are voluntarily choosing to use, just saying, “No, you can't use it. We don't like that one anymore; we don't like the content there.” 

It was originally justified because Chinese ownership and influence were nefarious. That wasn't enough to get the votes, what finally got the votes was the view that there was too much anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian speech being allowed on TikTok and that was what was turning the nation's youth against Israel. And that's the reason why Democrats finally joined, and the Biden administration advocated the banning of TikTok. 

I was vehemently opposed to that, but Congress did pass it. The House passed it, the Senate passed it with a bipartisan majority, an overwhelming bipartisan majority. Their argument was that it's vital to our national security to ban TikTok. Joe Biden signed it into law and it had a deadline in the law that it had to be banned or sold the day after the election. They didn't want TikTok being shut down during the election so that Biden would get blamed, so they cynically made it the day after, and then Trump had 90 days to extend it if he wanted one time. 

Trump extended it, that 90 days came and went; he extended it again, for another 90 days that came and went, he just extended it again. In other words, he's just refusing to implement the law that Congress passed. And nobody cares! Do you hear anyone in Congress saying, “President Trump, we passed this law because we said it was vital to national security, what right do you have to ignore the law?” 

We basically are a country now that has centralized so much power in the presidency that Congress barely exists, except as a sort of symbolic body of pretense of democracy. George Bush and the Democrats under Obama and Biden, and especially now against Trump, of course, the whole idea: each branch is going to want to grab more power for itself. In that fight, the Congress is trying to take this from the executive, the executive says “No, that's ours,” the court says, “No, that's ours,” Congress says, “No, that's ours,” and you get a balance of power. But when one of the branches, Congress, just says, “We're content not to fight for any of our power. You can have it all, we just want to get reelected, enjoy the perks of our office, travel around the world, get the title, be perpetually re-elected, have these nice offices in the Capitol building, go on TV, get special privileges and perks,” then you don't have balance of power anymore. You have the centralization of power in a president and an executive that the founders were really here to avoid. That has completely twisted and distorted what our political system is supposed to be. It by no means started with Trump. 

The Trump administration came in as one of its major plans to eliminate anything that could oppose it, including Congress. Trump uses threats against the Republicans and all sorts of other means. But he's just continuing a trend that started, I would say, that ideas were formed by the Dick Cheney in the 1980s, but really implemented with 9/11 as the pretext by Bush-Cheney. It's just all grown as powers do from there, and we have a model of the government that is very unlike what the founders envisioned. Of course, it affects all the discourses as well. 

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All right, @Readalot. That's a very good name. I hope it's accurate. 

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All right, so that's a critique, a pretty strongly expressed one. So, let me just clarify, because I do think it's good sometimes to just talk to, especially, our members, about how we think of the show, how we try to put the show together. 

When I say that we don't want to be captive of the news cycle, what I mean by that is that 24-hour cable networks are forced to talk about things every day. And even if nothing significant is happening, they'll make something trivial or insignificant the centerpiece of what they talk about so there'll be some offhand comment by Trump, or there'll be some rumor about somebody resigning or somebody being in trouble, or there will be some bickering in the Congress, or there'll be some law that might get passed, that they're speculating about, or some scandal. 

When I say we don't want to be caught at the news cycle, what I mean is, I don't want to come here every night and feel obligated to talk about things that I don't think are interesting or important just because every other media outlet, newspaper, podcast or other show is discussing them. 

In part, I don't want to talk about things I find trivial. That's what I mean by I don't want to be captive by the news cycle. But it also means sometimes there are important things that are going on that I don't feel competent to talk about or I don't have anything particularly interesting to say, I try to be very mindful that when I was writing a lot and I hit publish, and I hope to get back to writing a little more soon, we'll talk about that sometime in the near future, that when you press publish, you're making a claim to your readers that they need to rely on, that when you hit publish, you're saying to them, “Look, I'm promising you that I've written something that I think is worthwhile for you to take your time and read, that I have something to say that is unique or interesting or that sheds light on something important.” I was always very mindful of that. I would rather not write something on a given day than write something that was just I'm writing just to write or because everyone else is talking about it. 

And that also means that I try not to write about things I have no specialized knowledge of and that's why we don't cover economic policy or economic debates very often, almost at all. And if we do, we'll have a guest who's an expert. Every time I covered tariffs, I had a guest on to talk about it. So that's what I mean by not being captive to the news cycle.

Now, having said that, there are obvious topics, major topics, that I do cover, that I've covered for a long time, that I have a specialized knowledge in, a lot of expertise built up over the years, a lot of knowledge about, a lot of passion about, things like foreign policy, things like war, the intelligence community, civil liberties, free speech and when there's major debates like there were with the deportations of students who were here legally because of the speech that they made, or taking immigrants out based on allegations that they were in gangs without any due process, or when there is a new war or foreign policy, obviously I'm going to not just talk about it, I'm going to cover it in depth. 

And so, I don't necessarily want to talk about Israel every night, but the reality is it has been the center of our politics since October 7. We have fought a massive, dangerous war, one of the worst wars, and it's not really even a war, it's just sort of an attack on a population that the United States has paid for. We've supported Israel taking land from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq – bombing, not taking land from Syria and Lebanon, bombing them and bombing Iraq. And now we're on the verge of a major war with Iran. Of course, I'm going to talk about that a lot. I'm going to talk about it in the lead up to it, I'm not going to talk about it while the war is occurring, which is now, I'm talking about everything related to it, that's not being counted in the news cycle. That's right at the heart of what we do. 

And I think we talk about it and I hope we talk about it in a way that's not being talked about in many other places. They're getting a different kind of perspective on it, a different way to understand it, different types of information, different voices. And when war broke out in Ukraine and the Biden administration decided to be heavily involved in that, we did endless numbers of shows on Ukraine and Russia because that was a proxy war between the two largest nuclear powers on the planet. It had all kinds of things to do with the alignment of each party. We do a lot of political talk that way about what it means to be left and right. What is Democrat and Republican? How has that changed? Is that meaningful? 

So, when we talk about major events like the war in Ukraine, like the destruction of Gaza, like the imminent war in Iran, the ongoing war and our relationship to Israel, as we talked about with Tuck Carlson and Ted Cruz, the attacks on free speech on the Biden administration, the ones from the Trump administration, we don't just repeat over and over whatever the headline is. I think we try and delve deeply into it and talk about everything ancillary because it often sheds light on other parts of it that aren't directly related to it. That's what I mean by not being captive to the news. 

I don't feel obligated to follow the cable news framework of doing a movement, I don't think you have short intelligence span where you can only talk about a topic for four minutes and every four minutes we have to move or talk about something for two minutes, bring on a guest for five minutes, seven minutes maximum, and then move to another topic. We don’t do nine topics a night like a cable show does for an hour. We do one or two topics at the most. We want to dive deeply into them. We respect our audience enough to believe that the people here want to pay close attention, want detailed analysis and want to dive deep into things. And then, when we can and when we have something to do, we will do a show completely detached from the news cycle. 

Last week, we did a very deep dive into Palantir, what that company is, how it started, what its history has been, what it was built for, who runs it, what their ideology is, and what function they're now playing in the government. We do a lot of those. We've done deep dives into the anthrax and things like that, even though that had nothing to do with the topic. We spent a lot of time on COVID and related policies like that. So, I think our range is pretty broad, but yes, if there's a major war that Washington is heavily debating, getting more involved in, that's going to be something we're going to talk about, maybe not every night, but certainly close to it. The consequences of that make it impossible to ignore. 

And it's the sort of thing that, as I said, I think we naturally cover and it would be very odd if people came here, and I spent maybe one night a week, two nights a week, talking about the war with Iran and then just talking about a bunch of other stuff on the other three nights and didn't mention it, especially given how fast moving it is, how much of a debate there is, how much other topics that it implicates. 

We make our own decisions about what's important, what we think we have something unique to offer, provocative, interesting, informative to say, and just say it in a way that other places are not saying it, and we try and take our time to delve in, even though we know that maybe we would have more viewers, potentially, if we just constantly, can get members of Congress to come on the show every night, people want to come on the shows all the time but I want to do one or two topics that I find extremely interesting that give you a kind of an analytical perspective, a depth of information that other platforms don't allow you to. That's the reason I like this platform so much, and I think we try to use it for that end. So that's how we think about putting the show together. 

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All right, last question is a tennis question, which I'm always happy to take. It's from @Alan _Smithee, who I recognize as somebody who submits tennis questions, who says this:

 

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Okay. First of all, that is slander, that last part. I don't pick the slam owners after the event is played. No, I do pick them after, say, the first round. So, I don't like to pick somebody who then gets eliminated in the first run; I like to see how they're kind of playing. It's still not easy to pick the slam winners just after the first round, and I have done a great job on that. 

I did actually watch the Onyx Center match today. He played a player who's one of my favorite players, Alexander Bublik, who has an extremely exotic and idiosyncratic game. He's very funny as a person, but he's extremely talented and inventive, especially on grass, so I like seeing him toy with Center. I don't think it happens a lot that when you move from clay to grass, you lose your first match. Corey Gauff won the French Open, but she lost her first match on grass as well. It just takes some transition. I don't think it means that he's in trouble or he's going to have a bad Wimbledon or anything. 

But anyway, I'll probably pick the winners of Wimbledon when we get a little bit closer to the tournament, as you say sardonically, maybe once we start the tournament, right at the beginning, then you can go and take those to the bank. But if you do and you lose, do not blame me, don't leave me rude and abusive messages, because I do have a lot of knowledge about it. My predictions have been weirdly good for the last year, but that could stop at any time. So, although I'm telling you can rely on me, that doesn't mean that you actually should or can, especially when it comes to betting money that you can't afford to lose. 

All right. Those are all the questions we have for tonight.

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Will Tulsi Remain as DNI? Is Bombing Hospitals Permitted Only When Israel Does It? Plus: Glenn Takes Your Questions on Locals
System Update #472

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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What will become of Tulsi Gabbard? That was the question we posed last night and didn't have time to get to, but we will tonight. She spent years mocking and attacking Donald Trump when he was running for president for wanting to go to war with Iran instead of doing something like reinstating the Iran deal or something similar to it. Her statement to the Senate last March, when she was already confirmed as his director of National Intelligence, where she said the consensus of the intelligence community is that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons, was not only ignored by Donald Trump but mocked by him. Tulsi has also been excluded from key war planning meetings. Is there any way for her to cling to this position, and should she? We're going to take a look at that. 

Western media outlets today are awash in outrage that one of the ballistic missiles launched by Iran against Israel fell in a hospital that was used, among other things, to treat IDF soldiers injured in Gaza, to send them back to the battlefield. Israeli officials used every single media outlet and social media platform available to demand that the world stop doing what it's doing to honor their unique victimhood and condemn the unique Persian evil of bombing hospitals. I mean, what kind of evil, wretched, immoral country would bomb a hospital? In this case, there were no reported deaths at the hospital that was bombed in Israel. 

It should go without saying that this is the same country, Israel, and the same people, its supporters, who have spent the last 20 months not lobbing ballistic missiles 1,000 miles away, but using precision weapons to shell and destroy the vast majority of functioning hospitals in Gaza, one after the next. 

So, how should we react to Israeli cries of victimhood over this singular landing of a missile on one of their hospitals, given that they have invented endless justifications for almost two years now for why it is not just morally permissible, but imperative for them to bomb not one or two hospitals in Gaza but all of them, to say nothing about their far worse atrocities still? Is it justified to bomb a hospital or not? Or have brand new rules of war and morality been invented over the last two years to justify what Israel, and Israel alone, is permitted to do? We'll take a look at that question as well as some of the most recent updates and news about this still-unfolding war. 

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Most of you know the political history of Tulsi Gabbard. She was elected to Congress in 2016 as a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, representing the state of Hawaii. At the time, I remember all the cable networks that aligned with the Democratic Party, people like Rachel Maddow, were incredibly excited about her election and the political future they believe she represented because she was a young, charismatic, telegenic soldier in the U.S. army who volunteered to go fight in Iraq, fought and saw combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and returned as somebody who turned against those wars, who felt she was betrayed in what she was told about those wars and this is the kind of thing Democrats salivate over former soldiers or CIA officials, they've been recruiting people like those for a long time. 

So, when Tulsi Gabbard got elected to the Congress, representing Hawaii as a new member of Congress, again, someone very young, a woman of color, all the things that Democrats get giddy over, they really thought she was going to be the future of the party so much so that they made her very quickly the vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee. She held that position into the 2016 primary, which, although nobody expected it, ended up being this very protracted and contentious war between the Hillary Clinton campaign on the one hand and the Bernie Sanders campaign on the other. Tulsi Gabbard was one of the first to perceive and then to publicly note that the DNC seemed to be cheating to ensure that Hillary Clinton won, even though the DNC's role is to be neutral among the candidates. 

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